 Okay, welcome to the 2020 special town meeting of fall but being done virtually. I don't really have a lot of remarks tonight the only remark is obviously it's a dark and stormy night and a There's part of Precinct 11 doesn't have power I'm informed by just a chapter laying that about 500 homes without power in Arlington But we have over 200 and 31 town meeting members in attendance, so we're gonna keep going if for some reason We should lose power and a lot of the town goes down We're gonna figure out a way to continue the meeting till Wednesday if I should lose power Obviously everyone will know because my little box will turn black. I I'm gonna try and log on with my phone and my iPad and the Wi-Fi But and try and keep the meeting going so let's kind of just play that by ear Otherwise If the select board is still going maybe mr. Herd can read mr. I missed a basket can reach mr. Herd's I'm with you. Oh, you're here John good. Yep. I didn't see it down there. So mr. Herd Yes Thank you, miss moderate It is moved that if all the business of meeting has set forth in the warrant for the special time meeting is not disposed of at this session When the meeting adjourns it adjourns to Wednesday December 2nd 2020 at 8 p.m. That's you mr. Foskett second. Sorry. I was on mute. So that's okay Thank you very much. Mr. Herd. Thank you mr. Foskett. I'm going to direct the clerk to enter one vote in favor of that motion There any announcements or resolutions if anyone has an announcement or resolution, please use the raise hand feature on zoom And we'll see if any of those come up. I'm not seeing any no announcements or resolutions Does anyone have any reports? any Board or committee have a report they wish to give to us at this time again get my attention by using deep Raise hand feature on zoom if you have such a report Okay, seeing none Mr. Foskett if you could jump to number 11 on our agenda Skipping 10. Oh You know, well, we don't have any reports or to accept at this point. So we don't have to do number 10. Okay, I Moved at article 15 to 22 be laid upon the table Okay, Priscilla precinct 12 second second. Okay, so commuting members We are laying 15 to 22 on the table the speakers list from 15 is going to remain in the same order as we had before The other day, but we're taking 23 up and then 24 We're taking 23 up because the Capital Planning Commission does have a and hired expert who was going to be available for our question and answer if we should have any so instead of making that Gentlemen hang around all night. We're going to bring that article up first and then when we're done with 23, we're going to go right to 24 they CPA article because the tax rate is being set tonight after The town meeting and they need that CPA article to have been voted on for the tax rate. So I have Motion to table 15 through 22. It's been seconded I'm going to do a little unusual and ask if anyone is Objecting to a table in those articles to please use the raised hand feature on Yes, sir Okay, we have We're going to do this sort of verse So I'm going to take everyone who's objecting and then subtract them out from the number and do the math So we have three three people objecting to One person is objecting to tabling the articles So I'm going to rule 240 in favor to objecting 239 in favor and one in abstain so those articles are tabled that now brings us Part of so Julia this way and you can get rid of the raised hand feature. Thank you That now brings us to article 23 Mr. Moderator may I close close voting on the attendance? Oh, yes, I didn't even know it was still open So let's close voting on 20 on attendance Okay, mr. T more yontar Thank you Yontar precinct 7 and chair capital planning committee I rise to ask you to approve recommend vote on article 23 capital budget DPW yard There is detail in the CPC report to town meeting and we are available to answer your questions after the video now Presentation video by the project design consultant Jeff Alberti. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Yontar This presentation will provide an overview of article 23 for the DPW yard project I Would like to start by summarizing why the town needs a new and upgraded facility to support the DPW For starters a majority of the buildings were built in the early 1900s they've seen no significant improvements since the 1970s and the DPW responsibilities have increased significantly over that time as a result the facilities no longer serve the needs of the DPW They're no longer code compliant and this impacts efficiency of operations as well as employee safety These next few photos show some of the substandard conditions in the existing facilities that we plan to address From building envelope deficiencies to inadequate space for the vehicle maintenance operations To inadequate space for the staff as you can see locker rooms are located within the lunchrooms to inefficient and unsafe workshops Also due to inadequate space a large portion of the multi-million dollar fleet is left outdoors Which impacts the life expectancy of the vehicles and increases maintenance costs? Using the information from our inspections of the existing facilities we began the programming analysis in 2017 for DPW and ISD We later added facilities and IT operations into the mix Developed numerous concepts selected a preferred concept and completed an initial estimate This is the initial estimate that was completed in 2018 and it did include one year of escalation For an initial construction cost of approximately 25.5 million dollars We included soft costs at about 2.8 million dollars as well as owner and construction contingencies For a total project cost of just under 30 million dollars We'd like to spend a few minutes talking about what has changed since 2018 that has necessitated the need for the request in article 23 For starters when we began the project it was initially viewed as a DPW facility project as mentioned earlier We added the facilities and IT departments into the program when it was decided to relocate these operations out of the high school and into the DPW site as We began to coordinate with the high school design team We realized there was much more to consider from an overall municipal campus perspective Including providing vehicular access between the sites as shown by the red arrow and planning for a future Potential third means of access to the high school at this location The planning also included accounting for pedestrian access between the two sites to allow students to access the adjacent Recreation facilities on Grove Street as shown by the blue dotted line In order to properly incorporate these considerations the pace of the DPW design had to be slowed Said that that the proper data could be gathered and coordinated with the high school team and then the plans adjusted to accommodate these changes Some of the other changes that occurred since 2018 included changing the project delivery method from design bid-build To construction manager at risk to better manage the risks associated with a complex project With that change came increased project contingencies to include a guaranteed maximum price contingency and Also, we included some scope changes through the normal development of design These changes were primarily related to the comprehensive development of programming needs for the facilities and IT departments Which are being relocated from the high school to the DPW site as described earlier So where are we today this plan provides an overview of the current project on the right-hand side You can see the four buildings that will be renovated for IT facilities and DPW vehicle and equipment storage and on the left-hand side You can see the new operations building for DPW and ISD as well as a new assault storage structure This is an overall rendering of the new operations building for DPW and ISD You can see the main entrance located along Grove Street directly behind the individual shown in the image on your screen Utilizing the latest design documents we worked with the construction manager to develop a new up-to-date cost estimate this past October This estimate identified a total construction cost of just under 34 million dollars We factored in approximately three point two million dollars in soft costs as well as owner contingencies and construction contingencies for a total project cost of approximately thirty eight point nine million dollars We compared that to the 2018 estimate of approximately thirty million dollars and identified an eight point nine million dollar increase The factors contributing to this increase are listed below They include a schedule extension associated with the high school planning exercise mentioned earlier an Unforeseen 2019 market spike which saw a cost rise at a significant pace due to a competitive market in 2019 the change to the alternate delivery method Increased contingencies as well as enhanced building renovations as mentioned earlier primarily for facilities in IT It's important to note that the approach used on this project is a fiscally sound and responsible approach Especially when compared to what other communities are doing This chart graphs actual costs per square foot for DPW facility projects through 2019 with costs escalated beyond 2019 at a standard rate of approximately four percent as We add in the cost of the Arlington project based on today's estimate Projected out to 2021 you can see that there is a significant savings on a cost per square foot basis This savings is directly attributable to the fact that we are renovating and reusing four buildings on the existing site As shown below Another fiscally sound decision was to relocate the facilities and IT departments from the high school to the DPW site If they were to be constructed in the high school It would literally be off the charts as shown here when compared to DPW facility costs by incorporating them into the DPW site and renovating existing structures the town is able to save approximately two point five million dollars Finally one item that has not been reflected in any of the estimates But is worth mentioning is that we're starting to see some potential savings a dip if you will in the current market due to the economic Slowdown while we're not sure how long this dip will last. We're hopeful that by advancing the project now We will be able to take advantage of some of the savings. We're seeing Thank you for listening in anything else, Mr. Yontar. No, thank you, Mr. Mother. We're done. Thank you very much Ms. Mevin Mr. Moderator's Rain and Mevin Precision I want to know since this is going to be for a borrowing for fiscal year 2022 When is it expected just the project expect to start and how long is it going to take to finish? Do we have an idea? I wasn't clear on all of this Mr. Yontar, can you have you have that answer? Yes The design will be complete at the end of this year The town expects to sign a guaranteed maximum price in March of next year and site mobilization will begin in April And we believe the project will take two consecutive phases lasting 16 months and eight months So estimated completion is April 2023 Okay, that's all I have for now. Thank you Thank you, Ms. Mevin. Mr. Gordon Jamison Thank you. Excuse me. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Gordon Jamison, Precinct 12 Anyone who was a town meeting member and Mr. Rodamaker first presented the initial before the additions presentation Realized that this is a very difficult site on a very constrained piece of land Underneath it are toxic, toxic waste from the gas plant that used to be there There's a DPW sewer line and there's also the mill floodplain slash the mill river stream goes underneath this project So it's quite complex and in the past those things have consorted to flood Some of the lower areas towards the back of the of the property Impacting the equipment that we have that most of which Against standard ways things are done these days are housed outdoors So this this is this is the dump basically but one of the largest departments that impacts us all every day They were out working in the park behind me today has an absolute pit of a facility to work in We've done our fire. We've done our police done our schools. It's time to do our DPW I'm also very excited that the IT and facilities departments are being co-localized with the DPW This is because increasingly those will be Their ability to work effectively will be augmented by being close to the DPW As well as for the IT and facilities also close to the largest building in town the new high school So I understand that this was so my only disappointment was that when this was presented to us a couple years ago a town meeting That there was not more work done but that was necessitated by the changes in the high school project until the high school project was finalized There was really no way to go forward with this project. So I asked my fellow members to enthusiastically support the people that take care of us They sweep the streets they clean out the drains they plow and stand the streets especially in winter is coming up And for the most part the work they do you really don't notice and that's the good thing So please vote yes. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Thank you, Mr. Jamison. Stephen Revillac Good evening, Mr. Moderator. Good evening, Mr. Moderator Stephen Revillac precinct one. I have just a few questions during the presentation we were told that the sort of project methodology was being changed from I believe design and build to construction manager at risk. Would it be possible to get an explanation of what those methodologies are and why we changed Mr. Yontar Timorka Yontar, capital planning chair. I'm going to defer to one of my colleagues. I'm not sure if Mike Rademacher or if Alan Reedy would be the appropriate one to answer Mr. Rademacher is on we can promote Mr. Reedy but Mr. Rademacher can you answer that question Sure I can take a stab and if our consultant wants to add anything I guess I can ask Okay But eventually we originally were going to be building this as a design bid build where you put a set of plans together and then ask contractors to bid on them and you take the lowest bidder And at that point you live with the plans you have and the contract you have and you are often open to Issues with your drawings that the contractors can peel apart and take advantage of the methodology we are working is a Contract manager at risk where you bring a contract manager in as part of the design and ask that they help develop the plans to minimize any kinds of surprises you might find during construction where the contractor assumes that risk because they've been part of the design process We have used this successfully or the town has on a few projects I believe the Gibbs school one of them and it's been very advantageous especially a project as complicated as public works where it's a historical buildings and contaminated site and the issues we have And so it was determined that they divide the the PTBC and the design team that this was the more appropriate way to proceed Thank you, Mr. Rademacher. Mr. Chaplain did you have something to add to that. Thank you, Mr. Moderator Adam Chaplain town manager, Mr. Rademacher answered that extremely well I would only add that the high school is also being procured under that same model. So as Mr. Rademacher said the Gibbs school was performed in this manner constructed in this manner to the high school will be as will the DP. Very good. Thank you. Back to you, Mr. Refleck. Okay, thank you, Mr. Moderator. So, given that I realize this is a complex site and the facility itself. There's a lot going on between, you know, not just with DPW and DPW is many needs but also incorporating the facilities and IT department so I mean this that sounds like a reasonable choice. As you know the consultant said in his video presentation, the buildings on this site were built in the turn of the 20th century. They have not had significant upgrades since the 1970s. And to me this is work that is long overdue, and I'm hoping that we will vote yes on this article tonight. Thank you Mr. Moderator. Thank you, Mr. Refleck. David Levy. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Can you hear me okay? Yes, sir. All right, David Levy, precinct 18. I just have one comment. And then a question I, it should be noted in the 2019 capital planning report where this project was first approved. Both things that were sort of referenced in the cost increase were referenced in this capital planning report that summed up to $32.2 million. For one, the IT and the facilities groups were contemplated. That's on paragraph four of the campus renovation. And then in addition, the DPW project has been arranged in order to allow connection from our high school to grow street should that desire, should that be desired in the final design. So a lot of the contemplations in this cost increase are already discussed in the 2019 capital plan planning report that produced the $32.2 million cost estimate that was approved at that time. I do have a question. I don't know who the appropriate person is Mr. Iyer, but for the $8.9 million additional appropriations being asked, how will that be funded if approved? Bonding. We're going to borrow the money. Okay, so that'll be debt service over 20 years. Mr. Automaker. Actually, this is Timor. Timor Yontar. Yes, Timor Yontar chair capital planning committee. That's correct. It will be bonded. We anticipate over a 30 year period. And with interest rates being extremely low right now, it's, it's a great time to borrow. So we, that will cause a roughly a $400,000 annual debt service payment. Okay, so then do you have an estimate for the amount of increase in property taxes that will free household? I do. I do. The answer is zero. And the reason for that is that the capital budget is fixed in size. It was sized at 5% of the overall town budget. So this project and all of our capital projects and capital assets, trucks, police cars, etc. must fit into that budget. What this does mean is it's $400,000 per year, which is about 4.6% of the current capital budget. That portion will not be available for other capital projects. We'll have to, you know, squeeze this in by either, you know, deprioritizing other other things or reducing the expenditure or delaying them. Okay, so you were going on record now to say that we are not going to, that other cuts will come out of the capital plan in the 2021 town meeting to make way for this cost increase. I am going on the record to say that this is not going to increase your taxes and it will all fit in the capital plan with no increase in taxes. That's right. Wow. This is awesome. Okay. Thank you very much. No further questions. Thank you, Mr. Levy. Scott Lever. Mr. Lever, you can unmute yourself. Sorry, can you hear me? Yes. Thank you. Scott Lever, Precinct 8. Has there been an evaluation of the potential to contract out more services in this area to reduce the footprint and reduce the capital requirements? That's a little beyond the scope of the article, but I'll ask Mr. Chapter Lane to give us a very quick answer on that. Professor moderator, Adam Chaplain, Town Manager. Yeah, I would say on an ongoing basis, both the manager's office in cooperation with the director's office director public works office are considering where it might be more advantageous to contract out services. I'm not sure that's widely known. We do contract out. Law and maintenance services in the cemetery. We contract out a great deal of our tree work to supplement the work of our tree department, along with other contracted work for more construction related projects. If you if you're asking me today if I thought there was a lot of room for production via contracting with the response times that we get from our own staff. I'd say we're I think we're right up against how much we can contract, but But we do look at it on an ongoing basis to determine if there are some services that we can Good contract. I can't cite for you on a per capita basis right now, you know, where we are staffing wise, but my my general understanding and comparing us to other communities as we are A relatively either moderately or maybe even lower than moderately staffed DPW is compared to similar communities. Can I ask about the the it portion of this is the it build, including a data center or any other specialized construction. Mr. Rada maker or Mr. Alberti. I'm sorry. I didn't hear the question. The question is in the it component of the bill. Is there a data center or other specialized construction or is it primarily office space for staff. The it department server room data center will be relocated to this facility. Okay, has there been an evaluation of moving that equipment to a cloud service provision model. Well, I don't want to speak for the direct the it director. I know that he does a lot of that and there are some things I believe that More advantage is to have locally. Again, I don't I want to speak to the it director, but I know that he's working toward that. Mr. Good. Can you answer that. Mr. Good. Thank you, Mr. moderator David good to chief technology officer. We currently host a variety of Core applications in the cloud. We strive to keep a balance of other strategic elements local and then some number of those posted the crux of the matter is the core network infrastructure, which currently resides in the high school, which will be moved permanently to the DPW building. Is probably the most important asset we have it furnishes connectivity wired and wireless to every building in the town, including schools. So the reason for sort of a Location with conditioned environments. It is sort of a reason for having that server room relocated and built in the DPW building. One, one final question. How many of the staff are how much how, let's see how to position this question in how much of this facility is for for staff who might otherwise be located at some other commercial office space within town, especially given vacancy rates of Commercial real estate in Arlington right now. So we do have it staff that are located in some of the buildings around the town. There's 22 people, both in the town and school group. And I would say seven of those employees are housed in town or school buildings currently Sorry, Mr. Good that that was meant to be a broader question around the whole facility. Okay, sorry about that. No, no, that's okay. Appreciate that part. So, Mr. Good. I think the question is, can we put any of the IT staff into a commercial real estate as opposed to the new facilities you intend to build correct Mr. Lever. Yes, that's right. Okay. Or has that been explored at all. We've looked around town, but I think that the ability to keep the group together as one core group sort of moved us towards looking Looking at the DPW site as being the location where we would house about 75% of those folks. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Thank you, Mr. Lever, Lever or Lever, Lever, Mr. Lever. Thank you, Mr. Lever. Caroline Murray. Caroline Murray, precinct 12. I raised my hand in anticipation of a question I thought was going to come but I'll just answer it in case somebody is thinking it. I'm a construction professional. I have 20 years experience in the area and I just wanted to confirm that the CMET risk approach versus design build is the responsible way to move forward here and escalation that was noted in the presentation is basically right on the money. And as far as any savings that are potential for any, you know, recession or market change will probably be realized at the end of 2021. So planning now is the best way we can take advantage of that. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Thank you, ma'am. Mr. Alexander Bilski. Alexander Bilski precinct 2. I stand to terminate debate on the article and all matters before it. Thank you very much, Mr. Bilski. Thank you very much, Mr. Fosket. We have a motion to terminate debate and it's not debatable. So we're going to go right to the vote to terminate debate. So Tom, meeting members, when you see the voting grid precincts 1 through 7, navigate over to the portal, refresh and start your vote. After a few seconds, 8 to 14, please navigate over, refresh your page and start your vote. And now the remaining precincts 15 to 21, please navigate over and start your vote. If you're having trouble voting, please use the raise hand feature on Zoom in order to bring it to our attention that you can have a trouble voting. And if you're phoning in your vote, please call Ms. Brazil at her office phone number. 781-316-3071. I know there are at least one town meeting member who is not able to make a good connection with the internet, so she will be phoning in her vote. So this is on the motion to terminate debate. We've had 228 voting. There are 16 who have not voted yet. And we have nobody raising hands. Okay, so the last 11, if you have, please go ahead and vote. It's down to nine. We're going to give you another couple of seconds to vote. We've gotten much better at voting. We're voting a lot quicker than we were the first two nights. So after about a minute, we're already down to nine members who haven't voted. Sylvia Dominguez, Patricia Aldoone, Creston Klein, Daniel Jelkat, Stephanie Ford Weems, Lynette Culverhouse, she's having trouble, so she's probably going to phone in. Lynette, if you could phone in your vote. Sherry Barron, and we have just three people left. All right, let's close voting. Motion passes. By 91%, we have 217 in favor of terminating debate. We have 22 noes. That's a vote. And I so declare the debate is terminated. There were some requests if we could do away with running through the screens after each vote. We can't actually, because part of the enabling legislation, along with requiring us to show everyone who is waiting on the speakers list also shows, makes us show everybody how they voted so you can confirm what your vote is. So we do have to put up with it and we've got that down to eight seconds a page. So it doesn't really take too long. It takes about 30 seconds total. So we have to bear with that. And when that's done, Mr. Kowalski will open the main motion. As printed in the capital planning budget, capital planning committee report. Now we have the main motion of the capital planning committee to spend 8.9 million dollars. 8.9 million dollars by borrowing to spend on the town yard so we can complete the construction. So precincts one through eight will jump on over to the portal. Refresh if you need to. Mr. Foskett has a point of order. Mr. Foskett. I'm just a moderator. I believe this requires a two thirds vote. Yes, it does, sir. Thank you. Thank you, sir. And if the rest of the paid up see, we just had it all he had to do was refresh. We've had some hardware upgrades. So it should work a lot quicker for everybody. So eight through 21 can go over and start voting. Mr. Moderator. Yes, sir. Our vote as Mr. Foskett mentioned actually in the system is listed as a majority vote. Well, it's a two thirds vote. So I'm going to do the math. If anything with bonding is a two thirds vote. So please click one for yes, two for no. And then click cast your vote. You're having trouble voting. Please use racing and feature on zoom. We have 16 people who haven't voted yet. So if those last few people can go ahead and vote. Okay. Okay. Debra Butler, Michael Quinn and not a new OE. And I'll pronounce it his name. Go ahead and vote. We're going to close voting in 15 seconds. Five seconds left to vote and everyone has now voted. So let's close voting. We have 248 members voting. It's a 98% mark 96% margin. We have 237 in the yes. We have nine. No, it's a two thirds vote. I so declare it. And that closes article 23. Once we run through the screens. Okay, we're going to close out article 23. That's going to bring us to article 24. Appropriation for the community preservation fund. First up will be Mr. Eric Helmuth. Thank you. Thank you. I believe there's a video presentation. Yes, there is. Thank you very much. I'm Eric Helmuth, chair of the community preservation act committee here to talk about article 24. Article 24 asks town meeting to fund three CPA projects for the current fiscal year. We approve these projects for the annual town meeting earlier this year, but we decided to postpone them because they were less time sensitive. And we wanted to keep that meeting as short as possible. The projects are now ready to proceed. And we're here tonight asking for your support. Each of these projects fall under the open space and recreation category of CPA funding. And they're sponsored by the town department of planning and community development. The Minuteman bikeway planning project is a major study of the long range needs of this important transportation corridor and recreation resource. It would develop a shared community vision and action plan using heavy community involvement at every step of the way. It