Select Board - Regular Meeting

Start with the Pledge of Allegiance.

Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

The town is looking for volunteers to serve as community liaisons and help shape Grafton's future. The Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness 2.0 core team will help identify and address climate impacts in Grafton to make our community more resilient. Visit tinyurl.com slash GraftonMVP to apply. Grafton Rec will host their Collectibles Fair on Saturday, September 12th from 10 to 3 at the Grafton Middle School. There will be coins, comics, toys, records, trading cards, and sports memorabilia vendors. A vaccine clinic will be held here at the Municipal Center in the gymnasium on Friday, September 25th from 9 to 1. Walk-ins are welcome for flu and COVID vaccines. Pre-registration is required for RSV, pneumonia, shingles, tetanus vaccinations. Please visit grafton-ma.gov for more information.

Okay. Mr. Chair, before you go on, I just wanted to let you know that Greg is online, so all your votes will be roll call. Awesome. Thank you. Just before you get into the hearings.

Okay. So those are our announcements. I'm going to welcome Lucas and Bob from the Veterans Advisory Committee for their announcement. Okay.

Good evening, Lucas Remler, 27 Flint Pond Drive. I'm currently the chair of the VAC and the trustees of Soldiers and Sailors Memorials. And I was looking to invite the members of the select board in our community to our Gold Star Mothers event this September 27th. The event starts at 7.45, goes to about 8.30. And then I was also, I'm not sure if I needed to submit anything, but we were looking to get approval to raise the Gold Star Mother flag from September 27th till October 2nd.

All right. Is that that's 745 in the morning? I'm guessing? Yes.

So then for the full week of? Correct.

Okay.

I think the gold star mother flag request is on the September 22nd meeting. Okay. Like on the agenda for on the agenda. Okay. You might want to, I mean, they're not gonna vote no, but you might want to vote it then because it's actually on the agenda. Okay.

No problem. I can come back and i don't think you need to come oh i don't think they can just vote it but it's just not on this agenda it's on the next one gotcha okay so yeah i'd like to just invite the members of the select board and our community to the event we'll hold it up up over here in front of the senior center at flagpole right there nice all right thank you yeah yeah thank you so much it's been a great ceremony in the past we you know appreciate you guys coming in and publicizing it and you know inviting us to partake as well thank you looking forward to it All right, have a good night.

Thank you.

Okay, we'll start our first of three poll petitions tonight with a public hearing for an installation on Providence Road.

Select board will hold a public hearing on the request of National Grid and Verizon New England Inc for permission to locate poles wires and fixtures including the necessary Sustaining and protecting fixtures along and across the following public way Providence Road National Grid to locate 1jo pole on Providence Road beginning at a point approximately 525 feet north of the center line of the intersection of Main Street relocate pole 32 20 feet closer to pole 33 public hearing will be held on September 8th 2026 in conference room a of the Grafton Memorial Municipal Center located at 30 Providence Road starting at 7 p.m. remote participation will be available using zoom webinar ID those interested are invited to attend this public hearing and offer comments in writing in person or via zoom written comments must be received by noon on Wednesday September 2nd 2026 I move the board vote to open the public hearing second seconded any discussion

Hearing none, all those in favor by roll call. Ms. Roy? Aye. Ms. Duckworth? Aye. Ms. Foley?

Foley, aye.

Mr. Dauphiné?

Dauphiné, aye.

Jefferson, aye. We have opened the public hearing. I don't see them in those attendees, but do you have Fritz, Jolin, and the attendees, maybe? That's an excellent question. No. Well, that is disappointing.

We have a Mike Miller. I don't recognize anybody from National Grid.

Yeah, I only have the one National Grid email address for tonight. Well, at any rate, does anybody have any questions about the poll relocation? I mean, it's always nice to have them here to just walk us through it, but we do get the diagrams in the write-up as part of the packet. Seems a pretty straightforward request. Any comments or questions from the board?

Nope. Are there any public comments? Just throwing it out there. Any hands on Zoom?

No. OK. Take a motion to close the public hearing.

I move the board vote to close the public hearing.

Second. OK. Motion made and seconded. Any discussion? Hearing none, Ms. Roy? Aye. Ms. Duckworth? Aye. Ms. Foley? Fully aye. Ms. Dauphiné?

Aye.

Jefferson, aye. Hearing is closed. I can take a motion.

I move the board vote to approve and sign the poll petition by National Grid for Providence Road as presented.

Second.

Motion made and seconded. Any discussion? Hearing none. All those in favor? Ms. Roy? Aye. Ms. Duckworth? Aye. Ms. Foley? Foley, aye. Mr. Dauphiné? Dauphiné, aye. Jefferson, aye. Poll petition two.

The Select Board will hold a public hearing on the request of National Grid and Verizon New England, Inc. for permission to locate poles, wires, and fixtures, including the necessary sustaining and protecting fixtures along and across the following public way. Westboro Road. NATIONAL GRID TO RELOCATE ONE JO POLL ON WESTBOROUGH ROAD BEGINNING AT A POINT APPROXIMATELY 10 FEET SOUTHEAST OF THE CENTER LINE OF THE INTERSECTION OF SHREWSBERRY STREET. NATIONAL GRID TO RELOCATE ONE 40-FOOT CLASS TWO POLL NUMBERED P1 APPROXIMATELY 25 FEET NORTHEAST ON WESTBOROUGH ROAD. ALL OF THIS WORK IS TAKING PLACE PER MASS DOT REQUEST AS THEY ARE REBUILDING THE BRIDGE AND THEY NEED TO INCREASE THE WORKING SPACE FOR A CRANE. The public hearing will be held on September 8th, 2026 in conference room A of the Grafton Memorial Municipal Center located at 30 Providence Road starting at 7 p.m. Remote participation will be available using Zoom. Those interested are invited to attend this public hearing and offer comments in writing, in person, or via Zoom. Written comments must be received by noon on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2026. I move the board vote to open the public hearing.

Second. Okay, motion being seconded. Any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor, Ms. Roy? Aye. Ms. Duckworth? Aye. Ms. Foley? Foley, aye. Mr. Dauphin, aye.

Dauphin, aye.

Jefferson, aye. Okay. Again, these two, this one and the Shrewsbury Street are tied together. They're replacement slash moving a couple poles to make some additional crane space as part of the bridge replacement project that's going on right there over the for the railroad tracks. Are there any comments or questions on this from the board?

No.

A public comment. Okay, I take a motion to close the hearing.

I move the board vote to close the public hearing.

Second. Okay, motion made second. Any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor by roll call. Ms. Roy? Aye. Ms. Duckworth? Aye. Ms. Foley?

Foley, aye.

Ms. Davenay? Aye. Jefferson, aye.

I move the board vote to approve and sign the poll petition by National Grid for Westboro Road as presented. Second.

So many motions and seconds. Any discussion? Hearing none. All those in favor by roll call. Ms. Roy? Aye. Ms. Stockworth?

Aye.

Ms. Foley? Foley, aye. Ms. Dauphin, aye.

Dauphin, aye.

Jefferson, aye as well.

The select board will hold a public hearing on the request of National Grid and Verizon New England Inc. for permission to locate poles, wires, and fixtures, including the necessary sustaining and protecting fixtures, along and across the following public way. Shrewsbury Street. National Grid to install one J.O. pole on Shrewsbury Street and relocate one J.O. pole on Shrewsbury Street beginning at a point approximately 10 feet southwest of a center line of the intersection of Westboro Road and continuing approximately 107 feet in a southeast direction. National Grid to relocate one 40-foot class two-pole numbered P7. approximately 5 feet southwest on Shrewsbury Street. National grid to install one 40-foot Class II pole numbered P650 approximately 107 feet southeast of P7. All of this work is taking place per MassDOT request as they are rebuilding the bridge and they need to increase the working space for a crane. The public hearing will be held on September 8, 2026 in Conference Room A of the Grafton Memorial Municipal Center located at 30 Providence Road starting at 7 p.m. Remote participation will be available using Zoom. Those interested are invited to attend this public hearing and offer comments in writing, in person, or via Zoom. Written comments must be received by noon on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2026. I move the board vote to open the public hearing.

Second. Okay. I second it. Any discussion? If not, all those in favor? Ms. Roy? Aye. Ms. Duckworth? Aye. Ms. Foley? Foley, aye. Mr. Dauphiné?

Dauphiné, aye.

Jefferson, aye. Any comments or questions on these poll movements from the board? Anything from the public? take motion to close move the board vote to close the public hearing second second any discussion then I'll by a roll call miss Roy I miss Duckworth I miss Foley fully I miss Dauphine Dauphine aye Jefferson aye I move the board vote to approve and sign the poll petition by National Grid for Shrewsbury Street as presented second seconded any discussion hearing none all those in favor miss Roy aye miss Duckworth aye Foley aye Mr. Dauphine aye

Dauphin, aye.

Jefferson, aye. Okay. Is there anything here for public comment tonight? Okay. Easy peasy. First appointment tonight is Gloria for her Council on Aging. Welcome.

Oh, thank you.

So we got your very extensive resume. You seem like you'd be a great fit for this position, your heart in the right place for it. But for people who may not have read through the packet, do you want to just give us a little bit about yourself and what drew you to the role?

I'm a retired dietitian from Tri-Valley. recently retired and well not recently but in 17 and since then I have been involved in other projects but I attended what I wanted to tell you was I attended the senior center and all that like a lot of their programs and I'm grateful for all of those and I got to meet a lot of new friends after COVID and I heard a lot of things so I was able to share them with Shannon when she was here and now Stephanie when I was I was involved in the Alzheimer's walk that they had I I was the team leader for that Also, I've attended, back several years ago, my mother stayed with us every winter. She came up from northern Maine, and I needed some additional equipment to help my mother, rollators, that kind of thing. And it was loaned to me by the Senior Center, and I'm very grateful for that and needed advice. Although I worked at Tri-Valley in several capacities, being on the other side was a little bit different when it's your own mother. And I'd be really interested in helping and sharing whatever I could with the board. And I guess that's all I have to say.

That's plenty. confirming you said you are retired you have no problem maybe i believe midday is on thursday i don't have a problem with the thursdays no great does anybody have any questions or comments thank you yeah thank you so much okay take a motion i move the board vote to appoint gloria pilzak to the council on aging second okay motion second in any discussion Hearing none, by roll call, Ms. Roy? Aye. Ms. Duckworth? Aye. Ms. Foley?

Foley, aye.

Mr. Dauphiné?

Dauphiné, aye.

Jefferson, aye. Welcome aboard. You'll get a letter from the town clerk about your swearing in. You're welcome to stay for the rest of the meeting, but under no obligation. Okay, next up we have an appointment from the town administrator on this one. Our department assistant in the rec department, Donna.

Hi everybody. Welcome. Thank you.

Do you want to just take a moment to introduce yourself? Tell us what brought you here.

Sure. I'm Donna Olofsson, and I'm happy to be here. Thank you for the opportunity. I have a lot of experience in office management and managing the day-to-day operations, also with customer service and working with students and interns and volunteers, managing budgets and planning and organizing events and programs from inception to completion. And a lot of my experience really aligns with this position. I have a lot of customer service experience, too. And I've previously worked at Metro West Economic Research Center, where I manage the day-to-day, organize the conferences and events, as well as the library, where I manage the volunteer program. And obviously, there's a lot of customer service involved with that as well. And I'm very excited to be here with the town of Grafton.

Awesome. Thank you. Any comments, questions from the board?

Nice to have you. Thank you. Welcome aboard. Thank you.

Yeah, it seems like a really critical skill set for someone to be effective in the rec department. You've already met Adam, but you're joining a fun team, and yeah.

Yes, very excited. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

I move the board vote to affirm the appointment of Donna Olufsson to the position of department assistant in the recreation department.

Second. OK, motion made second. Any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor, Ms. Roy? Aye. Ms. Duckworth? Aye. Ms. Foley? Foley, aye. Mr. Dauphiné?

Dauphiné, aye.

Jefferson, aye. Okay, we have one appointment from the fire chief tonight, which is our new fire prevention inspector, Taylor.

