All right, hi everybody I'm Chris I seem to have about 30 minutes and I usually talk very slowly, so I'm gonna try to get through it quicker than normal I'm gonna talk to you about firmware today, which is kind of strange for a Linux user space conference But I promise you there's Linux user space involved in firmware And we'll get to that in a second First of all, I want to thank we have a whole bunch of contributors from other companies that we collaborate with on this project unfortunately, none of them are here But You should know they exist The first thing that I actually want to talk about is what in the x86 world firmware usually looks like And then what we're currently doing about it So if you have worked with UEFI before which is basically x86 firmware in most cases You're probably familiar with this picture, which is probably about 20 years old at this point and The individual pieces are not too important, but what I want to point out is the the left two columns the security and the PEI phases they consist usually of Intel binary blobs or Chipset like a vendor binary blobs or a motherboard vendor binary blobs And these are things that you're not likely to see being open-sourced in the near future So this is stuff that we don't that we don't really touch But on the right from there You'll notice that you're going to recognize a bunch of operating system like concepts You have network drivers. You have disc drivers. You have a scheduler that Dispatches those drivers and you can actually also run This is kind of important for later. You can run arbitrary PE 32 executables in ring zero and on On your normal UEFI system what comes together here is usually about 20 different vendors that put together codes that Ends up on your system like 20 to 30 different ones And if I look at some of these driver modules, which are by the way called Dixie's On a five six-year-old open compute platform server called Winterfell You can see there's Some outdated stuff here like the microcom networking protocol, which by the way the server doesn't have a modem It's a modem specific protocol Some ISA bus drivers like that bus from the 80s that isn't used anymore and In addition to that you have a full networking stack like IPv4 UDP TCP all this stuff re-implemented in firmware and Some of the observations you make when you work with this ecosystem is most of this code is closed source You don't really have any way of looking at it Except for some of the reference implementation that Intel open sources as edk2 that tends to be a Small portion of the code actually running as the firmware on your x86 devices though It's all stuff written and see and it all tends to be run in ring zero in one shared address space Between all of these drivers applications and all these things that ufi runs the other thing you realize from this ecosystem is that when someone like Actually, I don't want to name any names when there's a company that builds a new server or laptop or something They will tend to contract out firmware to another what we usually call an independent bios vendor an IBV And those vendors get paid when they deliver firmware that works on that server and it ships So the they're mostly incentivized to get something working that runs on the server based on the constraints that the manufacturer gave them and to ship it and forget about it, right? And the problem with that is as there are like 20 to 30 different vendors involved in shipping firmware because you need firmware for your devices in there you need to coordinate with the board manufacturer you need to coordinate with a The the company actually selling this stuff all these different companies that have to be involved You realize that Even for people that are involved in the process you kind of rob wrapping black boxes around black boxes Not everyone is going to know the entire system and One question I want to ask you about that is what do you think happens with vulnerabilities? Let's say you are a network card vendor. You found some vulnerability in your driver Where does the first fix for that vulnerability go? Usually Linux or Windows something large like that Let's say you also found that vulnerability in your firmware driver What's the likelihood that that fix will end up on your actual end-user system for that network card driver? Even if it's a security fix right and that likelihood is probably point zero zero one percent or something Because you have all these questions like who owns fixing it who actually gets paid to fix it by the way Is it the the the network card vendor? Is it the independent bios vendor that put it all together? Is it the OEM that you bought the system from? Who is actually responsible for getting this done? How do you integrate it and then actually how do you release it? So once you release an update you either you know You put it on the vendors website and you hope that your customers download it or you try to distribute it through Windows Or some Linux distribution, but then you also have to deal with those distributions So the likelihood that any of this happens is pretty low Unfortunately besides the ecosystem not being incentivized to fix these issues You also can't fix it yourself Because as I said most everything is closed source You likely don't even know if you're if your driver that's in firmware is vulnerable or not I don't think they don't necessarily disclose that and Just because you can't like you can't build firmware from scratch for your platform That also means that you don't really have a way of deploying fixes yourself if you want it to So with that I'm going to take the observation that you can run arbitrary pe32 executables in ring zero in UEFI and Tell you that you can compile the Linux kernel as a pe32 executable So What we started with is we took the UEFI shell We scooped out the code section and we've replaced it with a Linux kernel Compiled with config EFI stub. It turns out that this actually works pretty well Even if you remove most of the drivers on the system because Linux knows how to initialize most devices Linux knows has to how to initialize your disc drivers Linux knows has to deal with your network cards In most if not all cases without any interaction that has to happen with firmware beforehand except for ACPI and similar tables that have to be passed to Linux However, those usually come from the driver dispatcher and not from any of the individual drivers So if you take For example the ocp Winterfell server I was talking about earlier and you remove about 90 of the 120 drivers that were on the system and you replace it with Linux What you actually get is a system with drivers that are open Which means to you you can actually get fixes for vulnerabilities and deploy them yourself You also get a system that's reproducible And I think a lot of people here are familiar with the reproducible builds project The same properties apply to firmware and are important there and For those of you that deal with TPMs in some of your Hardware you also know that Linux is measurable. You know what you deployed, right? If I think I've heard way too many stories about new firmware updates somehow ending up on your platform and you Found out about it through a TPM measurement that gets reported because it's not what you thought it was And it's hard for you to tell if you got owned or if it's actually just an update that you didn't know about Through some channel that you didn't know about The other thing that you gain at least when you're a larger company If you Google or Facebook, you maybe have a handful of firmware engineers that can deal with UEFI You probably have hundreds of kernel engineers that know the Linux kernel So it's a way for you to leverage talent that you already have not having to hire people that are very hard to find And a nice side effect of removing a whole lot of Dixie drivers is that your boot time goes down the Dixie driver scheduler is not an especially Useful scheduler in that sense of word. It's more of a trial and error process. I'm gonna just say like this But for the Winterfell platformer we did this we went from eight minutes to 20 seconds so Okay, I already talked about this the one thing I want to point out is you know, Linux has too many contributors to count Compared to edk2 and grub which have a combined 248 Based on a github screen screenshot that I probably took quite a while ago But the point is there are a lot more eyes Looking at Linux and fixing things in Linux than there are in your current firmware and your current bootloader and The idea of putting Linux in firmware is actually not really a new idea This is something that the open power platform has done for the last four years And been pretty happy with and it's the original idea behind core boot Which used to be called Linux BIOS And It's something that works with UEFI it works with core boot and it works with U boot So this is not specific to UEFI and the Linux combination Here if you want to look it up later The thing that I would kind of want to point out here is that the build process is pretty easy If you've ever tried to build edk2 You know that this is probably much easier and by the way it works on Linux too The supported hardware that we currently have upstream is a bunch of OCP boards an Intel reference board and I Believe that Dell R630 these are things where you can actually build the system right now using these four or five commands if you wanted to So Now we have Linux and firmware we have drivers we can leverage What do you put in the nitro MFS to actually do something with that kernel? And this is where we get to a point where we say As a Linux boot project you can put whatever you want in there Right, there are plenty of Linux boot loaders that people have written like pitted boot on the open power platform like system deboot or You can if you want to just put busybox and K exec in there, right? It's kind of up to you but What we've done is come up with a Go-based runtime that we use as our bootloader platform and Google Facebook and a company called it were new currently collaborate on this effort and it's open source. It's all out there And it comes from the realization that we now have the full tool set of Linux applications at our fingertips We might as well use them And we also started with a premise that we would like to start with a somewhat memory safe language something better than C And a language that makes concurrency easy So you root is a project that has a bunch of busybox like tools like all the standard stuff You know of like DDLS CP all that stuff and a bunch of K exec based bootloaders That implement pixie-like or grub-like protocols in file formats and The why go besides the memory safety is Go gives you easy cross compilation In the initial days of your roots the project was actually kind of born out of a frustration with building a Cross-tool chain for build route and for a busy box and all these projects And one of the nice properties of go is also that it is reproducible Without having to patch GCC or do any crazy things in the sea because in the sea ecosystem And then of course you get a bunch of nice static analysis tools similar to the ones that you get in the C++ world Those of you that are familiar with go are gonna say, okay firmware storage tends to be pretty small usually we usually get between four and eight megs of space where we can put a Linux kernel and a runtime and You probably know that the a normal hello world go binary is something like 10 megs 11 megs So we've had to come up with a kind of strange system To take many different go commands and compile them as one binary We do this by taking