would provide a prioritized list of infrastructure of the community. It would provide a prioritized list of infrastructure upgrades with conceptual designs laying the groundwork for future grant applications to fund the work. The next project is the Arlington archaeological renaissance survey. Prior CPA funding has helped the planning department identify a number of undocumented archaeological resources that may be of significant value. This survey relayed the groundwork to protect them if necessary. The final list of sites is to be determined. The town is looking at Prince Hall Cemetery, industrial areas along Millbrook and Spipon, town on recreation areas and others. Town is applying for matching funding from the state and if successful this funding would reduce the need for CPA funds. Finally, the documentation of town owned historic and municipal resources. This would fund the completion of the detailed documentation that is required for town owned properties that could qualify for historic preservation grant funding. But before the town can apply for those funds there is some detailed work that needs to be done to document each property. These are landscapes, buildings and burial grounds and in addition to availing the town of access to grant funds for preservation. This work would also provide the town with a valuable planning tool when assessing building conditions and establishing maintenance, renovation or expansion plans. Thank you very much for your consideration and we're happy to answer any questions. And Mr. Monterey, this is Eric Helmuth once again chair of the CPA committee. I just want to make a quick correction to my recorded presentation. I incorrectly stated that all three projects were under the open space and recreation project. The men and men bikeway planning project is and the other two are obviously historic preservation. Very good. Thank you, Mr. Helmuth for that correction. Do you have anything further to add to your presentation? No, sir. Thank you. Okay. Ms. Nancy Bloom wishes to speak. Nancy Bloom, precinct 18. Mr. Monterey, I had a couple of questions about this. Sure. One was, will there be any for the men and men bikeway study? Will there be any liaison with other towns that also have the men and men bikeway in their towns? The Mr. Helmuth or Ms. Rae? Eric Helmuth chair of the CPA committee. The answer is yes. And if Jenny Rae is on, I think she can elaborate. Yes, Ms. Rae is on. Good evening. Jennifer Rae, director of planning and community development. Yes, we will be engaging with our budding communities along the bikeway. Okay. Thank you. And my second question has to do with a different studies, the one, the application of historic municipal resources. And it mentions they'll be, the project will include looking at older school buildings. Will that include some of the older school buildings that have been sold by the town? And are now used to say condos or is that totally off the board? Either Ms. Rae or Ms. Helmuth. Eric Helmuth, CPA chair. So the list of the school buildings is as follows, the Bishop's school bracket, Dowland, Hardy, Perce, Stratton, Thompson, the Gibbs, the Audison and the DPW building. So that's the complete list of schools that we have. Ms. Rae can correct me if there are any others. There's none of the schools that are no longer owned by the town. That's right. Yes, this project is for only for town-owned projects. That's correct. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Thank you, Ms. Bloom. Ms. Memmon? Yes, Ms. Moderator. I just want to clarification on the presentation. It said APS. I'm not very good with these, this abbreviation. We just get what that means. It was one of the last slides. I don't see it on the report and the recommended vote for community preservation act. I would assume Arlington Public Schools but I'll have Ms. Rae correct me if I'm wrong. I don't know. Could we have Eric, Mr. Helmuth? Hi, Eric Helmuth, CPA chair. Yes, that's Arlington Public Schools. My apologies. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. John Warden. You're on Mr. Warden. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. John Warden precinct, two questions. In that list of schools or properties owned by the town rattled off. I didn't hear the parmenter. Did I miss that or is that not included for some reason? Parmenters is no longer used to school. It's now used for babies sitting while the high school is under construction, as I understand it. Yes, it's a monotomy preschool. Mr. Helmuth, are you going to look at the parmenter? It is not on the list. If you want to do the rationale, you need to get information from Ms. Rae. I was just curious. Second question. In some of the pictures that flashed across the screen during the presentation, I saw the facade of the column building at the high school, which has been the symbol of the high school for the past 90 years. I wonder if there's any study or plan to preserve at least that little slice of Ireland's history. There's none that I'm aware of. Curious, they're still writing a picture then, isn't it? Yes. But Mr. Helmuth is going to answer that. Yeah, Eric, it's a CPA going to preserve the facade of the column house. Eric Helmuth, CPH chair of the column house is not on the list of buildings for the historic inventory. Okay. Thank you, Mr. moderator. Thank you. Priya Sankalya. Good evening, Mr. moderator of Priya Sankalya Precinct 13. I had a question about the archaeological survey section of the presentation. Would those be sites that are expecting some construction that are going to be surveyed for archaeological remains? Mr. Helmuth or Ms. Rae? I'd suggest Ms. Rae to take that on. Okay. Jennifer Rae, director of planning and community development. No, they are not locations where we would anticipate any sort of construction. They are simply sites that have been identified that are either currently, you know, recreation owned locations or locations such as the Millbrook and other sort of landscapes in town that we are looking to do some archaeological research as was identified as part of the survey master plan, which was a master plan that was conducted looking at all different types of historic preservation opportunities in town and identified the need to do some archaeological reconnaissance on specific locations in town, not ones where we would anticipate any sort of construction of new buildings or such. These are landscapes. Okay, excellent. Thank you. Thank you. Anything else, Ms. Sankalya? No, thank you, Mr. moderator. Thank you. Mr. Mark McCabe. Did that come through? You know, I'm starting again, Mr. McCabe. I'll start it again. Yeah. Thank you, Mr. moderator, Mark McCabe, precent to, I stand to terminate debate on article 24 and all matters before. Very good. Thank you, Mr. McCabe. We've missed you up to now. Mr. McCabe has made a motion to terminate debate. It's been seconded by Mr. Foskett. It's a non-debatable motion. It's a non-debatable motion when Mr. Kowalski brings up the voting grids. So the first half of the time, please go over. So precincts one through seven, please go over to the voting portal. Refresh your page. Then precinct eight through 14, please navigate over, refresh your page. And 15 through 21 can go over now and refresh your page. Then please vote one for yes to terminate debate, two for no to keep the debate going, and then click cast your vote. If you're having a voting issue, please use the raise hand feature on Zoom. We have a couple. Susan McCabe has her hand up. Adele Crouse and Ms. Pam Hallett. So let's see, Ms. McCabe, you're having a voting issue. That was an error. I hit that an error. I'm totally fine. Okay, go. Thank you. Adele Crouse. Ms. Crouse, are you having a voting issue? Julie Bresseltown-Clark. I have Adele's verbal vote. Oh, okay. Yeah, she raised her hand somehow. I'm not sure how she did that. And then Pam Hallett. Ms. Hallett, did you have a voting issue? Ms. Hallett, you can unmute yourself and vote or tell us what the issue is so we can help you. Okay, while we wait for Ms. Hallett, eight people have not voted. It looks like Pam's put her hand down. Okay. And she still hasn't voted, though. So seven members have not voted on the termination of the debate. If you could please do so now. Robert Tossi, Pam Hallett, Jennifer Seuss, Ian Thompson, and Joanne Preston. Those four people could go and Len Cardin. Okay. Pam, if you have an issue voting, please let us know somehow. Okay, let's give these last three people 15 seconds. Ms. Hallett entered a verbal vote. Very good. Thank you, Ms. Hallett. So Joanne Preston and Len Cardin. Go ahead and vote. You have 10 seconds. Five and time's up. Let's close voting. Excuse me. Motion to terminate debate is successful. 89%. We have 210 in the affirmative. 27. No. The debate is terminated. After we run through the screens, we'll take a vote on the main article. Just a moderator. Yes, ma'am. Maybe we can remind 10 meeting members that if they're having trouble voting, they can also call the town clerk. Yes. Thank you very much. I forgot to do that. Thank you, Ms. Sullivan. So we'll enter that number into the chat for folks. Okay. And Mr. Godsel, tells us that power is now back on increasing to 11. That's good news. Okay. We're going to open up voting on the main article 24, the CPA Community Preservation Act Fund request to spend $175,200 on the funds as Mr. Helmuth told us about. So voting is now open. So precincts one through seven, one through eight, please navigate over to this voting portal. Precincts eight through nine. Your voting portal. Precincts eight through 15 can navigate over now. And 15 through 21, go ahead and navigate over, please refresh if you need to. We're taking our vote. So one for yes in favor of the recommended vote of the Community Preservation Act Committee, two for no, if you don't want to spend this money and then click cast your vote. If you're having a voting issue, please either use the race hand feature on Zoom or call Ms. Brazil, 7-8-1-316-3071. Okay. We have 10 folks who haven't voted yet. If those people can go ahead and do that. What one for yes, two for no, and then click cast your vote. Joanne Preston, Ethan Zimmer, Brian Rearig, Caroline Murphy, Murray. So if those four people want to go ahead and vote. Excuse me, Mr. Moderator. Yes. Adam, there is a request to show your voting screen and not the article. Thank you. Yeah. We typically show the voting results once they're ready and the article during the voting period. Okay. Sorry about that. Yeah. Cause all it's showing is who has voted and who it's not. So at this point, I'm going to give them 15 seconds to vote and we'll close voting and all verbal votes have been entered. So you have three seconds to vote and time's up. Let's close voting. May motion passes by a vote of 98%. We have 236 in the affirmative and six in the negative. It's a vote and I so declare it. That ends article 24. Mr. Moderator. Yes, sir. The move that articles 15 to 22 be taken from the table. Second. Okay. I'm going to ask the clerk to direct to, to enter one vote in favor of that motion. That really is just nothing else to do if we don't. So we're going to go ahead and do that. And that will bring us back to article 15. Once we go through the screens. Now this is the grand experiment. I'm going to see if all the speaker. Speaker list has been preserved. And I did. We had some internal debate whether it would work or not. Looks like Mr. Crosby made sure it did. Thank you, Adam. All right. So we're back to the speakers list on 15 home rule legislation or tire police officer details. I did know that the town manager circulated the question of whether it would work or not. And I hope you all had a chance to read that. Ms. Memmon. Serena Memmon. Thank you, Mr. Moderator Serena Memmon, precinct 21. So I want to just start out with good evening, Mr. Moderator Tom officials and Tom fellow Tom meeting members. I hope that you had a splendid holiday and are staying dry and warm on this chilly, windy evening. I rose my hand to speak an article 15 because even as I was in charge, I feel as an elected Tom representative, I feel it's my duty and as a color person of color, it's my duty to bring up my concerns. So I went through this methodically and I'm sorry, if I'm going to probably hit the time marker on this, but bear with me since there was a lot that was presented by many people. I reviewed the lengthy documents, including the one from today that was sent out with the title of our ask questions prepared by the Tom manager, police chief in the legal department. I'm left with these concerns. First, the title, the special police officer, why, why choose that title? Why not a detailed flag or detailed police flag or police flag or itself or just a flag or period since this is not a police duty, I feel it's more gentler to have a title that better serves the town. Second is on crime. I felt that the financial committee reports stated that the crime has gone down in our community. So why do we need the people who are directing traffic to carry gun? You know, I understand in Britain, watching for Zikaria that they, the police officers don't even carry gun and our military, our police departments militarize almost. So it's pretty scary, but not. So I think we have to consider this greatly and nationally, locally, people of color are asking for reduced police department footprints. And this article does exactly the opposite. It increases the size of our police department at a time when our crime rates are down. This doesn't make sense. And as a, as a woman of color and as an Arlington resident for over 20 years, I feel, I truly feel that this matter, it's, it is important to see a detailed. Ken and should be handled better again. Next one is about the Fincom report. Recent Fincom report on Arlington Police Department show. The majority calls to the APDR for behavioral, mental health and substance abuse and do not involve crimes. This is a significant finding. And is evidence enough that both active and retired police mandated continued training in community policing or diversity and biases choose such as cultural diversity, bias training, implicit bias, LGBTQ, suicide prevention, ADL law enforcement seminar, procedural justice, implicit bias, recognizing symbols of hate as well as escalation, fair and impartial policing and mental health per se. Next one is on language. It makes sense that we provide our active and retired police officers training that they need to respond to a