The first item on the agenda is to approve the agenda. I know one change is that we're not going to be doing the minutes as part of the content agenda because the clerk hasn't found us that they're not ready yet. There are already other changes people like to make to the agenda. In that, we'll consider the agenda approved. The next item on the agenda is agenda business and appearances. This is an opportunity for any member of the public to address the council on any item that is not on tonight's agenda. So we're going to ask for your comments to approximately two minutes. And we'll go ahead and take those comments now. You can go first, Steve. I don't know if you all saw the piece in the Times Argus. I want to raise the temperatures are dropping again tonight and tomorrow night to deadly levels. And the motions of like opening the memorial room till 430 and then just saying you're on your own. And I went to the city manager and as last Friday and said, we should at least open up the info booth unlocked that info booth. And instead it stayed locked. He didn't find the key didn't return the call and somebody sleeping bag was locked up in there. So we are we are recklessly we're we are it may puncture. It may puncture sovereign immunity. If you reckless indifference to life and death situations, you know, we can't leave people outside at 10 and 20 below. And yet we are turning a blind eye to it as if it's all handled by our unaccountable nonprofit partners. So the fact that I said open open direct center open, you know, keep someplace open the teen center could be open. You know, you need to provide some measure of safety to these folks that are unhoused. And, and I got not I got crickets, even though he agreed to find out how it could get open and then call me back. Snow removal, you put this very onerous parking restrictions in place. And yet the city's not living up to its half of the bargain. You know, you're not plowing the snow while the cars aren't there. And that's why we agreed to move the cars and go way out of the way to park somewhere else to keep those streets open tonight. And yet you're not doing the work, or your people are doing the work. And to me that's just that's ripping off the citizens, you know. So those are those are the two minutes. Thank you. On line I see Peter Kelman and then Vicki Wayne. Hi, Peter Kelman, my period district three. At last week's budget hearing, a number of people myself included commented on the lack of transparency and clear and timely communication regarding a good bit of the budget. At the very end of the meeting, Bill Frazier expressed perplexity about people being at an open meeting complaining about this. So, I'd like to very briefly explain to Bill what I meant, and what I think some other people met, and a good example is getting on to this meeting. I went up and clicked on the zoom link, and oh, I needed to get the passcode to get on. Why do we have that additional block for people, if you're going to send out a link why can't the link go straight through most new meetings do that. And the agenda packet. I went to look at the agenda packet for the meeting early this afternoon, and I noticed there was virtually nothing for the budget item on it. So I sent a note to Bill and I suggested that first of all, he should include that terrific PowerPoint presentation that he gave last time that should be on there. In fact, it should have been on there the first time so people would have a chance to read it ahead of the meeting. And it really answers about 90% of the questions that were asked. And, and he here Cameron put it on a little later in the afternoon which was great because it gave me a chance to look at it again and come up with a bunch of questions which I'll ask later. But it doesn't include any agenda packet it doesn't include the link to the budget book. The book link, if you go to it doesn't really have a real budget. It's got a kind of an overview and it's got a bunch of other stuff that isn't really all that useful some very pretty grass etc etc. And it really isn't until you look at the bottom of one of them and see a place where it says spreadsheet breakdown that you get to the actual budget. But that budget is impenetrable, although some of us know how to read those kind of things and can find stuff but it's really hard to get at my point being that what we really need in a budget process. What we need is to have the budget to be put into plain language language that anybody, the sixth grade education can understand and bills presentation was a pretty good example of it it did have a few acronyms that I had to guess at, which we shouldn't be in there, but we need to have more plain language now. The other thing we need to do timely. Is the second hearing. If I am not mistaken on the 24th, the budget item will go up on the, the ballot. So, obviously, tonight, you guys are going to vote for the budget. So pretty much anything that any of us say, or question, or have an opinion about tonight isn't going to count for very much. I'm not sure that there even was any much change from people who got a chance to talk last week. But certainly tonight can't be really considered to be a budget hearing.  I really rethink the process so that you engage people in budget making, just like you engage the city council and the city council and the city manager work work together, people need to be engaged early and often. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. No, Vicki way. I, I should have written this down. I have a couple of responses to Peter. It did take me a few meetings to figure out how to do the, you know, meeting link and then the password thingy, whatever what I do is when I go on to the city's website and go to Orca media and call up the agenda. I just put a little piece of paper next to me and I write down the password and then when I'm ready to go to the meeting. I call it up, click on it, put in the password and I'm done in about less than two minutes, less than a minute. What I wanted to say was that I would hope that we could start having people speak and make points without the accusatory stuff going on. I think the points would be better taken. If there was less acrimony and less and fewer accusations that may or may not have anything to do with reality. So I would hope that we could have a more civil conversations. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anyone else I don't see any more hands online. Is there is that just me. Oh, okay, Maria Maria.  You're muted. You're muted. I can't. This is Maria. Maria, you need to unmute yourself. I thought I had, I clicked on it. I'm finding it somewhat difficult to locate some information and get informed and I don't know if this will be dealt with later but we have a pretty large bond vote coming up regarding rec center. And despite looking through the city's website, multiple departments and searching the local publications, I can find very little information on exactly what's being proposed for the 8 million that we're ultimately going to be putting into this. And I would certainly expect clear communication about what the business plan is basically before you come to the taxpayers for that kind of money. Where can we find this information. Well in advance of town meeting day. And why isn't it clear now. I have a point Maria and the, the bond vote right now is to purchase the property. And that's a relatively new opportunity that the city had and we've looked for years for a place for a rec center and felt this was strategic to move forward with this we do need to put a more detailed plan because obviously a land that size can have multiple uses, including, you know, rec facilities rec building possible housing and other things. So, if this passes we will then go through a whole sort of a publicly engaged planning process for the build out or use of the long term use of that property. There's a, to some extent it was a strategic parcel and Jay may want to respond to so I appreciate your question we've tried to explain what we know today, but we don't have much more than what we've said. No, I don't want to add much more than other than that what's on the bond is a $2 million vote not 8 million. So I just want that she was clear on on what we're talking about here. I grasped that, but I think that what's out there is a proposal to buy this property and then put 6 million into it. And I guess I'm curious as to what the contingency plan is if we decide not to go forward with 6 million to improve that property. We're taking it off the tax rolls if the city buys it so it's a liability in two ways. Then there's a development costs which we may decide is more than the city wants to carry. And what will we do with the property in that case. It's a big outlay as a just in case. Well, you're correct. And the we don't know that it's 6 million. I mean, that was what the estimate meeting the rec center is, but I mean, that's a fair you know, yes, there will be a significant capital investment for a new property after that. There's again, I don't want to speculate too much, because we don't know but you know the property could be resold potential that portions of it could be sold even after we own it. So, but all the questions are asking you know what we're sort of working on next steps ourselves. So, what are we buying precisely that even that isn't clear. How many acres is included. What buildings are included. I've only been up there once so it's approximately 138 acres and it's all the buildings that are there. Okay, hold up on the rest of this discussion until we get to that item on the agenda. Okay, so there will be more clarity coming I'm sorry. I don't know if there's any more clarity but they're going to be listed discussion about it. Okay. So hold other questions until then thank you. Okay. I'm not seeing any other. Kim Cheney. You have your thumbs up sign camera you're going to speak. Oh, Cameron's working on. I wanted to talk when you're the Central Mount Public Safety Authority item comes up. Thank you. I'm sorry I apologize. Okay, moving to the next item on the agenda, the consent agenda. Is there a motion. Second. Moved in second the consent agenda as presented. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Opposed. Okay, thank you. We're moving on to item five on the agenda. The order report. This is this was taken up last week and the council decided that we wanted to have more time to review the. The order report before. Voting to accept it. Is that Heather graves there? No, that's Heather graves. Yes. Okay. Okay. Okay. Kelly. I'm a finance director. Oh, yeah. Sorry about that. I'm going to leave it to the auditor's to kind of clean up where we left off last week and go through a presentation to just kind of give all the specifics. And then we can take questions after that if you'd like. Okay. Thank you. Good evening. Good evening. Thank you for coming. Yeah. Well, I'm glad I could be here and glad we could, you know, take some more time and, you know, continue this conversation from last week. Do I have the ability to share my screen. Now. Go right ahead and share it. All right. How do you do that? So walk me through. I don't see view. I'm not seeing an option here, Kelly, to share this over here. Got it. Thank you. Can everybody see that? Here we are. Thank you. Yes. So I'm going to go back to, uh, to last week and, you know, Kelly had kind of given you a summary through a memo, you know, of the, uh, you know, the fiscal state of the city of Montpelier and talk had some audit talking points.  And, you know, when it came into like taking the selected pages of the audit and going through and having some conversation, I know that there was some comment, you know, about not having either access or time to review, you know, the audit financial statements.  So right now you're looking at the balance sheet. Kelly here. Sorry. Um, would you mind just sharing this as a presentation? There's a, there's an arrow in the, um, top of the screen that you click on to. Okay. Hold on Kelly. So bear with me. Oh, no. There you go. You get out of there. So if you go up to the top banner. Yeah. It looks like there's, um, it's almost like playing Pictionary here. I feel like maybe it's the wrong game, but I'm going to try. Um, so if you, you can see where there was an arrow in the top banner, the icon right next to it, um, in between the finger pointing at, you know, deflection. On the left. Keep going. Keep going. On your left. You're almost there right there. Yeah. And then start from the beginning. Okay. There we go. Thank you. See that now. I don't want to confuse this. I don't know what the next slides are going to take out for screen, but do you guys all see everybody's picture on the right too? Yes. Okay. So, so, uh, Kelly, is there any way to get rid of that? Are you all good with that? That is good. And so if you just, um, hit the year enter key, that'll bring you on to the next slide. Okay. So. Right here is a balance sheet for the city as a June 30, 2021, this audit period. And, uh, what it's got is all your governmental funds for the city as of six 30, 21. The one that, uh, you know, obviously as the operational fund for the city of Montpelier is its general fund. And at June 30, 2021, the city had him in the first column, $6 million worth of assets, you know, against liabilities and, uh, obligations, you know, deferrals of assets. And, uh, um, obligations, you know, deferrals of about three million eight 50, which leaves you at the end of the year with equity of about 2.2 million dollars at the city of Montpelier. The big number to be discussed, you know, as the unassigned fund balance, and I'm about the third number up from the bottom, you know, of that column of about $1,600,000 a million, $599, everybody see where I'm at? That's a reduction last year of about, I believe it was about a $200,000 reduction, you know, from last year, the unassigned fund balance went down about $200,000. And the city, as I recall, has a fund balance policy where it's typical that you keep it at Kelly 15% or about 60 days of your operating budget. Does that correct? That is correct. Yeah.  We typically put three years of comparative information to kind of show where your assets and liabilities were where the year before to put it into context. Sadly, as I pretty much qualify every governmental presentation, you know, going forward for the last two years, 2020 and 2021 were a pandemic year.  I don't see it folks, you know, so I'm just going to like flip to the next slide here right now. And again, there's the liability comparison.   And that is money that the city has set aside for specified projects that is not in addition to the next slide of your unassigned fund balance of $1.6 million.  The city has a policy where it's 15% or 60 days of its operating budget and when you take that into consideration with the funding of the various articles and capital to put that in Montpelier terms, it's about $15 million. So your fund balance would be around $2.12.2 million for representing, you know, and adhering to your fund balance policy, which would try to be close to 60 days of that operating budget. You're at a $1.6 million and that's even shy of what your fund balance policy dictates for the city of Montpelier. So that's definitely a talking point that we're going to talk about in the back of the document and really come into some of the other things, you know, that play a part in that fund balance and how the city will use that fund balance to mitigate various things such as cash flow, such as fronting the TIF project, you know, for the investment, you know, as that TIF was gearing up and the planning and all that. And I think that that was about $1.1 million.  