to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, one God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. I'm your moderator for tonight. I'm Paul Gillis. And if you will turn to page two in the book, you will see the school district morning for article 67. We're not voting tonight. We're just talking and asking questions. I was just telling Chris that I just received word from the court that the lawsuit is probably dead on arrival and that there won't be an overturning that. So it's more than likely this is the last pre-hearing meeting of the school district. But you never know. Things could change. The court did rule this afternoon to deny the injunction. So article six, now before we start, some of you are not residents of the town. Raise your hand. Who will object to them talking when it's time without going through any fold-or-all? No one? You're welcome. But when you do go to talk, fold-or-all, yes, what do I do for a living? However, and even if you are a resident, if you're going to speak, I'd like to have you introduce yourself so that we have a sense of it. And if you are a non-resident, you don't have to be embarrassed about it, but you have to tell us so that you keep an idea as to how to balance your statements against our thinking. So article six is the election of school directors. And we are electing one school director for one year of a two-year term. Who is a candidate for that? Or is there anyone here who is a candidate for that? And we'll want to acknowledge that. No. All right. And then we have a school director for two years of a three-year term. Is there anyone here who is a candidate for that? Is anyone here who would like to be a candidate for that? You could have a write-in. Or two school directors for a three-year term. Anyone? Well, that's discouraging. And then article seven is the school district budget. Shell the voters of the school district approve the school board to expend $3,630,287, which is the amount the school board has determined to be necessary for the ensuing fiscal year. It's estimated that this proposed budget, if approved, will result in education spending of $17,637 per equalized pupil. This projected spending per equalized pupil is 4.41% higher than spending for the current year. Is there anyone? First of all, who will answer questions on this? I will be happy to make an exception. And so who has questions about this budget? I would have a question, which is, is this a budget that will make any difference if the court upholds its decisions? So for those of you who don't know me, I'm Chris Winters. I'm the school board chair until tomorrow, I guess. The news of the lawsuit and of the judge ruling against a stay or a preliminary injunction was news to me as Paul came in here and sat down next to me and let me know. That's one of the reasons that we thought it was prudent to go forward with a town budget tomorrow was because we thought either the lawsuit could halt the merger or there's also the possibility that the legislature does something to halt the merger and then we would be without a budget. So we felt it prudent as your school board to go ahead and warn this budget but in our conversations with the central office that prepares this budget for us to massage into what we want and then propose it to the voters, this budget would simply be rolled up should we merge. It will simply be rolled up with the other four towns in the U32 budget. So the outcome of the lawsuit really would have no effect on this budget. This is the budget we're proposing. We looked at this as a budget that we felt that the residents of the town of Berlin could support and should support and we hope you support. And so it's not going to change depending on the lawsuit. Well if the merger goes through will this budget be our portion of the unified school district budget? If the merger goes through you will see one budget and so this would be our portion. The other towns are building their budgets as we speak as well. Some of them are putting them before the voters, some of them are not but the budgets as built and approved by the local school boards right now I believe are just going to be rolled up into one budget. There won't be any shifting around based on merger or not. That could come next year if we're one board, one budget. We're going to look at things I think a little bit differently. We're going to look at them as a group rather than as individual local boards. It's just going to be very interesting. But this year it's still the same process that it has been in past years and our portion is going to just be what it is a portion of the overall one budget. Any other questions? Mike Streisberg, Junction Road in Berlin. First of all commend the board for putting together this budget. As a contingency I think it was the smart thing to do with the outcome of what was coming. But my question is therefore when we vote on this tomorrow assuming the merger is going forward whether the budget passes or fails becomes immaterial. Is that correct? This will be the budget that goes forward even if we voted down. I think the only other thing that could happen is the house has passed the house has passed a bill to delay merger for one year. It's not overturning at 46. It's not saying we aren't going to merge but to delay merger for one year the Senate is going to take that up or maybe already has started to take that up. If the Senate approves it and if the governor doesn't veto it that means we get one year to prepare for merger an extra year to prepare for merger. So I think it's still important that we have this budget and go on it. It's possible that it is going to be a move point and that we'll see a unified budget proposed in a couple of months. Now that we'll have to go ahead with the organizational meeting and the election of the new board and that new board has to put forward a budget for the merged district. So we're likely going to see another budget to vote on in the coming months that would replace this one. Although these numbers I think are going to be the same thing that you'll see as part of the unified budget. Any other questions about the budget or the process or the school district's future? I do have a YouTube video PowerPoint that's 12 minutes long. I'm not going to force it on anyone. If you don't want to watch it, it explains what's in the budget. It tells you the percentages. It tells you the dollar figures. Yes, no. Maybe. You'll be doing this tomorrow? Yes. I tried to watch it with a link and I couldn't get there. I think we can suffer through it in 12 minutes. Cue it up. Thank you, Bill. You're welcome. Aaron probably knows the best way. Maybe just this quadrant. Thanks for taking a moment of your time to view this Berlin Elementary School proposed budget for 2019 and 2020. My name is Chris Winters. I'm chair of the Berlin Elementary Board. And Tuesday, March 5th is town meeting day. So we hope that you'll come out and vote on your local Berlin Elementary School budget between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. at the school. There is going to be a public hearing on this budget at Berlin Elementary the night before on Monday, March 4th at 6 p.m. With this Berlin Elementary budget and the estimated budget for U-32, here's the bottom line for our taxes. We are going to see a net 2.67 increase in spending over the last year's budget. And when that's combined with a decreased tax impact from the U-32 budget, we'll see a projected education tax increase of .003 cents or $3 for each $100,000 of assessed property value. Before we begin this budget presentation, I just wanted to say that this is a really unusual year for a Berlin school district. We're operating under the assumption that we will be merged due to a state order and that a consolidated budget will be proposed to all voters of the five towns in a few months and it's possible that this budget and vote will be replaced by that merged budget. But