majority of services, service calls received. This bylaw does not contain language that specifically requires a training. By understanding that chief can mandate training, I'm uncomfortable that it's not specified in this bylaw. Next concern is a amount of work and civilian flaggers. So it has been already elucidated by previous speakers that there's more detail work than the police department, Arlington police department can handle, which makes me wonder, why are we not using civilian flaggers like the one like other states or other communities are? I have driven by, I have driven many times to the middle of the country since my in-laws live in Michigan and through Canada and notice high use of non-police detail in both highways and non-highway approach projects. Perhaps we're reluctant to change our ways in detailing in Massachusetts, but I think this is a highly worthwhile goal that we may consider changing our procedures and maybe we're even behind standard operating procedures elsewhere and other communities in North America. My next comment is on economics of this. Economics is speaking with a high rate of unemployment. I would like to see local residents who are also familiar with Arlington to be able to apply for these jobs as flaggers because it does have a high lucrative pay. Retired police officers could also apply for this work. I'm not saying they shouldn't. Contracts is the next point. Regarding contracts, why are there two police unions? I don't understand that. We're always going to be negotiating contracts and so this shouldn't be a roadblock to forward thinking on this matter. Next point is clarifying through frequently asked questions today. It says that civilian flaggers would not result in inappropriate appreciable savings to the town. Another way to phrase this is that civilian flaggers would not cost the town any more than Arlington Police Department flaggers, but it would start us in a process shifting a spending to where it's actually needed, especially as Arlington is facing an impending need for another override. My next point is on cost saving for our community. Civilian flaggers are paid an average of 46 dollars and some cents per hour while police officers paid 51 dollars and some cents for hour. Another potential area cost savings that civilian flaggers are only paid for the actual time work. Article 4 of the collective bargaining agreement states that regardless of how many hours they are actually worked, officers are paid minimum four hours per detail and at least after eight hours they're paid time and a half. And since these are going to be retired police officers, there's no dismandate. They have to be 16 hours or whatever restrictions that are listed in one of the frequently asked questions. Another point I have is inclusiveness. Other communities like Lexington permit civilian flaggers, including some of our retired Arlington Police Department officers. This is more inclusive, this is a more of an inclusive approach that allows both retired police officers and civilians to pursue these jobs and avoid arming flaggers. Voting no on this article we're more easily allowed to Arlington pursue this option of encouraging retired police officers to apply for civilian flagger jobs as well. Focus on the job. We should not rely on officers working over time at construction details to also be forced. Zemin, Ms. Memmon, time is up. Oh, okay. Can I just conclude or no? Give you five seconds. Okay, so I just think that the guns as well as the requirements of training and so forth can be more cost-prohibited than cost-saving and I think we should go with civilian flaggers as well as for diversity and inclusiveness. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Memmon. Mr. Allen Tosti, Mr. Tosti, you can unmute yourself. Yeah. We can hear you now. Go ahead. Can you hear me now? Yeah. Okay, Allen Tosti precinct 17. I urge the support for this common-sense proposal to put recently retired Arlington Police officers on our streets instead of out-of-town police who don't know our town. After reading this article in motion, I don't know why anyone would have a problem with this. After hearing the opponents of this article, I still think our town meeting should support this article in motion. The town manager and police chief said that they support police at detail work for three reasons. It expands the police presence in our town. It supports the take-home pay of officers, our employees, approximately 20 percent that is paid for by private utilities, not the town taxpayer. And three, it provides good value of service to the community, our sound reasons. Let's look at each. It expands the police presence. One of the opponents claims that people don't want more police on the streets. I think this does not make sense and is not true. I have never seen a survey or a poll that supports this claim from the people in the neighborhoods, whatever neighborhood it is. Common sense says that police presence deters lawbreakers, whether it's robbery and heart crime or speeding an illegal parking. The second point supports the police take-home pay. Why should we care? We compete with our offer police recruits with other occupations and surrounding cities, towns, and districts. We are not competitive. If we are not competitive, we will get a lower quality of recruits. 20 percent is a huge difference in pay. The town can't afford to make up the difference out of our general fund. 20 percent of our pay of uniformed officers equals about 1.1 million dollars. Which budget shall we take that from? Today, that comes from the private utilities. In addition, the town makes about 10 percent on administrative costs. And finally, it provides value of service to the community. The state prevailing wage law requires that contractors hired by the town be paid a set amount, which is approximately 90 percent of a police officer's detailed pay. If you don't like the prevailing wage law, take that to your state rep or senator. But that's the law now. So what is done for the extra 10 percent or five dollars an hour? We get trained law enforcement officers very visible on the street to turn crime whether robbery or speeding or illegal parking. Two, we have additional public safety personnel if there's an accident or a major disaster. And three, we have a medically trained first responder on the streets. When you get a 911, when you make a 911 call for a medical emergency, most people don't know this, but the chances are the first town personnel to respond will be a police officer because they're already in your neighborhood. Trained as medical first responders and CPR. Thus, for an extra five dollars an hour, the taxpayer doesn't even pay for it. The citizens get additional crime deterrent in the area, additional personnel in emergency for emergency or accidents, and medical first responders again in the area. To vote no on this article does not replace police officers with flaggers. It does not save the town any money. It only means some detail work will go to out-of-town officers instead of retired Arlington officers. It only punishes our retired officers who put their lives on the line to keep our community safe over many years. That makes no sense and is grossly unfair. Please vote yes on the selectments motion. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Thank you, Mr. Tosti. I'm going to call Mr. Tim Yontar to make a correction from his statement the other day. Tosti Yontar. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Tim Mokai Yontar, precinct 7. I want to offer a correction and apology to town meeting. I made a mistake in my remarks on this article last session because when I closed I said approximately if the town were to save money on details by using flagmen it could use the savings to increase police salaries. Now this is incorrect and oversimplifying for two reasons. First, a large portion of the details are paid by third parties such as utilities so a switch there would not save the town budget any money. Secondly, the details that are paid by the town are paid from the capital budget. So savings there could not flow over to the operating budget which pays police salaries. Savings there would be just more money that could be spent on capital projects. So while I do think that the town should explore spending its money on flagmen rather than on police details because they are legal, effective, and cheaper, it's incorrect to suggest that the savings could be used to pay the police more. Paying the police more is a separate matter entirely. I did not intend to mislead town meeting and I apologize for my error. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Thank you, Mr. Yontar. We appreciate that. Mr. Edward Trimbley. Like many of you, I have wondered... Mr. Trimbley, name and precinct number? Edward Trimbley, precinct 19. Thank you. Like many of you, I have wondered why we needed police officers on detail while the rest of the world seems to use flagmen. Then I got a job that required me to work in the street sometimes and I came to really appreciate police officers on details. A good detail officer facilitates the efficiency of a job site. They direct traffic and pedestrians, move cones, they facilitate the movement of construction vehicles, they can close roads, set up detours, if need be, and they also have an authority that flagmen don't have. I was working in the sorrow drive on ramp way to BU one night and a driver followed by six others decided to drive around the barricades right into the oncoming off-ramp lane off of sorrow drive. The officer on detail put a stop to it right then and, well, he was fair, he didn't hand out anybody tickets. He did let them know in no uncertain terms that there wasn't okay and that they were endangering the lives of a number of people, including myself. No flag man could have done that. I also got to see a detail officer because of their radio has become aware of a nearby bank robbery and he knew immediately what to look for and to keep his eyes open for it. I mean we didn't see anything but he was watching. We did have problems with details though. Sometimes we couldn't get them and we either have to wait until we could get one or we'd have to work in the street without them, which is not not the best situation. Sometimes officers from another town would come and they were fine. They knew they knew how to direct traffic and all that but the people stop a lot and ask directions. They ask where things are and the local cops can do that. The cops from out of town really don't know the answers to that. So the bottom line for me is that you know detail officer costs a little extra money but the benefits of a good detail officer is worth a lot more than the 40 dollars a day that a flag man would save and having a retired police officer available just means that anybody needing a detail can get one. You know at the end of the day a good detail officer vastly improves the chances we can all come home and so I would ask you to vote yes on this compensation solution to a safety issue for those of us who have to work in the street. Thank you Mr. Roderator. Thank you Mr. Tremblay. Mr. Siano has a point of order. Mr. Siano what's your point of order? One of one of the speakers. Identify yourself first. Frank Siano precinct 15. A prior speaker was allowed to speak for a second time solely for the purpose of making correction and then he made an argument and that's not correct. That's not right. Okay. I hear your point of order and I thought it was important for him to make his corrections because he was speaking on behalf of the Capitol Planning Committee when he spoke. We don't want to have a miscommunication from one of our committees so I think I believe that his entire point was correcting his other issue but I do hear what you're saying and generally people not allowed to speak the second time till the speaking list has been cleared of all other speakers but I did make an exception for that one point by Mr. Yontar. So I thank you for your point of order sir. Thank you sir. Leba Hayam. Leba Hayam precinct 11. I move the question. Okay we have motion to terminate the debate by Ms. Hayam. Second. Thank you Mr. Foskett. It's been seconded by Mr. Foskett. The motion to terminate the debate is not debatable. So going to enable convoting and precincts one through seven please navigate over to the portal page. Refresh screen if necessary precincts eight through fifteen go ahead and do that now and sixteen through twenty one go ahead and navigate over to the portal. Refresh if you need to. Press one for yes to terminate the debate two for no if you want to continue debating and then cast your vote. If you're having an issue to voting please use the raised hand feature in zoom and get my and Ms. Sullivan's attention. You will find out what your issue is if you're phoning in your vote you'll want to call Ms. Brazil at seven eight one three one six three zero seven one that's seven eight one three one six three zero seven one and two hundred thirty nine of our Tom meeting members have voted so far out of the two hundred and forty two that are here so we have about three well oh there's some extensions last time okay so having even higher number so we have five 240 out of the 245 have voted Jane Morgan, Janice Weber, Len Cardin, Peter Howard and Adele who Adele has voted and if those last four people can go ahead and vote at this point in time I'm going to give them 15 seconds Jane Morgan, Janice Weaver you have about five seconds left to give your vote time's up let's close voting half motion failed they want to continue to debate it's not a two-thirds vote 90 90 okay so we're going to continue debating let's go back to the speaker list as soon as we could get through that oh 43 okay 243 in the affirmative 90 in the negative 61 percent we needed 66 to prevail on that vote we did not get it so we're back to the list as soon as we go through the screens maybe what we'll do is before we go back to the screen to go back to the speaker list but then before we start taking additional speakers we'll take our five minute break because it's 9 30 okay so let's take our five minute break at this point and we come back we'll go back to the list and Mr. Warden will be our first speaker when we get back okay okay Tom meeting members please come in and take your seats that's what I usually say bang my gavel don't even have that that's in town hall in my little cubicle okay let's get going um let's promote Mr. Warden up Mr. Warden