 Good evening. I'm calling to order this meeting of the Arlington Select Board on Monday, February the 5th, 2024. I am select board chair Eric Helmuth and I will now confirm that all members and persons anticipated on the agenda are present and can hear me. Diane Mahon. Here. Steve DeCorsi. Here. Leonard Diggins. Here. Ashley Marr. Here. Tony Coneyham. Here. Jim Feeney. Here. All right. Tonight's meeting is being conducted in a hybrid format as provided by the Massachusetts Legislature. Before we begin, please note the following. This meeting is being conducted in the select board chambers and over Zoom. It is being recorded and simultaneously broadcast on ACMI. Persons wishing to join the meeting by Zoom may find information on how to do so on the town's website. If you're participating by Zoom, you may be visible to others. If you wish to participate over Zoom or in the room, we ask you to provide your full name in the interest of developing a record of the meeting. All participants are advised that people may be listening who do not provide comment and those people are not asked to identify themselves. Both Zoom participants and people watching on ACMI can follow the posted agenda materials found on the website, specifically the Select Board Agendas and Minutes page. And because one or more select board members are participating remotely tonight, each vote tonight will be taken by Role Hall and I will rely on Tony Coneyham and members of the team to remind the chair of this situation. There will be opportunities for public comment this evening, both in the people who present physically and on Zoom. We have two public hearings, items six and seven, followed by open forum. At that time, when I announce it, if you wish to participate in public comment over Zoom, please raise your hand. If you don't know how to raise your hand in Zoom, now would be an excellent time to Google for how to do so. Let's see how much of the town's business we can get done tonight. And a select board member, Mr. John Hurd, is in route and will be joining us shortly. So first up, we have the FY25 town manager's buzzard presentation and I'll turn this over to town manager Jim Feehan. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And if I could, I'd like to invite up Alex McGee, deputy town manager and finance director. Excellent. And I was thinking for ease of broadcast. I would probably join him at the table if we're going to be going back and forth. Excellent. We have a presentation come up on the screen. I know you've just missed the hot seat, Mr. Vian. Good evening, gentlemen. Good evening, members of the board. So as the chair mentioned, we have the budget presentation for you tonight for fiscal year 2025. Next slide. So for an overview, we're going to speak a little bit about the budget process that was followed, the budget overview itself at a high level, some of the highlights of the budget, the discussion of the long term outlook, and finally the next steps. I think before delving into the specifics, I would just say it's already been sort of a interesting budget season so far. You know, we're starting to get different figures in from different entities. You know, health insurance is coming in in terms of premiums higher than expected or projected. The GIC is looking at growth anywhere estimated between 8% and 10%. Folks know what we often carry a 5% growth projection there. So, you know, that will come into further focus come March when the GIC finalizes their numbers. But that, given it's such a large budget amounted to about, you know, a $1 million swing as compared to what was projected. Also, the pension projection, the actuals coming in a little bit over 6%, and we would normally project around 5.5%. So that certainly was not favorable. And then finally, which will allude to later, the biggest change since you received your FY25 budget book was the change in state aid. We had believed to have been conservatively estimating state aid, i.e. Chapter 70 for education to grow at approximately 5%. And it in fact grew at only 1%. So with respect to the previously approved long range plan, given that, you know, we're now showing a deficit of approximately $1 million in FY26, but we will discuss some options tonight that we're going to look into further as the budget season progresses to address that shortfall. I will say, though it wasn't necessarily all bad news, we did get good news from the Minuteman School District that for the first time in some time our community allotment is going to be going down by approximately $350,000 in fiscal year 25. And then in fact, there was a surplus in our fiscal year 24 appropriation that all of the member communities earlier this winter voted to use to fund the outstanding debt for the building project that was previously debt excluded here in Arlington. So that means there was a balance to be financed that was coming due via a ban that will no longer need to be issued as a bond and Arlington's taxpayers will not see the Minuteman School Building Project show up on their tax bills again. So without further ado, I'll turn it over to Alex to talk in detail about the process and some of the revenue and expenditure figures. All right. Thank you, Mr. Manager. So you guys are all very aware of our process, but to enlighten some of our viewers at home, we'll talk about sort of this is not just a one or two month process. It takes many months to get through. We're probably about 65% of the way through the budget process at this point, maybe a little more. Really, we start in earnest, as you all know, our fiscal year starts July 1st of every year. In mid to late August, we issue our capital instructions to all of our department heads. Capital requests then come in and are considered on a parallel track starting in November, we do the same thing for our operating budgets. All of our department heads receive instructions and they make operating requests to us. And then at that point, we sort of have two parallel tracks running one for capital and one for operating. The months of November and December are spent in the frenzy getting the budget recommendations put together, which is then delivered in January of every year to this board. Starting in January in earnest and running through town meeting time is when the finance committee is doing their budget review procedures. They're in the middle of that right now. Many of our departments have already had their meetings with their finance committee subcommittees. In March, the financial plan will be put together and delivered to the select board and FINCOM April. The finance committee's report will be put together and delivered a town meeting and then in April or hopefully May, hopefully not beyond that, town meeting will vote and adopt a capital and operating budget. And then in June, fiscal year ends and then we start the process all over again. So it's really is a long cycle to get through a budget. Next slide, please. So, thank you very much. Just wanted to do a quick tech check because my Zoom connection has gone down. Are we still online as far as you know, Ms. Mar? As far as I know, yes. Okay. Great. Thank you. Please continue. Okay, so high level budget revenue figures coming in. Our property tax is showing high growth. That is due to the override. So that's a 7.6% increase. Normally that would be comprised just of new growth and 2.5% on top of that. Local receipts sort of our standard 4% growth. That's still a relatively conservative figure there. State aid. We're coming in just at a modest 1.3% growth. Free cash. We're looking at a larger number here. That is due to a likely higher 10 year trailing average compared to our last year. And our other funds, we're going to see a huge drop there. This is because we're no longer have the ability to appropriate from ARPA towards revenue replacement. So we'll be seeing a drop of about $5 million there. And then override stabilization fund will see significant growth there to offset and balance our budget at the end of the year. Next slide, please. This just gives you a visual sense of where our revenues are coming from. The big large Pac-Man looking shape is our property tax makes up 75% of our revenues. State aid is the next biggest the gray slot at 13% local receipts at about 5% and then a smattering makes up the balance of about 6 more percent. Next slide. Expenditures. So after a very thorough process of putting together our budget, our expenditures are showing about a 6% increase next year. Municipal departments. Those are showing a 3.4% increase. But that really is lower than it's more like 3.2% just in holding with our override commitments. There's an additional $250,000 added to offset some of our solid waste and recycling costs in there. Other significant changes. As Mr. Feeney mentioned earlier, Minuteman, we're seeing a reduction in costs there. The school department, we're going to see an increase and this is again part of our override commitment. So they're rising to the tune of about 8%. Our non departmental, so this is healthcare and pensions. We are taking some big growth there, unfortunately. Capital and debt service. This is growing steadily with our budget. Warrant articles. That number fluctuates annually based on sort of what sort of warrant articles we are anticipating. And the Reserve Fund as well when our budget grows that accordingly grows with it. Our bottom line expenditure budget is anticipated at $218 million next year. Next slide, please. Again, this is just a graphic representation of what we just looked at. The large orange section is our Arlington Public School Department. Minuteman is the gray slice just next to it. So put together our education costs roughly 48% of the town's expenditure budget. Our non departmental sort of unclassified costs make up 19% of our total expenditures. Those are the yellow slice over there. Our sort of town hall operating budgets make up around 20% of our total expenditures. Capital makes up about 11%. One thing I'd like to note that's typically a 5% of our budget as our capital plan, but we have a fair amount of excluded debt that we're paying for the high school project, which brings that number up. And then the balance is paid. We reserve $600,000 in the overlay for abatements and unpaid property taxes. A little over $2 million, which is just 1% of our revenue number for the Finance Committees Reserve Fund. And then again, about 1% for our warrant articles. Next slide, please. Back to you, Jim. Sure. And one other thing that I would note on the prior slide, though it's not necessarily a big part of the town's budget, if you see the elections line, that is growing significantly in FY25 because it is a presidential election year. And then the following years would not require the same appropriated commitment. With respect to what we'll call the highlights, Alex noted before that there's a hair over 6% of expenditure growth. What we have here for the Board's edification is just noting that the override commitments, as you will, that arrive from the Long Range Planning Committee and that are adopted by this Board, is the town's budget is growing by 3.22% save for that one-time bump via the override in the solid waste and recycling budget. And then same thing for the school budget is growing by $4,073,000 in change, which is a blended growth rate of 4.56%, but then it will also be the $3,100,000 override commitment being added to the school's budget in addition to the agreed upon growth rates. So what we'll speak to now is sort of the town's operating budget and the municipal departmental budgets. So Alex outlined a pretty extensive process. So with that process brought from department heads was 38 new expense requests totaling $830,000. To date, in what was approved for inclusion in the manager's proposed FY25 budget was 20 new expense requests totaling approximately $270,000 of added expense to the town's budget. So you know, we'll on the next slide, we'll go through some of those line by line, but at the highest level, they respect to a pretty big increase in utility costs. The town is now in a new year of our agreement for supply charges. And we are seeing approximately a 40% increase to what we had been paying per kilowatt hour in this year's ever source winter rates saw the distribution and transmission side of our bill rise approximately 10%. So electricity costs are hitting us pretty hard. And in the facilities department, there are also increases with respect to our ongoing building maintenance contracts. So we typically procure three year deals. And with each year, there are particular escalators for growth within those contracts, whether it be for custodial cleaning, elevator maintenance, roof maintenance, electrical plumbing and HVAC services, those are all scheduled to grow contractually each year. In the Department of Public Works budget, we're seeing we're infusing some more money for street light repairs and replacements. Believe it or not, our LED street lights are now more than 10 years old and have exited the warranty period. So for the past 10 years when they burn out, we were able to make a warranty replacement call and get them replaced. However, now the town will be bearing that cost in less than until we're able to do another sort of wholesale replacement and get them back under a warranty period. We will own those costs. Similarly for field maintenance noted at the bottom, you know, that is another contract that's competitively procured for three years at a time. And between year one, year two and year three, we see a particular growth pattern. And this line is to fund that growth. What I would say with respect to sort of new services or adding services are the two lines in the middle. So in the IT department, we had to make some investments in a new internet service provider line that would be brought into the police station on Mystic Street to support the future body worn camera program that would require a significant amount of data given the video footage that would need to be uploaded daily and should be on its own trunk line. We would also be proposing to make investments in cybersecurity. I think holistically, we've seen that no longer are public entities, including municipalities, school departments, water utilities and other, you know, public business offerings, sort of no longer subject to cybersecurity threats. We are now facing sort of a growing and evolving threat on an almost daily basis. We're seeing new and more sophisticated phishing threats and attempts to, you know, implant malware or ransomware. You know, we have seen other communities in Massachusetts, you know, fall victim to their networks being compromised. So we're looking at finally making an investment in cybersecurity on the town side, but that of course would benefit the organization as a whole, as well as doing some annual penetration testing, a little bit of disaster response and preparedness work, but also looking into an endpoint detection and response platform that would basically live on the entirety of our network and regularly crawl looking for embedded threats and be able to take immediate response to them. So, you know, a pretty significant investment in cybersecurity, something that will benefit the entire organization, as well as a proposed GIS or Graphic Information System platform modernization. We've been on the same platform for a number of years. It is no longer meeting our needs operationally, nor is it fully supportive of the public use of our GIS information. So we'd be looking to move to the industry standard Esri Arc GIS platform that is better supported, more robust and has a larger suite of tools that we could avail ourselves to for asset management, work orders, and is again something that serves, you know, the school department as it relates to, you know, drawing districts, the town, whether it be planning and community development, engineering, any number of departments use that platform. So it's a wise investment because it will impact a number of departments operations. Mr. Chairman, just while he's on this point, because that was one of my two questions on the cybersecurity enhancement. I know when I was on long range planning about two years ago, that was a conversation that came up and the gentleman from powers and Sullivan and Mr. Fosk myself