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Video-1: https://videoplayer.telvue.com/player/994DtmGEsi0VDYK3jJI2BJ72GfgNIpU2/media/1029331?showtabssearch=true&fullscreen=false
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Good evening and welcome to the Select Board meeting of Wednesday, June 10th, 2026. I'm gonna call the meeting to order at 6:03 PM The first item on our agenda is requested Action to vote to approve and confirm the sale of bond anticipation notes and General obligation Municipal Purpose loan of 2026 bonds and sign the associated documents and papers. Ari, Am I on? I think I'm on Try. Am I on right now? Is a green light on? Yeah. Oh, I think you're on. Okay.
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All right. I just didn't hear my echo. Okay, thank you. Madam Chair. The town staff held a ratings call with s and p on May 19th, may. I'm pleased to inform everybody that the s and p re reformed our AAA ratings. That's great news. Yes. The debt sale was held on June 3rd. There were two tranches bond anticipation notes and about the amount of 4,015,000 and geo debt and the amount of 4,510,000. The ban was for a variety of purposes, including the largest one being rotaries and sidewalks,
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but also space renewal, building exterior repairs, field design for the high school, and a portion of the memorial feasibility study. All projects that have been funded through the capital plan. The geo bond purposes were a combination of fire apparatus, water and sewer projects, landfill, some elevator, elevator stewardships too, and, and various other items as well. On the bands, there were three bids. The most favorable was with a group called Academy Securities for an net interest cost of 2.8289% included a $36,900 premium, a little less than that,
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actually $36,878. For the geo sale. There were five bids. The lowest most favorable bid was from SWBC investment services at a little over three point at 3.292766%, which included a $396,615 premium, $285,000 of that premium will we applied to projects. The rest, we applied to the issuance cost of the pro of the of the sale. Happy to answer any questions. We have staff here ready to assist with the signature, as well as the acting treasurer and the town clerk Board members questions or comments? Very thankful for the AAA bond rating.
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At this time, I'll entertain a motion. I move that we adopt the vote prepared by bond counsel in writing before the select board approving the sale and in and issuance of the town's 4,510,000 general obligation municipal purpose loan of 2026 bonds, and 4 million of 15,000 and $15,000 of general obligation bond anticipation notes dated June 18th, 2026. Second. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Is that the correct amount?
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'cause it's different on here. That is the amount that was provided to us by Mr. Sky. The exact language we need to use given to us by bond council, There's a net premium that affects the, so, so it's 4,000,785,000 worth of projects, but 265,000 is applied. Two 85,000, I'm sorry, is applied towards the bonds for, to reduce the, the, the power ground a little bit. Saves us some money. Good question. Alright. No question. And your vote, Ms. Wal? Yes. So we are 5 0 0, and the vote to approve and confirm the sale.
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At this time, we'll take about a 15 minute recess so that the board can sign the associated documents and closing papers. Thank You. Calling our meeting back to order at 6:28 PM First step is announcements. Mr. Jacobs? Yeah. So I just wanted to make an announcement regarding Flag Day, which is coming up on Sunday, June 14th. This is courtesy of our old colleague reach Sidney, who wrote this. So I'm just gonna read part of it. So on June 14th, we honor one of our nation's most enduring symbols. The United States flag the roots of Flag Day, stretched back
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to 1885 when the formal observance was invented by a Wisconsin school teacher. Over the decades, communities across the country embraced the tradition. In 1916, the observance received national recognition, and in 1949 it became official when President Harry Truman signed the act establishing June 14th as National Flag Day. June 14th is also the birthday of the United States Army, founded in 1775. As we mark this day, we honor the generations of soldiers who sacrifice, whose service and sacrifice have protected the freedoms and ideals represented by our flag. Their dedication remains a
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cornerstone of our nation's strength. Respect for the flag also includes knowing how to reti retire it properly. When a flag becomes worn, torn, or faded, it should be disposed of in a dignified and respectful manner, traditionally through a formal retirement ceremony. Fortunately for anyone with a flag ready for retirement, the local VFW accepts worn or damaged flags and ensures that they're properly and respectfully disposed of. So let's take that day when it comes to reflect on our shared history. Honor those who served and show respect for the symbol that represents us. Thank you.
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Thank you, Mr. Jacobs. Does any, any other board member have an announcement they'd like to make or share? Okay. At this time we will go into public speak. I do have a couple, I'm Sorry. We're gonna stop public speak and go back to announcements. I just thought about these. There are Juneteenth events happening, and I'm saying this now because we won't have another meeting before the Juneteenth holiday. And so there is the Frederick Douglass reading that's happening on Juneteenth in the morning. I think it's 10 or 10 30. And then the Juneteenth activities,
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the actual event is happening on the 20th, which is Saturday from about 11 to one, I believe, on the common. So if you have time, you should attend 10. Thank you so much. Sorry, I overlooked that. For public speak, any individual may raise an issue that's not included on tonight's agenda, and it will be taken under advisement by the board. There'll be no opportunity for debate during this portion of the meeting. Due to the requirements of open meeting law, the section of the agenda is limited to 10 minutes and any individual addressing the board during the section of the agenda shall be limited to three minutes.
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Why don't you come up, Mr. Scott, if you could introduce yourself. You have three minutes. Hello, my name is Roger Scott, precinct 10 town meeting member and resident of 40 Water Street. When I come to you tonight is you probably are aware of recent disclosure in the town of Needham about a town employee being accused of stealing $200,000. So I wanna bring forward the, the book that we are presented as a town meeting member, the April 28th town meeting manual that we followed. And on page 41 of this
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Booklet, we have no listing of any of these expenses. There is no breakdown of the expenses in this town. So as a town, we're trying to create town government and not allowing people to see what's in behind the scenes. For instance, the select board administrative support, it has a set salary of $1.489 million, but it has expenses of $889,000, which is 60% the equivalent of the salaries.
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With no explanation. People in the town we're supposed to vote on these things. And now that happens in Needham. We want disclosure, we what's, what's there to, you know, who's to say something's something isn't happening in this town. We have a finance $1.8 million and $438,000 in expenses. That's 25%. But if you flip over to the police department with an $8.8 million salary, they had 396,000 in expenses, which is an equivalent of a four and a half percent comparison.
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A fire department, $10,941,000, 387,000 in expenses, less than the, the police departments in an equivalent of a three and a half percent margin. I don't know how people are expected to understand all this data and after having exposure in a RA neighboring town and the opportunity, but so many employees in this town that there's no transparency. There has to be some Mr. Scott, 30 seconds. Well, I'm just trying to say, I hope that the select board takes this under consideration
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and that people disclose information so that people in members of town meeting will have a proper thing to be able to vote and know what's going on in the town other than just being big items thrown before them to unanimously vote for. I, I think it's a discredit to the taxpayer in the town, and I think the taxpayer deserves better. So I hope you'll take that under consideration and print all these out expenses. So when we go to town meeting, we know. Thank you Mr. Scott. What's happening? Thank you very much. We will take that under advisement.
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Well, thank you for your time. Thank you. Is there anyone else in the room who would like to address the select board during public speak? Seeing none, I'll look online. We have one hand raised Mr. Alderson. Sorry. Thank you. Madam Chair. Doesn't look like I can start my video, so I apologize for that. All. I very briefly wanted to say that I wanna thank folks that had applied for the finance committee appointments that I make at the end of June. I had enough people applying to fill all the vacancies. And so that will be published and made available on July 1st on
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the finance committee website. I just also wanna put a plug in and encourage anyone that's still interested in serving on the finance committee to keep applying even mid se, mid-year, mid-season, because we do have the occasional vacancy from time to time that we fill with people that have applied. So again, thank you also to the select board for advertising the vacancy and making that available in your, in your minutes in your discussions. Appreciate that. Thank you. Mr. Alderon. Is there anyone else online who would like to address the board? Seeing none will close public speak and move to appointments. First series of interviews is for the Conservation Commission. There's one term expiring at the end of
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one term, which will expire 6 30 20 29. And we have three candidates. We'll take them in the order. They're listed in the agenda. So if I could ask Mr. Downey, are you, are you in the room or online? He's online. So we have very comprehensive packets and resumes from all of the applicants. So rather than repeating them into the record, I would ask that the candidates just tell us two to three sentences about why you wanna serve on the particular board or commission that you're applying to or committee.
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And then I will open it up to board questions for the candidates. So Mr. Downey, you, you're up. Thank you for that. I have been serving on the Conservation Commission as a member since 2014, and I'm looking to be reappointed. Thank you. Mr. Downing questions or comments from members of the public? Mr. Jacob? I mean from members of the board. First, please, Mr. Jacobs. Thank you. Thank you for your service, Mr. Downey. And thanks for obviously reapplying. So I, I just have one question, which is in the, in late 2024
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and early 2025, the bo the, the Conservation Commission considered the concept of adopting a tree bylaw in Natick, which, you know, for, I mean, obviously I know you know what it is, but for those listening, it's like the idea is there's some communities, some municipalities have a bylaw that kind of prescribes, you know, when and how, and you know, the, the process for removing trees, you know, kind of regulates the removal of trees from, from, from private property. And ultimately the, the commission decided not to go forward proposing a bylaw like that at this time,
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but instead to kind of work through a process of maybe get building more public support or engaging like a, a tree committee. So I, I wanted to ask you kind of what your thoughts were on that decision and kind of what you think going forward as far as the prospects for considering a bylaw like that for Natick. That's a great question and it's, you know, it's aligned with my profession. I'm, I'm a licensed forester here in, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and you know, I went to UMass Amherst for that. So, you know, trees are critically important
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to us as human beings. Not just for their shade, but also for the products that we derive from them. Trees are also important to our community identity, you know, so, you know, these, these are things that are very important to me personally and professionally. So, you know, a tree law, a tree bylaw and, and you hit the nail on the head. It is a regulation. And, you know, I think we're in an environment, you know, where we have to be very, very careful to balance a re an additional regulatory environment
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that's, you know, I would say in some cases in Massachusetts. And, you know, we're in a very regulated state, and I think we should always respect property rights first and foremost. That's at least how I was brought up here as a, as our family's been in Natick since, since 1920. So I've been here in Natick for a long, long time, at least the 55 plus years I've been on this planet. So, you know, I think that's, that's, I think, I can't speak for the commission, but I can speak for myself. I think that's why we took such a deliberate approach to
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that bylaw, because it does, it does have strong meaning. And especially if you take an approach as other communities have, it is ex extraneously regulating, you know, with regard to, you know, how many trees you have to put back costs and, and such. So I, I think we have to be very careful and very deliberate in terms of how we regulate private property specific to tree removal. And, you know, I do see a lot of trees being removed, you know, I think, you know, that sometimes is concerning,
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especially if it's in parts of our community that have heat island effect. You know, we have, you know, the town has been wonderful and generous in, in doing analysis of that. And I think those are things that should guide us where maybe trees that are in places where shade is not as robust, we should be very concerned about how much tree removal occurs in those areas. 'cause you don't want to exacerbate that. Or in communities where there's, you know, income or language barriers or places where trees are, are very important environmental justice type areas.
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So, you know, I I do think it's, you know, you can take a broad brush stroke like other communities have. And I think, you know, there's examples where these, you know, very good peer ver peer reviewed research done on these bylaws. And, and in many cases they failed miserably because first and foremost, as you've thoughtfully identified, there is no engagement. And I think that's, you know, just like the engagement the town did has done with the South Natick dam conversation,
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that's the type of engagement I think the Conservation commission is looking to have before any bylaw or something is proposed to your body or town meeting. And I think that's a thoughtful approach. We, and I think that's inherently what we need to look for, you know, in terms of our approach to reg, you know, added regulation. Thank you very much. Are there any other questions? We'll go with Mr. Evans first and then Ms. Walner. Thank you, Madam Chair. My question's sort of a general question, which is
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what conservation or environmental challenges that do you believe are most important in Natick today and in the near future? Well, I think from a, from a perspective of open space and, and I'll use a word that we commonly use in, in my profession, which is maintaining forest as forest. So I think having open space and maintaining it in a, in a place that is not exacerbating some of the issues that we have in front of us, whether that be climate change
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or invasive species or habitat loss, you know, or biodiversity loss. I think those are the things that I look towards as, so what we have, are we stewarding it? Are we caring for it? And, and the stuff that, and the items that we're stewarding, you know, are we doing the best that we can to keep those in a, in a place where we could be proud and, and point to that we've taken good care of them and stewarded them. So I think main thing is don't lose any more land if we can and maintain open space.
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And then where we have opportunity, and I think in Natick where the opportunities lie is these areas that maybe are degraded or in areas that may be right now a parking lot that do we have an opportunity to create open space in those areas, especially in, in parts of Natick where clearly we have heat island effect on top of environmental justice neighborhoods. And that combination is very bad. You know, not just because of the heat island effect, but this is also affects human health
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and we have other issues associated with that. So, you know, our open space is a direct, you know, impact of how well this community is in terms of its health and of human health that is. And I think if we maintain a good piece of open space and we do the work that we've been doing historically, which is trying to create those, these connection points to these islands of open space, I think overall that would be something that I would continue to support here in town.
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And I think the Conservation Commission is always looking for ways to create better connection, connectivity, and, you know, I think that, you know, from my perspective, it's, it's really about kind of no net loss and making sure that we have the open space and the systems, the natural based systems to, to tackle what climate may be throwing at us in 60, 80 years or less. Thank you, Ms. Salka. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Downey.
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Based on your experience so far on the commission, what characteristics and qualifications do you feel make for an effective member? That's fantastic question. I, I, I think a passion to serve your community first and foremost. And, and what I mean in, in serving is that you attend meetings regularly, that when there's demands put on outside of the meeting schedules, whether those be site visits, volunteer work, trails, days, et cetera, that
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you take it, you, you have the ability to participate in those, you know, earth Day events, et cetera. I think the other piece is, is that is also being hungry for improving consistently your knowledge base about between the regulation that you are overseeing, the Wetlands Protection Act and being able to continue to learn, because I, I can say from a, from a natural resources profession and from a, from a professional standpoint,
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just like Mother Nature's not stagnant learning and, and adapting and, and reflecting upon your knowledge base is, is necessary in this, in this work. 'cause the wetlands are not stagnant. They move and change over time. These systems, the forest changes over time in sometimes wonderful ways, sometimes in ways that we may not like. And I think that the regulation is always changing. And inherently when you're involved in anything that requires your complete understanding of the regulation,
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you have to be reading that and taking the proper training and attending professional engagement trainings and, and, and other opportunities like the, you know, the yearly conferences or the bi-yearly conferences that Massachusetts Association of Conservation Commissions hell hold. So I think that it's a life learning process, and I think that because you're appointed doesn't mean that, okay, great, I'm gonna learn by osmosis.
