 Welcome to Talk of the Town, I'm James Millan. And with me today are town manager Adam Chaptilane who has come into the studio to share with us a review of a busy, busy year here for him and for the community in Arlington. So Adam we always enjoy talking to you. Thanks very much for coming. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it very much. So like I said I think we will just kind of look back at 2019 as we are now within weeks of its close and just so much has happened so we want to just acknowledge that first and foremost. But also I know you and the rest of our local government, thoughtful people, I'm sure you have taken lessons from a number of the things that happened over the course of the year so we will want to kind of focus on that particular take away wherever we can. So we will proceed roughly chronologically and going back near the beginning of the year I wanted to ask you about just to take us through what happened with zoning, bylaw changes or proposals that ultimately after a lot of back and forth between the ARB and the zoning and I think the ZBA as well and the community the ultimate result was that these proposals were withdrawn before town meeting. So tell us both what the substance or content of those proposals was and a little bit about how that all kind of unfolded and again what lessons you've drawn for how to do things next time. Absolutely. So I think what we did in Arlington or tried to do in Arlington earlier this year is the same thing that's happening all over the metro region and frankly it's happening in many of the major metropolitan areas across the country. Many of us are seeing housing costs are rising out of control. Many would say they're not rising out of control now they've been out of control for 20 years and it's making it harder and harder for people really of any income level to live anywhere near where they work in the greater Boston region. So Arlington is definitely symptomatic of that but not alone in that. So starting with a process that actually dated back into 2018 led by the Department of Planning and Community Development we started a dialogue about ways that we could improve or enhance density along the commercial corridors to incentivize both housing development and affordable housing development and thereby also add some more vibrancy to our commercial corridors by putting some new redevelopment there allowing for new store fronts, new housing, foot traffic from those housing, from that housing and playing our part in the larger regional part of producing housing and hopefully if not lowering slowing the cost of housing in the region. So that's sort of the high level of what we were looking at. So the Planning Department went through a number of community forums and information sessions trying to find some community consensus around what the right steps were. And that's a typical way that the Planning Department approaches these kinds of things all the time, right? Correct. I mean setting these hearings, these opportunities basically for the public to weigh in. Yeah and in different formats. Sometimes it was the format of an actual redevelopment board meeting, other times it was a community listening session or even smaller group engagement to learn from residents what they were looking for. And I think what we found, the good news is I don't know that anybody as part of this process said that we don't need more affordable housing. That seemed to be a community wide consensus that Arlington needs more affordable housing. The challenge is what's the right way to do that? Is it through allowing more housing production in general, so both market rate housing that then allows for affordable housing? Is it finding ways to just produce affordable housing? And the challenges are there's only so much economic reality, or there are limits of economic reality of how to produce affordable housing. So not the jump to lessons learned, but I think one of the lessons we learned coming out of it is we need to do a better job of setting the stage of what the economic realities are of creating affordable housing. If it is true in fact that we have a community wide consensus around the need to develop it, then we need to have a community wide understanding of what it costs to develop affordable housing and what the realities are of developing it. So I think that was a lesson learned. So when you say that, do you mean that in general there seemed to be less understanding of what would be involved if we were to go whole hog in that direction in the way that people could come together and there was broad consensus around the goal? There was less clear understanding about what the means were going to be. And so having that conversation going forward so that everybody understands what those means are and then presenting alternatives to the voters might be a better or another way to go about it. Yeah. I mean part of the challenge is we hear a constant refrain, again not just in Arlington all over the region of we don't need market rate housing. We need affordable housing. And I understand that refrain saying basically we don't need more $800,000 condos. We need more either rental units or condos that are affordable to people of a certain percentage of the area median income. I understand that. But still being a capitalist society as we are when developers are looking at a parcel, all their costs and profit law statements have to come together to have it make economic sense for them. I'm not the housing expert on staff but my general understanding is to produce a unit of affordable housing you need about $150,000 worth of subsidy to come from somewhere. So because that affordable housing unit is going to produce less revenue than a market rate unit. So without there being either direct government subsidy, which we can do on a limited basis but not nearly on the scale or scope of what we want to do, you need to have some other ability to produce that scale that is necessary to create those subsidies and often that is through allowing market rate development that is then requires a certain level of affordable housing. And that level can only go so high before that profit loss statement goes off its balance again. So I think that's part of what we need to do is have a more direct and explicit dialogue with the community about what those realities are. Maybe even bring in some developers who aren't working in Arlington now or maybe don't even have an interest in working in Arlington to talk to people. That would probably be better, right? Yeah, right, and just have a dialogue about what it costs to put a project together, right? If you're going to build 10 units and we're requiring 15% affordable housing, how does that work? What does it look at 20% affordable housing? Then what does it look at 25% and where does, again, where does the profit loss go off the rails and start to get a better understanding of what it will actually require? And I think that will help us test what the commitment actually is to the production of affordable housing and get a feeling for what does the community really want to commit to produce affordable housing? Yeah, and I think that your experience in the community, both as deputy town manager and town manager