Good evening, everyone. This is the meeting of the Wilson Select Board on Tuesday, March 21st, 2023. Per the Town Charter, I'm Eric Wells, the Town Manager. This is the Board's reorganization meeting and I have the authority to call this meeting to order and welcome everyone to the new select board here. I want to welcome new select board members, Jean Jensen and Mike Aisham to the Wilson Select Board. I didn't have time today to prepare a robust summary of the town's history in my time with the gavel, so. I think with that, I will yield to the business at hand and call for nominations for the select board chair of this board here. Do I hear it? Mr. Manager, I nominate Ted Kennedy for the office of chair. Second that nomination. Are there any other nominees? Call for a vote. All those in favor electing Ted Kennedy, chair of the select board, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? You ayes have it. Chairman Kennedy. Aye. Oh. Four. Thank you. I don't have a speech either. I know that's probably very disappointing for everybody, but to continue on, the next order of business would be to nominate a vice chair. Mr. Chair, I nominate, I nominate Agustino for vice chair. Is there a second? Second. Any other nominations? Calling the vote. All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? The ayes have it. So I'm new to this, so I'm gonna be quiet at times because I don't know what I'm doing. But next order of business, the minutes from February 21 and February 23. There was a, I guess that would be the, so March 2nd? Yeah, the March 2nd meeting had a legal issue. But February 21st, 2023. Do we have a motion? Move to approve the minutes subject to modification. Is there a second one? Okay. So going through the minutes, page one. Page two. Page three. Page four. I do have a question, Mr. Chair. I was not on the board for this meeting. I did watch it online. I think I normally, I mean it's the protocol usually not to vote if you weren't there, but if Mike and I don't vote, you, we'll still have a little bit more. Yeah, on that one. But hold that question for the next, the next round for the March 2nd ones. So, okay, so all those in favor of approving the minutes? Aye. All those opposed? The minutes are approved. March 2nd, 2023. Is there a motion? Move to approve the minutes subject to modification. Second. Is there a second? Page one. Page two. And before calling the vote, Eric, you looked into whether this can be approved. You looked, the town attorney talked about that. Yeah, I reached out to Vermont League of Cities and Towns Municipal Assistance Center because we have a, here there were three members of the board present and one of those members is no longer on the select board, Jeff Fares. So a quorum is not present from that meeting to approve these minutes. The LCT advised that the minutes belong to the body and they advised that even if a member was not present, they could vote in favor of approving the minutes to have these minutes approved. They suggested if someone was not present at the meeting to likely refrain from offering amendments as a best practice. If that being said, calling the vote, all those in favor of approving the minutes? Aye. All those opposed? The minutes are approved. Public comment. This is according to state statutes and select board policy. We make time for public comment at each meeting. Members of the public may comment on any topic whatsoever. So is there anybody here in the room that has a public comment they'd like to make? Okay. Eric, is there anybody online? Nope, no one on Zoom with public comment. Next order of business, select board rules of transaction and meeting schedule. And Eric, I think you were gonna introduce the topic. Yep. So every year as part of the reorganizational meeting, the select board considers its rules of transaction. And this is a call for in the town charter for the board to set these each year. It is organizational meeting in March. I've included a copy of the proposed rules and inter-meeting materials. I haven't offered any proposed changes from the way these looked last year. An appendix to that is the board meeting schedule. We try to get that figured out early on here to get on everyone's calendar. The board typically meets the first and third Tuesday of the month. The one exception, or two exceptions, or three exceptions, I don't know. In July this year, July the fourth falls on the first Tuesday of the month. So in prior years, I'm proposing for the board to shift to the second and fourth Tuesdays in July. Then historically the board's met once in August. So you'll see one day as the third Tuesday in August on the schedule. And then as we get into budget time, there's additional meetings in December and January leading up to the town meeting day. Certainly if the board has any changes to the rules of transaction can discuss those. And otherwise there's a suggested motion to consider. All right. So is there any discussion or comment on the proposed rules? I had one and that was section two rules of order guided by Robert rules of order. It's actually Robert's apostrophe S. And I didn't want the whole thing to be invalidated because there was an apostrophe S missing. So I thought I'd bring that up. I Googled it. Well if you're gonna bring that up I do have a question. Under 6.1 quorums and voting, I assume present means if you understate current state while that can still be by zoom, is that correct? Yep. That's still present. And eligible to vote, is there anything besides a conflict of interest that would make someone ineligible to vote? I would be able to look at for a conflict of interest if the board member felt the recusal was necessary but nothing I can recall that would disqualify. I couldn't really think of anything else either. Yep. And present would be covered by section 5.2 that actually specifically says that hybrid meeting access will be offered using zoom. So I assume that would mean that you can be present by zoom. Okay. So we'd be looking for a motion. So I'd move to adopt the select board rules of transaction and meeting schedule dated March 21, 2023 for the term of the current select board and then in March, 2024. Is there a second? Second. Is there any further discussion on the motion? All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed signify by saying nay. The ayes have it. Next item, designee for examining and allowing claims. Eric, you were gonna introduce that as well? Yep, another item the board typically takes up during reorganization. It suggested the board designate one member and one alternate to sign warrants on behalf of the board. Warrants will be made available for informal review at regular board meetings. I think you saw it circulating this evening. Then sent to the full board using electronic mail after signature of the board designee. I've included a resolution in your materials to consider designating a primary person and then an alternate process wise. I was checking with finance today. Typically, finance link heaf in the finance office will send the warrant out Tuesday or Wednesday for a check run week, which is this week. And then we look for the approval from the board by Friday to send the checks out to meet deadlines. This is typically how that process lines up. I was the designee previously and I would actually do all that electronically. I would sign my name and PDF, scan it back. Tradition for a number of years now to have the vice chair as the nominee. And then a volunteer after that. All right, well, I will volunteer myself. Okay, all right. So do we need a motion on that? We do, right? I think we need designate an alternate tool if we can. I'm more than happy to volunteer. Then I would move that we, that we approve the resolution and having a good, I guess, you know, as the designated select board member with the responsibility of examining and allowing claims and Gene Jensen as the alternate member. Is there a second? Second. Can I second myself? Yep, you can. Okay, any further discussion? All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. All those opposed nay. The ayes have it. Okay. Next item on the agenda, interviews and appointments. You Eric?  