It's that simple. Yeah, I can't argue with that. You must be right. All right, okay. So I'll call them in to order. Good evening everybody to these like board meeting. It's nice to have some people here. Our first item of business as usual is our the minutes. We have the minutes of December 6th 2022. Is there a motion? Movely accept them subject to modification. Is there a second? Second. Page one. Page two. And page three. Here are no corrections that were to be made. All those in favor of approving the minutes of December 6th 2022 say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Next is public comment. Is there anyone in the room who wishes to make any public comment? No one on Zoom Terry. All right. So we'll go directly to our first really item of business and that's a resolution thanking Fire Lieutenant Sean Soper for his service. And we have the following resolution to adopt tonight. Whereas Sean Soper became a career member of the Wilson Fire Department on August 28th, 2006 and served in the rank of Lieutenant following promotion on February 24th, 2014. And whereas on November 16th 2022, Lieutenant Soper retired from the department having served the community of Wilson for over 16 years. And whereas Lieutenant Soper throughout his career exemplified the mission of Wilson Fire to provide fire and EMS services and care to the community. And whereas the dedication of Lieutenant Soper to serve the community in all hours of the day and night by answering the call for duty and service cannot be understated. And whereas Lieutenant Soper served as mentor to his fellow members of the department, sharing his experience, insight, and wisdom. Now therefore be it resolved Wilson Select Board, hereby thanks Lieutenant Sean Soper for his over 16 years dedicated service to the community and the people of Wilson as a member of the Fire Department. They wish him the very best in his retirement. So is there a motion? I'll move to adopt the resolution thanking retired Fire Lieutenant Sean Soper for his service to the community. Is there a second? Second. Is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, all those in favor adopting the resolution say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? So congratulations to Lieutenant Soper at your retirement. We will have a signed document for you that Eric will have framed and we will be presented to you at a later date. So on behalf of the Select Board, we really appreciate all of your efforts, all your work over the 16 years in serving the community and anyone who wishes to make any statements? Chief, make any statements tonight? Absolutely. Thanks for the opportunity. I know that if you understand who Lieutenant, he's not one for fanfare and that's been his M.O. since I've known him. I know he's more uncomfortable sitting here than he is sitting in the right front seat of a fire at your local hall, which says something about his character, right? A very humble person. But since my tenure here and before that, Sean's just the person you can go to. Here's my problem, can you fix it? Sean knew who to get things done with, knew how to get them done, he had the contacts in whatever role of the ex you had or whatever or just lived here, whatever. But Sean really was a person that knew how the station needed to be maintained and he took a lot of personal pride in that, even to the point where I would come in and I would find Sean doing the small task, right? I haven't reminded him that he has firefighters that work under him, it's okay, it has to do that. But he wasn't the type of person that would sit back and ask them to do something that he could do himself. And that legacy will last forever. And so, it's my sincere thanks. I send my sincere thanks. I hope you have a safe, healthy retirement.  Wherever that takes you, right? In the future, that guide you. And if I may, Mr. Chair, just as a personal note, we issued some recognition to our staff last night with a locker tag. If you know the station, you come in and we had some paper and written some words fancy as having marker on them and not in hand. Some appear to be drawn by maybe some children. But I felt it only appropriate that even though the lieutenant was moving on, that we at least issue this quick token. We'll have more formal recognition in the future. Thank you very much. Thank you, Chief. It's only fitting that his shift is here on serving tonight, so. Anyone else from the Department of Environment wishes to make any comments tonight? Well, shy. Okay. Again, thank you, Lieutenant, for all of your service and we really appreciate you being here tonight too. Thank you. It's truly been a pleasure working with you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. So we'll start the rest of the business now and the next thing on the agenda is talking about the vacant select board seat and Eric has given us some information and perhaps you'd tell us a little bit about that and then we can have a discussion. Yep. As Terry mentioned, there's a vacant seat on the board following a recent resignation for remaining duration of a three-year term that expires in March of 2024. Article 14, Section J of the town charter states, a vacancy on the select board shall be filled by a majority vote of the remaining board, set appointment to run until the next annual town meeting at which an election shall be worn to fill the unexpired term. Staff seeking direction from the board whether I would wish to consider interviewing and appointing a member of the public to fill the vacancy until town meeting day 2023 or operating as a four-member board until town meeting when a question can be placed on the ballot to elect to the select board a new member for the remainder of the unexpired term until March of 2024. Yeah, thank you. So as you may remember, the last time we'd been in the appointment was when Joy Limoges resigned about two weeks before the town meeting so we really didn't have an opportunity to appoint anyone at that point and since an election couldn't be held because it was so close to town meeting, we did make an appointment and we appointed Reddit to that after, I think we had 11 candidates at that time and narrowed the field down to 10 to 5 and then had interviews. So I put together sort of a timeline if we were to try to appoint someone for the vacancy. So if we were to start advertising, let's say on the 27th of December and have the people who are interested put their applications in by, say, January 9th. I think it's about two weeks time for them to do that. If we were able to then start interviewing either on the 17th or the 24th or maybe both depending on the number of people who applied there's a possibility we could appoint somebody on the 17th or the 24th but that is only five or six weeks before town meeting and we would essentially be at the very tail end of the budget discussions and with the election coming up, this would, well, with the resignation occurring now there will be an election if people are interested in putting their petitions in there will be an election on the 7th of March. So it doesn't make any sense to me at this point to consider appointing anyone at this point. Other thoughts? I agree. I think that signatures will be due for a petition late January so that the turnaround time doesn't really, to me, make sense to appoint somebody at this point. I agree. I concur. I don't see the verdict. I don't think we need a motion through this. I think we just say we intend not to by consensus we are planning on not filling it and letting the citizens of Wilson have their vote to fill the position through the election process. Yep. Okay. Then we'll move on to the recreation space lease agreement and Eric can lead off on that. The board might recall at its November 15th meeting it passed a motion authorizing a me as town manager to sign an intent to lease agreement for building space located at 94 Harvest Lane for recreation department use. This lease agreement was then prepared by the property owner and reviewed by our town attorney. This lease has been distributed to the select board to review with some edits suggested by the town attorney. They're also being circulated back to the landlord for consideration. As we look at this, the select board does have the option to enter an executive session at some point this evening to discuss the terms of the agreement with staff if it should so choose. Also suggested you could authorize a town manager to enter into the lease agreement when deemed satisfactory by the town attorney following further discussion with the landlord, which I've included with your agenda. Looking for feedback from the board on what direction you'd like to take at this point. Any comments or questions regarding the proposed agreement? Has the agreement gone back to the landlord with the attorney's edits? Yeah, I've said that back to them at the end of last week they were reviewing it. So I'm going to hear back from them if they have any. I want to discuss any of those edits further. I could confirm the town attorney if they don't want to accept all the edits to find something he finds acceptable in the town's best interest if that were the case. And the basic tenets on the agreement haven't changed. Most of this is just relatively minor tweaks to the agreement. Is that an accurate statement? Yeah, I'd say for the most part. Getting our additional legal review just to make sure our interests are supported here. Nothing that struck us in going through it as major hold-ups I would anticipate but just some things that would make terms of the least. We feel a little more advantageous for the town at this point. If there's any further questions or resolutions suggested? I've moved up. It's rare. Please. That's what his voice sounds like. I didn't know he had to say the word move. I'll move to authorize the town manager to enter into a lease agreement with Alan Brook Development for space at 94 Harvest Lane for the recreation department's use upon recommendation by the town attorney. Is there a second? Second. Is there any discussion on the motion? No, thank you. Hearing none, all those in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. Aye. Right here at four and the opposed we have four. So we have done that. We'll move on then to the park donation, gifting and naming policy and facility use policy. Eric, you'll start off and Todd, good one is here to talk about as well. Yep. A couple of policy documents for the board to look at this evening with our recreation and parks department. You might recall, I think it was, maybe it was back in September. Remember the first time this came before you looking at the gifting and donation policy and I know it worked and looking at some naming components of that as well. We also have in your packet looking at facility use policy and with the addition of the indoor space there's been some language added there and it also has some financial components. And looking at the history here, I don't believe the select board has reviewed the facility use policy in the past. I thought it'd be appropriate for the board to look at it at this juncture and looking for direction from the board to feel this is a document the select board should be approving with at this juncture and anything in the future or if it's something more administrative. But I didn't have clear direction for history on this. Recreation parks committees reviewed it in the past and given that it's a new offering for indoor space. I'd be appropriate for the board to take a look at this evening and provide staff with direction how you want to perceive this policy document before. We'll take everything from Todd this evening. There's no additional questions on us as Todd to walk him in the Recreation Parks Committee have been working on here. So Todd, anything that you would like to add to it before we go to questions? No, no. I'll take your questions and we'll go from there. So any, first of all, let's do the parks donation and naming policies since we've seen that before. Any questions or comments regarding that particular part of it? And I'll just say that we've always had park donations and this is just putting something formally to that. So if somebody wanted to do a memorial bench, you know, we had the price of the bench and they got the memorial and we checked it all out. That's all in here now. And on the fourth page is a request form so we can actually have something in writing and file it away and keep it. So we're making this more of a something tangible to have rather than just us in the department doing it. And then the naming policy piece came up with the hopes that building out Allenbrook, we would have people wanting to say, hey, I'd love to build a pavilion for you in such such person's name. And we just needed the way to vent that out and figure it out and make sure it was appropriate and stuff. But if somebody wants to build an amenity and a park, that's a great thing. We're not costing the taxpayers money. So this was that policy just to formalize that and make it something tangible. Thank you. Other questions or comments? And Eric made this a town policy rather than a department policy. So felt that something that could be used for the town. So Todd, my question is going to center around when somebody is making a donation for something in a park.  