[Music] [Music] [Music] Hi, it's Brandon from Crane Appliance. Since 1983, our goal as a family-owned company has been simple. To give our
neighbors on the Cape Islands a great shopping experience. Rest easy knowing our professional team will listen to your needs and help you pick the perfect appliances for your home. At Crane Appliance, we know how difficult appliance shopping can be. Our team is here for you. Crane Appliance, we call the Cape Islands home.
Carlson printing 5085487303. [Music] Our email address is carlson printing ataol.com. Carlson Printing for all your printing needs.
John's Liquor Store, 729 Main Street, Falmouth, 508-5482287, 2025. Uh, at this time, I will entertain a motion to move into executive session. So moved.
Okay, a second. Any further discussion hearing? None. All in favor? I. By roll call. Goldstone. I. MCAI. I. Brown. I. Reed. I. Richardson. I. Okay. We will adjourn to executive
session and return at 6:30. Okay. Good evening. We have just returned from executive session. So, I will now call to order the open session of the Falmouth Select Board for Monday,
September 29th, 2025. It is now 6:32 p.m. Uh, please join me in the pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God,
indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Okay, we have two proclamations. I'm going to turn to Mr. Brown to read the first, which is for the Falmouth Parks Department Arbor Day. Proclamation. Whereas the town of
Falmouth benefits from the pe graceful canopy of tree limbs that shade us from the blazing summer sun, purify our air contaminants, provide a peaceful respit from the ordinary world, and generally beautify our community. And whereas the
town has been recognized by a national program and is known far and wide as a tree city. In whereas the Falmouth tree warden and Falmouth public schools recognize the aesthetic value of beautiful trees of Falmouth by organizing a day to celebrate the purity
and strength exemplified by a statuesque tree and all living green things and thereby honor the trees of Falmouth by sharing thoughts and teaching more about the value of our trees. And now therefore we Robert Pscali, heather H MH
Goldstone, Douglas C. Brown, Colin W. Reed, and Jack P. Richardson, as the select board of the town of Felmouth, do hereby proclaim Friday, October 17th, as Arbor Day in Felmouth. In witness whereof, we have here unto set our hands and caused the great seal of the town of
Felmouth to be affixed this day, Monday, September 29th, 2025. Okay. Very good. [Applause] I will now ask uh Vice Chair Goldstone
to read the proclamation with Did you want to say something? I'm sorry. Jeremiah, come on. Good evening. Jeremiah Pearson Tree Warden Park Superintendent. I just want to let you know this year our belated Arbor Day is going to be at East Fama School. We're going to celebrate it with the second graders and we're going to be
planting orchard trees. All right. Excellent. Excellent. Thank you. Okay. Now I will turn to turn to Vice Chair Goldstone to read the proclamation with respect to indigenous people's day October 12th 2025. Whereas the second Monday in October is
celebrated as indigenous people's day in the United States of America in recognition of the indigenous people as this country's original inhabitants. And whereas Falmouth, Massachusetts recognizes indigenous people's day as an important time to celebrate the rich cultural knowledge, traditions, and
history and to acknowledge the important contributions of Falmouth's original people, members of the Wampenog tribe. Whereas Indigenous People's Day is also an appropriate time to educate the general public about the severe challenges indigenous people throughout North America including Falmouth have
faced both historically and in the present and the ways in which indigenous people have worked to overcome these challenges. And whereas the land today known as Falmouth, Massachusetts is located on the ancestral and contemporary lands of indigenous people
and home of the original people of Cape Cod since time immemorial. the Mashi Wampaog tribe, the Herring Pond Waog and the Wampag tribe of Gayhead Aquina without whom the building of this country may not have been possible and for whom Falmouth holds great historical, spiritual and personal
respect and gratitude for its original stewards. And whereas indigenous Wanag people over the many generations have protected and preserved the landscape of Falmouth and Cape Cod based on their traditions, customs, and ancient indigenous knowledge rooted in their
cultural belief systems that stipulates that they are protectors and stewards of the natural environment for the benefit of all. Now therefore, be it proclaimed that the town of Felmouth Select Board affirms the second Monday of October, October 13, 2025, as Indigenous People's
Day in Felmouth, that we honor and commit to promote appreciation, healing, reconciliation, understanding, friendship, and continued partnerships with the indigenous people in Falmouth, Cape Cod, and Massachusetts, particularly the Mashby Wampenog tribe,
Herring Pond Wanog, and Wampaog tribe of Gayquina. In witness thereof, we have here and to set our hand and cause the great seal of the town of Felmouth to be affixed on this 29th day of September, 2025. Very good. Thank you. Dr. Famon Silver, do you have some
comments for us? Yes. I I um see if I can get the photo up. I just wanted to um announce that we will be having an Indigenous People's Day celebration on Sunday, October 12th
from 3:00 to 5:00 pm at the Felmouth Museum on the Green um in their cultural center. And we invite all of you to attend select board members and town manager and so forth, assistant manager. And thank you very much for
considering this uh proclamation. What time does that start? It's 3 p.m. 3 to 5:00 pm. Okay. Well, thank you very much. Uh, I'd neglected to uh to announce at the start of the meeting to please silence your cell phone and please notify the chair
if you are making a video or audio audio recording of this open session meeting. The placement and operation of the recording equipment should not interfere with the conduct of the meeting. Okay. Thank you. Uh, our next is recognition.
Does anyone on the board have any recognition for for this evening? I would like to recognize uh Leonard Johnson of Falmouth as the Anelb Chaplain Award winner uh bestowed by the compact of Cape Cod Conservation Trust.
Uh each year they honor one volunteer who inspires uh with his or her excellence in the cause of open space protection and uh Leonard was uh awarded that uh this year. So, congratulations. Um, I'd like to recognize the Fmouth
Police Department, Chief Lori and his staff for the uh fundraiser they had this past weekend at the Dairy Queen uh in support of the uh the Special Olympics. So, so thank you, Chief, and your staff for uh for doing that on your
Saturday. Thank you. Okay, any announcements? No. We will then move to public comment. Public comment may be made on routine matters not on the agenda this evening. Comments are limited to two minutes.
Please introduce yourself. Since the matter has not been included on the agenda, the select board may not participate in the discussion of the topic. Does anyone want to speak on public comment this evening? Doesn't look like it. Okay. Well, very
good. We will then move on to the consent agenda. I will read out the various matters on consent agenda and if a member has a desire to hold it, we'll hold it. Otherwise, we'll vote it at the end. The first is a license to consider
a vote to approve an application by Falma Theater Guild for three special one-day all alcoholic beverage licenses for the performance of the Adams family on the following dates, Fridays and Saturdays 10:31 and 11, 117 and 118 and
11:14 and 11:15 2025 from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. and Sundays 112, 119, and 11:16 2025 from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. at Highfield Theater, 58 Highfield Drive.
Consider a vote to approve an application by Wagner Hospitality and Management LLC located at 291 Jones Road, Falmouth, for a change of DBA of its all alcoholic beverages inholder
license to Iris Hotel Cape Cod. Number three, consider a vote to approve the request to correct the business entity name on the existing entertainment license held by Cape Arts and Entertainment Inc. to Cape Arts and
Entertainment, Inc. DBA, Cape Symphony, and Cape Symphony Presents. Number four, consider a vote to approve an application by Cape Arts and Entertainment INC DBA. Cape Symphony and Cape Symphony Presents for a special
one-day wine and malt beverage license as part of their fall Cape Cod Record Fair to be held on Saturday, October 25th, 2025 on the Cape Symphony campus at 60 Highfield Drive from 10 p.m. to 4
p.m. Number five, consider a vote to approve an application from WM Cycling Events, Inc. for a special one-day wine and malt beverages licensed for the really rad festival of Cycllo Cross at
Cape Cod Fairgrounds 1220 Nathan Ellis Highway East Falmouth on Saturday October 25th and Sunday October 26 2025 from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Six consider a vote to approve the
application by Falmouth Oriental Inc. DBA Asia restaurant located at 452 Main Street for a change of hours to its all alcoholic beverages restaurant license to 11:30 a.m. through 1:00 a.m. Number
seven, consider a vote to approve the application by Falmouth Oriental, Inc. DBA Asia restaurant located at 452 Main Street to amend the hours of entertainment for its annual entertainment and Sunday entertainment
licenses to 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 a.m. Administrative orders. Number one, consider a vote to approve a request for a waiver of the special event permit fee for the 26th annual Chris Weatherbe Memorial toy run fundraising motorcycle
ride on Sunday, November 2nd, 2025. Number two, consider a vote to approve a petition by NSAR Electric Company, DBA, Eversource Energy, to install one handhole HH22/H36
and approximately 16 ft of 4in conduit from existing JO pole 22/86 in the right of way of Davisville Road. This work is necessary to provide service to 468 Davisville Road.
Number three, consider a vote to accept a donation from Tim and Rachel Burns in the amount of $1,000 to Felmouth Fire Rescue Department. Number four, consider a vote to approve a request from the DEIB advisory
committee for the use of select board donation account funds to support the planned indigenous people's day event on October 12th, 2025. Consider a vote to approve an intermunicipal agreement for sale of
shellfish to town to the town of Dennis. And number six, consider a vote to appoint benefits administrator Robert Callahan, Robin Callahan, I'm sorry, as the town of Felmouth alternate representative to the Cape Cod Municipal
Health Group, CCMHG. Okay. Is there a motion? I'll make the motion to approve the consent agenda as presented. Second. Okay. There's a motion in a second. Any further discussion? Hearing none. All in favor? I. It's unanimous. Thank you. We
will now move on to committee interviews and our first interview is for the cultural council. A villa or Avala Rudd, please come to the microphone and introduce yourself and tell us why you want to be on the cultural council.
Hi, my name is Avala Rudd and I would love to be a member of the Felmouth Cultural Council as I believe the cultural practices and presentations are essential. They're integral to any society flourishing. I personally am a member of my school's theater program,
creative writing program, advanced music program, and additionally, I'm the president and founder of my school's book club. And I just believe that cultural appreciation is what ties us together as humans to our sense of humanity and ties us together as communities. And I would be honored to
serve on the film with cultural council. Okay. Well, thank you very much. Uh Mr. Rener, did you want to make any comments with respect to it as to vacancies and so forth? So, yes, Mr. Chair, let up. Sorry. Thank you. Um, as part of your packet, you can see that we have three current vacancies. Two have terms ending June
30th of 2028. Um, the previous members had reached their term limits and we have uh the last vacancy, the third vacancy would fill an unexpired term which ends June 30th of 2027. So, you have those to choose from, Mr. Okay. Which which would you prefer, Miss Rudd, of expiring in 2028 or 2027?
May I choose 2027 as that is my year of graduation? We kind of thought that. Okay, smart. Uh, anyone else have any questions of Miss Rudd? It's just questions. Yeah, just say thank you. Um, you know,
as the young person here, um, no offense, um, you know, it's so important. You seem to mention it every time you Yeah. I mean, Mr. Richardson, I don't know. As the inexperienced one, it um thank you. Uh you know, it's so
important that people younger generation, our generation get involved, uh and the cultural council. You know, it's an incredibly important time to be on the council. Um so I I just want to want to thank you. Uh and I saw you're involved in student government as well. I did student government uh and another incredibly important thing. So I don't
have any questions. Uh I don't know if anyone else does, but I'm happy to make the motion. Mr. I would just say thank you also for stepping up and you know you're a young person and we love to have more young people getting involved so that's great that you're here. It's also I think an exciting time to get on the cultural council because there's
going to be a lot of opportunities coming up at the 1 Cape summit this year. They had a big presentation on uh cultural investment and how we can invest more in the cultural council and get more back. It was really very interesting financial perspective of how
investing in cultural councils really can invigorate your town's economy. So, and I think pretty excited about it. I think this would be the second high school student that's on the council or the third third. So, that's really wonderful that we have young people stepping up and being part of town
government and we can certainly use your perspective. So, thank you, Miss Gold. Great. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was going to say congratulations to the cultural council for three young people and whatever you're doing. If you can also talk to all of the rest of our committees and and spread the word. Um I think it's fabulous to see that level of
engagement. I'm really curious, Avala, what kinds of events might you like to see more of that you think might get you and um and others of a high school age um out to to cultural council events? I think that it's less a matter of
specific things as just reaching younger generations and telling them what's going on in our community because I think so much of the time people my age especially just get very busy and miss the fact that there are even things going on and I think just maybe letting
people know more in my generation whether that's through like Instagram or different things like people need to know that things are happening so that they can be a part and just really you know appreciate that more. So that's what I would say to that. Appreciate that insight. Okay. And just just to remind the
audience and the community that there are still two vacancies available and uh you know I'm sure that uh uh we could use your assistance if you're willing to step up and uh and join the committee. So do we have a motion? I will uh make the motion to appoint uh
Ailla Rudd to the term ending 2027 uh to the cultural council. Okay. Second. We have a motion and a second. Any further discussion hearing and seeing none, all in favor? I I thank you very much. Good luck. Good luck. Uh, our next committee interview is with
respect to the freshwater ponds advisory committee, Elise. I hope I pronounced that right, Seaman. And I'll ask Mr. Wshaw to uh tee this up as well. Thank you, uh, Mr. Chair. As the applicant is working their way to this podium, uh, we have, um,
two vacancies in one application. Uh the term ends uh June 30th, 2027 or June 30th, 2028. So those are the two vacancies the board has to choose from. Okay. Thanks, Miss Seaman. Please. Hi everyone. I apologize if it's I'm hard to hear. I'm suffering from laryngitis right now.
Um my name is um Lisa Seaman. I have been a resident of Falmouth for coming up over 35 years now. I moved here in 1988 to attend graduate school at Hoie. Um raised two kids. Now that my kids are grown and I'm not volunteering at the schools so much, I was looking for another way to give back to the town and
I am a spent many many hundreds of happy hours on our ponds. And so I'm very excited about an opportunity to get involved in this work. Um I am a biologist. Um I have a lot to offer in terms of just my knowledge and my skill set. Um and I'm just really looking forward to participating.
Thank you. Any questions? Miss Seaman, any comments? Miss Goldstone, could you tell us a little bit more about the pond restoration project that you're currently involved in? Uh, absolutely. Um, so I just got in touch with the town just um because some friends and I were talking about how frustrated we were with the condition of
Spectacle Pond. So I live on Twin Oaks Drive, which is at the end of Spectacle Pond in Hatchville, and there's just a lot of garbage being dumped there. And so we were hoping to work with the town and clean it up. Um, so we're sort of waiting for some guidance from the town. Um, once they're able to get in there and remove some of the the bigger items
and do a survey. We were going to get the neighborhood together to go down and just clean up the stuff that we can handle and try to turn it into a a resource for the neighborhood. Great. Have you heard about the uh old ladies against underwater garbage? I have. And interestingly enough, I've been working with them to try to start a
freshwater muscle survey program. Um there are freshwater muscles in a lot of the Cape um Cape Cod ponds and most people aren't even aware they're there unless you see your kids sort of skipping them like they're stones. Um but it's a really um unusual to have this many species in ponds and Cape Cod
is kind of well known for that in terms of people who understand their biology in Massachusetts. So I was working with them to have them go out do their garbage pickup and then just tell me what they saw. Right. And then the idea is to have then have scientists go out and do a more formal survey to um to understand what's actually out
there. Well, if they come out, don't give them any store-bought cookies. They have to be homemade. Oh, is that true? That's what they work for. Good to know. Good to know. All right. Well, you're the right person for the job, I'd say. Yes. Yes. I'm sure the the uh board remembers we did increase the membership
on this committee from 7 to 9. So, there'll be one vacancy left after uh we vote this evening. Which do you prefer, the 2027 term or the 2028 term? I say the 2028 so I can really dig in. Thank you. I think it'll take me a year to just get the hang of it.
Very good. Okay. Any further questions? No. I'd make a motion to appoint Lisa Seaman to the Freshwater Conference Advisory Committee for a three-year term ending June 30, 2028. I'll second. Okay, we have a motion and a second. Any further discussion? hearing. And seeing none, all in favor?
I. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Good luck. Okay, we will now proceed to our public hearing. And I'm going to turn to vice chair Goldstone to read the public hearing notice. Notice hereby given under chapter 140
section 183A of the general laws as amended by chapter 299 of the acts of 1926 and amendments there too that exit cape realy has applied for an entertainment license and Sunday entertainment license to be located at Holly Park LLC 634 North Falmouth
Highway North Falmouth Massachusetts. A hearing on the above application will be held in the Select Board meeting room Falmouth Town Hall on Monday, September 29, 2025 at 6:45 p.m. Comments may be sent to select boardfelmouth.gov. Okay. Thank you. Is the applicant here
this evening? I am here. Okay. Please uh come to the podium, introduce yourself, and tell us what what it is you're planning to do. Sure. My name is Claudine Ryder and I'm representing Exit Cape Realy tonight. uh
second annual vendor food truck fair and this year they would like the benefactor to be Capen Island's Veterans Outreach Center. So we have sponsors and gift certificates and raffles for people throughout the communities beyond
Falmouth but the office is in North Falmouth. Um we have about 25 vendors at this point and two food trucks 11 to 4. Uh parking is going to be at Little Kids, which is closed obviously on a
Sunday, um for volunteers and vendors. And then the North Felmouth Post Office is also closed on Sundays. Um Dunkin Donuts, which sadly doesn't have too much traffic going on there. Um that whole parking lot is open. That worked
out well for last year's event for parking as well as some parking up at where exit Cape Realy is in Cape Cod Cooperative Bank. And there's not going to be any amplified or live music. Is that correct? We have applied for an entertainment
license for a DJ to play. Um we have uh some of our state reps there acknowledging some of our veterans. Um, we've have the DJ there to play not some crazy music, but um, a family event. So,
we'd like to have music there that gets the children involved. Um, we have a someone representing a company that will try to do that as well. So last year we had a DJ um and
weren't aware and so this year we understand the process because it was our first year of going through the people in the town in the neighborhood and we've done that as well. So okay Mr. Mr. Renro do you have some some
comments with respect to No no no comments uh Mr. Chair and select board. I will say that the application's been reviewed by police department, fire rescue department, and health and there were no objections. They anticipate 3 to 500 people, I think, throughout the entire event. A question for the town manager. In
terms of that uh review by police in terms of safety, was this parking arrangement also part of that with off-site parking and and crossing 28A? That's my understanding. Yes. Okay, great. They look at the the totality of the application including parking. Excellent. Thank you. Uh just a comment about the DJ. They can
get really loud. So just, you know, keep it to what you need and not sure don't let them get out of control. There was an event at the North Felmouth Elementary School uh last month and it was so loud I could hear it all the way down at 199, which is pretty far. And the neighbors were calling me, texting
me and saying, "So you live over in that area in North Phelmouth?" Yeah. So if you hear it, could you do me a favor? Want to come and have some fun? So, no. So, I certainly will take that, you know, and and we'll listen to, of
course, if any neighbors or anybody were to come. Um, but we don't plan it being an outrageous event, hopefully a successful event to help with our veterans who so need it. Sounds good. And Mr. Chair, if I could one other comment for there wasn't a butter that
off the list that did reach out and I think select board is copied on that. We provided the abuter with the information in terms of the hours of operation and they're fine. So they Yep. We appreciate your uh your taking care. And the Patriots aren't playing that day either. So Okay. Okay. All right.
