001um so right now i'll do a call to order beginning with corey since jack's not here corey evans here diane kennedy here paul schubert here carrie thompson here okay um and i'm going to ask for a motion to go into executive session under exception number three to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation if an open meeting may have a detrimental effect on the bargaining or litigating position of the public body and the chair so declares i do declare we will be receiving an update on ongoing collective bargaining um with dpw facilities and fire so moved second okay roll call please corey evans dianne kennedy i paul schubert harry thompson i okay so we will get the link in our emails to go into executive session and uh we'll see everybody back here
002in a little bit thank you later now we've solved the clone yeah yeah we've got we've got one peter but um let me let me read through the the uh intro and hopefully jack will join us before we start on the agenda um good evening everybody uh we opened the meeting a little bit earlier because we had a executive session um but i'm going to just read through our our zoom language which is that tonight's meeting is being conducted on the zoom platform and live streamed on cohasset 143tv and also on cohasset's facebook page the public is invited to participate on the zoom platform which can be accessed using the link provided at the top of the posted agenda on on the cohasset website members of the board and other schedule participants will be able
003to participate when called on by the chair board members will be able to ask questions of any participant and all votes taken during the meeting will be by roll call we're going to do something a little bit different today and in for future meetings we're going to disable the q a feature only because it's been really challenging to monitor it and um and because it's part of the public record it's just really hard for us to manage that so for anyone who's interested in speaking um on any of the um any of the agenda items going forward we're going to ask that you raise your hand and we will bring you into the zoom room and recognize you among the panelists and then return you after you've made your comments um and that will be
004at the discretion of the chair and depending on how we're rolling in meetings but we do welcome people's participation for public comment period we are going to ask that anyone with public comment um do the same going forward um although if somebody um you know has something they want to mention during public comment that is not on the agenda you can use the q a feature um right now um put your name and address in and um the agendas are going to suggest going forward that for public comment if you could um put your comments in writing in advance of the meeting um so that we can manage kind of the discussion and make sure that your point of view is is being heard it's just very difficult for us to um you know kind
005of uh kind of manage the steering wheel and all the various parties that that um um are obligated to participate in the meeting and that being the elected members of the board so having said that um if there's any public comment you can either raise your hand or q a and i'm going to talk really slowly um i don't see anybody doing that so let's jump right into the earth day and peter pescatore welcome thank you for uh putting us on the agenda uh this coming saturday uh uh not this coming but the 24th a week from now uh we'll be celebrating uh earth day uh restore the earth is the theme of this year's earth day and uh to that end there'll be um at the registration which will be at the front of
006town hall on saturday morning starting at nine o'clock on the 24th there'll be other environmental groups represented we'll have the alternative energy committee the wild cohasset people and safe harbor cohasset which is going to be talking about some drug take back activity so we encourage everybody to take a moment after you register for a site to clean up and talk to the other folks at the other tables at the registration okay tracy could you put up the my first slide there hold on one second we're we're moving to do that yeah uh as part of the earth day um the entire event um during march uh we held a an online art contest for students in the town to uh award to to select the logo for this year's uh earth day uh celebration and
007um what you're gonna see in a moment i hope is the winning piece of art which will be on the uh the giveaway bags that we're we're going to be giving away at registration and beyond on our website on our webpage on the tom's website and other pla any everywhere else that we can possibly make it happen that's great um tracy had to step away she's back to her desk so it'll just be a second all right that's why i keep going in and out because i'm trying to yell at hi oh it's so much easier in person yeah it was the picture on is backwards from my perspective my room is backwards wow i don't know how that happens but it happens what the heck all right so speaking yes speaking of community art
008contest i have that nice 250 logo i think it's reading right outwardly here it is peter here we go so this is the piece of art that we had a panel that reviewed 80 participants in the contest and they selected this piece of art which will be on the tote bags that we're going to be giving away at registration and it's restore our earth is the theme for the 2021 which is the 51st earth day celebration and it's at the top it's cohasset birthday 2021 and this was submitted in the this is the winner and was submitted by ava desalvo a ninth grader here at cohasset fantastic well uh the committee again we have a marketing group that uh takes kid that ran all of this and and uh they they created a panel of
009there were three judges and they reviewed all of all of the entries and selected this so congratulations ava a great pleasure thank you um the next one trace please we have a lot of slides tonight so i only have three so oh good that wasn't a hint hint but i took it as a hint though this is this is the flyer that will be on uh it will be on your the town website landing page uh on 143 and you know we'll have it on our facebook page and every place else we'll we'll have posters made up for window uh store windows and and you know posting at the library the senior center the community center places like that just on a bulletin board so this is uh this is the the flyer that's gonna
010go around um and the registration is from nine to two thirty right in front of town hall where you'll be signed a site get a bag pick up your gift and there'll be other little things that as i said available there as and other environmental advocate advocates that i encourage you to talk with they've got a lot of good stuff to tell you about um during the month of uh april which we are now we have renamed echo hassett for the month of april to encourage people to be more aware of our environment we are having a environmentally themed online bingo game which the qr you can just uh just take a picture of that and it'll take you right through it um and it uh it'll be also on our page on the town
011website and of course every place that we can manage to put the flyer the qr will be available and it's um by doing um restore the earth kinds of things you you would earn a uh a square and when the contest over uh prizes be awarded there'll be another panel that'll pick uh choose winners and there'll be you know three or four winners for you know which items that they uh bingoed okay so that's it's going to run the whole month of um april uh of course you know we couldn't do things live with covert but we're trying to be creative and get people involved the other thing that's uh going to happen is on birthday itself which is thursday the 22nd this is the bingo this is the bingo earth day bingo game so
012it's echo hassett april and you can see you know you can plant a new tree in your yard watch a climate or environmental themed documentary choose second hand instead of buying something new find fit a rain barrel to your down pipe and have a plastic free day there you go bingo that's great that's a that's a bingo you can do diagonal you can do it any way you like and we hope people will take part in this and and you know get get involved with the theme of restore the earth and bingo a couple of cards uh to save the environment okay uh that's that's great thanks so much for all that creativity too that's really amazing well i i i'd like to take credit for it but it's really marissa manley deidre reilly and
013sarah burgess who uh takes a village peter creative creative uh geniuses and and did it all i'm i'm more of a analog guy than a digital guy so they they they carried the ball and did a fabulous job so other events [Music] we're hoping to have [Music] the board approve a proclamation for arbor day which was on april 30th and we are as you know the town was successful in being awarded tree city usa status and that's by the aberdeen network and so one of the things that was a requirement last year which was waived was that the board make a proclamation um recognizing arbor day and so i'm asking that the board consider doing that this time around as a gesture of support for planting a tree and the importance of having trees in
014in our lives in cohasset in particular uh it's part of the culture and beauty of cohasset so that's uh that's a request i'd like to put on the table great and thank you is that something um chris i believe was sent to us earlier is that something you want action on this evening um well it's april 30th so unless you're having another meeting it's it's something that i think may have to be done it if if the board's if the board's ready to do that and somebody has it and wants to read it it's relatively um short i have it in front of me but if somebody else has it okay corey you want to read it yeah whereas arbor day was first celebrated in nebraska in 1872 with the planting of more than one
015million trees and is now celebrated throughout the nation in the world and whereas trees can reduce erosion cut heating and cooling costs clean the air provide habitat for wildlife increase property values and beautify our community and whereas trees are a renewable resource giving us paper wood for our homes fuel for our fires and countless other wood products and whereas trees wherever they are planted are a source of joy and renewable now therefore be resolved that on behalf of the citizens of cohasset we hereby proclaim april 30th 2021 as arbor day in the town of cohasset and encourage all residents to support efforts to protect our trees and woodlands and to plant trees to promote the well-being of this and future generations okay is there a motion to accept that proclamation motion to accept the proclamation
016and a second second okay roll call please craig nye corey evans eye diane kennedy ai paul schubert gary thompson i okay another another thing for all of us to sign thank you very much that's that's really great thank you peter thank you great question i will just underscore that thanks to the work of peter and the entire open space committee the town is now a tree city usa so we uh we've been officially accepted to the program we should be giving our materials hopefully this month so we're getting a plaque and i think this road signs it's things yeah all kinds of good stuff and we have scheduling tree planting for the 30th at 10 i believe it is so any member of the board that would like to come we're looking to plant two
017actually we have two uh i think they're called four gels hybrid elms that are resist dutch elm disease and we're trying to find two appropriately uh public but um but non non utility wire uh utility aware free locations to plant them because they can get no yeah they're very big um so uh we are looking at the common as one possible location and then another prominent location uh so public works is kind of sussing those out so um great for your characters the 30th attack wonderful wonderful thank you one one last thing okay on earth day itself on the 22nd uh there is an ongoing sustainability and stem virtual earth day summit uh which will get the link out with a separate flyer and um that's i think a pay thing i think it's five
018dollars for um to to join that and participate in the discussions on on uh worldwide earth day activities so i just want to put that out that's on our flyer as a recommendation but we'll be promoting it separately as well so thank you thank you for your time i really appreciate it and i really appreciate the proclamation it's wonderful i think it's great for cohasset and peter thank you yeah thank you thank you and your committee um for all your hard work this is great i can't wait to participate carrie i think has a question and then we'll yes no just a quick question peter i wanted to compliment you on your amazing social media you're all doing too the art has been super creative but the social media is so good this year and
019i see a big improvement so shout out to the town to follow them on social media i believe it's cohasset earth day on instagram but the post has been really good and really creative and i'm really proud of everyone helping with the social media account well again and that's they're so good because i'm not involved okay the uh my my committee the three lovely ladies that i mentioned uh are responsible for that and do a fabulous job and i stay out of their way they tell me what they're gonna do and i trust that it's gonna be great and it is great all righty thanks again peter thank you all well we'll see you on earth day yes well good night well done peter well done take care so we i did have listed on
020our um agenda conservation trust land preservation that was just some clarification on their cpc article but we're going to get to cpc articles later um so i want to keep us as on schedule as possible because we are having a joint meeting with advisory and they have a meeting after they meet with us so um next up i'm going to turn over to corey who has we discussed at our last meeting generally um requests to use the common from some of the local businesses and corey has put together a framework for our discussion and hopefully adoption at our next meeting yeah uh thanks diane chris i sent you the updated powerpoint so if you don't mind sharing that or allow me to share and i can just go through it it's only a couple slides
021but just it'll help us keep things on track i'm the co-host now so okay here we go it's more power than they give me it's uh it's quite dangerous okay would be for me all right so we'll do presentation mode here and beach ball all right that's that helpful okay we'll just do it that way all right so uh just i was in my head trying to think about how we could get this easier uh and this is a very very draft there's a lot of questions to answer so um i'll just get into it and hopefully we'll have a short discussion and we can revisit this a little bit so cohasset get outside 2021 is a temporary streamlined process so we can have more events on the common without uh kind of having to
022jump through all the hoops as usual so again the basis for this kova 19 is still in our community we've got uh great vaccination rates but uh it's still something that we need to protect ourselves outdoor events are still the best way to keep people protected uh we have obviously employees and business owners that want to operate as well being outside is by the by far the best way to operate safely we have a town common which is uh the ideal place to host events uh people go there all the time there's been demand for events on the common and as we talked about last week there's historical precedence this is the town common this is a common space uh for everyone to kind of have an opportunity to use and as i said uh
023again this is a very rough draft here so so uh uh there'll be lots of questions and that's okay so basically the main crux of this program is a streamlined application process as you all know typically a business or a group in town that wants to have an event would file an application permit with us we would then put it on an agenda and then we would approve it i'm suggesting that we flip that somewhat and that the select board pre-approves a template and a revised permit application we will then pre-approve specific dates that these events can occur on and then businesses and groups that want to have an event can use the streamline process under this program to apply for a date and then the town town hall can't approve it they don't have
024to come back to us for a date it's much clearer if they meet the requirements they can have an event if the date is open they can have an event it you know it could probably be a turnaround that's only a few days versus trying to wait for a selected meeting obviously since it's going to be streamlined all the events would have to kind of fit into the same sort of box these are just some lists of some requirements or some restrictions that have as i've talked to some people in town uh what would be the case obviously we have a limited number of registrants because of coven 19. if we avoid food service altogether it really simplifies stuff with the department of health there's also kind of a parking question so we'd encourage participants
025to park in town lot not in the town hall lot or along the street i wouldn't say we have any cops enforcing this however i would just say this is something that we request of the community that way we don't uh create a traffic problem on the common when there are events one thing that's been tossed around is some sort of common space agreement uh basically the idea that if you're hosting a workout or yoga class and somebody walks up and wants to participate that they're not going to be turned away this is after all a common space um i you know perhaps we allow some signage but i don't think we should be putting up fencing or anything like that it's really not for events that require that kind of signage uh i have
026in here maybe no rain dates this is an ongoing program so if you don't get your date because of xyz maybe you just reapply for another date versus uh you know trying to have a rain date program again uh there's a lot more here these are just some things that that came up on top of my head about how to make this possible with the least amount of kind of overhead uh as we can uh for the event location right now i'm you know the one that we've had requests for is the common and that's between obviously next to pond in front of town hall i know that the common also has you know kind of the other on the other side of the church and that's been used in the past as well uh
027i'm imagining right now only having one event uh you know per kind of time slot but if we have a lot of demand we maybe could have more and then obviously we have to choose what dates we're going to do this on uh i'm i think that having kind of two slots per date if we have an am and a pm event that kind of makes sense uh but we can't have them every day of the week we obviously have to cut the grass the grassy types to recover those kind of things thursdays and used by the is in use by the farmers market so i'm it seems to make sense to me to have mondays and wednesday be an initial two days that groups or businesses can request a date to have an event
028but again we've had some requests but until this program launches we don't know what the demand is this may be you know a couple days a week may be fine we may have so much demand that we have to revisit the whole thing so in order to kind of figure that out i'm suggesting that after we kind of figure out some of these details we have a kind of a two-week registration process where businesses can apply for dates throughout the summer and then uh town hall can kind of sift through them and give us a report okay we have enough dates or we don't have enough dates and we can go from there however if somebody misses that two week pre-registration process this is a streamlined process it should be easy enough to as i
029said before just reserve a date one or two days ahead of time if the event meets the requirements and the date is open and then uh just kind of finally to what kerry was saying uh if we do this i would uh really recommend that we need to get the word out to the businesses i don't want any businesses to feel like they've been left out we've obviously been contacted by some but there's going to be other businesses that would probably love to take participate in this so uh we need to take an active role in encouraging businesses to think creatively about how they can use it i'd also encourage people to connect this event with other businesses in town uh if you're doing an event in town say hey let's meet for coffee or
030for lunch or let's do something afternoon and grab an early dinner you know those kind of things i think that our business community still needs traffic and if we're going to have stuff on the common it really should be connected to businesses in town as well uh we should do our best to promote obviously any events that are happening uh taking place uh on our social media and uh you know this is an idea that's kind of been bounced around also uh with with our neighbors to the south and north uh with the class chamber so there's a lot of kind of uh you know a lot of opportunities for partnering up here so uh that is kind of a express version of what's in my head questions thoughts ideas please thanks corey that was
031really well done i do have some questions but um let's go around and see who else jack good great work cory i'm i'm just so happy that you've come up with this and other people worked hard a couple of questions would this be limited which i think it probably should be to cohasset businesses i don't think we want um people from out of town coming in and the other thing is um if this takes off which we hope it will the wear and tear in the grass is going to be significant and that the grass on the other side of the uh first parish church is lush and we might consider you know moving that and it'll be nice if people became aware of that that's part of the town common because a lot of
032people aren't really aware of that but well done thank you thanks any other questions carrie yeah really fantastic presentation i think this is really important especially serving with you on the economic task force corey i do think this can really help revive some small businesses that are struggling especially our cohasset businesses i'm i guess what i want to discuss is are there certain areas of the common that we want to restrict to this do we want to choose some certain spots on the common that we think are more appropriate or do we want to leave the whole common as being an option i i'm a little bit no i guess i'm not sure how i feel about that in terms of restricting certain areas or if the whole common should be fair game paul so
