 Please rise and join Mr. Gallagher on the piano for the Star-Spangled Banner. Thank you very much, Mr. Gallagher. We're going to break your tradition tonight due to the heat. I'm not going to wear my jacket. So I hope you all forgive me. The front of the room is also, so if anyone else wants to take their jackets off, go ahead. Otherwise you'll have me passed out on the floor. We've gone ahead, we've passed the override. Now we have the budgets that Mr. Tosti and the Finance Committee have revised for us. So we're going to try and move through these. If we get through the budgets and then one or two other articles, we could be done tonight. I might point out if there's something just a resolution and only a resolution is in front of us. We really don't need to debate it too much, maybe one or two people, but let's try and keep the resolution debates very short so we could finish. This is kind of silly, but any time meeting members who have yet to be sworn in, seeing none. I recognize the Chairman of the Board of Selectment, Mr. Rowe. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. I don't want to move the next paragraph, but I will. His move that follows as the meeting is set forth in the board for the annual 10 meeting is not disposed of at this session from the meeting adjourns and adjourns to Monday, June 13, 2011. Second. All in favor? Aye. So moved. No. Oh, you want a no vote? Aye. Who doesn't want to? All opposed? Okay. Then finish up. Are there any announcements or resolutions? Mr. Leonard has one. And Mr. Rowe. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. I'm going to please take civil change. Mr. Moderator, town meeting members, I think we're all aware of it. There are two people in the hall tonight, which have been in the most courtesy of the Allenton Advocate the past week is seven days. We've attended, excuse me, which celebrated a great membership, let's say, in town meeting member. Of course, at this particular time, I'm speaking about 250-year people, Elsie Fiore and Harry McCabe. I was wondering when some circles are called Chippendale and Pixie and Trixie. It's hard to imagine what went on probably about 50 years ago, but I could imagine that probably 50 years ago we were not paying for bottled water. I would imagine we probably had free TV at that particular time. And if you really think hard enough, we might have some microphones in town hall that worked at that particular town hall. With your approval, Mr. Moderator, and the approval of the people here, ladies and gentlemen, I would like Elsie Fiore and Harry McCabe to please come up and join me for a couple of minutes so I could present them with a little gift that we have. Mrs. Fiore, Mr. McCabe, please come forward. Harry? Harry. Harry. Oh, he's waiting for Elsie, his cohort. Elsie and Harry, I cannot imagine what you've gone through in 50 years, but I would like to say that I can imagine that you've probably instructed a lot of people, helped a lot of people on their way, and going to the article, you're going to continue to do that. So if you have for myself and all your friends at town meeting, I would like you to accept this small gift from us, both past and present. Elsie, you have to open it up here. Oh, we have to open it up. You too, Harry. You could be working on yours, Harry. Harry, you could be working on yours. Don't forget to recycle the paper. That's what I mean. I didn't want to get yelled at at. Oh. You can open up yours, Harry. Oh, come on, Harry. It's part of the agreement. I got people looking for the paper. He says I have to open it. We don't know what's in it. Harry said they were going to explode. McCabe, where are you? I want to say thank you to everybody who have been so nice to me all through the years. But I am going to brag a little and say that in the 50 years I think I've only missed four nights. And that's not meetings, that's nights. And I know that Harry hasn't missed any. And I know there are other people here who have had, you know, perfect attendance probably since they started. So I don't know, I've just enjoyed it. I enjoy all the people. And I like being here. Thank you again. Thank you all. Just a few words. It's a little overpowering. Not really necessary. But anyways, the greatest gift that you can give us is the right to stand here and make a jackass out of myself. And in the 50 years that I've been here, I have to say that I've done it a number of times. But regardless, it's a precious gift that we have, all of us. This experiment that's going on, what, 200 and how many years, 35 years, which we're continuing here tonight, is just remarkable. And I came to Wellington from the big city over there. No names. And I was somewhat active in, I don't want to say politics, but in civics, if you will. And when I came to Wellington, it was very different. Very, very different. It was a real eye-opener to find out that all the things that we had been taught in our lessons at school were true in Wellington. They may not have been true where I came from, but anyways, it was a real eye-opener. And I think it had something to do with my interest in getting involved. I hate to give advice unless it's asked for. But I would like to offer some free advice, take it or not. But over the years as you go through the process, you're up, you're down, you're winning, you're losing. And sometimes it's discouraging, and sometimes it's an heartening. But the advice that I would like to leave with you is this, that no matter what, we are doing the right thing. Thank you. Thank you both for your years of service, and thank you, Mr. Leonard. Ms. Rowe? Here is the chair of the school. Thank you for saving our schools. And the other announcements are resolutions. Seeing none. Any reports or committees? Ms. Barron. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Good evening. My name is Sherry Barron. I live at 10 Raleigh Street in Precinct 7, and I'm a commissioner on the Arlington Human Rights Commission. I've put a copy of our brochure on each of your seats, and I thought I'd have some left over, but I don't, which is a good thing. And there is a report of our past year's activities in the town's annual report. But for those of you who have not yet reached page 51, or who are saving the annual report for summer reading, I'm here to give you a snapshot of what we've been doing. Every few years we like to come before you and report on our activities, and thank you for your continued support of our endeavors. We thank the finance committee for recommending continued funding, and we thank you town meeting members who vote for that funding. We thank town and school officials and staff who support us by exemplifying respect for the diversity of our town every day. We thank those of you who have attended our dialogues, our programs, who have stopped by our town day booth, and we thank you individually for reaching out in your own way to make Arlington a more welcoming community for all who live and work here. Some of you town meeting veterans remember that the Arlington Human Rights Commission was born in this room 18 years ago. We held our first meeting in January of 1994. I am one of the three commissioners who have been with the group since the beginning, and I will tell you that through the years it has been an honor to serve on the commission alongside dozens of remarkable people, some of whom are in this room, who have been committed to making this a welcoming community. Before I go on, I'd like to ask our current commissioners who are also town meeting members who are present to stand, and that would be Gary Horowitz, Nancy Sweeney, and Bill Shea. And Bill is also one of our original members. This past year has been busy and productive, and I'm happy to report the following highlights. In February we took part in a stand-against-racism initiative hosting three human rights events. Throughout the year we held three Arlington Dialogues, during which we addressed dating violence, bullying, and the fine line between church and state. At the Odyssey Middle School, the commission helped the school in their response to an anti-Semitic incident, and subsequently donated books to the library in honor of the students who very bravely came forth and reported the incident. In November, the commission, in conjunction with the Vision 2020 Diversity Task Group, cosponsored a civil discourse program for town officials, and we will continue to work on expanding this program. In early winter, the commission worked closely with the Arlington Police Department after notification that an extremist white supremacy group was planning to come to Arlington prior to a performance of the Laramie Project at the Arlington Center for the Arts. Although the group did not come as planned, the commission and the Arlington Police Department had a presence at this event. Members of our commission meet regularly with school representatives to discuss ways to increase diversity within our public school staff and how best to handle human rights issues in the schools. The commission also worked with the school committee and the police this past year to encourage training of school administrators and to help them develop protocols and techniques to investigate bullying. All year long, the commission continues to maintain records of hate crimes and incidents and works in cooperation with the police department in order to track their severity and frequency. Chief Ryan frequently calls upon us to discuss incidents and collaborate on ways in which to handle them. We are very fortunate that he has been a stalwart supporter of human rights since he has become our police chief. I'd like to thank Chief Ryan and his staff for their support throughout the year and throughout all the years that he's been here. Last year, six incidents were reported to the commission. Two were found not to be within our jurisdiction. In the other four, we worked to mediate the situation and help the parties resolve their issues. The commission also consults with the community safety department on the efforts to monitor potential racial profiling by reviewing their ongoing crash data statistics. So that's pretty much how we spent our last year. And now that I've given you a picture of what we've been doing, I want to end by asking for your help. We need you to be emissaries for us, which is why I gave you the brochures. You are the representatives of your precincts, and you likely know a lot of your neighbors. And you could be the one called upon or alerted when someone feels that their human rights have been violated. Or you just might hear about an incident where our commission could be helpful. We don't have a large number of complaints reported yearly. And I have always said that that is both the good news and the bad news. It's good because it appears as though we are a very tolerant, welcoming community, and I believe that we strive to be just that. But it's bad because I think that we all know that there are incidents that go unreported every day. Because people who believe that they have been victimized are very often scared, ashamed, or simply unaware that there is an avenue they can take that might give them some relief. Sometimes all a person needs is someone to listen to them, lend them support, perhaps make the first phone call, and help guide them through the process. Or at the very least, let them know that a process exists. And this piece I put in towards the end because I read it to my husband and he reminded me of how important this is. Please take the brochure home with you and don't toss it. Put it on your fridge with a magnet or somewhere in your home where you can easily find it. If someone needs us, you should have our information at your fingertips. If you know of an individual that you feel falls within our purview, please let that individual or individuals know that we are here. Help them begin by taking the difficult first step of making a call to our office so that we can help. The only way we can be of assistance is if people know that we are here. This is Arlington. Arlington values its diversity and its diversity is growing every day. It's one of the reasons people come to live in this town. I'd like us all to work together to make this a town that does not tolerate bigotry, prejudice or unlawful discrimination of any kind. And I have just one more comment before I close. I know that it's warm and you want to finish tonight. I've been in your seat. Shortly before the horrific attacks on 9-11, several neighborhoods in town experienced a drop of horrendous white supremacist hate literature. And we planned a rally to bring the town together to show that we don't tolerate this in Arlington. A few days later, 9-11 happened and the rally changed focus. And more than 3,000 citizens gathered in front of town hall. I began that evening's program with a quote that I believe should guide us every day. And I will end tonight with that quote attributed to Pastor Martin Niemoller in Germany in 1945. The pastor was responding to a student's question regarding the failure of so many thousands of people to speak out against the Nazis. The student asked the pastor four words, how could it happen? And the pastor responded. First they came for the communists, but I was not a communist, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the socialists and the trade unionists. But I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out. Please be that someone who helped someone else speak out. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Barron. And any other reports or committees? Seeing none. In fact, Toyota Corolla 266HF3, your lights are still on in the parking lot. Mr. Tosti, can you take everything off the table? I move that everything is on the table be taken off of it. All in favor, please say yes. Yes. All opposed? Okay, so all our articles are back up. Mr. Bean, for what purpose do you rise? Come down, use the microphones, introduce yourself. Name, precinct. David Bean, precinct eight. I move to reconsider article seven. Because of a combination of scheduling problems and poor planning, representatives of the conservation, historical and cemetery commissions were unable to address town meeting a few weeks ago when this article was first put to the vote. They worked very hard on this proposal and hope you'll allow reconsideration of this article tonight. So they'll have a chance to provide us with more information. Please vote. Yes, sir. To allow it. Yes, he did. He, on 42511, he gave us notice for reconsideration having voted on the prevailing side, sir. Did you vote on the prevailing side? I did. Thank you. I asked him that that night. Go ahead, Mr. Bean. Are you finished? I'm finished. Okay. Does anyone else wish to debate whether or not we want to reconsider? Or should we go right to the vote? Mr. Schlickman. It would have been nice if members of the delegation from the precinct that contains this parkland would have been notified that there was a move to bring it forth to reconsideration. This was a poorly considered proposal when it came before us on the first night of town meeting. It has not changed. We did the right thing in defeating it then. It would be the right thing for us not to reconsider it now and let them come back with a better proposal next year. The clean way to move a property into a cemetery district would be to transfer jurisdiction to the cemetery commission. This is a bad idea. Please vote. No. Okay. Okay. Okay. We'll use the last guy. Okay. We have a motion. Mrs. Fiori. I didn't see you. Oh, okay. I didn't see you. I'm sorry. On reconsideration itself. He's already moved the question to LC. I'm sorry. All right. So we have a second on moving the question for reconsideration. Okay. So now to vote for reconsideration. It does require two thirds. All in favor of reconsidering article seven, please say yes. Yes. Opposed say no. No. Okay. I couldn't tell if it was two thirds and also going to have to have a standing vote. Same. Tell us all in favor of reconsideration, please rise. Reconsideration is a two third vote. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm just too excited. Wait a second. We were voting. We're going to start again. I was confused. We were voting on. It's been too long a break for me and it's too hot. Now I'm going to vote on Mr. K's motion to terminate the bait, which again requires a two third vote. All in favor of terminating the bait, please say yes. Yes. Opposed say no. No. In my opinion, that was a two third vote. All right. Now we're going to vote on reconsideration. All in favor of reconsidering article seven, please say yes. Yes. Opposed say no. No. In my opinion, that's a two third vote against. You need two thirds. Five people rose. So we're going to have a standing vote on whether to reconsider. All in favor of reconsideration, please rise. Same tellers, please. Six in the affirmative up front. I'm out of practice. Sorry. Mr. Schlickman. How many? Nine. Nine. Nine on the left. Nine. Mr. O'Connor. 22. 22 in the left center. 22. Mr. Trembly. 19. 19 on the right center. Mr. McCabe. 12. 12. All opposed to reconsideration. Ms. Mahan. Two. Mr. Schlickman. 19. 19 on the left. Two up front. 19 on the left. Mr. O'Connor. 16. 16. Mr. Trembly. 14. 14 on the right. Mr. McCabe. 22. 22. Mr. O'Connor. 22. 22. The vote is in the negative 68-73 we are not reconsidering number 7. That brings us to article 31. Mr. Schlickman will report on this article. The Schlickman has put forth a vote of no action. All in favor of no action please say yes. Yes. Opposed. 34, 34, do you have substitute motion on 34, sir, or 35, on 34, okay. Come forward. Yeah. Peter Howard, precinct 10, thank you, Mr. Moderator. I have a resolution under Article 34, which you all got on May 16th. It's another copy of it in the back of the hall today. Along with the presentation that we'd like to give. Mr. Moderator, we'd like a few more minutes to give our, for a total of 20 minutes. Okay, he's the gentleman who's requesting 20 minutes of time. All in favor, please say yes. Opposed, say no. You have 10 minutes, sir. We'll do it in 10 minutes. Thank you. May I go ahead? Yes, yep, your time's rolling, go. Mr. Goode, could we have the resolution? What's your resolution, sir? Article 34. So this is just to remind you, could we have the first slide? Three of us from the town managers, Page Your Throw Committee, are collaborating on this presentation. Myself, Ryan Ferrara, and Carolyn Dan, who's a contractor of the town advising on Page Your Throw. Next slide. The committee that we worked with has a plan, which is specific to Arlington. These are the main points of it. I won't read the slide. Basically, there's only one change. Residents would buy bags instead of using their black, pastured bags or trash bin bins, with the bags and bins. And there would be two sized bags, a 30 gallon bag and a half sized bag, $2 or $1 a piece. There's no added town staff, except briefly in the beginning to get it started. And that would be covered by a grant. And the enforcement should be rather straightforward, since the haulers would simply pick up the special packs. I turn it over now to Ryan Ferrara. Thank you, Peter. Ryan Ferrara, precinct four. Next slide, please. Okay, so just wanted to hit on some of the highlights here. The first thing is, if we were to implement this program, you'd be buying your bags. Basically, local grocery stores, CVS, that kind of thing. You wouldn't be paying. There's no markup on this for taxes or anything like that. The places that enjoy having this in, because it's sort of a way to bring people and business in. The behavior is easy to learn, because you're using a bag right now to throw out your trash. You'd be doing the same here. It'd just be a town-issued bag. You can still use your barrel. You'd just be putting a bag within that barrel. And if you have extra recyclables, which is one of the objectives of this program, you could use a barrel. The town has stickers, and you'd be able to throw out excess recycling via that method. Next slide, please. So the reason you'd want to do something like this is, first of all, the environmental benefits. You'd be encouraging more reuse and more recycling. Individual cost control. You are going to be paying for those bags, so your capacity to stay within a 133-gallon bag, which we anticipate most people in town would be able to do, is a positive thing, and maintains at your cost the $2 per week. And we also, of course, save the town money. We estimate that the total benefit of this program, when you combine all of the factors in, is a net benefit of $2 million per fiscal year. Next slide. So here's how the breakdown is. There's three components to the savings. The first is the collection cost savings, because waste management, our vendor, isn't going to be picking up as many bags. It's less work for them, so we have a discount there, 44, roughly about $44,000. We're going to be throwing out less trash, and that's the savings there. And the largest component of that is the net bag revenue from the sale of those bags that we mentioned earlier. So it's a bit inverse here. You can see, if we are able to reduce our total tonnage on trash, the more we reduce the actual, the net benefit actually goes down. The reason for that is, you're not selling as many bags, basically, so you're not bringing in the same amount of revenue. So with that next slide, I want to introduce Carolyn Dan from Masty Pay, who's been a tremendous help to us for this. So, Carolyn, Carolyn Lee. Thank you very much, Ryan, and thank you town meeting members. So the question here is often asked, why do, sorry, Carolyn Dan for Rocka Dundee Road and over Massachusetts? I'm a contractor to the town as a DEP contractor. Was that your point of order, sir? She's a contractor to the town. She's allowed to speak. Thank you very much. So many times I'm asked, why change? Why change what we have? And so this is a short history of trash. 50 years ago, your trash, you probably even remember, was mostly organic, and we threw, we gave it to the pigs, and that was the right thing to do. And at some point in time, we'd invented landfills, a hole in the ground, and that was still the right thing to do with mostly organic trash. And it made sense at that point in time to have disposal be free and have it be local and have it be easy for everybody to get to. Somewhere along the line, we discovered that we were actually having a lot of packaging and we invented recycling in the 1980s, and everybody got behind recycling. And then we discovered that there were actually some nasty things that were going into the landfill. So we closed our landfills and we opened incinerators. And in the year 2000, we instituted some clean air active changes to the incinerator and upgraded the pollution control equipment. So now we no longer have a hole in the ground that's local and cheap. We have a distant and expensive high-tech incinerator. But we still have a funding system that's based on the local free disposal system. And our disposal system is no longer cheap. And so may I have the next slide, please? We've done some kind of transition to pay-as-you-throw in many towns. 132 towns across the state have done this. So Arlington has the benefit of choosing from the lessons learned in other towns. And this is just a sampling of some of the towns where it's been implemented. It has worked in large cities such as Worcester, smaller communities such as Concord and Natic, and everything in between. And what we've seen is there is a dramatic and immediate change in behavior. And so we can see the before and the after and the numbers you see here are tons of trash per household. So if you took a simple town that had 10,000 households, it might generate 10,000 tons of trash. Well, here in Arlington, you're actually better than that. You're only generating about 0.8 tons per household. But based on all the experience in all the other communities around the state, we project about a 20% reduction. Some communities have seen a 50% reduction because they started higher. You've been recycling well for many years. We still think there's room for improvement. 20% reduction would bring you down to the 0.61. You see on that number on the chart. Many of the towns that I've worked with are very proud of their results, and I'm sure Arlington will be too when you implement this. Now I'll turn it back to Pete. Okay. You have two minutes, Mr. Howard. There's substantial support for Page of Throw in town based on the Vision 2020 annual survey last year and this year as it says up there. Town meeting requested the town manager to come up with a plan two years ago, which he did last year and reported to us last year. The town meeting requested a selectman to consider Page of Throw as part of the long range plan. Last slide. So to repeat what's been already said, Page of Throw is a program that is good for the environment, is consistent with our status as a green community, it allows households to control their trash disposal costs and it creates a new revenue stream. Page of Throw has been successful in other communities and we have a plan that's tailored for Arlington. What does the no action vote of the Board of Selection mean? I think it means that they properly, but the override question first and could find no way to consider Page of Throw. Of course they could not do adjusted in the hour before this town meeting is so needing today, but no action does not have to be our final word. We ask you to strongly support the resolution, which asks the Board of Selection to implement Page of Throw as soon as practical. What does this mean? As you will soon hear, the Finance Committee has voted to use any Page of Throw revenue, not approved by the voters to reduce taxes. Consistent with that, the Board of Selection may consider asking the voters to approve Page of Throw by a referendum question next April with a revenue neutral proviso. Our vote tonight will encourage them to do that. If you have any questions, we'll try to answer them. And if you want a detailed written report, you can find it on the Recycling Committee as a part of the Towns website. Thank you, sir. Do we have a second from Mr. Howard? Thank you. Ms. Warden. Patricia Warden, Pl. 8. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Mr. Moderator, can I have permission for a resident of the town, Mr. William Icamp, to address the meeting? He can address the meeting by right. He just has to be a resident. Mr. Icamp, come forward. Well, Mr. Icamp is coming downstairs. I'd like to make a few remarks. Please vote no on the resolution. There is no specific plan in the resolution before us. Some of the plans being considered are bad. As a scientist, I have to tell you that environmentally, some of them are very bad. However, pay-as-you-throw can certainly be a cash car for the selectman's funds forever, if that's what the selectman wants. Regardless of whether whatever plan they select, the selectman chooses for the town isn't environmentally responsible and is a good plan. So that if you vote yes, it simply means that the selectman can say to your constituents when they implement whatever plan that the town meeting made us do it. In other words, you will have given the selectman a carte blanche. Mr. Icamp. Mr. Icamp, name and address for the record, please. Thank you, Bill Icamp, precinct date 246 Pleasant Street for 42 years and two days. I've enjoyed it. And about six years ago, I was on the original pay-as-you-throw committee and I found it to be a fascinating group of people, a very enjoyable duty. Unfortunately, sometimes when you're on a group like that, the facts led me a different place than they led other people on the committee. Nonetheless, even though I am known not to be in favor of this, I am very thankful to Peter Howard for being generous with sharing the facts. He's given me data and I want to tell you just very briefly what something about what the data show. The bags that are proposed are two dollars a piece and the pay-as-you-throw spreadsheet estimates that you will be able to put average 20 pounds in those bags. So you will be paying 10 cents a pound to have your trash hauled. The tipping cost of the town for that is about 3.4 cents a pound and the hauling cost, while not accurately knowable, is about 4.3 cents a pound. So as the best estimate I can get from the facts, it's going to cost the town 7.7 cents to get rid of your trash for which you're paying 10. This turns trash into a profit center, not a loss center. For a recycle, if I take a pound of trash out of my trash bag and put it in my recycle bag, I save 10 cents. But the town still has to pay 4.3 cents to have that haul to the recycle. So the town is losing 10 cents in revenue and incurring 4.3 cents in cost. Now, I have an interest to reduce my trash and I have an interest to increase my recycle. The town does not and good managers don't spend their time raising their costs and lowering their revenues. So recycle and trash reduction will become a grassroots movement completely. It will be up to us. I've asked before how anybody reduces their trash and I don't know but it's going to be up to us to find out. One other quick item after biking around East Arlington on Trash Collection EVE, I noticed that not too many people trash are in neat, tidy packets of 20 pounds each. So I think you should be aware that many of us are going to have a new hobby and that is how to fit our trash into the town's supplied bag. One final thing on which I have no special information whatsoever and all of you are better judges of this than I am. This program, according to the spreadsheet, will add between $2.6 and $2.3 million a year in cost to the town presidents. How the voters who just voted a $6.5 million override will respond to that is something you will be a better judge of than I am. Thank you very much. Thank you, sir. Mr. Fitzgerald. Thank you, Mr. Morena. Tom Fitzgerald, precinct 11, town of Allington 57 years, 336 days. Wait a minute, let me check. 15 hours and 49 minutes. But folks, stop the clock. No, that's playing for me. I never use the 10 minutes anyway. Don't worry about it. Don't bother, John. You've done enough tonight. I need the help tonight, believe me. I would just have to say that anybody that knows me, I'm a pretty talkative friendly guy around town. So a lot of people are aware that I'm a town meeting member and let me know how they feel. And based on the people that talk to me, I was kind of surprised at the override pass to begin with. But you know there's 47% of the people in this town that aren't happy right now. And a decent percentage of those are senior citizens who are struggling emotionally as to how they're going to be able to pay their additional taxes to begin with. The fact that we would even consider to take an additional one and a half to two million dollars out of the pockets of the people of Inlington shocked me. And I talked to a contractor today who's replacing the roof of my house and some other siding work that's going to cost me around $15,000. I'm going to be paying $45,000 for Curry College next year. And if this continues, I also will living in a small two bedroom home in Wolban and wishing everyone in Inlington the best. So I would recommend that we stop the nonsense. We saved the schools, we saved the town, we gave them six and a half million dollars. Let's not give them another two million now on the pockets of our citizens. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Martin, I believe you had an amendment. