 So hello everyone, it's Wednesday, May 4th, 2022. The fourth session of Arlington's annual town meeting is now open. Before we get started, I want to address a few points about improving the quality and pace of the meeting. First, a phenomenon we've seen since going virtual is that there's been a lot of points of order that aren't really points of order. We had about 20 of each of the first two nights and 10 this past Monday, which is an encouraging trend in the right direction. The comments might offer helpful information to the meeting, but that's not necessarily what a point of order is for. You should raise a point of order only if you believe that you're preventing the meeting from getting procedurally derailed by a mistake or oversight that needs to be corrected right away. Tech related questions should go to Q&A and also the get help button in the portal on the left-hand side. And I'm happy to take time between meetings to take feedback or to explain procedural details, or if you want to get an answer about what's going on in the meeting in real time, I encourage you to connect with other town meeting members in group chats, Slack channels, et cetera. The town meeting members who were kind enough to pull together this year's new member orientation would be happy to connect you. If there, if however, there is a question about, like there's uncertainty about what we're actually voting on, then that's something important to actually raise. If there's some ambiguity about, for instance, what we're actually voting on, but I'll try to be very explicit and clear about that when we're voting. Second, we closed three articles at each of the last two nights of town meeting, ignoring the first night, which is very different from the rest because of the consent agenda. We're on pace to finish in July. That's concerning because if we don't finish by June 20th, we will not have a town budget when the next fiscal year begins. And that would be problematic. I'm already exploring ways to speed things along some procedural and some technological, which I'll get into in a moment. Something that town meeting members can do is to keep remarks tightly focused on the matters we need to vote on. I ask that you put effort into preparing your remarks, either verbatim or just talking points before you're called on to speak during debate. Some folks have a talent for making extemporaneous remarks that are cogent, but most of us do not. Lastly, we have an upgrade to the voting system that should hopefully reduce the errors that you've been seeing. When we open voting, you may end up in the first wave, the second wave, or the third wave, and the wave that you're in, according to your precinct, will rotate from one vote to the next for fairness. If you're in the first wave, you'll be able to vote right away. If you're... This is basically what we've been doing all along, but this will actually be enforced through technology now. If you're in the later waves, you'll see a message saying your voting controls, this will be in your window and your voting window, it'll say your voting controls will be enabled in two waves or in the next wave. So look for that text in the screen if you're wondering why your voting controls have not come up yet. In the interest of time, we're going to skip the swearing in of new town meeting members at the meeting. If there are any new town meeting members who have not yet been sworn in, please contact the town clerk, Julie Brazil. I now recognize the chair of the select board, Len Diggins. Thank you, Mr. Chair. It is moved that if all visits to the meeting are set forth in the warrant for the annual town meeting that's not disposed of in session, when the meeting adjourns, it adjourns to Monday, May 9th, 2022 at 8 p.m. And one more thing, Mr. Moderator, may the fourth be with you and may it be with all of us tonight. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Thank you, Mr. Diggins. Do we have a second on Mr. Diggins' motion? Second. Okay, we have a second. With hands in zoom, are there any objections? Seeing none, we will reconvene at the time that Mr. Diggins said Monday, May 9th at 8 p.m. I did accidentally skip one thing in our agenda, which is the Star Spangled Banner. So let's actually circle back to that. Can we bring up the... We should have a new video tonight. Great, thank you. That's the Morgan twins. Thank you for sharing your talents with us tonight. I feel like this is turning into Arlington's Got Talent, and I love it. All right, so let's move on. Let's see. I will now call for announcements and resolutions. Let's enable raise hands if it's not already enabled. Anyone have any announcements or resolutions? I was expecting at least one. Yes, Mr. Warden has his hand up. Let's allow him to speak. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Name and precinct? John Warden, precinct eight. Mr. Moderator, fellow town meeting members, I rise while I don't really rise. I'm still sitting here to release my hold on article 14 of the town warrant, which was on the consent agenda. And my reasons very briefly are this. Article 14 looks for a study of the possibility of insurance aggregation by Mr. Fisher, Andrew Fisher, precinct six, looking at the millions and millions of dollars that we all in Arlington spend on car and property insurance. And if we could somehow get that together, maybe we could get a better deal. I think that's his theory. Anyway, he filed the article and unhappily he did not get reelected town meeting. So when I saw it on the consent agenda, I took it off, not realizing he hadn't been reelected. And then we spoke afterwards and he said, well, I'm not gonna go forward with that this year. So then I look for a way to reverse the action I had taken in his behalf. But he said he will be getting in touch with town meeting members to see if there are other people interested in exploring this rather interesting topic. Thank you. Great, thank you, Mr. Warden. And so Mr. Warden and I kind of discuss this ahead of time. So this will allow us to kind of skip any discussion or debate on article 14 when that comes up, hopefully tonight. Any other announcements or resolutions? Seeing none, let's now present any reports that are ready to be received. Mr. Foskett. Mr. Moderator, I moved that article three be removed from the table. Do we have a second? Okay, we have a second from Ms. Brazil. Any objections? Raise hands and zoom if you have an objection. Seeing none, we are now receiving reports. We now have article three before us. Raise hands and zoom now if you have a report that is ready to be received. Mr. Baraglu. I'm muted now. Yes, I can hear you. Thank you. I did submit a photo at some point. I'd like to submit the report of the remote participation study committee to town meeting. That was, I think, put on the website today. A hard copy should be available in the select board's office. Okay, do we have a second on that? Second. Okay. And any objections? I see no objections. We accept your report. Do you want to speak to it at this point? You would have to. Yes, I have a short presentation I sent in. It's in PDF format. That's it. If you could, I'll just say next slide as we go. So, Yep. And just, you know, you have four minutes. So go ahead. All right. So my name is Mustafa Baraglu. I'm the precinct 10 town meeting member and the chair of the remote participation study committee. Next slide, please. The remit of our study committee was formed last year at town meeting with the goal of studying the benefits and challenges of providing hybrid meeting options to Arlington's public bodies. In this case, a hybrid meeting is a meeting where there are people gathered together in a room and other people are joining them remotely via technology as we're using right now. We started on September 29th, 2021. And on the next slide, I'm a very brief overview of what we've done. We gathered a wide variety of information, which we'll get into detail in the coming slides. And from this information, we identified a desire from the town meeting members. Go back, please. We identified desire for continued access, remote access to meetings, but we also identified some very similar concerns. We presented our findings to the select board and obtained support for hybrid meeting pilot program in the fall of 2022. And we're currently working towards implementing that plan along with the town manager's office and other bodies. In the next slide, we have a summary of what we gathered. We ran two surveys, one to get the input of people that sit on town meeting boards, committees and commissions, one from the general public. We had good responses from both sets of surveys, similar themes emerged. People are definitely seeing the benefit of remote access where it's easier to get to the meetings in terms of especially if you have challenges with childcare, elder care, transportation and many other impediments to going to a meeting. But there's also similar challenges perceived in terms of parity of experience and technical challenges that people feared. We spoke with some experts that have shown that remote meetings don't inherently increase the diversity but do increase the ease of the existing participants, which is a topic that I think needs further exploration. And we also reached out to state representatives to monitor legislation and because all remote meetings are currently set to expire this summer and therefore you'd have to go to all the meetings in person going forward. So a hybrid option might be useful. On the next slide, we took this information and brought it to the select board in February. And we had a couple of key recommendations, one that we asked for the select board and the school committee to encourage meetings under their peer reviews to provide a remote option into the future. We asked the select board to invest in locations of technology for the pilot program. And we also committed ourselves to helping implement this pilot program by working towards policies, suggested recommended policies, optional policies that they can take. The select board overall was in support of our recommendations and referred to the town manager to review the budget. And we have received some external funding for this pilot program. On the next slide, I'd like to wrap up with where we are right now. The committee is working through recommendations and details of trying to get help the town manager's office get the hybrid meeting pilot program running. And I'd like to make a call out to Jim Feeney who's working on this in particular with others of course on our committee. And we continue, we've identified a good range of committee boards, commissions and committees, but we are open to others that would like to come forward if you need, if you're interested, please contact me or anybody else on our committee. Our goal is to gather information from this pilot and in particular verify where there's been equitable engagement between remote and in-person participants that the technology was suitable and that there was transparent policies in these meetings. And the results of this pilot will inform our final recommendations to the 2023 annual town meeting. With that, I'd like to thank this audience and I'd also especially like to thank a very hardworking and focused committee that we've had since September. So thank you again. Great, thank you, Mr. Baraglou. Do we have any other reports that are ready to be received? If so, you can raise your hand and zoom. Okay, seeing none, Mr. Foskett. Moderator, yes. I move that article three be laid upon the table. Second. Okay, so we have a motion by Mr. Foskett, seconded by Ms. Brazil to lay article three on the table so we can come back to it another night for more reports later. Raise hand and zoom if you have any objections to that. And seeing none, it is unanimous vote. And so article three is now laid upon the table. So we now have article 12 before us. So let's say, and this is, this article is coming from the report of the select board. So I will invite the select board chair, Mr. Diggins. Anything you want to introduce about this, about the select board's vote on this article? Thank you, Mr. Moderator. And so the select board, oops, that's my screen there, you know. Oh, I think we shared the screen and that caused me to lose things. Hold on a second, we just get it back up. Okay, there we go. The select board unanimously voted positive action on this article. Though we recognize that such a ban on single use plastic bottles would be more effective if done on a statewide basis. We agree with the proponents that we should become one of the leading municipalities in the Commonwealth to ban the sales of these water bottles and to demonstrate to our state legislators that more and more communities are wanting to do more to decrease the generation of plastic waste. In the face of major environmental challenges, we are grateful to residents who lead us towards becoming part of the solution, even if it's just a tiny part at the start. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Thank you, Mr. Diggins. And let's see, we have, I believe, co-chairs of Zero Waste Arlington. Either of you, I don't know if we decided which of you two will kick this off, either Ms. Sankalia or Mr. Slotnick. Do you want to speak to the article that your proponents have? Can we bring both of them on the panel? Yes, this is Larry Slotnick, yes. And name and precinct, please. Larry Slotnick, precinct seven. Good evening, Mr. Moderator. I'd like to say a few words about the impetus behind Article 12 before I introduce a colleague and a video. The committee I co-chair was established by town meeting more than two decades ago as the recycling committee. In 2019, this body agreed to a name change and an expanded mission, which states to foster greater participation in all forms of waste reduction to improve health and restore the environment. It had become clear that China's 2017 National Sword Policy was ending their decades-long importation of North America's single-use plastic recyclables. And I have air quotes around that word. And our eyes were collectively open to our community's massive scale of plastic waste generation and its subsequent incineration after passing through the JRM sorting facility. We feel Arlington can be proactive and we hope that Article 12 will spur a discussion about the consumption of single-use plastics in our town and about alternatives to the purchase of bottled water. We'll hear tonight about an expected $50,000 earmark in the 2023 state budget for outdoor water bottle filling stations in Arlington to compliment the more than a dozen indoor stations found in our municipal buildings. We'll be strategic about how we design and locate these so they become a manageable and desirable public amenity. It's widely agreed that we cannot recycle our way out of the crisis of plastic waste. So please recognize my colleague, Jennifer Campbell, for her video presentation. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. I thank you, Mr. Slotnik. We don't have a timer on screen but I am running a timer and we have about, let's say, five and a half minutes left. Okay. Of Mr. Slotnik's seven-minute time slot. Jennifer Campbell, for Precinct 9. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. I'm pleased to present Article 12 on behalf of Zero Waste Arlington with this prerecorded video. Zero Waste Arlington is proposing Article 12 to reduce single-use plastic water bottles. This is in response to increasing concerns from our community about plastic pollution and its impact on our environment. The United Nations calls it a plastic crisis. Each year around 400 million tons of plastic is produced worldwide and 40% of that is single-use, meaning plastic only one time before it's thrown out. All of that, described as plastic, is destroying habitats, harming wildlife and contaminating food chain. Plastic is made from fossil fuels in an energy-intensive process that emits greenhouse gases and hazardous chemicals. Plastic lasts virtually forever. As it degrades, it breaks down into smaller and smaller microplastics which remain in our environment. And plastic is very difficult to recycle. Recycling rates are low to begin with and even when it does happen, every time plastic is recycled, it's quality deteriorates. So either new plastic is added to extend its life or the recycled plastic is disposed of either incinerated or land-filled after a couple of recycling rounds. We can't recycle our way out of the plastic crisis. We need to actually reduce our consumption. Single-use plastic bottles have environmental costs, including greenhouse gas emissions at every stage of their life cycle. From the resources used to extract the water for bottling to produce the product packaging to transport it by truck for sale and ultimately to manage plastic trash. Article 12 would address this by prohibiting a sale of non-carbonated water in plastic bottles with one liter or less. This would apply to any business in Arlington selling bottled water as well as to town-owned buildings, including schools, effective November 1st, 2022. There are some exceptions. Carbonated and flavored water like the seltzer that you see pictured here would not be regulated by this by-law. Containers larger than one liter are also exempt. So gallon jugs would still be allowed. And if an emergency is declared that requires bottled water, that would be exempt as well. Massachusetts residents throw away over one billion plastic beverage containers every year. They end up in landfills or incinerators which create toxic emissions and pollute our air and our water. Only around 20% of these plastic bottles get recycled. The majority end up in the trash in part because they're often consumed away from home where there may not be a convenient recycling option. And the rest end up as litter as you can see in these local photographs. Most water bottles are made from thinner and lighter PET plastic which makes them even more likely to blow around and become litter. All too often, plastic litter ends up in our waterways and ultimately in our oceans. Plastic is one of the leading threats to our marine ecosystems and to marine animals. This is also where a lot of degradation into microplastics occur, which get ingested by wildlife causing them harm and ultimately getting incorporated into the food chain. Article 12 is really aimed at bringing about a culture shift. The best alternative to bottled water is tap water and we encourage people to drink it. In restaurants, from water fountains and bubble refill stations and by carrying refillable water bottles. And since carbonated and flavored water are exempt from this bylaw, if a customer wanted to buy a healthy non-sugar beverage, they could still purchase something like a seltzer. We got our water from the protective quabbin in which you set water sheds and reservoirs. Our water is very high quality as well as a low cost and local resource. And this is an example of a water refill station which are already present in most public schools as well as several public buildings. Zero Ways Arlington is launching a campaign called Arlington on Tap to promote our tap water. We're mapping out the availability of existing drinking water fountains and water refill stations. And we're reaching out to town stakeholders to explore the feasibility of adding more of these. We estimate that the largest retailers in town sell a combined 750,000 12 ounce water bottles annually. Zero Ways Arlington is also reaching out to small businesses to understand the impact this would have on them. We visited 20 small businesses to date and most reports selling one to 200 bottles a month. Losing any amount of revenue is an understandable concern for them. At the same time, there are 21 other communities in Massachusetts that have passed similar retail bans starting with Concord in 2012. Consumers and businesses in these communities have adapted and we think that Arlington can too. We also think that most consumers who go into a store to purchase bottled water will buy an alternative if one is provided to them. Stores can still sell carbonated and flavored water as well as other beverages. Article 12 is supported by Sierra Club, Massachusetts, the Conservation Law Foundation, the Mr. River Watershed Association, as well as local groups like Sustainable Arlington. Voting yes for Article 12 will reduce litter. It will help reduce our town's carbon footprint and climate change impacts, protect our waterways, and show the town's continued environmental leadership. Thank you and we are happy to take any questions that you have. Great, thank you. And so we're gonna pause that video. And okay, and we have two proposed amendments to the main motion. Can we bring up Mr. Wagner? Let's see, if we bring up this speaking cue, then he'll lose his spot there. So maybe we could just bring him up directly and we'll just keep a separate timer. Can we do that? Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. Name and precinct. Thank you, Carl Wagner, precinct 15. I'm also the author of, I guess, you call it the Wagner Amendment on Article 12. It's a very simple amendment. Instead of the main motion which I support, which says a volume of one liter or less should be in the definition to be banned, I would change that to a volume of less than one liter. The thinking here is that one liter bottles are quite useful. They're not really single use. They are useful for purposes of span activities or multiple days, people visiting town, to risk, for example, those starting trips from Arlington, such as walkers or hikers, as well as those that might come to Arlington and use our fitness trails or our roads and visit places here. Also, I was told by a member of the proponents that research shows that predominant sales of single use bottles are in the 12, 16.9 and 23.7 ounce sizes. Allowing the larger bottles like one liter and I suppose 32 ounces, which is slightly smaller than a liter would not be a large sales item but would have a lot of utility for people that are looking for a multi-use product like that or would like to keep a bottle for multiple uses. I think it would also be easier on our businesses to transition and I would offer that if we make my amendment to allow one liter and smaller, we can always restrict it further but I would think you'll never see or very seldom see one liter bottles in the trash such as what we currently see with the eight ounces and those terrible stubby six ounce bottles that are around. So I hope you'll support my change to include one liter and less in the, excuse me, to ban only less, to include one liter and less in there. Thank you. Great, thank you. And Mr. Weidner, we need an actual motion for you to make that you move to amend the main motion. I move to amend the main motion with my article number 12 amendment dated April 26. Is that adequate? That'll work for me. We already have a second from Mr. Leone. And so we will consider that as well. Thank you, Mr. Weidner. And we have a second proposed amendment. Can we bring up Ms. Bebiars? Josephine Bebiars. And so name and precinct when you're able to speak. Hello? Yes, we can hear you. This is Josephine Bebiars, precinct 15 and I have submitted an amendment to article 12. And I, let me explain it. I'm in favor of reducing plastic in all forms. I suggest that we should extend the effective date through November 23, because that would allow the town to implement the refillable water bottles throughout. It would give time for additional alternatives. As I've been talking to members of my precinct, some suggested that Arlington get a grant to encourage a deposit return for water bottles. And finally, there is an impact on the takeout for food prices. Food prices are higher, labor costs are higher. So the profit that is made by our favorite restaurants and takeout places actually goes towards paying these costs to keep the other costs in line. The other reasons why I'm suggesting this are in the document and I won't take the moderator's time to repeat them. So I think it is appropriate now that I say I move to have this amendment, the Baviar's amendment placed for town consideration. I don't think you can do that right, but you get the idea. Please go ahead. I get the idea. I think the meeting gets the idea. Thank you. And so do we have a second? We do have seconds. The first second from Ms. Tanaka. So we will now consider Ms. Baviar's amendment as well as Mr. Wagner's. Okay, so let's go now. Before we get to the speaking queue, we do have a point of order from Mr. Wharton. So let's bring that up. When you're able to speak, name and precinct place. Mr. Wharton, are you able to hear us? Looks like your microphone is muted. Yes. I can hear you now. Thank you, sir. The John Wharton precinct, the reason I raised the point of order because I wanted to get on the speaker's list that the speaking thing, the request to speak buttons were not shown. It still said attendance check-in or something. And so I just wondered, but I guess they appeared at some point for some people because now I got 14 people ahead of me. Thank you, Mr. moderator. Okay, so I will take a note of that. We'll try to figure out what happened there. I will try to insert you sooner than that because clearly you had some technical difficulties. Okay, I'll split the difference and try to bring you in at the seventh position if that works. Thank you, Mr. moderator. Thank you, and apologies for the difficulty. So we have another point of order from Mr. Rosenthal. Let's take that before we get to the speaking queue. Mark Rosenthal, precinct 14. I just want to say that I had exactly the same problem that Mr. Wharton had. So when we put you right behind Mr. Wharton at the, what's currently the seventh position. Thank you. All right, thank you, and apologies for that. So just to take a note here when we get to Ms. Allison Ampe, Dr. Allison Ampe, excuse me, we'll take Mr. Wharton and then Mr. Rosenthal. Okay, so let's, we have more points of order. Let's take Ms. Hyam. Leave behind precinct 15. I just want to bring up that we all had that same issue, Mr. moderator. So I really do not recommend changing the order. Some of us do want to speak to this article. That's it. Mr. Hyam has a hand raised. Is it about these points of order, Mr. Hyam? Mr. moderator, at your discretion, this is Doug Hyam, townhouse, my apologies. There's an administrative correction that's important to note before we begin the debate. So I just wanted to raise that to the town meeting's attention. Okay, so as far as the points of order, let me just finish that first and we'll get to Mr. Hyam, thank you for that. So since we're kind of in uncharted waters here as far as like this weird order of the speaking queue that seems to affect multiple people, I'll stick with my initial judgment. Now that I see it's a more widespread problem, we're just going to cut that off there and just go with the speaking queue. As we see here with the two changes that I mentioned earlier, and I think that's the best we can do under the circumstances, thank you. And we have a point of order from Ms. Allison Ampey. And... Hi, here's Allison Ampey, precinct 13. I just want to point out I had the same problem, but I chose to put in a question in the Q&A and I don't feel it's fair to be bumped behind Mr. Warden because I did something not to bother town meeting, thank you. All right, so we're going to go with the speaking queue as I discussed, we're going to have like those two adjustments and again, I think that's the best we can do under the circumstances. So Mr. Hyam, do you want to explain this correction? Thank you, Mr. Moderator, Doug Hyam Town Council. I just want to make two quick administrative corrections and I appreciate the folks who pointed them out. This, the proposed vote suggests that this will be inserted as Article 10 to Title 8 of the town bylaws. There already is an Article 10 which was about regulation of single, regulation of polystyrene. So this would actually go into the town bylaws as Title 8, Article 11, single-use plastic water bottle regulation. And then secondly, there's just a very simple typo in section five, exemptions for emergencies. Read sales occurring subsequent to a declaration of an emergency adversely affecting the availability. It should be of quality, of quality of drinking water, not, I'm sorry, the availability or quality of drinking water, not or drinking water. So the second or in the first sentence of section five should actually be an of and this will be inserted into the town bylaws if it's successful as Title 8, Article 11, not Title 8, Article 10, because there already is an Article 10. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Mr. Han, does this appear in the page in the annotated warrant? Yes, sir. The corrections are not there. That's why I'm taking town meetings. Right. So I was wondering if it's possible to just bring that up so folks can see what you're referring to. It's hard to follow the language without having the text in front of us. Of course. To bring that up for Article 12. And Mr. Han, is it possible to summarize those changes again? That's, thank you, Mr. Moderator. Dugheim Town Council, where you see vote language voted, there's a little inconsistency here. It should be Title 8, Article 11, not 9, not 10, it should be Article 11. These are all of our plastic bylaws. We've got polystyrene. We've got plastic bags. This should be Title 8, Article 11 in all instances because we already have an Article 10 regulation. Just the numbering, that's it. And that if his waymen would be so kind to scroll down to Section 5 of the proposed vote, in the first sentence, sales occurring. The second or quality of drinking water, not quality or drinking water. Thank you very much, Mr. Moderator. I'm sorry for taking the time to correct these typos. Thank you for the corrections. I accept those changes administratively. And I'll assume that Madam Clerk has those changes and can make them officially. Okay, so let's get back now to the speaking queue and let's take Mr. Siano. Frank Siano, Precinct 15. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. I had the same speaking problem where I couldn't find the button, but somehow or another I ended up number one, which is the first time in a long time I've been one, first one for about anything. So a couple of questions. I don't understand why I'm in favor of this article, but I don't understand why our federal government under the federal commerce clause doesn't enact something to help us with this plastic issue. And I wondered if we had the power to and I raised that with the proponents and as the presentation indicated 21 other communities have passed this. So I guess the AG has considered this to be okay. My second comment is I wonder why the proponents didn't include other plastic items like V8 bottles and other bottles and finally, I like the amendment. Not non-water beverages, right? Say what? Like beverages that are not water, you mean? That are not water, yes, why just the water? Why not other beverages? Because it's still a plastic issue for the world, for us. Right, well, let's take these one at a time. Did you have a question on the first one about a federal statute or was that just a comment? Well, I guess I'd, yes, a question. How can we do this when there's a federal commerce clause that a hundred years ago on the issue of sugar, the federal government said that communities cannot restrict sugar items because it goes across state lines and that's the province of the federal government. So let's take these in order. Mr. Heim, can you answer Mr. Sianna's question? Doug Heim, town council. Mr. Sianna, it's a very good question. The municipal law unit did in fact vet this issue in a 27-page opinion when Concord first passed this by-law in 2012. It addressed the commerce clause on I think pages 11 to 14 of that opinion. It's quite a lengthy discussion. I agree with you that it's interesting, but the best way I can summarize it is they found that the local concern enough was such that the town could essentially regulate a localized environmental and health condition that they weren't prohibiting sales relative to across state lines or anywhere in the state. They were only seeking to address a localized environmental condition. So again, and by the way, I should thank deputy town council Michael Cunningham for his excellent work on this, but I would refer for a full recitation of that to pages 11 to 14 of the attorney general's office opinion on the Concord by-law in 2012. I'd be happy to forward that along, but I hope that very brief summary is sufficient. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Heim. Thank you, sir. And so getting Mr. Sianna, getting to your second question, can we bring up Mr. Slotnick to answer the question of why this article is restricted to bottles, plastic bottles of water and not other beverages? Actually, before we do that, actually, I'm gonna say that that question actually is out of scope. I'm gonna save us some time here because that's what the article is, is water bottle regulation. So Mr. Slotnick, I mean, I'll give you a little bit of latitude of maybe like 15 seconds if you want something to say something really brief, otherwise we can move on to the rest of Mr. Sianna's comment. Is Mr. Slotnick able to speak? Mr. Slotnick, are you able to unmute? I'm sorry about that, Larry Slotnick, precinct seven. Very quickly, we recognize that bottled water has an extremely, extremely low recycling rate compared to other non-carbonated beverages that also are not covered under the Massachusetts Bottle Bill. As we said in the video, they're often consumed away from home. As you've noticed over the past decade, those bottles have a very thin wall, thinner and thinner wall to reduce the cost of transport and all that stuff. And they just, they're so inexpensive. There are so many things that lead to them being turned into litter and we're just being thrown in trash. Thank you. I think that's enough, Mr. Slotnick. I think that makes it pretty clear that there are unique properties of water bottles other than the liquid that it contains. Mr. Siena, any other questions or comments? Yes, one last comment and thank you. One last comment. The small stores will be impacted by this. I favor the article, but I like the November 23rd extension because hopefully the water bottle companies will switch to glass and the small stores won't be as immediately affected. I support it and I thank you, Mr. Moderator. All right, thank you. Let's take, we have a point of order from Mr. Tosti. Let's take that before we take the next member from the speaking queue. Allen Tosti, precinct 17. Mr. Moderator, in my copy of the Board of Selectments report, there is no sections five, six and seven. It ends with section four. And I assume that's what we're voting on is the Selectments report. Let's see. Mr. Moderator, if I may. Yes, Ms. Brazell, yep. Yes, Julie Brazell, Town Clerk. We made a series of administrative corrections and the first night to restore those and it is correct in the annotated warrant online. So the paper copy sounds like it's out of date, administrative changes were made between when those were printed and what we have online in the annotated warrant. Okay, thank you, Mr. Moderator. Great, thank you, Mr. Tosti. Let's take Ms. Sankalia next. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. Name and precinct. Priya Sankalia, precinct 13 and co-chair of Zero Waste Arlington. Mr. Moderator, town meeting members, one of the key goals of Zero Waste Arlington is to educate the residents of Arlington on how to reduce consumption. And I think Larry Slatnik already spoke about this and reduce consumption and waste and start leading a Zero Waste lifestyle. We're all aware of the ubiquitous nature of plastics in our lifestyles. This article takes a key step towards educating Arlington residents on the urgency of the issue with plastics and coming together as a community to take action towards reducing plastics, even if it's a small step. There's no denying that the effects of our consumption is going to have profound implications for future generations. Last week, we heard very eloquently from Ms. Amund and Mr. François on the Youth and Young Adult Advisory Board. Today, I would like to yield my time to Jonathan Forbes, the resident of Arlington and a junior at Arlington High School who would like to share his thoughts on the article. Great, thank you. Can we bring up Mr. Forbes? Mr. Forbes, you can unmute. And before we get started, is Mr. Forbes a resident of Arlington? Yes, he's a resident of Arlington. Okay, great, thank you. Then he has the right to speak at this meeting, introduced by a time meeting member. Mr. Forbes, go ahead, just state your name and your address, please. Jonathan Forbes, 71 Mary Street in Precinct 2. I first wanted to thank town meeting members for giving youth the voice of matters that impact the future of my generation, in particular those related to the environment. I can start with some personal experience. I run the Students Against Violations of the Environment Club at AHS. A lot of what we do is we work with local organizations like the Mr. River Watershed Association and we hold youth-led trash cleanups. I'd say about 65 to 70% of what we're picking up is single-use plastic bottles. The unfortunate truth is that we can clean an area and it will look pretty good for a couple of days and then we'll go back and it'll be all this new trash there, which is good for our club because we always have something to do, but also really highlights the environmental crisis that we're in and reflects negatively on the general beauty of Arlington. Another thing my club does is we run the recycling within AHS. What I can tell you is that there are significantly less single-use plastic bottles inside of Arlington High than there are in public bins and I attribute that to there being tons of water fountains and water bottle fillers inside the school. My biggest hope for Arlington is that we can create a culture where we'll feel like they don't have to rely on products that hurt our planet, such as single-use plastics and that is done by expanding access to water and public areas like the center of town, outside of schools and in our parks, sort of replicating this environment that we already have inside of Arlington High School. To speak on a larger scale, when plastic recycling really took off in the 90s, we didn't have the infrastructure to recycle all the plastic we produced. We don't have the infrastructure to recycle all the plastic we produce now and we won't ever have the infrastructure to recycle all the plastic we're going to produce in the future. There's nothing that you and town government can do to change that, but what you can do is vote to stop participating in this system and we can cut the amount of plastic that we are consuming. The first step in doing that is by voting to ban single-use plastic water bottles. I hope that Arlington Town Meeting members vote in favor of Article 12, both to limit Arlington's carbon footprint and to preserve the natural beauty of parks in Arlington. Doing so is a key first step in ensuring a safe future for youth who have already begun to inherit problems related to the environment. With that, I believe Article 12 needs to go hand in hand with expanding access to water in public spaces so people have an alternative to single-use plastics. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Forbes. And thank you, Ms. Sencalia. Let's take Ms. Barron next. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. Name and precinct, please. Sherry Barron, precinct seven. Mr. Moderator, I hope you don't judge this out of scope. I am in favor of reducing the use of plastic, but I've been thinking about this article and wondering about other beverages, soda and juices and chocolate milk and whatever else is sold in a one-liter or less container. So I did some research. There was a study by Qantas, which is a sustainable consulting company. Ms. Barron, I just interjected for a second. Unless your comment is going to result in a motion to amend, to include other types of beverages, is there, as an ask, is there relevance to the, okay, go ahead. I'll give you a little bit of latitude, go ahead. All right, thank you. What I've learned is that the packaging and distribution of sports drinks, enhanced waters and soda produce 50% more carbon dioxide emissions per serving than bottled water. So I'm wondering, and I know it was brought up already, about restricting the sale of other beverages, not that I'm necessarily campaigning for that, but why not ban the more environmentally hazardous, less healthy beverages instead of water? Yeah, I'm going to consider that out of scope. This is about the plastic, not about the dietary or nutrition. Okay, I do have something else. The University of Vermont instituted a ban of selling single use plastic water bottles. And as a result, the total shipments of all plastic bottles increased by 20% as people bought other plastic bottled beverages. So again, I mean, I'm just questioning the value of doing this versus other bottled beverages. Thank you. All right, thank you, Ms. Barron. Let's take Mr. Ballin next, name and precinct, please. Thank you, Mr. Modder, Mr. Rodder, Jim Ballin, precinct six and a member of Zero Waste Arlington. I want to just address one of the concerns about this warrant article that we have heard from several town residents, including town meeting members, which is about the availability of alternative drinking water sources if this bylaw passes. And I just want to start by saying, I'm lucky we are in Arlington to have extremely good quality tap water. It's among the best drinking water in the country. The bottled water industry has led us to believe that bottled water is rather, is safer or healthier than tap water. But at least for us in Arlington, that's not the case. Both tap water and bottled water sold in Massachusetts are held at the same drinking water standards. So given that, it really makes no sense for us to be buying our water in single use disposable plastic bottles, which is extremely wasteful and the production of all these plastic bottles contribute to climate change. So I want to just briefly mention the plan we have for the improved network of water refilling stations in Arlington and other measures we are taking to increase the availability of public drinking water options in town. Zero Waste Arlington has launched an initiative as was referenced in the video called Arlington on Tap, which is based on a similar effort in Concord after they passed their ban nearly a decade ago. Arlington on Tap will involve at least the following efforts. As mentioned, we will map all existing public drinking water sources in town. We'll make this available to all residents and visitors and we'll update it as sources are added. Secondly, as part of Zero Waste Arlington's No Plastic Please campaign, we will ask to take our food establishments if they are willing to commit to offering both customers and non-customers free tap water. If they agree, we will add them to the map as well as help promote these environmentally friendly businesses. Number three, we're working to reserve bulk water dispensers from the MWRA, that is to transport on site for larger events such as town day and these are free service provided by MWRA. Number four, we're going to continue to work with the town facilities department on expanding indoor water refilling stations. Due to the excellent leadership of Jim Feeney, the town already has water refilling stations in many public buildings, including nearly all the public schools, many of the town buildings and especially ones that are easily accessible to residents, such as the Robbins and Fox libraries, Town Hall and the Community Center. And lastly, I want to address that we're working with DPW and the Parks and Rec Commission to expand outdoor water refilling stations with a focus on replacing older fountains and targeting high use areas along the bike path and Arlington fields and parks. We've already started these discussions with Mike Rademacher and Joe Connolly. We recognize that some of the older existing fountains are not functional or don't work well and people may have concerns about the quality of the water from older fixtures. We believe that the new combined fountain and water refilling stations will get much more use that will stand up better to vandalism and abuse and allow people to easily refill water bottle brought from home. We have found that people are much more receptive to using water refilling station than the traditional old style drinking fountains. And lastly, I want to mention, in order to expand these outdoor water refilling stations, we are looking to both local and state funding to help move this effort forward. We're going to work with town officials on local funding opportunities, including considering a Community Preservation Act application. And I'm pleased to announce at the state level, our state representative Sean Garberley was hoping to join us on Monday to make this announcement, but he's not available tonight, unfortunately. He's been able to get $50,000 grant to Arlington for water refilling stations into the recently passed most budget. He's working with state senator Cindy Friedman to get some of the language on the Senate side. We're hopeful that this money will stay in the final budget and we'll be able to work with town officials on expanding water refilling stations in Arlington very soon. So for those concerned that we don't have a plan for alternatives to single use disposable water bottles, I just want to assure you that we do and that we are actively pursuing all of these. Please vote yes on the main motion. Thank you. Great, thank you, Mr. Ballin. I want to apologize for my dog barking in the background and quick disclaimer. This is Arlington tap water, but there is not an endorsement of this article. Could we take Mr. Kepline next? Thank you, Mark Kepline, precinct nine. The residents of Arlington are pretty exhausted with government mandates and in the plastic bag ban, which has only produced more paper bag recycling. I would reuse plastic bags myself for lining trash bags and tying up food waste, so they wouldn't smell by trash day and they were very handy. And I'd like to speak to bubblers too. I suggest we get those in first. It's like banning gas stations to promote electric cars and then sort of dealing with the ramifications afterwards. Bands don't help residents in their daily lives working, raising kids and hobbies other than recycling. We would like to just go about our daily activities. And I'd like to ask if any plastic originating from Arlington has been documented in oceans. I mean, this appears to be an Asian problem, not an Arlington problem. So could proponents answer that question? I'm not sure what you mean by that, that water is accumulating like in the Pacific Ocean and that's a problem for Asia. Plastic is accumulating in the Pacific Ocean and it's coming from Asian sources, not North American sources. I'm wondering if the proponents, they talk about ocean plastic and yet I've seen no proof that any waste from Arlington, especially plastic waste, ends up in the ocean. Yet they claim that's a reason for a ban. Yeah, I'm actually gonna declare that out of scope. I don't think we're talking about like this article, there might have been comments to that effect, but this article really isn't talking about reducing, at least the text of the article, it's not about reducing the level of plastic in the Pacific Ocean. So I'm not gonna entertain that question. All right, well, I would suggest for people that if they wanna do more virtual signaling, that they do it with town meeting. Well, I'll stop you there because let's not have accusations of virtual signaling, which kind of diminishes or dismisses the value or the intentions behind people's actions here. So let's not do that here right now. Okay, thank you. Then I yield the rest of my time to Mr. Warden. Okay, let's bring up Mr. Warden. And so if Mr. Warden comes up again, a second time in the speaking queue, then they'll have a reduced time with a five minute time limit, which is determined by our bylaws. Mr. Warden. Good, thank you. Thank you. Am I audible now? Yes, I can hear you, Mr. Warden. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Kaplan. I'll just speak very briefly and I hope you won't consider this out of scope, but a name and precinct, a social security. John Warden, precinct eight. Thank you. Just a little historical note. Some 50 years ago, the Arlington Conservation Association, of which I was president, brought in a suite of articles to town meeting on the environmental front. And one of them was to require deposits on all beverage bottles. And you may, well, you folks are mostly too young to recall, but during the 60s, the bottling industry and the beverage industry decided to do away with deposit bottles, everything used to be deposit and bring in throw away glass bottles. And so we had the same problem with gas glass bottles as we now have with plastic bottles. They're in our lawns, they're in the gutters, they're in the parks, all over the place. So we passed a bylaw that said, in Arlington, bottles must have a five cent deposit. Mr. Warden, can we pull this back in? Because this is drifting pretty far out of scope unless you can really kind of pull this back. Okay. I'm just saying that we were a pioneer at that time in trying to prevent that time of litter. And similarly, we're not exactly a pioneer, I guess we've been number 22, but this to ban these plastic bottles and I'm fully in support of that. And I'm glad that this latest form of litter is hopefully going to be under some level of control as we tried to do, the legislature and attorney general wouldn't let us do that by the way, but later the statewide bottle bill was passed. So we now have deposit bottles on most stuff except water. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Great, thank you. I tried to answer a question to Q&A about this, but the time is attributed to Mr. Kepline's time because it's his speaking slot that he yielded. Okay, if there's nothing else, let's say we're at Dr. Allison Ampey, but this is the point at which we were gonna take Mr. Warden. Let's say we have a point of order first, let's take Ms. Barron's point of order. Yes, Sherry Barron, precinct seven. Mr. Moderator, when I was speaking, I believe I asked a question of the proponents and I'd like to have an answer from them as to why they've chosen water bottles versus other sorts of beverage bottles. Yeah, Ms. Barron, that is not a point of order. That's already been covered. We can speak about that offline. Let's take- I don't recall that was covered. It was recovered. You can review the video. Let's not to take up the meeting's time with that. I can review that later. And let's say we had Mr. Warden. Let's take Mr. Warden still in the queue. If, you know, so let's just bring Mr. Warden up. He used part of Mr. Kepline's time. So a little unorthodox here, but Mr. Warden, was there anything else you wanted to add in your speaking slot now? Name and precinct, please. John Warden's still precinct date. Mr. Monterey, I said basically what I wanted to say in support of this article and the history of Arlington in being environmentally responsible, going way back into the last century. So I yield the rest of my time to whoever's next in line. Great, thank you. And let's take Mr. Schlickman's point of order. Paul Schlickman, precinct nine. I don't believe it's in the rules where we permit people to yield time to other members. Thank you. I will look that up after the meeting. Let's take Mr. Rosenthal next and then we'll be back into the natural speaking order. Mark Rosenthal, precinct 14. I'll try and be as brief as possible. I'm as concerned about plastic pollution and especially microplastics as anyone. And I wholeheartedly support the idea of reducing the use of plastic containers. But the solution proposed here strikes me as both ineffective and also discriminatory. The proponents of this article are proposing that people exercising in Arlington can switch to carbonated and flavored water in plastic bottles instead of plain water in plastic bottles. So I don't see how shifting from one product to another in the same size plastic bottle reduces the use of plastic bottles. Also, you may be wondering why I described this as discriminatory. This ban would reduce the options available to diabetics leaving seltzer water as the only choice available to them. And if the story you happen to stop in at doesn't carry plain seltzer water, you have no options available at all. Now again, let me emphasize that I would wholeheartedly and enthusiastically support a ban on all such plastic bottles in the future, but not until after what refill stations are widely installed and available around town. Thank you. Great, thank you. Let's take Dr. Allison Ampe next. Thank you. Here's to Allison Ampe precinct 13. Although I appreciate and agree with the environmental concerns held by zero race Arlington, unless rise in opposition to this article and to the also to its amendments. I do this because I feel the potential determinants to health greatly outweigh the benefits to the environment. And also because we might be well substituting a visible pollution problem for a bigger hidden pollution problem. My concern already health is that if bottled water is unavailable, people in need will substitute soda, juice or other sugary drinks. 2006 review of over 30 studies published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2006 concluded that the weight of epidemiological and experimental evidence indicates that a greater consumption of sugar sweetened beverages is associated with weight gain and obesity. Although more research is needed, sufficient evidence exists for public health strategies to discourage consumption of sugary drinks as part of a healthy lifestyle. These concerns were for both adults and children. Another metal analysis from 2017 in the Journal of Endocrine Society found diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke associated with soda consumption. For some of these problems in doses as little as two sodas per week, diet sodas also been found to have negative effects. Regarding the amendment, I am regarding the large bottle amendment. I'm against it because it gives the appearance of creating an option, but not really a practical option. One liter bottles are large and unwieldy and I think would also spur consumers to purchase soda or juices instead, especially for children. My concern already pollution with the substitution of hidden pollution for visible pollution is also related to health. Obesity is a major contributor to many diseases, including type two diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, sleep apnea, gallbladder diseases, cancers, kidney disease and more. All of these can potentially land a person in the hospital with one patient for one day in the hospital in average of 33 pounds of regulated medical waste are generated. This is the equivalent of 1,350 single use bottles. Yes, we don't see that medical waste around our town, but it's still being created with potential harm to our environment. So although I agree with the concerns expressed in the article with the article's proponents, I must vote against this article. A systematic approach that addressed all beverages equally would be much preferable as such as adding a deposit on water bottles and then raising all bottle deposits higher. I do a pod zero waste Arlington's efforts on making water filling stations more available and accessible and feel this will aid their efforts, but today I vote you to vote no. I vote you to vote no on this article and its amendments. Thank you. Great, thank you. Let's take Mr. Schlickman next. Thank you, moderator Paul Schlickman. Pre-sig nine motion to terminate debate under all items. Okay, so we have a motion from Mr. Schlickman to terminate debate. Do we have a second? Yes, we have a second from Mr. McCabe. Okay, so let's bring up the vote to terminate debate. And I'm going to assume that was all matters before it, which includes the amendments, the motions to amend. Okay, so we're going to be using our new voting waves system. And so you may be seeing a screen that says that your voting controls will be enabled in two waves or in the next wave. So just sit tight until your controls are displayed. And we're voting here on whether to terminate debate on article 12 of the main motion and the two amendments. And so if you want to terminate debate and get to voting on the main motion and the amendments, then you'll want to vote yes. If you want to continue debate, then you'll vote no. And the system appears to be holding up. I don't see any timeouts or errors and votes are cascading in. So it seems to be working as designed, which is fantastic. And this is a vote to terminate debate on article 12, the main motion and which is comprised of the main motion and the two motions to amend the main motion, which is the Wagner amendment and the Beaviar's amendment. So if you want to terminate debate on all of those motions and get to voting, you'll vote one. And if you want to continue debate on article 12 and the amendments, then you would vote two. Okay, so we still have several folks who, you'll notice that we took the timers off because the timers weren't very helpful other than stressing people out. And I think that they need to get their votes in. I'm just looking at the, I can see the voters here who have not voted who were active in the system, but have not voted yet. So that's Alham Sadat, Jane Howard, Elizabeth Exton, Carol Schwartz, Alia Atlas, John Hurd. If you are at your computer and you can hear me, please try to get your vote in. And if you're in trouble through the portal, you can contact the town clerk or more easily, you could even just put your vote into the Q and A. Okay, so let's just give another 15 seconds because we have almost everybody at this point. Just another 10 seconds, five seconds and we'll close voting on termination of debate. This is a two thirds vote and let's close voting now. And debate is terminated. We've exceeded the two thirds threshold to terminate. And with 197 in the positive, 37 in the negative, debate is terminated on the main motion and the two amendments. So we'll just cycle through the screens and then we will vote on the amendments in the order that they were presented, the Wagner amendment first, the Babiar's amendment second, and then the main motion, which will either be amended or it will not be amended depending on whether the amendments pass. And if you missed your precinct as the screens fly by, you could always go to the view votes button in the left hand side of your portal. Okay, so that's all our precincts. It looks like the voting change that we had in the server seemed to be very effective. So let's now bring up the Wagner amendment and let's bring up the text on that if we can. So voting is now open on the Wagner amendment. Again, we took the timer off so it's not stressing everyone out. And so we'll have a little bit of time here. So this amendment would change the main motion from one leader or less to less than one leader. So it's taking an equal to and replacing it, I'm sorry, it's replacing a less than or equal to with a less than. So one, which means in the main motion unamended, a one leader bottle would fall into this regulation with Mr. Wagner's amendment, if you vote yes, then a one leader bottle would still be allowed. And it's only bottles that are less than one leader that would be restricted. So if you want to allow one leader bottles, amend the main motion so that one leader bottles of water are allowed, then you vote yes. If you want to disallow one leader bottles, which is what the main motion originally states, then you'll vote no. So if you want a restriction on a one leader bottle, then you'd vote no to keep the main amendment, the main motion, if you want one leader bottles to be, let me start over, I'm sorry. The main motion disallows one leader bottles of water. If that's what you want, then you'll vote no to reject this amendment. If you want to allow one leader bottles, then you would vote yes to amend the main motion. Yes, Mr. Newton, yes to allow one leader bottles, no to ban one leader bottles, thank you. That's a much clearer way to say it. Most folks have voted, but we still have a number, we have about 30 folks missing. So I'll just start naming names. And again, if you're having trouble voting, you can use the Q and A to enter your vote there or you can, we just got a bunch of votes that just went in now. So some folks who still, we have not received votes from are Leah Broder, Anne Fitzgerald, Catherine Radville, Amy Lynn Miller, Michael Byrne, and Guillermo Hamlin. If you haven't voted yet, please get your vote in. And we're voting on, okay, just a couple of folks left. Let's give about 15 seconds. We have almost everybody, 10 seconds, five seconds. And let's close voting on the Wagner amendment. So article 12, the motion fails. 