033yeah i think you may have to open it up and maybe you restrict it you know four weeks on one side four weeks on the other more from the the turf failure that you may have there and the the other question i have is how do how would you do this would you do it with like a presumptive okay with the voter selection because i think the border side has to okay a lot of this stuff can we do like a presumptive um delegate delegation of authority and say there's a person that's gonna schedule would that be the way to do it yeah that's kind of the mechanism that i was talking with chris senior about that yeah i mean we've pre-approved an event uh and you know it's just it's a presumptive approval on
034that date that follows this template so if all those things check box it gets our thing i mean that's kind of the idea i did have a uh brief chat with brian joyce at dpw about the grass issue uh and uh he didn't express much concern i don't i'm not really expecting these events to be like a hundred people playing rugby um you know i think if you've got you know 15 people doing yoga i think the grass is going to be okay uh but you know that's why if we have mondays and wednesdays you know it still leaves the grass three days to kind of recover and um you know again i think this is pretty fluid uh i did have that concern but after kind of talking to people i said yeah maybe
035that's something we keep an eye on uh but maybe not something that we need to actively worry about and carry certainly um you know having i only kind of chose that one area because it just seems makes sense but i think we have the demand for it you know and we have if we have two events maybe we've got a little bit of a traffic issue but uh if there's demand for it and someone wants to use that other part of the comment i think that's great you know so um a couple of things i to jack's point it's one of the things i wrote down which is you know i do think unless somebody has a compelling argument otherwise that we should limit it to cohasset businesses or nonprofits i just think that makes
036sense we're really trying to help our businesses out as much as we hope everybody does well all around us um i do think we should start small and maybe it's an hour that we choose or hour in the morning an hour in the afternoon on mondays and wednesdays i think that's reasonable in one specific spot and we could also alternate you know i mean people have to be flexible maybe they're on the pond side one time and but we can we can think about that but i'd like to see if we just offer just a couple of hours a week how that how that plays out before we launch into anything bigger and then if there's a demand we can we can address it separately um i i would you know in as we write
037up the kind of the policies for this i would recommend that signage be temporary so you know if they have a sign and it says yoga class they take it with them um and um and then the only other question i have is because the process right now is if somebody wants to do an event on the common they put the application in and then it gets reviewed by you know like public safety board of health there's a crew that reviews events and um and then it comes to us so just want to make sure that whoever does the the sign off if we give them the authority to do that is either that same group or that same group has endorsed whoever it is that's going to stamp of approval on this i think
038it's a really good point i mean there's obviously multiple groups in town that need to kind of give a check box do or approve an event so if we can get them to the more we can get into the template uh the less decision making we have to do on the back end so um yeah and uh i certainly agree with jessica asset residents and uh you know i said the the aim and pm i was kind of thinking well maybe someone reserves the nine to 11 slot if they want to use all two hours they can if they don't they don't but that way we don't have like a nine to ten and then a ten to eleven somebody waiting on this exactly i just don't want that in one one other thing and
039then carry um is just i really do think and and this is probably something we can get from public safety uh whether it's fire chief or or the board of health director but is is i think we need to set a limit of people there are limits you know based on the state guidelines but we're not talking 50 people we're talking um probably 15 to 25 at the most but i think we whatever that is should be in our in our list of requirements carrie yeah just to clarify are we thinking we want this to be open to either cohasset businesses or cohasset residents that might own a business in a different town so residents or do i mean let's say there's a classic resident that owns a business in scituate or hingham should we
040be open to that as well right like maybe we want to include either you can be a co-asset business or a co-asset resident that makes sense to me i mean yeah the idea of i think if you're a resident you by default have right to the common so i would absolutely say resident or or you know resident group or resident business yeah um yeah i think we should think that through yeah um i think we ought to start just local and see how this goes if that if there were to be space but there are so many people in capacity who have you know um you know in my investment business do i go out and put a placard out there and say buy amalgamated mutual funds from jack creighton or something because i don't
041think we want that i think we want those government businesses they're good mutual funds by the way uh i don't sell mutual funds the um but i do think the um those people who've actually put bricks and mortar in the ground already and are paying taxes substantial taxes they ought to have first dibs i'm not opposed to it but i want to make sure that those people who've been struggling are given a more of a leg up because they not their business is in our town but anyway it's up to the board i i do agree with that i also think that maybe that narrows us into you know setting up what kind of businesses because we've already ruled out any kind of food service um and we have you know one of the things
042we'll be discussing in the next three to four weeks is um the the what do they call the trans the the transitory licenses the ice cream trucks and those kinds of things you know like then they pull up and all of a sudden things could get a little crazy for a while but we need to think about like it's the idea of a yoga studio or a small gym class or a taught class or something makes sense but at what point you know could somebody just put a desk up and say i'm giving tax advice or something so i think we need to think that through and i don't know whether you have an economic task force meeting this week but we do yeah i mean maybe is that something you could get way in
043from a wider group we can certainly certainly do that i think some of the conversations i had i was impressed by the creativity you know i was just thinking you know as you said yoga fitness whatever but you know there's also you know if you're a retailer maybe you just want to do uh you know a display of what you have i mean and i'm okay with that you know so uh you know i think let's not limit it too much because there we may see things that are very interesting and if there's something that fits outside the template we can always you know look at it again i'd say but i also think the two-week period gives us a little bit of time to say okay we've got these you know 20 applications and
044they all fit nicely or we really should think about this more uh and restructured a little bit yeah kerry i think this is close to bordering on a little too restrictive in my opinion i know that a lot of town residents who live in town are struggling as well with their own businesses and i understand the arguments being proposed here but i think we have to be clear if we just are going to make it be cohasset businesses we have to be clear that that doesn't mean it's open to cohasset residents right so i i would probably prefer to expand it a little bit more but i also understand the arguments you all are making i'm wondering about like for normal events as an insurance requirement right and that's that's kind of one of the
045things so i mean if a resident probably doesn't have those so i wonder if this is kind of self-limiting as it is because if you're already a business you already have a lot of those insurance yeah yeah i think that's i think that's a good a good point so what i would recommend um i'll recognize you in a sec jack what i would recommend corey is maybe just trying to draft an actual policy based on this comments and any you get over the next so that we can review it um for our next meeting i think it's an experiment that we're willing to try and that you know the parameters can be can be worked out um and then jack we have your comment and then i lost my train of thoughts let's let let's
046kind of learn to walk before we start running right i'd like to see a couple of things maybe port sits there and has some of their people walk out with their fashions and walk around or all kinds of fun low-key stuff but i i think you know the see what happens yeah this is a wonderful town i think we can be um creative and i don't and and we'll see what happens i think it's a great idea and i do i do want to stress that the the liability the additionally insured certificate has to be part of their application yeah so to corey's point i think that will kind of self-select we're also if you don't mind just one other thing uh i'm going to follow the town of arlington did this uh very successfully
047uh and i've been in touch with them and i've got their documents so we've already kind of got a pretty good template to kind of build off of and customize so this should be pretty easy easy lift great if you feel like you have enough feedback from us i want to move us along we're a little behind and i want to be respectful of both our next guest and um and the advisory board who will be joining us um after that um chris i think if we could promote um tom hickey who's here um from southshore votech um with the presentation hi tom good evening welcome thank you i uh i recognize that you've got a pretty lengthy agenda and i know you want to keep uh keep on pace i uh i did have
048some information sent sent along in advance if if it's all right with you i'd be happy to just do a high level review of of why uh why i'm here this evening yep that would be fantastic thank you no problem so uh as you know cohasset is one of eight towns that makes up our regional school district and we are in the process of seeking from all eight of our towns a debt authorization article and that's going in front of all eight of our towns at the respective springtown meetings the state law requires that when a regional school district wants to borrow money it has to get approval from its member towns there are multiple ways of seeking that approval and we're approaching each town individually and giving each community an opportunity to place it
049in front of their their residence on on on the warrants long story short is that as the second oldest regional vocational school in the state we've done a pretty good job of being able to uh infuse capital dollars in our operating budget because we only bring our towns one number each year when you see our number in the war and it includes capital perhaps debt transportation uh and operating costs and we've been telling our communities for the last few years that we're reaching the point where the projects we have to take on in the near future are going to be of such a scope that we can't reasonably ask our communities to absorb it in one budget cycle and the materials that i sent along indicated that we are we've it's been recommended to us
050through our facilities master plan that we developed in 2018 that we have to replace roof windows ventilation the original part of our building was built in 1962 and a lot of this has to do with upgrading that part of the building we are a perennial candidate for the msba's core program and uh just found out earlier this week that we did not make the cut for this uh for this delayed spring invitation despite seeking authorization and hoping to get approval from all eight of our towns we will still be seeking to be invited into that program which hopefully will help bring some state dollars in to offset uh deep renovations modernization and and needing a little more space the article talks about 18.9 million dollars and that is how we have to present it what's
051the total amount that we would be looking for a few legitimate questions that that should be asked up front are are you planning to borrow this all at once what's the impact on our community where is this where is this extra bar and going to show up our our intention after working with the financial advisor and bond council our plan is to phase in projects over a five-year period starting in fiscal 2023 and in doing so if we stick to that plan we would be we would be doing some bond anticipation notes and essentially converting this to two bonds uh that would be in fiscal 25 and fiscal 28. cohasset's share of any amount that we end up borrowing will be 0.81 and that that small amount is based on a three-year look back of
052enrollment so cohasset has seven students in in our school district and the formula that we use applies applies to all eight of our towns so when the materials i sent you what that translates to in real dollars your share of our capital budget for fiscal 22 is about seven thousand five hundred dollars and so this is probably where that number might crest as high as twelve thousand dollars over the at the high point of our of our borrowing if we stick to the plan the other reason we're coming to our towns in this way is quite honestly we're concerned a little about debt fatigue if we came to you every year at some point it would be who's that guy again and we hope that we can make a case that we've got we've got
053a validated plan here's how we want to do it we still have to be responsive to our towns and bring a number that's going to work if we borrow too much money and then we can't get an annual budget pass because again we don't segregate out capital it's all in one i'm very mindful of the fact that barring too much too soon not according to plan and then going to a town that says we can't afford your operating assessment that's going to cause a problem because with a debt obligation we'd have to find savings on the operating side of the budget so we're not we certainly aren't going to put ourselves in in that position so with your support and the support of the residents at your town meeting in late may uh hopefully we'll
054be able to move forward with plans uh planning fiscal 22. this has no impact on fiscal 22 and hopefully begin some projects in fiscal 23. i'd be happy to answer any questions you might have great thank you so much tom that was thorough especially with the information that we received ahead of time um carrie had a question and yeah thank you tom and there's such a need for people to be going into the trades right now it's there's i know that there are so many jobs available it's really important thank you for doing this my question is more just about the formula is the funding formula related to the amount of students each town has or is it more i'm a little confused and that amount of seven has that gone up or down in
055the past or has that held steady great questions first one is uh our regional agreement spells out how we would handle apportioning debt in the fiscal year in which the debt is authorized we would take a fixed three-year look back so all of our communities we would look at the enrollments from fiscal 2019 and 18. that's how we determined uh the 0.81 percent which in this particular year translates to uh seven students that number has fluctuated slightly uh i've i've been at the school since 1994 i've been uh superintendent for 10 years cohassets uh i can speak to my experience in the last 27 years cohasset's numbers have been small historically uh in general there are spots that uh go unused which we then reallocate to to uh where there's demand in other communities but
056in but in essence that's how that's how the number is determined what happens going forward if we have a hundred kids from cohasset five years from now the 0.81 percent doesn't change it's a fixed amount when we assess towns for capital just as a quick sidebar capital i'm buying a vehicle and buying some shop equipment that's on a three-year rolling average but when you when you authorize debt it's fixed we would have done the same thing with with r8 towns back in 2010 when we had a small msba project to replace the roof on our original building we would have come around 2010 put an article for the full amount and then msba would back out the reimbursement and we would have needed all eight of our communities so the last time we engaged in
057something like this a much smaller scale was uh 10 or 11 years ago and we currently have no debt on the books that's terrific uh corey yeah tom thanks for coming by and uh thanks for you know uh and encouraging our towns to invest in in this program um in your presentation you just said that it's kind of for you know kind of general improvement of facilities are there any programs in particular that you're looking to really use this money to to improve and enhance thank you three quarters of the money that we're projecting is going to go for infrastructure maintenance and improvement but about 25 of the money will hopefully be used to expand uh our master facilities plan ideally calls for about forty thousand square feet that's we can't afford to do that
058on our own but i think we can afford to up to maybe ten thousand square feet the good news the good story that comes out of this is that our own vocational programs electrical carpentry hvac metal fabrication welding our students and our instructors can actually take on some of the internal work our most popular programs are our construction and manufacturing uh construction and transportation programs so even if a student is admitted to the school pardon me there's also a secondary challenge that i have 30 kids a year in a freshman class of a who want electrical and i have to turn a dozen to 15 kids away every year there just is enough space it's a great i appreciate you asking the question my concise answer is i would i would ideally want to add
059five to ten thousand square feet and then reallocate some space for the programs who have student demand labor market demand and the equipment in the spa my hvac program is probably my most glaring example of a program that needs a lot of space per student but we're we're very short on space so i definitely have a plan on how we would we would renovate and reallocate space and add some new space for that would be my priority thanks i i think the most exciting thing about the pro the slide show you sent ahead of time was just that a lot of the students were doing a lot of the capital um upgrades um at school which is just so impressive and and having you know understanding ourselves what we have to deal with in terms
060of capital planning for our own facilities um we can certainly appreciate where you're coming from and wish we had a labor force um amongst us as well um but alas paul schubert yeah so uh if anyone has dealt with regional school districts um this is one of the uh toughest things is to try to get all of those districts that are [Music] spread out to several different towns get all the towns to agree at once and this is yeoman's work from the budgetary and convincing side from cohasset this is a a wonderful option for us because it is a uh an option for kids from cohasset that would not have otherwise and so i i'm really keen on supporting this because we need all the school all the district to get the support from all
061of the towns that are involved and it's sometimes a really difficult thing to do that's all great thanks any other comments otherwise um i think we will take action to um i believe advisory has already opined on this chris and has a recommendation to town meeting they recommended this unanimously uh okay nothing and what do do do you know what article this is on the warrant um i was just looking for the most recent version i think it's article 16. is that right tracy article 19. 19 sorry that was close um so if you're prepared you can do it now i mean i'd like to do it now then we can send tom on his way with happy news i'd like to move that we approve article for the south shore vocad for the town
062meeting approval is there a second second okay roll call please jack craig and i corey evans aye dianne kennedy i paul schuberth harry thompson aye great that was i think we're probably the easiest town um tom so good luck with everyone else well done thank you so much i appreciate the support i thank you as well okay we gotta come visit you as soon as we're able yes i'd love to have you lunch in the restaurant and a tour absolutely amen thank you thanks again okay um now i i um we have a joint meeting with the advisory committee so if we could promote the advisory committee this is for the purposes of the review of the school budget and we also have members of the school administration and school committee to promote as well
063so we'll let that take its course for just a few seconds it's gonna be big once we see rob okay i think we have everybody from advisory so why don't i ask uh rob to reveal himself and open his meeting and while rob's revealing himself craig do you have a are you posted are you are you going to call your meeting to order as well i sure am madam chairperson okay if you i'll let um rob do that first and then i'll turn it over to you craig to do the same thing and then we'll get rolling thank you thanks stan can you hear me okay we can we can't see you though well we can fix that it's not going to improve it's not going to approve the meeting any but there's so many
064people here rob we won't even be able to why am i not appearing can you see me i can't see me we can't see you i've unstopped have a little do you have one of those little yes little sliders that go across the camera at the top no hang on i think i might know what the problem is for goodness sake all right well i'll uh i don't want it there i am like i said it doesn't make anything better um so i will uh open the advisory committee meeting um so the uh the usual preface uh pursuant to gl chapter 38 section 20b and following governor baker's declaration of state of emergency in the commonwealth of rising from the covet 19 pandemic the advisory committee will meet virtually utilizing zoom technology and all votes
