[Music] [Music] time um the first the first thing I'd like to
do is just acknowledge that a person who's been a key part of the sort of sewer projects and things in this town Jerry Pat Thomas passed away oh no suddenly last weekend wow um he served
the town well over the years he was always a good source to go to for knowledge and information and he started out working at the EPA on some much bigger projects and he will be sorely missed so here's to Jerry jerry was a veteran most people don't know this he
was a veteran of three wars colonel he was a colonel yeah he was a colonel he was a veteran of three wars yep he got up at the meeting to speak wow yep yep all right so the first item on
here John is is yours uh you know a little update on where we are with looking at the title five septic tax credit okay so continuing on the theme of where's the money going to come from i think most of the folks here are aware that um we've been working with the um
the state representative and state senator p to push forward a bill that will change the um title 5 septic tax credit from non-refundable to refundable and just a brief status report on where we're at down okay so I think we owe a a
really a deep uh level of gratitude to Representative David Vieira because he's pushed through um you know the first bill on this and it's titled um an act relative to a refundable Title 5 septic tax credit um and he's taken the concept
that we've been pushing to make this a more widely applicable credit by having it not tied to how much money you owe the state in taxes but I've had the expense and I can claim the credit regardless of what I owe the state in
taxes so he's actually added to this bill the first part of the bill um which was submitted on the 16th and the language was added uh this past week is a refundable tax credit that would go to um primary homeowners whose principal
residences in Massachusetts and who can make a claim for work done to repair a septic system to bring it up to best available nitrogen technology or for the connection of a sewer to the uh to the
sewer line so it won't impact it's not going to be something related to the betterment but it will impact IIA systems and connections uh made by homeowners to the sewer system and he wants to make that a refundable tax credit so it would go to people regardless again of what they owe in uh
taxes to the state then in addition he's added a second part to that which would be a non-refundable credit which would go to secondary homeowners people who own uh vacation homes short-term rental homes and they wouldn't qualify for the refundable credit because their home
isn't their principal residence but they could still apply for the non-refundable credit so he's expanded this um um title five septic credit to include both primary and secondary homeowners so that's that's a big change from what existed on the books um and that's where
we stand with that let me go down and uh this is the language of the bill um they changed what's in called the general law um part one title 9 chapter 62 section 6 under credits subsection I and the parts that are in
red here are what he's changed he's added um the key one is the tax credit shall be refundable to the taxpayer and that's related to the primary homeowners and then he's added a whole second paragraph titled I and a half which um
which would relate to the non-refundable component for secondary homeowners so he's he's taken a big step forward we'll see where it all ends up one thing I wanted to just show is that this is not a simple process and sort of I've I've created a road map of how a bill becomes
a law and um the legislative process starts in the odd number years in Massachusetts so in the beginning of 2025 in the first couple of weeks um the um proposed bills are submitted and this bill HD 2942 for the refundable septic
tax credit was submitted um by Representative Vieiraa it goes to a joint committee hearing um when I talked to Representative Vieiraa he said he was hoping he was going to try to steer it towards the environment and natural resources committee before it goes to the Wayne Ways and Means Committee so
that way it can gain some weight in terms of the importance of the bill um relative to the environment relative to the many homeowners who are impacted by it before it just goes right to the people who make the money decisions and from there they could vote to um not pass it or a study order which would
kill the bill basically or ought to pass and then it goes through a whole series of processes through the different branches of the legislation and finally it you know it goes to a conference committee to align House and Senate components of the bill to a single bill
enactment and then finally to the governor for hopefully signing so it's a long process this can take several years but hopefully um with the work that Representative Vieira is doing and hopefully what this committee can do in terms of publicizing how important this
is towards um people homeowners paying for these very expensive um nitrogen mitigation steps that are being required by the state that we can provide some serious financial relief to people who have to undergo these expenses
now Senator Fernandez um in a previous meeting we had with him over Zoom also mentioned that he wants to support a bill that would provide relief his bill hasn't made it yet to um you know being submitted to the legislation but in
discussions with him and some of his um aids he's still talking about a bill that would um have an upper income tax upper income cap on eligibility if you make X dollars you know above that you wouldn't be able to apply for this bill we haven't seen what those numbers would
be yet he wants to keep the refundable credit um basically revenue neutral so by cutting off on the high end there'd be more money in theory for the low end and keep the eligibility to principal residents in Massachusetts so his bill if it does get submitted would be very
different than what Representative Vieiraa has submitted to date but right now only Representative Vieiraa has submitted a bill and then lastly I just want to close on um you know when you actually as a taxpayer you know look of how do I you know enact this um tax
credit well they have a a form SC um and in 2024 the extru instructions have been expanded to include the regulations or the regulatory framework that's being initiated by the D with regards to the watershed permit so if you are
responding to a watershed permit and you're putting in an IIA system or connecting to a sewer then you will qualify for these tax credits there's no doubt about that now the the language has been written in very clearly um so you know for all the work we're doing in
the 14 watersheds and the four um watershed permits that are going to be discussed uh I think later today um they'll all be included in in in this so th those those expenses will be qualifying expenses so thank thank you Jonathan a couple of quick comments i'll
take them from the rest of the board number one um Doug Brown our one of our select board members he reached out through the group that gets together about all the select boards on the Cape about this they're all aware of it there's been some positive feedback to David's office from multiple other
communities and in addition David has through the Cape um uh delegation has brought this issue up with the Cape delegation so there's a little bit of you know understanding of where this is at and and the benefits in terms of the
difficulty of getting from being told you got to put an IIA in and what it's going to cost to knowing that there's some relief in it that will encourage people to do it so it's a first step and if we don't get it this year we'll come back next year or two
years steve could you go back to the first slide um that paragraph with started with bold-faced refundable I think is unfortunate grammar because there are two different ways you
can read it one means especially because it says whose principal residence is in Massachusetts well obviously if we're talking about houses in Falmouth that residence is in Massachusetts and so if if if that's their primary resident or does this mean
to cover people whose primary residence is in Worcester but they own a second home in Falmouth no they're trying to get the credit i think that's the second if it's a secondary home that you're using this credit for then under Vieira's bill it would be a
non-refundable if it's your principal residence as written in the actual language of the bill then that would apply you'd be able to apply for the refundable tax credit so secondary means that it's not your principal it's a home that you use for vacation purposes or
for short-term rental and I know you're you're not responsible for this if it's an error you are responsible for it if it's right um just kidding um but and who are we to criticize the legislators who are probably you know
five out of six of them are attorneys and so on but there's a much clearer way to say that you know applies to somebody for the whom this house is their primary residence yeah when you go to form SC um for this tax credit it lays out you know
who is eligible and it states that if this is your principal residence in Massachusetts then you would apply you would uh be eligible for the credit what what Vieira has done is saying that even if it's not your principal residence but it's a Massachusetts home a secondary
home then you have the option to go for a non-refundable credit right yeah and and and that's what the language he's written um in this part here is basically saying so it's it's probably not as clear as you'd like but that's the way the
legislature writes these paragraphs in their general laws it's it's legal ease to some extent but it spells it out when you actually go to the forms where you would apply the tax credit when filling out your state income tax and John other comments yeah
um they make it clear too that even if you upgraded both of your Massachusetts dwellings you could only claim it for one of the dwellings that's correct yeah that's correct whichever route you go refundable or nonreund comments from the
board comments from the Oh go ahead the the the difficulty I'm going to see in this current uh fiscal climate is there's a great deal of unrest in the legislature right now over what's going to happen in fiscal 26 because of
