Select Board: July 24, 2024

Transcript captured from MHTV’s Vimeo auto-captioning. No speaker labels; proper names and dollar figures occasionally misheard. Click any timecode to jump to that moment in the source video.

0:06 Otherwise, raise your hand if you’re online and would like to make a public comment. And Kyle will let me know.

0:15 I don’t see any hands online. Madam Chair. Okay. So seeing no, um, public comment, we’ll, uh, proceed to our, uh, Thatcher Keysers Town Administrator update. Uh, thank you Madam Chair. I have, uh, put in the book in tab two, uh, an update of some projects and other activities, uh, to summarize one, uh, review our harbor improvement projects that we have ongoing. So we’ve finished a phase on, on one component of the harbor, the Harbor plan, and we’re, um, um, initiating a second phase by seeking grant money. So the, the phase that we’ve, we’ve gone through currently is the Parker’s boat, yard, Hammond Park,

1:01 cliff Street, boatyard area. Um, oh, you Need to turn your microwave though. Oh, okay. Now I’m on. Um, so the, the Parker’s Boatyard Hammond Park and Cliff Street Boatyard area, I just wanna highlight. So over the last four years, we’ve, uh, uh, received $898,678,000 in grants in order to do the projects, which primarily are, um, design permitting, which has been completed. Um, and, uh, some improvements in the area of, for example, cliff Street. Um, one of the major components built into the whole harbor plant

1:48 was to improve accessibility to the waterfront. So on Cliff Street, there was a lot of hammering of granite and such, which the hammering caused some noise, and the fact that we were hammering caused some noise. Uh, but the end result is, um, a, an a DA accessible sidewalk in that area, uh, leading down to the waterfront. There’s, there’s more work to be done on the sidewalk. Common streets levels are gonna be adjusted, so the sidewalks will be blended in. But anyways, um, we’ve made, uh, improvements in that area. Plus we have the permitting and the plans, uh, in order to raise the sea walls in that area. Uh, and they’re, they’re designed to meet 2030

2:37 and 2050 expected sea levels and have the ability to expand to meet 2070 sea levels. So, um, a good project. Um, we are initiating another phase of project, which is the State Street Landing and Harbor Masters Tucker’s Wharf Resilience Project, um, for that area. So we’ve put in, we expect, um, a project request of $239,718 to similarly come up with concept designs, cost estimates, uh, and so forth. Um, of that money, 210,502 is what we’re, uh, requesting for the grant.

3:22 And the town will match 29,216, mostly through, um, uh, employee time. So it’ll be an in-kind, uh, match to that. So, um, lots of work, um, by a lot of folks. We are looking to schedule a Harbor Implementation Committee meeting, uh, as I put in here. Uh, that is a very diverse group of folks that are on that committee to sort of have a broad view of the project. The challenge with having a diverse group is trying to get everybody’s calendars to blend Mm-Hmm. To be available, uh, to meet. So we’re working our way through that. Um, so big projects for Marblehead next, uh,

4:08 on another project, front Red’s pond improvements. So we do have, we have pair corporation engineering firm on contract. Uh, they are doing the design, um, and permitting, uh, for that improvements in that project. So it’ll prove the, the, the walkway around the pond, the walls of the pond, and the water quality of the pond. Interesting. Uh, that’s the effort. So, um, the scope of the work, uh, on this contract is $87,500, and that’s being covered by ARPA funding as well as a state earmark that, uh, representative of armini secured for the town. So that works ongoing.

4:53 There’s particular interests in the neighborhood of folks who, uh, neighbors who are interested in helping in some form or fashion being part of it. So we are actually engaging with some of the residents to, to be involved in this project. So, Adam, pure, if I could ask out curiosity, uh, how, how, what, how we, how do we treat the water, um, and how can they kind of maintain that consistently year from year? It’s, uh, Yeah. I mean, I’m not sure what it Seems to grow algae. I don’t know whether you have Oh, yes. Insight into that, or Is That something to be, I Have pond on my back. Yeah. I Struggle with That’s right. Uh, You know, the main factor, and again, I don’t know what the specific plan will be for this point. That’s fine. No, that’s fine. Right. That’s why Fair. You have the engineering, but Yep. Yep. Aeration. Mm-Hmm. Putting aerators in there. Okay.

5:39 Produce a lot more oxygen churning the water. Yep. Uh, among, you know, other things. Yep. Uh, and finally, um, employee updates. So we, we have a number of them. Uh, we have four vacant positions that we have recently filled. The first, uh, we have a new town planner coming in, uh, Alexander ler, um, starting August 25th. He currently works for Washington Gas in Virginia as an associate urban planner. He also has experience overseas in London and Switzerland. Um, and so he has, comes with a very interesting background. Um, looking forward to, to his start.

6:25 Um, we’ve hired a new veteran services officer, Roseanne, and I think she goes by Rose or Roz, I’m not sure. Um, it was Roseanne when, when we met and interviewed, uh, trying, uh, I’m gonna struggle with the, the last name, hyphenated name, tri Fee Mezo. She, who’s a she, how did I do? When she gets here, I’m gonna have to have her do some training for me, uh, on that. Um, comes with over 10 years experience there as a veteran services officer, currently in the, uh, Melrose Wakefield and Saga District. So she covers three towns. Um, she, she has in the past been the president

7:11 of the Mass Veteran Services Officer Officers Association. So she was very impressive. Just blew us away as far as her experience, her knowledge, and she brings in some other experiences. Her, she’s a Army veteran, um, and, and brings that, that experience too. Next we have Josh Bogle as just started this week as our new assistant treasurer collector. As you know, um, Cammy, Ian Nelli moved up from the assistant to the director. So we filled, he’s coming to us as, um, he was assistant vice president, staff accounting, corporate trust division for US Bank. And then he has a whole bunch of other impressive titles

7:58 and positions previous to that, that makes him very knowledgeable, coming in from the banking securities world, um, stepping in. And according to cam, he’s already hit the ground running, um, in that office. Um, this filling this position finally, and it’s been the two years I’ve been here, finally, fully staffs the treasurer collectors office. Amazing. And that’s been woefully understaffed for far too long with lots of turnover. And that’s a very, as we all know, a very critical function, uh, for the town. Uh, next, uh, a critical position for all of us. It may not be evident to the general public,

8:45 but we have filled our GIS position, our geographic information systems position, Ian Parley, who has graduated from Salem State with a master’s in Geoinformation Science, um, and experience in cartography, uh, and remote sensing and internships at Mass Audubon. So, um, g our GIS information System, it’s managed through the DPW and our over on sort of the engineer folks primarily, but it’s utilized by several other departments, uh, throughout the town. And one of the efforts over the last couple years, um,

9:30 previously different departments have had their own GIS systems, their own maps, and there’s been a lot of work, Amy McCue has been leading the charge to bring it all together and all the layers of data to bring ‘em into one system and to reconcile them so they all actually match up so that we can look at maps and we can look at infrastructure, we can look at the location of poles and trees and sidewalks and, and have everything accurately measured in place for any of the planning that that we do. So that’s a critical position. So those are filled. And then finally, um, our grant coordinator, an Ellie Lopez has given her notice and, um, is, is, um, leaving us,

10:18 she’s been here about four months or so. So she gave it a try. And, uh, coming from the pharmaceutical industry, it’s, it’s a different world here in the municipal world. So, uh, we’ve already posted for that position, so we’ll be taking a look at what our steps there. So that’s what I have for updates. Um, a lot of, a lot of personnel issues. Yep. Thank God we have a HR director. I, that’s what I was thinking when you were speaking, that it’s so great that we have that Position world of difference to be able to navigate these That’s A lot of interviews and vacancies filled. Yep, yep. Yep. I’ll just say that, you know, I get concerned about, um, the grant funding at risk down, um, for our CZM projects on the waterfront,

11:06 um, with our, uh, non-compliance yet to be compliance with the MVTA act. Yeah. Um, so it’s great. We’ve gotten $898,000 in grants. Um, is this something that we’re, you know, Logan has, um, our sustainability coordinator has received any information about regarding, um, you know, if we’re not into compliance Yeah. These seawall grants would be at jeopardy. Yeah. I mean, this is, They’re the first thing that was supposed, this is What we’re gonna lose. Yeah, definitely. I mean, so that would be, the town of Milton lost it right off the bat, a seawall project. So yeah. All these projects would come to a halt. Alright. Anybody Else? So what is the, yeah, what’s the runway for kind of the, the approval process at this

11:52 Point for the, for these particular projects? Um, I’m not sure what the timeline of the, the, the, the newest project. Uh, we just completed the permitting on the first Right. Part of it. I’m not sure of the timeline. I mean, it’s a couple years, I would guess. And, and, um, okay. Yeah. These are not easy. So they’re not, yeah. Yeah. They’re, they’re not secured by any means then. Right, right. No, they, they take some time. So.

12:23 Okay. Um, next, uh, on our agenda is our chair of the finance, uh, committee. Alec Goki here to just kind of give, use the time as you’d like, Alec, really just to give us an update on, um, how things are going, where you see them going. Sure. Welcome Alex. Good to see everybody. I see you. Make sure my computer’s working here. Try to share my screen.

12:55 Okay. So I’m sure You’ve all been in touch with Thatcher and Alicia, that our finance committee and the finance department is getting going with the budget planning season a little bit earlier than maybe years past in Marblehead. We had a meeting about a month ago to discuss, kinda, we’ve opened up our new year. Um, we know the budget challenges the last few years that we’ve reported at town meeting the finance director has reported you all have discussed at your meetings. Um, and we thought just getting going a little bit earlier this year would probably do a world of wonder for the whole process. Um, so I’m happy to say that Alicia’s message that went out to all department heads for the schedule and the plan for submitting initial budgets for fiscal year 26 that went out in, I think

13:43 before the end of June even. So that’s kind of three months ahead of when that message has ever gone out. But from my perspective, more importantly than just building the requests for 26, we want to see how we can support as a fin com and Alicia can, um, work within, uh, the finance department and all the other departments, a longer forecast and a more detailed for forecast than we’ve had maybe in years past. I know there was an override that went on to the, um, the warrant two years ago, and Thatcher was part of that, and I think his first three months here when he put that together. Um, but it wasn’t really an in-depth process with fin com part of that review.