Okay. So we'll have a motion. Anyone anyone like to speak with respect to this application? Okay. I'll have a motion to close the public hearing. So moved. Second. Okay. We have a motion and a second to close the public hearing. All in favor? I I
excuse me. Okay. Now we will move on to the application itself. Does anyone have any questions or comments with respect to the application? No. I would move approval. Okay. Second. Okay. We have a motion in a second. Any further discussion? Hearing and seeing
none. All in favor? I. Thank you very much. Good luck. Good luck. Thank you very much. Okay. Moving on to our business portion of the agenda. We're going to consider a vote to approve the sale of $8,885,000 in general obligation bonds and to sign
bond documents. Mr. Wrenchaw. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Real quick, um I'll turn it over to the finance director. Just want to let the board is already aware of this. I want to thank Laura and her staff um for what I think was the most efficient and uh shortest bond rating call I've ever sat through.
uh very well organized resulted in continuation of our AAA bond rating which resulted in a very favorable interest rate for this bonds offer. We'll turn it over to Laura. Right. So, excuse me. We um we're
selling the bond the bonds to pay for projects that we've already funded through short-term notes bands, but those are essentially um 3.8 8 million for the Great Pond phase 1
design and engineering, 4,915 for the repair and replacement of the North Falmouth Elementary School roof, and then a small piece under 200,000 for um the remaining piece of a wastewater management plan. We actually did really
well with the sale. We had 10 companies bid on the bonds. bonds are sold competitively. So, we go with with the best the best of the lowest interest. And so, that um bidder was Fidelity
Capital Markets. The true interest cost of 3.342%. Um we had, as I said, great response. The interest rate is great and the timing on the sale worked really well for us as well. So, from that perspective, it was a very successful
sale. Um, we sold the bonds with a premium of $597,997. Um, a portion of that will be used to pay debt issuance costs of 147,000 and
change. And then and then um 447,250 is actually going to reduce the amount that we actually had to borrow. So we'll reduce the principle on the bonds. So, the actual amount of the bonds that
we're issuing are $8,440,000. And again, all the bond documents that you're signing are prepared by the town's bond council, Troutman, Pepper Lock, formerly um Lockboard. That's it. Okay. Well, thank you very much. Does
anyone have any questions of our finance director? Certainly a very good result and result that results from the AAA rating that we have and all the good work that you and the finance department and town management does. So, thank you
very much. Do I have a motion? I would move approval. I'll second. Okay, we have a motion and a second. All in favor? I I Okay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
All right, Mr. Zin, we have a report of the recreation committee. Is that why you are here? Yes. Okay, Mr. Wro, do you want to uh give us any in uh introductory comments? Is there firing up the presentation? I will. As you all know, uh the rec
committee is comprised of seven members. Um, in essence, the committee is responsible for recommending policies to the select board regarding comprehensive year-round indooroutdoor recreation programming and policies. Such policies and programs shall be designed to meet the recreational needs of our children,
youth, adults, and the elderly. Okay. Introduce yourself, uh, please. Good evening, Mr. Chairman, board members, Mr. Reno, and Mr. Johnson's Stoptown Council. I'm Tommy Zin, the recreation chair committee, and I'm
going to give a PowerPoint presentation tonight. Um, that's our philosophy. I'm going to read it. The Felmouth Recreation Department has adopted a philosophy for all of its programs that emphasizes a safe and healthy environment that provides
sportsmanship, respect, responsibility, and teamwork while always increasing positive self-esteem. We feel that through this philosophy, winning and losing will not be as important as learning and fun for all.
Next slide. That is the town charter article 7 and that states that we are a seven member committee and we recommend policies to this to this select board. Next slide. I'd like to acknowledge our recreation committee and the outstanding
job they're doing. Obviously myself, I'm the chair. Sandy Cooney is vice chair. Um very experienced uh committee with Patricia Morano, Scott Gelfie, Richard BS, and uh our two newcomers, Tom Thomas Manchester and
Carrie Shanahan, who bring their own set of skills, and it's a great fit for our uh committee moving forward. Those are our hours, Gus Kanty. And those hours of operation are adjusted seasonally.
Our recreation staff, Julie Williams Tinkham, she's the director. Kevin Rottler, he's the assistant director. Lindseay Demer's senior office assistant. Sarah Wheeler, program administrator for enrichments and special events.
and Ramon Pyers, program administrator for sports programming. Okay, we meet the second Wednesday of every month at 7 p.m. Next slide. Those are program
highlights. And I'll just highlight that we're going to talk about the summer adventure program which includes on the slide you'll see a list of all the field trips that um we provide. Um also
Julie has implemented what's called creative theme days. It could be a hat day. It could be it could be something neat where you have to use a song title or a lyric in your sentences while you're at camp. and she makes it fun. In addition, along with all that, you'll
see a list of additional events and shows at the bottom. Program highlights continued. We have our youth and adult programs such as sailing, basketball, pickle ball, and Saturday morning birthday parties to name a few.
community engagement. This includes in December, we just started, we had our first one this past December, a pickle ball holiday tournament, um family dances, touch a truck, trunk or treat on October, and in December, a
New York City bus trip. And I participated in these events and they never disappoint. Community engagement continued and I'm going to name a few of the items up there. Um we participate in the after prom
celebration which is a great thing for our young adults in the community and it's has a partnership with Felmet. together we can. Um the American Red Cross blood drives and the Special Olympics initiatives,
turf fields. All I'm going to say about this is there is a need for our turf fields in the right place because of the heavy use our grass fields take from our recreation. And I just want to say we are all encouraged by Julie Tinkum and her
creative vision she has for the recreation department moving forward. This presentation was brief but it hit all the points. If you don't have any questions and I know you have a busy night, I'd be
happy to join my colleagues seated in the audience. Go ahead, Jack. I'm not going to let you off that easy. Um, thank you. Thank you for that. Um, thank you, Julie, for all you do. I do have a a question. I'm more curious. So,
uh, was this was the first year where there was a fee charge, and correct me if I'm wrong, but this was the first year there was a fee charge for adult after the uh football and the soccer or football and basketball. Is this the first year there was a fee charge for
over 18 residents? Yes. Yes. Yes. How was the uh attendance level? Was it the same? Thank you. So the attendance for the adult programs would be charged. Yeah. So, um,
it's still Please introduce yourself. I'm so sorry. Julie Williams director. Thank you. Um, it's it's difficult to tell because we're still we only had the fee charges during the summer and in the fall, so it's hard to tell without
having an entire year. Um, but we do have uh quite a few folks participating. Uh, we've had more just as an example, tonight is women's soccer and we have more folks participating in women's soccer than we actually had before the fee. Nice. Okay. Yeah, I was just wondering. Cool. Yeah.
Uh, thank you. Yeah, I have no other questions. Mr. Brown, I have a question about the synthetic field. You know, I know we've agreed to put that at the high school. I feel like maybe we need to think a little more about the the natural environment that
we have out there at Trotting Park. I'm having second thoughts about that. Can you tell me why you if it seems like the committee feels strongly about it? Is that would that be accurate? We're just looking for ways of just giving our fields a rest.
Yeah. Um if that's the answer. If not, maybe we we look at another solution. Maybe increasing our you know more fields. More fields, right? Yeah. more and more information every
day coming out about the differences. Vice Chair Goldstone. No, nothing. Oh, I thought Mr. Johnson stop, do you have something to add? Thank you. Yeah, I just uh on the on the question of the environmental impacts, I did want to let the select board know that uh Julie Williams Tinkham and I uh
requested input from the board of health with respect to environmental impacts. They've had a couple of conversations and they are um they have been deliberating on a statement um to provide their input on construction of
additional synthetic fields. I would also add we received some new information a couple months ago with respect to community preservation funds. Um they community preservation funds had been used by Falmouth and many other
communities for costs related to synthetic field installation and there was a a court case a couple of years ago that has um made that not allowable anymore. So um we had intended to apply
for CPC funds for synthetic fields. That's now off the table. So where that leaves us with future synthetic fields is to be determined. Well, certainly a a discussion we're going to continue to have. Uh Mr. Z, what any other uh programs that uh you
know you would like to see at the recreation department? Uh your committee have any ideas about additional programs? I know you do great work with the kids and adults, but anything we You know, I think Julie's doing I think she's doing a wonderful job. She adds
programs every every month. We talk about the new programs she's added and again her vision, you know, as you know, witnessed on some of those slides. Julie, do you have any uh ideas? Sure. We um so we have our half-day
program right now for fifth to eighth grade students. So on school half days to give folks um kids a place to to go after school. And while I think that our we have a lot of fifth and sixth grade students there, I think that we need to figure something out for our seventh and
eighth grade students. I think if anybody drives around town on a school half day, you see a lot of Lawrence clad children wandering about. Um, so we'd like to we're my staff and I are trying to get creative with how do we engage more of our seventh and eighth grade
students to keep them engaged and have something for them so they're not um driving their bicycles all over the roads as we seem to be seeing a lot of lately. So we're trying we're we're trying to figure out um how to eng engage those
students um while off also offering this continuing to offer the free half-day program for families that that need that additional support. That's a good idea. It's the first first age of mischief, right? If you can figure it out, let us know. Yeah. Okay. Great.
I'd just like to thank you for all the efforts having partaken in many of the adult activities including indoor soccer. It's um it's a great resource here. Um one question um I guess a comment first. Uh I really appreciate the inclusivity that you're building
into the activities. Uh welcoming people of all abilities. I think in today's world, no matter how much we do, isolation still happens. People still feel left out. I'm wondering if you feel that the staff and volunteers are
getting the appropriate training to not only prevent bullying, but maybe also how to build more inclusive and supportive social environments that the recreation uh is built upon. Are you getting that? Do you need more of it? That's that's a question.
Yeah. Uh thank you. Thank you. It's a great question and I think that our first challenge was having our volunteer coaches get them into the building to do a training at all. Um so our first uh soccer our soccer training this year we actually did a a clinic to help help
folks know soccer, right? And that was the um best attended coaches meeting in years that we've had. So, I think it's getting getting the volunteers in the door before the start of the season is the
was our number one goal. And so, adding additional information to to give those folks and provide those folks to help create an inclusive environment. I mean, we weren't even getting enough volunteer coaches for our programs, to coach our programs. So, we are in a much better
place this fall than we were last fall, and we had um a whole lot more folks walk in the door and were able to provide them some training specifically about coaching. Certainly adding those things in as we get more and more people is a priority for us. Yeah. Anything we can do to help you with that. I mean it's very important
especially in today's uh community. Thank you. You're welcome to volunteer for our basketball. We're looking for basketball coaches. I coach say you could get out there and be a coach. I coached soccer. Well, my mom was the coach, but I did the coaching when I was like 15. We lost
one game and I was pissed. You don't actually keep score. Yeah, I did. I kept score. I kept score. Maybe we don't need you. Yeah. No, no, I'm retired, Mr. Chair. Yes. I have a a question on the other end of
the age spectrum. Um, and that's with our senior center right next door and your mission to serve across all ages, all the residents of Felmouth. What's that working relationship like? um and the the kind of sharing of resources and and divvying up of activities to make sure that everybody is is getting what
they need. Uh great question and uh it is nice being right next door and being able to to just walk over and talk to Jill about different ideas. We do have our senior 60 and over pickle ball which is um not as well attended in the fall with the
weather still being as as nice as it is but we do have that opportunity. But the big thing I think for the seniors is the walking since they don't have the facility at the senior center to be able to provide a safe, warm, flat place for folks to come in and walk. And we do
that Monday through Friday 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. And we get um a group of folks that during the winter as it gets cooler, more and more folks will come in. But there's there's some folks that come in with with walkers and they appreciate no matter what the weather is being able to have that space. And um
certainly I know that at the senior center they offer a lot of exercise and moving classes um Jill does but the I'm always happy um to collaborate with her. Okay. Thank you. Any further questions? Anyone in the audience?
Okay. Well, thank you very much for your report. Thank you. It was nice to see everybody. Mr. Chair. Yes. Um we have a gentleman from Cafe Asia. We've already uh voted on his stuff. Do you want to make sure maybe he doesn't realize that? Uh, sir, from Asia restaurant, we
actually approved your application. So, you could go home. You're all set. Or go back to the restaurant. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Mr. Reid. Yeah. Uh, okay. Okay, we will now move to a uh
report from the police station advisory committee report and consider a vote to select a site for the new police station. Mr. Renaw, just a real quick preface. Um Mr. chair, members of the board, um the uh police facility advisory committee, which you
appointed um last year, has been working um just at an incredible pace since February, literally uh with the uh selection of a architect, Tecton, who you're going to hear from in a moment. Um I just want to thank um the entire project team uh for the effort. We had a
great uh meeting, community meeting last Thursday evening um where we took in a lot of great comments and suggestions. Um, but again, my thanks to Mr. Dlo is the chair of the committee and the entire project team for a job well done. And I'm going to uh once they get the
PowerPoint, they have this fine-tuned and the delivery of this presentation timed out. So, I don't want to spend too much time. You have uh 20 minutes, Mr. Dallo. So, thank you. We'll try to stay within the time frame. Sorry. We appreciate it. Anyways, um good evening. My name is
Boyd Demo. I'm chairman of the police station advisory committee. Uh here with me tonight is also Steve Kirby of the uh Veritex Companies who serves as the town's owner project manager and Matt Salad from Tekkong Architects. Also joining us is uh police chief Jeff Li and members of the police department's
internal working group. Um I don't see any of them here but I would also like to take a minute to acknowledge my fellow committee members uh Chris April our vice chair, Michael Duffany, George Sherrell, and Robert Solo. As Mr. Ranch mentioned uh their input and guidance and diligence on this
project has been outstanding over the course of the time since uh we started this. So I'm pleased to report that since December of last year, this committee along with the police department working group, the town manager, the assistant town manager, several of the town departments have been working with our owners project
manager and the architect. Uh and we've been meeting approximately every two weeks on site selection and conceptual designs for this uh muchneeded project. This is a collaborative effort that has brought us here tonight to present the proposed site to the select board. Um before I move forward, I'd like to
briefly uh review the existing police station site which is located on the m municipal campus on Main Street. Um this is the uh municipal campus down on Main Street which houses not only the police station uh the Edward Marks building to
the front of the property. Next door to the police station is a senior center and the recreation center after that and then Fuller Field to the rear. Currently the police station uh takes up about two and three/4ers of acres on that site. Um
this next slide kind of demonstrates going forward with the conceptional plan why we just can't stay at this site. uh one the um currently with the proposed conceptual design that we'll get into uh briefly here in the presentation um the
buildings I can't read that far sorry 43,744 ft with another additional 4500 uh foot out building. It's going to require about four and a half acres of land on that site. So that square represents
what would be equivalent to 4 1/2 acres on the current municipal uh campus downtown. And as you can see, it just won't fit there. So uh the committee moved on to uh looking for other sites. And I'm going to turn this over now to uh
Matt Salad from Tecton Architects, which will go over the defining the need of the new police station. Thank you, Void. Good evening, everybody. Uh my name is Matt Salad. I'm a project manager with Techon Architects. Um, and I'm just going to briefly go through a little bit of the process that
both the police department went through as as well as us working with the police department and the committee to sort of figure out how big this new police station needs to be. Uh, and it started with an internal staffing study that the the police department had conducted um
previously. Um so they went through using a lot of national standards, a lot of data driven guidance to establish sort of what their staffing model looks like both compared to today, but also looking forward in understanding what their department's growth is going to be
based on uh things like crime rates and things like that. So so the very first step in doing that is is utilizing what the International Association of Chiefs of Police has said is sort of a benchmark for what's called the officer per thousand ratio. sort of how many officers as a benchmark you should be
looking to have um based on the number of a thousand residents within within your community. Um they also looked at at uh a workload based approach um looking at number of calls and incidents uh how many times an officer or officers need to respond to an incident. Right?
