Okay so I won't call the meeting to order and it is 7 o'clock we are not able to do the minutes tonight because we don't have a forum of the folks that were here at that meeting so we'll postpone those to the next meeting and public comment unless Charlie or Bill wants to talk about anything under public comment or we don't have anyone here that brings us to the regional planning annual report and that is Charlie Baker executive director of the County Regional Planning Commission welcome Charlie nice way to move things along Charlie that was the fastest time to 725 on your job so yeah thank you for making time on your agenda I just passed out or Rick did our report from FY 2017 for those of you that may not be familiar watching this the Regional Planning Commission is a little bit over 50 years old as a body made up of the municipalities and really to work on issues of interest to municipalities and you all have a seat on our board Chris Roy is our chair right now and Debbie Inger is your alternate and and then we have various advisory committees around transportation planning water quality that you also have appointees on and you pay dues to us there's a little paragraph on the finances so essentially basically the municipal dues that we get really leverage state and federal dollars to the tune of about $1 for local money to $11 state and federal on the second page of the report we get more into specific things that we were doing with the town in last fiscal year which included giving you some report and advice on the town plan and then several transportation projects Mountain View Road scoping North Wilson Road scoping taking a look at whether we could set up a transportation improvement district around the growth center we call the exit 12 but it was really tax corner growth center and then there's some other projects transportation related projects we got some federal money to install some monitoring Bluetooth devices on 2a that's I believe that's underway right now so it's really to get a real-time information particularly well to drivers eventually but also to v-trans so that they can actually know what's happening in real time as opposed to you know maybe having people call in or say there's a delay here and so I think two things it can allow real-time flow yeah so they and so they can use it in a couple different ways one is to let drivers who might be further down the road no hey there's a backup here or an accident you might want to go a different route or hopefully we get to a point where and I think where v-trans can actually read time signals depending on what they're actually seeing so and I think they're they're getting to a place now where everything's much more connected yeah so well I think it's kind of the wave of the future we won't get into technology's role in our future but this is you know we're really just at the front end of how much technology is going to go be going on between traffic signals traveler information and cars so that's we will talk more about that in another time but we also worked on your disaster mitigation plan your local emergency operation plan and helped start working on compliance with the municipal road general permit that's coming down the pike permits getting finalized right now at the state and then of course the assistance that we provide for the MS4 permit which the stormwater education program and it's been now rebranded as rethink runoff but that is something the town pays for as part of your compliance with your MS4 and then some other a little bit of technical assistance so I don't maybe I should pause any questions on any of that stuff before I move into what you have in the capital program so you have a lot of things in the capital program because there's this little road that's not going to get built anymore and so a whole bunch of the first I'm not going to read all all of them but the whole set there you'll see they all say circle turn those phase one two or three you have a lot of projects in that mix you'll see and I think you've gotten from at least once a year and update from V trans on that process so I'm not going to speak for V trans on exactly when they're going to move forward but we are working on our transportation plan right now and so I think we have an opportunity to influence that schedule of what projects will go next in V transes capital program are these all these are all state funded then yeah I would say you know to you know if it's if there's a safety project sometimes they can do a hundred percent federal funds and then most of these some of them maybe 80 20 some maybe a hundred percent state and federal funding not town not town funded I don't know Rick may have a better sense I don't know if the town has any local shares in any of these not off the top of my head that I'm aware of well the the US to trader lane signal yeah that in and of itself is not there's no town money involved but the road that connects to it there is town money involved and most of its impact fees but about 30 million at exit 12 just oh yeah itself yeah yeah so that you know that is what came out of the circle turnips and really I'll call it a commitment that V trans made to the town and well to the to the whole county in lieu of doing the Cirque to make these kinds of investments you know I can't remember the total and I was like a hundred and twenty hundred and forty million dollars of projects in total they have not all on Wilson obviously coming Essex and Colchester and and then down at the bottom of that construction the capital list you'll see some of the earlier ones James Brown drive traffic signal which is scheduled for construction either starting this spring or it or an FY 19 which starts in July 1 so knock on wood I know that's been a long time coming and the park and ride they're looking at starting construction on that pretty soon too which is you know on the south side of the interchange which I think has gone through the town permitting process I think is all clear to move ahead activity as well yes yes it did the next couple pages are kind of a bolted list of different things that we've been doing that we kind of call them region wide they're not necessarily specific to any town and everything from a legislative forum to annual reports on our ECOS plan we updated our demographic forecast been working on regional dispatch that has mitigation plan I mentioned transportation demand management efforts the active transportation plan energy plan neighbor rides the opioid alliance building homes together what the ECOS plan is sure so ECOS is really the brand that we put on our regional plan so it's a start off meaning environment community opportunity and sustainability but that's how we've branded our regional plan and our regional plan includes the metropolitan transportation plan and the comprehensive economic development strategy so before we combined all those and one those were three regional processes that happened in three different years and they were all updated every five years so three out of every five years we were having a conversation about overlapping conversations about the future of the county so we've brought it all together and tried to make it a little bit more efficient and then we try to read we have goals in there and we try to report on our progress not just what's done but also we have indicators to track outcomes for the whole region so if you're interested there's 80 or 90 indicators that are in that score card that you see referenced there and I assume this is all on the web it says result score okay yep yep yeah the annual report is kind of like a one-year snapshot and the scorecard you'll see data going back to 26 of the regional and indicators and 20 I'm sorry 2010 what I say but the indicators go back to 2010 predominantly some may go back a little further but we're really trying to track outcomes across a whole range of issues so the transportation housing the environment health education pretty much anything you can think of we're trying to track the key indicators sorry that may have been longer than you want no that's good I had never heard of it didn't know what it stood for so yeah and we're updating it right now with the transportation and economic development strategy so if you're on Fernport forum you may have seen the energy piece was kind of put out there the draft last month the economic development strategy I think is going out probably next week for comment and then the transportation piece will be going out in December a vehicle for information yeah so it gives us access to 60,000 households so yeah we do county-wide front porch forum public publishing so yeah any other questions on these topics and any other things you'd like to discuss while I'm here so this is really kind of a customer service check in for me like how we doing in terms of providing services for the town and is there anything we can do better so I have a what if question for you perfect the we've been involved over the last several months with the airport governance issue as well as Burlington South Burlington a few other communities and present time we have said we're not going to pursue it through the resolution that was presented to us there is some points for discussion to come up in regarding the governance issues at some future time in the near future I guess my question would be what if we as a board asked the RPC to do a study on the regional aspects of this both the pros and the cons and make some recommendations and funding and stuff like that what is the process that you would go through if we actually did that yeah so I think the reality of that so our board is made up of all the municipalities and so there's 18 municipalities plus Bills Gore so all 19 have a vote and would probably have a vote on something like that and so if the majority of towns wanted us to move forward with a study or whatever it might be that could certainly be a topic of conversation but yeah I think we work for the town so if they want to do that we'll we'll figure out a way to follow follow up on that but probably it would obviously take some money whether it comes from our dues or whether it's an additional amount and that would have to be looked at as far as well yeah I think we'd have to talk about yeah what what the scope of work is that you were looking for and and how to fund that yeah similarly you know on regional dispatch with something that kind of came up from the towns that have dispatch staff and each of the towns kicked in a few thousand bucks to hire a consultant to look at that so we could certainly you know do a model something similar to that you know that one could be a little thornier because one town owns it one yes he owns it we won't get into that but other questions for Charlie here if not thank you very much another question but I just wanted to thank you for all your support in your agency support on the regional dispatch process yeah it's been moving along yeah no I think applause to all the all the participating towns and you've had Rick you're sitting on the joint survey committee and yeah I think I think I just saw my inbox a communication going out with the final agreement all the municipalities should probably come out either tomorrow or Monday so a very good progress and credit to all the people around the table there appreciate the all your staff's work on the town plan that got approved very quickly as well okay good well thank you appreciate it thank you very much we'll take any more time have a good night thank you so next we have errors and omissions to the 2017 grand list will human our assessor is here and you have a panel from him with all the various things that are being recommended to be approved so Bill go ahead quickly go through them nothing substantial this year fortunately we're two years out of the reappraisal now so last year was a little bit more work simply because we had reappraisal and there are errors found that weren't picked up during the reappraisal or agreed at the time the first one is a simple change that we found that there was an acreage change from point two three acres point five acres most of our house sites in town when we reappraise