Thanks for having us this evening. As you alluded to earlier, we almost didn't make it with that oven fire and then an alarm at the congregational church. So we just made it in the nick of time. Today I'm here to ask for the... Affirmation of Taylor Jonkus as the new fire inspector. Taylor is a lifelong resident of Grafton, graduated Grafton High, and has been a member of the Grafton Fire Department as a qualified firefighter for 12 years. During that time, he's obtained his EMT and his Firefighter 1-2 certifications that came through the Mass Fire Academy. Taylor has been a go to guy from the start. He helps us on numerous committees from apparatus purchasing, our SOG committee, and many more that there's too many to remember. Taylor also comes with customer service experience and is a whiz at small engine repair, which works out great for us as well. And we were able to steal him from the water district, so if we need to know where a hydrant is or why it's not working, he can tell us. So I'd like to introduce Taylor, and we're excited to have him.

Congratulations.

Thank you. You can tell us a little more about yourself if I missed anything.

I think he pretty much hit everything. I got on the fire department in 2014. I've been heavily involved ever since. Always wanted to be a part of the future long term and can't think of a better way than serving in this job. So I'm looking forward to it's going to be a big learning experience and looking to see where it takes me. It's moving the department forward and we'll keep moving forward and see what happens.

Yeah, it's a big step, you know. adding adding another full-timer you know and and again just throwing it out something that we had budgeted for um you know and and was an expectation but you know as as we talk about that transition from from call to to full-time and you know as hopefully a slow rollout um yeah you know like you're kind of the one of the first cogs that's you know it's pretty special so

Thank you. You don't have to stay. I got more to do. Congratulations, Taylor.

Yeah, congratulations. Let's say that I know the chief has been looking to both create and then fill this position for the four years that we've been talking about the budget. And I'm so excited that this position exists. And I could not be more thrilled that we're able to hire from within the department and promote based on skill, merit, dedication. I think it's just the best possible outcome.

Yeah. We're pretty excited.

The guys are giving them a good ribbing, but... Before you go, Craig has his hand up.

Yeah. Thanks, Andy. Just my apologies for being remote tonight, but I just wanted to congratulate Taylor and the department on the appointment. So I'm excited for him and excited for the department. So...

All right. Awesome. I move the board vote to affirm the appointment of Taylor Jonkus to the new fire prevention inspector slash firefighter position on the Grafton Fire Department.

Second. Okay. I second it. Any discussion? Hearing none. All those in favor? Ms. Roy? Aye. Ms. Duckworth? Aye. Ms. Foley? Foley, aye. Ms. Dauphine?

Dauphine, aye.

Jefferson, aye. Congratulations again. Okay. Moving right into our general update from the chief.

Um, little shorter than normal. I was hoping to give you guys a little presentation that I was looking to do on retention, but been pretty busy, so didn't get it done. So with that, I was hoping to schedule a time that I can come in possibly next month and discuss that. And just for Something to think about while I'm not here is the part of the retention thing is looking into bolster the pay for call firefighters and also a introduce a merit based stipend system for you know, rewarding those that are the more active and whether it's calls or training.

So are all three of those things going to get discussed next month? Yeah.

No, next month. Okay. And then so on my update, we are still doing pretty good with recruitment. We had one member recently graduate from the Fire Academy, and we have four members set to start the Academy at the end of October. And we have – Just interviewed one candidate last week, and we have two more candidates to interview in the upcoming weeks. So that's going pretty well. A couple of these are, you know, heard it through a friend. One of them is actually the new husband of one of our firefighters that applied. So it's pretty neat trying to, you know, keeping the family thing going and supporting each other. So it's been pretty good. update on some of our apparatus. Our new brush truck that's going to be assigned to station two that we loaded way back in January of 25 finally hit the build floor at the manufacturer and we're anticipating probably two to four months for completion. So they're right down in Connecticut. So it'll be a short trip to go down, make sure everything's going good and all that. So that truck is a twin to another one that we have so the the build process on our end was a little easier tweak some of the things that we had we had noticed with the other one that we'd like some improvements on so we're hoping that it'll work out good and last but not least training I can't say enough about the members they do tons of training so much that I As much as I try to get to, I can't make all the trainings. And I feel bad when I'm not there, but I know it's all in good hands. But this year, or actually, to go back to last year, we did four live burns at the Auburn facility. We upped that number to eight this year. And they've... little less attendance depending on the on the weekend. Some of them are close to holidays and stuff like that. So that's been tough. But we've been able to do carry out six so far and we have to schedule in October. So those are the ones that everybody likes to go to because it's not 95 degrees out. Yeah, I that's that's the my update for tonight. And like I said, I'm gonna be looking for the opportunity to come back and discuss some future items with you.

All right, questions will come back from the board.

I think most of my questions are going to be next month.

About the money?

Yeah. No, but that was really cool to hear that even just a live burn training has doubled in a year. That's great.

We may end up scaling it back a little bit because it is a lot logistics-wise because we're trying to – maintain not having to go outside and having another fire department cover the town while we're doing that so we try to make sure we have enough people back in town that are available to to handle the runs and stuff so but so yeah logistically a little bit interesting but we've been pulling it off so nice i'll just quickly um chime in that foley family personally uh requested the

THE SERVICES OF THE FIRE DEPARTMENT I THINK TWICE IN THE LAST MONTH OR THEREABOUTS AND JUST WANTED TO COMMEND ALL OF YOU, YOU KNOW, THAT SHOW UP AND YOUR PROFESSIONALISM AND EVEN WHEN IT'S AN INSTANCE WHERE YOU'RE NOT SURE IN ONE OF THESE CASES SHOULD YOU CALL OR NOT, JUST REALLY APPRECIATED HOW YOU GUYS ARE THERE QUICKLY AND HANDLE IT AND JUST YOUR LEVEL OF PROFESSIONALISM IS EXCEPTIONAL IN MY OPINION.

THANK YOU.

SECOND, 100%.

regularly about about gfd and and i think to circle back a lot of it goes back to how much live training and everything that you guys do and focus on and you know even getting to getting us to be a part of that auburn facility was something you know one of the first things that you did uh coming on board and i'm glad to see you're you're maximizing your usage over there it's great

It's fun, too. A little bit. There's perks.

Yeah, looking forward to next month. Yeah, it's not going to be as easy next month.

Okay, anything else? No. All right.

Thank you very much.

Thanks for coming in, Chief. Appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you. On a busy, busy night.

Okay, next up, Charter Review Committee.

Thank you for having us here tonight.

John Kelly, 9 Countryside Road.

Mark Haddad, 154 Providence Road.

We are here on behalf of the Charter Review Committee and multiple of our subcommittees. We're going article by article, and these are the suggestions for proposals that have been made to us so far. I figured we'd just go down in numeric order, starting with Article 2. It has been proposed, and also before we start, these are all preliminary. Nothing's been decided on. These are all still in the subcommittees, but First up is select board recommendations to town meeting warrant articles, similar to the finance committee, how they do theirs. So rather than just closing the warrant as a whole, and also rather than voting on them one by one, it would be a extremely similar process to the finance committee where the board would have a meeting and discuss each more an article and then whether or not they recommended the passage and. your votes at town meeting would obviously still be private. We reach out to multiple moderators, and the belief is always the same, that your votes at town meeting are of private citizens, not of elected officials, and I tend to agree with that. The process, we believe, can take place on its own timeline. It doesn't have to come before finance committee or after finance committee. Everyone here knows what's going on with these articles, the ins and outs, so I don't think anyone needs to rely on anyone else's recommendations. And then in collecting A list of towns and cities that already have this practice. These are just the people and moderates who reached out to us originally. Stoneham, Wellfleet, Hamilton, Concord, Ware, and Wayland. And that is before actually looking out to charters to see how many other cities and towns also are doing this. So, any questions or feedback on that?

I regularly attend town meeting in Hopkinton, and they do this as well. You know, select board recommends passage as they're reading the motions and things like that. So is that how you're picturing it, too, where the board takes a vote? It's not like each individual board member, it's just the board recommends passage or doesn't. And then if they want to know the individual vote, they would just watch the meeting, like a FinCon meeting.

What we do in Groton is we put it actually in the warrant. And if it's unanimous, it says unanimous. If there is opposition, we put the names of the select board members and opposed in opposition to the article printed in the warrant. So people, when they get to town meeting, they know how the select board feels about a particular article. And I think that's important. Okay.

That's how we've been tending. I know for the finance committee as a larger board, they tend to just put the numbers or whether or not it passed in general, even if it was five to four, they'll just put passage or not. Being that this is a smaller board and the highest board in town, Our discussions so far have been that it would be who is in favor by name and by vote.

Who is in favor of it? Okay.

Or not in favor, depending on the opinion.

Okay.

So I had a question along those lines as well, because I noticed that it indicates select board individually, you know, their votes. And so currently the finance committee and the warrant is, does it say four to one or six to one? I don't believe it does.

It says the vote.

Yeah. Okay.

So it just doesn't indicate the, so you want the, it doesn't, it doesn't give like the individual members, but it does give the, you know, whatever, whatever it was.

And you could see the end of them, individual members. If you would go back and watch the meeting, then you could see who votes how.

Yeah. Which happens right now. Anyway, so there's no change there, obviously. Um, it's just that I guess I would, I would tend to, I'm not sure why the individual names have to be there as a yay or nay. Similar to I wouldn't expect that for the Finance Committee to be on the warrant, so. Thank you. I would just, I don't mind us showing the vote and that it's indicated on the warrant. And obviously people can watch it in live time or look at the minutes. But I guess I would just question what do you get from that practice?

You're our elected officials. We should know how you stand on a particular issue. It might change the way we vote for you the next time you're on the ballot. So I think it's important that the citizens know exactly how our top elected board is voting on various articles. So that's why we do it in Groton, and it's been a tradition and people expect it. So I'd like to see it here.

It also serves the other hand. Many of you, all of you, I would say, are looked up to by many members of the community, and a lot of people when they're beginning to do research for town meeting, they want to know how the people they trust are voting. And so that can help on both sides of the coin, not only on the election side, but on going into town meeting. Well, I trust Ann's opinion. I want to see how they're voting on these individual warrants.

Yeah, that doesn't really convince me still. I would just push back on that. I think I wasn't here when you were here last time relative to the planning board and changes that might be looked there. But I know that there was a discussion about know getting people to run for various offices and i think that um this probably wouldn't help that and or um i guess my other feedback would be then why not have the finance committee align the same way no problem doing that yeah i'll recommend that on our next meeting and that's not right i'm just i'm not i agree with you 100 recommendation necessarily and um but yeah i'm not a fan of of that change i don't mind the board put on put on the warrant how the board overall voted or if it was four to two or whatever it was but i don't see the need for names and perhaps that comes from a place for me personally where i've been um the recipient of some brutal stuff relative to a vote or not including at town meeting when we did the thumbs up and thumbs down. So I don't think that that's something that I want to foster in our town any more than it occurs.

And thank you for bringing up the planning board. I want to give an update on that at the end. But sticking on this, any more comments?

My comment is more for, I think, the select board in general. I wouldn't want to see this slow of the process of getting the warrant out, uh, you know, any, any more than we currently do. Um, Fincom has two up to two weeks prior to get their recommendations in right before it gets published. You know, our best practice is we like to get them the printed copies distributed where they typically go as early as possible. I, I do think that having those, at least the Fincom recommendations in there critical when, you know, the public goes through that. So I, um, like the idea of adding this to it I would just want our board to make sure that we are getting them submitted submitted in a responsible timeline so that we're not you know delaying getting that out to the public I do have a question have you what what say if any does the moderator have on this just the changing of the warrant I know I know they run town meeting but do they have a lot no okay

And as far as putting select board votes on there, I don't really take issue with it. It's already going to be part of the public record and part of minutes, part of videos. It just increases transparency, and I'm for that.

