WEBVTT
METADATA
Video-Count: 1
Video-1: https://videoplayer.telvue.com/player/994DtmGEsi0VDYK3jJI2BJ72GfgNIpU2/media/1016191?autostart=false&showtabssearch=true&fullscreen=false
NOTE
MEETING SECTIONS:
Part 1 (Video ID: https://videoplayer.telvue.com/player/994DtmGEsi0VDYK3jJI2BJ72GfgNIpU2/media/1016191?autostart=false&showtabssearch=true&fullscreen=false):
- 00:00:10: Meeting Commences: Introductions, Agenda, and Parliamentary Procedure
- 00:01:34: Representative Linsky Presents Citation to Paul Caru
- 00:04:49: Senator Spilker's Regrets and Caru's Senate Citation
- 00:05:57: Gratitude from Paul Caru: Town and State Support
- 00:06:45: Select Board Presents Lengthy Resolution to Paul Caru
- 00:10:06: Select Board Members Express Gratitude to Caru
- 00:12:05: Board Member and Friendship Acknowledgement for Caru
- 00:15:12: Representative Linsky Introduces Richard Sidney's Proclamation
- 00:16:06: Linsky Speaks on Natick's Volunteers, Good Friend Sidney
- 00:18:49: Linsky Reads Citation to Richard Sidney
- 00:20:04: Senate Presentation to Richard Sidney for Service
- 00:20:49: Select Board Resolution Honoring Richard Sidney's Service
- 00:24:35: Richard Sidney's Thank You and Honor to Serve
- 00:25:34: Select Board Members Honor and Appreciate Sidney
- 00:27:41: Gratitude to Sidney's Warmth, Knowledge, and Friendship
- 00:29:34: Appreciation to Sidney's Humor and Positive Outlook
- 00:31:57: Legislative Updates Introduction, Senator Spilker
- 00:33:45: Legislative Updates: Environmental Bond and Budget Constraints
- 00:36:09: Senator Spilker Updates on the State Budget
- 00:38:09: State Revenue and Trump Administration Cuts Impact
- 00:40:38: Revenue Decreases and Chapter 70 Funding
- 00:43:04: Fair Share Funds and Special Education Funding
- 00:44:58: Constituent Services and Community Advocacy
- 00:47:25: Legislative Policy Updates, Housing and Environment
- 00:50:29: Data Privacy, Healthcare and Farmers' Markets
- 00:52:17: Protecting Libraries: Protocols and Preventing Book Removals
- 00:54:10: Representative Linsky's Budget Overview: Numbers, Process
- 01:40:12: Water Rate Financial Challenges: PFAS Treatment and Debt
- 01:45:29: PFAS Treatment: Analyzing Current and Future Needs
- 01:47:59: Budget Challenges: Debt Service and Regulatory Compliance
- 01:51:59: Expense Drivers: Temporary PFAS Tanks and Usage
- 01:55:27: Revenue Stabilization: Rate Tiers and Retained Earnings
- 01:57:21: Rate Proposals: Evaluating Three Options for FY27
- 02:06:19: Rate Comparison: Natick and Peer Communities Fees
- 02:07:37: Board Question: Elderly Rate Qualifications
- 02:09:37: Board Question: Rationale for Per Household Approach
- 02:12:06: Board Question: Projecting Longer Term Operational Expense
- 02:15:42: Board Question: Impact Of Changing Regulatory Environment
- 02:17:30: Board Question: Differential RTSD Increase For Irrigation
- 02:19:33: Board Question: Fiscal Challenges and Low-End Users
- 02:23:41: Board Questions: Analysis of Each Individual Option Fees
- 02:35:33: Board Question: Expected Future Rate Increases
- 02:37:33: Board Question: Baseline vs Variable Costs Analysis
- 02:41:15: Public Comment: Town Affordability, Costs and Revenue Clarification
- 02:47:29: Discussion: Vote Delay Due To Billing Challenges
- 02:50:00: Sustainable Purchasing Policy: Introduction
- 02:53:09: Board Question: 10% Price Preference Reasoning
- 02:54:29: Discussion: Partnership on Compostable Takeout Containers
- 02:57:35: Further Discussion: Policy Goals and Examples
- 03:00:38: MREC Regional Dispatch Center Updates and Changes
- 03:06:41: Board Approval: Dispatch Center Updates
- 03:07:16: Consent Agenda: Board Approvals and Resignations
- 03:09:42: Town Administrator Updates: Personnel Changes
- 03:11:33: Select Board Updates: Pride Month Proclamation
Part: 1
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Good evening. Good evening everyone, Speakers. Good evening everyone, and welcome to the April 15th meeting of this sch the school, the select board. I'm calling the meeting to order at 6:04 PM We have a very packed agenda tonight. We have some special guests with us and I, we're gonna start with proclamations from Representative Linsky and then from Senate President Spilker for, and then the board for Richard Sidney. And for Paul Caru, we'll do Paul car's. First, there will not be time for public comment
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because we do have such a packed meeting, and I'm going to encourage the board to use the ditto function, the ditto rule we've agreed on. So when we have a very busy meeting, we encourage each other to, once everyone's had a chance to speak or once someone's spoken, rather than repeating, we ask that you invoke the ditto rule. That doesn't mean that our enthusiasm or heartfelt sentiments aren't real, but it is an a parliamentary device to kind of move the meeting a little bit along. So having said that, I'd like to invite Representative
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Linsky to present a proclamation for Paul Car's public service. Paul Caru, you've got a bigger crowd than I could ever get here tonight. Paul, make sure you got a bigger crowd than this Is. This is actually bittersweet tonight. It's totally bittersweet. One, it's sweet because we're honoring somebody who has given so much to so many people and the people who are here.
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It's really a testament to you, okay? But it's bitter because you're retiring. And I can't think of the number of times that I have called you up and talked to you and looked to you for advice about how do we handle a particular situation. So I know we gotta move things along tonight, and a lot of people want to, but I did a, I offered a citation that the Massachusetts House of Representatives unanimously passed in that I want to read because I wrote some things in here
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that I really meant a, that are a little unusual in this. So the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the House of Representatives, be it hereby known to all that the Massachusetts House of Representatives offers its sincerest. Congratulations to Paul Caru in recognition of his invaluable contribution to the town of Natick Veteran Services office. Over 16 years of dedicated and faithful service, his leadership as director has helped save countless lives
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and forever change the community for the better. The entire membership extends its very best wishes and expresses the hope for future good fortune and continued success at all endeavors. It was voted on the 18th day of March, 2026 at the State House, Boston, Massachusetts, by Ronald Mariano, the Speaker of the House. And it's offered by myself, representative David p Linsky, To send this bill in her office in a minute. But I just want to say I really mean what I just said about saving lives, because that's what you have done, Paul.
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You have made so many people's lives the better. And you have contributed so much to not only this community of Natick, but statewide because you, when somebody was in need, you figured out a way to help that person. So we all owe you a real debt of gratitude. Thank you, Paul. Well, thank you First. It's, it's an honor to be here, Paul. We spent many a weekends on squares dedicating. That's probably one of the nicest things that Natick does, and Paul does that as an integral part of that. We dedicating squares to the veterans,
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and I know the family has meant so much to them. Seeing them cry and have such spawned feelings toward you and the dedication that you have to their feeling members, it's, it's a wonderful, wonderful events that you, you two carry on. First, I want send the, the regrets of Senate president spoke. She was unable to attend this evening for this portion of the meeting. She's tied up with the debate at the, the environmental bond bill at the State House. So she was unable to to come out, but she's gonna try to join you later for the later to update and break out a little bit. But she wanted me to express her deepest appreciation
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for everything you've done for the native community and for the veterans, not only in Natick, but Metro West and the entire state. So I have a citation on behalf of Senator Wilker. I like to just read a few words if I could, being known that the Massachusetts Senate hereby extends its congratulations to Paul Caru in recognition of the re joyous and happy occasion of your retirement of 16 years of dedicated service in Natick in your outstanding service to the veterans community. This signed by Senate President Kevin spca and also your state Senator Kevin spca, as well as the Clerk
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of the Senate, Michael Hurley d dated April 15th, 2026. Congratulations. I just gotta 0.1 thing out to you folks. Naag has been a great team effort, starting with my friends on the select board right up to my friends in the State House Senate. President Spilker has been a dear friend of mine for years, representative Linsky even more years. And it's just a great, great team between our legislators in the State House and you five sitting here. And Mr. Erickson, thank you very much.
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Thank you Mr. P. Crew. We have one more Mr. Crew. We have one more proclamation for you if you wanna just stay there and we'll do the select boards. This is on behalf of the select board, Mr. Caru, and I think because it's your hometown, we took some liberties here. It's a little lengthy, so bear with me. Whereas Paul Caru grew up in Natick and is a proud member of Natick's High School class of 1970. And whereas Paul married his wife Marguerite, Peggy
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Roan on May 2nd, 1998, and raised their daughter, Katie May Caru in Natick. And whereas Paul enlisted in the United States Marine Corps shortly after graduating from high school and joined the second battalion, fourth Marines hotel company supporting a helicopter force based on the USS Triple E. And whereas a further part of his deployment during the Vietnam War, Paul went on missions to Thailand and the Philippines and Japan as well as Vietnam. And whereas during his service in the United States Marines,
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Paul earned the good conduct medal, the National Defense Service Medal, the Vietnam Service Medal, and the Rifle Marksmanship Badge. And whereas Paul was honorably discharged from the United States Marine Corpse, the United States Marine Corps Reserve, and the United States Coast Guards Reserve. And whereas during his time as a Natick resident, Paul has served on the Natick Housing Authority and has been an active member of the community serving in leadership positions at the Elks Lodge, 1425, the M VTS post 79, the Metro West Veterans Outreach Center,
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and the Natick Veterans Council. And whereas for the last 16 years, Paul has served as the Veteran Service Officer and the Veterans Burial Officer, ensuring that Natick veterans and their families have support in obtaining their benefits, grave markers and faithfully executing the responsibilities of the office. And during that period of time, Paul served as the Americans with Disabilities Coordinator for the town. And whereas during his tenure as the VSO, Paul has overseen the establishment of 70 veterans Square dedications in Natick,
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honoring those Natick residents who honorably served in the six branches of the armed services. And whereas to ensure that Natick veterans received the best care and the best support possible, Paul continued his education and sought multiple certifications such as a certification in smart recovery for alcohol, for alcohol use disorder. And whereas Paul has earned the respect and gratitude of many of his colleagues, residents, and elected and appointed town volunteers and officials by the way in which he was, has supported veterans every day.
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And whereas Paul retired on March 28th, 2026, after many years of dedicated service to the town of Natick, and the select board wishes to recognize him for his service. Now, therefore, the Natick Select board can congratulates Paul Caru on his well-deserved retirement, extends its sincere appreciation for his years of dedicated service to the town of Natick, and wishes him a long, happy and healthy retirement in the company of his family, his loved ones, and his many friends and witness aware of.
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We here to set our hands and cause the seal of the town of Natick to be affixed on the 26th of March, 2026. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you very much for the kind words. At this time, I'd like to offer up or ask members of the select board if they wish to have, if they have any comments, Mr. Evans? Yeah, I'll do a brief, brief one. I've known, I've been through, I think about half of the square dedications that Mr.
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Caru has, has been at. And I think it was largely because I was tall enough to get The, As off the, the signs. But it was, it's always an honor. I think you said it earlier, it was the fa the family reaction to remembering their loved ones is just priceless. You, you, you can't beat it. It means so much to them. And they're such a little thing means an incredible amount to them. And that's kind of the tip of the iceberg of, of what Mr.
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Caru delivered to these people. And I have every faith that he'll continue in, in his retirement to actually on the side advise people and steer them to Mr. Martin and continue his good work. So thank you Paul. Thank you Bruce. Mr. Schlager, ditto. But I also wanted to say, Paul, I don't think there's anyone that is more supportive of veterans than you are. It is been truly inspirational to watch all that you do
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and have done not just the squares, but the everyday efforts that you've made on behalf of so many. You really set an example for all of us. But I did wanna, I noted that you mentioned your friends on the select board, and I do want you to know we are all, all your friends. Yes. And we hope we will stay your friends and that you keep in touch with us and don't be a stranger. The community needs you and best of luck in your retirement. Thank you. I appreciate that note. I, I'll, I'll stay in contact. Ms. Pope, Thank you so much. Ditto, ditto. I think it's, it's a perfect segue for what
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Linda just shared about being friends. Paul, you have been the most welcoming, the most warm, the most unifying, one of the most unifying people that I've encountered in this role. And you do that for everyone. You do that for everyone. And you, you just kind of, you have this embrace, you have this love that really makes Natick Natick. And so I'm very grateful for your service and how you love people and how you unify this community and your continued service. I know you told me you have a few things
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that you are planning to do. So I look forward to that because I agree with Linda that this community needs you. So thank you, Thank you, thank you Ms. Pope. Thank you Mr. Jacobs. Thank you. Ditto to, to all of that. For sure. So Paul, I, the, the only thing I'll add is just that, you know, personally for me, Paul was actually one of the first people I met in Natick government when I got involved, because I had done some work with veterans in the past, and a select board member set me up to talk to you, you probably remember. And I just, I mean, you guys all know if you're in this room, what he's like.
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But that being my first impression of, of someone who works for the, for the town, you know, to see this guy who just has such an open mind and an open heart with the way that he approaches people. And it's so obvious from the minute you meet him that he, he really cares about, about everyone as humans. And you can see that in all the work that you know he does in the community. And I'm, I'm glad to hear that you'll be sticking around and staying with it because you know, we, we do need you. So thank you very much for everything you've done. I appreciate the fact that Cody allowed me
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to spend the day with him on election day, holding a aside, Right, And bending. It's the practice of the board for the chair to go last, which means that I ditto to the fourth, fourth power. And the only thing I would add, I could talk for a long time about my work with Mr. Crew, especially over the last four years. And I work with veterans with him. One thing I one thing left out of the proclamation 'cause they're limited to one page and they could obviously go much longer, is I wanna recognize Mr. Cruz's unequivocal support for Black Lives, belong,
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black Lives Matter, sustained consistent res support and providing support for people of color who are in the military and who have left the military. That's a, a real degree of a degree of difference that I want to recognize. Again, Paul, thank you so much for all your work and I'm sure we'll be seeing you around. Thank you. I think Matt's still coming. Not but the other man. Oh, my lunch coming. Okay. I Baseball.
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I'd like to invite Representative Linsky again to the podium Podium to deliver a citation for our outgoing select board member. And dear friend, rich Sydney. Rich, come on up here. Rich is a dear friend. He really had, he really is a dear friend and he has been for a long time. But I want to talk first before I talk about Rich in general terms about wine. Natick is such a great town and The reason that this town runs so well is we run on volunteers.
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Natick does. Although we have wonderful, wonderful professional staff from the town administrator on down, Natick can't operate without people who step forward and serve in important roles. And those important roles might be the school committee, it might be town meeting, it might be the finance committee, it might be the Select board. And Rich has always been there to contribute on a volunteer basis, on his own time for, because he loves this community and he loves democracy
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and he loves good government, and he wants to see good things happen in this town. Rich stepped forward to be a member of this select board when nobody else would, quite frankly, a few years ago, to fill an unexpired term of only a year. And he was willing to, to stay on for another term. But before that, he served many, many years on the finance committee, on many other committees, and most importantly, on town meeting because town meeting is the legislative body of this town.
