 Please come forward. Usually we traditionally have the Arlington Minotomy Minutemen, some reason I didn't actually coordinate with them properly, so we don't have them tonight. Maybe another evening this year. So I almost got everything else. So again, I have a please rise. Going to have the Star Spangled Banner accompanied by Jane Howard. Because that's Star Spangled. Thank you, Ms. Howard. This evening we have our invocation by Father John Graham, St. Agnes Parish. Father Graham, if you're understanding, please. Can we begin with a moment of silence for all those who suffered from the tragedy of last Monday for the victims, for their families. And let's also pray in a very special way for those who put their lives on the line for the protection of others. In the Old Testament, there's a powerful story that tells us about one of the greatest kings in the history of the nation of Israel, King Solomon. And when Solomon was very young, he was afraid that he didn't have the wisdom to guide the people of God. And so he prayed. And we're told in the scriptures that God comes to Solomon in a dream and says to Solomon, Solomon ask for anything you'd like. And Solomon thinks and says, I ask that you give me an understanding heart so that I'll have the wisdom to do what is right for the people I serve. And God said to Solomon, because you didn't ask for riches or for more power of the larger enemies, I give you an understanding heart that is so wise that there'll never be anyone as wise. So as we gather here for this town meeting, we ask that God will give all of you understanding hearts. So with those understanding hearts, you may do what is best for the people you serve. Amen. Amen. Thank you, Father. Good evening. And welcome to the 2013 Annual Town Meeting of the Town of Arlington. This is our 206th town meeting, our first being held in 1807. And it's our 76th representative town meeting, the first being held in 1937. I wish to start off by thanking the voters of Arlington for returning me to the Moderated Chair for an additional three-year term. I'm humbled to have received the most votes of any of the candidates on the ballot. And also for your confidence on the manner that I've been running town meeting for the past several years. For procedural guidance, we're gonna follow our town bylaws and the principles and rules set out in meeting time. I provided each of you this year with a copy of the parliamentary guide so that for your convenience so that you could have something to follow. If you'd like your own copy of town meeting time, please come and see me at the break. Please remember to abide by the 48-hour rule, all substitute motions and substantially amendments to motions must be submitted in writing by placing a signed copy on each of your members' chair by providing me with a signed copy too, no later than the commencement of the session before which the article is expected to be considered. So if we're gonna talk about it Wednesday, you have to give it to us tonight. A copier is available in the town manager's office for copies of the actual votes, not your entire, not necessarily the entire backup documentation to convince us why we should vote for you. That's in your own nickel. The votes will print for you. Out of consideration of your fellow members and to allow full debate, please keep your remarks as concise and brief as possible so that all members have a fair opportunity to speak. I request that no one seek to address the meeting for a second time on an article, except to answer questions until everyone else has had a chance to speak. And let's please heed Mr. Doherty, the Andover's former moderator, who said, I don't have a formal time limit, but I did tell the meeting about three minutes is enough for anyone, five will put them to sleep, and seven they're gonna vote against you even if they agree with you. Our time limit is seven minutes. I hope we're not falling asleep or changing our votes too often this year. I'm gonna remind you also of the email distribution list for distribution of substitute and amended articles and other materials. If you want to get on that list or off it, please come see me at the break. I have written instructions on how to do that. We all appreciate that last year is the annual special town meeting. A majority of the debate was on topic, focus, thoughtful, and well-delivered, and that for the most part, it did not deviate too far nor did it deteriorate into personal ad hominem attacks, nor did it stray beyond the scope of the article. Let's keep that up this year and hold to to our civility pledge as we have some potentially contentious issues that will require careful consideration and thought. Finally, I wish to take a moment to recognize the tragic consensus events, both in Newtown, Connecticut, and at the marathon last Monday, Patriots Day, where Arlington lost one of our own, Crystal Campbell, by all accounts a wonderful young woman who chose Arlington as her new home. It could have been any of us at that finish line, cheering on a family member or a friend, completing in the race, could have been Mr. Chapter Lane, avid runner, could have been there, we could have been watching him. Fortunately, we were not there. Unfortunately, for many of our fellow citizens were, enjoying a beautiful, exciting day at the marathon, the last mile of which was dedicated to Newtown. As we go through our debates over the course of the next few nights, let us keep in mind both the fragility of human life and our democratic and free way of life, and how we, town meeting, can act to best preserve both the honor of Arlington's part in both this tragic event, as well as the original Patriots Day itself. Let me now ask to observe another moment of silence for Crystal Campbell, Lingzi Lu, Little Martin Richard, Officer Collier, the 26 victims in Newtown, as well as Arlingtonians that have passed away in the past year, and also offer a prayer for Officer Donahue and the other 176 victims of the marathon bombing. Thank you. Mr. Chapter Lane? Just mentioned, we all know that last week was one that we'll never forget. We lost Crystal Campbell, a member of the Arlington community in Monday's tragic attacks. To honor the life of Crystal, as well as to express our deepest sympathies to her family, we've placed a condolences book on the table in the front lobby for all members of the Arlington community to sign. We've also placed a condolences book dedicated to the entire Boston community and all those that were impacted by the tragedy. I ask that you all take the time to sign these books this evening and be part of Arlington's expression of sympathy. I also wanna take a moment to tell you all how proud I am of the men and women of the Arlington Police Department. Beginning on Monday in the aftermath of the attacks, Arlington officers were deployed to Boston to assist in the investigation. Then, continuing on Thursday, under the leadership of Chief Fred Ryan, members of the Arlington Police Department, both on and off duty, were called to assist the Boston Police Department in providing security for President Obama's visits to Boston. Following this visit, as the manhunt for the suspects began, Arlington officers remained deployed to aid our surrounding communities as they searched for the dangerous perpetrators of Monday's heinous acts. All the while, a full contingent of officers remained here in Arlington to keep us safe. As the manhunt came to a close and the suspect was surrounded, members of the Arlington Police Department, under the direction of Lieutenant Ron Kerr, were part of the perimeter that was established around the boat in Watertown to ensure that the suspect did not escape. Our men and women from the Arlington Police Department were there on the front lines helping to bring the suspect to justice. I saw firsthand how tired our officers were and I know that many were called back from vacation or family events to man their post. They did this all because of their commitment to their jobs and their commitment to Arlington. I'm proud to have each and every one of them as members of the Arlington Police Department and I thank them for their service. I humbly ask that you as town meeting members join me in thanking them. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay. Well, all our new town meeting members and town meeting members have not been previously sworn in. Please rise. In the packet I sent out, you all got a oath of office which you're now gonna take. Insert your name where appropriate. Repeat after me. I pledge to attend all scheduled town meetings to participate fully and fairly and evaluate all matters before town meetings and to vote in the best interest of the town. I can't hear you guys. Y'all are mumbling. Speak up. I support free speech and we'll treat others with mutual respect in spite of conflicting opinions and we'll conduct myself in a civil manner that is becoming of an elected town meeting member. I, your name. Do solemnly swear that I will faithfully and impartially perform the duties incumbent upon me as a town meeting member of the town of Arlington in accordance with the bylaws, the town manager act and the general laws of commonwealth shall help me God. Thank you. Put your phones on vibrate. I heard someone's go off already. I'll track you down and find it. I recognize the chairman of the board of select when it's done. Oh, the reelected. Oh, sorry. Anybody who's been reelected, please stand. I thought that encompassed everyone. I said anyone who hasn't been elected. I thought I got you all at once. All right, everybody else who hasn't been sworn in has been reelected. Speak up, please. I pledge to attend all scheduled town meetings to participate fully and fairly, evaluate all matters before town meeting and to vote in the best interest of the town. I support free speech and will treat others with mutual respect in spite of conflicting opinions and will conduct myself in a civil manner that is becoming of an elected town meeting member. Do solemnly swear that I will faithfully and impartially perform the duties and come upon me as a town meeting member of the town of Arlington. In accordance with the bylaws, the town manager act and the general laws of the commonwealth will help me God. Thank you. Now, Mr. Don. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. It is requested that the members of the board of selectmen and elected officials of the town, town manager, department heads of the town and staff, superintendent schools and of schools and staff, committees, commissions and boards of the town, minimum and regional vocational technical school district committee and superintendent, members of the general court representing Arlington and also any consultants who have been retained to work for the town relative to articles to be acted on by this meeting and representatives of the news media be permitted to sit within the town meeting enclosure. All in favor, please say yes. Yes. Opposed? Unanimous vote and I so declare. The constables returned. Madam clerk, do you have reason to believe that this meeting was appropriately called by the board of selectmen and that the constable made a return of service on the warrant in accordance with the laws? She signifies yes. Mr. Don. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. It is moved that if all of the business of the meeting as set forth in the warrant for the annual town meeting is not disposed of at this session, when the meeting adjourns, it adjourns to Wednesday, April 24th at 8 p.m. We have a second. All in favor, please say yes. Yes. Opposed? So moved. Mr. Don, that brings us to article two, Mr. Dunst. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to our elected officials, town employees and interested residents. Welcome to all returning town meeting members and for first time members, thank you for joining us. You're going to learn a lot and we're going to learn from you. Tonight, I want to share with you what I think we're doing well as a town and what I worry about for our future. The town's finances are good, but good is not forever. Our three-year plan was built around the tax override we approved two years ago. Since that vote, several key areas of the budget haven't further improved. Our employees agreed to join the GIC. We negotiated a long-term trash disposal contract with lower fees and better service and our support from the state increased more than we expected. That three-year plan might last us seven years. I'd like to talk about the GIC in more detail. As we expected, it significantly reduced our health insurance premiums. The move to the GIC has outperformed our expectations with lower annual increases and a one-time million-dollar benefit from fiscal year timing. The move to the GIC included a lot of negotiation and discussion about the compensation of our town employees. The town and employees have been working on a comprehensive salary study that will help us better understand how well or poorly our employees are compensated and how Arlington compares to similar towns. When that report is complete in a few months, we'll need to evaluate our employee contracts. So with all that good news, with a three-year plan turning into seven, then what do I worry about? I worry about how this plan ends and how the next one begins. I want you to think back to two years ago. We were all in this room. It was town meetings starting in 2011 and we were looking at a budget with a $3 million deficit. We were looking at the service cuts that were required to balance the budget and we were deeply distressed. Now I want you to fast forward to 2019. The projected gap is $9 million, not $3 million, $9 million. I worry about the Minuteman Vocational School. The building there is failing and the school district as it is currently configured is not viable. Whether the school is rebuilt or Arlington chooses a different path, it will cost us money. And at our own Arlington High School, the list of deficiencies is getting longer, not shorter. In the coming years, the school will need a large improvement. These are the things that I think about as we deliver our services and spend the taxpayers' money. How can we make that money stretch farther? Are we investing appropriately in education? How can we deliver more and spend less? Town meeting control spending, this is your task, it's our task to figure out how to do that. Enough about the budget, but you know me, I have to talk about numbers, that's what I do. Try these numbers, 6,100, 7,400, 7,400, 8,600. Those are the number of voters in our last four town elections. When you add in another 8,200 voters at the leaf blower ballot question last summer, you can see an increasingly engaged town. I think this engagement is going to be a huge benefit for us. Engagement leads to volunteerism and volunteerism makes this town work. All of you are volunteering your time here at town meeting and you all volunteer outside of this room. Thank you, thank you for what you do, and thank you for making our town the place that we love. The increased engagement comes with one sour note. This debate has had a bit too much acrimony and a little bit too, excuse me, and a bit too little empathy. Whether the topic is leaf blowers or the Mass Ave Rebuild project or proposed zoning change, I believe many have inferred malicious intent when there's nothing more than a disagreement on policy. Words are exchanged that open wounds without advancing the debate. It is healthy to disagree on policy and it's healthy to have passion about our town. But please, may we all hold our tongues when we are tempted to attack the person holding a different view. That person is here for the same reason that you are, to make Arlington a better town. The last area I want to talk about is planning, specifically parking. When I ran for Selectman two years ago, I had a pretty good idea about what I was getting into. What I didn't understand was how much of a problem parking is in Arlington. I spend more than a third of my time at Selectman working on parking in one way or another. As a town, we rightly spend a lot of time debating about taxes and education and public safety, but we don't talk about parking that much. Yet parking affects us all, and for many people in town, it's the biggest problem they deal with every day. Of course, parking is more than just building spaces. It's public transportation, it's biking, walking, traffic congestion, enforcement, public safety, zoning. That's why I strongly encourage you all to be involved in the writing of the master plan. The town started the master plan process last year, and the next large public hearing is going to be this summer in June. I encourage you all to participate and help shape Arlington into the town you want it to be. Finally, I'm worried about our town employees. As a Selectman, I get to work with and I get to see them all. From the water service crews to the firefighters, from the dispatchers to the recreation team, from youth services to veteran services, from clerks to department heads. Our town has built a great team. They get an immense amount of work done day in and day out, and I'm very proud of them. I thank them all for what they do for us. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Dunn. Any announcements or resolutions? Mr. O'Connor? James O'Connor, precinct 19 and your town meeting list moderator. In addition to what Mr. Leone already told us about the papers that he has, there is in addition a link on the website to the town meeting list subscription. But I would ask you all to consider if you do want to be on the list to try to use your own name or something like it. Recently people have been submitting either other people's names with a precinct number that is not an elected member, or a name that's totally frivolous. And rather than have people subscribing and trying to post where I have to read every detail of every document, someone is trying to, at least one person, trying to get on the list various ways. So I just ask you to consider if you use some sort of your name and your precinct number, town meeting member, or something like that, it'll be a lot easier to recognize who's an official member and who is not. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. O'Connor. Any other announcements or resolutions? Mr. Greeley? Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Kevin Greeley, Board of Selectman. I'd like to start like you did and thank the voters of Arlington for returning me to the ninth term on the Board of Selectman. It's scary to think I'm the one who served the longest, my God of mercy on all of you. But that's not what I'm up here about. I'm up here about, in a little over a month, we're gonna be celebrating the 100th anniversary of this town hall. And we have been putting together, I was co-chaired by myself, Patsy Kramer, and Richard Duffy, and we're putting together something called the Centennial Celebration of Arlington Town Hall and Gardens. What it's going to be is we've divided into four 25-year segments, and Richard Duffy, genius that he is, will first give a short lecture on the images of Arlington during those 25 years. And then a combination of the magical singers, the Arlington Jazz Band, the select tones, and the audience with some sing-alongs will be looking at the music during those 25 years. So the tickets are $40. There's food provided by Trist in the gardens. There'll be a cash bar. And if you'd like tickets, any of the leader banks in Arlington are selling tickets. And of course, the mayor of Arlington, Marie Kruppelka, will also be selling tickets. We expect it to sell out, and we hope to God it will sell out. But please consider joining us for the Centennial Celebration of Arlington's Town Hall and Gardens. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Greeley. Any other announcements or resolutions? All right, in the back table tonight, we have two important things. One, the finance committee report, which you should all make sure you pick up. And we also have the Town of Arlington annual report, which you should also pick up. This is, statutorily, the town has to provide this to us on the first night of town meeting. It gives us all the good things that happened in the town last year, and reports of all the committee head, all the department heads, committee heads, and how all the money we voted last year was spent. Okay, if no other resolutions or announcements, we're gonna move on. Article three, reports of committees. Anyone have a report of committee? Well, I'll take this done first. Mr. Moderator, I'll move the report of the Board of Select and be received. All in favor? Opposed? The report is received. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. You've all got the report in the mail last week, but I do want to take the opportunity to introduce the Board of Select and the department heads. I invite you all to come on up and talk to us before the meeting, during the break of the meeting, and after the meeting, if you have any questions. That is why the select one are here because we love it, and the department heads are here to answer your questions. And you can infer, so take advantage of that. So going, because I'll start with the board, our vice chair is Diane Mahon, Joe Currow, Steve Byrne, and of course, you all know Kevin Greeley. Our department heads. First up, town manager is Adam Chapter Lane. Deputy town manager is Andrew Flanagan. Starting over, sitting in that empty seat is Christine Connolly of Health Human Services. Edmer Lange does our workman's comp. Ryan Libergood is our director of library services. Ruth Lewis is our comp-troller. David Goode runs our IT and our information services, and the gentleman next to him is new and I have no idea who he is. I apologize. Michael Byrne does our building inspections, or inspection department apologies. Mike Rademacher runs our DPW department. Karen Malloy does our human resources. Chief Ryan is our police chief. Joe Connolly runs our recreation department, and Bob Jefferson is our fire chief, and I don't see him here. I'm assuming he's, I'm sure he's got a good reason. I have no idea who he is. So I once again, I invite you all, and if I butchered anyone's name, which I have this feeling I did, I apologize. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Dunn. Mr. Tosti? I move that the report of the finance committee be received. All in favor of receiving the report of the finance committee please say yes. Opposed? It is so received. Mr. Foskett? Oh, the capital report? Okay. Oh, sorry, Mr. Tosti. I just want to give a brief report on the, on the, for the finance committee. First of all, I want to congratulate Dan Dunn for his excellent speech. It was brief and it was quite substantive. He learned all of that of course on the finance committee. I'd like to introduce the members of the finance committee. The first one representing precinct one is Paul Bear. Over here, Steve DeCorsi from precinct two. Myself from precinct three. Ryan Ferrara is precinct four. Okay. And Mary Margaret Frankelmont from precinct five. Back there. Precinct seven is Joe Connors. The corner. Charlie Foskett at the head table. Brian Beck. Here. Peter Howard. In the there. Bob Jenkins. Okay, not sure. Ken Simmons. He was here back there. John Deist. Over here in the middle. Alan Jones at the head table. Richard Fanning. Precinct 15. Caroline White. Precinct 16. Grant Gibbian wasn't able to be here tonight. Mary Ronan from precinct 18. Christine Deschler from precinct 19. Over here. Dean Carmen from precinct 20. And Dave McKenna from precinct 21. Over in the corner there. As the chairman of the select one said, all these people are available to answer questions that you might have before the meeting during the break. More information that we could get to you. Sort of the faster we can move through the town meeting the more informed you can be. So I ask you to please take advantage of them. I'd like to, if you take a look at the Fincom report. My first paragraph I just want to emphasize we're now in the third year of our three year plan. The plan has worked well because of a successful override and the implementation of joining the state group insurance commission. Those two things have put us in good shape at least temporarily. And we usually have different colors. When things are really bad, it's usually a red color. When things are yellow, it's sort of caution. Because as Mr. Dunn said, we get by for a while but there's always problems down the road. We have to constantly be conservative in the way of finances. The rest of the report you can read through yourself but I'd like you to take a look at Appendix D, the last page in the Fincom report. Now, this is our five year plan, long range projection. And I realize it's a little small. We were thinking of legal size but not quite. What I'd like to do is just go through it very briefly. This is the heart and soul of our financial plan. This is the thing that's really held us together since 2005 with the original five year plan that went for six years and now the three year plan that we're hoping that will go for seven years. It's put together out of the town manager office because we don't want to have dueling spreadsheets. And in addition to that, it's also, they get the advice and approval of the long range planning committee consisting of various town officials and between everybody we put together and keep it going. You'll see the revenues up top, starting with state aid, I do have to make this bigger, including school construction, our local receipts and all the way down the line. And we try to project those out a smidget conservative but as accurately as we can. And then below, you see the appropriations that we have to do. And all the budgets, the school budgets broken down. The budgets are limited to 3.5% increases each year. We have allowed for special education to increase at a higher amount. Minuteman, which is, of course, we start off with 3.5% but to a large degree that's an uncontrollable budget that we have. And that's one of the issues that we're dealing with in this whole construction project. Then down below, you have the town expenses, enterprise funds, the capital budget, which Mr. Foskett will go through when we get to that article in detail, the pensions and the insurance. The insurances we're going into the GIC is been a huge factor. It has kept our growth, first of all, it dropped it fairly dramatically and then it's kept its growth within limits. It has truly been one of the best things that we've done in the last several years. Then our state assessments, and you could see the other types of things, overlay, warrant articles, and the Override Stabilization Fund. So again, the Override Stabilization Fund, we've done these each year during the better times. We put money into it. During the later years, we used that to balance the budget, hopefully, and putting our need to go back to the taxpayer as far off into the futures as we can. And that's the Finance Committee's goal, and I hope your goal to balance the budget, do it conservatively, and put the need to go back to the taxpayers off as long as we can. So trying to protect the taxpayer as much as we can. We ask your support in the various recommendations and stand ready to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Tosti. Mr. Foskett, did you have a budget to present for report? Charles Foskett, the chairman of the Capital Planning Committee, town meeting member precinct eight, I request that the report of the Capital Planning Committee be received, and we'll reserve any verbal report until the Capital Planning article is before the meeting. If we have a second, all in favor receive a report of the Capital Planning Committee. Please say yes. That post is so received. Mr. Fitzsimmons. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. I'm here to move that the report of the Arlington Redevelopment Board be received. I have motion to receive the report of the Arlington Redevelopment Board. All in favor, please say yes. Post, it is so received. Thank you, Mr. Fitzsimmons. Just one, two brief points. You'll see that this year's report is a relatively modest one. And if you're missing, all the zoning warrant articles that you usually look forward to every year, that's because we're embarking on a master planning process. And that's a very extensive and thorough holistic type of planning approach. Given that it didn't make sense to have a lot of ad hoc zoning warrant articles this year. So, but perhaps next year or certainly the year thereafter, you'll have a lot to chew on on that one. And I'd like to follow Mr. Tosti's example and just introduce the other members of the ARB. Andrew West, vice chairman, Christine Zepinski, Mike Kerr, not with us tonight is Ted Fields and our very able director of planning and community development, Carol Kowalski. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Fitzsimmons. Mr. Helmuth, do you have a report? Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Eric Helmuth, precinct 12 and chair of the Electronic Voting Study Committee. I move that the report of the Electronic Voting Study Committee be received. All in favor, receive the report of the Electronic Voting Study Committee. Please say yes. Opposed? It's so received. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. I will try not to use them, but I would like to ask how many for an additional three minutes so I could accommodate the showing of a brief video as part of my presentation. Mr. Helmuth, is it requiring 10 minutes total? All in favor, please say yes. Opposed? You have 10 minutes, Mr. Helmuth. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. I promise that my remarks under the articles will be short. Thank you. Electronic voting systems for town meetings can make elected representative town meeting members more accountable to our constituents. They can provide an accurate and fast way to count and record our individual votes. And they can make reports of those votes easily accessible to the public online. And this may encourage town meeting members to become more accessible to their constituents. So that's the theme of my presentation tonight. In recent years, electronic voting systems have become affordable to even modest sized communities, municipalities. And last year, you, the last annual town meeting, asked the electronic voting study committee to study the feasibility, the cost, the pros and the cons for such a system for our LinkedIn town meeting. So tonight I'm gonna hit the high points. You were all mailed a copy of our report. I've just placed an additional 50 copies in the back table. If you need one, I encourage you to get one before we take up article 12 and 42, which could be later tonight. So you have that at your reference. I wanna describe how we approach this and show you what some of this looks like. So our committee started with an open mind. Not all of us initially thought that electronic voting in town meeting was a good idea. By the end of our process, we unanimously concluded that it was. We focused on a question of feasibility. Is this possible, is this good? Rather than choosing a specific system to buy or to rent. And we focused on advisability. Is this a good idea for our LinkedIn town meeting? Rather than exactly the nitty gritty details of the operating implementation. We focused on benefits and the concerns and the costs. And we're bringing those to you now. Town meeting needs to decide if the benefits are worth the cost and if the concerns that we identified can be effectively mitigated. The committee believes unanimously that the answer is yes. And now that is the decision before you. And I just lost my presentation. Other communities in Massachusetts, the representative town meetings, as you can see on the screen, are using this technology. Our committee had the opportunity to visit two of them in the fall, Brookline and Framingham. We observed Brookline's town meeting on the first night of using the electronic voting system, in fact. Brookline has about 245 or so members that's close in size to us. We talked to the other towns, we watched a lot of video. And universally, they told us stories of widespread fast acceptance by all kinds of town meeting members of all kinds of technology backgrounds. And embracing by the community of the additional transparency that it permits. They studied the reliability and safety and security of the technology for many years. We did our own study and we concur with them that the technology is ready, it's cost effective, it's reliable and it's secure. So a little on how it works. So many of you have had a similar experience if you're in an educational or conference setting where you have a little audience response devices and it shows your votes up on screen. It's a similar technology but it's extended. Each member of a town meeting gets issued a handset. There's a wireless receiver that takes those votes. The voting computer tabulates and displays the votes both on screen and to cable access television. The computer can export the voting reports in a PDF or document format so that they can be easily posted to the town website. The handsets, this is a sampling what different handset vendors kind of look like. This is a little dark and it's not a great example but it gives you an idea of what one of the on-screen displays can look like, yes, the no, the abstain. It immediately calculates whether a motion has passed by the required majority or supermajority margin and so on. And this is, again, it's hard to read but it's an example of just what a simple PDF export report can look like. It just sorts you by precinct and this is something that constituents can look up on the town website the next day or so and see on the votes that were recorded electronically how it went. I would like to show you what this looks like. The town of Chelmsford's been doing this for a year or so. They're a smaller town meeting but they use the same system as the larger ones do. You're gonna see, and I hope that the sound worked if not on their rate, the moderator's gonna say, you're on. That's gonna initiate the voting. Very quickly, look for the guy at the front table. He's gonna hold up a remote, he's gonna vote. You'll note that they choose to display the votes kind of horse race style as they come in while the voting is. That's configurable. We could decide to do that, not to do that, to show only that someone voted to only show that the votes have come in, show the tally, show the results. Very flexible but this is what Chelmsford does. I appreciate you're oohing an eye. Thank you very much. I'm gonna have to go faster. Boy, 10 minutes isn't as long as you think it is. Let me tell you. You can read the report and I know many of you haven't sent me excellent questions, thank you. The benefits really, the prime benefit we're interested in as the committee is the accountability. Our constituents that elected us to make decisions on their behalf would be able to know how we vote just like the state representatives or representatives in Congress. It's a little faster, it would be faster than our counted votes depending on how we do it or our standing votes. We shave a little time, not enough to save a night off town meeting, Mr. Tosti, I'm sorry. It is very accurate by definition because of the way it works, probably a little more accurate than the way we do our standing votes. And it provides some protection as a report describes against a couple of ways that inadvertent or otherwise unauthorized voting could happen. In our report we identified some concerns and costs in our systematic investigation, having to do with accuracy, protection against fraud, ease of use. The committee in our technology investigation, our vendor inquiries, talking with other towns became convinced that all of these issues were surmountable and manageable. And I encourage you to read the report and ask questions when we debate Article 12 if you would like some details. The financial costs will go into if we get to the appropriation in 42 but you see the basics up on the system. We'll talk a lot more about that when the time comes. So how would we do this? So before us, at this annual town meeting as Article 12 which is a bylaw amendment that would permit but not require the use of electronic voting when we vote. Two minutes, Ms. Down. Thank you. An appropriation in Article 42 that would appropriate funds to obtain a system and actually be able to use it. If you decide to move forward with both of those things that at that point the study committee would continue and probably rename itself. I know that the moderator really wants us to have a cool acronym. That one of the towns is Elvis, the electronic voting implementation and study subcommittee. So we'll do our best. Well, we will collaborate with the town, the IT director, the town manager, the clerk, study exhaustively how this should be done for Arlington consult with town meeting members, work to identify the best vendor for the next stage and obtain the equipment. The first use would very likely be a year from now. I encourage you, again, to look at the report, the spare copies in the table. You can check it out online if you're watching this at home at the town website, Arlington, mad.gov, slash boards. Feel free to drop me an email. It's just my name, Eric, at erichelmuth.com. And if you liked this video, there's more. You can go to votevideos.wordpress.com. Certain selectmen I know said it's like watching paint dry, but then he likes that. So there's more towns, videos of all the other towns that are using that. And you can see the different ways, and what's really interesting about that site is the different ways that you can implement this technology. It's really flexible, really customizable to our culture, to how we wanna do things. And finally, a big, big thank you to an extraordinarily hardworking, good-natured committee. We met 15 times and worked very hard, and I love them all. Thank you. Thank you. Sir. Sure. Mr. Logan, come forward. William Logan, precinct two, acting chair of the Zoning By-law Review Committee. Actually, we don't have a report this year, but after many years reviewing the by-laws, I think over a decade, we've done a lot of work on that, and sometimes we even propose some changes to it. But now with the master plan coming up, we feel that we are no longer needed and that we've served our purpose. So we're asking to be dissolved. I hear a motion to dissolve the Zoning By-law Review Committee. It's been seconded. All in favor, please say yes. Yes. Opposed? Oh, I have new volunteers for the committee. The committee has been dissolved. Thank you very much. And thank all the past members of that committee over the past 10 years. Any other reports? Which brings up the last line of article three. If you'll look at it, it says dissolve committees or take any other action there, too. So if there are any other committees out there, I've kind of looked at probably about three or four dozen committees that haven't met, that no longer meet, and have basically, their time has gone by. If anybody was ever a member of one of those committees, like the outdoor swimming pool committee in this band, and you want to dissolve that committee, or if we don't hear from any number of committees over the next quarter of the meeting, I'm gonna let the very last meeting open article three and make a motion to dissolve a whole bunch of them. So if you want your committee to continue, get up and speak. Otherwise, we're gonna dissolve you. Okay, any other reports or committees? I remove that all the committee reports have been received, Mr. Tosti. I move that the recommended votes contained in the respective reports to the finance committee, the Board of Selectment Redevelopment Board and other committees before the committee, before the meeting, without further action. All in favor, please say yes. Yes. Opposed? All the recommended votes and all the reports are before the meeting, without further action. Mr. Tosti, you want to move article three to the table? Move that article three be laid upon the table. Motion to move article three to the table. All in favor, please say yes. Yes. Okay, opposed? Sit down kindly. That brings us to article four. Article four, appointment of measure of wooden bark. Mr. Tosti, done. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Dan Dunn, precinct 21. I'd like to nominate Elsie Fiori as the measure of wooden bark. Second. We have any other nominations? Seeing none. All in favor, Ms. Fiori to be measure of wooden bark. Please say yes. Yes. All opposed? None. This is Fiori. Once again elected for a new unanimously. Thank you very much. She even got like a kit last year. She was very diligent. She came up and showed me how she was gonna do it. No one ever called her. I want some work this year. That closes article four. We now have article five. Election of the assistant town moderator. Do I have any nominations? Madam. Michelle Jarosha from precinct 19. I'd like to nominate James O'Connor for assistant moderator. We have Mr. O'Connor nominated. We have a second. We have any other nominations? Seeing none. All in favor, Mr. O'Connor to be our assistant. Please say yes. Yes. All opposed? Say no. Mr. O'Connor, you're so elected. You're coming to collect your badge. That brings us to article six. Zoning bylaw amendment, accessory apartments. We have a recommended vote of no action. All in favor, no action. Please say yes. Yes. Opposed? That ends that article and they're so declared. No action. That brings us to article seven. Zoning bylaw amendment, medical marijuana dispensary siting. We are going to take the opportunity to discuss seven and eight at the same time because they're essentially the same set of facts and circumstances. So we will discuss them in total and then take individual votes in each article. Mr. Fitzsimmons, would you like to present? Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Bruce Fitzsimmons, Arlington Redevelopment Board. You have before you tonight two articles, both of which pertain to medical marijuana. Article seven would permit medical marijuana dispensaries to be located in the B-5 zoning district by special permit subject to environmental design review by the Arlington Redevelopment Board. Article eight would impose a moratorium on the implementation of article seven through the end of the 2014 town meeting. At the outset, I want to express that these articles were developed through a collaborative effort of the town manager, the director of health and human services, the director of planning and community development, the chief of police, the director of inspectional services, the director of the Arlington Youth Health and Safety Coalition, Town Council, and others. The ARB reviewed the articles and by unanimous consent approved the votes that are in your materials. In a moment, I will turn the presentation over to the town manager. Before he speaks, however, I would like to briefly speak to the zoning aspects of the articles, specifically to explain why zoning district B-5 was selected as the appropriate district for those dispensaries and how using the ARB environmental design review process would help regulate them. With respect to selecting zoning district B-5, the intent is to restrict the dispensaries to a limited number of locations in the central business district. In your memorandum from the town manager, you'll see on the very back of the last page exactly where zoning district B-5 would be. As you can see, we're talking about a relatively small number of properties in Arlington Center that are on the north side of Massachusetts Avenue west of Route 60 and on the south side of Massachusetts Avenue east of Route 60. By restricting the dispensaries to these locations, they would be in public view, allowing the public as well as various town departments to monitor activities at these locations to ensure that only permitted uses are occurring. Also by keeping the dispensaries in the central business district, we'll be minimizing the impact on residential neighborhoods. With respect to the permitting process, Article 7 would require someone who wishes to operate a medical marijuana dispensary to obtain a special permit subject to environmental design review from the ARB. For those of you who may not be familiar with EDR, Section 1106 F of the zoning bylaw sets out 12 environmental review standards. To cite just four examples that would be most relevant to this topic, the standards cover such matters as ensuring that pedestrian and vehicular circulation at the site is safe and does not detract from the use and enjoyment of abutting properties, that signage and advertising is done in an appropriate manner, that public safety is not compromised by the project and that sites with historical interest are preserved. The ARB applies these and other EDR standards to evaluate special permit applications to modify the proposals and to require mitigation of adverse impacts as necessary and in some cases to deny an application. I'll be happy to answer any zoning related questions on these articles and now I'd like to turn this over to the town manager. Thank you. Mr. Chaptoline. Thanks Bruce, Adam Chaptoline, town manager. So to build on what Bruce has said, I'd like to give town meeting a brief description of the proposals for zoning medical marijuana treatment centers. These articles were placed on the warrant to give town meeting the opportunity to carefully consider reasonable limitations on the location and operation of medical marijuana dispensaries in town if any seek to open here. As you may know, question three at the November 2012 state election was approved by voters statewide and went into effect January 1st, 2013. Under this law, the State Department of Public Health or DPH must issue regulations to govern local medical marijuana treatment centers. DPH issued draft regulations March 29th and final regulations are expected to go into effect by May 24th. The state dispensary permits may be granted as soon as 90 days later. Since the passage of the law, I've been meeting regularly with the group of town department heads that Bruce mentioned earlier to consider and develop proposals for reasonable regulation of these dispensaries. As a result of these discussions, I placed these two warranted articles on the warrant and the Arlington Redevelopment Board has recommended favorable action on both. The board of selectmen has also voted in support of both proposals. Given that this is brand new in Massachusetts and we have not seen dispensaries like this here in practice in the Commonwealth, it's appropriate for the town to proceed cautiously at this point. I'll now summarize the two proposals briefly. The proposed vote under article seven would limit the placement of the centers to the B5 zoning district that Bruce described I believe is on the map on the screen. It would be subject to environmental design review and permitting by the Arlington Board of Health and the State Department of Public Health. Also proposed restrictions on the visible display of marijuana and related products as well as limitations on noise, dust, vibration and other sensory disturbances outside the center. These restrictions are similar to those applicable to home occupations under section 5.05 of the zoning bylaw. Finally, the proposed amendment specifies that operation of a medical marijuana treatment center shall not be in excess reuse. Town officials felt that zoning these centers in the B5 district, which is centrally located on Mass Ave, would allow for adequate monitoring both formally and informally. The proposed vote under article eight would impose a moratorium on medical marijuana treatment centers until the dissolution of the 2014 annual town meeting. A moratorium would allow time to receive and evaluate state guidance on the operation of these centers and to carefully consider appropriate local restrictions to ameliorate any negative effects of these centers on public health, safety and welfare. Even if the restrictions set forth under article seven were to pass, this moratorium would give the town additional time to consider zoning regulations more comprehensively and with the benefit of state guidance. If the restrictions proposed under article seven do not pass, then the moratorium provides another year to consider alternatives, including making a new proposal to the 2014 town meeting. If both proposals fail, then there will be no zoning regulation in place applicable to these dispensaries. They may try to open under existing retail or other uses to which a special permit requirement may or may not apply. To close, I wanna make clear that these proposals are not intended to prohibit the opening of a medical marijuana treatment center in Arlington. Rather, they're intended to allow us time to responsibly and reasonably consider the final state regulations and allow the Board of Health the opportunity to draft, discuss, and enact adequate local regulations. I respectfully ask town meeting for favorable action on both warrant articles. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chaffton and Tom. Mr. Doherty, I have it up here if you wanna walk, I'm gonna get it. Yeah, it works better because the cameras only get people at the front. That's right. I'll turn it on and try to try to. Jim Doherty, Precinct 2. I rise to support Article 8 and ask that you vote down Article 7. The concern I have with Article 7, quite frankly, is I agree with the town manager that we do need more time to ponder this. I think the moratorium would give us adequate time to look at it in greater detail in terms of zoning. I'm a little concerned about restricting it just to the Arlington Center area. One, you have a large concentration of high school is there at Arlington Catholic, as well as at St. Agnes School, as well that area is a magnet for other adolescent type age children who would congregate there on Friday evenings or other evenings to go to the various establishments to have some food or pizza or what have you. The other concern I have is that the description in there talks about, I think it's related to the environmental review, that nothing can be visible from the street, which I think is a good thing to have. However, if you think about the majority of the properties that are in this district, they all or the majority have glass door fronts. So either no one's gonna locate there or they're gonna have to somehow board up those windows or somehow screen those windows so they can't see in. So I respectfully ask that you support Article 8 and vote down Article 7. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Doherty. Mr. Ruderman. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Michael Ruderman, Precinct 9. I strongly urge you to vote in Article 8 for the moratorium, given my eyes in service of this meeting, as President Washington said. But if I look as carefully as I can at the B-5 district and try to read all the tiny little squares that surround the red, those are the homes and residences of my neighbors, Precinct 9 and just on the other side of MassF2. I would hope that the moratorium would give us time to engage the neighbors in the process and bring their thoughts and concerns to bear on the siting of this new business use in the B-5. And so I ask your support for the moratorium under Article 8. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Ruderman. Mr. Harrington. Stephen Harrington, Precinct 13. I reiterate my good friend Jim Doherty and Michael Ruderman's comments. I think that there should be a moratorium. Let's get this right. There's not even state regulations yet for this proposal. And I notice in the handout, I have a question to the moderator, of course, to the Redevelopment Board. You mentioned what happens if we pass 7 and 08. Can we pass 8 and 07? Mr. Fitzsimmons. That may be a question for town council, but I'll try to answer it. Generally speaking, I don't think that you can have a moratorium on something that is prohibited. So if Article 7 fails, I'm not sure that you can have an enact a moratorium to prevent a use that isn't allowed anyway. What happens if Article 7 fails then? If Article 7 fails, we would have no zoning in place. And if you read the rest of the zoning by-law, you'll see, I believe it's in Article 6.17. And this was written at a different time with different facts in front of us. But that, among other things, allows for retail establishments to sell drugs. My guess is it's clearly intended to be pharmaceuticals and over-the-counter type of medications. But somebody could find that article in the by-law and use that as the basis for saying that they should be able to locate a medical marijuana dispensary in pursuant to Article 6.17. And I think that's the problem. A lot of us wanna have a moratorium so we can get this right, that you can gauge more people that you could wait until the state actually has its regulations. There's questions about integrated facilities, whether you can grow and sell in the same building. And a lot of this still isn't set in stone yet. And so, it sort of puts us in a tough position. However, the reality is that we passed 7 and ate at the same time, well, we can always come back and revisit 7 at the next time meeting. But because of the order, I'm not sure why the warrant was put in is 7 and 8. It would really behoove us to actually vote on Article 8 first and have a moratorium. And then we'd know that we can pass 7 safely and still have a chance to come back. I think a lot of people have expressed sent in to me that we wanna get this right and not just do it without having all the regulations in place. Mr. Moderator, is it possible to put 7 on the table now and have a vote on the moratorium, 8? Anything's possible. So I make a motion that we table Article 7. Do you have a second? Oh, with the proviso that we're gonna continue to discuss it. Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. So I make- The motion to table Article 7, all in favor, please say yes. Yes. Opposed? No. Let's try that again, chairs in doubt. All in favor of tabling Article 7, please say yes. Yes. All opposed? No. I think it is tabled. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. No. I just- Two-thirds of table? Mr. Sire, do you have something to elucidate on this? No, Councillor, did Mr. Fitzsimmons have a correct analysis of the law? Well, I think if Julianne can elucidate us, well, I look at the rules about table. It's two-thirds. Two-thirds? All right, it lost then. It's not tabled. It wasn't a two-thirds vote. I still don't know. Julianne. Can you elucidate- What's the question? Did Mr. Fitzsimmons have the analysis of what's going to happen if we don't? Or am I correct, Mr. Harrington? Yes, I'd just like to know, can we pass Article 8 first, the moratorium, and then debate Article 7? What matters for the- Well, no, Mike, you can come up and speak if you want, but it matters for getting it right. The fear that I have is that if we pass 7 and not 8, 90 days from now, in B5, you could have medical marijuana dispensaries, and we don't have the state regulations yet. In my opinion- I'm sorry, Juliana Rys Town Council. In my opinion, the town meeting could vote Article 8 first, and it could vote Article 8 solely. That's what the town of Burlington did, so I respectfully disagree with Mr. Fitzsimmons that it's not within town meetings prerogative to vote only Article 8. Thank you. So a motion to table Article 7 and have Article 8. What, are you making it again? Second. Yeah, are you making your motion? No, I'm the same motion, and you said it wasn't 2-3rds. It was not. And then six people stood up? I'm not sure if I was standing up for it. Six people doubt the vote. Six people doubt the vote. All in favor of tabling Article 7, please rise. Same tell as he asked you, Mr. McCabe, Mr. O'Connor, Mr. Schlickman, and Sean, you count your section. Out front, Mr. Mahan is traditionally our counter. I want to call all those in favor. I did, all in favor, please rise. All in favor of tabling, please rise. Mr. Mahan, how many up front? Nine. Mr. Schlickman? 22 on the right side of the room. Mr. O'Connor, how many in the right center? 12. Mr. McCabe, how many on the right, left? 27. Mr. Harrington? Well, no, if you're gonna count Sean, you gotta do it quick too. You got 26? 26, all right. All opposed to tabling, please rise. How many, Mr. Mahan? Two up front. Mr. Schlickman? 18. 18. 39. 18. Mr. McCabe? 24. Tabulation is 96 to table, 101 to not table. It's not table. Mr. McCabe, what purpose do you rise? Harry McCabe, precinct 21, I move to postpone further consideration of article seven until after article eight. Only requires a simple majority. We've just lost, anyways. All in favor of postponing article seven until after article eight, please say yes. Yes. All opposed say no. No. It's lost. Next on the list, Mr. McKinney. Lawrence McKinney, precinct nine. This town, like most towns in the early 70s, was concerned about, at the time, was the first reaction to the encroachment of drugs into young people's lives. In 1970, 71, 72, there appeared a curricula that was selected by Health and Human Services as the one that had the most demonstrated impact in the classroom. It was also recommended by the American Psychological Association and William F. Buckley said it was artful, informed, and ingenious. I am proud to say that this town adopted this substance abuse program in 1972, and I'm proud that the Robbins Library took another copy of it, and I'm even prouder that I wrote it. There are people in this room right now, and I know looking at a couple of them who have told me they actually read the marijuana booklets I wrote for them 40 years ago. What I'm trying to say is that we have a lot of talk here about regulations, but there is no one who has spoken about what we're regulating. Now, as the individual who first wrote the marijuana booklets, which people on your own board of education used for their education, I don't see any of them gotten particularly involved in drugs, we went forward to do it for the Army and the Navy. We started publishing the Journal of Cannabis Research, and in fact, I'm glad to say I introduced Robert Randall to Dr. Thomas Ungerleider. He became the first medical marijuana patient in history, and by 1980, we had actually patented the extraction of legal drugs from marijuana. The Cannabis Corporation of America was farmed with a bunch of MIT and Arthur D. Little and several hundred of my classmates from Harvard Business School, and we nearly got natural THC on the marketplace. I'm glad that after 40 years, I'm still here to help educate you a little bit about cannabis, and the fact that both of these articles are very well thought out. First of all, the most latest research on marijuana longitudinal study on adolescent drug abuse shows that those adolescents who abuse alcohol do show minor brain damage. Those who use cannabis do not, and this was only five months ago, so we can forget about the brain damage business. Marijuana has about the danger of beer. You shouldn't use it in drink and drive. You shouldn't go to school, but yes. We're talking about zoning. I know. What I'm trying to say is that people have said, not in my backyard, but really it's not that dangerous. Okay, split to the actual motion here. First of all, the kind of regulations that our town manager have come upon are really quite fine. Put it in fine view, make it perfectly obvious if anybody's going to go into there, we know who they are, we know what's going on. People are going to use marijuana anyway. A small percentage will at least get it, regulate it, and we have their eyes on them. And as far as putting it off for two years, for a year, I'm all for that. As far as I know, I'm the only person here who's been to the Department of Mental Health hearings. Anyone else here been to those hearings? You. Okay, two people here have been to the Department hearings and we know what's come up. It's really right confusing. I also went to two of the seminars by the people who want to do the dispensaries. Anyone here been to those seminars? Let me tell you, it's somewhere between amateurism, ambition, and falling over their shoelaces. So, as far as I'm concerned, I think that the town manager and his friends came up with a very good plan because if we don't have a plan in place, oh Lord, what's going to happen if something else goes wrong at the state level, at least we'll have a plan in place to keep it under guard. And I trust our public safety people and I trust our town planner to take care of it. It's not such a big danger. And secondly, yeah, put it off for a year. I'd be more than happy. I've been approached by three different groups who want to put me on their board and I'm backing off. Let's let this come into some kind of a fruition that we all understand what's happening. Put it off for a year and don't worry about it. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. McKinney. Mr. Jamison? Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Gordon Jamison, precinct 12. Oh, some light. That'd be nice. I went to the informational session that we had for precincts 12 and 14 over the weekend and I thought I understood everything that was gonna happen about this tonight but the discussion has confused me so I have a few questions. And perhaps Mr. Moderator, the town manager might be the person to answer these questions. As I understood it, the intent of Article 7 was to put in place zoning now as other communities have or in the process of doing as Mr. Chaplain mentioned at the introduction, I know the seven minutes kept him moving along very quickly. A whole host of the people to my right were involved in that. And as Mr. Dunn mentioned at the very beginning, we have very good employees that know what they're doing. So I don't doubt their intent but I would like to understand the zoning aspect now if Mr. Chaplain could comment on that. Adam, are you the right person to do that? Okay. You coordinated it, right? Yeah. As I understand Adam coordinated the process. So I think what you're, excuse me, Adam Chaplain, town manager. So you're asking me if the intent is to get zoning B5 now but also to place the moratorium so that the town has the best. Let's do seven first because I think people in the audience are confusing the two. Okay. So if you're asking me just directly, was the intent to have seven have favorable action taken upon it to zone it B5? The answer is yes. And the rationale for very quickly the scope of the zoning area. It's in the middle of town. It makes sense. It's an area very public. I think that was one of the discussions. Yes. You're having a colloquy with him. Ask for either questions and I direct that. He may not be the right person for that. And Mr. Moderator, the rationale for putting in the middle of the thing, what I heard at our precinct meeting was that they wanted it to be very visible. Hence the choice for the middle of town versus someplace else. I forgot what else was mentioned but the rationale for that seemed clear to me at the time. Does anyone want to comment on that? Frankly, I think Mr. Jamison summed up the rationale pretty well. Thank you. And so we go to all the trouble and member, if we don't pass seven this year, we can't pass it for two years. Is that correct, Mr. Moderator? Ms. Rice, and I don't think that's correct if the board proposes it. They can bring it up again. Mr. Moderator, yes. Thank you. And Juliana Rieshtown Council. The equivalent of Article seven could be passed next year, even if it were turned down this year, if the planning board, the redevelopment board were to report favorably on it. A different zoning proposal could also be made next year if Article seven were voted down this year. Okay, so, and let's just do one more on that level. Chief Ryan, is he in favor of this proposal being enacted this year? Chief Ryan. Yes. He said it's an affirmative for Mr. Ryan. Also at our meeting, I understood the process was that the state is the one that does not have their act together. Arlington has their act together and that's why the moratorium on the actual ability to sell product in the town is until next year. And several other communities, as I understand, are taking this approach. The people that will be prescribing this need to get a license from the state. The town does not license them. The town only zones where it can be sold. Those people are required to have a medical license. That person needs to be on site, as I understand it. And again, the utility is not recreational, it's medical, so it's for leaving pain and nausea for people who are often quite ill. So I strongly support both Article 7, which gets the zoning in place, in the place where it should be, visible in the center of town. And Article 8, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's debate. That's not a point of, no, madam, that's. Reclaiming my time, I'm strongly in forth of Article 7 and Article 8. And to reiterate the licensing aspect, the doctors and the DOs are the only people that can get a license to dispense medical marijuana. And it's irrespective of their actual professional license. It's an additional license they must obtain. Again, this is for, for lack of a better word, almost compassionate use for people that are deathly ill. I think Arlington, there are only gonna be 35 places in the Commonwealth, we may or may not get one. That's all state determined. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Thank you, Mr. Jamison. This lady right here with the glasses. Yep, you. I don't know your name. And when you come to the microphone, if you'll please introduce yourself with your name and a precinct for the stenographer. That goes for everybody. I'm Molly Fluggiger, precinct four, and I'm a member of the Disability Commission. This has been a painful lesson in civics tonight. I'm not entirely sure that Arlington has our act together and the state doesn't. The state will have final state regulations on this topic on May 8th. And if I had had my act together, the first thing we would have heard was to postpone this discussion until then. So we could vote on some more informed regulations. But here we are. I assume, I also don't know how if two articles, Mr. Moderator, get combined, do I get double time to talk? Well, the clock doesn't look like it started, so maybe I'm ahead of the game. What I had hoped to use the time tonight was to actually explain some of the state regulations. The state regulations were available on March 29th or maybe 27th and really give a sign of what's to come. And what you may or may not know is that the law in Massachusetts is much more strict and much safer than any of the laws, any of these sort of worst case scenarios that we've heard about in Colorado and California, and we're really dealing with something in a different way. And I encourage you to look at those or we'll sort of see what's coming, especially Mr. Harrington, because I think what you were saying earlier may not have been entirely in line with those. So I'm a little confused because the town is asking us to slow down with the moratorium, yet they want us to jump in to a zoning law, so it seems to be kind of a contradiction. In my opinion, and I'm not a zoning expert, B-5 seems kind of small. This idea of being in the public eye is actually a little scary. I don't know who here would be willing to admit that they have a condition that might entitle them to have a card and then also to go to the doctor because you have to first certify for a card and then you have to go to the doctor to get, it's not a prescription in the prescription sense, pharmacy sense, but it is a particular note or license or I forget what they permit, not a doctor. In addition to qualifying you, then also has to say that you have a condition. So for example, I have multiple sclerosis, my doctor could give me a card, I could qualify, but if I'm feeling well, I don't have a prescription or a prescription for it. I would then have to have a condition as well as that. And you'll find in the regulations that they go on and on about the safeguards that protect the doctors and how they can prescribe the patients. This law actually has additional penalties for abuse. So if I get my card and I get my prescription and I sell anything to you or maybe even give them to you at a precinct meeting, I could actually, I believe go to jail, I'm not sure for that, maybe if I only profit from it, I can go to jail. So in summary on article seven, I think B5 is a strange choice asking, you know, disabled and sick people to cobble on the brick sidewalks in the center of town and find a parking spot seems kind of cruel, but that's up to you all to decide. In terms of the moratorium, so why wouldn't we want a moratorium? In the regulations, there's an interesting process for processing. So if I were interested in opening a dispensary, which I'm not, I would have to be a nonprofit organization that would have half a million dollars to go through this crazy process and the state is gonna offer, they're gonna have a limited period for a limited number of these and there's gonna be one accounting, so they're gonna be 13 in the state. There could be up to 35, but the state is taking a conservative approach and then I can apply for the first round. Oh, I have a timer here. Anyway, and then I can get, if I get qualified to the second round then I have to apply within 30 days and then I guess the Department of Public Health gets as much time as they want to figure out if I am approved. But if I approve, part of that approval process is I have to open one in 120 days. Now it's a little confusing to look at the calendar, especially because you don't know how much time the Department of Public Health will take but theoretically that window could open and close before we meet again for town meeting. So I believe that these proposals are really an indirect way, whether it's intentional to keep them out not in our backyard or if this slow and cautious approach while looking out for the community could also have the potential disadvantage which may not be a disadvantage to some of you of really denying access to something locally to many of our citizens who could benefit from that. I guess I also, I'll be accused of being high but it's also sort of shame on us for a town that doesn't or often wishes there were more economic opportunities. I think because these will be potentially scarce resources, any town that has a medical marijuana treatment center which is not proven to increase crime and is not proven to increase minor drug abuse in a community, it would open, it would create an alternative health zone. If you have individuals who are taking advantage of this for legitimate reasons and legally, they're also likely to maybe need acupuncture to have a health food store and to have other related industries that maybe we don't want Arlington to have that reputation but it could have had some benefit. So please consider those thoughts as you vote on seven and eight if we know how to get that accomplished tonight. Thank you. Thank you, ma'am. It's 9.30, why don't we take a 10 minute break? The Arlington Belmont crew is selling cookies and treats out front. Please help yourself, we'll see you in 10 minutes. Let's come to order. Please come in and take your seats. Mr. Cleiman's our next speaker. Mr. Cleiman has the floor. Everyone, please take your seats. Yep, please come on and sit down. Mr. Cleiman has the floor. Good evening. Mr. Cleiman, person one. I'm having a very difficult time with both seven and eight. The problem I have is that we passed a state law. Now we're trying to say, well, okay, we have a state law, but now we're gonna put a moratorium on it. Now, personally, this is not anything that I need. Can someone shut the doors in the back of the hall? However, I have enough health issues that I need many medications. I would hate somebody to say there is a new medication on the market that I need, but you know, you have to go to the Lexington line because that is the only place that I can get my medication. So if there is somebody that is, let's say, is in Arlington Heights, is in East Arlington on the Medford line, and they happen to need this, we're not talking recreational purposes, we're talking medicine, that there's one place, there's two places that you can get it in town. And the answer is I'm too sick to go there. And to me, that is more than a legitimate answer to tell me that this should not be zoned in that way. And for that very reason, I will vote against this. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Klein. Sean Harrington. Sean Harrington, precinct 15. Motion to terminate the, sorry, motion to terminate the debate, and all matters attributed there too, right? We have a motion to terminate the debate that requires a two-third vote. All in favor of terminating the debate, please say yes. Yes. Opposed, say no. No. I do not believe it's a two-thirds vote. Mr. Schlickman, you're the next speaker. Paul Schlickman, precinct nine, Arlington Center resident. I'm looking at this. Mr. McKinney, do you live in this red R5 district, B5 district? Two blocks away. Oh, two blocks away, okay. I rise in support of the moratorium, but I don't think the zoning is quite right as a resident of the center, and somebody who walks around there quite a bit. At 299 Broadway at the corner of Alton Street, we have a right turn drug rehab center, which is right across the street from the red B5 commercial district where we're going to put the dispensaries. And I'm wondering if it's really such a great idea to have a zoning by-law which is putting the marijuana dispensary across the street from the drug rehab counseling center. So I think the R5 district needs to be rethought, and with the moratorium giving us another year to think of where we really want to put the dispensaries, I'd urge a no on seven and a yes on eight. Thank you, Mr. Schlickman. Mr. Helmuth? I thank you, Mr. Moderator, Eric, precinct 12. I just have a question about sort of the timing and the sequencing, and if I could get a clarification, if we pass the... Hold on, can someone turn this mic off? I think that mic is ringing. That's why it was off in the first place. Yeah. Okay, there we go. Thank you. Go ahead, Mr. Helmuth. So if we pass the moratorium under eight, sort of what bad things happen, to the people who really want us to do seven now, what's the downside? Yes, right. I mean, sorry, if we pass eight, but don't pass seven. I'm going to have to go to the middle of the mic. Juliana Rice Town Council, no bad things happen in the sense of you give up an opportunity to pass seven or some other zoning bylaw next year. Is that the question? Yeah, it was poorly phrased, though. So Mr. Moderator, let me try again. Is there time, if we pass eight, but don't pass seven, is there time to do another seven, to do another zoning bylaw before a marijuana dispensary business could be in place? Do you have an answer for that, Ms. Rice? Yes, I do. And yes, there would, because zoning bylaw changes, if they're approved by the Attorney General, become retroactively effective to the date they were first advertised, so that if a zoning bylaw change were proposed next year in say, February or March, and that were later approved, that would be, in effect, at the time the moratorium expired. Okay, so we could do the moratorium now, and that would prevent anything from happening. We'd have that one year period, and then we could still sort of do another zoning thing, and it'd still be in time. Right, and if I could just add one point that maybe will address some of this confusion. At the time the warrant opened and closed, and that articles had to go in, we did not know if the Attorney General was going to approve local zoning bylaws that imposed moratoria. So two options were presented. As it turned out, the Attorney General did approve that, but we didn't know at the time, so I understand that it's confusing to have these two seemingly inconsistent articles, but that's the reason for it. Thank you. Thank you. This young lady behind Mr. Schlickman, you had your hand up. Zarene Amendment, precinct 21. I actually, and I'm in favor of both Article 7 and Article 8. The reason being is this is just a complicated matter that the voters of Massachusetts responded very positively, and I think it's great, and if we don't vote for Article 7, we're gonna be stuck with a site that the state may choose for us. So I think it's great that we already investigated this matter. And as far as I know, the state may choose about five sites, not 13 or 35. I think there was some misinformation that was given here earlier. It is, this is a serious matter for some very sick, serious needs, and it's something that's gonna be carefully monitored. It's something that's beyond just regular pharmacy regulations or other regulations. So I highly think that we're going to be doing very well. The question I had about this was the town, we're gonna be putting this under the town amendment I think I saw, excuse me for a second. Oh, Section 505 of the zoning bylaws for home occupation. I'm not clear on that. Can somebody clarify that for me? Probably the manager. Ms. Rice. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Juliana Rice, Town Council. It has nothing to do with the home occupation, but some of the parts of the proposed vote under Article 7 are similar to restrictions that are in place for home occupations, and those are the parts listed in the proposed Section 507, which is on page three of the. 505? Of the ARB report, such as, be no equipment or process shall be used nor any activity performed in any medical marijuana treatment center that creates noise, dust, vibration, glare, fumes, odors, or electrical or other interference. So there are similar restrictions in place for home occupations, but this would not be a home occupation. Right. Well, that's good. Again, we're just defining what a medical marijuana treatment center is, and the state asks us to think about sites, and I think the town did a very good job of outlining that, and then the moratorium would give us more time to consider this even further, or have our regulations in order a little bit further. So I'd say vote for both of them. Thank you, Ms. Mimman. Mr. McCabe. Mr. Moderator, Harry McCabe, Precinct 21, couple of issues. First of all, a point of personal privilege. When we're counting the standing vote, would you ask the good members to clear the aisles? I came very close to falling on the last one. Very well, please do that. Secondly, not to belabor the point, but our job here tonight is zoning. This is not an issue of, shall we allow marijuana in any form into the town of Arlington? For the record, I am completely, totally irrevocably opposed to bringing marijuana into the town of Arlington under any auspices. However, that's not the issue. We cannot control that. If we approve both of these articles, that will not bring marijuana to Arlington. What will bring marijuana to Arlington is somebody that's got a lot of money and wants to gamble on opening a business in Arlington. If that happens, they've got to be licensed by us. Our job is to be ready for it. And we've got to give our people, the manager, the chief of police, whoever, the tools to deal with it. When and if it happens, my prediction is that it won't happen because Arlington won't be selected by anybody to open a store in Arlington. But that's just my prediction. They will go to some other locality where the business may be better. But anyways, I think we have an obligation and a duty to give our manager, give our police department, give our town officials the tools that they need to control this issue if it should ever come to Arlington. So I would recommend strongly that we approve in both articles, seven and eight. And I heard the magic date May 8th, something's going to happen between now and 2014. That'll give us plenty of time to shift gears if we need to. It's not a pleasant thought to have children people in Arlington with the threat of this hanging over their head. But that's not our problem. Our problem is to provide the tools that we need to control it. And I respectfully request that we vote both of these articles and then say a prayer. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. McCabe. This gentleman here in the blue shirt in front of Ms. Fiori. Nathan Swilling, please sing four. I move to terminate debate on all matters. Second. Okay, we have a motion to terminate debate on all matters. All in favor, please say yes. Opposed, say no. No. In my opinion, that is a two-thirds vote. Okay, we have a force article seven, Zoning By-law Amendment to Medical Marijuana Dispensaries. This requires a two-thirds vote. All in favor, please say yes. Yes. Opposed? No. In my opinion, if the vote is defeated. Five people have arisen. Okay. All in favor, please rise. All in favor of article seven, please rise. Same tellers, please keep the aisles clear. Ms. Mahan, how many up front? 10 up front. Mr. Schlickman? 24 to my left. Left side, Mr. O'Connor. 23. 23. Mr. Harrington, how many in the right center? 30. 30. Mr. McCabe, how many on the right? 27. 27. Okay, all opposed to article seven, please rise, same tellers. Ms. Mahan, one. Mr. Schlickman? 11 on my left. Left center, Mr. O'Connor. 24. Mr. Harrington? 21. 21 in the right center, 21. Mr. McCabe? 15. 15 on the right. The vote fails, it is 114 in the affirmative, 72 in the negative. Had to be two-thirds, so it does not pass. Thank you, Mr. Judd. Thank you. That brings us to article eight, Maritorium. All in favor, this is also zoning by-law. This will require a two-third vote. All in favor of the moratorium on the article eight, please say yes. Yes. Opposed? No. In my opinion, that is a two-thirds vote. And I so declare Madam Clerk, you certify the two-thirds of the members present voting in the affirmative. Okay, I'm declaring a two-thirds vote. Excuse me? I think it's a two-thirds present. It's under article title one, article two. I can certify 85. Madam Clerk, certify 85. Members of present voting in the affirmative. Yes. I think it's just two-thirds. Well, you check that. That brings us to article nine. Grant of an easement, Thompson School. Mr. Dunn. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Dan Dunn, Board of Selectment. As the, I don't have much to add beyond the comment, which is to say that in the reconfiguration of Thompson School, there were three polls that were originally on the street, essentially, like in the sidewalk. And that's within where the polls usually are. When the reconfiguration happened, the polls were moved deeper into the town property. And that's what requires some sort of special permission to be given to Verizon to have those polls. Those polls are actually already in place. Very well. Mr. Schlickman. Paul Schlickman, member of the school committee. The school committee requests you to vote this in the affirmative. What's happening is, is there's a pulinary on North Union Street where people can drop off children. And because of that, the polls had to be moved back onto the school department property. And that's what this easement's about. So please vote to support this. Mr. Berkowitz. Bill, you have to come up front. Janice. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Bill Berkowitz, precinct eight. May I ask if the town collects fees from Verizon or NSTAR from granting easements to seek into this or from other accommodations the town may make to Verizon or NSTAR. If not, should the town be collecting such fees? Mr. Dunn, can you tell us all about that? We do not collect any. And this is heavily regulated by state law. I'm not sure. I don't believe that we could if we wanted to. It would be something nominal, even if we wanted to. Why nominal? Because, yeah, I guess, Julie Andrew, can you help me out here? Is this one? I'm afraid I don't know the answer to that. Sorry. Julie on a Rice Town Council. If we did, we could expect that to be passed along to the ratepayers through Verizon. But as a general rule, municipalities will accept a nominal compensation. If we were to engage in, say, an RFP type process, we'd have to get an appraisal to demonstrate the value of the property that's being given. And it would be, I think, very difficult to come up with an appraisal that would show that it's worth any more than just nominal value. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Wagner? Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Carl Wagner, Precinct 11. I support us all very quickly dispatching this in the affirmative. However, as anybody who reads the Arlington Advocate for several years can tell you, there are a number of ugly double polls that I believe the utilities, perhaps Verizon, have promised to get rid of. I hope we, the voters in this building, as well as the people of Arlington, will let those utilities know that we're doing them a favor here and we would like them to get those double polls out of the way and make it nicer. Thank you. I think that's Article 15. Ms. Weber, do you have a question? Janice Weber, Precinct 21. I just wanted to know why we never asked Verizon, our end start, to put the cables underground, especially now where the possibility of flooding is much less with the type of cables that they use. Yeah, who wants to tackle that one? Mr. Chapterlain? Adam Chapterlain, Town Manager. I suppose the largest consideration would be that if the town undertook an effort to work with the utilities to put the wires underground, the cost of doing so would be put upon the rate payers in Arlington. So a great deal of research and analysis would have to go in to see whether or not the cost benefit would point us in the direction of moving forward with something like that. Thank you. Janice, did you watch your speak? Thank you, Mr. Monterey. Gordon Jamison, Precinct 12. I noticed that Mr. Dunn voted the negative on this. Could I have his rationale for his original vote? Mr. Dunn, what was the reason you voted in the negative? I voted no because there is a different way that we could do this that is not a permanent easement that is a temporary one. And I just would rather not give away something forever that we could just give away for part time. I confess that since then I've been less stressed about it simply because we could take it back by eminent domain if we needed to. So nothing is truly permanent. I think in the grand scheme of things, this is not the course that I would choose, but it's a fine, the town will not regret this vote. So I conclude that Mr. Dunn has evolved on this issue. You put your words in his mouth, sir. He gave you his opinion. In that the school committee uses this, the reason for this is the school committee is using a drop-up zone as I understand it. I recommend favorable action. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Thank you, Mr. McCabe. Nathan, I forgot your last name already. Oh, that's somebody else. So Nathan's swelling, Precinct 4. I move to terminate debate on all matters. Terminator. We have a motion to terminate debate on the article issues before it. Second, all in favor, please say yes. Yes. Opposed? No. My opinion is a two-third vote. We have a force to recommend a vote on the board of selection. All in favor, please say yes. Yes. Opposed? No. It is a two-thirds vote and I so declare it. Madam Clerk, you certify two-thirds and members are present in voting. Yes. Two-thirds of the members present are voting in the affirmative. Those are the proper words. That brings us to article 10 of our amendment, junk dealers. I apologize, Mr. Moderator. Thank you. This does not actually change anything that the regulations or the way these businesses in town are regulated. It's just we have a number of used good stores who have come in for licenses and they don't like being called junk dealers. So they want to change. Anyone wish to speak to this issue? Seeing none, all in favor of the bylaw amendment, please say yes. Yes. Opposed? It is an affirmative vote and I so declare. Sir? Okay, usually we take our moduses of reconsideration at the close of each meeting. Thank you. That brings us to article 11. Bylaw amendment, use of public land property. Mr. Dunn, no action. I recommend a vote on no action. All in favor of no action, please say yes. Yes. Opposed? It is a no action vote. That brings us to article 12. Mr. Dunn. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. The select man heard the presentation of the procedures committee and we definitely support this change. I think that we look at this and we say change in town meeting is town meeting and it's been here for, you know, hundreds of years but at the same time that doesn't mean that we can't evolve. So we look forward to this and giving it a try and if it turns out that we don't like it, then we will have the opportunity to change this rule again in the future. But I don't think we anticipate that. I think it's going to be an interesting and productive change for town meeting. Defer the rest of our time to the committee's presentation. Correct. I'm just going to recognize them on their own. I just want to correct one thing you guys heard from both the town meeting procedure committee and the electronic voting study committee. Thank you for that correction. Thank you. Mr. Helmuth? Mr. Helmuth is reassured us it'll be shorter this time. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Beg your indulgence while the slides come up. Oh, name and precinct. Yes, Eric Helmuth, precinct 12 and chair of the electronic voting study committee for once this issues. So as they always say, the devil is in the details but we spend a lot of time thinking about just what level of detail ought we to encode in the bylaw because once you pass a bylaw, you are stuck with that bylaw for better or for worse until the next year unless the state attorney general says, boy, you really messed up and invalidates the whole thing. So I'm still waiting for the slides, Mr. Moderator. Could I, am I allowed to ask for a pause? Oh no. No, certainly not. You just keep talking. I'll just keep going, all right. Technology will catch up with you. Yes, that's right. I should know that. So our approach was first of all to change as little as necessary or as possible. We don't think anything is broken with town meeting. The way we've done things for 100 years is not broken. This is an opportunity to advance the democratic promise of town meeting to further elevate it as an elected representative legislative body. Secondly, so you'll see that reflected in the bylaw. Secondly, the recommended bylaw changes, sorry. Secondly, we thought it was important to permit electronic voting but not require it. One of the very practical reasons is computers can crash. The power can go out. We need a back up, a legal back up system so that we don't have to all say we're going home until they fix the computer in order to vote. Thirdly, so I'm on, if we can put that in presentation mode. This is why we need the option for the monitor. That's right, it's making the point. Thirdly, we thought that there was a certain sense in keeping a parallel structure with how we currently do things. And you'll see this in the recommended bylaw changes that sort of for every existing way of voting there's an electronic option that's parallel. And speaking of option, the committee does recommend leaving a fair bit of operational discretion to the moderator. And this was after careful consultation with a number of other towns. One of the towns told us we kind of wish we hadn't gotten so specific in the bylaw and tied our hands because frankly, every town meeting is a little different. And the exact ways we wanna do this, we may need a little time to figure out. So this is entirely a question for you to think about. How much discretion you want to give the moderator in deciding how we do an electronic vote or when we do it and all that. And we have built in things to a proposal that would give town meetings specific power. But I think that that's a principle that we want to err on the side of leaving discretion and giving us some time to get this right. So what would these proposed changes do that you have before you? They would permit electronic voting for any vote but not require it. They would, as I said, preserve all the current methods as legal alternatives. It would continue importantly to provide for an official roll call 30 members can stand. I will point out that a roll call becomes unfathomably faster in about two or three minutes instead of 30 or 40 minutes as we have had before. But that's still there. For that matter, five members can still stand and request a counted vote which could be done electronically. As a final note here, because the votes are already in the system, we're recommending that if someone, 30 people do request a roll call that we just use the votes that are already in the system if there's been a prior counted vote that hasn't been displayed in full. And I'll be happy to answer questions during the debate. And I know I'm going very fast. An important provision in the bylaw that the committee unanimously feels very strongly about because it goes to the core of the goal of advancing accountability is that whether or not we show the individual votes in the hall, we really want and recommend that the bylaw says that our individual votes are available to the public electronically and kept presumably on the town's website or whatever follows websites for four, three years because that's the mechanism that our constituents can really look up and see how we did. There is an element to require an immediate display of individual votes, how I voted specifically if the margin is close. That is a provision that we put in that is a safeguard. There is a small danger, we don't know how much but somebody could illegally leave, give their clicker to another person and say vote for me. That's allowed to do that. One of the ways that you can deter that is through public scrutiny. So if we have on a really close vote where proxy voting could be damaging, if I do that and I give my clicker to Adam and I leave and someone says, oh, there's a vote for Eric Helmuth. Is Mr. Helmuth in the room? Oh, really not. Then that's the deterrence right there. So that's the purpose of that provision. There is a cleanup item that you'll see that eliminates a never-used provision. There's a little sentence in there that says we can vote by show of hands and we want to take the opportunity to just delete that since we never ever do it. Yes ma'am? Wait, wait, you can get in the list. So you've seen these slides before but these are further examples in case we need to have them for discussion later and I am almost done. And then we have the specific changes. I think actually I will just kind of pause right now and I'm happy to discuss any of this. If you want to get a copy of the report for some of the detail, I think there may be still some left in the back of the room and that might be a useful reference as we go through the discussion and debate. Thank you, Mr. Helmuth. I put you on the list, Ms. Fells. Mr. Loretty? Thank you, Ms. Moderator. Crystal Loretty, precinct seven. Before I begin, Mr. Moderator, I'd like to just preface my remarks by saying I'm going to use the term demoderator a lot during this presentation. I want to assure you that I am not referring to you personally. As expected. Good, I want you in town meeting to understand that as one of the many town meeting members who supported you in the last election. But we don't know how long your reign's going to last and we don't know how other town moderators- I think you're in a more elected position, not a reign. I don't know how other town moderators are going to handle this particular bylaw. And so I have left on each person's chair and given to you, Mr. Moderator, two different but related bylaw amendments