So I'm going to apologize for that. Is there criteria for what types of park amenities or improvements they can make donations regarding? And I'm thinking back to it probably was before your time, there was somebody who wanted to donate a scoreboard. Seems innocuous enough. But it actually raised some questions because of the sponsor and what the sponsor, you know, whatever the right word is product was what it was, you know, the sponsor did. And so I'm just wondering if this addresses those type issues. Yeah. So in here on page three, there's some general criteria. Donations must be compatible and just paraphrase in areas not covered by the master plan. So like if we have plans for something in a park, you know, a scoreboard is not a plan. So that could do that age and anticipated maintenance requirements. And then there's specific criteria of Morio plaques cash donation structures site furnishing plants or trees and artwork. So it kind of spells that out and everything gives us a right to say yes or no to things. And one other piece in here says that the person has to come to us first of all with their idea. And then if we say, Hey, that's a great idea that we're giving them this form. And then this form spells everything out and kind of it makes that that hard tangible item that we have and we can build off from there. So we do have, yes, if it's not appropriate, I think we have some things in here too that, you know, they can't support tobacco or marijuana or those types of things as well. Okay. So. So if there were donation that let's say meets this meets the criteria in here but for some reason that you weren't able to anticipate raises controversy. You know, within the town, let's say, how would, how would you deal with that? Since it's a town policy. Okay. I would think that we're bringing this to the, to the select board. So I would bring it to the recreation and parks committee. First of all, get their feelings, advice, and then I probably be sitting here again and explain, you know, the reasons why and. And why not force and that and that kind of thing and making, I don't know how you would deal with it, but as a select board saying yes or no to, you know, the advice of the recreation and parks committee, my advice and then yours. Ultimately. Okay. And again, since this is a town policy that reaches up to up to this level. Okay. Very good. Thank you. Any other questions regarding this part of it? We'll talk about the facilities use policy. This is the first time we've seen this, I believe. And are there any questions or comments regarding this? This was fields and facility use policy and it was very different than what you're seeing here past. And what it was was we're reserving renting out field space. And so put together a policy and had all the rules and everything else with the rental facility as a possibility. We wanted to change this to facility use policy and fee schedules. We could add that piece in here. So it became more of a general of all facilities that wills to recreation and parks overseas and would be overseeing to develop this policy. So it's more in general and then rules for the fields are on the permit application and will also be on the permit and rules for the rental facility would be in those places as well. And then we have a special events permit, which are events. I shouldn't say special events other than athletics that happen in parks that we manage compared to special events that are happening within the town. And that has its own set of rules. So this was this was written and reviewed by again myself, Eric and Aaron assistant to town manager. And what we've come up with for facility use in the department. I should mention the rock is the recreation opportunities for the community. So you can take a program at the rock. It's got a nice ring to it. The only question is again, not as prepared as I wish I was, but the use of the word permit or that's what you obtain. Should I read anything into that? It's more like a lease agreement. You're leasing this for permitting them to use a facility for a given day and time. And there's a fee attached to that. That's what we're meeting by permit. So it's a permit of use. And that's spelled out on the permit. And they're asking for that on the permit application. And it was more from that. I was to get more from the standpoint of, I think of certain things that the town permits and they're kind of different than what this permit is about. Right. But a permit is a totally appropriate mechanism to use for. Okay. Then I'm good. The only question I had is that I noticed the facility use fee schedule on. I'm not sure what page it is before the fourth page. As courts, tennis, pickleball, volleyball, but it doesn't name basketball courts. Okay. Yeah. Also notice that courts are cheaper to rent than fields. That's because the fields are so big. You don't have to mow a court. You don't have to line a court. You don't have to fertilize a court. So pretty much we put up the nets on the courts and that's pure. We put them up in the beginning of the season. We take them down at the end of the season. That's pretty much the extent of the court maintenance. So that's why they do customer. And you notice that the baseball softball field is less than the multi-purpose field. Because we don't line the infield. That's the batter's box and the lines to first and third. If we line those where we're set up and manpower that we have, it would be hours before it would be used. So it would get ruined. So it's easier for the teams to line those fields just before their games. And that is built into the time, but they're not charged for that time. It all sounds good. Are there costs like to measure it with other towns? I do. Before we set these, I do look at what is out there. Sometimes I'll send out an email just asking in general what everybody is charging and stuff like that. And you may find another place that's $30, but they don't line the fields. Where we're $30 and line the fields. So I would say we're still pretty much the cheapest around. So you're charging more? I don't want to say that too loud because I want everybody to come here. But the other thing that we did too was on this fee schedule. Now that you're focused on it, there used to be two fees, a resident and a non-resident. And we went to just one fee because teams are coming with residents and non-residents on a team that's playing. And a resident fee was, say under the soccer fields, $25 and a non-resident was $35. So we took the middle of the road and increased our fees this year by $5 on all of those. You can see we've added the meeting space, the rock, which is the rental. And we did a little bit more with events and other amenities. Which we didn't charge for before, like electricity and stuff like that. Other questions? Two questions. I'm noticing under fees a difference in the per person for nonprofit versus for profit. And it's a significant difference. Your thoughts there? Yeah, nonprofits, they're trying to make money for themselves. So you take the American Cancer Association that they wanted to run. We're trying to recruit some of that back without taking all of their money, which they're raising for a good cause. Sometimes I'll say to them, name us as a sponsor and we're not charging anything. If it's a for profit, they're doing a run and they're making money for a profit organization. I don't feel too bad about saying you can add that to $5 to your registration fee that you're paying to us. So it's looking at the organizations or the businesses that are being profit or nonprofit and the reason for that. Okay. And then the last question was under vendors, food, drink, product, etc. Would a vendor be able to, would there be event where they may want to serve or have alcohol, you know, is that allowed? I don't think that's allowed in our parks. Yeah, I don't believe in our, we've allowed it at Catamount under special event permits. Anything that has to do with serving alcohol would be a catering permit. Okay. So that would be above and beyond what would be required by this? Yes. Okay. Okay. This is vendors, like we do food trucks for the 4th of July. This is allowing that if baseball organization and during the hitathon wanted to bring in some vendors, we're just looking to protect ourselves and know what they're doing. Right. So I'm not that they're going to, but if they were all of a sudden offering alcohol, we go put the brakes on, you know. Yep. We don't allow that or you got to go through this process to make that allowed. I don't foresee any recreation program offering alcohol in its parks type of thing. It's not. And there's this thing called Cycle Cross. Where they seem to encourage it. Any other questions, comments? If not, thank you very much, Todd. Thank you. I look forward to seeing those back. They're in favor of the policy. Oh, it's the, it's the SDI or the cement truck with the law. What's that? There's a parade of trucks with Christmas lights going on. I think it's the military convoy actually. Yeah. So are the lights on purpose or? Yeah. Yeah. They're decorating the trucks. Yeah. Terry, but on the, on the last policy there, is that something the board would like to approve each one of the further changes to it, including the fee schedule or? On the part duration policy. The facility use policy. In terms of like fee changes and things. Yeah. Is that something the board would like to see annually or have staff set that up administratively? Yes.  Once we get complaints about it from, I would presume that the committee can do it. Okay, agreed. Perfect. Thank you. Moving on to motor vehicle and traffic ordinance amendments. And Eric, you're going to talk about that. Yep. So this was before the board back in October, first reading of proposed amendments to the town's motor vehicle and traffic ordinance. And at that meeting, the board had a few questions. First had consensus to proceed with the ordinance amendment process and then had a few questions for staff to follow up on. So we worked on that. I put a memo together for the board and also included the red line ordinance as it stands with, with these changes. You know, the biggest lift on this was the appendices to bring those up to date that Aaron in my office believed on that. And that was certainly a heavy lift here. But I, Terry, if you want, I can kind of walk through the memo for the board here. Yeah, please. So the first piece was article five subsection D, the board inquired whether the sentence I'll read should be stricken or remain in the ordinance. And it said no vehicle will be driven at speeds that a reasonable person would leave to be too fast for existing road conditions. For the board's direction, I consulted with the town attorney on this phrasing. I share with you via email the town attorney's opinion on that section of the ordinance. And the town attorney's recommended that that remain in the ordinance. If I remember correctly, it's in state statute in some way. And then article nine subsection C, there's inquiry about including class four roads in the sections for the list of prohibitions for truck traffic. I looked at our class forward roads listing with public works director Bruce whore. The town is a small number of class four road sections. Most of these are either unpassable or don't connect anywhere. We don't anticipate an issue with a truck becoming stuck on a class for a road section given the nature and locations of these limited road segments. Staff suggested us to not amend the ordinance any further at this point. And then the board's direction at the last meeting was keeping in article 10 section 10.02 the phrase that owners expense in the event of a snowstorm or in the event of past violations. Just remember reflects that was the board's discussion that evening. And then article 11 section 11.02. This included the towing and storage fees. The ordinance authorized setting these fees. And after further discussion staff suggesting that instead of putting these in the ordinance amending your annual fee schedule to set these fees. That could be part of the June revisions every year saying the fees doesn't for the fiscal year provides you more flexibility to change them outside of warning ordinance amendment process. There's a couple of questions about how the proposed fees are said and actually that's the next part of the agenda if you want to keep it separate from the ordinance. Those were the main points for discussion on the board on the 18. Should the board want to proceed you could consider a motion of more in public hearing or give additional thoughts for changes. Staff can do some additional work and bring those back to you after the meeting. Questions, comments regarding the memo and the ordinance. If here's our comments concerns were adequately addressed in my opinion. So there is a motion suggested to follow public hearing on this. Move to warn a public hearing on proposed amendments to the town's motor vehicle and traffic ordinance. Is there a second? Second. Is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none. All those in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right. Moving right along to user fees and charge the schedule amendment. You have a handout on this as well Eric. Yep. So as I mentioned if the board like to pull this separate from the ordinance and amend your fee schedule. The suggestion from staff is establishing an FY23 towing fee of $125 per tow. A storage fee of $35 per day beginning on the day of the tow. These fees were assembled after consulting rates in the area by staff. The storage fee for towed vehicles generally begins the day of the tow. But it can be dependent on the company. And charging these fees are means for the town to recoup its cost. Should a vehicle be need to be towed if there's a violation of the ordinance? Questions regarding the proposal? The only comment I have is that could become expensive very quickly. Yes. So don't do it I guess. To date we've had challenges with violations of the ordinance but not having a fee set for towing a vehicle. So this will give the police department some more ability to do that to rectify those situations. Okay. So there is a motion suggested for this one as well. Move to amend the fiscal year 2023 user fee and charge and charges scheduled to include a fee for vehicle towing and storage per the town's motor vehicle and traffic ordinance. Is there a second? Second. Okay. Sorry. Discussion on the motion. Very none. All those in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right. We're moving on then to the public rest facility solar panel purchase option.  We have Melinda here and I think Jeff forwarded as well. Both come up to the table. Yep. I'll give a brief introduction and turn it over to Melinda and Jeff here. So the town you may remember back when the town built the public works facility that we have a solar generation on the roof. Back in 2016 when the town agreement. Yeah. Okay. There was a purchase option after seven years. So 2023 will be the seventh year coming up. So the purchase option is for a fixed price for $125,000. That option kicks in in October of next year. And I think we need to give notice by June of coming up. If the town was to exercise that option. We've had some conversation with the town attorney. We have about $132,000 and unspent bomb proceeds from when the public works facility was built. Those are proceeds that we need to spend. If the board wanted to move forward with exercise option and purchasing the solar panels. Those unspent bomb proceeds could be the source of funding to make that purchase. And consulting with the town attorney. It's most likely to do that. You would need to warn a question for town meeting coming up in March. You'd have to make that decision by the end of January and start conversations with the board this evening. We do need to just confirm based on the scope of work there is bond documents that have the town attorney review that. But I'm anticipating right now it would likely be something that need to be placed on the warning. And should the board after its initial discussion want staff to further pursue that and looking at this option in more depth. I'll have an answer definitively for you early in January. So I tasked Melinda our energy and community development planner with looking at this with Jeff forward. Consultant based out of Richmond who's helped the town look at these in the past, including this array and the trackers behind town hall. They've done some great analysis looking at this and they'll walk that through the board. Kind of what the numbers look like and some things for the board to think about when it comes down to risk here. The energy committee has looked at this with Melinda. The energy committee is recommending the exercise of the option and moving forward with the purchase. But I'll turn it over to Melinda and Jeff to walk through this for the board and certainly have a lot of pieces to it. Sure. Jeff, I'm going to let you provide a summary of your analysis and then I can provide a summary of the energy committee's recommendation. Okay. So hello again. I was here back in 2016 when you originally were considering this project and I think again in 2018 when you were evaluating whether