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Town meeting makes, decides the budget, it decides the zoning, it decides the bylaws, and people don't necessarily remember that. And Rich has been a superbly important member of town meeting and many other boards for a long, long time. And anybody who lives in the town of Natick owes Rich a debt of gratitude for all of the all that he has done. He's smart, he works hard, he's dedicated, and I am sure that he is going
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to contribute in some ways, even though he decided to retire from the select board this year. So in recognition of this, of course, I have a citation from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the House of Representatives Beard, hereby known to all that the Massachusetts House of Representatives offers it sincerest congratulations to Richard Sidney in recognition of his invaluable service to the town of Natick. As a volunteer and member of the finance, the Natick Finance Committee,
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and the Natick Select Board, the entire membership extends its very best wishes and expresses the hope for future good fortune and continued success in all endeavors. Given this 15th day of April, 2026 at the State House, Boston, Massachusetts, by Ronald Mariano, speaker of the House. And it's offered by myself, representative David Plinski. Rich, thank you very much for everything. Thank you, sir. It's always a tough act to follow Representative Linsky, especially in Natick, but on behalf of the Senate president spoke up again.
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I wanna send her regrets that she was unable to attend today. She's doing good work. Thanks. Thank you. But I want to present a citation on her behalf, and it's a citation, again, is from the state Senate, and it says, in recognition of, to Richard Sidney for a dedicated service to, to Natick Select board in town of Natick. And a joyous occasion of your retirement, again, signed by Senate President Kevin Spilker, state Senate Kevin Spilker, dated April 15th, 2026. Congratulations, All tough acts to follow, but I mean, very hard to beat your home,
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your one's home, right? So bear with me, rich, it's an honor to do this for you. This is a resolution in honor of you for more than two decades of civic service, where Richard Rich Sydney has been a proud resident of Natick, Massachusetts for over 35 years. First arriving in West Natick in 1987 and establishing his family home in downtown Natick in 1999, where he and his wife Sandra, raised their daughter Sarah. And whereas Mr. Sydney began his volunteer service to Natick
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by volunteering on the July 4th planning committee, serving as the parade marshal from 2002 through 2019. And whereas Mr. Sydney has served as an elected town meeting member since 2003, a period spanning more than two decades, bringing his analytical skills and attention to detail to natick's legislative body. And whereas Mr. Sidney devoted 10 years to the Natick Finance Committee providing rigorous fiscal oversight, reviewing the annual operating budget and making sound financial recommendations to town meeting.
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And whereas Mr. Sidney served for four years on the charter and bylaw review committee contributing to the examination and modernization of the foundational governing documents of the town of Natick. And whereas Mr. Sidney was elected to the Natick Select Board in September, 2022, and was subsequently reelected in March, 2023, serving as clerk of the board and bringing to that office the same commitment to transparency, fiscal responsibility, and effective service delivery that has defined his entire civic career.
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And whereas throughout his service, Mr. Sidney has championed the causes of housing affordability, economic development, government transparency, and accessible public information, consistently working to ensure that Natick remains a welcoming fiscally sound and well-governed community for all residents. And whereas in his desire for efficient meetings, Mr. Sidney always had a motion ready and rarely missed an opportunity to state so moved. And that was the same aspiration that motivated early and often motions to adjourn
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even when meetings were not quite done. Now therefore, be it proclaimed that the Natick Select board does hereby honor and recognize Richard Rich Sydney for his extraordinary record of civic service, his tireless volunteer contributions and his abiding dedications to the town of Natick and its residents. Be it further proclaimed that the Natick Select Board extends its deepest gratitude to rich Sidney for his selfless commitment to the public good and wishes him continued success in all his endeavors. Proclaimed this 15th day of April, 2026
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by the Natick Select Board. Congratulations. Speech, Speech, brief speech. Thank you so much. You know, Catherine was communicating with me about dates and things while you were writing that proclamation. And I had most of them, I have a historical resume that I kept when I was still working and, but I stopped keeping it about eight years ago. So some of the dates weren't there. And so I had to like look at dates on files to see like when I saved those files.
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I still have records from the CBRC, from the Electronic Voting Study Committee. They're all in my archives somewhere. But it's an honor to serve and I think that's the most important thing to know about me, is that it's an honor to serve. It means something. And I sincerely, you know, I sincerely hope that I, I what goes down in the long record is that I did my best. Thank you very much.
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I thank you, Chris. Again, I'd like to open it to comments from members of the board. Ms. Slager Rich, what can I say? We are going to really miss you on this board. I had the pleasure of attending the Metro West Leadership Academy with Rich. It's a nine month program that many of the elected officials, including probably all the elected officials at this table have gone through. And we had some great conversations in, in the car, and I got to know him personally, and he's got such a great heart. And, and during the meetings, he was always one
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to break the ice and be very vulnerable with others and tell his stories in a way that showed a lot of self-reflection, but also courage, that not many people are who they are. I mean, you're a very genuine and open person and I really admire that from you. Rich is who he is and he's unapologetic about it. And we've all benefited from it in so many ways from, you know, not only your, your deep knowledge of the procedural rules, but
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but also just your perspective on things, which it's probably a different one than the rest of us have in a very good way. And I just wanna thank you for deciding to make Natick your home and not Wellesley where you grew up. And we will see you and please text us if we do something wrong. Darn it. Bruce, you had to read. Okay, you should go. Let's, oh, he's a gentleman. Thank you. I I feel like I have a particular bond with you, rich, because we were elected together. It was my first time and, and it was tough.
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It was tough for you because you were in the role and having to campaign and, you know, we lamented to one another from time to time, but you just knew so much more about everything that I did, and you were so generous with your knowledge, your information, just all the things that you knew and you, you helped to kind of shepherd me along. And I am eternally grateful for how warm and kind you've always been to me and for your friendship and for all that I've learned
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and all that you have taught, all of us for how you show up for this community. I feel as though I absolutely stand on your shoulders for all that you have done for Natick. And to continue in that spirit of it being an honor to serve because it is, is a, is a real privilege. You leave a tremendous legacy here, specifically in service. And I am grateful that you're gonna continue to stay involved. I can't see it any other way for you, but I hope that we will always continue to be friends
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and that you'll always continue to be generous with what you know, because as Linda said, it has benefited us all. So thank you. Please. I'm gonna do a di a ditto to the nth power because they summed up very well. What, what I could tell. So I'm gonna take this in another direction. Don't worry. It's not that bad. What people don't know and may not appreciate is Rich's sense of humor. He has a fabulous sense of humor. It's a dry sense of humor, it's witty and it, it's
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because of his calm demeanor. It's unexpected sometimes, but it's, it's potent. There have been, and there have been times that we've had some tension either on issues or something like that. And he'll break out something and the tension suddenly dissipates. And it's just attribute to his, again, the openness and, and his nature, his nature is, is to look for the good in people no matter what the circumstance. And I think it's a lesson all of us can learn from
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and I'm happy to call my friend. So thank Jacobs Yeah. Dito dito to all of that for sure. And you know, we didn't, we didn't get to overlap on the board obviously, but that doesn't mean I haven't learned a ton from you and continue to, and, you know, we'll keep, we'll keep texting you right? To make sure that we're doing this right. But no, I mean, I think like the, the most, you know, the, the thing that stands out to me, and you know, this kind of goes to Ms. Pope's comments, but the, you know, it's one thing that you have all this institutional knowledge and all this work that you've put in for the community, which is huge on its own,
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but the fact that you are so willing with so many people, no matter whether they agree with you, disagree with you, whatever, to explain it and to pass that institutional knowledge on and make sure that people are able to get involved because, you know, ultimately what you care about is the town as, as a institution, as a beautiful place to live. And you know, I think that you make sure that you put that into, you know, you, you give that back to, to everyone who wants to be involved. And I think that's, that, that's been really meaningful for me. And I think it's been meaningful for many, many people multiplied many times over.
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And the other thing someone mentioned is courage. And I think I, I, you know, I do see that with you. I see you as someone who, you know, I've, I've watched you in meetings where there's a ton of people saying to do one thing and you do the right thing. And I think that that's really hard and it's something I really admire. So thank you for your, you know, I don't wanna say thank you for your service 'cause you're not done, but you know, thank you for what you've done so far and I look forward to continue to working with you in the future. Thank you, Mr. Jacobs. So I, I did it. Ditto, all of my comment, all of my colleagues' comments.
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And I'll add just one more serving as chair for 18 months, I would frequently throw out an assignment. Could somebody get to x? Rich's hand was always the first up. He'd say, I'll get that done by Thursday at six. And I'd say, I don't need that till Monday at, at nine or end of business on Sunday. He always got in early on time and thorough and I deeply appreciated that he would take on work proactively. And he also served as the board's unofficial parliamentary parliamentarian. And that was also deeply appreciated. I'm very happy to call you my friend and have loved the long talks we've had over the last couple
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years about wide ranging topics that had absolutely nothing to do with natick or governance. I learned a lot, so thank you so much. Yes. Okay, a heads up comment in person. Yeah. If he comes in, I think he wants the three of you sit here. So we're going ladies and gentlemen, we're going to move into our legislative updates. So I'd ask that you quietly leave the room if you, if you're not staying for the legislative updates, if you could quietly leave the room, that would be very helpful.
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Okay. Is she waiting? It's only 25 minutes the meeting you So I, I have that on my calendar. I was gonna say congratulations. Good luck. I'll say Jesus. No, but I can. Alright, see you. How you Dr. Goldstein Dermatology. You know how it is at our age. It's, we talked Newport, Same drugs. Portland, Portland, Portland. No, You know how it is. One second. We go to the dermatologist every six months they have to just
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Center. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, could I ask you to please remove the conversations to the hall and Shai, if I could ask you to close that door for me. Mr. Grady, please take the conversation into the hall She, she's in now. If that's her, she should be able to unmute whatever video she wants. I Had to make her. So now we're moving into the legislative update portion of our agenda, and I'm just gonna give a brief overview about how this, how this works and what, what it is. The, the school committee and the select board sent a number of questions
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or themes to our senate president and representative or senator and to Representative Lee, representative Linsky. In preparation for tonight, we will hear from Representative Linsky and then we will hear from the Senate president who will be joining by Zoom. After that, I will coordinate questions from among members of the board and the school committee. And we have a hard stop, I think at seven 30 or seven 40. And so at this time, I'd like to check in with the town administrator. Should we go straight to Senator Polka? Is she ready?
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Is she, is she ready to go? Yep. Okay. She will be joining us by Zoom as she's still on Beacon Hill working on the, the big environmental bill. Madam President, how are you? I'm doing well, thank you very much, much Madam Chair. I apologize for not being able to be there in person. We started the environmental bond bill this morning early and I was hoping to be done, but it's a really big bill, billions of dollars for environment, client cleanup, climate clean water, waste management, pollution, resiliency
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for municipalities, and so many other things that it's been over 10 years since we did an environmental bond bill. So it's actually very exciting to get this done and I apologize to all of you and congratulations to Paul Caru and to Rich Sydney for your all dedicated service. And I offer, if there's another time that you would like me to come in for your meeting, I'm certainly willing to do that as well. But if, if it's okay, if I could do a little presentation, I may have to step out or, or get, get out.
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If there's things going on in the chamber where I'm needed, we hopefully will be finished within a couple of hours, but this lasted longer. But it's great to see all of you and thank you for inviting me to be here. S so thank you for your welcome and I'd like to recognize and thank town manager Jamie Erickson and his outstanding staff as well for their continued partnership as well as Superintendent Bash and, and the members of the school committee. There is, you know, a great partnership that,
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that I believe we have all of us in Natick to help get things done. So I wanna thank all of you and rep recognize and thank Dave Linsky, my partner in the State House for advocating for Natick. We work really closely together and I'm very proud of that. So thank you David. Thank you Joe. And I wanna, my pleasure and I wanna thank everybody that's here today for your devoting your time to our great community of Natick. I'll give a brief overview. I know the house budget came out today,
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so I'll let David talk about the house version of the budget. They'll do it right after vacation, and then the Senate will take up our budget in May and then hopefully we'll compromise and come up with a, a final bill and get it to the governor's desk. But I did want to just give a, a brief overview about the budget that we, the constraints that were under, which are unusual, the Trump administration's cuts to services and grants have had
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and will continue to have a significant impact on Massachusetts. We are nearing, believe it or not, $4 billion, negative billion dollars in real financial impacts, which are impacting and potential cuts that they're doing to all forms of education. Unfortunately, early education, K to 12, higher education, Pell Grants, every aspect. And we are being cautious with the taxpayer money. And even though at the end of to date revenues, we are ahead
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of last year's collections. So as a state, we're doing okay and if it was just the state revenue, we would be doing pretty strong and, and doing well. But we have to take into account all the billions of dollars that the Trump administration has cut. And that's not even taking into account the 350,000 residents that potentially will lose their healthcare in the coming months, causing them to, to go on a, a fully state supported healthcare. That will of course then cost the state a
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lot more men money. But overall, you know, our revenue, the pot that we have is, is diminished by federal cuts. I am happy to say though, that including the current fiscal year Natick chapter 70 funding has increased by close to 50% since fiscal year 2019. You know, through the budget we have dedicated 200,000 to the, having a review of the local contribution portion of the Chapter 70 funding recognized.
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I believe that it's time to look at the formula again. We passed it in 2019 and put in a provision for every 10 year review. I'm hoping that we can start it a little early and I know chapter 70 in local aid is, is a top priority for all of you. Rest assured it's mine as well. And we will continue to fund, fully fund the Student Opportunity Act and contribute as, as much as as we can when it comes to aga unrestricted local aid. Since 2019, NA Natick allocation has been increased
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by over 20%. Natick Chapter 90 has increased since 2019 by over 81%. And I know the house did, I believe the chapter 90 bill. And then we will take it up, work with the house to deliver additional funding for roads and bridges for our town here and hopefully get it out while construction time is is still ongoing. I know that that's important as well. So I'm following closely the, the town's budget as we do the state's budget.
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And I know that that many towns are, are having some trouble and dis difficulty. So we're also looking at potential policy solutions as well to help all of our cities and towns hope overall as we approach the budget process in the coming months. I can promise that, that we will do everything we can to support Natick. And so we will continue to have close communication with all of you, Jamie, and working with, with Dave Linsky.
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You know, I'm, I'm really looking forward to the, this commun continued communication. I do wanna mention that, that just last week we did a supplemental budget in the Senate and Fair Share funds. I'm happy to say that we were able to include the Senate included an additional $232 million for special education, which would enhance natick's amount for this year. Make sure that it's full reimbursement, it's 75% for the current year and we're of course looking at more ways to continue
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to support these areas and, and all others. I do wanna mention that was able to secure 75,000 for dollars for sidewalk improvements in West Natick and in the budget I have repeated every year, 700,000 for mental health services in schools in my senate district. So Natick thankfully was able to secure $116,000 for mental health services for our students.
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We know that our students still haven't gotten over the COVID and, and there are so many issues that are, are big for not only Natick but all of our communities across the state. So we'll continue to do that. And if that's important for, for the town for this year, I, I'll certainly continue to do this. So additionally, I just wanna say that constituent services play a really big role in what we do in each office in the State House.
