we're going to call this meeting to order um and we'll do a roll call of our voting members so Damon Jesperson Cindy Courier Kathy Za John Ferrar and then if everyone else
could introduce yourself going around I'm going to start with you maria Casey Kristen Gross planning director Bob Connham [Music] thank you all for joining us today
um we'll approve the meeting minutes from the last meeting if I could have a motion for that second all right all those in favor i I I so uh I believe most of you have
gotten the matrix and so what I wanted to do is talk about the what I imagine our next steps to be so we have the the things we're going to look at
for valuing a site and how to differentiate and we have those going one through nine you know is the building size big enough or could it could it have a building the size that we want does it have enough
parking does it have outdoor spaces what is the street access like does it have utilities uh is it easy to find you know some people complain about not being able to get to 12K way because it's off the
beaten path does it have the option for sewer or septic does it have proximity to the other town functions and needs and the cost so those are the things that we have identified as
being distinctly important in a site um I'm going to open it to the members first to say if there's anything that you guys want to add or change in how we put the matrix together and uh since we have a lot of guests is
there any comment from anyone else attending about the matrix or what is on it i I I think it's well done i think you've covered all the bullet points and and it's a good starting point to to look at a project you know site
selection obviously becomes the most important uh and and and then looking at it newbury has a habit of operating in a silo we always look at a fire station independently a town hall independently
council on aging independently the library independently do we I think you've done a great job of laying out the basics what would be the ask for a council on aging project now the location can and you've covered it
can you piggyback this with an existing facility uh which which is always optimum or you have a town hall need i guess there's questions on the condition of the fire station on more going to have
uh and then you have COA meets so we look at a little more globally across the town and say if in fact we need a fire station and and I'm not saying that you know I I'm in agreement with that one way or the other i haven't looked at
it you cannot renovate a fire station still operate out of it and I would think that moving the fire station or considering relocating the fire station to somewhere around Route One at the handover route one
intersection doesn't change the response time to Plum Island and it actually improves the response time to other parts of the town that being said that then frees up the fire station site and
the old town hall site where you could look at a combined town hall uh COA which has a lot of efforts mhm share meeting rooms share you stairways elevators you have great utilization
where you can your 10,000 square ft uh when you when you take out everything you need for a building uh and you can share space it could be 6,000 ft you know town hall's 10,000 ft does an additional 6,000 ft cover
your actual operational needs cuz your bathroom facilities your meeting your meeting rooms and all your infrastructure and MVP and HBAC is already covered in the rather than independently having a new elevator at a COA a new elevator at the fire station a
new elevator at potential town hall but I think you've established the need in the ask for size yeah so the next step is and you've already looked at all the sites
which it just brings back memories when we're looking at a town hall and you look at everything you already own y what can you piggy back off of it uh and then ultimately do you want to put a critical facility in a location that doesn't have both municipal water or
municipal sewer you can a fire station of all things is probably the one where municipal water is is is is you know certainly required but at such a low occupancy where you only have two or three people in the building during the
course of a day it would be of all the lesser equals that would be the one where you could have a septic system and it wouldn't be I mean I'm just wouldn't be a problem yeah sharing my my humble thoughts and
but I I defer to our resident expert and all this stuff Eric i don't know how I stepped in so many years ago but it is bringing back memories and a lot of what Bob said is what I was going to say in terms of the the process last time was everybody
had a horse that was running a different race in a different direction it was hard to corral everyone back and even even through the presentation which I think we had a great presentation on that October 30th at the library in which we had the planning board we had
the select board um and we had the um myself with the public safety site selection committee all in the room and it seemed like people that weren't agreeing or talking to each other were having some common path forward and that still fall apart from there
so doing your homework and proving your point I think is a necessary part for then for for making the pitch and thinking about what the next step is certainly can add um experiences such as Bob's to to adding color or the bigger
picture thought um a combined facility is more money and so hence that that is a harder sell for some um but there is great economy i don't think people were listening last time um operational costs also get added to the
savings um and I was thinking of this list of of something that was like a 1B of uh existing or new in terms of um putting some weight to
that um and that sort of comes in the building size and also comes in the cost and then other other things would be and you have it under eight probably proximity to other functions would be synergies like what are what are the greatest positives about the site
and then if there's some way that the other part of this about choosing by advantage is that somehow uh several of these might get weighted above the others well that is the the next thing that I wanted to talk about was waiting
so the way that I wanted to score these things is to use a 1 through seven scale because I think that is the the most clear because it's not so big that you don't know where you're going to fall on anything but it's not so tight that
everything ends up scoring the same way so what I was going to ask the members to do after this meeting is give each of the locations that we have been presented with and asked to look at a a score seven being the best one being the
worst but what I want to discuss now is the if there's a multiple for any of the the items you know is having a big enough lot the most important thing and so it gets a multiple of 1.5 so if it's
a big lot it gets a in its final score if you gave it a seven it would get a a 10.5 um and you know I have a hard time breaking that out as far as