And you also get, I'm not recommending this, but you can vote however you'd like at town meeting. That was one thing that was brought up. The specific actual example was the mosquito warrant from this spring town meeting where information changes from when the warrant is published to when town meeting happens. This is not going to be a situation where obviously you're like, well, I recommended it, so I have to vote for it. You will all be in attendance at town meeting. You can make yourselves known if things change. So we want to make sure that that is well known.

I'll say in general, I'm neutral on it. I tend to sort of agree that the way that we recommend and speak to it is already captured in memoriam, so putting it on the warrant to me is not one way or the other. But I do agree with the timing aspect. As long as we hold ourselves accountable for ensuring that that does not hold up the timeline, that's my only real concern.

I think that having those recommendations be individual also helps with that timeliness because you're doing it completely as a board that is a vote that is during a meeting whereas your individual recommendations there could be a way to make it even more timely if you were to submit them individually but that's obviously for later down the line as we write the charter I mean if we're framing it that way it feels like the general sense would be that we would not submit individual you know we bring individual to our discussion

But whatever goes in the warrant is going to be a group activity and not one-off lines like that.

Yeah. Okay.

Do I have a planning board now? Yeah, do the planning board. How's it going on? Article 3?

Yep. Article 3, the conversation was very productive with the planning board about shifting from an elected position board to an appointed board we received a lot of good feedback the most productive was definitely the accountability the direct accountability aspect of it there was comments about the number of municipalities across the state that are doing this and I think we came to different understandings based on those numbers. 70 municipalities across the state have swapped this model in our district alone, just our general vicinity. A quarter of the towns around us appoint their planning board, and a lot of them do it by town. administrator, so there's almost no, you know, elections determining the planning board. There are like two degrees of separation for them. Whereas what we felt most more comfortable with was the select board approach so that there's actually at least one degree of accountability where when you're voting for select board, you must take into account who they may appoint to any board. So we are continuing to discuss that proposal. It was made by multiple members of the community. So this isn't something that we're just going to drop after a meeting.

Part of our effort this time through with the charter review committees, we're trying to meet with people and meet with boards and committees and let them know what our proposals are. So Jack and I went and we met with the planning board, and I'll let you guess what their reaction to that particular recommendation was, but the committee still hasn't made a final determination on that.

We got really important correspondence the other day, and someone had pointed out that every planning board appointment that has been done by the select board has been contested, multiple people vying for it, whereas we have not had a contested select board election since May of 2018. Planning board. Planning board, thank you very much. So the argument of competitiveness is certainly in the favor of appointment rather than election, but we're still in the early phases of these proposals.

Does the board want to weigh in on the position on that article?

I do have a question. Of that 25% in the local communities around here, were they always appointed or did they switch from elected to appointed? I believe they switched.

Yes. They switched. Because the state law and charter says that planning boards are to be elected unless a home rule charter has a different want for it. So they've all started elected. And it's, I mean, like Shrewsbury is one of them. Uxbridge, you know, town. Yeah. People or municipalities very close to us are swapping to this model. And it's not just your Shrewsbury's and your Worcester's, obviously, where they're done by the town planner or the town administrator manager. We've got some smaller municipalities than ours that are switching to this model.

And one of the arguments from the planning board was that the charter review committee 10 years ago proposed this and it got shut down overwhelmingly at town meeting. Well, we also proposed that the town clerk be appointed 10 years ago, got shut down overwhelmingly, and we brought it back to town meeting a second time it passed. So I think it's worthy of a town meeting discussion, but that's going to be up to the charter committee to decide whether or not they want to. Bring it forward. And again, just to repeat what Jack said at the beginning, these are all proposals and we're doing our homework. The subcommittees are supposed to have all their work done by the end of the year and come back to the full charter committee for decision. And then hopefully we'll have something for what, the fall of? Fall of next year. Fall of next year. Is when we'll have all of them on the floor. It's been a very deliberative process, which I think is good. Article, any other questions on that?

Craig has one.

Yeah. Hey, good evening, everybody. So I was thinking the same thing as far as we haven't had a lot of contested planning board races in the last 10 years. So that being said, it kind of makes sense for us to consider an appointment process. Also, I've been involved with many, many appointments to the Planning Board, which has been a joint appointment with the Board of Selectmen in the Planning Board. Is that, you might have touched on that, is that process going to continue? Because I think it works really well. The Planning Board, you know, the board that's going to inherit whoever is applying, you know, they get to weigh in and the Select Board gets to weigh in as well. So it's...

You know, that's a great question. Under the general laws right now, when there's a vacancy on an elected board, it's the select board and the remaining members of that particular board that make the appointment. We didn't talk about doing that with a joint appointment between the planning board and the select board moving forward, but that might be something to consider. It's not a bad idea because it does work well now. I agree with you.

just right after that suggestion i would say that's likely the most optimal way of doing this because they're going to have to work with that member very closely on important issues and when we did discuss the appointment method our options really were select board or town administrator and despite the board's roles being more administrative than legislative because everything they you know put forward has to be approved by town meeting so that would make it feel like it should be more town administrator, but that lack of accountability we felt was too far. So I think that joint approach is very good.

Also with just, you know, so there'd be theoretically nine people involved with the vote versus one or versus five. So I think you might have a better shot at selling at a town meeting.

That's a good, that's an excellent suggestion. Yes.

Yeah, not to say that, you know, we shouldn't present this to town meeting and let the voters decide, but I personally am very hesitant to take away any selection or decision from the voter when it is something that they've already had. Didn't love it for the town clerk. Don't love it for this particular idea. Again, not opposed to the Charter Review Committee going forward and, again, letting the people decide, because that would be antithetical to my whole position, but personally, look everyone sitting up here can tell you that running for a election is not the most fun activity and i can understand why there's been uh you know several empty um slots in the planning board over the last few years just like this last one it's unfortunate but um still hesitant to to take away a direct piece of democracy from the town of grafton um as it as it stands today yeah

I think our talent pool increases by doing this because, as Victoria said, it's scary for people to have to run a campaign and put themselves out there. But there's a lot of people that you know, with this type of background, they may be willing to serve and would do a very good job on the planning board. But the thought of running is intimidating to a lot of people. So I think we attract, because we have had appointments, you know, sometimes we get, you know, three or four people applying for one position where we can't get anybody to run a campaign against anybody. So I think it might be good for the, you know, quality of the planning board future. Yeah.

Yeah, my initial knee-jerk was to agree with Victoria's take on this, that I appreciate the value of people running for these positions. However, having lived here for quite some time and seeing what's going on in terms of these positions, including this board, I agree with Craig that I think that we would get a greater pool potentially. I guess time would tell. But obviously what we're doing now hasn't been working over the last five to 10 years. So pivoting isn't a bad idea.

And we also made it clear to the planning board when we went to see them that, first of all, as we mentioned the proposal 10 years ago, that board did not do a ton of outreach. So we made it clear that this is a cooperative process. You guys would know more than us, so we want to hear that from all the boards that we're talking to. And at the same time, You know, we're going to go based off of the data for our proposals, and then the town gets to decide at the end. So in terms of the competitiveness, in terms of the number of candidates and stuff like that, this seems to be where we're leaning. And also, before we go past Article 3, I should mention that for Article 3 in the Select Board, we had no proposed changes for how the Select Board is written up in charter.

Just if I might add, it would be more palatable to me if I would know that it would be the select board and the planning board that would be involved because, again, five-member board, depending on the makeup of the board, we kind of get back into that, you know, who's coming up, you know, to apply for these positions. So a larger look at behind this table in addition to the planning board obviously has the knowledge of what they're looking for in a candidate. I think that that would be More palatable for me.

I like that suggestion. I think that's a good suggestion. So Article 4, town administrator, there's a consensus on the Charter Review Committee to change the title of the town manager. It's not going to change the duties. The town administrator in Grafton has the same authority as most town managers in the state. It's more of a – this is what I'm looking for. It's more of a industry-wide standard that the position is town manager, especially with the authority currently vested in the town administrative position here in the town of Grafton. So the committee feels that changing the town manager will do a couple of things. One, it puts a little more prestige to the position and God forbid if he ever decides to leave, which he better not, when you advertise, more people look at that town manager title than the town administrator title, even though the duties are the same, even though they're the exact same. So the committee feels that making that change makes a lot of sense. And again, it would have no material impact on the position itself. The duties, responsibilities, we're not touching that at all because it's a pretty good position and it should stay that way. so I part of our outreach I sat down and met with Evan and I ran it by him and he didn't seem to object to the to the suggestion so I think it's a pretty easy change and I don't think there's gonna be a lot of controversy making that making that change would like to hear any feedback from the select board on that issue I just have a question I think we were here when we had our first town manager didn't we start with the manager title Craig and then we went to administrator do you remember

I think it's always been a town administrator. Yeah, when it was Dan. I could be wrong. I don't know when.

Looking back at all the charters, Craig, I think it's always been town administrator.

Okay.

Yeah, Dan Morgado was a town administrator.

That's why I was thinking for some reason he was a manager, but okay. Yeah.

Another consideration that we're talking about and we need to do more research on is the appointment of the fire chief. Right now, the fire chief is appointed by the select board. The fire chief is a strong chief. We're not touching that. We're not looking at changing that. The fire chief should stay a strong chief. The committee feels that making the fire chief appointed by the town administrator, town manager, makes a lot of sense in terms of accountability, in terms of the fact that the town manager is the professional who appoints every other department head position in town. So it makes sense to add the fire chief to that. One of the big things and one of the main reasons that we looked at that, and we're not hoping that this ever happens, but when it comes to discipline of an employee, The select board is going to do discipline. The select board can't do it behind the scenes. It has to be a public. You're a public body. You have to post your meetings. You have to do it in public or in executive session, but you have to put on the agenda why you're going into executive session. That leads to speculation. That leads to a lot of controversy. By having the town manager, town administrator as the appointing authority, he or she would also be responsible for discipline. It can be handled more professionally, out of the public eye, and it just allows for a more smoother process. operation of the of the government and again that the town manager to administrator appoint every other department including police chief dpw director and the town clerk makes sense to have the fight you pointed that way i'm going to set up a media have a meeting tomorrow with the fight you to talk to him about this i supposed to be with him last wednesday in america I can't look at calendars. I don't know how to read a calendar, so I missed the appointment. He was gracious enough to agree to meet with me tomorrow, so I'm going to talk to him about that to get his feedback. But right now, we have to figure out how it's done because it's not specifically stated in the charter. It's a bylaw, and we don't know how to go about making that change if we want to recommend that change. So we have a request into town council to give us advice on how that has to happen. Is it a special act? Is it a bylaw change, or is it a? a charter change. So we'll keep you updated on that. And I'll let you know how it goes. Uh, after I talked to the fire chief, cause I'm really interested to hear on his position on this. And again, I want to make it clear. We want to keep it as a strong chief. It should stay a strong chief. So the only difference would be the appointment.

Are there any communities you've found that have, have it structured this way?

Uh, have the fire chief appointed by the town manager? Groton. So a lot of, a lot of towns have the town manager appoint the, uh, Town Administrator, Town Manager, Point of Fire Chief.

And it's a strong chief.

And it's an absolute strong chief.

Okay. I mean, for me, I completely agree with this. I have not really quite understood how it's working currently, having been the chair and overseeing Eric apparently. And then when we come even to do his evaluation, I'm looking to everyone in the departments as well as Evan. I'm not obviously during my day job overseeing him daily. So I think that this makes perfect sense to me in both the appointment and the oversight of the position. And additionally, you know, when it comes to even financial decisions, I think that should be going through Evan's office and Mary's and not necessarily me.

It's just the way you're doing every other department head in town.

Additionally, that's not lost on me. It's consistent with how we are working as a town.

Yeah, assuming the chief has no legitimate issues with it, I wouldn't take issue with it either. We're not removing any of his authority, just reassigning who he is. Again, to Ann Marie's point, we added kind of that 360 review where we talk to other people who interact with the chief so we can get a better idea of how he's doing on the day-to-day, but we're not really the people to best answer that.