all the source of those commands and rewriting it in a pretty simple way to be packages basically and Then compiling then generating a main.go file that imports all those packages and compiling that program What that gets us is a compressed binary that goes down to about three megs four megs depending on what programs you actually put in there And it's a system where you can plug in any go commands that you want to Compile into your firmware as well. So this is not not specific to you route itself and It's pretty easy to do you basically there's a make BB command since this is like busy box style and argv zero decides which program you actually run and You just give it some Go import paths to compile into a busy box and from there it should be pretty easy to use I'm gonna skip over that so now that we have a Base of go programs that we can use Let's talk about some bootloaders written in go I Don't know how many of you are familiar with pixie booting and excuse the shitty picture that I drew this morning but If you are familiar with it, you know that there are some strange complicated pieces in there for example Um The the original ufi firmware will talk to your Nick to find out if your Nick has what's called an option ROM An option ROM is just a like I'm just gonna call it a piece of code The Nick can say yeah, I have an option ROM. I would like you to run it So you go to the Nick you get some piece of code you run it on the x86 firmware and What that usually tends to do is pixie The reason for this in the I'm gonna say the olden days is that you didn't really have drivers for network cards in your firmware So the network card had to provide you a piece of code to do that for you That's not really necessary Anymore today since I also said there are drivers in UEFI, but it still tends to be the way it works in a lot of systems And then from there some pixie implementation makes a DHCP request from there gets a file name Downloads a file over TFTP It will run that file and that tends to be another piece of code another I'm gonna call it a microkernel pixie linux dot zero That will actually go and interpret The configuration for the kernel that you want to download and actually go and download it This is a somewhat complicated process for What I don't think should be as complicated and there's some other problems with it first of all pixie booting is At least in many systems still based on TFTP TFTP is a file transfer protocol With which it can take easily 30 seconds to download a 10 megabyte binary and Option ROMs are a problem because There are devices that hand you a random piece of code and you just go and execute it First of all, do you trust that piece of code that comes from the device? Yes. No, maybe right The other thing is that option ROMs tend to be your real mode code 16 bit Which can also pose a security problem for you in some cases so Now the other question is do you go and re-implement? newer protocols and newer standards like HTTP TLS SSL IPv6 Do you go and implement all that in UEFI and if you do go and implement that? Do you get a mature or audited or well tested implementation and the answer is likely no? Which is another good reason for us to do Linux and firmware But even if you have all these things A lot of companies out there have different security models in their data centers now A lot of companies out there have different very different security models on their client machines like laptops and workstations and even if I go and I Say I try to verify a signature on an option ROM or I try to verify a signature on a kernel that I downloaded over pixie Whose keys do I actually trust? in a Current secure boot system those tend to be Microsoft keys because they're the only ones willing to run the CA But does that really give you ownership over your platform and The other thing is what's your actual boot policy if you can't verify Something that you're about to run If you download a kernel and the signature check fails, what do you actually do? Maybe on a on a on a laptop It's acceptable to throw up a scary screen and say this is not safe You can't use your laptop because someone has compromised you But on a server system that presents a nice attack vector as a denial of service attack where you can take down a whole data Center just by serving something. That's one bite off So these are all questions that I don't have an answer for for you But that I want to give you the tools to answer and program for yourself So if you have Linux as a bootloader you can implement pixie booting and go pretty easily the protocols are out there as packages The the configuration file is not that hard to parse You don't have duplicate drivers from EFI anymore, but more importantly, it's trivial to use modern features, right? Go already has an HTTP implementation The Linux kernel already has an IPv6 implementation These are things that are somewhat well tested and audited and that we can reuse now Or if you're not something like Google or Facebook, you might just keep it simple, right?  It can be that easy for your own systems However in in many cases, this is kind of infeasible for for companies that have large infrastructure for example on our servers If a kernel fails to verify their secrets stored in a certain location on our servers that we have to say Any subsequent stage after this doesn't get access to these secrets anymore, right? These are some kind of set of keys that gives you access to production services, so What I'm trying to say is right our security model is not the same as yours And whatever we end up coming up with is not going to be something that you can just take and deploy in your data centers or on your laptops You have to answer some questions about You know Where are your secrets stored? Do you have secrets like that? What do you want to actually happen when kernel verification fails? and You also have to take into account your hardware security model when you design something like this So I would like it if once you answer all of those questions you yourself can write a bootloader and go For your use case in less than 500 lines of code But if we give you all the packages to K exec to deal with kernels, maybe in in Some way deal with the crypto involved Then it should be easy for you to compose these things and write your own bootloader now we have already written some and Our projects for bootloaders a little bit in disarray, and that's another reason that I'm kind of here Like I want to encourage people to do this on their own and also to contribute back to us because We like the users of this project Google and Facebook. We're busy building bootloaders for our own data centers But they're not the things that are going to be out there The same way that we use them in the data center So it would be great if other people were to look at the stuff and see if it's useful to them and to make it more usable So there are a couple different Bootloaders that exist for example with TPM support with DCP v6 But then there's another one that implements pixie as you know it only via dhcp v4 So we're kind of in disarray, and we would love some help And the plan is to hopefully have a shared code base of packages That we can all use and then implement our own commands that are the actual bootloaders So I'm just gonna quickly mention the people involved Which are you know Facebook and Google are testing this on their servers at the moment There's actually a French-American reseller of decommissioned open compute platform hardware that sells servers with Linux boot and you would already on them So you could go spend seven hundred dollars on a server right now to get it And then there's various other smaller people involved at the moment and Kind of to reiterate what I was saying before we want to provide you with tools to build the systems You need not policies right you should be the owner of your platform. You should get to decide How things actually work in firmware and how your bootloader works? and somewhat orthogonal to Linux boot is We would like it if these platforms give you security and user freedom at the same time It seems that a lot of platforms make trade-offs there That they don't actually have to make so if you for example buy a server that has Intel boot guard enabled Intel holds the keys to your I'm gonna say firmware universe We would like there to be server hardware that allows a change of ownership of those keys for firmware I don't care if that's actually an Intel boot guard or is that's an external chip that for example? Google is working on right now and many other companies are too and the the third thing that we want to kind of encourage users to do is Have systems that instead of throwing up a scary screen when something goes wrong and telling you like you can't boot Boot anyway, but don't allow you to get access to secrets or boot anyway and tell you it's not safe But you can still use your computer, which is kind of the Chromebook model With with systems that are available on the market right now like boot guard based server systems What you'll just get is a server that doesn't boot and that's not especially helpful to you if you're trying to debug things One of the things that we're doing is we are engaging with the open compute Community, so there's an open systems from our project Where you have where we have weekly calls actually bi-weekly calls now every two weeks Where a couple of vendors are listening in It's our way of trying to hopefully encourage some vendors to enable the option for people to use this on their system and There are a lot of things in the future, but I have about four minutes So I want to leave some time for questions we would love to see more contributors and Here are a bunch of links and also by the way, I brought stickers. They'll be outside on that table But so time for questions Yeah, I think By putting entire linux into the boot lord, don't you increase the surface attack? Um Yes, and no So one thing you have to realize that is that the UEFI you're running on your system is an incredibly large system That has multiple millions of lines of code of attack surface The other thing that we've realized is you can compile a pretty small linux kernel with only the features you want Start with config tiny config and add some you'll get a kernel that is no more than 800 kilobytes And consists of only a couple thousand or a couple hundred thousand lines of code so The answer is it depends but we hope that linux will be a smaller attack surface that is That has had more eyes on it than UEFI Have you have you worked with the ony or onie project the open network install environment? Which is another open compute project. It's effectively a bootloader for white box routers for sort of advanced pixie They are slightly different from us. I haven't spent a lot of time with that project, but They are not a bootloader that actually lives in firmware and I think the definition of bootloader is getting meddled somewhere in the middle there too, so It that we should talk a little more with them, but I don't think it quite fits together Okay. Yeah. Oh, they're primarily a linux distribution for what again? For Facebook switches fbass I Realize that this is a silly question But do you think that in our lifetime? We will be able to see this on normal consumer laptops I really hope so we do have some contributors doing it on normal consumer laptops But if you want to do it on modern consumer laptops It either has to be a Chromebook or a system where you find a boot guard vulnerability, so We have to work with vendors to Enable users to be able to do this or encourage vendors to do it themselves