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It's, IIII can't imagine taking on a conservation commission position as a volunteer without digging really deep into the training and understanding the Wetlands Protection Act. I'm fortunate as a forester, I live in the Wetlands Protection Act every day. That's just part of my job. I work in a, an aspect of the Wetlands Protection Act, that is the agricultural section of that, but I still need to know every aspect of that in my day-to-day job. So I'm fortunate in that,
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but I also regularly attend the MACC conferences and take training with the Department of Environmental Protection. So I, I think it's a, a love for learning, I guess I would say, or, and a passion for serving this wonderful town and community. Thank you very much, Ms. Pope. Hi, Mr. Downey, thank you very much for your service. My question for you, based on what you said about, you know, the, the constant desire to learn and that this and, and your willingness and initiative to learn, what would you say,
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you know, how has your perspective on conservation evolved and how, since you've been on the commission and how would you say that pertains to NAIC specifically? So I think, you know, come, you know, being away from Natick for a period of time and living in other parts of the, of the country and other parts of the state and, and returning back home to Natick in, in 2013 gave me a, I think a, a much better perspective of, of the challenges here. To be honest with you, I've,
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I've lived in very rural communities. I lived in a, in a town in, in western Kentucky that had 82 people in it, slaughters, Kentucky. And I was fortunate to live there for six years. I've, I've lived in Peru, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires that has barely 700 people in it, and 80%, 80 plus percent of that town is protected open space. And, you know, coming back home to Natick, a place that I care about and, and where my family and I, you know, where my family has been since, you know,
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the early parts of the 19 hundreds. And I, I do see conservation takes a different meaning here, you know, professionally it has a meaning to me as a forester. But here in this community, what it means is it's little pieces. It's trying to take little fragments of, of habitat and finding ways to connect that to people and so they can enjoy what I've been able to enjoy as a forester. And, and as somebody who, you know, is very fortunate to live in East Natick
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and I'm surrounded by open space, I'm very fortunate and, and I know there's folks in Natick that aren't as fortunate as I am. You know, I live on Oak Street, yes, it's a busy road, but within 30 seconds I can be on a trail within a minute and a half, I can be down at Piro Pond, you know, and I crossing Route nine I can be at, oh, I can be at, at the Town Forest. So to say I'm blessed is, is is remarkable, but that, that's the type of blessing that I believe everybody in Natick should have the
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opportunity for. So how do we find ways to conserve that? That's the conservation ethic that I'm, you know, that doesn't necessarily align with my profession, doesn't necessarily align with what I was taught about conservation, but it, it fits here in our community. So how do we find a way to conserve the areas that are meaningful to us and gives better opportunity for folks to be able to get out and enjoy and experience the things that I get to enjoy
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that I just take for granted sometimes. And, and that's, I think the uniqueness here versus other parts of the, the country and other parts of the state I've wor I've worked and lived in. So, and, and, and that's how conservation I think is interpreted is, is kind of where you are. Because I'll be honest with you, the conservation could mean to somebody in West Natick as having a couple of trees in their backyard in a garden. Yeah. So, you know, finding ways to connect people
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and maybe that's, maybe that's part of it too. You know, we do have some wonderful community gardens that's, you know, I I, you know, my first job in Natick as a town employee was, was working for a dollar an hour at the Natick Community Organic Farm. So, you know, it, I think those things, you know, those resources are so, so critical and, and I think some of us forget how important these places are. I probably wouldn't be where I am today
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without the organic farm. That's the reason why I went into forestry along with a few others. But, you know, Linda at the farm, at the farm was kind enough to take, take me under her wing and teach me about how to be a good person and how to work hard every day and how to show up for the community. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Downey, do you have any other questions, Ms. Pop? No. Okay. I'd like to invite the second candidate, Michael Price, are you in the room? He's on line, I think. Is he on line?
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All is in the left second row. Oh, Mr. Price, you're going to be unmuted and I'd like you in two to three sentences tell us why you want to apply to the Conservation Commission to serve on that commission. Okay. Hello everyone. I'm Michael Price. I've been a resident of Natick for over 35 years. Our three children gone through the Natick Public Schools from K to 12. I was a town meeting member for 10 years and I've worked in the construction field
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as a senior project manager for general contractor. And I've been on the other side of the table from the Conservation Commission a lot. And I think I have a, a different perspective to bring to it. I know that contractors take it seriously. Different pounds have different reputations for conservation commission. Natick has a great reputation. I want to help to keep it that way. And I have a little bit more time because I recently retired a week before this posting came out last month. So I would like to have the opportunity to give back
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and offer my perspective and experience Members of the board. Mr. Jacobs, Thank you for applying Mr. Price and congratulations on your retirement. My, I'll, I'll just ask you a, a version anyway of the, of the same question that I asked Mr. Downey, which is, you know, what would you think about, how would you, how would you think about the, the concept of a tree bylaw for, for natick of a tree removal bylaw for Natick? Well, it's a good idea in concept in generalities that, you know, as the previous speaker said,
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we don't wanna overregulate things, but I know there are towns or colleges that actually get down to the point of numbering their trees and then putting a, a brass tag number on the tree. But maybe we could do something to identify trees of major significance that we wanna protect. And so there, I think there's a place for it, but to have to watch out for Overregulating. Thank you. Other members of the board? Ms. Slager? Kristen, that's a question. Okay.
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Hi Mr. Price and thank you for applying and again, congratulations on your retirement. What do you think in your background would make you a particularly valuable member of the commission? Well, in addition to general contractor experience, and, and several of my projects were large warehouses with a major site work component with retention ponds and drainage structures and the like. The other aspect of it is from the design side, I spent five years with a design company.
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I'm a, a graduate civil engineer with a master's degree in construction management, master's of engineering. So I think, so I understand the concepts in erosion control and, and controlling sediment and, you know, eutrofication and water clarity. So the engineering, the science and the experience that I've had, I think just dovetail right into the Conservation Commission. Thank you Ms. Pope. And then Mr. Evans.
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Hi, Mr. Price, my question for you is about the time commitment and the learning component. The charge for the commission requires quite a bit of time and additional opportunities for learning. Do you see that as an issue? You know, I've got a lot more time than I had and flexibility, you know, I am looking to do a little traveling, but I can work my schedule around that. And so that's,
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and also I like digging into articles and items to, to learn, you know, continue continuing education. But I have had to deal with Article 79 on the other side of the table and Wetlands Protection Act and, and providing these reports and doing the inspections before and after a storm event and, and then making the modifications to the ERO erosion control system and, and budgeting for it
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and having an understanding of it. So, you know, that's, that's my perspective from the GC side, but also as a resident when I drive past the job site and I see that they're not complying and there's silt running down the road and, you know, that that bugs me when, when, when we can't swim down at Memorial Beach because of the algae, you know, something's not right there. So I would like to be able to help out with that
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and I can arrange my schedule accordingly. Thank you Mr. Evans. Thank You Madam Chair. I'm gonna, in the interest of consistency, I'll ask the same question I asked earlier, which is, what conservation or environmental challenges do you believe are the most important in Natick today and in the near future? Well, I think enforcement of the existing regulations, like I alluded to at construction sites, that they follow the order of conditions or the project requirements and the various plans.
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But as the biggest challenges I see in the town are have to do with water quality issues, lake cot and, you know, avoiding minimizing the algae blooms and allowing people to swim in water and not have dangerous conditions. And then we have the DAM project in South Natick. The Charles River is a great resource running through town and it needs to be done right. That's gonna be a major construction project that absolutely has to have the proper sediment
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and erosion controls. So I think that that about covers it for me. Thank you. I had a question. Did, did you have an opportunity, Mr. Price to read the memo from the Department of Community and Economic Development that was sent to each of the applicants as well as a select board? Yes, I did. So for members of the public, this is, this memo is uploaded to the agenda if you wanted to read it. It talks about the time commitment.
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And unlike many boards and committees on which volunteers sit throughout town con com and a few others have some specialized knowledge that that's either a really steep climb to get caught up on or they, you know, should have a, a baseline understanding of it. So one of the key parts that our conservation agent and environmental planner mentioned that there were over 300 pages of laws, bylaws and regulations. And she mentions some of them, specifically the, the,
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the Wetlands Protection bylaw, then Article 79 A and the aquifer protection bylaw and then some other regulations. I was wondering if you had had a chance to review some of those and how comfortable you felt getting up to speed with the, the duties and responsibilities? So the, the answer is yes. I've gone through Article 79 and 79 A and and they, I'm very familiar with all of those, but they align with the typical practice throughout the state in conservation commissions.
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It, there's really nothing unusual there, just little customization for the town of Natick. And, you know, it's, I I, so I, I have read through those prior to today's call and I'm comfortable with reading through the other documents as well, some of the, the state regulations that they all feed into each other. So there's nothing, this is what I'm accustomed to reading through.
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Thank you Mr. Price. I, I also wanna congratulate you on your retirement and for seeing the time that you have available in your schedule and for submitting Stepping Up and wanting to volunteer. Have you applied for any other committees or boards that you'd wanna serve on? I applied to the Net zero Commission because for the last five years at the, at my company, I was working as a sustainability collateral duty, which in Massachusetts it's been important to have a sustainability department and it has become a, a
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specialty of mine of sorts. I was on the Association of General Contractors Sustainability Committee as a vice chair. And so that's why I think net zero is important. It's, I've gone to a couple of activities. I don't think it's nearly as heavy a lift as the Conservation Commission though. Thank you, Mr. Price. Now we'll move to Mr. Beatty. Same instructions. If you could just give us two or three sentences on why you decided to apply for this particular commission board or committee. Yes.
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Hi. Excuse me. I'm David Beaty, resident of 29 South Lincoln Street in Natick. Have been there since 1999 and applied for this position for several reasons. Number one, un unlike previous candidates, I'm not professional in this space. I am a extremely enthusiastic amateur. I moved to Natick explicitly because of the amazing opus space and particularly the river, which I'm fortunate to live near. And was raised in a family, going back to my grandfather,
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which had a lot of activities in terms of forestry conservation. My dad was professional conservationist at TR Unlimited and Nature Conservancy and, and enthusiastic supporter of rail trails and, and, and did some big projects there, which I participated in in other states. And so since I've come to Natick, I've been very fond of the activities I see and the potential of this, of this area. And I've seen the value of the concerted effort of conservation specifically in the river and how much healthier it is in the, even in the,
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in the only 20 plus years I've lived here with the, with the conversion to septic system, I'm sorry, from septic systems and cesspools to sewer. And, and I've also been quite familiar with many of the projects the Conservation Commission has been, been part of, based on what's happened in my neighborhood, but also my, my acquaintance with Matt Gardner and based on his advice plus the advice in that memo that you mentioned would like to apply to be an associate member. So I have the chance to get up to speed on, on the substantial documentation I need to be familiar with.
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And lastly, I've just concluded my tenure on the MathWorks Con Scholarship Committee. Yes. And I'm looking for another opportunity to give back to the community in anticipation of my retirement, which is at the end of July. Thank you. So before I open up, up to board questions, I want to clarify for members of the public that the select board does not vote on associate members to the the con com, the but the, the chairs, Mr. Beatty, am I saying that right? Is it B is Beatty. Thank you for asking
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My neighbor's Beatie and I call him Beatie, so apologies. So the chair, you know, and, and Mr. Beatie as you mentioned, had a conversation about serving as an associate member. That's something that the chair decides. It's not something that we vote on. Thank you. It's not an official part. So I wanted to throw that out also to the board so that when we do take our votes, we understand that that is a possibility for someone to serve as an associate member for a year under the guidance of the chair. Ms. Evans, just A clarifying question. Is my understanding that there's no limit on the number
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of people who can be an associate member? That is correct. That that is completely under the jurisdiction of the commission. And it's similar to the NA Affordable Housing trust, although I think they built in a certain number in their specific charter. Yeah. But yes, associate members, unless they're members that we appoint by charter or bylaw. So thank you. So now I'll open it up to questions for the applicant from members of the board, Mr. Jacobs. Alright, well again, thank you for calling. Is it Doc? Dr. Beatty? Dr. Beatty. Okay. Apologies, doctor, thank No.
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Yeah, so thank you. Thank you, thank you for applying, obviously appreciate your interest. Again, to be fair, I'm gonna ask you the exact same question I asked everybody else, which is, what would you think about the concept of a tree bylaw and natick? So I appreciate the comments made by the other applicants, so I'll try to just add to them. I, I see tremendous value in it in that from maybe getting ahead to the other select board members' questions regarding what are some of our pressing issues here? I think, I think maintaining green space, maintain, maintaining our healthy tree population is very important. We have a tremendous number of in, of non-native species.
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Some very abundant, I have some on my property quite large, and they provide all sorts of advantages and all sorts of disadvantages. I would like to think about that concept of a bylaw in a more maybe holistic way in which we became more stewards of the, of the, of the trees rather than necessarily only talking about removal and, and talk about instead about evolution of our, of our tree population. I would adore it if I drove into town in Natick and I saw the sign that said Tree City, like you do some of our neighboring towns, like, you know, that would be a great evolution for us if we became more planters than cutters.
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So I would like to view the, that bylaw concept in a larger way to say how do we, how do we evolve our, our tree population to be a more healthy one, more native one and, and provide the necessary value we get from it, what we already have right now and more. Great. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Other board members? Yes, Ms. Pope. Hi Dr. Beatty. Thank you for being here. Thank you for the service you've already given to the town. What new or different perspective do you think you would bring to the Conservation Commission? Well, I don't know all their perspectives, but I can talk about my own perspective.
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I am a very enthusiastic outdoors person. I appreciate all aspects of the, of Natick's green space as well as our regional green space and, and, and regional, I mean, even all of New England, I have a training in natural sciences and I, and I bring a lot of understanding of, of biology and natural biology, even though it's, again, not my profession. And I, again, have seen a lot of the value of, of systematic projects in, in, in, in, in the northeast regarding waterways. I will say, for the record, I'm an enthusiastic fan of the,
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of the spillway removal project. I was there last weekend fishing and I saw fish trying to get up over the spillway, which is of course impossible. And that really struck me of the value of that. And I would, and I've seen a lot of migrating fish in the streams. I think art, my, my dedication to the waterways of Nader go, I think are gonna gimme a lot of enthusiasm for the role as well as the experience living in other parts of the country. I grew up in the southeast. I grew up in a town where in Atlanta, which is famously not focused on conservation when I was a child. And the, and the results speak for themselves as well as in,
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as when in the Midwest. And again, being involved in projects there that I can bring some wisdom to. I've, I've been involved in some invasive species eradication projects as volunteer work. And that's something that I, it's, it's, that may be more on the, on the labor side than on the policy side and on the, the leadership side, but it's, it's, I think it's my experience in, in, in other aspects and in and and in defending conservation more broadly across the country and bringing that back to my town of meeting. Thank you Ms. Slager, don't really have a question
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because I think you've already covered that. Okay. Thank you for being a thorough Dr. Beatty and I just wanna say thank you for being willing to consider the associate role. Any other questions for members of the board? I got a ditto for that one and he answered my question. It's part of Cody's. Yep. Okay. Wonderful. Okay. At this time I, I've handed out to members of the board a ballot, so we will vote. Thank you. Right. Thank you so much, Dr. Beat. Thank you Beatty. It's gonna take me some time 'cause I've got, I've got Beatie on the brain. Yeah. Know it's,
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Once it's there it's hard to err era. Write your name on the back or on, so that your name on the Back. Yeah. Just so I don't No, you're You gonna announce your Vote. Oh, that's true. Yeah. We, we'll all remember LL announce. Oh, yes sir. Thank you. The vote was unanimous For Michael Downey, I'd like to thank all of the candidates for applying. I encourage you if you are interested in the conservation commission to speak with the chair about serving as an associate member. And I wanna thank all of you for putting in the time and effort to fill out the application, attach your resume,
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and, and to be with us here tonight for interviews. So I wanna thank you so much Mr. Evans. Just a quick comment. I wanted to more or less echo what you're, you're describing is very seldom do we get, I shouldn't say very seldom. I said it's infrequent that we get such qualified people for openings. Having said that, it was a unanimous vote, but that's not a repudiation of anyone, for example. Not at all. Mr. Price is to me is,
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is a great fit with the net zero committee and they will have openings coming up and I encourage him to follow up with them on that. Similarly, Dr. Beatty wanting to be an associate member, I to look forward at the Conservation commission and I think there are either two or three openings, not this year, but the next year. So as an associate member, you'll be up to speed and be a tremendous candidate in the future year. So thank you. That'd be great. Thank you. Yeah.
