Acton, MA Board of Selectmen Meeting 10/05/2020

001presence of a quorum i would like to call the october 5th 2020 meeting of the captain board of selectment order uh the town of acton in response to the covet 19 coronavirus is currently following the guidance from the acton board of health massachusetts department of public health and the cdc regarding the virus and steps communities can take to prevent the spread the town hall is closed to the public the meeting will be broadcast live across local access cable on the actin tv channel or streaming online at acton tv youtube live channel and audio will be broadcast live on the radio on w-a-e-e-m 94.9 fm to participate remotely from a computer please click on the link below to join the public meeting webinar colin h t uh t p s uh collins forward slash forward slash

002zoom zoom uh dot u s forward slash j forward slash five oh three nine one eight seven eight five um or from a telephone dial six four six eight seven six nine nine two three and webinar id one five oh three nine one eight seven eight five telephone users may dial on asterix 9 to request to speak um after joining the meeting computer app users may use raise hand feature to request speed david are there any citizen concerns um i was fine please look she just went away or someone else might let her speak susan mitchell heart had her hands lindsay hurley has my hand raised sure well actually i'm not i can't make them speak it's wrong i'm not a co-host someone else can we'll need to make them speak john or mark okay

003lindsay should be all set unmute herself unmute there there you go can you hear me now yeah loud and clear this is i've never done this kind of system before thank you welcome aboard thank you thank you this is my first board of selectmen meeting nice to be here um i have a one-page statement that i put together to share with you i've talked with jim about this he knows what i'm talking about tonight but should i just dive into this please okay my name is lindsay hurley i live at 10 half moon hill and i am here to bring up a concern that i have about the health hazards of wireless technology exposure in our towns and in particular in our schools i'm a holistic health coach and i work with energy healing technology

004which give knowledges which gives me a background on how our bodies respond to energetic frequencies like most everything we are exposed to there are levels of frequencies that are safe and healing and there are other levels of frequencies that are toxic just like with sunshine we get vitamin d for many important health benefits from the sun but higher levels of exposure as we all know can be harmful there are thousands of studies about the effects of wireless exposure and it's clearly found to be dangerous to humans the industry assures us that it's safe just as the tobacco industry did years ago however if you look in your smartphone under the safety and legal settings you will see that they state your cell phone is not supposed to be held close to your head why is

005that not more clearly shared with us all most of us don't aren't even aware of that we must take action to protect our citizens because the industry will not our zoning bylaws say that companies can set up wireless towers in our towns wherever they like as long as they follow fcc guidelines i feel we have to have more safety regulation included in our town bylaws we need to protect our citizens from these dangerous exposures i'm particularly concerned with wireless exposures to our youth in the schools the kids are being bombarded with microwave radiation from wi-fi and again many studies have proven that these hazards these are hazardous for young and developing children there's a powerful documentary about this issue called generation zapped and i urge you all to watch it numerous towns states and even

006countries around the world are starting to demand safety studies and precautions before setting up wireless installations burlington massachusetts has already adopted a small cell policy to better protect their community and that has been being emulated across the united states bedford lincoln and andover have already adopted it and the city of boston is suing the fcc over their harmful rf exposure limits i've spoken with senator jamie eldridge and representative dan senna about this and they too are concerned and i've been urged to speak with you i've also been in touch with cheryl ball at the board of health and i'm sending her information for the board to look at to be clear here i am not anti-technology i am just in favor of safety and avoiding dangerous exposures to the citizens of acton i would like

007to see this addressed in this town i have been working with cece doucet who is the president of mass safe technology i sent you information about that you all got an email about that earlier this week and she would be willing to come and do a presentation because she's certainly more versed in this topic than i am so that's all i have to say i don't really know where to go next with all of this it's a it's a tremendous concern of mine and i would like to see us as a town move further forward and and check into this issue take some action if you're all in agreement so thank you well thank you um are there other is there anybody else uh david yes there's uh susan mitchell sure but i can't do

008it do you want to be made up uh i i've asked there she is oh are we ready yes susan sure thank you uh susan mitchell heart president of the acting conservation trust my residence is poke road aston it's with deep gratitude to our donors that we ask the select board to accept acts final gift totaling 60 thousand dollars tonight the purpose is to offset the cost of acquiring the piper lane lands in a matter of seven weeks a record number of supporters dug deep we allow this allowed act to reach its goal which we felt was realistic given the passion so many had exhibited for preserving the integrity of radio thank you susan thank you very much and the acceptance of the uh the gift is is on our consent agenda thank you very

009much um uh are there any further citizen concerns franny osmond is there randy please i don't really have to unmute someone could just read it i wrote it in the chat to you but i guess i can read it please um it's just some my father's house it's a little noisy um hi i would like to say as a citizen concern that i would appreciate as a public attendee that it would be better to share the list of participants in zoom meetings with the participants this could be done in various ways technologically it would be more fitting with being an open meeting and more similar to the town hall experience there's no reason not to be a recognizable body of visitors and board members until this is done could the chair please at least mention

010how many participants there are in the webinar thanks so much there are 17 participants okay but in the future i would love to ask you to talk to it and consider a way we could make it more similar to the open meeting um feel of town hall where you can look around and see who's there which has a lot of value i find as both as a well obviously as selectmen you can see that so i appreciate it as selectmen but also as a visitor to town hall it was always very valuable to look around and see who's there and um even if it's just seeing the names um it would be useful and i think appropriate so i just want to put in that suggestion thank you thanks are there any further citizen concerns

011no that's all okay so um for the chairs update um i just wanted to thank uh john and um mark and marianne um for the wonderful um uh town staff day um we had on friday september 25th it was obviously a different format than we would usually have um at nara but um i thought it was a very thoughtful and uh uh knowledgeable and uh took a lot away from me so thank you uh i just wanted to update the board on a a practice that um uh dean and i and john have instituted and it's something that i hope we we could continue with future boards um i had suggested um you know over the summer that um myself as chair and dean and john in his vice chair sit down a week ahead

012of each meeting and as a group of three plan on each week's agenda go over issues that would be coming up and look ahead to future agendas and we've had it was it's two of these meetings to date and they've been they've been really very helpful so i really hope it's a practice that you would continue with the next board if it goes on you know the normal progression for uh dean and david and then uh david and jim and it's so i hope that goes um in terms of agenda items um uh all of you are free to submit um you know items for the agenda we um now seem to have these meetings the tuesday before the next uh the following week's monday meeting so if you could get those agenda items to

013us like for the next time we'll be meeting would be um next tuesday october 13th um for our agenda on the 19th what we have on so far is a discussion of possible dog park sites and we will be hearing from david cantrell of wr grace with um the w with his updates as to the uh the wr grave site both the south side of the tracks um and the north side of the tracks um just briefly wanted to update uh we had an alg meeting on september 24th and we we had just sort of preliminarily uh getting uh down to business uh christy anderson the chair of the finance committee um put forth uh three ideas her board was coming up if none of these were voted on or uh officially stamped by the

014committee but uh they suggested three items to have a a try board um group similar to what was done during the great recession um for the the three boards to collectively look at ways to reduce spending between the school side and the town side they came forth with a notion of no no property tax increase for fiscal year 22. um and the notion of a use of free cash excess free cash to pay down new capital debt that's the debt that was incurred um for the fire station the twin school and the and um and minuteman uh over the next couple of years the only item that we um discussed um amongst the group was the uh tri board task force um dean um shared uh his recollections of a like task force that was

015formed this is what it's modeled from during the great recession when uh he worked for the town and uh his frustrations with it that you know you're taking people who are evaluating uh town members positions and duties without really any knowledge of municipal management operations amy krishna murphy on the school side said you know um our our people have been just working double time you know triple time um reopening school and uh in the face of covid and [Music] really couldn't ask them to you know undertake uh this you know type of work um i echoed her sentiments uh in the saying that you know our town town staff is working double time and uh you know their efforts are so well appreciated and there's you know some bit of i found condescension and saying

016kind of justify yourself you know whether you're you're you know where you're really worth uh you know your weight so uh we'll probably have this discussion again but it it didn't get any support from um uh the r2 representatives or um or amy speaking from the school side so um that's what i have to report let's hear from john please with the manager's update oh thank you i have several updates and thanks for uh participating in the staff uh professional development day it was really great for all five board members to be in attendance the staff of about 140 people really appreciated seeing you there and i think it was a considering the circumstances i think it was a it was a great day and uh we hope to do it again in person uh

017next year so uh just some updates on the election uh early voting is going to start on uh next saturday um so it starts october 17th um starting at nine nine am to one pm uh that saturday and sunday and then voting will be available monday the 19th through friday the 23rd from 8 30 a.m to 5 p.m then on saturday and sunday again it's nine to one and then the following monday through the following friday the october 30th it's 8 30 to 5 p.m the voting location for early voting is town hall come to the back of town hall we have a whole system in place to keep people uh separate and properly distance and mass are required so that's the information there if you have questions uh check out our website or call

018town hall uh there's been several people that have taken advantage of early uh sorry mail-in voting we've received 9 300 applications so far about a third of those have already had the ballots mailed out to them over this past weekend and the clerk's office will be working to get the rest of those out as they come in you need to return them as soon as you get them the last day to return them is november 3rd at 8pm uh we have uh the deadline to request a ballot by mail is october 20th to request a ballot you can go online to the secretary of state's website or to our website and request it there on that same state website you can actually track the ballot after it's been processed so that's the election and voting

019uh again the actual election will be on the third at the junior high for all precincts john yes how many total voters are there um i think just about 16 000 yeah in the mid yeah in that range yep so okay so more than half yeah we had about 500 people do early voting last time they're for the primary so we're anticipating that probably double that will do it this time but there's also been a huge popularity of the mail-in uh ballots so um a lot of activity in the clerk's office they're doing tremendous work trying to keep up with it all and they're gonna have a very busy uh next three weeks or so or until november they'll be very busy so that's election updates uh the pump track we had a discussion and

020presentation from an eagle scout a few weeks ago and there were some questions that we left that meeting with and those questions have been resolved the questions were basically who's going to take care of this project after the eagle scout moves along and natural resources will and i had some concerns about that the concept of parking but i've walked the site and i'm comfortable with what's being discussed there's also a question about trash and recycling and uh this will be a carry in carryout park so we're not planning on providing any of those facilities there um the student uh the eagle scout has been in touch with town hall staff and uh he's continuing to do uh his diligence and i'm looking forward to seeing his work out there um at the all staff day

021last week we announced the 2019 municipal employee of the year kristen gieshard in the 2019 public safety employee of the year lieutenant jim byrne this is something that we normally do at the annual town meeting but due to the pandemic we cut ceremonies out of the town meeting this year and so we saved it until the all-staff meeting to make the announcement so i just wanted to share it with the public tonight we have a traffic traffic study and 25 design meeting on wednesday of this week it's a virtual meeting so go to the website to learn how to log in this is to look at the redesign of the actin center right outside of town hall um as the chair mentioned we are expecting a presentation from wr greece on the 19th so we'll

022look forward to that west acton and the west acting library were featured last week on the chronicle of channel 5 abc's program uh some really nice footage of of our local businesses and and our own jennifer friedman was featured at the west saxon citizen library so that was very exciting to see if you haven't seen it you can look at the links on our website we got some good news from the state we applied for regional funding as part of a collaborative to help out micro enterprises and public social services providers we weren't funded in the first round but it looks like we will get funded in the second round so that's a serious amount of support we'll be getting to help micro enterprises and public service providers once we get the details from the

023state i will provide them to the board and and to the town on the small business program all the awardees have gotten their paperwork in and we're getting the grants out shortly one of our grantee recipients michael shu boutique was actually featured in the globe over the weekend so hopefully you saw that article it's a nice story the central street bike lane pilot project this is a project that unfortunately hasn't been completed yet there was some shipping delays and the signage hadn't been delivered or installed yet which i think is causing some of the issues that we're seeing out there we've received as i said positive and negative feedback on the on the program uh but what we basically did was as a part of a traffic calming and bicycle safety initiative we've uh re-lined

024or restrict the a stretch of central street about two mile stretch and the goal is to get cars to slow down and to make it safer for bicyclists who are trying to get up the climbing portions of the road um so there's some some people that don't understand some of the um engineering concepts that were implemented there i think the signage once installed hopefully tomorrow uh will help people better understand what what's uh intended there and i know our transportation advisory committee is looking closely at it and will be writing us some feedback so i just wanted to mention that because we've gotten quite a few calls on what happened out there and it was a it's a pilot project and uh we're hoping that it works and makes it safer for bicyclists and i

025think that's all i had for now thank you right when did when does uh uh early voting end the last day is the 30th which is a friday okay and the voting is it inside town hall or is it outside it's inside so what uh what we're doing is we're only letting two people in at a time and others have to wait outside so if it's a cold or rainy day and um you know you see people waiting you can wait in your car and then wait till the line goes down and then and then come up and wait to go in um we do we don't want to have that many people in the building at the same time so yeah it worked beautifully for the primary we never had more than four or

026five people in line and that was only occasionally so um member member minute um jim um i don't think i have anything from any of my committees this week i will say i did get my mail-in ballot in monday's mail which i thought was amazing and just wanted to thank the clerk's office and i know they're working so hard in getting all those out there thank you uh joan yeah the west jackson citizens library that john mentioned that i know it was dean's um initiative but both the citizens library board and the memorial library board have discussed how they can work together and i think that will be important for john as we go forward with the budget process thank you as with the revitalization of west acton with the new school and the ice

