Also last year's truck that we paid the bill for this year, so the 140 will be next year. And then the mini excavator, we had planned to buy a new mini excavator. We've actually changed our thinking. We're going to rent an excavator for a short amount of time, because our one excavator is used for pulling sidewalks. We'll use the second one to do some ditching and other work. So we'll spend, we think, $12,000, $15,000 on that. But this 95 substantial will be left unspent. So that can go to the capital fund and help to fix some of that deficit would be there for future years. Quarry trailer was $185,000. We'll spend every nickel that. We made some expenses at the quarter, but it's all spent in the third. And that's the trailer we use to spread Quarry when we grade roads to keep the dust down. Was that broken earlier this year? It was built. So we bought the trailer, and then we had to buy the pipe, then the equipment to spread the Quarry. And so Public Works essentially hand built that. And they built it, and it took a little while to get the bugs worked out. Audience members said about that. Yes. Cemetery vehicle, we didn't spend it in the second quarter. We did in the third. We bought a little greenworks side-by-side vehicle. Cemetery wants that. Public Works will also use it. And Parks will use it quite a bit. Talked to the disc golf group, for example, and we talked about now they do a lot of annual maintenance and spreading of wood chips and things like that in the past. And so that's a perfect little vehicle for those sort of jobs. Recreation CIP. I'm sure we'll have a surplus there. 12,000 of that is the pool study, which Alec is actively working on. He's talked to most towns that have pools and have done renovations of lead. He's taken some site visits, kind of having to do some of that with kind arena. And well, we'll go from there and see what he comes up with. And aside from the soccer field, our playing fields generally weren't damaged by the, by the floor. Some work that the, you know, some work the volunteers can help us. The bazillion down there is pretty dirty and needs to be cleaned. But in general, we came through okay. That's great. So that's good. And then the scuba system was a planned capital purchased. Gary ordered that. The bill came through in the third quarter. So you'll see that next. So the capital budget, the capital expenses will go from substantially unspent to pretty much entirely spent by the time I do this report next. I have a question for you. Thinking back up to the cemetery. Is there concern long term about this form of budget? Yeah. Cemetery has run and the cemetery fund has run a deficit for a long time. And they get $15,000 of taxpayer funds. That has to increase. And the rally of cemeteries is that there, there are maintenance responsibility and perpetuity. It's nice to have that investment fund. And they've got a pretty substantial amount. How are plots? Clots are, plots are fine. The challenge is maintenance of the cemeteries and finding people who do that work and we're subject to all those same inflationary pressures. The other challenge is John Woodruff, who's been the board chair for years, and gets an extra stipend because he does the administrative work that goes with recording deeds and all those issues. It's not going to do it forever. So we've got to find a staff person to do that at some point. So I, I can see our cemetery expenses in the next three years going up over 30,000 wouldn't surprise me. So that warrants us, you know, really like a special part of a meeting with, you know, with John, is John, is that right? And us and, you know, the future like percentages that should come out of the reserve fund percentages that we should raise, et cetera. I don't, in talking to John, who's been, who's been the head of the commission for a long time, I don't think he's ever gone to a select board meeting to have that conversation. But yeah, I think we need to have it because there is a balance about how much you should keep in their fund, which, which I think they view as large capital things, if they want to put in a new decorative wrought iron fence somewhere, that's a really expensive project. We might view it a little bit differently and worry about the maintenance costs. So yeah, I think that's a conversation we should have on budget time. Yeah. And I think a similar issue for the library. The library has, it has been our investment fund. My knowledge of the history is that when this building was built, the library pledged a fund raise for a portion of it. And they, part of that pledge was they said to the select board, if we don't meet our fundraising targets, our investment fund will be yours. They met the target. So they've got this investment fund. And I said to that board, you should come up with a plan for the use of it. Typically, these things are used for capital projects. You've got a new building. But yeah, a similar conversation. So with them, it's, it's not as pressing. And, and historically the library budget has, it's much bigger. It's over a half million dollars in taxpayer funds. So they've been sort of afforded the same increases year to year that the rest of the town has. They've also just done that visioning and strategic planning. So it could be simple enough as saying, you know, when you revisit that strategic plan, which whatever it's usually like three to five years, we would really like for this to be a part of that. So it's not as imminent. But if we can say, you know, we recommend it being part of that next strategic plan, but what the cemetery feels like. It's a little more in there and a little more pressing. How much of the price of the plot? I don't know offhand it's not expensive. When I, when I heard the number, I just, I knew a couple of numbers in my head from, from other people who've been buried in, you know, New Jersey, the price of the plot is real expensive. A lot more people there. A lot more people there, a lot less space. Nationwide isn't the issue that the plots aren't selling at the follow rate. Plots aren't selling. There's, yeah, plots aren't selling. There's very few variables. So they're going to, naturally, cemeteries are going out of business. They're going into default. So. And when a, when a cemetery runs out of money, by default it becomes town property.  Or a reason to have a proactive conversation. And don't forget to ask each one for that one. Thank you. Any further questions on the second quarter budget? Thank you. Oh, sorry, one, only because the auditor asked all of those vehicle expenses that were different years. Are they, he mentioned offhand, be posting back and whatnot? Is that what you do for that? Or at this point now? I just, it struck me that he said that and then you were presenting it in this way. The vehicles are not posted back to prior years. They're when you make, when you write the check. And that's the challenge in managing the capital budgets is the budget, 91 year, 141 year under the next and pay the bills as they come in. So you, it's not uncommon to run a deficit one year or a big surquest knowing that that's going to be accounted for in the next. But the magnitude of our deficit in the capital fund is much larger than that. Okay. For Ray DeLovone, let's discuss the agenda for September 5th. We've all agreed to meet on Tuesday. Yeah. I might be a little late, like five, 10 minutes, but I can make a word. Okay. Oh, I cannot. And I think I, oh wait. Is my work board meeting, but I'm pretty sure we're going to postpone it. And I had said this before, but I might be able to. So that's confusing, but have a meeting. And I might be here. Sorry. Mike, you available on the 5th of September? Yes. If I'm off drugs, I could drive down. Well, seriously, I, you know, when you're doing narcotics, I don't want to do anything illegal. You're not supposed to drive. We appreciate that. Your devotion to public safety is honorable. Oh, I'll tell you, I don't feel any, any altered state by being non-manticodal. You don't sound it, either. I think you are addicted to it. But it does not affect your judgment. And that is a big, big, perfect personality. All right. Okay. Struck from the left. Thank you. Thanks for that update. How are you feeling? I am tired now. You're not alone. Me too. No, I'm okay. Well, don't necessarily hit the bottom again. I'm just 10. God damn. All right. Let's move forward. What do we got on the agenda for, I don't have the draft agenda from the unfortunately. I don't know that we got this far ahead. I think our committee concerns when Karen goes away and some of the plan needs to be decided. You've survived so far. So I would suggest that the agenda should include schedule your, schedule your, by this time next meeting, Karen will be back as you can talk to the school if there's a vote there for a charter vote date. Schedule that. And updates. And it could be that September 5th could be your first public hearing. Just coincide with the meeting since you've got that 70 day rule. Got to talk to Karen, make sure we can advertise that, get that all done. I think that's an awkward date to have a public meeting on such an important topic right during a major, you know, holiday weekend. Do you have a professional spot on? Yeah, but it's the date. We're hemmed in by the 70 day rule. I don't know where. We're stuck with time. And it may be that a charter vote would, you know, if we, if we were kicking off the 70 days today, we're October 30th. If we're delaying two weeks, we're mid-November. So it may well be that after talking to the school, Karen might suggest a date in early December, in early December, depending on. Oh, that's kind of close. It's cutting it close. There's no way, I think, to not cut it close. But even if we have the public hearing on the fifth, we can still, worse, we are still able to have other public meetings regarding the charter between. So that can be the kickoff, but it doesn't mean it's the last one where people don't get away and, you know. Are we resolved on sentence two? No. But in the next two weeks. We can do that in the next two weeks. I would suggest if we can't resolve sentence two, we can move on to sentence two. Yeah, I'm not glued to it if it needs to be eliminated so that we can pass this measure to eliminate it. But we would want to work on that policy for suspending allocation. Yeah, what I've heard from Tom and Teresa is that we've got the framework. They want to see a little more flesh on the bone and we can do that. I can work on that and send it around and get some info before the next meeting. Perfect. That's great. I have to believe that there's other things that we had planned to talk about. I was going to say. Maybe we don't have them in front of us right now. So I can deliver that. All right. Committee stuff. Committee structure. That's what I want. Committee structure. That's, we can call it that. And just to say, I didn't get into it at that point, but the two, I'll talk with you after getting it. Just to say this, lessons learned from six weeks on research in tropical storming Spain that was done by two UVM students is just like a really good outline. That we could replicate. And they have three guiding questions and they talked about all the forms they use, which is what you already talked about. Like the 11 stakeholder interviews, they did do a public forum for public input. They had a survey, which I don't know that we need. But just to say, for consistency of nothing else, it's interesting to revisit and it's a good framework. And that also is really, it came, you got one too, to the long-term recovery steering committee after having shared the report, which I would love that. And now, again, to be on top of the new one. Anyway. And maybe a printer or a printed version. Whatever you want to throw at me. It's all on the website. But yes, I can say. It's a, which website? Our librarybt.com. It's on our website. Yes. Just like link it to the email. And I don't know if this would be a good item for September 5th to pull from the parking lot. But our police contract expires June 30th of next year. We'll need to renegotiate that. That'll take some time. I was intending to engage with the state police in a couple months. I don't know if you wanted to have a public safety state police contract agenda item before then to talk about getting the public feedback, what's working, what's not. I get a lot of feedback on the state police contract, but it's from a handful of people. Right. I mean, it'll be that as well. But yeah, it's worth putting it out. I don't know about timing. Yeah, I think we should pull it up. We may have to visit again. But it sounds like we may have a fairly light agenda. So why not pull it up and just dump it down. There's others. Well, I mean, we updated it. I don't know. I did talk with Dan Sweet today. He said he was going to talk with his listeners about how they're going to deal with the depreciation of a flood effect it has and that he may have an update. I don't know if we'll have it for September 5th or not. I don't know. I talked to Dan and I talked about about where it's some length who's one of the listeners. And the challenge is you're really supposed to reflect the market. Right. And we don't have any data yet. And so we're going to go back and look at what was done post Irene and try to determine how much of it was really data driven. And then the consultant who helped us then, that Dan Sweet is not working for us around is still actively working. But how much of it was data driven and how much was a little bit more settlement driven? And the good news is that this would impact the future grand list, which is set as of April 30th. But it's really as of the day you bill your taxes. So we've essentially got 10 months to work on that and reach some solution if there's any depreciation applied. And that's what they found post Irene was they applied depreciation to properties, reduce their grand list values in the market, essentially ignored Irene. And what I've said to Dan is it's an obvious and easy sentiment to say, well, sure, we should depreciate everything X percent. They were flooded out. But we're in this really unusual housing market right now. And I'm just, I think everyone should be convinced of the impact before we automatically depreciate things. And if there's an impact rate, we'll follow the data. But we should, I think they're going to take their time and develop some sort of a good methodology to get there. Okay. The other just a little, since you mentioned Dan, the other little update is the reappraisal process is a bit changed. It was based previously in your common level of appraisal. So once your values were more than 20% away from the market, you had to reappraise. The state also publishes something that in effect is your confidence interval around that. And now it's also based on that. And so we have another year before we've got to formally start the process. And even then, it's likely a year before the state notifies us we have to start the process and then we have some time to get it done. So we're potentially a couple of years away from reappraisal. I thought the state wanted to take this on itself. They, the bill that was in a bill, the bill they wound up passing was they were going to study taking on themselves. I think it makes, I think it's eminently reasonable for the state to take it on themselves. I hope they do that someday. From our perspective, we have almost $200,000 in a reappraisal fund. And we have ARPA funds devoted to it. So I think I can confidently tell you, maybe not today, but come budget time that that $200,000 in ARPA fund could be set to a different purpose. If that makes sense. That was my question is what would your optimum recommendation in terms of is there a strategy for doing it or is it a strategy to delay because the state is likely to do it? So a number of towns, we're looking for appraisers, they're looking for firms to do the work and they just don't exist. I think our strategy might be a little different and I think our strategy might be to acknowledge that the professional services firms are not out there and to hire someone as an employee to work under Dan's tutelage to Dan would do the training and then that person would do a substantial amount of the field work overseen by Dan. A couple of people we have in mind that do a little bit of work for other towns. That might step into the role, but I think that might be a better approach in hiring firms when we know they don't exist. Maybe things will change in the next year or two.  