065will be taken by a roll call vote so i should take take the attendance of the committee um so gina steno fran collins fran is not here gene healey it's not here um helene lieb i see helene i don't hear helene i see fran i don't hear fran and gene is here as well gene dipole good all right um meg wheeler present lee jenkins um who am i overlooking uh mary mcgoldrick unthinkable um and rob hillman is present so the the advisory committee meeting is open we're noticed for the purpose in this meeting of participating in a warrant article review regarding the budget specifically the school department budget uh just for anyone watching when the when this portion of your meeting uh ends we'll adjourn uh or perhaps suspend our meeting and there's a second
066link posted because the advisory committee intends to continue and do some uh some business with uh the open warrant articles that we have not yet voted on so we'll close here and um and and open up uh elsewhere great thank you and i'll turn it over now to school committee chairman craig mcclellan to open his meeting thank you madam chairperson i hereby call to order the april 13 2021 joint meeting of the go school committee cohasset select board and the class advisory committee this meeting uh this otherwise in-person public meeting as with all of our recent meetings is being conducted virtually by a zoom given the state of emergency in this commonwealth would all three members present please indicate so enroll call mrs caleria president mr kearney mrs marr president mrs st onge present and
067present craig mcclellan the meeting is school committee meeting is uh called the order as of 7 17 p.m and all members with the exception of paul kearney are present thank you madam chairperson great thank you so i'm going to turn it over to uh dr sullivan school superintendent and um to kind of walk us through um i know there's a lot of slides and um hopefully you can just hit the meeting pieces first primarily and uh thank you and welcome no my pleasure and and thank you to the select persons and also to advisory for for being here and for everything you do um if uh we could have uh sue owen who's our director of finance and operations have the ability to um be a co-host that would be helpful as we could share
068our slides so pat both you and susan should be co-hosts okay so i introduce ourselves then of course i'm um dr patrick sullivan the superintendent of schools and i'm here with susan owen who is our director of finance and operations and dr leslie scollins who i believe is having some trouble with her camera but um she is here as well dark scones can you hear us boss possibly not here but um maybe um doctor collins if you can if you can go in and try to come go out and try to come back in and perhaps uh that'll it'll give you there you go i'm here i just got promoted so now oh there you go okay all right so we're all here and thank you for your patience with that um so yeah once
069i'm just making sure sue are you able to share your your screen you can't i can do it just let me know yes i'm bringing it up right now hold on that's not what i wanted there we go okay wonderful um so we're very happy to walk you through our fy 22 budget for your consideration uh to start off uh so if you'd advance one slide maybe you can just do it in a presentation mode just hit from beginning there you go okay we'll start off with just talking a little bit about the fy 22 budget priorities and i should preface this with saying that we're in the process of building our next strategic plan we're at the ending of a five-year strategic plan and of course our strategic plans in in as all strategic
070plans do in an organization guide us from um you know beginning to end in other words our strategic plan governs our school improvement plans which uh govern our teacher goals and so it's a very important process for us and we're actually creating a three-year plan because we're finding that things are are moving so so quickly we want to make sure that we have a period that that covers everything that we have as a need but we have put together a list of priorities here that we feel confident will transition into our next strategic plan and actually the data that we've accumulated so far supports that all of these are very much databased and very much tie in with the work we've been doing in coastal schools for some time the first budget priority that you'll
071see present in all this is elementary numeracy uh and this comes particularly from um some of the data that shows that although we achieve very well in our mcas and our other data points that our math scores aren't exactly where we'd love them to be and we needed a fresh look at our elementary numeracy in particular so within the last couple of years we looked very closely at our data and we adopted with the some great collaborative work a program called elementary bridges math program for all of our elementary students k through grade five and of course that eventually is a transition and it's in the process of transitioning into our upper grades but in order to develop that appropriately we need to continue with our training of our staff uh and our resourcing for
072our students similarly instructional technology which is something that we're really looking at growing and in some cases beginning to implement in our district this includes a computer science program that will thrive uh throughout all of our grade levels and we did um venture into this with the hiring recently of a direct of our director of technology and digital learning and you you will see that we have a position in our uh budget this particular year that both includes the coaching of staff to include to progress our instructional technology and also this person will be doing some of our uh computer science work in in particular at the middle school but that's a of course with the pandemic our instructional technology has been uh at the at the forefront of everything we're doing but it is
073something that we feel very strongly needs to grow in our district and we're moving in that direction social emotional learning we've invested quite a lot in making sure that our students wellness and mental health is protected and supported we're lucky to have a group such as safe harbors with us in our town that works closely with us but we're also advancing what we have to offer our students at the elementary level we've been working with a program called responsive classroom and then we're very much trying to implement the castle uh competencies for social emotional learning within all of our curricula so you'll see that present in our in what we're advocating for as well in the area of social emotional learning safety and facilities of course safety has been very much paramount this particular year
074because of all the need needs around the pandemic but we need to make sure that we are attending to our safety new needs within the pandemic and then as we transition out and how the two tie into one another and then the last is addressing learning gaps and i really wish we hadn't called it learning gaps but but instead talked about unfinished learning because what we're finding is that as we really dipstick now and get a sense for where students are there are some definite needs but we also have learned that you know a lot of our students are still growing and we're still still creating environments even though we've had a difficult uh environment to do it in uh with the pandemic that have fostered student learning so we're looking to make sure that
075our budgetary concerns and priorities rather address our unfinished learning as we move forward into fy 22. so at this point now i'll turn it over to um sue owen who again is our director of finance and operations to go through some of the budget numbers with you and we're just again doing kind of a quick overview and then as we get to our priorities um and we look at the data that actually formulated our offer of what we're asking for for this year i'm going to have dr scollins lean in and help us with some of that is she her role is director her role is a assistant superintendent in charge of curriculum instruction and assessment a lot of those are tied into that so take it away soon good evening now before you start
076i just want to tell the select board members and advisory because i know a lot of this stuff is meaty and this is our presentation and time to ask questions um if you have a question use the raise hand feature um throughout and we'll try to stop after every slide if there's a question or two if we go too fast just slow us down we'll be glad to answer questions whenever you see fit ma'am chair person okay and and rob if you don't mind if i see one of your guys i might call on you or um but if you see them first go right ahead and and uh identify them if they have a question yeah please please do otherwise it's chaos man i'm here share a person if i may i just um
077i just do want to note on the record uh while uh mr kearney isn't officially in attendance uh on the meeting he is uh watching via facebook so he is participating in that way he wasn't able to uh because of uh techno technological problems he wasn't able to use zone but i just wanted everyone to know that mr kearney is watching and i was very much involved in the process appreciate it thank you so it's it's the floor is yours thank you so good evening thank you everyone for having us tonight um first time in front of everybody so hopefully i'll do okay um this is just a summary of what um the numbers look like so for fy 21 the appropriated budget was 20 million hundred 960 six dollars um and then i kind
078of broke it down by contractual salary obligations or what we call rollover costs um was six hundred and sixty six thousand four hundred forty two i gave you a percentage of the budget there we had a decrease in circuit breaker funding that we need to make up um so our circuit breaker offset some of our our school budget costs um and we had 125 000 less this year in reimbursements so we have to find we had to come up with or add in 125 000 to replace what um we didn't get in circuit breaker we also had a small decrease in special education tuitions which is surprising but it was about eight thousand dollars we've had several um long time teachers put in their retirement so we've projected retirement savings of about a hundred and
079forty thousand dollars um the more senior teachers leave and we have some new teachers come in um so some savings and salaries there um you'll see in our next slide a few slides up we have staffing and other requests which was about 255 000 and then we had to make some reductions in order to meet meet the bottom line and that the reductions were about 175 000 so the total fy 2022 requested budget is 21 million 684 432 which is a 3.45 percent increase which is what was allocated by the town this this slide shows the increases to our budget um what we did what what our needs were um so we had a 0.5 increase to a high school social studies teacher for 40 000 we added a 1.0 middle school reading specialist which
080was touchably desperately needed we added a computer science slash technology specialist at the middle high school for sixty thousand and we added a grade seven special education teacher at the middle school for seventy thousand dollars and we're trying to be we would love to have full day kindergarten be free um but that's about a 300 000 um budget impact so we're going to begin the process of trying to reduce a full day kindergarten tuitions by building 25 000 into our budget which will reduce some of the tuitions um by 25 thousand dollars divided by however many families um enroll in kindergarten next year so our staffing and our other requests for approximately 255 000 or 1.22 we will get into some of the data just a brief overview of these that drove these positions in
081just a little bit so obviously add um and stay within our means we had to reduce um so we have a retirement the middle school of a social studies teacher um based on enrollment we don't need to replace it as a 1.0 we only need to replace a half-time social studies teacher so there was a savings of 57 000 there um we had one um educational um support professional at the osgood elementary school that we didn't fill this current year so because we didn't feel it we realized that it probably wasn't needed so there's a savings of 22 000 there um the next one is a 0.5 elementary teacher move to medco grant so we're not reducing anyone what we're doing is we're taking a 1.0 elementary teacher and we're funding half of that teacher
082through the medco grant because we have medical students in the elementary schools um anything we're just shifting the funding and our mecco grant was particularly robust this year as as is helpful in this we also look historically um into our utilities and based on you know the last five years we we thought we could decrease our utilities budget by about a conservative thirty thousand dollars um and then as a team we all chipped in basically and decided okay in order to meet the bottom line we needed to just we needed to decrease in other areas we did not want to cut staff we did not want anyone to lose their jobs so we decreased some supplies and materials district-wide and um we're just being a lot more um careful on our spending on supplies materials
083so that's where the 175 thousand dollars in savings came from great so i'm gonna stop you there um mary mcgoldrick has a question from the advisory board yes sue um thank you just to back up a little bit regarding um the kindergarten tuition where are we in terms of the state mandating full day how long we can charge for it how much a part of your budget is that that eventually you'll need to make up when there's not tuition being paid so the whole program is a little over six hundred thousand dollars the school budget is absorbing three hundred thousand and then the parents are absorbing the other three hundred thousand so it's going to take us a few years at least to um roll it all into our budget um to be to make
084it become free full day okay any other questions before we move on um rob hillman chair of advisory thanks diane um you uh when you describe the current budget at 21 million 684 000 dollars and with an increase of 3.45 percent you referred to that as what was allocated to us by the town uh can you describe the process what that means who did the allocating and how um good question so thank you let's let me think about this i might need a little help with this one so um based on john pierre and chris senior in his team going through um revenues and um local receipts and what the state is going to give us and um the cherry sheet in chapter 70 based on all that um they they they come to a
085decision of okay what's the bottom line of what the town is going to be allocated from all their resources and then i believe it's divided up amongst the different departments um within the town um which is how the the number that we're allocated is um given to us so we didn't we started out with a much higher budget um obviously because we went in with you know what what do we feel we need um and we had to it was probably probably up over five percent um but we knew we had to slim back and and decide what our priorities were um i don't know if that answers your question um i know don piot just revealed himself rob do you have a follow-up question before we turn it to dawn and then i see
086corey has a question i i did just and if if it's out of sequence it can be let go for for later but i you did in that same explanation identify a 3.45 budget increase across the department budget um which uh i was wondering what the drivers were that put it at 3.45 percent cory are you okay to wait if if i asked dawn to see if he wants to win sure don did you want to help answer that question please yeah i mean susan pretty much covered it um as we've gone through presented to a select board advisory uh we chris and i we go through a bit of a process to identify what our increase from our tax levy calculation is local receipts new growth state aid as sue mentioned and then take
087a look at all the shared costs like central i.t pension health care then we come up to essentially uh total revenues less those shared costs and then what the difference is compared to last year and that's essentially our new revenue for the year and that is then shared between the school department pardon me and all town depart all other town departments 61 to the school 39 to the town and that percentage is not written it's not a uh anything documented this is essentially something that's been carried for a number of years i believe from uh uh you know we're having a long-range planning group that was around when i first started has essentially been been a percent allocation that lives in even before i i started here and really i think that percentage is really
088just based on payroll um i just took a look back a few weeks ago at the last four or five years and when you compare town and school payrolls based on the budgets it's almost dead on 61 39 so i think that that split must come up as a calculation an allocation based on payroll needs is what i would guess thank you corey uh this isn't nearly as technical uh dr sullivan you you began at the beginning of the presentation talking about you know the the need for focus on especially um mathematics and science you know performance in the schools i did a kind of brief overview of the budget it wasn't quite clear um if in the budget you're allocating existing resources to solve this problem or uh to to increase you know our
089you know student performance of that area can you speak to a little bit about that yeah basically and actually um dr scollins can certainly help with this we adopted a elementary math program called bridges which was a significant one-time investment but the professional development needs of that uh are are significant um so do you want to speak to that a little bit dr scollins i do thank you um so when we adopted the program we didn't realize that covid was going to happen and so we implemented it this year um and i guess probably um if we were um able to i would have held off but we needed the program the program we were working with um had no longer existed for us in the format it was so we went ahead and implemented
090bridges from the math learning center and it's really when you implement a new program it's not just a one-year rollout it takes a couple of years for the staff to really become comfortable and it spirals up so there's a lot of continuous work that needs to happen but with covid and teaching in a hybrid the company was very good about modifying it for our students but next year we still want to continue that because we want to continue to grow our students and our first year although it was an amazing rollout and students and teachers are very happy with the program and what we're seeing is outstanding it's still going to need a little more time to really grab hold i hope is that kind of what you're asking about mr evans yeah i think
091it clarifies so so it's it's a a changing program part primarily um not necessarily at this point uh an increase in resources it sounds like no not an increase in staffing so to speak but the resources are attached to this elementary program and need we also need to look at how that transitions up as well that was part of our role we determined we'd start at the elementary but we also have to look at you know how the how this elementary program leads into our programming at the middle of the high school and that will be continuing that work this year i appreciate it thank you we have um two additional questions from advisory board members so helene lee first and then gene dipole second you want muting helene see that yes there you go
092yes i got it on dr leslie scotland um i was wondering about the interface of this program this math program with technology um you know where i graduated from northwestern university we developed the university of chicago math series and right now they have a new development in terms of math education that's very stem and it's very digital oriented uh by um a professor who's working in the school of it um you know in education and technology there and i was wondering how this uh program in the elementary you know in middle school interfaces you know like i said with digital technology which has really been important in developing math and science skills especially math so this does have an online component this is also very much a hands-on experience for our students so it's a
093combination of both um allowing um for students to make that transition but especially as those younger years from a development perspective we really want them to have multiple opportunities to be able to solve math problems and understand those fundamental pieces so the program itself also has really stepped up during covid and really increased its online resources and its platforms for our teachers and for our students so i think that um as much as the chicago has a higher probably platform around digital learning this has a combination of both and within the units are also stem units so there's that interconnectivity with math science and really literacy so we're really across the board really trying to interconnect all our content because it makes more sense for students if they can see those interconnectivities in those real
094world applications so it's um it's teachers are extremely happy with the depth of knowledge that the students are acquiring certainly we had some concerns where we were all remote last year this year coming back as a hybrid and then you know increasing our time we were certainly concerned about what it would look like for our students but when quick quick conversations with teachers and we'll be looking at more data in the next couple of weeks as we're assessing students and looking at that data we're seeing that the students depth of knowledge is greater than the previous programs so that itself is um is such a win and especially in these times so teachers are very very confident that having a full year next year we're going to see a tremendous amount of growth in our
095students ability to have those higher order thinking and those real concrete understandings of of what is numeracy what is mathematics what is problem solving because that's really what we want for our students and also uh mrs lee thank you for for acknowledging the connection between digital learning potential and science and math um achievement that's one of the chief reasons that we brought on our director of technology and digital learning this year and also one of the reasons we're advocating for this um technology position at our middle and high school level which will complement our existing position at the elementary level so you're really um you know i think very much tied into our our hopes for really pairing technology with science and math other subjects too but i think particularly in that way and coaching
