Water Resources Committee - Regular Meeting

Good evening. This is uh August 19th. It's the meeting of the water resources committee. I'm Les Fox, the chair, and I am going to do a roll call for establishing a quorum for the committee. So, when you hear your name called, speak out. Steve Schmidt, present. Cindy Marowitz, present. Uh, Brian Clemens, you're muted.

I'm present. Thank you. And Brian Lynch, present. Janet Connelly, present.

And Les Fox is present. Um, John Marowitch is being admitted. If he shows up in one minute John, I see your face. Uh, if you can hear me, we're just in the middle of finishing up roll call. If you are here and want to answer, I can ask if you're here. John Marowitz, I will Oh, no. Do we do have a quorum? John is here, but he'll be speaking up later. So, uh, we do have a quorum. Uh I did announce that I'm present I think. So uh first thing to do is uh to welcome our new member Cindy Marowitz who I'm sure most of you if not all of you know. Um so welcome Cindy. And um we have other another new member Sam Anderson who is not able to to make the meeting tonight. Um so uh we also have a new finance committee liaison uh who will not be attending. They uh are uh unable to make it tonight. So uh Kashava is now going to be replaced by Mr. Sculpin I think. Anyway, um I don't want to waste any more time talking, so I'm gonna introduce Emily DeFranco here from Wesson and Samson. They've delivered what they're calling the final draft of the water resources

report they've been working on. And so, um we'll go over that tonight and uh have a discussion and talk about next steps. So, Emily, I'm going to turn this over to you. you are a co-host, so you can share a screen and whatnot.

Sure. Um, hi Cindy and Ralph. I haven't met you either. I've seen everybody else so far and I've met everyone else. So, uh, nice to meet you, too. I'm Emily DeFranco for you two that I haven't met. I'm the project manager, uh, for this project with Weston and Samson. Um, and I've been working with Kevin McKinnon, um, who could not be here tonight, who is one of our technical leaders and vice principles essentially at Weston and Samson to to complete this report. So, the the final draft that we sent you all basically has all of the pieces um that we discussed or that we had planned on having in this report. Um and it also addressed all of the comments that we had received um to date which are documented in the back um as an appendix. So you can see what was addressed, how it was addressed, if we didn't address it, why not. Some of the times it was the reasons we didn't address something. It's just would that you know one comment would have been a whole another project that was just sort of outside of what we were able to do here. But we tried to address as much as we could within the confines of what this project is. Um, so that's that was sort of the process.

You're still just to sort of, you know, this is not the final final, but any comments that we receive at this point, we're hoping they're more sort of on the if there's something glaringly wrong that we, you know, miss or you know, mispresent miss, you know, misrepresented for your town, please let us know. But it would be nice, it would be preferred not to get comments on some of on the sections we've already done unless there's some like glaring error as I noted. Um, and really just sort of more of the high level at this point um than some of the detailed comments because it does take a long time to address the comments and incorporate them. And I feel like the way we presented this report to you sort of chapter at a time or a couple chapters at a time allowed for that more in-depth review to sort of happen along the way. Um, and I like to do that anyway just to make sure that the project is going in the direction we want it to go in and that the final review is not a a heavy lift for everybody and just gets us closer to the action of what we need to do next. So, I I feel like we're at that place. Um, I can share the report. Um, maybe I'll do that just so we have it up. So, if anyone has any questions, I did not make um a formal presentation for this as I figured I would be doing that for wherever you would like us to present this uh to the select board or to whomever. Um, and I wanted to make sure as part of this conversation, Less and I were chatting about this earlier, you know, to get from you all what the the major pieces you would like presented to the select board or the planning board, wherever we're going. Um, what sort of stands out to you as the most important? Uh, you know, I can provide a a summary of this and and do the presentation, no problem. But if I I'd like the input from you all sort of on what um focus what we're looking from them. So

right. Yeah. Yeah. So I that's really I mean I'm not planning to walk through the report. I'm happy to do that. Um there is an executive summary. It's a two-page executive summary at the beginning. Um if there's anything that anybody wants me to talk about, I'm happy to. Or if there are any um initial questions or thoughts anybody wants to share, we can just sort of open it to that.

Yeah. I I I did not give this the the careful attention it deserves, although I did at least skim all of it and um it looks very good to me. Uh all a lot of the things that should have been there on the earlier drafts are now here and I think some of the uh ambiguities are cleared up in this current version. So I thank you for that. I do want to point out to members that uh the appendix that Emily mentioned that lists the comments that were sent in by all of us are in a table and what action was taken on them. So that's very useful. Um there's also a good appendix on PAS. Uh so it's a nice place to get appointed to the world of PAS and get yourself educated if you're or overeducated. I don't know how much you've been exposed to that. Um, and um, in general, um, I don't have a lot of detailed questions right now, but I do have one. Uh, I actually wanted to print those pages out so I could refer to them, but Emily, if you want to do it with me. Um, uh, let's see. Uh, I don't know what page table one, sorry, table 5.13 and table 5.14 right next to each other. I may have this wrong, but it looked to me that um they didn't agree on the uh total withdrawals for the town. I I may have just not paid careful attention, but if you could check that um I appreciate it.

This August withdrawal, this one, is that table 534 and 13? Yeah. Uh if you go I can't read those fine prints here. I can make it I can make it bigger. Hold on. Just got to find I'll go back to a single page maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Here we go. Right. So, that one says that if I understand groundwater withdrawals, which I assume means just Boxboro. So, this is for the No, this is for the entire basin. So, okay. So, it includes more than Boxboro. Sure.

Yeah. So we broke these up into based on comments from last time and then us sort of going back in and taking another look. We f we were able to estimate the groundwater withdrawal at the basin level and then we also estimate had estimated it at the town level as well. And then you know with the projections what that might be in the future but we wanted to you know to cover the question of these basins go outside of the town and water doesn't care about town boundaries. So what do we do about that? So this is basinwide and then there's a section for townwide as well. Okay. So let's go to table one 5.14 and see what that number says. Uh

yeah. So this this table has the same groundwater withdrawals for the basin and then it has here the town and that's the town. Okay. That's where I got myself demand as well for that we had estimated for the okay that's great. That's based on our sort of 27% share or whatever, right?

And the the the biggest thing is to see that the recharge rates are much higher than so you know, but we wanted to we broke this down more as basin level, town level, and then we tried to summarize it and it's a very hard thing to summarize because it's a lot of numbers and it's confusing and so it's in the text and then we tried to pull out, you know, important pieces. Um, yes. You know, as well. So, so that's why they're different. Um, and I think it would make, you know, it'll make more sense in the text as well as Well, no, I knew I was missing something obvious, but thanks for pointing me. Yeah, no worries. Yeah.

Good. Okay. Well, I think to me the biggest takeaway and uh most important outcome of this work kind of resonates with what a lot of people felt all along but couldn't prove, which is that we do seem to have enough water. In fact, I'm not aware of any evidence of running out in the sense that it's harder to find water when people drill private wells and so on. But what they've done is shown that the um average recharge rate uh the far exceeds our demand rate on average and it's projected to do so for the quite a while. Right?

So quantity seems in good shape. Uh which leads to the next obvious step. Well, what about quality? and that is is in your uh recommendations as a thing to look at next perhaps and uh so on and so on. There are lots of good recommendations. In fact, maybe um if you're looking for a at least my suggestion, maybe it's good to just go over the bullet points in the um recommendations and um go back and go from there.

Sure. Um does anybody have anything they want to say before we do that? We can always go back and forth, too. So I'm flexible. Maybe that's that these also I wanted to note these were our initial recommendations but we are happy to add other priorities that the that you all have as well. So that's why that's another reason why I didn't just say this is the final report here you go. I wanted this is based on what you know Kevin and I have like after we discussed this report as we you know kind of went through the whole thing these are what we would recommend as next steps but this doesn't mean that these are the next steps

right they're happy to take away or you know add more in as as you all decide and that could be something you discuss amongst yourselves over the next week or two or however long and let me know and we can add other because it is a good place a report like this is a good place to have concrete action items that you can then bring for funding somewhere, you know, part of it. Um, so we want to make sure those are captured from your from your view as well. Appreciate that. John, sorry. Go ahead. This is Janet. Um, Janet, I was gonna call on John. He has his hand up. I don't see your hand up. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Okay.

I'm sorry. said that, John. So, Emily, I thought this was a fantastic report. Can you hear me? Because my Yep. my microphone may not be working. Yep. No, we can hear you. Your lips aren't moving, but we can hear you. You're frozen, but your voice is coming through. Okay. Okay. It's amazing how I can do that. I'm throw my voice over the internet, but I did go through the whole document as you can see with all my tabs. Okay. Yeah, I thought it was great. Uh, one one of the things that I found interesting, there's two things I found a lot interesting, but I think part about the environmental assessment. Yeah,

the risk assessment that to me was very interesting because you did you looked at the number of properties um with septic systems and that's very important for our future water. Okay. In terms of we're talking about quality. that has a ready to present this to the public. Many of the t many of the graphs, okay, the a number of the graphs, can we get those larger so that you can actually try to figure out where the roads are and the parcels and the how the colors are correlate so that someone could look at that and say, "Oh, well, that's my neighborhood." Okay.

And that that's my question. Um that's so I just I was just talking about the um the environmental risk assessment section. John seems to be having audio or connectivity issues but um queuing off what he's saying um I don't know underneath the graphs that you're talking about there's a a set of GIS data layers. Uh perhaps you could if we could hand us the the right layers, we could maybe add the layers that represent our roads and do some of that work ourselves since doing all that wasn't part of your original original.

Yeah, I would say that's that tends to I'm we can hand over all the shape files that you need. That is fine. Um anything that we've created that will be part of the final package. All right, if that's enough. Um, the other thing is there you less at least has the word and you can make those bigger because they're just sort of they're just, you know, inserted in. So if you want to do that as well, you can. Um, does that sound? Yeah. So you'll have access. So I'll just I'll make I'm making a note about the shape files um for the final.

Yeah, we I mean our Tom Planner may be able to help us with that sort of thing. So Yep. Uh Jenna, you have your hand up and Steve has his hand up. What happened, Jenna? What happened to your hand? It went to you called on me, Les.

Now I see it. Um, so just following up with what John uh was saying in the appendix that lists out the septic system, there's a table and um it's unclear how the table was organizing, what the organizing structure was for that information. Mhm. And I'm wondering, I know that we um wanted to remove street numbers.

Um so we we noted that in the appendix that in response to your comment about that. Um we that is those are from the basically the title five um records and so we would have to physically go in to redact everything. We're happy to take out the appendix or you all are welcome to take out the appendix as well and just not include that if you want to do that. Um but we don't have that as an Excel table. It was built from sort of the the database of the title 5 records. Um so it's not as simple as just removing a column I guess is the and that's what we noted in the when we responded to that comment. Um, I think it's okay to remove that as an appendix, but we didn't want to remove that as an appendix before we heard from you all.

