Speaker 1: Good evening and welcome to the Wednesday May 28th Select Board, Natick Select Board meeting. We're gonna open this meeting at 6:05 PM and enter into executive session pursuant to Mass General Law, chapter 30 a, section 21, A two to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with non-union personnel or to conduct collective bargaining sessions or contract negotiations with non-union personnel. Fire chief agenda item two B, pursuant to mass general Law 30 a chapter 30 a section section 21,
subsection a, subsection three to discuss strategy with respect to litigation. If an open meeting may have a detrimental effect on the litigating position of the public body and the chair. So declares an I do Leslie PLO at all versus town of Natick, board of Appeals, etal 21 MISC 0 0 0 5 2 0 in land court. And agenda item two C, purpose 10 to discuss trade secrets or confidential, competitively sensitive or other proprietary information. The electricity aggregation program. At this time, I'll entertain a motion. Speaker 2: So moved. Speaker 1: Moved by Ms.
Slager, seconded by Mr. Evans to enter into executive session by roll call vote. Mr. Sydney. Yes. Mr. Evans? Yes. Ms. Slager? Yes. And I'm a yes. So we will enter executive session and should be back in about 45 minutes to an hour. And we are back from executive session. It is now six 19 at this TI seven 19. At this time, I would like to ask those in the room to rise to say this Pledge of Allegiance and observe a mo, a moment of silence. Speaker 2: Pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. Do Republic for which it stands.
One Nation under God and Justice. Justice. Thank you. Speaker 1: We have a few announcements. The Bacon Free Library is hosting a Maps of Natick art exhibit between May 21st and June 30th, featuring maps of Natick from the 19th and early 20th. You can visit the bacon free library.org website website for more information. Speaker 2: You gotta push the, Speaker 1: Just throw it. Thank you, Mr. Sydney. Visit the bacon free library.org website for more information and hours.
On Saturday May 31st, there will be a free community health and wellness fair on the Natick Common from nine to one. You can learn more about this event by going to Natick MA dot org's website and looking at Announcements on June 4th, mass, DOT will hold a public hearing on the Route 27 9 bridge replacement and interchange change improvements. This is an in-person only meeting at Wilson Middle School from 6:30 PM to 9:30 PM You may submit questions ahead, ahead of time via a link in the announcement on the town's
website homepage. And last but not least, the Wok sos Natick Town takeover will take place on June 6th, Friday, June 6th. The first pitch is at 6:05 PM at Polar Park in Worcester. Natick won the 2003 and 2004 town takeover over 24 other towns for the most tickets sold. So I encourage you if you can go, it's a great night for families and you can also donate game tickets to the New York Service Council. Again, details on how to do that are on the town home webpage.
Under announcements, Mr. Evans. Speaker 3: Thank you. One quick announcement, which is the last weekend was the Friends of the Mor Institute Library Book Sale, and it was the ninth highest sale since book sales started in 1991. Wow. For a total of 10,388 and 40 cents. Don't forget that. 40 cents. Those sales are, do a lot of things for the library like speed reads and museum passes and so forth.
So they raise about 35, $40,000 a year for the library. So thank you for all the people who came and bought books and my back for really thanks you for not having me to put it back on in storage. So thank you. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Evans. Are there any other announcements for members of the board at this time? We will go into public speak. Any individual may raise an issue that is not included on tonight's agenda and it will be taken under advisement by the board. There'll be no opportunity for debate during this portion
of the meeting due to the requirements of open meeting law, 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 during public speak? Seeing none. Is there anyone on Zoom who wishes to speak to the board or raise an issue? Please raise your hand. Seeing none. We'll Mo move on to proclamations. Mr. Sidney. Speaker 4: Thank you. Standing in for our Town clerk for our Board Clerk Proclamation in honor of Leo Paul Bork.
Whereas Leo Paul Bork was born on November 24th, 1922 in Sanford, Maine to a French Canadian family, raised in a bilingual home, grounded in faith, hard work and service. And after graduating from St. Andre's Catholic High School and learning the tailoring trade from his father, he proudly enlisted in the United States Marine Corps following the attack on Pearl Harbor. And whereas Leo served with distinction in the United States Marine Corps during World War ii, joining on January 2nd, 1942 and fighting bravely with the seventh regiment of the first Marine Division in Guadal Canal, new Britain
and pal plu. And whereas Leo was twice wounded in battle and received the purple heart with gold star Presidential Unit citation with star the Asiatic Pacific campaign medal with three bronze stars and other commendations for his valor and service. And whereas after the war, Leo continued to contribute to his community through his work as a tailor at T Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus in Boston where he met and married Jacqueline Maxwell with whom he built a loving family and home in Framingham, Massachusetts.
And whereas Leo Paul Bork, a devoted husband, father, and grandfather, celebrated his hundred and second birthday on November 24th, 2024, embodying the values of resilience, dedication, and service. Now therefore, it be resolved that the Natick Select Board on this 28th day of May, 2025, honor honors Leo Paul Bork for his extraordinary contributions to our nation and community. And I so Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Sydney. Moved by Mr. Sydney, seconded by Mr. Evans. Ms. Pope? She has, she made it on yet? She's on.
Oh, Ms. Pope, that's me. Thank you. I needed permission to unmute myself. Sorry about that, Ms. Pope. Aye. Mr. Sydney? Aye. Mr. Evans? Aye. Ms. Wilger? Yes. And I'm a yes. 5 0 0. Thank you so much. Thank you. Next item agenda is zoning board of Appeals interviews. Last meeting we interviewed Michael Lynch and Robert Stepback for reappointment. And Ms. Gail Weston Roberts, who also applied.
Tonight we have Davidowitz. Mr. Jow, could you come to the podium and introduce yourself please? Speaker 4: Yes, ma'am. Hi, Davidowitz on behalf of Davidowitz. I apologize for my mis queue of last week and I apologize for wasting your time. So for my missed calendar of the event, but here I am. Speaker 1: Thank you. Is your microphone on? Is the green? It's green. Okay. Yeah. So can you tell us a little bit about why you want to continue serving on the zoning board of appeals? Speaker 4: Sure. Yeah. Well, I, my career is as a land use attorney. I've been doing it since 1994.
I'm pretty well versed in the law. I've been on the board, this, the board of appeals for I think about 10 or 12 years. I've been the chairman for five or six years. I think I served with distinction. I bring a level of knowledge that assists the board in, in applying the law to the facts of these sometimes very complex cases. And I think I have the skills, the temper, the deme, the temperament and the demeanor to handle the board and some of the thorny issues that we have to deal with on a weekly basis or on a monthly base basis.
Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Jacobowitzs, I'd like to open this up now. Open questions and comments for members of the board. Ms. W Slager. Speaker 5: Thank you Mr. Jacobowitzs. I'll ask a question that I asked to the other interviewees. Sure. What do you think makes, what characteristics make for a good member on the ZBAA? Speaker 4: Good, I didn't hear this. Speaker 5: A good member of the ZBA member? Speaker 4: I think dedication, knowledge, someone with an, with an open mind. Someone who is knowledgeable, understands
the law of the case, understands the dynamic of being an abutter to a project. Understanding what it means to be a member, a, a citizen of the town. And you take all of those things on each case and you have to put it into a mix and come up with a decision that's not gonna make everybody happy. But we do it in a way that we think is fair, that's respectful to everybody who's involved. And we try to arrive at a solution within the bounds of the law that really tries to satisfy all
of the various stakeholders. Speaker 5: All right. My second question that I also asked, what would make your life easier? What kind of changes that potentially either the town could do or the select work could do? Speaker 4: I could resign Speaker 5: Or come meaning could do that, would that would make the job easier for you? Speaker 4: No, it's not an easy job, I don't think the idea is to make it easier. I I think the nature of the, the job is that it's difficult. And the reason it's difficult is because you have diminishing lots to build on. The economy's changing, the real estate market's changing.
And with all of those fa and, and people have lived here for, for, for 40 or 50 years, and they, and they're used to a certain way of life of looking at a lot that's next to 'em that doesn't have a building on it or that has had trees for 30 years. And it's very difficult to tell them, unfortunately, a house is gonna go on there because other people have rights and it's trying to weave all of these things together. It's never gonna be easy. You, you, you can't really change the law. Right? The the law is, you can tweak it in ways,
but chapter 40 a basically the enabling statute in Massachusetts governs it will tell this board and the legislature of the town, the town meeting of, of what it basically has to look like. And you can tweak around the edges. And it's our job along with a lot of the other stakeholders in this, in this building and in this town who work very hard to deliver a product for their constituency. Figure out a way of, of, of delivering on our mission
of rendering decisions on the zoning code in accordance with Massachusetts law. It's not easy, but it's what we signed up for. And so you didn't ask this question, but I'll tell you, you have to have a thick skin. And and I, I tell you, I I, on behalf of myself and the members of the board, I'm very proud of the work that we do. And, and why? Because we try to hold, first of all, we listen very carefully. I think that's a really critical skill to hear and understand what people say, what their concerns are.
These are people who've lived here for a long time and they're certainly deserved of, of giving the board their opinion at the same time times they are a change in and these little houses on, in, in, in a neighborhood like Weathersfield as an example. 'cause that's a very popular one. The, those houses get sold because, because sellers are allowed to sell their property and developers are allowed to come in here and, and they're allowed to put a petition before the board. And then the board applies the law to that particular structure, that one on its facts.
And we try, we try our really, we try our hardest to try to arrive at something that everybody can live with. Maybe we're gonna, the developer's gonna take a haircut and the, and the, and the, and the neighbor is gonna get some of what they want, but maybe not all of what they want. But after all, that's a compromise. And we do it again within the bounds of the law. We cannot make it up. It has to be done in accordance with the requirements of law. And I think we do that very well. Speaker 5: All right. Thank you Speaker 1: Mr. Evans. Speaker 3: Thank you, Madam Sheriff, first of all, thank you
for all the work you've done over multiple terms. It is a, a as you said, a thankless job. You're constricted by the laws and you have to navigate the discussion and keep it on track under difficult circumstances. So I wanted to thank you upfront. Thank you for that. Questions that I have is, we have a lot of non-conforming lots in town, and I think I asked this of the other applicants, something like 70% of the lots in natick
or non-conforming, pre-existing non-conforming lots. What can you do as a ZBA member to ensure that a building on a non-conforming lot does not infringe on the enjoyment of the, in a butter to that? Speaker 4: Right. I mean that is, that, that's probably the, the primary thrust of what we do. I, I would guess without having looked at it specifically, 80 plus percent of what the board does is render what's called section six findings. Right? You probably know on a non-conforming lot, a,
a developer, a builder, an owner for that matter, wants to expand the existing footprint of their house because they have a growing family or now they're working from home and they want to build an office. So our charge is to determine, based on everything we've seen from the developer, from the neighbors, from the engineers, from conservation, from board of health, is to determine whether what's being built is quote, substantially more detrimental than what's there today. Right. That's a legislative rule that comes straight out
of 40 a and the fact that it's substantially more detrimental, it raises the bar. Right? What is substantial detriment? Well, if you sort of know it when you see it, and we have eight people, five voting who have collective judgment about what that looks like. And when we see something that looks like it is substantial detriment, I think we have two choices. We can simply go to a vote and crush the dreams of a family who wants to expand, crush the opportunity, the business opportunity of a developer who wants to build and eventually sell.
Or what we really do do is listen to the people who come and say, this is what I'm concerned about. And what do we do with that? Instead of saying, we don't discount that, we listen and we say to the developer, Hey, look, you're running up against this issue, which we have got to consider. And that could eventually, that could be deemed a a substantial detriment. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna give you an opportunity to go outside, take a break, see if you can work it out, see if you can take a haircut on what you want to do to satisfy the neighbor
and come back to the middle. And that's why a vast majority of the projects that that come before us do get resolved because we force a compromise. And where a developer comes in and says, I'm not gonna change a thing. That project's gonna get denied more times than not. But at the same time, to be fair, and I don't wanna be too verbose, but if you come in and a developer or a homeowner wants to take a one family and turn it into a two family in a two family district and a butter comes and says, I'm afraid of the host of horribles traffic,
we discount that because a one family to a two family is gonna increase the traffic just infinitesimally. And so while I think there's an, there's a fear of change, I understand that, but that kind of criticism is likely not to turn the tide for good reason. Speaker 1: Ms. Pope. Sure. Speaker 6: Thank you. Hello. Good evening, Mr. Jacobowitzs. Aye. Wanted to also thank you for your service to the town and your service on this board. My question for you is, what challenges do you foresee
the ZBA dealing with? Speaker 4: I think that the, the biggest challenge that we're going to face, I mean every day is challenging, but that's what we do, right? That's the, that's what we're charged with doing. But I think what we haven't really got our head around yet is the ADUs. So when the a d start coming in, that's gonna be a a, a difficult, it's gonna be a difficult administration for the board. 'cause we're sort of just finding our ground on that right now and trying to understand the way the state
enabling act and the way that the town's bylaw intersect and, and how we're gonna render those decisions because it really is changing the landscape substantially. Speaker 6: Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you Speaker 1: Mr. Sidney. Speaker 4: Thank you. And thank you for your service, Mr. Jow. It's always hard to find volunteers around town and you've been doing a lot of service. We've had a number of emails from citizens of the town who have frankly complained about the way you run some meetings.
And as the chair, this is a question for you because Sure. You run the meeting. Yeah. Some of those complaints are that you stopped taking input from the public. And correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is all of these section sixes and so forth are public hearings, correct? Of course. Yes. They are. Indeed. My understanding of a public hearing is you have to take comments from anybody who wants to speak. And one of the complaints I've seen, and it's not the only one, is that you've denied non abutters the chance to speak Absolutely false. That's a false statement. Okay. I, I challenge whoever said that to bring
that forward Right Now, that's not something I've ever done. It's not something I ever will do, but I'll tell you what. Okay. I just wanted to get the record clear 'cause it's in our public record. Yeah. That complaint came into us in email. I would like to see that person stand here before me and face me and say that and produce the record where I've done that. 'cause I don't and I won't. Well, I wanted to give you a chance to. Yeah, no, I appreciate it. I believe me, my attitude toward you, don't, don't take it the wrong way. You can, you know, the keyboard warriors are out there taking shots, but they're not backing it up. Show up if you care, show up, say something in the hearing
and we will address it as we do with everybody. What I do say at the beginning of every meeting is I lay some certain ground rules up. The one first ground rule is you're gonna treat everyone here with respect and courtesy. The second thing I say is in, in, in terms of efficiency, if you have 20 people sitting in the assembled and you all agree with the position that's been said, that you don't need to go up and simply repeat it word for word so that everyone here and everyone there who's volunteering their time aren't gonna be here till midnight.
Try listening to the same thing over and over. But what I do say is, if you agree with the position that's been indicated, please tell us. And when people raise their hand, we count that as having been signed on to the position that was spoken. Right. And when people do come up and they repeat, add infinitum, the things that have been said, I hold my hand up and say, we understand I'm gonna have you stop. Okay. Unless you have something new to add. Right. And the meetings have to be run in a way
where relevance matters. Right? We are here looking at a project that's within the bounds of a lot in a neighborhood. And if someone wants to get up and say, Hey, you know, what they should have done over at that project five years ago was XI say, I'm gonna stop you there. That's not relevant, it's not relevant for tonight. If that's something that you care about, take it to the legislator. Take it to the people who can change what you don't like.
We don't have that authority. And what happened five years ago on a lot across town is simply not relevant to the four corners of the project that are before us. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for that. I, as I said, I wanted to give you a chance because all these emails are in the public record, and I, I know you didn't ask this question, I'm just gonna respond a little bit more at the risk of going on. And that is this, I I said it before, I'll say it again. Every decision we make is not gonna make everybody happy. Every decision you make is not gonna make everybody happy. We know that for the,
for the 40 B on on five Auburn Street, right? That is a project that this board wanted this board granted. The, the developer, the land for next to no money for a purpose. And that purpose was affordable housing. And it's up to the ZBA to figure out how under 40 B that project is or is not gonna get done under what conditions. But when you put up 20, sorry, 32 units of affordable housing on a lot that's existed for a long time without any use, and you have five houses
that run down Armor Street, guess what? They're gonna be upset and you can expect that they're gonna be upset. But that's what 40 B is. 40 B is, is meant to build affordable housing. It's not meant to make everybody happy. And if there's something that is egregiously wrong with the project, we will address it. But that, that project is gonna happen, we think, which I assume that the Board of Selectmen thinks is a good thing. There are gonna be some people who leave that meeting feeling they didn't get what they wanted. But I can tell you this, I leave that meeting
and I say, the project that they are getting is substantially better than the project that came in the front door. And the reason it got better is because of the work that board did with the input of the people in this room. And so what I say is the system works. So I'm gonna ask you the same question I asked all of the other applicants. One of the ways, one, one of the rules, and you you brought it up earlier, is substantially more detrimental. Right? That's a reason to deny something. Yep. One of the things that I've noticed around town,
I mean I've even seen it in my neighborhood, is, you know, one developer comes in and tears down a house and puts up something a little bit bigger that isn't that detrimental. But the next one comes in and by the time you get to the eighth of the 10th, the whole neighborhood, the whole character of the neighborhood has changed. And I wonder if there's any way you can imagine dealing with that so that we can avoid this kind of, you know, creep, what I would call creeping detriment. Yeah. Or creeping change. It, it, it really, that's, it's an excellent question.
