Speaker 1: Good evening and welcome to the Wednesday April 16th meeting of the Select Board. We are being recorded by Pegasus and available by Zoom. If you're tuning in with Zoom and you want to participate, you need to go to the bottom of your screen and there's a reactions button and that'll give you the opportunity to raise your hand. I call this meeting to order at 6:04 PM and we are going to be going into executive session. This portion of the meeting is not open to the public pursuant to Massachusetts 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 nonunion personnel. The fire chief Speaker 2: To enter executive session Speaker 1: Moved by Mr. Evans, seconded by Mr. Sydney. Mr. Sydney? Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: Mr. Evans. Yes. Mr. Wolfer? Yes. Yes. Sorry. It's okay. And I'm a Yes. It's 4 0 0. We'll be returning at approximately 6 35. Welcome back to the Wednesday April 16th select board meeting.
If you're on Zoom and you wish to participate, you can by hitting the button that says Reactions and Raising Your Hand Announcements. Mr. Erickson, the first announcement announcing ratification of the maintenance and custodian's local 1 1 1 6, and the Public Employees Committee. Public Employee Committee on health insurance contracts. Speaker 3: Sure. Do you wanna do the Pledge of Allegiance first? Yes, Speaker 1: Sure. Let's do the P Pledge of Allegiance for those of you who are able in the room, and please stand and we will observe a moment of silence, Speaker 4: A pledge allegiance Speaker 2: To of the United States of America
and to the Republic for which stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and Justice for. Speaker 1: Thank you. Speaker 3: So back to me. At a prior meeting of the board, it was actually an off cycle meeting. The select board voted to approve two contracts. The two that are noted here. One is a collective bargaining agreement with the custodians and maintenance division. That's basically the contract that largely oversees the facilities department staff. That contract will further be ratified by town meeting,
so there's definitely more details that folks can review in the finance committee book and in the budget book. On the impacts of that, it's, that was largely a contract that prior round of contract negotiations that a pretty comprehensive in collaboration with the union rewrite. This one was really making additional tweaks to advance some of the rewrite work. It's a shared department between school and town, so we really wanna make sure that it was truly reflective of that shared status in nature. And then some additional adjustments for compensation. The other contract that the select board ratified or voted on to support was a PEC
or public employee committee. A public employee committee is basically a committee formed under Master General Law under the adoption of a, of a component of master law made up of union reps from all the different town unions, town and school. And it basically centralizes negotiations between the town and the unions regarding healthcare benefits. We've had a very good and standard contract for the last several years. Good relations with that. PEC committee this year was a three year contract.
The last several years we've been doing a one year contract because of the market, not because of any challenges of negotiations, but because the healthcare market has been a little bit fluctuating in the last several years. But we, this year, we felt it prudent to do a three year contract. Really no major new terms, except some provisions in there to the protection of both the town and the the PEC to provide some flexibility should we need to make adjustments if the market were to continue to fluctuate. Both those agreements are currently in the process of being signed.
They're both unique in the sense that, that it's not just signed by the select board and the union. In the case of the custodians, for example, that also needs to be signed by the school committee because they're, because of the shared department. The school committee also signs those. And in the case of the PEC, it's actually signed by a rep from all the unions. So we had to get 20 plus signatures on that. Once those are completed, they'll be scanned and put on the town's website so people can see those in more detail. But those contracts were approved, and this is really just an announcement to let the public know that they were approved by the select board and the unions, the select board and executive session. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Mr. Erickson. The 2025 spring annual town meeting will begin pro forma on Tuesday, April 22nd at the Kennedy Middle School. There'll be no business that night, that's school vacation week, but we're required by our charter to open the town meeting on that date. So there'll be a simple meeting where we will adjourn till the 29th. And on Tuesday the 29th, we'll begin the business. You can find out more on our website. The hundred and 29th Boston Marathon will be held next Monday on April 21st in Natick.
And we wish all the runners who are running for charities in Natick and all the runners. Well, Mr. Erickson, do you wanna talk about the Green Communities Award? I just, Speaker 5: Yes. Can I add to that? Sure, please. There's a page on Our Town website about the marathon. There's a lot of useful information in terms of items that spectators cannot bring, runners cannot bring, what the route is, what some detours would be, and also talks about road closures, which is important
because 1 35 will be closed from approximately seven 30 in the morning to 2 45 in the afternoon. So plan accordingly. Anyone that's new to town that isn't aware of this, you're stuck on either the north side or the south side of Natick. So just wanted everyone to know that all that information is on Our Town website. Speaker 1: Thank you, Mr. Erickson. Speaker 3: Sure. So in the green communities and, and it is great to be informed about the marathon, it's a very big day and for the entire region.
Town offices will also be closed that day because it literally goes in front of the town offices and we actually can't get here for, for safety reasons. But moving on to the other announcement, Natick was awarded Green Communities grant funding. We are a very strong contender and recipient of grant funding through the Green Communities program, which is a state program that supports green initiatives or sustainability initiatives. And our sustainability manager, Jillian Wilson Martin, has been a, a advocate and, and very, very good at getting grants for the town. This year we got about a hundred thousand dollars, $99,703
to be exact, to advance various initiatives in town buildings and also with town infrastructure. These include electric vehicle support for purchases of electric vehicle zero emission vehicle maintenance equipment. We're actually using the green communities. We're actually piloting this in a lot of cases for the state to see how our facilities maintenance team can incorporate the, the equipment and the training that is needed to maintain battery powered or non combustion engine vehicles.
And so we're starting to do that training and do some of that equipment purchase through the green communities funding, and then also some heat pump work in two of our elementary schools. And I just wanna say thank you to Jillian and the team for doing such great work. Speaker 1: Thank you, Mr. Erickson. At this point in time, we'll move 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
while the board endeavors to ensure that all interested persons have the opportunity to address the select board due to time constraints that may not be possible. In cases where there is intense public interest in a particular topic, the board may schedule a future meeting to allow for further public input. Is there anyone in the room who wishes to address the board in public speak? Is there anyone online who wishes to address the board in public speak? Seeing none, we will move into discussion decision. The first item on our agenda is a presentation from Abby Labs by Gary Kaufman, CEO. We're gonna play a short video
and then I'm gonna invite Mr. Kaufman to come up to the podium and, and talk about it with us. Speaker 3: Okay. I am not getting the noise. Speaker 6: Audio. Speaker 7: Explain. Speaker 1: Oh, the audio is, Speaker 7: You're trying to help me with C since 2001. Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm not sure. Speaker 8: I think that's a setting on the Zoom. I think it may have to be a setting that we do on the Zoom where Speaker 1: It says audio. Speaker 8: No, maybe just turn it up on your computer so Speaker 3: I can do that. Yeah, Speaker 7: I've got an email that came in from a mom who explained how her young son was not doing well
and they didn't know what to do. The docs didn't know what to do, got put on her product, began to thrive. Do well, the email that we got back, just saying, I don't know who invented this, but thank you was private microphone. Speaker 3: If that's how it's picking up, we Speaker 8: Have to change the setting on the zoom. Okay. Speaker 3: So I probably, let me do this. If you gimme a second, I can probably get it to Pegasus to actually run the video. Speaker 8: We should be able to adjust it. Speaker 3: So the audio for Zoom is managed by Pegasus. Okay. So in order for my computer to be picked up, I need to do it through the mic, which means I need to turn it on, but it's gonna create the echo. We can also send the video to Pegasus and they can run it.
You do that? I can do that right now if they're able to receive it. Speaker 6: Hey Matt, rich, Speaker 8: Could you on the door? Oh, apologies. Mr. Kaman, while we're waiting for that, why don't we move to the public hearing for the Griffin Family Square discussion. Speaker 3: Who do I send it to? Speaker 6: Who do you send it? Speaker 8: Madam Speaker 9: Chair? Should I read this first? Yes. Okay. One second. Speaker 10: Good evening, select board members, town administrator, Glen, Speaker 1: Hold on one second. We need to open the public hearing. Okay. So just give me a minute. Madam Clerk, Speaker 9: The elect board will conduct a public hearing on
Wednesday, April 16th, 2025, 6:30 PM at the Natick Town Hall. Edward h Dlot, meeting room 13 East Central Street, Natick, Massachusetts, on the request to dedicate the square at the corner of Stag Drive in Hampton Road. In honor of Warren Griffin, Sr. Warren Griffin, Jr. Sean Griffin and William Griffin. Anyone wishing to be heard in this matter may participate in person or through Zoom. The login instructions for Zoom will be published on the 4 16 20 25 select board agenda.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Madam Chair. I need a motion to open public hearing. So moved. Second. Moved by Linda Wilger, seconded by Mr. Evans. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? And so we open the public hearing. Speaker 10: Thank you, chair. Hi, Paul Karu, veteran service Director for the Town of Natick. I'm opposing our first square of the season, the Griffin Family Square. This square is unique in one, one aspect where it's, it's the first time we're honoring a, a, a family member
from the war between the states. I have the discharge papers in my anybody wants to see, they're impressive. So I'm looking forward to that. And of course, Warren's the past eight year president of the Native Veterans Council himself following me, my nine years retired school teacher. So I'm proposing on May 3rd at noon at the intersection of Stag Drive and Hanson Road, and that is off Spain Street,
just before Route nine on that, that side of the road. William served in the Union Army during the war between the states. Warren Senior served during World War ii, reaching the rank of Corporal Warren Junior, served in Vietnam with the United States Marine Corps, achieving the rank of Corporal Sean served during the Cold War with the Marines achieving the rank of captain. We've all heard Warren Junior's name around town, and he's the one who proposed this to me. And I, so I just, I just said to Lauren, it's about time,
so I'm looking forward to this. He's been very active in the veterans activities in town. He's helped me through the square dedications through the holidays. We got Memorial Day coming up. He's helping me with some of the, with that work. And he early look forward to the Square dedication to honor the Griffin family. Thank you. Speaker 9: Shall we read the Speaker 1: Yes, please. Okay. Speaker 9: Thank you Mr. Caru. If you'll allow me, I'm gonna read the resolution.
Oh, please. Okay. This is the Griffin Family Square dedication for Saturday, May 3rd, 2025 at noon at the corner of Stag Drive and Hampton Road. Whereas on May 3rd, 2025, the Griffin Family Square will be located at the corner of Stag Drive and Hampton Road in the town of Natick, Massachusetts. And will be dedicated in honor of William Griffin, William Griffin, senior Warren Griffin, Jr. And Sean Griffin, all who served in the armed forces.
And whereas William Griffin served in the Union Army during the war between the States, enlisted in New Hampshire because he was too young and did not have his parents' permission. And upon discharge from the Civil War, went home to Boston and worked as a constable for the city of Boston. And whereas Warren Griffin Sr. Served during World War II with the army reaching the rank of corporal. And upon discharge went to work at a Boston Police as a Boston police officer and a school's resource officer, and a supervisor in attendance for the city of Boston.
And whereas Warren Griffin Jr. Served in Vietnam with the Marine corpse reaching the rank of Corporal, and upon discharged work as a special education teacher, special for the city of Boston, and is a past president of the Natick Veterans Council for a few terms. And he is also the past National Commandant of the Marine Corps League. Warren Griffin, Jr. Was awarded the National Defense Service Medal, Vietnam Campaign Medal, and a letter of appreciation. And whereas Sean Griffin served
with the Marine Corps reaching the rink of captain, and upon discharge went on to establish a thriving career in the technology industry. Resolved that the Natick Select Board hereby honors the Griffin family on the occasion of the dedication of the Griffin Family Square. Speaker 1: Thank you Madam Chair. Moved by Mr. Sidney. Second. Second. Seconded by Ms. Slager. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Passes five zero. Thank you so much, Mr. Caru. Speaker 10: Thank you Madam. Mr. Isle Board. I appreciate your time and pass this
Speaker 1: Thank you. Asking for a motion to close the public hearing. So more second. Moved by Mr. Evans. Seconded by Ms. Slager. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Passes 5 0 0 onto the public hearing for water and sewer rates. Okay. Do you wanna go back to, wanna go back? Yeah, we do need to go back. Thank you so much. They're all set. They're all set. Okay. Yes. So when we're ready, Matt should be able to pull it up. Okay. Matt, can you pull up the video for us? Speaker 7: We've been trying to help people with CF since 2001. We got an email that came in from a mom who explained
how her young son, who was not doing well and they didn't know what to do, the docs didn't know what to do, got put on our product, began to thrive, do well, the email that we got back, just saying, I don't know who invented this, but thank you, was probably the best email that any of us have ever gotten. And then the X number of years we've been working. So that's what drives the team. Speaker 11: One of the first companies we incubated was a company called Kahar Therapeutics. My partner, Dr. Ne, was a co-founder of that company. And as life takes us full circle, that company
produced a therapy that actually extended the life of one of my oldest and dearest friends who I knew since the time I was two years old. He had another good five years. Because of that therapy, my partner Dr. Near, said to me, I want to do more of this. I wanna help more companies. And I said, well, you really can't do one at a time. We have to buy a building. We have to do multiple companies at a time. As soon as we could rehab the buildings, we filled up the space. Speaker 12: The cancer we're trying to treat is one of the most aggressive cancers known to humans. It's called Anaplastic Thyroid cancer.
The patients, once they're diagnosed, the median overall survival is less than five months. So it's a race against time. My hope is that we can cure these patients and then move on to the other cancers, which are also in our pipeline. Speaker 7: We're bringing all of our research team and of our non-research team together under one house and the Abbey umbrella. And so by being at Abby continuously, we've had that continuity. We've had the ability to grow. We started out with one room, now we're in two or three, we're adding a lot more space. And so that flexibility without having to completely disrupt the teams gone a long
Speaker 12: Way. And when you work in rare diseases, part of the challenge is that there's just not a lot of patients. And so you really have to be very innovative. We have ambitious plans to grow. I'm glad that we are in a place like a BI Labs, which allows us to do that. I would love it if you could cure our patients, give them hope, and then allow them to live long lives. Speaker 13: Dacon has been doing life science work for years on design building. You're that much closer to the actual design. That design process is throughout the entire construction process. It's a much more efficient, collaborative environment to work in. We're invested in, we own every step of the way
until the day we hand them the keys. Speaker 11: The real benefit here, and the real amazing success story here is we know that in 20 years we're gonna be able to look back and we're gonna be able to rattle off the names of 10 to 15 to 20 companies that started here that we helped, and that are changing the lives of tens of thousands, if not millions of people. It's all about helping people. Speaker 1: Thank you so much. I invited Mr. Kaufman to come here before the board. I, this is the fourth time seeing this video, and it hits me hard every time.
Mr. Evans and I went to the ribbon cutting on the new Abbey Labs three opening of their new building. And I was extraordinarily impressed, not by only what they do, but their impact in Natick, making Natick one of the most competitive areas for life sciences. And I wanted to invite him so that he could share a little bit about the business model and open it up for questions from the public and the board. And thank you so much for coming tonight, Mr. Kaufman. Thank Speaker 11: You for having me. Board, there's a green light on, on the mic. Yes. Speaker 1: If you could pull the mic down just a little bit.
