We'll call the public hearing for the traffic ordinance to order at seven o'clock. We have Closemath, Pratt Town, Justin Lawrence, John Quinn here from the select board. Any additions or changes to the agenda? There's one of these when we get to the select board meeting about public hearing. All right, public comment. I'd like to take a minute where our local rep for the town of Berlin and Northfield's here. I think you want to say a couple of things. So you want to talk in, I don't know if that was a good time or if you want to wait until everybody's done or? Just nice to be here. I'll talk afterwards to hear what's going on. It's just nice to be back around seeing people and meeting in person and hearing what's going on through this in Northfield and in Berlin. A lot of passion I have to do and it's just nice to see people's faces again in person. Absolutely. Thank you for coming. Yes, thank you. Thank you. So we'll open it up for public comment, I assume. I have a question. This is the right time. I think you're talking about the Swingland, not Rogers, that 705, but I wondered if we could also add to that to put in a no-outlet sign on that road. I don't know if it makes sense to do it now or at the time when we're doing that road. I can speak to that, Justin, if you'd like. Yeah, go ahead. I'm checking the roads and the signs as well. And I will be coming out with a list of recommendations for street signs and that is one of them, that it's a bit in-street. Can we get in on that as well? What street? Co-Ost Trail. Yes, Co-Ost Trail is on the list also for that, so. I believe I talked to you maybe a couple times. You did, and I met you on TV. Oh boy. Oh boy. Perfect. So that is covered and it will be, there'll be an update on that on what the recommendations are for that, based on the driver and the data that you put that has. Okay. Let's do signage updates. I think there's a lot of roads like that in town that definitely need some signage, you know. The corner up on Crosstown Road, we spend a lot of time up there with our police department and our fire department. I believe in ours they have, they missed the sign and they want the medical center that is just up from us. So they come in our yard and turn around. Yep. We average three a day. Yep. Any other public comment on this?  Just a matter of procedure, don't we need to actually go into the public hearing and it flows out of the public hearing? Yes. Okay. We're in the public hearing right? I thought we were just doing public comment at the beginning of the meeting. I just wanted to make sure we were all procedurally doing it. Okay. Well, I thought I opened the public hearing. Okay. And then I opened it up for public comment. Oh, okay. And then I was going to do public comment again before the SWAT board meeting. Oh, okay. So I got the right procedure. Sure. Your meeting. Anybody opposed to that? Okay. I understood the comment. Any other comments on this, John? No. I don't have any either. Anybody else from the public? I don't have any. Would you like me just to give a summary of what some of the changes were highlighted for everyone? So basically, you know, the review and the recommendations, recommendations coming from an actual state approved process for doing an engineering study on Brookfield Road specifically as well for the speed limit changes. But we're looking at a reduction of speed limit to 25 miles per hour for Brookfield Road, Mirror Lake Road, Richardson Road, and Coaust Trail. Those are the four for this revision that we're looking at. In addition to that, just to give you some numbers, in 2020, the state data road count, car count survey on those roads for traffic, for average daily traffic on Brookfield Road, believe it or not, in 2020 was 310 vehicles on Brookfield Road. Mirror Lake Road was 76. There was no state count done on Richardson Road, and Coaust Trail was two, average two per day in 2020. So, then in addition to that, we're talking about some parking as well. On Payne's Turned Bike, on the west side of the road, that would start at the southern end of the guardrails just past the turn to Brookfield Road. There's a set of wooden guardrails there. At the end of those guardrails is where this parking would start, and it would extend south about 800 feet. So that would, if we did a little bit larger than normal, I think 20 feet is the normal for parallel parking along the side of a roadway. If we did 25 foot spots there, that would yield us 32 parking spots in that location on Payne's Turned Bike. And that would be off the road, by widening the road in our right of way, and it has been reviewed with the city of Montpelier as well, they understand it's in our right of way. They don't really have any issue with it at all for that portion of it. Then there was the discussion point about on that little section next to the boat launch on Brookfield Road, potentially eliminating that with the addition of those 32 spots to just to clean that area up. And then no parking, no, let me rephrase that maybe, no town authorized parking on Mirror Lake Road. There is a small area there, but the town really can't say that that's a parking area because it's really located on private property. So that's kind of a summary of what we're looking at and where we are with this. So I thought, I thought a couple of meetings ago, we talked about leaving that as parking in the area of the boat launch area for now. Yep, just looked up that it was looked at. So there was discussion on that. I don't think a decision, I don't have anything that showed a decision was ever made, yay or nay to look at. No, no, I don't think so either. I just, so are you saying that, okay, so you're not, you're not recommending that it be closed. You're just saying that it's up for discussion. It's up for discussion. That's it. Any questions for me on that summary? Oh, that the potential closing of that parking was kind of brought up, that brought up my mock bill here, is that? It came up in the discussion. What were we gonna keep it? What were we gonna deal with it? I just said it's on the table for discussion. That's it. We reviewed it on site. I think in the end, with a lot of us, with a lot of the different things that we have going on, we'll end up with much more parking around our own home than we currently have. 32 new spots, we'll definitely do that. And then we also have the spot on Irish Hill that we're working with Montpelier to get, you know, all the barricades are up above that. For the snow machine parking? For everybody. Right, yeah. Yeah, so that'll actually free up a lot of that area, I think. So Mirror Lake Road would still be open for parking, no? Well, again, as far as on Mirror Lake Road itself, we're saying no parking. There is a small area there that's. Who's saying no parking? Well, that was the recommendation when I reviewed it with Tim from, you know, the winter issues that he's been having and even the grading issues. It's a tough call. I mean, either way, but, you know. Yeah, I mean, someone who lives in the area, a lot of people launch their boats over there. It's a long way across. The other concern I had heard was that this could be special. Exactly. So the flow of water when we're on the other side is the current. It doesn't freeze well. So they have to access it from over there. So there was absolutely no parking there. That was another concern. So, you know, I do know that we have concerns with being able to get through with our plows. There's times when it turns out to actually go back around. Oh, really? Yeah, that's a clear road because it was blocked and we couldn't make it through in the wintertime. If there's a guy out there fishing in the morning, typically they park right at the culvert because that's not on most of your property. They park there, they offload and haul their stuff out and do the fishing. If there's somebody parked on the culvert, they can't get through with the plow one way or the other, whichever side they're on. So they park on it. It's definitely some concerns we need to address. I know last year there was at least one occasion where they were parked on both sides of the culvert and you had to go all the way back around because you couldn't get through. Yep. Right, but the police should have taken care of that. I mean, at some level. It's difficult if it's something that they can't really enforce because it isn't deemed a no parking yet and it isn't deemed a parking yet. Right. So maybe one side of the road, no parking. Would there be a solution or should? Yep. It's definitely not wet there. No parking on the culvert, obviously on either side, probably. No, it's still the same width, isn't it? No parking on the side. That would be a good. Anything else? There's a bubble up here. Oh, I didn't actually have to. Thank you. Oh, Joe. Go ahead. So you're talking about the culvert on Merrill Lane Road. We also have some no parking zones if you want to call it. You do have a dry hybrid there. And so I think whenever you want to decide on what you do there, I think, you know, a distance, probably the length of the driveway else would be great not to have any parking. Either side.  We're looking at, again, whatever the decision is, we're looking at the no parking signs and maybe some other verbiage on the signs for exactly this type of thing. Right. We have to put the signage on the show. Thank you, Joe. Sorry. For the fines that I see for no parking, I see you have like TandyCat and the fire hydrants set up $100 and you have a fire lane set at 25. Is that not as important? Well, that's a great question. Again, the only thing that was changed are what's highlighted in this. Those fines are pre-existing. There was no changes recommended at the time we went to revision on this for those fines. It's an open discussion, I guess. That's a good question. Right. Any of these fines, is that on private property or is that just for public property? Well, it's making sure of both, right? If you're blocking a private driveway, there's a fine associated with that. I was thinking of the fire lane, like at Price Chopper or at Shaw's. That's on private property. But it's still a ticketable offense, right? I believe so. I can double check. I can double check. I'm not going to have a private property. That's not, that's true.  