 Please take your seats. We're about to start accompanying us this evening on the star spangled on the pianos, Jane Howard, please rise. Come to order. Music playing. Thank you very much, Miss Howard. Are there any town meeting members who have yet to be sworn in? If anyone hasn't been sworn in, please rise. I guess all the people standing haven't been sworn in yet. Okay. The Girls Tennis Club is having a big sale today. And Mr. Gilligan, do you want to do your... Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Steven Gilligan, Town Treasurer. Ladies and gentlemen, members of Town Meeting, I'd like to introduce you all to Mr. Michael Morse, who's the town's new Deputy Treasurer and Deputy Collector of Taxes. I know that some of you had the opportunity to meet and greet with Michael in the rear of the hall prior to the meeting's commencement, but I wanted to introduce Michael to all of you and to the town at large. Michael comes with exceptional skills and stellar background, and this is his sixth day on the job. And since he had time to think about it over the weekend, I guess he likes us. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Thank you. Congratulations, sir. Mr. Byrne, is he going to introduce you? Yeah. Before I begin, I would like to say that my colleagues on the board will be down shortly. They are just wrapping up a selectments meeting. And it is moved that if all the business of the meeting as set forth in the warrant for the annual town meeting is not disposed of at this session, when the meeting adjourns, it adjourns to Wednesday, May 14, 2014, at 8 p.m. Follow in favor? Opposed? And I would like to recognize Mr. Greeley. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Mr. Greeley, precinct 11, member of the Board of Selectmen, highly anticipated coming attraction at Non-Pleasant Cemetery. And tonight I rise here because I'm also the liaison to tack from the Board of Selectmen. I'm not sure whether you are aware or not, but in Arlington, we have somewhere near 100 committees, commissions, and boards, most of which are peopled by volunteers. The Board of Selectmen felt two such volunteers are deserving of receiving this commission this evening. So, Mr. Moderator, I'd like to ask your permission to allow Mr. Edward Starr and also to allow Elizabeth Carr Jones to be part of the meeting here this evening, sir, on the floor. So allowed. So these proclamations come from the time of the Town Crier when a Board of Selectmen or other Board of the Town would pass something, and then the Town Crier would go out and read the news the next day. So there's a lot of where-as's and now there for. And I do public proclamations. So I need you to help me. Every time I point at you, I need you to say where-as. And if you don't do it well enough, I will call on individuals around the hall. Here we go. Here we go. Number one. Yes. Very nice. Arlington is blessed with many citizens who willingly volunteer their time, efforts, and expertise to make important contributions to the well-being and betterment of our community. But there are individuals whose dedication, integrity, and selfless contributions to the public good merit more than quiet thanks. And. Yes. Oh, lovely. Two such individuals, Elizabeth Kai Jones and Edward Starr deserve a moment in the community spotlight, although they would be among the last to seek it out or expect it. And. Where-as. You're getting stronger. Elizabeth and Ed are two of the original members of TAC 12 years ago now and have been instrumental in establishing and leading this Board in its countless takings with state agencies, town boards, and committees. They have assisted both residents and business owners to develop significant transportation improvements and enhance the safety for all users of our roads and walkways. Where-as. I didn't think you'd get into it this much. They have ushered through minutes because of you two that are getting so hot here. They have ushered through many noteworthy projects, including the Mass Ave corridor project, Route 60, redevelopment of the Sims and the Brigham's properties, and the town-wide, never mind the booing, and the town-wide Safe Roots to School program. And, one more. Where-as. There is no school, major roadway, or intersection in Arlington where their influence has not been felt. There are few words available to properly express our deepest thanks for Ed's and Elizabeth's selfless dedication to TAC mandates and our admiration for their consistent devotion to Arlington and its citizens. Now, therefore, be it resolved that we, the Arlington Board of Selectmen, do thank Elizabeth, Cara Jones, and Edward Starr for their many exemplary, important, and irreplaceable contributions which have made Arlington a much more vibrant, progressive, and safer community, and be it further resolved that we, the Arlington Board of Selectmen, do hereby name this 12th day of May, 2014, to be Edward Starr and Elizabeth Cara Jones Day throughout the town of Arlington, and ask all citizens to pay heed there too. Ladies and gentlemen, Ed and Elizabeth. Thank you. Thank you very, very much Board of Selectmen and town meeting. The group we have been working with is a wonderful group of volunteers and members of the town staff. These members of the town staff are both capable and very, very interested and hardworking. These members are Wayne Chenow and Mike Rotemaker from the Department of Public Works, Laura Wiener from Planny, and Corey Rattow from the Arlington Police Department. Together, this has been a wonderful team working together. We've had fun. We've made progress here and there. And thank you. We're really grateful for this recognition and it's made especially humbling by the presence of so many people who have done so much. Thank you. Thank you both, Ed and Elizabeth. You ready for a test vote? We're going to take a test vote and make sure our clickers work. It's not in our bylaws, but we've always traditionally held that only members within the enclosure can vote. And that would mean within these lower four walls, it's come to my attention that some people have been voting from the balcony. And I understand someone may have even tried to vote from Sim's mini market, which is definitely outside the enclosure. The reason for that is, if you're not within the enclosure, you really can't be actively taking part in the debate and getting the feel of the meeting. So I was going to ask if we could refrain from wandering too far from the first floor. So all in favor of voting within the enclosure, please press one at this time and all opposed want to vote. Any with you can press no. Oh, are we ready? Yep. Go ahead and vote. No, it's just a feel of the meeting. Okay, that's it. Time's up. Okay, we have 158. Oh, pass. Everyone wants to vote within the enclosure. Very good. You're going to run through the name so people can check their votes. Make sure the machine worked properly. And then we're going to have any announcements or resolutions. Does anyone have any? Here we go. Oh, look, it started on number one, too. Richie wants to vote from home. Are there any announcements? Yes, Angela. Angela Olszewski, Precinct 17. I just wanted to let you know that the Arlington Historical Society will be hosting the author, Elaine Marie Cooper, this Saturday, May 17 at 2 p.m. at the Jason Russell House Smith Museum. Elaine has written Fields of the Fatherless and it's a historical fiction novel about Betsy Russell, the daughter of Jason Russell, and it takes place here in monotomy. The book is pretty much I think the age range is maybe pre-tween to tween, but I'm sure anybody who's interested in Arlington's history might like to come. And the book rack will be there selling the books for the author to sign. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Moderator, Adam Chapter Lane, Town Manager. I just have several brief announcements. First, I wanted to let Town Meeting know and make a brief introduction. We're hosting two Pakistani municipal officials for the next two weeks as part of a collaborative process with the Mass Municipal Association and the State Department. So they're here tonight to witness Town Meeting. It's their first day in Arlington. They're going to spend the next two weeks here. And I just want to introduce you to them. We have Raksana Aziz and Sanam Zafar. If you want to just stand up and say hello. They asked me today what the challenges of our government were. And I said, well, come tonight. And just two very brief announcements on the back table tonight. There is a memo from me to Town Meeting members in regards to some of the energy efficiency work and efforts we've made over the past year, specifically an update on the energy efficiency funds that Town Meeting appropriated in the amount of $200,000 back in 2012. And some of the uses of that or all of the uses of that to date are included on that memo. And also in regards to Article 39, Warrant Article 39, the Water Bodies Fund, there is an accounting of past expenditures and projected future expenditures from that account that can also be found in the back table. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Sir. Can he do that? I mean, yeah. Mr. Greeley is insisting that I announce that my wife and I are expecting our first child in November. No, John. John is a perfectly fine name. Any other announcements or resolutions? Seeing none. We speed along. We could probably finish maybe tonight, maybe Wednesday. We don't waste too much time. Ma'am. Do you want to give a report? Go on up. Was it a report of a committee? Shall I wait? Yeah, article three. Well, we don't announce the resolutions. I'll run it to article three, reports of committees. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Moderator and Town Meeting. Anne LaRoyer from Precinct 17. Right into the mic. And I'm chair of the Open Space Committee. And the Open Space Committee report for 2013 is printed in the town's annual report, which is available at the back of the room and on the website. So I didn't reprint it, but I did want to speak briefly because we're right now in the midst of updating our current Open Space and Recreation Plan. And next year, we will be presenting it to you for endorsement. In the meantime, we welcome your ideas and feedback on the plan. And you can contact me directly or through the planning department if you wish to make any comments. Let me just tell you about the Open Space Committee briefly. It was created by Town Meeting back in 1996. And our 10 members are appointed by the town manager for three-year terms according to state guidelines. The group includes representatives of the Park and Recreation Commission, Conservation Commission, Cemetery Commission, Redevelopment Board, Vision 2020, Department of Public Works, and then several citizens. We do not own or manage any land in Arlington. Our mission and our primary responsibilities are to develop and monitor the town's Open Space and Recreation Plan, a long document which is available on the town website, and lays out lots of information about the town's open spaces, natural resources, and recreational facilities. This planning process and the types of information included in the plan are guided by the State Executive Office of Energy Environmental Affairs, which has to review and finally approve the plan. The first Open Space Plan in Arlington was completed in 1996, and the current plan was presented to and endorsed by the Board of Selectment, the Redevelopment Board, and this town meeting in 2007. It is set to expire this December. So we are now in the process of updating and revising the plan to cover the next seven years from 2015 up to 2022. Just kind of mind-boggling to think about, but we are looking at the goals and objectives that were laid out in the 2007 plan and putting together an impressive list of accomplishments and positive changes that have happened over the past years that are reflected in the original goals and objectives. Things like the purchase of Elizabeth Island by the Arlington Land Trust, which ensures its public access and its permanent conservation. That's the island in Spipon, for those who don't know. Construction of an accessible playground in a multi-generational park at the Summer Street Sports Complex area and regular removal and treatment of weeds and invasive plants in our highly prized water bodies. Those are just a very few of the things that have been accomplished in the last few years. We are relying to update this plan. We're relying on input from many different individuals, organizations and other sources and including the results of the Vision 2020 survey, which we heard about last week, which included some specific questions about OpenSpace. We're also working with the Master Plan Committee, because there's a lot of overlap between the OpenSpace plan and the Master Plan. It's actually very opportune that these two plans are working in tandem at this moment. In fact, I do want to mention that the next Master Plan meeting is on Thursday, this coming Thursday, May 15th. The focus will be on OpenSpace and natural resources. The report, the working paper, is going to be posted up on the website as all of the other working papers have been. I encourage you to look at that to respond to the survey that will be available on the website and to attend the meeting on Thursday night, if you possibly can, after all these town meeting meetings. It'll be held at 7 o'clock at the Senior Center. On behalf of the committee, I just want to thank Town Meeting, first of all, for passing the CDBG budget last week. It includes a small allocation that will help our volunteer committee hire a planning consultant to undertake some other research and analysis for the plan and to provide technical support for designing and producing the final printed report, which will also, of course, be on the website. I also want to thank Town Meeting for approving the CPA article. I didn't get to talk last time, but this way all the voters will have a chance to weigh in on the next November on the option of the CPA surcharge to support, of course, open space and recreation projects, as well as historic preservation and housing needs, as we heard about it like. So the next open space plan, which will cover 2015 to 2022, will provide a wealth of information about our current resources, facilities and programs, and it will be a call for action to do even more to enhance and maintain our valuable open spaces for years to come. So thank you very much. Thank you, ma'am. Mr. Hanna. Bill Hanna, Chairman of the Allington School Committee. Mr. Moderator, Town Meeting members. I would like to present the Allington School Committee's 2015 budget and additional information. I want to thank the community for its financial support for the new Thompson Elementary School and the generosity for making the Bill Shea Memorial Library possible. This year the district implemented the new Massachusetts teacher evaluation system that has as its goal the continuous improvement and accountability of all our staff. Teachers are also implementing the Common Core State Standards. We are participating this spring in the pilot of the new state assessment program park that will eventually replace MCAS. We ask so much of all our staff, especially our classroom teachers, I want to commend their work and diligence to the Town Meeting. Student enrollment continues to grow, causing added pressures on our budget. When today's Allington High School seniors were in kindergarten, the district had 4,265 students. As they graduate next month, we have 5,157 students in the district. The enrollment grew by 21% while these students were in the system. Thanks to the collaborative work of the school committee, the school administration, town manager, board of selection and finance committee, a formula was created to provide for funding for enrollment growth. The New England Association of Schools and Colleges visited our high school in December 2012, which resulted in a report commending our academic programs, but listing great concerns about our facilities, stressing how they were impacting educational programs. I recommend that you take the time to read the full report at our district website in the Allington High School Facilities Information section. The school committee and the board of selectmen unanimously voted to file a statement of interest with the Massachusetts School Building Authority in March to seek financial assistance to upgrade the high school facilities as needed. The Allington School Department has had three successful administrative searches this year, resulting in two new elementary principals and a permanent director of special education. These are only a few of the things that have happened during the year. The Allington School Committee is committed to providing the best education for all the students of Allington. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Mr. Cole? Thank you, Mr. Moderator. John Cole, chair of the Permanent Town Building Committee. I would like to show you a few slides tonight and review the work that we've done over the past year. You may recall two years ago we completed envelope repairs to the central fire station, and during the past year we have proceeded with design work for the interior. We will have that before you under the capital plan shortly. The scope of this project includes structural, electrical, and mechanical upgrades, new administrative offices which will allow the chief to move back to be in contact with his forces, and reconfiguration and refurbishment on the loom quarters. I think you can see from the slides this is a project that is desperately in need of happening. Last Thursday we received eight general bids for the project, two of which were under our estimate. We are in the process now of checking references on those two low bidders, but feel confident that we can reach contract within the allocation in the capital plan of $6,050,000. Subject to your vote, the project will begin July 1st and be completed in the spring of next year. Second project I'd like to talk about briefly is the replacement of the slate roof on the historic portions of the Robbins Library. This work was done over the summer. It was finished successfully, about $90,000 under a budget of $460,000. You can see from the photos and if you are out on Mass Ave that the metal work along the roof now is a little bit bright. It was specifically chosen to match the metal work on the 1980 edition, and over time it will dull to a value equal to the other building, so don't despair if it's a little shiny now. I'd also like to update you on the community safety building. This has continued to be the most difficult project in my tenure on the building committee. We have had latent conditions which I explained last year of things that were uncovered in the course of the work that needed to be corrected. We've also had some performance issues with the contractor, and frankly I don't think they had any idea of the rigor to which we were going to hold them. We are now in the process of closing out the project. These are recent photos of the Mystic Street side and the courtyard side. We are negotiating a settlement with the contractor for time delay at this point, and we're also doing some final testing. It is my sincere hope that this will be completed in the next month or two. As I stated last year, our goal is to return this building to the town as a capital asset, not an operating liability, and we shall do it. We are going to complete the interior renovation of this project as well, and we are seeking funding this year for that phase of the work. This will upgrade the public areas on the first floor in particular. One of the issues that I find most disconcerting is that anyone coming in to file a complaint has to do so publicly in the lobby. There's no private area for that, and I think given the range of incidents that the police department deals with, that's an unfortunate condition which will be corrected. There are some safety issues to be addressed in the cell block area where the doors currently are swing doors, and they have been used as weapons by people in detention to hit officers as they open the cell doors. So those will be changed to sliding doors. We will also upgrade mechanical electrical systems and refurbish public areas and the offices on the second floor. We are seeking $373,000 for the design phase of that work, and that is in the capital plan. Lastly, I would like to show you the new Thompson School. The project was completed in the fall. The permanent town building committee had members on the overall committee along with Thompson school members, school administration, and other town boards. I'd like to thank Kathy Bodie in particular for sharing that committee and doing a terrific job. The project finished $300,000 under a budget of $20.6 million, which I think was quite an accomplishment. And in terms of the design, there was a conscious effort to depart from the little brick red schoolhouses in Arlington and try something more colorful, which I believe has been successfully received by certainly the kids, but the community as well. Last one. Lastly, I'm very happy to tell you about the Bill Shea Memorial Library. We've raised over $100,000 to provide learning materials for the kids in that school. And I would dearly like to thank members of this body who contributed and particularly Clarissa Rowe who co-chaired the effort and brought it to a successful conclusion. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Any other reports? Mr. McKinney, then Mr. Maher. I think I'll have to read my own. I forgot to bring my script. To our visitors, you'll be seeing a very interesting bit of American history. And right now my company is doing some work with an engineer named Sammy in Raul Pindi. So we shall continue to our success. You have to speak right to Mike Lawrence. That's what you're saying. Okay, better? Yes. Okay. It's been five years and we've finally managed to pull off something which we didn't think we could do, which is the rehabilitation of Uncle Sam. That is to say, Samuel Wilson is a vibrant part of our own culture here. We started in 2008. We started with only $300. The committee hadn't met in five years. There's $300 left. We got a tent banner. Did our first tourism survey. In 2009, we learned the problem we were facing. It wasn't just the fact that people loved Uncle Sam. It wasn't the fact that we didn't have any money. The fact that people were thinking that Uncle Sam was a cartoon and he wasn't really worth the effort of a serious effort. And it's true, these are great historical sites. But the Schwann Mill, the Jason Russell House, the Dallin Museum, they have sites. They have property. They have programs, supporters, and history. But they remain obscure. The popular tourist radar. Uncle Sam is universally known. But how can an 1812 joke in Troy, New York be added to Arlington's historic sites? Well, something came along that helped out. Suddenly, we had a real job. The Battle Road Scenic Byway had picked the Uncle Sam Memorial statue as a resource. We volunteered for the tourism group. Now was the time to bring back the real Sam Wilson. To manage the Battle Road, the Board of Selectment created the Byway Tourism and Development Committee. We applied for the tourism group and $500 rollover design to start the process of introducing Sam Wilson and establishing his part. Instead, Chow Meeting told the new committee had made the Uncle Sam committee superfluous. The $500 is rejected by both the Selectment and the Finance Committee. Chow Meeting wasn't having any of that. With spirited opposition from Elsa Fiori and the late Dick Smith, our funding was approved. Uncle Sam got $500. Well, now we had something to work on. The federally funded Byway was supposed to open in 2012. It follows Massachusetts Avenue running right through Arlington. Your Uncle Sam committee attended every MAPC tourism meeting. The only independent town committee in four towns to do so. Our town had twice the representation, but we needed it. Elegant signs and unknown resources still can't make them familiar. But all tourists know Uncle Sam. We have to tell everyone the story of young Sam Wilson. Our challenge transformed Uncle Sam's statue into a historic site celebrating the colonial history of Sam Wilson. The statue area is a focal point. Visitors information at Uncle Sam Plaza before there was a Plaza. Town Meeting 11, more than a statue. Our new logo was unveiled. We distributed so far about 100 buttons. I was not invited to appear on American Idol. Well, anyway, we said it's time for Uncle Sam Plaza. Everybody passes this spot. So many attractions. Sadly, the battle road was put on ice. No money. Well, the select were like the idea. We had the tent, the banner, and now the buttons. So we were there for town day again. We even had a Ted Paluso to help out. We had a second tourism survey. Everyone liked Uncle Sam Plaza. Committee members got to work with public works to start fixing the place up. The first thing is to get a little light on that statue. Uncle Sam Plaza was gaining momentum. At this point, we had cost the town about $850 for three and a half years, but we finally knew how to oppose the Finance Committee. Lexington Minimals are nice, and Jefferson Cutter was sort of nice, but we were working on it. Mike Radamigger gave us a lot of help. And meanwhile, with the by way on hold, the committee renamed itself A-10. In March, $20,000 proposal to identify for historic Arlington sites was passed by the Finance Committee. Finally, Uncle Sam was included in by way signage. Thank you, A-10. But since none of the featured sites had heard about the proposal, we were concerned about being part of the process. Town meeting was finalized in amendment to make sure that things were done in consultation with the four organizations related to the statues. But we were happy. Finally, Uncle Sam joins historic by way sites. Or did he see article 41? We may need your help again. By town day, the lighting was ready. Public works didn't charge the lights on Uncle Sam's birthday. We served hundreds of cupcakes and ice cream snacks. From 2008 to 2013, unless in $2,000, we're moving along. Every time we get there, Mr. Donnelly shows up. At any rate, 2013, well, this is the last year we explained. We had to tell the story. A-10 and town meeting had voted in the fund of the historic Arlington Uncle Sam Memorial Statue sign. But nobody can read the base. Uncle other sites have places for brochures. So we located the official Massachusetts historic site people. Now every visitor will know the whole story. Town day, 2013, Uncle Sam Plaza opens with a huge vote of thanks to Ted Paluso and A-Ted, who did a magnificent job of orchestrating this whole thing. Committee member Elsie Fiori participated in the dedication of the statue. So we're really pleased she was part of this one, too. The local media covered it. The choirs sang. Proclamations were proclaimed. Technications were dedicated. And Sean Garberley does the honors at a new historic site opens. Yay, politicians love this. But there's more. Most people don't know that Sam Wilson, who aided the sons of Liberty and was a drummer boy, was woken up that morning by Paul Revere, who was rousing his father and his brother. Father was a son of Liberty and his brother was, in fact, a minute man. As a matter of fact, little Sam, he did some messenger running for Dr. Warren and he was bringing the news back from Bunker Hill. He was quite involved. But we've got to do something to make the world know. So a new historic Arlington tradition as Paul Revere meets young Uncle Sam Wilson again. There he is. He was saying, good to see you after all this time. Oh, it's 10 Donnelly again. With the tip of the tricorps, there's a reed and a metham. On our committee, Joe Currow with the flag, A-Ted and Ted Caudghyay, the first young Sam Wilson and our Uncle Sam Button model over there. And there's more! After 15 years of being dedicated to establishing an Uncle Sam day for September 13, it looks like it's finally going to happen. Uncle Sam was forgotten, but brought him back. Thank you, town meeting. And everyone who gave us a ham when we needed it. This took five years at a cold cost of under $5,000 for everything you've seen because it was all done by us and by you. With a final salute to Dick Smith, who did so much for Arlington and who stood up for us when we needed it the most. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Mr. Maher. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. John Maher, our President 14, Chairman of the Cable Advisory Committee. As you all know, there are three cable providers in town, Comcast, Verizon and RCN. The Comcast license is due to expire in July of 2016. The RCN license, September 2016 and the Verizon license in March of 2017. One might question why Maher is standing up talking about things that are going to happen two years hence or over two years. Actually, the process is federally ordained by the Cable Consumer Protection Act of 1992 and the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The process is begun by receipt of what I call section 626 letters from the cable providers. We have received those. And the next step in the process, which begins between 30 and 36 months before the expiration, is what is called the ascertainment period. And that is about to get underway next month. Ascertainment is a process by which stakeholders, members of town meeting, members of the general viewing public, Council on Aging, the elderly community, department heads, certainly local access, have an opportunity to talk about the performance of the three cable providers for the last number of years and to talk about what the respective stakeholders would like to see in the upcoming licenses. This will be a very transparent process. It will be duly advertised. I certainly would be glad to hear from any of you during the course of this process. We would probably be receiving a survey from the committee. The committee's sole reason for existence is to support the Board of Selectment. The Board of Selectment is the licensing authority of the town, and we also take direction from the town manager. Members of the committee are myself, David Good, the town's director of technology, Michael Quinn, sitting in the back there. He's a town meeting member and Joseph Weiss. There's Michael over there. There is a vacancy on the committee. We'd be very glad to have anybody who is interested in serving provide a resume and letter of interest to the selectman's office with a copy to the town manager's office. It will be, at the end of the ascertainment process, the town puts together essentially what they would like to see in a license. The respective cable providers respond and negotiations ensue. I did participate a number of years for each of the prior years for the three licenses that they can be contentious. We're big boys and girls out here. I think we know what we're about. The licenses that we have in existence now I think are very well regarded by other communities. We anticipate that will be no less the case in our hopefully successful negotiations. So we'll keep the town meeting advised. And again, strongly encourage anybody who would like to serve to submit a resume letter of interest to the selectman's copy to the town manager. And I'm available to talk to anybody about other activities of the committee. Thank you, Mr. Moderne. Thank you, sir. Thank you for your committee work. Any other committee reports? Ms. Barron. Thank you, Mr. Moderne. I'm Sherri Barron, precinct seven, and I'm a member of the Arlington Human Rights Commission. And it is my honor to present the Arlington Human Rights Commission 2013 annual report. Before I go on, I would like to point out the commissioners in here who are also town meeting members. You would just wave when I call your name, Christine Carney and Douglas David off. Thank you. We are very pleased to tell you that as of January of this year, we entered our 20th year as the Human Rights Commission. 