Select Board - Regular Meeting

It is 7 p.m. I will call tonight's meeting of the Select Board to order. We'll start with the Pledge of Allegiance.

to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Cheer on the Pan Mass Challenge riders on Saturday, August 1st, from 6.15 to 8.30 a.m. at Mill Villages Park in South Grafton as they begin their ride to raise money for cancer research. This is a great opportunity to show off Grafton's support for this incredible cause. Bring your energy, lawn chairs, coffee, noisemakers, and signs to give these riders the encouragement they need as they pedal for a cure. Reach out to the select boards and Marie Foley if you are interested in helping to collect donations, whether that's food, beverages, or noisemakers. Grafton Recreation is hosting and receiving the Floating Beach Wheelchair from the grant they're awarded by Smile Mass. Join them for the ribbon-cutting ceremony at Silver Lake Beach on Tuesday, August 4th at 11 a.m. National Night Out is back again this year. The event starts at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, August 4th. Come to the Grafton Police Department for games, giveaways, food, and family fun. We have No public hearings tonight. Is there any public comment? We do have a few appointments. First up, we have the Cultural Council. We have two applicants. We'll start with Sean Tatum on this one.

Hello, lovely to see everybody again. Like I said, my name is Sean Tatum. I live on Suzanne Terrace. I've lived in Grafton for about almost five years now. Just very much looking to get involved in the town. I've started to care deeply about things now that I pay taxes here. So that's really all I've got to say. I know this is my third time, so hopefully third time's a charm.

We will see you tonight for both the Cultural Council and the Trails Committee appointments. Anybody have any questions or comments for Sean at this point?

Is your wrist okay? That wasn't there last time.

Yeah, no, I had carpal tunnel surgery, so mostly healed, but they recommended a split in public in case.

Aggressive handshaking.

Yeah.

Thank you for your stick-to-itiveness. We really appreciate you coming back, and your commitment to wanting to be involved is apparent and obvious, and we so appreciate that and hope it's inspirational to folks watching.

Good.

question are you interested in both committees yes thank you next up we have Anna Massey you want to come up and introduce yourself

Hello, my name is Anna. I have Figaro the dog mayor with me tonight. I am new to Grafton. I moved here probably the end of March from Michigan, originally from Oklahoma. I fell in love with Grafton as soon as I got here. And so I've been finding and trying to find different ways to just be more involved in my community. I'm right off the common, I'm at 17 Worcester. As soon as I got here, I found out about the dog mayor thing. And so that was a way for me and my family to just dive right into the community. And for me, it just kind of sparked something to just find those ways that I can be more involved and share my gifts and my talents Um, I've worked with orchestras in marketing, um, for my career. And so I would love to kind of take that, that view of marketing and, and connection and communication, um, and bring it to, um, the culture of the, of the town, uh, that I'm really, really enjoying being in and really falling in love with even more every day. So, um, but yeah, I'm, I'm just excited to be here and thank you for letting me bring my little guy with me tonight and kind of share our, our love and our story, but.

That's a great story. Does anybody have any follow-up questions or comments?

I have a comment. I didn't realize where you were, so you moved into one of my best friend's homes. Oh! And she is going to be thrilled when I tell her that the dog that moved in there is the mayor.

Is it the Covanese? Covanese, yeah.

And they had three over the years. I knew all their dogs. Oh, my gosh. A bunch of golden doodles, I think they had.

I think so. I think so.

That's awesome. She'll be thrilled.

Oh, I love that. Thank you.

And thanks for volunteering, too.

Yes, of course.

Did we want to pause and take a picture with? Pause. And take a picture?

We heard you might be looking for a photo op with the board tonight.

If that's possible, I would love that, if it doesn't take up too much of your guys' time.

I think we could do that.

Okay. I'll grab my phone real quick.

I mean, with the Honorable Mayor, how could we not?

I don't know where you want me. Do you want me to take the phone for you?

Yeah, come around, stay in the front. Thank you. Make a better picture.

Anna, my wife grew up at 9th Street. Oh, my God.

Four houses up the street, the gray.

Oh, should I come around? Yeah, come around.

Evan, can you pull back a little bit? I sure can. We don't want to feed you. I'm happy to be off to the side. All right.

I took a few for you.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you guys so much. Of course.

All right, let's shut this off. Sorry, I'm recording.

That was fun. We don't get to ask for pictures often, so. I can take a motion.

I move the board vote to appoint Sean Tatum and Anna Massey to the Cultural Council.

Second. Okay, motion made seconded. Any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor? Aye. Okay, motion passed unanimously. And we can, I think, go right into a motion for Trails as well.

I move the board vote to appoint Sean Tatum to the Trails Committee.

Second. Okay, motion made seconded. Any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor? Aye. Motion passed unanimously. Welcome aboard to you both. Congratulations, Sean. Glad to finally appoint you to not one, but two. You are both welcome to stay. You are under no obligation. The clerk's office will be in touch with you about being sworn in so you can start attending and voting at meetings at your leisure. Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you all. Okay. We have two election workers to appoint tonight. You can just do a motion on those.

I move the board vote to appoint Carol Gagne and Amber Dennison as election workers. Second.

Okay. Seconded. Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Pass unanimously. And another fun one for tonight. We're going to welcome GPD and start with a promotion.

Good evening. Thanks again for setting some time aside for us for this. Always a pleasure. So we're here for the promotion of Detective Tom McNevich to the position of Sergeant. This was, this will be filling a vacancy left by Sergeant Michael Mazzola, who retired, affected July 9th after 31 years of service. Some of you probably know him, probably have went to him, you know him, but big shoes to fill, but nonetheless, we have a lot of confidence in Tom, so. Let's see. Detective Tom McNevich is a lifelong Grafton resident graduate of Grafton Public Schools, Blackstone Valley Regional Vocational Technical High School, where he studied electrical technology. He is the son of a retired Shrewsbury police officer. His dad's here tonight. He served the town of Shrewsbury for 29 years and a son to a mother who retired after an extensive career in the medical profession. Before entering law enforcement, Tom worked as an electrician with Fleur Electric in Auburn. He is a graduate of the Boylston Reserve Police Academy and the Boylston Full-Time Police Academy. He had several part-time jobs in law enforcement prior to coming to Grafton full-time in 2014. Since then, he's served in a variety of assignments, including officer in charge, field training officer, FTO manager, and was assigned to the detective division in November of 25. He has completed extensive training in criminal investigations, crime scene processing, sexual assault investigations, leadership, surveillance, and background investigations. He's also a two-time recipient of the AAA Traffic Safety Hero Award for his commitment to impaired driving enforcement, as well as receiving multiple commendations from the Grafton Police Department in recognition of his outstanding service and dedication. Detective McNevich is being promoted to the rank of Sergeant, recognizing his experience, leadership, professionalism, unwavering commitment to the Grafton Police Department and the community he proudly serves. Tom will be serving on the overnight shift for us. It's a big step up there because we've got a lot of younger officers, so we're fortunate that he's got a lot of experience in FTO. Even our younger officers who are just out of FTO will still be up there under his supervision and leadership, so we're excited to have him up there.

yeah i'd just like to say thanks for the opportunity i'd like to thank the chief all my co-workers my dad and family not all my family's here tonight but uh it's a great opportunity i'm looking forward to it um i like the challenge of new things so this will be a good opportunity for me and it keeps me engaged with the town still so again thank you congratulations thank you i mean do you

long-standing member of the Grafton PD. We talk about this, I think, every time there's a promotion, that it's great to see promoting from within and continuing that line of training. Thank you for being you.

Thank you.

And also, I think it's really cool that your dad came in tonight.

Oh, yeah, he was missed.

Thanks for being Willis.

It's always cool when Skip shows up. He doesn't show up enough. That's the thing. He's got to come out more often. Congratulations. Thank you. Congratulations. Thank you. Sincerely.

Okay. I move the board vote to affirm the promotion. To affirm the promotion, Thomas Biknovich from detective to sergeant in the Grafton Police Department.

Second. Bush made a second. Any discussion? Hearing none. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. So, easy yes or no. Do you want to speak to the change in former Sergeant Mazzola's role, or do you want us to just... You can just do the appointment. All right. Take a motion. You can just do that.

I move the board vote to affirm the appointment of Sergeant Mazzola to the position of part-time police officer. Second.

Okay. Motion made. Second. Any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor? Aye. Motion passes. Great. Thank you all for coming in tonight. Always a pleasure to see you, PD. Okay, moving on to new business. We have one day beer and wine licenses for Grafton Day. We'll start with Broken Creek Vineyard. And we have Val Parmenter for that one.

Well, this is John Scaff. I think Val is here too.

Okay. Yeah, either one of you is fine. Do you want to, I mean... Internally, I think we know a little bit about what's going on at Grafton Day, but if you want to take a few minutes to just promote yourself and the event and what you'll be serving, that'd be great.

Yeah, we're Broken Creek Vineyard in Shrewsbury. We've been here 15 years now. We're asking for a license for a day to serve Grafton Day Out with wine and sangrias for the day.

Now you're speaking my language. Questions or comments from the board? Okay, great.

I move the board vote to approve a one-day beer and wine license for Broken Creek Vineyard on Friday, August 21st. Second.

Motion made. Seconded. Any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor? Aye. Congratulations. Thank you for coming in tonight. Thank you. Nice and easy. We also have one for Slow Down Brewing.

Hello, everyone. My name is Rich Lenahan. I'm joined by my business partner, Scott Lynch, and we are two co-owners of Slow Down Brewery, a brewery hopefully coming to Grafton, Mass., sooner than later. Today, we're here to request a one-day pouring permit to also partake in this year's Grafton Day. We'll be serving three different beers, likely a Pilsner and two different types of IPAs. And, yeah, we're looking forward to partaking in the community, and hopefully it's the first of many to come.

Excellent. Any questions or comments from the board? I'm not usually an IPA guy, but I had the pleasure of testing some of your samples at the Beer Fest over at Willie Clark House and enjoyed all of them.

We love when people say they don't like IPAs and we can try to convert them.

Yeah, yeah. I'm down for your IPAs. Awesome. Glad to hear.

Okay. Move the board vote to approve a one-day beer and wine license for Slow Down Brewing on Friday, August 21st. Second.

Bushman seconded. Any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor?

Aye. Okay.

Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Have a good night. Next up, we will review our FY25 financial audit results. Do you want to kick that off, or do we want to just go right to Jeff Kendron?

Mary is here. Mary, do you want to kick it off?

Hi, everyone. Hey, Mary. Hi, so I would like to welcome Jeff Gendron. He's from Tom Scanlon and Associates. I've been working with Jeff since starting here in Grafton in 2021. And so Jeff has been doing our financial statements for Oh geez, the last I think Tom Scanlon has been our auditor for over 20 years. So Jeff is going to give a little summary of FY25 audit information.