I can tell that gets a statute, Brad. Take a look at that. I just don't want to stick to somebody and not have a chance to come through. And then I can, I will, based on the findings of that, I'll revise the statute to the ordinance to reflect what the statute says, whether it's private or private. Thanks, Bill. Go ahead, Joe. So I have a question that might be the same line as yours. The fire lane being at Shaw's at Price Chopper. Is it private? They also have handicapped parking down there. So it would kind of go hand in hand. You're going to treat them both the same? It depends what the statute says. If we can't take a ticket on private property. Either way, Joe, as president of the Fire Corporation, do you think the Fire Department would like to have some input on this? Yes. Okay. Perfect. Well, so we got an email from a resident saying that they just wanted to voice their disapproval of banning parking on the LA road. That they always park at the turn out. Who is it? Louie and Laura. So feel free to contact them with any questions, but everybody can kind of comment on that. Questions, are you saying that you don't want any parking on Mirror Lake, even that little pull-off that is... Well... There's like four parking spots down there that keeps people off the main road? The issue that we've had on Mirror Lake is sometimes in the winter, people park on both sides. It's blocked, can't get through with a plow truck. I think that there's a lot of use that goes on down there. John brought that up as well as one of his concerns. So the reason that we're talking about it is maybe looking at one side of the road, having no parking, and that will ensure that fire trucks can get through there. Emergency services are plow trucks. The issue that we run into with a lot of that property is that it's either out of the town right of way or private property. I thought that's why you built that little parking spot in the middle of the road, was to keep people out of the road. It is, but it doesn't, I mean there's, that parking spot is, I mean it's good for four cars at best if everybody parks appropriately. But you're not thinking of getting rid of that one? That wasn't part of that, I mean... Again, just the same the issue with that is that property is for sale and it's not town property. So we can't say that it is parking. We can't say that it isn't parking really. That's convenient right now, but at some point in time it's probably gonna go away, depending on the sale of the property. Right, so it's beyond our control in many ways. But what we can do is look at saying, okay, well we can designate one side of the road as parking, and just try to make it more orderly, if that makes sense. Any other questions, concerns, comments? Close in the public hearing, you guys? We're gonna make a motion to close the public hearing. If there's no further comment? Second. Any comment? No, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Motion carries. So we're closed with the public hearing. We'll start our regular select board meeting. We have additions or changes to this agenda. I have one addition and that's in your package as well, it's a document for the Fish Road Scoping Project. This is from the regular agenda. Discussions on adopting building codes and enforcement, we're planning commission. So, David done a lot of this, so it would have been great if he had been on here, especially with the development we have in town going on. I've realized, I'm sure you guys do as well, that we don't have any building ordinances, other than that there's the state that was obviously for the commercial, things like that. But, so, these got like the fire departments not overly involved in the process.  Right, so it would be kind of like the dog catchers where you could appoint them to allow them to do it. Some of the other municipalities do like Berry City, they do inspections. We're about to have 500 or so apartments in the town of Berlin, and there's definitely gonna be things where there's smoke detectors and there's public safety things over the years. And I know that, like all of my apartments, I have to pay an annual fee for registration and then they get inspected. And then if there's updates or changes that need to occur over time, the public safety will go in there and give me advice on that. David brought it up, he wanted to talk about it, but unfortunately, he's not here at the moment. Is there anything, you had some thoughts on that, Joe? I have been talking with Joe Alford, he was at a meeting at I think Fuels were at and discussing it. I think it's a program of which the town of Berlin I think could really, I think they would do well with everything that's there. We have no control over anything with all the development that's going on. The state is always short-handed. They're reactionary with everything. And just, I think this is something that I think that the board should really discuss and decide what they want from the fire department or somebody in this role.  That's something that, they have a survey that's coming to us and the results of that survey from the town as far as what they had for, you know what they perceived the Berlin volunteer fire department as. And we're waiting on some of that data on the issue. When should we have that? It's just putting the presentation together, just cleaning it up. And so what it was also part of was kind of like a pros and cons analysis from the fire department on whether it would be beneficial for the municipality from their perspective to be, to maintain volunteer independent status or become a municipal department at some point, what that might look like. So I think it would be beneficial for us to start having discussions about that. Go ahead. That is true how that topic was, what, how it originated. I think that it's happened meeting almost two years ago with Brad was there I believe. I think what we really looked at was not just staying volunteer or municipality, it's what model. I think that's clear that the model that we currently have is not keeping up with the development of the town. Right. Okay. Berlin is growing immensely and the speed of which the department is kind of at as, almost at a standstill, as so it feels. You know, I see Berlin as being like a little village. It's growing in various places and all of a sudden you're going to turn around and you're going to have just a lot of development. Right. So I don't know. I think it would make sense for the select, there's funding out there grants. I think it would make sense for us to look at it from a board perspective and say, okay, well, you know, we've never set expect, I mean, expectations or what we need for services covered by the fire department. So this is what the town needs. They haven't ever done that. I don't know if you know Brad, but. I don't really know him. I just think it would be a good idea looking forward as we're developing and growing. Yeah. I mean, we're a community of less than 3000 people, very cities, close to 10,000 people, much different clientele. I think even though we're kind of the center of it all, I just can't see putting the additional burden on Slam or a lot of them are doing their best, given what they have. I don't know that an inspection program necessarily benefit them. I kind of go back and forth on it. You know, the state does command if you're building new and they will go into the new development we have and make sure they have everything. But they, like Joe said, they're understaffed. I mean, they're not ever going to be able to keep up with a regular pace. So that being said, if they can't hire the staff, neither will we be able to. About the, from a direction standpoint or how we feel about the Fire Department and the services they're providing, does anybody think it would be valuable to have a conversation around that and look at a five year, 10 year idea? Yeah, I mean, certainly always good to understand where they think they want to go, where we think that they should be going, where the other departments in the local communities are going or where they have gone. The municipal fire service overall has been fairly stagnant and that's not meant to be negative. It's just the way the Fire Department budgets have been and the cost of equipment. They haven't had a lot of room for growth or opportunity. The training hours are five times or more what they used to be as far as being a certified firefighter one. Enrollments down as far as membership. Be interested to hear where they'd like to go and how they're gonna recruit. How is your enrollment right now, Joe? At the current time? We probably get three new members come on and probably losing two within that year. So, how many members do you have total at this point? Do you require them to go through the firefighter one? At this point, do we have, we just had three that went through the firefighter one. Yep. Just for the record, about 230 some odd hours. So, like Barry said, you're in order to go into a burning building, you have to be firefighter one, right? Like that's the requirement, but we don't require that. We require fire one for interior. Interior. That's for the inspections of houses or buildings. What is the monthly charge for that service? Barry at that point. I think it's Barry and roughly $50 a unit a year with an inspection, I believe, every other unit, something like that. Yeah, I think I'd pay 75 a unit a day, but it's every other year for an inspection. I was just thinking that if the fire department can, is there any training for that? Sure. We've had some people that have taken 40-some odd hours of that training. There's more to go as well. I just wanted to be a representative. It is, and I think that there are, you know, after incidents in Mary City, like the fires, and they make some changes, you know, they'll say, okay, we'll want to change the location, maybe of smoke detectors, and put them in bedrooms, and I've never perceived it as a negative as a landlord. I think it's positive. I certainly wouldn't want to put a burden on anybody. I don't think that $75 is a real burden for each unit. I don't know that it's the perfect answer, but I definitely think it's absolutely worth exploring because that's one of the pieces that may allow us to kind of build up the fire department, get that to a point that can maintain what the town that we need. Yeah, I'm just thinking about the logistics of it. Beyond smoke detectors, yes, you have them. What if you're blocking an exit, you know, or the baby crib, or what happens if you don't follow the recommendations to a tee? Do you get by the tenant or the landlord? Landlord. Landlord. Right. So in a situation like that, I mean, obviously with a crib that you wouldn't, that's not fixed, but. Yeah, I'm just saying, I don't think it's a business that we should get into, but. I think to answer your question, is it landlord or tenant? I think it works both ways. You know, where you have a tenant that may not be, you know, the perfect tenant, the landlord is assured that at that time, that it's being checked and that it's being extended. At the same time, you have tenants that have landlords that aren't doing what they should be doing as well. I think it works both ways. So I don't necessarily agree or disagree with whether the business that the tenant wants to get into, but I think it's definitely worth exploring, as you know, Brad mentioned, or I can see it as a revenue stream. I can see it. It's a revenue stream, but I thought it's a tax. It's a tax, absolutely. On people that have apartments. Absolutely, I agree. And I'm also, but it's also a way to help on some of the, like our governments help. The services they need, they could. That's exactly why we're having this discussion. Right, no, exactly. And I'm just thinking like we're gonna end up paying for someone for them to go in and do the inspection eventually, right?  