027cream shop and the restaurants and all people could use the west acton library for the minuteman books so that's an issue and an expense that has to be considered okay i'm david yes uh last tuesday we had our first diversity equity and inclusion committee meeting it went very well considering you know it's a meeting that you know all of us getting to know each other um next meeting is uh this thursday you did you people elect a a co-chair uh we had uh not nominations uh uh last that's the first meeting and the vote will be at this meeting on thursday and when's your next meeting this thursday thank you adin yeah um the one issue that i've got and i think everybody has seen the emails back and forth regarding the debacle i would

028call it in front of 5 pearl street where the developer took it upon himself to uh basically destroy a 22-inch diameter sugar maple tree and i suggest you know interested citizens might want to drive by and see a good example of what you don't do because not only did he essentially kill the tree but they ended up putting a sidewalk all the way around the tree um with handicapped ramps but because there's a 22 inch diameter tree in the middle of the sidewalk obviously there's no sense of accessibility there um if you go down further to central street you notice that one of the access ramps to get onto the sidewalk actually has a street sign right in the middle of the ramp so people can't get in there either um you know i think

029it's an example on the part of the developer i mean there's a little bit to stick on everybody here but i think it's an example of the developer being what i would call willfully incompetent um you know a fifth grader should know that you can't do that to a tree and expect it to survive i'm also concerned with the fact that the design review board when they reviewed the plans the plans that they had didn't even show a sidewalk in that location so i think there's a disconnect there amongst uh as the way information is shared with the design review board and how their reviews are actually received by town staff and by this situation the zoning board appeals and as liaison drb they've expressed their dissatisfaction i think there's a lot of work that

030needs to be done there to sort of close up a lot of these missing links obviously a lot of this occurred in a pandemic when planning staff and we had rolling on his way out into retirement we had kristin out on maternity leave so you know everybody is stretched very thin but the result is that um there was a plan that apparently everybody thought oh well we'll just put the sidewalk there and then after the fact if we have to look at holding a hearing on the tree that makes the assumption that the tree has no value and that the decision would be that well we'll take the tree down well maybe that's a good decision maybe it's not but i think it's a huge leap of faith on the part of zoning board of

031appeals and the planning staff to make those assumptions so i think these are all things that on the town side we've certainly fallen short of then we get to the situation with the tree and it's obvious to me that there has been huge amounts of root damage done if the sidewalk was properly installed because you have to excavate all the material since i'm not sure that proper inspections were done i'm not sure that the sidewalk was actually properly installed anyway and i would think that probably the developer should be required amongst other things the core a few sections of that sidewalk to prove that a proper base was late to begin with then we have the situation with the tree which as an arborist with over 40 years of experience i can pretty much predict

032that tree is going to die we'll have to hold a hearing on it i think everybody's agreed to that and it's all being sent some information about that and presumably if the decision made to take the tree down then we'll apply the long-standing policy from 1991 to re to compensate the town for the value of the tree the proposal i saw though said that if the decision is made to try to save the tree for two years then the developer is only going to be liable for the cost of taking the tree down when it indeed dies and there's nothing in that proposal to compensate the town for the value of the tree when it dies two years hence so i think there's huge amounts of issues here um and i'm frankly just appalled that

033this kind of stuff happened and i'm appalled that this kind of stuff happened um you know within a month of all of the discussion that we had about the trees on high street and obviously now developers will do whatever developers will do which will make the most financial sense for them but i think somebody to do that to just go ahead and pour a concrete sidewalk around an existing tree on property that they don't own that does not speak well for the developer at all and the fact that this whole thing got as far as it did shows that there's some problems here and i know a lot of them do the pandemic and there's a lot of miscommunication um public works is understaffed we haven't had a full-time town engineer for quite some time

034but i think there's there's cracks in the base that are occurring here and uh you know i applaud the town manager and trying to stay ahead of this and he understands that there's we've got to start staffing up some departments so we can watch this kind of stuff but um it was just an absolute classic i've circulated those photos around to some of my professional colleagues and you know a lot of grunts and groans looking from that so i hope that by the time we get through with this we'll make sure the town is properly compensated and that we make sure that we end up with a good sidewalk there and that we make sure we've got some some operations in place so that we can kind of monitor these things a lot more closely

035than was done in this situation that's all i have to say thank you very much okay hi john did you have anything to follow on to dean with no thank you i think you raised some some important points and i think those are all items that we're in the process of addressing the contractor did not do several things that they were supposed to do and our building staff did identify some of those issues and then the tree one was was a big one but the occupancy for that project is not an issue and we'll have to sort out these issues before that that can be issued so uh we will continue to uh work on this issue and do better going forward thank you um okay so um gender item three covid19 response updates john

036yes just sort of a um update on where we are from public health standpoint the total cases that are active in town right now is four um which is not you know we've been we've been in in the area of five six seven two three four ever since mid july so we haven't seen the spike that other places are seeing the state has now started issuing on a weekly basis a risk status for each community so if you look at that risk status that the state issued as of last wednesday we're considered lower risk which is if you've looked at the map online it's a green by the green color and that means that we've had less than four cases per 100 000 if we get to a position where we have between four and

037eight cases per 100 000 would then be considered yellow or moderate risk so we're in the low risk category now and hopefully we'll stay there um we are starting to continue what we're continuing to do reopening planning we had talked about trying to reopen town hall i think with early voting though uh with that amount of activity we're going to delay that until after the election's over and we'll continue to focus on providing our window service which we've expanded hours for our winter service we're now 10 to 2 most days except for fridays we're 9 to 11 so people have found that really valuable to have people to talk to out there and we also have people stationed in the under the tents behind town hall to help residents come through the library acting memorial

038library is talking about um starting with appointments only uh later this month as a way to start uh reintroducing people to the inside of the library we've been people are anxious to get back in there and we want to do it carefully we're still doing some final planning on measures that need to be in place but we think we'll have those uh in place before the end of october and look for an announcement within a week or so on the exact date and details other items coming up we get a lot of well not a lot we get some phone calls about halloween that's something that the board of health is actually talking about tonight maybe right now at their meeting so i would expect that from from those discussions we may have some guidance

039to provide to the community much like the cdc has guidance and recently the state of massachusetts put out guidance on halloween and trick-or-treating so that's another thing where we're just going to watch the public health metrics and and we'll continue to provide guidance to the community as we get closer to the end of the month other events coming up we have veterans day where we will we're going to try to do it within person given that the governor's increased the number of people you can have in an outside gathering as of today for lower places like this if those metrics stay where they are hopefully we can do something outside uh with people there otherwise we will go to a virtual format that's another thing that we'll have to just decide as we get closer

040any questions on um where we are from from a public health standpoint with regards to the response questions so town hall you'd hope to reopen after election day yeah i think i think having i think waiting until that flux influx of people is passed before we start having people in again it would be would be a better way to move forward makes good change i guess one of the note on the the financing part of it we had a call with the state last week 400 town officials won a conference call with state officials talking about the rules for the corona virus relief act funds and so we're working on submitting again for that reimbursement for all the expenses that we have for our telecommuting and all the different things virtual conferencing that we're doing

041in ppe and safety measures we've also received requests from both the act of oxford regional school district and the minuteman vocational regional school district for funding that we have enacting towards their needs so that's something that i will plan to bring to the board later this fall we have a more complete picture of both our needs and both of those districts needs because the idea is they can't apply directly for that funding they have to go through us as as the lead town thank you any questions on uh john on the covid report okay so the next item four would be to discuss the annual town meeting timeline so let me just offer this um um by way of background particularly for jim who wasn't with us when we went through this in the in

042the spring um um uh uh town uh uh bylaw chapter a sections one and two um sets it out that town meeting begins with the town election which this year escape which is always on the last tuesday in march and this year will be on it would be on march 21 it would be on march 30th and then it ends with the dissolving of the annual town meeting which begins um on the first monday following the annual town election which in 2021 would be on april uh fifth at our alg meeting on september 24 uh both john and john peterson of the school side suggested could we put off um annual town meeting until late may or june to allow more time for the revenue numbers to firm up it was also you know my

043thought that i just couldn't see um giving the the early april weather that we could possibly hold a town meeting on it on april 5th and it just at this point would be you know inappropriate to um although we legally could hold an all indoor town meeting um so we um we used this statutory provision earlier it's massachusetts general law chapter 39 section 9 which um regardless of charter or bylaw provisions to the contrary um a a select board made away annual town meeting by a simple majority vote so long as um the business of annual town meeting is completed by june 30 of the of the year between 30 of 21. so um i i spoke with nina about steps involved and we could do it similar to the way we did it in

0442020 where we could take a first vote um to delay town meeting just for our delaying town meeting to a date uncertain so long as it's done by um by two by june 30 of 21 and then we could take some weeks later a subsequent vote to set the exact um date of the meeting um the uh first step um vote into the laytown meeting we could uh deal with as early as this evening um now note that in in town charter article 6 section 2 and this really gets to john's point um that he is required to present the manager's budget recommendations to both the selectmen and the finance committee at least 100 days prior to town meeting so normally for an end of march town meeting uh his budget would have to be

045presented by the middle of december if we go to a town meeting say on monday june 21 2021 it can be done in early march so that would give john two and a half additional months to watch numbers and see how they develop and make choices and work is his budget out now with respect to the um annual town election if the select board does not have any statutory authority to move the date that's within the hands of the governor if there's an emergency or by act of the state legislature the way it was done this past spring um i asked um uh nina whether because of we're one of the small number of communities in the state um that links the town election to the um annual town meeting she said we don't necessarily

046have to link [Music] the two events and the march 30 town election can stand and we can under our section nine powers um move the um move the annual town meeting to uh to june now the key with the um with the with the town election is that um a special 2020 um enactment by the legislature authorized voting by mail for municipal elections through december 31 2020 only and um for our our town um our postponed town election which was held on june 2 we had 2 800 people voting um 1900 um voted by by early ballot so i've asked her if she would push ahead through her legislative contacts uh to see what we can you know what can be done as soon as possible um to extend the 2020 law for for another

047year she did point out to me just as an aside that um under another state statute that um voting by mail in state elections is allowed so long as the the the um you apply for the early ballot that ballots are just not mailed routinely so um let's then um discuss first um whether uh we would like to um you know delay the town meeting and if we um would would we like to take that action as soon as this evening and break it into the two steps that i suggest so dean yeah i think it makes imminent sense to the laytown meeting uh you know even before the pandemic hit and there was so much uncertainties it's a real horse race to uh get the town manager to have the budget ready in early

048december um and now with such uncertainties about revenue and we just need to give the managers some tools to work with so i would personally be in favor of delaying town meeting you know until the date to be determined but i'm i'm thinking we're probably looking at probably late may um or perhaps early june uh i think that just it's it's one of the things we just have to do and uh you know they seem to have the technique down now for having a hybrid type town meeting so uh i'm all in favor of of the delay yeah just to offer a comment on the day jane uh dean um the i i emailed um peter light and asked him do you have a date when the high school year um will end uh the

049way that he pointed out it at alg that students are in the school on monday and tuesday and thursday and friday with the only open day being on wednesday and um you know we've really got to be careful on this so if we use a wednesday you know and it rains it may be difficult to do things thursday or friday and uh we'll have to see as an option uh just to keep in mind you know when does the school year end and you know i was thinking probably more for a town meeting on you know monday june 21st or monday uh june 28th but you know if we can do it you know safely earlier that's you know certainly fine other comments david uh you're here's yeah sorry um delaying it starting tonight or

050whenever we we want to do that you know i i would favor a little bit earlier um uh town meeting in june i'd rather see it in the end of may i think foxborough's is currently scheduled for mid-may um maybe they'll change that but i think that's what this schedule is is right now um you know i think we could probably figure out a you know a one week delaying tactic if it rained or something but anyway um you know i think when you get down to the you know there's so close to the end of the fiscal year there are other worries that are uh you know when we're you know the 21st is only you know uh nine days away for the end of the fiscal year um you know so if there's

051a there's a problem in passing the budget or passing the school budget you know that i i think that's to me a little bit nerve-wracking so i'd rather see his name for for the end of may but i'm fine with delaying it tonight and it's a date not not set yeah just keep this in mind and john if if you would correct because we had this discussion uh back in june when we thought we might encounter rain on the 29th and 30th that we rent the stuff for i think it's several days well no it's quite an operation that has to show up that day and um some of the costs would have to be uh sunk if we cancel uh unless we cancel with enough notice to them and and which would be probably

052a day a day's notice uh with you know some of the costs some of the rentals you know i think having a rainy day something we can work out we just have to call it early enough to be able to make it to not too expensive okay so with respect to delaying town meeting um if there are no further questions um or comments jim yeah one thing i didn't understand um you've talked about how our charter has this odd feature that the town meeting technically begins right aft with the election and i didn't know if the uh we're trying to have this you know the 100-day gap go back to something more reasonable like march and does the does this odd feature of our charter frustrate that goal i mean 100 days for the budget