There's some other funds that are considered major funds for the city. You know, the capital project, certainly being one of them in the city has a multitude of, you know, various capital projects going on now. The community development fund and the other governmental funds, folks, is predominantly your cemetery funds, your recreation fund that you have. I think you have a senior center fund, you know, that you have out there, and you've got about $2.3 million sitting in those various funds and of which the three predominant ones that make up that $2.3 million are the cemetery funds for the city.  There's a breakdown, you know, clearly of what you have for, you know, for your revenue breakdown.  But obviously property taxation, you know, makes up, you know, the lion's share, you know, of what the city has for, you know, for revenue streams coming in. Expenditure is the same way.  You can see what that representation is based on, you know, a dollar in totality for the city.  And here's something that we always like to put in folks.  It's really tough to really take two pandemic years and really kind of make sense of it all in the world of government in this day and age. Cause that intergovernmental, you know, came in larger than what was budgeted for. Cause the city when it prepared its budget back in 20 for 21, you know, had no idea that it was going to hit a pandemic and no idea the various grants and funds that were going to come into the city, you know, that it typically wasn't used to, you know, so you can see kind of an increase in there folks, you know, of, you know, of what, you know, really what that, you know, there was some money and money that came in that was not property tax related to the city. And a lot of that was various grants and things and other funding that the city got to combat this pandemic and other certain things that were, you know, certainly, certainly some of them, what the city was used to getting, but a lot of that is pandemic funds as well.   And these are all the proprietary funds. These are all in theory funds that are generated with non-property tax payer dollars, you know, but clearly, you know, it's supposed to be paid by service fee revenues, you know, to fund the operations of these various areas. And the one that really, you know, strikes out at me, you know, certainly. And as I said, you know, in the past presentation for the city is the sewer fund at the city. You can clearly see the, you know, in the second column there, the $52 million, I'm about maybe two thirds of the way down the paper, on the paper on the total capital assets of $52 million. You've made a significant investment in infrastructure. In 21, you made a significant investment in infrastructure and upgrades with your treatment plan. And that was one of the conversations that we had in the past council presentation is for lack of a better way to stay at some of these deferred projects and, you know, obligations of the city, you know, that the city was going to have to have a plan for and come up with. And even though the city was in a positive situation, as we're going to see in a minute, you know, a lot of that's really skewed by, you know, grants that came into the city to actually fund this wastewater treatment plant. And it really kind of skews the financial position for the city.   And I just want to talk about some of the details of that, that what we've been talking about with, you know, with your management. And then the parking one and the district heat fund, you know, one of the comments that we had, you know, with Kelly, you know, regarding those funds is when those funds were birthed, you know, at the, you know, at the city and, you know, that there was this intent, you know, what these things were going to look like years ago, you know, the last two years of forever change, not just Montpelier, but government, you know, really kind of, you know, taking a look in the mirror now at some of its, you know, past plans and saying, you know what, if the legislators aren't going to park in the parking lot, people aren't going to visit the hotels and people aren't just coming to downtown. I'm trying to put it in Montpelier language here. You know, maybe we need to revisit that utility fund and maybe we need to redefine, you know, what that is because the city, you know, I believe made in the next slide that you'll see a $200,000, you know, transfer to break that fund back to zero, you know, and basically make it whole. And I think that that's certainly going to be something that's going to be carried on as a practice going forward, you know, as long as, you know, quite frankly, this pandemic has changed the way that we communicate and changed the way we do business and really quite frankly is keeping people out of cars and keeping them home and safe. And that really is going to affect your parking lot, folks, you know, and that fund. And I think, and as I've said to Kelly and Heather and is the, you know, is a simple fact that might be time to go back and look at that fund, you know, its birth rights and really that plan. And I know that that certainly is being looked at by management. And the same goes with the district heat fund.      And I think that that was only phase one. You've got phase two, possibly phase three, you know, you've got deferred maintenance that you're looking at here and it's not cheap to put pipe in the ground folks this day and age. And I think that that's something that, you know, that again, management continues to look at monitor and, you know, and quite frankly, forced to readjust their plan, you know, and how it's going to, you know, to take care of maintained wastewater in the city of Montpelier.  And I think that that's something between wastewater parking and district heat that the city really, you know, still has to take hard looks at that, going to make some hard decisions and, you know, and quite frankly go back to again, some of these birth rights on, you know, how these things got created and what their intent was, you know, and make adjustments where necessary or continue to make adjustments where necessary. This is a three year graph, you know, as far as what you own in those proprietary funds, you'll clearly see the non-current assets, which is your fixed assets or infrastructure. You'll see the level of increase in the investment that the city has made, you know, during 2021 net of depreciation to, you know, where the city, you know, you clearly see that trend is that the city is putting a lot of money in infrastructure, you know, and this graph is nothing more than support for that statement.  You use, government should use long-term money to fund long-term investments and clearly 11 plus million dollars for wastewater was invested, you know, in 2021. And really, you know, again, here's what came in the door and here's what went out the door and here's really some more talking points, you know, for the city and the one big one for the sewer fund, wastewater, you know, which I alluded to up front as we were, you know, kind of talking about those proprietary funds and as we get closer to the back to our talking points, when you look at that second column and you look at that line item, about three quarters of the way down the page to capital grants under the sewer fund, you're going to see about 3.7 million dollars of grants that came in from I believe Kelly predominantly that was all rural development, correct? The lion's tear, yes. Yeah, so that 3.7 million dollars, if that number is not in there and you go down into the change of net position, basically what you took in and what went out the door, you know, for the city's wastewater fund, that really excludes infrastructure, you know, the city actually looks like it was in a positive condition of about 3,250,000 dollars. If you take that capital grant of 3.7 million dollars, it brings to light the talking point of Kelly and the challenges that the city has right now with trying to understand, you know, the operations of this thing, keep the balance of maintaining the operations of the sewer fund, but also keep the balance of, you know, of continued and deferred maintenance and really addressing that plan. It really takes the city out of a favorable financial position and you've got a lot of people that would go up and say, but Ron, depreciation or a paper number for 1,059,000 dollars and I'm still in that sewer fund and I'm about halfway up with depreciation. You know, that's a paper number. That's money that physically didn't walk out the door, but when you first put that pipe in the ground, that depreciation is a real, real important number because it really turns the hourglass over. Not over for, not only for kind of looking at a capital plan and, you know, how you're going to fund those future renovations, but also how you're going to maintain that. And what we're seeing a lot of governments do in the area of water and wastewater is they're actually setting aside reserve funds, maintenance reserve funds, capital replacement reserve funds. And these are all things that I know are being looked at by your management.  The next column, the parking fund, you can look down and look at what his next net position was, was zero. And to get to zero at June 30, 2021, the city transferred in $203,000. I'm about five or six members up from the bottom in that column. So you're at really kind of a break-even point, you know, with your parking fund.   And again, I know that this was big topics of conversations with your management. And the district heat fund, you know, although certainly it looks like, you know, that you've got $4.3 million, largely, you know, in, in, in tack of net position, all of that folks is tied up into the infrastructure, you know, of that fund. So you can't physically put your hands on any money. And I think that that's another fund that the, you know, as I know that the city continues to monitor, it really is going to have to monitor that forever going forward, you know, because I think things have changed, you know, and, you know, I'm confident things have changed. And I'm confident management knows that I'm confident that there was a lot of conversation, you know, regarding, you know, your enterprise funds this year, particularly with the three wastewater parking and district heat.  I think is a big representation of that.   And it's a horrible analogy, but to stop the bleeding, you know, and some of these, some of these proprietary funds and really, you know, it forced the city to make some hard decisions and, and a lot of those hardwood decisions were really caused, you know, in the face of a pandemic. And getting into the discussion points here, the business activity funds, which I really tried to emphasize going through the plan, going through the pandemic, the city management continues to, to monitor, you know, the, you know, the financial position and the operations of those, of those business activity funds, those things that are, you know, that are supposed to be paid for with non-property taxation with user fees and, you know, any type of other service fees. And, and, and I know, you know, that that's a, that that is, this is going to be, I think, probably the single biggest challenge that the city is going to have over the next two and three years, you know, is really kind of looking at the business activity funds, you know, and really the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the objectives of them and revisiting any other adjustments that need to be, to be made to them. And I really think that the one thing that this pandemic has done is especially with the last one that was passed in November with the, the build back America, I believe is what it was coined as, you know, is the money that's gone into the infrastructure, you know, typically, you know, government, you know, through CARES and through APA saw some, saw some relief money for, you know, revenue deck, you know, decline, you know, through various hazard pay and, you know, other foreseen things that were caused by the pandemic. But now a lot of these projects, you know, that were deferred because the government didn't really, the projects may have gone away in their entirety or the complexity or the objectives of these, you know, of these, you know, these capital projects or investments would have changed during the pandemic, you know, as they're revisiting these things, they're finding out now that the cost has some, some things, you know, have almost double gone up by 20%, 30%, 40%, you know, so it's literally forcing government to really kind of look at the projects that it has, reprioritize, but the, the federal government also realized that. And the last stimulus package back in November, compounded with the one in Congress right now, which is like, you know, build back America again. You know, I believe that they're trying to pass in January of February. It is deal solely so that government can have an infusion of capital to literally allow you as a political subdivision to mitigate some of these additional cost and, you know, and inflation and some of the other things, you know, that, that go hand in hand with public works, that go hand in hand with water, wastewater, you know, your, your, your, your heat fund, you know, your parking lot. It allows you now to, to have access to some necessary money to kind of mitigate the pandemic, the inflation and, you know, allow you to kind of get back to, to, to business as usual. And let me just say that there's, you know, that there's not enough money to go around and infrastructure and, you know, and, and, and, and there's a recent knock, you know, at the federal government with this latest stimulus packages being, you know, trying to be passed in Congress right now is that the states are holding on to a lot of this money. And that doesn't help out the municipalities. You know, so I encourage you to work with your state departments on who typically will fund, you know, this because the states have a lot of money and the states haven't distributed a lot of money for infrastructure and for education, you know, and I know the states are now getting a lot of pressure from Congress to, you know, to go back and say, well, we've passed out a lot of money. What are you doing with it? And I would expect for the city of Montpelier and, you know, and a lot of the other political subdivisions, you know, in the state of Vermont, with this current infrastructure bill where you haven't seen, you know, any of that money that was passed in November yet.  Debt and future debt issuances. The city took on a lot of debt this year. It was about $11 million. That doesn't concern me, you know, as far as what that goes, you know, because of because I think it was deferred debt. I think it was deferred maintenance.  And I know the city is working with the bond bank right now on reimbursing itself for that $1.1 million.  