Thank you, Mary. As Mary said, my name is Jeff Gendron. I was the audit manager for the FY 2025 audit. And I just want to go over a brief presentation. Feel free to ask any questions either as we go or at the end. And anything I can't answer today, I'll get an answer and get it back to either Mary or Tom Manager's office as soon as possible. So the first thing is, what is an audit? The objective of an audit is to give an opinion on the town's financial statements, and these are the town's financial statements that we're talking about. It's the big thick report you have in front of you. It's 75 pages long. And then how do we go about doing this? The auditor has a responsibility to plan and perform the audit in order to give an opinion that the financial statements are free of material misstatement, whether caused by fraud or error. So we're not just coming in looking for fraud, we're looking at the financial statements and giving an opinion, are they accurate? So, That's kind of the big picture. The approach we take is we take a risk-based approach and we review your financial statements and we see where's the most risk and that's in the treasurer's office and the collector's office. So the treasurer's office is the custodian of all the cash and investments. Um, and the tax collector is the one that's bringing in most of your revenues, uh, except for the other revenues that are flowing through the treasurer's office, like the state payments that come in. Um, so typically, um, we start now ever since COVID we've kind of changed some of our approach a little bit more. So we do a little more, uh, remote work in advance. So we probably reached out to Mary, I believe this year in December, and we said, Mary, can you give us these reports? We reach out to the treasurer's office asking for records because you have a combined treasure collector. So that gives us a jump, a head start. So before we even drive out and come to the town hall, we've done a considerable amount of work. And then typically we start, Um, three to four of us come for about a week and you know, not all four of us every day, but we'll basically start for a week, uh, work on all departments of the town. and base it on that preliminary work we've done and we'll also send out internal control questionnaires to all the major departments that handle the finances which is once again the accountant's office the treasure collector the assessors and then from that we'll pick some other smaller departments too that we'll look at uh typically we look at the highway department every year because of the large amount of money you get on the chapter 90 reimbursable uh grant program Um, we'll look at the police department for the outside details. Usually another large one that we'll look, look at. Um, and I, I want to see, just see what we chose this year. And I think this year we looked a lot at the school department and their revolving accounts just to take, you know, a closer look. We usually do that every two or three years. We'll look at this, you know, various departments. We'll try to cycle through them. So, um, And then I was just going to go over the highlights of each report. So like I said, the first report is the financial statements, the big thick one. It's 75 pages long. On page three is the actual opinion that Tom gave. So if you go to page three, the first paragraph, it says opinions. And in there, it'll say that In our opinion, the financial statements referred to above present fairly in all material respects financial position the government governmental activity so that's that's what's called an unqualified opinion it's uh tom calls it like the golden rule you know gold standard you can't get any higher than that so that's the best opinion you can have um that's what people are looking for that that's the first thing people look for whether it's the bond council or anyone that kind of looks at this report they want to see what's that opinion what is tom giving an opinion on and what does it say um And then just to go through some of the finances, just the highlights, I won't get into too much into the weeds unless you guys have specific questions and then we can cover those. But on page 16 and 17, we have what's called the entity-wide statements. And those are like statements thinking similar to how a business would present their financial statements. So it's kind of full accrual. You're putting on things like, long term debt, you're putting fixed assets, long term liabilities like OPEB and your pension liability. Those are the big, big numbers. And if you look at the very bottom of page 16, the last in the first column, which labeled governmental activities, the last number is restricted and it says it has brackets in it and it says ninety five million negative, which is, you know, you never want to see brackets or negatives in your financial statements, especially in your net position. But that's really made up of the two things I was just saying, those two long-term liabilities that everyone in Massachusetts is kind of, you know, in the same boat is OPEB, which is the other post-employment benefits, which is the retirees health insurance that no one really funded till now. You're just starting to fund. And then the net pension liability is, what you've been funding since the 1980s, and you're getting closer and closer to getting fully funded, but there's still a large liability there. So not to say that you're that bad off compared to other communities your size. You're right in line with them. And then the next two pages are page 18 and 19. Those are the governmental statements. And those are more cash basis, what you're kind of used to, what the board would be using to make decisions. When Mary gives you guys reports that might say, here's your expenditure summaries for the year or monthly, it's going to look more in line with this. and let me see if I'm missing anything. Um, okay. And then you, I just want to talk quickly about your reserves. This is kind of scattered through the report. Um, you know, uh, your free cash for June 30th, 25 was certified at 6.8 million. And last year was roughly 5 million was just a tick under 5 million. So increased by, you know, uh, almost $2 million and your stabilization fund is 5 million. So your reserves are basically, you know, $12 million between the free cash and stabilization. And your original budget for 2025 was 78 million. So you had $12 million in reserves based on a yearly budget of 78 million. So that's basically 15% your budget for a year you had in reserves you know basically your rainy day funds and that's a good baseline to have anything over 10% is what's recommended by when you go up for borrowings and the bond council that's what they kind of look at sorry the bond market when you go out to the bond market they want to see do you have reserves you know are your financial policies working um things like that and that kind of tells you that you know um your financial policies are in place and they are working and then if you go to page uh 22 and which is the budgetary um Schedule of budget versus actual that's gonna basically tell you How your free cash was kind of created throughout the year So we can walk through this page, you know quickly But this is basically if you took nothing else if you could only have one page of this report This would be the page to look at Great oops Yeah, so this would be the page to look at. So like we said before, you had about $5 million in free cash to start the year. Well, how did you get from $5 million to 6.8? Well, of the... of the free cash from last year, you voted out of the $5 million, you voted out $3 million. So you had $2 million that you did not vote. So that free cash carried forward. So that was a healthy reserve. Of the $3 million, you voted for capital projects, nothing to fund your current year's budget. So that was good planning as well. And then we see, OK, so you're starting off with $2 million from last year. And then if you look to the variance with final budget column way to the right for the revenues, you see the total revenues variance with final budget was 4.4 million. So that's the majority of where your free cash came from. And it's pretty evenly except for one line item for the license permits and fees, which is a 2.4 million. So you budgeted one and a half million, but you got in 4 million and the biggest, um, difference there. I mean, it's, it's spread, but the biggest difference there was, um, the building inspector permits. I think, um, it was highly driven by, I think UPS, there was one receipt over a million dollars that, um, building permits due to the new UPS facility. So that was a big boom to your free cash. And then you got a little bit of free cash from your expenditures, 410,000, but it was evenly spread out through all their functions. So there was no one large big ticket item and that's kind of a small amount. So on, you know, a final budget of 81 million, you either expended or carried forward into next year to use those funds. So your budgeting process, you can see that it worked. You can't really get much closer than that. I did look at last year and you were very similar. You had about 500,000. both years you hit your budget almost, you know, as close as you can. So that's great. So that kind of shows you how your free cash changed. You start with, you know, $2 million from last year plus the four on revenues and a $400,000 on expenses to get you to your $6.8 million. And this also shows you that where your budgeting was what actually occurred compared to what you, you know, projected. And they're both right in line, except for that outlier on the revenue. And that that's, you know, that was a good thing for the town. And I don't know if there's any questions yet.

Nope, not yet.

Okay, great. And then, oops. The next thing I'm just going to say is part of that is property taxes. If you see on that page, it's the first line under revenues. And it says you collected $58,761,651. And that number, more or less, amounts to 98.8% of the bills that were mailed out for 2025 real estate were collected. That's a very strong number. I couldn't even believe it when I first saw it today. I've seen some get into the, you know, 97.8 or 98, but never, you know, approaching 99%. So that tells you that the collector's office is collecting almost every single dollar that they're mailing out. And that can also be attributed to the assessors as well. There weren't a lot of abatements that had to be processed. So yeah, so that was tremendous. And I think that's all I have on the financial statements. Um, like I said, this would probably be the, you know, especially from the select board, um, perspective, um, this would probably be the most, um, useful, you know, page in the report. And a lot of this, you know, is a broken down in later parts of the report. Like it gives you some explanations of some of these, uh, figures and factors, but this, this is always good to look at.

Does anybody have anything in particular that they'd like to discuss?

I've seen all of these figures through the last year.

I did have one thing. It wasn't specific to the report itself. Let me just pull this up quick. Sorry. Um, so we had, it looked like a letter from Scanlon and associates titled communication with those charged with governance. Um, and on the second and third page of the letter in our packet, that's, uh, 37 and 38, there was an other audit findings and issues section that identified some areas for improvement that you discussed with management. And I was wondering if you could just speak to those a little bit and, um, you know, they, they seemed. fairly innocent for lack of a better word, but I just, you know, for example, one of them was about reconciling with mass DOT records periodically for the state aid and chapter 90 that you mentioned. Is that something that we're not doing frequently enough for say an industry standard or that's kind of where I'm headed with these, you know, with the discussion, like what would you, what could we do to make those things better?

yeah so i mean you know and mary could jump in too as i explained this but um on this one you know it's every year you get a commitment from the mass dot that you know and the highway superintendent is allowed to put in project requests for up to that commitment. They have multiple commitments now. They have a couple of different types of commitments. And I think that's what we found is at the end of the day, there was some variance between what DOT was showing and what the financial statements. And we did discuss it with Mary and there was a plan in place to have it rectified for next audit.

was there anything else in that list that you think was particularly or, or warranted additional highlighting or are these all kind of at that, at a similar level?

Um, yeah. So the most important thing to know on this, so this is a new format. Um, I think this Tom might've done it last year, Mary in this format, but to me, I really started doing them in this format this year for 25 audits. Um, And the old management letter was basically just this section. This kind of goes into a little more detail. But the important thing to know is there's no material weaknesses or significant deficiencies. that were noted those are more important items of concern and in some of those if you had a material weakness with say anything from cash reconciliation to anything there's a possibility that Tom would either have written a board a letter to the board or Tom would have come to speak to you even before we finished the audit so there's no items like that that occurred. Most of these are just areas that could be strengthened, almost like recommendations. And like I said, most of these, I was even talking to Tom about them today, because he had a meeting at six. He said most of these, he wouldn't even recommend bringing up unless you did ask, like you did, which is good. The first one is kind of a recommendation about the special revenue funds. It's kind of a generic one. that DOR started about 10 years ago, kind of recommending every three years, you kind of review your accounts to make sure if there's any dormant accounts that don't have any activity, you kind of research them and figure out, well, why is this balance what it is? Is this balance accurate? And then the same thing with some special revenue accounts that have large balances. to do the same thing, to research them and rectify anything that you can. Because sometimes those accounts just sit there for years and years. So we kind of make this recommendation every three years, probably to a lot of communities if they're not doing it. Obviously you can do it more often. So that's one that we, recommendation we made to Mary, but it's not, you know, it's nothing really that concerning.

Great. Thank you. I appreciate the explanation. That to me was how it read, but I wanted to make sure that it was, you know, I was understanding it properly. You know, I think it's easier and we tend to focus on those types of things, the more negative aspects of report and what needs to be fixed. So I am really happy to hear, you know, that we got positive, not only a positive commentary, but the positive feedback. you know, rankings that we received and, you know, strong financial policy and financial leadership from Evan and Mary both. You know, those are great things that, you know, may not be discussed frequently enough. But, you know, to have you as the expert here come in and underscore those things I think is great. And I also I wasn't aware that you know, had you come into any of those larger issues That's something that you would have flagged for the board earlier. So I appreciate You know knowing that that kind of second level of support there and and that it wouldn't have waited until later in the process You know, it's it would have demanded some immediate attention.

So, thank you One question I could um Page 22. Could you just explain the amount carried forward to next year in the variance with final budget? Those last two columns on the right.

Yep. On the expenditure side or both?

Both, I guess. Yeah, more on the expenditure side.

Okay. Yeah. So you have your final budget amount. then what you spent or expenditures is your actual budgetary basis. And then there's an amount for carry forward that Mary, um, goes to the departments and basically says, do you have any outstanding purchase orders for, uh, goods and services that you're gonna, you know, that were budgeted for in 25 and you've either received the services, but you haven't received the bill or you haven't continued an article that's continuing and they just haven't been able to get the work done in time. Um, So we usually go through and review her file, whether it's, I haven't really done it in a couple of years. So I don't know if Mary's file now is electronic or if it's still paper copies from the department. But so that those funds will carry forward to the next year's budget and will be spent. And then if they're not spent by then, you know, Mary will probably close those back and that will create, generate more free cash. Because if you look at the first column, in the expenditures, that's the amount carried forward from the prior year. So that was added to your current year's budget to be spent in 25. And then amounts carried forward, the second to last column is amounts that will go into your 26 budget to be spent.

Okay, so this is money that was budgeted that just the purchase didn't happen, the expense didn't happen, right? Right. So that line item in their specific department budget. Right.

Yeah, they're what we would call encumbrances, right? So we'll encumber money at the end of the year because we've got something ongoing or, man, that was supposed to happen in March and the contract got delayed and now it's. coming into july so we've got to encumber that money so that we can still it could be anything in that specific department could be somebody retired and you had budgeted for the year or somebody could be operational yeah so what what and the process is mary meets with all the department heads sits down goes through any projects they have open and then ultimately she's the one that makes the decision whether it gets encumbered or not whether it meets the criteria we're not doing it just because you didn't get around to it or or we had extra money, quote, unquote, it's really for specific causes, things that we had ongoing that we need to be able to settle out. Okay.

So that money gets tracked through the next fiscal year?

Correct. Yep.

And if it doesn't get used, it ends up in free cash?

Correct.

But the department has access to those funds? Correct. For the next year?

Yep.

Okay.

Correct. Anybody else?

Are those numbers in a healthy range? Are they out of bounds for a community or a size?

Yeah, I mean, the the largest encumbrances for the education and that's. That yeah, that's not nowhere near their budget, so. All these encumbrances. Seem to be. trying to do a percentage quick, but less than like half a percent of their budget. So, um, if there's any large items too, we do take a look at those and verify those. And if there's any large closeouts too, we also do that to verify that, um, that Mary didn't accidentally close out an account and they did need the money and it got charged to the next year's budget and possibly wasn't budgeted for in FY26, if that makes sense. That was a little hard to explain, sorry.

And if I could jump in, I think as far as encumbrances go, we're pretty lean. We get a lot of our stuff done in a timely manner. But, you know, there are those circumstances that fall outside of that. But Mary's very diligent on making sure that it's an appropriate use and also that there's no carryover beyond that one year. It would have to be a real extraordinary situation for us to do that.

And we don't count on those. There's no budget for counting on any of those funds for the next cycle.

No, we don't use it. And we've actually in the last five years tightened up our encumbrance process. compared to 2021 and today, as far as what we're allowing to be encumbered. Um, and we're also, I think, and, and, you know, Mary, this is all due to Mary. Um, you know, I think we're, we're ahead of the curve most of the time. So we know where we're going to be by February that we're going to, you know, these aren't emergency encumbrances or, oh no, I forgot to do where we're, we know in February, March, that we're not going to be able to accomplish what we're supposed to accomplish. come June 30, and so we're already having those conversations, which I think for one reason or another, when we started, it was very much an emergency process. It was all finding out about things in June and scrambling. I think we've gotten much better at that process and decreased the amount that we're encumbering every year.

Great.

Anybody else? Thank you for coming in tonight. This was, even though brief, you know, very technical and sound presentation. Appreciate you walking us through it. It's great to have all these results to, you know, kind of go through on our own. Thank you for coming in.