The more you're taking somebody down the road to respond to to to deal with a response or an incident, right? The less you have the opportunity to deal with others. So when you're looking at the total amount of crime within an area, you need to make sure that you're staffed appropriately to deal with all those responses. Um we then looked at
the the crime, they've looked at the crime based statistics within the town and the community and and how that's changed and evolved over the years. That's not just looking at like how many patrol officers we need, but maybe there needs to be entire new divisions, right? Maybe there's more traffic offenses within the community. And so maybe now
we need to create a a traffic division within the police department. And and so it's it's it's sort of the policing model over the past 30 years has evolved from sort of this um this pull them over, lock them up sort of mentality to a more community-based service response within the police uh departments. This
is sort of a national trend as part of the 21st uh century policing tactics and community- based policing approaches. And so that requires a different um aggregation sort of of the departments and divisions within the police department. And each of those have their own specific requirements in order to
meet the need of their community. Um so that sort of summarizes is is in looking at the national benchmark that officer per thousand ratio on an average across the country we're looking at about 2.4 police officers per 10,000 residents. Um taking that one step further, New
England coastal communities, you're looking at 2.63 officers per thousand. um based on the staffing study that that the the PD had had conducted, it actually looked at a lower amount of that. And a lot of that has to do with with your seasonal increase in population and things like that. Uh but
what that actually looks at doing is increasing your your current staffing level of 67 officers to to 86 by the year uh 2029. So just in just in a few short years from now. Um, concurrently with that staffing study, we conducted our own independent space needs assess
an uh assessment working with the police department and the committee. Um, that involved us interviewing each division in the police department as a whole and understanding how each officer, each division, each department within that organization
does their job and what they need to do with that storage needs, equipment, office space, desks, lockers, things like that. Um, and we want to look at that because we're not building even though their staffing study went to 2029. We're not building a building for 2029, right? That's anticipated that
that's about when we're anticipating this is going to come online and start. So, we want to make sure that we're planning for the future, much longer term. And so, we're planning a building for 50 years with this project. Uh, we want to make sure the town of Falmouth is getting the best return on that investment. in that building needs to
stand up a significant amount of time so that you're getting the most value for it. Um, and so on the left you see sort of that that change in staffing over over this the next four years through the staffing study and then what we're projecting um over 50 years which leaves
room for about 129 uh staff within the building. An increase of of about 40 sworn officers. And and I should should note that right we need to we need to have some sort of accommodations for flexibility in the future because we don't know what policing is going to look like in 50 years. So we want to make sure we're building in that
flexibility within the facility to maintain that. In addition, we want to make sure that we're also not overbuilding, right? We went through that space needs assessment with with the police department. We were going through not just the needs but also the wants, sort of the wish list. We want to understand everything they need to
operate that facility. and then we'll sort of cut from there with what makes sense and what's affordable by the town. And so our initial space needs assessment generated a building square footage of just over 58 just under 59,000 square feet and a 3600 foot out
building. Boyd had mentioned we were looking at 4,500 square feet. Right? So that total program that total square footage was over 62,000 square feet. Now, we went through a series of value engineering exercises to rightsize that
uh program to make sure that aligned with the budget and the expectations of the community. So, we reduced a lot of things. We we took out some nice to haves and got back down to really the core values of what the building needs in order to function and serve this town over the next 50 years. So, we took some
program out some spaces out of the main building. Right? A new police facility has very high standards in which it needs to be built to structurally. Uh a lot of technology goes into it. So each dollar per square foot is very expensive with the with the main building. So we took a lot of storage spaces and things
like that and offset it from the main building and put it into out building that we can construct at a much lower cost. We also eliminated some very expensive spaces like a live firing range and things like that. That brought the total square footage that we're looking at today to 43,744
with an outbuilding of 4,500 ft. Right. We made that a little bit bigger to offset some of the space we removed from the main building totaling 48,244. Um so through that effort we actually reduced the initial uh space needs by 23% um and really got down to the core
mission of what the building really needs. With that I'll give it to Steve Kirby who will go through our site selection process. Thank you Matt. Good evening board. My name is Steve Kirby. I'm with the Vert.ex companies uh and the OPM for the
project down. page down by accident, I think. Okay, sorry about that. Um, so, uh, selecting a location for the, uh, police headquarters of the Lenley project, um, as part of the townwide assessment that actually started in 2023,
uh, foundless town planner Jed Corno, uh, actually assembled data on all the town owned properties. This data was used to review each property and evaluate its viability for a police headquarters. Now, Jed started with 576
town owned properties and systematically reduced the parcels to 404, 132, 3322, and then ultimately uh down to 16 properties that met evaluation criteria
such as um uh not being conservation land. uh the parcel size being five acres or above, adequate frontage, not being within a flood zone, and little to no environmental um uh concerns uh as as
well as road uh access and location. So those uh 16 properties were handed to the uh police station advisory committee to evaluate which was accomplished by using a site selection matrix that included uh the 18 evaluation criteria
that that you see up here on the on the screen which included topography, presence of wetland, deed restrictions, uh vehicle access, uh lot size, etc. and we were able to reduce the parcels from 16 to four. So the four parcels that we
uh uh reduced down to was uh what was called parcel 8/9 uh which was up on route 151 at um Nathan Ellis Highway and uh Felmouth Woods Road. uh parcel 16 which is by the
wastewater treatment plant on black blacksmith shop road and then parcel 15 and 14 which are on Brick Kilm Road and then just for uh location we're showing
the existing police station. So, we we continued on uh and had Tecton Architects do what we call a fit test to make sure that these parcels could accept a uh police headquarters facility given the the area that was needed. And
we also uh started a pros and cons list. So, this being uh parcel 8 and 9, which is up on Route 151, um you you see that it does fit within the within the property, but there are a number of cons. Multiple utility easements. It was a challenging topography. It was a very
narrow site and it was difficult access onto Route uh 151 due to this the speed limit. There were some pros. Uh there's no flood concerns and it had adequate utilities. Uh the next parcel and these are in no particular order. Um it's parcel 14 uh
which is Brookkill Road. Um again uh took uh the uh the layout and the and the the 4.5 uh acre site that is necessary laid that out on the um on the property and this is as you can tell this is a much closer view because that
parcel has 101 acres in it. Uh this is uh located across from the Lutheran church. Uh it did have good topography, good sight access, adequate utilities, no flood concerns and no geotechnical concerns, but it is in the water
resource protection overlay district. The next property is uh parcel 15 which is also on Brick Road which is ups parcel 14. Um again did the did the test fit that it does fit. Uh the initial cons were that you could visualize large
boulders. There's a challenging topography, uh, poor roadway visibility. It's in the water resource protection overlay district. There was some pros. It had good sight access, adequate utilities, and no flood concerns. And then the last parcel, parcel 16,
which is on Blacksmith Shop Road. Um, again, uh, did a test fit. It did fit on the property. That that property has 314 12 acres, but that's where the wastewater treatment facility is, and there's also an animal shelter located up there. Uh the challenges there was
there was challenging topography on the area that's left and it did have a poor sight access on the service road. It did have adequate utilities and there was no no flood concerns. So given given those four properties, we reduced it down to two which was parcel
14 and 15 both on Brick Kilm Road uh next to each other and we actually did a preliminary geotechnical assessment where with the help of the DPW we did test pitting with Tecton's geotechnical engineer um and uh ultimately um the the
uh parcel 14 had a much more favorable result. Parcel 15 which we had observed on the surface uh having boulders when we did the test fitting rocks and cobbles continued on on that uh on that subsurface investigation. Uh the prefer
preferred site is uh Brickill Road parcel 14. There's no they're both at u addresses zero but uh parcel 14 has the lowest potential uh site development uh cost. It's got good access and
visibility. Um it's got adequate municipal facilities, good topography. Uh the bearing soils uh are set up for uh geotechnical um uh to bear foundations. Uh you know it's an adequate size for
for now and for expansion. Um and we will ensure that and we meet all the requirements of the uh uh water resource protection overlay uh district including uh tying into the the upcoming sewer.
I'll turn it over to back over to Matt now for preliminary design review. Thank you. Thank you. So just real quick just giving a brief overview of of the design and layout. Steve mentioned that we weren't developing all of the site, right? One of the one of the key things with the
with the water resource overlay district is we don't want to develop more than 15% of the site. That's one of the requirements. So this site being well over 100 acres, we want to keep a tight tight compact footprint and we want to stay as far away from Long Pond as we can so that we're make sure that we're really protecting that resource as much
as possible. Um so we're maintaining about a 1,000 foot buffer between the edge of our development to Long Pond itself. Um you can see that we're we're putting our uh eastern most uh curb cut is actually
directly across the driveway into um the Lutheran church. So it actually sets up a nice a nice relationship there. Good good a availability for ease of of access for um residents as well as is as is the police. Um we're we're about 1500 feet away from the intersection to Gford
Street and about 450 ft away from the intersection to Andy's Lane. So, we're really trying to create a buffer from the residents within that area as much as possible. Um, and trying to keep our our site development as compact and as tight as we can to make sure that we're really protecting as much of this parcel
as as we can. So, zooming in a little bit closer to the site plan. Um, kind of want to get up here and point, but so you can see the site access over here across the street from the Lutheran church. um that would be your main entry point for any of the public coming in to
visit the police station. We have a a public parking lot along the front of the building. We're trying to create a little bit of a buffer between that parking and the road edge there as well. It's it's a it's a nice wooded road and we we want to maintain some of that. Um the public parking uh lot is is design
is is sized appropriately to h um to provide access for a training room that can be utilized by the public within the facility that houses 50 seats. So, we're we're giving enough so that the the public would would be able to park here, use that training facility for for an event. Um, as well as other police
function, you know, coming in to get a records request, things like that. Um, to the rear of the site is your main staff parking area. Um, that gray box in the middle, uh, just below where it says staff entry would be a a a potential covered, uh, parking canopy that we
would would, um, set up for a solar array in the future. And then behind that, to the south is our outuilding. So that's where a lot of our storage functions and and things like that would occur. Um to the left of the site, we have a small impound lot for any vehicles that are that are involved and
and need to be uh maintained for evidence and things like that. Um and then you can see highlighted on this plan as well are where our main staff and and public entries are into the building uh as well. I think that's so uh first of all I'd like to thank
Matt and Steve for their presentation. Um and they've been great to work with over. So to wrap up our presentation uh the police station advisory committee has voted to recommend the what we call parcel 14 on Brickill Road uh to your board for approval tonight. We
respectfully request the board's consideration on this recommendation at tonight's meeting or your next select board meeting. Uh now we're happy to answer any questions you may have, but I'd really like to thank you for your consideration at this time. Thank you. Uh one question, Mr. Renure
or Mr. Johnson, what what's the next thing that's going to happen here for to to move this forward? So So next step, and Peter can chime in as well. So next step is Mr. Demologist indicated select board approval of the site location. Ideally, what we're looking to do is go into town meeting on
November 17th with the site location in the explanation section. Um, just to give town meeting members an idea, it's difficult to ask for, you know, close to $5 million now in design monies without having a actual site identified. So, so that's the next step is select board um
approving the recommendation of the advisory committee as far as site selection and then moving forward um putting that in the uh in the warrant um in the explanation section for that um so that we can go forward and uh hopefully get funding for the design engineer. Okay.
All right. Thank you. Any questions? Uh we'll start with Mr. Reid. Just can you go back to the site selection overview starting with the 576 getting down to 22 slide please? Sure. Thank you.
Actually before we go there starting with all four of those parcels. Am I seeing any development currently uh underneath that overlay or is that undisturbed land that we're undeveloped? So all four sites are undisturbed
currently. Okay. Can you go back except for except for this one that has these these red lines are indicating utility ements that crisscross there. So utility. Okay. Shop road that is where the waste water
treatment plant is. Okay. 14. But the section of the uh wastewater treatment plant property where um we would have availability to construct the station is undeveloped at this time.
Were did we look at of the maybe this is a question for the town planner. Did we look at any parcels that were already disturbed or had current activities or anything on that?
Yes. Uh it was not we were mostly looking for um for sites that did not have a a competing use. So we were honestly looking for mostly undeveloped sites so as to avoid displacing an existing um
operation. However, one site that we did look at was the school administration site um and that one was assessed and it was not brought forward uh for a number of reasons. So, one site had existing uses, the rest of them not.
Correct. Okay. Um I'll just cut to the chase. I'm very concerned with the current site selection cuz that is the gorilla in the room which is or what however you want
to say the elephant in the room the 800 pound gorilla on the table is that this is right directly on top of conservation land that we just spent the last weeks and months conserving land to protect
our water source. I'm all for getting us a new police station and getting us a new police station with all of the size and everything that's been outlined. Chief, I want you to have it. I don't know that I can support us right on this
important aquifer. I know that there's a,000 ft, but there's if you look at the studies further, it's 10 years for something to get through, right? We have other places and I'm we've again we've been given three or
four days to really review this. My concern is that this is not the right spot. Um I'll I have a brief remark on that and I'll let uh others chime in on this conversation. Um the committee did, you know, that was very apparent to us, you
know, some of the dynamics of this site, but every time this committee and the working group sat down and we started evaluating the sites going forward from the, you know, 16 on down without fail, this one site always seemed to rise to the top of the list for us, you know, as being the best site possible. We know
there's some concerns being in the water protection uh resource district and I believe Mr. Johnson Stab or Steve or Matt or Peter can speak more to those concerns, but there's stuff that the we did discuss it in the committee meetings on a regular basis.
My concern is that we would never consider this for housing development. Correct. We would never consider this for anything. And so if we build here, we're setting precedent that says we can build anything so that it has 1,000 ft.
So, we can go all the way up 28, we can go all the way over, we can come all the way down Gford Street is basically the precedent that we're setting right now if we approve this site. Not really. No. No. Because not every place has an opportunity to connect to the town's
sewer system. Is that a prerequisite for the police department? I would say so. It's in the plan. I would say so, but is that a requirement? It's going to be a requirement. We we as as Boyd said, we we've reviewed this and and initially when Jed gave us his data,
it was it was clear that this was in the overlay district, but we we've talked with with Peter um as far as you know, this this uh sewer main is going to be installed well before this particular project goes into construction and would be accounted for. Um any kind of washing
of vehicles that would all that uh would have to be captured into a tight tank. We'd have to do hazardous materials management. It'd have to be permanent erosion control. Um there there's there's a requirement for groundwater monitoring. Well, all that would would be baked into the into the design and
and we'd have to go obviously go for a special permit. I appreciate the eliminating the live fire range. Is that completely eliminated or just not for now? Well, Mr. Chair, if I may. So, great
questions. totally understand, you know, developing near the uh the water supply is not something to be taken lightly. So, you know, we certainly understand where you're coming from. Uh with respect to the last question, the live firing range, the police department
would love to have a firing range on site. No question about it. This site size-wise certainly allows for that. for if for no other reason than cost, we are not including it within the scope of the project at this time. So, have we
absolutely eliminated it from future consideration? No. It would be an indoor modular firing range. So, there would be no materials coming out of that building. So, I don't know that it would really present a a risk to the water supply. Okay. Um and if I may with
respect to the precedent this is um you know in my view and it's not a legal precedent right so what what I think you're suggesting is it's a sort of conceptual premise uh precedent that
could put the the board in a position of having pressure to for other development in around the the water supply. this when we talked about this with the advisory committee, you know, one of the ways I framed it is we really need some
we we need to develop some more athletic fields. We would never put them here. Not now, not after the police station. We're talking about a police station. And it's, you know, it's not something that we're going to do five times in the next five years or five times in the
next century. It's it's a core public safety facility that needs to be in a really good spot and truly we're hardressed to find sites that are developed or undeveloped that are large
enough that would accommodate the town's needs um you know without displacing a site. We talked about the Morse Pond School for example. We at when we started our selection process, it was unknown to us that the school might be turning that over to the town, but after
we were well into our process, that was brought to our attention. Um, but we did not seriously consider it for a couple of reasons. One, because it was felt that we can't wait seven years to start construction of a police station given
the current conditions that the police department are operating in. and seven years is best case scenario. If they get SBA, if the school gets their grant funding right away, that would be the earliest that we might begin construction. But also, even timing
aside, Jones Road is a highly congested road that's very narrow and difficult to provide traffic improvements. So, the police department felt that that was just not a place where that would be adequate to meet their needs even if it was available today. Um so again you
know we we don't know of other sites that are developed that are available that we can move on quickly to um create a station that we really require. So can I ask why um I'm sorry I guess I should yield time. No, go ahead.
You said in a previous statement that you wouldn't put any recreation fields where this site is. Why? because it's it's a lesser priority. It's not a police priority. Gotcha.
Yeah. Um Miss Goldstone. So I I would also say first of all um very much appreciate uh the need for a new police station as as quickly as possible. I really appreciate the
building in realistic growth scenarios in terms of staffing needs and recognizing the incredible challenge that we face with uh a summer population that's nearly three times the the year- round population and and trying to account for that is incredibly difficult and really
appreciate also the um the second look that you took in the efficiencies that you built into to what you're proposing. Um there are a few things about the the current plan that that I'm struggling with and the they basically come back to
the site selection, but um the the sewer hookup um helps a lot, but my other concern is is not just waste water, it's runoff from all of the hardened surface um within 1,000 ft of our drinking water supply. Um and so I'm I'm curious uh a
few things. Have you considered permeable pavement um so that it's not runoff but you know and and some sort of drainage underneath that because we're talking about cars and that comes with both pavement runoff and potentially oil, gas, all sorts of those sorts of things that they're run off of parking
lots. Um the other thing is the number of public parking spots um seems truly huge and I understand having some meeting space there but also one of the pros that you're citing of this spot is
being near the Lutheran church near the YMCA near the high school. And I wonder if there are opportunities to explore sharing parking if we're going to have a public event. It's probably not going to be at 10:00 on Sunday morning. could people c, you know, park across the street at the Lutheran church to avoid
the need for additional hardening in a very sensitive area? And then, um, I guess my last question is why wouldn't we just go ahead and put the solar on the the parking lot canopy now instead of setting it up and and waiting for some future date?
