Select Board Meeting - December 9, 2025

I was absent um for a meeting a week ago. Um there was a matter that uh was addressed at that meeting having to do with an appointment to the CDEICR committee on diversity inclusion uh equity inclusion and community rela

Yeah, I gave Kate's upload to that. So, she Do you know what the how big a town is?

So a lot of them are pretty good actually. Lawrence is the main problem.

Um we are assuming that we are continuing our uh policies around the funding of OPEs. You we pause that in 26. We can talk about that. Uh and then um going back to the 6.6% uh level for the CIP as well. Um so all of thos

or not this is viable or anything appropriate is to tax the full levy amount in year one of the override, but not spend all basically build an override stabilization fund. So that in the event in the likely event that th

You know, there is something to be said for like a pyramid style override, but I, you know, you'll see what we talk about, at least on the town side. This is not an override where we're asking for new things, right? This

system of X versus a school system of X - 800 students. Um, and we rarely get that kind of analysis of what's going on with the school department numbers. So, um, I'm hoping that along the way we're going to have those n

um when in fact uh well actually you know we might not need that money if if there were 17 kids in a classroom on average versus 16 uh in a classroom on average. So if we we don't get into that level of discussion, I don

Well, it's because these other bills are coming due that you that was approved by the voters. So, it would be really helpful to overlay this into what the uh average tax bill would be for our classifications. So, one thi

override on the ballot is a individual property based property bypropy based um calculator so that someone can can put their address in and see based on this override and based at my current valuation what what will my t

borrowing coming on for the first year in fiscal 27. The fourth coming on for the first time in fiscal year 28 and the fifth borrowing fifth and final projected final borrowing coming on in fiscal 2029. just to give uh y

chapter 70 level funding for charter tuition uh assessment reimbursements and level funding for um offset aid which goes directly to the library so showing 2% increase in fiscal 27 slightly more optimistic in the outy ye

growth there as well. The BEu pilot is our biggest and obviously um in a declining economic condition. You know that we're very concerned about preserving the existing agreements that we do have. Um and so just trying to

Uh there's been um coverage of u I think it's a Governor Healey initiative to uh see if the legislature will approve allowing lo people at the local level to bump up pretty much those areas that you just mentioned, right

personal experience um in in our household that people who don't normally engage with town government found extremely interesting was all of the individual comments. Yeah. I mean, when was the last time that we saw from

Um I am I am I am concerned that that goal does not uh adequately represent the breadth of reasonably priced housing across many different dimensions um that we might that we we might want to we want to

So, I have a little bit of an issue with three. I I'm a bit concerned that we shouldn't always presume that maintaining what we have right now is the ideal scenario for potentially changing conditions on the ground from

So part of it was about communication, right? as you and Paul said, captures where John and I were just concerned and then the part about identifying infrastructure that we want to preserve or enhance um sort of squalor,