to buy the solar field out back here. So who I am is I'm an energy consultant. I live in Richmond. I'm on the Richmond select board now so I understand where you're at. And the town asked me to evaluate, crunch some numbers essentially of what the comparison would be purchasing the array essentially now or in year 15 or just leaving it where it is right now. Right now you get 10% of the benefit of the value of the production of the solar array on the building. So in order to do that analysis I had to come up with some assumptions and I welcome questions about them. I'll try to work through them a little bit. The first assumption that we looked at was operation and maintenance. So we asked, the company's name now is ISUN. It used to be PEC Electric. I think they're traded on the New York Stock Exchange. They're one of the bigger solar installers in the Northeast. Malin and I asked them for a quote on what it would cost to hire them, contract with them essentially to do annual operation and maintenance. And they gave us a figure of $2,650. In thinking about that that seems like a lot to me. The solar panels have essentially no moving parts. All of the equipment is under warranty. The panels have a warranty of it's either 20 or 25 years. The other main component are inverters and they have a warranty of either 12 or 15 years. I don't exactly recall which, but they're still well within the warranty period. So mostly what you do for annual operation and maintenance is you monitor the system to make sure that it's working correctly. That's not hard to do. You can see the output of the array on the inverter website. And if it dips, it can be set up to actually give you an alarm and tell you that it's not producing as it should be. And then it becomes a warranty item for quite some time. So $2,650 seemed like a lot to me for that level of annual maintenance. Their hourly rate is $85 an hour. So that works out to be about 32 hours or four full days a year for doing their operation and maintenance. I think you could easily do this in one and if you really wanted to do it, maybe two days of being on site to check all of the equipment. And frankly, I don't even think that's needed. So in addition to that annual maintenance, I talked to the Vermont League of Cities in town, you're an insurer, and they gave me a quote of an extra $300 a year for your property insurance on the building. So I looked at two different scenarios where either an annual operation and maintenance fee of $1,500, somewhat arbitrary, but half of what it would be if you were to do the full boat with ISUN at $2,600 plus the $300 worth of insurance. So that was the operation and maintenance assumptions that I used in the analysis. The other big number is we asked for a quote on what it would cost to take the panels off and put them back on if you had to replace the roof. It's a membrane roof. They typically have a warranty of 20 years. They can last longer or shorter, but that's typically what the warranty period is and that's a, you know, I think it's an appropriate thing to use in an analysis. It's figuring you'll have to replace it in 20 years. And so that's within the life of the analysis. The analysis runs for 25 years from the time it was put on the roof. And so in looking at that, they gave us a price of $132,000 in today's dollars to take the panels off and put them back on. Frankly, maybe, you know, maybe that would be what you'd want to do, but what's year 20 is another 13 years from now. My guess is that you'll have different decisions to make at that time. You know, if you have to take the panels off at that time to replace the roof, you may or may not put them back on. You may put different panels back on. And frankly, I would recommend that you actually do another analysis at that time because I think you have a different decision point to make at that time. But in the analysis, I just assumed that you were taking them off and putting them back on and use the quote that Ison gave us. And then the third variable is inflation. And, you know, mostly I'd say, I don't know, you know, good luck figuring that out.  But what I used in the analysis was a 3% inflation rate. What I used back in 2016 was two and a half. And that was based on historical numbers. You know, I did look back in 2016. I looked back over 20 or 25 years and like electric rates are somewhere around two, two and a half percent, something like that, as well as the general inflation. This time I used 3% and I also did it at 5%. So those are the variables. Ironically, the higher the inflation is, the better your return because the value of the electricity goes up as well. So what I did all of that, and, you know, I think you have in front of you, you have various different spreadsheets to reflect those assumptions and how they play out over the life of the analysis. It looks to me that the worst you could do if you bought the system is about the same as what you're getting now. A little bit better, but about the same return over that period of time. And if you chose any other assumption, if you chose to do some of that operation and maintenance and monitoring and evaluating, if you did it any other way than to hire an outside contractor to do that much work, you could essentially double the return on investment from just leaving it the way it is now, leaving your arrangement the way it is now. So I don't know if that's clear. I'd be happy to answer any questions and help you walk through it. Does that make sense? And for the board, I've labeled your two spreadsheets, scenario one and scenario two. Scenario one looks at the higher operating and maintenance costs of the $3,000. And scenario two looks at the lower number and calculating those bottom lines. I'm sure somebody must have some questions. I thought we're going to go through this sheet by sheet, but no. We can if you'd like. Okay. Well, I had a little bit of trouble understanding when I'm looking at the projected expenses for remove the panels and inverter replacements, where the two numbers are listed up above, 132 for the removed panels, 132K and 113 for the inverter replacement. But then down below, is that adjusted for inflation? Yes. What you're not seeing there is you're not seeing the column of numbers. It's annual inflation on year-on-year. I just was surprised with inflation that the 132 would go up to almost $200,000. Yeah. Inflation is a funny thing. I guess so. Yes. That was pretty much it. Other questions? It really is up to us to look at those bottom line numbers and see if we're comfortable with those. Yeah, I think it is. I think to my mind it's a matter of risk. If you do nothing, then you have a pretty predictable rate of return, but it's not a lot. It's like $2,500 a year. It's 10% of the value of the electricity that's coming out. And you have the opportunity of bumping that. If you buy it outright, you'll have more like a $25,000 a year return almost over the life of the system. There's a variety of ways you could look at that. You could look at it as if you invest $125,000 in five years, you break even, and the system could have a life of 50 years. There's solar panels that just went out of the solar system past Pluto that have been up there for over 50 years. There's not a lot that go wrong with them. They do degrade a little bit. And I did take that into consideration that they degrade about a half percent a year. But it's still got a long ways to go before that's nothing. I have solar panels on my roof, but I don't think they were made by NASA. And Jeff, as you know, I'm not an economist at all. When I look at the purchase in seven years versus purchase in 15 years, it seems to be you're not recommending purchasing in 15 years. So are we going to purchase it after seven years or not purchase it at all? That would be my recommendation. Because when this was originally put on, the net metering rules, what creates the return on the kilowatt hours that are produced, was considerably different. The Public Utilities Commission has backed off on its enthusiasm for net metering, and they've really ratcheted down the rate. At the time, you had net metering, the concept is a retail rate for the electricity that's produced from your system. The reason it's called net, it's like running your meter backwards, sort of. It's an accounting exercise, but it sort of works that way. At the time, in addition to the retail rate, they added a four percent adder that in addition to the retail rate, to encourage more people to do this net metering stuff, then it worked. It's worked quite well. It was probably the most effective renewable energy policy that we've had. So if you purchase it in year seven, you still have three years left of that. And it's not nothing. It actually adds up quite a bit. So there's a real advantage to purchasing now versus in purchasing in year 15. Because after that solar adder drops off in year 10. In year 15, the numbers look quite a bit different. Okay. So is that why we see the decrease in the value from 2000, trying to read across correctly, looks from 2025 to 2026. Yes. Okay. Yes. So that's the solar adder. Yeah. In terms of having good information, I don't know what else we need. Other questions from members of the board? It was a little scary looking at the figure of when you're replacing the roof and everything else on it. But so the energy committee and you as the consultant, both recommend that we sell at the end of seven years or buy it at the end of seven years. Yeah. That would be my recommendation. Yeah. The committee, that's their recommendation as well. Because buying, purchasing the array helps the town achieve its energy goals at relatively low risk. And gives the town more, a little more flexibility around when it comes time to replace the roof and having some options about, you know, whether you want to replace it with a new system or just take it down and not replace it and just allows more flexibility for that. And just the energy committee feels strongly that the town should be leading by example in trying to increase the amount of renewable energy generating the town. Other questions tonight? Sorry, just as I look at this. Jeff, your spreadsheet shows purchasing it after seven years starts in 2022, which I assume is this calendar year. Is that the way? At 2023, actually. 2023, yes. Yes, now I see how, okay. So that would be in, I guess I'm asking it from the question of when we're budgeting to purchase it. So we already are in fiscal year 2023, which means our budget has been set until at least the end of June. The piece with this, if you wanted to use the unspent bond proceeds, that's a separate action or question for the voters. So that's a pool of money that needs to be allocated. So if it were something that those funds were utilized, I would view it as outside of the year's budget. Okay. What I was getting at is, is this something we are considering in this year's budget? And as I kind of was talking and listening to you, I'm concluding the answer is yes. Yeah, I would, if you want to, the timeline to exercise the option, we'd have to let them know by June. So if it's something where we need to warn the question for the bond proceeds, we would have to happen this March. Okay. If that was the pool of money the board wanted to use. Okay. I think you purchased it in October. Right. It's my recollection. So, you know, when you're talking 2023, you know, I'm thinking October 2023 is when your opportunity will be. Okay. It all, it's all relative, whether it, whichever year, you know, that's where year seven is in October 2023, I think. And really my point was, is it this budget or a future budget where we're, you know, have to make the commitment, if you will. And it sounds like it's this budget. The bad news about this budget of course is, it's a tough budget here. Okay. The other piece there too, these funds, we think about the bond proceeds, there are separate pool of funds. Right. Okay. That you're looking at, that wouldn't flow into the operating budget per se or the capital budget. So it wouldn't impact the tax rate. Correct. That's good news. My recollection when we, you know, I think I've worked with your previous town manager, Rick. Remember him? Yeah. He mentioned that the, the public works building when you built it came in under budget. And there was money left over from that. And that was, you know, one of the, I don't know if that's the bond proceeds that you have. But it makes a certain sense. I think you, I think what he said at the time is you have a hard time spending that on things other that are not related to that building in some fashion. So this is related to that building. And I think it, I think that's what's thinking back at the time in 2016. Okay. All right. Terry, if I may, I just had a question for Jeff, Jeff forward. Yes, please. With the net metering credits, we've essentially applied them to our GMP bills today and thinking about the cash flow here where, if that's always the case to, you know, we're decreasing our bill cost with the net metering rules. Is there a way to, you know, receive that more cash in hand versus just decreasing your bill? No. So the way that the net metering credits are monetized is they're good for a year. They're good for 12 months. If you accrue more, and on any individual account, actually, if you accrue more net metering credits than you use, you know, consume and electricity, you get a bang, you know, you get a, essentially, what would have been a negative bill, and those can build up for a year, but you've got to have a positive bill within a year. So one of the reasons that municipalities are attractive for net metering projects is you have a lot of electorate accounts, and you can spread them over many different electorate accounts. You can't use them for street lights, but you can use them for buildings, you know, at water pumps, you know, wastewater treatment plants use a lot of electricity. So, you know, it is worth looking at. It certainly was in Peck's best interest to look at that, but you should be looking at your bills and seeing that, you know, you don't build up too much of a bank that you can't use up. Solar produces, like, it produces three-quarters of its energy during the fall and the summer, and in the winter months, the six months during the winter, it only produces about a quarter of its output. So what tends to happen is in the summertime, you overproduce, then you have credits, and then in the wintertime, you catch back up.  