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. John Worden precinct date. Yes, I do. And I will get to it momentarily. I wish you leave. The last time we had the pay as you throw that at that point it was called, I recall correctly, the trash fee. It was used as kind of a bogeyman to encourage people to support and override. And after the override passed, the article for the trash fee came up. Mr. Tosti, Chairman of the Finance Committee, came up and moved no action on it. And he had a little poem, not quite an epic poem, but it was fairly long. And I can't remember, but I think the first line was, last for a trash fee we knew him well. And he went on to, you know, kind of, we came not to praise trash fee, but to bury him. And so maybe he'll do that again tonight. The override has been mentioned, and I voted for the override, the six and a half million dollar increase. But I submit to you town meeting members and fellow citizens that maybe one tax increase is enough, at least for this week. I have been recycling since probably, since before some of you were born. And in the old days it wasn't as easy as now. All we do is now is put everything we can think of, except our garbage that used to go to the pigs, as was pointed out. We put it in the blue things. But in the old days, if you wanted to be zealous about this, you had to flatten your tin cans and take them to the town yard. And you could bundle up your newspapers and take them to the town yard. And I remember my children, we'd throw all the tin cans into a box, and then my children say, Daddy, can we go down and flatten tin cans? And we'd take a sledgehammer and flatten the tin cans. And I think I kind of tired of it after a while. But so recycling is a great thing. We should recycle. And as the lady pointed out, the problem with our trash nowadays is that almost everything comes in excess packaging. And I was thinking particularly my grandson, one of my grandson's birthdays was last weekend and somebody gave him some kind of a truck. My goodness, he needed a hatchet, a screwdriver, a knife, and all kinds of stuff just to get the thing out of the package. And then you had this big chunk of plastic and a big chunk of cardboard. I hope it went into the recycling bin. But we can't solve that in Arlington. We can't solve it in Massachusetts. It's a national problem. And if Congress had the stomach for it, they would get after the excess packaging from all this cheap stuff that we bring from China. Now Arlington has a reputation as a green community. Fine. But I submit to you that no green community would encourage the production of thousands and thousands of plastic bags every year. The plastic bags, you know what they're made out of? They're made out of oil. And oil, as you know, is very cheap and the supply is inexhaustible, right? Okay. So we're going to use all these plastic bags and we're going to burn them in incinerators and send all kinds of nasty stuff up into the air we breathe. And I don't think that's being very green, at least not my opinion. Now, I don't use plastic bags. Just personal inclination. We may use a few of them, but not very many. We use barrels. And I found by experience, and I've been putting my stuff on the curb in Arlington for more than 40 years, and I find that a barrel will last about 10 years before the trashmen manage to break it up. I'm sure you've all experienced some of that. Now, 10 years, one barrel. 10 years, 520 plastic bags. Now, imagine how much oil that takes, how much stuff that's putting into the environment. So I'm sure that we can all afford another $2 a week or whatever on top of our tax bill, on top of our override. But I think the issue is really that if you're environmentally thoughtful enough to use barrels instead of bags, you shouldn't have to buy bags from the town or from the town's agents. And I was pleased to see that the select one voted no action on this. And I would like to, at this point, offer an amendment, and I will bring it up and give it to the... I would like to move. And it was on the... I guess it's up there. And there was some copies in the back, and it was on the town meeting lists there. But let me read it. I moved the following amendment to the resolution offered by Mr. Howard under Article 34. In the last paragraph, strike out the words as soon as practicable and insert in place there of the words, when, as, and if, the same is approved by a majority of voters in a general town election. So I think that the voters have approved an override. If they want to approve at this point, or as soon as practical, whenever that is, I think we ought to put it to the people, because this is, let's not give the gentleman point out, this is a $2 million additional tax that's being imposed on the householders of this town. And I think, at minimum, the people ought to have a vote for it. So I hope you'll support my amendment to the resolution. And then, vote the resolution down. Thank you. I hear a second. Thank you. Mr. Dunn. This before, and I will say it again, people are passionate about their trash. I learned this when I went running for town meeting, and I confess I ignored it the first couple of times I heard it. I'd walk around neighbors and I'd say, hey, I'm running for town meeting, can I get your vote? And they'd say, what do you think about this pay-as-a-pro thing? And I was like, I don't understand why people are so hung up on this. And it doesn't make sense. But after I listened a little bit more closely, and I heard it repeated a few more times, people are passionate about their trash. People are passionate about the way their kids go to school. And we all know that, and we acknowledge it, we accept it because you have an emotional attachment to your children, and you have an emotional attachment to where they're going to school. And I've heard it assumed that trash can't be like that because who cares about your trash? It's just trash. I assure you, as you're seeing in this row, and as you've seen over the last several years, people really care about their trash, and they really care about how it gets paid for and where it's going to go. That is actually why I voted no action this earlier this evening in a recommendation on Mr. Howard's motion. And by reason, I actually think that we should do pay-as-you-throw in the long run. But I think that that has to be, we have to take the town through a process where we can get through this very passionate conversation. And that really requires more preparation and more consideration than frankly, we have been with the Florida Select when had tonight. I say all due respect to people who are proponents of pay-as-throw, because they've been working on this for a very long time, and I believe that the facts, and I believe that they are on their side, and I think that they're going to prevail in the long run, and I really respect their work. I also respect their frustration. But unfortunately, we're not there yet, and we need to have that conversation. My, another element of this is that I think that as a member of the Board of Seconds, I voted to put the override on the ballot. One of the commitments I was making was we weren't going to ask for an override for three years. And while the language isn't necessarily there, in my heart, that absolutely means we're not going to do pay-as-throw as a revenue source for the duration of this three-year plan while I'm ruling my vote. So that means what I want to do is I think or I think that the right way to get pay-as-throw done, which I think we should do pay-as-throw, and I think that we should stick with those commitments. I think we should do it as a revenue neutral thing, but that means lowering taxes and bringing in pay-as-throw. But I think we should do that as a part of a larger discussion. So my personal commitment is that I'm going to bring that up with the Board of Seconds. I'm going to endeavor to get it implemented over the course of the next year in a way that gets people through their passions and gets to a place where people are largely happy with the outcome. So I respectfully ask that you support a vote of no action, and you hear my personal commitment to bring the pay-as-throw forward again in the future. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Ms. Howard. Thank you, Mr. Marlader. Jay, I'll proceed 10. I'd like to ask the meeting's commission for Charlotte 9 of 19 Belt and Road to address the meeting. She's a resident of the town. She has the right to speak. She's right here. Would she go to get up? Charlotte. Name and address for the record, please. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Charlotte Marlader. I live at 19 Bellevue Road. I'm here tonight as co-chair of Vision 2020's Sustainable Arlington. We've prepared this statement. Municipal soil, waste generation, collection and disposal negatively impact the environment in numerous ways by contributing to local air and water pollution and to the emissions of greenhouse gases that cause global climate change. These environmental impacts occur along the entire lifecycle of the products we buy, use and eventually discard. Thus producing the municipal solid waste will create environmental benefits beyond those directly associated with its collection and disposal. As such, Vision 2020's Sustainable Arlington strongly supports efforts by the town to implement pay as you throw. Reducing the total volume of municipal solid waste produced, increasing participation in recycling programs and increasing the percentage of waste that is recycled. Increasing the use of backyard composting as a means of reducing waste and reducing the use of fossil fuel-based fertilizers and especially promoting behavior changes among town residents and businesses that result in less waste being produced in the first place. As we saw in the slides presented, there has been significant reduction of solid waste generated that cannot be explained simply by the increase in recycling. There's other behavior changes that are possible with the implementation of a pay as you throw program. For these and all the reasons stated by the presentation, Vision 2020's Sustainable Arlington strongly supports a pay as you throw implementation program. And thank you for allowing me to speak today. Thank you, Ms. Mulan. Mr. Jamison. Gordon Jamison, precinct 12 and co-chair of the Arlington Recycling Committee and apparently someone who will beat his head against the wall numerous times. I have a couple of personal remarks looking forward to the financial aspects and as well as the pay as you throw aspects. Yes, tomorrow I was happy to learn while helping my father through a surgery this morning which went well that the pay as you throw, that the override passed last night. Mr. Dunn, Mr. Dunn I believe was quoted in the paper in one of the publications, the press that, okay, we now again have a period of stability during which we can work towards savings and healthcare efficiency, several articles of which we passed this meeting which may help in that regard. And I, the one who you know looks at the numbers have been very impressed with the things the manager and his staff and the superintendent in the schools have done over the past five or six years to make this town more efficient and cost effective. But once again in the future we will face extremely tight financial situation like we did this spring going into this coming year. Something we never talk about when we cut budgets and personnel is our value system. We don't get to talk about that much here at town meeting as far as how we spend our money. We get budgets, we approve them, yes or no, and we question them. Sometimes we question the $25, sometimes we question the millions. But I hear time and time again here from the floor, from the people on my right, members of the school committee, the superintendent, the town manager, how much we value our direct employees that provide the services that we so cherish that make people vote for an overwrite here in town and for us to vote for things that we think will make the town better here on the floor of town meeting. We never talk about the fact that whenever we've made cuts in the past we've made a choice. Mr. Dunn remarks that people are passionate about their choice. Unfortunately, we consider, in my experience in this town and on town meeting, we have considered trash to be more important than those employees that we so cherish and value their services. So in the future, and I'm not saying some people have alluded that we're doing this now, we're not doing this now, this is something in the future, this resolution provides the board of selectmen, perhaps in the context Mr. Dunn spoke to, perhaps not. And I would speak again to Mr. Warden's amendment strongly because that ties the context, the ability to have an extra financial arrowing or financial perverse and we need as many as we can have notwithstanding the passing of the override. This is the represent, so I would hope that you would vote in favor of this, looking forward, this is not going to happen instantaneously, as Mr. Dunn said, this is a process that we're going to go through, I think we should support the process going forward as we have in the past. The next thing I want to point out is we are a representative body. Two years running, 65% of our constituents based upon the Vision 2020 survey have voted yes. Survey says pay as you throw. Gentlemen talked earlier about the cost, he thought the margin for the town was quite large, actually it's not. You can't charge more than the margin, I believe that's something in Massachusetts general law or something. The cost to dispose of a bag, the large bag, and transport it to North Andover is two dollars, maybe more than two dollars. So there you go. So where am I? Okay, so my other job tonight as part of the presentation group was to tell you a few things that the other presentation did not get to. So other than saying I hope that you'll support this so we can move forward. It's perhaps in the context as Mr. Dunn said, but without the ties, the hands of the Board of Selectsmen overtly tied through Mr. Warden's resolution. Can I have the first slide of the extras, please? Back up. Should say back ups or back up. There we go. Yes. First off, we already have a pay as you throw a plan in town. You may see orange bags out on Friday on Mass Ave. Commercial institutions in town who wished, who aren't required like food places to have a dumpster can avail themselves of the town trash searches. For a price of two dollars and 35 cents a bag, they would actually be saving money. This would make the plan unitized and mesh them within both the residential and the business. It was mentioned earlier that you would purchase the bags and local establishments. Our select people are very keen on growing our business economy and this would keep you in town when you were looking for those bags. You wouldn't be going to Home Depot or Costco. You'd be going right here to Wanamaker, Shattuck's, Johnny's and things like that. You only pay for the trash that you produce and you're not paying for the disposal of trash someone might bring in from a construction site or a place they rent in another town or the Cape. Next slide, please. Ms. Dan could regale you with experiences statewide about illegal dumping. It doesn't increase. We have some now. We have some later. Not anymore. If we find illegal dumping, it's dealt with the best way to do this. People deal with this in the first month or two. There's money from a state grant, as you'll see in a second, that can help pay for that. You open the bag unless you've sanitized your trash from your names. You're going to find out who it is. You publicize who did it and it goes away. Next, please. It's also illegal to not dispose of your trash correctly. The Board of Health can enforce this