And as far as, you know, the DNA of what that bond is going to look like, they continue to look like, look at that. We're having conversations with, you know, with management, you know, about that. But if that debt does not come through for the city, that's going to be $1.1 million of cash that the city invested in this TIF and good faith, thinking that this thing was, you know, was going to move through. And if that money doesn't come through, the city's unassigned fund balance and cash flow is going to take a hit by $1.1 million. And mom, peel your can't afford that. It just can't afford it. And then lastly, with the November stimulus package, you know, about to be introduced to, you know, to the various states and accessible by the municipalities. The 2021 November infrastructure, you know, package about building America back. And then the one that's in Congress right now being talked about, you know, clearly with all this money coming your way, you know, there's going to be some wholesale changes to federal procurement that the federal government, the various agencies are still working on. We continue to work with your management on upgrading its procurement policies to really kind of accommodate, you know, the, you know, the future federal stimulus funds that you're going to get. That's about all I got, folks. And I'd certainly, you know, Kelly and Bill, open it up to any questions that you all may have. Okay. Thank you. Other council members may have some questions. I'll just start off with one or two questions I have. You know, when I review an audit report, as I understand it, one of the things that I'm always interested in is whether the audit discloses that the city's books present an accurate depiction of the city's financial positions, assets and liabilities, expenditures, and whether the operations are in compliance with the generally accepted accounting principles. And as I understand your report, we have received a clean report on those items. Is that correct? Correct, Bill. To kind of piggyback on Kelly's memo last week and Miranda's confirmation, you know, we've got our highest opinion and that's called an unmodified, you know, report bill which basically says that the city's financial statements present fairly. Great. Thank you. Any other members of the council have any questions? Donna. We should all cheer Kelly and your crew. Yay. It was a Herculean effort, folks.  This was a Herculean effort, folks, you know, by your staff, you know, working with us really to kind of get to where we're at here today and hats off to them. Yes. And I do appreciate so many of your comments, Ron, not only for this audit, but for future budgeting. A lot of it resonated. So thank you for taking the time. And one thing I would just add on to that.  The last time we saw it, it really was nothing, you know, what it looks like now is back in 2008 with these error funds.  And as a stimulus money comes in, make sure that it really complements who you are and what you intend to do. Thank you. Any more comments on the side of the table? Any comments or questions on the side of the table? Thank you, Lane. I see you have your hand up. Yes, I was just wondering, is this the first year that this particular firm has been auditing us? No, it's not. Oh, okay. I believe we're in the third year of our contract. Oh, okay. I must have missed that. I was just curious. Nothing. You know, just curious. Okay. Thank you with that. The chair would entertain a motion to accept the audit. Any discussion. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Opposed. The order is accepted. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Ron and Miranda for being here. Miranda, Miranda's the brains. Kelly, I'll find you so we can continue our conversations. You all be safe. Folks. Thank you. Okay. We are up to item. Six on the agenda. Discussion of the central month public safety authority. Donna, do you want to kick this off? Yes, I did have a present. I thought there was a lot of comments made during public comment as well as this topic that it would be good to give people a little bit of orientation and I'll try not to take too long, but hit the highlights. And I thought it might be good to have something to look at. And as always Cameron is helping me with technology. Well, I haven't helped yet. So let's make sure explain some names. So center from our public safety authority could be called CV PSA, which you'll see on the slides. But I tend to say public safety authority. Another entity that's up on the slides that I call capital far this capital far mutual aid system. Sometimes it's known by its initials, but I have chosen not to use them. I'm trying to use real names. And hopefully I can keep you understanding who I'm talking about. Now I am wearing two masks. So anybody can't hear me either here or online.  That would be good. So the public safety authority actually started out with four municipals involved. Berry city, Berry town, Berlin and Montpelier. There were others like Northfield that attended off and on, but for five years we meant. And we worked on this charter. This charter includes not only the functionality of the board and the organization, but also governance of its members, cost allocation systems. And it went to before the legislatures and, you know, working with the legislatures, you have a lot of work there. And it was in 2014 that we finally got it approved and we were chartered and we had our first meeting with a handoff from central Vermont chamber of commerce was holding the committee meetings to the actual board of public safety authority. August and 14. Now March 2015 was the first time the organization attained money. It was $75,000. So we could hire an executive director. We were very, very lucky to get Paco. He was retired from Vermont safety department as deputy commissioner. They are very experienced and we hired him as a part time executive director. And he within six months created a, what we call a business plan. And we were looking at after meeting with the public safety authorities, public safety departments in the four towns that we had started with, as well as Barry and Montpeyre. We realized that dispatch might be the beginning place for us to look at regionalizing. Because we could have looked at the police department, the fire department. Dispatching was a central issue of communication. So his business plan was a model about whether it could be a centralized brand new dispatch building, or would it include both sites in Barry and Montpeyre, what we call one system, both using the same system and overlapping. And hence we'd keep both dispatch centers open in both cities. And that actually was presented to the councils, but it was not accepted as an operating plan. So in November in 2016, again, working with the city's public safety staff, under their advisement, we added an executive committee to our business plan where the police chief and the fire chiefs were part of the oversight of the operations. In 2017, the very beginning, we refined the one system with two locations as advised by the public safety staff. Again, it was not accepted as an operating plan by Barry and Montpeyre city councils. And they both encouraged us to find a third member. And we really wanted members, but I must say at some point we weren't playing as much time in seeking new members as you were trying to make good partners with the members we had. In 2018, Capital Far Mutual Aid System joined public safety authority under an MOU. They weren't a pure municipal, they were a group organizing 30 different towns. In December 2018, with the advisement of Capital Far and their participation, we looked at one centralized dispatch center, either renting or leasing with a simulcast system that was very important to Capital Far. And we laid out a cost allocation plan. This was not accepted by the Barry and Montpeyre city councils. And at that point, our executive director resigned. He felt there wasn't support for his work and he needed to leave. So in 2019, 2020, 2021, and beginning in 2022, we are without any staff. And as all of you know from our city committees, when you don't have a staff member there, there are things that fall through the crack. It is hard. But we have kept our spending under $5,000. We have our website, we have board liability insurance. We have given money to dispatch training. Very successful, all of Montpeyre's dispatchers have been certified, federally certified. And we've had enough money to keep and maintain as people come in. That's really good. Now, in August of 2021, we have brought forth a report to the cities about telecommunication need assessment report. Now, this was where we had gotten money two years before for $50,000. We took that and added it to our fund balance. And we spent $55,000 for phase one of an assessment and planning. And this dealt with telecommunication, all the radios, all the towers, huge study. And we were very pleased. And we heard very positive comments from Barry city staff, Montpeyre city staff and capital far. They made their own recommendations that came out of it. Everybody was in sync. And I must admit, I felt the central public safety authority board really thought we were having a turning point in our relationship that we were really going to have some clear action from not only us, but from our partners. And that hasn't worked out so good. Barry city has decided they'd like to report. They're going to use the report to move forward to get their councils to work on in building communication issues. But they don't feel a need right now to work with public safety authority or capital far on what capital far once is a simulcast system with radios. And as that says, it's a $3.9 million equipment acquisition. Now, we're not talking about upgrades, a simple thing of upgrading your computer. We're talking about having equipment from the 1990s, not only the radios, but these towers that are out there on all sorts of weather that haven't been modified. And you cannot get any federal grant money to apply to a public safety communication system that doesn't meet at least a P 25 standard. And that's what this report that puts out a design of a P 25 standard for radios, consoles, et cetera. Now, that report not only lays out the design, but also lays out the possibility of moving forward and actually getting perhaps even a new coalition. I mean, I must say I felt public safety authority board was very open saying, okay, if we aren't the entity that will work for our Central Vermont community public safety providers, then fine, let us find, let us help you create one. But you definitely need partnerships. That 3.9 million is not going to be carried by towns of people of 2000 people. I mean, the radio doesn't cost less because there's less people in the town. So we really have to have a regionalized system. And when we applied to lay his grant last year, we've heard again and again, it has to be a regionalized system. It has to have really strong, defined equipment. So we need another step in that equipment. We need to really lay it out. And hence our last $30,000 public safety authority is looking at spending that to get an RFP. So that then it'll be, it'll have to be fine tune when you actually get the funding, but it can help you get grants. If people can see the exact equipment. We said that like he's office said, they really would be much more willing to fund it. If they can see more exactly the equipment and know that the regional system has a strong body and a strong bonding. And unfortunately, public safety authority does not have a strong bonding, does not have a resume and finances because we've only maintained our executive director. We've had one capital grant of $75,000, which we spent on consoles and helping bury a Montpelier with their initial fiber connection. And then we spent our operating funds for training. So the next slide is like, okay, we think visualization works because it combines local resources, local control. And then you can go after state and federal grants. And we feel it can be a more efficient system because it gets rid of town boundaries. The call goes to the nearest truck. It's nearest the house. And one reason we started with Berry City, Berrytown, Berlin and Montpelier, that was the ideal geographic and population base. We had some low level departments. We had Berlin with great tower capacity. There were a lot of things in each of those communities that made a strong system. And we definitely feel that's what you've got to end up with eventually is something like a four system physical being. And that we think it's really, I mean, it is risky for the cities and the towns not to invest and replace this equipment. You're going to have one crisis and it's going to wipe you out because those radios are frail. Those towers are frail. They're totally not only obsolete, but they're crashing. There's a memo that Brian Pete put out recently talked about a couple crashes that happened. We're living on borrowed time and I'm concerned about that. I'm more concerned about that than the existence of public safety authority. I'm really concerned to have worked since 2006 to see some really consolidation of entities so we can work together and get not only the equipment but also help our employees so that they have good training. They have ability to move in employment. So we have good retention. I just think it's a win-win. But the concern today is what is the role of Central Vermont Public Safety Authority? Are we viable for a public safety authority services as now visioned by our members? And so we do have a valid item. The board wanted to move forward to have more consultant work. Whether or not we still exist but still have more consultant work this last year. And so the public knows the way a member withdraw from the public safety authority is a vote of their members. It's the same as how you join. It is a vote from the residents. And so that if indeed you were to vote out, it takes a year to leave. So if this $30,000 was passed and Montpellier decided to put it on their ballot, does we withdraw and that also passed? Then we would still have a year to work with that consultant and help advance this equipment, this RFP. So that could be in a good place for our members should we depart. And I must say, I think it might be really good to put it before the voters because I feel that the councils have not been clear of their own commitment to this regionalized entity. It had members that created the charter, but then select boards change, councils change, staff change. And that hasn't been as solid as when we initially started on the charter. And I'm hoping that if indeed we decide to put that on there, that the voters will get involved and maybe give the council some real clear direction. Questions? I'd like to take questions from the council first and then Jack, you can open it up. Connor, do you mind just like Recap and Barry's current status here? You said they heard the Tel Aviv report. They were like, ah, great, there's stuff we can take from that, but not necessarily through CVPSI. Right. We were asking that Barry Montpellier and Capital Far come to the table with us and work to implement this design system. And Barry felt that they were not committed to this simocast regional system, that they wanted to work on their councils and their radios. Okay, thanks. And, you know, there'll be other board members who will talk who maybe can do it. There was an actual letter that came out. Yes. Both, all the city that Montpellier signed on, Barry signed on. Yeah. They have a copy in his computer. So if I understand it, what you're saying is that Barry City likes everything about this Tel Aviv plan except the part where it would be part of a regional system. They want to go their own, have their own separate dispatch system. Right now what I would say, well, not separate dispatch system, but right now I would say they don't, they indicate they don't want to spend any more time on the more, this $3.9 million acquisition. They want to focus on their council, which is great. That's part of that system that needs to be done. And they're in building issues where they lose communication with their first responders when they go inside buildings. So that's what they want to focus their time on versus joining a committee to work on the larger simulcast system. And this $30,000 ballot proposal is not a request to the municipalities. It's a proposal being put on the ballot by the authority, right? Right. And the authority has taxation authority, but only to its members. Capital FAR is a member by MOU. They're not a municipal. So they're a district FAR union, which is quite different. So we can't tax them. And that was one of the things we were hoping that in phase two, with the consultant work, we would do more outreach with towns and get select boards involved. But right now the FAR stations are mostly independent and volunteers. And is it reasonable to expect other towns to volunteer to join up? In March? No. No, no. But in the foreseeable future? I think only through Capital FAR. I do think that Montpelier has built a great relationship with Capital FAR because a sub branch of that organization called Capital West has several contracts, like 18-20 contracts of dispatching. With Montpelier. So Montpelier and Capital FAR have a very strong relationship. And hence again, public safety authority is totally willing to work with them and our consultant to bring one on board to help them facilitate that happening. Okay, thanks. Anyone else on the council with any questions at this point? You'll have more chances, don't worry. Thank you very much.   