and others definitely highlighted that as a really pressing need is are you saying that and I agree it should be so when I saw the cybersecurity enhancement only at 5,000 to me that doesn't even scratch at it but from what from your remarks are you saying that to address that particular folder of concern that also the monies for endpoint detection and response applies to that or are you saying with the new IT director and the IT staff we have the 5,000 K plus that because I think we need a lot more. And I know it was identified two years ago and I haven't been in the past two years because it's chair and vice chair that goes so but I also don't want to be like laying out my whole hand of what our cybersecurity aid is the point plan is so is it like a short answer to that or should I call you tomorrow on that I would say the short answer is yes, those two lines taken together would outline what is proposed in this fiscal year 25 budget for enhancing cybersecurity. One other thing I will know is that we were just awarded a state grant for fiscal year 24 to enhance cybersecurity awareness and conduct training throughout the organization within the current fiscal year and frankly that training element is one of the most important pieces for our staff and to help you know protect the organization it's about frankly not clicking the links. So we will undergo training this year but those investments are the first step that we're making next year in the enhancements on the town side of course I'm concerned about everything whether you're paying a bill online whether it's the actual software of what we need to run a town whether it's the GIS or the body camera systems does that also envelop on the school side or do they have a separate software IT department and allocation to address their cybersecurity enhancements that they should be making. So with respect to that question I think this is one of those elements that when you do make an investment it has a benefit to the entire organization. So these tools that we would be purchasing or any testing that we undertake would sort of be available on the town's entire network. So it's not just the 5k it's the 47. It's the grant you spoke about and anything else in the future. Thank you Mister chair. Sorry to jump. I just didn't want him to have to go back to that. Thank you. So and just to sort of close out this side obviously you know the town's budget doesn't just grow. Excuse me. I forgot one other item in terms of personnel. The one proposed addition with respect to personnel on the town side's budget is one that totals approximately $18,000 and that is to introduce one part-time circulation librarian at the Robbins library with the intention of finally restoring Thursday morning hours at the Robbins library that were discontinued some I believe 20 years ago. So this would provide the necessary staffing to make that change but also support the fact that we you know the Arlington library system as the fifth highest circulation in the state is grown by over 25% since 2019 and our programs of the 10th most well attended library programs in the entire state. So with that and with the growing and interesting library of things we offer in terms of the complexity of those items and the number of items as those grow it requires a little bit of circulation support. So though one proposed addition in the general fund budget is for one part-time circulation librarian. And as I started to say the remaining funds available to the town via its budget growth would be put into the salary reserve for future collective bargaining agreements. So each and every one of our collective bargaining units is up for bargaining. So you know our last contract cycle ran from fiscal year 22 to fiscal year 24. So we are now be entering bargaining for a prospective three-year contract running for fiscal years 25 26 and 27. You know a couple of things that I will call out in terms of budget reductions that were made we did cut $20,000 from the town's postage budget and that was via agreement with the school department in terms of right sizing who was paying for different postage and mailing services. We eliminated $7,000 from the IT budget for some phone lines that were no longer necessary some related to cell phones but some also related to hard lines for you know that aren't necessarily any longer at certain school buildings or so we right-sized that and then not shown yet is a nearly $3,000 reduction on a software platform that we are continuing to phase out with respect to our water meter system. So we still have old software for the time being that allows us to access old data from an old metering system but that we're hoping over the next few years to fully phase out. So the next slide is just a rundown of sort of all of the expense requests that as I said total 270,000. We talked about most of the substantive ones of course there are occasional lines for you know software subscription increases for 3,000 or advertising and printing lines going up by a thousand dollars but that we spoke to the largest increases and then with that I would turn it back over to Alex. Thanks Jim. So very important to our budget is maintaining the override commitments that are made by this board to the public when considering an override and so this budget achieves that and we'll just run through these points briefly. Maintaining the commitment in regards to fiscal discipline. This maintains sort of the growth caps within the sort of areas that were stated so three and a quarter percent increases on the town side three and a half percent on the general education budget and six and a half percent on the special education budget. Maintains the board's commitment to responding to ongoing school enrollment pressures. This includes a 50 percent per student increase on the department of DESI's annual per student funding level. Maintains the commitment to building an Arlington future so this maintains certain commitments annually during the years of the override to make targeted investments. Separate from this budget but already planned and have already undertaken an example of this but you know looking for looking out for our seniors is the senior circuit tax breaker legislation that the town supported and it maintains and this is very important to me to keeping a five percent financial reserve of the duration of this plan. Maintaining our triple A bond rating is of paramount importance. Next slide please. So Jim mentioned our long range plan revenue shortfall and we'll look at this in a little more detail now. This is basically tied to a our chapter seventy aid coming in at a lower level than we had anticipated. We anticipated based on our the continuation of the Student Opportunity Act that we are going to be growing our chapter seventy aid at a slightly higher level than we have in the past. That was not the case under the governor's budget this year. We came in at just under one percent in growth and so this created a little bit of a ripple into our out years of our long range plan and so when this ripple is compounded over two years FY 25 and 26 it creates a roughly one million dollar deficit in FY 26 and so next slide please. This is likely too small for you to see up there but this gives a snapshot of the long range plan as the governor's budget came out so this is after the town manager's budget book came out and you'll see that really what's important is that the bottom of our FY 26 you'll see a red number down there and that just shows an imbalance. We're heavy on the expenditure side in FY 26 to the tune of about a million dollars and so we're going to look now at some potential budget adjustments so we can use to help fill that that gap and Jim and I will probably tag team this a little bit. Should I take revenues? Yeah so you know first we should look at the revenue side of the ledger. One thing that we are comfortable in recommending to grow in terms of our projected revenue is our ambulance receipts. As this board knows we collect our ambulance revenue differently than we had in the past with less money going into our ambulance revolving fund and more money going into the general fund which is a local receipt and so because of that we are we're currently budgeted at about $500,000 for FY 25 and we're confident that we could increase that number by some to give a sense of the last two years. Last year we came in at a million dollars just under a million dollars in total revenue in FY 24 and this is through November actually we're at $522,000 so we anticipate landing probably just over $1.1 million somewhere in that range for FY 24 so there's a little bit of room there. Annually we request surplus appropriations from the overlay reserve surplus account currently that account is at about $3.1 million because we all know we're still in the middle of a fiscal year and so the board of assessors has other items that they are considering other bat abatements to grant etc so but the town manager the director of assessing Dana and myself have met and discussed this concept and there is likely a little bit of capacity to go after there as well and then new growth. We're budgeted at $700,000 right now. The last two years have come in just over 1.2 and almost $1.3 million and with what we know is currently in the pipeline in FY 25 there is likely some room in there as well so we're looking at these and other areas to potentially bolster our revenue figures. In what I would say with respect to the last two given that they are within the realm of both the assessor and the board of assessors is just a reminder that you know that's sort of an annual process where you know these figures get reviewed with not only the director of assessors but the board and it's obviously up to the board of assessors to determine how much if any of the overlay reserve surplus they're willing to dedicate to sort of the revenue side of the ledger but it is the case customarily in Arlington that every few years there is you know some more significant drawdown of that account to ensure that it is right-sized. You know one other thing that I would mention with respect to the revenue side of things is you know part of obviously Arlington's long-range plan relies on the use of override stabilization funds. That fund has a significant balance in it currently and interest rates were you know held steady by the Fed last week so rates remain high and one thing that we're monitoring almost monthly is the actual balance in that account given that it's generating over a hundred thousand dollars a month in interest. So as the months pass and we're not yet to draw down due to drawdown from it it does create a more favorable outlook in terms of the long-range plan. Great expenditures. So expenditures there is potentially some capacity to use some ARPA funding with respect to some of our warrant articles. There are very rigid rules with how you can and cannot use your ARPA funding and so we are looking into exactly what may or may not qualify. We're confident that there are a couple that we can fund with ARPA and we're still kind of dotting our eyes and crossing our t's with respect to that. So specifically the master plan is something that we're looking at there's a warrant article beginning sort of the sort of revisions of the master plan. On the 250th celebration there are questions whether we can fund that with ARPA as well and then there are also a couple of targeted capital projects that we had slated with paying cash who we could consider funding with ARPA. So we're looking at how to supplement our our funding with sort of our grants that we have available as well. So the underlying logic or premise there being you know you have these one time funds you really only want to use them to offset what would be one time expenditures and there are some new expenditures especially via warrant articles that aren't they are year after year that may be ripe for potentially offsetting with ARPA funding and helping the the town's general fund sort of cash position. So I think you know those are just some things that we're already talking about internally and evaluating so that we can begin modeling but of course we're expecting you know much more discourse with the board of assessors as well as the finance committee as well as you know in the coming weeks you know bringing the what I understand to be called like the revenue working group or revenue task group together and then seeing where we land with that and then reconvening the long-range planning committee to ensure that we have a plan for presenting a balanced budget not only for fiscal year 25 but not showing any deficit through fiscal year 26 either as was committed to Ireland's voters during the November override. So thank you very much. I'll lead off with a couple questions and then turn to my colleagues for questions and discussion. Just on that last point do you know approximately how much ARPA funds how many how much ARPA funds we have that are not committed or otherwise obligated. I think it's around nine million dollars right now all of that funding must be what's termed committed by the end of calendar year 2024 and what committed means we need to have contracts in place okay so we can't just say we're going to spend it and have it in a document we it needs to be we need to have a contracted by that date. And then second one is a question of the timing of the process so that you know the governor's budget is out and you know we all know that the state budget cycle that you know the next thing we're going to hear will be the house's budget in April the senate in May and then we'll see when it gets enacted. Obviously you have to go to town meeting with the budget you know much sooner than that so I might correct that for better or for worse even even if the chapter 78 were to increase which my recollection is that usually is what happens to some degree when in the final budget even if that were to happen we need to start with this lower than expected number that we've got now with respect to that and maybe the higher than expected number with ARPA. I agree and I would just point out for the board's benefit for also those watching and we are presenting a balanced budget for fiscal year 25 which is the one that would be voted upon by the finance committee and ultimately town meeting be right we're going to have to watch that closely but we need to be taking steps now to evaluate all the things that are well within our purview currently right but we'll just you know continue to monitor. Yeah that is that is important I mean obviously things are tighter in this in NFI 25 it may accuse things up to be difficult in 26 with respect to less left over but I mean the takeaway I've got is that you've identified some areas where we need to pay very close attention but also some areas where some good news may well come in and some of it's likely to you know based on past experience and some opportunities to look so I'm glad that you are you know on this now that would define this committee and I want to also you mentioned the chair that the board of assessors I want to acknowledge the chair the assessor just here tonight in the room and I appreciate Mr. Jameson being here because they certainly are a critical partner at all times but I think now especially when we need to really count all our chickens it's a it's good to have their active involvement for sure that's all for me Mr. Herd. Thank you for the presentation. I had a couple questions but now I have a comment that just arose can we add an expenditure in here to flush out the steam pipes in town hall. We need to electrify town hall. All right. Relative to ARPA at the beginning you mentioned the ARPA revenue loss and it's not carrying over to the next fiscal year is there a reason why we can't recover for a revenue loss was that phased out our ability to sell. We have reached the maximum extent allowable by Treasury which in our case was ten million dollars and that was done five million dollars each over the the current fiscal year and the past fiscal year. Okay. So now we'd have to look at sort of one-time expenditures. Okay. And the increasing expenditures at six percent where I know with inflation everything's going up where does that number lie within increases over the past I'd say the past