for a long time now, I assume confirms that you feel like you can, if you can present the numbers and better information and stuff like that, like you said, a disinterested source, as far as folks are concerned, a developer who's not interested, as you said, in operating in Arlington, who nonetheless will give the real numbers so that people can chew on that, that I'm sure that you have confidence that Arlington community members will do so, will work to understand that reality and to accept it as best they can as they consider what the right steps are to go to address this issue. Yeah, I'm hard-pressed to think of a time at town meeting where a well-reasoned, detailed, statistically valid argument has been made in town meeting hasn't supported it. I'm sure there's one, and I'm sure there's something, but generally what you just said is right. I think if you do the homework, you do the math, you do all the requisite backup work that's necessary, usually you can make your argument. The other thing I would add in this particular case that I think we need to do better at and I think internally we all agree we need to do better at is providing graphical representations of what proposed zoning changes would do to the corridor. We did have some that I don't think fit the bill, that I think we all internally agree they didn't fit the bill. So as we start to talk about things in the future, and we're not looking for a spring of 2020, we're probably looking maybe fall of 2020 or even beyond that, I think we all acknowledge that we need to do a much better job of demonstrating graphically, what would these changes do? What would it make XYZ parcel potentially look like if developed per the proposals and give people a sense of what's either to be gained or lost from whatever their perspective might be. Right, and I assume those pictures would save you and others thousands of words. Yes, yeah. In fact, and that makes a lot of sense, but you just mentioned town meeting, that's again as we're proceeding roughly chronologically through the year, town meeting occurred as it always does in April and May, and a pretty full docket this year. Wondered if you had any takeaways from town meeting this year that you would like to share? I think it was it was one of the longer town meetings we've had in recent history. We had, I think when I first started here we were at nine or ten nights of town meeting and then we dipped down to four or five, but we were back up to, were we nine or ten again this year, forgetting probably self-protection for getting up in the nights it actually was. Yeah, as you know, my wife became a town meeting member this year and so, yes, those were also lonely nights for me in the house, right? So I'm glad also to think that, yeah, we already maxed out on the potential town meeting nights in future years are going to be better. So anyway. You hope. So yeah, I mean I think it was a very robust town meeting session, right? There was a lot of zoning talk even with the withdrawals. There was a lot of dialogue before that. There was still some other zoning proposals that were debated, the accessory dwelling unit. Article was it received approval right of 62% of town meeting but needed two-thirds approval, so it didn't pass. So there was a lot of dialogue about that. There was dialogue about the budgets. We had both an appropriation for the high school as well as the general town budget with the override included as part of the debate. But I think more than anything what I've seen this year and what I've seen over my time working here that your work in proving yourself as a government or building trust for the community is never done. It's on a continuum. So all the good work before, though important, needs to be constantly maintained and in the role of town meeting or looking at town meeting because there's turnover, because there's always new faces, there's always new residents engaging, there has to be a constant education process so that the voters or the town meeting members who come in have an understanding of what you've done in the past, what you're looking to do in the future, and how what you're proposing right then is based upon both of those things. And I don't want to say I didn't know that going in, but for some reason I would say this year that was particularly, I was acutely aware of that. And I think we're going to continue to see that. We have a lot of population change in Arlington in general. People move in, they move out for whatever number of reasons they might be and we see a lot of change in town meetings. So I think being aware as we go into this next town meeting session of the need to engage with town meeting members, make sure they're adequately informed about the matters before them would be a major takeaway that I would take from the 2019 town meeting. I have a small question and I realize it could be an embarrassing one for me and that maybe I should know this. But you mentioned in terms of the accessory dwelling units that the vote fell short of the two-thirds necessary. Is it two-thirds approval that's necessary for all warrant articles, zoning in certain finance articles? So general town by-laws know, general budget approval know, but if you're changing zoning, right now it requires two-thirds if you are putting money into or out of a stabilization fund or free cash or if you're trying to borrow money, that requires two-thirds votes. So the statutorily lays out, it's laid out statutorily what needs to be a two-thirds vote versus a majority vote. And well, thank you, we'll leave that there. I was about to go down a rabbit hole, which our audience wouldn't appreciate, I'm sure. Anyway, looming overtown meeting at that time and subsequent to it right away came the big vote, the kind of centerpiece of the year here in Arlington in a lot of ways, which was the vote both on the override and on the debt exclusion for the high school. On that debt exclusion for the high school, first of all, congratulations. Thank you. Lots of people working for a long time to make that argument and to bring in the figures as they are for the high school and the design, et cetera. But here we sit in December and already it's, we've had word that there's a, it could be running over budget by as much as 10% of the cost presented to the voters in July or June. So what gives, what's going on? Should we expect more bad news to come? Is this going to become this 30 million extra gonna be compensated for with cuts somewhere else? Tell us a little bit about where things stand with that right now and what should we should expect. Absolutely. And I think the first thing I would say, not to mince words or to parse words, but we're not over budget, we're over estimate. Over estimate. For what it's worth. Really, no, that's a good. I think it's important. That's an important distinction, absolutely. Just to make sure, I don't want people to think that we have over spent money that was appropriated or approved where we thought we were gonna be budget wise, the estimates are higher than that. So we're overestimate at this point. Yes, and I will try it and any references I make to that going forward, I will make sure to be careful about that, because you're right, it's an important