And you're still muted. Okay. I've been on a board for six years. And it's been a struggle. But what I want to say to this board is the only way that I can see improvements in the communication system is to have an effective regional plan. And there may be difficulties with well, let me stop there. It needs to be an effective regional plan. I think no grant provider will give us money for the towns or the cities unless there's an effective governing plan. CBPSA has the means to do that. But as Donna pointed out, we're a long way from reaching agreement. Chief Pete's plan talks about forming a municipal corporation. But I got to tell you, this is a really complicated business. You would have to work out proportional board representation. You'd have to work out cost allocation between all your members. All of this is in place in CBPSA. I personally opened it and have advocated for changes in the CBPSA board to include fire and police chiefs. The cities have rejected that. But this is the very plan that your police chief is making in some way. But what he leaves out is whoever runs this has to be a public corporation subject to the open meeting law and with transparency. I can't tell you how disturbed I am to have to find out what's going on by Mr. Whitaker filing public document requests. If we're going to work together, we need to get it out on the table. What really needs to happen, and it can happen under the auspices of CBPSA or whatever group you want to have, is essentially a regional plan for getting some grant money to build a communication system throughout the county that would include the hospital. Because, frankly, most fire and EMS services are EMS these days. And I think virtually every Washington County family will have some need for emergency services in the next few years. And unless we plan now, that's not going to happen. But I think the suggestion of this council is any idea to terminate CBPSA is premature. We need to get the RFP built. We need to get a so-called shovel ready plan to give to the grant makers at the state level, which is where the money has to come from. I think that's going to happen sometime between we need to put this together in the next couple of three months. Because I think grants will become sometime this coming summer and we need to be ready. But we need to have an organization that can handle it. And we have to clearly say who owns it, who maintains it, and who pays for it.  And I urge this council, let's give it a try here. If it doesn't work out, there'll be primary elections in September or whatever they are. And this matter of withdrawal could come up then. But it should not come up unless there's an alternative in place. And I have not heard any viable alternative that will get anybody at the state level to even consider a major grant to get at the kind of things that we need because we just haven't sorted out all the government's issues. And so, Kim, as part of your thinking that all the shortcomings of the Central Vermont Public Safety Authority, it's essentially the only possible vehicle to get us where we need to get in the foreseeable future? Yes, and there's something to say that the board can't be remade and restructured. That's completely possible. And I can see proportional representation for towns to belong to this central organization. And when we did the planning for regional dispatch, it shows what everybody knew would happen. If you band together, your expenses can be better managed and you'll get better service. Will it save money? Well, we figured out it would for that particular project because what we were doing with dispatching was so inefficient that they were paying huge amounts in overtime. And you could organize it in a way so that you didn't need those expenses. That was a substantial example. But it's an example about how cooperation working together can actually be more efficient. And in any case, I don't see any money coming for our needs from the state unless and until we figure out how to do this. And we ought to start right now and plan how we're going to do it. Thanks, Kim. Justin Dreschler. Hey, everyone. Thanks, Kim. Thanks, Donna. I am large part agree with both Kim and Donna. I think they're those parts saying the same things. Jack, can you hear me? Yeah, could you please just say who you are? Sure. Justin Dreschler, CVPSA member. So take what I say with the grain of salt. So having looked through this, the history of the committee and studied it and looked at the charter, the authority has this extraordinary amount of power like in theory, but in practice it has none has been my experience so far. Is that it could do a lot, but it's actually doing nothing. And Jim Ward said it best at the last hearing, which is that it's much closer to an exploratory committee than it is to an authority with any sort of bite. That's essentially what's been happening. So the authority is trying to get it back to the city council. We're trying to get it back to the city council. We're trying to get all these different options presenting them to various city councils and then being rejected. And so Donna explained that whole process where all this work is happening, but there's no buy in from anybody. Anywhere. There's no buy in from Montpelier. Like if we're being honest, there's no buy in all as far as I can see from Montpelier itself. And I, I don't know why. I think it's true as Mr. Whitaker has pointed out that Montpelier has a conflict of interest. I don't, I'm not saying that Montpelier is engaged in some sort of conspiracy to undermine the CVPSA by any means, but the dispatch contract creates a very clear and obvious conflict of interest. And you don't need to be actively thinking about that conflict of interest or conspiring to, or engaging in any sort of like ill behavior, but that conflict is there. And I have to question whether that informs this complete lack of buy-in from the town, but it's not just Montpelier. Nobody cares. Nobody cares about this project. And if Montpelier isn't going to care, nothing's ever going to get done. But it's like, we have this wonderful opportunity. The governor is ready to throw millions of dollars into his budget that we could tap, but everyone needs to believe. And until we believe, until Barry believes, until the outlying towns believe, nothing is ever going to happen. So that is my, that's my take on this. Thanks. And do you have a thought about what should happen with this ballot proposal? I think you should, I don't think that we should consider withdrawing from CVPSA right now. I think you should give us one more year, see if we could put together an RFP because I do think like, unfortunately, I think what happens to happen here is I think you have to put the cart before the horse. I think you have to get the RFP in place and then go out to all the towns and say, hey, look, we did all the work for you. Do you, do you want to be involved in this process now? Because we think we can get a few million bucks. And then if everybody agrees, then you can go to the governor or then you can go to lay here or whomever and say, look, we get along.  We can, we're here working on something together because that's important. You know, it's important. I think everybody is capable of working together and has the exact same goals. Everyone has the same goals. We just are having a hard time getting there. Okay. Thanks. Good evening. I guess the best place for me to start is to say to everybody is that when capital less was first form, I guess I was instrumental in getting it to where it is today. A lot of people have worked very hard to make capital less work very hard. I'm not so sure I'd go as far as Justin and saying that there's a conflict, but I understand where he's coming from. But I would also echo his, his concerns about where the city of Montpere sits in this whole process. In the history of the cap of the public safety authority, there have been any number of people that have appeared before us and talked to us that were members of public safety organizations that did not want to see public safety authority succeed. In fact, for many months, we even had a lawyer from the city of Montpere. We were able to get an opportunity for internal order of police at our, our meetings. And actually Carolyn was very helpful in trying to get us to a position of providing training for the dispatchers in both very in Montpere who are not getting the training they needed. So we were advocating for that type of training. And I think it did some good in terms of service to the city of Montpere, but also to those people that are in Washington County, greater Washington County. But as far as the future is concerned, I would suggest to you that you have to ask both of the very representatives on the Montpere representatives where are they getting the money to do the things that they say that they're going to do with the operating systems that are in place. Both console systems in both Montpere and Berry need to be replaced. They are beyond by any stretch of the imagination, beyond any life expectancy. Why they're still alive is completely beyond me. Other than the good work of the people that are in those organizations to make those systems work. So in the interest of time, I would ask and urge you not to put it on the ballot, but to ask the questions about what's going to happen and what is the plan for taking care of the consoles and the potential plan joining together of Berry and Montpere to act as a failover system should one of the other fail. Those are things that you should be thinking about. And I would encourage you to think of that and collect that information. And I thank you for listening to me. Thank you. Connor. First off, thanks very much for everybody who's served on this looking at the timeline. Can obviously see it's been a frustrating exercise sometimes, but you know, Tim being on for six years and everything and going to lack of direction, I think from some of the municipalities. Just need to say really appreciate this and sticking with it. The question I had for the group is, do you think this entity is viable without a staffer? It's such a heavy lift. And like a staffer is often like the glue that holds all this together. Like going forward, do you think you need a director as opposed to just consultants kind of piecing it together? Just be interested in your take there. Well, as Bill put on the agenda format, Central Montpublic Safety Authority over its eight years thus far has received 3085,000. And of that 320,000 was spent on an executive director in office. And it's about 80 to $90,000 a year just to have an part-time executive director in office. So I really applaud that the Public Safety Authority Board said, okay, we didn't fire Poco, but when he left, it was like, all right, we've worked four years, four and a half years to try to get some business operating plan accepted. It hasn't. I feel like we can continue without a staff, but I don't want to ask for $100,000. I feel like if my pay or in capital FAR can make it work, go for it. And I have to say they have a stronger bonding, a profile than us. They have a much better relationship with state and federal people. So I would do everything I can to support it. I don't care which entity does it. I just want to see it happen. And, you know, and if the council needs the voters to support them at it, put it on the ballot. If just as top helps, great. But I really don't want to get tied up in administrative money for Public Safety Authority right now. And I know it puts us out of compliance with our charter. But to me, that misses the point is that we have a wonderful study, a little more additional work. To me, it's very important to have the results of the federal and federal tax. I think we can kind of elevate as well, as just an example, is willing to do an extension to base two for $30,000 to work in that RFP. To me, that's a huge jump. Let's, you know, let's do that this next year and then see where we are by then, Montaigneur and capital FAR may have made all those contacts and access that money, but even if we work this year, And once you get a grant, it's a year and a half to get equipment, if we're lucky. So I would rather than to do it the fast track right now of Capital Farm, Montague are working together and going after that money was here now before it disappears. It really, really, we need that equipment folks. It's desperate. Thank you. Steven and then Kim. I've been working for quite a few years on this project. I first spoke at the joint meeting in 2018. I was at that point critiquing the plan for lack of a failover. So I'm delighted to hear Doug Hoyt finally getting the religion that you can't do public safety without a failover site. I'm personally, and I hear others, I'm not ready to squander the 385,000 and the dozens of person years invested in this Tom Galanca and others have invested enormous amount of years Kim Cheney, Doug Hoyt, et cetera, Donna even, but for Donna for this topic of withdrawing to even be presented to the council without having first been voted or approved or discussed on the CVPSA board is really a betrayal of the responsibilities of chair. So I think it's way out of order out of process because the CVPSA board has not discussed this or approved this or suggested this and the person who's supposed to be leading this organization is actually undermining it. So that that's a problem CVPSA has bonding authority to potentially purchase a radio system. They may not need to invoke that in such a flush grant environment, but they also have a governance structure, which is transparent and accountable. And this is part of the accountable is is hearing and being exposed for mismanagement. So capital fire, on the other hand, has a very opaque and non transparent and not accountable system. You've heard me complain repeatedly that the errors that happen in their funded dispatch operation hosted at our police station, including death and delays that could result in death are swept under the rug. The committee has never met to address those issues and make sure they don't happen again. So prying records out of how much revenue is taken in from the town's capital fire is in effect a straw man for Montpelier's dispatch monopoly. And that that cannot be there.  They're not managers.  