couple years is that on the high end or is that what's expected normally. Right that's higher than normal but it's worth mentioning that in FY 25 there are two sort of additional expense increases three point one million dollars for the schools and six hundred thousand for the town that are tied to the override and so those are embedded in that six percent number they're sort of part of it and so that drives that percentage way up. And on school enrollment is I know during COVID the increase had leveled off a little bit is the enrollment back on the is it increasing and at what percentage year over year. So you know this year the school department again added students it was in the single digits. Okay so compared to before COVID when it was much much. There was a period during COVID where you know enrollment actually declined but it is you know back rising but you know this year you know the data that we have indicates it was you know in this the single digits. Okay then my last question says Mr. Diggins isn't in the chamber with us I'm going to embody him and ask a curiosity question that just jumped out at me what is the expenditure from mosquito control so that there's awful specific numbers. So the town because it's via assessment right it's a number that's given to us so we belong to the eastern middle sex mosquito control project which is a grouping of communities in eastern middle sex county that all have sort of a joint agreement to perform mosquito control activities on mass so that is the treatment of our catch basins in some other areas in town it's to undergo all the surveillance testing sites we have so that is a very specific figure because it's prescribed to us via the state and said you know here's based on what the cost of those services is going to be in the following year you need a program in your budget. Okay is it a new program this year? No we've been a part of this program since frankly I worked in the Board of Health. If I could just add to that every year the way that we determine exactly what our state aid is going to be is something called the cherry sheets and we receive our cherry sheet estimates over the fall and winter and that is that shows all of the revenues that we can expect. On the flip side of that there are also cherry sheet assessments and so mosquitoes is one of those assessments and those bundle they total around four million dollars this year. That's it. Thank you Mr. Chairman. First of all Mr. Feeney and Mr. McGee congratulations on your first budget submission this is I believe you started last March Mr. McGee so the budget had already been submitted of course this is your first budget Mr. Feeney so congratulations on getting through that now some comments. So we had talked about in your original budget submission I think there's been a lot in the news about what at least is in the governor's proposal on Chapter 70 and the so-called aga unrestricted and you know there was some statements the governor made in the news that aga is going up 3% this year and for us it's as Mr. McGee said it's just below 1%. I wonder if you could just comment just a little for the public's benefit. Those are the two main sources of local aid but just the magnitude of each because if you were to have a greater increase you'd much rather have it on the Chapter 70 side than the aga side but if you can just maybe elaborate a little bit on on those amounts. I will note well Alex pulls those exact figures the aga stands for unrestricted general government aid and that did in fact go up 3% this year for Arlington and we had only projected 1% growth as we're usually fairly conservative in that estimate so that actually resulted in a obviously a you know some excess in terms of state aid for the town but with respect to its size in magnitude with the other makeup of state aid being Chapter 70 education aid only growing at 1% it actually results in that $650,000 revenue shirt fall but if you want to speak to the percentages. Yeah but the um so Chapter 70 is I don't have the exact number but it's somewhere I think around 17 million dollars uh is sort of our uh think of it as like our principal and if we had anticipated that growing at 5% it's one number when it comes in at 1% it's a lower number to the tune of about 650,000 dollars for aga it's in the neighborhood of I think 9 million dollars 10 million dollars so that's what our general unrestricted general aid is and so when that comes in at a higher percent it's a lower dollar amount threshold right and so um that's the sort of those are the those with the term in the numbers that we're looking at okay yeah and sorry I was looking for the exact numbers but just on the order of magnitude right the Chapter 70 twice is twice as well right okay so a lower percentage really hurts and that ripple effect um right as you mentioned we feel in the next couple years um just to comment on Minuteman because this is something that we had talked about last year when we were deciding on the override amount and and Mr. Feeney you mentioned that that assessment has gone down and and it was a big concern over the past several years but by my um the spreadsheet that I have here we had seen double digit increases from fiscal 21 through 24 now where we're down about 4% so it's good news in the short term it doesn't completely offset everything I still think it's something that we need to um probably have the Minuteman representative in it so just to see what's going on because I know there were some changes on foundation budget amounts for other members in the district that actually helped Arlington this year in terms of what its net assessment was um and and then just on the um and I'm more comments than questions tonight but um we had mentioned the increases for the town and school budgets or as a result of the override and and the school increase this year is to help them fund their strategic plan but after fiscal 25 I believe more than 50% of that five-year plan will be funded through a million dollar increase in 24 3.1 million in 25 and then lower amounts after that so um let's let's hope the House and Senate increase the chapter 78 and and thank you for the comprehensive presentation. This is my additional comments. Would I not have? No um I guess um started with Minuteman I I agree I'd love to uh shouldn't say I'd love to leave it to the chair to schedule the our Minuteman wrap as well as um if we could get an update on uh the superintendent search my understanding is they're nearing the finalists they're doing the background checks um which is a very important uh issue raised by many parents who came before us last year so maybe sort of a dual Minuteman budget and Minuteman superintendent um update um when the chairman and the representative says that's a good thing to go to and that is great news on Minuteman um uh I know last year we were asked for a one-time six-figure fee for I think Minuteman field maintenance or something to do with fields and they said they may be back um and the board said that it was just a one-year approval if it happens again we'd like to see them come back but it seems as though everything on that vein has really been taken care of um which is really really good news especially since like our public Arlington public schools our Minuteman schools first and foremost is education of our students that go there and um so that's good news all around um staying with my school comments I don't expect answers on this because this is the school side um but I anticipate by the final budget which I think you said was March to the select board and finance committee that um one of my questions is are they still using on the school side if you could let me know when I talked to you during the week are they still using their projections according to the McKinnon report which just speaking for myself solely has been total waste of money for that um and my other question went on on the school side would be uh when will we get the actual numbers of actual student growth I know for 24 they have it at 108 and then for 25 26 they have it at like three four and five so uh and the reason I raise these points um also you know not saying my colleagues agree with me a hundred percent but with the budget projected shortfall with the special projects that the board and the manager has outlined whether it's PAKAV corridor Broadway um Charterl you do have union negotiations coming up and you know DPW police fire DPW is so below and low it's a joke um I mean not that has nothing to do with um anything except for that's what it is but I know going forward you you'll be looking for that so when we can get actual numbers because that 108's not um an actual we were looking for a person who grew up grew up looking for you know spending nickels and dimes to add up to a dollar because that's sort of what we're doing and as the manager said I think at our last meeting uh the last time I got uh report from the previous town manager mr. pooler you could take it for what it's worth um the number he presented to the board again you could take it for what it's worth was 9.9 million um of opera funding that wasn't committed that needs to be so if it's not that number if you just give a brief explanation why it's only 9 versus 9.9 um and if it's not that number I can kind of figure out maybe why it's not um which has nothing to do with mr. McGee or mr. Feeney and I want to thank you Alex mr. McGee for saying special education that's something that was a tickler with mr. pooler and some previous people um Sped really is you know it's not as bad as the our word but it's you know and I had mentioned that many times it never seemed to stick so um it's a little thing but it means a lot to a lot of little people um am I correct that right now or am I incorrect that we don't actually know our free cash has not been certified yet our free cash has not been certified this year it will be at some point in the spring summer time frame um our last certification was done over the summer and it was at 17.8 8 million I think um and then so as everyone as you all know and everyone for at home uh we have a policy where we use 50 percent of our last certification in our next fiscal year as a revenue source and then I know we always look to every year certification by dor and a large part and parcel of that has to do with um the assessor's office and board of assessors is is in a couple of years two three years ago there was a delay in that because something that didn't follow a timeline has that all been everything that needs to be submitted to the department of revenue been submitted and have their numbers come back certified yet or is that just not in the natural course of time it's coming out we have submitted our new growth figures for FY24 I'm not certain if they've been certified they will certainly have been by the time we're doing our free cash numbers um we won't have our final free cash until we have our the close of FY24 done and we look at what sort of money was unspent by departments what money can be turned back what money needs to be encumbered for that has been promised in 24 for an ongoing sort of expenditure that'll trail into 25 and so uh sometime like probably early July we should have a real good handle of what our free cash will be and then it will be certified sometime thereafter we should have a pretty strong estimate at that point okay and then I know it's not a big number but it's six figures um the previous town manager Mr. Chaplin sort of had a policy or protocol regarding the municipal building trust fund and how that would be applied um I'd be interested if you could let us know by like March if the formula that Mr. Chaplin um had been using for the municipal building trust fund if you're going to continue with that practice or if it's something that I would ask you to relook at it I'm not saying how Mr. Chaplin applied it as a practice or a policy is it usually runs anywhere from six to seven hundred thousand and I don't know what the interest if any does on it but if you could just review what his policy was and say if you just want to continue with what he had done with that or if there's something else especially again where um you're going to be looking uh to close that one million capital improvements and budget negotiations did you want to just say as of right now we are projecting to hold what had been the underlying commitment to the municipal building insurance trust fund of you know growing it in around two percent annually and then um I know it's embedded in here and we won't know until we get further in the fiscal year but um I myself believe under uh inspectional service building fees that that will continue to over project I think the town I call it a three down conservative financial plan um and I've said this before that you know if you see something that comes in that you know 150 200 300 400 percent and continues as a trend that that's not necessarily a good thing but um I do think for um and we can't know it until we get further into the fiscal year but I think under building fees inspectional services similar to the fire department ambulance program um and I'm not and I know there's been some talk about the marijuana cannabis calculations and those seem to be sort of spiking a little bit further down so that's another thing we have to take into account um and I'm assuming that or can I ask the question just because it's in here somewhere and I just don't have the expertise to find it but regarding the Ellington recreation um what I'll call capital improvement plan relocating um to the Parmenter school uh the cost for that is that already embedded somewhere in the budget under capital planning is already embedded and or uh out of Ellington recreation department um budget or is that another number along with the million dollar shortfall townside negotiations for contracts capital improvements that this board has discussed that that's another thing you are going to have to balance that is already accounted for in the recreation department's enterprise budget okay so um if you could maybe by March um find out on the school side which I don't expect you all to know um if they use in the McKinnon report numbers I'd rather have Ellington public school report numbers and what that actual it's not 108 what that actual number is because again that'll give us some funding there and as uh my colleagues have said congratulations on your first budget presentation it's one of the things I always say it can never be too long because it's it's a really important item and sometimes a town meeting when we get kind of get bogged down in four or five different cogs and something else and the budget comes up and it's done sometimes in under 20 minutes I'm like ah um because to me that's uh something that warrants the time and attention and for anyone watching at home it may seem like you know we're really dragging this out but this is something in terms of especially for the town hall staff that um and moving forward with the override commitments but especially with town services side which the override didn't really in my opinion contain really that much money um but the residents of the town as well as the town administration have a certain level of service that not only do they want to continue but um in some areas enhance then I know that's a brand new dance for both of you um this is sort of your first fine solo year on that so I do appreciate um the time that you you've put into this you've given to us here tonight and as I said to Mr. McGee about a week or so ago and Mr. Feeney knows this I'm certainly going to be scheduling some time um not at the select board meeting um just to go a little further in depth um maybe the beginning of March if appropriate um to save everybody sort of the background nuts and bolts of this but um in light of the projected shortfall and some of the other commitments that I know we're really going to have to find a way to uh balance I really do feel um encouraged in um glass half full or in my case I'm just happy to have a glass you know if there's anything in there that's that's a bonus but um I I feel uh very well taken care of under the state of our our town finance director deputy town manager and town manager so thank you and thank you Mr. Chair thank you Mrs. Mahan