Hello, and thank you for tuning into Town Meeting TV's ongoing coverage of local elections. My name's Bobby Lucia. This is, this program is part of a series of forums that we are bringing you in advance of Essex Junction's annual election on Tuesday, April 9th. Town Meeting TV hosts forums with all candidates and covers of the questions you will see on your ballot, introducing you to community decision-makers and connecting you with issues that shape your local community. You can find all of our forums on cctv.org slash 2024 or on our Town Meeting TV YouTube channel where auto-generated captions are available. On tonight's program we will hear from four candidates running for two seats on the Essex Junction City Council. Those candidates are incumbent, Amber Tebow, as well as Timothy Miller, Jitun Khadka, and Jason Struthers. Thank you all so much for joining us. Thank you. We've got a full desk tonight, so we have prepared a list of questions for all of you, and you will have 90 seconds to answer each question. If you're tuning in live, we also welcome your questions at<PHONE_NUMBER>. If you call in, we will do our best to prioritize your question, though we will screen calls to ensure that questions are not being repeated. And we ask that you share your name, the town you live in, and that your question be directed at all candidates, just not just one in particular. So make sure your question is for all four candidates. So let's get started with one-minute opening statements, and we will start with Timothy Miller at the end of the desk there. 60 seconds for your opening statement, and the question here is, what do you love about Essex Junction and why are you running? What makes you qualified to serve as City Councilor? Essex Junction is just a great place to live. When my wife and I were house shopping, I grew up in Essex and then relocated to the junction in 97. And then my wife and I were looking for residents, as we were talking about marriage and starting a family, and it was top of my list, it's a great, absolutely great place to live. The amenities are top notch, the infrastructure is amazing, the people around you are just so open and caring and genuinely give you that sense of community that lacks in so many places. I've spent a number of decades on the fire department reaching out, you know, you often see those people in their worst moments of life, and it's just a neighborly area. We're fortunate enough to still have a volunteer fire department in Essex, it's a lot task of people to serve their community. We're very fortunate that we don't have the problems and struggles that a lot of other areas are having with recruiting volunteers. And I think that speaks volumes to the community as a whole. We're just very fortunate to have such an area as Essex Junction. Great, thanks so much Timothy. Jitun Kodka, your opening statement, 60 seconds. Awesome, thank you. So one thing that I love about Essex Junction is it's tight, close community. I moved to Essex seven years ago from Burlington, not so far, to open a business. I owned a Nepali kitchen in Essex Junction for five years, and you know, over time I fell in love. I decided to buy a house, raise my family, and I have a kids they're about to, you know, get ready to go to kindergarten starting next year, and I'm super excited. I've been in a community development field for quite some time, worked in various different settings, in a school, working with youth and young adults, working as a business owner, you know, and also working in various different capacity locally and in a state to address, you know, issue that affects, you know, under privileged community. And, yeah. Great, thank you so much, Jitun. Amber Tebow, your opening statement, 60 seconds. Thank you. So I love that I can walk into the bagel store and everyone knows my order. I love that I can be washing my car on a Sunday afternoon and realize that I'm out of cleaning supplies and can walk across the street and be back doing what I was just doing 10 minutes later. I love that I can run in the community and feel safe doing so. I love that Essex Junction is a small community where everyone is willing to support their neighbor. I have been involved in the village slash city as a volunteer since 2013 when I sat on the planning commission. I'm running for reelection to the city council because I have enjoyed the last five years in this role and look forward to continuing to represent the residents of Essex Junction. Great. Thank you so much, Amber. And Jason Struthers, your opening statement, 60 seconds. Essex Junction has been my family's home for 42 years. I'm a product of the Junction school system. And I started my first business there, delivering newspapers, and that experience translated into future endeavors, including, you know, skydiving instructor, coach, and jump master. My training allowed me to be certified by the FAA to pack emergency parachutes, which is one of an elite view. And over the years, I've been trusted with the lives of thousands of my students. I have a wide array of experience ranging from building my family's home to nearly a decade in the biopharmaceutical industry making medicine. And in a recent publication, Andrew Brown reflected on his time in the council and he said, for those interested in running for the council, there's no need for a specialized master's degree or deep institutional knowledge. A qualified candidate should just be somebody who is passionate and has a strong desire to help the community. I have a strong passion for everything I put my time and energy into and my aim is to put my broad set of skills in service to the community and be a voice for the voters. Great. Thank you all so much. Those opening statements. So, we'll get to our first real question here, which is about the city budget. So, the question is, do you support the proposed city budget of $12 million, which would result in an estimated municipal property tax increase of 6.6%. And is there anything that you would have liked to change about this budget? And we'll start with G-10 Khadka for this question. So, 90 seconds about the budget. Great. Go for it. So, yes, I do support the budget. And it's important for people to know that the increase is primarily due to the significant increase in the existing salary and benefits, which are on a level of affordable and also, like, you know, we need to take care of our streets and maintain them and all of those. And you know, I don't have anything that I would like to change on the budget at the moment, but, you know, as I'm aware that, you know, this has been going on for quite some time, you know, city council and the department heads have been meeting and talking about this budget. You know, it's been out in the community. People had opportunity to, you know, share their voice and concern. And I think it had gone through a long, you know, rigorous planning and discussion. And I think, you know, also given that knowing that there is a big increase in the school budget, I think city tried to keep it as low as possible. So, I think, yeah, I'm in favor. Great. Thank you so much, Shita. Amber Tebow, your thoughts on the city budget. 90 seconds. Sure. So, I voted in favor of the budget. I feel confident that collectively with staff, the city council went line-by-line over the past three months to reduce any expenditures and increase revenue where it was possible without sacrificing the services in the community. What I would like to see in the future for the budget, our process are two things. The council establishing a clear ceiling for tax increases for the staff and city manager. And for the budget process to begin earlier than the November time framework that we're on right now, which will enable more conversation with the staff, city manager, and more public engagement. Great. Thank you. Jason Struthers, city budget. I do not support the budget. The tax rate is higher than promised. It's currently higher than the town and it keeps increasing. Everybody, many people in the community are quite upset about that. We were also told that we would have some economies of scale and we would see some reductions after a year or two. So we're now two years of past and we're still looking at another 6.6% increase. So the budget's climbing and in conjunction with the school, it's going to be an absolutely massive increase. So some of the concerns that I have with it, the city has failed to cover even the designated value for the unassigned fund balance. This is the emergency fund. It's assigned at 9% and at $886,000, it's actually only 7%. The EJRP, it has 15% of its budget. So I'm not sure why the general fund can't meet. It's a minimum of 9%. So other concerns I have are EJRP is keeping a significant amount of funds in its enterprise funds. I believe that so it doesn't have to go to a vote. When the enterprise fund is managed by department and it doesn't raise any eyebrows if it runs in a surplus. The other thing I noticed was that there's no enterprise fund details in the annual report. So I would like to see those expense statements. So yeah, those are my concerns. Thank you so much, Jason. Timothy Miller, your thoughts on the city budget. And that brings me up. So the city budget is out, right? The ballots, I got my ballot in the mail today. I think at this point the budget really is up to the voters. Whether or not I support the budget is a complicated issue because I really feel like it snuck up on the council. The November timeframe really doesn't give them enough time. There were some kerfuffle with numbers coming from finance to Brown Hill Library as it pertained to what their increase was going to be. And that caused all sorts of confusion at the end as the budget needed to be set. I think this budget as it sits really is in the hands of the voters at this point. And I believe that they'll make the right decision based on what they feel. I do think that there's definitely some room for improvement within the departments and those conversations that can be had at a later date should this budget not pass. Thank you all so much. So now we're going to stick with the budget conversation but move over to the school budget. So the Essex Westford School District has proposed an FY25 budget of $97.8 million with an estimated tax increase of 22.86% in Essex Junction. So do you support this school budget? And how does this increase? I know the city council doesn't have any say on the school budget, but how does this increase potentially impact the city council's work? And we'll start with you, Amber and Tebow for this question. So while I wish the proposed increase was less and agree with the public, the tax increases are impacting residents' ability to reside in the state, I am supporting the school budget. As an elected official, I know how difficult it is to adopt a budget while we're in competing interests. I trust that the board members that we elected are operating in our best interest as a community and the proposed budget is based on the current needs of the students. I also know that similar to the city council, the school board went through the proposed budget with a fine tooth comb and cut expenses where it was possible without impacting the educational experience of students. So as you said, the increase doesn't directly impact the city council because they're two separate independent budgets, but where I do see this come up is when tax bills come out and the municipal portion is 70 to 80% or sorry, the education portion is 70 to 80% of your tax bill and the municipal portion is 20 to 30%. And so educating residents as to what that difference is and how it got to be where it is. Thank you so much, Amber. Jason Struthers, your thoughts on the school budget. Short-term, yes, long-term, no, and it needs to be seriously looked at. A lot of people are very displeased with the budget, but the thing is, I'm all about a protest vote, but in this case, you're gonna make people go back to the table that's gonna cost money. And there's really only time for one, maybe two rounds of negotiations. And so if there isn't a number by the 1st of July, the allocation's gonna be reverted to 87%, and that's gonna equal multiple schools closing, which I am not, I don't want any part of. So, yes, I support this budget, but we need to take a look at