Okay. Thank you.

Mr. Chair. Hold on, Mary. Before you move on, can I? Sure. So I just want to point out, we had a 98% collection rate, right? And that speaks to your Treasurer Collector's Office just fine. killing it and working diligently. This is the stuff that goes on in the background. That's super boring that nobody cares about, but really makes or breaks the community. And 98% is phenomenal. 98.8. I think he said 98.8.

Okay.

even higher yeah let's call it a hundred so um instead of residents right for paying for paying their bills right yeah we gotta thank them yep and so we have a great process in place there and that's all due to you know the assessor's office doing fair and equitable assessments and the collector's office collecting the money in the treasurer's office doing all of the work that they do i don't really know what they do that much um it's very complicated. Um, but, and then overall to, to Mary, uh, to really, really, in my opinion, transforming the financial, uh, wellbeing of the community and really doubling down on policy procedure and making sure that those funds are all accounted for in a really effective manner. Um, I've seen a lot of management reports, uh, over the years. And, um, you know, the fact that we're right up there at the top and right where we should be is, a direct result of all Mary's hard work and her team's hard work. So I just want to thank them for all that they do. And lastly, you know, Andy, you talked about the management letter and the kind of deficiencies that were called out. What I like about Mary's approach is that, one, I know all of the deficiencies before the management letter comes, and we already have a plan for how all of those things are going to be tackled, if they're tackleable. Some of them, it's a multi-year process, but You know, it's super transparent. And, you know, by the time we get the management letter, I don't even need to read it because we've already gone over all of those things. And I know exactly what the plan is. So great work, Mary, and great work to the finance team.

Thank you. Thank you, guys. Thank you.

I think we can move on and again wish Mr. Gendron a good night. Thank you for coming in.

Okay, thank you.

Next up we have review our municipal budget calendar.

Oh yeah, you were going to kick that over to me. So this is a result of a conversation that you folks had I don't know, a month ago maybe at this point to look at developing a budget calendar that is a little tighter and a little bit, let's say, more transparent and also holds us to a little bit higher of a standard. So what I did in the meantime is I put together a calendar based upon what we are already doing, essentially. So between the charter and our bylaws, these are all the call-outs that those two documents provide as far as who's supposed to do what and when. And so, this is not obviously the end goal, I think, of what was proposed, but I think it gives an idea, one, of where we are, and two, maybe, some of the flexibility that's already built into our system a little bit because when we looked at, we're gonna use Hoppington as an example, they had very finite dates, which I think some of the dates should be finite, but I also think that we need a little bit of flexibility in the process because we can't predict everything that's going to happen a year out, and some of the stuff needs to be fluid. Some things need more conversation. Sometimes they need less conversation. very straightforward sometimes they're super convoluted so um that was kind of what i tried to highlight in the approximate timing section um yeah i think that's pretty much it i think it's a pretty self-explanatory thing yep uh any questions comments concerns from the board um it's okay um

Just things that we would like to see added to what's already existing was my vision of these conversations going forward. For example, in the earlier September-October time frame, I'd love to see budget guidance given from the select board or maybe even in collaboration with the finance committee. So when they are going back to the department heads and they are building their budget, You know, some communities might say, you know, 1% cut across the board and go figure it out from there, and now they go. And that way we don't have to have those, well, what about this in March? We've kind of set the expectations pretty early, and then they go execute to the best of their ability. And I would like to see something like that called out in here in a fall timeline for us to be working on and disseminating out early is our part of this. I'd also like to see some hard dates for department heads and specifically the school department and school committee about when they're going to vote on their budget. I've noticed that over the last couple of cycles that sometimes they get hung up. And if they haven't voted on their budget yet, then it kind of dominoes into conversations happening here. Well, how can we move forward if they haven't? So if we can collaborate with the school committee and have them commit to a more finite date or range when they're going to commit to voting on their budget, just to help bring more, again, more efficiencies to the process. So those are two areas I'd like to see included in here somehow. But even throwing in things like when the Scanlon audit will come in and when we might hear a review from them, throwing that in there. You know, that's not called out in a bylaw or a charter, but it is part of the budget process. It was very helpful. It is something that we're getting back to doing again. So building, baking that in somewhere too. Those are just some of my ideas I'd like to see incorporated somehow.

Anybody else?

There's nothing novel about this. This is our actual timeline as of today. OK. No, I like the piece about bringing the select board in up top for that executive guidance piece, especially as we're going through sort of now running on an override budget and the override cycle. it would be nice for us to have some sort of say in the direction that we would like to head. You know, have some accountability, right, in that piece as well. We don't feel as though there needs to be any, this is a question, not a statement, but we don't feel as though there needs to be any more discrete timelines or dates for department heads.

All I did was put together what we're already doing. So this doesn't include any of my thoughts of what we should be doing. I think that part of this was to get this in the hands of the select boards. The select board can review it, come up with ideas, thoughts that they may have on the topic. And we as an organization can certainly come up with some things that we think should be in here and then try to kind of maybe massage them together. I regret that immediately. But we can kind of try to bridge that together.

Andy, just one comment. The capital budget, so just from a timing perspective, like what time of year? It seems like after the first of the year, we talk about the operational budget and that consumes a lot of our work. Is it, there's an advantage, I guess I'll just throw this out there, to do in the capital budget Early, early, early, like when there's not a lot of other things going on, not that there's not always a lot of things going on, but if we tackle that early, I mean, these department heads know if they're going to need a dump truck or, you know, a cruiser or whatever. And so we can spend the time on that that, you know, or the CIPC can spend the time on that and get that kind of done before we get into crazy budget times.

Yeah, I think right now the charter calls out that it's got to be 150 days before July 1, which we're always ahead of that. That's really too close. But I think that if we were looking at starting our capital process, let's say, everybody's updated requesting to be submitted by August or September because then we get our free cash certified in October usually. So then we know how much money we actually will have. So if we were aiming by policy, we're going to have our capital plan submitted to CIPC and the Finance Committee by November 1 or December 1. That would be a reasonable place to start because then usually – Yes, we've been working on the budget, but it gets hectic after Christmas, right? I mean, we come back, and then it's just pretty much straight through. So I think something like that would be beneficial, yeah. That's a good idea. I think that October is going to be the thing to plan around because we can have a great capital plan, but if we come in with no free cash, then we're not doing it.

It still takes a while for the CIPC to meet with everybody. It just doesn't happen.

Exactly.

It takes time.

I think that would be good.

It's a good call-out. I mean, we do tend to focus heavily on the operational budget. It would be nice to lean on that a little more. I do really like the idea of adding even just what we did tonight to kind of codify it and get it to be part of the process moving forward.

And I think through our conversations that Evan and I had is that we'll have possibly even two calendars, one that's a little more generic and one that gets updated each year where this is the date for this year, that whatever needs to be. And that would be more kind of an internal one with the department heads So that these marks are getting hit and that we can stay on track with the overall calendar.

Which we're doing already. We do the finite calendar because we need to know all of those dates. So we build out our calendar working backwards from town meeting back with all these. Because your charter here is a lot of 150 days before. Well, what the heck is that? You got to. know count backwards and we invariably get one or two of them wrong by a day but uh we're usually pretty close um no so we'll we're already doing that so i think that you know that would be something that would be easy to provide you know back out and then people know exactly what they're what they're looking at but this is the calendar that could live just in general you know it happens second week of february whatever it is and then the finite date gets plugged in per per year

Two more dates I'd like to see added to this are the CPC application deadlines in case department heads or anybody's looking for a possible CPC funds that that's on their radar to make sure that they're getting in and applying and coming and speaking to CPC in time. But yeah, I love where this is going. And I, you know, obviously I came with a couple ideas tonight that I'd love to see massaged in and kind of go from there. And then, and I don't know if you could provide maybe an example of some budget guidance i i pictures of one to two pager that maybe even less that we we would work as a board together maybe starting in august and september and then have it ready to go for october um but i don't know if that timeline is is too late too early how that would work for you guys but if you could provide us some some guidance to to give you guidance okay yeah we can do that thank you mr chair do you think maybe

have the board think on it and bring this back in a month or two weeks and have everybody send to our office anything they think of we can kind of create a list of things and try to try to plug them in in the meantime anybody have a preference on that whether we do it you know next meeting or a month from now no just a question or comment though you indicated that you guys have some input too so

Could we see that as well?

Yeah, I think what I'm thinking, and this doesn't have to be the way it goes, but I would think we compile kind of all of our thoughts. Because I think some of them are going to be the same. Some of them will be ones obviously we have.

As long as you guys are providing us with that too.

Yeah.

Okay, great. Let's do that. I did appreciate that you started the list of key legally required deadlines in the back. It's good to, again, just have them. right there and at your fingertips. I think it's a well put together document.

So just to answer your question, maybe do it at the end of August. Do it for that meeting. That would give you guys time and hopefully it's not really in town meeting crunch time too much yet. Get it off your plate.

I think that would work for us.

Great. Sweet. Thank you.

Absolutely.

Okay. So I think that's all we needed you for tonight, Mary. You are welcome to stay, but No obligation. Thank you.

Have a great night.

Bye, Mary. She's like, bye.

Bye, Mary.

All right. So next up, Annette is here to discuss social consumption regulations for marijuana establishments. Thank you for coming in tonight.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for inviting me. So I know there are a couple of new faces on the board. So I'm Annette Garcia. I'm the regional health director. Our collaborative serves as the health department for Grafton, West Boylston, and Shrewsbury. So I'm here today to talk about the marijuana social consumption sites. A little bit of background before I offer an opportunity to ask some questions. On January 2 of 2026, this new regulation was approved by the Cannabis Control Commission to allow on-site consumption of marijuana. There will be three permit types that can be granted under this new regulation. The first is a supplemental permit. So this allows an existing cannabis facility to open a new consumption site on their existing premises. So, for example, they'd have their sales floor within the dispensary and then they would have a separate entrance that could have like a lounge that folks could consume cannabis on site. The second type is a hospitality license, and there are three types that fall under this. The first is that an existing marijuana establishment can open a new business space. So, example, they can open a lounge across the street from their dispensary. An existing business like a movie theater could add on-site consumption license within that facility. They would partner with a licensed marijuana establishment to supply the cannabis, and the consumption could take place in a designated area of that existing business. And then the third type is that a marijuana establishment could partner to... run a non can't a consumption site within a non cannabis business so that would be like a yoga studio could rent out basement space to a dispensary and that basement space could be a consumption site and then the third type is event organizer licenses so these are where folks can host temporary consumption events within a designated area at that event. So that would be like consumption at a wedding or a music festival. These do have some limitations in terms of how many that can be given per year to a single organizer and so that would be up to 24 licensed days per calendar year. There are some limitations to social consumption sites so social consumption sites cannot and marijuana establishments in general cannot sell tobacco or alcohol at that establishment they can only sell tobacco, they can only sell cannabis. an opt-in option so each municipality has to decide similar to to cannabis in general that they want to allow social consumption sites within their municipality so the process would be very very similar that it would be adopted through an ordinance bylaw or ballot measure For each of these new permits, the town of Grafton would have to enter into a new host community agreement with those permittees. So very similar to the dispensaries, you come up with that agreement. I believe there's some portion of their sales tax and funds that go to the town. So it would be the same process if Grafton decided to go forward. Currently, there have been no permits issued. The Cannabis Control Commission did say to expect about 12 to 18 months until the first permits are issued, largely because the communities have to go through that legal process. It may include adopting or updating zoning bylaws to designate areas where these would be allowed. um health departments boards of health can or or other um you know regulatory bodies can create local regulations if you wanted to put some stricter guidelines or limitations on social consumption sites within the town of grafton that's within our rights as well and you can create local permitting structures So far I've heard mostly the larger cities expressed interest, so I think we'll start to see these in the next six months to a year showing up in cities like Boston, Cambridge, and Worcester. I haven't heard too much talk in some of the smaller municipalities and in the Board of Health sphere if they're really looking at adopting local regulations or allowing these, but I'm sure we'll start to see them throughout the state. And as communities consider whether or not they wanna adopt these and allow these businesses, I think there are some good conversations that should take place. With the select board boards of health getting public safety's input on how they would regulate and respond to preventing driving under the influence From social consumption sites and then also one of the big things that come up even with dispensaries as things like nuisances so odors are really the big one that we see in relation to dispensaries or grow facilities, it's really difficult to manage the odors that might come from those facilities. So that's really a very quick rundown of the update, but I'm happy to answer any questions.

Awesome. Anybody have any questions you want to start off with?

I have a question. So some of the examples you gave where a dispensary could do something like a yoga studio basement. Does that dispensary have to be Grafton based or could they be based in another community and then have a site in Grafton?

I'd have to double check at that, but I believe that they can be outside of the town of Grafton. They just have to be a licensed marijuana establishment. So they could hold a permit, say in Shrewsbury and operate in a yoga studio in Grafton.

And we would need a host community agreement with them as well. Correct. Okay.