I don't know that I, that I have an answer for you that that's gonna be satisfactory to you. I, I think based on everything I know and everything I've done, know, our decisions don't have presidential effect, right? There's no starry decisis in this stuff. We look at a project and say, is it or isn't it substantially much more detrimental? And in many cases, just so you know, in many cases nobody shows up. Nobody shows up to say anything. There's no abutters. And so it makes it difficult for the board
to substitute its judgment about detriment for nobody. For nobody. Nobody claims it right? For nobody there. We have to sort of invent the detriment. It has to be fairly substantial for the board to, to see detriment where nobody else does. The people who are gonna be affected by it. So many, many do get approved like that. But I, I don't know if we have the authority to say, Hey, you know what, seven have come before you. Your project, this,
the subtext is your project is not substantially more detrimental in its own right. But when you look at it in the context of the seven that preceded it, you know, we think it is. I think that's appealable. I think that's appealable. And I think it's, we would lose, I'm not sure, Hey, look, if, if, if the town is saying to us, no, that's probably not how it works. There are people who come in and say things like that. And we say, so something happened down the street,
then something happened farther down the street and you know, we're sick of it. We're, we're sick of the trucks coming in. We want to take a break. We just want peace and quiet for a little while. I don't think it's our authority to say, you know what, we're gonna deny this petition 'cause you wanna take a break. It, it, it, it's not exactly what you said, but it's not unlike it. And for it's bringing in reasons that I think are outside the penumbra of our authority. I could be wrong, I could be wrong. And maybe town council can render
an opinion and if they do, believe me, I'd look at it, I'd study it and put it into practice in a way that made sense. But I just, right now my conclusion is probably not. Well thank you for that. And I will say when I, when I needed a section six finding, nobody showed up except me. But I had letters from all of my neighbors. You were smart. You were smart. Not everybody is. But you know, it used to be that people would come in, developers would come in and they would try to bully their project through,
and then they ran up against us and we said, look, you can hear the way the wind is blowing. You want to go to a vote? Let's go. You know what they did? They put their tail between their legs and they walked outside and they came back a month later and they figured it out. You know what they did next time they reached out before they got here. So things change based on what this board does. And at the end of the day, I think we end up with something that I think is ultimately good
for the town. Thank you very much Speaker 1: Mr. Evans. Speaker 3: One, one quick one I hope, which is hybrid meetings. One of the issues that you've rightly pointed out is not getting a butters to the meeting. Have you considered, I I looked it up. The last hybrid meeting was held in June, 2023. Would you consider, if you reappointed using hybrid meetings at least more frequently? I understand there, there are going to be some circumstances where it's not feasible, but is that something you'd consider?
Speaker 4: No. And the reason is, is because we, there was a governor's order in place at the time, as you well know, you probably did the same thing for COVID and that was required. But they were ungainly, they were inefficient. You know, a lot of the time it's, we can't hear you unmute yourself, guys walking around with no shirt on, smoking a cigarette, not paying attention. It was com It was, it, it just didn't work. So look, if people think these things are as life changing as they are, they'll show up.
If they don't show up, then it's no big deal. And if they can't show up and they wanna show up, they write letters and we read the letters, the letters end up in the record and they mean something. If you take the time to write a letter, it means something. If you don't show up and don't write a letter, you don't care enough. Speaker 1: Or you just don't have the same access as other people. Speaker 4: I that may be, people have pens, they have paper, and they have stamps and they don't need stamps. They can drop the letters off Speaker 1: Or email them Speaker 4: Or email them. Yeah. I, I don't wanna be harsh. I I, I know I sound that way and I don't mean to, the idea is to get as many people
to be involved as possible. And I know using Zoom would help to do that, but it creates a situation where, in my opinion, where it makes it so ungainly and so inefficient, you get less done over a longer period of time. I think that doesn't work for, for our meetings. It doesn't, Speaker 1: I I would say as chair of this board, that having zoom access in a room full of people is ungainly. But I think that it's just the price we have to pay. I still get us out by 9 30, 10 o'clock the latest.
Speaker 4: You're better than I. Speaker 1: Well, we'll see. Any other members of the board? Ms. Pope? I have a few questions. The, the, I don't know if it's the bylaws. I looked this up last week, or the ZBA rules say that one person may not serve as chair more than two years in a row. Speaker 4: Hmm. That may Is that, if that's true, I I wasn't aware of it Speaker 1: Unless no one else is willing to serve, but yes, that's a, that's that something that was promulgated in 2013.
Maybe I had just stepped off the board. It was written by I think Mike Hickey and someone else. Speaker 4: Well, I, I can tell you this, you interviewed some of the folks, the, the sort of, he apparent is j Jason McKowski, he's the vice chair right now. And he's, and I said, look, you, you wanna take over? And he said no. So I think your answer is at least informally that nobody does believe me, if the guy was standing here and said, I'll be the chair, I'd take a seat, I really would. Do Speaker 1: You have reorg meetings once a year?
A reorganization meeting like we do on our board? Speaker 4: We don't, we don't have formal ones, but it's not something that goes undiscussed. Speaker 1: How many decisions or projects that have been section six findings that have been brought before the board that you can remember in the last 10 years that your board has rejected? Speaker 4: I, I don't know the number. I I'm sure Ms. Gale West and Roberts probably has that number. The number in the abstract though is meaningless in my opinion. Speaker 1: I understand that. I made that argument last week. I was just wondering if you knew, Speaker 4: I don't know. I know that I do an annual report every year to the town clerk and the numbers are substantially lopsided
in terms of, in terms of approval. But you, you have to understand a couple things. These numbers do not stand in the abstract. Speaker 1: I understand that. I made that argument last week. So I, Speaker 4: I'll skip the one I just made 'cause you understand it completely. But there are others. The second one I've already mentioned, nobody shows up. What's the board to do unless it's something, you know, really outrageous. It's difficult to call it substantially detrimental. The developer's sitting here, there's nobody saying a thing. And he says, or she says to us, where's the substantial detriment? There's nobody here. The third thing is that many of the projects,
and I I don't know what the percentage is, is like family, a husband, wife and two kids who just had a baby, right? And they want to add on a small room off the back of their house to, or a deck so that their children can eat outside. I don't think anybody here would consider that substantial detriment. And those, they typically, that's a paradigm section six finding. And they, they typically sail through after debate and after we understand the facts. And if somebody comes in and says, I'm in a butter
and that guy's gonna expand his deck by 200 square feet and it's gonna cause me untold harms. Well, I I ask you, what do you think it, it does not hold a lot of water. It just doesn't, it's fear of change. That's the way I see it. Now if that guy says, as the house is towering over me, I live here with my family, they're gonna be looking into our house. That means something that could be substantial detriment. So we can turn to that guy and say, you're, you're toast.
We'll see you in two years. But we don't, we say, go figure out how you can build your house and not disturb your neighbor. And they do, they change the roof, they change the height. I think that is, that's progress. Speaker 1: Thank you. Are there any other questions or comments from members of the board or last week? We, you can sit down Mr. Jacobowitzs. Thank you. We invited those who were interviewed last week, if they wish to come, if they wanted to follow up or make any other comments in light of Mr.
Jacobowitzs interview tonight. And so at this point I will invite Mr. Lynch, Mr. Beck or Ms. Weston Roberts, if any of you would like to approach, just raise your hand and I will acknowledge you. Ms. Weston Roberts. Speaker 7: Hi. Thank you for this opportunity. I agree with many things that Mr. Jacobowitzs has said and I greatly admire how he conducts hearings most of the time. The one thing I pointed out on my last opportunity was the issues that we have
with the changes in the decision letters. And this, the reason I bring it up again is because it does speak to what he just said about the problem we have when determining substantial detriment in terms of the constraints of state and local laws. The findings and decision language that were used two and a half years ago is what I think most people would agree is a reasonable standard for making these decisions. It does allow for individuals on the board
to exercise their own understandings and utilizing their own experiences in addition to the constraints of the laws. If that were not the case, we wouldn't have a quasi-judicial body at this final stage in the process. The building commissioner's decision that is an administrative decision would suffice. But this is clearly why we have this decision. In order to not nullify or abrogate the laws, we need to have public discussions that are essentially to having a jury
of your peers where you have a variety of nat residents who are not simply, I shouldn't say simply who are not only lawyers and contractors and other people who are very knowledgeable about the industry, but also people who represent those who are going to be affected by the decisions. There are many occupations which fill that need. And let's see. I'm trying to save time, so I'm skipping over cards.
Speaker 1: Could I ask you one quick question? Oh yes, please. Could you remind the public and the board what the change in the decision letters are that you're referring to? Oh Speaker 7: Yes. I have a summary of it. Just briefly, please. Yes. Replacement houses shall avoid intrusion on adjacent residences and avoid creating an appearance of building congestion on the lot. And in the neighborhood. They shall also remain consistent in scale, character and appearance with neighborhood homes. They will also avoid detriment to the neighborhood
in comparison with the existing house. So I'll skip all the things I could say and simply point out that the thing that has always been missing in these hearings, in my opinion is the existing house. The existing house is barely represented in these deliberations at all. And I believe it is because it's not required specifically in the language. It's, it's referred to in that law. But it is not spelled out what that presence, what would re would consist of.
I actually have considered bringing these in myself. Ideally the applicants would produce these images and these comparisons so that we, that everyone who's involved can see images of the existing house in comparison with the proposed house in C two. So you see it on the street with the other houses and it's easier for people to grasp how this is going to have impact on, especially for people who have find it difficult to put into words with their understanding of the detriment it,
it will present for them. There is no way that board members should feel that it's not part of their job to find words for that, to visit the sites in person to talk to the neighbors because board members have that authority and that responsibility therefore the standing to be asking neighbors before, during, and after demolitions and replacements. It's, I think it should be a part of the job
that we embrace as much as we can within the constraints of people's jobs and all the other things they do with their time in addition to serving on the board. But yeah, I'll Speaker 1: In a moment. Go ahead Ms. We, we Speaker 7: Roberts Oh no, I, I I think, you know, plenty of time is passing here. So if any, anyone, if if anyone has more questions, Speaker 1: Did you have anything else you wanted to tell the board? Speaker 7: I'll, I'll, I'll, Speaker 1: I'll Okay. Members of the board, do you have any questions for Ms? We Roberts? I'd like Mr. Jacks have an opportunity to respond to that. Thank you Ms. Wein Roberts. Speaker 4: Thanks very much. Yeah, very briefly.
I mean those are very well thought out comments and we really appreciate everything that Ms. Wein Roberts brings to the board. She clearly cares and she, she does her homework only, almost everything she said is just against the law. We cannot put that in decision. It's against the law. So I'm happy to have that sent to, to, to town council or I mean the, the authority of course I don't have the authority, but this board does send it to the, send it to town council, have 'em review it. We do not, as a matter of course, deny
a petition because it's not a colonial with a colonial next door or next door. 'cause is that substantial detriment? Mm, I don't think so. I mean, is it detrimental to the aesthetic of the neighbors maybe? Is it in historical district? If it is, then historics gonna take a look at it. That's their thing. But, but we don't say we, we, we just don't say hey, that that's just not a good looking house in that neighborhood. 'cause I don't think that rises to the level of substantial detriment. So I think we stay on point within the bounds of, of the law
as, as we understand it and as it's been developed over many years and is ever changing. So I don't like it is not a reason not to approve it. Speaker 1: I had one other question for you. How often do associate members of the ZBA sit on decisions? Speaker 4: So we have, there is a rule in the bylaw that says that unless one of the five full members yes, is unavailable or is conflicted out, that the associate member gets to sit in. And so if there are five full members there
and none of them are conflicted, the associate members while they get to participate, they don't get to vote. Speaker 1: Thank you. Ms. Slager, did you have a question? No, no. Thank you. You can have a seat. Thank you. We're gonna stop the interview process now. I'd like to open it up for discussion. Any members of the board have comments to make in the discussion? Ms. Wilger, Speaker 5: I'm just gonna touch on one thing. It's not a critical thing, but it's important to me. And that's the comment about hybrid meeting. I feel personally that every meeting should be hybrid
in this town if possible. And I understand that people are, they have various degrees of technical comfort and not everyone does. But I, you know, someone that had no problem dealing with a 15 member board and running hybrid meetings, it can be done with help. And I would suggest that if members of the ZBA feel that they need assistance with that, that they do so because I think it's really important for us, we are public servants and the more that we can give the public the opportunity
to participate, not everyone is going to bother to write a letter. They might not feel capable of it, but they can listen and they can learn and they're not gonna come and just sit at a meeting. Not everyone has the ability to do that. So I am, I feel very strongly that I would like to see that maybe not this year, but in the future that someone on the ZBA make that happen. Thank you. Speaker 1: Any other comments by Mr. Evans? Yeah, Speaker 3: I just wanted to, since I initiated that question, I recognize that you, the ZBA has a lot of things
to get through on a given night. I look at your agenda and you got to create a delicate balance between hearing everything and giving people their due and rendering a decision. But I also see a lot of, and, and I've only seen anec, I shouldn't say anecdotal observations in watching some of the meetings that many items, as you said, you know, there are contentious thorny issues that get resolved outside of a meeting. So many of these issues get surfaced
and then the decision is continued until they're resolved. So I think having the option of a Zoom call would gather more of that input upfront and allow the ZBA to get the in informed information and, and frankly more buy-in from the neighborhood because they see, okay, they've listened to me, they're not going to make a decision tonight. They're gonna weigh what's available. I, I acknowledge there are technical obstacles,
but I think we all manage to get our way through life of Zoom relatively unscathed. And, and we came out the other side and I think we all understand, you know, how to unmute ourselves and, and how to have a good background and you know, everything that we've learned during that process. So I think it can be done. I, I agree with my colleagues that I'd like to see the ZBA do this. I, I I, an analogous thing would be the planning board. You, you have this, they have hybrid meetings, they have
substantial amounts of information and I think they get a lot of benefit by having it available on Zoom. So I'll stop there. Speaker 1: Anyone else? So we've heard through letters, some numerous letters over the weekend that it is extremely important to invite new blood and people who are stepping up and volunteering because we're constantly asking for volunteers. There's a caveat that seems to go unspoken. Land use law is extremely complicated. When I first joined the ZBA, even with a legal background,
the learning curve was steep. It was very steep. I was reading SJC cases, I was going through CLE continuing legal education materials and it was really steep. Luckily I was an associate member and I got to sit at the right hand of the river Rev revered Michael Hickey, who taught me everything I know about land use law. And that's not a lot. But I was on there for five years and was able to finally participate as vice chair. So quasi-judicial boards like the ZBA con com planning board,
although that's elected, require a level of expertise that's not easily acquired and you don't really get that level of expertise in two or three or four or six years. We've had letters that have said people shouldn't sit on a board longer than two terms or three terms. Well, in land use law, you're just catching your stride at the end of your second term if you're lucky and you pay attention. Now, when I was on the board, we did a lot of site visits, we didn't do them together. You know, you have the agenda a month ahead of time. So you look at it and you go, let me go just see, drive around the neighborhood. You look at the house, you look at the plans
and then you come prepared to the meeting. I don't know if this current board does that, but that is, that was not an unknown practice when I was on. So my only comment about I, so I agree completely with we need to reward people who step up and want to serve. We need to have new blood, new ideas, people who want to be part of serving the town of Natick. Completely agree. I also know the weight of not being an expert in these, these couple of different boards. 'cause we're not talking about the Council on Aging.
That's a different level of expertise, but that's not a legal level of expertise. And those, those are my only comments. What, what I've done since, and normally I run a much tighter meeting, but I wanted to give this process a very fair and full airing. And we've done that as chair. My practice when we have appointments is to do them by ballot and then announce ballot. So it's all open, but we're not, members of the board aren't influenced necessarily by the first person who makes a motion to appoint someone or not. Ms. Pope is participating virtually.
She will send her candidates to Mr. Erickson. I'd like right now for all of us to write your name on the back of your ballot, hand it down to Mr. Erickson. He will announce the appointments. Just one Speaker 4: Second if I may. Madam Chair, while we do that, you may, One of the things I recognize and, and this isn't particularly true of the zoning board of appeals, the zoning board of appeals is an independent quasi-judicial body.
Once we make appointments, we step back. We don't, yes, we don't have any authority at that point other than the appointment making authority. And I'm very cognizant of that. I had some complaints early in my first term that I was able to review with a former CBA member not on the select board and learn some things. And I, one of the things I learned is that until we get to appointments, my job is to step back and I just want to want the public to understand that once the appointments are made, the ZBA does
what it's supposed to do as a quasi-judicial body and completely independent of the select board. We don't actually have any authority over them other than this appointment process. Speaker 1: After Mr. Erickson makes the announcement, then I'd like to start with Ms. Pope and go down the row and all of us say who we voted for and then move on to discussion and decision. Speaker 2: How many seats are there? Speaker 1: There are three seats. Four candidates. Three seats for a term of three years each for Speaker 8: All right. So in order of what's on the sheet here, I'll go in order of the votes.