053yeah i mean so the fact that the town meetings technically starts in some way on on the with the election on the on the at the end of march yeah it would be uh six five days five days apart five six days apart the the like for this for 21 the the uh town election will be tuesday march 30th right and uh the town meeting would start on monday on april 5th right but and if but if we i just don't get if we if we reschedule the town meeting to late in june for example um do we still get to count backwards yes i believe yes it would count that way from the uh the legal date of the start of town meeting with the election yeah the it's all in one but but

054in terms of the 100-day count it would start from the the the the the actual meeting date right so it would be you know say april 5th or if it's june 21 or or may 31 right backwards from there i'm very comfortable with delaying the meeting to a date uncertain tonight then um i i've tossed in the suggestion that maybe it's time to try a saturday meeting um we're going to try to get all this business done in one day maybe that's a day to do it yeah that's a good thought david yeah i i move that we delay the april a 2021 town meeting to a date to be determined if i could offer this friendly amendment to a date to be determined later um but before june 30 2021 yes okay is there

055a second yes is there any further discussion okay then uh david if you called the role please mr snyder grant bye ms gardner hi mr charter aye mr benson hi and i say i swear to animals okay so turning then to the um annual um you know town election um it's it's a question of whether we want to you know keep to the march 30 date or um um you know request the legislature to you know add a subsequent date i guess you know move it to another well or act now to make the request now to move the date to a you know a later date um or do we want to leave it as it is and you know the key item to work would be get the extension of the 2020 law

056that would provide for early voting in the in the municipal election so what would be the group since david i'd say i favor that i figured we'd uh i would favor not changing the date of the election but asking for permission to have early voting and mail-in balance okay further comments on that on that uh idea all right so um i don't think we need to vote on this but um let me uh ask peter again that uh we'd at the consensus of the board was to keep the march 30 town election and if she would proceed through her legislative contacts to have the 2020 law extended uh for another year through the end of 2021 to permit the early voting is that good okay okay so that would cover that item then we were

057on to number five um the board to vote on acquisition of four piper lane for our piper lane six piper lane and a portion of 90s school street uh purchase and sale agreement john so for this this is basically the final paperwork we need for the closing uh the closing for the second acquisition is scheduled for i believe the 23rd of this month uh so what i can do is share on my screen the latest copy of the deed um is that showing up for people i did send this to the board i think maybe on friday it hasn't changed since then but as you can see there are still some things that need to be added to it but the purpose of the action that we're seeking tonight is for the board to vote

058on the deed and take a series of votes that town council has laid out for you in a separate sheet which i can go through next but before i do i want to see if there are any questions on the deed 1.15 is a million is the acquisition purchase price um it lists the parcels um and the lots based on the deed research uh there are a couple things that need to be filled in but i expect that they will be um soon and that's um that's that and are there any questions on that okay so john it's if there's okay there are two votes that we have to take under the certification certificate of vote of the acting court of selectmen yeah and i can actually share that please thing that uh we're asking

059you to vote uh let's see here certificate so this is um this is a document that we'd asked you to vote on and there are two motions and then uh we would have tom clerk certify that you did that um and that will go that'll be recorded or will be necessary for the closing so i can read this or you can read this or i don't know how you want to handle this part of it move it can you move it up a little bit to the votes yeah i i move that we approve the deed to the property substantially in the form presented at the october 5th 2020 with final changes to be made by the town manager in consultation with town council okay is there any discussion on the first vote okay if

060there's no discussion then david would you please call the roll we need a second child in a second i'm sorry yeah second jim second okay david yeah okay um uh mr steiner grant hi mrs gardner bang mr charter aye mr benson bye i say hi okay can i move to authorize the town manager to take all actions on behalf of the town that are reasonably necessary in the judgment of the town manager to complete the purchase of the property in accordance with the purchase and sale agreement dated as of august 7 2020 by and between pipeline llc as seller and the town and buyer and the applicable town meeting vote including without limitation delivering closing funds and signing deed acceptances closing forms closing documents and settlement statements is there a second second um is there

061any further discussion okay then david if you please call the role mr snyder grant bye ms gardner hi mr charter aye mr benson hi and i say hi okay well done so uh our next item is the um board to discuss the house located on six pipeline that's the magoon house um and to consider declaring it a surplus uh dean is dean or john john let me let me just start i know that dean has some um some input on it but since the town technically doesn't own the property yet it may be too early to declare a surplus but i think tonight the purpose of tonight is to have that conversation and then we can bring a formal vote to a future meeting for the board to consider if that's what this discussion uh

062produces okay dean yeah so a couple of items regarding the house the um that we are about to acquire when the community preservation committee voted the funds to purchase the land the entire purchase was for open space preservation um there was no there was discussion but there was not any vote on preserving the house in point the fact on cpc the housing advocates actually were not enthused with attempting to keep the house because it would divert funds that were more appropriately spent on projects like the the main street housing authority project so i presented that to town meeting i think that it was very clear in my presentation that the intent was that the house would be either removed from the site or demolished so i think in keeping with uh in keeping good faith

063with town meeting i think we have no options now a couple of other items uh that people might think about well gee is at a historic house and would it be subject to demolition delay by law in fact uh since the house is not within the historic district but it is obviously within town of acton uh normally it it would have to be considered by the historical commission for a demolition delay but for the fact that the demolition delay bylaw uh specifically excludes properties owned by the town of so that by law does not apply to town-owned properties the issue that we had with attempting to dispose of the ace of parliament house behind town hall what stopped us there was not the demolition delay but the fact that that building is within the historic

064district so a different set of laws additionally the historical commission went into the house some years ago and investigated it and they had made the determination that there was really no historic value to the house and their intent was that even if it was still in private hands they would not evoke any delay in the demolition of the building so i think what we've got is a house there which frankly would impede access for people to be able to get onto the site we have way too many old houses that are owned by the town that are allowed to deteriorate uh they quickly become a money pit no matter how good they are when you start out with them so i think it's important that we get rid of it i would suggest that you

065know the town manager when it's taking a surplus put out an rfp and see if there's any interest in someone taking the house this is similar to a process that is being undertaken now at the discovery museum you know if there's some way that somebody can come in there and get some value out of it and if the town can get compensated in some fashion that would be great i'm not expecting that to happen but if it does that would be wonderful and if not i think it's uh it's demolition time okay thank you dean further comments or questions and david yeah we were under a very tight timeline in this situation i i i would have liked to have had a little bit more time to have this be considered for a habitat project

066or something like that um you know habitat rehab but you know i think they're like yeah you said dean there's probably no way considering you know to be in good faith with tom beating and everything um it's just unfortunate hi jim a couple thoughts um one is that i wonder if there's an intermediate if the actually never mind i think the i think dean and john spoke to this that we really don't need to have a final discussion or decision on this until after we actually own the property and given the length of the agenda and the time i'm happy to say nothing on any further discussion on on six packer lane okay so we'll we'll resume this we'll assume the conversation um after the closing when we own the property thank you um next

067item is number seven uh to discuss appointments to the diversity equity and inclusion commission uh uh a day that you have two rounds of appointments and one amendment uh yes um so uh what i'm uh the first two uh parts of this are pretty straightforward um if you remember for the initial makeup of the the commission there the commission allows nine to eleven uh full members and two associate members and we originally appointed nine full members and two associates um so the first two parts of this fill out the the commission um taking the two associates um diane randolph and uh lila ramachandran um uh promoting them up to full members and appointing two um uh new members as associates right julie o'nos and simon lee and the third part of this um you know

068uh when we set up the original uh uh members uh dean suggested actually that you know if if uh we thought we needed more members uh we we could do that and i'm not anxious to have more full members because it just makes a little bit harder to get a quorum you know um but i think two more associates would be appropriate if the board wanted to consider doing that so um uh i don't know if we want to take these uh uh john you want me to do these in three separate motions or one big motion or you know what why don't we do the um the appointments as one and um and then amend the charter amend the charge okay i would move that we promote uh dan randolph and leela ramachandran to

069full-time uh took full members um of the deic and appoint julie onos and simon lee as associate members of the deic is there any further discussion okay david would you call the role please uh uh mr snyder grant hi i'm ms gardner hi mr charter aye mr benson i can i say hi okay and the the last part i don't know if you want to discuss first you want me to make a motion uh either either way it's uh just allows two more associate members um yeah i guess the motion would be to uh to amend the charge to um um allow um up to uh four associate members right the charge in in one part of it uh says quote up to two associate members uh this would propose amending that to say quote

070four associate numbers second fine okay is there any discussion okay um then david please call the roll uh mr snyder grant hi ms gardner hi mr charter hi mr benson hi and i say hi so that passes unanimously thank you okay so jim you're going to be up for the next three um this is item a to discuss selectmen goal number eight regarding housing discrimination study uh jim yeah can we move on liz rust from being a participant of being a panelist she is i think i am okay great absolutely wonderful hi liz hi um so yeah we're gonna um i'm gonna talk about a little bit and then liz is going to take over and then i have a little closing to clarify what the questions are um so to start this this was

071our short-term goal number eight from our july goal setting session we said plan and prepare for a study to test housing discrimination and identify impediments to fair housing choice so i want to give you a progress report on this goal including some information about options we have and get feedback from the board on how we might proceed liz ross who's with our regional housing services office is here to help explain some of this this summer a study came out entitled race and voucher discrimination in the metro boston rental housing market i've put a link to that study in the packet and an article about it from the globe here's the i just want to read the first couple of paragraphs from the article because this is what really pulled me to want to add this

072as a goal an undercover investigation released wednesday found that black people posing as prospective tenants in greater boston were shown fewer apartments than whites and offered fewer incentives to rent and that real estate agents cut off contact when the renters gave black sounding names like lakeisha tyrone or kareem the white testers in the study posing as would-be renters on the other hand easily secured tourism properties were rude with discounts and got preferred treatment such as the opportunity to view additional units when looking at apartments in subtle and overt ways black renters experienced discrimination by real estate brokers and landlords in 71 of the cases tested in the study so there have been questions asked when we've talked about this before about whether there's um you know discrimination based on race and housing and acting and

073the answer is we don't know but no there's no magic rainbow that prevents the impact of unconscious or conscious bias from escaping beyond route 128. you know as you probably know in the 30s and 40s federal policies kept towns in and around acting largely white by for example denying va loans and fha loans to black families this was explored recently in a great article in the spectrum the high school paper which i've also linked to in the packet and this information was also explored in great detail in the color of law a forgotten history of how our government segregated america by richard rothstein so this goal number eight was designed to ascertain how much racial discrimination in housing is a problem in actin and it's an open question because the discrimination would be subtle the

074study showed lively disparate callback rates and other signs i mean if you were you know if you're a black family looking for a place to rent and you don't get a call back or were only shown some houses and not others how would you know that was the result of discrimination testing has been the standard of uncovering these sorts of problems since the 1960s and the modern fair housing era both the housing production plan goal that relates to this and the selectman goal mentioned impediments to fair housing which is a much bigger topic than just testing and includes more kinds of discrimination than racial discrimination so i want to give liz a chance to explain a bit about the larger world of fair housing and how communities have gotten together to address it and some

075possible options for act english yeah who is hi so i have um i have some slides that i can go through should i do um can i do share screen am i allowed to do that yeah okay so um is that um can you am i sharing my screen okay very good um so let me just get going here yeah so so i'm just going to start with some background material here's the rho so service model i think that you're all familiar with this nine towns and what i wanted to mention here is over on this side what the towns get when we talk about here um program development and administration what one of the things we do for some of these other towns is to administer their participation in the home consortium and the

076home consortium whoops which way you get is a group a regional group of 13 contiguous communities of which five of them are in this rhso service area it's a it's a regional collaboration that's a vehicle to flow federal home funds to through formula um and one of the responsibilities for participating members is to affirmatively further fair housing and that's why we even talk about this tonight and you can see um you know here you are acting so that you were really next to concord here and here's that whole consortium um the consortium this is hard to read but each just a little background on what it what it is it has allocated program funds and administrative funds and here you know if you expanded this you see how much money people are getting uh communities

077have exclusive access to their funds and uncommitted funds are annually rolled into a competitive pool for for them to use all right um hud imposes this obligation to affirmatively further fair housing by requiring the communities in that receive federal funds to provide an analysis of fair housing every five years so every five years this group of 13 communities get together and work on a fair housing plan uh dhcd as a recipient of fair housing also has a they call this the analysis of impediments to fair housing choice that's the title for the fair housing plan um and here's some links to the consortium document as well as dhcd's document the consortium has current efforts underway with a 2020 later this year submission plan to hud assisted by consultants of the consortium hired so there's uh

078some fair housing analysis work being done for that consortium area when we talk about that and this analysis of impediments plan this is what the housing production plan goal number eight is uh it has a number of components you know what is fair housing what's the demographic analysis housing quality you know affordability and choice what are the impediments and recommendations and action steps um something to think about is that fair housing is distinct from affordable housing because it's looking at all housing not only units that are restricted in any way so there's some overlap but they are very different um and this this few slides um these are materials that we did uh training given by suffolk university that has a strong fair housing arm um in 2019 and it's just a brief summary that

079gives you some background in fair housing this goes to back so this is their title page sorry um this was their agenda for the training so fair housing is really talking about protected classes and in massachusetts you have the federal classes that you pay attention to massachusetts that are added through mass general law chapter 151 b and additional so that these are all the uh the groups of people who are protected under fair housing so when you talk about just race you know there's lots of other things that you can look at when you're thinking about fair housing uh types of discrimination you can read those i'm not going to go through this in more detail um what we talk about is a discriminatory effect so even though that you might not be intentionally uh