are based upon a lot size valuation not an acreage valuation up to the first two acres so a house site will have X amount of dollars for that first two acres point two three point five it's really indistinguishable as far as the value goes Lyric theater they transferred the property over to a private entity and so they have now become taxable and we picked that up after the grand list was filed and so that's a plus on the plus side for town municipal taxes go a mailing address change while we're not required to do this at the owner's request it's simply you know simple thing to make it easier for him to receive his mail okay this one's a little bit more complicated and I want to pull it up to make sure I'm doing it right so this is actually a couple years old and basically there was a boundary line adjustment that was made and we are administrative assistant made the incorrect assigned to the owner as far as the boundary line went so the property owner that owned this property was receiving a smaller tax bill than they should have and the one that had sold a significant portion of it was seeming a bigger tax bill than they should have to make it in simple terms and this was brought to our attention and we brought it to the board this may and we did leave it to the owner that is going to have an increase result and they request for an abatement because it was not picked up last year but we're not sure if they have them and express any interest in doing it at this point so we've kind of leaving that up in the air going forward that's kind of a net zero right exact post years or maybe we'll give them a break exactly all right so that's g it and bmw two properties next page is Misha associates LLC this property was purchased by this company this past year and in the original reappraisal in 2003 or previously I'm not sure it had this property having 1800 square feet when it actually is 1200 the reason for the area discrepancy is the base areas 1200 square feet and somebody had built a mezzanine area which is kind of like an attic if you will of 600 square feet that was picked up at some point in time it is now gone and so we need to reflect the 1200 square feet and make it the same as that the other economy units are let's see this one said the owner hunt Nancy and Ronald this is just a name correction again the next one owner RBS says in spank was an incorrect list name listing due to an address change so we have to restore the ownership to CRE JB mix 15 northeast seen and this was a incorrect name change on a very unclear tax return one of the things I've been working with Debbie on is to try and identify that Debbie is doing all the transfers now and to try and help her identify when there is a concern or question in regards to a transfer because they can be a little bit complicated this year's with the for now with trusts living trusts life of states getting into play that whenever she has one that's a little bit unclear she comes to me with that and we make sure that it's done correctly and so that's that was an I would say miscommunication but I think that she started feeling pretty comfortable with doing them and it just kind of she's been doing and asking the questions up until this past year and now we found we had a couple so kind of clear that up and make sure that we're going to make the overships okay this one is Andrew Wood so there was there was a parcel that was active including a little mobile home and land and then there was a parcel that was active just including land and the property owner came up to us and said you have basically double tax on this dick made the mistake he created two parcels instead of one with a mobile home so we just have to back it off and have the mobile home and land on your third page you'll see that we had two decreases in total of 113,850 dollars and one increase of 202,500 dollars that was the Lyric Theater parcel so our net increase that we receive will or should be because we do have to do grievance on this property owners have a right to appeal when we send them notice of any change through the property or assessment record would be 88,650 or municipal taxes of 234 dollars and 93 cents so a little bit extra for it to play with but not a lot very far not going to go very far so to give you guys a quick update of what's going on in the office if you'd like we haven't we don't get to see each other very often yep there's been some changes and you're probably obviously aware of it with a new addition to staff we're likely going to be moving somewhere we're not sure exactly where yet it's actually unrelated really but it's unrelated yeah no but what I'm talking about is respect to digitizing our records so in the process of realizing that there's a need for space we have an illicit degree to allocate money from our reappraisal and maintenance fund of up to 10 $15,000 to digitize all of our records in that office so everything that is in those filing cabinets will be digitized sometime in the next month and it will be archived within hopefully our Proval which is our computer-assisted mass appraisal system so when we get people in our office that are looking at historical documents sometimes they can't find anywhere else an old permit could be anything an old map that'll all be digitized and available through the public inquiry database and then we can and then get rid of those files to open up some space for us so that's the first process of it the second part of that process which will be ongoing over the next six months is to digitize the office itself so when we receive a building permit from planning and zoning we will now be asking to have it sent over to us digitally maps anything we receive will be converted to digital and anything we need to keep by law a letter of appeal for property owner has to be kept for five years for instance we will keep but we'll also digitize it so now we're going to be hopefully relatively paperless going forward which I'm really looking forward to I think it's a step in the right direction otherwise everything's running pretty smoothly no real surprises and hopefully don't have you know less excitement is better in our office the one issue that Bill was alluding to is say we're at some point we're going to be moving offices around a little bit we're going to be moving the finance office upstairs and the Lister's office downstairs there's a number of reasons for that but that's pretty much it has not you know we are adding another person to the office but that person for the moment will be residing back here right yeah but it did give us a little bit of kick in the behind to kind of move forward with the digitizing and I was speaking to can actually about that and he's like you're doing that so I think that he's probably excited about maybe going towards that direction over the planning his own office as well yeah is that a service you purchase or is that something you'll do yourself so right now we are simply in the process of digitizing I've called out to several different communities that have digital brilliant city of brilliant everyone and John's actually supposed to get back to me via text so it's probably on my phone right now as to what format we need to save those documents there's three different effective ways to save the documents a typical adobe a JPEG or a I think it's called JGIF I'm not sure that's what I'm not familiar with but what I'm going to find out is what their vendors for the data management system itself is utilizing within their format so once we determine what that format is we're going to digitize and we're we've got three beds that have come in and we'll be awarding that bid relatively quickly then once we get everything digitized them we're going to be seeking help from it could be the company I'm trying to think with the there's a parent company to Proval and I can't think of the name off my top of my head but speaking with Russ Bowden who's the did the reappraisal for us they have a program that can work with Proval in data management and so that's one option but that's what we all be working through in the next six months is to how we're going to manage that data effectively and working with planning you know if they're going to become partners with that thank you guys appreciate it so motion I do need a motion yes I'll move to approve the corrections of the 2017 grand list is proposed by the Lister's second is there a discussion of motion if not all is in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. Any opposed? We have done it. We'll move on to the Alain Brook Meadow stormwater system acceptance and James Sherard our stormwater coordinator is here to talk about this and there is a memo from him as well welcome so long-awaited the very first neighborhood has come forth with everything in place for the town to incorporate their stormwater permit into our general permit in very brief the big backstory to this is Alain Brook is impaired due to stormwater state finally worked with the town to have a way for these neighborhoods to renew their permits not have them expired anymore and this is part of that process where each neighborhood that was covered underneath one of these expired permits has met standards by constructing a new system and then submitted a handful of legal documents to us to finalize the process those include easements to the town and finishing their system and getting a an engineer to sign off on that system so we're at a point now where this one neighborhood has given us everything we need and is ready to move forward so we're here in front of the select board to make you aware of it and hopefully just get final go ahead to move forward but happy to answer any questions if there are any. This is the Lafave Lane is it? Yes Lafave Lane. Up the next to the golf course. Yeah just yeah just since you're going off of the onto North Wilson Road the first right that goes up. After the church right? Okay yeah. Any questions for James? The engineering firm who did the approval is it this is it the firm that the Lafave Lane homeowner association hires or is it a town engineering firm? It's their firm okay watershed consulting associates in this particular instance they're the ones that gave us the certification of completion and actually their system has been done for quite some time at this point it's been tying together all the legal documentation which took longer than I think they had anticipated but they were also the first to get this far so there was some back and forth with our town council as well but we're here. Any further questions? If not a motion is in order. I'll move to accept the Allenbrook Meadows stormwater system as part of the town system is provided. Second? Second. Here are the motions say aye. Aye. Any opposed? And we've done that one too. Thank you very much. Mr. Chair with your permission since James is here would it be acceptable for him to give a short report on the grants? Oh yeah absolutely please. Especially since we're running a little ahead of schedule. Yeah and we just got some more money in so yes by all means. Yeah it's been a really good stretch of time for grant writing. The state has a program called the ecosystem restoration program it's a clean water initiative program. A lot of words there long story short it's a DEC giving funds for various types of environmental improvements. They have been focusing on stormwater mostly because of how important it is becoming with the Lake Champlain TMDL being finalized that's driving a lot of the funding statewide so a combination of us being an MS4 municipality and this new sort of spearheading at the state level to get funds to stormwater programs put Williston in an excellent situation to get grants. The reason we're in such an excellent situation is we were the first to submit a draft FRP back in 2012. We hit the ground running with our most recent FRP one of the projects of which you just approved for us to incorporate and we had arguably the largest number of shovel ready projects out of any municipality and that has shown itself in the fact that we've now received six grants for seven separate neighborhoods to perform their stormwater upgrades. These are 