Speaker 1: And welcome to the Wednesday, July 8th select board meeting. Tonight's meeting is being broadcast by Pegasus. Thank you Pegasus. And also available on by Zoom. We're gonna begin tonight an open session and a call to order and I'll take a roll call vote to enter executive session. I will start with Mr. Evans. Speaker 2: Okay. Do we have to read the exec session? Thanks. Speaker 1: Oh yes, we do. I always do that out of order. No, thank you very much. I know I do. I really Ms. Rich. Speaker 2: I'm trying my best to be rich. Speaker 1: Big shoes to fill. I'm Speaker 2: Coming up short on that one.
Speaker 1: So we, we will go into executive session reason A, pursuant to mass general law chapter 30 a section 21, subsection a subsection three to discuss strategy with respect to litigation where an open meeting will have a detrimental effect on the litigating position of the public body and the chair. So declares and I do Bailey Richie versus town of Ashland Putative. Class action ca number 2 8 8 2 6 8 4. CV 1 3 8 3 BLS two. Second reason pursuant to mass general law, chapter 30 a sub
or section 21, subsection a subsection three to discuss strategy with respect to litigation where an open meeting will have a detrimental effect on the litigating position of the public body and the chair. So declares and I do gadsby's Chophouse, LC versus town of Natick. 2 0 2 5 dash 0 0 0 180 2 dash ad dash ENF. We will not be addressing item C through H. Those will be moved to a future agenda. So we will be going into executive session for these two items and we'll take a roll call. Vote. Mr. Evans. Yes. Ms. Slager? Yes.
Ms. Pope? Yes. And Mr. Jacobs? Yes. And I'm a yes. 5 0 0. So we will go into executive session and return to open session at approximately six 40 or 6 45. The section of the meeting is not open to the public. Thank you. Back to the select board meeting of Wednesday, July 8th. We've just come out of executive session and we will now move to announcements. We are announcing the opening of the 2026 fall annual town meeting, opening of the town meeting warrant. At this time I will take a vote on opening the warrant
Speaker 2: Move to open the 2026 fall annual town meeting. Open. Open the warrant for the 2026 fall annual town meeting. Second. Speaker 1: Second. Moved by Mr. Evans, seconded by Ms. Slager. Roll call vote. Since we have a, A member who is online. So Mr. Evans? Yes. Ms. Slager? Yes. Mr. Jacobs? Yes. Ms. Pope? Yes. And I'm a yes. 5 0 0. So the warrant is open and I believe the last day for warrant articles to be submitted to the clerk's office is August 20th.
5:00 PM 5:00 PM Thank you Ms. Wolf. Schlager. And I'll pass this around for signatures and next will be an update on the South Natick Dam project. Is Mr. Sprat online? Speaker 3: No, he's not on. Speaker 1: We can, I can Speaker 4: Provide the Speaker 3: Update if that's okay. Sure. I apologize for trying to Speaker 1: No, we're we're having some tech technical difficulties in the room with audio and vis visual and the zoom and the camera. So just ask your patients tonight. Speaker 4: So the bulk of the, the reason lemme okay mic.
The bulk of the reason for the update is just a couple things. One, the project has largely started except for in water work. So what you'll, what people have probably started seeing is the level of the water is starting to be drawn down. That's in anticipation of the in water work. The in water work is when you're actually gonna be physically seeing things doing work to that spillway that won't start for another probably seven to 10 days-ish around the 16th, you know, weather pending. So what they did was they opened up the gates
to let the water flow to then draw down the river so that they could do the in water work. One thing that we are experiencing though is that some people are going into and actually walking across the spillway from the park on the bacon free library side and what that is causing us just a safety concern. So what we might be doing is looking at some public safety measures in that area. Additional construction fencing for example. We do have to do some construction fencing in that side of the park anyway during the actual in water work. But we might proactively put some out there in advance of that just to, to make sure
that it stays a safe condition for all involved. So the reason, a big reason for tonight is just to make sure the board is aware of that and the public was aware of that, that we are taking this with the safety of everybody involved very, very seriously and we want people to be aware of that. And please, you know, stay out of the construction area, don't go into the construction area. Speaker 1: And Grove Park has been completely secured. Speaker 4: The area on the both sides where we need to be secure are secure. Yes. We might, we just might need to add additional security on the, I believe it's the South Natick park is what they call it,
right On the bacon free side of, of the, of the spillway. The portions of Grove Park on the south side. But is the portions that need to be secured are secured. Speaker 1: Okay. Thank you. Public speak. Speaker 5: Can you ask questions in regarding the Speaker 1: Ms. Young, could you come to the microphone, please introduce yourself and you can ask a question about the update. Speaker 5: Oh, okay. Thank you. Speaker 1: Hi, I am Diane Young Morgan Drive town meeting member. I have a question about the gates that were open. Was the gate when it was open, was it also tested
for going for closing? Because I remember Mr. Spread mentioned something about they knew it could open but they weren't sure if it was gonna be able to close and if it didn't close they would, I don't know what he said exactly. Reinforce it or do something to make it able to close. I wondered if they had tested that. Speaker 4: Yeah, my understanding is that they were able to have it be functional, like fully functional. Speaker 1: So they knew it could close. Speaker 4: Right. But, but it's, so they've been able to open it and they've sometimes had to open it more or less depending on, they can only draw down the river at a certain pace.
Right. So they've had to adjust that on and look at that at a daily basis. So they have been able to open and close it and adjust it on a daily basis. Speaker 1: Okay. And they close it all the way if I, I suppose they could after it all drained Speaker 4: If they had to. I, I believe they can. Yes. Speaker 1: Well at the end they will close it at when you know, I know you have to preserve that for historical reasons we're right. Yes. And that it can't be at all changed. Speaker 4: Understood. Yep. Speaker 1: Yeah. So I want to check back. Yeah, appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. This time we'll enter into the section
of the meeting for public speak. Any individual may raise an issue that is not included on tonight's agenda and it'll be taken under advisement by the board. There'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 this section of the agenda shall be limited to three minutes. Is there anyone in the room who wishes to address the board during public speak? Mr. Joseph and Mr. Joseph, before you begin, I just wanna point something out. There seems to be some confusion
or I've seen some confusion about the reason why there's no debate or discussion from the board or response during this section of the meeting. If someone were to bring up, say an issue that is not on the agenda and we engaged in a discussion or a debate, that means the rest of the town would not have had reason to know that we would be talking about this. So that is the reason why if something is not on the agenda, it's dis it is brought to our attention during public speak. We take it under advisement and we'll either address it in a future meeting or by correspondence or otherwise. So Mr. Joseph, if you could approach the podium.
Speaker 6: Thank you Madam Chair. Good evening. Paul Joseph, just speaking in personal personal capacity. Ken Carlson Circle. I am the chair of the economic development Committee. It has nothing to do with my comments tonight. I just wanna make a general comment. First of all, thank you. Each and every one of you that's serving right now, whether you're on the select board or in any elected or appointed position in this town, to be honest with you, I've been horrified and disgusted by some of the things I've been witnessing online on Facebook, pointed comment, comments to individuals, myself included, because I was the chair when we decided to take that dam down. But I'm speaking more broadly, not just about the dam.
I saw it for the 4th of July picnic. I'm hearing people calling each other communists, questioning people's patriotism, questioning whether people are getting paid off for things, which is absolutely ridiculous. And the assertions that people are making with zero information and in fact only an intention to harm or discredit, is really disappointing for everybody that claims to be born in this town and thinks they have supremacy over people that found this town and chose to make it a home. You got here earlier, but you were never here first. We are all community members today. Many of us will be community members here tomorrow. To literally see people saying, call them out,
pay them a visit key, their vehicle is inciting violence. I was very tempted to go down to the 4th of July picnic to actually invite people that are, you know, just disparaging me online and invite them to have a personal conversation. I will always have a personal conversation with somebody if you have questions about decisions I've made, opinions that I have. What I don't really appreciate and why I didn't go down to that 4th of July picnic is frankly safety. We don't know in this time who is at that edge. People have mental health challenges, people have personal challenges.
Many of us have financial challenges. And the stress that this community is under is no different than most other communities in this country right now. We're in a very divisive state. But to use rhetoric, especially coming from former elected officials is beyond disappointing. It was disgusting for me to see some of this stuff being incited. So I'm gonna close, whether you're communists and my comrades, which I proudly stand next to you or you're all patriots for donating not only hundreds but thousands of free hours of service to this community. I want to thank you for preceding over this meeting tonight.
I wanna thank those of you that are watching this, that have done it in the past, and those of you that are aspiring to it, please appeal to your higher angels. And if you think you are higher than anyone else that arrived here after you invite them to coffee, get to know them. One of the best anecdotes I have, and I'll be talking about economic development later in this meeting, I had been giving blood at a blood donation in this room and a former staff member of this town came up to me and said, are you Joseph? And I said, yeah. And he said, I'd have
to tell you I pretty much disagree with everything you've ever had to say at town meeting. And I said, great, let's talk about it. So over the course of 30 minutes in a Lorna Dune and recovering from our wounds of donating blood, what I learned was we used to have movie theaters in Nek Center. We used to have grocery stores in Nek Center. We used to be able to shop downtown. None of those things are here. And what I explained to this individual was I wanted the same things for my family. And I've raised two now young adult people in this town. My daughter was two months old when we moved to this town. And she'll always be Mr. Speaker 1: Josephs. I'm sorry, but you have about 15 seconds. Speaker 6: That's fine. My point is, we are here, we all belong here.
We all have an opportunity to be here and make this the community. Either you think it was, but more importantly what you want it to be. And all I ask is that you use that decorum in a public forum like Facebook because sometimes that's the only information people are accessing and it's dangerous. Some of the conclusions people are drawing. Thank you. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Joseph. Is there anyone else in the room who wishes to address the select board during public speak? Is there anyone online? Seeing none. We'll move on to appointments. So this evening we are going to be interviewing one candidate for the commission on disability.
Tomorrow night we will have a full select board meeting, which at which we will be interviewing all of the candidates for about six or seven different boards and committees. This individual could not be here tomorrow night. So we're going to interview Eric Knight for the commission on disability. There are five applicants. The other four five applicants. One is reapplying, four will be done tomorrow night, one tonight. And that's for three terms expiring in 2029 on June 30th, 2029. So at this time I'd like to invite Mr. Knight,
I understand he's joining us remotely to unmute himself. We're going to be doing our interviews a little bit differently. Since we have so many interviews to do. We've created a five questions. Every candidate has received the questions in advance for each board and commission. There are different questions depending on the board and commission, but each of us tonight will take an opportunity to ask one question each. And all of the candidates will, will be given two minutes to answer that question or up to two minutes. And then we'll take three minutes to ask questions.
And I'm looking for those questions. Does anybody have the questions in front of them? Yes, I do. Beautiful. I know what my question is. So I will ask Cody, do you have the questions in front of you? Speaker 6: Yeah, Speaker 1: I do. I'm gonna ask Cody to ask question number one, Bruce. Number two. Linda number three. Ms. Pope, question number four. And I'll ask question number five. And Mr. Knight, if you could we, Speaker 7: I am here. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Knight. So for members of the public who want to know more about the applicants, you can click on their name in the agenda and it has their application and their resume. Since we've all reviewed those ahead of time,
we're not going to be asking questions like, why do you wanna serve or, what's your interest in this committee? Because it's expressed in those documents. So I encourage you, if you're interested in the candidates to read those. The rest of them will be tomorrow night. Let's see. Mr. Mr. Jacobs, could you start us off? Speaker 8: Yep. Sure. So thank you for applying Mr. Knight. Thank you. So, yeah, absolutely. So the, the first question that we have for you is attended any meetings with the commission on disability or met with the chair?
Speaker 7: I have not met with the chair, but I did try to attend one previous meeting and there was no quorum, so the meeting was canceled. Speaker 8: Okay, fair enough. Thank you. Speaker 1: Go ahead please. Speaker 2: What do you know? Thank you again Mr. Knight, for applying. Speaker 7: Thank you. Speaker 2: What do you know about a d? A compliance. And have you taken any training classes from the mass office on disability? Speaker 7: No, I haven't. But I do know that this year is the 36th anniversary of the passing of a DA and that's pretty much it. Except that we do need in Natick having a disability myself.
We need accessible transportation and open communication. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Knight. Ms. Wilger? Speaker 9: Yes. Echoing my colleagues. Thank you for applying Mr. Knight. Thank you. My question is, what do you think are the biggest areas for improvement when it comes to accessibility in Natick? Speaker 7: Transportation is a big one. Myself, having some moderate mobility issues. The closest bus stop to where I live on Silver Hill Lane is literally a 20 minute walk from where I live. Speaker 1: Could you say a little bit more about that? About town wide accessibility and transportation?
Speaker 7: Where I live, there's no fixed bus route. It's only the door to door service. Speaker 2: I'm WR. Yeah. Speaker 1: Thank you Ms. Speaker 10: Poe. Yes. Thank you again Mr. Knight, for being here with us. Thank you. My, my question for you is, have you applied to any other committees and if so, which ones and if appointed, which one would be your first choice? Speaker 7: I've only applied to the COD and that would be my own first and only. Speaker 10: Awesome. Thank you. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Knight. Thank you. In fairness, because we, we are gonna be reading this question to all of the candidates. Massachusetts General Law, chapter 40, section eight J
states that a majority of said commission members shall consist of people with major with disabilities. One member shall be a member of an immediate fam, one member shall be a member of the immediate family of a person with a disability. Remember this was written by lawyers, this is not me. Understood. And one member of said commission shall be either an elected or an appointed official of that city or town. Just yes or no. Do you or an immediate family member have an abil disability? And please do not reveal what that may be. Yes, I do. You you have read that. So then my follow-up question to
that would be, if you were not chosen to be a member of the Commission on Disability, would you agree to be the appointee of the select board as the elected or official appointed Official from from Natick? Speaker 7: Yes. Speaker 1: I think that concludes our questions. Did you have any questions or comments for us? Speaker 7: No, the only question I really have is when would a decision be made at this point? Speaker 1: Tomorrow night. Speaker 7: Oh, okay. Speaker 1: Tomorrow night We'll re we'll interview the other for applicants. Speaker 7: Okay. Speaker 1: And, and then we will vote
and it, I think, I don't know when that comes up on the agenda. There's about five or six different boards and commission committee. Okay. So it'll be made tomorrow night. Speaker 7: Okay. Very good. Thank you so much for letting me interview. Speaker 1: Thank you so much Mr. Knight. Great. Speaker 7: Thank you. Speaker 1: We're actually ahead of schedule, discussion and decision. First agenda item is Eversource Poll replacement project. Mr. Erickson. Speaker 4: Sure. I'll start and I'll ask Bill Brett to maybe fill in any gaps. So it came to our meeting a collective town's attention about a week
and a half ago that there's, I mean we knew that there was a project going on, but we didn't know the full extent of the project. That there was about 115 pole replacement project that is about to embark by Eversource in the coming weeks. Starting I think as early as next week, two weeks. Monday. Monday. So Monday we learned about the extent of the project about a week and a half ago Thursday, well Tuesday technically, when they asked our engineering team to do some dig safe work. And we really wanted to use this opportunity to make sure
that, that the board knew and that the public knew. We have since been in contact. And, and the poll replacement is actually a map attached to the agenda as well as we created an Eversource project page on the town's website as well. And so we wanna make sure that people were aware of that Eversource will be flyering the neighborhood as well with a, a letter explaining more about the project and including details about the project. I believe they're doing that now, if not like, like today, tomorrow. So that the people who are gonna be directly abutting these polls will understand what's gonna be happening. It's gonna take them several weeks to complete this project. It's a big project, it's a reliability project so it's not
so, you know, it's something that that's positive in the end. It's just a very big project and we all, we all know and love poll re replacement projects for what they leave us with, which tend to be at least for a period of time, the infamous double polls. So we just wanted people to be aware of the project, be knowledgeable as to where to get additional information. The, my understanding is there's no new polls going in. These are all existing polls that are being replaced. So they're using existing easements, which is why there was no request for the select board to grant new easements.
All these polls have existing easements for their current location and per the easement language, as long as they're just replacing them within three feet, they can do that. But it doesn't mean that there shouldn't be community engagement and outreach, which is part of what we're trying to do with them. And, and on behalf of the town as well. Keeping the town's best interest in mind because this is a, a substantive project that you'll see happening in and around Natick Center over the coming weeks, starting Monday. Trying to get a little bit more information for you. So it starts Monday, the residents will start seeing impact
during the next few weeks. But there'll be communications going to the home from Eversource. We did set up, like I said, a webpage. I won't read the link, but we can post the link with the agenda. It was only recently completed because we got information from Eversource just earlier this week. And on that Eversource notice you'll also have a point of contact at Eversource to con to connect with should there be any questions about the project at your, at your location. One thing that we're most concerned with is obviously just the extent of the project and just any public safety concerns
that come from having double polls. 'cause there can be, especially when they get prolonged through different seasons like winter season, you know, you can have issues with, with clearing sidewalks, with, with accessibility, with other things that are related to just the safety of, of accessing and and movement throughout these neighborhoods. And these are some of more tightly, more tightly straight. Yeah. Tight streets, tighter streets. So really here, just to make sure that the board is aware of that. There's no ask for the board tonight, but it wasn't under discussion as soon. 'cause we weren't sure if there was going to be an ask when we posted the meeting.
Speaker 9: Ms. Slager then Mr. Evans, I just would like to add on a little bit to what Mr. Erickson said. If you do go to the town website and search for Eversource, you'll see the project page and it has some additional information such as the streets that are affected and what you can expect, including tree trimming they say is an important part of the project. So that will, that will be happening. And the work hours for the crew are from 7:00 AM to 5:00 PM So be prepared to have people show up early.
But, and as Mr. Erickson mentioned, there is an email address that you can contact or a phone number if you have any concerns in your, in that neighborhood. Speaker 1: Yes. Thank Speaker 2: You Madam Chair. Just to pile onto this, this on the website and I just, I'm reading this right now. It is, it's designed to strengthen the infrastructure to install new higher capacity lines so that, that's really designed to help strengthen the grid in, in that area.
I do have a question, however, which is, and Mr. Erickson, you brought this up earlier, which is the safety aspects. One of the downsides of double poles is visibility. And given where this is in town, I would like to emphasize to Eversource that we need to work together to make sure that drivers have good visibility to either pedestrians or kids on bikes or whatever. Speaker 4: I yeah, I appreciate that concern. We will, we will bring that message back
to Eversource. Okay, Speaker 2: Thanks Speaker 1: Mr. Jacobs, I can't see you without getting a crick in my neck. So if you could tell me whether you, did you have any questions or comments? No, Speaker 2: I do not. Thank you. Speaker 1: Just a, a general Oh yes, I'm sorry Ms. Pope. Speaker 10: Sorry. Thank you Mr. Erickson. I have a couple of questions. Although Eversource is not required to give us the to do engagement, is that something that we can in, you know, in imply or in, you know, ask of them to do? Speaker 4: Yes. That's what led to this engagement that they're doing now. So they're gonna be, so
Speaker 10: They weren't even gonna do the flyering Speaker 4: Or I can't guarantee that because we weren't necessarily talking to the project manager. We were talking to our community liaison, but we implored on them that they need to do more community engagement than what they're expecting than what maybe they were anticipating, at least from what our perspective was. I, I suspect they were going to do some level of community engagement. My hope is that they were planning on doing that. We were just trying to make sure that they did that they did that, that, that we just made sure of it basically. Speaker 10: And even going forward that they understand that,
you know, you, they don't have to, but we would, we are asking that they do more than what they might. Yeah, I guess the bare minimum. Is that something that we can Speaker 4: 100%. Yeah, I, I know I made that message loud and clear when we talked with them. I wanna see how this project goes and see how the community engagement continues with this project to learn from this and also use that as a catalyst for continued engagement from their perspective with the community as well. Speaker 10: I understand that. Yeah. And my next question is, do they have a, a finish, an end date? I know you said a few weeks. Do they have a, an estimated date?