080creating a fair housing situation the effect of your actions might be that it is uh who must follow this is you know pretty much everyone who's a party in real estate the types of transactions that are covered um prohibited conduct and uh and then i just picked up one example to to show just how nuanced this can be um so here is just a an ad and i think that it's really i don't know if we can see this right here um it says uh you know this is a great property for students and professionals so um it's uh you know so it's best to not describe the type of people who might be interested it's not an active adult community you know some of that so so it gets at some of those things

081um here's tenant screening and yeah so that's just some background in the the complexity and uh and what fair housing is all about very quick one minute two minutes but just to give you a flavor for some of the depth of the the work there so what's going on in the consortium um so the consortium that has that plan that i mentioned so it's going to hud by the end of the year um we on behalf of the five members as part of the consortium would facilitate the action items for the member communities and testing is one of the recommendations in the report so there's probably going to be 20 items in the report for recommendation it's still in draft now so i'm not able to really share with the action plans there but testing

082is pretty strong and there's work going on now to find a testing partner who would you know there's a number of organizations but not too many let's say a handful who are trained and able to do testing and so working with them to see what what would the scope and cost be for the consortium um and then just in summary fair housing it's a complex area i hope in my in my five-minute spiel here that you could see that um because of the number of protected classes education and awareness are key cornerstones think i missed a slide right i'm sorry yeah this is the key slide for you so i was like i already went to summary right um so um and i think jim will really talk to these points is um is to

083establish a community focus area or committee so that being one thing of where and act in might fair housing fall whether it's a you know an existing committee or one of your newer committees or a yet new one and then once that's formed to educate provide a baseline of understanding get a presentation we can help you with that from subject matter experts to come in and do one of these larger presentations there's some fair housing quizzes that help you understand uh you know where your basis of understanding is and and to develop some expertise and then looking at options for next steps um there is you know you could think about joining the consortium overall you know as a major strategic effort you could embark on the act and specific analysis of impediments per the

084housing production plan or activate a testing program you know any of those things you could do to further your fair housing goals and then there we go the summary right so complex area education and awareness are key uh and you're to be commended for your proactive interest thanks liz and let me just finish off just to sort of clarify the questions that i that i have for the board um let's see so we have a couple of opportunities here specifically we could without fully joining the consortium we could cooperate with the consortium on the planning and funding for the testing and presumably it's going to be it would be easier financially to share the cost of this among a number of towns we you know one one might imagine based on what's happened in other

085consortiums that there would be a rolling testing where there would be you know one year they test some towns another year they test some other towns and then over the course of a period of time we'd have comparable data from a lot of towns about you know about how housing discrimination is happening also the consultants from the com from the consortium can help us understand what we do when we find these issues if we do um you know what's the what's the educational component what's the um what's the enforcement component where's you know how do we go about addressing these things another step as liz mentioned would be looking at the possibility of actually joining the consortium which is obviously a much larger and complex idea but even even with the notion of joining with

086the consortium on doing the testing we understand that that's um there's there's financial implications of that there's staffing implications of that so i'm certainly not expecting any kind of decision tonight i'm just hoping that we can get feedback to the to the town manager and town staff so they can help us understand what kind of next steps are possible so to be more focused on what i'm looking for doesn't make sense to get some people together to actually study this in more detail um and if so would this work better as a you know an official advisory committee or a working group assisting staff or as a pure staff effort and it seems like if we're going to include volunteers we might want to include people from the diversity equity and inclusion commission and the

087housing groups the achc the aha and perhaps the citizens group housing for all who else should be included um and as an alternative should one of these existing groups be asked to add this to their portfolio so those are the questions then people might have general questions about fair housing or about the consortium i wanted to mention something um in terms of active participating just in the testing portion of the consortium's action plan um that would be probably some number of months to determine if that would be possible and or how that would occur without joining the consortium i mean the consortium is is pretty bounded through its structure so i don't really know we'd have to work through how that would really look so i don't know you couldn't really vote on that tonight

088because i don't think that's presented as an option but more of a direction to follow okay um from the board uh questions comments david so i i'm i'm in favor of doing this is it's something it's something that i have um i i've heard these stories directly in in boston over the last few years uh well before the um uh the globe article and and you know uh the housing discrimination practices happen you know all all around boston i'm very much in favor of studying this but i'm just in favor of doing it in that kind of whatever the most practical method is if it's if it's if it's a good thing and we get benefits from it i i would be in favor of joining the consortium i don't know what the costs are

089with doing that and that kind of thing um if that's impractical in some way maybe something we do do on our own you know i also would you know like an assessment of how much work we think this is as far uh you know for a committee whether we would uh this could be folded into the uh achc's role uh the ach certainly abuts this uh this work and so i don't know whether that's possible it makes sense so um anyway uh i i'm in favor but there's a lot of logistics to work out um nadine yeah uh a couple of points uh one is that i you know i'm i'm wondering if this is in effect anticipating the work of the deic and uh you know should we wait until deic is has really

090got its feet under it and see if they think that this is a you know an important enough issue to work on so i think it's it's not good practice for the board of selectment to establish a committee and then start undercutting it and saying well okay you know these are things we're going to take on our own so i think at the very least we need to have deic weigh in on it analyze it they might have some suggestions they might have some stories that they they can tell so i think that's important secondly the funding piece of it our hso right now is gets its funding uh under affordable housing through the community preservation committee and uh you know i'm presuming that if we're looking at joining another consortium i don't know how

091much that's going to be you know we don't have a lot of extra money floating around in the couch cushions so i'm presuming that probably going to be going cpc to look for money to sort of expand uh the pool of resources uh in addition to what we normally issue to our hso so if you make that determination those sort of applications are due by early november so i think first off we need to get some idea as to how much any of these things will cost i'm frankly thinking that that this is coming at a fairly late in the process although you wouldn't think of the first of october as being late in the process but i think there's a lot of decisions need to be made and obviously money that is uh it's

092going to go to this consortium if it goes under the guise of affordable housing um is money that's going to be taken away from the more traditional places that where money is is allocated under cpc and most importantly the the big housing projects like the main street project so i think this i i think this is something that you know maybe if deic thinks this is important it might be something that we're looking at a year down the road jim um i just wanted to provide some thoughts on some of that um as liz pointed out affordable housing is different than fair housing so uh it's possible it seems quite likely to me in fact that cpa funding would not be an appropriate source for specifically the whole the wider world of fair housing so

093i think we'd be looking at a different funding source the other the other thing to understand is that joining the consortium is not a cost um it's certainly staff time to review the agreement it's actually a source of funds by joining the consortium we become eligible for um the federal funds from hud so it's uh and there's a portion uh not all but there's a portion of the work of the consortium that is entirely funded by um by hud money so it's a way of bringing new money in um that might be as we research this that might be a choice point between you know joining the consortium or just joining the testing part if there was some way of just joining the testing part we would presumably need to participate in the extra cost

094of that um so you know as as staff looks into this more deeply um that's something to consider that that could be joining the consortium comes with federal funds yes i just wanted to echo what jim said um so when we administer the consortium on behalf of the member communities or system in that it it it spreads out that fixed cost for the administrative activities of which there are are some for sure it does allow access to the funds and for the housing authority main street project would be a perfect um you know target for home funds um testing will always cost more than than any staff time and so that would be your your largest sort of expense dollars and by doing it through with other communities you would defray some of that you

095know if that's a practical approach to take um but versus going at it yourself um let me just follow on to to dean's comment and ask this today that um during the um anticipated work of the the deic um you know wouldn't um evidence or incidents of of housing discrimination if there are any come up through your commission's work yes i i i suspect that we will hear some things but that's not uh quantitative statistics right the the testing produces statistics which is very important and the deic would certainly be interested in understanding those statistics right so if those statistics exist uh we would be very much interested in in seeing them and if the board wants the commission to try to advise and guide on this program i'm sure that we can participate in

096that as well and very very happily participate in that so that that's all also uh good um so i mean it's up to the board whether you know you know who uh the board wants to drive this and assist in it um you know it seems to me that there are a couple of choices uh you know the achc which i mentioned before the deic or a new a new group um potentially but i i you know i think a new group is a little um know just kind of adds to the confusion a little bit you know i i would rather you know if there was a new group i would like to see it composed of members of the achc and the deic but um uh yeah and i i would like to

097see us uh uh uh join the consortium um um you know i but i you know i i think it uh as somebody said earlier that you know we have to have the the staff to be to be involved in that and so but i i i think that's that that's important thank you jim for bringing this topic before us i think it's too preliminary tonight to make a final decision on these issues great um jim to summarize then um it might be there might be some helpful uh conversations or investigation between um you know town staff and liz on sort of just understanding more about the uh you know the implications that from us staffing point of view and financial problems and then maybe we can come back and update the board when there's

098when there's more information developed the other part that i'm hearing is that it would be i would be happy to get information to the deity about um fair housing and the consortium as something that they can you know absorb and deal with as they wish and you know and get their thoughts that would be valuable thank you yeah i mean i mean i would imagine during the course of the mission's work if there uh are incidents or evidences of housing discrimination in town they will hear about it well you know as uh liz mentioned in her uh report you know even the the the um the incidents that i've heard about in in boston it's people have an impression that they were a victim of discrimination they really can't know because they don't know what

099was done for people that were um you know white or in another you know non-discriminated non-discriminated group right so they they don't a single individual is not able to do the testing i mean so you uh you know the people would come to the uh naacp boston branch and say and believe that they were a victim of discrimination and seeking help um but they wouldn't know right it's very difficult to know no for an individual just add also that people um if they feel like they're being discriminated against will go right to the massachusetts commission against discrimination and that they won't report it in town but they'll go to a group that has some authority to enforce i i think what often happens though is they just swallow and move on thanks okay um so

100um jim how would you wish to leave it and what would be your suggestion for going forward um so it seems like there's two suggestions for going forward one is getting some information uh i can work with david on how to bring this information to the deic whether they'd like a presentation or a document or whatever and we could ask john to have the planning staff and liz communicate more about to develop some of the details of what the options might be for either being involved in testing or joining the consortium okay uh john are you comfortable with that jimmy's second point with um working with liz on identifying potential costs and options sure absolutely so that would be both testing and gym and joining the cons the possibility of joining the consortium and the

101possibility of working with the consortium one testing okay so that's okay so john and staff look at testing and joining the consortium and uh jim and david providing the information to the eic yeah and i'll come back we'll come back with more information when those two processes have had a chance to run for okay so let's stand by that are you are you propos are you by giving information to the um deic are you looking to them to to incorporate fair housing in their in their work or is that still open look i think it's too early to tell but yeah i mean their charge is you know you know in terms of in terms of minority groups in town you know to identify problems uh that exists and to pose you know solutions you

102know that would be in there calling the report okay okay i said john there's one person with her hand up sure please uh janet please go ahead can you donate yourself hi janet adachi simon hapgoodlane and i'm also the chairman of the achc but the hchc is probably going to be talking about this topic at some point in the near future so i don't want to opine about how the committee might respond but i was involved along with bob van meter who's the vice chairman and jim snyder grant in the home consortium's present presentation i think it was last week of their draft executive summary regarding the findings of obstacles to fair housing in the consortium um towns and uh so there was um a slide presentation i'd be glad to forward that to well

103jim has it so you could you could circulate it to your your colleagues and as well including david but i circulated that to the achc and some of the members told me that they really wanted to talk about it um but as liz has explained and jim has also indicated uh the whole process of doing testing really requires a context which is complicated and however actin ends up doing it whether it's a sort of part of the consortium which is another decision or something else it really requires that you have professionals who actually know how to structure these things i don't i hope that nobody's in contemplating that a bunch of well-intentioned residents are going to get together and figure this out because i think that's a recipe for problems um it's a sensitive issue

104and what we don't want to do is is get people riled about this issue we want everybody to recognize if there is an issue that there's an issue and figure out how to to resolve it um but in the meantime i do think we have this new uh committee the deic which i will start using the acronym for because it's a lot easier but um i think let them start working on and doing their thing and i wouldn't you know i wouldn't want to sort of have the housing issue become a distraction i think they're they should be able to i hope david will let them talk freely about the issues that really are troubling them whether it's housing or something else um but i would mention that um fair housing concepts are working on

105fair housing is incorporated or encompassed in the new 2020 housing production plan so even though affordable housing is different from fair housing there is some compatibility uh between what the achc's principal charge is and and fair housing so but there was a there were there was a little group of us who talked informally jim liz and then town staff about this whole idea of fair housing and i think it would be it might be a good idea to have a group i don't want to say a committee but a group a working group that kind of works with whoever is going to be doing all of the the professional stuff the high level stuff to train people perhaps in town as testers uh we don't know yet but to have a group of representatives from

106committees probably deic achc and and then obviously some planning staff and who knows who else but to work together and sort of oversee the whole effort but those are those are my ideas as i said achc hasn't talked about this but um they're aware that this issue may be coming up on a future agenda so that's all i have to say thank you thank you janet is there anybody else thank you jim liz thank you very much um uh the next topic is a statement from the um mapc regarding systemic racism uh jim please um thanks um so this agenda item harkens back to again our goal setting session in july and as you may recall as we looked over this large list of potential goals we had all come up with we moved some

