Speaker 1: All right, so we better do this by roll call. So, Chris, are you here? Speaker 2: This is here. Speaker 1: Okay. Paul Conley here remotely. I'm here. All right. Saul Beaumont here. Remotely here. And Paul Gman. I'm here remotely. So the time is seven thirty two. And we can call the meeting to order. The first item on the agenda is citizens' concerns. Is there anyone who would like to speak to the committee about something that's not on the agenda? Okay. Seeing none then we'll move on
to item three on the agenda. I believe Donna is joining. Yeah, Speaker 3: I, I'm here participating and I may, I'm waiting for a ride. I'm at the hospital, so I may have to leave early, but I'm here for now. Speaker 1: Alright, well we've got you in Donna. Thank you for joining. So we have a number of, of items to, to consider and I'm actually, hello? Speaker 2: We can hear you. Speaker 1: Okay. I thought I actually have a tight
time constraint this evening. So what I'd like to do is if I could kind of take items three, four, and five kind of together. 'cause they kind of, they kind of run together, the finance committee, follow up our report and then what to do at town meeting. So at the finance committee we had a motion to hear our report, which was, which they, you know, recommended. And then we had a series of motions dealing with the collector of taxes, dealing with procurement and dealing with some other things.
The finance committee recommended re if favorable action on a number of our motions. But on two of our motions, the finance committee actually made a, a request to refer them back to us for additional wording or for, actually I'm looking at my note here to, to refer them back to us for wording changes. One of those was the propane and the other was the zoning council. The discussion was very supportive at the fin com. On both of those matters, they did make some good points about the way that they were
worded to improve the clarity and the precision. And we took the, I took those notes and I met online with Mr. Ensis. We made changes at his suggestion and I was prepared to take them back to the finance committee. I believe we have Bob Awkward joining. Bob, are you, are you here? Speaker 4: I am, I am now. Speaker 1: Okay, so we have Mr. Awkward joining at 7 35. I was just giving a report from the finance committee, Bob, the, our presentation of warrant, articles and motions. So all of our motions were favorably recommended
with the exception of two. One was propane, the other was the special zoning council. And the finance committee voted to refer those back to us for wording changes. They, they were not in opposition to the ideas. As a matter of fact, they, they were actually kind of supportive, but they, they actually pointed out some things that actually would improve the, the precision and the clarity. So I met with Mr. Duris online, taking their comments. He suggested some edits. We had refined motions ready to go and the fin com canceled at last. Its last meeting. Speaker 4: Okay, that's what I was gonna say. 'cause we did our project, we got, we went on,
we redid 'em and voted them Speaker 1: Right. So we have, you know, so the, we have a couple of options Speaker 4: That explains the report now. Okay, now I understand the notes Speaker 1: So we can push our motions forward at town meeting from the floor. Personally, I don't recommend doing that because just like the propane ran into some questioning and confusion at a town meeting on, at the finance committee and also the zoning council ran into some questioning,
but then like support for the idea, but changed the words. My recommendation to the committee is we have a meeting sometime, you know, in, I don't know, may, June or July where we just sponsor the same things, ratify our motions, we put 'em on for the fall because there was, there, there was not opposition to these items, there was just a request for wording clarifications. So we have one option to put this back on for the fall. The other is to try and, you know, bring it forward at this town meeting.
And sometimes that's a difficult sell at town meeting, right. Particularly with an article that's at the end of the warrant. Interestingly enough, interestingly enough, on the zoning council one, there was a lot of commentary from finance committee members, we need this, we've gotta have this, this is important, this is imperative, we need this, we absolutely need this. But there's opposition from key, from certain members of the planning board and from certain people on the, on the select board. So it actually may's more it, what's it it one level not,
not so much amazing, but another level. Yes. I was flabbergasted to hear the report that one member of the select board thought that this was creating a separate, you know, planning board in the form of an council that's actually supposed to advise the people. But the, let's say, my advice to the committee is don't force these things through the fall town meetings. They Speaker 4: Understood it's council SEL, not CIL, right? Yes. Speaker 1: I'm not, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I didn't watch the, I didn't watch, you know, all
of those, all of those meetings. But, so my recommendation is on those we respect the fin comm's wishes, bring it back to them with the wording changes, their schedule changed and they didn't have a next, their, their last meeting fine. But my recommendation is we bring it up, we bring it back forward in the, in the fall. So that's just a, I think Speaker 4: Think that's prudent. Speaker 1: I just think it's, particularly for an article, it's kind of at the end of the warrant. Right. So the other thing I wanted to, you know, give people just a, a kind of like a heads up on is
the new moderator, Mr. Alderson has been very, very diligent about trying to get sponsors of warrant articles to show up at native Pegasus and be interviewed, Mr. Connolly, I'm sorry you were raising your hand. Speaker 5: The things that you suggest that we just drop off until later. Suppose someone is actually in favor of it and makes the motion to, to do something. Now what is our committee going to do in that situation?