So Ms. Gail West and Roberts received five votes. Robert Eck Beck received four votes and then Michael Lynch and David Janowitz each received three votes. Speaker 1: Hmm. So we'll take another vote between Janowitz and Lynch. I think that's the prop. Oh, let's go through and say who we voted for. What's the proper order here? Because we have a tie for the third seat. Yeah, Speaker 2: I think we should Speaker 8: Say who we say you voted for and then go back. Ms. Pop. Yeah. Speaker 6: I voted for Mr. Lynch, Mr. Step Beck and Ms. Wein Roberts.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Speaker 4: I voted for Mr. Lynch, Mr. Beck and Ms. Wein Roberts. Speaker 3: I've voted for Mr. Jacobowitzs, Mr. Beck and Ms. Wein Roberts. Speaker 5: I voted for Mr. Jacobowitzs, Mr. Lynch and Ms. Weston Roberts. Speaker 1: I voted for Mr. Jacobowitzs, Mr. Beck and Ms. Weston Roberts. So I'm going to pass, I'm gonna take one of these right now we're just voting between, do you have a blank? Nevermind. We'll just put,
Speaker 3: You can write it on the back one. Speaker 2: I'll just take it on piece of paper Right now we're voting between, is this right? Yeah, just can you, this paper and Speaker 1: It's between Mr. Jow and Mr. Lynch. Speaker 2: Excuse me. All right. Speaker 8: So in the, the that vote, which was between Mr. Lynch and Mr. Jacobowitzs, three votes for Mr. Jow and two votes for Mr. Lynch. Speaker 1: So the remaining position is Mr. Jow. Mr. Jow, I would just ask that you check the CBA rules with regard to the chair and have a formal reorg meeting, even if it's just nobody else wants to do it.
Speaker 2: Okay, thanks very much Speaker 4: And I would strongly recommend you reconsider getting some help and running a hybrid meeting. Speaker 1: Okay, let's, let's move on. Ms. Weston Roberts, you'll need to, Billy Walsh will be in touch with you about how to be sworn in and next steps. So she'll, he'll send you an email. Thank you so much. Moving on to discussion decision. We're about 45 minutes behind and everyone knows how that makes me. So I Agenda item number A. We do not want that, do we? Thank you. We do not want that. So agenda item A, the hearing on Gatsby's chop house LLC has been continued
to July 9th, 2025. Item agenda, item number B, update on electricity aggregation. Procurement has been continued to the meeting on June 11th, 2025. So our next item agenda item is rate structure for electrical vehicle charging. Ms. Gillian Martin Wilson. Martin. Speaker 2: There you Speaker 1: Go. Speaker 9: Hi, thank you Jillian Wilson Martin, sustainability director for the town of Natick and I'm joined by Ben MacArthur, the sustainability coordinator for the town. He will be doing most of the presenting. He has an early flight tomorrow, so I advise him
to join remotely. I also appreciate hybrid meetings. We are here tonight to talk about the EV chargers and to ask the board for approval of a proposed rate structure. We'll try to be brief understanding that a lot of folks are here for other items. So Ben will be sharing his screen in a minute. But just as an overview, right now in Natick we have 12 EV chargers. We have an older model that was installed in the
2015 timeframe and those are located at the community senior center at the police in the back of the police fire station and on Pond Street in that parking lot between Pond and Central Street. And then we have nine other stations that are located throughout town. All the stations that are managed by the municipality are in municipal or school parking lots. And the older stations, if you just go to slide two when it's available, the older stations are non-network. So we can't actually charge people or require accept payment for charging a vehicle.
And the reason that that happened was because in 2015 there weren't a lot of electric vehicles at the time. And we installed them mainly to support EVs that the town received a grant to purchase and and operate, which is also why they're located in this proximity near town hall where we had municipal vehicles. The other stations, the nine stations which currently utilize ChargePoint software and our ChargePoint brand, those are networked and we do charge people to charge their vehicles. We accept payment, we have to pay a software fee to do that
and we pay for warranty and maintenance of those stations. So since we installed these stations, EVs and plugin vehicles have really grown substantially in Massachusetts and in Natick as well. And we have two charts on this slide that just demonstrates since 2020 how plugin vehicles have really become a bigger part of our vehicle inventory in the community among residents especially. So you can see how on the orange bar chart, how many plugin vehicles that includes electric
or plugin hybrid vehicles are registered in Natick. These are all residential, primarily residential vehicles. And then on the right, the pie chart, you can see just vehicles purchased in the last year that are registered in Natick, what percent are plugin or hybrid versus more traditional internal combustion engine vehicles. So it's been a really big increase over the last five years alone and definitely an even bigger increase in the last decade since we installed those first charging stations. Next slide, please. Understanding that we have a very tight capital budget.
We have been slow to replace those charging stations slower than I would've liked. And I know that the board has had discussions with residents about those stations, especially the older stations, the three that are located in Natick Center. And the reason that we have been slow in replacing them is because we wanted to do it right and there were grants and utility incentives that were available to replace the charging stations. And it took us a little bit of time to figure out what would actually make sense for Natick versus what the utility was wanting us to do. Right? And I'm really excited to share that Ben MacArthur,
my colleague, is gonna be presenting a rate structure for you after doing really a ton of research on this. And he was able to help us secure about $120,000 to cover 95 or more percent of the cost of replacing these stations and creating a rate structure and EV charging program for the public that can improve and expand the EV charging stations that we have in town support our municipal fleet as they start expanding to have more EVs align with state best practices,
which we have new guidance from the state on what best practices are, which we've included. And then also create a really financially sustainable program for this. Right now our current program has not been financially sustainable and the fact that we couldn't charge people for charging, we will be able to do that for all of the stations moving forward. So I'm gonna turn it over to Ben to share the rest of this. Speaker 10: So the best practices that Jillian mentioned come from the state. There's a couple of key points. One of them is that when we're setting a rate that works for both the town
and for the residents, you start with a baseline rate, which is usually the residential cost of electricity. And from there you, you have a small surcharge. So the idea is to have a rate that's accessible for people. There's a big equity aspect of this. It's not just providing a, a quick charging location for someone who's visiting or doing business downtown. Part of it is there's a lot of homes nearby, multi-dwelling units, especially that may not have either the financial means or just the space within their property to put in a designated home charger. So what we're doing in this case is creating
for what's likely a, initially a limited number of households is a quote unquote home charging location for them. And that's been a successful practice in other municipalities and encouraging the increasing EV adoption that Jillian mentioned we've seen happening in Natick. From there, we also wanna make sure that we're covering our own expenses. So Jillian mentioned before we were, you know, operating at a loss and that's been common with a lot of municipalities as the EV industry has just begun to roll out slowly but increasingly quicker over recent years. And part of that is taking all of the factors into account.
What a lot of municipalities have done up until recently is just count for the cost of electricity. What we're trying to also factor in now is the cloud or network fees that are required to operate the charger as well as the maintenance. So that includes parts and labor. If there are any issues with the charger, the amount that we need to charge for that to cover a, a full year's worth of warranty or network fees is relatively low. It's just a couple of cents, but it's something that we do want to account for to make it financially sustainable. The actual rate that we pick follows this best practice range between 30 and 40 cents per kilowatt hour.
This is for a level two charger. You may have seen higher numbers, especially on the highway for fast chargers. As of this time we're not installing any fast chargers in Natick. So the, the balance that we want to keep is not making it so high that it's out of reach for people or no one uses it while also keeping it competitive enough that we're not having people come, you know, from, from their home because they can get cheaper charging downtown than they could with their home charger because then you're creating too much demand and people who are relying on it for that quote unquote home charger can't get access to it
because there's a line in the parking lot. So I think the rate that we're going with fits the kinda toes, the line pretty well between the two, the three factors that go into the actual fee that we're going for, which is 35 cents a kilowatt hour. So right in the middle of that recommended range of 30 to 40. It comes from electricity. The network and maintenance, the electricity fee is relatively easy to calculate. It's an average of just under 26 cents per kilowatt hour. That's what the town has to pay for electricity when someone plugs in
and uses a town charger. The network option that we're going with through the company ready is the most affordable one on the market right now for a network charger. And the way that works is rather than charge the municipality a monthly or annual fee, they just take a percentage or a flat fee, in this case, 5 cents a kilowatt hour from the user, from the person charging every time they plug in. So in this case, if we were to charge 35 cents per kilowatt hour, 5 cents would go to ready and then the other 30 cents would go to the town.
And finally, for maintenance, we calculated that only 1 cent per kilowatt hour is needed to cover a relatively low parts fee for the warranty for the stations. And just to be safe, we added in buffers for two of these. So for electricity, we're adding in one sense, just because the cost of electricity often does go up incrementally, and that's likely to happen within the next year. And we don't want to be consistently raising the rates. It's again, following those best practices, not something that EV users like to see. So it's giving us a little bit more breathing room in the beginning.
And two is an extra 2 cents per kilowatt hour for any labor. The chargers do come with a full warranty for the first year for parts and labor. After that first year, the, the labor portion of it is not covered. It's our understanding through a lot of research and talks with installers and nearby municipalities that it's the fast chargers that generally have more technical issues and require more maintenance. The level two chargers, that industry has come a long way and they, the newer ones that are on the market now really don't break that often. You know, and any, any charger that you take that's produced now is unlikely to have a,
a breakdown in its lifetime. But in the event that that does occur, we want to be prepared for that financially. So that 2 cents per kilowatt hour should cover that. Going back to the, the general best practice range of 30 to 40 cents, this is the current rate structure of nearby municipalities. This is the municipal rate. So if there's a private charger or a a company or a gas station operating a charger in one of these municipalities, that wouldn't be reflected here. These are the municipal rates. The majority of municipalities have now moved to this range of between 30 and 40 cents.
For a long time it was below 30 cents a kilowatt hour. As towns were treating it more as providing a service and somewhat of a bridge for a new industry to encourage adoption, to get the public more comfortable with it, and then to cover just the cost of electricity. In a lot of discussions with municipalities over the last years, there's been more of an effort to take into account all of the factors that go into operating a station and making it financially sustainable. So doing 35 cents a kilowatt hour puts us right in the middle of that range. I think it's important to note that around the 40 cent mark,
there's research that shows people really won't use the charger if you go on the higher end and just from doing a lot of calculations, if you go closer to the 30 cent mark, that's still within the best practice range, but there still would be a, a cost to the town at the end of the day because you're not taking all of the factors into consideration. This is again, just another summary and a breakdown of those fees and how we got it 35 cents per kilowatt hour. So just a summary, because this is for the operating fee, it's gonna cover all of the costs. We won't have to make any adjustments for the new future
because it's taken that into consideration and it really encourages public use from an equity standpoint while covering everything but not encouraging abuse of the rate. People who have a charger at home will still likely use that overnight. The people who don't will be able to use this. The second fee is the idling fee. This one is a slightly more complicated to pin down. There's less research on it. Not all municipalities employ this. It really depends on the location. But the idea behind an idling fee is after if someone finishes charging their vehicle, the charger can recognize that.
And oftentimes there's a grace period, a varying time that gives them a set number of minutes or hours after that grace period ends. After their charge has finished, they start getting charged either an hourly or per minute fee if they don't move the vehicle. And the idea is just to encourage turnover so everyone has a fair chance to use the charger. It's important to note that any general parking restrictions or enforcement that's in place in a municipal lot would supersede this. So if there's a lot say behind police fire where there's only a certain number of hours
that someone is allowed to charge, that stays in effect during those hours of enforcement, this won't conflict with that and that's gonna be likely a shorter period of time than the grace period that we would put in. So on any given, you know, weekday, this won't have an impact. The idea behind the gr the idling fee is really to discourage people from leaving a car throughout the weekend. And we've had communication with the police department and they have noted in particular that in the charger in the back of their lot, there are sometimes vehicles that will stay there for a very extended period of time.
So the idea is on the one hand, to not put in a rate that people feel is detrimental to using it at all, but at the same time encourage them to move on when they finish the charge. The best practice range that we got from the state is between three and $12. And that just speaks to this being more of an unknown variable and being very location dependent. And it's something that I think we're gonna have to just be flexible with and see how things go. One, seeing are people moving quickly enough and speaking to the police department again and making sure that they're happy with what we're seeing.
And two, that people, in this case, people being the residents are feeling that that's a fair and comfortable rate. The way that we think we should implement this is not on a per hour, but on a per minute basis. And that's what the best practices recommends. Just so if someone gets there on the 61st minute, they're not being charged for a full second hour and it feels more fair. The grace period that we're recommending of 12 hours does seem large at first, but the idea is if someone plugs in their car in the evening, and again, this is all contingent on overnight parking being allowed at some point,
if they plug in their car in the evening and generally an evening will charge in six or seven hours, we don't want them to feel like they have to get up at two or three in the morning and go move their vehicle. If that's the case, people just aren't gonna do it. So the grace period allows them time until the morning to move their vehicle and again, come morning time, those standard daytime parking limits are in effect. It's is really more for the weekend. So someone can't park on a Friday and move it Monday morning. So the, the four general takeaways that we want to have after the first year are one, the chargers that we're putting in the software on.
It allows us to collect very detailed data on the, the usage, the utilization, the times that people are using them, especially with the idling fees. How often we need to actually enforce that. It'll sh we'll be able to see how often do the chargers break down. It gives us a sense of, is this fee that we're charging of one, two, or 3 cents for maintenance accurate? The overnight parking is something that we'll just continuously work on. Again, we would need to wait for that role to go into effect and then work with the police department to make sure that they're happy with the rules that we have in place. And finally, electricity rates do change.
So it's usually not an a lot, we don't anticipate it being significant within a one year period, which is why we think that 1 cent buffer would cover everything. Speaker 9: So with, and now we'll Speaker 10: Turn it back to Speaker 9: Jillian. Yeah. So with that, we welcome your feedback. We do have on slide 16, or sorry 10 a request of the board, which would be first we would commit to providing the board with an annual accounting. We could do it more frequently at your preference regarding the EV charging. We're committed to making this a financially sustainable program for the town. And then we are requesting your permission to adopt our,
the recommended charging structure, which would, as listed on the slide, would have an operating fee or per kilowatt hour rate of 35 cents, and then an idling fee of 15 cents per minute after 12 hours or $9 per hour. With a caveat that we would like your permission to adjust the operating costs in tandem with the cost of electricity as those rates change potentially without coming back to the board for that. And also to work with the police department. We've been, we spoke to the police chief about this, this meeting and what we were sharing tonight, just to
make sure that that rate isn't egregious. We don't really know yet if that, how effective the idling rate would be. So with that, we're happy to answer questions and Speaker 1: Thank you Ms. Wilson. Martin, Mr. Sydney, Speaker 4: Thank you first to comment, I, I have a plugin hybrid. I get about 42 miles before I have to switch to gasoline. And I charged the car during town meeting. I charged the car up at Wilson. 'cause I can't tell how much it costs at home. Basically, it doesn't blip my electric bill at all. And based on this is just, it's,
it's an interesting statistic statistics here, based on sort of some rough averages, the equivalent cost of electricity through a public charger runs me to about $2 a gallon. Mm. So it's equivalent of, of two, if gasoline costs $2 a gallon for electricity, which I think is pretty impressive and definitely a better way to go. The second question is more for the administration. I was wondering if you would consider sitting up a revolving
fund for that 3 cents. A kilowatt hour for that would be devoted to warranty and maintenance. Because one of the problems we've had, especially in Pond Street, is that there's no way to get the thing repaired without going through town meeting. And if there were, it seems to me, and I may be wrong, which seems to me if there was a revolving fund that it should something arise. And these are very reliable according to what we just heard, but should something arise, we'd have the money available to repair them fairly quickly. Speaker 9: Just in respond to that. So we actually did consult the
deputy town administrator about that. We, we talked about should we create a new revolving fund for this period. But we do believe that the new revolving fund that was established at time meeting last fall can accept these payments and that we would be able to use that funding to support maintenance. Speaker 4: Great. Thank you Ms. Speaker 5: Wilger. Thank you Jillian. And thank you Ben for this very informative presentation. Just a, a couple clarifying things. So this rate would apply to the existing non nine stations
as well as to the 10 new stations? Correct. Speaker 9: So it would, it's, it's not 10 new stations plus the nine stations. So we would be replacing, this is gonna start to get kind of like detailed. So sorry if this is getting into the weeds, we would be replacing the three AeroVironment stations, the ones in Natick Center at the senior center. That one would be, would remain a one for one replacement, just swapping it out at the police station. We would actually be adding two more state. We would be swapping one out and then adding two more. So expanding the number of charging at that location.
And then at Pond Street we would be swapping one out and also adding another one. And then the remaining stations, we would be replacing four of the nine ChargePoint stations. Initially those would be at East JJ Lane Cole, and at Doug Pond and then at the West Ntic fire station. We haven't figured out our plan for that station yet because there's some challenges with parking there. And there are requirements with the, the grant that require change modifications to the parking that increase accessibility of the stations.
