I'm certain that a few more board members will be joining in the next few minutes, but there being a quorum present, I want to call to order this public hearing of the Chittenden solid waste district for the purpose of the presentation of the proposed FY23 preliminary budget. That budget was presented or accepted by the board at our November board meeting, and the purpose of this meeting is to give the public a chance to hear about the budget and ask questions, and we'll take questions from the public. I see that there's some unfamiliar names on my Zoom screen. I don't know if these are members of the public or here for other business, but at this point, Sarah, I'll just turn it over to you for a little guidance and walking us through this public hearing. Sure. Thank you. So as Paul mentioned, this is part of our charter requirements. We are required in our charter to present a preliminary budget to our board by December 1st. We did that in the November 2021 board meeting, and we are also required to hold a public hearing no later than January 31st. So that is what this meeting tonight is doing. It's fulfilling that obligation in our charter. The preliminary budget was included in the packet for tonight's meeting. We also included a more expanded view in the November board packet as well, and in my memo at the time in the November meeting, I did describe some of the potential impacts of the very high 2021, particularly towards the end of the year, going into 2022 consumer price index. So at that time in that memo to the board, I indicated that it is very likely that the budget that comes before you in April for approval to be disseminated to our members of cities and towns could look quite different. So we've already seen some of the areas where we will certainly be reviewing at the finance committee. And last night, the finance committee did meet and agreed to the schedule for the budget meetings, which will be in March this year. So staff is taking next several weeks to finalize their budgets, and then we will begin the finance committee review process in the first week of March. So because the CPI was so large, the largest that we've seen in over a decade, I did not do what has become our standard practice, which was to take the previous year's budget, apply a moderate CPI one and a half to two percent across all of the expenses and the revenues, consider that our preliminary budget with the knowledge that the actual draft budget would most likely look different. I did go in this time, and where I could apply some more realistic numbers, we did that. One of the areas that we did that in was for the Solve Waste Management, the estimate. And as the board will recall, we hired Lisa Spomets Associates about a year or two ago to develop a model for us to help us to more accurately predict what the Solve Waste Management fee revenue would be for any upcoming year. So that number is going to stay. That is not going to change because we did use that model. So again, looking back in the more detailed version that was presented to the board in November, that Solve Waste Management fee estimate is not looking to change. And the whole reason for presenting a preliminary budget in November by December 1 is to let our cities and towns know whether or not we intend as a district to assess any kind of a per capita fee, any municipal assessment. And again, in my memo in November, I said that we will not be doing that this year for this upcoming fiscal 23, so that our cities and towns had plenty of time to develop their budgets, and they would know that there was no need to account for any municipal assessment. We also recognized there's several finance committee meetings this past year, where we looked at, as again, the board may recall, we brought to a reserves policy and a new approach to distributing funds across our different reserves. And at the last finance committee, prior to this one in December, the committee decided that they would ask the staff to use the proposed procedure in the development of this budget. And then the committee would look at that, how that worked. Did it work well? Did not work well? Does the need to be any changes, but as part of the budget review process, in case the board is curious as to where that ended up. So that last finance committee meeting, that was decided at the December 14 meeting. So that is the approach there. And again, this is part of our, our moral process. So at this point, what we would do is open up to the members of the public who may have comments or questions. In general, there's in these public hearings, there's not back and forth. So it is our responsibility as a board to accept the comments and to take that into our deliberations as far as how we prepare the budget. And then to make sure that we're we're hearing from the public regarding any concerns or questions they may have. Thank you, Sarah. Again, I can see that there are many, we have good attendance and folks that I do not recognize as regular attendees at the meeting. Are there members of, if there are members of the public who wish to comment or ask a question, I invite you to do so now. If you have the ability to use the hands raise function on zoom, that's helpful. Otherwise, if I can't see you, then just go ahead and start talking. And if we have two people talking at one time, we'll we'll figure out a way to have an order and get both of all the questions posed to the to the board. Thank you. And Paul, there is also the chat feature. So if for some reason we're not seeing a hand raise, please do put the question in the chat and we can recognize it as well. So again, now is the time for members of the public to pose their question or make a comment. I am seeing and nor am I hearing any comments. So I believe then there are no members of the public willing, wishing to address the board. And I think our next action would be to entertain a motion to adjourn this meeting. Thank you. Do we have a second? Second, Jericho. Thank you. I would clarify that we are voting to close the public hearing. Thank you very much. This motion is to close the public hearing. And once it's closed, we'll move right into our regular board meeting. It's been moved and seconded to close the public hearing. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? The public hearing then is closed and we're ready to move on to the regular agenda of the Chittenden Solid Waste District. The first and we do have a quorum present. We'll proceed with this agenda. The first item on the agenda is the agenda itself. Are there any additions or changes to the agenda that board members would request? Seeing and hearing none, then the agenda will be approved as presented. The next item on the agenda, item number two is the public comment period. Are there any members of the public who would wish to address this regular board meeting? Hearing and seeing no members of the public wishing to address the board, we'll move on to item number three, which is the consent agenda, which consists of the minutes of the December 15, 2021 meeting, board meeting, program updates, executive director update. I did not notice the finance update, item 3.4 in the consent agenda. So that should be for the record, I think it should be stricken so that should the consent agenda be approved, we don't mistakenly look back and think that that item was approved. The last item in the consent agenda was the solid waste implementation plan inclusion. Are there any requests to remove something from the anything from the consent agenda? Hearing none, we will accept the consent agenda as presented and we can move on then to item number four, which is the solid waste management ordinance. That begins on page 23 of your board packet. This has been presented to us before, but I believe there's been some changes and at that point I'll turn it over to Sarah to bring that matter for us. Actually I would like to bring Josh Estee in, director of compliance and safety to address any of the changes in any correspondence that he has had through his department at this point and just to describe really what we're asking of the board tonight. Josh? Hi everyone. Yeah, so tonight really is requesting what this should be the full board's first time seeing the proposed changes in their totality. They've been presented to the executive board a couple of times at this point and so at this point all of the changes that are being proposed are being brought to the full board and the ask tonight is for you all to approve us as staff to go out for a 30-day public comment period for these proposed changes and what that really entails is us doing our normal outreach as far as publishing in a paper, putting on our website, doing our standard outreach as well as hosting a public meeting to solicit feedback on the proposed changes. The proposed changes have already been sent to our hauler community as those likely to be more impacted by some of the proposed changes so that that outreach process has started. We have not received any comments back so far from the hauling community so and then afterwards after the 30-day public comment period is up we will bring all the feedback back to you all and that'll be at the March board meeting and we'll have a we'll review all the the feedback that we've received as well as any changes that we've made to the proposed changes in light of that feedback and at that point we'll ask for the approval of the of the changes so that'll be at the March board meeting so tonight is just for public comment as Sarah mentioned the the few changes have been made since the last time they've been brought to you as I wrote my memo staff believes the the few changes that have been made are mostly clarifying in nature and not significant in nature which is why we didn't go back through another round of presenting to the exec board but certainly willing to answer any questions about those or any of the other proposed changes and then afterwards there is a board request at the end of the memo. Thank you Josh. Sarah do you have any other comments at this point or we're ready to open it up to see if the board members have any questions. I did open up. Invite board members then to raise your hand be recognized and ask your questions. Ed you know I was reviewing some of the additions and changes and 3.10 rental and multi-unit property requirements. I'm wondering if maybe you know I don't know about the requirements of this. I know in Burlington we have a lot of new Americans and we've been doing a lot of translation in a lot of our materials to get out to residents and I'm just wondering if some properties of that one to five unit you know if that may be a requirement because even in our recycling I went out on the truck the other night to help the guys out and notice some contamination and it's around you know some of the the properties like Franklin Square Northgate stuff like that. I just wonder if maybe some language like that could be added just to help out. I don't know what anybody else's thoughts are on that. I know it's helped us out a lot in like our snow bands and you know saving people toes if and stuff like that. Lee would you mind just explaining a little bit more what the language would be are you are you talking about actual actually having translations available to those to those who have been putting that Norman. Yeah so you know I could check with our our P&I department as well and see what kind of messaging they put out but we do have like our snow bands our our toll message we even have translators available for phone calls as well if people call in. I forget how many languages we are doing right now but it's I think it's around like five or six plus languages. I could send you what we do for our snow bands or maybe Rob Goulding our public communications manager can give me some examples and I can send them over to you. We do have some of our materials have been translated into five or six different languages I suppose several years ago but I'm not sure if we have had a chance to update those translations yet for any changes we've made so if I'm understanding the request Lee and maybe I'm I'm not hearing it clearly are you asking for us to put in the ordinance or to suggest in the ordinance for comment that the information be translated for the need of attendance. Yes okay as part of the requirements for the property owner. Gotcha thank you. Thank you. I second and I I support that request Winooski has at least seven different languages that we translate notices into so that it would be beneficial for our municipality as well. Thank you Brynne Leslie your hand was up. Yes I like the fact that Lee raises issue I think when the staff are doing public presentations it might be good to try to arrange some interpreters or translators to be present maybe if that's feasible for Burlington and Winooski where we know there are concentrations of English as a second language. I know that Michelle and her team have worked pretty extensively in the past in the past few years I don't think since COVID but I can double check with several of the new American groups working in in Burlington and in Winooski so we can definitely verify that and double check that and see if that's something that we want to make sure is updated so I really appreciate this comment. Yeah it's definitely an interesting thought and something that we can definitely consider as as for what the language might be in there you know I can only speculate at this point but it's definitely worth having the conversation thank you Lee appreciate that. Other comments or questions yes Logan. Just tagging on it I heard in my colleagues comments you know Burlington and Winooski in particular but there are a number of sort of new American communities in other towns so if we're going to do this I think we should make it a uniform practice across towns and member municipalities and not just limited to the two. Thanks. Absolutely thank you for the opportunity to clarify we the resources that we've we've worked with happen to be in Burlington and Winooski but the materials are available for anyone who may use them so we could also do additional outreach just to make sure that we're not missing you know some some communities that may have happened to subtle you know enrichment for example that fall outside of kind of the known the known group of folks that we're working with so we will certainly expand that that outreach thank you. Thank you Brynn. Thanks I'm looking at the definition and use of the term compostables and CSWD's recent policy change for Green Mountain compost and the inclusion of foodware products just maybe want to walk through your thoughts on keeping that in here obviously it gets into the some of the nuances of the management of those materials but it might be beneficial. Yeah that's that's a great point Brynn I will I will knock that around with with some members of staff I know these these changes were sort of initiated quite quite some time ago certainly before we had this compostable ban you know I think it's certainly worth considering whether we want to take that out of the language but the only thought that I'm thinking of is if at some point in the future you know we do want to start accepting the materials again you know we whether we want to leave that in just on the opportunity that we do want to start incorporating again you know something changes as far as the certification process goes that you know just leaving it open but certainly worthwhile to have that conversation to see if we want to omit that piece of the definition. Certainly I see it as we wanted you know our goals are to divert as much material as possible while also ensuring the integrity of the systems that help divert those materials and with a new facility online to manage package you know packaging materials I don't know