I can answer question one and three and I think two is for the chief or someone else. Um so the on the first one on storm water management so this project will have robust storm water management practices those will be permitted through the town they will be reviewed
and and they will be engineered such that it it doesn't cause an issue. So, pvious paving where that makes sense. Certainly, you know, often we do that in in in parking areas, not main drive aisles because they they tend to get beat up and things like that. But anything that enters the storm water
system, management system, we're not just going to let water sheet flow off into into the grass or surrounding woodland where it will eventually make its way into Long Pond. It will be captured. It will go into it will be treated. It will go into detention basins. It'll whether it's a closed
system or or something that is is permeable and solely leeches back in after the after the storm water has been treated through a storm sector or something like that. You know, all those practices will be will be taken into account and engineered so that the whole site functions as a single storm water management system, not something that's
just going to sheet flow away water with oil and things like that. Anything that involves a garage, car washing, anything like that is going to go to an oil water separator. It's going to be treated. It's going to go to a tight tank and have to get pumped out. So it's not going to be discharged on site. Um so all those things will be taken into
consideration. Um in terms of building solar today, so it's it's it's very typical best practices in in municipal construction um to build out the infrastructure. Uh there's there's a number of ways that municipalities buy out solar packages uh for their
buildings through power purchase agreements or buying them outright. Um, it tends uh it tends to be a little bit more costly to just to just bid those out and have them part of a general construction contract. Those are normally specialty contractors that come in and do the actual installation of the
arrays in the actual final electoral connections and things like that. We certainly could consider it and put it in as an alternate. Um, there's a number of different procurement avenues that we would that we could go through with something like that. Um certainly it's getting a little challenging to understand what the cost of solar panels
are right now with a lot of the tax incentives starting the sunset. So it you know I can't say today whether or not they fit within the budget that we're imagining for this or or not. Um or if it makes sense to buy it with the building or not. It's certainly something that we would consider. Um but
the building code requires us now that anything that's a roof that can support solar shall be designed such. So the infrastructure will be there at the very minimum if not solar right away. And there's also some requirements that we'll have to coordinate with the electrical utilities because there's a
limit on how much solar from my understanding that we can that we can implement right now um because there's sort of a there's sort of a a a ceiling in which you can you can install a solar array right now just because of municipal utility capacity throughout the Cape. So those are all things we'll
continue to explore and and and certainly um report back on on as we develop the project. So, I I have I'll answer your question regarding the parking spaces. Uh and then I have a quick comment. So, it's
dark out right now. Um if you wanted to hold a select board meeting there or there was a community event, I foresee movie night for the kids. I see all kind of communications opportunities, you know, with this 21st century policing. Um and having them park in a safe environment that's lit and not having to
cross that major roadway to walk into dark parking lots. Um, I think let's do it and let's do it right. Um, and real briefly on Thursday night, I I talked about, you know, when I left this meeting in early June after you affirmed me, uh, I went to the station and
tooured it and and the deputy chief who's here today with Tom Maguire, uh, detective, and Doug Das, our internal committee, um, the deputy asked what the chief think of the building. He was appalled, and I was until I came in today, and we have sewage backup in the
male and female locker rooms. We need to get out of there. Um, we're doing our best to keep it clean and doing this site makes the most sense, not just for us to get out, but for you folks so we can adequately be able to handle their needs where it's more centrally located for people to come to. Just look at Main
Street right now and all those housing units aren't inhabited right now. Just for us to move on Main Street. There was one day I went from the police station to town hall to a meeting and it took me 30 minutes. I was stuck in the parking lot for 15. So, I'm just saying this is
definitely a priority. This is by far the best site. I have every confidence and faith into our internal team that we're going to make sure we have no environmental impacts on the community. That's why we're so far away from that waterway. But this definitely in our opinion from early on,
we felt this was the best site. And when we did shave this project down, we did it both internally and I use this exercise as a team building exercise. The entire department's been involved in this. We did our own internal bringing it down to in size. They did their and
it almost mirrored each other. So, we're on the same page. I have every confidence in them. Uh but this definitely in my opinion and I'll be quiet is the number one site that's going to basically serve this community for years and years to come and and hopefully you will support it. Thank
you. Uh Mr. McCcony. speaking as a director of public works not as a resident. So um when this project started I was in the selection process of the architect I was in the selection process of the OPM and I attended every project meeting that
every uh committee meeting that they had since the beginning for the reasons I as being the director of public works I I feel it's one of our major responsibilities for the water department is taking care of that water supply. So for us, we're very protective of that water supply to see what goes on
and see what happens. So I I I came to every meeting when they had them and went through and listened to what was happening and I offered our opinions of what could happen for that site. Um um permeable pavement is an option, different kinds of options. Public works reviews all the plans. So those plans
are going to get designed. They're going to come to public works for our review and we're going to do a thorough review of that because it's in the watershed area. The water superintendent is in favor of this. The if the police station was going to be able to go to this location, it would step up the enforcement for the
for the uh for the uh for the watershed around Long Pond. It it's very active area over there. So, the parks department is also in favor of it. Um this the the the site for us is a good location. 1,000 ft away from the pond um
is plenty of is 1,000 ft is plenty of room for it's not in the zone A district the 400 ft for the pond. So um as the director of public works I feel that we're going to be having a big responsibility checking into the design on this to make sure it's designed correctly and we're going to be looking
to see that it's designed exactly like the new water plant that was create that was um constructed in 2017 and open in 2017. state-of-the-art facility. The water plant was the first plant in the state that we went through D and they let us
allow that as um we didn't have to fully operate that with staff. So, we got a lot of accreditations for that and we're going to be looking for the same as this site for the site. For the building, I'll leave that up to the architects and we'll leave it up to the police department, but for the site access and the drainage and the wastewater, all
those functions we'll be looking at. So, the wastewater is is is um if it goes according to plan, it's beginning construction in 27 or 26. It'll be over in 28. The wastewater uh line will be running right up Brick Kilm Road. We've been working with the wastewater
superintendent having conversations. Um however that works out, there's two different options to be able to do with the wastewater. We will not be looking at doing an IIA system or a receptic system. We're not being looking at doing that. And for the storm water, we'll be we'll be looking over that also with the storm water to make sure that what goes
in the ground is not going to be affect the long pond. So I think from a public works perspect perspective, we're going to do as much as we can to make sure that that the site is designed in conformance to what we feel that we need for many years to come. Thank you. And I and I think that
rigorous uh review as well as the permitting process uh in my mind discounts any presidential uh uh import for what what we're doing. I have confidence that other applications will be vetted very closely by staff and and
the permitting process. So I'm not terribly concerned about the presidential value. Uh Mr. Brown. Thank you, Mr. M. Kelly. So, I attended the meeting on Thursday and I found it very interesting and uh one of the questions I asked was if we could
consider adding a full basement and uh I wasn't really clear that I would also like to know if we could consider four windows on the back side. The reason I brought it up was because uh I could tell that it was proposed as slab on grade and I know that's cost effective, but given that the size of the building
initially might have been as much as 58,000, now we're down to 43. Um maybe in the future we might wish that we had a little more space and without building new areas. The other airbrain scheme I had was that maybe half of that basement
could be a modified shooting range to get by for, you know, till we come up with a few more million to build the outdoor one. I don't know if that's practical. I just want to share with the board that those are questions that I asked. And I don't know if it's uh something that we can add, but I'd like
to know what what we're passing up. You know, if there is an opportunity there. It's going to be an elevator anyway going to the second floor. So to have it go to the first floor probably an economy of scale there. Um that's one thing. And then the other thing I was interested in I forgot to ask at the
meeting on Thursday. Are there new u drainage systems that have filtration? Is there something out there that is not the norm that maybe we could step a little higher? I'm concerned that permeable paving might allow stuff to go right through. Might not be the best.
I'd rather capture it in a you'd want catch basin and potentially filter it before it re-enters the groundwater. Is there such a thing? Anything over a parking lot, you'd want to uh capture that and have that treated. The water plant, they have oil water separators uh before it gets out. They have tight tanks exactly as um how
Mr. Salad experienced. There's a lot of technologies that are on the market um that the the the further you go with the technology, the the m the more maintenance it requires for the maintenance in the in the future, right? But like I say that those are the those
are the items that we'll be looking at at public works for us with with the with the site a 100 acund I believe it's over over a 100 acre lot we'll be looking to to shave off five and a half acre five and a half acres um
on on Brookfield Road and I'll just share this so so for access for uh so one thing looking down the road 28A it's always gets very busy so going southbound and the reason it gets busy is there's no southbound ramp getting on to on Brick Hill Road going down to
Woods Hole uh going south. If this site gets uh if this uh site gets selected and approved, we'll be making a call to Mass DOT to ask them to look uh to put a southbound ramp for the occasion. So, they'll be able to do uh emergency runs,
but we'll also relieve some of the um traffic on 28A. So there's a there's a big process with with working with this for the access for the for the police station. Yeah, that's kind of crazy that they ever built it like that with no it's something that they did back in the in the 50s and when they did that, but
um we've already been talking with Mass DOT about this anyways. Um but this is something we'll be looking to to push forward too. Yeah. Just I have a question on on process. Uh Mr. Dlo at his beginning said at this meeting or uh or next uh and there have
been some concerns raised or questions. Mr. Reed feels maybe we didn't have enough time. So what would be the process? What do you need from from this board this evening? Would it be possible to discuss it at our next meeting if
that's the sense of the board? So yes, Mr. Chair um and select board. Um the the request was for consideration uh for approval, review and approval tonight, but we do understand um that the process has moved relatively quickly. It's been a year-long process,
but getting the information together and presenting it has been relatively quick and we understand that. So, uh, my ask if that's the, uh, direction of the board this evening is to postpone a decision that we have that decision on October 14th because, as you recall, uh, that's kind of that deadline date for,
um, uh, uh, um, voting the articles. And as I mentioned earlier, um, we look to put the, uh, the site selection in the explanation. um so that uh town meeting members have clear indication of what we're do what we're requesting the the engineering and design funds for and
ultimately the leading up to um a year from now requests for construction funds. So October 14th the next meeting uh would be okay. Um but we my ask would be that we don't we don't go any any further past that. Okay. Any more questions of the
Well um Mr. Thank you. Uh yeah, the only uh Thank you, Mr. McConner. Your expertise there was incredibly helpful. Bless you. Um in terms of explaining the permitting
process and where the industry is at, I do share concerns um that Mr. Reid has about I would hope that a outdoor gun range would be unanimously ruled out at any point. Um because I think that would be a nightmare. I mean what we saw what
happened what happened on Joy Base Cape Cod. Okay. So, there you go. Check. Um, my second one uh would be to to work with us maybe a little bit on the parking spaces. I do I do think what you're suggesting is great in terms of using as a community space, but you know, I
played I played um soccer for the high school and and that lot that they have never has more than five cars in it. Uh, and there is a sidewalk on on Brick Kil if there's maybe we can get some lighting or something on the way there. Um, I'm not prepared. I would look favorably on just voting on this on the
14th. Um, but you know, I I want to thank the committee for all the work you guys have put in. Uh, the chief for your advocacy. I mean, you know, I tooured with Senator Fernandez last week. You you guys need a new building. That's that's for sure. Um, but just a little bit I think with a little bit of of
working with us here, I think we can hopefully come to a solution with this site. Um, but I think at this time I I do not feel comfortable voting a recommendation either way. I I just say that, you know, I we hear your concerns on the parking gate and through the town manager's office, you
know, the committee and and the working group can provide you some more insight into the parking plan if if that helps you make a decision either way. So, and Mr. Brown's uh reference regarding the U foundation under the building. Um
Veritex and uh Tecton are working on your request. It it just wasn't prudent to bring a price cost estimate tonight. It wasn't it takes some time to get that done. So to provide the right cost estimate on your request um you know before coming and we're not at that
point yet. We're looking for design funding at this town meeting. So yeah, ju just to clarify though with respect to the issue of parking, we're being asked just specifically for the site selection itself. Is that correct? That that's correct. I I I guess the
sort of the suggestion is that um we have plenty of time for design questions whether the parking has 50 spaces or 12 spaces. We have time to consider whether or not there's a basement. um where we do have some time pressure is to to
decide what site we want to to build on. And um we did have a question. I think um the board received an email from me out. It was late so I don't know if you had a chance to look at it, but even if we dramatically shrunk down the the parking to sit from 50 to say 20, which
we're not recommending, you know, we're still looking at four and a quarter acres. So it's not like, you know, it's it's not like it opens up a a whole bunch of new parcels that we didn't look at. Okay. And I would just like to say that if
we're going to wait and not recommend this site, look back through the the history of this and honestly ask yourself, is there a better site? Because I don't think there is. I mean, I just don't think this it's out there. I'll say that I'm I'm ready to vote
approval, but I, you know, concerned about the questions that some people have, and if they're uncomfortable, I just assume uh, you know, hold it off for for the 14th. Uh, Mr. Dlo, you have any other comments. Otherwise, I'm going to see if anyone in the audience has any
uh any comments they'd like to make or hold them until the 14th or send us emails if if there are. But you have any further comments? I do have one more question. Oh, go ahead. Uh, just like to ask the chief if if you had any chance to think about that
suggestion that maybe an indoor range might fit in the basement. Does that sound like it might be even possible or am I just off base there? Anything is possible. Um, does it sound practical to you or is it just crazy?
Possible. Uh, in my humble opinion, I would rather have the modular outside one for sound. You know, we can keep the sound in. I'm just afraid, you know, we may hear it inside. It could disrupt operations. I'm not sure. I would leave it to these folks. I know Borne has an indoor range and they can hear some
things. It's my understanding. Um, but I'm I'm open to to anything. Um, but like I said, for for us and and I I won't be able to attend on the 14th. I can have my staff attend if you have any further questions for the police department. Um, but um, anything is
possible. Okay. Thanks. Especially with these folks. All right. Thank you, Chief. So, is the consensus that we uh hold off on a vote this evening is that uh I'd prefer that, but I I would like the extra time to sit with it, but I I do just want to really
say thank you to all of you um for the additional information that you've provided this evening beyond what was already in our packet. Um it's clearly been a very thoughtful process. Um I would appreciate the extra time to to sit with both my concerns and the information you've provided, but very
very helpful. And I I Mr. Miss Kelly, first of all, I know we blew by your 20-minute mark, but this is kind of an important subject. So, we're doing aologize to those that are waiting after us. But, um, I think as the committee, I can kind of speak for the committee. I think we'd be happy waiting, you know, until the next
board meeting for you to, you know, we can get some of your questions answered. You can think this process through. You know, it took us from December of last year to tonight to get to this location. So, you know, honestly, a couple more weeks of letting you consider this is prudent at this time. So, as long as we
can get it for town meeting so we can keep the project moving forward because we, you know, we have to get them out of the building they're in now. Okay. And I urge members if you have any questions, try to get them out as quickly as possible so we could get some some response. Uh, Miss Schneider, you
have some comment. I just have to say one thing. Barb Schneider precinct 4 as a person who 15 years ago stood just down the road from where this site would be and had bulldozers carve an area in. I had no
idea at how the Felmouth dog park on Brick Road is the center of the universe of Felmouth, but it is so central and people can get to it from everywhere so easily except for those who don't realize that
there's no southbound on on ramp for 28 and go back and forth back and forth looking for it. But I do want to say it is really an excellent location. We picked it not looking at it on a map but because of what it did sightwise but it
it is absolutely the right location and we knew we know the dog park is the center of the universe. Thank you. Actually yes Mr. Mr. Chair, if I might, that sparked another uh thought question, which is just that we've heard from the bike and pedestrian committee that they are working on the multi-use
bike and pedestrian on Brick Kil, and I don't know how the timing of that development, whether that's going to be on both sides of the road, how that might interact with the entry for the the police station as well. But I can do a quick comment on that. Yeah,
really going past that time limit on this one. Um, yeah, public works is working with the uh with with the bike ped committee. Uh, we're looking at an east west west connected. We've been looking at it for many years. Brick helm road is the um the selection. We have a sore project going in. We're going to
put the saw project in and just for uh opportunity of cost savings, we're going to be putting the water main in at the same time. Several years down the road, we're going to be looking at putting an outfall once the outp comes in through. And then the outfall will be on we're looking right now, the outfall will be
on the north side of Brook Hill Road where the Lutheran Church is. And most likely if we do a uh a um a bike pedestrian multi-use path, it'll be above once they clear that, it'll be on the north side of the road. That's what we're looking at right now. So, it would
be on the the new YMCA or the New Lutheran Church side of the side of the roadway. We prefer that because there's no crossing of Brick Kilm Road. You can get right to the high school. You can get to the uh to the uh the lunch place up there. You can get to Lutheran Church. You get to the YMCA. So, the
north side of the road will probably be the location. Okay. Thank you. Can I just ask one further question regarding site selection? Sure. Um did we ever consider um a comprehensive look? Often my my challenges here is that we look at
things in isolation. Um we are looking strictly at a police department and a police building of which we absolutely need but in the context of the greater things we have a lot of moving pieces. We have schools and we did talk about Morse Pond, but we also have a major
pollution issue over at Trotting Park um where we're going to put a permeable layer down, but does that create a problem in another 50 years or not? Could we did we look at Trotting Park and other places that have existing
services or existing uses in a creative way that we could actually trade and look at things comprehensively um just to find another spot that's not undisturbed.
So uh two two answers to the question I think uh you know honestly did we look to combine activities you know or replace trade? Yeah. So uh not really. Um but any park
like the trotting park is sort of an interesting thought. It's article 97 land. So that um we we did screen out article 97, sorry, that's any recreational or open space um land is protected and requires not only town
meeting approval but state legislative approval in order to um to use it. And then you would need to um that article 97 process with the state um and I believe it's the department of environmental protection that advises the legislature on that process. And we
would need to whatever acreage we're taking out of recreational use in this case, we would have to find undeveloped land that is not in not currently protected as recreational or open space and put it into recreational
or open space. And we've gone through that exercise looking for athletic field locations. And you know, we're very hardressed to find that those opportunities. I'm just going to say bu building on what Mr. Reed said with respect to isolation. I think at some point, not
this evening, we want to talk about what's going to happen to the police station campus once we go forward so that the community has a idea the the process we're going to go through to uh to to use that property in the future. So again, not for tonight.
Thank you. Okay. Well, will you then we'll move on. We will hold this until October 14th. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all for your your hard work. Thank you. Thanks. Okay. We will now discuss and consider a u a vote to approve the site selection
site location for the East Falmouth Library as recommended by the East Falmouth Library Building Advisory Committee. And while as everyone is getting uh ready, we'll ask Mr. Renshaw to give us a little background here. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Um Brian Stokes,
our outstanding library director, is at his position at the podium. Uh Peter's been working uh closely with Brian and the uh in the advisory committee. Um so Peter, do you have any comments you wanted to make as far as that? So you know, I think Brian is going to pretty much address the whole thing
comprehensively. Uh it started with a um a feasibility study of the existing library and a grant opportunity that uh comes around very rarely. It's um I don't think it's maybe less frequent than a blue moon. Um, so the last and
Brian can I help sharpen up my recollection on this. It's something it's been like 10 years since the last library grant was available and it is not known when the next one might be. And with that, uh, I'll let Brian take it away. Thank you, Peter. Uh, I'm Brian Stokes.
Uh, I am the library director of F Public Library. I'm joined today uh by Jennifer Mcgroy who is the uh project manager for CHA uh who is providing owner's project management uh services on this project and Judy Feminick is in the audience there. She is the chair of
the board of library trustees as well. So thank you for coming out. Uh I'll give you a very quick overview of how we got to today since some of you are new to the select board since the last time I was here to talk about this. Uh, in January 2022, we did a survey of users of the East Felmouth Library.
Stay close to the mic. Sorry, I like to walk around. Um, we did a survey of users of the East Felmouth Library, essentially asking them uh what what they wanted from their library that they weren't getting. Um, they wanted more children's space. They they essentially wanted more library. They
wanted a bigger library. uh they wanted the library uh to stay in the building that's currently there and they wanted the library to be where it is right now, right next to Smitty's. Uh so we took that and uh in April of 2023, we came to
you when we learned that the uh Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners would be doing another one of these uh Massachusetts Public Library Construction Program grant rounds. uh we came to the select board and we asked for their support to uh file a letter of
intent to apply for the grant program. Uh we got that approval and so we filed that letter of of intent and then we had about a year uh to apply for the program. Uh so one of the first things we did as we were applying for this program was we wanted to find out the
condition of the current existing library. That building was built as a private home in the early 60s. Uh it became a public library in the early 1970s and it's been there ever since. Uh we commissioned or the board of library
trustees commissioned Gail Associates to do a building assessment in November 2023. What we found was that the building was not in great shape. Uh had about $2.2 $2 million worth of needs uh immediately uh in the next zero to two years to bring it up to accessible uh
condition as well as deal with some structural issues that the building had. Um, so knowing that, uh, and knowing that that work wouldn't address, uh, some of the things that people also really wanted in the new in a new library, which was more space and
definitely a meeting room or a multi-purpose room where they could meet, similar to the Herman room at the main library downtown. Uh, we decided that as we move forward writing the library building program, that we would pursue a new construction situation. So, we wrote the building program. We did a
lot of public engagement in the spring of 2024. Uh we had meetings at the East Felmouth Library and we also uh had an article on the warrant at April 2024 town meeting to allow us to apply for the grant and secure $150,000 for
planning and design if we were to get the grant. Uh we filed our application in May 2024 and in January 2025 we found out that we got the grant. Uh so the first thing that we did was we needed a building advisory committee. So uh you
convened a building advisory committee and in March they got together uh they uh recommended uh a OPM uh they recommended a designer for uh the project and then by the time all that got done it was July. Uh so the first
thing we set about doing after that was assessing the viability of uh the current site 310 East Felmouth Highway. That's where the library is right now. As part of the grant program, we had to submit two locations that would be possible um to build a new library out.