until then, we as a board believe we have a duty to present to Berlin voters with a local budget because there is a lawsuit and pending legislation that might halt the merger. We felt we needed to go forward as an independent school board as we currently exist and prepare for both tracks. The budget of the merged boards would most likely be the very same budget, but it would just be rolled up as one of five six counting U-32 budgets for a vote of the entire district. Your school board asked for a level service budget this year maintaining the same level of educational services as the previous year and we're now asking you to approve that budget that includes, as I said, a net 2.67 increase in spending over last year. I'll talk a little bit here about the budgeting process, the components of the 2019-2020 budget and the tax impacts, which include four factors, including our local budgets, the state tax rate, the property yield, and the common level of appraisal. These are some of the competing pressures when we're determining our budget for the elementary school. There are curriculum decisions, contracts, economic pressures, required student services, educational quality, political pressure, revenue projections, federal mandates and benefits, tax burdens and test scores. These are all some of the things that we take into account when we're developing our budget. In developing our budget, we first got a draft from the principal superintendent and business administrator with staff input. We reviewed multiple budget drafts and gave feedback on what we wanted to see included or not included on the budget. We had multiple meetings in open session at our regular school board meeting to discuss the budget and solicited community input. Eventually, we came up with a budget that we all approved and now we move that forward to you, the voters, in hopes of your approval. The proposed budget we have this year is a total of $3,630,287. That's an expense change of 3.4% over last year. With increased funding due to special education, the net impact on taxes is an increase of 2.67% over last year. Our proposed education spending per equalized pupil is $17,633. Last year, it was $16,892. That equalized spending change is 4.39% higher than the current year. You'll see on your ballot when you come out to vote the number 4.41% higher than last year's equalized spending per pupil. Those calculations are changing all of the time and this slideshow is based on the most recent information we have from the agency of education. But again, that's not 4.41% increase in spending in spending per equalized pupil. Our actual expense change is a net impact of 2.67% increase in spending over last year. These charts show you a little bit more about how we spend our money at Berlin Elementary School. As you can see, a large part of it is direct instruction of students in special education. You can see other categories here around operation of the building, the assessments from central office, and administrative costs. You can see on this slide some of the budget change highlights. We have salary increases and benefit changes from negotiated teacher contracts. We have staffing changes that is also contributing to an increase in expenses. Due to some teachers coming, some teachers going, and depending on the experience of those teachers that we've hired, the total for those negotiated items and salary increases, benefits, and staffing is $122,548. That's 3.49% of the budget. It is really most of the increase that we're talking about over expenses from last year. As far as non-salary items go, we've actually cut spending just a little bit at $3,179 less than last year for a total combined of $119,369, or that 3.40% of the budget we talked about in the beginning. We have additional revenues from special education of $25,531 for a net impact on taxes of 2.67% over the last year. Student enrollment ended up being leveled from last year. Again, we don't get those numbers from the Agency of Education until very late in the process, and it really changes each day as children move in and out of our town. Our pre-K through 12 enrollment is projected to be leveled over the next five years and has been relatively steady over the last decade. Here's a little table to help put in perspective the spending for equalized pupils in Berlin as compared to the other towns in our supervisory union. You can see the expense change for our proposed budgets and the net tax impact here looking at the five towns in our supervisory union. And as you can see, Berlin is at for $3 for every $100,000 of assessed property value. When we look at the tax impact, there are four factors affecting the local tax rate, the common level of appraisal, the statewide education tax, the property yield, and the Berlin Elementary and U32 budgets. We really only have control over the fourth item. The common level of appraisal or CLA is an adjustment to the education tax rate to account for the gap between appraised value and actual value of the property. The 2018-2019 CLA for Berlin is 102.14%, which is down just a little bit over last year's 102.45%. This results in a very small tax increase. The statewide tax rate as of February 20th of this year is a series of calculations where all of the statewide education spending is put together into a pool and redistributed out to the towns. The legislature comes up with this rate and it's subject to negotiation, perhaps veto or approval of the governor. This is some information about those tax rates and this is one of the factors in determining what our local tax rate is going to be. This slide shows you a little bit about the tax rate impacts for 2019 and 2020 for Berlin and for the other four towns in the supervisory union. As you can see here, the residential tax rate is $3 over 100,000 of assessed value and the non-residential tax rate is $5 per 100,000 of assessed value. It's important to note that these rates don't reflect income sensitivity adjustments, which are available to most homeowners with incomes less than $136,500 per year. This is a little more information on income sensitivity. 57% of Berlin residents receive support for their property taxes from the income sensitivity, so they won't see the same tax rate of $3 per 100,000 of assessed value. 43% of the Berlin residents will pay the full tax rate. Here's a little bit more information on property tax adjustments, showing how many folks in Berlin have that income sensitivity adjusted rate and how many do not. In summary, the Berlin Elementary Board is proposing a budget of $3,630,287. That budget is a 3.4% increase over last year's expense budget. When you include special education revenues, this amounts to a net impact on taxes of 2.67%. Passing both the Berlin Elementary School and the U32 budgets will result in a .3 cent increase in the local homestead tax rate. That translates to an increase of $3 per 100,000 of assessed value. Our tax rate is projected to increase in part due to the change in the common level of appraisal and the statewide education tax formula, along with what we've chosen to spend on the local budget. We think this is a responsible budget balancing fiscal constraint for your support. A public hearing will be held at the Berlin Elementary School on Monday, March 4th at 6 p.m. to provide information to be voted by an Australian ballot at town meeting. Anyone with questions can contact me, Chris Winters, through the Berlin Elementary website. You'll also see some posts on some front porch forum about this. If you're not registered to vote, please do. You can contact the Secretary of State's office through their website and register online. If you're not registered to vote, please contact the Secretary of State's office at town clerk and register there. You can even register to vote on the same day that you come in for town meeting. Thank you for your support, and we hope to see you at the polls. Now that your appetite