Speaker 4: Do you recall when Yeah, come up? Yeah, I have it in one of my emails, but I know Bill, bill knows a bit more. Speaker 10: Okay. Speaker 11: They plan on doing about 10 poles a day and that's once tree trimming gets done. There's 114 poles in this project. But depending on weather and those type of things, it could be as late as October for a finish. So it'll be a summertime project. Speaker 10: Thank you Speaker 1: Ms. Sla, just to Speaker 9: Follow up on that bill, that's when they're done, right? That's not when the polls are removed, correct?
Speaker 4: That's Speaker 1: Correct. That was gonna be my point. Yes. Yeah. So just so the public knows, this project isn't just dependent on Eversource, it depends on, and I'll turn this over to you, Verizon, Comcast. Yes, Speaker 11: Go ahead. So Eversource is managing the poll setting. Ideally they're going in the same hole. Not, not always. Once they get done, they will chunk the other poll, which means they'll, they'll join the two polls together. The other poll will have Verizon, Comcast, and any other type of communication line. And each individual contractor
and sometimes there's up to five per poll have to come and move their lines over. Speaker 1: And sometimes the coordination and scheduling of that can take a year, a year and a half. Speaker 11: In our experience with North Main Street, yes that was a major problem, but we have been very heavy handed with Eversource about get this done and get it done well and right. Speaker 1: And also for the public's information, there is no recourse. Townsend municipalities do not have the ability to, at this point find them for not moving them quickly. We don't have the ability, we have, we have almost no ability under state law to expedite this process.
So having set all of that and set expectations, I'm very happy that the town is engaged with Eversource, that we've set up an engagement page and that we're going to be enthusiastically encouraging our utility companies to move expeditiously in eliminating polls. Did you have anything else you wanna add Mr. Sprat? Speaker 11: Only that they were supposed to start this last Wednesday and we postponed that. We've had about four meetings with them. They've been very good on the communication side since we got their attention. Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Mr. Sprott and Mr. Erickson. Now we'll move to the public hearing.
Madam Clerk, this is JXCS Natick Corp, DBA SDU application for new Section 12, all alcohol premises license. Yes. Speaker 10: The select board will hold a public hearing on Wednesday, July 8th, 2026 at 6:00 PM upon the application of JXCS Natick court, DBA Saru for a new S 12 all alcohol on-premise restaurant license. The restaurant will be located at 45 East Central Street, unit one, Natick, Massachusetts 0 1 7 6 0. The premise consists of a single floor mixed use building
with 3,100 square feet of interior space. That seeds 68 people and an outdoor patio that seeds 31 people. The hearing will be held in the Edward de Lott room meeting room 13 East Central Street as well as remotely anyone wishing to hear in this matter. Wishing to be heard in this matter, can participate in person or through zoom. Login instructions will be published on the July 8th, 2026 select board meeting agenda. And I move to open the public hearing or is this, is this public hearing already open? No, Speaker 1: You're opening. No,
Speaker 10: I'm opening now. Okay, Speaker 1: So Speaker 2: Or second? Yes. Speaker 1: Move by Ms. Pope. Seconded by Mr. Bruce. It's really early to do that. Roll call vote. Mr. Jacobs. Yes. Mr. Evans? Yes. Ms. Wolf Schlager? Yes. Ms. Pope? Yes. And I'm a yes. So the public hearing is open. Could the applicants come to the podium? If you could introduce yourselves, just say a little bit about what you're planning to do. Speaker 12: Good evening, everybody. Really excited to be here tonight. Sue's gonna do a Japanese restaurant. Speaker 1: Could you, there you go. A little closer. Sorry. Thank you. Speaker 2: Yeah, my name's Jacks. You know we're a small business restaurant group.
You own dine-in restaurants and takeout restaurants. And we're planning to open Suru here in the corner of 45 central out street. And it's gonna be a Japanese din restaurant. We're planning a casual fine dining and it was a little bit of like a contradiction, but it's gonna be a fun place. We're planning a, you know, like outdoor seatings, indoor seatings, 68 seats inside, 31 seats outside. And we're trying to create a nice environment for people to come and enjoy. Hi. And this, this is my, this is gonna be our general manager. Her Speaker 13: Name's, my name is Ariana. I'm gonna be the one who are operating the restaurant.
Hopefully the restaurant would able to serve the community and then bring them higher quality of the service and Japanese food. And then try to teach customer about the culture of Japanese as well. Speaker 1: Thank you so much. Thank you. I'm gonna open this up to questions for members of the public. Is there anyone in the room that has a question for these business owners? Is there anyone online? Seeing none. I'll open it to the board for questions or comments. I'll go first. Thank you and welcome to Natick. Thank you for choosing Natick as your home. Thank you.
And we look forward to having another dining opportunity in the downtown area. Speaker 2: Thank you. I'll invoke the ditto rule on that. Dito. Dito. We're looking forward to the opening. I just, the only question that I have is, what's your planned opening date? Yes. Speaker 8: Yeah, that was my question. Speaker 2: Oh, so we're planning, you know, we are planning probably about September, October, depending on, you know, construction. We fallen a little bit behind, but I'm sure we'll be able to catch up. Okay. Awesome. Thank you. Speaker 1: Thank you. Thank you Mr. Jacobs. Did you have another question? Speaker 8: Did everything I already said my question was already asked by Bruce, so Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Jacobs. I moved to close a public hearing.
Speaker 9: Sir, we have Speaker 8: To wait. We, we move. Vote, vote, vote to. Can we give them the the license person? Oh yes. Speaker 2: All small details. Speaker 9: I'll make the motion. Okay. All right. I move to approve the application for a new S 12 all alcohol on premise license. Second to Speaker 2: Oh Speaker 9: JXCS Natick Corp. Doing business as seru. Second, one more thing contingent upon, and this is if we read this contingent upon the manager being fingerprinted here at Natick Police
Station Police Department by the police department. Speaker 1: Thank you Ms. Schlau. So moved by Ms. Slager, seconded by Mr. Evans. All in favor? Roll call vote. Mr. Evans? Yes. Ms. Slager? Yes. Mr. Jacobs? Yes. Ms. Pope? Yes. And I'm a yes. 5 0, 0. Congratulations. We'll vote on the other licenses and permits on the consent agenda later. Okay. Speaker 2: Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Speaker 1: Thank you. Such Speaker 2: A mind be Speaker 1: I was looking right at you. Next up is the Johnson interim use matrix. And now do we close the public hearing? Oh yes. We have to close the public hearing now we do.
Motion to close a public hearing. Speaker 9: We second Speaker 1: Move by Ms. Pope to close the public hearing. Second by Ms. Slager. Mr. Evans? Yes. Ms. Ger? Yes. Mr. Jacobs? Speaker 8: Yes. Speaker 1: Ms. Pope? Yes. And I'm a yes. The public hearing is closed and I'll just remark that we're a parliamentary mess tonight. Speaker 2: We're getting there. Come on. Speaker 1: Next up is the Johnson Interim use matrix and I'll turn it over to our communications director or director of communications. Mr. Port Paddock. Speaker 14: Hello, Jay Port Paddock. I believe the slides are gonna come up. I'm the town communications director and serving as the project manager on this Johnson
Future use project. I've got about four slides with actual content. Should be about 10 minutes and I'll hand it back to the board. But ultimately this interim use approach, which I'll get to in the next slide, was introduced in May of this year, May 13th. And we basically are deciding to, or the board is deciding to pursue some interim uses, imagine short term, as opposed to a long term use. So this attempt is gonna be to bring multiple opportunities to the board and the general public in kind of a matrix style. So we go to the next slide.
We'll go one more. I just covered the agenda. So the five 13 meeting, the outcome was pursuing interim use approaches, multiple versions, the definition's up there in a verbatim style, but think of it as clustered related options. So interim uses that ultimately is a cluster. And we, we reviewed to mothers on May 13th. The interim use itself again is short term that the building is activated in the entire property and the community benefits and that short term use. So we thought it was kind of a win-win and ultimately the board endorsed that on May 13th,
the rationale's up there. There's clear and immediate opportunities and it also adds to the fiscal responsibility that the board's committed to. Next slide. This is a timeline and hopefully folks in the room can get a decent read, but I'll, I'll kind of give you through it today. July 8th is the top left. And I'm gonna go left to right. This duration of time is July, 2026, taking us through June of 2027. So after we go through today's matrix and the board ask questions as well to whatever the board decides tonight, we would pursue
feedback, we would No worries. I'll keep going until I don't hear the echo please. And we'll pursue feedback through two primary means. So the red is gonna be opportunities for the residents. So the first one that you see there listed in the far left is an opportunity. And I'm gonna go through the Google form and it's linked in this document for anyone online or in the room. And the residents can give their ideas, their potential interim uses that aren't expounded upon within this deck that they're gonna be introduced to. After that, we'll work with the individual organizations that in fact might host those interim uses.
There we were gonna list off six that we kind of preliminary brainstorming internally. And those would be collected via form that would result in a matrix. But before we actually get to the report in that final matrix in December of 2026, we would hold interactive workshop in October on the May 13th meeting, vice chair Slager made a good point about ensuring community engagement throughout. So this workshop very akin to those that participated in the one last year. At Kennedy Middle School, we'll allow the public to give input before we produce a report
so we can iterate upon those inputs those organizations give us. Then we'll come back to the board with a report December of 2026, at which point ultimately the board will, you know, kind of endorse one or two interim concepts. And those sort of ideas allow us to then work with those one or two organizations and do allow them some time for some due diligence studies, which would be open up January of 2027 through March of 2027. Think of those around feasibility. Could be accessibility, any of the infrastructure, cooling,
heating, and, and we'd give access to the building and work with our facilities department in order to conduct those studies. So they could have an informed RFI request for information that would be due at the end of April. So that that point we'd come back to the board with that RFI and all the details associated and hopefully could educate the board or inform the board for a vote June of 2027, which does hit our original milestone when we kicked off this project. So there's still hope as far as hitting the timing. Next slide. Maybe if you pulled out of presentation mode and just gimme a zoom on the blue boxes.
If you just pinch zoom just to show the blue. But this is a matrix. There's a link to a more detailed version. This would eventually become a presentation for all sorts of viewing pleasures. But each of the organizations, and if you scroll up a centimeter, you can see, just scroll up to see all six organizations so you can get a sense, I'm gonna go left to right on the blue boxes. Each of the organizations in column one would give us a short description. They would give us a sense of full or partial use of the building. And then the fiscal approach. They plan to go a series of timing sort of ideas on
what their initial proposed timing was, as well as what needs they're gonna actually have for us or the board to ultimately allow this interim use. Whether that's the building, the grounds or parking, the six organizations, NPS our schools, obviously this was a former Johnson Elementary School in recent years, there's been discussion around preschool afterschool. And then option five, this notion of having swing space as the schools have a lot of competing interests across elementary, preschool, middle high school.
So the town administrators gonna work closely with the superintendent. Obviously that's a pretty familiar face. Additionally, our rec and parks department and the Kohl Center, that's been a known matter that the coal center, it probably has more, less number of years than more number of years left in its useful life. So we could think about things like administrative offices that don't have quite the same A DA accessibility needs as a full kind of community center, recreation center, as well as Natick Pegasus on our cable access tv. And Mr. Randy Brewer, who's currently in the Clarks building could potentially
pursue an interim use as he has those needs. And then the last one is number six, the YMCA afterschool, which does currently operate in a number of areas. So they could fulfill that same kind of afterschool need and kind of augment that for the community, which is certainly a need. Mr. Brewer as well as Ms. Sherlock, who's the COO at the YMCA, they've been, I've already been in contact with both of them. They've seen the matrix, they've seen all the inputs, and they kind of have a good temperature check that this feels like a process. That said, as you think back to that timeline, I do a series of discovery meetings to make sure there's complete clarity
as they completed those inputs. Again, September 1st through September 30th. And then last slide, this is, we're not gonna click on these two links, but ultimately these are two forms and I've just linked to A PDF of each of them. And we're ready to release form two, depending tonight's meeting with the select board and allow the general resident input in form two as well as ultimately then go back to the orgs on September 1st. And last slide is ultimately just to ask to the select board around any questions or concerns. And I hand it back to the chair.
Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Poro Paddock. I'll turn it over to the board first. Are there questions or comments about the process, the matrix? Could you go back a slide for me? Thank you. One question I have is where can residents find, if you could repeat that, where residents can find these forms? Form two, when it's released, Speaker 14: Once released, the kind of the website itself, the homepage social media, we do for this particular project have about 350 subscribers to a listserv. So that's a very relevant in interested engaged party.
But we have other sort of means of going to newsletters across our various town departments as well as those that might be familiar with getting General Natick news, which is our largest list on the town's website. So a lot of digital communications, the timelines are not gonna allow for all sorts of mailers or kind of offline opportunities. But the, and then the good graces of those that are engaged that want their neighbors to give input, certainly that I think is what we rely on in any community. Speaker 1: Thank you for that. Mr. Jacobs. Speaker 8: Thank you. Thank you very much for This presentation.
Very, very helpful. I have have several questions actually. The first one is I, I'm curious, I, I, in the, in the matrix it talks about the, I think it was in the matrix, it talks about the, the length of the use. And I, I think, sorry if, if this wasn't in the matrix, it might have been a different slide, but where it talks about the length of the use and it says like, oh yeah, it is, and it's in the upper left there, that it's a minimum of three years. And I was curious if there is a maximum in there or if there's a thought to giving a maximum. You know, I think there's sort of a, there was a concern,
at least I had regarding the interim approach about it kind of becoming, becoming ossified and essentially just becoming an, a permanent approach. You know, not that there may not be anything wrong with that, but I'm, I'm just curious if there's a, a maximum in mind as well. Speaker 14: Not currently. We didn't discuss it at length, but certainly open to it if the board feels strongly. Speaker 4: Yeah, I think the intent of the minimum was more to ensure that there was some level of understanding that some of the uses might need to invest in the property. It might even be be a DA, it might just be even be their own things that they do invest in the property
to make it usable for their purposes. And so putting in a minimum allows folks to actually pencil out what three years worth of their use. Plus might inc. Might be, would it actually work? If the board wants us to put a maximum, we can put a maximum, but at the same time, you can also just leave it open-ended because the intent was more just to encourage people to understand that you'll have three years to do what you need to do and then some, because the th you know, like A-Y-M-C-A might need to put in some, some pieces of equipment that might be related to their use, or same with Pegasus.
And we wanna make sure that they feel that they're not just going to invest and then six months later they have to get out. Speaker 8: And it's, yeah, that makes sense. And I mean, I, I guess maybe it's not necessary to have a maximum per se, as long as it's, it's understood that after the, after the minimum or some, like, it would be some obviously like contracted for sort of period of time that then, you know, it could be, could be reassessed at some point. But I mean, I guess as long as that's understood within the context of the proposals, I don't think, I don't think it needs to have a formal maximum per se. The other question I had was just if this contemplates the idea, and maybe it does like of some
of these potentially being combined of the, the possibility of a combined use, you know, for example, like if, you know, there could be, I'm just giving this as an example, but like there could be NPS after school there, but there would also still be room for, for offices if that would be a possible, a possible outcome of this, if that would be a matrix item, if they would be separate, and then we'd talk about what could be combined and how that would work. Speaker 14: Yeah, the way I respond to that is, I mean, the full or partial use, I mean, we want the organizations, it has to be a win-win to, you know, ultimately make it work for the organization. But certainly if we get a number of partial uses,
that's them telling us their needs and we can start to mix and match, I would hesitate to want to do that upfront and start to combine entities. Yeah, that feels a bit complex, but absolutely the, the notion that we're gonna have a partial use and not pursue a second or third partial use to have a full activation, absolutely. The intent is how much can we activate that building? So if the organization's aligned to multiple uses, absolutely that would be an option. Speaker 8: Yep. Great. Great. And then my, my last question is just the needs part on the matrix. I was curious exactly what that means
and specifically the thing I'm, I'm interested in making sure as a part of, of these proposals would be what kind of limitations there would be on, on the public's access to the, to the property with, with some of these, you know, for example, if, if the YMCA was using it, you know, would that, would that limit the public's access to the grounds, to the parking lot to the playground? Is that what, what the needs part would, would address or would that, would that be a different, a different part of the, the maix? Speaker 14: No, you, you hit it on the head. The needs would be the needs of the organization.
So we would expect and hope, and if you click on the detailed matrix, there's some subtext that gives an example of each of these items. So that's the hyperlink that's in the middle of the page that says matrix with sample inputs. But yes, to answer Mr. Jacob's question, the idea would be if any organization had any exclusivity or particular nuances where they didn't have a need that didn't allow it to go or didn't, didn't allow the public to access as an example, we would expect. And ultimately those discovery meetings will make sure
that's clarified for those organizations. Speaker 4: Yeah. To, to, okay. That would then become a decision criteria of the board to say, Ooh, maybe that use is not the best use to have here, or No, we can probably, we can try to make that accommodation because of X, Y, Z. Speaker 8: Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly why I wanted it to be on a part of this because yeah, that would definitely be information I'm sure we'd want to have in front of us. Exactly. Okay. I don't have any other questions. I, I have a few like big bigger picture comments, but maybe I'll wait till fellow board members can, can ask questions. Speaker 10: Other board members, Ms. Pope, I just had one it,
Mr. Jacobs asked my question about the limitations to the property grounds. I wondered if the organizations would also receive limitations to how the building could be used Speaker 4: Yeah. In their Anything's available for sure. This is really just to try to get understanding from organizations if they have interest in, in operating something at this building. And if so, what is it? And then what would that mean to the building the grounds, the parking area so that the board and town administration and staff and, and everybody can make an informed decision about whether or not that actually makes sense. Okay. So if, for example, used need to go in there
and need to build up partition walls down the hallway, we want them to tell us that so that we can then say, Hmm, okay, maybe that use isn't the best or No, we're okay with that. Go ahead. Thank you. What, whatever that, that thing is that might be needed for that use. Speaker 14: Just, just to quickly add to that, it's, it is a great question. So I didn't read the preferred uses, that's the box in the top left. But ultimately we town staff talked about the idea that we would ultimately want a total, total building use, whether that was full or a part combined, partial as well
as, sorry, I gotta, I just need to start printing a little larger, but the minimum of three years that was previously referenced, as well as limiting the impact on the neighborhood. That was a, we tried to take all of these inputs, we didn't look at the appendix slide, but for those that aren't as familiar with the project, that's been going on for about a year and a half, we have a very quick timeline to catch folks up, but one of the inputs that seems very applicable that the general public has asked for in residence is to mitigate an interest of a neighborhood centric school with a lot of abutters who have direct access as opposed to some of our other schools in town.