So there's a profit margin there if you want to get in that business. So that might change. Public works update have been a potential one. We are far past. Yeah, well, that's probably following the slide. Before we. Sorry, I said public works have been with Katerina and I don't think work can be scheduling, but do we want to. I would suggest after September 5th because if we give it until about October, the summer paving most of summer work will be done. Give us a better update. Maybe foreshadow 2024 projects. And then I'll meet with Karen when she gets back and we're going to take a look and see if she has anything on her draft agenda. And I'll try to rough out what we just went through plus whatever she's got. And we'll get that out to you. When does she? End of the week. Um, forget if it's until the week or Monday. Okay. It's three weeks. She's only three. Okay. By the end of next week. All right. Uh, any business? Yeah, I just wanted to say before we conclude, I would like to apologize to the board for using next to it. We're discussing tip wage workers. Technically breaking decorum. Thank you. Policy. Strike for the record. We had to get out of here. Okay, thank you. Second there. Hi. Thank you. Recording in progress. Seven o'clock. We're calling to order this meeting of the Waterbury School Act board on Monday, the August 21st of August. And first item on our agenda is to approve the agenda. Have a motion. So moved. Second. All right. Any discussion? We should take the minutes off because they didn't get circulated off of consent before the meeting, but I'll send them off. Okay. So if I understand it, motion is to accept the minutes, accept the agenda with the minutes to appear at the following meeting. Any further discussion? We're done. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Thank you, Michael. Hope you're doing well. Any? Surviving. That's the better than the alternative. Yes. Any opposed? Any abstentions? The agenda is approved as amended. Next is the consent agenda. The minutes have been struck. The rest of it is items B through F. Dial motion. Motion to approve the consent agenda item. Second. All right. Moved and seconded. Any further discussion? Hearing none. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. There's a slope of light. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Consent agenda is approved. Now we have the public session. This is for any items not on the warrant agenda. I invite any members of the public to come up and please keep your comments to three minutes or less if you can. And one for me. Oh look. We are moving through with some old equity tonight. Next we have the introduction of Catarina. Our new red door square. Red air units. Each slider. Master Romeo and Mateo Rose. Thank you. Got everybody in there. Catarina, can you go forward? Yep. Hi everyone. Have a seat. Welcome. Thank you for joining us as a red director. Would you mind just giving us a little bit of the background and your motivation for joining the team as a red director? Absolutely. So I joined the recreation department a little over a month ago. I was interested in the position having worked in government for the last decade plus and wanting to sort of venture into direct service into the role. I have a lot of personal experience in recreation, but most of my other my professional experience has been in human services and education. So looking to sort of blend those two, build community engagement and look into defining recreation pretty broadly so that we can bring people together. I just want to say you hear a lot in in today's world that it's hard to find employees and you're lucky people applied for this job. I had a lot of people applied and I was really glad that Catarina took the job. I had her whole first week planned out, none of which happened. We had some, she jumped right into some real challenges and did great. So I'm really happy and excited to have her and I think a lot of our challenges we've had up late are something going to vanish. No pressure. Awesome. Thank you all. Thanks, welcome. Any questions from the board here? All right. As you know, I'll be serving as liaison to the Rec Committee. We had a good meeting last Thursday night. I think that they're going to be taking a look at some of the recommendations from the SE group of two parks as well as other things that have already been on their agenda in terms of projects moving forward. What could be done differently going into the end of this year and then it's going to be on the budget for pre-chassis 24. All right. Thank you, Catarina. Next on the agenda we have update on the Viola rewrite. Unfortunately, Martha Stakis from chair of the planning commission was not able to join us because they are meeting every Monday night now to get the rewrite completed in time along with presentation by the SE group, which I think is for the 5th of October to do a first public session. But Alyssa, you've been following us more closely. Yes, I'm sorry. I'm trying to get the presentation and didn't have the chance. I can keep on talking. I did see a early version of this sort of exciting that the SE group, when we have contracted to engage the public on the to get public input on the rewrite of the bylaws for phase one, which concerns the village area, have already done a storyboard, which I believe is what Alyssa is pulling up. I've been doing that without my home phone email address in a moment, so give me one sec. But yeah. And so, you know, they've developed a framework to better understand where we were with the bylaws, what our current bylaws are and how this new bylaw is being approached and then a plan to get the public better informed, more involved, and so that we hope to have these bylaws in place before the town meeting 2024, which will be the first Tuesday in March. More digits. I'm apologize. This is not. What are we doing this? And here we are. So good. I think Roger really hit all the high points. I guess it's just saying, you know, we know we have something tonight. We're doing the presentation to the public on the charter, but just saying, again, recognizing for the bylaw rewrite that's upcoming and just making sure that this like board is aware of it. One of the things we know with zoning regulations is that they can be candidly dense and technical and knowing what that means as a property owner and residents in Waterbury, what a proposed change means about what you can do with your property was a really important part. So we actually have some additional funding from the state that's helping us to hire SE Group to help do visualizations to talk about where this is actually happening, what it means for your property and people to be able to get additional updates. And also talk about there's like walking tours to again actually see examples because it can also be very esoteric and kind of like, you know, your side yard setback is seven feet. What does that mean? What does that look like? There's a lot of housing that already exists in Waterbury, but one of the reasons that we need to do an update is because although it already exists in Waterbury and we love it, it technically might not be allowed under our regulations right now on the books just because they're outdated. And so folks just understanding what that actually looks like on the ground. Again, I think the big thing is shout out public hearings again, the point being that this would be early half time for folks to provide feedback and then actually get to the public hearings ahead of time meeting like Roger Aldrin even. I think that's really it. Again, there will be a survey making sure that's coordinated so people understand what it's about. The big thing for the select board. One of the only gaps that came up for us was just talking about the potential for industrial is one of the current zoning districts, so where Pilgrim Park is currently. That district right now does not allow housing in general, thinking like you're doing industrial, it's big, heavy, messy, you know, hypothetically, if we were to have that type of use in time, which we really don't. So historically, that has not been something that allows housing. One of the things the planning commission is considering is allowing that, recognizing that some folks have said, well, this is an area in our downtown where potentially housing could go. So just one request we had is if folks on the board feel like they have strong feelings either way on that proposal to let the planning commission know because again, the goal is that we're on the same page as the planning commission. If we have preferences one way or the other, they know sooner so that they can be proposed and stuff like that makes sense. Yeah, my my impression is that we're not envisioning putting in a concrete plant or anything like that in that area. I could envision housing in that zone and housing is, of course, a need. And Elizabeth, I don't want to stir the pot, but I'm just curious how the conversations have been changing knowing that we're on this tight line, but also with the flood and thinking about mitigation and how that's changing or impacted in conversations with their weekly meetings now. Good question. I can't speak specifically to the most recent planning commission meetings. I was like, I certainly as a select board member have received comments to the extent of saying, is this changing things? I guess understanding and part of the public outreach will be understanding what flood flood regulations we have in place right now that are going to still be in case. And I guess the point I would just make is that not all of the downtown is in the hundred-year flood plain. So I think having a conversation about increasing density and housing in the downtown does not always automatically mean that it might be in the flood plain. I'm not denying it might be in some cases, but I think they're not mutually exclusive in every case. And do you or Tom know, supposing it is in the flood plain, and are there rigs for building above the flood plain like they've done at the state complex or you know just putting things up on pier, perhaps putting parking underneath? We don't have our 2016 select board member that Chris is in the audience. I'm fairly sure we require two feet above hundred-year flood plain elevation currently on books from 2016. That's my recommendation too, having looked into it a little bit for Stanley Watson. It was just a general conversation about for the zoning update. We don't have a lot of industrial land in Waterbury in general. It's one of the few places. The owner could add more development there. There's more room there. It's not allowed by the current or any food drone or any type right now. Any further questions? If there were changes in the zoning regs that allow housing in an industrial area, what are the possibilities that could handcuff proposals for industrial ventures down the road? As far as if there were housing put in, what kind of objections could be forced on this industrial proposal? And in fact, it is what little bit of industrial area we have. I'm just wondering would it make it difficult if somebody had an industrial proposal and if you were to have a housing structure there or structures, you know, what kind of pushback might you get from those residents or would the zoning regs preclude that from happening if it was still designated as an industrial area? That's a good question. Alison? Totally. So I guess one, I just want to be clear. This is something the planning commission is talking about. So all the planning commission has this type of conversation in detail. The only reason I flag this for this life board is because this is one that feels like it might go to that higher level. It's a bigger change. But all of the ongoing work the planning commission does is really about is about every type of use is saying like, do you want to allow a restaurant in my residential neighborhood on South Main Street? Do you want to allow a museum and at what square footage? Like truly this is like the level of detail and things. Candidly Chris, I think what you're kind of outlining is the reason the current status quo exists. So the current status quo has said if you're doing a lot of uses allowed in industrial that often is considered incompatible with housing for reasons like noise and mitigation. The reason the planning commission has started having this conversation is because they were saying, we recognize that may someone may say it's a bad idea. Again, what I'm going to say, yeah, I have no interest. There's trucks in the area. I don't want to do that. But right now they have no option because they can't even propose anything at all because it's just not allowed. The answer is just that's not allowed. You need to look elsewhere in Waterbury. The conversation about what how uses are regulated in general, how much noise, what hours of operation, things like that would all be part of like what those industrial uses are. So that's a separate conversation. It came up in part in practice because handedly many of the uses they are folks felt like currently weren't incompatible with having housing. You know, there wasn't as Roger was like joking, you know, a more serious concrete. It tends just our current breakdown right now in Waterbury is more like light industry where minimal exterior impacts. So here what you're saying in that we certainly don't want to create a scenario that's going to set folks up for failure down the road. And just to say I think that's the conversation the planning commission is having to make that to say, do we make that call preemptively as a town and say, we're just going to not allow it. We don't even want to have the conversation. Or do we say we're going to say that you could consider proposing housing. It still might need to go through a town permitting process that would weigh, you know, standard development review. But again, right now in certain areas of town, we can't even start the conversation because it's not allowed, which is why they brought it up. All right. Thanks. And so as I understand it, they're going to continue working on these and have a presentation on Thursday, the 5th of October, 5 o'clock. And so questions such as quizzes can be brought forward. Or any of them. If you want to, they're probably not, but they're meeting at 7 o'clock on Monday, so like folks want to run over genuinely to the library. I'm sure it has to be back to them. Yeah. So as you grew, what is their role now? Is it marketing? Because to me what I just heard was they're reaching out to the public. So we got a state grant to hire an engineering firm to do public public really outreach, mostly like the visuals. So as I talked about, like what we have is something like a 40 days. The planning group and Tom can speak to about day of the scope of work with SE group. SE group is just providing the planning commission is volunteers. They're providing essentially assistance. They're being compensated paid for their work to do visuals and create a website to help with what the planning commission proposed. But the planning commission makes the policy. Okay, I got it. So the