So I hope soon, but I don't want to promise you anything Mike back there Okay, I have a question as well So if I seem correctly on your slides, so you need some downstream patches for the linux You needed you needed one patch and we're getting rid of it pretty much in a couple of days Okay, so you're working on up streaming this. Yeah, okay. Thanks. Have you It's on have you approached Intel on this? Actually Intel is on those open systems firmware calls and we also meet with them every once in a while Intel is pretty supportive of this project Because you can frame it as a this is Linux as an EFI driver project so They have no problem with this We're actually hoping that they will enable us to To do this on some systems with blobs they provide. I don't know that they will But I'm hopeful. Yeah So if I want to try Linux boot by itself or you root by itself Could I so in the case of Linux boot if I have access to my EFI shell and I can load Dixie modules Could I presumably take the kernel that I already have? And kind of like get it into the EFI shell mod Actually, what we usually start with is we replace the code section of the EFI shell with a Linux kernel Right. So if I have access to my EFI shell like presumably can extract it from my yeah firmware So I can put my existing kernel into it and and try to do what what will I expect to see if I just loaded that module from the Shell is that a way to test it load in that module from the show and so just to execute the Dixie module Oh, it's boot What would I see at that point? It's you should just get Linux actually Like it should just work one of the one of the issues There is you might not have enough space to actually do that without removing some of the drivers that you won't need anymore Right. Yeah, so that that really depends on your system though. Yeah So I'm pretty sure I can do that in my in my shell So then in the case of you root could I already now try that? Go based in it ramfs on just my laptop already today. Yeah, you can use it now There's a QMU environment too. So it Yeah, all right, I think I'm out of time. So thank you very much


All right, very good morning to you. It is Friday, the 28th of August. Hope you are well. First things first, don't forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel. I had a really great interview with a super experienced options trader yesterday, and I'm gonna publish that video on Saturday morning. So if you wanna get hold of that, subscribe to the channel and just click on that bell icon. You'll get notified as soon as that goes live. Also as well, if you've not looked before and you're new to the channel, check out amplifiedtrading.com slash traders. That'll take you to our proprietary trading arm and our trader development programs that we offer. It's our last day for our intensive one week advanced program today. So all the best for those guys and we're working with them throughout the day. But if you want to join the next cohort, this is the place where to go. But let's get straight into the charts and have a look at what exactly is going on this morning. And very much so, a digestion of the information yesterday, obviously from Jerome Powell. So at the moment, the dollar is weaker. We're at toward the lower bound of the volatility that was seen initially after the confirmation of average inflation targeting was announced in that conclusion to their monetary policy review. So the Dixie this morning has declined overnight. We're back down four tenths of 1% and as a consequence, hence the reason why you can see both EUR a dollar and cable then the kind of mirror image of that dollar index up testing around the initial pop on the highs that we had. So EUR a dollar up 45, cable up 60 at the moment. Elsewhere gold as well has just been edging higher during the Asia-Pacific session with trading above the pivot level in the futures up 18 bucks at 1950. Equity index futures, positive. We were talking about this at length going into the actual announcement yesterday about how equities could have been susceptible or vulnerable to potential sharp pullback if indeed Powell did not deliver. Of course he did. And so that eradicated any of that nervousness or I guess built-in expectation and the consequent action that might have happened if he didn't, but obviously he came through the information came out and that just gives further underlying support. Now this idea basically what's happening here in terms of the dollar, in terms of equities is that overall US interest rates are not gonna go anywhere for a long period of time. A new era of long low rate environment essentially. And so that's a supportive one for equities. And if you're having a look here in the S&P we've got some nice, I guess, platforms now for price activity for the session ahead. You've got 3497, you can see was that initial peak that we had in price push yesterday afternoon. We had a retest of that as well just before the close on Wall Street where we just dipped, but then we broke through it in the Asia-Pacific session and it acted as a nice area of support early in European entrance as well. And then if we go back further down really towards then looking at the S1 here, well, let me just quickly move this line for a second. You do have the pivot level which does coincide with around that high that we had on the push up on the 26th. And then that S1 encapsulates some of that price activity on those highs and lows that we're seeing during the kind of bottom of yesterday's price action. Further down then, even if we were looking in the most extreme bearish situations as well, further levels where ultimately, even if you did get a degree of profit-taking, perhaps a bit of book square and going into the weekend, it is a bank holiday in the UK, but it's very much specific to our country, the rest of the world operating as per normal. But if there were any profit-taking just given the push up that we've had this week, then ultimately you'd probably find some support at the skating levels to the downside. Again, it's not a market to sell equities. It's a market that if equities come down it just provides potentially another opportunity to reassert a long position at that point. Otherwise, elsewhere, WTI crude pretty flat. It has come off a little bit at the recent highs. Actually, Laura is now a tropical depression. So at the point of actually hitting landfall as it's moved inland, it has weakened quite considerably and also long story short, it's averted some of the main infrastructure, meaning that the worst case scenario has been averted. Otherwise, elsewhere, the US 10-year is down quite sharply when taking into context the move from yesterday. So although what they've done is a move towards being more dovish policy, what we've seen is quite aggressive yield curve steepening and then so yields rising in the lock-in has really dented the 10-year and even the 30-year in particular. But I'll talk about that more in a moment. So let's get into some of the headlines. What exactly has the Fed done? Well, as we now know, the Fed will look at shortfalls on employment rather than deviations and a new approach will tolerate prices overshooting a 2% goal, which gives them open flexibility then for this rather than having a definitive level of 2% where that would have a reaction effect of tightening policy. If we've had a prolonged period of undershooting, there can be a period of overshooting to average it out before then action would take, which means then essentially rates are gonna be left where they are for a long, long period of time, multiple years and well beyond what the current dot-plots would be suggestive, which is keeping rates low through 2022. You're probably looking now more like 2024 or 25 is what this would indicate. Now, one of the things as I just said that perhaps is throwing a few people off who maybe don't look at the fixed income market is that T-notes are down quite sharply because in a normal, I guess, asset class reaction you would think, well, more dovish would mean lower yields and consequently bond prices would rise, but it's quite the opposite because it depends on what duration and part of the curve in rates that you're looking at. And obviously we trade predominantly the 10 year, which is further out. So what you're getting is suppressed yields in the short end because in the near term now, we're anticipating rates to stay low for a long, but going further forward out in time, then there potentially could be a sharp pickup of inflation in the future. And so as such, then longer dated yields are moving higher and that's putting pressure on some of those bond prices further out. So this is having a look at that. The yield curve steepens as 30 year treasury sell-off. So a few things to be aware of here. The announcement, of course, as described comes as there will allow inflation to run above its longstanding target in order to make up for periods of undershooting. So investors have attributed the backup in longer dated yields to the possibility then of higher inflation. And what does that mean? Well, that means then that it would erode real return that bond holders earn on their fixed interest payments for government debt. In order to achieve higher inflation, then that it has managed in recent years, the Fed is likely to hold short-term rates very low for a long time as I described. So the steepening of the yield curve also reflects though a disappointment among investors about the lack of detail from Powell about the Fed's bond buying program. So away from this other area of inflation and how they're using that now as a way of dictating policy on the bond buying front. So the separate unconventional tool that bank committers to buying treasuries of all maturities at a pace of 80 billion per month that some investors have been calling for the Fed to purchase relatively more longer-term debt to reflect the increased supply and hold down their yields further out in terms of the duration. So again, this kind of idea about yield curve control suppressing the yield rise that we might see in the long end. And that's definitely not being mentioned so far and probably gonna be kept for reserves should it so be necessary later on down the line. So a steeper yield curve does though come with benefits for one particular sector in the stock market which we saw was quite evident yesterday and that is then improved interest margins for banks or at least expectations of prompting strong gains for some of those financial stocks. Then this is a look at the S&P on a sector breakdown. You can see down in the bottom here you've got financials. So you've got banks, diversified banks, credit services, banks in terms of regional, but some of those big ones, J.P. Morgan were up about three and a quarter percent whilst Fargo up two and a quarter. So yeah, some decent gains seen in that space. The other big green spots here obviously were Microsoft and Walmart. And you probably saw the news but Walmart joining Microsoft in its bid for TikToks, US operations was one of the big equity headlines yesterday and their shares moving higher on the back of that. On the flip side, Facebook just giving back some of those really excessive, some would say gains that we've had over the prior two sessions of gaining kind of double digits in a period of 48 hours. So a little bit of a pullback probably warranted. Similarly for Adobe which got a real boost on the back of that Salesforce earnings report two days ago. So just explaining some of the major stock moves there. Moving on though away from the Fed one of the other things to talk about is this this morning because the Japanese yen has been