if it's worth having a new definition or intending maybe not this round but in a very near future adding some additional language to capture that and to differentiate it. Yeah I will say that we we already do have another running list going of the next round of changes of course so if it if it doesn't make it on this one we'll certainly you know tag it onto the list for for the next round. And then the other thought I had at the moment on kind of refreshing my memory on what's here. When was the last time the penalty amounts were revisited? Those were updated actually the last time we went through the changes so those have just recently been updated to mimic the state's penalty amount so they went up from I'm not looking at it right now but I think from 500 to 800 dollars I want to say for maximum penalty and and that just happened in the last round of changes which I believe was in 2018. Okay all right thank you. Thank you. Other discussion from board members on the solid waste management ordinance. Oops I think yeah okay switching screens sorry. Yeah sorry the the ordinance specifies the solid waste management fee at 27 dollars a ton. Do we need some language in there which says this may be adjusted from time to time and you know and we'll be posted on our website and notified to haulers or something I mean it just seems odd that you know we don't change our ordinance that often. I just a question. Yeah and I I'm actually going to turn to Paul Stabler or Alan Nye as for some of the history but from what I understand regarding the history of having the solid waste management fee in the ordinance is actually specifically for that reason Leslie and that was put in many many years ago I believe at the request of the haulers so that there would be a very public process when and if we do need to change the solid waste management fee but I don't know if Alan or Paul if you have any additional information or a different recollection but that was my understanding that it was that that is exactly the point was to go through a very formal process. First I want to remember you're right on Sarah you know before we can change it we got to you know make a change to the to the ordinance and it needs to you know go through the same process. Lynn Fox was asking. Somebody has is speaking without mute their mute button on double check that you're muted thank you and I was just kind of confirm what Alan said I believe that is indeed the history in the case there regarding the fee. So that doesn't mean that we we need to keep that in place if that is something that the board would like to consider because Leslie you're exactly right it is definitely a process as you know but that was the intention if there's some other mechanism you know that we want to consider we can't. Well I think it's I don't know if this is the right time and place but it might be a topic for discussion at some point down the road. Josh said they're already working on yet more changes so they're you know there may be another opportunity to just think about that as a policy but I certainly respect Alan and Paul Saber's perspective on it but it might be worth looking into and having a discussion sometime in the future. You know it was I don't know seven eight years ago I mean that was when the ordinance was getting approved that was one of the biggest items and we had a bunch of holler management board meetings with respect to it and I would speak very highly of keeping the same process there because it did stir up the stir up the holler community pretty pretty significant. So going back to the rental language in 3.10 I feel like it's just confusing to use and or in ordinance language for all the renter multi-unit properties responsibility for the collection so waste recyclables and or food residuals I think it should just be and okay. Josh do you recall if there was a specific rationale for and or I don't unless it's is it tied to the contract so it says responsibility for collection shall be demonstrated through a contract so was the perhaps the or to allow for backyard composting for drop off I wonder if that was yeah I do think that was the reason that the ownership would be attributed to either the owner of the renter for each of those three materials in the contract and then if it wasn't spoken to in the contract then the as it says in there the owner of the activity would be then responsible and the and the reason we are being deliberately flexible in that language it was brought up from our business outreach coordinator because we do have so many of these different circumstances for these multi-unit properties if you think of a strip mall you know some of them are just you know clothing storefronts versus restaurants versus fast food locations dry cleaners and and they certainly talking about residential properties I mean this is intended for a residential setting not commercial well this so that no the yeah the and or applies to that the second sentence for all other rental and multi-unit properties so it's it's all others except for the five plus residential unit properties so my apologies so I can I confuse that the situation so that second sentence is as Josh said just for businesses so not residential commercial properties is it possible to just break that out so we can differentiate rental from residential rental from commercial rental yeah we could do like a three point one out a and b because it could it just kind of and then it goes on to talk about the department of health rental housing code so it's kind of going from one topic to another and back again yeah we you know you've you've sort of unearthed the the the section that we've been struggling with significantly just because there is you know all these different circumstances that that we that we're trying to account for I we certainly can do a little more massaging of the language and and try to clarify further I do see Janine has her hand up Janine's been integral and part of this process and all along so and she's also helped craft some of this language so Janine if you want to tag in that'd be helpful yeah no I think you covered it well and that you know this has been a challenging there's a lot in that section not only with regard to the types of properties but also the different facets of of collection versus everything else that we're trying to cover so we can work on it for some more one of the things we struggle with we're seeing a lot of these kind of mixed juice properties right where they have the commercial on the first floor but the upper three floors are residential and so there's a little bit of the mix in there but we can we'll work on a little bit more and see if we can make it clear yeah I just I've never I I have read a lot of regulations and policies and I haven't ever seen an and or used so whatever you need to do to clean that up in particular would be great yeah I do think I do think that was we were trying to apply to those situations where yeah maybe there was a contract that covered trash and recycling but they were dealing with food scraps on site or something like that um so but we'll we'll work on it sounds good other board commentary questions or suggestions I'm hearing none I'll move it move moving forward the board action requested is to approve the recommended changes there is a resolution that appears on page 24 of our board packet are we ready for for action on that resolution so Paul the the resolution is to allow us to initiate the 30 day comment period so so this may still change so I want to be clear that everyone's aware of that most likely you know based on certainly these comments we've heard tonight but any additional comments we may receive what you've seen here will most likely change so what we're asking for is to permit us to initiate the 30 day public hearing public comment period but this is what you're just to reinterpret it this is not the final we're not finalizing this we're not approving a final document tonight we're only further further the process Leslie your hand is up I'm just moving the resolution thank you do we have a second for the resolution it should be read out please yep I can I can read it for you Paul you're welcome attendance solid waste district's board of commissioners hereby resolves to permit district staff to initiate a 30 day public comment period seeking feedback on proposed amendments to the solid waste management ordinance as presented at this meeting on January 26 2022 thank you Leslie I would presume your your moving of this motion would stand do we have a second this is Logan from Richmond I'll second that thank you Logan it's been moved and seconded to pass this resolution I won't read it again or characterize it but there's a further discussion on the resolution I'm hearing none we can do a voice vote on this I believe all those in favor please signify by saying hi are there any opposed please say nay any abstentions the the motion carries thank you all I I do have to hop off but I do appreciate the conversation thank you very much Josh the next item on the agenda is item number five which begins on page 67 of your board packet before we get to that I just want to make a couple of introductory comments that as usual the process I'd like to follow is for Sarah and our invited consultants to make their presentation and after that presentation then open it up to board members for them to ask their questions I want to note that Sarah did ask in sending out the board packet for board members to submit questions in writing several did and and there were numerous questions and good questions but I want to just remind all board members that doesn't preclude you from asking questions at this meeting as well and I also want to state that I'll follow try to my best to follow the usual practice of allowing each member to ask an initial question and then go around the board and give every member a chance to ask a question before we go back to a board member and allowing them to ask subsequent questions that's I think very helpful for all our board members and we want to encourage as much member participation as possible also want to note that this is a two-part presentation this is the first part tonight really in second part next month if there are questions that are raised tonight that cannot be quickly or adequately answered there is time to have them researched and answered at the next meeting or if a question comes up after the meeting you'll have the opportunity this is a very important topic we don't want to close off any any questions or the opportunity to get them answered finally I just want to point out there is no action intended to be taken tonight this is informational there will be the opportunity well we will be taking action on it either at the February meeting or perhaps at the March meeting that that would be the intent my last request is as this opens sorry as you open it up with their members from from scs here when they begin to speak if they could just identify themselves for the benefit of all board members so we know who it is that's talking thank you that's my long-winded intro I will now turn it over to you sarah well you gave all the information that I was going to give so well done thank you I appreciate that um yes this is uh yeah again part of the just hopefully getting towards the decision-making point for the conversation about the MRF that we've been having often on more on lately than off since 2017 so this has been something that we've been talking about as a board as a district for quite some time about the need so tonight we do have our consultants from scs engineers who we engaged to do two two things for us to run a very high level cost benefit analysis which is what you have in your packet tonight and then next month we will be bringing the second part which is a revenue sufficiency for the model so just do I think you're going to do a very brief description um and show some some images of kind of the current MRF uh an overview google earth view and then the location of the new potentially the new MRF should the board decide to approve that because we do have some new board members and I want to make sure that everyone kind of has a picture in their their mind of what we're talking about so we'll turn it over to josh and then josh will introduce our folks from scs all right okay um hopefully everybody can see where i'm starting at here yell if you can't um so this as paul and sarah mentioned is you know the first step or the first presentation in a two-part series for the economic analysis of a new materials recovery facility for uh the chinsald waste district this will go over the cost benefit analysis the way to work is i'll just give a real brief introduction just to get anybody who needs to be refreshed of what our existing MRF looks like where we are proposing a green field kind of go over the cost benefit options and then i'll hand it over to the scs team um let them introduce themselves when the scs presentation's over we did receive about 21 26 questions um from board members so i absolutely appreciate that that gave us a chance to react to them um we will walk through those questions at the end of the scs presentation so that all submitted questions will be addressed um again i i can't thank you guys enough for doing that that's really helpful for us to really kind of articulate our points and then after that we'll open it up to other questions if you do have a questions as paul had indicated um if you can't write it down throw it in the chat um so just you know because there's going to be a lot of information presented um and it may be you know forthcoming that what you're thinking will be answered coming up so with all that said i'm just going to walk us through the basics of kind of where our new our existing facility is now so the existing MRF is located in williston um it's in the industrial section off of uh industrial drive um here's just the basic site map it's plopped over here by the kasella waste management transfer station and baker commodities the existing footprint is about three acres we've built as much as we can onto that three acres we are surrounded by on two sides other um other businesses baker commodities kasella waste management um transfer station um on the right in this picture we also have a municipal road and then kind of on the top of the picture it's a significant drop off and it's a privately owned land but we can't build it drops about 65 feet down so we are confined we can't expand the actual footprint of the building um to give an overall view um it is a production is it a high level production facility um the 54 000 square feet that's the rough area of our tip floor um that is where we bring the material into the facility in the event the facility goes down we have about a day and a half two days of storage in the building but that also comes with um managing what comes into our facilities things from out of district will bypass us and go to the other facility in the state our processing floor is about 12 000 square feet in the existing facility and our bale storage that's the commodities we sell out on the open market that area is about 3 500 square feet as we've mentioned in previous discussions these are identified as undersized for the amount of material we push through we've had a great run in this facility it's been a powerhouse I commend our our operating partners they've done a great job in marketing this material but when it comes to kind of expanding or planning for the future these are the constraints that we're talking about and there's a lot more nuance and detail i'm just going over the the larger larger picture things um now when we propose in the cost benefit analysis the greenfield site this little red star right here is where we're proposing our greenfield site the district's own the district