They don't manage regional public safety authority and governance. I attended their meeting last night. You heard that there were crashes. The Berry City Radio Dispatch Center went down because someone didn't maintain the UPS, the battery backup system, and tested repeatedly. And some of those units, when the batteries go low, do not pass current through to the console. So they just had to clarify UPS is an unenviable power supply. And that's a necessary piece on any rack. But what's worse is that no one even documented the process. If that ever happens, move this plug over to that outlet and your radio system will be back up. So this went on for some time until the police came over and figured out what was going on and they got the radio system back up. But that's not a failure of a radio system. That's a failure of management of UPS and maintenance. And that's what you can expect. That type of maintenance and management is what you can expect from capital fire. Last night we learned that a tower in Woodbury had been down for days, possibly, and it still wasn't up and it wasn't going to be up today either. So it's very clear that CVPSA is the entity that needs to grow the capacity to manage and finance. It's also critical that this planning for a radio system be integrated with the fiber planning that's being done by CV fiber and with the cellular planning that actually is how the calls originate when somebody needs help. The governors today and a few days ago presented a plan for 51 million to be invested in cellular infrastructure. The future of public safety communications is broadband cellular infrastructure in addition to those radios. You can't do these things separately, but yet the capital fire folks say we can't plan. We don't want to plan. We don't want to engineer. We don't want to have a design engineer independently. And we don't want to integrate planning with cellular and community fiber. That's just short-sighted. It's reckless. It's wasteful of public resources. And the emergency here is fictitious. You just heard that the consoles are way past their life. My pay or consoles are about six years old. In fact, one of them was paid for with CVPSA money. And they've got a useful life of 10 to 15 years. They've been discontinued from support, but they can, a Motorola rep told another public safety authority you can get five more years out of them if you have to just buy a few spare parts. I've told you this before, Stephen, I have a question, not related, not related to the technology, but there's something you said a minute or so ago. You said that you think the public safety authority needs to grow the capacity to develop and manage the next stage. And I wonder if you think it's reasonable to expect that that's going to happen. I think it is. I think Paco, if with a change in leadership, I think Paco would come back on half time at $60,000 a year and pull this together. I think he understands from years of my working with him, the importance of integrating the planning with LTE. In fact, that wasn't with LTE being cellular. Long-term evolution is the cellular technology that we all use, but that's what's going to add public safety, the capacity, drone video, mapping in the field, automatic vehicle location, fire ground, the chief incident, site commander can see what the camera on the fireman is going. It goes into locating a person who's down in a building. LTE does a whole lot of cellular technology, does a lot of public safety that hand-held brick radios will never do. So the integration of these, regardless of whether these firemen realize the opportunity and the necessity of planning for it now, has to be done. And that's where CVPSA can do that better. Berry City, I'm going to respond to a couple of the questions I heard. Berry City, especially the fire company leadership, resents the fact that CVPSA can put an item on the ballot and get some money when they feel they need that money to address personal safety hazards. They've got dead zones. They encouraged, they encountered a dead zone when they were fighting a shed fire just a year ago. And it really scared that they could lose some men. So I respect that urgency, but resentment over a politic of how the money is channeled by a regional authority is not grounds to just throw overboard a necessary regional investment. True, they have some priorities and they should put money into their priorities for in-building communications and infill of radio coverage within Berry. But Berry will grow to understand that they will gain as much as it will cost them from a regional system because the support they'll rely on in large incidents and the cost sharing from regional radio infrastructure will benefit Berry more than it will cost them. So they're focused on local priorities and I admit that, but that too shall pass. I heard from the Berry City manager that that letter that you heard about had not been signed. There was not a signed copy, that it was circulated as a draft and he was surprised that it had been handed out to the cities. Yes, other towns want to join. I've talked to a number of towns that are interested in joining because they absolutely need to have, I've talked to select men in numerous towns and they absolutely need to have control over the escalating costs of dispatch that Cap West is arbitrarily imposing upon them. Right now, and this is a problem with the structure of capital fire being relied upon as the third member rather than those towns joining directly, is that capital fire doesn't answer to the voters the way the select boards do.  So the fire chiefs submit a budget to their town, get it approved and then give most of that money to capital fire, which then gives it to Montpelier police department. So that aggregation fund works beautifully to the advantage of Montpelier dispatch, but it totally corrupts the process of the towns feeling like they have a say and some ownership in the process. Well, in terms of practicality, it sounds as though what you're saying is essentially that if this grant money comes through the municipalities that are not members of the authority, we'll see the benefit of joining and we'll get into it. Absolutely. They'll see that they already see the benefit of having seats, voting seats on the board. Any town who joins, in fact, I've suggested that the charter, if possible, the charter be changed to allow a select board to vote in the way they did for fiber optic districts because it would still require a vote of the general populace to do a bond vote because that's where the money liability kicks in, but just to join and have a voting seat on the board and create a governance structure would get this thing off the dime. I just feel we strayed from the topic and Steve is presenting himself as an expert, but there are disagreements on equipment and all of this. I would like us to get back on the topic, is that possible? Yeah. I'm addressing all the topics that I heard and I heard questions from. Well, let's let's I am an expert compared to the self admitted non expert. Let's focus more on the big picture and a little less on the technology issues, which although important or not, okay, what's going to get us in this environment with so much money, hundreds of millions being thrown at broadband, 51 million being thrown at cellular and only 11 million being thrown at public safety in the governor's proposed budget. That's clear that if the CBPSA can do an integrated plan and rely on that broadband money for fiber backhaul towers or delivering broadband, those and generators to support resiliency and in diverse routes of the fiber so that a windstorm doesn't take it out even buried fiber to a tower would be smart. Those costs can be born from the broadband side of the ledger and therefore get a whole lot more bang for the buck from the smaller public safety side of the ledger. Okay, thanks. Are you going to move to the next speaker, Kim and then Vicki. Thank you. I want to address Connor's comment about management. That's the root of this problem, Connor. Unless there is a staff, if you can imagine running 23 towns, all of which have radios that cost $7, $800 a piece and they need maintenance, they need care and they need to have this batch of frequencies so that people can communicate with each other and what we have now is the worst of all systems. We have pre-mandatas in various areas all wanting to do their own thing with no central management and hopefully, I mean, I don't know whether you can use grant money for that type of organization. We didn't put it in the budget this year. Some of us tried but we thought it would be better to see if we can't talk about getting everybody to go or we need to go. It's kind of like calling a regional council to talk about these things and kicking it around. That's going to take some push from the political managers of city managers, slack board members informed by the technical people but it has to be unified. There has to be one management structure. If you can imagine running a police department with six chiefs, pretty soon your head is going to spin and you say, no, maybe we better have one person in charge. We got to get there somehow. We got to be serious about doing it. Thank you. Thanks, Kim. Vicki, you're still not unmuted. My internet connection seems to be a little rocky tonight. Apparently, all the money I paid a Comcast isn't good enough. But anyway, I had a question because I missed some of this because of the internet thing so maybe it's already been said. I had a question for Chief Hoyt. The consoles for the dispatch, are they the original ones that we put in when we built the building or did we bring them over from the city hall? Or are they newer than that? Do you know the answer to that or do you want to respond? It's been a while since we built that building. You're unmuted. Still unmuted. Here we go. There. The system would not let me unmute, but now it will. Thank you. No, the current radio consoles that are sitting in the police department are not the ones that came from the police station in 1980, whenever it was, whenever we built the police station, those have since been replaced. If I'm not mistaken, there's one person here, Kerry McCool, I can tell you how old the radio consoles are. I don't see where Chief Pete is on board, but somebody can get you that information for sure. Thanks. Steve Whitaker said they're 2016. Does that sound about right to you? I can't verify that one way or the other. Okay. Chief Pete is here if we need to speak. Let's bring it back into the council, Donna. No, just that Fred Cummings came here and testified before the council about the problems of replacement parts several years before he left, which is what, over a year ago? Okay. I don't see any hands up. I'd like to get this back to council and move to a decision. So I'll give you my thoughts first, and I don't know if you were trying to get recognized, Bill. Just to add a couple things, whatever you all decide to do is fine. Just to address a comment that was made, the letter that went out from the two cities, the city managers, and the chiefs was not signed per se, but it was certainly all jointly drafted and agreed upon, and when it was sent out, everyone was copied. And to that point, talk a little bit about, I'm certainly not a technical expert, but to simplify the televate study, it basically broke it into three areas. One was the consoles. One was what we call the Barrie Montpelier project, which has to do with the internal radios and the interaction between Montpelier and Barrie, and the third was the simulcast system. And the letter that was sent basically said that the cities will take care of getting their own consoles, and Barrie has about half of the funds already appropriated. They're seeking grants for the other half. We have a third already in hand, and we're planning to probably lease purchase over a two or three years, so those would be in our capital budget. So I think those were, and obviously if we can get grants, great. The larger Barrie Montpelier portion of the project does need funding, but it's certainly not, I mean, that is a regional effort between two cities. It could be done through CV, PSA, or not. In a way that can get handled grant-wise. The third piece was the simulcast system involving the greater region for, you know, capital fire area, for lack of a better term. Barrie expressed very, you know, basically no interest in being part of that. And so that letter communicated that to the board and said that Montpelier was interested in working on that, and we would do so with capital fire and CV, PSA, if necessary, or we would be happy to work on it on our own. So we have attempted, first of all, committed to seeking the project working. And second of all, following the technical guidance, I think our teams did embrace, you know, felt that that report was great. We hear the concerns about cellular and are seeking to make sure that anything that is built is compatible with cellular in the future so that we don't have to duplicate efforts. And we are currently looking for ways to fund these projects for ourselves and for others. But I think the question I have is if the regional authority consists of two communities. It's not a regional body, it's two communities. And if one of them is not interested in expanding to the further region, I think, you know, I mean, I'm not here to speak for Barry. They should be speaking for themselves. And, you know, you could ask them that question. So that's caused the question to us. With regard to the single entity running this, I agree that there's clearly an issue with how capital fire is structured and how you get all the towns in. And I believe that probably the city will have the same challenges that CVPSA has. I'm not sure either one is more better positioned to organize all of that. And, but wherever it ends up, you're going to end up with a single dispatch with somebody running it. And it isn't going to be six chiefs and eight chiefs. The way it is now, we have a single dispatch and an entity contracts with us. So there's only one chief running that dispatch and the rest are customers. Maybe that's a long-term model, maybe it isn't. You know, with regard to the conflict that people have mentioned, the conflict that we feel is an obligation to the customers to make sure we're providing service. And to, you know, Donna, your summary was really great. And I think for people who heard that and kept hearing that those councils didn't go along with the plans and, you know, that I'm sure that is frustrating. I think it's important that the city said at the time this started the city, the then city council and mayor and said, we're interested in this process. We're not interested in changing anything unless it matches or improves the service that we receive now. I'm not meaning to look at you just the way I see this. And as various plans were put forward, the conclusion of the councils at those times or we don't see where this is an improvement over what we're doing. So it wasn't that they didn't appreciate the good work or anything else. It wasn't clear to them how the city delivering services as to its residents and its customers would benefit. So I think we're at a crossroads where we need to move forward with the regional equipment. In fact, a couple of years ago, our city staff at the time, it was Chief Fakas at the time, Chief Gowans and I wrote to CVPSA and said, we think that investing in equipment is the best place you can go. And you have and that's great. So I think the question to be wrestled with is how does a regional authority that consists of only two members and one who doesn't really want to be regional, how does that work? And I don't know the answer to that and does it necessarily have to be decided tonight? Lastly, I'll simply say that people can debate the structure, the benefits of the structure and certainly the looseness, I guess, of capital fire. But we have had a regional dispatch system housing 18, 20 towns for a long time. So the city is very bought into regional dispatch and I think the concept that they were taking two regional dispatches and putting them together to be one big one kind of overlooks the fact that Montpelier has 18 or 20 customers and Barrie has three. Again, that's not a shot at Barrie. It's just saying we're not bringing two equal regional systems together to make one big one. We are taking one significant one and one that really basically just serves themselves in a couple neighboring towns and that's fine. That's been their choice. And so that's been a hurdle to overcome and I agree with Mr. Whitaker that Barrie has a lot of pressing needs and they basically as much as said, we're looking out for Barrie right now. And so that's how I see it and how we at staff see it. We are very much interested in pursuing this project and we see the benefit of serving the region with modern technology, not because it's good for our monopoly. The fact is whoever runs dispatch will have a dispatch monopoly. So if we think a dispatch monopoly is bad, then everyone should have their own little one. So one hand we're saying one big regional entity is good, but then our big regional entity isn't good. So I think we need to be a little consistent in our rhetoric. That said, whatever you all do is obviously your call. And Bill, with regard to the talk, what we've heard tonight about how in 2022, we have a unique opportunity in the next few months to apply for grant funding to implement the televate study. Are you saying that on period standing alone would be just as suitable an entity to be that grant recipient as Central Vermont Public Safety Authority? I don't know if I can say that with 100 percent certainty. Haven't looked into the question. What I do know is that and I agree with what people have said that what systems that are funded are of a regional nature. And if we were to seek funding for a regional project, it would it would include the regional. So I'm not sure whether we would be at any advantage or disadvantage. Perhaps we would be. I don't know. But you know, the capital fire is a member by MOU with CVPSA. They're a member by contract with us. I mean, they're a customer by contract. So I don't know if there's any stronger legal tie to those towns with CVPSA than there is with us. The only issue is CVPSA's funding half comes from the city of Barry, who may or may not want to be a portion of any matching funds. So I think that's it. OK, thanks. Donna, I have the question I have for you. I talked to Kim this afternoon and we've heard him say tonight that it's premature that we don't need to do this right now. And whatever happens this summer, either CVPSA or some other entity gets the grant or not. And that might be a better chance, better time to make this decision. What do you think about that? Oh, I just love the discussion. I mean, it's brought it to the forefront.  