so we'll call this uh this meeting of the capital planning committee into order at 305 and um I don't have the minutes from the last meeting oh yeah I have them I sent
them to you I think I oh I didn't check I I can print them out okay you can go ahead um in our first our first presenter today is going to be Cindy Courier from the Council on Aging hi
there Cindy hello let's you've got uh two things here so let's let's get started um you you've got a car and a home correct okay the
Necessities so would you like to uh get started so the first item I had requested was uh to build a new Senior Center we are currently as you know in rented space and we are already
outgrowing the space that we're in so we were in the Newber Elementary School in a classroom having to use outside locations to put on some of our programs we moved here to kentway I'm still using outside locations to put on
some of our programs for example we use the Fieldhouse at the Central Street playing fields for exercise classes we were using petah hall for events up until recently um that's become an issue for us so now I'm uh
looking elsewhere so we have an event in March that's going to be held here at kentway my problem is I have to limit the number of people I can host at that event because of space constraints so we're looking for a new
home okay this is going to be more than what we're going to be undertaking at one meeting yep uh what we're looking for what we will be looking for from the capitol planning committee is uh a few
things one that the type and size of space you're looking for two the current cost of what your budget is for space in the in this year and we should
be able to get that from um from the administrator so that we can look at what a break even budget would look like for a new space over a
period of time that uh that that space would be usable okay and so that it's going to take some time to get that done but we we get started on that and it should be a uh a pretty
straightforward piece and then then we would uh flush that out make a plan however that works out and then that would go before the voters um because that would be a a pretty extensive U
project make sense sense any questions any comments not yet okay so you would like us to submit the the space requirements that we have developed to the capital planning committee that's
correct and do you want that in total square footage or in IND idual Space by space you know however you have it the more information we get the easier it's going to be to U formulate something to
go forward with and and this is a dialogue so we can go back and forth with this uh offline before we bring it back to one of the capital planning committees meetings sounds good well we can
certainly uh share with you what we have created so far and uh and as you said it's an ongoing dialogue so we expect both with the the voters in Newbery and the capital planning and select board to
have a continuing conversation what what is the term of the the lease for the space downstairs believe 2027 it ends on May 14th of 2027 ideally we'd be in a new space by then
but the ideal and New Politics rarely go together right what have you been smoking I said rarely yeah yeah okay all right so uh let's
just uh say that we'll take the rest of this project offline we'll get a lot of information um we'll work up something so that we have uh when we come back to Capital planning the next time we've got
some more definitive information to go um and then Cindy your next ask is for a vehicle whether it be like a a sedan or a small kind of crossover
vehicle um we have our van 14 passenger van it is wheelchair accessible we use that every week it's awesome people love it we're able to get people shopping to different events um right now we're helping someone who is uh wheelchair
bound and we get this person to and from medical appointments it's been really wonderful they've been spending a ton of money trying to get this person to and from appoint ments um and we have this vehicle and they connected with us and we've been able to do that that's all well and good occasionally we have
someone who might need a local medical appointment um it might contradict the time that we have the van scheduled for something else our our thought was to have my thought was to have another vehicle accessible that the COA staff
could operate none of us are um have the training for the van um I don't think there's a huge interest for any of the staff here outside of the van driver to drive that vehicle um but it would give us another opportunity to help people
get where they need to go locally also I will tell you sometimes people are calling us sort of in a pinch um I need to get to my doctor's appointment tomorrow and I don't have anywhere to go I don't have anyone to help me um we do use the neat program which is a
volunteer program in the marac valley I want to say there's 13 towns cities and towns that are involved in that that's a again it's a volunteer driving program it takes time so you have to list your ride a volunteer has to pick up the ride
and then hope hopefully they follow through with it so having another vehicle here would be helpful to get people sort of on a a one-on-one basis where they need to go whether it's in an emergency
type situation where they don't you know all of a sudden they don't have a ride or we could certainly plan it out that one of the staff members can be driving someone to a medical appointment or if they need to go to the post office or go to their lawyers off whatever whatever the errand might be and and would this be also a support
vehicle should you or your staff need to run errands uh we use our own vehicles for that but if that's something that would be allowed we could certainly instead of um mileage reimbursement with our own Vehicles we could use that vehicle
certainly and are you looking for new or used whatever you're willing to do well what I what I'm thinking is uh I I'm was wondering if there might be any other or any vehicle that might come
Surplus that might be um acceptable for this kind of uh work um so the only vehicles that we typically Surplus are Cruisers um the
next Cruiser that's up is next year and that will be surplused to shellfish Constable so it would be two years out okay well we do that yep so we don't have one available for two years okay but I also just ask um yeah are those