distinction. Yeah, and people have written to me and said, well, how's this project already over budget? We haven't even put a shovel in the ground yet, which is a fair question. So, but to the meat of the question, so we started at schematic design, which is where you get at the end of the feasibility study phase. And you know a lot of things at that point about the project. You know what it's gonna generally look like, where the building's gonna be, where the classrooms are gonna be. So you have to know a lot of things about the building, but you really don't have a design for the building yet. And that's why you start the design development process. And then at the end of that, you actually go into construction drawings so that you have architectural plans for a construction company to build from. So from schematic design until now, we're actually just at the end of the design development process, we've learned through the process a lot more details. And some of those details have illuminated that there's gonna be more cost than what we had originally budgeted. Some of it isn't necessarily that the detail illuminated it, but we've learned that market conditions are driving higher costs in trades like HVAC or electrical work. That either the complexity of this job or just how much work there is in general in the market is driving estimates or pricing to be higher for some of these sub-trades that are part of the building. So that's part of what's driving this overestimate figure. To get, we have to stay at the $290.8 million figure. The MSBA requires it. It's the only authorization we have per the debt exclusion. So we need to bring what right now is a $264 million construction budget down to the $235 million construction budget that was part of the original 290.8. So we are going through a value engineering process that we're required to go through even if we didn't have to cut. The MSBA requires us to go through a value engineering process. And what that looks like is a long spreadsheet that talks about a lot of different things. Some very small things like how high the tile is gonna be on the wall and the hallways and whether you're gonna have tile and all the walls in the bathroom or what color brick you're gonna have on the exterior of the building or are the windows gonna be aluminum? That sounds like a long spreadsheet. Right now I think it's a five or six page spreadsheet. And you go through and you make decisions about what you want in the building or don't want in the building. And often, there's a cost benefit on are we increasing maintenance costs or are we decreasing the longevity of the product or are we gonna get the total same functionality for using a different product? And you go through this analysis and try to figure out what the right things to do are. Also on that list are some bigger things. We're giving consideration to what exactly the HVAC system for the building will be. We had planned 330 geothermal wells in a fully electric building. We're still considering whether or not that's gonna be possible in staying within budget. Where the design team is committed and I think we all think it's gonna be possible to keep an all-electric building which keeps our hopes of eventually a net zero building alive. But perhaps with less geothermal, these are all things we're looking at right now. So that's one thing we're looking at. The athletic fields and whether or not they'll be artificial turf or just normal grass is up for debate. Whether or not they'll have lights is up for debate. But that's a good example of us. We're trying to think at the same time about what can we do that can be made ready to be added on later? And the fields are a good example of that. So on this value engineering log, we have synthetic versus grass, no lights at all, put the conduits in, put the footings in for the lights so that we can make a decision about how much money do we wanna spend to make sure that maybe three years after the project we spend the $600,000 to put lights up or whatever it might be. And that ripples throughout the entire buildings. There's some things you can cut and never get back. There's other things you can cut but know that you can add on later. Prepare for like what people do in their own hopes. Exactly, right. Exactly. And then figure things out and something might need to be deferred. And if possible, you just wanna prepare the ground for it and then undo that. Exactly. Who are the, when you say we, we, we, as you were just doing throughout your answer, who are the decision makers around these things? Who's looking at the spreadsheet and wrestling with tile to field these kinds of decisions? So it's definitely a we, right? The we is big. We have a 19 member high school building committee. So it's the building committee. So that's the, that's, that building committee holds the authority around all these decisions. So by not, by maybe next week, if not next week, the week following the committee will be taking votes on all of these value engineering items. We've already taken votes on a few, I think about $3 million worth to close the gap from 29 to 26 but the bigger ticket items are still up for debate in vote. So that's, that's the we. And that we has town officials, the superintendent, myself, Jeff Thielman as a school committee member and as the chair of the committee, Chrissy Allison Ampe as another member of the school committee, general residents with varied expertise. Some are construction industry experts. Some are marketing experts. Some are educational experts. We have our own educational experts in the high school principal and vice principal. We have teachers on the committee. So we have a pretty broad base of people from the community both working for the community and living within the community serving on the high school building committee. But the other sort of half of that whole process is our professional team. We have HMFH architects who are the designers for the project. We have Skanska who are the owner's project manager or OPM who basically serve to represent us working with the architect and with the construction manager. And the construction manager we hired is Consigli Construction. So now that team has come together to serve as the project team or the project experts. So we sit at a table with probably now 40 people around the table having these discussions. And the meetings go long. We're probably averaging three and a half hour meetings to get through all of this. But we definitely have a lot of very sharp people around the table. We have John Cole who was chair of the Permittown Building Committee for, I don't even know, 20 something years of professional architect sitting around the table. We have a woman who works in construction at Harvard. We have just newly joined an architect at Stantec. We have a professional engineer in the sustainability industry, Ryan Katowski. So we have a lot of brain power around the table from the community helping us to get through these decisions. And I think just to wrap this up, I wanna just confirm what I heard from what you were saying, which is, yes, it has come to public attention that there's a $30 million increase in that estimate, as you said. But to those in the know, this is not a surprise because