is well over one other question. Yes? Yes. On the slide that shows and I know that there's a lot that goes into that for facility cost, special education, all that. With this forced merger, though, would you look into your crystal ball and expect that those perfugal costs are going to be flattened out equal between the schools? I'm having a really hard time seeing anything in my crystal ball about this merger. Given the direction things have been going, the tension that we've seen between the towns, but I think eventually we're all going to get more pressure. But I'm not sure if that means there's going to be pressure for everybody to spend more at the higher end or pressure for everybody to spend more at the lower end. I don't know which way that pressure is going to move. I wouldn't dare to predict this way. But I do think there will be more pressure for us to treat our students the same way across the district. Berlin has made certain particular decisions about how we want our school to operate. I don't think one is any better than the other. We seem to have been in the past able to do well with a lower perfugal spending. I think the renovation bond kind of drove that up some in recent years. You'll see that East Montpelier and Middlesex have chosen to spend more in their districts. And that's not just renovation bonds, but that's also a number of staff per student that they choose to spend their programs they choose to put in their schools.  And there's going to be pressure to be I think more even across the district. But I'm not sure which way that pressure is going to go. Is it going to go to the higher end or to the lower end? Thank you. Anything else on the school district to turn to the town morning? To each one. And as with the school district, we have candidates who here might be a candidate for the select board for a three-year term. We recognize themselves. I'm Brad Town. I'm running for chair of the select board. I am running for re-election just tomorrow. Thank you. And candidates, there are two vacancies for one year term. I'm Florence Smith and I'm running for a one-year seat on the select board. I'm a resident here in Berlin. I've been a resident for 25 years and I'm a good upstanding citizen. I hope for your vote. Thank you. Thank you. Justin Lawrence. I'm running for a one-year term. I've been born and raised. Went to this school. My children went to this school. I'm running for the one-year term. Good. Any other candidates want to announce tonight? Article 2, shall the town appropriate 3 million $2,503 for necessary town expenses for the period July 1st, 2019 through June 30th, 2020. Questions for the select board on the town budget? Silence means none. Article 3, shall the voters in the town of Berlin about the land use and development regulations formally zoning and subdivision regulations filed in the town clerk's office January 15th, 2019. I assume that the town has had public hearings on this already, so you have discussed it, but is there anyone who has questions about the pending land use regulations? Speak up now. Don't sit on your hands. Article 4, shall the town appropriate $267,968 for the Berlin volunteer fire department for payment of necessary expenses from July 1st, 2019 through June 30th, 2020. Anyone here from the fire department? Want to talk about that? John Stov, president, corporate president of the fire department. Anything you would like to ask? Anything unusual about the budget? Well, a few things that are out of our control is the communication dispatch which went up like 7%, which doesn't sound like a whole lot, but when you're going up from 45 to over 47,000 that's a considerable amount. We have outsourced our accounting now for over two years and that comes with the cost. Of course. The one thing that we did put in the budget last year and we had a zero on it is our contingency plan and we're looking towards expenditures that are unpredictable, emergency funds such as that. We didn't fund it last year. This year we did fund it with $5,000 from carry over for last year's budget and so that is coming from our budget but it was appropriated by the town. That is something that's going to be new and I'd like to continue that and that would be things such as replacement of the roof, the furnace which is probably at least $10,000 to $12,000. It's those emergency expenditures that we can't afford. Those are the only real changes in the budget this year. Any questions for John or about the budget for the school or for the department? Okay, thank you. $5,000, shall the town appropriate $30,402 to the Cali Covert Library. Sir. Good evening. I'm Tom McCown from the Cali Covert Library. I live in the Cali Covert Library. So thanks for letting me speak tonight. The Cali Covert Library is an independent nonprofit organization. It serves Berlin, Calis, East Montpelier, Middlesex, Montpelier, and Worcester and it's important to remind people it's not a municipal library. So we depend on the six communities that we serve for 52% to manage without that. We're very grateful to the taxpayers of Berlin for their generous support and we're again asking for as Paul was saying, $30,402 the same amount that Berlin voters approved last year. So we're not looking for any increase. That is 3.3% of the cost of running the library and the rate is also considerably lower. The per capita rate is about one-third of what the statewide average is for municipal support of local libraries. So we think it's a good deal we're offering. We get a last year Berlin residents power almost 10,000 items from the library. Good old fashioned books are still the most popular thing about the library. We have e-books and e-audio books and those have grown in use over the years, but they still are very small. Their use is still very small compared with use of books. We have a collection of about 67,000 books and other materials. So I could talk all night but I know you don't want that and I'm glad to answer any questions that you may have. Any questions? Tom? Do you make an effort to sign up children for library cards in the school, elementary schools? What do you do? And we actually come here at least once a year and some years we've been here twice. We come in to some evening event and using the internet we can bring a advice where we can do library cards on the spot and people can leave with their library cards. So we'll keep doing that. The other thing we also added this past year is the the give a book, take a book at the Berlin Mall which has been really popular. It's right outside of Planet Fitness. So there's a little corner that the mall gave us and we have some shelves there. We bring free books. The main thing is to get books in the people's hands. So people can take books.   We keep those shelves stocked. And also the mall has provided us furniture there so people can sit and read. So that's something new in the past year.  