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The Select Board took a peek at all the warrant articles submitted for Annual Town Meeting this week, and it’s looking like a fairly typical Town Meeting for Sudbury… with a few notable articles and adjustments from prior years.
There are 48 articles listed in the Select Board packet, but there are many more than that on the warrant. The Town is considering bundling multiple articles underneath a single article. For example — Article 28 contains seven different articles under the banner of “Combined Facilities Town & School Consolidated Capital
Articles.”
The Select Board was open to the idea, but has not made any decision on this change to the way the warrant, and Town Meeting, are handled in Sudbury. The upside of bundling is greater efficiency. But some town meeting purists may feel that this discourages deliberation in the hall. Any article can be pulled from the bundle and debated separately, so the option is still there for the hall to discuss any article it wants… it would just follow a different procedure than has been the norm at recent Sudbury Town Meetings.
There are a few notable articles, though very few came as a surprise. The first, roughly 14, articles are the usual budget and finance articles. Things quickly get interesting with funding for Sudbury’s transportation program, followed by an article that would fund a consultant for visioning services for the Sewataro property. From there, there’s a good number of bylaw articles, including the Wireless Services Overlay District and an amendment to the regional agreement for Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School.
The warrant then turns to a laundry list of capital projects for the Department of Public Works and the Facilities Department. Some of those articles are fairly mundane and routine maintenance and equipment replacement projects. The standouts are the three solar canopies that were indefinitely postponed at the Special Town Meeting in December of last year.
The meeting will close with some very interesting citizen’s petitions, including a rebooted walkways petition that traces its roots back to the December Special Town Meeting.
The more interesting petition this time is from residents of the Pine Lakes neighborhood. Several residents are calling for $500,000 to be appropriated for the Sudbury Housing Authority to repair the four properties they are planning to replace with duplexes. The article stipulates that the money can only be used if the Housing Authority maintains the properties as single family homes. Assistant Town Manager Victor Garofalo told the Finance Committee earlier this week that this petition was already with Town Counsel who was “evaluating the legitimacy of that particular article.”
Town Counsel will likely spot one glaring error in the petition — it lists the wrong address for one of the Sudbury Housing Authority properties. The petition lists “21 Lakewood Ave” as one of the properties, but no such address exists in the Town’s GIS system. The Sudbury Housing Authority property is at 21 Great Lake Drive.
You can review the draft warrant on page 161 below.