and our colleague over zoom Mr. Diggins thank you Mr. Chair and I just want to echo the last thing that Ms. Mahan said you know about me just feeling good about me the leadership you know my financial team and Mr. Hurd made I'm really proud of you me that was a curiosity curiosity question that I didn't even have so so thank you for asking that you know I do have some some questions and some thoughts you know about the the further out in the future but I haven't had a well due to conflicts on both my part and Mr. Phoenix part eight um after the budget came out we weren't able to meet so so uh we talked a little bit about me the specific items in the budget that mean in our last meeting and I'm just going to save my um my my questions and comments made for more discussion with him um in a near term and then if something productive comes out of those conversations we'll talk about it um at one of these board meetings so that's it thank you thank you Mr. Diggins Mr. Hurd and I shouldn't thank you guys for your first presentation um and then my only note Mr. Phoenix was as a fellow lefty you should know that you got to sit on that side of the table and bumping elbows as you're trying to write the next to somebody other than that great presentation but just some food for thought for next year thank you very much you write that down to Mr. McGeese righties don't have to think about that that so we have uh uh motion to receive by Mrs. Mahan do I have a second Mr. D'Corsi and this is a roll call because we have a remote member attorney Cunningham. Mrs. Mahan. Yes. Mr. Hurd. Yes. Mr. D'Corsi. Yes. Mr. Diggins. Yes. Mr. Helmuth. Yes. By zero vote. Thank you very much. This brings us to the consent agenda and on the consent agenda we have the minutes of meetings from January 8th and 22nd of this year a reappointment to the historical commission of Diane Schaefer term to expire January 31st 2027 and a vote authorizing in person early voting for annual town election and police details for the presidential primary March 5th 2024 and the annual 10 election on April 6th 2024. Julie Brazil Town clerk and there is a memo in the select board agenda in minutes detailing that information. Do we have any provisions? Do I have a second? Second. Any discussion? So on a motion by Mr. Hurd and seconded by Mr. D'Corsi attorney Cunningham. Mrs. Mahan. Yes. Mr. Hurd. Yes. Mr. D'Corsi. Yes. Mr. Diggins. Yes. Mr. Helmuth. Yes. Five zero vote. Thank you very much. This takes us to item six and seven both of these are public hearings and we have the community development block grant a performance update for the program here 2023 and 2024 is the first one and this is Mary Mazenski community development block grant administrator. It's wonderful to have you this evening. Thank you. Hope I got your last name close to right. It was perfect. And let's turn it down to you. Do we need to take these separately? Is there these two different items? Yes. All right. So we'll start with the performance update first. I'll ask for any public comment and then we'll move on to item seven. Three. Well good evening. I'm Mary Mazenski the community development block grant administrator or we call it CDBG with the Department of Planning and Community Development. So first I'll present the mid-year report and a summary of applications and then a summary of applications for the upcoming program year for the board's endorsement. Then the program year 50 applicants will have the opportunity to present an overview of their proposed programs and activities. So this currently is the 49th consecutive year that Arlington has received HUD funding through the CDBG program. We are currently in year four of our five-year consolidated plan. Arlington is on track to meet the CDBG goals the community set to accomplish for this five-year plan period. The goals for economic development have already been exceeded. There are a wide wide range of uses that benefit Arlington residents especially households with low and moderate incomes. Over a million dollars has been allocated to the affordable housing, public parks and infrastructure, and public services just this year. Some highlights from the mid-year report by category include for affordable housing projects. The housing incorporation of Arlington is using grant funds carried over from previous years to continue capital improvement projects within their affordable housing portfolio. HCA's program year 49 projects are at midpoint and on schedule. HCA's projects completed so far this year include window replacements and a replacement of a failed chimney. Arlington Housing Authority has undertaken a large capital improvement projects at the Hauser Building at Brick Village. The program year 48 roof replacement project is expected to be completed this spring and the program 49 building exhaust fan project will go out to bid this month. Caritas communities projects have been delayed due to staff turnover and supply chain issues. Their program year 47 capital improvements were completed in September and their program 48 improvements which include a kitchen renovation and seven bathroom renovations are expected to be completed this month. And then for public service programming which provides essential health, recreation, employment training, afterschool and transportation services. CDBG public service goals are measured by the number of low to moderate income participants who have benefited from their program. At midpoint this year 617 Arlington residents have benefited from CDBG funded public service activities. This represents about 46% of the collective goal for public services for program year 49. All public service activities are on track to accomplish their goals by the end of the program year. Notably the Boys and Girls Club Scholarship Program has already exceeded their goal for the year. Arlington Youth Counseling Center, Arlington's Council on Aging Volunteer Coordinator Program, the Recreation Department Scholarship Program, and Fidelity House's Menonomy Manor Outreach and Jobs, Jobs, Jobs programs have achieved more than 50% of their goals by mid-year. And then for public facilities and improvements the Robbins Memorial Flagstaff Plaza at Town Hall project was completed in October. Food Links solar panel project was completed in July and their new solar panels went live in August. And Robbins Library ADA Accessible Restroom Project is being prepared to go out to bed. And then under planning and administration that's our final category the Department of Planning and Community Development manages a number of CDBG funded projects. The planning department is in the preliminary stage of the Town's master plan update process working to develop additional plans for the Arlington Affordable Housing Trust Fund and conducting analysis to advance recommendations for Connect Arlington net action plan and affordable housing action plan. And then lastly Envision Arlington released the annual Town's Survey in January and the survey is available to take online until March 4th. So that concludes the CDBG mid-year report. Do we have any questions or comments? Thank you very much indeed. Mr. Heard. Just one question. I don't know if you know the answer. But for the scholarships for the Boys Club how are they exceeding the anticipated are they reducing the the amount of the scholarships that they're giving? They must have because their initial goal or it was configured differently because their initial goal was to assist I believe 55 individuals and they wound up assisting 77. Okay yes seems like with a set amount of a scholarship you can't go over that but it might have been very there are several different programs too so it might vary that way as well. Thank you. Any other questions or comments from the board before we turn to the public for a total comment? I guess I would Ms. Mahat. Move receipt of the FY 23-2024 performance update. Okay and this is the public hearing at this time if any members of the public wish to comment on the performance update for CDBG program here please raise your hand and zoom or in the room. Do you agree with me that we see no hands raised Ms. Mahat? That's correct Mr. Chair. No hands raised. Thank you very much. On a motion to receive by the report by Mrs. Mahat is seconded by Mr. Hurd attorney Cunningham. Mrs. Mahat? Yes. Mr. Hurd? Yes. Mr. DeCorsi? Yes. Mr. Diggins? Yes. Mr. Helmuth? Yes. 5-0 vote. Thank you very much. Don't go away. Item 7. Shockingly the CDBG requests for fiscal 25 funding and unsurprisingly the same guest. Thank you. We'll continue on with the overview of the program year 50 funding request. So in recent year Arlington has received an entitlement grant of just over a million. We plan to receive the grant of this size again this year for program year 50. We estimate the program income for the upcoming year will not be more than about $12,000. The program income funds that have been trending downward as there are only eight remaining Arlington home rehab loans generating interest. So the grant awards will be budgeted accordingly. So for this application period we received 18 applications including new and returning applicants and projects. The full application portfolio is included with tonight's meeting materials and available for review. We received applications for two new public facilities and improvement projects this year. One is a green infrastructure project to complete a flood resilience design for the lower mill brook and a project to redesign the foot of the rocks parklet at Mass Ave and Lowell Street. And then the Department of Planning and Community Development requests for funding includes CDBG program administration and a portion of the plan are salaries while working on CDBG related activities. These activities involve data gathering and analysis, survey creation and implementation, community engagement, land use planning and zoning activities, and affordable housing studies and plan implementation. Planning objectives for program year 50 include long range planning for housing and community development studies to help in the creation and preservation of affordable housing. To help provide other benefits and to help provide other benefits to low and moderate income population of Arlington. And then also of course the development of a comprehensive master plan update. So the next step in the application process is for the CDBG subcommittee to meet again and then to draft a budget recommendation which will present it to the board for endorsement. I want to thank you for your time. I'm happy to answer any other questions and at this time I'd like to request that the public hearing be turned over for applicants and they'll be invited to share a brief overview of their proposals. Absolutely and I will note for the public's benefit that the complete applications that Ms. Mazzinski referred to are available online. It's like board's agendas in minutes page and I appreciate the level of detail. I enjoyed reading those this weekend. So let us let's go ahead and move to the public hearing and then after that we can have comments and questions from the board. So if there are people here who want to comment on the applications in the room please raise your hand or zoom the same. We have a hand raised in the room. Welcome come on up. And we noted a couple names in the zoom we can get those uh bring those in ready. Welcome just uh please introduce yourself and let's keep comments three minutes please. Oh my name is Lisa Urban. I work at Fidelity House and uh I'm noticing this chair I hope it doesn't cause me to talk longer because I'm a little more comfortable which you might be finding with I guess a lot of people. I just want to thank you for your past support and also for the opportunity to ask again this year. I know it may seem similar oh she comes every year and asks but the program itself addresses it's new every year like we're going to get kids that it's their first time coming it's not new you know it's new to them it's not same old same old and then even the kids that come back that we're trying to help are at a different stage in life that they were a year ago and have different needs and hopefully are a little bit more active and becoming a part of the community. One thing that we we do a couple things I put two applications in one is for our outreach program a nominee manner outreach program and it's threefold it's we do an onsite program for and it addresses a little bit younger kids too that can't come to Fidelity House or can't get there and also parents who may not want their kids traveling so it's a chance for us to meet the kids right in their neighborhood and then during the school year we provide scholarships for all our different programs so whatever their needs are and interests and then during the school year or sorry during the summer we have a day camp and we really we provide the transportation we go down we bring them to Fidelity House and then they go to our summer day camp swimming lessons nature you know it's it's an old fashion field it's archery it's you know being with everyone else and learning and being a kid and then we make sure they get home by transportation also and we found that transportation and just experiencing camp has been huge and we've had a great amount of kids that do it every year and if I could I'd ask for you know double the amount because what we're finding is we're getting a ton of kids and we can only give them each a week because you know do you give one more to some kids and others we want to make sure so we're getting the quality the quantity but we really are trying to get a little bit more quality to where they're here longer I mean 100 want to come to camp longer and I don't blame them it's fun it's great but reality is what it is so I did put in a request for 21,000 and then we have that jobs jobs jobs program that doesn't seem like it addresses a lot but those staff that we are able to get really have an impact on the kids and really on the families you know the funding that they get they really use to help their family too so it really is something that benefits us benefits the kids benefits the family so it may seem like it's oh it's a small thing but it really has a big impact so just want to say thank you and hopefully happens again this year and thanks for your time thank you for the work you do in the community and do we have anybody else in the room who wants to come in go on up reset my three-minute timer that was exactly three minutes well done hello everyone i'm andy don with arlington eats good to be here tonight we applied for program funding this is the first time since i think 2020 because i know that the budget is very small for program funding and there's a lot of great organizations in fact all the applicants are partners of ours so it's a small amount of money but there's a lot of meat out there so i felt like it was important for us to demonstrate the need that's we're seeing in the community right now so many of you know that we we moved into our brand new facility a year ago and in the past year we've seen a 35 increase the number of families we're seeing so we're now seeing between four and 25 and 450 every week in our market and home delivery programs and we recently learned from the greater boston food bank that the number of arlington residents and households that are food insecure is 20 percent that's all that's more than double almost three times as many as 2021 i mean we all feel it when we go to the grocery store right you get to the checkout counter you see your receipt and you're like how can this be i'm spending this much on groceries and so this is even more of a hardship for many of our residents here in arlington and that's why we're here to provide services we spend $300,000 just on food in our annual budget so we requested $30,000 that's kind of a drop to the bucket to be able to provide the fresh produce and meat and dairy and items that we aren't able to get donated that we do have to to purchase but just lastly i want to mention that we had a couple of our guests provide letters of support for application this year and one particular woman is a volunteer and a board member and a guest and she is a professional museum or professional musician and her small business does not have regular study income like it she gives lessons