Thank you so much. Could you talk a little bit about the business model? Speaker 11: Sure. So we started about 10 years ago, actually. We're celebrating our 10 year anniversary next month. We now have 140,000 square feet in four buildings, all in the Sherwood Plaza and the the Natick Business Park there. We host about 50 companies currently about 400 scientists are on campus on a monthly basis and about 125 on a daily basis. And as the slide talked about, I think there's been about 2000 jobs created as a result
of the work that the companies have done. A lot of those people live here in Natick. They tell me on a daily basis how much they love their five minute commute. They live in a lot of the neighborhoods that you probably live in. And they, they're so blessed. They keep telling me, you, you can't do science two hours a day in a car driving back and forth to Cambridge. You can't do science in a, in a garage or in a basement. We, we never closed one day during Covid. We did a lot of the back office research
and development for some of the vaccines at our building. We also had a very low rate of covid in our buildings because our buildings are what's called BSL two buildings. And the biggest determining factor of a BSL two building is that the air changes every 12 minutes. So five times per hour, fresh air is coming into the building. So it's a very safe environment for scientific work to be done. And of course, we, we learned after Covid that it's also a very safe environment
for individuals to be doing their work as well. Much different from what is in Boston and Cambridge in some of the retrofitted buildings that they have there. So we're, we're very excited. We're excited about the growth that we've had the last 10 years. We have run into a little bit of a hiccup as a lot of people have in this industry. Just today, another company came to me and said that they were gonna be shut down, shutting down. So there's a lot of economic challenges in this industry. What the politicians don't tell you is that it's eight
to 10 years and over $1 billion to create one therapy. It's just astronomical. And there's so many companies that don't make it along the way, but this is the struggle and the challenges that we all have to go through in order to achieve what we all want, which is we all wanna live to be 95 years old. We wanna live in our own home or our own apartment or condo, and we want to go to sleep one day at 95 and not wake up. We don't wanna live in a nursing home or, or an assisted living. And, and this is, this is what you have to do in order
to reach that objective. Speaker 1: Thank you, Mr. Kaufman. Mr. Evans, Speaker 14: Mr. Kaufman, I just would like you to share with the public your partnership with Mass Bay Community College. Speaker 11: Correct. We have a couple of different partnerships. We support Mass Bay Community College. We raise money for scholarships for Mass Bay. We do some events at Mass Bay. We host a number of students at Mass Bay. We're very, we are very excited and we're very active in
giving out internships every summer as well. A number of those students are from Mass Bay, a number of, from Framingham and a fair number of over the last few years have actually lived in Natick as well. We also partnership with the Natick school systems as well. I think we're doing a program coming up next month where Natick students are gonna come to our lab and they're going to look at the DNA of a strawberry, things like that. Thermo Fisher, one of our partners is paying for everything. The, the bus to bring the students there.
The, the lunch, I think that's being provided to the students. And we also work with the high school, the Natick High School, whereby we have students that come to our buildings a couple of times a week. These are students that have a number of different physical disabilities and they learn different types of tasks that they could utilize in business. And we've had a couple of students, I guess you'd call it, graduate from the program, and they're now working at, at a full-time job. So we, we very much enjoy meeting those students
and helping those students. Dr. Speaker 1: Other questions or comments from the board? Ms. Ocker, Speaker 5: Thank you. Thank you for the very informative presentation. Are many of the companies federally funded or is it privately funded at this point? And, you know, and what do you think the risk might be of, of if they are publicly funded of the proposed potentially upcoming cuts? Speaker 11: Yeah, it's, it's been a big challenge. The NIH funding has been frozen.
A number of venture capitalists or early stage investors have been, you know, holding back as well. So there's been some quite a bit of challenges. My philosophy always is that this is an eight to 10 year investment. If you're looking at a, a short time horizon, you probably shouldn't be investing in this type of business. But unfortunately, there are quite a few investors who are looking for, you know, show me the return right now. And, and that's, that's very hard to do in this type of field. We're not, you know, they're not building widgets or a better mouse trap.
They have to go through a lot of different steps and create a lot of data that proves that not only does their therapy work, but it's also safe. And that takes a long time. And there's a lot of steps and a lot of approvals that go through that. So it's, it's, it's been a challenge. I've been working with Mr. Erickson on educating a lot of people, companies that are looking to move to this area. We are very blessed. I don't know how much you realize it or how much the audience realizes it,
but the Boston Metro, west Massachusetts area is the center of the universe when it comes to life science research. More is done within 50 miles of where we're standing right now than any other place in the world. And when we first decided to set up our facility here in Natick, we actually pulled voter data registration. And in, in voter data registration, you can see how many people have advanced science degrees. And we realized that Natick is the center
of advanced Science degrees. There are so many tens of thousands of people that live very close to Natick and are commuting into Boston every day, or Cambridge every day. So we knew we would be successful because people want to be, you know, there's a lifestyle change. If you can drive five minutes or under 20 minutes to work versus an hour and a half every day each way, that's a huge difference. You can spend time, more time with your family. You can go to your son or your daughter's extracurricular activity performance in the afternoon. You can do a lot of things.
You can make it home for dinner every night to see your family. And so people are gaining five to 10 hours a week times 50 weeks a year. So it's a big, big difference. That's why one of the big reasons why we've been so successful here in Natick, because, you know, the drivability factor, I should say, we're also our partner in this HC Atlantic, the Cohen family, of course, you know, they've been great stewards of the Sherwood Plaza land since 1959. The fact that they've owned the property since 1959 allows us to be able to be the affordable option
to Cambridge and Boston. So we're about 50% of the cost of setting up a lab in Cambridge or Boston. And that's a big difference as well. Speaker 1: One of the things I'll note on the heel of Ms. Schlager's question is that the Natick Select board in its commitment to the community in response to the request for an override, made a commitment to work with the community at Economic Development Office to adopt standards that move Natick from a bronze certification to a platinum status from mass bio.org. And we're very close to, to nailing that.
The reason that's important for economic development is in light of the, the virtual cessation of funding from the federal level, this will make Abbey Labs much more attractive to international business or international researchers. Speaker 11: All of all of Natick. You'll make Speaker 1: All of Natick. Yes, all of Natick. All of Natick. And, and that will further scientific, you know, other countries aren't shutting down their scientific research, and so we wanna welcome them here with the wealth of talent we have with the low, low cost, with the great quality of life we have in Metro West.
Speaker 11: Correct. We're, we're close. I, I've had some conversations with Mr. Erickson. I, Jamie and I have been talking about this since before he was, when he was chair of the Economic Development Committee, I think 6, 7, 8 years ago. It's been a challenge, but we're close. I hope we were able to push that through the next couple of weeks. We've got the big bio conference coming up, up, we're lucky enough to have it in Boston. It is the, the 16th to the 19th bio. Actually, Laura Hamilton, who is one of the senior people at Bio made the offer recently
to allow the town of Natick to be a sponsor of the BIOS mass Massachusetts Bios Pavilion, if you will. A BI lab is happy to pay the cost of that sponsorship so that Natick can be featured on that. On that, I think it's a $5,000 amount. And this would give Natick more visibility, essentially. The first thing that a company from California or Florida or Germany or England looks at when they're looking to expand, again, they want to be in Boston
because Boston is the number one place where they can attract the, the people is they look at the mass bio, bio ready status, and they look at the towns who has the platinum status. Right now, Natick is the lowest, it's bronze status. I'm embarrassed to say. The towns that have higher statuses than us, most of our competition in Cambridge, in Worcester, in Newton, they all have platinum status. And it's, it's been a battle and it's been a fight and it's, it would be a huge benefit to, to push that through. So I don't know if there's anything you can do to help.
I'm not quite sure. I, I think Jamie is, Jamie sent an email to try to push it through last week. I, I think it's sitting on someone's desk and it just needs a signature. I'm really not, I, I guess I'm not totally understanding what, you know, what's holding it back. I guess it, Speaker 3: It, so we have everything in place. So when I started here 10 years ago, working with Abey Labs and starting with the town of Natick, we're at bronze and there are some regulatory things that the town had to make adjustments to. Those have been made. I give credit to Amanda Loomis, our current CED director, who actually shuffled those through
the town meeting in the last couple years to make the zoning and other adjustments that were necessary to ensure that we could qualify for a higher status than bronze. And it's quite frankly, a capacity challenge for her right now. But she has that completed, she has to get the final stuff over to David, believe David Cohen Pratt to sign, and then this can be submitted, it's strictly capacity issue that we have with, with town staff right now, but it'll be completed. I talked with her today and it's the next thing on her plate, so she wants to get that completed as well. Speaker 11: Fantastic. That, that, thank you very much for that help. Thank Speaker 1: You, Mr. Erickson. Mr. Sydney,
Speaker 15: Yes. I'm really intrigued by this idea of sponsoring at Mass Bio, and I'm just sort of wondering, logistically, it sounds like technically it would be a donation to the town and we'd have to accept that. Speaker 3: No, I think they're just sponsoring, it's under the name at Mass Bio. Is that my understanding? Speaker 11: I brought along some flyers. I, I'd might Speaker 1: Like to see a flyer. Thank you. That can Speaker 11: Print it off their Speaker 3: Website. Yeah, it's, it's through the, the conference organizers, Speaker 11: The town of Natick would get some, some note, some, some notif, not notification, but some notoriety. Notoriety in some of the billboards that are at the show.
Some of the things that are online, it would additionally potentially attract some more companies. Kula Bio is probably one of the biggest companies that has set up in the town of Natick. They are in the, what used to be one of the World War II buildings, I think where the tank actually was. And Kula Bio, some of you don't know who that, what that company does. They make low nitrogen fertilizer and they sell that all over the country. I think they've got over a hundred different farms that they're selling it to now. And they manufacture it in that facility
that they've built out. And, and I think they've spent over four or $5 million to retrofit that building to, and they've hired, I think they have over 50 people that are working at that building. The research and development is still done in our building, but it's a good example of a company that stats out with one or two people and spins off to being a medium sized employer in the town of Natick. And a number of those people live in Natick as well. Speaker 1: Thank you, Mr. Kaufman. Is there anyone in the room who would like to ask a question? Ms. Pope?
Speaker 9: I honestly just, I'm, I'm enlightened and I appreciate you coming before the board to share these things. And I, I liberally wanna say thank you for being in partnership and business with Natick. Speaker 11: Thank you. We're very passionate, as you can tell, we're very passionate about it. And we, we love to brag about our graduates and it, it, it will hit, it hit me. It, it affected one of my closest and dearest friends. Something that was developed by one of the companies that originally was started at a BI lab.
And it will probably affect all of us in this room, these type of therapies. We all, you know, except for the gentleman I met down in Florida this year, who's 96 years old, who told me he takes vitamins only, he doesn't take any medicine. God love him. I I, that's amazing. But unfortunately, we, we need, we need more therapies here to help us. So Speaker 15: Thank you. If, if I may Madam Chair, continue. Yes, thank you. I am really pleased with what you're doing over there. Speaker 11: Thank you. Speaker 15: You know, it's great to see another, what looks like a really good high technology firm,
really making deep footprints in Natick and really looking to be here for the future. And it sounds like to be a really great corporate citizen of the town. Thank you. And I, I just really appreciate that Speaker 11: The, the town of Natick has been a great, great place for us to locate. The building department has been fantastic to work with. The planning board has been great to work with. Just everyone's been very, very helpful. We are one of maybe only less than 50 incubators and, and life science facilities in the country
that are a hundred percent private. We don't, we haven't taken any state money or federal money. We're not affiliated with any university or hospital. It's very rare to be in that case. But we, we've invested millions of dollars. We have quite a bit with East, east Boston, or actually now it's Rockland Trust on loans for the buildings. But we're very committed to this. We have to show you how committed we are to this. We don't own the land where two of our buildings or three of our buildings are on,
but we have a hundred year lease on the building. That's awesome. So long, you know, long after I'm gone, my daughter is gone. My grandchildren will hopefully still be operating these buildings and new therapies will be coming outta these buildings. So we're very, we're very committed. Speaker 14: Awesome. Speaker 1: Ms. Pope, did you have anything? No, no. You wanted, okay. I'd like to, Mr. Scott, if you could approach the microphone and introduce yourself. Speaker 16: Roger Scott 40 Water Street. My question is, could you explain what you did with Covid
as far as, you said you had done work on CO and could you just let us know exactly what, what kind of work was? Speaker 11: So we did some, I would call it back office work on some of the vaccine work. Some, some of the companies in our building, I should say were doing some work for Moderna and some of the other companies for Pfizer and some of the other companies that were working on it. Speaker 17: Awesome. Speaker 1: Thanks Mr. Kaufman. Mr. Evans, Speaker 14: I just wanted to give kudos where kudos are due first to Mr. Kaufman for all the great work that he's done in the partnership.
He's forged to Mr. Erickson for all the work he's done over the years, as well as Amanda Loomis pushing it through with an ridiculous workload that she still manages to, to come out with things like this. And, and it's just staggering how, how effective she is and to our chair, who's also put down the marker to become a platinum community, which is essential to moving forward and, and being competitive.
We, we have a lot of advantages that we can take and capitalize on geographically. We're still, believe it or not, a cost effective community. So it's a, it's a great combination. We're, I think we can continue to move forward and this is exciting. Speaker 1: Yes. Thank you Mr. Evans. Thank you Mr. Kaufman for coming and sharing your, your work, your company's work with us and deeply appreciate the work you're doing. Speaker 11: Thank you to the select board for having me appreciate everything, all the help you've done over the years. Speaker 14: Thanks. Speaker 1: We will move on
to the next public hearing, which is the fiscal 26 water and sewer rates. Okay. Speaker 9: Should I read this before opening or make a, make a motion to open? No, you Speaker 1: Read it and then move to open. Okay. Speaker 9: The select Board of the Town of Natick will hold a public hearing on the fiscal 2026 water and sewer rates on Wednesday, April 16th, 2025 at 6:30 PM The hearing will be head held in the Edward lot 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 4 16 20 25 select board agenda. All persons interested in this matter may appear and be heard at the time and place as mentioned above. And I move to open the public hearing tuck Speaker 1: Move by Ms. Pope, seconded by Mr. Evans. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Public hearing is open. Mr. Sprat, Speaker 18: Thank you. Just a quick technology check. I just wanna, Speaker 15: Yeah, we can see it. Speaker 18: Make sure I can manage. Okay, great. Thank you very much. I appreciate your time tonight. Get on there.
No, I'm good, thank you. Tonight we have our water rate hearing. I think before we start, I just wanna give you some, just a brief overview. I know this is gonna be a difficult decision. This is a challenging subject. We have increasing cost regulations on unstable revenue, which really forced this decision to look towards the future for our water rates. The bottom line up front, I always try to give that is our recommendation will be option number two as we go through this presentation. The typical customer would see about a $33 increase per quarter for their water.
The cost to produce and the cost for our, our customers to get water is approximately 2 cents a gallon. So that's, that's, we're still delivering value. That's a very good water rate in general. So with that said, I'm gonna move forward through the presentation. The slides are numbered. Ideally we have questions at the end, but I'm prepared to stop during the presentation. But if we just keep tabs of the, of the slide numbers and then we can get back to that for the questions at the end. I'm all set. Oh, you're gonna do that for them? Okay. So the town work with Rayburn Consulting.
Rayburn Consulting is, they do a ton of water work on the East coast, very large water users, much bigger than us, private and public water supplies. So we've been using them for about three years and our model was built about three years ago. We've tested that model over and over again. Our model is good. We'll, we'll get into that in a bit, but our goal here ultimately is to match revenue with current and future expenses and still provide value to our rate payers.
One of the challenges, and one of the things that we'd started last rate setting was the RTS fee. That is the readiness to serve fee. And essentially what it does is it's trying to stabilize our revenue and really gives a nod to all the work that happens before you turn your faucet on. And water comes out. There's millions of dollars of work and overhead and cost that happen behind the scenes, and that's what the readiness to serve fee is. So we started with a, a base fee years ago, which was about 3% of our total revenue last year.
With the re readiness to serve, we're up to 5%. We're heading towards, with this recommendation, about 10% of our fixed revenue. Just to put that in perspective from benchmarking and the industry standard, the ideal would be to get to around 20 to 23% of our total costs or our total revenue to be fixed, not subject to the volatility of selling water in a time where there could be drought conditions or regulations or other things that make the revenue unstable. So essentially, what are our rates cover?
Not gonna read all of these, but I'll point out some highlights. We have 12 groundwater wells at the current time. Natick does not use any water from the MWRA. I'll explain later in the presentation that we will be looking to supplement our water with MWRA. The ELM Bank Wells won't meet new regulations coming with PFAS and we'll we'll be, instead of building more treatment plants, more, more, more expense, our best option is really to supplement that water with MWRA. But right now no surf, no surface water.
