Select Board: June 24, 2026

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.

0:02 All right. Let’s call the meeting of- Yeah … we’ll get this on the record over, June 24th to order. Announce this meeting is to be recorded. Rosanna Ferrante, select board, is participating remotely. And we will start with public comment. We are going to try something new tonight. We’re going to try to keep public comment to three minutes. Jim brought me a really nice looking timer. Uh, you don’t like that? Wow. No. All right. Well, yeah, that’s it. I’m going to cut you right off. Perfect. So we will open up with public comment. If anybody would like to speak, please come up to the microphone.

0:37 I still speak. I’ll say. Is it okay to move that up? Is it okay? I don’t know if people would like that. Good evening. Ron Knight, 36 Amherst Road, Marblehead. Also 321 West Shore Drive, which I spend way too much time at, talking to my wife. Here tonight, you folks were kind enough last year to allow the VFW to use the Spirit of ‘76 for our challenge coins this year. The committee voted on what we’re going to do with the 250th anniversary with Washington going across the Delaware. So as I started last year, the commander would like to coin all of the selectmen and support as our way of saying thank you. There is an event, if you haven’t seen it advertised already, this coming Saturday night. The USS Glover is going to be at the post.

1:25 65 of the vets are coming for a dinner that Bob Arbetta is organizing. Coincidentally, we have an event downstairs in the bunker that night, so we’re going to do a toast for the crew. They’re coming in from all parts of the country, so this should be kind of interesting. Rumor has it that they’ve already threatened to drink the bar dry, so let’s hope that does not happen. So if you could just go and indulge me for 30 seconds. So if you could stand up, if the commander could coin you, that would be great, and I’ll get out of your hair.

2:03 Appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate it. All right. Thanks for all your support. Appreciate it. Thanks. Thanks for all your support. We appreciate it very much. What time is this Saturday night? starts at about 7:00, is the dinner upstairs. They’ll probably get a hold of you guys to come by, but if you’re downstairs, that kicks off at 5:00. Okay. Great. Beautiful. Thank you. Anybody else? Thank you, Ronnie. Thanks, Ron. Appreciate it. Good evening.

2:33 That’s so cool. That’s really… That’s awesome. Oh, this is nice. That’s gorgeous. That is. Wow.

2:41 Thank you.

2:44 Yeah.

2:46 Thank you, Ron. You’re doing a great job. Hi. Bob Arbetta, 36 Chestnut Street. Just to camp on what Ron’s going to say, because I’m the Navy coordinator for this event, the USS Glover. And I’ll be touring them around town Saturday. And I think they have a challenge coin, a USS Glover challenge coin as well. So you’ll be getting that hopefully. And I’ll be at the fort probably in the afternoon with them, showing them, because I’m also a fort ranger.

3:33 And we’ll be doing that and making the VFW event as well. So,

3:42 any questions? Too bad we don’t have the ship. In ‘76, Glover’s regiment was actually aboard, and I remember being aboard. And we presented the cutlass, which I think is somewhere in the hallway, when Ed Butler was the skipper of the Glover regiment. So anyway, any questions? Otherwise, we’ll hopefully have a good reunion. These guys have been trying to get this thing together for a whole year. We’ve heard about it. But anyway, thank you very much, and you’re welcome to come. We’ll even take the Marine, too.

4:29 Oh, please. Glad you’ll make the exception, Bob. Thank you very much for organizing this. Yeah. This is really great. That’s great. It’s been fun. And

4:40 just to hear the enthusiasm of the… This guy is the first class cook, and he’s been on the phone with me for a year, actually. So anyway, I think we got it together, so we’ll see Saturday night. Thank you. Good luck. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks, Bob. Thank you, Bob. You’re welcome. Peter.

5:05 Good evening. Alexander Falk, 452 Atlantic Avenue. I come to you today as the chair of the Marblehead Fireworks Committee. Thatcher promised me I would be on the agenda, but I’m not, so I’ll use public comments for a brief announcement. The Fireworks Committee would like to recommend to have our harbor illumination and Marblehead fireworks again on the 4th of July, with the harbor illumination starting at 8:45 and the fireworks starting at 9:00. And with your permission, we will start the countdown to the 4th at 10 days as of today. All right. And I have a little- Excellent … printout for you. Great. Come on up. Thank you. Okay. I apologize for that miscommunication. No problem.

5:50 Three minute timeout. No. It pays me. That’s all right. Thank you.

5:59 Thanks, Alexander.

6:04 Thank you so much. Great. Thank you so much. Alex, thank you. It’s a highlight of the year. Yeah, it is. Thank you for keeping up the tradition. Thank you. Great. Thank you.

6:14 We don’t need to approve this, right? We’ve already… Yeah. Okay. It’s just an announcement. Yeah, it’s just an announcement. Okay, great. Anybody else?

6:23 Bonnie Carey, 24 Shepherd Street. And can I see your little timer? It’s right here. I’ll put it- Okay … I’ll hold it right up there. I think it’s preposterous that you’re using it. I think it’s stupid because there’s not a lot of people here. Thank you. Just like at town meeting, I totally understand that, but here there’s not tons of people, so I don’t think it’s appropriate. Thank you.

6:44 Anybody else want to speak?

6:47 Anybody online? I don’t see any hands up. Okay. So we will close public comment. We will move on to our second agenda item, which is Fiscal Year ‘25 Audit Presentation. We have Alicia Benjamin, as well as our auditors, Roselli Clark and Associates. Good evening, Selectboard. Good evening. I’d like to bring forward our auditors. This is the second year they’ve come before your body- Great … to present. Welcome again. Thank you. Good to see you. They’re our new audit firm. They’ve been with us for the last two years. Right. We changed for a new, fresh perspective to dig deeper into our financials for the town. They’ve put together a presentation for you, and the ACFR is posted on the website as well. Okay, great. Yep. Good evening. Good evening.

7:33 You’ve got the floor. All right. Well, my name is Tony Roselli. I’m the managing partner with Roselli Clark and Associates. They are your audit firm. We’re new, second year. With me is Paul Gargano. He was the in-service partner on this particular engagement. And, so today we’re going to talk about basically some very highlights of the audit rather than getting deep into the weeds. Just do a quick summary of some of the material things we found, some of the good financial trends that are going on in town. Talk a little bit about your bond rating and how to keep your bond rating. At the end, there’s some findings and recommendations, and if you have any

8:20 questions, ask them as we go. Up here. I think this is the same group. We have one- Yeah. One new one … yeah. One new one. One new one in the back. One new. Yep. Okay. Rosanna Fronte.

8:34 All right. So for those who, I assume this is being broadcast at home to the residents and will be available, just wanted to talk about the background. What’s an audit? How do we do it? What do we do when we’re here? So, basically, we have to follow, when a town meets certain requirements, it has to have an audit done, and we follow the audits under what’s called the Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards. Those are created by folks down in Washington. They give us a book, and I have to look at the book, say, “This is how we design our audit.” Marblehead, because you’re a fairly good-sized community, because you have debt offerings, because

9:20 you receive federal monies, you are someone that needs to have an audit, by law, every single year, and that’s what we did in this audit. So as part of the audit, we’re required to look at your internal control. And when we talk about internal control, it’s major transactions. So we’re not down in the town clerk’s office looking at the birth certificates and death certificates and things like that. We’re not down there doing that. We’re looking at your major transactions. So we’re looking at the treasurer, collector, that’s collecting all your real estate taxes. Your treasurer is collecting your grants, from your federal monies, from your state monies. So, revenues, that’s the big part of the revenue side of the audit.

10:09 Payroll is throughout the town. School, fire, police, everywhere. We do transactions on payroll, and we do transactions on disbursements. So like I said, the audit’s not designed to go in and focus on the small things. It’s designed to get an overall view of what’s going on here, how are the major areas working, and then report on that. Tony, for those folks that are listening in, can you kind of emphasize a little bit the process overview that you’re looking at as part and parcel of looking at the major transactions? Because I think that’s very important, that people understand that there is kind of a process component to this as well, that

10:56 we can always improve perhaps, but- Right … that is- So by the process, the process that we go through or your process? Well, our process. The question is whether you’re evaluating how the transactions get done, whether there’s backstopping in the process, whether there’s duplication, things like that. So at the back of the report- Yeah … we’re going to get into some of that? Perfect. No, I just- If that’s okay. I just hope people should understand- Yeah … that the audit does involve- Yeah … a fair amount of- Yeah. Yeah … that kind of review. So at the back, we’re going to talk about some of the large things that we found that we believe the town could- Correct. Correct … could improve. Correct. Correct. Perfect. The critical things. Yep. Yep. Thank you.

11:41 So as we go through that process, we design what’s called risk. Where are our risk areas? Where do we need to spend more time versus less time? Do we need to enhance procedures? Do we need to pull back on procedures? That’s all assessed as we go through our internal control review. As part of the audit, you’ll see I’ve got a bullet here on single audit. Single audit is your federal money. So if you receive, beginning in ‘26, if you receive and spend more than a million dollars in federal money- You got an audit. You have to have an audit. At the end of the audit, we have what’s called clean opinion versus a qualified opinion. So if we agree with the books,

12:27 the way you present them, and we can put them into an audit format that we can send out to the street so people, your investors, your stakeholders, can all look at it and say, “Okay, these are the numbers.” And if we’re comfortable with that, we’re going to issue what’s called a clean opinion.

12:47 If Alicia says, “No, you forgot to include a school in the capital assets,” or, “We want to put an extra school in the capital assets,” now we’d have a problem. We’d have to qualify it and say why we’re qualifying it. And believe it or not, we go to cities and towns that don’t even inventory fixed assets. So in our opinion, we say, “Everything’s fine except you don’t inventory fixed assets,” and that’s a huge asset for the town, but you don’t inventory it. Here it is inventoried, we do review it, and we put it in the financials. And the last thing that we do here is the governance report, and this is kind of what we’re doing now. There’s a Word document that I think you folks probably have read that has what I’m talking about here.

13:34 Okay. So let’s talk about just financially for us, where do we stand? What I want people to really focus on here on this chart is the consistency of the graph. Okay? It’s not doing this. It’s basically going right across. It’s consistent. Mm-hmm. So your investors love that. They love that. So when you say reserve balance, I think when we talk about it lots of times we’re talking- Yeah … which reserves are you talking about? So reserves, a good question. So let’s back up and- Okay … talk about the terms that are on here. Sure. Your reserve balance is basically what’s in your general fund, which approximates free cash. Yeah. So that’s your general fund. Then you’ve got all your stabilization fund numbers. Those get added in,

14:22 and then whatever you encumber at the end of the year gets added in. Standard & Poor’s says that’s your reserve number, and Standard & Poor’s is going to evaluate that. They’re going to evaluate that versus your budget. They come up with a percentage. If you are higher than 15%, you’re what’s called a tier one community. So it means that you’re very healthy financially if you’re above 15%. You folks are at about close to 20%, if I do the math with all those numbers. So from a financial perspective, you’re in very good shape, and you’ve maintained that for 10 or 11 years here. Just consistency across the board. You don’t have these times where you’ve gone so low

15:09 that you had to do something drastic to bring it back up. It just seems like a very consistent process that the town uses. You do use some free cash during the year, but then you replenish it through the way you’re doing your forecasting and your budgeting. It gets replenished, and that’s exactly the mechanism that the people that look at you financially want to see. So, that’s

15:33 five stars here, and that’s why you have a triple A. And just, I know you said, but I’m slow on the uptake. The reserves, Tony involved. Stabilization fund- Yep … was relatively low. I think you had a million or so or whatever. Free cash is one? Yeah. Your general fund, which approximates your free cash. Okay. So the term you guys are familiar with is free cash, because that’s what the state does. The general fund number is slightly higher- Okay … than the free cash, but they approximate. So that’s like seven or eight, maybe something like that? Yeah. Well- This was 2025, we had a higher free- Yeah. I’m just trying to get us roughly to 17 or 18 in my head, and I can’t. Yeah. I want to say it’s about, if you take your stabilization plus your free cash approximate,

16:20 those are about nine. Yeah. And then you have nine in encumbrances. Okay. And what are the encumbrances involve? Encumbrances are things you carry over from year to year that you’re able to use in the next year’s budget. Okay. Got it. So if the police have money left over and they’ve got some POs against it, they get to carry it into the next year. Public Works, the same thing. Articles that you haven’t rescinded yet, you carry over from year to year. So the encumbrances are making up about half of it. Yeah. About half, yeah. Which gets you to your number. Yeah. All right. Okay. You’re paying attention. I like that. I’m trying. Yeah. No. I’m slow on the uptake. That’s the first time I’ve had a select board member do the math and say, “I don’t know how to get to this number.” Good job.