I have to tell you, as a municipal official for 41 years who's had my performance evaluation done in public for 41 years, it stinks. And I think you know what I'm talking about, Evan. So I think having, you know, the performance review, any issues dealt with behind closed doors with the time manager makes sense. I agree with that, too.

And if I might, it stinks on me. Agreed.

I understand that completely. I think all the way around it. Public appraisals are not fun.

Yeah, I have a career of doing appraisals, and this is quite uncomfortable.

So I'll be interested to see how the chief feels about it, and I'll report back to you once I have that conversation with him.

And quite frankly, that's with two folks who don't have major issues.

The other one, other article that we're dealing with right now is Article 6, and that's the budget and financial procedures. One of the things that were presented to us and that we've discussed is how to go about doing the budget process. Grafton, the last couple of years that I've been involved with the Finance Committee, it's always been sort of a race to town meeting to see when we're going to make a final decision in the And I know the town administrator and the school superintendent have been coming in with 37 different budget ideas for you to consider right up until the very end. And it just doesn't help the town manager, or I keep saying town manager, eventually, Evan, but the town administrator or the school superintendent, it helps if they have direction earlier on. So one of the things that we're talking about is a budget calendar. And we're talking about having a budget summit in the fall where the select board and the finance committee get together and they provide guidance to the town manager and the school superintendent on how the budget should be established so that the town manager, town administrator knows exactly what the guidance is. If the select board and the finance committee come down and say, we want you to balance the budget within the confines of Proposition 2 1⁄2 and not seek an override, he knows what he has to do, and then him and the school superintendent can work together and get that done. It gives guidance, and we're not doing these last-minute meetings and trying to figure out how to get it done. Having that done makes a lot of sense. The other thing that we would like to do and clear up a little bit to have a date specific that the school committee gives the budget to the town administrator because right now it's it's really unclear the way it is with the calendar and so many days before town meeting and everything else we want to have a specific date in which the school committee has to vote their budget and and turn it over to the town administrator it would be within the guidance hopefully and then the town administrator can take and put the final budget together but we want to have more consistency we want to have a more deliberative process and we don't want to wait until the last minute to try to figure out what we're going to do the budget process would stay the same after that other than right now the way the charter is done and the way the bylaws are done is the town administrator presents the budget to the select board and then presents it to the finance committee And then eventually, maybe the finance committee and the select board get together and talk about it. That makes absolutely no sense. It would make more sense to have one presentation in joint session to the finance committee and the select board at the same time. That way the town manager, town administrator is hearing from all all boards at the same time, and he's getting the same message. He's not going to go to the Select Board one night and the Finance Committee the next night, and all of a sudden the Finance Committee has a different take on something, and now he's got to go back to the Select Board. It's a real disjointed process. So I think that what the Charter Review Committee wants to do is make it more palatable and more consistent and more Make it easier for the town administrator, town manager, to put a budget together. And then the budget would still go to town meeting. It would be the budget of the town administrator as it is now, and that wouldn't change. But getting guidance up front early on from the select board and the finance committee will allow for, I think, a better budget process. And there will be more consistency, and it will prevent the town administrator from doing seven budgets, as much as he loves to do it. I know you love to do it, Evan. I think it would help if we had more consistency. So that's what we're working on. Right now, on article 6, I'd be happy to answer any questions that you have.

Um, I love the idea of a budget summit, but, um, I would love to see the inclusion of the superintendent at the summit. Um, just so we get some school feedback. They're a huge part of the budget. And then it does say the intent is to assure that the town manager receives meaningful guidance from both the select board and finance committee. I think the Finance Committee should attend the summit, but the guidance should just come from the Select Board. It's too wieldy to get that many people to agree on one set of guidance. I don't know how anybody else feels about that.

You'd be surprised how many times the Finance Committee and the Select Boards have been in sync. I've been receiving the same budget guidance for the last 18 years, and it's never differed. The FinCom and the Select Board, when it comes to the budget, have always been in sync. And I think it provides, huh?

In Groton.

Well, I'm just saying. But it just, I think it sends a better message to the community when you have the, because the finance committee is going to ultimately have to recommend that, you know, make a recommendation to the town meeting on what the budget is. So having the finance committee and the select board in sync at the beginning makes it a more powerful argument to town meeting moving forward.

Which is why I totally think they should be involved in the summit.

But. That's your point.

Yeah, my feedback was also why is the school committee and or this? Superintendent story not included in the budget summit. They should be that's a good point very important 60 70 percent of our budget is there agreed so I think that should be something that should be considered and I would agree I Could be swayed in terms of you know, the the wording the verbiage of you know facilitating versus

making recommendations you know select board and finance committee together we'll see I guess how you guys hash this out and how it comes back so you like the idea of having that summit moving the process so that there's the red guy in the in the in the very front of the budget season yes absolutely excellent that's great yeah you know

You made the points, but things have changed rapidly during those few months that we're all meeting. There could be something that happens here that FinCon gets spun up about, and then by the time we have a chance to meet jointly, we you know, pivoted into something else entirely. And that was basically a wasted meeting, because, you know, you spent time focused on one thing that never ended up coming to fruition. You know, even even moving beyond the, you know, the override, insights and discussions, it'd be great to be as close as close to aligned on what we want to what both parties want to see come out of, you know, the budget for that year, and and, you know, what our priorities are, and get those worked out sooner rather than later. You know, after we've had Evan going through iteration after iteration, and then, you know, we finally meet jointly three months afterwards. So, yeah.

Have we met with the school committee yet? You and I are supposed to do that, right? I'm going to do that. Do you want me to join you? No, thank you. Okay. We have no suggestions, so.

I'll just, if I can.

I was thinking about the budget summit. We may want to bring that up to them.

Interject. I think that, you know, you can start the process as early as you want, or we can start the process as early as we want. There will be. changes and 100% you're throwing out number 737 however many times you feel but Evan has had to change the budget I don't see that changing dramatically if we do a summit I think it's it's a good tool that we get together and look at priorities but in terms of the numbers quite frankly they're coming in after our Maytown meeting so that's just Craig does have his hand up mm-hmm

Yeah, thanks, Andy. So currently we have our town administrator and our superintendent, you know, creating the budget and then the kind of the two elected boards, the board of selectmen and the select board and the school committee have an opportunity to review and to give input to those two budgets, the town and the school side. The finance committee at its core is an advisory committee, right? So I don't wanna, my concern is I don't wanna lose that. I like the fact that, you know, we generate the budget and then the finance committee gets to look at it objectively. I just feel like if they're involved with cooking the meal and then reviewing the meal, I think some of that objectivity goes away. So I think they play an important role as another level of kind of oversight to review it. And I want them to be able to look at it objectively. we present it to them just like all the other Warren articles, the budget should be no different. And they review that, they ask questions, they make comments and they hold Jay and Evan's feet to the fire on things that they think are important. I just feel like if they're part of cooking the meal, then I don't know. And then even if something stays in the budget that they strongly think should not be in there during the development process, then when they're reviewing it, I think their objectivity goes away a little bit. So I think the role that they have, that they've always had, is that advisory kind of review of the budget. I think that's important. And I think we lose that if we started involving them in the development of the budget. I think that's Evan's job and Jay's and our two boards to go through that. So I don't mind the summits. I don't mind, you know, communication is great talking about it. You know, I'm fine with all that. So it's just, I think they, I don't want to see their role change as far as what they currently do. I think it's important.

of the piece of feedback i want to speak on um during the process of crafting this proposal i know that the subcommittee has taken great caution into making sure that this is not a very like rigid timeline because as and mentioned we get numbers almost always after the fact of what's actually going to go into this. So everyone is planning out this budget calendar with that in mind to make sure we don't end up in a situation where we make a decision based on numbers that aren't the reality.

Do you guys plan to be holding any public hearings to get or put out surveys? We've had one so far.

Once we have all the final recommendations, we'll have another public hearing because we definitely want to get feedback on that because it could, you know, the public feedback coming in on a proposal, for example, the planning board issue, that could change our, you know, if we get a human outcry, not to go forward with that. I think that would affect the way the Charter Committee makes its final decision. So, absolutely. Public outreach is really important to this Charter Review Committee.

We just did that earmark survey, and there's a lot of responses, probably more than you'd get at a public hearing. Would that be helpful for you guys to potentially put some feelers out that way?

I think we've done one of those already for just open input. And if anyone watching wants to go right now to the Charter Review Committee's section on our town website, you can make a suggestion right now. Okay. Once we get further down the line and we have our list of proposals, we will be doing something like that to see what the temperature is going forward. Like we said, we have until next October to be putting these out, so we want to get a good feel of not only how all the boards are thinking about these proposals, but how the town as a whole is thinking on them. Another big step of our feedback, and that is more of an open question to you guys, is based on this feedback tonight, and we're going to be asking this of all the boards where we're suggesting big changes, do you feel you'd like to see us again closer to when we're actually submitting these proposals from these subcommittees, or do you think that this alone was enough feedback to have us go back to our subcommittees and put them forward to the whole board?

I personally would like to see you come back once they're tightened up as we get closer to the end of the process.

I like that. I think we should. I have a question for the board if I may. Do you have anything else? No. One of the things the Charter Review Committee is trying to figure out is how to go about getting the charter approved. There are two processes that you can do. You can do a home rule petition, which is a majority voted town meeting, and then the legislature and the governor. The other is a two-thirds voted town meeting and then a ballot election. It doesn't touch the legislature. Do you guys have a preference? Because we've done it both ways here in Grafton over the years. Is there a preference that you have on how to do it?

How have we done it historically? Probably keep it the same.

We've done it both ways.

That's the problem.

For all.

And, you know, doing it simple majority, it's easier to pass, but then it takes quite a while for the legislature to get around to it. We've had situations, and we're looking through the charter now, where, I mean, these seem like minor things, but they really aren't when you have typos everything spelt differently different capitalizations with different definitions you know that stuff takes time for our board where we could be spending it doing research on much more important proposals uh but then when it comes to the two-third option it's a much swifter approval but it's a much higher threshold to actually get it passed because you have to get the two-thirds vote at town meeting and then a majority vote at the ballot at the next annual election so think of you have to answer now i just want you to think about that because we're grappling with it as a committee right now great

Yeah, I would try and keep it in the town's hands as much as possible. And maybe the bar should be high. I mean, these are important changes and they're going to last for at least five years. Right. So is it 10 years? Yeah. So I think if we keep it with the residents, I think if we if we can, I guess that would be my two cents on that.

And we also do have immediate examples of the legislature handing us back a charter that doesn't make a ton of sense with the town clerk change. I don't think it's mentioned in there anywhere that the town clerk is now appointed rather than elected. That position seems to have just kind of vanished from the charter while leaving a ton of mentions to town officials, which is now no longer a thing that we have. So we are definitely going to continue looking at those different mechanisms.

We have a lot of smart people on this committee that are wordsmiths that really, it's amazing the amount of time they spend. We're very lucky. It's a good committee. It's a good committee.

If I might just chime in that I agree with Craig, I would go with the two-thirds and the majority ballot. For me, mostly, I agree we should set the bar high. This is something that we're going to live by for quite some time, and it needs to be right and agreed upon by everybody, or at least the majority.

That's good feedback. Glad I asked.

I like that approach for the speed and simplicity. You know, it really takes things a while to get through the legislature, as we've seen. So, you know, if we can hit that high bar mark and get it done even faster, let's do it.

Okay. Thank you so much for your time. It's always nice to see you.

Thanks for coming in.

Yeah, very well prepared presentation. Thank you.

Appreciate it.

Okay. Were we going to talk budget calendar with them, or was that just us as a follow-up?

I think it was just us, because that's how we started it, and we can always share it with them. I don't think it needs to go in the charter. These aren't going to be an official charter budget calendar. And whatever they do, we'll implement into the calendar summit, for example, the budget summit.

Okay. Do we have updates that we want to review of the current calendar or gather? This was gathering feedback, right? You were going to share some feedback. We were going to share some feedback.

I don't have the feedback.

Based on the new information, it feels like. That's it. Yeah.