107into a special category of items that were seemingly either simple or already in process that we could just deal with without making them formal goals the two that i remember are creating an updated org chart and coming up with some statement of our stand against racism in the face of the killing of george floyd um so tonight i wanted us to have a chance to talk about how and whether we should craft such a statement um and so the the statement you have in the packet there's two there's the there's an extensive statement signed by 19 town managers and mayors in the metro area it starts with general principles including an anti-violence approach to policing then it has a section on state oversight policy which is which doesn't include any statement about limited limiting qualified

108immunity which was a topic that came up in a previous board meeting and a section on local policy that seem to include some parts that our police department has already done such as banning choke holds and some topics that are part of our other goals such as examining the role of the police in delivering human services and some goals that haven't been part of board discussions yet such as having some form of civilian review board um so i you know i'd asked john mangerati if he was planning to sign it since this was a statement from town managers and he said that a statement on these topics would be better if it came from the board the next statement that i wanted to present as a possible model to learn from is this much shorter

109and focused statement from the boxborough board of selectmen entitled acknowledging racial disparity and it it's um it's much shorter it makes no specific policy recommendations it does explain that all lives cannot matter until black lives matter and ends with a simple affirmation that they'll place anti-racism at the top of their priorities there's two more pieces of this puzzle that i wanted to make sure were in our awareness before we got feedback from each other about this the first is that our our creating and chartering of a diversity equity and inclusion commission that includes a particular focus on black lives is a statement in itself of our priorities and if we proceed to create a written statement from the board i think it would certainly make sense to do this in cooperation with the members of

110that commission the second is that our town manager has been working on this topic by creating a staff-led diversity work group that may also have useful input into racially related issues facing the municipality and how to address them um so with that as background i just wanted to leave room for board members to say anything about whether and how we should craft a statement about racism and our stand against it and if people have any particular thoughts about whether the boxborough or the mapc models seem like useful starting points do you have a copy of the box for a statement that after all that mapc material can you see that now got it fits on a page yeah it sits on a page and it uh kudos to them they did a great job okay

111okay has boxworld formed their own equivalent to a deicy i don't believe so do you know any other communities that have formed a deic equivalent at the time we started i believe that there was only one that i could find but i've been told since that there is there are other communities uh including maynard i was told i don't know that for an absolute fact but i was told that um maynard has formed an equivalent committee so we were reasonably uh quick and in informing our our commission um uh you know each community has kind of done their their own thing but boxborough formed this statement david so i i think it is important that we we do something here i actually you know so they're they're very two very different styles between the mapc

112statement and um the the boxborough statement the mapc space statement is very specific in in in lists of uh things that are good to do specific actions for police departments specific actions for communities things like that very good the the uh the statement from box mural is uh in some ways in my mind a more powerful statement kind of a statement from the heart um uh and it doesn't really have a specific you know bullet list of items that need to be done um so but it i find it actually a little bit more powerful it's more powerful especially because it's pretty concise um you know i i think we could do either of those or we could ask the deic to crack something for the board's consideration um so uh you know any of

113those those three it depends on what the board wants to do in terms of style right yeah okay um other members dean or joan well i recommend that we turn this over to david's committee and hear back from them again yeah i i agree with the you know the mapc statement i think you know it really put the town manager if we were telling to sign it or if we were supposed to sign it but put him in a very bad situation um you know it's reading through that statement it was uh you know a lot of uh very tangible sorts of efforts that people wanted to take many of which we've already taken uh i'm interested in the fact that you know many of our larger cities that probably have more problems than we

114do the mayor's did not sign it um i didn't see mayor walsh signing it i didn't see joe carter tony signing it um lots of other people that could have signed that which they didn't um i think the whole thing was sort of overkill i think it's inappropriate this statement here frankly there's no way that i would ever vote to approve this statement that foxborough has put together um it's virtue signaling of the worst sort i think it makes some statements without backing or without proof uh about racism that i'm not sure exists certainly not here i would certainly agree with the idea of deic taking a look at this [Music] and in the course of their actions what the possibility of coming up with a statement which is considerably less incendiary than this and

115certainly a whole lot less grandstanding than what we see in this one here any other comments uh david jim um i i would support what joan had said and um um you know direct our our efforts um on the question of race and diversity and inclusion you know to the uh to the deic which is now gonna have about 15 members and you know that's going to represent a very broad um you know group and um you know it's a committee you know it's it's not a citizen committee it's a town committee yet you know that we were proactive and put together and i'd like them to you know do their work and um um have them you know report back to us identifying you know any problems if any and uh uh how they

116should uh be addressed but i i uh do share um you know dean's you know discomfort um uh with with both statements i i think the um the lengthy statement from the mass municipality leaders would uh you know uh you know put a terrible you know burden on uh on john to basically live up to everything that's in the statement and many things that you know really don't necessarily affect us and um you know i and you know a bit of quite a bit of the language in the you know boxborough statement i just find you know for my own taste just um discomforting um but i you know certainly leave it you know up to the deic and uh you know and i'm looking if there are problems let's identify them and deal with

117them david so um i i have just a statement and then a question uh back so so first of all for the mapc statement um for the to the i agree that quite a number of the things that are in there we do already do and so actually i don't consider that a huge burp frankly and i don't know why we wouldn't if if we wanted that style why we would not support uh that i mean it's you know it's it's uh i can't see any of the things on that mbtc list that you would not want right it it it's a matter of doing the right thing here right um uh as far as the boxborough list uh and not this as far as the marksboro statement goes you know it's it's a like

118i said a statement from from the the heart i think you know it uh mentions the names of many people who have been affected by police fault uh violence um acknowledge that racism exists uh you know i i think that's an important statement to make i mean i like both of them it's a matter of style um so but i want to understand what uh other members of the board are proposing um would you like the daic to come i think this is what joan suggested uh a dic to come up with a statement for the board's consideration that was my suggestion yes that's right um because because you know the dic could come up with one in its own style um for the for the board to consider would that be at the end

119of their um at the end of their task force work well i think that's a long way away i mean i think we could do this you know in in in a couple of meetings or so right you know get it on an agenda get you know some people to produce a draft you know it might take three meetings to you know the way these things work in committees you know a drafts and that it's an approval kind of thing um uh uh i i think that's something that the the ic could do in addition to the i mean it's it's it's similar to the the work that that's in the charge of the committee anyway um john further comment no okay well um i had one last comment if i could sure um so

120in terms of helping the deic understand what sort of statement we're looking for no question for dean which i i i think you use the phrase um virtue signaling which is i think it's a phrase that i'm i'm not really used to understanding um i think it's i so maybe you could explain what that means here and if there were statements here that were um uh not uh that were non-factual um maybe we could maybe you could pick out one or two of those so we could understand uh you know where the where the problems might be and coming up with a statement that you would find agreeable well i think you know this is one of these handy little statements that everybody thinks oh well we'll just sign on to it um and and

121the fact that to this point boxborough has not i guess they're in the process of forming deic yeah there's something they they wanted to check the box and you know make it look like they're on the side of the angels and they signed this thing um i think that's what i think is the epitome of virtue signaling i think well saying something that you think is right is virtue signaling i'm still i think i've heard it i've heard the phrase used but i didn't really understand what it meant and is it a pr is it a problem to say what your goals are or what your intentions are i'm confused i i think if if these were sincerely held beliefs i would i don't think it's virtual signaling um but i think that you know

122there are it's very handy to sign one of these things and certainly the way this is written i would certainly not sign it because i don't think that it and i would oppose the board from signing something like this because i i think there are many inaccurate statements here yeah if you if you go to the the paragraph that we acknowledge that there is racism in boxborough yeah that seemed pretty easy well it's not easy for me wow and and it's not it's not easy for me either and i think this is the point behind having the deic is to find out if there really is a problem and guess who opinions as opposed to having a bunch of white people coming up with a statement like this and saying that's a problem this is

123an example of you're getting ahead of yourself once again jim and i think let's put down the groundwork make sure that there really is a problem find out what the problem is and that's why we've created the deic and then have them come up with a statement that we can review now some of the other things that i would certainly object to and we don't need to come through with an entire paragraph of people that have died as a result of supposedly police brutality because we could probably come up with another list even longer of police officers who died at the hands of criminals and i don't think we need a shopping list like that so i think a short concise statement based on fact which in my opinion this might be the facts in

124boxborough but i don't think it's i doubt that it is and i'm not sure at all it's the facts to be enacting so i think it's very important to do your homework don't just think you're going to sign on to something um you know we form a committee we go to all this effort we've had all of this discussions through many meetings about this let the deic work have them come up with something and then i would consider it yeah i mean let the committee you know do its work um and you know if there are problems you know you know identify them but you know the whole idea in the charge did not assume that you know acton's a racist community that there's rampant prejudice and intolerance it's it's do the work david so

125i i i i i think we can have a a statement of our beliefs without uh you know prejudging the conclusions of of the deic all right so um uh you know i i i i think we could have a statement about systemic racism that that doesn't uh you know that uh puts forward what we believe to be right and true rather rather than i mean and it was out again uh as assuming in fact not in evidence um and to that end i mean i i would move that we asked the deic to produce a statement of about systemic racism for the board's consideration i'm sorry i would move that deic to produce a statement about systemic racism for the board's consideration or our position on systemic racism systemic racism in acting or societally

126i would let the deic do what they want to do well they're they're coming up with a statement that they want us to adopt and sign right yeah yes for our consideration for for our consideration well should we as a board um uh make the direction that we're talking about systemic racism at acton or are we talking about its society societally i mean i i think we're talking about what our position is on systemic racism i'm not i think we can say what we believe uh what we believe is right without having to say that it can't possibly happen here it doesn't have to be geographic specific right we we know what what is right um and we can state what is right so you're talking about a general statement on systemic racism uh again

127i'm not trying to tell the deic what exactly to do i i made my motion um and uh you know uh you know it doesn't make sense to me to put into that motion the outcome of that motion we might as well just draft the statement ourselves if we want to do that if you know if we want to draft a statement this group of five drafts of statement we could do that but um uh jones suggested that we ask the eic to do that and that's what we normally do we usually ask the the committees and that you know will cover the particular areas to do the groundwork for us and and give things back to us for our approval and and revisions as needed well uh again i it's for our consideration right

128what we what we want to do with it is our we can vote it up and down we can amend it whatever we want so um your motion was to um to instruct the deic to draft a statement for the board of selectmen on systemic races yes okay is there discussion um okay no further discussion let's vote um david please not mr snyder grant hi ms gardner hi mr charter guy mr benson hi can i say hi she's that passionate well thank you um the next gender item is number 10 which is the um the fossil fuel ban decision by attorney general maura healey uh jim again please thanks um i'm still kind of reeling from the last discussion which just had me understanding the differences in our sort of views in a sharper way

129than before i wonder if i could uh uh suggest we take a very short break uh okay you know let that sit before we move on to the next topic thank you all right let's let's break for five minutes we'll come back about ten after and uh uh ten after nine yeah from the patriots just she's gonna go watch football okay you we may we may all be back all right i think we're all back thanks thanks okay uh five or so john is back um yes okay so um next item is discuss the fossil fuel plan decision by attorney general maura healey uh thanks um get my notes up here okay so um so you may recall that brookline passed a bylaw to [Music] prevent natural gas and other fossil fuel hookups between the

130distribution system and new housing new buildings they had some exceptions for research facilities they they added an exception for cooking they added and then they also added a review and appeal process for special cases for things like large buildings where there was no financially reasonable way to do hot water heating for you know without without fossil fuels um then the attorney general who has to review all town bylaw changes over overall the bylaws said it was not legal that was preempting various state regulatory authorities and the reason i'm bringing the talking about this with the board is that there is now an effort among um 13 massachusetts cities and towns to figure out how to allow uh towns and cities to make these kinds of bylaws and they are working with the rocky mountain institute

131which is a colorado-based energy think tank that's been doing amazing work over the last few decades and they are understanding approaches to for example what would what would the what would a legislative fix look like to allow towns and cities to do this and what parts of this of the goal of reducing fossil fuel use could be met by perhaps zoning changes which are you know very clearly under the authority of towns and cities such as providing you know density bonuses for um for net zero houses in the way that newton does for example um they're also looking at the possibility of a uh if there is a legislative fix is there a way of getting these these towns and other towns to [Music] have resolutions that go forward to their state legislators saying you

132know please support these efforts um and we have the earlier versions of this board that i have listened to uh and been at meetings of some people have expressed an interest in having a similar kind of bylaw or a method in in as the brooklyn attempt yes something similar to brookline um in order to um basically stop digging the hole deeper uh that we um if we're trying to since we've just passed this resolution at town meeting to reduce uh our fossil fuel use quickly over the next 10 years certainly it's it's we want to have new houses and new buildings not be using fossil fuel right from the start wherever that's possible because it would be you know expensive and impractical at least very expensive to have houses switch over you know just a

133few years in so the idea is to intervene early on um so i the reason i'm back to the board is because i wanted to understand uh if there still was a majority if there is a majority in the board that wants to explore this direction and if we do um i'm happy to join in with these other cities and towns and recruit other people perhaps from the green advisory board perhaps from citizens groups to help with uh with this consortium of 13 towns to explore uh next steps and then bring them back uh um to the board so i'm looking for feedback on that idea and questions sure uh david well i'm yeah i i did this has come up a few times in the in the board during my tenure and maybe before

