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October 27, 2010 Minutes Town of Lexington Appropriation Committee October 27, 2010 Place and time: Town Office Building, Room 111, 7:30 p.m. Members present: Glenn Parker (Chair), Joe Pato (Vice Chair), Mollie Garberg, Alan Levine, Eric Michelson, Rob Addelson (ex- officio) Also present: David Kanter, Capital Expenditures Committee; Carl Valente, Town Manager; Paul Ash, Superintendent of Schools; Pat Goddard, Director of Facilities; Mary Ann Stewart, School Committee; Dawn McKenna, Town Meeting Member The meeting was called to order at 7:39 p.m. 1. Proposed Bylaw Changes. David Kanter gave a brief presentation on his and Eph Weiss's proposed revisions to the Code of Lexington regarding Town Meeting procedures to reconsider or reopen articles. The proposal aims to reorganize reopening and reconsideration motions and provide new options for their use. Under the proposal, the scope of reconsideration would be reduced to encompass only re -votes of the final main motion of the article. "Reopening" would be used to open previously voted articles so as to allow any type of action that would have been within the scope of the article when first brought up, i.e., it would be used in place of the types of actions that have in recent memory been called reconsideration. David distributed a written description of his proposal but did not have a draft of a motion or new bylaw language. 2. Estabrook PCB remediation. Paul Ash and Pat Goddard spoke on the present status of remediation work at the Estabrook School and plans for future work, with emphasis on the financial aspects. Dr. Ash spoke first. He stated that their goal is to bring PCB air concentrations below EPA guidelines throughout the building. He stated that the latest test results, some of which were just received earlier in the day, suggest that this can be accomplished within weeks. In parallel, EH &E (the consulting firm working for the Town) has sent a lengthy document on risk assessment to the EPA's Washington office that requests consideration of site - specific concentration guidelines. Dr. Ash outlined three votes adopted by the School Committee on October 26, 2010, which can be summarized briefly as follows: • First, to move all Estabrook students back to regular classrooms by November 9. The kindergarten wing is vacant (so it can be used for pilot studies of contamination control), and the gym and library are now being used as classrooms. • Second, to request testing of the PCB air concentrations in every classroom once in the relatively near future (see below), and to follow up with (less comprehensive) monitoring of levels throughout the year. The cost of this additional testing is expected to be roughly a few times $10,000. -1-