So I'll have a library card. We have done that and I don't know how recently we've done that. We invite the school, the company, the library also. How many Berlin residents are you signed up at? I don't know. We have 521 Berlin residents who have library cards. We have active library cards. Active is used in the last two years? Last two years. Okay. Thank you. I'm retiring in June 30th. So they're doing a search now. Thank you. Thank you. Good day. Article 6, shall the town appropriate $10,920 to the Green Mountain Transit? Anyone here from Green Mountain Transit? If not, your questions will probably go on answer. Shall the town appropriate $12,500 to the Montpelier Senior Activity Center? Anyone to speak on this? 8, shall the town appropriate $6,450 to Central Vermont Home, Health, and Hospice? I'm going to keep going until you stop to say you want to talk about some of these. Shall the town appropriate $3,000 to the Central Vermont Council on Aging? Shall the town appropriate $2,000 to the Washington County Mental Health? They're not here but they did leave an information sheet from those interested in some details. Good. And most of these I think have reports in the town report as well. If they were funded last year. Shall the town appropriate $1,200 to the Central Vermont Adult Basic Education? Shall the town appropriate $1,000 to the Vermont Center for Independent Living? Shall the town appropriate $1,000 to the Central Vermont Memorial Civic Center? Shall the town appropriate $975 to Circle? Shall the town appropriate $800 to the Family Center of Washington County? Shall the town appropriate $700 to Capstone Community Action? Shall the town appropriate $500 to the People's Health and Wellness Clinic? Shall the town appropriate $500 to the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired? Shall the town appropriate $500 to the Washington County Youth Services Bureau? Shall the town appropriate $500 to the Sexual Assault Crisis Team of Washington County? Shall the town appropriate $500 to Washington County Diversion? Shall the town appropriate $400 to Community Harvest of Central Vermont? I will say something. Thank you. Just to break it up a little bit. There you go. You've probably heard this before. I'm Allison Levin from Community Harvest of Central Vermont. I'm also a Berlin resident here. I just wanted to share a little about the organization if you weren't familiar. Our mission is to bring the community together through gleaning to recover surplus food from local area farms to feed those in the community with limited access to fresh local food and in the process bring our community together to gain a greater awareness for the local food system, healthy eating and waste reduction. We work with volunteers to use the nutritious food that's already being grown here in our community to feed that otherwise we would otherwise be going to waste to feed people in need. I founded the organization 2014 and since then we've been able to donate over 175,000 pounds of food that would translate into about 527,000 servings that would have otherwise gone to waste. This is donated to food shelves, senior meal programs, early childhood and after school programs also students here in Berlin benefit from the program and other programs in the community mostly in Washington County. We're asking for a small amount from all the towns that we serve throughout the county to help cover the small portion of the costs of us delivering the food to all the organizations throughout the community. We donate to all of the sites that we bring the food to. All of our gleaming recovery work is done with 2-300 volunteers each season to glean the food that we recover. We want to ask for your support again this year to continue the gleaming work that we're doing to reduce waste and feed 100 people. This is the same amount of $400 that we asked for last year. This food goes to about 9,000 people here in Washington County all that we've been able to glean. Just in 2018 we were able to donate 149,000 servings of food which was our biggest year ever and we hope to be able to continue doing that. We donate that food to about 20 different sites throughout the county. Berlin residents benefit from the program and have for the last five years through our partnerships with Area Food Shells and CU Meal programs and all of the surrounding towns that serve meals on wheels and other programs to Berlin residents. We also partner with the Berlin Elementary School on the Farm to School program to engage students and provide them hands opportunities to get out and glean to eat healthy food and learn about food production and also healthy eating in the classroom. And also, last year, we were able to get about 65 of those students, parents and teachers to come out and glean with us at one of the farms, the orchards that we've gleaned. We also partner with two farms in Berlin Dog River Farm and Rogers Farms at Red Hover. So they're serve plus food that they want to provide to community members that they're not able to sell. We're a 501 safety free non-profit and again, thank you for your past support and we hope for us tomorrow. Thank you. Questions? Yeah, any more time for questions? Thank you for your service. Thank you. And shall the town appropriate $300 to the good beginnings of central Vermont? And shall the town appropriate $300 to home share now paint? Thanks for coming. We have a couple other people who are part of the funding request but first from emergency services and Tim from the Capital Grange that would you like to say? All right. Let's start with Chris. Sorry. I'm Chris from Berrytown EMS. I'm not a resident so thank you for allowing me to speak with you all. So I usually ramble for a few minutes. I try to write some things down this year so just some things that I thought were good to bring up as we just approved for our last two years of your contract of your town so it's good we don't have to worry about that any more years. Our call volume is continually increased so this past year we had a 3.7% increase in calls about 7% over the last three years so our call volume continues to rise which has some positive some negatives and things we're concerned about. One of the interesting things I did look up is in any given year we have 989 ambulances scheduled to be on the road every single day and estimated we put about 978 of those ambulances on the road last year 99% over 99% of those with a paramedic on the truck and I would challenge any other service in the state of Vermont to compete with that. Nobody near here competes with that. Nobody else in the state competes with that. It's a phenomenal benefit you get with our scheduled ambulances. By all means if we have a 4th or 5th truck on the road you might not have that paramedic but having the highest level of care on all of our primary trucks is a great feat. Something we're really proud of. The last piece I'd like to bring up is that this past year we added $16,000 of our budget was geared towards improving some things on our ambulance putting some high level medical equipment. We purchased a ventilator to go up to three ventilators we include some video laryngoscope so being able to do some high level procedures with newer technologies which are safer and more efficient we added some new radios and iPads so we can do some documentation so that was all really good stuff. The concerns and things we're thinking about for the future is that we're looking at while our call volume is increasing the number of patients we transport to the hospital is actually decreasing. We increased our non-transport calls from about 17% to 22% last year. Which is great that we're able to show up and help people and get them to where they need to be and then leave them where they are. The negative is that EMS since its inception in the mid-60s has always been based on miles transported to patient. We have no funding from insurances or other billing sources when it comes to patients we don't transport. So that is a concern going forward that we always worry about. That's pretty much the actually I'll end with a positive. I looked up the number of times we turn over calls. Ambulance services like fire departments, police departments sometimes get two or three calls at a time you have to sometimes turn those over and last year we went to counting transfers out of the hospital. We went to 2,165 calls last year in the town of Berlin. We were called approximately 2,170 calls. So we made it to 99 point some odd percent of the calls when we're asked to come to your town. Which again is something I would challenge any other service in this area or in the state to meet that fee. That's all I've got for you for today. Questions for Chris? How many of those calls are just Berlin not the hospital? No. Do you have that? No. Did you actually look that up? Here we go. Let's see. The actual 9-1 calls in Berlin last year was approximately 480 calls. That also, that doesn't include the nursing homes in Berlin. That's just private residences in Berlin. Okay. I just have to acknowledge the proficiency and the incredible skill and professionalism that you've been very much needed. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you all. I'm Tim Swartz. I'm the president of the Capital City Grange. Thank you. Thank you. We are located in Berlin over on Route 12 as probably all of you know. You've probably seen our sign. I'm not here to ask for any money but to thank you for the tax exemption which we were given in March of 2016 at the town meeting at that time. I just wanted to come back and let you know that we are working hard on all the projects we had going then and more. Not having to deal with the property taxes has allowed us to not ask for fundraising from groups that use the Grange as we used to and in fact we've been able to invest money in the Grange instead of losing money every year which is what we're doing. This last year for example we installed an on-demand water heater instead of the storage water heater and electricity. We did a lot of landscaping around our main entrance. You can see the boulders that we placed so the plantings would be protected from the snowplow and that's certainly been very appropriate this year which has been quite snowing. We've got lots of things going on within the Grange itself and the people that rent from us. Among the things in the Grange is a baking contest and an Indian cooking workshop we had a holiday sing-along holiday boxes we donated to your Washington County Head Start and there's all sorts of classes, dances, all sorts of things going on at the Grange Hall. We are an all-volunteer organization and we welcome people to come and join us and we offer free rentals and organizations and individuals. At the time that we asked for the exemption we said that we wanted to give at least two rentals a month on average to brilliant organizations and having checked the figures we've had 76 rentals in the three years since so we're reaching and slightly exceeding our goal. But we have room for more people to use the hall so we'd like to spread the word and I have some cards here with information about how to contact our rental agent and we'll be happy to help you use the hall assuming that it's not already rented for one of the other things that's going on for us. Does anyone have any questions? Don't forget the potluck. Oh, that's right, yes, that's right, sorry. Never forget the potluck. We do have a potluck dinner on the first Saturday following our monthly Grange meeting at six o'clock and it's a chance for people to sit down and enjoy a lot of really good food. We've had some really great spreads recently when 30 or, I don't know, 25 or 30 people when you say last time, last couple of months. Anything else?  Thank you. That's the agenda for tonight. Tomorrow at 10 o'clock we start with a school district meeting and see you there. Thank you.


The recently-installed Ancillary and Canaries Constituency Councils have been urged to leverage the resources of the constituency to generate economic benefits for residents. Lisa Joseph explains. Parliamentary representative for Ancillary Canaries, Hon. Wayne Girard, is more than hopeful about the future of constituents as he charts a new path to improving lives and a development in communities. Hon. Girard is looking to the men and women of the Ancillary and Canaries Constituency Councils to assist in the rollout of the overall plan. During the installation ceremony, the Parliamentary representative noted that a concerted effort was made to select individuals from the length and breadth of the constituency to ensure inclusivity. Hon. Girard urged the councillors to lead by example with dignity, integrity and order. He told the councillors that as community leaders they must begin to erode the stigma of poverty and other social ills associated with the constituency. We need to pay close attention to the things that matter but cannot be easily measured like human dignity, freedom from embarrassment and humiliation. We need to harness the assets within the constituency for the benefit of the constituency. We need to deal with the issues related to garbage disposal and collection, access to public washroom facilities because we want to reserve the beach for recreation and enjoyment and not for anything else. Access to transportation in and out and around the constituency is also very important. No young person needs to care about the future.  So stay tuned for the announcements that will be rolled out over the next coming days. In closing, let us dream big, start small but begin now. Minister with responsibility for housing and local government Hon. Richard Fedrick called under councillors to be mindful in the execution of duty and render assistance to those who are truly in need in order to be impactful. Hon. Fedrick also encouraged the councils to adopt a business approach and be innovative in utilizing the natural resources of ancillary and canaries to the benefit of residents. I urge you in that regard to pursue ventures that are income generating. Those government facilities, if you have to, they are yours. They are under your control, not even that district rep can stop you. Use it. Use them to make money. Ancillary is world renowned with its fish friday. Capitalize on it. This is renowned for its cassava and farin and all the tertiary. Capitalize on it. Capitalize on it. Make something unique out of your constituency so you can use it as an income generating venture. Hon. Fedrick informed that funding for critical intervention programs and projects is available from international donor agencies. There are hundreds of millions of dollars for climate change. Hundreds of millions of dollars for nature reserve. Hundreds of millions of dollars to build homes for battered women, for children who are homeless. It is a matter of putting a team together and finding the donor agencies and tapping into the consciences of those donor agencies. Once you conceptualize your projects, it can cost 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 million dollars. Do not limit it or link it to government's affordability. The money is out there. Go get it. It's there.   Do what you have to do and treat government money as lamone because the big money is not here, it's out there. The Ancillary Constituency Council is chaired by Mary Samuel with Shari Gerard serving as deputy chairman. Linsha Mala Antoine is the chairperson of the Canaries Constituency Council with Degna Herman serving as deputy chairperson. From the Government Information Service, Lisa Joseph reporting.


Hello everyone My name is Jules Urback. I am the Founder of the company called the Oatway Some of you may know us from some of the software that we create Octane renders one of the earliest GPU renders We've had a blender integration for that I think over 10 years now And we're also known for light stage which is a digital double scanning service and the render network more recently Which is a distributed GPU cloud service that runs on individual users machines and When time asked me to come speak I was pretty excited. We've been Really we're focused on similar goals. We want to democratize content creation in particular Oatway's focus has been on democratizing holographic spatial tools and and rendering and And that's something that I think leads pretty nicely into the talk that I want to give today, which is called towards the Star Trek holodeck Show of hands. How many of you are Star Trek fans? Wow, that's that's a great amount good. So You love blender. You love Star Trek. This talk is for you the Star Trek holodeck for those that may not be familiar was a room on the Starship Enterprise it was Introduced in 1987 in the pilot episode of Star Trek the next generation And it was also featured interestingly enough in the very last episode almost 20 years later of Star Trek Enterprise and while the holodeck was a room that you could