you're the next speaker your lost has unmuted me thank thank you mr. moderator John Warden precinct eight i'm looking at the long list of the speakers here and i'm urging my fellow town meeting members to have respect for those who wish to speak it's uh this is an important issue there's obviously a lot of uh thought and emotion on both sides of it different aspects will be brought out and uh you know we're elected by our constituents and the precincts to come and debate this stuff and listen to every view and make a reasoned decision we can't do that if somebody just chops off a debate at an early point and you took that step just before the break and and rejected rejected it which I wish we'd do that more often uh in my long my 50 years in town meeting I don't I've never voted that I can recall to terminate debate because I think we should hear all issues all all viewpoints even those with which we don't agree we should listen that's what they did in the old days so and I think it's particularly inappropriate for this member of the board of selection to move to terminate debate because they're the ones that decided to have this meeting which was not necessary that they they held the warrant at your outside the scope of the article john okay well then I I was I was I have I have reasons for saying that but I won't I know and um and then any event I I urge you to to let the debate go on and let let every let every voice be heard on this important issue for our town thank you thank you sir um Beth and Friedman Beth and Friedman precinct 15 um hello hi go ahead um mr. moderator I rise in favor of this article um I prefer that members of the town of Arlington fulfill this function as as survey on special details versus the town having to go outside of Arlington to find appropriate personnel and though um I also see the um advantage of using flaggers I think that's outside the scope of this article there were no um amendments suggesting the use of flaggers and this article deals only with um whether the police chief and the and the town manager be able to hire retired police officers to serve this function so again I'm in favor of this article and that's all I have to say thank you mr. moderator thank you very much mr. Friedman Lawrence Lawrence Slutnick I'm the moderator I um I'm not raising my hand to speak to this article I um separately I was just hoping to submit a report to town meeting tonight but we can handle that at another time yeah yeah I didn't get a chance to reopen um article one to take your report in at that point so we can do it at the first thing Wednesday evening okay great sorry about that that's all right thank you uh miss hyam has a point of order leba hyam precinct 11 thank you mr. moderator mr. moderator I just want to bring up that as entitled every town meeting member is to share their opinions about any article so our town meeting members entitled to decide when they feel that they have heard balanced arguments on both sides of an issue and are able to raise um a a move towards voting I implore you to please safeguard those rights as well thank you yes um that's true everyone has the right to terminate the debate when they think they've had enough as you did last time around and thank you very much for that that'll bring up Guillermo Hamlin hello can everyone hear me yes hi so precinct Guillermo Hamlin precinct 14 thank you so much for the opportunity to speak okay so I maintain that this is a common sense solution to a need by police officers however things that appear common sense sometimes make me suspicious so I want to ask in regards to um traffic enforcement I believe that when it comes to flaggers say for instance there is a ice officer that wants to go ahead and partake of some sort of law enforcement traffic checkpoint I feel that a police officer may be able to rebuff an ice agent however I have a question for the I don't know if it's appropriate to dislike for the well you ask the question and I get to decide okay so I want to know is is this in any way shape or form do these officers participate with ice to participate in law enforcement traffic checkpoints uh chief larry thank you mr. moderator Julie flowery chief of police no the allington police department does not cooperate with ice does that mean when it comes to traffic checkpoints they won't participate in measures such as a clean sweep or removing a resident from their vehicle on the basis of the condition of their status chief correct okay thank you so much I'm satisfied I yield my time thank you uh sherry barron pass thank you uh michael ruderman thank you mr. moderator michael ruderman precinct nine I'd like to ask uh does mr. moderator can you call on anyone who has hard numbers for the number of times that officers working details have actually been involved in incidents where they were an actual force multiplier chief flowery do you have an answer for mr. ruderman on that point chief Julie flowery thank you mr. moderator I don't have hard numbers um that you're asking for I can cite examples when police officers um were working details and they responded to bank robberies in progress they responded to medical calls where they actually performed CPR and took lifesaving measures and I listen to the radio daily and I often hear officers who are on detail call off to a location where office where patrol officers are responding to so they are in close proximity and able to attend to the emergency quicker than the officer responding so although I don't have hard numbers um I can I can tell you there have been many times where detail officers have responded to emergency calls and intervenes thank you for posing the question mr. moderator I'll take that as a no and I don't mean that disrespectfully chief or to any other member the question was does anyone have hard data on this it was offered as an advantage for continuing to pay pay whatever extra incremental cost there is in engaging members of the sworn force as as working working details within roads and I have every bit of simply sympathy for mr. trombly that must be a scary as hell situation to see drivers coming at you I would want I would want armored vehicles out there protecting me again though these are anecdotes and I urge my fellow town meeting members to listen past the anecdotes ask for the hard data I will be voting no on this thank you mr. moderator and I'll do respect um thank you very much you're welcome but that is the kind of question I would have preferred to have received prior to tonight's meeting so that I could have chief flaherty actually get us numbers but next time if you would let me know those kind of things in advance so I can get you a good answer thank you mr. I understand sir yes um charles foskett this moderator charles foskett precinct date I have a question for the town manager yes sir um if in voting against this article we I'm sorry this article will not give if you vote against this article we will not have a town civilian flag persons as I understand it I believe that this would have to be an issue that would be separately addressed am I correct there I believe you're correct sir it's mr. chaplain is he correct Adam chaplain town manager yes that that is correct thank you I have a another question mr. moderator we have heard it's approximately a 19 percent difference in the salary between putative civilian flaggers and the and the wages paid to the police officers does if if the if the wage I'm sorry if civilian flaggers should be used to replace the police services here would this become a change in working conditions for the average police officer who relies on paid details for income and would this become an issue in collective bargaining can someone answer that question for me mr. chaplain Adam chaplain town manager yes I would say mr. foskett just described the situation correctly so as a follow on would that mean that the town would likely have to pay the difference in increased police salaries and benefits in addition to paying the cost of the civilian flaggers so that effectively there would be no cost savings in such a change mr. chaplain adam chaplain town manager obviously you know bargaining is something unto itself and predicting outcomes can be challenging but in broad strokes a situation where we would be heavily levered both locally and potentially at third party arbitration to increase the salary the base salary of officers if they had this compensation taken away from them would be likely and I think I think the the context you described whereby we would both be paying more out of general fund dollars to a high increased base salary while also employing either through direct employment or contracting an additional flagger service could eliminate any savings or even produce increased cost thank you mr. chaplain so I would just like to comment that for all the reasons so eloquently described by mr. toasty and mr. trembling that I asked my fellow town meeting members to please vote in favor of article 15 thank you thank you sir Barbara Thornton yes thank you my name is Barbara Thornton precinct 16 and I realized that this is the first roughly the first year for chief larity to be in office we haven't heard much about her but I'd like to give her an opportunity to run her department the way she thinks best to make the new changes and and respect her for that opportunity and I'd like to give her an opportunity now if she would take it to maybe say a few words about why this is an important issue for her or what data she's looked at that she considers compelling for making for supporting this request I'm going to entertain that but I'm going to round the conversation back for the last several speakers and future speakers we are talking about an act relative to appointment of retired police officers as special police officers in the town high road details only retired police officers a lot of this conversation has devolved into a civilian flaggers regular police regular police conversations so chief if you can talk about why retired police officers as detail workers would be good for you as mr Thornton asks go ahead thank you mr. moderated Julie Flaherty chief of police and thank you for making that clarification this vote does this article would not have any effect on police details by active police officers this article is about whether or not retired officers would be permitted to work details it doesn't have any bearing on replacing active police officers with flaggers thank you very much mr. Thornton for your question I think having retired officers working details is a good thing for the town I stated last week we have an average of 20 police officer 20 details a day we we probably fill 75 of those details and we are calling on other communities to assist us that was a satisfactory solution up until a few years ago when surrounding cities and towns started using their own officers for their own projects but by having retired police officers work details we're putting trained members of the Ellington police department in the community who are familiar with the community they have a direct connection these officers have years of experience they're academy trained and they have participated in the trainings that are specific to the Ellington police department as I stated to the last speaker there have been many times when detail officers on assignment have located missing persons missing children the bank alarm is broadcasted over the police radio or retired Ellington officer is much more likely to know where that location of the bank is and potentially intervene as opposed to an outside police detail and the same holds true for medical calls traffic crashes and any other type of emergency situation there also have been many instances in the recent past where we've had to tell contractors and utility workers that they cannot work on a particular street on a particular day because we just don't have the offices to assist with traffic and this is often frustrating for utility companies recently some of you may have noticed that Verizon was in Ellington Center and they were working on a project that lasted several weeks many times because we had officers at the other end of the center assisting with pedestrian and traffic safety with town projects we've had to tell Verizon that we weren't able to fill the detail and they would have to schedule it another time well they went ahead and brought in the state police without consulting with us to work these details on mass avid mill street so I think it's a good thing for the town and and I support this article and that's all I have to say about it right now thank you chief miss Thornton thank you very much I I really appreciate it and I think she feels strongly about it and I want to respect her for that and I will be voting in favor of it thank you very much Roderick Holland thank you mr. moderator Roderick Holland precinct 7th I support this article I find Chief Flaherty's presentation about the detail officers as a force multiplier to be compelling Arlington is not over policed Arlington police officers are not overpaid this is helpful in against both of those things and I will support it thank you thank you mr. Holland Laurie Leahy Laurie Leahy precinct 21th I just had a couple of questions for clarifications I'm not sure if I've missed things but I feel like I don't have a handle on the numbers at all so my first question is what portion of the details are paid for by the town versus third parties um the number of 20 details a day has been suggested and I'm just wondering of that 20 how many are private versus town fee uh Chief Flaherty that number would vary daily with the different projects that are happening in town well give me a sense of throughout the year I mean is it 50 percent or 20 percent or third parties I have no idea Julie Flaherty chief of police in any given day we have up to 20 or more details and if I had to estimate I would say that 75 percent of those details are outside utility companies or contractors but again I don't have those hard numbers in front of me so that's just that's an estimate I guess because this is a lot about savings or well it's a lot about a lot of different issues but one of the issues is definitely about savings I'm just kind of surprised that the numbers haven't been presented to us it seems like that would really help a lot of people decide on this issue um so my next question is that um it's true that retired police officers would be able to apply as civilians