owns this land um it's off of redmond road it's near our composting facility it's still in williston kind of zooming in on it this has been identified as a very viable spot to build it's roughly five acres for a facility we also have approach space to bring in vehicles off the road so it's got a lot of adequate spacing um it's will be inlaid right next to the uh the approach road you see there above it and that goes to a velco laydown space we have been in communication with velco and they're exceptionally friendly um to to this concept here is just a super rough rendition of what it might look like in a greenfield setting um the along the top that's redmond road it's kind of flipped from what i just showed you this would be redmond road the idea is a longer approach space to get vehicles off the road um and then we would have our facility kind of up against that access road um this is a rough rendition when we did our initial assessment in 2019 2018 2019 um zooming in on that you know the concept of this is that we would have 12,500 square feet of tipping floor that would give us roughly five days of downtime in the event that something went wrong um we would have 30,000 square feet to process um and that really goes hand in hand with the technology we're looking at because you need long runs to run optical sorters efficiently and get the the best value out of them uh also the tip the bale storage area is about 12,000 square feet um almost three and a half times larger than what we have now and that allows for variability and transportation which we've also seen and we have had to in our existing facility store material outside um containers can be stored outside fiber it's a really bad idea so this allows us to hold um to make sure that we meet all of our f o f o b commitments um the white area has been identified as a place for expansion in the event that you know whatever tonnages we land on on an annual basis that are coming into facility if we exceed capacity um say in 20 years this facility will have room to expand which we identify as a is a great option because if we had that now if I wouldn't be having this conversation so that's kind of the basics on the concepts between the two um and then I'm showing these are the actual scenarios so the status quo is using the existing facility I originally showed you and kind of just running it as is um it is dated a lot of the um equipment it needs to be upgraded but this would be kind of as it breaks fix it that's the concept um that is currently run at 40 000 tons annually into the facility which is what we used as our starting point for our model but as I showed you there's no room to expand so when we talk about expansion we can exceed 48 000 tons in the retrofit or I'm sorry in the status quo in the retrofit same confined configuration we feel like we could squeeze another 2000 tons and hit maybe 50 000 tons but it really would be taking what we have putting new equipment in we wouldn't get all the equipment we want we wouldn't be able to sort um to the level and purity that we would like to hit um we would just take the material we have now and clean it as best we could with the room we have to clean it um there wouldn't be certain redundancies built into the retrofit and then the greenfield there's three greenfield options and the reason we chose three is because we wanted to look at the inbound tonnage um 35 000 tons per year uh in the first greenfield option that would be to construct on the the space that I just showed you and it would be in the event that we didn't get any out of district tons so that would be literally servicing chitin in county um you know with potentially flow control but that was kind of what we feel chitin in county can generate 40 000 tons would be if we initiated flow control and then aggressively pursued tons besides the one we're seeing now and then 50 000 would be if we actually start at the existing state we are currently at which is roughly 48 000 tons um to 50 000 tons and then all three of the greenfields do have an inflator assuming that we would see over the 25 year 30 year life of this project an increase in tonnage while the status quo and the retrofit do not so that's kind of the basic rundown um from here I'm going to get out of my share mode and I will hand it over to Vita Quinn and Kellan and Robert and if you guys want to introduce yourselves go for it and I'll stop talking hi I'm Vita Quinn director of management services for SDS um I took the lead on this project with me here um Kellan Modlin is going to give a brief kind of overview of the analysis that we did and then Bob Gardner who I'll let him introduce himself really weighed in as a technical advisor to understand the scenarios and the feasibility of all of the potential MRF scenarios. Bob you want to go ahead? Sure I'm Bob Gardner I'm a senior vice president with SDS engineers I oversee SDS's solid waste practice nationwide and I was kind of brought into kind of a reality check relative to some of the assumptions that were being made regarding operation and maintenance of the facility and sizing of the facility so I was kind of the fly on the wall to look at and kind of bounce against and see if things made sense or not. Great thanks Bob um so as Vita said I'm Kellan Modlin I am a financial management analyst with SDS engineers and I'm going to go ahead and start our presentation all right and let me know if everyone is not able to see. We're good to go. Good to go all right great be even better if I could forward my slides there we go okay my apologies all right that's the team we've already introduced ourselves so we go through a process when we do our cost-benefit analysis um understanding the key issues of your specific municipality your specific district um develop the scenarios I'm not going to spend too much time on those Josh did a great job explaining the scenarios that we ran and then we analyzed that we took that over a 30-year arc for this particular analysis we looked at that both annually and cumulatively and I will show you how how that played out and then in the end we determined what are going to be your optimal scenarios or optimal scenario um I think the goal of this in the end is for feedback to know how which scenarios you want us to dive into deeper in our revenue sufficiency analysis instead of taking all of those scenarios through this process take the ones that you're most interested in and make that comparison so the issues with the existing mirf and staying in in in the current facility is a lot of limitations the capacity limitation the processing limitation and currently what we're hearing is there's also difficulty in staffing that and that staffing issue is not being offset by technology that's available to make the process more efficient so the goal of this analysis in evaluating these other scenarios is comparing that status to what your goals are of being able to grow uh being able to get cleaner bails so that you can demand a higher market price for your recyclables and using that automation to offset that labor demand that's that's creating some some difficulties so scenario one is what josh referred to as the do nothing scenario so that's the status quo that is continuing to operate exactly where you are and exactly how you are for comparison purposes we did put in labor to where it should be fully operated that way all scenarios were equally matched and we're comparing apples to apples the benefit to this is that there's no upfront capital investment you do have some aging infrastructure some aging equipment that over time as josh said when it breaks you fix it when it breaks you repair it so you know that equipment becomes more expensive over time to maintain but you don't have that large upfront capital expenditure but you're still going to look at all of those limitations you've maxed out the amount of tonnage that you can process and there's a lot of efficiencies that are lost because currently all of those recyclables are having to be manually sorted twice in order to get the lower quality bales that you currently are producing in your mirf the retrofit is taking that existing scenario and adding the technology doing what we can to move the current scenario in in the direction of being more efficient it has the lowest capital investment of the any of the other scenarios other than the do nothing obviously because you're not building from scratch it's not a greenfield scenario but you're still seeing the exact same limitations that you're seeing on your status quo you still don't have the room to process more tonnage you still have bales being stored outside you're still struggled to have the correct amount of labor to do your sorting and it limits your ability to introduce that automation and so there your quality still remains at that lower dollar amount then we look into scenarios three through five are the three greenfield scenarios they are very similar in that they're new construction from the new site that that josh just showed us but the capacities are different so we looked at 35,000 40,000 and 50,000 tons per year is the processing capacity of these new facilities these the new building has the ability to grow it has reduced overtime reduced labor demand and you'll have cleaner bales of recycles recyclables you won't have the outdoor storage you'll be able to demand that higher market price for the recyclables produced but these also come at the expense of the highest capital investment because they are that greenfield from from scratch construction so we compare short-term benefits and long-term payoff in our analysis the the first slide you're seeing here is the annualized net revenue and you can see that the do nothing the status quo option which is the gray line on your screen it very very quickly tapers off and actually ends up producing negative negative returns in those out years it becomes more expensive to operate and in these scenarios the 50k or 50,000 tons per year shows to be the most profitable the bumps you're seeing are anticipated capital improvements for that equipment we know that equipment and technology doesn't last forever so the way we kind of normalize that is to have a fund set up where it's being contributed to annually and then in the years that that equipment is needing to be replaced or updated or maintained it's being spent so trying to keep that playing field as smooth as possible cumulatively we see the same where that 50,000 tons per year option is still your most beneficial option and that your status quo option ends up negative in those in those out years and you can kind of see the in the middle options kind of play around there for a few years and taper off your retrofit being the next least desirable scenario to the status quo so we take that information and we're looking at those next steps in our decision making your decision making which is to to look at those scenarios and decide which of those scenarios are scenarios you want to delve deeper where we do a full revenue sufficiency analysis on those scenarios I think ideally Josh and Sarah would like to hear about two of the scenarios that that are the kind of the the top two but over the life of the facility looking at that 30 years out because this facility is going to be with your community into the future and we want to make sure that it's financially healthy and fiscally the most beneficial so you invest here at the onset to have the payoff over those 30 years of being more successful mirth so the next step is that comprehensive revenue sufficiency analysis of the scenarios that the committee here would like to see and via I will hand the microphone back to you okay so I apologize I have tried to move my camera around since the last time I met with you all I have been struck by middle age and now I have to wear glasses and I realize that you can't really see my face so I apologize I think that this is where Josh wanted to maybe bring up some of the questions that we've received and we can start to address them also I'll say that I am a consultant at heart which means that if you let this go I will talk into infinity so feel free to interrupt at any point should you have any questions that you feel like we're not addressing adequately and Kellan if you could stop these please share and then Josh can pull up our questions so we can see it okay this over can everybody see that oh no you probably can't hold on I'll put it over there okay can everybody see that hey other questions thank you yeah there's those questions all right so you know at this point I'm just going to jump right into them I see Kelton added one so we'll address that at the end of this but question number one in the appendix recycling capacities of status quo and retrofit options are shown as 48 000 tons per year and 50 000 tons per year respectively comparable or equal to the capacity of the largest greenfield 50 000 tons per year why so when the main text describes the status quo and retrofit options as capacity limited and as indicated we're calling them capacity limited because at the starting point the greenfield 50 000 the retro 50 000 and the status quo 48 000 is where we're starting in day one but as you extended over a 25 30 year period the retrofit and the status quo don't gain more tons because they don't have room to gain more tons where all the greenfields we anticipated growing tons now the 50 000 ton per year greenfield we anticipated over a 30 year period would probably get to about 60 000 tons just because we've educated our community very well we have a high rate of recycling so it would probably be tracking more with either different commodities coming online or more production of say like a polypropylene plastic and then also population growth and anybody else jump in if you need to comment in page three of the main text SES engineers recommend running additional financial projections the appendix schedule two shows an assuming CPI of 1.73 percent and an M annual escalator of 3 percent a labor cost escalating at 5 percent and a bond interested two I would recommend running additional projections at a higher assumed bond rate and possibly a higher assumed CPI and that would be what the revenue sufficiency which will bring to you next month will really dig into it will play it will we're recommending to pick one or two or a couple of these options and then that revenue sufficiency will take the deeper dive and really test the sensitivities on these things over the 30 year period. I'll just jump in there as well the CPI isn't being used in the analysis currently it is sort of a sounding board really it shows us how relevant our anticipated revenue growth projections would be in terms of cost increases and other things we were just comparing that it's not actually being used in the calculations in the model that you saw as far as the interest rates for the borrowing I could understand the concern because if we were very close in some of our projections there might be some sensitivity to those interest rates even in this high level analysis however I will say that as we're not cash funding we're bond funding everything in the difference then in the scenarios it's only that delta in the debt service with the difference in interest rates your interest rates for borrowing would have to be astronomical to make even a visible change really in that graph so it doesn't affect the outcomes in this scenario when we're just using current market rates current CPI understandings to just look at sort of all other things constant let's run this forward and see what the most financially viable scenarios would be but that interest rate will not affect the outcome of this model question number three the main text describes the two largest greenfield options as including two balers each at what percentage of full capacity