 Okay, please rise for the Star Spangled Banner Thank you very much, Ms. Howard. Any town meeting members who have yet to be sworn in? Has everyone been sworn in? Are you ready for the test question? Our test question today, right? We're going to take a test question with our clickers, make sure they're all turned on. Our test question today is, where it is? One minute. No, I can't do something that controversial. Well, we finished our meeting tonight. Vote one for yes, two for no, and as soon as we get our time, so go ahead, vote one for yes, two for no. These are the test clickers. Make sure you received your yes or no received window. Do we have a quorum? No. Well, we'll keep going while he plays over there with Mr. Harrington's clicker. I recognize the Board of Chairman, Mr. Greeley. Mr. Greeley has the floor, please. Quiet in the hall. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. It is moved in the unbelievable, untenable situation that if all of the business of the meeting is 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 13, 2015, at 8 p.m. Do we have a second? All in favor, please say yes. Opposed? No. Okay. Well, we're going to keep it down. Any announcements or resolutions? Announcements or resolutions? Sir, you have an announcement or resolution? Come forward. Kevin Koch, precinct 16. We all know that cancer is a horrible disease and it's rather indiscriminate in who it affects. And right now, there are two Arlington High School students who are battling cancer. And somewhat in response to that, the Arlington High School Biology Club and Gives Committee are raising money, thank you, Dave, for the Arlington's first scupermania, which will be this coming Saturday from noon to 4 p.m. in front of the Cyrus Stalin Museum. Local ice cream stores and supermarkets will be donating the ice cream and toppings, and all proceeds will go to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. It's going to be a great day to be out and about, so come on down to the center Saturday afternoon and enjoy some ice cream and support a worthy cause. Thank you very much, shirts. Mr. McKinney. Just give your announcement. Lawrence McKinney, 7th precinct, chairman of the Uncle Sam Committee, making a brief four minutes report for our committee this year. As you see, I stand before you with neither guitar nor powerpoint, nor just about anything at all. Well, it's back to exactly the shirtsleeves that I started with, you know, five years ago when our brave moderator put me in charge of this, at that time, Morabund Committee, at a time when no one thought that Uncle Sam was anything more than a cartoon and no one really, really remembered that he existed. And that 25 years ago when I stood here and we were being unvoted our $500, and you guys stood up and gave us our money. Elsie stood up, Dick stood up, Hugh McCrory stood up, and we were in business. This is a town meeting committee. We were created by you people, not those people. Different, different, different. Okay. Now, the thing was we came back the next year. What did we come back with? We came back with a button. We spent all year making sure that we weren't going to be put out of the byway. No, man, we were not a cartoon. We want to be part of the byway. Well, they didn't fund the byway, so the byway part of the tourism committee got locked off for a couple of years, but we kept working. We'll go, yes. We went on. We actually got worked with this fine department here and got a light on that statue. And then we cleaned the place up. And then we did a little magic, and we changed the name of Memorial Park to Uncle Sam Plaza when nobody was looking. The advocate keeps changing editors they didn't notice. At any rate, at this point, nobody's going to change it back because we actually got the Uncle Sam sign. We went to the Massachusetts Dish Cup Commission. Big, huge sign. Both sides bang. And it's there. And then we let Joe Currow open it up. Even though I had to lend him my microphone and guitar amplifier, we got the darn thing opened up. We have, and now we have something even nicer, as Steve Jobs would say, and something extra. For the last two years, little Sam Wilson has been greeting Paul Revere as he comes through town. We have the only young patriot. Talk about tourism. We have something that nobody else has, and he's no longer, no longer just a cartoon figure in this town. So that's why I'm coming here to say, listen, we need more people for our committee. We go through them pretty fast. I'm really here to say thank you for all those that put up with me. Humor, Cora, we have Bob. You've been with us, too. We had, oh, Elsie is still with us. We have Brian, Carl, Wagner, Hugh. We have had some of the best people come through, and look what we did. We were unvoted. They made us one of the four major historic things. They took our sign away. Clarissa even said the cops after us once. We have been through so much, but we are here because of you. Then because of you, we're here because otherwise we wouldn't be here. You check through your town document. You will not find the words Uncle Sam, Uncle Sam Plaza or Uncle Sam Committee once in the entire town planning document, which shows you about how much they love us. So you can ask them why we're not even part of the thing, but you are part of the thing and I am part of the thing, and we need more committee members. So with that, we don't know what's coming next, but I want to go off my hat to the people who have helped us, the departments who have helped us, the friends who have put up with us. And as Ted Paluso said, I'll never be appointed to the Tourism Committee because if they let me on, I'd make them do something. That having been said, I think I probably am the Steve Jobs of committee members. I'm difficult to deal with, but we leave beautiful things behind. So thank you so much for helping us get this far and let us hope we go forward into the future. This year again, Paul Revere came through, we had a good show, and again, thanks guys, and be welcome to join us in the next five years. Thanks guys. Thank you. Mr. Chappett, did you have a report of committee? No, an announcement or resolution actually. We're announcements and resolutions. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. We're all in Chappett Precinct 12. I have the honor of inviting you all to an event this weekend and it's called Hidden Treasures. Very briefly, as you are aware, Arlington is one of 40-odd cities and towns in Middlesex County and six little towns in southern New Hampshire that comprise freedoms, way, historical area. Now across the country, there are many freedoms way. Good example, for example, would be in Essex County on the North Shore. That's a freedoms way area. Ours is all of Middlesex County, so it starts way over in Malden and goes way off beyond Littleton. The directors of the freedoms way organization out in Devons decided that it would be nice if we have an opportunity to promote something in each community that's really special. And I was asked to work with Ed Gordon from the Schwann Mill to select one and we selected the old Schwann Mill as our hidden treasure. Now if you've never been there, it's a fascinating visit. That place has been making wooden oval mirror frames for over 100 years and they still make them. Very fascinating. The equipment alone, if you're mechanically minded, is really fascinating. What Ed Gordon will do this coming weekend, anywhere between noon and 3 o'clock, make short presentations about the German influence that happens here in the greater Boston area because that's where the equipment originally came from. And he'll talk about 25 or 30 minutes and then you'll have an opportunity to see some of this equipment that works. Really very fascinating. So noon to 3 o'clock, Saturday or Sunday, plenty of parking on Lowell Street, no cost. Hope to see you there. Thank you. Thank you. Any other announcements or resolutions? Seeing none, any reports of committee? So go ahead. Jeff Boudreau, Pursing 21. Mr. Rodder, when I arrived early, I picked up my voting machine and like Pavlov's dog just sat down and tried to vote when you had the test vote. It didn't work so I assumed. I found out that if you picked one up early, they were turned off. Normally they're turned on for us. So people might want to check to see if your machines are on and turn them on if I'm saying anything correctly. Technical people can assist, but it's just a matter of pushing the on button. Okay, good. So does everybody have their machine turned on? Make sure it is on. Mr. McKinney, did you leave it on the stand? Don't lose it. And your glasses. Don't say anything. You're done. You had your four minutes. Go away. Any other reports of committees? Mr. Toss, we never took three off the table, so we don't have to put it on the table. We never took it off. Move that article 3 be laid upon the table. All in favor? Post. Article 3 is on the table. That brings us back to article 22. Everything's fallen. Brings us back to article 22. We're in the middle of the education budget. The next speaker on the list, I believe, was Mr. Jamison. I have a couple of reports of stuff up here. Thank you, Mr. Monterrey. Gordon Jamison, precinct 12. Let's see. Where was I? So first of all, I think we should be extremely excited that the population of our school system is growing. And this is something that I've been a town meeting member for just my 12th session, 12th year. And I've watched this town mature financially in a variety of other ways and become a place where we're getting a lot of people who want to move here. I was impressed by Ms. Brazil's comment that Division 2020 survey for the first time in many, many years had the highest number of percentage of residents where those had been with us five years or less. So we together with the manager and the school system department heads have created something that I think many people in the Commonwealth would be very envious of. So I want to compliment them on that. My next thing I want to bring up, I want to echo some of the comments related to the school budget in particular of Ms. La Courte the other night. There are two bodies that often provide long-term planning input to the town, the long-range planning committee, which has seen fit to by, with some discussion I believe with the school committee, I don't know the details of that, decrease the rate of increase of their budgets de facto. And the other body that plays the game and that is the Budget Revenue Task Force, I would note that neither of those are codified in the town bylaws, but they seem to be being listened to as something that is going to tell us how we do our business going forward. I find that inappropriate. My last question was, the other question I had was address the other night, one of my questions, which was the large increase in Budget Line D and the School Education Budget as summarized in the FINCOM report. And as we discussed the other night, that is the large increase is money that has been held aside to settle contracts going forward. This is no different than we would have done in Article 20, which we'll get to after we finish this article, where we would have put aside $700,000 if we hadn't apparently settled all the contracts. And we would have used those monies in future years on the floor of town meeting to vote those monies towards those future contract settlements, which we've done in many years prior. But back to this, maybe we don't get everything we want and what do people really want from the services we provide. I would like to ask the school committee and perhaps the superintendent in particular, through the moderator, I read their very nice, voluminous report. I know the FINCOM gets something like four times this size with all the details. The other thing that struck my attention was there was $1.2 million of things that they wished they could have done this year. And I'd like to have some granularity on what we're not getting because we don't have those funds. We have a recurring theme with all of our budgets, but I know the manager struggles with this as well, but I'd like to have the superintendent perhaps or someone from the school committee address that briefly if they might, Mr. Moderator. Dr. Bodie, can you give them a quick rendition of what your wish list was? How is this impacting our students on the ground and our teachers in the classroom? Should I start with impact or what types of things? If you want to look at page 26 in the book, you'll see what we have identified, close to a million dollars of a combination of personnel, curriculum materials that we are not going to be able to fund next year. But I do want to say that this is actually a reduced list from the work that was done in the fall with all the administrators in the district about what they felt that we should have. So it's a process even to come to this list. So what is not happening? We are going to have to defer curriculum materials to outer years. We're not going to be able to have another school nurse up at the Odyssey Middle School, which has one nurse for over 1,100 students. We're not going to be able to have a full-time teaching assistants in our kindergarten. We're going to not have more administrative support and FTE in the high school and more classroom teachers in the high school. You'll notice on this list is a number of 0.4s, 0.2s that we are not going to be able to fund. So am I correct to say that in some ways as our class sizes by necessity, redistricting aside, which I hope you're proceeding with? It's class sizes support for our classroom teachers. Let her finish. It's support for our classroom teachers. It's the range of electives we can offer in the high school. Okay. And so this makes providing a full range of services more difficult. Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Thank you, sir. Ms. Brazil, you are next. Julie Brazil, precinct 12. I think I have a follow-up question on that chart on page 26. There are a couple things that are a little concerning and this is the one area that I got questions from neighbors about before town meetings started. Specifically, the curriculum materials you mentioned, they're designed, it indicates their STEM curricular materials in order to align with the common core. That doesn't feel like a luxury item. Can you speak a little bit to the impact on learning if we don't have updated curriculum? Dr. Bodie. Kathleen Bodie, superintendent. We want to be able to update our elementary curriculum materials for science. And we are putting this on a multi-year plan. So these materials are not funding several of the grades in the elementary. We'll stagger this. Okay. So it's just we're slowing. Slowing it down. If we had the money, we'd probably buy the materials for all the grades next year. Okay. And I'm gathering from looking at the list on page 26 that that's sort of the trend all along. Things that you might have been able to do are being slowed. It's slowed. We pace it out over several years. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Leonard. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. John Leonard, precinct 17. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope not to take up too much of your time. I would like to mention last year, April 30th, there was a special town meeting. And you could possibly ask, well, what has that got to do with this year's budget? I hope to tie that in for you in an explanation. At that special town meeting, page 26 appropriated $25,000 or $28,000, excuse me. The town was asked to come up with that money out of the transfer of funds from the insurance fund to cover the damage that was done at the pier school with the water pipe breaking. When we inquired as to the town manager as to why that should happen, he basically said it was our responsibility, but not to worry because we have an insurance fund. When we inquired as to what the makings of the insurance fund was all about, Mr. Tatsy, if the finance committee explained there's $100,000 in that fund and one of the principles of that fund, the reasons of that fund is to basically cover situations such as the pierce water pipe breaking. Later on in the year, there was an article of October in the town newspaper. The article basically stated there was an unexpected surge in student enrollment and the district was $838,000 over budget for the year 2014. A memo was sent at that particular time for the school committee notifying them that the costs were fully covered by the return of special education reserves from town meeting, existing school department reserves, and emergency funding for the damage caused by the burst pipe at the pier school. I guess my first question, Mr. Moderator, is that if I'm to believe this newspaper article, it's telling me that insurance money was used to cover a budget deficit. Could I have an explanation on that, please? Mr. Tatsy, can you address this? Any idea? Dr. Bodie? You don't remember? Yeah. Mr. Chapter Lane? Adam Chapter Lane, town manager. If I had had prior opportunity to take a look at this news article or some of the details that Mr. Leonard had raised, I'd be happy to try to find an answer or an explanation working with the CFO of the school department, but I haven't had any opportunity to review this question or any of these materials. This article, as I say, was in full view of anybody with the archaic system of a newspaper, which I read, and it was dated October 16th, 2014. It leads one to believe, Mr. Moderator, that insurance money, as I said earlier, was used to cover damage because I was used to cover a deficit in the budget. My second question would be that if this was allowed and if the $28,000 that was transferred, if it was more than enough to cover the damage that was done, why wasn't that money returned to the insurance fund? In other words, if the pierce damage was less than $28,000, that money should have been returned to the insurance fund. Lastly, Mr. Moderator, as you can see by Tom Meeting Book, which I gave you, as I read this and did some research, anything involving budgets, without exception, being the school committee also, any change, any existing funds has to come before Tom Meeting. Now, one could say, well, if this notice that you're looking at Mr. Leonard occurred in October, there's no Tom Meeting. There was no special Tom Meeting. My comment to that would be, Mr. Moderator, that depending on the amount of money that was used from the insurance money to cover the damage, could something else have taken the place to cover the budget deficit until such time as the next Tom Meeting convened? Can you address that, Mr. Tosti? I'm not sure if this is what you've been talking about, but last year at the special town meeting, the town meeting transferred $25,863 from the building, municipal building's insurance fund to fund repairs because of a system malfunction at the Pierce School. Exactly. Okay. Well, that wasn't a deficit. There was a problem with the heating system malfunction resulted in frozen bursting pipes. Excuse me, Mr. Tosti, no. What it was was that money went to fix the problem with the pipes. I agree with you. This article, which, you know, I was able to dig out of the newspaper, states that emergency funding for the damage caused by the burst pipe at the Pierce School, some of that money went to help for the budget deficit that was incurred by the school committee in 2014. And my question is, when is insurance money, why is insurance money, as I read this article, being used to cover anybody's budget deficit? Mr. Chapter Lane. Adam Chapter Lane, town manager. I think I understand more clearly what Mr. Leonard is getting at. That money was appropriated because the school department had to expend