this is the kind of thing that would happen in any project where you move from having just the basic elements of design to actually looking at things in more detail. And I assume that it's very predictable that when you do that at this stage of the process, things do go up as opposed to down most of the time. Just like when you start to do the actual construction, likely the surprises are going to cost more money rather than lesser the things we couldn't anticipate. Yeah, I think that is well said. It's accurate. I think it's also important to say, we're not happy about it. I mean, we don't wanna have to make some of the decisions we're gonna have to make, but I do think it's the norm to some degree in projects in general and becoming unfortunately more of the norm with big projects like this. Belmont, who's about six months ahead of us, has went through almost the exact same thing. Adelboro right now is facing almost the exact same thing that we're facing. So we're not alone in facing it, but I do think there's something, it is sort of common in the process. I'd also add, and I said this at a high school building committee meeting, this is, it's not dissimilar from if you were doing a $50,000 kitchen renovation in your house, and that was what your budget was. And then the contractor came back and said I ran some further numbers, I got some more detail on the cabinet costs or whatever it might be, and it's gonna cost you $57,500. Like on a percentage basis, it's the same math. And I actually said to the committee, probably half of us around this table have had that experience where our contractors come back and said that. So again, it doesn't mean we're happy or glad to be dealing with it, but it's not totally outside the realm of normalcy or reality. Doesn't mean that something is wrong. Yes, exactly. And I think that's really important for people to understand. So in addition to the debt exclusion, we also had the override pass and again, to remind people and override is something that even excellent fiscal management as we have in this town is gonna be necessary over some period of time because boy, I've heard this a lot. So I could say that project two, I mean, it's proposition two and a half, limiting the amount of increase in everybody's property taxes every year doesn't conform to the rise in costs of providing services in this town. So therefore periodically, we're gonna have to deal with this kind of thing. Again, congratulations in getting the approval, especially in conjunction with the debt exclusion because it's a big hit for all of us. But on that, I wanted to ask you about the budget. So we do now have you operating in an approved override atmosphere so that's good, but I know that here we sit in December, early December and this is a time when departments are very busy all across the town getting their departmental budgets together at a hand to get to you so that you can do the final work. So I'm curious about when it comes to the departments in town, are there any that are particularly challenging in terms of trying to limit the growth in their own budgets? And if so, what are those and why? So we start every budget season giving our departments budget instructions and for the past seven or eight years and going into this next fiscal year, the instructions are generally, please provide us with a level services budget. What's it gonna take you to run your department this year the same way you did it last year? We then also give them an opportunity on a separate sheet to tell us other things that based on what they're seeing in the community they think should be added to their budget and then we take those into consideration. So I think the top line thing this year that is a budget driver is an increase in the cost of solid waste removal. So we are contract for bringing trash, not recycling but trash to wheel abrader ends at the end of this current fiscal year and we've signed a new contract for the start of next year. It's gonna be about a $90,000 bump so we normally have about a two and a half percent I think was a 2% bump every year from the prior contract. This was an 11% bump. It then evens back out but there was a sort of a one-time adjustment at the start of this contract. So DPW is facing that and generally that has an impact on how we're putting together the town budget. Aside from that I would say across departments we're fairly, I think we're well situated today. DPW in general is always under the gun for more resources whether they be personnel or resources in general. So I think that's outside of the solid waste that's an area that we'll pay a lot of attention to as we go through this process. Another area that is feeling a lot of pressure is public health with the homeless population down in the Thorndike alewife area with growing mosquito concerns, rodent concerns. We have more and more of a need to make sure that we're adequately staffed in public health. So I haven't had my meeting with the Health and Human Services Director yet but I know those pressures are there so I'm sure when she comes in to sit with me that will be something that we'll have to talk about. Outside of that there's nothing else jumps off the paper at me or off the chart at me as departments that are gonna be looking for more resources but we do, we try, we talk all year. So I generally have a very good communication process with the department heads and there's not a lot of surprises as far as what we think we're gonna need as part of the budget but when things are happening in the community, when changes are happening we need to try to stay abreast of that and if budgetary adjustments are necessary then we consider them. Well, let me get a reality check from you on something. I've talked to people in town who are noticing and don't know what to make of. I'm not sure if a proliferation isn't overstating it but some increase in the number of positions in town government and senior level positions seems like and wondering really do we really need these people? We're five and a half square miles, we seem to be functioning fine, what's the scoop with this? So what's the reality there? So I think you started that point great, right? We're five and a half square miles, we're 45,000 people so we're not a huge community but we're not a small community but my experience has been that because of our proximity to Cambridge and Somerville and Boston that more and more we have residents with a high level of expectation in terms of the types of services we're gonna provide as well as the level of professionalism our staff is going to have and the type of things that we're going to undertake. So in particular, we've put a lot of focus on planning over the past couple of years. I think it's almost five years ago now we created an economic development position, we created or we've made more robust and environmental planners position, we've created a transportation planners position and I think it's actually been five or six years that we've had an energy managers position which started in facilities but now is in planning and I think that ties in well with the level of expectations that I see from the community. They want us to be in the forefront of climate change resiliency. To do that, you