An agenda item at the Jan. 6 Wellesley Select Board meeting to review the draft Annual Town Meeting warrant morphed into a sobering discussion of potentially significant capital and operational expenses facing the town (see Wellesley Media recording about 48 minutes in).

The warrant is “the shortest we’ve had in as long as I can remember,” said Wellesley Executive Director Meghan Jop, in reviewing the draft with the board (the board is set to vote on the warrant at its Jan. 13 meeting). Expect some number of articles deemed straightforward to be lumped under the Consent Agenda article that will allow Town Meeting this spring to vote on them in one fell swoop for efficiency’s sake. The draft has already shrunk from 37 to 36 articles since the Jan. 6 meeting.

Jop referenced some of the articles, including capital projects, that free cash (unrestricted funds that remain from the previous fiscal year’s operations) might be used to cover.

Following Jop’s rundown of the warrant, Board Vice Chair Tom Ulfelder raised concern about the Department of Public Works’ proposed campus renovation project, which has been estimated to cost at least $100m (“the dollars are enormous in terms of the option they seem to be recommending,” he said). Ulfelder asked that the board be provided with information on campus renovation options ahead of a joint Select Board-DPW meeting planned for Jan. 20 to go over a proposed DPW Campus/Municipal Service Building Feasibility Study that Jop said is expected to cost $1m. That study cost could be covered with free cash, Jop said (DPW leadership on Jan. 14, by the way, goes before the Advisory Committee to talk budgets and Town Meeting articles).

Putting an article about the study on the warrant for Annual Town Meeting—ahead of what looks to be a potentially heavy Special Town Meeting agenda in the fall—makes sense as part of the town’s broader capital planning efforts, Jop said.

A Town-wide Capital Planning Committee has been formed in the face of multiple anticipated huge ticket items.

Jop said the proposed DPW feasibility study would be used to determine “what is the programmatic design that we want to move forward with, exactly to your your point, Tom, and understand what the financial implications are with that…” Decisions would include whether such a project would include the land use departments that have been bumped from Town Hall to 888 Worcester St., or focus on park and highway, and garages. Board member Beth Sullivan Woods sought clarification on how holistic the DPW study might be regarding these other departments, and whether they might be relocated to purchased or leased properties.

‘The Year of Feasibility’

It could be the “Year of Feasibility” in Wellesley, with possible fire station and school feasibility studies hitting the Special Town Meeting warrant in the fall. The fire station and DPW planning could naturally sync up, depending upon how the plans evolve, given the proximity of the fire and DPW facilities along Rte. 9 west. The school feasibility outlook would address possible replacements for the town’s oldest schools, such as Fiske and Schofield Elementary Schools, plus the Middle School.

“So then you have three feasibility studies that essentially you sit down and say ‘OK,’ here’s our plan over the next 10 to 15 years, very similar to how we did that with the schools about 12 years ago,” Jop said.

The information collected through such studies would help the town give taxpayers a sense of how much each project would cost them. The current view is that if all discussed capital plans—DPW, classroom air conditioning, fire stations, etc.—went forward, residents could be looking at a $2k increase to the median annual tax bill over a four-year period down the road.

A big question, Jop said later, “is what is sustainable and what is not, because we’re at that precipice right now where it’s becoming unsustainable.”

Board member Colette Aufranc added that “as we’ve gone through the road show with the Town-wide Capital Planning Committee it’s becoming more and more apparent that the companion to this is the Town-wide Facilities Master Plan, which is in our work plan this year…” Elements of such a plan are coming together with the DPW and fire station efforts, but “the elephant in the room” that still needs to be addressed is the schools, and the need for a school building committee. Requesting funding for that at Special Town Meeting would be appropriate, she said.

Having information collected through these studies and plans would really allow the conversation to start over which projects the town can afford or not, and what operational alternatives there might be to large capital investments.

The plans won’t end here either. Board Chair Marjorie Freiman said “The other thing we haven’t thrown into this mix is the Comprehensive Plan and what comes out of the Comprehensive Plan and I would also posit that we’re going to need a new Strategic Plan as kind of an umbrella to all of the the facilities and the capital, and those are going to have costs to implement as well.”

Wellesley’s Unified Plan, approved in 2019, combines a Comprehensive and Strategic Plan.

More from the meeting

As has become common at Select Board meetings, members of the public queued up during citizen speak at the start to weigh in on the state’s proposed MassBay Community College land disposition. Speakers supported the board’s efforts to potentially take legal action, and pushed back against the state’s designation of 45 acres of property (including 40 acres of forest) as “surplus.”

The board ended the meeting by convening in executive session (aka, behind closed doors) “to discuss strategy with respect to potential litigation with the Commonwealth regarding the disposition of surplus MassBay Community College land.”