14:29 Um, so I don’t know if you guys can see my screen behind me Mm-Hmm, yep. Or if I should make it bigger. Um, but kind of, I put this summary together. Oh, can you go a little bigger? Yeah, sure. So just to give you some perspective on why I’m starting where, or why we are starting where I think we should in this process and kind of walk through. So, um, as the accountant that I am, you know, I all, you all know, I like to start with numbers that tie back to things to start. Um, so the town wide budget that’s right in the FinCon report, and that was voted at town meeting, um, about 115 million. Um, for now, I’m gonna take out the enterprise budgets as those are funded by their own revenue sources. So when we’re talking about planning a long-term plan and,

15:16 and forecast, not as concerned about those. Um, and for now, I’m gonna take out debt service too, as those were previously, um, approved debt exclusion overrides. I will come back to that. ‘cause I think as this report or presentation or whatever we want to call it that shows the long to long term financial forecast comes into play, I think the, the debt service is very important in forecasting new debts and what, what’s rolling off and how that impacts taxpayers is important. But for now, I just want to take it out. So that leaves us with our town wide budget adjusted after those items, which is about 91.5 million. And then I break it down and believe me that I’ve, I’ve done the work on the lower tabs to summarize this very detailed about to say, um, but I’ve breaking it, broken it down into

16:02 four main categories. Um, and the purpose of this, and, and the percentage next to them is to show you that, you know, when you take those two big picture items, enterprise and debt out, if you look at salaries, insurance benefits, and pension, that makes up 83% of this budget that we’re trying to forecast. Right. Um, so what, what I’m thinking is, you know, just as an accountant, let’s really scrub what’s really driving the budget first. Not to say the 17% of expenses aren’t important and aren’t volatile. Mm-Hmm. But let’s focus on the big picture items first. Um, so what I’ve come up with is kind of this report I’m thinking of. It’ll probably be a report that Alicia prepares

16:48 with us supporting her, um, with a long-term financial forecast. Um, the expense categories to deeply scrub and forecast for three to five years would be the goal. Um, and rather than, you know, in years past where we’ve just said, here’s our total salaries and assume a 3% increase, like to me, the process is more important than anything to taxpayers to, to prove that we’ve really dug in report what we’ve done, and that the results are, are accurate, right? We’re not just pulling a 3% figure out of years past. We’re looking at, um, you know, every department, all of their, um, funded positions, what grade they’re currently at, how many years they have left, things like that. So I’ll get to the, the template we’ve created

17:33 to support step one here in a minute. Um, but salaries and wages is the first expense category, which I believe is a process that Alicia can go through with our support. So what I’m asking of our fin com is that we do liaison meetings to help with the review of salaries and wages very in depth, which I’ll show you the template in a minute here, um, with all of the department heads. Um, again, I’ll show the template in a minute, but insurance and benefits is another category. I think Alicia’s all over this stuff. But I just think really digging in deep, again, feeling really good about the number for the next three to five years, putting together a presentation that shows trends in the industry, where the rates are going, where economists think the rates will go, that shows

18:21 that we’ve done our diligence to say, these are our true expenses for the next three to five years. Again, rather than saying it went up by 7% last year, so let’s say 7% per year, there’s probably more you can do there. Pension I think is fairly simple for Alicia and retirement board. Um, so I don’t know how much FinCon needs to be involved in that initially. We’ll obviously review all of these, um, but Alicia in the actuaries can, can come up with what Marble head’s pension funding will probably be. And then also, you know, just as a category to explain to taxpayers the big picture on the pen pension and, and, and what we have left and what Massachusetts requirements are and, and things like that. It’s, it’s obviously a big piece of, of the forecast. Um, my other expenses, I’ve for now broken out utilities

19:08 as that’s something I know, again, Alicia is all over, but it’s something that has been going up a lot lately and, and impacts all departments, um, TBD on whether we’ll break out more other expense categories, um, open to suggestions at this time, but I’m sure we’ll discover stuff along the way. Um, but those other expenses for certain departments might be really easy to predict. Whereas I, I think about health and waste and the, the trash contract we’ve all heard about the last five years. Like that’s something that we’re gonna have to really dig in, um, and get an accurate, um, estimate as to what that is. Um, so those are the kind of five categories when we get to other expenses, that’s where I see FinCon liaisons coming back in after phase one and, and really getting this template,

19:55 I’m gonna show you in a minute, filled out for salaries, um, sitting down again with department heads and saying, Hey, like, what’s going on with these expenses for the next three to five years? Are you way underfunded every year in this like, grass seed for health or park and rec? Like, you know, is this the right number? Things like that. So, um, that’s one in five is where I think the liaisons can help over the next month or two. Um, and then I’ve added debt service here, as I alluded to a minute ago. Um, I think Alicia can do a really good job. The other towns that have presented long-term financial pictures that I’ve read their reports, it’s the interaction of, um, debt coming on, rolling off, um, and seeing how that may impact people’s tax bills if there

20:41 were an override to be presented at some point. The interaction of those two things, um, is important. And, um, I say the override situation because I think these are the first steps to figuring out if one is necessary. Um, and also I think there’s a lot of news lately about a lot of towns going for them, um, more so than in the past in Massachusetts in these last few years. Um, with respect to their revenue, I think lease is very much all over that as well. Um, there’s the categories of tax levy, new growth, state aid, local receipts, other available funds, um, good news. We have some new local receipts. And by the time this forecasting exercises complete, we’ll have at least a few months of, of data on that.

21:27 Um, so I don’t think that the revenue forecast, aside from fin com reviewing and, and kind of, um, being a part of and asking questions, we need to do liaisons with Alicia for that. Um, but I think it’s just important that we line up these expenses that I just went through with very detailed, well thought out, good assumption, even if they’re conservative assumption on the revenue forecast, um, to really see what the, uh, what the outlook looks like for the next three to five years, assuming simply that we’re getting the revenue increases that we’re currently have without any sort of override request. Um, I’ll pause there. Um, I know that’s kind of a pretty broad exercise, but I think the details will be important

22:13 and the process itself and the reporting back, um, we feel really good about these numbers. I think it’s possible, we’ll, we’ll land in the same spot as if some of these, you just said 3%, but I, I think it for taxpayers to get behind something, if something is ever asked of them, they’re gonna want more than just that blanket, uh, increase Percent, a hundred percent. So, yeah. Well, Madam Chair, if I get course Yeah, good respond. I mean, I think this is just outstanding, right? I mean, I agree with you. Building up credibility in our, in our presentation to the town is all about process and drilling down. And I agree that you can do it, you can go to kind of top line rough estimates around 3%. You can kind of come in at reasonable numbers, but the rationale behind, uh, you know,

22:59 how the numbers play out is as important as we approach. So my question to you is, um, you know, how, how is our new financial technology affecting your capacity to gather data and integrate it and then kind of turn around and present it in a way that makes sense, right? It’s clear on the one hand and also is tied to the actuals, the historical actuals. Right. And I know that’s something that’s kind of been a long-term planning, uh, you know, a long-term hope, but I don’t know kind of where we’re at. What’s your sense about where we’re at with that? Yeah, so I’m not sure. So clear gov has been great, as I reported my feedback on that. I think others have too. Um, it helps us download data and, and create these processes.

23:44 The template I’m about to show you has a lot of data that I downloaded where I was sift them through emails two years ago Right. To get all the data. So that’s great. I’m not sure Clear gov is ready to like, take over our templates here that I’m about to show, but I think as we build the templates would be, would to continue to get better. Well, the goal would be to clear, go to house the information we need. So there may be well house the templates, basically the template, I’m sure you can do that you need to reconcile with clear gov to, to make it work. Yeah. And that’s something I can look into. So, yeah. Um, in terms Of churning out the kind of the Final numbers and, and so forth. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Um, does Anybody else have a question? Ask Quick question. Oh, on those expense, sort of the percentages? Yeah. Have you guys looked at how those compare to other towns?

24:31 Uh, I haven’t looked in depth at that. I’m, I’m guessing most towns are heavily, um, weighted to the salaries and the benefits and pension. Yeah. Um, and, and just an FYI, these are not new. Like, uh, I did the 24 and 23 right next to it. And they’re, they’re out in line. They go up and down a little bit year to year, but they’re about the same, the three categories combined every year. So it’s, it’s a pretty good trend right now. But yeah. We’ll, we’ll look at that. Um, we can pull, we can download other FinCon reports in, in town financials and stuff and see what it looks like. It’s also kind of like difficult is obviously we’re pending negotiations with Yeah. Town unions Me meant to mention that. Not to mention, um, yeah. The teacher’s union and, um, yeah, that town unions,

25:17 That makes it really hard actually. Yeah. Um, my experience since being on the Fin com is that we’ve entered town meeting without contracts often, but I feel like when we usually get going again in the fall, those contracts have historically been negotiated. I don’t know if that’s the history and how it usually plays out, but I’m not sure how it’s gonna play out this year. My short history was the contracts on the, at least on the town side, get negotiated last minute before town meeting because on the town side it requires town meeting to, to ratify or validate. Mm-Hmm. The contracts on the school side, uh, the school committee can do it. So the school committee meets regularly. So whenever they do come to an agreement,

26:03 the school committee can vote to, to ratify the agreements, then it’s based on the amount of funding that was already in their budget to fund it. Yeah. So when you say on the townside though, we, we missed the target of the most recent town meeting. So do you think that we’re gonna go all the way till next town meeting, or, Well, I’ll put it this way. It would require a future town meeting to ratify any agreement with the unions on the townside, whenever that may be. Yeah. So, very good point. I meant to, uh, mention that in my, my intro here. Um, it makes this difficult phase one difficult, but let me show you the template actually. If, if anybody has any comments on this, uh, before I move to the template? No. Any other ones? I don’t think so. Um, so this would be step one again, maybe I

26:51 Could, if I could just now, are, do you think a, uh, Alec that you’re gonna be able to apply this process to all the departments, including the schools in terms of the scrub that’s goal and the effort? Yeah. Okay. Um, so before I get into the template, I wanted to break down that 55 million of salaries Mm-Hmm. By department. Yeah. Um, because I look around the room sometimes at, at the FinCon and we think, wow, this is easier said than done, but as the accountants just take a step back, like I said before, well, let’s really break it down if we could, if we could successfully. Okay. Yeah. So, as I was saying, um, of the salaries and wages, those three departments, the schools are 67.5%. Right. They’re the largest. And then the fire and police on the town side of the largest.

27:36 So those three combined are 85%. Mm-Hmm. So if we can effectively do this the way I would like to, for those three, I think the other one should be easier, right? There’s less people to, to reconcile. But that’s just the data. Um, there’ll be two tabs, um, for liaisons to send two department heads. Um, as you can see, I bucketized all the select board departments. Yep. So I’m spoiled ‘cause I have Alicia kind of to help me with those ones. Um, and then, you know, the other ones are kind of by, um, you know, I put town clerk and elections together in health and waste together. Um, but the reason there’s two tabs, um, something we’ve talked about a lot is that, you know, some people get paid out of the general fund and some people get paid from other sources.