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Next up we have interviews for the math work scholarship committee. There are three vacancies, two terms expire. June 30th, 2027. One term expires June 30th, 2029. So we're gonna do all four interviews together and then vote the first two terms expiring at the end of 2027, and then the second vote will be for the term ex expiring on 2029. So going in order of the names on the agenda, can I ask Dr. GL to come to the podium
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and following kind of the same format, we have your resumes, we have your applications. If you could just talk a little bit, maybe three to four minutes about why you wanna serve on this committee. Thank you Madam Chair. So everybody here knows, but maybe other people don't. I'm Carol gl. I've lived in Natick since 1992 and I currently live at 20 South Avenue, so about a block from here. One of the reasons I would like to serve on this committee is I am a scientist. I have my bachelor's degree in pharmacy. I'm old enough so that you needed a five year bachelor's degree to be able to work as a pharmacist.
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And then a few years later I went and obtained my PhD in pharmacokinetics. And for those of you who are thinking, what the heck is that? That is looking at how the bo how your body handles drugs, how it absorbs them, gets rid of them. It involves a lot of math and math is something that I love. So the other reason that I'm interested in this, there might be a couple of others, but anyway, is this scholarship was established over 10 years ago now, and at the time I thought, oh, this is a great scholarship. As a somebody who went to school, both undergrad and grad on scholarships, fellowships, part-time jobs,
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loans, scholarships are so important and there's such a need for training in the STEM areas. So I thought that's really important. Now I feel like is a time when I could perhaps contribute to the review of the scholarship applications and do a part on this committee. Happy to answer any questions. Members of the board. Mr. Jacobs? Yeah, so the thank you for applying, of course the, you know, the, the criteria for the the scholarship, you know, is, is you know about people as you,
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as you mentioned to excel in STEM fields. But you know, I think we're fortunate in Natick, there's a lot of people like that as, you know, we just, they, they just came and did the award the other, the other night for that. And you know, we heard from the committee about how there were so many really qualified applicants. So if you were on the committee, how would you decide between many different applicants who were extremely qualified in, you know, in the STEM fields? So I believe the committee has, is it five members? So I expect there would be some, we would have different perspectives of who are the best candidates reasons why we should
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offer it to one or another. It would be a, a lot of negotiation and collaboration. I would be looking for someone who is clearly shows because these are high school seniors who are applying clearly shows in their background that this is the direction they wanna go in. I realized people get into college and change their plans and you know, I didn't end up doing that, although I thought about it. So, but it, it would require really looking into the applications and looking at what I think is really needed in the STEM areas.
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I'm a science and math person. I'm not an engineer and technology, A couple of you heard me talking about getting a new iPhone a few days ago and not really having it all understood yet, but hopefully I'll get there eventually. So I realize that's not a definitive answer, but it would, I would need to work with my fellow committee members to figure it out. Who would be most worthy of that, of those two scholarships each year. Thank you. Are there questions for members of the board, Ms. Pope? Yes. Hi Dr. Lov, thank you for being willing to serve on this committee. What role do you think that personal circumstances
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and overcoming maybe any kind of adversity should have in the scholarship decisions? You know, I have not looked at what the requirements are. What, because I come from a background where I depended on scholarships as I've already said, and loans, et cetera. I personally think that there's some value to that, but I recognize that that's not fair to only in, to put up a heavy emphasis on that. I will say the most recent scholarship committee that I on which I've served is the Metro West Health
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Foundation Scholarship Committee, which offers scholarships to anybody in the metro West catchment area. It's 23 communities I think. And you can be trying to get trained at Mass Bay to become a certified medical assistant. That's not the right terminology or up to medical school, dental school there we didn't have to make decisions. So there wasn't a lot of emphasis on what it do. You really need the money, basically. But this might, depending on
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what the description allows, I might want to have that information. Thank you. Other members of the board? There is the board this year. I mean the scholarship committee this year over the last year and a half have come up with a set criteria and rubric so that everybody's judged on the same items. And so that's, I think it's something they're also still working on developing and continuing to reiterate as they know more, just share that. Yes. Mr. Evans Have question, quick question. Thank you Dr. Gla for applying.
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Also there, there are a number of very highly qualified candidates who apply for this scholarship. It's, it's promoted very well within the high school, so we get an a pool of excellent candidates. How would you attempt to differentiate from among a pool of very intelligent, very qualified candidates? Good question. I don't know that I have a definitive answer at this point because A, I haven't looked at the rubric,
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I don't know if it's publicly available, but even if it is, I have not looked at it. I'm glad to hear that the committee has been working on coming up with a way to maybe prioritize, but more perhaps a better word, better terminology would be to make certain that everybody is, is being evaluated on an even footing so that we're all looking at them in a, basically the same way. We're all still gonna have our same, our committee, our own opinions. And I say we, but I realize I may not be selected for this committee, so I apologize for use of the royal we,
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so it's a, it's a tough one. You know, I, I have been through this with a couple of other scholarship committees, not with Metro Trust Health Foundation because again, we've had the money to be able to provide scholarships to anybody that we felt was going into an appropriate area. And I should say that in past tense, I am no longer on that board, the Metro Trust Health Foundation board. I hit term limits at the end of December of 2025 and at that time I dropped off the scholarship committee. So I'm, when I say make it sound like it's present, it's not, but with a couple of others that I've worked on,
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the American Foundation for Pharmaceutical Education, we give out fellowships and scholarships. I'm no longer on that scholarship committee and fellowship committee, but I served on it for about 10 years and served as chair for a few years and during that time we worked on trying to make certain that we evaluated people evenly. In addition, I worked on, served on, and for part of the time served as chair of a scholarship awards committee for the University of Buffalo for the University of Buffalo Alumni Association, which is, those scholarships are not science oriented, the others are.
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So, but I, sorry, I don't have a more definitive answer for you. That's a good answer. Any other questions from the members of the board? Thank you Dr. Cloth. Thank you very much. The next applicant is Jasmine Huck Ahmed, you in the room to come to the podium? You may need to slide the, the microphone down a little bit. There we go. If you could talk, just, we have your application and your resume, just a little bit about why you applied to this scholarship committee. Good evening board. Thank you for having me.
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I am a native resident since 2012. I've been here about 14 years and I have two kids that are young in the school system here. I personally have a strong love of learning and education. I have two bachelor's degrees and two master's degrees. I was somebody who was very passionate about health sciences and I switched careers just due to family circumstances. So my original plan or original track was I went to Northeastern, I did behavioral neuroscience. I also did a master's in public health at Columbia University and I worked in many hospitals in
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Boston and in New York City. I thought I was gonna become a pediatrician. I changed plans because I took care of a parent with leukemia and a parent who had a stroke. So I decided, hmm, I still wanna go into healthcare, what can I do? Reapplied went back, went through the grind again. I got another bachelor's degree from Northeastern in nursing and I got a master's degree from Simmons University as a nurse practitioner, so a master's of science and nursing. So I love learning because I am alu for punishment for education, but I also understand the nuances of getting colleges
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and degrees paid for. It is a very difficult process and I also know that you can be smart but also not smart enough. I also know that meeting students is very important. And the other reason I was gonna chime in, I work at Suffolk University, but I'm a nurse practitioner, so I actually work with a college student population. So I understand the difficulties of getting into schools now and the financial difficulties that students have. Thank you. Questions for members of the board, Mr. Jacobs? Yeah, thank you for applying.
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I'll ask you the same question which I'm gonna ask everyone. So there are many people who excel at math and science and are interested in STEM careers that apply for this scholarship. And I under, you know, taking, taking the point that there is, that there may be a rubric being developed and things like that. But what would be your perspective on how you would kind of separate, you know, figure out who to give the scholarship to given the strong pool of applicants? I believe in the humanistic component, I think that you have to meet with the students
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and really see what they're interested in and what their passions are. I think, you know, people on paper can look the same, you can have the same SAT score, you can have the same clubs extracurriculars, but you really have to see what drives the student. So I think one of the nice things is that we're, we're in a very hospitable, communicable town that we can get to know the students on, on, you know, a short term basis just to say, Hey, what are you, what are you actually passionate about? What do you wanna do? And how can this scholarship actually apply to your education? Thank you very much, Ms. Pope.
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I'll ask the same question as well. Thank you for applying. What role do you think personal circumstances or overcoming adversity should play in the scholarship decisions? I actually think that's a, a strong criteria because I, I don't feel that college or or higher education should, should be unattainable for anybody who wants it. So I think that we have to take that into consideration. And again, knowing that the rubric may change and may evolve, I think we have to look at the whole candidate, just like,
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I'm gonna say AI tries to just summarize and skim off the top and you know, get a, a quick result. I really think we have to look at the whole candidate and the whole student just to see what are they actually applying for, what is the career track do they have in mind? Are they just applying just to apply or do they actually have an understanding of what the career needs are and what the job opportunities are with that degree. Now I know this is a big ask for a high school student, but usually high school students deep down kind of know what they wanna do and they know what their passions are. So I think that is really important to consider.
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And I would try to look at the students' background situations and figure out, yeah, you know, cost of higher education is ridiculous. Doesn't matter where you go unless you're, unless it's a free program. All colleges right now are very expensive. So I think there's value into the scholarship, but I also think we need to look at the circumstances of the individual students. Thank You. Any other questions from members of the board? I have one question. You indicated that you had attended or watched Adic 1 0 1 and I was just curious which one? Oh my goodness. Ugh.
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And I hate to put you on the spot if you don't remember, don't worry about it. I actually don't remember. It's been going on for two years so It's, yeah, I don't remember. And I think, I think I was recommended to watch by one of the select board members here just to be a part of the native community. And I don't even remember what I watched, but I just remember logging in from work and then going, ah, I need to log back out. Thank you. It's perfectly acceptable. It's probably the select word. I was just thinking the same thing. That's, yeah, I've done the same thing. Logging in and then logging right out. So yes. Understood. Wanna appreciate you putting your, your name forward.
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Thank you so much. Our next candidate is Shrudy Kakar. If you could come to the podium and same thing, just a few minutes on why this particular one. And if you could also tell me whether I said your name correctly. Yes, You did. Thank you. Am I audible? Yes. Okay. Good evening, select board and thank you for this opportunity. My name is Shruti Kaka. I have been working at MathWorks for a little over 15 years now. I have been native resident for the past three years. I have a child in native public schools.
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He's, he goes to Benham. So I'm truly very grateful for our town. I see my child thriving in our school system and I feel this is my way of giving back to the community. I am a deeply invested in our community. Education is something I am very passionate about. So beyond MathWorks, I have been doing extensive mentoring. Notably, I want to call out two things that I do. One, for the last two years I have been mentoring at MIT
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through their breakthrough tech AI program. So I've been working with students in MIT who co come from all over the world. I have been doing that for the last two years. I have been in invited again this year as well. Second thing, a place where I mentor is Grace Hopper Celebration, which is the country's biggest conference for women in tech. So this is a place where I get to work with underrepresented community. So I feel that I bring a unique combination
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of technical expertise, deep passion for our community, and I want to give back to our town, not just as a math worker, but also as a parent of a child who is thriving in our schools. So that's little bit about me. Thank you so much. Thank you. Opening up to questions for members of the board. Mr. Jacobs, Thank you for applying. Of course. And I'll again, you know, no surprise, to ask you the same question, which is, you know, we have a lot of people who are very qualified in math and science and STEM fields.
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And how would you go about kind of looking at which candidates to, to support for the scholarship? So, that's a great question. I would work with my fellow board members to come up with a metric so that we are looking at all candidates in the same fashion. I have experience doing that. I have done this as part of my MIT program and I use that extensively. So I I, I would do that. Thank you. Other members of the board, Ms.
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Hope, thank you Shuri, for being here with us. What role do you think personal circumstances or overcoming adversity should play in scholarship decisions? I feel it should play a significant role. And as I was hearing you ask this question, this is a small story that I want to share. So I have been working with Christo Re it's an organization based in Boston. It works with youth at risk. I have been working with a couple of students from that program via MathWorks. I won't, I won't take the student's name, but I just want to share how that is so important.
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I was working with a student when she came in. She didn't know what she was going to do with her life and you know, she didn't, she had gone through some trauma. She was not doing in a, she wasn't in a good space. But via mentoring her, working with her, I worked with her for a year. We gave her scholarship. She's now a senior in FSU, she decided to do computer science and that was life changing for her. So I feel that, you know, some scholarship can be, you know, some monetary benefit for one person,
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but it can be truly life changing for someone whose, whose circumstances are different. So I feel that personal circumstances play a big role. Looking at a person holistically is very important. And I am ready to talk to all the students, all applicants and really get to know them better, understand their background and bring in diverse perspectives. Thank you. Other members of the board, thank you so much Rudi. Thank really appreciate you. Thank you.
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The last applicant is Hamma. Sura, Raja. Hema, we're gonna, we are going to unmute you and if you could do the same as the, the applicant's before you, which is to just in three to four minutes, tell us why you applied to this scholarship committee and wanna serve on it. Thank you. First of all, I would like to thank you for interviewing me today for this position. And I am an NAIC resident. This is our 14th year living in Burning Tree Road Natick.
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And I am a software QA analyst for the past one and a half years. I'm in between jobs and I used to work with the state of Massachusetts, the gaming commission. I'm in between jobs. I'm working on Natick service council volunteer currently. And before I used to volunteer with the Newton Homeless Shelter Place as I have the passion towards the public service. I definitely was looking for some opportunity to serve the Natick Council. My husband used to work for the Transportation Council for,
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as a volunteer four or five years ago. So that's when I came to know about this opportunity. And have two daughters who went to medic schools and they're 24 and 20 now. And I wish I knew about the scholarship when my younger one was in senior in high school two years ago. And since I've been heavily involved with the college application process and the scholarship applications and the reaching of the school counselor, et cetera, I definitely have the involvement around the area.
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So that's the reason I applied for this position. Thank you so much. Questions from members of the board? Mr. Jacobs? Hi. Thank you very much for applying, really appreciate it. No surprise. What question I'm gonna ask, you know, how would you look at the, you know, we got a lot of qualified applicants. How would you, you know, kind of look to figure out which ones you would support among those who excel, obviously in science, math and other STEM fields? Definitely the, the holistic approach I would say. And also collaborating well with the team members who has prior experience with that.
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And also looking at the previous scholarship distributions, how they decided and things like that. I would do my research as well in order to meet with the student or understanding their need, why they, did they really apply for the scholarship in need or do they just applied as they looked at the scholarship advertisement, things like that. So I, I tried to do my best with the research and the historic results,
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everything collaboratively. That's how I approach and decide. Ms. Pop. Yes. And I'll ask the same question again. Thank you so much for applying. My question is, how would you appropriate circumstances over overcoming circumstances or personal issues in the application process of scholarship applicants? Sure. Yeah, definitely. It definitely impacts significantly. So in order to do that, definitely the, the same like the holistic approach, understanding the need of a student and what they exactly looking to do.