310 East Felmouth Highway was our first choice. Uh it's a disturbed parcel. It's had a library there for half a century. Uh and you know, in our engagement, we really heard that people really like the library being there. Um for the purposes of the grant, we had to list another
parcel that was town owned in East Falmouth. So, we listed 81 Davisville Road as a secondary site. In July, we got uh the results of a topographical study of 310 East Felmouth Highway. And on that, we uh observed that there's
actually the top of a coastal bank running essentially halfway through the property there. So, essentially anything to the west of that top of the coastal bank can't be built on. Um, so we realized that even though we had a this full parcel here, which is kind of
strangely shaped and currently has a structure that uh impedes on that uh top of the coastal bank, we couldn't build fully on that. So that was going to be a challenge because for the library building program that we submitted to the board of library commissioners, uh
the library is about 7,500 square feet, which you can see is about twice the size of the library that's there now. Um that was going to be a challenge. Another challenge was the current site has about 16 parking spaces. Uh for our building program, we had to have 35. So
knowing all of this and talking to the conservation commission, uh we realized that there were going to be some challenges. So the first thing the designers had to do was establish whether or not they could achieve the building program and the parking on this site. So I'll scroll down here. This is
the buildable area and this is what they were able to achieve. So this is the library that uh they are able to design on the site as well as 35 parking spaces all fitting within that top of the coastal bank. Uh
the area to the west of this library is uh also wetlands area. So because of this uh we'll have to do some mitigation of uh the space. So a lot of the currently mowed lawn here will be sort
of given back to nature and sort of reclaimed with natural vegetation and whatnot. So uh the area that's current currently a sloped grassy lawn will actually be sort of just back to a natural sort of habitat. Um with this
established that the site is viable, we can achieve the building program and the parking on the site. Uh we uh the or Jennifer sent a letter to the uh East Felmouth Library building advisory committee suggesting that they recommend this site to the board of library
trustees and to the select board as is their charge. Uh and the East Felmouth Library Building Advisory Committee on September 11th did in fact uh vote unanimously to recommend the site to the board of library trustees who accepted
that recommendation a few days later and now that recommendation sits with you. Any questions on all that? I know it's a lot, but I was trying to speed through. Is there another is there any rendering of the building itself? Not on this. Um, so at this point we're
sort of just at the um, uh, sort of early design phase. Um, any renderings wouldn't be uh, realistic in terms of what we can actually promise the building would actually look like, but um, you know, the intent is to keep it within the character of the
neighborhood. Yeah. Were there any reasons articulated with respect to not going forward with 81 Davisville or what what the concerns were with respect to that site va your site? Well, uh, this site was, you know, uniformly recommended by people that we
talked to as we did outreach during the grant application period. 81 Davis Road is a densely wooded site. Um, so it would require if for any development would require clear cutting and uh, disturbance of uh, you know, natural
wildlife habitat. So, uh, it also, you know, this has always been where the library is in East Felmouth and so there is a downside to that. Yes, Mr. Richardson 81. Just to to follow up on that, 81 Davisville Road is totally undeveloped, right? There's nothing there. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Couple of questions. Um so I know a couple of kids who are going to really miss the tree that's going to come down for that expanded library, but um but I fullthroatedly uh support keeping the library in this location. Um my concern, and not to be uh monotone
tonight, but um is the amount of parking Um, you've got the parking lot behind Smitties. You've got a dramatically underutilized like three different parking lots right in front of the the grocery store, behind the grocery store, over next to
Family Foods. And you said that those 35 sites are required by your building program. Uh, well, they're they're actually required by Falmouth Code. Um, so the MBLC uh would require less. Um but there
is you know in the building program we do have a 50 seat uh multi-purpose room or a meeting room. So 35 would would be still below what the capacity of that would be. I have a new agenda. Well I was going to say so so the
planning board and Mr. Corno, jump in here if I'm misquing, but conducted a parking study at least for downtown. And one of the things that the consultant said was that our parking requirements as a town um are way too high, right? That we need to pull that back.
And they also really recommended public private partnerships and parking sharing. Now, that was primarily looking at downtown, but I see no reason to not extend that to the rest of the town. There's a whole lot of unused parking there. Yeah. Let's not pave over and cut down more trees to create parking spots.
I mean, I can tell you there's already parking sharing because I used to live 10 houses behind Smitties that we often park in the library parking spots to go to Smitties because they're closer to the front window. Um, but when those aren't available and we're going to the library, we'll park behind Smitties when Smitties is closed, right? So, that's
already happening informally. Yeah. Why don't we look at actually just formalizing that if we need some walking paths, some signage, some something to be able to do that and cut down on the amount of additional pavement that we're putting into this site. I think that's a great idea. I know that the town manager's office has been
talking to Smitty informally and um and so I believe we are maybe meeting with him tomorrow at least we've reached out to have that meeting tomorrow to discuss about uh collaboration on parking that might ease the uh the pressure there because you know frankly I I agree with
you Brian Brian what is the state requirement with respect to the number of parcels I believe and don't quote me on this but I believe it's 22 okay for a building this Mr. Brown. So, it's it's difficult to really endorse the site when it's so tight and
the footprint is so big. When we don't know at all what the design might look like, I'd be hesitant to recommend the site if I knew that I was going to have a just a giant box just to accommodate the space that you need. Sure. Is there any flexibility on the the
footprint of the building itself? Not just the footprint of the foundation, but you know how many floors it's going to be? Two. It'll be one with a basement. Oh, okay. Mr. Mr. Chair, if I might, please. So, yeah, to that question, what's a
little different about this process is that uh we are operating under the parameters of a grant, right? So, the grant gives us um two options and really it's sort of one option with a caveat.
Um so just looking through the lens of this the state grant we have to either pick this site or the alternate site that was identified and we have a very tight timeline to evaluate those two options. And in fact the reason I say
it's sort of one option with a caveat the the grant really spells out not you know study two sites and build you know give us a design on whichever one you like best. It says look at the preferred site that you have identified in your grant application and
if it is feasible to put a to site a library that meets the library program there then complete your design for that site. Now that doesn't mean that the town is absolutely committed to proceed with that. We have the we're in the in
the library grant process. We have the design grant. Um we may have a wait of a couple of years to get con the construction funding grant. Um in the interim if the town decides that, you know, we're really not satisfied with the library that we can put at this
parcel, we can choose a different site. It it won't be part of the library grant process. We won't get the 40 plus% um construction grant opportunity. So you're not completely bound to, you
know, to this timeline and and this option, but for practical purposes just to get the grant completed, you know, we don't have a ton of of options here, right? But I'm just trying to understand what are the constraints of the grant.
Do we have to build to a certain size to Yes. So the Go ahead. Yeah. Uh so we do have to achieve the building program because the building pro program was approved and that's what got us the grant. So they liked the library that we designed in the building program and that's what they'd like to
see completed. So it does have to have the elements that we laid out in that in that design. Do you have the opportunity to do a smaller footprint and two stories? uh it would be an option that would create uh significant hardships from staffing
because essentially you would have to double the staff in order to have for safety issues. Um with this library um you know you have uh based on the positioning of the circulation or the service point desk um you have 95%
vision of the public service area from that desk. You would not be able to achieve that in a two floor setup. So it sounds like uh unlike the u the police station, we have a tighter time frame here with respect to this
particular item. Yes. Uh so the the design is due to the state by the end of the year. So we'll be submitting this um if we move forward uh in December. uh it has to pass independent review and if it's accepted
then we're looking at probably 2028 before uh we would be up for state funding for their portion of construction. Um and so you know then we would have to seek local funding as well. So but do you need a vote tonight of
this board with respect to this application? It would be ideal given time constraints. We do have a lot of design to do as we move forward. Um and you know again we we did a lot of outreach on this. We you know uh people liked
people have a lot of fondness of this location. Um and so you know we we think that this is going to be a great library. You know we've we've done a lot of work. Uh there's still work to do. Uh but I truly do believe as somebody who
came into this process as it was already started and sort of inherited this project. I do believe this is is a really worthwhile pursuit. I'd like to see if there's any questions from the uh from the from the public. But yes, Mr. Just want to ask one more. You're the designer. I'm the owner in Oh,
okay. And we do have a um design uh outreach or a design engagement uh meeting tomorrow night at the East Falmouth Elementary School in the cafeteria at 6 PM. So there will be some design shared there and and opportunities to share
perspective with the designers there as well. Okay. So vote today and look tomorrow. Okay. Okay. I'm prepared to vote. I don't know. Well, let me just see if there are any comments from from anyone in the audience. Okay. If there are none,
the only thing I just want to add just because we're talking about libraries, I just want to thank you for your work. Uh this is a very interesting time in American history. Uh, I won't go beyond that to, you know, remain nonpartisan, but um, thank you for your work and thank your staff for your work. Libraries are incredibly important. Uh,
and just thank you for all you do. Um, I'm prepared to make the motion then, uh, to I don't have it in front of me. I'm not prepared to make the motion. Uh, motion to approve uh, the recommendation of East Famouth Library Building Advisory Committee to uh, identify 310 East Fmouth Highway as a
preferred site for planning and design of the new library. Second. Okay, we have a motion and a second. And is there any further discussion? N. Okay. All in favor? I I Okay, thank you. Thank your work.
Okay. Now, moving along. Uh and with uh two storms brewing in the South Atlantic, I think it's a very uh good time to have a uh presentation from the Fmouth Emergency Management Director regarding storm storm preparedness and
evacuation planning. Chief Smith or Mr. Renu would no introduction. I think you you you timed it up or you summed it up nicely and the timing is perfect. Thank you very much. See, so Peter, would you have this anywhere in particular?
I think it got loaded. Hope so. Let's try that big boat. Awesome. All right. Well, good evening and thank you for uh
such a lively conversation tonight. It was deja vu listening to planning infestations and building. So all all pertinent and all necessary. Um, so I was asked to provide just a a a brief
overview of emergency management and also to talk about the Cape Cod uh traffic plan, emergency traffic plan. and you know and I have a short window just to kind of give a a brief overview but um you know
as chief of the fire department I'm also the emergency management director and I work in coordination in conjunction with the town manager and town manager being uh you know uh responsible for the governing uh of of the town I work with
him and any declaration of any emergencies and such are are a coordinated effort. Um the Fmouth Fire and Rescue Department back in 2002 when we had our renovation done at our station. The previous uh fire chief, Chief Broer, had the forethought of
having the emergency operations center taken out of the basement of head uh town hall and brought over to uh the uh fire department up on the second floor. And so we utilize our uh training room also as our emergency operations center.
And we've used it many times uh since that uh in inception and um you know and placement back in 2002. And um it's been a a a a very good location for us to manage any type of emergency that uh
we've encountered over the uh last few decades in in reference to the storms that are brewing. We're coming toward the end of the hurricane season. uh when we talk about the traffic plan that's solely uh in regards to the hurricane uh
you know uh you know threats that we have but the storms down south from just watching them and and listening to some of our partners uh thankfully it's all going to stay kind of south and move a little bit east and uh you know we might have some surf issues but we're certainly not going to be impacted by
those storms um as long as nothing changes. So anyway, so just to kind of go over, you know, what our role is, you know, obviously emergency preparedness is uh, you know, is a is a vital
function, especially in a town like this because we are so uh impacted by weather and um we have certainly a lot of other things that we could encounter uh in our daily lives that uh you know may uh require us to uh have to come together
and manage uh you some type of event in town, but it's not uh it's not a costly thing and it's not a timeconuming thing because we we've been doing it for quite some time and it and it and for the fire department um and working with our public safety partners, including the
town uh manager's office and the board of selectman, you know, we've got pretty good experience and uh because the community being what it is, we work well together and I think that uh you know, it's it's a great partnership all around to try and manage and go ahead head with
uh trying to ensure that uh we're doing the right thing. So, it's worth its weight and gold to to be continuing to have these conversations. Just as a reminder, too, we we we don't rest when we're um dealing with emergency management. Um each month, every
Thursday, with the exception of the summertime, we meet um and we have our lo we host our local emergency planning committee. Um it's at two o'clock on Thursdays at in our EOC at headquarters and we come up with a different topic each uh each month. This this past week
we had a a cyber security expert talk to us about AI because it is something that could threaten town government. So we wanted to talk about that within our group um to have some type of preparedness because our IT people are uh you know always working on some of
these issues. So we thought that that was something that we could uh you know bring up as a topic and each month we come up with something new that uh we can present and uh you know and discuss. So as many know there could be two types
of uh you know of emergencies that could be out there. We either have natural or man-made disasters and our natural disasters are just mainly weather related. As you can see, you know, we are affected by winds. Who knew that
we'd be talking about droughts, um, but we are earthquakes, we've had a couple, um, emergency diseases, pandemic, not so much influenza, COVID, and here we go. We do have heat issues, hail with that comes with some thunderstorms. We could
have some damage. Uh, landside debris, not not so much except some of our coastal areas might have some issues. lightning, tornadoes. Who knew we'd have one, you know, hit uh down in Woods Hole and one come up Buzzard's Bay. And mainly what we see is
the winter and ice storms that affect us on a more general uh basis through uh each year. Uh sink holes, haven't really encountered any of those. That's a good thing. I wouldn't want to be on the road when that happens. um man-made. We certainly can uh you know encounter that
in our daily uh lives working in the fire department. We run into structure fires and things like that which uh can occur and they can be small in scale or if we had uh a a large scale fire confilration or something that certainly would be very impactful. Nuclear power
we have that nearby radiological emergencies as a result of these nuclear power plants. Fmouth Hospital uses a small amount of radiological um uh substances for some of their X-ray uh evaluations. Uh and they keep us a
breast of that every single month. We they they always give us a uh a um um pre-plan from them to let us know where everything is. It doesn't change, but they keep up with that as part of their ongoing u oversight of any of the
radological uh materials that they have up there. very small in numbers. Chemical threats, we could have that. And obviously the last few things, you know, we, you know, the civil unrest that's happening across the country, you know, we still we talk about that and we work in partnership with our police
department. And as far as aircraft, we do have a small airport and uh we have encountered air aircraft crashes. They're not in large scale, but we've had have had um some significant uh impact from smaller aircraft. And
recently we had one land on our beach and successfully take off from the beach which was uh which was phenomenal to watch. Um but they do happen in in this small town of ours. So our emergency operations when it's set up on the left hand side that's an
actual storm event during one of our blizzards. Our personnel get together we set up our room in in in a situation we call it a King Arthur room where we kind of square off everything. So, if we have everybody in that's uh seated at the table, we can all talk to one another
like I'm doing with you right now. And it helps to um you know to uh to streamline some of the conversations. One of those individuals that's sitting there was our Eversource rep representative at this meeting and um he was embedded with us along with the police department, the DPW ham radio
operators and the room is set up so that we can quickly set it up and uh to to get things running and then we can build upon it and we've been very fortunate with our IT personnel. They've done a phenomenal job to continue to uh uh to help us build with this infrastructure
to support our management. on the right hand side that was our recent uh road race and we we even we grew it in in in in size and in technology. We have more more uh computer monitors. We have rolling computer screens that are all
touch um touch screens that we have that are allow us to have that interaction with particular screens. We can put up now drone feeds and things. So this operations center has been growing in scale to meet some of the um the issues
that we face whether it's a storm related issue uh as I stated natural or man-made but also we utilize it when we have planned events found vulnerable when we have our fourth of July event when we have our road race event there's a larger um you know impact on us
because we have so many people coming into town and it really weighs on our services and what's necessary is for us to manage manage the event. And we use it um in conjunction with all of our partners and in conjunction with the town administration and we're able to make sure that we can have a central
location to manage uh this. And if we if we pre-plan something and we can set this room up, it works out uh you know to our in our best interest. And if we have to get together in short notice, we can do the same thing and put together
um you know uh uh this room for all of those uh individuals that need to be there to participate in um in the emergency management operations center. Uh Boyd Dlo besides being our fire inspector and being on the committee for the police station location, he's also
works with my with me on the staff in the emergency operations center. and uh you know we've been you know how many years we've been doing storm uh you know oversight. So you know in a nutshell the algorithm that that we utilize uh for the
emergency operations center all kind of stems from the town manager when uh you know in most instances in storm related issues we have plenty of forecasting so we can really uh discuss uh what's what might be forthcoming. The other thing is that we work with our partners in the at
the county level. We also do it with the state level. We have representatives from MIMA that joins us and the Barnes County uh emergency uh regional planning committee works uh in conjunction with a very large scale of uh of uh partners
that all come together when we start to do some type of readiness discussion and everybody's at the table and everybody talks about their individual communities and the impacts and the resources that might be available. So, we work well with everybody within the town. Once it's activated, we get the ball rolling.