95 and the affirmative, 145 and the negative, and the motion fails. So we will cycle through the screens. And once we've gotten all the way through the precincts, we will bring up the Baviar's amendment. Actually, before we bring up the Baviar's amendment, we do have a point of order, which we can take up after we've cycled through the screens here. Okay, so we bring up Ms. Penneron, name and precinct please, and state your point of order. Mr. Moderator, hello, this is Kristin Penneron from precinct 20. Can you hear me? Yes, I can, go ahead. Just to clarify, you did ask me to repeat and identify myself before I had the pop up, allowing myself to unmute. So that's why there was a slight delay. I just wanted to ask about the pacing of the vote because it didn't seem like we were voting in waves this time. And I'm just a little bit confused about when the system is set up to cue us to vote in waves and when the system is set to let us vote all at once. I was actually really taken aback to hear that voting was about to close and that I hadn't been able to vote yet because the previous vote took so long and this one went so quickly. So I was hoping you could just please clarify that procedure for us. Right, so the, and someone's saying in the community that there's no waves on the voting screen, right? So if you were, if you happen to be in the first wave, you... There's your pop up in the first wave, is that what I'm understanding? Right, in the first wave, you'll just go right into voting. So it won't give any indication, it won't have any message about you being in the first wave, you just get put right into a voting screen. It's only if in the second or third wave that you'll get the message that your voting controls will be enabled in two waves or in the next wave. That only happens if you're in the later waves. Okay, thank you very much for clarifying. It's gonna change from vote to vote so that we have some fairness. So like we don't get everyone in a certain precinct always gets the first vote or always gets the last voting wave, like we kind of initially did. And so it's gonna keep kind of cycling through. So sometimes you'll be dumped directly into voting because you were in the first wave, which it doesn't tell you that you're in the first wave, you just, you're allowed to vote. And then the next time around, you'll be put into one of the later waves and you'll get that message that voting controls will be enabled in a later wave. Does that clarify? Thank you very much for clarifying. Great, thank you. And so it will change throughout the night from vote to vote. Okay, so now we're gonna bring up the Baviar's amendment. Which was seconded by Ms. Tanaka. And so vote as soon as the system allows you to vote. And I'll explain it here. The Baviar's amendment amends the main motion to take effect one year later than it would otherwise. The main motion unamended would go into effect, if passed would go into effect November 1st, 2022. So November of this year. And with the Baviar's amendment, it would go into effect November 1st, 2023, one year later. So if you want to delay the main motion going into effect until next year, you should vote yes. If you want the main motion to go into effect this year November, then you'll vote no. Votes are streaming in. Seems like the system is working as intended. Yes, so vote yes for this going into effect November 2023, vote no for this going into effect November 2022, if the main motion passes. Right, this would amend the main motion. Yes, to delay is going to effect until November of next year. Vote no if you want the main motion to go into effect this year in November. Okay, we have most votes in. I'll just start calling off names of folks who have not voted yet. Michael Byrne, Benjamin Rudick, Adam Badick, Christopher Moore, Jane Howard, Elizabeth Exton. If you haven't voted, please vote. If you're having trouble through the portal, then you can type your vote into the Q&A. Otherwise you can call Ms. Brazil. So let's almost everyone's voted at this point. So let's just give 15 seconds again. Seems like this is working a lot more smoothly than it was in past nights. So kudos to the developer for getting this change in. Five seconds, and then we'll close voting. And let's close voting on the Baviar's amendment. Okay, and the motion fails. 77 in the affirmative, 162 in the negative, the motion fails. Okay, so after we've cycled through the screens, we will bring up a vote on the main motion. And we're just a time check. We're at 9.26 PM. Usually we take a brief break around the 9.30, like the halfway mark of the meeting. Let's get this, the vote on the main motion in before we take right after that, we'll immediately take a break. I've almost done seconds in the screens. If you missed your vote, you could always go to view votes button on the left-hand side of your portal. Okay, so let's bring up a vote for the main motion for Article 12. And so now we're, voting is now open for the main motion for Article 12 for voting on the select boards recommended vote of favorable action on Article 12 bylaw amendment for single use plastic water bottle regulation and it is unamended. It is unamended. So this will apply to plastic bottles that are one liter or less in size. And it will go into effect November 1st, 2022. So if you are in favor of a single use plastic water bottle regulation to go into effect this November, you vote one. If you vote one for yes, if you do not want a single use plastic water bottle regulation to go into effect, so that stores can still, in Arlington can still sell single use plastic water bottles unregulated going forward then you would vote no, vote two. Most people have voted at this point. There's about 10 or actually a dozen or so folks left. If you haven't voted yet, please, if you're having trouble on the portal, it seems like we're not having widespread problems in the portal, which is great. You could always use the Q and A in Zoom for your vote or you can call it into Ms. Brazil. So some folks who haven't voted yet but have been active recently in the portal. We have Guillermo Hamlin, Michael Byrne, Joanne Preston, Susan Ryan-Bolmar, John Gersh, and Judson Pierce. So we just have a couple of folks left. We're still waiting on votes from Michael Byrne and Joanne Preston. Let's give just 20 seconds for any votes. You can always get your votes into the Q and A or 15 seconds or you can call Ms. Brazil. Five seconds and then we'll close voting on the main motion for Article 12. Okay, let's close it up. Okay, and the motion passes 82%. 199 votes in the affirmative, 42 in the negative is a positive vote and I declare it. Okay, so we'll just cycle through the screens. We've gotten through one article in half of this meeting so we're on pace for two. I think we'll do better than that, hopefully. And after the screen cycle through all the precincts, we'll take a 10 minute break. Okay, so when we come back, we'll be looking at Article 3 of bylaw amendment to prohibit the use of face surveillance. So until then, let's reconvene at 941. All right, see everyone then. All right, so to start, let's get going. So this is from the Select Board Report, Article 13. And so let's bring up Mr. Diggins as chair of the Select Board. Do you have anything to comment on the Select Board's vote on this article? Yes, thank you, Ms. moderator. And first I wanna say, I had nothing to do with the selection of the music. So indeed it seems like the fourth is with us. On Article 13, the Select Board unanimously supported this article, let me just pull up my notes. We've just voted positive action on this resolution. And we praise Mr. Fisher for transforming an article that was headed to the land of no action into a resolution that we could all strongly support. Whereas from the outset, the Select Board, excuse me, shared the concerns about the abuse of facial recognition technologies. We need to walk the fine line that as I quote from our report, avoids potential issues of preemption by state law and is consistent with the discretion invested in the town manager and department heads under our separation of powers within the town manager act. Thank you, Mr. moderator. Great, thank you, Mr. Diggins. I do wanna just make one brief kind of procedural point that I did speak earlier with someone from the tech side who explained that like there could be a discrepancy where if you request to speak, you may see your position get bumped back as other speakers at the same time were concurrently requesting to speak. And so you'll see your name kind of pop into a slot but then the server will reconcile the ordering and give you a new ordering which might make it appear that you got pushed back but you actually hadn't like really reserved that slot yet. And so it's kind of an optical illusion. And so we're gonna confirm that and maybe we'll have more to report on that at next meeting but that appears to be what might be going on in some cases where it appears that you get bumped back. And so keep that in mind. And so back to the article. Let's bring up Mr. Fisher, Ezra Fisher, the proponent of this article to speak to this motion, to the main motion. Mr. Fisher, name and precinct please. Ezra Fisher, precinct four. Hi all, I am the proponent of article 13, a resolution against government use of face surveillance. A quick procedural note before I get started and to reiterate what Mr. Diggins said, this article is a resolution. The title and brief description in the warrant doesn't make it look like it. And that wasn't my original intent but in working with some allies, our town council and members of the select board, I decided to suggest shifting it from a bylaw amendment to a resolution and the select board agreed. At that point in the process, it's impossible to change the description on the warrant but the longer resolution in the select board report is what matters and what we'll be voting on. Face surveillance or facial recognition is any kind of automated software that attempts to identify people based on their faces. There are many reasons to be wary of government use of this technology. To start with, current facial recognition technology is inaccurate. Actually, it's worse than just inaccurate because in addition to not being extremely good at recognizing any faces, it has been proven to be worse at identifying people of color and women and even worse at identifying women of color. There have already been multiple cases of false arrest based on the use of facial recognition leading to lawsuits against municipalities. Even if the technology were perfect, it would still be against our values. We don't have a surveillance state in this country. We don't believe government officials can walk up to us on a street corner and demand to CID. They can ask and most of us are happy to comply but they can't compel us to. The rights to free speech and free assembly are among our most prized and would absolutely be degraded if the government were able to automatically identify everyone choosing to exercise these rights. And most of all the people disproportionately harmed whenever government surveillance power expands are the segments of our population uniquely vulnerable to any kind of poorly wielded government power. Homeless people, people with mental illnesses, people of color and of course the many people who embody more than one of those categories. Current state law passed as part of the GL Act of 2020 says that local law enforcement can with a court order or in the case of an emergency submit a request with an unidentified image to the state police who are then able to take that image to the RMV and use their facial recognition capabilities to attempt to identify the person. Aside from this specific procedure it establishes for law enforcement's use of what it calls facial recognition search. The state law is silent on all other government uses of face surveillance which creates important gaps that should be addressed. In focusing solely on law enforcement's use of facial recognition technology it does not regulate use of the technology by any other part of government. I'm sure you'd agree that our IT department should also not be running facial recognition software on the 400 plus surveillance cameras our town government operates. By specifying a procedure only for using facial recognition to identify an unidentified person from an image the state law does not regulate passive use of face surveillance. No part of government should be able to feed in a system an image of a known person and ask it to track that person or simply program the software to identify everyone who appears on surveillance footage based on a massive third party database. I believe these gaps must be addressed and I hope you do too. We are not alone in this feeling since the original state law was passed a special commission at the state level was created to study the topic and issue recommendations which it did just about two months ago. Our resolution asked the state legislature to waste no time implementing the tighter restrictions that the commission recommends. While our current town manager and chief of police have said they never have and never intend to use facial recognition we can't always count on having like-minded leaders. As elected representatives it's our responsibility to codify our expectations for how our town should be run particularly on issues as important as the limits of government power. Please join me in voting for this resolution which is supported by the Arlington Human Rights Commission and the Massachusetts ACLU. It will send a message of encouragement to our state representatives a message of encouragement to our state representatives and of principled guidance to our local officials. Thank you. Great, thank you Mr. Fisher. So I apologize that I didn't recognize that this was a resolution as Mr. Fisher explained like that does not appear in the title and it's also not in the section of articles at the end like in the numbered in the 70s this year that are the other resolutions. I was considering having a particular procedure for resolutions. So I apologize I wasn't prepared for that tonight. So here's what I'm gonna do in the interest of well time I'm gonna ask that because this is a resolution when normally different rules would kick in which I'm not prepared to implement tonight. I can ask that folks keep their statements as brief as possible. So let's head now to the speaking queue and let's take Mr. Hamlin. Guillermo Hamlin, precinct 14. I agree with codifying our expectations into this resolution. This assures a standard beyond any particular person serving in their posts. And with that, I ask that we vote for this name motion. Thank you. Great, thank you Mr. Hamlin. Let's take Mr. Tremblay. Mr. Tremblay, if you could unmute. Finally, follow the button. Take Mr. Tremblay. At Tremblay precinct 19. I too am concerned about facial recognition but more so by the federal government and the state than by the town. I have far more faith in our police chief than I do of like the FBI chief, for instance. There's nothing in here that, does this resolution apply to all agencies or just to the town? Right, so to be clear, there's no change in policy here. Is this resolution calling for not using facial recognition by all federal and state agencies or does this apply just to town police departments? Oh, it can only possibly be to the town. We wouldn't have any jurisdiction over the state or federal, right? Well, I know, but it's a resolution. We're calling, we're asking for something. We're calling for a certain action. So you're telling me that we're not calling for the banning of facial recognition by all parties. We're just asking for facial banning of facial recognition by the Arlington Police Department. That's it. No, so unless Mr. Fisher, well, if he scrolls it to the bottom of the article text in the annotated warrants or if you had a printed copy at home, therefore be it resolved by town meeting of the town of Arlington. And then there's three essentially resolution items there. So can we bring up Mr. Fisher again to briefly answer- I'm a moderator. Yeah, I'm still up. And thank you, Mr. Tremblay for the question. The resolution calls on our state representatives to move ahead with legislature that would further restrict facial recognition technology at the state level. And it also sets expectations for a policy set within the town of Arlington by all departments, including the police department and that policy is set by the town manager. Okay, so it says nothing about the federal government use of facial recognition. Correct. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Thank you very much. Great, thank you. Let's take Ms. Henkin, name and precinct place. No, Anna Henkin, precinct six. I want to speak in support of this resolution. I think it's a great idea to make sure that we are stating our values as a town that we don't want to be tracking town residents when they've committed no crime, compiling this kind of enormous amount of data that while most of these facial recognition softwares have dozens of known bugs, they're very better identifying people even if they were perfectly compiling that amount of tracking data on someone is an enormous expense, it's enormous database cost, security cost, and there's an enormous number of security risks. And just compiling that data puts everyone in the town at risk and the town's many, many cameras, if they were connected as such kind of software would be collecting that kind of tracking data on people and you don't need malicious actors or advertisers knowing things about you. I think this is a great resolution. I think it's a good idea for us to state that we don't want this kind of surveillance in our town and we don't want to accept this kind of burden and security risk for our town. And we don't want to place this kind of surveillance particularly on the most vulnerable people in town. I think we're much better than that as a community. Thank you. Great, thank you. So I'm gonna do something a little unorthodox here and again, I apologize that I didn't prepare for this in advance, but we'll see how this goes. We've had a number of speakers speaking in favor. Normally what we would do on a resolution is that we would offer kind of proponents and opponents and then usually we'd go straight to voting. We'll do something a little modified here. So bear with me. Can we enable the raise hands in Zoom and please raise your hand. If you are in the speaking queue already and you would like to speak against this article and I would be happy to take you up next. All right, well, let's take Ms. Baviarz because she's already next in the speaking queue. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Josephine Baviarz, precinct 15th. I'm not sure that raising my hand doesn't, I'm not in opposition, but I have a question please. When we talk about under part A, the exception of responding to emergency situations or identifying a disease person, deceased person, can we be sure that we can use facial recognition to find lost children, runaways, people who, older people suffering from dementia or some other thing who are lost? Would that follow, I mean, would that be allowed under this in general, I really support no surveillance, but when people cannot speak for themselves, I wonder if that would fall into the exception of an emergency situation. Thank you. Thank you. Let's try Mr. Heim. Mr. Heim, do you have an answer for Ms. Baviarz? Doug Heim, Time Council, thank you, Mr. Moderator. I don't think the resolution contemplates regulating the use of facial recognition technology for the purposes of help finding a lost child or something of that nature. So I think it's meant to prohibit a sort of passive collection of facial recognition data for the purposes of identifying people as part of a sort of criminal or quasi-criminal police investigation. Mr. Fisher has a different take on that. I'd be interested to hear it, but I think that we're not trying to prevent use of facial recognition technologies for the identification of like a deceased person or something of that nature. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, thank you. And so since I was a question, let's take Mr. Kepline next, because he's the next in order in the speaking queue who's raised his hand to speak in opposition. So let's bring up Mr. Kepline. Name and precinct, please. Thank you, Mark Kepline, precinct nine. I share Ms. Baviarz's concern. And I have another question which is, are there any documented instances of Arlington residents who've been harmed by the facial recognition technology you want to ban? Thank you. Let's see, who can we direct that to? Is Chief Flaherty on the call? I'm not sure if she's here tonight. If not, we can go to Mr. Chapter Lane. Thank you, Mr. Moderator, Adam Chapter Lane, town manager. Given that we don't currently utilize any facial recognition technology right now, I'm unaware of there being any impacts on Arlington residents from the utilization of such software. Okay, does that satisfy your question, Mr. Kepline? So that would be a no, thank you. Okay, thank you. So I'm gonna do something else unorthodox here. I'm going to ask that folks lower their hands in Zoom. And I'm now gonna ask, is anyone interested in terminating, I would entertain the possibility of terminating debate at this point if you're in the speaking queue and trying to find someone who's in the speech. Let's take Mr. Levy in the sixth position. You hear me, Mr. Moderator? Yes. Okay, name and precinct. David Levy, precinct 18. I move to terminate debate on Article 13, all managed report. Great, thank you. We have a motion to terminate debate. Do we have a second? We have Mr. Hamlin is the second. And we do have a point of order. Let's take up Ms. Stamps. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. My point of order was, I think you said you wanted someone to speak on the no side and you called on Mr. Cappeline, but all he did was ask the question. I don't think he spoke against it. That is a fair point. Unfortunately, termination debate is not debatable and we already have a second. Unfortunately, that is a fair point. But I appreciate your point, but we have to move forward. Thank you. Okay, so let's bring up a vote on termination of debate. I mean, there was some latitude there where Mr. Cappeline had some concerns, I believe. So okay, so we're now voting on termination of debate of Article 13, a resolution for text, resolving to kind of discourage or pushing a direction of discourage is the use of facial recognition technology both in town and at the state level. This is resolution, it's not a change in policy, but it's discouraging the use of facial recognition going forward. And so if you're in favor of termination of facial recognition by the town or the state going forward or encouraging our state representatives to pursue legislation that would prohibit or limit the use of face surveillance, vote yes. If you are not in support of this resolution, then you would vote no. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. This is for the first time in my life that I'm not in favor of termination of debate. I'm sorry, this is for terminating debate. This is not the vote on the main motion. Apologies for that. If that's what the points of order were, feel free to remove yourself. I apologize for that. This is a vote on whether we want to terminate debate. So I'll give folks a little bit more time. Apologies for that. I selected the wrong cell in my workflow. And so we're just voting on terminating debate on Article 13. All the points of order are clear, I think. Thank you for signaling with that rash of points of order. So we can get our procedures back on track. Thank you. OK, so we still have about 25 votes missing. About a dozen of those are folks who have been recently active in the portal. Cell starts giving names of folks who haven't voted yet who've been recently active. John Hurd, these folks should please vote. If you have trouble voting through the portal, you can always enter your vote into the Q&A or column as Brazil. And we should have instructions in the chat. Michael Stern, Michael Ruderman, Brendan Sullivan, Michael Byrne, if you haven't voted yet, please vote. OK, we have almost everyone at this point. Just a handful left. So let's go another 20 seconds before we close voting. 15 seconds, 10 seconds, five seconds until we close voting on termination of debate of Article 13. And let's close voting. And termination and debate is terminated. 213 in the positive, 21 in the negative debate is terminated. And so we'll just cycle through the precincts. If you miss your precinct, you can click the view votes button in the left side of your portal window. After we're done cycling through these screens, we'll take up a vote on the main motion, which is a resolution to take measures to prohibit use of face surveillance. Not a change in policy, but resolving to make changes and to encourage our state representatives to pursue state legislation and also limit or ban the use of face recognition or surveillance by the town government. So let's bring up the vote on the main motion for open voting. And so go to your voting windows and please vote. If you're in later waves, you'll see a map. You'll see some text in your window. It says something to the effect of your voting controls. You'll be enabled in two waves or in the next wave. So just please wait patiently. If you're waiting a long time to get in, because you were in a later wave earlier, you'll be in an earlier wave this time or next time. So we're now voting on the main motion for Article 13, which is a resolution. It's not a change in policy, but it's a resolution to take measures that would, either the town or the state level, we're going to encourage our state representatives to prohibit or limit the use of facial recognition technology. So if you were in favor of this resolution to discourage the use of this technology by local and state government, then you'd vote yes. If you were against this resolution and you don't want there to be any discouragement of facial recognition technology, then you would vote no. And most folks have voted at this point. We're a little bit longer. Some votes that were missing are from the following folks who have been active in the portal recently. Eric Helmuth, George McNinch, John Herd, Michael Ruderman, Michael Byrne, Joshua Arnold, Catherine Radville, Eric Bats, Larry Slotnick, Michael Quinn, Elizabeth Exton, down to just a handful of people now who have not voted yet and have been active recently in the portal. So let's just give 30 seconds. And that should give enough time for all these votes. If you're having trouble voting through the portal, you can use the Q&A, enter your vote there, or you can call Ms. Brazil. And the number is in the chat. 10 seconds left. And then we'll close voting on the main motion for Article 13, which is a resolution for discouraging use of facial recognition for local and state government going forward. OK, let's close it. And the motion passes. 213 in the affirmative, 16 in the negative, 7 abstentions. So we'll cycle through the screens. I will update my records here. You should update the dashboard in the next several minutes. If you're following the tracker that way, if you miss your precinct on the screen, you can always click View Votes in the left side of the portal. Apologies again for misspeaking the vote that we were taking to terminate debate. And that was an excellent use of folks jumping on the Point of Order button. That was an excellent use. OK, so let's move on now to Article 14. So Article 14 was on the consent agenda. Let me just double check that. Yes, it was on the consent agenda, and it was no action. Mr. Morden was kind enough to speak to this during the announcements and resolutions section of the meeting earlier on when we were just getting started tonight. So there is nothing to debate here. We don't have any, like, there's no substitute motion, and there's nothing else to debate. So let's bring up Article 14. Seeing that there are no speakers, let's go to a vote. So this is a no action article. Let me just pull up the text here. The more an article text, in case you're waiting for your voting waived to open up, article text is to see. That's the wrong one, isn't it? Bring it up quickly. Apologies for that. This is a no action article. We have to vote on it. You might as well vote yes. It actually doesn't matter which way you vote because there's no action. It's just a weird procedural thing that we have to do. Article 14, they want article text is to see if the town will vote to establish a committee to examine current issues related to insurance and undertake a survey of the costs of auto and property insurance premiums and claims of Arlington residents. These issues shall include but not limited to cost and efficiency, the possibility of consolidation and timely public access to information or take any action related there too. And this has been voted no action by the select board. So there's nothing to do here. We just have to vote on it. And as Mr. Warden pointed out in the announcements this evening, there will Mr. Fisher, not Mr. Fisher, we saw it tonight, but Andrew Fisher will be pursuing some sort of study group. And so if you're interested in pursuing this, going forward, you can contact Mr. Fisher, Andrew Fisher. But as far as tonight, there's no action to be taken here. We just have to vote on it. And so let's see. We have 207 voting. We're still missing 40 votes. Missing about 30 votes now. So if you haven't voted yet, please vote. 20 outstanding votes. Eric Batts, Mary Ellen Arno, Katherine Radville, Laura Fuller, Flynn Monks, Paul Marshall, Leah Broder, Michael Ruderman, John Herd, Michael Byrne, Paul Schlickman. Most folks have voted at this point. Let's just give another 15 seconds. Another 10 seconds. And then we'll close voting. Five seconds. OK, let's close voting on Article 14. And Article 14 passes 213 in the affirmative, 11 in the negative, and it passes. So we will proceed to do nothing for this article. So we'll just cycle through the screens. And when that's done, we'll go to Article 15. OK, and this is from the Select Board Report. So Mr. Diggins, do you have anything to add about the vote on Article 15? Is the bylaw amendment for noise abatement? Yes, I do, Mr. Chair. I mean, Mr. Moderator, I'll be very brief. So we're now entering into the anti-noise portion of the warrant. And though not indicated in our report, the Select Board supported this article unanimously. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. And we hope that notification by two business days of schedule that is non-emergency, high decibel work during the overnight hours will make it possible for more of our residents to get a better rest on those nights. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Great, thank you, Mr. Diggins. And can we bring up Mr. Slickman? He's already in the speaking queue in the poll position. Let's take him and he is the proponent of this article. And so take it away, Mr. Slickman. Just name and precinct. Paul Slickman, precinct nine. I want to thank the Select Board for the unanimous vote. This got on the warrant because of repeated jackhammers and loud sucky vacuum drain cleaners outside the bedroom window at four o'clock in the morning. And the notification that is provided under this article will at least give fair warning so that they don't show up unannounced. So please vote in the affirmative on this article. Thank you. Great, thank you, Mr. Slickman. Let's see, and we have no proposed amendments on this. So let's go straight into the speaking queue. So let's take Ms. Carlton Geeson next. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Elizabeth Carlton Geeson, precinct nine. I have a question that I know there has been work done on the road that I live on for the last couple of weeks. And all of the neighbors abutting have received this to business day notice that there was going to be significant work done. So I was surprised to see this amendment. I'm sorry, this article, which I'm completely in favor of, but wondered, you know, was surprised that this wasn't already standard practice. So is this because it's specifically about noise versus the type of work or what made created the need for this that is different from current process? No, I'll take myself off. Thank you. Sure, thank you. Mr. Slickman, do you want to answer that question? Certainly in Jewish terms, it's called building a fence around the Torah. The existing bylaw said that non-emergency work could not take place during the restricted hours without the permission of the town manager. Well, it turned out that DPW wasn't really abiding by that and by adding another step, requiring notification for something loud at 4 a.m. Just puts another step in there, which makes it more likely that the town's going to comply with the bylaw. Thank you. Also, and Mr. Chaplain, do you want to weigh in on this? Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Very briefly, Adam Chaplain, town manager. More directly, I would say this codifies practice. Mr. Slickman is right that there have been limited instances where we have fallen short of providing such notice, but the common practice is to provide this prior notice for overnight work, putting it into the bylaw simply codifies that and strengthens the commitment to making such notice. Great, thank you. Okay, let's take Mr. Trumbly next. Mr. Trumbly, precinct 19. Mr. Moderator, I was curious, although the town is doing this anyways, I suppose this is a mute point, I was curious how much this is going to cost. Is this, will this require hiring another person to manage all these notifications that have to get sent out? That sounds like a great question for Mr. Chaplain. Mr. Chaplain, do you have an answer for that? Like how much this might cost staff-wise? Thank you, Mr. Moderator, Adam Chaplain, town manager. I don't anticipate there being any expanded cost. As again, this is already something that we do very commonly as part of our practice. Okay, thank you, Mr. Moderator. Great, thank you. Mr. Tosti next. Yes, Alan Tosti, precinct seven. I'm moved to terminate debate on this article. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Thank you, Mr. Tosti. Do we have, we have a motion to terminate debate? Do we have a second? We do have a second from Mr. Siano. So let's open a vote for termination of debate of article 15. Okay, so if you're in favor of terminating debate on article 15, but noise abatement of having a butter notice, then vote yes to terminate debate. If you wanna continue debate about the a butter notice that this motion requires, then vote no. So we can continue debate. And this is a two thirds vote. We need two thirds vote to terminate debate. And if we don't reach that, we will continue debate. Okay, so we have about 180 votes cast, almost 200 now. We have a question in the Q and A, while we're waiting for votes to come in, question in the Q and A, someone has insurance costs on their screen, not to terminate debate, but I see article 15 terminate debate, not debatable at the top of my screen. I mean, it's not of the Zoom window. So you should go by what you see in the Zoom window. Yep, and we have it highlighted there. Thank you. So we just have about 20 voters outstanding at this point. I'll just start calling off names. If you hear your name, please go vote. If you have trouble voting in the portal, use the Q and A or call in this Brazil. We have Gordon Jamison, Wendell Evans, Ovia Atlas, Lynette Culverhouse, Michael Byrne, Kristen Pennerin, Eric Batts, Catherine Radville, Elizabeth Exton. Sounds like we're getting good feedback about very few instances of the server overload error. That's fantastic news. Okay, so most folks have voted at this point, at least folks who are recently active in the portal. So let's just give it another 15 seconds, another 10 seconds. Still waiting for votes from Gordon Jamison, Wendell Evans, Lynette Culverhouse, five seconds, Michael Byrne, Eric Batts. Okay, let's close voting. That's almost everybody. And this is for termination of debate and it passes overwhelmingly 223 and the affirmative seven and negative will just, well, we didn't cycle through the screens, but I don't know if we can get that back or not. Can we? All right, let's just click. So debate is terminated. And so next, after we cycle through the screens, we will vote on the main motion. At the end of this meeting, I will look into whether we actually have to cycle through the screens on termination of debate votes or not. Actually, while we're waiting, Mr. Heim, do you know if we have to wait for the screens for termination of debate votes? Mr. Moderator, Doug Heim, town council. Are you asking me whether we need to wait for the vote count to terminate debate? Whether we need to cycle through all the screens for everyone to see their votes. Like in the main motion, that makes sense, but yeah. I think that's purely in your discussion, Mr. Moderator. Okay, thank you. That's the answer I was hoping for. Okay, so now we're gonna vote on the main motion. And so this is article 15, the main motion. This is, we're voting, if you want to require, you want the town to require an abutters notice when there is loud work being done, then you'd vote yes. If you don't want there to be a requirement for an abutters notice, then you would vote no. Right, so I just read the warrant text while we're waiting for the votes to come in to see if the town will vote to amend the town bylaws by replacing title five, article 12, noise abatement with title eight, article 11, noise abatement and to further regulate non-emergency work by the Arlington Department of Public Works, public utilities and or their contractors or take any action related to there too. So this would require, if you vote yes, this will require an abutters notice for the town, essentially like the DPW doing any non-emergency work. So if you want the town's work to require an abutters notice, then vote yes. And this is the context of a noise abatement. If you don't want the town to be required to issue an abutters notice for non-emergency work, then you would vote no. And no would be the status quo. So let's look at the votes. Or no, that's not closed voting. I'm gonna take a look at the votes in my portal view. I see that there's still about 30 folks who have not voted yet. So we're gonna wait a little bit longer. If you haven't voted, please get your vote in. All right, so I'm gonna start reciting some names to remind folks to vote. If you hear your name, it means that I haven't seen your vote yet or I haven't seen that you've voted yet. I don't get to see the votes until everyone else does, but I can see who hasn't voted. And so Michael Byrne, Adam Oster, Joanne Preston, Michael Stern, Eric Baths, Carol Band, Lawrence Slotnick, Kristen Pinarum, Gordon Jamison. If you haven't voted yet, please vote. If you're having trouble, see the portal. Although the portal seems like it's been very reliable tonight, fortunately. But if you're having trouble voting through the portal, you can always put your vote in the Q and A. Okay, we're down to the order of about 10 people that we're waiting on. So let's just wait about 20 seconds. And then we'll close voting on the main motion for Article 15, the noise abatement. 10 seconds left, five seconds left, and let's close voting. Okay, and the motion passes. 216 in the affirmative, 15 in the negative, Article 15 passes. And after we're done, we'll wait for these screens to confirm your votes. You're coming up on 1030. And after we finish going through these screens, we'll take up Article 16, which has several amendments. Let's keep this up for just a few moments longer. Okay, so let's bring up Article 16 now. Okay, and this is from the select board report. And so Mr. Diggins, while we're bringing this up, do you have anything to say about the select board's vote on Article 16? Yes, I do, Ms. Moderator. Thank you very much. And you can hear me now, right? Well, the proponents' article might contend that's because you were not exposed to the noise created by a nearby gas-powered leaf floor today or on a repeated basis. In any case, the select board unanimously voted positive action on this article that phases out the use of gas-powered leaf floors in favor of the quieter electric-powered leaf floors. We also noted that there were other good reasons for making the transition, but the scope of this article is limited to noise reduction. There was a minor contention that focused on the times of permitted use that led to some confusion. And we hope that one of the amendments fitted by the proponents will clear up that confusion as well as provide more opportunity for educating us all on why this article deserves positive, excuse me, positive action. Thank you, Ms. Moderator. Thank you, Mr. Diggins. And so before we take the proponent, give Mr. Wright a chance to speak. Let's, we have a point of order from Ms. Friedman. Let's take Ms. Friedman, name and precinct and your point of order, please. Bethanne Friedman, precinct 15. I noticed there's a administrative error in section five. It refers, the date refers to June, 2014. I don't know what the correction should be, but if one of the proponents or can look into it through you, I'd appreciate that. Sure. And where is it that you're seeing this? This is in the Select Words Report. Yes, section five, I need to open that document. As of June 15, 2014, or one year after the effective date of this bylaw, and then it goes on. So the effective date of the bylaw, whichever is later. So I don't know why it refers to June 15, 2014. So I believe that's the existing bylaw not affected by the motion. Are you seeing this in the Select Words Report? Are you ready? Is this from the town bylaws that you're looking at? In the Select Then Report. What page are you on? What's that page? Section five. I mean, I have article 15, it's on my screen. 16. Someone in Q&A is saying page 33. Let's see, can we bring that up on the screen here? The Select Words Report, page 33. Ms. Wayne, you readily have access to bring up the Select Words Report. Okay, great. Okay, so number five, as of June 15, oh, 2014, I see. The year is just bogus is what you're pointing out, right? Well, I don't know if the year of the date or whatever, but I don't know what that refers to. Oh, I see, so yeah, so at least I'm taking a note in the chat here that that's the existing bylaw. So yeah, so Mr. Heim, can you confirm that, I think there's nothing to see here. Can you confirm whether there's an issue? I think it's just referring to a date that happened to be the time that was put in the bylaws, like when that was added at the time and 2014 was presumably in the future at the time that that was added. Is that accurate, Mr. Heim? Thank you, Mr. Moderator, Doug Heim, Town Council. Yeah, that date is a relevant toward discussion. That was the effective date for the bylaw that was passed at the time, essentially like the effective dates we've been talking about for certain things like the plastic water bottle ban, things like that. And it relates to the maximum decibel level for full throttle leaf blowers. It's neither here nor there for the purposes of our discussion tonight. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Thank you very much. Great, thank you. Okay, so let's bring up now our first, or our proponent for the main motion, Mr. White. We're speaking on behalf of the proponent anyway. David White, precinct 21, introduce Alicia Russell to speak for the motion. Okay, and is Alicia Russell an Arlington resident? Allen Gresin, yes. Yes, great, thank you. Let's bring her up. Ms. Russell, can you introduce yourself, your name and address or precinct? Yes, Alicia Russell, precinct eight. Can you hear me? Yes, I can, go ahead. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. White, Mr. Moderator, members of the Select Board, Town Council, and... Ms. Russell, can you hear me? I don't hear you anymore, your audio cut out. Can you? I heard you for like a second there and then it cut out again. Is everyone else on the panel hearing what I'm hearing, it was mostly silence. Silence, I don't hear anything. It just told me my internet connection was on. Are there, potentially other, Ms. Russell, if you can hear me, maybe, if there are other browser windows or applications that you could close to reduce the load on your computer, maybe, or if you possibly are able to hardwire through like an ethernet cable. Yeah. And yeah, so getting a suggestion here, is it Ms. Russell, if you can hear me, is it possible or maybe someone from the tech support could try to contact Ms. Russell to see if maybe she could call into the meeting instead? So we could at least have a stable audio connection and we can take some of the amendments ahead of this if we have to, just to keep things moving along. God damn it. Never. Oh, that's still cutting in and out. So let's keep things moving along by can someone from tech support or IT contact Ms. Russell if we have contact info to see if maybe she can call into the meeting by phone and we'll come back to that. I don't think we have a phone number for Ms. Russell. If any, if any, hello. Hello. Yes. Are you there? I hear something. Are you there Ms. Russell? Okay, we'll have to move on. We'll try to come back to that. Let's see. So why don't we take up, yeah, it's kind of hard to take the amendments first because then we don't have the context of the main motion. Is that audio coming? Moderator, this is Doug Hynne, the town council. Yeah, make a suggestion. Is Ms. Ann Goodwin on the call? I see her among the attendees. Yes, let's bring Ms. Goodwin up. Maybe she can substitute here so we can move along. Ms. Goodwin. Yes, I'm here. Yes, name and precinct. I'm Ann Goodwin. I'm in precinct 14. Do you mind stepping in for Ms. Russell? Yes, I can do it. Okay, thank you for doing that. So I think the timer was going the whole time but we'll get some latitude. We probably should have paused that during the technical difficulty. So Ms. Goodwin, you have the floor, go ahead. Thank you. So I'm Ann Goodwin from quiet, healthy Arlington. Earth slide please. Article 16, yeah, actually second slide. Article 16 proposes to amend our current noise regulations with a complete phase out of gas powered leaf blowers by March 15th, 2025 for commercial landscapers in the town and March 15th, 2026 for residents. A seasonal restriction would be in place until the complete phase out. During this transition time, gas powered leaf blowers would be allowed for spring and fall cleanups but not during the summer. We propose that enforcement would be through the Board of Health's online complaint form. Next slide please. What's so bad about gas powered leaf blowers? Well, the noise produced by two stroke engines that the leaf blowers use is different and worse than other machine generated sounds. Not only is it very loud at 75 decibels or more but the low frequency penetrates much farther and goes through solid walls. Multiple blowers around a neighborhood can create constant stressful noise for hours. Like secondhand smoke in public places, the noise affects large groups of people without their consent. According to the CDC, this kind of noise can cause serious health problems such as hearing loss, hypertension and cardiovascular disease and can affect the ability to concentrate work and learn. It's also an environmental justice problem. The health risks are highest for workers who operate this equipment continuously. They are exposed to very high levels of pollutants and noise levels of 100 decibels or more at the ear which can induce permanent hearing loss if proper ear protection is not worn. This puts additional disproportionately high health risks on a population that includes some of those at least able to avoid those risks. Gas powered leaf blowers are very polluting fueled by a dirty