Tuesday, July 5th, 2020, we're here in the Edward Steele room. We have an agenda before us. Can someone approve the agenda or are there any additions? I'll move to approve the agenda as presented. Do we have a second? Yeah. Any second? Before that, I just want to add a brief item. We can put it at the very end. It's just an item about should we invite a guest. We've discussed it before from the Worcester Select Board on cell towers. We just have probably under five minutes discussion on that. You want to put that in before the manager's items or after? I have a very end. I'll move to accept the addition to the agenda. Thank you. We'll still stay in place. Any? Yes. Okay. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Motion carries. Next item is the consent agenda. The only item on the consent agenda of the minutes of the June 20th meeting. We have a motion to approve the consent agenda. So moved. Thank you. Seconded. We have a motion and a second. Any further discussion? If not, all in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? There being none, motion passes. Now it's time when we move to where we can't have discussion from the public. Someone can make a brief comment. We usually like it to be two minutes or under. And it should be something that's not on one of the warned of agenda items. So if anyone has something to say for me. Hi. If you can step forward and say a word. Jenny Garber. I live on Twin Peaks Road. Sorry, just for the zoom. Yeah. If you can step forward. If you folks don't mind mostly because we have Danny in Birchville space and this way the owl head will turn to you. Right. And if you don't mind just saying your name for the record. It helps save you. You know, it's kind of your own sound. Jenny Garber. I live on Twin Peaks Road. And the only thing I came to mention was the survey that was on front porch forum listing priorities that were asking people to put, you know, the most important to you and then on down. And I've talked to a couple of other people too. But there was one of the things that I put it down at the very bottom where you could put in a note that there was nothing in there about trying to conserve our natural resources in the town. There was nothing very, there was nothing obvious about that. And with, I think with climate change and I think we over the years we're going to get more people moving north. And I also know that we need to get more affordable housing in the area. I just kind of feel like that could be lost and not considered in the development of all these things in the town. So I don't know if anything can be done about that survey at this point. But it would be nice to include something like that because we've got a lot of other groups in town that are interested in trails and they're interested in the reservoir and you know, all these sorts of things. So I think there's a lot of other people that are interested in that too. Thank you. You could always have antings on, you know, it wouldn't be maybe on the official because again the surveys are kind of out. But put things on front porch forum, put things, you know, put letters to the editor to whatever you read around about. And if there's an overwhelming, you know, groundswell for that, that would be something that would definitely be considered. There's been quite a bit of chatter on front porch forum about it. I'm not sure if you were the first one to put it on but shortly after the survey went out somebody on front porch forum did state that there was nothing about conservation and there's been several people all over the past week or so that have kind of jumped on that bandwagon. So I think it's clearly something the public is interested in. And I think that follow up if you don't mind like those are great outlets as well but that Jenny is exactly why we had that other button there and so we're really appreciative that so many folks didn't use that. And then just as a reminder because I know I don't know if there's other folks in the room or on zoom or or even just we'll be watching later. This is the survey was to put a couple of items in the town profile as we work to hire a new town manager just so they could see kind of an overview of some of the priorities that that you know the town is looking towards and that is not to minimize conservation as a priority. Absolutely. It's it's on there. But this but that is not an exhaustive list and it is not a list that's setting in stone what the priorities of them future municipal manager or select board is. It's just to give them an idea of some of the things that the town and EFUD together have as priorities in the coming couple of years. So just to give a little clarification and also thank you so much for bringing that up again. Thank you, Danny. Well said. Thank you. It's been mentioned several times about it but nobody's really taking the ball around with it and it's long overdue. Well that might put something on the water very regularly. I did see things in farm porch form and I think a lot of people do they're like me they probably skim through it pretty frequently. But it's just something to keep in mind. So that the new manager realizes that there are a lot of people in town that that's important to them too. Thank you for your addition. Thank you. Thank you. Any other comments? You can come forward and state your name and. Good evening everyone. So my name is Maggie Karen. I live in Waterbury. I just want to share some thoughts with you recently with a recent event. So I want to title election integrity and just and fair elections begin with the signs at the edge of the road. And as both the town chair for the Waterbury Republican Committee and also the chairman of the Washington County Republican Committee, I'd like to bring an area of concern to your attention. Well, I was taking a walk in my neighborhood and just right near here. I noticed this candidate signs seem to have been removed and tucked behind a cement wall near the side of the road which is right down there at the train track over. This occurred near the roundabout where numerous other signs still stand.  I would actually invite all of you when you're leaving to just go take a look. They're right behind that little cement where your transportation vehicles come through. I understand that on occasion transportation and public work staff might remove some signs for being too near the roadway. But to me it seems quite unlikely that the only signs that would have been too close to the roadway would belong to a conservative candidate and that all the other signs would be said to be more appropriately placed. During the recent town meeting election I know that other conservative candidate signs were also removed and were pulled down from the locations that they've been placed in several areas. So I want to talk to you today as town select board about your dedication and commitment to just and fair elections and to election integrity. I want to talk to you about what this community really stands for and who and what Waterbury is really all about. And that answer in my opinion starts with town leadership. So I ask each of you are you concerned about these actions? Are you willing to take any actions to monitor and correct the situation? For example if you're a road crew or anyone else is asked to remove signs for official town reasons perhaps they could report them to the administration so that you can know why and where you know so that we can know if and why they were taken down by town staff. And I want to know if it concerns you at all that not all candidates may have been given equal opportunity to show our Waterbury citizens who's running for state and federal seats this November and who they have the opportunity to support and vote for. It saddens me that the community that I moved into about 13 years ago has become so divisive and it saddens me that efforts to interfere with local state and federal elections seem to be becoming the norm in our area. I'm reaching out to experts regarding this type of behavior and I've also spoken to the Vermont State Police to see what might be able to be done about this. I'll be speaking to other professionals regarding this matter also in the very near future. I won't presume to know who's doing this but someone is. So I'm here asking you today do you care and what if anything are you willing and able to do about it? I believe in the opportunity for Justin for elections do you? So I would just like to go back to that basic question about what if any well first of all do you care and I'm hoping that that would be affirmative from everyone but what are you able and willing to do regarding this concern because we're just getting started in this election season and. So before the board answers your question or just a couple of clarifying clarifying points I'm I don't believe that the town staff is taking any signs down the plate you need to know Vermont State law prohibits signs in the highway right away so if they're in the highway right of way we try to take them all down. Signs that go up in the roundabout we absolutely try to take them all down because they can walk lines of sight. Signs that are on the grass strips along Main Street if they're between the sidewalk and the street we try to take those down. The highway right of way generally extends often onto what is perceived to be someone's front lawn. If they're behind the sidewalk we even though they may be in the town highway we respect that as private property even though it technically is the right way so we try to leave them up if they're behind the sidewalk. The welcome to Waterbury sign which is just off the roundabout is presently owned by the Everett for our utility district we're in the process of transferring that over to the town that's really outside the highway right of way. We typically encourage people to want to put signs up that can be seen from the road to put them up there so with that just understand if they're in the highway right of way we will probably take them down and I say this a bit tongue in cheek nobody really that works for us enjoys having to take signs down so unless they're told to take them down I don't think they're being taken down by the town. No no I'm not suggesting that they are I'm just saying that I'm not suggesting that they don't have initiative but taking signs down is not their highest priority so if they're told by the Woodruff or myself to take them down they will. If I see signs in the roundabout I typically walk over and take them down and bring them back here they're put on the front porch people can come and pick them up we don't throw them away until after the election because they do cost money but we do obey the law of sex. And let me clear by that I was in no way implying that your town staff but I guess I was asking if your town staff is removing them could you somehow keep a record of who's are removed and perhaps why or where so that when there is a question about some that are removed that we might feel shouldn't have been we would at least know if the town staff had done it if not then we would be able to do it. Well if the board wants to direct me to keep track of when and where I guess I will from my perspective if they're in the town I would have a way they're taken down I don't think we need to keep records of that and just put them on the porch out front if people's signs are missing you can look there and take any of them that you want because ultimately in the end they're going away so that's where they're going. Thanks Bill for that clarification. I would encourage first any other board members to comment. And we do I mean Karla can attest to this we do get people that call here very upset because there is someone's sign whether it's a left wing person or a right wing person doesn't matter that there's a sign and somebody's putting it up and it looks like it's on my own and our response typically as well if it's in the highway right away especially between the sidewalk and the street we'll take it down. If you live on Twin Peaks Road or on Meal and Flats there's often no sidewalks and if they're alongside the road and they're three or four feet outside the road even though that's the highway right away we're not going to take them down. If somebody complains it says they're in the right away then we have to go look and if they are we'll remove them but we try to respect the fact that most people if there's no sidewalk they roll up to the edge of the road and they take care of that as it's their property and if they want to sign up it's okay. So we're not completely you know not the law that needs proportions that we're out there measuring every inch of the right away and this is the way that's out so anyway we do get complaints from time to time and most of the time we tell people that we'd like to put the signs upon their property. I think this space that I'm coming from is you know experiencing the town meeting election and what happened to specific signs during that procedure and now looking at it already this early in our election for the primary in November I just wanted to come in and address it I would like to think that we would share the concern regardless of where you stand politically that we all want everyone to have an equal opportunity to be known and to be seen and to be heard and so I just wanted to come and play that at your feet and if there's anything at all that you can do to help with this that would be great. And over the 34 years that I've been here the sign themes have come from both sides of the spectrum it used to be a big problem the other way 20 years ago. And again I'm not finger pointing at all I just can tell you you know it definitely has become pretty clear since March that it is that that's my concern. Alright I will leave you with that thank you very much. I was just going to say yes and answer your question yes we are concerned and thank you for bringing this to our attention. I think we're all in favor of a free and fair election and as long as the signs are being put up within the regulations we'd like them to remain there as long as they are appropriately displayed. I don't really know the particulars of the situation but in answering your question we are concerned and we'll try to do what we can that they're respected. Well there is truth to what she brings to the table because surprisingly enough it's happened to me several times. And I've had other people