unexpected funds to fix the issues at the Pierce School based on the burst water pipe. So with town meetings appropriation of the $25,000 last spring, that reimbursed what would have been a deficit or a shortfall in the school department. So I think that's what you're getting at. Is it a practice? Lastly, is it a practice that at a whim, let's say, insurance money can be used for whatever particular purpose that they want? I'll allow him to answer the question. I don't believe that is what you're stating happened. Again, my understanding from what you're saying is that a deficit that was caused by the damages was then covered by the transfer approved by town meeting. The deficit was caused by an unexpected surge in student enrollment. Well, Mr. Leonard, I understand your position that you would look like looking for an answer, but this is the kind of question that if Dr. Bodie, Mr. Tosti, and Mr. Chapter Lane had been pre-approved of, they'd have an answer for you. Maybe they can try and find something at the break and advise you afterwards, but I don't think we're going to get to the bottom of your question today. In closing, Mr. Moderator, the only reason I brought it up is in town meeting is because as you can see by the town meeting time, it states anything changing on a budget in a town board has to come before town meeting, and I figured it would be appropriate for town meeting to hear this because they are the ones that vote on the budget. Thank you. Great. Get your town meeting time. Do you have a further answer for him, Mr. Tosti? The article that I mentioned, the sum of 25, this was approved by town meeting at the special town meeting on April 30th, 2014. The sum of 25,863 transferred from the Municipal Building Insurance Fund, which covers deductibles from our insurance to fund repairs replacements to heating system malfunction on January 14th, 2014, which resulted in frozen bursting pipes at the Pierce Elementary School, said some to be expended under the direction of the town manager, so this money did not go to the school system. It went to the manager to fund this repair. Thank you. Ms. Seuss, you are next. Hi. Jennifer Seuss, precinct three, and also a member of the school committee. About the previous speaker, I don't have an answer, but I think that Adam Chaplin's answer is probably on target, that there are a bunch of reasons, and that maybe it was maybe a poorly or loosely worded article in the paper that maybe caused confusion is my guess. Okay, to my marks. I want to talk briefly about the financial stressors on our school system, some of which you know. There are basically two stressors that are happening right now. One is coming from the state and federal government, and one is coming from our increasing enrollment, of which we are a victim of our own success. We have a great school system, and people want to move here. For the first stressor, there's sort of two parts of it. One is that the state keeps nickeling diamonds, taking away little bits of money, so Metco is going to get cut 7% next year. The kindergarten grant, which is a quarter of a million dollars, is going to get cut by 22% next year, and will probably be eliminated the year afterwards. Charlie Baker is just sort of philosophically opposed to the kindergarten grant. And the second part of sort of the state and federal financial stressors are what are known as sort of unfunded mandates. So in the last few years, we've had a bunch of mandates. These are mandates that are not optional. One is a new teacher evaluation, common core. We have sort of a refocus and retraining of teachers to deal with English language learners. We have potentially a new evaluation system in which we have to have new technology, new training to handle that. And some of these things are very good, but none of them are paid for by anyone but us. We don't get any extra money for them. So that adds an extra financial stressor on us. For the other sort of bucket of financial stressors, which is the increasing enrollment, as many people have pointed out, we've had a 450 student surge in the last three years. That's an entire elementary school. That is 9.1% growth. That enrollment is not a bulge. We are going to continue to grow at this rate. We are seeing birth numbers that are very high. We are seeing toddlers everywhere. In East Arlington, I say I can't sort of walk two feet without tripping over a toddler. Of course I don't. I'm very careful. But there's toddlers everywhere. So this is not going to go away. To put another sort of take on it, as you might have heard, our current high school class is about 300. Our current kindergarten class is 500. And the kids born is 600 last year. So we are going to see a big surge. Now, a couple of years ago, a bunch of people in town got together and worked very collaboratively to come up with a partial solution to this problem. So this was like Fincom, the school committee, the town manager's office, and this is sort of extra enrollment growth, you know, extra amount. What they decided on was 25% of Arlington's per pupil enrollment was going to be given to us the next year. So we have an extra 150 people coming this year. You know, next year we get the money for that. So it allows us to sort of not fall off a cliff each year. But I actually want to point out something to Ms. La Courte's sort of picture that she's been talking about. That 25% number was created sort of, it was a box, it was created sort of out of thin air. So it wasn't, we didn't do an analysis and say what is the marginal cost of adding an additional student to the Arlington Public Schools? We just said, you know, 25% seems like a good number. It seems like something we could all live with and let's come up with that. And I think one of the things that we're finding is that it may not be enough. We don't know exactly how much is enough and we have to do a lot of analysis to find out it's an incredibly complicated thing. But I have to say that we even with the incredible generosity of the town we are going to lose ground year after year. As you probably, as you know, as I know that you guys know, we, our education is funded by 10% less than the state average. Actually it's 11% less than the state average. So the state average is 14,021. We are at 12,546. We are also lower than the town manager 12 communities. These are the sort of semi comparable communities that we compare ourselves to. So we're at a very, very razor thin budget and when we lose ground it's sort of really bad for us. So I just want to sort of fill people in. So given these incredible stressors of which we don't really have a lot of control over, it is particularly upsetting that we sort of have decided to cut our rate of growth to 3% over the next couple of years. Now by itself, cutting the rate to 3% doesn't sort of severely affect us. But you put that with the fact that the enrollment is increasing and it's not totally covered, plus the unfainted mandates, plus the chipping away at things from the state and it's leading to down the road potentially a very dire situation. I just want to say though, I mean, Arlington's finances are very tight for structural reasons. I have a tremendous respect for the people who are intricately involved in the town finances, the capital planning committee, the finance committee, the town manager's office. They've been very careful with our money and this is a very, very good thing. We have a triple A bond rating. We have sufficient reserves. We don't do extraneous spending. This is a great thing. They look for ways to save the town money. We have solar panels in the roof or we will. But to the extent that Arlington voters have been given a choice. So take your typical person who's moved to Arlington in the last 10 years. 60% of people have moved to Arlington in the last 15 years. 60% of the adults living in Arlington today have moved here in the last 15 years. Take your typical person who's moved here 10 years ago to the extent that they've had any chance to vote at all. They've consistently voted for overrides or even to increase something. So the last two overrides, both whenever 50%, we have 52%, 53%. We have the CPA that was voted at 54%. And for those last two things, we didn't just vote to maintain our services. We voted to serve increase them slightly. So it may be that if you ask the voters again, they will say, no, no, no, I'd rather have small modest cuts. Taxes, I'm just at my limit. Taxes can't go up. But again, at your Ms. LaCourts point, we haven't really asked them yet. And I'd like, I urge you to do so. Thank you. Mr. Stephen Harrington. Stephen Harrington, precinct 13. And one of the lonely 46%. Budgets to me on about priorities or my goals in life. It's just financial management. And so, you know, I'm a numbers guy. And I look at the budget, which previous speakers on the other night pointed out that the education budget, the subsection D went up 79%. And I'm certain that we all understand why. It's $2 million. If you look on B13 of the finance book, and if you look in the school committee, the school department on page 34, you'll see the $2 million is the system-wide accounts. And Mr. Moderator, correct me if I'm wrong, we heard that that's strictly for negotiations that are ongoing with various unions. And just to be fair, let's say it's all of the employees and the payroll in the school department. So the question I have, though, is what is the total salary in the school department currently? We look at a $53 million budget here. What's the total salary roughly within $1 million? Mr. Moderator, do you know? I'm deciding if I should ask Ms. Johnson or Dr. Bode. I just want to number, you know, I think it's like $40 million. Give or take. Ms. Johnson, do you have that answer? So I guess it's about $40 million. And so who here can do $2 million divided by $40 million? Here you go. She's going to tell you. Diane Johnson, Chief Financial Officer for the school department. I regret to say that my intrinsic mathematics skills don't allow me to run up this row of sums in my head. But if you look on page 40, the first several lines, $8111 administrative salary, $8112 teacher salary, $8113 custodial salary, $8114 food services salary, $8115 clerical salary, $8116 teacher aid salaries, $8117 other full-time salaries, $8118 part-time salaries. And then if you skip down to $8134 maintenance salaries, those are the categories that comprise our payroll. Thank you. I think it's horrible that you don't know what your payroll is. I'm sorry. I think it's $40 million. So $2 million and $40 million is 5%. So what we have put aside, we're budgeting a 5% increase in payroll for next year. There's no question. It's absolutely a number. So the question becomes, why are we budgeting 5% increase in the payroll for next year? If you look at what the townside did, it was 2.75% or 2.5%. And so 5% is a lot to budget. This isn't what we're spending. This is what we're budgeting. Now, the problem is several problems. If you look back at the Finance Committee report and you look at the school department budget, it's going up 23% in the last four years. 5%, 6% a year. It's the single largest budget. If you look at the pension budget, which we'll talk about in a little bit, it's going up 5% or 6% a year. If you look at the insurance budget, it's going up like 6% this year. The four biggest budgets in the town accounting for 70% of all the expenses are going up at 5% to 6% a year. That's not sustainable even with overrides. It's just not sustainable. By taking $2 million for a 5% salary increase, what you're ending up with is actually a million dollars more than you actually need. And that million dollars is then compounded going forward. So next year, when we raise the school department budget, whatever it is, that million dollars included. And including that is, we won't know where that million dollars goes. If they wanted to fund the million dollars on page 26 that they wanted to do, I'd be all for it. If they said, hey, we want to create a lab, I'd be all for it. But budgets should have what you're going to spend the money on, and they're not spending it on a 5% salary increase. I think she's going to tell you what the... Well, you asked a question. You said what's the extra money, the 5%? No, I didn't ask the question. I just finished because I'm almost done with my time. All right. He doesn't want to find out what the answer is. I gave him a chance. I gave him a chance. It's not hard to... You should know your payroll. I mean, that's not a question that you should ask in advance. He doesn't want the answer to his question. So I want to ask a... I'd like to make a motion, Mr. Moderator. I'd like to change the school department budget. I'd like to take that million dollars. Hey, hey, hey. And I'd like to put it back into the reserves. And I'd like to... If they need the money because the salaries negotiated at 5%, then by all means, come back. We'll give it to you. But I think it's really important that this town meeting look at the budget and say, this is just financial management. And we need to provide good financial management. So, Mr. Moderator, I'd like to make an amendment to the budget and change budget 21 from $53 million to $52 million in change. Have a second, please. Do you have that in writing? I do. So now, I want you to think about this clearly. If you don't know what your payroll is, you'll lose a lot of credibility. If you don't know what you want to spend the money on, we shouldn't budget it. We shouldn't budget a 5% increase in payroll. That's what this $2 million is on $40 million. Sorry. You shouldn't put it into a budget that gets compounded year after year. And I don't care how many override you have. You can't sustain 70% of your budget between four categories increasing at 5% to 6% a year. Thank you. Carden. Mr. Carden. Len Carden, Precinct 20. I have some remarks, but before I get to what I was going to say, let me ask the question as to whether there is an explanation of the amount set aside in the school budget for salary increases. I'm sorry. Ms. Johnson is going to answer that question. Diane Johnson, Chief Financial Officer. Thank you for asking that question, Mr. Carden. Also included in that amount of money isn't just salary increases, but it's the steps and lanes that the teachers that are already employed as they go up through the ranks. So this is all of the funding that we use to fund the salaries in the upcoming year. So there may be a percentage increase on top, but the steps and lanes are built into a way our contracts are done with the teachers. And that represents about $650,000 of that $2 million. So if you wanted to calculate the percentage of payroll, I think I apologize that I wasn't able to answer the entire question in terms of total payroll because we're in negotiations and I'm thinking about it bargaining unit by bargaining unit and that's how it appears in the budget because they're not always the same percentage from bargaining unit to bargaining unit. Does that help? Yes, thank you. So I wanted to talk more about, we've already had a couple of speakers on this, but I wanted to talk more about the context of Mr. La Courte's comments about the master plan and what we want to spend as a town, specifically in the context of education. Again, we've heard some about it. I do have a chart here which shows the numbers that Ms. Seuss was talking about. This is state data and it shows the per pupil spending both by the state average and the town of Arlington. And as you can see, as compared to earlier in the decade, the last decade, 2006 and 2007, we began to fall behind and now we're quite seriously behind. And we can talk a lot about the formula. There's this formula for special education growth and we talked a lot about that at Finance Committee. We actually had a similar proposal at Finance Committee to reduce the budget by $1 million. We have this formula, this growth rate of 25% of the per pupil costs to get to enrollment factor. We have the 3% or is it 3.5% growth rates? We have all these formulas and we're trying to budget by formula and sometimes we lose sight of what we really need. So I think we're having a good conversation. What I'd really like to see next year is I'd like to see an alternative budget come forward from the school department. One that does meet the master plan numbers and one that gives us an opportunity to perhaps fund some of the things that the school department feels is necessary that can't fit in under the plan. The plan that we had before the voters was a three-year plan. We, for three years, had to fit under that plan because we promised the voters. That was two years ago. This budget we're voting on tonight is two years past the master plan. So we can make adjustments and I hope next year we'll have a serious conversation about what we as a town want for our school department, what we can do to close this gap and how we're going to move forward. Just a little bit more on why we're falling behind. We have to remember that the override did not restore everything that was cut from the school department budget. There were funding shortages leading up to 2012 and we only put back 600,000. We also had school growth of 150 kids that before we even started paying attention to it. So we had another 150 kids come into town earlier in the decade. And as we already heard about, the enrollment growth factor is only a quarter of the total expenditures based on this. And then finally, the enrollment growth factor also comes after a year. It comes a year later. So we're a year behind in funding. We're just putting funding in next year's budget for the 170 kids extra that we have this year. So that is also contributing to the problem because we're funding it a year late. So to get back on track with the state, to get back to where we were at about 96% of average would cost $4 million a year and nobody's asking for that. But I do think next year we have to take a serious look at what we want to do with our school budget going forward. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Mr. Hainer. Mr. Hainer, precinct two. Mr. Moderator, I just want to make it clear to the town meeting that any cut in the school budget cannot be specifically directed to any one item. Once the budget is passed, at whatever number it is passed, it is at the discretion of the school committee and the school department on how that money is spent. So a cut of $1 million does not guarantee it to be put somewhere or in a reserve or it has an effect on salaries. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Mr. Tosti, you were next. Al, you had your hand up. Mr. Moore. No? This is from the other day. Mr. Schlickman. Paul Schlickman, precinct nine. Let me explain to you some of the facts of the way school budgets are done and what it uses. It isn't just us, this is the whole state. The funding for the current school year, the one that we're living in right now, is based on the number of students who were enrolled on October 1, 2013, when we had 5,020 students. The foundation budget is calculated based on that enrollment. The foundation budget is derived from the foundation budget. On October 1, of 2014, we had 5,208 students. It's a 3.7% increase over one prior year and 188 students who were in our schools who were not covered by the foundation budget in the Chapter 78 calculations. But we need to educate them and as we sat in school committee meetings last June and in September, we were scrambling to use every resource we had to provide the additional teachers we could afford to fund to meet this significant increase in the number of students. We will open school in September based on the 5,208 students in the budget and the foundation that were counted on October 1, 2014. We know we're going to get more. The addition of students is a stress. And think about 188 students. That's about 12 teachers you need to cover those 188 students. And if you're thinking about our salaries going up 5%, we've got to increase 3.7% of student enrollment over a year. We need to hire more teachers to maintain class sizes. And that's one of the things that we promised the people of Arlington when we went for the last override. We will manage our resources wisely. We will put money in reserve. We will parcel them out parsimoniously. But our goal is not to run a muck with spending. But our goal is to maintain the services that people had. Because people who were in favor of the override wanted to maintain the current level of services we have. And we are struggling to do that because of the immense pressure of being very popular town. Now we don't have additional streets that we need to pave. We don't have additional miles of streets, additional water customers. We don't have a lot of additional things going on the town side. But a 3.7% increase in students. That's significant and we've got to figure out what to do with it. We've got to figure out how to manage our space. We're going to need to do portable classrooms which are expensive. We're going to have to hire more teachers. That's just to maintain the status quo. This is not new programs. This is not new technology. This is not new initiatives. It's just trying to provide next year's kids with the services we were providing last year. The other thing that I want to point out is for special education costs because that certainly was an element of controversy. Back in fiscal 2009 we had 69 very high-cost students. Last year of fiscal 14 we had 81. The average expenditure for those 81 students was about $75,000 a piece. A couple of them move into town or turn three years old. That's a big hit on the school budget that can come all at once. They walk in the door in September and say, okay, here's my kid. You have to educate them. That's why we had the stabilization fund. 2012 we put $500,000 in that fund. Last year we needed it and we took it back out. This year we're going to drop $200,000 into free cash, which will replenish the stabilization fund for next year. This is a high-cost item, and the state is not a particularly good player on this. They will reimburse us for part of it, but the first $40,000 is exempt from state reimbursement. The state is told to reimburse us at 75% subject to appropriations by the legislature. This year we got 72. Back in fiscal 2009, we got 42.34%. So the state didn't make their obligation, and the reimbursements for last year come in four equal amounts with that last $400,000 payment coming on June 30th of this year. It's not easy maintaining services in a system where you've got increasing special-leg costs just because of the nature of the beast. Every district in the state has this, and really sharp increases enrollment. I urge you to soundly defeat Mr. Harrington's amendment and then understand the needs of our children are beyond a formula because the enrollments are beyond a formula. The needs for contemporary education are beyond a formula. And I thank the people who are getting up and asking for a discussion on these topics, because, yes, this is the most important service we're providing in the town. It makes us who we are. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Please. Mr. Fuller. Thank you, Mr. moderator. Peter Fuller, precinct 20 back to nuts and bolts. In the finance committee report on the education budget line E operation slash maintenance programs shows a substantial decrease for the second year in a row down 8.4%. So my question is why the decrease, what are we not doing or what are we doing more efficiently? Dianne Johnson, chief financial officer for the school department. One of the things that's misleading about the report you see from the finance committee is that it represents only a portion of the total school committee budget. And so that is a piece of what we're planning to do. It's not all of what we're doing. And so to draw conclusions about the fact we're spending more or less on maintenance or anything is not really accurate. I think the better place to look would be in our books at what we've been doing on maintenance. And we have realized some energy savings. We've, you know, through the green communities grants, we've increased some efficiencies throughout our buildings. We've done a really exciting program at the Pierce School that allows us to detect faults in our heating systems and repair them ahead of time. And so all of that is allowing us to spend less. If we look at page 34 Facilities 75, I think you can see that facilities all in as we're projecting lower but our budget for next year is still quite strong. Thank you. I'm reassured though still a bit confused but that's the way it is. Second question in the school budget book on page 17 it says the school department is funding one half the cost of a new facilities director and administrator with the town funding the other half and on page 23 it shows as 60,000 for the director 30,000 for the administrator but if you look at the town's facilities budget that we talked about the other night they have their half of the director but the administrator is not mentioned so what's going on here? Did the school department hear half of the administrator? Who are you asking? Oh, Mr. Chapter Lane. The town's half? Adam Chapter Lane, town manager in regards to an administrative function for the proposed facilities department which we discussed last week the actual staffing whether or not be from within existing staffing that's handling that administration or potentially through the need of a new position is a detail that between myself and the superintendent needs to be worked out. Working on the jigsaw puzzle. That's a good description. Going forward if positions presently funded in the school department are moved into the facilities department is it anticipated the increase in the school budget going forward would be reduced by the cost of those positions? Adam Chapter Lane, town manager I think the way I would answer is that we'll be sure that there's a fair share between the town and the school department. Fair enough. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Mr. Valeri. Thank you, Mr. moderator. Bob Valeri, precinct one. First of all, I'd like to thank Mr. Tosti, Mr. Dice and for their comments the other night in their advocacy for protecting the taxpayer. And also in previous meetings Mr. Greely and Mr. Chapter Lane also said the same thing. So as a taxpayer of the town I thank them for that. In the education budget item B in the finance committee's report we already did hear that 7% per year is budgeted for special education increase and the change from last year was actually 1.08%. So my question is is there a way or some type of method that we can take the extra that's budgeted for the special education budget and put it into a reserve fund because as we just heard we can get big increases in that budget unexpectedly from year to year depending on the needs of particular students. So is there someone that can answer? Mr. Tosti is going to answer that. I made that recommendation to the superintendent that we keep the special ed at the 7%. And then if it doesn't go to 7% let's say it's going to go up 4%. You fund the extra 3% with a reserve and the superintendent seemed to think that was a good idea so I think maybe we'll see something like that in the future next year but obviously we don't see it now. You'll see an amount set aside in the town's reserve fund and a couple of budgets where a certain amount of money will be set aside for that. Thank you very much. Thank you sir. Ms. LaCourt. Annie LaCourt precinct 15. So if you look in the school committee's report to town meeting on page 19 you will see that there are several pages of goals and strategic initiatives so my first question is are those strategic initiatives intended to be accomplished in one year or are they multi-year initiatives? Dr. Bode. Kathleen Bode, superintendent. Some of the goals are aspirational and many of them are intended to be accomplished in one year. In a couple of cases they'll be continued into next year. I could give you specifics on those. No, that answers the question. So my follow-up question is simply to point out that you then have a couple of pages, pages 24 and 25 that seem to tie particular line items in the budget to particular strategic initiatives. Is that correct? Correct. Ms. LaCourt address your questions to the chair. Sorry sir. Okay. So the question that I have then is given that we are setting the growth rate in the general fund contribution to the school budget at 3.5% this year theoretically 3.25% next year and 3% every year thereafter do we have a set of strategic initiatives under these goals for years FY17, 18, 19, 20 and 21 and have we done the financial analysis to know that we can meet those goals with that rate of increase in the general fund contribution to the school budget? Dr. Bode of such studies been conducted? That's a long answer. Let me take one of the goals for example. There are two goals under goal one. One has to do with achieving a PPI score of 75 and a growth factor of 50, 51. Now in order for us to be able to accomplish these goals we need to be able to provide all of the instruction support, differentiated instruction for students that are not achieving at that level. And I think that one of the things we have talked about in this graphs here in the book that demonstrates that one of the things we have been investing in in the last few years is those interventions. But they are as we talked about before planned out over multiple years because we can't do everything at once. For example, we can't have a math coach at every elementary school. We cannot have a literacy coach at every elementary school. So we plan how we are going to be able to meet those needs for supporting students in a sort of a measured strategic way. Now if we were to provide these kinds of supports I think we would see a surge right away. We certainly did when we hired math coaches at the elementary we saw an immediate change in math scores for elementary students. And I am talking about elementary but we can also take that same kind of analysis to our middle school and to our high school. We have these goals and those are two that are aspirational. We certainly meet those with respect to our aggregate of our students but we do not necessarily meet them with all of our students that need additional support. Right, but I guess the question that I am asking is given that we are making a decision about the overall general fund contribution to the school budget that sounds like it is intended to be a five year decision have we done five year planning to know whether or not those numbers will match the needs of the students and the growth in our enrollment and so on and so forth. And it sounds to me like what you are saying is that we have not done that long term planning exercise and that decision is being taken not in light of that information. In other words, we haven't Dr. Bodie, do you have a five year plan? I think she is asking if you have a five year plan and a study to back it up. We have certainly a five year financial plan we also have it is we don't have a plan right now for when we are going to be able to do all of the curriculum additions we need. We certainly have a five year plan for technology we have a plan for basically looking at how we are going to maintain enrollment levels and that is the first priority. We are going to hire a teacher over hiring support personnel we are going to hire a teacher over paying for curriculum materials because that is the single and most important investment as we move forward. Are you telling me that you have a strategic plan that validates three and a half percent this year three and a quarter percent next year and three percent in each of the following years of an increase in the general fund portion of the school budget? Do you understand the question? We do have a multiyear plan financially. Are you telling me that you have a plan to move to these goals and answers? Wait, wait. Ms. La Courte, let her answer. You can't interrupt. Will that plan meet all of our enrollment growth needs? That remains to be seen because we don't we've done our own projections on enrollment. We're doing a study right now that is going to change our financial plan because again the priority will be toward teachers and that will eat a larger portion of our budget. So let me ask the question one more way if the moderator will tolerate. Does your strategic and financial plan support the reductions in the general fund allocation to the schools that the finance committee is talking about doing without reducing the quality of our education plan? A quick answer. Time is up. Our financial plan does incorporate the reductions but it will also mean there's going to be a reduction in services and a reduction across the board and it will not be a particular program. It will be spread out through a number of initiatives. I think the key words here are reduction in services. Time is up. I'll let it go over already. Sean Harrington. Way in the back on the right. Good evening Linda Hansen, precinct 7. Also a 23 year educator the last 15 years of those have been in Arlington and I'm also currently the president of the Arlington Education Association. I just want to say that as I've been talking about town meetings so far I've really appreciated those that have tried to pull the conversation back a little bit to help us see the bigger picture under discussion so I'm going to try and do that with my remarks. Over the past four years I think that the long range planning committee has worked effectively with the town manager and the school committee to create stability in our budgets and that's a good thing. The same committee has also kept the needs of the future school buildings in the high school and the minute man. That's also an incredibly important thing. With the help of the savings from moving the employees to the GIC conservative budgeting estimates and a recovering economy it's led to a tripling or slightly better of the number of years that this override should be expected to last. As has been discussed already Arlington runs a very lean and mean town budget. We spend less than the state average per pupil expenditures. We also spend less than the average per pupil expenditures for our most comparable communities based on a comprehensive salary study. Ms. LeCourt has referred in her remarks the other night to the competing pressures that shape our school and town budget. The financial pressures of keeping taxes low for the taxpayers and the tradeoff between that and growing our programs and supports in the town. I would like to add to that there's been a lot of pressure which is lifting our wages for employees to the average of our most comparable communities. We are also below the average in this vein as well. So just as the town was asked to vote in 2011 to raise the two and a half percent cap I really do feel like there should be a wider conversation about the teaching and learning environment in the schools as well as the supports for other town services. And what we get for it and what our aspirations are for the town we live in. Thank you, ma'am. Mike Cabe. I'm Mike McCabe, Precision 2. I stand to terminate debate on the school budget number 21 in all matters before it. We have a motion to terminate debate on the school budget 21 in all matters before it. You ready? Requires a two-third vote. So we're just terminating debate. And motion to terminate debate on article 21 and the amendment before it. All in favor please say yes. All opposed say no. O'Clock's... Oh, whoa! One is yes, two is no. Break my chops. Everybody knows would press one for yes and two for no. Well, 204 people figured it out. 206. 175 in the affirmative, 27 in the negative. Debate is terminated on article budget 21. That brings us to budget 22 libraries. We wanted to discuss libraries. Budget... We terminated debate. We're not going to vote on. We'll do the amendment when we vote everything. It's consent budget. Libraries. Is Seuss? Yeah, someone did. I have a hold on library. Yeah, I got a hold on libraries. I'm not going to be that long this time. I just wanted to give some information that several friends of mine who are friends of the Fox support members, they support the Fox library's mission, including paying for Friday hours. They have a bunch of money that they're dying to spend. They really want to spend. This is not taxpayer money. This is privately raised money because of the success of the little Fox library. There are some really generous donors who really support the Fox library. And the two things that they want to accomplish, and this is not them, this is coming from the community, are that they would like to add Saturday hours, and they'd like to do a big renovation of the space, including potentially adding an elevator if they can afford it to make it ADA compliant. So this is private money that they want to spend, not taxpayer money. And this is not the kind of problem that we don't currently have a library director. And I just want to say that I hope everything gets worked out, and that people are happy about it. Anyone else wish to discuss libraries? Seeing none. Health and Human Services 23, someone put hold who wants to discuss Health and Human Services. Ms. Momone. I got a hold. So I just wanted some clarifications on this health comp officer. I guess there's a 13% raise on the health comp officer under details of personnel services. It makes, it seems like a huge raise. Is that correct? Mr. Chapter Lane. Adam Chapter Lane, town manager. That particular position was reclassified last year by town meetings, so then the budget is included in the article in 2015, but then takes 2016, so that again was a reclassification. And also there's some expenses that went up by 25%. What's going on there between 2015 and 2016? Mr. Chapter Lane. Adam Chapter Lane, town manager. Are you pointing out veterans aid and assistance? No, I'm looking at the second line. It says personnel. First, health, 23 health and human services, all health and human services personnel, personnel services. So that's a summation of all of the health and human services line items, and the major cost increase in expenses is in that veterans aid, where am I? Veterans aid and assistance, and that is solely based on an increase in the case load of eligible veterans served by our veterans department. And then what about the expenses in council aging? I mean it's not a big number, but the increase is a big number. The increase in expenses in the council aging is for a contract based secretary to do intake and to greet people as they come into the council aging. Anything else? Thanks. Anyone else in health and human services? Seeing none, the next, someone put a hold on retirement. Mr. Jamison first. Thank you, Mr. Monterey Gordon. Jamison, precinct 12. First, I want to commend the body at large on the wonderful discussion we're having on our budget. It's really thoughtful that we're able to have this second. You think all the things you've been told we should worry about, if any of those get your knickers in the bunch, the thing that really should is the retirement budget and the associated OPED budget. That's the other post-employment benefits, be it health care pension for our employees. The budget is $10 million between appropriations and the water and sewer, which is all our money, and by the end of the current five-year projection plan, that will be $13.5 