50% match grants so we've gotten roughly a million dollars of which 500,000 will be grant from the state. What's extra exciting about that is the select board this past year also initiated the grant program for these neighborhoods that are participating in our floor restoration plan which means that $500,000 once all the projects are completed and all those funds are received from the state we're going to redistribute them to the neighborhoods that are participating in this program and that's a lot more than I would have bet on a year ago and even there's been two rounds of grant funding in the first round we had received the most grants of any municipality and then we went ahead and got two more so I think we're doing better than anticipated with that. That's really really great news. I hope it can do you have any idea any crystal ball to know whether this is going to continue is there anything changing at the state? I would like to say we may be living in a stretch of years where this type of funding is a little bit more likely. At the same moment more towns are aware of it now more projects will get closer to shovel ready than they were when these funds were initially put forth really what it was is we had pushed so hard our floor restoration plan was farther ahead than many neighborhoods you know some people's floor restoration plans instead of full-scale design drawings like each of our neighborhoods had they just had a one-page word document that said we want to we want to put something here so really we were just so far ahead we were ready to get into it and I should also add that two of these projects are already completed their their constructions complete. Southridge is one right? Southridge yep in Bretton Woods we anticipate being able to incorporate them in the spring so I don't want to make any promises we've already done so well that I'm happy with that and spending a lot of my time being a grant manager at this point but yeah we're going to keep applying for them. Can you say how much how much potential do we have left for grants I think the total bill for all the stormwater projects was around 2 million is that right? There was a spreadsheet that was distributed in the packet and it has that information has curious what are it was well on the spreadsheet it says one point just under 1.8 million around 2 million so have any neighborhoods actually said they're not going to go forward with the grant submission I mean clearly we want to because I mean just it just makes sense right to contribute and it's not a very big bill but we have to get a vote for it so we won't have our vote till February. Sure it was a mix some people said we just we just can't get together our HOA to give you a go ahead and others have said we're just not financially ready to even provide any sort of match or even enter into a loan agreement so it really was a readiness from the neighborhoods individual neighborhoods that dictated if they want us to apply or not so there is the potential for us to get not quite up to 800,000 again a couple neighborhood hoods have already constructed and I can imagine a few just won't want to participate this particular type of grant is a really good fit for us because there are no real strings attached there are some other grants which are even higher match but perhaps federal dollars which can actually increase the cost of a project so this is by far the most attractive grant for us and and we've applied for these first two rounds and been successful with it so the further questions for James no okay thanks we're going to skip over the health insurance planner Jennifer is at the Planning Commission meeting and will be here probably around 8 o'clock so let's go on to light online item budget transfers Rick if you wouldn't mind that one or pass that one over as well okay cases any questions for her too as well okay well how about the number 10 Jacob and crayons property we'll come back to chickens which came first on chickens it won't be here to talk about it no no we'll come back to that but let's do something quicker and easier Rick this is yours the sure the we're the so far this project of course has been endorsed by the slideboard but we are waiting for both the title report and the environmental site assessment both have been completed and there were no significant problems I believe you have a summary of this site assessment and a copy of the entire title report I believe and so at this point the we need a final vote by the select board to go ahead and close on the property can I ask about the report this is the KAS report phase phase one environmental site assessment so it said it revealed no evidence the ESA revealed no evidence of recognized environmental conditions in connection with the property what does that mean does that mean they actually did site assessments like you know board holes and tested soil or they just looked at records of past phase one they do not do physical on-site investigations so they just do records check and the when you're deciding whether or not you do phase one or a higher phase you have to evaluate whether have some sense that there may have been activity on this parcel it's up in the past and there was no sense in this case so that's why we did a phase one what's our liability I mean the property isn't necessary isn't necessarily useful right it's kind of behind some current developments or areas that has no no road access right it's underneath power lines right there are certain limitations that that do limit it I think there is potential for gaining access but we don't have that right now okay so the the value to the town of owning the property remind me again well it's it's a potentially valuable asset because it does border the the Allen Brook and and I think we do have potential for future access there's no liability concern because of soil contamination or anything do we have any protection as a result of this report of a I don't know the legal terms but do they have any responsibility for the accuracy and their recommendation if there was some significant contamination the company would say well we just you know we it wasn't shown in the research we did and we're they just it was a level one environmental assessment so that is limited but as far as I know there there's no indication there was any real major activity on that parcel I mean anytime you accept a piece of land there's some some risk involved but there's also the potential for using that in the future there are already trails on the parcel as opposed point out one of these reports you feel this results and due diligence and okay okay all right just not I'm just making sure I ask all the right questions here okay that's excellent questions it mentions in the attorney's opinion that they've paid the first tax and installment but in the second installment was just due how do we deal with that the attorney will have to work that out we I do I fact I got the copy of the tax bullets today from October through November 15th so the tax year runs July 1 to the June 30th your installments your first installments gonna be July August September next one's gonna be October November December so they will pro rate one way or the other to make sure that that's then possibly unless they agree that said that otherwise you're right that's just be prorated good not a lot of money and we talked about that last time right it was a fairly small insignificant yeah I just wonder because of accessibility yeah well the installments are $236 and $44 that's not great every four months three months yeah I'm sorry you're correct for four months at a time the last one was due November 15th yes okay sure any further questions Rick we are in this if not there's a motion to be academic we wish to not authorize the manager to sign all necessary paperwork to finalize the purchase of a 29 acre undeveloped parcel near Essex Road and to accept the deed for this property currently owned by Peter L. Jacob and Lloyd our crates second if not always and fear the motion say I I be opposed so we've done that and Jennifer is here right on time so we'll look to her to talk about the health insurance play a renewal and then after that one item budget transfer minus director Jennifer we also financial report so maybe she can fit that into that same time yes so health insurance for fiscal year 2018 it's actually calendar year so our health insurance is on a calendar year so we did receive our increase or our our premiums and plan from Blue Cross Blue Shield I say you received our increase because we did receive an increase this year I've yet to see health insurance costs go down which is unfortunate but we did see an increase for both our premium and our deductibles that our employees have to pay for each plan the premium we were expecting we had budgeted for a premium increase because we've been continuing to see premium increases the change in deductible was not something we had planned on as you can see in my notes here we started this plan in 2016 and this is the first time that we've seen a change in the deductible amounts and it's due to the actuarial value that the plan has to maintain in order to stay a gold level plan it needed to have this certain mix of deductible versus premium and that is where we ended up so for this year a single person the deductible went up $250 and for a family it went up $500 Rick and I talked about this because we got this information in mid-October and we have to do our open enrollment period in November so there wasn't a lot of time at that point to go out and look for other options and so we felt for this year we would ask the town pick up that additional deductible in the HRA accounts for employees and then we are going to look at other options for this upcoming year and really trying to find a plan that meets our employees needs but also is fiscally responsible we can't continue to come to the select board or the taxpayers and say can we fund more of this because each year it's just it's it's a large expense for the town yeah you can't afford it either so you being the employees nor the town and so hopefully people at some point rise up and say enough is enough of this crazy situation but this the deductible change though wouldn't actually not apply to all employees the fire employees have a written contract where the cap there's a cap on the deductible that the town would contribute so they would not they would have to cover their extra deductible of their own pockets so how does the HRA work that's a it's a fund that the town pays into it's a health reimbursement account and so that's another thing when Rick says it wouldn't apply to everyone if if you don't use all of those HRA dollars even if the town adds an extra five hundred dollars for your family if you don't use that amount that is not charged to the town so it's it's there for you but each year those accounts go back to zero and they're not they're not like a health savings account where right but that's the town puts that money there to defray the cost of the deductible yes yes the utilization rate is about 80 percent and when we chose this plan that was what we used as an estimate because you're never quite sure and we've been pretty close to being right on target as far as 80 so you would you would put in 80% of $2,500 into the HRA we initially put in a hundred percent and then we as I understand and we if it's 20% isn't spent then that comes back to the town the employees also have the option of putting in some of their own money pre-tax using flexible spending account yeah yeah okay any further questions for Jennifer on this issue not not for Jennifer so the the the budget did we budget increase that we budgeted increases for health insurance did we budget anything for the HRA well not specifically but this increase is only going to affect us for six months in other words the we budgeted a certain amount and so that even though this is greater it only affects us January through June 30th and we can adjust the budget for the following fiscal year right now okay the the plan that we get that we get one through the Vermont League of Cities and Towns or is this a is it a pool of just the