uh what the most important things are there are some things that if they don't have it you know if it's not big enough and it doesn't have any parking it probably won't work as a site you know but I don't think those I'm not sure what the multiples
need and so I was hoping to get more of that from Cindy and Kathy because you guys are the people who are working dayto-day in the building and working with the people so you know what is the the most
important things and or to you the least important things you know is it is being able to see it from the street not that important because eventually everyone who comes here comes here a lot and they'll know where it is and to me you can put a sign at the end of the street right so that's not to me building size
case in point is today we were just scrambling because we have constituent services who wanted private space to meet i have someone in the consult room we have a hearing clinic going on another room we had these meetings going on in this room my we are crunched for space we can't put any more than two
programs on at a time and when that happens the program in here has to be small our knitting group has already grown out of this room our maong group has grown out of this room drawing and uh watercolor classes used to fit in here but that seems to have exploded right now in terms of instructors not
being available so um it's difficult for me us to schedule programs in the limited space that we have it is a zillion times better than where we were in the school we had one little tiny room we could put on one program and it
had to be small um as it is I I also have uh stretch class on Mondays at the fieldhouse i have tai chi at the fieldhouse we have yoga at the fieldhouse we also have yoga at the library we're all over the place instead of in our own house because we can't fit
everything so to me I would say building size is top that's also why I put it in the top of my matrix that I made um because without having the space it's great to have a zillion parking spots but if you don't have the building to
house the programs why do you need all that parking however if you have a goodiz building you need the parking it's there's a lot of I don't know what your thoughts are i I agree size of the space is is key for us um because that has a lot to do with
what we can plan we cannot plan so for us I think it's huge huge can I ask a question when you move from your place on handover street to here what was the increase in traffic every day coming in obviously it's just judging by when I
come over here for other things that's pretty much full it is way bigger i do think being connected to town hall has helped us it has you know it's brought people in but is it a 50% increase in attendance i pick way more over there
people didn't even want to drive there the parking was really atrocious but the size of the room that that room included our offices and everything so we really didn't have any place to do much i mean we we did a bingo 10 people
so the more programs you can put on you're going to have more attendance because everyone's attracted to a certain Right man I'm not going to the knitting crochet class with with Eric but the cribage the cribage turn right it's above your pay grade yeah no that's
true that's But there's a lot of people so we do um pickle ball at the basketball courts outside that draws a ton of people in the summer they do nothing here they don't do anything else here so you need a pickle ball for that
part of the outdoor space it would be nice but um fantastic but there's there are things that we offer that certain people come to that other people wouldn't dream of coming to but the more space we have the more things we can offer the more educational programs it would be nice to be able to have the
knitting group and something else you know two or three things going on at the same time so that there's choices for people in town does size and proximity make this a hard sell a hard harder design i mean you think about it if you want size and
proximity proximity to I mean you just spoke that you the enhanced number of visitors as people come in to meet with Gretchen or Diane they stop in and that proximity aspect in a larger space proximity might cost you size it
might yeah well that was going to be actually my next question because we had talked extensively in building out the needs list about sharing uh proximity and how important that was so in thinking about it would you
weight size over proximity would you weight them the same do they I would weight size over proximity okay i would weight them the same we the same because if we have the size and not near anything and a lot of people are coming
up and down you know here they go to the town hall and they're like "Oh what's in there let me go and see this let me go see the COA." Um I don't know i think they're both they're both important it also brings in younger people to That's true they go into town hall pay their taxes they're
going to go you know do this they're like "Oh doesn't look so bad there i'll go in." Yeah but my thing is I feel like we've done a lot of work to build the program and the name for who we are and what we do and we're not just food stamps and bingo that more people tend
to come to programs that we offer so I feel like we've um made a name for ourselves that maybe the proximity the proximity doesn't matter as it it matters it matters i
don't think us in a standalone building somewhere by ourselves is is good but um I don't think it matters as much as having the space to put on the program cindy when people come we have a program
that you can work at town hall if you're a certain age see your property tax yeah and what's the matrix on that is it uh $10 an hour to 100 hours or I believe it's minimum wage is $15 an hour and right now it's 133 and a3 hours so you
get a $2,000 taxation oh okay yeah and that's off you go is that a tax credit off your bill or Oh that's huge so when we're on the conservation commission and ZBA we could be applying that towards I don't know if boards
actually counts for that i don't think you're bored in the house with that but um do you get a lot of that though we I have I think right now 14 so you have someone that come here and they may play bow or privilege during the day and then go upstairs for a couple hours and knock
off a couple hours so I have the person who's in our consult room right now we every program that we have we take attendance that has to be inputed into a database system he is a property tax volunteer right now who's inputting all of my attendance sheets into the
database program so that I have numbers i have to provide reports to say the executive office of elder affairs things like that people ask for numbers we have to have um I keep track of that so he's doing that right now he doesn't
come to any other programs but he's interested in the property tax i have people who are receptionists at the front desk they attend programs but they'll also be the receptionist at the front desk for several hours a week that comes up they build that off