Speaker 1: It's a pleasure of the committee, but the committee could say, here's our, here's the motion that we worked on based on feedback from the finance committee. Or we could say the finance committee asked us to come back, take a look at revisions to the language and bring it back to the finance committee. And their schedule didn't have the opportunity to do that. Let's respect their wishes and, and the process at town meeting, I think things move more smoothly if they go through finance committee first as opposed to pushed onto town meeting floor. And we just see what happens. Yes,
Speaker 4: It's always helpful. You'll, Speaker 5: You will say something about the fact that we're still in favor of this particular subject, Speaker 1: You know, I assume. Oh, absolutely. And quite frankly, the, so the, I was, I was about to, you know, comment, Mr. Alderson Hass been very diligent about following up with sponsors to try and get every article on the warrant to have its interview time, if you will, on Natick Pegasus. And his schedule. And my schedule and Randy Brewer's schedule at Pegasus actually worked out.
So that, I was actually able to do that yesterday. And you, it should be posted now on the town meeting information website. But I advanced a number of the arguments in favor of what we were doing, both on propane and also on the zoning council. But I only used one of the zoning examples and there are many, many more. The FinCo heard, most heard a good number of them. But we'll have to see when, if, if we, we can make as a, a committee a decision to push this forward at Springtown meeting
or to just bring it back around at the, you know, at the fall. So I did meet with Mr. Alderson yesterday and tape this thing at Natick Pegasus, which you can probably watch, but there was, you know, some interesting conversation I had with him afterwards and it kind of bears on our report. So in the past, what we have done is an extensive written report. I mean, Chris has done a lot of the work on writing those reports and we've reviewed it as a committee and then we actually give a, you know, kind of a synopsis or a summary as a verbal report on town meeting floor.
And the previous moderator would had a practice of maintaining a, a email distribution where every document that would gonna, was gonna come up at each a, each session of town meeting would be listed and town meeting members could look at it. The new moderator is not going to do that. So there is not gonna, you're not going to get an an email with here's the order of business, here's the, you know, here are the documents that will be coming up tonight, et cetera. Instead, what you may get if you've signed up,
is you will get an alert to go check on the town meeting member information website and see what the, you know, see what the agenda is. But the kind of the, the classic distribution of our report is not something that, you know, that I think necessarily will work the same way or the even work in this environment. Historically, committees have made hard paper copies of the report and put them on the table with the previous moderator's approach. You, we supplied documents electronically
and the moderator put them out and made them available to town meeting members. I think now they've gotta go to be submitted and somebody who's the website person at the town needs to actually load them up. And I can tell you person from personal experience, I had great difficulty accessing the site yesterday. I used Google Chrome, you know, after 10 minutes it crashed. There were too many, you know, strings of code for it to go through. I tried again and after 15 minutes I got through and there was, there actually wasn't anything there. So my recommendation to my recommendation
to the committee is we give a verbal report because when you think about what we have at this town meeting, it's a, you know, it's a couple of very focused motions and an update on the special act and an update on where we stand with the money with special counsel. And we could just give, there's nothing that says we have to do an extensive written report. It could be entirely verbal. Speaker 2: One thing I would say is that we could, if, you know, if the report was very short and it, you know, is very high level, we could make that into A PDF and have it be posted on our webpage where the other Yes.
So, you know, we could refer to that if people wanna read the full report. Speaker 1: I think it's a great idea. I think, I think it's a great idea. Speaker 2: And then, you know, giving them, you know, just letting the moderator know that we're going to give a little bit more form, you know, a little bit long, like I've prided myself on, you know, having short reports. But I think, and it still could be short because again, we have fewer motions and we can speak to those motions when they come up. I do feel less confident about all these motions compared to others. Maybe it's just like burnout and that's why it took me so long to get the report to you.
But it's just this, this last set of, even though it's, you know, I can definitely study them, but it's, it's just been harder for me to pull this off like, since we've finished our last meeting at the end of Speaker 6: Try to keep it on low. Speaker 2: But I know Harriet. Oh. So anyway, that's, I, I like the idea of giving the verbal, you know, recording giving more detail on those three areas. And then I also, Speaker 6: I guess you're Speaker 2: Busy like the idea putting Speaker 1: Donna, excuse me, Donna, could you please mute because we conversation in the background and we Okay, I'm sorry Chris, go ahead.
