 So I still see we're still waiting for Sandy to join, but I will go ahead and call the meeting to order. And the person who is missing is Jennifer. And she is today's minute taker, but in any case. So this is April 11th and it is the joint capital planning committee. I am going to call the meeting to order, although I see we're missing a couple key people. So, and one of them has just joined. So I'm calling the meeting to order at 401 p.m. On Thursday, the 11th, and I will just go around the screen as I can see people's faces and just call out and let me know that you can hear them. We can hear you. Bob. Present. Jean. Present. Lee. Present. Anna. Present. And Sarah. Here. So we're missing. I think one member. And I'll be right back. Okay. So, um, Sandy sent us yesterday afternoon. An update of the update. Um, I think that is, uh, is, I guess the best way to do it where the major change was on the, uh, earlier recommendation to move the $1.9 million for a radio safety, public safety radio system to next year for debt. And he, uh, I will let him speak to the changes. Okay. So I think, um, I think the update of the update for the, uh, is that it will, uh, necessitate, um, changing a section of the report. So Jennifer, I just want to, I'm called, I called the meeting to order at 401 and I'm confirming that you can hear and be heard. I can. Um, I joined us an audience member just as I heard you say something about someone taking the minutes, which I think is supposed to be me. Am I taking minutes? Sandy sent us an update that changed one of the recommendations from last week, which will also change what we have in the report. But Sandy, I'll let you speak to it and then we can change the wording in our report to match this if I'm assuming we agree with the decision but your recommendation, but I think some people have questions. So the floor is yours to say as much as you want about the update that we received yesterday. Thank you, Kathy. Nice to see everybody. I got a long email with some backup material from the assistant fire chief yesterday about the radio system, showing that the fire and police departments had done a lot more research into this whole issue and had conducted a third party. It's a current vendor of ours, but who did an analysis of both the equipment and of the brown spots or the blackout spots around town, plus more detail about the compatibility with other systems, both police and fire and UMass and other communities around, some of which had been mentioned, but it was good to see it in a report. Based on that, I then changed the timing of spending on the public safety radios to have 900,000 be borrowed for FY25 and just be spent then was payments starting FY26. The 900,000 would be to buy components of the base radio system, the towers and the controls and so forth. And then another million dollars a year later that would be used to buy the actual handheld radios. The handhelds would then have multiple bands on them, fire would speak on one band, police on a different band, but because they are multi-band radios, they could then switch over and listen to each other if they needed it. But they really need to do the base system first, get that in place before they can actually go in and buy the radios. So with that, I changed the numbers on the plan. It didn't affect at all our FY25 spending. It did somewhat increase the deficit in 26 and the overall deficit some because we're just borrowing money a year earlier. So that's reflected on this sheet. You can eventually see it. Actually, for some reason that's not reflected there and that's funny. It is reflected on this sheet here showing the public radios one and two in these blocks. With that, I'll stop sharing and answer any questions people have. Sarah, I know you had one. So Sarah Marshall. Yes, thank you. Sandy, can you, so this new system is being bought over two years, are the base, the new base pieces can be used with the existing subscriber? Radios. Or okay. Yes, because they all, yes. So it'll go into use as soon as it's installed, but then they'll. There may be some point where they're running in parallel just because they are testing and so forth. But at some point, the new one will take over. Anna. I just wanted to thank Sandy for looking into this. That was something I was worried about. And so I wanted to just appreciate you for checking in on it. Thank you. All right, I appreciate that company's concerns about these issues and it's good to have that back and forth. So we will fix the section of the report that said the whole 1.9 was moved and change it to say this split. And so people can assume that I will do that. I'm not going to do it in real time as in on the screen. So Sandy, I think what you're saying is that the debt table, I can talk to Sandy later about what tables we submit with the report. We don't always submit all the level of detail that we looked at with the report because the town manager already has that, but we submit enough that readers of our report will be able to at least have some idea what we're talking about. So I think that was, and then the one other, we had two other things we asked for either more information or verification. One was, and I shared it with everyone in explanation of the spending in the school out years that wasn't Crocker because there was an issue of, with a new school, why it's all this and Rupert sent us in a couple of paragraphs explaining what the technology now there was. And that didn't affect this year, it affected the next years. And then we questioned, because someone's very sharp eyes, not mine, saw the Greensmower in the middle school in addition to a Greensmower at the golf course. And we asked whether that was just a mistake and a duplicate and Sandy confirmed that it was a duplicate. So that freed up 71,000. So just to give you a little birds of you in the report, the way I drafted it after our discussion last week was that we're recommending $60,000 for the two resident requests