million. Mr. Billiford, the chairman of the Contributory Retirement Board kindly provided a report the other evening, and I really am appreciative of that. And I want to comment, use the words of a venture capitalist friend of mine. A venture capitalist, you might think about the money. It's not. It's only about the money, and my comments are only about the money, not the personalities involved. So, we have a little song and dance here. So, this summarizes from the last 17 years available online that I looked at over the last weekend or so, the annual return of the Contributory of our retirement plan. As you can see, we had good years and bad years. Actually, early on in 97 and 98, that's as far as back as I could usually access the retirement board's investments without performing the state, but there was only one other time in 2011 when the retirement board's assets outperformed the state. If you take that, next slide, please. Oh, actually, there was an illusion, a suggestion the other night that the reason a large loss happened in 2008 was because of the pressure to transfer the funds to the state system. Everyone tanked that the Dow was down almost 34%. Next slide, please. If you had $100 at the end of 1996 and you had invested it with the state and Arlington systems, you would have seen this type of growth neglecting monies appropriated by the town system. In the state system, and the only other option we have, Arlington system and the state system, Arlington is blue, the state is red, you'll notice that at the end of 2013, with the last available numbers, I checked again the other day, there's a $95 difference. What would that have been over time if we'd started in 96, if we'd been clairvoyance? In 96 we had $80 million, that would have been about $75 million in the state. So that's a pretty tough description there. So let's say retirement board was doing quite well in 97-98, but let's say after five or six, maybe seven years in 2005, they realized that maybe it was time to shift into the state. Next slide. Why might they have done that? Well, this shows you this primer print was performing a full percentage point in over 20 years from 1985 to 2005. This information was provided to me by someone at the prim board who was involved in the management of the fund at that time and was shared with the contributory retirement board in 2006-2007. You'll note that the prim actually gives a higher return at a slightly lower risk, and that is because it's a highly, highly diversified fund versus the limit diversity that we have in the contributory retirement's past investments. And that's just basic investment portfolio theory. I'm sure there's someone in the audience or at home who is a much better financial analyst than I am and can explain to that to the audience at some other time. Next slide, please. So that one pretend difference. You don't think that's a lot, but you started at the end of 84 with 100 bucks and you did that every year at the end of 2005, you would have had about $120 more than you've been in the state system than you've been through the self-managed approach. So if we had changed, let's say in the beginning of 2006, next slide, please, we still would have done better. At the end of 2005, we had $127.5 million. That difference you see on the right of the red over the blue is another $25, $27.5 million. Next slide, please. But we actually didn't change until 2007-2008 and the suggestion was that that was because of pressure. I might suggest that the rationale for changing was over the previous four years the state the alliance system had underperformed on average the state system by 4% and in 2007 it was actually almost, it was over 7% lower than the state. So we shifted in 2008 which I think is still a good idea. Next slide, please. And here's how we've done since then. And I was first dumbfounded by the fact that we're still less in the state except for 2011 and I went back and checked and that's because, well, we didn't put all the money in the state. We only put 90%. Somehow we think that having 10% of the side is still going to make us outperform the state. Next slide, please. So this is just a quick primer to say how we invest a lot of money. And this is the thing that could kill us in the next 20 to 40 years. We don't get this right. Next slide. So the other thing that the Contributory Retirement Board manages is the OPEP. I have two issues with that. The Contributory Retirement Board is not currently, I believe, have any representation of the teachers. The OPEP covers all our employees, not just the non-teachers. They have their own retirement system. And over three years, this 10.2 in the Arlington system versus 11.8 in the state system, it's not much. You take 100 bucks and it's $134 in one and 140 in the other. Not a big difference. But you're running out 20 years and you've got 25 or 30% more. So next slide. This is something that I hope the manager or a selectman do their appointees to the Board. The Contributory Retirement Board, the Finance Committee and our treasurer, and we as a town meeting focus on each and every year getting an understanding of what we're doing with our money because the more we earn the market, the less we're going to have to appropriate here on the floor of town meeting. Thank you very much. Thank you. 9.30, do you want to take a seven-minute break? The next speaker is Stephen Harrington. Mr. Harrington has the floor. Please be quiet in the hall. Take your conversations outside. Take your seats. Mr. Harrington. Motion to adjourn. Ah, just joking. Stephen Harrington, precinct 13. Quiet in the hall, please. Stephen Harrington, precinct 13. No facts and figures. No fancy graphs. Not so fancy graphs. You have to speak right into the mic, Mr. Harrington. You can't hear me? Stephen Harrington, precinct 13. I don't have any fancy charts or non-fancy charts to show you, but I want to share some experience. First of all, if you look at the pension budget, you know, it's up 5.75% this year. That's a self-inflicted wound. Mr. Billifer pointed that out to us during his report to committees. And I want to share some of my experience. I manage pension funds for a long time. I actually sat on the board with Bill Miller. I don't know if anyone knows who Bill Miller was. He's a legendary fund manager who outperformed the S&P 500 for a gazillion years until he stopped and then he never has since. And one of the things if you look, if you go back and you say, okay, I made a decision in, say, 2007-2008, but I'm going to go back to 1985 and look what I did or could have done. There's only one person who could have done. There's only one brokerage in the world that will do that, and that's the would-a-should-a-could-a brokerage. And they don't actually let you do that. They don't let you make trades after the fact. And so, you really have to look at sort of a big picture here. When you have funds investments, you want to have a fiduciary. And in the ecosystem of public pensions, it's almost always a consultant. Sorry, that fiduciary is high as a consultant. And that consultant makes sure that they do two things. One, they don't shoot themselves in the foot. And two, they don't whip-saw themselves. And so what you saw in 2007 was investments based on fear, a change based on fear. The fear was, we're going to be left behind. And I'll tell you right now, don't ever make an investment based on fear. Because that's exactly what happened, as you saw. You looked like you were being left behind. The motivating factor for that change was fear. We saw fear again. In 2009, in February 2009, some of the same people agitating for the change of the pension to the Pritt was also a drum because the treasurer had lost money during the market downturn. And it was in February 2009, when the drums were beat the loudest. And for anyone in here who's a participant in the market, March of 2009 was the exact bottom. And it was fear again. That was fear that you're going to lose all your money. And so fear makes you buy at the top, like we did with the Pritt in 2007, 2008. And fear is, you sell at the bottom. That's what you're going to do in February of 2009. And so you can always see who should not invest your money. People based their actions on fear. And so it's just a lesson to learn we lost $7 million, according to Mr. Billifer, had we not at that time. I think he was being generous because he only brought it down to the market bottom. In fact, he didn't consider the fact that then the compounded return since then and the greatest rally in the last six years, it's more like $10 million. It's a self-inflicted wound. We're going to pay for it with having our third largest budget have to increase by 5.75, 6% a year for, well, our town meeting. And so the one thing you want to make sure is that you have a fiduciary. It's their responsibility. They're going to hire a consultant who's going to tell them what to do. The last thing you want is people to come here telling you what to do based on the fear of being left behind or the fear of losing all your money. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. LeCourt. Annie LeCourt, Precinct 15. My recollection from my time on the Board of Selectment is that the reason that our pension budget goes up at the rate that it goes up is because of when we have to be fully funded. Can I get some confirmation of how we're doing on fully funding? What year it is we are supposed to be fully funded by and how we are going about setting that rate relative to that? Mr. Tosti. That is correct. Under state law, this system has to be fully funded by 2040. The system right now under projections is to be fully funded in 2032. So, in effect, we're not just funding our current expenses, we're catching up so this system could be fully funded by a certain point. And at that point, the cost will drop. But that's the target right now is 2032. And so that's the rate, that's why we set the rate of increase at the six or five or whatever percent because we're shooting for that goal? Well, for the last several years it's been targeted at a six percent increase during the about a month or actually several months ago when the One Range Planning Committee was meeting sort of a subcommittee of the town manager and one of the vice chairs of the finance committee along with a member of the finance committee went and met with the retirement board and they agreed to reduce their annual increase from six percent down to five and a half percent until at least 2020. But their primary responsibility is to make sure the system becomes fully funded. Fully funded. So, when you say we're going to be fully funded in 2032 and that will change our budget can you tell me sort of what will happen? Well, my guess is 2032, okay. I know. My guess is if we become fully funded in 2032 then we'll switch off and start pouring money into the OPEB system so that system can be fully funded. Right now our OPEB liability are this is basically health insurance for retirees there's a bigger liability on the OPEB liability than there is in the pension system but I think that's what will happen. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you, Greco. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Rich Greco, retirement administrator for the town of Arlington. On behalf of the board I just wanted to reiterate what Mr. Tosti was saying. The goal of the retirement board is to be funded in fiscal 2032. State law requires it done by the state. After we all witnessed in 2007 we were trying to leave some room in case there's another major downturn in the market. This would alleviate coming before town meeting and saying we need all this money this year to catch up on the losses. We're trying to come to a smooth level. Our numbers are given to an actuary data which is then approved and sent to the state actuary for approval of the retirement board. We did meet with some of the members of the finance committee. They asked if we could do the growth at five and a half percent and we were able to still maintain fiscal 2032 as a goal. So that's basically the goal of the retirement board speaking on behalf of the retirement board is to fund this as soon as we can as Mr. Bill if I told you the other night question. In 2032 the appropriation looks like it's going to be around 20 million dollars figuring it out many years down the road. In 20 fiscal 2033 it will be 5 million dollars. When it's over 105 percent funded it will hopefully be zero. So the one difference on the four large budgets this hopefully has an end date that will eventually go away in 2032. Thank you. Anything else on retirement? Seeing none. The next budget that was held was reserve fund. Someone want to talk about reserve fund Mr. Tosti did you? I just wanted to explain the increase which was a bit done at the last minute from a million to a million two. At this point the school committee released $200,000 into their stabilization fund for special education. Unfortunately through I don't know whose fault it really doesn't matter there was never a stabilization fund put into the warrant for the special ed. Therefore there was no place for them to put the money. I worked with the town council and the controller to find some kind of a solution there really wasn't any other good solution so I offered to the superintendent if you promise to put to let $200,000 flow back to free cash in June 30th we'll put $200,000 additional into the finance committee reserve fund and that will be available for you next year sort of a wash but that's the reason it's going up and it's really we set it aside just for that purpose and we'll get it back at June so it's a wash for the town. Thank you. Thank you sir. Anyone else on reserve funds? Seeing none. Someone put a hold on water and sewer enterprise fund. Mr. Fuller. Peter Fuller, precinct 20. Thank you Mr. Moderator. A few questions. I'm looking at the top line personnel services in water and sewer $2,095,000 and change and if you go down to personnel services detail it's $3,154,000 and change $1,059,000 higher then if you look at the top line expenses $15,711,000 and you add up all the expenses you get the same discrepancy $1,059,000 in the other direction so I'm wondering why these things don't match up. We should do a better job on that next year because you have the part of that is in indirect expenses to total up to it so if I add up water, sewer and indirect expenses I get that figure that's $1,059,000 off from the top line expenses. I'm embarrassed to say I'm not quite sure. Mr. Chaplain, do you want to give it a call? Adam Chaplain, town manager Mr. Tosti was correct it's in the calculation between both direct charges, employees of the water and sewer department as well as the indirect charges that are attributable to the town departments that basically provide support or service the charges. There's also a further breakdown where there are direct charges attributable to the health care and pension costs of the employees of the water and sewer department as the contribution towards health insurance and pensions to those town employees and other departments that service water sewer. We have a more detailed breakdown of how all those indirect costs come together, which other myself or the deputy town manager would be able to share with you if you'd like. I went through and added up all the offsets in the other budgets and it came out to about $3,246,000 in change I don't see how that matches into this anywhere. Between I think a portion of labor a portion of retirement as well as a portion of the indirect charges it should tie out to that number. Well I hope going forward we can get some greater transparency in the way this is presented but thank you for all your work. Thank you sir. Anyone else on water and sewer? Next budget those held is recreation. Someone want to discuss recreation? Excuse me? Okay. Ed Burns Arena someone held someone held the ice rink no one's volunteering okay and that was the last budget that was held. So the way we're going to do it we're going to vote all the budgets at once but first we're going to vote on Mr. Harrington's amendment so once we vote that amendment up or down then we will vote on the budgets as a whole. Is that clear? Okay you ready? So first we're going to vote Mr. Harrington's amendment if you want to if you agree with Mr. Harrington's amendment you want to vote yes please vote one if you do not agree with it please vote two and go ahead and vote one yes I want it two no I don't 164 negative 20 for the affirmative it is defeated. So 146 okay now we're going to vote on the recommended vote as presented by the board of finance committee I'm sorry are you ready? You want to vote yes on the budgets please press one if you want to vote no please press two and go ahead and vote one for yes two for no. 192 in the affirmative for the negative affirmative vote and I do declare it and negative. That ends budget 22 Mr. Tosti. I move that article 20 be taken off the table. We have a motion to take article 20 off the table all in favor please say yes. Opposed? Article 20 is off the table it is now before. This is the collective bargaining articles there's a sheet that was left on your desk I wish we had them on your chairs today and this explains all the different all of the collective bargaining units have settled except one that's pending a final vote by the union membership but all are settled for three years and I think there was a lot of negotiation strategy and philosophy in entering this and therefore I'd like to have the town manager give you a bit of an overview before you vote on this. Thank you. Mr. Chapter Lane. Adam Chapter Lane town manager as Mr. Tosti just said we certainly did have a strategy in approaching collective bargaining this year very simply that we would offer a cost of living that was guided by a historical consumer price index in the northeast market of 2% for a general wage increase for each year but then also taking a look at the salary study that was conducted last year and also provided a town meeting at areas of inequity to move certain positions within bargaining units up to midpoint in terms of our 12 comparable communities so if you look throughout you can again see the agreement on 2% cost of living in each of the three years but then also based on different bargaining units various approaches for example in the fire bargaining unit you can see mention of implementation of a new step system for positions again to try to achieve parity or midpoint towards parity and another example would be within the patrolman's association looking at patrolmen who are not currently eligible for the Quinn bill or the educational incentive and slowly phasing them in to once again be eligible for that educational incentive so that we don't have an inequity within the bargaining unit and also an inequity among our comparable communities all of which offered an educational incentive to all of their police officers so that was an important piece for both equity and education. Aside from that I think it was a very productive bargaining session with all units we're very pleased to be able to come here with all of the bargaining units settled with one to still ratify as it stated in the vote and we ask for your favorable disposition. Thank you. Mr. Marr I have one preliminary question though Mr. Tosti oops he went away or maybe the thing that was on our chair tonight is this substituting the recommended vote in your booklet in full? Okay, thank you. Go ahead Mr. Marr. Thank you Mr. Marr. John Marr. Just a brief word having been involved in collective bargaining negotiations with the town for the town for about 30 years this is a singular achievement not only for the town manager as bargaining agent but also for the