experience almost any Virtual reality simulation in it also had an interesting Concept in the story of Star Trek because it turns out that the show you just been watching at least the last few years may have All been on the holodeck Will Riker is looking at the history of that show and he's on a future enterprise and so The idea that that sort of was stuck in fans heads was well Is the show that we're watching is Star Trek actually just playing out in a simulation on Further enterprise in the future is that enterprises all the way down and it's one of those Mind twisters that's been an interesting part of both Star Trek and even our Literal lives today when people talk about the simulation theory. Are we living in a simulation as universe run? in a simulation The most recent episode of Star Trek believe it or not was called holograms all the way down It was released just a few weeks ago Touching on this theme and at Otoi, you know, we've been working on projects related to Star Trek Which I'll be showing but you can see here some of our work on the I guess on the left you'll see on the right you'll see You know the show and on the other side You'll see our render and they're pretty close and in fact it makes you question I mean these were of course shows that were filmed before CG was was this good, you know is what you're seeing real or rendered right? We have this Same issue with AI where we're not sure there something we're seeing was created by human or created by a machine And it's kind of goes beyond rendering But I want to focus as an aside on the technology that might make something like the holodeck possible It looks like it's closer than the 200 or so years that it was set in the Star Trek timeline There's a company called light fill lab that we partnered with it's actually building the real life Star Trek holodeck They were inspired just like me To go and see if that's something that could be created and they're working on the display technology It's a couple of years out. It's going to be in location-based entertainment First theme parks things like that, but like you know giant 4k TVs that were hundred fifty thousand dollars And are now hundreds of dollars. This will go down in cost significantly and the beauty of these Holographic panels is that you'll be able to have all these incredible experiences without wearing any VR glasses We've been building Tools to create content for those things and we're using we're using an iPad. We have projectors with tracking But if you actually go see the display up north in Northern California at their labs, it's incredible. I mean, I've seen it firsthand Again, hopefully the public will be able to see it at large, but these panels are tileable It's like the Samsung video wall So the larger the surface area the more tiles you make the larger the hologram can push in and out and If you have I'm a something like 15 million dollars you can put this on the ceiling curve it around you can actually build the holodeck it's expensive, but it could be done and It's hard to capture how good this looks on a 2d video But here it is This is basically the holographic panel as you move your eyes if you focus on it. It looks real It's very different than just stereo or autostereo. It's truly Sort of this magical endpoint and it's very expensive to render on I mean these panels are something like 100k pixels by a hundred thousand pixels per meter So it's an insane resolution and it's challenging to create content that will render on those devices and also run in real time But we're working on that Going back to Star Trek and our work Related to that. I was actually thrilled to find out that our renderer and our software was used to Rerender my favorite movie the Star Trek motion picture from 79 Not only that it was also rendered on the render network It was actually those frames that were put in this remastered version that went out in theaters and on Blu-ray in 21 it was done on average users machines, which is pretty cool A couple years after that we did another project. This was featured in the Apple keynote Twice actually and I'll be talking about this project a lot more later in the talk But I want to show you a video That was all done by us in 2022 and I'll play it now. That was pretty cool. Yeah Thank you Now I'm very pleased to say that this wouldn't exist without Blender. In fact a huge number of the artists working on this project Used Blender and have been using it for a while. I actually have a bunch of Screenshots that they prepared for the Blender conference They're all pretty excited to sort of show how Blender is being used in Full productions and it's being used to great effect. There's about I Don't know how many years of assets we've been building for this project and Blender has been really instrumental and essential in making this happen a lot of our artists actually a lot of Star Trek used to be done in a tool called Lightwave and That fell out of favor and Blender really took over for a lot of these artists and we've brought a lot of them onto the team and It's not just Star Trek. We're actually doing other properties in IP as well and Blender and it looks fantastic it's kind of incredible to see the trajectory that Blender has taken and You know kind of grow with that as well We've been building a lot of tools and technology around Blender. Obviously we have octane as a render in their cycles is fantastic We love all renders But there are things that we've been trying to figure out Look, how do you plug Blender into other pipelines other tools? We do have other artists and other Assets in the in the production pipeline C4D Unreal Engine and so we'll be building tools for example like this one that take Everything's happening in Blender as a C-Rap and run that into another process. You can have live linking. It's super fast We can take something and bring it into Unreal Engine share those materials share that same Pipeline obviously as we look towards standards like USD material X. It's being adopted in Blender Those might help but in the meantime, we've been developing these tools in this set of Pipelines really to allow us to go from modeling in Blender rendering and octane doing virtual production on an air wall and Unreal Engine and You know, it's something that is is definitely been very helpful to us But we've also been looking towards the future as well I mean there are standards that are emerging that are going to be great for making this You know pretty much a commodity and I think that the hydra render delegate system is one such piece It's being released obviously in in Blender 4, which is amazing. We have a rendered elegant ready to go and Even within octane We have the ability to load other red red elegates and we've been playing with that For example being able to take to rendered elegates storm in octane or cycles and octane and just do a shader and composite those together Obviously, you know Blender has a great GPU compositor. There's a lot of really cool things. You can do a technology like that Open standards are really important not just for Materials and meshes and data and apis but also just for collecting the works of artists themselves How do you organize these things? And I think that's becoming especially important When you look at a lot of the major players that are trying to build call it the metaverse or spatial computing I think you know a lot of people don't necessarily want one company or one format to control something as important as The spatial web And so I'm a strong believer in having open standards open systems for this You know, we've joined a number of organizations including metaverse standards form group Chronos Even going back as far as I started with MPEG back in 2017 to try to foster open standards That would make sure that there's no piece of the asset pipeline that isn't open sourced and available because you know bit rot and these Things are really a problem And