for these positions Mr. Chaplain? I'm Adam Chaplain town manager I'm not I'm not sure that I understand the question um if this is not passed and we start using civilian flaggers anyone can apply for that like a retired officer could apply for that position is that true? Mr. Hyme is going to answer Doug Hyme? So well if I if I if I could Mr. moderator Adam chapter town manager I I think I think we've tried to make clear that this this article does not address civilian flaggers whether or not this article rises or falls will not impact this action tonight will not impact whether or not the town will use civilian flaggers. Mr. Pooler wants to throw a little bit more on to that Mr. Chaplain? That's okay with me. Mr. Pooler? Thank you Mr. moderator Sandy Pooler deputy town manager um I was able to take a look at the money that we paid out to officers in uh the year 2000 uh 16 percent of what we paid was or on town details um and the 84 percent were for other details and among those town details I would just say um a certain percentage and I can't tell you what that percentage is I don't know it's not in the records are for things in addition to road projects there are things like parades or town day or so forth so uh to ask uh to answer Ms. Leahy's question about what the percentages are that are paid by outside contractors versus the town those are the percentages. Okay um thank you I think those are my only two questions. Thank you Mr. Moderator. Thank you Ms. Leahy. Kevin Koch Koch Mr. Koch you can unmute yourself. Mr. Moderator I see um Kevin in zoom twice so I um I'll try his other. Yes it was the other one. Yes I see the second one. Okay thank you Mr. Moderator. Kevin Koch precinct 16. Thank you Emily. My question is about section two of this article listing these various laws section parts of the uh state laws that these officers would be either subject to or not subject to and I don't have a clue what those are can somebody give me a summary of what what those various chapters and sections. Yes Mr. Heim can do that. Thank you Mr. Moderator Doug Heim from council. We discussed this uh I believe last week's town meeting but uh it's an important question the uh each each thing refers to some of the difference so chapter 31 of the general law relates to civil service officers if they were appointed do not be subject to protections under the civil service law. Sections 85H and 85H and a half have to do with disability retirement to please fire um and general disability retirement obviously these folks are already retired. Sections 99A 100 or 111F have to do with indemnification line of duty which is basically a league with pay those things don't apply to special officers and chapter 41 of the general I'm sorry chapter 151 that's basically your standard labor provision for collectively bargain employees so they're not covered by collectively bargain contracts. The reason that's important is because as we have as has been highlighted a couple times these are not um these folks are no longer collectively bargain employees they're appointed and serve at the will of the town manager and can be dismissed without all of the basic labor protections that we would see under civil service. Thank you. Thank you Mr. Heim. Okay thank you very much. Okay anything else Mr. Koch? No thank you. Thank you. Peter Gast. Peter Gast, precinct two. My understanding from last training was that it was possible to use civilian flaggers for some details on certain velocity of roads in certain situations. As I understood earlier this evening that's not possible and so I was hoping that someone could clarify under what circumstances we could use civilian flaggers. The reason this is relevant to this question is because I want to understand what's the need for additional resources to to be flagmen are and how critical the need is and and why we're not using civilian flaggers currently if the need is is critical. I'm Mr. Heim. Doug Heim, county council and chief moderator. The base the first thing to sort of understand is there's two base of different types of details. The law authorizes one kind of detail to be serviced by civilian flag. The chief just mentioned or maybe would just be cool to mention but there's certain types of details that basically involve more than the traffic direction that civilian flaggers are required to be trained to provide under the law. Things like braids, events at a park, things where the concern isn't just traffic, there might be other pedestrian safety concerns, there might be a need to have police on hand to provide personal responders, things of that nature. There's like a fun run throughout all and usually there's some sort of detail that's subject to one of the conditions. The second piece is obviously what the crux of this conversation is about about construction projects. Roadway construction projects that are on roads that are under 45 miles an hour but eligible for civilian flaggers. There's a few other sort of nuances to this situation but the long and short of it is is that it depends a little bit on the roadway and how it's set up so that it can be safely secured. So the rain flyers can some work on it on certain road projects and they can't work on the sort of other types of usage and go off to prevent braids. Hope that answers your question. Almost. So why are we not utilizing the existing possibility of civilian flaggers for those projects where they could be used under 45 miles an hour construction projects in order to free up additional capacity so there isn't officers not able to fill the rest of the capacity. If there is an urgent need to expand the pool, why are we not already using this resource? Mr. Chapterling to address that. Thank you Mr. Moderator, Adam Chapterling, Town Manager. I mean to be direct on this, former Governor Patrick put forward reforms over a decade ago to try to further enable or really allow civilian flaggers to be more widely used in Massachusetts and at that time the legislature gutted that reform and put in place some reforms that still made it very hard for local governments to utilize civilian flaggers. The requirement to pay prevailing wage, maintaining it as a mandatory subject of collective bargaining for achieve working conditions for police officers made it very hard to pursue civilian flaggers and that's why as was referenced on the first night of this debate only 27 of the 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts currently use civilian flaggers so less than 10 percent of cities and towns use civilian flaggers. We've chosen to not prioritize this matter as something we would pursue in collective bargaining for for myriad reasons there there's many items both related and unrelated to police reform that we would much rather pursue at the collective bargaining table as opposed to opening the door to civilian flaggers. We've really looked at this article with a very narrow scope we have trained police officers who have expressed an interest in being able to work these details it's a common practice in massachusetts 11 out of our 12 comparable communities and most of our neighboring communities allow this practice it was a very straightforward narrow focused approach to be able to provide just just a few more Arlington trained officers to work details so I I suppose that that's the best way I can answer that question Mr. Cast. Thank you very much for that answer. You're welcome. A subject I haven't heard spoken of this night and it's a concern of mine this is one of the most voluminous warrant articles I've seen in my in my tenure so far and it seems like it encodes very fine details of the issue into law which will require articles before town meeting if we want to update any of those details in the future. Why is this article so specific? Yes, Mr. Hine, please. Thank you Mr. Moderator. It's a good question. It speaks a little bit more to a very very broad sense of things about what the powers and authorities of town meeting are and how we go about best availing ourselves of those approve. So when we submit a request for special legislation that vote before you has to be detailed enough that the special legislation will outline everything that we need to accomplish in order to realize whatever that goal is. Sometimes we ask for a specific type of special legislation because that's a little bit less heavy in detail because we want to be given a broad authority. So for example with respect to our prohibition on new fossil fuel infrastructure we wanted to grant ourselves broad authorities so that we could have some time to hone in on a very specific viable. This specific warrant article and the motion before you is a essentially model legislation that's used in a lot of the communities that the manager referenced. So a lot of the sort of work was already put into it and then secondly some filing in specific detail was added into it so that we would know exactly and I believe this was some input that we got that we would know exactly who the town manager and the police chiefs could appoint to this position, what the restrictions were, what things they were going to be not entitled to. It was important that all that detail be in the legislation so that we knew exactly what our position is relative to the authority to do this. So again it basically distilled down to what authority are we asking the legislature to confer on us and sometimes when we're asking the legislature to confer on us a very very specific thing the irony is that you get a more detailed piece of special legislation in front of town meeting that's one from the legislature. When we're sometimes asking for something very very broad we don't know every single piece of it when we're submitting it to the legislature and we're asking for either town bylaw or something else to regulate the case. There's a lot more detail I could go into but I... No well I think that's good and I think Mr. Gast is used all his time up. Thank you Mr. Moderator. Thank you. Thank you Mr. Hahn. Thank you Mr. Gast. Mr. Ray has a point of order. Thank you Mr. Moderator. Elizabeth Ray, precinct eight. I'm sorry if this is I'm learning is I have more of a point of information to ask for clarification about what deputy town manager Sandy Cooler said I don't know if this is appropriate or not so you can shut me down. Yeah that would be that'd be a question when you get up for your second time after everyone else has had a chance. Thank you very much Mr. Moderator. Okay thank you. Okay Mr. Mark McCabe. I stand to terminate debate on article 15 and all matters before. And this is Mr. Mark McCabe of precinct two. Second. Okay Mr. McCabe has made a motion to terminate debate. Mr. Foskett has seconded it. Mr. Kowalski will bring up the motion to terminate debate. Terminating debate is not debatable. And we bring up the screen. You'll see the voting grid. Okay precincts one two eight. Go ahead and navigate over to the voting portal. Refresh if you need to. One for yes two for no precincts eight through 16. Go ahead and vote navigate over. Terminating debate on article 15. And now precincts 16 through 21. Go ahead and navigate over for one yes to terminate debate. Two for no to terminate debate on this article. And once debate once you voted either yes or no then hit cast your vote. If you have the issue voting please use the raised hand feature in Zoom. We have about eight members who have not voted. Oh we're down to three members who have not voted yet. If those last three can vote. Mr. Zimmer, Mr. Gersh down to two. I'll give them 15 seconds. And Mr. Gersh, Mr. Zimmer, Angela Olsalski, Jane Howe. And five seconds. And time. So our second motion to terminate debate. It passes by 78 percent. We have 185 in the affirmative and 53 in the negative. That is a vote to terminate and I so declare it. When we finish going through the screens we're going to make a vote on the main motion. Article 15 recommended vote in the select board support. Okay we're going to bring up the recommended vote of the select board report. To go ahead and vote. An act relative to the appointment of retired police officers as special police officers in the town for detail work. So precincts one through 15. Oh excuse me one through eight. Navigate over and precincts eight through 16. Then 16 through 21. Navigate over refresh if you need to. Vote one for yes to authorize this special legislation. Act two excuse me press two for no if you do not want to authorize retired police officers and then hit cast your vote. If you're having an issue voting please use the raised hand screen or call Ms. Brazils number 7813163071 and we give it a minute for everybody to one for yes two for no and then cast your vote. I vote ten folks who haven't voted yet if you can go ahead and vote at this point seven people six people left Mr. El Nui Mr. Hamlin Ms. Dutra Ms. Krause Peter Thompson and Ms. Roe. If you folks can go ahead and vote okay we give them 15 seconds for the last three people five seconds for the last few voters with closing to big vote let's close the vote Mr. Korolski the motion carries by 67 percent we have 158 in the affirmative we have 78 in the negative it's a vote and I so declare it and that closes article 15 as soon as we run through the screen so we can close 15 and bring up article 16. Article 16 is recommended vote of the redevelopment board of no action and as we have no substitute motions we're going to go right to a vote so all in favor of no action please what one for yes two for no so as soon as Adam hits confirm okay so precincts you guys know the drill one through eight go to the voting platform eight through sixteen gone over the voting platform and 21 through excuse me 16 through 21 gone over one turn one for no action two I don't know what no would be you know I have a choice to vote no action and then hit cast your vote if you have any issue to vote and please use the raise stand feature on zoom tell me any members can please cast your vote at this point in time one for yes two for no and some people left to vote we're going to give them 15 seconds looks like all verbal votes have been entered five more seconds to vote if you have not voted yet and that's it let's close voting we have 228 in the affirmative we have seven no's and the vote carries by 97 that's a vote for no action and I sort of clear it and that closes article 16 I'm going to go through the screens it's going to bring up article 17 and miss Sullivan why don't we get mr. Rodman mr. ruderman up and miss Milovchuk