But yeah, that's fine. I have no no issue. I kind of like that direction. I do appreciate Donna bringing this up, because I think largely we've been not not punting it, but we haven't given it the level of detail that it's needed. As I'm about to say, we should punt it. But now I don't know, like, you know, turn it on the ballot, whether it be now or in August, I think those force like a community discussion, right? It's, you know, we have to sort of justify the worth of this and sort of think the praises of regionalization. And I do wonder, would we have more information that we need to make an intelligent decision in the summer than we would now? Not necessarily. Think about it. People can think about it and talk about it. And we can find out if the grant comes through for Montella and Capital Fire and I mean, it sounds like if it's something we want to do, like safety authority would have to come to Montella and bury for a hundred or a hundred thousand dollars if you wanted us to be a full functioning entity with staff capability to do grants, etc. That's all. So right now, as Bill puts out, we have not got the paying membership of a region. We have two paying customers and that's hard. Well, and we'd have some work to do, right? Because we not only have to convince ourselves, it sounds like we'd have to convince Barry City Council to some extent, though, and that might take some time. So I, you know, I'd be on the page, throw it on the ballot this summer, unless, you know, we're convinced otherwise in the meantime. But I think we do owe it to the people who have served on this board, put the tough work in, you know, to give it a shot the next few months. But I really appreciate bringing it up now. But at this is 2006, it came out of my presidency in the Central Vermont Chamber of Commerce. So nobody's been at it longer. And I just want regionalization again. It doesn't matter which entity. So I thank you for all the time you've given it tonight and hoping it'll be more in the front burner. And we'll continue this discussion. Thank you. Anyone over here have anything? Yes, Lauren. I mean, just briefly, I mean, thank you for bringing this up. I do think this has been a really important and informative discussion. Um, I mean, I, I also agree with Connor's approach. It sounds like with the grant opportunities right now, the RFP, we'd be better informed. And it seems like it gives us the possibility of if CVPSA would be a better entity to get some of the grants, um, even if it had to be like Montpelier staff working, doing some of that work to, um, but having more options to be able to take advantage of funding opportunities. Like if we'd already kind of voted that we were going to mix it in the next year, it seems like that would be hard to put grant proposals forward. So I think that gives us more options. But I think revisiting it just kind of see what happens. And I like giving voters a chance to weigh in sometime in the near future, um, even just for the community discussion, it will spark and, you know, what are our goals and what changes might need to be made to it sounds like the structure and the way it interacts with the councils and stuff is a lot of, uh, storied, uh, challenges. So, um, how can we set it up for success if we're going to keep it? Thanks. Anybody else on council feel a need to say anything else on this point? I feel I'm in that position where everything that there is to say has been said, not necessarily been said by everybody, but Kim, do you, uh, need to add anything at this point? Very quickly. Look, we're talking about how to get money for the, uh, simulcast system. We're not talking about how to get money for the councils. The, you won't have any customers if we don't have a system. And Bill, we're not talking about dispatching. There's no way CVPSA should ever issue a bond issue without membership of the towns being part of it. And everybody would pay their share, uh, depending on the benefit they get from it. That's the work that needs to be done because I don't see any grant money coming in here, uh, to build the simulcast system unless we do that. So they're very different problems. Thanks, Kim. I think that'll be the end of this discussion. It's thanks. Thank you, everybody. This has been a very good discussion. And it, every, I was kind of daunted by the idea of trying to explain all this to the voters of Montpelier in the next month and a half to get a sensible decision. So I think, uh, I think this is a good, a good choice. Um, we're just over our, uh, normal 8 30 PM break. It's 8 33. So at this point we can break for 10 minutes and then we'll be back. Yeah. Okay. You know, we're at 8 44, uh, call the meeting again to order. And we are up to item seven and eight on the agenda and I will call to order the, I'll start the public hearing for the budget and the public hearing for the bonds and we will take those up together starting with the presentation from the city manager. Okay. Hello, everybody. Um, my name is Bill Fraser. I'm the city manager. This is the city council's proposed budget. Second public hearing for the budget and the bonds. For those of you that watched last week, um, it will look remarkably similar. There's some minor changes. Maybe I should do a contest, right? Like what's differences between the pictures, um, but it's a very similar presentation, um, but it is another opportunity for, uh, the public to learn about the budget to ask questions and obviously to try to convince the city council to make any changes as they desire. So tonight, just to be clear, um, it was mentioned earlier tonight, uh, the city, this is the deadline for the city council to make decisions about what goes on the ballot later tonight. We will be finalizing the warning. And, uh, so any, any last budget changes need to be made tonight. As we went into the budget, city council, um, hope to implement our strategic plan, uh, rebuild from COVID cuts. I think it's a good reminder that it's a good opportunity to remind people that the FY 21 budget, uh, excuse me, the FY 22 budget last year's budget, the one we're currently in, it's actually reduced from the prior year because of COVID. You heard the auditor talk about us take about taking certain steps. So some of our budget increases here are actually building back from a, you know, toward more toward the year before, uh, trying to get back to normal. Um, so that, uh, that has really been a big thing to try to get our services and our infrastructure back on track. Obviously delivering responsible services, one of the ways we held the line was, um, you know, freezing positions and those kinds of things. So to try to get those back, address the challenges with revenues. And, uh, frankly, they're coming back, um, in most cases, strong, not in all cases and to stay with inflation, uh, that is our goal annually this year. It was 7.0 as of December. The January numbers are not out yet. So revenues. Um, the good news is that we got full pilot funding of, um, 1.24. That was a significantly more than we had budgeted, uh, which was a great help. We had thought that the state would, um, that there would be reduction in that since a lot of that comes from rooms, meals and alcohol and sales tax around the state. We thought, uh, but the state made good on that money, even though those other revenues didn't come in. So that was much appreciated by us and other communities that receive funding. Uh, our rooms, meals and alcohol taxes are improving. Uh, we've got 253 budgeted this year, which is, uh, I think about 80,000 more than last year. It's still about 30,000 less than what we had received the year before. Last year, the state increased our highway. He aid money substantially by $300,000 and at least at minimum holding it there this year, hopefully even increasing it. Building permits are down. Uh, so we are, um, at 75,000, which is good, uh, because it was more than we had received, but our, uh, in prior years, we'd been up it around a 75,000. Still, our net increase from these items was just under 500,000, 488,000, 489,000 dollars. So that would, that really helped us, uh, both in coming out of the prior year, uh, but, uh, coming into this budget year. So looking at the city council's goals, uh, and how, um, what is in this budget that would address those. Again, there is a lot of budget detail that someone mentioned earlier that it's, um, I don't know, not unreadable, but, uh, it certainly is very dense. There's a lot of lines and a lot of numbers that's been the case for a long time. Which is one of the reasons why we try to highlight the main features of the budget. Uh, so we have, in our goal of improving community prosperity, we put $50,000 in for economic development that is up from zero last year, but down from 100,000 that had been in prior years. One of the goals was to explore the feasibility of, uh, uh, municipally run child care programs. And we are including that in all of our, our studies and considerations of a newer expanded rec center. Our goal for additional outdoor recreation. Again, the proposal for, uh, to purchase the Elks Club would address a lot of that, as well as, uh, we actually purchased some land recently for Hubbard Park. Uh, we have $45,000 in for the homelessness task force, uh, which matches what was in last year. We have $131,000 for the community fund, which matches last year. We have $32,600, uh, for Montpelier Live, which matches last year, and, uh, we have $10,000 for our arts fund. That is an increase from zero from last year, but a decrease from the 20,000 that had been prior to that. Next goal was, uh, to have, uh, provide responsible and engaged government. So, uh, one of the main things was that we are back to budgeting for fully staffed city departments. Our last budget actually had, uh, at least six positions that we did not fill, um, just to hold the budget down. Uh, we've heard many complaints about the website and we do have funds in there for an upgrade. We put in $10,000 for the capital area neighborhoods, are known as CAN, that is a reduction from 20,000 from the current budget. Uh, I think I mentioned this last week, however, we're, because we're only starting in this current year in December, we're six and a half of a year has gone by. So the 30,000 between the two budgets will get us through for 18 months till, till we do this next year. Um, we've been wanting to deal with our ADA transition plan to make all of our buildings, uh, accessible and in some of our programming. And so we were able to put, uh, pretty much the full estimate for the ADA projects into our capital plan this year, very exciting. We've also looked at, uh, some website, uh, excuse me, some, uh, software, thanks you. Uh, and data, uh, to, to try to help better improve communications with the public to be, have more information about our projects, uh, and also to get more information. So it includes surveying and getting some data from our residents, um, to have a more inclusive process as we make big decisions going forward. We have $30,000 for, uh, committees, uh, stipend to try to broaden the representation on our committees and $15,000 for advocacy, uh, um, at the legislative level. And I think the most, the key thing is that with the fully staffed city departments, our, our services can fully be fully restored. And we're slowly seeing that now. Well, we've had a lot of vacancies, not, not just the ones we held open, but others. And we're getting back to, um, you know, seeing some people coming and getting hired. And we're, we're, we're almost fully staffed now. And it is making a big difference for the girl of creating more housing. We restored the $110,000 or we budgeted $110,000. That is the annual recommended amount for the housing trust fund the year before that had been cut to 60, but part of this budget through the ARPA funding is restoring that last year's 60 back in. So, uh, actually a new $170,000 going to the housing trust fund. Our goal of, uh, practicing good environmental stewardship, we've included $100,000 to implement the net zero plan, uh, could be in the form of a position, could be in the form of consulting or some combination of the two. But, uh, city council said implementing net zero is a high priority. We want to fund it, uh, toward that end, uh, the, the net zero plan that we got recommended some projects for the city in the highest priority project was converting the DPW furnace to a department of public works, excuse me, furnace to a pellets furnace. Uh, and so we have $250,000 in one of the bonds to accomplish that we have some third some seed money set aside for dam removal. We believe there's going to be a lot of grant money for that, but this may help match, um, an application or, you know, provide some money for us to do some background work. We've continued funding, uh, $40,000 for the GMT MyRide. This is a continuation from last year, and we have got in one of the bonds, $600,000 for, uh, to help complete the River Confluence Park, uh, that area just over across the river from Shaw's where the Confluence of the North Branch and the Manuski meet right now is just an open field and there is a plan for that to become a very, uh, usable and, uh, inviting new place. The, um, our goal for building and maintaining sustainable infrastructure, I think that was one of the top, uh, efforts that the council and the staff made this year was to put a little, you know, there was a lot of money out there, and we wanted to put a lot of money into our community's infrastructure. We all know that it needs it, and, um, because of cuts the last couple years we were, uh, falling behind. So this