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How the scholarship will help them in order to succeed in their career. And even meeting with the family or sitting with the student, whatever it takes to change their life. I would definitely try to do my best for this. Thank you. Any other members of the board? My only question was, did I pronounce your last name correctly? Just wanna make sure. Yes, Raja. It's Hema Raja Sand. Thank you. Yep. Appreciate you checking with it. Thank you Excel. Any other questions? Comments from the board? Okay, at this time we will undertake voting.
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Every member of the board gets a ballot with all four names and you're to choose two for the term ending next June. And then hand them to Mr. Erickson. And then we will do the, and after we do this we Do. Yeah. And then after this we'll do the A longer term. The longer term, exactly. Okay, Got it. And there's three here. Okay. Yep. Thanks. Thank you. So these are for the two terms ending next year. Thank you. All right. Six. Oh boy. So for this photo, it was also unanimous for miss.
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I'm gonna butcher these names. I apologize. Jasmine and Shruti. Yes, Jasmine. And Say that's a great way to say it. We the same thing. Yeah, Yeah. I mean I figured if it was unanimous I could probably take a stab at it. So no, thank you. Thank you Jasmine Shruti and welcome to you'll be getting a, a letter of appointment from the clerk's office. Hey, my wonder really, thank you for putting yourself out, applying, getting your resume. Oh, we have second. Oh, we do not have, she's not yet. I have no idea what I'm doing here. Clear Running yet overtime. Yeah. Wow. So I will pass out ballots. I was about to thank Carol too. Dr gl.
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Okay, Thanks. This time I'm doing a nurse. I have learned about, oh, I didn't write my, sorry. I It's okay. We're we're, that's we're gonna announce our votes. Yeah, sorry, I thought you wrote it really small. No, I didn't write it down. I forgot my thought's. Gonna get rejected. That's it. We're have to have a recount. It's gonna be two two. The vote was unanimous for Carol. I don't wanna butcher her last name either. I would like to thank all of the candidates for filling out the application, putting yourselves forward, going through the interview process. And I encourage you, Hema, to apply for other, can
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apply for other committees. Watch for an opening. There will be two terms expiring next June. So watch for openings. And I'm really thankful that all of you have decided to, you know, become involved in, in volunteer in the town. So thank you very much. We will now have the Natick Arbor Day proclamation and I'd like to introduce our tree guy, tree warden. His title's very long. Art good. Hind. Excellent. Thank you. How are you now? Doing alright. All right. Thank you Madam Chair and the board. My name is Arthur Goodine
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and I serve as the supervisor of land facilities and natural resources tree warden for the town of ict department of public works here tonight to request that the board proclaim Friday June 12th, 2026 as a day of Arbor Day celebration, excuse me, in the town of Natick. This request is important to emphasize the important role trees and tree canopy play in our quality of life and joy. And this request is also important because it is a key requirement
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of our tree city USA designation. The tree city USA designation is created at no cost to the municipality by the Arbor Day Foundation to recognize those cities and towns throughout the country that demonstrate a commitment to managing, preserving and expanding their tree canopy. There are four key requirements for the designation. One, a tree department. You must have a tree department with staff that is legally responsible for managing public trees. You must have a tree care ordinance.
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You must have a community forestry program that allocates at least $2 per capita for urban forestry. And finally, why we're here tonight, we must have a, for the application, an Arbor Day observance and proclamation. And that's why I'm here tonight. For this calendar year. Nate celebrates its 19th year as a tree city, USA and this proclamation will be used for the application for our 20th designation. Thank you Mr. Goodine. Madam Clerk.
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Yes. I will read the Arbor Day proclamation. Whereas in 1872, Jay Sterling Morton proposed to the Nebraska Board of Agriculture that a special day be set aside for, for the planting of trees. And whereas this holiday called Arbor Day was first observed with the planting of more than a million trees in Nebraska. And whereas Arbor Day is now observed throughout the nation and the world. And whereas trees can reduce the erosion of our precious topsoil by wind and water cut heating
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and cooling costs moderate the temperature, clean the air, produce life, giving oxygen, and provide habitat for world for wildlife. And whereas trees are a renewable resource giving us paper wood for our houses, fuel for our fires, and countless other wood products. And whereas trees in our town increase property values, enhance the economic vitality of business areas and beautify our community. And whereas trees, wherever they're planted are a source of joy and spiritual renewal.
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Now therefore, we, the select board of the Town of Natick do hereby proclaim Friday, June 12th, 2026, Arbor Day in the town of Natick. And we urge all citizens to celebrate Arbor Day and to support efforts to protect our trees and woodlands. And further we urge all citizens to plant trees to gladen the heart and promote the wellbeing of this and future generations dated the 10th of June, 2026. And I move to approve this. Do I have a second? Second.
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So all in favor please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? 5 0 0 onto year 20 of Tree City. Much thank Mr. You very much Mr. Heim for being here. I appreciate it. I appreciate It. Thank you. Thanks Arthur. We're going to change the agenda just a little bit. We're gonna move the, well first we'll do the public hearing item a under discussion decision, and then we'll move the water and sewer abatement appeal to G. Next item of the next item of business. Madam Clerk, if you could, I'm Sorry. Read the public hearing. Yes,
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Sorry. I think it is here. Okay. Okay. The select board will hold a public hearing on Wednesday, June 10th, 2026 at 6:00 PM upon the application of epilogue L-L-C-D-B-A epilogue books and wine for a new S 12 wine and malt with cordials on-premise restaurant license. The restaurant will be located at 21 Summer Street, unit two, Natick MA 0 1 7 6 0. The premise consists of 23 2300 square feet of total,
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including Cafe bookstore, bar and seating for 13 and cafe seating for 12. One entrance exit on Summer Street, one exit in the back of the building. The hearing will be held, held in the Edward Delo room meeting room 13 East Central Street as well as remotely anyone wishing to be heard on this matter can participate in person or through Zoom. Login instructions will be published on the June 10th, 2026 select board meeting agenda. All persons interested in this application may appear and be heard at the time and place mentioned above
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or may submit written comments to the select board at 13 East Central Street, Natick, MA 0 1 7 6 0 select board@natickma.org by June 10th, 2026. And I move to open the public hearing. Second, seconded by Ger. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Public hearing is now open. I'd invite those who are here to come to the podium. If you could introduce yourself and limit your comments to just the application for the news Section 12, wine and Malt with cordials on-prem license. And then we will take up the other three votes
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outside of the public hearing. Good evening. Ladies and gentlemen. My name is David Rubin. I am legal counsel for epilogue To my immediate left is Maya Hoag, the owner, and her left is Sean Morgan, the proposed manager of Epilogue. The property is located at 21 Summer Street, just around the corner from here. It's, the concept is a bookstore that sells
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alcoholic beverages, beer and wine and cold food. As you pointed out, we are seeking a chapter 1 38, section 12 alcohol license for beer and wine. There are a few specifications that you might be interested in. The bar seating is for 13 people. Cafe seating is for 12. So the total seating capacity is 25. As far as the hours are concerned, my client would like to be open from Sunday to Wednesday, 11:00 AM to 10:00 PM
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and Thursday to Saturday from 11:00 AM to 11:00 PM The credentials of Mr. Morgan are impressive. He has managed four restaurants and facilities that serve alcohol. I'll just name 'em quickly. Lola Hospitality in the Boston Seaport District, which also has businesses in Florida and Nantucket. And he was the manager and assistant general manager there. The, that business has high profile customers, athletes,
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billionaires, he tells me and other well off folks. He managed the Franklin, which is a neighborhood bistro in Boston. They served alcohol, alcoholic beverages there until 2:00 AM It's a, a big industry environment with a combination of both the neighborhood and an affluent flavor. He managed the speakeasy group, which was not managed very well, and he quit, which I was impressed with because this indicates to me somebody
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that has the management and experience to know how things are done right and how they're done wrong and to walk away from it if they're not done properly. He has also been a bartender at the surf in, in Woburn and is looking forward to this opportunity here. So in essence, I think that this proposal will be an asset to the community. It's something that is needed here. And I encourage the, the board here to approve it.
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And I'm here to answer any questions that you may have. I'd like to open up questions or comments from the members of the public first and then we'll revert back to the board. I believe there is one person, Mr. Mr. Laval? LaValley? Yep. Mr. LaValley. Mr. LaValley, we're, you're going to be unmuted, I understand you want to Address this agenda item. Can you hear me? This is David LaValley, Yes. Okay, great. Thanks very much. Well welcome to NAIC Center. By way of intro introduction, my name's David LaValley.
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I'm the ex, have been the executive director for the Center for Arts in Natick across the street from your location for the last 22 years, recently retired. But I do have a question for you, Tecan hosts performances year round that typically would conclude between around 10 and 11 on weekend evenings. And I'm, I'm glad to hear that you're considered, you know, maintaining hours that would allow our theater goers and concert patrons to, you know, frequent your,
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your a location. I guess my question is, do you see opportunities for collaboration with neighboring Natick center businesses, including cultural organizations like TAN I'm going to, that's a good question and I am going to have my clients answer answer that. Thank you. Thank you Mr. LaValley. It's an excellent question. I have also managed the beehive in Boston, the South end. We did a ton of business with the Calderwood Theater and the Boston Center of the Arts. When I spoken with Maya about this initially, that was one
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of the partnerships about which I was the most excited because it was such a great partnership between us at the Beehive and the Boston Center for the Arts called World Theater. Does that answer your question? It's good to know you've had experience in that. I guess I'm, I'm, I'm wondering, have you invested any effort in understanding the rest of the retail businesses, the restaurants, the or or tecan and develop some of those strategies yet? Or are, are you open to connecting on this in the future? So you were my next stop. I have looked at your, I've looked at it in the 80 Center for the Arts. I've done as much as I could as far as a Google search
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and some AI will allow, but I was really looking forward to coming down, just meeting you in person, assuming this meeting went well. Well, we look forward to connecting with you, so we're definitely open to it and, and hope to hear from you in the, in the near future and the best of luck to you. Thank you, sir. Any other comments or questions from members of the public? I can't see online, so I'm not logged in. Can you guys, I don't see is, is there anyone in the room who would like to direct questions to the applicant? So I will turn this over to the board, questions
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and comments from members of the board? Yes. Can you just tell us a little bit about the business concept? I think this is something that's fairly new to Natick and just like to understand a little bit more and it sounds very exciting. Well, the, the, the, the gist of it is that it's gonna be a combination bookstore and cafe and Maya, maybe you'd like to Yeah. Comment a little bit on that. Sure. So one of the reasons why I picked Natick was
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because of, you know, the sense of community that I see around here. And I think one of the greatest thing, especially since COVID is the rise of third places. You know, it's not just a bookstore, it's not just a wine bar or a cafe. We're trying to sell the experience of welcoming people in and having all these conversations about books, about wine, about anything really. You know, I will personally be there. The staff will be sounding boards and people to have discussions with and it's going to be a community hub more than just, you know, a retail space or a hospitality space.
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Thank you. Any other questions? I have one, but I'll go last. Nope. One question I had. Can you talk a bit about the menu? I, me you mentioned cold plates. Can you gimme an, a sense of what that means? Yeah, so we are looking to do charcuterie and tin fish with basically cheese boards or like charcuterie boards. There's gonna be bread, there's gonna be cold prep. So nothing that would require, you know, heavy cooking. We're not cooking anything from bra, we're doing other appetizers and sandwiches as well. Light fair that is meant
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to really accompany the experience of a book. It's not, you know, a big sit down meal where everybody is, you know, just eating. We want people to be able to like pick up a book and then pick up some snacks and be able to enjoy both at once. Thank you. Yeah. I had a question about the wine list. Oh, I shocked somebody had that was coming. Please. Can you talk a bit about the distributors you envision using for and what type of wine list you curate for? So the program is highly curated. Like my said, this is finger foods, but we're going locally sourced coastal Atlantic.
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The wine lists are highly acidic and highly mineral. We're going with a lot of Koolis, Linas, Eno, Verdes, skin contact wines. The biggest message we wanted to convey is that wine doesn't have to be overly expensive. You know, I've sold 25,000 bottles of wine. It's great, it's very good. I'm not gonna lie, but you know, I've had $85 bottle of wines that are that good. Well, and and also you'd have to have a very sophisticated palate to tell the difference between a $25,000 bottle of wine and an $85 bottle of wine. I don't, So yes, I I'm guessing that's not a, that's, that's a rare talent.
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It was, it was a very specific expensive talent guest experience. But our whole wine program is built around value. The distributors through whom we're partnering are, you know, the basic was Martini, Ruby Wines, Southern Horizon, Ms. Walker and Atlantic. I have worked with all of them in the past for the last 15 to 20 years. We have excellent deals on it. So the point is to bring the best wine program we could possibly bring to Natick for the most affordable price. You know, the idea is $15 a glass max. Thank you. Yes Ma'am. That's all of the questions I have. Mr. Evans? Yeah, I'm just, it's, it's really not a question.
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It's a point of, of clarification on the hours that I like. I'm searching through it again and I can't find it. Yeah, the, the proposed hours are Sunday through Wednesday from 11:00 AM to 10:00 PM and then from Thursday to Saturday, 11:00 AM to 11:00 PM Okay. Alright. Thank you. If there are no other questions from the board I
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or comments from the board, I'd like to close the public hearing and take a vote. Do we have a motion to close public hearing? Move To close public hearing. Second. Moved and seconded to close the public hearing. Hearing all in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Is anyone ready? Do you wanna engage in discussion or are you ready to take a vote? Is there somebody with a motion? This is for the, yeah, I can do this. Move to approve the S 12 wine in malt with cordials on-premises license application for epilogue LLC doing business as epilogue books and wine.
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Is there a second? Second. Seconded by Mr. Jacobs. All in favor please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Passes 5 0 0. I would just request that pursuant to the Deputy Chief's request that you send to our office, the town administrator's office, alcoholic a alcoholic beverage training certification, because I don't believe that was part of the original application package. I, I might be mistaken but my, my paralegal that was working with me on that
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provided a copy of the TIP certification. But if, if you don't have it, It may have already been received. I'm just, if, if Mr. Erickson, we Can just confirm that in the office, That'd Be great if you, would you like, would it be a good idea to have my assistant call you or call somebody else at the time? I can call. Confirm that Billy in our desk. Yep. In our office. Call Billy Walsh in our office. Billy Walch. Call Billy Walsh. Okay. And, and just confirm that he has it. That was one thing. And then the second thing was ensuring that Mr. Walsh provides the license holders
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with the current liquor license policy. So that you'll have that. Okay. And then we have three other items to vote on, which are not required to be part of the public hearing. One is on the 2026 Common Vic license. One is on the 2026 non-live entertainment license and one is on the 2026 live entertainment license. And do they need all need separate votes? Not necessarily. I can take a motion on all three for one. Okay. They're usually on the consent agenda. But Mr. Jacobs and then Mr. Evans, I actually just had one question about the, the Common Vic license. It said on there that there was expected to receive a board
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of health permit by 6 1 20 26 and obviously that has passed. I was curious if that had happened. Yeah, so we did get You need to on the mic. So yeah, we did get approval from the Board of Health. Everything should be squared away and you know, we're now working towards with the building department. So all, all good with Board of Health. Okay. Great. Thank you Mr. Evans. I was just looking to do the omnibus motion here. Okay. Are there any other questions or comments before we get an omnibus motion for Mr. Evans?