state and the work that drives this activity is aligned to the schedule you just put on them. Okay. So this will not be another, my understanding of the bylaws is this has been a marathon times two. You showed 2019, but that's not the correct date. I mean, it's been going on for a while. So I guess my comment would be this will be the final bylaw rewrite, but you just said it's phase one. What's phase two? The phases have to do with the geographic constraints. The area right now that they're defining is everything in the town of Waterbury between the Winooski River and the inner state 89 if you drop those down on a map, that's what they're doing. It does in practice, I will say cover much of the downtown and much of IFA, but not entirely. And it's a good clarification because when we talk about industrial, I talked about the industrial in this area, there's little bits elsewhere, you know, down here on route two and things like that that are also industrial. I see a hand up, but I can't read the name. Oh, it's Mike. Mike. Yes. Okay. Do you hear me? Wow, clear. Okay, great. Sorry for some reason. I don't understand why my video is not on and says it's on, but there's there's no video. But my question has to do with something that we haven't touched on for a while, but we've talked about, you know, in the past is Airbnb's and other you know, accessory kind of kind of dwellings. I know I had a conversation with Harry Sanderson, the public works director in Stowe, and he said they're having they're saying it's going to be a real crisis in their community, because they said there were probably a thousand Airbnb units. And it's not the typical Airbnb unit that we associate someone to help pay the taxes, you know, it's more the out of state investors who are coming up buying properties and converting properties into Airbnb's that they're kind of taking properties, you know, out of, you know, single family residential, you know, coffers. To me, that's a real to die. You know, I don't think we have any kind of the numbers like like Stowe does a thousand. But I know our numbers of Airbnb's over the last, you know, five years or so have been increasing. And I know the DRB has kind of looked for some more guidance on how how we're going to deal with Airbnb's as a matter of course in our community. And curious if anyone has something to say where we want to make a policy statement on that. I think you hit the head on the word. We're using a hammer to hit a nail on the head. I think it is what you said, Mike, which is we have to as a select board. So just to say the planning commission's position, particularly as it pertains to this rewrite, right now we don't define short term use like an Airbnb anywhere in our regulations. In the rewrite, they will define it as a use. So we would hypothetically be able to regulate it, but they are not proposing any changes as part of the rewrite recognizing it's its own whole big thorny issue. And they are referring to if we on the select board want to do something different. But just to answer for the bylaw rewrite, it is defining it but not making any changes. We then as you said as a select board could have a conversation about if we want to do something separate outside of them. And is this on the agenda of the housing task force? I was just saying in fact on Thursday we went through air DNA and you know the numbers off hand you were looking at some of the data. The air DNA numbers for the state of Vermont, I don't have another book, hold on. The air DNA numbers are just the sole number of the sole number of short term rentals in Vermont. There was a study conducted in Stowe that looked at short term rentals and their impact on the town of Stowe as a whole. And nothing was conclusive in regards of whether or not they are taking away long term rentals or if it's a second homeowner who is renting out their second home during summer months or what have you. Though I share your fervor my friend. There isn't anything conclusive to show us other than one chart on air DNA that shows an upward trajectory of short term rentals and a slight downtick in long term rentals. And that last study was done 2021. So we don't have the updated data but as far as the numbers are concerned it does look like there is at the very least a slight impact on the housing market as a whole. But Stowe's numbers were inconclusive from their study. And the broader interest yes it's on our agenda we're working on updating all of our data including that but recognizing again you have standard housing units and rental and that this is kind of a separate piece of that. Yeah Chris I was just having the same conversation about Airbnb's 20 minutes ago before I got here. Is there any benefit to the town if those could be kind of listed under the commercial category from property tax standpoint to benefit the town because clearly if you think about it long term rentals are for residents. So many Airbnb's and we have many. I drive by a lot of them all the time. In fact one house on Ripley Road just got completely refurbished. They jacked the house up with a foundation on there turned this thing into a showpiece and it's strictly Airbnb. So I don't know if there's any advantage to us if there's a possibility to label it under commercial because they're they are commercial just like a hotel. Is there any tax benefit to the town? I don't want to use the word legal but my understanding is the the framework by which he does his job doesn't allow us to essentially list those as commercial properties. If it's a single-family residence that is used as an Airbnb it's taxed as a single-family residence and I've raised that same issue with him it's really got to be addressed at a higher level than this town to do what you're saying and perhaps it should be perhaps that's a conversation that they've had for 10 years at least. So it's not it's not a simple issue and that if it was commercial it's a whole another layer of complexity to us valuing those properties. So it's not an easy thing per se but I've had that conversation many times in house. Unfortunately it's taken us to the cleaners. It's doing a lot of people are benefiting from it obviously. What I will say is that an 815 is a charter presentation which includes local option tax which includes taxes on short-term rentals so there could be some benefit down the road. Yeah I think all of us recognize that this is a significant issue it's not on the agenda tonight per se but it is something that the housing task force will be looking at in more detail and I expect within the next three months we'll be coming up with some sort of way of addressing the issue to a better more constructive extent than we have so far. Any other questions on the zoning rights? My law will be right. Okay let's move on to the auditor's presentation. I believe Sullivan Towers and Company have a representative. Over here? Yeah please. Do you mind just stating your name for the record? Sure. Richard Burgum. I'm the partner with the firm of Sullivan Towers Company. So what I thought I'd do is take us through the audit report and kind of introduce you to it and get you kind of the focus of the different sections of the audit. Obviously there's a lot of information here. I don't know if you've had time to really go through it all but there's like I said there's 64 pages of information and we're going to kind of just come through some of the sections. A couple of them I'll stop that and kind of give you some more information on the others. I'll blow by relatively quickly because you can look at it on your own you know time to kind of figure out if there are other questions that I can answer for you down the road. So if I look at pages one through four and if you look at those that is really the actual audit report itself. So this is a financial statement which has all sorts of information based on you know transactions that have occurred payroll being paid, warrants being paid, policies being set. All the activities that management, the board, Tom as has done during the year has created processes for us to kind of go through it and as auditors come and kind of look at stuff. Test transactions, testing the political data and try to come up with you know an opinion. So my whole charge here is this four pages is really that's my goal is this four pages and you have really three different choices when you have an audit opinion. You have what could be an adverse opinion. Financial statements are not fairly stated. I've done those. I had clients who did that and we'll have those results. We have sometimes there's a qualified opinion. The opinion is fairly stated except for this or except for this or we didn't follow this for this particular reason or the the best one to have is obviously an unqualified opinion. That's what the town has achieved in this particular. I think it's actually achieved in all the audits I've been here but but I always like to congratulate the town on that because like I said I do a lot of these presentations and they're not always unqualified opinions. So to get the information that circulates that gets to the board, it gets to Tom, gets all the information. I just want to say that I think the town's done a great job to get to the unqualified opinion. I'm going to just skip through pages five and six or might come back to those in a minute but if we look at page seven and eight. So this is what your typical financial statements if you're looking you know you're working on your businesses. This is a balance sheet if we're looking at page seven. So this is a snapshot of time of where your assets and liabilities stood at June 30 or December 31st 2022. So if you're looking down you've got your major funds here and a couple of funds I just wanted to kind of chat about real quickly. If I look down through the general fund you'll basically see up top you have your total assets of two million nine ninety seven. You have your total liabilities of two million five sixty three. Plus you've got some deferred inflows of about a hundred twenty nine thousand. All that basically equates to if you subtract your assets to your liabilities you get your fund balance. And if we're looking at the fund balance of the general fund you'll see down there the fund balance for at December 31 2022 is three hundred three thousand four seventy eight. What we tried to do in the footnote there is to outline the pieces of that fund balance and kind of outline you know whether they're restricted committed assigned or unassigned. And so kind of going down here when I look at this there's a few little small pieces of committed and restricted which you can go to the footnotes of the financials and find out exactly what they're committed for or what they're restricted for. But the big thing is is the rest of it most of your fund balance is being assigned for next year's tax for balancing the budget in the in the 23 financial statements. So that's about two hundred fifty eight thousand one fifty. That leaves you with an unassigned fund balance of about fifty fifty three hundred eleven dollars. That's not a lot of fund balance. And so one of the things that we've had discussions with Tom we've had discussions with staff about you know you know maybe trying to figure out ways to increase the fund balance level. A lot of every time I go to is different in how much fund balance they want to retain. Whether you know they want to try to use it to reduce taxes obviously there's a heavy following of people that say that's what you want to do. But then you know if you go by the GFOA or if you go by other best practices they want you to build some sort of fund balance for the future to be able to so that you might have less borrowing. You can do more borrowing from yourself rather than especially in a time when interest rates are so high. So that's one of the things I you know I think the town should be focused on. I had a conversation with Tom not too long ago where he talked about I guess tonight you're talking about rooms and meals tax so that would be another way to build up a fund balance to be able to hopefully start putting money aside. And having a stronger healthier fund balance would be a great way for you to have more cash flow on hand so you don't have to borrow as much and save on interest costs. Rick what should that unassigned be? Well usually the GFOA recommends like 20% of the budget so that's a pretty good size number for you guys to get to. And so I'm going to say I wouldn't say a lot of Vermont towns get to that but that's what the GFOA recommends. But you know if I was starting with like 10% or working toward 10% I think that would be a good goal. But again it's a risk tolerance of every board. Every board is different. Every town is different. It's just one of the things I like to bring up when I'm looking at the numbers from an auditor's perspective. So our general fund is 7.2 million in the share of the budget so that's the target. One thing I just wanted to quickly sometimes we've had cash flow challenges since I've been here and sometimes we can borrow from EFA and sometimes EFA borrow from us. But we have a we have a million dollar tax stabilization fund on the books but bear in mind 400,000 of that is actually loaned to us already. So we have 600,000 invested 400,000 is essentially cash out the door. And we have cash flow not huge challenges but we have minor cash flow challenges. But also bear in mind that the the ARPA funds are generally unspent. So we're really living on the ARPA funds. So as we spend the ARPA funds we've got to find a way to build this. So we're going to have continuous cash flow challenges. It's not a big deal given our borrowing costs are far lower than what URI could borrow at the private sector rate. But it it makes for a little bit of instability and then it makes me spend a lot of time trying to manage that issue which isn't a really productive thing to spend your time on.  