But if the board members felt strongly, a fourth or a fifth could be entertained on preferred uses and those would be sort of guardrails or mandatories that the organizations would have to adhere to Speaker 1: Any other Ms Weger then Mr. Evans, Speaker 9: Thank you very much Mr. Po Paddock. I, I wholeheartedly en endorse this approach. I think it makes a lot of sense and I love the idea about having another interactive workshop, but one of the things that I'm just trying to understand is where the financial ramifications of each one of these imp potential scenarios,
how that will fit in and how that will get identified, particularly before the workshop, because it, it seems like some of the studies, the due diligence studies, I mean, maybe that's the time when some of the actual asks for the building and the grounds will be flushed out. But I would hope that we could at least get some scope before the October meeting so that people have some sense, like we've done before about maybe it's another AI project for you about what the potential
differences between the scenarios might be in terms of not only what it would cost, but what it would, what it might cost the organization and what it might cost the town. So I don't know if we've had conversations about how much of this burden on the property we are expecting to the various organizations to pick up. Speaker 14: So the column financial approach that's in the middle. And there's examples in there. I mean, we, we try to, again, we're gonna use a discovery meeting. I don't think it's staff driven ai, truthfully, these are the organizations saying what is it the financial approach that would, you know, most benefit your organization and they're proposing it,
but there'd be a dialogue with town staff. So at the workshop we would have, they could potentially just as examples provide a series of upgrades at a minimum dollar threshold that the town reaps the benefits of those upgrades. And that could be under the guise of a $1 lease or something along those lines. They could have a more sort of standard lease agreement on what's the market value of a building of 26,000 square feet. It could be a reduced market value where they provide a certain benefit at a reduced cost. So I think leaving the gates open at that point for the org inputs that would happen in the month
of September, we will not have the studies. We could certainly have another, you could insert, if you go back to the timeline slide post studies, we could have another, you know, meeting or a workshop of some sort to go back to the general public. But I believe you at that point, when you have all the inputs in September, you'll, you'll not only reap the benefits of what they want to do, but staff is having constant communications without, you know, kind of burdening the board during that period. As to what staff, the facilities department, the town administrator, other folks that have a general purview of the town.
Speaker 1: Okay. All right. That, that makes sense. Thank you Speaker 2: Ms. Paul Schlager asked the question that I wanted to ask about the financial implications and the getting the organizational inputs should satisfy that. Speaker 1: That was one of my questions. The, the other question was, are there any other nonprofit organizations that you've considered reaching out that are in the area that might want an offsite, an off site place for up to three years? So like advocates or Wayside Youth
or some of the other large ones, United Way Speaker 14: Discussed it? I think the, the two week survey to residents is also for residents to add to that list. But certainly tonight we try to keep it relatively, you know, constrained. We don't, so it's just as much as we want to kind of widen that gap or widen the hose and have so many different alternatives. But that's certainly an option. I don't, I would say that the easiest way to answer it, we did not identify another compelling number seven that we thought to bring forward to the board tonight, but each one requires a little bit of due diligence.
I mean, I, I had multiple conversations with Pegasus, with the YMCA. We have the benefit of knowing the school's needs very well, but is once we go down that path, it's just a matter of time and resources. We certainly could pursue any preferred or potential ones that the board was interested in. Speaker 4: The Pegasus YMC are also ones that we have existing relationships with. Like, we're actively working with the Y-M-M-C-A running a program at one of our other facilities in town up on 90 Oak Pegasus is a very clear partner of ours Yes. For which we pass money through from cable subscribers to them.
So we didn't wanna start then beyond that to pick and choose winners and losers at this point. We wanted to say, okay, let's get some feedback first to see what would might, what might make sense. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: I thought of one little thing and, and Jay this is right in your wheelhouse, which is how are we getting out information? One of the things we sometimes get dinged on is, I didn't know about this survey. How come and how can, how can we get that information out? I know we can do Civic Plus, but is there a way to, to, I know you're a Johnson parent
and you can sort of informally get that out. So how can we get the word out the survey exists and get as much participation as we can in that two week period? Speaker 14: Yeah, and I believe you're referring to the, the resident Yes. It kind of inputs. So I mean, similar answer, I think a similar question was asked, but it will be a lot of the digital communications through website notifications. Okay. Facebook and sorts. But I mean, some of this, this is where we have other survey tools that can get us a thousand, you know, responses in 48 hours and this, it's a more involved survey.
We're asking residents to do a little bit of thinking. Same way that we were talking about, what about other nonprofits? Yeah. You know, we might source that, but I, I would say that we've been in, we've been, you know, of going through this project for a year and a half. Yeah. We do have the benefit of putting a direct mail piece in every mailbox in Natick, albeit a subset of people will read it and click and get fully engaged. So the 350 folks or so that we have as subscribers, those are your influencers. Those are the folks that are most engaged. But I, I think we're talking about releasing this survey in the next week, if not days.
Yeah. And I don't think we're gonna be doing any avant-garde new stuff. Speaker 2: No, I didn't. Well, I wouldn't expect it. So Speaker 1: Just, and then the last question I had was two weeks for residents. Why two and not three or a month or Speaker 14: Just to make the total timeline work. Okay. I mean, it's, I mean, I, I will tell you, and we can have all sorts of discussions about response rates and longer isn't always better. Speaker 1: So I, I completely agree, but I think it needed to be said. Yeah, Speaker 14: No, no. Two weeks is somewhat arbitrary, full disclosure. And we're trying to do a work back schedule, trying to keep us on track for June target
and feel like it's still achievable and workable. And at the same time, allowing residents to say, what nonprofits could we do? I'll talk to my neighbors. And hopefully that two week span allows for, I'm not expecting hundreds, I'm expecting tens of individuals to come through. And I think we applaud those tens of folks that spend the time. Speaker 1: Thank you for that. At this time, did you say there was an ask, do you wanna vote to adopt this matrix? Speaker 14: Questions and concerns was the ask. So we've had it now. I, I mean, if the board chooses to endorse, they certainly can, but this, these
slides here are the plan on moving forward with after this meeting, unless I hear otherwise, Speaker 2: I, Speaker 1: Yes, Speaker 2: Mr. Romans, I, I would want to endorse this because that puts us on a much more positive path to, to head in this direction on interim use, in my opinion. Speaker 1: And I think it also demonstrates, demonstrates to the community that the board is involved in these decisions and that these decisions are not staff wide. I'll open it to comments. Mr. Jacobs, go ahead. Speaker 8: Oh, sorry. You wanted to, if, if you wanna take the public first, that's fine. I just had a bigger picture. Go ahead. Okay. Yeah, I, well, I, first of all, I agree with Mr. Evans.
I would be happy to, to have a vote on supporting this, this movement. I think there's a lot of good reasons like you, you guys both said to, to go ahead and vote to support this approach. And I, I like the approach. I think it's, you know, my questions were more aimed at like, what do we want to find out? Not so much do we want to limit what, you know, what people can ask. I would add the one thing I would add on nonprofits, I think for me it would be, you know, looking at other, you know, afterschool providers and, and also, you know, during the day providers since
summer that might be interested, you know, as well in terms of childcare. 'cause I think that's probably one of the number one needs in, in our community. So just, you know, starting with YMCA obviously, but there, there's probably others that, that could be interested. I don't know. Hopefully we'll get some good ideas from the, from the survey. But the thing I was gonna say is just, I, I wanted to raise more of a big picture thing about, about Johnson. You know, in our last meeting when we, when we decided on going forward with the interim option, which I think was the right decision, we did, we did sort
of receive at the same time as the meeting, a thoughtful letter from that was signed by over 200 Natick residents that had their addresses. So we know they're real. That was asking us about this concept of creating a, a study group around the Johnson project. And, you know, we didn't really get to, to fully discuss it because we kind of got it right contemporaneously with the meeting. And, you know, maybe this isn't something for tonight because I think, you know, but I, I was sort of thinking that perhaps in in parallel with the process of looking at the interim use, we could also still be having a conversation
or thoughts about what the long-term use is. And those might end up being the same thing, right? We might could come up with an interim use that turned out to be a long-term use. But, you know, I thought that the letter made some thoughtful points about how such a group could be utilized, you know, more, not so much as an advisory group that's making a, you know, binary recommendation like the the DAM committee or the main Street committee, but maybe more of a study group that's kind of utilizing the expertise of people in our community who are invested obviously in, in, you know, what's going on with, with this building.
And I, I did note that, you know, the, not only was it signed by a lot of people, but it wasn't just people who, you know, are quote unquote Johnson people or no offense Jay or any, anything like that. You know, it was, it was, it was widespread. So, you know, I, I think if there's people who want to help, who wanna help us kind of move forward in between meetings and kind of move what will be a multi, multi-year process of figuring out the future of use of that space, you know, and, and lend their expertise to that, I think it's something that we should, we should seriously look at as a, as a parallel. I'm not saying that as we shouldn't go forward with this.
'cause I think this is, this is great what we're doing, but in terms of looking to the future, I just wanted to raise that because we didn't really, really get to discuss it at our, at our previous meeting. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Jacobs. Questions or comments from the public? Mr. Joseph, if you could come to the podium. Speaker 6: Thank you. Paul Joseph, chair of the Economic Development Committee and resident at Carlson Circle. A couple questions. If there's still time for private entities to put in proposals as well. Well, I assume that it includes the nonprofits. Is there a process for them to get access to the building because for them to make financial decisions
or speculate on its possible uses, I would assume a tour of some sort would be required as those being scheduled set up one-on-one. How will that process work? Speaker 1: Erickson? Speaker 4: I mean, I, I suppose if there's a plethora of interest, we could try to do like an, an open tour where we can invite people in. But if it's really just like one organization, I'd want to probably talk to them first and then see what their ideas are before we, we start involving too much more staff. And then we, we have have opened it up before for, for people to look at. So we can certainly do that again on, on a very sort of limited scale.
We can't be spending a lot of, a lot of resource on this too much. But yeah, we can, we can try to do that. It really depends on what, I first want to have somebody fill out this, give us their idea first and then maybe have a dialogue with them before we start opening up too much to, to tours per se. Speaker 6: Yeah, no, I, I agree. I think an open house concept is smarter and more Speaker 4: Right, Speaker 6: Manageable. To that end to complicate things, the thought of nonprofits in the region, I do suggest rather than hyper targeting every individual one, there are a lot
of small non nonprofits that either do not have place based or have programs that are strained or constrained based on their resources. I would strongly urge the board or town to consider reaching out to the community foundation for Metro West, the Metro West nonprofit network, and the Metro West Health Foundation, because those are the major sort of conveners of smaller nonprofits. And in the same way, you might have swing space for the Natick public schools. There could be programming swing space where, for example, the Brax Center at the Natick Service Council might need exceptional space for the auditorium once in a while, things like that. So it might be sort of a shared nonprofit
that could be managed through a convening nonprofit organization like that. So thank you. Speaker 1: Thank you. Mr. Joseph. Are there any other questions or comments? Ms. Ms. Young, you can come to the podium. Thank you. Diane Young Morgan Drive. I love this idea for Johnson. My only concern is I hope that when they look at who wants to go in there temporarily or permanently, that it doesn't conflict at all with the ASAP program at the schools. That it doesn't take away from that in any way. Thank you.
Thank you Ms. Vickers. Speaker 4: I'm getting there. Sorry. Speaker 1: That's okay. Speaker 15: Hi, am I unmuted now? Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 15: Thank you very much. Finley Vickers. I just wanna, it's a quick, hopefully this is a quick question. As I'm understanding it right now, the only input from the public is going to be this two week survey Speaker 1: At this time? That's correct. Speaker 15: So what is the interactive workshop? Is that gonna have public input in October or is that not Yes, that will happen later. Speaker 1: Yes, that will happen later. After, after we do the, the after Mr. Par Poor paddock. Don't you come on up and un untangle my tongue.
Speaker 14: Yep, no worries. So if folks can picture that red in the back of their head from an earlier slide, there's a two week survey that would be open starting this July. And then when the input's going from the organization's in September, the general public is the primary participant at the workshop. The board is actually the recipient or the moderator, if you will. So those are the two primary means of community engagement. Speaker 15: Okay, thank you. So then my follow up that to that would be, would, I know that select board and town are separate from school,
but since there is so much school on this and since I do believe there's an interest in the community for The schools having an opportunity for that, I do hope that you could maybe part of this two week timeframe when we're looking for public input, you could find a way to engage the schools as well so that they send out a news blast themselves to, to reach school people, et cetera, so that we're not just relying on social. I know this is a really hard time
for the community right now. I personally, half the people I know are outta town gone for the summer or are on a vacation or what have you because schools are out. So I do hope that we find a way to outreach for that as well. Speaker 1: Mr. Po Paddock. Speaker 14: Yep. That's a great call by Ms. Vickers. I'm not gonna commit to schools. I will say good news, it, the schools do not send engaged newsletter, their primary newsletter over the summers. But the good news is a standalone email is actually easier to execute internally.
So I can certainly put the request in and I suspect the schools will gladly accept and put an email out to a rather large list outside of the Mors library. It's our second largest email list we have in town. Speaker 1: Thank you Ms. Bigs. I really Speaker 16: Thank you. I really appreciate that effort. Speaker 1: Dr. McKenzie. Dr. McKenzie unmuted. Speaker 4: I, I'm, I'm asking her too. I can't do it for her. I can only ask, Speaker 16: Can you hear me? Yes. Yep. Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 16: Okay. Thank you. Donna McKenzie seven bull wrap. I have two questions. My first question is, have you determined how much money it will take
to make this building a DA compliant or is it your plan to just lease it as it is and, and a non-compliant building? Speaker 4: So a DA compliant depends on the use. It's compliant for a DA purposes today for certain uses. It depends on the use will determine how much there is a need for a DA compliance. So we really do need to rely on the respondents to let us know what they feel they need in the building to determine what the accessibility requirements might be. We would likely then put it on the user to figure out how
to fund that rather than have the town put much capital into this building at this point until we know a permanent use agreed. But at this time it, it really depends on, on the use. So we could put some uses in there today and there would be no need to change from an a aada a compliant perspective, any of the building other uses would require some likely upgrades. Speaker 16: Second question. If you went with one of the uses with the schools for a preschool, it seems like that would likely require a DA compliance.
And if you put the cost of it on the entity that's leasing it, isn't that the same money coming from the town? The schools would need to take money from the town to make it a DA compliant. Speaker 4: So I guess the first question, there are portions of the building that could be accessible for preschool that would not require a DA compliant upgrades. It all depends on the extent to which the building might be used for a really any use. But in the, in your example, a school use and there, there could be a myriad of ways of, of, of fundraising or funding building upgrades.
And if it's a Natick public school use, certainly a component of that could be, you know, town dollars potentially needing appropriation by town meeting. But there could be other ways to fund that as well. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Speaker 16: Ericson. Okay. Just wondering because you could have handicapped students, you could have handicapped teachers, but thank you very much for your answer. Speaker 1: Thank you, Dr. McKenzie. Mr. Lunta, please unmute yourself. Speaker 17: Hi, thank you. Brian Lunta, 20 Locust Street.
I just, I said this at the, the school committee meeting. We, they just voted what to do with the preschools a couple weeks ago, and Johnson is not involved in that conversation. However, I believe it was kind of a missed opportunity to have that as a thing as a part of the conversation. They voted to have the preschools part extent to Memorial believe the high school and to East School. Adding classrooms to East School would potentially, I don't know, may, maybe Mr. Erickson might know better,
but the SAP or sorry, the YMCA programs over there, I don't know if that would create a use for this. But Speaker 1: Mr. Senna, I'm sorry to interrupt you. We, we have most of the room here for the next agenda item that we're gonna spend at least an hour on. So I'm going to ask the next three people who want to speak, including you, to limit your comments to either questions or something specifically regarding our next steps. The agenda item is Johnson Interim use Matrix. So do you have any questions or comments about the next steps in the use matrix? Speaker 17: I'll be real quick and specific to what is the town's current needs
for building space in the town that we don't have that this could serve as Speaker 1: Mr. Erickson. Speaker 4: I mean, today we we're, we're, we're using our buildings and there's not an immediate need for the use of Johnson for a town or really a a a school use in the next couple years to 10 years there. Depending on how certain projects advance, there could be a need for components or, or parts of Johnson
or other buildings for, for swing space or utilization of some space. We talked about some of them in the presentation tonight, the call center for example, not knowing what's gonna happen at the call center right now. But there could, I could see, I could see a scenario whereby we might need to put a part-time or storage or back of house offices or some offices or something else at a location that's not the call center. The Johnson space could theoretically fulfill that need. Speaker 14: And just a brief addition, like we asked boards and committees across the town to submit a series
of reports late 2025, including the schools. So, 'cause I, when Mr. Lucent asked that question and says the word town feel like sometimes we struggle. The Natick community largely composed of a town and school group that has distinct budgets and a interplay. Mr. Erickson explained the town side on the school side. They did submit a need report, which is on the Johnson project webpage, and that is where the afterschool and preschool arose, as well as the conversations Mr. Erickson's part of the Memorial School Rebuild Building Authority committee.
And that particular committee also has talked about, you know, these interim sort of uses of the schools might need. And this particular interim use matrix gets to the specificity of what those are. So a lot of, a lot of parallel tracks. Absolutely. But hopefully this heads off great opportunities. Yeah, Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Poor Paddock. Ms. Gly. Speaker 18: Hi, can you hear me now? Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 18: All right. Hi. So Ann Greg Lee at Pearl Street. Just wanna say thank you for bringing up the advisory committee letter tonight. I'm one of the folks who helped deliver it. So yeah, I just wanted to say, I know you're focused on interim uses right now.
I'm really happy to see this momentum despite it being summer and everyone being busy. So just wanted to reiterate that, you know, I'd love to talk through the idea more at some point whenever it works for you all. Honestly, seeing that many people sign the letter, you know, it was over 200 shows, how much, how many folks care about what happens. So, you know, I'm really excited about that. The energy's there whenever you wanna tap into it. I have no ask tonight. I just wanted to say thank you and to keep the conversation open. Thanks. Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Ms. Bas Jensen. Speaker 19: Hi Jamie Basten. So my question is how,
how was the select board communicating to the school committee about the possibility of the preschool? Because I did, like Brian had mentioned, listen to the last school committee meeting and they said it was outside of their scope to discuss it. So I'm just wondering how exactly is this now going to be communicated to them? Because when you listen to their meeting, they seem unaware that it's an option. Speaker 1: So I don't, I can't speak to what the school committee knows or what they don't know, but I do know that there's regular meetings between the town administrator and the superintendent
and they meet every two weeks with their budget committee, with their finance team. I know that I've spoken about this with the chair, the chair, the vice chair of the school committee and the chair and the vice chair of the select board and the chair of the finance committee meet in what's called the tri-board group. So there's lots of discussion. I can't speak to what they know or don't know or what they want to talk about publicly and what they don't wanna talk about publicly. Speaker 19: Okay, thank you. Speaker 1: Thank you. So if there's no discussion on this subject or any more questions or comments, I'd like to move on to the main street improvement project after a two minute recess.
So we are back in session at 8 0 3 on the Main Street improvement project. But before we do that, what I'd like to ask the board is to take a roll call vote to endorse the Johnson interim use matrix, which we failed to do before I abruptly went to break. So on the endorsement or the approval of the next steps in the interim use matrix, Mr. Evans? Yes. Ms. Slager? Yes. Mr. Jacobs? Yes. Ms. Pope? Yes. And I'm a yes. Thank you very much. So tonight we're going to continue the main Street
Improvement project discussion and what you'll see if you're in the room, and I don't know if Pegasus can get eyes on it and if not, I can direct people at home to where these images are on on the website. The images that you see on these two boards is the current view and the artist rendering date. We've only been looking at schematics, which are very difficult for people to translate into what something actually is supposed to look like. The, the board, the artist rendering was available at the community senior center about when we had that big meeting there, but it was in the back of the room
and I'm not sure that people have had an opportunity to look at it. If you were online and you go to the project website, I believe it's been added to the items at the foot or at the bottom of the the page. So what you're looking for is the artist rendering for the Main Street project for only one of the the four categories. Mr. Griffith, I was wondering if you could run the slides for me. We're gonna go briefly through some slides and then what I'm going to do is ask people at home and people in the room who have questions. What I wanna do is take questions first and then comments.