it. Tim, do you know your thoughts on the school budget? I will say I'm at a strategic disadvantage here as my wife is an employee of the school district. So I will say 22.6% really is unpalatable. I have so many friends that have grown up in Essex Junction that are hanging on by a thread. And it's more difficult for them. I mean, our food shelf is seeing all-time highs. People are struggling with the utilities and tax bills and everything that goes along with it, water and sewer rates are up. And so where's the ceiling, right? I think we're about to find out. And realistically, this budget, while maybe the best that the administration feels that they can put forward, there is time for a revoke according to the school board. So I don't think that everybody should buy into the, it's this or that. There was some directive from the school board for the administration to go back and look to save some of the teaching positions where I think probably gonna find out Tuesday night, whether or not that happens at the next school board meeting. So I'm very interested to see how that works out. But unfortunately for anyone who's paying attention to the school kerfuffle this year, I would say that that's where about where my answer's gonna land. And then G-10, Karka, your thoughts on the school budget. So 22.6% is increased is a very significant. I understand how difficult it will be for families to add to their already rising expenses and cost of living. One thing we must understand that this tax increase is coming from the state and even if we cut our school budget, it will still be paying the increase. I'm a young father. I'm a first time home owner. I work in a social service field. I don't make a lot of money to afford that. But also I'm getting ready to send my kids to school. And if we don't pass this budget, I'm worried that I might not have a school to send to. This is, I have been pretty diligent taxpayer, pretty working hard in trying to raise kid in a good safe neighborhood. And I think Essex has a junction as a city. We have that capacity and we can provide that. Also, I think we would also need to work together with the school board and the administration to really look into ways to keep the expenses low so that we're not putting too much burden on the taxpayer. Thank you all so much. So that was the responses on the school budget. Just a reminder before we happen to the next question that we do welcome your calls at<PHONE_NUMBER>. You can tune in, you can call in and we'll put your question live on the air. But for now we'll keep trucking with the questions we have. So the next question is about the rental registry issue in Essex Junction. So the city council is considering an ordinance which would require landlords to register their rental units with the municipality and to pay $120 per unit annual registration fee. So the question is, do you support this rental registry program as proposed? And if not, how would you approach rental housing regulation and oversight? We'll start with you, Jason, each other's. I do not support it as proposed but I think we can come to an agreement. The word that comes to mind with this is overreach. And I love aviation so I'll give you an airplane example. So what the city's doing with this is they're building the airplane while it's being flown. So there's a lot of things that need to be fixed and the plan needs to be engineered from start to finish. I don't feel that the burden should be passed down to the renter where that's what's happening with this. The ways we can change it, we can use fines as a revenue and collect fees when an inspection actually gets placed because one of the biggest things I have, the problems I have with it is, they're collecting fees every year and you're only getting services once every five years. So I don't know many instances where people get paid for not doing any work but this is what they're proposing. So yeah, I'm not in favor of it as proposed. Okay, thank you, Jason. Tim Miller. I think that there are a lot of unanswered questions about the rental registry at this point. I don't feel like even the city council or the economic development department has a good grasp on what exactly they're looking for. In its current iteration, no. Is there options that would make it more palatable? Absolutely. Part of that discussion has come lately with the fire department and moving the rental registry out of city hall and under the guise of the fire department. And that kind of has twofold. It benefits the taxpayer in that eventually there's going to be a need for some sort of full-time staff at the fire department. We struggle during certain times of the day to answer calls with enough people. Having that rental registry person under the guise of the fire department allows for one more person to be there. We already have the vehicle existing. We already have the software in place so we're not building it from the ground up. You don't have to go out and buy a vehicle and label it with the city of Essex Junction. The state of Vermont division of fire safety has recently rolled out a program that does some sort of rental inspection. So I think in collaboration with that, we could look to build. Also the city doesn't really have any of its own building codes or along those lines. So I'd be interested to see if we're just looking at exactly what the state is looking at in which case right now it's a complaint-based system with the state but they're very responsive. We've had some instances where we've called the division of fire safety and they've come out within a couple of days. So I'm interested to see what it could look like down the road but as of right now, I don't think I could support the rental registry. Thank you, Tim. G-10. Yeah, I have heard about this and also heard that there are some lenders who are not happy about it. And for me, as a city, we must not only look into providing housing options but also ensure that our residents thrive promoting safe and healthy living conditions. I think rental registries would definitely help in that way, ensuring compliance, housing affordability and also tenant rights and stuff. I think I support but I would also like, I'm still exploring. I would love to maybe explore this a little further and I think it's up in the table so I encourage the resident to come out and share their opinion. I think it would be something that we should definitely put in place. I think we need something like this and that's it. Great. Thank you, G-10. Amber Thibault, your thoughts on the rental registry. Sure. I support the rental registry program which would require all rentals, short and long term to register with the city as both the fire chief and the police chief have indicated. Understanding residential rental properties and better enables both of those public safety agencies to do their jobs more efficiently when time matters. As an attorney, I'm familiar with the inspection programs offered in other municipalities. I want to ensure that all renters in this community have safe housing but at this time, based on the evidence presented to the council, I do not support a rental inspection program but I am open to continued discussions. There are pros and cons to both the proactive rental registry proposed by the city and reliance on the reactive rental inspections done by the state. As the state inspections are in its infancy, as is the city, I'm in favor of continuing to gather the data and place the issue in the parking lot for it to be revisited in a year or two. Thank you all so much and that was, you started with that. So we got to all four. Okay, great. So next question is about S-Extension as a city. So in July of 2024, S-Extension will celebrate two years as an independent municipality. So the question is in your view, how are things going? What is the impact of this change in structure on the S-Extension community? And you'll start with you, Tim, on this question. Well, I think probably the most notable change has been your taxes. We've paid everything plus for the first year. We had a heck of an administrative buildout at Two Lincoln. And, but as far as the structural changes that the residents notice, it's pretty much what I see as business as usual, right? We still have a board of representatives that moved from trustees to city council. Business as usual still very much carries on. Your fire department operates the same way. Your police department is now a shared service. S-Extrescue continues to operate fundamentally the same. Your roads are still plowed. Your sidewalks are cleared. A lot of the behind the scenes stuff carries on exactly as it always has. The biggest difference really has been what we're paying for and the number of people that we're paying for. And I think that there was, I want to say knee-jerk reaction to, oh, well, we have this and now this is overwhelming. So now we need an assistant. And so now we have all of these people populating to Lincoln and now we have all the associated healthcare costs and salaries and everything that goes along with that. So are there bumps in the road? Yes, absolutely. Is it better long-term for us? I sure hope so. From the inside, it looks like it. It's made a big difference in what I see daily from the fire station and from other volunteer aspects. And so I'm encouraged, but I'm also a little apprehensive because if we carry on these current trends, it's going to become unsustainable. Thank you so much, Tim. Chitin Khadka, your thoughts on Essex Junction as a city. So I think with the changes that the city had just gone through the following separation and adoption. I think I'm still trying to understand how that plays, but also I think we still got a lot of work to do in terms of making a city more fully functioning and going. I think our budget is fairly young and it's hard to kind of compare with what we didn't have in the past. I think things are a little changed now. We're still creating structure and for the present and for the future. So I'm optimistic guy. I think our future is bright as a city. However, we have a lot of work to do and we have to keep moving. Great, thank you so much, Chitin. Amber Tebow, your thoughts on Essex Junction and separation. Sure, so one of my proudest memories sitting in the role as a trustee or city council is Independence Day, July 1st, 2022. So in fact, I have that picture, a picture from that celebration on my wall at home and I smile at it every time I look at it. It just makes me so happy. So disentangling two municipalities is a difficult task and we are only two years in. In my opinion, things are going well and I look forward to serving the community as we continue to assess what the community needs now that we can focus solely on Essex Junction. One of the most important post-separation decisions was the vote of residents for local option tax to support the capital improvement projects in the city. The next stage in the separation process is the implementation of a committee to investigate whether a mayor, district and wards is invalued by residents. And I look forward to the formation of this committee and the results of their independent investigation. Thanks, Amber. Jason, each other's your thoughts on the separation of Essex Junction. Well, as Tim was saying, pretty much business as usual but I really wish we would have seen some of those huge savings we were promised. That's what I feel strongly about and a lot of people in the community are upset about. We feel we were sold a bill of goods on separation and the reality was a reaction to the failed merger. And what the city proposed was more of a takeover, not a merger and the town realized it. So that being said, I've traveled extensively around the world. I've been to a lot of amazing places and if I didn't love the junction I would have left a long time ago. So I still love it and I think we have a really bright future. Great, thank you all so much. Our next question is going to be about public safety. So the question here is, what do you see as the most important public safety issue facing the community in Essex Junction and how can the city council work to address these issues? And we'll start with Jit and Khadka on this question. Thank you. Public safety I think should be the number one priority for our city. There are several things