I'm going to call this meeting up, the Waterbury Select Board to order. First, I know business is to approve the agenda. So moved. Um, is there. Second. Any discussion? I do want to. Uh, Please listen. I would say by being certain line of select board secretary. And an on Zoom vice chair. I'm going to act in chair for the meeting. So it's seven PM on. December 18th.  The Waterbury Select Board to order. I do want to, uh, I don't know where we could probably just do it under next meeting. Have a discussion about. Notifications. Okay. First one. Um, other additions or. Adjustments to the agenda. Um, striking the e-fund section at seven 10. Since our. E fund share will not be joining us tonight. Um, We're replacing that with blood. Um, Mike, do you think that. Um, we're replacing that with blood talks. Um, Mike, do you think that. Do you want to do a further discussion? Great. So we have a motion as amended to approve the agenda. Striking the seven 10. Okay. Okay. I'm replacing that with blood discussion, including conversation of notification for future marketing team. Any other discussion. Right. All those in favor, do you say aye? Aye. Aye. Any opposed. Any abstentions. Right. Agenda. Next up. We have to consent agenda items. There's four items. The minutes of December 4th, there's a second class license to back on things. And the markets to enforcement for filling farms. ihnen to not mainstream. Our first class and third class restaurant slash bar, the first phone for pizza water break or teams don't street. I got them for snow car winery LLC event locations and barns. That's over. Is there a motion with regards to consent agenda. approve the consent agenda with an amendment to approve the minutes for the emergency meeting for December 9th. I'll second that. Do you want to vote on the amendment first? So all those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Your attention is great to then as amended. All in favor of the consent agenda? Aye. The consent agenda is approved as amended. Next up, we have public again for anyone who just arrived with that agenda identity has been replaced with flood discussion. So this would be an opportunity to speak to anything else, not otherwise on the agenda or related to flood response. And we would ask that you keep your remarks brief and if needed, so do you on a future agenda for one time. Is there any public comment in the room or online? We'll move on to our updated 710 agenda item, which is the session of flood response and recovery. If not, we'll move to the board. I would start with an update from the manager of tumblinks and then we can go from there. Sure. Public works has been riding around all day. I think all the roads that need to be closed are closed. It seems like we're at peak flood stage now. It sounds like there's probably about 15 homes with pretty significant basement flooding. It's based on driving down on the Randall's words towards the few on union that had it. So there's four on union that are identified. Two are vacant right now. In fact, one of them was in front of people for a buyout a couple weeks ago and one's in front of you today, right? So from that perspective, that's good news, I think. But I think we're doing okay.  They drove through the signs and that happens. But they both perfectly fine. They can land and then check down. They're all okay in my knowledge. So no human, no loss of life, nothing like that. That's your purpose going down, maybe the reverse going down. Hopefully the most piece of interest is going on. As some other just general context setting, this is currently on the homepage of the municipal website, but I would just note that the winter parking van is suspended this evening. So anyone who wants to move and park vehicles on higher ground should feel free to do so with that concern. There's also a link again to the previous emergency response resource Google document that is being updated in real time. And then I would just add on a personal note, it was certainly an interesting afternoon and that sense of day job view after five months. So I would just encourage everyone to take care of themselves and reach out if they need support. We do have some systems now in place as a result of what has happened. Other folks with updates, Mike? No, this is just a follow-up to what Alyssa just said. If people are looking for places to park their car and fire ground, they may look at the parking lot up by the backside of an entry that could be very, very safe to park. Other updates for general conversation? I would just note there's some road closures. Again, in that Google doc, it is evolving. Again, general statement to please not drive through flooded roads and thanks to public works and town staff for being out during the day-to-day. And they're still out, we're done. And they're still out. We'll be out only. Although Chris, then Lisa, Chris? So I had mentioned it, not only would you ask, but we've commented here earlier. Some folks online here, I'm sorry, Chris. Chris, you want to come up here? Yeah, I'm fine. Sorry. I mentioned it earlier. Tom kind of jumped on it a little bit about the would you run down? Brooks, I mentioned it at the last one, whether or not we could have a brief discussion about some form of ordinance, talk about how we can put in some kind of guidelines, restricting the amount of debris, at least things like furniture and household crap. The natural debris like brush and stuff like that is not, it's harmless or harmful, I guess. It's human-made products. So if there's something that we can look into at some point, I appreciate it. Lisa, you were next. Sorry, we'll work a lot of time. That's a complicated question. This might be helpful, especially if there's people online. As far as the road closures today, I heard right before the meeting started that South Main Street is closed, as well as North Main Street. So just wondering like, and for people trying to get from point A to point B, is it impossible to get through downtown Waterbury? People would need to use the interstate, essentially. You can, still street, you can get around the roundabout is still functioning at least the last time I saw it. Right, how do you get out of town, though, on the south side of town? I'm not sure where the closure is. Can you- The closure is in front of the massage there. Yeah, so you can get around through Pilgrim Park, right? Okay. And then I'm seeing in the Google Doc right now, to me on the Jessica Potto has one over the road, which I don't have the time to say, but I'm just saying. I heard the same as well. Okay, all right, that's as good as we could still get through downtown Waterbury, and exit and get in on the bridge headed towards Fortown. Out right now, we're adjusting for this, which I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Well, I'm just gonna know how to go through both the park, people outside are troubled or not. Right, or even people who just travel through the Waterbury on a regular basis, you know, to go from the valley or wherever I may not know the back road. So that's just a good thing. Nora? Hey, everyone. Sorry, I should have walked over there because I'm literally next door, but I'm being lazy. We've just, on behalf of the crew, the resilience for Waterbury group, we've done a bunch of outreach tonight to families that were affected in the last flood and have about 35 individuals we've checked in on. Liz is on the phone too here and Tessa. And it sounds like Route 2 has been pretty hard hit and we'll need some ongoing support, all of those families that were literally just getting their basements and houses back in shape and they're feeling a little bit stranded out there. From town, it sounds like Randall and Elm are starting to see water in their basement, but the folks on Batchelder or Healy Court and others are doing okay. So I think we'll keep plugging away at checking in with everyone who's kind of on our list, but happy to hear from you all how we can help and provide updates to you all on what we're hearing. Liz, do you wanna add anything to that? I actually want to go back to the road closures, but I will say just tremendous work today, Nora and Mamakie and other folks checking in on people, Tom Drake. I expect that we'll find tomorrow that it is a lot more than 15 homes that are affected. There is water basements on Healy Court and Union Street. I have a text from a fellow earlier who said he has about six inches before the water reaches his first floor on Union Street. So in some places it feels like this might actually be worse. The good thing is most of these basements are empty, but we'll see what happens there. But it is gonna be, we'll be putting out a big push for a response. And so I think we're, we probably are gonna need to talk about that, right? Like how do we want to handle the response? I think, I don't know if anybody mentioned at school, I believe it's been canceled for tomorrow. Right, school is closed tomorrow, right? And just the only thing I would say that I am seeing a lot, I'm on the Vermont roads page on Facebook, a lot of people trying to figure out if they can get to Watesfield from exit 10, I do not think they can, right? Like you can get to Main Street, you're gonna drive through some standing water, but I don't know what's happening in Duxbury, right? Once you get past the route 100, route two intersection, and you will be driving through standing water to get there. So I'm advising people not to try to go to Watesfield. I was in a comment to Liz, it's taken tomorrow off from work and we can sit down, figure out a plan together. And then a second comment was to Lisa, North Main Street is closed, South Main Street is closed. As Liz said, there's standing water between us and everywhere else.  I would say thanks to the crew folks, especially for the hours can follow up. In terms of next up planning, is there useful questions or clarification now at this forum, or does it feel like it's an offline conversation to matter tomorrow or additional public information to share? I think I would, I had the emergency management question about, the river gauge has gone up a little bit in the past hour, it's not yet started going down. And most people did self evacuate, but I do think we're going to need a plan for, whether it's doing what Moortown did about saying be ready to evacuate, saying that earlier in the day. I'm a little anxious about that. And then we're going to need dehumidifiers, Tom, so get back to it. I think is one thing we'll know for sure, right? And a lot of some pumps. Since you happen to walk in and there were a question about notification and evaluation, so I think there's been general flood updates. How's your day been, anything to share? Not public. You can advise people, but you can't force people. And that's just the way it is, you can't make somebody leave their house. More certainly, the fire department certainly not going to get into forcing situations just doesn't make sense. I think Nora would ask you, I guess it's a question around, I assume you have this thing going to be in contact with relevant folks around. Yeah, an advisory wants to change. Been in contact with Swiftwater teams, state police. My wife happens to be working tonight, so she's giving me updates as we go. Probably 30 minutes ago, the state police said it's very close to arresting, so, but we all know that sometimes that doesn't happen.  Thank you very much. We are a lot paying attention. You have had people at the station, not right now, but it seems to be going fairly smooth. Do you have the information on B2 alert, the local cultures have been a topic of conversation and I'm just wondering around, I know this kind of lasts forever. Is that something you would need to submit as our EMD? Is there others? What's the process? That's a good question. All the road closures that emergency management has is what we have. So they're getting in, probably through AOT because they've been out and about. And where would one find you, maybe? But that's a good question. They don't take a trip and walk over there, but emergency management has let their emergency operations center because of the flooding and they have gone to their backup. So there's always a challenge in getting accurate information there in that transition point. Yeah. And I guess we're hearing concerns from the public around, and I think it's a 10 and get to wheat fields is a hypothetical we just heard in. We're saying when we have a crowd source, GoogleDOT is one source. Some folks go to the beef tealier or the online thing, but I guess I'm wondering if this, a lot of it is knowing how to get around some roads. Her, yes, absolutely. And others that would just discuss public part offline, not that we're endorsing or saying anything poorly as well. But it is a public accessible high legal.  In order to stop people to have to put a barrier on. That's not even working because if you go over that un-blued, I just got a hold of Lee there. We went down to put more barriers up, down by Napa. Yeah. And down, and then, you said one guy went right up over the sidewalk right on guy's line, around, just to know what to do around it. So he said, I'm about to restart going around. So I'm hearing there's, again, efforts ongoing to make sure we're providing the best guidance we can. There are still challenges with folks implying, and I think maybe an open question with regards to notification that we can vastly be communicating with the public in an ongoing way. Again, just to speak for the present, the Google Doc, the town Facebook page are two avenues available right now in addition to these fake ones. Other questions, comments, next steps, pertinent public updates. We'll figure out what they're about, for Karen and I, we'll figure out what they're about. Great. Karen will work on retailer. I think just to amplify, as was noted, there's going to need to be another response. And so just so that folks know, there are folks who are being impacted. And this is something moving forward. We're going to need to continue to think about supporting immediate short-term and in long-term recovery. Mike, you had asked about notification in the video. Yep. This is really not as in response to this event, but the last week event when the select board had an emergency select board meeting, the thing that I would ask, and I think it's just good policy that it goes out in two different ways. I happened to, I was in the upper valley and forgot I left my phone at a friend's house. So I didn't have my phone for, but I was checking emails. And thanks to Schlagel, I kind of saw our email afterwards. I read, oh, they had an emergency select board meeting. And I think it would be just good policy for the select board. If they do have something, not to just do text to do at least a couple of things, text and email. So because again, you could get email at the moment. Of course, text only if you don't have your phone. You know, you can't get it. But just point, I spoke to both Tom and Roger and then they made the decision, you know. It was after the fact, I apologize to Roger for, you know, I didn't know about the meeting, emergency meeting last week. And we would have attended it if I knew, but it all came via text. My phone was in the upper valley, so it was hard to respond. How'd you get an email? I like to get emails full, I suppose. But I don't have to get through my phone. I usually don't get through my phone. So you have a laptop with you or something? I just, yeah, or on my wife's phone, you know, I could hook onto my, you know, Gmail from anywhere as long as you have some sort of connectivity, so. So two things, I guess just to say thanks, Mike, and heard around information sharing. I guess one, just to acknowledge that was the amendment that was made to the consent agenda was proving the minutes from that emergency meeting. For the BLCT training, I'm sure we all took way back when obviously that's not a thing we're trying to regularly do at any frequency around holding select board meetings. We have one earlier today, again, because there was an imminent situation that was happening. We then take minutes from that. So the fact is, oh, from there, but I think just to say, I'm hearing a select board communication piece, but would also acknowledge, obviously, when we can't notice the public, we intend to do so in as many ways as possible. And it's what it's an emergency situation that. It's more short term. So thank you, Danny, I missed your hand, or I want to make sure I'm getting it. No problem. I just wanted to check in about planning for, tomorrow morning or ongoing communication for the effective folks, knowing that crew is already helping and also wanting to broaden their responsibility and curious if outreach to some of the volunteers to the new response, last response crew and just see if some of those folks are available and might want to come and help or join in and help. I'm not sure if there's going to be a meeting or just ongoing text, but thinking about if it's helpful to pull other folks in and if not, you know, that's okay. But, and that might be more of a Liz. I don't know a question. I'm not really sure. There's lots of them. Yes. Now, the members of the natural disaster preparedness committee, but seeing as we haven't had our first meeting yet, what we, I can see if I can get them to help us volunteer, but as far as any leadership or any solutions we may be able to offer, it might be a little nil. No, just more brains, more brains and more hands. Some people like Danny maybe shouldn't be resting and healing. Liz, did you have anything to add? Just that we will need more hands for sure. Right? I mean, Danny, we don't need to recap the after action report, but there's a lot in there that we need to go do now.  