performances is up and down and so she has turned to arlington eats for a reliable place to get her food so there's so many of our residents that are coming to us and we hope that we can find ways to partner with the town to address this need thank you thank you very much thank you everything that you do it's good to see you and anybody else in the room wishes to comment before we turn to zoom okay so let's let's start with Christine Shaw for the remote their participants good evening misha good evening everybody it's nice to see you all from from afar but good to see you i'm Christine Shaw the executive director of the council on aging and i do also really enjoy being here every year to present our cdbg applications we rely heavily on the cdbg every year this year is no exception we have submitted our three applications and i wanted to take just a couple minutes to remind you all of the good work that's funded by cdbg every year a big chunk two out of the three of our applications are focused on our transportation program and the volunteers that help make it run and the staff position that has both of those functions so our transportation program is an enterprise fund in the town cdbg every year helps us with a thirty thousand dollar grant to offset the income for the enterprise fund for transportation just to give you a snapshot i did include in the materials just one day of what our van schedule looks like i think it kind of is very telling to see the amount of rides that just two eight passenger vans that you probably see around town do every day we provide about nine thousand rides per year and it was good to see andy andy don't just pray for me but we are the transportation partner for arlington eats and almost 300 rides per week we do for arlington eats visitors as well we have like i said the two vans we have partnerships with the local taxi company for a discount taxi coupons and we also have a great partnership with uber as more people start in in the older adult age age using cell phones we help them with an uber central platform you don't need to have a cell phone to do that but we're trying to do that as much as we can for out of town medical ride especially when people need to get there outside of the van hours we've increased our volunteer drivers as well because as you all know there's hardly anything that that replaces a reliable person that will drive you to your medical appointment make sure you get where you need to go and take you home afterwards with that personal touch and we also do a lot of things for people helping with their transportation such as getting their mbta discount senior charlie cards for them and and really anything that they need transportation wise they call us and we help match them to the transportation program that works best for them and we try to allow people to have as much choice as possible we have a absolutely wonderful volunteer and transportation coordinator who's been with us now since before the pandemic and that position is the second application she not only manages all of the transportation and volunteers for the transportation but also an additional 200 plus volunteers that run all of the coa programs throughout the year um so that position is i would say vital to us it's a 28 hour a week position and other staff fill in that need enough in the off hours as well so um finally the third application is focused on adult um day health programs with our partner cooperative elder services ink on broadway they are a long-time partner of ours and really the work that they do in their facility is work that we cannot do at the community center through the council and aging they serve people that are have much higher needs than we have the capacity to deal with they have um they do they do excellent work in excellent programs all day and what these scholarships um do under this application is allow our linkedin residents to try out their services for roughly um it's about 12 12 days of service so if um there was a family that seems like they'd be a great fit we would um help them and connect them and get them a scholarship so they could try it out for 12 days so we have a close partnership with them and there are um many our linkedin families that didn't know what a what an adult day health program was that we're able to get connected because of these scholarships so thank you very much for all of the support over the years i appreciate it very good and i think we'll be seeing you a little bit later uh let's go with uh connect to kimberley sarah operation success welcome hi everybody thanks for having me um so my name is kimberley sarah i'm arlington public schools teacher this is actually year 11 for me um but in the last few years i've taken over operations success from janet mcguire and cd cdbg has been doing a great job ever since operation success opened um to helping fund school supplies and office supplies for the kids our proposal looks a little bit different this year um for those of you that don't know we provide academic assistance for students that live in monotony manner in grades six to twelve monday through thursday from seven to eight thirty with um from volunteer teachers that work in a ps and so far since this opened um back in like 1999 we've been doing that we've seen success with it um and we shut down during covid and since then our numbers have been growing and growing and growing um and one of the things we're asking for this year is not only help funding the school supplies and the office supplies but we've also seen um the importance of having students that live in low-income housing be able to access events that their their peers and their friends do as well that are talked about at school so that's also part of our ask is um some money to go to events and life skills classes like take them to a massachusetts-based sporting event or take them to a cooking class or something like that um i've seen firsthand in my classroom what students that cannot afford to do things like their peers what impact that has on them and we're trying to really support these kids both academically and socially emotionally um and we think that's a really big part of making sure they are feeling connected to their community so for instance we did a fundraiser last year and this year we actually used some of those funds to take the students to a Celtics game last week um and it was some of the best times these kids have ever had we have great pictures of it they loved everything about it and i actually saw the kids the night after we took them and so many of them at homework club were saying how much all of their friends asked about it um and how connected they were feeling to kids at school because of that experience so we're definitely still on the academic side of things and making sure they're getting their study skills their time management skills executive functioning like that is our primary purpose but in addition to that we're trying to support their social emotional well-being and their connection to the community so that's why our proposal looks a little bit different this year does anyone have any questions for me i cannot be answered thank you very much um i appreciate you being here today taking time out of your evening is literally a school night so thank you thank you for the work that you do and thanks for being here this evening no problem thanks for all this work thank you um anyone else in zune that wants to comment on the applications please do raise your hand in zune okay uh miss mark see a hand raised oh there we go uh yep yep mr. this brilliant uh mr. nagle and uh miss schwarz and that's um give a raise and see who can turn their microphone on first let's go with uh miss schwarz there we go good evening miss schwarz i need to unmute sorry about that hi thank you i'm eric schwarz the executive director of the housing corporation of arlington and um we have applied for funds cdbg funds for improvements to our existing portfolio so largely for time sensitive capital repairs at you know we have 150 units in our portfolio but 102 of them are the older units built between 1826 and 1966 so it's a tricky portfolio because there's so many buildings between you know two families four to five unit buildings nine unit buildings and then capital square our 32 unit um site that's also older and they all have very different needs so it sort of takes a lot to maintain that so in the past we've done new windows new roof chimneys porches exterior stairs when there's unit turnover especially if tenants been there a long time or they've just been a little tough on the unit sometimes we need to do uh new flooring or cabinetry drywall repair um you know building to building it can be very different so we just for some context we are in the process of working on a capital needs assessment and i realized last year i had said the same thing but i was only about seven months on the job and really underestimated all the demands on my time and the complexity of figuring out how to do a capital needs assessment on a portfolio that's as diverse as ours it's really we needed to take a slightly approach that would be typical because of how scattered site it is so that is actually finally underway now and we're really looking at you know big picture plans big improvements we need to make and we'll be putting together a much larger you know financing plan for that but in the meanwhile we do have these needs that come up that the cdbg funds are so essential to make sure that we're staying on top of those um so and we're not just looking to the town you know even for these newer term things or for the larger term um you know sort of longer term plan i have some free technical assistance that i've gotten from the national housing trust to help us think in particular about energy efficiency um there's a foundation that might be interested in supporting us they've invited me to submit a grant that might be $50,000 so we're trying to leverage all the money we can because the needs are great as much money as the town can give like we'll spend it um as you can imagine you know it's not cheap to do any of these small projects and they all add up on on our portfolio um so you know i i heard mary give the report um technically from her reporting we've you know where we haven't fully expended all the money yet but in reality we have a project that's finishing any day now we just have to get the paperwork in so there was a law in us spending in the past in the executive director transition before i came and now we're pretty much spending it as as soon as we as as you approve it we've been spending it so this is really vital funding to keep our properties safe sustainable for the long term you know keep them maintained as we in this moment sort of look to make this larger plan will be where we'll be looking more at you know HVAC systems and foundation issues and sort of some of the really big ticket items but this money in the meanwhile is so essential for these um not necessarily even smaller projects but significant projects like windows roofs porches stairs um turnover that kind of thing thanks excellent thank you very much thank you for your good work and i think finally we have mr. nagle from housing authority good evening mr. nagle good to see you good evening um thank you very much on behalf of the allenten housing authority board of commissioners i'd like to thank you for all your past support um not only for our for the you know critical capital needs that we need at the housing authority to preserve our portfolio but also for operation success and also for these other organizations here that directly benefit our residents on a daily basis the project that we're proposing this year is a is a repaving project at drake village the current parking lots there are original to when the development was to when housing building was built in 1975 what we're finding at this point is that the the amount of wear and tear at the parking lots has reached the point where patching and just ongoing ways to try to prolong life of it are no longer working so what we're proposing is a complete repavement which will help us not only you know address some of these health and safety concerns but upgrade the the parking lot surface so that it's um accessible for the residents of our developments that greatly need that as well as you know ensure that some of the crosswalks that we just added are evenly evenly paved so it's going to be for those individuals that are crossing as well one of the things that's unique about this project for the housing authority is that it's not only going to benefit the residents of the housing authority and those that visit the housing authority but it's going to benefit the greater community and the reason I say that is that island is that drake village is a unique property and that it it straddles the bike path as well as the allenton reservoir and and mass av so it's really a vital junction point between these three resources in allington so by repaving and and upgrading this surface here at drake village it's going to make it safer for the pedestrians that use our our parking lot and roadway on a daily basis what i'm hoping to do is be able to work with the dpw to figure out when they may be planning to pave the housing the town of allenton's portion of that road a great ask but something i'm definitely going to continue to work with them on and some of the other things that we'll be working on with this project are stormwater any stormwater mitigation that's needed and and one thing we're pretty excited about is is looking into adding some ev charging stations too and looking at grants to do that but but thank you again for all your past support and and have a good night thank you thank you sir it's good to see you and and we appreciate all the excellent work in your team do over there at the housing authority okay i think that's it for a public comment i'll turn to my colleagues now for any brief comments just as a reminder for our process that we're not you know voting on any on any appropriations tonight the the cdbg subcommittee on which two of our members sit has to do their work and i think that's the the best form for questions of the applicants so but any general observations tonight before we move on mr hurt yeah i would just say um we didn't subcommittee met last week to go over the proposals and in my years on the board i don't think we've ever had to cut so much as far as the funds that we have available in the requests it's always an amazing experience to be able to go through these and fund as many programs as we can because all these programs have an absolute direct effect on residents in the town and as opposed to the overarching budget that we talked about earlier you know it's five thousand dollars it's five thousand dollars that immediately gets put into the community and has a about as much impact as five thousand dollars will have at any municipal level but that said you know we do we have you know one point six million dollars of plus of requests for about a million dollars to give out so unfortunately we're going to have to tighten the budget but when we do that we you know we don't want to cut out any individual program but you know everything will have to scale back a little bit unfortunately but i do thank everyone for coming and for submitting your requests and we will get to work on this in the next couple weeks to to get some recommendations together for the full board mrs. mine that's the other half that's the other half of our delegation the cdbg subcommittee i want to thank mr. hard for really taking the lead i was having some technical difficulties um but at our last subcommittee meeting um as he stated the one point six million and the requests and the one million available and one of the things that's really always frustrated me but you have to live within the parameters you're given is um only 15 percent of that which means if we only get a million dollars it's 150 thousand can go to public services which would love to you know quadruple if we could but we're under the limits um and then one of the other things that were discussed that only affected one or two projects um well one facet was as mrs. Schwartz outlined in her presentation uh questions came up about whether