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I am thankful I know with me today they are there in person, Dennis Gian Betty and Joe Russo. We have a great and this exceptional team for, for helping. Last year alone, we helped over 4,000 Metro West residents and I urge people if they have issues to call my office, to call rep's office. It could be an issue for their children, their parents, it is trying to cut through red tape. Before I was a legislator, I never would've thought
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of calling my state rep or state senator for help. We can sometimes help them get the, the help they need or advice they need. And if we can't, we could at least connect them with, we can listen of course, but some sort of assistance and, and try to help to, if it's not the state maybe or or town, maybe it's federal, we can connect them with the federal de delegation a as well. I'm happy that, you know, recently working with Linsky and all of you to help our community to advocate
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for the new Natick Center Commuter Station to make it a reality. And one thing that I'm really proud of, and I know we all are, the complete station and platform renovation was the first in the state to be fully accessible. And I am, I'm really happy that Natick was able to benefit from that. Also proud to be able to fight alongside this community for certification by the Department of Energy Resources as a climate leader community and receiving $115,000 in a technical support
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grant, congratulations to all of you for a job. Really well done. I know that Natick is doing also a phenomenal job managing the transition to a newer school facility and as the town proceeds with the MSBA feasibility phase for the Memorial Elementary School, you know, looking forward to helping as much as we can rep Linsky and I and been a vocal supporter to get these upgrader upgrades. So please keep in touch as this transition goes forward.
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I just wanna take a moment to let you know what we've been doing in the Senate in terms of policy and legislation. In addition to the environmental bond bill, today we are focusing on housing. It's been a major challenge everywhere I go, housing, whether you rent or you're looking to buy a home, housing is really a challenge in every area of the state. And I know it's important for, for Natick as well. Last week, for example, we're looking at creative ways to get more housing here.
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The Senate passed a proposal to eliminate the sales tax on building materials to help builders cope with Trump's tariffs, which is estimated to create an additional 35,000 housing units across the state. The tariffs had added additional cost and many developers have put their projects on hold. In talking to them, the getting rid of the sales tax on certain construction materials doesn't equate to the full tariff, but they're willing to take a look and to put some of those projects back on to proceed and,
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and to build by getting rid of the sales tax. Our $5 billion Affordable Homes Act past last session is only just the beginning as we're starting to see new housing come online. This bill, this investment was the largest investment in housing in all of Massachusetts history. And we will see more housing production and we will continue in the Senate to pass legislation and be bold to offer new solutions. We also, last session offered the largest tax cut in a generation.
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And I do wanna mention with it being tax season, that we doubled the senior circuit breaker tax credit from 1200 to 2,400. So it's tax time again, so make sure seniors please, if you're eligible, take advantage of it. I think my team may have some handouts there about the senior circuit breaker. So either take a copy of one or feel free to call my office or Lansky's office to get more information. Lastly, we are very committed to protecting our residents defending the Massachusetts values,
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which I believe are so important and special and fighting real harm to some of our residents, including the immigrations community. We've given some funding for legal help for immigrants. We've given funding to AG Campbell to fight some of the bills, some of the policies, the executive orders that he's done without any congressional action. And we've done many other things as well. And I know that the house has passed its version of the Immigration Protect Act.
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We will be doing hours after vacation. In addition, we did a very broad and data privacy bill, but we believe in the Senate that your personal data is just that it's personal and you should have the right to say who gets it and who, what they can do with it or if they can sell it or not. We did a cell phone ban in schools. We safeguarded women's and transgender health and the house. We worked with the house and Governor Healy signed that into law. We've done a bail, several bills
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to protect our pets from inhumane treatment and one couple of weeks ago to support our farmers and put advance economic development and also help to keep and increase healthy local foods in our farmers' markets, our schools, and throughout our communities. We just recently did the Bright Act. It's in conference committee investing in our public higher education campuses and strengthening the learning experiences of our students in Massachusetts. We passed early literacy
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that ensures school curricula aligns with evidence-based principles. And we passed in the Senate legislation supporting our libraries, addressing challenges and expanding digital resources. We also fought back against the Trump administration's attempt to ban books by passing legislation that creates responsible protocols to help libraries, both the, the municipal and school to help them determine how library materials are put on the shelves
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and prevent removals based on personal or political bias. That's just a smattering and a highlight of the bills that we have done. We will work on primary care and energy lowering energy costs after vacation as well. So I wanna thank you for inviting me to be here tonight. Again, I apologize that I'm not able to be there personally. I once again appreciate your partnership and look forward to continuing to work with you for this great community of Natick. And I wanna thank you. And unfortunately I need
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to go into the Senate chamber right now. We're hopefully going to tidy up and, and some of the, the loose ends in the Senate chamber before the night is over. So if there's a specific question that, that I can answer, feel free otherwise, you know, I I leave it. Sorry David. It's fine, Karen, for your, you have a, a great knowledgeable representative there and I wholly support what his answers are. Thank you Madam President.
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I think we'll let you get to the chamber and undertake that very important business that you're working on and well thank You. Turn it over to Representative Linsky. Alright. Okay, thank you so much. I look forward to seeing all Of these changes. Thank, I just wanna say before Senator Spko leaves, there's probably no pair of senator and representative that works better together and closer than the Senate president and I do in representing Natick and I, I just, I really appreciate that and I think she knows that too. Well, thank you to both of you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Have a good night everybody.
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Alright, so I'm going to get to some nuts and bolts. Okay. And actually the timing on this could not have been better because today the House Ways and Means committee released its version of the budget that we're gonna begin debating in about a week and a half. And so I'm gonna give you some real numbers tonight. This is literally hot off the press. And then in addition to that, today the house passed the Chapter 90 bond bill. So I'm gonna give you some real numbers on that as well. But let me first go through sort of the, the process
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on both of those issues. And then I'm happy to answer any questions on the long list of questions that you all gave me here tonight. And, and also like Karen, I'm, I'm happy to come here anytime basically as well to, to, you know, that seems appropriate. So the process is, this is the Ways and Means committee today release its budget. All of us members are filing amend proposed amendments to that budget over the next three days. Next week is school vacation week, and then we start our debate on the house version of the budget on Monday
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after school vacation week on the 27th. That would be, we will finish it that week I expect. And then the Senate will take up their version of the budget. It'll go to conference committee and hopefully we'll put on Governor Healy's desk by July 1st so you can have it. But the most important factor, first, let me give you a little bit of an overview. It's a $64 billion budget, okay? 64 billion. The reality is, is as Senator Spilker said,
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state revenues have been great. They really have been great and they've been very much buffeted by the so-called millionaires tax that we passed the, and that also known as the Fair Share Amendment. And that is allowing us to do a lot of things. However, I'm gonna give you two buts on this. The first is, as Sandler Spilker told you, we're looking at a $4 billion hole from the, from the federal government. And every single day I'm getting requests from constituents saying, Hey, the federal government isn't funding this.
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We want you and state government to fund it. That is what we're facing right now, and it's getting worse and worse in terms of federal cutbacks. $22 billion of the state budget right now is Medicaid. That is a, it's a one-to-one match with the federal government, but they're cutting back on that. And we're having to fill it in for healthcare for people who are, who are on mass health. And this is very concerning. That's headwind number one.
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Headwind number two is a ballot question that is gonna be in all likelihood on the November ballot. Right now, the Massachusetts state income tax is 5%. As all of you know, there is a ballot question on the ballot that would cut that to 4% that if that passes, that goes into effect, not, you know, a year from now that goes into effect on January 1st. So that the fiscal year budget that we debate, that starts for the fiscal year in July 1st, the 2027 budget
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would have an income tax cut. So that means a revenue cut in the middle of the fiscal year after we've already passed it. We are very, very concerned about that, needless to say, because that will, that will have, obviously it isn't a 1% cut in the income tax if you think about it, it's a 20% cut in the income tax to go from 5% to 4%. This is highly concerning because I'm gonna give you some good news in a minute about what these numbers are,
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but I can tell you if that passes, we could be looking at mid fiscal year reductions in these numbers and in every single line item to reflect that. It's, in my view, it is a completely irresponsible ballot question. Unlike the federal government, we can't print money and, you know, we have to produce a ballots budget the same way that you folks have to in the town every year. And you know, if you take away 20% of our income tax revenue in the middle of a fiscal year, we've got a problem.
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Okay? So I just want to lay this out right now that we're, you know, we are going to present a budget, you know, based on our revenue projections now, but if that changes in the middle of the fiscal year, we're gonna have to take a look at, at a cutback. So I just want to put that there and that's gonna have a direct effect on municipal government and the schools just gonna put that right there. So anyways, the news out of the ways and means committee for Natick is actually very good today. Today. So what we're looking at is a chapter 70 number
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of 15,344,000 $137. That's an increase in Chapter 70 from last year of about $800,000. And as we said in the last five fiscal years, it's about a 50% increase. Overall, unrestricted local aid is gonna stay just about the same. That the reality is is that we're keeping that at basic, basically in inflationary level figure, special education circuit breaker we're gonna
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put a lot of money into. And that, that's particularly good for Natick because Natick quite frankly does better on that formula than we ever will on the Chapter 70 formula. Because the reality is that's a formula that is irrespective of property values or wealth. And we thankfully are a comparatively wealthy town compared with other towns in Massachusetts. So we're, we're currently gonna, we're going to propose funding special education circuit breaker at $653 million at
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least for now. And we have a chance, depending on fair share revenues of increasing both chapter 70 and special education circuit breaker money during the course of the fiscal year. 'cause historically we'll take excess fair share money and put it towards those line items. Chapter 90 will stay pretty much right where it is for now, just under a million dollars for Natick. But last year, because of fair share revenues, we do a split almost 50 50
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between transportation and education. We were able to supplement that in the middle of the fiscal year last year. And if fair share revenues remain about the same, I expect that we'll be able to do that again. So I, I think overall the budget, good news, there's good news for Natick, something that's very important to me. Natick is a proud METCO community. METCO has been funded at $30 million for several years. Today we're raising it to 35 million. So the natick's gonna get a good, a good share of that. And that's something that I'm the chair of the METCO caucus
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and that's something that I'm, I'm very proud of overall. Like I said, we'll be debating the state budget in about a week and a half. Senator Spilker as, as we said, we work together very, very closely and both of us are dedicated to trying to find every single dime of state funds in whatever line item we can to help the town of Natick. And I think that, you know, we're proud of what we're able to do. I'm gonna tuck in a few little earmarks for the,
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for both the school department I expect, and the, and the, and the municipal side of government as well as some social service organizations in Natick that are important to the people in Natick. And, and I'll give you the, the full rundown once we're through with that budget debate in, in about a week and a half. So I'm happy to answer any questions, talk about any topics that you want. I can stay as long as you want, but I know you have a busy agenda as well. Thank you, representative Linsky. At this time I'll open it to questions from members
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of the select board and the school committee and just raise your hand and I'll recognize you, Ms. Pope. My question is for the questions that we have prepared, should we Be selective would be my suggestion? 'cause there were about 25 questions. Yes, yes. But yeah, picking mainly for picking from That. Sure. Okay. I mean, I think those are fair because Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mr. Jacobs, So my question, I, I think this touches on a lot of the ones in sort of the category one on the list of questions.
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I appreciate your explanation about the, the situation with state aid and the state budget, and that all makes a lot of sense to me. I think the thing I'm most curious about is sort of the steps that may be taken in the legislature to help us have more flexibility to collect revenue and what sort of the statuses of those, so like the Municipal Empowerment Act, also the po you know, the, a couple of other things mentioned here, the real estate transfer thing, those kind of things like what might be in the pipeline to help us have, you know, tools that aren't just asking you for more money. Right, exactly. No, I get it. I, I get it.
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Mr. Jacobs, and I appreciate the question. I, I think when you look at the Municipal Empowerment Act, you have to divide that into sort of two different categories. One thing, one category that makes sort of the administration of municipal government easier. And then there's a second one that deals with revenue on the, on the, on the municipal side. I, I, I know that we're, we're going to debate and, and all probability pass a bill that deals with the first half of it, the easy to making municipal life easier part
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revenue's a separate thing. I can tell you that in the Municipal Empowerment Act, the governor was proposing the, you know, an increase in the auto excise tax. There is no, I'm gonna just try to be frank with you. There is probably no tax in Massachusetts that people dislike more than the auto excise tax. So I am not, I would not get overly optimistic in the house taking up that particular portion of it. I'm gonna say I get a lot
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of complaints on the auto excise tax. You know, the, it, it, it, you know, the, the reality is, is that although the economy is pretty good right now, people are complaining, rightfully so about two things. Number one, cost of food in their house, and number two, the cost of gasoline in their car. And I'm gonna throw in a third one. It's the cost of energy heating their houses and electricity. And we are very, very mindful of that.
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I am, you know, as much of a, of a progressive as I am, I also need to be very mindful of people's pocket books. And I'm not really, I, I don't see an appetite among my house colleagues to take up additional taxes right now, at least, at least non non overly progressive taxes. We, we are now getting to a point right now in Massachusetts where, where our, our tax structure's actually getting more and more progressive.
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The addition of the millionaires tax, the fifth year amendment a couple years ago has, I think is working quite well. And I, I think we're gonna probably leave things as they are. So that's that, that's my answer to that question, Mr. Folkman. Sure. So one of the issues that a lot of parents and educators are talking about these days is how do we help our children use digital tools? Well, phone bans, social media, et cetera. I know that the, both, the house
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and internet recently took that on. I believe the governor has also her plan, which is slightly different, but there's conversations in Beacon Hill on, on that. One of the things that I'm specifically curious about is how does the legislation, how does the legislature plan to support schools to implement some of the rec, some of of the language that is in the, in, in the bills, or I dunno if it, they actually passed. But anyway, your thoughts on that and just to advocate that that's something that Yeah, no, I, I, I'm with you a hundred percent. I think that if you talk to any middle school
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or high school teacher in general, 99% of the, of the disciplinary issues somehow involve social media, indoor cell phones. And, you know, this is something that I obviously didn't have to deal with when I was at Natick High School or Wilson Middle School, but it is a reality of life right now. And I applaud any teacher, public school educator who has to deal with those issues right now. So the status of it is this, the Senate passed a bill about a month ago that
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banned cell phones in school with a couple of limited exceptions, didn't touch the social media issue. Last week, the house passed a bill that banned the cell phones in school and then did a sweeping social media ban for kids under 14. And then a, a restriction on kids 15 and 16. The governor today or yesterday came out with, I'll call a third way with some other restrictions. This is gonna end up a conference committee. We're gonna do something. I don't know if it's gonna be the
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full house, to be honest with you. I don't wanna handcuff my con house conferees on this at all, but we're gonna do something. The reality is, is I'm gonna put this out there on the school committee right now, in that the every school committee in the state at this moment, even without this legislation, has the right to set a policy. So if you don't like what we do, right, you know, or you need something faster, you are empowered to do it. Oh, that's done. Okay. Yeah, I know NA has already done it, but this is a pitch to the 300 other, other school districts
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that are out there right now. I am open to any suggestions on this right now, and I really want to hear from teachers and school administrators. And thankfully we've got a great school department in Natick that are gonna be on top of this because this is a moving target right now. And the other thing that I know that we need to be aware of is, is as smart as the teachers and school administrators are in Natick, the kids are probably smarter in trying to figure out a way to get around it. So, you know, anything that you can bring
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to me would be very much helpful, I will say. And just to add, thank you so much for that. Advocating now only education in general is specifically metco. That was great. Yeah. So thank you. Other members of the board. Ms. Pope, I have a question. Thank you for being here tonight. Representative Linsky, it was about hybrid meetings and will this become permanent? Yeah, I think so. That's part of the Municipal Empowerment Act that I think we're gonna bring up. I'm a big advocate for hybrid meetings, both in boards like this and in town meeting as well. I think it's, I think it's important
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to increase civic participation. I really do. And I expect that we'll take that up sometime this spring. Thank you. Yeah. Ms. Brune, thank you. I have questions also from our fellow committee members, but so one of them, you know, you talked about the reduction in federal funds that are coming in. Some of that is directly Title one money. Yeah. That goes to support literacy. Natick is a Title one district. Can you talk about how We're trying to backfill, I mean, again, you know, these are issues. It's not just title one.