is an attempt to play catch-up and perhaps get ahead. I'm going to go into that in more detail, but as you can see we have, uh, about $2.15 million in our annual funding in our budget and another $2.5 million in between capital, between ARBA funding and our cap, our own capital reserves. So go into that more later. Goal of improving public health and safety, uh, the main, uh, focus here was the, the recommended, recommendations of the police review committee, which is listed to the PRC. So, uh, the only position that's expanded, as I mentioned, we'd fully staffed all our positions. We kept everybody level position with the exception of expanding, uh, the capacity for a .5 social worker in public works, although that really excuse me, not public works in the police department. That really is, wouldn't be a city employee, it would be a contract with Washington County Mental Health, but, uh, that was one of the recommendations from the police review committee. Uh, we would, we're including body worn cameras, uh, as we just talked about the dispatch consoles. We actually don't have funds in this year's budget for them, but we had, we carried forward over last year's money, so that this would be our first installment to, to make them once we're ready to go. And the Crisis Intervention Training program is underway and in fact has been sort of selected to demonstrate, uh, to others. In addition, the council has set aside 425,000 to deal with housing homelessness services, public bathrooms, uh, the, to be just, uh, to be determined exactly what that looks like, but the idea was that we have a, a significant issue. We need to put resources to, um, to helping address it. So moving on to the capital improvement plan, I said we go into more detail about that. This is just our annual funding mechanism. Uh, so our capital plan is made up of our debt service payments, our annual capital, and our equipment. Back in the normal years, we had a target number, you can see the 2.375 million in FY20. Uh, that was, it was pretty much our target number. We would, and then we always funded 515,000 for equipment. We subtracted whatever our scheduled debt was and that left us, whoops, I'm gonna go back. I just can't see it. Um, and that, that left us with how much money we had in the annual. Obviously, last year, FY21, we had in 22, we had to reduce those numbers greatly, uh, in order to, uh, stay within our budget. And so this year, the good news is we're increasing our budget by about 215,000. The bad news is we're still about 250,000 below our target. So next year's capital budget would presumably include that increase in it as well to get us back to our planned, um, funding level. So what's the money? We have $590,000 for streets and roads. We hear a lot about those and they are a high priority. As I mentioned, we have $230,000 for buildings and grounds, specifically for our, uh, ADA improvements, our accessibility improvements. $68,000 for parks and trees. $63,000 for sidewalks. Comet was made last week, I think, which was well taken, that $63,000 is not a lot for sidewalks and that's fair. Uh, there are also a lot of sidewalk work in addition to this that's included with some of the street uh, work and road work and the bond projects. Uh, so these are just simple, just sidewalks in and of themselves. Uh, $27,500 for bridges, $20,000 for transportation related things, and $75,000 to help manage these projects for whatever technical assistance we might need. In our equipment, again, part of the $230,000 we would have to raise next year's to get this from $360 up to the $515,000, but we do have $108,980 for fire EMS, and this is essentially payments, so the equipment plan also includes, um, financing payments, so this would be payments on the fire truck and the ambulance that we have purchased in the last couple years. $95,000 for DPW, this would be for a couple of cruisers, we have not purchased them the last, normally we cycle at least one per year, and we've withheld them the last two years, so this would be playing catch up for that. Um, information technology, again this is to improve our IT infrastructure, and then $26,000 for parks, uh, for our vehicle. Now we get to the ARPA money, uh, so again, uh, we've learned even more this week than last week about ARPA, but we, for now our plan remains the same, um, to be determined whether we want to change it later. So, um, part one was to restore our, the council made a commitment that the first section of money would go to restoring those projects and, and purchases which had been delayed as a result of budget cuts. So there's a long list of them, but essentially, uh, they lump into $620,000 for delayed roads, bridges, and retaining walls, $420,000 for deferred equipment purchases, and the $60,000 to restore the housing trust fund. So that was the first batch of ARPA money that we got, uh, actually did receive in September. The next batch, which we're expecting to receive in September of 2022, is currently planned for now for the community outreach that we talked about, the, the new, um, software, the, the community survey, and other transparency type things. The $425,000 for the homelessness issues, including the bathroom. $50,000 for an EV charging station. That would be, and just to be clear about that, that would be at the DPW garage, that would be for city electric vehicles. We could talk in the future or about also, or at some point putting another one in for use by the public, but this would be as we talk about converting the fleet to, um, electric vehicles, we need the capacity to charge them so that we can have, you know, middle of the night, whether it's a snowstorm or if we have a police cruiser that needed it to charge up, we can't have them waiting two hours while one vehicle charges, so we need, we need to have the high capacity charging ability. And then $450,000 for water and sewer improvements as needed. We heard loud and clear from our auditors about our investments, and this is not something we didn't already know, uh, in, in our water and sewer system, so here's a chance to get caught up on some of that work. In addition, um, we had, as, as I mentioned at the beginning of the, of the, um, presentation, we had better revenue receipts than we had budgeted for, which was great. And, um, so some of the capital money that we had budgeted for in the past but not spent, we were holding as a cash reserve. We had about $435,000, so we were proposing to use this to add to that $590,000 that's already in the budget for paving, bringing us up to $770,000, which is the recommended amount of annual investment in, um, paving to get our roads up to the level of pavement condition index, PCI, that we hope to, uh, that we'd like to maintain, so that is allowing us to meet a long-standing goal, and obviously that would be our goal would be to continue funding that at that level next year. We have $221,000 in equipment, as you can see, is because we got to the equipment fund the last couple years, this is catching up on all of that. And then $34,000 for dam removal, and that was mentioned earlier. So that's those last three items are the sort of the more detail of where we're investing our infrastructure money, but certainly we have not put this kind of money into infrastructure in the community for a long time, if ever. So our total capital, uh, is about $2.35 million in projects, a little over a million in equipment, and about $560,000 for community, uh, related efforts, so just over $4 million, and that's not including the bonds. So again, sizable in investment certainly made, um, easier with $2.2 million of that coming from the federal government. So we have four proposed bonds, uh, the the one is, uh, East State Street, which is a blend of general fund and, uh, Water Sewer Bond for $7.2 million. One is to purchase land for the Future Rec Center, the former Elks Club. We've revised this total to $2 million, discussed this last week with the council, and we have a group of infrastructure projects for $1.815 million, and the major phase two upgrade to the water resource recovery facility. The artist formerly known as the wastewater or sewer plant. Um, so our total of about $7.8 million, a little over $7.8 million in general funds, and $19.9 million in water sewer funds. Um, so to anticipate a question that we might get asked is that the budget, the total budget that we just talked about already includes the payments for the first year payments for these bonds. So, uh, there would any, if they were all approved, it wouldn't increase the budget for this next year, um, because they've already been accounted for. Obviously, the capital plan the following year would then have to incorporate second-year payments of the debts. Um, so just to, to anticipate that question. So, let's talk about them in a little bit more specifics. $7.2 million for East State Street. This has been quite a ways in, in planning. Very important project for us right in the center of the community. Again, $4 million from the general fund, $3.2 million from water sewer funds. So, this would be a complete reconstruction of East State Street, um, for Main Street all the way up to College Street. We'd be putting new water and sewer lines underneath and rebuilding the road base and surface and improve sidewalks all through there. Uh, we will also be putting in a new combined sewer outflow issue, CSO they're known as, um, and that'll be corrected by putting in a new outfall. Ultimately that will go outfall be near the Rialto Bridge. So, there will be some disruption on State Street as well as that is done. That's not really the main part of the program. Parking lot out back here behind the fire station will be approved. We've had this periodic odor problem at East State and Main. This will correct that. And this project is assisted with another $1.4 million in ARPA grants. So, that is, that has really been our top priority improvement project for quite some time. We're happy to finally be presenting that. Uh, $2 million, $2 million for rec center land. Had some good questions earlier today about, uh, plans. I can, uh, I don't know if I can offer any more clarity on the plans. What I can say is, uh, in the fall we were approached, uh, by, uh, private group that was interested in partnering with the city or actually interested in acquiring some or all of that property, uh, to, for recreation purposes and knowing, and so the city had been in con, conversations with them about ways that we can partner and we remain in conversations with them. So, it's possible that some of, some of this work could be done privately, some will be done publicly. As we talked through, we realized that it probably made the most sense for the city to own the property, because we had the most flexibility of what we could do that the group is being formed really for recreation purposes. Um, so this would purchase the land and buildings, the 130 acres could be done as a, in conjunction with private investment. Uh, it could, will very likely require a future capital investment for a new rec center. We're not going to, we're not going to build something for nothing. So that was correctly identified. We don't have a plan for that yet. What that would look like, some of that depends, what, I think our goal in working with the private group, if, if they're successful, is to make sure we're not duplicating efforts. So if they build certain private facilities that the city can sort of lease with operating costs to use, and the city can create public facilities. Uh, so we want to, we need to see how that plays out. It's a very large parcel size. It certainly provides for more, more, you know, building facilities, but also parking to support those facilities, trails, fields, potential housing, and more. We heard a lot about that last week. I think as we finalize agreements, we'll be able to talk about that even more. But we see there's a lot of opportunity to meet a lot of cities, of the city's needs there, and possibly even, you know, I'll just leave it at that for now. Why did we go there? We've looked, we have a recreation center on Berry Street that's really not functional. It's not accessible. It's got asbestos. It has terrible ventilation systems. It really doesn't meet our needs. It all has no parking. And I think it's one positive is it's central easy to get to location. So we looked at renovating that, and it was going to be in the six to seven million dollar range. And even then, it was going to be pretty constrained by its size, what could go in there. So it still had the same footprint, still had no parking, still had a lot of the negatives, and didn't allow for expansion. So we had the pandemic really put that on hold anyway, a couple of years ago. We also looked at expanding our rec center at our Elm Street recreation area, which is where the swimming pool is, tennis courts and those sorts of things, the baseball field. And again, it had a lot of space constraints because of all the other popular facilities that are there now. So not to take away from them. Parking is also limited there for those that use the pool, go to the ball games. They know that can get pretty tight out there. So to put another attraction there, particularly in summertime, was very challenging. So the opportunity to look at a major tract of land, which is already in recreation use that is situated so that it could be a regional asset seemed attractive to the city and to the city council and fully acknowledged that we need to have a more enhanced public process to design what happens as we go forward. The miscellaneous infrastructure bond, these are several projects lumped together in a bond, single bond for management. It's just easier to do that way. All coming from the general fund. So we mentioned $600,000 for the River Confluence Park. This is certainly not the entire budget for the whole project. We understand that's going to be in the $1.2 million range, if not more, and about $600,000 has already been raised from private and grant sources. So this would be about half the cost of the project and it would match these other funds. This park, people may forget that in 2002 when we submitted our grants and received federal money for the transit center, part of that project included creation of Confluence Park at this location. So this is not a new idea. This is one that has been part of city planning for a long time. And once the transit center was completed to finally the attention turned to finishing the rest of that project. And now we have it designed and we've got a group working on it. $550,000 for the Main Street and Berry Street intersection. Again, this has also been a long time concern for people. Most people that use it realize how dysfunctional it is. It's been identified in concerns about development projects at Sabin's Passure and out on Berry Street. It's considered a level F failure intersection. So the city engaged in a full Main Street corridor plan really all the way from Memorial Drive or River Street you see me all the way to the roundabout how we could improve that entire corridor. And so this is really for the phase one of that that includes signalized intersection at Main and Berry, some physical changes and coordination of those lights with the lights at Route 2 and at State and Main so that traffic flow will be smoother. Additionally, oh geez. Where do I press? There we go, I did it. Look at that. We've been talking about upgrading our street lights, converting them to LED lighting for quite a while, recognizing that there is an energy saving and a consistency of lighting. I think I said at one point that it would improve our lighting and I was DPW made sure that I understood that the light candles would be similar, but that we would have more consistent lighting. Right now we have some failures in banks and this will improve that. We