changes in at the federal level there's a lot of concern and there's a lot of talk already of reducing budgets that have been fixed for a long number of years because they don't think they'll have the federal support and anything
here that is not revenue neutral probably isn't going to fly very far um and I think that's a danger of expanding it and I know it's kind of a negotiating tactic too well we can pull that out but
anything that delays it can kick it into you know fiscal 27 instead of 26 or 28 because of that concern and I think I want to remind folks that one of the reasons we started looking at this in my memory
anyway is to help those of lower income who are going to be faced with either an IIA or a sewer connection because this applies to both doesn't have anything to do with betterments which is unfortunate but that's the way the law is written but expanding it so that a second
homeowner now would have eligibility in here can greatly expand the financial impact impact to the budget unless uh Senator Fernandez idea of yeah putting a an income cap comes in so I think this is a dangerous thing to do to
try to expand it i think right keep in mind when they get to conference committee at some point they're going to have to put these bills together i think that's where the battle will be and Fernandez may win out and it's as written with an income cap on it only a refundable
credit that's targeting lower middle inome people but as you say Vieira used this as maybe a potential bargaining chip down the road that's why he put it in understand all right and comments from the uh visitors z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z
Z you got to get up to the microphone because we're on TV on TV most people watch us all next week five days a week next week so I understand you know in the context we're going to look to reduce the identify yourself zenus Crocker uh I'm from the town of
Barnstable um neighboring town as we know yep a little different but we're trying to do the same stuff and we have the same problems um we're facing a lot of the same issues i'm with Barnstable Clean Water Coalition and and so I understand the notion of trying to
address the regressive nature of uh of the current legislation which I I think is important but is definitely regressive um you know I am not I am not a man who understands the legislation process so thank you for the flowchart i think
that's very helpful you're in good company it's it's complicated i wonder if we have done here in Felmouth any modeling to understand what the implications are for this particular bill versus what uh
Fernandez is is suggesting because I agree with the gentleman who's saying if we're going to tap into some very large potential numbers um I think it is going to be problematic so I guess my one comment is can we do modeling even if
it's in some smaller areas it's one of the things I've tried to do in the town of Marstable is pick some specific areas and do some modeling to look at the age of systems the home ownership what's the mix etc etc so I think understanding
that will be tremendously helpful uh in this process that's it ju just to help fill that fill in behind your question my understanding is that when it went through the first time uh inside the budgetary revenue folks of the state
they projected how many people would take take advantage of the uh non-refundable portion and there is actually a line item in the budget uh for it i I don't have the number in my head right now z yeah um what Dave has sort of pointed out is we put this
together and then the budgetary people in the legislature look at this and come back at one of these things with the readings or one of the other things and say here's what we have now we believe this is what the budgetary impact is going to be so rather than us trying to
do it the legislature will do it fair enough my only other comment would be and I haven't talked to Julian Seir and others to make sure that we've got everybody pulling in the same direction throughout the peninsula that's going to be critically important i welcome you to talk to them and see if that how they
feel and as necessary have them reach out to Dave okay i I I had emailed Julian and his staff and you got to go to the microphone sorry yeah i had sent emails to all the reps and u senators on on the Cape Islands and um I think you
know so far they've all been positive but only Vieira has actually taken the step and hopefully Fernandez will take the step too to introduce bills any other comments seeing none we'll move on to the second item thank you Jonathan good
good summary um I'm going to the podium steve you're taking over uh directing the meeting as as the vice chair okay mhm so uh today's meeting to today's meeting is
all money all the time I guess um you know uh we we we went through town meeting um there's been a lot of conversation about betterments and uh I just felt for those that attend this meeting some members of
the board and anybody that's watching at home understanding a little bit more about the state revolving fund and the Cape Island water protection fund um would be of some value so the 2025 SRF just walk us all through it step by step
a little bit um towns had to have submitted what's called a project evaluation form or a PEF on or before July 26 2024 which we we took care of um and then the
state evaluates the PEFs and they rank them and they establish uh from their sources what's the available funding and then they create what's called an intended use plan in other words which projects are they going to fund that's the
IUP behind all of this is what's called the Clean Water State Revolving Fund and they establish the available funding um they got set up originally with some federal money they get set they get some state money they give out loans the
loans get paid back the money goes back into the fund um they are the ultimate bank if you will for who issues the loans and what have to be paid off so in 2025 for this year the available funding for sewer
projects and wastewater projects uh is 931.7 million it's not an insignificant amount of money but we have 351 I think communities across the state and
everybody would like to get something done the final intended use plan was issued on April 8th 2025 and before we walked in to town meeting there had been some buzz going on that we were only going to be able to
get 50 million because of whatever so it was a it was a draft proposed regulation because of some demands on the system to manage the money a little bit better a lot of people pushed back on that um in the
final intended use plan that was put out there was no restriction on the funding to $50 million they did create a a a mechanism by which on any given year they would not give out more than 50 but then they
would have uh a carryover amount and um I'm not the financial expert or the bond expert but I believe in terms of the if you have one town meeting vote uh what they did satisfies it so
um the town has to have their funding in place by June 30th in order to qualify for the SRF funding that we would like to get we have a town meeting vote and in May we go to a ballot vote so you know with a
positive ballot ballot vote we're basically meet that criteria and the IUP is actually parsed down to the project priority list so the intended use plan is a is a slightly bigger number because
um the intended use plan I guess sits there as the projects they'd like to fund but then the project priority list ranks projects by what they will fund till they run out of money so for example my
past experience around these things you have a community that for they get a mo a vote at town meeting but they don't get the ballot vote so suddenly where we might be on the project priority list if we don't have our paperwork in place we
get kicked to the next year and the next person can roll up that list so I thought I would reduce this down to the Cape and the islands so this is the project priority list not the intended
use plan but the project priority list um there's a lot of work that looks like it's coming forward on the Cape makes me wonder who's going to do all that work and how that will affect the bidding climate um but but these are real projects um we are on there for the $60
million that we just voted at town meeting i'm not going to read all these off i'll leave them up there for you to take a look at it um the big elephant in the room is the East Ham wastewater phase one um number of other communities have broken their
projects up a little bit east Ham's going in there you know for it all so they'll get $50 million this year and then they'll be be deferred into subsequent years um going down the list
uh and this not Yarmouth phase oh my god exclamation point that should have been a one um so and Z there's a couple in Barnstable the the is it Penny or Finny how do I know how to pronounce that fine finey so they want to build sewers in the Finey
area and they want to build sewers in the village apparently so they're those are those look like real projects okay Steve can I just ask you a question connect to that list please just roughly that adds up to
about um half a billion huh 500 oh six yeah I got 430 but roughly all of those but the to and but this is just the cape that's not the
state the on on the state at this point the cape is very heavily uh weighted because we are under a mandate from the D every community's had to go get money every's got to do things a lot of the other communities are not uh in the same situation right but but you said that
there were requests from other towns that aren't on the cape I can get you a copy of the intent no I I just just just listen to the question you you said in the previous slide that the total amount was something like 900
million 931.7 right so over half of that is taken care of by the cape list on the next slide correct so so you're saying the rest of the state either the rest of the state has
got to be quite small considering its size compared to the Cape or the ones at the bottom of this list might as well forget it right i'm not sure bottom of which list should
they forget it in other words you've distilled out just the cape numbers here correct and that by itself is adding up to 500 million okay so yes to more than half of that that's allocated for the whole state yes