has a point of order miss Sullivan can we bring her up thank you mr. moderator I apologize name and precinct Beth Milovchuk precinct nine I thank you mr. moderator I apologize I'm just very confused whether article 15 had to be a two-thirds vote and when you said the numbers I I just couldn't follow it so 15 is a majority vote it was a majority vote thank you very much thank you very much yeah okay we're now on article 17 mr. ruderman you have a something to tell us yes thank you mr. moderator michael ruderman precinct nine I offer a substitute motion which has been distributed to all the members and is in rather simple form it looks quite like the article as originally submitted however it states the matter in the affirmative so that the meeting has something upon which to consider and debate as as the recommended vote is one of no action I offer the substitute motion and I hope people will support it with a positive vote okay do you want to say anything about it or just that's it sure I'll begin back in 2016 this meeting formed a committee called the residential study group to look at questions of the disruptive nature of residential demolitions excavations other other examples of of very large you know gross you know construction activities in neighborhoods and to see if they would see if there was something that could be done to allay homeowners anxieties about these projects they went out and they talked to people and they found out that many of these concerns could be very simply answered if the folks in the neighborhood knew who they needed to call to find out the answers to simple commonplace questions like when is this project going to start and end what are the allowable hours of operation how long are you going to be detonating the ledge in the backyard where are the construction vehicles going to permit are you doing things about the dust you know very very human immediate concerns like that they came back to the town meeting in 2017 with a short set of amendments to the bylaw town bylaw which have been dubbed the good neighbor agreement essentially they require someone asking for a building permit for one of these large projects a whole house demolition or reconstruction excavation removal of a certain number of trees in a protected area to present that plan to the neighbors to give them a contact person let them know when things are going to begin and basically give them a way to get questions answered and this needs to be done before you can get your building permit approved what i'm asking the meeting to do tonight is to put a cross-reference into the zoning bylaw and i take particular attention to pronounce zoning bylaw versus town bylaw i ask you to put a cross-reference to this set of provisions in the town bylaw across reference to it in the zoning bylaw so that anyone who consults the zoning bylaw on the requirements for getting a building permit will see right at the very top of section 3.1 point b where where the power of the of the building inspector to grant a permit is detailed that the permit shall be issued when the building inspector finds that the applicant is in compliance with the applicable provisions of this good neighbor agreement formally title six article seven of the town bylaws again i say it creates a cross-reference between the town bylaw where this set of provisions exists and the zoning bylaw where many people would think that is the one place where you would go to see what you would need to do to get a building permit and that would be incorrect i am hoping to to avoid anyone not knowing of the existence of the good neighbor agreement by creating a flag if you would call it i count is it 28 words a flag across reference in the zoning bylaw to a provision in the town bylaws which references you to these requirements my substitute motion does not expand the scope of the good neighbor agreement it doesn't make getting a building permit any more onerous their requirements are exactly the same i am asking you to create another place where these provisions are noticed and i emphasize the word notice that's all i'm trying to do here create notice of one set of provisions in another document which people may think is the one and only controlling document for getting a building permit back in 2017 when when these provisions were brought before us they were they were heartily accepted i believe the vote was something like 205 to 3 it was one of the most overwhelmingly positive changes to the town bylaws i can remember unfortunately since 2017 the provisions of the so-called good neighbor agreement have oftentimes been forgotten ignored missed simply not noticed i don't know but they haven't been carried out one survey that was conducted by our own town's planning and community development department found a compliance rate of less than 40 percent what i'm hoping to do is to provide some way that we can take an action as the town meeting to to make compliance with the good neighbor agreement easier by making it more noticed again this is not increasing the scope of the good neighbor agreement it either applies to the project or it doesn't apply to the project it doesn't make the requirements for a building permit any different it doesn't it doesn't make the uh enforcement any more onerous on inspectional services it doesn't change the prescribed penalty for for violation of the good neighbor agreement that was set back in 2017 it's as much as 200 a day for violation i can't tell you specifically how many times the good neighbor agreement has been missed or ignored or violated because we don't keep a record of that i can tell you that i asked for an official listing of how many times the 200 per day penalty for violation has ever been assessed the answer is zero none it has never been assessed in the three years that the good neighbor agreement has existed i am asking the meeting to take one small step towards making the good neighbor agreement better known by creating a cross-reference in a place where people commonly look to see what the requirements for a building permit are that's all thank you mr moderator i'm available for questions thank you uh mr foske can you second second thank you sir mr moak mr uh remin has made a substitute motion it's been seconded therefore it's now up for debate mr schlickman thank you paul schlickman presic nine mr ruderman's substitute motion is unnecessary in theory but probably necessary in practice can't hurt could help please vote yes thank you sir christopher higham thank you mr moderator tofer higham precinct 11 um mr moderator i'm wondering if anyone from the redevelopment board can explain their recommendation of no action miss rake jennifer rate director of planning and community development i'm going to actually defer to rachel zenberry chair of the arlington redevelopment board who is also with us this evening oh very good yes miss miss zenberry thank you mr moderator rachel zenberry chair of the redevelopment board there were actually uh two reasons why the redevelopment board uh voted no action on this particular article the first was due to the the circular reference and the fact that in the zoning bylaws the uh the definition of the the types of the types of renovations and other construction activities are actually broader than what is defined in the bylaws so given that it was more expansive the recommendation at the time was for the applicant to review actually come back in at a future meeting and look at actually revising the at actually revising the language of the town bylaw as opposed to the zoning bylaw if the goal was to um to increase enforcement of this particular uh good neighbor agreement thank you thank you man okay thank you mr moderator okay very good uh miss maglia maglia so yes thank you mr moderator so familiar to precinct eight um i rise to read a statement from a resident who would like to address town meeting very well thank you so the statement is provided by mr donseltser of arlington street a resident for 48 years he says i would like to speak in support of article 17 which is meant to improve compliance with the good neighbor agreement it was passed by town meeting in 2017 but essentially ignored by the town department responsible for overseeing it this is a case of deja vu another 2017 accomplishment of the residential study group was a bylaw with a residential driveway slope to a 15 slope for safety reasons town meeting passed it overwhelmingly 200 to 13 yet in the following year builders continue to build driveways with steeper slopes and special services continue to approve them apparently because of an ambiguity in defining how slope was measured in 2019 several members of the residential study group dropped a warrant article meant to correct this ambiguity but the redevelopment board voted no action for reasons that were not terribly clear here is their report to town meeting i quote the arb required additional clarification to further understand the intent and outcome of this article however the limited scope of the warrant article did not allow for that further clarification to be addressed in a proposed amendment for the vote the board is committed to addressing the intent and outcome of this article at a future town meeting end quote the bylaw on steep driveways remains unenforced and the board has forgotten all about its commitment to address the issue with article 17 this year it is much the same situation it was demonstrated to the redevelopment board last year that this bylaw was not being enforced they failed to take any action and now that a citizen's petition article is being offered they oppose it for similarly vague reasons suggesting that it is unnecessary and redundant they hear it is too burdensome back in 2017 the select board did not find the good neighbor agreement to be burdensome reporting i quote the board grateful for the time energy and teamwork of the residential study group highly recommends town meetings approval of this amendment in quote town meeting members agreed voting 205 to 3 to approve it is now up to this town meeting to make it enforceable thank you mr. moderator that's all thank you smugly and thank mr um it's always goodness seltzer uh steve revelak steven revelak to a hello miss hello mr. moderator this is steve revelak from precinct one close i understand that mr ruderman's article proposes to add across reference from the zoning bylaw to title six article seven of the town bylaws without adding or changing any new requirements and indeed paragraph d of title six article seven requires that a person doing you know as a project subject to the good neighbor agreement satisfy the requirements of the good neighborhood good neighbor agreement before a building permit is being issued so the requirement being proposed by the substitute motion already exists in the town bylaws now i do have a few questions and these i think would be best answered by someone from inspectional services if they're available well go ahead and ask you a question we'll figure out who who's going to answer thank you mr. moderator i understand that inspectional services has a set of you know a process a set of checklists that they go through before issuing a building permit i'm wondering if this article were to pass would there be any change to what inspectional services does in um you know when deciding whether or not to issue a building permit is mr. burn out there mike burn hi michael can we answer that question so mr. burn you want to go ahead and unmute yourself john i'm sorry i thought i did unmute myself um michael burn director in special services tell me remember precinct 13 um the checklist that sounds to me would be the same i think um if it's this this just i see it as making it confusing to people trying to figure out how to take up permits and what to do where we have we have we will have the same law in the town bylaws and there's only bylaws and you know i believe they are different um you know fines and regulations and whatnot um in those um i see that um i would agree that it's this this is already in our bylaws and i don't believe this is necessary and as far as this being ignored um i i i just don't see that and it's pretty simple for us that we do not ignore any of these bylaws okay so track yeah sorry jib but just to confirm in other words regardless of whether or not pass this passes it will not make any changes to when you do or do not issue a building permit no i apologize for me sorry no thank you very much mr. burn i have another question uh so uh we've heard about um some enforcement challenges regarding the good neighborhood agreement um are you what enforcement challenges are you aware of and could you describe the nature of um how you see these challenges um see but i would say that um it actually i took a poll of everyone in the office this week and last week when my notice was coming up and i will tell you that we do not know of any ignoring or are this not being enforced um yeah every every time there is something that meets these criteria we know that the good neighborhood agreement needs to be um you know one confusion sometimes is that it says first class mail we we suggest you recommend either register to certified to show evidence that way um but um that that is that is probably the only sometimes question we have or that we have no way to check it but um no so in other words the in other words compliance with the good neighbor agreement is on your checklist absolutely okay and uh i was wondering if the if mr. ruderman had any discussion with you about ways in which um you know he felt important enforcement might be you know improved or asking your feedback on what might make it you know might make the process easier any conversations like that uh that took place mr. perth the only the only conversation i've had of this mr. ruderman was on wednesday afternoon um any question the project at 8 28 mad sad and uh and the question of the good neighbor agreement well that that project was and still is it's an emergency project but if the side was falling off the building um that i already received the special permit and it's actually inspected inspected chamber went out at night and got an engineer out there the site secured it was and they are there in the process of going through the demolition of uh permitting needing signoffs and part of that would be proof or are doing us a letter and after they would that the good neighbor agreement has been met so that that's the only conversation i've had