It's all the topics we're discussing in the process. But you're spot on. That's why, yeah. I wouldn't just say no right away, but I would say from now, unless we have more information, which we're talking about, is there anybody from the planning commission on here? Yeah, Carl is. Carl, Carl is. Carl, are you here? I am here. Sorry, I joined late. I didn't think you were talking about this till eight o'clock. Well, we were chugging right along, so we're on it. Have you? Yeah, for some reason I've had the public hearing previously had the last for an hour because it was scheduled for so long. Anyway, here I am. I didn't hear the conversation. I'm not sure if you're looking for building codes for, yeah. So, you know, from the planning commission standpoint, have you ever looked at adopting any building codes or any inspection process for like, say residential units or anything like that? No, and I did a little bit of looking into it. And from what I understand, very few towns in Vermont have building codes because it's too expensive to enforce and administer. I think the size of the town is, I think it's a little, I would personally, without doing it, again, without hearing what was said and without doing a ton of research, think that the size of the town kind of does not support this type of activity. But that's my personal opinion. I mean, we have a lot of other things that we, I guess I would say that we have a lot of other things that would be more of a priority, I would think, for the town. But again, that's my personal opinion. The planning commission can certainly look into it and discuss it with this Blackboard if that's something that you're interested in. I'm happy to take that up with the planning commission and we can move forward and sort of do a little bit of exploring, maybe reach out to the Vermont League of Cities and towns and talk with them about it, in terms of towns that have or don't have it, et cetera. Okay. Well, I know, I know that Dave had brought this up. I talked a little bit about it with Joe, just the process that I do with the properties that I own. And I wanted to have a conversation about it at least and just see what the planning commission thought was on it. What involvement the fire department would have, what their thoughts would be on it. Yeah, sounds like- Yeah, no, I think that's good, but you're talking beyond just fire, right? You're talking building codes, generally speaking? Well, I think that was Dave's intentions when he put it on the agenda, so I can't speak to that for sure, but I was just more concerned personally with the fire. That was my concern. Yeah, no, I'm just asking for clarification because I wasn't sure. Yeah, well, Dave, I guess, probably for right now, we'll move along because Dave's not here to discuss this point that he wanted to bring up. Yeah, I think when I talked to Dave a little bit about it, it was a little further reaching, I thought, than just smoke detectors, right? Yeah, it was like structural building codes, which would be extremely difficult, you know? Yeah, I think that's beyond our capability at this point. Yep, I would agree with that. So, do you have anything else? I would just say planned. Yeah, I think it's something to talk about for the future, but I think that might be a ways down the road. Maybe the planning commission could just have a talk with the fire department about what their needs are and what they feel it should be and then see if it's feasible and we can have it as a select board about it. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. So maybe invite them into one of your meetings and we'll go from there? Yeah, that sounds good. Thank you, Karla. You're welcome. Justin, it's Keith and Otterstein. Can I add one little tidbit? Absolutely. So, in speaking with just the fire inspections portion, we had conversations with the Joaldsworth, Don and Barry City about their implementation of the fire inspection is because as you know, they've assumed portions of it from the state of Vermont. And the end result that they saw was less of a revenue stream and more of increased fire safety and reduced the fire call load to the fire department itself. That was the benefit that they saw from it. The fire department charged Barry Town for use of the, over there, and then they came back to us and said, well, it's over a 3% increase. Well, let Vince talk about it, but they were convinced that essentially, Rob, our assumption that since they had the contract six months prior to going before our renewal, what their rates were going to go up to, that it wasn't a 3% increase. Those are the contracts, the one that the town signed and the one that is out there for signature between the fire department and the EMS as well. And so, we signed this on January 20th. When did you give this to Barry Town EMS? October 6th goes in October. So, I think it was a, and I knew at that point that Joe, when I was the rep for the select board to the fire department, I did know that he had provided that with him. I couldn't remember the exact date, but prior to the RFP coming in, they had already known they were going to have a rate increase. So, I feel like we had assumed that that was in their new rate quote or the new RFP and their new pricing and that it would be a 3% increase over the current of the 1550 that they knew it was going to renew that. What was Rob's opinion on that? Rob's response. Did everyone, I was the only one who got it. Yep, I sent that out. So, it says this, Vince, it's my understanding that Barry Town EMS received notice of a 15% increase back in October 2020. I further understand that the proposed Barry Town EMS service contract was submitted to the town for consideration after that date and that the representative for Barry Town EMS signed the agreement on February 3rd, 2021. Based on this timeline, I further presumed that Barry Town EMS had notice of the increase in the rental rate from the fire department while in advance of submitting the service contract to the town for review and approval. Regarding their request to increase the per capita rates in the service contract, Barry Town EMS apparently relies on provisions that allow for such increases in the event of extraordinary unforeseeable circumstances. In such circumstances is an increase in Berlin volunteer fire department rates by more than 15%, I thought it was 3% in there. However, under the timeline set forth above the October 2020 increase cannot be said to be either extraordinary or unforeseen as the increase was known at the time to Barry Town EMS prior to its submittal of the proposed service to the contract for the town under such circumstances, Barry Town EMS cannot rely on misprovision as a rational to increase their rate. My understanding of the timeline of events here is correct or there are other circumstances at play that have not been brought to the town's attention and may need to revisit the issue. Otherwise the town should resist any requested increase in rates for any reasons articulated by Barry Town EMS. So I just, I know we've had a discussion about that. So I guess we really just needed to see where the board stood. Have you had further discussions with Ron regarding this event? No, I just thought so. Just that. Of course, Paul, it's unhappy to have on that. Chris, Paul, he said he'd be here in about four minutes. You know, my position hasn't changed on it. Yep. They signed the contract. I mean, this pretty well lays out the timeline. All right. I've been here. And that's why I had asked him to ask her off and see, you know, where it stood from his perspective. He feels the same, obviously. There's a brilliant opinion change there. So do we want to move on or do we want to wait for Chris to get in here and explain it to him? I think it's beneficial to hear Chris and what he wants to discuss.  He'd be pulling in in four minutes. And then do the board. I was going to say, we don't have a lot left. Usually there's a public comment at the end of a meeting, too. We could give him that opportunity to talk to us. It's not on here, but I think it was just messed in here. We can always come back to it. But I would move on with the licenses and permits. Plus we have also, we had to add the Fisher Room Scoping Survey, which we added at the beginning of the day. So Ben, can you explain that? Fisher Road? Yes. Yes. Thank you. You should have a notice of award in there as well. That is just looking for the, I'm looking for the authorization to sign it since I'm a designated person on that from the board. And then basically the breakdown on the cost of Fisher Road that came up, our loan amount, first, we were approved by the voters for $1.4 million. And you should have a page in there with this information on it as well, with my notes on it. The loan amount that we have is $1,063,200. So the total cost of the project is $1,399,412, which means the town has to fill the $336,212 gap. Diane has worked on those funds and she has reserves of totaling roughly $496,997 to cover that amount from the reserves and the structure fund. Which would include FY22. Correct. Reserves. Leaving a balance in the 22 structure fund of $159,885. Again, that's in the, you have those numbers. I know that's what we're talking about. Is that a special fund for highways? We have a reserve that was, I think, that's in there for $96,000. Then we were planning on carrying over $150,000 from FY21 to FY22. And the balance would be what we have budgeted in FY22 for structures. How much were we initially intended to visit $336,000? No, $265,000. I think it was $265,800. It was going to be what we were going to be putting in, the cost of the condo. But we're still under the 1.4. Well, this is without any project contingencies, right? Right. Right. That's concerning. At the limit, there's these contingencies. But the 1.4 would be borrowing. See if we can borrow them. We're not going to borrow them. We're going to borrow them at $63,000. OK. And if, so, under the project contingencies, if there's a problem and we need to borrow more, can we, or once we? Not from that. This particular area. I'm not sure what we could do, but we might be able to get, like, a loan through a bank. But I'm not exactly certain on that. They're always the same. Always. So I think we should probably find out from Rob. Well, take 10% right here on your $5,000. Pretty close to that. Right. There's a lot of structures. Yeah. Right. I suggest not spending any of that for a while. Well, that's it. That's my other one. Yeah. So this probably wasn't that. So we need a motion to allow VINCE to sign one. Yeah. Notice of award to Du Bois, or the whole better, $83,900. I make a motion to have Vince Conte sign the notice of award to Du Bois construction in the amount of $839,900. I second that motion. Any discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Motion carries. I apologize. I allowed you to get that. We're looking at the scoping, initially. But the last agenda. You moved on to the scope. Yeah. We also needed a motion for him to do it. It's going to face up them. I thought you were going to yell at me. I probably will, yeah. I'll bring the scoping up to the ground. But we have to make a motion to authorize you