28:22 Right. Um, so what we put together is a template, I’ll call it a data collection template related to those big three categories or the first two at least in salaries and wages and, um, and insurance. So, um, I know this is all public data and, and I met with Alicia when we put this together. So we thought, um, you know, to be populated in yellow is to be populated in this phase one by the department head with the liaison assisting them. Um, blue will be hold off. That’s data we need. But Alicia can work with people in her finance to populate that. Um, and what we, what we’re gonna ask for is name, position, weekly hours, Mm-Hmm. Grade step, step date.

29:10 This’ll come from health, uh, finance. Once we have this roster created for each department enrolled in health insurance and then health insurance plan. And then this first category is what we just approved. So this to me shouldn’t be hard, right? Mm-Hmm. They should be able to line up. And mind you, I put a note that said, um, if no person is currently sitting in a funded position, please indicate o open position as name and the rest of the data as needed to justify the funded salary. So said differently. If there’s a $100,000 salary that’s open, then they should be able to say for that position, what grade and step is that. Is that that’s who you’re planning on hiring. Um, You’re getting really a hand, you’re getting a handle on the projection. Yeah. So, so for 25,

29:56 and then again as the accountant, I’m holding them accountable by putting a check figure at the bottom that ties back to their total and up and down we’ve decided to split. That’s great. The non-union subtotal based salaries, because I think it’ll be good to split that from union for purposes of the projection out if contracts ever get agreed upon things like that. Um, union subtotal salary, temporary subtotal salary. Alicia thought it would be helpful to have the temp workers for the departments that have those to be in their own category. And then there’s always the stipends longevity over time, which may not be by individual, but mm-Hmm. Um, should still get populated as part of this for,

30:41 for completeness sake. Um, so that first tab is probably the one that we can anchor to the number that was just approved. And I guess people are probably wondering, don’t we already do this? And we sort of do, but I’ve never gone to the level of, sometimes you’ll see a line and a budget we approve and it’ll be, you know, heavy equipment operator, there might be six of those Mm-Hmm. In that line. And they’re lumped in and I don’t know what steps they’re at. And, and we probably could drill in, but we’ve never had the time to really drill in to a full roster. Um, and, you know, hopefully we can do it. Um, I think it’s possible. And, and, and at the end of the day, this template that we gather this data, I don’t think is gonna hurt. Um, any projections moving forward.

31:27 I’m, I’m gonna say that the departments do that. You know, I I don’t, it’ll be a great exercise to, to request it this way, right? Yeah. In, in a uniform format. Yeah. So elk concept, That’s huge. That’s huge. Sorry. That’s no Problem. So the concept is to get this and then be able to project that out three years based on some Yeah. Some assumptions on growth. So that’s different grades. Like Aaron said, it’s very hard to do the projection right now. We should be able to anchor to the, what we just approved by department and get that breakout. But now we have a good data point to at least if there’s no contract negotiated, you can put an assumption in 26 7. And as this process moves along, if any do get finalized, then you can update the model, um, to no longer have an assumption, but an actual, um, contract

32:16 and how that looks for three to five years. Um, so that’s, yeah. The challenge is that the main expense in the town’s budget is very uncertain. And we’re trying to do a three to five year projection on that. So, um, but that’s not to say we should wait until the contracts get negotiated to start an exercise like this. So the biggest department would be the school department in terms of personnel, I think. What is it like around 600 employees over there? I think so, yeah. So, um, have, um, have you gotten, uh, like acceptance around this with, um, the chair or have you Well, I’ve spoken with, um, the liaisons, Sarah and Jen. Okay. And I think Jen specifically was, I think she called it a staffing accountability analysis. So I know she’d

33:03 Spoken to something like this before. So, yeah. And, and I’m not sure she was perfectly satisfied with what she got last year. Mm-Hmm. Um, this kind of serves as that too. I would think so, yeah. Um, it’s up to them how they wanna, um, organize it. I’m obviously gonna let their finance team take a shot at the template first Mm-Hmm. And be there to support. Um, but again, like staffing accountability, if we’re looking for, you know, a list of all funded positions from the general fund, who’s sitting in those seats, what their position is, what their hours are, grades, step, step, date. If we can accomplish that, I think it kind of kills two birds with one stone with respect to that. Um, I haven’t met the new, um, finance director yet,

33:49 or superintendent, but we plan on reaching out Great. This week, so, or next week. So yeah. The, the schools is gonna be a very key piece of this. Um, And like you said, even though you don’t know, you know exactly where we’re gonna land with contracts, at least you have a starting base in the data loaded in mind that at that point it just becomes, the projections are just an equation, right? Basically. Yeah, I would, I mean, I would think based on the current contracts would be what 25 is at. Right. That’s how we built it. We didn’t, Yeah. I mean, part of the challenge is when you look at the contracts and you look at various, you have stipends and then you have, um, I’ll call ‘em stipends.

34:37 It depends on how they’re calculated. Some are just straight dollar amount for performing a function. Some are at an additional rate based on the hours performed multiplied onto the base. And so, so you can have the formula, but, but it’s dependent on the amount of hours that are generated that produce the stipend or the function. So you have night differentials, you have, um, other duties. And so that, that, that starts to create time, time becomes another variable that you, you, that you have to make assumptions, um, in calculating what the costs are really gonna be. Okay. Yeah. But in terms of, um, like the base salary, if,

35:26 if you could see, I know that it may change once a contract gets updated, but again, if it was a $100,000 salary and you saw what step they were at and stepped it, I think it, it’d be good information to be able to predict at least under the current contract what the next three years look like. Right. Right. So, right. So you have your base salary and then you have the additional stipends. Some of them, like I said, or just a extra $150 for performance function. Some are, you know, um, a, a rate, an hourly rate applied to either the base salary or applied to the overtime salary. So, so it, it may be generated by overtime costs versus straight time cost.

36:14 Um, is, there’s some, some the agreements that get very complex, What’s the general proportion of that kind of calculation do you think is, you know, that that represents of the salary? Um, Does it, I don’t know what the ratio would be. Is It like 5% or 15% Significant? Yeah, it, it, it, it’ll add significant amount of costs Yep. To what percentage? I I No, that’s fine. I don’t know. But, But you could use historical data to look at that, correct. Yeah. To protect it out. Sure, Sure. Yeah. I mean, just over time. Mm-Hmm. Without all the other stuff is a variable Mm-Hmm. That you’ll have good years, you’ll have bad years,

36:54 Right? Yeah. And that, right. That all depends on staffing levels and how you manage that, that Overtime. And then, and then we also have, we have a few of the, uh, like our building inspector right now, which we’re outsourcing a swamp squad. Right. And we also have Amy Mc mcq, who’s also kind of a hybrid, which we used to have two independents. So it’s, those type of things are also gonna have to be kind of taken into account. ‘cause if Amy retires, yeah. Are we gonna go back to two? Right. And if swamps got says we can’t do this, what’s that gonna do? So I mean, we’re gonna have to have a little fudge factor, like you say, for all those different unknowables. Well, I think, you know, yeah, I think that’s, but I think what, um, you know, Alec is really drilling down on is getting to a level of granularity so that you can actually model these things out with a, with a kind of a level of certainty, you know?

37:40 And, and look, I think the other huge contribution to this, frankly it’s awesome, is the, you know, kind of the, if, if you can get that uniformity across the departments, that makes for a very, you know, a very solid projection. Right? Yeah. And, and the fact that you’re rooting it in a base period, uh, with the base pay, you know, gives us a lot of confidence that we’re actually dealing with, uh, Yeah. Super concrete numbers. Yeah. You know, it’s 60% of what we’re going at. So we’ll start there. And then Yeah, I think that’s right. The data that you collect on the health insurance, it’s a template to collect that data. And that’s not to say that people can’t drop off or add on, but it kind of gives you a percentage of the total that are on it, which you would probably get from a different data source too. But I think it’s good to have the data in one spot,

38:26 and that’s category two. And then Alicia can really dig in and I’m thinking like three to four slides on how we came up with our health insurance projection for three to five years. And, you know, taxpayers, this is why it’s a very close number to where we’re gonna land, and then just move to the next category and, um, and then see where we’re at. And then decisions need to be made. So much of that is driven off your, uh, your, your headcount though, right? Yeah. Kind of what’s, what’s going on there in the rationale behind It. And I know we had tried, um, it was a little ambitious at the time, but to, to allow the school department to manage their own health care costs. Right. But that became difficult because, um, there was transition going on

39:11 a lot over there in the finance department. Um, and just became a bigger thing than we initially thought. But doing it this way, well, this will allow, I hope so. Yeah. Like for, you know, the schools to have a better inventory of who’s on their health insurance, who’s not. Yeah. Um, And I’ve, I’ve always had, it doesn’t, I mean, it’s not my decision anyways, but it’s not that big of a deal where that cost sits. It’s just the better data as to how much of it relates to where is is always better than just one lump line. Mm-Hmm. Town wide, $12 million, you know what I mean? So, Because that, that line I am also has to account for retirees, right. And then, so part of the challenge of Yeah. That is splitting is, um, whether the information about the retirees tells you

39:59 where they came from as to which side of the ledger they should fall on. And that, that that’ll take some more parsing. Okay. Yeah. So I guess this is the long term in the background that we’re supporting. The short term is a very similar process to the last two years, I think is by September, early September. I think the budgets are due to Alicia and it’s gonna be a, effectively an available revenues budget versus a level services budget. And we’ll see where that lands, um, just like we have the last two years. Um, ‘cause that’s all that from my perspective, is guaranteed that you can’t rely on, can’t rely on anything that’s gonna be on the warrants,

40:45 let alone past town meeting. Right. So, um, this is just us trying to ahead of time support the longer term projection better than just, you know, three to 4% or whatever it May be. Yeah. So clear gov will, will be ultimately be the tool. The challenge with clear gov is loading the data and building the tables that can do the calculation. So the work he’s doing is actually gonna solve that problem of getting clear gov built up. Because you build a table of employees, you’ve build your salary tables, you build all your stipend tables, and then you have to link them to the Appropriate, has the ability, like with the steps and read everything. Yep. That’d be great. And then you can run the scenario.

41:30 So the way we, we did it in clear gov for this this year was more traditionally of, um, of just putting in the salaries of the employees based on reading off of tables, but not yet leveraging the full tools of clear gov. I was the one that was building the personnel tables and just ran outta runway because it’s, it is, well, and again, my lesson, um, that when you look at the contractual agreements, especially in the public safety side, they are the me the, the, the, the way different things are calculated is so complex because they’re all linked to,

42:19 you know, different parts of, um, Are there kind of macros or apps in the, uh, in the gov software, the clear enough software that can Yeah. So help With that. ‘cause I think they, you can, you can kind of get a boost in, in modeling that, Um, Software. But anyway, that’s Just true. I’m saying. Yeah. But it’s, it’s building tables and then building the calculations of how a particular stipend is calculated. Yeah. Yep. So for example, in the police contract, I forget what stipend it is, the rate is based on a certain step in grade of like sergeants. It’s like sergeant step five, right?