would each option operate if one of the two balers was out of operation also for all option considers what assumptions have been made about baler downtime and just to reiterate the retrofit in the status quo would only have one baler and that's kind of why we're raising the red flag because we've had that baler go down and we've had to move tons to different facilities through to be honest our operators network of MRFs in New England which was not cheap but we had to do it because we couldn't stop our recycling program in Chittenden County in northern Vermont the green fields the 35,000 ton would have one baler with the potential to increase as tons come in because we'll have building room for expansion the 40,000 and the 50,000 ton options those both have two balers with full redundancy and when I say full redundancy it means that as we sort our materials we could send them to either baler so if one needs to be down to work we can work on it and send it to the other one the other thing we've kind of I wanted to point out is that we only do have two days of downtime in our existing facility retrofit or not and so if anything does break and the baler is probably one of the most important parts of the MRF we're in big trouble you know we're losing significant amounts of money to get to make sure that the material gets sent somewhere else to be processed this new MRF will be built in with at least five days of storage which will give us a full week and also the commodity so you know you take the material in and then you sort it and you put it somewhere well the existing MRF where you put it is really small those those areas are still designed for a 20,000 ton MRF so even when those you know you can't fill those up those fill up really fast this new MRF once you sort and put them in bunker space is what we call them those are me much bigger so we could take in that five days but we could still process and store materials to bail in the event that both balers you know we lost redundancy so that's another reason you know for you know optimizing and using a green field question for CSWB transitions to a more automated facility how to CSWB prevent layoffs of existing employees especially sorters we don't we don't have there are employees but in the transition from the existing facility to the new facility in a greenfield option we would be taking those sorters with us and one of the things to point out is that the existing facility is running at about 18 sorters shy of what the design is we have a positions for 18 people on our fiber line we're running one person there and that's an artifact of an older facility designed when labor wasn't as expensive as it is now so that's another risk we're carrying with our existing facility if somebody was to say we don't want your fiber anymore well then we'd either have to hire up to 18 people to clean it to the level we needed to get it out which was originally designed or we'd have to start paying to get rid of our fiber so that's you know pointing that out which is what we are looking to solve with adding technology and that's really one of the bigger differences and we're and we're using that level of sorters to compare them to each other so we're looking at the existing facility as it was designed to be run so that we can compare it to a newer facility as it's designed to be run so with all that said with the technology and the fact that we are at full capacity in our existing facility we would be going from hand sorting to qaqc which is a much more desirable which is a less difficult job than actual hand sorting so we would we would just transition the bulk of those employees to a more qc related sorting option a larger facility would give a question or comment or five a larger facility would give csw more flexibility to process new materials that are not currently considered recyclable it would give us the opportunity to put technology on our fiber line which is roughly 30 to 32 percent of the material we send out of our facility and try to extract a higher value out of that fiber line and also to clean it to a value where we would open flexibility to send it to different mills potentially we do know that there's a mill in vermont that has requested our material but where we're at they can't process what we make and that would be a great synergy if we could send it to the largest employer in windham county and transportation would be much more robust because we wouldn't be going around you know the eastern seaboard that's one thing another thing we could do is we can focus on particular container products so one of the things we want to focus on is pp or polypropylene that's a plastic resin number five that has been identified as one of the more environmentally conscious plastics to generate and we're seeing it start to increase in our inbound stream we currently are handpicking that an optical sorter and there's certain things we're missing right so tubs can be certain containers can be a number five and are hard to identify as they're zipping across the line where an optical sorter would be able to pull us out so we could focus that on a higher value product and that's the flexibility we can also with more room take lower volume lower value products and store them so we get a load one of the problems we have with 55 gallon drums which is a rigid plastic is we don't have any room to store them so we can't really expand a program into that but if we did we could also provide that service you know like for instance an autumn harp we work with them and they generate a lot of 55 gallon drums so we would be able to provide that they're not very high value it's literally a break even but we could do that you know to we could expand that potential process question number six could cardboard based and paper based material leaving the new recycling facility be used as a feedstock for future production of biochar that is an extremely interesting concept right now it's outside of kind of our mission of what we're going to get our recycled commodities to the recycled market as far as those two commodities go and I'm not against the thought or at least vetting it but in this particular venue I think it would require more conversation outside of this discussion I also see it because we've looked at you know the potential of biochar which has an extensive amount of uses it would require some significant capital outside of the capital for the mirth we're proposing so it would be maybe more of a long-term goal to hit and again I'm more than willing to have that discussion because I think it does have a place especially with some of the solids that would be land applied land applied around the state um question seven the proposed 2003 district budget shows a net income of 2.8 million the base case of scs model shows a net income of 1.4 million the revenue assumptions are within 5% the expense assumption in the scs model are 50% higher than the proposed budget um and what and correct me for wrong killing and we're assuming that there's 18 more people working at the status quo which then is roughly equates to a million more dollars in cost which then decreases the net revenue by a million dollars and that was in order to compare again each design capacities to each other um and that again we were we're talking risk mitigation you know with having that minimized amount of staffing we do run the risk of our commodity not are having difficulty marketing we haven't had difficulty our marketing partners to sell a waste have done a great job it's moving it's good but if you look at it over a 30 year period from whenever it is we decided to make a decision we're that's rolling the dice in my opinion um I just want to um comment a little bit on that as well so as far as you're not having difficulty moving fiber we're also receiving a lower than um average revenue on our fiber so when we look at and compare the average commodity revenue for certain products our fiber acr is lower than the region and we're talking region northeast so it's it will be an opportunity to be able to recover a higher quality and as you said potentially be able to also sell much much more locally um and to support the mill down in Wyndham but you know we we're while we're not having trouble uh moving the material it is definitely not at the the higher use um going out of the the door that it could be and we are realizing lower revenue at the moment um so again uh question eight SES uh base case model assumes a head count of 43 the current staffing is approximately 27 that's because we we we looked at it based on the design criteria of the of the facility tip fee of 80 there's no discussion on the rate relative to the mercs and the northeast and well this is a good point um we will dive into more of this in um I think the revenue sufficiency because we recognize that you know as tell and showed we you know our net revenues will are looking very strong and we recognize you know it's market based but also tip fee based and so we'll address that in the revenue sufficiency we'll check the sensitivities on that and where we need to break even that you know we need to pay our bills but we also don't need to make a profit and so we will adjust that um in through through the revenue sufficiency process and again you know we're we're looking at this is a current snapshot current moment in time so we're using the current information um you know we're we're trying to again compare current operations current operations as designed and then what would be new current operations as designed we you know I think Josh you and I recognize the tip fee is not going to be $80 a ton for the next 30 years but you know enable in order to be able to model apples to apples that's where we landed same thing well we did do some sensitivity though on the acr and the average commodity revenue between the different scenarios and we can um we'll make sure that you mentioned that going down there too yeah actually great great segue thank you question 10 the sks model assumes I just thought I should weigh in a little bit on that as well it's you know the the question while it seems reasonable to ask about what other people are charging it besides not really being relevant to the analysis here it doesn't really tell you anything so I say think of it like your life if you could buy a house for $200,000 here or for $100,000 an hour away it isn't necessarily necessarily comparing apples to apples it could have something to do with the market in different areas and it could also have to do with the condition of that home improvements um you know things like that so think the same thing about the MRF it may very well be that you have someone who's able to charge a lower fee but we're dealing with a facility that hasn't been upgraded or maintained properly that may be desperately in need of repairs and as we are looking at a snapshot that only tells you what they're charging right now you know when it gets to be so far that they it does trigger the need for them to put additional capital investment into that facility that fee could change dramatically so what we really need to focus on kind of what Josh was talking about is what is your cost of service and while we can compare that to other facilities it isn't a driver for understanding your particular needs thank you if we have questions on your responses Josh do you want us to hold those to the end or can we you know you you respond to each of these questions but I didn't understand one of your responses so if you just you know when you just flip on to the next then we have this gap Leslie I want to manage this Leslie are you able to access the chat feature yes I did and I put a question in there but now I have another question a question on one of Josh's answers which made no sense to me I couldn't understand his answer Paul how would you like to to proceed Paul you're on you Paul you're muted my apologies with 46 questions we have a long way to go but I'm very sensitive to Leslie's concern that we can step over something how to manage of a long list if we can ask a quick qualifying question sorry clarifying question see if that suffices I'd prefer to go that route but I'm gonna have to kind of step in and see how it goes but Leslie I gotta appreciate what you're saying can you go identify the question that was asked and the answer that you're not clear on and right for clarification and thank you Paul and Sarah and everybody for allowing me to interject but I did not this is for about question seven and eight or essentially have the same issue in common and I absolutely did not understand Josh's answer it made no sense to me so if we right now we're running our current facility with 27 people right correct so why all of a sudden do we up that to 43 we might not even have physical space for 43 people in the current facility so I I absolutely don't understand your answer and then we do that's what Josh was saying is that the design of the current facility is designed for that headcount of 43 and that's where the additional 18 staffers that they they don't currently have on the fiber line would be they would all be in the fiber room right now visually one and sometimes two usually one employee manning that fiber line because we're not focusing on the quality of the fiber we're able to move it kind of as is but it does not allow us to access additional markets whereas if we were fully staffed per the design parameters we could probably access different markets so that's that's what we're trying to again you know what is the the full design capacity of both the current MRF the existing one today and future MRFs that we're we're presenting in my scenarios well that I'm sorry you know I'm sorry to have to ask a follow yet another follow-up question because part of this modeling has an important presumption about the increased quality resulting from the greenfield scenarios now you're telling me we could have increased quality if we increased our staffing in the current facility so I'm having you know well the increase in increased staffing obviously is increased costs right and that's that's the point that you're increasing costs in order to increase your revenue in the in the new scenarios we're increasing our capital costs in order to increase our revenues so we've got there's a problem in this modeling here Kelly I think we're talking about two different subjects so we are modeling this scenario with the facility as it is and what what the revenues would be there's not a different answer this is just saying that to maximize what they can do there that we would need to add additional staffing I I'm not sure I understand the question essentially we took the current facility and entered the staff members for the design of that facility which would have increased staff of course if you're operating on a skeleton crew that is working an incredible amount of overtime your quality is going to suffer for that but even if they bring that headcount which has has been something that was discussed as a difficulty in in your guise scenario even if you bring that headcount you're still going to run up against the capacity and other restrictions that are also impacting your quality the duplication of the sorting the size of your tip floor those things aren't going to be impacted so you're still running up against those things that are decreasing the potential quality of those recyclables and the amount you can get when you take those to market I'm going to step in here and reflect on some comments that I've seen some of the board members made have made and I think that that may be helpful because and I'm going to read off Logan Logan's comment he would love to see the responses written out seeing the questions and hearing the replies is tough to follow reflect on and consider especially given the number of questions