to sign it. So that's what I was looking for a motion on. What do you say? Please follow along. Make a motion. Yeah. I make a motion to authorize Vince Conte to sign the project commitment form, the scoping of Fisher Road. Second. Any discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Well, approval of license permits, vouchers, and applications. I make the motion to approve the license permit vouchers. And in payroll warrant 22-03 from payroll from July 18, 2021 to July 31, 2021, paid on August 4, 2021, in the amount of $51,071.07. And payable warrant 22-GO2 with checks 21-317 to 21-345 in the amount of $81,493.75. So good. All right, thanks. Any discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Motion carries. We did review the public contract already. Thanks, John. I'll be efficient. I see that. Round table. So, Chris, we had a quick board discussion here. Let me switch forward because I can't be behind me. Yep. So I guess we want to take a moment and have a round table discussion with you and hear what you had to say about the increase to the flanger position. We'll go from there. So we've been at the Berlin Fire Station for more than my time here. The rate increases every cycle as it goes. This past cycle, the previous cycle, they talked about increasing this increase last year. They did it about halfway through our fiscal year. So talking to the chief and the president, they agreed to hold it off for a year because we had already budgeted for the year. So they put it in for this year. And so that's why we're talking about now versus earlier. The increases historically have been about 2% to 2.5%. So that's what we budgeted for. And so then I get the contract from them this year with that rate increase, which they talked about last year. So I see the full numbers. I put it in with our budget. I talked to the town manager and the slank board. And they bring out the provision of the Berlin Town EMS contract. Let's make sure I get the Berlin and Berlin. The Berlin Town contract has the provision where if there's large increases in something or decreases in revenues, there's an avenue to talk about the per capita rate. I talked to the interim town administrator here. We tried to get it done before. So we're going to do this kind of handover on Vince. Is that who you guys? I am. I'm Chris. We've back two times. I haven't seen him. I tried to get it done before. He got here, but I wasn't able to. There's everything going on. And we kind of talked and said, rather than just say, here's what we expect to pay every year. And we increase it when we budget every year. We're just going to throw the whole thing on Berlin. It was the interim town manager, Tom. So Tom and I talked, and Tom mentioned this idea. What about splitting it 50-50? And I thought that was a pretty fair arrangement. So I did the math out, talked to Tom, and wasn't able to get it in writing. I'm going to get it all the way down through till he left and had been started. That's what got us to here. That's kind of how we ended up in this 50-50 split. It doesn't necessarily look like a 50-50 split perfectly because every year I based it on what we expect. So this year is 50-50 based on what we budget and what the extra cost would be. Next year is we pay 2% more and then split the 50-50 and then the third year. So that's why you notice the price I gave you kind of went down each year. And that's the reason for that. I think that's kind of the follow-up we got here. So I think the board's perspective on that was slightly different. The way we perceived it, knowing that you had new renewal rate prior to the new contract that we just signed was that the renewal rate, whatever percentage increase that would trigger in the contract was based on being in the middle of the contract. So if in the middle of one of our contracts they decided to increase over that it would trigger that so that you guys could do it. Our perception was that when we received that RFD from you for the services that you already knew that that's what your rates were going to go up to. So we figured that was what was faster than that. That's the board's perception. So we didn't, I don't think we want to split it. Justin, were you aware of any conversation between Tom and anyone on the- There were some emails that went back and forth but there was never any real in-depth discussion on it. But I don't remember, it was after, I don't remember the time frame. I don't think it was prior, I don't recall. What do you remember the time frame was, you know? I'd have to look at when that would take place. I believe it was after we had signed the contract review for the new one. And I do know that one of the things that Joe had worked on was making sure that the rental agreement with Berrytown EMS went coincided with the town contract now because it was off a little bit. So I thought everybody was on the same page and I apologize for your misunderstanding. Yeah, and I can bring it back to the town board but one of the things I think they'll notice is that in the previous purling contract the same language was there. The same language is in our previous EMS one of the view and the post EMS one, so I'm sure how that. We're not debating that. What we're saying is the way that the timeline went out that you knew your police was there was about the $1,550 a month. So we were under the impression that that was built into the new RFP because we were already home. Gotcha. And so therefore with speaking to our town council it was also their perception that given that timeline that that would be reasonable understanding and even the contract that we should not just vote. And my, just outside my personal opinion which I probably shouldn't state necessarily is I think that $1,550 for the space that you have available in the purling corner is a little different. I think it's fair. It's available. One of the issues to recognize is that while that space is large the space we have that's ours is two, nine by 10 bedrooms and the rest is shared. So we don't have any space for, you know, while it's a large building there is an office space that the two of the people are gonna have to give other storage or supplies, things like that. So you're right, it is a very large building we get to kind of cruise in but the space that's ours to use is pretty. I understand the space that you have available. What was on the board prior this year? Joe, do you have anything you wanna add or say or? No, except that, you know, I mean, we're talking about space and shared space. I'm gonna say probably 90% of the time that shared space is very county and that's used, utilizes that. Joe, remind me what our utility cost is in that building for a year. The average for the last four years is just over here, $4,000. Yeah, just the utility cost. That's also including trash. Yep. Which is included in the very town, the MS lease agreement. How do you determine your per capita rate? And is it the same no matter what town you're serving or is it different depending on the town? I mean, I can give you very cursory ideas of that. In reality, I manage the contracts we have so the town manager would have an answer for that much better than I would. I can answer, the parts I can answer is that it is different for every town. Berlin's per capita rate is the lowest of the group that we have and the next one above high, sorry, the next reduced rate would be all of our other contract towns, all of those towns have the same rate and the town of Berlin, actually, the town of Barry pays more than, I can't say, I'll top my head. I wouldn't use any words to define the differences but that's kind of the case here. You don't know the formula though, it's not proximity to a hospital or anything like that. No, I don't know how they calculate that. That's between the town manager and the slide board when they present it to the town's. And so when you're also calculating your revenue, what you said, if revenues decrease, that's one of the things. Are you using non-emergency transfers? Yeah, our revenue is based on 901 emergency transfers, sorry, let's say, 901 non-emergency transfers and then any third-party things we get which could fall on their repairment intercepts nowadays, any kind of COVID money that comes in, whether it's grant money that was given out to the U.S. agencies and or some of their vaccine and testing clinics we've been doing, that's all calculated in those revenues. So are they, I noticed you're doing a vaccine clinic over there, have you talked to the fire department about it and they tried to do anything extra to utilize that extra space in the traffic, do they or how did that all come? They did not, so the current one, and I'll publicly apologize to the fire department that we did a clinic at the fire department Thursday-ish last week, the exact day last week and then we went scheduled tomorrow and we started doing our own vaccine clinics in the last four to six weeks prior to that, we were just assisting the state at their big clinics. And so in that, we were finally given our own vaccine and about a week and basically two to two and a half weeks ago we had a transition and then my person who leads it left for medical school so when everything transitioned to me, I kind of looked at some of the information and realized we had 95 doses that were gonna be thrown away as of the seventh of this week, their seventh of this month was Saturday I think. And so I talked to the state and said, are we allowed to just do our own clinics to try to get rid of these rather than, I'd rather throw away four doses and give one than have to throw out five and last minute came up with this idea of like, well, great, they said we can do them and the person that I asked to do it mentioned the idea of well, could we do one here and one in Berlin and with all this happening the last two weeks, I missed this and completely me did not reach out to them and asked for use of that space. I have no excuse for it and I have already talked to them and apologized for it. At this point we're done after tomorrow because we don't have any vaccines and moving forward if we did then we can fix that. No problem. Thank you, Chris. Chris, you're welcome. Appreciate it. What does that mean? Do you have anything for round table? Seems like you have a lot to say tonight. I do. No, I don't have anything for round table. Well, yes, I do have something about round table. I'm a little concerned when we, my family first moved to Berlin, we would see the police department daily through our neighborhood. We got about 300 walkers a week, more when it's nice out. And we just don't see them at all anymore. My sister's car was brushed. Someone hit my chickens. We don't even let the kids ride their bikes in the road anymore because the speed is just crazy through there. I've asked a couple of times to have the police department start patrolling and they're nowhere to be found. Well, yeah, I would be interested because we're not at the hotel anymore, right? Well, I'll let the chief into that. I think he still pays it some visits occasionally. Chief, would you like to speak to that? We had several calls for service regarding traffic enforcement, which we try to address whenever we can. We're still at an extremely high call volume. Our arrests are on par or just following behind Berry City. So given a police department that's half the size of Berry City and we're trailing Berry City and arrests, kind of shows us the level of intensity of that. I hear you, chief. I guess my concern comes from when I see Facebook posts about all the people we pull over for doing 15 miles an hour over on the Berry Beltline. We have 300 walkers walking across Berlin Pond on hills with blind corners and no patrol. I think the average speed on Berlin Pond in that circle is comparatively higher, I think, than the 15 miles an hour that you guys are pulling people over for on Berry Beltline where there's, I would say, less risk to pedestrians. It's just concerning knowing the number of people that are there. We're lowering the speed limit. We're trying to do our part, but if we're not actively patrolling, people are gonna continue to do the same speed. I understand you guys have a lot of calls and I certainly wouldn't want their job. I think they do a great job. All I'm asking for is that this is a high traffic area that's not getting any service right now and I'd really like them to start patrolling again. Is that part of a normal routine? It used to be. But is it now?  