The new information. Why I don't have it. No, Will and I have had preliminary discussions, but he is unavailable and I just don't have it. So. I need to circle back. Why don't we, if it's acceptable, put it on the 22nd and come back around at it again. Everybody's okay with that?

That's fine. Great. October 6th is my birthday, too, so it has to go on that day. Well, there you go. I'm very excited for that.

There you go.

Our best birthday present.

Okay. So we'll bring that back. Okay. We have a road closure request from REC for Apprentice Street for the Fall Festival.

Sorry, Adam, I should have asked to get taken out of order because your stuff's going to be quick. I had two anyway, so it's funny that I had Donna, so it's good.

Good evening, everybody. So we're doing our annual Ask for Road Closure on Prentiss Street, open for local traffic only. Last year was the first year we did the Fall Festival at Nelson Park instead of the Common as the The event has just absolutely blown up in a positive way. Attendance-wise, I thought it went awesome last year at Nelson Park, and I think having the playground there, too, was nice to have the kids have something other than the trees on the common to climb on. So we're just asking for requests to have local traffic only on Prentice Street for the 18th from 10 to 3. The event is 11 to 2. We're giving the hour buffer before and after.

Any questions, comments from the board? Love the new location.

yeah is it both sides of prentice street prentice is one way so they'll just no i think prentice splits 140 is what oh so yeah so it's just the part of prentice street that uh aligns on on the side of nelson park so it's not gonna be the top part okay great thank you anything else okay let's take a motion looking forward to it

I move the board vote to approve the closure of Prentice Street on October 18th as requested by the Recreation Department.

Second. Okay, motion made. Seconded any additional discussion? If none, all those in favor, Ms. Roy? Aye. Ms. Duckworth?

Aye.

Ms. Foley?

Foley, aye.

Ms. Dauphiné? Aye. Jefferson, aye. All right, let's talk about your gift account.

Yeah, so when we received the grant or had an announcement of the grant for the Smile Mass Wheelchair over the summer, the community advocate put out an article about us receiving that grant. And we had a lovely person call me within days and said, hey, would you like a second one? And I said, well, tell me more what you mean by that. And she says, well, how much do they cost? And I said about $2,500. We have one right now. I don't know if there's need for two. And she said, you know, would you be interested in taking those funds and using them for other accessibility purposes? So we're looking to create this account so we can accept that gift in particular, but also for future projects. We're actually looking to get an all-terrain wheelchair that we can rent out through the department. So this will be a huge chunk of that. Those wheelchairs cost $5,500. So our hope is to continue to grow that account so we can, you know, anytime we have accessibility requests or upgrades, we have easy funds to tap into for that. So we're just looking to be able to open an account for that.

Very nice. That sounds like a great cause. And that would be just a separate account, Mary?

Yeah, so it's in our Our REC department, it's a separate. So we already have one that's separate from this. But yeah, we would have a secondary account.

It's essentially creating another line in their general ledger that will be able to be tapped on, but otherwise stays static regardless of what the other budget does around it.

Okay.

Would the funds be restricted to accessibility or?

based on the title of the GIFT account, it would be accessibility or inclusion-based programming. So, obviously, in our continued effort to focus on that in the years that I've been here, so anything that would fall in that bucket, we would use those funds.

We have different gift accounts in different places that are very specifically worded because of the intent of the person's donation. And then 60 years from now, the town administrator will curse us for having created them because we have some that are almost 100 years old that have pennies in them that we can't get rid of. That Mary has to continually calculate. But that's, you know, that's future Mary's problem.

That's wonderful. That's very generous of that person. And I think it's an awesome thing to start an accessibility and inclusion account and see what else you can get.

Yeah. Yeah, they tend to be two of our heavier draws in terms of funding, especially like the inclusionary programming and something that is both things, to clarify, that are critically important for all of our residents and a commonly talked about issue. So yeah. Let's take that motion.

I move the board vote to create a gift account and accept the funding for the Recreation Department.

Second. Okay, motion made and seconded. Any discussion? None. All those in favor? Ms. Roy? Aye. Ms. Duckworth? Aye. Ms. Foley? Aye. Ms. Dauphiné? Dauphiné, aye. Jefferson, aye. Thanks for coming in.

Thank you, everybody.

Thank you.

Okay, next up we're going to discuss parking at the Grafton Historical Society. And Dave, come on up.

Good evening. Thanks for having me. My name's Dave Terry, and I'm currently treasurer of the Grafton Historical Society. We've been at that location since December 19, yeah, 2018. Just for a little background on it, prior to that, we finished up a 30-year lease at the old townhouse in 2016 and became tenant at will. And then the town went to outside management, and we could keep the place we had for a mere $2,000 a month plus expenses, which wasn't feasible. At that time, the town did offer us two other locations to look at. The present location, 71 Main Street, the old library, and the other one was the Nelson Library. The downside to the Nelson Library, it was too small and broken up. It would have been probably a 50% reduction in space. We had a little bit of concern about the 71 Main Street because we'd been told that the cellar was wet. As it turns out, It was an easy fix. The window wells were lowered in the ground around it. So I was down there one time when it was raining and I'm watching the water come in the windows and I sandbagged the outside and we haven't had a problem since then. The other enticement was that the town agreed that the lease would include 9 Orchard Street, which was the vacant parking lot across the street. across from the thing. Since 2018, it's progressively gotten packing becomes more of a problem. We had a meeting Tuesday, last Tuesday, and we had to pack on the street, because the lot was full. In the least specifically says that the area was reserved for parking for the Historical Society conditions were is that we would maintain the grounds at the building and the town would provide the space in plowing of it. In fact, they even said we may have to move vehicles to allow the town to plow it. As it stands right now, they can't plow it because there's too many cars in there and they don't belong to us. There are currently, I believe, three unregistered vehicles in that lot, which is in violation of town bylaw. Town is actually maybe in violation of their own bylaw because they have more than one unregistered vehicle on the property. And I know how that works because a number of years ago, I was nailed on the same thing. But fortunately, one of mine was, The town line, Upton and Grafton, goes through the property, and I didn't anticipate a problem. So one was in Upton, the other was in Grafton. It didn't become an issue. But as far as the Water 9 Orchard Street, my recommendation or my request is that they post it, no overnight parking. And they put signage up indicating that it's a parking photograph in the Historical Society. We currently are open Sunday afternoons, Tuesday afternoon, and then there's various functions during the month. And a lot of them, you just can't park because there's no space. I've been... raised an issue in this for about three years and i finally said well maybe i gotta go to the select board to resolve it but uh it's it's become a real problem at this point and particularly in the winter because there is uh they can't plow it and the two neighbors plow theirs into the middle so you end up with a pile in the middle that freezes so even with a front-end loader you can't move it so like i said my my request is that they uh quit a lot and they put signage up an overnight pack and I think would eliminate most of the problem. So I guess with that, I'll leave it to questions.

So my understanding is the problem with that is we can put up signage, but it would be non-enforceable. We can't, I mean, we... we can't bar people from using municipal lots. If it's municipal lot, it's open to the public. Um, you know, we, it sounds like we could confirm, um, you know, the, the, the vehicles that are parked there that you indicated, you know, somebody has three unregistered. That's something that it seems like the police department could look into, but you know, in terms of posting signage, it, uh, it, It doesn't really, again, we can, but my understanding is it wouldn't force any issue. It doesn't force anybody's hand.

Well, my question is, if our lease covers that lot, then why is it a municipal parking lot?

It's town-owned land.

Mm-hmm. We can't do no overnight parking on any of our – You can post it however you want, but the police won't enforce it. So that's always been the rub. Dave, do you have a current lease?

Yes, I do. Okay. We have a current lease. I have a copy here. But we have a current lease. It was signed in – it was a 10-year lease signed December of – 2018, and it has a provision in it for two extensions, five years each, or renegotiate the longer term. We would be looking to extend it for at least the five years, if not longer.

I mean, I have noticed those. I didn't know that there were three, but I've noticed at least a couple of cars that clearly are not going anywhere that have been sitting there for a while.

Part of the problem is that along the fence line, there's There's a Toyota that hasn't moved at the front of the lot since a year ago, September, anyways. But along the fence, if you go back and look at the GIS or the assessor's photos, you'll see that 10 years ago, there was nothing parked there. And then over time, the trailers showed up, and they're now unregistered. I suspect they're unregistered. They don't move.

Yeah, I've seen the two back there.

And the problem that creates is that when they do plow it, they've got no place to plow the snow. The logical place would be to plow it to the property line in the fence. But there's a line of trailers and cars there right now, and that creates more of a problem. We don't mind coexisting. The problem is that it's gotten so now that... Five of the cars that are there at night, I believe, are employees of the facility at 73 Main Street, the one next to us. And historically, they parked in their own lot or they parked along our fence. And it's only since the pandemic that... That moved into the lot. But, you know, when you put five or seven cars there and then the neighbors park all this and then you have commercial truck park there, we end up parking on the street. What's the business? I'm not sure if it's a state facility or what it is, but it's a group home. But I went back and I looked online at the aerial photos that go year to year. And you go back 10 years or so, and it progressively gets more and more and more. And the pandemic kind of just blew it out because nobody was using it. But now that things are back active, it just creates a real problem.

I mean, so, you know,

couple of things that maybe we can impact that the cars that are potentially there that are not registered etc and that I think there's a trailer that I've noticed there's this trailer three or four trailers that might even be more than that and there's two properties that that but that what yes one on Archer Street and one at Sampson and I it looks to me like they've just provided additional space for their own use so it

To get back to so maybe we can, you know, impact that in some way. Additionally, perhaps just a note to the group home to whoever runs, manages that, runs it, you know, they don't know, they don't know, right? They see something that's open and there's no signage.

I do want to point out that our public safety departments have said that once we move them out of that lot, then they start parking on the street and then we can't get our equipment through. that's one of the concerns with that area so congested and that the streets are so narrow that DPW wants people to park in the end lot when it snows so that they can plow the street and police and fire like to have people not parking along the road in there so that's the pushback that we've had on that side of the house that I want to be just cognitive of because that group home I think if we ban them from parking in the lot at the end of Orchard, they're going to be lined up on the street there.

I don't know about, I mean, I know a lot about a lot of group homes in town. I don't know about that one. Are there vans associated with it?

No, it's the employee because they rotate it three o'clock or one o'clock.

It's kind of depending on how big that facility is. Generally, group homes that I service, there's only a couple of Staff at a time, yeah. And the participants don't have cars, so it's generally only a couple of cars.

And I'm not sure at this point whether or not they have more employees than they used to have. But my recollection is there used to be two or three cars parked on the street, but they're off the street. They're up against the fence for the library at the back entrance. And there appeared to be more of them parking on their own site, but now there's anywhere from five to seven on a nightly basis.

And my other recommendation or idea was that we could put something relative to snow removal for the neighbors, but it sounds like, like you said, DPWX, it's handy for them to have the cars in there, so it doesn't align with that.

Yeah. I have a suggestion when I, when I'm looking at the GIS map, I see maybe total of like 15 residents that could be potentially using this space. Have you considered maybe sending out like a monthly mailer to those 15 addresses saying, Hey, these are the dates of events that we have coming up to just maybe be mindful and trying open communication that way with the people potentially parking in those spaces.

We have, we have spoken to the, uh, manager of the group facility and there was no they just agreed and that was about it logistically I'm not sure whether or not that would be something we could practically do

it does sound like if there was more communication for hey this is when we would like to be using the space and the rest of the time we're open to everybody else using it it does i don't know how you communicate to to the neighborhood though that you know we're having an event from two to four on this day or um an event on one to three on this day and and or maybe if you if you had a website that you could be updating or pushing out to just i don't know maybe an email chain to some of these residents to see if they're interested in staying informed to when you guys would be likely having more cars show up. Because they might want to know, too. They might not want to get stuck in or... Well, they're there before we get there.

So that's the problem. Our evening event started at 7, 6.30 or 7, and by that time, the whole row's already filled up. Right. And that's And that's gotten worse in the last couple of years. I'm not sure where, the number of houses hasn't changed. Right. There are a couple commercial vehicles that have been, that have showed up, and I don't know whether they work and they live at one of the houses or what it is, but it's just, You know, supposedly the space was provided for our parking, and as it turns out right now, we have no, we virtually can't park there.