action if need be because your trash will be picked up if it's not in the bag and you can't just leave trash on the curb. That's against the bylaws. Next slide, please. You get five bucks per person the first year. That's about $100,000 for Town of Arlington to help set this up. This is for those of you who are worried about the state money not coming our way. This isn't a special fund dedicated to this purpose. They can't take it away from us once we move to enact pay-as-you-throw. Several of the people in the finance committee were quite impressed by that. I remember one comment someone said that's reason enough for me to vote. I think a gentleman behind me said that. Three minutes, sir. Thank you. A previous speaker talked about plastic bags. Next slide, please. Yep. There'll be a lot of plastic bags. There already are a heck of a lot of plastic bags. It's just a different bag, a different color. You buy one that fits your needs. They go and rolls a 10. You set them on a curb or in the barrel. It's really no different. Go down your street. There's plastic bags everywhere. You're just switching out one bag for the other. The bag is less than 0.5%. That's 0.005 times the weight of the bag. Stickers don't work. Polyethylene burns really well. And guess what? We also don't talk about the fact that the North Andover plant that people talked against earlier. In this session today. Actually is a trashed energy program. So we're actually, rather than letting our trash rot in the ground and produce methane, it's being burned and produced CO2. And those of you familiar with global warming know that methane is many times more productive in producing global warming than carbon dioxide. So we'd rather have carbon dioxide than methane. There's no additional administration required. The people who buy and sell the bags and distribute them, take care of all that. They do all the processing of the funds. They send the town to check. Next leaves. And last but not least. Is it a tax or is it a utility fee? All of us pay a water bill. Some of us don't want to talk about water bills right now. But all of us play a water bill. That is a fee. It's not a tax. You don't get, it's not part of your tax bill except the part that we've, the capital part that's in our taxes, which is confusing. But it's like your gas bill or your electric bill or whatever. You pay for the amount of service that you use and you pay no more. You're not paying for your neighbor who has three bags out and you only have one or you have a bag every other week. You pay for just what you have, which I think is a very New England thing personally. And as Carolyn mentioned, two thirds, a large number, a hundred and some odd, actually have pay as you throw a program. And two thirds of the community in Massachusetts already have some type of fee, be it a dump fee or a pay as you throw fee or a collection of flat fee, have a fee for trash. We don't. Okay. So I'll go back to my first, my first thought. Okay. Looking forward from a philosophical thing, like Mr. Dunn said, this is something that's right. We need to move forward. We need to say that we support moving forward. How that's done will be gone through the process that he talked about. And we need to think about what happens three or four years from now when the override and the current financial plan of stability goes away. And we have to make that hard choice. Time's up, Mr. James. Between direct employees and trash. Thank you very much, Mr. Moderator. Thank you. Mr. McCrory, you're next. Hugh McCrory, Preaching 20. I respect what the Ellington Recycling Committee are doing, what they're trying to do. Now the work they've done probably over a number of years from what I understand. I don't agree with it and I'll give you a few reasons why I don't agree with it and why I volunteered to speak. I consider ourselves a normal family. We recycle as much as we can. So effectively I consider us to be 100% recyclers. I don't understand why we would want to bring in something like pay-as-you-throw and why would we at inconvenience expense and penalize essentially recyclers because of the behavior of some of our neighbors who choose not to recycle. I know from a personal experience that on our street, for example, many people recycle. Most people do. And most families, I know, also recycle. Some don't and it's only dawned on me this year that I've been living there for seven years and some of my neighbors have never put out a recycle bin. I have to ask ourselves why? Why have they not done that? Maybe it's expense. I don't know the answer to that. Maybe the experts on the recycling committee can answer that. So why not ensure every household has a recycling bin? Why not try to educate people to do this? Why penalize people who recycle because of the behavior of people who don't recycle? Previous speaker said the bags are different color but he I think he neglected to say the plastic bags are a different cost as well. Previous speakers have mentioned the override. This pays you through might be the right thing might be right but it's not right now. Now is not the time for pays you through. I would support it going forward but I would like to hear more about how it's going to be implemented. I haven't I get the sense that people think recycling equals pays you through. My opinion it doesn't. There's people who already recycle at 100% and we don't have pays you through. I think it's the wrong tool. So I would like to see it considered in the future. I would like to see it discussed better in the future. And I do believe it's an indirect tax. I was against it before we passed the override and I'm still against it. I haven't heard anything to convince me that we should support pays you through. So thank you very much and I would be urging at this time tonight this week not to support the article but thank you. Mr. Trosti. Very briefly the fan just wanted to let you know the finance country took a position about two weeks ago in a discussion in general terms of pays you through and established their policy or our policy that we would not support a revenue producing pays you through without a vote of the people. So in that consideration I suppose we would our policy would support Mr. Wartner's amendment if the word of select would put together a revenue neutral pays you through I think that would be another issue but that would be the position of the finance committee going forward that before we institute a pays you through that produces revenue the people should have that should be a valid question for the people to decide. Thank you. Thank you sir. Mr. Wagner. Mr. Wartner. Welcome your precinct to 11. I move the question and all associated matters. Thank you. We have a motion to terminate debate. All in favor please say yes. Opposed say no. Debate is terminated. We have before us three things. One the selectments vote from the way action. Two Mr. Howard's motion for the resolution and three Mr. Warden's amendment to Mr. Howard's resolution. So we're actually going to take them in the reverse order. First we're going to do Mr. Howard's amendment to the resolution. Mr. Warden's Mr. Warden's amendment Mr. Howard's resolution then Mr. Howard's and depending upon that the final vote will be whatever returns pires. So all in favor of Mr. Warden's resolution amendment to the resolution please say yes. Opposed say no. My opinion that is an affirmative vote. The resolution is so amended. Now we now have before us Mr. Howard's resolution as amended. All in favor please say yes. Opposed say no. My opinion that is defeated. We now have before us the recommended vote of the board is selected for no action. All in favor please say yes. Opposed. My opinion that we move no action on article 34. We have now before us article 35. Thank you Mr. moderator with article 35 the selection vote in no action. Anyone wish to address it? Nope. Recommend a vote in no action. Please all in favor please say yes. Opposed say no. It's unanimous vote for no action. That now brings us to article 54. Yep. Mr. Torsten. You are aware for the past several years that have protracted negotiations over the issue of healthcare with our employee groups. And I'm pleased to report that we've reached a breakthrough and we now have agreements three of our unions in the community and we continue to work with the rest of the groups. We'll provide for some significant savings of healthcare costs. You have a memorandum I submitted that summarizes the agreements. The agreements with the teachers union, the ADA it's with the service employees international union, SEIU and the professional librarians those three unions. What's before you tonight is just the two town unions the SEIU and professional librarians. Basically on the healthcare changes what's being proposed is an increase in contributions by the employees towards those costs. We basically have two HMO plans Blue Cross for SHIELF which is our more expensive plan. Currently employees contribute 15% of the cost for those plans. This agreement calls for that 15% to go up to 25% for that plan. The other plan that we have is Howard Kelvin healthcare currently at 15% and the proposal is to go to 20% for that less expensive plan. Once adopted by all these FOIA groups we estimate that the savings in FY12 will be approximately $1.3 million and subsequent years those savings will grow. In return for that the proposed wage increases call for zero percent in FY10 and in the last day of fiscal FY 2011 it will be 2% so effectively the employees will be going to our rates for two years both FY10 and 11. So that 2% really will be going into effect in FY12. In those negotiations we did leave open the option for the town to take advantage of any healthcare changes may be authorized to implement under the new legislation being debated by the legislation right now as you may have heard both the House and the Senate have adopted changes that will give significant authority to seasonal towns to implement healthcare changes without going through collective bargaining and I anticipate we will be able to make further changes later in FY12. So those are the agreements that we've reached today hopefully we'll be reaching further agreements down the road but I think that's all that we have available for this town meeting you have before you the proposed vote and I would recommend favorable action on that and be happy to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you sir Mr. Tosti. The Finance Committee strongly supports collective bargaining agreements before you. We take over in many cases these are breakthrough agreements we believe that the health insurance changes in these agreements will help tremendously in bringing these costs up to greater control not total control but much greater control. The increases they can see here the $106,000 will be paid for with reductions in the health insurance budget when we get to article 50 sets but again we strongly recommend these agreements to you. They will give tremendous help to the town down the road. Thank you. Thank you sir. Mr. Judd. I'm Judd Carson 9. I believe that the citizens just voted some $6 million more. I understood that because at least up to this point most of the employee unions wanted nothing to do with the GIC I was told that that was costing us about $5 million a year. So it sounds to me like we're going to have maybe an extra million or so to play with. I think the other thing about any kind of pay to whatever is you're going to add administrative expenses. Whether it's pay every time you call 9-1-1 whatever it may be but on point I'm trying to get at is I would like to see a little more clarity on these figures particularly I believe Mr. Tosti just said $100,000. Now whether this $5 million come from before people just feeding us numbers out of the year or are we supposed to accept what they say as gospel. I would like some clarification because I can remember too when we used to have a huge public works department. Mr. Tosti can you answer this question? Mr. Judge you're going way off the issue of collective bargaining. Mr. Tosti can you answer this question about the $5 million? If they even said that I don't know. You were the first one to say that. There's a couple of different issues here. We have a collective bargaining agreement which would so far have been settled with the Arlington Education Association and with the two unions to see before us. Those will be the 2% raises which will be paid for reductions with the health insurance budget. This year for fiscal 2012 because the raises are for a whole year and the cost savings are for only about seven months will probably break even for fiscal 2012. After in 2013 though there will be substantial changes savings and that. Now as far as the GIC is concerned we can't do anything until the legislature passes something in which case we don't even know if it will affect 2012 because it might not allow us to enter the GIC or make those changes for a while but I think that if that happens the select men have already put into this override million dollars in savings from those costs from those legislation if it passes. So those have already been taken accounting to a recent two a million dollars here and I think they've already also made the commitment that if there are additional savings up and beyond that that will help extend the three year promise into a four year promise or maybe even a longer promise. So there's a couple of different things going on there. Thank you. Thank you thank you for the answer. I would like to say too that I would like to congratulate and thank the various municipal employee unions for taking a little bit of the strain that's being put on the town's budgets that must be able to pull in their belt a little bit too and I'm glad that they are doing so. I just hate to see all of this loaded onto the taxpayer. Thank you. Thank you sir. Right the person's holding it down. I'll figure it out. Mr. Bear you can go until I figure out who that was. Okay Mr. McKay is the motion to terminate the date. And I think that that language needs to be specific and it is not. Thank you. I'll ask Ms. Rice. Is this language sufficient Ms. Rice? Okay Mr. Sullivan. Okay. So we have motion to terminate the date. All in favor please say yes. Opposed say no. Debate here by his terminated. We have before us the recommended vote of the board of selectmen as presented by Mr. Sullivan this evening on article 54. All in favor please say yes. Opposed say no. It is a vote and I so declare it. Affirmative. That brings us to 9.30. We're going to take a 10 minute break then we're going to come back and do the budgets. On article 56 we're going to address that right as soon as we come back. We'll see you in 10 minutes. Come to order. Mr. Tosti did you have something to tell us? Please come to order. Mr. Tosti has the floor. Please come in to take your seats. Yeah. Okay we're going to have Mr. Tosti introduce withdraw the old budgets. There were pre override introduced new budgets. Three to nothing ruins. Almost the end of the second. The end of the second. Five minutes in the second. Three o'brones. Then what we're going to do after Mr. Tosti is done is we're going to go through like we have in the past several years and hold those budgets people wish to talk about. And then at the end we'll vote the budgets as a whole in one swift vote. Mr. Tosti. The original finance committee vote. The budget that is in the original finance committee report and substitute the budget which is was on your chairs today. Okay that's seconded. Let's just take a vote on that right now. All in favor of withdrawing the old budget and substituting the new budget which is labeled appendix B which you got today. Please say yes. Oppose say no. Okay the new budget is so substituted. Now