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It is Early childhood Education grants. It's Head start. It is, you name the area, there is less federal money coming in to Natick and to every other town in Massachusetts. And there's another concern I'm gonna have quite frankly by now, you know, the, the cutbacks in, in federal support for higher ed, healthcare, pharma, biotech. They hit people that, they hit Massachusetts a whole lot harder than it does
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anywhere else in the country because those are the sectors of the economy that, that drive the Massachusetts economy much more so than other states. And the less money that is allocated in those sectors, that puts people unemployed, that means less tax revenue, that means less sales, tax revenue. This has a, as a negative, you know, a huge negative effect. So I definitely hear you on the title one cuts. We're trying to figure out a way to backfill this. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. You know, with the two headwinds
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that I talked about at the beginning of my presentation, Ms. Wilner, Thank you for being here, representative Linsky. Appreciate you as always. I, I feel obligated to ask this question since we are the sponsor of two meeting articles and assuming that the articles for extending the terms for the police chief and the deputy police chief past town meeting, that's not necessarily given, but if they do, what can we do to ensure that they go through the legislature in an expeditious manner?
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Right. Because as you know, we've had issues with That. Okay. So what, what, what, so I'm gonna give you some advice on that. Okay. Number one, dissolve town meeting as quickly as you can because you can't forward them to me until town meeting is dissolved. Make sure that the town clerk gets everything in order and calls me immediately and say the papers are ready. I will come pick them up and I will bring them to the state house. Okay. That's number one. But there's a number two, make sure
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that whatever gets passed at town, meeting the language of that is modeled after what another town has already done in this legislative session without a change in a comma or a semicolon or a period. So that once it gets to me, no changes have to be made. That's what slows things down. So that would be my advice right there. We've already done door number two. Okay. Something that, you know, where we can model it or
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after what's already been passed by another town. Yeah. Don't have an extended town meeting because, and make, I mean, there's an idea. Yeah. The other issue is, of course, is give me a good solid town meeting vote. How much time do we Have? Yeah, I, I I sound a book and I will literally file it the day that we, that we get this. And then I am gonna go to the chairman of the public service committee and say, gimme a hearing as quickly as you can. 'cause we routinely pass these bills. The problem is it's gonna hit us at a very difficult time
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of the legislative calendar. I'm gonna say I kind of wish that we did it in fall town meeting, but that's a whole nother story. But we'll work it as quickly as we can. I understand the time frame that you guys are gonna be under with a, with a, with the two dedicated people in the police department. Bruce, my mine is gonna be a a little bit related to your affordable housing comments and Senator spoken. So what additional legislative tools
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beyond MBTA community zoning compliance are being considered to increase production of middle income and affordable housing in communities like Natick, where most new development skews towards high end single family tear downs. And the second piece is, how does the legislature intend to address the tension between state housing production goals and local ballot referendums that can block rezoning? Hmm. I gave you a nice softball. Yeah, That's a real softball, Bruce. Thanks. Well, let me, let me say this, you know,
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one important thing that we did about two years ago is we changed the voting requirements at town meeting for rezoning to go from a two thirds vote to a 50% plus one vote. And so that, that makes it whole, a whole lot easier to rezone when a rezoning is necessary. I think that's probably the most important thing. We also passed the a DU law, you know, that is still, you know, we, we will see how that,
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how that all works out. But you know, the the reality is, is that it's, we have to get to a place in the economy where it is more profitable for a developer to build moderately priced housing than expensive housing. And we're not at that place in the economy right now. That's the reality. So the best way for that to happen is on both federal tax incentives and state tax incentives to make that, to make that happen. The, believe it
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or not, in our dysfunctional Congress right now, there are bills that may be moving right now because everybody realizes that this is a problem. Similarly, you know, we did a housing bond bill last session that that is a start. But this is a difficult thing for state government to, to do. The, the economic side has to really come from the feds and, you know, we can give them municipalities that the tool, like the zoning change tool that we did. But this is a, and believe me,
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Natick is not the only town that is facing this. This is a, this is a nationwide problem right now. Yep. Thank you. Yeah, great answer Ms. Brune. Thank you again. And I forgot to mention that David met with the students in Na Kai, the 15 of our student council members went and it was incredible. It was really fun. Wasn't it fun? It was really fun. Yeah. So thank you for that. I think that good kids, kids, I think the, the room that Senator Ska from and That kid better go to Colby, by the way, remember we were talking about going to Colby, so I'm Just putting that right there. Can't information out. So we're gonna keep moving. But I think the room that Senator s Spko zoomed from,
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I think that was the room that we met there. I think it, it's the former president's. I forget. It's like a, has anyone there The former, the senate president's reception room. Yeah. But it was like a, a president of the United States. It was, is Calvin. Calvin Coolidge's desk I think is in there. Right. Something. The kids thought that was fun. So thank you for that. Just really quick, I'm gonna run through this from our, from other members of our committee. One is Senator Spko mentioned of the, the funding that's coming for mental health. And she said, if that's still a need, we will do it. It's a hundred percent still a need. I'm not even the expert on that, but I'm gonna tell you it's still a need it,
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Believe me, that has my support. Okay. And I've spoken with the superintendent and we are on the same page on this one. Okay, great to know. Yeah. The chapter 70, she also spoke about the formula. If there's one thing that you can do is change the formula. Right? The 4.5% inflation cap is not enough. You, you know this. I really hope that there is a look at that formula. Yeah. I think that we're gonna have a foundation budget review commission coming up in the next year or so. Okay. So that, that's where we're gonna start. Okay, great. Yeah. And then one more thing I'll say is another thing that needs to be looked at is special special
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education schools that have literally no restriction on how much I understand they can raise the, the tuition prices that's gotta be regulated. Yeah. If there's one place to see, I understand that concern. Okay. I get it. It's, it, it's a, it's a difficult issue. Okay. Yeah. From my end, it's not as difficult. I know, I'd love some regulation there. You guys are so good at regulation. Yeah, please. Right. And then finally, the transportation and the special education. I think I heard Senator Bilko say fully reimbursed. Well, the, yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna be able to
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with without a problem, given the two headwinds that I talked about will be at the full reimbursement rate for special ed circuit breaker, where 75% will be able To be, oh, that's your definition full. Okay. Yes. Yes. So also then, that's not gonna change though midyear, right? If that ballot inish passes, is that one of the things that we'll change, I, the last thing we will ever wanna do would be to cut local aid in chapter 70. Okay. In any of those accounts. But, you know, I,
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I can't tell you when we're gonna be looking for some help from municipal leaders, I will say about the dangers of that particular ballot question because, you know, every, every, every line item is on the chopping block if that happens. Okay. Yeah. That's scary. Yeah. Thank you. I'm done. Other question, Mr. Jacobs? Yeah, just briefly, the, well, I don't know if it'll be brief. I, I don't know, depending on your answer, I don't know the question's brief. I don't know if your answer will be brief, but I I was just wondering if you could briefly address the, the issues raised in kind of category three in our summary
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that Jamie put together about kind of the, the cuts to like sustainability related things and how that interacts with like our, our capital planning and things like that. So I'm gonna start by talking about the, the, the effects of the current federal administration on these issues. We had in Massachusetts a very solid plan related to energy about shifting over to wind and solar. It was, we thought that we had this figured out
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and then the Trump administration comes in and cuts the legs out of wind and solar. And so the net effect of that is people's electric and gas bills. We saw what happened to them this winter. And we are basically starting over our whole energy plan based on what the, based on what happened to wind and solar. If all goes well in two years, I'm just gonna say maybe we can get back to it.
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Okay. But that's me talking here. But in the meantime, we have to do a balance, quite frankly, between what people are paying on their electric and gas bills every month. And the complaints that we all got about, what is this on my bill? I mean, we all, we all got our own electric and gas bills or if you have gas and given also what's going on in the Middle East right now, Lord knows what home heating oil prices are gonna be
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next winter as well. I'm just laying that out there right now if you think about it. So I'm not optimistic about trying to backfill some of those, some of those accounts on decarbonization on all of the, the energy saving line items right now because we we're trying to balance the, the cost of living and, and this I get it, Cody, I get it. It seems like more of a reason to save energy, but Yeah, it does. You know, it does. But you know, we're trying to, this is, it has put us
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what the Trump administration did in energy has put the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in an incredible bind. And I know that there's people in my district that are probably saying I'm overexaggerating and you know, this is a, you know, that crazy liberal democrat linsky is, is, is talking about the Trump administration again. But this is the reality and we're trying to find a balance between meeting our climate goals and also trying to have people be able to heat their houses. I hope we have a milder winter next winter
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than we did this past winter. You know, speaking of which we're about to do a snow and ice piece. That was my question to help the cities and towns. That Was my question. Yeah. Th this is, this is coming, this is coming because we know that cities and towns are gonna be needing some snow and ice help after this past winter. Does that include allowing for amortization of the deficit over three years? I haven't looked at the specifics on that particular thing, but if you, if you have a suggestion on how to do that, send that to me please. Okay. I'll defer to Mr. Erickson. Yeah,
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Yeah. Who's the subject matter subject Matter expert? This is a finance issue that, yeah. You want me, So one of the, one of the questions I had was, there have been proposals both from municipalities and within the legislature for an optional real estate transfer tax on homes valued a certain amount above the median home in that community. What are the, what's the prospect for something like that being enacted? And if, if not, what are the barriers? The, the barriers are people think health and prices are too high as they are. And that, I mean, that's, that's a big barrier. Sure. Okay. I'm open to it personally. I'm gonna say I'm open to it.
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That, but it is, it's a difficult lift, you know, anytime we're, we're talking about adding a new tax on anything, you're, you're, you're swimming upstream. I mean, this is the reality. I mean the, the reality is is Massachusetts, I'm gonna just make a pitch. Massachusetts is not tax Massachusetts anymore. We are in the overall tax burden. We are pretty much right in the middle of the 50 states when you add up all of the different types of taxes. Right. And in my mind, you get more
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for your buck in Massachusetts than you do just about anywhere. We are number one in public education. We are number one in healthcare. Yeah. We do really well. And taxes aren't as crazy as people think they are. Any other questions from the board? I had one. Yes. Representative Linsky, you mentioned that early on about taxes that you don't think people, you know, have an appetite to raise taxes. But I did wanna ask about prop 2.5. Yeah. And is there, are there any proposals on the table to
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modify, adjust, revolutionize change? Yeah, so let me, let me just say I totally get it. Prop two, prop two and a half does not work when inflation is more than two and a half. I mean, that is simple meth. I get it. But prop two and a half is also the, the third rail in Massachusetts politics. It really is. I don't, there are no, there are no significant proposals right now in the legislature to touch it.
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I'm just gonna say it right now. Even with that storm report. Perfect storm report from the MMA and kind of how, Well, let me, let me say the, I, I may amend that answer depending on what happens in that ballot question. Okay. Because we, we may have to look for revenue somewhere. Thank you. Okay. Mr. Erickson. I know, I know I'm not like the politician at the table, but I play one on TV sometimes. First, I wanna thank you, David for all your partnership linsky for all your partnership. It's been great just working with you. These really my entire career here at uni
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for the last 11 years, and obviously Don't remind me how long I've been here And, and obviously the, the team at senate president spoke his office and senate president herself. It's been awesome to have that partnership. I can always call, always text, and I, I think I share that with our superintendent, Dr. Sp you're just great supports for all that we do. And I can always just say, Hey, we need help with this. And you're, you're there within sometimes minutes. Sometimes you beat me to the punch 'cause other people are calling you just saying, Hey, what's going on with this? And, but my question kind of really plays into what we're actually gonna hear about later tonight and about water rates, water sewer rates.
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And we are seriously facing issues. Not only have we talked a lot about just issues tonight from, from just all costs, but in the case of the water world, we're hitting with regulation for PFAS and other issues on top of that in Massachusetts. And you know, I think we won one, we run one of the best water divisions in, in the Commonwealth. I'm not saying that because I have the team here. I truly think we run one of the best water systems in the Commonwealth. But, and, and we do it with integrity, we do it with professionalism. But we do get challenged sometimes when we have to.
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We, we get sort of unfunded mandates and or regulatory things put in place by mass DEP and there's almost a lack of understanding as to how much that actually costs to implement. And then also that then goes to the rate payers. Yeah. Then these rate payers are the same people that are also taxpayers. And so they're kind of getting hit with sometimes a double, a double whammy when they have to not only see their tax rates go up, but they also then see their water sewer rates go up PFAS Obviously it's, it's just something that we, we need to, to work with. We are doing that. I think we were one of the most progressive communities out there to try
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to get funding and, and fund and address it. We're about to face probably another $30 million investment in about two to three years time. That's above and beyond the five to 10 that we've already put into PAS addressing PFAS. And even if the regulations, we, we agree that the regulations go in place, we're not questioning that. But those are very real costs. And then on top of that, we're getting hit with additional things from mass DEP. So I guess I'm wondering, it sounds like there's not much funding out there for much else, but could there at least be some thinking or dis discussion with DEP to allow us the time to understand how to implement some
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of the right requirements in a cost effective way? Or, or maybe we can open up that dialogue. You can help us open Dialogue. I'd like to, I'd like to open up that dialogue 'cause I don't have an answer for you on that. And, and it, and it's, I will also tell you that I am really hearing it from my other town, Wayland right now that is facing a gigantic PFAS bill. Yeah. Yeah. They're much worse than what Natick is facing. And it's, it is of real concern. So I, I definitely want to talk to you some more about that. Yeah, great. Yeah. This is a suggestion for some of the, some of the things
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maybe lengthening the implementation timeframe might at least smooth it a little bit, you know, and we know, we know we have to get it done, but just give us more time. I'm yeah. I am open to any suggestion because it's, this is, you know, this is a statewide issue, obviously. Percent. Yep. Any other questions for representative Linsky from the five pages we sent? What I would say is, upon reflection, if after the meeting you have other questions, I encourage you to write to senate presidents Spilker and Representative Linsky. They're very proactive in responding.
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And that also is for members of the public who have watched this, listened to the questions and have follow ups, please contact their offices directly. Yeah. The, if I, if I can just, you know, follow up on something that, that Senate Senator Spilker said, the most important part of the job that both Senator Spilker and I do is constituent service in that, you know, we have helped literally thousands and thousands of Natick families. It could be healthcare, it could be elder care, it could be special needs kids, it could be getting an unemployment check, it could be,
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you know, just about anything we want to help. That's what makes this job fun and rewarding and that's why we do it. So I encourage people to contact me or send a broker's office on any of those issues. So thank you and thank you for this opportunity and I'm happy to come back on another night because it's, this is where I am, so this is not a problem. So thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you. We're gonna take a five minute recess and we're back. Next step is our announcements. Mr. Erickson, you back up? We're back.
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Yeah, we're back. Oh, that's just the, The back, Sorry. The first announcement just regarding a grant that we received recently, it's actually mentioned by Senate President SPCA in the prior item. And it's A-A-D-O-E-R or a Department of Energy Resources grant for our green, from the Green Communities division for $150,000 for the climate leader communities. Decarb Decarbonization technical support application that we put in. I want to thank Jillian Wilson Martin and the facilities team. I think Debra Shatz also worked on this and the school department actually, because it's for the schematic design for heat pump conversion at the Gel Elementary School.