096our educators to be able to make those connections with the students so that was a really and that actually ties a bit into your question um mr evans as well in terms of resources uh thank you um i'll go to gene dipold from the advisory board and then select board member paul shubert go ahead gene hi i'm not sure who this should be directed to maybe you miss owens or maybe you dr sullivan i just had a general question about the overall overall budget and maybe this is going to be answered in the later slides i saw but the enrollment numbers have obviously been way down this year there's a lot of people homeschooling or they've left for private school because the private schools were fully open in terms of in person and so my
097question is whether the staffing and the overall budget but most importantly the the the decisions about teacher staffing were made based on the enrollment from this year or are you projecting um that we sort of returned back to the you know trajectory that the enrollment was on but for the pandemic yeah you're not wrong in the in the thought that we did have more homeschool applications than we typically have we did not have a significant amount of folks who uh went into our remote only program which was we outsourced through a group called teca but to it really answer your question we have considered that those folks will be coming back and that is part of our our projections and our thinking in terms of uh our needs so yeah we did consider that okay
098a weird year like for example my daughter's in the fifth grade and there's one whole class that i think is gone you know doing everything but i expect that those children will return it is a strange year and actually some of the state funding was calculated on the current enrollments which is somewhat frustrating because as you pointed out you know that is not a reality when our students all do come back thankfully i don't think it's going to impact us in cohasset quite as much but we we were projecting that we would receive these students back and we do believe we will i i want to be mindful of the time in the presentation so um i think um these questions are really good and i think a lot of the answers are going to
099be seen um going forward in the presentation but we have um a question from um paul schubert and then jack creighton and then we'll go back to the presentation so a quick question the utilities based on historical data i just hope that you know mid-year as everything goes back to full duty full use open 100 after vaccination programs go through that that's not an underestimate for utilities as gas electricity and water will probably be a potential higher costs in mid-year just to make sure there's some potential flexibility in the budget that's all i'm done certainly thank you thanks jack creighton yeah hi um one well i think we lost his volume yeah can you hear me now yes yeah mr crazy okay that's good i think we both hit unmute at the same time um
100anyway i think what a metric that would be helpful is the ratio between the budget and the teachers and the budget and the administrative staff and this is some a metric that i think probably should be done every year so the the um the citizens and the parents know what is the cost per student what is the cost for teaching versus the cost for the administration and i mean that's a basic budgeting tool so is it possible to to get that information but down the line i believe it's in this presentation yeah we do have a slide that references that but we also um we did share or i believe we were going to share the line items with um document with you as well so i believe you'd have that to look at i
101think those are right break out the ratio of the cost i actually i think um i think sue is correct i think there's a slide in here that breaks breaks it down comparing the uh the categories not necessarily from year to year though so it would give the cost per student yes okay that's fine thank you it's well done welcome so i'll turn it back to you and um these questions have been great so keep taking notes and we'll stop again at the next break go ahead this sheet is just a summary of everything we just talked about just in front of you in one place so you can see the the steps and lanes the decreases the staffing requests the reductions um what the 21 budget was what the 22 budget projection is and
102the 3.45 so this is just a brief summary of it all in one place this i believe is what you were asking for um this is the latest on what's on on jessie's website so this is the fy 19 is the most current it's the fy 19 per pupil spending um compared to the state average so i think that's what you were looking for when it breaks it down administration teachers it goes through the whole um this comes right off the desk's website um they have yet to post fy20 unless they posted it in the last week um but i'm not sure so it gives you the percentages in comparison to the state in a couple of areas here that you can see we're lower than the state you can see our instructional materials equipment
103and technology which is of course something we're advocating for and then um it was the other one that was lower here instructional leadership no no our professional development is a little bit lower um dr sullivan um but we do offer no it was pupil services i apologize that's right my eyes were failing me my pupils were i guess but people services um the idea of providing so more social emotional supports for our students you can see is at a lower point than the state average and it's not a surprise that's that's an area we feel we need to to to add to and we have been adding over the last couple of years apologize for that are these are these numbers based on the budge the operating budget of budgeted amounts or you know i
104know there's other you know you get metco funds those aren't reflected in the the the budget number that we saw on the previous page yeah so are the per per pupil spending does that account for those other buckets of income i believe everything that's coming through destiny yes and it is it is important that everyone knows this is fy 19 per pupil spending because that's what we have the data for um but you can see the buckets where that we're trying to fill and it does align with what we have in this presentation great carry on so this is the uh enrollment projection well i shouldn't have corrections historical so it's based on october 1 enrollment um which is what we have to report the state every october first so it gives you an idea
105back to from fy 17 all the way through um and the changes from year to year okay whoops this is a breakdown of our ftes which is full-time equivalencies um i'm not sure what it looks like in the past i broke it down by by grouping um and i broke it down by funding source um because a lot of times we don't realize um or see that the school budget funds about 216 ftes but our grants fund about 14 ftes and our evolving funds support about 24.7 ftes um so the total ftes for the district is about 254. um it's broken down like i said it goes into the bus from right from administrators to specialists to the nurses to the bus drivers um so you can see um bus drivers for example half of
106them um are paid out of the school budget and half of them are paid from the transportation revolving account two of them are paid from the metco grant because they're echo buses um in the same um i was trying to think kindergarten is broken down the same way but they're not broken down by grades here so it wouldn't show that way it's important to remember that that 254.91 is not the amount of employees um it's not the it's not the head count this is the full-time equivalency so it's the employees that create a full-time employee so that i could totally understand it potentially being confusing between slide nine and our next slide but that's the difference just so everyone understands that okay next there you go uh this is just a head count this is
107truly exactly what that is it's a head count so even though someone might be a 0.3 or a 0.5 in our budget that's an fte as a head count they're counted as as my body so this is how many bodies or heads we have within the district great a little historical let's go back okay maybe not previous sorry about that circuit breaker um so this is just a historical on circuit breaker and what we we have received over the past several years circuit breaker is reimbursement on our special ed tuitions um we're given a percentage each year and you can see probably halfway through it will tell you the percent of reimbursement um and as i noted in the beginning that we had to make up a difference for about 125 thousand dollars in the
108decrease in circuit breaker you can see um we went from 75 reimbursement to 70 so we went from 726 000 to about 605 which is where the 125 difference came in and then we get into just some of the school priorities i don't know leslie is this way you want to get no i'm i'll talk about these a little bit and then hand it off to dr scollins and really we don't need to get into each of these uh that the point of this is just so you can see that the school priorities really line up with our our overarching district priorities for fy22 they're a little different as you go through them but you can see the themes of social emotional support for students a multi-tiered system of support which is something that we're
109really diving into uh mtss it was rti moved over to mtss for those people who are familiar with that you'll see the curriculum math curriculum um at the elementaries and then of course a focus on our technology instruction so you can just flick through these two so they can see each school i don't think i need to get into the particulars and then i'll let um dr scollins kind of move on with the data behind our decisions you just hit the arrows sue like the arrows on your computer they go deer hill about three to five school of course it's the middle school high school and the high school so i'll leave it to dr scones talk a little bit about our positions that we've already introduced but this is sort of the data behind
110them some of the data behind them thank you very much so the positions just as a review quickly the middle school is adding a reading specialist a full-time reading specialist and also a special education teacher and the high school is adding a 0.5 to make a 1.0 social studies teacher and the middle school in the high school will be sharing a computer science instructional technology specialist and that will be full-time thank you so first the reading specialist and um you saw if you looked quickly at those slides i know we went through them very quickly but you saw mtss and dr sullivan referred to it that's the multi-tiered system of support or in past it was response to intervention or rti and we are working to grow that system um it's a way of making
111sure that students who have not achieved where we want them to be yet they have the opportunity to get extra support and we use data to target those areas and then we use explicit instruction to help those students and then progress monitor so um so having a reading specialist will allow us to really grow that at the middle school level and also we have reading specialists at both elementary schools and so there are students that are getting reading support we'd like to continue that up into the middle school um just because they've left fifth grade doesn't mean that students still don't need support and still don't and they still may need some work around really grasping strategies around reading comprehension so i'm adding that reading specials will allow us to do that and on top
112of that really grow our screenings and assessments for reading so the slides i'm going to show you next need a little um prep these are m tests scores and student growth percentiles from 2017-2019 so this is older data we didn't have mcas last year we are having this year this all happened before our new middle school team the other thing i want you to look at is this is a very much a zoomed in graph so if you i want you to just kind of look at the numbers these are the achievement scores of students and it's our grades sixth seventh and eighth if you look at the numbers it starts at 475 on the bottom and goes up to 515 so it's not an enormous number however what we do want you to notice
113is that if you look at our students in blue that's all students so at sixth grade you can see their score that they achieved at five um it's 5 13 and then you can see in middle school it dips down to 503 and then up to 507 we're noticing that that dip occurs in seventh grade there's a couple of reasons for that one is that um students in seventh grade the assessment is really inference based and that's a higher order thinking skill for students and it's kind of a little bit of a different test and on top of that we also notice that where we don't have that reading support that could be impacting it also so that top is our blue if you look at the yellow that's the state average of our scores
114you can see that our students are scoring very well the majority of our students meet expectations or exceed expectations the students in the red are our students who received reading support in fifth grade their scores are lower than the state average and there is still a dip because again that test is a little bit more challenging and has that inference component um and 11 is asking students to really critically think a little bit differently so this data really makes us realize that we do need to continue that support from elementary into the middle school so we don't see that big dip because we'll be able to catch students or work with those students that we already know still need more work on learning strategies on how to break down text how to infer some of
115those higher order thinking skills any questions about that slide because it is a very it it's a it's just an interesting slide thank you good okay so here's the next one this is student growth percentile this looks like a really big dip again i want you to look at the scale it's a 30 on the bottom 60 up top this is growth percentile and just a really quick explanation of what that is is that when students take the mcas they are put in like cohorts so for example um let's say students all got the students got 560 is their score they're now going to look at that group of students over time they're going to look at that group of students who got that 560 they're going to see what happens how many had high
116growth how many had mid-level growth how many had low growth oh just cause that's across the state correct right so it takes all the students and puts them all into one pile in one cohort but they look at them over time and they look at them in specific cohorts so that's what the student growth percentile is it's not percentage it's percentile and we want our students to be about between 40 and 60. that's solid growth um for percentile for students and you can see that our growth is very good in sixth grade if you look at the blue line that's us our general ed students are all students at the middle school and then if you look at the yellow that's always going to be 50 because it's the state state and then the red
117line is our students who had reading support in fifth grade and again you can see that that drop down we fall right below the so although our students achieve really well and their growth is okay we really want to see high achievement scores and high growth yeah we want to see those lines going across or up down right and you can see that happening in with all our cats exactly so with having reading support in there we'll be able to work with our students sixth and seventh and in eighth grade um shoring up some of those strategies that they need for those higher order thinking scores um scores and even students who still sometimes are having some difficulty even decoding or with word um sense trying to figure those things out so um we would
118anticipate that this will level itself off or increase our reading scores and our comprehension for our students great all right any other questions about those are the two tricky slides okay um and then our um additional p uh physician at the middle school is a secondary special education teacher we need to add an additional section for ela math and the support center for the class of 2026 in addition we want to increase and expand our co-teaching classes our co-teaching classes are classrooms that have a general ed teacher and a special education teacher and they work in concert to make sure that all students get what they need um but our students who are on ips that their goals are being met and we would like to grow that because we're seeing that our students in
119the class all benefit because now you have two teachers who are helping our students and the groupings can be flexible so students are coming in and out as they need support within the classroom and so this is something that the district's been committed to and we have um we have at the middle i mean the elementary middle and in the high school so having that additional piece fills some need that we have plus it will allow us to loop as students as that bubble moves up that could be a possibility that this class moves into the high school just to make that clear dr scollins this is a really a lot of it's driven by the particular grade level yes the need is the needs of those students correct in terms of special education and
120that will loop up as as those students move so this person would move with them potentially exactly thank you for clarification all right the next one thank you um and then increasing the social studies teachers from a 5.0 to a 1.0 um so there's been a significant increase in the teachers the students desires to take social studies classes and we are you know we're small districts so we don't often have all of the offerings that that the students would like um so we do want to increase that in addition our ap courses one of the things that's really nice about cohasset is that you do not have to have a certain criteria to go into ap classes lots of districts you have to have a certain gpa you have to have a certain course load
121all different things we don't do that here so that really opens up ap opportunities for our students which i personally love because it allows a student to challenge themselves and to grow without without a ceiling which is what we want and our children do exceptionally well and in particular in social studies our students score very high when you are taking your ap for those of you that don't know um you get a one through five and in order for it to count you have to have at least a three our macro economics course um two years ago last year was very different um we had 25 students take that course we had one student get a four and the 24 other students got a five and if you look at our us history we had
122the majority of students got a four or a five so we are very fortunate that our students do really well um but we need to be able to provide that for them and if we have this additional person this additional 0.5 we could also potentially offer microeconomics and students have been asking for that they love the macroeconomics they would really like the opportunity for micro and in addition we have some new standards so there's uh the recommended for two us history courses two world history courses economic electives over four years so we want to make sure that we can have those opportunities um and that they align to the recommendations from the state and then we have the middle school high school computer science teacher and instructional technology specialist um this is something that has
123been um especially the computer science has definitely been a focus for the school committee and for the district for some time so this position would be divided for the instructional technology specialist for 0.5 and then computer science teacher 4.5 the instructional technology specialist would be shared between both the middle and the high school and it would be similar to the position at the elementary level and that instructional technology specialist works with teachers models lessons provides resources to teachers so that they can integrate technology and embed it in their lessons and then the computer science teacher would continue what's already begun at the elementary level in computer science and it would provide the opportunity for sixth graders and possibly seventh graders to have an elective choice between art and computer programming and then the intention is
124that eventually that instructional technology specialist position would grow from 5.5 to a 1.0 and the computer science teacher would become a 1.0 um and move its way up into the high school because we really do need to grow that program and so this is the beginnings of and these people will work in together with um lisa raden our director of technology and digital learning so this will kind of start to build that team that will allow us to really grow our technology and our computer science offerings great i see um helene lieb from advisory has a question is the plan to bring back ap computer science we had it in the past so i would say yes i think that that's part of why we have ms rodden here to help us with all of
125that and really grow those pieces um you know we've been able to offer that in a virtual high school format recently but i i would completely agree with the desire and um kind of aim to get that to happen here yeah and that's it and and um ms raden is working with the digital learning team and really you know building up the vision and then growing this thanks thank you so just to kind of conclude sue if you i can cover these if you want but you can certainly add in just some future budget concerns as we've discussed we are moving to introduce free full-day kindergarten for all that's going to be something that we definitely are pointing our budget uh priorities towards uh we are developing a new three-year strategic plan which we believe
126definitely fits all of this information in and then um we have an ongoing need to support this the emotional social emotional learning and the mental health and wellness needs of our students i think we're already building that pretty well always looking at enrollment trends we've mentioned the tech integration and then as we just just talked about the computer science curriculum so sue i think you can stop maybe stop sharing now and we'll take any questions so we can see everybody on the screen and thank you very much for your attention to that long but hopefully thorough presentation great thank you for that and for the the backup information and getting the slides out ahead of time um we'll entertain questions mary mcgoldrick from advisory uh yes i i'm not sure who is best to answer