So a bar could not have a separate room, correct? Correct.

Yeah, so they cannot sell, like within the same premises, they cannot sell both alcohol and cannabis. So it couldn't be like, you've got your alcohol room, you've got your cannabis room. They have to be completely separate establishments. Yeah, right.

So... So when we did the cannabis bylaw, kind of the philosophy, I guess my understanding of it was that we wanted to create some zoning for, it was a law, right? People could put in these establishments, but we wanted to establish zoning so that if we were going to get cannabis sites, we were going to get them, put them where we thought it was appropriate for our community, right? So that was kind of the, some communities said no, some did nothing, and some did what we did to like, all right, if we have to have this industry in town if somebody wants to be here we're going to make sure that's in an appropriate place so with this if we just say no right we're not going to allow it can they can they take legal action on that like or do we have to create like i don't know how we would do zoning we already we have zones for for cannabis sites right in industrial right oli and industrial so but do we do we have it do we have to create a zone for this or can we just say we don't want we don't want this and and have the activity not happen

So you can say we don't want this and you can not adopt it. It's an opt-in process. So similar to the dispensaries, each community can decide. I don't know about the zoning, if the existing zoning would apply to this or...

It's my understanding that you would have to spell that out. If you were to adopt it, you would then bring this into our zoning. We'd have to probably do a town meeting vote amend the zoning, and probably put it where it already exists, right? That would be the most common sense.

Yeah, but doing nothing with the dispensary part left us open to...

Right, so that was a little bit different, I think, because of the 2016 vote that legalized it by referendum. And then we had... It was actually a very interesting way to interpret the law, but basically if your town had voted yes... in the referendum, then you have to move forward with zoning. Whereas if you voted no, then you could do a separate vote and bring it back in front of the taxpayers and do it that way. This is a total add-on, a total opt-in. So if we don't opt-in to it, it doesn't exist here in graph. And there's no repercussions. Right. There's no repercussions because this wasn't a referendum vote. Okay. There's probably other reasons why there's no repercussion, but that's the main difference in my eyes between the two.

Thank you. Can we have a public hearing on this? Because I want to hear from business owners that might want to expand this into their businesses, but I also want to hear from residents to see if this is something that they do or don't want to see. I mean, we're always talking about economic development, and if a yoga studio can charge a cover fee to go in and do whatever i don't know but i don't know right right there's there's opportunities here that i don't want to just i i just would like to get some feedback from both business owners and residents and i don't know if that's two separate public hearings one public hearing have edc really push it out make sure we're hearing from from local businesses um but i i would like to at least start there if everybody's okay with that yeah no it's a good idea

You know, I think you would call it a listening session, not a public hearing.

We would call it, just for like the technical legal, we would do a listening session. It's a little less formal. If the Board of Health were to consider regulations, then we would have a formal hearing on those regulations. But I think more of like information gathering, you know, socializing it with the community to see, you know, where folks are in favor, opposed, concerns. We could certainly do a listening session style format. And look at does it make sense to have separate for business separate for residents?

definitely Because the 24 to that's just sounded like a one-day beer and wine license that people can come in and apply for so if you would opt in Do you have to opt into all of it or can you opt into some of it?

so You could, I don't know, like in terms of their regulation, if you adopt one part, you adopt all. I think we'd have to look into that. But you always have the option to do a Board of Health regulation. And so the Board of Health regulation can say, well, you know, we really don't have the appropriate space for outdoor events for this type of thing or large events. Let's only opt into the supplemental and the hospitality licenses. So that the Board of Health regulation could be more strict than the state. Some of the other things that can happen within that regulation too that I think, you know, we think about in the Health Department is you can prohibit combustion, so no smoking, because you're looking at a little bit of discourse between workplace smoking laws if you're allowing smoking inside of these social consumption establishments. So I think that's important feedback too from, you know, businesses, like how does this affect employees?

um and some of those public health considerations yeah yeah because you can't smoke in right yeah anywhere yeah especially anywhere they don't even let the private clubs smoke um yeah and so it it raises that question but they want to smoke at the legion they should be able to smoke it's their club you know so who who would host the listening session

would it would be us would you would you attend that or i'd be happy to attend i think we can figure out who the the proper uh folks are select board town um and i'd be happy to help support the organization advertising running that great that'd be a big help anybody else

I think the public listening session is a phenomenal idea I also think the public safety aspect is not something to look over as well and it is a conversation we should likely have with the chief because honestly I'm not up on the the newest techniques for being able to identify someone driving under the influence or how much of a risk that could potentially be right so I think we should not forget about that piece of

Yeah, definitely. It's important. It's something that, like, as we're having internal conversations about this, too, I'm like, I don't know. It's not as cut and dry as a blood alcohol level, right? Exactly. Like, you can't breathe into a tube and it'll tell you, like, how high you are. So it would be critical to get their input to think about, like, how does this affect public safety and how do the officers respond to these types of concerns? Yep.

if this were something that the town looked upon favorably next steps wise is this something that we need to update our current um cannabis bylaws uh first and then probably tackle the zoning issue second see if you know see if it passes one place and then move on to the next step yeah i mean it calls out that you have to opt in by ordinance bylaw referendum or the lawful measure for us i think it's bylaw

and then amend zoning to identify where it can happen. I think those two things could probably happen in parallel and probably make sense to happen in parallel. We would use council to verify that that's the process. And then local permitting and host community agreement, blah, blah, blah, in that order. But I think that, to be honest, there's so there's no municipalities currently operating this I haven't really seen anybody with a bylaw that that does this so one I don't know that in my personal opinion we want to invent this wheel um but also I think that there's gonna be more guidance that comes out as communities are you know, navigate these new waters that tell us this is kind of the way you should go or this is the way you should go. To your point, we're not on the clock here, right? We can do this whenever.

Yeah, whenever. And I think that, you know, similarly, especially from the public health perspective, like there's no model regulations out there. For these types of sites and so kind of waiting and seeing how some of these other larger municipalities respond and and learning from lessons learned if this is something the community is Interested in doing then, you know, we have that that benefit of seeing how other communities respond

I realize I'm kind of putting the cart before the horse with that question that the listening session is gonna go a long way, but I guess just underscoring the fact that it would have to go before a town meeting vote. It's not a decision that would be made by this board or the town government in general. It is something that residents will get the opportunity to weigh in on and cast their vote. So I think that's important to a lot of people to have that kind of safeguard in place.

Yeah, I would just highlight what I agree with. I was about to say what Evan basically says, that no need to rush into this. And like you said, reinvent the wheel. It would be interesting to see other communities. And I think the first, even with the rollout of the cannabis dispensaries and whatnot, there was no reason to be the first one in line for that, right? Owners as well as communities. So just to make sure that we look at everything and we can – follow other folks as lead in this respect to me wouldn't be a bad thing.

Yep. Okay.

Any additional questions or comments that we'd like to offer? Everybody pretty well? Good. Okay.

Awesome. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. And we'll keep an eye on things and update you how they're going.

Great. Thank you. We'll be in touch with figuring out when we can do a listening session and get everybody involved. Thank you. Okay. Next up, we have a general update from the HDC to welcome you all here tonight.

Did you kick your other member out?

We did. Oh, well.

too many people so just recapping quick we've you know over the last couple years just tried to invite boards and committees in to you know see how things are going give you an opportunity to speak to any projects or anything top of mind that that you want to discuss and share with the town and how we can you know better help you if that's necessary it's great great so I'm Bill Nicholson by the way I'm the chair and this is John Stevens and Paul Scarlet I'm sure you all know

So we have been conducting business as we usually do. People apply to, if they're going to make a change to their exterior of their building. Or even if it's to just replace, you know, do maintenance and replace siding or painting, whatever. So we've had, you know, a number of those applications come before us in the last year. Unitarian Church, just as an example there. Replacing the doors on the front of the church, not the main one going into the sanctuary, but the ones on the side. They're going to have glass in those, which 100 years ago they did. So they're going to do that again. And one of their parishioners owns his own custom door manufacturing business. So he's doing it and work. That's great. A big pro bono, too.

I actually had a call from Ted Beauvais from UUSVU. They are planning the middle door as well. Oh, really? Yeah. They're not cheap. And so they're planning for it. It is on the map. Really thick, heavy doors.

Yes. Baptist Church is putting on a new facade, just replacing what was there before. So that kind of thing. We have had a number of applications for 21 Graff and Common, which is the uncommon cow. There's been a lot of work done on that business over the past year, year and a half. And Paul's going to talk about that in a second. what else we have a new member joining us megan king uh we haven't met her yet but i think we're gonna see her at the next meeting in august so that's exciting um what else can i talk about we we want to expand the district um oh one before i get to that uh daryl from uh parks and cemeteries is terrific by the way he's really awesome super responsive does a great job so um He and I are meeting with an arborist, somebody that John met recently, and just wants to volunteer his time. So we're going to walk around the common a couple nights on Thursday night and look at the trees that we have now and ask for his opinion as to their health. And also, we need a couple new trees, so we'll get his suggestions for new species.

So that's happening soon.

Would you like to talk about the common expansion idea? I mean the district expansion.

The committee has discussed the possibility of expanding the district. I wasn't in Grafton at the time, but when the district was formed, It's my understanding that they wanted it to be the Common, North, and South streets. But for it to succeed at town meeting, it had to be focused strictly on the Common, but the North, South streets, that was not... That was too big of an ask at that time. We don't want to go that far right now. We're just looking to expand it by one building, which is the old tree barn. And that's just basically insurance that they follow through, that the new owners follow through with the requirements by Mass Historical that that building is preserved. and so we just carve out one little piece of upton street to include that so that we would have control over it the i've talked to michael steinitz at mass historical he sent me the information it takes about a year for the process it's it's quite a long process you start locally you have to have local hearings you ultimately then have to go to the state gets to approve whether or not the Attorney General whether this is legal so for a small piece of land we felt that it's that important to put that much work and effort into it yep community meetings it's you know it's it's a long process town meeting and votes and so forth so but that's something that we feel like it's important enough to and as a test to see if that is successful, then maybe look at other types of expansion of the district that they're not as strict districts that are called conservation districts that have some control, some oversight, but not nearly as much as the common. And I think that was the whole purpose of the common is that is something that everybody in town wants to preserve the look and the feel of the common. But the approaches are what we're concerned about because we're starting to see a lot of encroachment of development and changes and loss of buildings on those Millbury Street, Church Street, South Street, North Street, Upton. So, you know, all of those and then you'd have to decide how far out you go. But that's all down the road, big picture. We're just trying to preserve what we all feel like is a very important part of the community, which is our common. Related to that, Central Mass Regional Planning Commission approached us and asked us if they had a grant process, if we were interested in what would we like, and we suggested demolition delay by law. So we've worked with them over the past year. Is it Amy? The new person?

Jane Weirich was her predecessor, but I know we have a new person.

She retired, so her co-worker came and met with us last month to go over what this was a study of other towns in Central Mass to see what they did, how they did it, how long. how restrictive, you know, all the variables that are involved with demolition delay. So it's not a no, it's a not yet. It's not a final, it's just, it gives the town or groups that are interested in preserving a building, just like the tree barn. An opportunity to say, okay, everybody take a pause. Let's see if there's grant money. Let's see if there's anybody else that's willing, if the owner is willing to sell it. Let's see if the owner is aware that you could do the other things, then knock a building down. Because once a building is gone, it's gone. And to decide as either the commission or the community, is this worth saving? You know, not everything. You can't save everything. And I think that's, you know, important to realize that we're trying to preserve as much as we can, but certainly not everything, because that's not possible with growth. So that's something that we're working on. The other thing on my list, and I think you're going to talk about it next, is that common traffic. safety committee and appoint one of the five of us on that committee i don't know if all of us need to apply if you just want to slot one of them positions for our committee but we have were involved with the the previous study i think several of us would go to those um the hearings and the public meetings that they had and that's something that we're very interested in um and i hope we would have a voice in on that committee as well Anything?

One other thing that I forgot to mention was that we would like to have a couple of signs saying entering Grafton's Historic District on Route 141. One will be coming in from Upton. One will be coming up the hill, maybe in the vicinity of the old fire station, something like that. So we've got some designs, and so we're going to be moving forward with that, I think.

Upton has a really nice sign. I've kind of looked in Lexington and everywhere else. You're just trying to, again, not reinvent the wheel, but copy what somebody else did. And I've met with Sunshine, and she's given me some designs. And then I saw the one in Upton, and I thought, oh, that's really nice too. But again, it's like nice costs a lot. But we do feel like that that's important. Going into Southboro, it's a historic district. a National Register Historic District. So they have a very nice brawn sign, which, you know, that's, I think, way out of our price range. But it's important because you notice it when you go in, when you drive through, and it makes people say, hey, yeah, it is nice, nice comment.

And we do have one of the nicest commons, really, in the area. Yeah, I think so, too. To preserve it. And one thing about the expansion of the district, again, with just bringing in that barn, that would require a bylaw change. So I'm sure we'd be needing to work with you guys on that.

Yeah.

So I don't know. You want me to talk about the other thing?