with mr. ruderman on this subject okay thank you very much um so i i think that does it for my questions mr. burn and i appreciate you taking the time to get your you know your answers to them um i i i see what mr. ruderman is trying to do and i respect what he's trying to do but i would honestly hope that town meeting could take a pass on this and i'd encourage mr. ruderman to work with the building inspector and the folks in inspectional services find you know come to an agreement on how the process might be improved and um you know submit a new article in the spring thank you very much mr. moderator thank you mr. verpreleck thank you mr. burn uh john warden you're live mr. warden thank you mr. moderator john warden precinct eight um when this article was under discussion um at the in the hearings redevelopment board hearings in and 2017 um about uh whether to recommend it or not um i mean i mean the good the good neighbor agreement um is either one of those hearings are at town meeting itself on this i would do in a real town meeting i'd say on this very floor of this hall mr. burn uh when asked well if since this isn't in the zoning bylaw will it be enforced and he assured us it absolutely would be enforced now uh from what we've heard earlier tonight it's it's it's always enforced according mr. burn but according to these statistics which the planning department um presented mr. ruderman recited um the enforcement was something like less than 40 percent uh and i know that the originally when this came before the redevelopment board for hearing this year um they seemed in favor of it uh the planning director was in favor of it and then all of a sudden they discovered all these errors and problems and issues blah blah blah um and the important thing about having an important aspect of having in the zoning bylaw as a quote or having a reference in the zoning bylaw to essentially bring this language into the therein uh is that any citizen uh can go to instructional services and if he if he or she feels that the law is not being enforced they can they can demand they can request a written explanation he has to be given within 20 days of why the law is not being enforced and that is a tool that we do not have right now so there is mr. slickman said we mr. slickman and i don't often disagree uh and i can't match his elegance of his 10 word speech but but i i encourage you to follow his advice and let's vote yes on this thank you thank you mr. warden um patrick handlin chairman patrick handlin of precinct five um i have a question the statistics that are being referred to i think come in terms of non enforcement come from a study by the department of planning uh that find found that 38 percent of people who responded to a survey say they have not received the appropriate notice and i was wondering if anybody from the planning department or anyone else uh who's appropriate mr. moderator can tell us what the response rate was uh for that survey this rate you have that information for mr. handlin jennifer rate director of planning and community development that's correct this is from the survey response summary that we conducted in april of 2019 and the information that was provided at that time uh showed that we had administered a survey to a butters of 24 recent residential construction sites in arlington and they were mailed to 1,280 households within a 200 foot radius of the 24 sites and that we received a total of 125 responses to the survey uh of those 125 responses 48 reported that they received the good neighbor agreement and 48 said that they had not the remaining 22 percent were unsure or did not provide an answer hope that helps i have to unmute yourself mr. handlin sorry i wonder if mr. moderator if you could inquire whether um any effort was made to compare the addresses that were relevant for the people who said they had not received the good neighbor agreement and the others who said that they're had to see whether there were particular uh projects which uh appear not to have uh issued the good the notice that was required uh or and others uh that that had or whether possibly we're just dealing with uh inconsistencies of memory here miss rate jennifer rate director of planning and community development we did not do that cross type of analysis that you uh asked about so we do not know uh that level of detail i wonder if if uh mr. moderator if miss rate would agree that under the circumstances it goes a little beyond what the evidence would bear to say that that survey shows that less than 40 in less than 40 percent of the cases the uh your necessary notice uh was actually provided i think i think we all have to make our own determination of what that survey shows mr. moderator miss rate is going to draw a conclusion of that nature but miss rate jennifer rate director of planning and community development i would tend to concur with that observation mr. moderator if i could change course for a moment i wondered if someone from the redevelopment board could give us an example of the ways in which the inconsistencies of language that they are concerned with might lead to an expansion of the application of the good nature agreement miss zenberry rachel zenberry chair of the redevelopment board yes uh in the zoning bylaws there are um the the number and type of uh projects or changes that are listed in uh section 3.1 b uh are exceed exceed the type of projects that are listed in the section of the town bylaw which um which are referred to in the good neighbor agreement if that if that's the case um i'm wondering whether the putting this into the bylaw is incorporating the definitions in uh six seven of the of the regular bylaws rachel zenberry chair of redevelopment board it's a good question um the the reason for voting no action was due to the inconsistency rather than looking to necessarily create consistency as it was the failing of the redevelopment board that we agree that the good neighbor act is important and should be enforced um however the scope of the article is not necessarily to create an expansion of the uh types of projects that it covers but rather related to enforcement and so the recommendation was to work in a future town meeting to uh to revise the the good neighbor act that's already in the existing town bylaw rather than add the circular reference which is currently not in conformance mr moderator i wondered at this point i think that i kind of agree with mr schlickman i'm skeptical as to whether or not there would be a practical problem created by the mismatches in language that the redevelopment board has has referred to um that may be the case but i think it is much more likely the case that as the language of the amendment indicates uh the applicable definitions or the definitions that are already in the uh in the uh bylaw in article six uh i do think that the accusations of under enforcement are not adequately shown we could probably have done a little better if we had been we weren't really looking at the survey from this point of view but it might have been possible to at least identify some examples of systematic non-enforcement but i think the evidence before us is not nearly strong enough uh to conclude that there's any substantial amount of non-enforcement nevertheless i think it is important that the community be assured uh that uh this is being enforced and if this would increase the confidence of the community in that in in the enforcement i'm not sure it would make any real difference if we knew all the exact cases but i don't see the harm that it does and i think it does contribute to um alleviating your concern that many people have whether it was justified or not so i'm going to vote in favor of that very good thank you mr handlin elizabeth pile good evening mr moderator this is elizabeth pile precinct ten i was a member of the residential study group that put forth the good neighbor agreement i think that this amendment is a welcome addition and it's really just inserting a cross-reference to the zoning bylaw that will help boost enforcement and i think if you want the good neighbor agreement enforced that this is a good step in the right direction and that it can only help matters and i will be voting for the article and i urge my fellow town meeting members to do the same thank you thank you miss christin panoram christin panoram precinct 20 we're getting closer with the pronunciation so i want to speak in favor of this substitute motion the presented amendment to article 17 i would characterize myself as generally in support of redevelopment in town i love senior construction renovations they can shape all over town the rate of work the pace of change does not concern me we all want the good neighbor agreement to be working for us but i really i could not be more strongly in favor of the amendment and i appreciate mr ruderman's efforts on this point to bring this forward in its amended form now because i think we need it now i do also appreciate the efforts that inspectional services have been making to ensure that good neighbor is enforced but i want to share a few more data points since we've been talking about the paucity of data with regard to violations i live in arlington heights near dunkin donuts and over the past two years or so my family has enjoyed three major long-term renovation projects within a few meters of my home one was a gut renovation of our direct neighbor the property of that's mine the other two were not abutting properties but they were so close my property that i had to double check the boundary lines on our town's awesome user-friendly gis map to see whether they were or were not a butters i um did not go on a records retrieval request but i am near certain that we were not notified of any of these construction projects in compliance with the good neighbor agreement and i want to make the point that the construction proceeded to pace the noise and disturbance were reasonable the projects were fun projects but this anecdote makes a really good point we as a community are not enforcing the good neighbor agreement as we need to be i think that any action in support of such enforcement is an action worth taking now and the amended article 17 is timely so i think we should vote yes on it thank you very much miss moderator thank you miss pennarum um peter peter howard there's a peter uh your jane have to turn off your speaker because we're getting pretty bad feedback now go ahead and unmute and try again i guess pete's gonna give it one more try pass pass okay pete passes um susan stamps hi mr moderator can you hear me yes ma'am who's in a stamps precinct three i'm confused as to to the need for this article this reminds me of the tree bylaw um which um as a member of the tree committee we passed a few years ago and it's the same sort of thing where uh before there can be any construction on property um if there are any protected trees on the property there has to be a tree plan presented and approved by the tree warden um and there can and there can be no construction on the property ahead of time it doesn't mention a building in permit can't be issued it seemed at the time we were passing it and spoke with inspection services that we really didn't have to go that route we have not had a problem enforcing the tree bylaw um it's true we do have a good sheriff from town and um by the name of tim le quib our tree warden so he knows what's going on but yet still um i i'm i've been reading article seven the good neighbor agreement bylaw as the discussion has been going on tonight and it states quite clearly that there has to be notice given um prior to excavation etc and that um and that violation um it says prior to issuance of a demolition or building permit or commencing an open foundation excavation etc the applicant shall demonstrate to the satisfaction satisfaction of the building inspector um that they have given the notice required herein by providing a list of those notified a copy of the notice in an affidavit stating that it was mailed i guess i'm hearing tonight that that's not happening the bylaw couldn't be clearer um why isn't it happening it seems to me this is not an issue of we need more verbiage in a bylaw that's not even the good neighbor bylaw it's a zoning bylaw and the issue is um enforcement and so i think that our um building inspector mike burn just said a few minutes ago that they do have a checklist um which they go through before the issue of building permits so i'm i'm mystified as to why there isn't compliance with the good neighbor agreement but if the it seems like compliance is the problem and it seems like it is an easily solvable problem if um town council and the town manager and whoever else needs to get involved to make sure it gets done so i'm voting no on this article okay thank you very much ma'am okay it's um 11 58 move to adjourn thank you mr foskin we have a motion to adjourn to spend sec seconded by miss brends ill second and that we can directly clerk to enter one one vote in order in favor of the motion to adjourn so we're going to come back on wednesday um looking through we're pretty close to the end if we um have a couple no actions after this and then just a couple more articles we should be able to finish up wednesday if we're um pretty efficient and we move through the articles that are left all right thank y'all very much moderator one wednesday moderator yes sir um any motions to reconsider hey yeah it's just about to say that i realized that right i was wrapping up uh there any motions to reconsider if anyone has a motion to reconsider please use the um point of order or um yeah please use the raised hand feature on zoom right now if you have a point of motion for reconsideration if anyone has a motion for reconsideration uh sandra musta maybe she has a point of motion notice of reconsideration thank you mr moderator sandra musta hope recent 16 yes i would like to reconsider also i would just like to point which article uh article 17 oh we haven't voted on it yet so you can't reconsider something we haven't voted on i'm sorry i should say i really wanted to just point out that you said it was 11 58 and that it is 10 58 yeah i'm tired it's 11 o'clock now thank you so a motion to reconsideration on any of the articles that we made final votes on this evening okay anyone has any of those please let us know right now thank you mr moderate thank you mr stay home seeing none um okay thank you all very much we'll see you wednesday night