 Good evening. I'm calling to order the meeting of the Arlington Select Board from Monday, January 24th, 2022. This is Select Board Chair Steve D'Corsi. Permit me to confirm that all members and persons anticipated on the agenda are present and can hear me. Members, when I call your name, please respond in the affirmative. Dianna Hahn? Yes. John Hurd? Yes. Len Diggins? Yes. Eric Helmut? Yes. And Board Administrator Ashley Maher is participating remotely. Tonight's meeting of the Arlington Select Board is being conducted remotely consistent with an act signed into law on June 16, 2021, that extends certain COVID-19 measures adopted during the state of emergency. The act includes an extension until April 1, 2022 of the remote meeting provisions of Governor Baker's March 12, 2020 executive order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting lot. The Governor's Order, which is referenced with agenda materials on the town's website for this meeting, allows public bodies to meet entirely remotely so long as reasonable public access is afforded so that the public can follow along with the deliberations of the meeting. Before we begin, permit me to offer a few notes. First, this meeting is being conducted via Zoom, is being recorded, and is also being simultaneously broadcast on ACMI. Persons wishing to join the meeting by Zoom may find information on how to do so on the town's website. Persons participating by Zoom are reminded that they may be visible to others and that if you wish to participate, you are asked to provide your full name in the interest of developing a record of the meeting. All participants are advised that people may be listening, who do not provide comment, and those persons are not required to identify themselves. All participants and persons watching on ACMI can follow the posted agenda materials also found on the town's website using the Novus agenda platform. And finally, each vote tonight will be taken by roll call. Before I move on to the agenda this evening, I'd like to discuss two items. First, we were all saddened to learn of the fire at Chestnut Manor early Saturday morning. Fortunately, one resident died and another remains hospitalized. We'd like to send our condolences to the family of the deceased resident. We also want to thank the fire department and police department for their response in fighting the fire and evacuating residents and thank our Health and Human Services Department for creating a donation fund for those residents affected by the fire. I'd like to ask the town manager for an update at this time with any further information. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'd like to start by repeating your thanks for Arlington Police and Arlington Fire for an amazing response. I know tragic to lose the life of a resident in Chestnut Manor. The quick response of the fire department. I think averted what could have been a much larger tragedy and a 100 unit apartment building and they're there to be commended for their quick response and bravery in knocking down the flame as quickly as they did. I want to say thank you to the team from the Council on Aging and Arlington Health and Human Services for very rapidly mobilizing and partnering with the Arlington Housing Authority and the American Red Cross to immediately provide services, temporary shelter and now lodging for any of those who were displaced during the fire. Additionally, as the Chairman alluded to, also nearly immediately the same day a fundraising effort was launched to help those who reside at Chestnut Manor replace items that may have been damaged from either smoke or water damage which can happen when the fire both occurs and then is knocked down by the fire department. So I'd like to just share my screen quickly with the donation page if that's okay. If I can find it on here. Let me see. If I go to, I can't do this here. You know what, bear with me one second excuse me. Let me try this again. So you can see this right here if Arlington residents are willing, they can visit Arlington community center.org slash Chestnut Manor and support this effort. A little after midday today, I spoke to our Director of Health and Human Services, and she'd reported to me that members of the community have already donated over $20,000 to this effort, which is truly an amazing pouring of support for people in their time of need. So I think that will conclude what I would share. Investigations are still underway to determine the actual the absolute or actual cause of the fire. And then do follow up work between the fire department and the Arlington Housing Authority to be sure that something like this doesn't happen again or do all that we can to be sure it doesn't happen again. Excuse me. So thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to state that we are starting this meeting this evening with heavy hearts from the loss of town meeting member Brian Rarick, who passed away Friday after a long illness. We want to extend extend our condolences to Brian's wife Sheila, to his daughter Jenna, and to a son Matt. Brian was a member for over 30 years, representing precinct 16 originally, and later precinct eight. He was a voice of reason through his services vice chair of the Sims Advisory Committee. He was a member of the Capital Planning Committee for several years. And more recently, he served on the high school building committee. He was a full man who made us all better through his presence on town committees, and his involvement as a concerned resident who advocated for open space preservation. For those of us who serve with Brian in town meeting. We knew to play pay close attention. When he rose to speak on a topic because he was sure to add value to the discussion. We valued his opinions, and we so respected his commitment to the town of Arlington. Even in this final months, Brian continue to attend aHS building committee meetings as a member to attend to attend ZBA hearings regarding the mugra site. As a concerned citizen, and as the town meeting member who successfully moved to make the preservation of the mugar parcel as open space, a further priority in the town's current master plan. We also coordinated meetings between town officials and conservation organizations to discuss potential future conservation efforts efforts for the mugar site. I include myself among Brian's friends and colleagues from town meeting who are deeply saddened to hear of his passing, but who are also so fortunate to have known him and learned from him over the years. I'd like to ask the board for a moment of silence in Brian's memory. Thank you. We'll now move to the regular agenda. It's a difficult transition but move to the regular agenda. We'll start with the consent agenda this evening. Item two for approval, Black History Month banners, Crystal Haynes Arlington Human Rights Commissioner. Item three, Reappointment Tree Committee, Keith Snibbly, term to expire 1231 2024. Miss Haynes with us this evening Mr. Chapter Lane. Yes, would you like me to promote her. Sure. Hi everyone, how are you. Good, how are you. Thank you so much for, for taking some time. You know, we've this has been the third year that we have been putting up Black History Month banners and so our point our hope is to get, you know, in the month of February a banner throughout the entire span of downtown of the town so from the Broadway all the way through the heights so this year we are putting up 14 banners in, or we hope to with your approval of course, 14 banners in the heights. We put out with the Arts Commission, we put out a call to professional artists to make six images that then would be repeated so that for a total of 12. This year, which is new we invited students from the Arlington public school system to design a Black History Month banner and this year's theme is youth leading the way. We know that young people have been at the center of civil rights issues since you know the Birmingham Children's March. So the that's no different for young people today and so we really wanted to highlight their efforts and the work that they've been doing, not only in this but in the country and in the state. And so that was the theme that we put out to our call of artists and if I don't know if I'm allowed to share my screen. Yes, okay. So I'll just show you, you, you have three from because we chose. Yes, great. You don't know if technology is going to help work with you. We have three that were chosen by Jasmine Milton and Jasmine. She had the unfortunate experience of losing a number of friends to gun violence, people who have been prominent in her community, young people have been working to make the community safe. And so she, we chose her submission because she created these beautiful portraits of these young people in the Boston area and I apologize if they are not low. There we go. And so these so she created six different images and these are all people young people who have passed away you have three of them. She submitted three others just because and sorry about the internet connection here. But we chose them one because they're just such beautiful images of young people. And then when you go deeper on our website in a collaboration with Arts Commission and in other places in town you'll be able to learn more about their story and Jasmine story as we do an artist talk virtually hopefully we will do it in person one day, one year. And they will, and these are the young people, two of them chosen from the Odyssey and school. And this was the one there of the arts. The art classes got together and this was one of the, the as a support measure in order to get them to participate in this we did ask a specifically or we encouraged students of colors to participate as well just so that they understand that you know very so seldom often do kids of color get get elevated and asked specifically to do something so we chose these two students as a mixed in as well and this is one of the designs that we chose. And again I apologize for the spinning wheel of death here it will load I promise you. This is another one of Jasmine's. I will click on a leg risk, and this is a leg risk. So we just hope that we can go ahead and put these, and I'm happy to send you all, if I went too fast I was trying to be cognizant of your time I know you guys are super busy. We just hope for approval to put these up in the heights as you can see they're a unique shape, so that that that makes it a little bit different for us so we will this year put all of the banners up so we will have banners from Broadway Square all the way through the heights this year which will be really exciting for black history month, and that'll be partnered with an artist discussion, and also, including the two young students who got $500 scholarships each as well. Thank you very much and we appreciate you sending us some further background on the, the selection in the competition process. I'll start with the board with questions or comments, and I'll start with Mr diggins. Thank you, Mr chair, I mean, I would like to move approval of the placement of the banners, you know, and I have to say I mean I'm really impressed speed up by the ones that the kids did, especially the penance shapes me I'm looking forward to seeing them go up being and I'm looking forward to seeing the banners in the heights to me so so that's exciting I think last year, I kind of lamented that the heights was kind of left out and so it's good to see the heights this year. I just have a couple of a couple of comments, let me leave with the question. It. So, it's, I'm just a little bit confused it says that one artist from general college selected to create six designs, repeated for 12 new banners. I just don't understand that. So six designs. Yes, yes, so what it will be is so as you know the penance so there'll be a total of 12 of those those designs. And so they'll be if you go up up down this the street where the polls are available. So they'll be they'll repeat twice. So, okay. Yeah, so be six and then I'll repeat and then the two students there as well and then on the flip side it'll say Arlington celebrates black history month. Got it. Thank you. Thank you. And, and also I really like the banner, I mean about the help you pronounce is the combo he river collective. Okay. Yeah, because I really like me the international aspect of that because me, it's like me with respect to racial issues but also especially property. I mean, we have to really look beyond borders because as the other banner applied to me there's no pride. Well, no, no, no. No pride without equality. I think that's what it is. Certainly mean no quality as long as there are really a lot of poor people in the world. And finally I just want to say I think the Prince hall banners are really tight. Yeah, really like those three banners and the designs for them so great job. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Diggins. Mr. helmet. Thank you. I happily second that motion and and an echo lens comments. I think the scope of the art and of the topics of this show is really, really impressive. The banners are stunning. I just had to smile and sell Marsha P Johnson there. You know that I mean that's your, I think the diversity of black history that you're plumbing. You know, in the, in Marsha's case, especially in all these others is just delightful. And yeah, the Prince hall banners and for all agent center are fantastic. And I'm really excited about the about the banners up in the Heights as well so thank you for this very, very thoughtful work. I'll be proud to see those hanging in my community. Thank you Mr. helmet. Mrs. Mahan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank his haze and everybody else who I could probably go on for at least another four minutes, who I'm sure was involved in this effort. Excuse me, I'm a frog in my throat. Mr. Diggins asked, in comments on the Prince hall and Mr. helmets. I won't go over that but having lived down there. I'm really happy to see that we're continuing to highlight Prince hall and his achievements. And again, and I am also thankful that we do have two students submissions. I know we have more than that but to that have been chosen along with the scholarships. I didn't know about that. That's a great thing. So thank you miss Hayes and thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mrs. Mahan, Mr. Herd. So I think Miss Hayes and Haynes and echo my colleagues comments. I think everyone in town always looks forward to the black history month banners that we have on on mass Ab and I think we both are able to celebrate with something visually appealing but educational which is actually amazing how much you can learn by just driving down mass Ab and reading the banners and then a lot of the banners trigger, you know, inspiration where you want to go up and follow up and see, see who that person is and you learn even more. So I think it's a really effective way to celebrate black black history month and I look forward to seeing them. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Herd. Yeah, and I want to again echo again the comments of my colleagues. Thank you, Miss Haynes for everything that you've done three work on the Human Rights Commission and on this competition. It is great to have banners in Ellington Heights as other members have said so with a motion by Mr. Diggins seconded by Mr. Helmut. Yes. We're having trouble with your sound attorney. Hi. Mr. Diggins. Yes. Mr. Helmut. Yes. Mrs. Mahan. Yes, and can I just ask Mr. Chair, is this a vote in Mr. Diggins and Mr. Helmut is this a vote on the consent agenda or just agenda item two. Because Miss Haynes presented, I'm just going to take the vote on item two and then I will go to item three right after. Thank you, sir. Yes. Mr. Diggins. Yes. It's unanimous vote. Thank you. Thank you, Miss Haynes. Thank you so much everyone. Thank you. And I will go in the same order for a reappointment to the tree committee. I hope I say the name right. For a term to expire 1231 24, and I will turn to Mr. Diggins. I'd like to move approval of the reappointment. Mr. Helmut. Second that. Thank you for your service. Any comment, Mrs. Mahan. No comment. I have no comments either. Our motion for reappointment by Mr. Diggins seconded by Mr. Helmut the turning time. Mr. Hurd. Yes. Mr. Diggins. Yes. Mr. Helmut. Yes. Mrs. Mahan. Yes. Mr. Decorson. Yes. Thank you. Item four is presentation. Congratulations. And Mrs. Neggley, The Library's new strategic plan. Andrea Nicolai, director of libraries. Andrea should be joining us right now. Good evening, Miss Nicolai. Hi, good evening. Thank you for having me. Thank you. And thank you for your patience. I know this has been awhile waiting to present to us. So we're looking forward to hearing from you on the strategic plan. I do have a short slide presentation. I'd love to bring that up. Can I screen share, Adam? You should have permission. Yeah, it should be. All right. Okay. And I think the last time I was before this body, it was in person, so been too long. Can you see my slides? Yes. Okay, thanks. So first, before I get into the strategic plan itself, I just wanna share a little bit about the library's performance in the last couple of years. So if you'll indulge me, I'll go ahead and, oops, the trick of forwarding slides on Zoom. Okay. First, I wanna give you a short snapshot of the performance of the library in Arlington. And I'm really quite proud of this ranking that we have. So active card holders are defined as patrons who have used their library card in the last five years. And as you can see, Arlington is really quite competitive with the neighboring communities within the Minuteman Library Network. We're number three and we're really proud of that. So a lot of people in library, a lot of people in Arlington have library cards and are using them. This is a view of some census block data. So we have library active card holders by block group in this view. And this is really just for fun because this is data that we weren't always able to display in this way. So I thought that you would enjoy seeing the spread of library card use in Arlington and where it's concentrated. I also want to give you a quick overview of our circulation statistics for not only this fiscal year to date, but also for the last few years. So we've been doing some good business at the library despite the fact that the pandemic really knocked us out for a little while. We did our best to find ways to get patrons, the materials that they were craving. And we're happy to say that this coming year, this fiscal year that we're in now is shaping up to be a real record-breaking year for us. What you see is total circulation of materials and then broken down by physical library materials and e-content. And e-content is defined as downloadable e-books, audio books and any kind of media that you can consume that way. We have magazines streaming content now. So between the physical material circulation and the e-content that's become popular we're really on track for a record-breaking year and excited about that. Moving on to the strategic plan process itself. We hired a firm called Library Strategies. They're a national firm and they led us through a six-month process over the summer to help us come up with some new goals and strategies for the next five years of library services. So they started by looking at the town master plan at all of the library statistics that we were able to gather for them through the Mass Board of Library Commissioners and just our own data here in town, Minuteman Library Network data. They asked us to put together a steering committee. So we put together a committee consisting of representatives from schools, from the trustee board, from arts and culture groups and various other stakeholder groups. They then led us through figuring out how to present a survey to the community and we have that survey translated into a few different languages. We then distributed it. We got over 800 responses which was a great response for an online survey at a time when people were already becoming tired of online surveys. We also had a few focus groups and some interviews, notably with the select board chair, the superintendent of the schools and the deputy town manager. I also had the pleasure of giving Mr. Decorsia tour of Robinson Fox and that was a lot of fun. So through this robust process of community data gathering, we came up with three top goals for the library. The first being to make sure that our programs and services are, sorry, our programs and collections are evolving to meet the needs of the town. So we heard from people who'd like to see us expand program options, especially for teens and tweens and people who see the potential for us to expand and leverage our partnerships. And one type of program that we've created already as a response to that recognized opportunity is our social worker hours with the housing corporation of Arlington. So we're really excited about that because that came about as a result of the library's involvement in the Arlington Human Services Network. And those hours are in, they were in use up until we had to stop doing in-person programs, which we hope to resume very soon, but very excited about the opportunities that are presented by the many boards, commissions, volunteers in town. We have so many rich resources that the library can really do better at partnering with. Secondly, and these are just highlights of the strategies. I did share the full strategic plan and the community survey summary with you and the materials and they're also gonna be available on the library website. So our second goal, increased library access and use by all community members and a couple of the ways that we are looking to do that. We want to partner with Arlington Public Schools. There are so many great school librarians out there now and we are looking for ways to do better outreach to get library cards into the hands of more school children. And we also really wanna regularly always be looking at ways to increase hours if we can, resources permitting. And goal number three has to do with our facilities. So we wanna be always looking to improve our facilities and while a major building project may not be in the cards as far as improvements at Robbins, over the next five years, we wanna do some incremental improvements that really just make sense for the needs that we're seeing. One of those needs is the teen space is a little