town of Williston employees this is through Blue Cross Blue Shield and so we're not part of the league per se but the league does support these different plans and help the league actually got out of the business of providing health insurance so they it's not an option anymore okay yeah this is probably a discussion for your suggesting next year we need to look at this I was just wondering in terms of approving these budget changes we're kind of approving them now well yeah I think we're going to be able to accommodate this during the current fiscal year without any problem and we'll have to make an adjustment in what we're requesting for next fiscal year which is 2019 and we're doing the budget we're preparing budget right now so we can do that all of those bargaining things the chamber it leads to sitting to all those things they all lost their power when the edicts came down for how insurance was supposed to be and that we don't have the bargaining power we used to anymore so that's why they're getting hit with deductibles that they're not expecting single pair and stuff that happened in the state was not sustainable by any stretch so that's what you're watching interesting yeah the health care situation is terrible so it's hit it hits everybody so it does and that's where we just didn't feel like telling somebody in October that their deductibles going to go up for next year and it just didn't feel like something that we can have one up by four thousand just just as an example and it's a local company and they were hit with I think 26% I shouldn't say this in the record maybe but 26% increases it's not private it's public but 26% and they took away that they had a situation where they were paying for something and they took that away because the unbelievable yeah the private sector has been nailed I feel for you but I'm going don't even we have our own yeah actually over the past ten years or so are the average increases we've been getting are generally less than many other plans around plan for the town because the rest of the health care has been going up crazy in the last decade or just as one of the largest increases we had a long time and and it sounds crazy but you know 10 or roughly 10% that is a lot but it's as you point out there's far bigger increases happening other plans I guess maybe averaging over some time maybe you've done well so no years ago we did have the plan through the League of Cities and Towns and we were faced with like a 40% increase and decided not to do that probably can you know just about nobody can bargain the health industry and we were able to do something different as far as the health plan at that time any further questions for Jennifer if not we need a motion on this I'd move that to approve the proposed line item transfers as I'm sorry moved to authorize the manager to sign an agreement with Vermont Blue Cross Blue Shield to provide the blue rewards gold consumer direct health plan to eligible employees effective January 1 2018 sir second second right discussion of the motion all those in favor of the motion say aye aye opposed all right if you want to prove the line item transfer we need to do that too Jennifer you're on for the line item transfers as well you we do have a memo from you on that this one is pretty straightforward this one is an ask that we do every year of the select board we budget a portion of wage increases in discretionary funds and what we're asking for now is to take those discretionary funds now that we know the increases within the individual departments and spread that out amongst the departments there is no overall increase to the budget it's just moving it from one line item in the budget to the various different departments chart here to show all of the recommended chance transfers as well so are there any questions for Jennifer regarding this so when I look at this I look at water department charges sewer department charges so those are for departments of people or as those are wages for yeah so when you talk about the water department that is what is our what is our water department staff so they have four people in water what and they do water and sewer so we split half their time between water and sewer because it's the same crew going out to the same projects they also pay a portion of clerical staff and director salaries and you know billing items like that to run those utilities the whole concept here is to when we're preparing the budget December actually November is when the operating budget starts December and then the board reviews it December January and proves it you know it's quite a ways in advance of when we actually spend the money and often the slight board really don't want to set wages until the just before the beginning of the fiscal year which is July 1st and so what we've done traditionally is put money in a little pot called a reserve for I don't know what it's called exactly discussion account and and this will particularly was also helpful with union negotiations we don't have the contract resolved until after the budget is approved for example we start union negotiations with fire this spring yet their their new contract presumably will go into effect July 1st 2018 so we don't want to put money in their specific salary accounts to telegraph how much we may be willing to include in their union contract so we put it into this discretionary account and then once the contract is resolved or once the slight board approves the wages for all the non-union employees then instead of keeping that money in that discretionary account we move it into the salary line item accounts where it really belongs so that accurate reflects what's being spent in those particular departments right I understand I kind of understood all that I was kind of getting toes trying to figure out where the money was being spent so there's so in this page this represents four people all different categories it's also makes it hard when you look at the budget just to try to understand how we're paying you know part of our job is to look at the budget understand how we're paying people and it was it gets confusing because every person is carved up like a dozen different ways over 120 pages of budget here it's over there so it just makes it how do you ever so so is this this is four people this represents four people on the staff so between the water sewer or the water department wages and sewer department wages you have $80,040 in each of those categories that that's your four people okay so the clerical and the superintendent in the overtime actually applies to those people as well but the clerical and the superintendent those are those support departments that help those utilities operate so it's a portion of those wages all right so the four employees are the total budget for them is $160,000 because they're 50% is water 50% so okay okay any further questions no no then if there are no other questions the motion would be in order move to approve the proposed line item transfers is outlined in the spreadsheet dated November 13th 2016 is for a second discussion on the motion all those in favor of the motion say aye aye and there are 30 opponents then there's none then we'll move on oh to the financial report before we so you can get out of here about your weather meeting yeah so we're more months through the fiscal year third of the way through the fiscal year and the property tax payment did come in I think Rick provided that to you all separately we didn't see that big increase with sales tax revenue that we saw in that first or the last quarter of last fiscal year we weren't sure what to expect going forward but it fell back down to what we were expecting for that we are still seeing the increases in rooms and meals tax revenue so we are you will see this in the budget proposal we are expecting that I'll go up next year I was surprised how big a proportion that is I was actually amazed that compared to I thought the retail would dwarf it and it doesn't it's still significant less but it's bigger than I you know it's a sizable portion of money for sure and of course keep in mind that's not just restaurants that's also hotels other revenue highlight and this is you know one of those things that we're going to probably talk about it a few times as we go through the budget process but we've changed how we're doing the stormwater projects we started it at the end of last year with some grant work and we're doing it this year we actually have software in our public works department where they can go in and say you're working on this project for this neighborhood and they can provide a report that says these are the wages associated with that project and this is the equipment use associated with that project so in past years we've just allocated that out we've said okay two months your time is going to go to stormwater and portion of vehicle fuel and all and some other expenses will go to stormwater now we're in a place where we can actually use that software so what we're doing is using that to record revenue in the highway department so you'll see some higher expenses in highway in labor and equipment use in highway the revenue will offset that and then we'll actually be able to bill stormwater for those individual projects and you'll see that in this year's budget it's going to be confusing until we get some history to look at but I think it'll be helpful for us especially when we start working on the individual neighborhoods once we take on those stormwater systems and we can actually see this is how much we're spending on this project and we as we plan for them it'll provide us great budget information to know we have to do this project this year and this is what it's going to cost us so we can have some good data to put in there yes so we're getting there it's going to be messy this year there's no way around it so that's where you're seeing the higher highway revenues and then the higher expenses to offset that that's primarily a budget tool then you're going to use it to record and keep track of the informations that you can plan better in the future it doesn't change any taxes or other accounting it's just no our auditors actually approved of this method I showed it to them when we were doing because with grant work we have to record that grant separately and I showed it to them and said if we want to start using this I'm going forward for the highway stormwater work and they supported that decision so the other major expenses we did have a waterline break on route 2 we're hoping to get insurance dollars from the construction company that was doing that work it's still going through the process there so right now here's we're seeing the expenses in the water department but hopefully we'll get a credit from that oh the construction of the road yeah that would be nice to get a rebate on that for sure for the any questions for Jennifer on this thank you very much for everything so then we can move on to the keeping of chickens regulation and we do have a mill from Ken bellow and chart a couple other things here as well and so Rick perhaps you would like to tell us how we got to this point there's been an interest expressed by some residents would like to be able to keep chickens and our currently our zoning regulations don't provide for it unless they meet certain size requirements and so there'd been a kind of a hold up in pursuing this because we couldn't change even considered changing our regulations until we had a adopted comprehensive plan that has now been adopted and so what I did is ask the planning office to discuss this with the planning commission and come back with some thoughts on if we're going to proceed with this what would have to happen and they've come back with some relatively minor changes to the regulations that would be required this is just these regulations would be relaxed somewhat and more permissive that would allow for the keeping of chickens and so that's one series of issues do we want to pursue changing the regulations to allow the regulation to be more permissive on this there's a second range of issues which really don't come within or fall under the development review