It's all well water. We have treatment plants at the, a variety of our, our wells, primarily at Springville. That's where we treat for PFAS. That's our biggest treatment plant. We store water. We have miles and miles and miles of water, Maine and sewer Maine, and all the other direct and indirect costs. One of that is debt. We have to borrow money to, to build things for the future. This here is a, a graphic of our well system. I mentioned the Springville water treatment plant. The Springville water treatment plant is built essentially in two different treatment trains.
We have the h and t and the Tonka treatment trains. They are both green sand filter treatment and also PFAS treatment. So the h and t, if you see on the very top, has lead and lag PFAS filters. This is granulated activated carbon gac that is fairly new. We built this plant about five years ago or so, to the tune of about $7 million. We were a, a town that really jumped ahead of the PFAS regulations. DP requires lead lag filtration. So at the Tonka plant, which is really our biggest producer
at about up to 4 million gallons per day, we currently only have lead PFAS filtration. So in the future, probably around 20 28, 20 29, we will likely be building another treatment plant to provide either lead lag filtration or another filter media to provide a compliant PFAS filtration. Right now outta Springfield, we are providing zero PFAS from our well water that has one well-trained has 28, and the other has 19 parts per trillion of PFAS. The current standard is 21 by the DEP.
And out of that, what we're doing now is producing zero PFAS. Below the dot of the second dotted line are our other wells, which you can see also have PFAS. The ELM bank, well primarily delivers about 20 to 25% of our total water. It, it would be a very difficult place to provide treatment just based on the, the square footage of the site we have. So that's where we're looking to in the future, supplement our water with MWRA. So the budget challenges we have, we have kind of the perfect storm of challenges coming up.
We have a lot of debt service that we're gonna have to, we're building a new treatment plant that'll be to the tune of about $30 million. That's a huge amount of debt that we're gonna have to incur on. So that's, those are mandated regulations. We don't have a choice to get PFAS out of our water, so we'll have to do that. We also have challenges like state drought mandates, which we talked about last week, that historically we essentially sell water. So if the state is telling us we have drought mandates that's restricting the amount of water we can sell
and reduces our revenue this year alone, we'll probably have a three to $400,000 deficit in our revenue because of that drought condition, which is volatility. If we can't predict what we can produce for revenue, it makes a volatile revenue stream. We also have inflation, potentially more regulations down the line. And the current regulations, how we're treating per per PFAS right now are operational cost have increased by about $620,000 a year. That's GAC media change outs, that's increased testing,
things that have cost us more. So I'm gonna switch gears now and talk about our rate methodology and then we'll get into the specific options. So this is a very data-driven process. We've built a model we've spent hours and hours and hours with, with consultants and, and really diving deep into our data. We've established this model from 2023. It assumes operational costs will increase about four and a half percent over the next five years. The debt service that's on our model is based on the capital plan that we've produced.
Our consumption is based on the average of FY 19 and 21. And I'll show you that graphically, what that means. We've done an IT iterative process, we're presenting you with three options tonight, but we've looked at dozens of options and kind of whittled our way down to these three. Our model and our pricing and everything assumes there's no grants or alternative funding. We don't have that in hand right now. So we're producing really a, a realistic but conservative estimate. You know, we, we always pursue grant funding and things to help us offset these costs.
On the expense side, what we have is the blue line is our total expenses. The orange line just for really for reference is the current MWRA sewer assessment. And the thing to point out about this graph on the orange line, the sewer assessment from MWA increases roughly 4% a year. So that's a pretty static increase. You can see our total expenses are a little more erratic and are certainly increasing from FY 22 essentially on or 21 on specifically from PFAS.
And then later on from other regulatory changes and increased costs, you can see that we're increasing way more than that 4% line. So on the usage side, I told you before that 19 and 21 were our model years, but we've had some really kind of wacky things happen in the past three years. So FY 22, 23 and 24. The graph below here with the, the red circles, that's rainfall In FY 22, we had a very wet year. FY 23, we had a very dry year FY 24, again a very wet year.
And FY 22 we had not only a wet year, but PFAS restrictions, which caused us not to produce enough much water because of PFAS. But also we had tons of rain so people weren't watering their lawns. The very dry year. We had a drought condition we had to reduce. And the very wet year, again, we didn't have a lot of revenue from sprinkling. What does that mean? That means volatility. So on the blue line, what you're seeing in blue in the stacked bar chart is
the revenue that we collected from usage. The orange pieces of that was the total costs essentially that we had to make up. That orange mark is where we dipped into our reserves. So we have reserves, you call it free cash, we call it our retained earnings on the, on the enterprise side. So this is where we had to dip into our savings to make up our total revenue. So this is total annual consumption that we're looking at right now. So we're giving you the history 19 and 21. That's the model year in light blue.
And you can see in 22, 23 and 24, which we just showed that volatility, we weren't meeting our model year because of that volatility. This chart shows our retained earnings. The orange line is our target retained earnings, which is at, at a minimum about 10% of our total revenue. So that's where our, our line of retained earnings should be. At its minimum, you can see the blue line is a bit erratic. That's the retained earnings that we've had. And right now we're at about $2.8 million of retained earnings with the revenue loss
that we should have this year and increased costs that delta. So we lose 400 grand, but really we were projecting to, we have about 400 go into retained earnings. So the Delta's really about 800 grand. Call that a million dollars in two years, we could wipe out our retained earnings. This slide really is just showing how erratic we've been in our rate setting in the past. We've been really reacting to this retained earnings. We've been dipping into it. We've been really looking just one year ahead and that's really created this erratic rate setting.
Sometimes it's as low as 2%, sometimes it's as high as 10%. Sometimes we just do water, sometimes we just do sewer. It's been really erratic. What we're trying to do is stabilize that for the future. So I'm gonna get into the rate proposals. What you're gonna see once we get into the rate proposals is three of the same. I'm gonna explain it in detail the first time and I'll go quickly for the other slides before we do that. On the right side here is our customer breakdown. We have about 63% of our customers, our single family water sewer.
They get a water and sewer bill. We have combined water sewer, we have irrigation, we have different types. That's our customer breakdown on the right and on the left. It's how that customer breakdown results in revenue. So essentially 50% of our revenue is from combined water sewer, which is essentially your, your general household usage. Speaker 15: It, can you go back there for a second? It looks like when we have water restrictions, we're gonna obviously gonna lose irrigation. Yes. And that's gonna be like a loss of like
what, 14 15% of our revenue? Speaker 18: Yeah, it's 12. Residential irrigation is 12%. That's with people that have irrigation meters. There are other people that water the lines that don't have irrigation meters. So I'd I'd say you're probably correct, maybe 15 or so percent. Speaker 15: Okay, thanks. I just wanted to highlight that. Speaker 18: So recommendation one, and again this is not the full recommended option, but this is an option for you, is to get our readiness to serve our RTS fee to industry best practice,
20% or so. So if we did that, we'd have a pretty dramatic increase in the RTSV, but only in the RTSV. We wouldn't affect water rates. And if we did that, this is how that would break down. So water service only would have a $35 increase, a sewer service would have a $30 increase. That's where you get the 65 combined water and sewer. I just wanna point that out and this's the different types of meters that would be hit with the different RTS fees. So this slide here compares how our current rates are set up and what option one in the increases to option one
would, how that would change. So I think if I can do this here, you can see that the actual water rates and the tiers that we have don't change between these. This option, what does change is the RTS fee is changing. Also, I wanna point out here as with all of the recommended solutions that we have an elderly rate, that's essentially people that qualify both in age and income that would typically have the option
to do like a, if they work off some of their tax bill. It's the same rules for for water. And you can see they, they are not impacted by these changes. So in option one, this is, this is the breakdown here of bills, the different types of bills that we have and that the average user in each of those categories. So this CCF is a hundred cubic feet, which is this, which is 748 gallons of water essentially. So there are u this com residential combined user
is using 13.9 CCF. So that would be 13.9 times 748 to get the total gallons. This is the current usage and this is what the bills would look like in the new rate scenario. So in this scenario here, This is a slide that I wanna explain a little bit. So what you're seeing here is essentially a five-year projection of revenue and expenses with debt and everything included. I just want to go over that. The highlighted areas are what really we need to be paying attention to. The top line here is total revenue.
You can see the fixed revenue in that goes up to 18%. That's that increase in RTS fee. The debt service, you can see that we have a challenge happening here. Our, our debt service is going to double in the next five years. So that's really essentially because of a new treatment plant that we need to build. That's something to highlight. The third line that's highlighted is if and when we switch to MWRA, this will be the MWRA costs that will be added that we're not currently paying now for water.
And this is projected at 20%. The goal here would be to use Springville as much as possible and use as little MWRA water as possible. But we've done a ELM bank is what we use right now at 25%. We estimated at 20%. Hopefully we can drive that number down. But this again is a conservative scenario. So we have net revenue and you can see under this scenario that for FY 26 and 27 we're in the black and then projected out to 28, 29,
and 30 we're in the red, although we're covering about 98% of our our costs. And at the bottom you have your retained earnings, our target minimum is 10%. You can see we're we're building our retained earnings, but in the last three years of this projection, we're gonna have to dip into those retained earnings to cover those costs. So that's a kind of a deeper explanation. I'm gonna get into the other rates that will, they're using the same methodology. The recommended option is option two, which is to increase our RTS fees
and also increase our rates. So it's a lower increase to the RTS fees, but it's increasing all of our other tiered rates by 5% over the next five years. So again, building more of a steady model for the future. This is how option two looks like currently and how it would look like in the future. This is, you can see the, the rates have changed by 5% and then the RTS fees have increased, but not as much in that LA as that last option. This is how it would impact the
average customer on those bills. And this is where it's about a $33 increase for the average consumer of water per quarter. What that looks like on the five year plan, we still have, we're still in the red towards the end, we're covering again, 98, 98, 90 9% of our total costs we're building retained earnings. We would have to offset those, but we're still making, or it essentially works financially. The third option, which I've coined, kind
of kicking the can down the road, is essentially just, it will have the same RTS fee increase as option two. However, there'd be no rate increases for this year, but we'd have to increase rates next year in the following year that would be escalating. So we'd in be increasing our rates more down the line. That's how that looks compared to the two options, the current rates and option three. And that's the, it impacts the average customer a little less. There'll be about $125 a, a quarter
as opposed to the 33. That scenario does not build a retained earnings as much and also has more dramatic offsets in retained earnings in the future. In all of the rate models. This going back to the slide we had, the one pie chart was the, the makeup of our users, but the one on the right was the revenues. So this is that same revenue in the current model and this is how it affects us in the future model. And you can see it's proportional. So we're getting a little bit more revenue from our major
categories of the pie chart. So what you're seeing on this slide is our peer group. So our peer group, Braintree, Randolph and Weymouth are chosen because they're similar size communities. They are MWRA sewer only, and they produce their own water. So that's why they were chosen. And then we also have a Wellesley in there, which is MWRA sewer partial MWA water. So it's not a a, an apples to apples pier. And then you have natick at its current rates compared to
those communities at their current rates. And you can see we're not charging as much as them we're, we have a, a lower cost in the options and I wanna focus on option two here 'cause that's the recommended solution that is our future rate compared to their current rates. So you can see at this bar graph here, we're still competitive next year to their rates this year. I have no idea what they're going to be raising their rates. So again, just to wrap up, option two is the recommended path and this is the, the makeup of that bill structure in
that recommended path forward. Speaker 8: Thank you so much, Mr. Spprt. Yes, Mr. Speaker 15: Mr. Sidney. Thank you Madam Chair. Mr. Sprat, did any of your plans or or urinalysis suggest slowly rating raising the RTS fee over time as opposed to like fixing it for the next five years? The way you seem to be suggesting? Speaker 18: So the short answer to that is yes. The challenge with that, if we don't increase the RTS fees, we're really relying on rates, right?
So there's really three options that we could do. We could raise individual usage rates, we could raise the RTS fee, or we could do a combination. That's really the only three major things that we can do. Speaker 15: Right? But I'm really asking is, you know, if, if we project forward, you know, ideally we wanna over five or 10 years or whatever period of time you want to choose, get our RTS fees to, you know, more industry standard so that we're more, have more reliable revenue. Right. But from the way this is presented, it seems to me you're saying, okay, well we'll raise the RTS fees
a certain amount, but then they'll stay static for a few years and we'll go with raising rates from there. Is that your plan or are you gonna suggest raising RTS again in a year or two? Speaker 18: So the current plan is for the next fi next four years, we would raise all rates including the RTSV by 5%. So we'd get to 10% and then we would in a linear way, re increase everything 5%. There's one option that's on the table, and I think that's an on, on the table really for next year or so is we could get to that next big RTS fee,
but maybe include so many units of water essentially for free as part of that. That's one other way to do that. 'cause we have to get into a balance between volatile revenue and fixed revenue. Speaker 15: Yeah. Which is what I'm trying to Yeah, Speaker 18: That's, so we have looked at that. These were again, the three that we, that balanced out the finances the best. But I do think that that is an iteration for next year or the year after that we could balance more RTS but reduce some of the lower tier water consumption. Okay. And get to that same Speaker 15: Fixed revenue.
Okay. Thank you. I wanted to clarify that. And you know, you pointed out that somewhere in, and I forget what year 27 or thereabouts you're gonna be, we're gonna be bringing some M-W-A-M-W-R-A Water Inn presumably to offset Elm Bank. And, and I would imagine at some point we're gonna be ordered to take Elm Bank offline. Although you haven't actually said that. If, if we do that under the current DEP regulations, are we still going to be subject to the same rules about drought conditions where when Essex runs outta water,
we're gonna be in drought conditions even though we're not taking out of the Charles River? Speaker 18: The short answer is yes, it would be for all registered wells as opposed to permanent wells. Speaker 15: Yeah. So even, even though we're gonna have MWA WA MWRA water, we're still gonna be in volatile usage because we'll probably be in drought most of the time. Speaker 18: Right. Unless we were a hundred percent NW MWRA we're, we're still just supplementing. And the reason to supplement is we can still produce water cheaper in Natick for our rate payers. Okay.
Speaker 15: Thank you. Good presentation Speaker 9: Ms. Pope. Thank you. Thank you for your presentation and thank you for all the work that's gone into this. I have a question about the option that you're suggesting Option two in the net revenue with FY 28 and forward. What is, what's the plan? What would be the plan to make up the shortfall, the net revenue shortfall Speaker 18: Using the last highlighted line? We're we're developing our retained earnings. So to balance that we would use retained earnings to fund that. Okay. Speaker 9: Thank you. Speaker 1: Questions from the board, Mr. Evans
Speaker 14: More comment, also great job on the analysis and thank you for presenting multiple cases for us to consider it. It strikes me that, and correct me if I've got this wrong, option two seems to balance, I'll call it moderates, the cost increases while providing the best overall contribution to retained earnings for future years. Is that a fair statement? Speaker 18: Yes. Yes it is. Okay. Speaker 14: Right. That means I'm getting it. Good. That sga
Speaker 5: Thank you Madam Chair. So if I'm reading this right for option two, for a residential combina combination user that's about half of our residents, they would be seeing on average an 18% increase in their water bills next year. Speaker 18: Yes. Speaker 5: All right. And then people that are irrigation only would be seeing 14% and this would not include any additional tearing of water. I'm actually liking option three that the kick the can down the road a little bit more.