And from what I know of the Historical Society, it's pretty slim in terms of volunteers and what you guys are doing with the very few hours of support that you have. right now is a lot. So I mean, I think there is a website though, isn't there? There is a website, yes. And there is a newsletter that goes out.

It's just a matter of, yeah. And my gut feeling is it's the houses in the close proximity that use them. The ones along the back, the stuff along the back are clearly the two houses behind it. But that's

just it's there yeah yeah thinking about next steps as we go through this and Evan I mean chime in on viability of these ideas it seems like we could start with having GPD confirm you know active registrations and you know possibly remove any vehicles that aren't registered at that point or consider having them removed We can, again, kind of take the group temperature on if we want to have signage get posted there, knowing that it's non-enforceable. But at the same time, I feel like the odds are pretty good that the people parking there aren't watching this meeting, so we're not tipping our hand in any great way with that. But it seems like those are really our... two paths forward at this point beyond as was mentioned you know trying the the historical society trying to do more outreach which i do understand is difficult giving your you know limited staffing and um craig you uh you want to weigh in yeah thanks andy i guess a few thoughts um

If we were to, say, make that a real parking lot and pave that, do we have any idea how many parking spots we could get in there?

No. I mean, I could put that together like an estimate, but it's got kind of a funky little layout, too. So it would take me just a little – it's not a rectangle.

Right. I mean, I – Growing up, I had friends that lived on Orchard Street. And I know that that parking, you know, that dirt corner has been used by the residents there for decades and decades. So not that that's right, but there's just been, you know, they've had the luxury of having that vacant lot there at their disposal. So I don't know how the library worked before that, if it was an issue for the library when it was there, but... I would say that the girls' home that's down the street a little bit, you know, they do have, you know, it's a big, big house with a big front yard. They probably could make some parking there for themselves if, you know, they needed to. And the third, as far as their, if there's unregistered cars there, we just We need to find out, I think, who's they are and just give them, you know, seven day notice to get rid of them. I mean, this shouldn't be unregistered cars in that public lot. And then I guess to David, how many spots do you think you need on any given day, say on average between staff and Because you're early open. How many days are you open down there, David?

We're open Sunday afternoon, Tuesday afternoon. There's normally somebody there on Thursday. It's advertised. Call if you want to come in. And then we do a director's meeting once a month. And we have... We have other functions. It's getting harder and harder to find places to hold functions out, bigger venues, so we've been pushing to have more at the museum. So, you know, probably the maximum we need is probably 20 on a, if there was a function, but on the normal directors' night, There's 10 directors, 12 directors, so almost nobody carpools, so you end up with that many cars. As far as parking spaces, there would be another 10 spaces along the fence if the trails and stuff weren't there and it was cleaned out. And I suspect if there was some way to put lines put packing lines in, you could probably triple the amount of packing. The problem is right now, it's an odd-shaped lot, and the street line is really unclear. So people pull in on a curve, and then you could theoretically pack behind, but nobody wants to. And then when you put snow in there, it's just a horror show.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess I'll make... One suggestion is maybe we can have, you know, Paul and Brian, and maybe they've already done this and, you know, put their heads together and look at the kind of the layout of that corner. I know that's just one big radius. You know, maybe there's a way to square those lines up and make it more to, you know, specification, I guess, and look at doing that lot correctly because it's just always been there.

They all go back to the, 1933 layout for the subdivision when the mill sold off the property and all the lots went to the center line of the road because it was a subdivision prior to town approval. And I think that lot just is by the radius of the street or the center line of the street. So you could establish the back line, but you can't. You'd be hard pressed to do the front.

I'm just thinking maybe it would be helpful if There was just a sign, you know, town land or property of the Historical Society or something to that effect for folks that are just randomly parking there. I think that if I knew it was parking for someone, I would think twice about it. Maybe it's not going to solve your entire problem, but at least a way to let folks know that this is actually supposed to be used by someone might help.

I'm not entirely sure that the people that are parking there know the problem. And that's the other issue.

When we were having the issue at the lot out here at the senior center, did we end up posting signage or no? And then we've had people complain over the years at Norcross Park as well, where there are people who live in apartments around there parking in there, and we didn't post signage there at all. My concern about if we put signage here, we're going to hear back from all of the other parking lots that we've had requests for signage, and we've told no to as well.

Well, there's signage up here that now says no parking between 7 and 3 or something behind the senior center in all those spots, right? There's something up there. It's no parking 7 to 3.

Yeah, it wasn't. 9 to 3. There's posting in this lot, but it's just not enforceable. So we can... So we did put signage up. There's signage here that's pre-existing, and then there's... It hasn't been added since I've been here.

Okay.

And then Norcross, I don't believe there's anything. I was just over there. There's... There's nothing there, but I mean, you could, you can post this, but GPD is not going to take it and tell anybody.

Okay. But the difference between the park, it's like, it's kind of obvious. This is a park and that's the parking lot for the park. Whereas this little circle, you really, it's super random. If you don't know, you don't know. And, you know, quite frankly, even I know, and you're still not sure what is that for? So it can't be enforced, but it can't, harm, in my opinion, that at least folks would know that, oh, that's meant for the historical society.

Like I say, the only reason that it's been the last four or five years that it's escalated. I know some of the neighbors that park there, and I know they go there when there's a snowstorm, but they usually move them out. The last couple of snowstorms we've had is they were buried. They'd be there for a couple of days, three days, and... And then the town can't plow it, so.

Has there been any consideration about adding spaces on the lot that the museum is on, like on that back square property there, between that and the home?

There's about a six-foot drop from where the fence line is to the... There's nothing really around the library at all.

The fence line is about the top of slope.

Yeah. Agreed.

So, all right. What I've got so far is that we'll talk with the chief about, you know, confirming the status of the cars and whatnot that are over there now. It sounds like we're leaning towards posting signage. How is the board feeling on that? Let's get a temperature. Is that something that we want to post, you know, a, you know, grafted historical society parking sign, even though, you know, we know it's non-enforceable, but it implies that hopefully people will consider that?

I wouldn't want to post anything until we're confirmed that safety vehicles can get by where these vehicles end up as an alternative. Like these vehicles are going to end up somewhere. And what I'm hearing is that it's better for fire trucks and safety vehicles and plows to get by if they're here. But if that's not the case, then I'm okay with the sign. But if that is the case, I'm not okay with the sign. That's me personally. Craig?

Yeah, it sounds like there's no rhyme or reason to the parking down there. I mean, I haven't been down there recently. But without lines, you know, people, you know, it's amazing how some people park. They just don't think about it when they pull into even a parking lot with lines. You know what I mean? So we're not doing ourselves any favors. It's probably not efficient. And I don't know if we can put, you know, even some, you know, spend a little bit of money down there, um, just grading the place. And even if we have to put some wrap in there and just, you know, some hard pack or something, and they have something we can put lines on. I don't know if we can do that or not.

Um, yeah, I think, I think we should have Evan, uh, you know, draft up a lot plan similar to what we did with three Worcester and figure out how we can maximize, you know, parking there currently. Um, And I know we're focused on solving this one problem, but whereas we had the Facilities Assessment Committee at our last meeting, and I'm sure they've talked to the Historical Society as well, that building is in really rough shape, really rough shape.

I did the walkthrough with Ray Mead and the other two, and the article I read in the graph, the news, doesn't actually reflect The comments that came out of that walkthrough.

I'm not sure what appeared in the Grafton News article. I mean, I know there was a copy of the report that we were given that was in our last packet that was pretty damning. And their recommendation was that you consider the Nelson Park Library again. We also met with the Nelson Park trustees, I believe. that same meeting or the meeting after, who expressed that, you know, at the time, back in 2018, when you had initially moved, they wanted to keep at least the conference room area for themselves, and that that's not the case anymore. Their priority now is making sure that that building is occupied. And according to that report, we could put somewhere around hundred or so thousand into what it currently needs. Um, things like new sliding doors and, and, you know, minor stuff. Um, and that make that a more viable facility for historical purposes, the building and the envelope are in much better condition. It alleviates a lot of the parking issues. Um, you know, so again, starting the conversation as one member, I think it would be, worthwhile for the Historical Society to, you know, A, start discussing that idea, and B, start, you know, getting some pricing from, like, professional movers and things to do that.

We moved eight years ago. Right. And as of right now, we have a lease with an option to extend, and the North Grafton Library is Even with the conference room, it's too small and too disjointed. It's not a feasible location.

I'm going to urge you to consider it because we're talking about putting money into a parking issue and then also the assumption that we're going to continue to put money into that building. And I don't think those are reasonable assumptions to be working under.

What do you do with the building if you don't use it? You're going to tear it down?

That would be a future discussion. Our priority is making sure that your, you know, your group is in a viable location, you know, for sure. But, you know, this was part of the facilities assessment review is that we're going to have to have some difficult discussions about some of the municipal properties. And unfortunately, you know, the historical society falls in one of those areas. So I'm just... While we are... talking about parking and I take that point that we need to stay focused on that. I do want to just remind everybody that, you know, I think we, we need to look at the, make sure we're looking at this globally in that, you know, we're, it's not just about putting money into parking. It's going to be about, you know, a commitment to that building in the future and et cetera, et cetera. So it's just some forward thinking. And if we have two, two, two ish years left on the lease, it gives us some runway to start some planning on that and have those discussions.

Can I just circle back to the park? So we were coming up with a punch list of things to look into and talk to. And I thought at one point I heard that maybe some of the residents down here are even unaware of, you know, that the historical site is having an issue, even though I'm hearing that it's been an issue for at least three years. But if they're unaware of it, is there a way that the town could send out? just like a pretty generic mailer to these neighborhoods to say, hey, do you guys have your, when is your monthly meeting typically? Is it like every third?

First Tuesday of the month.

So the first Tuesday of the month, if possible, could you make the lot available? And just see what kind of response you get from that.

That could be helpful. We've got a function coming up in two weeks on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

So that might, I mean, if those are one-off things, but if you know if it's the first, sorry, what was it again? First Tuesday. First Tuesday of every month, you know you're having a parking issue and that's a standing thing. Maybe just some neighborly communication is something that's easy and we're missing that before we start dumping tons of money.

I mean, my understanding was is the intent of putting the parking spaces in our lease so they would be available.

right we we should not have to go out no i'm not asking if the town can send a letter on just a like a generic i understand you're you're saying that you guys have at least 10 people and that might not be enough for you to continue the communication i believe at this point there's 13 directors so 13 directors yeah and i understand that you guys are busy doing other things but it does sound like a communication issues at the heart of what's going on here and everybody has different objectives right the Public safety's objective isn't going to align with the objective that you have that's going to align with the people who are using those spaces. But I think if everybody could at least be aware of an issue, I think that could be somewhat helpful, at least one Tuesday night a month is my hope. You know, in addition to all of the other things we're looking into, do you think that's possible to send a letter out like that to the neighborhood?

Yeah, we could use our code red and probably catch more of those people.

Okay, whatever you think would be more effective on that, I think would be, and I don't think it has to go out every month, but just like a, Hey, just friendly reminder in case you're using the lot first Tuesday of every month at seven o'clock, the historical society does have an event. If you can make that space available, might alleviate some of the issue is what I'm hopeful for.

It'd be more dates though. That's the catch.

No, it's not a perfect solution, but it releases some pressure is what I'm hopeful for.

My reason for bringing the issue up now is in anticipation of snow again in the winter. We can live with parking on the street if we have to. There's no other choice. But the way it currently configured with the number of cars that are in there – They can't do snow removal, which means that if we get an early snowstorm, we're without parking for the whole winter. At this point, my concern is just in anticipation of more problems in the winter.

Well, at the very least, we can look into the vehicles that we're not sure if they're owned by anyone, and we sort out what happens with those. If there's three or four of those, it's something. And then for me, I like the idea of some sort of signage, whether it's enforceable or not. At least I know if I'm driving by, this isn't just a random parking lot for anybody. And then, sorry, I don't know what my third point was, but it'll come back to me.