regulations and that is does the community if we're going to allow this want to be regulate this activity in any form there are some communities that do that they have specific ordinances as it relates to keeping of chickens there may be health concerns you know I don't know all the issues but and so the zoning regulations are not necessarily the proper mechanism to provide that type of regulation a separate ordinance would be and so that's a second series of issues you know if you the board does want to become more permissive then do we want to also regulate that because you don't have to you know you can just leave it unregulated and see what happens and then if there's a need you can you know consider adopting regulations at that point in time so that those are some of the issues the board has at this point and so the staff's just looking for a direction from the board we can pursue you know the relaxation of our roles we can pursue an ordinance or neither which whichever way the board wants to go on this just for clarification I just want to make sure I understand this if you live in a pud and now that has covenants and restrictions with it that prohibit that any change that you're doing here would not overrule that correct that's correct so really you're talking more about the village proper well wherever there's neighborhood that doesn't regulate it doesn't have any restrictive governance yeah you're talking half an acre less than one acre they are less than one acre doors most of the parcels are quarter to half acre thanks so my thought on this is that I think we should pursue the zoning change but hand-in-hand with an ordinance to regulate I don't even want to consider this without regulation of some sort and yeah in order to do that I think we need to have input from the Agency of Agriculture and the Department of Health for public health purposes I think we need to take a look at other towns that have ordinances I know South Burlington does I've ever seen that a couple years ago I haven't seen it lately but it was passed around recently so I saw it I thought it was written pretty well we have a copy of that I don't know whether I got it from another home homeowner who wrote me a letter but it was I thought it was comprehensive so and I'm on the same page as you I like the idea of allowing it we should probably do something I mean I'll put mine out there just so it's out there I'm not in favor of this but if we're going to do this then I want to see that it's regulated I haven't seen this work while yet that's the reason why I'm not in favor of it so if we get to the point of actually going forward with it it'll require public hearings and everything along the same lines and I'm not sure where I stay on it at this point except that I'd like to see a lot more information for us at that point so I do have a question on you know Ken put together this he put together a bunch of stuff so and I looked at the difference between the different towns which allow this it's good yeah somewhat consistent we could use pieces of each of those again like I said the South Burlington one was written really well but the last document he put in place he talked about the two zones the VZD and the RZD and he said number of parcels less than one acre 93 yeah and 90 and I guess I'm trying to understand what does that mean does that mean person said it's applicable to because all the funds don't allow it because we have covenants and bylaws that don't allow livestock he wouldn't necessarily have knowledge of which neighborhoods have it which ones don't but the residential zoning district has hundreds and hundreds of lots less than an acre I mean that maybe thousands less because most of them are small right except for the you know the I would think yeah by itself is over 100 right it's 150 or something so I'm just trying to understand what he's kind of implying that it only applies to like 183 parcels and actually that's in the village district the residential zoning district there's over 3,000 no no no the number of part impacted lots the number of license less than one acre I see I see 90 okay just it was just confusing so and I was also confused about what he was is he making a recommendation here or these are options or if the board is pursuing a change in the just the development bylaws there is a recommendation here number seven oh I see so the one with the check in it is the one yes okay I missed that okay I was looking at them all so we have some citizens here that I think they probably came for this particular purpose and if you'd like to weigh in we'd like to hear from you interesting to the students and so we've we've just been pursuing this realizing that oh well since only only towns in Chittany County that's limiting residents from growing their own food through tanks mainly with the female poultry that was our main interest of changing rules because of that thank you one of the other things that would come into play on this would be enforcement of any ordinance that we might have as well and so it would need to think about that at some point as well so it sounds like the board is interested in pursuing both change I'm guessing that they kind of have to go hand-in-hand did you I know that Jeff weighed in did Ted weigh in I didn't happen to see anything from Ted on this at all but Jeff did and he would like to forward with the the by-laws changes and probably for the ordinance as well I would suspect I would feel the same way but I would never speak for him don't know either haven't heard much just talk to him the reason I bring that up is if if you were interested in just the bylaws and maybe separately the ordinance then you could move forward with one without necessarily other but I'm guessing that's probably not yeah so I will try to run a parallel path then I think it matters a little bit what his numbers meant because if he's really just talking about disconnected small lots I'm wondering whether there's really a neighbor problem or not because when I think about neighborhoods I think about where Southridge or you know we're I think all three of us live in a neighborhood of some kind and you know having chickens and every house in the neighborhood probably wouldn't be a great but I don't think that's in they're not allowed I think I know not in Southridge because I live there once and not in the one I'm in now so I can declare yeah I will do that that would him to me that would make a difference in how I would view the necessity of anything narrowing that down I don't see any limitation whatsoever that's what's that was what brought me to the ordinance so quickly was there was no limitation in this is the way I'm reading it for proposed bylaws understand your question okay I'm gonna clarify question but yeah based on this I don't see it that way so we'll have lots of opportunity to talk about the other questions or comments so how are we going to so we have to wait until we get more staff will do some research on this okay and there's some yeah right there's some samples out there as you pointed South Brunitons got a plan an ordinance in place and we're not going to reinvent the wheel so it's drafting an ordinance and it should be reasonably simple and we already have proposed amendments to the bylaws so this process doesn't have to take too long this next step the only thing would be it sounds like the well Terry mentioned that you'd like to get some people and maybe to provide some guidance to the board and things to look for so it'll be just a matter of trying to coordinate schedules and figure out who in those agencies will be best to come and visit with the slideboard we'll talk about chickens you know I haven't actually asked you know all these people many people more people wrote in than this and just about anything that I've seen letters on they're raising chickens for the eggs not raising chickens to slaughter or could it be both you could do both but they're presumably it's for the eggs but that is not you're not limited to that right because many of the towns have a no slaughter yes visible right right so that's I'm particularly interested in the health ramifications yeah me health risk ramifications because there are a lot yeah there certainly are anything else that we need to ask staff to do no okay then we'll go on to the manager's report some of which items I wanted to touch on already been addressed there's only a couple items I wanted to maybe enhance my written report a little bit with some verbal comments well one thing that it's not in my written report dated November 21st but I believe I provided the board with a separate memo concerning the my attendance at the conference yep it's in our packet yes yes yes you know what you to get papers I maybe didn't do the electronic version sometimes I forget to do that that's why you gotta play sorry about that no it probably isn't so I won't add it to there but anyway sorry so that yeah that's it was a very interesting conference and I had an opportunity to chat with managers from all around the world actually and brought a lot of interesting ideas back so the yeah the weather was beautiful so it was actually when I first got there was a little hot but it cooled off in fact the last day we're that well we I wasn't it was after the conference on vacation at this point we're in Austin Texas and it was downright cold I didn't have any winter code and it was colder there than it was here but anyway moving on to other items here the community outreach program there was actually an article in the local observer on this that article was taken from my previous comments I've given to the select board because I didn't speak to the reporter independently of my reports the select board on this I do have a little bit more information which I included my written report here Wilson share of this program for the next six months January 1st 2018 through June 30th 2018 is a little over $7,000 and we there's vast amounts of money that have been unspent in the police department because we're understaffed and we continue to be understaffed so my what I'm suggesting formal agenda item probably for the December 5th meeting is that the money be approved by the select board out of the existing money that we have in the police budget to pay for this service I think it has tremendous potential and it's being subsidized by the state I believe half the costs is at least initially is being paid by the state and the other half of the half is being paid by the city of South Burlington so all the other towns are responsible for the 25% that remains and that's and it's divided up based on population will also be including money in the budget for next fiscal year to cover a full year of that my one of my concerns though is that we keep good track of the services and try to relate that to changes in what's happening out in the street in other words I'm hoping to be able to see improvements in certain things and so we have to identify what kinds of things we need to measure what kinds of things we've been measuring and use those as metrics moving forward part of that will be the responsibility of these social workers and the and of course these social workers will be hired through the Howard Health Center and so they'll be supervising these social workers but it's it's an important service and I was talking to the police chief today about a situation where they got a call for an overdose in the park a lot of Best Buy and they were able to track I think down the person who sold this and in the process of doing that they found someone else that was just about to overdose and the same stuff that the first guy overdosed and they saved that person from actually inflicting the overdose on themselves it's just and that's only part you know this is only the opiate crisis only really part of it there's also really a separate mental health they're kind of interrelated but there's other families that aren't necessarily dealing with opiate a crisis they're also dealing with mental health issues and and hope is that social workers will be able to deal with those more effectively than police officers can because sometimes when police officers show up and