So yeah in relation to that if you look at the fund next to the highway capital fund you'll see that that ends up right now with an unrestricted deficit of about 591,901. Again I kind of looked back over the last few years and this particular fund has gone from positive to negative to positive to negative and it looks like it's a combination of when projects are happening timing was it planned was it not was the money you know their cash flows there or not. So I'm you know this is one again I'd like to make sure that everybody's eyes are on to so what is the plan for to get it back to positivity and how do we get there and how do we continue it hopefully to be positive in the future and not draw down into the negative. The rest of the funds there the fund balance is pretty healthy there was no major concern to their thoughts from me that I thought I'd go over. If I if you're looking at pages 12 through 40 we're not going to get into this but basically these are the notes to the financial statements they give a lot of detail in there what are the terms of our debt what are our collateralization of our cash accounts what are there what are our loans receivable what are our restricted fund balances if you're looking for a deep dive on any of the balance sheet accounts or any of the fund balances what makes it up these notes are great tools to go through and kind of give you a lot more clarity again they give me overwhelming there's a lot of information there but if you're looking for something specific about our debt this is a good place to go to find the terms to find about how maturities are going to happen over the next few years how debt's going to be paid off so I just wanted to point that out as well obviously if you're looking at pages 41 through 50 most of you have seen those probably in regular financial reports that you get budget to actual on how the year went again a lot of that information now is about six to eight months old so it's not really all that to helpful to go through tonight but hopefully you're getting that stuff on a regular basis so that you can kind of monitor the 2023 year in future years as well the rest of the funds if you're looking at pages 54 through 61 this any of the funds that weren't in those first two sheets I first sheets I showed you with all the major funds general highway that we went over the rest of the funds are in this section back here so if you're looking for the details of what's going on with the records restoration the real praiso community development the building reserve recreation account reserve all the information is back here again there were no negative fund balances that I thought we needed to go into they all look pretty healthy and no major concerns that I saw there so as part of our part of our work when we're done our testing and our procedures we always come up with if there's any significant deficiencies or material weaknesses within the organization we have to point them out and this will usually generate from auditor adjustments that we had when we're here and if we're looking at the material weaknesses and the significant deficiencies we point out there's only there's only three three items that we brought up but they're basically related to how grants receivable get booked how deferred revenue gets booked and so we've been kind of working with the staff over the last couple of years of hopefully training them to understand to book those adjustments on their own not necessarily wait for us to come in and get that all booked and done ahead of time so that's just one of the one of the recommendations we would recommend for that same thing on accounts payable cut off when when did the accounts payable get booked back to the previous year and did they get done correctly again we've been working with the staff on trying to get that done as well and so that's we had a couple of adjustments in that and then the last item we had was related to netting revenues and expenses I think this was in the paving fund I think some of the paving revenues were netted against expenses so you couldn't tell the gross expense within the art report or within the financial statement so we just were suggesting okay we grossed it back up with an adjustment and just letting you know to try to make sure that all netting all that there's no more netting of revenue and expenses last items I wanted to go over were basically required communications we had no difficulties in dealing with management we had no disagreements with management all the entries that we recommended were posted by by by management and so the final books and records as relate to this report everything's been posted and adjusted pretty much all I had for the presentation if anybody has any specific questions yeah Richard um in your letter uh to us uh thank you for that yeah I appreciate it um you say that uh you're not making any assessment uh as to whether the oversight uh is sufficient uh the the board's oversight of the municipal uh function and finances yeah it was sufficient how would we know whether it is that's a great question um I guess I guess to me you'll know when it isn't because only because because there's usually a dysfunction that that happens there's communication issues you're not getting the you know are you are you seeing when when you're reviewing more it's there you know and I ask this question all the time when I come in and see time hey when the when boards are reviewing warrants are they looking at the actual bills are they actually you know are they rubber stamping those are generally the kind of details you want to know are we getting good quarterly reports are is the board asking questions about those quarterly reports are they engaged financially in in the uh end of the reports that they're getting looking at fund balances thinking talking about cash flows there's a fine line between you know being able to over manage it or manage it correctly and I'm going to say that you know you're right I can't quantify or qualify for you but I know when we a lot of times when I'm coming in here to do the work those are the kinds of conversations I'm having with that staff you know you know I'll read to all the minutes for the whole year kind of identifying where I think you know policies haven't occurred or updates haven't occurred and so those kind of would be where you would find a lot of that stuff and since there's not a lot of other management recommendations like I said I can't quantify for you but it feels like you guys are in the right direction so job manager to execute the budget you know I've got I've got leeway to make decisions throughout the year where we're going to go over in some areas and under in some areas and try to balance the whole picture but the manager is unable to consistently execute the budget and tells you during the budget work sessions that we're we're not risking things at this budget it's your job to hold a manager accountable in that instance and it's a fair thing to do yeah when I looked at your financial updates I always looked for discrepancies places where you've under spent by a lot or over spent by a lot for an explanation and how are you going to deal with it so that's where I look for flags and then same things when we do the inside of the warrants here mostly just look at the big ones and make sure that it's budgeted and that the bills track with the with the summaries and I don't know all of us have done this on part so if anyone wants to speak up or have asked questions please do like Mike has a sand raised Mike yeah Mike yeah um just a quick question I know because we've had some fairly substantial changes in the personnel in in the town with a new town manager and a new town clerk have you noticed any changes in financial practices from that switchover that's been pretty consistent well during the switchover I know that there was a lot of communication going back and forth about putting new policies into place and I know during the switchover what what I've started to talk to the town about is having control manuals in place accounting manuals in place so that anybody new walking in could walk into these manuals and have an idea of how a bill gets paid how it how are the what controls do we have over segregation of duties and so that you can go to these documents when you're walking in and I will say most of my clients don't have them because they're the last thing anybody wants to work on everybody's too busy getting the work done paying bills and getting payroll done but one of the things I always recommend is those manuals and those control manuals in place to make sure that new people are being trained but but to to your question there's nothing I saw that that that concerned me at all it was just more of a with that changeover hey we thought about doing this thank you I saw a lot of positive changes as well in terms of like you know personnel procedures and such that I think will create a much more strong financial stability within the town so I think as you said I think we don't have a lot to worry about right now and Richard I don't think we do a lot of cash transactions but to the extent that we do do we have maybe Tommy you can answer this do we have sufficient oversight with two people watching the money come in we do it town hall we don't always at the pool is the one example that comes to mind where it's pretty small amounts we try to do a reconciliation where you look at what you actually bought for you know small sales and compare that to to what you took in and you feel that comes in pretty close but pretty limited cash outside of town hall and even at town hall not a lot of people paying their tax bill with cash use days even defund and we have a compared to St. Albans we have a really high uptake of people who do ACH payments for their for their water and sewer and their taxes which is which is great from my perspective takes away the takes away the cash takes away the checks so all that trunk another observation related to that is one of the things you could do at some point in time is like a fraud risk assessment an internal kind of look at yourselves of where fraud could be occurring not just from cash transactions credit cards from any potential you know where I always look for I look at you know transfer stations landfills recreation like we said those are all pretty consistent areas where potential fraud could occur so that fraud risk assessment would be an internal look board members management taxpayers all talking about controls within the organization to make sure you're identifying where fraud is occurring and then have putting in offsetting controls in place to make sure that the frauds don't occur any other questions I'm just saying the information received from Michelle who's the bookkeeper is that we did a fraud assessment with the consultant that we hired with the shop look at the time so just to say there's been one within past two years but knowing it exists as a board member I can look at that you know back to your point where would be a good thing you know I would want to review the control means as I want to you know not like take the deep dive but at least sort of no controls are exactly exactly not to mention your own being your own business owners you're going to have your ideas of where where some thoughts of controls could be headed in the different directions as well or more control so just use that experience that's all right thank you very much thank you very much next time on the agenda is the deep brief on flood recovery are you going to report out in place of talk I can yeah there's still ongoing work in fact there's still some some new people today who contacted the water very health that still have water in the basements and water very center in places where there's never an issue so we're encouraging everyone whether you would know on randall street or in water very center reach out to FEMA it's not going to hurt to make a phone call and see if there's any assistance there and offering you know some cleanup help if we have it the cleanup gets all those things the state also at the beginning of august hired a long-term recovery director um so um through the help of tom stephens he's reached out to me we're going to schedule a meeting to try to talk about and raise some of the issues we've talked about at the board and see to what extent they can help to what extent they can be involved and assist with us you know one of my comments to him is is it's clearly been a town by town effort so i think whether it's the state or vlct but having some umbrella organization help us deal with some of these issues which are truly regional is going to be necessary so feel free to send me and love to have you send me your ideas yeah i should raise that meaning if you got specifics and if you want to join let me know and we'll figure that out okay any suggestions off about the motherboard numbers yeah uh at the last meeting we voted to have a um flood preparedness committee natural disaster natural disaster committee preparedness committee yes would you like me yes can you just give us an update on that um yes um during the week roger reached out to me for more information unfortunately i've been incredibly busy with the work uh that i do to keep a roof over my head but i came to some conclusions um as far as the board is concerned or as far as the committee's concerns of five member committee you don't want it too small you don't want it too big five seems right it can break a tie that includes the select board liaison and then essentially i was going to use the goals that were outlined in the proposal as a jumping point they are not concrete but i any committee would be able to work off them at least okay so um if we were to open up uh solicit uh volunteers to serve on that committee the do you have any uh ideas to what the tenure might be um i would say usually our standard tenure or what is our standard tenure for a community two years varies from one to three one to three the question for the board is is it a permanent committee or is it a committee to do some of this work and then essentially right once we've got a plan in place then it would be the job of staff to maintain it right um the idea behind the initial proposal was that it would be a permanent committee that always keeps us ready to the eventuality of a natural disaster um so i would say work it like the select board right we have three members who are three years and two that are one do it the same way the at least my recommendation just an idea would be to um meet off in the beginning what there's lots you know to do and then perhaps it goes from a monthly meeting committee to a quarterly meeting committee just to say fresh up to date etc but if there's not as much pressing items not let it fall to the wayside but you know not me just for the sake of meeting so that's an idea as well right good question sure are we are we at the agenda item that is debrief on flood recovery or are we at the after action review we're still on the uh flood recovery but this was a motion that was passed at the last meeting and i watched it so the understanding that i think to some new guy i understand what you're saying right you want to have another committee that's going to you guys just had a and i don't think it's perhaps um spot on but you have an emergency plan that was just written in april has this um suggestion that's being brought up look at that plan and and decided what did not go appropriately or because before you start down the path of another committee i would say don't duplicate right can i through yeah so the next we'll act the next item which you brought up the after action we'll address that specifically what that emergency management plan did cover and what it didn't wear the absence of like where the gaps are what the imminent needs are and this committee will both help synthesize all of this after action reporting into a specific natural disaster plan versus just any kind of emergency which is the more broad elian the one you're referring to um and also talk about more like literal kind of people on the ground action yeah exactly so a plan is great until the action happens and then you have to react right so so i'm not i'm not advocating you you won't not do this i'm saying that you should probably and i think you just hammered where i was getting at the first action of this committee is to assess the after action what just occurred and see what the delta is what didn't work well okay so i before saying it's permanent right now i would say take that step and then you can fold it into well we think this is probably something we want to maintain it's basically i would recommend you come back on that discussion because people have time right and they want to put time into it right now because it's really close to what just occurred right but the further you get away from a problem like this you'll start seeing people kind of peel off it's just natural right which is i think we're trying to get this to move forward sooner rather than there's also there's also um as far as the recommendations i had made in the proposal there aren't contingency plans for when people decide that they don't want to be part of the committee anymore it's all built in well uh i don't know if you want to go any farther with that maybe it we're maybe it's right that we don't have a plan in place for having a description as to what the responsibilities of the committee committee members are yet or i can't office i can put that together by next meeting okay and remember like similar to the housing task force these are created because there's a broad maybe mission statement right there doesn't need to be a 10-year action step-by-step plan for a new committee or