We'll have to go do assessments.  This is serious water. It's not just a little bit of water, you know, so we have to wait and see, right, about how much mud is there. But it's the same situation all over again, right? It just may, what, like we may not need as many dumpsters or pumping, you know, but I think we're going to need all that. Other comments, updates, is that need to be reviewed now? Mm-hmm. Great, that's all right. Well, I would say thank you all. Please stay in touch. It's on the agenda, and we will go from there. Seeing as the members, it was impressive that we've got a very good item. We would stick to our time, and it was up to what you were talking about. Policeman, just one thing we discussed in our afternoon meeting. Is there been any discussion with the church about, you know, housing people? Because I know we've talked about it. Probably the school might pop in a good old term event. And the question is, do we have any people that will need to be housed over there? I have not heard of anyone for schools on call. It's a little bit close for a while. Okay, here we, is the church on standby as well? Probably won't like, I'll head down the road after this meeting, that it will be a place to stay or find an address. And just acknowledging there's a chat saying from Nora, saying folks are worried but have not yet moved from what I've heard, and I would also just say there is a shelter in there, you know, that that's convenient to folks, but that if they are able to get themselves there currently, they don't. Well, it is a Red Cross-operated shelter. So they have facilities and food, and that's at the various civic authorities. We can post that, and we rather get into the various of the other 20, like the town. I'm not taking for granted that there's, I think you can get there right now. Any other comments on this? And I would just note we have next meeting agenda, at the end of our agenda, so it feels that the next meeting needs to be soon, everything addressed at that point. All right, we'll continue on to live in exciting appointments to develop my review board. We have an email here. We've had at least some resignations from this development review board, and we went ahead and offered folks who are currently serving as alternates on this development review board the opportunity to be from full members. And I'm going to email from George Lester, who is an alternate indicator of his interest in becoming a full member, which again would be our third year to a full member of this election. I know George Lester. George Lester to a permanent position on the development review board. Second. With a motion and a second, any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstention? Motion carries. Board is appointed to the development review board. The next appointment we have on the agenda was to the housing task force. As folks may know, Mark Emilio, who was the economic development director at the Library, has left his replacement, Owen, who's last thing I'm linking on, is here and is excited to join the housing task force, but we didn't know as a formality that again, that is something we, as a select board appointed to the other members who should also probably just approve that update. Oh, oh. Motion by Mike. I found his last name, that's all. Thank you, please go ahead. Owen Setto-Cottie. Thank you. You are not with last week, anyway. All right, so motion and a second to appoint Owen to the housing task force. Any further discussion? Right, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Right, I want to split it, thank you, votes. Again, just acknowledging that this is quite the transition, but the agenda I'm going to look for tonight now is presentation of the full 2024 budget, so I'm going to turn it over to Tom. All right. Okay, Danny's signing off. We're going to have some time and just, I'll give you the full presentation and we'll call back departments. Kind of one by one after the follow-ups, we're going through it. Still some numbers to change, it's early, but as of today, assuming the pretty modest grant was right, we're at a 3.9% tax increase, about 64 hours for a family of three or 11. The grant list averages 1% a year for the past decade, so using 7.10% of itself is pretty modest, so using 1% would get us a bit lower, but I feel it gets at least a bit more from that perspective. And then the bottom of the tax rate page, there's that option I had on about using some of our fund balance now to pay off. Pay off and note that goes away in 2025, so there's just two years left, so that will not be about saving interest. That's just about buying down your rate if you want to do that as an option. And then hitting some of the highlights, it goes through a slightly different order than the memo I wrote, just to go through some of the departments. On the highway side, there's no, none of the operational change is proposed. Budget looks a lot different. There's no ARPA funds this year, last year there was a bunch of ARPA funds that passed through the hiring budget. One of the biggest changes is that, and the proposal is that we have a young man who's been working for us for the work department, started a summer help and then we've kept them on, and they really like them exactly, got us glassy water license, which is pretty tough to do, and we did it pretty quickly. So the budget has funding for him, where we essentially agree to a one-third town split, two-thirds e-foot split, and on the town split, which is roughly 700 hours a year, he would do his town work substantially in the summer because we spend so much time and energy and money on mowing our cemeteries in ball fields. So he'd do some of that work, we hopefully save on some contractual fees and hopefully have our experience road through that does mowing in the summer too, if you were one of us to that or more road work. So that's the thought, that's the hope. We feel like he's a good young man and he's proven himself to be his best few months. So I was on the fire team right now, I think he was your junior firefighter of the year. He was, he's a phenomenal young man. We have the opportunity to hire him. So that's part of the proposed line of thought, I would have to agree to pay two-thirds of them long term. Little further down on the budget and expenditure side, lines 41, 42, we are budgeting for pretty substantial increases for the other main is equipment maintenance. And that's the part of the ongoing impact of not having a full-time pack that we've had years past. And we've essentially given up on filling that position because we don't believe we can do is about paying someone 45, 50 bucks an hour. You need a diesel tech rate? Yeah, yeah.  Building a little further down in public works to the second page, there's an increase in salt proposed for line 55. Yes, that's correct. That's line 55, even with our proposal to essentially not solve 10% of our roads, the price per time is up more than that. But before we leave them, have a head fair. I hope people would move out of the way. I'm going to move out of the way. Nothing else really major in that department. If we move to the capital side, which is the next page, and there was an agreement in last year to consolidate some of the capital funds. So we used to have three capital funds for highway and a consolidated into one. But in essence, we're making a bump up on the paying side. We've got $45,000 extra divided for payment. That's about 10%, that's nice to see. Keeping some money in there for sidewalks. We spent pretty substantial amounts of sidewalks in the past, generally for the Main Street project, but this would be our own sidewalks off of that project. Generally, some of the sidewalks that were shaped around the squirrel. Not a lot of money, especially if the contract we inherited out of help, but we hope to do 500 feet a year, that sort of thing, and we keep checking the way at it. The pretty substantial amount in there for bridge improvements, that is for the state project, the So Street bridge. So we spent about $35,000 on that already. Arch jargon is 175% of the 3.4 million. So we're going to spend, I think the bulk of that in 2024 and then some in 2025, but still pretty cheap way to get a new bridge. There's always a little bit of money in public response for those of the improvements. The doors are an issue. There's always some minor issues and it doesn't take a lot, spend 20 grand. We better need more of this year in case we get to work. Got a big change for this year is we are not proposing to buy a truck or a greater, any piece of heavy equipment. We're having a debate about what we want next and part of the thinking is, is that if we're going to sell a barrier for material, sand, gravel, crack, film, as is everyone else in our area, we might want to buy a tandem dump truck. We have one, we traditionally got one in it, but we might get a second because of 10s and both 60 yards. We're not convincing that and they can cheaper to contract it out. Yeah, we're requiring both of the drugs. Yeah, and we have someone who is essentially almost that already. I expect we will come to you in the spring with a proposal to order a truck contention on 2025 order approval. But if we order a truck in the spring from what we're hearing now, if it's a tandem, it's two years. And in fact, the truck that we ordered this past year, we got a delivery of the chassis a few months ago and just this week we will get, so we had it, we can't use it as nobody just this week, it went out for the buy. So that was a truck order to over a year ago now, but I will finally get in service 15 months later. So that's just the timelines for these things. It's made a little bit worse because the internationals are switching engines. And so when we called international recently for a quote, it couldn't give us one. So couldn't order it, couldn't give us our names. Call us back any moment. So we're simply not ready and our fleet is pretty good, but we will right now. Do we ever look at, you know, there's basically a salary down in Tennessee and some of the southern states itself, you know, tandem jobs and things like that. Yeah, we look at the online auctions, we look at, you know, the military service, we sort of look everywhere. All that stuff, even all that older stuff goes for a real premium these days. It's no such thing, it's just children. It's not a bargain.  So we had, to give you an example, our, we had a Ford F-150, we sold it suddenly at auction. It didn't drive, we know the deep, we advertise it as we know that the turbo diesel was shot. So we had a vehicle that didn't drive, that was an older vehicle on its second engine and we got almost 20 grand for it. They're buying it, but we weren't hoping to get anything for it, I think at that point. So I don't see them getting, I guess in vehicles in general, the appreciation standards, the rules have changed dramatically for any type of vehicle, whether it's work or consumer. But you just ask what I can see with the numbers. Chris, you have a question? Yeah, I want to use back up a little bit. I thought we grabbed an issue. Has the town given up on the ori? Yeah. Rewinds that. You hit a wall there. Yeah, we hit a wall there actually, the state just a week or so ago, they published a unit management plan for the whole Worcester range. Essentially, you make the request through the Department of Forests and Parks. The Department of Forests and Parks, they're there to protect the state forest and they're not interested in negotiating, even if I were to offer, which the town doesn't know, but if I were to offer the waterworks, which is hundreds of acres in exchange for five acres or so, I don't think they'd say yes, their jobs to protect the state forest and what they have. So I think if there's ever going to be access, right, so like a solution, it's not going to go through a state agency. I think I got that message pretty well. Yeah, sorry, my question is, let me just tell me that Dr. Perry just had a, I thought he was going to be there the night about the same time. Yeah. In fact, throughout this entire central Monterey area, this, I mean, there will be substantial issues. Yeah. So many of these teams moved. Yeah, and the irony is that the state would have developed it, they probably could within the months that it was. But yeah, they're pretty hard to know on the issue. Towns, where would you draft an interview or would you just tell them the same thing and how it's kept to that point? Yeah, I think so. I think so. That's the need for the Dan and Trump. Perhaps. And I guess I would just say to reiterate, Tom, you have gone and presented to the applicable and our folks, right, at a previous meeting. So this is a relatively recent development in terms of it not being included in the plan. Yeah. I just want to say the town did do diligence in terms of trying to move it forward. Very, very important problem to us timing there. When I made the presentation, they were essentially finalizing their management plan, which nobody public comment on. It's a 10 year plan. So in the year 2030 or 2031, it's a good time to take up the issue, but it was not a good time in 2022. Well, they don't know how to bring that up. We're going to repeat legislators and someone told me how to do it and do it. It wouldn't even entertain my uncle. I don't know that it was that seems like they do that.  