they're called because the families that there what's in they can't deal with the person but police officers in uniforms aren't necessarily a calming effect on the person that's experiencing a mental health crisis the ones they have in Burlington from the Howard Center like angels I've met actually volunteered with many of them at Cots yeah they're quite the other ones that actually you know they have in the church street area they actually walk around and they know all of the homeless people they do that outreach like a constant this must be like an uncalled kind of thing here well it no it's going to be more than that yes they're going to be on call if there's an emergency situation but the hope is that they will be available to reach out to families before there's an emergency because you can identify the families that are experiencing mental health issues not everyone obviously but there is some that are kind of recurring situations we also have a homeless population in this community I've talked to some people recently and they're estimating it's between 10 and 20 people so it's you know that we have that and then on top of that the opiate crisis so and statewide the number of suicides is on the rise and that's a concern as well so there's lots of different pieces here that involve our police department they also involve our fire department ambulance squad and neither one or neither group or social workers and hopefully with involving another level of assistance where we can mitigate some of the issues that these people are dealing with it's not going to solve the problem totally but it might be able to help so what this will be coming back for future consideration by the board and the other another item coming up for future consideration is regional dispatch the survey committee of which I am the member voted unanimously to recommend to the select boards of each of our prospective communities to participate in the formation of a union municipal district the agreements which you've seen earlier versions of it have been finalized and as you heard Charlie mentioned Charlie Baker we should be getting a copy of that shortly it's gone through a review by the state and a number of attorneys anyway the board will have a difficult decision whether or not to place this on the warning for town meeting because frankly I don't think we're quite ready or in a place where we want this service just yet on the other hand I'm fairly confident this is a service we will want and need in the future and so do we want to jump in and participate in the formation of this union district if we do we don't necessarily have to become a paying member and that's a decision this will be part of the calculus of the board I have to consider and the board has between now and say the end of January to make this decision as to whether or not it'll be on the so and when it's presented to you and probably in sometime in December mid-December I'm thinking that you won't have to make a decision at that point but we'll just be presenting it again so that's all I had for this evening beyond you know unless there's any questions on the other parts my written report I have a question on this the sewer rate oh yeah placements sounds like they're becoming dangerous where are these things there we have a number of sewer pump stations all around the old stage road is that a pump station so it's that kind of a facility yes there's a grate in there and those greats are incredibly expensive right there they're heavy-duty of course and some are larger than others this one's I think it's one of the larger ones yeah they had this we had worked through and done some repair work replacing pumps and things that particular station they had hoped to get some additional life out of the greats partly because they were running out of money but turns out the extended life was not didn't really materialize yeah each station when we do a renovation is maybe Jennifer can help me with number but it could be as like 300,000 350,000 to totally renovate a pump station we try to do one every other year final one that takes it from the town to the plant down river called significant yes yes it's one of the largest ones questions Rick if not other business I just have a couple of quick ones the we had a letter from the Vermont municipal Thurks and Treasures Association they said it was with great pleasure that I write to tell you that your town clerk and treasurer received two awards from the VMCTA at our annual awards banquet in September the Beckett completed the requirements for certified from my clerk come like and certified from my treasurer come muddy so congratulations to Deb on that I received the letter from the agency of transportation regarding the public hearing that they had on the parking ride and Rick will be distributing that letter to you by email tomorrow next day so that's the one up at exit 12 yeah above the exit yeah south of exit 12 yes that's been in the planning stage for 20 years probably but they were finally getting close to a building I believe so yeah any other business to be brought forward tonight if not then we're adjourned nicely good timing


An attack at the Mgini Divisional Police Headquarters in Amos State have left the police inspector dead with another cop sustaining injury. The attack, which happened on Friday night, caused panic in the area, hoodlums who came in the vehicles and police operatives engaged in the sun gone due. Our correspondents gathered that on arrival, the invaders opened fire but they were repelled by the policemen on duty. A source who pleaded not to be mentioned said one police inspector was killed during the attack. The hoodlums arrived around 9 p.m. on Friday.


You probably already know me, I'm going to talk about running EuroPython 2020 as an online conference versus running it as an in-person conference, what we had originally planned. So a bit about myself, I'm Mark Lemberg, I'm based in Düsseldorf in Germany. I studied mathematics, I have a company, we're running Python projects. I often work as an interim CTO or a senior software architect for clients. I'm a Python core developer but don't really commit anything much anymore. I help with discussions and these things. I am EuroPython Society Chair and have been for a while now. I am a founding member of the Python Software Foundation and that's about it. So I've been running EuroPython as a Chair, I think this is the third year now. So we have developed a lot of experience running in-person events. Now as you all know what happened this year, we started the organization late in November, as we usually do. We first do an RFP request for proposals from the different venues, which is a commercial kind of process that we run to find venues that are affordable. And then we had the results for the RFP available in November and then we started to work with Dublin. We prepared everything, we configured the website, we put the content there, we had a logo designed, everything was really put in place, everything was ready for starting the ticket sales in March. And then as so many other conferences, then we had to face the COVID-19 situation. Things developed very, very quickly around that time. So in February we still thought, OK, we're doing the conference in July so it's not going to be a problem, we can still go ahead with this. And that's also what we told people. Then on March 12, things got a lot worse. Ireland became, you know, they started to put some restrictions up. And then we contacted the venue and discussed with them what we can do about this because of course like Naomi mentioned yesterday in the keynote, we had the same problem. We had signed the contract already and we would not have been able to get out of the contract without actually paying, I think it was 80% of the total fee that we had signed up for. Which in our case was a significant amount, I think around 200K or something. So there was no possibility for us to do that. Then of course, even though the government in Ireland had not really banned these events just yet, it was becoming obvious that it would. So we discussed with them what to do and then we decided or they offered us to postpone the event to next year around the same time. And so that's what we did on March 17th. And then we thought, OK, what are we going to do now? Are we just going to drop the event? Are we going to continue? We're not really sure what the community felt about this. And so we ran a poll and this is the result of the poll. So as you can see here, I don't know if it's readable, it's around we had 308 responses around 78% said, well, they would like to have a virtual conference. So we had a look at the results and also the other data that we got. So preferred dates was clear that they basically wanted to use the same week, probably because they had already made arrangements for this. And essentially, they also wanted to have more or less the same kind of content. I mean, a number of days, number of tracks. So we took all that into consideration and then we decided on March 31st we decided to go online with EuroPython 2020. At that point, we had no idea what we were getting into because we were not aware of how we could run this. We just said, OK, we're going to try to figure out how to do it. We then had to spend a couple of weeks shutting down the in-person organization. So basically telling all the vendors that we are not going to do it this year, we're going to do it next year, which took some time. And then we started to research into the different online possibilities. Now, unfortunately, at that point, two of the board members, of the eight board members that we had at the time, they stepped down because they were not interested in running an online event. And so we were just left with six people. So that was another challenge that we had to face. So let me just summarize some of the challenges because that's what this talk is also supposed to be about. The purpose of the talk is not so much to present what, you know, that we are just such a great organization. The purpose is more to just so that we show other conferences how this might be possible for them to do as well. And we want to provide as much help as we can and provide all the resources that we have created and all the research that we have established and put online so that they can benefit from our research. Because, you know, like in open source where you write code and you write, you know, make the code available to others to use, we want to do the same thing for the conference organizations that run conferences in the Python space. So the challenges that we had, of course, were we had to redefine the budget. The budget was already set up for the in-person event, same for the pricing structure. We had to figure out what to do with the sponsors because, of course, the sponsor would expect to have a sponsor booth available and lots of attendees coming to the booth, talking to them directly and so on. Now, for an online event, that doesn't really work and so we had to figure out what to do with the sponsors. What we did there is we basically replaced the booths with online rooms. We gave them Zoom rooms so that they can, you know, talk to people directly. We gave them chat rooms. We put in some extra features for them to use online so that it becomes, you know, more attractive for them. We also reduced the prices a lot for them and we needed to do lots of research. So what we did is we, for redefining the budget, we had absolutely no idea what to expect, how many attendees would come to the online event. So what we did is we basically played safe. We used the numbers from the poll that we had, which turned out to be around 250 paying attendees. So that's how we structured our budget and based on that budget and knowing all the costs that we will have, we then reduced the prices a lot by 75% because we did not have to pay for the venue rent, no catering and all these things. The big cost factors were basically not there anymore but of course, we still did have costs. The conference cost around 30K and we had to cover that in some way. So we put that into the budget. We came up with new sponsorship packages and