43:07 Whatever that rate is, is the rate over here for this function times the number of hours that you work that function, try to try to calculate that, you know, building a spreadsheet or a tool that could figure that out because you, and again, I time is a variable that has a significant impact, But you’re still linking it to an individual. Yeah. And then you can have kind of sub jobs. So at least it’s organized, you Know, and it may not be one individual, it may be whoever gets put into that slot for a period of time provides that function, gets moved out of the slot and another employee goes in and provides that function. We’re all, we’re already going into the weeds. Yeah.

43:52 Okay. Yeah. So that’s kind of our goal. There’s kind of two pieces that Fin Comm’s gonna support in this and kind of hold Alicia accountable, but I know she is accountable and, and help her with her presentation of the other, of the other, uh, expense categories. So. Okay. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Good luck. Thanks. Thank you, Al. It’s awesome. Happy you’re doing that. It’s above and beyond actually. You mean, you Mean not you, right? Yeah. Right. You’re not getting paid enough. Alec,

44:28 I thought we doubled the salary of the fin income this year. Might as well triple it while you’re out. I’ll vote for that. So, um, moving along next, um, we’ll welcome, uh, Gary Gregory, the chair of our har uh, harbors and Waters board to the table. Um, Hi Gary. Thank You so much. And I’ll just explain for my fellow board members, I became aware of, you know, the RFP request and I had a lot of questions ‘cause I wasn’t here, you know, 10 years ago when, when this, um, went through. I had a lot of questions about it. And I know we’re putting together, I mean, just the update alone was about a million dollars worth of grants either accepted or, or pending, um, on projects down on the waterfront. And we have the New Harbor plan. So I just had a lot of questions and Gary indulged me

45:17 and walked me through with a lot of background information that was super helpful and I just thought it would be good, uh, opportunity. And he graciously, uh, agreed to come to the, come to our meeting with late notice. And, um, so I just wanted him to kind of give us an update on, um, kind of the history of how, uh, the tenant and, um, arrangement with the Harbors and Waters board has been functioning and, um, the benefits that it provides to the town to boaters. Uh, and then if we have questions around that, um, I’m sure Gary will entertain. Okay. Well, thank you for the opportunity. And, um, so if you have questions,

46:02 tell me what to focus on. So I don’t want to just drone over a bunch of detail, but to get started, the, the town bought these properties to preserve low cost, uh, marine services. So what was happening in communities across the North Shore and probably the whole East Coast boatyards, which kind of have to be near the water because there’s an interface between putting the boats and taking them out. We’re getting priced out because they, they typically in their normal condition look like derelict properties. So developers were buying them to build houses, which waterfront houses with Chapter 91 licenses

46:48 for docks are pretty valuable. So the town felt, if they didn’t move in and buy these properties, the boat yards would get priced out. And it’s, I think a valid concern. So the Boatyards were bought, and it was a combination of the town and the harbors and waters. Enterprise fund paying for the properties, which was bonded, took 10 years to pay them off. And now what they do is a combination of, of public uses with a waterfront twist. So for example, the, and it’s a little complicated because it’s not a lease, it’s the combination of a lease and a license. The lease is for a little corner. I see. Moses has the, yeah, I asked this page open so that the,

47:37 the lease covers, I think the pink spot. Mm-Hmm. And so that’s 13,000 square feet is, is leased to the boat boatyard and some space in another office building the boatyard. Then to get the lease is required to operate the town’s boat storage program. Nobody in their no sane person would want to do that. You’re dealing with several hundred customers and those boats are hauled out from the pink spot and moved to the yellow spots in, uh, in, um, the Cliff Street boatyard and potentially all four spots

48:22 that are in the Parker’s boatyard. So when all the dust settles, this winter boat storage season is from September 16th to ju to July 15th, several hundred boats get out of the water gets stored. That’s the only place, uh, in Marblehead where you, where a boat owner can do their own work. So it is a kind of a low budget, if you will, low cost. So that’s the winter use. In the summer, all of those yellow spots at Cliff Street turn into parking. And the other thing, the white spot is the Marblehead Yacht Club, which is a subsidized, if you will, public

49:08 a public yacht club and marblehead at low cost. So that land is already flipping back and forth between cars and boats and the yacht club, the situation over at, at, uh, what used to be called Parker’s, the Redstone Lane Properties a bit more complicated because there are several areas and they’re designated for different things. All of them can be used for winter boat storage. Some areas are designed for long-term storage, where boats could be stored, you know, in the, in the summer season as well. Some areas are designated for trailer and cradle storage. Cradles are a thing of the past. I mean, there’s no, they don’t happen anymore, but they used to be wooden cradles, now it’s jack stands.

49:56 So, and then that yellow spot is set aside so that it could be anything. We can take away the ability to store boats there. And the way the agreements are structured, there’s a price associated with that, which is what we would get for storing boats. And we can make an election that the Harbors and Waters board can make an election that we’re not going to store boats in that location. There’s an amount that gets rebated or abated for the boat storage program. So that’s how the Marblehead, uh, I don’t even know what they called it, the boat, I think it was the Marblehead Boating Association. It was something that was a tenant there

50:42 for the first 20 years and ran a, a public sailing program. And what happened is they kind of, um, I, I don’t know if it’s a demand issue or a management issue, but coinciding with one of their treasurers retiring, they stopped making the payments, stopped maintaining the property. And after a while we said we, we were getting to the point of saying we can’t do this any longer. The property was running down and getting dangerous, and the state changed the regulations for cranes. So now to operate a crane, you need a, a license. And the state enforces that. The same lobbyists that found out that, uh,

51:31 golf courses were critical to the public safety during covid came up with an exemption that certain kinds of organized yacht clubs can get a license, a blanket license for a crane, and then arrange for essentially a one hour seminar. And their members can receive cards that operate under that license. I don’t think you would get that type of yacht club here, but that meant that no one could use the crane without the license. They weren’t paying us. So we shut it off and went back to storing boats. And it’s basically in the summer, it’s used as people walk around and, uh, that area is unsafe because of the sea wall.

52:17 It’s part of the projects we’re trying to do with the CCM Grant. Madam Chair, if I could just ask a, a question on this vein. Is there, have you, have you guys thought about perhaps making dual use, uh, more possible, you know, especially between the storage season and the, and the, and the summer season, you know, kind of making that area a for example, in the, uh, you know, the Redstone Lane area, you know, more accessible, um, you know, to, so it’s to potential uses. Yeah. That, that was the objective. And so what makes it complicated is we have to have places to put the boats. Yeah. So that’s why we push in that And the topography Yeah. Push the area down in size. And what started it is we were, one

53:03 of the problems is the storage season goes to July. Right. But MRA racing starts sooner. Mm-Hmm. So this was designed around the footprint that would be needed for, at the time, and this is probably 30 years ago, the footprint of dry sailed boats that were working there. Now, that footprint would be much smaller. So all of the yacht clubs now offer their own, uh, dry sailing programs. And that is, that is that, and demographics have reduced the demand. So I think the size is enough. I think that the, it would be great to look through. Um, I, I’ll come back to it because it’s a, it’s a interesting point.

53:49 This thing says beach. If you look at Yeah, that’s the beach. Yep. And according to the DEP, it is a beach, but you can’t get there. Mm-Hmm. Because there’s no stairway or ladder down to it. It’s full of rubble. And the reality is that there are numerous historical chapter 91 licenses for that to be a marine railroad. To be, to be what? Marine Railroad. That’s what was there. It was the Starling Burgess aircraft company had a railroad and there was another railroad. So kind of looking at that area, there’s probably better uses of it than a beach, because let’s face it, nobody’s going down there to use it as a beach. You can’t get there. But that’s, so we’re, we will attempt

54:38 to work on that because it’s, the access into this area is there’s two houses and there’s a kind of a pair of driveways. It’s really, I’m amazed at how good the professionals are driving in there, bringing in the boat. It’s not something I know I couldn’t do it. So a hundred percent. Um, but we’re all set up that if somebody, you know, come that point where we fix the safety issues, we are fine with the idea of, of, uh, having, I mean, it’s set up so that the town could say it’s time to set this aside, set aside this area. The biggest problem is the car parking in the summer. And there’s just not enough of it. And you have a yacht club. You have people that want to drive to their yacht, club

55:24 park, go to their boat, and there’s no, I I think that that locks up Cliff Street. It affects commercial street. All of the different areas are kind of, you know, cars of the, or the enemy, if you will, in this space. It’s the area to store boats and trailers and stuff. And it’s, to put it in perspective, if you’ve driven down, um, so it’s, I guess it’s front, it’s Beacon Street, and I don’t know what the thing is that goes to Pond Street. It’s Norman Street. So if you look at Norman Street and you see how clogged up that gets with two or three trailers, now think through 300 trailers, where do you put ‘em?

56:11 And so the, the storage space for those things is, is fairly important. And if you have a crane, you can stack ‘em. So go ahead, Daniel. Okay. A couple questions. Um, Votes. Are you guys in the winter at capacity there? Is it being you? Okay. And then the July 15th, is that date always been in place? I, I vote and it just seems late to me. Like my, yeah. It seems like a late time to, to not have that parking. I’d always thought it was June 15th till I read. Well, what happens is, um, more or less informally. So lemme go. Let me, I’ll, I’m gonna, so is there another question related to that? Not related to that question about that Redstone? We can do that after. Okay. You wanna Touch on that? So what has happened at the, the, the lease is

56:56 for this little corner to operate a boatyard, the boatyard is needed to have the cranes to pull the boats out. And it’s a launch. Mm-Hmm. You know, to un step, move to storage, et cetera. So we require that boatyard to have all this equipment to run the storage business, and we make them run it. So the way it works, they hand out the contracts, we print the contracts, the town prints the contracts, sets the rates, boatyard, hands ‘em out, verifies that the person has paid their excise tax, paid their mooring fee, hauls the boat, deals with them about that, collects the money and gives the town the money. So it costs us zero in terms of administration and so on.