cdbg was a sole funding and or are they looking for other sources and grants and and ways to mitigate the costs which each and every one of these pretty much do um and then the other last two questions that were out there before we meet again um one was sort of a global one which is you know um the term manager and miss musinski and um miss ricker uh planning director going back and looking at their budgets um to see similar to what we ask our nonprofits and others is um any of the expense can it sort of be added on to um something else where we anticipate we're going to make have to make such a drastic cut because the monies are going down because the pool of cdbg cities and towns are going up um but the funding has pretty much stayed the same so uh one of the questions and i don't know if we can ask the chair to go back in his uh co-chair of of the community preservation act but um in terms of their process i think they're in their hearings right now do you remember um if if the cpa committee sticks to sort of the time parameter that they've outlined um do they usually have because one or two of these requests are also tied into possible community preservation act do you know they do they come out in january february march um i'm not going to hold you to it but or is it latest april in past practice it's usually been early march early march but i'll encourage you to to speak with the chair of the body who you might know yes yes and because like foot of the rocks and some of the other ones yeah exactly you have to work out that overlap right and then the manager also indicated along with his department heads to see if there are any um requests that if we can't fill them um i don't know i know they're investigating other things under the budget but but also if any of these are one time requests that could somehow fall into opera if we meet the federal guidelines and that's a really big if but the manager and his staff did indicate that they're going to really go back and look and try to because because that's a big cut big hit you know 1.65 1.646 uh request in about a million that we have to give out so but we'll find a way we will persevere so um thank you mr chair and thank you mr herd thank you very much any further comments from my colleagues okay i don't think we need a motion for this since it's just a presentation so we'll move on to the next item which is open forum um except in unusual circumstances any matter presented for consideration of the board shall neither be acted on nor decision made the night of the presentation in accordance with the policy under which the open forum was established there is a three-minute time limit to present a concern or request if you are in the room and want to participate in our forum please raise your hand i see a hand raised let's start with the chair of the board of sisters although i do not presume that that is the capacity under which he appears not tonight all right well we'll be here from you mr jameson on any topic yes good evening um my name is gordon jameson i'm a town meeting member from precinct 12 this does count to your three minutes sir so this does count toward your three minutes yeah we want to just pass it down real money here so you might thank you stretch good to see you so i'm coming to you tonight um to talk to you about our mbt a a assessment and the handout lists um arlington and its neighboring towns and cities in the first column in the second column um the reason for this presentation having perhaps um validity with the state is uh these the community the the type of community that it is based upon the mbt a communities act the population the proposed 24 assessment and then i'll talk about how i prorated these for some background um the town managers of the past i know mr chaplain worked on this um i think there is a feeling um that as i'll present here that we're being over assessed and have been for a long time and um so the the the community the mbt a communities act classifies us as an adjacent community which is in direct opposition to what we are classified as far as the assessment so that that i think needs to be remedied and this might be how how how you decide to do it it could be directly or um if i'd been more um on the ball last month i a home rule petition might might be something that makes the legislature have to pay attention so let's look at this chart okay let's look at the bottom half first these are towns and cities belmont medford summerville and cambridge that are all in the mbt a communities related either as commuter rail that belmont or all the others are rapid transit which is the highest rating the lowest is adjacent in our neighborhood and then you have commuter rail and then you have rapid transit which can also include bus and and commuter rail as well so if you take those and you do by population you pro rate to arlington you see that the numbers are all about three million three and a half million plus or minus so that that that system seems to work pretty well but if you look at the top of the of the chart um you see that arlington is paying as much as those as it would if it was if it had commuter rail or rapid transit for our bus service which seems to me to be ill-advised if you take lexington's which has only bus service and it is an adjacent community and you pro rate that you get 1.1 million and winchester is getting away with bloody murder because they have commuter rail and bus service and they only pay five hundred and sixty four thousand dollars if you pro rate that you also get one point one million dollars for us so this could be two two million dollars that we're overpaying every year and i've been here 22 years that's 44 million dollars and we could do a lot of other things with so i think this is something that because of the change with the mbk communities is worth considering there's obviously the town council will help with the legislation differences and the town manager and the board can decide help us to do it but if there were to be a special town meeting called this this spring this would be a place where that might be a slot and i'd be happy to vote for it thank you sir thank you much anybody else i wanted to comment in public forum okay who's more seeing no hands raised thank you all right that concludes open forum thank you everyone let's now move to traffic rules and orders and other business and we have item eight update and a potential vote of approval or endorsement the bike lane design guide from john lessey senior transportation planner and his team and while they come up to the table i just want to commend mr lessey for the process i was fortunate to be invited to participate in in it for a couple of meetings and i thought that you know that i learned a lot through that and was glad to see a lot of participation by lots of different stakeholders from the town and the community so please tell us what you've got tonight and introduce your guests thank you mr chair so good evening select board members my name is john lessey i'm the senior transportation planner in the department of planning and community development i'm joined tonight by the town's consultants at tool design i have sneha adigari yes and set me wire here from tool design um to present on the recently completed bike facility design guide for repaving and restricting projects and um just just yeah just just we can we can take a uh a gracious pause for a moment while we get our screens ready just hang just hang tight thank you deep breath all around here we go thank you so so this guide will supersede the context and by the way this guide will supersede the context sensitive bike facility design guide matrix that was developed by the transportation advisory committee and approved by the select board in 2015 this is also a project that was started my by my predecessor daniel amstutz and i've had the pleasure of bringing it to completion so i'd like to thank our consultants at tool design who have assisted in the project's development and have helped integrate feedback from residents town committee members and town departments into this guide and i'd also like to note that any project that comes out of this guide requiring select board approval will be brought before um as needed similar to the medford street bike lane project that was approved by this board last year so with that i'd like to pass it off to sneha who's going to speak about the guide and be happy to answer any questions afterward all right thank you i'm happy to be here to present um the final version of our bike guide and give you a little bit of a summary so i'll go over project goals a little bit give you a breakdown on a timeline and then do a little bit of a summary of the content in the shortest shortest amount of time i can i can do it next slide please um we already on this so john has been our project manager and Stephanie and i have been here at tool design working on this project next slide so just to orient us towards the goal as um john has mentioned the really the real purpose of this guide is to provide clear indication to town department public works on implementation of bike lanes that is context sensitive and is prioritizing safety of all roadway users now this update was needed so that it would adhere more to recent standards a lot of the state and federal bike lane standards and guidelines and even funding programs have changed and increasingly a lot of them are requiring um preference for more uh separated or protected bike lanes and the list of those guidelines and some of the grants are listed over there uh next slide another big goal of this project was to ensure that there is more coordination happening um and identify how the town planning and community development department can be incorporated into design project projects and some decision decision-making around that and finally we really wanted this guide to align with plans and goals outline other planning documents including uh specifically the connect alling to an um transportation plan um so just to give you an overview on what we've been working on since um the summer of 2023 so we kicked off the project with john at that time um in august we had our first subcommittee meeting and this subcommittee meeting uh you know really involved a lot of different um groups within arlington including uh an arlington parent uh aback and tac member um arlington police department member someone from everywhere arlington um we also had mr. helmuth as our um select board member a high school student and a bike rider so we're trying to really capture the experience of a lot of people living in arlington and a lot of different stakeholders um so we met with them in august and they give us they gave us a lot of good feedback on what kinds of things they would want to see in a new bike guide and after that we developed the draft bike guide in the months of august and september um we had our second subcommittee meeting on october where we shared the draft uh bike guide um and we also shared it with our the department the public works department as well as um tac and aback members who reviewed it and gave us um a lot of good comments that fed into the final bike guide that we finalized earlier this year next slide great so now let's get into the actual content hopefully you all had some time to like look over it um so i'll give you a little bit of an overview next slide so really the design guide um is structured in in the way that you can see on this chart so at first it gives a breakdown on different bike facility types um it then talks about um methodology around how you would go about selecting the bike facility and then it gives um the actual matrix which has step-by-step instructions on how you would go about choosing a bike facility and one thing i want to note which you know was on the top of the bike guide was that this is for restriping and repaving projects so we've like made sure that it um any recommendations we're providing in here is fitting within that context um so just to go over some bike facility types um starting out with separated bike lanes and i'm showing like a little cross section of each of the design types on this table as well um separated bike lanes are bike lanes that provide exclusive space for people biking and it's physically separated from vehicular travel using vertical elements um now they may be implemented at street level with paint and flexible delineators so that's what you can see on the chart over there uh and it can be done as a part of repaving and restriping project as a result of being able to do it using these temporary materials um next up we have conventional and buffered bike lanes these are also on-street bike lanes um delineated from traveling with just pavement markings um buffered bike lanes use buffer striping and that's the image you're seeing on the right hand side uh while conventional bike lanes are delineated with just a single line to denote use for bike travel and then finally we have bike bull awards these are interesting they are meant for low volume low speed streets uh designed to prioritize travel um they really incorporate a whole host of treatments um working together including signage including pavement markings and traffic calming measures intended to ensure that speeds through these roads are not high so things like speed humps and chicane to really ensure that that low speed nature of the street is preserved while people are biking around the street next slide um so going into the matrix itself um so the first question that is asked in the matrix is if the street in the is in the town's recommended bike network now the bike network the recommended bike network was in the connect arlington plan it was identified um the streets identified on it had gone through some analysis in terms of um it being a priority street for biking so definitely if the street is part of that network we'd want to consider it for a bike facility the other thing that we added was um if the street is a primary route to existing schools parks libraries and regional transit that should also be prioritized as for connect arlington since those locations um are important locations to connect with bike bike facilities um the next part of the matrix looks at um really understanding the existing characteristics of the roadway so it asks what the vehicular volume and speed of the street is studies have shown that um you know speed and volume of the of the roadway is closely linked to the comfort that people feel are biking and you can probably you know feel that um when the volumes are really high and the speeds are really high it is not as much of a safe environment so you would signal a need for a more separated facility um the chart that you're seeing on the left there is from the fhwa bikeway selection guide and it kind of breaks down what those numbers would look like um so in our case here if you have if you're having a street that has volumes over 2 000 vehicles per day and speeds over 25 miles per hour it really signals a need for a bike lane whether that is a separated bike lane or a conventional or buffered bike lane um and certainly if the volumes and speeds are exceeding that it's you know grants for more um separation um next slide so assuming that you know we meet the criteria of those thresholds of the speed and the volume um it then the matrix will then ask about the curb to curb width of the street um and the matrix uh really compares it to the minimum separated bike lane dimension and i've mentioned this before but connectarlington and all all of other plans have really emphasized the need for a prior priority around separated bike lanes so the first comparison that it's doing is with a separated bike lane and if the separated bike lane a minimum dimension is not it is met then it prompts you to a table that really digs into how um other uses like parking can uh go with the bike lane if the separated bike lane minimum dimension is not met meaning the existing roadway width is narrower than that then you compare it to a conventional bike lane and the and the widths and if that is met it pulls you to another table which has a conventional bike lane table and i know this all sounds like super wordy because it's hard to explain um but it is clearly laid out in the actual guide