we could do to address public safety in our neighborhood, collaborating with the law enforcement to implement prevention strategies, investing in community policing, public safety awareness initiative, I think actively engaging with the community, knowing your neighbors. I think it's very, very important and allocating resources and support for emergency responses. I think those are very key things. Personally, I'm very actively involved in a lot of community initiative in Burlington. I'm also part of a restorative justice program in Essex also help implement their cultural advocate program and also I'm trained on the panel. So there is like, the crime has, when crime happens it affects everybody. So we need to understand that. We need to have a more restorative way of dealing with our folks in the community. A lot of things are in relation to mental health and other things that creates those situations. So we need to be very mindful of all those. Great, thank you so much. Amber Tebow, your thoughts on public safety. Sure. So I think the most important public safety issue that's facing our community is also the same that's facing the entire state, which is property crimes, such as theft. So I believe the best thing the city council can do to address the increase in property crimes is to continue to support the Essex Police Department and with funding. Jason Shreathers. Public safety has always been near and dear to my heart. My father was a military police. He was a uniform cop and eventually a detective in some major cities like Hartford, Connecticut and Albany, New York. So it's always been part of my ethos. I love the Essex Police. They do an amazing job. I think, as Amber said, we are seeing an uptick in crime. And I think that one thing we can do is initiate more neighborhood watch programs. We can't exclusively count on the police. So if we can get more neighborhood community participation, I think that can help. Thank you. And Tim Miller, public safety. So our public safety is top of mind for everyone these days, right? We're seeing rampant break-ins in cars, auto theft. It's become a real problem. Our police services are shared services. They belong to Essex Town. It's a contract that's in place for shared services for 10 years, I believe it is. And our police department does a really great job. I just want to say that first and foremost. Like, they are at a lot of the community events. The new police chief now has National Night Out. He brought that with him when he came into town. That's an amazing event that's out at the high school parking lot. It's one night during the summer. It encourages everyone to come out. Their uniformed officers are there. It's a great way to meet your police officers. The town has hot dogs and hamburgers that they give away and there's all sorts of games and events. Those events are great. The police department's also at EJRP's Trick or Treat Trail, the Halloween night. They're out there. They do a great job reaching out to the community. There are definitely some issues that I inadvertently left my truck unlocked one night. My driveway, I've lived there 20 years and never had a problem. I came out the next morning. Anything of value in my truck was gone. Did I call anybody? Nope, because there's nothing anyone's going to do about it. Right now in the state, it's not illegal for someone to enter another person's vehicle. And that's stuff we just need to work on. And I know that the police department is only a certain size and there can only be so many places at once. So increased patrol from community members or some sort of neighborhood watch is a great idea. I'm all for what brings more public enhanced safety. Right, thanks, Dan. Jitankatka, your thoughts on... Oh, we got through. Okay, great. Cool. So then we'll turn to our next question. I just have to also apologize. If anyone at home is hearing rumbling here and there, we have an axe throwing facility underneath us. So that is what's going on down there. Yeah, so that's what that's about. So our next question is about housing and it's sort of a broad question. What will you do as city councilor to help Essex Junction meet the need for safe and affordable housing? We'll start with Amber Tebow here. So it's important to continue monitoring the data from the health officer and the Vermont division of fire safety on housing, specifically rental housing to ensure we are meeting the need for safe housing in Essex Junction and adjust the city's policies accordingly if necessary. If reelected, I also intend to continue focusing on the proactive enforcement of municipal ordinances and land use regulations. It's also important for the city council to continue working with the planning commission to review the impact of the city's land development code, including fees that impact developers' abilities to build affordable housing in the community. Great, thank you so much, Amber. Jason Struthers, housing. Well, if we're gonna keep our tax rate under control, what we really need to do is balance housing with commercial properties. Otherwise, we're gonna continue to see increases in taxes and it's gonna cause turmoil. So a balance really needs to be established. We can't just focus on housing and I prefer if we can encourage more people to own instead of rent. Possibly building tiny home communities as a solution, but it's really tough for young people starting out. So hopefully we can do something. Jason, Tim Miller, housing. So there isn't a lot of inward land left in Essex Junction. So realistically, the option is up and we're seeing that now. The city has a height restriction of four stories. The state passed a law last year that allows that if there's enough low-income affordable units in the development that they can add an additional floor, which would be five stories. There was some discussion last year in the city council when that law passed as to whether or not they wanted to revisit the height restriction and increase it. There was some apprehension due to outlay of potential infrastructure, but the reality of it is if we're serious about housing, we need to, rental units right now are what is, whether or not we can talk to the people that have developed those rental units down the line and say, hey, maybe it's time to sell these to individuals and establish a homeowner's association type that allows people to come in and build some equity and there's a program in place that would take care of the utilities and the trash. And that's a way for young people to get in. And I think as we develop, I think if we're serious about housing, we need to revisit that height restriction within the city, especially as it pertains to the downtown core. The Chittenden Crossing is part of the Crescent Connector Development. I'd love to see those buildings, six stories. I mean, five stories, a height restriction and then an additional story because they have enough affordable housing in them. That's in the core of the downtown, the infrastructure is in place. The fire department already has the capabilities to meet the additional height requirements. And it's something we can do today to really make an impact and to bring people in and to increase our stock. Great. Thanks so much, Tim. Jitankadka, your thoughts on housing. So housing, it's a major issue that we are noticing across the cities. Finding safe and affordable housing has become like searching a needle in the sand for a lot of people. And I say that because it's difficult, it's very hard to find. And I think as a city, we really need to look into that. We must look into ways to implement affordable housing initiatives, such as collaborating with organizations to develop affordable housing projects, encouraging mixed income development and relocating for policies that support affordable housing constructions. Thank you so much. Okay, so our next question, that was everyone on that question, right? Okay. So now we're gonna get kind of into the nuts and bolts of being an elected representative. We're gonna talk about connecting with constituents. So as a candidate and an elected official, how do you gather input and balance differing perspectives from your constituents? How do you ensure you're hearing from a wide range of voices and not just the loudest ones? And we'll start with you, Jason, on this question. Well, we live in the electronics and communication age. So it's easier than ever for us to connect with more people. But that being said, not everybody is online. So if I was elected, I would take time on a monthly basis to knock on random doors. And that way, I would definitely be engaging with people that I may not agree with on every issue. And you can always set up a meet for the community to come and discuss issues. You know, yeah. Great, awesome. That's great. So thank you, Jason. Tim Miller, connecting with your constituents. I have a strategic advantage here as I'm actually in the community all the time. And it's something that's really actually great until it's not. You know, if you only seek the same voices all the time, you're only going to have the same information. And there are a wide range of voices that reside with us in Essex Junction. I love to see, like I said, I mentioned, I volunteer with the fire department for the police national night out. I also partake in the Halloween trail where the EJRP puts on. We have an open house, holiday open house at the fire station.  And there's an array of availability already out there that being a member of the council, they're more than welcome to attend. And I encourage it. Really, being, the reality of it is being a member of the council is also another full-time job. And it is a lot of time. And that's something that I think we see now. There's some community outreach, but it's around important events, the strategic planning, election time, bond votes, cycles coming up and through budget votes. So I think it needs to happen on a more regular basis. But I also do encourage, you know, you can pop into the senior center and see what the seniors are having to say. Hang out at Martones. I see Howard Center at the Bagel Place all the time on a Tuesday morning. They're just there available if someone wants to come in and talk to them. So I think there's plenty of options out there to engage the community who just need to actually step forth and do it. Great, thank you. Jeetan Gadka, how are you going to connect with the constituents? If I get a lecture at the elected official, I think it is essential to actively listen to all viewpoints, facilitate open dialogue, consider diverse opinions, also strive to find common ground while making informed decisions that reflects the interests and values of the community as a whole. I think Essex does a great community events. There's a lot of neighborhood pops up that happen in closing the streets and choosing to have that really engaging fund environment and also it promotes safety in a way that you feel safe and secure, taking your kids out in the Halloween night. You know, there's, you know, people are making some hot apple cider and giving out to the people. You know, it's all those things that happens. And I think I would love to see that more happen in each different street. Everybody's coming out, meeting their neighbors, talking to each other, knowing them by their name. I think it's not, we are not that far apart. It's very tight, you know, close community. So I think we do have that, you know, capacity and then we could definitely do that. And there are a lot of new business are popping up in the city and, you know, people are actually going out now and engaging and meeting people. And I think we could definitely, you know, increase those, yeah. Awesome, thank you. Chitankadka. Amber Tiba, your thoughts on connecting with constituents. Sure. So I think this is the million dollar question as public engagement is absolutely critical. I'm hoping that the strategic planning process will assist the city council in providing ways to gather input from the public. But as someone who has been involved in municipal governments for almost 20 years now, this is not a new question and it's not a new challenge. Residents tend to engage in an issue that they are passionate about, which is totally understandable. It's important to listen to all comments from the public, but