to work through I'm going to propose that that we follow that with this list of 40 odd questions work them through and distribute them to board members and for the remaining time that we have tonight for discussion to open it up to verbal questions from board members that perhaps wouldn't those questions might be not quite as deep and technical but still might be very helpful for the broad range of of our board members and their understanding if that is acceptable to the board that that's what I propose we do sorry do you have a reaction to that I'll give you first crack no no I think that's that's oh go ahead Josh we have a we were about to brush on question 10 which was an incredibly important question which might might give some insight to just kind of how the model went as far as the low medium high acr concept and then after that I step away but I think it is important to clarify that and then if that's amenable to you I'll give you I'll grant you that um but I hope you can give it clarify it for us and then move on thank you yep um so in our model we had the acr revenues and we had them at a low medium and high we marked the do nothing approach as low we marked the retrofit as medium and we remarked the green fields as high and it was driven by pga the cost to manage and move process glass aggregate so in our existing facility we have no real room to expand um and so we manage roughly 60 600 tons of pga a year um we currently pay $15 a ton to manage it to go out to a quarry there is only one quarry that takes it in vermont there's only one outlet in vermont I just checked um our costs to manage it just went from five dollars a ton to 15 dollars a ton the only other outlet we can find in new england is in massachusetts and their cost is 130 a ton so when I budget our existing facility glass management is budgeted at roughly between 150 and 175 thousand dollars and that's because we do have to send some material to massachusetts every year now with our existing footprint I we've got some solutions to that to get um a clean product without the influence of weather which would require more you know more of a footprint to work in um but I don't see that happening in the existing mirf or a retrofit so based on that statement it's up to a ten dollar loss actually it's up to a 12 50 dollar 12 dollar 50 cent loss in our acr if you factor in glass management if we can't add technology to what we have now um so that was one of the driving forces on that um if we stick with what we're doing that's why I have it roughly 15 dollars lower than the highest and 10 dollars lower than the medium so does that is that helpful for the group um because that is that is a very volatile that I make it worse my sense is we're getting deep technical questions and technical answers that that you're losing you're losing me yeah I suspect I'm losing other board members uh and I would like to bring it back perhaps to a higher level um discussion and question so I'm going to open it up to the full board um uh and ask um folks for questions starting out perhaps as I would like at a higher level I personally have one question but I want to get um give other board members first crack at it so uh Kelton your hand is up yeah so I put up a message in the chat and I'm just curious if we can go through all the questions that are going to be answered at a later time we're not going through those again so the rest of that list just we're not duplicating and you know doing it doing the asking the same questions twice I'd like to see what other people have already asked yeah Kelton I responded that yes we would we'll send them a result okay I would say if we could do it now that when people don't ask the same questions hear this discussion right here it was my thought we could just read through them all real quick not having answered them but at least read through them is your question my the audio is a little tough Kelton I think what you're asking is to just display the questions yeah or even just read through each question really quick so we know at least what will be addressed when you send out that document with the answers but I'm not asking those exact same questions right now because I don't know what other commissions have submitted I'm not sure I I think I'm going to disagree with you I'd rather just let board members ask their questions and if those questions happen to be on the list of 46 that would be realized down the road but I but I think we need to engage the full board now I don't think we have 46 questions I think it was 20 21 plus what is winding up in the chat sorry I thought I'd heard 46 earlier it's my mistake I don't want to freak people out so a lot of questions but right but not that many and I'm going to take that I've got my response Stan Kelton I'm sensitive to it but I'd like to give the board members a chance to to ask their questions verbally if they happen to also appear on that written list so be it we'll we'll understand that later I I don't want to be the first to take a crack at it but I'm not seeing any hands so I'm going to ask my first very high level question on the on the scenarios I'm confused as to why if we're currently operating I think I've heard between 40,000 and 48,000 tons per year in the current MRF why do we have several scenarios that are modeled at at lower than that capacity would reference are we intentionally could we intentionally say we are not going to process as much material is that what's going on that's my question yeah I know the away several months back we were asked some time last year to to model the tons that are just Chittenden County tons so we took that as our our base level of material um and we have a a relatively good assumption that 35,000 is that this level because we know that currently you're receiving about 15 to 18,000 tons from out of district from from a whole host of different haulers because cello is required to bring 13,000 tons of material from out of district per the current contract but if for some reason we were just focusing on Chittenden County and the question was and this was actually quite some time ago could a Chittenden County only MRF survive and be profitable and be worth the investment so we that's kind of the the base level of the material that is produced in Chittenden County that we know we could as Josh said if we needed to flow it to this material through regulation flow control that's what we would anticipate being able to being able to be receiving in the door so we're you know again as the model showed you don't think that would would be the best use of the capital dollars I think you know we would certainly want to maximize that that amount so we're looking at the between 1450,000 and keep in mind too you know when we say 50,000 that's the design design capacity it's standard in the industry to sort of push beyond that design capacity so we already would build in room if we designed a 50,000 ton a year facility that's built in additional capacity to reach 55 60,000 tons a year we wouldn't want to design for a 60 or 65,000 because we wouldn't want to over design and it's just more money up front and there's not that need to over design so you design for what we know we have with that that additional wiggle room for additional material. Did I explain it Paul? It does and just to hear 35 40,000 is a mid-range number I believe I understood what you said and what we're seeing here through the consultants is that financially using all of the assumptions that still have to be probed that it would appear that the larger facility capacity of 50,000 tons yields the best long-term return on our investment. Thank you. Ken you've got a question you're muted Ken. There we go sorry a couple questions for the experts about this is very exciting you know to think about a high tech mirf thank you guys for all the information. I'm curious about how this process works that we get bails that are valued less I'm curious about the process are somehow is somehow each bail sort of analyzed for content do we have is it that we have a bad reputation or that there's some objective measure for this pricing and is it also does it make sense I'm curious about the 30-year projection you know right now we have I think a 20-year-old mirf does it make sense to think that whatever we create now is going to be lasting for 30 years and the technology won't change greatly or the the items that need to be recycled might not change greatly in fact might not be much larger like 60,000 or 70,000 I mean who knows so those it's kind of a combined question but that's what I was thinking about. Thank you so the current mirf was built in 1993 so it's it's already nearly 30 years old so we are definitely anything that we would do if we would do a green field that would be the minimum life expectancy that we would want it to have you you want to build so that it's got maximum flexibility to be able to stay in that same footprint the same building and then just either again whether it's retrofit inside but we in a model here for the current facility or can you build on and that's what Josh was showing us at the beginning was in the green field option there would be the ability to if we wanted to extend the building out in a couple of different directions so we would already be in the design phase building in the capacity to expand should the tonnages grow certainly by you know leaves and bounds we would want to be able to have that flexibility and that's what we would sign in the current mirf is as he said hemmed in so there's not that ability to expand the footprint where in a green field we would be so we absolutely would be looking to maximize that that construction investment 30 years is the minimum you know you want to get as much out of that as possible so as far as the lower quality fails you know it's not that we don't we don't have a bad reputation it's that we're not able to take advantage of the of additional markets so for example right now you know our mixed paper and Josh you should probably be jumping on this interaction is just all mixed in together it's junk mail it's office paper it's all kinds of things with optical sorting which is what many of the mercs in the region across the country are doing they're adding optical to their fiber line their paper line so that they can have a standalone bail of sorted office rights paper they can have a standalone residential mix they and in any time you can get a higher bail quality over all you are able to secure additional markets additional processors and a higher definitely higher price so the fiber has the best quality index of all of the commodities so it's published you can see it and they do frequently downgrade for quality so we're fortunate and that we don't receive having it received many downgrades but our markets are restricted by who will take that kind of all lumped in together there so we're looking to be able to expand our markets and as a small market and Vermont is a very small market we need to have more and as many options as we can to be able to sell our material to many customers as possible Josh if you want to add the material processing flexibility that you had asked about optical sorting you can you can program them to full specific fiber resin or you know based on a size a lot of these these things are run off of AI or artificial neural network so long story short we building a new technology the technology that exists today gives us the flexibility to shift and focus on different commodities if they start to come in at a larger quantity or a volume that's you know beneficiaries of the district to sell um and also with the footprint we're proposing in a green field it gives us that extra space if the newest latest greatest whatever it is comes out and in 15 years it's vetted we could do a system upgrade and not have to slam it in on top of what we exist we have we are leaving room for the potential for QC robots we don't at this point feel that they've gotten to a point to replace humans although they're close they're extremely close and as Sarah had mentioned that um that green field also has about 10 000 square feet of extension space which could be extended to 15 if we needed to because there's space in our parking lot that we've identified so we're trying to build in as you know we can't predict what's coming up in 30 years but we're trying to be as flexible we we know what our problems are now is that we can't expand right and we don't have enough space to get the technology we want in so that's what we're trying to shoot for with this green field concept and you know while we're on this call this Bob Gardner while we're on the quad he's pulled up the the current markets for example the northeast relative to mixed paper sorted residential sorted clean news and the range is you know pretty substantial you know between if you go for a mixed paper let's say it's 70 to 75 dollars um and then if you go to a sorted clean news whose your upwards 180 to 195 so you see there's pretty material changes in terms of the price that you can get from recyclables if you're able to segregate them that's terrific thank you very much next question uh i'm not seeing any i'm going to ask my next question and it goes back to staffing and this may clarify or may confuse us even more i'd like to sidestep the 18 to 1 i did not follow that um but maybe i'm going to dip into that when i look at schedule two assumptions in this presentation i see there's labor requirements i see a whole list of staff positions and and i'm wondering why are we seeing those staff positions i think i know the answer but i'd like to get it out to the full board who might be as confused as i am why do we see these labor positions when are currently the operation of the mirth is under contract with kasella and they employ staff um so um you know so i guess my question is we're we're we see in these assumptions that we would be then employing staff and not kasella is that based on the on the open question we don't know what the future operate how the future mirth might be operated uh and so you're you're modeling out these um these positions as if we operated the mirth oh not not necessarily um so this is it could be either or and so it was just an example of here are the positions that we would anticipate or expect would be needed we know that these are the certain positions that are in place for example the um actually yeah so josh even the program director and engineer that which is josh's position um that may or may not be needed depending on if you know say a future operator whether it's kasella or someone else determines that they need another person kind of overseeing the entire facility they they did have that and then they promoted uh that person um up through the the organization so what you're seeing as far as the fte's does represent both kasella's um standard suite of employees and potentially what we think we would also use if we were to be the operator so it's it's just the list of who is who we are thinking we would either either or would need so when i i think you're saying i'm sorry for the follow-up and i see you leslie next but these are the list of positions that would be needed to operate this facility if we were operating it we would be doing those that directly if another party kasella for example if they were operating at these positions would shift over to them and those costs would be um presumably filtered through the arrangement that we have with kasella whether it's a net revenue however that would work out but at least i think i'm understanding i don't know if it's helpful for the other board members but um i'll leave it at that turn it over to you leslie you have a question yeah i i uh put a question to sarah in the chat about um the potential for additional capacity coming online and sarah's response