unions to have come together it's been rare in the past when we've been presented with all of the unions being in agreement and I think it's hats off to the unions particularly hats off to the manager and his negotiating team and I think it's fair to the taxpayers I hardly suggest that we support this mutual effort by the town collective bargaining units and the town management. Anyone else wish to discuss the collective bargaining budgets? Seeing none we're going to take two votes the first one was we're going to substitute what was on our chair tonight for what was in the finance committee book because it incorporates all of the unions and all the final negotiated settlements with all those unions. Are you just queued up for one vote? Two, okay. So first we're going to vote to substitute Mr. Tosti's substitute that was on our chairs in labeled amendment we're going to call it a substitute. So all in favor of Mr. Tosti's substitute vote yes or vote excuse me vote yes by pressing 1 vote no by pressing 2 and go ahead old habits are hard to break it is substituted 194 to 3 that brings us to the recommended vote of the finance committee as substituted all in favor please say yes opposed it's a unanimous vote and I so declare it that brings us to article 20 20 of 11 unanimous that brings us to article 23 appropriation reevaluation real property we have the recommended vote of the finance committee for 50,000 does anyone wish to discuss it seeing none all in favor please say you want to discuss it you're on a roll no one does Paul Terney director of assessments we have the recommended vote of the finance committee for 50,000 that brings us to article 23 three years cities and towns need to go under a reval project and fiscal 16 is that year for Allington we are contracting with an outside firm to do the commercial industrial personal property and income producing properties the assessors will be handling the project to fund the reval project thank you anyone wish to discuss 50,000 under reevaluation project seeing none we're ready for a vote all in favor please say yes opposed it's unanimous vote and I so declare it that brings us to article 29 appropriations committees we have the recommended vote of the finance committee for 25,000 dollars for various committees and commissions anyone wish to discuss this seeing none we're ready for a vote all in favor please say yes opposed it's unanimous vote and I so declare it that closes article 29 brings us to article 30 appropriation town celebrations 10,167 dollars for various committees flags etc anyone wish to discuss it seeing none all in favor please say yes opposed it's unanimous vote and I so declare it that brings us to article 31 appropriation miscellaneous $8,500 appropriated for legal defense indemnification medical costs anyone wish to discuss it seeing none we're ready for a vote all in favor please say yes opposed say no unanimous vote and I so declare it brings us to article 32 appropriation public public art east Arlington we have a recommended vote of $12,000 anyone wish to discuss it we have three people Mr. Chapter Lane first then Mr. Harrington then Mr. Fuller thank you Mr. moderator Adam Chapter Lane town manager I just wanted to give a brief description of what this warrant article is requesting it's a request for funds to fund the help or the work of a consultant to help the town manage a proposed public art process for the Mass Ave corridor in east Arlington there are several sites along the corridor that were approved by the Board of Selectment several years ago with the request of Arlington Public Art a subsidiary of Vision 2020 those two sites are the intersections of Grafton Street and Mass Ave as well as the intersection of Cleveland Street and Mass Ave at the Fox Library the idea would be to solicit proposals for permanent public art exhibitions at those two sites to sort of tie into the goal of added vibrancy in the commercial and retail district in east Arlington what the funds requested would go for is the planning of a public art solicitation process so the designing of a solicitation process as well as holding at least two community meetings with the public to solicit feedback following that managing the process of selection and community engagement recruiting artists managing their submissions as well as facilitating public input and interviews of those artists for their submissions and then finally reviews and approvals of whatever public art submissions we would receive so selecting artists and then reviewing their plans and getting them ready for fabrication installation what this doesn't fund is that fabrication or installation of the public art I would presume that we'd be looking at fundraising or grant writing for the majority of the cost of any fabrication installation but we are asking for town funds to support this planning solicitation and community engagement process. Thank you Mr. Harrington Sean. Thank you Mr. moderator Sean Harrington precinct 15 I was just curious Mr. moderator if we could find out how much funds have been raised from the for the public arts council at all a little far field of this but you have an answer Mr. Chaplain. Adam Chaplain town manager are you referring to Arlington Public Art and the fund for public art that was created last year? They can be those created two years ago. So I don't have an accounting of that account available right now but I do know that account has become a fund that enables programs like Art Rocks I'm not in this park last year Art Rocks By Pond which just opened this weekend as well as Cheerful where you sit those act as fundraisers but they also have used that fund to take money in from donations and then support those projects going forward so I could provide you with the funding of that fund. And just for my own second I'll I'm imagining that this is closely connected with that committee correct and helping it out absolutely initiative of that committee. Okay reason why I bring that up is because two years ago now not all of you were here two years ago I was we had a this came up to us about creating this committee and at that time the current or then chairman of the board of selection made a comment that the board of selection at that time was creating a committee solely as a vehicle for donations you know there was concerned by people whether or not we were going to use this for actual public funding if we were going to spend tax dollars on funding public art not that anyone was against public art but the idea of using tax hours especially now with our budget growth becoming smaller spending money on public art and the I believe it was Mr. Heiner brought up that point and while the current chair or the then chair of the board of selection said well legally you could use tax hours to fund it it was not the intent of the board of selection at the time to use public funds to push along public arts projects or to push the committee along it was solely for donations in my opinion that's not just talking about public art that's the committee period when you say that this is a vehicle for donations I was expecting that anything that to do with this committee whether it's a survey I don't care how much the survey costs or installation of the art it was supposed to be for private donations that this was solely a vehicle to push this for now people are going to say well you don't know we never really said that but if you look at the tape if you actually look at it it was clearly said the intent of the committee for a vehicle for private funds now I like the idea that we're doing a survey on this but I don't like the idea of it being used with tax dollars what I would rather see if anything is that the committee raise the funds themselves and then spend their own money that they have raised for the $12,000 survey I think that would be a lot better idea seeing as two years ago we passed this under the assumption that no at least to my knowledge that no public funds were going to be used for this or if anything I'd like to see if the committee would raise funds to reimburse the town the $12,000 Mr. Modder would that be a possibility at all to have the committee raise the $12,000 eventually and reimburse the town for the survey not saying that's their intent but would that be possible can you repeat the question would it be possible for the public arts committee to raise $12,000 in private funds to repay the town for this survey guess it's technically possible Mr. Chaplain is going to tell you something about it Adam Chaplain town manager I think it is technically feasible but it's not what's being requested under this article on that note I'd ask you to vote this down not because this is against public art this is not against service but two years ago we were told that the intent of this committee was not to use public funding the intent was solely as a vehicle of donations private donations we made a commitment then we need to uphold that commitment now just because it's been two years I mean the intent should change the point of intent and the point of making those type of promises is that they don't change regardless of progress or years forward they're always the same so please vote against this and have the committee fund their own surveys privately thank you Mr. Fuller Mr. McKinney Lawrence McKinney sounds pretty sync I very very rarely actually get telephone calls from my constituents about specific warrants but I did get one about this one from a constituent who was concerned that this amount of money was being spent on public art as I have heard from Mr. Harrington this is not really being spent on public art but spent on figuring out how to do public art and it strikes me that $12,000 which as you know twice what it cost me to put together the entire of Uncle Sam Plaza is really a rather a large amount of money the second part being that this is a repeat of what we had for our 200 celebration I applied to be on that particular committee because I have a background of raising money I started several corporations and I am a secretary at the Harvard Business School and we have to raise money for people who have money and I came up with several fund raising possibilities for the 200 during the summer because they had said we do not want money we will raise the money you bet they raised the money they had spent all their money on a sort of a beginning party and then there was no more money they came back and asked the town for some money and they came back and asked the time for some more money and then finally all patted themselves on the back and said we are giving you back some of the money that we said we wouldn't ask you for before and they all clapped now this is a repeat of the same thing apparently they said we want to do something we are going to get private you think with a town full of people with residences that you know cost what they cost we have a few people in this town who are rich enough to contribute to something like this if an appeal was made and that is what I am only asking if an appeal was made they didn't even try the 200 committee did not even try to raise money actually making a few phone calls it can be done there are people out here who are willing to support the arts and if you are out there in TV land come forward we don't have to ask the taxpayers to do this I know you are there okay thank you Palusso from Precinct 6 good I wasn't sure but there is three centers to this town there is the center there is East Arlington and there is the Heights now if I understand what this is for and I might not be up to date on this stuff I thought it was to continue the practice that started with the center to do some of the power units right now let me tell you a secret the East Arlington people feel left out now how do I know that because they have told me they have told me as part of ATED so whether you are going to spend the 12,000 or not spend the 12,000 it seems to me there is a whole issue of whether or not a significant population in this town maybe we should have stopped it way back when but if you have done it in the center and now you are going to say well guess what we are not going to do it in East Arlington not so good okay this is Luke Lager Molly Flukiger precinct 4 I just want to say that I support this and I support tax money a modest amount maybe not this is a modest amount for public art and I also agree with the previous speaker that those of us in East Arlington we often sometimes complain when things aren't when people don't ask our opinion so if this is for organizing it would be money well spent to make sure this is something we appreciate and we all enjoy thank you thank you Mr. Ruderman yes Mr. Slickman Paul Slickman precinct 9 motion to terminate debate under all items under this article motion to terminate under article 32 all in favor please say yes opposed it is a two thirds vote and I so declare now we have to terminate debate article 32 we have a force to recommend to vote y'all set so recommend to vote a $12,000 if you want to spend $12,000 for art you will press 1 and vote yes if you do not you will vote 2 for no and vote 1 for yes 2 for no because we have 130 in the affirmative 62 and negative this is an affirmative vote and that closes article 32 and that brings us to article 33 finance committee appropriations human rights commission Mr. Tosti I would like to make a small amendment to the recommendation of the finance committee which hopefully will be up on the screen okay basically it adds that the board of select and then adds the words that you see up there and town manager comma in collaboration with the Arlington Human Rights Commission comma and then everything else is the same do you want to add in the words in town manager comma in collaboration with the Arlington Human Rights Commission into the first line do I have a second on that okay go ahead this issue was brought on by a 10 register voter article primarily involving around the executive director of the Human Rights Commission and that there wasn't any officially appointed director of the Human Rights Commission finance committee sort of looked at this and some of the comment that we have down there is that I have there is incorrect we were under the impression that basically the executive director of the Human Services served in that function apparently a little bit of disagreement on that there is an appropriation for the Human Rights Commission that you've already appropriated for $4,500 for staff support but there's never really been any particular need for a human rights director because the amount of the workload that comes into the Human Rights Commission is not huge and they've been able to handle it very well on their own so the human rights executive director under the bylaws is an appointee of the town manager and the Board of Selection so rather than the finance committee getting involved with a management issue we requested that the Board of Selection and the town manager in consultation with the Human Rights Commission investigate this issue and then come back next year and say do we need a human rights director executive director if we don't then modify the bylaws to take that requirement out if you do think we need one then the manager and the Board of Selection should appoint one and if there's need for some additional funds there they can make a recommendation so basically this is the heart recommendation ask the Board of Selection and the manager look into the issue come back to us next year do they see a problem if they do what's the solution and they'll come back before this body at that now I know there's a substitute motion to appoint a new committee from town meeting and I hope you vote against that because this is really not a policy issue it's a management issue it's not what is done but how it's done the issue in Article 30 is the importance and role of the executive director position position is recommended by the town manager approved by the Board of Selection that's why the finance committee recommended this go back to the Board of Selection and the town manager research it together work with the Arlington Human Rights Commission and come back to this body next year there is no particular to take specific action right now the Human Rights Commission is doing a good job with what it does but they can study this and decide if there needs to be any changes so I recommend the finance committee motion as amended to you thank you thank you Mr. Arrington Stephen Arrington Precinct 13 I agreed with Mr. Tosti with everything he said except at the part about not supporting the finance committee motion the substitute motion is very similar to what the FINCOM found out that there is some need to look at the bylaw that is the Human Rights Commission and before I start there is nothing personal to me on this I have no personal interest in how the Human Rights Commission works or doesn't work I have an interest for the town because I think it's an important body one, two, three, four, five, maybe ten people well, if you read the bylaw you are going to see that it's a well crafted bylaw it's one of the few where there is a statutory requirement for a position the executive director and the executive director is not like just someone who takes notes or anything there is specific requirements for what the executive director is and most importantly the executive director is someone that you go to if you have a complaint between the monthly meetings and so the executive director is a very important role and the bylaw says there shall be an executive director and that it will be a town employee and he or she will report to the town manager and that the qualifications are extensive experience in history with human rights back in December when I went to find the executive director I couldn't and hence this warrant I was told that there was no funding because well, you guys didn't fund it and it turns out that the Fincom agrees with me everyone agrees that we have to look at the bylaw for that but if you start looking more closely at the bylaw you are going to find a lot of other things in there and it's an amazing commission the commissioners have a lot of authority one of the things that the commissioners can do that you are not going to find in any other bylaw is they can compel testimony under oath they can require the departments including the school department give documents and if you look at the bylaw you are going to find lots of things in there that actually structurally should have a closer look 22 years later and so all I am recommending is absolutely do what the Fincom wants but go one step better and have five people picked by the moderator mostly out of this group and I volunteer to look at the whole thing and restructure it and as I already showed you this reason I mean you have to sort of not be aware of the world that this civil rights issue about time is a de facto discrimination by public entities and this bylaw doesn't handle that for example if you had a complaint against a town and the human rights commission needed to hire a council the bylaw says that our town council will represent them well I think our town council does a great job but he can't represent people looking into a town department there is a conflict there there is no budget there is no money to actually hire outside council and he could recommend it and I am sure he would he is a very competent person but I think that what is key is if you look through that bylaw you are going to find lots of examples where structurally it doesn't fit into the 21st century and I think we owe it to the people back in 1993 to look through it and just come back and make recommendations usually I come up here and say okay here