And we haven't come to a agreement about what's right for that location. And then we need to work more closely with the public schools regarding the stations at the Kennedy Middle School, which both the West Natick fire and the Kennedy projects are both tied into the building. Were a part of those building committee decisions. Speaker 5: Okay. So net how many of the, how many stations would the, these rates apply to? Speaker 9: It would apply to the right that the, the rate would apply to all of the stations regardless of if they're new or old. Speaker 5: So how many in total? Speaker 9: So in total it would be,
I wanna say 13. I'm sorry, I'm having a little bit of hard time doing the math around my head, but we're adding, we're adding three more. So it would be, it would be 15 stations, sorry, Speaker 5: Yes, 15 Speaker 9: Fifteens. Okay. One five. Speaker 5: Okay. Do you know right now if someone parks in one of these, these spaces that is not using the electricity, do we ticket them? Do we do anything if, if there's a, a, you know, car that's parked there that is not using the electricity Speaker 9: In the Natick Center area where we have parking enforcement at the two stations at at
Pond Street and at police fire, not at the community senior center, there is enforcement. That happens. I think it can sometimes vary. And in talking with the police department, these, the updated stations will also come with new signage that we will further clarify what's allowed in those spaces basis. Speaker 5: Alright. So when you said it takes about six to seven hours to fully charge a car, is the owner notified in any way? Is there an app or something that will let them know that their car has been charged?
Speaker 9: Yes. There, I'll let Ben speak to the app a little bit more specifically, but they do let you know when your car is charged. Speaker 5: Okay. I mean, that's fine. Speaker 10: Go ahead. Yeah, you're required to use a, a QR reader on your phone, which then gives you access to an app where you then sign up and you pay through the app. There's no credit card reader on it. So because you're using that app, the app sends notifications and it lets you know when it's done charging. Okay. Speaker 4: And I get my notifications both through the app and on an email. Speaker 9: Right. That happens at our existing stations, at our networked. Speaker 5: All right, so now I'm getting in more into the meat of this. Now, the idling fee that starts from,
not from when the car is charged, but from when you park there, Speaker 9: No, 12 hours from when you plug in. So the idling fee, the only way that the idling fee, so the idling fee would kick in after 12 hours of having your car plugged in. So the charging software doesn't know if you're parked there and you're not plugged in. But it does know if you still are connected. And that's how it would be calculated. Speaker 5: So if you come home after work and go to charge your car, 'cause it takes six hours if you come home at six o'clock, if you're not out of there by 6:00 AM then you're gonna have to pay fees.
That's what I'm trying to understand how this works logistically, the Speaker 10: Idling fee kicks in after you finish charging. Okay. Just to clarify. So if you plug in at 6:00 PM say you finish at 1:00 AM you'd have until 1:00 PM the following afternoon to move the vehicle. Speaker 5: All right, thank you. That makes a lot more sense. I was, that's what I was trying to, to figure out. So what happens in the case of a, a snow emergency or something like that where I know that we allow the Pond Street lot to be used for other vehicles, would then they be subject
to this idling fee. Is is there any provision for overriding it under certain circumstances? Speaker 10: I think that's a great question. And that goes to the, the flexibility that Gillian mentioned we're asking for. We, we do have the ability through the, the management portal of the, the ready software to change that. So, you know, on any given weekend, you know, the majority of weekends it's not snowing, we would leave it at the default. But if we know there is a sperm coming, we would have the ability to go in and either right, temporarily change it,
or what some municipalities do is they put a cap on it. I don't know if we want to do that right away. And speaking to the police, it sounds like there are some people that will plug in on a Friday and move on a Monday. You know, that wasn't a fictitious example. So, you know, having no cap would allow that to or putting a cap in, you know, may, if the cap is reached, someone may decide to just leave the vehicle, but we could temporarily put one in. So what some municipalities will do is say, you know, you are gonna be charged $9 an hour after 12 hours,
but for no more than say nine hours. Just so again, you know, it, it could not be a snowstorm, but also a medical or emergency. Someone doesn't want to wake up and have a a $500 bill. That wouldn't be our intention. Speaker 3: All right. Thank you. Great idea Speaker 1: Mr. Evans. Yeah, Speaker 3: This is probably a question more for the police department and, and it deals with the parking in an EV space and is there any state law that governs that? Is there, Speaker 9: The grant does govern it to the extent that it's enforceable. We will have the space to stripe for EVs.
The ones behind police fire will say ev slash kiosk because of your parking at, and same, same with Pond Street. If you're parking in an ev spot, in a metered spot, then you'll also be expected to pay for pay the meter. Right now it's not perfect where you can't pay for the meter through the software and the, and speaking with the chief, we don't wanna put this burden of his meter readers to come and the parking enforcement officers to look at two different softwares and they're, and doing their job. But that's something we hope to solve in the future.
Speaker 3: Okay. So but if, if, if they're just sitting there and not using the ev the question I'm asking is, is what recourse does the police have in terms of giving them a ticket or a fine? Is there anything on the books for that Speaker 9: The police would have the authority to give them a ticket? I don't, I can't speak to, yeah, I Speaker 3: Think that's what's on the books or not. That's sort of takeaway question. Yeah, that I'd like to answer. Thank you. Oh, by the way, great job. Yeah, this is, Speaker 1: Thanks Ms. Pope. Speaker 6: Yes. Great job Ms. Wilson Martin and Mr. MacArthur.
My question was in alignment with Ms. Wes logger's question, and it may have been answered, but I was wondering about people who might keep their car overnight. Would this become like a charging station for people who, who just wanted to keep their car overnight and what are your thoughts around that? Or is that something that we currently see? Speaker 9: We do actually currently see that already. And the police do allow people to charge overnight and they don't ticket them over the weekend. So we believe that it is a benefit to the community to have overnight ev charging available. But I know that the board and staff are working on a larger plan related
to parking in Natick Center specifically. And so as that evolves, I think this rate structure would evolve too. Speaker 1: Thank you Ms. Julian Martin, we have, so are there any questions from anyone in the room or comments? I, I know I just wanna point out that we have a staff, heavy night staff who've been here all day today and they're still in the room waiting to present. So I'd like to move through the, there are two people on Zoom with I understand, I'm just getting there. And so I just want us to be mindful to keep on topic. So JR if you could unmute yourself. Speaker 11: Hello, I have a comment
and multiple questions on this if I may. Speaker 1: Let's start with the comment. Speaker 11: I'd like to remind Mr. Sidney that $2 gas prices were there under the 45th president and I think we're heading in that direction as well. Speaker 1: That's outside the scope of this. Could you go onto your questions please? Speaker 11: It's a comment he made about gas prices. Speaker 1: I understand that it's outside the scope of the presentation, so if you have questions about the presentation, let's stay focused. Speaker 11: That's a comment that Mr. Missin wants to make. Then I would like to rebut it, cold weather charging what we saw in Chicago over the last winter. How is that gonna affect the Chargers when we're in severe
weather and people are waiting in line to charge your cars is, Speaker 10: It's a different use case. I, I followed that too. I think a lot of what we saw in Chicago, the, the lines backing up, that's people kind of charging on the fly and that is, that's fast charging and that's a a different world of charging. What we're putting in is, in the grand scheme of things, a relatively small number of level two chargers. A lot of people, if you're using this as your primary charger or mechanism for getting around, you'd be charging overnight whether there's a storm or not.
You, you'd still be charging overnight. What we saw in Chicago is people who are traveling who got stuck because a lot of people were trying to charge it months and then continue moving on. So that'd be a different scenario. Speaker 1: Next Speaker 11: Question. I know there was a lot of people I know that was a lot of people with, to follow up with that I know there's a lot of people that were within the city that were upset about the charging and they couldn't charge their cars. Speaker 1: Cars. Do you have a second question? Speaker 11: I'm just following up on his answer. Speaker 1: I just, I really wanna move through this presentation and you said you had a lot of questions, so I wanna Speaker 11: Well, I understand. So like I don't feel like that answer suffices. Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 11: So it was, it was people
that live within the city that were frustrated with the charging. And I, I feel that this is very important to this situation. Like it on in cold weather. We get very cold weather here, like in Chicago and it was people within the city that were freaking out that they couldn't charge a car, go to the grocery store, get prescriptions or do like simple tasks. Speaker 10: Ben, did you have anything else you wanted to add? I think that's a, that's a valid, it's a valid point. I think what we're, what we're doing is working towards fixing that. I think the answer and the takeaway with what happened in Chicago is they, they didn't have enough infrastructure. They don't have enough chargers.
You know, it's interesting because you look at a country like Norway, which has a significantly higher number of EV ownership and overall EVs than they have in Chicago and they have much colder weather and they don't have problems like that. And it's because they, they have the infrastructure in place and that's what we're working towards. We we're putting in more chargers. So it's a a step towards addressing what you're mentioning. Speaker 11: Thank you, I appreciate that follow up. And then what percentage of the electricity actually comes from like solar farms and like renewable energy and what percentage comes from fossil fuels? Speaker 9: That is a bit of a complicated question
and I don't mean to try to not answer it, but a lot of it depends on the state and the renewable portfolio standards requirements that they have. So in Natick, our EV charging stations are part of our municipal aggregation program and the approximately 60% or more comes from solar and class one renewable energy that is in our region. So from wind and solar in New England,
and I, I think I'm low balling that number actually, but it's available on the aggregation website. Speaker 11: The last time I looked about two years ago, we were about 23% renewable energy and it's still 77% fossil fuels. Speaker 9: There's, there's a difference between what is shown on the ice New England grid for the percentage of renewable energy versus what happens at a municipal level or at a contract level for any electric account. So as a homeowner, you actually have a choice to procure however much renewable electricity you want for your home.
So that's a, a decision that is made through a procurement process here in Natick through, Speaker 11: So it different Speaker 9: In Natick necessarily then it's different in Framingham or Wellesley or the grid as a whole. Speaker 11: Understood. That was like Massachusetts as a whole and from the state website, not national grid or anything like that. And then as far as like rate increases, I know a lot of citizens are concerned about rate increases throughout the town. So if electrical rate increases, I feel like there should be a buffer with that.
You guys were talking about having a set rate for a year, but we've seen over the past two or three years where there'll be electrical rate increases within six months. So I feel like should, there should be a rolling thing where if electrical rates increase then the electrical rate should increase at these charging stations as well to reflect and not put a deficit, as was said before, that this has been operating at a deficit. Speaker 9: That's actually, Speaker 10: And we, we agree with that and that's, that's what's built into this
and it's one of the two asks, it's on the, the slide right now that we have the flexibility to adjust the rate in tandem with any changes in the electric rate. Speaker 11: I know you said it was over a year, but I feel like a year even. Like a year's a year, right. And it seems like a short time, but we've seen Speaker 10: No, within a year we would come back and we would reevaluate the, the entirety of the charging program, but within that year there likely would be multiple times you're right when the electric rate would increase and we would wanna be flexible and change that relatively quickly. That that's one of the asks is not to wait a full year
to reevaluate, but leading up to that one year period to change it in accordance with any changes in the electric rate. So it happened pretty quickly. Speaker 11: All right, perfect. Thank you for all your answers. I just, one last question with the, just the mini municipality fleet and increasing, whether it's hybrids or complete electric vehicles, I know there's, I don't, I haven't seen anything that there's a way to have, you know, refurbished batteries on electric vehicles. So as you know, being green
and if there's no way to re fabricate these, these batteries and fully electric vehicles, they're gonna go into a landfill. They have half lifes and it's worse for the environment than fossil fuels are. I just feel like going full Fleet electric is not healthy for the environment. And if you guys could comment on, if you know more than I do, if there's some sort of refurbishment with full electric vehicle batteries and they're not gonna be in landfills and destroying our environment for the rest of eternity.
Speaker 1: Thank you for your questions. Would you like to address that Ms. Wilson Martin? Speaker 9: Sure. I would just start by saying we agree with you that we are not interested in electrifying the full fleet right away. Our plan is to start with light duty vehicles mostly for inspection or vehicles that don't have any plowing needs. We're very focused on things that meet the operational needs of the town and have worked very closely in tandem with our fleet equipment maintenance supervisor. Regarding your question about pollution, I think that's an issue in that we're interested in seeing
how it improves over time and I do know that there are small scale, small scale solutions to that that are currently, you know, in the more early stages of development and I look forward to seeing them come to fruition. I think that's everyone's hope. Speaker 10: And I think just to add to that quickly, you know that that is a valid point. If you were to take the, the environmental impact for manufacturing an electric vehicle versus an an internal combustion engine vehicle, the electric vehicle does have a higher environmental impact just from that production cost. However, on an annual basis, on an operating basis, the
emissions are so much lower from an electric vehicle than the gas vehicle that after, usually it depends on the vehicle, but anywhere from two and a half to four years you reach that break even point. And from that point on, because of the lower operating environmental impact from the ev, it ends up being less harmful to the environment over the lifetime of the vehicle when, you know, given that a vehicle can last 10, 15, 20 years, the EV in the long run is better off for the environment. And I do think when you combine that with, you know, as Jillian mentioned, it's an emerging technology when you
factor in the potential for starting to salvage and recycle more of the material in the battery, that that distance between the two would only increase Speaker 1: Laura's iPhone. Speaker 12: Oh, hello. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, great. So I was just curious if you were able to tell the usage of the charging stations that do not charge a fee and how much that has been, and I think it was mentioned they came in around 2015 and also if those would be the ones that would be replaced first, because I'm assuming those, that
those are being covered by tax dollars. And correct me if I'm wrong. Speaker 9: Yes, you're no, you're correct that we don't have a way of accepting payment for those and that's something we're trying to solve through this program. We do intend to replace those first. Our plan is to replace the one at the community senior center first, followed by the two in a police fire in Pond Street. The community senior center is a priority for us because they're, the nat connector is an electric bus and it would be best served by charging at the community senior center. Regarding your question about data, we, because we don't have software for these stations, we don't have really excellent data about their usage
beyond the number of kilowatt hours used, which is a good proxy for usage. I will say that those stations, because they're free, as you would expect, they have the greatest usage usage. So that's why we're asking for some flexibility in this first year as Ben mentioned learning because it'll be interesting to see what, what that usage is like when you do have to pay to use them. And we believe that is the, the smart decision for the town. Speaker 12: So do you have that information available like the, the kilowatt usage? I mean you could use that to estimate how much tax dollars has covered that, right? Speaker 9: I don't have it with me tonight,
but we could look through the data from those electric bills. Yes. Speaker 12: Okay. That would be great. Speaker 1: Board members, we have two asks before us. I'd like to know if you have any feedback on, on the two asks. Ms. W Wilger? Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm, I'm comfortable with the operating rate, the idling rate. I think, I'm hope hopeful that this will work, but I would like to make sure that there's some flexibility if it, if it turns out
to be problematic in some way, that we can come back and adjust that, you know, in a shorter time period than a year. 'cause you're not asking for flexibility to adjust that piece. You're only asking for flexibility to adjust the cost of electricity. So I'm, I'm hoping that if, if it isn't working out for whatever reason, that you'll come back and, and we can adjust that. Speaker 1: It, it does say staff to adjust within best practice range in coordination Speaker 5: With the, with the police department. But that doesn't, that's not say timeframe, that's just, Speaker 1: I'm not sure the coordination with the police department other than
for information purposes is necessary. I think staff should make that decision. Speaker 9: Our time would be to coordinate with the police department to understand like if it's being effective or they're getting a lot of complaints. I feel like they might get the complaint first about it. Sure, of course. Yeah. So, but yes, we did wanna be able to adjust it without waiting for a meeting if we found it wasn't working at all or it needed to be tweaked. Speaker 1: Mr. Evans? Speaker 4: No, I was just gonna ditto that. Speaker 1: Okay. I'll entertain a motion. Oh, Ms. Pope, I'm sorry I didn't see your hand. It's tiny on the screen. Sorry about that. Speaker 6: It is tiny on the screen. That's okay.
I was thinking similarly, there's this, the slide that talks about, you know, evaluating in a year. I'm, I'm fine with it. You know, with the flexible evaluation processes, I think this is is a good plan forward Speaker 1: Mr. Sydney. Speaker 4: I move approval of the operating rate of 35 cents a kilowatt hour with staff to adjust in tandem with cost of electricity and an idling rate of $9 per hour. Charge per minute staff to adjust or tweak as needed. Second Speaker 1: Moved by Mr. Sydney, seconded by Mr. Evans. Roll call vote.
Ms. Pope? Speaker 6: Yes, Speaker 1: Mr. Sidney? Speaker 4: Yes. Speaker 1: Mr. Evans? Yes. Ms. Slager? Yes. And I'm a yes. The only thing I would ask is that maybe in six months if we could have a a say January, have a report based on what you found instead of waiting for a full year. I wouldn't amend the motion but I'm real flexible on that. Speaker 9: Sure, absolutely we can, we would be happy to do that. And there was one other point if you don't mind. I would like to just add regarding the usage of those stations in Natick Center, those are also highly utilized by staff. So we do have EV vehicles that are currently driven by admin
or by town administrative staff in this building. And so we can't really do justice to understanding what was used by the public versus by the municipality, which is just similar to how we're paying gas as a municipality for our municipal vehicles. So just fogging that. But thank Speaker 1: You so much. Thank you for that. Thank you so much. I'm going to take a couple of items out of order. As I mentioned earlier, we have, we're staff heavy tonight, they've worked all day. It's nine o'clock at night. So I want us to stay on, on topic
and moving through these relatively quickly. First I'm gonna poll the board. Does anyone have any questions for Ms. Loomis regarding 69 Central Street's lip application, which is item F on the consent agenda? No, no. Ms. Oger Speaker 2: I did but I, if they're not done at work. Speaker 1: Okay, Ms. Polk, did you have any questions about the lip application? So we're gonna leave that on the consent agenda and Ms. Loomis can Speaker 2: For the house Speaker 1: Take off for the night. Bye Amanda. Bye Amanda. Thank you so much you Amanda. Thanks Amanda. So we'll leave that on the consent agenda. We have a number of people here who are for the Johnson future use updates, so I'd like to take
that ahead of the finance team update. I think that that's gonna have fewer, I think the Johnson school use is going to have fewer questions than the financial update. So I'd like to invite Mr. Povich up. Speaker 2: Sure. Speaker 8: Lemme just make sure you're also able to share. So for you tonight and, and we have a, a brief presentation that Jay will provide to the board. We're really working through the, these initial steps of the Johnson engagement process and the outreach process which will help inform the board's ultimate decision in time.