itself uh if you go to the next slide it provides a little bit of context around where those numbers are coming from this is taken directly from the guide so you can see on the first row there we're talking about separated bike lane and sort of the assumptions around the minimum widths of the travel lane bike lane buffer uh and then you get a minimum that's 34 to 36 feet similarly for the conventional bike lane that absolute minimum is 30 to 32 feet but um you know if you are looking to see how parking or curbside use could fit within these both of these facilities then you're going to have to account for that additional width and compare it against that additional width um next slide so really the the the last point i wanted to mention related to the matrix was that it suggests the need for some reallocation of the roadway to provide um a facility that is really safe and sometimes that might might mean to me that we have to make compromises on available parking and as such i know that that's you know a topic that is very very timely and a lot of people care about that so what the matrix does is really recommends coordination with john and town planning department to uh address like how the changes in parking um could look like and certainly any removal of parking will be studied on a case by case basis next slide and finally um you know the bike i we were really trying to make sure that um what the dbw is looking at what the dbw department is looking for is captured in the guide as well one of the things that they mentioned was guidance around green pavement and how bike crossing should be um designed and we've included some guidance around that we've also included some guidance around if the roadway width is inconsistent or is like um you know constrained like what are some strategies that you could consider so that there is some consistency in the uh the network that you're providing and finally it also provides some um uh opportunities interweight bike facilities with bus transit in the form of like a floating bus stop that could work well with a bike facility all right so that was my really quick summary thank you for giving us the opportunity to present uh here today we're really hopeful that um the new guide will provide that clear direction on the implementation of bike lanes that is really looking at prioritizing safety um and is forward thinking and looking to the future thank you very much any closing comments mr lessee um no i just like to thank the board for um you know listening to our presentation tonight and we'd be happy to answer any questions thank you very much before i turn to the board i want to invite the town manager to offer any context you may wish about just to give the board some insight into how from where you sit if we endorse this this um this guide how this actually plugs into the work that the departments do how this will plug into projects that might come before the board particularly with respect to actually installing bike lanes and dealing with parking and just help us kind of understand understand what it's for and how it works from your point of view short thank you mr chair as mr lessee alluded to to open the presentation this is really a tool that will be used by our engineering division from sort of the get-go as they plan roadway reconstruction or resurfacing projects to understand what the sub subsequent marking plan may look like and that happens each year under our capital plan i think what's worth noting is right this provides a matrix by which to make decisions obviously those decisions need to be context specific to wit to whichever road it is is being planned and with that you know i would remind the board that as mr lessee also alluded to similar to the uh medford street project we're there to be a significant change in sort of the width of the road that specific project would be before this board were to have some implication on parking for example for the board to consider that particular project in context and to have a say in that particular project at that time mr herd thank you thank you for the presentation um i will move endorsement is that sufficient yep we'll approve i don't think we're approving anything um i mean i think everything in here is very much in line with arlington's continued efforts that we've done over the past 15 years starting way back with the mass app project in east arlington and our continued commitment to increasing bike infrastructure and connect arlington which is very important to residents um i think you know as has been said a few times i think this is this thing compasses our design thoughts for how we want arlington to look as projects move forward any individual projects comes before the board on a case by case basis and everything relative to roadways is like economics it's a efficient allocation of scarce resources and in this town our roadways are certainly scarce resources and you know i think we have very smart people who work on these projects that try to put together the best infrastructure for getting people to move along for safety and for all the considerations that go along with our with our roadway improvements for all residents and people use the town of arlington so happy to support this i think i like what it does i think it gives some clear directive and avoids some confusion that can come up sometimes when when we have these projects so thank you again for all your time on this mr de corsi thank you mr chairman i'll second mr herd's motion and thank you for the presentation tonight just a question on i see in the matrix and in your presentation this evening on separated bike lanes that i do see a picture in there on the floating bus stops there was a two-way separated bike lane is that and but i don't see it anywhere in terms of the analysis is that something based on what you've seen in arlington that you you wouldn't recommend for analysis that you would just stop on the one way or is there guidance there to try to determine that if if the right street came about yeah that's a really good question i think that was just a nice picture i found to clearly demonstrate the the context it can certainly be done with a bike lane that's going one one way in each direction the context in which i've seen that is it really works well when you have parking adjacent to the bike lane so if you have a parking lane then you have the buffer lane than the bike lane and when you're approaching an intersection it's it's often a a good practice to give um some space for visibility for so that parked cars are not like right next to the crosswalk anyway so i can see it in the context where you have a bus stop that's next to the crosswalk and that that parking that one parking space in that buffer space becomes this bus island that can then be the space that people can use to wait which is i think what is shown in the in the in the guide but it's shown as a two-way facility you can do it with a one-way as well okay all right thank you yeah any other comments questions for the board mr. Diggins so thank you and i got to see this through up tack and through everywhere arlington little streets one question i didn't ask me and you mentioned that this has been prompted by you know in different improved standards uh with respect to bike lanes i mean how do you recommend we go about keeping this updated mr. lessee so that's a good question mr. Diggins so i'd say that this guide was created since the previous matrix was completed almost nine years ago and you know standards change over time i'd say that a good opportunity to revisit this guide would be probably in the next five to ten years depending on the change of guidelines from both the state level at mass dot and at the federal level i'm not sure if my consultants want to speak to i don't know the change change in guidelines that's happening nowadays but i'd say that we're kind of at a point where bike facilities are becoming more you know progressive in terms of design so i would say that moving forward i will you know keep up to date with how guidelines are changing and as appropriate we'll coordinate with my colleagues in the department to update the guide as needed thank you very much i think i think i heard mr. lessee just say he'd be here for 10 years which would be just fine with me um i i appreciate this as well i i really like i like something my colleague mr. heard said which is that this is a really a good depiction among many of the purposes of what we want the town to look like i think that's really important in a big picture and it's a statement of vision and i agree with everything that our manager said and others said that you know we have to make these on the ground these decisions are tight they're tough they are full of compromises we've experienced that that's going to continue but i you know i feel really good that the town is sending a clear message to its residents um and to its departments to the staff that you know that we get we get this we like having guidelines that are up to date we like promoting bicycling as a viable increasingly safe way of getting around town and so i'm really excited to see this work continue as well mrs. mahan sorry i missed you before no i'm trying not to speak unless somebody else asks my question um now um and i know mr. heard made the motion and mr. decor say already seconded so i'd go if that wasn't already done i preface that um so now with this um bike lane design guide um i know there's different verbiage in there in terms of what the guidelines are and and what will be evaluated how decisions will be made um and i think one spot i think it was parking case by case basis my sort of process question is um with this guide in place who and or what department or departments town manager or select board in terms of the issues that different opinions in the community arise who has the final say i'm not saying that appropriately but um with this guide in place only because i remember years ago alan mclennan who was our planning director at the time came in with a uh 106 page uh planning open space plan and i advocated against it for many reasons and oh no just endorse this and then there were other things that were totally out of our hands but we had to carry the the buckets of water on it so if you would be smooth on like to direct that question to the town manager sure i i think that's a fair question with respect to where we're going next in the capital plan obviously we have a prioritization program for our roads uh that engineering develops but with respect to the you know once a location has been chosen and there are actual decisions to be made on the ground i would expect it would be the board that has the final say over you know how that curb to curb width uh is ultimately being distributed as it's been done in the past that into your question yes thank you i just wanted to reiterate the mr manager saying and i think that mr herd put it well it's an endorsement by the board to authorize and and kind of stand by this matrix this design plan but when future projects come up in a case-by-case basis to mrs mon's question that will remain within the purview of the board to decide on a case-by-case basis yeah it strikes me that you know similarly to the discussions we've had in reference to connect our only to that when we get down to the specific situation we do have to look at the look at that situation on the ground and you know and understand that that's how it works i think those specific statutory interpretations and authorizations and requests still fall within the board uh birth boards purview under chapter 40 section 22 mr lansing um i would just like to note that i'd like to think of this guide as more of a conversation starter amongst departments yes the intention is to have the select board be the final say when we are changing the um the roadway itself but i think this is a good first step in institutionalizing an ongoing conversation between planning dpw police so that we can come to a um town staff decision on what is most appropriate with approval from the select board so it will be many stakeholders who are feeding into a recommendation that's then presented to the select board so plan to see me more often yeah thank you thank you i'm sorry oh and my my only other question is and i apologize um miss adi hikara aikari aikari sorry you may have said this and the pipe was banging and i didn't hear it i'm just it's just uh mr diggins curiosity question when you talk about just the um i also like the mr degorsi opening preamble there's a whole nother thing but anyways but when you uh speak about green pavement is that gree because green means so many things is that green in terms of bicycle pedestrian or does that also include environmental flooding top topographical so it's like green paint oh it's literally green all right forget it i can you tell i've been in the cso world thank you thank you thank you mr chair thank you um i i i want to express some appreciation i think that mr lesi's comments were really well put um to to really give some context to this not only is a conversation starter but i think something you said earlier is that this is a planning document too to help the town departments understand kind of what they're going to need to do if we propose a project and i can see that it generating a lot of efficiencies and understanding you know ahead of time and that's you know i'm not surprised this came from a planner but it is a good planning document ultimately and i think that's it's been good to have this discussion so that we have clarity on what we're signing off on and and you know that we still have our the responsibility that we have when it comes down to individual projects but that there's tremendous value in having an updated document like this that articulates a general vision and provides the ability for the town to act in a more coordinated and efficient way to use our resources more wisely so thank you very much any last comments from the board so we have a motion uh to endorse by mr herd and seconded by mr decorsi turning coming in this is mahan yes mr herd yes mr decorsi yes mr diggins yes mr helmut yes five zero vote all right thank you very much thanks for your time this evening and for your good work so it brings us to item nine i believe we're going to have a revisit over zoom from miss christine shaw this is the mid-year update on a senior parking sticker program so if miss shaw is just taking a second sorry yeah that's right actually i don't see her in there oh there we go bring it in there we go in transit good evening again hello again just to reintroduce yourself for people who may have joined late great good to see everybody again i'm christine shaw the executive director of the council on aging and it was you know about seven months ago that i was there in the room with over a hundred older adults in arlington it was um truthfully one of the most exciting things that we have been a while and we were really thrilled when the select board approved a pilot of a of a ceo a parking sticker program so on that night we promised to roll it out in september so we did as of september 7th 2023 and i'm here tonight to give a mid-year update for your request on how how it's gone and some of the things we've learned and just really excited to share it with you so in your materials i believe you all received three different sheets like i said we started on september 7th we decided after talking to other towns that have similar programs to have one set time a week for people to come in and apply if they wanted to do that in person we also have the option for people to apply online for quite a while it was neck and neck between people applying online and people coming in person which in our demographic is always interesting to see that more and more percentage of people doing things online and less in person but as of at this was just last week when i looked at these numbers we had just over 1500 permits that had been distributed 614 people had applied online and 911 in person so what we're seeing now is mostly in person applications every week but we do see some online as well you may remember that the program was approved for age 65 and above at the council on aging we have programs starting at age 60 and there was some question