was she didn't know of anyone else building a new mirf but we know that's not the only way capacity can be increased capacity can be increased by retrofitting or bringing in optical sorters we've heard in all this conversation that other operators are using optical sorters so i don't feel that my question was answered in other words i i i i don't see the um competitive environment addressed anywhere it's just an assumption about linear growth uh for sit in child sit in chit and in solid waste district irrespective of other kinds of capacity or competitors competitors who might be doing the same kind of planning we're doing uh i think i think we need to know something about that yeah thank you for clarifying um i i did not see the nuance in that question and you are correct in that there is additional there are certainly additional retrofits coming online we mentioned the one that kasella is considering for rutlin for example um they have also recently retrofitted and added more capacity as far as yield to sort different grades of materials in their charlestown mirf for example same thing happened in rhod Island that is what most of the mirfs that that currently are online who already have this existing technology again remember we're we're sorting by hand so we're already behind behind the a-ball here they are adding that additional sorting capacity um onto their existing system retrofitting what i was referring to was greenfield so i apologize for misunderstanding your your question so in the region there are not any new new completely new mirfs being built but there are definitely additional sorting technologies and robotics being being implemented across the region yeah so um you know i i think we need as a board we need to understand instead of thinking about you know bricks and mortars we need to think about materials handling capacity that's what i meant by capacity and um this analysis presumes that there's no other increase in capacity for any of the prospective materials to be handled and that was my question i think it's a big uh missing piece in this analysis i don't think it is presuming that because we're already saying that your existing facility is one of the larger sizes considered here the only growth we're assuming in the future is additional tonnage that might occur along with growth in your existing service area existing haulers that come to you so just population there is no assertion that there is additional tonnage that comes with a new facility if anything you completely misunderstand my point i'm thinking that there might be other facilities that could pirate if you will some of the tonnage that's assumed to come to cswd you know there's a you know there's a presumption that the private sector is just going to sit around and wait for cswd to get its act together i mean a guy like meyers might be investing in additional materials handling capacity that would no longer come to a cswd facility that's what i'm asking about but i feel that's a different question than what's being addressed in this analysis that's a question about whether cswd can continue to exist because they're competitive facilities and there's no need for your mirf yes this is saying what's the optimal situation for an existing facility with existing tonnage um i i wasn't understanding that there was some perceived threat that your entire mirf might need to shut down in which case it wouldn't be wise to invest or even continue operations it might be best to consider what your alternatives would be but if you're over your tonnage is relatively constant at least with the existing customer base that you have then i think i i it would be kind of it's sort of off i'm not saying it's off topic but it's really not part of of what was being considered here at all if anything the consideration was that the existing operations are struggling and could be more financially viable um and they feel that the business is strong vita you have painted my question in black and white zero sum manner which is not what i was stating just to make it clear to the rest of the board this matters because when when we're doing a projection of how many tons of materials are going to flow through this facility and what the revenue of those those sold materials are going to be we are assuming that there is going to be no other venue for those materials to be managed and what i am asking is are there potentially over the next 30 years other operators who might create capacity that would reduce the amount of capacity being handled by a cswd facility i didn't say it would go to zero i didn't imply it would go to zero although i think you said it could have an impact on the forecast and that was not taken and that was not taken into consideration i think it should well i will say that oh sorry yeah i like to we're kind of down in the weeds here i think leslie you've you've stated the concern of the question clearly that's something i think actually for sarah um just to to evaluate um not for our consultants um i'd only throw out that this might be a case where flow control might come into play um but that's an important question but that's outside i think the scope of our current discussion here tonight with the presentation of the of the consultants um so but i'm sorry to cut you off i'm always conscious of the time we've got a couple more no no that's fine i'm done okay thank you and i appreciate the question alan yeah um their analysis is based on a one-shift operation uh is that my understanding so that you know if and when uh capacities go much larger a second shift could be utilized and and uh you know cover that that problem is that correct yes that's correct and uh with the addition of technology um the sorting technology will be less reliant on human employees if we did need to employ a second shift um so it does provide some additional flexibility for materials management yes thank you and your hand was up you took it down you're okay yeah i just wanted to pull us back to center so that was part of my reason for having my hand up um and just to give some relief that cswd as municipality does have the um authority to institute flow control which is part of the reason why the study looked at chitin solid waste um chitinden county materials specifically because that would be within the parameters of our authority so in terms of trying to have some assurances about where who else might cherry pick the material that's within the confines of of our municipal authority right uh paul your hand was up and uh brane just said exactly what i was going to say so thank you brane hey uh lee your hand is up you're muted lee very about that i think there was language added in 3.1 of the solid waste management ordinance that cswd can amend the solid waste management ordinance to require that certain material materials be directed to district facilities so that that may help address part of that question leslie's question i don't i don't know but notice that was in there yep again we have some some still the list of questions written questions and they're more in the chat um that will be addressed in writing are there other board uh questions to be entertained right now i want to point out that the beginning of the presentation there was a request to believe from from the consultants the hope that out of this meeting would be some direction to give them for running these revenue sufficiency analyses um so i'd just like to have a little bit of conversation about that to see if we can come up with that give them some direction um whether or not that's um um but first we still would need to answer all these questions but it might help to move the process along but tim you're quite your hand is up and you're muted i was just checking on the process are you saying that we're not going to answer any of the written questions we're just going to have take oral questions tonight that was what i was trying to do in in recognition of the the list of questions and and the time but i am not trying to squash um the examination of those questions i'm more conscious of uh board member time frames and mental capacity as the as the night goes on and in a way to answer technical questions i i guess i find that pretty frustrating since we were told the process was to go ahead submit written questions and now we've got down to some very media issues and now we've punted on that well everyone's left uh i'm only um i only serve it and direct the the full board and i would have to throw it back to the full board then to get a sense from them um how they would prefer to to proceed tonight when we all prepare to answer additional additional questions that we hadn't gotten to i would say if there's if josh is able to review um the list and see if there's anything that is pertinent to our consultants to help and assist with uh clarification i would say we should prioritize those questions since we have them tonight there there are a few things i could say right now that i think might help in regards to some things that were mentioned in the chat some comments that were submitted that i think that i can clarify where they fall into this analysis and i i it's becoming very clear that i think we need to talk about what a cost benefit analysis is and what a revenue efficiency analysis is because i think we are asking questions that have not been addressed yet so a cost benefit analysis is taking a snapshot really of you know the year one calculations for if we had all these facilities side by side and we could compare them the staffing the expenses everything else along with the debt service associated with those facilities and then just some very reasonable very high level expectations about market sales rates going forward growth in the system things like that let's see when we push that forward over 30 years given the fact that we know there will be cost of renewal and replacement in the system and those kind of things which one of those scenarios or however many of those scenarios which of them might be financially viable in the long term as we push out beyond our five-year sort of budget and planning look and we look in the long-term life term life of that facility which of those scenarios are likely to remain cash flow positive and which ones over time will leave the district financially constrained and that was the concern with the status quo scenario and that's what we saw in the long term is that when you're not able to move outside of the bounds of the facility that you had and somebody pointed out the fact that we built into that a maximum staffing level this is saying the most of this facility can do is still not going to be enough over time to really let you grow with the potential that you have so that's all this analysis is meant to do is at a very high level like I mentioned earlier I saw someone mention again interest rates understand that the the difference in debt service from 2% let's say now that we're assuming to maybe 4% it's very minimal in terms of dollars spent in debt service it is not enough to sway this analysis it's enough to hurt as you look at your budget from one year to the next and think wow I wish we'd gotten a lower interest rate but when you look at that graph you can see the difference in these scenarios is multiple millions over time so that potentially you know 50,000, 100,000 dollar change in debt service payments from interest rates would not be enough to compete with status quo which is the only scenario that does not assume debt service all the rest of them have the same assumption so as you raise the interest rate all of their payments would change so again this is just looking at running a given set of assumptions out over a long-term projection period revenue sufficiency now let's us go into um for those of you that were here more of what we did when we looked at the ODF a couple of years ago we went into line item detail we said okay if we're going to build you know this additional facility and have this capital investment what does it look like what does it look like if we do it what does it look like if we share those costs um you know how do our revenues change how do our staffing needs change what um we can consider potential different funding sources this is where we talk about interest rates right if we're going to finance it this year versus in three years how does our interest rate outlook look what's a conservative assumption to have and then how might also those project costs change if we delay the you know that project for three years so it's revenue sufficiency now goes out over a more reasonable probably 10-year projection period but lets you actually in every year plan for those costs what does our staffing look like what does our capital look like when do we actually start to pay this debt service when do we start to receive the revenues from this facility being built it's much more granular and that's where we consider some of these other things and back to someone that was asking about um you know tip fees of other facilities that's where we look at that in the near term and just begin to examine whether um you are particularly unattractive in some way that might in the near term result in a change in business it is not however I think something that is probably a big driver here right now and again with the ability to have flow control that's maybe another subject but the revenue sufficiency will let us address some of these questions that everyone's been having um the only other thing I remember in the questions that I think is worth addressing is someone had said that we didn't have um essentially business case scenario metrics in the analysis um and I would go back to um a couple of things first of all uh computations like internal rate of return and payback period are probably much more applicable in the private sector than what you would generally consider in a governmental or quasi-governmental entity where you're looking at revenue neutrality you're really looking at what is the best in the long term for your ratepayers your customers so we try to look at the most reasonable method of financing of expenditure and everything else to keep those rates or that need for increase as low as possible over a long term period with that said though um there is no internal rate of return for the new construction scenarios because they're predicted to be and to maintain um cash flow a cash flow surplus in every year of the projection period because they don't cross zero there is no internal rate of return calculation just for anyone who might have really gotten in the weeds over that one it just doesn't work here um but with the net present value uh you saw the graph with accumulative returns over time net present value would just simply discount those which means those lines would go slightly lower but the results of the analysis would remain the same so those are all the questions that i can remember that i thought were pretty relevant to our addressing them not sure if i made anything better i think i think this is bob and one of the comment on the tiffy tiffy issue is that is a material business case issue and it's something that you would ultimately look at as a variable if you can you can lower it you can hire it that's going to change your net revenue structure and you look at the market and you you determine whether you know your facility is here a competing facility is there you know what the what the market differential might be and what your processing costs and i think $80 per ton is a pretty at this juncture is a pretty reasonable assumption uh at least based on my experience on uh what the processing costs are associated with recycling facilities can your hand has been up you're muted can't hear you can't hear you can okay i wanted to address paul's question to the board about looking at the board