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Mr. Evans, go ahead. Okay. I move to vote to approve the epilogue LLC application for a 2026 common UAL orders license in the 2026 non-live entertainment license and 2026 live entertainment license. Second, Can I just, sorry, it, this could be a friendly amendment to all of them 'cause it applies to all of them. But Deputy Chief Luon had recommended that it be issued contingent upon a successful site visit once the location is upfitted. Should we put that into it or? Yeah, That should be in, Is that common
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for the police department to do an onsite inspection of the premises? I think if there's not a license, I mean I understand it attached to the license, but I think it's really uncommon to have the deputy chief of police come out and inspect an eatery when the board of health does, the building department does. Yeah. It seems someone else That's, that's fair enough. I, you know, I I appreciate you bringing that Attention. Yeah, it was, it was put on in in his, I don't know if in his, he put the reasoning so I don't know why he said that but you know, I guess he's not here to ask so I, you know, know. I don't feel strongly about it. I just brought it up 'cause it Was in there. I appreciate you catching that these,
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these licenses are usually on a consent agenda. Okay. Okay. It's probably covered by the health department. Okay, fair enough. That was a good point. Yeah. So Mr. Evans moved and Ms. Vos motion, who is a second? Ms. Slager was a second. All in favor please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? 5 0 0 on the other three licenses. Thank you so much. Look forward to you opening. Yes. Anticipated opening date. Did we, we close public hearing, we close Light of that is gonna also perfect. Depend upon BC approves the application
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as you know once. So the next step is for the town to forward the application to the A, B, CC and then I'll have to push them as forcefully and nicely, nicely as I can to be a pass, keep the process going and then if and when they approve it, then the license will be approved and issued. Okay. And so once it's licensed, I mean you're working with the building department, are you still doing your build out? So We're starting our build out Soon. Okay. So maybe a fall opening date? Yeah. Okay. Sounds great. Well thank you so much.
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Deeply appreciate you coming in. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank care. Thank you. Thank you. Next item on the agenda is the water and sewer abatement appeal. Arthur Arvin Arvin. Is he present? I'm not saying anything. So. So the last meeting we agreed to hear it again if the application came in and we agreed to put it at the end of the agenda. I understand that Ms. Arvin was here for two hours at the last meeting because we had a front loaded agenda. My understanding is that our office confirmed with Mrs. Arvin that they would be here tonight
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and also confirmed that we would move them up on the agenda so they weren't here till 10 o'clock. So going once, going twice. Moving on to the status update on Main Street Improvement project. Mr. Griffiths. Thank you. All right, thank you Madam Chair. Hello and thank you all for your time tonight. My name is Morgan Griffith and I am the Transportation and Economic Development Planner for the Town of Natick. I'm here tonight to provide you an updated briefing on the main street improvement projects and to walk you through our potential design concepts. Tonight's presentation serves as a kickoff for a discussion
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that will ultimately provide staff with guidance on which design concept to advance into the formal design process. During this presentation, I will review the project background, provide a high level overview of the four design concepts, and finish with our projected next steps before turning it over to you for questions and comments. Also, a quick note on terminology. Tonight I will reference the transportation improvement program or tip. This is the five year capital plan used by Boston's Regional Planning Agency to allocate federal funding to local transportation projects. You can think of it as a major regional grant
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program for transportation. So first, the basics for those who may be unfamiliar. The main street improvement project is a roadway reconstruction project along Main Street or Route 27 in Natick Center stretching from Cottage Street to Middlesex Avenue. This project aims to improve pavement sidewalk quality and drainage safety for all roadway users, bicycle and pedestrian connections, way finding lighting and overall street scape design. So why are we doing this now? The primary driver for this project is that this stretch of Main Street is aging from the surface asphalt.
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You drive on to the utility and drainage systems to quantify pavement. Quality engineers use the pavement condition and index or PCI, which scores erode from zero to a hundred. Right now segments along Main Street score between 49 and 77. In school terms, that's a B through a D with most segments sitting at a C. So while the road is structurally sound deterioration accelerates rapidly once a road drops below a score of 60. This means that while we don't need a total replacement this year, repaving will be necessary within the next three
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to five years for a lowest scoring areas and within 10 years for the higher scoring areas. Now we could just mill these sections and leave it at that. However, this infrastructure needs, this infrastructure need opens a unique timely window of opportunity rather than simply repaving. We can use targeted interim maintenance like microm milling and patching to keep the worst sections of the roadway safe and stable. Right now, this intentional maintenance strategy effectively buys us time, the time we need to design and implement a larger comprehensive project that solves multiple town goals at once.
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By utilizing these short term fixes to hold us over during the design process, we gain the opportunity to align the roadway layout with NATICK'S Complete Streets policy, ensuring we safely accommodate all modes of travel, deliver on the goals of the Natick 2030 plus master plan to expand our bike and pedestrian networks bridge a major connectivity gap since our existing bike infrastructure currently stopped abruptly right before and right after the specific section of Main Street calm traffic speeds. While providing improved access to our newly renovated MBTA station and the constituent rail trail extension.
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Optimize the overall functionality and efficiency of the main and central street intersection and refresh the downtown street scape with updated signage, lighting and landscaping. Transforming a standard paving job into an economic development tool to drop people into Natick Center and encourage them to stay. So this is a three phase projects. We are currently nearing the end of phase one, the planning phase during which the project team has been analyzing existing conditions and gathering community feedback to create possible design concepts. Once the select board approves a preferred concept, we'll advance it into full design in phase two
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and construct it in phase three. A comprehensive project of this scale takes time. While future timelines are subject to change, we estimate working on phase two up through the early 2030s with construction starting in the mid 2030s. This is a ways out, but by using small targeted fixes to manage the worst stretches of asphalt in the short term, the town can safely navigate this multi-year design process required to bring these major downtown improvements into reality. So let's look at phase one in a little bit more detail, which has been our focus since 2023. The goal of this phase is to assess existing conditions
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and collect community feedback in order to create a preferred design concept for the project. To be entirely clear, a preferred design concept is not a final construction plan. Rather it is a high level conceptual framework that serves as our foundation. Before we jump into multi-year, the a multi-year technical design process, we started this phase by using existing conditions and initial community feedback to draft two initial concepts. We then gathered public feedback on these concepts and blended them into what we are calling the hybrid concept. After conducting engagement on the hybrid concept,
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we are now transitioning into the final part of the phase during which the board will decide what concept it would like to be taken into design. Community voices have shaped this process for over three years. Between 2023 and 2025, we held listening sessions, launched a community survey and presented to various town committees. This culminated in our June, 2025 presentation to the board where you directed us to focus on refining what we call the hybrid concept. In 2026, we narrowed our focus to doing just that. Over the last few months, we've held multiple working group meetings, utilized a flashlight survey,
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hosted our second public meeting, held business office hours, and maintained an open project email for public commentary. All of this feedback has directly shaped the four design concepts summarized on this slide. First is the mill and overlay option. This is the basic repaving of the road. With limited sidewalk work, it's projected to cost around $2 million. The next three options all fall under a full reconstruction model. You'll notice that all three carry an identical estimated construction cost of $11 million. This is because the physical footprint or the total amount of roadway and sidewalk being taken up
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and rebuilt remains nearly identical across all three re regard. Regardless of which layout is chosen, all three feature a full overhaul of pavement and drainage, likely utility relocation, curb bumpouts to shorten crosswalks, new street scape elements, signage re or signal reconstruction a A one-way westbound configuration for Cord Street and narrowed travel lanes. And here's how they differ. So the limited bike option proposes shared use travel lanes or shares where bike bikes and cars share the road.
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It introduces reverse angle parking and increases sidewalk width across most of the corridor. Both the hybrid and enhanced bike options take a dedicated approach to cycling infrastructure, proposing an on-road bike lane from cottage to Pond Street that transitions into a protected sidewalk level bike lane from Pond Street up to Middlesex Avenue. The hybrid concept maintains the current parking footprint through a mix of parallel and head angle parking. However, to fit both the bike lanes and the angle parking within the right of way, it requires decreasing sidewalk widths across the majority of the corridor. Although two sections would see an increase crucially,
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however, every single sidewalk section will remain at or above five feet wide. Maintaining a DA accessibility, the enhanced bike option prioritizes sidewalk and cycling space by converting all parking to parallel spaces. This allows us to greatly increase sidewalk widths north of Central Street, though sidewalk widths south of Central Street would see a decrease in width. Again, no decrease would bring a sidewalk below five feet in width. Regardless of which option the board chooses for Main Street Town staff recommend that Natick should also look into the creation of alternate bicycle routes
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around Main Street and Natick Center. So this matrix further highlights the core trade-offs between each concept and we we can return to this during our upcoming discussion. There's also a link at the bottom of the slide that will take you to a much more detailed version of this matrix. So to summarize, the mill and overlay concept handles basic pavement repair, but completely misses out on safety. Pedestrian bicycle or street scape upgrades, it is the cheapest upfront, but the $2 million construction cost rests entirely on the town. The limited bike option maximizes sidewalk space throughout
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the corridor and adds six parking spaces, but offers no separated bicycle facilities. Despite a projection co a projected construction cost of 11 million, its lack of dedicated bicycle facilities makes it ineligible for tip grant funding. While we could theoretically apply for individual grants for certain components of the project, we would have to patch together multiple smaller competitive programs with no guarantee of success. While this is an while, this is possible towns staff, it is towns staff's understanding that currently the majority of this $11 million burden would likely fall directly on the
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town once constructed. This concept would increase long-term snow removal costs, though not as much as the hybrid or enhanced spike alternatives. The hybrid concept delivers dedicated cycling infrastructure while maintaining our current downtown parking footprint. It is fully eligible to be covered by TIP funding for construction, which could scale with any future inflation or cost increases. However, there is an important funding nuance for the board to consider. Well, the tip grant covers utility pole relocation. It generally does not cover utility undergrounding. While utilities are already underground on Main Street from
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Common Street to Middlesex Avenue. If the town wants to underground the remaining utilities between cottage and common streets, the specific cost would be ours. Other trade-offs include space and maintenance. The concept reduces sidewalk widths on seven out of 10 segments and adds roughly $250,000 a year in specialized snow removal costs. Finally, the enhanced bike concept provides dedicated bike infrastructure and creates wide sidewalks north of Central Street. However, it achieves this by switching entirely to parallel parking, resulting in a net loss of 14 spaces.
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Similar to the hybrid, it is fully eligible for tip construction funding. Once it is constructed, the enhanced bike concept would increase snow removal costs by about the same amount as the hybrid. So because the board directed us last center to or last summer to focus planning and engagement work on the hybrid concept, I want to spend a a moment, a moment reemphasizing its core trade-offs. Here the big pro is balance. The hybrid concept provides dedicated bike infrastructure while maintaining our recurrent downtown parking footprint. It secures our eligibility for TIP grant funding for construction as well. The major cons are space driven
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to fit everything into the existing right of way. This concept reduces sidewalk widths on seven out of 10 sidewalk sections along the corridor. It also adds an additional $250,000 to annual snow removal costs. So as part of our recent work, the project team formed a 15 member working group consisting of town staff, committee members, residents, and local business owners. Their charge was to review the hybrid concept, share feedback and vote on whether to endorse a ref refined version of it. The group met five times over the past few months and recently took an official endorsement vote. The final tally was eight votes to endorse the refined
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hybrid concept and seven votes not to. This narrow margin underlines the very real competing community priorities along this corridor because their vote shouldn't be taken out of context. The working group is compiling a comprehensive report detailing their full deliberations, which they look forward to presenting at your next meeting. So where do we go from here? The working group is finalizing its report and the project team will work on answering or providing answers to any questions the board may have. Once the working group officially presents its report, the select board we hope will determine which concept to formally take into full design.
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We project starting the formal 25% design process this July, aiming to reach the 25% design milestone by June, 2028. So thank you all for your time and I will turn it back over to the board for questions and discussion. Thank you Mr. Griffiths. So to set expectations about the process going forward on June 24th, we will receive the working group's report. The board will review it, the public will review it, and we'll have questions and comments from both the public and the board about the recommendations and receive additional public input on both the process,
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the design, and where we go from here on the, at the following meeting, which would be July 8th. If the board is ready to take a vote, then we will take a vote. Otherwise we'll have additional discussion and comments amongst ourselves if there's additional information we need. And I'd encourage the board between the time we receive the report, which will be in advance of the June 24th meeting and the July 8th meeting that any questions you, you have, you run it past Morgan and Jamie Erickson so that we can make the meeting as as efficient as possible.
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So going back, what I, what I'd anticipated tonight was inviting the public and the board to ask questions about this presentation only and the pros and cons. Looking at Mr. Griffiths, if you could bring up page 11, the slide, yeah. Slide 11 or another slide that the board needs to ask questions about and and kind of focus our attention on the new information that we've received tonight. We won't be talking about the working group vote because we don't know anything about it except for the vote tally.
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So at this time I'd like to open comments and questions from members of the public first in the room and then we'll go online and I've got nothing in the room. So online if you could raise your hand. Ms. Dorin, could you? Thank you. Hi, am I unmuted? Yes, you are. Okay, Thank you. I have a couple of comments and maybe a couple of questions. A comment first, I think it's interesting that the bike paths we're only looking at north to south
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through Natick, not east to west. That's just a comment, a reflection. Also, I think, I'm not really understanding why the limited bike path option has to include reverse angle parking. Sort of like if you take the limited bike path, then it's automatically we have to do the reverse angle parking. That's a comment. I am concerned about the impact on the DPW for snow removal and I did have a conversation with someone at the DPW. I see Mr. Spread is here, it was someone below his level.
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But if there bump outs to the curves, I think it becomes almost impossible for snowplows to properly clear snow. And so that's a concern. And then I, I do have one concern and I haven't seen it addressed. I live off the opposite end of Pond Street as many of you know and I frequently travel down Pond Street either to take a left north on 27 or to go around to the common with my dog. I'm really pretty adept at both directions and I'm concerned because a while ago I heard a possibility
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that we might not be able to take that left. And so I have concerns about the backup cars needing to go right or being forced to go right or having to go through the parking lot. So I hope this is part of the conversation anyway, yeah, I just wanted to express my comments and a couple of concerns. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'd like to go through those one by one Morgan or Ms. Erickson, if you could address the question about why on the limited bike concept, reverse angle parking would be required. Yes, I can definitely talk speak to that.