We work in conjunction with the police department, DPW, and all of our other agencies. And if you look at that um that scale, the DPW, the water department, building department, uh emergency services, health, school department, harbor master in in
Eversource and all these utilities have all been at one point or in time have been in the room with us working to manage uh largecale events. As you know, during blizzards or some of the um storms in the past, the no-name storms that have come in in the town and have
created such havoc for us because of trees, power lines, uh you know, flooding. We need to have everybody together so that we can coordinate our efforts and try and get critical infrastructure back online and this emergency operations center in this central location allows
us to do all to work within all those functions that you see there. Um it's it we haven't had something in large scale that would be uh you know something that would trip like uh you know a bigger presence from like the federal agencies and stuff but we utilize incident
management and all the things that you see on the right hand side are all part of incident management and and we call it scalable. So anything that happens in town on emergency management level or emergency response, we can build upon it um and make sure that we're addressing
some of these critical needs. Um with regards to the emergency traffic plan, just wanted to show you this is the state plan for the Cape the emergency um the emergency traffic plan. The one
thing that we have been fortunate over the years because this was developed in 2013. It's supposed to be evaluated um regularly and I think the last time they did it was in 2022. Um it's available on on the state on many
state websites. You can make access and um and you can you can bring it down to this size. So that entire book can be shrunk down to you know a flyer. And essentially what it is is just a
uh a valuable tool to try and move public out of the Cape area should we be uh subjected to some massive storm that in conjunction with uh MIMA
uh the the governor's office local government if everybody got together and decided that the impact was going to be that great they could put this plan in place and essentially What it does is it's it just uses Route 6 and Route 28
to the bridges and it'll it's uh coordinated and it's and it's planned through MIMA and the state police to make sure that we can move personnel or individuals off of the uh the Cape. They say it's not an evacuation plan,
but I don't know how else to describe it because if everybody's leaving the Cape, it is an evacuation if you're being told to leave. But most storms that might be very impactful, might be on a local level where we're trying to move people out of certain areas because they might
be prone to floods. Um, and if that's the case, the the uh Falmouth hosts one of several shelters that are in that are on the Cape and at the high school is where our shelter is. And if we stood that up and we had to move people, at least we could move them in locally. if
we had to move them in a in large scale off off Cape. This traffic plan is well coordinated and well designed by the state police and it's managed by local police as well that they would be able to move people over o over the bridge and shut down certain uh roads that
you'd normally would feed into um to Route 28 or to Route 6 and just make it one accessible lane that goes um either north or west. and um they would just flow everybody off the bridge. The one thing that is interesting with this plan
is that if they decided to shut the bridges off midstream and they're moving people off, they'll stop the traffic flow at the Otis Rotary and they'll stop it at exit two on Route Six and they'll stop the traffic and move what residual
traffic is left between the Rotary or exit two and the bridge and they'll move everybody off and that's it. They the base is set up for um shelters and staging and they have different tiers of how they would set up moving people onto
the base and that would be where anybody that got caught in this movement could be uh sheltered that you know in my in in my tenure in the fire department being here as long as I have I've never seen anybody do any practical or you
know or type drills where they where they exercise this. So, it's all written out. I it'd be interesting to see how it got going, but if there's enough time and enough presence of uh of resources and such, I'm sure that this plan could
accommodate, you know, any uh any type of evacuation that was halted because of the bridges were affected. Um but on a local level, we work with all our partners to make sure that we are um you know, we are coordinating our efforts.
We're also ensuring that everybody's doing this in a safe manner. And once you know we were ever uh you know uh all on the same page where something like this was going to take place then again we would get together at the emergency operations center in at the fire
station. and we would work together to to manage that with the town government and our local uh public safety partners to ensure that we were getting um everybody uh safely to wherever they needed to be. So the plan is is
pretty much you know uh illustrated and also um written out in these pamphlets and they're available on our um uh website or on our town website, excuse me. So you can access it if you went to
the Fmouth uh town website. You could go over to the fire department and we have it all listed on the lefth hand side of the page. Um, and what you see here is you could would see, you know, you'd be able to access these that just shows you
in this example on the left hand side that everything's going towards the Bourne Bridge. They shut down certain roads like you like I I know every everybody uses ways or or Apple. Everybody likes to take Trow Bridge and go around. You wouldn't be able to go around. They would shut it off. They
want to have direct access and and the same thing would go for Route Six. So, um, it's the state police would have a lot of detours and blockages for everybody. Chief, I'm going to ask you to kind of wrap it up if you don't mind on the end. Appreciate it. Okay. So, anybody that um is is interested in
our Facebook page, our um administrative assistant, Kim Stum is also our assistant emergency management director and she and along with Boyd also take care of uh a lot of our Facebook post because we post a lot on social media leading up to any events. But you certainly can access through the town
website. We have emergency preparedness page which gives a lot of information for preparedness to help anybody in the general public to set up to set themselves up for success to be safe at home to be prepared should there be a pending uh storm or uh event. Um and
again the other resources that are available are through MIMA which is our state um uh management direction FEMA on the federal level and the ready.gov would also give you the availability of uh you know of accessing other
information that would be very handy uh getting yourselves prepared for storms. So thank you very much chief all and thank you. You're very confident uh in the plan. Thank you. Can I ask I am I I'd be interested to you know we
you know I we always tell people that you know in the in in the fire department you know we we work well sometimes under chaos. So something like that's going on I'm sure working with all our partners we'd be able to you know to make sure everybody's uh being taken care of and we'll manage
it. Question two very quick questions that I hope the answer is a very simple yes to each of them. Okay. In the case of an extreme storm, does the second floor of the fire department feel like a secure enough location for an emergency operations center? Yes.
And excellent. We're one for one. Um, have there been conversations about the impact of uh bridge construction andor renovations on our emergency plans? Not at our level. I know that uh Bourne and Sandwich have been very active in
those conversations, but I it hasn't gotten to emergency managers on on you know on this part of the Cape yet. Okay. Okay. Mr. Brown, if we were to have a major hurricane heading our way and there was an evacuation order, who would coordinate that uh
traffic management at the Otis Rotary and the bridge? Who takes over on the regional scale? The state police. Okay. state police manages all that and they would work with their local partners but this this is this plan was developed by the state police and MIMA and they'd be coordinating that uh you
know the traffic patterns and plans and one more if I could um I saw this presentation slightly different a few years back and uh it was highlighted that we had that capability of petitioning off that road uh that room upstairs in case there was a need for
federal authorities in some kind of a a different capacity than in the local capacity. Is that still in play? We have the capability of splitting that room uh in to two parts uh on a on a we either can have an a partial or a full
of activation of the EOC on a smaller scale which you saw that picture of the storm. That's half of the room. If I ever had to break it down, we could. And we have we duplicated things on both sides of the petition. And I also have another room uh this the chief's
conference room. It's smaller, but that mobile uh screen that we have now will enable us to have a third area if we had to have our uh you know our government officials all together to kind of talk in you know and uh you know in a secure area. Thank you,
Mr. Reed. This agenda item is on there because of you. So if you have a question, please. No, I I appreciate your time and this is this came from the constituency. Someone was asking about this in especially in relation to the bridges being down. So appreciate it having been in the 4th of
July and the road race traffic. You have your work cut out for you because it is impossible to get out of town and that's not chaotic. Yes, you've added an emergency situation onto this. It's going to be very chaotic. So I trust you have the plans, you're working on it. Um, my one concern, and
it's not really a question, is just how do we get this information out more broadly to the average citizen so that they don't jump on uh ways trying to beat you, right, and get around you and add more chaos?
How can we talk about these emergency plans so people are aware? So if um if there was an event that was forecasted, we you know many days in advance we start to look at it. These storms have been brewing down down in the Atlantic
for for a while and um you know we pay attention to them. if they are getting closer. We have meteorologists that for for storm uh you know just for storm sake they give us information in whether there's confidence in something that's
happening and then if there is real high confidence it gives us a little bit of time to get together to to start to manage this a little better. Um and you know I'm confident that with everybody that we have in place that we'll be able to to manage it. But thankfully our
partners, especially the police department, we've worked together and we we do because of the road race and uh the uh Fourth of July, we have great planning now and we talk together on a regular basis and we do it several
months in advance for those two events. But on a regular basis for storms, we we also work together with our partners and I'm confident that we'll be able to manage it. Thank you. Hopefully, we won't get a chance to try it out next week, Mr. No. Well, no. The winter's coming
though. Uh, thank you. I Googled Cape Cod emergency traffic plan and mass.gov immediately came up right there. Yeah. So, perfect. So, any any, you know, you know, even with our our meetings that we have every
every third Thursday, we have FCTV joins us. We have the capability of live streaming out of the fire station as well. We have they have the capabilities. And if we had to do press releases or if somebody from town government had to get on uh on on the government channel, we can do that from
there. So, you know, everything's uh you know, well situated to help to get the message out to everybody. And the only other thing, this is super timely for me for my day job. The the Senate uh the joint committee on emergency preparedness is coming to Mass Maritime tomorrow uh because we're a regional leader on this. So, thank you
for your work and those regional touched on a bit, but the regional collaboration uh on this particular issue is really strong. Yeah, Mass Maritime is very helpful for us, too. We support them and they work well with us. So, thank you. Y thank you, Chief. Absolutely.
Feel much better today now. Right now. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. Have a good night. Okay. With the indulgence of my uh my colleagues, we're going to skip F for the time being and go right to G, which is to discuss and consider a vote to
approve an application to the Falmouth affordable housing fund from Habitat for Humanity of Cape Cod regarding the project located at 805 Gford Street Extension. Mr. Renaw. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm going to go through this real quickly and then turn it over to either Kim or the habitat
rep. Um so as the select board may recall um the uh this goes back about a year. Um the uh Habitat for Humanity Cape Cod submitted an application requesting $500,000 in funding. $250,000 of which uh was for acquisition of the land at 805 Gford and the other $250,000
was for construction of four homes for home ownership. Um importantly all four homes would be deed restricted as affordable in perpetuity. On July 29th of last year, um the uh Habitat for Humanity Cape Cod went before the select board as trustees of the housing fund who uh voted to award
that requested amount to $500,000. During the subsequent permitting process uh through the zoning board of appeals, Habitat for Humanity of Cape Cod agreed to include an innovative alternative septic system, which as you all know um is added an additional cost. And that um
request and consideration was um due to environmental concerns in the community with regards to traditional septic systems. So in essence um what Habitat for Humanity of Cape Cod is requesting is an additional $100,000 in funding
assistance to help uh offset that additional cost and innovative alternative septic systems. And with that, I'll turn it over to the representative. Please introduce yourself. Um I'm Norin Brown, director of land acquisition. Norin Brown, director of land acquisition for um Habitat
remaining of Cape Cod. Thank you to the chair and the members of the board to consider our application. Um as it was explained, we uh we have elected to install this new technology, although this um particular site 805 Gford Street is not in a nitrogen sensitive area, but
Habitat does take pride in protecting the environment and it was strongly encouraged as the project developed over time. So, we have a this side here. We have four homes. We have four homes going in behind um our restore. Um the lot two is a middle one with all the
more activity on it. And that's where the shared septic system will be. So, we've have to extend that. Um there'll be more um hardware in the ground. So, we have a little more additional cost. We received um estimates from two uh provisional um approved
um septic designers and we decided on the one that was more economically beneficial. Um so that'll go on lot two. It'll be a shared system for all four homes and um it's 25,000 per home and that'll be freeing up some of the construction funding that we already
have to get um the funding in for this the septic which will happen earlier on in the project. We've already received the comprehensive permit from the ZBA. We've gone past the 20-day appeal period and we're hoping to take title um in the fall of this year and start um some infrastructure work next spring.
Okay. Well, thank you. As as as the members will probably remember, our guidelines actually go up to $150,000 uh a unit. Uh and up to this point, we have allocated 125,000. So by doing this we would be you know getting to what our
our guideline current guideline is with respect to uh what what what we can allocate for projects such as this. So uh any questions would it be premature to move approval? Not at all. Second.
Does somebody have the uh Here you go. You don't have it up there on your acting as trustees of the Fmouth Affordable Housing Fund. Uh I move approval to award $100,000 in supplemental funding to Habitat for Humanity of Cape Cod for a collective total of all appropriations
to equal 600,000 for the project located at 805 Gford Street Extension and authorized the town manager to execute the documentation setting forth the terms of the financial award to Habitat for Humanity of Cape Cod. Second. Okay, we have a motion and a second. Any further discussion?
Seeing and hearing none vote. All in favor? I I Okay. All right. Thank you very much. Good luck. Good project. Thank you. Okay. We will now go back to uh F and uh
discuss and consider a vote to approve an application to the Felmouth how Felmouth affordable housing fund from Bushwood 545 LLC. Michael Gasso regarding the project located at 545 Main Street. Mr. Wrenchaw.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to give a real quick overview introduction. So, as you all know, I've been here for about two and a half years now as your town manager. Um, let me just my first tour down Main Street, I saw this really interesting existing building that was sitting vacant, and I think most of you know how I feel about
properties that sit vacant. Um, so I say this because this is a really unique opportunity. Um, and it struck me. It left an impression on me. Um, this, like the last application, goes back to June of last year, um, when Bushwood 545 LLC being represented by Mr. Galasso, uh,
made an initial presentation. Um, we've gone back and forth over several iterations of requests for funding. Um, as you all know, um, it's been well documented, u Mr. Glasso's efforts to secure, um, additional funding at the state level in addition to this request,
uh, of the local Felmouth affordable housing fund. Um, I'll say this. First off, I appreciate Mr. Glass's persistence because I do think this is a really unique opportunity. We've talked about just this evening, um, clearing uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, fields that are
currently, um, undeveloped but full of trees and vegetation. This is an opportunity for us to repurpose an existing facility and turn it into um, what over 60 units of affordable housing, 33 or 34 of which would be deed restricted. So, I think this project
from my sense is so important um that it it it it it it um it uh was it was the catalyst for additional conversations with Mr. Glasso. The last of which and uh as you all know my the recommendation in your packet tonight uh was for a
total of $3.4 million in funding um Felmouth affordable housing fund through the CPC. Um of that $3.4 4 million total allocation 1.5 of that was going to be dedicated allocated towards acquisition of the site of the land um
based upon some new information and you have in front of you at your desks a letter from Mr. Galasso a memo to me um dated today um we had an opportunity we being the Felmouth Affordable Housing Fund working group this morning to meet
with Mr. Glasso uh to discuss um what I think is a pretty significant development. Um and I'll I'll summarize and I'll turn it over to Mr. Glasser to go through some of the details, but this is important. Uh the original uh the seller reduced the the original asking price uh down to $3.2 million. Uh it's
my understanding the seller is going to receive a charitable uh tax deduction for the difference between the appraised value and this new reduced sale price. the seller takes out will take out a note of a million dollars uh which would then be subordinated to the town's uh $2.1 million uh recommended funding
level for the acquisition. Um m uh Mr. Chairman and members of select board throughout all these iterations and discussions with Mr. Glasso and I'll say this um the concern has always been protecting protecting the town recognizing the importance of this project protecting the town's
investment in this project. Um so that being first and priority um of any monies that were that were allocated for the acquisition was important to the uh affordable housing fund working group. Um this development this morning places us in that first priority first
position. So I feel confident it protects that investment that interest I should say of the town's resources. Um and it allows the project we hope to move forward. So u my recommendation and then I'll stop talking and turn it over to Mr. Lasso is to revise the original recommendation I'm making you tonight in
your packets. 3.4 total allocation uh of uh you acting as trustees to the uh to the trust. 3.4 total allocation 2.1 million of which would be uh allocated uh for land acquisition. Um so Mr. Gasso um I tried to lay the stage for you sir.
It's been a long process and again we thank you for your your persistence and your patience. So I'll turn it over to you sir. Welcome. Thank you Mr. Chairman. Thank you, town manager. Thank you very much for that for that great summary of where we're at today. And I thank town staff
for the persistence in working with us on this project. We've been here for a little bit over three years now working on this project through numerous meetings that we've had with the select board, with the working group, ZBA, with the planning board. And um we we
strongly support the um the recommendation of the town manager and the working group this evening. So, um I have a short presentation I can go through if you'd like answer any questions that you have, but um you
know, we've worked um over the last three or four months with the sellers of the property, the memories who uh own the property of over 20 years to come to where we're at this evening, which I think is a a great uh solution and a
great compromise on all parties to move this project forward. and their biggest concern was um you know we've had the property in escrow for under a purchase and sale agreement for almost five years now and they've been very patient with us. We've made a lot of progress on this
project putting together the financing. It's a $28 million project. We have roughly about 25 million of that together as of today and with your recommendation and we have an application that's due to the state on
um Thursday for another 1.7 million that would if we're successful with that application which I believe that we will be because we're very competitive. Then um we will pretty much have all the funds together that we need to move this project forward and start construction hopefully sometime next year. So, um, I
can answer any questions you have. What you have in front of you is, um, you know, what's changed in this project since the last time I was here before before the board. You know, the Mr. Card requirement is that we would have need to have seven units of affordable housing. We've always surpassed
surpassed that. Um, last time we were here in our original application was for 30 affordable units. eight of those at 80% mean income, 22 at 120% and 37 those 37 at 140 are the ones that were allowed
to rent at a a minimum of six month lease and then monthtomonth after that. That's sort of for our temporary workers um for people who come to town that need a need a place to live. Maybe they're going to work for the police department, the fire department who beyond they need
a temporary place. That's what those uh 37 units are. Since that time, we've heard from the select board, you know, that there's a need for more affordability in these projects. So, in working with the Fouthmouth Housing Authority, which I'm
a a member of, um we've made an application to get seven projectbased certificates for the project, which will allow us to rent seven of the units at 50% of median income and the rest of 27 of the uh 33 34 affordable units at 80%.
So, we've made some big strides, I think, in both raising the funds for the project and also the affordability. Um, you know, we've added a couple of new uh partners to our project, too. Um, our nonprofit
uh co-developer is uh Bill Grogan with the he's the president of the planning office of urban affairs. They've been around since 1969. and with his help is how we were able to structure the agreement that you have in front of you tonight because he's a nonprofit and that's how the seller will be able to
get some credits for selling the property to us below appraised value. So that's been apparent he's been very uh helpful in getting us to uh where we're at tonight. Um I mentioned the Mammurray family and the help of Kevin Murphy and Pat Callahan, two local folks who have
helped us very much in these negotiations with the Mammories. Um, you know, we had our local business gentlemen who have put in some initial funding for the project. Um, the support of, uh, the MBL in HOIE, the Chamber of
Commerce, Mike Casperian, um, my assistant Ann Pride, who's helped me research a lot of the grants that we needed to have. So, we're here this evening to um request your approval of the town manager's recommendation that
would allow us to uh increase the funding from 2.4 to 3.4. That is still under your guidelines of 150,000 per unit. We're at 100,000 per unit and permission to allow us to use 2.1 million of the 3.4 to move forward and
acquire the site. So, I'm available to answer any questions that you may have. Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Glasso. I'm gonna make a statement first. Uh I was on the affordable housing uh working group. Uh I have seen how uh how diligent and
persistent you have been uh in in moving this forward together with Kim Fish and Jed Corno from from the town staff with respect to responding to questions as they came up. there's been an awful lot of uh give and take. Um, and I
appreciate it. It's it's a testament to good collaboration between developers uh and the town nonprofits to uh to help us solve our uh our housing crisis. Uh I want to echo u what Mr. Wrenchaw said as
a member of the committee or the working group. I was very concerned from the outset with respect to the town security with respect to the property. Uh I pushed uh and and asked for an analysis of what rights we might have with
respect to securing it. uh and uh this modification that now puts the town in the first place uh with respect to this acquisition with $2.1 uh million dollars
is a is a is a major uh improvement from what the uh last uh iteration was. Uh I do also want to mention that uh that the CPC in looking at this matter recommended uh 2.1 without the iteration that you've
mentioned uh this evening uh and recommended that the uh that the board consider uh acquisition funds of 2.1 million even when the board uh even when the town would not be in first position. So uh I think this is a a major
improvement. Uh I think the town's position is is very well secured. Uh the appraised value of the property is 4.2 or 4.3. Uh and uh you know we would be advancing less than 50% towards the appraised
value. So uh I'm I'm I'm in support of this uh application. Uh we've gotten many letters and emails supporting it as well. So uh I don't know if anyone else has any questions. I'm sure there are
some. So, uh, we'll start with, uh, Mr. Brown. Uh, just doing the math, it looks like so we're subsidizing at about 60,000 per unit for 34. Uh, if No, we're at 100,000 per unit for the 34 affordable units,
right? The other the other But now we're only coming up with 2.1. Is that right? The initial the total commitment tonight would be 3.4. Okay. of that 2.1 we're asking to be used that we can acquire the property with. Oh, okay.