19 years ago, we sat in this room, I think it was June. And over the course of two nights, we discussed the pros and cons of establishing a Human Rights Commission. It took passionate, articulate stories from a number of community members who had been victims of human rights violations to convince the majority of town meeting that a Human Rights Commission would benefit our community. And I believe it has. The Arlington Human Rights Commission has a two-fold mission to investigate complaints arising from human rights violations and to educate and raise awareness of the benefits of living in a diverse community and illustrate the often devastating effects of intolerance and bigotry. Through the 20 years, it has been an honor and privilege to serve with so many remarkable, dedicated, truly good people, both on the commission and community residents. Each of you has sacrificed to make the world a better place. You, by your existence and voices, are ambassadors for justice, fairness, equity and peace. And the Arlington Human Rights Commission thanks you for that. I would be remiss if I did not thank some very special people who have also been our allies for 20 years. Our gratitude goes to the Finance Committee for continuing our funding. The Board of Selectment and School Committee, who support us by exemplifying respect for the diversity of our town every day. Our town manager, Adam Chapter Lane, who very early on in his tenure as town manager, came to one of our meetings and offered us his complete support. We thank you for that. And most especially, our police department. Oh, he's here. For the open, collaborative relationship we have always enjoyed. We work closely with the police department. And our relationship is the result of having Chief Frederick Ryan at the helm. Chief Ryan often calls upon us to discuss and to collaborate on the best ways to handle incidents. We are very lucky in Arlington to have a stalwart supporter of human rights in our police chief. I'd like to thank him and his staff for their support through the years. If you were here, I would give them applause. So what have we been doing the past year? You can read about us in the annual report. If you've not yet gotten to page 62, I'll tell you a little bit about what we've been doing. We initiated a response coordination team that will act in a timely manner to determine the course of unified action with the goal of preserving civil discourse and behavior in the Arlington community. And this committee is made up of Nancy Rhodes, who's one of our commissioners. The Human Rights Commission will serve as chair for this committee. And on the committee will be the police chief, the superintendent of schools, the town public information officer, and representatives of the school committee, board of selectmen, the diversity task group of Vision 2020, and local clergy. We continue to update our website to increase user friendliness and accessibility, and our website is www.arlingtonhumanrights.org. On this past Sunday, May 4th, nearly 70 people came to the Whittemore-Robbins House to celebrate the 10th anniversary of marriage equality legislation in Massachusetts, and it was a wonderful afternoon. We continue to support the Martin Luther King Jr. celebration and other human rights related events as our budget allows. We donated 10 children's books to the William Shea Memorial Library at the Thompson School in honor of our past commissioner, Bill Shea. We donated 10 books to the Robbins Memorial Library in honor of another past member, Nancy Sweeney. We purchased the film misrepresentation and a set of curriculum that focuses on media portrayals of women and how they influence and affect young people. We hosted an event showing this film this past April, and we've donated the film and the curriculum to the school system. We have permanently established a school liaison program so that each school has a commissioner attached to it, and we've sought to go out and speak to each principal, letting them know who we are and how they can use us. And we are trying to get on the agenda of school councils and PTO meetings so that we can do the same thing. One of our problems I know has been over the past 20 years is that there are just too many people who don't know that we exist. And we have been here as an insurance policy, a place to turn to for those who feel their human rights have been violated. I'm very proud of our accomplishments. Our goals for 2014 as we move ahead are to continue those school liaison program, sponsor a viewing of the film Rescue in the Philippines, and a discussion with the film producer, participate in Town Day, which we've done for 20 years, increase collaboration with relevant town groups, and expand outreach to other community groups, and hold two dialogues, hopefully focusing on human rights related issues. We're looking forward to a very productive year. On a more somber note, I just want to say, I think Town Meeting knows that we've lost Bill Shea. Bill was an original member of the commission. Last summer we lost Nancy Sweeney, excuse me, who had been on the commission for about seven years, and then several weeks ago our administrative assistant died, Marilyn Cornell. We will miss all of them, and I ask for you to join me in a moment of silence. If you'd like any information about the Human Rights Commission, there are brochures on the back table, and I urge you each to take one. Even if you never read it, keep it handy so that if you need it, or more so, if you know someone who needs it, you can hand it to them. What happens, I believe, is that people who need us are sometimes the least likely to come to us. It may be because of their being new to town, maybe for any number of reasons. It's very, very important to help them make that step, and we hope that you will do that. We also have a phone number, we have an office phone number, 7-8-1-3-1-6-3-2-5-0, which is on our brochure. I want to thank you for your continued support. For some of you, this might be the first time you've ever heard of us. Please feel free to come to our meetings. They're the third Wednesday of the month at 8 o'clock, and I believe they're going to continue to be at the Jefferson Cutter House on the ground level. Enter from the back. We're here if you or someone you know needs us, and I will end with this. Margaret Mead said, Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Farron. Thank you, committee. Any other reports of committees? Seeing none. Mr. Tosti. I move that Article 3 be laid upon the table. All in favor of laying Article 3 upon the table, please say yes. Yes. Opposed? Article 3 is upon the table. Mr. Tosti. Move that the town meeting take up the special town meeting, Article 5, on money for the fire station. Article 5 of the special town meeting is moved now before us. Ladies and gentlemen, as Mr. Cole said, the bids have come in on the fire station on or under budget. Therefore, Article 5 can go with the original recommendation of the finance committee of no action. We don't need a second. It's already in the force. We have before us a recommended vote of no action on Article 5 of the special town meeting. All in favor, please say yes. Yes. Opposed? I move that Article 1 be taken from the table. All in favor? I'll post. Article 1 is now before us. I move that the special town meeting be dissolved. All in favor of dissolving the special town meeting of 2014, please say yes. Yes. Opposed? The meeting is dissolved. Ladies and gentlemen, brings us to Article 28. Mr. Tosti. Of the regular annual meeting. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to move to table Article 28 for just a couple of minutes to take up Article 29. Article 29 is the appropriation for the Board of Assessors for revaluation. If you remember a question like that, a question came up and the assessors were not here to answer it. I talked to the assessors and they were not here to answer it. The assessors were not here to answer it. I talked to the assessors over the weekend. One of the assessors is in rehab. The other assessor was not available so Mr. Doherty said that he would be available today but not Wednesday to take any questions. Therefore, I move that Article B28 be laid upon the table so we can take up Article 29. All in favor of laying Article 28 upon the table, please say yes. Yes. Opposed? Article 28 is on the table. That brings us to Article 29. We have, of course, recommended a vote of the finance committee of $10,000. Mr. Jamison. Thank you, Mr. Minor. Thank you, Mr. Minor. I have Gordon Jamison presenting 12. Yes, I did rise at the previous meeting to ask a question of the Board of Assessors or the assessors. And I was disappointed and I understand there are circumstances, mitigating circumstances, but I did speak with the past chair. While holding signs out in front of the bracket and said that I was disappointed last year when an article came up that no one from the assessor's office or the Board was here to answer a question. So I think it's very important that Mr. Tosti and the town manager and school committee, many of those members and department heads are here for every meeting. Even when their department is not specifically involved in the night's action. The clerk is here, the treasurer is here, the other independent offices are represented every night on the floor of town meeting. I think it's important that the assessors take town meetings seriously and make an effort to be here, especially when their articles come up. So we can ask questions. Hopefully before we have to get up and ask questions on the floor. So my question the other night was we're appropriating $10,000 now. We did this once before when I was a member and I want to know what the future costs are, which were alluded to in the report from the my finance committee. What the future costs for this, the full reassessment will be. Thank you. Cessor James Dougherty. Thank you, Mr. moderator. Thank you town meeting for taking this out of order. Before I make my comments, I would just ask that all of you, Kevin Feely, the chairman of the Board of Assessors, long serving member of our board. Former selectman in town, lifetime Alantonian was unable to be here. He went in for knee surgery a few weeks ago and as a gentleman just getting into his golden years, he had some complications. And he would have cherished to be here tonight. I can assure you him as well as the other two members of the Board of Assessors have the utmost respect for town meeting. We do don this to make it here. I myself have been a town meeting member up to last year for over 24 years, so I spent a great deal of time on this floor as have the other members. It was unfortunate last week that we weren't here. It was no slight to this body whatsoever. We actually happened to be meeting with some members, taxpayers, who had questions about their assessments and time got away from us. So I apologize for that. Having said that, many of you are aware that we are required by state law to do a revaluation once every three years. In addition to that, we have to do interim annual adjustments to the assessed values. On these three year cycles, we do use, as most communities do, some outside assistance. In that particular case, we've engaged, we've had a long standing relationship with patriot properties. They're the preeminent revaluation company in the state, and they work actively nationally as well. As you material is pointed out in the Fincom report, we are requesting $10,000 in this year's budget in addition next year because it will go over 14 and 15, 15 and 16. We will be requesting next time an additional 10,000. So that will give us $20,000 for this revaluation in addition to the 19,000 that we have had incumbent to assist in that. We will be working with the Fincom committee over the next couple of years to get a stabilized appropriation hopefully on an annual basis. This negates the necessity as many of you know who have been here for a while. We have peaks and valleys, depending on the requirements of the DOI Department of Revenue. There are some years where the high water mark on those appropriations can go upwards of $700,000 because we're required once every nine years to go out and canvas the entire town. This year is considered to be more of a mathematical statistical type update, so we don't, it's not that labor intensive. I hope that answered your question. So this is not the heavy duty reassessment. That's correct. Okay, thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you Mr. Harrington, Stephen. Mr. Klein. Thank you Mr. Moderator. Christian Klein, Precinct 10. The assessment include a reevaluation of the number of units in buildings, and particularly residential units that are supposed to have a maximum of two. Mr. Doherty. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. This particular reevaluation does not include a complete canvassing of the town. So unless something came to our attention that would warrant us to go to particular group, particular neighborhood, anything like that. We will not be going to door to door this year. Okay. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you. Mr. McCabe. Michael McCabe, Precision 2. I move to terminate debate on article 29 and all matters before. Motion to terminate debate on article 29 and all matters before us. All in favor please say yes. Yes. Opposed? It is a two-third vote and I so declare it. We have the force to recommend a vote of the finance between $10,000 for the assessors. All in favor please say yes. Yes. Opposed? No. It is unanimous vote and I so declare it. That brings us back to article 28. Ladies and gentlemen, I move that article 28 be taken from the table. Mr. Do you want to do your thing? Yeah. After Alan. Okay. I just want to make a couple of comments before we start the budgets. Number one, we always try to have this sort of mistake free but I suppose 17 pages or 18 pages of financial numbers will generate at least one. So if you can go to B-9, B-9 police services and if you look down under detail of personal services under police services, you get down to patrolmen and it has 49, 47, 47, 49. Last 49 is a mistake. It should be 47. So for these, for the last two years and next year, we will have 47 patrolmen. So that 49 was a mistake. Please change that. And just the reason for the increase, substantial increase in the patrolmen is that's basically three years of salary increases. I think it's a 3, 2.75, 2.75 that all got rolled into that since contracts were just settled. So it is 47 patrolmen, not 49. As you go through the budget, you'll see increases on most of the people. Keep in mind for fiscal 15, next fiscal year, there is a 2.75% cost of living built in. And for those people that haven't reached, there could also be a step increase in that. So that accounts for probably 90% of the increases. And the finance committee stands ready to try to answer any questions you may have. Thank you. Mr. Jones. I'm going to start from here if that's okay. So Annie LaCorte, precinct 15. Allen, do you want to? Allen Jones, precinct 14 in member of the Communist Party. So you're probably wondering why we're standing up here. We want to talk to you a little bit about the Arlington Visual Budget, which is another way that you can get some information about the budget that we think might help with your decision making tonight. I'm just going to briefly tell you a little bit about how the Visual Budget came to be and then what the point is. And then we'll do a quick demo, take any questions and hopefully be done with this because I know we're all wanting to get to the end at this point. So a little over a year ago in March, I was doing some work over at Involution Studios, which is a local software development company. And I turned to the principal of the company. I said, I need you to do something for me for free. I need you to create a visualization of Arlington Town's budget. And he thought about it for about 30 seconds and said, sure. And then I called up Adam's office and I forget whether I talked to Adam or I talked to Andrew, but whoever I talked to when I said, so I got a guy and he says, we'll do this. What do you think? I got the second quickest answer I've ever gotten to a question, which was, sure, we'd love that. And hence we went about putting together a team to build the Visual Budget. The principal folks who worked on this were Mike Boten, who's sitting over there next to Alan and David, who is the business budget analyst. Say it again. Management analyst in the town manager's office. And he worked a lot with Alan. I, having put this all together, then became so swamped at work, I couldn't even get to meetings for six months. And when I got back there, they put together this great visual tool. And all I've done ever since then is sort of a shill for it. So I want to congratulate Alan and Mike and also the folks over at Involution Studio, who pro bono built this tool and paid a great deal of attention to its design and its usability. The point of this tool is to create greater transparency for the residents of the town of Arlington and for you to give you a different way of looking at the budget that will answer some of the questions that I think we sometimes struggle with here, which is sort of, you know, what is the relative, I don't know, effect of certain parts of the budget and are we putting our money where our values are? What's important to me about this visualization is that it shows you what we value because it shows you the size of things in the budget. So without further ado, we'll run through a quick demo for you and you can get at this tool to inform your own decision making anytime you want and you can recommend it to your friends and neighbors when they have questions about how we budget in Arlington. So we're starting here on the expenses page. If you look across the top of the screen, which hopefully you can see well, you'll see that it says revenues, expenses and funds and reserves. Those are the three pages in the tool. And then on each page of the tool, since on the start page there's a place to put in your annual tax contribution. You will see at the top of this main page what your annual tax contribution is, the size of the proposed budget, the average budget over the last few years and the increase of the budget over this year over last year, just some basic information. Then there's two graphics. The one graphic that Alan's playing with right now is a trending tool which shows you the trend of parts of the budget over time from 2008 to 2019 which is the end of the current five-year plan. And then you have what we call the tree map which shows you the relative size of parts of the budget. And then there's, in addition to this map view, there's a tabular view. Alan, if you want to just quick flip to the tabular view and then we'll come back. So for those of you who are text-based like me, you can come here instead and get a list and a little trend line and see the effect on the budget and drill down into this. But most people are going to want to look at the map view if we go back to the map view. Okay, and here on this page, what happens if you go to one of the blocks of this map view here and click on it, you will drill down to the next level. This is the town department and if you drill down from here into say public works, then you begin to see how our public works money is distributed. And the most interesting part of this budget if you drill into it is what we spend on snow and ice. You see all those bumps. You can tell what the weather was by looking at them. Interesting thing here is that you will see that your contribution to the budgeted amount for snow removal this year is $32. If you go back and you look at say 2011, the numbers travel with you. You'll see that in a bad year, the average contribution is about 90 bucks or a slightly less than what it costs for me to have a professional plow out my driveway. So if we go back up to the main page on expenses again, Alan, if you don't mind. If you scroll over this page, you will see that there's included a tooltip that shows what your contribution to each section of the budget is. And on some of these, like the MWRI debt shift, you can see that there's additional information that explains the obscure terms that we sometimes use when talking about the budget. If you go and you look at the insurance budget, you'll see another interesting piece of information here which is that you can see the effect of going into the GIC. We sort of have a dip and our trend is much flatter than it used to be. If we go from here to the revenue page, you'll see a similar block diagram of where our money comes from. You'll learn some interesting things by digging into this. If you dig into, for example, where you headed Alan, you headed into state aid or local receipts. If you dig into local receipts, you'll see that funny little bump there. If you dig down into licenses and permits, now you can tell when it was that we permitted Sims. So it's interesting to walk through here if you know the numbers, but I think it's also interesting for residents to be able to walk through because it shows them some things about what has happened over time. If you go and you look at funds and revenues, which is the last thing that I'm going to show you, then you begin to see that here in funds and reserves the effect of the override. The dark blue at the bottom of the trend line, that is the override stabilization fund. Spend down, add up, spend down again. And then if you back out from this, you'll see that dark orange line in there. That is the tip fee stabilization fund, and you can see how we spent that down to zero and no longer have it. Interesting piece of history. And then finally, another thing that becomes obvious from this particular view, if you look at the dark green line, which is the free cash line, you can again see the effect that going into the GIC had on free cash the year that we budgeted that amount of money and it gave us a big boost in our free cash reserve, which will make a difference to how long it is before we do another override. Got to wrap it up. Yeah. The only other thing we were going to talk about is sort of what we're going to do next, but it depends upon the indulgence of the meeting, I guess. Well, quickly. Thank you. I do want to point out this is open source code. You can go to GitHub and find the code. The data that this is driven is all there. Part of the links we didn't show is where the data comes from, whether it comes from the town of Arlington or whatever. This won an award at the Mass Municipal, or the town of Arlington, our town, won an award at the Mass Municipal Association last year ever since, and we've been getting a lot of phone calls from towns as far as California, Asheville, North Carolina, Arlington, Virginia, and Grafton, Massachusetts have put it up themselves. We've been getting a ton of suggestions on what to do with the thing. We want to add borrowing and debt service. Those are important parts of the budget. Drill down in deeper levels of detail. Add enterprise funds, CDBG, CBA, all of those. A lot of people have asked for comparisons from projections versus actuals versus budgets per capita, per household numbers, things like that, add comparables. We want to move it to a platform that makes it easier for people out there to add plugins and modules to expand the use of it. So this is just getting started. We've got a lot more stuff to do, insurmountable opportunities. Thank you. Now, where do we find this magic tool? ArlingtonVisualBudget.org. Is there a link on the town web page to that? Yes. Yes. Yeah, there is a link on the town web page. Somewhere. Google for it. You'll get thousands of hits. Oh, it would be on Google. Do you have any questions or suggestions? Please talk to one of us. Adam's going to tell us where it is on the town website. Adam's chapterling town manager. If you go to ArlingtonMA.gov, there'll be a link to this site as well as other financial information. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you both for your work on that. We're going to handle the budgets as we have in the past several years. I'm going to go through each budget individually. If someone wishes to discuss that budget, yell out hold. You'll go through all the budgets. Once that are held, we'll address those budgets on a piece of real basis one at a time. That way we can have a good discussion on each individual budget and get it done with it once as opposed to jumping all around between all the different budgets. So I'm going to start off with the finance committee. Someone wants to discuss that. They yell hold. So finance committee. Okay. We're all happy with that. Board of select men. We're all happy with them. John manager. Hold. Hold. Human resources. Information technology. Comptroller. Treasure collector. Hostage. Board of assessors. Legal. Town clerk. Board of registrars. Parking. Planning and community development. Redevelopment board. Zoning board of appeals. Public works. Community safety. Inspections. Education. Libraries. Health and human services. Retirement. Insurance. Reserve fund. Water and soar. Recreation. Wait. Wait a second. I'm into appendixes. We usually don't go into those. We'll go through them in case someone wants to talk about them. Ed Burns arena. Council on aging. Youth services. Hold. Okay. Now we go back to the beginning. Someone wanted to discuss the town manager. Mr. Fuller. Peter Fuller precinct 20. This is not really a town manager question but. The moderator inform me I could ask it here. Way at the back of the report appendix C. Summary of recommendations. Down on the lower right summary of expenditures. There's an item. Sims urban renewals six hundred seventy seven thousand seven hundred fifty dollars. Last year in the past few years this has only been a hundred thousand dollars. This is debt service I presume for the town's purchase of the sims site so. I have three questions. Why the increase. What's the revenue source for paying it and when does the debt go away. Mr. Tosti is going to address your questions Mr. Fuller. Thank you. The six hundred and seventy five thousand and change. In C is for debt service for the bonds for the. Purchase of the Sims property. The Sims property is under urban renewal act state law. In regards to that in order to pay debt service the first amount of money that's available from property taxes from Sims goes automatically into the urban renewal to pay the debt service. The reason it's been about a hundred thousand over the last couple of years is because that's all the property tax we were earning on Sims. This year with the development of Sims as you can see up in the hill the property taxes increased fairly substantially. So the first six hundred and seventy five thousand and change of that property tax goes immediately to pay the debt service. That's the total debt service. Anything over that just goes into the general fund. We had to put it some places and it is showing as an expenditure because otherwise it wouldn't balance on that. So that's the purpose for it. The money goes directly there for debt service. The debt service will be retired in two thousand and twenty two. Thank you very informative. I just wanted to air it out to inform on new members and refresh the memories of the rest of us and thank you Mr. moderator for allowing me to ask the question. Thank you Mr. Fuller and thank you for contacting me in advance to discuss that. Anyone else wish to discuss the time manager's budget. Seeing none we're going to move on. Someone wanted to discuss the treasure collector. Mr. Harrington. Stephen Harrington precinct 13. This is a general comment for us if you'll look at these budgets or the budget book. We're looking at past budgets and that's not good financial reporting. We should be looking at actual numbers. Lexington if you look at their budget book shows actual numbers. When a budget is done a budget is a plan for the future. When a budget is done you never look back to see what you've done for a budget. And I called out this one in particular because it highlights exactly this problem. If you look at the treasurer's budget under the deputy treasurer who we all met tonight. Seems like a nice guy. But if you look back for the past four years there's been an appropriation for deputy treasurer. And at least for two of those that I know of we had no deputy treasurer. So to compare a budget. Number that we're playing for the future for the next fiscal year to last year's budget which is a made up number. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. So that brings up a question. Mr. moderate I'd like to know where did that what is it $69,000 in change. Where did that go. Mr. Gilligan our town treasurer. You understand the gentleman's question. I do Mr. moderate Steven Gilligan town treasurer in order to fill a vacancy the salary must be budgeted. I had attempted to fill that vacancy over the last several years in order to do that town meeting has to vote the salary for that budget. Where that money has not been used. It was utilized either to avoid a transfer because of overtime. And or returned to the general fund turned back to the town. Thank you Mr. moderate. And that's your question sir. Yes thank you Mr. moderate. Thank you Mr. Gilligan. So these types of things are spread out throughout this financial report and the financial report really should make things clear. And so when you see a number you know like this. What's that. Are you done. Mr. OK. Mr. Tosti you have the floor. Please come in and take your seats. Quiet in the hall Mr. Tosti has the floor. OK. In response to Mr. Harrington. When I became chairman of the committee. What's your point of order sir. Yes I'm trying to get the control of the members. Not too much luck. OK. Just a couple of comments in response to the question Mr. Harrington. When I became chairman. What seems like a hundred years ago. We actually did that. If you go back and you look at the early 90s to the about three or four years of finance committee reports. It was budget budget actual actual. And what I found was after three or four years of doing this. Three things. One it was a tremendous amount of work to do that. To get all that done in the finance committee report. For a volunteer board. Secondly it created a tremendous amount of confusion. In town meeting. Because you know of the of actuals versus budget. And it just after a while we just gave up and went back to budgets. And I think that the budgets are actually better. Because the budget is is what you vote. The budget is the values of the town. The and the town meeting as far as what money you allocate towards a budget. Actuals. You know really don't give you that much information. Now we get the finance committee gets all the information from the town meeting that contained all of that. The actuals contains all the individuals and everything. On that. And so we do go through all of that. But when it comes to you looking across the line. At an expense item. I think it's. It's more reasonable. People have told me this to look at what we actually voted. As opposed to what the actual was two or three years ago. And I think that's another thing is that. We don't beat up on department heads for not spending money. That's the worst thing you can do. Because if you beat up on department heads for not spending money and ask them all kinds of questions. Next year. They will make sure that all the money is spent. And we're trying not to do that. So we try to say thank you very much for not spending the money. And then we go over the budgets and see if we can go through that process. So. We did do that. It really didn't work out very well. And the in having the actual budgets that you have voted. To compare next year's budget with seems to have worked out better. Now at some point the. You have the town manager's financial plan. Which is on the website. And that does have actuals in it. So if you want to look at that. Does have the actuals doesn't have the detail that the finance committee report does. But it does have actuals there. At some point in the future I know the manager is looking to be more to be have a more explicit detailed. Set. To go on the website. He's not there yet. So I hope that explains why we're doing it the way we do. Thank you. Thank you. Yep. Mr. Court had her hand up. We're still in the treasurer's budget. Correct. The fiscal year of 2015. Mr. Moderator. Will you indulge me to continue along Mr Harington steam and ask a few questions. About. Not. In other words more general questions about how we present the budget rather than just on the treasurer collector. Yeah, I guess. But thank you. I promise to be brief. Okay. Okay, so I'd like to point out. Not trying to two my own too much, but that the data on the Arlington Visual Budget that all the past data is actual data. So you can certainly see the actual budget or actual spent. Actually spent. Okay. Thank you. In the budget categories. And of course the audited financials which tell you exactly what happened and what the auditors say we actually did are available. But perhaps the town manager could talk for 10 seconds, 15 seconds, about the upcoming project which is the open checkbook. Okay. And then we're going to get back to budgets. Yes, sir. Thank you. Adam chapter in town manager. What Mr. Quartz referring to is a concept called open checkbook that the commonwealth has used for the past couple years which would allow someone to go in and query all expenditures in the town budget both salary and expenditure wise from department levels, personnel level and find out exactly what was spent in any number of given fiscal year. So we received a grant through the state to work with munis our accounting software to provide that as a web based interface and should start working on that in the next couple of months. So by this time next year that should be a tool available. Thank you. Thank you for your indulgence, Mr. Moderator. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay. Now we all understand that. Anyone else want to talk about the treasurer's budget? Seeing none. Someone wanted to talk about the board of assessors. Mr. Harrington. Stephen Harrington, precinct 13, I want to do a sales job. On the board of assessors last year, Mr. Moderator, we had asked a question. There was a volunteer in the town who had given an extremely good property search tool. And I've talked to that volunteer and the only reason that he doesn't do it anymore is because the assessors won't provide it. And last year when we asked this question about the Patriot properties, the provider of assessment services to the board of assessors provides a really poor tool. This individual provided a really good tool. And it wasn't a question of either or. It really was just a question of releasing the public information so that residents of Allington could look at properties in a very good way. And so my question, Mr. Moderator, is last year the board of assessors said that they would look into providing the functionality of that tool. I just want to know the status of it. Thank you. Mr. Doherty, the difference between the Patriot and the old. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Thank you for clarifying that. The person who was donating his time was donating his time to a multitude of departments. My understanding through conversations with the IT department, the town manager's department, was that some additional content was being contained on this site. And citizens had expressed concerns about it. And based on some of those concerns in the reluctance of the gentlemen, who I might add is a very capable, competent, and great citizen for donating his time for many, many years. It was sad to see him go, but unfortunately it was one of those things that had occurred. I would just reiterate in terms of what we currently have out there. The capture is the same data, format may be different. Patriot properties, again I will reiterate, is the preeminent revaluation firm in the state as well as provides its services nationally. And I would suggest you that over 100 communities in the state must be pleasantly pleased, including Arlington Board of Assessors with their software package. Thank you. So Patriot properties has boards of assessors for clients. The tool that I talked about had residents of Arlington, really, as its intended audience. And that's the main difference. It was a tool that let you search cross-sectionally. It was a tool that let you look back in time. It had nothing but public data on it. There's no reason for the Board of Assessors to hold back that public data. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Thank you, sir. Mr. Ward, did you have a hand up? You wanted to respond? Thank you, Mr. Moderator, I did have my hand up. Yeah, well, as many of you know, I'm about the most incompetent person in the world when it comes to computers and using the internet and all that stuff in general. Fortunately, I have good help in my office and good help at home, and they sort of almost guide my hand. But I used to be able to go to the assessor's website, and as Mr. Herrington was saying, look up some address, and there it was, and how to get the assessment of this particular building. And I couldn't do it save my life now, and other people have told me that they have the same problem. So I don't know, as Mr. Herrington suggested, Mr. Doherty said something that was very mysterious, just one of those things. Secret content or something, I don't know what he's talking about, but it seems to me that it shouldn't be that secret from people, computer illiterate people like me or any of you who wants to just go on his computer and push a few buttons and find out what the assessments are of his neighbors or whoever else it is that he's snoopy about. Thank you. Mr. Doherty, can we get the old system back? I'm not sure we need the old system back. I think maybe we need a little tutorial for people that may need assistance with it, which the Board of Assessors again takes very seriously. Patriot property is a client of the citizens of this town. As the Board of Assessors who are their duly elected representatives, we actually implement it and we take responsibility for the actions of Patriot property. And we take very seriously our role of making sure we equitably disperse the levy that this body asks the town to raise every year. Let's be very clear for the prior speaker to the last speaker and the comment of the last speaker. There is no data that is being hidden from any taxpayer in this community. Every single bit of data on anyone's property in this town is available in the assessor's office for inspection at any time during business hours. The content contained on the prior site and the content contained on Patriot property's hosted site is the same data. Maybe in a different format, but it is the same data. There is no data blocked out. I think, Mr. Moderator, for clarity about the change in, if you will, service providers. Maybe Dave Good could speak to that. He's next on the list. Thank you. Mr. Good? Thank you, Mr. Moderator. David Good, Chief Technology Officer. The former version of the assessor's tool was housed and maintained by a citizen. We had discussions with this citizen with offers to lease and buy his tool. We came to a sort of a parting of ways when the citizen wanted to advertise on his site to actually pay for the maintenance of the site and being a municipal site we're not allowed to advertise, so we came to a parting of company. It was a pretty civil discussion. Unfortunately, I wish we could have kept the tool. We tried two or three different avenues, but there is not data that's sort of not available. Data's available. It is just currently not displayed in the tool that we have. Thank you. Thank you for that clarification, sir. Mr. Schlickman. Paul Schlickman, precinct nine. Motion to terminate debate under the budget item. On budget nine, board of assessors. Motion to terminate debate on budget nine, board of assessors. It's been second or all in favor? Aye. Opposed? No. It is a two-thirds vote and I so declare it. And next budget that was on hold was public works, 17. Who wishes to speak to public works? Mr. Trembly. Mr. Fiori. So, Mr. Moderator, I have to ask you the annual question. Oh, Ed Trembly, precinct 19, sorry. So, how much salt did we use last year? I've tried to give up salt. I have a little pressure. It's really bad for us. You know, Mr. Rademacher. How much salt did we put in our roads and that slushy stuff you spread out? Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Michael Rademacher, director of public works. We applied approximately 9,500 ton of salt this past winter. The advocate said we had used analysis while we still had several snowstorms left. The advocate said we had used 11,000 tons. I don't believe they were accurate. Ah, very good. So, do you have any idea how much we had a little snowstorm? It was kind of a surprise because it had been warm and the streets were warm and it rained. And then it snowed overnight, maybe a quarter of an inch or something and we salted the town again. We didn't salt the entire town. In the middle of the night, about two or three o'clock, we had gotten reports of several accidents within the town and that usually triggers us to begin a salting operation of main routes, the hills and towns. Later that day, before we even could finish the weather broke, sun came out, we could stop operation. Oh, yeah. It was melted before the sun came up. I, being in snow on ice myself went out and looked. But, so I've seen on some of the town, I think I've seen on some of the, some tanks on the, do we have, are we starting to spread liquid the ice routes now? No. I must be confused and I apologize. And Mr. Moderator, these accidents that happened, do we, do we have any idea how fast the cars were going? No, I don't think Mr. Rademok hires accident reconstruction specialists. But I guess that's the point, you know, when it's snowing, we need to be a little careful with driving. And as a taxpayer, how much does it cost us to salt the town? Depends on the amount. Per storm? Per storm? I don't have the average in front of me. It varies from storm to storm. You know, in a conversation I had with you a couple of months ago, I think you told me that it was something like 900 tons to salt the entire town. Again, it depends on the severity of the storm. Okay. So, I mean, I don't mean to, I'm not trying to beat up public works, I'm really not. But I would like to make the general public aware that we do use a lot of salt in town. And the salt really does eat up everything. I mean, it damages the infrastructure in towns, it certainly eats your cars. And perhaps if people use snow tires, like they should, because, you know, not too many people go out in the winter with their summer shoes on. Maybe we could use a little less salt. And if people slow down during snow storms, because I for one don't see the need to spend a lot of money on salt so people can go their normal summertime speed. Thank you very much. Thank you, sir. Mr. Fiori? Peter Fiori, precinct two. I'm not up here to beat up public works. I'm up here to beat up the private contractors that do the snow removal. I had three questions about the contractors. One, what's the hiring or selection process? I'm not looking for the job, but I'd like to know how they get it. What kind of training, if any, do they get from the town and what kind of active supervision do they get during the storm from the town? You want to field that one, Mr. Rademacher? Michael Rademacher, director of public works. There are a few factors when we select a contractor, past performance being the first that we get many repeat contractors in town and we take them back only if we've been happy with their work in previous years. Second, we do a thorough inspection of the equipment contractors have to make sure that we feel it will withstand a winter's worth of abuse and use. As far as training goes, really it's on the job. We look to see how their performance is during the course of the winter. During storms, we keep a few employees solely for the purpose of evaluating the work of the subcontractors to make sure the streets are being plowed and they're not missing certain areas and that the work is being performed to standards that we so desire. Great, thank you. Mr. Harrington? Stephen Harrington, precinct 13. Just draw your attention to the public works budget. The Water and Sewer Enterprise Fund is an offset of about a million dollars this year. That'll come up later. I just wanted to draw your attention to that now. Mr. Moderator, I have a couple questions. First, I notice under administration that we have an energy manager and a recycling coordinator. Now the recycling coordinator is one part time and it's seeing a 79% increase this year to a $51,000. And the energy manager is also seeing a double digit 23% increase to $43,000. Now if I look further into the DPW budget, I see that there's street lights and traffic signals and fire alarms, maintenance and electricity costs, and they're down about $38,000. But they don't offset the work of the recycling coordinator and the energy manager. And if I look at the budget for the waste hauling, that's also up this year. It's up, you know, 7% or so. And if I look at the presentation that the recycling group showed us, you know, we're sort of flattening out in terms of recycling and as far as our waste hauling goes. And so I just want to understand, Mr. Moderator, whether or not we've used the energy manager to reduce about $38,000 worth of, you know, operating expenses and turned it into a fully loaded, salaried position. And the same thing with the recycling coordinator. Why at this time, when it seems that we're bottomed out on, it doesn't seem like they're gonna have the chance of actually earning the increase that we spend on this position. And so I'd just like to see in the budget where that is, not so much, you know, what could happen. So can someone point to me why we're increasing these two positions much more than it seems that they're saving us on the budget? Mr. Tosti is going to address that issue, sir. Let's take two of the positions. First, the energy manager. This is not entirely Arlington. This energy manager is shared with the town of Bedford. So the energy manager, two thirds of his salary and benefits are paid for by the town of Arlington and one third of the energy manager salary and benefits is paid by the town of Bedford. So we share that, and I think that's a good example of trying to reach out and share certain facilities. And I think obviously with the logic for increasing the hours there is to try to save more money down the road. Now as far as the recycling coordinator, the finance committee was concerned about this. So we called the, we asked the town manager to appear and discuss the merits of the recycling coordinator. And basically the manager and DPW were concerned that recycling was leveling off and that they needed to put some more effort, some more resources into encouraging the recycling. And obviously the more we can encourage recycling, the less money we have to pay for in the tip fee that goes up to North Andover Incinerator. To partially compensate for some of the money, you will notice under the recycling fund offset above it, $12,663 was taken out of that budget and or out of that fund to help pay for some of the cost of the recycling coordinator. So that's the reason for the increase in hours to simply down the road to save money. And like I said, the energy coordinator, we share with the town of Bedford. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Thank you, sir. Mr. Fuller. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Peter Fuller, precinct 20. Two things. First, I think the increase in the sanitation budget that the previous speaker brought up, you can explain a lot of that from the tip fee stabilization fund offset going away. Can you speak right into the mic? Yes. Pull it down closer to you. There you go. Yeah, I think that the tip fee stabilization fund going away explains a lot of the increase in sanitation expenses. Secondly, down the bottom of the page under street lighting, if you look across the years from 2012, there's been a huge reduction in the cost of electricity. I guess this is from putting in the new LED street lights. So I applaud this saving. And are we gonna see more savings in the future or is that conversion all finished? Adam, Mr. Chapter Lane, I'm sorry. Adam Chapter Lane, town manager. There may be some additional savings when we finally get a full 12 month look at the actual street lights. We're also gonna start looking at LED light installments in town parking lots. We're also further looking at decorative light fixtures in the three business centers for upgrades to LEDs. So there may be some small additional savings in future years. Super, thank you. Thank you, sir. Mr. McKinney? In the interest of brevity, having the opportunity here, one of my motions had to do with the difficulty we had in finding some Christmas lights for the Uncle Sam Plaza. Laura Weiner and Ted Fields were kind enough to get in touch with me and ask if we could join First Light. And that was about three weeks ahead of time. We called and we were sent to one place and we were sent to another place. You have all invented to a third place. And it went around several times. Now the last time we needed lights, like for the Uncle Sam statue, we actually put in for the money. And although we didn't get charged, it happened. Now, since we have always had a fantastically good relationship with Mr. Radimaker, and I have heard that this money and these lights may be available, if he can assure me that these lights will be available, I can withdraw that article and save us that much time. Mr. Radimaker, will there be lights available for Uncle Sam Plaza next Christmas? That's my duty to ask him the question. Oh, Mr. Radimaker. Mr. Moderator, please ask Mr. Radimaker if there will be lights. Will you give him the lights under this budget so we can dispose of his other articles efficiently? Thank you, Mr. Moderator, Michael Radimaker. Yes, we will do so. Thank you. I will withdraw that article and we'll have that much more time for town meeting. Thank you very much. Which article is that? Which one? Okay, thank you. Thank you so much for your time. And I forgot to say Lawrence McKinney, please read the precinct seven. Ms. Phelps. Mr. Leonard. Thank you, Mr. Moderator, John Leonard, precinct 17, with a question from Mr. Radimaker, if I could please. Over the years, we've had trouble in regards to finding places to place some of the snow that we've taken off of the streets. We've had it placed at Sims Hospital, which we know we can't do anymore. We've had it placed at the reservoir. We've had it placed behind Stop and Shop. I wonder if there's any long range plans right now for getting ready for the next winter season instead of possibly running around like willy-milly and trying to find a place. Is there any plans down the road, Mr. Moderator, that this place is going to be designated the excess snow that we take off of the highway? Mr. Radimaker, are you exploring a permanent snow dump for the town? Yes. Well, that's what they called. Yes. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Michael Radimaker, Director of Public Works. So we did have a plan this year. We were prepared. We had permitted for two or three years to put snow at the reservoir parking lot. We had a plan with the Conservation Commission with the manager's office that we presented to the selectmen before the start of winter, which enabled us to basically handle a winter such as we just had by placing snow at the reservoir. And then once that parking lot became too full, we had that trucked out of town by a vendor and disposed of offsite. And that would be the plan for the next few years while we do look for potentially a better, more long-term position. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Thank you, sir. Mr. Jamison, pass. And Mr. Wagner, last on the list. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Carl Wagner, precinct 11. I actually wanted to say, given that we have distinguished international guests and you haven't said it to us in recent years and it feels like my five years or sometimes 500 years when we do budgets, supposing I decide that we should spend less money on one of these budget items or I feel that something should be changed in a budget, is talking and asking questions about it going to do anything more than inform the populace of our question, can we actually make changes to current issues? You'd have to make a motion, obviously, present a motion to the body and the body would have to accept that motion and vote on it. If people want to change budget items, is there a recommended way that you or any of the members sitting behind me would suggest for future years? They have to write a substitute motion and give it to me the night before we're gonna talk about it. I would also recommend that if they have any issues with a budget, they should meet with the finance committee starting in January and entertain the finance committee on their recommendations because it is an open process. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Thank you. Anyone else wish to discuss public works? Seeing none, we're gonna move on to community safety. Someone wanted to discuss community safety. Mr. Harrington. Stephen Harrington, Precinct 13. I want to bring your attention down to the FIA service. Personnel, it's sort of on page B9. Under FIA service, you have personnel expenses. And then you have this ambulance revolving fund offset. And it's $131,000. And we talked about this a little bit when we did the revolving funds. Remember that was the fund that had about $600,000 in revenue from the ambulance services. Now I'm gonna give you a little background too. Medicare, about six weeks ago, released their payments first time in 46 years. And in the Medicare payment system, it shows a ton of Ellington receiving $300,000, that's $290,000. And Medicare, if you actually take, they tell you how many service calls and they break it up by advanced life support and basic life support, much like that revolving fund did. And much like if you look in the time report, you'll see a little statistic on how many times basic life support or advanced life support was used. And you can scale it. And so if you take the Medicare payments and you scale it, you come up with down close to the $630,000 of revenue that appears in the revolving fund. And then what disturbed me is that you see $408,000 for contracted services to armed strong ambulance. And what I find disturbing is that I don't know why the town of Ellington isn't getting that money and why it's not showing up here to offset salaries. That's $4,000 or $5,000 per firefighter. And so my question, Mr. Moderator, is why this ambulance revolving fund offset is so low and why, what is, what contracted services are we providing or that armed strong, armed strong providing to us that gives them the lion's share of this ambulance revolving fund? Mr. Chapter Lane, do you wish to address that please? Adam Chapter Lane, town manager. So the offset that the speaker's referring to represents two firefighters salary as well as some fringe benefits. And what that represents is that at any time we have two firefighters or EMTs riding our ambulance or our rescue. So that represents what we every shift have committed. Two firefighters, two EMTs are one of the same. We don't have paramedics. We don't provide paramedic level service also referred to as ALS or advanced life support. So when we need ALS support, we contract with armed strong ambulance and they provide the paramedic level of service. They obviously want to be compensated for providing that service. So the revolving fund works just as it sounds as a revolving fund, we collect the revenue from the provision of that paramedic level of service and then we pay armed strong ambulance for the provision of that service. And so I talked to a comm star today. Thank you, Mr. Jeff Lane. I talked to a comm star who was a billing agent for municipalities that used to do it for Allington. And paramedic services, he's right, about $250 for a paramedic for ALS and Medicare will give you back well $363 for the payment for ALS. But that only explains half of it because there's not a paramedic for BLS and that's more than half of the total revenues in that fund. And so, well, Mr. Chapter Lane can give you sort of the off the cuff answer. I think there's actually about $100 to $200,000 that we're leaving on the table. And the most disturbing part of it is that the billing agent for the town of Allington is also armed strong ambulance. So you have the person who's providing a service doing your billing for you. And I'd like to see that separated. Mr. Moderator, could someone address why we've chosen to have the person who's doing the entity that's doing servicing also doing our billing when we have a treasurer's office that can do billing or there's certainly great service providers out there to do this type of billing at the same or less expense? Chief Jefferson is going to address us. Robert Jefferson, fire chief. The speaker's comments aren't exactly in line with how all the billing for the town of Allington's ambulance service is done. There's actually two ways that we built. When we built for ALS, which Mr. Harrington is talking about, there's a 60-40 split between the town of Allington and armed strong ambulance. They get 60% of the revenue for that call, the collected revenue, not the bill revenue, and the town receives 40% of it. So that's what you see when we pay off for the ALS. That's what we're paying to armed strong for the portion of service. We get to keep 40% of that. When we transport a BLS patient, that money goes directly, whatever collected monies for that run may be, goes directly to the general fund is not in that revolving fund. That's probably another $400,000 that we collect each year for BLS runs. The reason that armed strong ambulance service, they actually call it armed strong billing service, is our billing service, is because we went out to bid several years ago. When I first took over, we found that Columbus Star, who was our previous biller, was not effective. The billing collection rate was somewhere in the 80% range. They were charging us 4% for every dollar of revenue that was recouped. And they were basically carrying old debt from back in the 90s. And that's when I took over in 2008. Very inefficient, it was not up to speed. It took us probably a year to go to all that time and find where we stood with our billing. We put it out to bid and the Allington billing company, Armed Strong came in at 3% of total collected revenues, as well as we're currently receiving somewhere in around the 92% collection rate. Thank you, Chief. With all due respect, I'm gonna give you two numbers. 400,000 and 600,000. Revenues in the revolving fund is 600,000. We're paying a contract service, we're at a 400,000. That's two thirds, roughly, exactly. And so the BLS is half, thank you. Ma'am, yep. Debbie Edelstein precinct nine. Between fire and police services, we spend a million dollars a year in overtime. And my question, I could ask it in a bunch of ways, but ultimately, are we short staffed is one question. I can imagine that some of this is by negotiation, but a million dollars is a million dollars. And I'd hate to think that public safety is compromised because we have people working more shifts than they should be because we're short staff. Chief Ryan. Chief Ryan, please. Good evening, Frederick Ryan, Chief Police. There are a number of factors that drive that over time. On the police side, testifying in court is a big piece of it. And also, whenever there's a vacancy, both on the police side and the fire side, it takes about two years to recruit, hire and train a new police officer or a firefighter. I think I can speak for Chief Jefferson as well. So during that recruitment and hiring and training process, we have to backfill the vacancy. So that drives a lot of it as well. And then there's the contracted vacations and personal days. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Kleinman. Good evening, Stuart Kleinman, Precent One. I'm up here to say that I don't really care how much it costs. I'm also up here to say that the reason I'm up here is because a number of years ago, it was Armstrong Ambulance that arrived at my house within minutes upon my having a heart attack. They saved my life. I hope that never happens again, but I do hope that that happens to anybody else that is in need of quick medical care. So what does it matter what we are paying to anybody that is in need of medical care? We just pass this budget because we need to serve our citizens in the area of immediate healthcare. Thank you, sir. Mr. Jamison. Thank you, Mr. Marrider. Gordon Jamison, Precinct 12. Some of the discussion, so first I was off the floor talking to Mr. Donnelly in the last session when the revolving funds come up, him up, and long-term members know that that's been something that has been an interest of mine. And I want to applaud the manager and his staff for providing that additional information in the back of the Selectment Report that addresses some granularity on where those numbers go. In chatting with Mr. Chaplain, I learned that they found that that exercise is useful and they learned a lot of things about, they gained a greater understanding, including that $400,000 that was mentioned previously. As far as the offsets go from that fund, if you look in your capital plan, which hopefully we'll get to, there's about $50,000 that that fund is used to offset the cost of an ambulance, the debt service on that, and that's appropriate. And it also is used to, as I understand, in part in response to questions I posed in previous years to offset several firepire positions that are off the formal budget, but supported by, appropriately, again, in my regard, through the revolving fund. So I'm sorry to have to get there and provide some discussion, but I think that's all very well managed and above board, thank you. Thank you. Anyone else wish to discuss community safety? Seeing none that closes that budget, the next budget that was placed on hold was education. Mr. Hainer. Bill Hain, the chairman of the Allington School Committee, Mr. Moderator, I would ask the superintendent, Dr. Bodie, be allowed to come forward to give a brief presentation on the school department. Please, Dr. Bodie. Good evening, Kathleen Bodie. Mike, I want to bring the, there you go. Good evening, Kathleen Bodie, superintendent of schools. Good evening, Mr. Moderator, Tom, meeting members and town officials. And thank you for this opportunity to speak. I know that you're very interested in having a brief report, and so I will try to comply as best as possible. Mr. Hainer mentioned earlier this evening in his remarks that the school department has been experiencing significant enrollment growth over the last decade and certainly within the last two years. And this enrollment growth has posed the challenge of being able to meet all the needs of our students. This last fall, the school department met with the town manager at the finance committee, the school committee to work collaboratively to find a solution to this problem, which we did, which involves an enrollment growth factor. And I do want to thank everyone who was involved in this process for their willingness to find a solution. Can you go to the chart? The chart, there we go. This chart shows the difference between the FY 14 and 15 budgets. The general fund increased, as you know, by 3.5% and special ed by 7.5%. And I do want to take this moment to say that the school department is committed to maintaining this financial plan for the town of Arlington. And so we're keeping the growth factor as a separate number. In doing so, what will happen is that there will be an increase each year, but if there is an enrollment in decrease, then this amount will also go down. The other continuation this year is having a $970,000 offset for the kindergarten fees. Because of this offset in the work we did last year, we now have a tuition-free full-day kindergarten. And as a result of this change, the Chapter 70 money allocation for FY 14 increased by over $1.9 million, primarily but not exclusively to this change. There is a lot more detail about the school department budget in the budget book that was distributed on the first night of town meeting. There is also for those that are watching the cable, you should know that that report, as well as a complete budget for the school department is, can be found on the district website. This next chart demonstrates the Arlington Public School budget by funding sources. And the purpose of this is just to remind everyone that about 10% of the school department budget actually comes from grants and fees. The FY 15 budget allows us next year to maintain level service, which includes contractual step lane and college increases for our employees. We will also be able to mitigate class sizes, which have become large in recent years due to the enrollment growth, in particularly at the middle and the high school. Next year, for example, we will be adding an additional four-classroom cluster at the middle school. We will also be able to provide the necessary staff to ensure equity and quality education for all of our students, which will include a number of positions, several positions, staff to provide support and coaching for behavior management. And at the elementary level, we will increase our mathematics coaching by another position. The out-of-district tuitions will be represented in the next budget so that we support our current placements. We are also going to increase infrastructure support for technology to ensure the timely rollout in support of the expanded technology that was provided by the generous support of the Capital Planning Committee, which you'll hear more about maybe this evening, and the Arlington Educational Foundation. The next graph demonstrates the FYI budget by major expense categories. And the one thing I would want to point out on this graph is the wedge for interventions for nearly $3 million. This amount of money helps support our most struggling students, and one example of that intervention is our elementary reading program. The FYI 14 budget supports the vision of the Arlington Public Schools, and this is actually important, and I won't read everything, but we are committed to making sure that every graduate is ready for college, career, and active citizenship. And we do this by fostering a culture of continuous improvement, cost-effectively, and with partnership with all of our town departments and other stakeholders. I will leave you with some highlights for the Arlington Public Schools in 2013 and 14, many more of which are in the book that you have. The one highlight, however, that I do want to point out is the gold medal of distinction given to Arlington High School in the recent edition of U.S. News & World Report, Best High School Rankings. Arlington High School ranked 21st among 75 Massachusetts public high schools that met the criteria for ranking. There are, however, 352 high schools in the Commonwealth. Nationally, the high school ranked 465 out of 31,242 schools, public high schools. These rankings are based on several metrics. The school's performance on the state assessment in math and English language art, which is MCAS, how well our most disadvantaged students, the students representing we call subgroups, how they perform, and then they measure college readiness by the exam scores on advanced placement tests. So much congratulations goes to the high school staff and teachers, but also to all Arlington public school educators because the preparation for rigorous courses at the high school begins at a much earlier age. And as I mentioned, part of the vision of the Arlington public schools is to have a cost-effective education. And I will tell you that, and those of you could look this up, that among the high schools that were given the gold medal distinction, Arlington had one of the lowest cost per pupil. So with this, I will end my remarks and we'll certainly be glad to answer any questions you have. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Vody. Mr. Karman. Dean Karman, precinct 20, and a member of the finance committee. This is gonna sound weird as I start to say it, but I think it'll make a little more sense. I do wanna take a sec to thank our town leaders for something, and that is how they dealt with the school enrollment issue this year. In a lot of towns, you have these weird situations where you have a town manager who represents the town and you have a superintendent of schools that represents the schools. Now, I don't know what town the schools belong to in those towns, but they somehow don't belong to one another. And they sort of battle back and forth and they don't agree with each other. And then sometimes if you're a volunteer on the finance committee, you have the unenviable task of sorting these messes out, which frankly, as a volunteer, I have no effort to do, and I don't think anyone else in the finance committee has any effort to do. One of the really nice things that happened this year, sort of I guess one of those insider things you would say is by the time we had started our finance committee session this year, the leadership of the school committee, the leadership of the board of select men, the finance committee, the town manager, the superintendent all got together and figured out how they were going to deal with this enrollment challenge in terms of additional funding and funding mechanisms and things like that. And so I did wanna sort of point that out and thank all of them for that because I don't think the finance committee member as a town meeting member that you really feel like you need to deal with people that can't get along. And while it seems strange sometimes to think that executive leadership wouldn't get along in a town, you'd be surprised that there are many communities where it doesn't happen. So once again, to all the leaders of the different boards, thank you. Thank you, sir. Thanks for pointing that out, Mr. Chappett. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Roland Chappett, precinct 12. I just want to ask the superintendent through the moderator about a situation in terms of enrollment that we addressed last year. And that had to do with fair loading in each of the elementary schools. You remember that the Thompson School was under construction and the kids from that neighborhood were going up to Stratton and I think in one of the other schools. And once the Thompson opened, those youngsters came back, there was a lot of discussion around each of the elementary schools in the community as to which streets, if you will, would be sending their youngsters to that particular school and then there was a, how you pronounce it, around each of those districts, there were some streets that were up in the air about which way they would go. So I guess my curiosity here is how has that worked out? Okay, well, Dr. Bode, can you address redistricting? It's really a school committee issue, but I'll entertain the question. Last year it worked out very well. The vast majority of people in the high 80% had their first preference. And we have a very, very clear protocol for how we go, we assign students. It's basically looking at the enrollments at a particular grade and just trying to balance those enrollments. But people also are able to go on a wait list and the wait list is set up based on the data registration and then for those that register on the same day by lottery. And we were able to do a number of wait list changes over the course of the summer. What does the, even though most people had their first preference, what was able to happen is we were able to start addressing the problem of unequitable class sizes. And I will say that this year I'm seeing even more of that. We have now a kindergarten coming in right now as our 495, and I suspect it'll probably go over 500 before the school year. But by having the buffer zones, we're able to at least at this stage have some equity among our kindergartens. And in the past we could have very different numbers and we could also potentially have the way the numbers would work require an extra kindergarten or class somewhere. So it is working, but it's very much a tweaking to what is happening in our schools rather than a major redistricting. Thank you, Dr. Rowdy. Mr. Harrington. Pass. Anyone else wish to discuss the education budget? Seeing none, that ends, that terminates that budget. The next hold was on libraries. Yeah. Michelle DeRosha, precinct 19. Mr. Moderator, I have a number of questions perhaps for the director of the library system through you. I'd like to first off hear just a report on the status of this data accreditation. I know in prior years, that had been a point of vulnerability for the library system, which I believe was fully corrected last year and wanted a status on that. Mr. Levergut, everybody's been moved around because of the computers. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Ryan Levergut, director of libraries. I'm happy to report that we are in good shape with staying, maintaining our certification with the state of Massachusetts. We're meeting the municipal appropriation requirement again this year. Great, thank you. Another question in the budget summary in the finance committee report, there are two sections of the budget that show very large percent changes. First one being in the children's librarian category with over 550% change, which strikes me as a programmatic setting of priorities and I wondered if you could comment on that. Yeah, the way this reflects here is just a bit skewed to what the reality is. If you look back in 2014, children's librarian, you'll see one part time position. What happened in 2015, there's a position showing up that is the Fox Friday Librarian. Before that, it was reflected in the budget but in kind of a way that wasn't as transparent as it could have been. So if you'll look this year under 2015, there's a Friends of Fox offset because thanks to, we have two wonderful friends groups. I think most of you know that. One of those groups is the Friends of Fox and they fund Fridays at the Fox. The reason the Fox is not Fridays is because of that friends group. So that position is reflected there and we did reallocate a position. We had some retirements this past year and there was someone that used to be in the adult services department that was reallocated to the children's department. If any of you ever use our children's services, you'll know that it is booming. We just heard about the schools and how we're seeing increased enrollment in the schools. That's also reflected in the library system as well. So those are the two factors that attribute that change. It looks very striking but essentially it's just one more person in that children's department. Thank you. And the other section that shows a large percent change is in overtime and I understand that that is for Sunday hours. Is that correct? That is correct. And do you consider that sort of an experimental thing that you're doing this year to see how it goes and in future years we would see that elsewhere in the budget and perhaps a more cost effective line item? Sure. Historically the story of Sunday hours is complex but let me just limit it to the past five years or so. The library used to receive much more state aid to libraries than we receive now and we were able to fund Sunday hours through that library state aid. When we saw that number decrease around FY09, the board of trustees worked with the library director at the time, Erin Loud, who went to the team manager at the time, Brian Sullivan and it was agreed that if the trustees could raise money to fund Sunday hours that we could have Sunday hours. So money was raised when we started that effort. There was a large initial donation to get those Sundays going and over time, although people have been very generous supporting Sunday hours, that's diminished and we were reaching a point where it was going to be difficult for us to maintain those Sunday hours and what's happened over the past five years, people love Sundays. We're only open three hours on Sundays and we see tremendous usage and it's a real demand. You look at the Vision 2020 survey, one of the things that's reflected is that people want weekend hours. People want summer weekend hours now and that would be a wonderful thing for us to have so the Sundays are really important to the community. A lot of working families can't make it to the library other than the weekends in Arlington. And so would you say in next year's budget cycle you'll be looking for a more structural change to account for that rather than in overtime? The reasons reflected in overtime is because it is not obligatory for library staff to work on Sundays. There are some collective bargaining issues that come into play here and that's why it shows up in overtime. Hopefully the answer is your question. Okay, thank you. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Livica, thank you, Mr. Rosha. Anyone else wish to discuss libraries? That closes that budget. The next budget that was placed on hold is retirement. Mr. Harrington. Oh, Mr. Gamison next. Stephen Harrington, precinct 13. I wanna draw your attention to two things. If you look at page B12 of the budget book, under retirement, see if contributory pensions, you have the water, sewer offset, another million dollars. And if you look, there's a 5.92% increase. And if you look year to year, I know this is just budgets but in this one I believe it's real. You know, it's pretty much 6% a year. So it's a large amount of money as well. It's the same size as say the capital budget. So it's a lot to go up 6% a year and expect it to be able. Now, Arlington has to do this. Arlington has, they actually rate towns on their pension and they have to be by law fully funded by 2040. And Arlington's, I believe is in the low 50s right now. So it's about 50, say 3% funded. And that gives Arlington an F. Just to put it in perspective, Minuteman is 100% funded. They get an A. There's only a couple municipalities that get A's. But my understanding, and Mr. Moderator, I'm gonna ask this question that once you put in say this year 9.5 million, that becomes your high water mark. And from every year after that, you have to put in at least that amount. And so the last few years when we've been flushed with cash, it's been sort of an easy thing to do to try to catch up and beat that 2040 statutory limit. But part of me sort of cringes that we're doing it, see markets reach highs. This is when we're putting most of our money in. We're trying to keep budgets at 3.4, whatever the number is supposed to be. And one of the largest components are at six. And so, Ms. Moderator, I guess I have the question first, is that my understanding correct that there's a high water mark that with the pension, we have to put in at least 9.5 million dollars. I wanna go forward basis. Mr. Tosti, can you address that? Yes, Mr. Harrington is right. We have to have a fully funded pension system by 2040. And right now we're projected to be fully funded in 2032. And one of the agreements that we've made over the years with the retirement board, because they really control to a large degree this, is that we cap it at 6%. And they've been able to keep it. Now it's a little over 6% now because the Arlington Housing Authority is also in the same fund. So it just doesn't quite work out to exactly 6%. Sometimes a little higher, sometimes it's a little lower. But they're involved in that too. So a good chunk of this increase is to fund services for retirees from the past. In other words, you know, back in the 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s and really even probably half of the 80s, we were just pays your go. That's it. Nobody was funding anything. And then about 1988, I think the state passed a law that said you have to start funding for your retirement so it's fully funded. So I'm guessing about half of the say is to become fully funded as opposed to pay as you go. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Mr. Jamison. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Gordon Jamison, precinct 12. I'm disappointed that we did not see, even though this number is a number that's given to us by the retirement board and we have no control over it, it is completely in their hands and we have to pass it. We don't, it's still appropriated. I'm disappointed that the retirement board has not seen fit to providers with an update on things beyond the comments Mr. Tosti provided. And the recent returns on the investment, majority of which is now in the state system, thank goodness. And how they're doing on the small percentage that they're still managing on their own. I would hope that next year, there would be a much greater detail both in, both in the financial plan that the manager's office presents and is online beyond the, I think, one page that's in here and nothing in the annual report that I saw. I just checked earlier and obviously nothing for us. I hope that they could give us an update because like Mr. Harrington said, this is a lot of money. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Mr. Chappett. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Roland Chappett, precinct 12. I held off asking this question until we got into the retirement budget because I'm retired. I don't really have a fuss with the numbers. What I do have a fuss with, I can't read the numbers. So I would suggest please, in the future, two things. Make the font a little larger. If you look at the school committee budget, the numbers I could read were not a problem. Number two, if it's not already available, put the budget on the website so I can read it at home and blow the numbers up so I can see them. Thank you. I bought a magnifying glass. I gave up asking. All right, anyone else wish to discuss retirement? Seeing none, that closes that budget. Brings us to insurance. Who had a hold on insurance? Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Marvin Lewitt in precinct 16. I think it was five years ago that we needed to add $100,000 to the workers comp budget. While thankfully that number has not increased since, I would like to think that we could hopefully drop it a little bit. The State Department of Labor Standards recently started a program that provides free occupational health and safety consulting to municipalities. And I guess I would strongly encourage the heads of any department whose employees have filed a comp claim to take advantage of this in the hope that we can make this number smaller in coming years. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else wish to discuss insurance? Mr. Fisher? Andrew Fisher precinct 16. I mean precinct six. I'm not sure where to ask this question, but can Mr. Moderator, can somebody explain more specifically why it is that in 2020 so much of the stabilization fund will have to be spent. Just, I understand there are structural deficits. I don't understand exactly what it is and where the money's gonna go all of a sudden or does it start to go downhill in 2017? It's just a question I have. I'd like to understand that more explicitly. Thank you. Mr. Tostek, can you address Mr. Fisher's question? Restabilization funds. Unfortunately, several of the major fixed costs of the town grow at a certain level. One of them, for example, we just discussed was retirement. That's going up 6%. And that's a very big number. So you have that, you have health insurance which was growing in the range of eight to 10%, well, seven to 10% until two years ago when we entered the GIC and we've been able to hold that down to a certain degree. You have salaries and cost of living. Over the last five years, we've given two zeros. So you have some costs which are just increasing which are very difficult to deal with but you also have some major elements of our revenue which just aren't growing. I mean, our state aid has been a disaster in the 2000s. When we got first hit in 2000 by a recession, our state aid got hit fairly drastically and then in the middle of the 2000s started to recover a little bit, not to where it was but to recover a little bit. And then we got hit again by the great recession of 2008 and we got whacked again with insurance. Sorry, with cutbacks in our state aid. Our state aid is probably some place about where it was in the late 80s. I mean, that's what's happened to it. And during the 80s, we were getting five, six, 700,000 increase in local aid every year. During the 90s, we were getting, it started off around 200 or 300 by the mid to late we were getting five or 600,000 new local aid a year. In the 2000s, it's probably overall been a negative. When we can't get five, six, 700,000 dollars and increase local aid each year, we're gonna have to go back for overrides. And unfortunately, during the 80s, the legislature and the governor at that time had a strong commitment to local government. During the 2000s, they had a commitment to education, but not necessarily to all of local government. And during the 2000 period, the commitment to local aid has really not been terribly strong. The governor in his recommendation hardly gave us any increase. The House has increased that a bit, but not all that much. So I think the local aid has been a major factor on that. And we're gonna try like heck to bring that deficit into 2020 down as much as we can. But there'll probably still be a deficit. Hopefully it'll be manageable enough with a reasonable override that we can get by it. But if we're gonna keep the services we have now at that level, we need the revenues to back it. And over the last 12, 14 years, we just have not been getting that kind of support. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Anyone else wish to discuss insurance? Seeing none, that closes the insurance budget. Water and sewer was the next budget put on hold. Mr. Harrington. Stephen Harrington, precinct 13. So we started this conversation last week. If you'll look at your budget book on B14, you'll see the Water and Sewer Enterprise fund. I first wanted to draw your attention to the back. It's almost $20 million. So it's the second largest budget that you have that you're looking at tonight, behind education. It's twice the capital budget. I just want to break it down, because it took me a while. I mean, I still don't fully understand it and so I'll have some questions. But if you look at it, first of all, user charges. That's us. So those are your water bills and you see that it's up 12.7% for the user charges year on year. And over the three year period you're seeing here, three year changes, it's up 22%. And so it's increasing a lot. And I think everyone knows that, water bills. So when we look at property taxes, we don't seem to think about water bills, but I just milled up mine in $500 bill the other day. If you look at the next line down, you see shift of debt to tax rate. So that shows up in your property tax bill. And that's the, I think it's 86 cents on the 13.79 property tax rate. And you can see it's 40% or 30% of the total user charges plus your tax bill. And so about 30% of the cost of the water and sewer enterprise fund is borne by people through their property taxes. And it's not done equally. It's not based on usage. It's based on the value of your property. And so that's something I think that people don't fully appreciate when we talked about, what I mean is we're subsidizing someone somehow. It turns out that actually people more likely to have large properties and irrigation systems are actually subsidizing everyone else. And this is how you can see it. It's about 30 to 40% of the total over the last four years. So those two add up to about $19 million. And if you look at the first line up at the top, you can see that there's some personnel expenses and there's other expenses that are mostly the MWRA infrastructure charges and water itself and the sewer treatment. And then you look down, you see the capital outlay and debt service. And this is what I wanted to talk about the other night. It's $2.1 million in this budget. And it's been 1.6 to 2.1. If you look over the last five years and you add up those loans that we approved, one of them we still have one to go, they total about nine million bucks. And so the five year loans means every year we're paying off about $2 million of the loans that we maybe took out five years ago or maybe they stepped in 150 every year. But then if you look at the capital budget and especially this year, you'll see that there's a lot more in the capital budget than just paying back those loans. And over a five year period, that capital budget is $15 million. So this year in particular is very large. You'll see in your capital budget that there's over $4 million for water and sewer enterprise fund in the capital budget. And this is the question. I just, like I said earlier, financial statements should be clarified questions. They shouldn't make it difficult to find information. And I just can't see how if we're taking out of this fund $2 million to pay salaries and pension costs, so personnel costs. But we're putting it, we're appropriating through bonding or the capital budget, more than the fund itself is paying out on the order of, it's about $2 million a year. I don't see, and this is a question I have, Mr. Moderator. And I asked the kind of manager to clarify this for me. I'm hoping that he's prepared, I asked him last week. How is this not a shell game? How are we not using operating expenses by using debt? Mr. Chaplain, do you want to stand that question? Adam Chaplain, town manager. So they're really separate matters. They're all covered by the revenue sources that the speaker has spoken about. There's the money that is charged based on rates. And then there is the amount of money that's raised on the tax rate, the debt shift, the $5.5 million amount. So as the speaker mentioned, there are debt service payments that are appropriated to service the debt that's issued under the other warrant articles that we've talked about earlier in the meeting. And then there's also direct capital appropriations that aren't borrowed. They're direct cash appropriations, which are supported by the rates that are charged for water and sewer. Now, separate from that, you've heard a lot of talk about water and sewer indirect charges or water sewer offsets. And they really, they make up two primary areas. There are offsets that take care of the actual employees who work directly for the Water Sewer Enterprise Fund. And those are their retirement and healthcare offsets. So the retirement costs attributable to water sewer employees, monies come from the Water Sewer Fund and offset the general fund appropriations that we've already spoken about for both retirement and health insurance. Then the other side of it is the Water Sewer Fund supplementing or supplementing would be the wrong word, supporting the general fund expenditures that are used to support the Water and Sewer Enterprise Funds. So there's a great deal of offsets used to support other DPW functions that support water sewer. Engineering does a great deal of work for water sewer. Administration, I know Mr. Rottemacher's time and most a lot of his staff's time is spent on this large $20 million budget in DPW as well as highway and as well as other smaller administrative departments, including the town manager's office, the treasurer's office, the comptroller, IT, legal, and so forth. So there are personnel offsets for the personnel time that's spent in each of those offices, as well as smaller offsets for the portion of the health insurance cost and retirement costs for those offices as well. So those all add up to the indirect costs that you're, excuse me, that have been spoken about. So they're really, they are separate. There is a capital portion of the water sewer budget that is again supported by rates and there's also the offset portion, which I just spoke about, which is also supported by rates. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Anyone else wish to discuss water and sewer? If not, that closes the water and sewer budget recreation. Who wish to discuss recreation? Seeing none, move on. The last one, someone wished to discuss was youth services division. Who wish to discuss youth services? No one, okay. That ends the budget. So, we have before us the recommended vote of the finance committee and all the budgets we've discussed. All in favor, please say yes. Yes. Opposed say no. Was that unanimous? It's a unanimous vote, and I so declare it. That closes all article 28 and brings us to 29. We have a motion to adjourn until the Wednesday. All in, any notices of reconsideration? Let's vote with our clickers. Mr. Flynn, are you ready? All in favor of adjourning until Wednesday, please vote yes. Yes. No, use your clicker. Go. What? We got a clock. Tosti voted, we can see. Alan Tosti gave notice of reconsideration on article 29 and 28. Time's up. 160 to adjourn, we'll see you on Wednesday. Six noes. If we really do adjourn, we could probably get done Wednesday.