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So reverse angle parking has several safety benefits. One of those is that when you are pulling out of parking spaces, you can see what you're pulling out into. And one of the reasons that it's included specific, what we felt comfortable taking it out of the hybrid concept but leaving it in the limited bike concept is the hybrid concept removes bikes from the street. It puts them between the sidewalk and the parking. So it essentially removes the conflict between cars pulling in and pulling out of travel lanes and the bikes. The limited bike concept essentially provides the only
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accommodation for bikes it provides are shares or shared lane markings. Essentially bikes and cars are sharing the travel lane. This essentially puts and the cyclist cyclists at risk when cars are pulling out of spaces and can't necessarily see them. So the reason why reverse angle parking was added or is included in the limited bike concept is to prevent that conflict between cars backing out of spaces and cyclists that may be passing between them or behind them. Then the second question I think has been covered in the matrix, but if you could expound on the increased,
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so limited bike and then the hybrid and enhanced bike all factor in, we're gonna have increased snow removal costs. And I'm assuming that that's based on hiring outside contractors not using current staff and equipment. Is that correct? Yes. So I believe Mr. Erickson and Mr. Sprat can probably comment on this as well, but my understanding from talking with Mr. Sprat and also Brian Casey from the DPW is that currently when the DPW performs snow removal operations or there's a bit of a buffer zone between
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where the parking is on Main Street and where the sidewalk is and DPW is able to pile when it's moving snow, it's able to pile snow in that area as like a sort of staging place and then we'll take that later on, we'll take that snow elsewhere or keep it is able to keep it there. But the hybrid concept essentially proposes putting a bike lane where that buffer zone is. So essentially in DBW would have to keep that bike lane clear. So essentially they would have to not just move snow but also remove it entirely in my understanding.
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And is that DPW currently does not have the resources to do that, so they would have to hire outside help to do it. Does that sound Accurate in essence? Yes. Basically during a typical storm event where we're doing snow planning operations, that would necessitate eventual removal of snow in Natick Center. That's not every storm event. Usually it's things over six inches or so, roughly even less often, even less often we, the team snowplows stores the snow and then a couple days later we'll go back at night usually
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and then remove those piles when you don't have that. So snow storage areas, you pretty much have to do it during the storm. We already use contractors to augment our snowplowing operations even with, without these, any of these changes. And we also hire like, like retired employees to even drive our current vehicles. We have enough equipment, it's really getting the drivers and the equipment as well as contractors. So in essence, to keep up with the storm in Natick Center with some of these changes with the expectations of having travel lanes for all users open, we would likely intend
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to do that during the storm itself because we wouldn't have the flexibility to store the snow and then go back on like, you know, two days later at night when we do nighttime removal operations. So that's, that's where that's coming from. The, the reason why limited bike versus hybrid is, is is still additional cost but less is just the sheer street scape, you know, how the curbing works and where the snow storage, it's really just a factor of, of the design. And these are all rough estimates based on current concept designs. Once you get into the formal design process, things will,
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will adjust accordingly based on what those final design details are. And the last question just posed, I think that we've all, there is no consideration of forbidding a left turn from Pond onto 27 onto Main Street. There was at one point We There been, but there isn't now, right? Yeah, we've got in this presentation in the last three presentations It's been part of this, that's for sure. Yeah. But several presentations have happened and there's been discussion where that's been taken off the table, is that correct? Yeah, and we, we've looked at this turning movement for years, even before I started
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with the town over 11 years ago and there's no real general consensus on exactly how to really handle just Pond Street in general. Right. You know, whether, you know, attorney movement changes or even one way movement changes. Like we've looked at everything and it seems like it's really, I mean Morgan, I know that you are more involved in more recent reviews, but I've, I've looked at this in years past with prior town engineers. I dunno if you wanna comment a little bit more about that or if I covered it. Yeah, I think it, it's definitely been discussed during this process. I don't think anything concrete has been decided. Okay. But it's not part of the, the design?
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Not currently, not currently. That's, that's under rev review. Okay. Are there any other questions from members of the public? Yes, let's go to Mr. Devereaux and then after him to Mr. Gates. Okay. Am I unmuted now? Yep. Yes. Yes. Okay, thank you. First, I apologize a good presentation. I apologize for not having been past one. So I look forward to coming to others. I believe I heard you mention to get to my question that alternate bike routes that, you know, steer bikes and other and other, you know, two wheel vehicles,
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everything that are motorized, everything from e-bikes to e scooters and so on would be a consideration. And I'm wondering if you had any, I mean this is a lot, this process won't produce a finished main street as I understand it, no matter which option you take. Is that correct? First off, is that a good assumption? It'll still be the mid 1930s or 34 or something before it's scheduled to be complete if it's completed on time. I'm not filing in the question. Is that a, is it safe to assume
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that no matter which option of the ones he's laid out, the job will not be finished until the mid 19, 2030s, 40 Maybe. Well go ahead Morgan. So the, the full reconstruction options, that is our current estimation. Obviously timelines are fluid and, and, and can change. The mill and overlay could probably be done quite a bit sooner than that. Yeah. In the next year or two, probably depending on funding. Okay. Well the reason I ask that as an assumption is that things are changing in terms of transportation very quickly
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and I'm all for people using motorized bikes and so forth and, but they're gonna have to get off of sidewalks. The state is probably gonna maybe gonna do something about that first and lead towns we'll see. But I imagine that these bike lanes are, if they're only five feet, are going to be crowded with vehicles that go different speeds. And I just think there's an awful lot going on in a very tight area. So I wonder if you're sort of projecting ahead and thinking about what transportation is gonna look like,
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you know, you'll have a lot more, you know, driver assisted or self-driving cars then that may help traffic flow in that sort of bottleneck from cars. But I don't know, I just think there's a, you're trying to pack an awful lot with these bike lanes going through there and since the town is a destination for some of that bike traffic because of the bike path rail trail coming in toward the, the two, the T and so forth, I think it would be a great, I I'd like,
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I really look forward to hearing about the alternative for those things, which I think would, the benefits of that would be that it would help widen sidewalks a bit and you know, not be a detriment not not reduce parking and in improve the road for vehicle transportation trucks and all of that are going through that area frequently. I just think it's, you know, I just think it's too much stuff, you know, to not to look seriously at an alternative which diverts the,
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you know, there are plenty of other roads that are quiet around downtown Natick. I'd love to see bikes off of that whole common and, and you know, main street area coming down there. You know, that's my opinion and you know, I'm happy to offer it another time at a meeting, but if there's any answer to that I'd love to hear it. I think I would say that, you know, I think I agree with you that alternate routes are very important regardless of whatever goes on Main Street, I think you're gonna have cyclists of all different ages
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and abilities and I think ideally a welcoming cycling community is one that encourages all different types of people to feel comfortable cycling and some people are going to be feel comfortable in different types of facilities. So I think absolutely whatever design we go with for Main Street, I think towns staff would absolutely recommend looking at alternate routes as well. Okay, thank you Mr. Gates. Okay. Sorry I didn't unmute myself. Thank you Madam Chair. Just a question regarding the likelihood that the grants will be available when we actually make the decisions to do this, as well as what the cost would be,
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you know, adjusted for inflation and even if we were able to get the 11 million in grants, is that gonna cover it or are you saying that the grants will cover whatever the construction inflation is as well? I, you know, I just worry about the amount of spending that the town is doing in general and committing to something these days that's 11 million today with the expectation of grants could be 20 million or 25 million in the future. And we don't have any grants. So that's my concern. Thank you. Thank you Mr. Gates, Mr. Erickson.
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Sure. So typically for, and in this case, the grants that are considered, or the program I guess that's considered for the hybrid and or enhanced bike is the tip or transportation improvement program, which is part of our, I'm gonna go into acronym crazy MPO or Metropolitan Planning Organizations Funding. These are state and federal dollars. We've used these most recently, for example, to, to rebuild North Main Street from the Natick Center to the Wayland town line. That was about 12 to $14 million. Those funds in that program actually factors in inflationary costs so that they continue
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to cover the full cost of construction, of approved construction costs. There are typically what are called non-participating items that a community might choose to add to that project so that you get the cost of effectiveness of the bid. But for participating items, they actually factor that into their program and they, and you can actually see it when they put, when they push a project out on the tip is what they call it, it's a five year plan. They'll actually say, and we're gonna add our factor to it, but then they, they provide the full cost. It's an 80 20 split between federal and state funding with no town. But the town is obligated
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to provide all upfront design and right of way costs. So that, that's our, our, you know, share. Yeah. The other program costs, like the other grant costs for like limited bike. Absolutely. There's a concern there with increased costs that we have $11 million rough estimates today. Those programs, in my experience, haven't really budged in their dollar allotments in many years and they just continue to get competitive. So for, for our sake, the competitiveness is gonna be trying to include as many of the things that the state's looking
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for in our grant program. And, and it depends on the grant program, what they're looking for. But you know, typically if it's like a complete Streets or something like that, they're gonna be looking for accommodations for all users and or like in the case of like a Mass Works grant, they've been in the range of 500,000 to $5 million ever since that program really was put together 20 years ago. I remember I worked for a community that got one of those early grants and they've always been in that range. That's just the reality of those programs. So to your, to your point, it is very possible and likely that if we see increased costs on
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the project going forward, those grant programs aren't necessarily gonna increase with it. The tip will, the tip will. Yeah. But the other programs are, are less likely to now anything can happen. The state can put more resources towards those programs. They can change the format of those programs. MathWorks has gone through two or three iterations through the years. So, so anything can happen in the next couple years. But, you know, based on today's sort of expectation, I wouldn't expect there to be too much more funding coming from those programs for something like this to cover obviously the mill and overlay that's all town.
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So that's not really a factor. It's just a matter of us getting bid pricing as part of our roadway improvement program, which we do annually as part of our, the, the five year roadway plan that this board votes on. Sorry, Mr. Gates, did you have an additional question or is your hand just up? No, I did. I, you know, I, I actually don't think it's a bad idea to do the mill and overlay just in case this doesn't work out. So we've got the road in good shape if, if the grants don't come through in the future or things change so that the money isn't available.
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That's just my opinion though. Thank You. Thank you. I appreciate that. Mr. Erickson or Mr. Gr, do you have any comment on that? Nope, No comment. One thing that I believe to, to be mindful of, of just the mill and overlay is we would absolutely look at just the ongoing conditions of the roadway. And I know there's portions that are actually in pretty decent shape and portions that are in less decent shape. And what we do with any of our roadway improvement programs, we always try to get out there in advance with any underground utility work that needs to be done. So like our water sewer division would be looking at this
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before we do any mill, and this is true for actually all of these concepts, right? We'd be doing that and we'd be engaging with the gas company if there's underground gas or other things that need to be done underground. So that, that is something that with all these concepts we would be doing. I I just have a follow up question about that. The $2 million estimated cost for the mill and overlay, does that take into account that while we're doing this patch process, any underground utility work we're going to need to do or pipe? Because we're not gonna just like pave over something if in five years we need to dig it up and do water and sewer and Pipe?
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That would be a separate cost. So it will, it will likely be more than $2 million in estimated construction cost if we do the mill and overlay. So if there's water and sewer work that needs to be done, that typically comes into water sewer enterprise fund and we have annual capital dollars that go towards that type of work already. So we we're already doing some of that work that we do try to do preempt proactively before we get in there. Obviously emergencies can happen, so Sure. Unfortunately sometimes you pave and usually you put what's called a five year moratorium. It's a, it's kind of the term the state uses onto a roadway and then like six months later you get a water break and you have to dig it up and that,
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that's really just unfortunate. It's not because we didn't do anything, we did something wrong. It's just that's what happens. Unfortunately a water break happened and you have to do that and they, they're unpredictable, but to the best that we can, we'll get in there for water and sewer, obviously gas line work that's more on the gas company to cover the costs depending on what it is. If we were proactively like putting things underground, that would likely be a town costs the stretch. It's mostly already underground, so we're fortunate that the town did that about 15, 20 years ago already. So we don't have to cover those costs now. That's extremely, extremely
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expensive though, doing undergrounding. Thank you. Questions and comments from members of the board? Ms. Slager, Ms. Pope, Ms. Evans and then Mr. Jacobs. I'm just gonna say that in the interest of time, the questions that I have, I'm going to email. Okay. Thank you Mr. Wils. Thank you Mr. Evans. I've already sent my questions. So I'll say that Morgan and I are collecting questions that are sent over and we've already received a bunch from, from board members, not from everybody in the public, from board members. And we'll put that together in some type of,
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probably just copy and paste document for the board for the next meeting or an upcoming meeting. Thank you. Yeah, I've already sent my questions in, so I'm set. I can do that as well. Have a List Okay. With the q and a. We'll do both questions and answers. I Sounds good. I did. I I did. And continue to send many, many questions into you guys and I appreciate you guys we're collecting us. You've answered many, many of my questions already and like you'll continue to do it. I just, there was, there was just one thing, well, two, two short things that I just might thought might be helpful in this setting just to show one thing is on slides, I think it's 22 and maybe 21
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and 22, you go through examples of what it actually looks like when you say that there's a shared that the sidewalk is at that, I'm sorry that the bike path is at sidewalk level. 'cause I think when people picture that, they may not be picturing exactly what that looks like and you know, you guys provide some great examples there and if you want to, you know, if you, if you have anything you wanna say about that to explain that, I think that would be good. 'cause I think that conjures up images that may not actually be what we're talking about. Sure, yeah, I'd be happy to. So I'm actually gonna go back to the previous slide,
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which this graphic is, There you go. That's, yeah, This graphic is not as large as I was as I would like it to be. I'm happy to provide a a, a larger image, but essentially this is taken from the MAs dot separated bike lane planning and design guide essentially is giving you a schematic diagram of like if you were going to construct this kind of separated bike lane, specifically if it's gonna be at the sidewalk level, A big concern is, you know, you'll be close to pedestrians, you'll be at the pedestrian level. So there's a sort of this expectation like,
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oh there may be increased pedestrian and cyclist conflicts. And so what the MAs dot separated bike lane guide and also the NDO guide, which I will reference I've referenced a few times I think previously essentially does, is suggests putting essentially buffer zones. So there's a buffer zone essentially between parking and the bike lane itself. This is to prevent, I think this is showing parallel parking here, but it's essentially is to give some space between the cyclists and people entering and exiting their cars. There's also a buffer zone between the bike lane
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and the space where pedestrians would be walking. Typically this will have things like street furniture, you can see it in this image. These are two examples from Boston. There'll be street furniture lights, bike racks, trees, things like that. As well as different material on the ground essentially to indicate that these are two separate areas, that one is the sidewalk and one is the bike lane. And kind of to both visually and physically demarcate those spaces. It's also a MAs dot requirement. I believe that along with that sort
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of texture near the bike lane, it has to be, there's specific a DA requirements. So folks that are visually impaired know when they are essentially leaving, if they're pedestrians, when they're essentially leaving a sidewalk space. It's not portrayed on this slide, but typically when there are crossings of the bike lane, those are typically striped and often come with signage and warnings essentially for the cyclists saying like, slow down pedestrian crossing and for pedestrians, like, you know, you are about to cross a bike lane. Things like that.
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Thank you. And then just my last thing and then I'll take the rest offline, but just the, to, to clarify about the, this the exchange that you guys had about the, about the snow removal. So under the, the hybrid option or the, the enhanced bike option there would, you know, right now the, the current way that it's, it's plowed from my understanding from discussion with you guys is that, you know, the, the, the snow is sort of is piled up in a major snow event. It's piled up kind of in that space that's sort of in between where you park and where the sidewalk is. And under this plan, instead of being piled up for
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however many days it is until you're able to remove it, that would be removed the same time as the, essentially with the, with the plowing with the snow event. So there would no longer be those snow piles between people's cars and the sidewalk. Is that right? That is my understanding. I think in part because bike lanes are, they're a lane, they're like a, like travel, right, like through, like through far. So they would need to be cleared same as, you know, the roads or the sidewalks as well In in essence. Yes. Yeah. That, that's, that's what we're kind
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of expecting would be the expectations. So we're trying to plan accordingly for that and provide the expectations that it's not a surprise afterwards. Yeah, no, I mean it's the, I just wanted to clarify 'cause then yeah, people would no longer have that, like it would for the person parking and walking. They would, they would no longer have that in between, so. Right. Thank you. Yeah, Ms. Schlager, that was a brilliant idea and I thank you for that. So we will see no more public comment. We're gonna close this agenda item and we're gonna take a three minute off camera break, three minute recess and we'll come back for our third quarter fiscal report. Thank you. Welcome back to the select board.