And what I'd like to do is start by asking you to be patient If you've already asked questions or had comments and allow the people who haven't and then we'll circle back. It isn't gonna be the case unless it's getting very late and this will not be the last opportunity for input. There's a farmer's market on July 11th where a select board member will be there. Yes, I will. Ms. Pope will be there. We're still taking letters and we're still taking, I'm still taking phone calls. This is not the last opportunity for you to voice your opinion. Having said that, it's very important to understand,
and here I'm just speaking for myself and I'm happy to open it up to board members if they wanna comment on this as well. When I make a decision on this board about anything, I don't take the number of people who say support 250 and against 150. So support wins. That's not the way I make decisions. I make decisions based on constituent input, business owner's, input, input from professional staff, department heads, town council, engineering, data reports, budgets, all the stakeholders, anybody who has an input, what's best for the town in 20 years.
Not necessarily tomorrow. I take, I have gone to towns for this project. I have gone to towns that are currently under construction for a similar project in their main street. Not apples and oranges, right? Ick, special. It's uni, it's different from other towns. But for me, in making my decision, I'm talking to professional associations like the MMA board members in other towns and cities, input from legal counsel, regulatory framework, all types of information. So it isn't as simple as, for example, if someone were to write a letter and say, and this is just me, I'm not speaking from the,
for the board, if someone were to write a letter and say, yes, two bike lanes in the subject line and the whole body was, I like riding my bike downtown, I'm not gonna weigh that with the same weight as someone who writes three pages and says, or three paragraphs. It's a very thoughtful, committed letter and says, this is why I am against bike lanes. I own a business, we don't have the room sidewalk. It mentions all of the things that that we've been talking about over the last couple of months. So I'm just sharing with you how I make my decision. I had a conversation with the resident who was very surprised that we weren't simply
tallying yeses and nos. And again, I'm only speaking for myself about how I make decisions. If there's another member of the board who wants to weigh in on that, I'd like them to do that now. And then we'll start with questions. I'm not defensive and if somebody wants to have a conversation, you can take it outside in the hallway. Thank you. Speaker 2: You're welcome. Speaker 1: Any other member of the board wish to comment? So Speaker 2: I do. Speaker 1: Mr. Evans. Speaker 2: Thank you. I would just echo what the chair just said. We, it's a complicated issue.
It is not something that's a straightforward issue. We're all residents of this town and we all love this town. That's why we serve on this sport because we agree or don't agree on something. It doesn't mean one person is right and one person is wrong. We're going to, to the best of our ability to sift through all the material that we've been given and make a, a a, in our estimation, our best judgment on what's appropriate. Again, this process is to get to a 25% approval design and I'll just leave it at that point.
I have some questions about the current plan, which I'll raise when the time is appropriate. Speaker 1: If you could bring up the slides, Mr. Morgan or Mr. Griffith, I appreciate it. If you go to the second slide. So a number of conversations and emails that the board has received asks, why are we doing this project? Why are we looking at it? Why are we examining it? And I thought it was important to go back and look at the purposes. Now, when we started this project, there were four primary goals. The primary need is to repair aging roadway infrastructure. I think everybody, whether you're pro bike lane
or against bike lane can say yes, main street needs some improvement in terms of paving and roadway and millwork. Then there were some other opportunities. Calming traffic speeds, improving safety for everybody who uses the roads. Not just pedestrians. Not just bikers, not just cars. Enhancing economic development and improving intersection intersection functionality. The one common thing we've heard from almost everyone is traffic is terrible. You know what might fix that is a new traffic, you know, a modern traffic light or something like, like there's lots of different ways we can, we can, we can address some of these opportunities.
Can you go to the next slide? Go ahead. We don't have to go over every single time we've had this discussion, everybody's seen this or people who have been engaged have seen this. We've been look working on this since November of 2023. We're not making a decision tonight. I don't believe we're scheduled to make a decision on the 22nd refining the hybrid concept. Actually let's just leave this one up so that when we're taking questions people can know the next one. I'm sorry, the four options. So when people are asking questions they can refer to the four possible design concepts that are before us. So rather than taking up a lot of time talking, I'd like to turn it over to residents and business owners
and interested parties that are in the room. And then I'll take people who are online with questions first. And I'll ask you to on your honor system, if you haven't, if you haven't asked questions and you haven't given input, if you could just give your neighbors a chance to talk. And I promise you I'm not gonna cut you off or send you out of the room. Mr. Erickson, could you change the slide so I can see people who are online on the one in front of me? Thank you. So has everyone in the room then I express their opinion. Okay. Yes sir. Is this just questions? This is just questions right now and I, I promise we'll get to to comments. Thank Speaker 6: You. This is
Speaker 1: For questions. This is for questions. I have a question. Yes sir. Please if you can approach the podium and introduce yourself. Speaker 6: Ed, do Ed Dougherty, chair of the transportation advisory committee. And I just wanted this question to be out in the public and I've also been on, anyways, the question is, if we skip this bike lane thing and just refix the road, are any more cars gonna be able to get through the traffic light? Are we adding lanes? Are we doing anything that's gonna, no sir. So if we do nothing and we get no funding from the state, we just get
nice asphalt and maybe some sidewalk improvements. That was a question. Thank you. Speaker 1: I'm sorry. I said that Speaker 4: Was pretty Speaker 1: Accurate. Yeah, that is pretty accurate. So, so yes, if we choose the millon overlay there will be no sidewalk changes, there'll be no curb adjustments, doesn't anticipate a DA compliance or bump outs and there's no way to move traffic faster through the, through the interchange. Other questions, Ms. Young, if you could come and then gentlemen in the back with the blue hat and then I'll take questions from online. Diane Young, thank you so much for letting us have another night of questions.
I have actually three, I'll try to do them quickly. The first one is regarding the estimated $11 million cost of the main street improvement project. Can someone on the select board provide a breakdown of how much of that 11 million is specifically related to the bike lane and requirements including roadway, re reconfigurations, parking changes, drainage modifications, barriers, and additional engineering design costs needed to accommodate the bike lanes? One moment. Are you prepared to answer that? Speaker 4: I can answer it broadly as it relates to the limited bike,
which is really just putting share like shared stripings on a street versus the hybrid. And I'll say that the limited bike also includes full reconstruction of payment and drainage, some utility relocation, bump outs, you know, shortened crosswalks, a new street scape and signage and things like that. So once a project includes some of those full reconstruction bump outs for, for improved crosswalks, updated street scaping, updated lighting, updated signage,
signalization upgrades, whether or not you include a bike lane, there's minimal additional cost at that location at that time. The bulk of the cost. That's why if you look at the matrix that's on the board right now between limited bike and hybrid, they're both the round $11 million. There's really not much of a difference of costs whether or not you add a bike lane at that point 'cause you're already impacting curbs. So whether you put it here or five feet over, you're already impacting the space. Speaker 1: All those things that you mentioned would go along
with bike lanes only, right? No, Speaker 4: That's not correct. Speaker 1: No, I'm, I'm confused because the 11 million requires you have bike lanes, correct? No Speaker 4: It does not. Speaker 1: The 11 11 million grant that you're, Speaker 4: The grant does, yes. Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, there's an 11 million Speaker 4: Limited bike project that is just biked like shares or shared travel lanes that does not include the designated bike lane. Those are both $11 million projects. Once you start, I guess I'll say this, regardless of bike lanes, once you start doing reconstruction
of the pavement and drainage and drainage improvements, bumpouts for shortened crosswalks, new signalization, new lighting and new streetscape furniture and new sidewalks, your project becomes an 11 in this case. Okay? Your project becomes an $11 million project whether or not you include bike lanes. Speaker 1: So have other sources, other grant sources been looked into that maybe don't come to $11 million. I know you put up 5 million at the senior center, something about up
to $5 million grants that might be available. Have, have you looked into getting grants that don't require us to have bike lanes, but do let us do some of those improvements? Speaker 4: So we have looked at grants. The, the one that is actually helping to fund the, the design work is called Mass Works. That's one of the ones that has up to $5 million. But on in, in experience, if you just look at the grant awards for a project like this one to be more maybe in the million dollar range, maybe in the $2 million range, okay, by no means would you get to the near $11 million that you would need to do bump outs reconstruction of the,
of the payment and the sidewalks. Okay. Signalization, I mean a signalization loan could cost five to $700,000 if not a million dollars. Okay? Yep. So you're talking about once you start doing certain amounts of work, you're hitting the 10 to $11 million range. Right. And there's no grants that are gonna be able to get there unless you're looking at a tip funded program which then has a mandate for a designated bike lane. Speaker 1: Okay. But we don't need to do all of those things to improve downtown natick.
We do could do some of those within the town budget. So Michelle, that doesn't cover bike lanes. I'm sorry. So that, that's your third question. So I do want you to let your neighbors ask more questions. All I have. One more? Yes, one more. It doesn't have to do with. Okay. So I think we all can agree that with the damn decision, trees were a huge issue and preservation of trees, were a big decision maker. I wanted to know about the trees on Main Street that are decorated at Christmas time, provide shade
and really beautify our town. I haven't heard anything about what's happening with those trees to preserve them or move them or replace them. And we're trying to make the town look pretty and I think at Christmas we can all agree that that's why our town looked so pretty with all those trees. So what is in the plans for the trees on mainstream? Speaker 4: So I guess just briefly, a much depends on the decision. So if it's just a mill and overlay in all likelihood the, like the existing curbing all of that, and that's even just mill and overlay, which is just repaving.
The pavements is $2 million. Speaker 1: Okay, so Speaker 4: Just mill and overlay is an expensive project in that type of scenario, in all likelihood the trees would not be impacted. Okay. As soon as you start impacting significantly like sidewalk making sidewalk improvements, doing curb curbing work or curb cuts, you're gonna increase the impact on existing trees. We won't know the full impact until we get direction on what design to pick so that we can then start doing the design work.
In all cases, if any of the trees were to be removed, there would be a desire to put back trees, if not more, have more trees be installed. But until we get into the design process, we really can't say exactly which trees will be heavily impacted versus and then where can we put new trees? But in all likelihood we would have, you know, the desire to preserve the existing trees, but if that's not possible, replanting of new trees. Speaker 1: Right. And then there wouldn't be specifically money to put those trees back in the budget?
Speaker 4: Well that would be, that's incorporated in the $11 million. Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 4: So there, there's a line that there's, there's placeholders and it's, it's, you know, there's about a 20% delta right now because we're so high in concept design that we, you know, each time you do design work you get a closer and closer to a fine number. But built into that $11 million includes things like landscaping and that is therefore Speaker 1: Street trees. Okay. And finally has a survey finally been done to see how many bikes come down Main Street because a year ago I was at a meeting and they said they would be doing some surveys
and I wondered if we have surveyed how many bikes actually come down Main Street at certain times of the day. Has that been done? I don't think we have a formal survey. I'm gonna defer to Mr. Griffiths, but I also wanna point out that we're making a decision not for today, but for 20 years from now. So we also have to be thinking about where we're gonna be in 20 years, right? And that includes the age of our population, right? What our population looks like, what the downtown looks like, or if we're here in 20 years. Thank you Mr. Griffith. Speaker 20: Yeah, so I, I could definitely speak to that. So, so I've been an employee here for about three years.
When I first started, one of my goals was to conduct kind of like a bike census or like count, basically set out and count how many bikes passed through Main Street. I was able to do that for a while and then I just got busy and lack of capacity was not able to continue. So we don't currently have those numbers, but current bike counts on Main Street would not accurately reflect future demand because existing infrastructure doesn't
safely support cycling. So instead of manual accounts, we've been using MAs dots potential for everyday biking index which predicts where people would reasonably be expected to bike for everyday travel on every road in the commonwealth if safe, comfortable, and convenient bike facilities are available. This index takes trip distance, transit access, safety and demographics into account. And in the 2022 data set that identifies this corridor as having a medium potential for everyday trips, which confirms that demand for cycling, blatant demand
for cycling exists along Main street if safe infrastructure is built. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Grs, the gentleman in the back, in the white. And then we'll go online and I'll take some people online. Speaker 21: Mike, couple things if we mill and pave, we have cleaned up all downtown. Looks great. Nothing's worse, nothing's better except it looks much cleaner. If we go with this project with bike lanes, we find out it's a safety problem, we find out that the project fails. Do Speaker 1: You have a question Mr. Ardi? Yeah, Speaker 21: The question is, what is the town planner doing
if the project fails? Speaker 1: Can you describe failure for me? Speaker 21: Yeah, accidents, bicycles, cyclists getting hurt, people running red lights. Speaker 1: I don't know that we have a plan for that. Does anybody else wanna take that question? Speaker 21: I mean we're gonna do something. I'm asking what is the town planner doing if the project fails for whatever Speaker 1: Reason? I, I understand the question Miss Mr. Griffiths, can I ask you to find in one of your appendices the slide if you can, if, if you can put your finger on it that shows the crash map, the, the heat map for crashes for downtown current one mast.
Do you know which one I'm talking about? Speaker 5: Do I don't? It might Speaker 1: Take, that's okay 'cause we can come back to this question. Mr. Ardi, thank you for that question Ms. Deo, could you please unmute yourself? Speaker 22: Thank you Madam Chair. So I have a couple of questions. I believe at the last meeting Mr. Evans stated that the fire, the police and DPW were against this project for various reasons, safety and logistics for clearing the snow and et cetera. So based on their input,
why is the town still pursuing bike lanes? That's the first question. Speaker 1: Okay, Ms. Mr. Evans, do you wanna take that? Yeah, Speaker 2: I just wanna clarify what I said. What I said was, in looking at the vote that the study committee had put together, it was noteworthy that two of two things. One, a lot of the town department people were not in favor of going or recommending that the select board take the existing
hybrid bike option forward for the reasons that you've mentioned. The other piece that I wanted to mention is even those people who voted for voted yes to take the hybrid concept forward, they, many of them said they're taking it, they're saying yes to move the concept along to, to move the process, to have the process continue. They were not definitively for that hybrid concept they wanted to see refined. So I just wanted to clarify those two points.
Speaker 1: And also for those of you at home, if you go to the main street improvement project working group, so if you Google on natick ma.gov main street working group, you'll find the complete report with all 15 members of the board of the working group's opinion why they voted the way they did. Did you have a second question Mr. Mayo? Speaker 22: Yes. I'm not sure that that answered my question. I guess the question was directed to the board. Speaker 4: Can I try to answer Mr. Mayo? Speaker 1: Mr. Erickson would like to answer this. Sure. Speaker 4: It's, thank you. I, I believe I heard the question be why is the, why is essentially the board
still advancing the bike lanes? Well the reality is the board has not made a decision about about the design yet. It's seeking input to make a decision. This is part of the process to make a decision about whether or not to include bike lanes. Speaker 22: Okay. That answers the question more fully. And also how is this in project with the bike lanes? How will that get traffic through the downtown area quicker or, or easier or safer? Because you go through any town at rush hour, you're always gonna have backups in traffic.
I don't think that that's an issue that can be solved. It's just the nature of the beast. Speaker 1: Do you wanna, I can take it but, Speaker 4: Well, I guess that is the nature of the beast. You are correct in some respects. During rush hour we're always going to have traffic in this intersection. One of the benefits that comes with, with a project like this is that we can look at and utilize other resources depending on the approach taken to pay for improved signalization at the intersection and improved accommodations for all users, which present day. All users at that intersection do have limitations.
Meaning even if you're just a pedestrian today and trying to cross the street, that does have an impact on the flow of automobile traffic. So if we can get better signalization and if we can get it paid for by others, then there might be a net benefit for all users of people going through this intersection. Will it eliminate rush hour traffic? Absolutely not. Will it make marginal improvements to rush hour traffic? That is the hope. That is the intent with improved signalization and improved just flow for all users. And if you can add bike accommodations, one of the things that tends to be the case
with bike accommodations is in when, when it, it's a little bit of a bill when you build it, it will, they will come if you have the bike accommodations, in theory, more people will utilize those bike accommodations that might not be utilizing them today, which could take cars off the road. I'm not saying that's gonna happen in this particular case in Natick Center, but it's something that, that, that could occur and could be part of what occurs at this location. Speaker 8: Can I, can I just real quick, Jamie, do you mind just for the, for the public's benefit, just explaining a little bit about what, what you,
what you mean specifically by the word signalization in that context? Sure. What's improved signalization in that? I know Ms. De Mayo knows 'cause she's a very informed citizen, but just so everyone knows Yeah, Speaker 4: Absolutely. Yeah. So improved signalization. When I, when I say that, I mean the traffic signal lights. The traffic lights. Right now we have really a primary one at the intersection of 1 35 and 27. It's the primary intersection in the center and it's got some older, you know, it's an older light, it's older technology, it's
it, it certainly works. But the timing of the light signalization and the technology could certainly be upgraded. So when I say improve signalization, what I mean is in all likelihood we would be improving the overall signal. We'd probably be reinstalling, you know, new heads implementing new, new technology. The technology nowadays is much stronger and much improved when it comes to sensors and being able to sense the amount of traffic in, in all directions. In this case we don't have this, but when you have a series of lights that can,
that are together back to back in a roadway system, you actually connect the lights through, through the technology through and, and have them timed well. So in in this case it's an older technology light. It's, yes it has some sensors but those sensors can be improved. It's also working with an existing streets scape that has turning movements and through lane and through puts that could be improved. I, you know that this is all part of the next step of, of some of the study. So when I talk about improved signalization,
those are the types of things that I'm, that I'm thinking through and I'm talking through that I've experienced personally in this particular location. We can also look at just some of the other pinch points in and around that, that location that we can also try to improve as part of a main street design improvement. Whether it's, it's just improved pedestrian mobility which might not have any, any impact on traffic flow but could still just improve pedestrians, which is then encourage more pedestrians to, to walk through the area. But then also just the overall signalization improvement.
So it's really just the traffic signalization which can have updated technology and updated light timing. Speaker 22: And, and my last question and thank you Mr. Jacobs. So we're on time lights now and during rush hour, I can't see where the new signal signalization technology would help. I would think that that's more for past rush hour times when there is more tr traffic coming from the east or the west and it can sense that and keep the traffic flowing. But during rush hour, I think the timed lights right now are
sufficient and do a great job. Thank you. Yeah, Speaker 4: Appreciate the comment Speaker 1: Ms. Vickers. And then I'll take someone in the room. Speaker 15: Yes, thank you Brynly Vickers precinct date. Understanding that this is only for questions right now I'm not commenting, I have two initial ones. One I am, how many years if we only did Millen overlay, how many years before we would we think we would have to replace these signals that we have now? And then when that happens, does that mean that we have
to dig up the road that we've just replaced to make them better? Or does that mean that we can't have better ones that we want because we're not gonna dig up the road that we just replaced. How was, how would the signaling updating work if we don't do it right now, Speaker 1: Mr. Erickson? Speaker 4: Yeah, thanks in, in all likelihood and we have a, a, a a, a good team that tries to keep up with the maintenance of, of all the signals in town. But you know, the, the, if, if we were to just do a simple mill and overlay, we would likely continue with the current signals for as long
as we would need to until it really got to a breaking point where it becomes, you know, unsafe where they're just, the technology is, is so beyond its, its its age that we would not really be able to even continue with the existing technology. We would, we need to dig up the road with, to put in new signals. If we just do milli over day, not likely we can probably just replace existing signals on the existing mass arms with the existing foundation or at least the foundation locations of the signals. But, and, and just retrofit the existing infrastructure
with newer technology so that it can probably be as long as needed I guess is the answer to what to to, to the question. But it, it is something that, yeah, Speaker 15: So the, the follow up to that before I ask my next one is, does I know that parts start to get more expensive when they're, as they get older and stuff like that, does that mean that that could actually end up costing us more money in the long run if we don't do the signaling upgrades now? Speaker 4: I don't know if I can answer that question. I don't, probably not.