whereas the Cape even though we like it and we live here is a tiny fraction of Massachusetts okay and and so either we're lucky
or the as you said the fraction of requests is in fact mainly coming from the Cape it is okay okay it it is because we've all got this watershed plan FA that we're all facing um the the
Cape has got has got timelines that a lot of other communities don't have but for example if you go to the greater Boston area there's very few places that are not sewer or don't have a wastewater plant um there are a number of projects
and if you look at the list you know mid part of the state or further out but yeah right now the cape has got some of the greatest needs for doing some wastewater and on that intended use plan and then the project priority list you
get points for things you get points that move you up the list okay and the fact that we are under these sort of D situations elevates us up in the list
okay Ken so question on on the 930 million is that how does that pool change in size is there a way it can grow shrink let me go let me go on to the next
couple of slides okay okay so the answer is it won't grow for this year it it does change from year to year okay so um you know I I want to walk some people through if we can why is SRF funding a
good thing okay first off if the town was to go out and borrow money $60 million for the sewer project we have in front of us currently the town is borrowing money at about
4.25% okay however Felmouth qualifies for SR funding we believe we'll get 0% because of everything we've got in place that we've used before we don't see any reason not to get that so the first and most important thing to
realize is that getting an SRF loan at 0% in year one saves us $2,456,000 in interest costs and municipal finance works like this you make the same equal payment
every year over the life of the loan so we could turn around and say we're going to pay three million or whatever a year well I don't have the number in front of me but you pay interest on the outstanding balance so in the year one
you have a big nut and in the final year you have a smaller nut but using a 30-year life of the loan which is what we're expecting to get from the SRF if we took a 30-year loan and the town borrowed that money at 4 and a4% that
would add 39,525,000 to the project's cost so we would have gone to town meeting looking for authorization for a lot more money for 100 another aspect of the SRF process and loan that's
um is advantageous is you don't have to do short the town doesn't have to do short-term borrowing to pay the contractor they have to do a small amount but as the contractor's monthly pay comes in it gets submitted
in uh to the to the trust fund and they reimburse this it's typically runs on a 45 to 60 days cycle so you have to have enough money to cover 60 days but the rest of it gets paid back um so since short-term borrowing is not required
typically you can't go to the bond market to do a bond for something that's under construction you have to pay for it to be built and then bond it for long term um we save short-term borrowing um the other thing is right now because of
the economics in a portion of Falmouth we actually qualify as a disadvantaged communities program and uh in the SRF regulations right now they call out a 3.3% loan forgiveness
um if you're a disadvantaged community so if we go in for a $60 million loan it would get reduced by a,600,000 uh because of that 3.3 loan forgiveness now the next big thing to follow through here is you have to be on
the intended use plan to get into the Cape Island uh grant funding so what is that the Capen Island Water Protection Fund was established by the Mass Legislature in
2018 got established with a lot of hard work by all the Cape communities um some understanding of what we were seeing coming this was even before we got the nitrogen sensitive zones uh and the scale of the of projects that we're
facing it is actually a dedicated fund within the Mass Clean Water Trust in other words money raised goes into the Mass Clean Water Trust and then is to be designated back out um through actions of the Cabin Island
Water Protection Funds Board uh against the project costs that are approved it only applies to the communities within Barnstable County Dukes County and Nantucket County where does the money come from
there's a 2.75% excise tax on traditional lodging and short-term rentals okay so um unless you're doing it on the side by yourself if you're going through Airbnb or the other the other short-term rental companies they
collect that money uh and turn it back over you have to be on the SRF IUP to receive funds from the Cape Island Water Protection Fund the goal of the water Capen Island
Water Protection Fund has been to reimburse or subsidize 25% of the project costs they've had to do a little juggling um over time they they sort of switched from a straight outright
subsidization model to a more stretched out subsidizing on a year-to-year basis against the loan uh to maintain that but the um they've been pretty good about it they've they've been smart so for Falmouth going back to our $60 million
job this could reduce the overall project costs to the community by up to $15 million now these numbers will juggle a little bit as the project goes forward everybody good
right so well wrong place we already talked about that i'm going to do the funding caveats now certain project costs are excluded from all of this they're primarily any legal costs any financing costs or any
land acquisition costs the underlying SRF funding is 20% state and 80% federal that's how it was originally set up then there's the way the money rolls back around each year we're living in
a interesting times um the federal percentage could change in future years they do appear to be in place through 2025 because the money's already pretty much there the other one is the Cape and Island Fund depends on
tourism an economic downturn would impact revenues and the governing board would have to take a hard look at whether they were going to hold to the 25 or or go to a lower number um
did I get to your question Ken okay any other questions from the board from the audience there's one behind you yeah uh Malcolm Donald uh how does
Felmouth qualify as a disqual as a disabled or whatever uh disadvantaged community it has to do with median income not not median worth but medium median income um and there's a table in the
back of the SRF uh intended use plan that that relates to that Malcolm okay thank you so I I wonder if the town of Felmouth has looked at using SRF funding for innovative alternative septic systems yet i think we've seen the first uh
application of that in Wealthley which I understand has been approved uh it's uh somewhat complex as I understand it because I believe that the equipment is what can be financed not the installation of the equipment so that's
uh one part of the question and then the other part of the question is uh the 8020 um mix uh I I listened to a presentation by Andrew Gotautle who indicated that because of the money that's currently out the state revolving fund money
that's currently out uh the state is able to recapture a lot of that and and and continue to use that leverage as financing so I'm even though obviously I think we're all concerned that we could be at risk for federal money i'm not
sure what the how big that I can answer both your questions i I'll answer the second one first so there is money in in the whole trust and communities pay back but to the extent that that what the communities pay back and the level of things that are needed
to be funded and everything if they need more if if they need an infusion of capital into the bank historically it's been 20% and 80% so it's not not that whole 931 million is 2080 state and federal the large bulk of that is coming
back out of the revenues and someplace over there I have the whole big package for the state revolving fund and you can anybody that wants to play accountant can look through all of the numbers on it the second one is we're very much aware of what's going on in Wellfleet um I would agree with you that they they
first off they they did get SRF funding apparently it is only going for the purchase but not the installation we are keeping a close eye on that and we view that as a resource or alternative on the next
steps going forward okay any other questions okay all right how do I get to the next one okay give myself so at a a recent water quality management committee meeting we put
forth uh a way of looking at wersheds to ascertain where the cost benefit might be relative to whether we should expand the sewer service area and reduce the IIA areas or not um in which we worked
up a rubric or or a metric a metric um not a rubric a metric uh that talked about dollars per kilogram removed um uh at least one if not more board
members felt that there were other cost factors that needed to be considered as we looked at that so we haven't rolled those cost considerations back into the evaluation of watersheds yet but I wanted to walk through what some of these numbers are and how they fit
together um because people stand up and they say this costs this or that costs that so to the best extent available from the data that's been rattling around I put together a little cost consideration so capital cost in a sewer
system what is the town cost if we have to upgrade the plant that's the town cost we're how far along Amy we twothirds of the way through the plant upgrade 55% 55% we're 55% on the current plant upgrade we know that as we
add more sewer areas we're going to face at least one possibly two more plant upgrades in in a 50-year cycle we also have the town's cost for an outfall in a diffuser which I think we've talked about where we're at with
that several times there's a big effluent line that has to get from the plant to the outfall pump stations particularly when they serve multiple uh areas or neighborhoods are typically town costs and the force
mans from the pump station to the treatment plant are town costs the town has for the Marav Vista area purchased the grinder pumps and provided them to homeowners for
installation and then there is the sewer lines that are in the street or the low pressure lines in the street and the cost for those 30% of those the town picks up the cost of that so what's the homeowner's cost the