strengthening. So if you're looking at the Dolly yen pair Dolly yen has dropped from around a 107 mark down to awards really the 106 handle. So pretty decent move seen overnight. And it comes on the back of this report that Abbey is set to resign and that's due to worsening health. He's 65 years old. So say he's not that old. He's certainly younger than Joe Biden in that respect. But he's visited hospital twice in the past two weeks. Officials have been pushing back strongly on the idea that he's gonna resign but it looks like from some of the latest things that I've read that it definitely looks like that is going to happen. He's gonna hold a press conference shortly to confirm and outline some further details as well. But why is the yen strengthening? Well, the yen is strengthening and stock markets have been pressured because this chat right here that you're looking at the resignation of him could represent the end of an era of his reflationist and three arrows, abinomic policies, which he's put in place really over the last eight years or so. In addition, J.P. Morgan, just to refresh a note that they recently put out, they said that any resignation of him could result in Dolly yen actually declining to the 100 level. I mean, that's a long way off from where we are at the moment. And certainly there's been about a point move seen in the overnight session. But yeah, I'd say generally speaking then this idea of supporting the economy through monetary, you know, kind of Japan has done everything that they possibly can albeit inflation still remains somewhat in the doldrums which is a bit of a warning sign I think for the Fed in some respect. But the three arrows being removed under his stewardship would be seen then as a potential move away from such a cognitive stance that he's adopted with that three arrow strategy. So, but again, strength. Other things that have happened overnight, you had the closing of the Republican Convention and this is when Donald Trump officially kind of accepts the nomination. He actually spoke for about 70 minutes which is actually the second longest nomination acceptance address since at least the early 80s, I believe. What was he talking about? Well, this is his kind of moment to shine. The optics were very clear to see. I think Joe Biden when he did his was pretty much in an empty room on his own whereas Donald Trump, of course, the complete opposite. He was outside the White House on the front lawn draped in US flags. There was about a thousand people who probably not doing the best case that they could do in adopting social distancing. Roles, chanting USA and so on. But what was said, well, he said that Biden would only exacerbate racial strife and coronavirus pandemic besieging the nation. He claimed that Biden would defund the police. And again, it goes back to that kind of classic US political narrative of law and order. You know, using, you know, really pulling on the strings of innate human fears like using words like chaos and just talking about rioters and these types of things. I mean, it does come on the back of quite a contentious issue that's risen again on the racial front this coming after in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where on Sunday white police officer shot another black man and that has caused renewed rioting and so on. But Trump trying to flip that almost and leverage in his favor in the idea then that law and order is of the utmost necessity at this point in time. So really things like that, the other things he talked about was promising a cut to taxes, which obviously is the opposite of what Biden is proposing, which is move back up and then creating 10 million new jobs in 10 months, expanding chartered schools and school choice for more families and turning the country into a quote, manufacturing superpower of the world to end our reliance on China. So he's pretty much hitting all the notes that you would expect, I guess. Law and order, that Biden would be inappropriate to deal with the coronavirus, that he's gonna create jobs, he's gonna take care of the kids by giving more school flexibility and he's gonna make America great by maintaining this dance as a manufacturing superpower and not being so reliant on China. So be interested to see how the polls play out. I don't really envisage too much of, now we've had the Democratic and Republican conventions and typically you see a shift either way whilst those weeks are happening. I don't think there's been too much of a change. I think the polls are still about a seven percentage point lead Biden's favor, but again, still a long way to run until we get into those elections, but that's the latest state of play. So nothing really too much to consider if you're looking at an intraday strategy on the back of this. The other thing then was oil. As I said, it's backed off its highs a little bit. What is going on here, what oil gives up some hurricane related gains after refiners are spared. And here's a map you can see now. Tropical storm, well I believe actually now it's a depression, it's even dropped down one further than that since this graphic was made. You can see it's moving through the state of Louisiana and into then moving north and east through the country. The overall idea here though is that oil is actually heading for its fourth weekly gain given what's happened. However, it has then appeared to not inflicted as major damage on the region's energy infrastructure as had potentially been feared. The shut-ins as well, we know that more than 8% of oil output in the Gulf of Mexico and almost three million barrels per day of refining capacity has been shut in due to the storms because remember, Laura was the main focus but there also was Marco as well earlier in the week. But the idea here is that the shut-in production is likely to return in the coming days and relatively quickly and perhaps more so, more faster than people might have thought because of the fact that it was spared the main bulk of the actual worst case scenario that this weather system could have caused. So that should help accelerate the resumption of normal activity which would be a negative short-term to just cap that recent rally we've had in crude. Okay, other things, in terms of the Canada four today, what have we got? It is relatively quiet for this morning, not too much going on the 10 o'clock Eurozone numbers, the economic industrial service sentiment figures rarely market moving, so it wouldn't be too phased by that if you're trading European assets. Then into the afternoon, you've got the US data, PCE price index, personal income, you've got the advanced goods trade balance figure, CAD GDP for the second quarter, and then the US probably more interesting is the Chicago PMI number that is expected to remain relatively unaltered from its prior reading, so expectations of 52 for the month of August. Then you've got the final universe Michigan number coming out later on this afternoon and the Baker Hughes rig count for the energy traders at the regular time, 6 p.m. London, mid-day in Chicago. Jackson Hole's not over, the symposium continues virtually, and today actually one of the interesting ones to look out for is going to be Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey. So he's going to be speaking at a similar time to what Powell did yesterday, so just shortly after 2 p.m. London time. And yeah, perhaps a bit of interest in that actually, just given the fact that in the rates markets, we are still somewhat priced for the prospect of negative rates in the UK, irrespective of the fact that Bank of England officials have pretty much done their best to put that off for the time being. It's kind of an idea on the table, but not one that they're anywhere close to adopting. So given market pricing, it'd be interesting to see whether he comes out and says anything, and particularly given now that what we've seen with this new change of tact from the Fed as well. So if you're trading sterling, I probably would recommend being out of any position at that point of which he does speak. There is a tangible risk associated with his speech, and I would suggest it's one to watch. Yeah, and that is it. So I hope you've had a good week. As I said before, don't forget to subscribe to the channel, that new video on some basics around options trading, some examples of where it's been particularly effective so far and quite a volatile year that's been 2020, and I think you'll like it, and please do engage with the video myself and Imran as the chap I spoke to would be more than happy to answer your questions. Okay guys, that's it. Wish you all a fantastic weekend. And I'll see you on not Monday, it's a bank holiday, but I will issue a video on Sunday for my week ahead for the macro menu. Okay guys, take care.


It says five o'clock and this one says 502 on the clock. Behind me, welcome guests. Peter's right here? No. Peter is caught in Colorado. Peter is not going to call in his place due to the latest official statement saying that she is running late. Yep. We have a, are there any amendments to the agenda? The only amendment to the agenda is to consider whether to hold a select board meeting right before town meeting on the 3rd. OK, so that will be any other business to come before the board? We probably could go to the next board. OK, so we, do you know all the, do you know all the selectmen here? If not, the two of them will introduce themselves. And we are getting another one who's coming in once delayed at the airport in Denver. Phil Hayek, Steve Myrne. And this is? Brenda Curls, I'm the treasurer. OK, so if you want to introduce yourself for the record keeper there, our town clerk and administrator, that would be great. And our first item on the agenda is Ben Rose, recovery and mitigation chief, section chief of Vermont Emergency Management. Hey, how long have you done that, Ben? Since I read it, I assume you're asking for help. You came with, she asked me to help and I jumped in about five months after I read it. She dropped me into FEMA world and my hair was on fire for two years. And you haven't come up yet. OK, so if you want to, and do you want to introduce yourself for the record? And what you do? I'm Jennifer Evans, 28 Rich Road. I'm the owner of the property that I'm looking for. It's under discussion. Buy out, yeah. Yeah, and? I'm Tracy Collier. I was the head of the Disaster Case Management Program right after Irene. It's now no longer there, but I can speak to that. But she's still my case manager. You're heavily involved in this issue. Tracy, do you work for the Vermont Department or are you currently do work for the state of Vermont? But previous, when I was in the role of Disaster Case Management Director, it was for Capstone. Oh, OK. OK, Ben, if you want to chat with us. Yeah, thank you. And have the floor. Thank you all for your service to the community. Thanks for taking the time for this. So what we're going to talk about is what's commonly called a buy out. And this is where FEMA, Federal Emergency Management Agency, provides 70% federal share of the cost of a project to buy out a residential property in this case, which is in a flood vulnerable location. And this is hazard mitigation. The theory is that it saves the federal, state, and local taxpayers' money over time if people don't live in extremely dangerous places, which require repetitive flood recovery. And this was a very big deal after Irene, because the way this hazard mitigation funding pot works is that for every dollar of federal assistance, there's $0.15 made available to the state, the recipient of the grant, to make hazard mitigation grants anywhere