I don't think there would be that much of a, of a, of a major cost difference or increase if we, if we choose now versus later. I think if, if anything it's just all costs are going up and so a new signal 10 years ago is about twice as much as or half as much as it is today and it's gonna be half as much as it is gonna be 10 years from now. So that, that, that's just the reality of cost though, of, of, of replacing signalization. Speaker 15: Thank you. And, and we would lose the, the upgrade opportunities. Now the, my next question is are,
are these options totally set now, meaning not movable, meaning looking at the limited bike it says that that's reverse parking. Looking at the hybrid, it says that it's a mix of parallel and angling. Angled meaning that it can't go to more parallel. Like are is what's being considered right now solely and strictly these four options and no more mix and matching? Speaker 1: I'm gonna say no, no, not at all. No, no, not at all. I mean it may be that the board, it may be that the board chooses to, to take, say I'm,
I'm just picking a number, limited bike lanes and then directs the, the professional staff and the consultants to advance the design for the next part. And we want to include information on, well reverse angled parking has been taken off the table. That's just on the slide. That's for all. Is that not true? Okay. I'm sorry Mr. Griffs, could you come? I thought that was taken off for all options. Speaker 20: So reverse angle parking, at least as the concepts are currently proposed, reverse angle parking is off the table for the hybrid concept. The reason being that the bikes are removed from the street
and put between the parking and the sidewalk. River angle parking is advantageous when cars and bikes are sharing the travel lane. So like the shes and the the limited bike right concept. And that's because if you have vehicles that are backing out into traffic, it can sometimes be hard to see cyclists who are behind them. So it is still in the limited bike concept because the limited bike concept provides the sheros in which cars and cyclists share the travel line.
Speaker 1: That makes sense. Thank you. Speaker 15: The last one is just my understanding is we're gonna, after we go through all of the questions, having the opportunity to speak opinions and give some feedback thoughts if we've not done that before, either through public speak or through email. Is that Speaker 1: Yes, that's the plan. Time permitting. So we've thank you. We've spent, we started at 8 0 3 on this topic. I spoke for about five minutes. I'd like to give an hour to this. We still have the rest of the agenda. This isn't the last time we're gonna be talking about this. So that, that is the plan.
It depends on how quickly these questions go. Yes sir. In the blue shirt, if you could come to the I need you to come to the podium. Gross. We just need you at the mic. I need to come to the I'm Speaker 2: Gonna come to the mic. Speaker 1: Thank you. Speaker 2: I'm a former resident in Natick. I grew up in Natick. I remember riding my bike from Weathersfield to downtown Natick when I was 12 years old. We didn't need bike lanes. Why can't you fix those lights in another year? Doesn't have to be tied to a grant. If you accept that grant, you should retitle the main street improvement project.
Main street destruction project. Speaker 1: Did you have a question sir? Speaker 2: Yeah I do. Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 2: Why do you have to tie in the lights with a grant and why does Natick have to ruin the downtown area Just to get a grant of $11 million. That's how I see it. I've had a business in Natick for 47 years. I still have it. It's a law office in 20 main Street. I probably know more than all of the of you about the parking around here 'cause I grew up here. I worked at the old Nat Trust company where the citizens bank is.
There's always been a parking problem here. You can't tell me you're gonna make the parking better or the traffic better by putting in bike lanes. We should not have bike lanes and you can fi you can take care of those lights with another budget in another year. We don't have to, you don't have to take that grant if it's gonna ruin downtown Natick, which I think it will. Speaker 1: Thank you for your comments sir. Yes sir. And the black shirt. Could you come and introduce yourself? Speaker 2: Good evening. My name is Steven Howard and I just have a question whether this hybrid
redesign, is it the intent of this to make the downtown area impassable? Because I'm looking at the artist rendering there with the concrete kick outs and there's no way in God's green earth that any truck could ever go through there that you've narrowed it so much When you look at the old picture, the lane is half again is wide. Unless you get everybody in the world driving little tiny cars, there's no way that you can take up all of that room with the bike lane and still expect to get
10 wheel dump trucks, fire trucks, ambulances, the trucks that have to deliver goods to all the businesses. It's a, it's a ridiculous concept and it, there's not enough people that ride bicycles to make it worth delaying all of the traffic that goes through there in a normal day. Stand out in the street and count the bicycles. There's nothing. So, Speaker 1: So sir, I just wanna sit there. I want to address something you said our consultants did run modules with fire trucks, dump trucks, they have adequate clearance and they have the ability to turn at all four corners at the
corner of main and central. So I can appreciate that looking at it, you don't actually can't actually envision that but, but those models have been run. Why you Speaker 2: Tie up so much area with concrete. You've got these big giant burs sticking out here and all it does is it restricts the ability of somebody to get by there with a car to back out with their car when they're in one of these parking space. Speaker 1: So those bump outs are to make it possible for people with mobility challenges and others pedestrians to be safer in crossing the street.
It narrows the width of the street. So it makes it safer for pedestrians, people who have mobility challenges, people walking with children, those are called bump outs and they get Speaker 2: But what about the safe view of the children when they have to get out of cars to cross this pipeline? They get mowed down by 40 mile an hour Ebus, you haven't figured that into the whole thing. And half the time they Speaker 1: Have. I really need you at the mic 'cause this needs to be picked up for the minutes and then I need you to wrap up your question, sir, I'm Speaker 2: Wrapping. They, they essentially, you, you're, you're taken away so much room
that you've made it harder to park, harder to get a car through and I don't see that you're bringing in anything to the table. And as far as the people crossing the street, crosswalk is a safe area. You know, nobody mows people down in the crosswalk. It doesn't happen. And it's not, just because you make that area narrower does not mean that you don't have some knucklehead that's still gonna try and run you down the Speaker 1: Width down. Thank you for your comments. There's no more I'm, you've had your time. There are other people who wanna ask questions. Okay, fine.
Thank you. Is there anyone else online for questions? Any other people in the room who have questions? So at this time we'll take comments and we'll do that for about 20 or 25 minutes. Yes ma'am. If you could come to the, well go ahead. I'm really gonna need you to keep the conversations out in the hallway. Please don't talk in the room because it's not respectful to the speakers who are at the podium who were quiet when you were talking. Speaker 23: I'm Jeanette Davis and I wanna just ask where did the bike lane start and end? Speaker 1: Great question. Griffith, you go ahead
and say could you bring the map up the, the slide with the map or is it on this one? It's in a different, that's okay, go ahead. Speaker 4: So there are current bike lanes on North Main Street from North Avenue just over the MBTA tracks. Actually they're on the, on the bridge now I believe, or they're soon to be all the way to the Wayland Townline. So they start, I guess in Wayland. I think there's even some in Wayland. They come all the way down north Main Street. And then this will continue depending on the, the concept chosen. If it's the hybrid or enhanced bike concept, it would continue through Natick Center heading south. And then on South Main Street,
they're not technically bike lanes, but they're enhanced. What did you call, you call them Speaker 1: Sheros Speaker 4: Shoulders. Enhanced shoulders. Enhanced shoulders, which are basically wider than typical shoulders to allow for bikes all the way to the Sherburne Townline. So Speaker 23: They go from Sherburne to Wayland basically, Speaker 4: In essence? Yes. Okay. Speaker 23: That was my question, Speaker 4: Except for this stretch that we're talking about now. Because right now there is no, presently, there's no bike lanes in this stretch from Cottage Street to North Af this, the decision the board will make will determine whether
or not there are bike lanes in this stretch. Speaker 23: Okay. Okay. And I also want to say I agree with the bump outs. I, I disagree with the bump outs being there. I, I don't think it's gonna make it any safer to cross the street. I, I think it's gonna hold up traffic and I think it's making the street too narrow. That's my opinion. I'm not an expert, but that's my opinion. And it looks, it doesn't look good. And I also have to say, and I still, still, how long will this take? What's, its stats Speaker 1: Probably won't start till 2030. And it would probably take what, Speaker 4: It might be two construction seasons depending on,
but not all of that's going to be necessarily impactful to traffic or businesses 'cause So Speaker 23: It won't even start till 2030. Speaker 4: Well, there's at least two years of design work depending on the concept. And then there's likely some utility work, which is minimal impact, but still ex extensive work. 'cause it's a lot of underground work with utility companies as well as around water, sewer, utility. Then you would likely start the work. So we're already in halfway through 2026. And the construction season is typically April-ish till, you know, November-ish.
Yeah, depending on, on the weather. And so when you look at the, the construction season, it's around 20 29, 20, 20 30. And that's also depending on funding. Speaker 23: And then how long do you think it will take? Speaker 4: I think I said earlier, maybe two construction seasons, but that doesn't mean it's gonna be like a full on impact during those two construction seasons. It's likely one heavy Speaker 23: Construction season. What, midway through the construction season? Sorry? What will happen in the winter if it's midway through the construction Speaker 4: Season? The construction season is April to November. Right. So what's gonna happen? So like two of those Speaker 23: Construction season. So would just be all dug up all winter? Speaker 4: No, no. They would put together winter conditions
depending on where they're on the project. And, and that would all be part of the bidding process for whomever would do this work. They would tell us how they would, how they would plan their construction between the construction seasons. In all likelihood, the there'd be one full construction season of the bulk of the work. And then the second construction season is more likely to be landscaping, lighting things that would not impact traffic. Speaker 23: Okay. All right. I just, not that it makes much difference, but I just disagree with it completely. So that's my opinion. I don't think it's necessary. I drove through Newton a few weeks ago
and they have, they're Route 16 is all dug up. It's, it looks like a war zone almost. And I didn't see one single bike in their bike lanes. And I don't see many bikes here either. And people coming from other areas, like if they're coming from East Natick or West Natick or whatever, they still have to go on streets that they have no bike lanes to get to downtown to get to route 27. So it's kind of, I don't know. I Thank you. Speaker 1: Thank you Ms. Davis. For someone who hasn't spoken
yet, Mr. Ostroff, Speaker 4: Thank you. Board members. Josh Ossoff, town meeting member, former chair of the transportation advisory committee. And I've long involvement in transportation projects in the town and around the state. So I just wanna first acknowledge the good work of staff and the working group and the board's willingness to really dig into this issue. I think that I just, I just appreciate the attention that you're giving it and, and the leadership on, on this and many other issues. I have a couple of, you know, global concerns.
One is that for a while it's been my hope that we would do more town wide planning around bicycling and pedestrians access and, and the mobility needs of people with disabilities. Because I feel that we're now dealing with a very contentious project, but don't have the kind of visibility and what the demand is, what the needs are for people to get around safely on foot on wheels throughout the town. And while this is a super important project and there's funding attached to it for a much more modest investment, which I know is part of the q and a of of the board's questions
and past discussion, a field like things are outta sequence. Not much we can do about the now, but the, the way in which people are exercised about this with, I think it's a fundamental misunderstanding of how much better pedestrian activity contributes to the vitality of Natick Center. How many people really bicycling for transportation, you know, not just for recreation, nothing against recreational cycling. The challenges we have in for people with assisted mobility devices and get around getting around the town, those are really foundational questions that I think would inform this project. But we can't go back.
I just would hope that the board will prioritize this because for the amount of money we invest in roadway projects, we're not doing the kind of farsighted planning that I believe we should. That's just my perspective on it. The second is that if, as someone said the last time this was on your agenda, ENG parking is being treated as sacrosanct. And I feel like it is unfair to Main Street to try to satisfy all the parking needs or so many of the parking needs in Natick Center with angle parking on our busiest roadway there in the past 10 years, according to the mass DO OT crash data portal, 320 collisions
between Pond and North Avenue over a 10 year period, most of those vehicle on vehicle, some pedestrian, a few bicyclists. But I think that we've got a, a challenge in trying to accommodate, really quantify the parking demand and, and credit to the staff and the parking, parking group for tackling this. But assuming that angle parking is sacrosanct, I think is a disservice because if we have other ways that we can satisfy parking needs in Natick Center, main Street can function much better as, as a,
a more welcoming and friendly place rather than a place that people are just jockeying to get there. Those are the two big concerns that I, that I have. I think that there's like a lot of benefits to active transportation, which a term of art that means cycling and walking. There's health benefits. Our, our comprehensive plan has identified the need for more walking, walking and biking. The Newt Station is obviously bringing a lot more people, you know, through the center of town. So I think that we, we really need to take a, a more comprehensive look at this and not just make it all about bike lanes because the benefits of better street scapes
and shorter pedestrian crossing distances and what that will mean for merchants and visitors. A 10 native center, particularly how much more walkable it needs to be to accommodate the hundreds of new residents that'll be moving in in the years to come. I think that we need to do some, just anticipate that need. The last thing I wanted to talk about is the upcoming connectivity projects that are gonna bring more people on foot and bike into Natick Center. So the, there's a MAs dot project going out to bid probably early next year, connecting the rail trail
to Spain and Hartford Street. That's going to open up a whole area for, for people to get access to the rail trail. Getting into downtown. While there was a, a project that I think has been paused to extend the rail trail up to Main Street next to Pizza Plus because of some engineering challenges with MAs dot alternatives to that I think need to be on the table. And that's gonna bring, you know, the hundreds of people that use the CRT today into, into a more conveniently in NA center as well as the 9 27 interchange and then extensions of the shared use path network.
I, I want to give other folks a chance to talk, but I wanted to just talk about some of these strategic issues that I think would better serve the board in making decision than just the narrow bike lane versus no bike lane, which I know is tempting and people glom onto that. But I think the board needs to take a more far-sighted holistic view and I hope you we end up with the tools to allow you to do that. Perhaps while this is in design, we'll get more of the public input and a sense of the demand modeling that we need to do. Appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you Speaker 1: Mr. Ostroff. I'm gonna take a couple people offline then. Mr.
Sidney. So Mr. Ska, could you unmute yourself? Speaker 24: Sorry, Speaker 1: Go ahead. Speaker 25: I can also enable my video if the host would let that happen. If you'd like. Speaker 1: We generally don't do that. Thank you though. Speaker 25: Okay, no worries. Okay. Hi, good evening. So my name is David Ruka. I live at 21 Rosemary Street in Needham. I frequently bicycle two and through natick year round. I bicycle thousands of miles per year. And I could talk about any number of things. I could talk about the research on bicycling, the benefits of incrementally adding a bike lane network. I could talk about braces, paradox induced demand,
latent demand, traffic evaporation. I could talk about the accident we had in, in our town here in Needham, where a child was hit by a motor vehicle in a crosswalk on Great Plain Avenue. And it's because we have a four-lane road that is inherently unsafe that this accident occurred and a child was injured. I could talk about any of these things, but I won't go into those topics. I encourage you to look into them though yourself if you're not familiar. Instead, I'm going to offer you an invitation to experience two different extremes. And I think extremes are useful to look at because they really highlight the differences. So I encourage every member
of the board to try the following. Number one, go out to route nine as a pedestrian. Go by the mall. Cross route nine, use the crosswalk. Use all of your senses. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you feel? Ask yourself, is this an area that I would like to spend time existing in the world? The second experiment, go to open Newbury Street. This is in Boston. It's every Sunday for the rest of the month it's closed to motor vehicle traffic. Again, use your senses, what do you see? What do you feel? What do you hear? What do you smell, experience,
what it's like being in an area that is prioritizing pedestrians. Experience these two extremes and ask yourself, which is a better experience and which one you want for your town, which would encourage visitors like me to spend more time in your downtown to support your businesses. I encourage you to do the research and to come to your own conclusion about what is best and what will make your downtown a really nice place to be and not just a place for people to drive through. Thank you. Speaker 1: Thank you sir. Mr. Lewis, could you unmute? Speaker 26: Hi. Yeah, thank you. I wanted to echo the last two speakers comments that
if we were to provide alternative options for parking that might open up better pedestrian and and bicycle access. And so I kind of have a follow up question to that is, if we were to go with one of the options that funds with grants, is there an opportunity to leverage some of those funds to add additional parking like a garage or a lot? And I know that in the past those projects have not gone
forward because of poor ROI, but does this funding give us an opportunity to really develop mainstream into that more pedestrian and active mobility initiatives that, that people seem to, to want? So comment in question. Speaker 1: I I don't know that any of the grant funding opens the possibility for, for parking structures. Mr. Griffiths, did you wanna address this? Or additional parking or room for additional parking? Speaker 20: I think Mr. Erickson could also speak to this,
but I think they would be two separate projects. So the town could pursue a parking garage if the town wanted to, but it would be separate from this project. Speaker 4: Yeah, and and I, we, we explored a parking structure 20 18 20 19 at that time to do a parking garage on the Middlesex Avalara. It was about a 12 to $15 million endeavor for which there's really limited, if any grant funds available for parking garages. It's not something the state seeks to invest in. There are some federal funding programs, but there's some kind of like low interest bonding
or, or loan programs. So the town would still have to come up with the money to invest in that. So there's really a limitation on, on the funding resource other than just the town putting the money in and parking structures that what we learned from the economic analysis is that while the revenue from a parking garage could pay for the annual maintenance, it would never come close to paying for the actual upfront capital cost. So the town would likely have to come up with the upfront capital cost to build a parking garage really anywhere in Natick. But the analysis that we looked at was on the Middlesex a lot, and that was in 20 18, 20 $19 was 12
to $15 million. You know, I, I think that's significantly more today. Speaker 1: Before we go to the next speaker, I wanted to get back to Mr. Ardi. Mr. ARDI's question was, has the town planned for when this fails and there are accidents and people are hurt and killed. And I have to say we didn't plan for that. That's not part of this plan. The, what I'd asked Mr. Griffiths to look for, and he doesn't, he can't put his finger on it quickly, and I'm not gonna ask him to, to look for it, was mass, a mass DOT map of the downtown area and Route 1 35 and up 27. And it shows that our intersection right at mass and at 1 35
and Main Street is a crash cluster. So they do a, like a heat map where they show where the places are that have the most accidents. And so currently today that is an accident prone area. So that's the only answer I have for you. If any other person on the board has an answer about how we plan to fail, I'm happy to entertain her. Mr. Sidney? Speaker 27: Thank you Madam Chair. Richard Sidney, I'm precinct Tate town meeting member. I'm not gonna talk about bike lanes. First of all, I do wanna say I don't envy you guys having to work through this. One of the things that I've been thinking about relative
to this project is what do we want our downtown to be? We want our downtown to be an economically viable area where shops open and people shop. I don't think we want our downtown to be a commuter, a a commuter through space. And what that says to me is we don't want a really wide street because we want a traffic calm. We want people to go slow and say, oh, that's a nice shop. Maybe I'll park and pull over and, and do some shopping. And if we constrict the commuter traffic
as a side effect of doing whatever we do to traffic com through Main Street, I think that's okay. They'll find other ways to go and it could potentially reduce the total traffic through downtown while still improving our economic viability and keeping our downtown a vibrant and really wonderful place to visit. Which is, I think what ultimately we want and we want pedestrians, we want, you know, people to get there and be able to stop. We don't necessarily need through traffic.
And I'm way less concerned about the commuters. I'm not a bicyclist anymore. I used to, I used to be and I would like to see bike lanes, but I don't think that's what we have to think about as you guys, as, as a previous speaker said, do the appropriate planning for the next 30 years. So thank you for listening. Speaker 1: Thank you very much gentlemen, in the first row, please just introduce yourself. Speaker 28: Hi, I live in Hudson Street. I bike, I walk, I drive through Natick. Me and my daughter. She's age, she's an avid cyclist.
It's her only mean to like go into downtown really walking. So too far right now, the infrastructure downtown is not really welcoming for a child on a bicycle. We don't really want bicycles to be on the sidewalk because they can create accidents with pedestrians. And having a na yard on a street with cars that go too fast, that plow through crosswalks is also pretty dangerous.