mixture of oil and gas. They spew carbon monoxide smog forming nitrous oxides and carcinogenic hydrocarbons just like automobiles. Are you still there, Ms. Goodwin? Oh, Ms. Goodwin, you're muted. You're now unmuted. All right, go ahead. A 2011 test by Edmunds Automotive found that the hydrocarbon emissions from a half hour of yard work with the two-stroke Ryobi leaf blower are about the same as driving 3,900 miles in a Ford pickup truck. Finally, gas powered leaf blowers produce greenhouse gases that drive climate change. Backpack style blowers typically consume 0.43 gallons of fuel per hour. This translates to 11 pounds of CO2 per hour of use. They also emit large quantities of fine particulates and black carbon due to inefficient combustion. And these particulates have additional global warming effects. All these facts are cited on our website, by the way, quiethealthyarlington.org. Next slide, please. Quiet Healthy Arlington has spoken with a number of commercial landscapers in town. Next slide. They are naturally concerned about the costs of purchasing and maintaining electric equipment. We based the proposal of a three-year transition period on the model set by Washington, D.C. Gas blowers normally have to be replaced every two to four years so the three-year timeline would enable landscapers to replace gas with electric as they wear out. The cost of replacing equipment has been recognized at the state level. There is now a bill in the mass legislature, House 868, which, if passed, would give grants to landscapers to purchase low noise, low emissions equipment. Next slide, please. Commercial grade electric blowers are already powerful and affordable, such as these products from EGO. Batteries and charging technology are continually becoming cheaper and more convenient. Electric equipment is cheaper to maintain and operate over time. Some local landscapers are already using only electric equipment and are doing good business while charging customers reasonable rates. There's a national trend toward laws to restrict gas-powered leaf blowers and some local communities already have them, including Cambridge and Lexington. Lawn care companies who operate in Arlington are already adapting to seasonal restrictions in these communities. James Fallows, the noted writer who helped lead Washington D.C.'s successful effort to ban leaf blowers, said essentially, any sizable company operating in D.C. has made the switch. It's like a seatbelt law or a secondhand smoking law. They wouldn't have preferred the change, but they're operating with the new reality. Next slide, please. Residents will have four years to transition to electric blowers. Here you see that the current consumer reports website rates an inexpensive plug-in model higher at 81 than the more expensive gas model at 78. Both are described as powerful and able to move large volumes of leaves quickly. Next slide. The facilities department of Arlington is already replacing their gas blowers with electric. They've found the electrics are much quieter around the school, and this disrupts the children's learning less and makes scheduling the work more convenient. Article 16 includes exemptions for emergency work for clearing the largest areas maintained by the DPW and for public safety, such as clearing the Minuteman bikeway. Next slide, please. Our current law passed in 2013 is complicated to understand and enforce and is often violated, though it was meant to be a compromise. The bylaw has turned out to greatly favor the landscape companies. It is time to amend this law to protect the health and quality of life of Arlington residents. Enforcement may continue to be a challenge, but other communities are successfully enforcing these laws and they offer good models to learn from. Electric powered lawn care has developed substantially since 2013 and will continue to improve. Arlington has created a net zero action plan and has declared climate emergency. It is urgent that we stand by these commitments now. Next slide, please. So summing up, transitioning away from gas powered leaf blowers will help Arlington live its values of caring for each other and the stewardship of our natural environment. We envision a quieter, healthier Arlington for everyone. Please vote yes on article 16. Thank you. Very thank you, Ms. Goodwin. So let's bring up Ms. Goldstein to introduce a speaker for the first Goodwin amendment. Goodwin amendment. Amy Goldstein, precinct 14. I would like to formally introduce Anne Goodwin, a resident of precinct 14 to present her amendments. Great, thank you. And normally, I guess we wouldn't have the same speaker speak more than once, but because of the technical difficulties that Ms. Russell had, let's bring Ms. Goodwin back. All right, thank you. So this first amendment is intended as a friendly amendment to the language approved by the select board. It would restore some of the language originally proposed by our group, but in the process of merging the new ideas with the old, with the existing bylaw, some confusing wording arose that makes it unclear to readers exactly what the article intends to do. So we want a really clear bylaw that's easy to understand. So I'm gonna define a couple of terms first. So the term transition period refers to the years between now and the total phase out of gas powered leaf blowers. The transition period for commercial and municipal users is May 31st, 2022 and ends March 15th, 2025. For residents, it's one year longer, May 31st, 2022 to March 15th, 2026. A note about the beginning of this transition period when we proposed that this period begin May 2022 is because we wanted to give immediate relief to residents. Now we've learned that local bylaws did not go into effect until they reviewed by the attorney general and she may very well not complete her review until September. So this bylaw, if it passes, will almost definitely not go into effect this summer. And just to briefly interrupt, Ms. Goodwin, can you cover both of your amendments? I can, yes. Great, that'd be great, thank you. Yeah, is it, all right. So still on the first one, the term seasonal restriction refers to the months when gas powered leaf blowers can be used during the years of transition. So these seasonal restrictions are the same for commercial, municipal and residential users. The gas blowers would be allowed between the dates of March 15th and May 31st for spring cleanup and September 15th to December 30th for fall cleanup. These dates were informed by the needs of commercial landscapers who use the gas powered blowers most heavily during those times. They use them much less during the summer months. In our conversation with the local landscapers, some of them acknowledged the workability of this type of restriction. So looking right at the amendment now, there are three proposed changes. Part one simply strikes out the date of June 15th, which is a holdover from the current bylaw and replaces it with May 31st as the start date of the seasonal restriction. The June 15th, as I said, is a carryover and it's not consistent with the rest of the dates approved by the select board in this article. Part two defines the terms for commercial and municipal users in section D2A. The phrases here are rearranged so that the transition years are stated on the first line. The seasonal restriction months are in the main paragraph and subsections one, two and three with the days and hours follow that. We think this clarifies what refers to what and makes it clear that there is a seasonal restriction for commercial and municipal users. Part three refers to residential use section D2C and simply creates the same format as the one for commercial use. An important difference here is the transition period ends in 2026, not 2025. I believe this date was mistakenly changed in the administrative fixes on the first day of town meeting, but this extra year was added at the request of the select board and acknowledges that the equipment will last longer in residential use than commercial use. So that is the first good wind amendment. Should I just go on to the second one, Mr. Moderator? Please do, please do. All right, so the second one is much shorter. The amendment two just adds the phrase of an acre or more to make it clear that not all municipal properties are exempt. Just the bike path, which is cleared quickly by a larger blower for safety reasons and the very large properties such as the cemetery. This is responsive to the needs of the Department of Public Works. We hope they'll eventually find another way to clear these large properties, but right now it is a safety issue. That's the second amendment. Great, thank you Ms. Goodwin. Thanks for covering all that. Let's now, we have two more amendments. I think we can at least have the presentations for these or the explanations of these before we adjourn tonight. And this will give everyone homework over the weekend to study all these amendments when we come back on Monday. So let's bring up Ms. Freeman to, oh, actually, let's, before we do that, I kind of missed something here. Let's go back to, can we bring up Mr. White? Is Mr. White still able to speak? Because we actually need a town meeting member to move to amend the main motion. And we also need seconds on those. I moved to amend the main motion. They have a quick precinct 21. Okay, thank you, Ms. Wright. So we have a motion to amend the main motion with, let's take these one at a time, with the Goodwin amendment one. Goodwin amendment one. Yes. Thank you. Do we have a second on that? Okay, we have a second from Ms. Zill. And let's see. Goodwin two. Yeah, you wanna move to amend with amendment two? Okay, do we have a second? And we do, Mr. Trembling. So we have both Goodwin amendments before us. And now, okay, so now let's move on to Ms. Freeman. Would you like to propose your amendment? And let's remember to actually move to amend the main motion with your proposal. Ms. Freeman? Yes, I can, name and precinct. Excellent, Bethanne Friedman, precinct 15. I moved to amend the main article by eliminating and the main article as it currently exists exempts commercial users, commercial users are not limited using gas blowing leaf blowers throughout the year during the transition period. And my amendment would eliminate the summer hours restriction from residential users. I don't know about other homeowners, but I use my leaf blower to clean out my garage, to clean my gutters. Sometimes I'm late in doing my spring cleanup and it's after the beginning of June to get rid of oak tree pollen. All these reasons I might need to use my leaf blower during the summer months. And by restricting use of a gas blowing leaf blower and gas engine leaf blower during the summer months, you're essentially forcing homeowners to replace the gas blowing leaf blowers within a year versus over a four year period because they have to use it once. They'd be in violation should this article pass unamended. So I urge you to support my amendment to eliminate, excuse me, to restore the use of gas blowing leaf blowers during the transition period to residential users. Okay. Is that clear? Sounds good. And it's been, let's see. I was like, did we get a motion from you? This route, I don't know if I checked it off or not. I think I did move to... That's right, you did. Okay. I second. And do we get the second for that? I apologize. Oh yeah, based on the timestamp, yeah, we have a second from Ms. Brazil. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Friedman. And now if we can bring up the opponent of the fourth amendment, Michael Jacoby Brown for the Brown amendment. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. Okay, thank you very much. This is Michael Jacoby Brown, town meeting member from Precinct 17. I first wanna thank our town clerk, Julie Brazil for helping me craft this and get it into the correct legal formula. Also got help from you, Mr. Moderator from town attorney Doug Hyme out of Chapter Lane and police chief Flaherty. So thank you. When I get an email from the town now, it often reads, quote, Arlington values equity, diversity and inclusion. We are committed to building a community where everyone is heard, respected and protected, end quotes, end quote, quote unquote. I am asking the town meeting members put these words into action, into practice by including Saturdays as well as Sundays that the leaf blowers are prohibited. Leaf blowers are prohibited on Sundays. That is the day that the majority of Arlington residents, Christians celebrate their Sabbath. Jews, seventh day Adventists, Adventists and other minorities celebrate our Sabbath on Saturday. Adding Saturdays as a day to prohibit the noise and disruption of leaf blowers that allows the town to build as a quote, a community where everyone is heard, respected and protected. Voting yes on this amendment provides a great opportunity for you, my fellow town meeting members in our town to put these words into action. Now you may ask, can't we value diversity and inclusion and keep doing the things we, the way we've always done them? Can't we respect everyone and keep the bylaw the way it is? The short answer is no. And you may ask, won't this be inconvenient for some? The answer is yes. Won't this cost some people to change how they do business? The answer is yes. To quote, respect and protect everyone, do we have to change this bylaw to prohibit leaf blowers on Saturdays as well as Sundays? The answer is yes. So I encourage you to vote yes on this amendment and take this opportunity for all of us and our town to live up to these inspiring words and the values they represent. Thank you very much. And Mr. Brown, do you have a motion to amend the main motion? Yes, I sent it to you and it's to amend to add Saturdays, to add Saturdays as the days the leaf blowers are prohibited as well as Sundays and legal holidays. I submitted it in writing. Right. Okay, so we have a motion to amend the main motion with Mr. Brown's amendment. And do we have any seconds? I see we already have seconds. We have one from Ms. Weber. And so we now have the fourth amendment before us, the Brown amendment. So it is now past 11 p.m. Before we move to adjourn, let's enable raise hands and zoom. And do we have any, does anyone wish to give a notice of reconsideration for any of the articles that we've voted on tonight? I'm sorry. Was I talking too loud? Can we, yeah, okay, so it's mute there. Okay, and so anyone who has a notice of reconsideration, so if you voted on the prevailing side of any of the articles that we voted on tonight, and you can give notice of reconsideration at this time before we adjourn, this will be your last time to do that. And that will allow, that will give you the right to move to reconsider an article potentially later on if there's new information that you would like to bring to the meeting. So seeing no raised hands, we have no notices of reconsideration. So I would entertain a motion to adjourn from Mr. Brown. Mr. Moderator? Yes. Mr. Moderator, Charles Foskett precinct date, I move we adjourn. Second. We have a second from Ms. Brazil. We have a motion to adjourn and any objections from raised hands in Zoom, let's make sure that raised hands are enabled. Any objections to adjourning at 11.02 PM on Wednesday, May 4th. I see one objection. It is a nearly unanimous vote, two objections that are kind of popping back and forth, but we clearly have a majority vote. And so we are adjourned for the evening and we will return on Monday. Oh boy, I don't have the calendar in front of me. Monday, May 9th at 8 PM. See everyone then. Have a good night everyone. Have a good weekend.