in the state. And so Irene, it was about a billion dollar to hit on the state of Vermont. And more than half a billion came from different federal sources. One big source was Federal Highway. The other big source was Public Assistance, which is grants to communities to repair their infrastructure, like local roads. And there was $210 million of public assistance. The state got about a third of that for the Waterbury Office Complex and other state buildings, too. Well, long story short, so $0.15 of the dollar means that there was $34.5 million available to the state to make hazard mitigation grants. And we're still spending down the last of that, but we used over 20 million of it to buy out people who'd been badly flooded, in some cases who had lost everything in Irene. And most people in Vermont don't have flood insurance. So this was a good humanitarian mission, and it also bought down the risk in a lot of communities. And we've had about 10 smaller floods since Irene. Five of them, we've already closed out the grants. We've got a lot better at managing disasters because of Irene, and we learned a lot of lessons, which we're trying to hang onto. Well, long story short, that just gets us to the starting line. For whatever reason, this was not a buyout that people were ready to move on right after Irene. And I should stop and say that the way the program works is that the state makes a sub-grant to the community. And it is entirely voluntary on the community as the sub-recipient and on an individual landowner whether participate in this program. And in this case, the stars are aligned. That we have a willing community, I hope, and a willing landowner who said, enough, I don't want to live in a dangerous place anymore. And in one of the subsequent disasters, DR 4330, which was, I believe, the storm of June and July 2013, one of the applications that was submitted was to buyout 28 Rich Rowe. And we submitted that to the town of Middlesex? You did indeed. I have the application right here. Just in one line. This is the application that was submitted, and it was signed by, I don't know who, whoever that is. Peter Hood. You couldn't read that? That's right here. So that got you one would think to the starting line. But FEMA has a lot of rules, but they move very slowly. And there's a lot of hoops to jump through. And we have now jumped through a bunch of them, including a site inspection visit, and FEMA asking lots of questions. And there's a new requirement, which FEMA has added since Irene, which I think FEMA came to this honestly. It's a requirement that both the recipient, the state, and the subrecipient of the town sign a recapitulation of the terms and conditions of the grant. So what I have for your consideration is this eight-page document, and there are copies right there. And I have some extras, so I can share them with you. How's an email there, too? This is the thing that was emailed. You're going to ask me difficult technical questions about this. I know probably. Well, I didn't read this because I couldn't bring that up. Well, if you have difficult technical questions, I'm probably going to say, I don't know, but I will get you an answer. I should tell you that I am not a subject matter expert practitioner of hazard mitigation grants. I'm the state recovery mitigation section chief, which means I've had three hazard mitigation officers work for me, but I've never actually been in the leads of doing projects until I very good hazard mitigation officer, Laura, know it's left for the Nature Conservancy a few months ago, and I've been trying to keep things moving forward. But just last week, we hired a very good new state hazard mitigation officer named Stephanie Smith. And Stephanie already knows a lot more about the programmatic details and guidance than I do. So I don't want to say anything that's going to be wrong. But the good news is that there's nothing in this document that is materially different from what the rules were when you applied for the grant. What FEMA discovered, I said they came by this honestly, what they discovered is that there's misunderstandings later in the process because people didn't understand what they'd signed up for. And so they're getting people to sign saying, yes, we understand all the rules of the game. Things like, we know that we need to provide a clean title. We know that we can't redevelop the property once. We know, we the town, we the state. Just looking at the title search, and we the town do know that we have outstanding obligations on that property and the town, isn't that right, Jordan? No, no. No taxes or? Not on that one. Oh, okay, sorry. Well, you can't turn around and resell it to a developer, for example, because the reason the federal government is investing in this buyout is so that it will remain an open plot of land. You're basically giving it back to the Nooski River, which really wants to be there. Can you just tell me, Ben, will we own it? Yes, the town will own it. The Vermont Housing Conservation Board, here's some other good news, and we didn't know this until, even when I got on the agenda, we weren't sure about this, but now we know. This is Liz Scherfer, our fourth member of the State Board. This has been Rose and others, about 28, 38, Rich Rose. Yes. Hello. I know these people. Yes, Liz. So, we're talking about the terms and conditions for a hazard mitigation grant to buy out from there, to make sure. Okay, do you have one more copy of that? I have a few copies, yeah. Here's the agenda, and... Oh, okay, this is what we're discussing when we were on kinda like, I was on page 308. Yeah, well, I wanted to talk about the funding, because that's usually where the real pain is. It's a 75% federal share of the total project cost, and the elements of total project cost are the appraised value, pre-disaster, it's been flooded. Basically, the town hires an appraiser, that's a cost. The appraiser says, okay, the fair market value of the property is X thousand dollars. If the property owner doesn't agree to that, then there's a mechanism for a second appraisal, and you get into all kinds of back and forth. But usually the appraisal comes in somewhere in the neighborhood of what's on the tax rolls for plus or minus. So 75%- But we can't use either of our town listers or what we have on our record for the price. No, you have to hire an appraiser. It's after, or pre or post? Well, in this case, it would be right now, because it hasn't been gutted by a disaster recently. Post-disaster, right. Then there is well, then you have to hire a, the town does a title search, ascertains that the title is clear. Okay, that's another small cost. Then the town schedules a closing. Okay, and um... That's another cost. The closing, okay, there's a closing cost, right. 75% of all of that is eligible. The FEMA cuts a check, the state makes the check available, so the town is able to, at the closing, buy the property from the property owner. You walk away, okay. The town now has to hire, procure somebody to demolish the site and bring it back to clear ground and cap the utilities and whatever else needs to be done. And then take a picture of it every three years, and it's a green field. And that's pretty much the end of the story, except where does the town come up with that extra money and how does the property owner afford to walk away for 75% of the appraised value? That's an answer that we don't have for all projects, but we had it for the properties we bought after Irene because the state also got a community development block grant, two of them actually, for $40 million, and we were able to use the CDBG money as the non-federal match. And as that was running out, the Vermont Housing Conservation Board stepped in with a small allocation that we could use to finish out the remainder of the buyouts. And we were running out of that money and we didn't know where the match was gonna come from anymore, and then a property in another community dropped out. It's kind of a sad story, but it's middle sexes and Jennifer's good fortune, I believe, because there is just enough money left in the last VHCB allocation to cover the non-federal match, both for the town and for the homeowners. So when the dust settles, other than carrying costs for a little while, there shouldn't be any cost to the town and you should be able to walk away with the fair value and not get into the difficult situation where your buyout offer is 75% of a price value, minus the town's share of the demolition cost and so forth. It's tough to ask someone to walk away for 63% of their market value or whatever. Especially since it won't be as high as it would have been before the flood. Well, again, it's an appraisal and there are times when during the demolition of you encounter unanticipated asbestos or some other unanticipated expense, it is possible to amend the grant. I mean, if the appraisal comes in $10,000 higher than what we put in the budget, we don't even need to do a lot of paperwork with FEMA unless the overall cost changes by 10% or more. If it comes in under the budget or on the budget, it's pretty much smooth sailing on the other end. I don't really want to go through all the pages of legal gobbledygook with you, but if you have specific questions, either about the program or about the language passed away. Ben, do you mind if I ask a question? Please. As from my experience from administering the last grant, we submitted bids for asbestos consultation. I forget exactly how much that was, but there was a little bit of asbestos. There was asbestos in a kitchen sink and there was a little bit of asbestos on one of the rooms in the two trailers. It was not a big deal. We then submitted RFPs for asbestos removal and two of them came in at over $40,000. One of them came in at $20,000. I'm not sure the person that's the one that the sledboard chose, I'm not sure that the job he did was probably the greatest job because I then was yelled at by the state engineer who insisted that I record on the land records that did not follow the exact procedures for, but I think I don't know anything about asbestos removal. I hired a contractor. Going back to that, considering that we were just looking at a sink and a little bit of asbestos on a roof, of a mobile home, things that are Jennifer's house, I think, considering its date, probably the asbestos. That's what I'm thinking. I mean, that's- I think there may be some insulation in the out of the asbestos. So now we're looking at if her house is like $120,000, do you know what your house is valued at, Jennifer? It's like $115,000 or something like that. So now we've got a $40,000, this was seven years ago, a $40,000 asbestos removal at the minimum. What do we do? How much does the town get back then? We will put in a cost- Because that's over- Change, a scope change, cost over on request to FEMA if that happens. We have a little room to work with because it's in the map, special flood hazard area, and FEMA has a policy, which is called the BCA waiver, the benefit cost analysis waiver, for buyouts that are under $276,000 total cost. FEMA does not require a benefit cost analysis for anything that's in the map, special flood hazard area. And that's because it was just, they found that those buyouts are cost effective. And so because we're not pushing up against that limit, there's nothing that's going to trigger a red light to go off with FEMA, and it is what it is. If you end up having to spend a little more on proper demolition and disposal, then we'll put that in as a cost overrun. Do we get the estimates, and then we ask for the waiver, or the additional amendment? Well, you'll write, Sarah