task force if it's a two-year term it's a two-year term and if in two years we're still looking to fill it we're looking to fill those seats still great and if not you know but but the you know the general broad like mission statement of the committee can can be what wants it and then you know we've got those first two tasks right which will not be done in one meeting so um more tasks will arise as those are accomplished so um i just yeah it's okay to get started with that broad umbrella when we're ready versus knowing what they're going to be doing for the next two years or beyond i think yeah chris i believe there's been some discussion within the agency of transportation how to address some of these communities that have zero funding to repair the damage and i think they were talking about low interest loans and i don't know if anything has come to fruition on that whether or not it's you know again waterbury dodged the bullet when it comes to a lot of our major roads but just a i don't know what the criteria is and what categories it might cover so i don't know every town i know that i'm sure there's some programs i've missed because some of this is still being rolled out but uh the vermont miss bauban bank has offered us low interest loans and that seems to cover the FEMA cost order or the and potentially to cover the difference in and what we get reimbursed versus our true costs haven't taken advantage of that net i haven't needed to but i may well at some date and just to name it as for other municipalities in vermont in some cases damages exceeded annual budgets and FEMA operates on reimbursement so just to say some towns are facing intermediate immediate need for that type of lending water brace fortunate to not be in that position right now but hence those programs are being developed and i also believe that mr. scott phil scott signed a bill that basically allowed a lot of these aggregate quarries to harvest material from areas that they weren't allowed to before basically kind of opened the door for getting necessary materials to help assist another aspect uh tom one thing i just want to add is when you we talked last meeting about creating the committee but then staffing the committee uh and then paying that staff so when you make your motion to create the committee just give me some clear direction i can i can hire someone to film and hire someone i can figure it out make sure that's a part of the future consideration um another aspect of uh flood recovery is uh flood mitigation uh spoke with last meeting about our interest in uh looking further into this i have had some uh further conversations there's a study being led by uh uvm uh working with the flood management and uh walewski uh watershed and i've been invited to their meeting in september to see what ashen steps could be taken there are a couple of different things under consideration one is the uh removing some some materials from the harby farm across the river another is removing material from the cornfield which is owned by the state which would increase the capacity for water to come out without inundating the downtown area at least to a larger extent so those are things that will be taken a closer look at going forward unless there's other things to discuss about the the flood recovery let's move on to the after-action review do you want to take that sure so um as we just touched on a little bit what um what we're working on is compiling a document and synthesizing the information of what we did just in general factually what went really well what worked really well and then what was the challenge or what needs to be done differently in the future so um roger made some categories such as preparedness early warning and during the flood next day next week and future um and so those are sort of the categories that we're dumping that information in and folks i i've begun it and then the folks to contribute will be the board as a whole town staff including i think public works feedback um people like bob butler who is helping insert areas got the chief and then um lish legal tondrake et cetera so i think getting feedback from as many of those coordinators and people on the ground is possible i'm sure we feel out um and then working to synthesize the information comparing um some of that preparedness piece to our area management plan um and then you know talking about how can this group how can this committee help in that work so that we're a you know that we have something to turn to when natural disasters happen again um and then something to rely on like we talked about so that it's not just in people's memories like we relied on this time around from um Irene so um right now it's just like high level categories and then kind of bring up of information to be better synthesized in the future i don't know if there's more detail you want or just that kind of process like i don't know you know uh what do you think is your timeline on that so my answer i would say 85 finished i've circulated it to a small group to start getting input i didn't give anybody deadlines or anything i wanted to kind of since i missed last meeting make sure i was on the right track um and then uh once uh once either after this meeting i can you know circulate it to that wider group and then kind of set deadlines do you have an idea of like do we want this by mid-september do we want this sooner than that um i mean i guess just like all the input when i say this maybe just keep it on the agenda and you can give us an update next time and then you know ideally i think by the end of september it'd be nice to have something that can be presented to the public and we may have more more input from the public because we certainly don't have all the answers thank you we'll do okay any other questions comments about after after review flood recovery okay let's move on to the presentation of the charter i'll be relatively quick on this i think um so we have started um fairly informal charter conversations back in april really they began right after town meeting day um it's really focused on two provisions two parts the first is the authority of the manager and the second is the local option tax um a little bit of background um on the authority of the manager which i can get to each part of it separately um the language that i drafted can be written um any number of ways there's dozens of towns with charters many of them have had language about the authority of the manager um you can slice this and dice this a lot of ways i reviewed this with jim barlow who's a Vermont attorney who's got a specialty in this sort of work um and i just want to go over some of the some of the individual items in the article to give a little background broke it up into a couple of slides but in essence there's four sentences first one the manager shall hire a point discipline and remove all type of employees subject to our personnel rules that one is clear enough and that's been our practice with a couple of exceptions because there's a few positions that are outlined in state law um but i can't hire an example right now is we have a vacant zoning administrator and it's a little bit awkward because that position has to be recommended to the select board by the planning commission um what makes that especially odd is that the zoning administrator really works for the development review board so to truly have a fair interview process um and then once that person's hired reports to me on a daily basis um and then subsequently every few years has to get reappointed by the planning commission so to really have a fair hiring process i've got to involve the planning commission who makes the formal recommendation i've got to involve the development review board who would see this person every two weeks and then obviously i have to be there and then neo lightener who's our planning director works close with person has to be there so it's a complex process um to begin with and then you have the potential for i think some conflict to arise um in the event the parties don't agree on the job the person is doing so i think having a clear line of authority simply makes the process easier um also eliminates the need for the reappointments um so i think that's just i think that's just a cleaner way to to to manage the hiring process for those few positions the second the second sentence um the manager shall fix the compensation of benefits of employees in essence in accordance with our budget and there's a lot of different ways to write this the short version of how i view this is that the manager um menace whiteboard have to have a working relationship and the manager has to execute the budget the manager has the authority uh within the day-to-day duties to give increases the manager has the authority to hire but the manager does not have carte blanche authority to make substantial decisions that impact the long-term future of the town um so this uh this in essence puts some guardrails on it um it ensures that my authority is not unabridged and i'm ultimately accountable to a select board and i think that's a pretty critical sentence to have in there uh the next two um the next one i think is fairly straightforward i can designate authority to department heads and that's the way traditionally things have been done here great examples we've got a public works chapter who's been here a long long time under this language i can say to him that you've got the ability to hire someone in fact in with me but but you've got the ability to hire at my discretion um the other piece is that this is consistent with our employee end book because in the event of something disciplinary it begins with a department head and then essentially can end with me so that's consistent with their authority and i think that makes perfect sense and it really codifies our history in our in our current practice and then the final one which which i think is is maybe the most critical of the four is that the manager has to check in with the select board when hiring a department head um the sentence does not say the form of approval the sentence in essence says shall be approved so i just hired a rec director who was introduced to you when i hired the recreation director i involved the recreation committee in the hiring and i involved two members of the select board which i think is is normal and reasonable um in the future i would check in with the select board and and if they wanted to be a direct part of the hiring process they could be if they said you know what go ahead we trust your judgment that's fine but ultimately they've got some role here um which i think is which i think is important um especially when we think of of a public works director um who's got uh a big chunk of employees overseeing a lot of responsibilities so that's the part about the manager's authority um the final thing i wanted to say here is um this in essence was not my request that the manager's authority and especially the hiring was something really brought to me by the select board when i started because we'd recently gone through the planning and zoning positions and we're going through it now and it's it's an extra layer and it's a difficult process on to the local option tax which i'm sure everyone is interested in um it's a very simple article i just wonder if you're going to have questions um the whole thing or um what's going to be your process for any time i think go ahead do you want to start with the manager's authority questions well that's what i just was wondering um i have a couple of questions sure absolutely two reasons can you go back can you go back to the language um yeah that was fine because that's got all four up there um so i was on i was on clear time when you were talking about the um the zoning administrator uh so this would preclude that process that happens now so you would say that this would be okay so i just you you referenced state law so i was wondering if there was state law that requires it to be done a different way state law requires that the planning commission make a recommendation to the select board about the hire it doesn't require that's a select board take their recommendation okay so it's a bit it's a bit awkward to begin with i think um but as i mentioned the position really works for the development review board right so it's a it's an extra layer of awkwardness and difficulty i think so uh would this supersede uh that state statute yes i was going to say the same thing just to clarify i think it's we're defaulting obviously to state statute which candidly serves much smaller municipalities well and in waterways case i think has become kind of outdated as someone who served on the planning commission and sacrificed you know three out of 24 meetings in a year to do interviews it was really challenging um just from you know i had a problem with this i just was wanting to know the interrelation right and so i'm just well i'm assuming the attorneys review said we're allowed to supersede by having us so that other languages probably for uh if the town doesn't have a charter then this is the procedure it's default yeah um i'm sorry you ready hey that wasn't my only question okay uh so the compensation piece in accordance with compensation ranges and schedule of benefits so uh you know i'm aware the select board sets the benefit packages the compensation ranges are there competent formal compensation ranges for specific positions you know like public works director zoning administrator is there formal ranges there are not and that's where i had the conversation went to borrow at some length there are no formal ranges but the but compensation is very clear in the budget and so in essence in essence the range is the range is the budget um and the range and that's not how i read this i mean i understand what you're saying um but i mean that i mean theoretically you know a town manager could you know uh i get there's there's no guidance i guess other than what was previously paid to a previous employee or what's currently being paid to an employee it's a great question i've had a lot of conversations about this um in general some positions in some departments the compensation is clear because it's a one person department and and for a bunch of the general fund where a bunch of town hall staff were sort of lumped into an item and so we've never had formal ranges from that from the perspective you're saying that we don't have a job description that says the planning director makes between 70 and 80 000 um but we have a really clear budget and so in talking to Jim Barlow and fleshing this out um if the select board sees in my quarterly updates where if they see them if they see in my budget proposal that hey that the compensation of that department of two people went from 140 to 160 there's an obvious level of approval needed if if the across the board raises our 3 percent for employees and that department went from 100 to 103 000 it's a lot more clear so i think i mentioned at beginning there's a lot of different ways to to slice and dice this um and in the end it boils down to to the manager and the select board having a relationship where these things are openly discussed and agreed upon and and you're right it's that it's a bit of a challenge sometimes to anyone individual can have a difference of opinion about how that how that should be phrased yeah i just uh you know uh if the everybody agrees to submit this time and everyone's going to have to be describing what this means uh in in at the legislature and so i i think that i'm just going to say i think that the um that people logical people disagree about about that and so that's just i'm just flagging that um as a potential question so yeah to to to tag on to the back of that to me that was very vague i think you know if you had a budget that was established