in fact they get in the way of some of the pipeline issues that on we were trying to solve We have in fact created a couple of open source standards One of them is called it came F that extend things like usd and material X with the last missing pieces that we need To be able to do something like this which is to send data between Blender and 26 other DCC tools Rendered them on the cloud without having to worry about the DCC being there all those things become really important at scale Especially on the render network, which is built on running up pretty much in the background on people's machines We wouldn't be able to have a million GPUs in the cloud without having that capability So it's not like running it on AWS or data center The the power and the speed and the costs reductions you get from having a decentralized GPU network Matter and it does help to not have to pull in 30 DCC tools into a rendered job But of course in the case of blender, it's open source We can integrate the blender pipeline into the mix and that's been a really strong Positive point for for our artists and our developers The work that we're trying to do to organize Individual artists and IP and all these things and if you looked at the last talk I think the idea of being able to have proven us over your artwork your creations whether you're coming from the digital world or the physical world is Incredibly important people who is a well-known artist digital and physical Has been a friend of mine and we've been taking his thousands of pieces of artwork and putting them into a system that he can Basically have proven us over not an NFT, but something that just says I rendered this I created this Sended on the render network every asset every texture is hashed and I can prove it was mine And I can prove that if somebody runs a AI, you know learning job on it this data This came from this render in the case of Alex Ross another wonderful artist a very good friend of mine He is purely you know a gouache painter. He uses watercolors doesn't do any digital work But we've been taking his paintings that you're beautiful. He's been Probably best known for doing yet tons of Marvel and DC work over the years and we've been turning those into 3d assets that have been going into a similar archive and You know, he's actually pretty Interested in sort of seeing that digital world being created around his physical pieces And in fact the amount of work that he's done is so expansive It really does seem to cover almost most of pop culture from the you know late 20th and 21st centuries That we're now and if you look sort of at this testee She almost see you know the you know the seeds of what could be You know the metaverse like you know something that comes out of snow crash Or Neil Stevenson's book or ready player one And in fact Neil Stevenson who I've had the pleasure of getting to know recently Is also pretty intent on having a very open standards-based metaverse Going back to people's work for a minute, you know Again a lot of his forward-looking work is really going back to physical pieces even though he's a you know Most well-known for being a digital artist and so some of his newer pieces are really cool I mean they are physical pieces you install them in a museum or you buy them in this form and They're pre-rendered and they're on LEDs that are you know meant to fool you into thinking you're looking into the piece But obviously with the holographic display panels from LFL that are coming out in a couple of years You'll be able to have a piece from him that looks like it's been physically Created, but it'll be digital to be rendered and this is the kind of stuff that I find fascinating As the future of these technologies all converge in these really interesting ways The third archive project that I want to talk about and it's the one I'll be spending the rest of this talk Discussing is the Gene Roddenberry archive. This one has enormous personal interest to me my best friend's dad was Gene Roddenberry he Rob Roddenberry his son invested in in Otoy and Created an endowment that started this project and initially the Roddenberry archive is really just you know scanning and documents scanning the millions of pages that Gene Roddenberry had wrote You know obviously he's best known for creating Star Trek, but there are many other sci-fi stories and things that he had You know put out there over the years And the archive work that we had done since 2021 has focused on not just the written word But also the visual aspect of Star Trek right basically taking everything and because it's a visual medium, right? It's not just the printed page You know, how do you preserve the work of all the people that created the sets the designs? for this show and we're fortunate to have a lot of those people still around Mike and Dean Sakuta who wrote the Star Trek encyclopedia and who curated the 11-foot enterprise model that's in the Smithsonian all of that is part of this archive and It's more than just you know scanning in you know data and models It's also figuring out how all these pieces connect to tell the story of Star Trek Both in the fictional universe of Star Trek, but also in the production of its creation So you can see in that video. I just played you can see the actual You know a piece of the of the show and you can then flip into the stage nine where it was filmed or the lot Paramount or Desilu One of the other aspects though on the flip side of that is you want to have the 1000-foot version of the Enterprise not the 8-foot model of the 11-foot model that was filmed and that was one of the very first Pieces that we took on in this project. It's sort of been a dream of many people even before me to see You know that enterprise made life-size. This is some renders from a proposed 90s Vegas Hotel that was gonna be a life-size enterprise, but this is our version of it We're about 30% of the way through it You can see the inside of the ship every room is is detailed. You see Kirk's coffee mug. It's all there And it's beautiful and we're also working on the world around Star Trek It's not just the ship. It's what's outside of it earth is solar system the galaxy as it as it's been you know defined in that show And if you're a fan of Star Trek, this is pretty cool I mean it really is something where this data this exists in a form with gross of how it's rendered and what the Medium is that allows you to sort of see the show and the world in a way that I think is pretty novel and unique And it's something that's really been driven out of passion and love But it's also gotten a lot of attention since we started putting out these renders in these pieces You know we've gone as far as to you create the entire show system as we as certainly as we can the Starship Enterprise and Even the leather and the you know the 70s Shag carpet that was in the recreation deck in 79 All of that's there and when you take these renders and you put them up next to the actual You know footage or film that looks pretty good You can also create interactive experiences of the where you can go inside of the enterprise and you can look at the buttons You know push the levers all of it So it's not just a static scene That's an important aspect also of trying to preserve how these sets and how that world worked And and while we have the folks that can help us basically create the provenance for this We're trying to build all of it And it's a pretty exciting project again sort of my favorite Star Trek movie is the 79 film So this is that bridge where you go inside of it audios there Every panel is working This is the in-universe version. So this is there's no plywood. There's no cameras and no set lights This is what it would look like if you're you know on the ship operating it is as a crew member And you know there's more than just of course this first movie. There's you know 12 movies that followed it so Star Trek 2 Star Trek 3 we've built all of