 Thank you, Tara. I am Christine Deschler, the chair of the Allenton Finance Committee and I am calling the September 28th, 2023 meeting of the Allenton Finance Committee to order. The first thing I will do is to confirm attendance of members of the committee and that everyone can hear each other. So when I read off your names, if you can answer in the affirmative. Starting with Jordan. Is Jordan here? No. Shane? Shane's not here. Jennifer? Here. Sophie? Here. Sophie? Here. Can you hear me? Here. Ryan? Carolyn's not here. Rebecca? Yes, here. Josh? Here. Grant? Here. Charlie? Here. John? Here. Daryl? Here. Annie? Here. L. Jones? Here. Topher? Here. Peggy is not here. El Tosti? Is not here. Dean? Here. Dean Carmen? I'm here. Can you hear me? Yes. And Dave McKenna? Dave is not here. And Executive Secretary Tara Bradley? Here. All right, if I'm gonna read off the remote meeting script. All right, I'm hoping you can all still hear me. On March 29th, 2023, Governor Healey signed into law a supplemental budget bill, which among other things extends the temporary provisions of the open meeting law to March 31st, 2025. This further extension allows public bodies to continue holding meetings remotely without a quorum of the body physically present at a meeting location, so long as adequate alternative access to the deliberations of the meeting is provided to the public. Adequate alternative access includes providing public access through Zoom video conferencing, which is what we are doing tonight. Ensuring public access does not ensure public comment or public participation. This meeting will not feature public comment. Those wishing to provide comments may do so by emailing our Executive Secretary, Tara Bradley at tbradleyatown.arlington.ma.us. Please note that this meeting is being recorded and that some attendees or all attendees are participating by video conference. Please be aware that other folks may be able to see you and take care not to screen share your computer. Anything that you broadcast may be captured by the recording. All supporting materials that have been provided members of this body are available on the town's website unless otherwise noted. The Chair will recognize members wishing to speak who hold, to raise their hand in Zoom by calling upon them by name. Please do not speak until you are recognized until your name is called. Please remember to mute your phone or computer when you are not speaking. And remember to speak clearly in a way that helps generate accurate minutes. And finally, each vote taken in this meeting will be conducted by roll call vote. All right, turning to our agenda. Can everyone still hear me? Yes. Can people hear me? Yes, yes. Yes. Yes, we can hear you. All right. Because I am the subject of the complaint that has been, I am a subject of the complaint that has been filed against the town of Arlington for an open meeting violation. I intend to accuse myself completely from this meeting and I'm turning it over to Al Jones to take over in my stead. I am so as not to chill any discussion or debate. I'm gonna remove myself completely from the meeting and Tara Bradley will email, text me when you have completed your work on this agenda item and or if there are any questions that you might have for me and when Tara texts me to say that you have finished your business with this agenda item, I will come back and we'll finish up the meeting. Does everyone understand that? Yes. Yes. All right, so I will be leaving the meeting. Thank you, Al. Okay, everyone. Tara, could you put the complaint up from the package that has the complaint and town councils memo and the draft response? Yes. And has everyone read this thoroughly and understand it? Yep. Yep. Are there any questions or comments about it? I think town councils responses fine. Okay. Or I mean, the one question seems to be should it be joined between all three bodies that are mentioned as opposed to, I guess having separate responses? I think the way, could you scroll down to the draft response, please? Yes, I think the way it's written, it says insert board or committee. So I think basically he'd send three separate, very similar. Well, I guess it has to jointly respond. I think he mentions like you could just do one. Okay. I don't know like the select board or the school committee has any opinion on that? Do we have any preference, does anyone have any preference one way or the other? Mox, Nix. Does that mean no? Doesn't matter. Well, if there's no discussion on this, I would entertain a motion from anyone. All right. So I'll move that we take about authorizing, excuse me, authorizing the town council to file a response on our behalf based on the draft of which he has provided us. Second. So they're all moved and Tofer seconded? Yes. Okay. Any discussion about the motion or any questions about the intent of the motion? I have a question. Charlie. The town council is leaving. So who's actually going to carry this forward? Well, I think I believe the