17:04 So next slide is just comparing you to some of the metrics out there. So we talked about the reserve ratio, which is, I think it’s just under 20%. The tier one sits at 15%, so you’re above the tier one. You’re well above the state average, which is about 10 to 11%. And the danger which I tell all my finance director clients is if you start getting down to that four or 5%, that’s where the red flags start to go off. And you haven’t been there in forever, so I don’t see that as a danger, but I always put it out there. So if the town says, “Hey, let’s use all our free cash to build a building instead of going out to borrow,” you’re going to see this plummet, just so you’re aware. That’s one of the reasons why that would plummet.

17:51 Now you’re going to go into that low end, and when your bond ratings fall, they’re going to say, “How do you expect to get it back?” Back up, right. You can’t do it through differential. Yeah. How do you expect to get it back? So any questions on that?

18:08 All right. Let’s talk about some of the bigger liabilities. Everyone knows what debt is. It’s tangible. You can look at it. It’s a number. You owe it. It’s like your house mortgage. The two- Components of debt that are hard to analyze are your pension obligation and your OPEB obligation, because they’re liabilities that are out there, and they’re based on how long people are going to live, how healthy people are, what sorts of benefits you have. So they’re a little more difficult to measure than saying, “Hey, what’s the mortgage on my home?” So what you do is you go out and you hire an actuary, and the actuary goes through all sorts of assumptions and says, “Hey.”

18:54 And the actuary’s licensed by the state, they have to go through a whole process to come up with the numbers that they come up with. And so you’re not just hiring a shoemaker down the street to tell you what this number is. These are really qualified people that are coming up with these numbers. So on the pension side, your unfunded liability, that means the amount. So when you take money from the employee’s pay and the town puts in money, those generate what’s called an asset that’s used to pay benefits. Whatever’s left over is an asset that grows and goes against the liability. The goal is to get that unfunded liability to zero. That’s the goal. And you decrease that number. So last year that was

19:42 54.5, I believe it was. So that went down about $4 or $5 million over the prior year. So, unless we’re all sleeping under a rock, we know what the stock market has been doing in the last year, year and a half. It’s been on fire. So that’s helping this process. So right now you’re at 72.5% funded on your pension fund. Pretty good place to be. You’ve got another 28% to go, so with more help from the stock market. And each year they come up with what your assessment is going to be for the next year. How high is that going up, Alicia, your assessment year to year? About 8%, 10%? Yeah, almost 8.6%.

20:27 8.6%. So you’re in a really good spot because most of my clients, their assessments are going up 10 to 12%. Got it. You’re going up 8% because you were smarter back in 1990 when this legislation came out on pensions and said you have to fund it by a certain date. You folks did a better job of upfront funding that. And if we’re all familiar with how the compounding of interest works, if I put $100 in at the beginning and someone put zero in, I’m going to have a lot more- Sure. Mm-hmm … 20 years, 30 years from now. So whoever did a nice job at the beginning, I see them in the 70 to 80% now. A lot of my clients are still in the 40 to 50%, so they’re in a really bad spot. You guys are in a very good spot. Quick question on that. I can maybe ask Alicia.

21:14 What is our projected funded date? Is it

21:21 ‘23, ‘26? Yeah, ‘36. That’s been pretty stable- Yep … as I recall. Okay. Yep. Is that the state requirement, or that’s what ours- The state requirement’s 2040. ‘40. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Right.

21:34 There’s some towns, believe it or not, that are at 48% right now. I won’t mention any names, but they’re at 48%. Wow. So this law went into effect in 1990, 30, 36 years ago. So when I sit at the meetings, I say, “It took you 36 years to get to 48%. How are you going to do 52% in the next 14 years?” That’s the question I ask them, because that’s a budget breaker, because the only way you’re going to get there is if your assessment skyrockets and starts to- And you can contribute. Yeah … So this has been managed really well and you’re in a good spot with this. OPEB, you’re starting to make some progress on OPEB. Your unfunded liability’s 145 million. The good news is there’s no state law on this, so you’ve

22:23 taken this upon yourself to say, “Hey, let’s get ahead of the curve on this and start funding it.” Because my prediction is once these pension liabilities start become fully funded, the state’s going to- Mm-hmm. Kick in … they’re going to come in on the OPEB and say, “Hey, guys. This is bad all over the state. We’re going to create a law for OPEB.” And if you’re ahead of the curve, it’s less that you’re forced to fund. Anything coming from the state, or is it just going to be purely local funded? No, they’re not going to. No. Okay. No. All right. I know it’s kind of a naive question. No. Yeah. Just add in, so in fiscal ‘27, we’ll put through a new policy before your board- Yeah … for that. Between when the pension ends and start to fund the OPEB.

23:09 Right. Okay, great. What’s happening is people are living a lot longer. Yeah. And they’re healthier. Yep. So for the old guys like me, that’s great news. For the town, that’s not good news. So Social Security, believe it or not, when Social Security was put in, the life expectancy was 68. Mm. When Social Security went in. And you retire at 65, so they only expected to fund you for three years. That’s what’s happening here. People are living into their 90s now. So this liability’s getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So just keep it in the back, as the managers of this community, keep in the back of your mind when you’re going through your strategic thought process, that we’re doing really great on our pension, but we got to keep this in our rear view mirror very close by, because we’ve got to keep

23:56 on top of that. And that’s, believe it or not, if you include the light, you’ve got 7.7 million in assets in the two OPEB trusts. The liability has gone down six million. And there’s ways to design your health plan that can lower the liability. There’s different things you can do if you really want to dig down. I think you’ve done a lot of that. Over the last few years to manage to get that number down. But it’s out there, and the good thing about it is once your pension is fully funded, it’s going to create a windfall- Mm-hmm … because it’s baked into your budget. Right. So you’re going to go to normal costs, you’re going to have the delta. Now you can say, “Hey,

24:43 what are we going to do with that? Are we going to fund salaries with that?” I would say, “No. No way. No, that should be going to your OPEB.” That’s what I would say as an advisor. That’s helpful, Tony, to understand. Yep.

24:58 All right.

25:01 Paul, you want to take over again? Sure. Thank you. All right. I’ll talk about the informational items. The first was investment income. This year was $3.9 million across town-wide, which was slightly down from the prior year, mainly because of lower investable balances because of your capital projects. You had capital projects and stuff. Oh, not. One of my- ARPA. ARPA. Yes, exactly. That was part of it, too. Yep. So the 3.9 is spread out across the town. $2.3 million was in governmental funds, so the general fund and your trust funds, and certain special revenue funds that can keep their interest. And the rest, the other 1.6 million, came from your enterprise funds. So all your enterprise funds retain their own interest earnings.

25:47 Some towns, it defaults to the general fund, but in your case, you keep them with each enterprise fund. So out of that 1.6 million of investment earnings, I think nearly a million of it was the light department, and the remaining 600,000 or 6 or 700,000 was for the other enterprise funds, mainly water and sewer. If I take that 3.9, how much did you say the enterprise funds were? 1.6? They were about 1.6 million, so your governmental funds were 2.3. And of that 2.3, fair amount of that was

26:23 trust, or what would you say? I would say it was about 600,000 trusts and other special revenue funds that keep their interest, and about 1.9 million in your general fund. Okay.

26:41 Well, not 1 point. There’s- 1.7 … there’s some stabilization- 1.7. That’s true, too. Correct. In your general fund- Correct … that’s earning interest, too- Correct … on a financial statement. Correct. So again, how much do you think was for the general? The true general fund number? Yeah. It was probably, what, 1.4 or 5, I would say. That’s about right. Yeah. Okay. Once you strip everything out. So just to follow up on that. On the stabilization, because I haven’t dived this deep, but when we earn money on that, it rolls up to general? It stays in the stabilization fund. Stays in the stabilization. But the stabilization fund in the financials gets collapsed into- It gets collapsed. Okay. That makes sense. It’s what GASB requires. Okay. It goes- Just so I can move on, the budget, governmental, public safety-

27:26 Yep … it’s the same thing. Okay. All right. And then we always talk about network securities at these meetings.

27:37 As Tony mentioned at the beginning of the presentation, we look at major transaction classes. One of the other areas that we’re required by our standards to look at is your IT. We have to gain an understanding of your IT controls. We do that through memos and also through certainly walk-through processes and interviews of your staff. You have a fairly… It’s well set up. You do annual trainings. You haven’t had any major issues, any penetrations like that, so that’s great. But there’s always one or two clients of ours almost every year that gets hit, so it’s something that you can’t let your guard down. And just keep doing what you’re doing.

28:24 Your IT

28:26 department does an excellent job, so- … they need to keep that up. Yeah. And then the uniform guidance, the single audit, is the last informational. So as Tony mentioned, if you spend, it used to be 750,000, now next year it goes up to a million. If you spend over 750,000 of federal money, it triggers a federal grant audit. So it doesn’t mean we look at all your federal grants. We’re required, it’s like calculus, believe it or not. But there’s a calculus formula that fit that, and we do risk assessments, and that it whittles it down to where we have to audit either 20 or 40% of your total expenditures. In the case of the town, since you had filed some of your financial statements late

29:14 recently, you’re in the 40% category. However, with ARPA being so large, we’re looking at ARPA as the major fund this year and even prior year. That gets you to the 40%. So, in this case, your single audit is focused on ARPA. We are nearly complete with that audit. We are not completely done with that, and that should be issued over the next several weeks. Okay. Great. Thank you. But again, similar to what Tony was saying, it focuses on the major transaction classes. And then on top of that, each federal program has their own specific compliance requirements. The OMB in Washington gives us a compliance supplement every year.

30:00 They’re talking about every other year coming up. When they come out with a new compliance supplement, it gives us our marching orders of what exactly they want us to look at. And we are required. We don’t have any- I understand … no leeway in what to look at. Once we look at the internal controls, we’re specific on what we’re required.

30:24 And again, talking about gaining an understanding and testing the major transaction classes. While we were doing that and performing our audit work, in the ‘24 audit, we identified two material weaknesses, one on cash reconciliations and another on receivable reconciliations. Unfortunately, we were just here nine months ago, so your ability to correct that for June 30th, ‘25 is extremely limited. Mm-hmm. In addition, you’ve had turnover. So unfortunately, the same conditions that existed in ‘24 also exist at the end of ‘25, and less than a week away from the end of ‘26. So hopefully, that’s well on its way to being rectified.