Eric, your last name, Hilmuth? Hilmuth, yep. Welcome. So you're applying to be on the energy committee and generally we ask people to give a little spiel about themselves and why they want to be on the committee that they've applied to and then the board, whatever questions are on their mind. Okay. Well, I've lived in Wilson for about 20 years now and this position opened up and I'm currently working as the director of technology of long gas systems. So I've worked a lot with our efficiency teams and service technicians. So I know a lot about the thermal part of energy consumption. So feel like I can contribute that knowledge back to the community a little bit in this role. Okay. Questions from the board? Question for you. Have you read the charge to the committee that we passed a number of months ago? No. Okay. I'm gonna recall seeing it on the website. If you had a chance to talk to any of the staff regarding what goes on at the meetings. No, not specifically. Okay. Anybody else? What would you say in thinking about the energy committee, what would you kind of designate as your priorities for your work on the committee for the town? Well, I think since most of my experiences around kind of thermal energy management, I think probably being able to help with efficiency efforts and, you know, weatherization, things like that. And also, because of my background in technology, I threw out a lot of access to tools and, you know, statistical analysis. It's not a kind of thing that could help out the committee as well. Okay. I'm a little concerned, given your professional background, putting somebody from the carbon-based... Your company is carbon-based and a lot of what I read in the charge and the introduction and the goals would be to eliminate your job over time. But I'm just curious why this committee and how are you gonna bring your professional background and experience to a committee that's, it appears to be working quite hard to leave fossil fuels and move to electricity and how do you think you're gonna finish that with the rest of the committee? Well, I mean two things. I think at least professionally, my understanding of our efforts is that we plan to not be out of a job. We're going to, you know, ride this transition into the future and probably won't be providing methane-based thermal surfaces, but we'll be providing some kind of thermal surfaces well in the future. And in terms of, you know, where I kind of fit in with that, you know, I think just having the knowledge of some of the challenges that I've seen, you know, working in the business for a number of years around weatherization and around electrification. I mean, I think I could bring quite a bit to bear. And I think as a sort of as a represent, you know, I'm obviously not acting as a representative of a lot of gas, but I don't think that their long-term vision is out of line with that, of any of the energy committees in the different communities we serve. They've worked closely with Burlington and South Burlington. I think they would hope to work the same way here. So I shouldn't be concerned that you'd be a bit of a drag on the committee who's already had a pretty big load, pretty big job to move us away from fossil fuels and into electrification. You don't feel you'd be a, you think you'd be a help in that situation and not a drag on that situation. Yeah, I don't, I can't see being a drag on all that. I'm sitting in the Jeff Fares seat and I ask the Jeff Fares question. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So Jeff Fares is not here with us anymore on the committee around the select board, but he always asked, how would you identify a conflict of interest and what steps would you take? So I think it's going to be pretty apparent that I think anything specific to things that would impact the business that I'm in would be considered a conflict, right? You know, an example would be maybe if they were looking at banning gas connections, right? That would be a discussion that I would be able to take part in. Where do you see growth and opportunity in the town's energy and efficiency? What's your passion? So the two biggest things that I see that the most, I mean, in the thermal sector, right? Which is like a third of the state's greenhouse gas emissions, roughly, right? So, but in the thermal sector, you know, the big things on the short term are going to be, you know, hybrid solutions, something that can, you know, heat pumps that can run on down to a temperature where they're no longer really economically efficient to run, but you sort of have the carbon savings of running the heat pump during the sort of shoulder seasons. And, you know, I think they, depending on the house, you can adjust the set point with a hybrid system down to, you know, like 35 degrees or 25 degrees. And that can be the, you could pull up your heat from electricity, right? Once it gets pretty cold, then those heat pumps run quite a bit and you can really drive up your bill, right?  And another thing that I think has a lot of promise is the network geothermal concepts. But for towns our size and for a lot of mixed-use developments, being able to use geothermal heat pumps in a sort of a networked community-based system rather than sort of individual homes. There's a lot of interesting technology going on there and a lot of pilot programs happening. Things are moving pretty quickly. So, thermal, those seem like the two most promising, you know? And then the other pieces are, you've kind of figured out a way to get people out of their cars, right? And on to all the tricks. And then, I think probably a final piece is supply, right? Like, we can electrify everything, but at least in the peak load, we're still burning quite a bit of peaking fuel oil and diesel in the state to provide peak load. So, you know, finding a long-term solution to those peak days. What a very other key thing. Thank you. Any other questions? Okay. Thank you. Do we want to... Is there a motion? Chair would entertain a motion. Move to appoint Eric Hillman to the Energy Committee for an unexpired three-year term through June 30, 2023. Is there a second? I'll second it. Is there any discussion on the motion? All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? The ayes have it. Eric, thank you for your volunteering. Are you Nate's dad? I am. My son, Luca, plays football with him. Oh, yeah, okay. Thank you. We'll be in touch on the next step. So, Jane was going to be here. Yeah, I'm getting... We're ahead of Skoda. I just connected her on Zoom. She emailed me and said she was having a couple tech challenges, but we'll see if we can get her here. If not, we can... Shirley's always ready to jump in, even out of order. I need to give... There we go. I just connected her on Zoom. She emailed me and said she was having a couple tech challenges, but... I'm here. Let's see if we can get her here. Can you hear me? Yes. But we're hearing ourselves from... Shirley's always ready to jump in, even out of order. How's that? Jane, do you have the stream going still? It does appear on here. We can hear you. I need to give... There we go. I just connected her on Zoom. She emailed me and said she was having a couple tech challenges, but... I'm here. Okay, if we can get her here. Can you hear me? Yes. But we're hearing ourselves from... Shirley's always ready to jump in, even out of order. There is a new and interesting Zoom challenge that is still occurring. Jane, do you have the stream going still? It does appear on here. These meetings we can hear is live on a YouTube channel, 17's YouTube. I don't want anything here. And there must be a lag. And that's what we're hearing. It's like when radio people call into the radio and you... Yeah, turn the radio down. I remember that. Can you hear us, Jane? Jane. Jane, can you hear me? You can hear me now? Yep, can you hear us? Did she turn her volume down, maybe? Well, I can pinch it for Jane if we want to start it, or we can try to get her back and go to another item. Let's go to another item and try to get her back. Given that, let's skip down to item number 10, Auditor Shirley? Sure. So I started by memo with just a little history for our new select board members tonight. So the town hadn't gone out for an RFP for their audit services for many, many years. So we did that in June of 2020, just to firms in the state of Vermont that did governmental accounting. We sent out five RFPs and two firms responded and Sullivan Powers and Company at a Montpelier was selected as our auditor for three years. That the end of their three-year engagement just completed with the June 2022 fiscal year. So I am making a request of the select board to continue another three-year engagement with Sullivan and Powers. In my memo, I have outlined many reasons why, but I think as you heard the auditors and when they presented the financial statements, I have mentioned a few times to you that they are a real partner with the town of Williston. They certainly, in the world of governmental auditing, and Jean, you've probably seen this too, there's just not many options for education. And so I bounce a lot off them because my background prior to coming to the town was not governmental accounting, it was not for proper accounting. So they are a true partner, they're always there when I need them to bounce a question off, send an email, they respond quickly. So I do appreciate their service. There are only a few firms left in the state of Vermont who actually do governmental auditing. They, I'll just say in the one-year previous to having Sullivan and Powers, we did not have a management letter and when they came aboard, we had lots of discussion with them and they've had a management letter every year and they have good comments and we have a lot of good discussion during the audit. Let's see. When you change audit firms, it takes a while to get to have a pattern going so you know what they need, you know what schedules need to be prepared and so it takes a couple of years to get that down so this past audit year, other than the fact that it was very busy, went very smoothly, we prepare the financial statements ourselves and most clients don't, but that's me, I need to know what goes into the audit, the financial statements and how they're prepared. So we now, and when you switch auditors, it takes a lot of town resources to go through that process so just for that sake, purpose I would rather stay with Sullivan and Powers as well. So I have not asked them for an official engagement letter because you first need to decide whether we want to stay with them or not but I did ask them for fees so they're going to keep the price for the FY23 fiscal year the same at $30,200 and then in the next two years, a 2.3% increase. So I'm gonna read Eric's last paragraph, he added to my memo. So I'm seeking direction from the select board whether we'd like to consider approving a new three-year