Speaker 2: Oh, I do, I do think that we should have a sort of, you know, abbreviated reports. Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 2: Please method. Speaker 7: Chris, maybe you can mute her. Can't you mute her? Speaker 1: Yeah. Can you Speaker 4: Donna mute the host? You can mute. Speaker 2: Did Speaker 7: I muted? It's muted now. Okay. Speaker 1: Okay. Thank you. Speaker 2: Good idea. Speaker 1: Okay, any other comments from anyone on this kind of an approach? Speaker 4: So where do you want me to send my comments? Chris? You want me to mail 'em to you? Or sounds like it won't be as time, as time sensitive as it would've been.
Speaker 2: You, you, you printed it out, right? Yes. So you're not gonna be able to email it to me? Speaker 4: I printed it out. I marked it up and I highlighted it. Speaker 2: Okay. I can stop by and get it from you. Speaker 4: Oh, okay. Speaker 2: If you, if you could Speaker 4: Leave it in my mail mark Speaker 2: Or in your front door, you can Speaker 4: Text me. Okay. Speaker 7: You're talking the report? Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 7: Yeah, I went through it too. I probably found the same things you did, Bob, but maybe I got a couple of extra How do you want you, you want me to email it to you? Is that what we're saying? Speaker 2: Yeah, if you have edits can, if you have edits, can you send them to me?
Speaker 7: What did you say? Speaker 1: Send your edits by email. Yeah. Speaker 7: Okay. Mine are mostly, there was confusion between fin income and our committee and some other typos and nothing Speaker 4: Yeah. That was send on 'em. Yep. Yeah. Speaker 2: Paul, did you have any comments on the report? Paul Conley? Speaker 1: Paul, if you have comments on the report, please email them to Chris. Speaker 7: No, I don't have any comments. Speaker 1: Okay. Okay. Anyone from the public on any of these items? I think we have one member. Okay. Seeing done, I think the next item is the special
counsel invoice is that Pegasus? I, I found the invoice a little bit confusing and I had emailed them back that it was confusing because there was one total for, you know, 3000 and another total for 4,000 and another total for 10,000. And I said there's no way we owe you 10,000. And I've received late today an email from Michelle Laramie, the town comptroller who said the amount due
is $4,080 and 90 cents. Speaker 2: That's the amount due, that's the amount due before the April bill? Speaker 1: No, that is the amount due. Including the, I believe the, well, I don't believe there is an A there is no April bill. Oh, they, they didn't, they, they didn't do anything in April. Speaker 2: Okay. I thought they had sent you a new bill when, when we received the December bill, you know, there was outstanding balance, the total due from the December bill and the unpaid amount was
$9,901 and 8 cents. So if they're saying that we owe $4,000 to them, that doesn't match up with any of the invoices that, Speaker 1: That we can, we can put this to another meeting. 'cause I've asked for this stuff to be reformatted. I Speaker 2: Think we do, but can we get a statement from the comptroller on what she's paying? Like I know she gave you a verbal amount, but can we ask Speaker 1: Her for No, no, it was not a verbal amount. It literally was an email that came in today while I was teaching a class and I just saw it
and she looked at them and said everything has been paid except $4,080 and 90 cents. But if you wanna put this to a different meeting, then we didn't put it to a different meeting. Yeah, because I thought, I thought the bills were very confusing and it was a new person that actually sent them. It was not the same billing clerk. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we're, we can't, I mean if we don't have, we've already approved invoices, so if we don't have an in new invoice, then it's just getting clarity on what's going on with the invoice. Okay. Speaker 1: Without objection. We'll put this to the next meeting.
Speaker 4: Not ready for prime time. Speaker 1: Okay. Meeting minutes. Speaker 2: We have three sets of meeting minutes. Four sets, excuse me. January 28th, 2025, which I sent on April 1st. February 4th, which I sent on March 30th, February 18th that I sent on March 30th and then March 31st that I sent on April 1st. So do we wanna take one at a time? Does people have any changes to the draft minutes of January 28th? Speaker 1: No change. Bob, do have a motion?
Speaker 4: Make a motion. Bob, I move the acceptance of the minutes of January 28th, 2025. Speaker 1: Is there a second? I'll second. I second. I'll second. Okay, so I'll second it. Okay. We'll vote this. Chris, how do you vote? Yes. Paul Connolly, how do you vote? Yes, Saul, how do you vote? I have to abstain. Okay. Bob, how do you vote? Speaker 4: Yes. Speaker 1: And I'm a yes. So I've got that as 4 0 1. Speaker 4: Did you ask Donna Speaker 1: I'm a yes. I'm sorry Donna as a yes.