as a city council, I think it's important to also balance those voices with independent research on the issue. Awesome, okay, thank you so much. So we've got our last question here unless someone calls in here, you still can call in for the next few minutes,<PHONE_NUMBER>. If you call with your question, we'll put you live on the air. But for now, this is the last question that we have and it's about the challenges facing the city. So we'll start with you, Tim. What do you see as the most important issues facing the community of Essex Junction right now? Continued growth along with securing our future. We need to be looking long-term. We need to not just see what's right in front of us, but what is potentially down the road. We're looking at very near future, potentially a bond vote for a new public works facility. Our fire station is aged beyond pretty much its useful life. Those are two very big items that are coming down the barrel that I don't think are getting enough attention right now. We were limited with our funds. We did pass local option sales tax to try and help with some of that. And some of that has been marked for capital expenditures. There's just, there's a real potential for stagnation. I don't know, there's a lot of housing units that are coming online in the near future. Again, with the redevelopment of the Domino's Building on Park Street that's going to happen in the soon. And the hotel that's coming online in Pearl Street along with some new units on Pearl Street down near 241. But there's, we need to really be preparing ourselves for what our future looks like. And I think that anytime we have the opportunity to look long-term, that's something that we need to be doing that I don't think we're doing enough of right now. Great. Thank you, Tim. Jeetan Kodka, your thoughts on the challenge. The most important challenges facing the community of Essex Junction right now. I think looking long-term, like I think affordability would probably be something that in that, we need to look into it. Things are, costs of living has increased and things getting very expensive every day. It has become very difficult for family. We want people to come and live and stay in Essex Junction.  Long-term strategic planning on that, like budget, when we look into budget, I think it's very important and also have more time to prepare and plan. That sounded like currently you barely have a couple months before the voting season to put that discussion in the public. So I think engagement from early on and trying to come up with more clear and budget would probably be the good, yeah. Great, awesome. Amber Keebo, thoughts on the challenges facing the city? So I think the two challenges that I see are housing as we've discussed and it's specifically affordable housing and inflation. So there is no magic wand to unfortunately fix the inflation issue, but my hope is if we're elected that I continue to focus on revenue generation to offset the tax increases, which I've continued to do for the past few years, trying to find additional sources of revenue, such as the town clerk offering, or the city clerk offering passport services in the office, which will allow some revenue to come in and again offset the tax increase. Great, thank you. And lastly, Jason Struthers, challenges facing Essex Junction. As Jeetan mentioned, affordability, that is on the top of my list, and the increases in taxes in this economy. Everybody's strapped, a lot of people are struggling and it's only getting worse. So a lot of people feel that they're not really being heard in the community too. So one of the challenges that we have, as Amber was saying, is community engagement. And one of my goals will be to significantly increase not only the amount of people that show up to city council meetings, but the amount that people engage and actually speak up. So hopefully we can increase that. Great, awesome. Okay, and that was everybody for that question, I think, right? Okay. All right, so we're actually kind of ahead of schedule here. So we're gonna do 60 seconds for closing comments here, and we'll start with Jeetan Kodka and 60 seconds each, starting with you. Your closing statements before we wrap up here. Great, thanks for hosting this forum. I appreciate that. As a candidate for city council, I stand committed to fostering a safe, inclusive, and prosperous environment for all. If elected, I will prioritize community input, advocate for transparent governance, and will also be your voice on the table. I believe together we can build a stronger and more resilient community for generations to come. Thank you. Great, thank you, Jeetan. Amber Tebow, your closing statement. Sure, I wanna say thank you to Town Meeting TV and to everyone sitting at this table for the opportunity to engage in the forum. I appreciate all those folks who are listening at home. I also wanna thank the residents for allowing me to serve for the past five years. It has been a great experience, and I hope to earn your support for another three-year term on the city council. And if anybody has any questions, then they can certainly feel free to email me at amber at amberforeja.org with any questions. Great, awesome, thank you. Jason Struthers, your closing statement. Yeah, thank you to everybody that helped produce this. We hear a lot about housing, so as I said before, I think we need to balance housing with commercial. The three words that come to mind for my campaign are accountability, transparency, oversight. And I would bring a responsible approach to spending in the city and increased community engagement. Great, thanks. Tim Miller, your closing statement. Well, I have the distinct advantage to continue to serve my community, regardless of how this election turns out, as I'm very much intend to carry on with the fire department either way. So I'm thankful, I'm also very thankful to everyone that has been such a civil campaign season. There has been a tendency over the last few years for things to not be real community-based. And I think this season has been an exceptionally great time to be a candidate for council. And to have four people running for two seats really speaks volumes to how much people care about Essex Junction. It's not an easy thing to do. And it's very much a time commitment. Everybody looks at it as meetings every other week, but there's so much more that goes on behind the scenes. And to Amber, who's done this now for a few years, I really do appreciate the time that she's put into the council. So I think regardless of how this all goes out, we're gonna stand to benefit as a community. I think everybody here at the table really wants what they feel is best for Essex Junction. We might have different views on how we're gonna get there, but no doubt that where we end up will be okay. Awesome, thank you all so much for joining us. And thank you for tuning into TownMeetingTV and our ongoing coverage of local elections. Here you can find this and many more programs at cctv.org slash 2024, as well as on our TownMeetingTV YouTube channel. And don't forget to cast your ballot in Essex Junction on April 9th, day after the eclipse is Essex Junction Election Day. So thank you so much for watching and sharing TownMeetingTV so long.


Live from Massachusetts, here is your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, this is Stu Miniman with wikibond.org, SiliconANGLE TV on the ground at the Virtualization Technology User Group, or VTUG, fall forward 2014. Talking to users here at the conference, joining me for this segment is John Judson, who is the Senior Systems Analyst with Courier Corporation. John, thank you for coming. Oh, it's a pleasure to be here, Stu. Great. So Courier Corporation, can you tell us a little bit about it and your use of technology? Yeah, we're a book printer, and we print custom textbooks, we print the Gideon Bible, we print all kinds of cool stuff, and our challenge has been a transition from printing large runs of books to short runs, and we've kind of met that challenge by going to inkjet printers and using virtualization to speed up the actual process with which we're ripping apart PDFs and presenting to the printer so they can get a book out the door. All right. So John, when most people think of inkjet, they think of this thing sitting on their desk or down there. Talk to us a little bit. You said this thing is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, and you've got a couple of them. What are the challenges of kind of getting the data to these printers, and where do you have them? All right. So we've got three T300 presses from HP in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, and we have two 450s from HP out in Kindle, Indiana. And again, the print engine itself is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. It's kind of curved like that too. It's kind of neat. And the paper runs through these things 300 feet per second on the T300, and I think it's 450 feet per second on the T450. We have actual racks of blade servers whose sole purpose is figuring out when to turn the inkjet heads on and off to get the ink on the paper as it's streaming through this. So we had to kind of rethink our whole printing mentality from plates and the old offset press process of spinning ink onto paper. And how do we go from an analog process to a digital process? All right. So, John, as we've gone from physical to virtual, you're still going to be with physical paper. What has the changing role of the publisher and online versus self-publishing? How is that impacting your business? Well, one of the things that we're looking at these days, and it's very popular, is the customizable textbook where publishers instead of having to sell an entire book of intellectual property to a customer can now offer schools or professors customized textbooks where they choose, select chapters, and can even upload their own content. And then instead of having to print 500 or 1,000 books to be cost-effective, they can print 22 for their class. So it's changed the whole dynamic of printing large numbers of books down to very short print runs and having to get many of those out the door. And the old model we had was constrained by the physical speed of the processors and the underlying disks that the application was relying on. We were able to get the vendor to nod their heads and say, yeah, we'll work in a virtualized environment.  It was a very powerful win for us. All right. So you mentioned education as a use case. Any other industries that you've seen be able to undertake this change in kind of the print world? We're going down a path of self-publishing also. We're looking at providing customers with the ability to print their own books. And we have FastPencil.com where we actually allow people to upload content. They can work with established authors and publishing professionals and edit their material and prepare a professional book with their content and get it printed at a very cost-effective price. It's a very web-centric, new age path instead of having to mail many scripts in and all that kind of process. It's all online. It's cool. So John, tell me, this is a nice local event. You're a local company here. What brings you out and what do you hope to gain from attending conferences like the VTUG here at Gillette? Well this is my third or fourth VTUG event that I've been to. And these folks always do a great job. The keynote speakers, they always have something interesting to say. It's nice to kind of get your finger on the pulse of the industry. It's a great chance to walk around and talk to vendors. Both the ones that you know or you have an interest in and meet new ones. There's always something interesting to talk to up to the people. And then the breakout sessions are a good chance to have a more in-depth conversation or hear a specific strategy or thought process as to what's going on in technology and how that might help us. So it's a great place to be. All right. Well John, I really appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to us. We're talking to all the users here at the Virtualization Technology User Group. Check out youtube.com slash SiliconANGLE and siliconangle.tv to catch all the videos that we're shooting at this and many other shows that are changing the world of technology.