And the and the balance will come at construction financing. Yes. Okay. Well, that's still well below our our cap. So, yes, it is. Yeah. Mr. Rich, I just wanted to speak to the persistence. I checked my Senate email. I 25 emails on this project. So, I will
at 24, one of those was about getting Gary to basketball. Um, but yeah, I think that um to speak to Mr. Renaw's comments. I think that, you know, we just had a whole two conversations about, you know, potential deforesting of properties. You know, zero west found
with highway that is probably the way we're going. Uh these this these type of projects are the way that we solve this crisis on Cape Cod with it's in a central location in downtown uh an existing building. Um, you know, I I
can't think of a better example uh uh of of a project. So, I'm I'm certainly in favor uh of this at the risk of just piling on. Um, also very much in favor appreciate all the work that has gone into finding um
something that that works um for for everyone. I feel like we are tiptoeing toward essentially a public private partnership, right? The and I love what you were saying, Mr.
Renshaw, about recognizing the potential. Um, you were very new in town and this was already underway. Um, and uh, I guess I would just hope that moving forward um, this board, our staff, our whole community can, if anything, be even more proactive so that
it doesn't have to take the kind of persistence that this project has taken in order to move other projects like this forward that get us affordable housing that meet incredible needs in our community with redevelopment. It just it ticks all the boxes. And so I'm really thrilled that we can actually
reach this point tonight. and and if I'm reading this latest memo correctly, potentially close within 90 days. That's our goal. I know that we have holidays and everything coming up, but I I know that the sellers would like to close before the end of the year, but we've we actually have an extension if
we need it beyond that, too. So, I think we have adequate time to accomplish that. Comment. Well, we could certainly ask if there's anyone in the public who would like to uh to make a comment or have a question. These
are many of our supporters who've been here numerous times already. So I appreciate we know you packed the audience Mr. I strongly support this project. I'm a retired neuroscientist who used to be the director of education at the Marine Biological Laboratory. So I'm familiar
with the challenges of research assistants, post-doal fellows, and graduate students at all six of our scientific institutions. And on top of that, since I've been retired, I've been making friends with more than 10 local
servers and bartenders who live in Felmouth year round who also have challenges finding housing. And I talk to them every day because I lift weights with them. And there are some of these people who are sharing a house with one
bathroom and there are six of them living there because that's how tough it is to find housing. in Felmouth and the fact that there are also many people who need to find temporary housing so that you know they
come here and they have to um you know identify maybe more permanent housing although that is also rare. So I very strongly support this project. I'm very happy to hear the support that I hear from you and I think in all realms of
people who support the economy of Felmouth, this is really really important. Thank you. Would you mind identifying yourself? I'm Thank you. My name is Ray Nishi. Thank you. And I'm a resident of Felmouth year round. Thank you.
Anyone else? Good evening. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My name is Carter Hunt. I'm live in Lynen Road here in Felmouth. I'm a member of the board of directors of the Capeen Islands Veterans Outreach Center and we've had conversations with Michael about adding veterans to the this
equation and I appreciate your support for this and so will our veterans. Thank you. You okay? Uh Mr. Brown, do you have a motion? Yes, got one. I recommend that the select board as trustees of the Felmouth
Housing Fund support this application with the following revised recommended motion. I move that the select board acting as trustees of the Falmouth affordable housing fund award 3.4 4 million to Bushwood 545 LLC for the
creation of affordable housing at 545 Main Street to be awarded as a loan secured by two mortgages on the property of which 2.1 million will be awarded for the acquisition of the property located at 545 Main Street and 1.3 million for
the construction of the 34 affordable deed restricted rental units with conditions to be further determined in the financial documentation and to authorize the town manager to execute the documentation setting forth the terms of the financial award to Bushwood 545 LLC.
Second. Okay. I just So you don't want to say anything about how important it is for young people such as yourself. [Music] We need more housing for young people. Okay. We have a motion and a second. Is
there any further discussion amongst members? Hearing or seeing none. All in favor? Hi. Hi. Very good. Finally. [Applause] You guys get to leave now. I I I liked how the motion was as long as possible,
too. I saw Okay, we're very good. Thank you very much. [Laughter] So, we are actually still very close to being on time. So, uh we're going to go
to H, which is we'll let everybody uh leave 30 minutes to vote articles. Possibly not. How about three? Try to not be as I'm trying. Thank you.
Congratulations. Okay, we're going to uh vote the articles and execute the warrant for the November 17, 2025 town meeting. Mr. Renua, Mr. Peter Johnson, stop. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Uh, so we're going to go through this. I'm going to what
approach it 30,000 foot, then we're going to drill down, but I hope to go through this in about 20 minutes and answer any questions you may have. Um so included in your packet as you all know um the proposed uh town meeting warrant currently includes 26 articles. Nine of those are financial. There's two petition articles included in that nine.
Five of the uh proposed articles are zoning amendments. Two are bylaw amendments. Three authorized special acts to be submitted to the state legislature and four are non-financial petition articles. Uh one of the special act proposes a change from an elected town clerk to an appointed town clerk.
Changes supported by the current uh town clerk, Mr. Palmer. As the work of the town clerk has become more complex, uh we feel it's important to have a town clerk with professional experience in elections and the functions of town clerk's office. Uh three of the articles address Cape Cod Country Club land
transfer related, as you all know, to the proposed solar development, Pure Sky, uh of which two of those uh articles are proposed by staff. One of those articles authorizes acceptance of the land itself and one authorizes a petition to the legislature seeking an exemption from current procurement laws
to allow land to be accepted subject to a lease. What I'd like to do now, Mr. Chairman, is go through and again included in your packet is a um a copy of the warrant with proposed 26 articles. You'll note they don't include recommendations. That comes next uh next meeting, October 14th. So, this
literally is the uh select board's mission tonight is to uh vote the articles and execute the warrant. So, with no further ado, um what I'm going to do is go through each of the 26 um answer any questions and I'll try to get consensus. If there's any desire to uh
not include a particular article on the warrant, let me know that as I go through. Article one, um as you all know, is just uh necessary electing choosing necessary town officials for the upcoming year. Article two is always that hearing of reports from committees and other town officers. Article three
is to see if the town will vote to appropriate sum of money for the purpose of funding capital improvements um to determine how that uh how that uh to determine how the same shall be raised and by whom expended. So that's the capital funding piece. Um that requires
a simple majority of town meeting vote. Article four uh to is to see if the town will vote to appropriate a sum of money for the purpose of funding capital improvements to determine the same shall be raised and by whom appropriated. Um this requires a twothirds town meeting vote. Article five um is uh to
appropriate a sum of money for the purpose of providing non- capital projects to determine how the same shall be raised and by whom expended. These as you all recall are uh non- capital projects that come up through the year. Article six is uh to seek approval for a vote to appropriate a sum of money from
free cash to supplement the FY26 budget, determine how the same should be raised and by whom expended. Article seven um is a transfer of sum of money from the fiscal year 2026 budget to make necessary adjustments throughout the year. Article eight is to see if the
town will appropriate a million dollars. Um this is um kind of a replenishment of the special education stabilization fund. um in the amount of a million dollars. Article nine, as you all know, um is uh town seeking town vote to amend the code
of Felmouth by deleting chapter 150 noise in its entirety and then replacing the said chapter with a new chapter 150 noise control. Um Mr. Chairman and members of the board, um I'm going to stop here because included in your packet is a copy of a redlinined uh
version of uh the proposed uh noise bylaw update. Um, as you all recall, three weeks ago, uh, we had a community forum over the Gus Kanty Rec Center. Uh, received a lot of public input, good public input from, uh, from that group,
and I don't know how many folks attended that meeting, but it was a lot. The room was full. Um, subsequent to that meeting, uh, we were continuing to receive input, um, from members of the community, members of the select board. So the version, my point is the version that you currently have, the red line version incorporates, I feel comfortable
saying uh most if not all of those comments that were heard. It addresses a lot of concerns about um types of noise. Uh a lot of concerns that we heard in the community forum a few weeks ago were related to existence. What are we going to do? How do we handle and address uh
courts that have already been permitted private property? So, as you can see in the redline version um that has been uh produced by town council, it addresses a lot of those concerns. Um I've said this before, I'll say it again. Um I'm a huge proponent and believer that in order to
move forward um with um a new pickle ball facility, it's going to be important for the town to have uh some protection, some assurance. I feel comfortable that aid noise bylaw um is going to be an important piece of that establishing that community standard and
threshold. um that um everybody in in the community feels comfortable with. So obviously a section of this noise bylaw update includes specifically addresses pickle ball. Um there's other elements obviously that it touches upon. Um I feel in general um that this red line
version of the noise bylaw before you tonight for consideration of inclusion in the warrant is a huge improvement over the current noise bylaw which I think was adopted in the in the mid70s. It's it's it's difficult for us to enforce. Um it's not objective. It's really not measurable. Um this bylaw
makes it much more objective and in my opinion uh easier to enforce. Um so with that um I'd like to stop there um as I said before and answer any questions you have specific to um this proposed article 9 um the uh the noise bylaw.
Anyone have any questions? Um, not sure I have questions. Um, I guess I would say I agree with um the vast majority of the town manager's comments. Um, our current noise bylaw is woefully out ofd and out of step with our
community. Um, and I very much appreciate the efforts um of staff and the working group to both expedite the drafting um of the bylaw in the wake of delays of the noise study and to then um
in a very expedited way to integrate extensive feedback um into the redline copy that we that we have right now. Um and I very much understand the need for a regulatory or other framework within which to move forward with any pickle
ball development. But um as I've shared with uh town manager and assistant town manager previously, I continue to have really fundamental concerns both about the approach of the current bylaw or draft proposed bylaw as well as some of
the details in it and and just don't feel like um to put it onto the warrant at this point as being at the request of the select board would would be authentic. Um I I don't feel ready to move forward with the the noise bylaw as
currently drafted. Okay. Anyone else questions, comments? What would you change in it? So I I'll say for one, I feel very uncomfortable with the idea of crafting a broad noise bylaw and singling out one very specific activity within it. Um, I
understand that pickle ball um is a different sound of kind of sound from either um a tonal general noise and tonal sound, which the state already sets different standards for those. One of my other concerns with the current draft is that the state standard is different from the standard that we're
adopting in this bylaw and ours is more lenient at 5dB above uh background as opposed to 3dB above background for tonal. Um, and I would feel much more comfortable with understanding, okay, if if what's different about pickle ball is that it's impulsive sound, maybe we need a standard for impulsive sound, but not
specifically pickle ball. And otherwise, if what's needed for pickle ball is a series of looking at it as more of a land use. This is a specific land use and activity type, and we need some ground rules around this land use and activity type. Doing that, but not
specifically as a a noise bylaw. Um I Okay, Mr. Richardson, I was very eloquently put and I land there for the same reason. And then for just a I and I and I do appreciate the the redline strikeout version is a
significant step in the right direction. I was particularly fond of the um change of the enforcement uh from the police health department. Um, I think we're and open to hear what you guys think on this, but I think in terms of how does this change if we wait until if whether
we want to bring this up again for the next town meeting, I don't think that the amount of pickle ball will substantially increase in the next 6 months until the next meeting. Um, in terms of why I I think that more time is needed, I didn't attend the community forum. Um, shuts out the enterprise. It
was it was a good article on it. Uh, from what I've heard, uh, I I'm not prepared to to to approve this one either at this time. Uh, yeah, I I feel the same way and I and also I think just and maybe Mr. Johnson sty wants to talk about the
exigencies of the funding and so forth but as a as I understand it as a practical matter u given the timing of requests and so forth that if we don't do anything at this meeting and actually do something in April uh you know after
some more reflection and and comments and and and iterations and so forth that that the the the actual construction won't be really delayed as a result of having this on April's uh town meeting. Is that correct?
So essentially that is correct. So the the timing issues here are that um first just to reiterate what the town manager said. We certainly feel strongly that it would be irresponsible to construct a new pickle ball facility without a noise
bylaw in place that we know the pickle ball will survive um so that we don't have another new pickle ball shut down new pickle ball court. But so with respect to the timeline, um we have always contemplated using community
preservation funds, seeking applying for community preservation funds for construction. We have used town general funds for the design of these uh of these facilities and recently uh received word that a small additional
amount that we will need for design would be contributed by a nonprofit donation. Um, so the cycle for community preservation funding for a project like this would start with an application in August.
August of of next year would be the earliest. So if we have a bylaw in place in April, um, we would be able to submit an application in August. Don't you get to you in a second. Can I ask um
was the 5dB used specifically because we felt like that would be leveraged to allow the pickle ball? Are we getting to that? So, so we had um actually two uh acoustical sound engineering firms
conduct two separate studies. Uh the last of which we incorporated uh into this uh recommended Blaw update. Um 57 was the original. We've changed that, upped it to 60 dB. Um what they did, and
I'm gonna Peter can probably speak better to this than I can right now. Um they looked at um alternate sites, uh Trotting Park being one of those, and then two additional sites, and we asked the uh acoustical engineer to um
measure uh at various distances from the property line to the courts of property line of existing homes what the decel readings would be. So they kind of simulated that. They measured at Ny Park. They looked specifically at Ny Park and took actual measurements of uh pickle ball games as they were being
played to try to use that as kind of a metric as well. Um so it's 50 it's 60 dBs as the current um uh uh proposed bylaw stands now. Um would be that threshold. I mentioned earlier when I first started the conversation um about my feeling that it's important to
establish a community standard. um other communities that I've managed in um also struggle. This is not unique. Um citing a pickleball facility, especially multiple courts when I was out in Colorado, it was a huge issue as well. Um and and in other places as well. Um
uh so it's important again to establish that what is that community standard? What is everybody comfortable with in the in the not everybody what are the majority of of the Felmouth community comfortable with in terms of that that very unique uh noises produced by by the
sport of pickle ball and uh and again based upon the results of the uh acoustical engineer study we came up with that 60dB um and then compared it for those of you who attended the community meeting compared that to other different um sounds right that are more
common to folks like a car passing by a roadway within within 100 ft. So, um we felt pretty good. But the number but the number I was referring I believe Miss Goldstone was referring to the relative background noise and that the the tonal sound relative to background.
Okay. The D state standard is 3dB above background. So ours would be more lenient than the state standard. And that was really key in the uh development of the standards for wind turbines because we found that the
background noise was very significant factor in considering total noise. Like say if you're next to a highway, your background noise is so loud that pickle ball doesn't matter. But if you're out in the woods in Trotting Park, it's a big it's a big
factor because it's pretty quiet out there unless kids are playing baseball or something. So, Mr. Richardson, I'm sorry, Miss Reed. Yeah. Uh, I would like to echo Miss Goldstone's statements. Bylaws, I
believe best practices are meant to be high level and not necessarily single out single activities. Um, in the 70s when this was created, we didn't single out the conversion of wooden baseball bats to metal ones, and I'm sure the
community hated that at the same time. This is a very important issue that we need to get right. This is based on what we're hearing. This is not an urgent issue. And that's my matrix that I typically use is importance and urgency.
I think it is extremely important for us to get this right. I think the urgency allows us uh more time. It's less urgent and that gives us more time to actually plan it out and work on other measures. Perhaps there's a different vehicle that
we can use or mechanism than a bylaw to commu to set a community standard. Perhaps there's other ways we can build in uh noise mitigation factors around uh the existing plans. I mean, as an
example, if the Cape Cod golf course comes to fruition, it was noted that we have 5,000 truckloads of earth that has to be moved somewhere. Could that be noise mitigation to create a burn?
Is that better used somewhere else like uh coastal resiliency? Um, but we have I think we have to get this right and time will help us do that by the April meeting. Uh, I know that we have a representative
of the pickle ball working group here uh that might like to say something. Miss Schneider. So I first I have to say this. So, as a one of the original members of community preservation,
um we never say we want to use CPC funds. We say we would ask for CPC funds because it's supposed to be an autonomous fund. And so, I apologize to Sandy that there was any statement made that makes it sound like
it's a given. the goal that the those of us working toward getting a facility in Felmouth so that people are not going and signing up for the new club pickle ball in Mashbby and they can actually
play here as part of what their taxes provide is that we would have this sound bylaw and be able to go and ask community preservation for a year from now's round of money if they could help
fund that. So that was a goal and if we were to go forward and it sounds very much like we shouldn't have had this discussion tonight and we should have just waited and worked on this and gone forward for April town meeting. It would
be that the town manager's office would have RFPs ready right away the day after town meeting ready to go so we could put out RFPs if the sound bylaw were to pass town meeting and get going on a design
that could go forward in time for an application to the CPC. That's the that's the tightness that this would be. Totally sounds like that's where we are and that that's what we would need to do. I want you all to understand that
the pickle ball working group, four out of the five are in support of what this redlinined draft looks like and think it's fair and doable and something that can work. I would say the one who's not
would rather see that we have no rules at all. And that's an that's some people's opinion. That is definitely an opinion. But we don't find that's going to happen. What is happening is that the
the actual world is working on quieting pickle ball as every day companies get it and they us pickle ball gets it and they were very interested in fact in what we came up with with our sound
studies and with what we're proposing for a sound bylaw because they are running into this all over the place. And while you think that pickle ball being named might be wrong, I can tell you I think you're going to see it more
and more. We as fmathites just happen to get into these debates earlier than some. So I want you to know that it looks good the way it is for the most part. If it needs education, tweaking,
talking about it more, great. We'll do all we can as a pickle ball working group to help with that. But I did want you to know that we would beg the CPC to help us build pickle ball courts and not just say we want to use that money.