contract with Sullivan-Powers at the future meeting or would like to undertake an RFP process for audit services at this time. Discussion? I mean, I can say from my experience there's just not that many firms out there and we've had to extend that because the RFP's just didn't come in. I do, is it the same, I understand it's the same audit firm, is it the same person doing the audit because it would be really valuable to have a different person look at things as opposed to if you can't switch the whole audit. We actually, the senior manager who now became a partner in this last year has been the primary engagement but we've actually had, we had another audit partner this past year here working so he was sort of doing the second review while he was here and then a different audit partners of course doing the concurrent review in the office. So this year we actually had three of the partners working under engagement and looking at the work papers. So it is helpful because the new partner who was out in the field actually had some other recommendations that we've discussed. Right, so yeah. Yeah, I'd be comfortable as long as we have different eyes looking at it, not same eyes for six years in a row. Yes. I think it was just last meeting we were commending the work that you all did as well as the auditors and what a great job that they had done in helping us to kind of streamline to some of the processes and over the past few years I know you've been really working on that. And so yeah, I think that makes sense to continue with them.  Just when I think of something like this I think about like based upon their experience of doing the auditing and looking at the books and no fault against what we're doing but what do they see as our strengths and weaknesses of future risk or anything? Does there have any suggestions that they have? They do not talk about risk in the audit. So they're really looking at the accuracy of our financial reporting. Making sure we are following our controls. Looking at fraud but not necessarily looking at every single transaction for fraud if they come across it. That's their mission in the audit. Is the management letter in what you handed out? Is the management letter in this? It's in the back. It's one of the staple documents in the back of the financials. It's like inserted in there. That tends to be where an auditor would say I'm not gonna write you up for this but consider this improvement. Right, like some of their recommendations are is I need to update the purchasing policy to include some of the government, I'm sorry, the single audit requirements we need to include for grants management. Kind of think of what else is in there. Sorry, I didn't, I don't have it with me and I don't remember what the top of my head. Some of them have been there for a few years Mike and we're just slowly, there was a lot more and we're just pecking away as we have time to get to them. So they look at process and policies, accounting processes, things that we could make more efficient or do differently to make it more efficient. So that's how they help us in the audit. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. In the past number of years we've had a recommendation to change auditors after a certain period of time but it doesn't appear that we would want to do that at this time and not open it up to an IRF pay but just re-employed solar and powers in my estimation. Is it a three-year contract? That's what we did the first time so I'm assuming that's what you would want to. Typically it's a three-year contract. In my experience it's been a three-year contract so we would just be looking for a three-year contract again. Any other questions? Okay. It's not a thing that we vote on but do we have consensus that this would be a good path? Yep, yep. Okay. Okay, then we'll move forward and we'll see you in the engagement later. Thank you, thank you. I recommend we do a Shirley request. Yes. Sure, thank you. You're welcome. So is Jane? Let's see, I see her auto. Gonna see if she can start her video and see if we can get this to work here. Can you hear us Jane? Jane? Are you able to hear me? Yep. Can you hear us? I don't know. Maybe we should all wave and see. Yeah. Can you see if she's muted or she's not? She's unmuted. It might be like connecting. Oh, you know what? Scott, our microphones are muted. There we go. Okay, can you hear us now, Jane? I can! It was on our, it was on our, we just, no one knows so. Hello, Jane. We've got you. Hello. Jane, we're, we're covering the issue that is the library, the patron services librarian position. What, what information do you have for us? So I, assuming Eric gave you a little bit of background that Bonnie Lord, our youth librarian has been promoted to the assistant director youth librarian positions. And as you know, you approved the assistant director position to go full time. Bonnie would like to keep her youth services role in addition to taking on the assistant director role. So we need to backfill a full time position. And this is the proposed position, the patron services librarian who would take on Debbie, the current assistant director's non-administrative assistant director roles, some of the youth librarian roles as well to free up Bonnie's time to be assistant director. So it's really moving around some of the, the roles from the two positions. Okay. And I think, did I read that this actually does not have the budgetary impact? Because it's moving. That is correct. It would actually, there would be a savings. Because the patron services librarian is grade seven and it's entry level. Okay. Questions from the board. So like with many things right now, many positions, it's hard to fill. Are you, what are your thoughts on the, you know, speed and likelihood of filling this position pretty quickly? Well, I would hope to post it, if it gets approval this week. And I would, I would hope to fill it in six to eight weeks. The Dorothy Alley Memorial Library has a very good reputation in the library community and the town itself has been a good place to work. So I don't anticipate any difficulties filling it. Any other questions? If not, the chair would be looking for a motion. I would move to create a position the patron services librarian. Is there a second? I second it. Any further discussion on the motion? All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. All those opposed may the ayes have it. Okay. Great. So thanks, thanks for everything, Jane. And thanks for your presentation tonight. Okay. Thank you. Have a good evening. You too. Thanks Jane. So that would bring us up to the wastewater ordinance amendment is Matt. I just texted Matt for a new board members. The planning commission meets at the exact same time. So when Matt is presenting, if it's running early, I usually text him on my phone. So we should have, oh, that sounds like a good idea. Try to keep the train turning on time. I hope he doesn't like this. Here he is. Perfect timing. I was told 739, but I got the early notice from Eric. We're talking fast tonight. Do you make a big deal of like leaving the planning commission? Oh, I throw my stuff. I try to slide out quietly. So Matt, we are up to the wastewater ordinance amendment attachment A overview. So if you are ready to present, if you could do that, that'd be great. Well, thank you for having me tonight for the annual review of the proposed attachment A to the Williston sewer allocation ordinance. This would take effect for fiscal year 2024 on July one. I'll give a brief overview of the memo and then I have a couple things I wanna point out in this year's attachment A that are a little different from prior years, not the least of which is it's now in color, very exciting. And for some of you, this will be old hat and for some of you, this is relatively new. So please stop me anytime with any questions you have. This memo contains the proposed attachment A to the town sewer allocation ordinance for the fiscal year upcoming. We talk a little bit in this memorandum and report about historical patterns of use of Williston's wastewater treatment capacity, new development that may come on and make use of additional capacity the town has at its disposal and some of the long range planning, goals and considerations around how the select board makes sewer capacity available for purchase by users in the upcoming fiscal year. So as many of you probably know, Williston has a certain amount of sewer treatment capacity reserved for it at the Essex Junction plant along with the city and the town of Essex Junction together referred to as the tri-town. We share the capacity of that plant under an agreement and we have a certain amount of that capacity that is dedicated to Williston users and that amount for fiscal year 2023, the year we're in right now is 1,090,000 gallons per day of wastewater treatment capacity. It's about a third of the plant's capacity. We are currently in the second year of a five-year purchase cycle buying an additional 10,000 gallons per day capacity in each of those five years. So fiscal 23, the year we're in, represents the first year of that and fiscal 24, the year that this memo is really about is the second year at which point the town will have 1,100,000 gallons per day of capacity available to it at the plant. So a couple of things about sewer capacity. It has a relationship to how the town regulates the pace of growth, in particular residential growth in town which has a more sort of granular system for regulating that pace. And in the sewer allocation