is a problem I did that back in article 9 there is absolutely a problem in Arlington that should be looked at I then say why you care well we do care because unlike you know I forget the previous speaker's name about his milk and cookies someone should just sue the town I think that we really owe it to ourselves to have a good insurance policy and that is what this bylaw was all about was to have an insurance policy an outlet for people that have complaints and for us to handle it internally and then finally I usually say oh this is a solution and this is what I am going to vote on I don't have the solution I haven't had the solution from day one and I think that it is going to require some amount of thought and effort to come up with a solution so that this human rights commission can be effective and have enough relevance to actually deal with the great civil rights issue of our time thank you Mr. O'Brien Andy O'Brien precinct 16 Mr. Moderator did the human rights commission ever make a determination about the reason why students of color are suspended at much greater rates someone from the commission here Jerry Ms. Barry Ms. Barron took me three tries Sherry Barron precinct 7 and member of the human rights commission we did not investigate that because no complaint was brought to us the issue was brought to us by the proponent but no direct complaint was brought to us so you the proponent was that was not in a form of complaint or request or anything like that the proponent brought the issue before us and we formed a subcommittee to investigate the matter and that is ongoing but we don't have an individual who brought the complaint to us which is the procedure so you have an investigation going on but we won't know what happens to that investigation unless someone brings forth a formal complaint I'm a little confused well you can come to our meeting and you would find out at our meeting yeah but we don't have an individual the procedure is that an individual comes to us or makes a phone call brings a complaint to the commission we then form a subcommittee of two or three people to investigate that complaint the proponent came to us with that issue as an issue of concern to him and we said that we would take this on with a group of three and investigate it as best we could with the school committee and come back with a response well I personally was not aware of the elevated suspension rates bring it back to the article we're talking about forming committees okay well these questions will determine at least for me anyhow these answers whether Mr. Harrington's warrant article is worth voting for if indeed that nothing will happen I think I might be inclined to vote for Mr. Harrington's warrant article excuse me Mr. Otter I never said nothing will happen I said that we are looking into it yeah yes there's no question right hey stop no no wait till there's a question presented finish your question Mr. O'Brien I've just been finding it kind of confusing that okay there is an investigation going on but there's not a formal complaint will there be a response or something like that if there isn't a formal response then maybe I see some value in Mr. Harrington's warrant article if we are going to get a response and a recommendation then maybe it's not but right now I seem to be a little confused thank you I'm over here yep ma'am I'm not sure I don't got your name yet Hila May precinct 20 this time I'm going to talk into them Mike I just wanted to say very briefly I come from a background where this is something employment discrimination is something that I do all the time and I know that human rights goes beyond that I'm an employment attorney and I have substantial experience representing particularly low income people and I think it's important to look at what agencies like this do within the function of all the other agencies that exist both in Massachusetts and federally and I think it's really worth noting and honestly within the scope to note that the Massachusetts commission against discrimination which handles all types of employment and housing and public accommodations issues is seriously underfunded so investigators at the MCAD have hundreds of cases where they used to have dozens and the reason why this is pertinent here is because robust agencies at the administrative level do a tremendous amount to support the civil rights of individuals either who don't have a lot of money or in situations where what's at stake isn't worth a percent of an attorney so I'll say that people who come through my door very often I can't help because there's not enough hours in the day and there's not enough money out there so a robust agency goes really far now it may be that we put together a committee and we realize that what's happening is what should happen and what we should do is change the bylaw but this town meeting exists to look at things like this and in the absence of a committee it feels to me like we get a recommendation back in a year and we see right before we vote for it so some input from town committee is an essential way to make sure that there's a check which doesn't mean that a committee isn't going to look obviously what the Human Rights Commission thinks because they're the best people to do it or what the town manager thinks should be done but that's why we're here I think so thank you. Next speaker is Peter Fiori I just want to remind people that we're talking about whether we're going to form two type of committees not whether we like the Human Rights Commission or whether it does great stuff Mr. Fiori so let's try and keep it on the scope of okay the two proposed committees Mr. Wagner what's your point of order well if that's they're forming a committee with of their own right Mr. Wagner pass Mr. Harrington Sean pass Mr. Hayner Mr. Deist I'm just recognizing you for the list. John Deist piece in 13 I would like to try to bring forward to town meeting if the moderator will permit me a little bit of information about how it is that the Human Rights Commission works right now so my question Mr. Moderator's address to maybe Mrs. Barron but someone on the Human Rights Commission who can talk about the process by which one brings forward an issue no that's beyond the scope of the article okay thank you very much thank you Mr. Rowe Clarissa Rowe, Precinct 4 I rise to ask you to reject the amendment for you all that are new to town meeting I have been a selectman I have been party to the kinds of incidents that our Human Rights Commission takes care of and they have included things like hate literature being dropped and I think the current structure as it stands now does an excellent job with the town leadership and with the police chief and the police of taking care of the kinds of complaints that we need to be taken care of and I do appreciate the lawyer that came up to question that and we should in town meeting question it but I think this is one place where we are doing a really good job and I would like to see us continue that structure and I would ask the new town meeting member the lawyer to possibly join the commission thank you Mr. Mr. moderator would we be able to see a copy of Mr. Herrington's amendment on the screen it was on everybody's chairs I believe last week on the 23rd you put it out do you have it Dave I apologize for lack of my preparedness but I cannot find it in my bag here if you'd like one do you need one in the back in the red shirt I could trembling precinct 21 I would like to remind everybody in light of Mrs. Rose comments that the human rights commission I'm sure does very excellent work and this is not about whether they do good work or not this is about forming a commission to determine whether or not we need to update them and so if they're doing the job that they're supposed to be doing then there's no reason to update the bylaw and this commission is just going to kind of reassure this to town meeting if we do need to update a couple of things then we update them and I propose to that we support Mr. Herrington's amendment because it's going to take the load off of I believe it'll take the load off of the select but it's already very much burdened with a lot of work so it's a volunteer commission it will not require any extra town funding so I urge you to support this thank you thank you sir Koro thank you very much Joe Koro precinct 15 also a member of the board of selectmen and with all due respect to the last speaker you already have five people who are vested with the responsibility of policy recommendation bring forth recommendations and I'm happy to be one of them I want to give you three numbers to think about 3, 13 and 22 the human rights commission actually has three appointing bodies this is very unusual for the types of commissions that we appoint six of the members appointed by the school committee five by the moderator with the agreement of the board of selectmen actually I think I'm sorry it's 5, 4 and 4 there are 13 members it's actually a fairly large commission and it has the benefit of having some veterans who've been on since the very first day and some who are brand new there's actually having that large commission actually allows for new blood to come through and new ideas as a matter of fact we just confirmed an appointment tonight at the board of selectmen's meeting the commission has been in existence for 22 years and I wasn't around at that time but I understand from the veterans that the debate over this was long heated and very thoroughly vetted I actually had the privilege of serving as a commissioner for two years I was the chair for one year and I understand some of the confusion I know Mr. O'Brien came up there is a difference between issues of concern and complaints but one thing I'll tell you is that I don't think that during my time as a commissioner that we felt the need or the lack of an executive director which is what this warrant article originally addressed what we did rely on however was having our office staff and our administrator and during my time there we had a wonderful administrator Marilyn Carnell many of you may have known her and she unfortunately passed away about a year and a half ago and so this is one burden that I think the commission has been laboring under is the lack of the administrative staff and I understand that that job has been posted and that there's a process underway now to refill that that's an immediate need as far as implementation goes furthermore it's also my understanding and Tom manager can confirm my understanding from what Tom manager said to us that he intends to go to the next commission meeting to discuss with them the state of the executive director and whether or not the executive director is formalizing the director of health and human services either as a de facto executive director or discussing other potential ideas for satisfying this this part of the bylaw might be on the table with that in mind there's a lot in motion it's actually very consistent with what the finance committee is recommending to this body so I would urge you to vote and to support the finance committee's motion thank you this is deschler pristine deschler precinct 19 I move to terminate debate on this article on all issues before okay motion to terminate debate under the article on all issues before us all in favor please say yes opposed it is a two thirds vote and I so declare that terminates debate we have before us the recommended vote of the Mr. Harrington's motion did we get a second on Mr. Harrington's motion second thank you sir we're going to vote on that after Mr. Harrington's substitute so first we're going to vote on Mr. Harrington's substitute then we'll vote on Mr. Tosti's amendments if the Mr. Harrington's substitute is not affirmative and then we'll vote on the final vote so first it's Mr. Harrington's substitute if you are in favor of can you throw his up there again oh no Mr. Harrington's substitute so everybody doesn't have it can see it what's that oh it's too small so you guys got to send these things to Dave Good in word format so he can actually put it up there in big so there it is he wants to establish a committee of five members appointed by the moderator for purpose of studying article title two article nine human rights commission report back to the 2016 town meeting whether they make any changes so first we're going to vote on that all in favor will vote press one all opposed will press two soon as Mr. Rinoa is up so if you want Mr. Harrington's amendment press one if you do not press two we have 42 in the affirmative and 151 of the negative the amendment is defeated that brings us to Mr. Tosti's amendment to add after the words that the board of selectmen and the town manager com are in collaboration with the Arlington Human Rights Commission he wants to add that in all in favor of adding that in please say yes opposed it is an affirmative vote and it's so amended now we have before us a recommended vote of the finance committee as amended Mr. Rino what the heck was that if you're in favor of the recommended vote of the finance committee please press one if you oppose press two one for yes two for no it is 161 affirmative 24 in the negative it is an affirmative vote so declare and that closes article 33 and brings us to article 34 appropriations for water bodies anyone want to discuss the appropriation for water bodies $40,000 seeing none of the peers are ready for a vote all in favor please say yes opposed say no unanimous vote and I so declare it that closes article 34 brings us to article 35 appropriation for community service programs $7,500 raised by general taxes and Mr. Kleinman wishes to discuss it thank you Mr. Monterey to Mr. Kleinman recent one those who have been here for a long time I for one still miss Harry and this is a wonderful way to remember him but the reason I speak is I happen to talk with somebody fairly recently who knew nothing about the program and it turned out that her husband had retired and their taxes were high so I explain the program this is a wonderful program but I think we might need to do a little bit of a better job of getting it out to the public so they were aware of it thank you someone in the treasurer's department make sure they do that in the future anyone else we should discuss to have you Bob program we're ready for a vote all in favor please say yes unanimous vote and I so declare by way revolution road $5,000 for the by way of the revolutionary road anyone wants to discuss that Mr. Leonard thank you Mr. moderator John Leonard precinct 17 I rise to support this but would it not if I could one of the things I've noticed in the town so many other signs that we have is a sign that basically announces the Paul Revere ride the Paul Revere ride signs for what it is worth are bleached out now by the son that you can barely read them now I'm guessing that with this memorandum of understanding we're acknowledging that this battle road by way taking in all these towns I can agree with that but I find it unusual that on Patriots day we gather at the town hall to acknowledge Paul Revere announcing the British are coming but yet we don't do anything about the signs as they're being bleached out by the weather I would make an emotion maybe or an idea to basically say either stop acknowledging Paul Revere on Patriots day at town hall or at least repair the signs to announce that this is the way Paul Revere rode his horse thank you good idea Mr. Roe anyone else wish to discuss the scenic byway seeing none we're ready for a vote all in favor recommend the vote of finance committee please say yes opposed say no it is a affirmative vote that closes article 36 brings us to article 37 appropriation pension fund former 25-year accidental disability recommended vote of zero dollars anyone want to discuss zero dollars seeing none all in favor please say yes opposed unanimous vote and I so declare it that closes article 37 brings us to article 38 and brings us to article 39 recommend the vote of finance committee for no action all in favor of no action please say yes all in favor please say yes opposed unanimous vote and I so declare it that closes article 68 excuse me 38 brings us to article 13 9 recommend the vote of finance committee for no action all in favor no action please say yes opposed unanimous vote for no action I so declare it that brings us to article 40 long-term stabilization fund 100,000 dollars be appropriated for long-term stabilization fund anyone wish to discuss that all in favor please say yes opposed unanimous vote and I so declare it Madam clerk do you declare that you're more than 186 time meeting members present voting deferred yes thank you that closes article 41 brings article 41 appropriation overlay reserve fund $350,000 be appropriated to the overlay reserve surplus account anyone wish to discuss that all in favor please say yes opposed say no unanimous vote and I so declare it brings us to article 42 transfer fund cemetery they want to transfer $150,000 to the cemetery commissioners for the care of cemeteries and $10,000 for the capital budget and $150,000 $160,000 total anyone wish to discuss cemetery funds being none all in favor please say yes opposed is a near unanimous vote it's affirmative vote and I so declare it that closes article 42 brings article 43 use of free cash I love free cash $3,435,846 dollars to be transferred into free cash anyone want to discuss free cash being none all in favor please say yes opposed it's affirmative unanimous vote and I so declare it that closes article 43 brings us to article 44 appropriations fiscal stability fund we are going to appropriate $2,782,763 of the fiscal stability fund anyone wish to discuss this seeing none we are ready for a vote all in favor please say yes opposed unanimous vote Madam clerk you declared it through 86 Tom meeting members present voted in the affirmative thank you that closes article 45 brings us to excuse the article 44 and bigs us to article 45 resolution Tom meeting member removal process Mr. Greeley first then Mr. O'Connor thank you Mr. moderator but having voted in the minority on this I'm going to ask Mr. O'Connor to review sir that vice chairman Diane Mahan speak on it hi Diane Mahan member of the Board of Selectment this was a 3-2 vote having voted in the majority basically it's what is stated in the report from the Board of Selectment the town moderator opposed that he would like to explore and have a conversation with town meeting members about an issue that several people had raised to him concerning absenteeism should there be a process by which to even look into if a town meeting member has an extended absence from town meeting should there be some sort of process that they go through I voted myself personally because the town moderator indicated that he'd like to have this conversation with town meeting members this is something that they would like to see I did say for myself personally that I know there have been times when people have come up to me and said you know so-and-so Diane Mahan from precinct 14 didn't show up all year long you know I'm not going to vote them back in I have always cautioned people it's probably happened two or three times in 20 years of that you know you may want to contact that person contact a neighbor that knows that person it could be a medical issue so one of my concerns was if there was a process or protocol regarding looking into extended absenteeism that that facet somehow we brought into it but basically we just want to get a sense of town meeting if this is something that you'd like the town moderator and or any other vehicle he deems fit to look into this and report back Thank you ma'am Mr. O'Connor James O'Connor precinct 19 your assistant moderator