So oftentimes I find myself driving to the library with her instead of biking because downtown is not welcoming. So I just want to support the idea of making downtown just nicer to humans and less nice for cars. Speaker 1: Thank you sir. Is there someone else in the room who has not spoken yet tonight who would like to speak? Speaker 5: Well, Speaker 29: I'm just thinking Speaker 1: Sure. Please come to my name's Speaker 29: Evelyn. Speaker 1: Could Speaker 29: Morgan Drive?
Speaker 1: Can you speak your name into the mic for me please? Speaker 29: Evelyn, I'm sorry. Evelyn. So I lived in Southern California for 10 years and the weather's lovely and beautiful all the time. So weather ist an issue, but no one's brought up like the hell. We went through this winter and there was nowhere to put snow anywhere. And I'm looking at this and I'm thinking about our weather pretty much sucks from, from let's say, you know, November to even into April, we had snow. You're already, you're gonna lose parking with the weather.
I'm just, I'm thinking about, you know, emergency vehicles getting down there with the weather with, with the narrowing of the road. And it's a lot of months of bad weather, a lot of months, most of the months here, people aren't biking. If they are bikers. Let's face it, it's not really, you know, conducive for most of the year to be biking. So I don't, I don't know. That's just, that's my Speaker 1: Thought. So Evelyn, I just wanted to point out one thing and you brought, you raised a really good point about the snow removal. So with the bump outs, with the model and the limited bike and the, well the hybrid and the enhanced bike, there's bump outs on
and what that means is there's, there's a, a good side and a bad side. The bad side is we're gonna have to have overnight snow removal. I mean, that's the good side. The good side is every single night that snow's gonna be pulled out of there because there's no place to push it. Right now, we push it into a place and then when we can, our DPW trucks and other trucks will come and pick it up and remove it, if we have the bump outs, it absolutely, there's no room for it to be pushed anywhere. So it absolutely positively means that those sidewalks are gonna be clear for those businesses. The downside is it's gonna cost a quarter of a million dollars a year.
So there's, there's pluses and minus this entire project, every single element of it has a trade off. There isn't, there isn't one element of this entire thing that you could point to and say that's a great idea. Could we just do that one thing? There's gonna be trade offs. So for the mill and overlay the trade off is finding $2 million in our budget and that means we probably won't do any road repair. We'll do very little road repair. So one, we have to find the money, and two, there's very little road repair that entire construction season. So every single one of those has a trade off. But you're right about the snow repair, I mean the snow. Yeah,
Speaker 29: I mean there still is just no, this winter trying to get through native and trying to find parking with all the snow. I mean, and in this one Speaker 1: Or walking sidewalks. Speaker 29: Absolutely. I mean it was, so if you're gonna take away parking, you don't, I don't see any additional parking with this. So it just, to me, I don't, I just, and the safety issue during the, during a lot of those months, you know, Speaker 1: Morgan is one of your, the slides in this deck have the, the set where it shows the parking and the trade-offs where there we go. So this will show you the, the concept.
If you look in that first row, it says number one, number two, number three, and number four, whether it improves safety, whether there's, there's bike facilities, sidewalk space, the net parking change. So limited bike, we would add six parking space, hybrid, we would add two enhanced bike, we would decrease four. And there'd be no change with number one. 14. I'm sorry, 14 I, we'd Is that lose 14? 14? Yeah. Glasses don't work very well anymore. So, sorry, it's, it's decreas 14, decrease 14. Yeah.
So, so yes, every single aspect of this project has a trade off. And that's why, you know, the question was asked earlier tonight, why are we still talking about this? If public safety or if DPW is against it, it's because it's part of the process. We're gonna still get public input. We're still doing research, we're still asking questions on the project website is 47 questions that the select board has sent to Morgan for answers. A lot of them have been asked tonight. I encourage you to read it. It has fantastic information, information about the parking information about what other grants would cover
and what the likelihood of probability of getting those grants. So this is just part of the process and we're gonna keep getting feedback. We're gonna keep asking questions. And I think that's, we're at about the top of an hour. Mr. Doherty, I'll let you be the last speaker and then we'll pick this up again on the 22nd. Speaker 6: Ed Doherty town meeting member and resident, I'm not speaking as a chair. A story today that struck me is my brother, who's 75 years old, called me up and said he wanted to go shopping for a bicycle. 'cause he wants an electric assist bike.
He's lucky he lives in Belmont, which border is on Cambridge. So he does all his shopping, all his going to school in Cambridge. Well, what has Cambridge and Belmont done? They made it so that it's, he is at age 70. He gave up driving a car and he's gonna ride a bike because he's frustrated with traffic. So because they have bike lanes, a 75-year-old is getting on a bicycle for the first time because it's the only way he can mentally handle going to Cambridge. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Dougherty. I'd like to thank everyone for their comments. No, Mr.
Ardi, we're done. We're done tonight. Nope, we're done. And so I'd like to thank everyone I, the and and there are people online you didn't get to comment. We at the end of our time, you could pick it up on the 22nd. What I'm going to do now is just thank everybody for your public participation, for the letters, for the phone calls that I've gotten for coming to the meetings for participating. It's really important that we get this feedback and we take it very seriously. So I wanna thank you and we'll see you on the 22nd. If you're still interested in this topic, I encourage you to read the, it's, it's for a lot of the questions that you have. This 47 questions and they're still growing.
The select board has been sending questions to Morgan to answer. So I strongly encourage you to look at that when you have time. So now we'll move to the report from the Economic Development Committee and the discussion of the EDC vision statement. Thank you Mr. Joseph. Speaker 6: Thank you Madam Chair. I need to be able to share, for those of you interested in the bike lanes and their impact on business, you might be interested in some of Speaker 24: It. So you should be good that call. Speaker 6: Thank you. Speaker 24: Sorry, Speaker 6: I am not seeing the presentation here is my, Speaker 24: I'm not seeing the Speaker 6: Presenter mode. Speaker 24: Yeah, that's what I'm trying to do. It's up upper. There we go. There I got it. Speaker 6: Thank you Madam Chair. Good evening. Select board.
Paul Joseph. I'm the chair of the economic development committee tonight. Wanted to present what we had submitted as a voted document, which we call the proposed Natick Economic Development Vision. The EDC is a, is a committee, advisory committee to the select board. In preparing for this tonight, I, I actually resurrected some slides from a previous economic development introduction. So I'd like to spend a few minutes of just providing the community with context about what is the economic development committee, some of our history, maybe preemptively address,
why can't we do X? Or why haven't we done Y? Or why can't we preserve Z? Which often come up when it comes to discussions about businesses in town. So with that, if you'll indulge me, I'm gonna talk a little bit about the committee, why it matters for community members, most importantly, residential tax rates. And then we'll talk about the vision statement itself and where we see opportunities for moving forward. So the Economic Development Committee was basically a recommendation that came out of the Revenue Enhancement Task force, which the select board in 2008 had appointed to study ways
to help the town coming out of the override vote of 2008, find new ways to generate revenue that would not burden the tax re taxpayers, residential taxpayers in the community. Recommending a standing economic development committee was one of two recommendations, including marketing the community. And so in 2009, the summer of 2009, we formed an economic development committee with the following charge from the select board. So you see the five points there. This is available on the committee website as well. I'm gonna kind of go through some of these slides fairly quickly.
Current membership in the Economic Development committee. And I understand you'll be interviewing candidates for two open seats tomorrow is as listed here. I do before I want, before I move forward, want to give extreme high praise and appreciation to Mr. Griffiths in context, especially of the preceding topic and the nature of how his job as the economic development planner working with Ms. Loomis, the community and economic Development department director, their roles have been instrumental and integrated not only with transportation and business,
but also the Natick Center Cultural District, Natick Center Associates. They've been heavily involved in a lot of different overlapping issues. So when you hear this presentation, the previous presentation on bike lanes and and Main Street redesign, the community should know that it was almost two years ago that members of the Economic Development Committee were asked to participate in the safety committee meetings, discussing Main Street and some of the limitations. And then early on we were provided as members an opportunity to submit business concerns to the main street development process. So we've been aware of this as individuals
and the committee for more than a year and a half. And I've seen comments in the public that the businesses weren't asked. And I will say between Natick Center Associates and the Economic Development Committee as entities that represent larger numbers of businesses, we have asked, and these plans and proposals have been informed by business people. It took, took the liberty of looking at some statistics as well because economic development matters for the community. Mostly because this town is expensive, right? The residential tax rates are going up, the value of our property is going up.
In fact, we've had sort of an interesting trend where the tax rate goes down. But because home values are assessed higher, we pay more in taxes plus our additional taxes for development of schools and the like, the Community Preservation Act adds another cost to us. So the importance of bringing a robust commercial base is critically important to offset some of the costs that we incur as residential tax rates. Took some statistics from the assessor's presentation for the classification hearing last year, as well as thet amended town administrator budget. Thought the community would be interested to hear the 17%
of tax levy for 2026 is actually down from 22% a little over 10 years ago. And the 17% of new growth coming from commercial sources is down from 31% from about 10 years ago. So what that's showing us is that we're getting less and less money from these commercial entities because of the robust and explosive growth in, in residential and value of these residential properties. The top 10 taxpayers in town account for about 11% of the tax levy. Half of that comes from the Natick Mall owners field properties and the MathWorks.
So it's important again, because this is augmenting what we pay out of our pockets. In addition to offsetting residential tax rates, economic development is about providing jobs. I think more people work in the town of Natick that live in the town of Natick than commute into Boston. If I remember my last look at the statistic on that, it's very close. We do employ a lot of people in this community. People move to Natick because they're employed by the MathWorks, they're employed by TJX, they're employed by Cognex and the like. They obviously provide the businesses, provide services and goods. And now as we've seen the mall shift
and as retail trends are changing, you're seeing a mall provide experiences. So we have bossy for pickleball, we have the putt shack, we have things to do at the mall as opposed to just your traditional big box retailers. So it's important that as trends are changing, we're aware of the macro issues that affect the quality of life for us in the community. In addition to the fact that these are the comm, the entities that provide donations for scholarships. The MathWorks annually provides MathWorks scholarships to high school graduates, fundraisers. We know we go to our local shops asking for donations
and gift cards and the like when we're doing fundraising for our local nonprofits and community needs. So it's really important for us to think about that. And I hope to be back when you do your classification hearing for the tax rate at the end of this year, to provide more information about why that matters in setting a tax rate. It started as laziness, but then it actually had a point, I actually kept a couple of slides from 2014. This is a, from a presentation that I gave to town meeting, this is why it matters. We have these employers in town. At the time it was the Natick, they wanted to call it Natick and then it went to the Natick collection, the mall.
But you're seeing some companies here that no longer exist here in 2026. And I'll go back to that for a minute. Kerio Farm is a great example. They were a life sciences company that announced their IPO and the day after they moved to Needham, we lost a company that was a growing life sciences company because we didn't really have a proactive approach to securing the growth of some of the incubated companies that come to town. And that's just the natural life cycle of things. I also want to be extremely deferential and appreciative to Mr. Erickson who actually served as our director of economic development. And some of these years, not, not as far back as 14,
but the comments I'm making here run the risk of implying that people either, you know, didn't do their jobs or the system was working against us and so forth. I wanna be very careful to, to remind the community that we've actually gotten blood from a stone from the resources we have. I've been involved in economic development in the town since 2009. I didn't know it from Adam as a discipline. I learned all of it by doing. And what I have found is, and I felt even at the time, the director of that department that didn't even have economic development in its name
was understaffed for what we needed to do. So we have under-resourced the revenue generating engine of this town pretty much since I've been active in town politics, which is almost 20 years now. So we lost some of these businesses. But the good news is we've gained more, and I can't emphasize enough, when you look at a BI Lab, for example, this is an organization that started through a company called SBH Life Sciences. Natick won a life sciences company from the state of New Jersey. Just as the flight from New Jersey to Massachusetts for life sciences happened. One of the founders of SBH Life Sciences is a partner in a
BI labs over the last 15 years, A BI labs has developed three life sciences buildings behind the Sherwood Plaza area, including replacing the travel lodge, which has been an eyesore for many years, which just opened. And they won, I think a bronze medal from Mass Econ in terms of economic development contribution for the state. This past year, obviously we lost Wegmans, which was a disappointment for those that liked Wegmans. But we're excited to welcome Tea Market, bringing, you know, relevant and Asian grocery to a growing population in in the community.
Bossy I mentioned before, pickleball, an exponent occupies a building between Route 27 and Speed Street standalone. They have, if I remember correctly, the corporation has 700 PhDs that do forensic research, very, very high level work, well paying jobs. And they've committed to building a facility in part because the rail trail is there. So I want people to understand there's holistic connections between a lot of these things. This was an interesting slide because what you're looking at is a town, a building on North Avenue that's for sale here. My understanding is a permit's been or a request has been made.
'cause they're looking to actually demolish and redevelop this into mixed use retail as well in the next couple of years. The middle image there is the American Legion Hall, which is now Buttercup. And you know, c and t Paint is there and some housing up above. And the Old Town Paint building, which is now next to Sweetwaters, it has a Pilates studio and has apartments residential above. What is important for the community to know is when that development went into place, myself, people working on the town and other volunteers on the committee reached out to grocers.
We reached, reached out to restaurateurs. We had an Iron chef considering a location here. We had two major grocers that are in the town. Consider putting, you know, grocery stores downtown, but for whatever reason couldn't make it work. Whether it was parking requirements or there were certain restrictions at the time that didn't make it feasible. There has been a lot of dogs not barking when it comes to economic development in town. A lot of activity that just basically dies because we didn't, you know, achieve what we hoped. But that's life. Lastly, you see the parking garage at Middlesex in that lower picture that has looked like that for better part
of 20 years right now. And honestly, to paraphrase and build off of what Mr. Ostroff was saying about planning for mobility and access, to me the parking question is the ultimate to unlocking the main street redesign question. If you go to the Natick master plan 2030, there's actually a wonderful picture of what the main street corridor could look like with parallel parking spaces and bike lanes on Main Street. This is not a reactive process to a grant. We have been talking about this since 2018 and 19, when the master plan was being developed.
The problem is we continually, by necessity because of the availability of funds from the federal government, from the state government, we have to pick and choose our battles. We have to prioritize and make choices as you had indicated previously. So the idea of, you know, is this the, the, you know, cart before the horse in terms of what we're looking at for Main Street, it may be I am of the mind that we have underinvested in our downtown. We have underinvested in long-term planning, true structural changes to overcome some of the discontinuity of retail spaces that were the byproduct of building this building,
the town hall building the public safety complex. We lost a block of commercial and residential properties when, when the public safety facility went up, what treated us and served us well then might not treat us and serve us well for the next 50 years. So it's really important we do take these steps back and look at 20, 30 years from now. And I applaud what this select board is doing with this Main Street process because there is no perfect answer and we have to guess where the puck will be and skate to it. But as community members, we also have to say what we want.
And that's part of what I'm getting to with this vision statement. So the vision statement that we developed basically is, is designed for providing an opportunity for the select board to now say what matters. What matters when it comes to economic development, what matters when it comes to hopefully investing and doubling down on our investment in generating non-residential tax benefits. One last interesting note, and this is important for competitive reasons. We used to have funded by town meeting a proposed website for economic development.
This is state of the art, about 10. It preceded Mr. Erickson coming here. I think even for economic development, we had a concept in place, spent about $20,000 to build this. It was designed for a volunteer committee. So we would have volunteers come in and manage the website. We had an interactive map that we could pull into it and actually demonstrate with pins and and zones of different places of where people could we, we could zoom in on Natick and actually find places where businesses were and had a very, very state of the art website. Unfortunately, this was handed over to staff at the time,
and over the course of two years, the design was lost. The management of it was mishandled and we'd never launched this website. So this was all prior to the people sitting around this room. But I say this as an important point, how we do things, the lack of clear ownership and accountability and the lack of clear priorities in some ways as manifested because of the limitations of how we run as volunteers in this government form, has adversely affected our ability to have more substantial and robust economic development.
And I bring this up because if we now look at A few examples of what's around us, Speaker 24: Oops. Speaker 6: Oh, thank you. City of Framingham next to us, which changed to a city form of government about six, seven years ago, has just launched with the $50,000 earmark from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, its economic development in industrial corporation there in the process of visioning the Framingham Innovation District where Bose Mountain is and Staples corporate headquarters is, they've got a state-of-the-art website. They've got visions for quantum computing,
artificial intelligence and life sciences initiatives in their innovation district. They've already talked to Northeastern University and several other universities about potentially co-locating in an industrial park and doing very robust integrated economic development. The city of Marlboro was our benchmark when we created the Natick Economic Development Committee back in 29, 2009. They had just finished a five year strategic plan and they as a city decided to allocate their local options taxes to fund economic development to the tune
of about a million dollars a year. So they take the restaurants and meals tax and hotels tax, and actually put some of that money into a private economic development corporation. Their city form of government has allowed their mayor to travel to the bio conference in San Diego and recruit life sciences companies to come to the city of Marlboro. They actively recruit to the country of Canada because the New England Sports Complex that has multiple hockey rinks, there is the defacto tournament location for hockey. They have invested and reaped the benefits of that investment over the last 20 years. Everyone talks about Hudson, why can't we be like Hudson?
Well, Hudson has a, what's called a business improvement district, and they've got a robust economic development website. And their business improvement district is basically a, the, the property owners of downtown Hudson have taken it upon themselves to invest in their business district. So they tax themselves willfully to have control over how they attract people to downtown Hudson. So they do that through what's called a bid, a business improvement district. And that's a voluntary tax that's paid by the property owners. If you have more than 50% willing to do it. They can control things like a parking authority.
They can manage different things that we don't have the mechanisms to do. And last but not least, we have the N two Innovation District In Newton Needham. This is actually started as an initiative of what used to be the Newton Needham Chamber of Commerce, which is now known as the Charles River Chamber of Commerce. And it's a very robust development along Route 1 28. Many of you know that location. TripAdvisor was this sort of anchor corporation that went there and now it's got hospitals and it's, it's a thriving economic development area because 15 years ago, the businesses
and the cities got together and the towns got together and said, this is a priority and we're gonna work together with the commonwealth to, to bring money here to develop this. My point of bringing all of this up is that that could have been us and should have been us, but for, you know, I think a combination of reasons, and again, not to be critical of the people of the process or the system. I'll take that back. I'll be critical of the system, but I'm not gonna be pointed about it today because we do have limited abilities to, you know, in, in, in the, in the form of government that we've got
and the priorities that we have as a community, we've made decisions for ourselves. So I share those examples with you because I think one of the things that's really important to understand is competition is increasing and getting aggressive. Okay? You look at Westboro, years ago they took BJ's Wholesale Club from us. You look at Marlboro, years ago they took the Boston Scientific from us. We were able to get MathWorks to acquire that building, but that could have been potentially devastating for us for a long time. You've also got Westboro now. They've attracted the Olympus North American headquarters, Amazon Robotics. You've got Marlboro with the TJX expansion
and they've got the incorporated medic, the Economic Development Corporation. I mentioned Wellesley has developed Lyndon Square. They've done a tremendous amount on Route nine in terms of housing and, and restaurants is the other piece of it too. So we, we have competition coming from all around, all around us because of the mechanisms and choices these communities have made. In addition, we're coming outta the pandemic. So what was being developed as a Metro West Regional cluster, with the support of the 4 95 partnership in the Metro West Chamber
of Commerce and and regional organizations, the wind was knocked out of our sails. And the tendency has been to pull back towards Boston and Cambridge and Worcester in terms of large scale life sciences in particular, but economic development. So while we've seen this trend, Natick in particular, and Metro West in general remains at high risk of remaining a bedroom community of Boston, Cambridge, and Worcester. And so it's really important that we look at economic development, not only for our own, you know, surviving and growth, but also as ways to collaborate and do things with our regional partners.