You know, this is a multi-year process that we've outlined for the board at a prior meeting and ultimately what we're going to be, are you able to share Jay, Speaker 2: I'm going into the meeting. Speaker 8: Okay. And ultimately what we are going to be outlining for you tonight is just this next step in the process and Jill, I'll get into much more detail. What we're looking for tonight is alignment with the board and our understanding and some of the feedback that the board provided at the prior meeting where we talked about the Johnson school work. And that will give us the direction moving forward from tonight as we sort of roll out what you're gonna see,
and I'm just trying to make sure Jay is on here and I'm gonna make you a co-host so that you can share your screen. Lemme make you cohost first before you request. There you go. You should be able to share your screen now. So Jay has a series of slides that we'll run through and also some of the survey work that we gathered in the last several weeks, including the flash flow survey analysis and, and gel run through some of the details from that as well. Anything else you need me to provide for background? Nope. Great. All right. If it's okay with you, Mr, Mr Chair, I'll pass over. Jay please. Speaker 13: Awesome. So Jay Port Paddock town communications director.
I've got two sort of presentations, one on the flash vote that's six pages and then one on the summary of upcoming meetings of the next six months. I can do each of them in about 10 minutes of discussion from me and then open it up from the board and I'll follow the board's lead. So I'm gonna walk through first the flash vote survey that was done earlier this month in May. This was open for a 48 hour period via this flash vote platform. This was May 7th through May 9th. And then on May 9th, after you were one of the 943 people
that did the survey, you would've received the results on five nine. And then this will be a quick summary. I would encourage folks to think about this as a single tool or set of inputs over a two and a half year process. Flash vote itself is just one of many different ways. And again, the second topic will actually be going through different meetings. We're gonna talk ultimately kind of at a 30,000 foot view. Feel free to ask more detailed questions, but I'll just try to keep it relatively high level. So three primary findings that I'd encourage people to walk away with this survey. On average, seven outta 10 people prefer one of two
particular use cases around open space parks and fields or community or recreation building. If you take those two top choices and compare them against the next three choices, that's 129% difference. That in the world of, you know, survey findings and statistics is a fairly significant, there are two very clear preferred use cases according to this particular survey. Number two, we asked a question around do we just want a combination of uses more than one or just a single use case? And there was a preference in general alignment towards a combination of uses as opposed to just a single one.
And lastly, we asked a pretty pointed question around as we work through this Johnson project over a two and a half year period and we balance the fact that it's clearly in the Johnson neighborhood, how do we think about the sort of input, and I'll use the word input versus influence. And then the survey result really came back with a series of interesting results, which we'll walk through in detail, but it ultimately says greater access to input for the Johnson neighborhood while balancing that with ultimately allowing all residents to have the same influence. And again, ultimately this is a board decision. So this will be the five select board members voting two
plus years from now with the public participating along the way. So those are your top three findings. Is this survey data valid is just kind of an interesting question. I'll just walk through a couple areas. When looking at 37,000 residents, 25,000 registered voters, 20,000 adults over the age of 18, and you take a look at those different views of data, what flash vote enables you to do is put what they refer to as filters. So we had a total number of responders, all responses of 943 individuals. Those are defined as someone who registers
and gives us their various demographics and someone who doesn't register an unregistered user. So all of the data that we're gonna talk about at just, at least on this first slide, is that a 95 statistical, 95% statistical significance That just means is it a real impact and is the finding valid versus a more random or by chance 95% is kind of the gold standard. The US census data that you see available is calculated 90 percentage points. Corporate America makes decision at 80 and 85. Very frequently it's more directional, 95%, very rigorous.
Then you look at the margin of error and I'll talk through the other two filters. You look at a margin of error and that's kind of the upper and lower bound plus or minus. So if you're around four percentage points, plus or minus it, it may not work for a drug trial. That's important life or death. But when you're talking about subjective public input on a important decision around the Johnson future use four percentage points is typically a gold standard as well. So combining those two, you know, makes us feel good about the data local only, that's someone who registers with a local address in the NA town of Natick.
And then the member panel, those are individuals who were pre-registered prior to the point that the survey deployed. It's an interesting one, especially with an emotional topic like Johnson future use. It gives you a sense as people come into the survey panel, these are registered users on the member panel, it gives you kind of a, a checkpoint or a gut check is did we get a subset of bias data that may or may not represent the totality of Natick. So that's a checkpoint on the member panel. Additionally, on note one, we did a custom radius around the Johnson property, so 99 south Main Street
and we looked at an arbitrary one mile radius and I worked with a flash vote team on this. This allows us to ultimately draw that one mile radius, but you know, for those that remember they're PI calculations, that's about three square miles, 3.14 versus a 16 square mile town. So we can look at near Johnson as a definition versus other local. So that gives us an interesting cut. I then took a look at the near Johnson, that was 170 individuals versus the other local that was 4 29. That total aggregates to the local only up above the 5 99.
But looking at those, the subset of flash vote responders, let's just take the near Johnson and the one mile radius versus the total population, that's an interesting two percentage point sample and that's consistent if we look at the other local, the non Johnson neighborhood. So the fact that those two are both around a similar ratio of two percentage points says that we have equal representation of those two groups. I'll now just, and sorry I didn't give you guys the visual says I was talking through that bottom. Feel free to let me know if I messed that up again. So flipping over to page two,
I'm just gonna walk through question one. Question one, this is what we just reviewed as the primary finding. This is if you pay attention to anything, focus on this particular one. We ask individuals ultimately what makes the most sense for future use at the Johnson property. Those top two responses were, you know, 129% percentage points versus the next subset. If you're looking on the screen or if you have printouts, you're looking at black and white apologies. But the three orange boxes ultimately comparing the averages of those areas versus the green box, the top two responses,
that's 129 percentage point difference. So this is, this was a significant gap between the top two choices versus otherwise. There's some more nuanced areas. If you start to break this down as we go through the next few charts. When you look at the gray, that's all responses. If you look at the near Johnson, that's Blue Johnson's, blue and yellow that seem to make sense. Other local, that'll be your non Johnson neighborhood. So those, if you look at housing for instance, 20, 24, 22 and 30 are the various data filters for
that particular response. And a lot of the interesting insights come from comparing the Johnson neighborhood where it fundamentally is closer to home for those individuals who live there versus the other local. So I'm not gonna read through the additional call outs, they're noted there, but it's a rather consistent story. There's some nuances in the data, but again, those top two choices popped quite a bit when you, you had an ability. The other, if you look at the very bottom, that's an open-ended response. I'm not gonna get into it here, but you can click on that link and see the AI summary. This whole report is entirely unbiased to,
ultimately AI is telling us what to believe and think ultimately the board will decide, the general public can weigh in. If you look at those open-ended responses, there was a sample of 96 people who chose to fill in other, and the top response was around recreation and pools. The next response was around affordable housing and senior housing. The third response was geared around, I believe a recreation center. But again, all 96 responses are linked there. I think this is a 30,000 foot view as we or we are in month two of a two year process. What is the general public kind of sentiment
around particular use cases? And I think we have a pretty good sense of that. Moving on to question two, this was the combination verse single use question. We asked individuals whether or not they would be, you know, prefer a combination use. You can see in the green box there, that was the preferred over the single use. If you do the average of those various three filters and compare the green areas of combination versus single, that's about a ultimately a 32% difference. An increase towards combination.
I will say that the not sure bucket has about, you know, roughly a third of the population. There's a lot of different, you know, thoughts and hypotheses as it's relatively early in the process. Different people have different interpretation of the data. I mean, surveys are meant to be aggregated. Summary datas, they're not meant to understand anecdotes and individuals opinions. That's what, you know, additional meetings, what consumer marketing research would refer to as focus groups. We, the government refer to 'em as public meetings and that's where you talk to the public and try to understand the why. Question three, this is where we started to under try
to understand the difference that people might feel about input and influence. Again, the way to read this particular re survey question, blue is gonna be the near Johnson. Red is gonna be the other local, the top, there's a lot of text if you look at chart C, but I just did a quick overlay. The top response is ultimately saying more input, more influence. For Johnson, it's a Johnson heavy response. The middle ground is really ultimately more input for Johnson versus the same influence for all in Natick.
And ultimately that, and that ends up being kind of the middle ground. You definitely see a spike in the blue for Johnson around more input, more influence. I don't think that's gonna shock anyone, but that puts a quantifiable number against it. But the idea that even the Johnson near Johnson individuals at 31%, nearly a third of them felt that that middle ground was appropriate. Whereas if you ask Johnson all, you know, every, all had the same input, all have the same influence. That was a six percentage point. So it drops pretty dramatically. But I think an interesting, you know, thought
and I encourage the board to discuss and have that conversation of how do you balance this local, you know, impact, you know, to the Johnson neighborhood while ultimately this is a decision that you know, the entire community will have some degree of interest if you will, but input, input and influence a different construct to think about dividing those and just thinking differently then onto question four, this question was a little bit of what other statements do you do you also agree with?
And there was quite a few. This was a, I would say, of the five questions, this is the most difficult to make heads or tails of quite frankly. But the two takeaways I would encourage the board to think about here is the top two items. So there's four items in chart D, the top two were ultimately the top rated for the all filter, the near Johnson as well as the other local. So those two findings that are in there in green, universally the town is aligned to benefit the whole town, if you will with this decision. And the second one is an interesting one as well.
There's an alignment around min minimizing the impact to the Johnson neighborhood. So obviously those folks closest will have the most impact. So all even the case of other local, which is non Johnson, it was the third ranked response where 40% of that population chose that response. The fifth and final question, relatively simple open-ended, do you have any suggestions, comments or specific uses? And we went back again to AI and we asked them to take 310 responses
and turn them into, you know, fourth grade reading level with a simple headline and a description. Everything in the parentheses is, that's the count of the number of mentions. Ultimately keep it for recreation. 152 individuals had some iteration that tied to playground ball fields, green space, a lot of kind of family use cases 104. Number two on the no more housing, there's this idea that there's already a, there's a large number of people that say Natick already has too much housing. And then they talk about, and the AI summarize this
as condos and apartments. So what I would refer to as dense housing. So that's just something for the board to think about. Number three, a community center with, you know, now we start to get in below a hundred, we get to 81 individuals use it for a school. Again, I think that gets into mass general law and what the school committee has sort of control over versus select board. But there's public sentiment around that notion. And then this idea of let the town decide. The word decide is from ai, that's ultimately a select board's decision, but it's certainly this idea of let the town
ultimately ha it belongs to all of Natick and everyone should help, which I'll use the word, you know, have input and maybe disproportionate to the Johnson neighborhood, but the influence was more seen as a middle ground across all. So that is a six page review of five questions, roughly 10 minutes and maybe I'll defer to the board how we want to go from here. Speaker 1: What was the second thing that you were gonna talk? Oh, you were talk about the communication strategy. Speaker 13: Yeah, this six month outlook of meetings that we'll do over the next six months. So we can go into the second one and keep rolling. Let's do that. Okay.
All right. So this is four slides. The topic is ultimately a summary of meetings that we want to ultimately consider for Johnson future meetings. Kind of think about this as the may timeframe through October of this year. The goal is a really clear, timely roadmap of all the future engagement. We're not gonna get a confusing Gantt chart with all sorts of details. It looks out over two years of unknown things. So we're gonna look at a six month increment and every three months I'll come back to the board
and give an update and we'll adjust that six month outlook on a three month basis. This was driven by some community input. The last time I was here in front of the board was April 9th and we had a meeting and the board suggested that they wanted to see more me, me, more meetings and I think just more detail behind the meeting. So that's kind of what spurned this. I flipped out one question survey the next day on April 10th. We left it open for about a week plus we had 90 responses. The themed input on the bottom right of this slide gives you kind of the five takeaways.
Again, I wouldn't call anything groundbreaking, but you know, government meetings can be difficult, difficult sometimes for people to attend. Just make it easy. Prioritize the neighbors, which we got a little more input on the flash vote survey. This idea of being on site and walking, you know, the property is something that residents showed an interest in collaborating, co-creating, and ultimately just being transparent. I think, you know, this is a closed school and a tight-knit community and this was sort of the response I would imagine of those 90 individuals that's gonna be heavy
around the Johnson community. And I think that's in line with giving them more access to input with what the flash vote survey gave us. This slide is showing you six different meeting types that I'm encouraging the board to think about. Again, this is all subject for input from the board or the general public tonight. But the idea would be we would continue to do survey reports primarily using flash. Flash vote gives us rigor and scale. Sometimes we might use a Google form for just a little quick one-off. And then this meeting, you know, town staff myself or otherwise would come back and give the board a quick review
of the findings and seek some input. The second item, this is a monthly Johnson speak. It's taking the concept that mass general law kind of dictates that in public speak. You the board have to sit there and hear public speak, but you can't, there's no retort, there's no conversation. So by putting this firmly on the agenda and having a dedicated slot, this would give the general public an opportunity to not just attend the meeting, say their piece, but feel like they can engage, ask questions. So we're just trying to stay within the bounds of the law, but also give the public a chance to give input site walking meeting.
So we've done this before and we'll continue to do it. I mean recently the, you know, south Natick dam removal and parks improvement held one. But this type of meeting we would allow residents to pre-register just to get a sense of the volume of people coming. We wouldn't, you know, turn away anyone who was not registered. We'd have multiple group tours that could run in parallel led by a single select board member and a single staff member. I mean, the idea there is that a select board member, you know, he or she has 20 percentage points of the vote. So you're talking to a decision maker and an influencer in a really intimate group setting
and you have a staff member who had maybe has more knowledge about some of the background of the property or specific areas. So by having those two individuals walk groups, who knows the number depends on how many registrants we get, but keep it small and ultimately have a, a scribe or a note taker from the staff member as well as maybe you allow the individuals who were there to just answer a quick one question survey with some thoughts, let AI tell us some thematic feedback. And I'd come back and give that to the board. Number four, the Johnson office hours.
This takes your current select board office hours and it just adds a meeting where it would be on site and it would allow for a single select board member to host people for one-on-one or kind of small group sessions, one to many, and this could be done on some cadence. On the next slide, I'll walk you through what the next six months looks like. But again, just adding another opportunity for the public to engage workshops. This is the idea of ultimately collaborating and feeling like the public isn't just getting baked materials for them to comment and agree or disagree. So we could, you know, this interactive session,
lots of public engagement. It could be things around the advisory committee, the charge, the composition, or what sort of data we want. It could be around a space analysis if we kind of bubble up particular use cases. And they, they seem like the public's moving in direction. The board agrees or disagrees, but they need more data. And a consultant would do a space analysis that would add some rigor to that and maybe we would let the public engage before we ever issue that work and figure out how to, you know, define the scope and at least get some input. And then ultimately, town staff and the board would make, you know, final decisions on how
to engage those consultants. A public forum, a little bit of a more typical government meeting. It's moderated, it's still a two-way discussion, but those would be more formal, more baked materials. And we'd have a couple of those sessions. So those are the six meeting types. Just for folks to kind of get the next slide, I'm gonna walk you through how to view it. I don't think it's that difficult, but it looks a lot like a consultant slide. The way to read this, ultimately left to right May through October of this year, if you look at the top right, that's a key for those outta the black and white. Trust me, the top one of key deliverable is red.
Then any triangle that's in blue is a high engagement opportunity. The top half of this, this kind of roadmap, it looks at ad hoc meetings. The definition of that is it's not a regular scheduled select board meeting. We would add these as additional meetings versus select board meetings that are regularly occurring every two weeks on Wednesday nights. So over the course of the six months, there would be 18 meetings, but 12 of those live on the bottom. So I'm not adding and taxing the select board too much. And then six of those would be additional meetings. If you notice, for those
that are looking at the color version of this, everything that's in red really is primarily on the front half May, June. And that's where we're just getting these key deliverables. So we can do the blue items that happen later once we actually do the engagements. So we have some, we have something to talk about ultimately. And that's, that's kind of the idea. Walking through the top side and the ad hoc meetings, we would have this walking meeting. We used a doodle poll to get some select board availabilities, and it would be on the 21st or 22nd, which is a Saturday or Sunday.
And that would allow the board an opportunity again to work with a staff member. And each individual board member would walk the general public groups of imagine, you know, 8, 10, 15 individuals around Johnson office hours. We would hold those twice in the six month period. I have one in July and then one later on. If you look at item six, that's later in October. Going back to the top, there's a workshop that we would put on the books in September, and then we would have two public forms. None of the topics or specific details are, you know,
we don't want to bake those yet, but we'd have two public forms. And then speaking now to the regular select board meetings, today's 5 28, we've talked about the survey report around the use cases. Now I'm talking about the summary of survey meetings, item number eight. And then we would move into monthly Johnson speak starting in June, and that would continue. So you can see the, the dates are already in there for already scheduled select board meetings and then a walking meeting, or sorry, a report on the walking meeting June 25th. So pretty quick after that. Kind of driven by my personal vacation.