During the daytime, it would depend.  So I myself have gone out there and have not observed a whole lot of traffic. It's difficult for me to justify expending officers' time there when there's other stuff that needs to be addressed as well. So the only thing that I can suggest is that we start to monitor traffic to see if there's any patterns there and we can do that by putting our speed enforcement card out there or speed enforcement sign out there so we can track when the speeding is occurring and how frequently it's occurring so that we can better utilize officers' time addressing when it should be up. I think that would be great. I think earlier, Vince mentioned something about 350 approximately. Cars go across Brookfield Road every day, 310 per day. Average. It's a fair number of cars when you consider the number of walkers.  Not just from speeders, but just from the blind corners themselves. So I think the select board's trying to do their part by lowering the speed limit, but a little bit of enforcement will certainly make people recognize that they need to slow down. I'm not asking for all the time, I'm just asking for a little bit more. So does it make sense then that we try to put a speed sign out there to monitor what we... Yeah, that'd be a great first step. I think that would be ideal. Thank you, Chief. That was it for me. Thank you. Brad, anything? No. Before you do that, what's the state's policy going to be on closing or stopping the voucher system for the hotel? I don't know yet. I think you're so much left to be determined. I think there's a lot of information that comes out in October that I'm really anxious to hear more of where we're headed with stuff. I think there's a big amount of COVID money that is going to be distributed and stuff like that. I know I posted it, I think I talked to Vince at the Ampract Gathering, and I think there's a million dollars in the next couple of years that's going to be with Northfield and Burling, and I think that's divided up per capita. And where Northfield will get more is because of the university. That part of there will help us with that. But it seems like with this American Rescue Plan I've got our first thing there, it looks like that could be ongoing and sure, some money may not be able to be used for a certain thing that you're trying to do, like some of these bridges and stuff like that or COVID's, whatever you want to say. I know I get a tremendous amount of input calls on Lovers Lane Bridge in West Burlin or Riverton, whatever you want to say. I mean, I feel like I'm on the Burlin Select Board.  Which by the way, this is fun to hear again too. I mean, I do miss it, but yes, miss it. Do you know at the top of your head about what percentage of the ARPA funds the legislature's expended or appropriated? I haven't been on top of it that much at John. I know it's a different committee, so you have your own stuff in judiciary. I couldn't remember off the top of my head, so I wasn't sure if you knew. If I come back for a third term, I'd like to be on those money committees. I'm not against lawyers or any of that stuff there, but I happen to deal with this guy before, too, in Northfield, but I enjoy working with the money committees a lot more. So, but anyway, I appreciate, I miss this stuff. This is good, this gets right back to the community. What's going on with everything you guys do or all of you do, and it's great to see you and really appreciate what you all do. I think to read between the lines there, he's saying these are the boards that get stuff done. Just kidding, representative, go side. Thanks, Mr. Friend. Enjoy the rest of your night. Thank you. I would like to spend some more time around Berlin and how that COVID is hopefully taking a break and maybe disappearing and get out and about more. It's good to see people move in again. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Appreciate you. Appreciate you. See ya. You're going on a second discussion, right? Yes. Howdy here. Entertain a motion at the executive session. So moved. Second. I can call with my water a little bit sometime, right? Yep. Any discussion? Is that a priority list? The only favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Where you by.


my onlinejobs.ph interview and secret techniques. Hey guys, JR Fisher here. Welcome to my channel. There's a big subscribe button down there. Don't forget to hit that and also click the bell next to it. Turn on all notifications so you're part of the VIP Fisher family. You get notified every time I do a video or I go live. Now the other day I was contacted by onlinejobs.ph and I've been using them for a long time. I've hired a lot of people there and they asked me to do an interview so I went ahead and did it and I'd like to share that interview with you. Now keep in mind I've been selling online since 2009 and I've sold millions of dollars of both digital and physical products and the one thing I think really helped me was having some really good assistance and if you're thinking about hiring somebody on one of these other sites, whether it's Elance or Odask or whatever the heck it is, I gotta tell you onlinejobs.ph is probably one of the best sites to use if you have need for a full time person. I'm talking 20 hours or more a week. Now we've hired a lot of people on onlinejobs.ph so I really like them and this interview is me and their marketing director. So what I wanna do is just go to the interview, let you listen to the interview, it gives you a lot of the tips and techniques that I use so that you can get good results too. So don't forget also I do have a $97 course that's below all you gotta do is click and learn, it's a free course, you wanna grab that. I also have a link to onlinejobs.ph where you can get some discounts. So if you're gonna sign up for an account with onlinejobs.ph, you're gonna wanna use that link below here, don't just go directly to the site, use my link below. All right, thank you so much. Let's go ahead and jump in the interview and I'll be back with you in just a few. So I'm sure that things are booming for you right now. Oh my God, it's like six figure days. Wow. I had Shark Tank call me the other day, they wanted me on the show there. I've had my college newspaper interview me and write an article on me. Hey, it's Sarane from onlinejobs.ph here for John Jonas. And today we are really excited to have JR Fisher with us. How's it going JR? It is going amazing. It's a little strange because of the pandemic but outside of that it's going pretty well. Glad to hear it, glad to hear it. JR is the CEO of Survival Cave Food. He's also an author and an educator and produces incredible amounts of content at JRFisherTrading.com and on his YouTube channel. I honestly, when I was learning more about you that just blew my mind. How much content you're able to pump out, especially the free content. Tell us a little bit about your business and what you do and what you're here to teach us. Sure, actually it's JRFisher.com not JR Fisher Training. My YouTube channel is JR Fisher Training. I actually got started selling online. I started with cell phone cases first and I did a failed edit. I was miserable. I didn't make any money whatsoever. And then I moved into camping equipment and then some guy called me one day and he said he had the survival food. He wanted me to sell this freeze dried food and I'm like, yeah, I'll sell anything. It didn't matter to me. So I started selling that and we did really well and there were some world events where sales really increased. We were doing like 4,000 a month then 20,000 then 60 and we got up to like 80,000 a month. And I thought, wow, this is great. And I went in and quit my job. I was in the automotive industry. Got a little tiny warehouse and then a few weeks they stopped shipping to my customers and I was on eBay and I had like 300 listings on eBay and we were still going out to like gun shows and selling at gun shows and all that. We were leaving one day for a trip to North Carolina and we were in Virginia at the time. And I looked down at my phone and I had no listings on eBay. And I'm like, how can I have no listings? So I contacted them and they were like, yeah, we also took $20,000 out of your account because you're not shipping on time and we've removed all your listings. And I was like, wow, and I didn't have a job. So I was like, what do I do now? And I decided that since that company couldn't ship anymore, they got overloaded. They just literally couldn't ship. They were taking my money but they wouldn't ship anything to my customers. So I said, well, maybe I'll come up with my own product line. So I came up with the idea of a survival cave. I had survival cave as my website and I just added the word food to it. So I go to the survival cave food because I was just selling camping equipment and then moved into that. And I found a company to manufacture it. And then I thought, well, it'll be really easy. I can just put up a website and people will buy my stuff. And I didn't know anything about SEO. I didn't know anything about traffic. I didn't know anything, but this is like 2010. And so nobody came to the site, nobody bought it. And I'm sitting in my office one day going, well, I got a problem. Because all these other sites, they have all this traffic and all these people go in there and I've got nothing.  