I think that's a little bit more palatable in terms of the increase because then we have the opportunity next year to come back and also increase our rates at that point. I don't necessarily see the value of, of setting this as a fixed rate for five years. But if, if you think there's value in that, I'd like to hear the explanation about why you think it's good to set it for a longer period of time. Speaker 18: So first of all, we're not setting rates for five years. We're setting rates for one year. Right. So we're only the vote tonight. Or if you continue the hearing, the vote is really only
this year's rates. Right. We are projecting out five years. 'cause five years are known in the capital plan, kicking the can down the road. The challenge there is first of all, that those two options kicking the can down the road. And option two one is a $25 increase and one is a $33 increase per quarter. So we're not talking dramatic differences. The major difference though, is looking in the future, there is one of the years that we have a million dollar shortfall. And that's, that's the problem. You're really increasing the problem down the road
and we're gonna end up being forced to have potentially a seven or 10% increase at a further time. Speaker 5: But that assumes that in future years there's no further increase. It's just looking at the increase from this year and then assuming no increase for next year. Correct. Speaker 18: Yes. But the time value of money, you're putting money away sooner. So you're stabilizing it later for the future. Speaker 5: Thank you. Speaker 1: Are there any other questions or comments from the board? There's a hand raised on Zoom. I know. Thank you Mr. Sydney. Mr. Sprat, could I ask you
to take down the presentation and Mr. Sydney, could you move the screen to me so I can, Speaker 18: So I'm stopping the share? Speaker 1: Yes, please. Thank you so much. Opening it to, is there anyone in the room who would like to ask a question? Mr. Scott, could you approach the podium, remind us your name and that you're Natick resident Speaker 16: Roger Scott 40 Water Street. My question is, looking at that chart you had the RTS it seemed like the, the higher group, the, the, the lower usage water people were getting a higher
percentage increase versus the people who consume all the water. And I'm trying to say, I think that's a very unfair approach. You know, you're talking about the previous person spoke about having somebody live to 95, but I don't think they can afford to live 95 at these rates with the tax increases and everything. So I think you need to know a a for the average person, a, a better arrangement, or, you know, everyone pays the same lower price, you know, just so that you have big consumers sucking up all the water and everyone else is technically paying for it through
the way you've set up the billing on it. Speaker 1: Thank you, Mr. Scott. Mr. Sprat, could you address that? Speaker 18: Sure. There definitely is a higher percentage on lower usage because we have this RTS fee. The RTS fee is constant across all the rate categories. So if your bill, I'm just gonna say is a hundred dollars and we have a a $10 increase, that's a 10% increase on that. But if your bill is $2,000 and you have a $10 increase, it's a much lower percentage. So I understand the question.
The whole goal here is to stabilize the rates. One thing to point out with our rate structure, we have these things called EDUs equivalent dwelling units. So a large condo complex that would have a one meter bill that would get divided by all the occupants. So they're really not paying at the right tier. They get divided out and they end up paying a lower cost of water. This RTS fee would, would stabilize that. 'cause that is a weird dynamic of natick's water rates.
Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Raat. Mr. Er, could you unmute yourself or could you, could you unmute Mr. Celebr? Thank you first and if you could introduce yourself and whether you're a Natick resident or a business owner. Speaker 19: Yes, this is Mark Celler. I live at 14 Allison Way in South Natick Hills, and I'm also the chair of the Finance Commission for South Natick Hills. So much of what I was planning to say has been covered in the questions from the board and from Mr. Scott. So I just want to maybe just highlight a few things.
I think basically the bot my two bottom lines is I think it is too significantly too large an increase for fiscal year 26. And in particular, I think the percentage increase for residential and commercial should be much closer to each other than they are. So let me, let's mention a couple of quick things. First of all, obviously the voters of Natick recently approved a override to proposition two and a half. So all taxpayers will be paying higher
property tax rates this year. So I think that would be even more of a reason to try and moderate the increase in the water and sewer rates for the year. And as I look at it, I think that it could be done by basically having a lower increase this year and, and basically have a steady increase over the next five years. That's in the, in the package here. You know, the, the power of compound interest means that if you increase every right here, we're increasing,
you know, e 18%, close to 18%, for example, for residential. And probably in the neighborhood of 5%, I would rec recommend something. So in five years it'll be 38, 40%. I would recommend more like seven or 8% a year. It would be, at least for this year, it would be more steady. And is, and is kind of a question on the ques on the aspect of the residential rates going up by much more than the commercial rates. I know you said that we have one, one of the RTS rates, but is it possible if it's legal?
I, I would suggest that we have different RTS rates for residential and commercial because obviously as, as I think Mr. Scott says, for the residential, there's a, the RTS counts from much higher percentage. So that leads to a significant increase in the RTS leads to a much higher overall increase for the residential owners. So I would propose that the R-P-R-T-S be lower for residential homeowners
so that the overall increase would be fairly similar between residential and commercial. Speaker 1: Mr. Sprat, Speaker 18: There is some complications on the rate setting. Part of it is how we bill it out through our immune system. Two years ago we changed all the tiers, we changed a whole bunch of things and it, it caused a major disturbance in our muse system. So part of the goal here, while I agree yes, we could charge different RTS fees for different types of categories, all of that has
to be built into the software system. So part of our considerations also are how do we work this into our billing system? 'cause we could have make, we could make a decision tonight and be three months into building a new system. So we also looked at capacity too. We have a model that works and we're trying to build around the model that we have as well. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Sprat. Is there anyone else in the room who would Yes, sir. Could you approach the podium and introduce yourself and let us know whether you're an NAIC resident or business owner? Speaker 20: Hi, Bob Zoff from Glen Street.
I represent the Glen Ridge Residence Trust and Meadowbrook Water Trust, who have been customers for, well, 40 to 50 years. We have a total of 70 users that I represent, and I've been operating our systems for the last 23 years. So I've been familiar with how they operate. And your billing, because I've been coming to these meetings for many years recently, I haven't had to because you've done a great job of doing financial planning,
which I have to commend is very different than many years ago. It, these type of analysis that Bill has done is substantial and appreciated. One of the things that I, I think a lot of the questions I had have been answered in the presentation and questioned, but I, I am concerned about the weight of contribution by the residential own bills compared to the commercial side.
And, you know, bill just addressed that somewhat, but it seems that the commercial side is not contributing substantially to this increase in co revenue over the coming years. And it seems that the cost of water for commercial and industrial is a nominal fraction of their total product or service. And very different than for a residential customer who, where these rates are quarterly rates
and when you annualize them, it's a hundred to or more dollars a year per meter. Now in the case that Bill mentioned about the equivalent dwelling units, our trus get billed as if we had meters on every one of our units, but we don't. We do, but you don't read them, you don't bill them, you don't collect for them. We get a master meter bill and the trusts take care of all the distribution, the new meters, the meter reading
and DEP filings. So it seems that, you know, in some cases the costs are not being allocated appropriately. I did have one question that, that came up in my review. It seems like in two years, in 2028, fiscal 28, that the goal is to buy a million dollars worth of MWRA water. And it seems that is that practical
in considering contracting construction and approval of the M-M-W-R-A-A connection in two years from now. I know the study that Halen Ward did two years ago suggested that timeframe, but now we're two years down the line. Can all that be accomplished and deliver a million dollars worth of water to years from now? I don't know. That's something that you need to answer overall. You know, I, I can't really complain about the way
the water rates have been going. Everything is going up, it's increasing. It's just a shock to see it all at once. And you know, that's one of the problems we all have. I have it with our water trusts the same as the water department has it building up enough reserves to pay for our own equipment and our own metering systems in addition to the rates that are charged here. So thank you. And Bill, if you could just answer the one question, the Speaker 21: MWA question?
Yeah. Speaker 18: Okay. So the question was will be will we be ready in two years to connect in a supplemental way to the MWA? I guess the short answer to that is, I don't know, a longer answer is we're projected to meet that. So we've been working with MWA, we're been working with DAM, we have a design for a small pump station. The connection to MWA is actually very simple. There's already a connection there. We just have to put a pump station in and, and pump that water into our system with a little bit of treatment. We're already working on that. The, I don't know, part of that is we have some land acquisition and,
and things that have to happen so that some of that might even require some legislative approvals. So we're working through that process. It, it very well could happen and that is our plan and projection. If we don't have that happen, we have the risk of having to shut down Elm Bank and not have that water. So there's a bunch of timelines happening there, but we're, we're working on that. I'd also like to, if I could just address the commercial versus the residential side of your, you had a question in there about that. The commercial users are paying higher rates
depending on the tiers. So the average homeowner is in mostly in tier one and tier two. As you get into tier three and tier four of our eight structure, that's when water starts to get more expensive. And while they're not influenced as much by the RTS, they are heavily influenced by the higher cost of water at those tiers. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Pratt. Mr. Evans, Speaker 14: I just wanted to amplify some, or, or ask Mr. Sprat to, to comment on this, which is the MWRA connection. The, my understanding in the past was they were waiving
the connection for a period of years. Can you comment on that? Speaker 18: I believe you're speaking to the connection fee waives. Yes. That is still a waiver in process. We are marching towards, we haven't been fully even accepted into MWRA yet to say that NATA can take supplemental water, but we're, we're marching through that process. But yes, the, the fee to join MWRA was waived until what year, Tony? Yeah, FY 27 or 28, somewhere in that timeframe. But there is a waiver Speaker 14: That's millions of dollars. Yes. Thank you. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Evans. Mr. Ostroff. Speaker 3: Hello. Thank you Madam Chair and board members.
Josh Ostroff, I guess I can't start video, but Natick resident time meeting member. And I was on the board when, when you, when we implemented the administrative fee, the $5 or so fee that has been in place for several years, which caused a lot of confusion and I think some resentment. But I think it's really important to separate out the base charge that, that all rate payers need to pay and that everyone benefits from, in terms
of the, you know, the system-wide improvements to the quality, reliability, availability of our water supply for all the reasons that we need it. So I don't have a strong point of view on which option to take, but I, I would be guided by, by a few principles. One is the importance of, of clear communication to the rate payers and the residents can't be overstated. I think that just judging by some of the confusion that people have over that base charge, even to this day, speaks to that.
But I think that the town has a really good and important story to tell both in terms of, you know, the innovation such as the real time or their near real time usage data that's now available. The investments that we've continued to make in, in the quality of the warn of, of the system and the pending connection to the MWRA. So I really think that there's a, a good communication to our residents is, should be something that we are very proactive about.
So in terms of like a percentage of the bill, I'd say I'd look at the, you know, the blue bag fees, which are roughly, you know, you folks know better than I do, but I think it's about half the cost of the entire sanitation operation. And if the water, you know, base fees were even like a third or a quarter, that would still be, I think, fair because however much water we consume, we benefit by its availability and, and the quality. So I think it's reasonable to have that administrative fee.
And, and I like the idea of calling it a ready to serve fee or something that conveys the importance that all the investments that we make in our water supply are available regardless of how much you consume. Finally, I just want to commend staff for a very comprehensive presentation. And, and a lot of the work that's gone into this, not just tonight, but over the years, has, I think really paid off. People do have complaints about the flavor of our water. I'm sure that the water division would prefer that we not have to add as many chemicals as we do to,
but that's sort of out of their control. So thank you so much for your time and your service. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Ostroff. I'd like to open the board discussion and debate and I'll entertain anyone going first, Mr. Sidney? Speaker 15: Yeah, I'm ready to make a motion if, Speaker 1: Well, I want, let's talk about it. Let's talk Speaker 15: Real quick. Yeah, well, let's, I didn't know if you wanted to talk about it under the aegis of a motion or, Speaker 1: Okay. Make a motion. Entertain Speaker 15: Me. I, I move. We approve option two as recommended. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Sidney. I'll second
for purposes of discussion. Mr. Sidney, would you like to for, for making motions? I move, we approve option three. We have an option. We have a motion for option three by Ms. Slager. Is there a second? Speaker 14: I'll second just for discussion. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Evans. Speaker 15: Yeah, I, hold on. Speaker 14: If Kristen wants to talk, Speaker 1: I wanna talk about it. Speaker 15: You well, I, I think as that's Speaker 1: What we're doing, right? Yeah. We're talking about we are. But I wanted to ask Mr. Sidney to say why he wanted option one. Yes, yes. Speaker 15: Yeah. So I, one of the things I like about option two is
that it gets us a lot closer on the ready to serve fee to the industry standard and to, you know, essentially covering the fixed costs of running the system, which are extensive. We have more fixed costs in this system than we do operational costs, you know, repairing the sewers, repairing the water mains, keeping the system running, repairing the pumps, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, once the, those things are, as long as those things are working, we produce water pretty cheaply, but we need
to cover those fixed costs and usage fees. You know, back when I was an accountant, we always looked at both fixed and variable costs and your cost of goods sold has to cover both of those. And fixed costs, you know, heavily influence your ultimate net income or what eventually becomes retained earnings here, if we're not charging enough to cover our fixed costs, then we're gonna be in trouble. And that's shown by the chart under option three.
What that tells me is if we don't steadily increase the RRTS fees, that we're gonna end up hitting people with bigger changes later. This seems to be the best gradual option. It also means that maybe in future years, you know, as the RTS fees get in line, we can have a better chance of not actually raising the, the variable rates. So that's why I like option two. Yeah. Speaker 5: This ms. Oh, Ms, thank you. The reason I'm proposing option three is
because I think that this puts a disproportionate burden on those that use water the least. And if you are, we, we received an email from community member who basically said, who was looking at option one, I believe, but that the increase was more than they pay for their water bill because they're water only. They don't have sewer. But I think even if that's not the case for other residents, I think it is the case that we are penalizing our low end users. So I would prefer to see option three.
And then as Mr. Sprat said, maybe next year come back and maybe look at our tier pricing and potentially in, in up the RTS at that point more, but also look at potentially including more in our baseline for our lowest users. So that's why I'm doing it. And also because I think it is a fairly hefty increase on the heels of the override. So that's why I would support option three. Ms. Pope, Speaker 9: I, my greatest concern is how we remedy a growing shortfall.
I, I don't like to make assumptions about what we can do in the future or, or to mortgage, you know, to, to deeply mortgage the present in, in light of the future that we haven't, that that's unknown and uncertain. That's, that's my greatest concern with option three and kicking it down the can further. And I, and I'm, I hear what you're saying, Ms. Er and I, I mean, I hear you completely in terms of, especially on the heels of, you know, raise taxes
and it's, it's challenging. You said it was gonna be challenging when you got to the podium, but my, but my concern is about how, what it looks like to come back in the future and have to do it because to now we, we do, it sounds like we have options. I mean, we have to do something, but there are options. My concern is that when this comes, if, if we go too low, we have to, we, we won't have options.
We, we will just have to make a decision whether people like it or not. And that's, that could be punishing, in fact. So that's, that's where I'm sitting with that. Speaker 1: My issue with option three, the quote kick the can down the road issue is that's why we ended up with a $7 million override because we kicked the can down the road for the last decade in terms of budget process. We could have had a two or 3 million or two small overrides during that period of time. This board wasn't in charge of those decisions, but we are in charge of this decision. I also have concerns about
the ability of the, the, the funding costs for the bonds that we're gonna need to take out to build, since the current administration is talking about eliminating tax-free municipal bonds. So that means the cost of borrowing will go higher. We have 220 million bonds issued. A lot of that's rolling off. So when we go out to buy that or or sell those bonds, we're gonna have increased costs. There are a lot of things that we just don't know in the next two to five years and that we can't reliably count on like we could two years ago.
So that lack of stability makes me want to bake in whatever the knowns are. I deeply appreciate the data, the heavy data driven analysis that arrived at these three options. And that's really all I have. Mr. Sidney? Speaker 15: Yeah, I just want add that Mr. Spratt pointed out that the difference to the average consumer between option two and option three is about $6 a quarter. Its minimal impact between the two. If it was significantly larger, I might have supported option three as well.
Speaker 1: I agree. Mr. Evans? Speaker 14: Yeah, I just wanted to comment and reiterate what the chair has just said. I was concerned about the borrowing costs and, and bonds as well. And that's why I asked the question of whether this is a good balance. Option two is a good balance between cost increases and future retained earnings. And I, and I think it is important to be mindful that the borrowing landscape is, is uncertain as we move forward.
So we have to be as conservative as we possibly can. I also looked at the residential combined and water only rates between the two options, option two and three. And there's a roughly 4% difference between the two for com combined and water only. So I think to Mr. Sidney's $0.60 a quarter, to me, the, the greater good is to solve or to begin to solve the variability
and the volatility of our water revenues moving forward. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Evans. Further comments? Discussion motion. The first motion on the floor is adopting option two as outlined in the packet. We'll take that motion in. We will take that motion first in order. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed? No, it's four one dissenter. Ms. Slager, thank you so much Mr. Sprat and Mr. Kamo for SP spending your evening with us. Thank you for that data-driven analysis. And I, I know I speak
for the board when I say we deeply appreciate it. Yes. Thank you. Speaker 15: Move, we close the public hearing. Speaker 1: Second, Mr. Sprat wanted to speak. Speaker 18: Just thank you very much for your stewardship in the past few years. You've created a 55 year plan for your residents. You've done amazing work in, in voting for great changes and that really sets us up in a good place. And I'd also like to thank Tony and his team for executing this on a day-to-day basis. So thank you very much. Speaker 1: Thank you Tony. We have a motion to close the public hearing by Mr. Sidney, seconded by Mr. Evans. All in favor, please say aye.