I'm not asking I'm just trying to understand it then. I'm not asking to remove the what I'm trying to get at ultimately is um well, I had a couple of questions about the table. Um, and so I understand that it came to you in a certain way, so you don't have the freedom to move things around. Y but if we were to include something like that um getting to the table so that we can know so we can be clear about what we're talking about. I can't remember which appendix that is.

D. It's D. Uh okay. I think that's before this. Sorry for the nauseating moving. I think it's this one. this table. Well, let me uh see what you're sharing. This is the title five,

right? Yeah. Yeah. So, I know this is coming from other people who are compiling it is what you're telling us and that's fine. Um the the thought I had about this table and again this might be committee level work that we do but what wasn't clear was whether maybe some of these entries were first entered because there was an issue and then they were entered again in the ledger so to speak because something else was done on the same property.

Okay. And so, so it's like, oh, is the problem as big as we think it is, or maybe it's smaller because some of these entries resolve what was originally enter. You know what I'm saying? I understand what you're saying. Absolutely. Yep. That's that's clear. Yeah. We just were pulling the septic the septic for these are the tier one properties, so they're the ones in the environmentally sensitive areas. And so yes, that's possible that that that that happened as well, that this is the inspection replaced the the problem inspection from before. And so is there enough information in the unredacted version of this that would allow us to knit together the you know if it's X Middle Street and X Middle Street, oh that's actually one location. Is there a way for us to know that or is it not allow us to see that kind of thing?

I think I'm gonna have to get back to you on that, Janet. Um Okay. Just because I I did not assemble this these tables. I've reviewed them, but I don't know. I want to see the initial version of this. And then

and I guess where I'm headed with it is what would be you know one way to use the information that could be useful would be um to go a step further in terms of how we present it and maybe present it by drainage basin. Um so that way you're like okay do we have a problem in one area or more likely in one area or not at all things happen systems are in old old houses or you know whatever but I don't know that but I thought oh there we could know it maybe because I don't know what this data set has but I thought you know like in South Aton right what happened was all of a sudden all of these systems are failing the you can see the flows in the river and it's like, okay, yeah, we have a problem in this part of town. And so then they do something about that part of town.

Um, and that might not be the story for Boxboro. Um, it's a different conditions altogether. There's not a river that runs through it, right? So, um, but that would be a good finding as well, right? That would be something people would want to know about. or there is some area of town where it's really high ledge and things don't perk well or it's really close to a wetland and there's issues then that would be a pointer towards something to just put on our list of let's revisit this let's update this you know in the future as a recommendation so that's where I was headed with that all of those ideas

let me ask a question on your question so is your interest here in not revealing uh the identity properties that might have a problem which might have been fixed later or is it just in figuring how to make the best use of this information for planning what to do next? Yeah. So, it's the latter less I mean I'm more interested in when there's a table of data that it should tell a story you know on its own. Um and this is an appendix. So appendices are where you just put your data. Okay, there it is. Yeah. Um, and so I I you know, not a criticism at all, but when I saw it, I thought,

"Oh, how are these organized?" It's not by year, it's not by location, it's not by street, it's not alphabetical, it's, you know, and so, and that's what made me look at it and think, "Oh, I think we have some things that got resolved." And it would be better to kind of know that so that if the problem is not as big as we think, that's important. Um and then if we really want to use this to group it by drainage basin then we would have to organize the data in a different way than what we currently have. So that would take some effort. Um maybe that is a committee level activity but only if the information is in the underlying data set that you're relying on.

Um that's it. That makes sense. And I will say that towns have used this like as a starting point to create like an actual septic system inventory which then you know h it would basically that gives you that ability to sort of track what's happened at a specific property over time electronically versus having everything in a file somewhere in in the town offices or hopefully getting a title 5 inspection upon property transfer. So that's, you know, there's there's a way to be able to use this that was sort of beyond what we were doing here. Um, but it be it sorts like it sets you up to eventually be able to to have sort of a track an electronic tracking system down the road.

Okay. Right. If if we can maybe squeeze a little bit more uh relationship information in this flat file first and then we could then we could have an electronic file. Yeah, I can find out what else is in this and what was taken out. Okay. Okay. Well, one of one of the me messages or recommendations in the report is that the town should encourage people to do regular septic system inspections. Um and as we all know, people are not typically very regular about that even even to the point of pumping their systems, right? Um I know I we personally pump every year

u but many people let it go for multiple years before they think of pumping. So basic educational things like that I think you information like this can be useful in terms of identifying what people should do or in some cases maybe already have done we don't know without knowing the answer to your questions. So anyway let me shut up a minute and Steve hand's been up a while. So Steve and then Cindy. Oh. Um the the report says that we have um abundant water in the ground, but um one of our solutions is to pump water in from outside from Lake Littleton and Actton. I'm not sure this is part of the report, but is that thing is that a good idea? Is that a good plan to do that to pump water in from outside if if we have an abundance right here? Oh, you're referring to just the Littleton water line extension or something else.

There's that and I think they have another existing one and the actton water district pumps all water into somewhere. Well, there's one place where active water district is delivering water to uh Joyce Industrial Park and that's been a historic case that's been there for decades. Yeah. I guess I I guess I'm just wondering about about pumping water in from outside if we already have plenty here. I I didn't Yeah, I'm I'm not familiar with where that idea came from in the report as it might not be.

Yeah, I think what he's saying, Les, is that the report is showing that there's enough water in the ground. So, is it necessary to pump it in from outside of town? Is that what you're saying, Steve? That's basically it. Yeah. Yeah. I I think that's a question that's a question that is outside of what I can tell you. It's you have enough water in some ways, but those decisions to have put those connectors in came from some other, you know, sometime would might I could ask Kevin that of of how that came to be, but I feel like less is involved just as much with the Littleton Boxboro project. So would know more of that history of how it got to that.

Yeah. But the other ones that are even more historic uh you know the uh Joyce Industrial Park and the Mean Apartments which are directly connected to the Lon that was all done by the contractor who developed those properties. Nothing to do with the town. Yeah. Yeah. Private arrangement. I'm just wondering but we are extending a big line from Littleton now. Um well that yeah that that is with full knowledge and participation and support by the town but that's to address a very specific problem at a very specific area. It's not intended to say this is a general solution we want to pursue. Could I speak less?

Yeah I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm just saying is it a good strategy? Sure. Yeah. Go ahead Brian and then Cindy. Well I I think the Steve to answer your question um the question isn't the amount of water. The question is the quality of the water. The water that is being supplied is highly treated and it meets very specific standards for what is considered to be safe drinking water. And that is why it's being imported is because the groundwater is contaminated and does not meet those criteria. Mhm.

So, in order to have people drinking safe water, we work with Littleton to bring that safe water into the town to alleviate the problem. Oh, yeah. I got that. Yeah. It's not a quantity issue, it's a quality issue, right? Obvious thing, but thanks for making it clear, Brian. Yeah. Uh they have plenty of water that's bad. They do. Yeah. Yeah, I think I think um we have we're connected to their aquifer, so they may actually pumping some water out from our ground though. Maybe I got that wrong. Sorry. I'm sorry.

We share an aquifer with Littleton and Actton. A lot of the water that comes from Actton, I mean from Littleton is part of water that is in the zone two, right? Those wells from Boxboro. Yeah, the zone the zone two is for the Clappic wells go all the way up to Applewood basically, right? I think Oh, that's that's active. But yeah, that's active. All the way through Beaver Valley. Oh, you're right. Okay. So, uh Cindy,

yeah. Hi, everybody. Um thanks for uh including me. Um I haven't had a chance to really digest this report. I was just going to follow up on a comment Janet made because I was searching for the appendix to to see what it described and I realized now the cover pages of the two appendices are are swapped. Okay,

so C is D and D is C. So that confused me um now that I figured that out um because I was trying to understand what where was the reference to this appendix and what were we trying to learn from it. But um now I I see there's a whole bunch of text that describes it. I just had the wrong appendix. So um I I will continue to listen, but I just want to point that out. Thanks. Yeah, we'll make it. We'll fix that. I apologize. Just going to go back to the beginning. Any other thoughts or comments? I'll go back down to those next steps less if you want.

Do we um Well, in terms of that whole water quantity versus quality question, I don't disagree with what was said. Does this report without doing an assessment opine on the reduction in availability of water over time because of draws from Actton and Littleton which could increase over time and likely will based on their development plans. Well, go ahead, Le. With respect to Littleton, uh their maximum withdrawal is fixed by the IMA

for that one water line. They water for other things in other there's no there's no there's nothing to prevent acting from pumping more water out of their wells which happen to pull from a a zone of influence or an IWPA that extends well into Boxboro. Um that's just water wars, right? So uh but I'm not aware that it's causing any issues now. Brian may know, but if it should become a problem in the future, we'll have to address it. But this report, to answer your question, this report does not opine on that. I don't think it does anywhere in there.

Not specifically. I mean, it's it's, you know, we noted that this is we're we don't know anything about beyond what we could, you know, estimate from the water management act, you know, withdrawal methodology that we used for the basins outside of the town. you know that we we we didn't do any sort of you know uh population projections for outside of Boxboro. We didn't you know do any you know property bypropy assessments for drinking water demand. It was all sort of just you know what what you've seen with how we've calculated things for the basin versus the town. So you know we can show in the tables we show that the recharge is still order of mag orders of magnitude higher than the current withdrawal for all the basins and that includes you know parts of other towns but it's it's not something that we can

say without doing any sort of a study about the you know available land for development in those towns and any sort of you know population projections and what that might look like in the future. Yes, change less. I'm just going to talk to Emily. So, I'm not suggesting that we do that, but there could be a statement about what we didn't do because it's beyond the scope of this work, right? Okay. I mean, um, it's definitely beyond the scope. I I just want, but someone could ask us or it could be part of it may be too in the weeds, but someone could ask it at a public forum, right? and we'd want to be really clear that this is what we asked,

you know, you to evaluate. You did that and you and I think it's a great report. Um, I just want to have, you know, official technical words that we can reply to people if they do ask us about concerns about Actton drawing more water or Littleton putting another well in another area that could draw more water from the same uh location where the where the extension line is. you know, we just don't know. And those are uncertainties and we don't have to do every single what if that could happen ever. That's not what we're talking about. I get you. I understand exactly what you're saying. We can add in a couple lines in that section and I think that would cover what you're saying, Janet, and that's an easy easy fix. So,

yeah. And if you're going to do that, Emily, it might be good to put in a few words about who else gets to chime in on that like the water management act people uh about pumping across basins and so forth because there are limits to one can do but uh it's not clear where the rubber hits the road first. Um but we don't know as someone said we just don't know how much is action action actually withdrawing from uh recharge areas lying within the political boundaries of Boxboro just because that's where the water and the aquifer lies. We don't know what that volume is. I don't think we do. We could probably guesstimate it but it would just be wild guessing.