I'm like, what if my product was on their site? What if I could get them to sell my stuff because they already have traffic. So I got on the phone and I made, I don't know, 200 phone calls and I sent out a few thousand emails and I got zero results. But I came in the next day and did the same thing. And then finally got a couple sites and then I got a couple more. And now if you Google survival cave food, you'll find it on literally millions of spots right now. I think it was about 23 million results for survival cave food. So I actually got them to sell my product. And which is pretty much true today, about 85% of our sales are through other websites. We've had them on everything from Sears and Walmart and I mean, all kinds of different sites, camping sites. And then to take a little bit further down the road, I had a lot of people start saying, well, you make money online. How did you do it? So I started helping some friends and family members. And one day somebody says, why don't you charge for that? I'm charged for what? And they were like, charge to teach people. I'm like, I don't know anything about teaching people. And they're like, yeah, yeah, make a course. So the people at Cliff Bank got together with me and Cliff Bank is an affiliate marketplace. And I put a course together called Digital Cash Academy where taught people how to sell stuff online. That went off pretty well. We ended up doing like six figures in 72 hours on that course. And then I came out with another course on Facebook ads, which is Facebook ads university. And I came up with web cash Academy, which is a course where I was actually teaching businesses local here in San Diego when we filmed that. Then I came up with Ecom Road, which is another course. Then I came up with email earning systems. And then I started doing coaching and then YouTube channel.  And I use all my jobs.ph because that's the only way I can do any of this stuff. Matter of fact, right after I had talked to you yesterday, I guess through email, I was talking to my, I don't know, I just call them team members. I don't call them VAs or anything like that. Cause I think we all kind of work together. You know, I don't look at them as they're an employee and I'm the boss cause that's like silly because he knows stuff I don't know and I know stuff he doesn't know and it just kind of works out. I use online jobs.ph. I've been using them for several years and I've gotten great results. And I couldn't have grown my business without it. Seriously, and I have people in other countries that I don't use online jobs.ph for but online jobs.ph, it's a whole lot easier for me to verify what I've got in advance. You know, if I go to one of these other job sites I'm not going to give them any credit by saying who they are. But if I went to one of those sites, you don't really know because they're not vetted the way they are on online jobs.ph. It's a whole different thing. And on online jobs.ph, they worry about what their rating is. So they act a little bit different, you know? With the other sites, they worry but not so much. It's not that big of a deal, you know? So yeah, that's my whole story in a nutshell. No, that's great. That's great. And we're going to go into detail a little bit more in a minute with how you work with your VAs, how you manage them, how you train them. I've got some questions for you though about your business. So I knew this to seem when I was reviewing some of your content and you just shared with me that you were a single bad when we were putting this together. Do you mind talking about that a little bit? Oh yeah, no, that was nightmare. But yeah, it worked out just like this. And how you're working from home and creating this and experiencing failure. Well, I would tell you I'm literally excited over failure now because I've never had a failure or a problem where it didn't turn into something even better.  It's amazing, you know, like when I got a divorce, I got both my kids, I'm like, oh my God, this is terrible. And it really turned out great because I spent a lot of time with them. We have a great relationship now. One lives in Florida now and I live in San Diego and one lives in Wise, Virginia and he's finished in his school there. And I talked to him every single day, they're like my best friends. And I don't think that relationship would have been there like that had I've had a wife around, you know? And then the funny thing is as they were growing up, I finally met at work my wife who I've been with now for 10 years and she's great and she gets along with them and she works in my business. So, you know, failures are just awesome.  And I'll give you a real quick example. I was going to one of my warehouses in Ohio a few years back and I have my car parked in the street. My wife's car is parked in the driveway and we're gonna take her car and we walk outside and her car's gone. And I looked at her and I said, well, your car's stolen, let's take my car. And she says, how do you know it's stolen? I said, because it ain't there. It's really pretty simple. And she's like, are you sure? I said, oh no, I'm sure. She's like, well, this is terrible. I said, no, it's great. She goes, oh, how do you figure it's great? I had like 15,000 miles on it. I mean, this is probably brand new. I said, I don't know yet, but when I get back, we'll figure it out and it'll be great. And sure enough, when I got back, we talked to the insurance company and they gave us way more than what the car was worth and we got her a much nicer car and it all worked out. And I'm like, see, see, there you go. When you run into obstacles, and I think some of the biggest examples are people like Elon Musk.  That's an opportunity. And I was in the automotive industry and the executives at the big companies never looked at it that way. They were like, no, that's competition. We don't want that.  And I know I bought their stock at $167 and I think yesterday it was $750.  If I could grab a 25-year-old now and go listen to me, really, problems are awesome. It's like the huge opportunity, like the pandemic right now, big opportunity for a lot of people. I mean, our courses on how to make money at home right now are doing great. I mean, that's a big opportunity for us. My survival food, obviously, doing great. So any time there's a problem, somewhere in there, there's an opportunity. So that's kind of how I look at it, you know? So good. So good. I read something a couple of months ago that said after the breakdown comes the breakthrough. Yeah. So I love to find that theme over and over because I think that we discount that a lot, especially in business, that we think of failures as defeat versus opportunity. So, yeah, I always love to hear other people's reflection on that and see how it affected you and your business. So how many students do you have right now if you were to just guess in your various teaching courses? Thousands and thousands and thousands. Yeah, I don't, I couldn't even guess that. We've sold so many courses and I've done coaching. I was literally doing coaching for businesses for a while but it took up a lot of my time. But I was charging $2,000 an hour. I had a billion dollar company that was paying me to teach them how to do marketing online. And it's so funny because when I started my business and I told everybody I was gonna sell stuff online, they were like, you can't type. You know, you don't know how to send an email. Are you insane? I'm like, no, I know, but I figure I could learn some of it. They're like, no, you don't know anything about technology. You know nothing. This is not for you. And that was literally the response I got from everybody. I remember having a neighbor come over to my house because she was helping me with my kids one time when I was at work.  I was selling online and they were in my laundry room. And she looked at all the stuff. She goes, what are you doing? I said, I'm trying to sell stuff on eBay. And she's like, no, you're never gonna be able to do that. So it's funny now when somebody pays me two grand an hour to, you know, get advice. I'm like, that's so funny. I still can't type, by the way. I have not gotten good at that. You can't force that. You can't force that. But what I did figure out is, you know, nowadays, it doesn't matter what you wanna know. If you wanna know how to do heart surgery, you could go to YouTube and pull up videos on heart surgery. And there you may not be authorized to do it. You could learn how to do heart surgery. There's nothing you can't learn online. Nothing. MIT has free courses online. You can literally go through their curriculum. And I just did a video on this where you can go through their entire college curriculum and learn it all online for free. I mean, and just watch. I mean, it's the same. So what's your favorite thing to teach?  I don't think it's a thing. I think it's a result. I think if I can teach somebody that they can make money from their laptop at a Starbucks and quit their job and be able to spend time with their friends and family and travel, which one day we'll be allowed to do again. And, you know, actually go out to a dinner they want and wear the clothes they want and drive the car they want and live where they want. That's the thing for me. So it doesn't matter which direction we go with that if it's a digital product or physical product. Once somebody realizes that they can make some money online, you can multiply it over and over and over again. And, you know, I remember the first time I sold something online, I made $10. And I came running into the living room when I was telling my kids and they were little at the time. I think they were like eight and 12. And I'm like, I just sold something online. They were like, really? How much did you make? I said, well, I sold $10. And they were like, really? I said, no, but you don't understand. If I did it once, I could do it again and again and again. And they were like, okay. They didn't get it at the time but because their allowance were more than that. But the point was I figured out that somebody actually sent me money through a computer. I thought that was really cool. That was amazing. That's the coolest thing in the world because I didn't grow up with computers. I'm like, for somebody to send me money online, it's insane. They don't even know me. So with the success, we're gonna, this is where we're gonna shift gears. Start talking about outsourcing. What is your personal favorite thing to do with the freedom that you create through outsourcing?  What's your favorite thing to do with your free time? Travel, really. I was in seven countries last year. I was on two cruises. I've been to, you know, Bangkok. I've been to all over Mexico, Caribbean. And the cool thing is no matter where I'm at, I can work. And I will, I wanna add one thing about outsourcing though because I know a lot of people, they say, well, I can do this so I don't need somebody else to do it. It's not a matter if you can do it. It's a matter of what you could do if you weren't doing it. So, you know, I can edit my videos. That's not a problem. But I have a video editor. And I have a video editor because number one, he's better at it. Okay, that's just hands down, he's better at it. But number two is it's really time consuming. And on online jobs.ph, you can hire somebody at a lower amount. Like, you know, I'm worth more than, you know, whatever per hour. You know, I know I can make two grand an hour. And if I can pay somebody less than what I'm worth, wouldn't it make sense to pay somebody? And I think that's the one thing people shy away from. And they go, well, gee, I don't wanna spend money on that. I could do that myself and save that money. You're not saving anything. Because if you're paying somebody less than what your hourly value is, and you gotta pick whatever that is, then you're making money. As long as you actually work with that time, if you just sit in your lounge chair and watch Netflix, of course not. But you've gotta get that in your head that if you're paying somebody to do something that is a lower value than what your hourly wage is or what you put on your hourly wage, it's a good investment. It really is.  