Cruisers SUVs because I would say to you that that might be a challenge for some of our folks yes yes they are now would the SUV be a challenge I'm thinking yeah some of them can't get uh into that's why I was thinking more of a sedan or a crossover would be a little bit lower to
the ground easier for some of our folks to get in and out of the um well that's a it's a a great point and looking at picking up something that would be um a small SUV
that somebody could literally sit down into would be like I've got a Chevy bolt now that that would work that really well
um and let me ask are you a gas or electric so the only thing I'm thinking of is for an electric vehicle where I would need to there's no charging stations here uh we would just need to you know have the vehicle y we just
installed one at the library and at manter field so those are the two closest probably to this location okay so would the councel and aan ever pay for just pay for cab fair for somebody that needs so we do have a um a fund so
the new report chocolate tour every year donates money to the Council on Aging for transportation so we do have a fund for that um and we use that if the van is not available and there's no neat driver available um so we do use that as
well so if would that be available into offset some of the cost of a vehicle yes okay thank you that okay any other qu any questions from Richard any
questions um I say you put a priority three is that what's what's what's the real priority it's not it's not urgent it's certainly not urgent no okay that's it Damon um it's not a high priority but
it's also not a high cost item so I think the priority may want to be slightly it's not urgent but it's not expensive so it may want to move up a little bit because it could be taken care of in a standard budget without uh
raising taxes so but that's just my opinion of the matter yeah it well it's a cap it's a capital expenditure and so we would we would code it as a capital expenditure um and that would be a little different than operating budget
even though there would be some cost an operating cost for it yeah okay Joe any questions I have no questions thanks Joe Nick no questions okay thank
you Cindy thank you very much have a great day everybody thank you and now Jonathan we'll have Jonathan with us talk about updating the website
[Music] all right come sit [Music] down all right perfect okay so we have
okay talk to us about website and where we're going so uh the website on Project number it 2026 St to currently the town of new's websites are uh pretty distributed across multiple
surfaces there is a website for the fire department the police department the municipal offices the historical committee and the uh public education government TV service oh wow as as well as
a I we could call it a website it's more of a thirdparty vendor tool that the recreation committee uses as well we have many such tools uh all of them are disparate so they come from different vendors with different support paths and
different management challenges as a result the end users have a lot of difficulty in determining where it service can be had when it service is needed um in addition to no
real budgetary and technical analysis tools available to determine if what's been purchased under those packages are either meeting the need or exceeding the need of the specific user um in addition
to this it's a very um loose arrangement of cyber security controls there's a lot of room Improvement as well as cyber security concerns for maintaining protecting and
preventing acts of web vandalism whereby an incer would replace a normal website with materials otherwise inappropriate or of a political nature or of pretty much anything you feel like putting there um that's a pretty common form of
attack there are others um so this is a set of vulnerabilities as well as some uh budgetary planning and managerial issues when it comes to the change of staff and the change of board
members um on top of all of these challenges we also have a deadline in April 2027 for uh Ada act compliance due to a Supreme Court decision in 2024 mid
2024 I believe def finding Town websites as equivalent to town municipal buildings or notice boards whereby they must be made accessible under the ter the AI um ADA compliance
on websites is a challenge all of its because of the nature of websites they were not originally designed in their first version um back in web 1.0 and that design lack persists to this
day where ad of compliance is achieved through third party products that are plugged into a website to ensure that nothing that's uploaded puts the website back out of compliance that's a major challenge that can so could could you
tell me what an Eda compliant feature would be absolutely an example of anate compliant feature would be a screen magnifying tool a color changing tool a font adjustment tool all
three of these adjust the visual structure of the website so that someone with vision challenges or a processing challenge such as dyslexia or dumaria is able to adjust the form structure and layout of the website so that it's
easier to visually process or comprehend or change the font between sarif and Sans sarif's types that's a common issue with people suffering from dys naria or dyslexia and and that happens at
their at their port or their their computer not to an extent with um technology packages that are available to the person accessing the website those tools are available on their own
but it doesn't meet compliance requirements a a example of compliance tools that would meet the requirements are tools that are hosted on our website and a common example uh would be an ADA
plugin these appear on vendor websites on Municipal websites and other areas as an outline of a blue human being in a white circle hovering a mouse clicker or other form of tool indicator over that we'll reveal a popup menu with many
different adjustments tools that product is provided by the website so this would exist on our website we posted the changes it makes are plugged into our website but they occur only for the individual accessing them it also allows