those versions of the enterprise and Again, we've done our best to make sure that it's you know exactly like it was in the film And in the production In the case of the movie enterprise we do happen to have the blueprints for the whole ship It's one of the only versions of the enterprise and those six movies that has that there's a lot of other enterprises We're building 3d models of all the concept versions that were created before they went into production And then you have the timeline of this ship It's like 40 years from 2245 when it was launched so 2025 when it blew up in Star Trek 3 And if you look at all these versions to play them back It's almost like a time-lapse of history and these are all the you know renders of the of the ships sort of Overlaid on each other through time. It's pretty cool. And so the experience you can have is Almost going through time and going through space To see the world of Star Trek and the story itself play out As it turns out, there's not just one enterprise. There's many ships that preceded it and followed it The most famous one of course is from the TV show, but there's about 13 or 14 others One of the more famous ones is from the 90s. It's from Star Trek the next generation Enterprise D Captain Picard ship and again, you know, we've done our best to make it absolutely perfect. There's a follow-up ship the Enterprise E from the 96 movies and Again, the you know, the detail is pretty exquisite So, you know, there's another aspect to this which is if you build the sets of this quality Sure, you can give people an experience that allows them to go in there and explore that and have it saved a Prosperity, but you can also film in those sets and virtual production as well And we've gone to the trouble of I mean even Picard's fish from his office is in this in this world Recreated perfectly But there's a lot more to this than just these fun pieces. There's also documenting You know the people that are you know that the work on the show that also acted in the show So we had William Shattner come in he sat in the 1979 Starship Enterprise the one I just showed you in a you know virtual production facility in an air wall and he loved it he was super excited and You know his interview was just amazing and he talked about you know How he wanted Kirk's story to end and how it didn't go that way And so we have all this amazing, you know, these interviews This behind-the-scenes footage and of course, you know a lot of a beautiful renders that cover Effectively 60 years of Star Trek history 800 hours of the show everything from the J. J. Abrams movies to the You know to the original 1964 pilot that wasn't aired back in April We put out a interactive experience on the web It was online for three weeks just an experiment and people loved it It got a lot of attention the Thessonian of all places actually wrote an article about it This was the you know early interface that we had for the web portal, but you can see there's a timeline You can look at all the different ships The Akutis who wrote the Starship psychopedia helped us create the text and the information that's there Major Roddenberry my friend's mother who was the voice of the Starship Enterprise, you know She recorded all of her venoms all of her dialogue Right before she passed so that one day we could bring her voice back in 15 years later We did and so that's part of the experience as well And there's about 20 other alternate timelines and things like that that are actually also created for this experience It's pretty amazing Back in April. We also put out another video. It was again a concept video no dialogue Just meant to service interstitial after William Shatner's interview and it was unlisted on YouTube It got a million something views and people really loved it They went crazy and it got much more attention than we ever expected I'm gonna play that one next. It's about two minutes Here he goes that was a lot of fun How am I doing on time? I'm gonna make sure I Know go over here Just briefly. I know that we're we're already short You know the the work that we're doing also involves scanning, you know actual assets including the Set from the Star Trek card season 3 the Enterprise D. That was me on set our team scanned it in preserving it It seems also built these props and these assets It's it's an amazing project. You can go see this on otoi.com on the blog We're hoping to have a lot more put out there in the Months to come. I do want to show a couple of the behind the scenes of Star Trek the cage the very first pilot episode we brought in the director It was amazing to have him on set and to show You know, basically the world of 1964 brought to life in this, you know, really quiescent way and I think on the I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit to The end of the presentation here. You can see how we created Spock. It was done with and you know Basically, this is the actor Laurence Ellicott played Spock Literally, there's no digital work on him that you're seeing here He looks so much like Leonard Nimoy With just prosthetics that it was an incredible incredible match and we did use Some digital techniques on his face. We should can see here live as we're filming it to get To get him to look that you know to get a little almost perfectly like Nimoy We also would scan the actors in With a 40 capture system or we could relight them later Which was pretty useful and we experimented with nerves green screen CG turns out that CG scans and being able to sort of bring the actors in costume Through a rendering process looked to be the most You know to be the highest fidelity And as we've you know explored virtual production even further You know, we've done a lot of physical props that we've scanned in we've had a D age and age Lawrence who's our actor playing Spock on set And it was very challenging to do that last scene because again, he's transitioning from an older Spock to a younger Spock This is the virtual capture system that we were using This is me helping the director set that shot up and as you look at these beautiful renders You know where this is all heading before you get to the holodeck is a pair of really beautiful Mixed reality glasses which are being put up by Apple next year And that's something that I want to end this talk on which is showing our roadmap for the vision pro It's definitely challenging. We're doing renders at 16 K by 16 K or 48 K In the case of stereo cubic panoramas and that's just for a simple panorama There's something that you need to actually move through a walk into you have to render a light field Which is a volumetric rendered job that is Part of our pipeline and you can see here it's running in the simulator It actually will allow you to explore these worlds at final render quality on the Apple headset and that's pretty remarkable We've been trying to work towards this technology for a while and it's finally here now that play back side where we explored What you know Web XR is does work on the vision pro html 5 is a model element but we are building a native viewer for the light fields among other things and You know, we're hoping to have that out sometime next year when the device launches And you can see in mixed reality I mean the quality of some of these assets you couldn't really appreciate on the web page is awesome I mean you can see here this enterprise J The you know enterprise hundreds years in the future has a whole world the whole city inside of it And in mixed reality and you take a close look at that asset you can see all that it's actually incredible It means you really reimagine how you know content can be consumed when you have this kind of Fidelity and quality and so we see the future of rendering and content creation as being pretty awesome and really exciting So thank you all it's been a pleasure presenting this today and look forward to talking to some of you after After I wrap up here. Thank you all