Aye. All opposed? It's 5 0 0. I'd like to take out a couple of items out of order and I would like to invite Chief Hicks who has been here very patiently for two hours to discuss the promulgation of the town of Natick emergency comprehensive plan and the sheltering plan. Thank you Chief. Speaker 22: Thank you Madam Chair. And members of the board as, as you said, James six, the chief of police, but I'm also putting on my other hat, emergency management director. Speaker 23: Oh, how's off? Oh, how's that? Better? Speaker 1: Thank you. Speaker 23: Thanks. Thank you Madam Chair and members of the board. James Hicks, chief of police.
But again, as I was stating, I was putting my other hat as emergency management director and I just want to briefly introduce the two of my interns who have worked on, on pro on working on a a comprehensive plan. I'm actually wanting to highlight the work they're doing by bringing them forward, but just for the purposes of the board, our emergency management plans and our sheltering plans is ones that's supposed to be updated on a regular basis. And admittedly we have not done that. It was just a matter of capacity and resources. It was the help of these two interns who came in
and did this for us at got us to where we are at the end. It's up to you as the board to promulgate them, to vote them and approve them. And then once they're voting approval, they are filed with the state, with the Massachusetts Emergency Management Association, which also gets filed with fema, which affects our ability to receive grants as well as, and if there are any emergency funds based on incidents that may occur, we have to have these on file. So it's been a long time coming and I would like to just turn it over to two of our interns.
First I'll have Ed Viles come up and Ed has worked on an emergency management, the Comprehensive Mercy plan. And then after that Sarah WinDor will come up to talk about the work that she did on the sheltering plan. Ed, Speaker 24: Good evening everyone. Yeah, so for those who I have not met, my name is Edward Viles. I'm currently a senior at Mass Maritime. I study emergency management and as part of the curriculum at Mass Maritime, you're required to do two co-ops before you graduate. So I was lucky enough to do both my co-ops through the police department and help with their emergency management efforts. My two primary tasks were, was working on the comprehensive emergency management plan
and as well as developing a tabletop exercise. So for those of you who don't know, developing aemp, it's basically the state or MEMA that puts out the SEM template and then you put in information pertaining to your specific town. So at first, the last time the SSP was developed, when I started it was 2007. So it's been quite a while since the sample was updated. So it was pretty challenging finding all the relevant information to put into the plan. So it took a lot of digging, a lot of reaching out to different department heads, town leadership.
But once I got got all that information, I was able to spend my first co-op throughout the summer, filling in the SEM and making progress section by section. And Chief Hicks was always there as a a helping hand and always was there to help me with anything I needed help with. And in terms of going through different sections of the plan, obviously don't wanna bore you guys. You guys have already read it. Just some important sections to review. The first section would be just the basic situation section. This is kind of a brief overview of the town, common knowledge for MO most people,
but it is important information to know. It goes over demographics, the geographic, geographic layout, and then a brief threat and hazard identification and risk assessment. And it covers all the different types of hazards that Natick faces and could face from transportation accidents to severe weather incidents, et cetera. The next important section that I wanted to talk about briefly was just the organization and layout of the Emergency Operations Center. The section kind of outlines the layout of the oc, the equipment involved, and it goes over the primary
and secondary locations. And this is something that usually the police and fire department are pretty well trained on and have a lot, lot of knowledge on. But once you get outside of those two departments, you go to any other department, they're not always as well knowledgeable about it. And when a time of emergency strikes and you need to activate the EOC, you want everyone to be properly trained and be aware of what their assignments or roles and responsibilities are in the EOC. So that kind of goes into my next section, which is the roles and responsibilities. And I think this is probably the most important part of the plan. And this is where I went
to every single department head in the town at the end of the summer and kind of had a brief interview with them and kind of sat with them and went through a sheet and outlined what their roles and responsibilities are during a time of crisis or during a time of emergency. That way everyone knows what they're are responsible for and what their role is during a time of disaster. So there's no confusion there and everyone is ready and properly trained in the ooc. And that concludes what I have. Once again, I want to give a big thanks to Chief Fix and his team at the police department. It says a lot about the town
and the community taking on two emergency management interns. Unfortunately at the local level, emergency management often doesn't get the focus it needs. There's a lot that goes into it and people often don't recognize that. So it has a lot about community taking on two interns just for emergency management. That concludes what I have subject to any questions. Speaker 1: We'll hold questions until the end of the presentation. Thank you. Speaker 24: Thank you. Speaker 25: Good evening. Good evening. I had to wear my heels because they're both way taller than me, so I was afraid I wasn't gonna reach the mic. My name is Sarah Wenzel. I'm a Millis resident. I'm currently attending Virginia Polytechnic Institute in
State University for political science and a graduate certificate in Homeland Security policy. You may be wondering how did I end up in Natick? I applied for an internship at the town hall and sadly it was filled, but luckily Dorothy and HR offered me two positions. One in the fall with the health department and then one in the spring working on the marathon with the Nat Police Department. And because I like to challenge myself, I said, why not both? So I went over to the health department where I was introduced to director Michael Boudreaux and Jessica Cliff. From there, Jessica introduced me to the shelter plan that hadn't been updated when she was an intern
back in 2014. Wow. So I started looking at it and applying some of the things I've been learning in my department of Homeland Security classes, specifically some MEMA and FEMA regulations that hadn't been updated since 2014. So I started there as well as updating names and dates because a lot of people on there had retired or moved away or numbers had changed. So I updated those and then I decided to go into the depths of the town hall where a lot of our sheltering equipment is kept. I created an itemized list of all the items within the town hall, the two trailers we have at the CSC,
which is our primary shelter location and the location in the Natick Police Department. After creating an itemized list, I was able to go back into the shelter plan and understand what things needed to be updated in terms of our usability. The issue with the shelter plans, or shelter plans in general is unlike the MP where there's a template, the shelter plan is, sorry, specifically made for the town. So when I started asking other towns what they did, they said, it's up to you. So I said to think what towns have had to use an active shelter in recent years.
About two years ago, Leominster, the town of Leominster had a major flood. So I reached out to their EMD, which is their emergency management director, and I had a phone call with him. I said, what did your shelter plan look like? And he responded, was saying he hadn't updated his plan either. So because of that and what Ed was saying earlier, it's super important for these local governments to be working on mitigation plans before they happened. So he explained to me that he wasn't gonna give me his shelter plan that he had just made. He said, you need to sit back, look at the regulations that you've, you've already gone over and look at the town.
What are the current issues and what can you work with? So because of that great advice, I went through the regulations, I looked at what we had and then I started talking to the different heads of departments. I think that was where I started to realize that local government does a really great job of working together. Something you learn in school is that federal agencies do not. So it was a huge shocker when I was reading about agencies hating each other to going to a community where there's so much positivity in working togetherness. So because of that, I was able to meet with the different heads, talk about their different roles
and responsibilities within the shelter plan and create a a more comprehensive plan that made you, that made all the agencies work together. And along with Ed, we also did a tabletop exercise where we had some of the heads of the departments come and work through an exercise where a shelter would need to be activated and what their roles would be. This allowed some practice for them and it gave us feedback on what roles we needed to elevate or kind of build up upon. After that, we had a, another major meeting we met, talked about more of the roles. That was probably the hardest area for us, talking about
ICS roles, which is the incident command system. And after that we did a couple more edits, a couple more ends of that, and we've kind of created this new shelter plane specifically centered towards Natick. It was definitely a challenge because again, there wasn't a, a certain template. I asked my professor if he had any ideas. He said, look at the national, the nims, which is kind of like a 50 page do it yourself kind of color. I would you called it a coloring book 'cause you kind of just fill it in the blanks. But again, the hardest part is that there's no how to do it. It's up to you.
But it, it was a, it was a challenge, but I really do enjoy, I do enjoy a good challenge. 'cause at the same time I was working on the incident action plan for the Boston Marathon Security. So, and also defending my thesis in a couple weeks. So thank you so much for your time and I, I look forward to hearing some of your, your questions and comments about the shelter plan. Good Speaker 15: Luck defending your thesis. Speaker 1: Yes, good luck. Thank you so much. Chief Hicks, Speaker 23: Again, I wanna give a lot of credit and not a lot of credit. All the credit to these two wonderful interns who are committed to this, this subject
and this topic, which obviously is very, very important to us. Also, I mean, you've heard many times department heads in the community as well as town leadership sat through many hours of meetings led by these two. So it was kind of interesting to watch all our department heads being told what to do by two interns and they followed through. So they held Speaker 3: Their own. Speaker 23: They did, they did a great job. They did. And this, and, and coming here tonight was another big, big part of why I wanted them to be here and highlight them for the work they've done. So as you know, you've had to for, for quite a while.
There's a lot there. If you have any questions, we are here. I say we are here to, to answer them. Speaker 1: Thank you. Chief questions and comments from the board? Mr. Erickson? Can I Speaker 3: Just quickly say that I sat through several of those meetings. They were very informative and very, enlightening is not the right word, but just it truly did show the collaboration within the organization that we've built with the current leadership structure and the current leadership team. And these two did a great job just working in partnership and in tandem with, with the, with the group
and also taking our humor and our pointed comments and just willingness to, to listen and learn and, and also teach us was just a great experience. So thanks to you too. Speaker 1: Thank you Board members, Ms. Slager, Speaker 5: Just wanted to say thank you for the very impressive job and kudos to the town for hiring interns to do this. And very impressive both of you. Good luck at Mass Maritime and good luck on your defending your thesis
of very, very exciting things. Upcoming. Just a quick question on the shelter plan. I noticed that you did the inventory and I looked at that, it looks like a number of the items are expired. So is that something that we're looking to address Speaker 23: That goes to next steps? So once the plan, once these plans are, are approved and promulgated by you and filed, the next step is actually now we have to practice them. We don't intend to have 'em sit on the shelf for 10, 17 years anymore. And that is requirement under the new guidelines coming out of MEMA and Emergency Management and also fema.
So this is why this was so important to us. So next steps are going to be, in fact, I'm, I'm trying to convince both of 'em to, to stay on, to do our to, they talked about doing a tabletop. And a tabletop is when again, just like you said, you sit around the table and you come up with ideas, which created some additional needs within the plans. The next is gonna be a functional exercise where we actually have to set up the, the, the center for a shelter and then we are gonna see what we're gonna need and then we go forward to look at the equipment that needs to be replaced.
We're already working on some of that through some, some mercy management grants to do that. Speaker 5: Thank Speaker 1: You. Thank you Ms. Wilger, other board members. Speaker 9: I too felt this was so impressive. I felt that both of you were extremely impressive and your depth of knowledge. I don't, I don't remember how long you both said you had been working on this, but your depth of knowledge, your initiation, your enthusiasm around all of this is incredible. Chief Hicks, you mentioned put putting things into practice and that's where my question was coming from. Now that the plan has been updated, what's, what's the plan
to put it into practice? Speaker 23: Well, we do have a, another group called the, the, the local emergency planning committee, which is actually required by law also, which we do have, which has been inactive. Now that part of that committee is to do the planning, the planning and the exercise. So everything you see here will have to be exercised. And we're meeting with the chief KY is actually chairman of the LEPC and he will take these plans and start putting 'em into a practice. So practical exercises. So setting up a EOC, setting up the shelter, running
through the plan with members. One of the things that we had to do that I know that Sarah worked on, is we had to look at our, our MOUs, most of our MOUs and, and I know she didn't mention it, but most of our MOUs, which we need during an emergency plan. In other words, sheltering, if we set up a shelter, we need food. So we need to, and she has a whole list of MOUs that we need to get updated and upgraded in order to get that done. Working with, with the town administrator and also the finance department. So there's a lot of work to do and this by you approving this
and then we file with, with mema, then now we practice that and put that into, into place. Speaker 1: Thank you. I wanna also commend the work of the, our two interns and also the police department in undertaking this. Thank you Chief Hicks. Thank you. Very important work Mr. Evans. Speaker 14: Yeah, I just wanted to invoke the Dito rule in the interest of time, but I, I was very impressed with both of your presentations and I have no doubt that you were more than able to hold your own with the police staff
and town administration. So that's no small task. But I I'm sure that you handled it very well and you, I, I wish you, I hope that we can continue to count on your intern services, but wish you well. If we don't, Speaker 1: I'll entertain a motion to adopt. So moved. Speaker 14: You gotta do 'em one by one or both. Second Speaker 1: We'll do 'em one by one. Okay. So Speaker 14: The SIM Speaker 1: Person, the SIMP moved Speaker 14: To, Speaker 23: Yeah. Comprehensive emergency management plan.
Speaker 14: Oh, come on. I was doing the lingo Speaker 1: That, that was, that was Kristen's motion and seconded or, alright. Speaker 14: Okay. Speaker 1: Split. Split the, just split between them all in favor please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes. Passes to approve the sheltering plan. Sure. Rich has moved the sheltering plan. Second. Seconded by Ms. Slager. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Passes 5 0 0. Thank you Chief and interns. Thank you Chief, once Speaker 23: We, once we get into a final
'cause this is still in final draft, a complete draft and it has to come back to the board for signature. Speaker 14: Yep. Speaker 1: Thank you. Speaker 23: Thank you very much. Awesome. Speaker 1: Just a word to the public about how our agendas are put together. 'cause I realize it's going late. We had a very packed agenda. What we tend to try to do in scheduling items is to schedule outside people first, staff second, so that people who've been working all day aren't here till 10 o'clock at night and then further business. So what I'd like to do at this point is move agenda item H to next and invite town engineer Mr. McDowell to
approach the podium and discuss the street acceptance process on Point Street, Jennifer Circle and Evans Drive. See if I can find this. Speaker 26: Thank you Madam Chair and members of the board. Bill McDowell, town engineer. I don't have a presentation per se. You have the reports. This is the first set of the resident requested, the petitioned request for street acceptance. Three Streets, Evans Drive, Jennifer Circle, and Point Street. The recommendations were made within the report. Two of the roadways have some serious right of way challenges in that the beginning of the road
of Evans Drive and of Point Street were never really established as a way the work that would need to be done would be a full layout. So there's a lot of survey work that would be done in both of those properties. Our land court properties. So they would have to be land court surveys, which are more extensive and more expensive. Our recommendations for the three streets for Evans Drive, it had a very high score and as you recall the, the lower score means it's more favorable for the town for acceptance. The biggest challenges for Evans Drive were again, the right of way issues.
The land court issues. There are wetland concerns with, there's a brook crossing on Evans Drive. There are some construction constructive concerns regarding what that roadway was before they turned it into a roadway. I mean, it fundamentally was a driveway, so it was never really set up as a roadway base that would be a full construction of a roadway to take out top soil subsoil, et cetera, and, and build a roadway base from from below, which is far more than we generally do in our pavement management and pavement improvement programs year
to year Point Street is exactly the same. The right of way was noted as either 16 or 18 feet wide on the plans that established it. And as general rule, the planning board's minimum right of way width is a 40 foot right of way, which would mean taking either 22 or 24 feet of additional property to either side of the center line of that roadway. That is something that could be worked through with the planning board to accept a smaller right of way so as not to, you know, have so much encroachment within the private properties itself.
But that would be something that would need to be worked out as part of this, again, the two scores for both for Point Street and for Evans Drive, were well over 250, which is not favorable. So we did not recommend acceptance at this time for the third street, Jennifer Circle, that was recently subdivided. It was subdivided after the subdivision control law was adopted by the town of Natick. That makes it eligible for the accelerated street acceptance process whereby we can use the actual subdivision plan as the layout plan itself. We don't have to go and have a surveyor separately lay that plan out.