last week we mailed the finance committee mailed to all the town meeting members a two-page or back-to-back which includes all the override for one better term putbacks. And what you will see is the difference in this book with one or two exceptions matches the putbacks that are listed in the mailing that we sent to you last week. So you can see what would have happened you know if the override passed and those are now in this book. Now there are a couple of differences because of the corrective bargain. So you will see in the education budget and you will see in the health insurance budget that those changes are greater than the putbacks here because of the corrective bargain. In other words the corrective bargaining has been out of the health insurance budget and go into the corrective bargaining article which you just voted on and into the school budget to pay for that two percent for next year and they all came out of the health insurance budget. But otherwise you go down and see $475 restored to Fincom there's the override at backs of $475 so you will see those as you go down. Now before I would like to say one thing I'd like to thank very much especially two people Alan Jones, a vice chair of the committee who ferociously worked on this for the last 24 hours to make sure it was set and championing the deputy talent manager for working with him to get all this set up so it could be before you tonight. So that's instead of a raise. So this is what gave you the notice. Now I think here we include the fiscal 2011 as voted by this town meeting last a year ago. We include the 2012 that's from the original that's from this book that was given to you April and then the 2012 override with the ad backs which in all the cases will be identical to the mailing with the exception of the education and the health insurance which also had to include the savings to pay for the budget bargaining agreements. I think I put my email down in the mailing and I didn't get any questions so I'm sure all this is hopefully clear to you and we'll be ready to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you very much. So Mr. Tossi so I understand we're actually voting on the column that says 2012 override that's the numbers we're voting for see I'll understand that. Okay and go through we're going to go through each of the budgets if someone wants to discuss it please y'all hold and I'll mark it down then we'll go back and discuss those budgets. Finance committee budget okay Board of Selectment budget Hold Town Manager budget let me ask you something Mr. Judd you're going to hold every budget? Okay Personnel Information Technology That's good Comptroller Good Treasure Collector Good Postage Good Board of Assessors That's good Legal That's good Town Clerk That's good You're safe Stephanie Board of Registrar Good Parking Good Planning and Community Development Hold That's it Carol Redevelopment Board Good Zoning Board of Appeals Good Public Works Community Safety Inspections Good Education Hold Libraries Hold Health and Human Services Retirement Retirement's Good Insurance Hold Reserve Fund Let's see Water and Soar Recreation Good Veterans Memorial Rink Council on Aging Council on Aging Transportation I'm sorry Good And Youth Services Division That's good And And there's the summaries Okay So the first one someone had to hold on was Board of Selectment We want to discuss Board of Selectment Mr. Judd Oh watch out Ed He's going to barrel you Hold on Good morning to get into this budget and all Good See you next week I'm glad to see that the budget account in 2012 is going to be less I'm glad to see that the 2012 FY budget is going to be somewhat less than the FY 2011 I'm just wondering if this includes as it should the cost of elections because the Board of Selectment are responsible for setting up the voting places and separately hiring the workers So I would just like to see if this is that has been brought into consideration Sees would have a special election this year which is not originally planned on me and we will have I believe next year we will have a federal primary a topology a state primary and a federal election So that comes up with a floor election and that's not including anything else So I'm just hoping that that's been factored in the past I think this is the time to progress The next budget will be the same thing Wait when you ask until the time is up Yeah So if the union We're talking about selectmen now Yes Yeah I hope that the unions are going to take a pay cut or at least no increase I hope that our administrative people are in the same position Everybody should share the mystery Okay thank you Anyone else wish to discuss the selectmen's budget? Seeing none The next budget that was held was town manager I believe Pass Okidoki Next budget held was personnel Mr. Wagner Thank you Mr. O'Reilly Mr. O'Reilly Mr. O'Reilly Mr. O'Reilly Can't note the question Mr. O'Reilly I just wanted to ask a question about this in terms of the life percentage of the early 20s who didn't vote for the override one of the things that they are frustrated about I believe and maybe we all are is the potential for waste and extra money being spent by the town So I hope that I can ask this question without offending anybody but specifically people are asking me for example what does in the town manager's office what does a deputy town manager do and is the remuneration for that position is that commensurate with what we have in other towns around us Mr. Sullivan would you like to tell us what Mr. Chapellein does The conversation here is probably lower than most of us In the high paid positions or relative to me high paid positions in the town there are not raises and in fact in that position there is a reduction I believe so I thank you for working through that Thank you Thank you Mr. Deist One who thinks that there is waste in the selection in the town manager's office Adam does an enormously important job interfacing with finance committee bringing to us all the details associated with the budgets as the manager puts those budgets together for us to then work on Adam has been enormously hopeful as was pointed out just a few minutes ago in the last day helping the finance committee get together that budget that you hold so thank you very much Thank you sir Anyone else wish to discuss the manager's budget Okay the next budget that was held is personnel Sir Mr. McCory Humatory precinct 20 Just also I just wanted to ask a couple of questions quick questions with regards to the personnel budget and also with great respect to our town employees and town management I just I'm just wondering I'm looking at this from the trying to be from the perspective of someone who voted no I actually campaigned our failure right but I'm looking at this I'm just seeing a large percentage increases in budgets for from going from 2011 to 2012 there may be valid reasons but can I'd like to understand why there are such double digit increases in the personnel budget they are responsible for implementing among the many federal programs here is the health care and as you're all well the health care is a big issue we are implementing a number of changes as a result of the contribution changes that I referred to earlier this year but in addition sometime during the course of February 12th we're going to be able to implement the legislation that the legislature is currently working on that'll result either not going into the GIC or implement implementing significant plan design changes either of those will require a considerable amount of work in the personnel office as you can imagine not just close to 2,000 people that are covered by our health insurance programs about half of those retirees and you can imagine when we start talking about changes in the health care for retirees we're going to get thousands of calls about their coverage and what they're supposed to do so this is just to gear up with all those questions and assistance to the employees retirees that need during the course of the year so that's why we've added a half-time position in the benefits area to administer those programs as I mentioned those programs are expected to reap millions of dollars in savings so adding 20,000 or so for a half-time position to help the minister all those changes is as well worth it yeah okay yeah I also realized that it is a smart element relative to the budget but it's just the percentage increases so thanks very much for the explanation thank you Mr. McCormick, Mr. Markey, do you have a question? can that be most of them are president now and now a little bit president 20 but I was told it was still a okay to be part of town leading for a temporary period of time and what I want to talk about is what I would call a personal poll that I have been doing regarding the override not a poll on paper but just talking with people Mr. Markey? yes? we're talking about the personnel department of the town right now not your and my personal goals yeah but people had been talking about the override so I thought it was acceptable well in relation to the budget we're discussing this is in relation to the budget okay but keep it in relation to the personnel department budget if you can I don't believe that very many people are very much in favor of the override so many people think that it has a lot of supporters I've talked to a lot of people who are seething at the idea well in relation to the override the voters have spoken all I had they are people who essentially hurt themselves because they unfortunately are so cynical about poll well Mr. Markey I'm going to have to ask you not to go down that path okay thank you thank you for that Mr. Tosti okay anyone else wish to discuss personnel the next budget that was held is number 14 planning and community development okay we have a few people sir right here then Loretty Mr. Fuller Fisher okay thank you Mr. Otterway well in relation to I'm sorry I meant to I asked to make a note on article five which is budget five which is information technology I'm sorry okay well you have a question on five go ahead oh very quickly under the expense line can someone tell me perhaps someone from the school department is that a court that's purchased just for the town use or is that part of that money also used to purchase computers and data processing equipment within the school department Mr. Gooder who do you buy computers for the expense budget and the this is my operating budget that you're looking at the computers are bought out of capital accounts and they are separate there's a school PC account and a town PC account but mainly what you're looking at here is operational costs okay so these are two separate line items out of the capital equipment budget not here not here okay thank you thank you okay um Mr. Loretty thank you Mr. Moderator Chris Loretty time meeting member precinct seven went back to budget 14 and planning and community development I have a few questions about what appears to be a new position called economic development coordinator and if I'm reading this right it looks like we will no longer have an assistant planning director but we'll have something called this economic development coordinator and I guess I would like to know a couple things about that one and whether that's a full-time position what the responsibilities will be and why the decision was made to hire into that position instead of having an assistant planning director miss kowalski at this time are considered urgent really important the tasks would include implementing the priorities that come out of town plans and policies like the commercial development plan that was completed in 2010 some of you know what is the larry cough study implementing some of the economic priorities of the acetic byway for example many of you know that town has a does not have split tax rate we tax businesses and residential property the same that means that the for the most part because Arlington is residential the tax burden is largely on apartment homeowners increasing our businesses will help spread that tax burden without sending a signal to the business community that the split tax rate sends a bad message it sends a message that we're going to slam business with a higher tax rate than residential property owners we have a very developed community and people say well where where would you put new business there's a lot of opportunity in Arlington for redevelopment you see it all the time you saw it at the cbs site you saw it recently where 30-50 mill street the former Brigham's location is going to be 116 apartments some people say could we do something different or better couldn't we expand business opportunities Arlington I think is uniquely situated geographically geographically to take advantage of certain technology sectors green business business incubator this person would help to explore the opportunities the strengths threats of the weaknesses that we we have so that we could try to make the very most of our existing zoning and to suggest changes to our zoning to increase the business base in Arlington and though that seems to be at this time more pressing than assistant director so is is this a full-time permanent position then yes one other question related to the change and this gets back to some of the statements that were made before we took a break from town meeting pertaining to the management of town-owned real estate one of the functions of the former assistant planning director was managing the leases effectively met working with the tenants of those properties and I believe the town manager said something like the town currently lacks the skills to properly manage commercial real estate if indeed we're not going to be rehiring into that position and not having anyone dealing with these properties which collectively bring in about a million dollars a year to the town and rent how is the town going to be managing those properties our responsibilities for this position would be economic development focus they will be assuming some of the duties the assistant director once he mentioned Chris in terms of managing those properties I envision these responsibilities for that but again the focus being on economic development of that thank you thank you sirs uh mr. Fuller mr. Fisher mr. Tremblay the same individual I don't know Mr. Tosti might know no it is not the former assistant director left the town for another position in another town so this will be a new person thank you mrs. Fiori Elsie Fiori placing two I'm concerned about the planning and community development budget only in the sense of the references of the conservation commission I was on the conservation commission a few years ago for nine years chairman for three and if most things have changed I recollect that conservation commissions are autonomous if city or town doesn't have a conservation commission the board of select men or whoever else runs the town has to act as a commission and they would have to go out on hearings and things when people you know want to do something involving conservation issues and I noticed last year and I see again this year that the conservation commission administrators salary apparently is in the planning and community development department and I want to know why the conservation commission doesn't have its own budget the other thing in here that covers conservation commission talks about fees and fines account it's not clear to me and I made it just not understand it whether the 2000 and the two in the 4000 figure our money is that the town puts into the fees and fines account or whether that shouldn't be fees and fines that are paid by people who come before the commission so I'd like a little bit of explanation of how the conservation commission got absorbed into the planning and