134um you know jim called the digging the whole deeper i it's the same thing for me it makes absolutely no sense to have a building constructed now or a home constructed now that's going to last for 75 years or 100 years and haven't used natural gas when we want to be off of natural gas in 25 years and um it's just it just makes no sense i i will say that one other alternative for us um i i've been chatting with senator eldridge about this and the in the bluepine situation um i believe that our legislative delegation given a resolution or request from just us is willing to file a bill that would allow cities and towns to control uh have bylaws to control fossil fuel infrastructure so that is something that we could do

135quickly if we would we could do it tonight but we may want to consult with some people beforehand but that i i think that could happen even without reviewing you know it doesn't preclude any other uh methods that you know uh that that jim talked about it's a pretty simple mechanism to just allow to have at the state level allow communities to regulate fossil fuel infrastructure dean yeah i think i think a better way to attack this is not from the supply side but to attack it from the demand side and i think it's more important that folks whether it's the rocky mountain institute whether it's green act and whether whoever they are to take much more of an educational effort and explain to people what the objections are to the use of fossil fuel

136rather than using a sledgehammer approach of the government imposing its will on the people i think it's more important that people be able to make an educated choice as to what sort of fuel sources they feel is appropriate to use in their houses and not put any artificial barriers in their way you know it's certainly choices that i've made in my own home um you know with putting in mini splits and that sort of thing and very fuel efficient heating devices and that sort of thing you know it's something as a result of an educational effort and you know i would not be in favor of doing anything that is going to impose any more governmental restrictions on on the homeowners and business owners uh joan do we know how much of the housing stock

137in actin is serviced with these fossil fuels from an approximate point of view you can think of the town as being about half hooked up to natural gas and then there's uh and then a great deal of the rest is uh is using oil yeah on the the growth of modern electric heat these air source heat pumps that dean was referring to and ground source heat pumps are a rapidly growing but still small portion of how active needs and there still are a few households that actually use the old style baseboard electric heat that's incredibly expensive and very inefficient but in some places that's that's how the houses were built well um i mean i i would certainly be for jim if your you know group could work out um you know legislation that was

138similar to what passed in brookline that would uh um you know uh pass muster um and you know that wouldn't be subject i guess in that particular instance the it was a bylaw that had to be approved by the attorney general and keeps you know reluctant because i just have to i i can't approve this for reasons a b and c as much as i want to so whatever the glitches are work them out because david's absolutely right i mean we've got to take the bull by the horns and say you know look for new construction not existing construction we're not requiring everybody who has oil or gas in their house to within five years incur the cost of uh of converting over we're just saying in in new housing stock construction um you have

139to stay away from you have to use alternative energy sources and i i would support that so you know yeah i would say go to work on that david did we ask the green advisory board to make a suggested course of action here um you know the the thing that you just mentioned uh john uh that's exactly what senator eldridge proposed uh in his bill that we could we could vote tonight or we could ask the green advisory board for their their opinion um it just removes that impediment that the attorney general that forced the attorney general's hand um right so the bill that senator eldridge is proposing um uh it would uh just make it allowable for cities and towns to regulate fossil fuel uh in infrastructure um and and it's specifically to what

140you mentioned for new construction you know so we get asked from time to time should we uh and should we allow um natural gas down such and such street right and for all intents and purposes we have to vote yes right um uh and senator eldridge just built means that we don't have to vote yes and we could require developers doing any news construction use ground source heat pumps or whatever whatever the board and the town meeting thought was appropriate i mean we would bring bylaw proposals to town meeting and time meeting would make its judgment as to what was what was appropriate but we can't do any of that until the legislature allows us to well um [Music] gene i'm sorry i i'd be very reluctant to uh to vote i have to vote

141no tonight on something like that until i actually seen the legislation and understood the whole process a lot more and certainly read the bill so i would certainly uh be opposed to that kind of an action tonight jim i'd be happy to work with gab on this i'm their liaison and i could come back after they've had a chance to chew it over and i can i can talk with david to make sure i understand the you know senator eldridge's proposal too so we can you know get all that information in front of gab um and the last thought is um it's going to agree with dean on the part about education and and persuasion that especially when we look at all of the existing housing stock um there's you know folks that are looking

142at who currently look have oil systems or or you know electric baseboards are going to be would financially benefit from knowing about um air source heat pumps and grey outsourcing pumps and uh um so yeah i i think that that's that's another aspect of this that that you know i'm sure the green advisory board has started talking about as well which is how do you get how do you get that kind of education and information in the hands of homeowners so they can act on um you know they just have this oh we just had this overwhelming vote about the climate emergency at town meeting and people want to know what they can do so it's you know it's very important to be able to you know offer these options to people like you know

143stepping up to acting power choice green or you know looking at when they're replacing their heating or cooling systems no these things we definitely want to do a lot of education okay so do we have a consensus then for jim to take the issue back to the green advisory board and then come back to us with a recommendation is that the sense okay so then let's let's do that great thanks we'll stand by for when you want the sun again yep okay good um then item 11 is discuss the archaeology bylaw dean thank you so um somewhere hopefully waiting in the in the background should be uh bob ferrara and perhaps bill dickinson from the historical commission uh i'm liaison to that board uh they've been discussing quite a bit recently uh and i i

144think there was actually an earlier draft attempt some years ago to look at creating a an archaeology bylaw in an attempt to protect primarily ceremonial stone landscapes that there seems to be some pretty convincing evidence that many of these are related to native american ceremonial sites um and then sorts of things have come up in the past and you know the discussion about things like um some of the sites up in north act and trail through time that sort of thing which are on public land so that we can protect them but then there's also a possibility of uncovering some of these uh sites as uh during the development process on uh on privately owned land so with that uh i think if we can have bob and bill uh take over i know they've

145got a presentation for us so what i think we'll do is i'll start out um and bob's gonna screen share um and then i'll go through the first slide and then um we'll continue and above we'll carry on with the presentation so uh bob you should have permission to screen share please he he has that permission all right i'm working on it um okay [Music] you could have a screen share button in the bottom of your screen and then we'll get it in presentation is that it don't work yeah excellent so um i'm bill dickinson i'm the chair of the um acting historical commission and uh bob ferrara is with me and he's been uh heading up the uh uh this effort to create a archaeological bylaw and we want to have this by-law as

146dean had mentioned to better preserve the archaeological and historical assets of the town of acton and acton through mass general law 40 section 8-d created our historical commission for the preservation protection and development of historic and archaeological assets well right now we are really just trying to protect the project structure building structures not the archaeological aspects or or assets so what are the assets we're trying to protect well above the ground they're native american ceremonial stone walls and structures and colonial artifacts and underground there are cultural artifacts like pottery and fire pits tools and evidence of previous cultures both native american and colonial so what we're looking for the board um we're looking for support um that of the concept concept of an archaeological bylaw and we're looking for the board to allow us to

147work with town council to develop this bylaw for presentation at town meeting so with that i'm going to let bob take over and give you a little background and a better description of the bylaw thanks bill uh and thanks to dean for that introduction um as they've noted uh where demolition bylaw helps a lot with structures but we can't do much with what's underground um however back in 2009 there was an attempt to draft the bylaw in fact it was a very good bylaw but it just seemed to lose momentum with the uh financial crisis of the time and it just slipped much further back and actually the impetus for that bylaw that came well doug haley as many of you know of course uh was one of the key people uh with that uh

148also the historic commission worked quite hard on it and and where it really started was back with highhawk uh the the pine hawk discovery in southampton if some of you may remember that back in 1999 uh when you went to build a sewer plant atkin went to build a sewer plant we were acquired by with because it would involve federal funding to also do a uh do an archaeological survey most things don't but federal uh federal requirements do and that led to just a really big uh fine um 3 000 artifacts dating back some 7 000 years right here in our backyard in south of acton uh and that actually started a group called the friends of pine hawk which i was uh privileged to join because i happen to be president of the library

149at the time saying hey we've got to understand this a little better so we went on to work with with actually the schools the library and other discovery museum and other interest groups to put together a program actually every fall we now have several several events and lectures and we've understood our local archaeology much better we've also made contacts with a lot of native american groups uh and one of the interesting things that's happening kind of now just in this moment in time uh many of the native americans are saying hey wait a minute we we know we have this this past that but our culture was broken but we've been separated from our past but we know something's there we think these are valuable but and now it's time to start working with pounds

150us folks to protect them because they know they can't do it themselves they just don't have the numbers but uh so it's an interesting time to be forming these relationships uh we wanted to show you give you some idea of what we're talking about what we're trying to protect uh these are we're going to show you quickly two maps one is a pre-contact map in other words before concord was settled the first inland town massachusetts uh so that seven thousand or more a year before that where did these people live where do we think they live this was the survey done by pal professional archaeology laboratories back in 2009 and if you the red areas are the ones where you very high probability that you're going to find something yellow is not so much and

151the others are all fully developed and you're probably whatever's there is gone but one thing i would point out though you're looking for water features native americans particularly during these periods settled around water they got pond that area up in the upper left if you can see uh see there that's a highly and that's exactly where concord is building their uh water filtration plant if you look at the very bottom there's it actually is not showing to all well but that's the pine hawk site itself where about all those artifacts but in the other red areas you're going to see are along like fort pondbrook or uh neshoba brook so that's that's where you're gonna find this sort of thing uh let me go on so that's pre-contact that's before you know the other colonial

152wars and all that good stuff uh now you come back to the post-contact period and if you remember up in that northwest corner of acting near near fort pond and on you had the praying village one of the 16 praying villages of that was established in massachusetts back in the 1600s so that's why you see a lot of uh heavy uh purple up there in the light purple in this area and then again here this is along the shoulder brook uh trails of chime is up here so uh those are the areas that we would focus on okay just to go all right we already mentioned there's an existing bylaw and i one of the things that the mission asked me to do was look at other towns and i will tell you what was

153already written here although it was never adopted by town meeting was awfully good i thought it was a very fine product compared to the few others that do exist but the other thing the commission told me when we started working on this was what happened there did that screen just go there okay um they said look we want people to understand it on how it actually is rolled up not just this a bunch of legal words on paper and so they said go go do a flow chart which we did we've actually gone through seven iterations now we think it's getting pretty close to the final flow chart although it's not legal language uh and these are some of the people we had looked at it um land use selby staff has been on it

154um we've shown it to stamps again nick mcnary several local archaeologists including the former head of the uh massachusetts archaeological association antonio large who lives down in weyland has been very helpful uh and so basically what the flow chart calls calls upon or requires is explicit triggers uh in other words several conditions have to be met before they'd even be considered to have this site looked at and if they're met but those conditions are met they would be pushed into the over to the ahc to uh to begin a formal evaluation what we're trying to do and what selby has insisted on but i think very correctly is it has to be integrated with how the town already does business we think when you look at the details and certainly tom council will help us

155get there and the town manager's office will help us get there you know we're not trying to have a off way off of one side it's a little special procedure no we want this to be simple easy understandable to developers so they can they can see what they're getting into uh and very explicit um what's happening and also explicit time limits at each step and in those rare cases and i don't think will happen very often but when they do we will require a mitigation plan or uh so you'll either have to try to save this stuff or document it or whatever there'll be some or or you could even in the very biggest case stop things for a while which is what happened in the final round in south africa i don't know if

156you can read the purpose but that's kind of a preamble to our work okay so this is a final um slide here uh by the way those two i should have mentioned it then those two maps i showed you are already on the town's gis database they're now available to the public anybody can see them and we it's it's good information for for all what we'd like to do next is review with these these groups obviously we wanted to stop here first and get the selection conservation commission actually is meeting this wednesday and we're going to be meeting with them then go on to these other groups including some general community outreach we'd like to have a couple of meetings to explain what we're trying to do we do want to meet with some developers

157um we're not trying to throw arbitrary roadblocks we want them to understand perfectly what we're offering what we're trying to protect and one other interesting thing we want to try uh and we're going to be applying in a few weeks or the process when it starts is for some just very modest amount of funding so if we need to have a expert look at something very quickly a local archaeology firm or expert we'd have it available for the most part it will be funded by developers the big projects of course that would be on their side um and then well this is this is our punch slide this is our ask this very last bullet and bill you want to type in here well i'll just reiterate uh that we're looking for the board support

158and and proceeding with this bylaw and uh that we're really ready to hopefully work with town council to start putting some legal language together so we can submit it at the pound meeting so um we thank you for your time and uh bob and i can answer any questions that you may have um so questions comments from board members i only have a part i can't see dean oh let me stop the share together okay all right let's go back so do we have so the request is um can we get behind this um and have uh bill and bob uh begin the process of uh taking shepherding the bylaw the proposed bylaw through the uh various you know town committees um and begin work with nina pickering cook and in the actual drafting oh

159jim um i'm an enthusiastic supporter of this work um i would have some questions at the end after we've heard from other board members if we have time hi david yeah um just a couple of questions on that on the last slide the the where you had the list of time groups to review that's reviewing the language of the proposed bylaw after it's put together um well actually the planning board i would i would like to see the planning board earlier in the game because they're so important um but some of the others you know we would push off till we have better language um yeah part of it is we're just we're verifying the uh the work the part flow chart about all the triggers and and the responses and so a lot of