then we had a look around for chat systems and audio visual rooms that we could use. Now, a question came up and there was a discussion on Telegram about this as well. Why don't we make it free? I just want to bring this up because there was a discussion and there was some back and forth and people wanted to have this free or maybe half it at a very low price. And we thought about this a lot and what we ended up with there is we wanted to have the volunteers that we get for the conference to have them feel that the work that they're doing is actually worth something so that we are creating a value. And so we decided to use a value-based approach for pricing. So we thought what's the value that we give to conference attendees by putting all this content online, making it possible for all the speakers to provide all this content to the attendees. And so free was not really an option because free does not really have any value. And there's also something that I found because lots of conferences turned free when going online. I really didn't understand what they were doing because they were completely ruining the pricing structures of events. If they want to, if they have run a conference with the same content and now it's free and versus where you have to normally pay 700, 800 or maybe the commercial ones for 1,000 or 2,000 euros to attend, there's no relation between those two things. If you do it online, you do it for free and then you go there and you have to pay 1,000 euros, it doesn't really make sense. So I think the industry there, not only the industry, also in the open source world, the conference organizers are actually not doing the right thing by making these things free. And also specifically for us, the European society uses the income from the conference to provide grants to other conferences and to projects. And so this would have completely killed the revenue for us. In fact, we would have to pay those 30K out of our budget. And so that was not really an option. So we decided to use lower prices, a lot lower prices, but still higher than what you normally see for online conferences. And that was like, we were betting on this that people actually will see the value in this. And I think looking at the attendee numbers that we have right now, I think this worked out. So I would recommend this to other conferences as well. Because it's well possible that this status that we have right now will continue for some time. Right, so online means we need a lot more volunteers. We had to do lots of research. We did experiments, trainings, rehearsals, trial and errors. So we only had six members left who were actually active. So we started to downsize the event to stay on the safe side. We put all this documentation up online. We first, internally, we came up with a virtual conference concept. And then we were also researching to all these online conference tools. And because there was a lot of research going on, we wanted to share this with the other organizers. We put these online and we made a blog post which has the links to these. Actually, I'm gonna post these links as well. So there's a lot in there that can be used by other conference organizers, especially in this online conference tools one, but also in the virtual concept one. So you're free to copy what we did and maybe improve upon it, right? Use the things that didn't really work that well this year and maybe improve them. So what we decided for the chat system is we wanted to have a system that is, you know, it's kind of, it groups a number of channels. And the best system that we found to do that was Discord. So we used Discord. We had never used Discord before, so we needed to get in some expert. We've fortunately, we found Jason who is a Discord expert and he helped us a lot setting up everything. For the audio video, we ran a couple of tests. We then ended up deciding to use Zoom and Jitsi. Jitsi is a free server that you can set up. You can also use a shared server that's made available by a company. But then over time, you know, we thought Jitsi is nice, but it's not really that good for larger events. You can maybe have maybe 30 people or so in a Jitsi room. What the company says is that maximum is 50. After that, it simply doesn't work anymore. So for the larger things, larger talks, we had to use something else anyway, so we decided to use Zoom. And now, because we have so many Zoom licenses, we basically removed Jitsi completely. We scaled down, we just have two conference days, not three, and we have two sprint days. So the CFP was already ongoing. We had to repurpose that. It wasn't really hard to do that. We just simply extended the CFP and we made everyone aware that whoever had already submitted will now have to do the talk online. And most of the speakers actually agree to this. We also decided to use the chance to open up a bit more, make the conference available to more time zones. So we added extra slots for the Indian, Asian Pacific time zones in the Americas. Now, having more content because we actually did get a lot more content in that we had then we had already originally expected, we started out with three tracks that we wanted to do.  Of course, we had to find more volunteers to help run all this, because unlike for an in-person conference where you can just send the speaker somewhere into a room, and then they can just do things there. And it's easy to get on-site volunteers. We did not really have that possibility. So we had to find more volunteers. And fortunately, we found a very, very good team. We have 18 people now helping with the track hosting and a few other people helping with other things that behind the scenes. The team that we built was basically built not by doing a call for volunteers, but instead we used basically word of mouth. So we asked the people that we knew and they asked the friends that they had. And this worked out really well because we very quickly got a nice team of excellent experts with lots of different expertise. So we could assign the different roles very easily. So how do you run online conferences? Well, we ran a lot of experiments with this. We joined other events to see how they did it. We tried various flows. We found that you need two people to run a track. One role is the session chair, which is very much like for the in-person conference. The session chair introduces the speakers and the talks and helps moderate Q&A in these things. So the session chair is more talking to the attendees and the speakers. Whereas the room manager has a more technical role. The room manager will then take care of onboarding the speakers, making sure that microphone works, screen sharing works, all this technical stuff. And also manages finding the speakers before the session so that they can get on board on time. Room manager, we also have for the in-person conference, but the room manager for the in-person conference is completely different. This has a completely different role. Now, the online session hosting is a lot different than what you do for an in-person conference. And that's something that if you're running in-person conferences and want to switch to online, you have to be aware of. There are many technical challenges. The most difficult one is getting the internet connections working and making sure that everything is done. You have to have backups. You have to figure out what to do in case the connection goes down. For example, we ask for slides so that we can run them and then people can join by phone. Unfortunately, we did not so far have to do this. We also ask people to send in videos of recorded sessions in case they were going offline during the session. There are lots of personal challenges. Talking just to a webcam, it doesn't feel like an in-person conference. So you have to imagine that there's this crowd sitting there listening to you, but it's difficult. For example, the applause that we always play. This is something that we found in other conferences where they did not have this. This was really the major lacking thing from our perspective. And so we added this. It was simple to add. So it feels a bit more like an in-person conference. You need a lot more organization. You need to practice a lot. You need to train everyone. We had lots and lots of training sessions. We ran two and a half weeks of speaker training sessions, sometimes two sessions a day. I think it really paid out because we don't have a lot of issues. Also, this part we had a document, of course. So for the host, we have a hosting guide and we currently don't have that online. We are gonna clean this up a bit and then turn it online so that others can use it as well. We sent the speaker guide to the speakers where everything is basically explained. The flow is explained, what they have to pay attention to. Tools are explained. All these different things that are important to know as a speaker, both of these guides are more than 30 pages.  And this, again, proved to be very beneficial because the conferences running were very smoothly. So let's do a reality check. So where did we end up? Originally, we had, like I said, we planned in the budget with 250 people, but of course there was a hope that we get more people. So we hoped to have something like four to 500 conference attendees. And it turned out that we actually sold 650 tickets or around 650 tickets. Plus, we made the sprint tickets free because we wanted to attract more developers. And also, you know, our mission is to help Python projects. So we wanted to help open source projects there, attract more volunteers.  And it turns out that right now we have 390 signups for the sprints only. Plus, of course, the conference attendees also can also go to the sprint. So we're going to see how many people we're going to have tomorrow. And then maybe we have to, you know, increase the size of the sprint teams a lot. What's important to know for other conference organizers is that the dynamics of ticket sales are a lot different compared to an in-person conference. There's no preparation that you have to do as an attendee for an online conference. You can simply hop on. And so most of the ticket sales happen in the last two or maybe even just the last week. So that's something to be aware of. Don't get worried, people will show up and will sign up. Right, and because I wanted to make this a bit more interesting on the technology side I put up this slide. I wanted to explain to you what technology we're using. So, of course, we have the Django website over here which is what we always have. We have that for the in-person conference as well, of course. It does the registration of tickets twice. The payments, it manages registration of talks, the CFP and also provides all the content that we need. Then you have the main Discord server down here which we decided to use as a platform. So everything is linking from the Discord server to everything else. So for the attendees it's easier to find things. Initially we didn't want to set up a lot of channels but then we found that it's probably a good idea to have one channel per talk. So we ended up with, I think it's around 170 channels that we have right now which is a bit overwhelming but we found that and people also appreciated it that we have these breakout channels so that people can continue to ask questions, get in touch with the speakers more directly. So it's a good format. It's something that if you run an event like this you should consider as well. It's only important to have some consistency in there so the naming of the channels should be consistent and you always need to mention the names of the channels when the session runs so that people can easily find it. Then we have basically a Zoom setup for all the audio video. So we have in total 18 Zoom licenses running now for the rooms, three or sorry, four of those rooms have an add-on for the webinar which is what's running now here in this track for example. This is basically meant for running events where you have lots and lots of attendees and you want to have a little bit more control over what the attendees can do and what the panelists can do versus in the standard rooms basically everyone can do everything