That's why we do have this organization called the Metro West 4 95 Partnership, our regional economic development organization. In addition to general trends, you've got new technology, artificial intelligence they say is gonna influence and reduce entry level jobs to the tune of 30% companies hiring 30% fewer entry level workers because of this technology in the next five to 10 years, you've got the return to work mandates, work from home norms, and in aging workforce in suburbia, young people cannot afford comfortably to live in Metro West. You've got state and federal tensions right now.
Blue states are not being shown the love by the federal government in this moment in time. We have a risk of what's called brac, the base realignment and closing process. The Department of Defense goes through every several years to consider which army bases to close Natick Labs is potentially at risk. And again, for political motivations, we always have to be sensitive to the fact that we've got the only active army labs, army base in New England that's at high risk of closure because a lot of what they do here is now being done at Devons and Aberdeen, their Aberdeen facility. So you, you've got, and,
and the changing retail sector I talked about before, the trend to move away from large box retail into more small and online shopping. So we've got macro trends that are affecting us. We've got local trends that have affected us coming outta the pandemic and we've fallen backwards because, you know, we're not moving fast enough. I think we're losing ground and I'm, I'm very concerned about that. So as the chair and as as a committee, we came together late last year, early this year to talk about, okay, well what can we do about it? So we developed the six page document that I think is posted on, on the website for folks. And we did submit it to this board several months ago
to talk about a vision. And my hope for tonight is really just introduce the community, summarize things for you, provide you an opportunity to ask questions. But this should hopefully be the opening of a dialogue and a, and a and a long dialogue. Not, you know, this is not gonna happen overnight, it's not gonna happen this year alone. But I think as we start thinking about an aging population that needs mobility options, as we start thinking about the needs for accommodating autonomous vehicles, electric bikes, whatever's coming next, you know, who knows we're gonna need heliports or air, air, air landing strips at some point. You know, we don't know what things are gonna look like in
50 years, but we do know this. We will not sustain growth with what we've got today. We also know this, it's going to be very expensive to prepare us to accommodate the future. And by not making those choices 20 years ago, it's going to cost us more. There's two times to make a decision when you should have and when you can. And I, I want the rest of this presentation, just the summary of the vision statement, to encourage the board to ask of its advisory board. What can we be doing better? Who's not at the table? What do we need to help the administration do its job
to help you as the politicians in town, set policies and priorities that will serve the community in a holistic way. And again, before I jump into the vision statement and details, I'm preaching to the choir. When I look our town administrator in the eye, I'm preaching to the choir. When I talk to Amanda Loomis, I'm preaching to the choir. When I talk to Morgan, preaching to the choir, when I talk to many people that have been involved here, we have very good people working the best they can with what we give them as taxpayers, in my opinion, we have underserved, under-resourced,
the very people we're asking to do more for us at a time that it's gotten harder and we need more done. So I, you know, I kind of angrily opened during public comments about the temperature in the community right now. It saddens me when I see why can't we just do this? Or Natick used to be like that, you know, the point is, we're all living in a community. Economic development is about the community. It's about what shops do we want to go to? Where do we want to dine? Very excited to see our most recent restaurateur still sitting here listening to this presentation today, because we are asking people to make expensive investments
in our community, and we wanna be sure that we honor their commitment to doing that. So my my hope for tonight, really to talk about a community that's resilient. We have opportunities that really, really, you know, it's an embarrassment of riches of what's in front of us, but we have to think differently. We look at Route nine right now. I was actually just this morning at the, there was a Associated Industries of Massachusetts did its State House day. So I voluntarily went downtown for a couple of hours and I listened to aim, which is a trade organization focused on manufacturing. Well, because of the provisions in a big beautiful bill,
there's opportunities to acquire properties and convert them and write off the, you know, as a tax write off. You don't have to amortize some of the capital improvements that are in that bill. The problem Natick has had is we don't have a redevelopment authority. We've talked over the years, and I've served on the select board twice over the span of the last, what, 15, 16 years. The Middlesex lot. We had a a a report back in 2013 that said you should acquire all of the properties to Spring Street and actually do this. Right? Mixed use retail, housing, parking, you know, at a time.
What year was that? I'm sorry, the 2013 Was that report, was that Nelson Nygard or that was, I'm trying to remember which one it was. It was a different, different vendor. But, but my point is, even then they said we didn't have a parking problem in 2013, but if we wanted to grow, we needed to invest in that parking. But the risks of the lawsuits of the select board having to do eminent domain kept us from being bold and doing what we needed to do for the town. And the, the, we've constantly been faced with opportunities to take action, but be before because we have to go through a town meeting process or
because as a, as a public entity, you know, the, the town has other considerations and priorities we've missed out by not having a private entity that can serve as an economic development engine. So I'm gonna get to the, the mechanism in a second, but, sorry, I lost my train of thought. But this idea that we basically want to create an environment for these businesses where they're not only gonna come to start, but we actually have a lifecycle plan for everybody that comes to town. That lifecycle plan, by the way, might be start your incubator for life sciences in Natick
and then go to Framingham because they've got vivarium space and laboratory space that we don't have the space for, or the town meeting chooses not to, to adopt. We build an ecosystem with our partnering communities. But the idea is to adapt and be efficient and be responsible and be inclusive and think long term for this community. Because to me there's nothing more important to helping keep Natick both affordable and equitable than investing in economic development. So we created this recommendation with some guiding principles. The first of which was agility with accountability. Natick should be known by commercial interests for
its clarity, speed, and predictability without sacrificing public process and trust. We do have now electronic permitting. Ms. Loomis came to town as we were implementing electronic permitting. It was a, a nightmare and it was coming out of COVID and we had a lot going on and there's reasons we haven't gotten to certain things because of other community priorities because of different, you know, relationships between administration, superintendent, and the history of the town has all kinds of stories. But the point is, you know, we want to be seen as not only an attractive place to do business,
but an easy place to do business. We've made some improvements, but unfortunately sometimes we get in our own way. So the EDC input for this question about how do we do that was to emphasize speed, certainty and reduce friction for businesses. And we asked the staff to provide their input. So Mr. Griffith, Mrs. Loomis, as well as a review of the Natick 2030 master plan. We looked for alignment between those, that document and our professional staff. So I'm not gonna read through these slides verbatim. I will provide them so they can be uploaded with the record of this meeting for community members that wish to, okay, because Speaker 1: We do have that in the report.
And these recommendations are in the Speaker 6: Report? Yes. This is a verbatim from the report. Okay, so these are already there, but I thought if the other stuff's interesting, people can look at that as well. The second principle is retention and attraction. So we want basically to not only bring new business in, we wanna keep the ones we have, you know, we want them to know that they can grow here. And so it's really important that we have continuity of services providers and we have stability for long term. We right now have a very sort of bipolar of dynamic and commercial real estate in Natick Center. We've got a lot of older, tired buildings that are not up
to current code, but if we wanna change their use, it's gonna trigger the need to come up to current code. So the cost of upgrading some of our old buildings is prohibitively high. Therefore we have tenants that are paying traditionally low rent, so there's no incentive for the landlord to make some improvements to maybe bring in more restaurants because it's gonna trigger major costs. On the other hand, we've got all this new development that incurred additional costs they weren't expecting because they invested at a time that supply chains were affected. The cost of borrowing has been affected, expenses are high, attracting employees is high.
So we've got two different types of businesses. And again, I really applaud our, our, our new newest business here because restaurants in particular, we want them downtown. We've, we've talked about this for 20 years. The problem we've got is now we've got some shells of developments that the property owners are imposing the fit out costs on the tenants. Historically, a land a property owner would do some of that fit out and incur some of those costs, but because their costs of building were so much higher because of the pandemic and supply chain resources, they've had
to shift their costs downstream to their tenants because the banks are requiring them to borrow more money and so forth. So we have this trickle down sort of environmental impact on a lot of different things. It's not one factor, but Natick has been caught in this perfect storm. My biggest fear for Natick Center, honestly, is we're going to be slowly emerging from that disparity. But as we get anchor tenants to come in and invest in one property, you'll see those dominoes start to tip. People will start to come down, people will start occupying all those apartments, and more restaurants will be here
because it's a no-brainer to have the walk by traffic that we hope to attract. So retention and growing is, is just as important as attracting new businesses. Reinvention as a strength, you know, Natick has basically redefined itself a couple of times over the last 50 years. You know, we, the Carling Brewer Brewery then became Boston Scientific Medical Devices, which then became MathWorks. So we see evolutions of businesses all the time. The Natick Mall has evolved, as I said, into more of an entertainment and, and a live work environment. So you've got apartments there. So this idea of resilience through change is important.
Change shouldn't be scary. Change should be embraced because even if we want to stand still, we have to change. We do have a movie theater. Downtown Tecan is showing movies on its upper levels. I'd love to see them offer more matinees. I'd love to see the businesses synchronize in such a way that we have a predictable nine to five, nine to 10, whatever our, our business hours are going to be. But we've right now still have a lot of discontinuity. So we have to think about new ways to offer businesses because the businesses are thinking about new ways to attract their customers through social media
and through basically demand marketing that never existed 20 years ago. Last couple of ideas here, I didn't expound on them for the sake of time, place-based differentiation. So what we put into South Natick to grow around that part of the town is gonna be different than what we put in the East Natick Industrial Park. What we put up in the Golden Triangle by the Natick Mall. And reinventing that area is gonna look different than what we might do at the West Natick train station. Route Nine offers a tremendous opportunity for us to address housing, potentially live work environments and radical transformation,
but for the fact that the transportation is terrible and the cost of doing those changes is prohibitive. When you look at the competition, that's basically pulling other projects away from this area. So we should be thinking very differently about Natick for 2050 and start with what we've got, because we've got a lot of great raw material, but we have not had the will to invest. Lastly, transparency and trust. Why should we? Because we will demonstrate to the taxpayers we are custodians and trustworthy custodians of their tax dollars.
I know it's hard to spend a dollar to think we're gonna make two, but unless we make those decisions, Marlboro, Westboro, Needham, Newton, Framingham, they're all making those decisions. That's the, that's it as far as the PR guiding principles. Lastly, this has come up time and again, even at our first meeting of the Economic Development Committee in July of 2009, we talked about the idea that the committee itself should probably be spun out as a private entity. And much like the town has a partner in Natick Center Associates, which is a 5 0 1 C3 nonprofit organization.
And together, through the a memorandum of understanding the partnership between those two entities creates the Natick Center Cultural District. We've always felt that there's an opportunity for us to think about town-wide economic development the same way. The problem we have, one of the problems we have with the Economic Development Committee is the people around the table. We've had very committed, very dedicated volunteers. Some have been with this committee almost since the beginning. And I do wanna, again, shout out to Scott Laughlin, who has been with the committee. He just stepped down as a June 30th. He served as chair for about six years over the span
of the 17 that he was with the committee. So what we're doing as a committee is saying, well, what can we get done as an advisory committee to a policy making board that's inundated with other higher priorities, such as the dams, such as Main Street, such as, you know, balancing budgets between the schools and, and general services and the like. For the time being, we'll focus on public advocacy for initiative, supporting our overall growth goals. And the idea is that members of the EDC should be more visible and present in using their volunteer hours to attend planning board meetings, ZBA meetings,
making sure that the voice is heard. So when the planning board hears that, the West Natick development is gonna have 200, I think 17 apartments and four, if I remember the numbers correctly, 40,000 square feet of, of a building of which only 4,000 is dedicated for commercial use. We're missing an opportunity to bring destination grocery restaurant, and the like to the people of West Natick that probably need some kind of economic vitality to go part and parcel with those apartments. So we need to think about economic development as it touches other aspects of our planning,
including mobility, including housing and transportation. So one priority for the select for the EDC at this point is really just to be a presence and hopefully have a basic platform that we remind our other volunteer politicians when they're making policy decisions to think about the implications for commercial contribution to a project. This also gets to the formation of the committee right now because the economic development committee is appointed by this select board. It's a public entity that's subject to open meeting law.
Historically, we've not been successful in getting what I consider to be the true blue chip types of members. Someone from the MathWorks, someone from Cognex, someone from Brookfield, because a lot of these larger organizations do not feel comfortable in a public forum talking about things that could affect their legal, you know, affect them legally. So they have, you know, constraints on what they can talk about in public. They don't want to talk about things that might affect a future planning board decision. So by being a public entity, we're limiting the pool of applicants and the inputs
that we're getting from some people that could and should be part of these decisions, much like we saw at the N two corridor in Newton Needham. Much like we're seeing in Framingham in Marlboro for the long term. That goes to what I'm talking about. I think we do need to think about a form factor of this committee. One member has referred to us constantly as the toothless tiger, you know, and, and you know, we do have charges. If, if I go back to the charge that this committee has said, we're responsible for marketing the town, but we have no budget. The one time we got a budget, we actually did something state of the art and it got lost. So, you know, it's, it's, it's maddening to know
how much we made tens of millions of dollars on local options taxes and not earmarked any of that for this purpose. And so, to me, the economic development committee, the vision that we're trying to support for 2030 and more importantly beyond 2030, I think starts with a robust conversation tonight. Welcome your questions, but really just wanted to kinda lay this vision statement out there. Not looking for an adoption necessarily, but really open a dialogue. And I would love the opportunity to come back with members of the committee as we digest this and what our priorities are. Noting that you're gonna be interviewing folks tomorrow
night to hopefully join our committee and continue this moving forward. We are an embarrassment of riches if we choose to exploit them. Speaker 1: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Joseph. Given the late hour, what I'd like to do is just ask the board if they have any specific questions about this one, one presentation, the presentation and the, the EDCs development vision. And then we'll move on. It's a late hour and we still have something else that's gonna occupy us and a consent agenda and updates. So from members of the board, I think Mr. Joe, Mr. Jacobs, if you could go ahead. Speaker 8: Yeah, thank you. Yeah,
I have two questions just picking up, up. First of all, thank you very much for this ex extremely informative and thorough and I, I appreciate it and I definitely, you know, second encouraging the public to actually read the underlying six page document, which lays this out very, very well. My two questions Are, first of all, I, I kinda wanted to follow up on something on I think the second to last slide where you were talking about, you know, going into tomorrow, obviously we're going to be considering appointments to the EDC. There's, we have many, well, what I would consider well qualified applicants. And I was, I just wanted
to follow up a little bit more on the, the bullet about, you know, you're looking, the committee needs, you know, kind of relevant business and economic development qualifications, I think is the thing that you said. And I, I just wanted to drill down a little bit more on that and, and ask you if you think there's any particular areas of expertise where you think there are gaps within the existing membership of the committee that we should consider as we're making those appointments tomorrow. Speaker 6: Sure. Thank you for the question in the future. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think one of the most notable, and I I, I give tremendous credit to Mr. David Pratt, who's
part of the owner of a BI labs and Harold Cohen properties that own Sherwood Plaza. He has been very vocal, very insightful, and very generous with his knowledge as a commercial property owner and developer and somebody who's a professional commercial real estate person. Having commercial realtors on the committee would be useful to hear ear to the ground what's going on because we don't invest in proactive statistical software packages in the town. We have, I think we have access to CoStar through one shared resource in the town with the tax office, if I remember correctly.
Yeah. So we, we don't even have the major commercial real estate database available to our economic development people. So a commercial realtor might be somebody that brings something to the table that can share data with us. Commercial and zoning law. We did have Mr. Landry, who is now a member of the planning board, served on the economic development committee. So he brought some interesting context to the conversations. Again, these are people that focus on commercial development and have an understanding for the holistic aspect of business. So that's been good. I think we do have many members who have small businesses. We've got one, I think he's owned three businesses,
and he's been a tremendous contributor, Mr. Attia, he's also served on a parking committee, and I think he served on the Main Street project, if I remember correctly. He was a member of that team. Yes. So we, we do have what I'll consider small business owners there, but I think some folks that have worked, for example, in looking for economic development incentives for larger corporations, people that have done site selection or might have specific industry sector experience. So if we're building out life sciences as a focus area, you know, maybe we find somebody that has ancillary supply chain experience that can bring upstream
or downstream types of expertise to, to industry sectors. Speaker 8: Great. Thank you. That's, that's extremely helpful. And then my, my second question is, is more about the, the medium term aspect of this that you mentioned about the potential for privatizing into a, you know, 5 0 1 3 C 5 0 1 C3 and you know, or, and or examining, you know, kind of public-private partnership models for the EDC in the future. And my, my question is, I guess just a process question, which is like, what, like, I guess like what is
that, is a proposal on that something that could come from the EDC itself? Like if we said either today or at another meeting, like yeah, we as a board think this is a good idea. Like, would a proposal of how to move forward and actually do that be something that the, that the EDC itself could, could take on to, to bring back to us? Speaker 6: Simple answer is yes. And we have done that. We've actually met with people at Marlboro in particular, we sat down with the Marlboro Economic Development Corporation so they could share with us their process. In fact, when I served as the CEO of the Metro West Chamber of Commerce, the predecessor
of the current executive director of Marlboro was on my board of directors. So I actually had some pretty interesting background on, on Marlboro's EDC process. So yes, is the answer. The other part of the question though is can we do this without it becoming bogged down in public process? Right? So there's, I have privately asked people, sometimes I've, I've been curious about the willingness of other business owners to come together and just privately create one. You know, it, it's, it's a, I know it's a economic development specialist. Our town administrator probably cringes at the idea of a rogue entity coming in.
But, but to be honest with you, sometimes I think having outside private pressure helps bring clarity to government because we don't have a voice as a business planning entity. We've done committees to do long-term strategy. But even the Natick 2030 master plan, it's a great vision document, but it does not get into rigid metrics about how are we gonna do those things. So if you look at the grid that's in the master plan, so I, the simple answer Mr. Jacobs is yes, I think we can provide something, we've done it and we've tried, and I feel like we get on this hamster
wheel of studying it to death. The fact of the matter is somebody needs to pull three people together, create a nonprofit board, and start recruiting people to be on that board. Honestly, that's what it starts with. And then we have an informed mission informed by commercial interests working with town to develop priorities that make sense. And I, and I think it just, yeah, it's, it's no different than any other citizen initiative, but it's with corporate citizens. Speaker 8: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I think just, you know, kind of to your, to your points in the presentation, like what I was looking for is what we can do to like actually get the ball rolling on this and not have it just be, well, we brought it up again and then like, you know, whatever.
Like, you know, so, so if there, if there's something we can do to move the process forward for that to be a possibility, like I think, I think we should, you know, we should, we should look at it. I mean it's, you know, it's, maybe that's not a discussion for today 'cause it's late, but, you know, that, that's, so I guess that's my comment. And thank you for answering the, the questions. Speaker 6: Sure. Thank you for the question. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Jacobs. Anyone else from the board? I just had one question. Under guiding principles, Natick should be known by commercial interest for its clarity, speed, and predictability. I don't disagree. How do we become known as that? And it's not a website. So if you could elaborate on that,
Speaker 6: Drawing on 20 years of experience witnessing, I can go back to some anecdotes. We've had a major employer on Route nine was brought to the planning board multiple times and basically had the goal line moved on them. They were told to do some things. They, they hired lawyers, they hired architects. They came back to the, to following up on a request only to have the constraints change. That's history. I think the planning board has, has evolved and, and gotten a little more sensitive to the fact that it's expensive to bring these people back and forth and they have other options. But I think part of what we need to look at is
how are we engaging with the commercial interests when they're looking to do business here. So right now there is an online permitting process, but there's still a lot of confusion about, well, if I'm opening a restaurant, you know, where do I go for the common vitreous license and when do I have to go to the Board of Health for healthcare inspections and when do I go to the community and economic development for the, the structure itself. So while we do have online permitting, there's still other permits or sort or, or licenses that people need to get. So the one stop shop, the, the document of how to do business, I know Mr. Griffiths has picked up the ball on a previous predecessor.