homeowners got to pay for a connection from the house to the sewer line in the street in front of them they have to pay for the abandonment of their septic system if they have a grinder pump they frequently have to pay something for an
electrical upgrade and then they pay 70% of the cost of sewer lines in the street that becomes known as the Betterment back in 2017 we did the Marav Vista area if you had a gravity connection the
homeowners connection from the house to the sewer in the street it averaged 3,828 somebody managed to pull it off for 2,000 somebody spent 6,000 you know the variables are how far are you from the street landscape and other
things did the same sort of table down below for the grinders and then for lack of anything better I've used 4% escalation throughout anything I'm doing here and so one could project that the cost to connect a gravity line
will average around 5,239 you could bump that up by a couple of 4% times if you want to go to two two 2027 i just didn't do that in my math today and the same thing for the grinder pumps okay what's the annual cost for the
sewer use so in 2025 looking at the way the wastewater user fee is currently structured which has um do we call it a meter fee there's there's a base fee that everybody's got
to pay i think it might be called a meter fee yeah but it's it's like I think it's around $125 um and then you know as Christian's been speaking to us for the wersheds we've seen numbers between 110 and 140 gallons
uh per household uh from the various things I used 130 and I did this assuming that somebody lives in the house year round i didn't try to prorrate it for any seasonal use so right now a year-round homeowner on
the wastewater system is paying around $460 for the wastewater user fee could be more could be less dependent upon how the house is run so if the town continues to raise their rates and the
process there is once a year the water department and the wastewater department and other departments are asked "Are the fees being charged reasonable do you want to raise them and they submit a request through the DPW that goes to the board of selectment and the selectment has a fee hearing
um the wastewater fee has been held pretty level over the last few years it was shifted to a tiered system in other words your first 10 units and a unit is 778 gallons if you need to know that your first units get priced one way from
10 to I think 60 in a year um gets priced slightly higher and then if you use more than 60 units in a year it's even a third tier higher so it discourages people from wasting water anyways 20 years from now escalating at
4% the average homeowner will be paying about $1,000 a year for wastewater water oh but wait a minute what if I have a grinder pump the grinder pumps don't use an awful lot of electricity because they
cycle they fill up and then they empty i worked off of E1's data for typical electric consumption in kilowatt hours i estimate the 2025 electrical cost for a grinder pump is
$49 if electricity goes up at 4% in 20 years the homeowner on the grinder pump will be paying that $1,000 plus another 107 um in electric cost and currently the betterment
estimated range over a 30-year payback period is estimated to be 900 to 1333 per year i have not tried to do anything other than that take that number ahead because once that
betterment is set in place it's not subject to inflation so you know you pay the same amount every year going forward now let's compare that to an IIA system there's several variables on an IIA system do you have a cesspool you
know is the lot big small everything else didn't try to drill down into every variable there i said I'll just look at the assumption that given given the age of the the places that we're putting sewers into there's a reasonable
expectation that they've got a title five system these aren't these aren't like legacy neighborhoods from the 40s and the 50s that would would have a cess poolool they're they're likely to have something close to a title five system right
now what are the towns cost one of the things we're going to need to circle back to in our conversations over this year is the whole septic utility program we talked about where you know there's an entity that the town is supporting that's doing a lot of the monitoring and
measuring um that's yet to be decided but I put it in there as a potential town cost what's the homeowner's cost first off they got to hire an engineer couple thousand dollars to figure out what to do they have to buy an IIA
module typically it's going to come with a pump because it's unlikely that there's a gravity situation they'll have to divert from the septic tank to the IIA module and then pump back into the leashing field again they're likely to have an
electrical upgrade and then there's an installation cost uh to put in the ground we've been working with a range of 30,000 to 50,000 for doing that work
2025 what does it cost to run an IIA system currently folks have to get a an O andM contract one of the things that we need to consider is whether the O andM portion of all of this should be moved into the SUP but some people pay as low
as $1,100 a year some people pay as much as $3,000 a year it's a it's a it's a free market system and there's not a lot of players in it electricity the current
cost to run an IIA system is $373 a year of electricity the blower typically runs all the time over 20 years that price at the 4% factor will inflate up to
816 right now the board of health's regulation in this town requires for the first two years of operation that there be quarterly testing of the effluent to demonstrate that the system is accurately
performing as of yesterday morning the lab charges $60 to do a TKAN analysis so the lab cost is $240 a year people talk about what they have to spend because they have an IIA system a big portion of that
cost is inside the O andM contract and then the person who does that work gathers the sample takes it to the lab and then they get a lab bill and they tack it on if the systems work the way it's designed the board of health will reduce it down to two per year upon proven
system performance so I I I thank Ed because Ed did his own summary of costs at one point um I generally agree with a lot of his numbers he he was able to check what I did over the last couple days to make sure that he's not going to raise his
hand and say "How about what if?" Um but what he did was a thing where she tried to do a summary of out-ofpocket costs for primary home owners with the current tax credits not anything that John talked about maybe being available
in the future or town subsidies beyond what we have so for a su for a sewer I just assumed the betterment was $30,000 it's a little bit higher than the loan number that Amy has put forth
it's a bit below well it's well below the upper boundary but I'm reasonably confident that we will get 25% from the Cape and Island that we'll get the 3.3% uh values in front of us so I think 30 is a is a reasonable working number for
this conversation the average 2025 grinder cost would be $7,143 the tax credit right now you can only claim 60% of the installation cost which would be the cost to get um from
your house to the street i calculated that out as about $4,286 some numbers rattling around in here but with no tax credit the homeowner's out-of pocket expense is going to be in the $37,000 plus range with the tax credit it's reduced a
little bit to about 33,000 what happens on the IIA on the IIA the installation for primary residence is going to run around 40,000 i could have used the 30 i could have used the 50 i chose the 40 the thing is they will be able to get
60% of that install cost so they will be able if they're paying state taxes at a reasonable rate they'll be able to get the full $18,000 credit that is out there which means that their cost with the credit is around $22,000
now as we keep talking you know an IIA system only is achieves half the nitrogen reduction of a sewer connection but for the individual homeowner you get on the sewer you're going to be putting a moderately moderately priced well car
prices are changing um you you know you got you got a pretty big number to pay but it gets spread out on the IIA it's It's not quite as steep but they're real numbers they're you know these are not you know this is this isn't painting
your garage this is this is costing some money to everybody so that that that's as far as I've gotten but I didn't want to try to get all the numbers down in one place for everybody to sort of see them and follow them and to the extent you want my Excel spreadsheets for how I did any
of this stuff I'll be glad to send it to you thank you should we take questions from the board and you're the you're the you're the chair you tell me what you want questions from the board we'll start with John's end first i guess um this is the maximum credit for you know
getting the the um title five septic credit but again lots of folks won't qualify that on the low end especially we talked about the income disparity so that 22,000 quickly escalates closer to the 40,000 because they can't deduct as much
from the front end and that's that's the part that's always worried me that we're we're disproportionately helping our wealthier homeowners in the town at the expense of the lower income people so
I had to choose some place to to to understand but just that point needs to be hammered home again yeah john I think the the reason that I I spent some hours working this and then Steve has put together a lot of great analysis
here is to demonstrate that sewing even though the town is paying a portion of the cost is an extremely expensive option and you know there's been a lot of dialogue going on and it continues
to since we subsidized the sewer as a town shouldn't we also subsidize the IIA and that's an ongoing discussion but I think it's important to have these numbers in front of people that are making that discussion
because depending on that Betterment that's the big driver for the people that are mandated to hook to the sewer depending on that betterment it becomes extremely expensive to hook up to the sewer versus the IIA because that state
tax credit as it's currently structured heavily more subsidizes so it's more state money going to the IIA than proportionally to the sewer connection folks betterments aren't eligible for that tax credit and as that betterment