I can't outsource. Hey, come up with some new courses for me. I guess I technically have somebody write some stuff, but the creativity part, you can't outsource. And if you're an entrepreneur, you should be creative in some form or fashion. If you're not, then you can't be an entrepreneur because you can't create anything. But if you've got that creative thing in your mind where you're thinking of ideas, you need to outsource. Absolutely. So who else? We know you've got a video editor working for you. How many various team members I like that that you just call team members? You don't refer to them as anything other than what you'd refer to your local workers. How many team members in the Philippines do you have working for you right now? And what do they do? Various things. I don't want to say the number, but various things. Everything from like social media. I'm not a social media person. I know how to do it, but I don't want to do it. So every day they post my videos or my pages on my groups. I have a couple of different groups. I have an inner circle that people pay monthly to be a member of. I have another one called the art of e-commerce success where people get access to through some of my courses. And they post in there for me the videos that I've done. So I have video editing. I have social media stuff. I have people who do more technical type things, the kind of boring stuff, but more technical types, things like working on websites and WordPress stuff. There's so many areas that you can outsource. And then I'll tell you, there's two ways to outsource and you gotta be really careful with this.  And that doesn't work. Number one, you can't manage what you don't know. That's a big thing I see people do. And they'll say, well, I'm gonna hire somebody to do SEO for me. And they don't know how to do SEO. So how are you gonna know if they did it right? So number one is you gotta learn whatever it is because you can't manage somebody. And on top of that, if you don't know it, you can't manage it because you can't tell them what you expect of them.  A lot of people will hire somebody on online jobs or any of these websites and they don't give them clear direction. And then they're upset because they didn't get the result they wanted. I'm like, well, you didn't tell them what to do. So if you don't know it, you can't manage it. And if you don't tell them, you can't expect anything. You know, you gotta just get what you get. So, you know, that's the one thing I tell you. And then the other outsourcing I do is for stuff I literally can't do. We have a Magento website and it's pretty high level programming type stuff. And I know essentially what needs to be done and I know how long it should take. So when I find somebody I trust, I have one person's been working for me for five years now. All they do is work on my Magento projects as I need them and it's really high level stuff. So that's the other type of person you're gonna hire. But even if you hire that type person and you don't know how to do it, you should at least know what it should pay and how long it should take. And, you know, the basics of it or you can't manage it. So I think that's the biggest problem is people hire people. They don't have to manage them because they haven't given them expectations. So I think that's a big thing. Establishing expectations. Yeah, yeah. So do you have any favorite tools that you use online to train or to manage your workers? Do you have systems in place that you share? First off, if it's on-screen type work that I expect somebody to be like entering in orders, okay? I have somebody right now entering in orders from one website to another website and it's pretty difficult to get it all right. I make a video of, you know, I have somebody in the office makes a video of that exact process. You click here and you do this. You click here, you do this. And then all those steps are written out on a sheet so that they can check off each one. Well, I did this, I did this, I did this. And we know how long it takes to enter an order. You know, how many minutes it takes. So literally we know, you know, that exact job. And then what I do is I use a thing called Cartra. Cartra is my online marketing software. I love it, I'm not giving a plug, but I would, they're really great people. They have a membership site in there where I put my courses in there where people pay for membership. But I also put my training videos in there. So like when somebody comes to workforce and I say, hey, I want you to do these jobs, here's the training videos. Cartra will monitor when they log in and how far into a video they watched. So I know if they went through the training or not. So it makes it really super easy for me to do that. So Cartra is a big, big thing I use. And Cartra is also email provider. They're also a sales page maker. They're also landing pages.  And I've been, and I don't wanna get too much on that, but I've been through a lot of different, you know, infusion solves and Awebbers and Mailchamps have constant contacts and it's way better than all those. So I give them a little plug every now and then just because they're good. That's great. Now we just wanna know what works and be able to share it with people so they can do it too. Would you mind running through what your system is, how you find the right people and how you hired the right person the first time? First off, it's a great site and it does a lot of the work for you because you don't have a lot of low-end people on there. If they're low-end people, they're gonna be rated as such and you're just not gonna look for them. The first thing is posting a job with specifics. I think that's really important. That way that people know what's expected of them. I think it's a real shame. A lot of times somebody will get hired and you'll say, well, I want a social media person. Okay, but what are they gonna do?  I say, I want you to work in Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and I want you to do this many posts today and I want you to edit this many videos and I want you to have experience in three months, six months, whatever it is and I want you to have a rating of this and I want you to have whatever level of proficiency of English, like some don't need a high level of proficiency of English, they just don't need it because they're not talking to people like mine don't. As long as they can communicate with me, I'm fine and also tell them what hours is to be expected of them. I personally don't care when they work. It doesn't matter to me. As long as the work gets done. So, you know, you've got to be cognizant of the fact that you're in different time zones and people can't always be at your beck and call, you know, at eight o'clock in the morning, Eastern time when it's not that time in the Philippines. Now, if you need somebody like that, let them know that upfront. So don't hire somebody and then say, hey, now I need you at eight o'clock in the morning. They'd be like, well, that's 3 a.m. here. I can't do that. I have two kids. All right, so once you do that and you do your job post, then I actively go out and I look in online jobs at PH and I try to find people that would match that and I send them an invitation for that particular job. And then I get all those people. I like to talk to them, my first meeting, I like to talk to them on camera where I can actually see them. I think that makes some kind of connection. You don't always have to do that afterwards. Like I talked to Billy all the time. I've talked to him several times a day and we never, you know, pull up the camera because, you know, we've been working together for almost a year. So yeah, we do that. We check them out.  Now I will tell you, there are dishonest people out there and I see it and I really hate it because I saw something with Instacart the other day with this really made me mad. But what they'll do is they'll find somebody and say, hey, do this task for me to see how good you're doing it and they have no intent of hiring somebody. They're just trying to get a free task done. That's like really wrong.  I saw this on Instacart the other day and that's the grocery delivery thing. Are you familiar with that? People were putting like a huge tip on the app and saying, hey, you know, go get my groceries. I'm gonna give you this huge tip and then once the groceries got delivered, they zeroed it out and they took away the thing. I was like, what kind of human being would do that? I was so angry, I actually posted it online and I was like, this, you know, there are A-holes out there. So anyhow, don't do that. Yeah, context of what we're living in right now. Yeah, I'm like, God knows. But anyhow, so give them a task and it's gonna take them 15 minutes or so. Don't give them a task, it's gonna take six hours. They don't have time to do free work for you. But I like to get an example of what they can do. And if they don't, if you don't do that even, ask them if they have examples. A lot of people who are video editors, they can say, well, here's the videos I've edited. Let me send those to you. And that's fine too, that works for me. I can kind of see what their skills are and what they did. I then like to have a really in-depth interview with them. And when I say in-depth, I let them know how I'm gonna deal with them and how they should deal with me. I let them know upfront that if they run into a problem, and this is when they are talking about the Filipino workers, if they run into a problem, they feel really bad about it.  Let them know that you're not perfect because you're not. I don't care who you are listening to because you're not perfect.  It's just something we gotta fix. Come to me, let me know, I'm here to help you.  And when you say stuff like that, you gotta really mean it. Like I know Billy and I know his wife and I know it's kid. And I mean, I literally know their family and I'll ask about them when I'm talking to them. And you should. And I did the same thing when I was in the automotive business because if people just say, oh yeah, yeah, I'm part of the family, but you don't even know who my family is. I mean, it sounds like BS. Also understand that, and can I get into how I manage them? Is that okay? So when you're managing them, I require that every day I get an email. And in that email, I'm very specific. I'm gonna say like, how many people joined this group? How many videos did you edit? You know, how many posts did you do? What are the posts that you did do? I never allow them to say, I'm working on this project. Working means nothing. It's only completed. What did you complete today? What did you get done today? You should be working every day, but working is not a task, okay? A task completed is a task completed. Did you post a video? Did you edit a video? Don't say I'm working on editing this video. Makes no sense. Also understand that they have different holidays. So you gotta be real aware of their holidays and you have to respect them. Just because in the U.S., maybe we try to work 70 hours a week or something, you can't expect somebody in another country to do the same thing that you would do. That's a big mistake.  