So just trying to keep in mind of the cash flow aspect, whether it's the town's not getting a check every month with this amount of money, giving on utility bill, so to monetize that we would just have to think about that and account for it for the value over time. So the effect will be is that your utility budget will go down. You'll invest this money and your utility budget will go down. In that concept you just talked about, Jeff, is the town has enough accounts to spread this over that we won't end up having that non, a non, a positive bill, having a situation where we won't have a positive bill in a year. It is worth paying attention to. You know, one of the things that I noticed is I did, in order to average, you know, to figure out what your, you know, your average production was, which is a little bit less of what they anticipated when they put it in. But in order to figure that out, whoever is tracking your utility bills does a really good job of it. And he or she had a very good spreadsheet of exactly what it's producing, how much it's worth, what the credits are. And that's what you need to do. It's because you don't want to, you don't want to get under water because it's hard to dig yourself back out. But you have what appears to be plenty of accounts to do that by. This is not really, you know, a lot of money on electricity compared to probably what you spend, I would think. Just to add to that, I calculated that the solar array on the DPW garage and the town hall fields produce about 40% of the town's electricity. That includes like the buildings, the pump stations, the, yeah, I mean, basically all the accounts. You got plenty of room to grow. So that raises an interesting question. I don't know where I'm going with this question, but some of those pumps that we, you know, are used to electricity for are under enterprise accounts because they're water or wastewater department, you know, versus the town, which is, is there any, is there anything I need to know about that or is that just a non-issue? That's a good point. As we look at this further and look to potentially add to our solar generation capacity, thinking about those enterprise versus general funds, pump stations are a big user, sewer pump stations, we spread them around.  We get a credit because that way, because they're smaller than the town population, the folks who are on, so. I could see a board policy at some point of how we allocate those credits. As we start to get more of them, it might be something for the board to think about how you allocate them between the general fund and the enterprise funds. But who goes on the 40%, that's pretty cool. Anything else for Jeff? Thank you. I need to make a decision, a firm decision on this sometime between now and the January. So you'll see it back on the agenda at some time, hopefully in the near future. Jeff, how do you find being on the select board in Richmond? Close the fund. Nothing better to do, I guess. Wow. Fun, huh? It's surprising, it really, I've been involved and worked with select boards and school boards a long time. I was on the blue board and I've been involved in politics for a long time. And I'm surprised at how much work it is. It really is, it's daunting. So I'm still trying to catch up, but it's my first time. I'll figure out a way to balance my time. Great. Thank you. Good to see it. Thanks. So we're at the Energy and Human Rights Development Planner update in Melinda. Well, Eric, you're going to lead off and then Melinda will take over. Yeah, just briefly, I think Melinda, you haven't been to the board meeting since your, something in your role, I don't think. Yeah, maybe not. Yeah, so Melinda's back, you know, a long time conservation planner. She stepped into our new role of Energy and Community Development Planner, the new position the board approved last year. She's doing a great job stepping into this new position for the town. We had some transitions in the department as we promoted Simon Miles to fill a conservation planner position planning technician Andrew Plum late in the summer. So we had a staff member sharing duties. So the last couple of months, Melinda's had more time to really jump into her new role here. I thought it'd be a good time for the board to just hear an update of all the work she's been doing in the energy front, affordable housing front and transportation. So there's a number of different things. Yeah. I know your memo focuses on energy. Yeah, so I did not have any updates on community development activities. I anticipate probably appearing in front of you at some point to provide that update on housing and community development work. But today is just focused on energy. So basically I have been since mid-April engaged in staffing the Energy Committee and providing guidance for their role helping them develop a work plan. The Energy Committee has really been amazing in their efforts. They have largely focused on community outreach in the first six months of this, of their appointment as a board. They've been publishing articles in the observer monthly articles for the living green section. They've been setting up a table at the farmers market several times last summer and talking to people there and they've been participating in town events and they coordinated Williston's first EV Fest last October 1st which was a real success with over 75 people attending and over 18 people with their electric vehicles there to share information with people. So the Energy Committee is really you know, they're really engaging the community and they're providing a lot of information. They are themselves very highly educated in the energy field and just extremely bright and dedicated. So I feel honored to be working with them. The Energy Committee has also looked at potential locations for EV chargers and I've helped them map out locations and they've been looking at the town capital improvement program and developing some recommendations for the inclusion of energy efficiency into that program and as you saw here also developing recommendations for the potential purchase of the solar array. So the committee has developed a two-year work plan basically reviewing actions and the energy plan and prioritizing those according to what I would call a ratio of effort to impact so in other words just really choosing those actions that will have the most impact for the lowest amount of effort as the low-hanging fruit and prioritizing those. So largely that's been outreach which is great. And then myself besides staffing the Energy Committee I have been gathering a lot of information on the town's energy usage in town buildings and sort of documenting that in a program called Energy Star Portfolio Manager which is an online platform that provides a lot of information on trends over time and energy use intensity so I've learned a lot from that and I reviewed the 2009-2010 energy audits for the town buildings and I've been putting together information as far as what retrofits have been done in those buildings and how they track with those audits the town has been doing a lot to implement the recommendations in those audits for the town buildings and I did participate in a walk-through last spring with Efficiency Vermont to look at ways that the town could save energy in town buildings and based on their recommendations we looked at a plan to retrofit lighting in the police station the fire station and the annex from a local contractor to do that work that's been included in the town's capital improvement program budget I've also been compiling data on the solar generation at the two arrays that the town one that the town owns and one that town leases and the array of the town hall fields produces over 200,000 kilowatt hours annually and yields an average of 33,000 annual net meter in credits and then we've already talked about the array in the public works garage and then I've also been working with some energy developers renewable energy developers on exploring the potential options for community solar in Williston and then we are also working on some sustainable transportation initiatives we got some funding through Vermont AOT to conduct a feasibility study for microtransit service in Williston which is essentially a demand-based service of smaller vehicles to get people from the more rural areas of Williston to Taft Corners where the fixed route bus services that work has not yet begun we're still waiting on we're still waiting to see a grant agreement from VTrans but as soon as we have it we can get going on that the town has also been working with CCRPC and STAN Tech to assess the feasibility of a proposed multimodal hub in Taft Corners on a piece of town owned land in Maple Tree Place so that would be kind of a mini transit station that includes some facilities for bike storage and and we've been talking with GMT during this process and they've been very supportive of a multimodal hub there and also I want to say so we're the town is currently kind of planning for an upgrade to the town hall parking lot and I think there's an opportunity there to really use that parking lot as more of a public facility for to incorporate some park and ride spaces potentially public EV charging bike storage facilities so we the planning department will be working with public works and the contractor to develop plans for the parking lot that will hopefully you know include some amenities such as that and then finally we will continue to look at bylaw amendments that further energy goals the Taft Corners form based code supports the town energy goals because it promotes energy efficiency through building form i.e. more building stories more dense development means fewer it means fewer exterior walls it also means more units more dense development mixed uses so that people live near where they want to go shopping and want to go do stuff reduced parking requirements encourage other forms of transportation and the goal is to make Taft Corners a place that's pleasant to walk and that will also encourage other forms of transportation than single occupancy vehicle transportation and then okay I'll try to speed up the rest of this because I know you're busy so we did also receive a small fund a small grant from Vermont Council on Rural Development to do some outreach regarding the inflation reduction act and the funding that will be made available through that for residential energy improvements so the hope is that we will be able to do outreach to the most energy burdened households in Williston really target that outreach to those who need the most help in making their homes more energy efficient and saving money on their energy bills and there will be other funding opportunities available next year there's actually quite a lot of funding available so our job will be to figure out the most effective way to use that money we were recently notified that the town is going to receive $75,000 in direct funding from the Department of Energy provided that we submit a plan that meets their criteria for how we're going to use that money to further our energy goals there's quite a bit of flexibility in that funding and there's a lot of potential projects that it could be used for so I will be working with the Energy Committee to kind of come up with a list of high priority projects and I'm sure that you will be seeing that hearing about that again and seeing it and then there's also there may be an opportunity for additional funding through the state's municipal energy resilience program grants of up to $500,000 will be available for approved projects for weatherization, thermal efficiency replacing fossil fuel heating systems with more renewable efficient renewable or electric heating systems in town buildings because because Williston is not considered an energy verdant community overall we're probably not it's kind of a long shot for that funding but nonetheless we will look at it and probably apply it What is an energy burden community? So the state has done an analysis town by town of energy burden and essentially what that means is that a town is considered energy burdened if the majority of residents are spending more than a certain percentage of their income on heating and cooling and transportation energy and I think Williston was ranked as one of the lowest energy burden communities in the state so Interesting Questions, comments? No, good job. Yeah, very impressed. Thank you. That we have you doing this and that our town is leading the way and you're leading the way for us. Well, I feel lucky to have the job. You've been a lot in a short period of time so thank you. Thank you, Melinda. All right, then we'll move on to the Barthie-Alleyne Memorial Library update looking for the structure of libraries Shane Kerns and the new president of the Board, Charity Clark. So welcome and this is always my favorite report again because it's always upbeat and so many brand new things to talk about so take it away. I almost touched the microphone and I got the evil eye over here for touching the microphone. Thank you, I'm Charity Clark. I was recently late to the board meeting and now I'm the chair. That's why I'm here tonight.  We all of us, we are elected members to five year terms and I mean I think we all just love getting to talk about the books that we're reading and what's going on in the library. We provide such an incredible variety of programs. I live in the village myself and my daughter and I skied to the library on Friday because it was a snow day and that's how we spend our time and as a parent I know we use the library so often to help with parenting and I see other parents there. We're so fortunate to have this library and one of the hubs of our community and the village I think it probably is the hub of our community. One thing that Jane will be touching on is that we of course live in a growing town. It's very large. It's one of the largest towns in the state and we have a pretty small library considering the size of the town and the staff is incredible. They're creative. They use the tools that they have to excellent effect. The bookmobile alone is incredible. The program especially during the pandemic but even still getting into the community and neighborhoods and the senior communities. Folks who are home bound for a couple of months can have someone drop off books for them, whatever they need and of course the library of things is always a fascination. You can get a ukulele at the library and many other really cool things. One of the items in the budget that I wanted to highlight is that we currently have an assistant director of a library who is part-time and has been for many years. She's been there forever and I think it's time for us to be right sizing the staff and the services that we're providing the town. We have this incredibly capable staff but we have a tiny library with a pretty small staff and as Williston has grown it's time to make sure that Great Library and Great Staff is a sustainable thing going forward and has the tools and the resources they need to be successful and to make sure that those in Williston who are enjoying the library and have the opportunity to enjoy the library continue to have that so that we can have a strong library going forward for all of us, for seniors, for children for people who are skiing on snow day to the library and people seeking jobs and all the many folks who use our library we're so lucky. So I'm kind of the main hype girl about the library so I'm going to stop talking because I could just keep going and let Jane tell you in more detail what we have in mind and what we've been working on. Great. So Eric if you could hit that link Thanks Charity and I'm happy to say we were fully open on the snow day. I know we're early but a lot of libraries jumped the gun and closed so I'm glad you were able to ski over things. So I just wanted to highlight a couple of the trends and challenges we've had at the library over the last year. One of the things we now have over 4400 patrons and that's a number that goes up and down as we purge the database but one thing we've started