goes up and now you know there's was discussion at town meeting about that betterment range of 27 to 40 uh when little pond was sewered the original betterment estimate was 18,000 after about a year was
reduced to an estimate of 16 and quite fortunately because of some really good engineering and working with the contractor the final betterment was just over 13 so from 18 to 16 to 13
hopefully we'll have that same kind of good fortune going forward and I think you know Amy and the engineering folks have done a lot of work to make sure they're using very very conservative numbers in estimating this sewer cost
but it's critical that we get that townwide ballot approved so we don't lose our place in the SRF funding um but as we continue the dialogue going forward Felmouth currently does not have an IIA mandate as Wellfleet does and
some of the towns on the Vineyard and Mashp has so we're not doing much with IAS under a mandate from our board of health but hopefully in the not too distant future they will start putting in some triggers for installing IAS and that's where this number becomes more
important but what I did what I didn't do in in this analysis um I didn't take it to sort of the next step which is if you're on the sewer the town will put that on your sort of tax bill over 30 years at a
certain value if you're doing an IIA currently there's no mechanism for the town to put it on your tax bill so you would have to either have that money in the bank or put it add it to your existing mortgage at whatever rate that is and whatever
cost that is so there is a little there is another level on this of you know what's your cash flow on a yearly basis that that could be done ken questions i don't I've got a question Steve before I go to the
audience have you considered also using these same numbers the same no additional research just if you just compare the total what you consider the town government with
its tax money and the homeowners as a single black box I'm going to call the town you just look at the total cost to the town of the sewers per per property and the total cost for
IIA and you per amount of nitrogen removed which then effectively doubles the IIA look at whichever is less and then it's just an exercise in fairness how
you divvy that up with betterments to make it as fair as possible but I mean just common sense tells me the first thing you do is reduce the total cost and then figure out how you make it fair to the taxpayers versus the
homeowners does Does that make any sense not sure I understand are you asking for the total project cost i'm saying it's overly confusing to consider the betterments and how much is being paid by the homeowner and how much by the
town which is the taxpayers which turns out to be in some cases also the homeowners but you're clearly separating it out here whereas I if you if you had a club or a corporation
or any other entity you you'd just look at the total cost and minimize that and then have a separate that that minimizing the total cost in principle is a benefit to everybody in the town the only person that loses are
the vendors and we don't care about them um and then you have a separate discussion about how you divvy that total cost up in what the betterments are and although there was initial objection to having betterment for
IAS there's recently been talk including from town council that it may be possible after all it remains to be seen but I'd hate to have a a higher total cost just because we had some weird
nonoptimum way of divvying it up so I would say that having introduced a way of looking at costs in the watershed for combinations of sewer and IAS that we've sort of put on pause to come back to some of this stuff Steve the exercise
on a watershed by watershed basis was to look at the optimum overall project cost okay we just haven't done that work yet okay anybody questions from the audience amy what did I mess up amy Amy Law
wastewater superintendent thank you very much for doing that Steve that's a lot of very useful information for everybody including me uh I just had a couple of um points um when you were talking about the grinder pump costs um you there was
a a low a middle and a high um when when I that the high there were numbers that were higher than that high is is is only is my only point on that is uh some of the grinder pump property owners or some both gravity and grinder pump had high
higher costs and I actually we actually threw those out of the average to come up with the um yeah the grinder I'm sorry that's okay so there there were outliers right so that that that high number excluded the outliers um and
probably the the low may have as well um the uh for grinder pump purchase and providing to the property owners and grinder pump reimbursement uh I just want to note again I think this has been noted recently but we need special
legislation uh and there will be discussion of that by the select board and then a vote likely at this fall town meeting so that is the plan but I we can't I can't the town can't guarantee that the town is providing the grinder pumps uh and doing that reimbursement
until that special legislation passes the last legislation was specific to Little Pond and so it needs to be renewed for um this and future projects um and the last thing I wanted to note is that we are due for a sewer rate
increase and I will be looking at that oh so much to unpack so much to unpack uh Peter Hargraves uh stand here Peter so they can Okay you can scroll up and down if you need here here we go because I want to
look at this so the danger with the Thank you thank you and thank you for making this template that shows and features the elements of all the different systems thank the way together was a little bit harder to understand i
just So I'm his editor so if you wanted to make the most provocative statement possible about this you would say the town and all the taxpayers in the town whether they're on the sewer or not subsidize and underwrite the cost of
sewers and for the people who are stuck with IAS it's all on them and by the way if we go the route of Dylan Fernandez then it's going to be that people who actually pay more than $4,000 a year in Massachusetts income tax maybe won't be
allowed to because we'll have to subsidize other people and so that's more that's kind of the political twist but it gets to the point that I want to make when you do something like this people are going to look at this and
they're going to say "Ah IA systems are much cheaper uh for me to own." So you had an operating cost element so I suggest as you polish this that you kind of get to a total annual cost line so
they're more directly comparable and to that effect you know the IIA people are subsidizing all of the 30% that the town pays because our taxes are all going to cover that line uh the
betterment is 70% to the people on the sewer and of course they have installation and operating expenses so if you want to make a direct comparison apples to apples you would add the cost of the town subsidized uh
elements because both are taxpayers in Felment the other thing that is really going to dramatically affect and maybe even swing the IA into a higher cost regime than the
sewer and that's the dangerous part of showing this you made a point earlier that the betterments are fixed and for the 30-year life there's no increase
but for these people well you know according to Dylan it's pocket change for them to pay out of their checking account but if they have to take a loan it'll probably be at six or 7% and they'll have to finance it over a period
of time and you can only take $4,000 a year for for uh well you couldn't take it for all six years maximum because that would be 24,000 and 18,000 isn't a maximum so you
have to put in the cost of the homeowner well that's in the spirit of the homeowner is all in on the IIA they would have to pay the financing and thank you Steve for saying we started
this discussion looking for justice and equity in the distribution of cost and I think we've really drifted away from that i did note that I hadn't gone to the next step here which is to show the annual cost for the out-ofpocket expenses for
each of these people and then add the other numbers on to them but um that's more a factor of I ran out of gas late yesterday no no it's great okay but but but I but but but but taking the annual cost for sewers and annual cost for IAS and then adding to it you know what
you're going to pay where it's 0% on the sewer and what you're going to be paying if you go borrow the money at at a bank that that that that slide can be built i'm not criticizing the work i know you're not i was telling you I didn't get to Oh so so all I'm saying is you
know what town meeting's going to look at they're going to look at that and it's not a fair comparison of the cost to the homeowner by virtue of the elements that I brought up but when you polish it and add it in then it [Music]
will Steve my only comment is for larger context we have a certain target amount of nitrogen we need to get rid of and if we could include some metric that says okay per kilogram of nitrogen removed
cost of per septics is this and for the sewer is that i I agree so we started off with discussing how we do this on a watershed basis for the dollars we got asked to not just look at the capital numbers but look at the other numbers
and factor them in we haven't pulled this all back together yet but rather than wait weeks or whatever I felt like coming before you and saying here's where we're at and here's what we This gives you the homeowner perspective all right Steve another way of expressing what I was trying to say is
suppose you had a given mix of sewers and IAS you had it all laid out you knew which properties were going to get you knew all the costs you knew the amount of subsidies the amount of betterments and everything and then somebody came along
with a way to make the total cost lower by changing say the ratio of sewers to IAS and they figured out that this made the total cost lower but on one
particular the particular scheme of betterments and um subsidies and so on it actually made it look worse then mathematically there would be
a way to change that scheme to make it lower for everybody because your total is lower okay but I won't beat the dead horse no it's not dead horse we are you're still in charge i have a back to Amy i forgot to mention one more