call me that have had other candidate signs in their yard outside of the village outside of any of this area here that would be more prone to rights of way. It's unfortunate that we've come to that but like he says apparently 20 years ago it was the same thing. It's always happened. They get taken down, they get trampled down, you're asked to put another one up that gets taken so it's happening. There's no doubt that it's happening. I also appreciate it when the election is over but I'm not going to get their signs done. Thanks Chris. Kelly was first. Hi, thank you very much. Good evening. How are you? Can you speak up a little bit? Sure. I'm sorry. There is that better? Yes, much better. Thank you for the school board so that was the issue. Good evening. How are you? Thank you for your time. My name is Kelly Hackett and I'm the vice chair of the HUSD school board. We would like to share with the community that Dr. Mike like letter has officially begun his tenure as the superintendent for the HUSD school board. He's holding a variety of three actually meet and greets in the community for Dr. Mike and his wife Mary Edith. And those will be held on Thursday, July 14th at the Waterbury farmers market from 4 to 7 p.m. Wednesday, August 17th at the Warren town hall from 5 p.m. to 7 30 and Saturday, September 10th, at the Greatsfield farmers market from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. So we were just hoping to get that information out to the community and if you could have it in your minutes that would be great. Our first official school board meeting will be on August 31st at Harwood. Thank you Kelly. Linda? My name is Linda Gravel. I am the vice chair of the Democratic Party of the Waterbury along with the justice of the peace for Waterbury. The Democratic Party comes to my house to pick up signs, lawn signs and when they arrive I tell them they must follow the according rules of the town of where they can put them and they are not to touch any of the other parties of any of the other parties signs. So that is our take on lawn signs. I don't like our lawn signs to be touched either so I can understand where the other party is coming from and we will respect their signs. Thank you. I would like to say thank you to her. Anyone else? If I just want to say one brief comment I will send a letter to the editor of the paper and urging people because one I believe in very free and fair elections I don't care if you are a Republican, Democrat, progressive, whatever everyone has the right as much as I am kind of anti-lawn sign. I don't like them. I wish you would ban them but I know it is first amendment rights that we keep them but I think you are probably having a few hooligans who just that is what the issue is. But I will ask and make a plea of the citizenry to respect each sign because it can happen when one starts taking down other signs it is going to happen the other way. I wouldn't finger point at anyone but obviously it is happening so someone must be doing it but I am not pointing at a party or any group or anything. I just wanted to come in and basically ask exactly that. Is there any manner at all in which you can address it to the community we are a community and we just respect each other. I think that is the best way to let it to the editor. It concerns me but I don't know what you know again as Bill said it has happened for years it may not ever stop but we can put a good voice to it though. Right we could put a voice to it it is not a cool thing to do with stealing any party signs. And I really do appreciate I can't see her name but I really do appreciate the alliance in this. Thank you. Appreciate bringing that to attention. I was one of the candidates that had signs that were stolen this last go round and having paid for them myself they are very costly so you know I like to look at the last half full and figure out otherwise they wouldn't steal the signs but or maybe they wanted to just poster or something but they are costly so it would be nice to put something in there and they do cost a lot of money. I don't feel like 10-12 dollars a piece now. Yeah. Anything else if not we are going to move on to the next agenda item. Mike I think this is another one. No it's a new subject. Thank you all for your time. So I'm Jillian Sackett I live on Ring Road in Waterbury. Sorry Jill Sackett S-A-C-K-E-T-T and I just want to echo a little bit more into the survey and I know we sort of talked about it but there's a lot of us out there that really are concerned that conservation wasn't addressed because although I understand that you guys were doing just a skinny dip into the possible waters if that does not remain an issue that is in the front of our consciousness it will be an issue that is literally and figuratively trampled on so I think that we moving forward it would be for everybody's benefit in this community if we could all recognize the importance of conservation and keep it in the forefronts at all times so in that survey the fact that there were eight questions eight possible answers I apologize I feel that that was a serious omission and not a slight omission so again I think unless we keep something like this in the forefront of our conscious it will be trampled and this is a beautiful community and one of the most beautiful parts of it is all this beautiful land and I think everyone can easily agree to that as part of why you are here and I would imagine that all of you when you go back and visualize childhood memories a lot of those are outdoor amongst all of this beauty so I want you to just pay that forward for the generations that are coming and keep that that memory that beautiful memory forward for my children for everyone's children and that is really I guess the main thing that I want to say and I appreciate your listening. Thank you Julia, I appreciate you for watching that. Thank you. Thanks. Anything, Billy? Billy, Victor. So now that the survey has come up and I don't have any agreement with my colleagues on the conservation commission but we have been working for the last few months to create to do what we're supposed to do by our bylaws which is create an inventory of the town's recreation, natural cultural, historic resources. Why we got that broad mandate I don't know but that's what we have and we've been working on actually taking a more formal process. We're not going to start inventory trees we've agreed not to do that. We also are struggling with kind of the scope of the inventory because we don't think it should just be conservation out of conserve. The idea I think of and this is my thinking only is conservation comes with a series of trade-offs. The town will have its community values it will have a lot of values. We have to worry about housing, economic development inclusion and conservation. All needs to be met together. So we're working on trying to figure out how to prepare a comprehensive well-established survey. To that end what we've done is we're in the education process so we've invited Fish and Wildlife to come in and they have a program where they teach conservation commissions how to do some of these surveys. One I wanted to let you know we're doing that and I know that Linda Gillpin's talked to Bill about us being less siloed and maybe other committees of the town being less siloed. This is my first brick where some board coming out of the silo so I wanted to tell you about that and that's what we're working on. The other is just a plea for help. For anybody who cares about conservation or the survey inventory we could use resources and people to help. I put things out in front of Pushforum so we could really use some resources when it comes to that. So I wanted to let you know we're working on that. It doesn't address this particular as to this particular survey what I hope you consider though is people who went to the effort to write in to appear that's kind of like double triple voting. I'm hoping that in the profile what comes out is we have a, like you guys and like Bill we have basically a manager who sees conservation as a piece of the puzzle here. Thank you Billy. You know I think let's say one more thing here before we're done with this topic is I think a large part of this conversation is I think that we're leaving out is large tracks of property owned by private individuals and how that, what's at stake there in the future of where that land is going and the current owners planning to do with that property because that's one of the number one underlining problems that I see with the degradation of a community that in its open landscape is the inability for anybody to tell what somebody else can do with their property. You know fortunately and I mentioned this somewhere and I don't know if it's at a prior select board meeting but right now the benefit that Waterbury has is we have certain fairly well off people that have large tracks of land that are wanting to keep that open. What's going to happen in the future when those people are gone. You know there's their children and so on and you know whether that should be a focus of part of this issue and how we can lock that up. Chris did you say it's problematic that there's an inability to tell people what they can do with their property? No one of the problems don't misunderstand me. What I'm trying to say is that through many different reasons one being over taxation to being people are dying off like certain people I know and I won't mention them and then once they die off the property starts to get chopped up and for children of people with their own large tracks of land not wanting to stay here or it's an asset to them that they used for their retirement you know how can a town any town try to make use of those opportunities if there were some to preserve that property. I know a farm here in town that adjacent landowners are scared to death that this farm will go under and that it will become housing and there's been an effort to try to connect the farmer and these people together because they have the wherewithal to conserve that. To me it's more the fear of that current use goes away. If current use goes away and there's not that the large track tax break. Well current use has some problems too. But current use if it disappears you'll see a lot of change in terms of property. But the unfortunate part is the conservation committees have like zero money to work with. I'm not a board member if I'm out in front of my skis here. I have testified before the Valerie review board at least three to four times asking them to take a look when we did the municipal plan part of the Worcester range was designated not only as bear habitat but unfragmented forests that needed to be carefully considered before we develop it. Whatever happens in the room outside the public meeting it's hard to tell how they come to their decisions. The ones that I'm familiar with have no reason decision as to how they decided that it's okay to build a road or to build a property or whatever. I've given up there but I think the tools the board has here that I know of is a zoning regulations. And what the conservation commission did was we proposed to the planning commission a priority wildlife corridor where not only would shoots fill but we would have a town discussion of what else needed to be conserved which would have a heightened level of scrutiny before we would build on that. Number two and I think like you and I spoke about who goes on the development review board is important if you have builders, architects and real estate developers on a development view board you're probably not going to get a lot of effort in terms of digging into the facts and saying is this an area that we think needs to be conserved do we need to limit the housing modify or whatever. I don't think we should take people's housing rights away but zoning regulation is the only tool I know of in town and I think some of that is on all of us to think more about. Isn't that a basically a process of the same thing? I mean shoulda coulda woulda but the Worcester range should have been maybe 25 acres owning at one point but the horse is out of the corral on that one. Alicia? To go maybe full circle, thank you Billy for the comments I just want to emphasize because there was folks interested in conservation commission you can hang out every week and do this with Billy and just to say at least personally when we had this select board survey and I shared this response to some folks who emailed but to stay. Just to emphasize you came back to the zoning and I proposed the idea of my top priority in the next one to two years is to update our zoning bylaws. The parameters we were given is what is an actual item in the next one to two years. So speaking for myself the framing said housing and economic development and I do regret not including the word conservation but in my mind the priority of creating some forward progress on a zoning rewrite that I personally have been involved in for four years and trying to get something over the finish line even if it is for the downtown to create more density where we're already developed is an important actionable step we can do. So that was my personal feeling of conservation in a top priority item for a survey but I think this idea of not being siloed is really important. So that's the other thing for us to think about how do we have not a conservation planning commission developer review board and select board all talking about different things that we're all moving in one direction. Thank you. It might be something that we may want to have the conservation commission again to us or to a select board meeting. I think we're going to be around because this inventory is something we're working on but we'll need to talk to you about that. Could we hear what Bill has to say? Yeah and as everyone knows I have six months to grow and not trying to tick people off in the next six months is a big goal of mine and I hope nobody here from the conservation commission or the people who have expressed this concern take offense to what I'm going to say. I'm the municipal manager I kind of see everything as people and organizations come in and out they ask for funding, they want to talk to the select board I was just trying to count I think probably in the last ten years there's been six people who've called me up in December and said I'm the new treasurer of the conservation commission and what is this