Thank you. Fair enough. Thank you. Yes. And I think that is a really good point in terms of like I was reading that the innovations are trying to do to make it quieter. So hopefully they the geniuses, the engineers, whatever can figure out, you know, a way to make the sport
actually quit. It's a fairly young sport is what people, you know, fail to realize. So maybe something happens in six months time that makes this conversation, you know, less relevant. Hope hopefully and we'll have to incentivize people to turn in their old rackets. I'm okay with that. That's what it comes
to. I I'm more than happy. And then a procedural question, Mr. Chair. Do we u say no on each individual article or do we do this like the whole thing and then go back? So what I'm going to suggest um is I was trying to get consensus on on nine and it appears to me that um this the
consensus of the board is to hold article 9 as is currently proposed. Um article 10 is uh I think a companion if that's the if that's the term um in terms of a penalty. So, um, based upon the consensus I'm hearing, um, my
recommendation would be, um, we'll go through the rest of the articles and then, um, I would ask the select board to vote to, uh, vote the articles and execute the warrant, um, uh, removing articles 9 and 10 and then allowing staff to re renumber the articles,
taking those articles nine and 10 out. in an effort for efficiency. Um, is it possible to uh assume that all have been read thereafters and we can just call out any ones we have so as to not review
them all and if there aren't any, we can proceed to vote to approve or is it mandatory that we go through each one? I'd prefer that the town manager go through them uh as quickly as he has been doing it up to this point. We're getting to the point now where we've got, you know, several petition articles
and then uh Jed's helped me out. Jed Corn, the town planner, community development director, I'm sorry, has helped out with um drafting some of the uh uh uh uh recommendations, which you're not approving tonight, but some of the verbiage with regards to the the planning. So, let me go run through these quickly if you all don't mind, and
then uh like I said, I'll ask for a vote with the exception removing articles 9 and 10. So with that being said, um article 11 um uh is the police station uh funding article um for uh costs related to design, engineering and permitting of systems and improvements.
So that is article 11 that would require a twothirds uh town meeting vote. Article 12 um is a vote to authorize select board to petition general court of the commonwealth to enact special legislation to allow the town to expend a sum of money to reimburse certain property owners in the future town sewer
service area. cost associated with the purchase and installation of low pressure grinder pumps. This is the grinder pump um special uh special legislation that would be requested. Um article 13 um to see if town would vote to authorize the select board to petition of the general court of the commonwealth to enact special
legislation to amend the charter again as I mentioned to change the position of town clerk from an elected to an appointed position. Article 14. Um I'm sorry Mr. Yes. Uh town manager question regarding uh article 11 based
on the previous conversations and moving this to vote next week. What happens to article 11 regarding the design costs of the police station? So um article Yeah, go ahead. Uh nothing. So, so the you know the the
decision tonight is do you want to move forward with design for the a new police station at the funding funding design for the new police station in November. And um we need that vote tonight, not
next week. And then next next meeting I should say um you will potentially be voting a recommendation as to the specific site where that new station will be. There isn't a legal requirement that the the vote is not specific to the
site. The town meeting action is just design funds. It's just for the town meeting voters. It's right. It's just for you know the purposes of having a good ex being able to provide a good um presentation and explanation. What are we doing here? you know, we want to be able to say in
writing that we've sucked this. Thank you for the clarification. Uh, so Peter, could you be favorable, could you address article 14? You think I think you can speak to that a little bit better with regards to the solar um article 14? I I might keep passing that baton down
the road here to talk. So, article 14 and 15 are both about the proposed grow um groundmounted solar array to go at the Cape Cod Country Club.
Article 14 is to will um have a town meeting vote to authorize the select board to accept the donated land and it is these various parcels that are listed out here totaling uh approximately
139.43 43 acres in total. Um, what this also does is it not only allows the select board and the town to accept the land, but it also authorizes the select board to enter into um certain leases for the construction
and operation of the solar facilities. um to enter into a pilot agreement for tax purposes for the decommissioning agreement of of the um solar facility and to negotiate and enter into power
purchase agreements, any interconnection agreements, easements. It's really getting all of the permissions that are required for the land use part of it because it's such a um well because town meeting is required for all of for any kind of easement or disposition of
property but also because of the length of some of these that you'll need um to lay all of that out. So that is article 14. It's the land use accept the donation and permission to enter into all the agreements. Article 15. The
purpose of that is um because what it's really a timing issue. What is being proposed from um Pure Sky is they really wanted the town to
accept the land donation subject to the lease and subject to the leases and all of these agreements. That posed a little bit of a procurement problem for me. I it it doesn't quite jive as far as I'm concerned that we would the town would accept the land
subject to the leases. So what this does is it does it the other way. Um it allows us to um take control of the land and then immediately start negotiations back with the with the company to enter into all
these agreements. That still poses a procurement problem um that's not really allowed. you have to we would have had to bid it. But a way to um streamline this is just to ask the ask
the general court ask the state legislature knowing that this is a holistic deal. It has a bunch of moving pieces and parts and that um we have every intention of of having pure sky as
the partner for this whole deal and um we'll ask permission. I don't see any issue with it being granted to be able to accept the land and then turn right back around and start negotiating all these agreements with the same partner without having to go through the procurement. So that's article 15.
So So are 14 and 15 an either or and we have to make a decision. No, it's just they're they work together. They work in concert. Um, if 14 doesn't work, like if that if town meeting doesn't vote for for 14, there's
no reason to have 15. They we do need both. I have a question. Go ahead. Oh, I'm sorry. How much um ability do we have to modify the project
going forward? because they came to us a few years ago and told us what they imagined. Then they went to the Cape Cod Commission and we haven't seen them since. So I'm curious if there's opportunities to, for instance, reduce the amount of fence. Do we really have
to have all that fence? I'm wondering if there's an opportunity for the panels to be more elevated so that they don't need the fence. Maybe the place could be walkable. Could be a nicer project. I wonder how much ability we have still to
discuss those potential opportunities. I I think there's room. You'll see the the way that these articles are written, it's all um it's authorizing the town manager to negotiate the lease and the power purchase agreements. As long as it doesn't impact the um
the operations of the ground mounted solar array, I I think there there's some wiggle room. I um I don't know how much, but certainly what all of these all that these two articles do is it allows us to sit down at a table.
So I I don't I mean we can always bring every all of your concerns up to the table and see see what happens. I guess my question is if if the town votes Article 14 and 15 and and we don't
get the legislative approval, then what happens? Well, then we'd have to talk about procurement and how to how to go about doing that. It's not um it wouldn't be um it wouldn't make the project
undoable. It would just make my life a little bit harder and who cares about that? We don't want that, Dad. Okay. All right. Back to you, Mr. Unless there any other questions. I have a question about the the order of the articles
because if somebody makes a motion to take 16 out of order, it preempts all of this. I guess that's just something we'll have to wait to see, right? Hope that person doesn't do it. It have to be approved by town meeting. Yeah.
Speak speaking of article 16. Uh so 16 through 21 are all petition articles, right? Um so what I'm going to do is uh so article 16 um seeks to amend the official zoning map in effect taking out the parcels that article 14 uh discussed in terms of accepting those uh for the
for the lease. Um so that would have the effect of amending the official zoning map taking those removing those parcels from the large scale groundmounted solar overlay district. Article 17 um seeks to authorize and direct select board or another appropriate authority to commission an independent financial and
operational audit of Felmouth Public Schools. Article 18, you have a copy of a letter from the uh from one of the petitioners, Miss Raquel Russell. um with regards to article 18 um and as you see uh from the letter dated September
23rd uh Miss Russell is um requesting um that uh she's indicating a withdrawal of this article from consideration discussing this with town council. This needs to stay on the warrants and we're going to keep it on the warrants um and then we'll take action on town meeting floor on November 17th
and we are not allowed to remove petitional art petition. That's my understanding. That's right. Can the petitioner recommend indefinite postponement herself or would that be on the floor? It would be on the floor, but I I believe that um this will all be
communicated to the fin as well. And the I I don't see any recommendation except indefinite postponement coming in connection with this article. But then on the floor there would also there could be a withdrawal or I mean there would have to be a positive motion
then. It could be taken care of on the blanket vote. I that's how I'm thinking it it happens, right? Yeah. Any other questions on uh that was 18. Article 19 um seeks a vote to authorize select board to grant the conservation restriction restrict restricting in
perpetuity in accordance with MGLuh 40 chapter 40 um uh specific parcel identified as zero westmouth highway placing in conservation restriction. I do have a question on that one. Sorry. So the 300 committee came out against this, but they're on the article. How
does how does that work? It's my understanding. Well, go ahead. You know, there was not conversation is my understanding between the petitioner and the 300 committee in in essence. Yeah, the petitioner just I think made an assumption that that would be the the right group to name has to go,
right? So why does it make it an approvable warrant if it's not factually correct or you can petition anything you want meeting? Okay. So so you know essentially the answer is it's a petition article that's going on
the warrant and that's an issue that so the 300 committee so it's a political discussion of how do we kill this? No. Right. And and so this board's going to vote. I'm saying the person like who would be against it? that he might offer an amendment on the floor with different language or strike the language or
whatever. So, it's in the home. The select board will be voting a recommendation on this article. So, that's an issue that you'll consider in coming up with your recommendation. Thank you. And the same to be said for article 20 uh referencing the same the same parcel zero westmouth highway.
Um, article 21, uh, is to amend zoning bylaw by authorizing construction of scale multif family dwellings containing up to five dwelling units by right in areas within one quarter mile of business redevelopment districts. Any questions on that particular petition
article? Um, the uh the remaining articles um 22 through 26 as currently uh enumerated are zoning articles. Uh, article 22, uh, seeks to amend the current prohibited uses and special permit allowance section of the zoning
bylaw by deleting the option for an applicant to seek a special permit from the zoning board of appeals for a use that is not listed in the zoning districts. Could you mind if I went back to 21? Not at all. I had um the proponent of 21
asked for my thoughts on 21 and I just said I thought it was going to be impossible to uh hook these up to sewer connections because the sew the sewer land areas can't be changed once I mean
it's a very big deal to change those is that did I speak out of turn that's correct right so yeah it's I think you're you're absolutely correct that it is very difficult for us to
modify sewer service areas. Um there's a there two ways to do it. One is to adopt a a section of the general law local option. Um but that and the other is to just seek D approval to change the sewer
service area. Um, but either way, as as you're well aware, the we have limited discharge capacity and limited treatment capacity. So, we we can't just decide that we're going to have a larger sewer area, you know, unless we have addressed those capacity issues,
right? Okay. Thank you. It's a discussion for the next meeting. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, article 23 as proposed by the planning board seeks to amend the current business district use table to ensure compliance with affordable homes act and the regulations issued by the
executive office of housing and livable communities concerning the protected use accessory dwelling units. Uh, article 24, um, as proposed by the planning board, seeks to amend the current accessory dwelling unit bylaw to comply with the requirements of the regulations issued by the executive
office of housing and livable communities. And article 25 uh seeks to amend the current maximum building heights and stories table in section 240-11.5A of the zoning bylaw in order to clarify certain height requirements by removing
information that is unnecessary and potentially very confusing. And lastly, article 26 as proposed um seeks to amend the current accessory structure height limitation language uh to comply with the requirements of the regulations issued by the EOHLC concerning protected
use accessory dwelling units. And um I have again the uh town planner, community services director, uh community development director here to answer any questions on those um several uh zoning articles if there's any questions that I can't answer. But with
that, Mr. Chair, if there are no questions regarding the uh the zoning related articles, um what I would recommend is that the select board consider voting the articles and executing the warrants as presented, removing articles 9 and 10 related again to the noise bylaw and uh directing
staff to re re uh reumber uh those articles. So move. Okay, there is a motion. Second. Okay, we have a motion and a second. Any further discussion hearing? None. All in favor? I I
Okay, very good. Thank you. All right, moving on to the minutes. Thank you for hanging in. Has everyone had an opportunity to review the minutes? We have I have one question or comment I should
say or two comments on the uh the joint meeting with the planning board. Yep. There was two comments that I made. I feel like I would like to have them included in this one was I proposed that we consider a sunset of three years on
irrigation systems or municipal water. I think that should be in the record. I think that's something that we should be thinking about going forward. We talked about it. I'd like to have that included. The other one was on uh tiny homes. I recommended that the planning
board might consider um changing zoning in some areas that might have twoacre zoning to allow for re subdividing those lots to allow tiny homes to be integrated throughout those areas.
And and this is the meeting which meeting, Mr. Brown? Uh the joint planning board meeting September 20. Just what what date? September September 20. September 20. Yeah. No, sorry. 8. September 8th, right? Yes. Sorry. That's okay.
No problems. Do we want to hold those for you to send? Maybe we should just hold them and you make make whatever comments. Well, I mean exactly what I mean there's no harm in holding it and just making sure we capture what it is you think it
should say. Okay. I don't know if anyone's taking notes or I mean I want it to be I want you to be somebody's out there taking notes. Somebody's taking minutes. Yeah, I don't have to have ex exactly the perfect wording, but it's just that I made I mentioned that we should consider
uh suns setting in three years using municipal water for irrigation systems. That's just a simple comment. The other one was that I I hope the planning board would consider offering people with if it's twoacre zoning, maybe they could offer them something less to accommodate
the tiny homes widespread throughout the community. Um I don't it doesn't have to be perfect, but not like we voted it or anything. It's just that those are comments I made that I I felt like they were important and I like want to make sure that they're in there. That's Mr. Chair, I can't. So some someone is
watching. I've taken notes, but somebody um in our office does watch goes back and watches this so they can incorporate those changes if the board is comfortable us making those changes. I would move approval of the minutes of 1118 2024 1216 2024 98 2025 um with the
amendments noted by uh member Brown and 920 2022. Second. Okay, we have a motion and a second. Any further discussion? Hearing none. All in favor? I I Okay, Mr. Renaw,
just one quick update. Mr. Chair, um I think you've all heard me talking about the uh digital uh implementation grant that we applied for through the Massachusetts Broadband Institute just today. Um I got the official notification that the town was awarded $84,954.
Um, and what the, uh, group plans to do is, uh, through an RFP process that's currently underway is, uh, hire a consultant to, uh, implement a digital navigator, uh, program, which will help folks that, uh, either don't have access, don't have the skill set, um, to
access the internet and participate fully and engage fully with that technology. So, we're really excited about that uh, formal announcement. uh October 14th meeting, I'll be bringing a request for the select board to accept those grant funds and then we'll move forward. And that's all I have.
Excellent. Good job. Any reports? Well, short-term rental committee has pretty much assembled our thoughts on paper and uh our member Tom Crane is going to try to put them into a
cohesive something that we can present to town council to put it into proper form. So, and then what we're going to have a forum. We want to have a public forum
before we bring it to the select board. so that we can get any public comment that we might find relative before the board's asked to support it. Okay. And I think we're going to be ready for April uh Springtown meeting. Okay. Anyone else?
Uh mine ties into future agenda items if that's that's fine. Unless anyone else has any reports or reports. Go ahead. So, I um met uh I was at an event uh with the Master Chamber of Commerce in my day job
and uh every member of the uh Mashby Select Board uh was there. For the record, I spoke with them individually. They did not deliberate as a group to save the folks at Mashby any headaches. Uh and they all talked about how successful and how much money they've been able to raise already through implementing their residential tax
exemption. I just want to know the status update on on getting that on the agenda. not raising any money residential taxes. So, we actually plan to bring that to the select board at the next meeting on the 14th. That's the that's the current plan. Great. We want to allow the new assessor to
kind of get in uh Melissa to get in situated. Um but that's the plan right now. And with that, in conjunction with kind of the thematic approach, we also want to have the select board discuss and consider uh identify what resources and whatnot and the potential benefits
of a water improvement infrastructure water infrastructure improvement fund or a whiff. So I think we're going to try to combine both of those discussions because they've indexed theirs to that specifically. Okay. And they've said it's been very that's what I've heard other communities do as well. Yeah. Uh, and then I just got a
community, it's on the future agenda items. A community member asked me to ask it. Update on the the the ICE and immigration uh forum scheduling that. Yeah. So, I think uh so unfortunately um I don't have a lot of details. I think we were looking uh to at an October date
which is like here. So, um yeah, September got away from it. Um, so we're we're looking at trying to the the venue I think is going to likely be the senior center u because I think it it's it's it's it holds quite a few people. Um, and and uh so yeah, we'll select the
date. I'll consult with the chair, vice chair, take a look at some dates in October. All right, I'll hold. I think the rest of the items are important, but I'll hold for now. I'll add a couple of Well, I guess three. I'll give you give you my top
three um top uh new agenda items. Um multiple of us have been approached by multiple different individuals um very enthusiastic about um the town uh being involved in some way in a civic academy uh to increase understanding of how our
town government works and how people can get involved. So would love to have um some of those folks come and share what they've learned from other towns and be able to have a discussion about that. um mentioned it earlier tonight uh but would love to get a a formal presentation of the parking study that
was done and completed last year. I don't think that actually ever came to the select board and it really does have some very interesting ideas about our downtown. Um and then I would say sparked by um seeing two parcels that while they are not formerly conservation
land really lived in my mind as conservation parcels be potential development sites for the police station. um made me think that it would be worth reviewing um our holdings and also knowing that it's come up multiple
times in affordable housing conversations actually that Falmouth is is lagging behind other towns in conservation land and I wonder if a lot of that is just that we haven't officially designated a lot of the land that we hold in open space and are essentially conserving and maybe having a conversation about whether some of that land should actually be formally
conserved like the housing coordinator but I I think I've seen some social media posts about that and you know I think some of those are misleading because some some towns just have by luck
they're connected to the the military reservation or other like I'm not convinced we're necessar and I don't want to get into deliberation. I just think it would be worth looking at the land and and I'm sure that our community development
director who just left um very deservedly um probably has this sitting in his office, right? But the land that we hold and how much of that is formally conserved, how how much of that is kind of open space just to have a better sense of that,
right? Um, and to think about because like you said, I think we have a lot of open space and green space land that that may not actually when you go and look at the GIS map doesn't show up as green conservation land because we want to keep our options open, right? I'd like to uh have some kind of a
report on the um progress or lack thereof of the um housing plans for joint base Cape Cod and what's what's been going on if anything and where we are in that process. I might have a state update, Mr. Chair,
eventually on that one. Our office has been engaged recently on that. So, yeah. No, master the master planning process. Yes. All right. And eventually, not urgent, but I would like to discuss the retail cannabis dispensary license at some point in the
nearish future. I understand we have a lot of issues, but I do think this is an important thing and would bring a lot of money to our community. Okay. And with that, I make a motion to adjurnn. Okay. We have a motion and a second. All in favor? Hi. Hi.
[Music] [Music] [Music] Hi, it's Brandon from Crane Appliance. Since 1983, our goal as a family-owned company has been simple. To give our
neighbors on the Cape and Islands a great shopping experience. Rest easy knowing our professional team will listen to your needs and help you pick the perfect appliances for your home. At Crane Appliance, we know how difficult appliance shopping can be. Our team is here for you. Crane Appliance, we call
the Cape Islands home. Carlson printing 5085487303. [Music] Our email address is carlson printing ataol.com. [Music]
Carlson printing for all your printing needs. John's Liquor Store, 729 Main Street, Falmouth, 5085482287.