and that we thought there was enough money in the budget and there's enough money because of this mower. And we can just say that. And I don't think we need to update the longer lists because the town manager still will have to approve those resident requests in terms of, whether it's 60 or 50, it comes out to 54, 500 if you just add them all together. But we didn't know whether that had installation costs. So I just want to confirm that without going into a deficit in the FY25 budget, we can achieve that recommendation. So I'm turning to all of you for any comments, substantive editorial and other on the draft report. Sarah. Well, I do have a bunch of a little punctuation things which I'd be happy maybe just to call you and walk through them. But I did have a comment or question about section D, JCPC and CIP plan meetings and discussion because it is basically just repeating information that has been presented earlier in the report. So I didn't know why that was useful. I mean, one could just append all the minutes of our meetings, I suppose. So it's just duplicative, yeah. So can people see the section that, can people see my screen? I just put it up. Yes, no. This is minutes, is this minutes? Those are minutes. Wrong file, thank you, Sarah. Wrong file. Okay, Sarah, I do agree. I wrote it with one section and then another. So the question is, should I shorten the first part to just be one-liners and have the longer paragraphs be at the end? Does everyone see what she's talking about? And I can try to find the report and pull up the right one. I just, Anna was an early reader on this and she had a, well, Anna, you can speak for yourself. You suggested that I shortened the first part to one sentences. Yeah, I thought the first part could be shortened really just to be an overview and that the second part could go more into the detail. I thought that might be more helpful. Sorry, first part and second part of what? Of the report. So the first part, the parts that you were talking about being repetitive, it's in there twice. And so the first instance of it, I thought should really just be about one sentence. And then the second part should be the details, why and how. So I'm looking for, I will try to, I think I can bring it up at this point. This is a problem with here, draft two, that's it. Okay. So this is the issue when we did, this first part goes through a long paragraph of the things that were moved out of FY 25 or changed. And then later on, a lot of that is either completely repeated in this section D or we say more. So this, I think the honest suggestion, and I just didn't, I didn't do it because I didn't have time, was make the first part just things like move the sidewalk plow. One quick sentence and then make this part the longer. Do people agree with that change? Okay, so I will do that. So the first part is just a list of what we moved and the clearly the 1.9 million will now have different wording in it. And what Sarah suggested on, just so people know, in my past life as well as my council life, I'm known for missing words, small typos, not enough spaces or too many spaces between a period in the beginning of the next sentence, so punctuation. So any and all, I appreciate. And I think one way to do it is either set up a time to talk with me or just send me a track edit with highlights and I just can merge everything. I'm pretty quick on getting those. I have no pride of authorship or worry that I'm a little bit better at not repeating the same words over the way I used to. So any other comments on the draft? I particularly wanted the couple places, well, the one place we had a fairly long discussion was on the resident proposals and I tried to capture a sense of not so much discomfort but we thought these were reasonable proposals and we wish they fit into a larger policy and schema and we're leaving it to the town staff, the school staff to figure out how many of these should go where and whether they should be mobile or not. So I think we left it with a strong approved recommendation, but caveat. So I just wanted to make sure that that wording worked with everyone. It looks like I'm not seeing anyone say no. Oh my goodness. All right, so then I do think we said it but we're not out at the woods with our capital five-year plan and we're not even seeing the out years. We've got, and Sandy probably says I hope there's a finance director for next year because the next year budget, both to give it a longer planning time but we're a nearly $500,000 deficit is problematic, particularly when a chunk of it is driven by the debt, some projects we've accumulated and I put one sentence in that flag when we get out five years there's even less for new projects as we decide to debt finance that debt service starts coming in and that means some of the projects that might be in the wings aren't gonna come in if we still wanna do roads and we wanna do vehicles. So, but this is, the JCPC report has always really focused on FY25 and I think Bob was the one who said last week he doesn't believe anything that goes out much than a year because too many things change over time. So if there are no other major changes and what I would ask that people get any editorial, whatever you wanna call it punctuation to me if possible or make up a time to talk with me if that's easier and I can go through it by, could we say by the, either the end of the day tomorrow or by Monday morning because I'd like to finalize the report and we send it to the council where we also send it to town manager. Does that deadline work for people? Yeah, Sarah. I'm leaving town tomorrow for four days. So I wonder if this meeting is shorter than two hours which looks like it may be if you and I could just talk immediately. Immediately after this meeting that would be fine, that's fine. Before my next meeting at six, yeah. Okay, that's fine with me. Did I succeed and stop sharing? Stop sharing. There we go. Okay, so Sarah and I are gonna talk after we end this