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These are great opportunities for the town to augment our capital program for these upgrades. We try to take advantage of them as much as we can. Sometimes it's out of, a little bit out of like our, our usual, but I, I appreciate the, the flexibility of the entire team just to say, Hey, we an opportunity here to get this grant. In this case it's a technical assistance grant that should theoretically lead into an actual implementation grant, which is great and we tend to have to shift some priorities around, but it's, it's, it is a way to help us augment our capital program.
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And so this one is from the Green Communities program for, for a project at the Lodge Elementary School. Thank you Mr. Erickson. Thanks. The second announcement is tomorrow night from six to 8:00 PM in the community senior center's great room. There'll be a, a main street improvement project, public forum discussion of some of the plans taking in public comment and questions. So I encourage those of you who are interested in the main street improvement project to, you can watch it on Pegasus or you can attend in person from six to eight.
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This time we'll move into public speak. Any individual may raise an issue that is nodding yes. He's got one. Oh, so sorry. Before you go Bruce, I wanna say mc by our wonderful chair tomorrow night. I'll be MCing and moving as quickly as we are now. Sorry about that, Bruce, Go ahead. No problem. I was at a, in my role for leaders in 81 80, they, they wanted me to announce something for the mental health month, which is in coming up in Maine
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and set on Saturday, May 9th, 2026 from nine to 1:00 PM on the, they're going to have a series of things there which are connecting with local mental health resources and wellness organization free giveaways, which are always nice and family friendly wellness activities. And they encourage, bring your kids all, all, all good. They do say bring healthy, don't forget
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to get a healthy snack at the Natick Farmer's Market. So not what I'm currently even, so anyway, thank you Mr. Evans. So thank you. Thank you Mr. Evans. At this time we'll move into public speak. Any individual may raise an issue that is not included on tonight's agenda and it'll be taken under advisement by the board. There will be no opportunity for debate during this portion of the meeting due to the requirements of open meeting law. This 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. Is there anyone in the room who wishes to address the board in public speak? Is there anyone online?
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Seeing none. We'll move into discussion and decision. Public hearing for fiscal 27 water and sewer rates. Okay, I forgot to print that out for you. Okay. Okay. The select Board of the Town of Natick will hold a public hearing on the fiscal 2027 water and sewer rates on Wednesday, April 15th, 2026 at 6:00 PM The hearing will be held in the Edward lot meeting room Natick, town Hall 13 East Central Street, as well as remotely. Anyone wishing to be heard in this matter can participate in
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person or through Zoom. Login instructions will be published on the April 15th, 2026 select board agenda. All persons interested in this matter may appear and be heard at the time and places mentioned above. And I move to open the public hearing. Second, Moved by Ms. Pope, seconded by Mr. Evans. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? And the public hearing is open. Mr. Sprat. Well, thank you for having us tonight. We're here to talk about the water rate setting for 2027. So can You check your mic? The green light's on. It's
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Been long testing. It's been long. Okay. Do you want me to get closer to, is that Helpful? Yeah, did you get a little bit closer? Thank you. All right, I'm kind of loud, so hopefully that will not be a problem. Okay. So I always like to open these by giving you the bottom line up front. The bottom line up front is we're facing some financial challenges. We discussed with Representative Linsky, the DEP mandates, specifically around PFAS. And we'll get into the details of some of that in the presentation. But we will need to build PFAS treatment that will cost about $30 million within the
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next two to three years. So that's a major financial burden. Our debt debt ratio is gonna double. We have some challenges. So tonight I'm really not the bearer of great news. I think the bottom line up front is water rates will need to increase to supplement the current rates so we can pay for these things. So that's the bottom line upfront. We'll get into the details of this. The slides are numbered, so if you want to take notes of the slide we're on, if you have questions, I don't mind if you stop me. I'm gonna try to get through this presentation fairly quickly. A little bit of a warning upfront.
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It's, it's pretty data heavy. I just want to thank Tony and his team, Ari and his team and Rayburn consultants who worked with us for these rates. This is not something we just put together in the past week to present to you. We've been working on this for months and we've put together, we probably did about 10 different scenarios and we're presenting three of those tonight. Okay. So our rate setting goals are always to match revenue with current and future expenses. When you look at water rates or the the water sewer enterprise, this essentially runs like a business within the town.
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It's a not-for-profit business. We don't charge rates to make a profit. We charge rates to cover current and future costs. The goal, when we started our, our data and, and how we're going to manage these in the model to increased fixed revenue for financial stability, you as a board have been doing an amazing job staying ahead of these things. We've gone over the past few years from 3% fixed revenue to 8% fixed revenue. We're currently at 14% fixed revenue and we're trying to get to industry standards of about 20% fixed revenue
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and we're preparing for very large capital increases in the next our five year capital plan. Just a quick bit about Rayburn Consulting. This is a, a consulting corporation that specializes in water in utility enterprises, public and private. They are currently working with Miami-Dade County, Yonkers, New York, and about 150 other communities, but Natick is one of them. So the, there is some heavy duty data and analytics behind this with the help of, of Rayburn.
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So revenue for the water sewer account. There's really, when you boil it down to it, it's just two things. There's fixed fees and there's consumption which can be volatile. So that's what we have to play with. We can change rate structures, we can charge fees. Those are really the only two ways we can develop revenue. I mentioned before that we're trending towards a really healthy fixed revenue of about 20%. If we go with the recommended solution for tonight, we will go from that 14% to 18% fixed revenue. That helps starve off some
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challenges when we have volatility, and we'll get into that in a little bit. We also have best, best practices we're trying to reach with retained earnings. Retained earnings are essentially free cash on the, the enterprise side. And we shoot for the industry standard is around 25%. That probably seems high from a free cash number, but the water side is much more volatile than the free cash number. So what do your rates pay for? I'm not gonna read all of this, but essentially it's all of the parts and pieces
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and infrastructure to deliver a billion gallons of water a year. That's about what we produce a billion gallons of water and we're delivering a billion gallons of water at about 2.30 cents a gallon. So when we put that into perspective, we are providing value to our customers. I know it's painful when water rates go up, but at 2.30 cents a gallon, we're doing very well. If we had to build this infrastructure out today, you'd be talking billions and billions and billions of dollars. So you can just look at all the things that we manage.
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I do wanna pause on our treatment side, and this is where PFAS comes in. What you're seeing is kind of a very simplified diagram of our treatment plant. We have many treatment plans, but two main ones that provide the bulk of our water. And those are at Springvale. Off of Route nine, we have two different treatment trains. We have the h and t and the Tonka treatment trains up on top. Hopefully you can see my mouse. Yep. We have three wells going into the h and t from the ground. Those have a 28.1 PFAS
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concentration parts per trillion. We are going through green sand filtration. We can pump about 2 million gallons a day. We currently have at the h and TA permanent PFAS treatment plant. We're using granulated activated carbon gak. Basically if you cut open a bread of water filter, the black stuff in there is gak. These are huge gak tanks. We have lead lag, so we are completely DP compliant with that treatment plan. And we can pump out no parts detected of PFAS at 2 million gallons a day.
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On the Tonka side, this is where the treatment plant will be needed in the future. We have these wells coming into the, the Tonka plant at 19.2% parts, I'm sorry, not percent parts per trillion of PFAS. We can pump 4 million gallons a day. This is our biggest provider currently right now we have temporary PFAS set up with four lead GAC tanks. We will need, this is where the treatment plan comes in. We're piloting a study right now. We're, we're studying different types of media.
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GAC is one of them. There's different types of media we're trying, there's also something called nano filtration. We're piloting those things right now to determine what type of plant we need to build. We're looking at most likely $30 million to build that plant. And that will take these temporary PFAS filters and turn them into a permanent structure. And the $30 million is the, hopefully the upper end of what we're looking at, depending on what treatment we choose or, or are is most available to us. That depends on the size of the plant.
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So we have to build a brick and mortar structure and put that treatment inside that structure. We also have Elm Bank. We've talked about Elm Bank quite a bit. Our ELM bank, well, although has lower PAS and and is currently compliant with DEP regulations at 21 parts per trillion. That wellhead is completely dependent on the flow of the Charles River. When the Charles River is, is down in certain times of the year, we cannot run that, that water source. And that's why we are building towards a supplemental MWRA
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source we've talked about quite a bit. So just painting the picture there. I think the big takeaway from this slide is, our biggest water producer at 4 million gallons a day needs treatment, permanent treatment. So the budget challenges that we'll be facing in 2027, we're, we're in really healthy shape. You've done a great job setting rates and, and building towards a more stable financial picture. However, our debt service is about to double by 2029. And that's the debt service specific to that $30 million treatment plan
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and other improvement projects that we do. We are beholden to state drought mandates. You get the, the responses about every month it changes. It's a level one, two or three when the state has a drought mandate, we have to reduce irrigation and non-essential water. Essentially we sell water. So those drought mandates have a a, a direct impact on our revenue source. So reduced usage equals less revenue. We are subject to volatility. That's a, that's a big driver. Inflation, we,
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we just heard a whole bunch of inflation talk. We're subject to that as well. And probably the most important piece is the regulatory compliance. We cannot control what's regulated When the regulations come down, we're mandated to do the work. There is no funding source that comes with that. So going into the rate methodology, we built a model in 2023. The model works. We, we kind of pressure test that just about every six months. I'm, I'm back in front of you talking about where we're trending in revenues. The rate model works and this is the rate model that we've been using. And that's how we, we test our scenarios of
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what we need to do for rates. Essentially we take the total cost known for expenses and our debt and we run a bunch of models to see what we need to do to raise rates to meet those expenses. Currently and in the future, we do the future based on our current five-year capital plan. We work with Ari's team to figure out what that debt schedule will look like. If there's one good piece of news coming out of this. Our model assumes no grants or alternative funding. We were fortunate enough to be part of class action lawsuits regarding PFAS. We've had settlements that have come in to the tune
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of about $4 million as of right now. Today, we don't necessarily know how we're allowed to use those dollars. They will most likely be used to supplement debt or whatever for the, the $30 million plant. But we don't know exactly. These are fairly new funds that have come in. So we have to do some research of how they can impact the budget, which will likely be in future years. So as we get, as get to know more about those funds, we can offset rates with those funds ultimately. And we're looking for a fair distribution of the responsibility of rates across all customer groups.
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I I like to pause at this slide. What you're looking at here, these, these tanks, those are the temporary PFAS tanks that we're currently using at Tonka. They are outside right now covered by kind of a temporary shed or like a plastic cover essentially. But when we talk PFAS and I gave the example of the Brita water filter. This is a giant Brita water filter. This is a key slide to pay attention to. The blue line is the total annual expenses for the water and sewer department. The orange line is MWRA assessments for sewer.
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And the reason we have two shown here, the MWRA typically on our sewer, they have a motto no more than four. So they have a stable rate structure and you can anticipate year year it's about 4% increase. So when you look at the orange line, you're looking at a 4% increase over time. We flagged 2021, FY 21 as when PAS regulations came to play. And you can see where at least for those years, relatively stable before and once the PFAS regulation has hit, comparing against a 4% increase with the MWRA,
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we're looking at about an 18% increase over time in the operational budget. These are filter media change outs. These are testing protocols. These are things that are relative to PFAS. We're gonna transition onto our usage. Our usage is important because that's what essentially drives our rates. Our rates are mostly based on usage. This is old data, but it's old data for a reason. We have FY 22, 23 and 24, which you're looking at in the chart in the red circles. This is rainfall in natick. So we might have a wet year in FY 22.
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We also had, that's PFAS regulations came into play a wet year. People aren't watering their lawns. It's a little counterintuitive, but you have a wet year, your revenue comes down or on a very dry year, like in 2023, we have drought conditions. We have to reduce water usage and then we lose revenue, right? That has a major impact on our revenue. So the swings we we have relative to those years I just showed could be 1.5 to $2 million swing. So from an operational budget standpoint, your budget set
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the year before and you really don't know. You have very little control over the volume of water you pump, especially with, with a drought condition or something like that. We can't control the weather, we can't control regulation. And this is what happens ultimately. We don't have a lot of control over our total revenues. In our, in our model, the, the way we forecast and plan, we have chosen, I believe it's FY 19 and 21, create that model year in lighter blue. And you can see there's been years of higher consumption.
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Recently we've had lower consumption, but our model year is based on a relative average year to year. We look at that and say, is our model year accurate? Should we raise it? Lower it? But it's been pretty stable. So we're keeping that model year. That's how we predict the revenue. This is another important slide to note your work, being forward thinking has helped stabilize our revenue. You can see the blue line is our certified, our certified retained earnings. So essentially our free cash for the enterprise fund,
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the target line, the orange line above is, is that 25% line. And you can see since we've made aggressive changes, we have changed our rate tiers. We have added the RTS fee. We have added volumetric rate changes in the past few years that has had a major, major effect on our retained earnings. And you can see this year we're finally, or 2025, we're finally at a crossover point where we've met that. I just wanna point that out, keep that crossover point in mind
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'cause we're gonna look at that as we analyze the different rate proposals. This is a history of our, our changes to the water rates. In the past, before we started doing a deeper dive, before we built the model, we were just reacting last year's, last year's revenue came in that predicted next year's budget. And if we didn't receive our revenues, we would hit our retained earnings. That's how we've done it in the past. I think we've gotten smarter, we've gotten data driven and we're using metrics to, to help us along.
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We've done better in the past three or four years. We're gonna head into the proposals. There are three proposals here, there in order of our preference we're our preferred model or rate proposal is is three. I'm gonna go over one and two and then we'll, we'll go to three before I jump into that. There are hundreds, probably thousands of ways we could create this. This rate structure are gonna go over the top three that we, that we had. We, we are still only looking at FY 27.
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We can always make changes in the future. We can balance this. Tonight we're talking about FY 27 with an eye to the future. This is basically just a slide regarding the breakdown of our consumption on the left hand side and the breakdown of revenue on the right hand side. And you can see we're pretty well balanced. I think the slide's important because more than 50%, actually a lot more than 50%. If you include the other residential categories, more than 50% of our revenue is residential.
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That's, that's essentially our bread and butter for the water sewer enterprise. So the first option, and I politely say short term focused, I could also say kick the can down the road. I could also say, kind of bury our heads in the sand and say we're not gonna do anything if we do nothing in FY 27. We are covered. We have enough retained earnings, we have enough revenue, we will be fine for FY 27. So doing nothing is an option. However, it does not protect us for the future years where we know we're gonna have revenue
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changes or expense changes. I should say Graphically, the blue line would be our total revenue. So if we did nothing, and this is forecasting, doing nothing for five years, and I know that's not realistic, but if you look at our total expenses versus our total revenue, we have a gaining shortfall that shortfall is $16 million over the next five years. So again, this that, there's that crossover point we talked over where the, the blue line crosses over the orange line for a short period of time, we gained some revenue
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or our retained earnings is healthy and then by 2028 we start dipping into those retained earnings. Those retained earnings go away by 29 and by FY 2031 will be $16 million in debt. Obviously not a great long-term solution. Option two, we've heard the complaints as much as you've heard the complaints. The RTSV is not popular. The purpose of the RTSV is to stabilize our revenue. It's, it's to meet industry standards. It's to help us manage through volatile usage.
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Option two is to keep, is to not increase the RTSV, just keep it as it is and raise the rates in FY 27 beginning at 7%. So we've modeled out 7% increases over the next few years. This gives us revenue to meet our expenses. So that looks, that chart looks healthy. And when we look at our crossover point, we'll actually in the short term build that retain earnings in preparation for the treatment plant expenses. And then we, we see in the outer years 2030 and 2031, we're following that orange line more closely.