31:10 But the two main issues, again, were cash reconciliations. What happened two years ago is you brought a consultant in, and they had to do extensive work, and they finished the cash reconciliation about 10 months after year-end, but there was a lot of reconciling items, and it was hard to map, and it delayed your free cash. Mm-hmm. So this year, same company was brought back in. A similar condition. Nine months after year-end, we were handed a reconciliation. Everything was reconciled and identified to the penny. However, a lot of the items still weren’t adjusted, so you were carrying them still as reconciling items, some from

31:56 years prior. Much of that has been already cleaned up, so we do not expect that to be an issue when we come back in for fiscal ‘26. But, again, with the turnover, I believe a new treasurer coming on board, it might- So I’ve been reorging, as you are aware. So accounting now has an assistant town accountant. We have a new wonderful town accountant working, and now I’m reorganizing the treasurer’s office. So I have split the treasurer collector position with one collector and one treasurer. As this has been ongoing for over seven years, there’s been a consultant coming in trying to rectify this cash issue that has just continued on. I think splitting those two positions where we have one just focused on cash, one just focused on collections, which is

32:45 one receivables, one cash, will rectify the situation moving forward. Fairly nice. And this is all in cash receipts, correct? Correct. This is all in cash. So again, no cash. We didn’t find cash missing. No. It was a matter of the lack of monthly reconciliation procedures just caused all these reconciling items to not get reported timely and just got carried forward. And it bled over into the receivables. And our second material weakness is related to receivables. Similar issue. When you compare the receivables that the collector has versus what’s on your ledger, saying there’s, in total, about $146,000 difference that still needs to be reconciled,

33:31 usually within different years. Are there any technology weaknesses that contribute to that for us? Or is there software technology that we could use that would facilitate this or improve upon it? I know we have the reorganization, but- Right. So we have that Assess Pro, Collect Pro software, which is not good. Which did not work well. Yeah. And then Softwrite was our secondary, was our GL that didn’t really talk to that. So we have these variances between those two, and we have to take those reports, and now we’re going to be on one platform with Munis instead of having three different systems talking to each other. So that was an issue. That also- Does the cash receipt side of it,

34:17 is that live now? The cash receipts is live. The cash module- Yeah … for reconciling goes live 2027. Okay. Hopefully so. Okay. And you know what? It’s a great time. With the reorg, a brand new system, this is the time to implement these controls, document them in writing. You want a binder with the idea that if you get turnover, if the town accountant leaves, if the assistant treasurer is out for six months, someone can just pick that binder up and they know exactly what to do, step-by-step, the processes. So that’s going to be key. Are these still going to exist in ‘26, Alicia, when we come in to do the ‘26 audit? Or are they going to be-

35:03 The new accountant is going to work to try to clear out the receivables. Before the audit? Yes. And we still have consultants on board for the 2026 for the cash, so that once 2027 comes around, I’m hiring a new treasurer for ‘27. These should not exist anymore. So there’s a chance these could disappear in the next audit. We’re positioned to do it. Yeah. Great. Good work. Any questions? That’s all we had. No. No. That’s a good high level- Good overview … overview. Yeah. Excellent. Great. Well, thank you guys for your assistance. Thank you very much. And thank you for showing up at night. Appreciate your time. Have a great night. All right. You too. And you didn’t have to turn the- Ah, it’s- … alarm off. Yeah, exactly. I had taken a lot for that one. Yeah.

35:49 Take care, gentlemen. Thank you. Thanks. Appreciate it. All right. We’re going to move on to year-end transfers. We were going to have a joint meeting with Finks Hall, but they couldn’t get a quorum. They’re going to meet on Tuesday night, June 30th. So we will go through year-end transfers on our side first, and they will then do it next Tuesday, correct? Next Tuesday. Yep. So Alicia, do you want to walk through any of this for us?

36:17 So the majority of the year, the District 101 has covered the snow and ice deficit. Yeah. And the good news on that is I reserved 150,000 to be raised on the recap, which I will not have to do because I was able to cover it all with a year-end and reserve fund transfer. Good. So, I transferred it to several different lines within snow and ice, and then I transferred a very small amount, $67, to the finance committee for dues and for a training conference. They’ve been doing trainings every year, which has actually been fantastic in sharing their perspectives on the overriding things they’ve seen in different communities as they’ve been going out there, and things that other finance committees are finding challenges. So I thought that was amazing that they’re going out and getting those trainings

37:03 and going to those conferences. For public buildings, I received an email from the building commissioner, Steve Cummings, that he needed some money to cover his gas bills through the end of the fiscal year. That’s the largest ask that he’d asked for. That’s about 33,000. He needed some money for electricity, and he needed money for buildings and grounds. That’s about 2,000 for the building and grounds. It’s to cover a North Shore survey to survey the town property line. He needs 2,000 for that and 2,000 to cover the electricity through the end of the fiscal year. When looking at veterans, they had a shortfall of 1,305 for flags. So I’ve asked for 1,305 as a year-end transfer to cover flags. And from the finance department, 95,000 to cover consulting services in conjunction with the prior year cash

37:52 balances, and $55,000 for IT. And for the IT part, there’s a lot we have that’s unexpected costs, and we cover it town-wide, so I made a little listing. I’ll go over this with finance committee too. So we upgraded the wireless at the fire headquarters. Some phones on the second floor had no cabling in the area as well, so we had to do the cabling and we had to do the upgrading of the wireless. That was about $10,000 unexpected. I needed to buy a special printer for check printing for the new software. That was $3,000. I had to do Wi-Fi wireless networking at Mariella. That was another $5,000. I had to do server upgrades. That was another 35, almost $36,000. And I had to do some domain controller upgrades. That was another $4,000. So in all, that was 59,000 in unexpected costs.

38:43 Alicia, can you just explain high level? Yes. Like I see on some of these you’re zeroing out exactly. Yes. Like for instance, some their current balance is negative 55 for finance IT, and you bring in 55. Yes. And on other ones, we can pick some other ones, but you have a bigger deficit and you’re not bringing in as much. Right. So how does that look at year-end? We’ll have a negative in there. So when they have a negative in there- Yes … we’re covering them, but it’s because there’s different lines. So when we vote the budget, even those are as line items, we vote total expenses. So as long as their total expenses in total aren’t changed- Okay … the accountant can now clean up those lines. Within that category that we vote. Right. Okay. So all the regular expenses may be off-

39:28 Okay … but he’s going to do an entry and move all of that.

39:32 Okay. Okay. HR, we needed to cover some monthly HR subscriptions, job advertisements, and HR materials. So that’s the majority of his big transfer, and the total transfer for HR was $35,000 for that. 4,000 for the payroll manager. We did a reorganization with them where we changed the clerk position up to their benefits and payroll, and then we had the HR payroll manager. So between the two, I’ve moved some salary out of the HR payroll manager, which brought it short by 4,000 to include the benefits person. Park facilities heating, they need to cover their heating and gas bills through the end of fiscal year, so they’re asking for 15,000 90-day transfer.

40:20 Planning board legal, they need a $6,350 for their legal services and $617 for their legal notices that are in deficit. Police out of rank, $1,222 has been forecasted through the end of the fiscal year.

40:41 And public buildings, that went over to the electricity and gas. Abbot Library materials, 5,050, and I’m taking that right from their salaries for a shortage in their materials.

40:51 Is there any questions or anything you want me to go into more detail on?

40:59 Pretty good. Looks good. Yeah. So we need two separate motions here, I’m seeing? Is that correct? Yes. One for year-end transfers, and then I’ll go over the reserve fund transfer. Okay. So if I could have a motion that the select board authorize the following year-end transfers in accordance with MGL Chapter 48.33 , the year-end transfer, which totals $555,631 from the fiscal year ‘26 appropriation line items listed below, title, transfer from to the fiscal year ‘26 appropriation line items listed below, title, transfer to, as submitted by the town’s finance director, said transfer subject to the concurrence of the town’s finance committee. So moved. Second. Okay. This will be a polled vote. Ms. Ferrante? In favor.

41:46 Mr. Zessin? In favor. Ms. Noonan? In favor. Mr. Greater? In favor. And I’m in favor. All right. Okay. And I have- Okay, so the next one is a reserve fund transfer. So there’s approximately about $315,000 left in the reserve fund, and I’m taking 287,658 to cover the overage left in the snow and ice budget for overtime of 287657.22. Now, this reserve asks the finance committee? This reserve fund? This is going to come right out of the finance committee’s- That’s what I’m saying. Yep. It’s the finance committee reserve fund. Yep. Reserve fund. Okay. And you can pay that down. Great. Questions? Good. I have a motion to authorize Alicia Benjamin to appear before finance committee to request a transfer in the sum of

42:32 $287,658 from the reserve fund in accordance with Chapter 40, Section 6 of Massachusetts general laws for snow and ice overtime. So moved. Second. Mr. Zisson. In favor. Ms. Noonan. In favor. Mr. Greater. In favor. Ferrante. In favor. And I’m in favor as well.

42:56 I think we’re good there. And Alicia, you then had a– You wanted to give us a presentation on Open Finance? Correct. Thank you for all that work, by the way. Thank you. Let me just try to share my screen.

43:19 Okay, I’m going to the Town of Marblehead website. So a lot of residents and constituents say hey to me, “I went on to your ClearGov, which houses all our history. Why can’t I see anything current?” Because that’s now in Open Finance, our new Tyler Munis system, but it’s also an online software. They can go right in. The difference between ClearGov and Open Finance is, Open Finance is live. Hmm. So I’m going to go straight over to Departments. So if a citizen wants to do research, should they use OpenGov and not ClearGov? Is that correct? If they want to look at history, they should use ClearGov for the history. If they want to look at current, they want to look at Open Finance. So to find Open Finance, they’re going to go to the website, go to Departments, go down to Finance Department.

44:07 Alicia, while you’re doing that, at some point, will the history be migrated over? Only one year of history will be migrated over- Okay … which will be ‘25. So we’ll have ‘25, ‘26, and we’re starting ‘27. Okay. And then at the very top of the Finance Department page, you see Open Finance Application. Click the link.

44:27 And this takes us right into Open Finance. At the top, it has Budget, if you want to explore revenue, explore operating. Checkbook, if you want to explore our spending. You can also go down here in the Financial Summary, and you can explore down here, Total Vendor Payments.

44:46 It also has links below if you want to go back and look at our Adopted Budget, the General Fund, a graph, if you want to look at the graph. Related Content, it has a link right here to go back to the website if you want to look at our ACFR docs. Takes them right back to the website and report documents they may want to see. So I’m going to just start and say, okay, I just came in and I want to look at vendor payments, so I’m going to hit Explore.

45:13 And here’s my ledger broken down. They got Public Works, Education, Debt Service, General Government, Culture and Rec. What do I feel like looking at? Let’s take a look at Public Works.

45:24 Do I want to look at Light, Water, Sewer, Waste, Public Works, or Snow Removal? I think I want to look at… Let’s look at Public Works.

45:35 And here’s some, they’re doing storm water, the different funding sources they’re using. Okay. Well, let’s take a look at Undefined Expenses. Yeah. So they are paying somebody to DNR, Richard Ambrosia, Seal Coating, Tyler Equipment Corporation, K5, Environmental Partners. Let’s look at DNR.

46:00 So eventually, when we do have history, you will be able to see how they’re doing with the different vendors over time. You drill down. Yep. And I’m going to click Checkbook. So when you click Checkbook, you can go right in and we paid DNR for sidewalk. Here’s the amount, here’s the date we paid them. And you can download the data. So you can see the transactions of who we’re paying and when we’re paying them right at your fingertips. Let’s go back here. Let’s explore revenue.

46:32 Is go into Budgeted Funds. Let’s say we want to look at the General Fund. There’s different categories you can see below. Treasurer, Collector. Here’s the budget. Here, what we’ve actually collected. Building Inspection, what I budgeted, what we’ve collected. So we can see that. Not all receipts are in there right now because we’re still importing. We just started the revenue module live for property taxes May 1st. So we’re importing from our old system of SoftRight into Munis. But now that we’re live, next year, that’s not an issue because we’ll be on this platform. So starting July 1st, everything should be up to date on almost- Almost everything except excise tax. Our excise tax platform goes live in October. Okay. And then we’re completely on Munis at that point.

47:18 So Open Finance is getting populated through, Munis. Munis. Yeah, live. Okay. Yep. Perfect. So there you go. So if you guys do a transaction, the public can see it? Yep. Right. Public go in right themselves and go in and see it and say, “Okay, I want to look at property taxes.” There’s Real Estate Taxes 2026, and they can see what the budget is, what we’ve actually collected. They can make a pie chart, they can go over time if they want to, and they can just keep drilling as far as they want to drill. Sure. Beautiful. Yeah. And then the same thing if they want to look at operating expenses. Is the excise tax one the last module to get implemented, would you say? That’s the last module. So we’ve done it so fast. We did our GL July 1st, we did Payroll January 1st.