I'm probably but during these rules a little bit. But the Department of Forestry. Entertainment and swap. If there was their initiative, if they needed the land, they wanted the land. Otherwise there, they're pretty reluctant to do it. And you've seen that around the state with other entities that saw land swaps. I think the legislative solution would be very welcome. Yeah, I can understand that that was like a critical habitat and something like that, that they would want to be used. There's nothing more like critical about that space. Other than being there. It's critical from the perspective that you have. Yeah. You enter from their perspective, it's critical to interrupt the hiking, you interrupt the, you know, so it's in the heart of the wildlife corridor. There's going to be some disturbance. You don't, you don't blast. So we'll see. I don't see, you know, you know, if it's not that far from, from the hiking trail. What essentially we know for it was to go in the middle of the stream. We have to try this there. The pond is not a classified wetland or, and they seem to agree. They even talked about the stream that flows in there. It's not really, it was disturbed in the first place. So maybe as part of it, there could be some, some reclamation work for the stream. And we would leave them in the end, a flat parking lot, which there's over a well now. Right. So we thought that was a pretty good deal. And we said, and I said, I don't have. You know, I'm talking for the town, but if I go home to land, and there could be some possibility of the town where you would be put on the land spot, because that was part of it. But in the end, it's simply not how I will party list. Sure. So. Um, the other piece in the capital budget, we talked about it, and we invited it for an excavator last year. We decided not to make that purchase this year. Part of it was. We didn't put as many hours of them on the rental excavator. We got this summer part that was due to the flood response. We really couldn't. So we decided to just keep renting an excavator. For now. Those are. Excavators are something we can buy in a lot. They're generally available. And. So we, at this point, we're just sitting in the box, but we're just going to keep renting. There was money in the last year's budget for gravel. That stays in the capital fund. So we don't necessarily need to be appropriated. You could in theory, but it doesn't change the bottom line to anything. But essentially, it's the market bunch you allocated towards that. Didn't get to that as here. That's one of the stories of the flood is, is not that it necessarily cost us. A lot of cash. It cost us time and energy. And it costs us the ability to do other things. And then rose for one of them. So we're hoping to. Make a gravel road. I've got the big primary and do that as soon as we can in spring. And based on the roads this year, public works as many towards the bottom of sweet road. That might change a little bit. And then the winter. But that's there. That's their current thinking. And then perhaps in 2025, we'll have a budget with local open taxes. And so. Sorry, these numbers can change pretty substantially. Wine. Oh, that doesn't have a wine number. A cemetery vehicle. Is that in reference to the. The roller. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was purchased this year. Cemetery parks. Choose for the great. We're going to use it. I guess that's less than a salary. Yeah. Less than a salary. The library is next in the packet. In the library, I think we'll have a preppy property. Even conversation with Fiona and Rachel and the library board. When, and I can have detail at a later meeting and we can have. Named if we need to or go to executive session. If we need to, but. The long and short of it is. When you take as. Objective that you can look at library staff. And. And what they do. Versus some of the town administrative staff. There's about a $4 and I are differential on that. And you could argue, well, you know, the town administrative staff deal with angry taxpayers. People who have angry water and sword. That's true. Library deals with an awful lot more foot traffic. And to the extent we've had. Some challenging social issues.  But when I look at the jobs, I view them as. Relatively similar and complexity. Relatively similar in terms of the public interaction. And a lot of other categories. So we sought to try to. Bring libraries salaries. Up to a level. Pretty consistent with the town salaries. And so that's a big increase. That's a near $30,000 increase in payroll for the library. The other big thing we can't control is. Is help benefits. The library is not having any staff, but a couple of people changed and decided to go on our help. Which they can. And you see in the year 40,000 degrees for that. So effectively have the libraries increases to. Health care changes beyond that control. And sometimes. That impacts a challenge of a positive way. From Angelin sometimes not. I brought forth a proposal through the library board. and pass it down in a positive way, but financially and sometimes not. I brought forth a proposal to the library board. The library for some years now has given $30,000 from the trust fund, which is essentially skimming the earnings off the top. The library has a $600,000 trust fund, so that's been pretty close to the earnings in recent years. We actually found an old trust fund policy from, I'll choose, I forget what year, about 10, 15 years ago. We found a couple versions. They were slightly different. Neither one was signed, but nonetheless, policy is not law. But the policy said essentially what we've been doing, which is take the earnings off the top. Policy can be set by the board. Policy can be changed by the board. The board can make exceptions. So I proposed to the library board that as a one-time exception, the amount taken from the trust fund should be increased to help pay for these salaries. I thought it was a pretty reasonable proposal, and I think they did too, because they did not agree. Part of it is I think they've got a new treasurer, and rightfully so, they wanna warn a little about the funds and safeguard them. And part of it is I think they're just concerned about precedent and going beyond that 5%. The argument I made to the library board, which I'll make a little bit today is you have trust funds for a few reasons. One reason is you have financial stability. You've got this endowment, if you will, to draw into it if you need to. And one other reason that's common is you build a trust fund. If you've got a big goal, you need to build a building, for example. And in fact, the library board agreed some years ago that when this building was built, that it had certain fundraising targets that they would make up for with the trust fund. That was agreement with the library board and the select board. Right now, there was a big challenge in what we did in Vermont and the country, and that's labor. That's finding employees and retaining employees. So I thought given the trust fund is healthy, given this is our major challenge of the day, tapping into it for an extra 15 grand in one year wasn't unreasonable. One of the questions the library board has was can you guarantee it's just one year? And I said, I can give you my handshake. I can give you my word and it makes every effort that it's for one year, but the year is a long time. So I can't 100% guarantee it, but I can, I think, 99% guarantee it. And I can guarantee you that from my perspective, I'm in a straight-up renerve to get you back to the 30 and 2025. In the end, they weren't comfortable. Where I think the conversation has to happen at some point is the select board cannot tell the library board that you need to withdraw more money from the trust fund. That's not to my knowledge in your legal authority. It's a little bit of a gray area about what the financial boundaries are between the select board and the library board, but it is not a gray area that you can say to the library board that we think your total increase is too high and we are reducing it or we are advising you to reduce it in an intelligent way. So you have to power the person in the end. You just don't have to tell them specifically you have to take it from the trust, but you can tell them we are not appropriating $632,000 to the library. Some other lower number. You could figure it out. What do you want? You could lay someone off. You could cut your personages. You could do what you need to. But ultimately, this is a number that we'll approve without basically saying take it from the trust fund and let them make that decision. Yeah, so it's not a closed issue. I think it's a dangling part of SIPL. I don't think they're closed to it. I think it's a bit of a conversation. And part of what they said, which is fair, which is that, hey, if our staff have been underrated for all these years, why should we take an extra fix and an equity that shouldn't be there? And then it's not a bad argument to make. So I think we just need to have a conversation with the library board and find some resolution. I don't feel that's a big conflict. I just think at a future meeting, probably the two boards need to meet with the town manager and the library director and we'll return this. You know, unless, as you said, they had some sort of overwhelming reason that they need all this money in their endowment. Otherwise, with having that endowment, the taxpayers, when you have this big savings account, it's just like all these universities that have these huge endowments. I don't understand why they don't decrease tuition per case, you know, when they have, you know, some of them have a $80 over a billion dollars in endowments, but my personal opinion. And then I can talk about how we were thinking of structuring the pay increases, but that's names that some of those, some of those more sensitive issues. So I think that's probably better discussed with the library board president. Part of it is I'm concerned with the total dollars for paying increases, but I'm also sensitive to how they want to spend that increase and how they want to get people to stay up. So I didn't want to have a top down approach there. Would it seem worth it to put a select board to sit down with the library board? I think a separate meeting when we review the library budget, I think we can have that conversation. And it was a really good conversation. It's, you know, it's not a confrontation with Shavilla. Their job and large part is to guard the trust fund. So I didn't expect them to why do we say, sure, let's go ahead and take a hundred while we're at it. They're doing their job and they're doing well. And they're advocating hard for their staff, which is also their job. I see Bill has his hand up. And again, just in terms of orientation for Keynes Boy, I just want to say, like it is high level review, I want to just orient and take that. I think Tom's goal is to thank you for our Christmas present of a full draft budget. But that part of this is identifying why areas need more follow up bills. Yeah. Do you want to make just for the start? I think Tom's right. Just a little background because, you know, the library had abandoned offices here over my tenure. When I came, the library that was in this building was a not-for-profit library. It was not owned by the town. The town had a library at the Waukes Center. I won't go through all the history of how we put the two together, but the town did it in stages. We took the employees on. We provided additional money, but the library, not-for-profit owned the building and they owned the trust. And they were indeed trustees of that library trust. Long story short, there was an agreement between the town and the library commissioners because the town agreed to go to a bug boat to try to expand the library while it was still not-for-profit. And the select board agreed to hold the boat, but said recommended to the voters to turn that down because they said we shouldn't be binding for something that we don't own. After that failed, the library and the town got together and in essence, the library commissioners who were elected and the library trustees who were self-appointed board, they joined to be a super board for a couple of years. They had 11 or 12 members all together and they now are back down to the five and they owned the elected library commissioners and they are still the trustees of the library trust. However, unlike when it was a not-for-profit corporation, the public library trust now is a trust. It has to be used for the benefit of the library, but I believe that somebody remembered and alleged how meeting could make a motion and say, I vote that we increase the transfer from the library trust to the general fund, if you will. I think that I would encourage- I believe that's true. I don't believe the select board can do it on its own. No, I remember in the public has to make a motion. Well, the select board member is a member of the public. I mean, I'm not here to tell you you should have a mutiny or have a will. I think your idea of sitting down with them and talking to them, but there are members of the library trust, there are commissioners who tend to think that this is really the library's money, it's not the town's money. It is clearly the town's money now. I think that, you know, the conversation comes exactly right. I mean, the select board can go to the public and tell the library commissioners, we're going to recommend a tax appropriation of $600,000 or whatever the number is. And that can be amended up or down at that meeting as well. If they think it's not enough and the library commissioners get up and ask for more and the voters say we'll give you a 625, that's the way it works. But I think that the trust has been well managed over time and taking a little bit more help now, I think is a reasonable thing to do. The, a lot has changed in the post pandemic years in terms of where salaries have gone. I'm not convinced that the library salaries have been woefully under what they should have been for a long time. Maybe they are now, I'm not disagreeing. But I think you can work out something reasonable with them. And, you know, it was a pretty fitful year in the stock market, but the last few months have been pretty good and they can probably stand a little bit of taking a little bit more thought, but it's a conversation that you should have with them. But I think the library commissioners, if they look around our library, I believe gets a much higher percentage of its revenue from the taxpayers than most of the libraries that are around here, especially those that have endowments. I think library has done a really good job of supporting the library with tax money. And, you know, Tom's got a budget money now that's about a 3% tax increase. And if you can do that, especially given everything that's happened and is happening out there, it's not going to be fun. I mean, that's going to be a major victory. So I think that everybody needs to kind of contribute where they can. And I would encourage you to, you know, work with the commissioners and figure it out. But we've done this in the past and there have been times where, you know, the number has gone up and down. It was 15, it was 18. And the last couple of years it's been 30, but I think it's at least the most request.  Obviously I was on the board, we did not have any of the staff really represented. I don't know if you can speak to that. I feel like that strikes me as a time there was an increase. In my mind, the library trust is getting to the point where you can do what you do with the tax stabilization fund. The tax stabilization fund at the beginning of the year, I don't know what it is now, but it was about a million dollars. And we used to have this complicated formula that, you know, if the stock market had to go up at least 3% people would take anything out of the fund and then the next 5% would go to the general fund and then above 8% would be split 60, 40 here and there. We've got the tax stabilization fund to a point where we just say, you know, you can take your 5% out and whether the stock market goes down 20% or up 15%, if you only take 5% out, they'll be reviled and you're gonna be okay. I think the reason why in those years, Melissa, especially the one that was 14, my guess would be that the stock market probably didn't perform well that year and, you know, 2020. You know, so it was just, you know, a little bit of conservative budgeting, you know, let's take out less because the value of the portfolio went down. I don't know all the other parameters, but clearly we made the budget work. And in recent years, was there a market increase for some reason? I have this big recollection that like, oh, we just recently did a thing where we asked them to contribute more for some reason, but that could be entirely. Well, I mean, we went from 14 to 26 in the last two years, I think, or 30. Yeah.  