ordinance, it sort of says the town won't approve new growth and development beyond its means to support it with sewer capacity and in the town zoning bylaw it says in making decisions about new growth, we're gonna pay attention to how much sewer capacity we have. They kind of point it at one another and this attachment A process is kind of an outgrowth of that. So contained within this proposed attachment A, there's specific allocation recommended to be set aside for new residential development and I'll go over those numbers when we get to them. First the basics in determining how much capacity would be made available for sale in the upcoming fiscal year, you need to know how much you have available in total. And so I'm here on the bottom half of page two if you're following along on the memo, we have to think about the current amount of capacity at the plant the town has available. Again, for FY24, that's the 1,100,000 gallons per day. Any capacity the town has sold and committed to provide that's being used by existing customers. So this one's easy. We go down to Essex Junction, we read the meter. Actually Bruce's staff does it and they send me a sheet that has the reading on that meter for the end of every single day of every single month. We know how many gallons our current users are using and that's what the nice color graphs are about on the next page. We also have some capacity the town has sold to users who are paying to hold that capacity but have not yet put it to use. So those gallons are out there. We don't see them at the meter but we shouldn't sell them to anybody else because they're spoken for. And there's a small amount of that left in our system. And then there's the reserve. So a recommendation from the town's engineers, Albert and Elliot is that 7% of the total capacity owned by the town should be kept in reserve to manage any fluctuations in use and not allocated to any particular user. So we have a 7% reserve. So the fun colored graphs for this year, the existing flows and looking at capacity needed for our existing users. The first graph you see with the green and blue lines, the green line extends from the beginning of sewer in Williston almost from 1992 all the way to the end of calendar 22. And that's the average daily sewer flow for the year. So if we averaged up all the days of the year, what was the average daily flow? And you can see that from about 1992 to around 2006, it goes up and up and up. And then it fluctuates after that but it stays much more level to the present day. In fact, looking at the axis there, there's a couple of peaks up above 700,000 gallons per day on the year. One of them's in 2006. Another one's in 2011 and then one in 2019. But up and down in between. Well, if you think about how much has grown and changed and how much of that's on the sewer service area in Williston between 2006, or between, yeah, 2006 and 2022, there's an awful lot of new users encapsulated in that. So why does the graph not keep going up and up and up? There are a couple of explanations for this and I can't tell you how much of that why comes from any one of them but we have some theories. Changing household size. So households get smaller. So those homes that were built and originally occupied by three or four people might have one or two people in them now sometimes. Demographically, our census data tells us the household size on average is getting smaller. Aging population, fewer teenagers taking long showers. Installation of water saving appliances over time, a house built in 1985. That 1985 washing machine is probably history and there's probably one that uses less water in its place today. Also ongoing efforts by our public works department to repair any leaks in the sewer system. Sewer pipes leak in, not out. So when there's a failure, ground water or surface water runs into the system and ends up showing up at the Essex Junction meter. So if you can keep up with that repair, you can actually take down the amount of flow a little bit. The other observation I've made but not written down because I'm really not sure about it yet is that from 92 to 06, if you were to map the expansion of the system and in particular the amount and length of sewer main that was installed to serve development across a pretty broad geographic area, I have a hunch that much, many more linear feet of pipe and many more joints and failure points and pump stations were put in place in the 92 to 06 period than have been put in place since. Williston has shifted to a much more compact form of development. And so, less length of pipe, fewer failure points, less infiltration. And I think that's a little bit of the story as well. I hope to be able to do some GIS work and maybe give you some cool color maps in the sewer memo next year. There is also a relationship to rainfall and the second graph, I'm looking at how different was the rainfall versus the five-year average before it and how different was the sewer flow than the five-year average before it? So in other words, this is the percentage departure from the five-year average in any given year. And you do see a little bit of correlation between some of the peaks and some of the valleys in that blue and orange graph down below. So more rain, more sewer flow because more inflow. And I did take a look this year through the individual sheets that were observed at the Essex Junction Meter. And I found a day where we came very close to 100,000 gallons, October 14th of 2022. Well, in about a 24-hour period, it rained 1.7 inches that day. And it was a total outlier and clearly due to infiltration with rainwater into the system. So that has a big impact. And again, it's why you have your reserve. So we get that number and we take those other numbers I mentioned and we do look at the existing flows both in the most recent year as well as the five-year moving average. And typically the select board in a fairly conservative way has said, when we're thinking about how much capacity we're using, if it's a low year and the five-year average is the higher number, we'll calculate using the five-year average. For this year, as well as the year before, those two calendar years, 2022 and 2021, the year has been below, sorry, just barely below the five-year average. So the recommendation is to use the five-year average. And in the paragraph in between the two graphs, sorry, Eric, you already scrolled past it. There's a second 2022 in that first sentence and it should say 2021. So in 2022, the daily volume was just below the five-year average as it was in 2021. I wanted to catch that. I'm really struggling to make all my numerical corrections without member fares here anymore to do it for me. So I've really, I wanted to thank him at town meeting for always doing that. And I didn't get a chance, but I did my best to do right by and I hope I don't get a phone call tomorrow if he's watching at home. Thank you for that, all those years, Jeff. So the recommendation is to use the five-year moving average, that's 676,720 gallons per day. And then we have to look at the capacity we've committed that's not yet in use. And here again, I'm sorry I have to correct myself in that paragraph it says 40,058 gallons per day, but some of that has been put to use and the correct number is 38,001 gallons per day. And that number is correct in the table below from which the calculation was made. Similarly, the 7% reserve, because we're at a million 100 now, it's not 75,600 gallons per day, it's 77,000 gallons per day. And again, that's correct in the calculation table. So if you do look into table one, for FY24, we have the 1,100,000 gallons minus what we're already using, minus what we've already committed to users, minus the reserve, and the remaining capacity for FY24 that the select board has available to look at is 308,279 gallons per day of treatment capacity. For quite a long time now, the planning commission and select board have wanted to take a long-term outlook to sewer capacity. In other words, great, we have over 300,000 gallons per day of treatment capacity. Well, that's got to last for quite a good long while. And the planning horizon that we've chosen to use is 20 years. So the calculation at the bottom of this page is simply to divide through 308,279 gallons per day by 20 years and it's a little over 15,000 gallons per day per year. What that means is you could sell new capacity to users at that amount, 15,414 gallons per day per year every single year for 20 years before you would run out. And in fact, you wouldn't even run out then. It would be a few years after that because for every gallon that is sold to a user, we see about six-tenths of a gallon at the S-exjunction meter. People don't use as much capacity generally as we ask them to buy. So the gallons per day is part of the price calculation, but every year we go in and look at what's happening at the meter. And so every year there's gallons we've sold that have now been put to use by users, but they're probably not using the whole thing. So that 20-year horizon might look more like 28, 29 years, something like that. We can go back to that. So if we do use that 20-year outlook at 15,414, we can also look at, well, what's been sold in past years. So in the past 10 years, the mean amount of capacity that's sold to new users is 11,770 gallons per day. We don't and have not historically sold 15,000 gallons per day every year. It's more like 11. If anybody's wondering what 11,000 gallons per day of sewer capacity looks like, it looks about like the Hilton home