community development department Mr. Tosti want to tackle that this happened several years ago couldn't even be five or six years ago now the conservation came before as immediate they wanted to increase the hours of their conservation commission administrator and so I'm trying to remember all the reasons but I think at that point we felt that position at that level whether it was not just a couple thousand dollars a year working for a committee but in effect a half time maybe even two-thirds time position should be within the department of the town and the administrative so for all intents and purposes the conservation commission administrator works on the authority of the conservation commission but also works within the departments of the person has access to the computers and calculators and copy machines and paper and stuff like that and also the ability to work with other people in the office on similar type of project so it seemed like a reasonable place to put that position but it does not take away any of the authority of the conservation commission to you know for work from that person what about the fees and fines the negatives right so one part of the promise was that the conservation commission would use some of the fees and fines account that they have in other words when they when they do their work if you're coming before that for a permanent say you're next to a life broker or something like that you pay a fee and so the conservation commission agreed because we were increasing the staff hours of that person substantially they agreed to allocate a certain amount to offset so they increased selling okay that answer your questions is fury okay else if you're a precinct too does the salary of the conservation commission administrator with that cover uh any um somebody that they needed to bring in for instance the name escapes me you see my 50 years here have taken part of my mind away you know consultants I'm sorry if they if they had to hire a consultant on some project would that money come out of this the administrators account or how would they get money for that well my understanding is that when a developer puts forth a project which requires study outside on the expertise of the conservation commission members or administrators that the developer basically pays to that consultant on conservation commission consultant so that's that's how those are paid well I hope that's true thank you thank you anyone else which discuss um planning community development okay we're going to move on to the next one 17 public works who wishes to speak to public works okay mr fischer no excuse me mr trembling last year a lot yeah you know sir here we go thank you like we have a director public works 8,447 tons out of 447 tons uh is somewhere is about uh $580,000 not currently no okay that's the few mr fury here's a mike peter okay peter for increasing team why why isn't recycling picked up every week why isn't recycling picked up because a lot of people don't put it out um i don't know mr redamarker can you answer that maybe that's because it's not picked up every week i just want to know i mean if we want to charge it why don't we do that uh but when our current collection contract does not include collection services for recycling every week uh that was partially based on uh at the time that the contract was written the need for recycling pickup we are currently looking at uh renewing or putting a back out to bid the trash and recycling collection and we will investigate the need for potential more frequent recycling all right thanks okay thank you anyone else wish to discuss public works seeing none that brings us joy next year can you guys make this a little bigger i'm going blind i can hardly read it community safety we want to discuss community safety okay hold go slow so mr schlickman it's still already go ahead mr schlickman rolly chape okay uh it appears that uh yeah this is a small time uh we have a 1.57 percent reduction in the line item for parking control officers i'm sort of wondering a lot of uh there there's suddenly a lack of illegally parked cars in the town but the one thing i did ask last year and i'm not looking at this year is that we itemize out what the parking fine revenues are in the town and it's it's not apparent i'd like to ask that when we develop this document next year we include that number and i'm wondering if we have anyone at this point who can state where that number is this year vis-a-vis last year okay if there's two questions then the first would be the chief um ryan is there a reason for the decrease in salaries for the parking control officers good evening mr mario frater quaringt chief of police i believe that's due to attrition so a new employee would come in at a wider step in the in the various steps in the pay grades i i was sort of hoping this uh line item which generates revenue if there are indeed illegally parked cars on the street would increase well this line item pays these salaries of the parking control officers and it went down because of attrition the newer employee makes less money i'm thinking we should have more of these people out there working he wants more of them well that's that would be above my pay grade i think mr so i'll take as many employees as i can get i'd love to help because they seem to generate a lot more revenue than we pay them mr gilligan do you know how much we get in parking fines and the year to year increase decrease in that mr gilligan as the treasurer is a parking collect ticket collector guy 2011 finance book with me it's in the book that's published every year i'll be more than happy to go grab it in my office if mr truckman of the meeting would like parking revenues fluctuate not only because of the number of illegal vehicles and violations but the dollar amount of violations that's why you would see fluctuations from year to year that information is published in the town's annual financial report i'll be more than happy to go grab it it's on my desk this tomorrow mr schlickman do you seem to do that i'd like to see that because i mean the state has raised the fine for parking and bus stops to $100 so i'm hoping that might help or brine knows it yeah oh okay the manager has to book in front $350,000 and how does that compare to last year it's about the same okay thank you mr seleven and if i could ask a fire department question the ad box for the fire department given the debate on the arlington list uh i just have to ask if the fire chief believes they used to be necessary the ad backs the ad backs in the fire department because there was considerable opposition on the arlington list coming out of the fire department so i'm wondering if they actually need the people that are being added back chief i'm understaffed as it is i don't subscribe to the arlington list i don't know what's on this all i have no idea what you're talking about um mr lemretti and i'm looking at the numbers and parentheses the number of patrol men and it seemed to have fluctuated over the past few years from uh 43 to 44 but this year with the override it's up to 49 and i'm wondering if someone could explain that increase um either mr selvin or chief ryan thank you mr maury frederich ryan you'll see a decrease in in the number of ranking officers above that and um that's a management strategy and an attempt to control over time we're trying to uh put bodies in the places where historically we've we've uh spent more over time so you're reducing senior staff to have more patrol officers is that the and have more patrol officers thereby when those vacancies uh eliminate the uh the need to backfill thank you okay any can mr chappett excuse me thank you mr moderator roland chapter precinct 12 um i'm up here for the second time to ask this question i hope i don't have to do it again a couple of years ago tell meeting approve the significant amount of money in the capital equipment budget to upgrade the communications system that's inside the police department the dispatch of positions it became a state-of-the-art configuration and i asked at the time since we were paying for it could we have a look well either i missed the date that was held or just get dot done and i'd like to ask through you mr moderator a comment from the chief of police and or the fly chief can we get out for an hour and have a look and see what we're actually benefiting from for this new state-of-the-art equipment chief ryan can mr chappett have a tour basically yeah anyone else now go ahead and have a tour of the place freder crime yes absolutely i think we did invite the capital planning committee uh after the completion of the 911 center and we've we've uh we did and um certainly any member of town meeting is welcome um to view and tour the community safety building either through contacting me or chief jeffson and we're happy to accommodate that yeah i'm just a lowly town meeting member so i didn't get that invitation but i think they're my apology so might like to go and have a look let's work together we'll set a date absolutely yes sir thank you thank you sir just don't call 911 to set it up mr mccrary humacrory precinct 20 uh had a question for uh fire chief robert jefferson um just regarding the number of mr monitor uh regarding the number of employees there are currently in the fire department uh pre and post um override because i i just found a discrepancy and so the documents that i received from uh one was a i guess i left mr jefferson i answered the question chief jefferson and this current fiscal year fiscal year 11 uh there was 75 personnel for the fire department not including myself i'm under administration not fred ryan's budget currently there's 70 employees on the job with the override in the ad backs um we're going to add back four bodies bringing us up to 74 and then there was a strategy worked out where we would be able to pay for two additional firefighters from the um ambulance revolving account to the fact that we're running a second rescue more often bringing in more revenue so as opposed to bringing back five into the fiscal 12 budget they brought four back in for the regular process as you see in the budget there and then hoping to bring two additional firefighters back to the ambulance revolving account that's good so i guess i maybe i missed it it's the total number of employees not including yourself for the fiscal year 2012 is estimated at what exactly your total body 76 thank you the other question i have and there's probably a perfectly good reason for this is uh so we have the pre budget and post budget override and i'm just curious why uh why there are fuel costs additional fuel budgets uh added into the budget now uh when i understood that pre budget we were just uh we would be potentially losing personnel as opposed to um craft so i i just wonder why there's uh i guess mr mutter i would ask uh i'm not sure who i should ask i'd ask you i'm curious why we have additional fuel uh budgets in uh post the fire and the police and that's probably for my own uh education gasoline and diesel yes pre budget and pre override and post override no it's simply that in the meantime yeah okay so it's okay thank you and madam i have a question please department budget why if you are restoring uh all personnel you anticipate an additional 125 plus thousand dollars in overtime chief ryan thank you for the grind uh historically you'll notice we've spent um um in the area of 10 percent of our total appropriation on overtime uh historically and that increase is just to reflect the actual spending year to year although you will see it doesn't amount to 10 percent of our total appropriation we've taken other measures to control over time so our goal is to bring it in less than 10 percent in fiscal 12 thank you thank you chief thank you any other anyone else we should discuss this budget seeing none the next budget that was held was education okay let's start slowly back there in the corner you can go first and we have that guy lavali mr lavali there go it's yeah go ahead brine whenever you're ready brine of our precinct 15 my question is will we be restoring all 31 traffic supervisors given the fact that the override has passed thank you who can answer that miss miss brody dr brody superintendent the answer is no we will only be we will only be restoring the traffic supervisors that we've had this year and there were some partial posts some full posts but i think there were there were 13 people that were appointed this year by traffic supervisors thank you mr berkowitz thanks mr moderator back what's pressing date a question that's come up before regarding grants and i'm looking at the blow budget book uh from the school committee we have a looking at page 16 we have a grants coordinator and one question i have is what percentage of time that person works dr brody it's your grand coordinator part time full time that is a part time position and it has sort of an ebb and flow to it uh with respect to when the grants are are applied for and uh and sometimes we have to do compliance reports certainly have to do compliance reports accountability reports the federal government and that person helps with that as well by part time do you mean half time or some other percentage of time it's i would say that it is it's slightly it's very close to part um point five but it's probably more like point four on however on page 20 of again again on this budget book uh this person is pulling in apparently upwards of two million dollars in grants which represent something like five percent of the school budget as i'm reading it here is that is that correct actually our grants represent a much bigger percentage of our budget than that um not an overwrite budget was as high as 15 percent some of those grants are entitlement grants and some grants are grants that we apply for um so it does represent a significant part of our budget so given that we have a half time person pulling in up for two million dollars or upwards of grants would it not be cost effective to hire such a person for a greater percentage of time it's probably would be yes um but what you have to understand too is this is our grant coordinator some of our grants are also um she works with department chairs principals the assistant superintendent to write grants so there's more than one person in our school district that are involved in the writing and the management of grants i guess i'm asking as you i think you understand because i'm looking for additional sources of revenue and ways to maximize the revenue that we do have i'm aware that for example when we voted under the block grant development funds this was article 53 we voted for about 90 000 dollars for a grants administrator within the department of planning community development which presumably is pulling in a comparable percentage of of grant money so it makes sense to me to have uh more percentage of time writing grants i would say in general that we've been trying to do the last few years is to shrink our manage our administrative costs as much as possible and um in the ideal world we probably would be great to have a full time grants coordinator but um in the choices that have been made over the last couple of years we've made choices in other directions primarily toward the classroom i think i hear that but again this is a revenue source so i'm just looking for ways to maximize the revenue for the school department i have one more question which is that on page 20 i believe of the blue book or 21 uh there's a reference to grants declining in uh in the current fiscal year if i'm not mistaken from about 2.4 to 2.1 the grants are declining well we've had grants um that were federally funded the our grants and so they're that those grants were not available to us um certainly we have no no