But anyway, I think it's something that you should definitely talk about with them. And I think that the public has done a great job of supporting the library with its tax dollars. And yeah, you can't guarantee that you're not going to ask for more money next year, but they need to remember that Joe Smith can make a motion and say, you know, take more out of the trust. And if the public says, OK, that's what happens. Thank you. On to one. So before you move on to the next question of clarification, so not having this paper tonight for the first time, I haven't had a chance to look you up. But on the library, you've got, it's like you're up 77, almost 78,000. Unless that's taxes, yeah, it's all taxes, basically. Yeah.  You're almost at a watch. Yeah. So my question is, to ask more from the trust, can you explain the reason for that? So if we ask for more from your trust, it's going to go over the town tax, absolutely. And that's the reason to try to find some balance. And in short, if we're asking the town taxpayers to pay roughly 75,000 more for the library, then asking the trust to cover a fifth of that strikes me as reasonable, reasonable answer in that part. Yeah, I'll give you the term to read it. I didn't have any questions about that. I didn't put the trust readable in there because it's not a guarantee. You're welcome. I don't think so. So far, we've said no. Yeah, right now, it's positive, 77% of it. Right, but it's all taxes. The very top line is taxes. So from your view, it's up to down a bunch. So one way to think of the library budget is, so the very first page of this, total taxes are up a little over 200,000. They're about a third of that. And every penny to get a penny in our tax rate is about $0.78 grand, $0.79 grand. So they're almost a penny every just for the library in one year. So hence, I thought of going to the trust for a little bit more. I thought it was a reasonable ask. And so this is just another question. So are the fees off of annual? They do charge non-resident fees. I forget what a non-resident card costs off in, 25. I'd like to ask something about that.  So libraries in general have moved to a model where the non-resident fees tend to be low for all parts of broader networks where you can do inter-library loans, but the days of libraries booking overdue fines generally have gone the way of doing that sort of thing. So I think they could get a little more from non-resident fees, but it's mostly the resident part of it. If it's 25 bucks and we're talking six grand a year or something like that, and fees for hundreds of people, we're not thousands of people. Karen has a question, and then I just want to be mindful that this is a preliminary discussion. It feels like there's more to begin from this one, but also that if Tom gets to the phone with you, but Karen, go ahead. Well, it was very specific to that topic. I wonder when the last time the library audited their non-residents, because there's a lot of individuals that come into our office believing they're one of very residents. They live in Duxbury, they live in Moortown, they live in Bolton. So I wonder, and I don't think that that's thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars by any means, but I just wondered the last time that list was audited for accuracy. Fair play. Good point. I have some succinct readings for the resident. Folks to come to the library just kind of a piece of old work, it's a new one. Absolutely, I'm talking about non-residents, rental fees, rentals, cars, and the library. Got you. Yeah, we're hearing what's recognizing more, barely a form of the board right now. It's not like this is the topic. We're going to dig more into it. This is just a question of the time, though. I mean, I know it's not a lot of money, but the 2023 budget for the library in this piece was $4763. We've taken in $4900, and we're only budgeting $1500 next year. Why not budget $4700? So there's a proposal to have the town of Duxbury pay a fee to the library in Duxbury residents. Duxbury are treated as residents, so if the town of Duxbury says no, that money just goes back until the other one. Okay. So there's really no mention of that. Duxbury used to pay, and then they decided not to pay. And so that, Duxbury paid a little bit more than that. But Duxbury ended up basically telling the residents that don't want to pay more than that. And what I've heard is Duxbury staff are now saying that's more household than it's worth. Let's just pay water, Mary, and stop dealing with the rent. Okay. I didn't see that you were going to fix that one. Thanks. I'm complaining, but there's a lot of that. Department's changed, thinking changed when you have new staff, and we've got Neil, who's not quite new, but he's still relatively new. He's in a different role, like Mike, who's a very different personality while he's treated in a lot of respects. But we've thought a lot about this budget and thought a lot about the future and reached a few pretty strong conclusions. The first is they spent the last six months looking at different software options, and they've picked one. They're all more or less for towns that are size-dependently priced. Basically, 19.5 and the first year will go down to 15 or 16 the second year because there's one high startup cost, and that's related to digitization of some of our existing files. Simple way I think of the software is if the select board creates a rental registry, people can go online and join a rental registry and not at the come-to-town hall. But in general, the permitting process would be entirely online. They would also connect to the town of Worcester, so anything in the pipe he would see, he would be able to track it well for grant list purposes, which has been important for the permitting process. The DRP would have access to it. Get them away from the paper, which they want to be made tracking easier, make the financial tracking easier. So it's a big goal of theirs, and I think ultimately it would freeze up staff time. The other piece we talked about at some length, which is a pretty substantial cost, is zoning enforcement, which the DRP wants, and I've heard from the select board and various coaches, they want more of. I haven't done that in a major debate for a while, at least to my knowledge. And so what we've talked about is working with a council, not in anticipation of higher legal fees going on, because we're gonna be getting legal battles to people, but to an essence, write the script and help us up front, so we're avoiding those legal challenges later on. So part of that is dealing with a few dangling participants where we know there's violations today and how we address those. Part of that is just going forward to make sure we have better enforcement. So we view the legal budget as a one-time bump. It probably won't go back to the tandem, probably go back to more of 11 or 12, but we view it mostly as a one-time bump. And then the other big thing is, and I'll have the detail on this for you very soon or the detail, but we've looked real hard at our fees, we're looking at comparative towns and we're really low on our fees. And so we're gonna bring you a proposal and I'll have that well before your next meeting, probably at the end of this week. I hope to be working on that today and finalizing it. Our permits now are a set fee. We're gonna tie that on the set fee per square foot. And we're thinking in various, there's different types of permits, different components, but your base permit for the centrally-construction permit will be the first square foot basis. And then we're thinking about proposing some reductions for development on this boat water and soar and perhaps a non-profit reduction. But we'll have that for you likely in the next few days for future conversation, but in looking at other towns of our size with fees in this structure, we're looking at our best development. We think $50,000 a year is quite reasonable.  And with the reductions for the development where the planning commissioners trying to drive it in our developed downtown. Most of the development in our downtown is really redevelopment. So that if the fee is on a square foot basis, there's not a lot of square footage added. Whether it be in Stanley Watson, sure. But most of this is redevelopment. So that the square footage is huge. But sometimes square footage is Waterbury Center, especially for submissive and family residential are pretty big. So I think it's time, I tried to find, we tried to find the last time the fees were updated but it's not really clear to me our financial records go back 14, 15 years and one of those late years, our revenue went from 10, 12 to 25, 30 in kind of state of that level. So I suspect that's when it was but I didn't find a select order minutes that reflected that. But it's been some time. And looking at other towns, what we're gonna propose is really comparable to other towns of our size. And I think that's a pretty critical part of this process. Something I've said to departments is it's not always possible but if we have new initiatives like software, we should try to pay for that with non-property tax revenue if we can. So yeah, folks, if you're building a house in the Waterbury Center and it's a 3,000 per foot house, is there gonna be a pretty substantial fee? Yeah, in the context of your 3,000 per foot house that probably costs a million bucks is substantial. In that perspective, I don't even know. But we'll have that before you with some time to consider. Can I ask about some of these special projects? Yeah, those are not in because those are essentially done. Oh, are they? Yeah, what we did keep in the budget and I'm glad you raised that because I forgot to mention that is we did bump up the budget for professional services. And the rationale behind that is we've used the SE Group on the bylaws update. And that's generally paid for by brand that they could get it before my time was still finishing that bit. But the bylaws are just a part of it, a part of it accounts out of 89. There's the whole rest of the town. PC is working well with staff. They're moving along pretty quick and I didn't want to end that momentum. So I think some money for the SE Group is gonna be helpful. And the best example I put out is the last open house, the visuals that were put together. I thought made it really easy for a lay person to understand the zoning changes. I thought that was worth the money. So part of it is, big part of it is for the SE Group. I think we just want to continue that relationship and keep it going. And then part of the conversation is what is phase two of the bylaws? I would argue phase two is not the rest of water, because that's too much. I would argue phase two is let's pick a chunk. Whoever we wanted to find that. Billy, Billy, thank you, are aware of his dual conservation planning commission, kind of said. You know, maybe that should be a zoning overlay district for the Wildlife Board or maybe that stays till we start there. So I actually think it's a really good idea. But I think we want to give the PC date by a set schedule. They're gonna have their public meeting soon. They're gonna put their bylaws to you pretty soon. I think after that, given they've been meeting weekly for a long time, I think we should reasonably expect them to read a little bit, maybe just need bi-weekly or even take a month off. But they're gonna want to get into it. And I think we just want to get in that level of their professional help. It gets worse so far. Oh, I think you could make an argument that SE Group should keep that every year, because while our fees are a little relative to a lot of our surrounding places, our staffing is pretty low comparatively as well. And I think that those, when you just described in terms of the open house, that was definitely worth the money. But I think there's probably plenty of stuff that were $10,000, $15,000 to any consultant who did a lot more than that. And we've got two staff people here trying to do all of it. So it's good. The other thing I want to point out on my fees, and I want to say this specifically, because Neil tells me to say it is that Dana Allen on the planning commission has a mapping background, and does a lot of that for the PC that we otherwise probably have to pay for. So we're talking budgets, Dana says, I spoke about cash. A lot of our volunteers do, I just want to say that since we're on this budget. Thank you.   Yeah. So we met with, What's up? I'm sorry? Why? For some years, I forget the company name, but we've had a, we've had a relationship with Lanko Shabudal and his company, who's maintained the rounded outs and on a tremendous basis. Yeah. The guy on the same job that you were. Yeah, we identified this year, what Jared and Evan call the orphan gardens, which are just these, these little green spaces that we determined we own that no one's really taken care of. And they got some complaints about them. So we wanted to just make sure we budget for it and use my services or someone else's services to maintain that. I know I'm starting off like, just want to know what an orphan garden is. And then Karen, in her first budget, for some other work herself that she really didn't have a whole lot of money for. Right. We talked about beautification in general and maybe beating that up a little bit. The other thing we talked about is at lefty's funeral, they gave away sunflower seeds to plant in his memory. And so we thought some of our gardens led to a sunflower theme this year. And the honor of lefty was a nice idea. Does the garden call for any money or is that just? I don't know. I've never, perhaps they already thought that. Because I know they were always like the roundabout, they used to do always do the planting and stuff. But it's like every day, you know, things seem to be hard to get involved. Yeah, they, once the roundabout was built to a roundabout, we didn't come up on that. Okay, where was it from? They used to, when we had the little solidarity down there on the shore, when it was still rude to a hundred-year-old. Right. It's dysfunctional, after we did it in the section to garden a lot like that. But ever since we had the roundabout and along with this, like this, this still out here to Leipzig and stuff like that. Yeah. And I think month is going to work in the beginning for the garden. They did a good job on the, they took away from the rotary, putting up all the garland and decoration. Okay. Very nice. So last one, I would just say since that first focus, I look forward to revisiting both the software and the, I'm sorry, outwardly opposed to either of them. I think they're both really positive developments. I think we want to just, especially in planning. So I mean, think about like regular Joe homeowner who's trying to build a debt and what that's going to need for them. So again, for future conversation, but just want to dig into that. And I would also just know, coming on the field of our library conversation, if we're moving to all online permitting and that's not a requirement for someone, just noting our library is all where we have public access to the internet. So I don't know if that's going to become a proposal. This is to be adopted. Interesting. Okay. Moving on to rep, we had presented back in August. So there's, and that was in the context of hiring, we've now