In addition to the utilities that were laid in. The roadway have proper easements for the drainage, et cetera. There doesn't need to be any establishment of easements or creation of a drainage system for the roadway. So Jennifer Circle scored low is around 102 and that is favorable for street acceptance. So the recommendations that you see within the, the street acceptance reports were to not accept, we don't recommend that the, the, the planning would sponsor a warrant article to accept Evans Drive or for Point Circle.
In such cases, what we would do would be to write up a list of recommendations I just mentioned. One of them as far as right away on Point Street or on Evans Drive, these recommendations would be brought back to the residents. There are certain things that they would be able to work out. There are certain things that the town would have to work out, such as the right of way width. In the case of Evans Drive, it was noted that the beginning of that right of way is actually Massachusetts Turnpike property. We've been working with the surveyors at Mass DOT regarding that particular piece of land. They actually have a pencil written note on their plan at
mass DOT that this parcel of land was accepted by the town and they have a specific date of 1963. I cannot reproduce any action by the town that we actually did accept that. However, we would be willing to accept it again, you know, where that should be offered to the town. So that may be something that could be worked out and that would be a large impediment being removed from the Evans Drive recommendation at that point. We're continuing to work with that. Again, the recommendations that you have are before you. My question right now is, is there anything within those reports that you have received that you would like to see?
Would there be, you know, more pictures? Do you need more explanation or do you feel that, you know, you received, you know, a, a proper amount of information for what would be for most of these streets? There'd be somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand dollars to $150,000 Forest Street acceptance process and then, you know, reconstruction within the pavement improvement program. So, I mean, it's a relatively expensive article that you would be looking at. Is there more information that you feel you need? Is there some other way we can convey that information to you? Or are you, you know, satisfied with these reports?
We have received requests for over a dozen petitions and we've received back these three plus an additional three that are waiting in the wings. We have, we've written up the reports again, but we wanted to just kind of vet this out first before we came in with more. Speaker 1: Thank you Ms. Linda, please. Speaker 5: Thank you Bill and thank you. This is, this is great. This is, you know, I know this is the first time this is coming before us and it's, you did a great job providing us this information. The one thing that, you know, given, given my background
I'd like to see is some estimate of cost. And I understand that it's highly variable. Sure. But just a, a guesstimate of what it would take and, 'cause I, it, it's kind of hard to tell because obviously these roads are different lengths. There are different conditions. So it's, you know, just to get a ballpark of how much Speaker 26: Totally understand that as part of the process for these three roads, we actually did have a, an opinion of probable cost, not really an estimate, it's per se the fact that there may be years between when we actually accepted that
and did the work was a little bit, it, it makes that variable. But we could just as a reference point based on, you know, the year to date costs, we had worked up an estimate, just as a general estimate, if I had to do this, this is what this would cost. This is what a drainage system would likely cost in some of these cases. Particularly with like with the land court survey work and stuff like that, that is kind of unknown and we would just mention that, that, you know, the, the expense would be this, but we can, for construction costs give you a kind of apples to apples, just a spreadsheet for the different articles,
items that would be needed for the roadway construction. Speaker 5: Yeah, I think that would help just to, you know, to really understand what it, what we're getting into if we say yes Speaker 26: No and understanding that, that sometimes we were looking at this as it was almost pre prejudicial in that some of the costs were like, this is gonna be a $500,000 road or this is gonna be $150,000 road. And those numbers, we didn't want those to be a benchmark because they really are, you know, they're, they're a very, very preliminary estimate. So that the thought for that, we went through this and we vetted these reports as we looked at that, we thought
that that might be a little bit too prejudicial, but I absolutely understand that and that can definitely be something that we could add. Speaker 5: Thanks. And then if we turn down some of these streets, you mentioned some things that could possibly be brought back to the neighbors. Is there a formal process for doing that or is that it? You know, how do, how does that work? And and then what's their next steps? Speaker 26: Their next step would be in, in many cases there will be a problem with, we mentioned impediments in here and or encroachments. If I have stone walls, I have trees, things like that,
that are within or would be within the right of way that we would be laying out. Those are things that can be, you can speak to the neighbors and say, you know, would you be willing to either move that fence or take down that stone wall or there may be some grading issues. In a lot of cases where I've got steep slopes coming down to the side of the road, would you be amenable to allowing a construction easement? So this could be, you know, made more able to put a roadway in that and have those conversations prior to so that we could come back with basically agreements in hand and said these things can be worked out.
So this is an impediment has been removed. And again, it wouldn't necessarily take the actual action of the person to do that. Just the willingness to have that be done. Alright. Speaker 5: So is this something, let's say if we turn one of these down that your office would be doing? Speaker 26: Yes. Okay. Yeah. That, that would be up to us to give, I would bring the recommendations back to the select board to, you know, do you agree with these, these are the recommendations we're gonna give to the, the residents. And it would be a much more comprehensive list than what you see in there. We just note that there are problems. It's like we would've to work those problems out and then bring them back some of the problems such
as the right of way issue on Evans Drive that may be worked out by just the town without the residents having anything to do with it. But right now that is a very substantial impediment to accepting that roadway. Speaker 5: Thank you. Speaker 3: If, if I can briefly note to the point of next steps in doing the work, some of the work will also be on the residents themselves. One thing to balance that has to be with the, for the board's consideration is, you know, for the easy decisions, it's a more streamlined process, likely a lighter effort on, on staff for the heavier lifts.
It's going to be a balance on what the staff can reasonably do given the staffing constraints and capacity of existing staff. So I want to make sure that we're setting reasonable expectations as well for the board and for the public who might be going through this process. Just because the board says, yep, we want to advance this one or this one doesn't quite make sense, but we're gonna put it in the hands of staff to get this work done. Doesn't mean it's gonna turn over to happen overnight. There are a lot of steps that can happen. There's gonna be a lot of work that needs to be worked through. And knowing that all of our staff are
are already balancing competing demands on their time, it's just gonna be something that is gonna be added to that comp competition. I just wanna make sure there's some expectations setting at that point. Speaker 26: I appreciate that. Thank you. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Erickson. Ms. Pope, Speaker 9: You, that was my question about the next steps with the residents. Let's see. Speaker 1: Mr. Evans, Speaker 14: My questions were addressed by Ms. Bolger's question. You Speaker 1: Wanna say something? Speaker 26: No, Speaker 1: I'm going to open up two questions from the public. Ms. Duran, can you or Ms. Doran, could you
Speaker 3: Bill, did you wanna say something real quick? Oh, Speaker 1: Okay. It's okay. Sorry, I didn't recognize that. Speaker 18: I just wanna put a finer point on the discussion we just had. Part of this is a very, again, data-driven process. I hope to put in your hands kind of the three options. Yes, we can accept this maybe, but there is some work that needs to be done either by the town or by the residents. And the other category would probably be not now, not ever. So if a, if we have really bad scores that it's truly a driveway and it was set up that way.
I, I, I want also want you to think in those categories as well. That's where we're putting buckets. There are, this is a serious drain on resources. So I, I wanna make sure we are setting a really clear expectation where we have the easy ones. Like Jennifer Circle, let's, let's progress in this. This is, this is a process that we really never had before. This is the first round of that process. But I also don't want to give false hope 'cause there's some places that just we should not accept. So I, I just wanted to put a finer point on that. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Sprat. Ms.
Doran, I'm gonna take her first and then her hand's been up since the beginning of the presentation. Speaker 27: Can you hear me? Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 27: Okay. It says Host is not allowing participants to unmute. So Speaker 1: We hear you. Thank Speaker 27: You. Okay. Catherine Doen, I live on Point Street. I don't know if Bill McDowell remembers this, but February four years ago, 2021, I called him at 7:00 AM and invite at what was happening right in front of my house on Point Street, which is not in the circle, it's up the hill closer to Punt Street. And he came and we met a half hour later in the middle
of the street and he took one look and said, I know exactly what's happening. He said it, it's obvious that the subsurface is failing. And I think you said Mr. McDowell, that it was sort of washing down the hill. He said, we can't patch it, we can't fill the cracks. And because of this. And then he said, the town can't fix this. And I think he was thinking of a short stretch of the street, but we can't do this until it becomes impossible to emergency vehicles. And I understood that. Fast forward to 16 days ago, March 31st, I injured myself badly here in my house
and I was in excruciating pain. I hurt my shoulder, I was screaming in pain and I called my brother to see if he'd take me to urgent care. He said he'd be here in an hour and 40 minutes. I said, great. And then I called the dispatchers and asked should I put heat or cold on it? And they said we can do an assessment. And I said, fine. And so I went out to wait and the assessment crew consisted of a fire engine with four firefighters in it that pulled up just past my driveway, followed by an ambulance with two more. And we gathered in my front yard and they spent about 20, 25 minutes trying to get me
to relax deep breathe. My arm was in an upright right angle position and I was holding, it was in that position, I was holding it. I was in so much pain. And finally after 20 minutes they said, sorry to say this, but we really think you should go to the er. And I agreed. I said, as long as you take me to Newton Wellsey. And so I got in the ambulance, the fire engine was ahead of us and had to go down and turn around in the circle and the ambulance followed. And it seemed like forever and a day that we were down there when the goal was to get me to the emergency room. And I was in so much pain.
And it turns out I dislocated my shoulder. But that's not the point of this story. My brain is like fried now 'cause it's so late. But a few days ago when I knew this was being discussed today, I went to look at my ring camera footage and I looked at the exact time that the ambulance pulled away from the street in front of my front walk to the time it had circled down the end of the street, turned around and come back to that same point, heading to Pond Street, ultimately to the er. And you will be shocked, it was three minutes and 28 seconds. And I think that is unacceptable,
whether we're an accepted street or an unaccepted street, but thank God it was only Aloc heart attack or some other medical emergency. Thank God the firefighters ahead of us, the four in that fire engine. Were not being called to fight a fire and save lives or, you know, address other emergencies. I have this image in my mind. It's a piece of paper with two columns and in the left hand column, all the details on the report indicating why we're not a good candidate to be accepted, which really is
to get our street repaid by the town. And on the right side, I have one word and it's safety. And I really think we on Point Street have a right to have access to emergency personnel and services and a timely fashion. I worry that next time it could be a life or death situation. It could be mine, it could be someone else's. And I just want you to know that this is a serious concern. The street down the hill and the circle is not going to get better. It's going to get worse. And perhaps you might reach out and speak with the drivers of those vehicles, the fire engine and the ambulance, and,
and get their take on what that was like down there. Because I don't know if we were going so slow because they didn't want me to yell out in pain or because they didn't wanna like have a flat tire. And, but this is a problem and I know there are a lot of reasons why you don't wanna say yes and help us out here and pave the street, but the street is in such disrepair, much more so than Jennifer Circle. And I don't want my life to be in jeopardy. So Speaker 1: Thank you Ms. Doran, there's in the room you wish to speak? Yes.
Could you approach the podium? Tell us your name and whether you're a NAIC resident. Speaker 5: My name is, my name is Lee Payton and I live on Point Street. So I'm a resident and I've spoken to Mr. McDowell or emailed him quite a few times and we're very fortunate to have you analyze the situation. We appreciate all the work that went into that. I, I do just, and you and I know, and, and I'm very glad that we'll have another chance that we didn't get a hard no today on getting our street repaved.
But I did wanna mention a couple of things. I won't mention them all because you know, it's, things are gonna change. But when I first met with Mr. McDowell, he, or one time when I met with him, he, he informed me that if Point Street was approved for acceptance, the reconstruction of the road would follow the existing path of the roadway and no private property would need to be taken. And that's a point that I stressed when the neighbors were signing the petition. So everyone, no one wants to have their taken, their
property taken from them or a section. And actually it, in many instances, it, I'm not even sure it would work because it would make their houses too close to the street. But one thing I really wanted to mention was the recently paved Dirt Road, Whitcomb Road, which is across Pond Street and into the Fisk Road area. That road we went up to measure today, and it's only 16 feet and seven inches wide. And the town is recommending that our street become 22 to 24 feet wide. Why is there a difference in,
Speaker 1: So actually the recommendation is the planning board requirements to be 40 feet wide. So it's not, the recommendation is not to enlarge it to 22 to 24, it's to additionally, from what it currently is to an additional 24 feet, it's virtually impossible for the, the road as it exists in its dimensions is, is not appropriate and doesn't, it doesn't comply with the planning board with requirements. Now, it may be the case that the planning board could,
could, as the permit grant granting authority grant an exception or a reduction. But at 16 to 18 feet, it's, it's not an appropriate width Speaker 5: And fine. You know, I, I respect what you say, but however, I'm just pointing out that Wickham Road is only 16 feet, seven inches wide. Speaker 1: Mr. McDowell, Speaker 15: If I may. Speaker 1: Sure, Speaker 15: Yeah. So the width of the road is not the right of way. The right of way is usually much wider than that. So it includes places where there might be sidewalks.
The, you know, if I look at my house, I live on High Street, the town owns almost halfway through my front garden, that's the right of way. The pavement is 10 feet from that. So the fact that it's only paved 16 feet wide doesn't mean that's the only part of the right of way. And just, I want you to be okay. I want you to understand that the right of way also allows for utilities and other things to be put underneath and also allows for things like sidewalks if they ever come around.
So it's more than just what the physical width of the pavement is. Speaker 5: Alright. Also, I do want to mention that we don't really need a sidewalk at all. I think my neighbors would agree with that. That was mentioned in the, in the evaluation. Speaker 1: Mr. McDowell, could I ask you to address the question with regard to this other street that is 16 point? Thank you. Speaker 26: So I appreciate the question and I'm glad somebody actually went out and took a look at Whitney Drive. That right of way is a 40 foot right of way, but the, the pavement obviously is a much narrower width.
We paved what the gravel road was. If you recall in that neighborhood, the Fairview Estates, we accepted several roads or eight roads that we, that we accepted Wickham being one of them. When I did state, and I mentioned in, you know, speaking about Point Street, is that we would talk to the planning board about accepting a right of way that was smaller, that would make that more palatable because there are encroachments with street trees and walls on the point street property. So that is something that we wouldn't necessarily have to take the 40 foot right away while saying if we did a
planning board compliant roadway, that would require that much. So that was maybe misconstrued a little bit. And I, I completely understand that we would not necessarily have to take that wide of a right of way as part of a street acceptance. However, I would want to know that that was acceptable before we did any kind of layout work for the survey work. And then basically be able to give the planning board an idea how wide that street should be. And if we went back into repave that, you know, the, the paving of a roadway, generally as a planning board road, when we're building new roadways, we have gone down as low
as 20 feet for, you know, a narrow right of way where it's an existing right of way like that it could be paved within the footprint of the right of way. We mentioned in the evaluation that for a roadway of that length, we would recommend a sidewalk. We don't have to build a sidewalk if there isn't one. Now it doesn't have to be constructed, however, we would recommend one. And so that moving forward with the residents, this is what we would like to do, this is what we recommend. They can make up their minds as to whether or not they would make those, you know, improvements or listen to our recommendations or not.
