1999-11-16-CEC-min - Laserfiche WebLink

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Hi: Proposed minutes of the November 16th meeting follow. Please send me any corrections, complaints, etc. -Tom G- Capital Expenditures Committee Minutes November 16, 1999 Meeting 1) Meeting was called to order in Room G15 by the Vice-Chairman at 7:30pm. Members present: Shirley Stolz, Narain Bhatia, Tom Griffiths, and George Burnell. The Appropriation Committee was represented by its liaison member Sheldon Spector. 2) The first 45 minutes of the meeting were spent in Room G15 with members of the Recreation Committee and Karen Simmons from the Recreation Department, who presented our Committee with its five-year capital spending plan. Written copies of the plan were made available for all members of our Committee. 3) The Recreation Department requests fall into two categories, Enterprise and Tax Levy. The criterion for which requests go into which category is whether the request is related to a revenue-making activity. Thus, the $125,000 requested this year for swimming-related improvements is requested from Enterprise and the $30,000 requested for playground improvements is requested from cash-capital (tax-levy). 4) The tax-levy request for playground improvements is not within scenario 1. If the Recreation Department has excess revenues this they will be applied to reducing the amount of bonding for other projects, not for the playground request. 5) The soccer field for Harrington has run into some siting problems, but the Recreation Department expects to have a plan in place next week. It may take two years to complete the work. One goal of the project is to produce three soccer fields that don't experience competition from baseball for use. 6) The Capital Expenditures Committee reconvened in Room 105 at 8:15pm to meet with Connie Rawson, Steve Ellis, and John Ryan. Connie and Steve presented plans for installing connections to a fiber-based network RCN will run between Town buildings. John talked about the plan to replace the Town's financial software and acquire an integrated financial system that would support both the school- and town-side administrative applications. 7) Connie and Steve handed out a description of the fiber-connection proposal and an earlier study of the Town's Wide Area Network (WAN) needs by Shooshanian Engineering Associates. 8) The principal argument advanced on behalf of installing the connection equipment (switches and routers) now is that the current WAN is extremely unreliable. Amplifiers in the current WAN are at approximately 1/3rd-mile intervals. Network problems are frequent and hard to localize. The resultant lost time, wasted effort, and frustration are hard to live with. Particularly unreliable is current WAN service for the COA, DPW, and fire-stations. 9) The fiber net would increase WAN bandwidth from 30mbs to 1gbs, a thirty-fold increase.