001Hello and welcome to Around the Clock. I'm your host Yolanda Greavves. This is the select board update for the meeting that happened on Wednesday, April 17th. We're in a slightly different setting today because we just finished doing a river cutting here at Clover Road Brewery at the old fire station. So, if it's a little different, that's why. Our meeting started at 7:00. We were fortunate to have both Senate President Karen Smoka and our state rep. Jack Lewis come and speak with us for almost an hour and a half last night talking about housing and budget and what's coming down from the federal government, how they might see impacts at the state level and what those will do to us potentially here at the local level to see the full footage of their speaking. Go ahead
002and watch the show uh that's on YouTube. From there, we had a hearing for a new class 2 license over on Dickerson Road. had a nice conversation with those owners and we've approved that with some stipulations. From there, we went into our old and new business. We started with a discussion of the fiscal year 26 budget. We went into great detail into the general fund budgets as well as all the enterprise funds and other special funds. Again, for footage of that, go ahead and watch the meeting. But the important thing is we have about an $83 million budget and it's coming to before a town meeting on May 7th for approval. From the budget discussion, we then went into a discussion of the May uh election and town meeting. So the May election is happening
003on May 20th. There are a number of contested races, so make sure you find out who the candidates are and get out and vote. There will be early voting, so look for that through the town clerk's office. From there, we then had a discussion about the um we had a detailed discussion about the town meeting, the full town meeting warrant. There's about 181 19 articles and that's happening on May 7th. We also discussed some um a slight change for a finance committee posting. If you're interested in being on finance committee, make sure you fill out a talent bank form and reach out to Adam Schustster, our moderator. From there, we had an update on 40B projects. There's two currently that are in front of the ZBA. The one is the 10 to 50 Main Street
004project and the other is the project across from the Ashlin High School. Whereas we appreciate members of the public coming to the select board to tell us your dissatisfaction or not wanting to see those products projects go through, we do recommend you watch the ZBA meetings and contact them and give them your feedback. At this point, the select board is out of the discussion. We are watching it and paying attention, but the full decisions will most likely come down to the ZBA and how they work with the developers. We then discussed, hold on, I got to put a little closer. We thanked our public safety building committee. The public safety building has been open now for about a year and we wanted to thank all those members of that committee, specifically Jen Ball, our assistant
005town manager, who really ran with that project and made sure to go through. Um, let's see. We then had our consent agenda and we had some updates and reminders and then we had a update from our town manager. He talked about some priority projects. Pawn Street, the focus there is that we have received commitment from the state that it will be done in 2025. We don't have a final date, but hopefully before the fall. We also had an update on the Upper Charles Trail. They're in the process of writing up an RFP to get 25% design for one end of the trail to the other, which goes from Framingham Town in Ashland all the way through to the Hopkin Town line with certain portions of it already being done, but this would be for the
006engineering of the full stretch of the road of the trail and that way we could go to the tip to have it built. We also had an update on the Warren Barn that is in the process of moving forward. Fair Framingham State is working with us to get the Henry Warren barn rebuilt. It's the barn up on Chestnut Street. There's been a standalone silo and soon there will be a barn back there um for all of us to enjoy and hopefully use for community events. We spent a lot of time talking about the budget. So, we didn't wrap up our meeting until about 10 of 11. And we wrapped up our meeting by saying goodbye and thank you to Jen Ball. She has been our assistant town manager for nine years. We're going to have
007her with us through town meeting in May, but then she's moving on to her next adventure. And we wish her all the best. And that's the select board update for the meeting that happened on Wednesday, April 17th.