The most frightening thing for me was being in Ramadi. And, you know, I was the commander. I was in charge. And so a lot of the time, guys would be going out in operations. I had five different elements out in the field. I wouldn't be going with them. The scariest thing for me was watching those guys roll out of the gate because there was soldiers and Marines getting wounded and killed every single day.  So the responsibility of leadership was frightened? I never really even cared.  I wouldn't think about that. Once you're not afraid of dying, well, then you're not really afraid anymore. So what are you really afraid of?


Design of tile drainage pump stations. I guess I've been doing this for a long time, so we have many, many of them in the valley. So what we found with pump stations is we pump in the spring, typically not in the summer. And if we get enough rain in the fall, we pump in the fall. Last fall, there were no tile pumps really running hardly. And those are the two times a year we see them. I've seen tile pump stations running into the first part of November or January, but typically they're done by the middle of November. If there's, if you got rain, if you don't, they don't run at all. But they're necessary. And that's I think the most important time is in the springtime when, when your crop is short and excess water can drown out small crops a lot quicker than they can older crops. So tile drainage, this is the time of the year I think when tile drainage really shines is that is in that time of the year. So you can go online. We have everything I'm going to cover today is in our Tile Drainage Pump Stations for Farm Fields and Extension Bulletin AE1747. I think if you just went on the internet and did a search for NDSU AE7, it'll take you right to it. You can get a download a PDF copy of it. And it covers all of the stuff I'm going to be covering today. The main reason that we need the pump stations is topography and and and outlet conditions. So flat ground, shallow ditches, as I pointed out earlier in the design process. This ditch is full of water here, but most of that water in the ditch came out of that surface runoff culvert there. This is a double pump system, just one running at this time. A lot of times they can program them to alternate unless the flow becomes too great and they can both come on. We had a situation where way back here there's a road. There's a culvert under the road. And if they could load that culvert they could have gravity drain this field. But it costs too much and the county wasn't really willing. So they ended up putting in a lift station and just using the existing drainage. We've had a number of conditions where people tiled into ditches. This is a gravity outflow with a road and guard. The field is on the other side of the truck here. And this is this is six days after a big rain event. And you can see what a water level was. It was up here. And you can just see the flag. And after we drove out there, we walked out in this field in the lower 300 feet of this was still wet six days after the rain event. So the tile is not draining properly. And really needed a lift station in order to handle that excess amount of water. Because the outlet here was backed up so much. It reduced the drainage coefficient significantly. Some additional reasons that we've run into. Some people just want to be able to control when water leaves the field. We live in an area where there's we can get too much rain or we can get not get enough. So you can use this like control. You can use this as for controlling how much when and when the water leaves your field. Like I said, generally, I tell people that by June 15th, you could shut off the pump because you after that you should be done with most of the planting and everything. And and then you could spring and then you could whatever rain you get. If you get a lot of excess rain after that period, you could turn it on. And there was one case some cases where you can gain more grade on laterals by using a my drop in the main. The situation was close to where they could use gravity, but laterals ended up in such a shallow grade they couldn't make it. It had to get too close together. It was just too too. As let's just say it was less expensive to put in lift station and it was then to put in more laterals. So the pump problem areas areas where that can be flooded. A lift pump that's flooded is not doing any good if it's pumped. If water sitting in it because it's just pumping its own water, just recirculating it very near water bodies. We have some situations where these were installed too close to rivers, lakes, etc. And you just get it basically is trying to they're running almost continuously because they're almost trying to empty those. And then we've had some problems where we run into shallow aquifers and sand lenses that contribute to excess water that we can't account for, which is rainfall amounts. So those are some of the problem areas we've run into with lift stations. A typical lift station is is about 13 to 16 feet deep has a base on it. Pump, a lot of ours are submersible, goes out and goes into ditch. Your inflow is usually seven, eight inches. And I'll explain why this is as low as it is. So basic requirements is you got to determine the drainage area, how much how much is actually going to go into it. And if you're going to pay for one of these, and they're not inexpensive, you might want to consider future development where you might be able to use the same lift station for two different sets of field fields. Then you select the location of the pump station. Once you know the area and all that, you can do the pump selection and power requirements and then determine what type of controls you want to purchase or have installed. So let's start with the location. The ideal is near surface drainage outlets, electric service. It limits the pumping distance and the pump size. You don't want to put it too close to the surface drain because you don't want to get flooded. We've had some situations where you get a debate about, do you put it near the electric service or do you put it more where the outlet is? And that is a trade-off on whether you extend electric lines or cost of extending piping. I say 10 years ago, the cost of extending piping would have been more expensive on electric lines, but that's changed. Some electric, rural electrics charge quite a bit to move electric lines, and piping starts to become, can be beneficial. Any other considerations are the potential for vanillism? You want, if you have a large rainfall event and this thing gets hit by lightning or gets knocked out because of lightning or something, then you've got to work on it. You don't want it. You want to be able to get to it and not have to wade to water. And you want it in a stable soil condition where that's why I don't want it too close to a drainage outlet so that it doesn't wash away. And some of the biggest thing is the impact on neighbors. Remember I said that when tile flows, it flows for a long time. So here's the situation in Cass County where they had, well, you can see the drainage lines and they drained it up to here, but the natural place to put the lift station would have been right here because electricity is right near, it was there and it would have been easier, but the water would have flowed past this farmstead and this is not the farmer. So given the long duration flow, you could have ended up with mosquitoes and cattails and just a lot of grief for those people. So this gentleman moved it and put it over here. So there was downstream, so the water's flowing away from the farmstead, not creating those problems. And this is, you can see the farmstead windbreak over here and this is a system put in. The box there is some of our monitoring equipment. This is kind of an ideal situation where you'd like to have it pump right next to the electric lines if you can identify those sites. We have seen sites like this, portable generator. As you can see, this is pretty low. My guess is that when they get a lot of rain, this floods. I don't know if the person moves the generator in and out, but this could be problems. Probably not an ideal installation. We had a gentleman here that created a propane power generator. He didn't have to use electricity. And whenever it called for water, it would turn on the generator and pump water and then shut off. And that was some solutions that people have used when electricity was too far away. It's just another view of it, enclosed it in a shed. It's got a BFD controller on it. So if we talk about sumps, sump construction, difficult casing materials, the sump is just the outside area. It's corrugated metal. Ellington uses a lot of that with a mastic on the outside to keep it from corroding. Prints grow in ADS, so plastic, pre-made plastic ones. And then we have some people that put in their own using concrete sections. I just mentioned the main. The people that use the concrete sometimes put in the main line into the sump found out they had to be sealed very, very well because there were a couple of cases where it kind of washed out and filled up the bottom of the sump with soil, which is hard to get out. And most of these plastic and other ones have a, if you made sumps have sealed bottoms. But you could have concrete down there, or you could have gravel and rocks. At least it's just thick just to keep out the silt and other things. And there's some areas that we found you need to dewater and install in the sump casing. And this is a typical, this is an ADS product sump casing cover on the top reinforced to support the weight of anything that's on top of it. So dewatering, we've had, like I said, you can dewater a Dr. One installer. He said he could dewater with his backhoe, but he was digging in and clay soils where the water flow coming in wasn't where to use the regular trash prompted a lot of contractors use. But when you get on sand, you start digging that hole that just keeps washing gets. And when you're going down 1316 feet, it just starts filling in. And sometimes the best way to do it is to put in a dewatering system, series of small wells around it and pump them out and take out all the water down to the depth you need. We're showing up here. And then do your drainage, do your putting, install it, put it in, and then fill it in. And then you can let it fill up partially with water so it doesn't float out and then let the water table come back up. We've seen this a lot in sandy in areas with a lot of sand. So pump selection need to determine the maximum flow rate. And then the total head, how high do you have to lift that water? And we'll look at some common pump types. So this pump is sold through ADS. It's actually being distributed through a Fargo company here. This is commonly used by, it's supplied by Kerry Pump out of Michigan. Stainless steel submersible that they use to pump water. But what I want to, what you should really understand is that all centrifugal pumps and doesn't, you notice some pumping in your basement is a centrifugal irrigation pumps are mostly all centrifugals. They all have a similar pump curve in that they, the pump manufacturer will put them at a constant speed on them against the constant head that they're pumping against. And then they'll measure the flow rate. And they can develop this pump characteristic curve. So you can see here that if you pump it against 10 feet ahead, it'll pump this flow rate. But if you pump six feet ahead, it'll pump this flow rate, which is much greater. So we can take advantage of that in some with lift stations to a certain extent. And of course, unless you got a lift, there's some, there's some having this kind of ability can sometimes increase your flow rate to keep up with what's flowing into the sump. So, so again, the lift I'm talking about. Can you say what does feet of head mean? Oh, feet of head is the feet of lift. So that's what I'm explaining here is all of these pumps, whether submersible or even the other makes, I'll show they want a minimum submergence depth so that they don't want the water level to go below this because then they start to get vortexing, which can eat up an impeller on a pump or they suck air. So they're not pumping. So they have a minimum of submergence depth. And that's why these things are as deep as they are. So they lift.  