160those groups are just ones we want to do uh you know kind of round out our our flow chart with all the boards and then then get to the legal language and probably do another ride okay and then you you yeah that last slide also said uh you were going to apply for a cpc fiscal 21 money what is that for again i wasn't clear from that okay we have what's called the preliminary review there's a multi-step process but really like two bits there's a preliminary review and a deep review plumber interview you want to get a quick feeling of whether this site could potentially have anything and if it's uh if it's a developer you certainly could ask them to fund that this is to bring in a professional to look at it very

161quickly uh there may be cases uh where if it's a homeowner or a large plot uh or maybe a public interest group i don't know we'd like to be able to have a fund available so we could hire somebody quickly to look at this well i see so you're you're looking to have some seed money for when the uh bylaw might be passed yes after the bible yes yes so i i'm assuming you can't do that until after the bylaw is passed right right so that's not true that's not fiscal 21 because we wouldn't be passing this until top annual time meeting at the earliest right so and and tell me seems to be moving back too so yeah well but it's still it's still fiscal 21 but yes um okay i just wanted to

162understand what yeah i think to uh to david's point uh about the uh the ask at cpc and and actually we're in fiscal 21 right now so i'm sorry yes they actually would have been asking for money for fiscal 22. i think there probably is some latitude for them to make an application where this is being supported and proposed by an existing town committee an active historical commission and cpc has approved modest grants along the same lines out of planning and preparation for these things for both in the past acting historical commission and for the historic district commission so i think that technically it could probably be done of course it's hard to imagine what cpc might agree to but i think i think their application probably could go forward and then you know it'll

163get thrown in the mill with everything else i the other point i think to uh as far as it would be nice to have some money available presuming that this got passed at town mediating whatever town meeting occurs it'd be nice to have some money to work with uh right off the bat uh especially you know for homeowner situations or you know big developers they can pay for it themselves but if we had something for instance sega a farmer that was attempting to uh enlarge his fields or something like that a lot of the farmland that exists out there is actually adjacent to water resources so those might be areas you might look at for finding ceremonial stone landscapes probably a lot of them are gone but i think you know some some individuals that

164you know might want to do some work with that which would trigger it depending on clearing the field or opening up the field or redeveloping something for an agricultural purpose so i would suggest along those lines just thinking out loud that perhaps the uh actor now has an agricultural commission so that might be another group that uh you check the box on as well thank you further comments no i would support this okay so i don't think we have to take a vote is there a consensus that we uh um you know support and uh and wish uh the the ahc to go forward um with their uh with the proposed bylaw okay okay uh last question be pleased thanks um so i remember uh bob going to a meeting with you that included um

165doug harris the the uh the preservation say he's the deputy tribal historic preservation officer for the narragansett right he was talking about um it seems like a lot of our ceremonial stone landscapes are on conservation lands the ones that are still in town yes and there was talk of a memorandum of understanding between the tribes and towns to sort of jointly steward these uh existing um these existing features and i was wondering if that where that conversation was at it seemed like a very exciting opportunity yeah it's it's a little bit paused i don't know if you know doug had a stroke oh yeah uh he's okay he's okay now um but what kind of way when he's back on his feet we'll try it again uh but yeah it was a memorandum of understanding

166but honestly he was the one since you mentioned him he's the one who really got me interested in the historical commission he said the place to go is to go to historical commission so i applied to be a member of this historical mission i'm now the newest member i'm glad to have him he does all the work great i'm glad you hear that there's a chance of getting back to that conversation thank you okay so um proceed then with our support thank you all right thank you very much thank you bob and bill so um our next item is 12 next steps for crosstown connect transportation programs um and that was john thank you so the crosstalk connect is a regional collaboration with concord littleton maynard sudbury and westford this is a partnership that has

167been very successful over the last five or uh six years or so uh we've won awards uh international awards for this uh programming that that we've put together um we're at the point now where the ima the interim municipal agreement that we have with the other member towns is expiring on the 16th of this month and it's necessary to renew it uh we're also at a point where i think we need to re-look at a couple of the ways that this system and the partnership was is operating and i think we're embarking on a process right now with the other member towns to make those changes but i'd ask the board tonight to authorize me to execute a short-term extension of this intra-municipal agreement just to allow that work to um to take place a

168time frame that i would request is through the end of the fiscal year which will be through june 30th and so just to give you a couple updates this crosstown connect collaborative is the municipal partners i mentioned but it also includes corporate partners some of the bigger businesses in the region participate and our members and the work involves getting trying to help their commuters and their employees access last mile uh transportation solutions it also is the jump start for the shuttle programs and a lot of the other initiatives we do in acton and littleton and maynard we use the same dispatch service which is run through crosstown connect to to dispatch our senior vans and some of our other on-demand van services so we get a lot of value and benefit from the partnership but

169there's some things that have changed we've lost some grant funding and there's some transition happening with some of the people that we work with and so this is just an update um and asking the board for your support and extending it uh frannie osman who's been very involved since day one in all this she's been a great champion for transportation in particular with this partnership i've been working closely with her to make sure that we're on the same page with some of the things that we're working on i believe joan is the um designee from the board to work on this and i'm the i'm the alternate um so that's all i just wanted to bring that tonight with any questions you'd like a request a short-term extension through the through the end of the

170fiscal year please we'll move to approve the extension to the end of the year is there a second now uh a second but it's it's a friendly amendment to authorize the town manager to uh engage in an agreement to extend to the end of the fiscal year okay so that's that's your us and joan you accept the amendment and we have a second is there any further discussion okay then david if we may proceed with the vote mr snyder grant hi ms gardner hi mr charter hi mr benson hi i also say aye so that's your names thank you for your help i'll report back um progress okay uh thank you so the next item is called we called it housekeeping for um email policy and communications with staff um so uh let me i

171we never came up with a formal policy on this we've been we kind of uh muddle along in a in kind of a comfort zone um so let me just and it's typically jim the chair each year or the person the chair designates to respond to emails that are directed through the board's shell so doing it this year um um i when i uh get a request i acknowledge the receipt generally say that the issue will be taken up at a board meeting on such and such a date and please join us and i avoid certainly avoid any um personal opinions and i think it's really important that you know all of these emails be responded to you know you know promptly and and in in all instances i copy um board members so they

172could see that um a reply has been made and um and then uh the issue that nina pickering cook had raised in my first year on the board well is that is the act of copying all board members um a uh a communication with a quorum of the board outside of a meeting and i i i just didn't you know you know uh you know really by that i i think the the problem is and i think we've all avoided it is that another board member engages the emailer uh tagging on to that and i think we've all avoided that and i think that's um that's really what we've got to continue to do um there are operational questions that come in about you know i have this problem on school street or you know

173there's a pothole on main street you know um you know by the arboretum and um i just routinely refer that to to john and and copy the board and the board has followed a practice of not you know no further responses and then there are um um are other emails that you know seem to be that they're questions that would be directed to a board member who who is either working on that issue or is a member of the liaison to the town committee and i just refer it to um to you to uh to the board members i think we had that jim with the cultural council recently and did a very nice job so i just would um um you know would would like to um you know continue um this practice if

174everyone's comfortable with it and if subsequent chairs and vice chairs you know want to alter it um you know based on circumstances you know that's certainly fine with me does that make sense to all of you okay then um um just a final thing if they're emails to an individual board member either on your personal account or your town email you could respond as you deem appropriate including a substantive response but you know just don't um you know respond to um you know just don't involve a quorum of the board um in your in your response so i i think that you know that should pretty much cover the emails john do you have any concerns are we good no i just the the quorum of the board copied on an email raises concerns for

175me but you addressed it so okay good let me the other thing with it's a little more complicated and it's and again we've kind of you know muddled along with this for um you know um you know during john's tenure and in my tenure because they parallel um these are a communications um with town staff um by by board members and it it's basically you know achieving a balance between john's needs as the manager and not encroaching on them um and our job um as select men and women um to get you know information um that we need and i'll just say up front there's no one you know right way um you know to do it i think we all make a practice if we're communicating with uh town staff members um to copy

176john in on um you know the email so he knows exactly um what the communication is recently um there's been a request to the it department um i'm from select board members um uh asking for that you know requests for things to be done and i guess we we carry a little more clout than we might think we have because uh the um you know staff that was you know selectmen asked me for something so i better put that at the top of my list um that caused some concerns recently where um i t people were you know were busy with existing tasks and felt you know an obligation like you know john what do i do here and um you know um you know john um said he would prefer that you know all

177requests for information um you know go through him so because he gives staff work to do and uh and he felt he would be in a better position um um you know to um to manage it um so i i have given this a fair bit of thought certainly over the um the um the the last year and i've had several conversations with janet adachi who was you know a nine-year member of the board um and maybe here's a way to that we could think about it we could all get comfortable um we could look at um what we might call mandatory um access um including actual telephone or in person meetings with town staff for issues that i know this comes up with me all the time you know issues come up and you

178know i'm looking for background and you know in details and i'll reach out to town staffers always you know copying john with the questions i had a recent one with uh steve barrett and i said just take your time on i don't need a quick reply but it went to the issue that one of the fincom members raised about we see shortfalls in revenue several years into a recession so i just asked you know john is has that was that the practice during the great recession and what air revenue sources were impacted he got vacuum in a couple of days and it was a good reply and he was fine there are also issues where during when we get site plans a select board member is assigned a site plan knowing nothing about it but

179you've got to take responsibility and leave the discussion so you would reach out to someone in planning i've got this could i come in and can we talk about it and also you know the common one that you know that that i've had is either in the you know the presentation of a town meeting article um or in putting an outreach together for a town meeting article where we where we need information and i'll you know deal directly with the town staff person meet with the town staff person so i think those are what i thought were mandatory things where the selectmen can go in as long as john is aware versus you know discretionary items such as um hey i've got this you know great new idea how we could do things better or

180i'd like to institute some that i'd like the staff to take on a particular project that those items are discretionary and should go directly to john as to how um he would best think you know that should be done on on some bait on whatever basis has worked best so having said that um i'd like to open it up to to member comment and discussion hadeem yeah i think you we all have to be aware that it's pretty easy to get on a slippery slope here um asking an innocent question you think i'll take somebody 30 seconds for an answer and then the next that leads to another to another to another so all of this comes out uh at the end i think it's very important that you know we all be cognizant of

181the fact that we hire the town manager to be the manager and that includes controlling all of the staff and all of their tasks and how they spend their time and uh i think we need to be respectful of that we're paying this guy a lot of money to do the job and we shouldn't be in the business of undercutting them this is not a new thing for me um i got hired by chris farrell as town minister and you know one of the initial conversations he said to me as a new department head is never talk to any of the selectmen especially never talk to joan gardner so i think it's uh and i think i had the same conversation at one time or another with uh with nancy banks and bernie hartman and

182nothing johnson and steve ladue so i think it's you know it's the long history it's taken a long time many many years over 50 years to sort of uh have the the office of the town manager institutionalized into the thinking of the town staff and also into the thinking of the board of selectmen so you know as far as you know some of these momentary contacts that that chairman benson is talking about that's one thing but i think the bottom line for me is that you know we really need to respect and go through the town manager for you know anything of any substance whatsoever but with in terms of what i had tried to break it down between where staff where were some kind of mandatory access versus discretionary access if it were the

183things that i mentioned if you needed infra understanding of an issue if you needed help in preparing um a town meeting presentation if you needed information in conjunction with an outreach for an article a site plan um you have any problem with um selectmen reaching out to town staff copying john and getting the answers either by email by telephone or in-person meetings or some combination dean jim anyone um no i think you've laid out a bunch of helpful distinctions that i'm very comfortable with um i i had some questions about cases you hadn't quite covered yet because i think that um you know for me the transition from being a sort of outside advocate where i would you know just wander into town well and talk to people all the time to being a selectman

184hasn't always gone smoothly so i'm sure i'm one of the people that has tested the edges or going beyond them so i want to make sure i'm doing it right in a way that's you know doesn't undercut uh john um so a few cases i'm wondering about one is that if i'm the lease on to a committee and there's a staff assigned to that committee um like austin with the commission on disabilities i've often talked directly with austin without involving john figuring that austin that's sort of part of his job to work with us and that he would contact john if there was anything raised that was you know going to involve you know extra time or extra money um so it's mostly all these logistical things so i i sort of at one point

185i wanted to hear from john if that was okay um the other thing is in terms of contacting it um i'm i'm pretty sure that i have um taken the edges of what the it help desk is for and stretched it into suggestions about you know oh why don't we do this with the website so i'll stop that um i i i'm guessing that that's the wrong place for feature suggestions or if i send an email to the it help desk with things like that i should start including john uh in the emails which i'm very comfortable doing so i guess those two i had the questions about those two parts so john hey i'm john did you want john to answer what would be great if he was yeah well i think i i

186would respectfully request that if you need something from staff you you work through me okay um regardless of what it is uh you mean any any request of staff should go through you well uh generally yes i mean i'm available most hours of the day mark wait waking hours of the day and if i'm not available i can make someone else available in my place okay so you want so in my terms of if i mean if if i want information uh for a town needing presentation um dealing with the finance department i should go through you well uh generally it's my job to make sure that you're prepared for tom eating presentations so i'm happy to do that i'm happy to bring in anyone that needs to be involved to make sure that you're