will write me a letter saying, we got bids, and it turns out we have this unanticipated $40,000 cost overrun, and I'll send it to FEMA, and we'll tell her that it's a red light for an infuriating couple of months, and eventually it'll be granted. Hopefully it doesn't rain for four days then. Yeah, it's a slow process, and I don't control FEMA's time frame, and I apologize in advance for the bureaucratic grind of this process for all parties concerned, but it's a good outcome in the end, and it's actually a pretty good program. I might have missed something in the, so the 75, the 25% match. So if the cost goes up because of this, the match then would go up as well? We have enough budget. You have enough for that. We have enough, VHCB has enough to bring up. Well, it's actually VHCB money, and we're hoping they'll be, well, I don't think I'm allowed to say this, I work for the governor, but there are people who would. But this is Gus, right? Sorry? Gus Selig's operation. Well, there are people who would like to see it, the VHCB appropriation go up, if it does, there are people who would like to see a piece of that go to keeping the buyout program going because it leverages these federal dollars. But that's above my pizzeria. But in the short term, yeah, I don't think, I think there's about $50,000 available up to about $50,000 should the town and property owner need it for the non-federal share. And please don't ask me about the transaction sequence for that. I know you get the money. I don't know who gives a check to who or all others. We're used to paying that and getting it back later. But is vermiculite considered like asbestos and something that would be beyond or is that normal in the process of demolishing? Because vermiculite is one of those things that has asbestos in it. Or is that just a part of the, like that's an assumption that all houses have vermiculite in them at a certain age? I don't know. You don't know? Okay, because I'm sure that that's what that's. But that's where my- And that's what the issue that this claim was when I thought you missed. Yeah, yeah. I mean, my house has it. I'm gonna ask another question. In the audit of our, I'm sorry, Mary. In the audit of the last buyout we did, FEMA recommended that the board pass certain policies regarding contracts, bids, you know, to make sure that those policies were in place before we went down this road. Does that sound familiar to you? Is there anything in dealing with small towns that you make sure that there are certain policies we have in place before we- Yeah, yeah, unfortunately I know a lot about this. Okay, so tell us what we need. The good news is you probably are going, well, I don't know what the good news is about is, basically in order for the state as the recipient to make a sub-grant to the town as a sub-recipient, we have to follow the state rules for making a grant which have been through the state auditor and everything, so my employer, the Department of Public Safety is gonna be making a grant to the town before the Department of Public Safety makes a grant, they require the town to have a conflict of interest policy, a procurement policy. You probably have all these things. Vermont League of Cities and Towns has templates and I mean, basically if you've ever gotten a grant from the Department of Public Safety for anything, you've checked all these boxes and you'll have to fill out a little questionnaire in the same, I don't know if it's calendar or fiscal year to assess whether the town of Middlesex is a high-risk applicant or not, but it's pretty routine stuff and basically follow your own town's procurement policy which is you don't just call your brother-in-law to do an appraisal, call three and if only one response and you deem it cost-reasonable then you put a note in the file saying we RFPed for three and only one responded and we think it's cost-reasonable, we'll have town of Middlesex and that'll let the FEMA person check the box. Is that, Sarah, we did that for the last two, didn't we, in the other trailers? So to be clear, we did send out RFPs, we had closed bids, we opened them up, we went through the bids, I did an analysis explaining why we did the lowest and best bid that we felt we chose, it was quite a learning experience. I'm a little worried about our procurement policy, I think I brought it to the select board earlier and there is really no, for towns of this size, then unless you're dealing with these big grants, there is no requirement that you send out bids for everything, it's just in the state statutes. So we're gonna have to bone up, that's why I'm asking now because if this is coming down the pipe, we should have all that paperwork in line. And in a way the process keeps, you're right, but the process keeps out of trouble because we're not gonna be able to actually do this until you have the sub grant and Melissa, our very good finance person won't issue that sub grant, won't send it to the commissioner for signature until you've signed it and she's determined that you've checked all her boxes which all of her requires her to check, so. Which means all these policies. You're gonna have to have it all there. The board is going to be that once you pass that procurement policy, you gotta follow it for everyone, you gotta follow it for sand, you gotta follow it for trucks, you gotta follow it for, I mean it's. Why can't we, why can't we exempt it? Certain times. Is this gonna change the way you do business? I recommend looking at the Vermont League of Cities and Towns policy and most towns have a, have a like a small purchase threshold I think of $10,000. Like if you're buying something for more than $10,000, you probably wanna procure it competitively, right? You're probably doing, I mean you're good stewards of the people's money. The policy just tells the state how you do that and it's pretty painless. You're right, it's a good opportunity to get that in place. The other one you'll need to check Melissa's box is a conflict of interest policy. Which again, I'm sure you're following and it's a good thing to have it in the books. I don't think we have a policy, a written policy on that either. I think it's in our personnel policy that that may not be good enough for the state. Well, Melissa will help you if you, she can get you templates for all of that. Yeah, it can be done. It puts a little work on you. But you know how last time we could spend on templates. This is the two-take-any-finders I've got. They're just for 190 and 191, three-mile bridge room. But there is also, I think up to, I don't know if it's okay. Oh no, no, no, I'm not charging time. I'm not doing that again. You can take a little management cost money. You can do that. May I speak, Mary? Yes. The problem was that female wanted me to work on this project over time that I was not allowed to work during office hours. So if I was going to do anything for FEMA, I had to do it after hours. The city of Barrie paid back $63,000 because they did not do it correctly. We had to pay back 252. So I've been down that road. We'll talk about flying about that. I'm not sure yet. All right, yeah. Wow. And we sure want to do this, huh? That's why we're here. Any other questions or any other members of the board about any of it? And so let me ask a question, Ben. Is the reason you called up to find out action unlikely and you wanted it action possible is because you want us to sign this tonight. Is that what you're saying? We can't move forward without the town signing it. It doesn't have to be tonight. I'm not trying to rush you. It's been what, four years, right? But, but... But we just saw this 10 minutes ago. Right, this is one of the steps we do control and FEMA wants us all as the recipient and subrecipient to acknowledge these terms and conditions and then they will issue the award and that gets us to the starting line. Now I should say that even once you've signed this and they've issued the award, if the town changes its mind or the homeowner changes its mind, you can pull the plug. I mean, until the closing happens, there's no obligation to go forward. So I don't think there's really risk to the town by signing this document at this time, but it keeps the possibility of success moving forward. Well, we have to have a title on the show, too. Well, what does the board think? I mean, do you feel comfortable moving ahead on this a feat? I do, let's go ahead. If the representation is that it's substantially what we did when we indicated, when we put the application in. How many years ago? Seven. Four. 23. Well, the homeowner was submitted in 2014, I guess. Oh, I know it said 13, but that was just, wow. The disasters have sort of all blended together for me now. And Jen, you're 40 years ago. Yeah. Okay, well then I'll accept a motion. And the motion should be to authorize the acting chair to enter into the terms and conditions set forth in the FEMA document project number 4330-8R. Is that right? Don't you need that? Yeah. Is that what you said, Phil? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyone else for a second? Liz. Liz. I'll second it. Okay, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Those opposed? Chair votes yes. Okay. And so, I'm the signature recipient? Yes, would you just, yeah, I talked to Peter, yes. You are the signature subrecipient, right there. If you sign that, then I can make a copy for you, okay? Great. I didn't mean to cover any of these questions. No, they're good questions. I'll get everything on the record before you go down. And there's, you know, there's always some bureaucratic kerfuffle with these, but we'll get through it. By now, it's, I mean, I haven't done it once. The day is the 18th? Yes. The 18th, yeah. Okay. Do you just need the signature page? Sure. Right. You can get a chance to say anything, anything you want to add for the record? No, not for the record. Off the record? Thank you. It's a lot of work, but she deserves it. It's hard to live somewhere where you don't feel safe. Yeah. Right. There's no question about it. Sure. It's a beautiful spot, but it's not safe. It is a beautiful place to live. I like there all the time. I prefer not to have to carry two cats through icy water up to my hips again. Well, they were going to make it the Mary Skinner Memorial Park and put it in a toilet right there. First you have to die. We can have the memorial later. Let's not go there. Well, you call it the memorial. It's a memorial. Oh yeah, right. The bikers of the world would thank me though. Great. Thank you. Thank you very much. Oh yeah, the roads are bad. I didn't have any trouble accept it when I go down the road. It's the paved road. There's a lot of bumps there. I can feel myself skidding if I don't get in the right groove. I was in Montpelier earlier today. It was just so much everywhere. But that's not the same as icy. Are you saying it's icy? Yeah, it's just, I mean, I'm not in the right car. Somebody was saying that I'm in a couple cars. I saw cars actually on the center road. There were, somebody had gone off like into a giant. Thank you, man. It's so. Yeah, my dad went off the road yesterday in a Subaru because of the rust. Can I get the checks out of the road? The two of them off the road. All I need is just the checks and you guys can look at the others. You mean you're just assuming we're gonna approve them all? I know you are. I got two out of three signatures already, so. Wait a minute. Here you are, Liz. Okay, thanks. Sorry I'm late, everyone. I don't know if things have, I used to go into town because I was spent the day at my house cleaning up after family, but how great is that? Yeah, right, right. It's good. How was life? This is yours. The hike was great. And even though it was cold when it started, they said it was one of the clearest days. Yeah, it was a beautiful day. I've never seen it in the eyes of 24. Yeah, that's great. Okay, so Sarah, you don't like to join us. You like to talk from afar. I can't help it. My eight-year-old laptop cannot exist without being plugged in. But what, you don't like to get an extension cord? No. Are they gonna fly over here? I don't like this anymore. She really wants to create some distance. I know. I noticed that. Looks like we got paid today. I mean, I feel, I didn't get paid. Get our annual paycheck. Wow!  