I Yeah. And that's what you're saying Janet makes sense. I mean we know we put some caveats in there about we based all of our estimates even in you know Boxboro on current zoning and if that changes then our you know we have to caveat these things just because this can't be this is a planning level report you know and we have to make sure that you're right that people aren't saying well why you know that these are things that need to be considered in the future or may become an issue in the future. So um that's worth putting in. So we'll do that for sure. Great. Great. Yeah. Um, uh, Brian Clemens has his hand up. Hi, Brian.

Yeah. Hi, Emily. Um, were you able to say anything about climate change, how that might affect recharge rates because the sustainability committee is still claiming that we need to conserve water.

We did not. Um, we can add in a line or two about similar to what we were just saying about, you know, in response to what Janet was saying. We can add in anything like that's an easy addin that you know that it could change it this way and we didn't account for climate change for this, but it could be accounted for and this may be something that um, you know, sorry, I'm just making myself a note as I'm talking. Um, so that's we can add something like that in if you if you all feel like that would be helpful. Um that that would be helpful.

It would. Yeah. I mean people sort of expect there to be something about climate change in there. Um you know remember Charlene Golden rest in peace. Um she her simple motto was the rain comes down it falls in Boschboro and we use what we get. That's it. We have nothing else. And uh so but that's essentially it. We're we're we're fortunate that our recharge rate seems to be well in excess of what we consume. But that could change if somebody starts pumping madly on the borders or if uh there's a lot of development or if climate changes in a big way.

Probably I don't know my mouth just off the top of my head probably the biggest development threat might be from the bordering areas in Actton and Littleton which are growing strongly. Um Harvard doesn't seem to have a lot of intensive development uh that would affect us although all things are possible but yeah things that would change consumption outside of us would affect us because these basins are all interconnected. Um now as somebody pointed out it might have been Brian Lynch that you know a study looking at hydro geological modeling across the multiple bases and adjoining towns would be a very complex project and expensive but that would be the logical technical step to try to quantify that and say well how much of the water that is consuming is actually coming from our land you know

you know and just think of those old western western old westerns about water wars you I think the one thing we have to consider that's a little bit different than what this report has been aimed at is that when the more water is extracted, whether it's our own water or others, it's the quality of the water that's recharged that begins to affect the overall water quality in the basins. Correct? And this is why the quantity is one thing, but quality is a whole different different issue. And it has to be addressed section by section because the way things are

um the more you load the water uh from septic systems and from other things uh you need a lot of land to dilute that because there's certain parameters in the water that need to be kept below drinking water standards. Right. Right. Um yeah, conservation is a good thing and protecting the source is another very good thing. Um that comes through pretty clearly in our report, but it wouldn't hurt to emphasize it um as often than we can the quality piece is the quality the quality piece.

I mean that's right here in the summary. We the seems good further analysis of the quality was is needed. So, you know, and and I can see if there's other places to add that. I know it's in there a few times um that this is that focus. Um and we do talk about things that could impact the quality, but you know, there's no obviously real looking at the quality for this,

right? Um and I'm going to get to Cindy, but first I want to say we just passed it briefly that one thing that we don't get into in the report is so what's the impact on the commercial development? There's no demand projection for the commercial because we don't have any good data on what to project at this point. But this is something that I'm sure the planning board is going to want to think about and terms of uh what's likely to happen and when must we start being concerned about it and what do we want to do about it from the planning perspective in terms of development which would increase more demand on the available water in the ground. Mhm. So, uh, Cindy,

yeah, Les, I guess you're kind of reading my mind. So, um, I'm looking at this report from a planning board perspective as I'm a member of that board. Um, and and we were very, uh, enthusiastic that, uh, town was undertaking this project. Um, kind of getting back to both themes, conservation, which we were just speaking about, and also this commercial development piece. you know, I think um it would be helpful to have, you know, um some address some area to address conservation and best management practices perhaps and again I haven't read this cover to cover so perhaps it's already addressed but I would love to see in the summary and recommendations some you know reference about best management practices when we when we grant permits you know we do have some um conditions that we generally put in in our decisions But, you know, commercial development and uh expansion in town. You know, it'd be useful to have, like I said, two themes. One about I think there's value in having a conservation um recommendation in here um in some way and also something that references best management practices for for water withdrawal, water disposal. I mean, I think uh I might be simplifying it too much, but um everyone's going to go to the recommendations and and it would be useful, I think, for our board to have something to point to um that is supported by data. So, you know, again, I'm speaking high generalities here, but um we could certainly um would love to have sort of a document that can support some of the goals that we're trying to achieve and and uh in sort of simplified form if that makes sense.

Right. Um I I think there are other agencies that have best management practices or notions there are similar uh that might speak to these kinds of concerns. I can't think of who there are off the top of my head. Uh from the conservation commit comm uh conservation community board of health. Well, I mean, yeah, Border Health does, Storm Water Management Handbook does, and our but um yeah, any flow over 2,000 gallons in wastewater flow, no matter what's its origin, right, required to have treatment in the town of Boxboro, right? Only septic system treatment. I mean, an active treatment facility,

right? Now, um, so on the commercial side, large wells and and wastewater treatment facilities, I mean, the planning board has plenty of opportunities to try to impose some best management practices on the developers and so forth. But when it comes to private homes, uh, there are limited means, I think, and the way we currently operate. There are some homes in this town that already have private water treatment plants. Yeah. But I mean there's no hard to from a municipal government's point of view to require people to do things about private wells other than it's already in title five, right? But maybe that's an avenue to work on. Maybe there should be

we're in the process of rewriting the well regulations for right. So that's something that you I don't I think there's a maybe a mention of that in the report. I don't remember. Um I'm wondering if it would be helpful for you all. I don't know how often you meet less. Is it every month? Every two weeks? Yeah, we've been meeting once a month. Um

well, or maybe just through communication internally um for you all to come up with, you know, build off maybe of these five recommendations and, you know, determine if you want to add some more items to the list. that would be helpful like Cindy was mentioning for you know from the planning board perspective or what you would like to see um because we could you know I think that there were probably any type of report like this where we're talking about water management for a town we could probably come up with 50 recommendations we tried to down right but that's what I why I started this was saying these were just sort of the top the five that rose up to us but maybe this is an internal discussion for even if it's a circulated email that you guys add to um to get come to a conclusion of what you'd like to see in this list of recommendations and then get that back to me or I'm happy to have another discussion about it at some point um before it you know gets to that final presentation time. So um I don't know that's just a thought because I feel like there are there are things I don't know about within the town especially with the internal workings of the town that you know that you all are much more familiar with. So maybe having that discussion and then you know circling back circling me back in at some point um might be a way a good way to move that forward.

That's a good idea rather than try to solve that now. Yeah because there'll be things that come up after this call too. So I wouldn't want this to be sort of the final you know final list. Well one my plan here is that since we're reviewing this final draft tonight um it's already been distributed somewhat. Brian Lynch distribute it at the board of health and so tonight I'm going to distribute it to all the boards uh the select board planning board and so forth and um hope that they actually read it especially just the executive summary uh just to get a handle on what's going on

and I think that that will may uh stimulate some conversations and some feedback that we can uh bring back to our discussions here and communicate them back to Emily if we see obvious places where we might make some slight adjustments. Sure. I think it's in the messaging and how it's presented. Not not that there needs to be a lot of new work done in terms of investigations and so forth. Yeah. There's plenty of opportunity here to um do very um elaborate uh and expensive studies. Um I don't know if we want to do that. I think my gut feel is there's a lot of payback and just basic education about what people have

sepic system pumping getting your well tested telling people how to do it you know less when we were talking earlier it's you know there my uh in-laws didn't know they had a septic system for years I've heard that story that that that happens all the time it turns

and I was like I they never had it pumped they just didn't even think about what happened when they flushed the toilet and it made my brain I couldn't even understand how that was true cuz they were educated. They, you know, and they just never it never entered their mind. U they had a private well on the property and I was just like, "Oh my god." Um, so I think that it's just lost on some people, you know, and so there's a lot that can happen with especially targeted education, whether it's for the town or it's in areas where, you know, that there might be some, you know, the the it might be part of one of those environmental risk um areas that are discussed, but everybody could benefit from getting some education in some way and what what that might look like. I think that should always be part of a next step. Um, but you know, like Les is saying, there's a million things that you can do. Some of them could cost millions of dollars. Some of them can be relatively cheap, you know. Um, so what's the right way to move this forward and that's most effective and you feel like is actually, you know, getting this message out there and doing some good for your town and that's, you know, we're happy to help shape this to fit that um and fit your vision of where this goes.

Right. I mean, I'll just make up something off the top of my head. I don't think the report it talks about basins that are have more demand on them than others but I don't think the report really identifies any basins that are unduly stressed or no none of even the most stressed order of magnitude right so everybody seems to have a safe margin but nonetheless uh we might the planning board might and the board of health working with them might start thinking about what would we do if there was such an area that emerged you It could be a quality issue, you know, and then we'll

more likely it I think in this town, just like it's with the Littleton Boxboro connector, it will be and that's not just this town, lots of towns, it's a water quality issue as they sort of become known. Um, then you have to figure something else out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, uh, Brian Clemens. Well, I think it's important to remember that the buildout analysis only includes zoning by right. It does not include the development of any of the large properties in town. And that's standard procedure for a water demand projection. But we have to remember that.

Yes. In fact, um, and we have quite a bit of land. It's in chapter 61, for example, generally in the A res district, which is could be developed into residential units. Um, I don't recall off hand whether it's an estimate of whether I think that's that is probably included in the buildout analysis. what what would the potential be but uh doesn't come to mind whether it's actually back through the buildout typically is not going to it's not going to tell you much about what could happen on a residential property right because we don't know what that

what could go in there and that's why that's not included in the right the because who knows right it could be a a facility that needs a lot of water it could be one that doesn't you know and it's really hard to there's no good way to predict that whereas you can predict certain things for resial properties based on zoning in a different way. So yeah, generally you don't include properties that have to get permits to be developed, right? You can't assume that a property is going to get the permit to develop it. And so it's not generally not it's not included. Yeah. Yeah. And that's just sort of how these things tend to go.

Well, we can't lose sight of the fact that there are some very large properties that could be developed. Yes. Uh some of them are ANR pieces too that don't require much permitting. [Music] So I don't know that that has to you have to think about that. Maybe it's not something the planning board wants to chime in on in terms of you know what might be what might be missing here from this analysis in terms of things we should be worrying about or maybe not worrying about depending

again I go back to the obvious thing is education is the key thing here I think. Welcome to Boxboro. You have a private well and you have your own septic system. Did you know that? You know, my fantasy is that when people come from town from moving in from the city that they're handed a brochure that explains all this. Uh there was a thought at one time of doing that. I don't know that it ever happened. Les, can I just ask about the commercial development? Is it possible to run a sensitivity analysis and just do some what if scenarios and you know low medium high kind of uh numbers add to that table?