part of federal stimulus money and for next year sure but we there our grants have been decreasing and one of the things that we've done is we have projected what's the what the percent decrease has been in other grants for example um medical grants have gone down 12 5 percent they've just been a variety of percent decreases um our federal grants titled 2a sometimes that that's gone down as much as 12 percent title one has gone down so when we're looking at a overall percentage we take those all of that into consideration thanks i'm looking at page 21 which does break out the grand totals here and as you say it does show some reductions in grants from those that are expiring but my question here is why are my question here is why are not new grants being written and included in apparently included in this breakout chain this budget together we have to do projections on the different grants we don't have our grant allocations sometimes to the fall of the following year um i i won't know the title 2a actually i won't know a lot of these grants until much later in the summer if not well into october so that's one issue as far as new grants we are always looking for new grants but one of the things that we have been finding over the last couple of years is that the grants that really would make it would help with operating expenses whether they be personnel or direct um impact in the classroom are very hard to find our file engine doesn't necessarily qualify for some of those grants but i can assure you that any we are always looking as soon as i get a grant notification people are scouring other sites for grants we we have applied and we've actually been fairly successful we've had a horizon grant that is um been around 10 000 it's not a lot but it's made a big difference in some of our science programs we've had a federal emergency readiness which is really um these are it was provided evacuation plans and emergency planning grant um procedures that while we would certainly have like to do uh we wouldn't have had the money to do uh not a lot of professional development and a lot of other things so we're always looking for grants thank you uh and i can appreciate that new grants are hard to find and for that reason it makes sense to me that you would have somebody who's working on a full-time basis to go find them i'll conclude by saying that uh i hope that the uh the school department will reconsider its uh allocation of money for a grant coordinator if this person is pulling in uh upwards of two million dollars in this fiscal year and has the prospect of pulling in proportionally more next fiscal year which would i think justify the additional cost i'll stop here and thank you thank you sir um mr trembling i'm kind of curious about the uh the two uh school budgets uh on the uh blue book here on uh flying 75 it's called facilities for uh around three and a half million dollars and then the uh education budget of 20 it's i think the same thing i uh so i'm trying to find out is operation maintenance programs for five and a quarter million dollars it's not a lot of detail on that i'm kind of curious how much of that is uh you know paying for um fuel to eat the school rules and that cost the audience and the regular sort of regular daily expenses uh diane johnson chief financial officer for the school department a full detail budget is available on the web and it is pdf searchable so if you were to go to that pdf on our website and type in facilities and continue to tab through it it would take you to every citation in this whole book that mentions facilities and you can see all the detail it's our maintenance it's the maintenance staff they're actually the maintenance staff for the entire town um we have um the maintenance director the facilities director we have all fuel um power electricity oil gas um though with the closing of the tomson that'll be the end of the oil um we have uh paper products for the schools you know there's just a lawn care um exterior maintenance interior maintenance um snow removal okay i i guess what i'm trying to get to is when uh when we when we uh talked about the tomson uh a few sessions ago a number of sessions ago uh the proponents made a big deal about how the uh the kids were really really hot in january and that that was a reason one reason we needed to have a new school because the uh the boilers were uh the heating system was really messed up because the kids were so hot well if the kids are hot in january that means the boilers were working really really well and it's a lack of it's a maintenance issue with the controls so when the new tomson is finished we're going to have something like 75 million dollars or something something in that order of new schools how much are we actually spending on maintenance i think we have established that on the tomson school nobody was maintaining the heating system um are we going to be are we going to let the new schools go in that respect the way that we let the tomson go um well obviously i'm relatively new to service here in arlington but it's very apparent to me looking at the long-term financial picture that the money doesn't exist to knock down schools and rebuild them that we're going to be living with these schools for a very long time so it would behoove us to take the very best care of them we can now most of them are new or renovated with the exception of the strat and it's getting some major renovations and so it's extremely important we continue to invest in the maintenance right now the capital committee is also spinning off a maintenance committee where these these discussions are going to happen townwide to look at you know right now there's sort of a gap between operating budget and capital budget and this hopefully the development of this maintenance committee and budget will help bridge that gap so that we're doing more proactive maintenance and not just reactive maintenance and i guess that's what i'm trying to get to is do you have a figure some some dollar figure that you're aware of that yes we spent a million dollars maintaining you know heating systems and roofs and doors and fixing holes in the walls and i don't have that information off the top of my head but this is the first year we're tracking the different types of maintenance efforts in the school and so when i close out fy 11 i will be able to answer that for you okay and so what you say now can i find you something you can see that what's been budgeted online but the actual expenses for 11 obviously weren't available when we built this budget back in the winter thank you mr wagner i wanted to point to the simple version of the education budget that with the override thanks to the town for voting yes a huge difference is made in in item a instructional service programs without that we'd be looking at a disaster so to me that that is amazing and it's good because that's that's the education that goes to the kids and the recipients in the town i do have a question about with or without the override the items for f student out of out of district and be special education i noticed that without the override those numbers are basically the same in other words the the kids suffer but those two services continue and i wondered if if there's any way that the town can cannot be forced to pay those fees it can be shifted to other bodies if anybody can answer that well i think those of federality and state meundated requirements can change get congress to change it yeah well one of the things legislature one of the things that people who are complaining about the override we're saying is you know schools spending all this money and i guess it's it's important for us as town meeting members to talk to our constituents if you will and point out that the schools don't have any any way to get around those costs and the override basically looks like it went to improve directly item a so i thank us for doing that i do have a question also about the the budget overrun one of the things i was hearing as i talk to people in the last couple weeks is there was a huge budget overrun in the school department and nothing changed so i hope i'm wrong i was wondering if somebody could tell us what actions i don't know what to say maybe disciplinary actions or what changes in course have been made since that budget overrun that prevents that from happening again miss miss johnson's going to address that i'm naming name and johnson chief financial officer of the army two public schools um when the school budgets are created there are revenue assumptions that are that are made and voted and their expense assumptions that are made and voted and the f y 10 budget are revenue assumption the revenue assumptions that were made and voted were not realized actually the expense portion of the budget came in right on target so there was no over expenditure there was an under availability of revenues that have been counted on so that that's a different thing than over spending and i know that's a subtle distinction that probably on the element cares about but it isn't important distinction in terms of control measures that have been put into place we have a new chart of accounts we have a new budget format we're doing monthly reporting that are available on the web once they're presented to school committee and i think we have a much improved system for maintaining a close eye on what's going on in these budgets the difference was that the systems that were in place during f y 10 were designed for the time when there was much greater fiscal stability coming from state and other revenue sources and also there was a significant amount of reserves in the school's health by f y 10 the reserves have been entirely largely if not entirely exhausted and if we all know the economy went crazy and the systems in place while adequate for many years prior to that we're just not adequate to that kind of bounce that was going on it's just not able to get beat on it but i feel the new systems we put in place are able to track much more closely thank you i guess i would just like to say that although this is not my opinion the opinion of perhaps the uninformed masses of the town and they may be watching and listening to us is that there was some frustration over that and i hope that that the changes can be communicated to the town as much as is possible thank you thank you swerver um it's a gentleman in the right my right back right here sir one card increasing 20 looking at the budget summary i noticed that the difference between the service level budget and the non override budget at the thompson school is 470 thousand and i realized that a large chunk of that are classroom teachers that will be restored but part of that is also the principal who's not going to be restored janitor is the secretary what are those funds going to be spent on are there plans for that yet doctor i provided is is a level service from this year so all of those positions that were slated to be cut will still be positions within the um the arlington public schools now there is one exception we mentioned principal um in the move from thompson to now three schools hearty bishop and stratton um we have mr brown who is retiring is is i know many of you know and miss donovan is going to be the principal at stratton elementary the the principal there as well as retaining the principal uh at thompson now we are going to use some of the the money that's been realized by this override to help fund um we're going to have uh assistant lead teachers to help us donovan at stratton so we have custodial we have teachers but custodians all of those positions will be retained and just re appointed to other places in the district thank you uh mr deist i was precinct 13 november of the finance committee i'd just like to point out once again that uh in this short budget uh b and e and f excuse me both of which are special education costs are very large in proportions of the budget they represent something like 30 or 35 percent of the budget and they also are increasing in each case by 27 20 26 27 percent and uh at a presentation that the superintendent and the financial officer did to the finance committee we spoke a good deal about the fact that those budgets have to be managed that's a special education has to be managed carefully and in fact the schools have done quite a good job over the last 10 years or so with a person who was in charge of special education and the cost of special education and uh as i understood it the schools lost that person that person went on to another position somewhere else so my question to the superintendent is have you a plan or have you replaced that person and what's the likelihood that we can continue we can make good progress in the future under controlling those costs dr bodie thank you mr deist for the question um we have a good progress and our progress in holding down the cost of special education is to develop really high quality programs in district um what we're doing is something that other districts are doing as well there's always an investment that's involved in developing these programs but when you look at the cost per student it's we save a lot of money and we have been able to uh to change the rate of growth with special education our rate of growth over 10 years has been somewhere around 10 percent for the last couple years um it's been easily have to that now there are sometimes that the needs of students do not match our industry programs and they're going to have to go out of district and because it would not be cost beneficial for us to provide some of the programming that these students need so i anticipate that there will always be some number of students that are going to be out of district placements and those costs in some ways we have no control over the department of education pretty much has the total control in terms of approving tuition increases so our long-term plan with respect to special education is not going to change even though our current director is moving on to another position the direction is still the same and the direction is that we need to provide high quality in district special education programs um when our when we can't it's not cost effective to do that because we might only have a couple students need a particular service then we would um have our students in the lab program which we are part of a collaborative which also keeps the cost of out of district tuition is down do you plan to replace that director but i'm what we're planning to do right now the answer is yes but i'm not sure what the the the um the structure will look like there are some other districts that have been looking at um different structures where they have an assistant superintendent and a number of co-directors or coordinators and and this is an opportunity to do some research into that we will have an interim person for next year for next year and the idea that we'll we'll after research and involving the parents of the CPAC in in looking at this make a recommendation with the school committee and probably be looking for a replacement next december thank you uh mr judge possible for us to finish this evening even if we stay a little extra time or is that too much more to be accomplished we don't say that again sir is it possible we can end town meeting tonight if we can you know well we can we can terminate the bid on the education budget blow through the rest of them into lots three articles we can end town meeting tonight but if the people want to talk we're going to talk i understand that what i am trying to find out though is if we have a possibility of completing town meeting tonight before the air conditioning breaks down uh i will certainly pass on anything further that i might have to question or say if that will