187prepared i mean is that a real good use of your time i mean i want you out of here i don't want you i want your home with your family at night i don't want you to tie down you know an extra line of communication um i'm happy to do it that's uh what i signed up for other comments david uh no i'm um you know i i don't i don't think i've been making significant requests uh uh you know i mean know i guess i do do what you were saying john i you know that there is times uh earlier in the year or late last year uh where i would ask uh kristen a question uh for example and then i would copy john um but i don't know uh john majority if

188that's what you you meant that uh that you should be involved or we just send the request to you you send it to chris kristin kristen responds to you and you respond to me uh no i don't think it has to be that um much of a no i don't mean to be a gatekeeper for access that's not the role here it's just to make sure that if there's a if there's a task that i'm involved in the ask and if it's you know i can help determine how substantial it is uh you know inside town hall because sometimes things um as as somebody mentioned sometimes things take longer than they you'd they they should and sometimes uh you know as as you mentioned john when it's when a selectman sends something it rises to

189the top of the priority list regardless of what other things are going on um just i same thing i do i mean that's where all we all work for who we work for and uh everyone that works for me indirectly works for you and if they hear from you they they um address it but i know excuse me i i always try to include john for no other reason that you know i don't know everything that's going on so i might be asking one person for something and john would know that oh someone else is already working on that right and uh you know i don't want to start duplicate work or anything right so uh for for any anything i i make sure uh john's involved um what's the comfort level that we all

190have i mean i try to set something out mandatory discretionary um fantastic are we far apart here right john i think you said on the request you would always copy uh john manderati is that right i think you said right if you were asking something from the finance department that you would uh copy john mangerati on that is that right are you comfortable with that john generally sure he wants to be involved more rather than less so ty goes to the manager jim um so don i'm wondering if if uh if you feel comfortable with if um if one of us um you know does a cc when when you would have preferred that it be a uh you know an ask through you um i just want to make sure that you feel comfortable

191just you know giving me or the other others of us feedback about that and uh you know no no it's not a foul it's just oh by the way uh you know this is a case where i would have preferred that you go through me instead of just cc me because if you can give me feedback then i'm then i feel very comfortable with this process i just don't want to have to guess all the time yeah i think that's a good that's a good uh suggestion okay and i'm happy to do that so i mean echoing what john benson said at the beginning what i do if i'm there were times last year where i just um wanted a piece of information that i knew that kristen had and i i just was asking

192for it i would still copy the town manager so i i but if there's something i want staff to do i just send it to the town manager and not have it so i make that differentiation between information and do right i would never ever ask the staff to do anything uh direct um you know you know i want you to start a project to do that would never do that um but i i would occasionally ask them for information and i would always copy the the manager just in case so is under the the david's notion um information versus do like a project or um does that does that kind of make sense obviously you're asking me what would be the what would be the distinction right where we don't have to tie we

193don't have to go around a horn to get answer to a question um you know that we can you know that a staffer you know you know you know could respond to um in in one sentence one paragraph yeah i don't i think that's i mean and you're copied right i'm here to work on all of the things that you want to happen in the town you set the policy and direction and i go for it and if there's things you need to to implement that policy i can get it for you um and if if you think that sending a message to a staff person is the quickest way to get it that's fine copy me on it but i may say hey here's the answer um and save my staff personal time um

194as well it's you know i mean it's hard to come up with every single scenario and how it should be applied but generally like i said earlier i would just respectfully request it if you need something from the staff that you work through me whether it's formally working through me or informally working through me that's all dean yeah i i think you know this has gone on way too long but i think i think you have to appreciate uh the human human dynamic of this is that you know that i find it hard to believe but you know people look at us as being olympian gods on a cloud someplace and all of a sudden we reach down through three layers of bureaucracy and ask somebody a question you're absolutely terrifying some of these people

195and i think it's important that we not do that um you know and then you get all the speculation goes around well how come you know some the selectman's reaching out to me personally and you know why are they going around my department head why are they going around the town manager you know i just certainly you know we can't come up with a scenario for every possible option but i think it's i really want to stress to everybody from the point of view of not only supporting the town manager but supporting town staff is you know let it go through we've got a nice nicely established pyramid organizational structure and i think that we should respect it as far as we possibly can i know you know there's going to be changes and there's

196going to be times when people sway from this one way or another i mean i run into that because you know i've known a lot of these people personally for many years you know it's easy to ask an offhand question then you realize oh wait a minute that's not my role anymore but i just really beg you folks to keep as much as you possibly can through the town manager um you know i send stuff to him sometimes on a sunday night and i say don't respond to me this is a monday morning or monday afternoon thing you know don't drop everything to do this but you know can can you give me this piece of information and he always gets back to me and i think you know we just have to respect that

197that we don't want it to appear either to the town manager or to the town staff that we're undercutting him or that we're going around them i will strive to do better others okay i think we have a comfort level that will do as much as possible through john sounds good okay thank you all right um we have one more regular item that may take a little bit of time do you mind if we just go through the consent items first so we're done with that so um consent item 15 approved meeting minutes september 14 2020 16 committee appointments jim luciani full member cable advisory committee term to expire june 30 2023 um 17 committee appointments richard keller her full member design reviewer turned to expire 230 2023 number 18 accept gift recreation department for

19850 from sandy eldridge to be used for constructing a dog park in acton 19 accept gift recreation department for fifty dollars from mark j frederick's to be used for constructing a dog park enacton 20 accept if natural resources for 6 four dollars from president environmental for a septic system for the narrow sports pavilion twenty-one accept gift recreation uh department for fifteen hundred dollars for think for fun to support production costs for the 2021 summer concert series 22 accept gift recreation department for for david and maureen christmas to be used for constructing the dog park in acton 23 accept gift recreation department for five hundred dollars from steinberg alley charitable foundation for purchasing picket for picket pickle ball equipment for the elm street courts 24 accept gift recreation department 48 dollars and 25 cents from various

199donors for jones field and playground renovation 25 accept gift natural resources for 230.16 from adam d arthur to be deposited in the natural resources account for future rail trail improvement 26 or to declare surplus materials department of public works 27 um except um uh uh gift board of selectmen four thousand dollars from the acting conservation trust towards the acquisition costs for piper lane property as a community preservation open space project where do i have a motion to approve consent items 15 through 27 inclusive so move second second okay david would you call the roll please uh mr snyder grant aye ms gardner aye mr charter aye mr benson aye and i also say hi okay the the final um um new special business item is to discuss the actin box for a regional high school

200mascot um this is not before this is a matter uh within the uh before the school committee at present there was a petition brought by uh current and it's now included former active box persons of your parents and others uh seeking to um um changed the uh uh name of the um uh acton-boxborough school of asset from the ab colonials um that's also engendered um um a counter petition on facebook they both both sides have probably over um 2 000 signatures um the school committee is taking it up on october 15th i don't know whether they're planning a vote or further discussion and i wanted to put it before our board whether it was appropriate that we take a position on the mascot issue so i'll ask we have one um we have uh since

201it originated uh in the schools and with some alumni we have one board member who's a member of the a b class of 68 and that's dean and i'd like you to open the conversation okay thank you so great class of 68. the uh i think you know normally i would say that this is not something that what a selectmen would get involved with because you know it should be the the certain sensitivity that maybe there should be a regional school issue and let them deal with it um however the uh that uh it's really hard to divorce the two um certainly bloxboro is an important component of the ab schools but let's face the majority of people and the majority of the money to those schools come from the town of acton um you

202know as john pointed out undergraduate 68 both my sons attended there as well and graduated so we've got a long and rich history with the schools i think my feeling is that it seems to be a misconception that the term acting box for a colonial somehow talks about colonialism that you know we've heard about in other places and indeed in parts of north america certainly the the impetus and the understanding that everyone had of the term colonials going back to the early 1960s at least was that it was in reference to the revolutionaries the minutemen who fought and died in concord and other places during the revolution it really did not take into account any impacts that colonialism might have been having on native american populations in massachusetts and throughout the rest of north america

203really it was geared towards isaac davis and i find it very upsetting that people don't realize that and the people are willing to discard that just because we recognize because we're in the cradle of history here in the cradle of democracy here uh i'm surprised that people don't appreciate it more the value that that these revolutionaries had they came they fought and they died to provide us with liberty to even have these kind of discussions otherwise we'd be getting all of our all of our orders still from london and i think it's very important that we recognize that and we respect that now certainly as far as the impact on the native american population i you know frankly a lot of the native american population many of them unfortunately died out due to the introduction

204of european diseases before the true colonial period even got started the early pilgrims landed on cape cod they found an area with bodies everywhere because of diseases that it struck here from explorers and fishermen and traders that were you know predated through colonial people that we think over up here so that being said i think there's been a lot of effort recently to try to understand and celebrate the native american heritage here in acton we just had this discussion about an archaeology bylaw to to understand and respect ceremonial stone landscapes we have uh the trail through time up in north acton that that investigates a lot of those those sites we've got all the stuff with pine hawk that's gone on so i think you know even some simple things like the naming some of

205our streets how many kids in high school realize that the term new town road actually referred to the fact that it was a road that went from the center of acton to the new town which was the praying indian settlement by fort pond with the children indians so i think you know just because we want to celebrate our traditional history does not mean that we want to denigrate anybody else's history so i think it's it's appropriate for the board of selectmen to make a motion to support the fact that we support isaac davis we support the rest of the colonial revolutionaries frankly it would be a lot easier if we if it wasn't for the fact that concord had already taken the name of their mascot it's the minutemen because let's face it we had

206minutemen too but uh the last thing that i would i would say to you if you look over my shoulder you see that you all sign there john a tree service and even the exchange word for our telephone exchange traditionally enacted was colonial 34086 so i just think that it's important that that we make a statement i will certainly be making a statement on my own and many other people have been making statements uh one way or another but certainly i i fully support the continuation of the mascot as the colonials i second dean's comments i've been here a long time and i recently re-read the history of acton and i think the colonials is perfectly good name david well yeah i really like revolutionary war history i've read a lot of revolutionary war history

207and you know we can have a mascot based on that if we want but i have to say you know colonialism is a really troubling concept where our power comes in to dominate a people it's taking us hundreds of years to get away from colonialism and if we have to explain well while the word colonialism doesn't apply to colonial that's a little awkward um and but the biggest reason for me actually is that the students should decide you know everybody is the current students everybody is you know weighing in one way or the other i think this current students should decide i i would not support a motion by this board to um to tell the the students what aspect they should have jim um yeah i also want the as the school committee makes

208the decision and they look at you know these thousands of comments pro and con i do want them to weigh the current students the most um they're the ones who were being asked to you know go out there and play sports and be excited about uh you know this old white guy mascot and i if they find that divisive if they find it like not a point of unity for the school then it's not a useful mascot so i also don't think it's in our bailiwick to do to come up with my statement but my thought is you know if i was writing a personal statement i would be in favor of changing the name so um i had thought about this and wrote up um a little background and um and a possible solution

209to all of this so i started uh for a small town acton has a unique place in american history and challenging british british oppression and later slavery on the morning of april 19 1775 it was the citizen soldiers of acton led by 30 year old isaac davis who took on the strongest fighting force in the world isaac davis private avenue hosmer and acton's drummer boy were killed that morning on concord bridge isaac davis left a wife and four children mr davis mr hosmer and the young boy are buried beneath the monument on our town common and in 1862 it was another generation of acton-citizen soldiers the davis blues who were the first unit in the nation to answer president lincoln's call to end slavery and preserve the union um as the ab school committee decides

210next week whether to retire the colonial the colonial mascot it may be beneficial to pause and have a teach-in on local history where the differing aspects and the positive and the negative can be presented at the high school the social studies department members past and present can make a very knowledgeable and balanced presentation one possible solution is to update the colonial mascot by commemorating the colonial wife who ran the farm intended the family while the men were away fighting and adding the faces of today's acton students chinese indian black and brown latino and lbgt let's not sever connections let's add to them so that's that's my comment dean is there anything further before i think dean wants to bring emotion i think i i think your suggestion about uh you know encouraging the schools to

211uh to further discuss this i think is a really good one and and certainly in my opinion there's a disconnect uh between the high school students who are signing on to this and their understanding of history i could be wrong with that but i i think there's there's a lot of history that needs to be cleaned out to folks so with that being said um i would like to move that the border sliceman express their opinion to the school committee in support of the continuation of the mascot the acton-boxborough colonials okay is there a second okay um is there any further discussion okay then uh david would you please call the roll mr stutter grant no uh ms gardner hi mr charter aye mr benson hi and i uh i wrote names so it passes

212three to two okay does how do we wish to communicate this to the school committee do we have your would you wish to communicate it dean because i i it sounds like you're going to take up well certainly i i will do my own communication but i think probably to de-escalate things here okay that's the town manager to uh okay convey that to uh his opposite number either white that makes much better sense okay jim um yeah i think that's the right way to proceed i think communicating that it was a you know split vote would be helpful okay okay so um i don't have any further business um being none i'll take a motion uh to adjourn joan move to it sharon is there a second okay um david mr snyder grant hi ms

213gardner hi mr charter hi mr benson hi and i also say hi so we're adjourned okay thank you all see you on the in two weeks bye good night you