for for direction um i'm uh reacting a little bit to to tim's comment as well i understand it's frustrating to submit questions and then not have them all addressed but it it seems like you know the situation on the ground you know calls for paul to make that kind of decision i personally as a new board member appreciate the higher level approach i really appreciate vita's uh description um the charts and the stuff that was sent to us made it you know very it was very exciting and made it very clear to me that we should be looking more deeply at the greenfield 50 000 tons i imagine everybody else feels similar to that you know so if the board finds a way paul can find a way to let people who want to get into the weeds get into the weeds at the appropriate time i think that'd be great and for the rest of us the fun things like through analysis would be really helpful because i've never heard that term before um so thanks i'm just supporting paul's idea of putting it in writing and letting people get into the weeds in a committee or some other form thank you ken whatever the however we can deal with these responses that it'll be presented to the full board and not at this point not a not a subcommittee um uh i would bring it back again to the to try to give the sarah and sbs some direction as to what scenarios we um we think are are most likely that we want to want to pursue um kelton um i think just jumping to tim's comments there i'd love to see an actual base case of what we're you know we have the base case where is what we're currently operating on and i'd love to see a more in-depth analysis rather than what we might be operating at why don't we i'd rather give a base case of what we're actually operating at right now and see an analysis of that compared with one of the bigger options because i feel like again there's a lot of stuff thrown in there and it from these comments i could see that isn't necessarily what we're currently operating at and it i feel like it almost makes it look like the other models are better than the current either retrofit or base um model and that's just how i feel liz yeah hi everybody i you know if i'm i'm just going to put myself out there on a limb and and put the first thought out for uh where to focus and i would say look at the retrofit in the 50 000 greenfield based on all the things that i've read and the questions that i did hear the answers to um that's where i would go just going to put that out there start it up thank you lez it's important to get a sense from of the full board where we want to go here so i'd really encourage other board members we've got an opinion to weigh in brinn i support liz's recommendation thank you brinn Leslie um i agree as well but i do think we need to see the written answers to all those questions um because it will help us um make a stronger better decision uh after we have the more in-depth analysis on whatever two cases come to us so i i wouldn't want to lose that definitely i'm gonna i just want to remind the board we've been in a three-year process i think we have to be careful not to um kind of get ourselves right back into questioning uh going back to square one on this entire process i would frame it that three years ago it was determined that our current mirth was inadequate we needed to do something about it um i think already the case of the status quo do nothing um would be unacceptable unpreferable uh unwise um for this board to pursue that so um my comment is that we need to continue to move this process forward uh and not lose sight of the fact that we've been at it for three years uh and paul stabler at the risk of uh uh uh asking uh scs to repeat themselves i know you've talked about it a bit but uh could you describe again what the you're going to be bringing to us next month just so i can fully understand kind of your approach and what what you're bringing to us next month so the revenue efficiency analysis for people that are wanting to see more about status quo it it really will reflect that because you're you're correct maybe we named that one incorrectly on this one it was sort of maximizing your current operations but what your budget will reflect which is what the revenue efficiency model is reflected off of is how you currently operate and so we'll have a 10-year projection of that with all the expectations and that does include expectations about growth and tonnage in the near term and then looking at multiple years of history to come up with the best predictor that we can get there it will um model each individual revenue stream according to as much detail as we can get and then the same thing with the expenses in line item detail we talk about your salaries and the related benefits costs and every line item in the operating budget as well as the existing capital program fully funded meaning that if there are things that you know that are necessary to keep the current facility operational let's go ahead and program those into the 10-year capital improvement program understanding that those are going to be have to have to be dealt with at some point and so then we'll have the status quo but in a very detailed scenario and then we will overlay that with the additional scenarios which is why we it's not really Sarah and Josh that are asking why we ask that you give us the key scenarios because we're going through every single line item in the budget for every one of them but if we can narrow it down to a few that you really want to see then we'll do the same thing for each one of those and we have graphs that will let you compare side by side each one of those potential scenarios to let you see if our current facility maybe we know on the average tip fees or material sales will need to go up by one or two percent a year and if we have this new facility this new capital investment what does that look like does it trigger higher or lower need for additional revenue in the near term what does that look like I mean it's it's a lot more detailed and it will let you plan year over year so if it's too late this year to imagine that you would fully be constructing a facility within fiscal year 22 so let's say design and engineering started in fiscal year 23 and construction is the following year let's plan that out so that you guys can get a better expectation this cost benefit analysis was only meant to give you a representation of which scenarios in the long term look to be the most obviously profitable if there were any that were incredibly close you might have had to go to a deeper level but you could see where those lines kind of really diverged in the longer term so I think it was easier to see which scenarios maybe we might want to address in the revenue efficiency does that help with what you're asking okay good thank you Liz your hand was up and then it came down I don't know if you wanted to make a further comment oh I'm all set I just hit the wrong button thanks thank you Tim um in your in your letter it says source data assumptions and scenarios it says CSWD provided estimated operating expenses capital and equipment costs labor and overtime expectations and anticipated borrowing terms for each scenario and so I'm just wondering what assumptions did SCS bring to the table did who brought ACR assumptions and mix on ACR and sensitivity on ACR or those provided by CSWD or SCS I I would well let me start by saying when we say they provided it that's kind of a loose interpretation of how we work Josh and Sarah will tell you that you get pretty tired of my face after a while so most of these assumptions were derived from actual meetings with staff and then that's why Bob Gardner is part of this analysis because as he told you he's SCS's head of solid waste and has done a lot of similar studies so any assumptions that we made we tried to vet with him to make sure that they made sense not only in year one but over the longer term that those those expectations that we had would make sense for a facility or facilities of those various sizes so I would say it was a pretty interactive process honestly but it did start out with looking at Josh looking at your current budget in us talking about how that would change and specifically why so for example you could see in the model that we got to the staffing numbers or to the salary and benefits numbers by saying okay if we have this many staff in this facility what would it look like in a newer facility and then if we can also have optical sorting how does that change the staffing and in what year might that happen and so we we tried to get as detailed as we could with the understanding that you know we don't have a perfect crystal ball but we did work together on those where did the ACR numbers come from as far as the revenues yes so for each scenario I think Josh explained earlier where where he got the low medium high numbers from so it was the assumption of those low medium high material sales rates along with your I would call it contamination am I using the right word here Josh the the inbound versus outbound or the inbound versus um advantage they can actually be sold at market and so when you multiply those together and and that was just taken from your historical I guess contamination amounts and then going forward in the future there was the expectation that there would be some growth in revenues over time just due to growth in the system and or the need for you know revenue increases from one place or another it might be due to increases in material sales it might be due to the need to raise your tipping fee but that was kind of just a general assumption and give you a give you a flavor in terms of the the numbers they are highly variable obviously over time and you look over the last three years the ACRs that you're paying and when the China sword came down it was like the the world was ending for most recycling facilities as most of you probably are aware and that's moderated over the last a year or two in terms of the prices that you're able to get for your your commodities which is great which really helps improve and so I think there the assumptions that were used relative to the low medium high gosh as good an estimate of disjuncture based upon how life is and you may actually get better at some points and we've seen that increase in for example mixed paper which you had to pay for about two years ago to get rid of you're not getting a fairly decent price for for those materials which is great which really helps the overall financial picture of these facilities was that sufficient for what you were asking um I kind of I have a follow-on question this morning okay Tim go ahead you said Tim you had a follow-on question yeah I didn't know but I want to give some other folks a chance okay I see no other hands raised so go for it it it just it seems like there's a bit of an elephant in the room here about us moving away from work up we own we own a MRF and we own the equipment in the MRF and we contract for operation today and we've been very successful with that model and all the scenarios that we're looking going forward and which is have us essentially have us owning and the building and the equipment and operating that MRF and which is and unfortunately that's caused a lot of confusion I think in looking at this base case because we've inflated the costs of our current operation and and pretty significantly understated our revenue which makes all the other scenarios favorable so that's point number one in which I so I think it's very very it's very dangerous to go ahead and look at these graphs and say oh yes we're clearly going to focus on these scenarios and discount these other scenarios because the accepting the base case as the base case is making a very very serious mistake in my estimate and you know those numbers are pretty simple to prove out just go ahead and look at the income that we've generated today from the MRF and look at the income that the space case generates so we're talking we're not talking apples to apples we're talking anything but but I guess the bigger issue for one of the larger issues for me is I'm fine with the districts exploring operating a MRF but I'm very we'd be taking on an awful lot I guess in my mind and saying hey we don't we don't have any experience operating work and we don't have any experience marketing materials now we're going to go ahead and build a brand new facility with technology that we're not familiar with and we're going to go ahead and operate that that equipment that we're not familiar with and we're going to market the materials that we haven't demonstrated any capability yet so we're I'm worried that we're painting ourselves into a corner you know and I would argue very strongly saying if we really think we want to head in this direction fine let's go ahead and bring the contract to Casella to a close today and let's get some experience operating the MRF as is improved that we can operate the existing MRF and market the existing materials and no no once we demonstrate that let's go ahead and make the investment but I'm just wondering if staff has any comment about our you know for example our am I just reading that am I reading the scenarios wrong Sarah would you please respond yeah in in in a word yes so the the it's actually it's agnostic as to who is is operating right so we don't say it's these are CSWD's employees or these are a in operators employees it's just these are the employees that would be needed to run any of the the scenarios so we're not making that assumption I have said to the board that you know we haven't gone out to bid for the operations of the MRF maybe 20 years so it's it's not a bad exercise to run Tim to your point to say okay if we're going to have an understanding of what it could look like we should run that exercise we also may want to consider going out to bid and I and up front with Giselle about that so but as far as how we're displaying the information in in the models no we're not saying this is definitely us you know staff Josh and I saying we're going to to run this we are not actually stating that it's these are the employees who would be needed and under these scenarios given given technology materials to run through these are the assumptions of a number of employees that we would expect again based on our best estimates Kasella or you know these connections or ways management whoever might been on it may have a different take and that would be reflected in a response to an RP for operating the facility if you want to go down that road so you know we're we are though assuming that CSWD still wants to own the MRF and that is based on the retreat that we had back in 2018 that was the the direction that we received my team and I received from the board to say yes we do still want to be in this business so from that perspective yes you're reading that correctly and it's just it is yet to be determined whether or not it makes sense for CSWD to operate and you're right the costs would certainly increase if we would take that on it's another 25 plus in place it's not to be taken away gosh I believe you wanted to add a comment yeah I'm going to keep this short so I don't get too far in the weeds but schedule three does have a brokerage fee that we assumed as a cost because we definitely do not want to assume that we're going to market the material ourselves so that's where that marketing comes into place there was some some work to make sure it was agnostic so that we could you know take with what we knew how Cassel runs existing facility and then really be able to say if they choose to run it or if they are awarded or if anybody is awarded there would be kind of there would be a processing fee involved which is how we're initially set up and I'm going to stop there because I'm just going to get into the weeds and it's not to be helpful and just the