thing which is the county aqua fund um which pro provides low interest loans 0 to 4% interest loans for either a required sewer connection or a required um septic system replacement and that
that 0 to 4% range um on the interest um depends on the income level and the residency of the like if it's your primary home versus a secondary home um so that is there available to help with
with either of these costs on the connection side obviously it doesn't help on a betterment um but it does help with connection sewer connection costs or IIA costs thank you i'm turning the meeting back over to you
next item on the agenda is watershed plan requirements i think at some point you everybody on this committee has probably heard this before but we are marching towards
actually going out and finding somebody to start putting together wershed plans i think Amy if I can put you on the spot you're you're planning on going for funding in fall watershed plans yes thought it'd be a good time now just to
come back to what's in a watershed plan and what'll have to happen so that we've we've got a sense of what people will have to do to get us to a watershed plan and get it approved take it away Kristen Roth ScienceWarses
so at the last meeting I talked a little bit about two of the natural resource nitrogen sensitive area awards that the town just received and mentioned that they were for planning of what has to go into this watershed permit application so as Steve said figured we'd take a
step back and review for everybody what is entailed in putting together the watershed plan according to the new regulations so a watershed permit these regulations establish a process for municipalities to restore and protect water quality in
nutrient impacted wersheds the permit establishes performance standards authorized activities and outlines the time frames that'll be used under adaptive management um so this is basically the same thing as what our comprehensive wastewater management
plans do as well but a little bit more highlights the time frames because you're restricted to that 20-year time frame falmus plan so when the state promulgated the new regulations all municipalities were given two options
option one upgrade all septic systems to IAS in a watershed or apply for a watershed permit and go the adaptive management route falmouth chose to apply for watershed permits for all its nitrogen sensitive areas the tenative plan for
this as John had said during his presentation is looking at applying for four different permits grouping select waterheds together to be covered under the same permit so the first permit the town intends to apply for by January
27th that is Little Pond and Great Pond second one the following year which would include Green Pond Borne Pond Eel Pond and Wait Bay the next one for 2029 would be Oyster Pound Oyster Pond Felmouth Inner Harbor and West Falmouth
Harbor and then the last one to be applied for by January 2030 would be Wild Harbor Meansit Harbor Fiddler's Cove Rans Canal and Quiset Harbor the deadline under the regulations to apply for watershed permits is June of 2030 so
there is a buffer built into this and this is a tenative timeline as we've said before the town wants to stagger these plans because there's reporting requirements that go with all of these including a 5-year update so this will stagger that five-year update for each
of the permits so besides a couple of other little administrative things the two main elements for that are required for a watershed permit application are a watershed management plan and if it's shared wershed an intermunicipal
agreement so the watershed management plan there is a whole list of elements that are required that have to be contained within this watershed plan including maps depicting the watershed boundary description of
current and historic water quality conditions any earlier planning approaches maps depicting core sewer areas documentation of the pollutant load reduction plan and timeline contingency plan or for backup conventional approach
description of each proposed pollutant reduction action for current and projected loads cost estimates for proposed infrastructure and programs implementation schedule not to exceed 20 years grouped into the five-year period
again that's the timeline for the permit itself monitoring plan including parameters and a quality assurance program plan information sources used to develop the watershed management plan and proposed alternative plan if you will
not attain 100% reduction to meet your TMDL during that 20-year permit term so then the big item in there is the description and timing of ongoing and planned implementation activities included updated nitrogen loads so this
is a big element that is needed for all of the wersheds because the MEP data is 20 years old um and within that projected nitrogen loads for following 20 years this could be the same or could be different from the MEP buildout
numbers depends what the updated nitrogen load numbers tell you the percents and methods for reductions during the permit identification of conventional and alternative approaches um where those implementations are going
to happen um how much nitrogen is going to be reduced by either of those technologies and an implementation schedule for each alternative approach including a time frame for acceptance or abandonment of such approach so Falmouth has several
existing approved plans will these meet the requirements for the watershed plan as outlined in these regulations short answer is they can provided that those plans include or are supplemented with each of those elements that I went
through so Falmouth has the original 2013 comprehensive wastewater management plan that's for the south coast and west Falmouth has a 2014 amended targeted watershed management plan that was for Little Pond 2019 it was the CWMP update
for the south coast and West Balmouth and then 2022 had the TWWMP for great pond so those are the four primary planning documents that the town has that they can use to submit as bulk of elements for these wershed plans for
these wersheds so those two planning grants the natural resource nitrogen sensitive area as I said they're planning grants the town decided to put two applications in um the first one was to work on
things associated with Little Pond and Great Pond because that's the first watershed permit the town wants to apply for so because those two wersheds are greatly detailed between those planning documents the scope for that grant is to identify what elements are missing from
all of those existing planning documents necessary to meet the watershed permit i can tell you first and foremost is the updated nitrogen load numbers um which is the second item for the scope so determine the updated nitrogen load numbers and evaluate the existing plan
with respect to these new numbers so GHD has acquired all of the town's water use data for the last 5 years and they are starting to work on those updated nitrogen numbers um then developed a phase implementation plan in five-year
increments so that's kind of the scope of what that first award is the second award was put in for Meanset Fiddlers and Brands that was done because these three are part of the final permit they don't make up the full permit but these
three have not had any formal planning and they're actually kind of grouped together because Fiddler's Cove and Rans Canal actually empty into Meanset Harbor so any improvements within those two wersheds will have an effect on Means and Means has actually been pretty much
achieving its threshold nitrogen concentration at the Sentinel Station for the last 5 years so the first item on here again is to determine the updated nitrogen loads ghd again with the townwide water use
data is doing that then to formally look at Falmouth's contribution there's been a number uh thrown around for Meansit that Felmouth contributes 61% so similar to what we did for Wquite Bay looking at
the actual loading and who's responsible for what and where um and those numbers will be used to start the discussions uh for an inmunicipal agreement with Bourne um and then the final element of that scope is to estimate the nitrogen load reductions and descriptions of
management approaches to meet the TMDLs so that's going back to potentially the geo boundaries and refining what it might take in those three watersheds to get there because the town could work on implementing a plan there ahead of being
under a watershed permit um I'm gonna I'm gonna start with down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down with Jonathan um does the 2022 um wastewater management plans for Great Pond Little Pond did that incorporate all the recent work on IIA systems or is that is that
something that has to be added into the the sewering and the other nitrogen reduction tools what do you mean by recent work on IA well you did uh you looked at how many IAS would have to be done in each watershed so that that will be part of this because we know we can't
get there with suing alone so yep y nothing good time john Steve um if I were the town manager I would ask the following really simple question only
partly tongue and cheek this is a lot of work right a lot of work it's going to cost millions of dollars just the analysis and writing the reports I right certainly hundreds of thousands
reports aren't going to cost millions right including the research to write them I mean I would I would want to know how that total amount some rough back of the envelope calculation compares to the
difference between a the alternative that everybody thought was so bad which was to put IAS in everywhere and what the actual cost will be h as a result of doing these reports and I would hope that the amount for the
reports was a lot less than that difference so you would still need to do the evaluations to determine whether putting IAS everywhere would meet your TMDL because if it doesn't what if what if we chosen that to put in all the IAS
and it didn't work then you have to go back and do something else you either have to go back and sewer because that's your conventional backup plan okay then I'll change it to the difference between what we might do after the reports and what a back of the
envelope simple calculation would be with subsurers to make sure that we met the DMDL in other words it's it's not irresponsible engineering if if you're really sure