bit too small. So we're looking at some different spaces that we're hoping to turn into a larger teen space. And these are projects that we'll be looking for support from Capital Planning, from the Arlington Libraries Foundation, which is of course our main fundraising organization for the library. And so I'm hopeful that with the support from the town and from our private sources and state aid, we'll be able to achieve some of these incremental physical upgrades at the libraries. And lastly, I just wanna call out our new website. So we launched last week and it's a visually appealing website that also has a lot of great information about our services that was a little bit buried on the previous website. So we're happy about this new presentation of material. And you can also find the new strategic plan under the about section. So that kind of concludes my formal presentation, but I'd be happy to answer any questions that you have about the process or library in general. Certainly. Now, thank you for the presentation and thank you for the tour and for putting up with me on my trip down memory lane as I was going through the building, but I really appreciate that. And I did visit the new website and it's great it actually inspired me to update my library card, which I did over the past week. So with that, I will turn to the board for any questions or comments starting with Mr. Helmuth. Thank you. It's great to meet you. This past summer when we coincided on history tour it's all a little bit of the library and this is great, I appreciate the work. You know, the Arlington library is a beautiful building and that's where people first encounter it in the main library, but it's clear from this presentation that it is a real center of our community. And I think that your work really appreciate the hard work that you do to listen to the community for programming needs, for materials so that it's really the nexus of a lot of our community life. So thank you for that. I just had one quick question and that's just on the circulation trends. I noticed that in the last couple of years the physical materials circulation went down and digital went up. And I'm gonna assume a lot of that had to do with COVID related closures and reductions. But do you think that that is an overall trend irrespective of the pandemic and that we would see changes in that or not, do you have any way of knowing? The pandemic gave a huge boost to our online, you know, our downloadable media. There's no question about that. People signed up for more library cards just using the online library card signup system and so registration's increased over the last couple of years for one thing. We are seeing the e-content use level off a little bit but the physical materials use is actually still rising in ways that we didn't necessarily expect. And we're still looking to understand where that use is and how we can encourage more of it. One of the ways that we increased use of the library and of the library materials during COVID was through our grab bags program, which was a way for us to get bulk materials out to patrons, a lot of busy parents, a lot of busy people took advantage of that program. And so we're gonna continue offering that indefinitely. So that was one way that we got physical materials out the door and people are still using taking advantage of that and taking advantage of our resources in general. So it's great, we wanna keep it going. So yeah, appreciate the question. Yeah, I'm glad I asked it. And that is another example of creativity and responsiveness to the community. So that's terrific. And Mr. Chair, would it be a motion to receive the appropriate or necessary? Yes. Right, happily move for seat. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Hiller. Mrs. Mahan. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Definitely will second this. I'd be interested, perhaps offline hearing some of the chairs are strolled down memory lane when it comes to the library. I'll share a quick one of mine, one of my first jobs was as a page in the library. And this is back in the days of no Google, no cell phones, all Dewey decimal system and the special lock cabinet for certain books. Like now are very, very tame mostly historical books. First log has always been the library and I haven't had a chance to really dive into the new webpage website. So I'd like to ask Ms. Nicolay, I saw real quick as an icon for events and I'm just wondering when people click on that, is it like how the town has it in terms of you see a calendar, you click on a day, is it something different than that? Like, does it go in some sort of an order? And is it all events listed or is there split between children, teens, teens, adults, et cetera? Thank you. Yeah, thanks. Thank you, Mrs. Mohan. So there are a couple of different ways to view events. You can look at a calendar view that shows you all of the events that we're offering under the general events search. There's also, you can look at just children's events, just teen events, just adult events. So there are a number of ways to make the cattle or the events calendar show up to you based on your needs. And so that was one major improvement to our calendar. And thank you for asking about it. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mrs. Mohan. Mr. Hurd. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you, Director Nicolay for the presentation and all your work. I certainly, I mean, as a lifelong resident of Arlington, I know Arlington Treasures Libraries. And my memories, Mrs. Mohan, were at the Fox Library. We used to go as kids and read a book and then you get to write your name and put it up on the wall. And there was always a contest to see how many, who had the most cards on the wall and who could read the most books. And then we go to the Robbins Library in middle school and study. So I think it was more of a social event, but we just, amazing things happen in Arlington Libraries and it's such a resource that Arlington residents have such great library system in two libraries, which I'm sure most localities, most municipalities don't have. So the options that we have for libraries and the services that Arlington provides through the library services is really just amazing. So appreciate the presentation and thank you. Thank you, Mr. Hurd. Oh, I'm sorry. Mr. Diggins. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have some early experiences and some early enjoyable experiences libraries, but I'm not going to relate them now because I have some questions I want to ask. So I noticed that chart, that Arlington is number three, but when you factor in the size of our population, it seems to me like we would be number one. I mean, we have a, like Cambridge had like 32,000, it's like 90,000 people. We had what, like 20,000 or something. And do you know how we factor in when you, how we rank when you factor in the population? We're still, I mean, even with the population factored in, we have the third highest number of active card holders in the network. So we're just behind Cambridge and Newton, but it's that much more impressive for that reason. So what I was looking at the graph, it shows the total number of card holders. Yes. So that's, but that doesn't tell us what the population size is though, right? No, no, it's, you're right. So it just shows the active card holders per municipality. Right, right. So then what I'm saying, if you like take that and divide it by the population, it seems to me like we would be number one. Yeah. We have a, we have a good rate, but we're not, yeah. All right, I was just impressed with me. So I was trying to like, I didn't go through and look at me and the population, me for the various municipalities within when I saw our numbers are compared to Cambridge, which is so much larger than us in population. I was kind of impressed. So I was just wondering if you had a sense of that. So that's okay. So in goal number one, you said expand non-traditional collection offerings. Can you give me an example or two of what a non-traditional collection is? Oh yeah, sure. So our library of things would be an example of a non-traditional collection. So anything in the library that you wouldn't expect on the shelves, for example, a hotspot that you can check out and use at home to save you from having to rely on your spotty Wi-Fi or a scanner that you can check out and use different devices that you can check out that fall into various categories, kitchen gadgets, technology, et cetera. So anything that's in that category would be a non-traditional. Gotcha, hotspots are good. Definitely good. So excellent, glad to hear that. And I also see that you mentioned one of the goals was to take a leadership role in the community to offer services and resources that spark conversations and critical thinking around issues facing Arlington. That's wonderful. And I'd like you to consider the new civic engagement group of Envision Arlington as a partner in that process because anytime I have a chance to promote that group, I do. And your second goal, so it says you want to regularly evaluate where possible, expand hours of operation. And so I was just at the website and I'm impressed by it too. And you said with a special attention to weekends and Thursdays, what's the deal with Thursdays? I mean, I noticed you open a little later on Thursdays but why Thursdays, right? We're closed on Thursday mornings at Robbins. So we are open at Fox on Thursday morning. So there's a library alternative but the Robbins library is closed, famously closed on Thursday mornings because of budget cuts from a long time ago. But I'd be happy to fill you in more on that offline. But yeah, Thursday mornings are a focus for that reason. And then we of course are always bananas at the library. So we want to always look at how we can ramp up weekend hours if possible. Gotcha. And look, I really appreciate the survey that you did and providing us all the information on the survey. And I noticed that one of the big concerns or issues that respondents had were the hours operation. I think that related to children's hours. Was that the focus of the concern about the limitation? Yeah, so the children's department closes at six on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesdays. And so that would be another way, looking at children's hours would be another way to improve the hours. But of course, take staff to increase hours. So that's one factor that we always have to consider in relationship to that. Right, right. Well, and it'll be good to get a sense of what it would cost being to do that, because as we all feel and believe, I mean, our budget reflects our values. So we'll see if we can reflect that in the library. And the last question I have, and this kind of relates to what you said about the hotspots as being one of those non-traditional collections. I know in the survey that it was an online survey. So it's probably hard to get from an online survey any issues that people might have with online access. But do you have a sense as to whether people in town have problems with online access? Like, do you have a sense that maybe people aren't watching these meetings or participating in other town meetings that are all Zoom based now because they don't have online access? Well, based on the use of our hotspots, we have 20, we have actually 22, and they're almost always out. So based on that use alone, I would say that there's a need. I'm not sure exactly where that need is distributed. And we don't, of course, ask people why they're checking things out, but that's an indicator right there. All right, good enough. Well, thank you very much. Great work. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Diggins. And yeah, just a brief comment, a couple brief comments. As you said, I had participated with the library strategies consultant and I had a great conversation with them and impressed with their slides that you presented where they actually used pictures of the Robbins Library and the Fox Library as opposed to just stock photos, which sometimes you see in these types of slides. So that was very helpful. One thing I did, and I noticed this when I went to the library over the weekend, is you have been receiving a lot of feedback on parking or lack of parking and maybe a desire to have an area for 15 minute parking. Right now, just to clarify, there is no short-term parking next to the Robbins Library. Everybody needs to use a meter. There's, so the meter, the individual meters right in front of the front steps of the library, you can press the button for 15 minutes and the sideline, you can get the pay and display for 25 cents if all you need is 15 minutes, but that's it, those are the options. Yeah, I wonder in the back if there isn't a way, maybe we can talk to the town manager about this too. It may be one or two spaces, just for the real short-term type drop-off where you actually have to go to the machine as opposed to going to the meter. The other thing I found interesting was just the, what you'd like to do with the schools to try to get more students to get library cards and hopefully there can be further coordination on that effort going forward. So thank you for the presentation and the great work that you're doing as library director and we really appreciate the presentation this evening and we'll look forward to working with you through the strategic plan and other initiatives. Thank you so much. Sure. So on a motion to receive by Mr. Helmuth, seconded by Mrs. Mohan, Attorney Hahn. Mr. Hurd. Yes. Mr. Diggins. Yes. Mr. Helmuth. Yes. Mrs. Mohan. Yes. Mr. Diggins. Yes. It's an end with both. Thank you, Mr. Nicolai. Have a good evening. You as well. Items five and six are together. This is our public hearing, our 730 public hearing at 758 this evening. So thank you for people who are coming in on CDBG for your patience. Item five is the CDBG performance update for program year 2021-22 Mallory Sullivan Community Development Block Grant Administrator. And we also have the requests for fiscal 23 funding, which will follow that presentation. Also Mallory Sullivan Community Development Block Grant Administrator. And I believe we may have a number of the applicants with us this evening as well. Good evening, Ms. Sullivan. Good evening. Thank you very much for having this public hearing tonight. I'm Mallory Sullivan, Community Development Block Grant Administrator in the Department of Planning and Community Development. So yes, we have the two agenda items. I'll start with the mid-year report on the current CDBG program year and then move to the summary of applications for our next program year. And there are indeed a number of subrecipient representatives here tonight. So we look forward to hearing from them. So I'll begin with our mid-year report. This is the town's 47th year as a CDBG grantee through the Department of Housing and Urban Development. As you know, CDBG funds a wide range of uses that benefit all Arlington residents and primarily or especially households with low and moderate incomes. We are currently in the second year of our five-year consolidated plan period. And this year over $1.2 million has been allocated to a variety of projects including affordable housing, public services, public facilities and parks, economic development and planning administration. So with our affordable housing projects this year, there were two housing activities funded to two subrecipients. The Housing Corporation of Arlington is currently researching opportunities to utilize its pre-development surveys and testing grant. It is also still carrying out some capital improvements renovations to its housing portfolio using its prior year grant. Caritas Communities is one of our new subrecipients this year and they are finalizing environmental reviews for two properties that will also have pretty extensive capital improvement renovations happening. With our public service activities, so as usual, most of our subrecipients fall into the public service agency provider category and all of them are on track to accomplish their goals by the program year's end. I should have mentioned that the materials outline all of the numbers associated with all of these different activities and their different objectives that were set forth and where we are at this mid-year point. But at any rate, cumulatively these public service agencies had supported 848 residents. That's from July through the end of December and that actually represents 66% of the goal. So they're collectively well ahead of their target. In particular, the Arlington Boys and Girls Club and Fidelity House have either met or exceeded their goal in terms of number of participants to serve for the entire program year. And I'd just like to note that organizations have really adapted to the conditions of the time in order over the last year, over the last two years to make sure that these services are being provided safely. And that's especially notable since many of these organizations are serving youth or seniors. So this year there were a few economic development activities that were originally planned, however with the availability of the American Rescue Plan Act funding, the CDBG funded activities have been postponed. The ARPA funded activities or the ARPA funding is open to a wider range of organizations and businesses. So it made sense to utilize those funds first but the CDBG funded economic development activities will likely begin in early fiscal year 2023. In our public facilities and improvements category, there are some projects that have faced delayed timelines with respect to the pandemic and the subsequent kind of upheaval in the construction industry. So that's impacted costs, schedules, and necessitated some additional planning on the part of our cyber recipients. Nonetheless, all of these projects are moving forward. DPW reported constructing 61 ADA accessible programs this year and the Whittemore Park project, Food Links Generator Project, Arlington needs to market fit out and the recreation departments, departments or playground pre-development work are all also underway. Our final category is planning and administration and the Department of Planning and Community Development has supported and participated in a number of these different projects and activities. Recently released the updated draft, or the draft housing plan, which will be finalized this spring and the annual town survey will also soon launch. So these are all of our typical entitlement grant activities. I also wanted to take a moment just to share a brief update on our CDBG CD activities. Those were the additional funds that were allotted through the CARES Act in two allotments in 2020 and 2021, specifically to prevent, prepare for and respond to the coronavirus pandemic. We received cumulatively a grant of $980,000 and most of those funds have been utilized at this point. So cyber recipients were really able to take those funds and apply them to projects that impacted the community in a particular time of need. There are just two projects using those CARES Act funds that are still underway. One is the Emergency Tenant Assistance Program, which is actually just about completed because funds have been or are nearly exhausted. And then the Arlington Public Schools Tutoring Program, which will conclude at the end of the year. So those are all of my mid-year updates on our current program here. Happy to take any questions or otherwise turn to our appropriate 48. Yeah. What we're thinking of doing is maybe ask the board if they have any questions on the mid-year progress report and then we'll continue on to the request for the upcoming year. And I will start with Mrs. Mahan. Sorry about that. I'm using laptop and phone. No, I don't have any questions. I just wanna say two things. When I first got on the board, it took 15 plus years for exactly what is happening tonight. So I wanna thank Ms. Sullivan and Ms. Raid and everybody in planning. Sort of getting the mid-year report, see where we're at, what benchmarks we're hitting, where perhaps falling behind. And I also wanna say is Mr. Herd and I serve on this committee on behalf of the select board. When I first came on and was on CDBG subcommittee, it was just one time every year, CDBG funding in, out, but as Ms. Sullivan has no highlighted, we had to, I believe two federal cares act. We had the COVID-19, which is a totally separate thing, but that also came under planning that residents of the town donated to regular CDBG as well as opera funding. So I know we're getting a lot of bang for a buck for the very small amount of original CDBG money that go towards the planning department, which still doesn't cover it all. But I do wanna thank Ms. Sullivan. I know if you're just listening to all these different acronyms and letters at home, it just seems like a big hodgepodge. But if you think of what happens, everybody where right now Ms. Sullivan is balancing at least four, not counting COVID-19. So my gratitude for that. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mrs. Mohan. And now turn to Mr. Herd, our other representative on the CDBG committee. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Sullivan for the presentation. Again, and we serve on the committee and we see the, and we vote on these distributions, but it is good to get this report where we can see the money in action and get progress as to where the money's going and the differences it's making. So I do really appreciate that in the work that everybody does on the CDBG committee, I think we might have undersold the time commitment to some of the applicants in the past couple of years, but I think that will level off a little bit in the years to come, but we do appreciate everyone's efforts. And this is, you know, one of the most important things that we do is hand out money that the federal government gives us. So this is the fun part of the jobs. So I appreciate the update and look forward to the request. Thank you, Mr. Herd. Mr. Diggins. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I just want to report. So I'm just a few questions, you know, so with respect to the scholarships, I take it that those are year-inloaded, back-inloaded. That's why we see zero at this point of the 50. Yes. So some of, depending upon how the programs operate, some of them are for summer scholarships. So they would come later on or just at different points during the year. Great. Thank you. So the curbs, 61 versus 54 that you're aiming for, I mean, this is mid-year. So 61 is going to be like the final number or are we going to have even more? To be determined. Interesting. So I mean, in an environment where you used to hearing like things are costing more, I mean, and there are supply chain issues, these are overperforming, how are we managing to overperform? Like that's 20% overperformance. It was good. I'm just kind of curious as to how that's happening. So there are some grantees, including Department of Public Works that have a combination of some prior year funds available as well as current year. So I know there are a combination of two grant years there so that I expect us contributing to the ability to perform at that level. Gotcha. I understand. And that kind of leads into my next question. So with respect to the economic development, you say that we can put those monies into fiscal year 23. I didn't, I mean, look, I'm not on the, I mean, I'm not the board representative for the CDB committee or whatever it's called. So we can put off spending monies for a fiscal year or what's the limit to which we can put off on spending money? So HUD does Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provides this money does set timeliness tests. So our goal is to use our entire grant within a year. There is flexibility for a few year period. If we run too far into that, HUD will come knocking and let us know that we need to be spending that money. Gotcha. And finally, so for the CDBG-CV activities, so that's what we're using the 900,000 that we got. I mean, that's where that money's coming from. Yes. So that was an additional allocation on top of our annual grants and it could only be used for restricted activities that were related to the pandemic. Gotcha. So then the anticipated numbers that I see, what was that anticipation based on? Because being the over performance on versus the actual is just so high. I mean, it's like, I mean, so where does the anticipated numbers come from? So those are all set forth. Even with the CARES Act funding, the COVID-19 funding applicants submitted an application with their best estimates. Of course, there is quite a bit of variance between what was anticipated versus what was expected. And I think some of that was just because at that time, the applicants had no idea of the real need and they were really able to leverage that funding to maximize impact. But those, a lot of them, they're best guess attempts. So some of them may have been unintentionally under anticipated. I mean, it's just phenomenal how much they were performed and they over perform with the money that they were given. That's amazing. That's truly amazing. Because I mean, in the case of FoodLake, I mean, it's like a fact of nine almost, you know, it's just, wow, well, I'm impressed. I'm very impressed. Great job. Thank you. Incredible work. Yeah, yeah. All right. Thank you, Mr. Diggins. I'm Mr. Helmuth. Thank you. I'm also impressed and grateful and I have no further questions. Thank you, Mr. Helmuth. And yeah, thank you for the mid-year progress report. I just one brief comment. I was a little concerned when I saw that there was zero individuals who had received athletic scholarships from Alincorne High School, but I understand that that may be some administrative issues in terms of reporting that because in talking to the athletic director, John Bowler, I do think they're accessing those and we probably should be receiving some reports shortly on that. Yes, thank you. Sometimes there are reporting delays so that could also be affecting our numbers. Sure. Okay, so why don't we move to item six? Do you want to introduce what the requests are and then we'll hear from the applicants or I believe you provided us with the request by category. I don't know if you want to briefly summarize that and then we'll open it up to the applicants to tell us a little bit about what they're requesting. Sure. So if it would be all right, I'd like to just share my screen to show that one document. Sure. I think you should be able to see this. This is our overview of our grant requests for program year 48, which is beginning in July. It aligns with our fiscal year. So each year in recent years, the town has received a grant of about 1.1 million and that's what we are expecting just based on past years to receive for program year 48 FY23. This year we received 19 applications that's a combination of new applicants and new returning and new applicants and returning and new projects. So you'll see the new projects denoted with the double asterisk there. So many of our applicants, as I noted, are here tonight. So in the interest of time, I'll just point those out to everybody and then I would love to hear from our sub-recipients. So the Arlington Housing Authority requested funds for a roof replacement at the house or building. That's a new activity. Food link here, this is someone of a new activity since they have received funding for their hub for several years now, but this would be solar panel installation at their hub facility to increase their resiliency and sustainability. Several town departments, also in the public facilities category have requested funding to improve ADA accessibility at the Robbins Memorial Flagstaff Plaza just to the right of town hall. And then in public services, there were two new applications. The Arlington Boys and Girls Club is requesting funds for a swim safety program. And then the Arlington Public Schools is also requesting funding for a family welcoming information center. So in total, our applications, our requests for funding are about our amount of our grant, 1.1 million. There are different caps that the grant is subject to in our public service category in planning and administration. So our next steps from here are to convene the CDBG subcommittee in February and March in order to review these applications and to develop a budget recommendation. So I'm going to stop sharing unless there's a need to keep this up, but that's all that I've got today. So thank you very much for your time. Great, thank you Ms. Sullivan for the thorough presentation. And consistent with prior years, what we've done is again, we've had the applicants come in, tell us a little bit about the programming. The CDBG subcommittee will then go through the process as Ms. Sullivan had described in terms of putting together a budget and recommendations for various programs. But tonight is the opportunity for us to hear from the applicants to see what they're proposing and how they want to use the fund. So Mr. Chapterling, if you want to allow any of the applicants, we can just go down the line in terms of them presenting to us a brief description of their requests. Mr. Chair, if I could ask the applicants to use the raise hand feature that would allow me to go one by one, if that's okay with you. Sure. So the first hand raised is Jack Nagel from the Housing Authority. Good evening Mr. Nagel. Good evening. First, I'd like to take this opportunity to offer my sincerest condolences to the family of the resident that passed away this past Saturday at Chestnut Manor. I'd also like to extend our thoughts and prayers to the resident that's still in the hospital. I'd also like to take this moment to thank Chief Kelly in the Allington Fire Department as well as the other local fire departments that responded to the scene and provided immediate support. I'd also like to thank the other agencies that provided immediate support, including they're not limited to the Allington Police Department, Armstrong Ambulance, Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, American Red Cross, Town of Allington, DPW, and Allington Council on Aging. I'd also like to thank the members of the Task Force that are assisting in the relocation and rehousing of our residents that have been displaced. Some of those members include some of the homeless coalition, Miniman Senior Services, and the Town of Allington Health and Human Services and its members. In regards to our application for CDBG, the Houser Building is one of the Allington Housing Authority's senior low-income public housing development, and it is located at 37 Drake Road in Allington. The replacement of this roof will ensure the preservation of this important affordable housing site. The Houser Building is the Allington Housing Authority's single largest building. It provides 144 single bedroom units for low-income seniors and individuals under the age of 60 with a disability. The Allington Housing Authority is requesting $250,000 in funding for the Houser Building Roof Replacement Project. The roof was installed in 1986 with an estimated lifespan of 25 years. The replacement of this roof will address the infiltration of water into the building and resulting damage done to common areas and resident units as a result of roof-related failures. The installation of a white roof will increase energy efficiency and decrease the AHA's coven footprint. The replacement of the roof of the Houser Building will be consolidated plan goal number one by preserving this important source of affordable housing and making the building more energy efficient. Delays in roof repair would otherwise lead to additional damages to resident units and potentially result in units being brought offline, which would reduce the availability of affordable housing for Allington residents. By updating the roof now, the Allington Housing Authority will meet its goal of providing safe, clean and affordable housing. Utilizing available energy efficiency options will help the Allington Housing Authority reduce its coven footprint while also resulting in cost savings for the authority. The project will be planned, designed and procured and completed in accordance with all Massachusetts procurement laws. And because of the cost of the project, the Department of Housing and Community Development will assign us project managers, architects, engineers and the additional oversight to ensure the project is done efficiently and in accordance with all state laws. Thank you very much, Mr. Nagel. And also congratulations on your appointment as Executive Director Kay. Here is Christine Shaw from the Council on Aging. Good evening, Ms. Shaw. Good evening, everybody. Thank you so much for having us and me representing the Council on Aging tonight for the select board meeting. And I also can't start without thanking the Allington community for all the support that it's given to the residents of Chestnut Manor. It's been really inspiring once again to see the community. So many people reaching out, asking how they can help, how they can support and being so generous. So the folks that are displaced right now, that live there are really gonna be supported thanks to the great teams that we have in place in town. So very proud to work here. The Council on Aging is highly involved with CDBG funds every year. As you can see, once again, we have applied for three different grants through CDBG. We're also one of the lucky recipients of the special COVID-19 funding where we established our technology loan library and are still really, really growing that program. There was discussion earlier in the meeting about the need for hotspots. We're finding that is truer than ever for older adults. We're finding that hotspots are really needed more than Chromebooks or laptops or devices, which I think is pretty interesting. And that's really thanks to the CDBG fund that we were able to establish that library. The three programs that we have applied for once again, this year is our adult day health scholarship program, our transportation program and our volunteer coordinator position. To start our adult day health program has really revamped since the COVID pandemic. We have a long history of partnering with Cooperative Elder Services, which is an adult day health program right in Arlington on Broadway. During COVID-19, as many of you know, that was one of the industries that was closed but has since reopened and Cooperative Elder Services has done a fantastic job of keeping its participants safe and really revamping their programs in light of the new situation that we're living in with the pandemic. This year, our team re-engaged with Cooperative Elder Services in new ways. We retoured their buildings, our social workers met with them again to find out about updated programs and services they offer. We also had them recently on our ACMI show to help promote the fact that we have an adult day health program right here in Arlington. So right now more than ever because of the isolation due to COVID, so many older adults need adult day health services and so many caregivers really need a little bit of a respite break for maybe anywhere between one and five days a week that people can attend their programs. I did ask for an increase in the amount this year in the hopes that we could make a more impactful scholarship for the families of Arlington that would attend the program. In the past, we've been able to fund about four days total which is a great way for people to try out the programs but we found it really doesn't give a long financial, a way to really alleviate the financial costs. So this year after speaking with Cooperative Elder Services, I agreed to ask for a little bit more in the hopes that we can grow the scholarship. Moving on, our transportation program is one of the biggest programs we have at the Council on Aging. We're back 100% to pre-COVID levels of ride requests, especially with medical ride requests. Due to a grant that we got from Leahy last year, we were able to offer all medical rides free of charge for 2021. And we found that really helped people get to the medical appointments that they had put off or weren't able to go to during the pandemic. Due to that, we've gotten a lot of new people familiar with our programs, familiar with our transportation programs that are calling our transportation coordinator for all of their needs, which is great. In addition to the partnership we've had for years with Arlington Belmont Taxi, we've expanded to once again, partner with Uber. We have a central system that we can help people request ride shares without having their own smartphone. We also are partnering with other local businesses to help with chair car rides or medical escort rides if our volunteers aren't available. And we hired a fifth van driver this past year as well, which is great because we definitely have the need to transport people more than ever. And with the reopening, and we're very excited for the reopening of the Arlington Community Center in the next hopefully month or so, we're anticipating all of the new programs that are gonna be at the center will drive up the people needing transportation to get there. And we're gonna be pushing that a lot considering the parking situation near 27 Maple Street. So we're lucky that we have the vans and we just got a grant from MassDOT to replace our oldest van. We have the van drivers and we have a great, some great new partnerships to help our transportation program really grow and meet the need in town. And finally, our volunteer coordinator position. This position manages over 200 volunteers and the pandemic, if anything really showed the need for volunteers that help the older adults in Arlington. Many of the volunteer roles kind of changed a little bit but moved towards helping deliver food, helping deliver Chromebooks or hotspots to people, helping talk to people on the phone to teach them how to use their Chromebooks or hotspots. But I think the most memorable volunteer role in 2021 were the volunteers who helped get vaccine appointments for older adults that didn't have access to the internet themselves. We all remember this time last year, everybody was trying to get a vaccine appointment. The only way you could book a vaccine appointment at this time last year was on the internet. There was later a 1-800 number that was set up but in the meantime, our volunteers, honestly they just like draft, took calls all day long and called people back and refreshed the CVS website 900 times until they could get an appointment and then helped arrange free transportation for the person there. So COVID definitely put into light a lot of volunteer positions that we never thought we would have but we're very thankful to the coordinator who puts all of those positions together in addition to everything that our volunteers still do our ongoing programs that keeps the council on aging, running every year. And again, we're looking to unveil, you'll probably see me hopefully at a select board meeting back soon to unveil our age friendly action plan and really moving Arlington through this action plan and the opening of the Arlington Community Center I think will make all of these needs even more important. So I'm very, very grateful for the support of CDVG through the years. I'm looking forward to continuing it in the future. Thank you very much, Ms. Sherrod and thank you for the work you're doing at the council on aging. Thank you, Christine. The next speaker is Sarah Fendrick. Good evening, Ms. Fendrick. Hello, hi. Thank you so much. I wanna just begin by saying thank you, really thank you on behalf of Caritas and our residents for being so generous this past year. It was our first year as a CDVG recipient and we are just overwhelmed with your generosity. And so thank you. We will do our very best to use the funds as best we can and as efficiently as we can despite all of the setbacks of course with the pandemic this past year. So Caritas communities has two residences in Arlington, 22 Festington Road and 12 Russell Terrace. And we have approximately 35 residents of low income residents in Arlington that we house. Our individuals are sort of very diverse in terms of a background, age, race and some of them are disabled, some are veterans. I think about 70% come from homelessness. So these are individuals who are really needy and really grateful for being able to live in a community like Arlington. So thank you. Our last year's grant enabled us to start chipping away at some of these residents at both of these residences by making improvements to them that we could not make otherwise because we have very, very low reserves. We run on a very lean budget as you can imagine. So we are grateful to be able to make improvements to the bathrooms, kitchens, security, accessibility. In 22 Festington, and we began this work also at 12 Russell Terrace. This year we are applying to continue the work at 12 Russell Terrace. We have bathrooms that are dilapidated inaccessible to some of our residents that have broken, you know, broken showers and so forth that really need repair. So we are asking to have monies to repair and to rehabilitate seven bathrooms at 12 Russell Terrace and also the communal kitchen. The communal kitchen is also in pretty bad shape. It wasn't really used very much the past, you know, year and a half during the pandemic. As you can imagine, it's been very stressful for our residents to keep themselves fed well when they didn't have access to a communal kitchen because of health and safety reasons. So we would like to renovate this kitchen and bring it back to full functioning so that our residents as the pandemic eases can start to cook again, communal meals, healthy meals. And that is pretty much what we would like to do this coming year. So thank you. Do you have any questions? Oh, I'm on the grants manager at Caritas Communities. So I could answer all the operations questions but I can answer some if you have any. Thank you very much for your presentation. Usually what we do is we allow the applicants to make the presentation tonight and then they'll be further follow up by the CDBG subcommittee. But we appreciate you hearing from you and the good work that you're doing. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Stay well. You as well. Next speaker is Carla Brussisi. Good evening, Brussisi. Hi, good evening. First off, I wanted to thank the town of Arlington and all members here in the community as well with all the support for the Arlington Public Schools as well as for all of our students. It's been a trying two years and I'm hearing a pattern as all these other panelists are coming in to discuss as well. So good evening and thank you again all Arlington Select Board members. My name is Carla Brussisi. I'm the director of the English Learner Education Program in the Arlington Public Schools. And our application for, this is the first time we're asking for a grant through the CBGD for a, we don't currently have a family welcoming information center. So what we're asking for hopefully proposing and potentially receiving monies, the Arlington Public Schools plans to establish a new family welcome and information center in the upcoming school year. The goal is to advance educational access and increase equity by improving access to information, especially for families who would benefit from a personal connection. The center will provide a single centralized district location for newcomer and marginalized families to easily access school and community information. They will receive assistance with the student registration process, navigating technology platforms, locating community resources. The center will provide ongoing access to resources and programs and establish stronger family connections with currently marginalized families. I was thinking as the librarian, the director was discussing even connecting the resources within the Arlington community for libraries. There's a slew of things that that personal touch is needed for our families. And we've seen that a lot of things that have done online, a lot of our English language learner families, some of our low income families need to have that personal touch. So that is the request that we're trying to get going into the Arlington Public Schools. I thank you for your time. And I did hear the chairman say that if there's other questions the CBGD group will contact us. So thank you again for your time. Thank you for letting us know about the application and for the work that you're doing. Thank you. The next speaker is Kevin Flood. Good evening, Mr. Flood. Sorry for the little delay right there. I was just trying to figure this out. Should know it by now, I would think, right? I'll do whatever I can. Every platform seems to be a little different. Well, first off, just wanna thank you for allowing me to be here and just speak on behalf of the club and what goes on there. But first off, I wanna just send my appreciation of all of you, the town of Arlington for the support of the club and the community as well. But the club over the past two years, it's been a challenging time for all. And it's great to see the community rally around one another to accomplish many common goals. So I really appreciate everything you guys of this committee, the town itself is done for the club to help us get us through a difficult time. And also appreciative of the funds that we received this past year and past years through the CDBG and what it's allowed us to do. Just real quick with this past year, we had our scholarship program funded through the CDBG and we're able to provide 51 children with opportunities to participate in programs at the club. And those 51 children come from 35 families. So we're able to meet our goal and we expect to go beyond that as we haven't used all of the awarded CDBG funds but we fully anticipate to do so in the next few months. So again, thank you for that. And also this past year, we had our jobs program which we were able to employ. Currently we have 14 enrolled as part of our jobs program and they're working in our drop-in club kids program, helping in our games room, our front desk as well as our after-school program and gaining valuable on-the-job experience and really becoming an asset for our kids at the club. So those two programs, they've been taking place this past year and in the year ahead, we are requesting funds for two programs, one of which will remain the scholarship program which in past year, we've used the funds that we've received during the summer months but over these last two years, our enrollment just hasn't been what it's been for obvious reasons but we fully anticipate to be back pretty much close to normal this summer. However we define that these days but we do anticipate running pretty much all the summer programs that we've run in the past which is a good thing and we predict there'll be a greater need for support, for families this summer for our full day programs, sports clinic swim lessons, our boating program which is unique in this town. So again, any support we can get for our scholarships will be greatly appreciated and then new this year, we're gonna implement a swim safety program and this program is gonna be led by Aquatics Director Kim Erkart who many of you in the audience may know is an absolute asset to our organization. She knows our pool inside and out and she's a certified Red Cross instructor certified to teach, lifeguard training, swim lessons, you name it, she's our swim girl at the club and she's got a dynamite staff of certified Red Cross instructors who are ready to take this program on and provide what we hope will be 100 participants is our goal but we feel confident we could go beyond that because there is a great need for people to understand safety when being around anybody of water. So we'll be focusing on general water safety, home pool safety, sun safety, the importance of knowing how to treat your body when you're in the sun, whether you're in the water or outside of the water, it's still important to understand that the sun is, it could be a very dangerous thing to be around if we don't prepare ourselves for it. The, we plan on running the swim safety program during our school vacations, we'll run them during the summer, our spring, winter, we'll have select weekends during the year where we'll reach out to, we'll use certain methods of getting the word out that we'll be offering this program. We look to work with local schools, AYCC, with Mr. Nagel at the Allenton Housing Authority to identify individuals and families who will benefit from this program. And just a quick note in 2018, there were 99 drownings in Massachusetts, 2019, 103, 2020, 125. And last summer on pace to go above that 125, I don't have that true number in hand, but I know it was around 50 as of July of last summer. So, but I mean, as we can see there's a need. And I think Allenton is a unique town where it has several bodies of water. You have the Mystic Lakes, the Mystic River, we're situated on Spide Pond, you have the Allenton Reservoir. You do have neighborhoods in the town who have residents with pools which invites all sorts of activity and the need to know the importance of swim safety and how important it is to be aware of your surroundings. And we have the only indoor recreational swimming pool in town, so we believe that sets us up to do something really special with this program and do something special for this community and building awareness. We feel that again, this is something that we can build on to perhaps run year after year. I mean, currently right now we're offering classes to just about 500 kids swimming right now and that's just in this session alone. So, we know there's a wide audience of families who have children. And it's not just the children either as we know. There's adults who are nervous around water and don't feel truly safe around water and they have children or friends that are going into the water. And we wanna be able to lend our expertise and what we know to those families and children who could use that extra support. So, those are the two programs that they'll be working on and I must say it's been great working with Mallory and a great addition there. She's been a pleasure to work with and guiding us through the CDBG process. And I think it'd be hard-pressed for me to not have this platform before this committee in the town of Allenton to not mention those at the health department, Christine Margino, Natasha Walden, Jessica Kerr and that Kerbo in all the help that they've provided us at the club over the past two years to help us feel as confident as we feel right now in what we're doing. So, just thank you all for your time. I really appreciate it. And if you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them. Thank you very much, Mr. Flood. I'm sure that the CDBG, I'm having a little trouble with that tonight. Subcommittee will get back to you with any questions but we appreciate the work that you're doing at the Allenton Boys and Girls Club and appreciate the partnership that we've had for this program over the years. Thank you very much. Sure. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Kevin. Next speaker, Mr. Chair, is Larry Slotnick. Good evening, Mr. Slotnick. Thank you. Good evening. Thanks for having me here. I'm the Facilities Manager for FoodLink. I've been a long time volunteer with them also for about six years and I served as the Project Manager for FoodLink in the recent redevelopment of 108 Summer Street, which is now our headquarters, which we call the FoodLink Hub. I'll just give you a few more tidbits. We have about 6,600 square feet on the three floors, three levels of our building. We presently, and it's an ever-increasing rescue about 1,800 pounds of food every day of the year from supermarkets that are both in Arlington and in the surrounding area. And we distribute that food to about 45 agencies, small food banks, et cetera, that are also sprinkled in Arlington and the surrounding community. I wanna thank you for past distributions from FCDBG funds. There were two grants that came to us during that construction period on the facility to help us pay for some site work that was much in need over there, as well as some exterior renovations of the building. So that those funds really got us to the finish line. Last year's funding was dedicated towards installation of an emergency backup generator. As Mallory indicated, and as others have probably experienced, we've had some small delays on that, but it is proceeding and we expect that to be completed by May of this year. It's a 22 kilowatt generator. It's gonna be powered by a natural gas feed that we have in the building, although the building mostly operates on electricity for its HVAC and pretty much everything else. And that generator will essentially enable us in the case of a power outage, a neighborhood, you know, ever source power outage to continue supplying power to the walk-in refrigeration system to basic services like internet lighting and our door access security. We have a sewage ejector pump that all everything that goes down the drains and food link ends up in this pump that then gets pumped into the MWRA street sewer system. So that I'm managing that project for food link. And as I said, we expect it to be another four months for completion on that. So what we're seeking this year is to install I'd say a sizable rooftop solar panel array 63, right now it's, the design is looking like 63 400 watt panels. Overall, we have a flat roof there. So we're able to install, you know, a very decent sized system. We, there is some, you know, Minuteman bikeway tree coverage on the south side of our building that we'll do some selective trimming just to maximize, you know, the solar input that we get on an annual basis. That 63 panel system and with our solar orientation should generate about 27,000 kilowatt hours of electricity. So of course, you know, we'll be utilizing ever sources net metering system. So that power gets, you know, we sent back into the grid. We can't use that power directly to power, you know, equipment and other things inside the building, but it will go a long way to making this overall, our overall facility overall closer to net zero. You know, we, when we built this building, we really designed a very tight secure envelope around the building, the wall, the insulation walls, the roof, the triple glazed windows that we installed. So it's been running very efficiently right now or our HVAC costs have been lower than we expected. So we're very pleased about that. And as you see in your sheet, it's about a $73,000 investment that we expect an eight year, eight month payback period on. And I think that's all I have. Okay, now thank you very much for your presentation. And it's a number of us have been through the site since it was renovated, it's very impressive. So thank you for the presentation and for the work you're doing and for the work that FoodLink does in our community and through the region. You're welcome and thanks for having me again. Sure. Next speaker is Lisa Urban. Hello, can you hear me? Yep, good evening, Ms. Urban. Good evening. As you can tell, I'm not really a Zoom meeting expert here. I try to avoid them as much as possible, but this one obviously is a very important one. So that's why you're only seeing my name and nothing else. But I do wanna thank you guys for all the past support with the CDBG. It is life changing for our programs. And I just can't thank you guys enough. I know you guys spend a lot of time and you discuss a lot of things, but it is something that really does make an impact that you'll never really see, but we do appreciate it. And of course, again, I'm asking for support for next year for both our Minami Manor Outreach Program and our Jobs Jobs Jobs Program. Just if anyone's new to the Minami Manor Program, it's really designed to reduce the financial and transportation barriers that we've found have been the biggest problems to trying to get as many kids involved into the community. But it's kind of a three part thing. We really try to provide day camp scholarships in the summer, give them a whole new experiences, swimming lessons, get them out of their comfort zone and meeting new people. And then we try to get at least two weeks of camp for each kid that would like to come more, if possible. And then we usually do an onsite programming at Minami Manor and then also a component with coming to Fidelity House. And then we've had to tweak it for the last two years because of the famous COVID, but it definitely is something you wanna keep face to face and keep these kids active and busy and involved. So it really is an awesome program that I hope we continue with. And then also we do a Jobs Jobs Jobs Program where we really try to get some teenagers involved in working with the kids and hopefully send them on a new career thing. But regardless, if they go into working with kids in the future as a career, they're definitely going to probably work with them some point with families. So it's a learning thing that we really want kids to get. Probably the only other thing I just wanna add is I know this year in the application I really noticed a lot of, is this a new program? This is something new that you're offering. And I just wanna leave you guys with the realization that even though this program's been going on for years, it really is something new to the kid. So it's a new experience for whatever kid's joining it or a new opportunity. And it's something that even though it's a program it's been established, it really is to a kid like a first day of school type thing. It's a new experience that hopefully you're opening up their world. And thank you for your time. I know this has been a long meeting and I appreciate everything you guys do. Thank you, Ms. Urban. Thank you as always for the work that you're doing at Fidelity House and the important programming that's taking place there. And have a great evening. You too. There are no further hands raised, Mr. Chair. Okay, great. Thank you, Mr. Chapter Lane. So I think that concludes the presentation. Ms. Sullivan had given us the requests spreadsheet by category or schedule by category. The subcommittee will now go to work and come back with its recommendation. So unless any members have a question for Ms. Sullivan I think we can move on to the next item. I don't know if you wanted to conclude with anything, Ms. Sullivan or if we're set on the agenda items. No, I think we're just about all set. I think typically the board votes to accept both the report but that's all for me. Thank you very much. Okay, great. No, thank you. Yes, I will look for a motion to receive the reports from the board. No, moved. Do I have a second? Okay. Okay, so an emotion by Mr. Hurd seconded by Mr. Helmuth, Attorney Hine. Mr. Hurd? Yes. Mr. Dickens? Yes. Mr. Helmuth? Yes. Mrs. Mahan? Yes. Mr. DeCourste? Yes. Senator Ms. Pope? Thank you very much. So what I'd like to do, we're getting close to, and I'd like to do a couple more things. Maybe we can then take a short break. We have three appointments and maybe we can call up all three individuals. We have item seven, appointment to the Allington Historic District Commissions, Avon Place Representative, Philip Chavez, item eight, Allington Historic District Commissions, Realtor Representative, Stephen Savarise, and item nine, CBVG subcommittee term to expire 630 2023, Jennifer Hernandez. And what I'd like to do just in the interest of time, invite each one of the applicants here for appointment, just to tell us a little bit about themselves. We'll do that in order. If anybody has any questions, we can run through the questions and then we'll have a separate vote for each appointment. So let's see who is with us here first. Everybody's here, Mr. Chapterlings, is that right? Correct. Okay. Yes, I promoted all three. Okay. So why don't we start with Mr. Chavez? Am I saying that correctly? It's Chavez. Chavez, I apologize. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and why you're interested in being on the Historic District Commission? Sure. So my name is Phil Chavez and I have been an Allington resident since 1979. So almost over 40 years, I've graduated Allington High School in 1985. My children have gone through the Allington School System and we all still live here at Allington. I've been in real estate for about 20 years. I've always been very interested in the town and really I want to be able to use my experience in real estate along with giving back to the community is why when I was called to consider this position, I gladly accepted and would love to do it. Great. Thank you very much. So what I'll do again before we go back to members will hear from each one of the applicants. Item eight is Mr. Savarese for the realtor representative to the Historic District Commission. So same thing if you could tell us a little bit about yourself and why you're interested in being in the Historic District Commission representative. Thank you for your time this evening. I have been in real estate since 1985. I've owned an office in Arlington since 1989. First on the corner of Mass Avenue Street at the fabric corner. And then subsequently when we bought and renovated our building and merged with Keening QZAC up on Park Avenue. And I would say very similar to what Phil said that it's a matter of wanting to give back inherent interest in homes and maintaining a certain style and integrity of the community and wanting to be more involved in the community. Great. Thank you very much. And we'll now hear from Ms. Hernandez and then I'll turn to the board. Jennifer Hernandez, CDBG subcommittee for a term to expire June 30th, 2023. Good evening, Ms. Hernandez. If you could tell us a little bit about yourself and your interest in being on the subcommittee. Hi, thank you so much. My name is Jennifer, Davidson Hernandez and I am a lifelong resident and have deep family roots here in Arlington. And I'm just the president of the Monotomy and Attendant Association also and looking to get more involved and contribute to the community that I grew up in. Great. Thank you very much. I will now turn to the board for any questions or comments. I'll start with Mr. Hurd. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'd like to move approval of all three of the appointments and just thank all three for your willingness to serve. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Hurd. I'm Mr. Diggins. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I know that we were tight on time, but these are just three really impressive people. And I just wanna say a couple of things, and then ask a couple of questions, it'll be quick. I mean, first, Mr. Shavs, I'm sure there's an interesting story behind your foundation for the Massachusetts Association of Portuguese Speakers. Can you just give like a little quick version of what's going on there? So that was, we started the foundation 10 years ago and my father passed away. He was a teacher at Bunker Hill Community College and a very involved in the Portuguese speaking community, especially with citizenship and health related issues. So when he passed away, we decided to form the foundation to continue to support organizations like MAPS that do the work that my father really cared about. And it's been absolutely amazing what we've been able to accomplish in the 10 years. Well, thank you very much for that. And I appreciate you sharing the story with us. And to Mr. Sabariz, I'm excited about you because looking at the stuff that you were doing back in the early 80s, creating the database back in 84 and 87 is not to be underestimated. That's very forward thinking because I suspect you were doing it on a PC and that makes it even more forward thinking. And you're on the Automation Committee for Central 21 in 94, 95, that's forward thinking too. And what years were you on Vision 2020? I would have to check my records, I don't remember. Okay, well, still. But it was before the year 2000. It was before year 2000. And now as a person who hangs out on Vision Arlington a lot, I really appreciate the work that you all did back then because we're still around. And I like to think that we're making a little bit of a difference being in. And Ms. Davidson and that's the congratulations being on being the president of the Tenants Association of Anatomy Matter. And I'll definitely want to talk with you later about what we can do to engage that part of town more and I love your email address. Thank you. Oh, thanks. Thank you very much. It's an honor to represent 179 families. Great, thanks. Thanks so much. Thank you, Mr. Diggins. Mr. Helmut. Thank you. Nothing to add other than my gratitude and I also wanted to congratulate Ms. Hernandez. And I'm just delighted to see the re-emergence of the Tenants Association there. Yes, we're very excited. Thank you. Yeah, you should be very proud of that. And yeah, you'll be seeing a lot of wonderful things coming out of here soon. Fantastic. Thank you so much for your work. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Helmut. Mrs. Mohan. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you to all three people, as they've said, from their standpoint, I'd like to get back to Allington and from our standpoint, we probably couldn't afford to pay for the expertise that you're gonna give to your community. You love so much, Allington. And Ms. Hernandez, congratulations on your victory. I know you've heard some of the discussion tonight around CDBG on previous agenda items. I hope we haven't scared you away. And for old Menondee Manor, it's gonna be represented, having lived on Godna Street, Memorial Way, and then Fremont, Fremont, so. Fremont, Fremont Quarter Street. Straight. Always in the duplex. My dad was a Korean War veteran. We found a way to get by. And I just would, as you probably heard earlier on CDBG, we'll be meeting soon. We do have a scoring sheet and a couple of the speakers spoke on it tonight. One of the things that we address are new programs that bring something new versus longstanding. And that's something we put a lot of thought into because one of the speakers pointed out, even though a program may have been around for many years, it's new groups of kids, seniors, et cetera. It's the first time for them. But you'll get more of that. But when you do get after you're approved, you'll get the application some of you've heard tonight, probably heard about a quarter of them, maybe a third. And then there, Mrs. Sullivan in the planning department, God bless them with rules from HUD. They have come up with sort of a graph of how we rate each one. And those are very important because sometimes literally we're making one point decisions, but we always put a lot of conversation behind it. So, and thank you to Mr. Charles and Mrs. Severisi and look forward to seeing you about town in another capacity for the town of Wellington. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mrs. Mahan. Yeah, and I want to thank all three of you for your willingness to serve both a two realtor, well, one realtor representative and another realtor getting involved in the Historic District Commission. So thank you both for that. And to Mr. Hernandez, echo my colleagues' comments, congratulating you for becoming the president of the Monotony Manor Tenant Association. So we have a motion by Mr. Herd that was seconded by Mr. Diggins. Attorney Heim should, I think we should be doing one separate vote for each of the appointments. Is that preferred? Okay, so we'll start with item seven for Mr. Shavs, motion by Mr. Herd, seconded by Mr. Diggins. Mr. Herd? Yes. Mr. Diggins? Yes. Mr. Helmer? Yes. Mrs. Mahan? Yes. Mr. DeCourse? Yes. Okay, congratulations and thank you. Thank you very much. I look forward to working with you. For item eight, Mr. Savarisi, same thing, motion by Mr. Herd, seconded by Mr. Diggins. Attorney Heim? Mr. Herd? Yes. Mr. Diggins? Yes. Mr. Helmer? Yes. Mrs. Mahan? Yes, thank you. Mr. DeCourse? Yes. That's right. Thank you. And item nine for the CDBG subcommittee, you can see there's a lot of work ahead of that subcommittee for Mr. Hernandez, motion by Mr. Herd, seconded by Mr. Diggins. Attorney Heim? Mr. Herd? Yes. Mr. Diggins? Yes. Mr. Helmer? Yes. Mrs. Mahan? Yes, thank you. Mr. DeCourse? Yes. That's your unanimous vote. Thank you, congratulations. Thank you very much. I'm very eager to get started. Great. So what I was gonna ask the board at this point, we have open forum coming up. It's about 10 past nine. Got a bunch of things afterwards. This might be a time to take a brief break, come back, do open forum, and then get through what we can on the remaining agenda items between now and the end of the session tonight. Would people like to have a break now or getting a few people nodding their head? So we will take a five minute break and then we will return with open forum. Okay, I believe everybody is back. So welcome back to the select board meeting. Our next item is open forum, except in unusual circumstances, any matter presented for consideration of the board shall neither be acted upon nor a decision made the night of the presentation in accordance with the policy under which the open forum was established. It should be noted that there is a three minute time limit to present a concern or a request. So we'd ask if anybody wishes to be heard in open forum to use the raise hand function. The first hand raise, Mr. Chair, is Mark Kaplan. Good evening, Mr. Kaplan. I just unmuted myself and everything. So thank you for hearing me. Wanted to congratulate the board on doing a great job distributing CDBG funds to so many different deserving groups. I'm here to talk about having a unvaccinated lives matter banner on town hall. I mean, this is a, it's a discrimination issue that's going on right now rather than something from 2019. I sent you letters, but consider the history of a previous pandemic of HIV AIDS, or initially it's called the gay plague when not much was known about it. And those dark days, gay men were discriminated against for jobs and housing, public access to places because people were afraid of catching the disease from them just for who they were. And we've got a similar situation going on today. People are afraid of unvaccinated people. It's also irrational because the vaccine offers very little protection against Omicron. It was designed against a virus of two years ago. And today's Omicron is quite different and the vaccine doesn't give immunity or protection from spreading the disease. So having vaccine passports for people to enter public places makes no sense. Having vaccine requirement to have a job makes no sense because it offers no protection to others. That's why people are wearing masks because the vaccine doesn't work against Omicron. So I encourage you to read my letter. It's much longer than I can do here, but the firing of people from jobs is should be unconscionable. And it's a civil rights issue at the moment. It's being institutionalized even which is really shameful. So I hope you can think back to those old days and remember how scared people were and how irrationally they behaved. But out of it came some good things too. Virus research got tremendous funding and advancements from that. And we've got civil rights laws protecting people based on sexual orientation because they were so discriminated against during this HIV scare. People didn't know if you could get it from toilets or surfaces or how it transmitted initially. Much like people didn't know how COVID was transmitted. Excuse me, Mr. Kathleen, you're at about three and a half minutes. So if you could wrap up, please. Okay, so thankfully protections came out based on sexual orientation and also medical status and people's whatever viruses they had. So thank you. And I hope you consider such a banner. The next speaker, Mr. Chair is Melanie Francis. Well, thank you so much for hearing me. I'll be very quick. Can you hear me? Yes. Good evening, Ms. Shannon. Thank you. I just want to talk about what town meeting voted for last year, which was the hanging of the Black Lives Matter banner over town hall. We passed that vote and that banner is still not being hung for whatever reason, we're not sure why it's not there. We would love for you to consider re-hanging this banner or some type of symbolization showing unity for Black Lives. Arlington residents have also voted for this. We'd represent so much for the community and the Black community here in Arlington. Arlington as a town is a perfect. We have some bigoted people here. We have racism here like any town. But just in human regard, I think that we should really consider this. We need something that symbolizes community and for the Black community and that we're not gonna stand for racism. I would love for my children to see a symbol up when they walk by to show support for them as a Black mom and I have Black children that go to a school that's predominantly white. I would love for them to just be proud of their town and where they're being raised. It shouldn't be that complicated. I just really would love for you to consider this and not to table it. Don't forget about that. And that's pretty much it. I just want to emphasize the fact that showing a symbol of support is very important, especially today. And thank you for listening. Thank you, Ms. Francis. There are no other hands raised, Mr. Chair. Okay, thank you, Mr. Chaftalin. We'll now move to item 10, under traffic rules and orders and other business for approval, Dallin Elementary School Arrival Dismissal Plan with Transportation Advisory Committee endorsement, Laura Swan from Transportation Advisory Committee and to add Dingman-Dallin Elementary School principle. They are both here and I just promoted them. Great, thank you. Good evening, Ms. Swan. Ah, good evening. It's good to see you all face to face. I'm Laura Swan, the school committee liaison to the Transportation Advisory Committee and the current chair. I think Principal Dingman is here as well. Yes, good to hear, Laura. Good evening, everybody. That Dingman Principal at Dallin Elementary School. Thanks for having us. Thank you for your patience this evening. So yeah, Laura, you wanna take it away? I was just going to preface the discussion with just a little bit about sort of the unique problems that we're going to discuss here. How school arrival and dismissal really challenges the transportation network and how around 800 to 1,000 people are all converging on the same building within five to 10 minutes. And by encouraging walking, biking, busing and other modes of transportation, it can reduce the congestion, but those have to be safe options in order for people to really take them. I'll say that most Arlington schools use infrastructure like one-way streets, time-restricted access, curbside drop-offs, help manage some of the traffic and arrival and dismissal times. But right now, Dallin doesn't have any of these tools. So when Dallin School recognized some of their traffic safety issues, they were proactive in reaching out to the Safe Roots to School Organization and to TAC to help them come up with a new arrival dismissal plan. And this pilot program was conceived. And I think I'll let Principal Dingman talk about why Dallin needs this change and how this program helps to accomplish that. Thanks, Laura. Part of our seeking out this approval for a pilot arrival and dismissal plan is in response to our community voice. We've heard pretty consistently for the past several years from our community that arrival and dismissal for walkers in particular has felt unsafe because of some of the traffic behaviors in front of our school. Dallin Elementary, like the other elementary schools in the Washington Public School District has experienced significant enrollment increases over the past several years, which has resulted in increased traffic along Florence Avenue, which is the Main Street first school. It's popular for drop-off. It's also a popular throughway for commuting in the morning and in the afternoon. So on top of that, I should also point out that areas of our school that had been previously designated for drop-off areas have now been used to transport some of our sixth grade students to the Gibbs Elementary School. And with the change in arrival time, particularly in the morning, we're now not only welcoming our kindergarten through fifth grade students, we're also welcoming our sixth grade students at the start of their day. So I guess I'll add one more detail is that over the past two years, we've also seen an increase in incidental traffic accidents. So we've had side swipes to vehicles on the side of Florence Avenue. We've had vehicles entering into our cut-off area at unsafe speeds resulting in minor accidents in unsafe situations. We fortunately to this point only heard multiple reports of close calls, but we're ready to be proactive. We think we've developed a pretty comprehensive plan that we would like to try out. Hopefully everybody's had a chance to preview some of those materials, look through what we've asked. You can see that we have midway points where we plan to go back to our community and ask for more feedback to make sure that the outcomes are anticipated and are positive. We know that this plan is, we're not anticipating any effect to direct butters to the school. And we're feeling pretty positive about it. Our hopes would be to continue this plan for the remainder of the school year with that checkpoint sometime in probably April or early May with the hopes of launching next school year with a new plan for arrival and dismissal firsts. Great, thank you very much for the presentation and for the materials that you submitted. I'll turn to the board now for questions and comments and we'll start with our Dallin parent, Mr. Heard. I have a feeling that I would go first here. Thank you. Eyes on the street, eyes on the street right here. Thank you, Ms. Swan. And thank you, Mr. Digman. I just checked on Wes and Dylan and they're on the break and they're safely tucked away and get ready for school tomorrow. Okay, well, we'll be ready for them. This is certainly something that, I was happy to see this on the agenda. This is a long time coming because in the past few years, the traffic patterns and drop off and pick up have been really, really difficult to navigate. And I think everyone's been aware of it and most of it has really just been personal responsibility of amongst parents dropping off and picking up their kids and people parked in crosswalks and disobeying signs. And at times, really the only time that we've had safe pickup and drop off is when our school resource officer, officer White comes down and is there on site or Mr. Digman goes out and puts cones to actually signify where people can park. And I think the school has done everything that they can but this is exciting to see a pilot program that will help streamline the drop off and pick up process and make it safer for the kids as they walk down. And hopefully it will let the parents know that it's not safe to block a crosswalk and when kids are crossing the street. Something that generally should be common sense but I think this will take big strides to put us in the right direction. I should say in full disclosure, the page 14 of the plan appears to show a vehicle similar to the one parked out in front of my house. But I do dispute that that was during a dismissal time. I think that was the only time I've ever parked there is like that is if I was just dropping off something if they forgot a hat or gloves or something. But we needed your support, John. So you forced her. I think that was placed in there for a reason. But I am happy to see this. Me and my neighbor Eileen sometimes make ourselves deputized parking enforcement officers for this part of the street to try to remind people of the parking rules to make it more safely. Her husband, Greg Matthews, who I'm mentioning because he really likes when Eileen does this and he's not at all embarrassed when she goes out and reminds people of the traffic safety rules in the down area. So this is a good step in the right direction. I'm excited about this. And I think it will go a long way in making the drop off and pickup procedures are down and much, much safer. So thank you all. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Would you like to make a motion on this? Motion to approve. Okay, thank you. Mr. Diggins. I'll be happy to second it. And as a member of TAAC, I know all the work that's gone into this. So I won't have any questions here. And I'll just say that nothing excites me more than, a few things excite me more than a word pilot being in. And so I know that this will be conducted well and looking forward to seeing the results and making the appropriate decision based on the data we receive. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Diggins. Mr. Helman. Thank you. I really appreciate the careful documentation of this, the thought that's gone into it. I just want to say every time I'm looking at two heroes here, you are educators and community volunteers as the son of a career elementary teacher and principal. What you do is so important. And thank you. I know it's been a hard couple of years. And then you do this work on top of keeping our kids safe and educated. And I think it's just remarkable. So know that your community appreciates what you do. Thanks. Thank you, Mr. Helman. Mrs. Mohan. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have two quick questions. And if I need any more details, I can follow up with each person individually. And they are, I would like to ask Ms. Slauna on behalf of TAC, I understand that besides the work that TAC has already done, Transportation Advisory Committee, that you're also going to continue monitoring this and committing resources to it during the pilot program. And my question would be, and then I have one for Mr. Dignan, that future role in the pilot program, it's probably going to be sort of incidental or incident monitoring or yes, or will it be something else? Yes. TAC has agreed to help sort of measure the impact that this pilot program would have on the residents and on the neighborhood. For instance, we've already went out and took some measurements of like car volumes and speeds on Oakland Avenue with the idea that if we looked at the block directly south of the school where people might detour, we might get a chance to get sort of a before and after condition or a before and during comparison of how many vehicles are being diverted if they are, if there is more speeding in the neighborhood because of this, that sort of thing that was the concern of residents, but we're also available to help advise the school and help them get in contact with the right people in the town, you know, whatever logistical support they need, we can always lend a hand to them. Thank you. And for Principal Ziegman, just I'm encouraged that you're continuing on with in terms of getting community feedback. I sort of anticipate that for the neighborhood around down in school, probably maybe at the halfway point and also would be interested, not that you have to speak to it now, what election day does to this program? And perhaps there needs to be a third phase of it. So my question is around the community meetings and either now or in the future, I'm just curious what election day does. Well, so the only anticipated impact around anytime within a school day, regardless of its election or anything else, is gonna be just for those beginning of the morning, you know, eight to eight 30 on a school day and then right at the end of the day in the afternoon. So, you know, depending on, typically when we're seeing election day traffic in the morning, we're not seeing it. Like I don't anticipate that it's going to impact parking behaviors, particularly on election days, just because that's not usually the time that we're seeing the most volume of voters. Typically we're seeing voters before our arrival and then we're seeing them sort of, you know, the 930 to 130 mark and then it picks up again in the evening. But, you know, if we ever feel like any of this is gonna break or the ripple is gonna be bigger than we've anticipated, I think we've sort of, you know, built in this communication plan with our community that's been pretty good. I've heard, you know, I was pretty encouraged actually when we started this this summer to hear from people who don't have kids at our school who reached out directly to send emails around, would you think about this? Would you consider this? And then we had our forum, you know, there were very few actual, well, there were some down family people there, but there was also community members, butters, people who do not have children at the school who came to share their feedback. And we had as many in support as we did to add genuine questions and concerns around what this might look like. So a pilot makes sense for us, but and, you know, I think we've spent quite a bit of time thinking through what this will look like. I'm not, you know, I hope I'm answering you. I feel like people who people know to reach out to us and we feel pretty good and soon be successful. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mrs. Mahan. Yeah, and I also support this. I want to comment on the evaluation language that you have there. It seems like you really thought it out and to have that break point in April to get feedback, I think will be really instructive and this could all be a model for other pilot programs that could be implemented in terms of reaching out and timing and hearing back from the community. So I will say I was up by the school of the weekend and I can see the issue with the George Street signs. That's those, no parking signs may have been there when I was a student at Dow and because they are completely faded and hopefully we can help you get some new signage there. But I think this is well thought out and I think it's something that is worth trying and it's a long enough period that you can get meaningful feedback. So I'm happy to support it. So on a motion to approve by Mr. Herd, seconded by Mr. Diggins, Attorney Hyde. Mr. Herd? Yes. Mr. Diggins? Yes. Mr. Helman? Yes. Mrs. Mahan? Yeah. Mr. DeCoursey? Yes. Mr. Hanuman? Thank you both for the presentation. I appreciate your support everyone. Yeah, best of luck with the pilot program. Thank you. Thank you. Item 11 is a proposal for another pilot program and overnight parking pilot program, Sylvia Dominguez and Amy Lister. Just asked them both to be promoted to panelists. And just before they come on, I just want to introduce this a little bit. I mean, again, just by way of background, what you're seeing tonight as a proposal started last year as a two-worn articles that Ms. Dominguez was going to present to town meeting. She agreed to withdraw the warrant articles. And I had told her that if she did that, we will provide an opportunity for her to present either a pilot program or a program for parking, which originally it was limited to precinct four. You'll hear tonight. It goes beyond that. So with that, I want to introduce Ms. Dominguez and Ms. Lister, thank them for coming and invite them to make what I think is a short presentation on the pilot program. And so I don't know if we have screen sharing potentially. I don't know if you want to present the PowerPoint or you just want to talk us through it. Hi, I'm Amy Lister. I'm happy to talk you through it and not go through the actual screens of the pilot. PowerPoint. Thank you. Okay, so essentially, so I'm a resident of East Arlington. I've lived here since 2015. Sylvia is a resident as well. And we put this pilot program together as Steve said in response to what Sylvia had promoted at the town meeting last year. And essentially the reasoning behind this is that East Arlington is unlike the rest of town. It's densely settled. It's urban adjacent. The needs are unique and different from the more suburban areas of Arlington. The proliferation of condo conversions and multifamily living units has greatly increased the number of cars over the past 10 to 15 years. But the number of corresponding parking options hasn't increased. There are numerous multifamily homes with tandem parking arrangements and pricey condos that pay high taxes but are hampered by these parking restrictions. It certainly affects residents' quality of life and property values. There are no reliable overnight parking alternatives in this area. So unlike towns with similar parking restrictions, there are few if any places to actually rent a parking spot. So if you don't have a spot, that you're kind of out of luck. So there are no options. The town overflow lot does exist but it's not really a viable option in this part of town. We're not close to it. Especially I would say in the winter it gets dark at four or five o'clock and it requires you to move your car very early in the morning. It's just not a viable option for many people for a good at least six months of the year if not the entire year. There's an honestly, and I will say since I've lived here, this has kind of been the reason. I just don't know that there's any overriding reason for continuing the prohibition. So it runs from 1 a.m. to 7 a.m. But I think that you're allowed to park also for an hour during that time. The restrictions seem really arbitrary to me and the time chosen seems arbitrary. So I live on Varnum Street. I have the Scoop and Scootery, which I love because there are a lot of people at the evening hours and traffic, which is nice because it makes me feel safer when I walk around. I also have the Arlington Diner on the other side of me. So there are cars parked on my street in front of my house at midnight or past midnight