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We've had a slight change in order and we are going to hear a, a short presentation discussion about the historic fountain on the common and then we'll go to the third quarter fiscal report. Thank you sincerely for taking us out of order. Vince has young children and promised to be home by nine. So thank you very much. We had some new developments this afternoon just in the past few hours that I think is gonna change the pathway that this project will take. So I just wanted to update you. Initially there was gonna be a board ask and I don't think that that's even necessary anymore.
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So I'm happy just to tell you, I've been using this format about the, oh, excuse me. Andy Meyer, Vincent Victoria skipped all that. Sorry about that. Thank you. Town volunteers working on the restoration and renovation of a fountain that was on Natick common for 70 or 80 years that was gifted to the town of Natick by the ladies Temperance Union, 19 10, 19 11. So I, I've been using this format of things we know and things that we don't know, and I think we had a big breakthrough today. So essentially we know the history of the fountain. It is a, it is a, a piece of history.
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Many people in this town remember drinking out of it. And the goal is to restore it on a night like tonight when you see people walking across the common, having an ice cream, you can just imagine how pleasant it would be to get a drink of water on our town common. So that's kind of why we're doing this. We, we know the location of the fountain pieces. We have a proposed location where it would be best to put the fountain on town common. We have an interested party who has the skills to restore it. We know now that the fountain does not need a sewer hookup. I met with the Department of Public Health. They were pretty clear that it can act as a drain, drain
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through the ground and recharge the aquifer so that we do not need a, a sewer project. We know the approximate cost of the fountain, the restoration as well as the installation. We know that the approximately yearly cost of maintenance is quite low. We know that there's a funding source we would be proposing to apply through the Community Preservation Act. We've sent in a letter of interest and we note that our application checks off two boxes, historic renovation and open space improvement. We were initially advised to partner with a fiscal agent
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that would handle the money and pay the invoices. That is the Natick Center Associates. And I've been working with, we've been working with Steve Lavinsky on that. The thing that changed today was the role that the Nat Center Associates is willing to play. They are willing not only to be the fiscal agent, but they are willing to provide an individual, which we would budget for, who would serve as the project manager. So that would mean that a recognized nonprofit, Natick Center Associates would hire a part-time individual,
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maybe somebody that has retired from the town of Natick in an engineering capacity or somebody like that to oversee the collection of the necessary engineering documents. Those documents could be procured and once those are settled, the Natick Center Associates would apply to the town of NA for a building permit, at which point everything would be approved, reviewed, organized, and finalized. And then of course, once the work is complete or is initiated, we'd be partnering the Natick Center Associates with the Department of Public Works
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to oversee the work that it's, that it's done correctly. So we were going to be asking tonight if the board would consider making this a town project. We don't need to do that because I believe this path forward eliminates that entirely now that we have Natick Center Associates stepping up willing to serve in that capacity. So the task before us is that there is an a 27, an efficient 27 page application that is due for the Community Preservation Committee. And I believe the deadline is the end of June. So we would be partnering as volunteers with the Natick Center Associates
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to fill out that application. And then we would go through the public process, which, which is public hearings and eventually a vote of town meeting. But I believe we have a pathway now that resolves many of the questions we had about how exactly are we gonna do this and it's new information. So essentially there's no ask to be made tonight. It's an update of where we are and I, I feel like this is a viable way to pursue it. I'm reminded of the words of the great Bob Eisenmenger who said, what's wrong with that. So there we are. That's our update and we are happy to answer any, there was a question about whether this qualifies
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as a historic project and out of, out of a saving of time. We don't need to go into it, but Vince is here and he could, he could explain why we feel this is very much a historic renovation project, the, the actual piece to be restored back where it was. So other than that, that, that, that's our update. Happy to answer any questions if you have them. Questions for members of the board. Mr. Evans, Just a quick one, which is, if I understand correctly, your application for the CPC will be, will include both the restoration
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and the hookup to water. Is, is it going to be the whole concept in other words? Yes, sir. I, I, I think it makes sense. I, I'm, I'm thinking about how I might feel if I was a town meeting member. We're gonna be describing the project and, and the project in its entirety includes restoring the actual fountain and its installation. So I, I thought it might be a touch misin, a disjointed to, to do, to put in two applications. So I thought it would be one application for the project, but specifying that the ne what the necessary steps are in order to make it happen. Excellent. Okay. Just a follow up question, Mr.
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Sprat actually, which is just have, have you reviewed the, I know a while back we were talking about the challenges in connecting and location on the common, et cetera. The view of any insight on the feasibility of this? We have been involved from the beginning, so yes, I have been involved in and understand the full project. Okay. And you're, you feel it's within the scope of what DPW can handle? The DPW would not be doing, I'm guiding the process, but the DPW would not be making these connections that would have to be part of the project
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And, and Natick Center Associates would then manage the connection to suppose there's, for whatever reason, there's a difficulty who owns fixing the problem, A licensed drain layer would have to do that project. Let me ask Mr. Erickson to weigh in on this. Yeah, I mean the, the program, sorry. Thank you for, for, so in essence the, the grant program would pay, would be a, a grant to NA Center Associates for the project. Okay. And then that project would include the installation and connections and everything as part of that. So essentially what, what DBW doing would be reviewing the
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design plans once they're created and overseeing the project once it's done by private contractors provided through, as, you know, through a gift to the town, so to speak, as part of the grant program. So we can grant through CPC, we can grant to private nonprofits. We do it. A good example of this is the one that we're currently doing with the RY libraries, whether we're doing the historic fence fence that is partially on town property because it goes on to public right of way, mostly on private property because the Bacon free library land is actually nonprofit owned. Yeah. And that's an example of how we gifted,
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we granted the CPC or the town actually granted money to a private nonprofit to do that work and then they did all the work. Okay, thank you. That will So In essence cleared it up. Yeah. The long-term maintenance is still on the town because once it's, and the board would likely have to take some action at some point in the future to accept the gift. Yeah. Probably before installation. But we had to talk through legal counsel exactly how that mechanism works. But that's a, okay, you accept gifts a lot, so it's probably a fairly straightforward process. Okay. Thank you For that explanation. That really helped Mr. Jacobs, I, I was just asking, so if needed Center Associates is, is doing this in the way
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that you guys all described, so do, do they, do they have to follow this state procurement process or No, because it's, if It's handled as a grant Yeah. And it, everything is done by the nonprofit and then gifted to the town. My understanding from legal counsel is no. Cool. So then It's when we got into the, who's doing what portion of the project and who's covering what and is town staff involved, that's when we started getting into where's the procurement? Like where's that line? We, we couldn't, we had to have a pretty, this helps with having a very definitive sort of like, line for
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It. Well, this sounds like a really good outcome, but just the only thing is just like you're, you know, Jamie, just like, do you have, I mean, 'cause obviously eventually there, there, and you know, even going through it, like there's still gonna be work on the town side involved with this, especially once they're ready to hook this up. Right. But like, do you feel that it's like with, you know, this concern about bumping other things to the side or do you think like now with the, with you know, Natick Center Associates hiring the people and doing all that, that that, that takes enough off of it that it's manageable. I I mean time will tell through the project, so Sure, sure. There's your
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Crystal ball Not having enough. Having To, it's not really a fair question, I Guess. Sorry. I mean this is definitely a, a benefit in the sense that town staff isn't being relied on to do the procurement to manage any sort of components of the project to do the design work. Yep. You know, reviewing project design is, is what we do every day when we review private projects that connect to our water lines. So it's kind of like a similar role from that perspective. Yes. It's also on town property. Will there, will there be added, you know Yeah, yeah, there will be. But you know, that, that's having an
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outside entity doing the work is, is the bene is a net benefit. There will still, there is still, you know, just the, the, the reality that adding any component to the common that's actually functioning is going to have long-term Yeah. Maintenance costs as well. So, and we need to understand that. We don't fully know that quite yet, but we do need to understand that eventually, If I may just add one thing in our discussions with the board of health, they, they confirmed that there's enough water pressure in the line. This thing doesn't need a pump, so it doesn't really need any electricity. So it, it, it, that's my understanding.
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Yeah. That, that's, that's a net benefit. But we do still, like we, with all water lines in town, we do have to winterize them. Oh yeah. And all that stuff, There's a shut off and a turn on and, and originally my my understanding is that that is a, well they, they're they're, they're sprinklers on the town com and they get turned on a shut so that Yeah, exactly. It's, it kind of dovetails with that. So, And we have water fountains in other park spaces, so it's not, it's still That makes sense. It's not the, the little added cost isn't much of a concern. It's just when we have this plus plus, plus plus. Yeah. But, but you know, I just wanna make sure the board's aware that there, it's not as if it comes with no cost.
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There is some cost, but of course. Definitely. And I think his other image of this plan is that the interested sculptor who, who we've mentioned in the past, yeah. I, I think we can definitely attract his attention now knowing that he's not gonna go out to like a, a three person blank bit. That's why I asked that. Yeah. Yeah. So I think as a private entity contracting with him, we can almost assure that, that that would be the person that would be doing the work. And I think he's uniquely qualified for it. Yeah. So interesting. No, we again, no ask from the board, but unless there's some horrible objection, which there does not appear to be, we're gonna proceed
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and we'll we'll kind of walk it through the, the public hearing process in the fall And as changes come up, could you convey that to Mr. Erickson? Sure. Will those issues come up? I'm sure you will. Just Happy to. That would be great. And Vincent, you are probably grounded. It's 9 0 4. 9 0 4. Sorry About that. No, no, I understand. My husband, thank You again for taking us out. Appreciate It very much. Yep. Thanks for being here. Third quarter fiscal report. We invite Mr. Sky and to come on up. Hello. Gimme just a moment. I do my thing here.
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Gloria's got it up and running. Oh, Well Gloria does. Yeah, Of course she does. Of course. Of course She does. Good evening. Thank you board members for having us today. We really appreciate it. We'll try to be complete, but expeditious, given the hour, this, the purpose of our briefing today is to give you a, just a quick update on third quarter and some sense of what's to come in the next few months as far as future presentations go and things like that. So the first part's gonna be the, this overview and then the second part will be a, an updated financial outlook. Okay. So this
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slide shows you kind of a, gives you a sense of, of overall what we're seeing this year. Bottom line, we're generally on track ma major revenue sources are up by about 7.5% over FY 25, mainly due to the operational override, as well as some higher numbers on some local receipts in state aid. There's a detailed breakdown on later slides. One thing that should be mentioned at this point is motor vehicle excise tax. So that's up by about 4%. While other excise taxes like such as hotel and meals tax are up by a bit more, we expect that to continue given, you know, openings that are happening
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around town, the license permits are down rather dramatically. That is not so much down below, below the historical number. But last year was an aberration of a year because of the large projects that we had. And the golf course continues to be doing well. They're probably nearing a ceiling in terms of their capacity to generate additional revenue. You're seeing a big increase in here, mainly due to rate changes, but they're probably, they're probably reaching their max capacity in terms of traffic. So the, on the expenditure side, general fund expenditure is about 67%.
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The biggest obstacle we're facing there is snow, is snow and ice costs. We have about a $1.9 million snow and ice deficit. We are confident that we'll be able to deal with that through various transfers. And Michelle Lowery's been working on that now, but, but it will affect, it will probably affect our turnbacks in subsequently our free cash number as well. Okay. Tax levy stated collections are generally on track tax. Levy is is the third quarter with just over 75%. And we have a number of prior year receipts and real, real estate taxes
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and personal property taxes from the tax title project. Third quarter local receipts show significant increase about 34%. However, as indicated in the chart, the biggest escalation was the large building project in 25. This pace had been normalized in 26 after excluding that source. Okay. This Is a look at kind of major categories of revenue. So select numbers, the there, this is, it's a fairly dense chart and I don't want to belabor it too much. The thing to really focus on, I'd say is that a couple things, the penalties
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and interest are still doing well. Mainly from for reise tax and real estate taxes as well as on the tax title project. We would've raised the base on that. Also on investments, well you see a small increase here, but we have with our, with our ongoing project in the treasury's office, discover some opportunities on, on interest yield on our accounts that we're taking advantage of, which should increase some that number rather dramatically. Okay. On the expense side, general fund expense is about 67%, right? At this point, towns about 73%.
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Schools at 61% schools generally end up fully spent by the end of the year pretty close and shares about 72%. Most of the departments remain under 75% except for public works, which is, that's strictly 'cause of the snow and ice issue. And the line chart in the middle shows town, school town and shared expense trends from FY 23 to 26 over the third quarter period, schools are up by about 18%, town 13% and shared 11%. That's a, an interesting data point
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if you look at it in context as we go along as well. Next chart, this is a closer look at third quarter expense page operating function as you'll, as you can see, public works is showing the big increase schools as well. There's this budget related and public works. It's the, the snow and ice deficit. Okay. Enterprise funds remain generally positive through the third quarter. Water sewer has seen a more so far seeing a more substantial surplus in the, the golf course in terms of revenue to expense.
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That makes sense. Golf courses, the golf course is big. Revenue generation doesn't obviously happen over the winter. It happens over the spring. So they'll probably catch up and look pretty good by the end of the year as well. So that's the third quarter update. I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have on that or I can move on to the future budget considerations discussion as well. Let's go through the whole, okay. Yeah, let's do the whole Thing. Yeah, sure. So some thoughts just about what's to come over the next several months. Next slide please. So this is the five-year forecast. You've seen this before. This is basically the forecast that we showed you with the
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preliminary budget back earlier this year. The only difference is that we've updated it to incorporate the FY 27 budget that was adopted, which had, which obviously was a little bit different than the preliminary. It's a little bit different on the revenue side thanks to state aid. And it's a little bit different as far as health insurance, as well as the new initiatives that were approved and, and, and the way we allocated free cash and so on. So this forecast incorporates that in, but the numbers are generally pretty close. The bottom line to where we saw what we saw in February, as you'll note there are deficits in there on the ongoing years. The, there's some assumptions in this proposal that,
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or there's a projection that we, that we showed you, which were, which need to be kind of taken into account when looking at that. For example, the schools are showing 5% a year annual increase. That's based on the historic average that we've seen over the past number of years. The, we move forward in this projection with the retirement with, with the retirement of, of the use of operating free cash. The three and a half million that we've been using for the past several years for sustainability issues. We tried to get that to zero, see what that would look like. So that obviously affects the out year years as well.
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And then also we don't use any of our, we don't use our stabilization fund funds. That's a, that's, that's, that's another point. And of course, per the financial management principles, any money that that, well the majority of the money that, that, that's, that, that, that's freed up by fulfilling the pension obligation is going toward oped. So, which is why you see the below the line item number going up and the shared services number going down in those out years. Okay. And, and why you see the continued deficit, Right? And the continued deficit in part because of that. Yeah. And revenue assumptions overall,
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of course are largely rather conservative. We're showing we're continuing with the one and a half million a year in new growth as well as, you know, as I said, minimizing the free cash and showing ongoing inflation in various other issues. Things like healthcare and so on. So this should be viewed as kind of a sensitivity analysis more than anything else. However, it also informs some of the things that we need to look at going, going forward. So next slide. You know, some of the issues that we're focused on and concerned about are ongoing growth.
