Town Meeting 2013 - "Special" Recap 1

A "Special Town Meeting" in the middle of the Annual Town Meeting always makes me think the officials could not get things together in time for the Annual Town Meeting. Usually it just from too much stuff going on to meet earlier deadlines or technical reasons having to do with timing of actions of effective dates.

Last Wed (May 29) was the first night of the STM. I initially had some hopes of wrapping in one night if we stayed focused and plowed through. Alas, it was not to be.

"Article 1" of any TM is always for reports given to TM. We started with a warm tribute to former School Committee Dan Scharfman, who died suddenly in January. While the proclamation was read, I was both sad for the loss, yet smiled thinking of his enthusiasm for Belmont. Damn.

Library Trustee Matt Lowrie gave an update on where the hoped-for library project stands after the School Committee voted a few weeks ago to not give up its limited athletic space for that project. Do we now have to give up that money and start fresh? Can we get an extension (from the state library board) to work on a new location? Library Trustees will explore those. That will get into broader questions. Will Belmont's "leadership" give us a context for all projects going forward that we can all agree on? Or will that be just another in the string of reincarnations of "Mega Group" to "Capital Planning Oversight Committee" to whatever will be assembled this fall? Can you say "omphaloskepsis"?

Bylaw Re-org

The Bylaw Review Committee and Town Clerk (Ellen Cushman) pushed through 8 articles related to reorganizing the Town's bylaws, diving deep into the language for consistency, accuracy, relevance, and adherence to state law. It's lots of nitty-gritty details that makes most people's minds go numb. It took an hour, twice as long as I had expected. My view: the folks mentioned above swim in this stuff all the time, and they should drive structure. Town Meeting, of course, should own the content.

After an initial presentation of the rationale behind the effort, we punched through most of the articles. The break in momentum was was TM member Ed Kazanjian insisting we use "chairman" rather than gender-neutral "chair", getting into some other gender language discussion, and specifing how the bylaws should start sentences that begin with numbers. 300 of us lost 9 minutes of our lives with that discussion, and many of is may have hurt our eyes, rolling. (Yes, I started that sentence with "300", not "Three hundred".)

I have actually read the current bylaws start-to-end (just to how how exciting my life is) a few times, and very much welcome a more rational document. I hope this makes the bylaws more approachable, and that more TM members get more familiar with the details.

Inclusionary Housing Bylaw Rewrite

This article replaced the "Inclusionary Housing" part of the zoning bylaws. There were several flaws with the old one, some technical/legal, and some with the impediments being too high for developers to want to get small-ish projects rolling in Belmont. 

Affordable housing is a topic most of us rarely, if ever, think about. Whether you agree or not on the goals or means, this was a good mechanism to focus some thought and discussion.

New Electric Substation Deal

Selectman Ralph Jones was excellent in his presentation on the progress the BOS (who also act as the Light Board) and got a well-deserved round of enthusiastic applause. He, and the committee convened for this project, gave us tons of good news, where a deal with NSTAR is in the works so we only have to borrow $23M rather than the initially expected $53M. (The article was, essentially, bookkeeping to allow the BOS/Light Board to move forward in the project that TM already agreed on last year.) That's good for ratepayers, as far as our montly bills go, and for the Town, leaving a lot of borrowing capacity, which is important for our bond rating (eg, for the BHS renovation in coming years). While important and informative, 45 minutes was too long for this one.

Gotta love lawyers, with "therein, thereunder, on thereon" being part of the text of that motion.

Next Time

Hopefully we'll wrap the remaining articles. The biggest discussions will be snow removal and demolition moratorium, and I'd bet just those two could take an entire evening. At least it'll be at Chenery; the BHS auditorium seats are terrible.