So that would happen on the 25th. Then we would have a quarterly report that I would come back and deliver to the board that comes once a quarter. So that would be July 23rd. And then October 29th later I come back on eight 20 and give you an update of the summary of meetings, this document we're looking at. And at that point we will have had 18 meetings in six months and hopefully made some progress around what sort of Johnson uses that the board is gonna ultimately consider. And that is hopefully a mildly clear view of
what these six months look like for the board to consider. I will say lastly, just to see an appendix slide, just for those that can see this, we're just looking at the yellow shaded items. We're not gonna make, you know, ultimately the board is not gonna make a decision until the middle of 2027. We're in the very early stages, truly, I would say month two, last month we kind of kicked off a project plan on April 9th. Now we're here roughly six weeks later and you know, still in the early stages of this project. Speaker 1: Thank you very much. At this time, I'd like to ask the board if you have any questions for Mr. Evans?
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, no questions. I think it's a very thorough analysis. I just wanted to give kudos to Mr. Port Patti on all the heavy lifting that, that he did on this project and, and I, I appreciate the emphasis that he made that were very early stages here and we're looking to get as many people involved as possible. And that was our objective from the outset. Speaker 1: Thank you, Mr. Evans. Ms. Pope. Speaker 6: No, I felt similarly. Thank you Mr. Porter Paters for this really thorough work.
Thank you. Speaker 1: Kudos. Are there any persons in the room who have a question about this process? Yes ma'am. If you could come to you, you'll have to come to the podium. If you could say your name and whether you're a resident of Natick. Sure. Speaker 14: So it's Speaker 15: Potentially a question more so a comment. Speaker 1: Could you please speak into the microphone? Speaker 15: Yep. It's a comment name please. Jamie Bason. And it's a comment more so than a question, so I hope that's okay. Sure. Okay. So the, so it was questioned how to keep the balance between the Johnson
nearby neighborhoods as well as the feedback from the town as a whole. And I'm just wondering the influence on the comprehensive master plan 2030 specifically Chapter seven, the open space recreation, because there's some very specific information in that that would really apply to the Johnson property. And I actually printed out a couple of the maps just for your convenience. I don't know how familiar you all are with it or are becoming with it, but I think it could help answer some of that
because a, the survey you, you know, it showed people are leaning towards open space and recreation and yes, that's what the neighborhood wants, I'm sure, because you know, they abut the property and it's a direct impact to them, but it's also according to the master plan, it's a town need, it's a community need. So when you ask, you know, how are we balancing this? Well, it's not only for the neighborhood, but it's also for the town. So I just think that's important to note
and I hope you know, you all keep it in your mind and reference it as this process continues. And if it's okay with you, I'd like to hand you the paperwork. Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that would be fine. Okay. I would just like to follow up on that, that there are nine chapters and so there's public facilities and services, there's historic and cultural resources, economic development, there's infrastructure. So there are chapters on things in the 2030 master plan that are far beyond chapter seven. Speaker 15: Right. I'm specifically saying because the survey resulted in the feedback that Yes, Speaker 1: Understood.
Speaker 15: Yeah. So that's why I'm saying the open space and the recreation, the maps that I had printed out for you specifically shows the area of Johnson neighborhoods, the dense housing, how much that area really depends on that park or that property as open space and recreation currently. And historically, I grew up in Natick. I know, you know, it doesn't make my opinion any more influential than anybody else's, but I've seen how natick changes over the years. I've seen, you know, all the private properties turn into densely dense housing
and having less and less open space. And just, it shows me how important this property really is and how it's gonna continue to be even more important the more the dense housing comes and the more private properties, you know, and open space becomes limited. Speaker 1: I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. I'd like to, since we're at a, an advanced hour of the night and we still have staff here for other presentations, I'd like to limit this now to not use cases, but to, or, or comments, but rather questions about either the process or the flash vote survey, the information presented tonight.
So is there anyone online that has a question about, I'm gonna go to online and then I'll come back to you, sir. Ms. Becker? Speaker 16: Hi, yes. I'm Dina Becker. Yes. Resident of Natick. Thank you very much for all of this. I wanted to ask whether the walking tours, which I think are a great idea, will offer the opportunity to also go inside the building or whether they'll just be outdoors. Speaker 1: Mr. Erickson, Speaker 8: Our intent at this time is to, to ensure we can go inside the building, but we'll have to depend on how many people we have there for safety and for security purposes of the building. So if it's a very large crowd, we might not be able
to accommodate going in the building, for example. So it, I I'll say our intent is yes, but it will, it will determine on, on the extent of interest in the walking tours. Speaker 1: Okay. And there'll be more than one walking tour, so presumably at some point, Speaker 8: Right? Again, I Speaker 1: Mean, the intent is to, Speaker 8: Depending on how many people sign up and how many people show up, we'll, we'll try to keep it to smaller groups and that's gonna be easier to do some type of onsite in the building tour. Whereas if we have a very large group, we might then limit it to outside type space. Speaker 1: Thank you. Yep, sir.
Speaker 17: Good evening. Matt Purnell 11 Circular Avenue. First of all, I just wanna commend the board for, for approaching this in such a process oriented stakeholder engagement fashion. So thank you. I do have just a, a, a question about the insertion of an advisory committee as an outsider looking at the, at the, the committee which looked into the, the DAM project in South Natick, that struck me as a very comprehensive fashion and of approaching the issue. So I'm curious as to, as to why the committee is coming
at a later date and whether or not the committee would be more effective coming in this this year, rather than in next year when presumably some of the choices may have been narrowed. So I'd, I'd love to just hear a little bit more about that. Speaker 1: And the board has not made a decision about whether to committee, so that's part of it. Mr. Poor p do you wanna address this or, I mean, I could take a shot at it. Speaker 13: Yeah, this is kind of what we discussed on April 9th. Yep. And when we initially proposed it, I mean, it's a viable option to consider, you know, early stage committee.
I think the reason why we staff put forward the current plan is there's certain things that staff members who were, you know, even the advisory, if I understand the South Natick DAM advisory committee that had at least, I can think of three staff members, if not more, who were doing a lot of the legwork to get a lot of the data points so the committee could work with information. I think the idea of a committee sourcing the information in the public input agree is quite a hurdle. So that would be why we, the staff put that in front of the board on April 9th and why I think it's best suited.
But that's just, that's again, just, Speaker 8: Yeah. And, and for context with the dam, there are several years worth of staff analysis in advance of even deciding to do an advisory committee that we haven't done here. So this is our opportunity to condense those years worth of analysis that the advisory committee for the DAM had the benefit of in a, in a shortened period to ensure that that advisory committee has some direction and some baseline information to work with. Speaker 1: Thank you. Mr. Brunell, online, JR could you say your name please and whether you're a NAIC resident, and limit your comments please to questions only?
Speaker 11: Yes. My name is Jim Roberts. I'm Precinct five. I am a native resident. Thank you. Just, I appreciate the work that Mr. Porter does. If I pronounce it correctly, with the flash boats, a big concern that I think should be directed to committee is that why was it never directed for school use for Johnston as a new school? I think where I can Speaker 1: Answer that, Mr. Roberts, the school, the school committee operates independent of the select board. And so you would have to direct
that question to the school committee. The school committee has its own process and makes its decisions however they make their decisions. But the property is now under the care, custody and control of the select board. So we won't be able to answer that question. Did you have a second question? Understood. Speaker 11: No, understood. I'd like to follow up on that. So like, as, as the flash vote, why was that not an option? I feel like that's was purposely inverted and a lot of people did in the flash vote. I think it was in like the fourth or fifth section that it said people want a new school there. And it was purposely left out in the first
and second bullet points. The Speaker 1: Smart board doesn't have, the ca doesn't have the ability under state law to create schools. So we're looking for use cases that we can legally see to fruition. The school committee decided not to keep it as a school. It has been transferred to the select board. And the select board will make decisions based on community input and information we get and data points and a whole bunch of weigh in from a lot of people. But a school will not be something the select board will be building at that site, I think I can say with concrete. Okay. Speaker 11: If the, if the community input was
that they wanted a school there, could the select board then transfer the property back to the school committee and build a school? Speaker 1: No. Do you have any other questions? Speaker 11: Yes, I just, Speaker 1: We can come back to you feel like this, we can come back to you. Is there anybody? Speaker 11: No, I feel, no, no, I have, so this, this town as a whole has eliminated Johnson schools through my parents' generation and through my generation. And we've gone from center and Coolidge and my parents' generation, Murphy and Cole, my generation,
this town is destroying neighborhoods, local knit communities removing this school. And this is a neighborhood thing that there's, there's less fortunate people in this neighborhood that are suffering from this decision. Speaker 1: Mr. Roberts, Speaker 18: We didn't make Speaker 1: That decision. No. I'm gonna stop you right there because as I explained numerous times tonight, the community, please mute him. As I've explained numerous times, we have a room full of staff and we have a lot of people that wanna speak. So we did not make this board, this body did not make the decision to give Johnson to the select board. This board will not be
giving it back to the school committee. It's a very emotional decision and I, I, I respect that there are a ton of changes over the last 50 years and I wanna respect that This is traumatic for a number of people, but we do need to move on with the business of the town. Is there anyone else in the room that would like to ask a question? Ms. Vickers, can you come and just say your name? We know you're a NAIC resident. Thank you. Speaker 18: Yes, thank you. Brinley Vickers. Natick. I'm curious with all of the input from the community in all of these meetings, if there's an opportunity in advance for some general
data before we start this so that our questions and our and our input is better guided. Speaker 1: Say more about that. What do you mean? Speaker 18: Sure. For example, it's not going back to being a school. Could there be a page before we start that says this is what the needs were for the A DA compliance. If it's going to be used as a building so that people have an understanding of what might be involved in the building, Speaker 1: I think that's gonna come much that much later in the process.
Speaker 18: The reason I ask in advance is because I feel like people are asking for a splash park and they're asking for a pool. And it seems like if we are going to be efficient with our time and your time in terms of having these conversations, some parameters up front might help the process be more efficient. Speaker 1: I think it's really best to leave everything completely open. The last thing I'd like this board to be accused of is coming in with a preconceived idea about what we're gonna do. Speaker 18: I'm not looking for preconceived ideas. Okay. I'm looking for
Speaker 1: The only thing not on the table is a school and I don't have information about a DA accessibility or what that would cost. That will come much later down when we decide or not when we decide. But when we start looking at use cases that involve the building, that won't be something in the first six months. Speaker 18: Okay. Thank Speaker 1: You. Thank you. Ms. Vickers. Speaker 8: If I can just briefly note, yes, a lot of those requirements that you just noted really depend on what the use is. So like an a DA requirement will depend on what the use is. So for us to do that ahead of time is really quite challenging when we don't know what the uses are proposed to be. Speaker 18: But that's exactly why I am asking for some type
of guidelines because I do think that that matters in terms of input. Speaker 8: So I think that's what we're trying to get now with this work, is actually helping us determine what those guidelines should be. Because we need to hear from the feedback from the community to the point of the board. We don't want to have a preconceived idea of what the uses are going to be. So we're seeking that guidance, seeking that input now so that we can then start doing some analysis. The data that we have right now is we have a building on the property. You can look at the property record card on the town's website. You can look the acreage, you can look at the building. That's the data that we have. That's all public information.
Beyond that, we need more feedback to be able to put some data behind it. Speaker 18: Okay. So then, then my follow up to that would be is once we've had all of this and we do start narrowing things down, I hope that the input from the community is allowed to be as grand as it is right now. Instead of saying, okay, we let you guys have all your opinions and, and now we're gonna, we're gonna jostle these four or five on our own. I feel like as we narrow, I hope that the participation and inclusion from the community is Justice. Grant,
Speaker 1: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Ms. Vickers. Emily's iPhone. If you could state your name please and whether you're a Natick resident. Speaker 12: Hi, this is Emily Grant. I'm a native resident and live a block from Johnson School. I appreciate the thoughtfulness that's going into the plan and the, the forward thinking and that you're taking time to do this. My concern is just in the meantime, upkeep of the grounds and the building and the safety issue of having an empty building up there. You know, within the past six months there's been a bunch of graffiti.
You know, every time I walk through there I'm noticing kind of more things going on. I'm just concerned about the property getting to a tipping point while all this decision making is going on, where it's now attracting more, you know, I'm assuming kids and stuff like that causing trouble. So I'm just, I guess sort of making sure that's still on your radar. And I know police are, are coming through occasionally, but just making sure that's on your radar. That there's a big empty building and, and empty grounds there.
And for us neighbors who are right nearby, it's a concern. Speaker 1: Thank you so much. That's really important. Mr. Erickson, did you wanna address that? Speaker 8: Well, it's a very good point and, and it's something that is very much on the minds of staff. We do have a facilities team that do regular checks on the building. We have a DPW team that do regular checks on the grounds. We do continue to maintain, for example, that playground space and some of the other space that's up there. But it is an empty building, so it's a concern of ours as well. When you have an empty building, it's always gonna be a concern about keeping eyes in it. What I would recommend is that it's a, it's a group effort. So if there are residents that do see things that are
concerning, please call, call the police to the police and let us know, you know, we, we need your eyes and ears just as much as we can send our own eyes and ears out there. We can't be there 24 7. That's just not realistic or possible. So we do need the people that do live in that area to help inform us of what's happening. Speaker 1: Thank you. Mr. Erickson. Is there someone in the room who has a question I've gone twice to Yes ma'am. If you could come to the podium and introduce yourself. Speaker 19: Hi Anne Gly, 30 Pearl Street native resident. I had a question about items five and six of the meeting types, which I believe were workshops
and workshops in the public forums. I'm wondering if there if that will be run by town staff, a member of select board or an independent third party facilitator Speaker 1: Question. Speaker 8: I think right now we're not totally sure. It will likely be either town staff or we might have a consultant supporting town staff or be there as well to support. Really depends on the feedback that we get throughout this, the initial three months to determine the topics and, and what type of, of of information we need to bring or at least engage with the public about in those, in those forums and workshops.
Speaker 19: Okay. And just one more question just because you just addressed this and I had a follow up regarding maintenance of the property. Obviously police and Dbw DPW can't be there 24 7, but a lot of residents do take daily walks there and are still aware. I've made numerous reports on c CCL fix and I know that there's so much work to do. I mean I, I swear CCL fix is like 50% pothole repair right now and I respect that. Speaker 8: It's the time of year. What Speaker 19: More can we do as residents short of buying spray and sponges and doing it ourselves? 'cause that's what I'm about to do.
Speaker 8: If there's a desire to do a resident cleanup day, we could certainly support something like that. We would like to try to coordinate that with our DPW and public works. But we have done, for example, on the rail trail, there's a regular cleanup rail trail. We can certainly help organize that, but we would, we would rely on the residents to really organize it and we would be there more for support with like materials or, or or equipment Trash removal, sorry, Speaker 1: Trash removal. Speaker 8: Yeah, trash removal and, and maybe some rakes or you know, it really depends on what it is that the desire is and we can, we've done that with other groups as well. So that's certainly something that that staff can support.
Speaker 19: Okay. So, Speaker 8: But you can reach out to the town administrator's office and we can help coordinate that. Great. Speaker 19: That was gonna be my next question. Yep. Thank you very much. Yeah, Speaker 1: Ms. Flas. Speaker 2: Oh, that's me. Speaker 20: Hello. I know everyone's very tired. So very, just briefly, Mr. Erickson, I just wanted to key into the fact that this analysis phase you were saying is much shorter than it was for the DAM project. And I just wanna understand what, how did you calculate the analysis time needed by comparison Speaker 8: Based on the desire to have an outcome within
the two year timeframe? We just started putting dates on, on a calendar to determine what in this particular project case would be reasonable for us to help the board get to a decision making timeframe. Understanding that we did not want this to be a 10 year timeframe or a five year timeframe, but trying to ensure that we had it within a reasonable timeframe from a starting point, which the starting point was a was about a month ago. A month and a half ago. So the Speaker 20: Urgency was the, the urgency was the empty building versus I just, what is, why does one project have more urgency than the other? Is the question.
Speaker 8: It really depends on the project. In the case of the dam, we're actually mandated by the state to take action. So we had to advance that on a timeframe that was required by the state because it was considered a high hazard dam. In the case of this, the board could tell us, Hey wait, we don't wanna make a decision for 10 years, in which case we will change that. We will change the timeframe. We have not heard that from the board. We've heard the board that this timeframe works for them. It's ultimately their decision. So it's really the board's decision on the timeframe, not necessarily town staff. Speaker 20: Thank you. Speaker 1: Thanks Ms. FLIs. Is there anyone else in the room who has any questions? Okay, I'd like to move on to our tax title
and finance team update, which is agenda item E. Speaker 4: Madam chair, I'll be right Speaker 1: Back. Okay. Actually let's take, we're gonna take like a four minute break Speaker 21: And we're back. Mr. Townsend. Speaker 4: Thank you Madam Chair, members of the board, John Townsend, deputy town administrator and director finance here to present the quarterly financial review for the board. We have sort of combined together quarters one through three to give you a little better look at what, what, what's happening with the town. So let's go into the next slide there. So we're gonna try something a little bit different tonight.