I'm very questioning whether or not I can sign checks, you know? I think she would look at this to know that she's getting paid tonight. I'm right. She thinks she's gonna get coronavirus from one of us. That's probably, like... Okay, so the next item on the agenda is discuss updating town rental policy to include waiver of liability and to clarify renter's obligation, raise snowman removal. How's this the kind of thing that probably Keter would like to be in here? But I just wanted to... Well, you could at least outline it because we're not gonna... Right. We're not gonna act on it tonight so we can discuss it twice and it will be a lot shorter when we discuss it and when Peter discusses it. So we had two Saturdays ago, we had a baby shower here and it was the day after a big storm. And I got a text at 1.30 in the afternoon before the two o'clock baby shower and unfortunately the people who rented it were very nice. They rented this before. They're middle sex residents. But, you know, the renter said, it's 1.30, when is the road crew coming today to plow the plow town hall? To plow the parking lot. And I made clear to her that we do, I will not be shoveling the walks, we will not be doing the, we will not be plowing at all this, but she was under the impression that this would happen. That was an issue.  Because the road crew was asleep. They had been plowing all night the night before. Then the toilet's over the floor. The toilet's always overflowed this year. We have this problem where we rent town hall at this time of year because people need a space this time of year, but we don't have, this building doesn't work. The front steps are impossible.  They can't get in. It's not up to the road crew to plow. The toilets inevitably overflow if you've got more than 10 people. So I guess what I'm asking the board is to consider what we should do about this. If we should amend our policy to not rent during this. Don't rent it. Right. Don't rent it at all. But this is when the community wants it. For example, we've done that. How many people, really? It's like a few people. It's not like we're overflowing. I mean, sorry about the analogy, but it's not like we have somebody who wants it like 30 times out of the month. Well, like Weight Watchers comes once a week, right? Weight Watchers no longer come. They're no longer here. They have found the building intolerable in the winter. Okay. So that's that. And also Carol Hughes moved across the street, moved so that's the other issue. But we always get at least one or two March birthdays. We get things like this.  Sometimes we have yoga during. People, it's weird that the only time this hall gets used is the absolutely worst time that this hall should be used. So I guess that's what I'm asking for is a little bit of guidance. I say don't rent it. How many times do you rent it? How many times was it rented this past year, not counting? Not counting Weight Watchers? Weight Watchers. I don't know, maybe about six times. But again, you know, there was a dog therapy class. There was a lot of, last year was kind of weird because there was what's next, middle sex stuff. The results of the local political parties wanted to get together, you know, stuff like that. But March and February, at the times of, you know, non-political, regular people use this building and they always run into these problems. And the reality is that our building should be, I would say some public space would be nice, but. Yeah, well, but not if it's not. But not if it's not, yeah. It's usable and we're renting it to somebody, so. I mean, we don't charge much, but I don't think we should rent it out or if we can't. I mean, we've had the problem with the toilet for as long as I've been on the board. I know, we've been on the board.  No, and I can't figure out the well. Sometimes there's water, sometimes there's not. It ended up the toilet was kind of broken, we fixed it. Well, the toilet in general is a problem here anyway. Right, it's not a traditional grade toilet. It's a type of toilet you have, not really. I would suggest we just don't rent it. I mean, it's not, I agree. Okay. Yeah, especially in the winter. But I mean, if in the summer it's, I know, every time people have had a party here, we've had a problem with the toilet every single time. I mean, the other thing we could consider too is rather than saying no one can come and use this space. There might be just space limitation, like crowd limitation. Yeah, but the baby shower, how many people were there, 30? Yeah, no one else. But that might be too many. Like maybe, but we shouldn't say, oh, you can't have a conservation commission meeting here, five or four or five, six times a year that we've rent that out. And it's not like they're making any money. You're making it available to the public. But for that few times, you'd be better off just not renting it. Well, I think it should be kind of either or. That's where we get into the problem of, you know, people could have heard themselves. Again, I want to say that these people who rented it were fantastic. When the toilets overflowed, they cleaned them up, they cleaned up the upstairs, they were great. I would never have known that, it wasn't like the other time that the toilets overflowed where I couldn't even open that door because it was so... And I'll say I rented this town hall three times and never had an issue with it, but never expected anybody to shovel off the steps or anything like that. But I think it's a, to Liz's point, it is a nice... Yeah, I don't want to just say no, we don't have this available. Well, I think it's a really nice idea, but I don't think we should be spending a lot of money because we're not going to fix the toilets easily. Well, what about people? I mean, the other thing is the liability issue. Well, they definitely have a waiver of liability. Why don't we suggest that they rent the fire station? Because there is that little public room, I should say. Yeah, but we can't have people around that equipment down there. And if there's a fire, you can't have a party going on. You've got a ping pong table upstairs there. Oh, that's upstairs, yeah. Better off to go up to the school. Can you rent this camp? No, the school is really bad. What? No more. You've got to get fingerprinted before you go in. It's kind of tough. Yeah. You do. Background check. Pretty soon we'll have to get fingerprinted before we go up and vote. That's a tough one, but if you start making rules of, you know, only so many people or this and that. But I just don't think we can say we no longer can. I mean, I think there has to be caveats. I think this warrants further discussion of how we're going to deal with this. Well, of course, it's going to warrant further discussion because, you know, Peter wants to weigh in on it. I just wanted to bring it to your tent. Yeah, no, that's good. I thank them for the foreseeable future, though. You should not rent it. OK, well, I've got people ready. I know. We've got events happening here. I mean, we've got something upstairs now. Well, it's not too bad. Here's a typical example. The local water district that's right here, they're using it next Sunday. They'll be fine. They'll probably want to even turn on the water. Right. I mean, when we do a yoga class up there, it's not like we're running down to the bathroom. It's more like parties. Yeah, it's parties. It's big things. Kids. Parties can be a problem. There were games and food and, you know, so people watch their hands at the bathroom. That's wrong. Games and food. It just causes us to have to go use the toilet. Absolutely. So there's one of the things right there so you can rent it out to more meetings type thing, but not for parties. How about playing for meetings only? Meetings only. No food or drink allowed. No use in the matter. Go home, go at home. Go outside behind the fire station. And that's to sign a labor reliability, although it's a town meeting. If you overflow the soil, you have to clean it up. OK. Well, we're trying not to discuss it and do it. Yes, we are. Well, I think we've narrowed it. I think we've got it better. OK, so it took us about 10 minutes. It will discuss it next time for about 35 minutes. No, no. We shouldn't because we have discussed it some. We know where our minds are going. I think we've done some searching. We've got to hang together. Let me just say, we'll have a little monologue from Peter. And it will start with this. I've thought about this a lot. Yeah, we've thought about it for a whole week. I love Peter, but he's so sincere. OK, Treasurer's Report. Well, the report is, you guys get paid tonight. Yay! So there you go. Thank you. You vote, yeah. Thank you. I know. This might be my last one for all I know. Why might not get voted in? So this is for this year. This is for the year ending, not the year beginning. And then we get a separate W2 in the mail, right? We already got it. Yeah, we got it. We got it a long time ago. Well, I always put anything. It's the exact document. I put it right to my file. That was what you got last year. This is for the W2 you got, which is for 2018. You'll get one. So this is a real check. I have to deposit it. Yeah, but she can take a picture of it. I do. I do that now. I do the mobile deposit. That's the greatest thing that's ever happened. Yeah. I'll try to do that with cash. Oh, I know. That'd be cool. But I deposited $20. Ray, wait, what happened? Oh, wait a second, I don't know. I don't like to do as much stuff on the internet as you do. I'm afraid somebody's going to break in and know everything about me. They probably already did. They already do. Yeah, I know. There's a camera right there. They just don't want them to access your bank accounts. That's all. Anything else that you want to tell us? I don't think so. No? Lane duck session. Yay, this is nice. That's what we like. Lane duck session? What do you mean by that? Because it's between the budget. For the new board seven. Yeah. As if it's you guys to go. As if the new board's going to be any different than the old one. Or she will go running on a post. I'm running on a post. Are you ready? I'm ready. Yeah, just the two of us are. You didn't need that, huh? I didn't. I was throwing it your way. All right. If the treasure report is done, oh, we're ahead of schedule. We are. Anyone want to move the approval of the February 4, 2020 minutes? Who hasn't signed me? Sure, I did. Move. Mary, did you sign most? No, I haven't even looked at it. Phil moves that we approve the February 4, 2020 minutes. And is there a second for that? I wasn't here. I'll second it. I think I was here. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Those opposed. Those abstaining. OK, let's move. OK. Where is the memorandum of understanding for the emergency medical service between Middlesex and Montpelier?  