need professional planning staff as well as engineering and administrative staff to put together grant applications, plans, documents, whatever it might be. People want safe, efficient, affordable transportation. They want safe roadways, they want complete streets. Those things don't happen by accident, right? That you have to have a very planful mindset that engages the community to come together with those plans and that's why we created a transportation planners position. People want vibrant storefronts, people want a vibrant economic districts or commercial centers and the heights and the center and the east. Again, those things don't happen by accident. I mean in general, there's the private market that will do what it'll do but if you want an additive from the government, you need to staff that, you need to do those things and if in more broad strokes, you wanna be a sustainable community, you wanna go after green communities grants, you wanna get solar panels on the roofs of your schools, you wanna build a net zero high school, you wanna have community choice aggregation, you wanna do all these very progressive important things. Again, they don't just happen. You have to staff them and you have to provide the staff support to do it. That's what our energy manager does and has done over the past number of years. So I think that these are all positions that are important for the community to talk about because if there's ever a time in the future where the community doesn't value those services, then we should talk about those positions. But sitting here today in 2019 and going forward in 2020 and fiscal year 21, I think the community values the services those positions provide very highly and if we weren't doing those things, I think we would be criticized pretty strongly and in fact, it's funny that I brought up those positions, those are still the areas where we are highly criticized, that we're not doing enough about climate change resiliency, we're not doing enough about renewable energy, we're not doing enough about becoming net zero well before 2050, and I think we're doing all we can within our resources to do those things, but it's those places that we've added professional high level staff where we still receive a lot of public criticism for not doing enough. Yeah, I think people here that a new manager has been hired and there is an assumption that okay, there's gonna be, things are gonna kind of rock it ahead from here because we didn't have somebody doing that before, we do now, so therefore that's their job, so we're just gonna wait and see, make sure that they're earning their keep so to speak and so that's probably in a broad sense, that's probably somewhat unrealistic as you point out quite persuasively, but at the same time, just to take one of the aspects that you were just talking about, economic development, it is both a place where I think we can see that there's been investment planning, new ideas, be it the beer garden or other things that really are meant to enhance our prospects for generating more commercial income here, et cetera. I think also people see in conspicuous locations, empty storefronts continue to see those, I'm not sure again, I think what I'm asking for once again is a reality check from your perspective for our expectations because should, I'll put it this way, is it fantastical of us or kind of quixotic of us to think that we can fill all those storefronts? Is that a viable goal or aspiration or not? And if not, why not? So I would say it's probably quixotic to think that every storefront will always be filled because there's the natural business cycle. People will open business, close business, some businesses work, some businesses don't work, so I think there's a natural churn, so the five and 10 in the Heights, that comes to mind. A lot of people lamented them closing. I did too, right? That was sort of an institution in Arlington, but nothing wrong happened there. The family decided to retire after a couple generations of being in business. I mean, I read all those stories looking for like, what did we do wrong? What did the community do wrong? I don't think anybody did anything wrong. They closed and I don't know where they went, but they're retired. Hopefully they had a happy retirement, right. Having a happy retirement. And now there's a proposal to put a pub, the Heights pub there, but the process takes a little while, but in terms of that reality check, it's very costly to outfit an older storefront in an older building. It's very costly. So finding a small business owner or an aspiring small business owner that has the capital to come in and build something that's attractive to people living in Arlington or neighboring communities, it's capital intensive and it's hard to do. So I think it's probably fantastical to think that all storefronts are always gonna be filled. But it's not fantastical to think that we can have increasingly more vibrant commercial centers. And I think we are better than we were a couple years ago before we passed the vacant storefront registry. I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but I think we went from at that point near 30 vacant storefronts down to, I think 12 vacant storefronts. Is that right? And it's ebbed and flowed from there, right. There's openings and closings. I know the Heights are particularly in worse condition right now than the center in East Arlington, but I think even right now in East Arlington, I think we might be down to one in East Arlington Christo's market recently closed. And then before that, I don't even know that there was. Yeah, you're right. As I think anecdotally about passing through the East Arlington corridor, it does seem like everything is filled. And I think a lot of this connects actually back to the discussion we had earlier about zoning, that if you want vibrant storefronts that are gonna be resilient or vibrant commercial districts that are gonna be resilient against the Amazon effect or the big box store effect or whatever it might be. It's probably more the Amazon effect now. You need to have foot traffic and you need to have a good mix of businesses, right. You need to have daytime business that are gonna put foot traffic into places that serve lunch and dinner. You need to have service businesses. And I also think you need to have people that live there, right. Like people have to come out of the neighborhoods to support these businesses. Businesses don't operate on the desire for vibrancy, right. Businesses operate on customers. So we have to find the right way to find that right density mix to provide customers. Business is an opportunity to succeed, right. I do think a lot of it in East Arlington has to do with the fact that it's a little more dense. The people live very close to the business district and can easily access those businesses on foot. And they can go buy breakfast at K-Brother or coffee at Barismo, go have breakfast at the Arlington Diner, go get lunch at Anthony's East Side Deli and then go to dinner at Sugo, right. It's all very close to, I live in East Arlington. I know my places, yeah. Yeah, I wonder if that's your daily dinner. Not every day, not every day. So I do think that's part of the dialogue back to zoning