annually and that was your budget and then we did we had to stay within those parameters would probably make people feel a little bit better i know it's hard to lock down like you said compensation specifically i mean but the federal government does it right they're only allowed to spend so much on bonuses or or raises or things like that i think not having any range established um and and i think as a town we've seen some compensation packages happen quite quickly and very frequently in the last few years that kind of you know increased you know some of that deficit that we had so that was just that was one one question and then town employees does that include anybody who's a contractor or is it just town employees okay thank you uh i apologize uh i know teresa because she's our representative Cheryl and the the challenge with something the compensation raises for someone for a government our size is um it's pretty difficult when you have small departments um and sometimes your compensation can vary substantially in the event of turnover sometimes the market moves quickly on you which has happened to us in the past couple years um sometimes you advertise a job and you get a candidate that quite frankly is above and beyond your expectations and you you realize that it you you know you come to the conclusion it's worth it to compensate that person to get that person on the team um yeah there's a lot of as i mentioned there's a lot of ways to to slice and dice this i think it's reasonably consistent with our practices i think it's consistent with how we develop our budget and how we discuss our budget um but and you can read 10 different town charters and and they all have similar language um suited to that tom you know your hand up early yeah i just wanted to be clear for and ask the select board just to be clear we don't have a charter now so we operate by state whatever the state tells us to because or what we're allowed to because we're a deal in this lost state we have to ask so now we had a charter the village did um and part of the 20 year old conversation or 40 year old conversations about merger was to assume that charter it would have been easier to assume that charter from the state's perspective because i was teresa mentioned we have to the town has to pass this and then the state has to give us permission to put this into effect and i just is that the way we're working here is and but the bonus of having the charter is that we can operate slightly differently from the state statute so when we want to change our charter we can do that on a local basis a lot more easily than we can now so i just want to so a lot of this conversations about the levels and whatnot that'll come out you know as we do business but um and it gets to point the second point the second article which is then we can have like we can't easily have this conversation about the tax the sales tax unless we have a charter is that is that am i am i remembering this correctly that's correct i'm so sorry i am but i can't have a charter that simply is a one-sentence charter that refers to the local option tax for example yeah and um just for clarification we have been talking about both the local option tax and this change in the municipal authority to just simplify the the hiring practices for a couple of individuals that now differs to the default in the state statute so we wanted to put both of these together bring it up for public discussion have another open meeting after this one probably in october and then bring this to australian ballot for the time to vote on probably the beginning of november if things go well maybe having to wait until december if things go less than ideal um yeah well i was just turning because we don't have a charter i think it needs to be a town meeting not australian ballot because we default to our general oh okay i believe it's australian ballot okay great out of town out of town meeting yes we have a special meeting right um and and then as kaw was saying then the uh the recommendation will go to you hopefully you and teresa can introduce this to the legislature and yeah talk one other piece i want to say is with article one there is no pride of authorship here so if the select board thought well you know that the compensation and benefits and the ways been done historically is is fine that whole sentence can be struck i i would argue that the first sentence about making the manager of the the appointing authority is is really useful and valuable um having the manager in essence sees some authority to other department heads is really valuable and consistent with our practice so i think it should be codified and then the final sentence about having the select board weigh in on appointment i also think is really important um but if if people are hung up on the sense on the second sentence and want to change it or remove it no pride of authorship it was something i worked out jim barlow that i've all made sense i understand from other people's perspective it can be a bit confusing so uh i wanted to ask some follow-ups on number two um i one wanted to give tom props for being the one who when we have the audit presentation said i'm the manager and have to state of the budget and hold me accountable if i don't so in terms of budgets i think he tries to be on that um for both of you who raised about the um this item two is it the structure of the sentence or the fact that we haven't adopted this in practice just to say during my time on the select board like when bill shet-black presented his annual raises we actually received a memo that would be almost identical to what this policy and adoption would be that said planning director one position gave a salary range public works seven positions gave salary ranges so if we were to in a more formal process which i recognize the board haven't adopted that is it having this provision or you think that this provision is not reflecting the current practice um what you just described is not reflected in that sentence i mean the way i read that sentence it says that the municipal manager so that the select board sets some you know this is what everybody receives for benefits and here are the salary ranges for x number positions and now the town um municipal manager can um you know hire into positions at those at you know at what's been established um and uh so that doesn't seem the same as what you just what you just said elissa i guess well i'm saying in practice yes it was an approval saying here's the admission go forth and do it i was saying in a hypothetical scenario if we have a set of current existing practices the select board wanted to codify more formally in that way to me that is what the second sentence is getting so i guess we have a different reading of it which is what i was trying to suss out yeah i mean i i think also you know what tom was just saying that second sentence actually is sort of a subset of the first sentence i mean as well i mean it could theoretically be covered in the first sentence subject to provisions of personnel you know rules and policies or whatever um so i i just i just was asking for clarification because um i hadn't i hadn't known about compensation ranges for you know specific positions and you know as tom said sometimes it's a one position and you know the budget is what you have you know i get that so it doesn't make sense but it you know for larger departments like the you know the road highway department you know where there's more employees and there's different people multiple people in the same kind of position you know just an equity kind of consideration is all so so a really simple question but so are you basically like the human resources or town like you hire you fire you determine i've just never seen any place it doesn't have a range of scale for salaries or that a group of people just determine i can't work here anymore because of i'm just curious i mean so we have a range and a scale for all of our summer hunters um for every other town employee their their salaries were their wages were what they were before i started um they're generally consistent there's some some minor differences for tenure but we don't have an automatic system where you know x number of years you get a bonus per se or or an increased rate um to me when i was developing this and talking with jim barlow we went over our budget practice and in our budget for the highway department which is the biggest there's a there's a line for salaries um an example i can give is before i was manager but when i was here bill scheppler came into the town to a sweatboard meeting and said our wages are no longer competitive we've lost someone we're looking at neighboring towns and we're a couple bucks behind per hour i feel like i've got to do this to to retain our staff and we're going to go over budget and they gave the okay and and those numbers were reflected next year so to me i think of the word range i think of it in terms of the department overall in the town overall i don't think of it in terms of any one person like you might if you were in a federal job where you know your pay is level 30 and level 30 is what it is level i was talking about range being you have so much in your animal budget so not maybe not everybody gets the same compensation that year right so maybe you hire somebody new and the compensation is what it has to be and so therefore other people that maybe you plan for and when that budget they just don't get that compensation or that bonus or something so living it vague could put you us in a deficit because of you know if we don't have things that are standardized or there's like merit raises there's cost of living wages and sometimes it's free so it sounds like you just get to do a two feel is important to keep an employee employee i think the approved by the select board is probably a i mean that's the checks and balances pieces of it so i mean i the the process that you've described is that you would make a recommendation to the select board and that's that's the approval process and you would say whether or not this was in budget whether it was over budget whether we need to do like the example they just gave so the the part that i was having confusion about is whether or not there was something you know established already and then you're making a decision and you and it's the the compensation range and benefits that have been approved by the select board not the higher do you know what i'm saying the way it could be just the sentence structure frankly yeah it seems like it's how it's written so i think in a couple of notes it doesn't drastically change having that in or out doesn't drastically change the way we're already doing things so if we can't really consent like come to a consensus of how to word it really clearly i think it could go for now and then be a longer term addition i'm not saying we can't come to that consensus but it doesn't drastically make an improved like like my one makes a drastic improvement in our processes that doesn't change a whole lot it's what we're already doing it's just not worded super clearly so folks aren't really understanding or we have maybe some improvements to make on our process um but i think also we haven't really gone through this with tom yet like as elissa was saying bill would come to us you know during budget season and approach us with those ranges and salaries etc so we haven't gone through this with tom yet so i think we still have yet to see what that process is and then we can reflect and say how do we make this better or just because this is how we've been doing it maybe that isn't the way we should continue to do it i think it's a okay thing to i think fix is the word that i'm sort of like struggling with so the process that you all have been describing is that the municipal manager recommends and the select board approves and so just as an f that's just a recommendation that maybe you change that to you could easily say the municipal manager sets the compensation and benefits of town employees and courts with compensation range and scheduled benefits approved by select board and then what you're doing is in fact see i'm kind of a select board junkie i watch this as much as i want to get in so so i saw that discussing elissa talked about and how mr. sheplock brought it to the attention select board i thought was very fair it set a range i would say that if you get too specific as with most things in regulation what you do is pigeonhole you into a process that now you're not actually uh free to do what you would like to do and it's like we're being that um but the people's representatives kind of set that as does the marketplace right so i mean bill's comments before because you were losing or potentially losing some people um the marketplace is going to drive some of that but and you're going to do that i'm assuming on an annual basis the idea though the one area that's a little fuzzy would be is the benefits side compensations one thing benefits is what we're getting kind of hammered on and that's something that probably needs some political talks but as an example when insurance goes up though that affects everyone who include taxpayers not just employees one piece about the benefits but the history here which i intend to adhere to is um so there's town employees but some people who work in this building are technically legal e-foot employees so there's a joint there's a joint meeting there's a joint meeting every year there has been for a long number of years once the insurance rates are out we're both boards review those rates and determine the the town and e-foot year versus the employee share so really the benefit is fixed at that point okay yes sir could you state your name please yes i can go well uh 683 maple street um my comment is a brief one i just wanted to comment about the uh the zoning administrator being hired as an ordinary kind of employee as opposed to being appointed to a term as the default standard in state law um and what i would say is if that's the only thing that you accomplished with this charter you would have accomplished quite a bit it's a it's a uh it's an anachronistic archaic uh antiquated uh custom that the state has in state law and um i don't think it makes any sense for waterbird also for the record i used to be on the planning commission i was the chair and um back when steve was here we've made some recommendations for changing some of the hierarchical structure within the planning department which i think made a lot of sense and this would make a lot more sense to further that goal so i i applaud that and i would certainly say that i would support that 100 percent thank you okay any further comments in the second uh the third line this municipal manager may authorize a department head to hire a point discipline or remove employees subject to manager's discretion and supervision can you elaborate a little bit more on that and uh you know me as as prior select board member in a business man of 40 years i'm about performance base getting the employee through the door hiring uh them on is one thing but then you know year over year their performance uh and compensation has always been a huge sticking point with me how does this help you or help the town taxpayers when it comes to you know i'm tired of the municipalities and quite honestly businesses being held hostage by um people that are being hired and you and you're paying them in excess just to have a body to fill a position uh we're seeing it everywhere and uh you know i'm just i'd like to think that uh we can make changes to to help move that out to as i said the first is vermont is what's called a louder mill state and what that what that means in short is that if you're disciplined you have an appeal right so in our employee handbook if if an employee is