We've been working, or let me say Gloria has been working very hard on coming up with a dashboard for you so that you can have sort of regular access to various indicators for the town. And so we came up with a dashboard, this is a Power BI on Microsoft product essence. It's been custom made by Ms. Wong here, so we can customize it. If you need something, we can hopefully accommodate that. But this is the first cut at it. So it, it's available on the website under the finance team page.
At the very bottom is quarterly review dashboards. There's also a QR code on here. If you click on that you can download the app. We do have an app, so if you're on the road, you're sitting in some waiting room waiting for something, you can take a look at the finances of the town. So let's go on to the next one. Also in addition to my own slide here. Alright, so let's just start off first of all, looking at the quarterly view, generally speaking general fund, like on the right hand side of the screen there, 153.6 million for quarters one
through three local receipts have hit a historic high for us. They've actually exceeded what we were looking at at FY 19. Pretty much say that we have recovered from COID motor vehicle excise tax continues to sort of lead the way for us other excise tax, hotel meals and cannabis. I'll talk a little bit of that in just a second. And finally, license and permits, building permits up 41.4%. Thank you MathWorks for filing for a building permit. Yeah, Speaker 8: That's, that's likely a blip. Yes. It'll, it'll normalize.
It's, yeah, it's not something that is a, a likely sustained level Speaker 4: But it is an MathWorks. Speaker 22: Is it still up? Speaker 8: Sorry, excluding math works. Yes, it, yes it is still up but, but it's just, this is a bit, and we had this happen the last time MathWorks did their expansion project about six, seven years ago. We saw a a one year, it was still on its way up but it was, it was definitely sort of an abnormal year. Speaker 4: But it is a nice blip and we will make sure we pointed it out to you. So now we're gonna cut over to the dashboard itself, sort of run through some of the, we go, so we get
to the finance page, click on here and up pops the dashboard. So for some reason it loads up to the golf course. Don't quite know why. We'll fix that one. So this is the, the should be the landing page for the dashboard. So running across the top in the blue boxes you have your 1 153 0.6 million revenues for quarters one through 3 7 78 0.1% of the projection. That actually is a very good number for us. Well within our targets I wanna spend a little bit of time in these last two boxes.
The tax levy 1 0 9 0.8 million, collection rate of 75.4. Our collection rate of there, 75.4. It's actually a little higher than we thought it was about about 2%. And basically that is from taxes due from other years. So obviously this is the tax title piece on things. So I'm gonna give you a little rundown with regards to that. As you'll recall, last time we talked about tax title was that town meeting we had collected a little under a million dollars, almost a million dollars. And we are planning to continue on
with our on tax title collections. Unfortunately shortly after town meeting, Eunice as it oftentimes does, had a total meltdown, would not work. Unis wouldn't fix it. And so we sat there and sat there until finally, I think it was this week, yes, we got the patches from Eunice, we gotta cleaned up, we're gonna get ready to go. So I said, well let's take a look at our numbers. Well instead of being 1 million, we've actually collected 2.3 million during that little hiatus on our collection efforts. A lot of people got together and got us, got us money and we're actually collected 60%
of our outstanding receivable so far. That doesn't mean that we're not gonna continue on. We are hopefully we're gonna get everything uploaded and that includes all the old stuff from our point, our point system going back to 1959. We'll get it all loaded into Muni and we're gonna continue on with our tax taking. We should have all that loaded up. Let's see, T N's gonna gimme a, a dirty look but it's gonna, hopefully by next week we'll get that all uploaded into Munis. We'll continue and compile the tags, taking lists by six 13. We'll make sure you get a copy of that.
Then we're have a 14 day publication notice and serving of process on individuals. And so we will do our taking at six June 27th. It's a little close for comfort but we would get it in before the end of the year. So we will meet our goal of making sure we deal with our $3.65 million of receivable on tax title. So that's a little bit of a good news story. Unfortunately I thought it would be a bad news story with regards to a muni but like I say, a little silver lining there, giving people a little more time and they actually came through for us. Definitely appreciate that.
So going back to the dashboard, moving to the left hand side of the slide, little graph with regards to year to date. Revenue trend by month. Once again when we understand how you like to compare things with the previous year. So you got your red line, your previous actuals and then of course your back line is a little year to date. Now if you take those little buttons at the bottom little, no no, yep. Okay. And you can move it up and down and figure out if you wanna drill down on this to a particular period of time. You can do so to get a little better look at what the trends actually are.
Believe immediately below the graph there, just some total year to date the, the first through third quarter, 153 million, 6.6 million. Our targa is 1 47 0.42 for the first three quarters. So that's up 4.19%. Once again, a very good position for us to be in state aid. Anticipated 14.24 million unfortunately only came with 13.98 million. That's because the state was unfortunately a little bit
late on one of their payments. Once again, this ends of course in March, the end of March. I think we have received that payment in subsequently, but at the time of this was actually set up for the third quarter, we had not received that. And then finally local receipts, 16.23 million, target was 13.8. We are up 17.6% over our target. So talking about local receipts, if you go a little bit further over to the right hand side there, we do the top 10 local receipt sources. We know people like to have those top 10 lists and that's what we did here.
So if you click on one of those, let's click on motor vehicle excise tax and you'll see the graph changes to the motor vehicle excise tax. If you look up at the top blue boxes, you also see the representation of the revenues that were collected. 5.2 million, 89.6% of our projection motor vehicle excise tax is doing very well. Obviously the graph looks like that because that is when the bills all got sent out. That's what you see the very steep climb up there. Continuing down a little bit, let's take a look at the hotel, no, not say meal excise tax. Take a look at something that was a little bit on a
disappointment for us. The red being previous, actual years, year to date actuals. We are running about 9% below on what we did for FOI 24. So if you are hungry, please make sure you eat out DoorDash or something in Natick. Oh absolutely in in Natick. We had a lot of excellent restaurants here in Natick. Let's eat, get that, get those numbers up. But overall at the exci, the local receipts are doing actually very well. Let's take a look at the hotel and motel excise tax. For some reason that's really bounced back sharply
that we're up substantially in the hotel motel And also I, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the fact that cannabis has started to pick up a little bit with the opening of one of our stores in Natick. So that is looking very well too. And then finally just below the chart there of local receipts, best performing local receipts sources over $1 million license and permits. We had a discussion of why that is and then things that of concern mis miscellaneous reoccurring. A little bit of concerns we have, we actually did get the supplemental bills out last week,
but obviously you missed this particular presentation 'cause it this ends at the end of the third quarter. Let's gonna head back over to our slides and take a look at our expenditures and I gotta remember to do this myself. Okay, here we go. So general fund expenditures, actual versus budget, 67.4%. Well below the 70, 75% benchmark you'd think of as a third quarter year to date. Obviously as we probably know, the fourth quarter is a very big quarter for us with regards to people buying stuff.
So we would feel we probably will catch up there. But we are actually in a very good position with regards to our expenditures. One of the sort of highlights is that we have actually filled a lot of our vacancies. So we do see the actual personnel costs versus actual versus budget running around 70%, which has been a substantial increase over our past years. Of course employee benefits for FY 25 is 83. Is that 83%? Let's go over, let's go back to the dashboard. Take a look at the, how the dashboard talks about this. Now if you look around the very left hand side,
little blue bar there, a little ribbon there, you see some icons. So if you'd like to, the first one of course is revenue. The little hand of the money and of course is expenditures. You got a little tap there and we'll talk about that. The water and sewer. And then the bottom one is some one playing golf. I guess you can probably guess what that one is. But that's where you can navigate between the various stages in, in the particular dashboard to get those particular areas. So taking a look at the top left hand corner of the two blue boxes, expenditures 130, 32 $0.1 million and which I sent, I said 67.4% of the year to date budget.
Below it are two ring graphs, expense types, salaries versus expenses. You hover your cursor over that and you see a little bit of a more detail with regards to that, those particular areas. And directly below it is the allocation town school and shared. Now moving over to the, to the chart on the right hand side, those are all your basic, your departments. Let's click on DPW pick, we'll pick on them, click on that. And once again the blue box in the top there becomes DP W'S budget, $7.5 million in the first three quarters,
66.4% year to date. They're actually doing fairly well. And then the ring grabs once again correspond is like the overall expenditures going over to the, the far right hand side there. Not far right hand side department's. The highest percentage of budget over $1 million. The award for the total one through quarters, one through three is information technology. Of course that's not really much of a surprise, that's not really concerning because the information technology, of course IT folks do get to pay for all the apps and software that we do.
Most of the expenditures are in the first quarter. So they do have a very front loaded budget. However, if you are interested more in how, how, who's the, who has the top expenditures for a particular month, you can take your little, you know, little circles there circles, there we go. And you can squeeze it right down. So for the second and third quarters you have parking enforcement was the top spender on their budget of 54.59% or 104,000,280. Speaker 8: That was probably also related to a technology bill.
Speaker 4: Yes, exactly. And that's the thing. What about these particular dashboards is that, you know, you do have those little nuances here that is very difficult to sort of tease out. So if there is something that's very much a outlier, you can always give us a call and be happy to try to explain things for you or call up the department head and ask 'em about it. I'm sure they'll be happy to help you. Speaker 23: I'm interested in the school budget now this Speaker 4: Is Sure. Speaker 23: May 31st, right? Can you turn your mic? Oh sorry. Speaker 4: This, this is as of March 31st, right? Yes. For both Q1 two, Q2 and Q3. Okay.
I'm interested that the schools are only at 60. Don't they usually aren't they usually spent out by, substantially spent out by the end of June? Yeah, so this, this is another one of those budgets that has, they have a very, they have a balloon payment towards the end of June that will sort of bring that up to where we would particularly think it should be with regards to expenditures. Yeah. Yeah. So that, that in and of itself is, that's pretty normal for what we'd see from them. But they also, their, their last quarter also they have very heavy expenditures as well. So, okay, thank you.
Speaker 8: They do a lot of payments for end of school year and then balloon payments to salaries for staff and teachers and such as well. Yep, Speaker 4: Yep, yep. That's what I was remembering. Speaker 8: Yeah, exactly. Speaker 4: Yeah, academic year. Yep. Alright, so let's kick back to slide. There we go. Enterprise funds. So golf course over the last four years, 23 2 years, 23 to 25 average 8.6% increase, which is a, a good, a good increase for them. Water and sewer use categories.
Revenues pressed the average of FY 22 to 24 by 11% thanks to their return for ready to serve. Ready to serve Speaker 8: Readiness to serve fee Speaker 4: Readiness. To serve fee. Exactly Speaker 8: The work that the board has done over the last several years to sort of revamp the, the, the fee structure. Speaker 4: That was a big help when making certain that they do on maintain their revenues expenses are at currently at 55% of their budget. Let's go back to the dashboard. Gonna go down to that little icon that has the,
has a little tap on it and we have a sewer icon down there at the top. We have little, little arch arch graphs there. Year to date revenues versus budget 17.01 I guess it's a $21 million budget year expenses the same thing. 10.96 water and sewer ring graft over the time. Same sort of thing. Salaries versus expenses and their allocation target 17.01 million in, in revenues target was 6.06 so they're up 5.97. They're actually in a very good,
a very good position to move forward. Just one other thing I'd like to sort of mention with regards to this particular both water and so we're, and the Gulf when we hit there down at the bottom is a fund summary. Fund summary. It also is a fund summary of course, but the fund summary that is an AI generated sort of overview summary of the actual slide. So take a look, read through it, let us know how you think. Sometimes the wording is a little bit strange but I find it very useful with regards to just getting your general sort of snapshot of what's going on with water and sewer and,
and let's click over to golf Speaker 8: And that actually helps us provide context. If you notice in the water sewer it actually noted that there's still a payment due for MWRA. So that's why expenses are only at 50 to 60% percent. Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. Thank you ai. So the golf course once again up at the top revenues versus budget 8 8 830 9,091 against the $1.32 million budget expenses versus budget 77 83 against one point 11 million
fund balance, 56.65. The little ring graphs over the side. Same as same as the other ones with regards to allocation and the actual breakdown target for the first three quarters, 839 1,080 $9,000. Target 90, 99, 92 off 15.34%. And that was because Speaker 24: Seasonal activities. Speaker 4: Oh right, okay. No one plays golf during the sun winter. So this is obviously as they go forward
their revenues are gonna kick up because of the, this is the off season for, for them coming through March. Once again those i, a summary, AI summary over the problem actually probably tells you that there. And then our revenue source comparison, onsite retail and services, that of course is your Golf of Greens fees program and memberships sell memberships and then non-operating other, those are the golf towels and drinks that you buy in the pro shop. So I think can we go on to, okay, go on to the slide.
Next slide. So that basically wraps up the actual overview with regards to the numbers wise of our quarterly report. We would like to announce that Muni citizen self-service is now live thanks to great work by TN to get that up and running. One of the great things about this, a lot of people ask can I get PDF copy of my actual bill for the longest period of time we were not able to do that. Once again, thanks to TNS efforts, we've resolved that problem. So you now can go into Citizen self-service
and get a copy of your actual bill as well as be linked directly to Unip pay to pay those particular bills should you wish to do so. Speaker 8: John, for for purposes, 'cause it does say instant access to bill history and things along those lines. Is that to a certain timeframe or is it five? Five years back. Five Speaker 4: Years back. Yeah. Speaker 8: So that'll show you if you missed the bill for example, and you have to pay a bill, you can see that if it's within the last five years. Yep. Speaker 3: That's Speaker 8: Awesome. Yeah, and you can pay it through uni pay and Speaker 4: You can pay it unit pay where you're set up your account
and your instant payments and everything. So, and Speaker 8: It's, my understanding is it's a pretty publicly accessible, you just need to type in name, address, some other type of identifier and you can Speaker 4: Yes. And Speaker 8: I The Access. Speaker 4: Access, yeah. You set up your own account on it and everything too. Speaker 8: So you set up your own account. So it's pretty easy to, to do that as a property owner or, or, or a resident or or business owner or what have you, depending Yep. Speaker 3: Is there, is there a way to do like a brief video for how to do that to, to get residents to understand?
Speaker 8: Unless there's one already, does uni already have one or but we we can look into one. Yep. Speaker 3: I would think the average resident would Speaker 4: Would be. Yeah, absolutely. Good idea. Yep. Because like I say, a lot of people just, they just wanna see a copy of their bill so this will be the easy way for them to get it. Yep. Speaker 3: Awesome. Speaker 4: Alright, so that concludes our presentation for the evening. Any questions, be happy to try to field them. Questions Speaker 5: For members, Speaker 1: Questions for members of the board. Ms. Wilger, Speaker 5: I really questioned just a couple comments. Awesome. Awesome job. Yep.
And I'm wondering for the enterprise funds for the Gulf and water and sewer, if there's a way to add percentage of the budgets on, on the various things. 'cause that's something that's useful. That's on some of the other slides. Yep. Speaker 4: So no, that would, thanks. Had the same thought. Yeah, we'll work on that. Yep. Yep. Speaker 3: Good. I've got a ditto for that. Yep. It's great work. Yep. Speaker 8: One of the things that we'd welcome as you look at these reports, 'cause one of the things that we were looking at as part of sort of the financial management principles is the board getting information and understanding what information, like look at these reports if we need to add information,
tweak information, this is in my opinion, a great dashboard for the board to, to get the information in the public, but for the board to get the information you need. Speaker 5: Yeah, I think it would be great once we revise our digest Speaker 8: Management Speaker 5: Principles to incorporate that as well. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 8: Agree. Because if we know what you're looking for, then we can make adjustments here. Or if this is providing the information that you, you like, then that's great that we can then reiterate that in the financial management principles. Cool. Right now it seems like we have great feedback from the board. Speaker 5: I love it. Speaker 4: This is obviously, you know, please,
you know, have, have some time to sort of play around with a little bit. You can give us a call if you'd like or happy to come back to help you work through it or, you know, take your suggestions however you'd like to proceed on it. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Townsend. We have someone online with a hand raised. Mr. Roberts, do you have any questions? Speaker 3: You rather left, left it up inadvertently. Speaker 1: Well, Mr. Erickson is asking him to unmute. There we go. Speaker 11: I just like to remind the chair that I have five minutes on the comment on,
on agenda items and I've been cut off twice and muted twice. And that's open meeting violations. Speaker 1: Actually it's not, you don't have five minutes to comment on agenda items. The only thing, the only time this board needs to take Okay. Comments. I'd like you to listen to me Mr. Roberts 'cause this will save us some time at a future meeting. The only time this board needs to by law take public comments is at a public hearing. So when, when we are here at 10 20 and I have staff who've been here since eight o'clock in the morning, I am not going to tolerate ad homan remarks or comments that are off the topic of the agenda.
You are not entitled to five minutes, no one is entitled to five minutes. So if you have a question public with Mr. Roberts public, no, it is not a public hearing. This is a public meeting. Speaker 3: It is dnce Speaker 1: Further, if you have a question with regard to the presentation, I will allow you to make that. If you don't, I'm gonna ask that you be muted. Speaker 11: I would ask if the town knows the difference between sales and use tax. Speaker 1: You would like to know if the town of Natick knows the difference between sales and use tax? Yes, it does. Do you have any other questions? Speaker 11: Okay. And then excise tax has was the purpose of it was from World War II to fund the war. Speaker 1: So why we still outside the scope.