about outside of just affordable housing, what are the right strategies to increase the vibrancy in our commercial centers? And I believe from a statistical point of view and I think there's a lot of studies on this that you increase foot traffic, you increase vibrancy because there's just more opportunity for businesses to succeed. And I do think that foot traffic, again, this is speaking anecdotally, et cetera, but it does feel like there's been some incremental progress around that in and of itself. I just do see it feels like. See just more people out and about along the Mass Ave corridor specifically. Okay, changing gears. There's another story that actually began at the beginning of the year but continues to unfold here at the end of the year. And that is the retirement of our longtime police chief, Fred Ryan, back in January. And then the assumption of his duties by the acting police chief, Julie Flaherty and the things that the police department has had to deal with since then, which we will touch on shortly. But, and then there's the search for the new, for the new chief, permanent chief. And so my question is really, looking back on how everything has worked this year, let's go back to that theme that we set out at the start. Have you drawn any lessons from both the support that acting chief Flaherty has had for stepping into tough shoes to fill in general and a tough time right here in Arlington. And also the search for the new chief. Has that been going as planned, as predicted? If not, what's gone awry? And again, what lessons would you draw from that? So I think I struggle, I know there are lessons to be learned, but I struggle to know what could have been done differently from putting acting chief Flaherty in the position she was put in to deal with the challenges we've faced in the police department over the past year. At the start, I had committed to a process where anybody in the department of rank could be considered for the acting chief's position when Fred had thought about leaving for the MBTA three years earlier, actually four years earlier. At that time, I had said I would only want to look at candidates who weren't interested in the permanent position, but to make sure that we had as wide a pool as possible when I knew Fred was going for certain, I changed tack this time and said anybody who wants to go for acting can go for acting, whether or not you plan to seek the position permanently. So I guess I could look at it and wonder, think about whether or not I could have done it like I did four years prior, and maybe that would have made it easier for whoever the eventual chief would be. But that said, there was no way around, and I know we'll talk a little bit about it, there was no way around the challenges whoever the acting chief was going to face regarding this situation, the Lieutenant Padrini situation. And I have to be honest, I've said this to her and I've said it publicly, I can't imagine a more challenging situation for any police chief to come into than the situation that we've been dealing with over the past year. In general, again, separate from the Padrini situation that will take up the majority of the rest of our conversation, I think. But in general, how does it work when you're transitioning such an important position from one person to another? Do you ideally hope that there will be some mentoring, some opportunity for mentoring and for bringing that person up to speed? Or is it really just completely situation dependent on the lives of the people involved? Particularly in this case, for instance, I think to myself, well, wouldn't it have been great for Fred to have been able to, again, ease the transition for Chief Flaherty in some way? But I don't suppose there's anything written in stone about how to do this necessarily. And again, whether you might take from this whole unfolding of circumstances something that you could apply should this ever arise again. Well, I guess what I would say to that is under civil service, having there be some type of transition period would have been much more challenging. I do think that now that we're out of civil service in the future, we could have a better opportunity to say whoever the permanent chief is, to have a dialogue about please give me X amount of time of notice before you think you're gonna retire or potentially leave so that we can go through a hiring process and make a decision about who your successor's gonna be before you leave and put in place a stronger transition plan. To some degree, this civil service process which relies on a test and an assessment center and gives you a ranked order list of people who you can pick for what is probably maybe even pushing myself and the superintendent aside the most important job in town or at least in the top most important jobs in town to have that selected via a test I just think is incredibly antiquated and doesn't serve the community well. With the process we have now, I think in the future I would strive to do something more like what you described so that whoever was coming in could have some type of ramp up period. Dammit, to jump from a captain's role into the chief's role is very hard. I mean, technically, the police department is very technically sound and I have faith in all the captain's ability to technically be the police chief, but to jump in and have the soft skills and the ability to work with the community and the ability to work on the budget that you've likely not worked on before. Those are all very challenging things. Right, especially since, as we know, Fred Ryan presided over quite the transformation in culture and orientation in a lot of ways of the Arlington Police Department much more towards, as you said, softer skills and seeing themselves as kind of woven into the fabric of the Arlington community in a slightly different way than police departments traditionally have perhaps. So that work is continuing to need to be done and again, that's yet another thing to pile on the plate of the new chief. So where do things stand with the search? So right now we have an assessment center which is the process we're gonna go through to basically test and assess who the candidates should be or who we should select to be the next police chief. And we have that assessment center scheduled for January. We had been hoping for it to be scheduled in October but the ranking officers association had asked that we delay that so their members could have some more time to prepare for it which in the desire to be harmonious and have this be a smooth transition to the permanent chief, we're happy to do that. So though we would have hoped to have a permanent chief by now from our initial plan, moving to January, it'll be what it'll be and hopefully it will maintain that harmony within the department. Great. Can I add, I do wanna add while we're talking about chiefs that we, Ryan left after 20 years but Bob Jefferson who was chief for over a decade and a member of the department for I think over 30 years retired this year as well. So. Thank you very much for bringing that up. I apologize. No, I know it's. Chief Jefferson actually for that oversight but anyway, carry on. So just to say, I know sometimes the fire department's much more quiet