some special settings to be saved and Associated to that person's device so that when they find the right set of adjustments that work best for them they don't have to generate those again so and that would be resident on their
device or okay so the settings become resident on their device typically through what's called a cookie cash or local file okay uh the actual tool which has more access to the back end of the website and one that would exist
exclusively on a users device and also doesn't require that user to go and say purchase an adaptive technology on your own the tool actually resides on our website you could describe this in physical terms as the
difference between adding an access ramp for wheelchair accessibility to the front of the building that would be the the tool hosted on our website versus a person buying a wheelchair capable of climbing stairs that would be an example of an adaptive technology owned and
running on their device got it okay how long would it take one two would you basically take all of the
information sounds like a big job taking all of the information and and incorporating it into one website that the service all of the people who have websites
now effectively there are some details that we're working out with regard to the police department and the terms of the criminals uh Information Systems Justice act I'm maybe misquoting the name there there are regulatory terms
associated with that about access security those types of details that may require us to operate two websites so we're determining that now in addition to that um regardless of whether we can
create a complete website with all services in one location or we need to operate in parallel sites to satisfy the terms of the cious uh regulations it is generally a six-month project from the
point of signature meaning that when a vendor is selected to provide the product the start of work would begin that moment and the completion would be delivery which would be the town websites websit websites swap over to
the new one about six months after that this does not include the procurement phase which it has already started to find elements of budgeting to better ID where and what costs there are what vendors are available what the current
industry practices are so so you would hire some outside firm to create the new website and Port everything over is that correct you wouldn't do that within house no well in practice today with the scope and depth of just this Town
Municipal website alone it is a database with a database back end we post uh a fairly significant amount of data as these things are measured but not in the context of a website there are certainly much larger websites a greater amounts of data but it's still a pretty heavy
data we've got mostly in the form of Records I mean it's agendas forms documents permit systems and plugins into payment portals uh where they app fly uh so the industry standard in this
case both at the commercial level and at the uh Municipal level is to generally bring in a third party firm this accomplishes multiple it best practices in that we don't have the data of the website
physically in the building which keeps it from being vulnerable to a major disaster such CL Etc we also Outsource is the wrong term and more would be offshore because the data would
be hosted in the US this wouldn't be the nation physically um in doing so a third party vendor has their own security team that's much larger than ours I'm the individual in this that would be John they have full team that provides much
more active security measures and countermeasures along with a suite of tools intended to help cope with some of the cyber security and cyber activism that's been seen over the years such as distributed denial of service attacks
that take websites offline cyber squatting cyber vandalism which I described earlier where someone faces a website with their material of choice it makes our website more uh resilient resistant and better able to not be
impacted by these so we don't have a disruption of service to the residents how much traffic does our does the town website get now so it tends to vary um it depends on your measure if we
measure strictly on hits we get something to the tune of 12,000 hits a month that's not a great measure it's fairly imprecise because hits are simply measured as unique accesses unique
sessions and that can be Bots that can be programs that can be AP I calls depending on how that is done interact um application programmatic interface is a it's a technology term
for a website tool interacting with another website at the server level at a programmatic level rather than opening up a web page displaying content what you would consider a normal access session it's a more efficient method of
transferring data depending on how those tools are used though they can register as a website hit um do you have any measure of how many of those hits are real people sitting there with a
mouse the closest we can tell being active sessions meaning more than one web page is accessed in a time frame that's more human for example a bot or other automation would run through the
website at approximately one click per second that's a lot faster than a person Page look around go through some menus those types of persistent access sessions where someone isn't or a robot is not simply looking at the front page
and moving on they tend to be between um 3 to 12 seconds per click between individual change and then usually up to 12 minutes on average sometimes in excess of two hours usually two hours is
more common if someone is accessing the older records older agendas minutes documents uh or the laser feat archive on average we have about I say about 1100 I would need to check
um the records but about 1100 of those per month hey Jonathan month yes sir Jonathan do we currently have any links on the main town website for the other
external websites for our services they're linked mostly at Department page level so for example the my committee I should say apologize the recreation committee's my tool that's the name of the website is linked on the recreation
committee page uh similarly the P page I believe is on the media committee page and then the new 1635 page which is the historical committee's website um until recently now currently does not have a