48:05 Okay. We did Revenue May 1st, and then October 1st. Now let me tell you, anywhere else, it’s three years per module. We’ve been doing ours in six months- That’s great … to try to get us off those different systems, to try to get us- That’s why you don’t sleep? Yes. Okay. But we’re getting there, and I have a great team, so it’s getting really well done. So here, again, we can look at the school if we want to. So here’s the School General Fund, District-Wide, High School, Village, Middle, Brown, Glover. So let’s look at the high school.

48:39 They can look at what’s going on, professional salaries, what’s their budget, how much they’ve spent in other clerical supplies, contract service, other. They can look as far as they want in every single department- Drill as far as they want into all of our spending and what we’re doing with the money.

48:57 And they can see high school teachers in SPED, English, Math, Science, Social Studies, everything that’s being paid right at their fingertips. And Alicia, I’m sorry, because you said- Yep … the actuals, as you’re looking at the slide, what are the actuals? Through what date? Today. What are we today? The system. Yeah, they’re linked. This is coming straight from Tyler. So before, with ClearGov, we had to take our system out of software to export it, give it to them, wait for them to update it, so it was always behind. Here, Tyler actually runs this right from our system.

49:35 So just looking at that, for instance- Yep … high school SPED teachers are slightly underspent, and high school world language slightly overspent. And that is- Yep. And you can see it. Yep. But percentage of that’s good. And so people can look right at it themselves. And we want them to do the same thing for us. And then what I’d like to do next year is post all salaries. I know that’s a newspaper request, but I’d like to start doing that in-house, putting it on our website for the public to go look at what everybody’s paid each year, and we can just put that out on the website for transparency. Hmm. Well, Alicia, it’s hard to emphasize how important this is, and it’s a total capstone to all the effort that you’ve been putting in in the last few years. It’s really remarkable. And yeah, we had a initial start with

50:22 ClearGov, right? But then- And adjusted … and this is very significant. And you deserve full kudos and congratulations on it. Rosanne, I think I saw you raise your hand. I did. I didn’t know if I could just jump in or- Yeah, just jump … what my process was here. So I just had a question. Yeah. So I think this is a great tool, and I think a lot of people would want to know about it. So, how are we communicating this to the public? I only see 14, or maybe even less than that, maybe nine people on. So I don’t know, I guess, what’s the thought on communication? So, this is definitely good because we can post this up, but also I’ll probably reach out to one of the newspapers to help me get the information out as well. We should make this one of the, what do we have, eight boxes there, quick links

51:10 on the front of our website. This is one that I think people would like. Oh, yeah. You know, those- Make it more accessible. Make it more accessible so it’s on a front page as opposed to having to search through all that. Right. That would be nice. Okay. Yeah, I think that’s an awesome idea. I think my thought is just the easier we are to use, right, and it’s just fast, and they don’t have to go searching, because I know sometimes it can get pretty cumbersome to try to find things. That would be great. And you probably already set it up, does it export in Excel file or anything like… You probably already mentioned, does it export in Excel file? Can you do something like that? Yep, you can download. Yes. Okay. You can download them, and you can create charts with it as well. Okay. Create charts in the software? Yes. Yeah, they had a pie chart right in there that you could do. Yep. But then you could export to-

51:56 Yes … Excel or whatever. Excel, correct. I’ll do another presentation for you when I have the 25 and their history, so we can actually see what those charts will look like. Yeah, that’d be great to see. Yeah. And I’m just thinking forward to that quarterly combined meeting of the select board and school committee, and then I don’t want to solve a problem here, but I’d like to see a monthly that we could have with our board, and this looks like it could pop that out pretty quick. Yep. Sure. And now that I have a town accountant that’s excited to present to you guys monthly reports and is already asking me about it, so. Oh, yeah. Love it. Monthly reports, variants- Yes. Perfect. I think that in light of the override and everything, people are looking for that.

52:41 Yes. They were already. It’s even more important now. Absolutely. This is great. Thank you for bringing that tonight. It’s great to see and- Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Alicia. All right. All right. Moving on. We have a public shade re-hearing. So this is a legally advertised public hearing to remove a public shade tree at 275 Pleasant Street. Call up John Foberg. And Amy, if you’d like to come up as well. If you want to be part of it, you don’t have to. I know you love being up at the table. Come on up. Good evening. Good evening. How are you? Hey, how are you? Good. So if you could just, we do have your letter

53:30 and the pictures, as well as the legal notice that was posted. Just explain a little bit about the need for it and your recommendation. Sure. John Foberg, tree warden, Town of Marblehead. Amy wants to describe this as what, it’s an infrastructure issue. They’re redoing the intersection coming up Pleasant at Baldwin and Smith. And the MBTA is planning to redo that whole corner.

53:59 It’s a large locust tree that’s approximately 15 feet from the corner, 15 to 20 feet from the corner. It presents a lot of sight line issues. And also, when they do the initial excavation, they’re really going to seriously compromise the roots. We try and make an effort to work and save every tree, but in certain infrastructure projects like this, there’s just no way to avoid taking it down.

54:27 And what’s the MBTA doing there? So MBTA has done some ADA upgrades to their bus stops, and they’ve given us some intersections while they’re doing it. This is the fourth one that they’re doing for Marblehead. This one has been designed a few times because it’s also in the area where we’re looking at the road diet, which is from Smith Street Up towards Veterans School. Right. So they have actually incorporated a lot of our requests so that in the future we won’t have to redo what they’re doing now. This tree, they have been able to fit this in with this tree, but this tree is a sight problem, and then it will be a sidewalk problem because we can’t get the width of

55:15 the sidewalk. A traffic sight problem. Yeah. The bus stop is right next to the tree, the proposed bus stop. So coming up to it, it’s hard to see people walking around that corner. But I mean, is this a physical sight problem or a line of sight? Well, it depends. If you’re walking, it’s a physical sight problem to be able to see the road. If you’re driving, it’s a line of sight. Okay. So it’s a large tree really close to an intersection, and we all know it’s- When I was putting the signs on it, when I post, I have to put signs up on each tree that we post. I was in fear for my life, quite honestly, because there are two lanes that come shooting through there, and I would have to time when I was going to taper on the tree because of the cars are doing at least 35 through there. Is there a bus stop there right now?

56:00 The

56:03 two bus stops are on the inward side towards downtown. There is a bus stop there in that area, yes. Okay. And this crosswalk is where- Yep … people would go to get to the bus. To get to the bus. Right in front. Is there a crossing guard there for the school kids? Yes, there is. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That’s a tough one. And I might add too, that a couple years ago, it was two or three years ago, they requested taking down the two cherry trees across the street, and it seems like those have been taken off the menu, so we’re not taking those trees down anymore. I think one might still be in question. One still might be in question, but- One is staying … but- And I realize this is for a different reason, but how is the general health of the tree? Is it- The overall health of the tree is good. It’s just very, very large for-

56:48 Yeah … the position it’s in, too. Will we be able to like- The roots are extremely large too. Yeah. So there’s no getting a sidewalk over it. Some distance away, would we be able to replace it at all? Or- I’m going to reach out to the church further on down the street where it bumps in- Mm. Yeah … on the other side of the sidewalk. There’s some dead cherries that we’re going to be removing pretty soon there anyways, but I want to contact the church and see if they’d be acceptable to our new setback tree planting program where we can put some setback trees on the hill, some large shade trees that would be appropriate for the site. This tree really isn’t appropriate for the site either. These utilities involved. There’s a lot of stuff going on there, and there’s a huge

57:34 electrical box on the corner. And that lane narrows down significantly- It’s- … on the right there. It’s crazy. Yeah. I worry about the crossing guard there. Yeah. I worry about that whole intersection. My daughter got T-boned there- Oh, geez … last year in that intersection in a car, and it might be one of the worst intersections in town- 100% … quite honestly. Yeah. Okay. So I’m hearing it’s your recommendation, the two of you, to get rid of this? Yeah. Okay. Yep. All right. And John never recommends to have a tree- Oh, I know. It’s a- I was going to say in my- Good job … entering my third year, it’s the first time I’ve ever heard him recommend it. Yeah. I was going to second that because John definitely takes his trees very seriously, so if he says this has to come down, I believe him. Did TSAC take a look at this at all?

58:22 Have you guys had conversations about the tree and the… I know obviously this intersection- Not the tree itself. I think the intersections we have. But too, this whole divine of four started before TSAC was- Okay … I think. But I know they’ve looked at the road diet. Mm-hmm. So. Yeah. Amy, if I can chime in. The MBTA. They did review the concept of this, I think it was in the fall. And then, the MBTA was able to incorporate the planning that was done as part of that early design phase into this, but they have the funds to- Okay … build it. So it’s a great way to leverage other state funding for here.

59:07 Questions? Okay. Why don’t we open it up for public comment? If anyone here that wants to speak on it, come on up.

59:18 Amy. Christine Cuddihy, 8 Phillips, and I have a couple questions about the tree- Mm-hmm … with sight lines. I was the one that stopped you that day. I actually disagree with the sight line issue, the traffic issue. The speed of that issue is not the fault of the tree. If it is utilities, that’s one thing. It’s a healthy tree. We’ve lost a lot of street trees. There’s areas of town that are almost decimated of street trees. The street trees are needed for shade. That street tree does not affect the traffic. It is not sight lines. I walk, I bike, I travel that road every day. If that’s where it’s coming down for an MBTA stop, that is the

1:00:04 worst place to put an MBTA stop to have a bus stop, because we’ve all said this is one of the worst intersections in town. If anything, the MBTA needs to be further down the road in one direction, but not at that intersection. It’s just too busy.

1:00:19 I defend the tree. Mm-hmm. It’s a healthy tree. Is there a reason that that stop goes there? What is going on? The stop goes there to- The location So there are stops there now. There’s the one there now? Okay. I don’t see it on here. Yeah, I don’t remember seeing it. I thought there’s a support spot. There’s not a stop on it. It’s not there, though. It’s not right there, no. It’s before the intersection, right? Right. It’s on the other side of the intersection. Right. So people are in the middle of traffic and stop traffic. So there’s a problem with the bus being right there when all the traffic is stopped. And the two cherry trees that remain at the pass, they’re in worse condition So there’s a sidewalk issue too, which is what we have to address. Marblehead has to decide that trees and sidewalks are not getting along. They’re not the appropriate trees that were

1:01:07 planted years ago for sidewalks. You can look at the roots on this system, and they are way up. You can’t ramp over them and get the appropriate ADA slopes that are required. These are concrete ramps that have to go in. So this tree is, you could butt right up to the tree, but now you have a huge tree root that’s right there. So- And in other places where we have that issue, you’re not using concrete? Like you’re able to go over? Is it asphalt? So you can go over– Right here, you can go over them, but you still can’t get the appropriate slope- Right … to meet the ADA requirements. So there are areas that we’re going to go over them, but the state can come in or the ADA group can come in and tell you that you made it worse by ramping over. You need to address it so

1:01:55 you could meet the requirement. So these roots are huge, and they are– We can’t get the width for the sidewalk that we need. We really do need to protect the vulnerable users. I see Maggie- John, I’m sorry. Sorry, go ahead. Maggie, town engineer, 5 Curtis Street. Also, just to add to what Amy’s saying, the turning radius we have to accommodate in that area, it’s a tight intersection.