last comment about the experience and running a MRF I do want to remind the board and actually look some of the newer members know who may not know my background but I did run a MRF and I did manage marketing commodities contracts when I was at Rhode Island New Social Recovery Corporation I did manage the 17 million dollar retrofit of the only MRF in Rhode Island that now is running 125,000 tons through so so you do have some professional experience in in running these facilities do I know how to program the optical sorters no would I want us to be doing that no that's what we hire people to do the you know manufacturers do that and and that's part of that contract so there are certainly things that we would need to learn and go in with our eyes wide open if that were a choice that we were to be made but we are not completely completely newbies when it comes to this and again we have the 30 years of experience of working with the existing facility hand in hand and Josh has taken a much closer hand in understanding the operations of the current facility than any previous MRF manager has. Just one more thing I will say that this is another thing that I think would be addressed in more detail in the revenue efficiency analysis this cost benefit analysis even in the way we describe the scope when we proposed to help is a comparison of facilities this is looking at what these facilities can potentially do what the revenues and expenses would be with a realistic CSWD scenario but if we're told we want to really compare in depth the idea of you know these few facilities and we think we might either contract or operate ourselves there would likely be differences in that line on a budget that we would address at that time so there is the intention of that being addressed but the analysis you're seeing today is really the potential for the facilities themselves. And I just want to follow up with Sarah's last comment like I do think there is I personally have a great deal of confidence in Sarah and in the CSWD staff I do think that the do nothing option really is kind of fatal and I and I from the sense of the board I do think that there is agreement that we need to do something and what that something is is what we're discussing but I do have confidence that everybody's asking excellent questions we don't have all of the answers right now that's part of the process that we're going through so I really appreciate the effort that's put been put into bringing us to this point there are a number of new board commissioners here so it's hard to give the context and framework for where we've been over the last few years so I I don't know if there is a need or benefit to having another follow-up meeting I know there's going to be some another another analysis but in terms of the timing if there's particular timing that we're aiming to have a decision by and I know it was yesterday but if it's before the end of the fiscal year then I would say it may behoove us to have some additional meetings about this particular topic so that we can just move forward faster. Bryn you speak as if you were the chair of the board but thank you and I think it was I appreciate your comments I want to look again at the clock it is 8 20 we have another item on the agenda tonight and we this is on schedule for February so the conversation can be continued I don't want to give anybody the impression that we're cutting off conversation but for the management of any meeting tonight I would encourage us to move on to the next agenda item Josh your hand is up one final comment one final comment I would recommend any new board members for context to come on a tour between maybe now the next meeting that would be really helpful to put into kind of framework of what we're talking about it while it's actually happening I think that would be extremely helpful or for anybody who wants to refresher I'm more than willing to walk anybody through through the place so run it out there okay thank you Josh then I'm going to encourage this board to move on to the next agenda item but I want to thank the SCS staff for for being present tonight and and offering your contributions and hearing all of our deep discussion and concerns I hope you've taken that seriously and can roll that into your next step of this work and again the written questions and there are a lot in the chat will be addressed and disseminated to the full board I'm reminded also on my the very first meeting that I shared that went on very long I don't know if members need a brief five minute recess I would encourage us to do that and we could have a motion to do it or we could just do it by by by general assent I have 823 so if we meet back at let's say 828 let's give it an honest five minutes and and not keep us any going any farther than that so we'll reconvene at 828 81 of your board packet and this again is informational and and for discussion purposes tonight the context here is that we've had our drop-off center review last year and we wanted to continue to keep this high on our list of items to to to be considering and intend us to have some time to address this at just about every meeting going on going forward so that's the context for what we're coming up with now Sarah I'll turn it over to you and staff thank you so Josh is probably still getting a little serious because I can't let you guys jump into my version I know you have an updated version of PowerPoint so as Paul mentioned this is the the first iteration of a more in-depth look each month for the next five months for sure and what we're starting with is level of service so we're going to do a level of service part one this month and level of service part two next month and then in March April and May we'll be talking about economics pricing and some customer response customer survey results and then when we get to June we will take a glance back and what we've discussed over January to May make sure we're on the right track make sure that we if we need to adjust we can adjust take that time in July to adjust and get back at it in August through September October November and then in November December come back again to the board with here's what we heard for the entire year here is where we see the system going maybe option one option two and then have that be kind of that end product of this year along with discussion so that we can see and what do we want the drop-off drop-off center system to look like and what we wanted to do for the district and for our constituents and everyone who uses these systems so Josh I will turn it over to you to operate the PowerPoint I don't think this will take quite as long as the last conversation so but I do appreciate all of the great conversation that we had and I anticipate they will continue to have very good conversations about the DOC's everybody see yes okay great you want to kick it off there and start going for it yeah okay um so drop-off center system review as Sarah had mentioned this is our level of service this is just kind of getting us an understanding of what we provide and what we want to look at and where we want to go and this will be in you know part of a full series six in a row so kind of discovering how we got here I know everybody was at the retreat but you know over the last a long time we've been talking about drop-off centers we have kind of generated a level of consensus that we do want to operate a DOC system which stands for drop-off center we want to maintain our existing system it means the existing facilities we have we'd like to keep running those we will only operate in a community that wants us there and that would be for them to provide us land now in Williston we have we own it because that's kind of our hub it also came with the landfill that we had built in the 90s um in Burlington we're in communications to hand to work that out um safety is one of the biggest concerns we have we have addressed that in multiple retreats and that is kind of on the top of the board's agenda of things that we want to make sure that we're covering because there is a significant amount of throughput through all of our facilities our drop-off center facilities um and we do recognize that some material is subsidized and that we do want to subsidize that for the better of people's incentive to manage that material in a proper way I guess the things we haven't really come to consensus on scale and scope of services um you know we've had a lot of good discussion number of DOCs in the system locations of DOCs in the systems and materials to be subsidized and to what extent um so this is from our retreat slide you know drop-off centers as we look at the next 20 to 25 years of drop-off centers because that's about where we're at right now from when we first started developing them kind of we want to look at our challenges and opportunities who we serve and where to what degree and at what cost and what do our customers want versus what does the public need and really that's kind of my little service big surprise as the title of the uh of the presentation and we broke relevant level of service down to kind of four major categories accessibility materials uniformity and cost and what I'm showing on the right in this picture is a population density map of Chittin County and those green stars are all the facilities that we have existed in place so when we're breaking down accessibility what we really mean is kind of drive time to a facility what's an expect acceptable amount of time to expect a customer to be able to reach our facility and then at what level of service does that facility provide and really that was kind of to make sure that people could get access to our facility and that we're not asking them to drive all of the county to find the services that we provide there are two kind of cut and drive basic base levels or levels of service there's kind of the basic MSW recycling leaf and yard waste and organics and that's really what's required by the state if you offer at a facility MSW collection and management you have to provide those other three and that is kind of what we consider the base level of service that's what you can get as a homeowner that's what you can go to and drive yourself you know to find a facility and and manage your materials that way full services currently only offered at Williston but it will soon be offered at the Kasella Richmond facility then those would be the two in the county as it stands right now and that that really is the full gamut of HHW special waste the whole shebang that we offer appliances metal everything so the other thing in accessibility is you know like I said if you look at our network of just CFWD specific we are actually placed in a relatively decent proximity to population density and if you look at this the red you know as there's Burlington there's Winooski you know this is Essex and Williston so you can see there's Milton that's kind of the most bang for your buck is to be as close to the population density as you can because that can serve the most amount of people with the services you're trying to provide so when again as I explained earlier I just kind of wanted to pencil these out for everybody to see again state mandated we call that the baseline level of service are the we call them the big four that's on your left full service is everything that CSWD and the soon Kasella Richmond facility will also provide I low I don't know if dry well that's our full service that's our full gamut so looking at the baseline level of service we also have to include all of our drop-off center facilities the Myer C Indian Colchester because they do take you know all the four that are required the CND the Kasella waste transfer station in Williston the Kasella waste management Richmond drop-off center and then at your disposal in Jericho that's kind of the network of baseline service and then really what's expected and as I had kind of mentioned you know what is the level of service and we broke it down into the network of roads that can lead you to the actual physical location of facility and what we found is that within 15 minutes almost 91% of the population can find a base level of service if they don't choose to have a subscription hauler they can go find a facility somewhere in the county and you know this is kind of a point of discussion or pause or just you know I think 15 minutes and staff thinks 15 minutes is an adequate amount of time it's it's a decent and this isn't you know I got stuck behind a bus or cows were walking across the street this is just average I got up I loaded my car I went to where I wanted to go so we know there's variability but that's just that's how that was laid out and you know I just want to get the temperature from the board that you know that seems reasonable that's what we should shoot for in our service level and if anybody disagrees or says no it's crazy you know it should be less or more you know please please speak up but that was kind of the assumption that we made and I wanted to point that out at this point and josh I think you part of why we're we're showing this the drive time population and showing the universe is because if we if we don't as a group think that a 15 minute drive time is is adequate if we think it should be 10 minutes or if we think it should be five minutes then that's going to dictate the number of facilities that we would need to offer so so that's that's what that means similarly 30 you know if we think that anyway so I just wanted to to clarify that you know right now it seems reasonable and josh's point if if you're comfortable with 15 minutes of drive time and that's not counting you know maybe once you get there and you're behind three cars four cars or five cars right it's from kind of door to essentially hopefully door or am I misunderstanding that josh is that like in the physical yes it's to the physical facility and that's you know part of the rest of this is you know hours of operation days of operation and then also throughput and what's the expected time for somebody to wait in line which comes into full service and not full service so yeah that's that's really the point if this is acceptable then you know we don't necessarily need to add a baseline level of service to the county because 91% of the community can get there within get to the actual facility in 15 minutes that doesn't address how the actual facility interacts with the population it just says that you can get there so full service which is a lot more comprehensive and really what we want to look at you know and identify are what are the factors that come in to us wanting to offer full service or at least the thought process that we work through when we start thinking about a full service facility and one of the big things is yes it takes you 15 minutes to get there but once you're there there's a lot of variables that affect or influence how your experience is as a customer and queuing space is a big one and queuing space kind of also falls under that category of safety because some of our facilities had queuing lines that were extended into major roadways and that was the one thing that we wanted to address and we have addressed with kind of shifting how we manage trailers and that's kind of the bullet under the under that a trailer has it takes up the equivalent of two car spaces right and also a trailer brings in more material which requires our operator to then manage the cost and pricing structure we have which also increases the time at the booth and the time in the facility so it's really that's what we identified and that was kind of one of the big things we learned from covid is that when you know it hit we learned that hey we don't need trailers we just need to offer a baseline level of service and we saw our throughput skyrocket so that was one of the things we le