And so those are basically kind of like, that's the bargain of this, you know, they would like their road paved. We want the right of way over that. We're not taking the property, we don't take the fee interest, we accept an easement over the way, and that's enough to consider a public way and then we can spend public funding on it. So again, there's just some, there would be some wrangling back and forth as far as what's acceptable for that. But the recommendation that you have is how to make this into, you know, a fully acceptable street. We're mentioning those things, but saying that there's ways around them. So I understand the question, but I do feel like some of the things that were said were kind of misconstrued such as, you know,
the width of the roadway and things like that. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. McDowell. We do have two other people online. Did you have any further comments or Speaker 5: Questions? No, I, no, I just wanted to thank Mr. McDowell for the clarity and it still leaves us with a little bit of hope. Speaker 1: Thank you. Mr. S Shig. Speaker 28: Hi there. Will s Shig two point street. So I, I've am encouraged by some of the things I've heard here this evening, particularly related to the town willing to work with us on a variety of issues. I I did wanna call out a couple of things that stood out to me. So I noticed in the report there were a few items that were
recommended, things along the lines of drainage and water supply thing, things of this nature. And hopefully this will be something akin to the sidewalk in that it is more of a recommendation and I bring this particular i, these particular items up because we have a fully developed street. So when we look at this and we talk about the planning board and the planning board's requirements, there is no real future growth on our street. So I, I would hope that this would be something that would allow a fair bit more flexibility in the ability
to move forward with, you know, re repaving the road. I think folks, most folks are fairly happy with the situation other than the fact that the road is terribly deteriorated as noted in the engineering report. And, and to be honest with you, I think that is ultimately what the ask is here is to repay that cent section of the road, right? So I understand that the depth may be improper for, for what it's been for for all this time and that there's alligator because of potholing, but that is a bit of a catch 22 when the only work
that can be done on the road is to fill potholes and that is the cause of more damage to the road over a longer length of time, right? So things like that, I, I think I, I wanna call out and make sure that are, are noted. And then I, I do have to ask a question folks, and I apologize for bringing up a thorny issue, but you know, this has been sitting in the back of, back of my head for a while. My understanding is that there is no differential assessment rate for houses on accept public ways. And if you are on an accepted public way, and we have found a need like these roads and it is turned down, I'm,
I'm having difficulty parsing these two things together where you're paying the same amount of money as everybody else, but you're not getting the same amount of services. So I, I just wanna put that out there. I don't want to cause any trouble for folks, but I do want to raise that as I, I'm choking on that a little bit to try and figure this out. So I am really hoping that we can move forward and find some sort of middle ground on this Speaker 1: Mr. Nik with, with regard to the lack of a tax rate differential between homeowners on unaccepted roads or accepted roads. We have to comply with mass general law. And Mass General law says that we can't do that.
That you essentially that road is private property and we cannot use public funds to anything more than patch it. So I, I I understand your outrage and it's the seeming incongruity of it and the unfairness of it. It's just we have to comply with mass general law. Speaker 15: And in terms of the valuation, I've actually had a, I I'm on a corner lot with an unaccepted way next to me and I've had a talk with the assessor about this. And the fact that the road isn't accepted doesn't affect the, the effective sale value of the property.
People buy them for what they buy them for. Our assessments are based on fair market value and whether the road is accepted or not doesn't actually impact that. And Mr. Henderson, our assessor, has pretty clearly SA stated eecs no differential in sales values on houses, on accepted versus on accepted roads. Speaker 1: Mr. Kroger, Speaker 29: Thank you Speaker 30: About this. Speaker 31: I, yes, thank you. Shane Krieger. I'm a resident of seven Jennifer Circle. Just first I would just want to thank Mr. McDowell and SSON for
many emails I've sent you over the past two years and, and being so kind in, in your responses and taking the time to, to conduct this. I I also wanna just reiterate what Mr. Sprat said earlier, maybe a few minutes ago, is, you know, it'd be really helpful to see progress on this. And I, I, this is certainly progress, but you know, Jennifer Circle, as the assessment said, is just a, a good candidate for acceptance. We don't want this to become a street that is like the others. And I, I understand all this will do is put us on a list of many other streets to eventually get repaid and taken care of.
You know, we as residents have already taken some of our own, the work, you know, into our own hands. We had trees and vines just covering the center of the, the street in our center circle, which made it dangerous because we couldn't cars who use our street all the time couldn't see our kids on their bikes. There were other things that we fixed, you know, and, and before any of this even started, and I, I'd really like, you know, for me on behalf of my neighbors, we'd like to just see progress if Jennifer Circle can be accepted, what does that look like? Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Krieger. At this time I'd like to the board to discuss property
by property or street by street and start with Jennifer Circle since it has the most favorable rating. Are there questions or comments? Mr. Evans? Speaker 14: I was ready for a motion. Speaker 1: Any questions or comments? No, I'm ready for a motion Speaker 14: Move to accept Jennifer Circle as a street Speaker 1: Second moved by Mr. Evans, seconded by Ms. Pope. Ms. Ms. Wilger, Speaker 5: I just have a discussion on this. Yes, of course. So let's say we vote positively.
Is this something that would be a, an an administration sponsored warrant article for the fall? Speaker 3: It's, I was actually gonna ask if we could outline what happens next with the positive vote. Do you want to talk through that bill or? Speaker 26: I can. So what the recommendation would be for would be to sponsor a warrant article to be brought to the next available town meeting, whether that was a spring or fall town meeting, depending on where you are in the cycle, that motion
to lay out would go to the planning board, have the planning board approved that as, you know, laying out the way. And this particular case, as was noted, because this is eligible for the accelerated program, we can just go back with the original subdivision plan. So that could be taken to the planning board within a matter of weeks, depending on their agenda following that the warrant article would be brought to town meeting and you know, to the vote would actually be made by town meeting whether to accept or not accept. You are voting basically to accept us as a candidate for street acceptance.
Speaker 3: So essentially the, it would be probably likely sponsored by the select board at the next town meeting subject to completing the process that builders outline, meaning getting the set of plans going to the planning board. In the case of Jennifer Circle, since there's a set of plans, it's a lot quicker in the case of a different street that maybe there aren't plans that could take many, many months, more months. If the direction from the board is to do the survey work to create the plans, so then go to the planning board to then that can just take a lot more time. Speaker 26: Something else that also needs to happen is there does have to be a public hearing prior
to the, the town meeting that is advertised, you know, a proper public meeting through the select board Speaker 14: By this board Board. The Speaker 26: Select board level. The select board board, correct. Speaker 5: By the select board? Correct, Speaker 3: Yes. Speaker 26: Okay. I do have a step-by-step process that was given to us by our town council that can be provided so you can see what that step looks like. But fundamentally your responsibility would be to sponsor the warrant article. I take that through the planning board, they, you know, vote to approve the layout as shown and then that would come back to the select board for the public hearing prior to the town meeting. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. McDowell. So we, any other discussion on Jennifer Circle
so we have a pending motion? All in favor please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? It's 5 0 0 2 except Jennifer Circle As a candidate for the accelerated acceptance process, I'd like to move to Evans, next Evans Drive Speaker 3: For, for Adam, the board. If the board chooses just not to vote, it could just be direction to staff to continue to work or direction to the neighbors to continue to work through the process Speaker 1: To continue, have to take an action. Understood. Yeah. Or we could continue this pending additional information, which is what I'm looking to the board from. Speaker 3: Right? Fortunately this
isn't a public hearing by any means. So it can just come at a future meeting, you know, as Bill mentioned, his next steps or those engineering team's Next step is to sort of further outline really some of the items that can be accomplished based on the report, working with residents of a particular roadway. There could be some things that the town can do, there could be some things that neighbors will have to do. And, and so the board could just basically give direction to recommend that, that the neighbors and town staff continue to work on some of those challenges. Speaker 1: Ms. Slager, Speaker 5: Given that this is a very new process,
assuming we don't move forward with these streets, you know, it sounds like there's gonna be a lot of additional work on your part bill and, and the department that we wanna try to avoid. So maybe there's some way to turn that into more of a formal process about, you know, if it doesn't meet these criteria, maybe there's something else that we can do. I know that you mentioned working with the neighbors as the next steps, but if there's some way to, to formalize that in some way so, you know, to make it easier for everyone so that they understand, you know, what comes next. Speaker 26: I appreciate that and, and that is something
that we had mentioned before with my own, you know, executive director as far as like what does that look like moving forward. Maybe that is something that is also included. There are certain things that the, the residents will not be able to do and Evans Drive is an example of that. The work that we'll be doing with mass DOT to try to acquire that property, even though they said we already own it, we don't seem to, so there seems to be at least a, a, a methodology of moving forward with that. And that is, like I said, probably one of the larger impediments to the work that would need to be done on Evans Drive. And we can follow up with a report.
And again, when we're making a recommendation to the neighborhood, we were just, you know, through the, the town administrator give a a list of, of the recommendations that would go. So the board can look at that and say, you know, this can move forward to the neighbors. And there may be cases where we are going, our recommendation is this is not a good candidate for street acceptance period. And there's really nothing the residents can do. Speaker 1: Mr. Evans Speaker 14: Chair, just I wanted to float in idea, which is, it sounds like there's, there's sort of the near term tactical thing
of identifying what the town would need to do and what the residents would need to do versus the longer term policy change that says if a street is not voted to be put immediately on the, as an accepted roadway, what are, what is the policy? What are, what are the steps? So to, to specify and codify what those steps might be? Speaker 1: So what I was going to suggest, I had identified two of the largest impediments.
My suggestion to the board would be to continue this and allow the engineering department to ask mass DOT for recover to reconvey for town acceptance. If they have this post-it not asking you guys to deep, if, if that seems like a shortcut as opposed to having somebody do a deep dive into land court. The second biggest impediment is that these proper, the properties fronting 12 Evans Drive and the cost for a formal street acceptance document
by a registered land surveyor. So my, my my ask would be to come back to the board what that cost would be and given the, the very considerable amount of work before the, the engineering division, I would ask for to have that in three months. And if you need an an extension, just let us know. Okay. So for, Speaker 26: Appreciate that. And there are several different entities I would call to get several prices for a land court plan Speaker 1: Or plan. It's, so for Evans that would be just the two things.
Continue for three months and ask mass DOT and figure out the land what, what it would cost us to even entertain that. Speaker 14: Is that your motion or do you want me to, Speaker 1: I just wanted to hear if that was acceptable to the board. Yeah, I, Speaker 9: Yes, I want, I would like recommendations and next steps before Speaker 1: We Yeah, yeah. So let's continue this for three months. We'll get that piece of information and then we'll come back on evidence strive. Okay. Okay. So the, the last property in this package is Point Street. I was going to suggest the same process and, and that process would be, first I would ask if you could contact the
fire department about the ambulances and find out if the road was an impediment for Ms. Doran's journey or were they going slowly not to jolt her because she was in pain or some other reason. Yeah, Speaker 26: And you just may want to take a look at Point Street is very unique in that it's cul-de-sac has two separate islands in it. Yes. And I mentioned that and had a picture of that in the report. Yes. And said this is impossible to negotiate for one of our larger vehicles. Likely it was the larger fire engine that was slowing down the ambulance, the ambulance could make it through that island. It was very likely the, and I will speak to the fire department regarding that
specifically for how we would lay that out so that, that we make sure that that's not a problem. Thank my, I'm looking at the islands that are in the, and and noting that those are an impediment to any sort of large vehicle, making a turn there. However, I mean, they drove through it, they would be able to tell me exactly what it was. That was the problem. That'd Speaker 1: Be great. I I know at least three of us have been on point Street and looked at the street. Maybe more of us the other impediment, the other very large impediment, well there are many, but the, the next largest is also the surveying. So
Speaker 26: Also LandCorp parcel land. So Yep. Basically that estimate would work out for both of those roadways. Speaker 1: Okay, good. Another impediment is one of them has Speaker 14: The water prob the water pipe Speaker 1: Problem. This the water pipe problem. If, if you could get a back of the envelope estimate, which we will not hold you to, given that it pro the work would probably take place in several years. And we can't guesstimate, we can't guesstimate out, but changing the water main to the recommended eight inch diameter ductile
iron, iron water main. Speaker 26: And just to note, I I did note one of the, the residents noted a question about, oh, if you just pave it, you don't need a drain. The reason it's in the shape that it's in is because the roadway was not drained. So there is, you know, there does have to be provision for drainage. It's possible some of that could be infiltration. So I mean there, there are ways of looking at that depending on soil conditions and things like that. However, I mean to, to put in the roadway, if I paved the roadway, I'll flood the houses. So the, the roadway needs to be drained. Just to clarify Speaker 1: The wetlands, I was wondering if you could con discuss
with our conservation agent, what does it look like in terms of specificity? What, what, what would need to happen with the street if it were to be voted as a candidate for acceptance? Speaker 14: Would, would that, just following up on that question Yep. Would that be something that the conservation commission would need to weigh in? Speaker 26: We talk about that. We're part of the stormwater management team. Myself, the conservation agent, the board of health director, and the assistant town engineer. So we talk about this kind of stuff all the time. Really the question is when I have direct connect
to a wetland, similar to, you know, Evans drives the same way with the brook and point street is the way because of the, the pond Fisk pond. What would we need to do prior to discharge, you know, toward the pond itself. So that's really the question. And we have a fair, I mean I have a fair idea of how that would be designed. Okay. However, it's just that it would need to be designed, just makes that, you know, more of a difficult roadway to accept Speaker 1: And constructed. And constructed. Indeed it Speaker 26: Would make it more expensive. But yes, we can give you estimates on what that would likely be. Speaker 1: Awesome. And then the last thing I would ask
is if you could have a discussion, informal discussion with the planning board as about this particular street and what they would need to consider in terms of the width. Speaker 26: And I would likely need for that, I think I would need the opinion of the board as opposed to just the, you know, the CED director. So I will sit down with, you know, at, at a planning board meeting, we can get a generalized idea, you know, for right of ways that are in this condition or are so narrow. What, what would be acceptable for that? You know, what would they be willing to go down to.
We have in other neighborhoods, Phillips Pond, the roadway that built there. We have altered right of way width for what is acceptable. And then once we get to a place where we can get the 40 feet we do. So that, that has been done before and they are, you know, willing to talk about that. So yes, I will do that. Speaker 1: And I would ask, given again, Springtown meeting and the considerable amount of things that are on your agenda and the more extensive lists that we've given you, if you could come back in five months or just let us know if you need more time. Yeah, I
Speaker 26: Mean, I serve the pleasure of the board as far as that goes. That's fine. And that's a, that's a reasonable period of time to have all this information back to you. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Mc McDowell. Are there any other comments from members of the board? Bill, do you need me to send you this list? I will. Oh, Mr. Sprat has it so wonderful. 'cause my writing is atrocious. Thank you very much for coming before us. Thank you to all of the neighbors and those of you online who have stayed with us till this late hour. I deeply appreciate it and looking forward to next steps. The next item on the agenda is the public hearing for the Eversource Electric grant of location
application for Sylvester Road. And we have a representative, Shauna Kyle. Madam Clerk, if you could read the public notice. Speaker 9: Yes. In conformity with the requirements of section 22, chapter 166 of the Massachusetts General Laws, you are hereby notified that a public hearing will be held at Natick Town Hall 13 East Central Street, Natick, Massachusetts, as well as remotely on April 16th, 2025 at 6:30 PM upon the petition of Eversource to install one pole number 4 6 4 dash
12 A, this work is necessary to provide electric service for solar array at number 39 Sylvester Road. Anyone wishing to be heard in this matter may participate in person or through zoom. Log instructions for Zoom will be published on April 16th, 2025. Select board agenda plans are on file in the town clerk's office for your review. Speaker 1: And, Speaker 9: And I make a motion to open the public hearing. Second Speaker 1: Move by Ms. Pope, seconded by Ms. Slager. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? 5 0 0. Ms. Kyle, if you could unmute your, or if you could,
Speaker 15: Which, which one? Speaker 1: I think it's Kyle's a Speaker 32: This Speaker 9: Kyle SA? Speaker 1: Yeah. Kyles a Speaker 32: Yes. Hi. Okay. Speaker 15: Just wanted Speaker 32: To make sure. Good. Can you hear me? Speaker 1: Yes, we can hear you. Speaker 15: You're on. Speaker 32: Okay, thank you. Yes. So we're just trying to get a gran location to install Pole 4 64 over 12 a to provide solar array. 2 39 Sylvester Road. Speaker 1: Thank you. Members of the board.
Do you have any questions or comments? Speaker 15: I do. Just give me a second to bring up the map. I accidentally closed. Speaker 1: Got it. Speaker 15: Look at Mike. No, no. I google Speaker 14: That map to you here. It shows our polls. There's poll further up. Speaker 15: Yeah, I was, I I I was looking at this earlier and it looks like, and I I just want to confirm this. It looks like you're gonna put the pole in the little green space pretty close to the corner of Carlson, is that right? Speaker 32: That is correct. Speaker 15: And about how far away from
that corner will you be? Speaker 32: It's roughly 40 feet. Speaker 15: Okay. From the corner? Speaker 32: Yes. Speaker 1: The map is showing 40 feet plus or minus from the center of Carlson Circle to the proposed installation site. Speaker 15: Okay, so that's gonna be Speaker 32: Correct, correct. Speaker 15: Yeah. Okay. So I know I was just looking at it at, at Speaker 32: The No, that's okay. Speaker 15: I was just looking at the, at the street view and I was a little concerned because the sidewalk is a little funky there with access.