57:44 And, and what’s even worse for the lessees point of view, they guarantee the revenue and the way it works is it’s 90%, they guarantee is a minimum of a number and 90% of the previous year. So it can go up, can ratchet up, but it can’t, can’t go down and it goes down or it can’t go down below the, the base point. So it’s a great deal for the town. If you talk to Becky Kern, the previous, uh, uh, town procurement officer, before this was put in place, she was dealing with those contracts. So she had the 300 people coming in and asking questions and, and bickering about, well, I wanted my boat here, but it’s stored there. And what time they have learned how to do this in an order

58:32 that they clear out the areas near the yacht club first. So if you look at the contracts, they actually say on them that, um, kind of the order in which you’re gonna be launched is somewhat determined by the order that you come out of where you’re stored. Okay. So they manage that and the yacht club, um, the yacht club gets two spaces, uh, for as part of their deal. And they want to clear that out as fast as they can. So I guess the question is, does it take ‘em till July 15th? It just seems late. No, It’s the people, it’s it’s people that are doing their own work. So the problem is caused by the fact that everyone starts, you know, it’s sunny in May.

59:18 Everyone believes they’re gonna go in in May. Yeah. You know, nobody is waiting till July on purpose because they’ve already paid the MO and everything else. So, so I think that what, you know, we, we experimented with different, can you go in earlier, later? It, it’s, it’s being, that is being determined by the people working on boats. Mm-Hmm. So it’s, and putting a deadline on It won’t, I don’t think it would work. And the reality is that it’s like, look at outside today. Sure. It’s not reliably pleasant around here until August. So that’s that’s true. It has worked. Now from a dollars and cents point of view, the current, our current

1:00:07 RFP is for a $5,000 a month boatyard rent, and they have to pay the town what would be a guaranteed 137,000. That’s based on last year the boat storage program was 152,000. So it’s 90% of last year. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Say the first number again. 1, 1 70. So the, the last year, the boat storage, uh, program, uh, well, will this year have returned 152,000. So it’s significantly bigger than the lease payment. And by not charging the boatyard operator, uh, rent, if you will, for that space, they passed that savings on to the, to the boat owners.

1:00:55 Yeah. So the direct money is 152,000. Indirect is the mooring fees and excise taxes for those boats. And you said they’re new? So they’re on the new RFP, it’s gonna be 55,000 as well. New is 5,000 a month. Okay. So it goes from 55 to 60 basically was the old one. Yeah. Okay. And the concept is keep that lower and take more money on the That is pretty much, mark, it’s funny, it’s market rate for boat yards. It’s that low. Yes. But Boat yards are never in the middle of a town like Marble Marblehead. Right. So, you know, the comparables are, uh, the Marblehead laundry area and things like that. Yeah. Okay. But if you, if you use that works

1:01:42 because they drive, they use, uh, launch ramps and they pick a boat up and it’s on a trailer already. Right. If you’re picking up bigger boats, you have to move ‘em with a hydraulic trailer. It’d be expensive. So, Okay. So when you put it all together, this, this program meets the needs of some 200, between 200, 300 boaters gives us about $192,000 towards the enterprise fund, which pays for the safety patrols, the floats, the docks. And it’s already got very good dual use for the yacht club and the parking and the commercial assets. The only thing that seems to be in question is, is there

1:02:29 a better use for this corner of, uh, of Parkers in this summer? And there probably is, but you have to fix the C wall before you can do it. Mm-Hmm. So looking at that Parker’s with the letters there, if I just drove down there before, it’s area B, is that basically the raise park? Yes. When you drive down the left and then there’s the Yep. The retaining wall, it seems. And have you guys looked into making that not part of the lease and just part of the license? ‘cause it seems like it’s underutilized to be part of the lease right now. It Is. It’s all licensed. None of this Is lease. So, so this whole thing is licensed. Yeah. None of, so even though we’ve got these, so these, but they’re using some lease. The reason they’re Split is they’re, uh, we control where we’re willing to allow boats to be stored year round, because

1:03:18 otherwise they would clog up access to drive a trailer in and, and launch your, your, you know, a, a boat Using their, so that, so where the trailers are in a couple of boats, that’s part of the license that people pay. Yes. Gotcha. Okay. So in theory, if you wanted to, in the summer, you can use area B as well, or anywhere. In fact, we, the, the, the,

1:03:42 the lease agreement and the license, the license part of the lease agreement says that we can, uh, restrict that use For area A. But what about B? So BB, no, we have to, we can b we have to make available, I, I think, I’m not sure of the letter, but that’s, we would have to abate the storage fees that they give for that. I think that’s the only problem. Right. Okay. But any of that could be, we could take away any of that license without any reduction in, in the minimum in our revenue with abatement, except for some small, Well, if you don’t let people, if you’re saying you can’t use that space to store boats to store Right. Then whatever revenue we’re getting from that Sure, that makes sense. Has to be replaced. Okay. And the, the problem with things like trailer storage

1:04:29 and there’s no other place to do it. It, it turns into a real Mm-Hmm. Yeah. It’s a problem throughout town, so you’re just gonna be pushing trailers out into other parts of the town. So I’m not sure there’s that much demand. So that’s the other thing that, you know, it’d be worth, it would be worth doing a deep dive into why did the original program fall apart after working for 20 years? And I think you would find that it dovetails with the demographics of sailing in general. I mean, how many sailboats are in the harbor versus center consoles? Yeah. And the center consoles can get on a trailer and come out through any, you know, any one of two, well, there’s two public and Right. And two private ramps that can do that.

1:05:17 So I think that’s the shift. Makes sense. Can anybody, um, if you, if you sign up to join the Marblehead Yacht Club, will, can you dry sail like your roads 19 there if you, is that? No, uh, because they don’t have a crane. Okay. The, uh, the less c Marblehead trading company offered to support, uh, dry sailing. I think they were charging, I don’t know if it’s four 50 or 500 a year, which was the amount that was being charged by the Marblehead community voting. Got it. And they originally had nine, then they had six, then they had four, and now they had two Mm-Hmm.

1:06:03 So it’s just, it, it’s, you know, I I, I honestly don’t know if they would still support, but it’s the same thing is happening. The, the yacht clubs themselves are not, they were expanding their, their dry sailing. Now it’s kind of holding steady. Mm-Hmm. Okay. So I think that the demand for that is, is, is I think that the amount of smaller, uh, power boats, you know, recreational boats is cutting into the demand. Is there enough water to even launch throughout the day there, or is it only like half tied up? It’s, uh, if you wanted to launch, uh, like sonars Yeah. Then it’s an issue. Yeah. Because, you know, a couple hours a day, you can’t Yep. If you wanna launch whalers and such, it’s no problem.

1:06:52 Mainly what that crane is used for now is, uh, commercial, our, our storage. So when we haul harbors and waters, the floats like all the swim floats, speed limit floats, all that stuff go outta there.

1:07:10 And that dock is public. Yes. Okay. And so that’s a whole separate much, there’s a whole set. It, it actually is used a lot for squid fishing. Oh, they go people squid fishing down there now? Yeah. Oh, okay. Because it’s, you know, it, yeah. I knew that one I’ve always seen at Commercial Street, but I, Yeah. Well, it’s, I guess it’s anywhere there’s squid, right. And it’s public. So similarly this float and is a public float, the one next. So the boatyard leases the one along this wall Mm-Hmm. And this one is, is public. Right. Good to know. So there’s, you know, plenty of, um, well, a lot of of Boat tie up box space.

1:07:56 Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it’s just busy. It’s just 1800, well, 1500 boats. And the, it’s, you know, you run outta space really quickly. So what’s the enterprise fund at like, uh, like around a million? So the revenues are, I guess we have 1, 1, 1, 1. Yeah. Yeah. Like about, okay, well, 1.1. So this is a significant amount of 20, 20% percent, 20% of the revenue for the enterprise fund. And, and it’s, it’s, it’s a little more, well, it’s probably more, slightly more than that, because don’t forget, those boats also have, uh, moorings and excise tax. That’s true. And they’re the sort of, they’re the budget point where if, if they couldn’t do that, they would probably stop.

1:08:41 You know? So it’s, And in terms of the rate you’re charging the people to store their boats there, how is that calculated? Is that compared to other communities? Is that just something that somebody started, because I, I look at it as it’s in my fiduciary duty sitting here. I’d want to charge as much as we could. Mm-Hmm. You know, these, these are people who, you know, should be paid. So, so it’s 152 good enough. Or could we get more than 152 a year? We could probably get, and could that offset, could we open up some of the areas like Mr. Fox was saying, and maybe charge people more money to do that offset to, to take a look and maybe put in money to repair the walls and do different things along that nature? Those are three linked thoughts. So, oh, No, there’s a lot. I’m just saying, We do raise, I wanna get As much money as I can. What I’m, that is one of the, the town boat storage fees

1:09:31 are set by the, essentially set by the harbor master and, and, and signed off on by the Harbors and Waters board. So that’s the discussion. We raise ‘em all the time, and they’ve steadily raised, I think that the next logical choice, they’re now $5 a square footage, probably go to five 50. They’re very closely tied to commercial rates throughout town. So we’re in sync with the local people. I don’t know if they copy us or we copy that. Okay. Yeah. But the main difference is in, in our storage, you can do your own work. So it, it gives somebody who, you know, it can do the work an option to save the money on that.

1:10:17 So we, we, I hear you on that. And I think that what I would look at the second thing is, what are the other activities? How do they generate revenue? Um, and should they generate, you know, well, how do they pay their freight to be here? My big thing is, uh, sustainability. And by that I don’t mean necessarily, uh, you know, let’s not break down carbon, you know, hydrogen bonds. But what I mean is, okay, we’re gonna do something. People are gonna get used to it. How does it stay successful for a long time? If it’s gonna have a clubhouse, who maintains it? And, and where does that money come from? And who manages their finances?

1:11:03 So, you know, we’re very, we’re sort of very concerned about the long term, because an enterprise fund is about maintenance of capital assets. And so we we’re hyperfocused on that part. The connection to the seawall is these things we do at, in our million dollar budget. We have fixed a couple of sea walls already. We’ve built peers, we’ve built builds. These are all hundreds of thousands of dollars projects. Repairing the sea walls is a multiple million dollar project. And so there, I don’t see a way that you could, you know, charge enough to somebody to belong to the club to fix the sea wall.

1:11:49 And when we look at, so if you go look at the mission of the enterprise fund, the primary thing is safety. So we do the, the safety patrols and the harbor. We do the regulations, all that kind of stuff. The secondary thing is looking at, uh, maintaining the assets used by the recreational boaters. So I think we have 50 floats, multiple piers. There’s so much public access that we maintain. We even maintain the Crocker swim float, for example. And those are more important to us than functions that are kind of adjacent to the mission. Like our number three priority is other public uses,

1:12:35 because they’re not part of our revenue stream. And the way a enterprise fund works, we charge a, a fee for a service, and a fee has to be defended, defendable as reasonable for the cost of the service provided, plus an allowed capital accumulation. So the rules are complicated and we, we live within the rules and we kind of chug along. Could we, uh, raise more money? Probably, I just don’t know if you raise the mooring fees a lot, which is what it takes to put it in perspective, we could double the mooring fees and raise, raise, I think, um, about 300,000, which is just a blip Mm-Hmm. On, on some of the maintenance stuff that we do.