1:02:26 These main roads have more conflicts. You have higher volume. With higher volume and higher speeds, you have a higher conflict. There’s been two fatalities in this stretch. It’s definitely something to consider and to make sure that we do have adequate spacing. A lot of the design that we have thus far,

1:02:51 MassDOT has a five-foot wide sidewalk requirement. If we were moving to a shared use path, which the board has the complete streets policy, which is to accommodate all users, which include multimodal bike, et cetera. We need to be looking at these things. And it’s a space problem. You only have so many feet wide of a right of way, and every vehicle, pedestrian, bike, everyone has space. And sometimes, especially on these main roads, the trees are a conflict. And that’s a really hard thing, and we don’t take that lightly. I think I would be number two with John on this Marblehead. And to add, this is just the first part of trying to take care of one of the most dangerous intersections in town. If this tree was anywhere else in town in the sidewalk like this, I would

1:03:39 strongly object to taking it down, but this whole intersection really needs to be addressed. Hmm. And this is the first step in addressing it, is removing this tree, unfortunately. Rosanna, you have something? Yes, I was just going to– And I don’t know if I missed it, but are we going to try to replace that tree with a different tree somewhere else? I think you were saying with the church? Yeah, I’m going to reach out to the church and where you come around the turn and continue on Lafayette, there’s a wide open spot behind the sidewalks, not on the strip in between the street, which we’re trying to avoid. And up on top of that hill, I’d like to place two or three large shade trees. Okay. That’d be great. That’s my first question. And then my second is,

1:04:25 the MBTA piece of it, taking that aside, it sounds like it’s still a dangerous intersection with the tree. So regardless of the MBTA stop? Yes. Regardless, yes. Okay, thanks.

1:04:39 How is it– I’m just kind of curious, is it a sight line problem with making a right-hand turn? Or because I drive it a lot- Yeah, if you’re coming out of Baldwin- … I have not noticed it as a sight line issue … There’s no cars coming that way, obviously. Coming- Right … inbound. And it’s just taking a right-hand turn. Yeah. There’s nobody there. Yep. And you see past the- But if you see how it is really close to the intersection, and there is–

1:05:03 You have utilities there. There’s a lot going on. Mm-hmm. Interesting. Yep. A lot of times you have people trying to cut through- Yeah … the intersection. A lot of times you have people in middle high school, on top of two lanes, you got people that play chicken with each other trying to get in front past the intersection, and that happens in folks going into town every day. Sure. I mean, that’s- So then the idea with the road diet is to bring that road down to

1:05:38 one lane each way. That’s got to go one lane. Or worse. Yeah. With bike- Council, anyone else online for public comment?

1:05:51 What’s that I can hear? I didn’t hear at the end, Christine. Did she- We won’t because there isn’t a mic. We won’t hear anything. Okay. All right. Yeah. Okay. All right. At this point, there’s no other public comment. I’d like to close the public hearing. I’ll start with you guys, if you want. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. Thank you. Hope this doesn’t kill you too much to take down a tree. Not good. Any other discussions? I’m hearing that this is clearly a safety and for ADA, right? And there will be replacement trees planted. There’ll be replacement trees. Yeah. Yep. Jim, any comments? Any discussion? No. Okay. If I could have a motion to approve the request to remove the shade tree at 275 Pleasant Street in accordance with the Town of Marblehead Shade Tree Policy, and to

1:06:37 coordinate this with the town administrator. So moved. Do I have a second? Second. Thank you. Ms. Noonan?

1:06:50 In favor.

1:06:53 Mr. Zisson? In favor. Ms. Ferrante? In favor. Mr. Greater? In favor. And I am in favor. So that passes five to zero. We’re going to move on, continuing with DPW. Maggie,

1:07:13 we have a stormwater management plan annual review.

1:07:20 Cool. All right, cool. One second. I just got too excited. I let my laptop die, so- Oops. Amy’s going to share the slides. Okay. Trees and roads. Trees and stormwater. And now we’re in drains. You got excited with that? Yeah. Which one’s more exciting? Ooh, it depends. Depends on the minute. Got you. But always people safety. Perfect. That’s fair. So we’re just waiting for Amy to bring it up? Yes. Okay. Thank you, Amy. So, I guess I can start with the intro. Yeah. I’m Maggie. I’m the town engineer. Excited to be here before you all today. Today, I’m going to be talking about our stormwater work for the year. It’s part of our MS4 system, which is our

1:08:06 municipal separate storm sewer system. It’s a good tongue twister. And it has some EPA regulation that also goes through Mass D– Not Mass DOT, wrong. Bad in my brain. DEP. Get a good jargon in there. But it also directly impacts the health of our water bodies around Marblehead. So that’s really want to drive home with you all today. So I’ll give you a quick background on our system. I don’t know, did it work, Amy? Yes, just click find the right one. Okay. So once we have it up, there’s a map of our stormwater system and a beautiful picture of a catch basin. For those of you that do not know, a catch basin is a

1:08:52 two-by-two grate with holes in it that leads directly to waterways of our area, generally the ocean.

1:09:04 So anything that we do through DPW is with the goal to improve our water quality that leads to our beautiful ocean and surrounding waters. Thanks. Sure. Thanks. So the photo is a catch basin, and I really want to make sure that you all understand that what we are doing today, and every day, is to improve our water quality. So the next slide. Yep. So this is a slide. You can see on the left is the photo of a house. Rain is falling. Think of that classic, whatever you saw in about the fourth grade, the rain cycle. So if you have water falling on the ground, it picks up whatever is on that ground. It leads into a network of pipes, which you can see on the bottom left. You have sewer pipes, sanitary sewer pipes, which is not what we’re talking about. It’s the right side, the blue, the storm drain pipes.

1:09:53 But that being said, they are not treated. The image all the way on the right is a catch basin. So the outlet pipe is that pipe going out that way, and there’s a hood on there. And so those are some controls that we have generally on a catch basin. We also do annual cleaning. But it tries to take out floatables if there’s an oil sheen on the surface, and we take out any sediment or debris at the bottom. But generally, the water is flowing untreated to, I’m going to say, generally the ocean. We have a couple freshwater sources, but pretty much the ocean. Next slide. So again, we only want rain in our storm drains. And they will still pick up whatever is on the ground. We get a lot of interesting pollutants. That photo on the center bottom of a clamshell

1:10:39 bucket is us cleaning out a catch basin in the area of Conant Road, and those are all poop bags from–

1:10:49 They’re all the same color, so I would assume the same resident dumping them in that area. You can see some sheens, but everything will end up in our ocean. Next slide. So why we do this, there’s a whole bunch of regulations, starting with the Clean Water Act and all the way up to a November 2024 draft that is in holding from the EPA for our permit that the town of Marblehead is liable and regulated for. But again, in addition to the regulatory requirements, we really just want to make sure that the residents, the businesses, the visitors, everybody in Marblehead knows that we have a piece to contribute to the health of our waterways. Next slide. So there’s six minimum control measures that we go through.

1:11:34 We’re going to check off a little bit public education and involvement today by talking with you all. And then we’ll go into the rest of them as we go through. So let’s look what each means. Public education, you’ve seen the green message boards around at our beaches. We work with Salem Sound Coast Watch, and they generally do presentations to, I think, it’s the fourth graders in Marblehead. We have had some difficulty making sure it fits in with the school’s schedule, but we do work as closely as we can with them. We have some signage out at our outfalls. We make their flyer for our signage. And I’ve seen some other communities do that as well. We have annual poop flyers. And yeah, public education is important. Public involvement, again, we work to engage.

1:12:21 We accept comments on our website. You guys, if you know me, I love to talk about this stuff. So we do stay engaged and talk as much as we can. And we work with Salem Sound as well through their efforts. Next one is a big one, illicit discharge detection and elimination. It’s a mouthful. IDDE is a good acronym because you know I love a good jargon word. But illicit discharge is any discharge that goes into our drainage system that is not exclusively stormwater. So you can have direct connections, you can have indirect connections. A direct connection is a sewer that is unintentionally, hopefully, connected to- Our drainage system, or you can have somebody that poured paint wash water into a catch basin.

1:13:06 Those are example of direct versus indirect. The pictures are pretty helpful because it kind of shows. And so we have ongoing investigations. This year we did a fair amount of sampling. We did dry weather screening at outfalls and wet weather screening at outfalls. We completed our dry weather screening this year. We don’t think we’re going to complete, our permit year ends with the town’s fiscal year. I don’t think we’re going to be able to complete our wet weather screening. Everyone remembers all of our rainy weekends. Labs aren’t open on the weekends, so we can’t get our testing done during that time as well. That has definitely been a challenge for some of our wet weather screening, but we’ve done a good job the last two years being proactive

1:13:51 with some of this. And it’s not cheap. The town has made a significant investment in this work. The photo on the top right there was actually from last night. There was a potential illicit into a drain. I was out at Riverhead at about midnight last night looking at this.

1:14:12 So other things that we do, we do training, and this is some images from some targeted dye testing that we did in the last year or so. You can see different pipes and linings that can be done to deal with some of that. But we’re looking at and doing dye testing regularly, as the need arise. Next slide. The next minimum control measure is construction site runoff control. We are lucky in Marblehead, we have a very active conservation commission, and many of the more susceptible properties get looked at through the conservation lens. And the building inspection department is supportive of that as well. We work with our contractors from the public works side of things. And National Grid is good at putting silt sacks

1:15:00 in the catch basins. We’ve had a couple interesting porta potty adventures in the last year or two. But, yeah, so there’s a lot of pieces to construction that we are working during active construction to mitigate stormwater runoff into the drainage system. Next slide. Post-stormwater management. Again, the conservation commission does a good job with the more susceptible properties. The building inspection department works on this, and then this is basically reducing runoff where possible from site. There are other communities in Massachusetts that have pretty intense nitrogen and phosphorus regulatory requirements. We are primarily regulated by bacteria,

1:15:44 E. coli, enterococcus, fecal matter. So that’s more of where our regulations come from. Post-construction can get pretty stringent if it’s nitrogen and phosphorus. Next slide. Good housekeeping and pollution prevention. This is what Amy and I do every day, or make sure it gets moved along every day. So this is seasonal street sweeping, annual catch basin cleaning. There’s quarterly site inspections that occur at Tower Way and at the transfer station. Again, my favorite image of the poop bags coming out of the catch basins, and you can see the map of our areas. We did also in the last year look at our stormwater control measures. I love to use interesting words that aren’t so

1:16:33 intuitive. But for example of one, between the high school and the community center, there’s the basin there. That’s a stormwater control measure that slows down the water runoff, and it has an opportunity to capture pollutants. And so our consultant worked with us and has an inspection schedule and plan for us to keep up with that. Next slide. Pet waste management, my favorite thing. We have some new flyers out there. But really the thing is, there’s specific residents in Marblehead that are not picking up or disposing of properly of their pet waste, whether they just leave it behind or they leave a bag behind. Even if you leave pet waste in the yard and it rains, it has an opportunity to run off. So that is something that is a friendly reminder, and

1:17:20 maybe more than friendly because there can be fines issued through the health department and I believe the police department for pet waste improperly disposed of, definitely left in the road. You are responsible for your own animals and what comes with and behind them. Okay. That is kind of our– Did you want to say something else with that? One more thing on pet waste if you don’t mind. Please do. So the majority of our catch basins do run to outfalls. A lot of the outfalls are on beaches. Yeah. So the water that’s coming out of those outfalls after a heavy rain can be picking up the pet waste that– Because it generally will sit in the bottom of the catch basin, but when a catch basin fills, is then-

1:18:05 Yeah … pick it up. So, those are things that do close our beaches. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Thank you, Amy. So that’s primarily the six minimum control measures, but that’s not all we have.