budget process and I explained to them we've put a budget together the conservation commission hasn't come close to spending its budget and I don't know how long there's $700, only $700 that's in the planning commission's budget every year to go to the conservation commission and the conservation commission last year got its $700 and spent $245 and I know there's a pandemic and everything else but if you go back in time you'll see $700 in very little spending, there's been talk about having speakers come in and is there money to paying our area, is there money to buy refreshments you can do what you want with your money and nothing happens and it's a little frustrating to me in that in this survey I guess the squeaky wheel gets the grease and until the survey happened I don't think anybody on the conservation commission has been in here waving the flag too much, maybe you've been to the planning commission and I know you Billy and I'm sure you've been to the development review board and I'm not trying to say that nothing is being done but I might be the only one in the room who remembers when the conservation commission was started and I don't remember the year was started but I know Karen Miller was on the board and I know that because just of conversations that we've had but when the conservation commission was started the point was made by the select board at the time and I was like okay that's what you want to do but you're going to have a conservation commission but we're not going to spend any money to conserve public money to conserve property to conserve land you have to kind of go out so we give them $700 a year to do a little bit of programming and they're supposed to do everything else and if conservation is important you know I look at page 28, 29 of the annual report and you know there's $57,000, $60,000 a year that goes out for circle good beginnings, down street housing, children's room, senior center all worthy causes but if we can afford $60,000 for all of those outside organizations couldn't we afford a little more than $700 and actually do something with the conservation commission? It kind of sits there and it's impotent. It doesn't have authority and it has no money to even do anything with so if you're going to make this a priority I think you should and you know the large tracks of land and again I have mixed feelings about this because we're in Waterbury, 60% of Waterbury is in state forest land that can't be developed ever and people complain about their taxes they have 40% of our land that we can tax and the state owns a whole bunch of it and we get a good pilot payment from them you know the forest land we get I'm happy I'm telling you to select what in my report today well we'll probably get more than $9,600 I mean $96,000 from the state this year for the state forest land and we're going to get $107,000 for the pilot from forest and parks you know outbuildings and lean tours that they have and we're going to get $380,000 from the state all of which is probably 60% what we would get if those same properties were owned by the public so I'm not against conserving land but in Waterbury we have a lot of land maybe it's not the white land you know that's maybe where the rub is it's connected for us the wildlife corridors and everything else but we have a lot of land in Waterbury already and that land and property is where our revenues come from so I know I said a lot I hope I didn't offend anybody but the conservation commission wants to do something maybe they got to be given a little bit more money to do something with and maybe there needs to be some kind of strategic planning about what role the conservation commission has because every time somebody talks to me it's just about well can we have a speaker we're going to rent the Green Mountain Club and somebody's going to come in and they're going to talk about whatever the landslide that happened up in the state park land so I'm not being critical of you folks I'm just trying to say it's guilty is charged because I've been on the commission for three or four years and it's we don't have a big mission we don't we don't have you know if someone wants to do that was why I comment to the DOB by myself because one moves too quickly for the commission to move and then you know to have everybody edit everything I write would take three months that's all said and done I mean it took us six months to make the comments you know so that's the moment right but I think it's I would just say I think some of the ownership of us is because it has been a loosely managed group appropriately I don't want to criticize anybody done basically on what individuals wanted to do and our last big effort was helping on shoes on the radio or the tower and things have kind of lost momentum that's why we did this strategic planning to say let's do the inventory let's figure out what the tower is nine of us in a room are not in a dictate so I agree with you and I probably shouldn't need to respond just a quick comment I know I was a former chair of the conservation commission and I I think I was on the conservation commission I was founding member probably there for seven years the problem was I know when I was there we founded the conservation fund I always said and we had people in the conservation wanted town money to go in every year I said I was opposed to I say if we have a good project the conservation commission should come to the town and ask for money from the town if you don't have a thing I don't want to ask taxpayers who are hurting already and I think that's where you're at if you have a good project as Bill kind of says ask for money thanks everybody that was more than my two minutes but I appreciate it thank you we appreciate that perspective though thanks Bill thanks if there's no further we are already behind on the agenda we're going to move forward if other people do have comments we'd be glad to have you at the next select board meeting thank you okay we'll move on to select board items update from the library director thank you for having me for those who don't know me I'm Rachel Muse the director of the Waterbury Public Library I know you have a lot on your agenda so I'm going to try to make this relatively quick I do have a handout for you I won't read through the whole thing so this way you can take a look at my notes but the reason why I wanted to come here today is because we've reached kind of an interesting milestone at the library which is that we have now as of June 16th been fully reopened for a solid year since our pandemic closures which feels really good it's really nice to be back up to speed that means we're back to being open 46 hours a week and we were open 2380 hours total in the past 12 months which is almost double what we were open the 12 months before that so that is very nice to see again I'm not going to read through all these statistics but I do want to point out that we welcome 351 new card members in the past year and one of the things that's been really interesting about that is so many of those people have come into the building and said oh we moved to Waterbury a year ago but we haven't been able to be in this building we didn't know there was a library we didn't know anything about it so it's nice to be welcoming people who are relative newcomers but haven't found a way to be in the library before that we are very busy these days at the library but there are some interesting takeaways that I want to talk about that have happened since the pandemic if you look at the backside of your handout you will see a very strange looking chart at the top there which is actually kind of Waterbury's pandemic in lines the orange line represents our print book usage in circulation starting in September of 2019 and the blue line represents our digital book usage you can see that that blue line spiked up and went right as the library closed in March of 2020 and has stayed relatively stable ever since well that print book usage line has really been all over the place with a very nice spike last summer which was sort of our kind of brief era of normalcy but I found this to be kind of an interesting statistic to look at to see what Waterbury has looked like in the past few years we are slowly creeping back up to normal and I hope we'll be getting there in the coming months I have high hopes that this summer will be a really good and more like normal summer for us the next chart is a kind of interesting thing for me to look at was I was looking at a lot of different numbers at the library but one that I found really interesting was computer usage so this means people who come into the library and sit down at a public computer for long stretches of time to get work done to access the internet to do things like that and that number has very slowly instead of even creeping up all this year which says to me that there are people who are still coming back into the building for the first time after a long time away so I just pulled these numbers out of a lot of different statistics that I could have shown you because I thought they really showed us something interesting about library usage which is that we are still creeping back up to normalcy after a very erratic couple of years so what are we up to at the library right now lots of programming, programming is back in a big way and one thing that's really interesting about what we're doing with programming that I think is actually a silver lining of the pandemic is that we can offer programming in so many different ways we do a lot more virtual programming some of our programs have people have chosen to stay on virtual programming for things like certain book clubs for our chair yoga other programs that maybe target an older audience who don't yet feel comfortable maybe necessarily coming out to a public space but they do want to access those library services we are working on more and more and better hybrid programming where we can have people available on zoom as well as in the building and we are recording a lot more of our programming than we used to so that we can make programming available after the fact we are also taking a lot more advantage of our outdoor spaces and thanks to funds we received through the department of libraries through their ARPA funding we were able to purchase things like a PA system, canopies, tables lots of items that make it easier for us to move around and to set up a space wherever we need to set up that space as you saw from one of those charts on the back our digital usage went up quite a bit during the pandemic and our closures and it has stayed steadily high even as we see people coming back into the building to get print books they are not giving up their digital books they loved those well they had access to them they learned how to use our systems so that is something we are going to continue to provide at a high level and again thanks to funding we received through the department of libraries we have been able to really supplement our digital book collection our friends of the library are also paying for a service called press reader which allows us to provide access to digital magazines and newspapers to the public so we are definitely going to be providing access to more digital materials going forward and then what we are really enjoying this summer is that feeling of getting back to normal and I think folks who if you have had young kids go through the school system you know that the summer reading program at the library is a very big deal this year we are really trying to make that feel celebratory in a lot of ways so we actually kicked off our summer reading program tonight with a presentation from Vince the Vermont Institute of Natural Sciences so we have just leaving the library now a tortoise and a falcon who we are here to teach kids about watershed and we talked about conservation but actually that's a huge part of the theme of our summer reading is watershed management but one thing we are trying to do this year is expand our summer reading to teens and to adults as well so I am also going to give you a handout which is our summer reading bingo for adults in the community to challenge themselves to do some reading in the summer and to read a little differently we do have some prizes that you can win if you do this so that's one way we are really trying to not just focus on the kids this summer but to really expand our program to people of all ages so I would encourage you to take part in the summer reading if you get a chance and if you want to yeah I don't know they are great and this is something that we hope that we will see going forward but the biggest thing that's happening right now is that we are launching a strategic planning initiative to talk about strategic planning we are going to launch a survey on August 15th that we are going to access the community a lot of different ways including of course we are going to have it on our website but we are also going to bring paper copies out to the farmers market get that survey out lots of paper copies available right at the library and then in the fall we will be convening focus groups to like really get into more of the details of that survey when I started at the library almost a year ago I was excited to read what the strategic plan for the library was and discovered that the last strategic plan had been written before this building was built so the great work clearly was done to get that building into place but it's time to really take a look and think okay well now that we've got the building what are we doing with it what are our priorities for the future so the goal this late summer into the fall is going to be to spend a lot of time talking to the community figuring out what they want to see out of that space and what their priorities are and how those have shifted since the pandemic since we've definitely seen usage change in some ways including a lot more digital services and a lot of use of our small meeting rooms as more and more people live lives on zoom so that's my quick report as to what's going on at the library when I'm convening those focus groups I'll definitely reach out to you because I'd love to hear from you and if you are available to take part in some of those meetings we'd love to talk to this left board about what they'd like to see from the library Any questions? Just a real quick question in your digital numbers does that include digital