1:13:22 Yeah. And, and I know safety is an issue, but has there been other, and I know we also have the Harbor plan, other studies, but I mean, I know I have lots of friends that go across to Beverly to use their boating club over there because they can rent boats. We just don’t have anything here. I mean, has that ever been explored? Are there ways to utilize that you, you know, in types of, to try get people who maybe can’t afford a boat but might be able to rent a boat, you know, a couple hours a month? Well, so there is, and then That’s another source of revenue for the, for the town.

1:13:51 There is a, an active rental thing that’s going on at off of the beach. We don’t have anything to do with it. So I don’t know, I don’t even know if the town has anything to do with it. But you can rent, uh, standup paddle boards and such. There, uh, used to be a boat, boat rentals here, and it, and it, uh, went out of business. So I think it’s another demand kind of issue. And there are liabilities associated with that. So, but no, the town, all the yacht clubs run charter, you know, rental things. And then there’s a new public launch last year, Jordan’s launch. Right. That’s using that. That’s a public launch. Anybody can go out There. Yep. He uses, I think, uh, state Street, uh, south.

1:14:40 Um, my, my, uh, kind of the only thing that really kind of concerns me about in terms of a decade long lease really just involves this area down here because of the recommendation in the harbor plan about really putting a master plan together for, you know, what is a good better use potentially of this, this area during summer months. Um, you know, and when we get this, when the final sea walls are, are replaced, say that, say we have beautiful sea walls, say we’ve got now two of those permanent float docks for surge protectors out there all year. Um, in, you know, in four years from now, maybe some, someone comes along wants to start a, you know,

1:15:26 not-for-profit or type of like standup paddleboard thing there, using those docks potentially put prams on them or, or whatever. Um, I just worry that we tie our hands a little bit for a, a decade long lease here. I would, I guess I just would have a little bit more peace of mind if, if these two areas we could carve out, you know, say five years down the road or some, you know, there is that opportunity for somebody to come in and do some, I’m sure you can amend the lease or the license. Um, and I, my guess is just a guess that if you told the lessee, you don’t have to deal with this, they would go great, because it’s the thing we make them do

1:16:14 to get the little piece of land to run a boat yard. So I think you can easily ratchet that way. The part that is hard to address is what do you do with the boats that were there? Right. And how do you make sure that, um, so we have, the biggest problem for the boatyard is we make them have all this equipment to operate the storage program. The capital cost of that equipment is insane. And the licensing, and if you look at the insurance, they have to have, they have to have $3 million aggregate liability insurance. You’re never gonna find a nonprofit that has that kind of insurance. And so the town has been kind of accustomed

1:17:00 to not having to worry about the liability of these things. Mm-Hmm. And I think that if you wanted to do something like that, my advice would be work with the Marvel Head Yacht club who already has sorted out. I mean, they’ve been around for 150 years. I think they know how to do that. And if they’re not offering a service, there’s a reason. Would be my, I guess. So I think I’d start from them. And, and during the harbor planning process, we talked about how it would make a lot of sense to rearrange these spaces and, and where you put the yacht club and build on the fact that they have the, the kind of structure to, to keep operating. But, but I don’t think there’d be a problem, uh,

1:17:48 amending it, you know, because you’re letting them get, as long as you’re willing to give them the money back then, I don’t, I don’t think they’d have, they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t cry about not being able to store boats. The individuals affected would be upset. Mm-Hmm. And then you get into the question of if you want to do something, there’s, so there’s a slight difference between a plan that asks everybody, what do you want? Well, I want a stand up paddle port. Mm-Hmm. Okay. Ask all these things. They can go get one anytime they want off of, um, the beach. There’s the rock and Roll club that is got plenty of capacity. So the problem is not providing,

1:18:34 the challenge is not providing the service. The challenge is figuring out who’s gonna run it, who’s gonna maintain the assets that it uses. So we’re far more focused on that, because that’s what the enterprise fund does. So for example, if you wanted to do something like that, why not go take a look at Shamsky’s. We maintain, uh, a very, you know, kind of nice pier and facility. The whole land side is operated by, uh, park and rec. It, that would be the logical place for a public private partnership to do this kind of thing. Okay. ‘cause they’re already operating sailing lessons. There’s space over there to put, uh, rental boats. And it’s probably safer

1:19:20 where the prevailing wind doesn’t blow you out into the Atlantic. It’s true. It is a safer harbor. Did, um, just is the walkway that we talked about, I know there’s like an open walkway that got included into the plan, into the planning. Yeah. That’s, does that continue? Does that, is there a connection now between the light department and, uh, to Redstone property like the old Parkers This second? No. No. But, and is that the Goal? That is the goal. And that’ll be nice. So the, the, that bridge connection was required to preserve the beach. So that’s why we’re trying to figure out if the historical permitting of Chapter 91

1:20:06 could let us und designate that as a public beach. Because if it did, there’s a lot. If you look at the, the blocks involved and everything, deconstructing the interior sea walls and reconstructing them in a straight line will save a lot of money and give you a lot of land that could be used and simplify access. Oh yeah. That would all be, that could be like a park. Yeah. How long a process is that to, uh, Take it up? It’s probably a, when you ask how long, I mean, it only took 17 years to do STRs skis. Right. So it’s gonna boil down to does the Massachusetts DEP who regulates, uh, public access to water, do they believe that, uh,

1:20:53 this is a valid argument? It’s gonna probably be an emotional decision To un-designated the, The age. Well, there are, there are chapter 91 licenses to put a railroad in. So those are active licenses. So you wanna build a railroad. There’s no head though. There’s no railroad. Well, that’s right. It would be just for, but the licenses there. So then the question is what’s, we just don’t know the legalities of how did it go from being licensed that way to then now called a beach?

1:21:29 Because you can’t get down to the beach. Right. By water. You can, Right. I mean, but, but from the land, and you would never, well, I mean, we’re putting a sea wall there, so it’s not, we’re not gonna want to do a boat launch there. There’s a wall, There’s a, there’s a wall to prevent the, the waves from coming up into the storage area, so there’s no ladder over the Wall. And you’d never want a boat launch there, because we’re, it’s dry trying to protect the surge too. Yeah. There’s no water. And it’s dry. And it’s not deep. Like you just go to, It’s such a crazy little, um, yeah. But it’s one of those technicalities, technically we even say it’s a beach, therefore it’s a beach. Therefore, the public has access to the beach,

1:22:09 and there’s a policy against filling in. They’re very aggressive about not allowing you to fill in beach. That requires a Chapter 91 permit, because you’re taking that public access. But we happen to have the permits for railroad. Well, I wonder if it’s something that, you know, our representatives at the State House could help us with. I think that if it was a don’t know, one would hope that the, if the objective is to create more parkland Yeah. Make the whole thing more resilient. It’s, it’s probably smarter than a bridge. The bridge was just another solution to connect the walkway. Make a better park than a beach. Yes. I mean, we have great peaches. So,

1:22:58 Does anybody else have anything for Gary?

1:23:02 No, it was helpful. Yeah. I just wanna say, Gary, thank you you for this, because it, it really, I think it frames you’re quite welcome. The 10 year, the 10 year time horizon, and the revenue model with this, it’s really more of kind of an operating, uh, you know, arrangement. Yep. And we don’t think With, with a ratchet every year. So it’s kind of Very, we don’t think we could get a person interested in mobilizing the equipment or maintaining it for Five years. I do have one more question. What was the delay in getting out the RFP? What, sorry, what, what, what were your obstacles? So, three, uh, the, probably the biggest one was the 20, uh, 14 RFP was done by Jason. And we couldn’t find the, the source.

1:23:48 So then Becky and I were working to try to reconstruct that source and she retired. Mm-Hmm. And I didn’t push her very hard about it because, you know, I was thinking, all right, well she’s retired. Yeah. It was just so we got lazy. That’s the short answer. And then we started worrying about it. It’s hard to fight that hat. So we started worrying about it, thinking, all right, it’s a two week advertising period, which it is. So I read that correctly in the Chapter 30 B manual. But because of the size of the land, there’s also a 30 day in the Commonwealth Register. And it doesn’t count from when you give it to ‘em, you give it to them The Thursday before, Then they think it through, ‘cause it used to be printed,

1:24:34 but they don’t print it anymore, but they think it through. And then following week, We have to file tomorrow to get it onto the central register next week to start the clock, the 30 day clock, 30 Days, something Like that. Close Call. So we waited till the last minute and got undone by not fully understanding the process is basically the understood the correct answer. So, But we’re ready now. So Had I been here 10 years ago, I would’ve known this was coming. Exactly. You would’ve known when the file was Also the flare guns went off. And I had Yeah. No idea what Well, and we were, we weren’t worried until we went to look for the old one and couldn’t find it. There’s no digital form of it. And the Harbor Master’s copy was different

1:25:23 than the tenant’s copy. Got it. So there was a little work to figure out what was the actual original, it’s all done. So projecting forward in this lease, I was at your meeting, in theory, if we get the money to do the seawalls, then, then you would, you would have an out, because obviously trading company wouldn’t be able to operate there during that time period. Right. So there’s already, and there’s language in the RFP about what will happen. Okay. For that. And also then you have to, to really figure it to, if you were gonna optimize the decision, you’d wanna know the speed of light is if, if you told me we have a grant and it’s available today, It’s probably got a 25% match, is the structure

1:26:08 that we think we’re gonna get. So that would mean that the Harbors and Waters board would be responsible for, I think our share would end up being about 2 million. The electric light would have a share that’s bigger that they have to come up with. And so for us to do it, because we are an, uh, enterprise fund, and it would involve bonding, there’d be an article on the next town meeting. So that’s, you know, so we put an article in, we have a town meeting next May that gets approved that June, we could, um, let the bonds and have the money. Speed of light. That’s a speed of light. But you don’t have the grant today. Right.

1:26:54 So now add to that, what do you think’s the speed of light for getting the grant? You’re at least four years from project start. And it’s a one to two year, one and a half to two year project. So it could even not happen. It, you gotta predict what is the financial condition of the Commonwealth gonna be, and are they gonna feel that $10 million thrown to Marblehead is a good Mm-Hmm. Expend, I don’t know. Because the state will have its own bonding authorization process. Right. It’ll be part of some bond bill. There’s the authorization, but then the authorization, that piece of it needs to be released through the governor’s office.