1:18:19 So some of the additional things in the last year since I’ve been here before you on this matter. On the left is part of our West Mystic Lawrence work. We actually uncovered a buried manhole structure that we were able to uncover. In the middle, it’s hard to see, but it was a clogged pipe on Mooring Road, right before the Mooring Road outfall. That log, that’s Mike, one of our DPW crew members carrying it. It was a fairly large pipe. So they were able to take that out. And then on the far right, I believe it was Gerald Rowe, but there was a point repair that we did there. So in addition to all of our MS4 operations, we do have typical repairs. I don’t have it pictured here, but plenty of catch basins and other things that we are working on

1:19:06 year-round. But there’s always more to be done. On the right, you can see our list of capital improvements. Again, the work that I talked about in the beginning through our MS4 regulatory requirements, those are pretty significant efforts. It’s not cheap. And with the drain construction article, these are the additional list beyond that, but on the sampling and catch basin cleaning and street sweeping disposal, et cetera. We have a lot of infrastructure. We have an older system. We have a number of corrugated metal pipes, metal salt environment, salty roads. It’s definitely something that will reach the end of life, and has already in places. So it’s definitely something that we have

1:19:54 to be aware of for capital needs. And then my favorite slide at the end. These are some of the ducklings that we rescued out of a drain this year. No way. Yeah. And you can- That’s nice. Yeah. So the construction article for stormwater, the majority of that does go to fund the regulatory piece that we have to meet. Now, I said to Maggie, I hate to say we do it because it’s the regulation, it’s a regulatory piece. All those steps are creating cleaner water for our harbors and all the receiving water that’s around Marblehead. And we all enjoy that. That is why you live here. You don’t live here for the field. You live here for the harbor, for the

1:20:40 ocean, the beautiful views and the beaches. Yeah. So even though the regulations, you have to do them, they are helping us. And they are definitely worthwhile doing. But they do take up the majority of that construction article. So, we keep a little each year and put it towards something or hold it until we can do a project. These projects have probably been sitting for six to 10 years. I think we have a few new ones on there. But the funding just is very difficult to get for those capital investments. And the stormwater system, it’s a really cool system in Marblehead. It’s all gravity. It doesn’t have pumps. It doesn’t have pump stations. It doesn’t have mechanics.

1:21:26 All we need to do is keep these pipes clear and solid. But you also don’t see them. They work for a really long time until they get a log jammed in them, or the galvanized iron, or the corrugated metal is definitely at its end of life. And we have that quite a few places, which is now going to cause sinkholes and cutting up streets and more fun. And who was- What is the long-term fix for that? Is it lining, or how would that proceed? So we hope that lining will be the long-term fix. You’ll definitely have to do point repairs where it’s rotted. Yeah. Because once that pipe has rotted, the lining will just expand beyond there, and it won’t give you a solid pipe. But where your sanitary sewer system is clay, and so it’s a

1:22:15 longer, more heavy material, but it’s a lot easier to line. But we have lined it. We lined one Atlantic Avenue on the left-hand side that was corrugated pipe in front of Shoie’s. That whole . Yeah. Everything else was replaced, but that piece was lined because it was one of the larger pipes that we have.

1:22:36 Okay. Great. Thank you. Thank you. I always love this presentation. Awesome. And I know that you love talking about your poop eggs, so always good to see that. Perfect. Yeah. I look forward to that every year. I counted about six pictures of- Did you? Yeah, I did. It’s a good one. I see. It’s so good. It’s crazy. How’d you get that to hang out from the bottom? Nothing. We did nothing. You can’t control those. It’s nature. But sometimes it’s the operator’s great, but yeah. Right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, moving on. Number seven, Bob has this in front of us. Before talking about the USS Glover crew members reunion, we have a proclamation to read to them, which reads, “Whereas commissioned in 1965, the USS Glover is closely linked to Marblehead’s history,

1:23:22 having been the first United States Navy vessel named in honor of Brigadier General John Glover. And now, therefore, we the Selectboard of the town of Marblehead do hereby proclaim June 26th through 28th, 2026 as USS Glover crew member reunion days in Marblehead, and extend a warm welcome to all reunion attendees, their families, and guests as they gather to celebrate the ship’s legacy and its enduring connection to our community.” So moved. So… Second. All right. Let’s go with Ms. Noonan. In favor. Ms. Ferrante? In favor. Thank you. In favor? Mr. Greater? In favor. Jim? In favor. And I’m in favor as well. We also have in front of us the 250

1:24:08 years of Postal Service Day, which is going to be happening on, why am I missing the date? July 2nd at 10:00 AM down at the post office. If somebody would like to attend that to read a proclamation, that would be great. Know of anybody that’ll do it? Sure, I’d be happy to. Okay. Looks like we have a volunteer for that. If I could have a motion to prepare the proclamation to honor the America 250 and 250 years of Postal Service Day. So moved. Second. Mr. Zesin? In favor. Ferrante? In favor. Noonan? In favor. Mr. Greater? In favor. And I’m in favor as well.

1:24:51 Number nine here. We have this lease that we had discussed previously. I think we took it in the executive session at one point. This is North Shore Medical Center. Just to remind you, they had a seven-year lease, which we extended to 10 years, which was allowable because the original RFP was for 10 years. So we did negotiate to extend that for an additional three years. The original lease was for $360,000 per year, with no increases. We were able to negotiate with them for 15% increase in the first year of the extension, which totals $54,000 a year, and then 2.5% for each additional years. So the lease will rise by the end from 360,000 to a

1:25:39 little over 445,000. And the rest of the terms, as we’ve seen before.

1:25:47 So, if I could have a motion to approve the First Amendment of the lease between the Town North Shore Medical Center, Inc., doing business as Salem Hospital, as prepared and presented by Town Council, extend the lease to August 13th, 2033, and authorize the chair to sign behalf of the board. So moved. Second. Mr. Zisson? In favor. Mr. Greater? In favor. Ms. Noonan? In favor. Ms. Frontek? In favor. And I’m in favor as well. All right. We are going to move on to reappointments for 2020… It says 2026 reappointments? Mm-hmm. Okay.

1:26:25 So, if I could have a motion to accept the following appointments, all for terms expiring in June 2027, unless noted, and accept those placed on hold in accordance with master laws and town bylaws. So if you want to place a hold as I read through, say aye. Town Administrator, Thatcher Keezer. American Disabilities Act Coordinator, Thatcher Keezer. Animal Inspector, Emily DeGrande. Building Commissioners Inspectors. Building Commissioner, Steven Cummings. Local Inspector, Ron Lebowitz. Local Inspector, Roger Ennis. Plumbing Inspector, Bradford Smith. Wiring Inspector, Eric F.S. Chisholm. On-Call Plumber, Nelson Gagnon. For the Canine Control Clerk, Robin Amicio. Assistant Dog Officers for the Parks, Brad Delisle, Greg Snow, John Globicki.

1:27:13 Town Council, me, Tellerman & Costa LLC. Assistant Town Council, Brody Hardoon, Perkins & Kestin, and Hinckley Allen. Council on Aging Director, Lisa Hooper. Emergency Management Coordinator, Chief Gilliland. Sorry, Chief Jason Gilliland. And Charles Ceruti, Assistant Finance Director. Alicia Noonan, Flag Officer. Roseanne Tromfi, Forest Warden. Chief Jason Gilliland. Harbormasters and Assistants, Mark Souza, Harbormaster. Craig Smith, Deputy Harbormaster. Assistant Harbormasters, which are seasonal, Rick Doan, Andrew Ouellette, Mather Thompson, Steve Lalonde, Jared Russo, Elmer Hurley, Mike Colby, Andrew Nazaro, Chris Bendixen,

1:28:00 Hayden Hall, Tyler Dana, Leo Burge, and alternates, we also have Felix Amsler and Jeffrey Flynn. Keeper of the Lockup, Chief Dennis King. Licensing Authority, Police Chief Dennis King, Captain Jonathan Lunt, Lieutenants Eriko Saddan, Michael Everett, David Osovich, Jason Conrad. Sergeants Sean Brady, Brendan Finnegan, Andrew DeMarie, and Timothy Morley. Measurer of Leather, Brian Rucco and Amy Agelde. Town Designee, Mass Water Resource Authority, Alternate Amy McHugh. Parking Clerk, Karen Clark. The Treasurer or Tax Collector. Chief Procurement Officer, Allison Jenkins. Public Works Director, Amy McHugh.

1:28:48 Records Access Officer, Kyle Wiley. Chief Dennis King, Retirement Board. Charles Gesner. Right to Know Coordinator, Jason Gilliland. Steward of Weights and Measures, Leonard Rose. Special Auxiliary Police Patrolman, James Donovan. Superintendent of Public Buildings, Steve Cummings. Tax Collector, Treasurer, Cami Aranelli. Town Engineer, Maggie Wheeler. Veterans Agent and Director of Veterans Services, Roseanne Tromfi. Veteran Grave Officer, Roseanne Tromfi. Workmen’s Compensation Agent, Massachusetts Interlocal Insurance Association. Town Accountant, Nicholas Gilmore. If I could pause- Sure … briefly. Not a problem. Mr. Chair, and I’d like to

1:29:34 welcome Nicholas Gilmore to Marblehead. Welcome aboard. We’re very excited to have you. We already hear that you’ve contributed immensely to the office and to all the things that were talked about tonight, so we really appreciate that. You’re also moving to Marblehead, which is highly motivating. It will be great to have you in town. And good luck on finishing your CPA, which is a huge achievement. So, thank you. Excellent. Affordable Housing Trust Fund, we have a select board in Kurt James. Board of Abbot Public Library, Second Century Fund, Peter Jelbert, Judith Eisner. Cable Television Advisory Committee, Liaison Robert Peck. Capital Planning Committee, we have the Town Administrator,

1:30:20 Public Works Director, Community Development Director, Superintendents of Schools, and the Superintendent of Buildings. Caretaker of Fort Beach is David Rogers. Chaplain, Marblehead Police Department is Reverend James Bixby. Conservation Commission, which is three years staggered, is Jessica Norton. Constables for the purpose of serving civil process, Christopher Comeau, Yaimy Reynoso, Gabrielle Mongiello, Mark Iannuzzi, Jared Walsh. Constables for Shellfish, these are all one-year terms, Raymond H. Bates Jr., Dave Donahue, Jeffrey Flynn, Felix Amsler, Rick Kuznar, Craig Smith, Douglas Aikman, Jennifer Duffy, F. Webb Russell, and Eric Holly. Council on Aging, this is a term of three years, Marcy Schwamm.

1:31:09 Emergency Medical Services Council, Jason Gilliland. Finance committee, three years staggered. Eric Knight, Lindsay Du and Linda Gifford. You will notice that there is one name that is missing here, that we have Al Goolsby, who’s been on for nine, 10, 11, 20. Yeah. He’s been on for a long time. He’s been- He will be greatly missed. We can talk about him after, but unfortunately,

1:31:36 I think Alex’s family, and in particular his wife, are pretty happy given the amount of time that he’s put into this town. A lot of hours over the last years, and especially this last year. He has a newborn. And he has a newborn as well. Yeah. Yep. Exactly. So, we can do more to talk about that, but it just jumped at me that I was going through, that name wasn’t there. We can get him back in 4 years. Yeah, exactly. He’s been a significant contributor and leader. Yep, he really has. So he will be greatly missed. Yeah. Fireworks committee, Alexander Falk. Fort Sewall Oversight Committee, Town Planner Jamie Block from Rec and Park, Seamus Daly, Glovers Regiment, Judy Anderson at large, Christine Nuccio at large. Green Marblehead Implementation Committee, the town administrator, town planner, one select board member, two reps from Sustainable Marblehead,

1:32:21 public health director, building commissioner, finance director, Marblehead Municipal Light, the general manager, and the commission chair, and a school department representative. Harbors and Waters Board, John Doub, Stephen Wolff, Jay Michaud, Rick Kuznar, T. Clarke Smith. The alternates are Karen Finocchio and Matthew Burke. Harris Street Cemeteries Oversight Committee, Ellen Harrington is at large. John Frassinello at large. Edward Nielsen, historical commission rep. David Bitterman, historical commission rep. Chris Hardy at large. Hazard Mitigation Plan Implementation and Monitoring Team, Jason Gilliland, Maggie Wheeler, Amy McHugh, the town planner, and William E. Connolly. Historian, Donald Dolliver. Historical Commission, again, three years staggered. David Bitterman, Peter Stacy, Edward Nielsen.