and a member of the town meeting procedures committee it's been brought to our attention in the past that towards the break before we had these electronic clickers and people could see who was here and who was not that the number of people dwindled down perhaps that's one of the reasons we were asked to address the issue of the time limits on speaking because people wanted an efficient meeting I know we have another article after this so it's more than likely that we won't conclude tonight as some people had hoped we did but when the town meeting procedures committee spoke together we talked about asking the town meeting as we did last year we had a resolution and the moderator asked a question whether people would consider a shorter time limit for minutes what we'd like to do is just to investigate because some towns have a procedure by which if there's an absence of more than 25% of the time that the member of the meeting that isn't there be considered vacating their office or abandoning it we're not asking people to make a decision tonight what we're asking people is to recommend by resolution that we consider the matter as several people have asked about it the purpose of which is to determine why do we have 30 people that last year didn't attend more than 50% of the meetings well one of the questions we might ask when we're talking about democracy is if the voter speaks and the voter votes a person in regardless of their absences should they be allowed to continue well maybe they watch at home the one thing they don't have is a clicker you know they can't use it from home so we don't get their vote doesn't represent that precinct what we would like to do is have a trusted body and I for one want to thank all of you for the most interesting budget discussions that I've had in the 17 years of imparted town meeting I thought that tonight there was a lot of really good discussion in the last couple nights about different articles we're trying to encourage people to want to be here so absence kind of indicates maybe people don't want to be here I have to honestly tell you in the last week 19 and a few years ago one of the members of my precinct came to me and he said I can't be on it anymore I'm not going to be able to be present but I'd like to appoint Joe he's my neighbor across the street I said that isn't the process the process is that you bring it to the attention of the town clerk she posts the vacancy and it's brought up on a vote at the next town election if that is during town meeting that somebody decides to resign for medical purposes or otherwise then it's certainly possible that the precincts get together at a special meeting with a quorum and appoint somebody to fill the term but what we really are looking for is a mood of the meeting to determine do we want to as other towns such as Framingham and others that we looked into do we want to ask people do they want to be here we're not going to kick them out unless it's the recommendation and the decision next year subsequent to investigation with the bylaw they'd ask them to just give us some idea of their intention so that's why this is on the warrant and we ask for your support I believe that maybe some other people have some thoughts about that Thank you Mr. Sean Harrington Sean Harrington, precinct 15 so I'm going to mention because we all know that there was a member who was a member of town meeting but didn't show up for I think it was five years do we know the status of that member Mr. Moderator are they still a member of town meeting? There was one member who didn't show up for nearly 10 years and resigned this year so he wasn't here for 10 years 10 years wow and I don't mean to pick them out and point at them but my first thought on this is to be you know if we could just ask them to resign or simply say look if you're not going to be here could you potentially vacate the seat that seemed to kind of work once they were asked or nudged or at least publicly shown they haven't shown up for I thought it was only five years I was just curious not to just try to drag this along but do you guys have any thought committee looking at this or that plans on investigating this have any thoughts on potential procedures already I don't need to hear what those procedures are I'm just curious if they have any thoughts already or if they've been starting to talk about it no there's no thoughts it's just investigation as to other towns how was it done the only thing I would recommend is that to the committee is that if we end up voting for this that they not allow it to be a vote a town meeting but of the precincts and have it specifically be the members of the precinct that vote to remove the member that is not showing up I think that that would be more appropriate enough with the hand waving in the back okay but anyways the reason why I'd say this is because their member love to the people who are also representing that precinct to remove them not the whole body but your precincts didn't vote for them thank you Mr. moderator thank you sir Mr. Tully I thought Joe had his epi did Joe Tully precinct 14 I know everybody is eager to get out of here I also thank the moderator for the job he does as a moderator and also for his participation in the procedures committee as well as the other members of the procedures committee and I understand that tonight's vote is merely to decide whether we want to move forward with exploring our options but it seems to me that it's a little bit like letting the Campbell's nose under the tent so if you're like me please vote no tonight so that we don't have to go any further with it the principle behind this in my opinion seems a bit sanctimonious and I think the penalty of expelling fellow town meeting members seems a little bit draconian clearly there are some members that don't have an adequate attendance record but does that does that poor attendance record from a small handful of members really affect our finished product this is my 22nd town meeting and I can't recall a time when we've ever been close to not having a quorum few times during this meeting we've heard the term solution looking for a problem in this case we have a problem for which a solution already exists it may be blunt and sobering to say so but those who are elected to serve here owe us no duty not even a duty of attendance their duty is to the people of their respective precincts and it's really up to the voters of those precincts to determine whether they're satisfied with their own members performance further keep in mind that attendance doesn't mean that anybody is necessarily participating in the meeting in any significant way or even paying attention for that matter in fact one doesn't even need to be present for the meeting to be credited with attendance all you have to do is check in at the beginning of the meeting and you're credited with attendance regardless of how long you stick around and of course there's also the existential irony of coercing attendance only to routinely terminate debate before everyone has had a chance to participate I suppose I'd feel differently if people were clamoring to fill these seats but year after year we have uncontested races and even seats that go entirely vacant now I'm generally from the crowd of people that never has seen a problem that can't be solved by government intervention or overreach but in this case I think we need perhaps more of a free market solution what we ought to do is determine why so few people find serving in town meeting to be unattractive when we solve that problem and the attendance problem will solve itself thank you sir Mr. Swilling Nathan Swilling, precinct 4 move the terminate debate on all matters related to this article motion to terminate debate on all matters it's been seconded all in favor please say yes yes proposed okay we have the recommend to vote on the board of select men in front of us all in favor please please say yes yes proposed the chair is on sir unsure let's use the clickers there's no substitute yes sir there's just the main motion yep okay we have the force to recommend to vote on the board of select men to set up ask the town meeting committee to investigate the issue if you want them to go do so please vote 1 yes or 2 no if you do not and he's ready so please vote 1 yes 2 no is 7 in the affirmative 79 in the negative it is an affirmative vote and I so declare that terminate article 45 and brings us to article 46 I have a motion to adjourn all in favor please say yes yes proposed no okay I believe that is a failed article to adjourn Mr. McKinney what purpose do you have your hand up okay we haven't even got there yet so we have the force article article 46 resolution for the master plan endorsement the recommended vote of the redevelopment board to endorse their plan goes on and on someone want to present it good evening Andrew chair of the Arlington redevelopment board before I get into my presentation I want to briefly thank the board themselves the staff that's participated in this over the years and the the MPAC who was very highly involved in getting this together the Arlington master plan is the result of more than two years of work by residents volunteers business owners and town staff to create a comprehensive action agenda for future land use and physical development in Arlington from the beginning of the process the Arlington redevelopment board and the master plan advisory committee expressed their intent to also seek town meeting endorsement of the Arlington master plan out of respect for the many action steps that will require future town meeting consideration tonight we asked for your endorsement of the adopted master plan in addition to the full copies of the plan distributed to town meeting members throughout town meeting a summary of the master plan was sent back in March to all town meeting members and to candidates for town meeting the adopted Arlington master plan was posted on the town's website back on March 16th copies are also available to be borrowed from both the Fox and Robbins library four information sessions were given for town meeting members on article 46 and the Arlington master plan in March and April and we thank all of you who attended those sessions the Arlington master plan addresses seven different but interrelated elements land use, transportation housing, economic development natural resources in open space historic cultural resource areas and public facilities and services the master plan is a coordinated community agenda for future land use and development in Arlington the Arlington master plan's action steps address the community's expressed desire to maintain fiscal stability while continuing to provide public services and facilities to upgrade schools expand the commercial industrial tax base, protect the environment and our historic buildings and landmarks improve mobility and expand housing choices and affordability more than 140 public gatherings surveys, news articles town notices, television programs and meetings went into the public process for this plan in addition the master plan advisory committee met more than 25 times to guide this process and after a public hearing and public comment on the drafts the Arlington master plan was adopted by the Arlington redevelopment board through its planning board authority on February 4, 2015 in accordance with mass general law the board of selectmen then voted March 9 to recommend favorable action on this article much of the implementation process for the Arlington master plan will require returning regulates here to town meeting and will require town meetings approval of any budgetary or zoning matters just as they do now endorsement of the Arlington master plan signals town meeting support of the overriding vision and countless efforts to which hundreds of residents, businesses and volunteers contributed and chose town meetings willingness to consider policy solutions at upcoming town meetings the Arlington master plan is not a zoning bylaw change it is not a capital improvement program it is not a budget or any regulatory document it simply provides the framework for the development of these plan implementation tools later this year a master plan implementation committee will be formed to coordinate, schedule, manage track and report process on implementing the Arlington master plans 94 action items those are found in the implementation table included in chapter 9 of the master plan a town meeting member will be appointed to the implementation committee town meeting members have asked whether a yes vote to endorse a town meeting to future yes votes to implement specific recommendations in the plan the answer to that is no town meeting members have also asked what happens if town meeting fails to endorse the Arlington master plan Arlington will still have the benefits of having adopted a master plan but it would be a missed opportunity because with town meetings support we send the strongest message to state to the grant makers and property owners and developers on what this community values and what this community envisions for itself over the next 20 years Arlington is and will be stronger with the united piling policy going forward with a yes vote on this article we ask the town meeting endorse the action of the redevelopment board in adopting the plan the town meeting consider the Arlington master plan to be a living document to guide future action being subject to regular review of states and conditions warrant and we ask the town meeting look forward to active participation and consideration of future actions to be taken will continuing the open process and ongoing public participation as implementation of the Arlington master plan proceeds we thank you very much for your consideration and hope you will vote to endorse the plan thank you, thank you Mr. Moderator thank you sir I got to turn my light on Mr. Rierig thank you Mr. Moderator and I rise in support of the master plan and observe that the master plan calls for the permanent protection of the Mugar site some town meeting members have fought for that objective for decades others may be entirely new to the issue and wonder why it's seen as so important or why this is coming up right now well it's back in the news because of the latest proposal contrary to decades of Arlington public policy and it matters because the parcels condition affects our public safety and property values for better or worse by affecting the severity of flooding in surrounding and downstream neighborhoods Eve if you would the 17 acre Mugar site is bounded by Route 2 Thorndike Field and the backyards of Mott, Little John, Parker, Dorothy, Birch, Edith and Margaret Streets are threatened of the great swamp of Alewife Brook which once handled tide waters naturally with increasing development and increasing rainfalls our neighborhoods streets and roadways are threatened with more frequent and more severe flooding you'll see some reminders here of the flooding of 1996 98, 2001, 2004 and 2010 and there's worse to come for three reasons First, continuing over development nearby and any remaining resiliency out of the watershed and increase its vulnerability to flooding Second, the combined sewer overflow project, separation project underway in Cambridge will at last prevent raw sewage from being diverted into Alewife Brook but also means that storm water formerly sent illegally to Deer Island is now kept in the watershed and finally the effects of climate change cause extremes of storm events to get bigger already the old rules don't apply since 1996 we've had a 10-year storm 325-year storms and a 50-year storm all in a span of 15 years why? because the definitions of those storms are based on 60-year-old regional rainfall statistics updated data by the National Center at Cornell shows much higher local storm event extremes are already the norm now what does this have to do with the Mugar parcel? as development steals resilience from a watershed so wetlands add to the resilience of the watershed the Mugar site is locally one of the lowest lying areas and in its natural state was substantially tidal wetlands the site still contains significant wetland areas and still functions as a buffer for our neighborhoods despite having been grossly degraded over the years its owners allowed the state to use it as a dumping ground for fill from the widening of route 2 and later the construction of L.Wife station perversely they now want to buy it on the back for proposing to clean it up by paving it over adding acres of impervious surface will make matters worse perhaps more importantly will remove the potential that the site offers for greater protection of our neighborhoods if restored to nearer its natural state the Army Corps of Engineers set out to evaluate that potential in 2002 when it proposed including the Mugar parcel in a study of potential restoration of degraded wetlands the project proposal went unfunded but consider what some of the Corps had to say about potential restoration sites like Mugar I quote industrial development and flood plain encroachment have resulted in the elimination or reduction of fresh water wetland areas along many of Massachusetts rivers wetlands provide areas for groundwater and can improve water quality by filtering pollutants and provide natural flood attenuation by storing floodwaters the current proposal which would pave over or disturb half the site relies on the hammer of the state Chapter 40B statute which in exchange for providing a bit more affordable housing than Arlington's inclusionary zoning bylaw would require gives the developer leverage to ignore or leapfrog over local bylaws and local concerns I've heard it suggested that the town under this threat should negotiate with the would-be developer to reduce the size of the project over 219 units and 300 parking spaces I say no thank you the town of Arlington has a strong basis on which to oppose issuance of a 40B comprehensive permit for this site that basis is a clearly articulated and consistent public planning and policy history calling for the protection of the site based on a significant local need this is a factor that can and will be considered by the state permit review authority it is to reinforce Arlington's consistent voice on this issue reiterating its open space plan and previous town meeting actions that we highlight the master plan's call for preservation and bring town meeting attention to it in this resolution what's the eventual goal here there's a 65 year trail of failed development proposals for this site my own hope is that it finally becomes clear to the owners when this proposal fails the site is substantially unbuildable commercially virtually a white elephant and that it's past time to engage with the town the state non-profit conservation partners and FEMA which has available hazard mitigation funding for acquisition and restoration and bring to a future town meeting a deal that lets them recover some of their unfortunate investment while protecting the true value of the site as conservation land going on I'd like you to look again at this clip we saw a few minutes ago this is a line of mass highway trucks trying to clear route to a flood water by pumping it away and to where onto the Mughar parcel imagine if that were paved over and going on again Dorothy Road residents will recognize their houses in this next image beyond the Mughar parcel in this 1951 photo showing the land in its natural state as a marsh and captioned by town employee who is clearly given the understatement the low land is wet he wrote 64 years later it is still wet and despite being abused it adds resilience to our neighborhoods and offers the potential if preserved and restored of greater