music as well as print? No this is just books and audio books yep so not music or streaming video your computer usage do you have some people that are perhaps overusing and maybe crowding out people that want to use? No I think we're in a really good shape actually and we offer computer usage in a lot of different ways and that's actually been another thing that's changed since the pandemic so not only do we have the standing public computers that you're used to seeing there that people come and sit down at we have a couple of chrome books that can circulate and those have become very popular because there are people who don't necessarily want to be in the building all the time or they're doing something out in the world that they need a computer and our Wi-Fi gets a ton of use even I'll arrive at nine in the morning and people will be sitting in the parking lot using the Wi-Fi so I think that we're able to provide access to computers in a lot of different ways than we had been previously Is three thousand books per month what you consider a norm? Yeah that's been about the norm but as you can see from the numbers on the back it's really jumped up and down we are crawling back up to three thousand last summer we were well back up over that I think we are going to get there this summer I do feel that usage picking up already but it has been just it's been really interesting to see how you can actually see sort of the waves of cases in the community Yeah it's kind of fascinating to see that visual and the way people have actually been using the library Thank you Rachel. Thank you so much for your time Okay next item on the agenda is a maker sphere request to paint electrical boxes to represent from the maker sphere I'm MK Monley and I'm actually here with a few different hats on one as a former art teacher at Brookside Primary School two maker sphere three water barrier area anti-racism coalition the common factor in those three hats is community based art which I'm passionate about which you would know with River of Light Lanarky At any rate maker sphere had approached Bill a while ago about painting some of the electrical boxes and we had written a grant to do that and we were thinking to have students paint them and we didn't get the grant and so that sort of went by the wayside but I'm also part of the public art team on the anti-racism coalition and when I was the art teacher at Brookside we had artists come into school the first people who were allowed to come in during the pandemic and we did this project called Windows and Mirrors where we were taking perspectives so you look out a window and you see people and what are their experiences? they're different than yours and you look in a mirror and you know what your experiences are so it was a perspective taking lesson for the kids tied in with art and what the public art team is thinking if we can paint the two electrical boxes and this is all if's and what's in the one at Park Row and Main Street and the one at Stowe Street and Main Street those students who were at Brookside are now at middle school I haven't talked to the middle school yet because I need to talk to you folks but you know could students work with one of the artists who worked with them when they were at Brookside to continue the Windows and Mirrors theme and paint those two electrical boxes what they would look like I don't know yet and we would have to bring the designs to the board for approval so it's just an idea to just bruise it up a little bit add some community art get kids involved so that's my pitch so there are a lot more boxes we went through this a year and a half or two ago and green mountain power doesn't allow big boxes to be painted but these are the traffic signal they're big ish 5 feet tall by 3 feet wide we went through that green mountain power just doesn't want their boxes painted for whatever reason I would like to see if there's some sort of I know you maker sphere gets funding from the town as is you know if there's some sort of fundraising to provide the costs and stuff like that if we could do it yes it would have to be presented and approved you know because everything nowadays seems to be controversial you know and we're not asking for funding we're just asking permission to spruce it up and it's going to cost some money from somebody so the anti-racism coalition has some money maker sphere has some money and then if we needed to raise money we would do that through the community art sales and the kids are already well no I haven't talked to the kids yet because I wanted to get permission before I approached the art teacher at the middle school I need to any object Danny any comments wonderful you know I drive sometimes and see it in other communities and it's just so beautiful so you gotta go through each step and then I think the whole board would love to see you know the pitch of what the art might look like but I think it's wonderful for the town so thanks for making it happen thanks Danny any other comments jane's got her hand up yeah I'd say that any of you have driven through south Burlington they have community wide embraced painting their elliptical boxes and they're really interesting they're all different a lot of them have kind of garden themes but they're very bright and colorful they catch your eye so I think it's a terrific idea and I think we are very we are in good hands with the MK and her group to come up with a good proposal thanks Saratoga like a month month and a half ago and they have all these at first I didn't know exactly what they were but my wife said those are kind of high heels and I guess they have a history of dance and they're all different ones painted and they look great all around town so if there are spaces that are applicable of you know tasteful means and stuff like that I think I don't I don't does anyone have any objections no I just I don't know if we can ask the question I'm just curious you know I think we're in sensitive time do you come forward to the people on this area in such a sensitive time and I know I was at several meetings recently about your banner and I just it's such a heated thing to go in a certain area and so I guess my question is going to be is this what we're talking about again one of these very controversial items or are we just talking about a very random decorative scenic all inclusive all comfortable for everyone kind of piece of art I think we need to see what students come up with but the idea would be perspective taking and being open to understanding other people's perspectives and then looking at our own perspective so it's hard to say you know the kids came up with abstract things they also did self-portraits and looking at themselves so I can't say what it's going to be until we're actually working with students but whatever designs we wouldn't want to paint that we came up with we would want to bring to the select board before we started painting on the bosses it wouldn't be anything that we would just do without permission any other comments do you want to come up to the camera? I really don't want to come up if you don't mind I love art, art is extremely subjective and I think that's what we interjected into this conversation which is what is going to be appropriate to one might not be to another we can't please everybody out of this blink of an eye art you know that so I would certainly be interested I think we're putting the board to be the jury for everybody in Waterbury and this is what we've run into before I don't know what the time frame is to have some sort of a painting but let's say a painting goes up that Waterbury doesn't love and then we have a student we're in this awkward position of telling a student that we've had a public outcry we have people that aren't happy about it it could go the other way and everybody could be really happy and that's great but we've got so many things that we're juggling right now that I just think it's really putting the board in an awkward position to have to be the judge as to what is going to subjectively make people happy throughout all of Waterbury if there were going to be gardens and flowers and all of that I'm all for it right it's very very neutral it seems to be the potential here to end up in another black mario because you're saying that this is about a child's perspective of something perspective we're leaning into again because you're sitting here from war which is a wonderful group and it's anti-racist and I think that's terrific but if a child comes up and decides to put words on it that they want to put on it you know I don't know I mean we don't know what's going to come out of a child with a mind and that child wants to do that who should be one to go and say that's really not going to work I think we just need to be very careful what we're putting in our community because we're asking everyone to have it in our space and so I agree with the neutral there is I love art to our art shows every year it's absolutely amazing we have beautiful artists that come and show their work all the time I love to go to galleries I love so it's not an opposition to any art if it's a community public space where everyone will be seeing and I feel like it should have a very neutral tone that everyone is comfortable with and not a controversial one I think that's important because I don't think this board wants to be put on being a censor for any way I think and I do like the term neutral you know art isn't supposed to be neutral art is supposed to be someone's expression of their perception of the world or whatever I mean there's public money spent on art all over the world and some art you love and some art you hate I think it's really sad if everything in the world has to be neutral that nobody can say anything and I'm not taking one side or the other but it's if you want it neutral just leave it green it's neutral right now well maybe that's a good thing to consider I think if you want to talk at art gallery or in some much more personal home I would agree by what you want put it there or don't but I think when you're putting it in a public space where the community of upwards five thousand or more I think you really do need to think what's a public space a museum is a public space this is a public space you're talking about putting it in our streets that's different than choosing to go into a library to do if I go into a certain public space and I don't like what I see I just walk right back out it's an option if you're posting it on our streets and where we have to drive by I think it's very different so a public art on the train bridge or the mural that was put up on the side of Axels you may or may not like either of those but you're going to drive in or walk by them I think they're pretty neutral well that's your opinion I don't know what that art is going to look like until we get a chance to work with the artist and the students to say right but you're leading them by asking a specific question I'm asking them to take perspective how is that leading I think we have I think we have to wrap up I think I don't want to see this board being a censor either pro or con but I think there needs to be as Bill said some reasonable way to have expression and again let the makers of yours folk bring something to forward to us and we'll react to it Roger I've spent a lot of time with kids in Waterbury I have a lot of confidence in most kids I move that we allow MK to take next step to address those kids about this project see what sort of designs they come up with and we can debate that can I have a question please once we get to the discussion we first have a second I'll second it I'm just responding to okay do we want to have any further discussion yes that I'm not going to pass judgment until I see what's here presented I think the goal here from what I'm understanding hearing let's try to keep our childrens out of the political realm if that's possible I'm not saying it's going there but let's try to keep it from going there I guess that would be my sentiment and I'll be excited to see what's brought forward there's a handout Chiomi Hi everyone my name is Chiomi McKibbin I'm a resident of Waterbury I'm also a member of the public art committee at the Waterbury Area Anti-Racism Coalition I think one thing I just want to note is I've had conversations about work putting together ideas for public art around town and I think a lot of people make the assumptions that because we are an anti-racism group that our art is automatically going to be political it's automatically going to be controversial when that's not the case at all we just want public art in town and I think there's a lot of assumptions being made of what it's going to look like in reality we don't know what it's going to look like you know we don't have any drafts up letting the kids decide what they want to paint on the electrical boxes so I think that there's a lot of assumptions that this is going to be something really controversial when in reality we don't know what it's going to look like yet because we're waiting for the kids to put together their own ideas and what they want to paint on the electrical boxes Thank you for that comment I think we have made a statement to direct makersphere to look into that and come back with a formalized plan we have a motion and a second do you want to take a vote I just want to be clear that I'm here with the anti-racism hat on but also then my other hats but makersphere isn't taking on this project MK is part of Waterbury Area Anti-Racism Coalition as well as our community makersphere so it's not just I just don't want I want to be transparent the board have any further questions if not we'll go to vote all in favor say aye any opposed any abstentions motion carries okay next item on the agenda is Blackback Pub Entertainment Permit and Outside Consumption Permit right so Lynn Mason one of the owners came in with two outside consumption permits one is expansion of their outside consumption on the Stowe Street side of the building they currently have outside consumption on the main street side and the second is to serve beverages to coincide with the music in the alley which you approved last meeting I believe which is on July 22nd on August 26th I don't know if you want to do all these at once but the entertainment permit they want a two to three person ban to provide light music on Thursdays through Saturdays for