It's not under this scope. It's not that's something that we could do. We could put that in as a as a recommendation. Um I think that would be worthwhile. We had a recommendation in here about doing something like that for the commercial properties and then we took it out. I wanted to sort of gauge interest um instead of throwing that that is sort of one I wasn't sure if was that was too much to put in there. There's ways to do it, but there's no like it's not as I mean all of this is planning, so it's never, you know, it's like a model, right? Because perfect, but it's something. So I would say that one might be worth putting back into the recommendations to do sort of an analysis of uh commercial properties potential

because of the large tracks of land. you know, if we were just sort of already somewhat built out and there was minimal, you know, moderate amount of additional, but we have a good chunk of, you know, office park that's not developed and uh so I think that would be a a useful uh thing, but understand if it's not in the scope, but yeah. No, I would I would suggest when you if you do I don't know what the process you all will do to sort of discuss these recommendations, but and add to them. I think that would be a good one. I made a note of it, too. So, if it's not, I'll make sure to circle back, but to add to to add that in. Great. Thank you. Yeah, lots of possible scenarios. Um,

the recommendations list is a good place to put all those things because we want to, you know, there there are other things that we could take any one of the studies we've already done uh and go further. You know, we could do new studies and water quality studies, whatever it is. There's a million things that can be done, but having a list of the things that are the most important here then become action items that are easier to fund later. Yeah. Whatever it is, it's identified as something that the town is wants to do. So that's we we want to have as many of those in this recommendation list as possible.

Yes, indeed. And we should be thinking about at some point if we want to do more along this line that we need to make a plan and a proposal to take to the town to fund some additional studies that would produce certain results and got to lay that out in a way that makes sense to people that it's worth doing and why. And uh right now there's just too many possibilities. I don't think we we haven't even prioritized them. Like what would you spend your money on first for example? Right. Yep. I'd spend for the I'd go for the lowhanging fruit education. But anyway, just my opinion. Nice. Never overlooked the opportunity, right?

So, uh, any other thoughts, folks? Um, Emily, I think, uh, you got the sense that we think this is a very nice report, very detailed, very thorough. Um, thank you and Kevin Kevin for all your work on this. And

thanks. I and I recognize the limitations. Kevin does too. I think planning exercises makes Kevin's head hurt because he just wants to do everything, you know. He's like, "Well," and I was like, "No, we're just talking about what we could." So, he doesn't. So, I had to pull him back many times. But there it's frustrating because there's all you want to go deeper on everything, of course, you know, and so I recognize the limitations of planning, but this is a good starting point if you think of it like that. and then we build from this um and without but you want to obviously target how you're building from this by taking a minute looking at it and determining which path to go down and that's I think some of those internal discussions maybe some input from the select board and the planning board that's really how we can target how this like the finished piece looks so it has so it cues you up to be able to do all the things that you know that make the most sense Yeah. Um, lots of food for thought.

Is most of this data um, pretty um, it's stable. In other words, you know, we don't need to repeat this report uh, in 10 years. You know, we feel pretty good that this is going to last us at least the data you've gathered.

I mean, I think you can always look at the withdrawals easily. um when we did the basin scale withdrawals or just you know through the um I'm blanking on the name of the website because it's it's dark out and my brain starts shutting down. Um but it's in the report sort of how we estimated the basin withdrawals. I mean those are sort of posted all the time. Um, so that's something that can be updated or you can just kind of keep your pulse on the the buildout is the buildout, you know, and it doesn't include some of the larger, you know, empty properties, but it is the resident where can that's especially for residential, that's kind of where things can go unless your zoning changes. If that were to happen, we note that in the report sort of as if zoning changes at any point, you're going to want to think about taking a look at something like this again. So that caveat's in there just, you know, that that's based on what it is. So, it's I wouldn't say it necessarily needs to be done that often, but I do think, you know, just kind of keeping if anything major changes or you're starting to see very large developments going in when you weren't expecting them or something like that, then that might be worth at least assessing part of it again.

Yeah. Yep. Great. Thank you. Yep. All right. So Les, before we're done though, I know that there's a this you want the the final report to be presented at least to the I believe the select board. Is that still the plan? And do you have

Yes. Uh thank you for that's what I was going to bring up. So what do we do next? Um and what how do we time all this? I'm going to be on vacation for a couple of weeks and it's that time of the season. We our next regularly scheduled meeting is uh September whatever 16th. Um and then we have to think about when we uh have you come and present something which I say it can't be everything so the select board. Well, my plan is uh to put it as a presentation to the select board well in it in advertise well in advance, which looks like that probably will line up with their schedule at the end of October after there's a special town meeting that everyone's very consumed with getting ready for. So, I don't think we'll get any attention units from the select board before then, frankly. So, um, my plan to try to work towards that date. And so, I just want to see whether that is consistent with your expectations and your schedule that we could work out a date in that rough time frame or give us time to kick us around, come up with some questions of our own and

sure that you October 27th. I think that's the date because I saw it on your agenda and that's available that night to I don't know if to come or to I don't know what those meetings are if they're virtual or in person, but I'm happy to come down. Right. So that would be a as a select board that we'd invite as many people as you know we can let everybody know. Are they in person less or are they virtual? They're both uh they the select board does still meet in person and uh their meetings are recorded. They go out on BXB and so on. Okay. Yeah. So I would should I prepare to come in person I guess is the question.

Yes, I think so. Yeah, that's fine. I I would I hope members of this committee would make the effort to be there as well. So,

sure. Um, so then it sounds like that's fine. I mean, that gives us two months or so to sort of come up final message that we want to present that, you know, including the recommendations and things like that. So, you know, I I know you're going to be gone for a few weeks less. Um, you know, and I can start assembling things like the shape files to transfer to the town. um you know look at some of the small items that we talked about today to add those in. Um, but I I would say what is a realistic time to sort of get your final thoughts? You know, again, just sort of those if there's other highle thoughts high level like we were talking about tonight and that list of recommendations, how you'd like that to look. Um, right? You know, and it could be depending on it. You know, if you if you wind up with 10 items, you would probably want to consider um ranking them at least from highest to lowest of what you'd like to see. Five. items probably doesn't have to be quite as ranked. Um, in my experience, um, just, you know, but when you start getting to be a really long list, you want to start thinking about like putting privacy to them as well.

Sure. Sure. I don't know if like a probably even the end of September would be fine. It's not going to take if we can get all that information from you before then. by the end of September. I'm just throwing out that date because I know there's a lot of coordination and a lot of people

that a little bit of time to just, you know, incorporate the new recommendations and any other large things that sort of came up um and then get everything back because I would assume for the the select board would then need to get the final final report a week or two before the presentation. Well, I think that what we're doing tonight, it's good enough for them to know what to expect. I mean, you know, it'll it'll evolve somewhat, but it won't change in a major way. So, as I say, I'm going to get it distributed out to the world. Um, okay. And we'll be having a meeting on September 16th. So, I'm hoping folks that what you all can do with me is between now and then collect our thoughts.

Uh, I'll I'll aggregate them and then on our meeting on the 16th, we can discuss them as a group. What's our priority? What do we want to do? What do we would give back to Emily as her next step to do and add to the report as the what? Final final final version of the report. It would be the finalist the finalist of that. That would be that'll be the wrap. Right. Exactly. Yep. And then that would be the basis of you making a presentation. Now I'm just getting putting out October uh 27th as a the best guess right now. Things could always change on the town calendar, but they have fixed the special town meeting date. So, I think that's probably a good date, but we don't want to try to do it earlier. That would just

No, that's fine. That's fine. And I can um if I can get those so sometime in September, like after you meet, um get those comments back to me with the list of recommendations. We can wrap up the report, send it to you, and I can also draft a version of the PowerPoint and send that to you all. And great, you know, if you then have any comments on that, you can let me know. Okay, that'd be wonderful. It sounds good. Did anyone anybody have any thoughts on this process? We're cop cobbling together as we go. Plus, when can when can I distribute I mean the reports draft now. Can I distribute it to the planning board as a draft?

Yes. Or or I I can do that tonight. I can send it to u uh Rebecca and uh Alec if you like and everybody will get it or or you you've got it and you could do it now. I mean, people may get their mailboxes flooded, but Well, I just I I want to understand the dates. I don't we know Emily doesn't I don't want to take her time for this discussion. I just want to understand when do you want feedback because I'd love to give Oh, the feedback. Um, well, let's see. We're going to be meeting on the 16th of September. So, first week of September. Okay. So, we could distribute it to the board to at least I'm not holding back on sending sending this report. Yeah,

this is just your feedback as committee members to to us so we can talk about it together on the 16th of of September and terms of planning our next step and what we want to have a dialogue with Emily about. Right. But if if I'm just trying to if if would it be useful to get the board's feedback for this final final. Yeah. Well, I'd like to get I give them as much time as possible without cramming it too much on the end. So, I would guess give it to the board right away. Okay. and invite them to weigh in. Okay? And then they could either collect it as a group and send it as a group or send it to me and uh the other members individually. Um whatever's convenient.

Yeah. I mean, I'd like to talk about it with the board, but um I'm not sure everyone will. I just want to give our the board enough time. We've been slammed for, you know. Oh, I know. That's why one reason I don't want to rush this because I know how busy you've been. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Yeah. And as I say, I don't know. I didn't ask Emily if we have to slide it later because of all this is that going to cause you a huge pain Emily. No, I don't think so. As long as it's I think the the doing a presentation at any time is fine. I'll say that. You know, just imagine within the you know I know October, November somewhere in there. I assume it will happen and that's fine. It's more the,

you know, I want to make sure that we're not at this point doing big rewrites of anything, which I don't believe we'll be doing, but that's that would be my only concern is is having too much time for comments just to so we can get to a an end point sooner. So that that I don't mind whenever the PowerPoint or whenever I need to come to do the presentation, I'm happy to come do it. So even if it doesn't happen till November, that's fine. We'll give ourselves a goal of getting our collective input back to you uh after right after our meeting on the 16th. But if if planning board is, you know, up against the wall and they can't do it, we'll we can slide it a little bit. Yeah, that's fine. Better do it right, you know.

Yeah, I would say as long as we get I mean with the October 27th date in my head, I'd say as long as we get all the town every comment, every input, every recommendation sort of in a something by the end of September, that should give us enough time. That's what we're going to try to do. We're gonna try to do that. So, Bri Brian Clemens, you have your hand out. Yeah. Emily, if um if we also have some technical comments, should we get those to you like ASAP? We're not

as opposed to I understand you're not expecting a lot of them, but you said if there's something glaring, but there shouldn't be any reason to hold off on that until our meeting. The meeting seems to be focused more on the big picture recommendation stuff which we really can't do without discussing.