to do something conservatively in to avoid a huge expense of finding out how to optimize it by 10% i hope somebody's thought about that intuitively that's all
i think the first step I mean I mean I I you hear I heard I heard what you said there is an approved watershed plan for buttermilk bay and we I we will look up that that number so you have some
sense of of and that was a difficult one because it involved four towns you're talking about Pleasant Bay Pleasant Bay so Pleasant Bay's got a plan it required four towns to raise money to appropriate and to put it together and it's sort of it's the one
plan I'm aware of so far yep it's a very complex plan but we we can find that number Steve and bring it to another meeting so you'll have a sense of what a complex plan costs and the cost for that one in my mind I I just do this because
some of the stuff is going to be the same stuff for each watershed okay we're not going to we're not going to reinvent uh a component that talks about what um lawn fertilizer may or may not do for each wershed we're going to we're going to develop something that says this is
what what we think lawn fertilizer may or may not do and that'll get moved along so I'm just like if we get the Pleasant Bay number we could use a multiple of two or three of that for all 14 wersheds as an initial guess and that would be a back of the envelope okay and and I defer you
i mean your background is way closer to all this stuff than mine is and you may just have a very good intuitive feel that surely these reports will cost a tiny fraction of what they're likely to save but I think it could be shared with
other people so six of those watersheds are covered under the CWMP and the first step would be the evaluation of how the nitrogen numbers have changed maybe they haven't changed from the MEP and those plans are still valid that's that's a
big question so there might not be as much reworking there there could be more that's a big unknown remind me we we got a we got a grant for Little Pond in Great Pond how much was it like 50 or 60,000 45
45 so we have $45,000 and we're doing what I think is the hardest component of this which is we're taking we're revisiting the nitrogen loads between our consultant and Kristen right now to say that's the MEP nitrogen load a legitimate nitrogen load or to Tom's point you know there's other data points
rattling around that would tell us that nitrogen is different from what the MEP said so that that's a big component of what will happen to final plan Steve okay you're next Ed i think it's a good start i think it's great that we've got these
initial planning grants that'll help to identify what's got to happen and um you know I understand Steve Leighton's point about you know what's the this analysis going to cost bottom line you got to do this analysis either way and if we took
the ah the hell would everybody's going to have to do an IIA problem is then it doesn't work we don't won't work because our analysis and modeling has said we've got to sewer the lower watersheds now not only did those folks have to put in
IAS but now they got to sewer and it's going to be 30 years from now and none of us on this committee will be here but that problem you're just kicking the can down the road and the numbers will explode more than they are already so
um ju just a benchmark to your question so these two grants we got were it was a block of money and we expect that to see a similar block of money next year or the year after where they're they're they're putting money out there to help
communities get to watershed plants okay so eight eight of the communities submitted I would venture to say that Brewster Chadam and Dennis applied for the money to do their watersheds you know and so those numbers like 133,000
to 175,000 for them to do their watershed it's not millions okay that's that's another sort of metric to use Okay okay all right okay are you hearing me
you ready Ken um you already did uh some of the basic background for these things right so what we're talking about is sort of the next level of refinement of what with those updated nitrogen loads and so I'm
just trying to understand the mechanics here are we engaging GHD to do that work so so this will be next level refinement using professional engineering firm uh and and
then once those plans are accepted I guess is that is that what happens they they go to the state the state accepts them um implementation now requires the next level of design
engineering for example if you're going to do sewers I just want to be sure I understand the mechanics what we're talking about right if you're going to do IAS what's the next level of for for for that that could be the town board of
health voting a district right but but I I this is a big part of when we actually get to doing the watershed plans we're going to have to have some conversations with border health and the selectment about this plan's going to go in it's
going to say we're going to you know put 200 a year into this watershed 200 every year for five years or whatever and how we're going to do that is going to have to be established okay if you have a good idea I'm willing to
listen i think that's going to be really interesting but yeah I mean the process wise the plan has to be put together and it has to be be stamped by a registered professional engineer in Massachusetts the plan has
to go before the board of selectment for their acceptance andor possibly depending upon what path we go down with IAS before town meeting when you say the plan you mean comprehensive plan including sewers we don't we don't submit a watershed
plan with all the stuff that will be in it to the state till the town has accepted the plan okay okay amy had her hand up yeah Amy kristen did a beautiful job summarizing all of this and uh I'm really glad that
you applied for it and got the grants to do the work i wanted to clarify that we're not um committing to submitting these plans um as soon as they are complete the the grant um the grant work
is is due by the end of June or by June end of June um so uh the next ultimately after a watershed plan is complete we will we will after we decides it's complete then we apply for a watershed
permit and that's really when they grant us the permit it's linked to the plan so that would be that's a timeline right so um what what the work that Kristen Science and GHD are are is is doing is
not necessarily going to get us to the final plan but it's a next big chunk of work um and the watershed plans will um include a schedule for the work as as Kristen said and that um that will have
to reflect the reality of what we can say at the time we submit them about about what we can do so the town will have to um so for example as as you know the additional sewering is contingent on additional discharge site which we're
the town is planning on an outfall but the plan will have to you know say that and and um so so our our when we when we submit these plans it doesn't mean we have to immediately begin to do the work uh but we have to we have to be prepared
to do the work in the schedule we're we're We're saying we're going to do the work but you have 20 years is that correct to so for implementation the the um watershed permit regulation says yes you have 20 years
but it also provided an exception um where um for a watershed for for towns that have 14 wersheds for example and where compliance may take like a great
pond uh is is is going to require an enormous amount of work and that may be a watershed that will take more than 20 years and there's an exception in the in the um there's an allowance in the regulation to take to request more than
20 years if needed to what about and quite potentially as well great pond is even is even tougher i think nobody's nobody's gone for the exception yet and I I I I think that for most of our public conversation we're better off talking about the fact we got
to put a plan in Shaw we're going to get there in 20 years and if we get to year 10 and we're having trouble we can ask for some relief okay but I I wouldn't start off by saying we need relief when we walk in i think I think but that did
occur to me as a you know because Oh yeah 14 watersheds is a a lot different than two um somewhat so the last bit it's it's we know how to you know how sewers work right we know how to you get a design you get a sewer service area
you build it etc so it seems to me that the fuzziest thing that's left here is how do you mandate uh IIA hookups and uh I'm I'm going to momentarily do a I
do I'm going to momentarily throw out the Wealthfly model right now which Wealthfly went and got an SRF commitment and they identified places that the IAS are going have to go in and they said to people if you put an IIA in we will use this SRF money towards the cost of your
IIA and when the money's gone the money's gone right so they incentivized but we talked about that some time ago is that you know you get more help early and we're not we're not there yet so one caveat with going with SRF funding for IAS is to get the 0% loan you have to
have basically growth controls even with IIA districts Because if you upgrade your IIA then you have the right to increase your bedrooms so that would mean more land purchase for conservation or some way to control
additional flow for the 0% loan so So that's another pet peeve of mine or pet topic which is the that runs into the affordable housing question and and particular chapter 40B I guess because this is
statemandated right we would have a way to say no under 40b i I All right we're going to close disc we're going to close discussion everybody on this board's talked anybody
in the audience has a comment not on on Ken's comment or on Kristen's presentation i have a question for Kristen is that what you're asking for i'm asking for this subject we just talked about if anybody in the audience wants to wants
to raise raise a comment it's not so I could pretend I'm a judge and ask you to refer to me as your honor but I'm not going to do that well your honor thank you uh thanks for this too and so just I
didn't realize how big this is and getting my hands around it the whole thing al together is getting tougher all the time but this is helping and so I really want to make sure I'm not misinformed by synthesizing several