1:33:10 Marblehead Cultural Council, Janine Stahl, Jeannie Stahl. Marblehead Disabilities Commission, Gayle Mack, Laura Blaisdell. Marblehead Forever Committee, Karen Lang, Meredith Reardon, Linda W. Dolliver. Also, Harry O’Shaughnessy and Kyle Wiley. Marblehead Housing Committee, community development and planning director, the town planner, Deacon John E. Whipple from the Task Force Against Discrimination, Disabilities Commission representative, the housing authority representative, and Nisha Austin at large. Massachusetts Ethics Commission Municipal Liaison is Mead Talerman and Costa LLC. Metropolitan Area Planning Council, term of three years, Brendan Callahan from the community development and the town planner will be the alternate.

1:33:59 Old and Historic Districts Commission, Bob Bragdon, Gary Ambrick, Charles Hayward, Duncan Facey, Paul Pruitt, and alternate of Michael Hall. Old Burial Hill Oversight Committee, Judy Gates, Stanley Goodwin, Pam Peterson, Alex Finnegan, as well as the town planner. Planning Board, three-year terms. Hold. Okay.

1:34:25 Task Force Against Discrimination, Helene Hazlett, Dan Agora, Maura Dartley Rochko, Deacon Johnny Whipple, Christopher Bruell, Lee Stahlberg, Eugenia Goustafi. Chief Dennis King is ex officio. Niko Vaughn King is student rep, and Kaleem Seidman is also a student rep. Taxation Aid Committee, Meredith Reardon, Lisa Hooper, Phyllis Smith, Cami Ionarelli. And Traffic Safety Advisory Committee, David Kucharski, police chief or designee, fire chief or designee, DPW director or designee, town engineer designee, town administrator as ex officio. Town physician, we have Quadrant Health Strategies. Tree Warden, Jonathan Foubert.

1:35:12 Zoning Board of Appeals, this is a term five year staggered. Benjamin Labrecque. Alternates, which is one year, Christopher Casey, Bruce Krasker, William Rudolph, and Mark Liebman. Could I have a motion for everything except for the one put on hold? So moved. Second. All right, Mr. Greater. In favor. Ferrante. In favor. Suzzesen. In favor. Ms. Nernon. In favor. And I am in favor as well. We had the planning board term, planning board, put on hold, and I must– Go ahead. We have a letter of interest submitted by an architect, so I just thought we could maybe give it a little thought, have a- Sure … kind of an interview for it. So I’d recommend that maybe what we do is have both

1:35:58 the person who was up for reappointment as well as the new applicant come in for an interview, maybe in two weeks. Okay. And we can do that, and we can interview and appoint.

1:36:10 Good. Sound reasonable? And refresh my memory on the planning board. Is appointed one- One seat we appoint, yeah. Okay. Five elected and one is appointed. And they act as an alternate, correct? Associate member. Associate member. Yep. So do they typically vote, or? Only if- If someone’s missing … if someone’s not there. Okay. Yep. Okay. Everybody okay with that? When we do have an applicant, I think that we do owe them the opportunity to interview them. Yeah. Okay. The applicant came in late. Is that- No, the applicant’s been in, but he also, everyone who said that they wanted to be reappointed also put up their name. Got it. And so given the timeline from the pair, we don’t have applications for anything else at this point anywhere else of any of these

1:36:58 appointees. Okay. And- It’s already been done in the past … and Steve will receive this okay? I mean, given- Yeah, he’s been notified or he’ll be notified. Okay. Yeah. Yep, absolutely. Okay. Yeah. He’s been notified. There was some feedback on the planning board as well. Yeah. Just like- Yeah Although, I know this was a… I’m just going to say a few things. We don’t have to figure it out now. But a few years ago, there was some talk of turnover. There are people that Express interest in boards and we typically reappoint, so I don’t know if we’re setting a precedent, but we can figure that out. Yeah. We’re reaching back during the normal appointment period, right? That’s all. But as long as there’s an explanation, I guess, and- I think we’ve had feedback- … I think that’s okay … from the planning board that they would like us to interview this person as well, so we are listening to that.

1:37:44 Okay. That’s fair. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, we tend to open it then- Yeah … open it up for others as well. Okay. Oh, yeah. Okay. I think that’s a great point. So

1:37:56 why don’t we open it up for any other further applications. Good point. For any recommendations you guys want to throw out here. Why don’t we open it up till the… So our meeting in July is the 8th, is that right? And- 22nd. 8th and the 29th? 22nd. 8th and the 22nd. So why don’t we open it up until the, you want to go to the 13th? We could go to the 17th. Let’s go to the 17th. We’ll open it up and we’ll do interviews on the 22nd. Does that sound amenable to everyone? Okay. Just one meeting. Sure. I think that makes sense. Thanks. Moses, next item, everybody. All right. If I could have a motion to renew the following request to use premises owned by

1:38:45 the town of Marlborough on Front Street at Little Harbor, commonly known as Turner Land, subject to the receipt of the proper application, current fishing license, and all taxes paid to the town. Steve Bird, number two, Jeff Flynn, number three, John Burns, number four, William Brown, number eight, Dave Rogers, number nine. So moved. Second. Ms. Noonan? In favor. Ms. Ferrante?

1:39:09 Rosanna, you picked. In favor.

1:39:14 Okay. Mr. Zisson? In favor. Mr. Greater? In favor. And I’m in favor. I’m going to backstep one here, too. We did mention a few people who are stepping down. We are losing some other people who have given a lot of time and service to this town through volunteer to different boards, and committees. So if I could have a motion and send out a letter of appreciation to the following individuals who did not seek reappointment this year or have reached term limits for their services to the town. David Oster, Conservation Commission, Alec Goolsby, Finance Committee, Gary Gregory, Harbors and Waters, another one who’s been around for a long time, has contributed a lot to this town. Jennifer Uhl, everyone here. Some of these other people, I don’t know their name, not that they haven’t done a lot as well. Cultural Council.

1:40:05 Got John Dipoy, Cultural Council, Bob Nus, Marlborough Housing Committee, Andrew Gallucci, Old Barrel Hill Oversight Committee, Marian Zuber, Sister City Liaison for Graspe, France, Gary Hebert, Traffic Safety Advisory Committee. And I think your copy doesn’t appear. We have Jeff Shribman, Town Council. Yeah. Oh, I missed the first, and I missed thank you all. I’m always screwing this up. And Jeff Shribman, who was also- Perfect … in Town Council for a long time as well. Did I get everyone else? Thank you for your, thanks to- Yeah, you have your copy. This is great checks and balances here. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. If I could have a motion. So moved. So it’s working the way it’s supposed to. Ms. Ferrante? In favor.

1:40:51 So Ms. Noonan? In favor. Mr. Greater? In favor. Mr. Zisson? In favor. And I’m in favor as well. Kyle, did I do everything in there? Oh, and volunteer opportunities. So the town’s website will be updated to reflect the current list of vacancy on town boards and commissions. The select board does appoint residents to over 30 boards, committees, and commissions in this town. We accept letters of interest regardless of a vacancy and will keep such letters on file. The board will then notify you if a vacancy occurs during the year. We strongly encourage anyone interested in applying for a position on a board, committee, commission to attend a regularly scheduled meeting of that board, committee, or commission, and to reach out to the chair of that board, committee, or commission to gain further insight and a better understanding of the committee’s

1:41:37 purview, scope, and what time expectations may be. Contact for all information on this can be found on the website, which is marlboroughma.gov, and you can also contact Kyle at wileyk@marlboroughma.gov, or you can give her a ring at 781-631-0000. And if you are interested, you should submit a cover letter and resume also to wileyk@marlboroughma.gov. And thank you to everyone who does volunteer. Yeah. That’s what makes this town move forward and work on a daily basis, and I think a lot of people are not recognized for the hard work they do, so we appreciate. That’s why we do read everyone’s name as well. Moving on, we would like to have a discussion.

1:42:24 Moses, if you want to lead this for the July 4th reading of the Declaration of Independence. Yeah, I just wanted to bring before the board an idea that’s been done in the past, and that is especially on our 250th anniversary to collectively read the Declaration of Independence, and the idea would be to do it before the pealing of the bells from 12:00 to 12:30. So maybe we gather at 11:30.

1:42:52 Perhaps we can get a flourish with the Glover regimen as well, and I think it’s highly appropriate to bring back this tradition because it’s been many years. Yeah, I think it’s been mentioned before. I love the idea, and we can go through it all together. No, I think that- Take different sections- I think that’s fine … the five of us and- Yeah … pull straws and guess what. This is just before noon on the- What’s that? Just- On July 4th. Yeah. Just before noon. Yeah, so why don’t- Before the bells. Yeah. The bells ring from 12:00 to- 12:30. Yeah. We’re going to do it before noon for you, Moses. Yeah? Why? I’m just kidding. All right. So I think, I hear that we are going to gather- Before 12:30 … at about 11:30 On July 4th and read the Declaration of Independence. It’s great. I love it. Next up, Memorial Day Planning Committee.

1:43:37 Moses, do you want to take this one too? I’d appreciate that. Yeah. Certainly. I just wanted to bring this to the attention of the board, and I just want to let you know that Roe, our vets agent, wants to lead a planning committee of volunteers for the next Memorial Day parade. So I think the idea is that we get some advanced planning, we solicit volunteers to help Roe, and I think we expand the potential to get some physical assistance. We have more money to be able to deploy into this effort, so getting a band and securing a band early is important. And I think volunteers can

1:44:25 also get the word out as to what the agenda or what the day would look like. So I think this is also an opportunity for us, Mr. Chair, to just announce our backing for the Memorial Day services, which is a cherished tradition in our town, and we can continue to, I think, improve upon it. Great. And will she put that committee together? Yeah. Okay.

1:44:50 Unofficial. It’s not intended to be formal. Sure. It’s just, I think, an idea that there’s some momentum building around that, and I think she would do a great job leading that with Thatcher’s assistance. Sure. So I have taken the liberty, Mr. Chair, of going ahead and contacting both Roe and- Great … the lady. Yep. All right. Well, great. Well, and I think I just heard you volunteer to lead that effort as well, so I appreciate your volunteer- No, I’d be happy. Of course. Yeah Great. I appreciate that. Of course. Great. Well, Roe’s done a great job, and it is a lot of coordination given what she’s doing every day to help our veterans every day. That’s exactly right. So I love it. Yeah. I think that’s great. No, and she’s gung-ho about it. Great. Is it something that we need to help publicize for volunteers, or is there a good

1:45:35 sense within the veteran community- I think there’s a pretty good sense … that there’s enough interest? And I just want to make sure that there’s a point of reference under the select board with Roe kind of leading that effort to secure volunteers that can- Mm-hmm … they think they can do that. Great. So I think publicize– Let’s ask Roe on that front. Yeah. I’m happy to. But I think she has a committee that’s potentially forming. Okay. Great. A group of volunteers. Great. Okay. Great. Yeah. All right. So while we are a little further out from Memorial Day, but it’s a good time to start it. Well, I think it’s a good time because the demand for bands and so on. Right. It’d give the chief a chance to buy a new fire truck. Spending money. All right. So let’s move on.

1:46:21 Select board retreat, we have a date set for July 24th. Just wanted to open it up so we could have a little discussion about what we’re looking to achieve at the retreat. I think I’d mentioned before, I would love to come in and have everybody come up with three to five specific goals, concrete goals to achieve that we can discuss, and then maybe we can categorize them. We can discuss on priority, and then maybe one or two select board members sort of oversees that specific goal throughout the year, and it’s something that we can actually measure. Real concrete. And it also gives an opportunity to get feedback from Thatcher on the operating elements- Yep … of what we might want to achieve. Sure. Yeah. And is there anything else that we’d like to-

1:47:09 I like the idea of concrete things. Yeah. Sometimes return, it’s a big esoteric thing. Mm-hmm. Okay. And also a chance to assign us some things to champion, if you will. Yeah, I think that makes sense- Yeah … to have somebody responsible for each of them, especially if they bring forward or feel more strongly about them. Yeah. I think we should probably include some discussion on the town administrator search. Yep. What are we looking for? What are our priorities for that position? Because applicants in the search firm will want to know that too. Sure. So it’s a good opportunity to talk about that. For a firm up the process, yeah.