Yeah. No, I know. I just am trying to think in terms of our p our process of I mean you could I think guess you could send the the comments if there's something like that. Um but most likely we're not going to go back into the report more than one more time to make all of these changes. So that's that's why that's the hesitancy. I don't I'm trying each time we go in back into a report and make big make changes. It's that's a that's an effort, you know, and an undertaking. So, we're trying to just go back into the report one more time. Um that would be fine, but this would this would at least alert you a little earlier if there were any issues that people had. Okay. Sure. I mean, that's the process we've been using. Yep. No, that's fine. Yep.

Okay. Even though I don't know what Brian might be sending you, I'm still going to deliver this report now because it is a final draft and it's good enough for people to understand what's going on, give us feedback, give us their comments. That seem reasonable to everybody. Yep. Y Okay. Um well, okay, that's our plan. Um the public outreach, you know, the main thing is we get scheduled to be as a select board target date October 27th, right? Yep. And see if we can hold to that. If not, we'll do what we can. All right. Sounds great.

Emily, we don't want to keep you u up any longer than necessary. So, well, I've got to go get all my children to bed now. So, you're keeping me up. It's not you, but Okay. All right. Okay. Well, thanks very much. Have a good night, everybody. Take care. Good night. All right. Bye. Thank you. Brian, your hand's still up. Is that just Could you didn't take it down or do you have another comment? No, no, no, no. It's

okay. Uh, okay. The next uh item is to review the minutes. Uh, two sets of minutes. One is July 15th and then next one is July 22nd. Brian did distribute them. I think I said got Cindy got a copy. You may have gone twice because I think you already put you on the water resource committee distribution, but I sent it out just for built and suspenders to you and Sam. So, if anybody if everybody's read their minutes, uh, I'll entertain a motion to approve the minutes of July 15, 2025. So moved. Second. Any discussion?

Uh, hang on, Les. I saw a typo or two. I just got to bring them up. So, uh, you're on July 15th. Apologies. I had them up. It was minor. I think my name was spelled wrong and there was something else. But, uh, that's not minor. Thanks, Brian. Uh,

you have a difficult name myself. Well, I am not the Marowitz that John is, although I know people think we're related. Um, let's see, which one was it? It might have been the other set. And then there was a word missing. I'm sorry. I'm not Oh, um, shoot. I see where it's in number four. Yeah, number four C. And then there was a missing letter, Brian, when where you were referenced. Uh it was a missing sentence in number six. Oh yeah, number six at the back end. The last sentence is Clemens weather condominium associations. It doesn't make sense. Oh, it should that should say asked.

Ah, got it. Okay. Where are you talking about the misspelling of my name is misspelled in number number four of July of July 22nd, right? July 15th. Oh, July 15th. Yeah. 4C. Yeah, Cindy, it should be I M A R K O W I TZ. Yeah, it's it's on the July 22nd. So, the first number four should be a number three. Oh, good point.

Okay. See, we're used to seeing both marker widgets. So now I have to be really careful about which one we're referring to.

So again saying it's m a r k o w i tz. But you're talking about the meeting where you the mo the number four item was adjourned, right? We're on the July 15th minutes. July 15th minutes. I don't see you. Oh, there it is. sending arguments and uh number four should be number three, right? Got buried. All right, there you are. Yeah. And then number six. I I don't know. Is Brian keeping the minutes? Yeah, he does that. Okay. Okay.

Produce the final minutes. You send me them posted um to the offices of the town clerk. Uh what was the issue on number six? I missed it in the discussion. Oh, we asked whether Yes. Okay. Okay. Brian, you have all those amendations to Yep. All right. So, um we can entertain a motion to approve the minutes as amended. So, move. So, move. Second. Any further discussion? Wait a minute. All right, we'll do a roll call. Seconded.

Pardon? Who moved and seconded? Brian Lynch moved. No, John. Oh, you seconded it. My hearing is terrible. Did you Cindy, did you move it? I I moved them and I thought John Mark and I second it. That's right. All right. Okay, and John then. Yes. Right. Okay. So, now we'll do a roll call vote. Steve, hi. Cindy, hi. Brian Clemens. Hi, Brian Lynch. Hi, Janet Connley.

Hi, John Marowitz. I and Les votes I. All right. Thanks very much for approving the minutes. Um, the next thing here is that uh we we really kind of talked about uh we got presentation for the we got one more minutes left. Oh, I'm sorry. We went wrong with that. I was looking at them both. All right. To entertain a motion to approve the minutes of July 22nd. So moved. Oops. I see a typo. I see a typo. Should be 2025. Anyone second that? Right. I did.

I didn't notice it before, but that should be July 22nd, 2025. Right. Uh question about uh I don't know if Barbara Bert was is she representing Boxboro News. Barbara Bert. Yes. She Al Murphy is here. Barbara's just an interested citizen. Oh, okay. Okay. When you have somebody from Boxboro News, do you note that? Right. Oh, that's Al Murphy. He's here for Box. He's here for tonight, but I guess at that one there was nobody. Okay. Just curious. I don't think Barbara's on this call. I can't see her.

Uh, the only thing on on those minutes was I didn't catch who seconded the motion to adjurnn. I don't know if anybody recalls that. Brian, did you get the date at the top? Yep. Okay. And I I thought it was Steve who's who second the adjournment.

Okay. What do you Yeah, sounds like me. Okay.

All right. Did we move to accept? Sorry. Yeah. No, no other comments, folks. All right. Uh let's uh move to uh accept the minutes as amended. So moved. Second. Thank you. Uh roll call vote. Steve Schmidt. Hi. Cindy Marowitz. Hi. Brian Clemens. Hi. Brian Lynch. Hi. John Marowitz. Hi. Anna Connelly. I Fox I. Thank you. I did not hear Janet vote on the other minutes. I

think she did. Yes, she did. Yeah, she did.

All right. I only I only heard seven eyes on that. So beyond uh Western Samson making a presentation at the select board meeting, we need to start thinking about what else we do to continue getting the message out and keeping interest up. So I I know I don't have any answers tonight. Um but we need to do something. Can we get something put on the front page of the town website just as they have with fire station they have with 495? Just something to let people know that we're going to host a meeting to give the findings of our water resource study.

Yeah, that's a good idea. But maybe we should do it just a little closer to when we're going to be doing it. What do you think? Um, well, I I've always I found, you remember when we did the master plan, we gave people like anywhere from four to six weeks notice and then we continued to let them know about it. Yeah. So that they had plenty of time to adjust their calendar. Well, we can do that. I mean, we don't know for sure that the October 27th date will stick. I mean, that's just a stake in the ground at this point. Well, we we could just put something that says, you know, preliminarily uh targeted for late October.

We could do that. Box News has a question. Yeah. What's the message? I mean, I we have an opportunity. I put it in the news article. What is Yeah, Ralph can do it. Yeah. Uh they could do that for the news, right? Uh the water. I need I need to know the right message, though. [Music] All I can say right now is that water resource committee hopes to be able to make a public presentation at a select board meeting in late October

regarding the comprehensive water reported by Weston and Samson. That's right. Right. Right. Right.

I I'll give you a couple sentences out. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Good. Thanks for thinking of that. We'll also be producing some new information for further study.

Yeah. Um so uh item number eight is we had a request from the sustainability committee. I think it actually came to us via the assistant town administrator. It looks to me like it was put together by an intern working for the sustainability committee. I don't even know who is the chair of the sustainability committee now that Francy's gone. Uh but at any rate uh it came at a bad time in terms of uh meeting schedules. I could not get it distributed to you folks before our last meeting. So I did send it around um with a comment that they are hoping to have uh some comments back from the boards they sent it to. Uh I did not prepare any suggested message. Uh Brian Clemens, I don't know whether you were talking about maybe you do something. I don't know whether you did, but my impression of reading the report is it's very good timing for us because the main message of that climate action plan report is that um we got to improve community knowledge communities uh knowledge of water got to work on community education which is right in line with what we want to do. So, I'm hoping that the sustainability committee can be encouraged to help us with uh the messaging, but I have no plans to actually do anything about it with them. Um, and that's about as far as I got with their report. I don't know whether anybody else took a look at it or have any thoughts.

Can you forward that request to uh myself and Yeah, you probably weren't you probably weren't on this list when I sent that out. I'll do that. Right. Kate Davies is the uh I believe the chair of the sustainability commission. That's it. That's right. It didn't come from her. It came from Ian, I think, but I could be wrong about that.

My problem with the report is that they continue to characterize Box Boxboro is relying on private wells and we need to conserve water. There's no mention about the study that we're working on and that we have much more upto-date information than that. And I think that's a big oversight. I mean, water is a huge thing for climate, and they're just trotting out the same tired cliche about we rely on private wells. Well, I think there's more to water than that, Brian. I think that we have the situation that says a lot of the drainage areas in town based on climate information uh could become more susceptible to damage on roads, culverts, crossings, uh flooding in certain zones that are not flooded now. uh due to the intensity of the water we we see coming down in certain areas and I think as that approaches here we're going to be more affected by that and I think those things are things that we should be planning for and we should be looking to make safe

I don't know if they got into that specific move equipment around and do other things emergencies yeah all that's true but I I would think some of that messaging might be coming better from the planning board or some other partner as opposed to the folks who are mostly focused on drinking water as a resource. Well, I think the message should be spoken by all.

Yeah. Well, I don't know. I um I'm not sure. They had a survey they wanted people to engage. I haven't really had a chance to pay much attention to it, frankly. Um, I'm probably going to get back to Ian and say, you know, we we might be able to do something by the end of next month, which would give us a chance to talk about it at our next meeting on the 16th of September. If it's a hard deadline, we might miss the deadline, that's all.

Well, I don't know if we want to hold a special meeting. I I don't not I don't No, I don't. I can't. I'm way too busy the rest of this month, including my vacation. Yeah, I would like to see the email. Like I said, I don't think the planning board was at least if Rebecca got it, she hasn't circulated either. It sounds like they word input. We haven't I haven't heard about this yet either. So, um Oh, okay. Well, I will dig out the original mail and and send it to you. Maybe we can all buy some more time if other boards haven't had a chance either. Good point. Yeah, that's I mean they've already extended the deadline. It was the beginning of August originally.