looking at more closely is new patrons that are added each year and you can see in FY22 there was quite a jump even from pre-pandemic so we are welcoming new people in town and we're happy to see them coming in and getting cards part of that increase is also you can apply for a library card online now so I think both factors but clearly the town is growing as Charity mentioned we're also back to normal our patron visits are still not what they were pre-pandemic people especially the seniors are still a little hesitant about coming in some of them but we are getting closer to normal. Our circulation is almost back to pre-pandemic levels so it's very strong and if you scroll down a little bit Eric please our e-resource usage is a subset of our circulation and you can see the trend is growing accessing e-books and streamed audio books not as steep a trend as during the pandemic but I expect that trend to continue so if if you go down a little bit Eric every these stats from the department of libraries just came out from FY21 comparing all of Vermont's libraries Williston ranks 13 the 13th largest community in FY21 and a couple of data points that we really were very strong in is one is programming so we ranked fifth in the state for attendance at our programs and that's up from seventh in FY20 so people especially our youth programs but all our programs are very well attended our collection use we ranked eighth in the state a subset of that is our print collection which ranks sixth the real stand out here is the circulation of our youth collection which is fourth in the state and that's pretty impressive there's some pretty big libraries that we're up against and in our young you know young families are really using the library heavily so thanks Eric obviously our ongoing challenge is space and you know we try and be creative with how we're working with what we have the town green has been wonderful people love having programs out there this was the watershed program that was pictured and if you scroll down Eric the other program that we had this I guess it was in the spring is the 802 reptiles which was supposed to be outside but it was too cold for the reptiles so I don't know if anybody here attended that it was definitely capacity for our community room and our family room you can see people were were overflowing so anyway we meet the challenge we try and we spruce up our patio a little bit and a lot of the groups the other way we meet the challenge is we take the library outside the walls of the library and meet the community where they are you may recall in FY21 the outreach position expanded to 25 hours and Sarah Hibbler has really hit the pavement with this and really reached different community groups so she visits four senior communities every month and five preschools and she'll do story times book talks sometimes it's just drop off but she also visits homebound patrons between 10 and 20 a month someone may have had hip surgery and they'll call to see if they can renew their books and we'll offer we can come to your house and that's a real lifeline for some people and obviously Dottie is our most visible symbol going around town we went to 14 neighborhoods this summer and we rearranged the route a little bit we always look at the number of visits some communities are aging a little bit and some are younger so we redid the route to meet that need we also visit Allenbrook school on Wednesdays we visited the part 2 camps would come on board and we went to the farmers market and several special events so you can see there was quite a big jump 36% of visits from last summer so that's in part because of the special events and also redoing the routes so that's a quick recap of where we are in the library this year thank you very much questions space issues let's talk about that okay let's what do I need to know what do you need to know well you know we are very excited about the scoping study getting started and I think it will be really interesting to see what Black River design brings back from the first step of that was an assessment of the library space so the engineers came through I think about 3 weeks ago 4 weeks ago and looked at everything electrical, plumbing and structure so it will be very interesting to see what they say as far as what we need in space that will be part of the process as well there's a library consultant Marisol who is an expert who will help us evaluate what we need but definitely more spaces smaller spaces for smaller more space for the collection so it's accessible a lot of our books are out of reach for someone even my height and at the bottom level aren't accessible either you can't get through the stacks with a wheelchair or a walker, some of them so there's a lot of it just feels very compressed okay do you have thoughts man realize this is speculative you really want to wait but should it be in the same location a bigger library same location is our town at a point where we maybe should have two libraries does a remote a more main and maybe a more remote library makes sense what other uses of the library might you contemplate that I might not even be able to you know envision I can answer that last part first that's the easy part the rest I kind of have to be Switzerland here Jeff and let the scoping study and what the community wants is so crucial in this obviously I don't want to I want that to be open but as far as things that you may not have imagined makerspace where 3D printers and cricket machines and computers for gaming you know there's all sorts of different things you're seeing in libraries a video space we're just doing a podcast series related to the Vermont Reads and Bonnie you know we have a two way microphone but a recording studio there might be people in town who want to come in and use that Charity was envious of one day snowshoes which we don't have room to store the snowshoes to loan so there's the library of things which might not be things you would imagine a library would get into so yeah it's not the same as it was and it's an exciting it's not your old library exactly yeah it's a community space yeah that's interesting to hear from the perspective of that Scoping Study is not only looking at library space but community space and what I'm hearing from you is that you see a connection maybe a strong connection between the library and its services and programs with a more community base space yeah I think we are functioning as a community space now to some extent obviously we can't fill the full need in the space we have so clearly yeah there's overlap there and potentials for multi-purpose spaces sorry I don't know how to shut it shut it off any other comments or questions thank you thank you there's probably a couple other people who remember the oldest part of the library just the Vermont room and the old brick structure that still exists on the front so it's certainly grown since I moved into town so great great progress so thank you all thank you for the members of the Board of Trustees that are here tonight as well so we appreciate all of your efforts I'm sorry I did have one I see I see in your in the budget where you discuss the new position expanding from part-time the assistant librarian from part-time to full-time what else do you want me to know about the budget about the budget okay you want me to jump into the budget well we're going to be going directly to the budget presentation as soon as the is this presentation is done yeah that's the answer okay sure so anyway thank you and we'll start now with the budget presentation and operating the budget is the first that you don't have too much in line of capital expenses I think only one just the one bookmobile right so we can go through the operating expenses of your budget that would be great so with the exception of department salary the budget request presents line items that are essentially level funded or slightly increased for rising inflation the obviously the major request in this budget is to make the assistant director position full-time moving from the current part-time 28 hours a week to 40 hours with benefits we're going to be very sad to say goodbye to Debbie Rotter the assistant director who has been I believe in that position since 1987 I was trying to find out from her the first couple of years maybe she had a different title but so 36 years as sad as we are we have to look at the transition in April and feel that this would be a good time to move that position to full-time which is more appropriate for a grade 7 position that is would be in a leadership or is in a leadership role after the director it's the most senior position in the library so the current duties performed by the assistant director include cataloging book processing so basically overseeing the book from the box to the shelf audiobook and periodical collection development library safety and emergency procedure statistical gathering and reporting to the state and management of operations when I'm not there so as you can imagine the volume of work has increased and changed a lot since 1987 meeting the current job responsibilities of the position has been a challenge for several years as a part-time position the part-time hours preclude the assistant director from taking on some of the supervisory and administrative support duties that are in the job description specifically supervising the students the substitutes training them and administrative duties like scheduling the staff and the community which is being heavily used by outside groups as well so basically I am doing those functions now and my supervisory load with three full-time staff are five part-time four students and a team of subs is very high and it detracts from meeting with employees one-on-one and from focusing on higher level duties like strategic planning and long-term planning also having a part-time staff member stepping in as director is problematic because problems arise five days a week and it doesn't always work out that well does that answer your question? Sure so you've known for a while that the retirement would happen what are your thoughts about the issue comes in the current budget there isn't because it wasn't anticipated to go to full-time when you're hiring this new staff person so how would that work let's say we did as part of the budget we're considering now agree with moving it to full-time in terms of hiring the new person which I assume you're going to start either soon because you'll want to fill it soon after April or maybe even have some overlap that might work for you but yet the budget wouldn't be large enough to support the full-time person until sometime after July 1st does that make sense? I did think of that I think we could manage to July 1st so somebody would come on after July 1st or come on part-time if it worked for them you could structure the position in a way the hiring up just a few other things in the operation so the remaining lines cover inflation and a 3% overall increase so obviously the salary benefits was the big piece here our largest line at 87,000 is books and I'm requesting only a 1% increase for the increased usage of electronic resources a small increase to small equipment 1,000 to cover inflation and also to replace some office furniture which has reached the end of its life and in building overhead the other increase would be maintenance and repair asking for another 2,500 as the building has aged I'm finding each year that things go wrong and having these extra funds to address those issues is included that looks like covered it pretty well sorry as far as the major increases that are happening so any questions for Jean on the operating budget no not the operating so you had one under the the capital budget and that was I think the bookmobile yes so the request is for $8,700 to put toward the replacement of the bookmobile at $90,000 replacement cost so this is assuming 12 years with replacement in fiscal year 28 we started this one after we got the new bookmobile and we had one gap in FY22 that we didn't set any money aside and then increased for the remaining years page 91 we constantly have this problem of trying to catch up because you with what page were on I don't even have page numbers Jeff so but if there were any other line items too that you wanted more details on that was the only one that I noticed in here that so this is simply to start building the fund to replace the bookmobile yes we have about $40,000 in that capital savings account right now sort of about halfway there any further questions? how much to talk about there if not thank you very much and we appreciate the being heard today thank you moving on to the fire department, Chief Collette I was hoping they were all going to stay to support the fire department so get your presentation sure great so it's my honor to sit here in front of you tonight to present the fiscal year 24 budget proposal when we prepare a budget I know and you'll see in my letter of transmittal which was no different than any other department head that set in front of you so far this is a tough one as we all know right we know that when we go to the grocery store we know that when we're filling up our vehicles and paying our bills in our daily lives so we went into this budget with that lens because we know that this potentially cascades to the daily lives of the citizenry the first photo here is appropriate and then we'll skip into the next photo as well is that when we look at the fire department budget the resource that you have in your fire department budget is the people right in that human capital and so I really want to acknowledge the work of the staff here this was the gathering for Lieutenant Soper his last day on shift here at the fire department next slide please and this is the result of town meeting earlier this year when the community supported the addition of this nine staff and for those of you that remember the presentation that we updated you on earlier this fall with that nine staff has done for us has allowed us to decrease our request for mutual aid so any calls that are coming into the community now we're able to address them more readily and I'll go into that a little bit further here in the presentation but next slide please so some of the trends and major issues here was this the addition of the nine staff what we've seen as a result of that is the average request for mutual aid both for fire and EMS responses into the community was over 20 incidents per month and as I presented like I said earlier this fall we saw that effect be realized in July when the nine new staff went on and the request for mutual aid dropped down to four we saw that in August rise up to 11 but then in September it dropped down to four again just today I pulled the data for the following two months October we're back down at eight and in November we're down at six request for mutual aid so what does that mean for us what that means for us is that we're able to address the concurrent EMS call for потому because that patient is being transported by our own ambulance or the backup ambulance so that's something that we've taken into consideration in the budget proposal for FY24 The operational changes that we see here is the ability to staff a tanker for rural water supply in remote