Weston UPC Advances Issues Report, Flags Water and Governance Concerns

WESTON -- March 2, 2026, Weston Unified Plan Committee spends two hours refining town's long-range Issues and Opportunities draft. The seven-member committee, chaired by Danielle Black, voted unanimously to approve minutes and submit a progress report to the Annual Town Report before turning to substantive review of draft sections on traffic, schools, water infrastructure, and governance. Member Laurie Bent confirmed that the town's single MWRA water connection, an unresolved redundancy gap flagged in a 2019 Wright Pierce report, remains under active discussion with the MWRA, and the committee agreed to reflect those ongoing talks in the draft. Jon Harris, who introduced a facilities and services section that includes a metric estimating each capital project's impact on the median tax bill, said the Finance Committee had raised concern that small-project impacts should be viewed in aggregate rather than in isolation; Harris will return the revised draft to the Finance Committee before bringing it to the full UPC and the Select Board. The committee's $43.3 million water tank replacement project, funded through tiered water fees rather than property taxes, surfaced repeatedly as a reference point in discussions of water conservation language and municipal financing. The next meeting is set for March 23 at 4 p.m., with a separate demographics session with the Barrett planning group to be scheduled by Doodle poll.