link it did previously we had some security issues that we needed to iron out before we could put that link back one of the problems with multiple websites spread out in this manner is that everyone that links back to the municipal service page identifies it as
associated with the town and therefore falls under the required in the Ada act right or I should say the American Disability Act rather than words sorry um that extends our liability as a
result we sit in a gray area at the moment where we have time to achieve this compliance but we do need to show that we're trying we have a small measure of attempt in that our current website is built on fonts that are known to be less difficult our website is
accessible and parsable by a screen reader though not as well as it could be and other assistive Technologies in terms of dating and generations of Technology our accessibility toolkit is Circa 2016 it
has a lot of room for improvement compared to what is currently available on similar websites at other towns got it so this um I guess is this in the capital realm
because of the cost because of the cost and the likelihood that its useful life will exceed the fiveyear mark okay our current website was in place approximately 2013 going by the oldest
database entry in it which is sort of the start of life websit um paperwork can site older than that but usually it's better to go by when first data entry is made uh or if
there's a go live date associated with it we lack the go live date the original one in the paperwork that I've come across so I'm going by the database entry where the first homepage is visible okay um
we've got about 12 years approximate of current lifespan on the current web page it's great so the request for $155,000 is that to do the whole
job so that number is actually incorrect yes uh that number I cited based on prior budgets and on initial assessment with just browsing vendor pap in common similar work I've had because we're in
procurement already I have to be careful here but we've had much higher we've had lower um I will most likely need to amend that number depending on what we land on as our final Preferred Product many of the approaches so far have
varied between each other so there's a need to identify exactly what we need out of the vendor suggestions okay when would that be updated I expect to have an update within about a month okay we have other
vendors currently working the annual town meeting we'd have an update but you don't expect installation no no no our got potential price range there is a fair bit of back and forth
communication needed the way the vendors approach these projects is they bring their best and brightest product at the highest possible cost and then it's um a little bit of communication and back and forth and what are you need and how much
does it really cost exactly because do the comparison so we're looking at the exact same products yeah some cases vendors will come along with the common product what works for most people and we may find that we have an element not
common but needed in our installation okay do you have anything else for 26 uh there was a second project um actually the the first one it 20261 that was a firing project at the
44 Central Fire Department location we've actually um resolved that need the owner of the building and their it Department were able to furnish the changes that we needed to succeed without having to extend anything or
request a project oh good well done Jonathan love those okay excellent yep okay okay that was uh the infrastructure at the fire department other questions
comments Joe do not Richard yeah I was just curious it's for the web new website it's Town Hall fire police and library is that what I heard uh no the new website would contain our initial goal for the project
is to have the municipal office's website currently town ofy.org the fire department website the police department website the historical committee's website uh so that they don't have to go through the challenges of direct
management the public education Government website believe that's all of them together I approached the library uh however they let me go they prefer to continue operating directly on their own
um website infrastructure yeah Richard they they're part of the um meramac Valley Library Consortium and they their their website operates through that Consortium correct that's my
understanding is partially is serviced by the Consortium also with support of the friends of the library so it really exists without direct uh investment by the town buget yep yep I've I've used it
yep and that's hardware and software 15 15,000 do we need any new hardware uh we don't need hardware for this one that's the other benefit of using third party vendors is they leverage their existing infrastructure to serve our need okay
and was Recreation on there as well yes I apologize Recreation committee has a tool called my it's a third party vendor tool that provides a cohesive single website environment
for intended for reservations management of those as well as Facilities Management um it's been a little challenging in their application in their practical use so we're looking to see if we can Rel that strain and
simplify management for them okay Nick any other questions not for me all right thank you thank you thanks John okay the last thing that we have to
uh well a couple of things to talk about one we have to do the rating and I have packages that I can drop off for Joe and Richard here um all I have to do is find out where
they are Joseph Boston Jose in Boston yeah well he lives around here yes he does so I just I can get the Dres yes I I'll
send them back to you yep okay and uh and then we'll we'll uh get those returned and we'll do the rating um and then we have
a uh the minutes from our last meeting where we had some uh presentations from the police department DPW and fire department all of those uh requests are here and I did email those
to Richard and Joe I don't know if you can access them so okay okay so I would um entertain a motion to
um minutes yeah so move okay and all those in favor all right I okay and to approve the minutes as submitted I entertain a motion
so move second all those in favor I okay good I think there is no further business before this body today so entertain a motion to adjourn at
3:43 well done so move second second in favor I done thank you all