So I'm using engineering terms. That's your maximum lift in feet. So engineers call that head. And so that when when this pump was running, you would pump down to there.  Because you don't want to get below that. And then when the water level rose so high, you turn them on. And so you go through this up and down. And there's alternatives to this that I'll cover here. But is that good, Hans? Yes. Okay. So what I've seen a lot of installers doing lately is they deangle it down. This serves two purposes. One, it report it reduces the point of discharge. So now your lift is less. So instead of a 10 feet left, once that pipe is full, you may end up with only a seven foot lift. The other thing is is if you're in an area where ditches are full and flooding's taken place and the pump is pumping into it, you may get a lot of nasty phone calls from neighbors who think you're contributing to flooding. So by putting it down like this, when the ditch is full, you can't see it's pumping. And so it kind of reduces the number of nasty calls. So anyway, and that's what I'm showing here is that when you have that situation, and the ditch is full here, now, and the pipe is full, now the maximum lift is as much reduced. And it's as a lift as a water level that you're pumping against. And so that means your pump can move more water. So if you have high flow conditions, when you have these kind of situations, you actually gain something by putting those extensions on. There's a number of companies that make above grade pump stations. In this case, they have a drive shaft going down. You have the impeller down here lifts it up and discharges out. The motor's up here and they got a drive system for the drive shaft. But again, even on these, you look at their technical material, and they want a minimum submergence depth of at least three feet above the impeller. And the other thing about these is the weight of this rests on top of your pump, the sump here. And that, you know, you got to have reinforced systems here, whereas the submersibles will sit on the bottom here. So in this situation, again, you have your maximum left would be up to here. That's the point of discharge. And this gentleman has this is a drive made out of in Wilmer, Minnesota. And the motors right here, they got a drive system here, you can actually change sprockets, so you could change you can have two speeds with these. And then he's just tacked on some, some dreatile here to put it down lower into the ditch. Also reduces the amount of erosion from the discharging water. This manufacturer Ranger pumps out a Vesta Minnesota. And they have a direct drive electric drive to theirs. And there's a design more to handle. Excuse me, trash. The impeller they use is more like an auger flake in a way. So if you've got surface inlets out in that cornfield, and you get pieces of corn into the tile get washed down, this pump will move them. The submersibles will not they don't handle trash very well. They might handle some silt, but they won't handle trash. That can be a problem. And because the weight of this sets on top of the sump, sometimes they, in this case, they put in a reinforcement so that the weight didn't push down so hard on the plastic and start to collapse it. So what are these things cost? Last I checked, the pumps can cost anywhere from 3 to 7,000. And then in addition to that, you got the sump construction and installation costs. That might add up to 15 to $20,000 for one lift station. And that doesn't take no account if you got got a pay to have the electricity move to that site. Last I heard sometimes a single phase power can cost $30,000 a mile or even more depending on where you're at. And also if dewatering is needed so that these could end up be a sizable investment. And that's why I said at the beginning to look to make sure that if you're going to build one of these that there might be some other fields that you could put into it to handle with a second pump. Pumping costs from what I've been able to, we have one great cooperator Hans and I have worked with over the years up in Grigler, Minnesota area. In 2010 that rain here he at his farm he measured 37.34.7 inches of rain over the growing season. And at that time he had 5000 acres little over 5000 acres in lift stations, 25 electric meters. Some of them were some of the pumps are on two meters on one meter. You have more than one pump on one meter. And his total electric bill for the whole year was saying that he pumped 34 that much water. I'm just saying that that was what was it 12 13 inches above average, would you say, Hans? I think for the growing season, but probably his his electric bill, he shared with me a spreadsheet is $30,000. So the average for the whole 5000 acres was about six bucks an acre for the year is pumping costs. And like you told me, he thought his meter charges were greater than that. So it's not like you need a lot of energy to move this water, but when you need it, you need it. Of course, he had some smaller fields where the costs were a little bit higher. And I talked to a farmer by Barnsville, who without me even prompting told me that that was about what his energy pumping cost was about six bucks and average an acre. So Tom, the question is, what about solar or options? Okay. Solar. It's a good question. I always get that. And there is a Josh Johnson here with Jemco is going to be installing this spring, a solar powered system as a test system. And there's a company, I think the young guys out of Minnesota, I haven't been there. I just sharing information that Josh shared with me that he's selling solar panels or power these, but we don't have any real information how well they perform. At this time, what's definitely people are looking at the definite option. It would probably work a lot better for smaller fields or targeted drainage where you might have a like I showed my in one of my slides that there was a 200 acre field, but only 45 acres have been tiled. You got lift pump on something like that. Solar powered system might work just fine. Flow isn't that great. So good question. I think I showed that some people are using propane in some of theirs and some are using portable electric generators. I'm going to skip over this. The pump horsepower. If you put a sump down in there. A lot of our electric utilities don't like a single phase pump single phase motor. That's more than 10 horsepower. And the reason is that the operating current when they start up is the in rush current is about six to seven times greater than its normal operating current. Well, if you're at the end of a line and near a farmstead, that could actually create when that pump turned on, it could create some brawn out situations on nearby because of the current draw. So they'd like to limit it to 10 horsepower. And that's why these are shaded. So just looking at it. Say you have 10 feet of total head you're pumping against. And you're moving 1000 gallons a minute use you the 10 horse. But what if you have what if you had 700 gallons a minute? Well, you could buy a five horse would probably work just fine. And I've seen a lot of them. I think that's the upper limit of the of a five horse. So that's kind of what that's the blue areas for single phase pumps. If you are got a higher head or you got a higher flow rate, you're tiling more acres and need 20 horses. I've seen some people go to two 10s and have them the 10 would operate most of the time. But if the flow came in really high, then they would turn on the other 10. That way they aren't turning on at the same time, things like that. So I talk about fixed speed pumps, just like to some pump in your basement is fixed speed, which means when you turn it on, it comes up to full RPMs and stays there until the float goes down and then it shuts off. These were used a lot in the early days. But because they pump at full speed, they pump a lot of water. So you need some storage volume with them, which is dependent on the maximum inflow rate, which is you're not determined by your drainage coefficient.  Manufacturers tell me that they think their pumps can handle up to 10 cycles per hour, which means that the pump could go on and off over a six minute period and turn back on again. But we actually measured one site where it was pumping 18 cycles per hour, which on and off, that's really hard on motors. And it turns out that the maximum pump cycles occurs when the tile inflow rate is half of the design of the pump flow rate, what the design pump will move. So I say you got a pump that moves 700 gallons a minute, the maximum pump cycles would happen at 350 gallons a minute. This is an old style system, you got your floats here, pump down here, you can see water coming in. And the water gets up to here, the pump turns on when it gets down to here, it shuts off. And I almost like us on pumping your house. So you got a certain amount of storage depth that you need because you need this for minimum submergence, you got your maximum lift. So how much do you need? It's a simple equation. Just to show you drainage coefficient three eighths of an inch, 10 cycles per hour. You need 1.4 cubic feet. Yeah, you need 1.4 cubic feet per per acre of storage. So if you had 100 acre field, that'd be 148 140 cubic feet, which is approximately 1000 gallons of storage so that this it didn't cycle too often. And so in the early days, going back to 1940s, when they designed some of these pump stations, they had these big vertical storages be poured concrete and pumping to be sitting up here and they'd have a pump house on top of it. But for farm fields, this is not desirable. What a lot of people went to is they got the small diameter riser and then they got two foot diameter horizontal storage underneath. So just to give you an example, if you were draining 120 acres, you need a with three eighths and drainage coefficient and 10 cycles per hour three foot on and off, which is not unusual. You needed nine foot diameter sump. Well, that's pretty hard. You know, that can involve some real construction to install something that big in diameter and a deep hole. And this is one of the few I've seen. This is eight foot diameter sump that was installed here. Close to 3.2 feet apart. We checked the storage is 1200 gallons. What a lot of farmers went to is for that same design with a four foot diameter sump. 120 acres. You need 44 feet of two foot diameter storage and your tile goes into that. This can be handled and dug in pretty easily. So more and more, we've seen people go to this type of storage. It's buried. It's easier to install and still provides the amount of storage that you need for your pump. This one might look like if you had it out in the field. I put this picture in there because we found that if this is too long, it gets out to 7080 feet. And that pump turns on the time it takes for the water to get from here down to there. And there is a delay time.  