Well, I think your point I think Brian that you made is or whichever Brian made it um you know I worry that we work in our own silos and I'm really hoping that these kinds of things are you know uh crossboard um you know inputed. So it is important that we all look at that and make sure the messaging is somewhat consistent. Um you know and clearly if they're not even aware that this water study is just being done that's a really important point. So, um I was prepared to submit comments individually um if we couldn't prepare them. But let's let let's let less find out if the deadline can be extended and if it

and if not and then feel free to send in your comments as an individual. I I will. Was it a thick report or what was the uh nature of the document? Oh, it's a four-page survey kind of a thing. Oh, I thought it they're building the climate resilience plan now. They're creating one. No, no, they're it's just a survey uh that they put together asking questions about climate awareness, I think, of what should be done. Oh, I have it here. Wait a minute. I I have it up. I can bring it up. No, it's a 100page report. Yeah, that's what I I think they're trying to prepare a report and I think they

Oh, you know what? I am looking at just the No, that I completely blew it because I'm just looking at the presentation that asked for what we're doing. Um, hang on. Let me try to share it. It has about 90 pages. Looks like this. I probably missed that in the report uh in the email. This is a prior box climate action priority plan. Oh, she had the folks from TUS uh folks from TUS survey analysis,

demographics of the survey, climate concerns and awareness. What are your concerns about with climate water resource management? Water management. That's a big one. Yeah. Yeah. and um definitely defined the basins that were subject to um analysis the storm water stuff should be really looked at. Is the planning office aware of the two efforts that you know this report that water resources is doing and the climate action plan? I mean it really seems like they should be aware of each other. I don't know. Okay. So,

well, they're aware of what we're doing because Justin and Samson had to work with them. Yeah. So, then a little summary of what they've done. So, but you know, Brian, I have overlooked the fact that there's a larger document that came in the mail with this thing. Sorry about that. Did that I sent I forwarded the mail directly. Did you guys not see it? Did you see the document that Brian's talking about? No. Huh? You didn't have to download it somewhere, Brian, did you? I thought you did send it, but I may have got it

through an Agricultural Commission email as well. I well I'll have to look at that again, but I what I remember was that the email had this little report or presentation that I'm going through now plus a cover letter inviting you to please respond to the survey. I think I think I had to actually go on the website to get it. Well, I missed that completely. the website meaning the website of the sustainability committee. Yes, I guess.

Um, let's see the survey and the documents.

Well, clearly I missed something that Brian has found a document that's that long. um which says there going to be more more time needed to study what's expected for a response. Um yeah, I see the document online now. It looks pretty final. Where are you seeing it? Uh from their from uh the sustainability's website. Oh, so is part of the issue that they never asked us to comment on the plan itself? I never saw anything. Did anybody else?

I'm going to stop sharing this. I mean, it looks like it's a complete document. It doesn't look like it's a draft. Well,

I got I got a Okay, hang on. Let me I'm going back. This is the thing I sent to you folks. I sent to everybody except Cindy because she wasn't on the committee at that time. I didn't forward this in time for our July meeting, blah blah. Please review the climate action plan and be prepared to list. So, I saw that Sarah Martell, who seems to be a uh maybe an intern or something, and it says, "Dear border committee chairperson, the sustainability committee and the office of land use and permitting are seeking your feedback on the town's first climate action plan. The attached letter requests feedback, outlines the method to provide feedback, and provide you with greater context on the climate action plan. respectfully arrested, you take it up, blah blah blah. Two attachments. One is the thing I just showed you and the other one is a local letter that just says what do you we're requesting feedback on four things and they're providing materials which is the full TUS cap presentation oh climate action plan presentation and then a memo which provides context and lastly a survey where you can record your board's feedback. I don't see an actual plan anywhere since you probably found it on their website.

Yeah, it's on their It's on the sustainability website on the right hand side. It's titled Boxboro's climate action plan. It's partway down on the right. This process is screwed up under documents. Well, I think what I going to do is uh get back to Alec and Ian saying that, you know, it's come to our attention there was a survey we didn't know about and so we're not prepared to respond right now. No, there's a plan we didn't know about. And yeah, a plan. Sorry, a plan we didn't know about. Yeah, like I said, planning board. It never came to our attention either. At least to my knowledge. But

I can't tell because uh this only Yeah, I don't It's a blind mailing from Ian Wilson who is our assistant planner sent to Sarah Martell and to Alec unless he's blind copied some other people. I have no idea. Well, it sounds like uh we should circle back. Yeah, circle back with the planning office maybe. And uh yeah,

it's you know are they still looking for comments or you know are they going to do a public presentation? I mean I think that's would be interesting to know. Well, I'm going to give them comments whether they want them or not. That sound like a plan. Go for it. Bry. All right. So, um I'll follow up and find out what's going on with that thing and let you guys know. Um so, let's see. Do we have any other parts? There's no. So Sam is not here. So we can't hear from the select board. Planning board. Cindy, I didn't want to say anything uh as your report from the planning board.

Since you weren't here last time, it's okay. I mean, but you might want to update people on things that are happening.

Uh we finished our meeting at like 12:15 last night, this morning. Um I don't know how much detail you want me to go into. We um so we had four items on our agenda last night. Two of them were the um articles uh related uh coming up for town meeting. One was on the municipal use and then the other was on the MBTA communities. Um the vote on the municipal use was to only bring forward one article by a 3 to2 vote allowing um public safety. uh and we used it we defined the agreed on the definition for public safety. Um and the article is to add it as a line item on the use the existing use table. Um and the proposal is to allow it by right in all districts. As I said that was uh recommendation at a 3 to2 vote. Um so that appears that will be the only article brought um on that issue to town meeting by the planning board. Um, we will probably have a public hearing on another article that um tweaks the um uh the the limitation on uh building size in town center for public safety buildings. Um proposals to allow just for public safety buildings to increase from 15,000 to 25,000 ft by special permit from the ZVA um and for buildings in town center because they right now have a limitation of 15,000 square ft in size. Presumably that was done when Town Center would had a different vision to uh keep things at small scale. Um so that uh we'll have to post a separate public hearing because that particular item was not noticed. So we will have a hearing on that coming up. The MBTA communities um under uh late late night. I think we agreed on language. Um we will be putting forth a proposed district. Um it's up in the northern corner of town at the Littleton line.

basically includes the Mean condominiums and the other condominiums in front of Mean um part there's about I think five or six parcels um there's a lot that went into the modeling for this but um we will be bringing forth basically the overlay district that's in presumably in compliance with the town's um with the state's requirements and again we um were a little bit uh at the mercy of the modeling which we had a consultant assist those with. But um the uh the density um you know we're required to get a density of 15 units per acre. It's a little confusing because the modeling ultimately shows something a little bit less than that per acre, but the overall model works. Um we were required to um zone for 118 units. Um the model has basically identified 164 units and it's not 100% clear to me why that happens but we are told that that is the number that um we have to work with unless we kind of reduce the number of parcels. Um so the board is moving ahead with the plan as it is now. So we were required for 118 the model is showing 164 over these um to meet the density requirements. So there'll be more explanation I'm sure at town meeting about this but um that will be the one MBTA community up for vote um for October. And then uh the other two items we discussed were uh site plan review for um a trade building on 975 Mass a which is um uh kind of across from the tree master's property. Um and the other uh we had um continuation of a hearing with Campanelli for their um request to extend or amend or reissue the special permit for the park at Beaverbrook. Um they're proposing

667,000 square ft of new um buildings of over five buildings and um that that hearing is continuing. So that's uh that was four items that we uh worked through last night. So we had a very long meeting to get through all that. Yeah. How many buildings total, Cindy? I'm sorry. How many buildings total are they proposing now?

Uh camp proposing five buildings. Um basically lot 600 is next to the um it's next to the solar carport area there if you're familiar with the park. Next it's next to the building 500. So that's sort of all part of that part of the campus. And then 700 and 800 a little further up the road. 700 is on the right hand side. 800 U has three buildings proposed. Um each of them at least 100,000 square ft footprint. Um and those are sort of above or behind them are the Trail Ridge condominiums. So we did have some interest from the folks in Harvard at Trail Ridge um concerned about the proximity of those buildings. So,

so how many buildings total are they proposing, including the ones that are already exist? Uh, you're going to make me do the math. I think it's about 1.2 million square feet. So, um I'm not sure I have my numbers on. Originally, they were approved for 10 buildings.

They're originally going to have 1.4 Well, there are two phases. The original after the second phase, they were going to have 1.4 million square feet. um second phase never got built. So what they're proposing now I believe is on the order of 1.2 million square feet. So 66 667,000 of that is the new project. So they've got about 500,000 in there now plus or minus.

I did have a question um for less and or for you guys at this point. Um, one fact that um, I did learn last night was that out of the 65,000 um, gallons per day in the IMA that the park was allocated 40,000 gallons. And I just wanted to run that by you guys. Was was this news to you or is this something you already knew? And does that leave sufficient the 25,000 remaining gallons for all the other customers? Is that something you guys had discussed or I'm just curious as to um you know are you comfortable with those with that breakout and everybody's going to get what they need? Um was curious about that.

We haven't looked at it for a long time but it seemed okay at the time. I haven't I have not gone back and revisited it.

They've indicated the betterments are going to be starting to to kick in. Well, um, it sounded to me from what Russ was saying, this is a slightly different Betterment model than I was expecting, it sounds like some part of the Betterment's fee is going to be tied to volume of water drawn, which I think means how big the pipe is that will be attached, but I'm not sure because ordinarily the betterments are defined in law to be a portion of the capital investment to produce the benefit. So that's a capital investment point of view, not a water volume point of view. So they may be using some new model or a blend of models. I need to find out. I'm not sure about that. But the last time I talked to um Matt Silverman, who was the water u guy in Littleton about when when she be getting starting on our Betterment U calculations or process to apply them to our tax bills. Uh, by the way, just the pipeline is not expected to come on the line or be finished until the end of 26. So sometime around that time frame, we need to be ready to get ready. Um, so that's a lot of runway left yet. But at that at that time, which was a couple weeks ago, Matt says we're not ready to actually do anything about because we haven't finished tallying up all the costs, which are the thing that goes into what needs to be better. That's what the bottom line is. This is the cost. here's what the betterment fee is based upon your share of that cost which doesn't talk about water volume. So, uh we're not ready yet to actually talk about total cost because they're still doing some in discussions with some properties that are to be benefited or not. No, I guess they're all going to be benefited. But, um why would it change? Uh

I think the uh I think the cost are tied the uncertain costs are tied to that portion of the connection which is not yet defined by for all buildings. That's my guess. I'm not really sure about that. Okay. Well, I know this wasn't a separate agenda item, but you know if it's okay for me to just continue you can bring it up now because on Campanelli. Um, so it was unclear to us up until recently that whether they were actually going to take the water from Littleton Electric or, you know, they did a lot of work on their own well to to mitigate PAS.

Yeah, I that's good that you brought that up because I've been wondering that myself. What I heard, you can see what you heard Cindy that their plan is they will connect to the uh Littleton pipe and that water will be dedicated to the buildings, the new buildings and the existing well that has now been uh upgraded to treat for PAS will be used to service the other buildings. So there there's some division of where the water goes, but they're going to be using both sources. Perhaps the little water will go to the new buildings. I'm not really sure. your buildings that they're talking about permitting for the future.