Do you have a question with regard to the financial, Speaker 11: That's part of the financials is motor vehicle tax, world Speaker 1: War ii EX tax and the history of excise tax is beyond the scope. If you have a question about excise tax in Natick, please make it. Speaker 11: So that's my question. It was to fund World War ii. So why are we still collecting excise tax and what does it fund in native? Speaker 1: It funds general operating exp expenses. And I'm gonna stop the questions there. Thank you Mr. Roberts. So do any other questions or comments from members of the board? Thank you so much Mr. Townsend. We'll get back to you with additional feedback. If there's any questions or comments,
appreciate all the work your team does. Speaker 4: Thank you Madam Chair. Thank you. Members of the board have a pleasant evening. Speaker 1: You too. Enjoy. Speaker 8: Thank you, Gloria. Thank you Tian. Thank you John. Awesome, awesome work. Great, great work. Really amazing progress. Speaker 1: So of the things that we absolutely positively need to do tonight before the building closes at 11 o'clock. Mr. Sidney, could you open the public hearing for Bill's pizzeria? That'll be really quick Speaker 4: For bills. Okay. Yes. Actually, both public hearings will be quick, right? Yep. The select board will hold a public hearing on Wednesday, May 28th, 2025 at 6:30 PM
Upon the application of YMJ Inc. DBA Bills pizzeria, manager of record, Yasser Londi for an S 12 wine and mal beer on pre is license transfer. The previous owner is Little Bills Inc. Bills Zeria is located at 58 East Central Street in Natick, mass. The premises is located on the first floor of a multi-tenant building. The premises contains 1608.5 square feet of area with movable seating for 54 patrons. There is also a service counter for takeout orders. There's a public entry on the south side of the premises.
There is also a rear entrance on the north side of the premises, primarily for deliveries. The hearing will be held in the Edward Delo meeting Room 13 East Central Street as well as remotely. Anyone wishing to be heard in this matter can participate in person or through Zoom. Login instructions will be published on the May 28th, 2025 select board agenda. All persons interested in this application may appear and be heard in the time and place mentioned above or may submit written comments to the select board at 13 East Central Street, Natick, mass oh 1 7 6 oh select board at Natick Mat dot Oregon. I move to open the public hearing. Second.
Speaker 1: Moved by Mr. Sydney, seconded by Mr. Bruce. Ms. Pope? Yes. Mr. Sydney? Yes. Mr. Evans? Yes. Ms. Ger? Yes. And I'm a yes. So the public hearing is open. Just Speaker 4: Move to approve the transfer of license. Second. Speaker 1: Moved by Mr. Sydney. Seconded by Mr. Bruce. Ms. Pope been Speaker 4: Called a Speaker 1: Lot worse. Yes. Mr. Sydney? Yes. Mr. Evans? Yes. Ms. Linda? Yes. And I'm a yes. Speaker 4: Move to close the public hearing. Second. Speaker 1: Second. Moved by Mr. Sidney. Seconded by Ms. Slager.
All in favor, Ms. Pope? Yes. Mr. Sidney? Yes. Mr. Evans? Yes. Ms. Slager? Yes. And I'm a yes. Beautiful. Let's see if we can't do that again. We, no. Speaker 4: Shall we do the other public hearing? 'cause it's a, you're honor, open. Open and continue. Speaker 1: Which one is that? Speaker 4: That's the Scott. Speaker 1: Yes. Did you open the public hearing? Speaker 4: The Select board will conduct a public hearing on Wednesday, May 28th, 2025, 6:30 PM at Natick Town Hall, Edward Delo, meeting room 13 East Central Street, Natick, mass on the request to dedicate the square at the corner of North Main Street in Pine Street in honor of Scott Mitchell.
Anyone wishing to be heard in this matter may participate in person or through Zoom. Login instructions for Zoom will be published on the May 28th, 2025 select board agenda. And I move to open the public hearing. Second Speaker 1: Move by Mr. Sydney. Seconded by Mr. Evans. Ms. Pope? Yes. Mr. Sydney? Yes. Ms. Mr. Evans? Yes. Ms. Slager? Yes. And I'm a Yes. Public hearing is open. Speaker 4: Move to continue the public hearing to June 11th. Second. Speaker 1: Moved by Mr. Sydney, seconded by Mr. Evans. Ms. Pope? Yes. Mr. Sydney? Yes. Mr. Evans? Yes. Ms. Slager? Yes.
And I'm a Yes. Mr. Sidney. Oh yeah. We're not closing it. Nevermind. No, that's Speaker 4: Great. Okay. No, it's continued. Speaker 3: Good work. Richard. Speaker 1: Submission testimony to the joint committee on the public er, public service in support of H 3 9 0 1. Has everyone had a chance to review that? Yes. Wonderful. I'll entertain a motion to allow the chair to sign the letter. Move Speaker 3: The, allow the chair to sign the submission testimony to the Joint Committee on Public Service in support of each 39 0 1. Speaker 1: Move by Mr. Evans. Second. Second of Ms. Slager.
All in favor, Ms. Pope? Yes. Mr. Sidney? Yes. Mr. Evans? Yes. Ms. Slager? Yes. And I'm a yes. And it has been signed. So, Mr. Erickson, could you speak with regard to the central Massachusetts Regional Stormwater Coalition, inter Municipal Agreement with Tru Barry? Speaker 8: Hopefully yes. So this is, this is an ongoing partnership that we've had with a number of communities for the central Massachusetts Regional Storm Water Coalition. Starting, I believe, back in 2017 per the memo. In the folder in brief.
Last year, I believe, or two years ago it shifted. The host community shifted to Shrewsbury, but we need to now re-engage. It's the same terms, same everything. It's just the town of Shrewsbury is the lead for which we need to enter into an inadmissible agreement. So we need the board's approval to do that. Speaker 4: So moved. Speaker 1: Second. Moved by Mr. Sydney, seconded by Ms. Mr. Evans. Any questions? Comments? Ms. Pope? Yes. Mr. Sydney? Yes. Mr. Evans? Yes. Ms. Ger? Yes. And I'm a yes. Beautiful. Speaker 8: Can I take the M rec? Speaker 1: Yeah. M rec and Mr. Sydney is prepared to make both motions.
Speaker 8: Great. So M Rec, Middlesex Regional Emergency Communication Center. Just a brief update. We are moving along with the work of the, of the, of the M Rec. We actually just had a meeting today as a M Rec board of directors, as well as our finance subcommittee and the operations committee to approve the FY 26 budget. Most of it is grant funded, if not almost all of it. There is a small amount that we need to cover that is not grant funded at this time. Basically in order for us to maximize grant dollars until we're fully up and operational, which won't happen until the end of this upcoming fiscal year, we don't want to ask for funds
to cover the operations because they give the, they give based on fiscal year. So we wanna maximize that. So there will be a small assessment to the town of Natick. Right now it's looking at a very small, maybe 15, $20,000. We might need to amend the budget partway through, but we won't know that until December timeframe. We have enough discretionary funds in our budget right now to cover that, but I might need to go to town meeting in the fall just to seek some supplemental funding just for this fiscal year. Our intent is once the, the special center is up and running, the grant actually covers a hundred percent
of the costs for the first several years. That's why we want to make it sure it's a full fiscal year, not a partial fiscal year. So that's why we're maximizing it. So the small cost up front now is actually gonna save us quite a bit of money down the road. Just want the board to be fully aware of that because that is something that might come down the pipeline, this upcoming fall town meeting that I might need to ask town meeting to supplement some of the budget just for the remainder of this fiscal year is our, is our thinking at this point. I do need to seek. So since the last time I provided an update, we've had interest in this town of Wayland and we've gone through all the process to accept them.
But the final process to accept them as part of the M rec is for the select board to actually vote to accept them. Since you're considered the official participating community, the select board is per the IMA. It's actually a super majority of the participating communities, which in this case is the select board and the mayor in Framingham. So I need a board, a vote vote from the board to accept Wayland. They were one of the communities that we were actually initially talking to anyway, and we are actually excited that they went through their process as well. They've been attending our meetings. This is the final vote to then actually amend the IMA. The second vote here is really to authorize,
and this is also outlined in the IMA, I'm blanking on this section, but I'm, so I'm paraphrasing this section before a little bit. Thank you. Before it was in my email, I think to the board to authorize town administrator to execute all contracts, agreements and other documents. That's language from the, the IMA to effectuate the purpose of the IMA. And this will essentially authorize me to sign an amended IMA when Wayland joins. It'll also allow me, in the case of a more immediate need, I think I mentioned in the past that we're looking to hire a deputy director. We have a director on board and
because we're so early in creation of the M Rec, the M rec actually doesn't have health insurance. We're still creating it, right? We can fund these positions, but they have to live somewhere. So the director is currently a city of Framingham employee and what we're planning is the deputy director to be a town of Natick employee. All of the costs of the employee Fringe, everything will be covered by the grant. But we're gonna cover that through an employment contract. And I just need the board to be aware of that one and through, because it's effectuating the M rec, I need you to, then this vote will authorize me to then enter into
that type of employment contract. So yep, I can clarify that. Speaker 1: Are these new employees that Correct. Speaker 4: Be hired. Okay. Speaker 8: Yep. Yep. So the EM rec didn't exist. It was just on paper, right? So in February, the EM rec hired the border, the the director that is currently a city of Framingham employee because we literally just had the emer on paper. So what that director is currently doing is actually guiding us now through the process of creating the EM rec and like getting a, a tax ID number, signing them up for retirement, we're gonna be joining likely the,
the EM rec is gonna be joining the GIC for example. That can't happen till next January. That's how the GIC works and all the other things that goes into just literally organizing an entity. But we still need to hire a deputy director. Sure. And to balance out who's just logistically managing that, we Natick said let's we'll take on the deputy director 'cause Framingham took on the director. All the costs, again will be covered by the grant. So we're sub subsequently also entering into an MOU with Framingham to ensure that we have that ability to get reimbursed for all the costs.
'cause they're currently the grant recipient come July one, the M rec is gonna be the grant recipient. So we have another MLU at the M rec to then get the funds through them. So it's no cost to the town, but we just need to, to legitimize the process from a legal standpoint. And you that second vote not only helps for me to sign the IMA pending your vote on the accepting of Wayland if there's an amendment, but also help me then effectuate other contracts that might come down the pipeline. I'm gonna inform you of all those anyway, but it just helps to streamline some of the process
by you authorizing me to do some of this work ahead of time. Speaker 3: Okay. Welcome from Speaker 4: House Ready? Speaker 1: Yes, I'm ready. Speaker 4: Move to accept Wayland as a full partici particip participating community in the AM rec. Speaker 1: Second moved by Mr. Sydney. Seconded by Mr. Evans. All in favor? I'm not even gonna ask for discussion. Ms. Pope? Yes. Mr. Sydney? Yes. Mr. Evans? Yes. Ms. Wilger? Yes. And I'm a yes. Mr. Sydney Speaker 4: Per section B, do four of the IMA move to authorize the town administrator to execute all contracts, agreements
or other documents to effectuate the purposes of the IMA second. Speaker 1: Moved by Mr. Sydney. Second. Mr. Evans. All in favor? Ms. Pope? Yes. Mr. Sydney? Yes. Mr. Evans? Yes. Ms. Wolfer? Yes. And I'm a yes. Thank you Mr. Erickson. Speaker 8: Thank you. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Speaker 4: Consent agenda? Speaker 1: Yes, please. Speaker 4: So Speaker 3: Did we already move the flashing beacons? Speaker 1: Oh, let's move the flashing beacons. Speaker 8: Yeah, that doesn't have to be voted on. It is just gonna be moved. Yeah, let, it's not a hearing or a public hearing or anything. It's just an That's what I Speaker 1: Thought.
Yep. Okay. It's continued. Mr. Speaker 4: Okay, throw it off. Yeah. There are six items on the consent agenda. Item A approved common request, brown School PTO, to host family science night on Wednesday, July 16th with a rain date of Wednesday, July 30th from four to 8:30 PM Item B except Tom Brewster's resignation from the Economic Development Committee. Item C, appoint Heather Rockwood to the Economic Development Committee as the Natick Center Associates representative with the term ending June 30th, 2028. Item D, approve Ashbury Boston, P-O-R-L-L-C.
Application for a class one Auto dealer's license. Item E approve late May, 2025. License renewals. And item F, select board approval of 69 Central Street LLP Lip application. Anything to pull? Nope. Hearing none. I move item A through F. Second Speaker 1: Move by Mr. Sydney. Seconded by Ms. Alger. Ms. Pope? Yes. Mr. Sydney? Yes. Mr. Evans? Yes. Ms. Slager? Yes. And I'm a yes. Consent agenda is moved
before we take a motion to, I'm sorry, Mr. Erickson Town Administrative updates. Speaker 8: No additional updates at this time. We covered a lot tonight. Speaker 1: Select board updates. I'll be sending everyone an email with outstanding select board business so we can figure out how to prioritize and go from there. That's all I have before Move to adjourn? No, before we move to adjourn gentlemen, Mr. Roberts, your hand is still up. Is there something that you want to bring up that concerns? One of the last three things we did? Speaker 11: Just the M-R-E-C-C? Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 11: Just how I understand what Mr. Erickson said
that it's being funded now, but going forward, how would that be funded? Is there always gonna be a grant from that through the state? And then how would the town be responsible for that if the state is not funding that grant? Speaker 8: Great question. So the first several years of an of a, it's basically a regional dispatch center. So we are currently funding dispatch as part of our budget through their, their police department personnel. When the AM rec is fully up and operational, we will no longer be having a local dispatch center, will be a regionalized dispatch center.
And the way the IMA works is that essentially the communities that are part of that regional assessment center or regional dispatch center will be provided with an assessment based on a, a ratio of population as compared to the other communities in the, in the dispatch center and call volume as compared to all the call volumes. So in the case of Natick with Framingham, we're about 50% of Framingham's size and about 50% of their call volume. So it's about a two thirds, one third current split. Although with Waylon coming on board, it actually then lessens the split. And we do have room in the EM rec
to add additional people in future years. But we're in such an early stage, it's not even physically built yet. We just actually the bid documents are out and they're due at the end of June. So we're gonna have some construction happening. And then once the Americ is fully up and operational, that's when state grants help pay for all of the operation costs for a period of years. And then that will phase out. Actually I think it's like three years of a hundred percent and then it's 75 and 50 and 25 I think it phases out. And that's when our, our current funding that goes towards funding the dis our,
our local dispatch center can then be used to then supplement or pay for those costs. It should be actually less cost to us because we're sharing a lot of the costs with the other communities. So our personal, our those costs should, I mean they'll probably look more level because it's several years out, but they should be on the long term cost savings for the town. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Erickson. Speaker 11: Yeah, so that's, that sounds all good. And so it's more of like a dispatch thing. It's not like MBL and then No. Is there gonna be very Speaker 8: Different? No, it's just this, just Speaker 11: Dispatch. Yeah, no, yeah, I understand that completely.
Now with your explanation. And then will there be one local dispatch center for all the communities or how would that work? Are we gonna be communicating through Framingham dispatch, native dispatch? Wayland dispatch. No, that's a great question. That would be my last question. Speaker 8: Yeah, excellent question. So the way the regionals work, and this is our first time doing it, so you know we're learning as we're going as well is the dispatch center. Right now it's Natick, Framingham, and Wayland. It can expand. So there might be additional communities added in in future years. But p basically the training works so
that everybody's cross-trained, but when you call in it's geolocated to where you're located. So it actually knows whether it's a NATA call, a Framingham call or a waylan call. And then that dispatcher one, they're usually trained on the community. So they are designated for the communities. But then you can have cross training so that if somebody's out for example, they know, they know where the, where the call's coming from. And then each community will have their own protocols. There'll be a lot of overlapping protocols. But if Framingham handles certain calls differently than Natick, they'll know how to handle that call specific to Natick and then they'll be calling that back
to Natick public safety, whether it's police, fire or otherwise. So it, while it's a regional center for multiple communities, it is still having the policies and the procedures localized to the individual communities. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Erickson. So I believe Speaker 11: I so the way, just one last question, but the, the way, so there will be one local regional dispatch center and then we'll still have dispatchers at our local police and fire. No. Do I understand Understand that correctly? Speaker 8: No. Our dispatchers at local
and fire, once the regional dispatch center is open and operational, we will have no Okay. Need for Natick specific. Speaker 11: No, I understand that. Yeah. Our, our Speaker 8: Hope is that all of our dispatchers will work for the the regional. 'cause right now the regional doesn't have any dispatchers, so. Speaker 11: Yep. Yeah, exactly. No, I just thought, just the way you were explaining at the end, it was just like, I understand how every person in each community would understand the community. Yep. And that like people being out and all that. But then it seemed like at the end of you were saying that there would still be a dispatcher like in NA
or in framing AM and Wyoming. I apologize, but it would all, it would all be at the regional. Yep. Speaker 8: Correct. It would all be at the regional. Alright. Speaker 11: Thank you guys for me with time. Thank you. Sorry if I was a bother. I just like asking questions and Thank Speaker 1: You Mr. Roberts. Speaker 11: Thank you. Speaker 1: I I heard a motion from the end of the table over there. Move to adjourn. Move from moved by Mr. Sidney. Seconded by Yes. Everybody. Ms. I writing down, just pick a name. Ms. Pope. Yes. Mr. Sidney? Yes. Mr. Evans. Most def? Yes. And I'm a yes.
And that is at 10 37. Goodnight.