Calculating the spots that we can have if we paved it?

No, I don't know about that. I mean, that's like down the line if we're looking at trying to pave something. We all know we have financial issues that we have to to look into so that's no it wasn't it wasn't that it was oh sorry um if you know in fact the group home seems to either have increased in volume with their vehicles or whatever's going on there i think if we're looking at targeting a mailing i would target that facility and just indicate ps this is municipal parking was meant to it's in a lease for for the historical society if at least they could be mindful of it because to colleen's point i wouldn't be surprised if they don't even know If all random people are parking there, there's vehicles that we all know aren't moving for years. Anyone's going to park there, of course.

There's one Toyota that sits in the middle of the front that, like I say, it hasn't moved since sometime last October, November.

I think we all already agree. At least look at that further.

In regards to the Nelson Library, I will take another look at the floor plan, but I looked at it eight years ago and even using the entire facility, it would have required us to, we took about a 30% reduction in space moving from the townhouse to South Grafton, but the floor plan was open so you didn't lose as much. When we did look at Nelson, the floor plan was terrible. You're back to a number of rooms, and it just doesn't make for an easy flow on exhibits. We'll take another look at it, but I'm not confident that you're going to get much of a different answer out of it.

Yeah, just ask that you look and try and be open-minded. Looking at those reports, they are pretty comparable in square footage, the two buildings, but like you said, the library has a much more open floor plan than the other. Yeah, maybe there's something that can be done with that too. Okay, so I think my suggestion is going to be that we have a few items that in our punch list here that Evan can go through and we'll start to get some answers on some of these things. We'll add this back to a future agenda so we can check in on how the progress of those things are going. And then we'll also keep the Historical Society updated as to, you know, as that information rolls in and, you know, make sure you're aware next time it's going to be on the agenda and we're going to discuss it and all those things. And we'll see what sort of progress we can make with this.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you for your time. Yeah, thank you for coming.

Okay, um, except we have the streetlight locations on Clearview Street. We talked about this briefly earlier. This was part of a road acceptance.

Yeah, yeah. Stand by for one second. I think Neil Rybecky. Is there a Neil Rybecky here? Yep.

Oh, I mean, I have one on the list.

There's nobody on Zoom. Essentially what this is, this is a project that was started by Fiona before her departure. And so it appears that... You know what, let's push this to a future agenda.

All right.

Easy enough. Because I thought Mr. Neal was going to be here to speak to it. Okay. So I didn't review enough, so let's just move it. That's fair.

Okay, earmark survey results. I was pleased with the... feedback that we got and the level of engagement. I feel like we got pretty good engagement from the town overall on this compared to some of our other outreach sessions and whatnot. Yeah, I don't know how we want to kick off this discussion. I went through the responses that Amber provided us with and put them into you know, numerical order from the highest percentages to the lowest percentages. And, um, throughout each one, you know, in the first choice category, water treatment facilities was first, uh, at 59.4% municipal roof projects at 12% adding sidewalks at 11.3 and then funding additional funding for safe streets and roads for all at 10.2. While the order of those four things change throughout the eight options, they are the same top four in the second choice, in a slightly reordered fashion, and then in the third choice they are the top five. with aquatic invasives edging the water treatment for that fourth spot. So those four things it felt like to me were important to consider in sending our request. I don't know if we want to limit it to four or simply provide them like say, the list of eight, and this is, you know, kind of give them, again, a ranking, an overall ranking for the order of importance for the town. So I'll just open that up for some discussion and see what y'all think.

I am hesitant to provide Anything other than the top choice as a request there's risk and there's reward in that But I think we we have a quantitative ask here this is and this is precipitous this is 60% of respondents said that they were the most interested and in funding water treatment facilities or infrastructure. So my fear is that if we structure our ask and give too many options, maybe worst case scenario is they Specifically create right fund grants that then are so small Because we've now taken a limited pool of money and split it up that there's not an impactful amount for anything Right, we can't actually make an action on any of that with any of that fundage meaningfully I also fear if we go with a long list or a list at all, you could probably convince me top three, that we ourselves look as though we are unsure about what we would like for the community and that might be less compelling for the federal grant powers that be to actually give us anything at all. like if we if they say well the town of Grafton seems to not even be sure of what is a priority for them like is this something we should even think about or consider because this is not a guaranteed pot of money this is not a guaranteed grant this is just an ask right so I think being directive and quantitative is is going to be the most helpful and part and parcel to that I think we do kind of have to approach this like a grant, right? So just for an example, we go and we write this up and we say 60% of our respondents have said they would like additional funding so that we can bolster our water treatment facilities or infrastructure for problem areas. And this is how much money we would like and this is where we would spend the money and how and potentially who, right? We'd probably have to have some sort of actual thought out plan or or true grant proposal as it were to be as compelling as possible to do the work for them so they're more likely to give us the fundage and if we spread ourselves too thin um we're less likely to be hyper compelling on every individual line item is another fear of mine if we if we go to if we spread ourselves too thin anyway that's my thought process um but i'm not I do a lot of grants, right? So this is just sort of an experience writing grants to the federal government, even if it's in a scientific capacity. But yet still, it's just a watch out if we do the list approach.

Can I ask a question? Sure. I didn't consider it that way at all. So it's very interesting to hear that. My thought was to send top three and give compelling arguments as to why. And I think the top three would be easy enough to do with the water treatment, the roofs and federal safe roads. We have compelling arguments for all. Three of those pretty much ready to go, I would imagine. But my thought of doing a list of three is like, what if they're like, oh, well, hey, we have like these two opportunities here and they send us more money than we were anticipating. I didn't think about it your way. So now I guess I'm wondering what's more likely. Is it? Is it more likely that if we give them too many options, they say, you don't know what you're doing? Or is it more likely like, oh, look, they actually have a couple opportunities and there's some grants available for that. Let's send them this. And again, none of it's guaranteed. But I guess I didn't think about it that way. Now I'm wondering what's more probable.

So what we do when we work with the state on gear marks is that we give them our top three choices and ask them to pursue whatever they think is most likely or they're most passionate about.

Mm-hmm.

because if they're most passionate about it, they're likely to actually advocate for it, and they know what opportunities are going to be available and more likely than we are. So that's how we do it with Senator Moore and Representative Meridian. And that's worked out pretty well for us.

Okay. So I would definitely be in favor of sending three.

I mean, if there's a track record, I'll take it. This is federal. No, not state. So that is also something to think about. But I will. Your expertise is much appreciated.

Food security is a huge McGovern issue, too. And I think I saw that in one of the additional ideas. So it wasn't in the survey as one of the choices, but maybe kind of do the top two that we saw in the survey and then include something for the Grafton Food Bank or some other food

security initiative in in grafton that um could benefit i don't know what that would be exactly um funding for the senior center or i don't i don't know what that could look like yeah he did a he did a refrigerator milk refrigerator with us and he did some community harvest project related grant work as well in recent years okay but that personally that's why i like the Here's what the community is telling us is an important need. Water is obviously very important to everybody. And then let that office tell us what the process is going to yield, the best option for us to yield a positive result.

Okay.

my opinion i like that so does this is this suggestion there then to sort of do the opposite of what i i'm advocating for which is to be more vague and less prescriptive and say this is the goal how is the bet how would you best yeah because in my opinion you we're not this isn't really you're not asking for a grant you're asking for an earmark so this is you know pork essentially they would call it which there is in in every budget and and you want to try to get

we can for the residents of grafton so what you're essentially looking for is hey here's the in my opinion these are the veins that the community finds most important here's the things we have going on locally that are related to that right there's your specificity a little bit what what can you do to help us okay that's that's how i would frame it

I guess when you're talking about the water, you know, I would think that the water district already had a bite at this apple. I mean, they went for federal funding before they started the projects, right?

Yeah, and they have received some federal money. But as a resident, I don't think that they necessarily care that much that we've already gotten federal money. They want to see it faster. And I don't know that any amount of money is going to do that for them, right? It's part of the problem.

Yeah, so I guess I'm just saying for residents to know that the Water District already had this opportunity before they put a shovel in the ground in terms of looking for as much federal funding as they could.

Yeah, I can't remember what the name of that grant is now. I'll draw a blank. It might not even be a grant. It might be a loan. I think it's a loan.

Yeah.

Craig, you have your hand up.

yeah um just two cents i i think um evan's right we got to be pretty specific about our ass so they're not guessing at it i think that's what he said um and the roofs i love the roof idea but i think if the the feds you know they're all probably going to figure out that there's you know state money that's you know grant money that's out there for roof repair so they may I don't know if they would balk at that because there are state funds to repair school roofs, a program for that. So I guess for me, it would be like what we think would resonate most with the feds, whether it's, you know, public safety, the, you know, the environmental stuff, like with the water chestnuts, the dams, you know, the feds, that might resonate with them. Just pick on some things that we think

they would you know that maybe that they funded in the past had programs um to to help municipalities out might it be helpful for us to draft a earmark request based on the survey results and bring it back to the board rather than looking at this entire survey we can narrow it down sure okay i think we can work on that we can do that I'm just going to keep picking whatever is the opposite of what Victoria said.

That's cool. I really like that.

It's my new barometer.

No, but it was helpful hearing that perspective because that's not the lens I brought to it. So I liked thinking about it that way.

As a general rule, when you are going out for something like that, a grant specifically, I mean, you want to basically say, I've already done all of the planning. I've thought everything through. And I know who I'm going to use for this. Trust me. Right? And so that's kind of the lens that I'm going through it with. but but but but heard like there are functions and triggers that exist to already take these sorts of um inputs and create money tree output and let's utilize that if it exists because that what i heard is that you know how to shake the money tree evan i do work for the government

All right, so you would just take the top three that you saw from there and kind of present it in a different way for us to discuss?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, you asked the residents for their input, so I think it's good to be honoring what they asked for, and we may be able to massage it a little bit.

I also wanted to say I love the survey. I love the responses. I love that people were taking the time. And I think we should be doing these more if we can, because it was good to read all the additional ideas for funding or just the general comments. But, you know, we don't typically get 152 people showing up to a public outreach meeting. But will someone take five minutes online and provide that same amount? Oh, yes, please. I think. How do we do more of these?

Yep.

sorry for that.

No, I mean, I think it's great. It's a great way to solicit feedback.

I didn't go through, I mean, and write up something for all the feedback that we received, you know, and the additional ideas and whatnot, but there were, there were some things that I felt like we should highlight just because they are in progress things. And hopefully it just helps get the word out, you know, and, uh, the invasives were a big deal, not just the aquatic, but the terrestrial ones. Um, You know, we do try and get those state earmarks. We've been pretty good about getting those and doing our water chestnut treatment. It would be great to get some additional funding to take care of some of those terrestrials. The Route 122 corridor came up a few times, which is something that, you know, we're ongoing, doing ongoing work with MassDOT over the next year as they start to, you know, address some of those issues and get ready to repave upgrades to our emergency communications, which are you know, going to be, um, part of the, the rec, the regional emergency communications, um, repairing old sidewalks, adding new green spaces and parks, uh, for the old sidewalks, we've added them sidewalks to our asphalt management manager plan in an effort to address those things. Um, new parks, green spaces are, are an ongoing commitment. Um, it was a suggestion to about an independent auditor for, um, Municipal spending that's something that we've discussed and are in the progress of investigating, you know, so, uh, things like that that, um. You know, we're are good suggestions, but I, I want to just, I guess. Comfort the residents to a degree that that, uh, we're already invested in some of those things and trying to seek some answers.

I'll call out 1 more to the protected bike lanes with physical barriers between cars and bikes. I would highly suggest going down Main Street in Hoppington where they did implement that, and it's been a nightmare. I would strongly advocate against anything like that coming here. It's really difficult for emergency vehicles to get by, cars to get by. It creates a real pinch point, and it's just not awesome the way Hoppington implemented it.