All right. I I wasn't that wasn't clear to me that they were splitting it out that way. But anyway, I just wanted to make you folks aware of that. Um and I thought well some split he definitely implied some split some use of both sources of water. They treated water from their current well which is a pretty large well and then water from the Littleton pipe. Okay. Well, there was some discussion that maybe Littleton would take over their well at some point and do something. That's between them and that's a private conversation between private property owner and Littleton water department. We're not at least I'm not privy to those conversations. Okay. Well, the water balance and what the town is getting. I just thought that was um something that you folks might

Yeah. The water balance then goes back to what they're permitted to deliver from the Littleton water system to Boxboro and that excludes what they can pull out of the ground with the existing bill. Right. Right. Okay. Anyway, that's the that's kind of the summary of what the plan towards that. Les, did I hear you say the waterline wouldn't be complete until the end of 2026? That's my understanding. Yeah. That's a year and a half from now. Am I confusing the years here? Um I think so because the part must be the end of this year, end of 25, right?

I think the part that goes across 111 is subject to the bridge work. Well, there's the Well, remember this pipe's not going to go across the bridge, but the bridge work is tied into all this. Uh the Mass D I don't think they've started the work in Mass Avenue to do that. I I don't know. I haven't seen

what you can do and because I may get it wrong or be confused. U it's a little obscure. I mean, they've been both ways on this. Littleton Water Department's website had a very prominent update section about this Boxboro waterline project. You have to dig a little bit to find it now, but they will have the schedule in there if you want to look for that. I will refresh my memory, too. I said 20 less less. Um, Mass DOT did cut across Massachusetts this past weekend, I think. Oh, they did? Yep.

All right. There you go. Now, last I talked to uh Tara Mcmanis at Western and Samson, who's the project engineer on that work, she she implied it would be happening about that time, but I hadn't noticed any evidence of it myself. I I haven't been down the transfer station for a few weeks. Yeah, they had uh they had white marks on the road the other Saturday last night. Okay. Okay. Wow. Well, the hydrant hydrants are all showing up uh down Swanson and um also on Cogman Hill Road. Yeah. When you say tied into Massav, can you What did you mean by that, John? I'm sorry.

So, in other words, they they did the cut across Massav to connect the line. I don't know if they if they connected the line yet. And I saw them cutting the pavement and it looks like they've dug the it looks like they've cut it and maybe dug the trench. Um, you're talking from Swanson to Codman, right? Okay, got it. Okay, thanks. That's where it changes from a 12-in pipe down to an 8 in pipe, I believe. Think you're right. And they also did the con they I saw them also cutting the connection to that office park that's right on the town border with Harvard. Oh. Um, executive office part.

Executive office part. Yeah. Yeah. They're running a small diameter pipe up to there. Yeah. It's only like a one and a half inch line, I think. Something like that. That was probably salt mediation. They had terrible problems with salt mediation. You heard the funny story I heard from D is that they had a RO system to clearing up the water, but they had the discharge going right back into the wellhead area. So guess what? Didn't work. Didn't work. They had they had sodium levels up around a thousand. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That's one of the lines. Uh Cindy didn't say one of the more amusing things that I heard at the planning board meeting, but they had actually a pretty uh sharp guy seeing to me from MAPC walking them through this whole MBTA communities thing, which Cindy, here's what I heard. This is kind of a messed up piece of legislation, but here's how we're making it work. We have a model that we tweak and things don't really line up, but we make it work. I'm exaggerating slightly, but it's a little bit of a house of cards, I think. Well, they're trying to account for local um limitations and I think you know they just don't have the on the ground ability to really put in accurate. So they have to make estimates and yes data the data doesn't flow through their model the way they

it doesn't all fit it doesn't always fit with an Excel spreadsheet is what I got. Let me tell you that area of town is very poor soil drainage. What area? Oh up in the memor there. Yep. Well, the intent was to because there's an existing water supply which I believe is we're told is served by Littleton Water already. It is. It's been there since forever since they built a Mean War. Right. Right. Doesn't change the nature of the soil. But I don't know what the waste water situation is. Well, he says that's going to be a big engineering challenge. So, um they could put in their own wastewater treatment system. I suppose

they would they probably would have to. Now, here's a question for you, Cindy. Um, how many what are the total residential count within the affected properties of this new uh MBTA commuter zone? You said it allow up to 180. Well, that's residents. It's not population. What is the number? How's it What's it going to look like then as opposed to now? So, Alec and did the the estimate and I was a little surprised, but there's over 100 units there currently. Um there's n I think 96 in mean and another 36 or something. Um so I was surprised by that. Uh but he was pretty certain that was correct. So

you know if if we were to if those were to go away and we swap them out we might be net positive by a few units. But um that was surprising to me. But I was also and it's not clear to me why the 164 has to be but we are told it sort of has to be because we were you know we're required to do 18 zone for 118. So I'm a little bit concerned about the fact that 164 is the number right now and I I guess we need to dig into it. But again this was well after midnight last night and um you know we need to get our language together. So if you have questions about the model you can either bring it to Alec or or when it comes up between now and town meeting. I assume he'll do some more public education on it.

I don't know if the model takes into effect the the limitations of the soil. Other words, there could be a lot of reasons that the soil up there uh I this may be this may Oh, hold on. I just can let Brian finish this. The soil may affect how much they can actually do up there. My understanding of NBA communities law is that you do not have to show that you have a viable source of water or sewers. Correct. You're not required. It's just a paper exercise. Yes, I understand that. But I what I'm saying is the actuality is mean more septic systems have failed once already.

Yeah. What I don't know in the law is if you can't ultimately with real ground truth reality when you get out there and dig can't build what you showed in your plan, is there a penalty? What will the state do at that point? I don't think they would do anything because part of the part of the thing if you read deeper into it, it says unless there are environmental considerations meeting state criteria. So if they don't pass D regulation, that's not going to worry about it. All right. Well, tend to keep a close eye on that stuff. There's a lot of moving parts of it. It's been a haul.

Uh Okay. Uh, Steve, you have anything for us from the consum? No, the last meeting was uh two weeks ago and I'm pretty sure there was nothing of interest to us. So, I guess I guess I don't Who is the chair of the Conscom now? Oh, it's um my wife. Oh, it is Liz. Okay. Liz is okay. Okay. Um, and Brian Lynch, anything for us from the board of health?

Yeah, we're working on a new set of regulations about wells in town. Yeah. And we're going to require testing on transfer and we're going to any additional construction is going to require testing also to meet criteria. Okay. When are those when are you going to start putting out that information? Well, we've got to we we're still negotiating what we're going to actually put on the paper. Uh but we're following the model modified from STO. But you're going to have a public comment period and all. Oh yeah, we still have to have all that.

You know, when when you do put that stuff out, I mean, last time you when you did it for the septic, I sort of found it only. So again, I know we all have a problem in town getting information out, but the board of health really if you guys could put make a little bigger effort to put that out a little more widely um because I wasn't aware of the public comment for the septic until somehow I found it. But um again, we we need Boxboro News, we need, you know, all these uh these kinds of things, as mundane as they are, really need to get get put out there so people have a chance to read about it.

Yep. Well, we're going to be doing that. We're also uh we're developing a uh GISbased model to uh try and locate as many of the wells as we can in town on properties. Oh, what kind of a GIS or something? GIS. Yep. Um there's u work being done on that currently and there one of the things we're going to look to add to it is all the septic systems to be added uh from our asbuilt plans. Um, so we know what's going on in property areas.

One of the goals that we're talking about is that uh as we look at these, how should we say clusters of uh development uh would be to put in some sentinel wells that would then monitor the groundwater quality so that we would have some alerts if the uh levels that are required for drinking water are exceeded. Well, that goes back to this something this committee started looking at back when we were still figuring out what to do and we knew there were a lot of monitoring wells uh in town and but we realized they were fairly shallow because they were designed to look at effluent from civic systems and therefore didn't have any knowledge of deep water.

We're not looking at that. We're looking to install actual production wells quality and then pump them to see exactly what the water quality is going to show. So all this be a whole different type of well than was previously installed. I don't think they were able to do anything with that, right? Getting records from the people who were on the list. Well, we I didn't that was with the planning board. No offense, Sydney, but they the ones who set up the things with the criteria for it was a condition on Yes. a site plan approval, I think. And I know at one time Littleton Water was doing all that testing anding that to the town. Yeah.

What happened when Littleton's uh person or or division that was doing that went out of existence, right? Um it kind of fell through the cracks. Yeah. I don't believe and I know for a fact we've looked in our records. The board of health has not received anything on those monitoring roles in quite a while. No, I have all the original files if anybody wants them.

So, so that's uh Brian, both those initiatives sound like good recommendations for Ellie's um report. You know, we're talking about, you know, future activities or action plan. I would love to see those bubble up, at least identify that it's been done and that, you know, it' be good to resume it or whatever. But, you know, that's a good discussion. I'd love the board of health to talk to the planning board about anyway, the monitoring wells. But the new well stuff that you're talking about would also probably fall under sort of an action item if you're already doing it. That that would be a good a good item to call up. It's all part of what we're trying to do is make sure that we don't have and again, we're more worried about water quality than we are quantity. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, Brian, since you're here and we were talking about this topic, it reminded me that when I was looking through the uh West and Samson report in the appendix, uh, it points out on page 144, they point out that the Overer Protection District and the Board of Health, I'm doing this from my crib notes here, the Oafer Protection District and the Board of Health um, protections um, needed to be resolved or somehow uh, uh adjusted and it would be done at ATM 2025 and the comment from Western Samson was we don't know what happened to that. I think Brian uh that article never came to town meeting they decided not to pursue that. Is that correct?

Well my understanding is uh anything that would be done with a board of health regulation doesn't have to go to town meeting. We promulgate those things. We publish notice and it become fact I don't do you remember do you remember this conversation way back when about no because I I mean because the APD would be a planning board thing right well somehow um I guess because I don't know what zoning proposing because right now the way our regulations are written it covers both the IWPA for public water supply wells

and it covers the zone twos that have been identified by study for the wells that are supplying water for like Actton and for Littleton. Oh, Littleton Boxboro at this point. But I just remember seeing that item in the back in the appendix of the Western Sam report went off and said, "Oh, I remember we had discussion about this." Brian Clemens, do you remember this?

Yeah, I looked into it. I went to a board of health meeting. Jim Guffy was there. He was making a comparison between the aer protection district and the board of health regulations. The board of health regulations are consistent with D regulations, but they do not apply they apply to wells. They don't apply to the land.