too. That's about what a hotel with 100 rooms in it uses in a year or uses daily. So. That's a better visual than I was thinking. I had you worried for a minute. Yeah, I was going there. We can talk later about how it looks in terms of new commercial or new residential and different types of residential, but a normal size hotel like that with about 100 rooms is a little over 10,000 gallons per day in terms of new capacity needed to support a development like that. So, you know, the other way you can look at it is to say, well, if we keep selling it, you know, like we've been selling it on average for the last 10 years, how many years is that? That also stretches more like 27, 28, 29 years depending on how you look at it. So, it's a limited resource. It's probably one of the most limited resources and one of the most complicated and expensive resources to expand beyond what's there now. But there is a relatively long horizon where that resource can continue to support a pattern of growth around like what the town has been experiencing for the last many years. And, you know, as that capacity is sold and the future gets closer and things look more limited, what are some of the strategies the town can consider? And this is a list on the memo. Thinking about build out and how far in the build out of various parts of town does that amount of capacity get you? Those of us who remember going through the form-based code project remember a year 2080 total build out of something in the realm of 4,000 dwelling units in Taft Corners. This capacity doesn't get you 4,000 dwelling units. It might get you half of that depending on how it's prioritized. So, thinking about long range build out, thinking about how to spend the remaining capacity wisely on new development that meets town goals. And that's part of why new capacity is made available in various use categories and not just a blanket amount for all new users. So there's an attempt between the sewer ordinance and the comprehensive plan to have some sort of communication between the two. Purchasing additional capacity if and when available. We're doing that right now. We're buying some additional capacity. Again, we're buying a Hilton Hotel every year for five years essentially. That's the amount of capacity we're buying. And like I said, thinking about prioritizing among various uses and possibly adjusting residential growth management allocation or other controls on growth. That would really be a sort of, gosh it looks like things are gonna be really, really constrained five years from now. We really need to start prioritizing exactly what new stuff is coming in. We need to buy ourselves some time. So go over that. So every year the select board goes through this exercise and creates an attachment A that assigns a certain amount of new capacity that's available to be sold to users in different use types. And in total, not including the reserve, the average over the last 10 years is about 35,334, 344 gallons per day, a little over 35,000 gallons per day in total, not including the reserve. And then there's what's sold. And what's sold fluctuates quite a bit more than what's made available for sale. So remember you have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven different categories of sewer allocation and there's headroom built into every one of those categories. So if you look at the amounts in table two that have been made available historically by the select board, you do see some variability there. Typically when there's variability, it's because staff had an inkling that there was some new user or users coming in that were going to want to purchase capacity and recommended making it available because the development was close to approval. In fiscal 19 and 20 on the top line of table two, new commercial industrial was increased to 19,500 gallons in anticipation of the permitting of the Blair Park Hotel, for example. So it was a project we knew was coming in. We discussed whether that headroom should be created in the sewer allocation ordinance or not. Select Board ultimately decided to put it in. So moving to table three, we're then looking at the history of what's actually been sold every year. And when we look at this, the 10-year mean of all categories of sewer capacity sold is currently under 10,000 gallons per day. It goes up and down depending on what years we look at. And you can also see that it's quite variable. Anything from under 5,000 gallons per day in fiscal 21, not surprising considering that included half of 2020 to a high number just before that, with just a few years before that in fiscal 19 with 22,507 gallons per day. And then if you're interested, well, where did that number come from? What happened? You can go up in the column and you can look at what category that capacity was sold out of. And generally, most of what happens is in the new commercial and industrial and new residential categories. Those are the two kinds of new development we mostly have. Most capacity is sold out of those categories, but it varies greatly year to year. And in fact, we had fiscal 22 with no new residential capacity sold at all. We are almost three quarters through fiscal 23 and have only had a very small amount of new residential capacity sold this year. Why is that? It's kind of an echo from 2020 in COVID. It relates to projects that are underway that purchased all the capacity they needed in years prior, which is why purchase tolls are higher in those years. Is it gonna stay that low long-term? No, probably not. We have new projects in the pipeline under review by the DRB that we expect to come in and purchase capacity either toward the end of this fiscal year into next fiscal year or beyond. So when we get into the categories next, I'll talk a little bit about why the recommendations are what they are for those various categories. So when we make these recommendations at the staff level, we do try to look at what development we anticipate is coming and at what speed. So we look at what's through various stages of the approval process, take a guess sometimes about whether we think the project's likely to make it all the way through approval, which given the prescriptiveness of our bylaws actually, it's pretty easy to tell what's gonna get an approval or not. It's less easy to tell what's gonna move forward and how fast. So now for the last two falls, this board's been given a growth report by our staff in the fall where we've given you a sort of very colorful table talking about all of the projects we think are coming in, how many dwelling units and of what type and what commercial projects we're aware of. That's what we call sort of the pipeline memo of what's in the pipeline, what's gonna show up. We use the same information to try to make these recommendations here. There is always a possibility that more new users or users who need more gallons than are made available will come in in a given fiscal year. There is the ability for the select board to come back and amend the sewer allocation ordinance as many times as you want, as many times as you wanna go through this. There's some reasons not to do that. It's an ordinance amendment, so it creates significant delay. And what we're told by our development community is when they have a project that needs allocation as a prerequisite to their state wastewater permit, they're not able to move forward in their state permitting process until they obtain that allocation. So if we say, well, that's great, we don't have any to sell, but everybody's supportive of going back and amending the ordinance. It's still a 90-day delay before they can even really file for their state permits at that point. 30 days to warm the hearing, 60 appeal after. So there's some good reason to try to have a little bit of breathing room in what's made available to new users. So I'll go through those categories really quickly and we can come back to ones that folks have questions about. The first proposal is new commercial with a total of 15,000 gallons per day of allocation proposed for that category. We're aware of a couple commercial projects coming through, nothing in permitting right now that's a really heavy user of water and we do have a new grocery store on the books, although that may actually come from an applicant who already has some of that reserved capacity. We just talked about that they might be able to put to use on that. So there's, again, some variability and some choice in that. In new residential, you'll note that this is really the biggest difference number-wise from prior attachment aids. I'm recommending and this, I reviewed with the Planning Commission, they recommend as well 30,200 gallons per day in the category for new residential. Couple of reasons for that. The first I've already been over, which is we've had a couple of low years in which we've had approved projects on the books that have not stepped forward yet to purchase capacity, and we expect that some of them will. As they accumulate their growth management allocation, they perfect their approvals at the state level. We think there's been kind of a lag, a little bit of an echo from COVID, also just kind of a fluke of when projects come in and when they don't, and we expect higher demand for new residential this year and would like to be able to support those permitted projects getting into their first phases with this allocation. The other reason this is a little bigger is as the Planning Commission was looking at Attachment A this year, they were also looking at the housing needs assessment. One way to be supportive of housing is to make infrastructure capacity like sewer available for it. We do have the possibility under the administrative approval provisions of the form-based code that we might see a building or two with a residential component that comes in during this, that we don't know about yet, but that makes it through approval before the end of FY24. One of the exchanges for heightened design standards, scrutiny in the form-based code was a more rapid approval process and a more efficient one. So trying to build some flexibility in there to support that change in zoning as well. And in the table under New Residential, this is just a hypothetical showing how we allocate gallons per day for different kinds of homes, whether they're one, two, or three bedrooms. And obviously there are any number of mixtures of those home types that you might see supported by this allocation. Generally the smaller units are, the more of them you can support with the same amount of sewer allocation. We also have a category for residential additions and minor subdivisions. This is typically where somebody who comes in and gets a permit to add a bedroom to their house or an in-law apartment they're gonna buy from this category. 