benefit to the community please continue to support Arlington's clearly articulated goal of preserving the site by endorsing both the amendment and the master plan itself thank you Mr. Moderator thank you sir you got a second on your motion second thank you Mr. Arrington Stephen Arrington precinct 13 different view I've come here to actually support what Brian says but I think that you got to take it a little step further so one of the reasons the CPA was passed was preservation of open land space and Mughar's open space and my amendment just calls for further the resolution that we use the CPA funds preferentially to purchase the land and ask the town manager to enter negotiations post-haste and the reason that I bring this up a bunch of reasons wishing and hoping that something's going to happen may mean it doesn't happen if you take action you have a much stronger possibility of it happening and what is it turn the Mughar into open space by buying it now we all like to say oh well I hope the developer realizes that it's not developable land it's been taxed and marked as developable land for the past 20, 30 years to the cost of about a million dollars to the Mughars and so we can say it's not developable but that's not how we've been telling them for 30 years and you go in front of any reasonable person and they're going to say well Hamilton look at it you've been saying it's developable and now you're saying it's not in addition if you say oh well maybe they won't do it by right I think that you're going to find that that a civil maple forest will give you a lot of example of where a developer can use a 40B to ignore it to ignore the zoning in Ellington to ignore town meeting resolution and so all of my amendment calls for add to the resolution that you want the CPA monies the CPA funds to be preferentially used to purchase the property it's fair to the developer it guarantees a higher chance of success and I think it's actually better all around for everyone now of course the 30% that's already earmarked on CPA funds that's not what I'm talking about it can be a small amount you can bond it you could purchase that land and bond it and pay off the CPA bond over a long period of time it's fair to the Mughars I prefer Mughar in context to this you could maybe put in you know Genghis Khan the Mughars are actually a wonderful family very philanthropic they've done a lot of good for the state of Massachusetts and I'm sure that they'd be happy to enter into negotiations where the one thing that we never hear about is Ellington actually paying for it and so I ask you to support this amendment actually put our name on this this is how the CPA was partially passed to purchase open space let's use our CPA to purchase the property thank you thank you sir that's seconded we have a motion for what oh it's a motion to adjourn all of it's a it's a motion to adjourn it's a privileged motion to adjourn any time all in favor of motion to adjourn all in favor please say yes opposed okay we're gonna stay I guess this is done so for the motion to adjourn we don't need to Ms. Fitzgerald Ann Fitzgerald my name is Ann Fitzgerald precinct 17 town meeting member and League of Women is on to the coalition to save our wetlands the board of the League of Women voters of Ellington voted unanimously to support Brian Rehrig's amendment to article 46 the league has a solid local positions under conservation and recreation the acquisition and retention of land and water for conservation and the preservation maintenance and beautification of existing open space the league urges you to support this amendment to preserve the Mugau land as open space for the future of all Ellingtonians thank you ma'am Mr. McKinney Lawrence McKinney precinct 7 as an aside I might add that as a young camper Steven Mugau taught me how to use a camera he was a camp counselor once and I can only tell you how small I was because I thought Mr. Mugau was tall and skinny okay the reason I'm standing up here is because I believe in this town and it's historic and it's famous colonial association and the amount of time that this plan seems to put for the importance of expanding the knowledge of our town for investment purposes for just about any good reason for people to know about our town and as you know I am the typical you know I only have one one shtick here which is there is only one person that everyone knows about that came out of Arlington we've never going to be able to tell the world about the Schwann Mill as wonderful as it is we're never going to be able to do it with any of our other things because they're not that well known Uncle Sam is and what we have done in the last five years is to prove to everybody that Uncle Sam is not a cartoon character scope scope scope okay well I've been talking about the master plan about Uncle Sam our most famous guy is not mentioned once and I'm going to ask Miss Kowalski are there any provisions that we can add Uncle Sam to this document you had a two years to ask her about Uncle Sam in the master plan with all due respect I brought this question to the consultants two years ago Mr. Chaplain is going to tell you your answer to Uncle Sam the statue and the park are mentioned on pages 41, 115 and 120 of the master plan document and give Mr. Chaplain that should be about it I stand corrected very good and I'll sit down Mr. Ruderman I guess he just cut you right off Mr. Ward and Mr. Ruderman was up oh sorry Mr. Ruderman neither is mine sir the hour is late I follow a very slick presentation I'm sorry I didn't have time to put together the graphics I'm speaking against the amendment I'm speaking against the resolution of the master plan I ask your indulgence for about five minutes I know the hour is late but you voted that you didn't want to adjourn yet so please hear me out with all sympathy to the horrors of flooding repeated flooding house ruining flooding it appears that certain areas of East Arlington flood very well on their own without developing the Mugar parcel has anyone considered the possibility that developing the parcel might just include a plan developed by hydrologists for drainage to ameliorate some of the likelihood of flooding it is presumed and it has been put forth it has been expounded from this podium from public venues all across this town that nothing good can come from developing that parcel and you are asked to sit here at a very late hour and simply believe that with no one to speak to the contrary I will speak to the contrary perhaps something good from developing that parcel second point every time you hear someone say save our wetlands stop the middle word hour wrong they are not ours they are someone else's private property we can make them ours we could restrict them until they had no use we could down zone the property to something that we say we could live with I am certain that the owners would contest that in court we could take the property by eminent domain we could offer them a sum of money they would have a statutory three years to decide if they would accept that sum of money or come into court in suicide I propose to you it would not take them three years to decide that it was an insufficient sum of money no matter what we voted because whatever the value of the land was last year it's not that anymore it's not what they were being assessed for it's not what they've been paying the taxes on it for generations as developable land now it's the value of the land as the return on the now it is the return on the investment that they are ready willing and able to make at this point it's not what the land is worth it's what the profit of their project is worth that's what we'd have to pay for it that's what Mr. Rehrig's amendment basically puts us on the hook for that's what Mr. Harrington's resolution to devote a large chunk of the community preservation act funds puts us on the hook for to not be confused every time we vote for something we set precedent for something else how many votes were put in front of us in the entire saga of the redevelopment of the Sims hospital site oh this is just to move the process along oh this is just to enable the next step this is just to hire the next people this is just to consider I don't know how many times we were told this is just but we got exactly what we would have gotten in the end we got a residential development as densely as they could build it about a half an acre of public land no medical use no public amenities but every vote was just another step in the process they used to call the Sears catalog like a city phone book the wish list for kids for Christmas presents there's more wishing in this master plan than there is in the Sears catalog and the fault with a master plan is not that it wasn't the product of hard work it was the product of hard work the fault in the master plan is not that there were dozens literally dozens of public meetings there were the fault in the master plan is not that good people brought lots of people in from the public that good consultants spent our money in good efforts that's not the fault in the master plan the fault in the master plan is that you never see dollars and cents mentioned there are no choices in the master plan it exists as if every budget item was an island and every one of them could be individually posited to you as a good thing and yes they are all good things but no budget decision is ever made in a vacuum every budget decision contests against every other budget decision and with the zero option of maybe we should just do nothing maybe this isn't worth spending our money on every solution in the master plan for the business and real estate and land use sections is more development I could quote you the sections it will take too long build higher cover more area zone properties up reduce the number of parking spaces that developments require it's all in there all you have to do is read the first 30 pages it's all in the summaries and now we have before us an amendment that not only takes all of these very expensive wishes and puts one more in one more that would take 30 years to pay for this is exactly why I oppose the community preservation preservation act adoption in this town because the community preservation committee would have the ability to propose to this meeting a project which would take 30 years to pay off is there no sense in this meeting then in the next 2 or 3 or 5 or 30 years we might have something else to do with I don't know how many million dollars do you as anyone and yet we're being asked to vote to underline that part of the wish list above everything else make sure we buy the MuGar property because that's the only way it does become our wetlands 30 seconds this may be the last time I speak to town meeting I urge you do not spend future money that would be better off in other places thank you sir Mr. Michaelman Tom Michaelman precinct 7 I have a question Mr. moderator Mr. Harrington's amendment if it passes does that mean it's mandatory that we spend community preservation act money to purchase the MuGar property or does it mean it's just a recommendation of town meeting that the community preservation committee vote to spend money purchasing the MuGar property town council Doug Hyme to address that issue town council Doug Hyme most would be a recommendation you can't as a vote of town meeting bind the community preservation committee to expend money in one way or another with the resolution of town meeting thank you very much thank you sir Mr. Warden now is your chance thank you Mr. moderator I'm sorry I misunderstood you before a John Warden precinct 8 well I can't possibly match the brilliant surfer of the oratory of the speaker just before the gentleman who asked the question so I shan't try to I the I have to agree I think with Mr. Harrington's amendment one of the reasons that I supported the community preservation act is I'm on the public record if anybody still reads the advocate that that one of the a single justifying reason for passing it would be to enable us to obtain the funds to perhaps purchase that property which the town has been pointed out has been a goal of the town for a long time and was very nearly achieved a few years ago with the negotiation fell apart for some reason that is not not known to me anyway so that that is something we really we really ought to do obviously then I would support Mr. Rarig's motion that emphasizes the provisions language in the master plan that says that this is a a real priority and of course it was forced upon us by the by the Mughars people coming in and filing this 40B application which has a good deal of irony about it because the zoning, the PUD zoning on the Mughar parcel is there at the instance of the Mughar family that brought it before this meeting in 1970 it's the only PUD zone in town and they wanted it and now they say now we decided we don't like the zoning we asked you to pass we want to trump all your crummy zoning and go for 40B that's I think that's not not really plain fair in my book but the I really didn't come to speak about that particular issue but about the master plan in general there's a lot of good ideas in it there's some some residents with the thoughts that I I was in a lot of those public meetings that were talked about and I contributed a few ideas and some of which made them into the big book here but there is a problem that afflicts this town it's like the elephant and the parlor that is just barely mentioned but if you look on page 186 item 21 it deals with it in a kind of soft peddled way if you obviously live in an Arlington neighborhood you're aware of this mega houses tear downs on small lots taking away many of those smaller homes that might be as someone put it semi affordable for a young couple or an elderly retired couple for that matter and putting up some huge building that deprives one of sunlight and is out of scale with the neighborhood and just kind of overwhelming there's one in my neighborhood recently four stories off the ground I don't know how they compute this stuff but from the ground to the top it's four almost full stories if you just came into town and say oh there's that little hotel we're looking for but I don't know it doesn't have a sign on it yet so I don't know what it's going to be so anyway I bring that particularly to your attention because I hope that the redevelopment board it says this is a priority item that staff can do it will take serious efforts to research what other towns have done to prevent this mansionization or mick mansionization it really is and fix up our zoning law so that neighborhoods can be protected and be kept as they said in the presentation not this one but in the previous one that our goal is protect Arlington's neighborhoods pretty much the way they are I think that's the way we would like to see them and I hope they will work on that otherwise and I encourage you to vote for all the items that are before you but just in closing say this is the latest we've run town meeting since before I was moderator but that's what you wanted to do so have a nice night thank you thank you sir Mr. Kaplan Bill Kaplan precinct 6 I'm not moving the question sorry people voted to stay so this is actually the master plan is a major plan that spent years to develop and had a lot of community input the idea that we're just going to cram it in to go home is it's a bad idea we should have adjourned and spent some actual time discussing this we still the next person who raises his hand could still try to adjourn and we could come back and spend a half an hour 45 minutes on Wednesday but I'm just going to say that the master plan has got a lot of ideas it's a big plan for the future some of the ideas are good ideas and some of the ideas are bad ideas I'm not sure that I can support it because even though there are things that I really like in there there are things that I really don't like I know the town meeting voted a few years ago against changing the zoning to allow five-story multi-use buildings in the town we decided that's just too big well that's in the master plan is something they want to do so I mean it's a mix of the MuGar property absolutely don't want that develop into a massive apartment complex so that's in there that's good so I'm just making the point that it's a mix of good and bad things there's probably no one in this room who will like everything there there's probably no one in this room who won't like anything there so to say we're back in this it's a little odd because we're back in some of this each one of us is backing some of it and not back in other parts of it they're going forward whether we whether we say yes we're forward or not the town's moving forward so our opinion is really they don't care whether we support it they're doing it anyway so when you vote just decide for yourself how much of this do I like how much of this don't I like do I want to be putting my stamp of approval on this massive document with a ton of ideas and a roadmap for the future again some of it you'll like and some of it you won't that's all for me thanks thank you sir Mr. Wagner and you are next thank you Mr. moderator Carl Wagner precinct 11 I motion to terminate debate on the article and all associated matters motion to terminate debate on the article and all associated matters under there they're under it's been seconded all in favor please say yes opposed my opinion is a two thirds vote we have a force to recommend a vote of the Board of Selectment and we have Mr. Harrington's motion we'll vote on the motions as they were presented to us first Mr. Rehrig's and then Mr. Harrington's and then we'll vote on the sir he doesn't say it wasn't in order I believe if you want to reiterate what you said Mr. Heim we can't direct to them what to do it's only a resolution Doug Heim Town Council it's an amendment to a resolution I think well in some ways it might be a close question but I think it ultimately needs to be highlighted is that a resolution of that nature can't dictate to a community preservation committee how they'll expend their funds what they'll even recommend a town meeting what it would be doing is basically expressing a sentiment of town meeting and within this larger resolution that's about the master plan and the new guard development very good thank you sir so first we have Mr. Rehrig's amendment Mr. are you ready so if you want Mr. Rehrig's amendment Rehrig's Brian Rehrig's amendment be Rehrig Brian Rehrig that's what I'm saying if you want Mr. Rehrig's amendment you'll press one for yes and two for no so vote one for yes and two for no and Mr. Rehrig's amendment we have an affirmative vote 123 in the affirmative 43 in the negative it is so amended we now have before Mr. Harrington's amendment so soon as Mr. Reynolds schooled up his machine if you want to Mr. Harrington's amendment you'll vote one for yes and two for no it is defeated 114 in the negative 162 in the affirmative so it is defeated Mr. Harrington's defeated Mr. Rehrig says one now we have the recommended vote of the Board of Selectment as amended by Mr. Mr. Rehrig's amendment so if you wish to vote for the resolution as amended please press one for yes and two for no we have 136 in the affirmative 41 in the negative it is an amendment that leaves no more articles on the table all articles have been dealt with Mr. Tosti I move that article 3 be taken from the table all in favor of moving article 3 from the table please say yes yes all opposed article 3 is now before us I move that this town meeting be dissolved we have a motion to dissolve town meeting all in favor of dissolving the 2015 opposed it is so dissolved thank you very much good job we'll see you next year yeah thank you please return your clickers