1:47:54 Mm-hmm. Yeah. And also just really define our roles- Yeah … for select board versus town administrator at the same time. So I think that’d be a good part of the agenda as well. Yep. And then, of course, you know what I’m going to bring up. Go for it. I don’t want to ruin your surprise.

1:48:11 No, just get a little bit more shape to the financial quarterly meeting in terms of how we’re going to structure it, and the steps we need to take to be ready for it in October. Okay. Yep. I think that would be- And I would add Rosanna to that since you can’t see Nick Gilmore, but he’s here. We can also add the monthly that we’re talking about too, but we’ll feed into the quarterly. Yeah. I would say talk about the entire communication piece of it, right? So we have the meeting coming up, and then what does that look like going forward? To your point, is it monthly? What are we doing? But I think we need to probably have a little bit of a brainstorming session around that. Sure. So it sounds like we have an agenda set just like that. Look at us. Great.

1:48:59 That’s three hours. Who’s bringing donuts? It used to be Alexa, so I feel like that is a rookie thing to do. So Rosanna, we appreciate that. We’ll get your orders in. Whoa. Sure, whatever. Let me know. Yep. Perfect. Instant shout here. We’re going to move on to flash vote surveys, Erin. Yep. If you could lead them. So we had talked about this months ago, and Alicia was able to get us the tool to do these quick one-minute, maybe monthly, bimonthly surveys that a lot of communities are now… The biggest … trend in municipal government these days is community engagement. You go to any conference, they’re talking about community engagement. And

1:49:45 so one of the things that these people are using are these data collection tools, and I’d spoken with a couple of town managers that have used Flash Vote before.

1:49:59 Specifically, I talked to Andover and Newburyport, and they just had such great feedback about it and how it really enhances the decision-making at the board level, where we’re sometimes making these decisions, you feel like in a vacuum or just by the self-appointed vocal, and oftentimes it can be a minority vocal. And so we have the tool and it’s just now the plan is we have to create the panel, and so the panel hopefully can be a target of at least 250 residents who opt in, who sign up to receive– You can choose to receive messages via survey or messages via SMS text message or email.

1:50:47 So you want to encourage the community to opt into these so they’ll have the opportunity to respond even in a text message. These are surveys that take two minutes for residents to get a quick pulse on feedback on that.

1:51:07 Actually, one of their examples on the website was another community that had to go to auto– just debating going to automated trash for curbside and automated trash barrels, and they really didn’t anticipate any feedback on it throughout the survey, and it turns out people had a lot of opinions on the size. And so it’s just one of those things that it helps us at executive level make decisions and have better data on where our residents are at. And actually, this tool is pretty scientific to within 4% to 6%. So we present the issue, say there’s something around Reynolds Park, right?

1:51:52 And the rec and park wants to know, okay, well, how does the community feel about this? Is this worth our investment? Communities have used this. Would you rather have $1 million for a structured cover here? We were already doing this. This is just an example. A structured cover or

1:52:11 a field or whatever. And so you’d solicit and you’d get a quick feedback, and within 48 hours of the survey opening, it closes, and everybody gets the results immediately. Is this conducted through social media or how does it get out there? We want to sign people up through social media, through press release, through the newspapers, and that’s an effort. Brendan Callahan and I are working on it, but I’d welcome if anybody else wanted to join in just helping to build the panel and onboarding us to be able to actually just use the data. And they are the scientists about the surveys, and they will structure the question

1:52:56 the proper way. There is actually a science and a technicality to these. You don’t want to have leading questions, and they’ve just studied in that. So we want to make sure that we’re onboarding enough people. But then once it’s live and once we have a panel going and people keep opting in, then they just get the text message or the email and they respond. Yeah, I guess the one question as you’re going through is just to figure out how they’re solving the self-selection bias potential. There’s typically a self-selection- Right. So they have all the demographics of the towns. I think they offered us a GIS version where you can make sure– You can even tell by the-

1:53:42 Interesting … respondents where they live. Are we getting all the respondents from this section of town? Is Old Town feels this way, but Clifton feels this way. It’s kind of incredible, the level of detail you can get back. Yeah. Participation, broad participation is the key then, right? I mean, that’s- Yeah, they found, I think I was part of listening in on that call as well, and they found that depending on your population, about 250 people, depending on who comes- Is pretty- … has been that number. Obviously, you’d like to get up four or five, all that. Right. Maybe it makes sense based on some of the questions that I’m hearing you ask to have them come present at our next meeting. Yeah, I would agree with that. Yeah. I would agree with that. Yeah. So why don’t we, maybe if we could get them to come present. I think we had pretty big agenda today, didn’t we? They also send out 3,000 postcards-

1:54:28 Right … in a mailing to help build participation. And then we can share it, obviously, once we get going on any department, any elected- Yeah … elected boards to use it as well to gather information. Yeah. And department heads can use it if there’s- Yeah … a project or whatever. So. Yep. I think it’s- Sorry, I just had a quick question. I just- Yep. Is there like a pilot period where we don’t have to pay for it just to see if it works for us, or like how does that work? Right now, I think we have

1:55:03 just a short-term membership right now. Okay. So it’s a year- Yep … at the most. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, we can opt out. No commitment. Yep. Yeah, there’s no commitment with that- Okay … for sure. But I think why don’t we try to add that to our agenda for next time? Great. I think that’s a good idea. I think they could probably get us a 5 or 10 minute to answer these questions, because I think it’s hard for us to explain as well.

1:55:24 So moving on. Town administrator search process. We will discuss this, we just said at our retreat. I think our next step is to really find and interview a search firm. I know that we did that in the past. I have asked Allison to put together an RFP To put out so that we can get people to put in proposals for the search for the consultant or the executive search team. Okay. So what I would recommend is if we can have Allison fine-tune that, and then we can have her circulate it to people now for discussion just so they can have it before the meeting. And it would be nice to get that RFP approved, maybe at our next meeting as well.

1:56:10 If we think we need more time, obviously we’re not going to rush into this, but it’s just the RFP for the search team itself. It’s pretty standard. Yeah. I would say six months sounds like a long way away- No … but I don’t think it is. No, I think we need to get going, ASAP on this. Yeah. And so if we can bring them in, and again, we’re not doing an RFP for the actual town administrator, just to hire the team. Yeah. And I think there’s a handful of people in Massachusetts who- There’s a short list … who live in it that’s like two or three. I think if we can get that moving, yeah. Yeah. In reality, if we want somebody to come at the end of December, we’d probably have to sign them up in October, assuming they have another job, they’d probably want to give two months notice. So that even tightens it up further.

1:56:55 Yeah. Yeah. And it’s different than, say, if you’re hiring someone for schools, that there’s a set term of July 1st. Yep. And it would be ideal to have a little bit of overlap, too. Yeah. Ideally. Yep, we’d like to get them in before. I know Thatcher is working on a big book of basically everything that he does and guidelines for the new person, and have had discussions with him about overlapping, and if we need him to come back after. So I think if everyone’s good with the plan other than what we discussed about the details, at least for the first step, to get that RFP for the executive search services out first, and then our next step, hopefully by end of July, mid-August, would be to hire somebody to get going on that. Completely makes sense. Okay. All right, and then maybe what we can do is we can do a detailed

1:57:42 timeline at our retreat as far as we want. We can discuss that and try to stick to that. Great. I think we need really good time management on the retreat. It’s just been one of those things that’s hard to do. Yeah, so not too many doughnut breaks. And hopefully whoever is helping us with the executive search could fine-tune the timeline as well. Oh, would hope. Yep, I’m sure they’ve had a lot more experience than we have. Yep. Although you’ve been through it, so- Yeah, absolutely. Yep. Yeah, there’s basically two firms that will bid on it. Yep. But we should- That we’re going to call and thinner. Yep. So it was out there. All right, moving on, we have some consent agenda items. If I get a motion to approve the following consent agenda

1:58:29 items subject to the usual rules, regulations, and fees, and receipt of required certificate of insurance. The minutes of April 27th, 2026, May 4th, 2026, June 10th, 2026, and June 17th, 2026. Abbott Hall, July 19th, 2026, 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. for an American Revolution talk sponsored by National Grand Bank and VFW Chaplain Lyman Rollins Post 2005. Declare surplus of the following items as no longer needed for municipal purposes, so they may dispose of in accordance with the town’s policy on surplus equipment. Canon imageCLASS MF4770n, HP LaserJet Enterprise M608, HP LaserJet 9040n. And the

1:59:14 Best Friends Walk on October 4th, subject to the approval from police, fire, and recreation, and parks. No permanent markings are allowed in the public way, and all temporary markings shall be removed at the conclusion of the event. So moved. Second. Great. Mr. Graeter? In favor. Ms. Noonan? In favor. Ms. Ferrante?

1:59:35 Sorry, a little bit- Moved. Yep. Okay. Mr. Sisson? In favor. And I am in favor as well. You do have the letter of interest here from Susan Goel

1:59:48 for the associate member position for the planning board. You have her letter, a little bit about her, so we can look at that when we meet end of July. And we do have one other late

2:00:05 addition here. MLT parking request. This has been reviewed by both the chiefs of police and fire chief, and it has been decided that we could, on July 4th, from 12:00 to 4:00 p.m., that we would allow a couple of spots in front of MLT to be blocked off. They are going to be doing some outdoor space. They had asked for more, but determined based on traffic and the holiday and the late request, this was best thing for public safety. So if I could have a motion to approve request from Marblehead Little Theater to restrict parking and three parking spaces directly in front of MLT at 12 School Street on Saturday, July 4th, 2026 from 12 noon to 4:00 p.m. to facilitate an event on their terrace and

2:00:50 to notify the chief of police. So moved. Second. Second. Ms. Noonan? In favor. Mr. Sisson? In favor. Mr. Graeter? In favor. Ms. Ferrante? In favor. In favor. Okay, great. In favor. Great. Let’s move on to select board announcements. I do have one announcement I’m going to start off with, which is the Town of Marblehead Historical Commission sent us a letter saying that they are pleased to announce the publication of a new book about the Marblehead history to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States. The book will be available on or shortly after July 4th, and it’ll be for sale at Abbott Hall Gift Shop at a minimum cost of $10. Mapping Marblehead: Five Centuries of Marblehead History covers the history of our

2:01:38 town from indigenous people through an early settlement, through the events of the 21st century. Maps from all those periods are included. And through the hundreds of years, Marblehead has maintained its independent, feisty personality, both welcoming and insular. Fierce pride in its cherished history is unwavered. So it is the spirit that this book celebrates, and this was submitted by Pam Peterson. So hopefully everyone will go take a look at that. Sounds like a great book. It’s great. Thanks. You got a second out there on the great book. Any other announcements? Just that the master plan survey 2037 is out, so if people want to go online and fill out the survey. I haven’t done it yet, so I don’t know how long it is, but it’s out there.

2:02:24 Okay. I don’t know what’s going on here because it’s not even that late yet. No, we’re getting punchy. It’s late. Okay. Did you want to do a second thing? Quick DPW update. Yeah. Paving is scheduled for Wednesday on Atlantic Ave in Boobyere. Paving for Atlantic Ave is scheduled for Wednesday on Boobyere and Atlantic Ave. Is that your DPW announcement? Great. All right. If I could have a motion to adjourn. So moved. All right. We’ll count this as a second. Ms. Ferrante? In favor heard. Ms. Noonan? In favor. Mr. Graeter? In favor. Mr. Sisson? In favor. And I’m in favor.

2:03:06 I guess your green thing gets going on