motion was for the town council to do it. It doesn't mention Doug Hyme. So I assume whoever would be the new or interim town, okay? When's Doug leaving? That's actually news to me. October 6th. Okay. I think if we vote tonight, he should be able to get this out before he leaves. But if not, I think it's the responsibility of the town council, whoever that might be or it might be acting town council. I don't think we can go without a town council for very long. Is that Charlie? Yes, thank you. Any other questions about the motion? This is Sophie. Sophie. I just wonder if in the motion we should say whether or not we authorize it to be a joint response if other boards want to do it joint so that they don't come back to us with the same question. Could Daryl, could restate the motion so that either of those would be acceptable, either a single or joint response in the individual response? I think about authorizing the town council to file either a joint or single response. Does that work? I think so. On our behalf based on the draft which he's provided us. Any comments about that amendment? We need a second. Sounds good. Second. Okay. So hearing none, I think we should take a roll call on this usual manner. Jordan. I vote yes. Shane's not here. Jennifer? Yes. Sophie? Yes. Brian, Carolyn, not here. Rebecca? Yes. Josh? Yes. Grant? Yes. Charlie? Yes. John? Yes. Daryl? Yes. Annie? Yes. I guess is acting chair I'll skip Christopher? Yes. Peggy and Al Tosti not here. Christine not voting Dean? Yes. David? David's not here? Nope. Okay. So I believe that's a majority of the quorum and the vote is passed. Okay, I'll text Christine. Okay, thanks. Thanks, Alan. Sure. Now we can all go back to making apple butter or whatever we're doing. I don't want to know. I wish for that. The apple butter is great. It takes hours. Apple butter is a code for something. Yeah. Yeah. Not sure I want to know. But I've made apple butter many years of making apple butter. Apple butter comes after apple picking. Yes. Yes. Or a trip to Demolwens or whatever. Yeah. 89 cents a pound. Oh, that's cheating. That is cheating. Okay, Christine, Andy the camel. All right, thank you. That was quick. Thank you. So you have taken a vote and can you tell me what the vote is? The vote was affirmative, unanimous of everyone present and voting. And I refrained as acting chair. To support the town council. Darrell, could you restate the motion? To authorize town council to file a response on behalf of the finance committee, either jointly with the select board and school committee or singularly in the manner set forth in the draft response attached to town council September 19th, 2023 memo to the committees. So, Christine, we authorized either a joint response or a single individual response. And Charlie noted that town council is a short timer, but hopefully he can get this filed before he leaves. Can I request Tara, would you communicate that vote to town council tomorrow? Yes. Okay. All right, thank you all. All right, so there's really nothing else on our agenda tonight, other than I would like to have a very brief discussion about what next Thursday's meeting will be on. We're gonna be visited by the deputy town manager, Alex McGee, who will talk to us about at least one, maybe two, but probably only one contract ratification that will be in the warrant for the special town meeting. That article will be at the very end of town meeting because the hope is that there'll be an agreement with the second union by the time before town meeting closes. So he'll have some numbers in a description about the contract for us next week. He hopes to get something to meet by Tuesday and I'll get that out to you all before, hopefully before we meet on Thursday. The other finance article is, I think we've already covered it, it's the 400,000 contingent ad into the school budget, contingent on the override. Those are clearly two finance articles we'll have to report on. And I know that there's been discussion about the finance committee waiting in or not waiting in on the MBTA's communities law and we'll discuss that next week. Whether we should or should not wait in on any part of it. And if so, what that would look like if we did. So that will be a week from tonight. Anybody have anything to add to that right now? We'll hold off on actually discussing or debating or commenting next week. But I just want people to understand what we'll be doing next Thursday. Also with town meeting starting, we will do what we typically do, which is the finance committee will meet a half an hour before town meeting, at least the first night of town meeting. And then we'll see how it goes. I think we all know that the most of town meeting will be taken up with non-finance articles. So we may be just cooling our heels for a while before we actually get into any finance articles. So that's that. Anybody want to say anything about how town day went? Well, we were commenting on, we didn't have candy or anything, but