areas rural areas in the community that are not protected by a hydrant system the aerial ladder truck which was obviously a big addition to the department but our ability to actually run more people to an emergency call with in a safe operational or a safer operational posture that has we're directly benefiting from that addition. What we see as a continued challenge is the recruitment of and retention of call staff members. Despite creative opportunities, creative recruitment strategies, we had a number of applications come in and we continue to see that ebb and flow as people discover really what it means to be committed to an on-call position in the fire department. So that averages about we have about six active staff in the call staff right now despite our efforts to try to recruit people. Just life continues to get in the way for them to serve back because the demands of the position. Next slide. Looking at EMS revenue when we are fully staffed and so we've had some challenges recently because we haven't been fully staffed with Lieutenant Soper's retirement and other medical illness within the department. That's why I think we saw those rises here over October and November but what we have been able to do is see more ambulance transports through our own service which has resulted in more revenue. The projections for FY24 for ambulance revenue will likely exceed $490,000 which is about $100,000 projection increase of where we were in 23. What works hand-in-hand with that is the ambulance agency assessment of 3.3% which will increase that to about $16,000 which is a fee that's set by the state. We have no ability to impact that. So as fallback goes up, our contribution goes hand-in-hand with that. Next slide please. The call staff wages for FY23 were in excess of $70,000 as we budgeted it. When we look at FY24, we took a hard look at this and we've just not seen the participation and so we feel comfortable that we can reduce that budget by $30,000 to take that down because we just aren't they're not people that are showing up and if they are our expenses very low for the for the rate that we're reimbursing them at. So there's a you know it's a double-edged sword. We don't have people that are on the call staff but in the backside of that we actually saved $30,000 in that call budget. Next slide please. This is the trend. I know you've seen this trend line before and that red line continues to dip down. The September, November rise that you see really at the end was again a result of our recruitment where we tried to put some extra staff on. We saw that number go up but then we've had more resignations of the call staff since then so I expected that will continue to go down here over the in December. And of note this is call staff payroll. This is the payroll hours right. Next slide please.  It's costing us more in fuel costs because we're actually now remember that essentially one year ago we only had the ability to send a single engine on a fire response with the ambulance. So we're really running two trucks and now on average to a fire response we're running two fire apparatus in addition to the ambulance. We also have incurred we have to maintain that training and familiarity so those units are getting run daily and trained on daily so that's we've seen an increase in the fuel budget. So yes we have a better operational force. What we didn't expect is to see diesel fuel jump to where the prices are today. And that reflects in the FY24 budget. Next slide please. An amendment in the turnout gear so we're doing bulk purchasing we know that annually we have to purchase on a replacement plan seven sets of personal protective equipment which is the turnout gear that you see here as an example to maintain that because the turnout gear has a 10 year lifespan so that seven sets is our rotation to keep everyone in a set that's compliant within 10 years of its manufacturer date. What we have done though is any of the turnout gear that didn't hit that $10,000 capital threshold so that would be a set of gear that got damaged or something that we didn't anticipate that fell outside of the capital schedule. We've kicked that back into the operating budget and removed it from the capital budget and surely that I believe that was cut by the auditors as a best practice to make sure that we're doing that correctly. What other costs associated with maintaining that equipment is the request for an extractor. We applied for a fire act grant to replace extractor is a fancy word for a commercial washing machine for turnout gear so that's the extractor. That's the extractor right there the silver machine right there that you see in the photo. I've got kind of one at home too. So we applied for that and at the time of application it was still operating the time of the grant award it was not operating that dates back to when the fire station sat across the parking lot that so that machine that we have has been transitioned to the new station. It certainly outlived its life it had failed and we struggled actually Lieutenant Soper championed the work to try to get some repair company in and now it's been Lieutenant Proudy has taken the role of getting this in but we've essentially put a Band-Aid fix on a machine that's on its last legs and so we'll need to absorb that into capital in FY24. Unfortunately it doesn't come out without a hefty price tag that extractor is around $17,000 and then the dryer to accompany it is all around $11,000. Is that where you paid Ted for yours? Yeah. Yes.  We tried to optimize it for what is the makes practical sense for the fire department on our demand. So when we come back from an emergency what can we put into that not to get too much into the weeds but you can only wash the outer shells of the gear together and then you have to wash the inner liners together because one is more aggressive it'll break down the other and it will destroy the lifespan of it. So you have to do a multiple wash cycles and for all of our staff we tried to match those two so they complement one another. And sorry I know this is a naive question that you have to do this to this this equipment it's not like my ski coat that never gets washed. This stuff has to get washed. Yeah so it's a matter of safety right it's a matter of firefighter safety so any fire response we go on we assume that that's been contaminated with a carcinogen and we don't want that on for the next call. And it's not fair to one it's not fair for our firefighters but it's also not fair for our public we shouldn't be going on the next call with cancer on our gear and coming into people's homes. So when we come back from a fire actually we don't even leave the scene we'll bag our equipment at the fire scene into a plastic bag so it doesn't come back into the cab of the truck with us and then it goes in line and sits in queue at the extractor. Earlier this year when we did have the failure we were actually of the our current extractor we were going and shipping a gear over and we're doing at Essex Junction fire station because ours have broken. So yeah it's a safety issue that's why we issue two sets of gear so when that contaminated set is in queue to be laundered and that's the need for the dryer right we could sit it out and we could we could have that gear there but who's to say that if you run back-to-back incidents you need to have a cycle where you can get it back in relatively quickly so that's why there's a dryer to complement the extractor. Okay and this is just common equipment at fire stations. Yes sir. Okay. What was it 25 years ago? Absolutely not but the science is dictated the science has led us to say it's unsafe. Okay. Next slide please. Funding for regional dispatch was in here regional dispatch had projected the same cost that we're paying into Shelburne Dispatch now and I know that you've been apprised of the update that just came out earlier this this week about regional dispatch. Suffice to say wherever this lands we feel that the budget will either wherever the agency be this the amount of money we're going to spend is equal so you'll see that either the price we pay for Shelburne Dispatch or for regional dispatch at the in the operational budget is still 58,000 annually and that's what they had bid for us. Sorry chief I'm just looking at the budget and for regional this for dispatch services it's showing 80,000. What am I missing? The next slide. We'll get it. Okay. This is happening a lot to me too. No worries. I'm glad that we're following along on this so this is what comes along with it our records management software so where we gather all of our data we enter our data today into a platform called emergency reporting that emergency reporting is a very cost-effective product we pay less than $2,000 annually for that records management software but with anything in today's world emergency reporting got bought up by a larger company called ESO ESO is sunsetting the the emergency reporting product so forcing us to change our vendors we have met with three vendors so far and interviewed them they range in price of greater than around 15,000 each though the vendor that we're leaning towards the startup cost is going to be 20,000 so that we realize is a big deal in addition to that 20,000 is the bridge from the CAD the bridge from the records management software to link it to the computer a to dispatch software that's an additional 4,000 okay so there's your 60,000 and now we're adding another 20 24,000 so we're getting into that $80,000 range so and that's all under the dispatch to the house so where where did we save how did we save money next slide please thank you I the command car was set to be replaced in FY 24 I couldn't in this era in this challenging time I couldn't see why we can't add another year and not replace that to its life so we're going to not replace that in FY 24 there's a couple of things that that does for us it allows us to actually look at alternative fuel vehicle options IE an electric vehicle to replace that if that's going to be something it allows us to look at that right now that option I I watched Bruce's presentation last week and so I saw right that's really not out there yet giving us a year maybe we're going to be in a better spot so we we're not going to be at any detriments we've kicked that expense out the other thing that we've done we had projected for FY 24 the paving of the fire station apparatus in the parking areas and the apparatus ramp out front yes it needs to be done but is it going to break us operationally if we we kick that expense out a year no it's not going to break us so we have deferred that paving project to FY 25 how else did we save our paramedic grant that we had another fire at grant we were able to purchase a 12 lead EKG monitor so for our paramedic use that monitor we had it budgeted at 32,000 we were able to do that through grant funding so we actually pulled that out of our needs in capital equipment and addition in addition to that way we were awarded another fire at grant this year that's what we put our our exhaust is our exhaust recovery system in that exhaust recovery system is in installed and working in the firehouse there was leftover funds and our managers from FEMA region one on the grant award say they don't want to ever have us give anything back so as long as our project sits within what they call their high priorities we're able to spend that down so we have purchased we haven't completed the purchase yet we have designed and have the spec award out for a new accountability system for accountability of members and that's actually a county-wide approach where all the mutual aid partners are adopting the same accountability project it's a simple project there's not there's no IT that's it's essentially Velcro and tags but it works and it's it's true and tried and works at fire departments across the nation and so we're moving forward with that right now we have no formal accountability system outside of the ones that you see on either the deputies from my car so this will actually have accountability command capability on both the deputies car the engine and the ladder truck so no matter what apparatus is there we'll have some capability so again that's going to be grant funded next slide please moving into capital some of the other areas here that you see in the tabs in the budget for capital the paving like I said earlier was deferred until FY 25 the heating ventilating and air conditioning costs we haven't looked at add any cost to that so it's an unchanged the phone system we completed in FY 23 what we'd like to do is start anticipating the replacement of that again in FY 25 so we'll start putting a little bit of money away because those phone systems as we all know right technology is going faster than some of our our equipment is living it out living its life we heard Melinda speak earlier about the fire station LED lighting project you see that here that's not in the fire department budget that's in her budget but that's a hundred and twenty seven thousand dollars that's the estimate by the the vendor the local vendor to change all of our lights from their current fluorescent lights to LED lighting and that's been deferred in the FY 24 budget so a new here really is a re a new realization of the tab for capital budgets for buildings for the fire department this tab is we have to start reinvesting you heard Jane just speak about that for the library we hadn't had this tab here before but it's given back to the maintenance upkeep here for some of these large projects and what we identified in the FY 24 priority is the person doors on the fire station they're rusting out so the frames are rusting out and the doors are rusting out they were as I understand it they were sandblasted and recoded a number of years ago already so we've already gone through the maintenance cycle and now we need to replace them so that's what that fifteen thousand dollar capital expenses for for the building hopefully was something a little more durable we hope right yes we hope so that is the end of the formal presentation now I think where we're at today is the ability for us to deliver services today for the value the added of the personnel I can't undersell right we are much more capable today than we were a year ago so are there questions on the operating budget that's so we reviewed it on the list that the chief may have missed the question I'm sorry man are we going to go through the capital budget items or we will okay all right yeah they were included in the slide so the slides went the first battle slides were ops and then we transitioned the last three were there's there's about 11 different things that are in the capital budget that we can take a look at but look at are any questions on the operating that's just one question about the department how many fire vehicles does the department have currently I may get it wrong 11 okay that may include the trailers okay and and the tankers and the the thing we think of when we think of a fire truck the tankers the ladder what yeah the so one called the engine three three engines yep and a ladder truck okay so four is it when I or the suppression units it's okay good way to think of two ambulances the utility truck the two command cars but then there's the the