You know, it looks like it's far away. Enough away from the, looks to me like it's far enough away from both the corner and the driveway. Speaker 32: It is, yeah. I was out there today and there's enough space on either side. We, we weren't able to go off of 13 because that transformer is at full capacity. So we, we really don't have a choice. We have to put it here. Speaker 15: Gotcha. Okay, sounds good. I have no more questions. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Sidney. Mr. Evans, did you have a question? Nope. I'll entertain a motion Speaker 15: Move. We approve the grant location. Second
Speaker 1: Moved by Mr. Sidney, seconded by Ms. Pope. All in favor please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed to close the public hearing? Speaker 15: Second. Speaker 1: Moved by Ms. Pope, seconded by Mr. Sydney. All in favor, please say a aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? It's 5 0 0. The next item we're going to take is the South Natick DAM update. Speaker 3: Thank you Madam Chair. Bill Spprt will be right back in to provide an update on the actual DAM project. I'm gonna provide an update on behalf of John Marshall on the park project. John would be here tonight, but he's working through some family items.
So with regards to the park project, there's been extensive public engagement, a got of outreach, some concept design work that's ongoing and to date, essentially next steps include really advancing some of the design work. What, what I give credit to the team for doing is, one, just the community engagement. It's been fantastic, but two, also recognizing where we are with the, the, the dam removal project as it relates to the features of
what a future part could include. Ensuring that features that may shift as the river finds its new pathway aren't going to be overly designed at this point, but give accommodations for some of those feature features so that they can be added in several years time ahead when those features of the river settle. But still coming to a finished product that we can implement, the intent is to really have the design completed and bid at, at the same time or soon after whatever gets bid for the DAM project gets bid so
that it can be constructed on the heels of that project. A lot of it is really primarily more simplified work use, utilizing a lot of the existing, you know, features of the space. Taking some of the work that well actually removing some of the hardscape work that has really been a defunct park for a long time and using that as flood mitigation and potential future space that can be activated. And then really improving a lot of the parking and other access to various spaces but parking and access to the park itself and that a lot of that came through the community engagement process. So that's advancing very smoothly.
We, it is on the capital program I believe for this, for some additional work in a future year for construction, but we're timing it really with the DAM project and bill's here to talk through the DAM project, which is also going smoothly so far. But he can give more detail on that. Speaker 18: I just really like to say the word DAM project. Speaker 3: All the projects tonight have been DAM projects, but this is the DAM project, Speaker 1: This is the DAM project Speaker 18: Removal project. Things are progressing really well. We have a detailed memo that we sent over, but I'll give you the bottom line, which is essentially our permitting process is going very smoothly. GZA our consultant is, is really on it.
We are working through that. I believe if I have this right, we have two more permits to get. One being con com and one I believe is the Army Corps of Engineers. But the process has been great. We're getting permit acceptance a little bit faster than we anticipated. So I, I would say we're ahead of schedule. The most likely scenario is we will have all our permits for deconstruction. I would say a removal of the spillway for the appropriate time next summer. So we have to wait for a low water condition, which is somewhere between August and September of 2026.
And in the meantime we'll be working, we already are working on grant opportunities for funding that at that time. So that's, that's the timeframe I would anticipate by the fall of this year. We have our permits in hand if not sooner. And then heading into next year we have plenty of time to get our funding put together so we can remove the spillway. Speaker 1: Mr. Sidney. Speaker 15: Thank you Madam Chair. So I was looking at the funding and going back to when we
actually made this decision, it does look like the dam removal is significantly less expensive than the repair would've been, which is good news for a lot of other good positive things. It looks like we're going to it. It looks like we're going to be at least eligible for a grant grant that will co cover most of the cost of this removal, which is also good news. The question I have remaining is what do we have currently appropriated around the dam and is it usable for this
or are we gonna have to go dis appropriate money and and appropriate new money? Speaker 3: So we do have some existing funding that we're able to use to complete some of the permitting process that was already appropriated and that's cash in hand. There is an appropriation to, for borrowing from many years ago. I think it's in the tune of like $1.2 million ish. Yes. That we have to look at the language of the appropriation to confirm if it would be able to handle or, or it could be used for this. And then we still have to come back to this board 'cause it's borrowing. So we don't have that cash in hand. We haven't borrowed for it.
If anything that first and foremost we're gonna seek grant funding. The intent is to try to, there, there's seems to be enough grant funding that we can potentially cover most if not all of the removal costs with grant funding. That's our hope. Then we'll have to look at that appropriation language to determine if it can be purpose for this. 'cause it was less detailed at the time because we, we, it was when the town was looking at just doing a damn basically repair project. So we're working with Kyro legal counsel on that. Speaker 18: So I think the bottom line is
with the appropriations we already have, assuming we can reuse them somehow we have enough money, we have to figure out the leg legality of that money, but already approved in some capacity for damn use. We have enough money and already appropriated cash in hand 'cause we've been using grants to this point to do the design work. So we should have enough cash in hand with somewhere around $400,000 that we could use as matching for grants. So we're in good shape and we're, we're really actively pursuing the
grants right now. So by the time we, we are ready to remove next year, we should know about grants and opportunities and what we have and we're really heading down a good path. Speaker 15: Great. Well it's bummer news about FEMA brick. It's good news that the dam and seawall construction grant program is still around and let's hope that we qualify because, you know, it would be great if the taxpayers didn't have to pay for pay for too much of this. Speaker 3: Yeah. To be fair, the FEMA brick wasn't our most likely.
Yeah. That was a long term. Anyway. It's still a bummer. But it, we were, we were just applying for everything just because we want to see what we get. Yeah. We're also working with our delegation on various potential for earmarks or appropriations, formally known as earmarks or whatever they're called nowadays. Pork. Pork, yeah. Pork, whatever they're called. Just to see if we can get some other funding from other avenues, Speaker 5: Ms. Slager. So it's very good news that the DAM and seawall grant, if we get it, will cover almost the full cost.
And is there any, do you know, is there any time limitation to this grant? So like, let you know, it says that we'll know June of 2025, you know, for some reason construction gets delayed or you know, we don't have a level where the wa we have a very rainy next summer and the water level No. Never gets low enough that we can do it next year. It would it still apply? Speaker 18: We're game planning some of that. So gz a's been really, they just have a lot of dam experience, Speaker 3: A lot of Speaker 18: Experiences with dams. I know I, Speaker 3: As Speaker 18: Soon as it came outta my mouth, I'm like, I wish I could just grab Speaker 4: That. It's impossible. Speaker 3: They have a lot of experience
Speaker 18: With dam, they have a lot of experience with dam removals and they're, they're kind of guiding us along the way. So we're trying to think about strategies. So sometimes it, it impacts when construction starts. So could we start construction by doing preliminary fencing or what, you know, how do we start the project so we can get it in line? So we're already strategizing how to do that, but it seems feasible. Okay. And, Speaker 3: And, and the grant funders for reasonable, for reasonable reasons, I've found most, if not all, to be
good at working with communities. You know, if we have a legitimate reason why we're not starting this because it's an exceedingly wet summer, they're, they're probably gonna be hearing that from not just us but from some of the other grant funders. Other grant recipients. And typically we get some leeway with them. Speaker 18: So this is the longest. If you, you can think about the, the Gantt chart we originally posed. The permitting was like a two year window. Yeah. By the time we get our grants and move forward with the removal, it's gonna be really anti climatic. It's gonna be about three weeks and the day we'll be gone. But, you know, when we actually do construction. So we're, we're starting to get faster
and faster along this process. Speaker 4: Awesome, Speaker 1: Thank you. Any other questions or comments from the board? Nope. Speaker 3: Thank you for great update Mr. No, you wanna thank the team? We Speaker 1: Have a question from the audience. Speaker 4: Mr. Scott Roger Scott Speaker 16: VO Water Street. Just a clarification now, Jamie just mentioned that if we'll legally be able to use this money that was for Dan Pier, that money was all voted by the town at the town meeting and previously in another issue we had
the $2 million for five Auburn Street couldn't be used for the town. I'm just trying to figure out how shouldn't this have to be revolted by town meeting the appropriation of this money. I mean, because it's for a totally different purpose as that $2 million was, it's Speaker 1: Actually there was no $2 million and let's not conflate five Auburn Street with the dam. But thank you for the question Mr. Erickson. Speaker 3: On the appropriation, the basically authorization to borrow funds for work in the dam. That's what we need to review with legal counsel. She'll review the actual language of the town meeting, vote
to determine the scope and if, if, if this project would be within that scope. If it's determined to be within the scope, then we have and and the reason why legal counsel is so important is 'cause it's a borrowing article. So the borrowing authorization, our bond council will actually probably review it, not even caris to determine because they, they would have to justify that in front of the borrowers. If it's legal found to be compliant, then we'll move forward with the project. I mean the board would have to vote on that borrowing. So it's really at that time the discretion of the board. And if it's found not to be,
then we would need to go back to town meeting. And we do this with other borrowing or bond authorizations or borrowing authorizations all the time. I say all the time it happens, you know, maybe once or twice every couple years. But we're, we're accustomed to it when a vote needs to be either modified or you need to de authorize a de authorize or and then re authorize it, it's a relatively enough common occurrence that we have experience doing this. And we have bond council that'll review that with us. Speaker 16: It was quite possible it would have to go back to town meeting. Speaker 3: Just the, just the borrowing authorization is possible. We might, based on our hopeful success with grants,
we might not even need that funding. So we don't have to go back to town meeting for anything. Speaker 16: Well, that'd be nice, Speaker 3: Thank you. Right. That that's part of the reality as well. And well, we would go back to timing, I guess to deauthorize just the authorization of the, of that borrowing. Right. But they use it, there's usually, that's usually pretty unanimous Speaker 1: Support. Thank you Mr. Scott. Good question. Last agenda item is the five Auburn Street update Elliot School. Hi Mr. Erickson. Would you just brief us? I I wanted to get this on the agenda knowing that the, even knowing that the developer could,
could not be here tonight so that we could provide a, an update as we promised. Could you just remind us where we are in the process? Speaker 3: Yep. But I'll, I'll try to be brief. It's nine 50 and try to get outta here by 10. Essentially the, the process, so the five Auburn Street developer is still in front of the zoning board of appeals for the comprehensive permit. That's that required master launch chapter 40 B permit process there. That was continued from their last date, which was earlier this month to I believe May 12th is the next hearing date. The night date. That's fine. It's a Monday night and they've been doing consistent Monday
nights and at that night the intent is to get some, you know, ZBA, I don't wanna say closure, but they're, they're going to really take up some of the final meeting components of the, of the project and, and the process. I understand that there's a draft that, that that staff is working on a draft decision, but obviously it's all pending ZBA vote and ZBA final review. There's also some continued peer review work that I know staff is working to coordinate on behalf of the ZBA request with the developer. And there's still some dialogue around
what the potential future recommendations would be likely for even this board to review for Auburn Street because Auburn Street is a public way that Israel, the jurisdiction of the select board, not necessarily the zoning board of appeals, but they can certainly put forward recommendations and have some level of condition on the developer to at least en ensure collaboration with the select board on on future potential adjustments or upgrades or, or changes to Auburn Street. I know there's been a number of questions in
the public as well. A lot of the questions around the project details really are still under the purview of the zoning board of appeals at this time because they're in front of them during the review process. So I can answer any, any questions, but I wanna be mindful of the fact that it's still under review by the ZBA. Speaker 1: I wanted to take this opportunity to address some of the concerns that have been raised with the board by members of the public, both through emails and at a Monday night meeting during public speak. The select board are the roadway commissioners. So any changes to Auburn Street have to come before this board to be approved.
But at this time, since the property and the project is under the purview of the zoning board of appeals, we cannot inter insert ourselves in that. So we have been asked to please require this. We don't have that authority. And so for those of you at home who wanna know more about this process? Look at the Natick zoning bylaws, section six dash three subsection two A, which out I outlines the process. And what that will do is it'll give you a sense of where we are as a former member
of the zoning board of appeals. We always respected the fact the select board stayed away from the Special permitting authority and let them make those decisions and recommendations. And then when the, when the zoning Board of appeals has something, whether it's, you know, something, whether it's a recomme, if it's a recommendation that touches on any aspect of the Select Board's authority, it ends up being a condition in the, in the final decision. And then that will come back to the board, at which time we will weigh in on those.
So I just wanted to take a moment to explain to the public what, what was happening. And we are reading your emails and we appreciate it. We know that this has been a very long process, as are all special grant. I mean, all 40 B comprehensive permits are long processes. So I don't want you to think that we're not listening. I wanted to make sure that we got this on the agenda and I didn't want to wait until the applicant could make it before us. So that's why we have it on the agenda tonight. And I encourage you to continue being involved, making yourselves heard, copying the zoning Board
of appeal members, and, and letting us know what your concerns are because if it does come back before us, we are, we have been kept up to date with what the concerns are. And I deeply appreciate all of you and your patience and during this very long process. And that's all I have on the five Auburn update. At this time, I'd like to ask Madam Clerk to read the consent agenda. Speaker 9: The consent agenda is I'll read items A through G and folks can let me know if you wanna pull something. Item A, approve safety committee.
Recommendations Item B, approve request to occupy a public way. Natick little league Opening Day parade. Item C, approve one day alcohol licenses for Natick Community Organic Farm on May 10th, 2025 for Farm Fest in July 19th, 2025 for barn dance. Item D, approve one day entertainment licenses for Natick Organic Natick Community Organic Farm, again on May 10th, 2025 for Farm Fest in July 19th, 2025
for barn dance item e approve request to occupy, occupy a public way for Natick Nights on June 26th, 2025 from five to 8:00 PM July 10th, 2025 from five to 8:00 PM with a rain date of July 24th, 2025 from five to 8:00 PM August 7th, 2025 from five to 8:00 PM with a rain date of August 21st, 2025 from five to 8:00 PM appoint Gavin Wilson as a permanent full-time police officer, effective May 12th, 2025
and G 2025 adult use marijuana license renewal for Kacha, Massachusetts LLC. Does anybody wanna pull anything? Speaker 1: Madam Clerk, do you move the consent agenda? Speaker 9: I do move the consent agenda. Speaker 1: Seconded by Mr. Evans. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? The consent agenda is approved. Mr. Town Administrator, do you have any updates? Speaker 3: No. Good. I'll stick to No, Speaker 1: I was afraid my tone was lost. We can, but no, no. Really? Do you have Speaker 3: Anything? No, no. We covered a lot tonight. That's, that's a busy, busy night.
Next week is school vacation week, so I am out for that. But then we have town meeting that starts the week after, so we're gonna be busy going into maybe two nights, three nights of town meeting. We'll see. I can Speaker 1: Just jinx it. You just jinxed it. I know. Just jinxed it. One night of town meeting. So I let you speak and that's what you come up with. Thank you. You should Speaker 15: Have cut his Speaker 1: Mic. I'm gonna, I'm gonna speak on behalf of the board and say there are no updates and if we have updates, Speaker 15: I do have a quick one. Oh, sorry. It is really quick. I was at the farmer's market on Saturday. There was nobody that came up. And I would like to see us maybe pre-announce our attendance
at either the senior center and so going forward, I think it might help. I Speaker 1: Agreed. And after we spoke about that, I put that in the list of things to do for our agendas. So thank you. I'll take, I told you it's quick. I'll entertain a motion. So moved. Moved. Second to adjourn. Indeed. If it's coming from Rich, it's to adjourn. So move to adjourn. Seconded by Mr. Evans. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. We are adjourned at 9 59 1 10 o'clock. Thank you.