hired, there's essentially no pay, sorry, essentially no real change from what was presented in August. But we've learned some things between now and then that I think I would talk about. First is on the pool. We've learned that a number of pools in Vermont have public swimmers with no lifeguards and no lifeguards are not free. So we've thought about that and we're going to have that conversation with our pool manager. And to some extent, I think, simple examples, there's a swim team seems a little bit incongruous to me that we, I know the swim team pays us for the fee for using the pool, but you've got swim instructors, you've got kids in a swim team, seems a little bit incongruous that we need additional lifeguards there. There's also public swim hours. Typically after rec pools is during the week and there are pools that have public swim hours without lifeguards. The part of it is a lot of public pools are essentially primarily used by the rec programs and not a whole lot by the public beyond that. And we'll be looking at the number of people that use our pool. And this summer was a terrible example because it was cold and cloudy on good days. But we're paying a couple of lifeguards, 18 bucks an hour and we have people, we have three or four families come in and we're pretty happy. So we're losing the public water money, not a lot of each day, but it all adds up. And so there are towns that have a swim at your own risk and the insurance is comfortable with that and maybe we need to get there to better balance the pool. I also haven't read it because it came in on my email today but Alec has given me a draft of the pool study. So we're getting there. We showed out pretty soon some pretty queer recommendations that where things were headed. And I view that as, you know, I've been saying for a while to staff that I view the pool or perhaps a graph facility as something that we're really not ready for. I've said, you know, let's give our staff a full year to get their feet wet, be better introduced to the public and to grow some of these revenues. And then perhaps 2025 will be the year where planning in 2026 would be the bottom of all. Maybe that timeline changes a little bit. Maybe it doesn't, but that's just my current thinking. But I'm impressed by our staff. The other piece we've talked about a lot is the after-school program and looking at what some other towns see that we can do. So some towns, for example, offer snow day coverage send your kids to our rec facility or snow days. That's a little tough to do sometimes. You don't know when the snow days are, you don't know what demand is for kids, but we've already changed that we're now taking kids and in service days because those are planned and that's all revenue with margins, but it's revenue. And so they're working hard on just creative options like that to pump up the revenue. And then on the summer side, you know, we're basically 100 bucks a week for, you know, nearly 50 hours a week of our day camp. And I understand that those rates are low because a big part of this is public service. We are childcare for working families. And that's important to the community. And we've got, you know, at our pack last year, we had 165 kids there for one day. So that's a big deal if your parents and you're trying to make ends meet and having 100 bucks a week is a great deal. And I still think it's going to be a great deal in 2024, but it's not going to be 100 bucks a week because at 100 bucks a week, it really moves a pretty substantial amount of money. Now that the private market is more like 50 to 100 bucks a day. So we're still at HEPA bar if we charge 120 to 125 bucks a week. So I think that's where we're headed, but we're also, I think now that we've got two full time for our staff versus I think we're working towards, you know, better programming, so better outcomes during the summer. So I think parents are going to pay more, but I think parents are going to see some value there. And then we're going to work real hard over the next few months on recruiting. You know, our rec program is no different than the other public rec program because that you see and truly rely on high school kids and some college kids. And we need some, we need some older people to know, so we're going to work really hard at that.  Guess what? You're going to work for us this summer. Doesn't that be 40 hours a week? Give me a day a week, give me 15 hours a week. But someone who, someone like him who was, you know, skilled and experienced working with kids and known to the community, I think helps us out a lot. So I'm hoping I can get a few people like him to help the counselors at our camps. So I think we're moving in a positive direction. We've also looked hard at some of the expenses. We've, the last few years done a number of bus trips in the summer and I spent a lot of time personally talking to parents.  And I said, why? And they said, well, you know, we live near a really nice one. And it's a long day for the kids. And the staff said, you know, it's really tough because, you know, we've all got a category of kids and we're doing headcounts all day to make sure we're not losing them. And it's easy to pull with clear water. It's harder in a murky lake if you're just sort of at what's end. So I think our strategy is we've got two rec fans that we can take between kids and counselors, you know, 20, 25 people. We'll do trips to stay parks all the time but we'll do small groups and maybe we'll do one bigger trip to sort of close out the summer. But we've got these fans working for our parents. It'll be a bit more local. You know, it might be the Resport, it might be Haiti, things like that. But we really don't love the concept of putting 150 kids in buses and it's just a lot of work for the staff. And I can see that. The other piece, nothing really changing on the park slide. We've got some money in the budget that would be grand natural funds for the whole recurrent that we applied for. It'll be some time before we hear about that. Nothing else really huge we change is what we presented in August. Again, I think we're, even if we have a pool number, to me, we're not ready in the near term for any sort of decision by the public because I think we need more time for our staff to get familiar with the pool and to run it in years. I think we want to make sure operationally we work out all the kinks and we're running a really good operation before we ask the taxpayers, presumably for millions of dollars. I want to first be able to say that with a straight face that we're really good at running a pool before we say, hey, let's ask, let's just ask for money and solve a problem that way. It's an old pool, it was really tough to maintain this type of summer. There was out of the issues that we just couldn't quite deal with. The rain made it a whole lot worse. Kyle, I had in the water department to his credit that a lot of work in the drain and we think that helped with some of the water loss, but in the end, we've had issues mixing water in the shallow end and we still have a ton of water loss about equal to the volume of the pool. So it's, we lower the water a bit for the winter and it stays there. So it's in the, it's in the system and the water exchange system up high. It's not the drain in the bottom. But in the end, without reading the study, that's a very good pool. So whether we call it a new pool or build it nowadays, it's essentially a new pool. And then we raise a question about with the teenage staffing, the high schoolers staffing that we have underpants and a pool. Are we going to be able to compete what the private sector is paying teenagers for their labor? We rate, we, so historically, and what water barriers done historically is from what I found comparable to have the other talent for mine, the hierarchy of a certain age and every year they go for about an hour to help keep them around the back. We started in kids at 16 bucks an hour. And there's, here started, you know, a sophomore in high school, year 18 as a senior. I felt like that was all too competitive. Feels like they had a way to me. At the, the challenge. Oh, so I was making the 60s. So to me, my, my observation was that we need to do a better job so our early recruiting kids. Last summer, everything turned over and was just going to do the stuff we got through it. So a better job recruiting early or really work hard on, you know, those kids that are selling at school and doing extra critical activities and really are a side of that and don't just get a job. Part of it too is, you know, the day starts early and ends late. And most high school kids are pretty burnt out at the end of the day and by the last few weeks is somewhere they're really burnt out. And so we need far fewer people working full time. Or if they're full time, it's really 40 and not 50. So if we can get a bigger quadrate of kids we can rotate, we can set schedules better and move kids around a little differently. But yeah, there's a lot of burnout. So I'm not sure the challenge is wages. I think it's actually a pretty tough job. As the young kids, you know, they're energy AC's ours. So you've got to be on all the time. And I think some of our staff were born pretty thin by the end when I was at home. All right. No big changes in parts in trying to get the total budget. I mean, put around 100 grand for a while. And on the capital side, not putting a lot of money into the capital side. Partly because sometimes you over budget on the capital side to save something. But if there's a future of a pool replacement which isn't important conclusion, of course, I'm also allowed to happen between now and that if there is one for a rep building. Those are not small items. Those are multi-million bond items. And so I really can see the point of saving that 20 grand as a down payment for something that might cost three or four minutes. If it was something that might cost 100 grand and divided two or three years, I'd say, well, maybe you want to save and basically cash. But those are pretty big picture items that might be in our future. And the final thing I just want to say about the pool is we haven't just talked about a new pool similar to its current form. We've also said, hey, the pool is substantially for the summer rec program and not used all of that much by the public even in its best years. It's used by the public, but not hundreds of people. And that part of that I think is I think the reservoir is a pretty decent place to swim. Pretty inviting, pretty cheap. So we've said, well, there could be an array of options that we discuss in detail when we're there. And one is replaceable as it is. One could be a smaller pool that's really just for rec. Still could be public, but smaller pools, save some money. And one is to try to engage with the state and say, hey, maybe whatever your residents come to the reservoir and they show their license and they get in for free and you bill us. And maybe that's a reasonable thing to consider. We'd have, in my judgment, we want to talk about some increased usage so we can do things like swim lessons. And I think that's a good public service, but we're not just working blindly towards multiling a dollar in a pool. There's, I think, the right options to talk about. I like how they do. I'll let you have a second. Thank you, Dr. Wright. Go ahead. Can you explain, maybe I can do some terms of a line 45 where we're at a salary? I know in 2022, it was 89, that was probably when SNCC native was here and that's his responsibilities. The position was kind of raised. How we've gotten to, I know, last year, we budgeted 78 and we were actually at 66. And that was, I think, because of vacancies and stuff like that. But how have we gotten now up to, have you tell what sales 125? So that's our two full-time people. Yeah, that looks good. Two full-time? Yeah. How much each one is? Well, it says the change for this year is 48.5. Yeah, so the new hire is almost exactly that. That's okay, so that's exactly what we're... New hire? Yeah, and then for the summer pay below that, the staff are gonna spend a substantial amount of time in the summer camps, obviously. So I just still need that army with a high schoolers and college kids. That's all I thought, but I just wanted to make sure it's not a significant increase from what it previously was, because it had increased. And have you know that the person was at 48? And that's part of the needs of the great increases. And would you do something? No, it's just cold. I think it's... It said it's 79 for the record, so, but I'm shivering. Persevering. Moving on to Cemetery. Cemetery has been a difficult issue over the past year or two. I think now I use books. A couple of fundamental issues. The road crew and public works. Various places in the budget, we pay other town departments. We have one too in the cemetery, but perhaps we should, because the road crew does an April Street Cemetery. For a long time, we had a company that mowed in the Tramp Hope Cemetery. I don't know if it was company, I think it was one person, but he did it really cheaply. It was, so I recall, 14, something like 14 grand for the year. So he retired, tried to entice him into doing it and paying him more money. He wasn't interested. What do you call it, every mowing service and recounting as I think? And the best we got was two grand a week for that, you get mowing every week and trimming every other. So that changed things pretty dramatically. Part of our reason to wanna hire the person in public works is to take some of that work away from contractors. So we're gonna rebate all that this year. We're working hard on a few people to see if we can get a better rating. And I thought three or four times that someone who would do it pretty substantially cheaper than just never quite hand out. So that's a real challenge where we're probably a year away. I don't know if I mentioned this at the cemetery meeting here, so I'm not satisfied with the technology yet, but we're probably a year or two away perhaps from looking at road modelers which are hugely expensive, but if we're paying two grand per model, that's also hugely expensive. And my problem isn't the mower itself, my problem is the service contract you need to maintain for the PC that goes with it and the software. And then if you have a robotic mower that's rechargeable, you want power on site because they've worn the route and they can go and redot themselves and recharge just like the low vacuums that you can buy for your house. But I worry about a small mower that weighs 150 pounds, that's out there doing its thing on its own that costs $80,000. And someone can easily pick it up and then what happens? Do we have a GPS on it? We have duct tape in here, and you're tied to it or something. But we wear those and traces down the mower thief. It's a little bit of a scary proposition from that perspective. So there's, I've got to sort some of that out. Well, let me, you know, there's battle bots that come on hammers. And you know, maybe one of our staff trims in the mower mows while we're there, I'm not sure, but. Speaks is probably our long wayside. They have a mowing service. Okay, in the softest possible way, I'm just going to remind folks it's 8.36, we have a FEMA buyout on our agenda, and this is a high level overview. Not that I am not also excited for the saga of the future robot mowers, but I don't see it as a high level point of reference. Yes, Kate. One, I'm worried about the robot mower revolution. And two, what do we charge for a lot? I like to forget all the time. Is it $1,500 bucks? Wait, $1,400 bucks? That's the lot I just processed for John recently. It was $1,425. I think it was like, if it's eight cremations and maybe forecast get burials or something, but just to give you a sense. And then more or less covers are cost. There's a couple of words up