then realizing that if we had candy, we'd be spending funds and that would look bad. And the bare bones was being fiscally responsible. Oh my God. Do you really think people would have noticed? I don't know. That was just a point of discussion. That was for fun. It was bare bones of a tent for sure. Oh, we did talk to one person in precinct 18, who might be interested. I don't know if he's reached out. I am not, but that's good news. Okay. He's a retired finance guy. So he was interested. So we'll see. All right. I had one person come up and say that they might be interested and I referred them to Tara. So I don't know if that got through. All right. Good. That's good. I had one guy come up to me wearing a blue lives matter cap. So I should have been a little more attuned to his ideological perspectives and learned that he hates DEI and thinks we shouldn't be spending money on it. And meanwhile, I could feel Rebecca behind me laughing her head off because that would have made me honored with this guy. Yeah. I had one person want to talk about the override, right? Which was, you know, so, you know, it was an interesting, not a lot of people coming up, but yeah, a couple of conversations were interesting. Do you think it's worthwhile to do this in future years? People who were there? Well, I'll relate. So Chris Moore, who's the, this year's chair of the Capital Planning Committee and he was the one who was really interested in doing it, his view was maybe we only need to do this every few years. So. Well, I think it was tough too. It was a tougher day for traffic this cause of it. Yeah. It was really rainy in parts of the day. So yeah. I would also suggest that if we did it consistently, people would be used to the idea that we were going to be there. And if we did something to draw people into the booth, quiz to take, materials to review, whatever, we might draw more people in. And, you know, I was a deadbeat. I was only in one booth of the six that I should have been in this year, but in future years, if we want to do it, I will help with that. Yeah. Frank has always introduced something about the water and sewer budget to make it work. Yeah. That'll pull him in there, Grant. Right? I mean, it's interesting that, you know, we say, maybe do it only every so often. And I was thinking, well, we could do it when there's some big issue coming before the town that might draw interest. And here we are with like two big issues. And it doesn't sound like anyone, you know, had a lot to say about them. What more interesting finance issues could there be? I think there are other booths addressing, right? So that, you know, there's investment around to booth, there's stuff on housing, right? There's other booths out there that we were stopping at. Yeah. We did have one person come by early and ask about the windows and more windows than Winslow Towers and Timor was there with me and he dutifully took down the information. Some, it was a capital question and it was not something that was in the capital budget. It was funded in some other way and she didn't know how. So, at least one person was on a mission when they came. Well, even though it wasn't well-attended, as you might think, maybe it's because of the weather, but there was a presence and people did have questions. And so, you know, we'd had somebody there to answer them. It does sound, you know, reasonable for those that went. When we had the booth, when I was chair, I always provided the, every booth member with apple pie and ice creams. That was missing. We call that. You could still do that, Elle. Excellent idea there. Can we get that retroactively out? Well, I'll make an apple pie for our first meeting, if you like. That'd be good. Okay. Yep. Apple ginger guys, gotta like ginger. I mean, we could put together some more handout type stuff. You know, one page on the budget cycle, another page on the, water super-process. Two different committees did, but a comparison on tax rates of our neighbors, things like that, just, you know, simple handouts. Nothing fancy. Grant, you could do a poster board on water and sewer. Yeah, how are you often back in this apartment, right? Yeah, the par for would have been, actually nice to have it, it's possible that, right? Yeah, but we don't want a lot of people falling asleep in front of, you know, in front of a Zunmass have. We could all donate some candy. Yes. Yeah. It's actually some good ideas here. So maybe we'll follow up for potentially next year. Cool. All right, is anyone have anything else for us tonight? I want to thank you all for coming out virtually to this brief meeting. I appreciate it. Had to be done, appreciate it. And then I will see everyone on, hopefully everyone on Thursday to really fit down to business with regard to the special. I will entertain a motion to adjourn right now. So moved. How come? All in favor? Aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? All right, we are adjourned. Thank you everyone. Good night.