picking up ice cream. And there are people who are first thing in the morning going to the diner. So the question of parking in that interim overnight it just seems arbitrary to me that you can't do it. I've heard a lot of arguments about emergency vehicles needing to pass down these streets overnight. I will say there are cars parked on both sides of the street for 18 hours a day. So I don't think that's an overnight parking issue. It may be an issue on some streets that should be addressed, but I think these are two separate items. Similar towns, Somerville, Kingbridge, Medford have similar housing and zoning and they don't have these types of restrictions. I'll also say a few more points. The town doesn't provide for sufficient parking alternatives. So you can only get two weeks of overnight parking waivers. People who have tandem parking or insufficient number of spaces, this doesn't address the issue. Each house in Arlington, East Arlington these multifamily homes may have between two and six adults who need cars but don't have parking options. It forces people to make difficult choices and could be a financial problem for many owners, especially those who want to rent to other people. And many people park three or four nearer cars in the driveway, misappointments, it's not great in an emergency situation. So overall, looking at the issue, I think it's time we start to think of some solutions that could benefit this part of town that wouldn't take away or cause great issues for others in the community. So our program, our pilot proposal is to create a resident parking system in East Arlington. So anybody who has essentially registered with the town paid a nominal fee like a $20 fee provided proof of residency and registration and garaging in Arlington can get an overnight parking permit. The idea is also to waive these permit fees for residents who are over 65 who have a disability plate. Also to allow residents to receive several visitor permits per year at the same price. Similar to the towns around here, we did a study essentially, Cambridge, Medford, Somerville, I think, and they all have similar systems where you can park two or three days in a row with a visitor permit and that sort of thing. And again, this is on the East Arlington side streets. This doesn't include Mass Ave. And to the extent there are issues or concerns of street parking, I think we're open certainly to one side of the street parking if that would make this easier for folks and cause less concern. The list of proposed pilot streets. So precinct four Lafayette, Fairmont, Thorndyke, Magnolia, Barnum, Milton, Melrose, Edgerton, Chandler, Herbert, precinct two, Edith Osborne, Dorothy, Mary, and Margaret, and precinct one, Henderson, Teal, Fremont Street, Fremont Court, Sunnyside, Merrigan, and Gartner. And I'll turn this over to Sylvia to comment as well. But what I will say is that I have one tandem parking spot and now two adults living in a home and I don't wanna have to leave Arlington, but there's nothing, we don't have any other options at this point, right? And I don't think that we're the only ones in this position. So Sylvia, I'll turn it over to you. Yeah, I think it's important to point out that this is not permit for the overnight issue. It's really permit parking during the day because we are a parking lot for Elweif, okay? So this is permit parking during the day, but also we're looking to do away with these restrictions overnight in East Arlington, okay? This is a serious problem and yes, it's an economic issue for a lot of people who can't rent to people with cars. Some of these houses around here have up to six people, six adults. So this is just a gigantic issue for the last five, six years that have lived here. The only people that don't have a right to the streets is us who live here. The streets have always been pretty much full of commuters. So this is what prompted my warrant to begin with. So we did check with the neighboring towns and we came up with the proposal that pretty much it's along the lines of the towns around us. Yeah, and one more thing I'll add, I'll just say during the pandemic, especially for the first six months or year, I don't know how long the parking restrictions were sort of not enforced. I saw a lot of neighbors parking on the street six months longer, there were no problem. I mean, I don't think it was a big issue. I kind of think, I saw just through that, like this can be done, it doesn't have to be something that would be disruptive necessarily and that's why we're doing a pilot, so. All right, thank you both for the presentation and I just, before I turn it to the board for any questions or comments, I did have an opportunity to have a meeting with Mr. Mingas and Ms. Lister and also a precinct meeting and again, depending what the board wants to do this evening, I viewed this more as a presentation tonight, a receipt, maybe some initial discussion to see, take the board's temperature on whether we want to look into a pilot further or initial reactions that way. But I think it was understood that we'd receive the proposal this evening, we'd have an opportunity to digest it and make some comments on just our general feelings, whether it's this type of pilot or larger scale pilot or whatever, what the feeling was on that. So with that in mind, I will now turn to the board for any comments or questions and I will start with Mr. Diggins. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will move receipt and I want to listen more to what my colleagues have to say because Mr. Corsi and I were at that forum of precincts one through four. And I just, I do want to point out that precinct three is also going to be included in this. So the streets, Teal and Henderson were in precinct three and I would rephrase that or in the proposed pilot, but yeah, I want to hear what other people have to say at this point, so thank you, Mr. Chair. Okay, thank you, Mr. Diggins. I'm Mr. Helmuth. Thank you. Thanks for the good thought that you've put into this. I know that you're doing this for your neighbors and in the town and we appreciate that. I have a couple of questions for the proponents that's appropriate, Mr. Chair. Yes, go ahead. Yes, so I understand the intent here. I'm glad that Ms. Dominguez clarified, pointed out that there's two parts of this at stake. There's overnight parking ban and then there's resident stickers and that they accomplish solve different problems. I guess my question would be as you see the pilot program, do you feel like it's important that both of these elements be in place for the whole thing to work? Instead of like, and I don't have any view on this, I'm listening, instead of just doing the overnight ban and not a permit program or vice versa. So the way that I think we've envisioned it, at least in part is the idea that if you can park overnight on the street, then your car will be there in the morning and to some extent alleviates the issue of somebody coming in and driving in first thing before you move your car and then your car out and park it when your neighbor in the tandem situation is coming out. So that's partly I think why we started to talk about it this way because that was sort of the first item that we could address, right? If you got a sticker, you can park overnight on the street and we can see how that goes. But I know that this is a bigger issue on some streets again, so Sylvia, I defer to you. Yeah, I mean, I think we really can't do one with the other because taking out the prohibition overnight helps everybody that right now doesn't have anywhere to park or that is parking tandem or et cetera. But during the day, it'd be just really helpful for us to have a permit system so that we control this, I don't mean to sound like I wanna control the streets, I just think they should be for us, that's all. They should be for us first and then maybe for some other people but we're totally out of any kind of possibility in the streets. I mean, they're not for us all this time, they have not been for us. So I just think there's a real need to have both. I want to create the flexibility that these households need because they have more than two or three people and also to accommodate for the cars that are not necessarily fitting in which are like at the end of the driveways, et cetera, et cetera. I think these are the two issues. Yeah, thank you, thank you, appreciate that. So just, I think just briefly to kind of say where I'm at on this, I'm open to having the discussion. I think I'll gladly second the motion to receive this. I think that we should listen to residents and I suspect that if we go through a process with this, we'll wanna listen to residents and some of them may not wanna do this. And I think the particular residents in the neighborhood, we would wanna hear their rationale points of view as well. What I'm not sure about myself is whether I wanna ask my board colleagues if we wanna go back to the voters in any kind of an unbinding referendum. I think it's been eight or 10 years since we've done that before. I think in some ways we could learn some things from that, but also that can kind of cut both ways. And I don't know, even if I would support doing that, whether we wanna do that before or after a pilot program, I think you could make an argument both ways. So that just for my board colleagues, that's in my mind and unresolved that I'd welcome thoughts on the wisdom of doing that. But I will say, I know what the results of the last referendum were. And even though I wasn't on the board, I think eight or 10 years is enough time for situations to change for the kind of people who live in neighborhoods to turn over and change, needs to change. So I'm open to all that. Obviously this has been an issue that's been hard to solve in this agreement in town, but I think we can't go wrong by listening. And so I think that's kind of what I've got for now. And I look forward to hearing what my colleagues have to say. Thank you, Mr. Helmuth. And Mrs. Mohan. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I guess a couple of suggestions as we move forward on this. I know in terms of, we're talking about came, I've heard Cambridge and Somerville and Arlington. I think what we should do is, I know what's proposed in this initial pilot starting point would be a $20 year fee. And I know legally we can only charge what we estimate the cost of covering this quote unquote service to be. So one of the things I think that not only the board, but the residents of the town would need to see is sort of an apples to apples comparison. I think for Somerville and Cambridge, it's not $20 a year. I think it's a monthly fee. So if we could look at that. The other thing I'm looking at this just in terms of not equity, not fairness, but I think for a pilot program, it should be a like scenario. Excuse me, I've had a tickle all night in the three or four precincts that if we do have this pilot program, and it seems for precinct four, it's just about all of the streets in precinct four when you think of upper and lower. And then when you look at precincts one, two, and three, it's a few. So I think for a pilot program, it should be a little more balanced. Definitely we've wanted to hear from having gone through this is years ago, a member of the Silent Good Neighbor Committee, which I know Ms. Dominguez's dad was very active in that. And I think Ms. Dominguez was also, but I do remember her dad and George Lake and I meeting with him a lot. Every time we started this endeavor, we did try to, as Ms. Dominguez and others have, get a consensus of the street if there was a pilot program. So I'd like to see, I think it's a little too top-heavy for precinct four, it's basically, because there's two ends of each of those streets. I think, let's think of, is it gonna be two, three, four streets in each precinct? What they should be, can this those streets from the neighbors, I think it's more manageable to do it that way also. And then as we, in terms of Mr. Helmuth's question regarding a non-binding referendum, it has been, as you said, eight to 10 years. That's something else we could discuss in the future. I'm anticipating, first we need to have the discussion on Ms. Dominguez's and Ms. Leicester's proposal. See that out to fruition. So I wouldn't anticipate it for this year's ballot. I just don't see that. But I do think it's something that should be on the table. And it may be something that we have the vote and it may be a little bit closer and maybe some of that demographic or geographic information might guide us in terms of, you know, where the vote was. It may not be palatable town-wide, but it may be, as has been pointed out, in the more dense, I grew up a negative, we rented, we can never afford to buy a home. Before we moved into Monomy Manor, I lived at 23 Augustin Road, first floor. No cars, couldn't afford one. But I definitely wanna, you know, continue on this and would be happy to either through the chair or any future discussions or meeting. But I think, you know, it should be an apples to apples in terms of that. We need to investigate the, see what it would be. And I think we really need to pick one thing first, which I think would be overnight parking versus making this a 24-hour parking. And these are just my thoughts. I'm not saying I'm cemented to those, but that's where I'm coming from pretty firm right now. I think it's a lot to bite off from there. But I do wanna thank the chairman and the proponents of this warrant article for agreeing to work with the board. And I think, I hope you're hearing a willingness that we definitely wanna continue this and come out with something. And please don't take that. I'm happy after this meeting to have any conversations with any of the proponents. If there's anything I said that was confusing, are you like behind your way off base? You didn't get it. So I mean, you can point it out real quickly if you could do it in 20 seconds. I'm not saying you can't, but I do. So that's where I'm at. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Ms. Dominguez and Ms. Leicester. Thank you, Mrs. Mohan. Mr. Hurd. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Ms. Leicester, Ms. Dominguez. I mean, this is an issue that's been coming down the pike for a while. We've been dealing with it for the past few years, a lot of discussion about overnight parking. And I think we're on the right track with a pilot program. I, like Mrs. Mohan said, I think we're really just need to focus on the overnight parking. I'm definitely not sold on having resident-only parking. I think, you know, there's other mechanisms that we've used in the past for our many streets in Arlington that have commuter parking. And I think those we can look into. But I think a pilot program is good. And I think to Mr. Helmuth's point and Mrs. Mohan's point, I think that we do a pilot program in anticipation of a town-wide ballot question. We've had a number of ballot questions on this and the results have been the same in past years. But again, like Mrs. Mohan said, it doesn't mean it's not gonna be the same now. And there'll be, I'm sure, a robust campaign once that ballot question becomes out. My initial thoughts as far as the structure of the pilot in I'm certainly open to persuasion, but where it's gonna be town-wide ballot, I think I understand the rationale for East Arlington and why to have a pilot program in East Arlington. But if it's ahead of a town-wide ballot, I think if we have an East Arlington-only pilot program that other parts of town are gonna come out of the woodwork and say, hey, this affects the same issue is happening in our neighborhoods. So I would like to have a discussion as we move this forward about whether or not we have a East Arlington-specific pilot program or a limited town-wide pilot program. In some parts of the town will be relatively unaffected by this. But I think as we're gonna ask the entire town of Arlington whether or not a pilot worked, we need everyone in the town of Arlington to participate in the pilot. So I think to that point it makes sense to have to expand the pilot if we're gonna do it to all of Arlington. But again, I'm open to persuasion from the proponents or my colleagues as to why that's not a good idea, but those are just my initial thoughts. And again, I think we'll go move forward with the pilot, however we can craft it in anticipation of a town-wide ballot question. We've dealt with this issue many, many times and I can't find myself anywhere, but indifferent to the overnight parking ban. So this is something that I certainly would look to the voters of Arlington for guidance as to where we move forward because it doesn't necessarily affect me in my part of Arlington, but I think if we can educate the residents as to why it's either necessary or why we should keep it in place, I think it's a good thing. And I look forward to continue to work on this and figure out what the correct parameters would be of a pilot program. And then we can move forward and send it to the voters. So thank you for the presentation. Yeah, if I could respond one more thing, I know we're running late. I think some of the concerns that Sylvie and I have and a lot of the people we've spoken to in East Arlington do have to do with the town-wide referendum because we are a small segment of town. We're a representative government and I will just put forth the reason we're here before our representatives is to think about the issues that the minority of voters might not have represented in a town-wide vote. Folks who have single family homes, they're the majority in town, but I don't know that a portion of town having parking rights is going to affect them. And as you said, Mr. Hurd, just about your neutral on it, I feel like a lot of people would say that too. And so just think about the needs. I think it's a real necessity for people here. That's all. Thank you. Thank you all for your comments and questions and for listening to our proposal. We certainly appreciate it. Thank you, Ms. Hurd. Actually, I'm going to make a couple of comments before we let you go. So I appreciate you thanking the board members for that. So just as a follow-up to what Mrs. Mohan and Mr. Hurd said, I am certainly open to the consideration of a pilot program. I think the scope of it, in my mind, is if it is going to be done, it should be done on a precinct-wide basis or on a town-wide basis. Because we got into the discussion last week about this in terms of some streets might want it, some streets might not want it. But what will happen is that if I'm on a street that doesn't have overnight parking, I'm going to move my car a few streets and park overnight in a pilot program, not in a permit parking program if it ever came to that. And so I will say there are unique issues to precincts two, four, one, and three. But I had a separate meeting with the Office of Roteau. And there are overnight parking issues throughout the town. And so that is, while it may be different than what you're experiencing, there are issues in terms of limited parking in certain areas. And police get calls in certain neighborhoods about it. And up the heights, we've had several people come in looking for permits because they don't have parking and they can't park overnight. So that issue has come up. I think it's worth continuing to have this discussion with an eye towards implementing some sort of pilot program. I don't have the scope of it available now, as I said, where we're receiving this. A question for the board members, if we are to continue to explore this and seek feedback, do you want to do it as a board or do you think we should do it as a, maybe, through the parking subcommittee working and coming back? And so I throw that out for questions to my colleagues in terms of how we structure this. I see Mr. Diggins put his hand up first. So I'd ask you to comment on that. Well, I'd like for us to have a discussion in amongst ourselves again. I didn't say anything. I certainly have some strong feelings. And because we had talked after the forum, I didn't want to take some of your words out of your mouth. That was partly why I held back. I mean, I certainly have some strong feelings about things and lots of thoughts about things. So I would like to voice those at a subsequent meeting, hopefully sooner rather than later. And then we can discuss whether we turn over to a committee or not. So that's all right. So I will put it on for a full board discussion again. And I think, as I said, I mean, if this is a pilot, it's a fixed time. We get feedback. And perhaps it's with an eye towards going to the voters and looking for different things. I think that's still on the table in terms of what we do. So I think for purposes of this evening, we have a motion to receive the report that has been seconded. And I will put it on certainly before the March meetings for a further discussion from the board. And we can talk about where we go from here. But I want to thank you both for the presentation and for the work that you've done on this issue. So on a motion to receive by Mr. Diggins that was seconded by Mr. Helmuth, the turning hand. Mr. Hurd? Yes. Mr. Diggins? Yes. Mr. Helmuth? Yes. Mrs. Mahan? Yes. Mr. Corsi? Yes. See you next week. OK, thank you both for the presentation this evening. Thank you. Thank you. OK, next item 12 is a discussion on the sign policy. And I put this on following Mr. Helmuth's motion at our last meeting about working on a policy, putting together a subcommittee for the policy and continuing to have dialogue here and moving forward. So I want to make a couple of comments. And then I want to ask for some comments from Attorney Heim as well. And then I will open it up to board members. Since the last meeting, I have been contacted. And Mr. Diggins and Mr. Hurd have agreed to work as a subcommittee on these issues. I want to thank them for that. Attorney Heim sent a memorandum to us that was in the agenda packet that concerned the case that was argued last week at the Supreme Court, the shirt left, the city of Boston case. And when we first took action on the banner issue, and this is going back to 2020, and going back to our discussion on January 4, 2021, where Mr. Currow and I had made a proposal to the board, Attorney Heim had relied on a case from the First Circuit Court of Appeals, shirt left versus Boston, that dealt with the so-called third flag poll at the City Hall in Boston. Since that case, or since that meeting on January 4, the Supreme Court of the United States took that case and agreed to hear it on our arguments as part of their October 2021 term. That case was argued last week at the Supreme Court. And the issue in that case, among others, is the extent of the government speech doctrine and whether Boston, by not having sufficient standards and policies, created a public forum with their third flag in terms of what can be flown there and what control the city of Boston would have over that flag. And I raise that because that decision is pending. While it is pending, it could change the government speech doctrine as we know it today. There's been a couple of Supreme Court cases that the First Circuit relied on. This court may change that through concerns that were expressed in the briefs and in newer arguments. And I will say, as to the complexity of this issue, the First Amendment issues, the so-called government censorship issues that come out in this case, the Solicitor General of the United States took the position that Boston's, the decision in favor of Boston should be reversed. Our Attorney General, Maura Healey, sent an amicus brief to the Supreme Court that the case should be affirmed. And so the ACLU took the position that the decision should be reversed. And so from the oral arguments that came out, it's clear that if there is a decision, we may see some guidance from the Supreme Court in terms of what is the extent of the government speech doctrine. I will add that during the pendency of these appeals, the city of Boston has ended its flag-raising program because they don't know what the court is going to do and they're looking for a result in their case, but also for guidance. So with that background, I may have gone on longer than Attorney Hyman tended to be to on this issue, but I did want to turn it to him to just discuss some of those issues because these are real issues in terms of the need to be clear and not have unintended consequences. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I won't, I'll try not to belabor too much of what it could set forth in the memo, but I know this issue is of great concern to the board. We're concerned to the public. And for lots of good reasons that many of which are similarly aligned and some of which depend on the IIT polder and others which really don't, as Mr. DeCoursey sort of started to outline in the sense that the issues at work in the Schroetliff case aren't necessarily follow a specific political point of view as much as they do follow a prioritization about concerns about the first amendment. So the real issue is just to be very brief but it set forth in this case is, as far as, especially as far as Arlington is concerned is when does the government create a public forum versus when does the government engage in what's considered government speech? Another way of thinking about it is when does the government invite, or in our case, the town, when does the town invite folks to submit speech that the government will essentially allow to be broadcast in some way versus when is the government, especially the select board, the school committee, the other elected officials in town actually speaking and saying this is a message for what the elected leadership of the town stands for. And then secondly, what are really the limits of this relatively young government speech doctrine in terms of how do we sufficiently identify when the government speaking versus when it's allowing folks to use a forum, it's a platform for their speech. So as folks are probably aware, Mr. Corsiz already mentioned these aren't really abstract or academic issues and they really represent these competing concerns about how much latitude a government should have to decide to broadcast only the messages it politically supports in public spaces. I can't really distill all the dozens of briefs in the short time that we have perfectly but a really severely summarized version could be expressed as one side is chiefly concerned with making sure that the local government can express the messages of elected officials like yourselves without fear that they'll have to allow either a contrary message or all messages such that a reasonable person either looking at city hall or town hall doesn't know what the government stands for or even worse, mistakenly believes that somebody like Boston's elected officials support a very specific message like a Christian heritage flag or even more controversial or potentially hateful message in many people's points of view. And then the other side is chiefly concerned with the government engaging in viewpoint discrimination whereby public forums and resources are used to promote ideas that a government likes but not ideas that a government disdainers and this is sort of the chief argument of the ACLU and to a lesser extent the argument of the Solicitor General and to my understanding, the issues that we're still trying to figure out here are how to navigate these things in very practical terms so that this board can decide we feel with some confidence that if we wreck the flag or banner or we decorate the crosswalk in front of town hall, we're not going to be forced to display or broadcast some message that we find totally inconsistent with our values or display and broadcast some sort of all messages so that we don't even really have a voice. It's just like a billboard at a baseball stadium that just turns over and over and over and the town hall or the town's flagpole or other town buildings and public spaces are just sort of billboards that everybody is supposed to have an equal opportunity to present whatever message they want to present. So again, I think that what's important about this case is to understand that some of our previous discussions have hinged on this idea as expressed by the First Circuit in the short-lived case that you as a select board are allowed to and need to be able to say, this is our message, this is what we're saying and the natural consequence for somebody not agreeing with what you're saying is an election, which is one of Attorney General Healy's primary arguments as well as a strong argument made by a consortium of local governments. And if I can editorialize for just a moment, while I do recognize that there are very competing and legitimate First Amendment concerns presented by very, very smart lawyers and articulated by very, very seasoned judges and justices, I do sometimes fear that there is a lack of meaningful experience as to what happens for local government officials at a local level trying to balance the rights of people in the community who have diverse viewpoints versus also being able to say, this is who we are and these are the values of our community as we understand in select officials. So with that, I'd be happy to answer any questions. I've probably gone on a little bit too long. I hope that the memo was helpful. And I'd also encourage members of the public to either look at Piscotis blog or Hoye, which is I think associated with the University of Chicago Ken Illinois Law School where you can read some of these briefs or you can listen to the oral arguments and understand how these competing concerns about the First Amendment are sort of coming to life before the court. There is some possibility that the court will, as I think I put my memo, the court will find on some very narrow set of facts and kind of punt but there's also a very real possibility that as Mr. Decorsi suggested, the government speech doctrine which has been very important to the way in which Arlington has been some of the decisions that we've been making about signs and banners and flags and things like that. It's very important if it's seriously amended or altered or even clarified, it would be extremely helpful to developing a clear and consistent policy going forward. Thank you. Thank you, Attorney Hyman. And I was asked by a member of the public that when would the Supreme Court decide this case? And this is in the October term, they typically will have the decision issued by June 30th. It could be earlier, but it's that last week of June that they finish up. Sometimes it spills into July, but right now it's under advisement before the Supreme Court. So I did wanna allow members to have any comments or questions in terms of what a timeframe is and where we go from here but I thought it was important to bring up this case. There were two, the editorial board of the Globe as well as one of their prominent columnists had a story about this last week. So this case has been in the news, it is prominent right now and there is real doubt as to what the court will do on this. So with that, I will start with Mr. Helmuth. Thank you. Thank you both, Mr. D'Corsi and Mr. Heim for your expertise and thought that you put into this. Mr. Heim, your memo was quite helpful. Thank you for your hard work on that. So we've heard from members of the public who I think are asking a very fair question. And, you know, in regard to my motion about referring this to develop a policy and as are we trying to punt this under the table, you know, in so many words, are we trying to make this go away by bearing it committee? My answer for myself is no. And I wanna say that when the banner hung on Town Hall last summer, I was proud as an Arlington resident to see the town expressing its support for Black Lives. And that moment, especially in town, I was moved tonight to hear Ms. Melanie Francis speak as a member of the community, what it would mean for her and her children to see the town visibly affirm the meaning of their participation and full participation as members of the community. That's where I'm coming from. I supported as a town meeting member, I voted for the resolution last year. And I did that relying on the government speech doctrine that was new that attorney Heim and Mr. D'Corsi just outlined believing that the select board as the elected representatives of Arlington's government could choose which messages represent Arlington's government for its buildings and signs. I am persuaded that more than ever that a policy is a very smart thing to do. And I think that we're seeing in my understanding of the Boston case before the Supreme Court that having the correct policy is really important to ensure that we do not have unintended consequences that if we are able to continue hanging public messages of any kind on a public property as the government that we have the ability to be selective. I do not wanna be in a position where we are compelled to give equal time, equal space to messages that I believe would be offensive to this members of this government and to the vast majority of citizens of this town and residents of this town. I think we need to be careful. And I think that particularly given that Arlington is doing the hard work now of looking at equity issues on a number of fronts, we are literally putting our money where our mouth is in that regard. And we're finding avenues for public speech and expression when we think that it's legally safe to do so. I think it is very smart to establish, to think about what a good policy would be. And I appreciate my colleagues, Mr. Diggins and Mr. Herd for stepping up to do that work. And I think that that work will have to be informed by the legal situation. I think it's really informative that the city of Boston has stopped doing what they're doing now. I think we should take a good hard look at that for ourselves. So, I say this, I think as a response to the members of the community who I appreciate hearing from and I appreciate where this is coming from. I say this as someone who again, voted for something like this to happen again in town hall as a town meeting member. I think that it could be very wise to take a step back, think about how we could do this right, to think about what the parameters would be and think about how we can do this in a way that will withstand legal scrutiny so that we do not end up having to do things that we don't wanna do. I'm continuing to be open to new facts and new persuasion. And again, I just wanna emphasize that I really believe this government representing the town and the volunteers to this town and the diversity task group and the Human Rights Commission and much more are doing the work. We're walking the walk as best we can. I want the residents of this town to keep holding our feet to that fire because that's really important. It's about, and I think public expressions and banners and signs can be part of that and important part of that but they're not the sum total of it. I hope we can get there. That's the outcome I would like to see that we can do something like we've done before but I see the wisdom in doing this policy and frankly waiting to see what the Supreme Court does. So those are my thoughts now. I very much welcome my thoughts for my very well-informed colleagues. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Helmuth. And Mrs. Mohan. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to say I agree there should be a policy and I don't know if the town manager if it got carried over from Mr. Sullivan and to Mr. Sullivan from Mr. Marquis but I know when we started hanging banners on town hall not talking flag polls, I'm not talking the banners that line up and down mouse have. We did establish a policy and we had many, many discussions and this is many, many years ago that the policy was anything that hung on town hall would be a town event because we went through sort of a similar discussion but about different topics. There was a pro-life group that also wanted to hang a banner at town hall. So I mean, I don't know if I could through you, Mr. Chairman maybe my memory's a little faulty but and I only say that that I think there is a policy that we can start from with and thank you to Mr. Herter, Mr. Diggins for taking this on but I don't know if Mr. Chappellane if anyone kind of passed that on to you in terms of what the policy was on town hall regarding banners, my memory wrong. Mr. Chappellane. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and through you to Mrs. Mohan. Yes, no, your memory is absolutely correct. There was a banner and signed policy adopted by this board in 2013. It may have been a new iteration of even a previous edition but there's an existing signed policy currently governed by the board. My understanding from dialogue with all the board members is that the desire is to review and then potentially consider updates and amendments to the policy to take into account either the potential of government speech or depending potentially on the outcome of the share lift case the prohibition of government speech. Okay, so just to one of my previous colleagues questions about establishing the policy I think we should take what we have as policy and I know my Mr. Herter, Mr. Diggins will do this and look at it but I know way back when when I was just a volunteer and I wasn't a member of the board and I was co-chairing town day the discussion did come up that if you open it up to anything beyond information on town or school events and there was also discussion that not to put information up there about elections which is how the sandwich board came about because that could be somehow construed another way. My only fear is, well, first that I wanna wait to see what the subcommittee does I wanna see ways to see what the First Circuit Court of Appeals and the Cherdoch case and what Attorney Hyman, our chair, Attorney Mr. D'Corsi and the town manager has to say but I certainly don't, I just think we need to see and have a further conversation on this. I'm just fearful that if we open it up if for some reason we allow one message that we know all of us our future boards would be in agreement with and a majority of the town might really tie our hands also put messages up that may be an issue of fairness but it's not an issue of what reflects the values of this town. So if we can just take that policy that already exists on the books right now where I'm coming from is unless someone can convince me likewise including the courts that I think it's wise to unless there's a greater argument to maintain that banners on town hall only could be informational on town or school events. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mrs. Mahan on Mr. Hurd. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm happy to work on this with my colleague Mr. Diggins and we'll certainly consider the comments from the board tonight. Sort of piggybacking on what Ms. Mahan just said I think we'll come up with what we're just gonna work on is a general banner or display guideline not specific to any one banner or one message but I think my thought is as far as town hall I don't think it's appropriate place for any sort of banner in that, you know, back in, you know, 20, 25 years ago it was hard to get information out for town events for people so I mean, I'm coming at it that I think we'll come to a place where or at least from my perspective where it's not necessary to put banners on town hall whether for informational purposes or otherwise. But I think we also as far as discussion can come up with appropriate locations to identify for government speech in the event that the Supreme Court rules favorably in allowing us to do so. I had brought up over this, I think in the summer or way back when we talked about this that Uncle Sam Plaza, there's two flag poles one with an American flag and one flag pole that sits empty as a potential location. So I think that's one idea that we can kick around as to, but I think as far as timing it is important to step back and make sure that we're not doing anything that's inconsistent with what will ultimately be the ruling of the Supreme Court because in the past couple of years, I would say that I've had requests for all different types of banners that range across the political spectrum. And, you know, if all of a sudden we are in a position where we can no longer decide what we are hanging in our public spaces, then we're gonna have a much more difficult discussion than even the discussions that we've had in the past couple of years. So I'm open for persuasion, just like anything else. I'm happy to work on this. And I look forward to working with Mr. Diggins and then coming back to the board and having further discussion on this. Thank you, Mr. Hurd. Mr. Diggins. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yes, and I'm looking forward to working with you, Mr. Hurd. And also Mr. Heim. So we're gonna learn a lot about constitutional law. And so, I mean, initially it'll be interesting to see me what are the limits being under what we currently have for law. I mean, and then we maybe kind of game out me what are the limits based on the possible outcomes made of the case in front of the Supreme Court. And to the extent we can do that and move forward with some thinking, then we can move forward. I mean, if you feel that we can't meet until we get a decision, then we wait until that decision to move forward. So I think we will be consulting with you me real soon to get some advice on that. And I would suggest me, well, you know what? Let me hold off on suggestions. So, and just have a conversation with Mr. Hurd and then get back to folks. Hopefully sooner rather than later. That's it, thank you. Okay, thank you, Mr. Diggins. Yeah, and I appreciate everybody's comments this evening and I appreciate Mr. Hurd and Mr. Diggins for agreeing to do this. And I do view this subcommittee to try to develop consensus that perhaps a recommendation or further discussion with the board that what are the parameters if we are going to engage in government speech and where we would do it. Mr. Hurd raised the issue of the second flight poll at Uncle St. Park. And that is almost identical perhaps to the issue that is in the Shirtloaf case because Uncle St. Park is a public forum but the flight poll perhaps could be a spot where the government chooses to speak maybe not. But those are the type of discussions that I think perhaps we could have and see if there's some agreement among the subcommittee members and to bring back to the full board working with Attorney Heim and also being mindful of what the court does. Now the court could issue a decision in a month that could issue a decision in two months but I can't understate the significance of what could come out of the Supreme Court and what we need to look for. And Attorney Heim mentioned SCOTUS blog. SCOTUS blog is an excellent site that captures all of the Supreme Court cases. If you look up the Shirtloaf case you will have access to the 16 to 20 amicus briefs. You'll have access to the Supreme Court site to the oral argument and to the transcript. And again, this case where it had been relied on I think we're at a point where we really need to see what the court is going to do here. And one final point I will add and perhaps this is concern that two of the justices have of a potential outcome but justices Kagan and Breyer both questioned during the oral argument why couldn't this case have been settled? And I think there's concern in their part where is the court going to go on this issue? We don't know. And so it's only speculation at this point but I think I appreciate the two members agreeing to work with Attorney Heim and to come back to the board and to see if we can develop something. Final thing I will say is one of the criticisms of the city of Boston was that they hadn't developed a sufficient policy and in fact they didn't develop it until after the case was, the lawsuit was filed. Boston has been involved in this litigation since 2018. It's on going into its fourth year. So there are real issues and real costs and real potential concerns here. Attorney Heim, I see your hand up. Sorry, I just wanted to mention one other thing because what you said for folks who are interested while I think SCOTUS blog probably is the best overall resource. When I say Oye, it's O-Y-E-Z apparently how Oye is spelled with the Oye.org is you can listen to the oral arguments before the Supreme Court from January 18th, 2022 if you just want some light listening while you're driving in your car somewhere but they have the entire thing of it instead of reading the transcript you can listen to it at your leisure. Thank you. Oh, yeah. Thank you, Attorney Heim. Okay, so with that I am gonna move to the next item on the agenda which is a discussion on polling locations. Ms. Brazil might be