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We can get to a stable point and then our rates don't have to be so dramatic. We can get, we can get to a more standard rate increases. Option three is a little more creative. So still paying attention to the RTS fees that aren't very popular, but including, so we're, again, our goal for the RTS fee is to get reliable revenue up to about 20%. I mentioned we did 3%, 8%, 14%. This would bring that reliable revenue to 18% and get us pretty much on target with the best practices. But we would include the first two units of water in that RTS fee.
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So you don't start getting billed the rates of the volumetric rates until three units. A unit of water is about 748 gallons. So in this, this is a quarterly billing. So what that looks like, again, stable revenue from the crossover point chart, we're not building our retained earnings as much as we were with just a straight 7% rate increase because we're also essentially including water that is not charged. So we're not bringing in as much revenue there. We do have that crossover point back again around 2030,
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but a more stable rate moving forward. Just some details of what that would look like from an FY 26 current rate sheet. So this is essentially what's on the back of your bill on the, on on top here, just paying attention. I'm just gonna do combined water. I'm just showing you how to read the chart. If the RTS fee is currently $25, that RTS fee will increase to $40. Keep in mind that water is included and the approximate value of that water from a combined water sewer is about $21.
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So there is value, there is some value there. It's not the total increase of the RTS fee because you're getting $21 value there. Then we are adding a tier of our, our rate structure zero to two, which is not a build portion. And then our normal rates start at two and then the rate structure hasn't changed, but these rates have increased by 7%. That's how you're reading this chart. But to simplify things a little bit, these rates here, the, the, the, the combo residential water, sewer,
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these are actual accounts. Then we took average for some of these accounts. But when you see the like kind of the dot, dot dot, we're hiding the account number. But those are actual accounts that we pulled to give a representative sample. And then these are averages, but for a low user, their FY 25 bill was 53 60. Their FY 26 bill was 80 52. The projected bill is 85 68, which is a $5 and 16 cents per quarter charge.
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And from a percentage standpoint, it's a little less than 7%. The reason it's less than 7% is we're, 'cause we're including some water into the RTSV. So you can see it's about 7% consistently. The outliers in that are irrigation. Irrigation is billed at a higher rate. That's why that's higher. And then there's this anomaly here that's a very small quantity of our users. The residential water only would be somebody that has water from the town but probably has a septic system. What we do on their tiers, they're the same as the combined water, the regular water tiers.
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But at the last tier they match irrigation. So if you're using very high quantity of waters for a single family, you're likely watering your lawn or filling a pool. And that's why it has the irrigation rate. It wouldn't make sense to have an irrigation meter when you're not charged sewer. So that's, that's why that is that way if we choose option three, you can see our revenue, our usage and revenue is pretty much stabilized. It's a fair distribution of that rate across the rate payers. This slide here, the orange represents option one, two and three of FY 27 fees.
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Then you have natick's current rate, you have other peer communities. And peer communities are different than a peer community. We might compare ourselves to from taxes or other things. From a municipal standpoint, we're looking at peer communities that are about the same size as Natick that have the same water sources as Natick. So in the, the ones in blue here are MWRA sewer just like Natick, but they make their own water. And just for comparison in green, this is MWRA sewer and partial water. We could be there when we're doing MWRA supplemental
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that those would be our peer group. And then you can look at full MWRA water sewer communities. We are comparing these rates here to their current FY 26 rates. I have no idea what their rates are going to be next year. So we're comparing our future cost to a current cost. So to summarize, we feel option three is the, is the recommended solution moving forward. It meets best practices both on retained earnings and in stabilizing our revenue streams. It's equitable for all rate classes.
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It insulates the town from volumetric fluctuations, which we're experiencing a lot in the past three or four years. And it really sets us up well for this $30 million treatment plant. Thank you. Thank you Mr. Sprat. So we're gonna take questions from members of the board before we open it to members of the public. And so Mr. Jacobs, Thank you very much for the presentation. First of all, really appreciate, appreciate all your team's work on this. A couple of one, one question I had was on the elderly rate that's on the slides. Does that include, is, is that only for people who qualify
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as, as elderly low income or is anyone who's low income able to qualify for that even if they're not elderly? So I met with the assessor about this. I have two I I want to basically say it's follows the assessor's rates for elderly or low income. There was a question I I asked that the initial answer I got was yes, it's the same. And then I got a follow up answer for some of the other categories for disabled veterans or other things. I'm not sure a hundred percent if it, if it meets that. Exactly. So I can get back to it.
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Did you get further information from Not yet. Yeah, so I, I got a conflicting answer so I'm, I'm hesitant to to say exactly what that is, but to the best of my knowledge, it matches what the assessor uses for tax rebates and then he provides that to the collector's office and then it gets part of our, our billing. I, I do wanna say just one more thing that represents about 52 total. I see. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. I I think that whenever you find that answer, it would be good if that was a little clearer on the rates
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because if it just says elderly, I think people would assume only elderly. But the, the second question I had, which we, we also just talked about last week, but I just want to, you know, for the public's benefit to the, in terms of the, the, the RTS fee, it is assessed on a, you know, per per household basis. And there are other ways to assess it too. Like, you know, in other communities they have, you know, some, some assess it based on, on meter size for example. And can you just kind of go, briefly go over kind
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of the reasoning for adopting the, the per household approach as opposed to a meter size or some other approach? Sure. Thank you for the question. 'cause it, it is a hot topic. The RTS was chosen because Natick has a fairly unique water rate system where we bill by EDU, so equivalent dwelling unit. So if there was, say let's just take a a three family home, that three family home has one meter and all of the water coming in to that, that meter,
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if it wasn't separated out by equivalent dwelling unit, so taking those three families that live in that home, they would automatically be charged a higher rate because they'd hit those rate tiers faster. What we do with the EDS is recognize that, and again, we do this through the assessors, that that three family home has three different families in there. They each get assessed an RTS fee, however their bill is reduced as if it
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that went through that meter and was metered three different times. So they don't hit the higher tiers as quickly. So it's a way to really make it fair, especially use the example of a three family, but let's take a massive apartment complex that might have a huge meter. The individual apartment dwellers don't have meters, but they get assessed. The EDU, we get to charge the RTS fee to bring in some revenue. However, they get lower volumetric rates because of that. So it's, it's a way, it's a fairness factor.
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I Right. Thank you Ms. Sla. Thank you Bill. And, and thank you for your team and thank you Ari as well for participating in this. Just wanna ask about some of the assumptions that are behind the financial projections. I know that our current filters are very expensive and need to be replaced fairly frequently, probably more than we would hope for some of the alternatives that you're considering for Tonka. Would they have a lower total cost
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or is it all about the same and it, and it doesn't matter. So what are you using for your longer term projections in terms of, you know, the operational impact of filter replacement? So the short answer to that is we're using $30 million and that should be, that should cover whatever technology we use. Okay. From a, from a one time cost. So the challenge is we don't know what filter media we'll be using yet. So for example, GAC has a pretty short lifespan,
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like 12 months and every 12 months we're spending a hundred plus thousand dollars. Once we know what the pilot program realizes, we'll be able to do that. But there's other factors. So if we go nano filtration, which is, let's, for lack of a better word, think of it as a pool filter. And every once in a while you have to backwash your pool filter. When you're backwash nano filtration, you're backwash high concentrations of PFAS. So now we have a hazardous waste problem. So we're balancing those things out. We haven't yet got to, what is the recurring cost
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of this plant yet because we don't know what it's going to be yet. So our eyes are on that, but we don't have the data to support it yet. Okay. So if I'm interpreting this correctly, when you say the $30 million, you're amortizing that over a period of time but aren't really breaking it down between, you know, the capital interest expense and or the operational expense. It is the capital expense and we just don't have enough information yet. We're, we're looking at a five year time window on this, on those type of things. We have to go out a little further to find out
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what the recurring cost would be. We're building this plant two to three years from now. So really the $30 million is a pretty safe assumption in that five year plan. It will have an impact on expenses. We just dunno what those are yet. Okay. So I just try to clarify, bill, is it safe to say the operational costs of this new plant have not yet been built into the model? That is correct. So the, the, the except That the $30 million is supposed to cover that, Right? No, the 30 million is just capital. It's just capital. The operational is not yet built in.
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'cause we don't know what those operational costs are yet. All. So that's what I'm trying to understand is, Is so we'll have additional costs once we know We, we are projecting in the model a 4% operational increase year over four point half percent year over year. So that is in the model. Okay. All right. So the $30 million is capital only and there is some additional expense for, for the new Tonka filters. But in the 4%, but not explicitly because you don't know yet. Correct. Yes. All right. Okay. I just wanted to clarify because I could see, thank you. Yeah, yeah, that's what I was trying to understand.
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I was trying to figure out if there's any savings there. So now it's just maybe only savings if, if we go to a cheaper, if there is a cheaper alternative and, and it costs us to build. So my next question is, you know, given the, the regulatory environment seems to be changing, would you still recommend that we go ahead and, and build this plan on, on this timeline even though there's a potential that this won't be regulated as we might expect at the federal level? So regardless of the federal level,
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'cause the federal level, if I have this right, and Tony, you can kick me under the table here. We're currently looking, we currently have six PFAS factors. The federal government is looking to maybe go to two. Do I have those right Don? Of those two, we have one of them. So regardless if the federal government goes from six to two, we still have the, one of the two that they're right, two, two that they're regulating mass DP the best. So from the A PWA and other trade groups for water, the best on the radar screen
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that we have from DEP is they're looking to go from six to eight. So DEP has to meet, has to be as strict as the federal government. They can't be less strict, but they can be much more strict. And that's seems to be what they're choosing to do. Alright, thank you. So as you mentioned, we've heard a lot about, from our residents about the RTSD. And in particular, I think the people that have complained the most are people that see it when they have no usage, let's say on a year, an irrigation meter.
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And they're being charged money and they don't see it. So, 'cause they, there's zero usage. So for them, adding a couple of units in there really doesn't matter because they're not using the meter at all in the off season. So did you think about maybe having some differential in, in terms of, you know, the increases in, you know, maybe not increasing on the irrigation side? Those are options. Irrigation meters essentially are
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for high volume usage. So to build the infrastructure to be ready for higher volume in the summer, we don't change the pipes in the ground winter to summer. And that infrastructure is not only feeding the water and the irrigation meter, but the fire hydrant down the street. So the infrastructure to provide the water at the max day is in the street. We average 3.3 million gallons a day. Our peak could be up around 6 million. We have to be ready for 6 million. We have to be ready for a fire and those type of things. So for irrigation meters, it,
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to me personally, it doesn't make a ton of sense to give a benefit to somebody who's already using more water. We wanna conserve water as much as possible. One of the, one of the things when we do this research that always blows my mind is our average yearly water has not changed in like 25 years. So this town is growing, but conservation efforts really has helped stabilize the amount of water. It, to answer your question directly, we could do that. That is an option. We could do a million different things in our models. This isn't, that's not what we chose to do.
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I am just, I'm struggling with some of this simply because of, you know, the reality. I think that's very well presented about what our fiscal challenges are. But on the other hand, I'm trying to see how we can make this more palatable for, especially for our low end users. And thank you for, for providing data in terms of our lowest end end users. And, and that's where I'm, I'm primarily focused and, and where I'm concerned is that the people that use the lease tend to be, you know, single family households or seniors
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or people that are seeing a huge increase. If you look at this, at, at, at the proposal for the, the low end users. And you know, I don't have an answer to this, but you know, I know that, you know, you've done a great job in looking at, at these different alternatives. But do you have any thoughts on that? Well, I could say we could increase volumetric rates in option two at 7%, but our lowest end users, if you look at the data, are being, it's like 6.5% or so. So there's actually value in option three
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for the lower end user. Mr. Jen, did you what I was just gonna say, and just to be clear, when you say there's value and even in option, in option two, the lower end user, the user who uses two units alone would pay less than in option three. 'cause in option three they'd pay $64, assuming they're a a joint water sewer user. And option two they would pay 61 68 is, is is, isn't that right? This is the data for option two. I, I don't have the percentage. I'd like to see the percentage increase, but let's just, let's choose one and go back and forth. So yeah, this is, this is option two,
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just the straight 7% increase. So let's do a combined water and you're talking lower end user. So Tony, what's our average user? What should I choose? Tier one or tier two? Just do tier One. Tier one. So we're gonna, we're gonna choose a combined water sewer. There's an RTS fee of $25 and their rate goes from $2 and 65 cents a unit to $2 84 cents a unit. Right? So let's just remember those numbers real quick. So we're gonna have to do a little math on the fly.
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So we could do, let's say this is eight units, so we need to do eight times, so 2.8, 2.84 plus 25, 47 point 47.72. And then I'm gonna go back to the slide for option three. And we're gonna do the same exercise. These don't line up perfectly. So my, the, we're gonna have to play a little bit here. The combined water sewer account that I have there, the, the 61 30 number that's for four builds.
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So maybe we should go back and do four build on the other. Tony, can you do that for me quickly? Yeah, I mean if, if I did it right, 'cause I did that before and it was, it was about $3 more under option. Under option three for someone using four units per Quarter. Okay. So let's, let's do that four unit math. I just want to verify that. Yeah, No, please verify it. I can definitely be wrong. Make sure your Math, it's not my, not my strong suit. Two, 2.84 times four. Yep. It is 25 is 36 point 36.36. And in this one here, it seems like we're missing something. Yeah, so, So 'cause that would be, it should be 80 point
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52 is four units of water and 26. But is it, so I'm a little confused about some of this because isn't the, the, the rate right now for the combined water and sewer rates for the RTSV $40? Yes. Currently 20, 25, 15, well, 25 for water, 15 for sewer. It's 40. Yeah, it's 40. Yes. Yes. So weren't we only adding 25? Okay. I just again, math on the fly. Yeah, we can, so I, in our model, the option three seemed to be more economically.
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So essentially you're looking at a, a 6.41% increase as opposed to a 7% increase. That's, yeah, I mean, but I, I, I don't think that's actually true. Like if you look at two units, just two units, right? The two units that they're getting for free, right? Under op included Yeah. Under option under the, the two included units that they're getting under option three for the two units in option three, they're paying $64 a quarter because that's the RTS fee. That's all they have to pay. Right. That's easy math. Yep. 'cause it's just $64. Now if you look at option two, right?
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So option two, they're paying the base of 40, right? So we start with $40 'cause they have to pay the RTS fee under option two. But then if you go to, if you go to the, the, the rate, if you go to the rate, it's, it's $2 and 84 cents per for the the water plus $8 for sewer. And so that gets you to 10 84 right? For each, for each unit. So then times two units, that's $21 and 68 cents.