on if 65 was going to be something that people would talk about or you know ask about and i'd say it's been very minimal and i'm probably the first one that was a little surprised at that but i was expecting there to be more questions about age 60 to 65 and although we get them we've said you know as of now the program's approved for age 65 so on your 65th birthday come on in and get your sticker we have had people come like the day after their birthday which is exciting we also limit it to one for household so if there's two cars in one address we do make them choose which car they're going to put the sticker on again minimal minimal pushback sometimes just some brainstorming i'm like okay well we usually take this car when we go you know to the community center we usually take this car if we're driving during the day when the meters are turned on so i think you know there's some strategy that goes into it but people have had no problem sticking to the one for household and also nobody complains that there is no cost for the program i'm sure you're happy you're not surprised to hear that but it's really really great to have something that people come in the program it's very simple to apply we give them their sticker and they're just really grateful to the town for for running the program i have heard so much appreciation people who you know had never even come into the community center before have come in and they said you know this is a really great thing i it's just so easy and i'm so grateful that i just don't have to worry about downloading the app for the meters little things like that that make a huge huge difference and we've definitely felt the positive the positive commentary about the program so that part has been has been really great we have had minimal issues with replacing stickers um there some due to you know weather related problems and ice scrapers and you know things like that and others related to people putting them in the wrong spot and needing to get another one to replace it but out of the 1500-ish there's been 23 due to weather related problems and 12 for other reasons um i expected i was a little worried for a while on the weather related problems it was due right after a snowstorm but we talked to the company that printed the stickers and they gave us some recommendations for people putting them on in the future so hopefully that will make a improvement and if not we have been replacing them you know no problem at all um there's been the parking enforcement has done such a great job there's been really minimal i've only had three people come in that got a ticket and they and the other they shouldn't have with them with the sticker i expected that to be a lot more of an issue just with oh you know a new sticker out in the community um so i really appreciate all that they've done to um embrace a new sticker in town and i i said a little bit about this before but the last thing i want to mention is we have had hundreds of people come in to the community center that literally said i've literally never been in this building before and while they're there they get their sticker and then they pick up a newsletter and they sign up for programs and so it is a great way and it's somewhat unintended that it gets people into our building and you know they're like wow what's going on here this is great with that class you know and just getting them to know what we do they otherwise wouldn't have known that so it's interesting um and it was at the beginning it was it was a lot of people coming in every Thursday in person it did take a lot of staff but at this point we've now trained two of our tax work off program volunteers to they they they help um when people come in in person and give out the stickers on Thursday so it's been a great program that is now manageable enough for it to be volunteer run with of course staff oversight and whether if there's any questions um but that is um i'd say the mid-year update and it is a pilot program i believe it was approved for a two-year pilot and you know my ask or recommendation would be that it continue um but i'd love to answer any questions anybody has if there are any great thank you i will first turn to our colleague who is the select board representative to the console agent thank you mr chairman and thank you mr for the for the report i have to say that was one of the that the better nights i've ever had at select board that the night we approved that with all the people that came and and the interest and and it's interesting we i was at some of the council on aging meetings and and um we never thought that having the sticker program would bring more people into the community centers so that certainly is a great benefit and it sounds like the visibility on the stickers has worked out fairly well because there's only been three tickets that were given in error um and in a small percentage as you said with the the weather related problems i mean that's something maybe we look at going forward for all our sticker programs to see if it's sometime in the future maybe we we bring the sticker inside the vehicle as opposed to being outside but i'm really happy that it's worked out i've received a lot of positive feedback i did hear from one um two car household where um the person who didn't get the sticker blend himself are not staying informed um his wife beat him down to the community center for the sticker but uh it and it was all you know he's fine with that they've worked it out but uh i i'm glad that this is has been a positive program and thank you thank you mr. de Corsi mr or any of them coming mr hurt did you move her seat of the i didn't move her seat hi okay um thank you for the presentation uh i also was going to mention you can't see the gallery right now but there's nobody in the select board chambers which is a stark difference from when we heard this initially um there was certainly a lot of enthusiasm we're really happy to be get the opportunity to support this then and i think you know of the people that individuals that spoke in favor a consistent theme was you know our elderly in many ways support our schools and our children through through uh you know property taxes and a number of other ways and this was just a small very small way for us to show our appreciation um and it's certainly not surprising that there's been excellent reception amongst those who use it but i think it's a really important uh program to both give back but also to help promote you know 65 plus residents from driving down narrowly to the center and make you know that they can get an easy parking they don't have to pay for parking they can go to a restaurant or whatnot and uh i think it's really important to continue to incorporate our i don't know if the word elderly is sounds bad but our 65 plus residents i will say i was going over the agenda over the weekend while i was at my parents house and my mother said oh we gotta go in and get our stickers so they're certainly certainly excited about the program and again thank you for all the work that you do and look forward to continuing this thank you miss mohan yes um thank you to miss shah and mr decorcy our representative and um i guess what i would do is and i wouldn't expect that you're somehow keeping track of how many people between the ages of 1664 come in but um i i would leave it to miss shah or mr decorcy whether at the yearly update or uh any other time in the future uh whether there are any facets of the program um we want to revisit you know including age and it may be 60 maybe 62 it may whatever um and i think it's so funny that um i've run into several two-car households um and i've had more times than not that one of the spouses have come to me because the other spouse or partner already went down and caught the sticker and i said hey you snooze you lose you know um so i'm not asking you you know but i'm not saying what areas of the uh this uh sticker program should be revisited and revised or retuned but um i would leave it to the two of you in terms of whether it's the yearly update or any other time from there on after um and i do appreciate you providing the numbers because i got for some reason i had it in my head after our biggest snowstorm that we had that there was a big long discussion on several i think three different lists that i saw about the stickers and falling off and they don't work and and then when i saw there were uh 23 of them which is a little uh about 2.2 percent of the actual numbers of stickers given out i thought it was like in the 100 so i'm glad to see that that's what it was and i'm also glad that you know in the cases that that did happen that the stickers were reissued so that's it thank you very much mr chair thank you very much anything for mr diggins yes yes thank you thank you for the report you know i'm glad to see it's such a nice uptake you know um on the program me and following on what mrs behind some suggestion about me revisiting some parts of the the program what do you make of the lack of query uh between um although between 60 and 64 you know um we do have people ask and we say um it's been approved for age 65 um and you know it's just not been something that people have really pushed back on i think that i try to explain the same way as i do for the two car household is you know the town um there's 11 thousand people over age 60 in arlington so if all of them were able to get a parking sticker they would probably you know it would be a burden on the program so we're trying to create a program that is sustainable and good for the town there's been very few times because of the age question that i've even had to really explain that and i think we promoted it as age 65 um plus from the beginning um so people that have come um it's really only been a few that have actually come and not not seen that it was age 65 i guess i'm sorry so i guess my question is is really do you think there is no demand there or very little demand there or if do you think that if the program was expanded so that the age limit was dropped there would be demand you think there would be demand yes there definitely would be demand yeah okay all right all right it's good to know i mean um you seem pretty confident about that and that's that's good you know i mean so i think i'm just being dense here you know but what's the link between the the program mean and people who haven't been to the center coming there and you know i just i just didn't get that i think they um hear about the parking sticker or they a lot of times where having people come in that's on neighbor with the sticker okay i'm a little biased but when i drive around arlington i actually notice that a lot of cars now yeah so i think it's a conversation starter people have to get it because they'll and so they come in on thursday evening and they'll have never been there before gotcha all right thank you yeah okay we have a motion received by mr decorsi and seconded by mr herd mr attorney cunningham mr mahan yes mr herd yes mr decorsi yes mr diggins yes mr helman yes by zero vote thank you very much that concludes our regular business and now we will move to new business in our usual order miss mara no new business thank you attorney cunningham no new business mr chair town manager phoenix no new business mrs mahan no new business mr herd i just want to give we're continuing relatives of the 250 um celebration but give an update of what of things that come particularly this year for in april um within the intervening spill group we came up with a schedule of events for each each town that involved for 2025 so we can help coordinate and so in 2024 it's meant as a sort of dry run a lot of the the towns are going to be trying to launch events that they'll do in 2025 and this year and so for the patriotic celebration we're looking for at more of a week long of events there might be some tavern nights that we work with individual businesses to have you know it's this location on that night and have revolutionary era themed events on that week and we're looking at a few other events and a pretty significant reenactment that's in the works we're working with town staff right now to make sure that it's feasible and safe but just look out for things to come because we're going to have some pretty pretty interesting and fun events that week and it's coming up on us everyone that's involved in the planning is coming up very fast so we'll look forward to that but we'll have more information with concrete plans as that comes together thank you very exciting thank you for that update Mr. Corsi thank you mr chairman yeah i just want to give a brief update um back in september we had a mugar update uh for the board and they mentioned that the conservation commission hearings would be starting and there was an interesting development last week at the february 1st conservation commission meeting the olington land trust had engaged a hydrologist to take a look at some of the test pit results and groundwater results and that that individual submitted a report that was just entered into the record last week it was done a little while ago and i'm just going to read one sentence from his report um based upon my analysis the proposed stonewater management system will not work as designed and may result in increased groundwater levels and surface flooding and of course we've been looking at this issue since 2015 and opposed uniformly as a as a community out of flooding concerns and other concerns in the area and one of the issues that is now come up is that there are seven or eight test pits and the reliability of the measurements on those test pits has now been put into question um had been putting to question previously but more formally through the submission of this report and it was a recommendation um that that this individual made that more monitoring wells should be installed so there's more of a measurement period and i think that's consistent with what we our position has been an abo as a board that um if the project is ever to be approved every single criteria must be met and every test must be met and if there's doubt um as to whether it's a test pit or monitoring well i say go with the monitoring well it's not our choice here but i will remind people who are watching that um there's not going to be a building permit issued unless there's a demonstration that there's a separation between the groundwater level and the in the lower foundation of whether it's parking garage or townhouses so i spoke to the chair the chairman about this and i may ask to come back to the board depending on what the the response is to this report for a further um maybe a comment letter to the conservation commission um from the board and and i will say the proponent that this letter just went on the record the proponent is going to have an opportunity to respond to that but it is i consider it a major development something that's consistent i want to commend uh one of the people who attended that meeting uh mr. more steve more who attends a lot of our meetings and he just really captured the essence that this has been the issue there should be no doubt and testing um that's something that everybody should be in agreement what the what the water levels are and more testing is probably necessary so sorry for the length there but i thought it was um given the timing was important to update uh the board and the public on that yeah no thank you for that update mr. diggins well it's the meeting before valentine's day and we hadn't picked up the pattern that's the day that's the meeting i always wear my favorite tie me so happy valentine's day to all of you it's always a pleasure spending you know monday evenings with you all you know so so uh yeah that's my new business thank you mr. diggins um i also have a red tie but i think i really can't it cannot compare so it also was an accident so i also i'm going to leave that one alone i got a couple of i could come back at but anyway sorry i think at this point we are ready to adjourn anyone here to make such a motion we'll enjoy all right let's take it the motion to adjourn by mr. herd seconded by mr. decorcy attorney cunningham this is mahan yes mr. herd yes mr. decorcy yes mr. diggins yes mr. helmeth yes by zero vote we are adjourned immediately bye