So what people started doing was putting a tee here and they'd run say 20, 30 feet this way, 20, 30 feet this way, 20, 30 feet this way. And then they had it all right close and then then it would all drain faster because if you get too long a drainage pipe, then it takes too long for the water to travel down there. And it's sitting in here. So here's a concrete reinforced top and he's got 70 feet of dual of two foot diameter dual wall pipe buried underneath that provides the storage needs for this pump unit. Well, about, I got seven years on this, but it's actually about in about nine years, variable frequency motor controllers came in. The nice thing about these is they had expense, but they can take either single or three phase power. You can use three phase motors, which there's less wear on the motor, three phases better than single phase, tolerates more frequent starts. It's got three phases soft start options, but you have to control the speed of the pump of the motor. And to do that, they use a feedback water level sensor that feeds back through the circuitry to control the speed of the pump. So it's in effect, what these VFDs do is the water coming out of the discharge from the pump is almost exactly the same as the amount of water flowing into the sump, but less storage is required in fixed speed. So typical VFD, you have your power coming in, you have a water level sensor here that's sensing the water level that you want to maintain in here. And then this, the VFD controls the pump, controls the speed of the pump so that it matches the inflow. I'm going to skip over that. So I did some testing with Jim Co here in Fargo on their VFDs and they had 12 foot, they had a test setup where they had 12 foot left and we're measuring the flow rate. So at 60 hertz, which is what comes out of your line, the five horsepower pump would pump a little over 600 gallons a minute, this is against 12 feet ahead. By the way, 10, this would be higher. 55, you can see as it goes down. And then the 10 horsepower pump would pump almost 1,400 gallons a minute. Now one of the things that they don't like to see is that when you get down around 40 hertz, that's about as low as they want to go with these VFDs. So then when the flow rate coming into the sump drops that low, then they go into an on-off situation almost like a float pump. And so they, but they had that saw start option so they can ramp up slowly and pump and then shut down. So you still need a certain when they go into that low flow condition, you still need some storage but not near enough. And I see in some situations, sometimes they use the main depending on the installation as part of the storage. So this was when we put in a big iron in 2011. That's the VFD that that Ellingson put this in that they put in. The early ones of these VFDs were not very good handling our winters, but the modern ones, you can leave this out all year and you don't have to worry about the LCD display or whatever. Most of them now can take the weather. And this is the water level sensor. It pressure sensors up here. This is just two inch PVC pipe that goes down in there. And as the water level rises it pushes, it compresses the air column and pressure sensor senses it and then controls the pump through that. Pretty simple system. They can get waterlog, but all you need to do is pull them up, fill them back up with air and shove them back down and then they're good to go again. Just tin covering for fire protection. When water does come out of these, it can create erosion problem. This gentleman put a concrete slab there. I noticed that I drove by here last fall and he's now on the end of those two pipes. He's actually got drops that come down and drop down to the top of this. So pump manufacturers that we've seen here in the Red River Valley is carry manufacturing out of Michigan. And I think you can do a search on carry pumps and you find them. JMD manufacturing on a Wilmer. They're the ones that make that yellow pump with the motor up on top. Ranger pumps, as I mentioned, they're out of Vesta. Jemco, Maxair. They're here in Fargo and they're making the pumps for that sold through ADS. And years ago I saw some Parma pumps, but I haven't seen any for several years.


Hi, I'm Zor. Welcome to New Zor education. I would like to talk about friction, friction. This is just one of the forces which we are dealing with on a day-to-day basis. So, the whole theory is really very, very simple. It's probably the problems related to this are much more important and that's why I would like to basically introduce the concept of the friction in this lecture and then have a couple of other lectures dedicated only to problems, because that's probably the most interesting and educational and developing. Okay, so this lecture is part of the physics 14's course introduced on Unizor.com. Now the website Unizor.com contains a course of mathematics, math 14's. Also, there is a US law for teens as well. The site is free. There are no advertisements. So, you're encouraged actually to watch this lecture from the website because it contains lots of very important detail notes for each lecture and exams for those who would like to get involved in a little bit more interesting way of studying. Plus, you have the functionality, educational functionality of this website. If you would like, for instance, to participate in the flipped classroom or study under supervision of a teacher or a parent, there is basically the functionality of the website which allows you to do this. Okay. Back to friction. Well, you know that if you would like to move a furniture, it's hard, right? Why? Well, because there is a friction. So, friction is not really something which you are kind of looking forward to when you're moving the furniture, right? Now, in addition, if you have certain machinery after a certain amount of time, the parts of this machinery are wearing out. Why? Well, because of the friction again. So, friction is not our friend in this particular case. If you are in a, let's say, space shuttle which returns to Earth and it goes through, it enters the atmosphere. At that time, friction between the body of the spacecraft and the air of the atmosphere.  So, that's just, you know, one of the very important factors why we don't like friction. Well, at the same time, I couldn't really stand on this floor if there is no friction. Friction actually keeps me in place. Friction is something which allows me to hold the glass of water in my hands because if there is no friction, it will just slip down. Friction is keeping the furniture in place, for instance. That's another furniture-related example. So, in these cases, friction is good. We couldn't live without friction. The closet probably would slip off our bodies if there is no friction. So, now, enough theory of kind of practical implementations and practical usage of theory. Let's go to the more physical aspect of it, more theoretical aspect of the friction. So, first of all, why does it exist, the friction? Well, the more or less traditional explanation is that if you have two surfaces, one and another, and they are really touching each other, well, they're not really smooth as I'm just putting in a picture. They have certain bumps here and there, and this one has certain bumps here and there. And when these bumps are catching each other, that prevents the movement. So, if you would like to move this object relative to this, let's say this is a floor, and this is a sofa. Well, these bumps are basically catching each other. They are in this position. And to move it, you have to really like a little bit, maybe even lift, and maybe some bumps will be crashed during this movement. I mean, it's kind of a difficult procedure. So, this is the reason why friction exists. Okay, now let's go back to a little bit more theoretical aspect of it and think about what factors contribute to this friction. And right now, let's consider so-called static friction, which means this object is touching this object, and I would like to move one relative to another. So, in the beginning, they are at rest. And now I would like to move. Now, if they are at rest, these bumps are already caught each other, right? So, to move it, I have to have some kind of a force to either jump over the bumps or maybe crash certain bumps, etc. So, which factors contribute to this force? I need to start movement, start the motion forward. Well, the most important factors are obviously the force. This thing pushes this way and this thing pushes back the reaction, force of action and reaction, because this actually contributes to this catching between the bumps, right? And also what's very important is the material these surfaces are made of. There are smoother materials and there are more rough materials. And obviously, in case of material of a rough structure, this catching is substantial and it's more difficult to move. Now, let's consider the most typical situation that we are on the horizontal plane. Let's say this is the floor and the floor is completely horizontal. So, what kind of forces exist here? Well, obviously, the pressure is a result of the gravitation, right? So, the weight of this guy is this guy onto the floor and obviously the reaction backwards are these two most important contributors to this pressure between these two objects. Okay, now, it has been experimentally established that for given two surfaces, for any pair of given surfaces, weight is actually the most important factor and the force needed to start movement to push from the position of rest forward depends only on this particular pressure or weight in this particular case and is proportional to this. So, the force which is needed to start the motion is proportional to the weight in this particular case. Now, in a more general case, we shouldn't really put the weight, we should really put some kind of force which acts perpendicularly to this surface, right? So, I will use the letter N which stands for a normal. So, the normal force against this surface. Now, why is it important? Well, because our floor can be tilted. In this particular case, force goes this way but it's not really the force, the full weight of this object which contributes to the pressure between these two items. I have to really make such a representation of my weight going normally perpendicularly to the surface and tangentially to the