I think I've gone through three different people working on the how to do business and Natick guide. Okay. But we get busy. Right? And again, this goes to, we don't have somebody focused on this. So one of the recommendations of the Natick 2030, if I remember correctly, was actually hiring somebody to be like a commercial ombudsman to have somebody to be a true champion for business. Speaker 1: Yeah. I think Framingham has that. Yeah, that's the only question I had. Does anyone else have any questions? This is not the end of this discussion. We'll bring this back. Yeah. Gives us an opportunity to, to digest it and to have conversations with business owners, which is something I know we all do on a regular basis.
So thank you very much, Mr. Joseph. Misspoke. Did you have something? Speaker 10: I do just wanna say thank you and I appreciate you bringing up the personal example of that personal example, because I do have friends who have tried to start businesses in Natick, has been very difficult, very frustrating. And so one of the things, and this has been for years now, one of the things I would love to see is for Natick to become easier to just start a business, you know, to do business here or for people to not have some of the, you know, the, the challenges and obstacles that they're having or for those challenges and obstacles to be handled
in a way that is more seamless. So I agree with you on, on those things. I appreciate you seeing that, you know, bringing this forward. We're all concerned about economic, you know, development and I appreciate you taking the time to share all this with us. Speaker 6: Thank you Madam Chair. If I may just a quick follow up to that. You just, you just reminded me, you know, we, we do things. I've been, when we started the EDC, it was a hope to have a member of the school committee participate. You know, when we start thinking about the community as one set of buildings and one set of resources opening up opportunities for us
to use facilities as revenue generation. You know, we missed an opportunity to put a commercial kitchen in place by the Natick High School that could be a commissary kitchen to all of our recreational fields. So we wouldn't need boosters to be at five different locations and maybe we could serve food at the golf course. We miss an opportunity to really exploit the commercial kitchen that we put into the community senior center that could have been incubating food-based businesses, especially coming out. Speaker 1: I really wanna stop this. We've got, if, if it weren't for the fact that we had three people in the room who want to address the next item, I would go ahead and kick it to another agenda. Ms. Wolf schlock, did you have something you wanted add? Speaker 9: Just wanted to say thank you Paul,
and I think you, I hope that the EDC watches this meeting and watches for the tremendous job you've done of summarizing the past 15 or so years on this committee. And agreed, thank you so much for informing everyone on, on this and, and fantastic job. So thank Speaker 1: You. Thank you. Agreed. Mr. Evans, Speaker 2: 32nd ditto. Thank you, Paul, for, for not only the, the backstory, but the front story in identifying the challenges. We've met the enemy and it's us. You know, we, we can do better, sir.
Speaker 6: And, and I welcome people to join us at our meeting tomorrow. Eight 30 in the morning. Thank you. 15, Speaker 1: Thank you. I'm sorry. Eight Speaker 6: 15. That's Speaker 1: Eight 15. Next agenda item is to discuss merging the cable advisory board and the information systems advisory board. I'm gonna welcome thoughts from the board before I ask. Well actually, Mr. Sidney, why don't you start the presentation. Speaker 27: Well, I just wanna say, I came here tonight, I had some questions that came through email and I wanna make sure that I'm, I'm just here to answer questions about the memo I wrote as I drove this through town me, they, they, as I drove the
repeal of, of the bylaw through town meeting. So I just, I'm here to answer questions. I don't really have a presentation. You've all seen the memo. Yep. So Speaker 1: Questions from members of the board. Speaker 8: I, I had a question whenever, well, go ahead. Speaker 1: Go ahead Ms. No, Mr. Jacobs, please. Speaker 8: I, my, my question I was curious, you know, in, in some of the email exchange with, with, with, with Mr. Sidney, we were talking about, you know, you know, the, the town administrator had raised the, the issue of kind of security and the difficulty of having like an open,
an open public body that's discussing like the i the IT issues. And I was wondering if we could, we could discuss that a little bit more. I was particularly interested in kind of what, whether whether a body like that is something that exists at all in other communities. And if so, kind of what, what role is there a role for it that, that wouldn't have those sensitivity concerns? I don't know who that's a question for, but Speaker 27: Yeah, I, I think it's for me and Mr. Erickson, that would be my thing. Yeah, yeah, Speaker 8: Fair enough. Speaker 27: I think there are some things that a body like this could discuss.
The things that, that I think would be dangerous to discuss because everything there, there's no executive session ability documented that lets you take it security into executive session. So you can't discuss, you know, what are our security protocols. You can't discuss like, you know, where our database is stored. Anything that could expose the data or the systems of the town to public scrutiny in a security fashion
really can't be discussed. You know, things you could discuss I think is things like, you know, do we need more switches? Right. More general topics. Now I know that a member of the IT board and the cable advisory board, I believe he's on both is here tonight and he can talk about some of that if you want him to. But that's my take. This is all, there's not as much that the IT board could talk about as there used to be. Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I would agree with that.
From the security perspective. I know in speaking with Dennis or now IT director, which is he's head of both town and school 'cause we've done a partnership with the school department. He, he, he deliberately does not talk a lot about certain things at the public body because of the, the safety concerns and the security concerns. And he's an expert in the field. So I, I guess a question that he, he's on vacation this week, so I wasn't able to get him before this meeting. But a question that I know he and I have talked about in the past is what work, what guidance, what is, what, what's useful from his perspective for the IT department.
And I don't wanna speak and say things incorrectly for him, but I that's, that's the question I have for board. What, what, what does the board feel they need to know about our IT infrastructure that a board a public body would be useful to give you? I know from the 10, from the sort of staff perspective, we are not, we're not, we are here to serve the board, but we, we don't necessarily have a need per se. It, I think when it was in its early years when it was still new to governments and figuring out how to incorporate into the daily work of,
of our operations, yeah, we needed that expertise from the outside. It's so integrated into what we do. Everything we do is technology based now and cloud based and like every part of our, our operation touches this. So it's less of a, of a need for expertise because it's just so integrated into what we do. So I guess the question would be what would an information systems advisory board provide to the, to the, to the select board, but also to, you know, on the town side, I'm not sure what the staff really needs from it because we already have a team of, you know, five to 10
if, depending on how you count school and and town together. You know, five on the town side, another five to 10 on the school side, experts in the field that do this as their daily job that are trained and go to trainings and do this work. So that would be one question. The other part of, of your, your question, Cody, is where else is this done? I'd have to do the research on that. In all the communities I've worked in, I've never seen an information systems advisory board. I've also worked mostly in city forms of government though. So it's a little bit of a different structure. We can certainly do an analysis and, and, and get back to you on that one.
I'm not sure if other communities have something similar or a model that we'd wanna model after. I, I don't know the answer to that Speaker 27: If I may. Yeah, I'd point out that this board, this advisory board was created when the town did not have an IT department and did not have any in-house expertise. And it was the IT department for a good number of years. So, you know, there are probably things that, you know, you know, if we go to a different form of electronic voting or something, maybe there's some advice that could be gained on how to integrate that with the town
in terms of like town meeting process. But that's, you know, that's what I would say on that. Speaker 8: I mean, so from, from your perspective, like do you, I mean, Well, I don't know. I guess I'll see, I'll hear what other people have to say. I just, I guess based on, you know, based on that it, and based on the fact that, you know, it, it's, it's hard for me to understand sort of what the, what the purpose is of continuing to have a, a, a standing committee like this. I mean, if we had an individual thing where it was like, oh, we're adopting this new thing and we need, you know, an ad hoc committee
or a working group or something. Like, we could create that. But I don't know. I mean, I'd I'd love to hear the other, the, the arguments for it though. I mean that's, that's what I'm not really hearing though. So I mean, know maybe, maybe that will come up in the discussion. Speaker 1: Mr. Evans, Speaker 4: I'm, I'll just briefly note, I did do a very brief search and it looks like there are other communities that do have something similar. I'm I just a quick search, Belmont Pepper, you know, there are communities that do have information systems technology committees or, or advisory boards of So Type I I, neither of those are really comparable to Natick and their sale size or, or, or scale.
But it's just something to note. Sorry for, for interrupting. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Erickson. Mr. Evans, Speaker 2: Just very quickly, it, it seems to me that that, given that we made this change at town meeting, and we're not sure at this point whether we need a information systems advisory board, but we have people on the cable advisory board and on the information systems advisory board. What we could do is just do that merger,
go for that merger and then in a future meeting decide, hey, this, this really isn't necessary. Let's change the remit to this of this to be more. And we don't know, we haven't heard, we've, we've heard secondhand about the IT director's need. I'd like to hear what his opinion is on the value added by an information systems advisory board. I, I would con, I would probably lean towards what Mr. Erickson described.
They have plenty of people who understand the technology. They talk with consultants, for example, on security, IT security. I'm not seeing the real need long term, but short term, maybe we should just have this merger take place and then we redefine it in the future date. Speaker 1: Mr. Gillenwater, Speaker 21: Good evening. Todd Gillenwater, one of the members of both of the information systems advisory board and Cable Advisory board. I'm not trying to abdicate for continuation one way or the other. And I briefly spoke
with the deputy town administrator this afternoon. Just a little historical context and just a little bit of, I guess information. The board as it's currently comprised in includes world class experts in some of these fields. We have a person who has been a long-term member who's international security firm, has done the penetration testing for the town. We have expertise in, you know, the, the, the things that you were mentioning of that, you know,
we have professionals on staff who stay up to date and current and in some cases are groundbreaking thinking on these sorts of things. A lot of the members of the information systems advisory board are some of those people. So there, there is, in, in some way you can look at it, is there's some free consulting that over the years this, the board has really lent to the town. And, you know, we're still current, we still, you know, participate and ha have, you know,
some fairly broad expertise and if the town wants to avail themselves of that, I mean we're free consultants and have been over the years. The other issue of how do you discuss things like security in an open forum, we have the ability to do executive sessions and in the past we have, we might not have a formal policy that has it written up on how we, you know, vote to go into executive session. But that, you know, that's, if that's required, that can certainly be done. But we just sort of follow the example
that this board does. So, sorry, the, the interest in the ISAB is one thing. If anything, the cable advisory board is even more straightforward over the years. The public input to that has essentially disappeared. And it is really the function of that is the negotiation of the three cable franchise licenses in town. Verizon's coming up fairly soon and there's probably time to start engaging in a specialty
council and start negotiations on that because they last contract cycle, they wanted a five year revisiting point, which is shorter than any of the other ones. So they're coming back around. But that, that's really, that can also be handled, you know, by sitting down in a, in a, a meeting with, you know, town administration and things like that. And, you know, it doesn't necessarily have to be a formal board, but you know, there's some expertise and there's some specialty council involved.
And I know I've been before this group before and you know, when table franchises and the licenses have come up before for your, your group to renew, you know, either the former chair or the current chair or I have gotten up and just giving you the thumbnail sketch of what the contracts are. But it's, once again, it's, you're the licensing authority and do you need, do you need input from people who have done the existing contracts and know the process
and all that or do you feel comfortable doing it in house? And that's, that's another option is is do you want do it in house with, you know, us sort of being available to take a call or have a meeting or something like that. So there, there, there are util there is utility to each of the boards, but it's a, it's certainly something that could be either re replaced or reproduced by town staff and town resources. It's just the trade off of a group of professionals
who are willing to, you know, give free consulting or you can bring it in house and you know, there's, there's, it's not magic. You, there's certainly enough, you know, there's enough brain power in house. It's just, it's a time issue. So if you want to pick that up, I mean that's certainly a, certainly a consideration and you should, you know, give serious thought to that. But we, we continue to be, you know, available, interested in willing to contribute. However, you know, the town wants to avail itself of the resource.
Thank you Speaker 1: Mr. Gillum. Water. I have a question for you. I wanted to wait till you got far enough away from the mic. There you go. It actually just hit me. So this, this without the cable advisory committee, we hire outside, we hire outside counsel. Yes. The town administrator negotiated the last contracts. He's in the room when you guys are discussing the contracts, hasn't, did you negotiate the Verizon one? Speaker 4: Yes, I was on the team with Todd and Hank Retter to negotiate the last three. Verizon, Comcast, and RCN. Verizon is coming up in March 20, 28.
And then five years later will be the other two. 'cause Verizon, as Todd mentioned, wanted only a Speaker 21: Five year. Yeah, they're, they're, they're, they might be a year outta sync. They Speaker 4: They could be. Yeah. Yeah. It's roughly five years later. Speaker 21: It's, they're they're further out. Speaker 1: Yep. Is it your recommendation to this board that we maintain two separate committee? Two separate committees? Speaker 21: No, no, certainly not. I mean, there's the, Speaker 1: So they could be merged and then the, Speaker 21: They, they could be merged. You could, you could remove the function of one of 'em. You could bring the expert, the, the workload
or the advice load. You could bring it all in-house. I mean it's, Speaker 1: I'm looking for your expert opinion. I know the range of options. I'm looking for your expert opinion. Speaker 21: I think I, I think probably the cable advisory boards, contract negotiation and contract reviews and legal thing that might be a little bit more transferable to in-house counsel and in-house negotiation and Jamie and John Marshall and all of that with some backup in assistance with people from his, with the historical knowledge,
the I-S-A-B-I, it's, it's really you, you've got a pool of consultants and either you, you want a room full of TE geeks kicking around ideas and having discussions on how we might be able to, you know, make improvements or, you know, just came back from a conference. And I have the following observations to make those sorts of things. But it, it's Dennis, Dennis runs a great job. Dennis has expert expertise in everything that he needs to have expertise in, including hiring other people
that have expertise in the gaps that he doesn't understood. You can, you can run the town very, very well. It's just do you want to avail yourself of the additional resource. So Speaker 4: If I may, maybe it's worth having Dennis also provide some insight. He, he is on vacation this week, so I wasn't able to get him to, to be available for this discussion. I had talked with him several months ago, just about general things with the IT and information systems when this was coming before the town meeting, Speaker 21: Certainly on the town side when it, when there was a, a brighter division between the town and the schools.
The, the town, the municipal side was so chronically underfunded. In some ways it still is, but so resource poor there, there was some real utility and having, you know, five tech experts available to Bob. That was, I would agree now that the structure has changed and the resources are at a different scale, there's still utility in that, but it's not necessarily, it's not necessary to get through day-to-day operations like it was before. Speaker 1: Okay. I appreciate
Speaker 4: That. Yeah. The reforms we made, I would argue to the IT department have drastically improved the overall situation for the town. IT Speaker 21: Absolutely, and, and, and it's, and changes we, we've been at that, the information system advisory board had been advising be made for quite a long time. So Speaker 1: I appreciate that. Thank you. Sure. Mr. Sidney, Speaker 27: If, if I were still on the board, I would be advocating for the merged board because so many of the members are the same and it's a little easier to, for the board to manage the advisory process if it's one
advisory board, that would be my advocacy where I still on the board, I think that there's probably some utility in having an ISAB process. It's completely up to you. There are advisory boards to you as the board and you can keep both boards, you can merge them, you can decommission one or the other. Understood. Speaker 1: We have, we mastered the options. I'm looking to the board now as to whether you wanna take any action tonight. Do you wanna postpone this? Oh, Ms. Ms. Slager then Mr. Evans. Speaker 9: So I, I think you raised some good issues about needing
to hear Dennis and I, I would vote to postpone this for now. I don't think there's any hurry. There's, I have a number of questions about this that I'm not gonna ask tonight in the interest of time, but I don't think that we are under the gun to do this right now. Nope. So Speaker 1: You certainly aren't. In fact, I would've kicked this to a future, but we had people who've been sitting here all night, I would've kicked this to a future at, at 10 o'clock or 10 till 10. So I agree with you. Speaker 2: What's a good target or you have a better idea of what the,
Speaker 1: I'll look at the agendas. Yeah. Probably September. Speaker 4: Yeah. I also want to talk to Dennis to see when he, his availability might be, well Speaker 1: I'm thinking months out. Speaker 4: I know. I, I would say the, the only pressing potential item, but we're gonna be starting anyway. This work is, as Todd mentioned, there is the Verizon contract in March, 2028. But those take a while to do. Yeah. So we're starting even our tile log now. But whether our intent is, regardless of whether there's a, our intent, meaning I've talked to John Marshall about this a bit internally, is whether
or not there's a cable advisory committee available, we would pull in Yeah, Todd and probably Hank and definitely Randy from Pegasus to help us do that. Anyway, we used that a similar model when we were negotiating cannabis. We didn't have a formal cannabis committee. Right. But we negotiated host community agreements and it was more a direction from the select board to have town administration put together a group that could help advise the negotiations of those, of those essentially contracts. They were host community agreements. And in that case, I pulled in like
my Kiki from the board, James Freeze from CED and I think that was it actually it was a group of three of us. So we brought in the people that had some expertise into that group. That way we didn't have to post meetings, we had to keep minutes. We still reported back to the board. Ultimately it's your contract to approve. So that's, we, we did for the, for the host, I had experienced negotiated host community agreements. So did my Kiki. Like we, we had that experience and I would, I would expect to do the same thing here, even if there was no advisory board, because I think it's something that every five, 10 years, let's pull the experts, let's get them together.
The benefit of the board is, it's, it's sort of a set group. The other side of the board is they're, they're minutes. They're posted meetings. If you have a quorum, there's, I also feel it's fairly sporadic, but it's, it's all Speaker 1: I was gonna say. It's just less nimble as opposed to Yeah. Less opposed to wanting to be less transparent. It's just more nimble. Speaker 4: Exactly. Yep. Okay. And at the end of the day, the contract comes to you. Speaker 1: Alright, I'll move this to September or at a date at which we can meet with, with Dennis. Let's move to the consent agenda if I could, Speaker 9: Sorry. Yes. I just add one thing. I think that before we meet again on this, I think
that the select board should really familiarize ourselves with what the charge of these committees is to really understand what is it that we wanna get out of it and understand that, because I think that we might wanna make some changes to that Absolutely. As well. So that I that homework for all of us. Speaker 1: Absolutely. You're you're absolutely right. And also discussions with the chairs about whether they actually do all of the charge getting input from the chairs about what, what the charge should be, what it looks like. I I I agree Madam Clerk. Speaker 10: Yes. The consent agenda reads
appro a approved meeting minutes for June 24th, 2026 B. Approve request to occupy a public way back to events. Ride on Mrs. V Katie Voer lith by garden dedication July 20th, 2026 C approved JXCS Natick Corp. DBA Saru application for new 2026 common Vehiculars license item D approved JXCS Natick Corp. DBA Saru application for a new 2026 live entertainment license.
Item E approved JXCS Natick Corp. DBA Saru license application for new 2026 non-live entertainment license. Item F approve request to occupy a public way and request to bag parking meters for NA Knights. The rain dates are July 16th, 2026 or the dates are July 16th, 2026. And the rain date is July 23rd. August 6th, 2026. And the rain date is August 13th, 2026. G, approve and sign. September 1st, 2026.
Annual state primary election warrant. And I Anyone wanna pull anything off the consent agenda? I move to approve items A through G. Second Speaker 1: Move by Ms. Pope. Second by Ms. Slager. All in favor? Roll call vote. Mr. Evans? Yes. Ms. Wolger? Yes. Mr. Cody? Yes. Ms. Pope? Yes. And I'm a yes. 5 0 0 town administrator Updates? Nope. Thank you. Select select board updates. Nope. Speaker 10: I'll be at the Farmer's Market on Saturday morning Speaker 1: And thank you for doing that.
Move to adjourn. Yeah, I'd love a move for that. 9:00 PM adjournment. Got a move. Motion for motion to adjourn by Bruce second above. Linda. Roll call vote. Mr. Evans? Yep. Mr. Bush Logger? Yes. Mr. Jacobs? Yes. Ms. Pope. I mean, yes, we were adjourned at 10:22 PM which is.