in the grave. There's some work that John Woodruff does. He's not entirely free, he's very cheap. I don't have any frame of reference for. He actually pay extra for the opening though. That does have additional cost. Right, Bill does have a skin up? Yeah, so the cemetery has changed a lot over the past 30 years, especially. I mean, when I first came here, everybody that died got buried in the cemetery. And most of them were full grave burials. And that was an expense to them. Lots of people don't get going in cemeteries at all so really in a position of painting to maintain the cemeteries, what we have, you could double the rate for some in a lot and for opening graves and stuff like that. And it's going to be a nominal difference in your budget. So I just wanted to say that. And in your memo, I'm a little confused because the cemetery is its own fund right now. And on your budget, you don't show any of the. Yeah, I put it on the summary page, but I didn't put it in. Interest and gains. The $15,000 that was sent from the thermal plants but the cemetery fund was just so it was an easy way to get $500,000 of tax money into the cemetery. And that money was put there because forever the town didn't even realize they owned the cemeteries because we had two cemetery associations that were planning it. And the two associations, that started around 2012 or 13, right after the flood, the one of the center cemeteries charge over $100,000 to the town and said we're out of business. We're not doing anything simple because most of our members are in the cemetery now. And all the cemetery like Robert Graves and Ed Brown went back. And then just, we had moved into this building when the Hope Center for Association was all home and they turned over close to $400,000 I think. So there's a substantial trust in the cemetery and comment that the general fund would have to pay in deficit if you don't pay more out of the truck. It's all in one fund left. So the tax payers paid $15,000, let me say that really right now, the rest of it is being paid $500,000 or $30,000. And the lack of work, the cost fund is still increasing in daddies. So we paid $40,000 or whatever it was this year for Graves' statements. And I understand that's higher, but I don't think it has to impact the tax payers at all at this point. There's plenty of money in that. That's a conversation with the cemetery, the elected cemetery commissioners because it's a similar issue to the library. I mean, the cemetery trust in the library trust is fundamentally different. And I can see a future where I think the cemetery trust could be gone down because the amount of money we're gonna have to spend in the cemetery is gonna stay higher. It might level off, but I don't think it's going back to where it was. The library I think is a little bit different from the perspective of the net. We're gonna maintain the cemeteries forever. That's our obligation, but nothing really has to change. The library is an ongoing evolving organization and always will be. So I think having a trust could be useful because one of those little levers, look at it, the cemeteries will have two libraries, for example. But fundamentally, the cemetery maintenance is gonna stay the same. I'm not sure the cemetery commissioners agree that with my theory that maybe in a decade or more that the trust essentially just gets whittled out over the years, but it doesn't mean we're not meeting our obligations to maintain the cemeteries. It's just a matter of how you pay for it. And I think the conversation that has to be happened is that the cemetery commissioners are spending a fair amount of money, or at least not this year, they were spending a fair amount of money in the pool of stones and things like that. That's, I think, where the debate needs to happen. But I think right now, the idea of that, when we went from zero, when we first started off with $7,500, one in the general fund and the cemetery fund, and it was just to show the taxpayers that that's the kind of cemetery. It's been $15,000 for quite some time. I noticed you took the 15 out of the budget this year. I think that's fine. I think there's not, I'm not disagreeing with your assessment. I'm just saying that as a president, I don't think that there's a big crush gonna come down on the fact that it's something that you have to plan for. But you could simply, you know, if the town ended up spending $60,000 on the general fund for the cemetery, it's still a pretty dry little, less than one cent of the tax rate, but it's four times what the taxpayers are paying right now. So I think you've got some time here. All right, that's the question. Just, I'll make it quick. Say for example, we don't charge the taxpayer a dime per cemetery up to you. How many years before that trust fund expires? About 400 grand in it now. Spent 127 the last year? Yeah, just this past year, they spent a lot. Part of it was the mowing. Part of it was they had a donation from a few years ago that they essentially earmarked to spend some money on it this year. And that's the big part of it. It's not just the mowing and trimming. It's the monuments to what's in there to maintain them all. There's some specialized cleaning that goes with that. Yeah, they just built a nice sign up on the Epiple Street Cemetery there. It must have cost a little bit more. So to some extent it's a matter of I think just managing those expectations. Right. Mike and then Chris, but and again, I'm not trying to be cranky at folks or not encourage the discussing. I just want to be aware of. I'll be real quick. I really think a lot of cemetery expenses shouldn't come at the expense of taxpayers.  I don't see why we can't charge people who are going to bury their loved ones, you know, it's a cost of, you know, care. I think most people will regret, but to make sure that they're, you know, the cemetery will be kept up. The cost of a lot now is significantly higher than the cost of a lot was in the perpetual care. People did buy perpetual care here and the two associations went out of business and turned all that money only to the town and that's what that $400,000 was that came from. So, you know, you can adjust your rates, but like I said before, the number of people buying graves is the percentage of people who die, 100% of the people die, like the people that actually buried the cemetery are much smaller now and they're not buying lots for even cremations, you know, they're, right, you know, they're burying people in their back garages gathering their ashes at the beach. So, Tom's right, I mean, the money that's going to come from selling lots and charging perpetual care is minor. Should we start by the rhythm, why Chris, do you have a hand up? No, I just want to kind of think back, Aimee's question, the rule of $400,000 in there now that an estimated speculative cost of $60,000 a year, seven years, that's gone if there's no additional revenue to come back in, what estimated or what revenue is coming into that? That's the answer here now. That's the issue. The only revenue that can go there is things like a lot of sales or taxable air money. What was there in that? 10,000? Yeah, about 10, it's pretty low. So, in seven, eight years, that's history at now. So, on the fire, the clock, I can just make a quick observation, as a person, the fire department sets up tents at the cemeteries on a regular basis, works out well for the funeral home, works out well for the association, but the cemetery up in Monterey Center, last couple of summers has been a disgrace as far as the way it's been taken care of. Wheatwackers destroying stuff, grass all over the stones, big holes from lawn mowers. So, I just think if we're gonna obviously continue down this road, but there ought to be somebody that's overseeing the people that are mowing and go over there and say, take your time and do this right there. That's all. It's a shame when somebody goes up there and they're showing their covered trees, grass and mud and stuff like that. That's it. On the fire, the revenue for duckberry is based on, kind of the longstanding contract that changes every year based on fire and climate costs. No real major changes in fire at all, pretty flat numbers, some payroll increases. We were over budget on payroll this year, but remember there's flood response, so much of that comes back with FEMA. We've got a good, pretty good cadre volunteer, so you wanna keep the volunteer, so you want to budget for that. The dispatching cost is up. There's an agreement, long term agreement there with Capital West. They did a presentation last year about that, but they're making some capital investments and that's the biggest reason for the increase. And then public safety side, WASI pays for a fortune of our substantial portion of our dispatching costs. And so in essence, that's the credit on their bill. Wait, they can pay for our dispatching costs, we subsidize them. We pay for dispatching in full. WASI charges us a per capita fee. We get a credit on the bill for, they are shared dispatching that we do. Got it, okay. No other huge items or some money on the capital side for some work in the department for some water lines and we have some capital reserves, so we can dig into those reserves. So the fire budget is up three, four percent, pretty reasonable place for a division, pretty well-functioned department. On the new equipment side, that 87.5 is pretty consistent last year. If you wanna have a detailed conversation with Gary, he's got his laundry list of items and they try to keep up with that each year. One thing I'll say about equipment and fire departments, and I've made this up, I was told this when I was a rookie in government over a few decades ago and I've really learned it and that's when you have volunteers, you have to have good equipment. You're not paying them, they view the equipment to a large extent as how much you value what they do for you. It does help a little bit to have pretty good equipment budgets. If you have someone who you're paying on a full-time basis giving benefits, if they've got to drive that cloud truck in extra gear, they're okay, they're getting paid. It matters a little more to the volunteers. So I think if you don't need that, you gotta get kind of these volunteers. True. Moving on to the general government and public safety where a bunch of the- Bunch of those are, we have nothing budgeted to capitalize on preventing a truck that's here and that will not be the case in other ones. So there's some money in the debt for that truck. But that would go before the loaders in March. That's a debt principle. Yeah, true. And that would be so about, well I assumed about half of that new truck would be in there, I assumed a 20 year long period for that. So it's about 26 grand a year, we've already been working on this. So 2025 would see the full impact, but about half of it is here. I wouldn't anticipate issue in the bond until 2025, but we'd have some short-term debt. And this is going to be upright but this will require a while. You authorize the purchase pending order of approval. So that would be on the warning. Then on to general government and public safety where there's a bunch of other government users here. And none of them need my list of debt. Trying to be conservative on the tax interest penalty numbers. I suspect our interest in penalties is going to be about being in Morris as much of that as the school taxes and then the school increase of 18 or so percent comes to fruition, which I don't know if it doesn't, but I can imagine what would miss the impact and we're going to collect more interest in penalties because the government struggle to pay that, that bigger increase. No real changes in current use far as the tax revenue, the amounts we get reimbursed for by the non-reimbursed for we get paid by the state. Current use is essentially a reimbursement for our lost tax revenue for that program. Forest and parks is more or less a set fee for state land and border very. What is the railroad tax? That is a tiny amount that comes in each year. I got to get you to details on that one. I used to know a lot of you well. I've shared those on that one. But I don't recall them exactly, but I don't like to increase railroad tax. Well, I know it's the ability that increases. The state sends us to stand once a year. I think I got to fix them. I think you're avoiding true. On the corks fees, we're on pace to collect a little over 60,000 this year. There's a lot of pieces that go in the cork fees, but a big part of it is tied to the real estate market and part of it is prices are high, but there's no inventory. There's few sales and no one's refinancing because interest rates are high. So in having 2024 a little lower than 2023 is probably pretty safe. The money from the historical society is tied to staff wages. The town makes a small appropriation to the society, but last year that revenue went up because they have someone who's half-time. So the budget assumes that continues, but if it doesn't, the revenue goes down, but the expense goes down correspondingly. The money in debt service, the interest in sleep on CDs is just interest rates are high already more than the tax state stabilization is just taking that cut off the top. And then where did I miss it? It's the piece on the pilot revenue. Yes, that's up at high rub. That's the 420,000. So we've collected 400,000 this year and that revenue source is funded through the local option tax from other taxes. That's the state, the chunk of state collects and puts into the pilot cost. So it's based on the insurance values of state buildings in your town. So the $20,000 increase is based on just the town is still allowing and their additional local option tax that they'll enact with this past year and then what we've seen from their revenue. So I think when I presented our numbers that our pilot payment would go up about 15,000. So that's from the study, but there's some other towns that are getting there too. So we might well see a pilot payment for $30,000 in a couple of years. That's great. Question about animal control income. We have none for 2022 or 2023, but 2021 was $6? I'll dig into that one. Pre-design. I'm not quite sure. It may just be a little real a little misposting or something, but yeah, I'm not sure. I'm going down to the expense side. Move a little bit of the pay around because past year is the court was in with an early line, but the existing court was in the regular pay line. We just saw a little bit of the court line. Let's put it all in honor of that course in the course. But on a net basis, there's really no longer a change year to year. We had some transition costs in the last year. So essentially staff, we're going to staff the four foot semi-budget response board makes up for that. And then throwing in, I put in $10,000 for a time break at this continued work, or if it's not some other person in a room, similar to this, too. That's a second line, natural disaster coordinators. Going down about a further way down the page. It's a small item. I did not get a role system in the place this year. We were able to do that. All the quotes I thought were not something I thought gave us a good value. There's a couple other systems I found that sometimes around issues and still researching but that $4,500, I think would still cover the cost based on the other systems I'm researching. The initial systems I wanted were, they were sort of all in one systems. And we didn't need all the features, but I had presumed and thought from initial conversations, they would sell us a system out of cart and you could choose which options we wanted, but they really wanted to, you were sort of a client or you weren't, and I didn't want to spend $15,000 on a system. I want the time clocks, which I think gives us some accountability. Can you get some advice from leaders