surface and only this component is actually contributing to this formula. Only this component would be N. Now, obviously, there is a reaction force. Now, this is the force needed for basically pushing it down. Okay, so now, let's just consider this particular problem in the following contents. I have this particular structure and let's say this angle is phi. What I'm interested is how big the angle phi should be that the object still doesn't really move, that its own weight is insufficient to move it or if you wish what is exactly the angle phi when the movement starts, right? So, maximum from all those angles when object still stands still or minimum from all those angles when the object slides down just on its own weight. How can I solve this particular problem? Well, again, since my force of the static friction depends on certain coefficient mu, which basically depends on the surfaces and let's consider I know this because I have to know what these objects are made of. Let's say it's a boot or a metal or something like this. They all have different coefficients of friction. Now, considering I know mu, let's just think about what is exactly the force of static friction according to this formula. Well, if this angle is phi, this angle is obviously phi as well, right? Because it's too perpendicular to two perpendicular. An angle between two perpendicular to the sides of the angle and obviously if this is w, this is the weight, then this is equal to w times cosine of phi. Which means my force of static friction which prevents movement is equal to mu times w times cosine phi. Okay, so this force is always against the motion, right? It prevents the motion. Now, what basically this is, this is the maximum force of the friction because let's consider I pull a little bit. Let's consider horizontal place. It's easier. And let's consider that I'm pulling something with certain force but it's very, very weak force. My object would not move, which means that my resistance, which is static friction, is equal to my force which I am applying to pull the object to the left, right? Now, as I'm increasing my force which I'm pulling the object with, object still is in the position of rest, in the state of rest, which means my static friction is increasing as well, right? Because the object stands still, it doesn't move, which means all friction and the force of pulling are supposed to be the same, right? And only if I'm overcoming this particular force of static friction then the object starts moving and that's exactly what this is. This is exactly what coefficient mu is related to. So, it establishes the maximum force of static friction or, if you wish, minimum of the force of pulling to start moving the object. It's either or, it's still the same thing. So, maximum of friction, it cannot go beyond this or minimum of the pulling force to start the motion from the state of rest. Same thing here, except here is the weight, it's just vertical and here the normal does not correspond to the weight. So, this is my normal, this is my force of friction and, okay, so the force of friction always against the movement. Now, my weight, this component of the weight, let's call it weight forward. Now, the weight forward is obviously weight times sine of phi, right? This is phi, this is phi and this is weight times sine of phi. So, this force goes this way and my force of static friction, this one, goes this way. Now, my question is, when exactly the object starts moving? Well, obviously when these functions, when these forces are exactly the same, which means that the maximum static force is equal to my component of the weight, which goes tangential to the inclined, at that moment, this is this pivotal moment. Before that moment, as I'm increasing this, for instance, if I'm increasing the angle, I'm obviously increasing this component. So, before that moment, object stands still, it does not slide down, but as soon as I have reached the angle when this force is equal to the maximum possible friction, static friction, then this is exactly the beginning of the motion. So, these are supposed to be equal to each other and obviously weight cancels out. So, I have sine phi is equal to mu cosine phi or divided by cosine I will have tangent phi equals mu and phi is equal to arc tangent mu. So, this is the answer, this is the angle starting from which, if I increase the angle, my object starts sliding down because my force will no longer be able to hold the object. This will become greater than maximum. So, this force of resistance has certain maximum and the maximum is this one. So, while my weight is such that its tangential component less than that maximum, then the friction will be sufficient to hold the object at the same place. As soon as I have exceeded that maximum, immediately I start moving. So, what's important here is that the static friction force is only as big as I'm trying to pull the object and start moving, but not greater than certain maximum value which is determined by the coefficient of static friction and the normal pressure between the surfaces. Alright, so this is all about static friction. Static friction is when we are trying to start moving the object. Now, I'm sure everybody noticed that if you are moving a sofa, if you ever move a sofa, it's more difficult to start moving than to continue moving. So, once it's already moving, it's kind of easier to move it further. Now, why is that? Well, there is a concept of, as I was saying, static friction and there is a concept of kinetic friction. So, kinetic friction is a friction between moving parts. And it's not the same obviously as friction between the parts which are not moving against each other. Now, why they are different? Well, let's go back to this theory of the friction related to these bumps. You see, if the objects are not moving against each other, the pressure which is applied from this to this or from this to that is sufficient to penetrate. So, bumps of the top part penetrate in between the bumps of the bottom part. As soon as they start moving, they don't really have time to go deeper. They are kind of sliding on the surface. They are definitely touching something. All these bumps are touching. But this is much more difficult situation to overcome than this. So, if they are just slightly touching each other and that's exactly the case when we start moving, then it's kind of easier to move further because these bumps are not deeply penetrating into each other. Now, does it depend on speed? Well, yes, but most likely it's not that much of a dependency. And in the problem which we will be solving, in most of the cases we will not really have this dependency. I mean, intuitively you would think that with the higher speed the tension, this friction between these two parts should be smaller because the penetration would be even less deep, right? More shallow. But at the same time if you think about this, these bumps are so tiny that even normal and relatively slow speed would still be sufficient for them to basically slide only on the tops of each other without any kind of deep penetration. But obviously it's an approximation and this particular law, it's not really 100% mathematically correct law. It's kind of an approximation and it's sufficient in our experience to have this approximation as long as we know the coefficient of static friction or in the case of kinetic friction, the coefficient of kinetic friction. So these are two different things. I mean, the state of rest is significantly different from state of movement as far as the friction is concerned. But one state of movement with one speed from another state of movement with another speed, they do not really differ that much and we usually ignore these differences. So we will have to deal with two different kinds of coefficients of friction. The static coefficient to start moving the object, which by the way we will rarely use in our problems, and kinetic friction. That's the friction of the same type actually. It's also the force of friction will depend on some coefficient of kinetic friction and the normal pressure. So the formula is exactly the same but coefficient between two different kinds of surfaces like between metal and metal or whatever else is probably different in case of movement than in case of starting motion from the position of rest. In any case, my point is that the old theory which I was just talking about is exactly the same. And if you already have a problem where the motion is kind of already occurring, then you obviously have to talk about the kinetic motion. If you have a problem, which by the way I think is a rare problem, when you have to start moving, then basically the problem is exactly the same. The only difference is the quantity of this coefficient has a different number basically. So it's one number of certain units per whatever in one case and a certain unit in another case. And by the way what's interesting about these things, this is the force which means it's a vector, right? Now what's the direction of this force? Well the direction of this force is against the movement. Now if there is some kind of a trajectory where our object is moving, then this force, since it's directed always, for instance this is my movement. Now my force of friction always against it, which means it's always tangential to trajectory. Now this is always perpendicular to trajectory. So this is not a vector equality. This is equality between the magnitudes of these vectors. So the correct would be either just don't use this bar on top, so just this, assuming that we are dealing with magnitudes of these vectors. Directions we do know this is tangential to trajectory, this is perpendicular to trajectory. Because obviously the tension depends on how you press the surface where you are moving, right? And as far as direction, so these are perpendicular to each other. And this is purely numerical, it's not vector equality. It's purely numerical equality because this particular two things are in perpendicular directions, right? Okay, that's basically it. Now I promised to solve a few problems that would be the subject of one or two next lectures about frictions. And other than that, that's it. I do suggest you to read notes to this lecture. There are quite substantial, quite details, you can read it like a textbook basically. And it's more or less whatever I was just talking about, but it's still nice to read it again. Okay, that's it. Thanks very much and good luck.


One, immune mothers produce a type of antibody called IgG that is specific to allergens, and this has been linked to a lower risk of allergy in their children. Two, several studies have investigated the mechanisms by which maternal IgG can prevent allergy development, but these are not yet fully understood. Three, to summarize previous research, we review literature on urine models of maternal immunization with allergens and human immune regulation after passive therapy with purified IgG. Four, based on our review, a new hypothesis about the mechanisms involved in inhibiting allergy development is proposed, which could serve as a basis for future therapies to prevent allergies. This article was authored by Jefferson Russo Victor.