Yeah. I mean, if you... Yeah.

So... And one of the things we pride ourselves on is working with the property owners. Anytime you have to talk to them about a project that they have, they have ideas that they want to put forth, and we want to protect the integrity of the common. But we also understand there's a cost to some of those things, and so we try to work closely with those folks. But one of the things that we've been seeing, and it isn't something that's new. It doesn't reflect the current building inspector office. It was happening before that, so I'm not trying to point fingers. But one of the issues that we have is that it's really the building inspector that has the teeth as far as enforcing any kind of restrictions that we want to enforce. impose in order to make sure that we remain with a historic district that we can all be proud of. And what we've found over the last few years is that there have been occasions, not always, but where we are not looped in. And that causes problems because when eventually we do find out the owner has already gone forward, they've got their plans, maybe they've already implemented them, and then we're left with trying to pick up the pieces to work with them and you know it just becomes really problematic and we actually had feedback from one that they realized we don't have any teeth and so why even bother with us so really implore I guess it would be you Evan to kind of bring that up with the building inspector. Again, not pointing fingers, but just bringing back the fact that it's really important that we get looped in early on so that we can address this with the owners and make sure that we're doing our job. We want to do our job, we want to work with them, but if we don't know about it, then it just becomes problematic in the end.

The process is if they come to the building inspector and say, we want to do this, the building inspector's office would say, great, you've got to talk to the district first. Then with your certificate from the district, then you can get your building permit. The problem is, is once they give them the building permit, they don't think they need to talk to us. And it's just by accident that we find out that work has started. And so that creates a lot of problems, financial hardships, issues, hard feelings, because they feel like they went to the building inspector and they thought they were doing the right thing. And here we're kind of the bad guys and we're not, we don't, we want to work with everybody. We not understand that we can't, this isn't a, bell jar you know we're not preserving things as a museum it's a living breathing neighborhood and we need to have growth and change but we also want to have the bylaw followed and if there were design review which we have that's our charge is the design review that we need to make sure that we're we're part of that process

I will say the uncommon cow came out beautifully. That building was in need of some upkeep and certainly by having a vital business there now, we're creating, not we're creating, but he's creating traffic to the common that is reaping its benefits with other businesses around the common and the town in general. And he was talking, Steve, last time we met with him about how he's noticing that it's people coming from surrounding towns, it's not all just grafted people. So, you know, where it is getting out, people want to see the vault. So he's done a beautiful job there.

Speaking of restaurants, have you heard anything about the inn? Is there anything happening on that front?

No, it's a constant source of conversation.

Yeah, it's a concern. I emailed her last week, one of the owners, the only one I have contact info for, Just to say that you've got signs, Hunter's Tavern signs still in the building, and people are stopping in. We heard from Kayleen Foley, who works at the tavern, people will stop in and say, we stopped to have dinner at the restaurant around the corner, and that place appears to be closed. And those signs have been up there for well over a year since the restaurant was closed. So anyway, it's a five-minute job to take them down. But they haven't really been maintained on the outside of the building too well. I think Steve Bellafiori, owner of The Incompetent Cow, I think he speaks to them fairly often. I don't know if we can...

And they're responsive when he reaches out to them, but there's a lot of stuff from inside the building that is just sitting there outside, and it's pretty unsightly. There was trash, too. In the dumpster, it was overflowing, which there's only one or two people, I believe, in the building now, so they're not generating a huge amount of trash. But over time, it built up, and it wasn't being empty. It was making an unsightly mess. They have been responsive to him when he's called. We haven't had to be involved, but

just wanted to bring it to your attention okay and just one more back to the uncommon cow because of all the work that they've done this this is we're not Historical Commission tonight or District Commission but the Historical Commission over the last six months to a year has decided that we want to present an annual preservation award. And I think that that building, the restoration of that building, it's kind of the impetus to that because we need to recognize not just buildings on the common, but anywhere in town and whether it's in a residential, whether it's commercial, This is kind of, as we've only had a couple of meetings, but to come up with nominations and then have a nice plaque that goes on the building so that these owners do get acknowledgement for the hard work. the investment that they've made, whether homeowners or businesses that I think that it's hopefully that'll make people a little more proud of their buildings because so many people do this and they do it just because they want to. That would be just one more little pat on the back to say thank you for doing a good job and we appreciate it. We recognize what you've done. So that's hopefully in the next six months we'll have our first award. And we're also, we talked about It's not just what's happened today. It could be things that have happened in the past. Because almost all the buildings on the common that owners have done things, other buildings in town, homeowners, so that we will try to recognize people that have done things in the past as well as moving forward.

Do you have any questions for us?

So you guys are thinking about expanding the district. Have you ever thought about having another district, like another pocket in town rather than, you know, obviously expanding, but like is there somewhere in South Grafton or another part of pocket in town that you want to start preserving and paying attention to and beyond just the common?

Well, it's a good idea. I mean, I know in North Grafton they have what they used to call New England Village, which is basically you know, North Main Street there or Washington Mills and then heading north towards Shrewsbury. Yep. So that's a thought. Yeah, I mean, I hadn't personally thought of that, but I'm not sure where you do it in South Graff and maybe along Main Street.

Yeah, that's where I was thinking, over by Samson Square, that little area right there, like a little pocket.

There is a whole process. It's harder to get it approved if you've got a lot of residential properties. People become concerned. And the problem with New England Village, which is an intact village, I mean, it's actually still operating as it has been for well over 150 years, I would say. But the problem is that Washington Mills probably doesn't want to have a lot of restrictions on how they use the property either. So you'd have an uphill climb getting there.

Yeah, I wasn't thinking there in particular. I was thinking more South Graffin where there's a couple churches, there's a fire station. It's very similar to the common in that little pocket area to just start to, you know.

We did do, the Historical Commission did have a consultant come and discuss National Register districts, which is a different animal. It's more recognition rather than local control. And New England Village did not want that because they felt like they would have restrictions And at the time, I think the Baptist Church was still there, but that was fully intact. Everything was still there. Well, we've lost two of the mills, and so that kind of hurt in South Grafton doing the National Register because you've lost why it was a mill village. But you could do a district, like you said. We could have meetings. We could have informal discussions where people would say, yes, we want that, or no, we don't. I think that's how you start because I don't think people, for it to succeed, they don't want to have the town come in and tell them what to do. Do you want to talk to people in those communities? Like you could talk to your neighbors and say, is this something we would like to do?

Yeah.

How expansive would you want it to be?

Sorry, because your commission, there's just two residences that are part of it, right?

There are four, I think. So you've got next to the library. Oh, those two.

Sorry, four.

There's two there, and there's the house at the top of Church Street, and then you've got the one at the top.

Yep.

Oak Street so but you know limited number of homeowners that are affected by I think they're all three of them are apartment houses they are all four of them are all four yeah one of the things I have to look into is I'd have to look at our charge again but I don't know that we'd be the right committee to look at starting another historic district probably be the historical commission actually the the district it's called the Grafton common historic district because that is

district it could be that this commission that grabbed the district commission what could expand its oversight or you would have separate commissions that would do it depending on how you chose to do it to make it more palatable to the neighbors you could make them more conservation type districts where the restrictions aren't as significant and it's more oversight and more guidance so that people are aware that, and then you can sign it to people. I think that makes people feel special that, you know, it's like you're entering this, that I live in that neighborhood. that because we have so many villages and that that would be a nice thing to do but you want to make sure that you have buy-in from the owner homeowners and property owners because otherwise you're it's it's not it's it's a lot of work and it's not going to succeed that was my point that there's just there's few homes that are part of the district um but there are you know and other cities and towns sure districts that are 100 residential sure it just you have to make sure that that's what the neighbors want

I have a question I'm just back to is there do we have something at the building department like in terms of a flag that or something?

Yes, I don't want to misrepresent it, but we've done a ton of work in that area okay, so we flagged all of the buildings at the the common and So it should trigger with the building department that you don't have to do that. There is some rub with I when information goes back and forth that I have to navigate still. I'm not going to overstate that. You know, it's a give and take a little bit. I think that this is just my opinion. I think we're in a better position to do a better job now than we were even a year ago. But, you know, some of that is lessons learned from it not going particularly well. And you go, okay, well, we've got to make these changes. Um, so, I mean, I think we've done quite a bit of work on that. I know Tracy spent some, uh, some time on it to try to make sure everything is flagged and noted when you're in, um, it's not viewpoint anymore. It's been sold like three times since then. It's opened up. Um, so everybody sees it when they pop in that address, but when you see, okay. From the admin to the end of the process, right. It should keep driving that flag. Um, well, thank you for that.

Yeah.

I mean, it's getting there. It's not foolproof, and it's not probably the only time we're going to step in it.

The last issue we had was probably a little over a year ago. Yeah, it was last summer. It predates it.

Yeah, some of that is that it hasn't been triggered to the extent that it was, I think, in a while as well. But while you were talking to me, I really think that you should pursue at some point in the not-too-distant future a demolition delay bylaw. because you're getting to the point with the density that you have in town that some of these properties that already have a home on them are going to start to become more valuable to be demolished and replaced with something else, right? We've seen it happen. Um, and like even, I'll give an example is the Pratt house that was at 29 Oak street. That was a home from 1800. It was, it's, I was, I was not aware of it. Um, even working in this building, that that was going to be demolished. And it was gorgeous. I mean, I've only seen pictures, but it definitely would have been worth, in my opinion, saving a home like that, especially given its proximity to the common, but also just the architecture inside.

And it's just an empty lot right now.

It's been since 2023 or 2022. But if we had a demolition delay bylaw, that would have triggered Not necessarily – might not have saved the home, but it would have triggered the ability to go document, research, and maybe put it before the town and have the town say, yep, that's a valuable asset that we should buy regardless of what we're going to do with it later. Not that we need another building to maintain. But those are important things that, you know, without that demolition delay bylaw, they can just – go is that is that the one on the corner of north brigham hill and yeah it's kind of hidden so from here if you head up north brigham hill it was almost on the right yeah yeah i walked through that house did you it was it was you could not save that it was a rough shape right but you could what i'm saying is to have the ability to do that if you wanted to because some some of the houses would be better I think in condition, especially looking at the pictures of the upstairs and you had some, some other, uh, structural issues, but, um, you know, to be able to get in and document, save components of it.

Cause I did that at Tufts because they were tearing down the, the one building that I really wanted them to keep. And I was going to let these houses go and I'm on the committee and they said, Oh, this is coming down in a month. And I work with them and I took doors. I took not, um, heavy brass that i've never seen such heavy brass doorknobs on a from the state hospital a mantle i found plants the original blueprints that were just stuck in a coin you know just random stuff that nobody ever threw away so you can at least say pieces you may not be able to say i got a couple of the slight tiles from the roof you know

I'm definitely in favor of the demolition delay and what does it so what is it that we where are we with that so we met with them and she's presented the information that they researched on what's available in other towns so that we can kind of custom our own approach But we're just at the beginning of that because we literally just met with her.

That's great. So we need to meet with Christopher, the new planner. Christian.

I agreed to it just then, and I was like, no, that's not his name.

Christian. Christian. We had a Christopher before, I think. Anyway, meet with him, and then probably for Maytown meeting, it's when you'd have to, again, you'd need to have public hearings and

informational things so that people understand what it's all about and then get the that force so you under your jurisdiction do you have any authority over buildings say that are being neglected or is it just capital projects you know it's just projects that people are doing to the exterior of the building that's demolition by neglect and that's not in the bylaw okay so if there's if there's a piece of property that's not let's take the end for an example right we all see it it's like we're all concerned about it because it's an important building and it's being vacant and neglected is never good for a building so but you have no authority over only if they want to make repairs changes Only if they come to you with, we want to paint it, or we want to fix a door. So nothing with property that's not being cared for. Which is why we brought up the rubbish, debris issue.

But that could be added to the bylaw. You could have that. Like Cambridge, a city, usually these are in cities that have staff that can deal with this, because we don't have any staff at all. It's just kind of us. And anybody that wants to help us in the planning office that has time, you know. But for the most part, we're kind of doing the heavy lifting.

Can we answer any other questions?

I think we're good. Thanks.

Thanks for your time.

Thank you for having us. I'm excited to be able to come before you.

Yeah, I appreciate that.

And we'll definitely work on that in less than a day.

Yeah, we're happy to help draft anything. You probably need counsel or something. We'll be reaching out. Okay. Have a great night.

Okay. Thank you.

Okay. Segwaying into our next topic, Consider adding a historic district commission rep to our traffic study committee for the common.

I feel that this is a valid ask by the commission. Again, probably almost all of the commissioners, if not a majority of them, live or near the commons certainly interact with it they are in touch with all of the businesses and owners up there as well in terms of you know getting feedback and having a relationship with with business owners in terms of what they might envision or what might help them with their their businesses up there so I think just their familiarity and it seems to me it's a commission that should be involved in this my only caveat is It's a shame to then just go to two at-large members. So I don't know how to negotiate that, but I think that having one of these people on the committee makes complete sense.