comments I heard together here tonight my impression let me just give you the scenario i live in a great pond and that's first up at bat in 2027 we have to have a permit application and so
based on what Jonathan asked that application will have to define the anticipated IAS in addition to the sewering that contribute to compliance in the Great Pond District yes and so and then there's someone said 20 years
from when the permit is granted yep which won't be 27 it'll be something after 27 they're granted pretty fast yep for simplicity though simplicity just assume it's 27 okay and so then you know
I understand the sewers and how we develop the rationale and the planning and the funding and the implementation but thinking the IAS it's like you know you have point sources as they say all over town and you're going to be
defining what those are and so how is that what the discussion was here about how do we get those folks motivated to participate and that's the that's of of of all the nuances and
sticky points we have we can say that we want to have 1500 IAS in the great pond watershed we have yet to figure out how to compel homeowners to do that we've not figured that out but for
instance in the health department's we'll call it prototype with quasi enforcement they're saying for instance you might not be able to transfer title unless you met they're wrestling with the lowest hanging fruit on the So you might have to wait for people Yeah
they're wrestling with it to not be able to live in their house anymore okay they're wrestling with it oh this is neat thank All right thanks Peter i'm I'm looking to move the meeting along so we get out but go ahead what do you got i I think
this is related and I think it's important because it has to do with this and with the board of health i I haven't kept track of the latest version of the board of health thing when I was reading it carefully one of
the key issues was if you were in an area that was likely or planned or I'm actually going to cut you off because you're headed into what the board of health is doing we can have another discussion john's probably going to give an update to make sure yeah
John's going to give an update okay i'll wait for them john and or what where where their next meeting and how close they're getting to a hearing okay thank you sorry just no fair enough okay reports of members and staff how are we doing monitoring down
at Little Pond there Chief we're monitoring we We Some of our apparatus was destroyed over the winter so we are constantly fixing things good how How we doing in the Heights people happy i'll I'll try to be brief but I
got a couple of things I want to raise want to just follow up on what Ken said unfortunately I in my walk by the pond yesterday I noticed a small probably 10 foot by 30 foot algae mat developing haven't seen one in several years but
right at the end of um Grand Avenue where it is right at the pond and the stop sign there is a little mat growing and we have not seen that in several years so I don't know cold wet spring probably part of that uh a lot of
interesting stuff flowing into the pond from the ocean but it is somewhat disconcerning uh there is a couple of grants that uh Kristen has been working on on the PRB for Snug Harbor uh one of which we have
the application in and the award will be in early May a second would well the award will be but we don't know if we're going to get the award but we have submitted the full it did go it did go in yep and uh there is a second grant
opportunity uh called the uh the SNEP grants and there is a letter of intent due on 418 which Kristen is submitting yes it's already in and already you know that will be May 19 is the day where they
would say hey you got a nice letter of intent go ahead and submit a full proposal if we cross that hurdle then we would do a full proposal so I just I'm going to jump in kristen has put that together yep and it's for two data loggers which we've indicated different grant no oh the Oh you're talking the
other Okay sorry this is This is for the Snug Harbor PRB project yeah the the sec the secondary approach second opportunity the second opportunity and the two granting authorities have said "Yeah you could submit this to both of us." And the undercurrent I read in their correspondence was they like this
project so I'm I'm cautiously optimistic on that um there is something else I want to mention briefly and I think should be an agenda item possibly for our next meeting uh that we talk about the information
sessions for homeowners that are impacted by this next phase of sewering great park um looking back historically a couple of years before actual construction the town started informational meetings the first one was
in March of 14 for the Little Pond folks town officials wastewater uh town engineering department town manager water quality management were key in representing to the residents what in
the hang was being planned and there was a lot of unrest there was some very heated meetings there was probably six or eight of them over a year and a half period and you know they started about a year and a half before construction began so I think we're we're due now to
start having those types of meetings with the affected homeowners and whether it's this committee andor uh wastewater management and time i think I get your request to put it on the agenda under adisement i will talk with Amy about what DPW may or may not be planning and as appropriate we'll add it to a future
agenda okay a quickie uh May election is uh the 20th uh there's been a committee formed to advocate for the phase one of the great
pon sewer connection uh and uh donations would be accepted for buying signs uh uh if one would like to donate to those who is the treasurer john yeah who who
do we give them to you just make checks out to the committee i'm going I'm going to I'm going to finish the paperwork tomorrow john's going to be the chair i'll be the treasure okay um and I'll circulate something external of this meeting okay okay to people that might be interested in in participating with
with that that project okay um we we jumped over you Steve but uh we've put an invite out to the test center to make themselves available at an upcoming meeting do we have a date Kristen may 7th may 7th whatever that
first meeting is whatever that mean yeah next meeting you a couple of comments were made on the town meeting floor about people didn't know where the test center was what they were doing and the status of things we had a meeting uh the other day and I heard this yeah so we reached out and said "Yeah you know can
you come in and tell us where you're at so that um you know people know what's going on?" So that's uh that'll be the next meeting i thought you said John was going to say something about the board of health i don't know you can say whether the board of health has got set up a hearing date
or not yet um they've been uh working very hard on getting the plastics regulation finished so they deferred u and it looks like they've eliminated their list down to just uh
requiring uh IAS in new construction okay all I was going to say is we owe it to them and to the town to let them know as soon as possible and as accurately as possible what the sewer areas are or else you'll have people that are
required by the board of health to put in an IIA and then X years later required to change to throw it away and change pay for a sewer and that just strikes me as
incredibly unfair okay tom Shellfish um I'm waiting to hear back from Chuck because I'd like to combine the report thing about a near-term plan of his expansion you think you're going to come
back in a future meeting and talk about That's what I'm planning i'm going to be in touch with him again last time he Why don't we pencil you in for the second second second in May what's that date Kristen he said the second meeting of May so that would be the 20
day after election day 21st yeah all right yeah pencil that and Jonathan I think we got an update from you on uh where we're at we're good well good everybody's keeping busy things are moving along and the the one thing we didn't talk about is we did put
a request in for apparently the SNEP people said you could ask for capital items not to exceed 10,000 and Kristen put together uh a grant request uh working through Amy to get a couple of data loggers that can go into um Perch
Pond as we we march forward on the Great Pond cleanup um and we measure we can measure dissolved oxygen salinity and temperature i believe I also put in Ken's suggestion for the PAR meter and then Yeah so Oh nice good you know I I
would say we probably have a pretty strong probability on that one because a it was really targeted to capital items under $10,000 and these are two devices that have some value the saw thing or whatever that that broke the $10,000 barrier so we stepped
back and decided to give Right i knew I knew you couldn't do them i'm just those those are all paying attention because you had suggested that once before so Right right okay but we can do a lot of okay all right that's the reports we have minutes from a prior
meeting read in detailed by Tom couple minor edits hopefully everybody's had a chance to read their minutes any further revisions or comments on the minutes yes um I don't usually do this there's a sentence in there that Leighton and
reports of members and staff reported on some crazy system using trucks and I I just mentioned it fyi I I want to make it clear that I don't think it's practical for anything we're doing here
did the minutes say that you think it's practical or that you just mentioned no we just took a very neutral approach kept it right i mean I almost intended it as a joke central collection of waste but it's okay if you leave it in say it after we adjourn is it okay if I I can go back and put a smiley face
emoticon into a big Okay all right so I'm going to move that what Kristen and I presented be accepted as presented okay second second all those in favor signify by saying I i i absent i think I might have been absent uh yeah
you were you were you were sick right so so you stay there you go that's why I didn't know about the trucks all right we Motion to adjurnn no debate allowed on a motion to adjurnn can I get a second no second we're having too much fun
all right we're going to sit here until somebody seconds it i said second all those in favor sub i [Music]