127but um i know that a special education fund was created i think it was right after i left school committee i just wondered how much is is put into that budget um and then what happens to it if you don't need it at the end of the year the stabilization fund i believe yes yes you want to talk about that i know you and barbara meet about barbara is our direct new director of student services so sue and barbara meet as you know quite often so go ahead sue so the sped stabilization fund um is for unanticipated special education needs um right now i believe is a little over three hundred thousand dollars ellen probably knows the exact amount um it doesn't go away at the end of the year it's it sits um and
128we can continue to add to if we feel we need to or we don't um and if we have a need or you know a shortage in our special education i believe we go to um selectmen and school committee to ask to utilize it could often be used for a um situation where we had uh un anticipated uh special education need in the district or potentially if it was a settlement or something to that extent it's it's great that that's been set up um because those costs have just derailed the whole budget yes that's right went with one with one issue um gina stino from advisory junior mute sorry it mutes you if you don't talk often enough hard to believe i'm not talking often enough no i'm doing it now um isn't there a
129cap on that fund on the stabilization fund i thought there was there is there is um i believe you're saying it's over 300 000 and i thought that at one point the cap was in the 200s no um i believe um i don't i believe it's a percentage um i want to say a third of our sped tuitions total okay don piet uh percentage now might have the answer and then i see ellen with her hand it's a percentage there's a maximum two percent of total net school spending okay that's that's what confused me it's the two the two percent of net school spending based on i think these are the fy 21 net school spending numbers from the desc would be 517 000. we currently have 400 in the fund we're just planning to
130appropriate another four another 75 000 at town meetings so we're pretty close to the cap okay right ellen was that what you were going to say great okay any other questions just fran collins from advisory is there anything being offered for the student who's not particularly going to go into college where you need some man what we used to call manual training or home economics or anything like that where people learn how to do basic things that you need to do if you're going to live a human life um sewing and how to use it and how to use a screwdriver and how to handle a cough before you answer dr sullivan fran we just had a presentation right before we opened the joint meeting with the of um uh tom hickey from the vo
131tech school which was wonderful and certainly that's a great option for a lot of students but i'll let dr sullivan speak on behalf of the cohasset i heard dr hickey's talk but now we're talking about glasses and kids are not going to vote texas yes and we we do not have a what's entitled a comprehensive high school there are a few of them in the state and because we aren't a comprehensive high school we do have partnership with our vocational technical school that um you know superintendent hickey spoke of before i got here however we do have some offerings in woodworking we have a stem class in our middle school um we have art of course in in in our in our buildings but we do not have the traditional home economic pathway that you
132that you speak of mr collins and so obviously if someone is moving in that direction the vocational technical school will be more appropriate doesn't mean we can't build that and i i can i can understand your point we can definitely we could do more um and not be you know have to be a comprehensive high school still be partnered in with the votec but right now we don't have a significant amount of offerings in that area i would like to see some basic offerings and the reason why i i teach at mass maritime academy and i we receive students from all over the place and they're not all from bulk tech matter of fact most of them are not from vo-tech and it's just astounding how little basic mechanical knowledge they have they they don't
133know a screwdriver from a 14-point pail when i see them this isn't right you know somebody's going to teach them something about it and eventually um it's us no i hear you and and we do have some um practical uh applications of uh we have a cred credit for life fair that we do with our our students we have courses that teach financial literacy but you you are correct that we do not have a lot of offerings other than our our um woodworking offerings and uh some of our stem offerings that really deal with the mechanical nature of um you know of a need there so very well noted thank you um i i do have one question and then if anybody else has a question before we we close this joint meeting uh raise
134your hand while i'm i'm asking mine which is just the social emotional um focus that you presented on one of the first slides as a goal one of the things that i recall a few years ago is the presentation of the need for extra i think it's guidance counselors or adjustment counselors at the high school in particular and throughout the school district so i don't see that as a as as having grown in the last number of years and i just wonder if that's still a priority or if it's being funded some other way yeah actually it has um chairperson kennedy it has because it um we last year we were able to uh add a full adjustment counselor and through some maneuverings within our own um hiring our own staffing we were able to
135create a middle school halftime school psychologist and halftime adjustment counselor in a high school halftime psychologist and adjustment counselor that works specifically with those grade levels uh we were able to through our um because it was on our second tier through some retirement savings we were able to um add an additional 0.5 guidance counselor at our um at our high school level and then the year before that we added a adjustment counselor that floats between the osgoode and the deer hill school so we've actually over the last few years added significantly to um to our offerings because we were very much lacking in that so we're that that was a major focus of ours in the last couple of years great thank you and i think ellen maher has her hand up from the school
136committee yeah um thank you mrs kennedy i just wanted to comment on how we put together our budget priorities because mr evans asked a question and you just did as well and um what we found some years ago is that our budget priorities would come and go and we would test a program or pilot a program and then not do anything with it and we felt that by if you look at last year's presentation social emotional learning early numeracy safety and security in the buildings were all our budget priorities last year and we want to echo those priorities through all of our documentation whether it's the superintendent's goals the school committee goals our budget priorities so we're all focused on the same thing it doesn't mean necessarily that additional funding is allocated it means that
137the funding that we have is is going to continue to work on those and these priorities will evolve and help shape as dr sullivan mentioned our next three-year strategic plan and then our budget priorities from that strategic plan will flow for the period of that plan so we have continuity and we don't forget the things that we started before we would start something and stop something and move on to the next and that doesn't make for a high level of education or achievement for our students thank you so much very very nicely stated uh jack creighton has a question from the select board yeah um this is uh indirectly related to the budget but i get a lot of uh questions about the 1619 project and whether this is being taught in the schools or
138whether the and this is the budget and if the money that the taxpayers are paying is being paid to instruct in the 1619 uh project and we could answer dr um campbell may want to answer that more comprehensively later i don't think we ought to take a lot of time with it but i think that in this public forum um that the school committee and the school should know that people are wondering that and maybe we should give them an answer thank you yeah they 16 i mean it's the journalism project yeah i i i mean i we dr scones i don't know if you know of anything around that i mean we that's all right i don't i you know i don't i think um i mean yeah i i wish i had an
139answer for you right now i'm sorry that i don't um this is not the time just with everybody here and it's a public meeting and there's been a lot of people asking and when people ask it's better to give them an answer rather than let rumor take over so and we we have lots of stuff to do tonight so yeah nothing though our our cultural cultural competency is a huge part of everything we're doing um we're looking at all of our texts mr creighton to make sure that that they're they're balanced and that they're inclusive of all cultures um particularly you know as it comes to um situations around slavery and um and the way we're teaching all of that is is paramount to everything we're doing and you know as a town we're really
140working on uh celebrating juneteenth coming up that's very it's it's the first year that it's being recognized as a um a state holiday and it will be a um a day off from school the in 2022 so next year um by law so we're we're really looking at all of our curricula to make sure that it's balanced and um it's it's a major major enterprise of ours right now and it's something that we added to our strategic plan so one of the things that ellen spoke of was the strategic plan really governing everything and we every year examine it and make adjustments appropriately and cultural competency has been a an addition and really a deeper dive over the last couple years thank you um we we do have um and i didn't announce this at
141the beginning but um if if you would like to be recognized from the public to ask a question there is somebody that posted in the q a um if you would like to ask your question please if you would raise your hand and then we'll promote you if you want to ask a question of the advisory of the select board or the school committee at this time so okay um okay so um carrie did you have a question uh we have one question from mike dick i'm trying to promote him right now okay thank you it's just easier um you know i i said it earlier in the meeting it's just easier for us to not monitor the q a which can get a little out of control and ask people that want to be
142recognized to come into the meeting and ask a question okay i think mike might be here now um terry you can just go ahead and read the question that i typed into the q a that's fine thank you sure okay mike dick from 27 parker ave says it appears that the district is adding teachers and staff for fy22 what is the forecast for adding teachers and support staff for the next years what will the effect be on the post retirement benefits to the town well i mean we're thank you mystic for the question if you know we're certainly aware of the uh strains that come from post-employment benefits that's why we're really trying to be um mindful of the data that drives our decisions to grow this district we certainly are um you know looking
143for ways that we can reallocate our current positions to try to fill these needs but if the data does drive us to a point where you know we feel that we're we're falling short for our students we're going to advocate for those positions so i guess my answer is that we're mindful of both the needs of the district and our responsibility to be fiscally responsible regarding post-employment benefits um we're you know we're looking at all the priorities that i just mentioned earlier in the presentation uh and our new strategic plan which will certainly take our decisions i think i think he might have broken up anyway that that's that's what i would offer but sue or leslie feel free to answer if you feel there's something else you want to add thank you mr dick
144they've lost their chair yeah can you hear me uh i can hear you i don't can't see you i don't think i know i'm sorry i'm having wonky wi-fi um hear you if you want to just talk without us seeing you that's fine or i can continue it'll be a little challenging um carrie if you could just i think what we need to do is unless there's um any other question all right pat are you are you done with that point i'm gonna try to pick up where diane was i but i didn't know if you'd finish that thought i i am i want to be respectful to mr dick's question i i that's what i would offer you know i know it's not as specific as probably the question might have led me to
145believe he might be looking but i think we're just at this point we're looking at our priorities looking at the data that's driving it and trying to be mindful of our responsibility fiscally with post-employment benefits thank you welcome thank you thank you all right on that note are there any other questions i know this has gone a little over time but everyone has had some important things to ask so i'm trying to read the room here seems like we are satisfied great questions i really want to thank the the advisory and the select persons for the quite just awesome questions thank you okay i think if there is no further questions on that we should be able to move on to our agenda of recommending articles for the warrant uh carrie yeah actually i'm gonna
146go move while you may uh oh sorry the select board may do what it pleases but we're going the advisory committee is going to go someplace else and do our thing i suppose that's allowed yeah you need to officially adjourn so go ahead yes so the uh um can i have a motion from somebody on the advisory board that we adjourn and reconvene in our subsequent notice meeting fran collins and lee jenkins seconds uh roll call vote gina stino well sorry it muted me again hi uh fran collins hi gene hilly hi lee jenkins hi elaine lieb hi do we have a um zoom for the next one we do it's on our agenda there's a link okay great um if you could send me that um that would be great because i'm not sure
147i have it chris thanks chris senior thanks uh mary mcgoldrick hi meg wheeler hi and rob hillman is an i uh so we are adjourned from the joint meeting and we'll reconvene in our own meeting in a few minutes thank you advisory thanks thank you thanks for the select board for hosting very nice to see the school committee good luck in the next meeting all right we'll manage thank you all right thank you emotional adjourned from the school committee go ahead motion made by mrs sainer and seconded by mrs callery on fit here mrs cleary aye mr kearney aye mrs marr aye this is saint john hi hi craig mcclellan motion answer carries meeting is adjourned thank you so much selectboard everyone thank you very much everyone have a great day thank you everybody if
148you can't even hear me all right school committee's heading out diane you're back am i i can't see anybody i'm so sorry i'm at town hall too because i thought i'd get a wi-fi signal but we yep we can you're freezing a little bit but we can hear you is she frozen again she dropped again all right all right that's fine let's let's start to move on with our warrant articles i know we have a lot of articles on here for the agenda starting with planning board and i do see lauren lind has joined us and katie dugan and chris hi everyone all right so starting with chris did you have a general presentation about all of these all together or do we do we want to go one by one with the other let
149me let me set you up for this so i believe lauren can you correct me if i'm wrong you're going to hear two separate presentations you're going to hear from lauren lind our director of planning on articles 20 21 22 23 and 28 is that correct lauren did i miss one 24 as well yeah 20 24 and 28 28 and then katie dugan will present from the zoning advisory board uh designing i'm sorry the zoning working group 25 26-27 okay wonderful and i don't know if kenny has said something she wants to preface uh carrie i just wanted to ask that you promote woody chittick and tom callahan they're the two members that are going to be joining me for zoning bylaw working group tonight thank you thank you yep i'm we are promoting them
150right now okay is it working let's see there we go there's tom all right woody you all should be here welcome everyone welcome welcome this is fun don't you all love town meeting season no woody says no all right so planning board articles let's get started with i believe article 20 is the first one is that correct lauren yes blood plain watershed protection yes so i'll get started thank you very much for having me um for those who don't know my name is lauren lind i'm the planning director for the town i'm going to share my screen and go through a quick high-level overview presentation for articles 20 through 24 and 28 for annual town meeting this is um for those of you who are at the advisory committee meeting on april 8th uh this
151is going to be a very similar presentation um so i'll get started with article 20 flood plain and watershed protection district amendment this is um an update for the it's actually mandated by the federal emergency management agency this is sort of one of those um we must complete this this update before actually july 6 2021 or results in an automatic removal from the national flood insurance program for the entire community which would be a very large liability for the town so this is very important that we get this done you will um you may recognize that this article actually was one of the the one art zoning article that made it through the annual timing process last year we had scaled back due to the pandemic um but at the last sort of moment fema
152decided to rescind that round of the update because there were issues throughout um throughout the commonwealth and also there's two towns in rhode island that fall into this watershed that we're having problems adopting because of annual town meeting issues so this um update it's very similar to last year in that it updates the map references and panel numbers and the dates of the effective maps and flood insurance study but what's really substantially different in this year's version is that they also um and they being fema decided to update their model floodplain bylaw so there is um significantly more content at the end i would just simply state that it's not anything controversial it's really sort of procedural and policy um designations so that's why you'll see more of a substantial change this year in this
153version of the article as opposed to last year it has been reviewed by town council and i've been working with representatives from fema and the state department of conservation and recreation to make sure that it is up to speed on what it needs to be done for this year please stop me at any point if you have questions or we can take them at the end i'll i'll defer to you but i'll just keep moving along until like thank you i'll let you keep going unless anyone has any pressing questions but we can save them till the end to ask you about all of these as a complete product here great thank you um so the next article 21 is an amendment to the ground mounted solar photovoltaic installations overlay district uh this bylaw originally
154was established to allow a solar array development about the townscap landfill and this amendment would add a second location to the applicable parcels that would allow for the potential for an additional solar array to be developed atop a capped landfill um off of crocker lane in the 3a corridor article 22 is a zoning map update relative to the parcel that is known as the whitney spur rail trail it's currently zoned light industrial with a small portion that falls into technology business and what we are proposing through this article is to reclassify the parcel to be zoned as open space which would be consistent with its current use article 23 is a amendment to the fast food restaurant definition what this would do is add one single word a principle to the definition of fast food
155restaurants to allow for clarification of interpretation through the zoning board of appeals process that request to have fast food components as an accessory to a primary use um i want to be clear here that doesn't expand applicable areas where this would be allowed as a current use in our zoning bylaws an example that we commonly use is to sort of what brought this request about is the snack shack at sandy beach and the rationale is that the snack shack is an accessory use to the principal use that is recreational of the the beach and therefore the snack track does not constitute a fast food restaurant and this was one of the amendments that had actually been sort of proposed for annual time meeting last year as well it was requested through the zoning board of
156appeals uh through the planning board and the zoning board of appeals is the special permit granting authority for fast food restaurant uses article 24 is an amendment to special permits in the village business district the table of use regulations in the zoning bylaw currently lists the planning board as the special permit granting authority for all uses in the village business district with the exception of guest houses and veterinarian clinics which currently go to the zoning board of appeals it's believed that in a previous revision of the table of use regulations that it may have been a scrivener's error and that it was intended that the planning board would be the special permit granting authority for all of the uses in the district so this amendment would just establish that and as the planning board and
157give all special permitting authority in this district to the planning board articles 25 26 and 27 you're going to hear more about in a moment from the zoning bylaw working group this is a group that is formed from the master plan implementation committee and they have been doing an extensive amount of work i'm not going to get into all the detail i will let them fully verse you on that but these are the articles relative to use variance's amendment land alteration and the sunset of the senior multi-family residential overlay district and then finally article 28 is the board of public health voting by law amendment and what this would do is change every instance of the reference to board of health to be board of public health to be consistent with the board's official name