That's where I struggled as well, because it does, to me, feel like a reasonable request. But in general, I think, try to keep as many at large members in these communities as we can. Um, and I think in this instance, it's also critical, um, so that it's, I think it is, it is important that we have representation from the common itself, but I also think it's critical that more members of the entire town are able to, you know, be a part of this committee as well. So that's kind of where I was struggling with that as well and wondering, you know, if this is something we choose to move forward with, if we want to change it from maybe a five-member committee to a seven-member committee, you know, just, again, trying to give people off the common the opportunity to have their voice and input as well.

And maybe, you know, that's it. We, you know, big committees sometimes are a pain, and then having quorum becomes, you know, more of an issue, but could open it up and perhaps there aren't a ton of people out there that want to you know be on that at the at-large position I'm not sure although actually we already have four or so people right I think we're up to six now six but two of whom are on the Commission so that probably would take two off so yeah I I think I feel strongly enough to have a member of the Commission on this and just wanted to express that I

certainly see that having only two at-large members is an ideal that makes sense so I had when I saw this come up I I did have a little bit of a concern having a representative specifically from that Commission on here I mean people can apply and be an at-large member but to call it out and say they have to be on there because we're talking about traffic and and not necessarily historically preserving any buildings or things to that nature. I guess I just didn't understand why someone from the district specifically needed to be involved when we're talking about traffic patterns. I understand it's in the district, that makes sense, but they seem more focused on historic preservations of buildings and know doorknobs mantles things like that i didn't understand how a traffic pattern necessarily needed historic district input but i understand it is their district so there are going to be public hearings and again there if we have three at-large members um you know they have an opportunity to apply and get on that way so i guess i was confused why um

when it comes to traffic specifically which is all this is going to do we need a representation from the commission well it's also i mean we're going to be looking at pedestrian access which i think then is where i was going with this in my mind um you know concerns of business owners folks who live there um i know steve has brought up a number of things to me personally so you know they have relationships with all the folks that are right there um so just Yep, it's traffic, but it's more than that.

We have like a business owner on the committee already from there. We do. Isn't that you?

I think it's me.

Yeah. So, I mean, I just don't want to tilt the committee, skew it too far one way either. And I hear what you're saying, Ann Marie, but we do have someone, you know, wearing that hat right now that's the only appointed member. But, yeah, that was just my two cents is that getting it bigger than five when all they're charged with doing is reviewing an existing study specifically to traffic, reducing the numbers, and now we're talking about increasing it. To me, it just didn't fit. It didn't feel right. I have no problem with them being one of the members at large. I just didn't see the need to update the charge to call it out specifically.

Yeah. when i saw that kind of made sense to me to have you know somebody from that because they are involved with the district there they are there it seemed like a logical thing to do um but again i have concerns about not having members at large because you know we might get somebody that does this for a living like somebody might have called john bouchard and said john this would be a great you know, committee for you to be on. He was deputy chief engineer for MassDOT. He worked at, you know, with basically every town and city in the Commonwealth designing, you know, infrastructure. So, So somebody on the board did call him the other day and say, please apply. So, you know, we might get talented people like that that we want to have as a member, you know, at large. So I hate to minimize that number. I don't really think we need anybody from the planning board on this. I look at that, and to me it makes more sense to have somebody that's in the district all the time. You know, Billy, we'll pick on him for a second. He's been roaming around the common for years. 60 years huh so you know that understands you know it you know better probably better than anybody and and to answer your question colleen i i look at those all those slip lanes that we have up there which are taking up massive amounts of space and are really unsafe and i and a lot of those have memorials on them so if we're thinking about you know having moving one to a more appropriate place i think having somebody that has you know that would to me be kind of in their purview a little bit um maybe a little bit of a stretch so i don't see the value of the of the planning board specific um to this i see more somebody um from this group for this specific committee. So I don't know if we want to swap that out and keep three members. I guess that's one idea that I would throw out there. And see what we get for people that have been involved with public safety or engineering, you know, infrastructure work, I think would be valuable and would help the committee answer a lot of questions that they may have during just kind of general discussions about what you can and can't do.

So to that point, Planning seems, it kind of seems to make sense to me because they look at plans all the time and traffic and things like that. But the select board, would you want to give up the select board rep for the historic district?

Well, I think ultimately we're going to have to decide on what happens there.

Right, so we can just have somebody else take that spot and then when they come with their recommendation, we see it anyway.

Yeah, I wouldn't want to do that. You wouldn't want to do that? No, I don't see the necessity. the need for somebody from planning board to be on it honestly but if we want to keep that on there we can and we can add that add somebody from the from the district commission and have two members at large or we can leave it leave it alone but it made sense to me when I saw it on the agenda why did we decide to forego the seven member we can do that too Bigger groups are tougher.

Bigger groups are tougher, no doubt about it. But I think if this conversation has told us anything, it's that a lot of us see value in many different perspectives having a say in this particular conversation. So I think perhaps limiting input versus broadening input is not the right move.

And to that point, given that we already know because we already got the people who are interested, that we have six, or at least four, five, if you take one of the district folks out of that, that are interested. Because part of it is, do we have enough folks out there? Can we fill the seats? Yeah, so the seats can be filled. And I guess perhaps if we decided to go that route, then when the folks come before us, we would have to really drive home the importance of being able to show up at these meetings consistently. Because once quorum becomes a problem, derails the committee. So I guess with that caveat, just ensuring that folks know you really need to commit to this. Maybe to your point, we know that the folks are out there. We are talking about tonight that we think we value different opinions on this. And I think that there's, for that reason, even though I don't like the bigger committee and the quorum, we could at least, I think we could give that a shot.

Because we already are at seven. So we'd be moving to nine.

we have two non voting members that we but at least you don't have to worry about if you aren't able to be there we're not worried for a vote it's the corn problem right yeah why we added a planning board member as a dedicated seat simply because like what Colleen said well they're the planning board which is kind of this is a little bit within their bailiwick right I mean we do a lot of projects at town they have a lot of traffic input they've got a lot of

kind of knowledge in that area.

I don't disagree. But we'll have the planner there. Right, with Christian on board.

I don't know that we gave it this level of thought. Cleaning seems good. Yeah. But you'll have Christian there. Christian knows he's going to be there. I was actually, when you said the planner will be there, I was like, oh, I probably got to talk to Christian about that. He does now. He will tomorrow. You'll have... You will have some planning expertise there.

I think, you know, for me it's changing the charge. It would be unfortunate to oust somebody that the board already put in that position. Whether or not we gave it enough thought, you know, at the get-go remains to be seen.

I'm sorry, I just don't have it open in front of me. Is it seven members plus Christian and I? no yeah it's not it's not seven it's five right because we're ex officio so we're non-voting we're not really members of it so if you did go to seven it's just yeah right well we have a few options on the board

also something that we could take some time to consider I guess if we want and bring it back on our next agenda if we're so inclined if we anybody feel strongly at this point let's make a motion we could do that too I'll make a motion I move the board vote to amend the charge for the Grafton common traffic study committee to include one member of the historic

district commission and add to at-large members with relevant experience okay motion made in a second any discussion seven it's just it's a big you know it's Evan I mean I guess I'll add not to put you on a spot but you know this is a this is I look at this is a really important committee we're already the comment is already has significant safety issues especially with pedestrians but with vehicles as well and obviously when those two combine it's not good and and we have you know four major developments going up within half a mile of the common which that's going to add another i don't know four or five hundred units right so that's obviously not going to make it better so what like so i look at this as something that really important do you think a seven committee with a topic like this can function I mean I'm not against going to seven I just want us to be able to do the work and stay focused on coming up with some you know realistic solutions for that area I think that if you go to seven and you do

very diligent job of selecting the people that are on it so that you don't have representatives that are going to be focused in the same areas, spread that out. I think you're going to be able to, to get a good result. I think seven's two people bigger than, than probably optimal, but you have a lot of, you do have a lot of public interest in this. Yeah. And I think for good reason. So, I mean, I think it's, I think it's manageable, but just to circle back to,

select board will weigh in on the results of this committee does it require a select board representative why do you think it doesn't well to your point about the planning board you it's just it's your point but using a different person and if you guys all feel very strongly about putting a historic district commission on while also still feeling strongly at keeping it five it comes to us at the end so do we need to take up one of those seats

think it this is going to be one of the most important committees in town because of the impact that it's going to have on the community and the businesses up there um i think we need somebody from this board on that i guess well and for me what craig brings is not only being a select board member but a property a business owner landlord etc you know right there so um i think that that's that that that adds a huge value in my opinion over me

doesn't have a business right there certainly i still care about it not on the select board but i would certainly defer to someone who actually has a business and just weigh in on not weigh in but maybe i i agree because craig's right there uh he's in the room he's looking at me he can't see me because you're you're you're in a good spot i don't know where to go um You could also consider making a historic district commission seat, doing away with the dedicated select board seat, and have Craig fill an at-large seat because he can also be an at-large member of the community. It doesn't have to be a dedicated seat.

And that's what we can do with the historic district.

You could do that as well. I think you can do seven. I would just do seven if you don't.

Yeah. I'm on two seven-member committees and one nine-member.

Go to the mic.

Yeah, if we need you to mic.

I'm on two seven-member committees and one nine-member. Nine, but they're all committed. And I think that this, I don't know when it's going to start. I don't know how long it's going to go, when it's going to end. If I think people know, you know, and you agree up front, we're going to meet the second Tuesday of every month or whatever. they commit and they block that time and they meet this is really this is very very very very very important i live near the common not on the common and all these developments are already impacting me i can see that how traffic has increased just in just normal growth of the town so I really feel like that we have a voice that even though this isn't a building, everything that goes through the common affects the common. Signage is a huge thing, and that's one of the things that that study came up with that we agree with. There's so much signage, it's so confusing, and it only makes it more dangerous. So I think all of that, we are aware of a lot of these things so that we would not have a learning curve. that other people, they may have their pedestrians or their commuters or, you know, that they have always liked to comment. We've got most of that because we've experienced, we've experienced the work that they did and a lot of that work was not done correctly. And so the little flashing light crosswalks are not correct, but we were not really included in part of that. So it's like now we know that. So I think we have a lot of, base of knowledge that we can share with that committee that will be helpful and meaningful and impactful and what the final resolution is also traffic lights and and if there are lights what what are they going to look like you know that's i don't think that's anybody wants to jump to traffic lights but if that has to happen i really would like to see them fit in with the common it's nicely as you can with traffic light so um I'll put Mike in a decent case for one of us, but also seven is not fatal. I mean, I do it every month.

I think that bringing a variety of folks, if we already know that some of the people that are on that list already bring a variety of backgrounds, I understand, you know, reservations with the seven member board, but more opinions and on more not even so much opinions but just more input from various sources might not be a bad thing in on this particular committee and i think that the three members that we have you know planning select board and now historical um should remain so i'll stick with my second to the motion that's we're discussing um

Yeah, for me personally, I don't think 7 is unmanageable. I think it does give a little bit of leeway in quorum when it comes to putting the meetings together, though we would want everybody to do their best to attend everything. I like the idea of opening it up to be a little bit more inclusive so that we maintain a good mix of people. I guess I'm just prefacing that that may mean that you know, there are some tough decisions before us when it comes time to appoint those at-large members so that we are not, you know, to that point, appointing, you know, three more historic district commission or three more people who are at-large but also happen to serve on the HDC, you know, or other committees in that regard. So I'd like to see us take some care when we do that, but I'm... I'm okay with this. Any additional discussion? Okay. Hearing none. All those in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed?

Okay. Pass the unanimous.

Well, that's something you guys can add to your August meeting.

Figure out who you want the rep to be. So does your committee select or do we?

You select. It's up to you guys to choose and let us know who you'll be sending to the committee. Thank you for coming in tonight. You too. Okay. We're going to pass over the allocation for funds for the roof again, um, and make sure that Jay is able to attend, uh, which brings us back to the list of earmarks for federal, uh, federal grant funding and creating a survey. Um, this was something that we discussed, I believe at the last meeting, um, really this time we just be focusing on the survey aspect of it. We, throughout the idea of getting some sort of survey out through the town to the residents to see what they felt were worthwhile things that we could look into. We already had a preliminary list going. We can offer those options as well for them to weigh in on. Maybe we could consider a ranking system where they could pick up to three options as well as, you know, kind of an other field where they're allowed to add their ideas. But just throwing that out there to see how the rest of the board feels about getting something like that moving and where we go from here.

I love that. Absolutely reasonable. I like the ranked choice.