disciplined by their department head they can appeal to me if i if i discipline a department head they can appeal to the select board um so that's that's consistent but the other piece here is that it says first of all the the word is may not shall so there's not a requirement if i've got a department head who's brand new i might take over that function for some time until they're comfortable um but it also allows that department head um to take action in the event i'm not available if i'm on vacation if i'm indisposed and something happens as super critical that department head doesn't need me to spend an employee to somehow discipline an employee or to hire an employee if there's someone who i trust their judgment they can go ahead and make those first level decisions on their own i've always got the right as the manager to step in and i think that's how the organization should be managed uh yeah um and shout out to the employee handbook which hadn't been updated for a very very long time but now is really helpful exactly what you're talking about with reviews and clear much more modern procedures and things like that so um really excited to have that as well this year being being passed and implemented and to give an example i was on vacation a few weeks back um and i i had one bar so i was available but there was a disciplinary issue that came up with the brand new department head um so i forcefully was able to take the call and and go from there um but those situations happen and then the select board whether it's now or or later um we can we can work on the sentence sentence or like i said no pride of authorship so we can remove the second sentence yeah i think maybe it does need a little further clarification particularly second sentence um but any other questions on this component let's move forward second sentence um article two would pertain to the uh it's commonly called the local option tax the one percent sales tax and as written it is one sentence so uh this could be written um several different ways uh to do it by category um what i'll point out the bottom of the slide is essentially all the major retail centers in vermont already have this tax so i actually think not having it puts us at a competitive disadvantage from that perspective from the perspective of the town budget from the perspective of diversifying our revenue which any business tries to do not on this list there's also a few that that just have you know an alcohol tax or just have a woman meals tax but these are the towns with with the full monty that that i think is appropriate for waterberry to flesh it out a little bit um so these are your current tax rates for sales from meals alcohol and all those would increase by one percent doesn't impact buying a vehicle that's a separate part of state law doesn't apply to prescription drugs doesn't apply to medicine doesn't apply to groceries i'm not a hundred percent clear yet on clothing i believe there's some some expensive uh essentially luxury clothing that it would apply to um but i don't have a hundred percent of those details but my nursing is most clothing is exempt it does hit short term rentals um and that's collected and paid by those rental companies um and it does apply to internet purchases um so the amazons of the world are collecting it and paying it so hopefully this is go ahead tom sorry because this has to do with charter and now the local option right it's a charter going to finally collapse into one town of waterberry you're full stop not as proposed today then i don't understand i don't understand where would be a better option than now i mean in tom i i get it but what i'm suffering here remember i'm the it's like a junkie right this conversation continues and continues and gets pushed and pushed and i just don't understand the mechanics of running a municipality and now a town the benefits just to do a local option tax but guess what that local option tax covers everyone right but the primary businesses are in need but district correct so i i just don't understand why don't why why aren't we just willing to go all in i think that a question um legally to execute it has to first be directed at the e-footboard before you mm-hmm if you want to go on this you know i can ask this question i don't want to be the juror but i just i'm gonna go see flood meeting in a week next week i think second week and every month they know i'm gonna ask the same question and you know again i just don't understand if we want to be a community if we want to really establish a town let's have a town if i'm dead um we have a waterberry we are the select one for that town and you're addressing us so um am i on the e-footboard am i on the e-footboard i am not you go to the e-foot i've been to a couple yes i don't go every time so i'll address you then okay so why could this not be part of the plan a we wanted to pass why wouldn't we think it wouldn't pass uh how long have you lived in this town born and raised but reached in 28 years okay this town has been divided between the village and the town for number of years um i'm just thinking strategically uh i i accept your point and frankly i've been part of this trying to find the solution to this issue but i'm not sure we're gonna find it to this year and uh i'm not willing to sacrifice this measure for something that's been going on for the 20 year 23 years that i've been working here um i think your point is a good one and be glad to raise it but i don't think it's appropriate for right now yeah Teresa um i just want to say that i 100% agree with you um i i think that um that we as a community are missing out by not having this ability um to have the local option tax and i know it's been discussed over the course of you know time um and i and i don't disagree um with this gentleman either however i think that is uh it is a much broader conversation it needs a lot of thought a lot of facilitated discussion and um i just i wouldn't want to jeopardize our ability to have this pass which i think we can get quite a lot of support for um with the controversial discussion that would ensue about that so i i agree with you uh roger can we at least have a discussion on that sure i mean yeah i understand your point and i'm addressing you now so i'm going to ask that a question you put a lot of things in the parking lot this is a one percent tax because it's a revenue discussion it comes out of the parking lot why can't we take this e-foot consolidation conversation to the next one we have an honor timeline uh elissa well i would just say you i'm now responding to a question not directed at me which is bad form but nonetheless i would say i am fairly rather bill shekel bullock hoped very dearly before he retired to have resolved this issue yes and so in my time in the board in the two years we tried to start this conversation unsuccessfully for a variety of reasons it's a two board problem again you're sitting and addressing one board i do spend quite a lot of my time at e-foot they do quite a lot of other infrastructure needs so again i don't dispute it's a goal the community should have for one day but as someone who has also since 2017 said wow i'm the economic development director and it's so darn confusing when i have a new business coming to town and i have to send them to this board for their loan fund and different things we've taken action over time to diminish that this year we now own the property down at the ice center we now own rusty parker park as the municipality the town of otterbury the 41 voters you referenced in e-fud said this is a good movement towards becoming one unified municipal political entity and have made changes so there actually has been in the past several years steps to move towards that to say that the only functions they're doing are water and sewer that former general government functions including the money that went with them should be transferred to the town and those actions have taken place so i would counter that it is something we care about is something we want to move i recognize it hasn't come out of the parking lot yet due to timing with the legislature and what we're talking about around wanting to have local option tax sooner this has been prioritized don't misunderstand i don't want to derail your one person right that's that's taxes again inflation will create its own insurance here as does the legislation other taxes we have not absorbed yet we will absorb those next year that the whole question to me though again comes down to just having a roadmap and i get it 20 year discussion 30 year discussion if this town has changed the the the reason i keep references is because and you and you brought it up so i'll just hammer that point the last time manager was here for 30 years plus he put it in this time report three different times that i'm aware of um and there was no action no discussion that meaning no no desire to bring it up for this very reason so i get it but when you say that the transfer of property um you you referenced one thing that the udag loan right now is controlled by ifa correct because the transfer was improved it was put on the ballot but it was voted down yeah yeah that's a long and yeah i don't understand why i would also just say bill like also put in his report that ifa definitely desperately needs new commissioners so if you're a resident of ifa i didn't interested in this discussion i would encourage you to write right now i recognize that and i would encourage you to recruit support and endorse candidates who you think Sharon would further that view so we can work with them so you're saying that the the people that decide whether ifa exists with the ifa there's certainly a partner at the table as i have said and so certainly respecting their fellow board they don't want to decide they're part of the conversation so i as a select member am not having this conversation without talking with them so i would encourage you like you said you're going to go to the meeting and talk with them so i understand that like again i'm not trying to be the jerk right all i'm trying to say is if this is a plan to go back to a town he will be well i mean this is we are we don't have a chart many towns in this state okay okay so we'll play the semantics game you are the town manager right not the municipal manager okay i rest on case it's probably poorly made thank you all right anything else that you said before tom continues and if it's small and ask you to drive a listen so i just want to show some history all this data is on the state tax department's website we broke it down by category this is 2022 versus 2004 so in 2022 we would have collected almost 31 000 alcohol taxes poking an 80 grand for rooms a little over 130 for meals and then general retail sales 360 so 600 000 in total and then i just put the growth in those categories since 2004 inflation since 2004 is 2.65 percent so all those categories are well above inflation any guesses on our on our taxes not our rate but how much our taxes have grown on average we're five percent the rates lower and it's hard to compare a rate from 2004 since we had a town in a village but five percent so we could in theory tie ourselves to a future revenue source that's grown a little faster than what we've taken from from town taxpayers which i think would be a very good thing um just move on real quick oh page down okay these are just some some forecasts um 2025 is the first realistic year and i'll get to a timeline later but if this is passed locally this fall the legislature has to approve it that takes time the governor has to sign the bill the tax department needs two quarters to implement it so maybe in my wildest dreams this could happen in the fourth quarter of 2024 but i think the first quarter of 2025 is realistic which really means the state collects it takes their time to process it we would see revenue in may of 2025 but we can budget if it's passed we could budget in 2025 with this revenue in mind um but a little forecasting um and showing our tax rate if all those categories i showed in the previous slide grew at 50 percent their historical rate which is a pretty conservative assumption um we're actually almost 650 000 in 2025 and that based on today's tax rate today's taxes we levy um is over eight cents um i've gotten a number of people have called me and said well are you are you promising an eight cents tax cut and my answer is no certainly not um i can get into some pressures later um what i'm suggesting is this gave us some ability to control our increases taxes at a rate lower than five percent but tax cut that's a i think a massive over promise at this stage another big question i've had is is how much of this is paid by torus and i have spent a long time scouring the earth for data about this and i can find none um what i think is an interesting data point if i took that 8.26 cents and and applied it to your home um so almost 250 bucks is is how it would how would equate to if it was pure property taxes um and what i think about that i think how much would you have to spend to spend that much in retail sales taxes and if you're calculating are just our one percent of course it's 24 780 dollars um so i think you're getting a bigger bang for your buck um i've i worked real hard to try to find something even anecdotal that i could say you know x percentage of non-residents or torus pay this and i know the data is just not out there to my knowledge i think if you looked at the uh traffic you could and and you know maybe a downtown business owner could tell me that the zip codes of their credit card receipts something like that but i don't have anything that actually wasn't hard to get in here um no no no this um before it was um yeah i mean it's old it's the one where we got our branding from that study okay and they did it they did a zip code they did do a you know a time i mean would give you some sense although i i think that um you know the it it broke it down by town by region by county and then state and out of state i think karen could probably get that for you oh yeah so when we look at our budget today we are substantially funded by property taxes outside of property taxes um actually a nice biggest source of revenue comes from the state through pilot payments for state land and and their buildings on our on property in town and after that you get down to fairly small revenue sources in the grand scheme of thing after the state pilot payments actually our fire contract to the fire chief is our next big revenue source so this gives us pretty substantial diversification and then there's all the old adages we've heard about property taxes which is it's a regressive tax it's not income sensitive and so the local option tax is substantially income sensitive and is substantially voluntary so i think it's good that we could decouple ourselves to some extent from a completely involuntary non-inconsensitive tax to at least bring it to some level back to the consumer and their ability and desire to pay um some people have asked me about other towns that have done this and and behavioral changes there's some concern that you know if we had another one percent people won't shop here um i think as i slowed in the first slide all of our competitors already have this i think that was a really valid thing to to bring up in in 1995 when you were the first town to do this somewhere or if you were imposing a five percent tax i think it's really valid but i think given where we are in today's economy um i think it's actually puts us a competitive disadvantage to not have it um the uh the the select board was given a draft policy and how we had we'd utilize it and the thought on that was to at some point have a formal adopted policy to give our partners in the legislature some some understanding of how to introduce the bill and how to