who now, because I know it's out there, there are a whole bunch of those kind of things. And they're the ones that were $15,000 or $20,000. So that now sounds like some more of the ones. Yeah, there's a nice one, the kind of one that we'll use is I think it's going to fit the budget. I hope a couple of them, but they were like full-service. Yeah, I quite want that. Nothing else really, really huge in this budget. Down near the bottom, the senior citizens have not, we're going to rest at an increase. I'm just trying. So, so... Is it at the senior center? So we can have them here to have a buggy conversation, but if there's no increase, maybe we don't need to do that this year. I think it's pretty good value for what we'll give them then. Can I hold on a minute? Yes. Do you have a rating increase on the time but not other departments? Or is that enough? That's across the board, yeah. It's across the board. And then going down further on a second page, the funding we gave for revitalizing water there, we think that years was partly here, it's partly in funding development, but I've just consolidated it in young place. And then there's some big changes on the art side, but there's no proposal to use our funds here. There's big numbers on the public safety side, really big numbers here that impact a lot. So the first is, let me get into Wazie first. So looking at Wazie's budget, they've been pretty good at searching for revenues. They're doing the vaccine clinics and some semester revenue. But in essence, if Wazie were to break even, they're per capita fee and it's water variant and torsions of our neighborhood count. So per capita fee, we have about 50 bucks per person. They were 26 this year. So that's an awful big jump, you know, we're talking about $125,000 for one year to get there. Not about the new building, it's about operations. And it's an issue I've been hearing about, growing services for 10, 15 years. It's not, simple way to say it, it's not their fault. They are substantially tied to insurance reimbursement rates and that's Medicaid, that's Medicare and those rates have gone up, label all the rate of inflation, most years they don't move at all. So it's a state and federal government not paying a nickel more in those years for the service. And that just has to come from somewhere. We see it on the health insurance side because hospitals need to get the revenue from somewhere and they make it up and the private pay people like us, WASI has to make it up from us too. So we talked about where we can get them to be on a sustainable path. So the number I proposed is 35, which is a big increase in one year. We do still get a credit because they're using our building and that's about $20,000 and then the dispatch credit, the dispatch credit is more or less a fixed percentage. The building credit will go away at some point. They're in front of the DRB now for the new building, I think from the financial side, they're really close, if not there. So probably 2025, that budget won't have the building credit but full credit. So we'll see a pretty substantial increase then plus the rate. So this is really one year, so it's probably similar increases in the next couple of years to get them on a sustainable path. But they're looking at some other towns and can they compete for business in other towns and that's potentially a viable option for them. That's certainly how it's going to go. The building downtown helps attract and retains staff. That's going to help on the revenue side too. So it's an evolving world but I think fundamentally we're all in one services but we're going through with ours is not at all unique. They're just putting up against this financial law that reimbursement not keeping pace with expenses for a long, long time. And WACI, whether it was, for years it was probably to their credit, they didn't ask the town for increases for a long time. So if you look back over the long term, this is almost inflationary, we're just getting it all at once. So I don't think we have to talk about any of it before a long time. Yeah. So Tom, can I just clarify, would you say what you're going from 26 per cabinet? At 35, yeah. And 50 is the first one back? About 50 would be the very important issue. At this point in time? Yeah. So just down the road that would be higher. Yeah. And then on the state 40 side, I'm in talks with them, we're not at a final number, but the contract is an expiry in the June period. It's a three-year contract that has served through for three years. The numbers have been almost entirely flat. We should logically expect some form of increase there. How much is anyone's guess? I think to some extent, how much of an increase they asked for shows us how much they value it. And it's a little bit of a unique contract. So I'm hoping they don't ask for a ton, but their costs have not been flat for three years. Super, then around the police department. How much did I lose the order to bring here? The building was the character that is behind you back in about three thousand and a half, it's about 165 thousand. When they had two officers at the edge, the building is paying about what they call it. Yeah, and then the whole lot was, even a small PD would be seven figures. But yeah, those are pretty eye-popping numbers. And I hope, started by town meeting day, but I hope in the next month, we'll have some more certainty on the sequence number and that can come down. But I think it's a, I built in a hefty increase to hopefully not come back to you in a month and say, well, the tax rate estimate was pretty low. But again, that expires June 30th, I think they're less quarterly, so we're generally just paying for half a year. Sure, sure. So I think it's reasonable. The municipal building operating fund, nothing really hoops there. The building keeps winning up at night because the heating system, as we see, is squirreling. It's, you know, in places of 50 and others and the next day it changes. I didn't have heat for a week and now I have heat, but when it's on, it's sort of max blast, nothing else. So I turn it on and then I turn it off. And then I'm not gonna make it a big deal out of the way because he's got enough going on, but it's typically really cold over here and really hot over there. Summer seems to be fine. I have a question. I think the municipal building operating fund is all the way down the bottom. Why is our debt in trip to almost 50% of our principal? It's a long-term bond. Got it. So that's just great. The way the math is. And then health and social service. It's on the last page. There's very little talk about we had, so we had the health officers in the room were thankful for that. So we're going to price the pay, but we're thankful for the service. The community service officer is really, I think of as the animal control officer, we had one for a while. We haven't had enough of finding one. If we get lucky and find some do that role and we go over budget, that's great. It's a tough job to find and fill. That's the case everywhere. Oh, are we paying for animal control option or health officers? No, not health officers. Practically free. The animal control officer, it was, I forget the hourly rate, but kind of a manager's sort of thing. But it's only when we're called, right? It's only when you're called, yeah. So we weren't paying an hourly rate for work. And then if you had to respond in person to your vehicle, a little bit higher rate, it's just a struggle to find anyone to do it. It's a pretty thankless job. Yeah. So as it comes in, I try to fill the calls as best I can. Unfortunately, there's been nothing major for some time. Just a small carrying is a bunch of them too, but it's just shown we've been sort of nuisance calls that I've gotten at least. And so I keep my cell phone on the website for the average things that come on occasion. But usually it's, I found a dog, I lost a dog. My neighbor's dog was driving me crazy. It hasn't been a lot of fish, dog, it's nice. It's probably not a problem for me. That is a payment every year to Watchman County Mental Health. What's going on with it? It's a lot of money, but it's $13.5. So the first point I want to add is $500 for this time we will pay in the fall. So it shouldn't be. And then just one thing I want to point out that's not in here and I don't want to go over the detail. And I think this is the case historically, but all the small items on the warning, which is 35-ish thousand, Karen correct me if I'm wrong, but you chase them down to pay them at the end of the year. So I'm not suggesting they're not worthy causes. I'm just suggesting that if our money was meaningful, maybe they would call for it. The fact that it's late December and Karen is feverishly working the phone saying, hey, you wrote us a letter for a thousand bucks. We agree. We need you to give us an invoice so we can pay it. And then it's a challenge. I'm just suggesting that maybe that's something to think about. It's not the case with the senior center, they're different. It's not the case with RW, they're different. To get too close to a zero increase, zero or one-to-chat increase, how substantial is it? So I had that option on the first page where if you spend it right, some money now, if you're out in front of the house, there's errors. Right. Oh, and our thought was part of it, sorry. You know, that lowered you almost, that lowered you to 2.7. You know, the official measure of inflation in the CPI for the Northeast the past year is about 4%. So we're beating that. I would argue if you can bring your budgets at, I would argue that bringing budgets where all the wrong inflation is a worthy goal, but it's probably not realistic for the long term. But if you can bring your budgets consistently at or below inflation, you're gonna do something with the long term. You know, if you're one point below inflation, you've done something meaningful, I think. How do you reduce it? Well, yeah.   Yeah. There's some more cuts to make to get. If you wanted a zero, it's 200 grand. I'm hoping with the state police contract, we can find some money there and get it lower. But 200 grand is not possible with our current income. Plain and simple. The only reason I'm concerned with the expected, you know, 18 to 20% increase in property taxes on the state level for education.  So I agree with you, but at the same time. I know, it's just, if you do, do we make the town less effective and less efficient because of an organization that we don't control? Right. I'm not sure we need to go backwards for getting them space to go forward. I think that's their problem. I'm not insensitive to it. And, you know, that's a statewide rate. So we're all gonna pay it. But at the same time, I just really feel like if we can be reasonable year in and year out and avoid those things, that's the goal. But I feel like if the state's gonna be about inflation and we want to try to get to zero, we're never gonna be anything far from zero. I can still with it. And sorry. Because in the last three, four years, we've tried to be as close to a zero-based budget as we could. We've gotten pretty close, but there are, we do have some challenges.  You know, that's right on track was then right for the last 10 years at the Tom's point. Right. I always used to say that all those with the town, we always had to turn on the sacrificial land to try to keep, you know, cut their own necks so that the highway or the education fund can continue to run granted.  It's not their entire problem. It's just we're not getting involved. Kermit, right when I went to the process for an informational meeting the other night, and I was out of town and I couldn't be there. I texted him that I wanted to be there. I said, how many people there? 25. Which figures turned out to be long. So what I'm saying is 25, you know, and I keep wondering to myself, what is going to take the people? How far into the corner do they have to get pushed before they finally start to react? Because I'm sitting here listening to this and I'm thinking about all the things you're talking about, you know, to change this year for maybe a half, we're trying to get down to nothing to offset that, you know, eventually we're going to blow on our face. But to continue to absorb even this pain a half and then whatever the state legislative body is doing, and then the budgets for all these other things, you know, I'm thinking to myself, how much longer am I going to be able to stay here? Even doing what I do. I mean, I'm looking for the target. So my revenues are going to start to drop. Yeah, get on the bandwagon of all these state programs, which I don't want to do. Because that just impacts everybody. But, you know, it's kudos for the work you guys are doing. You're right on target and Roger Pat was up in the house all the day, he spent you time with me. When he was talking, I asked him what the budget increase was going to be and he thought it was around three cents or something like that. That's the biggest it's been in 10 years. I'm thinking to myself, I'm curious to know what's right with that, staggered that you're depending on that.  And that's going to be a big slug of cash. So they're on that note. And I would just talk into the owner of the mold today right on top of that. I could explore and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but the original conversation with the local office tax was specifically for rooms and meals, alcohol and WC grants. It's everything.  Is there discussion to change that or is that? That's what was passed by the votes. All in. 267 people decided that. I think for something as important as a charter, you would have gotten a lot more response than you would have expected. We're in the same country. So people are a lot more open to what you're talking about. Last one on that, the current exemptions and five cents per session. All right. The current exemptions, five. Really? People with things that are currently that success was the main point, even for the local office tax. And I guess I would just say the last bill is we quoted one and a half cents, which is based on Tom's budgeting and utilizing the fund balance. And I guess just personally, I would say I'm not opposed to using the fund balance, but I do have some potential questions or reservations to risk to at least I'd like to revisit that conversation. Again, I think I can be brought on board as to why it's a good idea. Yeah. But I think again, there's all these we can do it once and then when it's not there, what happens? The reason I wrote it that way is you're not using it for an ongoing expense.  And so that debt's gone from the budget. Right. And we have the ARPA fund interview now, but then we get into a very circular conversation about that or the formerly ARPA now and designated fund balance fund, I'd stress. Any other budget notes or information you need to pass, Tom, in terms of next steps? Yes. The only information to think about is the presented and draft schedule based on the initial overview. Do you want to email and talk about this? Do you want to change that? Do you want to focus on different things? I'm of the opinion, for example, if the senior center is not asking for an increase, we probably don't need a meeting with the senior center. We're revitalizing water barriers. They're asking for a very minor increase, as I recall. I'm not sure we did a separate meeting with RWA over the rest inflationary increase. So I see we have a draft agenda last on our list. So we can maybe look at that again and then work through the one for January. So that would bring us to FEMA biop documents. Yeah. Yes. And I... Thank you for this. The excellent food for staff on... Here, here. Oh, I'm glad you came. I agree. And I meant to print the full...  