I'm sorry. Thank you Bob. I missed that. And Donna is a yes. That'll be 5 0 1. Okay, next set. Chris, Speaker 2: February 4, 25. Speaker 1: Any comments? Speaker 4: I've got a, yeah, have a couple small ones on the meeting was call to order. The call should be lower KC citizen concern non offered. I think it's supposed to be none offered. Yep. And, and on the second page, one, well 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 paragraphs down. It's a paragraph that starts that Ms.
Meows move to accept the warrant article. And then it says the text can be reasonable, I think should be reasonably modified. Speaker 2: Yeah, Speaker 4: Go ahead. Speaker 2: Those are good changes. Thank you. Speaker 1: Yeah, without objection. We'll accept those editorial corrections. Any further comments? Bob, do you wanna make a motion? Speaker 4: I move the acceptance of the minutes of Tuesday, February 4th, 2025 as amended. Speaker 1: Okay, second. Thank you Saul. Thanks for a seconding that. Bob, how do you vote?
Speaker 4: Yes, Speaker 1: All I'm assuming it's an abstention. Yes, abstain. Okay. Chris, how do you vote? Speaker 2: Yes, Speaker 1: Paul. Cony, how do you vote? Yes, Donna, how do you vote? Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: And I'm a yes. So that makes it 5 0 1. Alright, Chris, next up Speaker 2: Is Tuesday, February 18th meeting. Speaker 4: What date is that? You're saying Speaker 2: February 18th? Speaker 4: Yep. Oh, I got a couple. You ready? Speaker 2: Yep. Speaker 4: On page two, that first paragraph, third line
during discussion to remove something in between spelling errors, remove, remove that thing between remove and spelling. You don't need it. Whatever it is. I can't say I could X over it. Remove a, remove spelling errors. There's something in between. Remove and spelling. Speaker 2: Are you on? Which paragraph is Speaker 4: First? Paragraph Speaker 2: Next motion A and motion B. Speaker 4: No, next motion. Hey, where is that? Speaker 2: Oh, Speaker 4: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the next page, top of the page. Next page. Speaker 2: Oh, there's only two pages. Speaker 4: Right? So I'm on the page
that says calculated on unpaid taxes for what your tax title has begun. Then you drop down a line and drop down a line. Third line during discussion to remove something. Spelling errors. You don't need the something between remove spelling errors. Speaker 2: I must have pulled up the line seven minutes when I, 'cause I'm, what, what I'm looking at right now is that, hang on. Speaker 4: Oh, you don't have that in yours. Oh cool. If you removed it already, good fin com Shouldn't that be capitalized? I mean that's a proper name.
And the same in paragraph, starting on page two. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, paragraph five. The one that starts a discussion of the history when needing motion. F is fin com again, and then it should be capitalized. Speaker 2: No, I think we're gonna have to wait to do these minutes. 'cause I, I probably need to look at what you're doing. 'cause nothing matches with what I'm pulling up as a document. So, Speaker 4: Oh, have you already, have you made changes since you sent this to us? Speaker 2: I, I haven't touched it since, you know, I sent it as far as
Speaker 4: Back a while ago. Speaker 2: Let me, when I pick up the report edits, why don't you give me those edits and I'll make them and review this at a future meeting. Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 1: Without objection. We'll put the, the meeting minutes for February 18th to our next meeting saying, no objection Chris, the fourth set of minutes, Speaker 2: Set of minutes is from March 31st. Speaker 4: I got nothing. Speaker 1: Anyone else? Bob, do you wanna make a motion? Speaker 4: I move to accept the minutes of Monday, March 31st, 2025.
Speaker 1: Okay, is there a second? Second. Seconded by Mr. Beaumont, we'll vote this. Bob, how do you vote? Speaker 4: Yes, Speaker 1: Saul? Same. Same. Chris? Yes. Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: Okay. Paul Connolly? Yes. Donna. Donna, are you there? You may need to unmute herself. I'm a yes Donna. Speaker 2: I'm a yes. Speaker 1: Okay. Thank you. So that is 5 0 1.
Ms. Berkowitz is, we're through the agenda. Ms. Berkowitz is not here this evening. Who would like to do the honors move to adjourn? Moved by Mr. Beaumont to adjourn. Is there a second? Speaker 4: Second. Speaker 1: Seconded by Mr. Awkward. Thank you Bob. Saul, how do you vote? Yes. Bob. Speaker 4: Yes. Speaker 1: Chris? Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: Paul Connolly. Yes. Donna? Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: And I'm a Yes. That is 5 0 0. Thank you all.
We are adjourned.