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And then if you add that to $40, that gets you to 61 68. That's for two units, right? Right. That's for two units. That's for two units. So what I'm saying is for two units under option two, the user pays 61 68 under option three for two units, the user pays $64. So the user is paying more under option three for just two units. Because, because the, because the RTS fee is increasing by much more than 7%. Right? So they're, they're paying more for the, it's, it's a small difference. It's like $2 and something. But they're not getting like a value
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or something by they're, they're not, they're, I mean they are getting value, but I mean they're not getting, it's, it's not less, it's more under option. It's more under option three. Slightly than it is under option two because option 360 4, option two is 61 68. So for the very low end user, I agree with you, yes. For the very low end user, it's a marginal difference between two and three based on your math there. Right. And I mean, I'm saying, I'm saying there's no user for whom they would pay less under option three. Every user would pay more under option three
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because if you're starting with that, that they like, after that it just, it just gets to be more and more so like, it's not, I mean, again, like the difference is marginal, but, But you're hitting the, the tiers later, which makes a difference. How Are you, thank, thank you Mr. Sprat for the presentation. Can you explain that, that you're hitting the tears later? Is it still at eight? It's still eight, yeah, it's still at eight. We're hitting you're you're not hitting later. Yeah, the same time. That's not gonna be any different. You're just getting two units of water included in your RTS. Right? Right. You're getting two units of water. But Yeah, you're right. I apologize. Yeah. Yep. You're not hitting the tier. Sorry, I'll,
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you're not hitting the tiers later, but you're getting two units of water included in your RTS fees, so therefore you're only paying six y. Yeah, it, it, I guess can you go to the op, so we have option two at a rate of 2.84 for the water for zero to eight, can you just go back to the option three? Just what's the option three rate for irrigation? I mean, for water it's Right here. Should it Also be two point? So it's the same 2.847% increase? Yeah. Yeah. So it's the same. Okay, I just wanna confirm that. So to the point that Cody's making is, so it's slightly more
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for option three gonna be more expensive. It's not significant, It's more, yeah, But it also stabilizes revenue, which is a major part. So if we don't, if we do option two, we will, if we do option two as opposed to option three, we will go, option three is 18% of fixed revenue. We will go slide back to, I believe it's 11%. We where at 14 we'll slide back to 11% of fixed revenue in the next Fiscal. Yeah, because the RTS fee doesn't increase, but your overall revenue does. So that far as a percentage of overall,
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you're saying it becomes less. So if you don't increase the RTS fee at all, you're still increasing rates unless you do option one, which is no change at all. Therefore your overall revenue goes up and therefore your guaranteed revenue goes down because that, that number doesn't change. Right? It's fixed. Yes. Go ahead. Sorry, Just the, the, the, the slide though does say like, to to, to Catherine's point, the slide says, because for option two under on slide 22, it says, because the RTS fee does not increase fixed revenue falls from 14% to just over 11% by 2031. So is that, is that, is that 11%,
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like presumably next year it'd be something between that, right? Are you saying I was remembering the 11% off that slide. You can ask like 2030. So like, yeah. So what would it be like to, to Catherine's point N next year? Or do we have I don't know if we have that. I Don't have that data. Okay, that's fine. Yeah, But it would, you would, it would lose all The time. It's On the, it's on the chart. I mean it, it's on the, it's on the chart that we're looking at now in option two, it shows impact on retained earnings and fiscal 27. It would go slightly up into 28 and start dropping in 20, fiscal 29 Retained earnings. Not Guaranteed, sorry. Next, revenue
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Retained earnings are two different, right, Right. Metrics. One thing I will add, it's just part of this discussion with the, the units of water. We started at three and then the, the financials didn't work. So we, we backed that down and that's how we came with two. 'cause we initially just kind of gut feeling maybe it should be three units of water. We looked at average bills, we looked at all of those things, but the math didn't work. And that's why we use this model. So we could input things and see how it affects Ms. But if, if I'm looking at this properly, we're assuming
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that whatever these options are, that they're in effect for five years and not, there's no escalator that there's not saying that we would increase the revenue at any time. That, that, that all of those charts assume that that's the rate that's in effect for the next five years. Is That correct? Correct. The 7% continues. So, And again, we're only voting on or not tonight if we don't want to. No, I understand the assumption 2027 Is that this is it and then you're just, you know, projecting
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that same rate out for the next five years. Yes and no and no increase. But that's probably not realistic. That's not reality we have. 'cause we, we probably will have additional increases over time. We also have $4 million in, in earnings that we can use. So there every year will be slightly different. But this is why we model and project. It's not perfect. Yes. Mr. Bruce? I just, a question that has to do with, you know how I'm looking, I'm looking actually at the retained earnings impact. And it looks to me the difference between,
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there's a negligible difference between retained earnings and option two and option three. Option three uses a bit more retained earnings to balance things. So we, the peak is not as high and the crossover point is a little earlier. Okay. But if, if you go back to the, this main slide of the crossover point, we were like millions of dollars below that. So I would still say looking in the future, this is, this is stabilizing. Okay. Just follow up question on, you made a comment about, and this has to do with the zero to two units.
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Do you have any idea what percentage of Natick residents are in that grouping? The, the very low user? Yeah. I, I don't have, I have it broken out, but I, I only have because, because the data that we have from last year is zero to eight. I haven't pulled out zero to two. I did get some quick math on that from Rich this afternoon, and it was roughly 700 users, somewhere between 700 and a thousand users. And I'm saying somewhere between, because sometimes there might be a contractor
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that hooks up a meter for, for water and it's like a one and done. And those show very little. So we think the residential side of that is about 700. Okay. And when we're thinking about the impact on quarterly bills, whatever we choose to do, one, two, or three option or some other un unknown fourth option. I think mentally we need to keep in mind that every year our MWRA sewer fees go up automatically 4%. Correct. So whether we choose to raise either the RTS
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or the, the, the tiered rates, let's say we adopt one and then we say to ourselves next year, next year we're gonna hold off for a year or two years, residences are still gonna get hit with a 4% On sewer, on The Sewer, on sewer Only, which is about $7 million of our $23 million budget. In my experience, the MWRA has rarely said no more than four, but oh, this year we'll just do two. I mean the, the MWA is experiencing a lot of the same pressures that municipalities are, pfas, PFAS issues, things like that.
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And because their water mostly comes from surface and some it needs to be treated, it's not Yeah. And their infrastructure costs continue to go up with the same cost drivers that we're experiencing in Natick buying anything from piping to collective bargaining units to pick something. Yeah. So yeah, it, it could be, it could be 3%, but in any event it has, I think I can say confidently, the MWRA has never said no, will not do a rate increase on
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water or sewer to its water and sewer client. I I've never known that. No. Yeah, I think that's a pretty confident, I mean, I don't know that to be true, but I feel pretty confident that's Pretty safe that, Are there additional questions? If not, I'm gonna open it up to the public and then bring it back to the board. I do have an additional question. Yes, please vote. My my question is, we people could expect that you would be back next year with an additional increase. Yes. Our models are projecting that
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to 7% currently right now. And so it could be like, you know, you're, you're giving us the example of the 7%, that's what's modeled out. But for, for, for the next five years, neighbors could expect an increase every year. The models we have are 7% compounding over those five years. There are things like grants that we could offset that, but that's why we really have to look at that year to year. The goal of bolstering our retained earnings and getting fixed revenue is our rate changes will not be dramatic.
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We want to get to the MWA level of right. Stable, what you can expect year over year. That's our goal. That's why we're doing the hard work now for the future. And also this, but this keeps in mind, does this keep, this keeps in mind the $30 million plan. Yes. Yeah. I think, I think no matter what approach the board takes, there's gonna be increases for the foreseeable future. Yep. It's just how does the board want to prioritize how those rate increases need to be handled.
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We can go back to the model where we were previously where it's just this, every year we go up and down, we have 4% one year, 12%, the next 4%, the next 12%, the next, which creates other types of questions and instability both for us and for the right payers and politically and, and what have you. And just the stability of the system. We heard many years ago that that is not the desire. We'd much rather have a stable set of rates and we're still working. That was even when PFAS was less known. Now that PFAS is known, we have an added complexity
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and it's not a cheap complexity, it's an expensive complexity to try to figure out how to create stable rates in the long term. And the, the reality is we need guaranteed revenue. Guaranteed revenue is hard when it's a system based on consumption. So you create that by creating some guaranteed revenue on all across all users, which is that RTSV. Now the justification for that is I think we've heard a lot, there's a, we have to keep infrastructure in place. Even if you do not turn your water on, there's water ready to go to your house for when you need to.
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And that has a cost to it even if you use no water. So that, that's arguably what that RTSV is intended to cover. That baseline costs, you know, being ready to go, the industry standard is having that be in that 20% range. Sure. It doesn't have to be, that's kind of what the board, but the less, it's, the less the, the closer it gets to the 20% range, the more stable we can think about rates long term, the less close it is there, the more you're, you're gonna have fluctuations in rates. It's just part of the reality.
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Ms. Wilger, so a a question about this. I mean, we talk about we wanna have some stability, we wanna have fixed rates in terms of our, our baselines, but, but how much of it is really variable? I know that in the summer we, the usage can change, but that doesn't affect the usage over the rest of the year. I mean, if you're looking at your water rates, I mean they're, they're not, if it's water only,
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we're only really talking about irrigation. Right. That, that is seasonably variable. I'm trying to understand how much of it really is, you know, I understand that chart about the the revenue vol volatility, but how much of the actual revenue is associated with could potentially vary. Like isn't there a lower bound and then, you know, there's how much it might change over that. I I hear what you're saying. Yeah. I'm not saying it will. Well no, primarily
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it is irrigation in summary usage, right. Filling a pool, irrigation, washing your car. Our summer rates, our spring and summer rates really dictate our revenue. I mentioned that we, we go from 3 million gallons a day to about 6 million gallons a day. 6 million gallons a day. Doesn't happen in the winter. That happens in the summer. Tony, can you help me with the volatility question? Is there any other vol volatility other than irrigation washing your car pool, summertime use, I can go down here. So commercially chillers, they use,
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they use water sometimes natick water to it's evaporative cooling. So water gets pumped up to the roof, goes over coils that a fan blows. And just like when you sweat and it cools off when the air blows on you, that's evaporative cooling. Our companies in town that have large data centers use a ton of water year round for evaporative cooling. But those don't have the volatility. They don't have the volatility. That is correct. They will use more in the summer for sure. There. I mean isn't it temperature dependent in some Way?
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Dew point, but yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'm gonna go ahead and open up to questions from the public. Ms. Duran, you've had your hand up for a while. Could I asked her on mute? Yep. Okay. Thank you. You hear hear me now? Yes. Thank you. I have one thing I hope Mr. Sprat can clarify for me and then a general comment. I'll try to put them both out quickly. I thought I was paying close attention right from the beginning and I thought that, I heard you say that
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the water charges to residents is just to cover the usage, that it's not a money maker. But then later when you were talking about the drought mandates requiring reduced usage, you said that that would result in less revenue. So that's, if you could clarify for that. But I have a general comment and this presentation is compelling and so is my stress level at what I'm finding is like the lack of affordability for many of us in this town. Last year we passed a $7 million debt exclusion. We're looking ahead to the 95 mil override
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and then we're looking to the $95 million debt exclusion to build a new memorial school. And then I think I remember hearing the coal center needs 25 to $30 million in upgrades, renovations, and now there's $30 million for the water thing and it's really sending fear into my heart and spirit next month. We'll mark the end of my 31st year here, and what four outta five current select board members know is a very modest home that I live in. So I just, I know you know this and I know many, if not all of the select board members have a sensitivity to this, but I just need to put it out there.
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And I don't know that their answers are solutions other than for every single cost in town to continue to go up. But you know, it, it does make me panic. But if you could clarify that earlier point, that would be helpful to my brain. Okay. Thank you for the question. And I, I do sympathize rate costs are going up, gas in your car, a whole bunch of things are going up and, and they do seem to be hitting all at once. And I do sympathize with that. And I I appreciate your question and your comment as far as not a money maker. So let me clarify that the, if we think of the water department as selling water
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or selling taking sewer, it would be a non-profit. So our expenses each year are covered by the rate we charge. It wasn't a contradiction about the volatility. Volatility does not keep us, let us have a stable revenue. So we might set our budget and our budget is somewhere around $23 million a year. But if we have a drought condition, users are not allowed to use as much water and therefore we do not bring in as much revenue. So it's more about revenue stability relative
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to the budget than profitability where we do have extra money per se, that's in the retained earnings that is going to future costs like the treatment plant. She, she muted herself, so I can unmute her if she has to. She doesn't have to raise her hand again. Ms. Dawn, do you have a, a follow-up question? If she does, she can raise her hand. Okay. Yeah, raise your hand if you have a follow-up question so we don't have to make a decision tonight. We can think about this. Bring it back on the 29th. Sorry, Ms. Durran just raised her hand. I'll just finish so we can bring it back on the 29th
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and between now and the 29th. As we think through these models and have additional questions, I encourage you to reach out to Mr. Sprat or Mr. Erickson or if, if everyone feels like you have enough information or don't need time for deliberation, we can take a vote tonight, but we can also continue the public hearing for, for two more weeks. Mr. Spt, Can I just add to that comment a little bit? Of course. We don't have to make a decision tonight. We can delay the decision. We can delay it multiple meetings. There is a challenge with billing, right? So we always do this about this time of year
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so we can get our rates set that we can get our bills made, that we can go out with the billing. There have been years that we've delayed billing. It's not pretty when we do that, it, it makes a cha an administrative challenge. So I would just throw that out there. A timely decision would be helpful for Ari and his team and our team administratively. Thank you. I mean it's, it's also the case that we could keep everything the way it is and postpone the decision until middle of the fall and with, with a lead time for the beginning of another quarter. Not ideal. I think we, given the presentation
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and the questions, the thoroughness of the questions and I know that members of the board have independently including myself, sent you a number of questions so that we were prepared for tonight. But, but yes. If we were to do this before May one IE at the April 29th meeting, that means that, that sets finance up, it sets up the billing structure, water and sewer so that the beginning of the fiscal in July is when it would kick in, right? It's a confusing answer. Yes. The bills get sent out for the three year up here, three month period leading up to that.
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Okay. We have kind of a weird system and it's, it's a July bill or June bill? I think it's July. July. It's a July bill Do due. July it's, Yeah, June, may and April. Gotcha. Thank you. So that bill would be a mixed, a bill of mixed rates. That would really be A future Yes, except for the one, the, the read of that quarter. Gotcha. So we, we stagger our reads through the four quarters. Okay. Thank you Ms. Doen. Okay. Y yeah, thank you. I didn't really understand Mr Sp
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Pratt's clarification, but I can reach out to him privately. It's been a couple years since he and I connected and I will do that. But I, you know, thank you. Thank you for the answer and I, I really do appreciate everything that you all are doing and it, it's, you know, there are no easy solutions or answers it seems. So thank you. Thank you Ms. Doran. What's a pleasure of the board? Continue the public hearing or vote tonight. Ms. Pope, I'd like to continue the public hearing. Ditto. Well we got two. Any, any voices from the men on the board? I mean, I would, if if there's anyone who feels like they could use more time,
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I would want them to be able to have it. I, you know, yeah, I, i I personally think I know what I think but I'm fine to wait if other people need time. Mr. Erickson, do we need a motion to continue the public hearing? You Do? Yes. To date certain. So I'll take a, a motion to continue the public hearing. Mr. Evans Move to continue the order and for our rate setting hearing to April 29th. Meeting. Second. Second by Ms. Wolf. Schlager. All in favor please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? So we will put that on the agenda for the 29th. Thank you so much Mr. Frat. You, Mr. And Tony and Ari for coming out and sitting.
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I know all of you have very long arrived, very early at your jobs and staying late. Deeply appreciated. Thank You very much for Your time for the board's knowledge. Bill and I have been working on consolidating all the questions and answers that we have gotten. I was hoping to get it to you for tonight, but then we're still working on someone's I think from a couple of you. So we'll still do that so that you have that hopefully maybe even at day tomorrow. I think we have most of the answers ready to go. I've updated as of today all the Questions I had. Perfect. Yeah, we'll just, we'll just confirm that tomorrow and I'll try to get to the board just so that you can see what each board member has said to each other and we'll also we can post that
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to the no agenda as well. Oh, that's, That's very helpful. Thank you. They're not gonna be contributing to anybody. It's just gonna be one through like, like I did for the, for the, Yeah, for the legislative delegation. Yeah. Okay. That That's, thank you. Little helpful. Thank you Ari. Next is discussion on the draft SUSTAINA sustainable purchasing policy and we have Jillian Wilson Martin on the line to talk about that. I'm making her co-host right now so that she can also show her face if she wants to. If she doesn't that's okay too. Oh, she does. Okay.