you know before anybody starts to uh move adjournment i'd like to see if we can finish tonight i i'd like person like to finish tonight but you know it's 10 to 11 and we've got a number of budgets to go through and three more articles there's one two four more budgets to go through and you know this is our you know this is what we do we ask budgets so we just don't want to rush in if they want to talk about it so do you have a question on the school budget yep two three questions but the main one is on the bottom line of them because by the way town meeting all we have to vote is article uh is the article uh that is shown here in the budget book uh the breakdown of anything you're best to re-vote their bottom line you have a question to your line or what i say i have i do have a question i just lost my question well you want to pass on what i want to find out if you don't know very simple there's a asterisk at uh 2010 11 and 12 stating these appropriations are not do not include federal funds which go directly to the schools without appropriation i would just be curious if and now and in the future we could be told how much that is even though we do not appropriate and the other thing is i chose the bottom line i think in the budget book is uh let me see uh forty two thirty eight thirty eight million and we already no we were magnifying class here when you had a forty two million five hundred thirty six thousand four hundred thirty eight dollars okay that's not pretty good um the other question would i i would have right mrs johnson wait a second okay mrs johnson can you give us the figures next year okay including wage adjustment um dianne johnson chief financial officer including the wage adjustment from the new contract agreements our total budget for next year all funding sources included is forty seven million seven hundred ninety thousand two hundred fifty one dollars thank you for a very accurate i hope thank you never applied but the other thing i noticed too is on item b special ed and also item f which is also special ed are we being reimbursed by the department of education at the rate that they are supposed to reimburse us while we give there's just another case of the state telling us do something but we won't pay for it yes yes to go they set the rate at which they'll reimburse us and that can fluctuate depending on their funding and yes they tell us to do plenty without funding it that's nice well that's the only thing i can say and i know in the past other towns and cities which were dissatisfied with the way the uh cherry sheet was being distributed had a class action suit that finally got us around to getting something in the range of equitable assessment so you could compare apples and oranges so i'm just hoping that perhaps we can possibly turn to paying us you have to bring up so without with the selection okay thank you very much mr. mccrory mccrory precinct 20 mr. moderate quick question for the school superintendent yeah it's just really to confirm uh so the uh the ad back that's in the budget that is to uh to maintain the 64.6 full-time positions that's specified on page 30 i believe is that correct top yes so you mentioned earlier that their traffic supervisors may or may not be restored to something that there may be uh all the positions full time is full time employment positions in other areas or she said it's keeping the third that she had this year in a position that we had in the in the budget this year will be restored for next year in addition to that we also received an additional allocation of 600 000 which will be divided um that that amount of money will allow us to have physical education in our elementary schools two times a week which is what had been through two years ago and also provide more electric courses in the middle of high school okay thank you thank you mr. bayer okay mr. bears move to terminate the date on the education budget that is second second all in favor of terminating debate on education please say yes yes all opposing no my opinion that is two-thirds okay that brings us to libraries number the next one will help those libraries we want to talk about libraries mr. laretti i think i just want to say just one question on the adult services librarians the um numbers in parentheses indicating the staffing levels seem to indicate um equal staffing over the past few years yet the budget's increasing almost 30 percent this year and i was wondering if someone could explain that mary ellen loud library director so you're talking about the adult services librarians the yeah and i'm looking at the four uh three fours in parentheses indicating the staffing levels but when i read over to the far right it looks like the percent change from 2011 is almost 30 percent and i'm trying to understand why that is i think i'm going to have to look at my budget book i'm sorry um because we do have the same number of adult services librarians projected for 12 in full time um as we had in 2011 i'm sorry i am going to have to look at that mr. toss you do know um if that includes any other position bruins four conox zero is that the game end bruins win four to nothing yankees six red sox 11 red sox and bruins both win yeah you know my guess here is that it should have been three three and then a and then a four but you know the the increase in that budget and you'll notice there's several decreases in other areas you know the total putback is the 144 334 um you know the budgets were examined by all the department head so i you know i i can't answer your question right it's the total of dollars that allows them to hire not the parentheses is just for information in this case there could be an error there thank you thank you anyone else we should discuss libraries nope okay that brings us to health and human services who wanted to discuss health and human services mr. jud there's no one seconded it okay okay do you really want to adjourn you want to come back monday it's not all right i know all in favor of adjournment please say yes opposing no okay who want mr. jud what's your question that's a negative vote of you german okay i would just ask him i uh budget back from the finance galaxy under uh detail of personnel services health compliance officer slash why don't you move back into the lights so you can see better then you can see and talk into the mic at the same time yeah okay health compliance officer slash silver part time now does the override restoration mean that we will have a sealer of weights and measures or not because i think that's something they can't do without this comment okay christine connelly director of health and human services yes we will that's all i need to know for the moment thank you anyone else wish to discuss health and human services nope next budget there was health was insurance who wanted to discuss insurance pass okay anyone else no one else wants to discuss insurance water and sewer pass anyone else want to discuss water and sewer nope that brings us to the end okay so we have before us all the budgets recommended by the finance committee and appendix b all in favor please say yes opposed say no my opinion was there a no back there my opinion it's a nearly unanimous vote it's approved we approve the budgets okay that brings us to article approved 68 appropriation for post employment benefits oped trust fund we have before it's a recommended vote is put in your chair sir who said that mr. mccory oh mr no we're going to we have three more articles dude we're going to finish we have to dispose of his movement to adjourn because it's a motion all in favor adjournment opposed no okay please stop making those motions to adjourn go ahead mr uh reset yes I will sir that's very good sir thank you so articles 68 is subject to motion by mr. toasty with respect to the appropriation for other post employment benefits the first part of that article a of is to uh three hundred eight nine thousand represents the difference between um a baseline figure of five hundred thousand which which we have traditionally voted for the um non-contributory retirement system and as the members of that system who work for the town before 1939 pass on the actual cost in that system drops so we're putting the balance available between that actual number and the five hundred thousand dollars into the opev account the second appropriation is not quite the amount that we have previously voted in prior years to the opev account one hundred ten thousand three hundred eleven dollars but it's the amount that we were able to put together this year and this is part of a general consideration I'd like to remind you that earlier tonight the town manager spoke about the negotiations with the unions and the fact that there was concession on health insurance costs that part of the negotiation for salary increases and with respect to retirees sort of in a general way the retirement board represents the retirees and the finance committee is often involved in trying to pull together all the various components of this now with the changes in the health insurance plan that have been adopted by some of the unions the responsibility is going to fall on the board of selection to rationalize the contributions from all parts of the town including salary employees and including retirees and they'll be starting that process in general discussions with the retirement board the retirement board has generally made some indication that they will consider in their future actions some points which I think are important for the town meeting to understand first of all they will seriously work with the board of selection on rationalizing the health insurance payments so that all the city all the town employees and retirees are treated fairly with respect to the contributions to the retirement system but I also like to point out to you that going back about 15 years ago when the town adopted some legislation that allowed the retirement board to give COLA increases to the retirees without coming before town meetings this was done with an informal agreement with the finance committee that they would not grant such COLA increases in years when the employees didn't get them and last year for the first time in 15 years and with after some sharp debate the retirement board kept to that commitment and did not vote on the COLA increase for retirees this year there's a two percent increase going to the town employees so the finance committee is indicating its agreement that the COLA increase goes to the retirement board the finance committee is part of this overall consideration with respect to the retirees is supporting the retirement board's recommendation that we increase the COLA base from $12,000 to $15,000 in other words the COLA is normally three percent of the first $12,000 over retirees compensation and we are recommending that this be increased a thousand dollars a year over the next three years and that's the vote that you have an article of six to nine pound meeting has already voted an increase in retirement benefits for the certain survivors this was an article that you adopted earlier in this meeting finally as a part of this overall consideration the retirement board is asking its actuary to look at the contribution that the town is going to be asked to pay over the next several years starting in fiscal year not 12 but in fiscal year 13 to make an attempt to constrain the annual increase in the contribution to the retirement system from six percent to five percent which is going to be overall a big benefit for the operating budgets of the town so with all of these considered in a package as a sort of cooperative effort between the town manager the finance committee and the retirement board we're asking your support of article 68 as recommended we're also asking your support of article 69 where the which is which is asking for the increase from actually this the moderator let's just take article 68 first that's that's the way i'm going to do it that's a motion by mr toasty and it's in front of all of the members of town right you would you know today they have a substitute motion in the back of the hall a june 8 by mr toasty is here a second on that substitute motion seconded thank you anyone wish to discuss are you done mr foskey i'm done in the presentation okay has anyone wish to discuss article 68 any questions mr k thank you it's very important that we thank our finance committee capital budget committee and all of our town officials for a great job under some very trying circumstances okay that really wasn't within the scope anybody else wish to discuss 68 okay first we have no other discussion article 68 first we have this we're going to substitute the motion all in favor of substituting mr toasty's june 8th substitute motion for the motion presented earlier please say yes okay now we're going to vote it as substituted all in favor of article 68 as substituted please say yes all opposed say no it is a unanimous vote and i so declare it now that brings us to article 69 mr foskey do you have anything else to say about article 69 no okay we have a second on that motion anyone wish to discuss article 69 okay so we have first mr toasty mr foskey's motion of june 7th that was given to us today all in favor of substituting that motion please say yes all opposed say no done okay it is substituted all in favor of articles recommend a vote article 69 as substituted please say yes all opposed that is a unanimous vote unanimous that brings us to our very last article number 75 mr toasty it's 75 go oh it's on the back article 75 is on the back we tried to we saved one or two trees so if you look on the back of 68 you'll see article 65 this is the appropriation for the stabilization fund and this obviously is directly tied with the successful override this is money that would be set aside in the fiscal stability fund much as we did back in 2005 and then this money will be used in fiscal 2013 and 2014 and maybe even in 2015 if we can pull this together to make sure there's no need for any more overrun so basically we're doing the same thing we did back in 2005 town meeting with the successful override at that point okay do we have a second on mr second in okay mr toasty substitute motion is seconded okay mr fuller thank you for precinct 20 in 2005 after the override we put some of the money into the stabilization fund to use in future years as i recollect some of that money was invested in a way that it sustained some losses are there any protections that we have now so that won't happen again who wishes to address that mr gilligan as requested by town meeting all stabilization funds are in either our banking services depository which based on a new rfp in contract that was executed is 100 fully collateralized above any fdic insurance and or in the massachusetts municipal depository trust which is also backed by the commonwealth of massachusetts thank you sir glad to hear it okay thank you mr wagner pass okay anyone else wish to discuss article 75 to 102 million 603 thousand dollars 139 all in favor of of substituting the substitute motion for the main motion please say yes all opposed it is substituted all in favor of the article as substituted please say yes all opposed say no okay that is unanimous vote by my calculations we have disposed of every article in front of the meeting on the warrant for 2011 mr toasty may i prevail upon you since i believe article 3 has been taken off the table at the beginning of town meeting i move that the 2011 annual town meeting be dissolved all in favor of dissolving the annual 2011 town meeting please say yes all opposed that's an affirmative vote thank you all very much we did a good job this year and we got done in 10 meetings thank you for staying a little later this evening see you next year