Is this an annual thing? Yeah, it's big bucks. It's big bucks. This is like a very short agreement for a very large amount of money. That's exactly right. OK, the city should provide the ambulance service to the town for a two-year period, July 1, 2020 through 22, the amount of $0.40 per capita, $40.58 for the first year, and then $42 for the second year. And they're using the town service population, which is the 2010 US Census, and then they do the multiplayer. So we're going to owe bills $35,000 and some small dollars on the 15th of 2020, December 15, 35, and then 36 and 36. And if the city explores joining a regional ambulance service during the period of disagreement or shortly thereafter, the city shall negotiate a concert with the town so as to maximize the interest of both the city and the town. This is not only for this town, don't they provide this for a bunch of the other towns, too? I don't know. Is this something that we always sign every year since the weekend? I know, but I mean, like, are there other towns, too? We're not the only ones. All right, does anyone want to move for approval? I will move. OK, Steve moves. Anyone want to second that? I'll second. You should probably authorize, you should have a motion to authorize you to sign that. And that motion includes the provision that the vice chair is authorized to sign it as the chair. I'll just put vice chair. I guess that's it. Yeah, and I signed it. I got what I said. It's authorized me to sign it as the vice chair on behalf of the board. OK, that's the motion. Have you heard the motion? Any of them. So I will amend that motion to read that. Great. Good. I'll second that amendment. Second that. You accept that amendment. I accept that amendment. You second that motion. Yeah. OK, all those in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. And those opposed say no. Any abstentions, Steve?  So a bunch of different towns pay them for the service. Can I have a look at that one? They also file with health insurance. What do you say that again? Well, I'm just saying, you know, so they have contracts with a number of different towns to provide ambulance services. Don't they also file with health insurance to get paid for ambulance services? Oh, you mean putting insurance claims? Well, they bill the. They bill, like if they go out, they bill on. That person? That person. That person. Oh, yeah. They bill the person and then the person, then the person submits it to their health insurance. This is like just like an insurance coverage. It's basically just to make sure they'll respond to your town. Yeah, this isn't like based on number of runs or anything like that. Just curious, like so in our budget, it's like $70,000 something. Yeah, they gave me the number. I was going to look, but it was something that was supplied to us from the fire department. I don't know. I didn't compare to see if the number was exactly what they gave us, but supposedly they had called and gotten it from them. But that was a number they provided to us. The number, you mean the US census? No, the dollar amount was given to us by the fire department. $40.58. No, no, the total. Oh, the total. The total amount. Wonder what our 2020 census is going to be for? Well, they do the American survey every five years. Well, we've got an increase in our population, haven't we, Sarah? I don't know. Small. I doubt if it's much. I don't think it's much. $40 a person is pretty reasonable. Oh, for this? Yeah. Yeah, it's reasonable. I mean, like the number of people in the town has increased. I don't know what that is, but probably small. Any correspondence? No. No one's writing this. Orders have been signed. Orders have been signed. You guys want to talk about the meeting on the proposed meeting of holding a select board meeting at half an hour before town meeting just so you guys can at Romney School just so you guys can sign orders? Sure. Sure. That's a good answer. Perfect. Did we just talk about it? And we're done now? I think so. If I could just comment on that one. Can I share my experience with the fire department? Yes. How were the outfits? Did they feel good? It was really heavy.  And it was Jeff Koons was in charge. The chief wasn't there. I always forget his name. Doug, right. Doug wasn't there. And so there's a new young guy named Eric. I've been. He's been on for a couple of years. Yeah, he's been on for a couple of years, yeah. Relatively new, I should say, for us. And so he was kind of my partner. And everyone was really professional. And I think Jeff had really good command of everyone. So what we did was we met with Moortown Fire Department. And we did a joint training with Moortown Fire Department. And so we went to a house just down the road in the fire truck. And I was all suited up in Katie's outfit. Did you get to ride in the front? Yep. I was suited up in Katie's outfit, Katie Koons' outfit. And then when we got there, we basically trained by going in in teams of two. And there were other people in the building into a smoke-filled building with fake smoke. And so I was wearing the really heavy breathing gear that they're looking to replace. So they're looking to replace these oxygen tanks and the whole sort of system. And it was terrifying and exhilarating. And I definitely had a renewed appreciation for what a firefighter has to do in terms of going into a smoke-filled building to look for bodies. Because that's what we were doing. We were searching for a body that was somewhere in the house. I couldn't see anything. I couldn't like, I had my bearings for completely off. And this was a house with no furniture in it. So imagine a house with furniture in it, right? So we had to climb up to stairs. And then we had to crawl around on the floor and find rooms and find doors and things like that. All the while making sure that I wasn't panicking because you get claustrophobic because you don't see anything around you. You've got this breathing apparatus on. And so I mean, I thought it was good. And then when we got back, so we did that with the, and the Moortown guys were, they were in command of the training and they did an excellent job with just the command of the whole group. Everyone was really a fluid group, I think. And then- How many people were there? Oh, there were a lot. There were, on the Moortown side, there were at least like eight guys. And on our end, maybe six or something like that. There was a decent number. I don't know if everyone was there so I'm not entirely sure who's on the fire department. So- They're the Ketchapaw boys, I know they're on that. There's a man and his kids. He's been on it for a long time. His sons are probably like, so I'm high school either. Oh, I don't- Like teenagers. But there are no one that's in Little Sex except for this guy, Eric and Jeff. So Eric and Jeff both. And Eric is, he was really professional and helpful and I felt very safe with him. So anyway, it was, it is definitely older equipment now.  And so I don't, I can't speak for the equipment being not in good enough shape for our firefighters to use it. Like is there, is there a reason that they have to be replaced? If it is that there is a danger, I mean, certainly we wanna be very mindful of that and because they're definitely putting their lives on the line every time they go into a burning house. Do they go into a burning house when they're part of a mutual aid? I don't know, I think they do. Yeah, there's- Yeah, sure.   And so, you know, that you, so you have to say, well, you have to crawl on the ground because the heat rises.  So, I appreciated the invite, I learned a lot from it. I don't wanna be a volunteer firefighter because it was pretty scary. And, but the other thing that was nice about this training was that this was designed to train these volunteers to go in and know that they might not be good at that. And if they are claustrophobic or they do panic, they might not be the ones that we send in to, so being in those circumstances of a safe place to try it out, I can tell you, I was terrified, yes. Yeah, I was, and there was no, and there was no real smoke. It sounds like the way I felt when I started doing scuba diving and I said, can we out of here? Yeah, no, that's pretty cool though. Yeah, it is cool. And the reality is that if we do need to replace this, I still think we need to figure out, is this something like, if you borrow the money for it? I don't know how that would end up working out. Do you set money aside every year for it? How much did they say it was? I think it's 50,000. Yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot, yeah. 50,000 for how many sets? I think eight, wow. Yeah, that's expensive equipment. Yeah. Or can it be done sort of piecemeal, like you do two at a time so that you're not, or do you just do it all at once? You probably, I think he said that you do it all at once just because of the interchanging. I think that's what they said when they were here. So we'd be better off to just do it all at once and take a multi-year for it. Probably, yeah.  I mean, they're really expensive to maintain and I do think that this is even more reason for us to think about, are there ways to do this more cost effectively either like, why aren't more towns partnering together with fire departments? Why does each town have its own fire department? I mean, I know because- I think it started in the old days just because it wasn't that sophisticated and you'd have like one truck and one tanker.  It's not to save houses really, because that's just not possible in rural areas to really save houses. So, I don't know. Anyway, that's my update. Oh God, here they're, yeah. No, I feel good, yeah, and I feel good about how everyone respected Jeff and, you know, they really had it all down what they were supposed to do when they got back and all that. So- Are the other guys friendly to you? Oh, everybody was really friendly. You just can't remember who they were. Well, I don't know, I'm not good at remembering names. The more town guys were really friendly. I think they thought it was a novelty having this like bird person to come out and put on a- That's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. How much did this stuff weigh? A lot. Like probably 50 pounds, and I didn't have half the stuff on me. 50 pounds. Like because you, there's all this other stuff. The tanks were really heavy. The clothes themselves, the thing, maybe not quite 50, but it was a good, I mean, I had trouble like moving. I was like- You were like, yeah. I have to get down and crawl? Right. Because I can't stand up. Exactly. Yeah, it was, it was a lot. Yeah. It was sore on my back after carrying it for a while too. I wonder if the new stuff too is lighter. I think it is. I think it's more comfortable and it's lighter. I think it's easier to get on. Like I couldn't get it even on myself. Like I needed all that help like swinging it around because it was so heavy. So you got a fire, it's gonna take you like 20 minutes. Oh, I don't know how they do it. Yeah, I mean, well, no, they, that's what they train doing, you know. But yeah, so anyway. Sure. Okay, well, we still have the board of civil authority meeting. I know who's the chair of the civil board. I think I am. I think you are. Who is it? Well, remember the last time I got adjourned, it's my first meeting. Okay, so is there any other business to come before the board? No. So that meeting is on the 30th, is it four o'clock then, correct? Yes, there's life board meeting. Yes. You lost your adjournment, would you like? No, we're the board of civil authority. I have a whole bunch of right over there as soon as Mary's down all the way. I, there, okay, I hear by adjourn the meeting. Yep. At six o'clock. Five fifty nine, it says over here. It says six o'clock over here. It says six o'clock over here, yay. Yay. It's five fifty.