than the police department in the dispatch of their duties and hopefully we don't have big fires where they have to be less quiet in the dispatch of their duties but I mean, before I came here today I was thinking about this year and having two very long standing exceedingly professional exceptional chiefs retire and having that changing of a guard happen in one year that's a big year from the public safety perspective so I just think it's important to acknowledge that. Absolutely. Bob Jefferson retired and is doing well in retirement. I still see him in town and his successor which was selected via the civil service process Kevin Kelly has stepped in and has been doing a great job continuing to lead the department in their professionalism. Again, thanks for of course mentioning that. So I don't need to remind you or anybody else when I say unfortunately in a sense when I say the name Lieutenant Padrini we know what we're talking about. There's been a controversy that will not abate about what to do about, not only have you from my observation been subjected to a lot of scrutiny and criticism around the process as it has played out so far but there is also still great concern about what's to happen from here going forward. So it's a big topic. I know you've spent untold hours on this already but what I'd like to ask you is as you think back on what has happened so far over time again lessons learned for you and anything that you wish you had done differently that you would do differently in another time, et cetera and then we'll talk about what the options are if any going forward. So I think a few things and some of these I've said before publicly. I think the major one is I've thought on this, I've slept on this, people have asked me I would still do the restorative justice process if I could reset and start all over again but I think I would have focused on broadening the participation in the restorative justice process. I have received observations or criticisms that you can't do a restorative justice process with a whole community because you can't include the whole community because if a whole community was harmed and every harmed party is supposed to be part of the process then you can't do it. I do think again in hindsight that if we had broadened that circle or layered the circles or found some way to bring more voices in at that circle process we could have done better. Do I think it would have put us in a totally fine position and not have to have the dialogues we're having now? No, I don't think it would have fixed everything but I definitely have learned that lesson. I think the other thing I would say and I don't know if this is so much a lesson learned or a lesson learned or observation but and this goes a little bit back to education of residents. I think I would have said more in March and in April I guess the timeline of when I released public statements would have said more along the lines of what I said in August or July when I released the more detailed letter because I think there's been this continuing problem with people not understanding the rules that municipal government has to play by. I've talked now to dozens not even just a handful of dozens and dozens of my colleagues in various cities and towns and literally to a person not one of them believes that a termination would have been upheld with an arbitrator. Some of these are people with 30 years experience, five years experience, all along the gamut most of them having gone through labor arbitration disputes and again not one of them has said to me they think a termination would have been upheld. None of that forgives what Lieutenant Padrini wrote or says that any of us thinks what he wrote is okay or that a termination shouldn't be pursued if all things were being equal if all things were considered equal but under the rules we play by and my job is to play by those rules. If we had terminated him or pursued some type of discipline beyond what we did actually pursue we do believe that an arbitrator would have put him back to work without all the dialogue we've been able to have and will still be able to have. So it's hard to say this it's hard for people to hear this but I think people who are really concerned about this issue to some degree are focused on the wrong issue. If you want to be able to hold certain types of public employees accountable you need to look at the systems that diminish that accountability and looking at this one decision I understand the criticism I've tried to talk to people about the criticism but if you really wanna take on the challenge you really wanna affect change and make sure things like this don't happen in the future then you have to look at the system and take on the system talk to your state legislators talk to the governor's office about the civil service system and the labor arbitration system that's the core of this issue to me and I have challenged some people to look at that and they've not taken that challenge because it is easier to criticize the specific issue rather than looking at the systemic issue but on many matters if not most matters if you really want change you have to change the system not the one output of that system. Right and who knows again how many situations quite frankly like this where that system seems to be working against what people would want and what would seem the most just outcome who knows how often that is the case versus where the system is in fact protecting people that the community or interests that the community would indeed support in most places so it's tough again like you said to say that because the outcome in this case is lamentable in a lot of ways that that means that the system has to be changed who knows who knows that's a tough one but nonetheless as you I'm sure I'd be very surprised if you couldn't tell me that you have talked about this or heard about this within the last week it continues to be an issue of concern for people what's going to happen with Lieutenant Padrini going forward and so what I want to ask you is like what options are there realistically can as I understand it Lieutenant Padrini right now is restricted to working within the police department building and is not at this point getting out on the street at all which seems to be, him being on the street is seems to be a concern for a certain number of people in town can that, if I have correctly described that situation at the moment can that continue indefinitely can that continue until Lieutenant Padrini opts to retire or do something else or is you know can, is that either, is that or any other option that people, that might make, might assuage people's concerns to some degree how viable is that or any others that you might be considering? So I will say to be clear so his assignment is a desk assignment he's the detail, he's the Lieutenant in the detail licensing and traffic unit but he is eligible to work details in overtime so he does have some exposure to the street to be clear about that. Thanks for clarifying. And generally yes, we feel as though the Chief has the management rights to keep any personnel in an assignment in perpetuity or indefinitely so it is possible I think myself and the Chief have wanted to at least hold open the