Did anybody have any additional ideas that they wanted to add to the list? Just recapping from last time, we talked about some funds for the water district, specifically for either treatment facilities or infrastructure. Some of the higher cost road incorporations for things like engineering, sidewalks and targeted locations, water chestnuts and other aquatic invasives. investments in some of our dams, municipal roofing. And I know I alluded to it and I'm kind of getting slightly ahead of ourselves, but Evan's going to be talking about the strategy to reduce fatal and serious injury in motor vehicle accidents. And one of the things that's discussed in there is increasing or trying to procure more federal safe streets and roads for all grants. So maybe that's something we could work in there as well.

anybody else have any anything they'd like to see appear on the list before we send it out when you put sidewalks on there are you gonna list or just sidewalks in general because i don't you know if you put hold up in road for example like everybody in old up and wrote a vote it might skew it i'm just curious how you would put that on the survey i didn't really put a lot of thought into that part based on sidewalks do tend to be a priority for people but based off of the ranking that has been you know, been looked into or something like that. So nobody feels they're getting gypped. Like I want to see a sidewalk, but I know I'm on a list and I have to wait till one, two, three is done before they get to me.

I think you, I think you just put sidewalks.

Okay.

Yeah. Cause I think, I think that you'll get, um, I think it'll, it'll be hard. And I think it also, you know, gives some flexibility to select, um, which one makes sense with other projects that we have going on and other ways that we can do it because folks might say I want my street and I fully understand that but we know that there's development happening over here and we can leverage the developer to give us sidewalks to here and then we can do another component you know all those things that play in that the average person I don't think is gonna know did we did we put street lights on there

we need you know we used to have a lot of street lights in town and now it's you know it's been kind of the way it is for a long time minimal just at intersections um but i don't know if there's any grant money for street lights for for um solar lights or i don't know what's out there but if there was an opportunity to there's some pretty dark roads in town you know it'd be nice to have some some street lights now i know there's a capital piece and then there's an operational piece to that that scenario to operate the lights but

I think that we've seen the opposite of what, I mean, you could put it out to residents, but most residents have asked us to dial back the lighting. They want to go to a more dark sky compliant roadway. What's that?

They don't want the lake pollution.

Right.

Oh, my God.

So I've seen that personally since being here. We've had more people ask to get rid of streetlights than add streetlights.

I just think of some of the really rural roads.

And there may be some that absolutely need that, that needs to be looked at. I don't want to upset Anne-Marie now.

Leave it alone. But to correct, is there reflective paint or something that we could do in those areas? Yes.

Yeah, let's get to my 18-page document that I just spent three weeks writing before you just blow up the whole thing.

And to that point, there's no reason that streetlights couldn't appear on the survey. That's right. And maybe they're not very highly ranked by the residents when we get the results back. And that gives us the answer there.

Right. I wasn't suggesting you don't put it on there. I'm just anecdotally going the opposite direction for a while now.

Do we do the very dangerous thing and also have others? A user entry blank? Yeah.

I think we should. Sure.

Excellent.

Yep. So you guys will put that together and get it pushed out? Yeah.

Marijuana smoke shops at Mike's Mobile on the shack while you're waiting to get your car inspected. That would be a great spot for that, wouldn't it? Just, you know, get your car inspected, you go in the shack, wait for it, and just have a little...

you know hot dogs yeah we have to vote on it first everybody what zone is that yeah hot dog zone there's gotta be a light industrial we're all set light alright so we're done with this yep well um I'll make sure Amber has a copy of that list and we'll get that over to your big beautiful safety presentation

Thank you, and I appreciate you phrasing it that way. So I'm going to kind of run through this quickly. So this just got dumped into the packet today. I don't expect you to have read through the whole thing. This is a list of ideas that I've been working on. I've bounced them off the chiefs and just trying to put together a more maybe concrete way to look at traffic safety in Grafton. We have a lot of different players, a lot of different ideas, and kind of try to look at that. So the impetus for this was that since 2016, as far as the records that I have access to, and I've asked the police to give me a little bit more data, but since 2016 we've had five fatal accidents in Grafton. Four of them since February of 25. So we have either a I mean, it's the law of small numbers, right? So this is either just a concentration of accidents that just happen to coincide around a certain time frame, or we're seeing the culmination of more traffic on roads that weren't designed for that traffic. Distracted driving is now at, you know, I'd say an all-time high probably. You know, most of these have some kind of speed component, distraction component, or... some kind of impairment of, uh, you know, uh, component. And so some of that is going to be a blend of enforcement. Some of it is that we can do things when we're designing roads and intersections to try to mitigate some of that. Um, but so what I, what I put together, it's, it's, uh, it's lengthy. It's 18 pages long. Um, But essentially, I break it down into a number of different topics. So one is to develop a local road safety action plan. So this is called an LRSP. We would employ someone like Central Mass Regional Planning to do kind of a deep dive on all of our 10 years of crash data. relook at the locations where that's happened and identify ones that have similar characteristics right that we can start looking at kind of these broader mitigation techniques and I think we could probably get a grant or technical assistance to do that at either no cost or very low cost to the community we do have a layer on our GIS that shows us accident history and But it's always way behind. And so we could use local data from, say, the police and fire to kind of get better data that's more relevant to what's happening today. I think I'm going to do this regardless of whether or not we implement this whole policy, but this is to establish a fatal and serious injury crash review team. So it's an interdisciplinary team that is police, fire, NEMS, DPW planning, my office, CMRPC if we do do the road study, and MassDOT if it's a state road. And so that would be a group that could meet quicker and take a deeper dive into the different components that each department would touch. It kind of grew out of the meeting that we had with Representative Bradian at Milford and 122 to be able to just do that quicker and more efficiently. maybe more of a concentrated manner it would be very helpful because in the hour that we stood out there I think we came up with a lot of different low-hanging fruit that we could do to try to to get some some enforcement or change fast yes I also felt like it was eye-opening being there

realizing that there's kind of a disconnect between even like the police and the DPW, because they both approach these problems from kind of a different perspective and have different ideas as to how they can be solved.

Right.

So having them all together and being able to work with the state like that, I think it's critical.

Right. Thank you. Conduct road safety audits. So these are essentially field observations, but you have to do them at different times. And during like schools getting out at this time so now we post up people on the road and we we do these this this study that I think will probably do regardless again we're just we do a lot of these things that I'm going to talk about in some small way but not necessarily in an organized way we're all kind of doing it but you know maybe not you know in a way that generates success adopt a municipal speed management policy. We don't have one. That's basically just a survey of the area and try to match your speeds with kind of the conditions that may have changed since the last time those speeds were looked at or set. Traffic calming measures, we've been talking about this, especially with the common study, but that's a road diet, right? That's narrowing the lanes, chicanes, Curb extensions, raised intersections, raised crosswalks, those types of things, right? We're going to talk about that around the common, but just more in a global kind of idea. Redesign high risk intersections. That's exactly what we were talking about when we were talking about, you know, Milford and 122. I've identified some other intersections that are kind of the genesis of a lot of the accidents in Grafton. And And just understanding that when we're doing construction projects, that's the time to strike while the iron's hot. Try to line those things up in a more concentrated way. And then improve safety on higher speed in rural roads. So this... Talks a little bit to what Craig was talking about, seven and eight, I think. So this is center line rumble strips, edge line rumble strips, better reflective paint when we're painting, as Colleen was saying. Those types of actions. Improved lighting and nighttime visibility, so even though we're trying to be more dark side compliant, there are certainly areas that lighting would help, especially dangerous curves, intersections, you have quite a bit of intersections that if you don't know the intersection's coming, all of a sudden you're right on it. So those type of things. Also look at the opposite, glare from existing lighting. That's something that we don't do generally, and most municipalities don't, but send people out at night to say, you know, that floodlight on that garage, when you come around the corner, it's right in everybody's face, and that's why you might hit a pedestrian right here. You can't see those types of things that we're not really addressing. Um, speed feedback signs, which we have already employed. Um, we don't have a ton of traffic data. Um, and so there are some devices or services that we could opt into or purchase for local use here that we could do our own traffic data collection, which I think would be supremely helpful. Um, Switch to, and I haven't gone down this road entirely with the chief yet, but switch to high visibility traffic enforcement. So that's a different approach than hide around the corner and pull people over unsuspectingly. This is parked in very conspicuous areas. They call them cruise lights. You see them in Sturbridge. They've been doing this for a decade that I've seen. So they're just always out. The blue lights flicker on the roof. You know where they are, and you can see all the traffic bunch up because everybody actually starts doing the speed limit, putting their phones down, paying attention. do a better job of pushing out public education, linking it to enforcement and engineering, so looking at distracted driving, creating some kind of a campaign slogan here. It doesn't have to be what it is, but just an idea of, like, slow down Grafton, right? So you have the slow down Grafton campaign. Andy doesn't like it, but he's only one out of five. And so, you know, those types of things that we're not necessarily focusing on, think again I'm not taking anything away from GPD I think they do a lot of great work they've done campaigns like this in the past but you know just building upon that municipal fleet distracted driving policy so we have kind of policy that touches on this but make it its own policy exempt my office but everybody else really got a crackdown on distracted driving but so I some policy around that that's actually enforceable. Planning board's doing this number 13, which is strength and transportation safety requirements and development review. You do have a good planning board and zoning board that do a great job with this. So I think it's something that needs to be codified, that's a focus for us, but I don't think there's huge gains to be made there. You really do have... good people doing good work in that area. And then pursue outside funding, which we talked about. And the other thing I'd like to see us kind of prioritize is visual traffic monitoring cameras, whether they're portable or whether they're fixed at high-risk intersections. So one of the things that I think would have been helpful for us is we have intersections where we see a lot of accidents, and yet we do our reconstruction and we do all those things. But if we had a way to visually capture some of this data, and it's not capturing, we're not talking about the license plate readers, we're not talking about things that are kept or used for enforcement. It's just a camera that would look at, say, we'll use Milford and 122 for example, would just be capturing data so that when there's an accident, you can go back and look at it, or you can go back and look at it for near misses, or what's the traffic pattern look like, or what are people doing that we don't even know they're doing, because they haven't had an accident yet.

That'd be something that would be helpful for this committee coming up, too. We've had the police come in the store several times, you know, asking for video.

So I think we should have our own video at some of these locations. And again, it's not a spying technique. Some of this would be really good for us to be able to go back and see, oh, that was the one guy was on his phone, so we don't need to redesign an entire intersection. Or this continually happens, and these are the circumstances in which it happens, right? This would be helpful, I think. And secondarily, it's helpful, especially at high-risk intersections, to be able to have that information for the dispatchers, whether it's here or regional, to be able to look up at the camera and say, you have a two-car motor vehicle accident. One's on its side. I mean, a plethora of detail can come out that we don't necessarily get from callers. I've seen this in the city of Chicopee. I spent some time in their call center, and it made a world of difference being able to look up and say, there's a car on fire. We should dispatch more than just the regular rescue engine. We should get two engines rolling right now. Those type of things are helpful. So anyways, I don't want to belabor that. I just know that video surveillance right now has got a lot of scrutiny. We're not talking about red light cameras, we're not talking about light display reading in this case, we're talking about just being able to monitor sections of town and intersections. And then I have a whole bunch of policy stuff after that that's camera recorded. So lastly, I kind of give a timeline, maybe an implementation schedule, and then kind of some, try to put together some performance measures, right? road safety report, which I don't know how reportish it needs to be, but some kind of way for us to look at whether we're trending in a positive direction or the other way, and whether we're missing the mark. Then I've got some conclusion, I've got some of the documents that I used to prepare this, and then I've got just kind of a four-step, maybe recommended select board action. Um, which is endorsed the development of the safety action plan, direct me to, uh, start road safety audits with our crews, um, support applications, right? You're going to do that anyways, for state and local funding, um, and request and implement a plan with initial findings in a certain amount of time. It says six months here. It doesn't have to be six months. I don't know what a reasonable timeframe is for something like this. If the board is.

interested in this type of document thank you for putting all this together it is thorough you know I'm sure everybody would like a chance to sit with it a little bit and and really go through it I think you you did a really good job catching not only a lot of the issues that we hear from residents even, or why can't we install, why can't we do this, and putting those up for potential, but really getting into the video discussion and touching on some of the sensitive topics there. I think at least one through three in your requests are very easy for us to support just based on what was shared tonight. And then I think we can just continue to work to not only discuss this, but work through your implementation schedule here. There's a bunch of. preliminary work that's going to need to be done and discussions that are going to need to be had. So, you know, certainly isn't the be all end all tonight, but yeah, I was really impressed. Good work.

Thanks. If I could, just before you go down, there's one thing I forgot to mention as I went. This doesn't address our ongoing traffic safety committee and what their role in this is. I haven't figured that out yet. I don't want them to be marginalized. I think they've done great work over a long time, and you've got a lot of dedicated and talented people on it. So I just need to tie them into this, and I haven't done that yet. So it's on my mind. I just haven't.

threaded that needle yet yeah it would be great to have one of them on that other committee too maybe as a member at large if there's somebody there that would you know because they deal with this stuff all the time yeah um I'm just thinking about our roads committee you know for something like this would like when we're repaving roads doing infrastructure work, is there an opportunity there to do some safety upgrades and look at the road, not just to mill and fill a road, but to look at what we could do to make it safer?

Because when you repave something, it becomes a highway, right?

So people go faster, right?