158change that's all i have for you this is my contact information for anyone in the audience who'd like to contact me um at any point really but if you have any questions on the zoning articles as we go into angletown meeting there you have it i'm gonna stop sharing my screen and uh we can pause for questions wonderful thank you lauren hi diane i see you're back i'm back on my phone i'm trying to get um to get uh boot rebooted so i think paul schubert has a question and then i do have a question so a quick thing on the solar array overlay district is that when you go up crocker lane is it all the way to the end beyond the sports complex on the hill yes okay thanks corey has a question
159yeah for uh 24 um special permits in the village business district so you know as it stands right now you'd have to go in front of a zba if you wanted to do uh one of those two use cases as well as planning board this would i guess effectively just take out zba from that process is that a good re-summary of what's going on okay um thank you thank you my quick question um lauren is the board of public health just remind me did we address this last year and it ended up not going to town meeting or did it go to town meeting that's correct i believe it got withdrawn because it needs to be changed for both the general and the zoning bylaws got it all right that's what it was okay thank
160you okay no other questions from the select board i will turn it over to katie for the more meaty zoning articles excellent uh do i have billy's share excellent i will share ours get this in full screen all right so uh just a a quick introduction of the zoning bylaw working group as lauren alluded to we are um a working group that was convened by the master plan implementation committee in in august of last year we started our work in september uh we are charged with helping implement the 20 or so zoning related strategies that are in the master plan that cover a wide range of topics from land use to housing to open space one of the first things that we did was set up our goals and what we're here tonight to talk
161about are three of those the youth variants senior multifamily residential overlay district and land alteration but just to give the community a little bit of perspective we are working on some meteor projects which will be back to the community and the select board and the planning board to talk about relative to harbor zoning housing options and residential zoning and then longer term we've laid out a topic area around historical districts and then also just a broader recodification of our zoning bylaws since the last time our zoning bylaws were significantly overhauled was 1989 we're going on 35 years so it's it's time to sort of look at reorganizing and recodifying in general so with that um as a quick backdrop um there are seven members of our group um from zba from open space and rec
162for master plan implementation from the select board uh and two from the planning board so it's a it's a working group that comprises a number of the land use permitting boards and master plan um and i think really has started some good work so with that skipping to the first one that we want to talk to you about um which is article 25 the youth variants amendment all three of our um our articles have gone before the planning board the zba and the advisory committee and were voted unanimously to recommend them for annual town meeting and now it's here to you tonight to make your vote so the youth variance amendment um the specific is we're recommending that we delete a use variance prohibition in 12.5 and replace it with the following language in 4.2
163which is the table of uses the specific language that we're looking on to insert reads a special permit may authorize a use not otherwise addressed in the bylaws a variance may authorize a use specifically prohibited in the bylaws just to give you a little bit of context and background here in 2001 a motion on the town floor which was not vetted by any of the land use permitting boards created an outright prohibition of use variances this small amendment has had many unintended consequences over the last 20 years and as a result the zoning bylaw working group is recommending to return to language that's more typical in massachusetts towns and what our zoning bylaws were for over 40 years up until 2001. an example of sort of the unintended consequences i think we all may remember
164there was a veterinary practice that was looking to relocate from the downtown village area to 3a unfortunately that was not a use that was allowed in the district they were moving to on 3a and as a result the the business was delayed moving by over two years it cost the town and the business and required approval all the way up to the state attorney general so what we're proposing here would allow the zba the zoning board of appeals in its um in its duties to look at specific uses that are not stated and make a determination through a special permit process whether they should be allowed or not in a district in addition to the the practical pieces associated with the veterinaries practice relocation there are a number of commonly accepted uses um such as
165ins assisted living facilities and group homes that are not currently listed as accepted uses and as a result would be denied permits because they are unmentioned and undefined in our zoning by laws and the reality is is that our zoning bylaws and our table of uses attempt to state those which we would like to prohibit specifically you know a gas station in a residential district but it doesn't necessarily envision every single use that could possibly happen um over now or in the next you know 50 years and obviously what we're looking for here is not to um do anything more than what is typical in other massachusetts towns and so for uses not stated in the zoning bylaws a special permit process would apply after a public hearing and the zba would require findings relative
166to neighborhood compatibility public safety and health and open space and make a determination whether that unstated use was compatible with the district that was who was being proposed to be um placed in as for you uses that are stated in our zoning bylaws there's a stringent variance test um and and this would be for exceptions where a youth is specifically prohibited in a district and as a result of republic hearings and again a zba vetting of that use as to whether it would be permitted or not as a variance we actually believe as a zoning biola working group that this will allow the zba to use its judgment and hearings as it relates to uses and is a valuable tool for this land use permitting board to have in their tool chest so with that
167if your preferences i can keep on going through all of these and hold questions to the end um diane kerry yeah i just i would like to see after each of these because they are um important whether anybody has any questions or needs any clarification so corey just quickly katie i think your papers are hitting the mic and it's uh it's on your computer so just blast in my ears um but you know 25 makes a lot of sense i think it's as you said earlier it's impossible for us to envision uh kind of what we need in the future and having a sentence that says we can't do anything outside of these specific things uh seems a little bit backwards so this uh and and i i think what you said about the ways
168that the mechanisms we have to protect our town are very are robust as it is so you know this to me just uh it seems like a sensible very you know uh logical way of of kind of bringing stuff up to speed so thanks for that great thank you um jack um yeah yeah i was on this working committee so just a point of order diane do we want to vote on these after we go through them um because if so i would make this motion but i don't want to preclude other members of the board from speaking uh yeah i would wait till we have just the full presentation and then we'll um go through all of these zoning articles one by one okay one by one so we'll go discuss everything and at
169the end we'll go bang bang bang i would like to do it yeah only because allah lauren's i'm fine thank you all right any other questions on this um great work katie want to move along yep excellent okay um so the next article is article 26 which is the land alteration amendment um so the mechanics of this are were we are asking the town to um remove and replace the tax under in article 11 which is currently regulating governing regulations gathering earth removal and replace it with new text related to land alteration this is a article that has had seen previous versions in 2017 and 2020 but after research and additional benchmark marking the zoning bylaw working group has deliberately decided to take a phased approach in the land alteration by law that's being proposed
170for annual town meeting phase one which is going before annual town meeting this spring adds limits regarding clearing activities to the existing bylaw governing earth removal activities in phase two the working group will study lunch protection and we will come back with recommendations in the near future which balance the fundamental rights of landowners to enjoy and develop their property within reasonable limits with those of their neighborhood we do not believe that ledge protection is ready for discussion at anton meeting this year but it is something that the community has inputted in and our working group is committed to studying as it relates to the bylaw that's before you tonight the working group was able to analyze multiple examples of detrimental clearing activities in cohasset and the data showed a clear pattern of one clear cutting
171on undeveloped lobs and two clear cutting on developed residential lots when they were subdivided into multiple lots for redevelopment and the data that we looked at actually seventy percent of the cases that we saw were clear clotting on undeveloped lots and thirty percent fell in the second category of clear-cutting on developed residential lots when they were being subdivided into multiple parcels the proposed bylaw takes puts in place a special permit process through the planning board if an applicant looks to exceed certain preset limits related to clearing activities and to be clear clearing activities in the bylaw are defined as the complete removal of trees four inches or greater in diameter we chose that specific metric um so that it was in concert with what already the town has adopted in our scenic roads bylaw in
172terms of the type of trees that we're looking to protect um in terms of the as i said the type of um land that the special clean clearing permit would apply to or the limits applied to there's three categories one is open space where the clearing of lots is prohibited unless that it is necessary for a permitted or grandfathered use in terms of undeveloped lots which were 70 of the cases that we were able to analyze there a special permit would be needed if you were looking to exceed 70 clearing of a lot area in a residential district and 80 percent five percent of a lot in a commercial district one of the reasons that we chose seventy percent was not only based on the benchmarking research we did of other massachusetts massachusetts communities who
173have adopted land alteration bylaws it's also consistent with what is already in our existing zoning bylaws in um article 14 for the water resource district which represents about two-thirds of cohasset's land mass there's already a prohibition on clearing beyond 70 limits and so again when we were developing this we were trying to create harmony between our existing bylaws and what we're proposing tonight so the 70 limit is something that's already in our zoning bylaws but we're expanding it as we suggested to three categories open space undeveloped lots and developed residential lots that are being subdivided or reconfigured the third category is undeveloped in residential lots and for those lots that are being reconfigured again there's a 70 limit in terms of the lot area being cleared for those residential districts the last but not least
174point in 11.3 just so that everyone is clear the language that you see in 11.3 is uh almost exactly the earth removal activities that are existing in our bylaws today so the language is consistent you're not adopting new language um in 11.3 but just maintaining what we already have in our our governing of earth removal activities and we're adding to it as we just discussed with the clearing activities in 11 in the proposed 11.2 the only other thing that i would um say that is important that we that we worked into this land alteration bylaw was the fact that a lot of what we've seen in town is actually the clear cutting of lots before any building permits were issued so in 11.4 there's actually an express prohibition of clearing activities before the issuance of
175permits whether it's a building permit it's a special permit as considered under 11.2 for clearing activities or it's a storm water permit so the activity of a developer doing land alteration prior to having any of the approvals they might need from our land use board will be halted which i think is an important step in terms of regaining some control of how land alteration takes place as we further develop cohasset so with that i'll pause and see if there's any questions yeah we have a question from paul and then corey and then i have a follow-up okay so a question for the development developed residential lots which are subdivided or reconfigured that portion says not to exceed 70 of the lottery what if the the lot area is already 75 cleared then can you go
176from 75 to 80 so is it the 70 of the existing or is it of the total it's 70 percent of the total so if you had a house subdiv a subdivision area property that had already 75 cleared you'd need a special permit to remove trees correct yes but i guess the typical situation is not that the lot is 70 or 75 cleared you've got a lot that let's say is a four acre lot is being subdivided into two two acre parcels usually one of those parcels has the existing structure on it and the second is is essentially for all intensive purposes raw land and and that's what we're looking to protect in the subdivision but again the situations that we saw were larger parcels um just so everybody has a perspective in terms of
177what this means there are about 62 parcels in town that are greater than four acres that could be subdivided um that in total those 62 parcels represent about 400 acres so this is a meaningful amount of our land mass it still could potentially be redeveloped if the homeowner had the frontage and had the other ability to subdivide um that's what we're looking to protect okay thank you thank you corey i guess my question is is kind of in the same vein and i don't i'm not trying to be glib about it but you know the question is what does 70 really mean you know and and you know i mean i guess on the surface it sounds simple but in the in the myriad of different complicated scenarios um is there a definition that we
178have in the bylaws for how that 70 is calculated that could bring more clarity to it because i i am you know can you clarify that i thought a lot about this um and one of the things that we were very cognizant of was um choosing a methodology that the buildings and inspection department in particular our building inspector felt could be measured and we could talk to applicants about so we actually chose a concept that's already in place and administered in our town under the stormwater bylaw regulations where you measure the percent of disturbed earth versus the total lot size and you know when you think about it if you've got a stand of trees the way this practically plays out is that you know that the the applicant's engineer is going to basically draw
179a circle around that stand of trees and anything in the middle of that is considered disturbed earth and you're looking at that as a percent of the total lot size so again we were very cognizant of choosing a measurement tool that was um the building and inspection department was comfortable with and in fact is one that we're already using in town in stormwater management by a lot with the concom okay thank you any other questions um just two quick things one is i really am happy about 11.4 a which is the prohibition until building permits are issued i think that's key and then um on 11.3 the land alteration is that something that will be readdressed um is that part of the next phase in in terms of the uh earth removal yes i mean
180it'll either be modifications to 11.3 or a new um section you know whatever number we choose to make it a totally new section um again you know we felt strongly that anything that we could propose to address the community concerns that have been raised relative to ledge removal would be rushed and we simply needed more study rushing was going to result in an incomplete bylaw that doesn't serve the community in the end and also creates issues for the land use permitting boards that are attempting to uh enforce the bylaw so we are we are listening we've got examples now and when we're beginning our work on that great thank you okay um any other questions if not katie you want to move on to the um yeah so this is this so this is our
181simplest one um and this really falls under the category of cleanup um and recodification um so what we're recommending here is actually to delete article 16 completely which is the senior multifamily residential overlay district and to make further amendments to delete references to this overlay district in the bylaws the senior multifamily residential overlay district was adopted in 2002 and in the 19 years since his approval we've had zero applications utilizing article 16. furthermore the town actually voted to sunset the senior multifamily residential overlay district at annual town meeting in 2006 but the sunset provision that was adopted by the town created a legal inconsistency because the language in the sunset specifically referenced the completion of um the cook estates which at the time was being contemplated to be being done under the senior multifamily but
182ultimately was completed under a completely different zoning article the working group itself absolutely recognizes the importance of the diversity of housing types such as senior multifamily in affordable housing but we are recommending the sun setting of the senior multifamily residential overlay district because it has been an effectual overlay and hasn't resulted in the types of housing and the town had already voted to previously sunset this so the working group is studying various amendments that we will bring forward under our housing option goal to better support senior housing multi-family and affordable housing and we'll make those recommendations in the near future so i'll end there and see if there's any questions great is is there is there an um a shortcut to the senior multi-family overlay district link residential overlay is what is it called other
183than that uh it's it's just sm rod right like i'm like there's gotta be right sorry like i almost said that and then when i teed up the conversation and then i i thought there's gonna be something i'm missing here okay any questions on the specifics of that article um okay great so um and chris correct me if i'm wrong so articles 20 through 27 which are enumerated on our agenda and we have just reviewed have all been recommended unanimously by the planning board and the advisory board and chris if i'm if if i'm correct we don't have a vote on from advisory on the public health no no you do they learn everything they did vote on everything okay so i might be looking at an old um going through this before so if
184there's a mistake it's on me okay they did vote on all of this okay so basically we have affirmative unanimous votes from all the relevant boards on all the articles 20 through 28 um unless somebody wants to suggest another means i would say if we could have a motion to make a recommendation a town meeting for approval of these articles that would be great i make a motion we recommend affirmatively to town meeting floor articles number 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 and 28 as listed on the agenda okay is there a second second okay any last-minute questions okay great work everyone thank you so much um i'll call for a roll call vote jack craig and i corey evans diane kennedy i paul stewart i carrie thompson i great congratulations a lot
185of really hard work and it shows it was very clear and thank you guys appreciate it okay next up is um cpc thank you for your time thank you thanks lord thank you my interweb is still working this um we'll keep moving yeah for right now um so the next article is article 14 community preservation um diane you saw russ is here if we need him to talk i did see ross and maybe we should promote him unless we have any specific questions um so i think maybe um if it's if it's okay with the um and and chris we have um we have all the votes on advisory for this as well is that correct yes um there's the one that should be on here tracy and i were talking about earlier um and
186we're getting into the like quickie you know these things the warrants are getting updated almost on the fly yeah um there's a 200 000 allocation uh it's going to or our award that's being recommended to the housing authority for uh refurbishment of um the facility of the buildings uh to maintain them um it's effectively a repurposing of money that they have already awarded that never got that never was needed fortunately for the traditionals which is not complete or actually it's not the trade assassins now the uh it's the kate house um that was just dedicated the um so the um that should be done here so if i there should be another two hundred thousand russ could correct me if i'm wrong there's another two hundred thousand on here uh i i i and that
187that's literally just a scrivener's error on the preparation of this yes i guess because we've been literally going like it's like every day it's a new update on stuff okay so uh but it's there i i was i watched them vote on it so i know what happened okay so the tom voted on it so he can testify so there you go no not testimony no i'm not sworn anybody in tonight um so just just to describe what we're looking at in the warren is there's four um accounts that um they we have to vote town meeting has to vote money into um which are listed at the top and that's pretty much something we can probably just take a motion for and then all the other uh the specific projects that have been recommended
