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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2025-04-09-AC-min-att1From:Alan Levine levfam4@rcn.com Subject:Thoughts on the draft consultants' report Date:April 4, 2025 at 9:38 AM To :Lily Yan manhuayan@yahoo.com,Anil Ahuja anil_ahuja@yahoo.com,Glenn Parker glenn.parker@comcast.net,Vinita Verma vverma10@yahoo.com,Eric Michelson eric@michelsonshoes.com,John Bartenstein john.bartenstein@verizon.net, Carolyn J. Kosnoff ckosnoff@lexingtonma.gov,Sanjay Padaki sanjaypadaki@gmail.com,Sean Osborne sdo2591@gmail.com Cc:AC Archive appropriationcmte@lexingtonma.gov Dear colleagues, My notes on the draft consultants’ report on MBTA housing impacts may be found below. I believe this topic will be on the agenda of our April 9th meeting. Alan Good aspects of draft consultant’s work   Included revenue from motor vehicle excise taxes   Conducted interviews w/ department heads   Distinguished between affordable and non-affordable units in students/unit analyses   Looks at various aspects of public safety and other municipal impacts in some detail Major issues 1) 1,100 pipeline project units is only a start   Potentially thousands more units from     Zoning freeze property developments     Developments in areas remaining in MBTA overlay districts     Non-MBTA-zoning developments like those at 28 Meriam and 257 Waltham St.     Town projects including spinoffs - Lowell St, Vine St, and whatever may follow 2) Amounts for new per-student expenses for the schools must be fully explained and justified.     For general ed students the given amounts of $10,000 to $12,000 per student seem rather low - at a minimum, the basis for each of these numbers needs to be fully justified.     The number of out-of-district SPED students is about 1.4% (report states this as 1%) of the total number of students.     For out-of-district SPED per student, I see $80,000 per student.  LPS projects 100 out-of-district SPED students, out-of-district tuition of $7,216,610, and SPED transportation expense of $2,830,499.  It is unclear how much of the SPED transportation expense applies to out-of-district (OoD) students; if all of it is for out-of-district transportation then the OoD costs are $100,000 per student on average.     Circuit breaker funds will offset some SPED per-student costs for additional students.     There is no indication that employee benefits from the Shared Expenses budget were factored in.  This could raise estimated expenses by roughly 20%.     Per-student marginal costs are likely to depend on the magnitude of the enrollment increases, and are likely to be significantly larger due to needs for additional administrators, specialists, etc., if the enrollment increase is 3 to 5 times the 499 students assumed in the report. 3) Every projection is subject to statistical and systematic uncertainties that must be estimated in order to put the projection into a valid context. This is not done in the report.    The projection of a number of new students is based on existing apartment and condominium developments.    The report does not use all such developments.  The number of condominiums used is so limited that the statistical errors on the derived occupancy numbers become quite high. The number of apartment complexes is also more limited than the number used by LPS in the LPS January report on student occupancy numbers.  The selected developments used bu the consultants may be more representative of new developments but are also subject to greater statistical uncertainties.    There is no correction applied to account for the pandemic-related dip in enrollments that lasted at least three years.    The enrollment projections do not appear to consider the possibility that a den may be used as a bedroom.    There is a range in student occupancy numbers from one existing development to another even of the same type. Some, perhaps even much, of that range is attributable to expected statistical variation. Nonetheless, until a deeper analysis is performed, one may wonder whether an average or some other, potentially higher, occupancy number should be used because it is not clear which occupancy patterns will be followed by the MBTA and other developments.  If the MBTA-housing occupancy is similar to the higher occupancy existing developments, the number of students that occupy the 1,100 pipeline project units could be quite a bit higher than 499. 4) Capital or one time costs will likely come into play if and when well more than 1,100 units are built.  The school part of this is not covered in the report. 4) For planning, management, and budgeting purposes the analysis should assume reasonable highest cost cases.  That has not been done. 5) Some of these comments apply to the AC memo and AC STM report as well as the Fougere report.