Whereas the aer protection district applies to the land. Well, what I remember in my note, and I'm going to go check that whatever the disconnect was was supposed to be resolved through an article to be brought at the ATM in 2025, but it was either passed over or never brought forward. So, I don't remember. Does anybody remember what I'm talking about? I have to go back and look, but I'm pretty sure the regulation that we proposed included both zone twos and IWPA,

right? But this that town meeting actually would be required to address a planning board issue. We had I had raised this issue and uh we sort of back burnered it because uh we needed to circle back with you folks. Um Brian had Brian Clemens had provided us some commentary on it and uh I was trying to clean up some language based on I guess I got to think back now but little when Littleton sent us a letter and sent the board of health a letter about um zone two and and protections around the zone two for the uh the new well. Um, I think they that prompted us to start thinking about whether or not we needed to align our language and our zoning bylaw, our APD overlay district with D regulations. And I think uh we got a little hung up because it wasn't always apples to apples. As Brian pointed out, there are, you know, lands that are in the APD that are not in zone one and not in zone 2. And anyway, it get it was my initiative. uh we decided to table it because we I realized that we hadn't really covered all the things we would need to. So that's what that was about. Less

yeah what I yeah I had kind of forgotten about it but when I saw it in there it prompted me oh that's right we were going to do something about that but the article was either never brought or it was passed over town meeting. Yeah we passed over it because I felt that we need we weren't ready to bring it. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I remember but I forgot all about it. So that's what I know. I know nothing. I kind of forgot about it too now that you mention us. Again, I think part of the part of the vagrity of the thing is that the zone two is a line that was prepared by a consultant for water districts, right? Adopted by the state,

but it is an amorphous line that just follows where the intended soil diagrams were laying out things. So, if you said you had to go and mathematize that, I think that would be interesting mathematics. I thought zone twos were a measured radius. It was the IWPA that were

estimated. Zone twos are an amorphous field that depicts where the recharge area is that's supplying water to a large public water supply well. And IWPA is just a circular line drawn to protect rock wells because the definition of what recharge is for a rock well is more based on the rock fissures underneath than it is the surfology uh materials. Well, D defines a zone 2 as a measured amount 400 minus some flow rate times a a factor. So there is a IWPA.

No. Uh that's a zone 2 definition I think from Dway there are maps supplied to us by both Actton and Littleton. Yeah. My recall the zone 2 has to be defined with hydraological studies including uh testing in the ground. Yes. Whereas IWPA is a mathematical construct. Right. I'm sorry I had that backwards. You're right. Yeah. And the zone twos are are fairly consistent with the aquifer protection district mapping where they're located, but the aquifer protection district mapping is bigger than the zone twos. Right. And that's why we were getting stuck on the language. Right.

Well, we were wrestling with this some time ago and I've kind of lost track of do we need to do anything at this point about this or is it been resolved satisfactory or do we we have in place the zoning reg No, not the zoning. Sorry. The board of health regulations cover both zones, right?

The the big problem you have is an aquifer protection area uh would be areas that were not defined as actively contributing to the 50-year drought cycle for the well. So that they have a little bit definition difference that says yes there's more sands and gravels further up but they may not be defined as the zone two as the definitive study allocated

right and my intent was to try and be as protective I guess as possible if the APD is you know which is the biggest area if the APD is the biggest area and we've already got protections in we have prohibitions in the table on our overlay district which you can't put in there, then that may be fine as is. I guess that's the that's what I was trying to understand. But if there were zone ones and zone twos that didn't line up with the APD, then some of the protections in the APD, you know, did we want to expand that in some way? That's what I was trying to marry up. But um

um the zone twos are are a definitive study that was done for the water company that's supplying that or using that water well. And those are all done with geolog geohhydraologic work and all the other stuff, right? Somebody like a western and Samson to do. But they they have to meet certain definitions as to how far out they go. And all of that stuff is part of what they they look at. So you can you can actually have sands and gravels that may not be in the zone too, but they're they're out there for the next level kind of thing.

Well, this is kind of turning over a rock that's been left undisturbed for a while. But the point is we were worried about an inconsistency then. Do we care now? Is there any worker that we need to put on our plate going forward or I I think if you defined your your overlay district for zoning would be any sand and gravel uh deposit and in g Beaverbrook Valley those at one point were defined because when we had when I was on the planning board we had big uh mining operations going on removing gravel from out there.

Yeah. Well, we've we've digitized our aquifer protection district, so you can now see where the APD is. And I guess again, what I was trying to do is marry up the language to protect it's basically to be as protective as possible of all our water sources, right? Um I don't I don't know that BEP could enforce that language on areas outside of the identified zone, right? So the question is who would enforce it? But it follows a planning board definition of a APD. Who would be the enforcing agent? It's the ZBA enforcement officer, right?

Well, the ZBA is responsible for granting variances on it um on the prohibitions in the zone 2. Um yeah, it it might not be worth digging into again. I mean, I I I don't know, maybe I'm not articulating it exactly. Um, I have to go back to that letter that Littleton Water identified, but it felt like there was some inconsistencies, but that might be purposeful and and might, like you said, might be a rock we didn't need to turn over. No, I Cindy to me, this is a very low priority thing, but since it's a planning board thing, if you think it's worth getting into, why don't you come back and let us know sometime? Right now, I've kind of put it out of my mind. Yeah. Yeah. I'll dig up the letter from Littleton and look at it again. I mean, Brian, the board of health got a letter similar. So,

and Brian Clemens looked at it quite intensively at Oh, Brian's good at it. He's he's pretty good at looking at that stuff. Brian wrote us a nice comic. I think to remember that the aquifer protection district is protecting sufficient sand and gravel aers, right? We have no protections for bedrock wells. just the that's it. And but if you install a bedrock well, no matter where you are, it will have an interim wellhead protection area that will be subject to border health. Correct. But there's nothing until you build the well.

Right. So a great many bedrock wells in town have have no protection. No, they all all all all even private wells in the town are subject to an IWPA, are they? Well, that's not mapped though, right? We don't see it on our Oh, you see it. One of the This is where one of the things gets real fuzzy. Why we fought long and hard to try and get a bigger lot size.

Because around all the private wells, there's at least a 100 foot radius, assuming it's only providing providing water for a fourbedroom house. Right. Right. And that radius doesn't necessarily fall all within the lot that that well is serving. So there's many radi that go across roads. They go onto neighbors properties. Yeah. And some of the uh we'll put it say the jury manded lots that we've seen in the past. the the actual radius from one house may actually go all the way up almost adjacent to the foundation of the house in the next lot.

So it doesn't doesn't get the protection that a zone one of a public water supply gets. Right. And that's what you're saying. Is there something? Well, it's a protection that says there has to be some care given as to what they can do in that radius. But as time goes by and the homeowner does what they want to do anyway, there's nobody watching the store. Right. Nobody's paying attention to what's going on with private wells, right? Yeah. But the board of health regulation maps the interim well pad protection areas that are covered and it doesn't include those for only but only for public water supplies. Right. No, no, no. For everybody's water supply, every well in town has an IWPA. But the mapping doesn't show that, right? Yeah.

Well, it' be very I mean what would it be typically? It be depend on the volume and 3inch well, right? Well, it depends. Number one, a lot of the lot of the stuff is done for homes and it's based on the number of bedrooms and the water draw from but for the most part it's usually a 100 foot diameter circle around the well. I wasn't aware that they applied to in the private

they apply there and as a matter of fact that's why when I asked the question of Weston and Samson about when the housing is over on property that is part of the zone twos for public water supplies. Our obligation is that there's very strict limits as to how much nitrogen and other stuff can be allowed to flow into that groundwater septic system.

And that's why I also said earlier that there are some houses in this town that actually have their own individual treatment plants because they have to meet certain criteria for that water to go in the ground. and all of that is all in the mix of what's out there. So, it's a very, how shall I say complex process in some cases where developers decided they wanted to put houses versus what uh the other parts of the town were using that water under that land for? Well, this kind of brings to mind the situation, for example, in Boxboro Meadows where they have a wastewater treatment plant for everything, but each little house lot has its own well and they're all very densely packed. I think Brian, you told me that when D and they somehow got that passed and DP was not happy and they took some steps, I don't know what they were, to try to make sure that doesn't happen again.

Allowing small wells to be packed too closely together in a small area. That's one of the drawbacks of 40B that you know they were all written by folks in Boston that assumed everything was accessing MW or public water, right? But if you take a 5,000 square foot lot and you put a well on it, then you put another well on another 5,000 square foot lot, you didn't the board of health have to approve those wells? Well, we have to approve them because they're the the lot size is fixed by the 40 uh B criteria that says the minimum lot size in the state is 5,000 square ft. So, you had to approve them. I mean, it sounds like you guys would have authority over the

You'd have to prove the water was tainted before you got approved. Interesting. All right. Well, I I think, you know, less I'll look into it, but I I'm a little burned out tonight, but I think No, no, no. I don't even really want to bring this up, but put it on the way back burner. Yeah, I wouldn't have even thought about it except Emily captured that in the appendix to the report. So,

well, that's why I was sort of want to circle back maybe if there's a recommendation maybe that comes about this issue, you know, I just I don't have the bandwidth to really think about I have to read the report. I think that if you if you consider your overlay district to be representative of the sand and gravel in the area, that's okay. And the defense would have to come uh via the zone twos that say, you know, there's certain restrictions, but again, that's also defined by D's criteria for what designates a zone two,

right? So, so I guess what I was saying was the things that are prohibited in the APD don't exactly match up with things that are prohibited in the zone 2, right? Does that feel comfortable to you guys? Because I I don't know how to evaluate that. I I guess the problem comes down, Cindy, what what can you enforce? In other words, we can enforce the DP's regulations on zone twos and the D will help us do that. If we get into the aquifer that's or the sand and gravel that's beside it, but it's not in the zone two, that becomes more of the town's problem to right. It's in our bylaw, right? It's a town bylaw. So, so there will be areas where both boards have jurisdiction and there will be areas where only one has jurisdiction.

Correct. And there will be areas where neither have jurisdiction. Yeah. And I think that was the point of your letter, Brian. And I guess I I didn't know whether so we may not have a problem, but maybe you guys can help me figure out if we do have a problem or Emily's report can help us figure out if they if we need more protection. That was really the the intent was are we doing enough? So, well, I think this discussion proved only one thing that I actually looked through the report and saw the appendix and scanned it and I picked that up and said, "Whoa, I remember that. What happened?" So, yeah. Well, like I said, maybe we can talk about this again, but I don't have the bandwidth. When you have more bandwidth, it's nothing urgent, I don't think. Well, I think

Well, I'll read the report. Maybe that'll prompt some uh it's just in the appendy. I'm not even sure it has a reference to something in the and I think actually it's there because I think Brian had it in one of his inputs and she was just responding to that, but take a look at it. Yeah, thank you. It's on page 144 of the report, right? Appendix C, not D, although I don't know. That threw me. Okay. Viva Brook on the eastern side of town in the report, too. And I noticed that was a little bit off.

Oh, okay. Good lord. I think we've gone to the bottom of this or possibly below. So, all right. So, uh, is there anything else to talk about tonight or is it time to entertain a motion to And by the way, next meeting will be on the 16th of September, as I said earlier. Other than that, I'll entertain a motion to adjourn. Move a second. Let's vote. Uh Steve, hi. Brian Clemens. Hi. And Brian Lynch. Hi. Sandy Marowitz. Hi. John Marowitz. Hi.

Jana Connley. I hanging in there. And Le says I. Thank you all for hanging in there, folks. Okay, good night.