Probably more than they should, I don't know. But I've never docked him for that because overall, if I don't, when he comes back, he's gonna work that much harder. So don't worry about every nickel and dime. I mean, you're getting a good deal anyhow when you're hiring somebody there. And that's another thing about getting a good deal.  Don't go, I wanna pay somebody a dollar an hour. I would say pay on the higher end. It's gonna do a couple of things.  You're already paying a little bit less than the US anyhow, but if you pay on the higher end, you're gonna get a much more loyal employee. And the next thing I would say like, and Billy's gonna see this, hey Billy, he's been with me for less than a year and he's already got two raises and some bonuses. So make sure that you give them raises. Don't set somebody like, I got somebody at $2 an hour and that's all I'm ever gonna pay. That's like the worst thing in the world because they don't see any future in it.  And if he's doing better, I'm gonna give him a bigger raise. Like I recently, I think a week or two ago, I gave him a raise and it was double the raise, what I told it, because he was doing a good job and he had screwed up a little bit before that, but hey what, everybody does. So make sure you're paying your people well and you're taking care of them specifically. They know what to do. If you change their duties from doing one thing to another, like he's working on SEO now and he didn't work on SEO before, but I got him a course on SEO so he could go through the course and learn how to do it so he could educate himself. I didn't just say, hey, you're gonna do SEO now because that's ridiculous, I don't know how to do it. You know, when he finished the course, that's when his raise went into effect. I'm like, when you finish this course, even if you haven't done anything yet, I'm gonna give you a raise just for getting them through the course. So little things like that matter so much. And then there's the 13th month which he's coming up on that. Understand that in the Philippines, after a year they get a month's salary, which is the way it is, okay? And that's accepted there. It may not be so in the US, but you're not hiring in the US, you know? You guys have a really good blog on there. And I went through it all before I started hiring there because I'm like, okay, how do I manage these people? I can tell, I can tell. You've got so much good stuff to share and it's coming from experience. I'm just, I'm loving that. Yeah, and it does matter. And you know, I'm very gentle with the way I talk to people in the Philippines, which I was in the automotive. This is in the US and I wasn't always gentle, but it's a different mindset. It's a different group of people. They're very family oriented.  And if you're expecting somebody to work six, seven days a week and not do that, then you're hiring from their own place. This is what I love because this is why I'm hearing from you is that your whole training management business relationship with these team members in the Philippines is based on trust, which is established by respecting their culture, paying them what they're worth and showing them that they are worth it to you, that they're adding value to your business, training them well and establishing your expectations so they can meet it. And then one of the biggest things I love is having that open relationship of come talk to me if you have an issue because you talk to anyone with experience. There's a cultural context in the Philippines where if they get embarrassed because they don't know how to do something, it overlaps with their desire to please and do good work for you and be motivated to be there for you that they will disappear on occasion and just there's no way to get in touch with them. They won't respond to emails and it all stems in that lack of trust. But if you've established that trust from the get go, like you're saying, you don't even have to worry about it. I mean, that's the number one thing that we see from our users, that the number one issue that gets run into and you just, I mean, that's how you prevent it. So it's so great to see that manifest in another context than in our personal experience. I, yeah, just thank you. Yeah, I knew that trust thing is a funny thing. I know on online jobs, it's got this like time watch. Literally, you could see when they were logged in, how long they were working and all that. And I never used it because I thought, wow, that's like, you know, someone looking over your shoulder because I gotta be honest with you, I don't work 100% of the time when I might work. So it's like, and it's like, if you've gotta use that to tell if somebody's working or not, that just screams, I don't trust you. I mean, that's what that says, I don't trust you. So I never wanted to use it for that reason because I want them to know I do trust them and I know they're not perfect. And I know sometimes maybe they're gonna take a two hour lunch and not be working. I know it, it's okay. So you know what? If I know it and they know it, they're gonna get the work done overall. And that's all I care about. It's, I don't want to monitor somebody's life. They work with me. They're not, I don't own them. You know, I just don't, you know? And if they know that I honestly genuinely care, which I do because they're humans, just like me, we're no different.  And you know, because somebody else wasn't, it doesn't make them any less than you. So it drives me nuts when people say, well, those people, there's no difference. Everybody's the side of you and care what your job is. Everybody's the same. And as soon as you realize that, you're gonna start treating people better. As soon as you treat people better, you get really good results. I mean, if you treat them really good and give them respect, you're just gonna get great results. So that's what I found that works the best is, you know, and I don't mean to be a pushover and let people never work. And I'm not saying that, but give them expectations and, you know, give them the freedom to do it. It's really that simple. Thank you. Thank you so much for your time and all of your insight. I mean, this has just been gold. Do you have anything else that you, any other advice or anything else you'd like to leave with us? Anything about your business? You know, I don't want to tell my business that it's a great channel, check it out, JR Fisher Training on YouTube or jrfisher.com. But I will tell you this, you know, when you think you're saving money by not hiring other people, or, you know, I know online jobs charges a fee a month, you know, it's well worth it. Because I mean, I think you guys are like 69 bucks or something like that.  How far do you think you're going to get not spending anything? You know, you look at the most successful people in the world, you know, whether it's a Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or whatever, they hire the best people they can frigging fine, man. The best people they can find. And if you just go out and hire people who are good at what they do and they free you up to actually run your business, it's like the best move in the world to do. And with online jobs, you can do it so inexpensively. And God, I really do recommend it. And I'm no BS.  But I mean, I really mean it. I really feel that. And if somebody else uses it and they watch this video and they get good results, all the better, you know, really it's good for the people in the Philippines. It's good for me here. And I know I'm doing it right because one of my VA's or employees called me there and they were like, hey, a lot of my friends lost their job because of the pandemic. You know, can you hire these people? You know, so he wanted to bring those people and come work for me and I couldn't. But, you know, the point was, he thought enough of our company to want to send his friends to us. You know, and I think that's a real compliment.   Well, thank you. Thank you for that. We feel that way too because we see it happen over and over and over but it's so great to be able to connect with, with faces and stories and really hear about it. So thank you for your time today. Thank you for sharing with us and we appreciate it so much. Oh, no problem whatsoever. Again, that was JR Fisher from JRFisher.com and also the CEO of Survival Cave Foods. If you wanna learn more about his business, you can head over there. If you wanna learn more about how to find success outsourcing to the Philippines like he did, we can help you out at onlinejobs.ph. Okay guys, so that's the end of the interview. I hope you enjoyed it. We covered a lot of information and I think if you put a lot of these techniques into place, you will have better results with the people you hire. It will be easier to manage them and you'll have a better relationship and that's what it's all about. We're all equal in the world, okay?  You're not better than that person. It doesn't work that way in the world. Without that person, you probably couldn't get to where you need to be and I know I really appreciate all the people that work with me and I say with me, not for me because we all work together to reach a common goal. Onlinejobs.ph is a great site to go to. I'm putting a link below there where you can get some discounts. If you wanna hire people on that site, I highly recommend it. I'm also putting a link below to a $97 course I have. It's absolutely free, no credit card required. All you have to do is click the link and learn, very simple. If you haven't subscribed yet, what are you waiting for? Seriously, you need to hit that button there. You need to hit that subscribe button and don't forget bell notifications. Don't forget to turn on all notifications. This is really important because if I do a video and you subscribe and you haven't turned on all notifications, you won't know. I mean, it could be sitting there for weeks and months and getting all dusty, right? And you don't see that video. When you get there, it's gonna be this big dusty video and you don't want that. You want the clean, shiny videos and the way you're gonna get the clean, shiny videos is you're going to turn on all notifications. Don't forget to do that. If you have any questions, put them below. Thank you so much for watching. Give me a thumbs up if you would and put your comments in the comments section down there if you have any questions about this. I'll see you in the next video.