So I think, in my mind, the action steps in here would then inform that committee that yep you're going to select the roads and we're going to do this we're going to do that but when we're doing it we're also doing that because i think we're missing that right they're focused on pete right and they do a great job with it they they really make that money they're not necessarily i mean they're all the missed opportunity right potentially and we and we see that we see that kind of all over because you've got this disjointed kind of approach to things not that that's grafted specific but even like with with mass dot right they're going to pave all the 122 and we have four to five intersections that we're like these are these are horrible we need to fix them but those those two groups are not having that conversation and i know people that don't want their road paved because they're like oh people are going to go a lot faster if it's a smooth road versus a bumpy country road you know yeah

I think a decent amount of this is really policy driven too. So hopefully that committee would find that it makes their job a little bit easier in some of these decisions as well. Or at least gives them more of a scapegoat where they can go, hey, we didn't decide this, go talk to those people.

It should be a happy scapegoat. I mean, ultimately the only proven way to get people to slow down is design implementation and physical change to roads right it's the road diet it's curb bump outs it's speed tables enforcement only works if there's an active officer there you know and then of course it's a double-edged sword because you also impact people that

Yeah, they shouldn't have been speeding, but it's a single mom on her way to get her kid to daycare. Totally. They can't afford a $350 ticket. We're not heartless. We don't want to be doing that either. We're not trying to be punitive.

Right. We're just trying to get people to be safe. Totally.

That's why, in my opinion, the high-vis traffic enforcement is a great tool because You slow down cars because they see you there and follow the rules, albeit maybe only for a short time. But if you can do that enough and they're aware that you're out and about.

Yeah. But ultimately, this is an incredibly necessary and also incredibly expensive undertaking. So I'm happy to see that there's grant and federal funding opportunities built into the plan because we're going to have to tear up some roads, and we should, or at least get masked off to do it.

Mm-hmm.

Can I ask a question?

The two policies that you called out, the municipal speed management policy and the municipal fleet distracted driving policy, are those going to be part of the safety action plan or are those separate that need to be created and crafted?

They're pretty much separate that we just don't have a great policy in place and we need to.

Okay, so that like in the recommended action plan, that could be done fairly quickly. I know you have it in the six to nine months, but when I look at that.

Yeah, I put it in six to nine because there actually may be some union negotiation consideration that has to be done. Okay. Depending on how we implement that, and I'm not sure how to approach that yet. Okay. So I think there's probably ways to do it where you don't have to negotiate, but that's why I gave us some time to kind of figure that out. Yeah. It may be, you know. Oh.

shrewsbury's already got it and we're just making a graph policy seems to be kind of easy sometimes yeah i think i think i put it there because i i just don't know all of those things at this point uh so if i may um for me you know finally so thank you i feel like i've been on this for a long time and when i first came on the committee even just asking for some sort of you know overlooking looking at our roads um so i appreciate everything that's in here and agree with all of it the only thing i have concern with is the video um part of it and i have heard from a lot of residents relative to the flock cameras since they were installed um and while i see it i already read everything that you have in here relative to it um that's the only part of it that i have some concern about i don't see it in your the implementation schedule so perhaps that is because you're going to Think about that longer? I don't know.

I don't have an implementation schedule, mainly because I don't know what the cost is. I don't know what mechanism we would go. Some towns use portable trailers with cameras that they move around from site to site to try to watch this intersection for three weeks and then they'll watch another intersection or whatever it is. I don't know enough. That's not enough in my wheelhouse to have really clamped down on it yet.

So I guess I'd just say that I would like a lot of thought and research into that. And as you said, that now that the cameras have been out for a while, you know, municipalities are pulling back on them for a variety of reasons that initially we were told that, oh, don't worry about that.

Right.

So that's my only concern with that part. And quite frankly, if it was a mobile unit, I would have less concern maybe because kind of like the visibility of the police officers, just the visibility of that would maybe help. So that's the only component of it that I would just want to make sure that the committee or whoever, or yourself or whoever's looking into it, can assure, I'm not even sure if you can, but somehow make sure that

Yeah, I think this video, I mean, we've probably.

You're still taking pictures or video of people in cars.

Right, but I think, yeah, you are, but I think that. No, it's a long road to go down. But I take your point, yes. I was going to go down there and then I was like, oh, it's almost 930. I don't have time for it.

for the dissertation on camera it's a hot topic and it's got a lot of variation in it but yes i take your point i think that that's important are we at least comfortable under the the recommendations endorsing the development of a local road safety action plan directing the ta to identify and initiate road safety audits at priority locations and supporting applications for state and federal road safety funding some of

Second. Second. Yeah.

OK. Motion made and seconded. Any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor? Aye. Aye.

Thank you.

Welcome. Thank you for putting this together.

Yeah, it's great.

OK. This one's more of a housekeeping thing. Every year we have to vote to approve the warrants that the animal control officer uses to operate. Does anybody have any questions, comments, concerns that they'd like to share?

I move the board vote to approve the animal control officer's warrants as presented and authorize the chair to sign.

Second. Any discussion? None. All those in favor? Aye. Great. Any select board reports tonight?

I can just do quickly open space and rec. We met, I believe it was last week. We discussed update of some of the committees that reported to us a little bit late with their action plans. And so the chair was hoping to have all of that information on the website soon. And then the open space and rec plan needs to be updated by the global open space and rec plan needs to be updated by, I believe they said next June. So we just discussed the notion of having the current committee be part of that going forward, being part of the committee that's going to put together the new open space in REC. We didn't go into details in terms of are we opening that up to more folks to be involved, CMRPC is going to be involved, but that's the Reader's Digest version of our meeting.

Cool.

Anybody else? All right, let's cruise. TA report. All right. What haven't you told us tonight?

I don't know.

What do you got left?

I don't know. I got a couple things. So Grafton Energy Choice, that's our energy aggregation program that all residents, that's where we get most of our customers in Grafton, our energy choice customers. And it's where we negotiate an energy price up front, and it kind of takes the highs and lows out of it. It's a great program. It saves Grafton Residence like $10 million in energy costs over the last 10 years. It's a great program. So right now we're doing a little bit of a thank you, give back type of initiative. Emily Brick, who's our energy advocate, has been putting together some programs that have been very well received. And they are, so customer rewards while supplies last. You don't get to say that a lot in government, but... You can get a free roll of large trash bags. You can get a free backyard compost bin. And you could get energy window coverings. They're like the plastic. They cover you for wintertime to stop the drafts. So, so far we've had over 100 requests for bags. 40 bin requests, which is great. It's a way to try to help us with our environmental initiatives and our waste reduction initiatives, you know what I mean, composting initiatives. So that's tying those two things together. We've only had one rebate request, but it's also summertime, and I think that might pick up when people start to winterize their homes.

It seems like that just went live, too. That wasn't available.

The rebate request is a later edition, yeah. So, so far, since July 1, we've had 135 participants. that have actually come and engaged in the program. We have more requests than people are coming in at different times. So we have a new enrollment initiative as well. If you are a new customer, you get a free small roll of pay as you throw garbage bags. I don't know why we picked small instead of large on that. Doesn't matter. That's maybe because we were going through large bags and we've got small bags. And then just some frequently asked questions. So this is all funded through the aggregate has what's called a one mil adder. It's a 0.01% addition fee that comes to the town to use for energy initiatives of some kind. So this covers the cost of Emily Brick, and it also covers a whole bunch of the things that we're doing right here and more initiatives to come. Yeah, I'll go to the next one. Okay, so into the bad news for the Grafton Energy Choice programming. So we just negotiated a new contract. It is a one-year contract, and I'll speak to why we did that a little bit in a second. So the new rate is going to be 16.984 per kilowatt hour, which is up from 14.035. We still beat the national grid rate. I'm proud of that. but not by much, not by the amount we have in the past. And this is all driven by the energy market. And so the reason we did a one year instead of our traditional two to three years is that the energy market is incredibly unstable right now. We had originally delayed going out to bid right when we started attacking Iran. And we thought that that was going to be a short-term thing and that was going to, be a blip in the energy market so we get on the other side of that and we can go out to bid. That has not been the case. We're still engaged there and energy prices have not fallen since we started that campaign. So we did a one year with the hopes that we are in a better energy market a year from now. So I will say that in looking at what other communities have been getting for rates, we're all pretty much in the same boat. It doesn't matter if you did it last month or this month, they're all coming in high 16s, low 17s is kind of where the energy market is currently. So, you know, we did really well during COVID. We're not doing as well during the, This Iran crisis. And the other concern, just to put on the table, is that after Russia invaded Ukraine, we saw a bump in the energy costs. While that came down a bit, it did not return to its pre-Ukraine invasion pricing. And so we don't know if once this latest turmoil ends, if we're going to see it go all the way back down where we can get another 14 cent rate, or if it's going to stay at a new normal that we don't know. So not great outcome, but I think the best we could do under the circumstances, and hopefully the one year pays off. So this is just some aerials of Fisherville Pond. You can see on the right is before we treated it for water chestnut, and this is about five days after on the left. I did not get out. I wanted to get out today to have a picture from today, but It was raining, so I couldn't fly the drone today. But you can, it's pretty interesting. I mean, you can see the results. And I've been down there since then, and you can, the left doesn't do it justice how much material has been wiped out. So I think that's gonna be, I don't think, I know it'll be a great improvement to that body of water. But they do the whole thing with the airboat going back and forth. You can see exactly where the air ball went. It's interesting. And so they'll be back out for another round I think in August for that other section. You can only do so much of a pond or a body of water at a time because it over oxygenates it when you do this herbicide treatment and you'll kill wildlife that you're not attempting to kill. We're just trying to get rid of the water chestnut. Pretty interesting.

What is it on Lake Ripple that's taking over now, too, from the high school side?

So that is just white water lily, I believe.

Oh, okay. Because I haven't seen it as much as it is now.

I think that's... Before we dredge. I'm not a scientist, but I think that that's because you've got some silt in there and you've got warmer average temperatures for the water. That's my... There's only two locations in Ripple that have water chestnut. One is over by where... The swans generally nest over, everybody knows that as a landmark. It's right there. And so we're going to do a hand pull there because it's probably the size of this area in the middle of the tables. And then they had marked out one across from where the middle school is on the little kind of peninsula. But I couldn't locate that anywhere. So that might have been either pulled or resolved in some other way. But we're going to keep our eye on that. But ripples not, that's native species to my knowledge is what's growing there now. Route 122, we're going to kind of breeze past this. I just spoke to some of it in the traffic safety plan and nothing really has changed since last time. We're still moving towards that understanding with MassDOT about moving some intersections. We did do some signage work and some mobile speed signs and things like that, but Those were kind of the low-hanging fruit things we talked about last time. Paving update, nothing really. George Hill, we've done... Oh, that's not what my thing... This slide didn't update, so I apologize. What the slide is supposed to say is that we're continuing with the tree work. We're now awaiting a crane to do some of the bigger trees. We've done a lot of the big trees, but we're doing some big trees that impact either power lines or houses. These are kind of the last phase. It was small to medium trees, large trees, and now trees that have some kind of impediment to being able to take them down. So we're waiting for a mayor. That's a tree company that's doing the work.

come back and they should be hopefully by the end of the week we've got that got that in hand no I guess that's all I got just one question so I was told that there was gonna be some flashing crosswalk lights put up in South Grafton on 122 a over 122A, kind of towards the end of Ferry. Okay. By that little Baptist church.

Yeah, yeah.

And it was, I don't know if you know anything about it, but I had a call from a resident that crosses there every day with his grandchild and almost got clipped twice. People come and, you know, haul him.

Yeah.

You know what, down 122A. And so... this is a guy that worked for Lynch for like 40 years too. So he understands road construction. So, but I had called Brian about it. He said that they were going to put up some blinking flashing, you know, like they have up in the common. But he said it was going to happen in the spring. It hasn't happened yet. So I didn't know if you knew.

I don't know the stats. I can certainly look into that. I know we, well, my guess is that it's because it's hard to get them there. They take a long time to come in and we've, we've, We've had some significant delays in trying to get them, but that's just speculation. Yeah, let me look into it. I'll certainly. Great. I love them things.

Hawks.

Hawks?

Hawk lights.

Is that what they're called? Mm-hmm. Okay. Is that an acronym?

It is, but I don't recall what it stands for. So you got half of a fun fact.

Okay. Great. I appreciate that. Maybe come back to us when you know the whole thing.

Yeah, you got it.

Any correspondence anybody wish to discuss? Okay. Meeting minutes.

Sorry, just quickly, I'll just bring up the final version, Mr. Carroll's correspondence, the final version relative to, and even for myself, relative to town meeting.

yep i will have that for the next meeting you have okay i did not i'm behind but i did i did interview people last week or the week before to try to wrap up people that wanted to talk to me about town meeting great hawk high intensity activated crosswalk thank you that was gonna be my guess just got there

All right, well, fun fact complete. I move the board vote to approve the meeting minutes for January 20th, February 24th, May 7th, May 11th at 6.30 p.m., May 11th at 7 p.m., June 2nd, and June 24th of 2026 as written. Second.

Okay, motion being seconded. Any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor?

Aye. Motion to adjourn. Second.

All right. All those in favor? Aye. You're adjourned.