trailers that we own and then the utv so that 11 encompasses the trailer okay good thank you that's exactly what I need the difference a year makes though in that a lot of those vehicles were essentially unusable this time last year right so now now all those major capital expenses from previous budgets are being utilized exactly yeah that's huge two things about that one year that was the surprise of last year you couldn't you could literally could not take a ladder truck to a fire that needed a ladder truck but the other piece of it to me was with the firefighters was this safety it provided to the firefighters having that additional staff and that to me was an important piece of it and as you saw in the October presentation I mean we that's four follows function right and and when you're out there you have building fires are auto-exposing on occupied residential building and we're able to stop that because our staffing is I mean that alone is a testament to moving forward in the right direction no more questions and operating let's move on to capital and we have the capital book and the first one that I saw that has expenditures and you've just talked about that a little bit ago it's on page 24 the HVAC system so there's no change here same amount of money yeah in HVAC and page 25 is the what you had just mentioned is the the doors correct 15,000 for the for the exterior person doors pages 2026 sorry can I ask a question about on page 25 is the 15,000 anticipated to be enough for the doors in other words the 15,000 I'm seeing for 2025 will be for other aspects correct yeah the 24 project if you will will be the doors and that will exhaust that 15,000 okay that you're in your anticipation okay we've already asked a vendor for a quote that's where the number comes from if you don't mind I was just asking are we going to be spending 15,000 a year for six years on doors and the answer is no so we and we have a list right so we've there was recommendations that came through on building improvements outside of the maintenance cost right and so that's what that would be for okay moving forward and in 25 and because it's here I know it's true but you anticipate $15,000 a year at least from your perspective right now is sufficient sufficient okay should have asked it I think that you know as with anything we're going to have to look at where the costs are it would be unfair for me to say that and how all references is right the roof of the firehouse right over a hundred thousand dollar expense did we anticipate needing that as soon as we did not necessarily but when we evaluated it and saw the risk for not replacing it we had to protect that infrastructure and oh yeah and so yeah similar to the police station we're trying to put some money away for that as well you know if we don't have a project program we're trying to build this fund and then some of the come up absolutely agree okay that's what I had was on page 26 that's the phone system you talked about correct no no allocation in 24 but we'll resume that in FY 25 that's right there's nothing to prove by the manager right and next page I had was a page 65 this is replacement of the 4x4 yeah so this is the command vehicle this is where we deferred we did not we will not move forward with the replacement of it in FY 24 66 is next 66 we will be moving forward with the replacement of the 2011 pickup truck that's the utility that's our haul vehicle it's also our brush fire vehicle and currently acts as our plow that's how we plow the station yard so 67 is next yeah because we do have the four defibrillators here we'll still have to have a capital replacement plan so our liability although we were able to score it by grant now we'll still have to plan on the replacement all about four so that's where that's 30 the 16,000 stays at here for 24 we'll pick it back up a little bit in 2025 but we're able to defer some of that cost because we were able to buy that through the grant process 68 is next no change in this this we're just actually this is gone down we actually reduced this didn't we are right we had it 8,000 we bumped it down for you down just so we could lower the overhead for the year on the hydraulic tools so also with that the way we did this is we have currently have a grant application in to the state of Vermont home and security which will be decided here in January and so some of the expenses for that may be picked up by a grant award and that's for an airbag a high pressure airbag system so we'll know more January or February this year but this is anticipation of being a grant award I'm afraid to ask what a high-pressure airbag system is so there they're two different systems in the way but what they are is they are Kevlar bags that store flat and have the ability to lift heavy objects either in the vertical or horizontal orientation let's say you had a vehicle come down on top of a person they were trapped underneath it these airbags go in and they provide a platform you inflate the airbag and use air pressure it's a simple mathematical equation by the pressure per square inch and that's what gives you a lifting capacity and so the current bags that we have in the department are out of date they actually have a service life and they need to be inspected well ours don't comply with any of that in fact I don't think we can find the records on them so they're that old so we need to update those replace those part of that is in capital the grant application is for a much more robust system that gives us a single bag that's a new technology bag that allows us to lift greater than two feet with a single bag up to 34 times we did an analysis in the grant application where we've had and I may get this wrong it's at least seven commercial vehicle crashes since my arrival here in the department that have involved heavy commercial vehicles and we have limited capacity to deal with outside of the relationship with our heavy record operators so that's what the grant request was we use again data to drive their decision I could use one of those when I changed the oil in my car it's you wouldn't want to see the price tag what kind of end looking at it when I so well not in the grant application the grant the grant product is over 10,000 for one bag a 69 is next the IT server there is no change it stays on our current track please and page 70 again no change for the fire radio in that 24 5 is that seven sets of turnout here we budget right okay 72 no change scuba scuba and then scba compressor last one is 73 according to my my book and so what we've done here is added the turnout gear extractor and the dryer into this you'll see that there's enough money in the current capital to to make that initial purchase but we will need to make up for that expense so we give it a life a life expectancy of about 15 years in the $30,000 investment so that's why we kicked it up that amount of money okay those are all I found is ambulance on 74 if I may on the ambulance from yeah remember town meeting day last year the voters supported short-term borrowing for the ambulance replacement it's on border we learned recently the Vermont municipal bomb bank has a new opportunity to pool debt for these smaller relatively smaller purchases compared to larger ones that are bonded for I think truly it was the interest rate was one percent so we checked the town attorney and we asked about our boat last year with the short-term borrowing if we could enter in a future pool like this for the financing and he said unfortunately no so I'll be bringing back to you thinking about we put this back on the warning to ask about bonding when we need to then pay for the ambulance was delivered we could finance it at a one percent interest rate they offered this pool for the first time right now we anticipate they're going to offer it again that'll just give us the flexibility of we'll see what the better option is the interest rate when we go to finance it if the board supports putting out the warning at March you don't decide right yeah I'm just previewing it for you and so you understand that ambulance was ordered after the successful bond vote yet the the way the industry is right now we can't get the ambulance chassis so that we won't see the arrival of that ambulance surely I think it was at July is when we're expecting that potentially so we have some time that ends the fire department capital budget so if there's no more questions for the chief then we'll move on thank you very much have a safe holiday you too thanks so we'll move on to the outside services and Eric and surely are probably gonna work on this truly if you want to come to the center and whoever's gonna start this is ready to go I can kick it off this part of your budget is looking at appropriations to outside services we break them down for health including the BNA health officer stipend the regional services of regional planning Commission which I Park District County taxes we need to pay VLCT among others like your FOI association social services we have our committee that allocates that funding to request from nonprofit organizations and other groups our allocations that we need to change this from CCTA it's Green Mountain Transits annual appropriation you heard their update at your last meeting and then our reserve funds I'll get back to that moment most of these you'll see the proposals we get these from the organizations not surprisingly they've all gone up a little bit I do report from the social services organization they met recently to make some funding awards for this current budget year and there certainly are getting more requests and requests that are going up I kept it level funded in this initial proposal but I know Aaron Dickens the new staff that committee passed on the me that they were they were out they would certainly welcome more funding in their line item and also Lake Iroquois Association they made the request of the board at 15,000 that covered their Greeter program and the the dash the assisted harvesting and they didn't anticipate needing to do the harvesting and as I was balancing the budget I suggested ten thousand dollars with their 15 certainly the board's discretion how much you want to fund there but I just deviated from their request slightly based on their presentation and then finally the land ERF funding and affordable housing trust funding and trying to bring in a lean budget I did not fund either of those in my initial proposal here looking at where we were in the bottom line and our reserve funds so it's the board's discretion if you'd like to put additional funding in there but where we were the bottom line and when I was looking at these I wanted to deliver the bottom line where it landed so I didn't put funding in here in the short term. With the ERF and the affordable housing trust does does include where they level those funds right now? So the I'll just mention when you get the Planning Commission's comments you're going to hear that they are requesting for funding to go in both okay yeah I believe the I don't have that number with me right now the affordable housing trust is maybe $50,000 and the Environmental Reserve Fund is almost $219,000 and they have another $20,000 that is the student fund so for repairs not for purchase but to maintain. And with the ERF I assume there's there's not something looming that they have their eye on in terms of some purchasing land? Not that I've heard from the Conservation Commission that we have a number of high priority parcels still that that we're looking at but there's nothing kind of impending at this point no the Conservation Commission's meeting tomorrow morning and you'll likely receive a letter from them. Okay good all right. For funding in that in that line, higher than it is right now which is not okay Eric I don't have I don't have much to add to what you've already summarized except for like Eric said the GMT ADA is 19-5 we heard from their presentation that number in our list of increases that will present come January that needs to go up to 23,000 and we just got the county tax budget today that's 101 that needs to go up to 102-2 so you'll you'll see yeah pretty close so you'll see that we already have a couple of requests because we know that we've got more accurate numbers now. And I've got the Winooski Valley Park District will be coming in hopefully have them in at your next meeting in January to give their annual update. Any questions on services? All right next is revenue so we've spent multiple hours on the expense side and this is the other side to make me proud. I've kind of alluded to this throughout the process and in my transcendental assault just a few general points that you're thinking about balancing your budget here over the next month. Bill Himmons advising using a quarter of 1% grand list increase for next year that's about five million dollars our grand list is over two billion dollars so what does that really mean so five million dollars on the grand list the yield with the property tax rate would be about an extra sixteen thousand dollars there you take the growth of five million divided by the hundred and then multiply by the tax rate and that's essentially your yield from hearing increase in property value. It's the idea of these housing units larger buildings are larger commercial building like U-Haul that was multiple millions of dollars just in that building I think we'll we try to do too is think about what's what's coming ahead down the pipeline so we'll have more housing coming online maybe some more industrial the next year but the the big piece here in the grand list will be we in any day now we anticipate getting our CLA and we know it's going to be below 85% so the town will get a reappraisal order only to do that in the next few years Bill Himmons believes there's going to be over a hundred thirty towns in the state getting the reappraisal order in the next year hundred hundred thirty yeah upwards to that many only two hundred fifty one towns yeah yeah so you're gonna have probably a half of it a half or more communities needing to do a reappraisal when you get the order it says you must do it but doesn't actually put a timeline on it it becomes the capacity to actually do it with limited number of people who can do this work bills got some ideas we have a consultant we used in the past to use sounds like he'll be able to do the work and maybe hiring some people to do some fieldwork for us which is the heavy lift here to get out and inspect properties but that'll be a couple years away but certainly when that reappraisals ended the grant list is going to go up by X amount but you know in relation to taxes you know the rate might be able to go down but your your values going up your rates going down it's gonna be a wash to some extent but that's a couple budgets in the future but it'll be on the horizon and in terms of the grant list growth I've included the draft budget trying to balance number these factors a rate increase of three and a quarter cents that's about thirty two dollars per a hundred thousand assessed value so looking at that median home assessment in town an assessment first appraisal is what we assess it at the median level for our residential properties it's about ninety eight dollars more a year about eight dollars per