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Hello. Hi Jillian. Hi Jillian. Hi Julian. Hi Julian. Hi Julian. Hi. Thanks for your time tonight. I hope this will be quick for everyone, but the, as included in your materials for tonight. Natick has had an environmental purchasing policy previously called a recycled product procurement policy for many years, predating me since 2003. That one is available on the select board policy portion of the website. And having this policy in place has been really helpful for many reasons. One is that it's made us eligible
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for an annual grant program that we always participate in from the mass department of Environmental protections like waste oriented group. It's called Sustainable Materials Recovery. And we've received about $370,000 from that program since 2014. And this year, every year that program, the way that program works is it essentially rewards municipalities that follow best practices in recycling and waste reduction and they increase their requirements
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to maintain eligibility. And this year they're requiring municipalities to update their procurement policies to remain eligible for the grant funds. And Natick policy from before in many ways already fit a lot of their criteria, but they did still ask us to update it. And so included in your packet is a draft of that policy. It includes the objectives of the policy and outlines the policy overall, which is really similar to the last one. I would say. We added some things to this version to try
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to make it easier for staff to use. It really is meant to be guidance for making decisions about environmental and long-term impacts upfront and then all the way through our products lifecycle from before you purchase it to when you need to dispose of it. And hopefully that is not actually putting in the trash, but potentially reselling it for any final value it may have. Or prioritizing donations so the town doesn't have to pay to dispose of the item. I'm happy to go into more detail with you.
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I think we might have discovered small typo in one of the last bullet points on it where it says supply. Maybe we should say supplies instead for the disposition of goods or supplies not supply. And we can make that change. But I'm also just happy to answer any questions you have and appreciate your time. Thank you. Questions from the board, Mr. Jacobs? Yeah, thank you for this is very helpful. I, my question is just, and I, I think this is a carryover from the previous version of this policy, but I was curious
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how the 10% price preference was arrived at, like why it's 10% as opposed to, you know, 12, eight, whatever, if that's like a municipal standard or, or something like that. Yeah, that was really carried over from the last policy and it hadn't really been a barrier for the town. I think that it does give some flexibility in pricing. There's always gonna be best judgment from, you know, a department head about what they're willing to spend on a product. But we know that, for example, the facilities department uses cleaning products
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that have less toxic chemicals in them and actually have better quality results for them. And sometimes those price difference can be greater than 5% and things like that. It's meant to be a guide. It's, it's, it's also difficult for a staff person to really review all products that are available for a certain purpose. So this just is meant to give them some sense of what's possible as they're reviewing options. Thank you. Other questions, comments, Ms. Post? Just that I, I really like this approach. I like the approach that you've taken here
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and I had not seen that previous policy before. We were having this di discussion. I saw it tonight, but before we were having this discussion and I, I think this is great. So thank you Jillian, Mr. Evans. Yeah, this is great stuff first of all. But I, I had a thought in looking at takeout containers and it and it for municipal events and this kind of hits one of my pet peeves on in takeouts, right? Compostable containers are, are useful
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for municipal events, but they're also influenced by what we do as a town. And is there a possibility to extend that to some of the businesses in town? You know, it, it's a mixed reception to compostable containers in the town. And I know between meat we get at Roche Brothers or a takeout container we get from a restaurant, you know, a lot of them are plastic based.
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So is there a way to partner with the Board of Health? I'm not sure where it would go with that, but that's something that I'd like to see happen. It's kind of independent of, of approving this or not, but, So I'd, I'd like to weigh in on that. The fee places in town that do have compostable takeout containers do not compost. So in the restaurant, for example, if you go to Wonder at the corner at, at the 9 27, everything's compostable and then you go to dispose and you have trash or recycling. So if they're not composting mandated and, and,
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and if there isn't a, a a, a cost effective way for them to procure composting. Yeah, I I I get, I think that's where I'm trying to head is, is how can we extend this, you know, once, once we adopt this as a town, you know, and it might not be tomorrow, it might not be a year from now, but, But what would be the, Get it on the radar of the Board of Health to to think about. Yeah, I think, I think that's the key. This is really just an internal looking policy. Anything that's external looking would really be a, for something like this would be really a board
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of health regulation and that they're, they're very independent of each other. Yes, agreed. But leading by example is what we're Yeah, that, that, trying to thank you that that that's really what I was trying to drive at is no criticism of this. I think it's fantastic. Thank you Mr. Evans. Ms. Wolf. Well I would just offer, if it's, if it's okay that this is, that's actually one of the ways that we can use our grant funds that we get. And that's something we talked about last year. There's a program called, I think it's called Re Circular and it's a reusable container program that
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restaurants can opt into. And we had thought about using some of those funds to make that upfront payment for the containers for natick center restaurants that we're interested in participating. And that's just another reason this policy can be valuable. 'cause it can also support programs in the community, not just municipal programs. Yeah. It unlocks those funding sources. 'cause we comply with the program. Yeah, this policy does, this policy doesn't do that. Yeah. It supports the funding applications to unlock the, the source of the bbb. And Jill, As we know is the grant whisperer. Yes. Schlager.
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Thank you Jill. Thank you for your work on this and all the work that you do. But I just wanna clarify what appendix A means. This is not a policy in the sense of for these, under these purchasing situations, you must do these things. Aren't these just examples and, and guidelines but they're not, they're not anything that we're requiring our departments to follow. Is that correct? Right. They're just example situations where you can consider the policy and use it to potentially
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pursue a more sustainable alternative. So it's really, this is actually in response to some feedback that we got when we were working on this policy, which was, you know, when when would I use this? What kind of products would I wanna even think about this? And these are just some examples that we gave. So they're not required to use these. And even in the text we just say this, you're advised to consider the most sustainable option, but it's, it's not a requirement. And we can make, if you'd like in the appendix, we can make
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that more clear that it's not a requirement. These are just examples. We tried to say that, but yeah, It, it does say that. I didn't want it to be confusing that, that these are, you know, that these are requirements that we're saying if you're buying office paper, here's what you have to do. So it's, yeah, Makes sense. And I think if, I think our intent is that we could add to the example purchasing decisions. It's not necessarily, you know, constrained by board review and having to go back to that to you for
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updating the examples that we share. That sounds smart. I'll obtain a motion Move to approve the draft sustainable purchasing policy. Second Moved by Mr. Evans, seconded by Ms. Pope. All in favor please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? 5 0 0. Thank you so much Jillian. Thanks for staying up with us late. Thank you. Take care. Thank you. Thanks Jillian. Mr. Erickson, I think you're up. Yep. I'll try to be brief with given the hour. M rec is the our regional dispatch center for those. I guess there's nobody watching from home on the Zoom link
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who's still watching Pegasus, you're off Middlesex Regional Emergency Communication Center. We're partnered in with Framingham and Waylan to create the center. It's physically under construction right now in downtown Framingham. That's part of the update. The construction started earlier this year about a month ago, a month and a half ago. If you actually drive by Framingham City Hall, it's on 1 26 just past this hall. It's like literally shares like a driveway and you can look up and it's an off old office building that's now ripped off and it's torn apart. So construction is actively going on. The intent is to have the construction complete so
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that we can physically move everything and have it be a true center starting January of next year. But we're gonna be starting transitioning including hiring staff, training staff this summer, starting likely July-ish. 'cause we're applying for a grant that is a fiscal year grant and that should fund next year's operations, which would be a hundred percent mean meaning a benefit to the town. So that's our intent. The grant application was submitted today. We won't know for another couple months and I say we, it's the M rec that's submitting the application also.
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So that's, it's, it's moving along. We have a great executive director and a, and a Deputy SEC director for M Rec. Those are literally the only two employees we have right now. They're getting everything up to up to date and they're working with the Framingham team on the, on the construction because as the Framingham owned building, but the grant funds are coming through the M rec to pay for the construction from state 9 1 1. So all this is coming from state 9 1 1. What's in front of you tonight that I just want your confirmation on? A confirmation vote is some I would call, I would consider them kind of minor adjustments to the inter municipal agreement. There's three primary components and then some script
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or errors to just like definitions of committee versus subcommittee. I'll go through them. The three ones are, one is when we created this, originally we had a requirement in here that the chair of the board of directors as well as the other committees, there's an operations committee and a finance committee would rotate annually no matter what to the different participating communities we're finding that's actually challenging. So we're just asking that that that requirement for it to rotate, be removed and that it's just an annual vote.
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So a good example is we actually weren't able to comply that with this year, this, this past year. And I've been the chair of the board of directors for a year and a half now going on two years. So we're already sort of finding that difficult. It's just one of those things that you wouldn't know until you actually started doing it. And I have no desire to be in perpetuity a chair. We're going to rotate. But it's just one of those things that we need more flexibility built in. The second one is the term of what is called both. The next two are actually part of the allocation of cost section and one is regarding what, so there's two parts to how we do the ratio.
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One is population and then the other part is the call volume. In the current version it mentions 9 1 1 calls. That's actually a term that makes sense when you're separate dispatches because that's how they're cataloged and you can separate them by community. When we merge, the 9 1 1 calls are all emrich calls. So we need a way to separate them by the community. And CAD is the computerated dispatch system that actually does that. So we need to defer to cad. It's all the dispatch system. The dispatch center owns the system, controls the system. Basically when you call dispatch it p it tell,
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it tells the system where it's coming from. They then get information on the call the dispatcher and then they dispatch it to the community. All that information from that call goes into the, to the cad, the computer aided system. It then is also linked, but it's a one way link to the town's record management system within which all of our stuff gets put into. So if it's like a, if it's a fire call, all the fire reports go in that it doesn't come back. That that information does not go back to the mc a, it stays in our system. It's really, but it's the basis for all the information that we have. They're obligated to follow the same rules and regulations that we follow for public safety facility
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for any public retention for data and things like that. But the, the system is called a computer aided system and that's where we can actually separate between the participating communities. So it's a bit of a technical change but it's an important one. Then the third one in that same allocation of costs is just when those allocations of costs get paid. So where per the IMA, each community gets budgeted their allocation of costs in the beginning part of the calendar year for the following fiscal year. And it takes into account any overages or underages from the prior fiscal year. So it's all outlined in in the IMA.
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So we get an assessment kinda like KE tech, we get an assessment for the year. We have to pay that. The current proposal is we would do it over quarters. This is asking to do it all up front on July 15th. There's a primary reason for that is that the grant funders pay it per our IMA and we want all of their money up front. Right. When we also look at it in reality we're gonna be budgeting it now, like next year, future years, we're gonna be budgeting it now. So whether we pay it all up front or quarterly, it's not that much of a difference for us. We will revisit this probably in a handful of years time just to see.
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Maybe we need to do 50%, 50%. Yeah. But doing it quarterly seemed a little, little bit excessive. Yeah, we probably can learn from that and moving forward. So anyway, yeah, these have been approved by the board of directors. I just wanna bring it back to you to get your just endorsement of them and I do have a question on clarity on a may vote that the board took, but I can also do a future date. It's not, it's not urgent for tonight, but if I can at least get the board to just bless these, that'd be great. So blessed. So blessed. Yeah. So if you can do a quick vote would be great if you could just 'cause I I do have authority to sign these. Okay, so I have, I I have authority
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to sign the IMA from the board from prior votes. I just wanna make sure you're full up to speed if, if and when we make any changes to the IMA Motion, I, I can't do Rich by myself. I don't, I don't. I giving the Blessing Move, move to support change. That's Changes mentioned by Mr. Erickson that I hope we can summarize appropriately. Billy's on top of that. Thank you Billy. Moved by Ms. Walsch Logger seconded by Mr. Jacobs. All in favor please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? 5 0 0. Madam Clerk if we can move on to the consent agenda? Yes. Thank you Sheriff. Thank you.
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So tonight's consent agenda reads is item A approved meeting minutes for March 11th, March 18th, March 24th, April 1st and the April 3rd, 2026 meetings. Item B approved Natick Center Associates incorporated applications for a one day liquor license for a one day liquor license is the beer garden for Natick Knights on June 25th, July 16th and August the sixth. Item C approved Natick community or organic farms application for a one entertainment license.
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The Farm Fest on May 9th, 2026. Item D approve Natick Community Organic Farms application for a one day alcohol license Farm Fest on May 9th, 2026. Item E approved Natick Center Associates Incorporated request to occupy a public Way sidewalk sale April 25th, 2026. Item F approve Hungry Pot NAIC Incorporated amendment application for an S 12. All alcohol license, change of corporate name and change of corporate structure. Currently approved corporate name and structure, hungry Pot NAIC Inc.
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Corporate name and structure requiring approval. 1400 HP Natick. LLC Item G approved Farmer Market Farmer's Market Permit. Spicy Water Distilleries Distillers, LLC, broken Creek Vineyard and item H except the resignation of J Ball from the Affordable Housing Trust fund. Does anyone wanna pull anything from the, I guess Mr. Evans, I just wanna pull item H please. Okay, motion to I I move that we approve item A through G
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Second. All in favor please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? 5 0 0. Mr. Evans, I just wanted to take the opportunity to thank Jay Ball for the many years that he's put on the Natick Affordable Housing Trust since its inception. He was an instrumental driving force for years on that group and has made it an effective body. So I wanted to thank him and wish him well. Well said. Thank you so much Mr. Evans.
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Make the move. So we have to move. Yeah. Move, move to approve Item H. Second. All in favor please say aye. Aye. A Aye. Any opposed? 5 0 0 Town administrator updates? Just briefly, may is Mental health awareness month. So you're gonna see more information about that coming out. We are, I'll have more about this, but we mentioned the retirement of our town engineer. I think earlier tonight. I know I mentioned this to the board in the past, but we did extend an offer and it's been accepted to have John Dema be our new town engineer. So we have a nice transition period.
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He's a long, he's been with the town for about 20 years, so we're excited to see him. Nice. Elevate. We're gonna make sure he has the supports he needs 'cause they're already down a staff person and it's, it's gonna be, you know, hard to lose bill's, bill's capacity and how much he did. But I know John will elevate and not elevate will rise to the occasion and, and fit that role well we do have an official resignation from our collector treasurer, so I am working through that process as well. So just for the board's knowledge, that is official as of the end of March and we have a,
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we've designated a new a DA coordinator, gosh, now I'm having late night Melissa Carter, who's been with our rec and parks division for a while and worked a lot with the Camp Arrowhead and people with, with special needs. So she has a lot of knowledge from the a DA compliant perspective. This is an appointment that needed to be done because of the retirement of Paul Caru. Paul Caru was our a DA coordinator. So we made that appointment this week. Thank you Mr. Erickson. Is he, we Select board updates. Does anyone on the board have an update? No, I have a brief one.
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We generally issue a proclamation for pride month that the first meeting in June. I'm going to ask the board to consider it mid-May because on May 31st, the first Congregational church is planning a kickoff for Pride month where there will be like a moth story hour and they'll be sending a formal request for somebody from the select board to read the proclamation in a, in a public, you know, I mean, we don't have a compelled audience here, so I think that's a great idea. I'll be keeping the board updated as I get more information about Pride events for June.
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Sounds good. Cool. And I will entertain a motion to adjourn. Move To adjourn. Second. Second. Margaret should be move. Moved by Mr. Evans. Seconded by Ms. Slager. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Nope. And we're adjourned at 9 24. Thank you.