about six to ten they're using the stairs of the building now it's kind of like a holding area for people to go be seated and they just want light music for people to listen to while they're waiting you're talking about that small deck that they have inside inside they own the building so upstairs on the Stowe Street side and the outdoor permit is up on the deck of the Stowe Street side they were asking for it they talked with DLC and they said submit permits just saying you're expanding your outside consumption Any further comments before or do we just want to go to a motion so their music inside is not going to conflict with the music outside right that's the same time as music in the alley no the music in the alley is only two evenings but it's not like noise is going to be an issue like competing I doubt they would compete with themselves yeah I don't know if I'll move to accept Roger moved the permit this is seconded any further discussion they're big none all in favor say aye any oppose any abstentions motion carries next item tax rate homestead filing penalty okay it's tax rate and homestead filing I send you an email on Friday with information about the tax rate we received as we're supposed to this year the notification from the Department of Education and the State Department of Taxes about the education tax rate the grant list has been filed grievances that won't change the grant list significantly so the school taxes are actually going down from last year the homestead rate in 2022 set by the state 1.7622 as opposed to 1.7986 it's down a little more than 2% the non homestead rate is $1.6956 that's 3.44% down so that's helpful the grant list in the water rate did not rise to the degree that I anticipated it would and I made some poor assumptions I guess with all of the sales properties especially residential properties over the past couple of years that have been really going down about game busters I thought the grant list might increase by 1.5% it increased about half that much 0.73% and I was disappointed in that I talked to Dan Sweet the assessor and he said well you're right all of the residential properties that are selling for multiple times what the tax listing is but we can't change them unless we change all of them so in other words we have to do a reappraisal there have been times in the past when we had a hot housing market in certain segments for instance back when Tom Vickery was here there was a point in time where properties that were say between 450 and 650,000 were really selling well above the market and he actually reappraised that small slice of the grant list and I thought maybe we would be doing that again but Dan indicates that it's across all of the grant lists so really the reappraisal which I would be not next year but maybe be after Excuse me, did Dan give you any indication of what part percentage perhaps of new construction that played into this? Yeah and there is new construction the new construction has to be fit into the existing grant list as well if something is a million dollars it's probably not listed that way now because it's going to go up and down to anything else but in my defense even though the estimate was about a half we didn't lose value on the power generating dam if we don't power have a significant value just staying the same the increase would have been one percent and for those who don't understand when the new FERC license was issued to Greenbelt Power they no longer can use that dam to make peak power they used to be able to hold water back in the summer pool the summer pool was supposed to be 740 feet it raised the elevation in the pool to 742 and then they could draw it down to 738 they had four feet ahead that they could release on some afternoon that was 95 degrees and everybody wanted their air conditioning it's a run of the river dam now what comes in to the resin war goes out so there's still generating power it's not anywhere near as valuable to them as it used to be and therefore we do an income analysis and Dan doesn't do this this is done by the state folks so the power dam value did go down and that exacerbated the problem so anyway if you divide the $4,139,475 of taxes that we voted to impose on ourselves this year by the grand list the tax rate comes out to $0.53.4 the voters at town meeting authorized the tax rate to be set at no more than $0.53 so we've got a round down that four tenths of a penny and I put that in the memo I didn't bring it but so there's a little bit of lost revenue that our tax bill will not generate quite the $4,139,475 having said that though there's a few other things that are going to offset that our pilot payment is going to be significantly higher than we anticipated the whole time list for current use is going to be a couple thousand dollars higher than we anticipated and our fund balance we did a superb job of collecting delinquent taxes at the end of the year so our fund balance is significantly higher than budgeted and I apologize I'm happy that it's that way I project the fund balance the best I can when the year closes on December 31st and we're doing a budget in the middle of January it's hard to get it exact there's some revenue comes in that gets posted back because it was from a year ago there's some expenses that come in and get posted back so I think we'll be in good shape and we'll see that when we talk about the budget in a minute so my recommendation to the board is set the tax rate at $0.53 given the higher than anticipated fund balance given that the pilot payment will be a little bit higher I toyed with the idea of saying well you could round it down further if you wanted but the school taxes are going down the total tax rate for homesteads all inclusive this year will be 1.15% lower than last year it will be $229.56 as opposed to $232.22 and the non homestead is going to be down about 2% at $2.22.99 and the last year it was $227.96 so because it's going to be a lower tax rate for everybody than it was last year I think that given that our tax rate should be $53.4 we should just go with what the tax payers authorized us to levy which is a $0.53 tax rate if there's a I think right now I'm projecting that we'll have a small fund balance next year but we talked about the profit funds yet so I think we're going to be pretty good going forward but there are some shadows most of which revolve around petroleum costs so anyway that's my recommendation for the tax rate $0.53 tax rate for municipal services and then $0.174 for child care contract and $0.174 for the venture exemption Any comments from the board? Phil do we have the authority to approve a tax rate higher than what the voters approved? No $53 is the size we can go I recommended that because frankly I thought with a 1.5% grant list increase that maybe we would have a lower tax rate than that and I wanted to be able to go to $53 in case there were things that would be forward indicated that we should but many years the voters we present the voters with emotion to simply raise a certain amount of taxes and if they had done that then we would just divide it and say $53.4 but this year we recommended to them to approve the budget and set a tax rate and they did so $53 is as high as you can go I have a question on the municipal tax rate per se but can you just see if we work around the common level of appraisal it's showing where 86% what is the statutory requirement for when we need to be appraised that's likely next year? Probably not next year Dan and I'll confirm with him Dan and I talked about a reappraisal several months ago back when we were putting the budget together when you look at the budget report you'll see that we did budget this year to move $75,000 from the general fund back into the reappraisal fund when the state started paying us about $20,000 or so a year they set up a fund and it's a 4% amount that you get and our receipt from the state was about $21,000 and when Tom Vickering was here we used to use say $5,000 or $6,000 a year to offset the costs of running the Lister's office and then we started seeing what reappraisal costs were going to be Tom who had worked in Waterbury for a long, long time he was a private contractor but he worked for Waterbury, Duxbury and Stowe basically and he always did it and we got a really good price we paid him more than we normally pay we decided to go out and get XYZ reappraisal company it was a really good deal and when Tom retired we decided then to stop moving money from the reappraisal fund to run the Lister's office to conserve money and then when we saw what Barry had paid and I don't remember this off the top of my head now and what some of the other surrounding communities were paying for the reappraisal stand and I talked and I said maybe we ought to put $75,000 for the next couple of years back if we could reappraisal fund so we've done that so I told, I asked Dan because he does this service for Duxbury as well he works 28 hours a week for us, I'm not sure how many hours he works in Duxbury, maybe the other 12 but I talked to him and said, you know, we should think about when it's time to go out for an reappraisal that Duxbury and Waterbury should put together and get some colleagues to help that way so we'll be back to talk about that but we're not in dire you know I think we were 89 or 91 I don't have last year's sheet with me but it's been dropping a little bit more quickly of late but I don't think we're going to be in trouble with the law this year or probably not even a year after but it's good to reappraise before you have that mandate Any further questions? The discussion about ARPA funds, is there any reason to think that we should do that before we set the tax rate or is there nothing that a pot of money could do to Well yeah, you could put you could say reduce the tax rate by 1.5 million dollars I'm not interested in just reducing the tax rate put it towards something that in turn reduces the tax rate and you're getting a bang for your buck I think you'll do that my expectation is you'll have that discussion and you'll do that next year So the next part of my question is with the economics being what they are, are we better off to take a look at that for next year that post this year? This is a very modest increase the tax rate is going to be exactly what the voters anticipated it would be it's not quite a 2% increase from last year inflation is running 6 or 8% so I think it's very reasonable for right now but no I think your ARPA discussion should be dealing for next year and maybe I'd spread it out you've got a couple years to spend it to me So I'll move to approve a 53% tax rate Thank you Roger, we have a second Crawling Any further discussion? If not all in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Motion passes Okay now you need to make a motion to set two fourth tax rates the veteran's exemption that, so the state law says veterans, disabled veterans get a $10,000 exemption on their property while we voted a number of years to go I think we voted to 40,000 as opposed to 10 state allows you to do that but if you go above the 10 you have to pay the education fund so the cost for the veteran's exemption over $10,000 is $13,428 this year if you divide that into the grand list it's an additional tax rate of 0.0017 and then a year or so in the spring of 21 we had a court case and we had a settlement with hunger model child care and hunger model child care pays the municipal tax but not the education tax again the state allows you to do that if everyone else in the town picks up the education tax so again that cost to the town in 2022 is $12,965 and that rounds it's 0.00167 so round that up to 0.0017 as well so if you could make a motion to add 0.0017 for both veterans and hunger model child care exemption so moved second Chris's motion we have a motion and a second any further discussion if not all in favor say aye any opposed any abstentions motion carries by the fire's homestead declarations to be filed by property owners I forgot what the deadline is most of us if we are with it file it with our income tax that's the deadline there is a provision in the state law that allows a penalty of up to 8% for late filing and it's a complicated law it's this if you file late and the homestead tax is higher than the non homestead tax and it's something different we have been in the practice of recommending a 2% late fee regardless of the relationship between the homestead and non homestead rates we're recommending 2% because 2% penalty on the average residential property and those are the ones who would be guilty of late filing a homestead you don't file a homestead if you're a commercial property the average residential property with a 2% late filing fee will pay somewhere between $1500 of a late fee when we were charging 8% before it was way more the idea is that you want to be able to recoup the expenses of having to print a new tax bill for somebody $50 clearly we can do it for that nobody is filing a late homestead declaration here because they're trying not to pay more taxes because the homestead rate is high so do we have a motion to that effect do a 2% we can state a 2% penalty rate thank you roger we have a second any further discussion aye any abstentions motion carries we'll go on to the managers items discussion of highway projects and schedule yeah this will be very brief it's not really too much of a schedule there's 2 projects that you need to take some action on one if you remember what we have in the budget here for paving we're going to pay the Stow Street and North Street and Hill Street so the paving of Stow Street we've got $270,000 budgeted and we have a grant from the state of $175 to go toward that project the requirement by the state if you're going to use the state's paving grant is you have to put the project out to bid you can't just hire your local every day paper like sometimes we don't want to do so we did put the paving out to bid we had 3 bidders, Whitcomb, Estee Paving and Pike Pike was high significantly higher than everyone else Whitcomb was $83.25 per ton for Stow Street Estee Paving was $83.75 so for $0.50 we have to take Whitcomb the state says that you have to take a little bidder unless you can show that they're not qualified to do the job I think that's overkill but it's the long, you can't do anything other than that so I would ask the select board to accept the price from Whitcomb and I didn't make copies