1500 gallons per day has been more than enough in this category historically, so recommending staying with that. We do also have a category to specifically support affordable housing. This is for homes that actually would be deed restricted or otherwise restricted to be available at an affordable price. And this amount, 7,250 gallons with the unit mix I've given would support 60 dwellings. And the only other thing I wanted to say about that is I think historically going back to table three, you don't have to go back if you don't want to Eric. We've only sold out of this category once in the last 10 years, it was in FY 2021 and we sold 250 gallons. Having it available means it's easier for someone to buy it. The other way that affordable housing purchases used to be handled was through the encouraging specific development category which is the next one. Affordable housing is one of the types of specific development that's kind of earmarked for this. Somebody who wants to buy out of the encouraging specific development category has to come back and ask the select board for permission to buy from that category. So that's not as long as that 90 day lag around an ordinance amendment but it still takes some time. And we did go through that exercise last year for the Evergreen Family Health General Practice Physician to go into the adaptive reuse white cap building. Building that was built as a warehouse needed a lot more sewer capacity to be turned into a doctor's office. So that's that. Finally, plant public facilities. We generally have a really good long lead time when we know that we're gonna need to set aside capacity to serve a new public facility. Not recommending putting anything in this category at this time because we don't have anything we expect to need sewer capacity during FY 24. Finally, the 7% reserve, easiest one of all to calculate and I still got the wrong number in the paragraph but not in the recommendation. 7% of 1 million 100 is 77,000 gallons per day. The bold number at the bottom of the paragraph is correct. And then finally pollution abatement. We don't know of anything coming in the pollution abatement category but this would be, for example, somebody with a failed septic system who is not able to replace it or in a more extreme circumstance an entire subdivision whose community system has failed in the example of Porterwood subdivision in distant history or Meadow Ridge in more recent history. Again, lots of lead time on those. If we have a little bit there, we can support somebody who's really in a bind and has the ability to connect sewer to mitigate an environmental problem but otherwise this is one if it was something big we would know it was coming pretty far out. So that's essentially the whole memo. The final table, table six is just showing again, historic approved allocations and a proposed summation of allocations for fiscal 24 in the far right column. These are the numbers I just went over. And tonight is me just reviewing this with the group. The next step would be for the select board to set a public hearing. If there are any of these numbers, the board would like to change. I would take that back to the planning commission for comment and bring it back to you prior to setting a hearing. Thank you. It was easy. If there are any follow-up questions, I'm happy to answer them. Thank you, Mike. Thanks for that, Matt. You talk about the pipeline memo, future growth of new industrial commercial capacity. Is that something, you know, I think about being conservative approach to that. Is there any way, you know, we can encourage more commercial industrial based? To encourage more commercial or industrial, I think to some degree, that's been done for the growth center where mixed uses is encouraged and where the development standards allow a fairly, you know, we think of density as residential density that allows fairly high density of commercial use as well. In the industrial zoning district, the development standards tend to be pretty favorable to the kinds of projects that we see showing up. We don't have, in our traditional industrial west district, a whole lot of big pieces of land left. It's getting more built out. The recent Roe Bayer subdivision along route two and Shun Pike Road is the outlier, but that's rapidly nearing completion in terms of projects building on it. So in terms of encouraging new industrial, and I assume you mean maybe on a productivity and a jobs basis, that's usually why people want to increase those things, other incentives would probably come outside of the sewer ordinance. They would come from reductions in impact fees or other things that make development easier. And also, you said based on the sewage usage, is that also the same as the water usage? I mean, I take it from your conversation that you're actually measuring the physical sewage, so it's not based upon the water meter. So the water must be comparable to the sewage, the amount of water that's available also? So water availability is quite a bit greater than the availability to treat wastewater. We have plenty of water. We might need another tower sometime in the next 20 years, but we get our water through the Champlain Water District, they get the water from Lake Champlain. It's a lot easier to make drinkable water than it is to treat sewer water. So that treatment plant that we're sending our wastewater to can only handle so much waste, and ultimately through its permit can only put so much phosphorus into the Winooski River and then it's forth Lake Champlain. So our capacity issues are much more weighted towards sewer than water supply. Okay, so it's not a one-to-one ratio. And I think you answered the other question I had was the expand developments outside the current usage.  The current sewage now, the lines go so far. Can you see that being extended further down through Williston? Eventually, it could be down old Kilroy River. Who knows where it's going to go? Down two-way further, probably be the first place. So two things. In the event of an environmental issue like Meadow Ridge, the select board to expand the area where sewer is provided to a place like that that's not within the sewer service area boundary. And that's the other thing to remember is you have a sewer service area boundary where you say this is where we will provide sewage treatment to new users and beyond this boundary we won't. So Meadow Ridge is a whole project that's beyond that boundary, but had an environmental problem. So when the select board goes through the process of mitigating an environmental problem and connecting someone like Meadow Ridge, they have to make findings that doing so will not result in setting off greater amounts of development around the periphery of that. And generally the finding is we're only connecting the houses that are having the problem. In this case, everybody on the Meadow Ridge community system. Moving the sewer service area boundary. So when you said, you know, eventually sewer could go down to Oak Hill Road. Well, physically it certainly could. The pump station's already there by Thomas Chittenden. You know, it's putting pipes in the ground, but it's a humongous policy decision. And right now, almost all of the sewer service area is concurrent with the village residential zoning district for the commercial zoning districts and the industrial zoning districts. So we serve, other than that, those two environmental mitigation places, Porter Wood and Meadow Ridge, we serve fewer than half a dozen parcels in the agricultural rural residential zoning district. And I mean, the pipe runs right down Mountain View Road, which is the border between the suburban residential in RZD and the rural residential in ARZD. There's no physical reason you could not serve a development just like an RZD development on the other side of Mountain View Road. But for 40 plus years, there's been a policy direction in Williston to say the line is here, the zoning boundary is here. This side of Mountain View Road is residential density and this side is in agricultural rural density. So I would, as the town planner, advise that if there was a decision to expand where sewer was available in town, that it be made in concurrence with a land use designation decision and a zoning change decision. It's, in other