will be an energy cost savings. It's a relatively long payback about 11 or 12 years, but it's still using a lot less energy and we're looking forward to doing that. I already mentioned this earlier, but we will be replacing the oil-fueled heating system at the DPW garage with a wood pellet system. This is again the top priority project identified in our net zero system. We're excited about that, particularly given the fact that the wastewater plant right next to this garage is already fully now net zero for heating with the methane. So that's great. And then we have a slope failure on Marvin Street, which is putting section of our own street at risk. So we'll be stabilizing that with a slope stabilization technique. So those together are this particular bond proposal. And lastly, the big one, we have 16.4 million for the wastewater plant upgrade. This is phase two of the plant overhaul project. Obviously it's a huge investment, but this will then bring our plant fully up to modern standards. And again, this was, it was 40 to 50 year old technology we'd been using. And it will be work in conjunction with the project that we recently passed and completed. So the phase one modernized the plant and to accept, so in reduced to, trying to say too much at once. Phase one modernized the plant to accept commercial food waste. It also really reduced our energy costs and increased our methane production to enable us to heat the plant. In fact, to the point where we have excess methane. One of the residual issues as a result of this, however, by taking organics is we do have an odor problem that was unanticipated. And we're still, we're looking at ways to address that. And we have excess methane. So this would use that methane to dry out the biosolids or sludge as it's called. We send that to the landfill down, we pay by weight. So the the dried sludge is considerably less weight than the wet sludge. So it's going to save us money. And also because it's a much smaller in size volume, it will be a lot less trips to coventry, meaning us truck trips. There's environmental benefit that way too, with the reduced road traffic. So that is really this would then we would have a fully state-of-the-art wastewater plan at that point. And utilizing the resources that it's creating as best we can and certainly addressing the very foul odor that is coming from it. In addition to the city's budget and the bonds, there are three independent ballot items. I'm obviously not in a position to speak on behalf of any of these groups. Teller Harbor Library has a budget for a ballot item of 395,696. That's an increase of 45,000 from last year. The Central Vermont Public Safety Authority we just talked about has it's actually a ballot item for 30,000. Our share is 14,100. And that is up. There was no request last year. And the Central Vermont Home Health and Hospice has the same 23,500 as they had the year before. So those are other money items. You'll see on the ballot. As well as the school rate. And so this brings us to what I think is ultimately the good news and the best story of this year. Obviously, we have put a huge amount of investment in the city budget and trying to play catch up, trying to get our services back, trying to deal with our lost revenues. And so our, the municipal portion of the tax rate is up 6.8%, which is one of the highest that's been proposed. However, the residential, residential education tax is projected to drop 4.7 cents. I think there's due to federal funding and some of the state funding. So that means that the overall residential tax rate that people will actually see in their tax bill is only going to change by 1.1% this year. That is actually the lowest change since 2016 when it was also 1.1%. And then before that, 2011 when there was actually an overall reduction, I think there was some change in the state education funding formula out here. So as you can see, the total rate was $3.44 in FY 22, excuse me, $3.4.4 cents, and it's going to $3.7.7 cents. So only 3.3 cents change, 1.1%. And I took a look at the overall tax bills over the last five years and discovered that our average change with all in has been about 2.7% per year for the last five years. So while property taxes are certainly a concern for everybody, I think when you take a large look and you can see both the city and the school board have been doing their best to provide what they provide with the taxpayers in mind and keep up with costs. So again, I think that's the best place to end with the lowest tax rate in a long time. Lowest tax rate increase. Start the lowest tax rate to one of them being misquoted there. So reminder that this is the final public hearing that make decisions tonight and then voting is on Tuesday, March 1st, but early voting will start as soon as possible once we finalize the ballot, which I believe will be done on Monday night probably, and go off to the printers and then the early voting will start. So that is a lightning summary of everything that's in the budget. Obviously, if there's any questions the council members or members of the public or anybody have, we will do our best to answer them. We do have the department head team available either here or online to answer any specific questions about those operations. So with that, I'm going to move back up to my seat and conclude the presentation. Thank you for listening. Okay, thank you, Bill. This is an opportunity now for members of the public to ask questions or make comments about the proposed budget. There's a fair number of people in attendance, so I am going to ask people to hold their comments to two minutes and I'll ask Councillor Bate to keep time. I recognize that people may have more extensive comments but I'd like to go through it at this two-minute minute rate to make sure that everybody gets a chance to be heard and if we need to give people more than one turn, we can do that. So I have a two-minute sign. I'll put up a one-minute and then stop the red. I mean, I can't read it, but you can see the red, right? Right, yeah. That would be a blurred out screen but we can't see it. You can see the colors though. You can see the colors, yeah? The yellow is one-minute red as time's up. Okay, and I already see one hand from the people online, so we'll start with Tina Munsee. Good evening and I just want to express my disappointment with the council, the city manager and the mayor about this budget because even though Bill has explained the tax increase, it is almost a 10% increase from last year's budget and I think that asking that plus these several very hefty bond issues is not showing a great deal of respect for the people of Montpelier. I love Montpelier and the city is changing. You really do have to have some money to buy a house in Montpelier or to rent an apartment and if you're retired like I am and on a set income, you may be having trouble paying the taxes you have now. So we live in a state that has high taxes. We live in a city that I think has high taxes and despite that, we have potholes and we have pipes in the ground, as the auditor said, that need to be kept up and are decaying away. So at the last public hearing, Didi said, well, everybody in Montpelier just votes yes for whatever you put on the ballot. And I have to say the only reason your taxes are at the level that they're at is because the schools are in the minus category. So I wish to say that I would vote no for this budget and no for the expensive bonds that you will include on the ballot and I will encourage everybody I know to vote no also. So thank you for listening to my comments. Thank you. Vicki Lane. I just have one thing to say. I don't spend money easily but I do think that purchasing the land that the Elks property was occupied on is probably a very good thing for us to do right now because we will at least have control over it. And if we don't take this opportunity, we'll lose it forever. And we don't have a whole lot of land that Montpelier can control the development on and maybe get some community some community benefit whether it be an affordable housing or recreation or a combination of recreation and affordable housing. I do think that that particular bond issue is I see it is a good thing to vote for. That's all I have to say. Thanks Vicki. While I'm not seeing any hands online, I'll go to Peter Kilman. Yeah. Jack, I would like to ask a few clarifying questions mostly of Bill Frazier. So it's not a typical two-minute thing. I can ask my questions but I'd like to ask them and just go back and forth with them a little bit. So let's just try it, okay? Bill, let me start at the very end about the tax rate. Can you say, I read an article which was very hard in the Times Argus talking about the common level of appraisals and the possibility that that actually could hurt us in combination with Roxbury. Could you just explain that a little bit because it seems to go contradict what you said about anticipating that the school rate would be low? I can generally explain the common rate of appraisal. I have not really spent a lot of time looking at this year's school budget or their tax rate calculation. So I'm not in a position to answer it. We did get those numbers from the school after their budget hearing last night. So those are the ballot items that they'll be putting forward. So that is the projection they are giving for their tax rate for mobility residents. So we're just using their numbers. Okay, so I would just suggest that, I mean, if you didn't read that article, it was a January 6th article about the common level of appraisal. It sounded kind of scary to me. Now, maybe it's wrong or maybe they've gotten better numbers since then, but just let's not count on those numbers unless it's... Just quickly on that, I mean, I really... Try never to comment on the school's budget. Let them explain their own budget. I would say that they have the common... We have the common level of appraisal number for this year. So that would have been available to them in their calculations. Okay, Bill, what is pilot funding? What does that stand for? It's payment and lieu of taxes from the state. So the state pays us payment and lieu of taxes because they don't pay property taxes. Okay, good. Economic development, $50,000. What specifically is economic development? I know we used to have Montpelier business, whatever it was called. What is economic development for 50 months? The Montpelier Development Corporation had been funded at about $100,000 a year. They recently folded, they went out of business. So we had no money in the budget last year. I think in general, we think that economic development is an important priority of the city. The $50,000 for this year is going to be used kind of for two major purposes. One is to update our economic development strategic plan that was done in 2015 or 16 that led to the creation of Montpelier Development Corporation. But some of those goals are now... Some of the goals and priorities in that plan are sort of out of date. For example, they called for a hotel in parking garage in the center of downtown and that's not happening. And other... So I think the idea would be to have a community process to see where our community priorities are for economic development and commercial activity. And then next year, figure out how to fund that going forward if it needs to be. The remaining funds are used... So when we do have economic development opportunities, we often need some specific expertise, development type expertise that we don't really have in City Hall. So this would be to contract out with people. To assist us in that area. Until there's a more permanent group or person that's handling this. But there would be a public process to work on this as well, right? Absolutely. I thought I heard you say that. Yes. Okay. In terms of... You mentioned in passing the purchase of the Hubbard Parkland, what funds were used from that? Was that this year's fiscal year 22 funds? Yes. I'm looking at Kelly to help me answer that question. Okay. Yes, please. I'm looking for my instructor. So it's the U.S. Forestry Grant funds that would be coming through in 22. Great. So we have a U.S. Forestry Grant money and some private donations. Okay. And on some of these budget items, and I mentioned this point last time about black boxes, like the Homelessness Task Force for $45,000 or the Community Fund... Oh, the Community Fund, I think it would be great in the future to actually append the Community Fund specifics in the budget so that people reading the budget could actually see it. I happen to have been at the meeting where the Community Fund reported, but it wasn't included in the budget that I could see. Appreciate that concern. As you know... I can't do the hand. I don't know how to put the hand up there. And so we don't have that. We just know what it's for, but we don't know what their recommendations are usually till right at the very end of the budget process. Well, it would be nice... It still could be appended. All right, anyway. Those are the... People pick at those Community Fund amounts, and it'd be nice to have them be more public. You could come in the annual report so that everyone can see them. Yeah, but that's after this vote. That's two minutes of your time speaking, not of Bill's time answering. All right. Well, I'll be quiet for now for a while. Maybe I can come back later. Thank you. Thanks, Donna. That's great. Linda Berger, I think you're next. Thank you. I just would like to remind people that the mob failure is under corrective action from the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation because of our waste water treatment plant, so that this bond is critical to being sure that we no longer have a public nuisance and a health and safety issue in Montpelier for our public. Thank you. Thank you. Vicki, you're up next, but I want to give other people who have not spoken yet a chance. So I think Nat Frothingham is up next. Okay. Thank you. So you can go ahead and speak, Nat. Thank you. Just since you introduced this tonight, Bill, how did it, how did the, on the purchase of the Elks property, how did that happen to go up by $500,000? I mentioned this last week as well. When we first brought this to the council's attention and we were preparing the budget, we were just using an estimate, I guess, of what we thought the value and available resources were. And since we had done the preliminary work, we've had conversation with the landowner. We have a better sense of what the price might be and what our available resources are. Okay. Obviously, we're negotiating, so I don't want to get too specific, but I feel like- So that number could change? No, the number that the city, I mean, it's going on the ballot tonight, that would be the city's bond. So we'd have to find other funds if we needed more. Okay. Thank you. I heard you allude to this question a bit, but it is front and center, I think, in trying to imagine this bond. What will the new rec center include? Who will own it? Who will run it? What will it cost to run? And are we going to lose tax money as the city owns the property? So there's a lot there. So presumably, if there's a new- So take these in kind of a strange order. The first question was who's going to run it? So the same people that run the current rec center would run this rec center because presumably that one would not be functioning anymore. That's not to say we might not need more staff. It's also possible. Many of our staff, like with the senior center, they have programs that bring in revenue that help pay. There is no specific plan for that. So those are all questions we're asking ourselves. So what would it be? How big would it be? What's included are all questions to be asked. As I mentioned, there's a group that is looking at creating some private recreation facilities, tennis courts in particular, but