month with local option tax we we budget increase about 180,000 we we look at our rollback for three years the rolling average we've omitted the first half of 2020 for both the sales and the rooms and meals just where we were at that point and we look back a quarter in the 2019 that we've historically have been exceeding what we budget we try to keep this conservative because you never you can have a bad year so we're and that goes into your fund balance policy of 10 to 20 percent so we did round it up a little bit I think we had another 40 or $50,000 of seeing on the performance there but we we feel comfortable where that's budgeted in this proposal you heard from the fire chief tonight our town fees another source of revenue overall this buckets down a little bit but the ambulance revenue significantly up the additional hundred thousand dollars projected here we see other things down like our recording fees or the refire rates are not what they were a couple years ago so we're not getting as much town documents be recorded for that was a big driver a couple years ago we're starting to see our investment income creep back up and we signed a CD the other day for six months at maybe four percent which was quite a bit better than when we've seen the last couple years so our money will start working for us a little bit more that's in the bank so that's that's always always helpful and just managing cash flow and operations here it went into a bit with with fund balance use what I'm proposing here structurally is that we've the town's uses for a number of years to help balance the budget and a number of years we've exceeded the local option tax revenue primarily coupled with expense savings so you know we budget to use fund balance to help reduce taxes we haven't actually had to use it we're anticipating an FY 23 we're likely going to need to use some of that it was quite a bit higher last year have been five hundred thousand dollars for a number of years I think it's it was over 650 and 23 trying to incrementally step this down so I think I have it in at about 518 or so to help offset taxes I think as the town looks the next couple years which trying to ween that down a bit by bit each year and maybe that's not really a placeholder for taxes at a certain point could think about other things like sweeping those into just capital savings for years then using that money to help fund the capital fund and not use operating dollars as much for end of the fiscal year if you have that surplus of local option tax sweep into the capital reserve fund and use that as a strategy as well but I'm trying to this is always challenging trying to model a couple years ahead yeah you know it's good it's accounting for it to a lot of its local option tax we think we haven't done a detailed accounting but trying to think to what do you want to get back to taxpayers if it was from a taxing standpoint as well so trying to balance those variables for you your policy is 10 to 20 percent of operating how we've built this using fund balance for capital and operating our projection is at the end of FY 24 it would be about 17 percent in your range that makes an assumption looking at our local option tax receipts will rest this year how the first quarter went that's gonna come in over budget by I think 300,000 so we're modeling right now but we have to make some assumptions and try to think conservatively as well but those are kind of the moving pieces here for the board as you from a policy standpoint on that and then we were channeled follow from last week's discussion the ARPA funds did include some in the proposal here last year it was 300,000 dollars for general fund revenue to help balance things we've decreased that down to 125 this year but we've also included $92,000 towards floor calling the one-time fee of the police retention incentive that's going to hit its third year so that that was adopted by the board last spring and we knew it was stepped up over multiple years and this is the third year so thought is you could use ARPA revenue to offset that last year expense there but it's an expense that will have to be how it wants to be funded you know and this is one way to carve it out with the one-time piece to think about the ARPA funding also we have allocations into the capital budget which is a separate allocation so the total ARPA number is just over 390 for these proposals surely you've got a tracking spreadsheet that we included to kind of give you a big picture look at what we've discussed the last few years in terms of capital and operating our original location is just over 3 million if the board funded it along these in the proposed budget like to be over a little over 1.9 million at the end of FY24 I think back to this time last year and we were trying to figure out the ARPA rules that were tied to a lot of different things and then at the I think in January the Treasury Department changed the rules and said you know you could use it just towards operating in the board you know given where we last year decided to use the $300,000 for for that purpose and we had built into that like using it for parks replacements and town trail management funds because those were the uses allowed last November and December towards some some recreation projects as we're trying to spread it around some other ways to unimpact those other areas the operating budget so certainly a lot of moving pieces there I know the board has a lot to think about with ARPA and trying to produce a lean budget and you know frankly the tax rate is higher than I wanted to be in your proposal but there's been a challenging here I'll say just on that front and your direction where you want to land on your bottom line expense side and then how you want to balance that with the revenue side probably your main levers to pull are the taxing the fund balance in the ARPA primarily however you want where you land on your expense side of the budget okay that makes sense just one question because this is a number I like to have if I look at the tax rate from fiscal year 2023 to fiscal year 2024 I'm asking if my math is correct that that's a 10.6 percent increase in the tax the anticipated tax rate I believe so right around there okay I'm hesitant I guess a comment is I'm more like if we decide that we want more revenue to offset the tax let's say rate increase and I think I'm more likely to look at the fund balance than I am ARPA ARPA is in a sense it's easy to use because it's it's it's kind of like I hate this term but people think of it as free money but what I worry about is if we use it for tax abatement we don't have it available for projects that folks want to happen in our town to an ARPA you have a timeline to where yeah you could step it down I think next FY 25 budget be your last opportunity to use it because you have to spend it by the end of calendar year 20 that actually is a very important point is and I hadn't taken that into consideration is it does come with that that timeline we have to spend the money by is it's going to be upon us a lot quicker than we think it will be and the timeline to allocate is comes first right so yeah that actually I I'm going to actually retract what I just said maybe not change it but let me give it some thought because that's so important use it or lose it exactly then then you're to be aware of to you have that replacement piece where you know going into this budget I had hoped okay that you know we use 300 and ARPA 300,000 in this budget by reduced expenses and increased revenues that will need to wash out somewhere in the budget but given the inflation we weren't able to wash that out completely so if it carries for a couple years depending how the other balancing mechanism of the budget go that's going to be have to be made up somewhere in revenue at some point just for the board to be aware of the couple of flowing years ahead here surely as you look at that need to allocate date are you concerned that we aren't making that we that that could become a problem down the road I think we need to have that public meeting soon in 2023 to start that allocation because they're certainly I think a lot of a lot of uses and I think there'll be a lot of public community you know from the energy commission committee especially I think yeah okay there'll be a lot of requests on the funds and giving you time to prioritize so the alarm bells aren't going off quite pretty soon only because that process will take time that'll be my focus in the new year to tackle that project that'll be probably one of my main focuses here once we wrap up the budget process I'm just looking at you know the ambulance and the delays on that you know if there's big kind of more capital type purchases that need to be made and the money has to be spent you know in excellent time I mean it could be you know a year or more out before we get deliverable if that's something we decided to to put it towards so right yeah same with if you decide any public works projects for curing the contractors and you design so we have some things designed already but yeah that procurement yeah you want many shortage of places to send it that's yeah what I what I anticipate is there's going to be a lot of support for let's say using it for some sort of a community center but the thing is is we may not be able to use it for a community center if that project doesn't move ahead you know fast enough if you will yeah I've thought about that a little bit where the trajectory there is probably getting a report to you and the library trustees maybe some time in the late spring early summer you know hypothetically if there was a town you do acquire piece of property maybe the ARPA funding is something to use towards a land acquisition within the next couple of years but it's kind of a few steps down the road here but that's one of the potential things you could think about right and if you think of a little you know under two million that sounds like a lot but with all the projects on the list it's probably won't go very far and if you think of something like the library community center even if you said we're going to use the whole thing which we can't because we won't be in construction by then it wouldn't really even make a dent in that project so how can you most effectively use those funds for like one time before we're going to purchase the land for the community center you know capital projects I'll just going to say it for instance don't don't shoot the message here but you know you're going to hear again from the Planning Commission about the second sidewalk plow and the limited number of the number of sidewalk miles we had and what we plow and making that a livable walkable Williston you know so there's a good use of ARPA one time and the fact that you know and as you heard Bruce say as well that plow goes down we have no backup so you'll hear that so I think from my perspective using it on things that we can get done and get done quickly and meet our deadlines is of course that one comes with other issues and employees and things yeah you have an ongoing person personnel cost yeah as well so are we through was revenue for tonight we'll be talking about this again next year that's that's the end of the proposal moving to the communications union district representative Eric you have a proposal for us so the communications union district that was formed the Williston Essex Essex Junction South Burlington and Shelburne in November ready to form a new government formally so looking at an organizational meeting in early January I've attended a few calls throughout I've been doing this study with a consultant looking at this that the state's been funding looking at a meeting in early January the board I consider appointing me to just start this to have the town have a seat at the table that one community member reach out to me expressing interest already and this person has a good background for the position as well our plan was to post this and see whatever applications that the town receives and the board to interview folks and I'd happily step aside or move to an alternate role or step aside all together depending on what can she get at that point but this is more administratively looking to have represented at the first meeting there's a couple of meetings that's what it takes so there's somebody else that will serve the role questions regarding this looking for emotion then move to a point town manager Eric Wells as Willisons representative of the Chittin County Communications Union District it's your second second discussion of the motion if not all those in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. Aye. And there are no opponents so moving on to manager's report. So a couple brief things you have at your seats this evening the quarter one quarterly report delayed a little bit for this fiscal year the reason is we decided to take a look at this report and Aaron Dickinson led this effort to work with departments on looking at the data looking at the presentation you'll see there's more of graphics and visuals and charts here really want to work each department about how they want to share their story to the board that community so still considered a work in progress welcome your feedback on any time of how this information is presented what you're seeing we'll be starting the second now we have this kind of modified template we'll spell at the end of the second quarter so we'll get that to you in one more timely manner just took a little bit to work through this but you have that to look through this evening I'll I'll show the PDF version as well that we that we put together and Aaron took the she did a great job to believe on that and then the tax sale property update the mobile home the town took possession of at 53 94 Wilson Road I think we've had to assess it look for things like asbestos and other materials before we're moving it we've had a couple consultants and they're doing that work we found someone who was going to remove it hopefully in the new year it sounds like they had an opening in their schedule to the good news we spent about three thousand dollars before we're moving it just you assess it and look at a couple things we do a bait I don't know the final cost will be to remove it but I think when we're all in here we'll be spending over ten thousand dollars to address the property the good news is the Chittin Salt Waste District has community cleanup funds that are available to towns we have our maximum allotment of five thousand dollars that we haven't spent for a bit I requested to use those funds for this project to help offset the cost and they've agreed to award them to us so we just need to read we'll get reimbursed for those expenses that's the board wants to move in a different direction with those with those funds it's away with a project we have right now those funds get recouped over time every year so they'll they'll accumulate again and we can use them again on something last me of the year thank you for your comments any others this spring before tonight if not this is the last meeting of the calendar year we'll see you all next year to people out there and the zoom land happy haka merry christmas happy holidays and same to the staff and board so I will declare us adjourned