depending on how you set it up. We have seen other events that used rooms and they had major issues with spammers. Fortunately, we did not run into those here yet. This is also why we asked not to publish the links to the Zoom rooms because spamming in these Zoom sessions is really a major problem. You have to be aware of that and act quickly. So we have three for 500 attendees and one for 1,000 because before the conference, like I said, we had 650 sales so we thought that maybe we need 1,000. Turns out that you don't need the people spread over all the tracks quite a bit so the 1,000 investment here was not really necessary. So if you run one of these events using Zoom, I think it's perfect if you just use the 500 one. Down here we added some bots. The registration bot was very important because this essentially gives you permission to access all the channels on the Discord server. We initially wanted to do this manually and then Chuck went ahead and wrote a bot for this based on the registration database that we have and so this made it possible for people to self-register and this worked out really well. I mean, it's just doing an amazing job that bot. We also put up a stream bot which takes snapshots of these sessions taken from YouTube streams and then post pictures of these snapshots to the peak channels that we have. I don't know how many people use this. It's something that I wrote a while ago and I thought it would be a good idea to have people see what's going on in a different room before actually joining it. Right, so then the next big issue is that of course we had to make sure that everything stays up online and because we are all joining from different remote locations, some have good internet connectivity, some don't, sometimes the internet connectivity breaks so we decided to, we don't want to risk that these sessions go down because if they host and there's only one host per room that you have in Zoom, if the host goes down and there aren't any co-hosts to take over then basically Zoom shuts down the session and we wanted to not have this happen. So what we did is we set up a couple of desktop VMs at Hetzner and those are actually running all the, there's one VM running all the different sessions so it's host for all the different sessions and then we have for the main four tracks we have additional VMs which are used to run the sponsor ads for example and maybe show other things so that turnip would be really useful and of course we have, each of us also has a personal setup very diverse, so Windows, Linux, Mac OS all kinds of different Linuxes. These are typically set up as a co-host so we have some extra backup and some of the co-hosts then also do the playing of the sponsor ads directly from their system. Others go into the VMs and then play the videos like this. Something to be aware of is that if you want to run this as a co-host or anything that has to do with this it's recommended to have at least a dual setup dual monitor setup. It's even better to have three. Right, so going to production. So the major challenges as I mentioned was internet connectivity. It turned out that at an online event you have to do lots of things in parallel. You always have to be very, very much attentive to what's currently happening. You have to watch several different channels you know, on Discord you have to be aware that the YouTube stream can go down you have to check whether the Zoom session is still running whether the VMs are still okay. Everything is, you know, very... Well, it's not very complex but you have to know how to do things, right? So you have to train a lot. And what you have to do is you cannot plan for everything so you have to accept improvisations. You have to be aware that you cannot just, you know, expect everything to work which is fine.  Right, so what did we achieve? It's actually quite amazing we're running this conference online even though we had no experience running the conference online before. We still managed to get more or less the same kind of content size as we have for the in-person conference. So basically we addressed the... In the poll what people asked for. And everything is working quite well, I think. I haven't heard any, you know, negatives or people, you know, having major problems. So this is definitely a format that works. If you know how it works even better if you can, you know, if you have some experience, we now have experience and we'd like to share this experience with others. So if you have any questions, please come to us, ask us. We're there to help. Right, so thank you for your attention. I can take a few questions if there are any. Yeah, so we have two questions. So here's the first one. Is there a preferred method to give any feedback in hopes that it can be passed on to future online conference organizers? Is there... I didn't understand the first part. Is there a preferred method? Ah. Ah. The documents I showed, they are public and you can comment on them. So if you go there, even though the virtual concept that we have, it hasn't been updated in a while, we're going to update it after the conference with what we actually did. You can comment there. You can put extra hints there of what you think would be good or not so good. We are going to have a feedback form after the conference, like we do for every conference. And we're going to send this around probably on Saturday and then you can put any comments that you have into that feedback form as well. So those are the two ways to do that. Okay, so here's the last one from Gil. If this works well, would a hybrid conference format be a possibility? For example, people choosing to watch from home with a lighter Discord moderation plus live streaming without the Q and A from Zoom while the conference is happening in a venue? Well, we have been running the in-person conferences with live streaming already and people had the telegram chat. So, you know, we kind of had this kind of setup before. We're going to probably keep this. We are thinking about maybe using Discord for next year as well. But, you know, the hybrid version is not really something that I think is not going to work well because the remote people don't have enough contacts. But let's see, I mean, maybe we can, you know, make it happen anyway. Maybe there are some ideas out there that we can use. Okay. So I think we have one more question, but I think we are out of time. Now we have the next speaker plating. Yeah, we can actually take it. Yeah, we can actually. Yeah, we can take it to the break group. And there you can like ask your questions to Mark. Thank you very much. Yeah. Thank you.


Welcome back to our lecture series, Math 1220, Calculus II, for students at Southern Utah University. As usual, I'm your professor today, Dr. Andrew Misalign. This is our first video for Lecture 46.  There's not as many lectures or many videos for 46 because of that. That's because we want to talk about the very important topic of Taylor's inequality. So we learned last time about Taylor's theorem, which tells us that if a function has a power series representation, then that power series will necessarily be given by the formula you see right here. So f of x, so well, I should say that what we see is that the function, the power series would be the sum of cn times x minus a to the n, such as the power series centered at a. And then the formula would be given as this. The coefficient sequence would look like the derivative of f evaluated at a divided by n factorial. That's what the formula for a power series representation has to look like. But then the question I want to explore today is how do we know that a function is actually equal to its power series representation? Now, the reason why this if is such a big deal is we'll actually talk about in the last video for this lecture here. The last video actually will give us an example of a function which is not equal to its Maclaurin series for any number except at the center of the Maclaurin series, which is zero, of course. So the question about if a function is equal to its Maclaurin series or any Taylor series is a big deal because the answer is sometimes no. But we're going to talk about some situations that can help us know when a function is equal to its Maclaurin series or some other Taylor series. And we are actually going to do this using what's called Taylor's inequality. So Taylor's inequality is the following. This is actually, it's going to look like an error bound formula that we've seen in the past, which actually it is an error bound formula. And in section 11.11 of this series, so not lecture 46, 47, excuse me, but in lecture 48, we'll actually use Taylor's inequality as error bounds. So we'll talk about that a little bit later. But for this lecture today, we want to use Taylor's inequality to show that certain functions are equal to their Maclaurin series. So what Taylor's inequality tells us the following. As first, we have to find an upper bound for the n plus first derivative of f. So if the absolute value of the n plus first derivative of f is less than or equal to m for all x's that are no more than d units away from the center. So the distance between x and the center is less than or equal to d right here, right? Then the remainder of the Taylor series is bounded above and satisfies Taylor's inequality right here. The remainder r in of x is going to be less than m over n plus one factorial times x minus a to the n plus first, while x again is sufficiently close to the center there. So let me give you a little bit of more explanation what's going on here. So like we've done with series so many times, if we were to approximate a series, we often use a partial sum to do that. Well, what if we wanted to do the same thing for a power series? We wanted to approximate a power series. Well, in that situation, we're going to use the notation t sub n of x. And if this is a partial sum, we would take the sum where k ranges from 0 to n of f, or the k-th derivative of f, evaluated at a divided by k factorial, that's Taylor's coefficient there, times it by x minus a to the k. This is the formula for the Taylor series. The only difference is that instead of going towards infinity, we only go off towards n. We only go toward n there. And as such, this sum is a finite sum. And this right here, this partial sum of a Taylor series is commonly referred to as a Taylor polynomial. A finite power series is a polynomial, much in the same way as I often describe a power series as an infinite polynomial. And so this is in fact the nth degree Taylor polynomial. And so what we see here is that this remainder rn of x, you'll notice how it's rn of x, right? The remainder depends not just on how many terms in the sum, but also depends on x itself. And so therefore, rn of x, we're going to define this to be the absolute value of f of x minus tn of x, okay? So what we know for a fact here is that the tn of x is the Taylor polynomials, they're going to converge towards the Taylor series, which we'll call that capital T right here. The Taylor polynomials will converge to the Taylor series. Now, if the series is equal to the function f of x, that means the Taylor polynomials will converge towards the function itself. So we want to look at the error between the function and the Taylor polynomial. How close can this Taylor polynomial get to the function? The remainder rn of x, this measures the error between the function and the Taylor polynomials. If the Taylor polynomials converge towards the function, then this would converge towards zero. And so that's what this rn is trying to measure right here. And therefore, we want to show that this thing goes to zero and one can use Taylor's inequality to accomplish that. So that gives you an explanation of Taylor's inequality. What we're going to see in the next two videos is I'm going to show you how you can use Taylor's inequality to prove that e to the x is equal to its Maclaurin series, and then we'll also show that sine of x is equal to its Maclaurin series. And so check those out in the next two videos. They'll be a little bit longer. That's okay. Take a look at those on the links. You shall hopefully see right now.