1:27:41 And they’re operating under a cap of how much, so, so the, the bond authorization can be, you know, whatever, millions and millions of dollars, but only a portion that can be released because of the overall cap, depending on the status of the Commonwealth. So it adds more uncertainty. Right. As to, I mean, we, the Harbors and Waters board has $80,000 on deposit somewhere with the Commonwealth for the last 20 years because we matched our grant to do dredging. And then they never, the money evaporated, but they didn’t give us our money back. Right. So it’s a long way of saying, I think the real likely speed of light is seven years before this starts.

1:28:27 And that’s why it’s kind of, we’ve got, and then it’ll take two years before it’s, you know, run its course. So I don’t think 10 years Is problem. So if we’re looking forward into that sort of dovetail what Mr. Murray was saying, this is a hypothetical and just for anyone listening, I’m not suggesting that we double our moring fees. No, no, no. I was not about the morning, I was about to vote storage, boat storage. But would it make sense to say seven years from now, instead of, you know, could you start saving more money by increasing those fees? Have you guys thought about that with the potential? So I’m, I’m sure you, I’m sure you’ve thought of everything. I just, Just the, no one has ever challenged the fees, but the Enterprise fund statutes are pretty crazy about, like, we have an inter, uh, electric light.

1:29:12 They, you have to be able to opt out of the service. Right. I don’t know how that works, but you have to be able to do it. Then they have to justify based on their costs that the, you know, their net costs, the fee they charge, plus the capital. It’s so, so we’ve been afraid the state, the state statute Yes. That, that dictates that. And that lets you take those expenses off the books for two and a half. Right. So that’s their, their vehicles be, and the, the intention was to allow the accumulation of capital for capital maintenance that otherwise would be really hard to justify in a tight town budget. Sure. So we’ve, so the, so we do raise the fees.

1:29:59 It’s funny, we’re making more money off of transient dockage now that we started using DACA to manage it. And so there’s, you know, probably there’s ways to look at that. Sure. Too. But yeah, we, we do raise the fees, the storage fees are, uh, if we raise them for our town storage, probably all the other Boatyards will raise them. And the net effect will be you’re taking a lot of money out of the boaters, which might decrease the amount of boating. And it’s not, you know, we capture a small amount of it. So I don’t know. Do you qua those, um, uh, the floats, like if someone wanted to tie up for three hours, we

1:30:47 Use a couple of floats. The ones that are in front of the Harbor Master’s office. Yes. You use Qua for that.

1:30:55 Um, anything else you wanna Well, thank tell Us about or Thank you. It’s very informative. Thank you very much. Appreciate your knowledge. Yep. Thank you, John. Thank you. Okay. Um, uh, next, um, I think so, uh, we had voted at our last meeting in an effort to kind of expand some, um, different stakeholders and, and, and expand upon the work that they do down at the harbors and waters for to, um, uh, to add to, to, to, to add, to change the, um, uh, what do you call them?

1:31:40 The membership. The membership. But the, um, alternates. Alternates. It was like vacancies, no alternates to, um, to make them voting members. And we were, um, had also voted to change the terms from one year to three year. And, um, we, there’s a state obscurely state statute from 1977 that’s come to the attention. So, um, it’s not something that we are capable of doing. So I do need to entertain a motion to rescind the previous votes of the board on July 10th, 2024, to reorganize the Harbors and Waters board and to change the terms on the Harbors and Waters board. So, moved. Second. All in favor? Okay.

1:32:21 Anybody have anything else on that? Um, okay. So next, um, I, so in looking at a lot of other, uh, town agendas, there’s Robert’s rules of order allow for consent agendas, which apparently a lot of select boards take advantage of your routine business matters. Um, like road races and things that we individ vote individually and motion individually, you, um, that are not expected to require any discussion. They’re called consent agendas. The assumption is it’s just routine business that, um, we, we typically do. So, um, and, and the reason why you do it is to, uh, expedite the process of approving these kind of routine business matters.

1:33:09 So I thought we would try it, um, for tonight, and then at our next meeting, we can, or maybe at in announcements, we can see how we like it. Um, I’m going, so how it works is the chair reads the consent agenda items, and if anybody on the board wishes to pull one of the items out, it will become, it will move out of the consent and back to the regular agenda and will be voted individually if, um, but if nobody has any discussion or re you know, or reason to review each one individually, we can stay in the consent agenda and then we just vote to adopt and approve the consent agenda. So I’ll go ahead and I will just, um, I’m gonna pull out 6.5,

1:33:55 be just in an abundance of caution. I wanna, ‘cause typically we’ve done poll votes for that. I see these on other select boards agendas routinely the one day liquor licenses. But I just wanna, um, I just want to, it’s separate. It’s already separated. Yeah, I Sure. Oh, okay. It’s alright. So I just wanted to make sure. So, um, so let’s go ahead and do the liquor license then. Um, so, uh, this is a marblehead, uh, little theater. I need a motion to approve request from Marblehead Lit Theater 12 School Street for one day liquor license on Saturday, August 17th, um, 2024 from 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM subject to the following conditions, delivery of and receipt of by the licensing authority

1:34:41 of the required fee of $50. Delivery of, and receipt of the licensing authority of proof of the alcohol will be purchased from an authorized source. Proof that the applicant can receive proper delivery, provide proper storage and disposal of all alcoholic beverages purchased. All in accordance with the requirements of general laws. Chapter 1 38, alcohol will be purchased from Bent Bent Water Brewery. And this is a polled vote. So moved. Second, Mr. Fox. In favor, Mr. Grader? In favor, Mr. Murray? In favor, Ms. Nunan in favor. Okay. So, um, these are the items on the consent agenda. If anybody would like me to hold and remove them and put them into an, into the regular agenda, let me know. Um, just say, hold approval of the minutes of June 26th, 2024 and July 10th, 2024. Abbott Hall’s, uh, approval of Abbott Hall for an Eagle Scout ceremony on August 3rd, the reappointment

1:35:29 of Michael Fuer of OHDC and, uh, approval of the dollars for scholars 5K Road Grace on Sunday, October 6th, 2024. Okay. So I need a motion. So, So move second To, to approve the consent agenda. Uh, moved and seconded. All in favor. Right? Thank you. Now we’ll do the contracts and, um, I am gonna go through the contracts, um, individually.

1:35:58 Uh,

1:36:00 um, well, okay. So we need a, um, a motion to approve. I’ll do the first two. And then, sorry, Has everybody had a chance to, um, read through the narratives? Okay. So then I guess we can go ahead. Um, and I will, uh, read the consent items. We’ll do it all together then. Um, uh, to approve the Purvis Fire Station alerting system to approve the counsel on aging’s rejection of all bids received June 14th for the counseling, uh, on, on Aging’s Diner project, uh, the Walter Jacobs Architect’s LTD, um, approval for the support and construction, um, of the

1:36:49 three season room. And Hayden Safe and Lock awarding the contract for the, to them, for the Mary Alley Building Electronic Locks project. Does anybody have anything they wanted to pull out for discussion that they would maybe potentially not vote on? Yes. Okay. So I need a motion to approve the following contracts with the town and contract related votes. So moved. Second. All in favor? Great. That brings us to mail, water, and sewer commission notification. These are the rates. Um, they’re in our packet. And, um, I guess we’re just in, um, uh, on alert of the rates. And I’m assuming these get posted also on the website.

1:37:40 And, um, so we don’t, it doesn’t require any action. Um, the letter of interest, we have two, or sorry, three letters of interest received for the Council on Aging. Um, Jim Sen, Meredith Reardon, and Lisa Palmer. So we should perhaps, um, set a deadline to submit. Yep. Great. And let’s go ahead and maybe, um, I have a suggested date of August 9th for deadline to submit. And I have, um, a, uh, suggestion of August 14th at our interview for, um, interviews. Did those states sound Good? I will not

1:38:25 be able to be here. I’m I’m, I’ll be out of the country, so, Oh, okay. Um, do you wanna move to another chair, another date, or, uh, Well, whatever’s, whatever’s convenient for the board, frankly. I mean, how are you go the next and we don’t, uh, do we know whether we have a second meeting in August? We’re gonna have a retreat on the 20, what did I say? The 23rd? Um, currently our regular Yeah. Norm Yeah. Meeting. Do we have a Yeah, do we have a, when’s our second meeting in August 28th? The phone’s on dead, so That may be too far. You guys might have to Okay. Proceed without me. Is that, if that’s all right with you? That’s fine. All right. So we’ll, we’ll just proceed. Um, Staycation, How many, uh, vacancies are there? Two. Two, okay. And three letters. So right now, and, um, okay.

1:39:12 So we will do the deadline to submit will be August 9th interviews on August 14th. And, um, we’ll just note a letter of resignation we received from Lou May, uh, HPP implementation committee. He was our at large member, very active. Um, we’ve all seen, you see him, um, at a lot of meetings. And he’s moved out of town, or he is moving out of town. So that’s, uh, that’s why, um, uh, I can’t remember if he, did he say he’s already moved? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. He’s already moved out, so. Okay. So Thatcher and I had emailed, um, our appreciation and, and everything for him. I don’t know if we have an updated address. We could send him a letter of appreciation. Well, We got his email, so Yeah. We’ll, Okay. Right. Yeah,

1:39:58 yeah. Um, do, do, should we send a formal, um, letter of appreciation to Lou? So Moved. Moved second. Alright. All in favor? Okay, great. We can do that by email. Um, Could I just ask On the council the deadlines in ninth, the 14th? Yes. Yep. Okay. And then I, um, put on here the select board retreat. Uh, just for discussion, I thought I just would like to see, um, what the board members feel in terms of an agenda. Um, I, I, I feel like, um, I was, my intention was to, um, put on like both, um, short and long-term goals as, um, an item

1:40:46 of discussion at the agenda. Um, the cap, the long-term financial planning and budget planning. Um, how to, are there, I know, I don’t wanna get too, too, don’t wanna overload too much discussion items on the agenda, but, um, it’s the, it’s the board’s retreat. So, um, I wanna hear how others would like to use it. The time. GOA Hmm. Document? No. Why am I not surprised?