188by cpc they've been reviewed by advisory and we discussed all of them last week so unless there's a question i'll ask for a motion to approve the the four revenue accounts allocations i move we approve the four cpc revenue account allocation seen on the screen and kerry do you mind just reading them just for people that might not see it thank you for cpc revenue open space recreation sub account 68 100 the historical sub account 68 100 affordable housing sub account 68 100 and the administrative sub account at 34 050. great thank you is there a second i do see that russ benetti's hand popped up i don't know if he wanted to make a comment before we voted on this i'll get them after i get the second yeah thanks second okay all right
189russ did you want to make a comment on this the allocations how's that can you hear me yep oh okay uh they had just added the cohasset housing authority everything else uh in there is the uh the way it should be um yeah the uh four categories we have no choice on those that's statutory uh the sub-account for the administrative i believe we spent about thirty three hundred dollars last year so the rest of that will get turned back in um we're allowed to take up to i think it's five percent um there's no way we're going to spend 34 000 on it so there'll be money coming back but just in case great so what i'm going to do is take this um these revenue accounts to a vote now that we have a
190motion in a second and then we can um discuss what follows um after that so uh we have a motion in a second roll call please jack creighton and i are you evan diane kennedy i paul schuberth kerry thompson i okay so those um revenue accounts are all set and now they're the individual projects um so we reviewed we reviewed these last week with advisory um the recommendations are all there does anybody have any questions on the specific projects okay just one little typo i see is milliken field is spelled it's spelled with two l's i believe um so basically this is three thousand dollars for paul pratt memorial library three hundred and seventy five thousand dollars for the cohasset high school track five hundred thousand dollars allocated to affordable housing trust seventy five thousand
191dollars for the town clock clock which we learned a lot about last week forty thousand dollars for the town docks three hundred and eighty five thousand dollars for parker avenue ramp a hundred thousand dollars for ada improvements to see to the cybsa bsa ball fields on north main street nineteen thousand dollars for the deer hill softball field restoration 450 000 land acquisition at 487 king street through cohasset conservation trust um 58 000 beechwood basketball court 13 200 sawyer street basketball court 15 from milliken field 50 000 for second congregational preservation facade and 200 000 for cohasset housing authority diane yep that is not new money the 200 000 that is a transfer of funds we gave the housing authority two hundred thousand dollars towards the tretis house uh which is now finished and they didn't
192need the 200. so we transferred it back so they can use it for i believe storm doors and a few other uh things around the uh housing authority so that's not new money uh it's just a transfer for for the purposes of the warrant um chris is is it fine in this um in this format and then maybe it'll be separately i see a tom in a second it'll be it'll be separately um listed maybe as a motion that different language yeah the actual motion it'll say where the source is it's being repurposed but that'll so the pusher will note that it's being repurposed but it is a it's a new project in a sense the money's being sent spent on something different but russ is correct it's money that was unspent it's basically being
193reclaimed and then sent back out okay tom did you want to say something yeah i i just like the church project should probably be listed as historic preservation not as open space and recreation just a typo on that chart okay um and i just think it's important to acknowledge that on on the second congregational um preservation of the its facade we have received communications on that um you know just just making sure we are aware and um i'm sure tell me will be made aware of funding for religious institutions and and where that that fine line might be and i know that was discussed um very um significantly with the cpc membership and i believe that was not a um a unanimous vote no it was five three five three from cpc uh one person
194was absent okay and every every other um every other recommendation ross was unanimous uh as far as i recall some i believe recused himself from the was it the king street property tom there was one where you where you didn't vote they may have uh actually actually actually was you russ who accused yourself of the parker avenue votes right i i i refused on parker yeah no i don't know no i don't think i did but they were all unanimous except for the church yeah okay um okay corey has a question and if if there's any member of the public um that would like to be promoted to make um to to say anything please raise your hand uh corey go ahead i'm just wondering if the chair would entertain just a little bit of
195back and forth on the funding for the second congress congregational conversation amongst us absolutely yeah okay well i just um our colleague mr schubert uh dirt i watched the the replay of the of the meeting and um you know i think the the point being that um what town council advised us is that this application must be you know uh really looked at and scrutinized uh very carefully and uh mr shubert brought up the point that um you know if we were to give and my apologies if i'm not paraphrasing and correct paul if so just please correct me um that if we were to give money to the church uh we need to be sure that the money that we're giving them uh isn't displacing money that will then go towards religious services and
196i did a lot of thinking about that point and i think logically i may disagree with with paul a little bit here and i'd love to thank love to hear all your feedback on this is that applying that standard as you phrased it is somewhat not falsifiable in that unless the church literally had zero dollars left to turn on a light or to mow the grass or do anything then it would mean that they would fail that test every time so i'm not quite sure if we can apply that test then and for me i landed on the idea of if we can confirm that this money is just going to be used for the purposes um that it's stated for and i think that's more what the law or what the opinion we gave
197stated then it's something that that we can consider um it doesn't you know we can consider you know for approval um feedback on that idea tom i'm going to have you wait till after the board's headed thank you paul yeah so the the legal aspects are there's three qualifications that you have to reach the hurdle and get uh over the bar one is is it an historic building under historic recommendations it is is it a budding or on an historic landmark or site or in view of a national historic location and so it is on a historic location uh the third is that you have to be confident that the monies that will go will not be co-mingled or used for other purposes and that was my um my concern is that the money will
198go towards the church and well does the church or any church have monies outside of the monies they asked for that could easily be used for fixing it and would you be able to clearly earmark all of that money and be sure and be certain that that money is only used and not displacing other monies that would go for uh interior work of a church on altar uh religious windows any of the things which would be considered religious uh use so that was my the third hurdle i could not reach couldn't i couldn't get over that um corey do you think that's an impossibly high bar though i mean just i don't exactly know how a an institution that you know would ever clear that bar as you phrased it um you know so that
199would be that would mean that every church would be immediately disqualified because i don't know of a way to make that hurdle clear you know have you thought about that and um you know i'll i'll weigh in paul go ahead and then jack and then we'll get to the cpc members i believe it is a high bar yes and that um i just think that it should be a high bar because you should in in my view from the separation of church and state where yes it's historic it's historic location but you should clear be clear about when you're funding uh religious organizations and that i think you have to have a high standard and a high bar so yes it is a high bar um but i think in this case if if the
200church has monies that are available and it's usable then they should not be asking for it and should be taking it from their coffers um it does benefit the town so yes it does but i still think it's it's a bar that i can't reach over jack um well clearly um and i am disclosing that i have a member of second congregation um but clearly when the court decided to approve this in the in the opinion which had not been decided five years ago when this was so controversial so we should all be clear about that clearly the court was obviously aware of of that fungibility of of funds and if they did not intend it to be allow funds to be used that they would not have ruled as they did they clearly understood
201that now the question is is whether the church is not funding this and they're just grabbing money well the cost alone of this work that they're going to do is twice the fifty thousand dollars and in addition to that you should be aware that there's a substantial amount of additional funding that is going to be required and this church is not a wealthy church they have a parsonage which has been thrown out then the purpose of the parsonage is so they can afford a minister because they can't afford to pay a minister who can live in cohasset so they have a house that's been the church has had it forever so that's a that's not like an asset that's like on your balance sheet that's a an economic asset it's part of paying the minister
202so there's tremendous amount of money that needs on that old wooden church the church is not awash in hundreds of millions of dollars of things the church right is paying their bills but not much more so this is not a thing where where the the town is giving money to a wealthy church so they can use it elsewhere this church is not well funded this church is a historic church it has a lot of long-term um cohasset residents and the church is paying more than half of the cost you know of this and what is being fixed is only the part of the church that's really looking right out over the comments well and i am a believer in separation of church of state by the way and i would uh um if i i
203think paul has a good point um that if money was being taken from cpc to make it money available for religious indoctrinations or preaching of whatever that would be a different thing but this is a thing that is funded mostly by the church it only faces out onto the honor of the common and the church has got much other liabilities of that building so i'm very comfortable with with this paul do you want to respond to that then i'm going to say something and then i'll take tom and russ and also in that ruling the term substantive uh or substantial monies used and i i in my view 50 000 is a substantial amount of money so that was the other uh point which i think um regardless of how much the church has in
204my view 50 000 from the town is a substantial amount that's all i i um i am very conflicted in a lot of ways on this but um to corey's point it it really is an impossible you can you could make the case that any penny that is given to a religious organization is is replacing money you know that they don't have that they can spend on there on their religious work it really is a very high bar having recognizing that and also as somebody that is a fundraiser i spent probably 120 hours and hired a consultant to help me to apply for 20 000 from for a federal grant and um it was incredibly complicated and i had to produce all kinds of 990s and balance sheets and whatnot from our arts from our
205organization and i just think in the future and this is this is something for us to talk about going forward but there there we really should require a lot more due diligence in terms of finances um so we can understand what what organizations that are applying for taxpayers money um you know what kind of assets they have because a lot of arts or organizations churches sports organizations etc you know are sitting on a lot of cash and so i do think it's important for us to understand what their assets are vis-a-vis what they're asking from the taxpayers in town um so with that i'm going to carry unless you want to weigh in right now i'll ask tom and then russ to speak and then we'll um we'll go to a vote on yeah i
206appreciate this discussion and i think everyone's being really thoughtful about it that being said i am in favor of this article and this motion and i support it in its current form great thanks uh tom yeah i i i just want to point out um that you know you've heard that there's been a case there was an sjc case from acton and corey that set up this three-part test so we can't ignore that there's a third part to that test um in that case the court only rejected outright the proposed expenditure for stained glass windows which had obvious religious symbolism it then just created the three-part test for the other renovations and basically sent it back to that town cpc and to all the other town cpcs about how you interpret that three-part test i
207i will say this i was one of the three voting against this i'm pretty much an absolutist on separation of church and state i think however paul durensis gave you as good an opinion that can ever be given on how to fund something like this there's the deciding factor i think here for the five votes is that there was no religious uh icons and symbolism involved in this it's a pure straight historical uh renovation in a historical district i personally and as a lawyer don't think the third test cut can ever be overcome because obviously if a church is not spending money on renovations it's using that money for something else and i don't think you can ever so i disagree with paul durenses ultimate conclusion but he gave you as good a legal opinion
208for that side of the question that you are going to find you know so i voted against this but my concern my concern for the future is you know one of the members of our committee who's a member of a different church in the common and i don't know if it's a historic building or not but said well we'll be on the door next or what if it's one of the churches who are not on the common right and then we're going to get into some really dicey questions you know before i got on the cpc this time around i guess money was uh given to um for the church on the in the middle of the common for window renovation this is for historical renovation okay there's very legitimate historical renovation arguments that can
209be made for both cases but it's a very fine fine line and i i don't think it can be crossed and that's why i voted against this but you know we're here and i i think we can in light of what second congregational intends to do with this money i think we can all even those who oppose it can at least rest somewhat easily that we haven't gone over a line that we shouldn't have crossed but that court decision left this three-part test without any strong guidelines other than obvious religious icons and symbols you can't fund fixing but you know it's left it to all these towns and has pointed out that 59 towns since that decision have given money to churches including us before it's it's a potential slippery slope but as one who
210opposed it i'm i'm not losing sleepover and um russ i'll recognize you and then i'll sum up and maybe we can hold this out of if we're going to vote everything else together um you're right it is hard to separate this money as whether it will free other monies for them or not but at some point you have to take people with their word and i think considering all the benefits that second congregation has contributed to this town the appalachian project the first uh food pantry in town the uh not yoga i'm sorry tai chi classes in the morning tons of other things a.a at this point i think you have to make your decision on are they a good citizen and are they representing themselves honestly and i chose to take that path again
211this had no religious icons in it which was the same with first parish which when it came before us my initial reaction was this does violate church and state the first amendment says that the government will not establish nor deny a religion it doesn't say anything about fixing the windows i think in the sense of what they contribute to the town uh that it's worth us doing this thanks russ um and for just for the for the board um it it was a 5-3 vote from cpc so it's it's on the warrant unless we wanted to throw it off which we wouldn't i don't think we would ever do that so ultimately our vote on this is is whether to recommend it or not to town meeting and it's town meetings decision um on this
212and i think all of these concerns are valid i think we all have some conflict on these particular decisions because as tom pointed out there was a a legal decision that really didn't provide any clarity like everybody wants it to say you can do this and you can do that and you can't do that but that is not how the law typically runs which is why people um are can be employed as lawyers exactly it keeps tom busy and uh my husband and many other people so um so unless anybody has any other comments on that i think what i'd like to propose um if if there's any other recommendation for cpc funding that you are uncomfortable with voting as a totality speak now or forever hold your peace otherwise i would recommend that we
213take the second congregational 50 000 one and vote that separately from the others i would like to make uh yeah i can make a motion if we'd like um i'd like to make a motion that the select board approve uh or recommend at town meeting um the following cpc projects uh paul pratt memorial library for three thousand dollars go as a high school track for 000 affordable housing trust for 500 000 town clock for 75 000 cohasset harbor town docks for forty thousand dollars cohasset harbor parker avenue ramp for 385 thousand dollars cybsa ada improvements for 100 000 dear hero softball field restoration for 19 000 land acquisition at 4487 king street for 450 000 beachwood basketball court for 58 thousand dollars sawyer street basketball court for 13 and milliken field improvements for fifteen thousand
214dollars at time meeting go ahead and set that already in the housing authority i have i'm sorry as well as two hundred thousand dollars for the uh coasted housing authority is there a second exactly okay um any discussion in russ i see that you have a question but let's let me ask the select board first any other questions on those okay russ yeah the uh land acquisition is really misnamed we're not buying land we're buying a conservation restriction the title will be held by the cohasset conservation trust like in any other case that we've had what we're purchasing is a permanent uh conservation restriction on the property okay thanks for for clarifying that um um chris can we make sure that that's clear clarified in the um warrant that the conservation easement on 487 king
215street yes okay okay great so we have a motion a second any other discussion okay i'll ask for a rule called vote please getting with jack jack craig and i rory evans eye diane kennedy i paul schubert harry thompson i okay um and then the next um vote would be for um the historical and we're going to clarify that and the warren also changed that to historical preservation for the work being done on the second congregational um church in the their facade preservation i do have um one question russ that you might be able to answer or chris which is sort of a mechanics is this done on a reimbursement basis so we're not cutting them a check for fifty thousand dollars but we're approving their invoices um what will happen is when work is
216done a bill will be submitted yeah that's how it that's how it is on any of our projects right we pay as they come in uh it's kind of funny because a lot of times people will say oh gee if we don't spend it i'll we'll turn it back to you and we have to explain two of them until you're not just yet about getting it right right i mean that that gives me a a little more comfort in supporting this and also because it is a facade on the town common and i i you know we've been talking you know every year there's there's some discussion about preserving preserving the character around the common and the buildings around it certainly with the town hall project which we will be discussing in on the 27th
217in in great detail um you know i i think that that's um i think that's a compelling reason and i think russ um also kind of pushed me over the fence a little bit in in knowing that what i know about the work that the congregational church in particular that that has done in the community with asp and has you know it really is a building and a community of people so um anyway so if there's a motion to support it um and again it doesn't have to be unanimous i would like to make a motion the select board uh recommend cpc funding for the second congregational historic preservation of the facade at town meeting is there a second second okay roll call please i'm sorry was there any discussion oh sorry is there any
218discussion thank you yeah so could i just make one quick comment please um so you know 10 years of jesuit training and i am perfectly fine with supporting churches but i will find other ways for ways to support a church other than using public funds that's all so that's that's my comment thanks paul okay so um jack if you don't mind just re-voting oh jack great night uh while paul schubert beats me two years of jesuit training uh corey evans eye no jesuit training but lots of ccd uh diane kennedy eye paul schubert nay harry thompson i okay great to point out that i have no jesuit training no religious training but i was in woodstock oh that's way cooler the different religious experiences all right thank you you may need to be exercised i
219look forward to a robust discussion um at town meeting the this this these are the kinds of things that are very difficult for all of us to you know vote on to be honest with you um but we will uh carry this forward and see what our uh citizens think so thank you all for your hard work um russ and tom and your committee um really great work okay i gotta find my agenda now that i still have a wi-fi signal uh capital improvements budget oh my gosh we still have a long way to go i don't yeah bye bye bye chris you want to uh uh capital improvements so are we fully um or is capital made their votes on that uh yes so at this point uh they voted well the the the