If you're able to plan for those types of infrastructure, it's great. But trying to go back and retrofit Grafton would be difficult. Okay, we can move on to the findings, implementations of strategy to reduce fatal and serious injury motor vehicle accidents.

Rolls right off the tongue. Yeah, so, and there was a little confusion on how this got back on here and for what the purpose was. And so it's my understanding, having reviewed the previous meeting, that really we were just coming back to see if anyone had any feedback before issuing this, because it's in draft form now, so before issuing this in more finite version and before starting to implement some of the some of the discussion in the document I think you know going through it it was it was very well very well broken out

When you talk about developing the local road safety action plan, it seems like CMRPC would be a great partner in that. That was one of the routes that you threw out there that we could go. Perhaps we have some hours available with them that we could put towards that. Establishing a fatal and serious injury crash review team seemed like a no-brainer. Yeah. I was honestly kind of surprised that we don't already have a municipal fleet distracted driving policy. Would that have any bargaining implications to put something like that?

I don't think so. I just don't think we have it. I don't think it's ever been added. I'm not going to go into it right now, but that is something that we're going to be discussing in the near future with the way that our personnel bylaw is written. and versus how many municipalities have moved away from the personnel bylaw because it doesn't allow us to shift very quickly because it's in bylaw form. Um, so they wind up with a very short bylaw that has to deal with personnel and then they create another layer, right. That's usually through my office or TA office, TM office, whatever to create into, you know, these, these subset policies. Cause there's probably, a number of areas that we are lacking in local policy as far as for our staff. I mean, that would take us a very short amount of time to push out. The bargaining component only becomes if it's used for discipline. So we'd have to figure out how we would approach that.

Everything listed under 13, the strength and transportation safety requirements in developmental review, is that more to, like, codify how we, how we do all those things? Because a lot of them seem like their current practices, whether they're something that's legally mandated or good practice.

Yeah. I think that we have a lot of these things, um, that we're already doing, but it would kind of codify that in a way that's every board committee and staff member knows that these are priorities when we're doing, um, I liken it to, and this is not the same thing, but, um, you know i had sent a memo to the planning board and the zoning board to ask them to stop adding fences to developments like to the entryways because they would add these really pretty like split rail fences or all these decorative fences and then we don't we have no means to maintain any of these things and we wind up owning fences that we don't so we put out a memo that just says look at that you can have a fence there but it's standardized and this is what it is so that we can go to home depot and get post and put it in and fix it and that was very well received so it would be kind of taking that idea and just reiterating some of these things that are probably already happening in practice but bringing them back to the forefront and saying here's what grafton values in in this particular area that's the intent there no it makes a lot of sense um the only other

I wouldn't even say concerning ones. But I wanted to highlight number 10, which is conduct data driven high visibility enforcement. Yeah. Because I do think that's a great idea. My understanding is that currently, you know, our traffic enforcement hours are pretty minimal compared to the other You know that the necessary police work that's happening. Um, so, you know, I think is, is that something that's discussed? We need to just. Consider that from a budgetary perspective, um, you know, and and whether that's asking the chief to revise the way he currently a lot some of his funding or. If we're going to seek additional annual public safety funding through the budget as part of that process. And then 15, install visual traffic monitoring cameras at high-risk intersections. I thought you really detailed our approach to that very well. I think it would require that and a very careful rollout with lots of public outreach and education based on how the whole flock conversation went. You know, this is something that's drastically different, but we need for people to understand that and understand, you know, what the, where it's coming from. So that was, that was it for me.

Anybody else?

Okay.

We can move on then. Representative for the CMMPO information and member selection. This was something that was emailed over. The CMMPO is a central mass metropolitan planning organization. They are responsible for prioritizing federal funds on roads, bridges, transit, and Worcester and the surrounding suburbs. It was asked if we'd consider at least sending a representative from the Grafton board there. So is that something that we would be interested in? And if so, is there somebody who has an interest in fielding that position?

I'm going to throw out there that I cannot attend that day in time. Five o'clock is really hard for me on Thursdays. I'm still cleaning teeth.

It's not great timing. Craig's hands up. Craig, go ahead.

Just a suggestion. Could we... PB, Jorge Boone & Can we nominate our town planner. PB, Jorge Boone & As our representative that's a good question. PB, Jorge Boone & I mean, I know we can we can appoint people that are not on our board to represent a position that designate yeah. PB, Jorge Boone & But.

PB, Lupita D Montoya, He has a background in this kind of stuff does say specifically a select board member town administrators and town managers are also included, but the select board member, it looks like they're looking for somebody from this board. It's a good idea, though.

My question, not to burden anybody further, I was wondering if we should handcuff this to one of our CMRPC reps as well. Because CMRPC is one of the organizations that sends representatives to the CMMPO along with representatives from MassDOT and the WRTA. So it seems like an area where there'd be a little bit of overlap. If you already are rep to CMRPC, that this could dovetail easily, but I don't want to make that commitment for anybody either. That said, we have two reps. I am one of the CMRPC reps. I should be able to make the CMMPO meetings, but I don't want to deny somebody else that opportunity if they're looking for it.

I'm all set.

So I could attend this on the 24th. I have a conflict that has come up this upcoming Thursday that's going to make attending the quarterly meeting difficult but not impossible for me. Would you be able to make this Thursday if I attend?

Yeah, I'm definitely going to the quarterly meeting Thursday. Okay, perfect. If you're down with that, that could be something that we can coordinate offline too. I can catch you up on what happened at any of the CMRPC meetings if you're not able to attend, and then you can take that information here. Really anybody, I guess.

That works for me. If you're up for it.

Yeah. Great, it's settled. Open the warrant.

This meeting in particular is I wish I could go to it because they're talking about federal funding for roadway bridges, transit transportation, and that's all part of our earmark request. So, if there's. You know, some language, or if they mentioned something for us to be including, I, I would love to.

Capitalize on that information, it'd definitely be good to be aware of my. My gut is that this is very forward-facing. You know, like, over the next 10 years, what are we projecting? What projects are we prioritizing? That type of stuff. You know, just thinking about, like, the railroad bridge in particular and how many times we had to approve the Chrissy grant as they, you know, as Grafton Upton applied for that siding. We just kind of waited for that project to come up every year. But who knows? But, yeah, great. We can. Victoria's on board. Moving on. Thank you, Victoria.

Okay.

I move the board vote to have Victoria Duckworth represent us at the CMMPO Information and Member Selection Meeting.

Second. Motion made. Seconded. Any discussion? Hearing none. All those in favor? Ms. Roy? Aye. Ms. Duckworth?

Aye.

Ms. Foley?

Foley, aye.

Ms. Dauphiney?

Dauphiney, aye.

Jefferson, aye. Congratulations. Thank you for representing us.

You're so welcome.

Okay. And let's... Take another motion to open the fall town meeting.

I move the board vote to open the fall town meeting warrant.

Second. Okay, motion and second. Any discussion? Hearing none. All those in favor, Ms. Roy? Aye. Ms. Duckworth? Aye. Ms. Foley? Foley, aye. Ms. Dauphiné? Dauphiné, aye. Jefferson, aye. It's open. Okay, select board reports.

I can't think of it. Anybody? Okay.

I'll throw a thank you to Troop 107. I got to sit in on an Eagle Board of Review for Lucas Pellegrin last weekend. Of interest to this board, Lucas built the second 48-foot equestrian pedestrian bridge over at Hassan MS at Woods. So both of those upgrades are now complete. He worked with the Trails Committee to get this done. And he's also a camp counselor for Grafton Rec over the summer. So pretty dynamite kid. Young adult. I shouldn't say kid. Young adult. To your report.

Yeah, great. Wrap it up, Andy. Getting late. All right, so I'm going to skip. So I've got Route 122. We're probably not going to hear anything for the next month to two months, I would think, out of MassDOT. I'm going to leave it in here so that we don't lose track of it, but I don't think we're going to see a heck of a lot coming out. There's a lot of planning work to be done. So, George Hill construction update. This will be on the website tomorrow morning. We will be doing this monthly. That is our goal. And this should give a breakdown week by week of what they'll be doing and where. But I also created an overview. I'm gonna just, unless anybody wants me to read this out loud, but it's essentially they're doing drainage for the rest of the month. And that'll subject to change subject to change without notice I put it on the bottom because we don't can necessarily control that but I also created kind of a phased plan There are no dates in the phase plan and that's because as we move into fall and winter if we have a mild winter crews will then be pulled off of other work and we will make better time and Um, or we may have a bad winter and make less progress. So, um, but these are the, these, this is essentially what's gonna happen. Um, so we did the tree work on the full length. Again, there may be more tree work to come, but the preliminary work is done. Um, we are currently working on completing the widening and drainage from Leland to Soap Hill. Once that's complete, we will pulverize the road. grade it, and put a binder on it, which is essentially a base coat of asphalt. Phase two is soap hill to merium. We will, same as we did on Leland to soap, we'll widen it, we will install the drainage, and we will pulverize and binder that section. We will then do Fay Mountain, we will do soap hill, and then we will pave the full area as the top goes. Crews may turn up at other places at other times as they make their way through the project. So this is an overview purpose only. Other updates, we finished the senior center ramp. That came out great. We also finished the installation of the pavilion over by the senior center. We do have some picnic tables off to the right that will be moved back under this pavilion. And then we have sourced ADA accessible picnic tables that have spaces on either side for wheelchair or other accessibility. Now that we have finished this, we can start hopefully doing some landscaping around this and finish landscaping around the exercise court because it'll all be kind of contiguous over there. So this is good. We've been waiting for this for quite some time. Looks great. But I think it think it does look great it's a really nice structure yeah I like it and I think people are gonna enjoy it both staff and residents and senior center folks so very happy with that other updates there's no changes to this slide staffing updates because it never ends Amy Berry our town clerk is leaving we will be posting that position this week And I would request that the select board get a volunteer to do the exit interview. Anybody want to?

I mean, I've done a number of them. I'm happy to do it, but I'm fine if someone else wants to take it, too.

I haven't done one, so I don't mind doing one. Amber, do you want to kind of give me a rundown of how you handle them? We have a form. Oh, I think there's a template now. Oh, okay.

I just have a.

conversation okay yeah ambrose send it over okay yeah i don't mind doing it either okay um bob dotoma is retiring that's not new information but i'm putting this on here uh just to kind of keep track of it um we're gonna try to post that position this week that's our goal anyways um and then paul canoyer is retiring as dpw director We have been working internally on a different management plan, so we are going to not fill the DPW director position. I am going to serve as the DPW director on a trial basis. That's allowable under the charter. So highway, cemetery, sewer, and engineering will report to me until about May 1st. Again, this is a trial basis. We're going to see how this goes. If we get to May 1st or a little earlier and it's not working, then we will have a conversation about posting that position. But there is a considerable savings to the town if we don't fill the position. And given what we've been discussing, we're going to see how it goes. If we can save folks some money, we will. And that's it.

Your hands are going to be full. Brian, Daryl, Kevin.

Yep, it's full already because we've been pretty much doing it. We've been piloting it a little bit. And then that did allow me to, I shifted some day-to-day management over to William so he can kind of get his feet wet on some of that work as well. So, yeah.

I will say the three names that you mentioned are all, you know, seasoned, competent guys that hopefully will make your job easy. Hopefully. That's section of your job.

Hopefully. Hopefully.

Well, I put it out into the universe.

I appreciate that. It will be. Take all the help I can get.

Any correspondence anybody wish to discuss? Take a motion for meeting minutes.

I move the board vote to approve the meeting minutes for February 17th of 2026 as written in a second.

Okay, motion made in a second. Any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor, Ms. Roy?

Aye.

Ms. Duckworth? Aye. Ms. Foley? Foley, aye. Ms. Dauphiné? Aye.

Dauphiné, aye.

Jefferson, aye. Take a motion to adjourn. So moved. Second. Okay. By roll call, Ms. Roy. Aye. Ms. Duckworth. Aye. Ms. Foley. Foley, aye. Ms. Dauphiné.

Dauphiné, aye.

Jefferson, aye. We are adjourned.