option that he could return to a street assignment at some point and we've promised full public disclosure before any such decision has been made but we have said for the time being he's remaining in that assignment and he won't be put off, he won't be moved from that assignment again until there's some more public dialogue about that. So I'm comfortable, I'm very comfortable saying that. And I know you've been in dialogue with those who you know have had, have criticized you frankly and scrutinized the process and found it wanting and are concerned about things going forward. So just if you don't mind perhaps repeating yourself for the umpteenth time about this, what is your understanding within those conversations about what you will be doing about this going forward? So probably the most important or the next thing we're doing is putting together a set of community conversations. We're working with a facilitator who has had dialogues with me, dialogues with members of the community, some of the concerned residents that we're talking about and she'll be putting together a report on what her suggestions are for what the community dialogue will look like. I'm expecting to see that very soon. You know it might even be in my email right now. At the request of the concerned residents we're not gonna hold any of those meetings until January so that we can get through the holiday season and not have people have scheduling conflicts around these meetings. So the hope is sometime in the next week or so we'll see what those meetings are gonna look like, find some dates, announce them to the public and then hold what will likely be a series of meetings through January and February to start the dialogue about where we go. Probably address the restorative process and talk about harm and then try to carve a path forward for community healing. So that's the first aspect of what we're doing. We're also simultaneously contracting with Visions Incorporated. They're a group that works with the diversity of organizations and diversity inclusion in organizations to come in and do a third party bias assessment of the police department. So Acting Chief Flaherty is working with them to outline what their work will be. They'll come in and work with members of the department over the course of a number of months and then put together a report likely with recommendations about how to address any presence of bias as they might find it or what the department can do to maintain or upgrade its efforts to be as diverse and inclusive as possible. So that's underway. Outside of what was specifically requested in the petition, we're also working with the National League of Cities and their Race, Equity and Leadership Division to bring training to town department heads and other supervisory staff in the town. We're looking at a list of about 50 or 60 town staff to go through what will be months long training in race, equity and leadership. They have a curriculum that's based on the government alliance for racial equities curriculum that boils it down to a racial equity toolkit for government officials to be able to look at their systems and things happening in the government and make sure that there is an institutional or systemic racism or bias in their programs, processes or whatever it might be. So we're gonna be starting in January with a training called Real 101 that goes to then 201 to 301 and 302. We have the date for 101 picked out and further dates to be planned, but we're gonna be undergoing a pretty rigorous training with significant amount of town staff on these issues. And then finally I would add we're very close to making a hire for our first ever diversity, equity and inclusion coordinator position that was included in the FY 2020 budget. We've gone through a recruitment process and maybe in the next week or week to 10 days, we're hoping to have an announcement about our first ever person to be serving in that position. Appreciate as usual the thoroughness and comprehensiveness of your answer. I did wanna ask you one last thing and this is a little bit more on the personal side because I have to say this is the way I'm gonna put it. I've had the pleasure of dealing with you officially and interviewing you over the course of years now. I know that you have are held in extremely high esteem in this community and with good reason. But I also know that you have had that sense for much of the time that you've been working as our town manager. This year has brought more criticism for you and put you really in the bullseye for a certain number of folks. So let me just ask you, I mean, how has that been for you? How you doing in a sense and what do you make of it? So admittedly, it's been very challenging and a resident actually wrote to me last week or over the Thanksgiving holiday to express concern but also express appreciation for in general my work here in town, which I appreciated on this issue, on the Lieutenant Padrini issue. But I did say back to them that what has been frustrating is that I do, I'm not an ego driven person but I do feel like collaboratively and working with other people a lot has been achieved here in Arlington over the past decade and much was achieved in the decade before that but I do feel good about the work that's been done and the things we've been able to move forward on and the things that we've been leaders and the commonwealth on many issues and I do feel like there's people in the community that have disregarded all of those achievements and are judging me and the town to some degree based on this one issue and I suppose it doesn't matter if it's fair or not but it has been challenging, right? I think, I've spoken to other people, I've spoken to you about this before, I've taken plenty of personality tests and I know the general personality type that I have and I'm a pleaser. I like people, I think it's what motivates me to work hard in this role, to keep citizens happy, to do all that we can within the resources we have, to keep citizens happy and feeling like this is a good strong community that supports them and supports their quality of life so to not be doing that in some people's eyes is challenging and I don't know that there's like a closure to that answer but yeah, it's been a tough year dealing with this. Fair enough, I appreciate your candor. I'm gonna let you go now because as I said, we've had many conversations over the years and this was a tough year. Tough year, busy, lots of achievements as well, we've covered them as well, but a tough year and so to make like this, by extension I assume this has been one of your more grueling conversations with ACMI just kind of going back in such detail over so many things so as always our appreciation for your willingness to do it, for you doing it again with, not just with candor with clarity and speaking directly to the issues, we always appreciate that, we know that we can count on that with you and we will continue to do so in 2020 and beyond so thank you very much. You're welcome. For coming in and we look forward to our next conversation with you, we always do. Same here. Appreciate it. Thank you. For our town manager, Adam Chapter Lane, this is Talk of the Town. I'm James Milan and appreciate your being here.