with us this evening. She did present some potential polling locations for our consideration but this is something again I wanted to take this as a first read tonight. We probably need to make a decision at our next meeting in terms of polling locations to allow that our town clerk to send information to voters but I see Ms. Brazil here now and thank you. I told you it would be on the late side so I apologize that you're coming on at 10 36 but I appreciate you joining us tonight. Happy to be here. So I wanna start with just a quick update on election issues. Our home rule legislation that changes town meeting elections was passed by the House and Senate last week and sent to the governor. Voter registration database is still being updated but I believe Galvin's office is close on completing the Arlington work. So that means I can prepare nomination papers for town meeting races and I hope to make them available to candidates at least by Thursday. A date of Tuesday, September 6th has been proposed for the state primary in September. It's an obviously inconvenient date following the day after Labor Day and the likely first day of school from any communities. So we're waiting to see where they go with that. I want everyone to understand vote by mail and early voting are not currently allowed under the law. The legislature has announced they're planning to debate changes to election law starting on Thursday. But of course there's no telling when we'll see results. Until they pass the new legislation, Arlington is not allowed to offer vote by mail or early in-person voting. Last year that was reinstated on March 16th, three and a half weeks before our April election. So the best I can do now is make some contingency plans but until they pass the actual law we won't know the rules or requirements, the structure of any of it. So we of course always offer absentee voting but that is not the same as no excuse voting that has been allowed for the past two years. So just that little bit of background and update for everybody. Now onto the logic puzzle that is selecting polling locations. So I wanna just quickly hit some key points from the report provided by the election modernization committee of which I'm a member. The committee put questions on the 2020 town survey and based the recommendations I'm presenting tonight on that data and hope that we can use this opportunity to improve voting access for some residents who have expressed concerns in recent years about their ability to access their polling location. The largest number of complaints in the survey were about the crowding at the pier school and the lack of parking. I note that the Bishop cafeteria is also very small and two precincts are crowded in that space. The committee strongly supports using the Gibbs and the high school. They are on Mass Ave which makes them accessible in a way that Bishop and Pierce are not. I have spoken to Dr. Homan and she believes that both Gibbs and the high school can serve as polling locations this year. Since the election in April is on a Saturday that gives us a chance to test things without the complication of the building being in use by students and staff and we believe that we can make adjustments for the state primary. And of course, the potential of the November election being a larger turnout because of the governor's race. We have at least some time to plan for that. The election modernization committee also believes very strongly and Dr. Homan brought this up when she and I talked. We probably really should develop a parking plan for every location and consider whether temporary sort of temporary signage and short-term parking at some locations would make access for quick in and out voting better. So there's a lot of work that I think we need to do just as a community once we sort of to take best advantage of the locations that we have. If I can screen share, I wanna put up a map. Just I think before we dig into the spreadsheets it might help to make this... It's just sort of visualized. So I just wanna walk quickly through sort of the way the committee and I thought about this. So I'll just sort of start in East Arlington and talk. So right now, one, three and five vote at the Thompson. And sort of, you can see that one and three makes sense. Seven currently votes or has been voting at Town Hall, which makes very little sense in this current configuration. Two, four and six have been voting at the Hardy. Some initial thinking was it could make sense to combine six and seven at the Gibbs, which is sort of nice for proximity, but there's a sort of a thought process of not asking people to cross Mass Ave. And now that the house district line includes six with the other precincts in Middlesex 24, there's a certain virtue in keeping six with two and four. Everybody voting will have the same state rep and it reduces confusion. So Town Hall is very centrally located. So we did get some advice that may have been shared with members of the board suggestion to consider having five and seven voted the Gibbs, which is interesting. There's a lot of recommendations to have nine voted Town Hall, which certainly makes sense based on the proximity. And right now we do have room, we can accommodate three precincts, eight and 10 have traditionally voted at Town Hall, 12 and 14 voted the Brackett. The Dallin hosts 16, 18 and 20. The Pierce, which is small and crowded hosts 17, 19 and 21. So one of the real things we've been thinking about is where can we put 17? Audison, after discussing it with the Election Modernization Committee and Dr. Homan, Audison is probably a very difficult site. It's conveniently located for 14 and 17, but it is up a hill and it has really bad parking. So for people trying to drive there, that would be a challenge. Right now, the Bishop hosts nine and 11 and you can see how with the majority of people in precinct nine here, their Bishop is not, that doesn't make as much sense. And then 13 and 15 have been voting at the Stratton and that probably does continue to make sense. So having walked through that, if the board would like, I can share the spreadsheet. Can everyone see that? We still just see the map right now. Got it, let me get the spreadsheet. Thank you. I'm a wide awake, I'm sure I can get this. All right, is the spreadsheet up now? Yes. All right, awesome. So just to review, these are the current locations. These are the recommendations in the election modernization committee report. And then there's just a variety of other options. I definitely felt like it was important to offer the board some thinking if the high school was not available, but having talked to Dr. Homan just this afternoon, she feels that it is workable despite the inconvenience, the other inconvenience of having it be a construction site. And then there are two ideas that the board has not seen proposed by members of the public. I've gotten some very constructive feedback via email, which is always greatly appreciated. And as I mentioned before, there is an idea that five and seven could make sense at the Gibbs. And then it really just sort of boils down to, do we push to close the bishop, which one idea would be to have the bishop vote with 13 and 15 at the Stratton, which is a bit of a haul for them. And so at this point, I could walk you through the variations, but it might be better to sort of take questions just because there's about a million different ways to do this. And I haven't stumbled on one where I'm like, oh, sure, everyone will obviously go for that. I think there are gonna be challenges with almost each scenario. Okay, no, no, I think that makes sense. And I think board members, we need to absorb this a little bit with an idea or just a question before I turn it to board members. You would like us, our first meeting in February, February 7th, ideally we should have a decision that night in terms of where the polling locations are just for your own timing. Is that okay? All right, so with that in mind, I will turn it to board members for any questions or comments or a motion to receive the report here. And I'll start with Mrs. Mohan. Yes, I'd like to move or speak. And we're really not voting on anything tonight. I think what we need to do is, of course, I already have an idea in my head because I like my colleagues in the town clerk who's been thinking about this. I guess if we had any further questions or in-depth conversations, we could have it with the town clerk between now and February 7th, I think the chair said. And then I think once again, we're having a discussion on something that we're gonna vote another night. So I'd rather make the motion to receive. And then as the chair has indicated, he'll have it on February 7th. If we haven't already got any questions then, that's when I'll have my conversation. But I can say right now, also having spoke with today with Mrs. Cropelta, I have a plan A and B, and I think A is probably going to be the one that I think we'll all agree on. But I will say the town clerk has the unfortunate job that as well as this board, no matter what plan we take, not everybody's gonna be happy. And I accept that. And having moved precinct 17, when it could no longer be at high. So thank you, Mr. Chair. Okay, thank you. This is Mohan. Mr. Hurd. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you, Mr. Resil. Just one question on the high school. Where in the high school would be the proposal to have the voting take place? My understanding is the red gym. Okay. So it's fairly clear access from the back parking. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I'll trust Dr. Hurdman's opinion that that's a workable site. Just as I drive by and look at the construction going on and see it's almost unfeasible, but I'll trust the experts. Yep. And again, thank you for the presentation. I certainly will look at all the information that's provided to us and just look at, I'm sure we, I know we have and we'll continue to get resident feedback. I know polling locations are very near and dear to certain voters hearts. I have one specific memory in high school back when we had answering machines. We pressed the button where somebody was screaming at my father for five minutes saying it was the worst thing that the Board of Selectment had ever done. And it was, they moved to polling location. So there's a lot of emotions that run high with polling locations. So it is something that we want to take into consideration. And I look forward to working with you on it. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Hurd. Mr. Diggins. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I mean, I thought I was just going to pass on every question because I am part of the election moderates committee. I mean, the select board's knees onto it. I worked with Ms. Brazell and a couple of members from the committee on recommendation. But then in your presentation, Ms. Brazell, did you make an argument against having six and seven at Gibbs? I am intrigued by the idea of having five and seven vote at Gibbs. There are a couple of things that I factor into that. The Hardy School has a very large space. So hosting two, four, and six isn't really a challenge in that space. And the Thompson is a smaller space. And so having moving five out of the Thompson and into the Gibbs doesn't not make sense. And so it's an intriguing idea that was sent to me today. So it's possible I would sleep on it and find the flaw. But I think it's worth, I think it's really worthy of serious consideration. Don't find with that, I also hear you correctly when you say the argument, I guess, keeping six being at Hardy was not only that they didn't have to cross Mass Ave, but also me because they are being represented by the same- The same house district, yeah. Okay, all right, well, that's kind of compelling. I guess, I'm sorry, just thinking this through kind of changing my thinking, you know? So then if we went with column P where we are going with the high school available, it seems like then we're just gonna have one polling station, one precinct voting at H.S. Yes, so, and you know, and we'd have 10, this is, you know, I would prefer just from a cost savings to avoid, you know, having 10 precincts, we may need to work with nine certainly for a couple of years until we get more comfortable with the impact of expanded vote by mail. So, yeah, I mean, so, you know, what if we took the top half of column T and the bottom half of column X, column X is a sort of a bold proposal to have precinct 10 vote at the bracket and move 14 and 17 to the high school. And then that would still leave. So, you know, it's an interesting concept. And, but again, it's, you know, somewhat more disruptive. And it's really, you know, there are a lot of different ways to slice this all, but if we were to do, you know, five, six and seven, and then the rest of this column, that's interesting and it solves a number of problems. It reduces the crowding at the pierce. It keeps us at nine precincts, nine locations, which, you know, is only an increase of one, which is somewhat of a benefit. So, you know, there's, that's probably sort of how it's evolved in my head. And the one change, the one significant change is, it does move, you know, it does put three precincts at the stratum and that's, that's a lot. We, I certainly, we want to try it this year and see how it goes. It's possible that for a large turnout election that would be a serious challenge, but I think it's worth, I mean, I've talked to the warden, the election wardens who work the stratum and they think that three precincts is doable. So. Yeah, I mean, do you, do you think it would be possible to have another meeting with AMC before the seventh? Certainly we can raise the question. This is, you know, it's a very enthusiastic bunch of people who care a lot about elections. Right, and so you could, so maybe we could like spend a week or so like getting comments and then have another meeting with the AMC meeting in time to make another recommendation if necessary, you know, here is the OML, you know, so I just put that out there. I mean, so it's definitely, but I'm not insisting by any stretch, you know, it's a logic puzzle, you know, as all the girls that go along with that being so, thank you. And thank you, Mr. Diggins and Mr. Helmuth. Thank you, thank you, Madam Burke for your good work and for your endurance tonight. I look forward to conversations over the next couple of weeks and talking about this one next time. Okay, thank you, Mr. Helmuth. Yeah, and I thought this was important to get this in front of us for us to be able to think about a few things and we've heard from the public. And I saw that suggestion on five and seven and Gibbs. I'm intrigued by that as well. I voted the Hardy School and it seems like two, four and six works very well there. Keep six on the same side of MassAd. So I will look to hear from people in precinct six and reach out to some people, see what they think about it. As I look at this, there's one real issue is what do you do with precinct 17? And that seems to all, it seems to be an issue here. I also want to acknowledge people from precinct nine as far as that possibility of going to Town Hall and then certainly open to that. I do have concerns about Arlington High right now this year because just the use of that red gym for other functions and just access to it before construction is complete. But I'll have an open mind and be ready to talk about this on the seventh. So I want to thank you, Ms. Brazil, for I will next time you're before us, it'll be the first half of the meeting. I appreciate your patience. And did you want to add something? I do, it's a plea to anyone watching, but certainly the members of the board to email me your thoughts and ideas, the more scenarios I have to play with, the better I can sort of filter things. And at the very least explain the pros and the cons of a particular move. Sometimes it's the five, six and seven thing hinges on how many different ballots and house districts we have. And so there's a lot of subtleties and weird little details. And I would love to be able to answer your questions individually, but then also make sure that I'm seeing all the plans so that I can make the most coherent response. And talk to all the school principals, where we're talking about making significant changes. There's a lot of pieces. Indeed. Okay, well, thank you very much. And then we're talking between now and the seventh. So an emotion to receive by Mrs. Mahan, seconded by Mr. Heard, Attorney Heine. Mr. Heard. Yes. Mr. Deeds. Yes. Mr. Elmer. Yes. Mrs. Mahan. Yeah. Mr. DeCorsi. Yes. Madam, let's vote. Okay, great. Thank you. Good night. Good night. Good night, Mr. Priscilla. Thank you. Thank you. So next is item 14. This is just for discussion. I wanted to ask Attorney Heim on this. The warrant is closing this Friday. We have an ability to add things to the warrant. I think you sent something out to board members if they did have something to get in touch with you by the end of this week. But if I could just ask you on timing on that, given the hour, there might be a couple that we could add this evening, but just in terms of timing for board members to get in touch with you. And also, could we add warrant articles on the seventh as we get a draft warrant as well as the board? So I would say that you have really two options if you wanna add warrant articles before the close of the warrant. I'm sorry, two options. One is, if you wanna add warrant articles and you wanna just send them to me, it might not have a vote of the select board. It might be something that's like inserted by the town manager. If there's something that you really find pressing, there are a few articles that are coming from various different committees and commissions. It's not strictly required that the select board takes a vote to put every article on a warrant. It's just the mechanism by which it gets on. And then the second thing I'd just say is that the things that the board isn't ready to talk about tonight, the special town meeting warrant always opens and closes and there've been many years when most of the select board's articles as a body that you all want on the warrant have gone on in the special town meeting warrant instead of being the town that makes sense. Okay, but otherwise we should individually get in touch with you by Friday if we want it on the regular warrant. Yep, that's right. So again, given that late hour, there were two things Mr. Heard had contacted me about perhaps having a warrant article for potential funding for beautification committee that came up. So I think that is something in between he and I we can get in touch with you on that. I also had talked to you about putting on a warrant article similar to what the board did a few years ago in terms of the timing for the town manager to submit his budget right now. He's required to do that on January 15th. We're still waiting for the governor's budget figures and we know that number is gonna change and there may be a way to work out a compromise with Mr. Foskett and the finance committee. So that's one thing I'd have, I can get in touch with you. I just wanna ask if there's any board members who wanna bring something up tonight or if they would prefer to just reach out directly to attorney Heim, I think given that the timing and I think has a courtesy, any member contacting and turning behind between now and Friday, we would get that on a draft warrant without having a vote. And if I could, Mr. Chair. Sure. The third option is and we can check with the select board office tomorrow. Since I've been on the board 1999, the select board has up until the date that the select board's office needs to submit what it needs to submit to the printer. So that's usually middle of February. So we do have more time there in terms of if the full board wants to submit a warrant article or if an individual does to see if he or she myself can get it. So we do have more time beyond this Friday but I think ideally people have their thoughts and they should have it in by this Friday but we do have, this board has a purview up until we have to send it to the printer. We can put it on the regular. All right. And thank you, Mrs. Mahan. And I don't know if there's anything any board members want to bring up now if they prefer to get in touch with attorney Heim and or we can wait until February on that, but I don't see any hands. So I will follow up with you attorney Heim and the two items that I brought up this evening. I appreciate everybody's indulgence on that. So with that, I will move to items 15 and 16 correspondence received item 15 request to rehang Black Lives Matter banner, Rebecca Gruber and Vision Arlington diversity task group and item 16 request for an update on the status of warrant article 25 home rule legislation, real estate transfer which was passed by town meeting on May 5th, 2021 Jordan Weinstein, town meeting member, creasing 21, Mr. Diggins. I'll move acceptance of the letters and I'll mention that I have some information to Mr. Weinstein about the status of that, HRP. Great. Thank you, Mr. Diggins. Do we have a second? Second. I'll second Mr. Diggins to move received. Move received. Any other comments? Okay. Any comments on the motion by Mr. Diggins, seconded by Mrs. Mahan, attorney Hine. Mr. Herd? Yes. Mr. Diggins? Yes. Mr. Helmuth? No. Mrs. Mahan? Yes. Mr. DeCoursey? Yes. Yes, sir. Okay, thank you. New business, attorney Hine? No, new business. Mr. Chapter Lane? Given the hour, no new business. Mr. Helmuth? No. Mr. Diggins? No, thank you. Mr. Herd? I just wanted to say to the people out there, it's cold out and it's been cold, but as it comes to spypond, use some common sense, please. There's lots of people out there today. On a day after four people went into the water, there was covered in snow, which is 101. If you can't see the ice in front of you, then you don't work on it, that we're still walking out there. So I'm not saying to never go out there and skate because you might see me out there at some point when it gets cold, but use some common sense. Thank you, Mr. Herd. Mrs. Mahan? No, no business. And I have no new business either. Move to adjourn. Okay, do a second. That's fine. Second. Okay, a motion by Mrs. Mahan, seconded by Mr. Herd, attorney Hine? Mr. Herd? Yes. Mr. Diggins? Mr. Helmuth? Yes. Mrs. Mahan? Yes. Mr. Diggorsi? Yes. And let's vote. Okay, thank you, everyone. Have a good night. Good night.