meeting and I'm open-ended after we end, Sarah. So I think we're at a point that there's an emotion to approve the report as amended or as we've discussed, it will be amended if someone can make that motion other than me. Lee. Second. Great, then I'm putting it to a vote. Bob Hegner. Aye. Nothing is a yes. Eugene. Aye. Anna. Aye. Sarah. Aye. Lee. Aye. With thanks. Jennifer. Yes. Well, thank you all. And I wanna give a big thanks to Anna because she read a much rougher draft than you saw and both the great queries and what exactly did you mean here? In some cases it, I had no idea, you know. It was a sentence left over from another thought that didn't get removed and then she made some clarification. So I thought that was extremely helpful just that a really close substantive read which made it possible. I got this done in a day but it made it possible to get it to you earlier. Thank you for writing it today. It's a beast of a report and so I appreciate you doing that work. Well, you know, it's, I will say for whoever's chair next year, now there is kind of a format. And so, you know, unless there's something really controversial you can start to plop in pieces before that discussion. You know, you can speed it along but a lot does change. So Sandy, I just, I wanna thank you so much. I mean, we thank you in the minutes but again, as Anna just said, continuing to follow up on details like this and double checking with staff is extremely appreciated because we really, your wisdom in what you were doing was a good guide to all of us but you'll be able to go back and be able to talk with staff and raise questions and respond was fabulous on what I know was a very tight timeline for you and Jennifer and all the staff that worked hard on this behind the scenes. So thank you both so much. And I will lead you to clean up the list of the projects and working with Anna, the final report will have that summary table in it and we may put the, since the debt, tenure debt schedule is of interest to people put that one into and not put the longer project list just until you tell me it stopped moving. So what, in terms of some of the other components that were in the report in the past, I'm just gonna look at those past reports, see what other things we need to create if any and then I guess we should be on the same page as to when you want to then transmit it to the board or to the council and to the manager so that I make sure that all the past reports are that all the backup material is in place. Okay, so if Sarah meets with me at the close of this meeting and we just get back on the phone or Zoom or something with each other or because I have to close this meeting, Sarah, to just then talk with you about the edits but I can do that easily. But you could just stop the recording. I can just stop the recording. I can just stop the recording and I should double check to, we don't have any attendees. So we won't have any public comments. So Sandy, I ought to be able to give you a final draft of this by Friday and I'll double check against your, the one place in the report was so much in each major category. So that I took off of the last version of the project list. So that just mainly gives you a sense and so Chiller, as you pointed, as we all read, Chiller was under facilities rather than under police and now safety equipment and radios might be under fire rather than police, but it's labeled as such. So just that line is gonna change with this 1.9 million split in two different ways. And then we got, just so you know, we got, as Jennifer will know, we got a fuller package at the very beginning that was the beginning draft of what Paul shows to the town, which had each project in with like two sentences on it, but we don't need that for our report, you know, we don't need that for our report. That was just easy to refer to if people wanted to know what the project was, we didn't recapture it in our report. So we kept it to the kind of length you're seeing, you know, five or six pages with the summary table at the end. Okay. Ben, that's great. I think we should be in good shape then. So any other closing comments, Jennifer, you signed up for a good minute session. Any other closing comments or questions? So I wanna thank everybody because I thought this year, this year was harder in some ways, but because we had a less fully formed, there was a lot more participation of all the JCPC members. You know, when you get a totally balanced budget that looks like it's in good shape, you have to look more, you have to, it doesn't, things don't jump out to you as much. And so we, in the last few years, there were one or two things we focused on and this time it was a wider ranging discussion, which I think is healthy. I mean, it's the purpose of JCPC. So thank you all very much, Bob. Yeah, I just wanted to say this is, I think the way this committee operated and the real focus on getting the job done is a testament to how the town itself, how the various pieces of the town work together in order to get things done. There's not, there wasn't a lot of jockeying for position or anything like that. It was, we were focused, we were wanting to just get it right. And I think we did. And I wanted to thank everybody for their cooperation. Yeah, I would agree with that entirely. So thank you all. And you are, you're giving the gift of time as we've had a very efficient last meeting. So I am going to end the meeting by stopping the recording and then everyone can leave. And then I think Sarah can stay on. Do we need to vote to adjourn? Oh, yes. Is there a motion to adjourn? So moved. And I think Bob is seconding. You second Bob. Bob. Yes. Kathy say yes. Eugene. Yes. Anna. Aye. Sarah. Aye. Lee. Yes. And Jennifer. Yes. Okay, unanimous that we are adjourned and I'm going to stop the recording, but Sarah, we can stay on and you can, and I can, we can do the copy. Together. So thank you all. Have a good. Thank you everybody. Thank you everyone. This is good. Bye.