of this but I just want to say we haven't bid it for a while typically we've negotiated with Estee Paving in fact we were thinking about would we hire Estee Paving to do other streets but their bid for the other streets were actually significantly higher so they really sharpened their pencil on the Stow Street project and there was some talk that Whitcomb was going to sub it out to Estee which would have been really nice for us because it would have got the lowest price plus it would have been the local people doing the work but I don't think that Whitcomb is going to sub it out so anyway, that's where we are $83.25 a ton I entertain a motion I'll move to accept Whitcomb's bid on Stow Street project for a rebave Thank you Chris, we have a second Thank you Roger motion second any further discussion Is there a time frame for that Bill? I'm hoping next week or the week after next is what the hope is and talking to Bill Woodruff here just a little while back I don't know if you want to wait and have this conversation after this okay or whatever Bill said something about possible extra money to maybe do some additional stuff elsewhere that just to kind of tide over some of these other roads until we can he has to talk to me about that speak out of turn here I'm not upset by that but we'll just have to see and we've done that in the past the main jobs, the Stow Street job North Street, if you've gone up there you can see North Street has already been milled Redwood Street really had a shape and then if all goes well we'll get that up on every hill replaced just beyond Lonesome Trail and get that done and then we'll pave all the way out from Lonesome Trail to the end and put the top on we are having difficulties with getting contractors and you'll see that on this one so the other project that we did put out to bid we have $200,000 in the infrastructure budget I believe it is no we didn't go I'm just go ahead so motion been made in second no more further discussion thank you all in favor say aye motion carries sorry about that so in the infrastructure budget we budgeted $200,000 to do some work on Reservoir Go info route 100 to the center side of State Park as I've joked if you drive in there the grad rail is really curvy you know it's just sinking down and down and we've had problems in the past we've addressed this once or twice before we allocad people geologists and people from UVM to help try to figure out what needs to be done there so anyway we put scope together and put that out and we asked J. McDonald and Kingsbury to give us a price on that J. McDonald's price $192,050 Kingsbury's price when it first came in was $99,000 and Alec looked at it and said I think they missed a few times they did something wrong it shouldn't be $100,000 we're hoping it would be cheaper than $250,000 but so we called Kingsbury and gave them a second bite at the apple without telling them the other bit and their sharpened pencil price came in at $399,000 quite a sharp pencil I'm not here pleasely so I'm not making fun of Kingsbury it's kind of ironic how things work and maybe when we give them the opportunity to look it over again they had a full plate and they said well if they give us $100,000 to do this we'll do it but we don't have time so McDonald is set to begin in September we want to wait until after Labor Day but it won't be closed until Labor Day but it will be much less traffic going in there but you do have to accept the proposal so in September what date are we talking? it just says in September right now because that's when the switch changes from good to bad and I know for a fact that I won't say summertime to wintertime but conditions can really get difficult I think the idea is we're hoping to get in right after Labor Day this year obviously we're a little bit at discretion it would be pretty difficult to do that project in the summertime the problem is the difficulty of the project itself you wouldn't want to be doing it in the mud either if conditions deteriorate before they start we'll put it off I don't think we're going to want to go in there and just have them muck around and make it worse so we'll work with them they're good contractors and they don't want to screw it up either but if somebody will make a motion to approve that accepting the J. McDonald bit I would appreciate it I move that we accept the J. McDonald bit of $192,050 second we have a motion and a second if not all in favor say aye any opposed? any abstentions? motion passes okay let's move on to allocation of ARPA funds okay so first thing I have to say is that I don't have any better information than I had the last time about whether or not the select award has by the authority or if you need to go to the voters the last meeting Chris that when I talked with I called Fred DuPlessis from Sullivan and Powers to just ask them when they did the audit this year if they could just consider the ARPA money as general fund money because the select board had indicated several meetings ago that we wanted to use it as just replacement revenue we wanted to use up to $10 million for that and if they would just call it general fund fund balance life would be simple when you're talking to auditors they're worse than talking to lawyers nothing is ever simple and there's all kinds of reasons why oh we can't do that and it's deferred revenue and all this stuff that I'm not sure of but this last revenue we did make a few appropriations this year and then in that conversation I said well the information we're getting from Bolivia cities and towns and from from Linda is about the money that we were talking about appropriating to CD5 was that the select board had the final authority and Fred's comment was well the legislative body has the final authority but in Vermont the legislative body for the purposes of appropriations is how meeting unless you have a city charter so the select board isn't really the final authority they recommend the budget and he said you kind of did that with your other your ICENRA appropriation and the $600,000 that we were going to be able to EFUD that they said no thank you to so I mentioned at the last meeting maybe we should have a special town meeting but if you have a special town meeting it's an open town meeting it's not it's not my ballot so now everything is on the table and people can make a motion to you know give Billy Big Door a million dollars whether he wants to give it to the general to the conservation fund or not that would be up to him the idea of just having kind of a free-wheeling town meeting doesn't appeal too much to me a lot of other communities are making decisions about money with their select boards I think the auditors of the wall they're going to have to get over it I do expect even though I couldn't tell Fred when he calls that I retire now, I talk to somebody else I do expect that since I will be here all of 2022 that I'll probably be somehow involved in answering questions about how 2022 money was spent the worst thing that the auditors can do is say that you have a material weakness in your financial statements that you didn't follow procedures there I don't think anybody could stretch it to say it's fraud it's a voted legislative body and even if somebody did say that nobody I don't think anybody would try to prosecute on that so having said all that I think I'm still going to try to talk to the folks at BLCT and at your next meeting Ted Brady is going to be here by the way he's the executive director of BLCT if you want to ask him about his opinion about it and what they're telling their membership we can do that together so having said all that I think a town meeting is a bad idea especially we're going to have to do that at a regular town meeting but at least we'll be prepared for it and several meetings ago we made the decision to appropriate $50,000 in powerful money to CD5 so I think we should just do that and let the chips follow where they may at it's $50,000 it's not $1.5 million I think in the end it will all work out having said that I sent Linda and Chris an email several weeks ago with the contract that Linda had sent to me with some amended language that I explained in the email and I sent it to them because at the time I didn't know who the executive director was even if they had hired one and didn't hear anything and then a little bit before the last meeting I emailed Linda and asked her if there was an executive director and I hadn't heard that it was Danielle Smith was that true she emailed it back and said yes so I sent this to the executive director last week and Linda sent something back this afternoon that came at 5.30 into my email address and I wasn't here so I just got it before I came to the meeting so Linda is on the screen here and I had several items that I had put in yellow and I got the email back from Linda saying most of the yellow was okay but it's kind of modified by what's in green and Linda I guess the one thing that I I'm wondering why it has to be in here is in number three it's on page two and I think I suggested that the language be taken out it is understood that the town may receive ARPA funds over one or more years and that the contribution and the settlement to CD5 shall take place within 30 days of each subsequent receipt we've already received half of our ARPA money we've appropriated $50,000 I don't know why we have to have language saying that we have to give you money after the next one so I know you're not the lawyer but that's the one kind of question that I have and then in number five I have no idea what that technical language means but those are my major questions I suggest that you talk with Janelle she is the one that made these changes and she is the lawyer representing CV fiber I would like to point out that on section three it says it is understood that the town may receive ARPA funds and it doesn't say that you have to appropriate anymore to us that's all it says we're extremely happy with the contract that you had sent she made just a few changes and they are would like to proceed with the contract so please discuss your objections with Janelle it's not really an objection it's just a clarification that our appropriation was fairly simple $50,000 if it doesn't all get used for this particular project we want whatever is not used back it's just confusing to have the language in there to me about a subsequent receipt of ARPA funds because we've got way more than enough to give you all $50,000 now but anyway let me just work this out I think at the next meeting it can be resolved and then you can authorize me to sign it I'm uncomfortable but I know I got that like two seconds before I came here and I didn't have a chance to review it so I'm not about to I'm not saying I'm sure but it's the timing and I didn't send it to Janelle until late last week so it's nobody's fault all day and everything else I did not expect a signature or anything tonight and I didn't expect a vote on it it's unreasonable to ask the select board to make a decision on 10 minutes thank you Linda for understanding I've been trying to get it to you but the 4th of July holiday kind of blew it off so I'm sorry take your time discuss it with Janelle I'm sure we can come to a resolution thank you we'll put that in for the next meeting Bill other ARPA issues I think it's just benefit at the last meeting we talked about some time this fall maybe starting to have conversations with the community about what the ARPA funds will be used for I think it will be it may be tough for the select board just to deal with it all during the budget process or January and it will be up to the select board of course to present the budget to the voters at the meeting next year and the voters will have their say up and down of course but the same as I got from the board was you'd like to have this conversation with the public I would agree with that statement the conversation amongst us select board members as to what we might have for ideas I think there's nothing wrong with that you're obviously getting input from the public but you might want to shepherd it a little bit and talk about things from the perspective of the board as to what's important maybe make a list of do's and don'ts what we might want to use it for or try to narrow down the scope possibilities for it because there will be very global wants a lot of wants out there I would like to have use in such a manner if it were possible to have a long lasting impact on our tax rate in the quality of the community Any other comments? I think that we would want to focus on one time capital expenses rather than on going budgetary items and then we would get hit the next time that we don't have any federal funding I would really agree with that statement Roger Any other comments? Danny, Alyssa I think we should talk about it more and come up with a process I am a little concerned about the sidewalks on Randall Street that didn't get mentioned last time While the sidewalks on Randall Street are still scheduled to go this year we are planning to do the work ourselves so there is no need to put it out a bit There is always the possibility that all of it doesn't get done I'm not really fearful any longer that none of it will get done this year but things come up and things have to be fit in We have to pay $200,000 for a $240,000 project Some of that money is to pay for lighting in Rusty Parker Park and trash receptacles in Rusty Parker Park and then the rest of it is for sidewalks and we have two years to spend that grant money so if it doesn't all get finished in 2022 it's still there and it will be done next year My hope is that at least well my hope is that all of it gets done and then descending the least favorable options would be Randall Street done and Park Row ends up waiting until next year I can't imagine that we can't get at least one side of Randall Street done but the goal is still it's still in place to get it all done Just to clarify when you say we're doing it I didn't know our highway department was used to pouring sidewalks Well we did both sides of Onuski Street So set the forms and were you using foam as well? In some places we did Any further questions? Let's move on She doesn't have it High technology Danny Bill can go email If you want that library information tomorrow I don't have it but I'll get it from Rachel Excellent thank you very much Thank you Did you let me know you weren't coming Danny? No I just