that I would like to have voted on separately. And I'd prefer not to read them, but I would like to explain that the reason I'm putting these forward is one of the things that struck me on in the report of the committee, which I very much appreciate, is a couple of lines in page eight under recommendations. And one of those lines says that this bylaw change would permit but not require electronic voting. And the other one said that the abiding intent is to fit electronic voting into current procedures, preserving as much as possible how town meeting now votes. And I believe that these two amendments more closely represent how we currently vote and how we should continue to vote when a question first comes up. When a question is first comes before town meeting, the moderator does not have the discretion to say on any vote we're going to have a standing vote. He can do that if he doubts the vote after it's been taken. But what the bylaw says right now is that in the first instance, that vote will be taken by a yes or no voice vote, period. And the change that the committee made was to allow that first vote to be by electronic tally. What I'm doing is reversing that change and keeping it as strictly as a voice vote. After that voice vote is taken, if members rise, then the moderator will then have the discretion to do an electronic tally or a standing vote as we currently do. And I believe that should stay that way. The second change that I'm making is to strike the last sentence at the end of the first paragraph, which says that if the electronic vote has a margin of difference of less than six vote, then the votes will be displayed. And that's really the equivalent of a roll call vote. Under our existing bylaw, right now the only time you can have a roll call vote is when 30 members rise. I would like the discretion and the choice to have a roll call vote to remain with town meeting members and not reside with the moderator. And so that's the reason for the second bylaw change. That's really in keeping with the spirit of preserving as much as possible about how town meeting now votes. And I'd like to address one issue and explain a little bit more about the voting in particular. I was going to show a video but giving some of the difficulties we've had. There was a comment made earlier tonight that watching this electronic voting is about as exciting as watching paint dry. And I've got to tell you that was exactly my reaction and watching the many videos that the committee posted on its website. It takes at least two minutes to do a vote. And in one of the videos that I had hoped to show, the moderator says, no, somebody rises to terminate debate. The moderator says, there is no one on the list. How do you think they're gonna vote? Well, they go to the electronic vote and two minutes later, they come up with a vote of something like 150 to 12. We don't need to take that much time on routine votes. And to the point that electronic voting is allowed but not required, the way the bylaw change reads right now is if we get a moderator who says all votes are electronic, then electronic voting is required because it's entirely at his discretion. And that's why I wanna strike that sentence at the end of the first, or strike that additional language at the end of the first sentence. The other issue that comes up with this, and I think people need to understand that effectively every electronic vote is a roll call vote, at least the day after, because if the moderator doesn't choose to display how people vote at the meeting, that information will always be available. And one of the concerns I have is something that's been happening recently, and that's been the targeting of town meeting members based on the way they vote. And if that's going to happen, I think people ought to stand up and be requesting the votes. It shouldn't happen by default because it's close, and it shouldn't happen because the moderator has chosen to choose an electronic vote. If people wanna do that kind of thing, and I recognize there's no way of stopping them, they need to literally stand up and be counted. And that's the reason, part of the reason I wanna strike it in the first case, but also in the second case. And also I wanna address one comment by one of the, by the chair, Mr. Helmuth, about this, is he talked about the possibility of proxy voting. Well, that issue can be addressed with the electronic technologies simply by noting that a person has voted without actually indicating how they voted. And that also addresses the concerns or the benefit some people see in having electronic, using electronic voting to show that people are here after the break. Now, looking around tonight, we've got very good attendance after the break, but we don't always. And you don't actually need to display the actual votes each member made to do that. You only need to show that they have voted. And frankly, I have a lot of concerns about displaying the votes as they occur. I believe people should vote the way they wanna vote. They shouldn't vote based on how their friends are voting or how their enemies are voting or how the vote itself is going. They really ought to vote their conscience. And that's what happens now when we take the votes the way we do by, initially by a voice vote. And I would argue also as a standing vote. So I see I'm running out of time, but in conclusion, I support the article, but I support it with these amendments because I think the committee's right. We ought to really do things as much as possible the way we do. And we ought to leave the discretion for having electronic votes, either as tallies or as the equivalent of a roll call. We ought to leave that to choice up to town meeting members and not delegate it to the moderator. Thank you. Second what? Oh, on his vote, on his amendments. Thank you. On both amendments, one and amendment two? Both amendments have been seconded. Mr. Leonard. Did you wish to speak on this article? Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. John Leonard, precinct 17 with two questions if I may. As most of us know for many years of being town meeting members, the acoustics in this hall is lacking as far as microphone problems and et cetera. I'm wondering is there any way of having this organization that is backing this maybe on the last night of town meeting this time to possibly set up a makeshift operation to try their wares in town hall from all sections of the hall? I'm going to attempt to answer that and if I have it wrong, I'll have Mr. Helmeth come forth. The simple answer is no. No organization is backing this. This was a town meeting article last year and we studied several different vendors and this would have to go out to bid so there's no particular vendor that we've thought about, that we've chosen, that we've speculated would win the bid and they didn't, the committee did not ask any of those vendors to come forth and if they did, our impression was all they would show up was the clicker itself because otherwise they'd have to hard wire in all 252 members into the computer in order to have a demonstration vote so the simple answer is no. Well my concern, my concern I guess you've already figured it out is that we could go ahead with this process and find out that due to one thing or another due to the structure of the building or whatever, the acoustics or the environment of the building will present problems with this system working. Now granted it works in Brookline and all the other places but we're not Brookline and all the other places and we just don't know if this will work in here I guess from what you're telling me until it's actually up and operational. Mr. Halleth can you address that further? Thank you Mr. Moderator Eric Halleth with Precinct 12 and boy did I sit on the wrong side tonight, so the moderator is correct that I think it's not practical to have a vendor come in and do a demonstration. However I think it's important to note to your concern which is absolutely valid that committing allowing electronic voting by bylaw and then committing the funds to do it does not require the town to proceed and I think I would pledge in my role with the committee as in its advisory role to the town manager and the IT director that we would test that in this hall and even very likely have a public demonstration before we signed a contract and spent any money to make sure that it did work. That's how the leading vendor in the space does business is they will come in and do a free demo during that period so that's what I would commit to advocating for. The reason I bring this up is because on page eight there is talk of a rental of the system for $1300 excuse me dollars per night and I'm probably misinterpreting this but I was wondering if you were renting the system for $1300 per night could you get one night out of it to see if it works in the environment of Town Hall of Allington but I guess that question has been answered. My second question is just talk about handsets that we're going to be using in order to show our voting on certain articles. We're all aware that over the years technology changes with a blink of an eye is there any way that a fail safe could be built in that every time new technology arises the Town of Allington wouldn't have to come out and pay more money for new and improved handsets because they can't handle the upgrades that are coming down the road. Mr. Helmuth can you answer that question. Thank you Mr. Moderator Eric Helmuth, Precinct 12. I think that one mechanism for dealing with the obsolescence question would be to choose to go with a lease or rental agreement over a purchase. A purchase has a lifespan so you have to kind of do that calculation. The second thing I would say though is that in our investigation the technology in its current form appears to be pretty mature to us. Some people have asked why couldn't you do this with using people's smartphones and that sounds great until you realize that nitty gritty that not everybody has one and there are lots of other problems with that. So the idea of using individually keyed handsets with radio transmission is pretty stable, pretty reliable. So nevertheless I think if we get to the point of addressing Article 42 the only thing that the Finance Committee is recommending that we do is start with a rental and part of that is to see how much we like it before we commit a full $29,000 and $30,000 to buy it. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Mr. Carmen. Mr. Carmen. Oh, I thought Dean had his hand up. No, all right, next to him then. Paul Bayer had his hand up. Paul Bayer, precinct 13. While I support strongly the work of this committee and I will be voting for this article and the later article on funding it I am up here to express my somewhat dismay that the committee was able to use this little quirk of filing a report and then getting up here later to get 16 minutes of time to present their case instead of the seven minutes that I would normally have expected them to have to present their case. Thank you. It's an important issue of changes our culture. This gentleman right behind Mr. Ruderman who was spoken before and I just can't believe. I'm first night, I don't know everybody's name yet. I forget sometimes too, Bill Kaplan precinct states. I'm in favor in general with the electronic voting. I did have one question and it seems like there's a public record of how we vote and in a closed vote we can see how we vote but in other votes are we gonna have to wait till the next day to see that if we thought we voted yes we actually voted yes or is there some, do we get some confirmation that our vote is actually being accurately counted? Mr. Helmets is gonna answer that for you. Eric Helmets, precinct 12. The answer is yes. The system that, although we didn't pick a system because it's not the appropriate phase, the system that we liked the best has a hand held handset device with a display and it has the ability to actually get a positive confirmation so that the computer, the server transmits back to your handheld you voted yes so it's a positive confirmation you can actually see that and get that confirmation. Okay, that's my question. Thank you. Ms. Phelps, Mr. Oster. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Adam Oster, precinct three and I'm also a member of the committee and I just wanted to address the two proposed amendments. As it happens, both provisions pertain to the possibility of error or fraud in voting. That's not exactly what the proponent was after, I think, when he proposed them. But that's why they are, that's why they're there. Last year we had a vote about a parking study. I don't know if people recall it and it clearly failed by a voice vote. Not even close, the moderator called it. It sounded that way to me but five people rose and we had the count and it actually passed by 103 to 49. The voice vote is simply not accurate. We saw that earlier tonight. Of all the voting methods that we use, voice is the only one that is inaccurate. Requiring it for the first instance when there is a fast and accurate alternative would be a mistake. The other amendment concerns deleting the proposal to require a check of close votes. And that's frankly a provision against illegal proxy voting. Can everyone hear me? Okay, it's funny noise too. Maybe it's a little bit of over caution on our part but we were concerned that the one thing that the new system did was it introduced this possibility of illegal proxy voting. So this was a measure that would simply require a check at the time, not after the fact because once the vote is called by the moderator it's final. It would add a minute or two to close votes and votes that are this close are very rare. I believe we had no votes that were this close in the last town meeting. I haven't looked any further back. So I think that these were reasonable amendments. I think they were well-intentioned but I disagree with them and I hope that you will reject them. Thank you, Mr. Howard. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. This is a nice idea. Oh, name and precinct. What? Name and precinct. Oh, Pete Howard, precinct 10. This is a nice idea. Mr. Helmuth and his committee has done a very nice job. They wrote a nice report. It has most of the information that anybody would want to know about this or that can be known at this point. But we do not have a serious problem. It will cost plenty. It's not big dollars but Mr. Dunn and Mr. Dostey both urged us at the beginning of the meeting to keep control costs. This is not controlling costs. Thank you, sir. Mr. McCrory, Hume. Hume McCrory, precinct 20. I just want to congratulate the committee for the good work that they have done. I had a couple of short brief points. I also have the same concern as Chris already alluded to regarding which votes are electronic and which votes are voice votes. Hence which votes are recorded, which votes are not. I'm also uncomfortable with the the discretion of the moderator, although we have an excellent moderator in place moment, but we are setting up bylaws for the town of Arlington and maybe after we're all long gone. I would ask the moderator, is it possible to amend an amendment? Actually, I think it's done before there's a... Yeah, you can make your own amendment. Well, yeah, my amendment would be to amendment one and that would be to allow the sentence in place but to put a clause in it, which would allow the choice of the moderator to be overridden by town meeting. So it actually would be a... You would urge rejection of Mr. Loretty's amendment and acceptance of your amendment, which would be you just write out what you want. Yep, essentially we would allow the town meeting to override the moderator in terms of his discretion of voice vote or electronic vote. So you would have to write something up and let us read it and do it quick. All right, I'll try to do that. Juliana has triple pieces of paper you can do that on. Thank you. So why don't you, for the rest of your time and we'll go on to the next speaker. The other couple of general points are the sense of voting accountability. We have two choices. We have, I guess, the opinion of the committee, which is it will enhance voting accountability, which initially I'm for. I am concerned about the point that Mr. Loretty brought up regarding the targeting of town meeting members. I think that issue exists in all democracies. I'm not sure how we address it. Perhaps that could be a question for Mr. Loretty to answer at some point within maybe a suggestion to enhance the situation for those people who feel they have been targeted, be willing to help. Last question is a question to the committee, which is a logistical question. How does Mr. Helmuth see the distribution and collection of these handsets if we do decide to have electronic voting? Would there be facility to have a number of distribution and collection hand points or would be similar to signing in where 250 people are trying to get to the desk to pick up and drop off handsets? That would be the subject of next year's study. Okay. We didn't get to that point. We just got to amending the bylaws and investigation of the feasibility of the system and the cost. Okay, thank you. The actual implementation hasn't been worked out yet. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Hainer. Bill Hainer, precinct two. I rise in support of the main motion and the subsequent motion to come later. I am opposed to the amendments. The main purpose of this is accountability. The issue with years and days, I've seen too often as stated before, people stating yay, and then when a standing vote takes place, they react for whatever reason and they vote opposite that. I see accountability. Maybe because of my size, I'm not afraid of anybody screaming at me for my votes, but I will support anybody with my size if they feel they've been accosted. We chose to be elected. We chose to make decisions. We chose sometimes to make tough decisions. We should be able to stand behind them. We should support anybody, whether they vote far with us or against us, their right to vote. And I support anything that brings about accountability. And I look forward to seeing the votes the next morning, whichever way they go, farm here against me, whichever way. But the public needs to see where we stand to make a sensible choice the following year when they vote for us. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Mr. Dunn? Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Dan Dunn, precinct 21, and I'm speaking for myself, not for the board. I concur 100% with what Mr. Hayner just said. And I think that we need to take our votes and we need to stand with them. I understand the concern about being targeted for a specific vote, but I think that one of the benefits is that we're going to generate a body of votes. We're not going to be targeted because of a single vote that we took. We're going to have our work of our whole meeting, or in actual fact, over three years of our meetings for people to evaluate and look at us. And I really think that that evaluation is very important. I'm proud of what I do here and I think that we all should be. So I continue to support the main motion and I'm opposed to both amendments. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Ms. Mennon? Ms. Irina Mennon, precinct 21. A little louder, please, ma'am. Ms. Irina Mennon, precinct 21. I'm actually in support of the article, but I have concern about the first yes or no vote, then the moderate, moderate chooses. I feel that if we're going to invest in this technology that we should try this on a trial basis. So I'm hoping that the moderator is going to go for that technology, use first on discretion of making the article work. Do you understand my question? No. Okay. I hear a statement. In the article, it says a lot of these things about the yes or no vote voice or by electric talent by an option at the option of the moderator. So you have to decide if you're going to use electronic voting or the yes or no voting. And so I'm hoping that when this article, if it passes, would be used with the electronic device that we're going to invest in. If you're asking me how I would do it? Yes. I envisioned, frankly, on no action votes, voice vote. It's too quick. That's understandable. Is the, at the back of the warrant, we have a lot of housekeeping votes. OPEB, money for committees, money for the parades, et cetera. They're too quick. We just take those by voice. On votes such as Mr. Harrington's motion to table earlier. I would do that by the electronic cooker because it's a two third vote. Boom. It tells me if yes or no, I don't have to stand up here with this faulty calculator and try and calculate it. Right. On those, that's how I envisioned using it. But also, it's going to be new for all of us next year. And we're all going to have to gain a measure of confidence that the thing works properly. Okay. Once we feel it works properly, we may want to use it a lot. We may want to just go through the easy ones without it and anything else use it. Okay. It's going to be a learning process for all of us. Okay. I have a couple of questions also on, has there been any data lost in the towns that have used this and also what was the maximum length of time that's been used in these other towns? Can somebody answer that for me? Mr. Helmuth, can you address that? Eric Helmuth, precinct 12. So the first question is, has there been any data lost? I've had no reports of that, but I don't know that it hasn't. I think that one of the reasons we recommend allowing a non-electronic backup each step of the way is because something could happen. It's unlikely that something could happen. What was your second question? I'm sorry. And the length of time, the maximum time that's been used so far. Framingham has used it for at least one spring annual town meeting and a fall annual town meeting. And Chelmsford has gone, I think, a half year past that. So I wanna say a year and a half. Okay. So it's all relatively new. So I think it would be great to start something current with other towns that are using this technology. My concern on this is with electronic voting that we lose the human factor of voice voting. We wouldn't know who voted yes or not unless you knew the person that was voting. So if the person's names came up on the board or whatever, you would have to know who they were. A lot of it's building associations here by just looking at who's voting for how. So maybe that would be lost. The human factor would be lost in this. But I still favor this article. I don't favor the amendments because I think they, I don't know, I just feel that they're not, I prefer the conability. I think that's an important issue and having the votes recorded will have us give us more accountability to our voters since we're representing only less than 1% of the population in this town. Thank you, ma'am. Mr. Berger. Thank you, Mr., excuse me. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Eric Berger precinct six. I rise to support this main motion and I wanna speak against the amendments. I want to reinforce Mr. Hayner said, Mr. Dunn. It's builds in accountability. I understand there's an expenditure, I think it's worth it. We are responsible to our voters and it builds in transparencies. And as far as the targeting issue goes, if someone is, wants to threaten me by saying, look, you voted this way and so we're gonna work to get you out, okay, I'm prepared for that because I stand by how I'm voting. So if I'm not representing my people, enough of them in my district, in my precinct rather than I should be voted out. So I don't have an issue with that. And so I'm for this. Thank you, sir. Mr. Wagner. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Carl Wagner precinct 11. I move that we terminate debate on the question. Okay. Oh, Mr. Wait. Mr. McCrory is gonna give us his amendment first. Then we'll take the motion to terminate the debate. That's okay. Humorary precinct 20. Moderator, should I read out the amendment or should I deliver it to you? To read it quickly, then deliver it to me. Hi, Hugh McCrory, do hereby submit the following motion to amend the selectman's vote on article 12 by adding the following language to the end of the sentence, end of the first sentence of the first paragraph. Unless overridden by a vote of time meeting. Very, okay, thank you. Just also I wanted to say that I'm supportive of the intent of electronic voting. I just wanted to reassure everyone by future moderators and make sure our language is as sound proof as possible. Okay, thank you, Mr. McCrory. All right, we have Mr. Wagner's motion to terminate debate on all issues. Is that been seconded? Seconded. Second, all in favor of terminating debate. Please say yes. Yes. All opposed. No. Oh my goodness. I believe it's a two third vote. Alrighty then. All in favor of terminating debate, please rise. Same tellers. How many are we up front, Ms. Mahan? 11 up front. Mr. Schlickman, how many is my left? 29. How many, Mr. O'Connor? 45 left center, right center. Mr. Harrington? 49. 49. Mr. McCabe? 34. 34 on the right. All opposed to terminating debate, please rise. Up front, zero. Mr. Schlickman, how many to my left? Six. Six. Four. Four in left center, right center. Three. Three. Left. Excuse me, right, Mr. McCabe? Six. Six. Oh, I can do that one in my head, 10, 19. 168 in the affirmative, 19 in the negative, debate is terminated. All right, you all done? I'm speaking. We have the main vote of the committee, as recommended by the Board of Select, and we have Mr. Loretty's two amendments. His first amendment would strike the words, or by electronic tally, at the option of the moderator after the first sentence. His second amendment would strike the language at the end, in the instance where the difference between the yes and no votes according to electronic tally is less than six votes, and the individual vote shall be displayed. And then we have Mr. McCory's amendment, which opposed to Mr. Loretty's first amendment, would say, unless overridden by a vote of town meeting. So that would say after the option of the moderator. So first we are going to take up at Mr. Loretty's two amendments, then Mr. McCory's, then the recommended vote, as it is or is not amended. Is that clear to everybody? Okay, all in favor of Mr. Loretty's amendment number one, please say yes. Yes. All opposed. Say no. No. That amendment is defeated, Mr. Loretty, I'm sorry. Mr. Loretty's amendment number two, all in favor, please say yes. Yes. Opposed, say no. No. That is likewise defeated. We now have Mr. McCory's amendment. All in favor of Mr. McCory's amendment, please say yes. Yes. All opposed. No. That is likewise defeated, Mr. McCory. We now have a forced or recommended vote of the Board of Selectment endorsed by the electronic voting study committee. All in favor, please say yes. Yes. Opposed, say no. No. In my opinion, that is an affirmative vote. Well, we have five good minutes left. Motion to adjourn has been put into forward. It's all in favor of the journey, please say yes. Yes. Opposed? No. Okay, Mr. Tosti. Oh, yeah. It's good if we could take the same subject articles and deal with them all at once. So therefore, the finance committee report, and I'll just read it quickly so you don't have to fumble through it. Article 42 is the appropriation to implement what you just voted. So I move to table, articles 13 through 41. All in favor, table of articles 13 through 41, please say yes. Yes. Opposed? No. In my opinion, that is a two-third vote. Okay, so article 42, the finance committee recommends that the sum of $10,000 be and hereby is appropriated for the lease of electronic voting equipment for use of town meeting. Said some to be raised by general tax expended under the direction of the town meeting. So basically, next year, we'll get to try this whole thing and see if we like it. If we do like it, then the next year, the capital budget committee will decide whether we should lease it or whether we should buy it. But by leasing it for next year, we get a chance to see if we really like this. You don't wanna go out and buy $30,000 worth of equipment and then find that we really don't like the system. So I recommend the $10,000 be appropriated. Thank you. Second, okay. But we don't have to second. That's a recommended vote of the committee. Yes, what purpose do you raise your hand, Mr. Judd? Yeah, it is. Yes, it is debatable. It is. I'm in Judd Precinct nine. Mr. Moderator, town meeting members. If you wish to vote on this funding. Name and precinct, please, sir. I already said it. I'm in Judd Precinct nine. Thank you. And if anybody doesn't know me, I'd be surprised. However, I believe that if we wish to vote on this funding this evening, then that means you're endorsing the article and it's being rammed through. If you wanna take a little more time to think about it till Wednesday or next week, I would suggest you defeat this particular motion. This is a parliamentary procedure to just push it right through. So I would recommend that you vote no on this because that is on this motion. I would rather that we had voted not to suspend or not to table these other motions because now if we vote no on this, and I will vote no. And if that's the prevailing side, I will move reconsideration so we then can take it up again. But I think this is a parliamentary procedure that could have been avoided. However, I think also as far as the voting, the electronic voting, I think that there are several defects that should be corrected, but perhaps that can't be done because we have rejected amendments and we have also voted to pass this as more or less as written. I see no penalty in there for anybody falsely voting for someone else or proxy voting. Also, as near as I can tell, there's four doors there, there's four there and there's two at the back. I would suggest if there's anyone that doesn't want to have their vote known, you have your choice to get up and walk away. Mr. Judd, we're talking about the appropriation. Yeah, well, this... I'm gonna implement those procedures next year if someone is lying about their vote, which is illegal. I would certainly hope so and I would hope the penalty would be to remove them from town meeting immediately. Incidentally, sir, a procedural matter. I looked through the motions that you have in the parliamentary guide. No, no, you can bring those up. We were talking about the appropriation of Article 42. This is perceived. You wanna bring those up, come up to me after the meeting, please. Well, I'm just wondering, it seems to me that town meeting has always had the privilege of overriding the moderator. Well, I may be wrong on that, but that's what I wanna know. Those are right out of the books there. Well, are there other motions? Mr. Judd, talk about the appropriation, please. Okay, well, I may be sure as you, Mr. Judd, but you've tried my patience in the past. Yes, and you've tried mine, thank you. Yes. And by the way, it's a moderator, not dictator. That's why you don't get recognized, Mr. Judd, ad hominem attack upon the body and its head. Mr. Dice, you have the, you have, look it up. Mr. Dice, you have the chair. Excuse me, the podium. John Dice, prec. 13, move the question. We have motion to terminate the debate on the question. All in favor, please say yes. Yes. Opposed? No. In my opinion, it is a two-third vote. We have the recommended vote of the Finance Committee for $10,000 for electronic voting equipment. All in favor, please say yes. Yes. Opposed, say no. No. I think that is an affirmative vote. Mr. Tosti, can you take 13-41 off the table? I move that articles 13-41 be taken from the table. All in favor? All in favor. Opposed? They're back on the table. Now, the motion to adjourn. Motion to adjourn. Motion to adjourn, all in favor? Mr. Moderator? Okay, we have motions to reconsideration. Reconsideration on 42. Okay, we are adjourned. We'll see you next Wednesday. Thank you very much.