talk about how we would utilize these um but that policy was payment of existing debt paid on our debt faster um spend it directly on capital expenses and substantially avoid debt um we talked about economic development community vitality i would put for instance stanley wasan and and some affordable housing investments in that economic development bucket um and we talked about some investments to generate long-term sales whatever that may be oftentimes in the local government role that's psychology to help you save on some labor and then i've had a number of questions from people um you know why do you need the 600 000 um what are your challenges and the answer is there's a lot um stanley wasan site is a simple example um the town at some point soon i hope will be an option by the state to buy that property but it's not going to be free the state has an obligation to to sell us that property in essence at the market value um so the town hopefully can can partner and enter into an agreement to develop that site and get our investment back but there's likely costs along the way the second thing is we're subject to all the same inflation costs that everyone else is our paving budget is four hundred five thousand dollars this year it's the same amount as last year it's the same amount as the year before that price a ton of ash faults up 40 three years so our paving budget really isn't level or close to it so what i love to have a million dollar paving budget i would um i think a lot of people would uh the fire chief is here he's got a 20 year capital plan and and a couple of years three years um he's got he's got three 17 year old vehicles now so his hope is to replace those now he's he's really good at looking at the vehicles and and if we can string them along another year or two we will but those two vehicles if we bought them today are poking out a half million bucks i think we have to buy them in 2026 or 2027 it's going to be 600 easy yes and and there's on that delay when you order as an example an engine or a pump truck it's almost three years from the time you order till you get that's how far back log they are other by the other trucks are less time tank trucks are significantly less time less than half that amount of time so when you when you're planning this you have to like all right we need one in 2026 do you need it in 2026 because if that means you need it 2026 you have to order in 2023 so there's a lot of processes involved in identifying what is it that you need what you can string along a little bit longer and we've done that with both tank trucks they're past the time that the plan initially said that we should replace them but you have to look at when you can get them and when you should order them and when you order them you've got to be able to have access to money so it's it's not as easy as any of us going to a local car dealership and saying i'd like that truck or that that car there we've certainly strung along some of our vehicles and they've they've been good vehicles but at some point you pay the piper yeah so we have currently as long as everything goes through with with the budgets a tank truck next year that was ordered already this year we didn't order the vendor ordered it as a demo truck that we're going to buy potentially from him and he's already ordered another one for the following year that i would certainly recommend we purchase that one as well they have been good trucks it's been a great vendor they take care of that the apparatus but again you have to think out that far ahead and jump ahead of every other fire department in the state of montan and this side of new york not quite as long as time but the cost of the relation on big trucks has been really substantial the last few years feels like it's leveling off a little bit but it's 30ish percent over the last three years from from what i've gathered chris might have bought one himself and you've seen that i just wanted to ask gary real quick how is it you managed to step in front of all these other municipality first dibs on these it's a it's a secret that i am not willing to disclose we have a really good relationship with the vendor we have purchased a number of vehicles from him and he gives us really because we've purchased so many vehicles from him he gives us first right of refusal so it's it's a good end so he wants a piece of heavy equipment he can have it it's got to be at least the cost of the fire truck or less and he's got to get gary to to stop the orders so those two can fight it out and i just a few other items policing is is uncertain i think that's the best way to put it that's fair police departments are struggling to hire the state police aren't immune from that and we might want to at some point increase our services we're paying four hundred thousand dollars a year now for two troopers but if this town desired an increased presence call it two hundred thousand dollars per officer it's not a not a free service and then we might have noticed we just had a flood um roger earlier mentioned harvey's field and that work um 10 years ago that that mitigation project was pegged at 3.2 million we can safely assumed it's doubled um even if the state and federal typically on large infrastructure projects you can find state and federal partners typically you can't find them until you've paid for the engineering locally rough numbers most large construction project engineering is 10 percent so there could be an investment over half million dollars on one flood mitigation project just to get it to the construction stage never mind the construction cost so i mentioned earlier i've gotten phone calls about people saying well will you cut taxes because of this i think we can have some some stabilization i think we can manage the rate and its growth upward but no even if we had this today i think some of these priorities um are thrown into the mix in a pretty big way and i think that's just the reality of of where we are as a town and where the state is and where some of these inflationary pressures are impacting us the top of the last step yeah the top of the last slide it's affordable housing the top of the last slide is affordable housing yes that is absolutely an issue for this town a vast population of our town are tipped wage employees when you pay your bill at a restaurant or a coffee shop you tip on the bill total including tax well so when you tip it says here's your total and tip what your total should be right but that's an extra one percent when most people tip 20 percent right if you're not an asshole um anyway it raises folks salary annual salaries which helps afford housing especially in a town where housing is so expensive so yes this is a huge benefit to the town having this tax but it will be a benefit to tip wage employees who make up a vast portion of our restaurant sector yeah um katia d'angelo 16 road street i think there are two towns that have rescinded local option taxes or parts of one okay i was killing 10 and they rescinded the sales tax portion and i forget what the other one was but i think it was in a big list um and i'm wondering if you have any thoughts on why or if you know why they had it for so many years and then decided to tax it i'm not aware of their story or what i mean i can speculate that their grand list is growing pretty dramatically and they may not need it and if you're if you're a town that but the the major employer in that town could well feel that one percent um in a different way than an entire town would that's just my speculation i'm not it was an outlier in the list and i thought i was like it looks like they rescinded it before they actually implemented it oh really oh no sorry 18 2007 one they had it in effect for about 10 years yeah sorry i i missed the one so is in the midst of a huge infrastructure project involving what's called tax increment financing which lets them tap into the fund and so they they've got a huge financing source way above the 600 grand per year which which may also have been their plan all along so just to be clear though because throwing those 600k makes everybody really excited right but the mechanics of that is we don't get that money right when it goes to the state then it gets apportioned correct the state pays 30 percent i've accounted for that when showing that data already so the interesting thing is that 30 percent goes into a fund that goes to every town so when stow enacted there one percent we'll see a cut so looking at at data from the last few years the state apportions they call the pilot payment which is funded by that 30 percent of the one percent the state apportions that they take all the revenue and it's based on the insurance value of their buildings so we're about 15 percent um sorry our local option tax a different part of our budget would yield us about 15 000 if nothing changed i don't know what stow is estimating there is going to bring but as more towns do this we actually we actually grow in that area of our budget too one of your following slides was what the process is but if we have a charter that allows us to off to have a local option tax do we still have to apply to the state for permission anyone that when the local option tax was first instituted it was only available to six municipalities or whatever and over time it's been opened up to everybody who goes through this approval process but do we would we still have to apply to the for the the ability to do this and at which point we decide whether it's all the taxes that you just listed or whether it's just alcohol or just sales so it's passed locally that the town clerk would give would give the local approvals to the secretary of state the bills would go through government operations committees um in both the house and senate so that's the process and our senators no formal ask on our part um and of course the legislature can say no but the legislature legislature can say no to a portion of it so the the short version um of this slide is once we're certain on our charter language um step one is schedule public hearing 70 days in advance of the vote Karen is not here but she would have to reach up to the school and find an appropriate day for a vote um but 70 days from today puts us at the end of October um the vote has to be all strike and ballot at a special town meeting um and along the way there's a couple public hearings to the critical the critical days to think about our 70 days from today so if this were to be approved locally and brought to the legislature for their next session time is of the essence um and that's that's my presentation uh chris thanks for your you know explanation of all this and uh i gotta tell you i'm internally inside in myself i'm more concerned about the overall concerning bigger picture of this thing yeah it's nice to think about $600,000 but as you talk about 40 increase in asphalt costs fire vehicles that are beyond reason in my opinion of expense and inflationary costs across the board and then kane speaks about affordable housing i'm going to tell you that there's a lot more people at risk in that affordable category than you think because as time goes on and we're being outpaced by the expense of doing business you know there's more a threat for a lot more of us here than i think people realize what the answer is yeah i don't have any big answers either but what i see is that we're worse off if we don't do this and so that while this isn't it's not going to solve all those issues that tom had up there but it is a step in that direction in terms of helping us think about think about those items and and prioritize i mean it you know all of us need to prioritize whether it's in our personal finances the state's finances or the town's finances so but i find us worse off if we don't do this and i i for one have been anxious about not getting on this bandwagon frankly and now we have something 25 towns something like that and there have there have been some rumors floating around the ways means committee about closing this ability to do this and so i think time is of the essence so and and we get a double benefit you know so that that 30% goes in to fund the pilot payments and we get a big chunk of money from pilot so we not only get the you know whatever amount it would be but we also get the amount that it will increase the pilot coming back to us so it seems it really seems um like something that you know at this point in time in our history and and where we are right now i think it's and must do are anything else the town should be doing in order to facilitate this the passage of this within the legislature the one question that i have and i i think um you know we can talk to tucker who's the attorney who would be looking at this um my recollection of the ones that we passed in recent history they've said what they are going to be used for um and so there may need to be some statement in that charter that i don't think we need to like tie it down as specific as some of the other folks have but we may need a statement in there about why it would be used for so we um had a draft policy of the select board um but i i mean that's fairly generic that's fairly generic yeah which means you want to in my estimation you want to leave yourself as much um flexibility as possible but i don't recommend is just playing in the actual charter what it's used for because then you cannot change those categories without changing your charter but if it was a select board policy the select board can make that decision the voters can make this decision every time i go to the budget but you might need a statement in there that says the select board shall draft a policy you're like in accordance with the policy set by the select board something like that show that that's probably the same way like tonight because that was that was my concern i don't have children i eat out a lot i spend my money around town um some of the things that the money might be spent on are not going to be beneficial to me so my do are you guys obviously going to come up with a process to how you're going to allocate or prioritize that money and will the voters have a chance to weigh in on how we utilize that money yes the voters can weigh in at all the time but in the same way um at town meeting at town meeting day voters made uh their emotions to made to to reduce i believe what was um an arpa allocation to downstreet housing so let's see that's the thing so what i'm trying to say is i know that we have issues and there's everybody has their own things that they think are important but you have to remember that all of us are taxpayers in this town who go out and spend money so like if you're going to spend it on building a skate park i'm not going there but if you're going to do a park where they're skating and maybe something else head great you know that's going to be a benefit to me so i would appreciate having the ability as a voter to look at how we're going to prioritize and allocate that money so one way i think of this tax is not a six hundred thousand dollars a number to keep in your head is nine million um if the town at the interest rates we can borrow if the town issued nine million dollars in debt today six hundred thousand dollars will be the annual debt service towns that have a local option tax frequently have items at their town meeting and it says in the warning shall the town pay this railroad or buy this and service the debt with a local option tax and that's part of how i envision this will be used in the future and that's how most towns tend to tend to phrase it so it'd be it'd be a way to you know forget or to have a truck without impacting your tax rate in theory don't get any ideas is that money just isn't going to go into the general fund as a revenue source it's a it's a separate line item that will be specific to the certa