decided right before and I only emailed Mike He emailed in to Lisa because I didn't know it should be here but I'll be right back You can look it over you can formulate all your questions and we can get out of here Does anybody have an extra orange one? Perfect You want to play bingo or something? I think I can be bingo pretty quick I'm already tipped off Back to budget Pay in lieu of taxes Pay in lieu of taxes from the state That's what the state for only a property should pay They owe 40% of the town That's significant Should be more We didn't get this in advance I don't usually do that Where do you want to start Bill? Let me start at the end Go to page 11 Given all of the pluses and minuses of pilot money and other state funds and over budget on petroleum and everything else at the moment I'm projecting that when we end the year we'll have about $80,000 in the fund battles We built the budget for the three operating funds and no money in the fund battles So right now we're still projecting better than budgeted surplus They'll have $80,000 more revenue than expenses Obviously that can change Now if you go back to the beginning You see highlighted in yellow are negative things So property taxes for the general fund $229,000 is what we're going to build when we do the tax bills this week I'm projecting a 97% collection rate So there's 3% to the bad When we get to the end of the year it will probably be almost 100% The school taxes we get .225% of school taxes since the school tax rate just went down I don't know if that will translate into school tax revenue is actually going down because there's an increase in the grand list there'll be more property that's being taxed than it was before but I reduced that projection The things in blue Those are information that have just come from the department of taxes They always have a caveat there saying check in October or November but pretty much those are on and you can see there were about $37,000 almost $38,000 for the building and the pilot Do you know why those went up? Yeah, why did the pilot go up? Well, there's a couple reasons that it could be So pilot is based on a formula It's the insured value of the property So maybe the insured values has gone over here but get adjusted all the time So it's based on the insured values and the property and then the revenue that is generated by local option taxes across the state I think there's 14 or 15 communities now that have local option taxes they're allowed to have a local option tax of 1% on groups of meals on sales and alcohol All of the above or any combination So sometimes just do groups of meals, sometimes do all three just do sales The state takes 30% of the 1% So those towns that have local option taxes if they collect $1,000,000 in local option taxes it all gets sent to the state with the state sales tax by the merchants and if there's $1,000,000 in local option tax in Stowe, Stowe gets $700,000 The authority, the $300,000 stays with the state The state takes a little bit of that for administration and then they distribute the balance to the communities like ours that have state property So the local option tax revenue is likely going up so much So remember, yellow is a negative green is a positive and that dark blue on page two means I just have to look at that a little bit that's that particular one it's recreation program revenues and budget of $99,000, we're already at almost $138,000 and I just want to make sure with Nick and Michelle that some of that maybe should be on the line below that the mini camp wouldn't come maybe on the proper line but it could be some of this posting as well so the good news is that revenues for all the recreation is up significantly still but it might not be posted on the proper line You see there at the top of the page town clerk's fees last year we took in was a little bit older town clerk's fees last year was $1,143 so I budgeted the same amount and again that was probably foolishness on my part except not to the degree that it's looking like so the last in 2021 and in 2020 there were lots of refinances of mortgages and when they do that they have to file record the deed or the mortgage and when interest rates are 2% there's a lot of refinancing now interest rates are up again 6% refinancing has petered out there's not as much demand because there was a lot of purchasing in 2021 and the interest rates there was a lot of cash sales in 2021 there was a lot of cash sales we're likely not going to make on the clerk's fees this year but it's not a killing matter interest on this sweep there's nothing really well if you looked at page 3 there's something to point out there at the very bottom of the page in the budget if you look at the budget report for town meeting $600,000 on that bottom line we're going to give $600,000 to EFUT because they said no to the UDAG transfer I've taken it out of the budget now so rather than have the auditors ask me next year why there's a $600,000 variance in this particular line they'll not ask unless they look at the bill and say have you voted to give them $600,000 so anyway I took that out there's nothing else that's really particular interest until you get to page 5 and at the last meeting Chris the board suggested holding off on the community service officer while we're visiting her on Monday if we don't hide that individual there's about $60,000 savings that will drop to the bottom line I will start looking rather closely to see if we have to pull in our forms on any of the projects Bill can you just remind me of what the community service officer was? Yeah, we talked about having a community service officer perform a couple of functions health officer that for all intents and purposes I am the deputy health officer but one of the hit calls they forwarded to me thank you Carl I deal with those issues the second thing the community service officer was supposed to be would be the animal control officer I won't do that job and then we talked about having a community service officer do some ordinance enforcement mainly involved with parking in the downtown we did a survey I asked W to do a quick little survey a couple of months ago business community and like surveys I want to do unless you remember as I told the board this but you weren't here Chris however many businesses there are let's say 48 respondents 25 respondents one way and 23 respondents the other way so it was split right down the middle and we don't so right now we haven't filled this position I'm thinking we can revisit it around Labor Day but probably a better time to revisit it is when you start interviewing people for my position and talking to them about the fact that we don't have these right now and we can maybe an option to consider instead of thinking about filling it out Labor Day is maybe start advertising around the time your manager starts to get somebody to come along for you know the beginning of the year it's not a lot of work to do the health officer stuff except what it is you know I probably get if I get a dozen calls a year for a health officer that's probably a lot there's always one or two a year that take up a lot of time and a handful in my career that took a lot of time and a lot of work with attorneys and things like that and it's just so it's something that most days you can do without but when you need one having it be the health manager may not be the best option the animal control officer how do they any complaints and maybe it's because people know we don't have anything that didn't seem to matter the complaints we get now where we're missing the animal control officer is again on the times where we get the odd dog bite last year there was a dog bite that was very very bad that happened at the apartment building where the bargain team is so they get extremely hurt and be hospitalized and I'm sure thousands of dollars of medical expenses fortunately that all of the dog happened to be from Iowa State were very conscientious and good and they took care of it I was involved a little bit as the health officer on that one and then you know we didn't have an animal control officer so no one got arrested or no one's dog got arrested so it's just one of those things that unless you when you need it you need it and the ordinance enforcement on the other places where we thought about the pandemics over now issues that we had down at the boat launch the state's planning to build the parking lot down there to get I don't know they can probably get four or five trails off the boat oh eight okay well that's better that's what the capacity of the parking lots come in yeah they saved between seven to eight depending upon the size of the trail I haven't been up to observe but we're not getting the complaints from you know a hundred mile trailhead that we did so right now not feeling this position isn't really hurting but in the future so it's I thought I was going to say this position maybe ought to be filled based on necessity not well the problem is this position that we put in this budget is a full-time position and it's again it's a little bit hard who's going to apply for it we put this position out there three or four years ago and it was a part-time position with no benefits and nobody was interested nobody there was not one out the difficulty with the job that I'm talking about is that it's kind of a 24-hour day job and obviously nobody's going to work 24 hours a day but animal control officers get called at 10 o'clock at night because somebody's dog is chasing a deer or because somebody got bitten or somebody's dog got hit by a car whatever we had that Bolton guy that drove like 300 miles I think for a lost dog one night that we had to pay so the challenge is the other thing that we talk about is right now how we deal with the winter parking van we've got a winter parking van Celia basically calls the towing guy in Richmond that says nobody's supposed to be on the street told him it'd be nice if we had like the old village police department that it's not snowing you could just issue some tickets and you know $25.00 or $5.00 and get somebody's attention all I've got to not leave my car on the street as opposed to just hoof it's gone and you know people say the skies are up there's no snow going to come why and it's like so that was the other thing that that position would do but again it requires somebody to go out at night I'm going to get one person to do this for 21 bucks an hour without a good job anyway we spent too much time on that I'm going to start watching closer there's nothing else really to report until you look at the highway fund on page 9 I do want to point out we did include in this year's budget $95,000 of an highway fund transfer into the highway fund and my thought was at the time we needed that in order to get to the 53 cent tax rate that we were trying to get to right now I told you at the beginning it looked like we were going to have to be $80,000 for the good as it stands right now if you look at page 10 the highway fund is going to be $106,000 in the whole even using the $95,000 for an apple and the idea was if we didn't need the apple money to balance the highway budget we wouldn't transfer it we wouldn't save it for later if things are looking right now we need that money there's a few things on page 10 that I've got to go over with Celia and Woody and to see if we might need to postpone a few things that we were otherwise going to do you can see I didn't print the call next to it but if I remember correctly we budgeted about $70,000 in the highway fund for fuel of various sorts between hearing fuel and diesel fuel gasoline and propane and I think we budgeted $70,000 and we've already spent $62,000 or something like that so we're definitely going to go over all the fuel lines I think I included in the budget a 10% increase over last year's fuel costs and obviously they've gone up way more than 20%. And then we had about two thirds of the way down the page you see emergency road repairs we've spent $30,000 there mostly buying stone and gravel that we needed for the month season so I'm going to probably look at the stone and gravel lines we didn't use all of that that we bought at the time so I think the gravel line and the stone line that we budgeted $36,000 for gravel and $9,000 for stone and we've spent $27,000 and $1,200. I don't think we'll have to spend all of that because we had we start piloting from there so I'm going to sit down with Woody and Celia to look at this budget in particular because it's clearly the one where our biggest exposure is to the fuel. I mean we have that same exposure to the fire department they have diesel fuel in their trucks but the trucks mostly sit there as opposed to our trucks. The sand line I put here $48,000 is it $48,000 for sand? Yeah, $48,000 for sand again we'll look at the piles see how much we might need. I haven't asked but you would know better Chris I mean I've got to assume somebody like Stevie Wilder is going to be raising his price just due to the fuel prices. He has raised his price and I'm glad you brought this up because I wanted to ask you because she's limited him to a thousand yards and he's almost completed that. I don't know what she's slated to purchase this year I know there was some left over from last year I don't know how much without standing on top of the pile and guessing at it but two things I'd be curious to know if dollar for dollar if she can haul it after wages, fuel costs, wear and tear on the vehicles if she can actually time from other projects if she can afford to haul it for less herself. Well and that's why I want to sit down and talk to Bill because I'm not aware that she needs Steve this direction and my guess it's not a guess even if she could I'm not sure it's worth doing because there's other things that there's opportunity costs they got to build in as well. If you send somebody hauling 40 hours a week basically they're driving between here and Bolton for 40 hours a week and how much gravel or sand whatever it is they got in that's what they've accomplished and we pay contractors to do that to save wear and tear on our vehicles and to allow our people to do other things that need to be done. So if she's made that determination already I'm not going to tell you that I'm going to rescind it but I'm going to certainly talk to Bill and Celia about that and you know I'm not trying to take a swipe at Celia or any other department head