words, a big deal to do that. I would expect one of the things we will do as we get going on the 2025 town plan, which is the next town plan needs to be in place by August of 2025, we will ask the community for input about those land use designation boundaries. So literally going out to the citizens of the town and decision makers and saying, should the residential district be extended beyond the boundary it has now and if so where or how? And I fully expect if I stand up in a room full of Willestonians and say, should we zone more of the ag rural zone suburban residential, I'll probably be told no. If I'm lucky, it'll just be no. But it's very important for the community to understand the relationship between what's physically there and what's there because of regulations that have been adopted by the town, plans that have been adopted by the town and say, yeah, for the next eight years that this plan is in effect, we won't consider moving that boundary or we will consider moving that boundary so that your planning commission, ultimately the select board, the select board that comes after you can make decisions based on that comprehensive plan. So, sorry, really long answer, but you let me talk about land use policy and there you go. Yeah, I apologize for picking on somebody there. That wasn't my intention, but we've had weeks in the past, you talk about the ups and downs, could it possibly have been a leak? There could possibly still be a leak somewhere possibly. There's almost always a leak somewhere.  So we're just running it and it takes a while to track those down. And again, that's why you have that really big 7% reserve is so that you can withstand that stuff, but you're always fixing leaks, there's always going to be some, you're always trying to get a little bit better, but it's just part of that piece of infrastructure. And you can see, I think the strongest correlation I could ever find was against rainfall. You do see a little bit of the economy in sewer flows too, when people start going out to eat more, you see a little bit there, but I tried to run rooms and meals tax receipts against sewer allocation or average daily flow years. I could not find the same correlation that I could find with rain. Thank you, Matt. Sure. So I noticed, and you were talking about, nothing has been allocated for affordable housing for the past few years, but this is the first year in, past five years, six years that we've seen a relatively large bump in allocation for affordable housing. Are you anticipating, right? Because it was 70 to five year recommending this year and it was 47, five last year. So I mean, that's not huge, but it's, so are you anticipating a project for affordable housing coming in to desicitate the bump? I'm hoping, but I'm not anticipating anything specific right now. So again, going back to the policy conversation with the planning commission, the issue of the moment wanting to be supportive of the creation of affordable housing and also supportive of some policies in zoning that might be amended before FY24 is over. And I wanna really sort of save that for when I'm back in front of you folks in a month to talk about the housing needs assessment and some of those policy responses. But suffice to say they would be in part about getting some residential projects off the ground that do bring a significant amount of affordable homes to the table and doing that in a way that meets the town's other goals and the comprehensive plan. And again, just having that headroom there, if that really, if that policy change goes through and works to not have it come to a crashing halt because there wasn't headroom in the sewer allocation ordinance. I'm very excited about that. That was a little concerned about seeing a doubling of the allocation for new residential that was a bit eye-popping to me, but then I see nothing, we didn't use any like two years ago and I think I heard you say we haven't really used any. I'm looking at FY22. We haven't sold any. We did not sell any for FY23. And how about, how are we doing this year? We haven't sold very much yet, but there's often a little rush at the end. In fact, we were expecting that last year and then it didn't happen and we left it at zero. I'm not sure this is the time to be pushing the accelerator on new housing, but I think what I'm hearing you saying, looking at the list of the, I recognize a lot of these projects. So these are projects that are in the pipeline and sort of built up demand that we need to be ready for. Is that fair or? Yes, and I would add to that, that when we see a project in the pipeline, say a project with 50 dwellings in it. Williston's experience of a project of 50 dwellings, unless it's a 50 unit apartment building, but say 50 duplexes or 50 single family homes from DRB approval to the last certificate of occupancy, that might be six or seven years sometimes. And I've made this argument before when we did some growth management reforms in 2017, our local sort of development industry capacity is not like it looks in, you know, Scottsdale, Arizona or Florida. It's generally quite a bit more incremental. So what having sewer capacity does is it allows the town to sell that to a user who then pays the town to hold on to it, but it doesn't tend to accelerate their build out that they're able to buy the capacity. You know, what we hear from our development community right now is what's slowing them down is that interest rates doubled in a year. Labor is hard to find. Projects are very hard to get completed as a result of that. There's a lot of compounding issues for a production builder of, well, I got everything done except the closet guy decided not to come today and the painter won't come until the closet guy is done and I had to tell the painter guy to go away and now he's mad and he's not coming back for a month. And we hear this, every CO inspection I do in a new development, there's a story like that. So, and even in the best of times, users will buy that capacity, they will get through the remainder of their overall development approval. What they tell us is generally if they are in Act 250 project, the state permitting regime, Act 250 wants them pretty much through the local process before they go do that. So then that's six to nine months. It being Vermont and us having winter that often takes out an extra construction season or public works director goes and posts the roads for a couple months and no earth moving equipment is going over the road. So there are all of these things that kind of compound. And so two years in a row now, we've given the board this fall growth report pipeline memo and we've always said this is like the very most optimistic theoretical as fast as this stuff could possibly build prediction that we have next year. I am proposing to staff that we go back to the first one we did two years ago and say how far off were we? Things are significantly slower. So I don't find the ability to purchase capacity to be a determining factor in the speed but the inability to purchase capacity is a huge limiter. And it's build out town wide or even in a project is what I say it's lumpy. It doesn't happen at an even rate no matter how we try to regulate it. And you can kind of move those lumps around but it's really hard to flatten it and get a very even number of dwellings every year. People that just developer have to buy the whole, they're building 50 units, they need to buy all 50 units. No, they can buy partial capacity they need to buy capacity to support any permit they pull. So a developer who pulls 100, buys capacity for 100 units in a subdivision. They then are cashing that capacity in each time they pull a permit. And developers do it all different ways to manage their costs. We have some who have been holding capacity for a very long time actually an amount of time we no longer allow people to hold capacity for because that policy has changed.  Literally one house at a time. Any other question? So again, we're not approving any of this tonight. The thing for us is whether we schedule a public hearing. So the chair would entertain a motion. So I'd move to schedule a public hearing to receive comments on the proposed attachment A of the sewer allocation ordinance for fiscal year 2020-24. Is there a second? Second. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. All those opposed, nay. The ayes have it. Okay. Thank you. Great. Welcome back. So that does bring us up to managers report. Yep, okay. So I distributed yesterday the finance report through December that Shirley put together. Shirley, if you wanted to walk through that for a moment for the board. I have mentioned before that we've been very busy and we're behind in continuing to catch up. So hopefully next month you will see January and then we'll get a little bit more caught up. So for those of you who are new here, you'll see that there are highlighted sections in this memo. So back to Jeff. He on my copy when I was reviewing every month, I was highlighting just the changes so he wasn't regurgitating every meeting to hear the same thing. So he said, oh, can you just do that for us as well? So hence that's why you have the highlighted sections. And those are typically the only things I touch upon. So there are only a couple of new things from our November to December. So the town was awarded a highway paving grant in the amount of 157,000 approximately, which is not included in the original FY23 budget. The grant was last awarded in FY19. So it's not something that we get every year. And even though you apply for it, you're not necessarily going to be awarded anything. And so currently the plan is to use those funds for additional retreatment before the end of FY23. We have already expended our retreatment budget for the year. So we'll have additional revenue and we'll go over our budget line for retreatment. And then the only... Is that a state money? Is that a state grant? It is. It's not really a grant, Jean. Like you and I would think of a grant, but you just apply and you get awarded. So there's no official grant agreement. Yeah. So, and the only other, I guess, significant variance is for the library there. So we're 50% of the way through the year in December. And the library is at 44%, just because we don't typically pay the library rent to the school district until May or June. So it'll come back in to align with what we would expect for them to be expensed throughout the year. So those are the only two changes. So, any other questions? You know, it takes you more than a few minutes to absorb these and I did get it a little bit, right, for the meeting. But so any concern, big concerns like annual electful year concerns that I've missed out on by not listening to every meeting in the last? No, not this. Thank you. I mean, so maybe the piece of good news is that our local options tax is, this only represents one payment because we get it November, then February, then May, and then August, and the August payment comes back. So this only represents, these numbers represent only one payment, but we obviously have got February. So year today, I didn't bring that with me. We're 200 and something above what we budgeted. So that's been going well beyond and we even increased the FY24 budget by I'd say significant increase because of the way that our local option tax has been rolling in. Good, so the only thing we wish we could get, I heard somebody say something, Matt was referring to it. We have tried to get from the state, the local options tax, like what's retail and what's online, and they will not share that information with us. It would be really, I mean, because that's truly what's driving the sales, the newest portion of this, the sales tax portion is the online sales. And actually the check back is S60 in the Senate was a proposal to allow that information to be released to essentially town manager to keep in confidence and advise boards without proprietary information going out. I'm gonna check, because that bill was before committee last Thursday and the board authorized the chair to submit a letter of support for that bill a couple of meetings ago. So I know we got voted at a committee, the LCT. Okay. I have a seat chat on Monday, so. We'll go to the house. Continue to move forward. A couple of other highlights here. Pleased to announce Christine Doherty who served as our storm Mark Horner since 2019, promoted her to assistant public works director. So we'll be working now to fill Christine's former position and it's great to have her in-house to help train the new storm Mark Horner and help carry the ball till we get some of that position. Jeff Fares served as the select board's representative to the Catamount Community Boris Committee for the committee's charge. The select board has representative to serve on that group. Typically meet the second Thursday each month, 5.30 to 6.30 next door. Look, you have a future agenda item for the board to consider appointing someone to that group. So I'm gonna be thinking about if anything is interested in that. Good. Our community center scoping a library assessment steering committee still need a shorter name. Meeting on Thursday this week, things are going well with the, first wave of interviewing community members. I know Chang and Greta, she's been chatting with a number of folks for that and other members of our committee. Black River design or architectural consultant has finished an initial assessment of the library space on the green. They shared some potential ideas with the trustees the other night. It is viable to consider in addition on that facility that was kind of the, because that's the big news right now that that's not off the table. It's an option to consider, but the committee's gonna be getting a similar walkthrough that the trustees did the other night as that kind of factors into their work. And ultimately they're deliverable to you and the trustees is a kind of pros and cons of different options looking at library, community center, recreation into our facilities moving ahead. So that project is moving along nicely. We'll continue to, committee meets about twice a month and we'll see it pick up a bit more here as we get into the spring. Hot off the press today, planning department and the town received a municipal planning grant in amount of just over $26,000 of fully funded application. This is to assist with the comprehensive plan, community outreach and engagement efforts. So share that with the department today and it's gonna help them have a more, some more resources in that effort moving ahead. So that's a nice award for the town to get. Eric, what would they spend that on? Yeah, different efforts for our community engagement and using some resources, web resources, more kind of mailing resources. I can share the application if the board's interested in viewing that too. And then finally, that with town meeting TV last week, we're hoping to get rid of this, right here. I don't think he's pointing at you, it's okay. It's worked for a period of time but one thought is we put that first TV on the screen over there. Could think of doing something the same over here. The board's interested. Other idea, we could try a gang rule cart for that TV to put it in front down there. I can monitor. I think that cost was maybe $800, $900 with the TV and the mount. The board's interested in having to have a mirror image of large monitors in here. I can look to see if we can make that work for the end of fiscal year and install it. I want to check with you before I go putting big TVs in the room. I think it's really been helpful. I think especially when there are things that have been presented, it's very difficult for people in the audience here to see and the TV has made it infinitely easier for people to be engaged in what's being presented and so forth. And so I would certainly support having another one here mounted. So you think that would disappear? Yeah, we would take this out of the way. We put another TV essentially here facing out. Thought as we could get audience on each side, could see it and then the board, no matter where you're sitting, you could potentially look out of screen that way. Other option is or in addition, we could put a TV like that on a cart and kind of sit it there. So Ted and Terry, your line of sight might be do a TV over there rather than turning over here. I'll second, that is a suggestion. Look for a good sale. No. Yeah. We'll work on it. And I just, I do have some catering permits for other businesses, but that's the end of my mattress report this evening. Okay, great. So let's get into other businesses. Is there any other business? The catering permits. Payment today. So these are on March 25th and April 1st. It's a maple sugaring open house at Sugartree Maple Farm on Bradley Lane. They've done this the last couple of years working with Bebo catering. They do some maple cocktails and also some non-alcoholic lemonade. So they typically might have 50 to 60 people cocktail. The new state system does not provide much information about what we get. So I checked with the caterer this afternoon. They said they've contained the consumption inside the sugar house. They've done this the last couple of years. They haven't had any issue. I asked them, do they limit drinks? They haven't in the past. What if the board wanted to set a drink limit? They're certainly happy to do that. Events on the two separate permits. So an events on the 25th and the 1st of April. The hours are, let's see, 11 in the morning. It's military time. So 1100 to 1700, it's like five o'clock. Four out of both of them at times. So that's two permits for one thing? For one. I guess two separate events. They're doing it on two days. Okay. All right. I'm kind of blanking on the procedure here. On which days and what times? 25th, is that a weekday or a weekend? I think they're both Saturdays. Let's see, the 25th is, yep, back to back Saturday. So this coming Saturday, then the following Saturday. And they would be 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. is the event time. So I'd move approval of both of the events. Second? Second. Second. All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? The ayes have it. Okay. Is there any other business? There is an agenda item for an executive session. And there's proposed language for a motion. I'll move to find premature public knowledge regarding a labor relations agreement with employees and a contract matter would clearly place the town at a substantial disadvantage and further move that we enter executive session to discuss a labor relations agreement with employees and the contract matter under the provisions of title one, sections 313A1A and title one, sections 313A1B of the Vermont statutes and invite fire chief Aaron Colette and finance HR director Shirley Gidell-Lackey and town manager Eric Wells to join. Is there a second? Second. All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? So we will be going into executive session and we will not reconvene for a public session after that. So we will adjourn.