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There's about a half percent structural imbalance between the rate of revenue growth and rate of expansion growth. It doesn't sound like much, but it's about equivalent to about a million to million and a half dollars a year, which compounds. So, and that's driven largely by the fact that revenue's been going up by about 4.4% expenditures overall going up by about just under 5%. The components of that are about five, as you can see in the, the box here, about 5.4% schools, 3.7% town, 5.27% shared. So those are all those, that's a structural gap
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that we're seeing on the economic conditions side. Look, receipts have been doing pretty well, but there are, you know, inflationary pressures, the economic issues, there's a lot of uncertainty right now. So we need to keep a real close eye on what's going on there. Obviously things like utility costs, inflation and so on are affecting our numbers for FY 26 and won't affect our numbers for 27. One of the things that we did in the FY 27 budget was, if you recall, we doubled the fi the fiscal reserve. So that, and, and that's specifically because we wanted make sure with the things that were going on at the going started at the time
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and they're going, it's still going on now out there that we had some abil some flexibility to handle costs like that. The, and then of course the, the, the town's policy priorities, both the, the, the, you know, our decisions on capital and, and, and the board's priorities as well as the financial management principles and looking at those going forward, making sure that they are well attuned and appropriate to what we're looking to do. So next slide. So next steps later this summer, probably August or September, we'll give you,
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we'll do our year end financial review also give you a sense of what we're looking at for the preliminary outlook for 28. We, we will probably be talk coming back to you at, around that time with some thoughts about the financial management principles and things that we can do there, but to update them and possibly po possibly revise within the context of where we're trying to get to as far as our projections go. And, and also of course look, continuing our focus on long-term sustainability. Thank you so much Mr. Skye. Thank you. I'd like to open this to questions from the public, seeing no one on Zoom or in the room that has a question, like open up
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to questions or comments from the board. Ms. Slager. Mr. Jacobs. Alright, no questions on this yet, but I do wanna say every time we see this it gets better. And so just wanted to say thank you to Gloria because we all know it's Gloria. Oh, it's definitely Gloria. You mean the presentation gets better? The presentation presentation gets so much better. The data gets better, the presentation gets better. Definitely. Just wanted to make sure and and I, and I have to say I really do like the future budget considerations and, and adding that as a, as a topic.
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It's extremely helpful. It's, it's very helpful and I have a lot of questions, but it'll wait. Happy To answer nine 15. So, Alright. Well may maybe I'll take a cue from my fellow board member and, and I'll, but I, I do have some questions that I will, I will email, but I, I dito on the appreciating the presentation. Yeah. 'cause it is, I have seen him over the years get better And better. You, you all know where to find me, so. Yeah. Yep. Ms. Pope, I just Wanna say I appreciate you all staying here so late to do this and to share this with us. And I will ditto and send my questions.
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Fair enough. Okay. Anyone else? I did a mental ditto. I'm a ditto too. Thank you Mr. Skye. Thank you. Thank you. It's a, it's a, the presentation is just gives us a lot to think about. It does. There will be, you know, this, this is, we, we felt it important at this stage to at least kind of give me a little, little, little, little tease about what we, what we need to be dealing with in the next few months. So, so we'll be coming back to you with some more ideas and information at that point.
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Thank you so much. Yes. We plan to collect your questions as well and, and the answers and then Okay. Bring 'em to a future meeting so the public can also see this. So yes, I that. Thank you. That sounds Good. I was thinking that and it just didn't come you similar To the main street, which our intent there was to make sure that, that, that once we have them, we'll actually include as a, an attachment to each, An faq. We do something similar here. Okay. Awesome. That be awesome. Just that the public can also see the questions that you have and the answers. Thank you. Which You'll send individually not to each other, so that you're Right. We send them to completely Compliant with the mean law. Yep. Send them to Mr. Sky and copy Mr. Erickson. Okay.
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I don't need to see them. We shouldn't be sending 'em to each other. Next up is the update on trash and recycling study. Thank you Ari. Thank you Gloria. Yes. Thank you so much. You, And then we can move to the consent agenda. Not the rushing it just saying, just to give you a preview where we are in the meeting. You just want to hear go for. Okay. Putting Yeah. Yeah. The late hour guys. No problem. It's my job. You don't have to come in tomorrow. I'll just make that decision. I can't see that. Just did, that's directly managing. We can't do that. That's, So I'll do my best to keep this very brief.
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Where is this? For some reason I didn't share. You shouldn't be able to. I I did share. Hold on two seconds. Okay. Okay. It's gone. Here we go. Okay. Thank you. I'll be very brief. Really this is just an update. We'll be back in front of you probably in August just to get some feedback on some of the data we're collecting. But this is our recycling and trash services study, affectionately known as the Rats group. So it is a working group that we put together. It includes myself, Ari, who just spoke from the financial side, Steven Marshall,
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director of Finance and Operations for DPW, Brian Casey, Jillian. We have two members from the public, one that is on the net zero committee. And then Missy is from DEP. We acquired her services through a grant. So, which has been really helpful 'cause she has the data from every single town and city in the, in the Commonwealth. So pulling, pulling our data is, is very easy with, with her there. One of the tidbits that I'll just share that we've learned so far, Natick is one of three communities. The picture on the screen shows us using staff members
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to put trash municipal solid waste in the truck. We're one of three communities in the commonwealth that still do that. So just an interesting tidbit. I was surprised by that fact As well. Just point of clarification, you mean as opposed to having a truck actually pick it up and put it in. Correct. We use human beings to do that. Yes. Thank You. In in-house, right? Isn't that also part of it? Well that's, that's we one of three communities that still do in-house trash with people on the back of trucks. Wow. So part of, we're looking at a comprehensive review of our trash and recycling programs.
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Municipal solid waste, curbside recycling, bulk pickup. All of the above are being looked at here. We're benchmarking ourselves against other communities and, and learning is essentially what we're doing. This started out really with a question, are we doing this the right way? Are we consistent with other communities? Is this financially responsible? Is this safe? Kind of the whole gamut. And really there is no pre-made decision. We're really letting the data follow the recommendations here. Ah, fellow rat, you're a fellow rat fellow.
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The the rats group, fellow rat, well the rats group, the rat Pack. Don't bad About that. These are the areas for review. I just kind of went over that. But really looking at collection methods, staff retention, even safety, the pay as you throw program, really comprehensive of look, even things like route optimization and scheduling. These are things we haven't looked at in decades. So just a really great opportunity to just make sure we're doing things the right way. Here are potential outcomes.
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As I said, we're, we're not pre-judging any of this, but potential outcomes could include doing nothing, just continuing going on. As we, as we do things, we could fully automate municipal solid waste. Currently we have recycling programs that use automated pickers. We could do that as well on the municipal solid waste side. We could have a, an outsource program, we could have a hybrid outsource program. Really those are potential outcomes that could exist based on what other communities do. Essentially what I'm here tonight is just to talk to you about the project timeline. We're in the benchmarking phase right now.
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We've had two or three meetings. We've learned a lot really in that short period of time. I would anticipate by July or so we'll have our benchmarking done, hopefully coming back in the August timeframe just to talk about those things, get some feedback from you on the directions you'd like us to, to go with this. And then ultimately use that information to come back maybe in the December timeline for a final recommendation to the board. Thank you Mr. Sprat. I have comments or questions from members of the board. Ms. Slager, just a really quick question. As part of your comparison to other towns,
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are we also looking at what the costs are and and factoring that in not just, you know, their methods, but we're also looking at, you know, what the cost to the residents and what the cost of the programs would be? So is this a full analysis? So the the short answer is yes. The, a full financial analysis being done, it's one of the reasons we have RA on the team. But even something simple as when we started our pay asyou throw program, what was the, what was the composition of our cost relative to revenue then and what is it now? So even things like that.
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Great. Thank you Ms. Pope. Thank you. And thank you for the, the update and the presentation. And this may roll into the question or, or the, the statement you just made to Ms. W's question is, there have been trash and recycling studies before. What are you trying to, to gather from this one that maybe hasn't been gathered before? So, to the best of my knowledge, there hasn't been one, I wanna say since 2016. I might be off on that date, but it's, it's Actually earlier. Okay. It's been quite a while. It's been a long time. So it's really just kind of a refresh.
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We will pull up old studies, but we have the opportunity through this grant to really do a deep dive. Trash and recycling is not something I've looked at in my two years here. It just, we've been looking at other priorities and, and now's the time we really, it's, it's a fairly big portion of our budget and it's time to take a deep look at that. Thank you. We're also, one thing that that bill sort of sort of talked through, but not in too much depth is policy decisions as well. So it just even discussing, discuss discussing the ratio of revenue versus general budget going
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to support the trash program. That that could be a policy decision, a financial policy decision. Do we, do we con, you know, how do rates for trash also like that needs to be discussed. And then also just other things like, and you mentioned this as well to a certain degree, how we handle just overall trash pickup, not just the mechanisms, but also we have some policies that, for example, we pick up trash for up to I think a four unit building and what does, what does that mean for the town? 'cause every town has something different when it comes to those things. Those are all categories we're benchmarking against it.
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Yeah, you'll be actually quite fascinated by the amount of benchmarking we're doing with with DEP right now. Sounds good. There is a hand up from the public if Ms. Dorin, Yes, thank you. I cost hasn't been brought up tonight and I may be jumping the gun, but I just want to express my concern. I remember hearing in previous months or years the possibility that residents would have to pay for trash pickup. And a lot of us are feeling the crunch financially with the override
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and the pending debt exclusions and the increase in water and sewer and, you know, social security is not increasing at the same pace. So I'm just gonna put it out there. Please, please, please try not to do that. I'm thinking about the $250,000 that snow removal would be, you know, extra given the redesign of native center. And I'm like, well can we like maybe take that two 50 and put it into trash removal rather than, you know, having to pay snow removal people, contractors more for that
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'cause Yeah, you're pushing us to the bring financial, I just wanted to say that I also had a thought about rescheduling because I, I can't remember if it's FedEx or UPS, but a number of years ago they changed their route scheduling and the drivers don't make left turns and they saved like millions, millions, millions of dollars. So I don't know if you've thought of that Mr. Frat and maybe it wouldn't work, but I'm just gonna put it out there kind of humorously. Mr. Sprat, could you address again how you had talked about cost being a factor that you're looking into this? Sure. Thanks. Thank you for both questions and comments.
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And, and I'm just gonna do the root one first, but yes, we are looking at root optimization. That's, that's a critical part of that. But as far as cost, the, the reality is we are a pay asyou throw program, but not an enterprise fund. So we do pay as you throw, which really subsidizes the tax burden that covers the rest of the, of the trash. So either way, the trash does cost money, it either comes out of taxes or it comes out of pay as you throw currently. So we will be reviewing that, but cost is certainly a factor of how, how we proceed
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and it, and it's going to be something I'll bring back to the board in detail. And I know I could speak for me and not for the board, but I know that all of us are very concerned with however we approach whatever we implement in terms of policy. The, the financial impact, especially coming out of the override. We've worked really hard at a future meeting will be going over our financial commitments and what the town has been able to save and what we've been able to turn back and what, you know, the, the initiatives we've undertaken in light of that. So thank i, I wanna, you know, thank Ms.
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Doran for raising that 'cause it is a, it's a very important consideration and if you didn't hear it in the presentation, it is something we're deeply considering. Any other questions for members of the board? Okay, thank you Mr. Spratt. Thanks for being here when I know you roll in around six 30 in the morning, so, well Not that early, but I appreciate, Happy to, happy to be here. Thank you. I think we all appreciate it very much. Thank you. Thank you Bill. We are done with our discussion and decision and we'll move on to the consent agenda. Agreed. The consent agenda tonight reads item A approve meeting
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minutes for May 27. 2026. Item B, approve Natick Police Department's request to accept donations to be used for the National Night Out event. $250 from Middlesex Auto Body, $2,000 from Brigham Gill Dodge Jeep. Item C appoint Richard Sydney to the Audit Advisory Committee as a select board representative for a term ending of June 30th, 2028. Item D approved the Cheesecake Factory Restaurants Inc. DBA, the Cheesecake Factory Change of Officers, directors,
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LLC managers application for their S 12 alcohol license. Item E approve request for exemption from town bylaws Chapter 41 S four, Abigail Garrity, Kalin del Tufo. Item F approve US Roadshow Inc. Applications for a one day junk dealer's license for June 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th of 2026. Item G approved boards and committee norms. Item H approve request to occupy a public way for the Coolidge Avenue Block Party item.
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I authorized the town administrator to sign the RHSO, which is the regional housing services office. IMA inter municipal agreement on behalf of the board, including any items related to the IMA over the three year term. Does anyone wanna pull anything from the agenda? I mean from the consent agenda? Okay. No, I move the consent agenda for Approval. Second move. Move by Kristen. Second by Linda. All in favor please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Next on the agenda is town administrator updates.
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Just briefly and it's not in direct response to a comment made during public speak, but there was discussion around a Needham employee during public speak and I just wanna note that the, the issue actually dealt with a nonprofit, not a town entity. Yep. It was a nonprofit for which that person was sort of skimming some money, for lack of a better term. We no Evidence. Thank for that clarification. Thank You. Thank you for that clarification. I thought I had read that but didn't feel secure enough to say that. No, Couldn't respond anyway.
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I didn't even think it was a town employee. I think It was technic discuss or debate. So for example, a plausible response would be, have you brought that up with FinCon? Have you gone to the FinCon meetings when you're in town meeting as a town meeting member, have you raised these questions? 'cause it isn't, those are all perfectly acceptable. The discussion would be no, of course we don't have that. And no, we're not going to, I mean I think there's a very narrow line and we try to fall on the conservative side of it and I think that's a good idea. But I also think it means that people have to wait two, eight weeks for us to have a contextualization as opposed
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to a response or a discussion. Town administrator. I'm good. Other Than that, I swear I didn't look at you Threateningly select board updates. I just have one and then I'll open up to anyone else. I've asked Rich Sydney and he's agreed to er, serve with Cody and I on working with, looking at the bylaws in the charter. Good. He has great experience on the charter and bylaw review committee. And I think he'll be an asset to Cody and I working through that. Cool. He's our consultant. Exci. He really is our sixth member. An elected member. And then he's like the fifth Beatle. Yeah, he is.
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And then the, the other thing I was going to ask Mr. Ericsson, since we've abor we've adopted the board and committee's best practices and norms, could you ask Mr. Walsh to send that out to all of the chairs? Chairs? Yes. And select board appointed or Yes. Select board appointed in whole and say that we've adopted this and these are expectations for people we appoint. Cool. I mean, we can't make boards and committees adopt them, but we can enforce say that these are the expectations and ask them to kindly for that, to all the members that are currently serving. And that's, that's all I had.
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Anybody else motion to adjourn? Oh, that was beautiful. A motion to adjourn. Second. Wow. Moved by Ms. Kristens, seconded by Mr. Bruce. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? We are adjourned at 9 35.