220four they're still remaining are the um enterprise funds um here let me show you really quickly um yeah these four are the sludge thicker the activated carbon gradual activated carbon filter lilly pond chlorine conversion and late pond skin update those are all still to be looked at by capital budget that's supposed to be happening i think in the next week or two um the others have all been voted they were all voted uh except for one unanimously that was the chipper um that was still four to one and an advisory voted to support i'll recommend all of them as well unanimously except for the bucket truck and that was six to two um so those are the votes um and i think you have this in the world and yep and we discussed all of
221these last week does anybody have any questions in general on on these and if not i'll ask for a motion to recommend town meeting article 9 as presented minus the ones that we don't have votes on yet make a motion to recommend to tom meeting floor article 14 i'm sorry article 9 capital improvement budget aside from the two that are pending votes from advisory second clarification is it two that are there are four that are pending votes from capital budget uh correction to the uh motion four that are pending votes okay is everybody clear we have a motion in a second okay great all right roll call please zachary nye corey evans eye diane kennedy ai paul harry thompson i great okay article seven which is supplemental appropriations um we reviewed those last week as
222well yeah this is the there was a slight modification because of a change in that and the timing of a debt payment it was all fact in the capital schedules it just it needs to be officially supplementally appropriate to um to pay the pay the debt as it comes due in june um and i haven't i do have a memo a short memo from don i can circulate but this was reviewed last week and was reviewed by uh advisory and they recommended um to support it eight nothing okay so and that so that's you're talking about there was an adjustment to the adjusted debt payments which number is 127 785 and the other one is the cable um and the cable the cable is probably going to change it's going to go up um again
223this is the informational summary the actual numbers right okay um that's going to go to the full amount because we have one more quarter coming in and so all the money to the x 143 don't just waiting for that so we get to 10 million we'll have that updated number okay in the motion okay great any questions okay is there a motion to recommend article seven to town meeting i make a motion to recommend article seven automating floor supplemental appropriation for fiscal 2021. second second great okay roll call please yeah great night corey evans eye diane kennedy eyes all right paul should i harry thompson i okay next up is this same thing we reviewed it last week this is article 11 the allocation of funds for one-time costs um the i'm trying to think
224if there's anything in here that we didn't fully flesh out i don't think there is um okay any motion or questions discussion make a motion we recommend a town meeting floor article 7 supplemental sorry article 11 allocation of funds for one-time cost second second okay we have a motion in a second and just just for everyone to know advisory recommended approval by a vote of eight to zero except there is a seven to one vote on the field court study recommendation do we know what the dissension was there chris uh yes um remember jenkins uh thought that the town engineers should do the design work and and the assessments and i said well they were certainly capable of it it was more of a timing function they're working on very large projects for water and
225sewer and public works and they would just never get to it so if it was a timing issue not that they're not important but at the same time at the same time there brian and jason's time tends to be on the 100 sewer projects where they save a lot of money um so after they talked about that the board all said fine but okay great thank you okay um help me did i ask for a motion yeah there's the motion in a second on the floor all right are we going to um diane are we going to separate those because i had brought up earlier that i thought that when the predecessor of this was a tennis court motion and i had brought up in an earlier meeting that i thought the that study should
226have been done by existing personnel so similar similar to what was discussed so that's fine we can take that one separately um so um paul if you want to just amend the motion to um to take out that forty thousand dollar field court study and we'll vote that separately so i'd like to uh amend the motion to accept the [Music] town court uh study on the uh well wait a minute let me can i ask some questions about that particular thing sure because is that a study for the all of the it's unclear whether it's for all of the fields yes jack it's it was expanded to not just be tasked with just out baseball across so this would be consistent with the baseball study and the need for fields yes yes okay so that
227i'm fine because i called for that last tuesday that we should do that so i'll i'll rescind that and as i guess never mind amendment okay so we have a motion and a second on the floor to recommend article 11 uh allocation of funds for one time cost to town meeting okay um we'll go for a roll call vote jack craig and i rory evans i diane kennedy i paul schubert harry thompson i rate thank you okay um town hall um renovation article 16 we're going to take up at the meeting on the 27th there are still all the committees are meeting about that and we look forward to a good discussion there and then um we have articles three and four which is the rate restructuring for both water and sewer separate articles um
228chris are we promoting anybody from either of those boards or are you just going to walk us through this let me see i think tracy's looking too yeah um i know bill was out there earlier but he's not there now um i don't see anybody from water um there's anyone from water either any the other boards and have they voted on it or yeah yes uh the uh on the water the advisory uh devoted eight to nothing to recommend uh and water voted through nothing to recommend so what's the pleasure of the board um i'd like to hear what they have to say i mean this is such an uh completely encompasses you know actual out-of-pocket expenses from every citizen in town with the exception of parts of north north cohasset i'd much rather have
229them here because i i'm i'm not i mean i can tend to support them but i'd like to hear what they have to say before i vote you have some questions for them yeah corey yeah i mean i think i'm more comfortable with it i mean i did you know uh i uh observed the advisory meeting a few of their meetings um i understand the logic and they've been through a few rounds the other thing that i think about is that this is kind of their lane i mean how we're governing our government structure is the water commission that's their lane so um you know i'd be uncomfortable moving forward with it if they voted 3-0 you know that's their vote um and i think we can accept that as their word i know advisory
230um there there was actually um a joint meeting with advisor in the water commission and there was an adjustment made to the rates um being proposed um due to the questions that were asked at advisory so i too am comfortable but again let's i'd like to pull everyone and again it's all going to town meeting [Laughter] you know let the wild rumpus begin uh paul yeah i think it it comes down to if if anyone's comfortable putting it forward to town meeting it's going to be a rough and tumble town meeting i think there'll be a lot of discussion on the floor um so i'll go either way i mean i certainly willing to put it forward if um if the group wants to can we submit it to the diane can we submit it
231to put it on the warrant without approving it yeah corey i know i'm getting wishy-washy i saw you just you're choosing different words so it's it's it's um it's we've placed it on the warrant so the question is what is our recommendation to town meeting i mean we can recommend it at town meeting just the pre-town meeting meeting is the other option right that's the thing we we can withhold um we can we can vote affirmatively negatively or we can withhold a vote i will say the the advantage to taking a vote is that the warrant goes out complete um so you know the residents in town that are participating in town meeting have a sense of where the boards came down on it but but we have voted things at town meeting um in
232advance of it so it's just something to consider um chris just procedurally you do have until the 27th so you can we could also vote it next week yeah to two weeks i'm fine with moving forward tonight especially because the others have been unanimous votes but you know if one of our members wants to hold on i'm fine with that too so i could go either way okay i would like to make a motion that we uh the select board recommend article three water straight water rate restructuring to town meeting is there a second second okay any discussion i would like to amend uh corey's motion that we put this off until the 27th until we can have a representative from the water and sewer of the select board is is this i'm asking for
233a second on the amendment well i guess that settles that hearing none that settles that we're gonna take the recommendation to town meeting on the water rate restructuring to a vote beginning with jack uh i'm going to abstain okay we haven't died diane kennedy i paul sherwood harry thompson i okay so we have a four zero one believe me nobody wants to raise rates look i'm well aware it's gonna be a good one on tommy and i'll have no sewer service i get that um okay similarly um sewer sewer rate um restructuring um and that is a um 10 i believe um no a modest is that correct yes 10 uh diane that's the number so i'm just looking on the on the on the informational summary chris did we receive that from the sewer
234commission yeah this came from the sewer commission we might need to ask yeah i don't i don't think it i think it should be neutral um i don't think it should be newsy or plus or minus it should be the facts um and in the 10 isn't clear um in this you know it it says a 0.6 for this year i think we need to clarify the language in that when it when it's going to drop when rate would go into effect and how it would if it's a gradual rate table um and again i think the rate table should probably be there there is no there's only one rate there's no table it's that's always the entire rate table it's got it pays the same thing so so as long as as long as
235the people as long as everybody understands what the actual increase is year to year if it's 10 for you know in perpetuity till it changes or whatever um it's just going up to one number and that's what it is i just make that clear in the informational summary um uh paul yeah i would agree i mean the informational summary it's bringing electrical costs i mean uh it has to be a bullet point of what the information that the town voters are going to need not any other and explain to them what what their vote will mean that's it thanks yeah i think they can i think they can write the promotional language and present it at town meeting but i i'd like to keep the warrant pretty much stuck to the facts and the summary
236of great corey if if we do a vote to recommend are we recommending the the informational summary as well or can that be changed after the fact that it's not just separate correct yeah i'll fix the you got to get another look at the entire warrant with cleaner information summaries too right any comments on them it's your warrant so you can make them say differently yes and and and also ultimately the it's it's the the motions that that are the the the critical action that palm meeting takes this is really a larger context and summary agenda if you will of the topic so um you know if for some reason we felt something was whack-a-doodle when we get to the motion state of things we can make different decisions at that time so okay um
237any other discussion otherwise is there anyone who would like to make a motion on article four my only discussion is i'm going to have the same um issue that i had with the other one and i'd like to see i see a representative here before we vote um but i'm assuming that as we read the three as i read my fellow select board members and i won't get a second there so just want to confirm that and uh so we won't have to go through that and i'll just abstain and and and we can we can also have that discussion later after the warren closes um um for for our own edification so we can talk about oh i i i will and i've talked to i've talked to water and i've talked to sewer
238a lot on on all of that so i will probably ultimately support it but anyway for sake of time um make the motion and go from there thanks corey uh i think i'm on uh jackson on this one because you know water there's a lot of information a lot of detail a lot of stuff sewer i think that there's still some missing data points that um could be brought to the town to make it more clear why this is required i mean uh water went through a lot of revisions and a lot of stuff and made it clear that this was really necessary i don't quite feel the same way about sewer yet so i would also like to hear it okay i and and i i actually agree with with that um and maybe
239we can have the sewerage i move we put this off until the 27th yeah we don't even have to vote that but we can um so i think we're all fine with that we don't need to come on deny me you know i'll talk to the sewer commission about coming in i mean water this is this is the second or third year that we've been discussing the water rate study that they formally um you know um conducted so i think that isn't they have worked very very hard and they've had a lot of really difficult issues so i hold them in great admiration absolutely okay great we'll bring them in um well we're in really good shape thank you all for your patience tonight um it is late uh much later than i anticipated but
240we got through a lot of work um we have just um our own updates and uh yeah chris if if i may so poor brianna bennett who's the uh uh the intern assigned to alternative energy got skipped over earlier because she wants to talk a little bit about the electric car celebration part of earth day so there she is she's been very patient and i promised her oh brianna i'm so i'm so sorry that was at 6 20 this morning or this whatever days ago whatever thank you for your patience so sorry i'm happy to hear about the warrant articles are you really though yeah thank you uh i i don't want to keep you all too late tonight so i'll try to keep it brief i'm just here to talk about the the cohasa
241ev ceremony that was kind of floated a couple weeks ago to the select board um and we've put together a more concrete proposal so instead of a ceremonial ribbon cutting and a car parade we're kind of focusing on the ribbon cutting and then maybe getting some electric vehicles together to take photographs after at the stations that can then be published to the public we'd like to live stream the event to the public so we won't be promoting in-person access to the event we'd like it to take place on sunday april 25th from 12 pm to about 12 30. at the paul pratt memorial library we have alternative locations where there's other chargers but i think that this location uh has the best aesthetic view for the for the ribbon cutting um and then the virtual
242event will have a zoom webinar that will be live streamed onto the town of cohasset youtube and hopefully the town of cohasset facebook um so we'll have multiple avenues for access and then it'll just be a good celebration of the electric chargers that cohasset secured in town there's gonna be the ceremony at the library we'll commemorate the new chargers um and any guest speakers for the event will be asked to submit virtual pre-recorded videos and then the in-person ribbon cutting will probably just feature the uh town manager and the alternative energy chair tanya bodell and any of you who want to attend in in a safe way that as long as dr sherman said it's okay yeah i we would any of you and if you'd like to give a speech you know you could
243probably make the argument you can do it in person but i i would recommend you make a virtual speech and i'm hoping to be the zoom coordinator for the event so i can play it for the public absolutely that sounds fantastic um comments questions thank you i'm so sorry that you raided around for three hours thank you for waiting of course yeah rihanna is very brianna is very dedicated yeah this is great and i i think you know any and carrie always um articulates this better than i will but just any opportunity to get the the work that we're doing in town out to the community through social media channels is is is great so thank you for that um all right any comments do you need any kind of approval chris or no no
244no it's not that big it just really just let all of you know you're all obviously all welcome as brianna said you can do a video there's eight charging locations uh the front of the library the back by wreck uh up at the school and also in the town parking the main village parking lot by the uh what hopefully what will be the teen center in the fall it's right now so uh plus the ones behind town hall so there's now ten charging stations around you yeah terrific okay all grant funded by the way so even better grants pay for the electricity no they fund they pay for the installation um okay the point you did i think you raised this uh i've uh about whether the child will at one point want to charge
245for this um it can um at this point i don't know if anyone's doing it yet because once it becomes there um it's something that the town can most certainly uh continue so at this point it's the town has been giving out free electricity uh the yes the the use of the transactions yes uh pounds should know that yes and we do have those amounts that we can report on at a future meeting too it's all being tracked in chargepoint so we kind of see we're seeing a steady increase in the number of users using the electric vehicles so it might be something that you want to take up in the coming weeks after we've really you know open up the the charging stations to see how many people use it what you'd like to
246be charging the residents absolutely great thank you thanks brianna that's that's my that's good all right april 25th 12 to 12 30. virtual mostly um all right chris do you have anything to add all right select board comments no comment corey uh small comments uh uh just thank you to uh my fellow colleagues and the others that participated in the discussion about second congregational i think that's the kind of discussions that that we really need to have in a way we need to have them so thank you all for that however uh my soapbox for the day is uh not next week but the week after april 24th is national drug take back day which is being promoted by safe harbor it is a nationwide program to turn in any unused prescription drugs it is
247well known that you know the majority of uh misused prescription pain relievers or stimulants or whatever are actually come from leftover stock and getting rid of that stock is a great way to keep our community safe we are lucky in our community the police of the coastal police station has a drop box for these things year round but april 24th is the day to put that on your mind go through your cabinet get rid of anything that is left over and keep everybody safe thanks very much thank you corey uh paul i'm good things are things are so far so good terry it's not too late to pull papers for our town election people have a few days left to turn in signatures and in my opinion no election at any level of a ballot
248ever should go unopposed so i always think that there should be competition i never think people should run unopposed for anything and unfortunately that happens a lot at our municipal level in massachusetts and at our state level so i think we need to do better at that so this is my plug for people who might be thinking about pulling papers go do it great thanks carrie just to be the deadline is tomorrow close the business to pull the papers you have to return them by friday that's the okay okay um two quick things one is that on um uh this thursday night april 15th at 7 p.m via zoom and the link is on our town website is the elm street corridor working group public engagement session and i highly encourage everybody to participate i
249had a member of the public a friend of mine sent me an email the other day and said why aren't you dealing with some other area of town and and the truth is um this came out of of the master plan when we had a lot of public um uh discussion so i encourage everybody to spread the word among your networks to to get people to participate in this is a really key link between the harbor and the village and um and um please join in and get the zoom link on our website and then lastly and we'll have a presentation for this when we have less of a full agenda but there's a group of residents in town who are putting together a one-table cohasset cookbook and it's pretty exciting what they're doing and
250they want people from all over town or you know restaurant owners or chefs or just individuals that have lived here forever and have a good old seafood recipe that nana made or any of you that have new recipes in your rotation there's a website it's onetablecohasset.com so i encourage everybody to check it out and they're they're going to publish a beautiful book hopefully by the holidays and the proceeds will support um a local nonprofit so um just wanted to plug that one table cohasset and we'll get a presentation from them some other time it's a great community uh effort so with that um we have minutes from 4 6 20 21 if anybody would like to move those i move that we approve the minutes from 4 6 20 21. okay is there a second
251okay roll call please uh jack creighton i'm standing until such time as we get proper electronic records of our meetings thank you we for you dianne kennedy i paul schubert harry thompson i okay i have no other topics so i'll ask for a motion to adjourn to adjourn okay is there a second second okay roll call jack right now cory evans tired eye diane kennedy eye paul schumer died harry thompson i okay thank you thank you all good night good work good night good morning everybody we had fun