I meant to print the full array of documents, but these were the standards that we had last time, just different property. And I can print the full array, but I was... Oh, thanks. Yeah, but Kana, thank you. But the standard set of documents, this was 40 union, the one before you was 36. There's a house that splits up those two houses. But it's not a client for FEMA biop. Not as yet, no. I spoke to him this morning. I asked if I was doing okay. He said there's no water in this basement. Yeah, it's probably changed now. It was not really. But I would think that that probably changed. Yep, in the last few hours. Every evening. 30, evening. Gates, Gates. Wait, is it 38 or is it 42? The last one, does it go 42 to 40? Well, if you're talking about the blue one in the middle of the two, then that's Gates. Yeah. But this is the standard biopay for work. They've been coming to town hall and notarized with Karen on Friday. We didn't actually do the notary. I need you folks to approve it and sign it, backdate it, and then I'll notarize it. I witnessed their signatures. So we have, at least in one page in the documents, we have under grantee name, we have we need them in this record. So we just have, we just one place. So we can just pass that around if it's not for degrees on this file. I personally would like to see a couple other houses in union and these two houses on Main Street, why? There's that strip of four, right, on union? Yeah. The duplex, this one, 38, and then the... The one where you just approve, yeah. And then the other property that applied 36 union, you approve the paperwork. She's got us, she's the owner is in Florida. She's got to sign the date and notarize and that's going to be a challenge. So hoping we won't have undue delays there. But I think it's in the interest of people to apply now since there's state funding that they are 25% or normal 25% share. I don't think that you have any comments that were from the previous with regards to... I think not. We're going to see a lot more buyout requests or... I had thought it would have seen four or five. I think the two properties right here on Main would have applied and they have not. I'm going to announce the time, like I wonder if people under the misguided notion that it has to be there, they're residenced. But that's not the case for buyouts. The one right there at the end of Main Street is there and then at this point, right? I haven't seen anyone there myself. I'm not sure it's abandoned. I don't know exactly what the case is, but it's all for alone. It's been flooded twice now in six months. So it would appear to me that a buyout is not the worst thing to consider. We able to reach him? No. Not able to reach. I don't know what there. It's certainly not ten and occupied. Or I'm not occupied. I don't know that it's abandoned, but I haven't seen anyone in there since I've been here. So it's a good candidate, but we can force them to do it. Karen, do you know what the tax bill is on that? By any chance? So there's some 36 junior both in the grand list around 150 and 60 grand. So pretty little impact on the grand list. The ones across the street are similarly low. Right, low. So Tom, do these monies from Vienna that they also include the monies from Google? Yes. Yeah, so if the owner signs off, the town signs off, it's really a first step. FEMA has to go through their whole process. FEMA gives the owner an appraisal value for the property, and that's based on the pre-plug value when the owner can accept or reject. Once they accept, the real process starts, and FEMA, through state emergency management, really, who does the work and administers it, but property is leveled. Title is turned over to the town. We can let it grow. We can have a park. What we can't do is put in pervious service. So if we make a parking ride, we can't gravel it. We can put a playground, and that's really it.  We'll sell you a lot for a buck. There's pretty substantial deep restrictions on the properties. Well, not a lot, and it's in the ground. So it's essentially green, I'd say. Wouldn't be a bad thing to put a public park, necessarily. Rodgers would grow, and we'd put a lot of work to it. So it's free to us, because our normal 25% bio-chair would be paid by the state, but the long-term maintenance is our challenge. But we don't have to maintain it necessarily. Were you asking me the value of the last one right here, 35? Yeah. 72,800. Say 72? Yeah, that's the ground ones value. So the brief load of diesel might be better. Well, and 36 Union is on the market, I think at 135. So if this flooding continues to happen, what's going to happen with our grand list?  That's the challenge. The few houses that have applied, it's pretty small. It's 300 grand, if they were both approved. And even then, the buyout's not going to happen for another tax-seeker. Not a huge challenge, I don't think, because even if this extra flood gets a number of other people to apply, maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like if you own the house now, you know the history of Irene, you've been through this flood. Maybe this one's not all that like, but it's changed your mind. Well, I'm talking about real estate values in the village as a whole, not just like all rambles. Yeah, so that's something our whistlers have spent some time on. After Irene, what they did was they did, they applied essentially a deflation factor to all the property that was, I forget if it was in the flood plain or impacted by the flood, but they lowered it. And then they moved it up slowly over the years, but they determined after not that long a period that the real estate market ignored Irene. And so they said, well, houses are selling, and there's no difference in market prices in the flood zone versus without you don't get a grand list discount. So they're talking about that now, and any action would take place for next year's grand list. But they're not thinking it's a massive discount in part because they don't have any data, at least as yet. And it's a long term issue, and there's so much demand for housing right now that it's going to be a little hard to sort of allow. And I think they're reluctant to say, hey, we're just going to lower your grand list values for this whole neighborhood by x-factor without having a good logical basis for that. So they're going to take their time there. Well, there's two buildings on the interment, and down in South Nature, you almost across from the southern exit of the state complex that have been real estate side of your venue for effectively longer than I would have anticipated in there. And I'm wondering if they're scratching their heads or a lot of other people would be scared of being in the interiors or they was asking for that. One of the ones you're referring to was in the bankruptcy proceeding. No, I think you're talking about Maters, aren't you? Matere maples on the corner of Battschelder. Yeah. I can only speculate why those are still on the market, and I don't think it's appropriate today. And last but not least, I'm going to just say I think it's also the statewide issue, like so much as we've talked about, but this buyout and grand list, I will just say there's communities beyond water very wrestling with it. And I don't know if it's a state solution or whatnot. We have a motion on this 40 union street by out request. Yeah. I'm going to approve the new buyout for 40 union street, Sally, Ashken, Jack, Oh, and Patty, and Celestine. Excellent. Good night. Please, no. Please, no. Please, a certain amount. I'm not bringing them all, I'm going to leave them just to have one. Yeah. I'll just say it's a second. And they've all worked for my wife. Perfect. Can you make a motion? Second. Awesome. Any further discussion? Right. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any votes? Any abstentions? All right. Buyout have things with the people requested. Yes. So I'll pass this one around. Looks like it needs one, two signatures. Maybe Tom can witness and I will motorize. So it's that. Well, we have made our. Yep.  Grant, this one? Yeah, I guess so, right? They were grantor. So you're going to grant these. Next meeting agenda. The first question just to say is a federal meeting for Thursday, January 4th. Do you need any state to meet for questions in your area of avoiding? I don't know if we know that. Do you think it's going to schedule a meeting? Virtually, or otherwise or tomorrow or some other time prior to January 4th? You know, they've been texting during the meeting. We are generally. We are certainly pressed on the. Yeah, actually, Mike and then Alyssa can witness and then three of you will assign. Make sure you date it on the 8th, please. Oh, I needed it for the. Okay, last meeting. The reading on the river when I checked it half hour and 40 minutes ago was 424.3. And I'm still going up on us now for 24.3, too. So it's going down. I mean, it's a hundred, right? We're here, so I'm not even sure it's going anywhere right there, so I don't wonder of text to me. You said it looks like it looks like in the neighborhoods we're starting to see things going down, which would tell me that the catch basins are probably moving a little bit in the right direction. Well, I feel pretty confident in saying anything. And so I just think not all this watch don't do because I'm like asleep and I'm just nodding for wrap up and debrief. I guess just in the spirit of, I will say, like we all witnessed that we were just getting some emergency meetings and I saw half the room discussing it and I don't think there's any part of it. We're from legitimate emergency. And yeah, I'm just saying in the spirit of you are in a public meeting now, is it better to have one and cancel it the other way around? You want to be in for a while? Yeah, I'm just in the spirit of is it better to put something on the counter and cancel it if you determine it's unnecessary. I think that's a good idea to put a meeting on the books for a while. But in the event that while we're asleep, waters rise, you know? Right, or even timing. I don't know what you're saying. I'm trying to pose, but the three of us that make any standings online should be just schedule an emergency meeting for 10 a.m. that could adjourn after 15 minutes or we can't solve this. Sure. So if not, I just say 10 a.m. Is that better? Oh, she's good. I think we can just say 10 a.m. and Karen will be much better, you know, what's the type of thing? One item, blood restocks. And of course, because we can't solve it. And if you're coming on Facebook, I would just say better. Yeah. Not due to stress. I would say that too. Whatever. What's the number for 10? I just said 10 arbitrarily. I'm open to the consensus of the group. No. This is not a text. I have a sequence of both. I would say I'd like text. I have to do this. And then we can discuss the actual thing with any video or something like that. Yeah, I have one thing before we adjourn. I think it's kind of out of place. It's just more of an acknowledgement. Let's do a general first, then, if that's okay. I've got one more. So we're going to proceed as though we're having a special emergency meeting tomorrow at 10 a.m. If nothing else to touch base, and then can adjourn. Karen then was kind enough to provide a draft agenda for Thursday, January 4th, with public budget penalty tax rate, which I said we need to do by that date, rat committee update. I'm just saying out loud that we should join both big, big groups tonight. I'm not saying that I think January 4th is the next best time for it, we should reschedule them at some point. So the penalty tax rate, I'm not sure we need to discuss it at all. We put it in there as a bit of a placeholder. So the penalty was set by the voters at 8%. It's been that way forever today. Every year, some people pay a day or two late and they say, hey, it's 8% on a big basis and it's a lot of money. And I say, well, guess what? I can't wait that for you because the voters proved it. And I've essentially become a fraud, right? I can't go against the voters. And so I say, well, you can come to the select board, you can file, you can file, go through the process, you get your money back, you can go through the board. You can do that, but I say to them, I don't think you need to go right to your actual vacant when I send them the statute. And I say, you can go to town meeting day and say, I think 8% is too high. And what I also say is to them openly is that most of what we're doing is not just collecting our taxes, but the school taxes, which is where times ours. And so if there's no penalty or interest, I'm gonna have a cash flow problem and that's gonna cost you in the end in some way, shape or form anyway. So comes up every year around penalty time. I'm not sure we need to talk about it, but we certainly can. There's a desire, but it's a big penalty. I think you'll probably struggle to find a town that doesn't end substantially maximum, probably struggle to find a town that charges the rest of the evening. So to clear this would be for you first, and the first part of the question, I don't know if that would be the same thing. It's more just general times. And I would just say, I know like, Chris, yeah, he was here, I'm gonna say a big thing about it at town meeting because that has had come up in the past. Like, you're like wanting to talk about it in some way, so. And Chris was? I don't know. Chris made a big deal of it, because I think he was sick of hearing people. Word of a layman hearings, yeah. Yeah. So you're leaving it on then? So when he's putting the skips on there? I guess that's an open question. That's a question for Skip. Yeah. I think probably for now it's safe. Sorry, I think this. What we have to do, like keep me up, we should have a keep wallowing phenomena. Right, so this is getting right for it. Yeah. Sooner. You can get in this way if you need to, guys. Thank you. Yeah, of course. We're willing to reach out to Skip and just ask if there's any item. Yes. Okay, so I will get old to Skip when the time is right and ask him, you have agendas on the fourth, the eighth, the 22nd and the 29th. So there's plenty of time for me to put him where it suits him best. I'm happy to be the point person for that. And. We'll also need to reschedule the event. Yeah, I've already started that process. Yeah, thanks. I've thrown an email to Liz, Bob Butler and Alec Tuscany, Mary Woodruff. I need the select board and at least two Listers to make my quorum. So I will make plans to do that on a night when we're already having a select board meeting. That's the easiest for you guys, the easiest for me, frankly. You mentioned just a short time ago, the schedule that you provided. A couple of meetings ago, I presented a budget schedule. So we have budget as a meeting. So it's more just who shows up and presents and what are we talking about in detail. Okay. So do you think, I looked for it in the last meeting, I didn't see it. You think it's back a little ways? Maybe I just didn't go back far enough. Okay. I'll put back an email. Because that'll be helpful for me. I can start plugging those things. Yeah, just a matter of what departments we go through. Okay. All right. So I will do the outreach to Skip if you're all okay with that and see when we can. I'll say my thing. I would say budget in conversation with Tom and Roger. When is that, from the schedule around what specific, I think the people review that, right? And it's probably time to add to the parking lot at least. Our development bylaws. The PC has now set dates for their public hearings. And when they have two public hearings, they will then send to you the bylaws. So, I can circulate around the length of the draft bylaws. I think Neil told me April 8th. I already happened to know. It may be on our calendar already. I know we have a different, I don't know what else, and that sounds about right. But it's a pretty extensive document. So I'll talk with staff and the PC a bit about how, you know, they've been