1:41:17 No. Just as No. Okay. Um, just a thought. I mean, it, could that be, it, it could be a way to structure some of the Mm-Hmm. Some of the things that you’re raising. And I don’t know if we have, I know we have a, an application that kind of cranks cranks it out now, but well Clear Gov. But is it, is it actually produces it, is it actually a document right now or is it kind of in, uh, you know, electronic Form? Um, Alicia is still working to finish up. She’s asked for an extension. Gotcha. We’re filing with GFOA. Gotcha. And you know, she’s out for a few weeks, so, um, he’s asked for extension to, to rep, finish it up. Okay. So that’s not gonna, that’s not gonna necessarily, I, I mean we can And just for our own purposes,

1:42:02 Or, or do you think GFY is gonna be a reflection of the discussion that we might Yeah, so I mean, what she’s finishing up is the fully formatted Yeah. Meeting all the requirements of GFOA. Right. Got it. But what we have already, i i is built into our system are the goals and objectives that have been carried. So we can, we can produce that document internally. You know, it’s not gonna be all shiny and bright for GFOA award, but for our working document, Because I, I think it’s an incredibly efficient kind of framework Yeah. For, for doing that. And, and it allows us to drill down kind of a little bit more on that to the department level rather than kind of, you Know, because I have the notes

1:42:48 And understanding what kind of the departments are thinking about, Because I have the notes of, of what we did last year. And that can be Yeah. Brought up to date. Yeah. We could Review, yeah. Last year’s list. We could, um, we could actually, uh, that’s a good idea. We could review last year’s and that’d be part of our, um, let’s say our 24, 25 short term goals for this term. And then maybe there’s some that are kind of probably longer term goals, um, more that are more outside of like this year or whatever we decide to bring to town meeting this year. Um, those two things I was thinking about putting on the agenda. So as part of that we could, um, just review

1:43:33 that list from last year. And, and, and also kind of, there’s, there’s a lot things that are, were crossed off a lot. Got done. So, um, So in regard to GFOA, the way I look at this, this conversation in August, is the board’s injection to what goes into the document for next year? That’s right. So we don’t need the, Well, I guess my question is, is that when we’re going through a process, I think as you’re suggesting of, of visioning and kind of looking into the future, really great to kind of ground yourself Yep. In what the kind of the sub, you know, the context of what’s going on in the departments, right? Yep. I think that just is so informative. So if we were to use last year’s document, I think

1:44:20 that would be a great kind of Yep. Framework to kind of, or knowledge framework to do that. You know what what I’m saying? Yeah. Yeah. Because I think oftentimes we’ll also talk about things that we don’t really understand is going on, frankly, uh, sometimes. So it’s a great tool for, for understanding all of that. And then, um, yeah, I agree. Okay. And then the other thing I was just going to say is, you know, it went really well last year. Um, there’s a number of different, um, retired like former town administrators that uh, often facilitate all the time for select boards, these types of visioning and planning sessions. Is it something that, um, we would want, we would be interested in, you know, um, asking for like a facilitator to help with the, with the retreat

1:45:11 Other than our town administrator and, uh, finance Director. So we had, We Had our managers, our monthly managers meeting, which was hosted in Danvers this past week. And this was the, one of the major topics was fac facilitating board retreats. Um, and so some of the managers worked to facilitate, in fact, Mel Ner, who is our facilitator for the charter committee, was one of the presenters. But, so, you know, the, the thought is, um, having sort of that outside party who, one, they do this on a regular basis, so they take some of the workload off of us of all the prep

1:45:58 and organizing, you know, kind of creating the framework and such. Um, and, and what they talk about is, is they’re in a position to better engage and probe Mm-Hmm. The board members that your, that’s absolutely your current town manager slash uh, makes sense administrator makes sense. Yeah. May not be, you know, a wise career move to POK And probe. Right. So they, It hasn’t stopped you in the past. It, it has stopped me. Others? It may.

1:46:31 So it’s, it’s just, it, you know, it’s an idea. It was interesting. I I I, I mean I brought it up that’s to the chair just because the way it was presented, it was worth considering. Um, and again, it’s somebody who’s doing a whole bunch of these, so they really have sort of the, the retreat process down, uh, you know, and, and kind of have it very efficiently be able to manage It. I think it makes sense. Yeah. Okay. I like it. ‘cause it’s just gonna avoid that shiny little coin. ‘cause we all kind of hate to say it, we went off on a lot of tangents last year, which was great. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. Because it was, there’s some new additions and changes and and whatnot. But I think we really need to come down to some core things

1:47:16 that we can accomplish in the short term and, and also just set the stage for the long term, especially depending what happens at town meeting. We gotta be prepared. So I think we gotta start sooner than later. And, and, and I think we as a board need to realize these are the things we gotta be focused on critically and accomplish. And, and I think looking at what, you know, tonight, not to go to off topic, but you know, your consent is just kind of moving things along faster. So I think I’m all for it for that reason. Keep us on track and, and focus on the big, big issues. So, um, so it sounds like, I mean, would, do you feel like you were able to get some connections through that, that you could reach out to Just probe? I mean, um, we’ve set it for, we’ve set it, penciled it

1:48:06 for, um, August 20, the Friday the 23rd. Yeah. Um, and I know because we’ve worked around some vacations. I think if we, if I think the 22nd, um, I know you, you return on like the 19th I’m or something. So if, you know, if, if, if he couldn’t do the 23rd, but he could do the 22nd, um, you know, we could, well The key factor is 23rd is a Friday. Right. So that, that’s I typ I thought it was like having a retreat on a Friday morning is kind of like Yeah, I I just thought that was, There’s still sort of major issues raging through Thursday. Yes. And Friday kind of Friday’s kind of a good time to do Right. It right before the weekend. Always good. Yeah. So, um, yeah, that’d be great. Hopefully somebody’s available and we can Yeah.

1:48:52 ‘cause all those that we’re presenting, there are people who I’ve known and worked with for almost 30 years now. Right. So. Yep. Okay. All right. Thank you for doing that. I’ll check if you could look, reach out. I already gave him some dates. I already gave him the date, So I’m so Glad we’re here for you. I so glad Walking back. I put him on hot standby. In fact, you already hired hot standby and I haven’t, I know my limits. Okay. Um, that now I think we’re, um, onto select board announcements. Does any members of the board have anything they’d like to share? I would just like to REIT reiterate, reiterate, uh, that the consent agenda I think is super efficient and,

1:49:38 and a great way to, to run some of these. Yeah. Listen, I think there’s, my only caveat to that would be that, you know, I think we should give some thought about the announcement effect of some of, of these things. For example, it would be great to, you know, to dwell on the, um, you know, the Eagle Scout, uh, ceremony. Yeah. It’s the third time we had talked about it With, with, uh, with Kurt. Yeah. Uh, what’s his name? Bian. Cooley. And you know, that’s a big deal. Mm-Hmm. Generally, I mean, just to announce it, I think spent a time thousand DI know, I know. So, you know, it’s that kind of thing. Look at the project he did too. Exactly. Yeah. Does that even look at it? I haven’t been there and seen it, but no knowledge. Exactly. I I think there’s some things like that that we should just be sensitive to. Now obviously there’s, there’s an option to call out. So you can put a hold on it for those.

1:50:23 You can put a whole on it or you can just make it a separate, you know, separate thing and, and spend, You can, um, also spend more time on it. Um, uh, yeah, you can, yes. You could also acknowledge it as you as I read it. I, I’m sorry I missed, um, I, uh, that’s okay. Didn’t realize it was for Her. I’m just making that it’s just a copy. No, But it’s a good, it’s a welcome. It’s Just a caveat. Um, the other things were so far out too. Um, right. That like October and August plus you see them on the agenda so that it reads on the agenda, the dates too, when people go look at those. Right. Um, Well, the, the, I guess the road, yeah. I mean you see the road races are also Yeah, it’s fine. I mean, I think the liquor licenses are the ones you could, you would like to be able to just plow through quickly,

1:51:10 but but you can’t Right. Because they’re more, they’re more standardized. Well, it depends. So as long as the conditions, ‘cause they’ll have different conditions on them. Right. So it, it’s a matter of how is that articulated? Well, the announcement has to be made, right? That’s the point. Yeah. So the announcement in the gen, I have seen them routinely as part of consent items in Not a pulled vote. Wow. I know. So that’s why I pulled it out just to clarify. And I’ve watched those meetings of other towns and they just always put those in the consent items. Like they’re just routine business. And unless somebody objects, like you’re not, you’re not anticipating anybody to not, it’s, that’s why it’s the consent items. Um, so, but I wanna make sure that you’re not just be,

1:51:57 you know, that, that we’re doing it the right way. So I’ll check on the liquor licenses. Yeah, no, that would make sense. Um, and I think, you know, there are things like, you know, fire station alerting equipment, look, I mean, you know, that’s stuff that’s useful to know. So I don’t know how much we want to emphasize kind of the announcement factor, uh, you know, letting people know in a public meeting kind of a little bit, a little bit more detail. ‘cause you read them off very quickly, right? Yeah. Uh, and, and maybe you, you read the long form rather than the, you know, the, the short form, uh, on the, on the, uh, thing. You know what I’m saying? Mm-Hmm. Um, my only caveat, but, but Madam Chair at your discretion, so Okay. We always have the option to call so you have the ability to call it out Exactly.

1:52:44 And just call the for, for what it is. A hundred percent. Yeah. ‘cause if it’s like a $5,000 contract, no, but if it’s like a 500, eh, might Have a little discussion. You know what I’m saying? It’s not, that’s not a no. That, that’s exactly, And they do get pulled out. Like I’ve Mm-Hmm. Um, embarrassed to say how many, um, other board meetings, other town select board meetings I’ve watched just to like, just to kind of see how they do things. Um, but if you do, if you go take a look on, um, it, it’s just interesting to see, um, how our peer communities, what their agendas look like and how their meetings kind of flow. Interesting. Interesting. So, I mean, it did save us time, so it’s good. Okay. Um, And it may be maybe on the, uh, when you have to do the license renewals, that would be a great time for Cassette agenda And it would, uh, save you tons

1:53:30 of lozenges having to, uh, to Read. Well, I did find out from our council that we do, we can, you know, the reappointments that we do. Yeah. We don’t need to read them. You don’t need to read them all out really. No, we just say a motion to approve. But I Wonder if that’s the reappointments Someone acknowledging though your standpoint. It’s kind of like a traditional acknowledgement, I think. And we take, we go through the effort to do that. Well, it’s Significant. People hear their names, you know, and What’s significant, the reason for the REVO is it’s because it’s all posted as part of the agenda. Right? Right. So the public has access Yeah. To the details. Right. As part of the agenda rather than verbally naming them off in The meeting. It seems a little, yeah, it always felt a little just kind of like per Oh, it’s very performative to read them.

1:54:17 Well, I think it is, but it’s, you know, in some ways, like, I would argue that it’s a, it’s kind of a celebration of the Yeah. Extensive volunteerism that we haven’t done. You know, it just re under it reinforces that a little bit, I think. But, but I agree. It’s, it’s a heavy reading session. It’s a heavy reading session. Um, okay, so I just need a motion to adjourn. So motion second. I’m sorry. Did anybody have anything else, right? No. All right. Um, all in favor. Three. Thank you. Thank you.