if they're looking at their budget and they're saying jeez we're going to go over we got to do something to save money I'm all for that but if they choose the wrong they're paying wise and dull and foolish about something so we'll help that go. My other question is what other areas can we be more efficient in than we haven't been in the past possibly going into the winter I mean it still sticks in my mind that when you split up the highway department you had half the guys doing the same amount of work as both crews together that to me showed a huge inefficiency in the crew as a whole when you can take half of them away and still get the other half to do the same amount of work and then there's the use of the sand on the road you know how many times again and I've said in the past maybe we'll be better off sending them home instead of sending them out and spreading the product if it's not needed just for them for something to do those are other areas that need to be looked at as far as efficiency because the less time they're behind that wheel if they can still accomplish the same thing it's savings to us and fuel and wear and tear and put the breakdowns and fuel and we're not the only one going through this I just spoke to my son-in-law heads of all of St. Johnsbury in the northeast kingdom's district for agency of transportation and there happens to be another guy that I sat and had conversation with yesterday who operates southern part of the agency of transportation and they're the two of them telling me the same thing that they're starting to clamp down on efficiencies and starting to make their people operate more fluently and use their head when it comes to instead of sending seven guys to do a job that could be done by three you're sending three stuff like that and some of the stories that these guys are telling me and just makes your blood pressure go up because there's no need of it but I think looking at efficiencies wherever we can gain them is certainly going to help our bottom line and I'm a little concerned about the gravel especially the gravel and stone I hope we don't have another spring like we had last spring but there's always that chance in grappling some of the roads I don't even know where we are at our back road grappling process whether or not we're where we should be or whether there's more that needs to be done and we're just putting it off because you don't want to spend the money or maybe that's where some of this money may come in handy. I think we had some and I don't think we were off the top of my head where we had the gravel projects but we budgeted enough to do some work and I'll try to bring that to the next meeting where we are on some of the projects. One other thing before we move forward here I don't want to forget is that I mentioned to Bill here a while back that the Bolton Pits where we get our sand and gravel from right now and all indications are saying that she's gonna but all indications are looking that resources may dry up at some point in the not too distant future. Dry up in a sense that she's at the age of retirement and for instance she closes now on Fridays and she never used to be and she's closed all this week and she never used to be so there's indications that she's less and less open to the and where's the next closest source? Not close. Not close. Probably Wolcott or Lowell up in that area.  Those are the types of things that yeah I just wonder like with the ARPA money to me ARPA money is like real long term kind of investments versus you know I look at sand, gravel, you know that's kind of operated costs. Percy just bought out Nadoos out of Johnson. They've been operating there forever and Percy just cooped that up here not too long ago. In fact they just got a bracelet sheet from him. I don't know they sell several different products of aggregate. Well everything is consolidation and all these industries might be worth taking a look at. Yeah. I'm sorry Bill. No. You said gravel projects. So that's basically yeah. I'll be working mainly with Philly and Woody to kind of get updates on where we are with these projects. See if there's light items in the hiring budget that we should kind of shift into neutral. I'll certainly ask about the issue with hauling sand and I think even with the nice increases that contractors are passing along the metrics stay the same. I don't even haul them. Whether if fuel is 250 a gallon or 550 a gallon we're all painting it. So if it makes sense before the contract nothing has changed it's just going to cost a lot of money. From an efficiency standpoint. Bill did we get voter authorization for that 95,000 transfer? Yeah. It was not specific voter authorization it was in the budget. Okay. So that's it. The library is the last page. Things are working We did order the three speed limit Oh guys. Assigned the purpose order a couple of days after your last meeting and I don't know the exact price but the three together were between 9 and 10,000 dollars. So 3,000 was expected a lot of money. So anyway, four to six weeks before supply change. Well the constituents that came forward before us are very happy about the fact that you got signed some either side of that little community when they get here we'll get them out. I wound up speaking of that. I'm on the board of the friends of Waterbury Reservoir and we had folks from the forest parks and recreation and they were actually glad to hear about the last science being deployed because they know people go tear on the road and it smells like a bad out of hell going up that road. That's all I have. Okay. Last item is we just wanted to ask the board what's your pleasure on we spoke about I don't know if this is before Roger and Alyssa we discussed the Worcester south towers and granted that project kind of went away but John Cating who's on the Worcester Select Board offered to have kind of sit down with us. We just mentioned today with the conservation commission they were concerned about that shootsville hill where we spent quite a bit of money and just if we want to have maybe a short conversation just asking if you think that's a good you know it's not something that has to be tomorrow but you know at some point within the next few months what's your pleasure. Do they still have a cell tower problem over there? No they had a cell tower a proposal for Ryzen to put a cell tower there and there was much community opposition to the cell tower and it wound up being you know he kind of asked me what we wound up doing when we had that problem shootsville hill and I was telling him about and it kind of you know we had a fairly protractive you know legal battle on who we won you know it kind of went away so there's just happened to go away but you know like we all say cell towers the cellular companies want towers in different places and it's going to be an ongoing you know issue and where they're saying you know no one wants a cell tower probably everyone wants them when they need to you know I go crazy going by billings when there's no cell service but I figured it would be a good conversation between the two communities. Go ahead. I don't want to mean I'm open to it in the spirit of paperliness and wanting to be good literal neighbors to communities I guess I would ask if is there any potential you know candidly the last request was asking us as a slut or to write a letter against the public utility board commission whatever it is at this point not something I personally as a board member was ever going to support and so I don't want to do I am also a candidate we have pretty full agendas including for the next couple of months with the municipal manager search with our allocation of the like so if we have a gap in the agenda I'm certainly open to welcoming newcomers but I would hate to see us I just think we have pretty limited time together a pretty healthy workload I'd love to see us tackle the zoning on our side of the boosters so I you know I think if you want to and I would also just say like is there another regional forum I know Steve is our rep to the regional planning district and is there so again I'm not a host right you know in general like I know war town talks about things that's where we want to be good neighbors and so I would never want to flat out refuse I'm just saying personally looking ahead to the next couple of months I think our board has a pretty healthy workload I'm looking at down the road the only reason is John's also he's more than willing to come here but their board meetings I think parallel are so he would just need some you know a good amount of lead time as well so I'm thinking two three months down when we could fit it in if we had a slow big day to give this an imminent concern or action needed no there's nothing I think it's just one of those good conversations that we never get to so I got one other question for the board I've heard that our Vermont State Police Department public safety is having some staff issues and in lieu of a couple of shootings that have taken place here in town and what seems to be a growing drug problem I didn't know if the board had any interest in having a visit from our deputy state's attorney to explain to us a little bit about what's happening on the other side of the state police department itself in other words what happens after arrests are made and talk about policies that are in place and things that are being done on the prosecution side that are either having some effect, no effect whatever effect that they're having that's either allowing this problem to continue to grow or policies in place that are policies that could be changed just an overall discussion about maybe the other side of the coin on law enforcement that none of us have probably much knowledge about well you're probably going to see with at least the state's attorneys and stuff like maybe that deputy state's attorneys but we're in a primary season and probably they're going to be busy with a lot of things until after the August primary you know maybe sometime well actually I've been in conversation with Bridget Grace and she's more willing to come in and talk to us a little bit about it if the board's willing to hear what she has to say I guess I have the same reaction to what I just said about the Booster South Tower which is agreement I will say candidly it is a contested election it's primary season so I'm just throwing that on the table I guess my question is like do we see us as what do I see us doing with information we have to take from her to be clear I think it'd be hugely informative they did a substance abuse forum the woman who came on open meeting one thing I went and sat in this room for two and a half hours we had folks in recovery I felt like I learned a lot so it was worth it I'm not saying it's a bad news of our time I'm saying of the select board meeting I guess would I see us changing any of our policies as a result I also know we've had our trooper visit and reports on the agenda parking lot that we haven't gotten to so personally I feel like we should deal with what's in house before inviting so again I'm not saying it's off the table but for me again the next couple of months being healthy that would be my preference on where to go first I wonder if they could coincide if that would if there'd be any benefit to that the Vermont State troopers and I'll win the troopers give their yeah report yeah I don't know it was just a thought my cousin's death from fentanyl overdose and cocaine still bothers me and will bother me for ever this useless death and I I don't know I just feel compelled to try to look at options of what the what the board if anything can do to help curb this problem that's growing in every town and every city in this country and is worse than the COVID epidemic as far as I'm concerned I understand you're feeling Chris but I also I hear what Alyssa's saying and even if maybe something like this could be a separate select board meeting I'm just bringing it to you guys we want to do that spend some time doing that but I do agree on our first and third Mondays we should concentrate on the tasks being and maybe a few months down the road we might have some time for some of this stuff Mike I'm curious if we can you know find some middle ground too of getting the troopers on the agenda since they have been I think in the parking lot a little bit and even if we need to schedule out a month or so just getting that on and knowing that they'll likely address this and or field our questions about it and then Chris they wonder if she might be willing to do something in writing so that we can at least as a board become more informed about what's going on even if we're not quite ready to have her come into a meeting just yet we've got the information then we might be able to schedule down a line if we want to do something in person so if that's something she'd be willing to do for us you know I think the more knowledge we have the better sure I'll certainly pass it on to her that seemed like a reasonable on the parking lot the ESP reports try to do that fairly regularly that was for their monthly report and it wasn't all that long ago that the troopers were here it's okay they typically come once a year they don't come all the time we can certainly invite them they recently moved well a month just ended I've gotten a report I just wonder if you invite the person that you're talking about right now if you're going to get other people saying you know you should let the opposing people who would want to come in and talk to you so it might be a good thing to do but it might be best to wait till after the election after the November election whoever is in office just they're the ones who are going to be dealing with it not somebody who's aspiring to be in office so I just think that you might open yourself up to saying if you're holding a candidate's form I won't come in I know it wasn't your intent you had to get the democratic response just to the signage so as soon as you start inviting somebody who's running for an office you're going to have other people saying you need to I think it's a good idea but there can be no such concern just inviting the police in and I think they could address that fentanyl issue I'd be interested to hear what they have to say about it I can reach out to them and see what they can come up with if they've come before us if not, motion to adjourn second, all in favor say aye bye