Probably under approval of licenses permits vouchers and applications. Yes. I think that it's I'd rather not handle things that or have things come up last minute like this if we can put them off but they're a business and that was the issue right they expired. They kind of they came in at the last minute and begged and pleaded nicely to try to get them approved as quickly as possible. Obviously they're they're open tonight and selling so. Can I just I just want to ask one question and and and I just I don't know because I remember years ago when I had a liquor license in the state and I had residents weigh in on stuff like that. I had to be put on the agenda in enough time to get that approval. Are we in are we in the right is this in the right stay in mind when we just blank it put this out there on the agenda and it doesn't say what establishments are looking for their license. That's a great question and I think you're probably right. Probably in the to be prudent we should put this off for approval until the next meeting. I mean I just want to do what's right. I mean I know that I just think blank and it doesn't give that we're not doing due diligence for if somebody had an issue or you know to be brought to our where you know I don't know. I'm just asking the question that's all. Well the other thing that I do just to just to is we also run it by the chief to see if there's been any incidents or calls or anything like any issues that he may be aware of for those that are applying for the liquor licenses as well. So we do that also. Historically we have always just put down liquor licenses. No not any specific one just liquor licenses. Okay the other option the other option is we could I could post that again and just we could have a quick 15 minute special meeting in two days from now or Thursday or whatever for approval. That's another option. I think we can I'm available. Okay if that's the way we want to handle it. If that's the board's wishes we'll do it that way. I'm comfortable handling it tonight after some thought under the approvals of license permits vouchers and applications but if the board wishes we can hold a 15 minute meeting in a couple of days. I mean I would I'd be willing I am not opposed to doing under under licenses permits and vouchers but if you want to take and have it as a liquor license application then like I said I'm available Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. I'm good with whatever whatever the pleasure is. I just I just think that from here on out I think we shouldn't blanket something like that. I think it should be on there who's looking for that's just my opinion you know. I agree with you Dave as well. My concern was just that it was that they should have applied a while ago personally. Exactly. They did operate. We don't have any we don't have any information or any we haven't heard from the police that there's any any issues there and and being there the state ultimately is the one who regulates this. That being said that that's why I was comfortable but that's fine I don't we can we can go we'll do a quick 15 minute meeting. I mean I don't know how anybody feels about Thursday but I'll be available. I'll make myself available. Okay I'll warn it I'll get it I'll get it posted tomorrow. Is there a particular time Thursday you want to have it? What's the board's wishes? Anytime after 5 30. Same here. It's getting done sooner than later. Six p.m. Thursday. That works. That's good. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Public comment. All right treasurer's report. I don't have anything this time anything I have is in the agenda. Excellent thank you. Thanks. All right next up we got capital city stampede 10k permit application for approval. Yeah she was uh going to join us uh Ms uh Salma Air I'm not sure of the pronunciation. The application is in the package that I sent out for that with a with a map as well. Let me open it here. Have they done this in the past? Have they is this the capital city stampede? Yes they have.  The permit application is it's going to be on June 12 from 9 to 10 30. Okay and it includes a portion of the Junction Road. She did provide a copy of the certificate of insurance as well which is in the package. They will have what they what they call course marshals throughout the race to assist with the traffic control and safety. Okay have we ever had any issues with it in the past? Again I'm on the rookie here but none none that I'm aware of in looking through everything. Okay but I don't have a deep history on it either so. Does the board have any questions? No I'm good. I would make a motion to approve it. All right we've got a second. Any further discussion? All those in favor? Motion carries. Perfect. Next up personnel policy revision approval. Yes so that one we've been talking about that for some time. I've had some some comments and feedback from the staff and I think perhaps maybe you Justin and John I did with some revisions. All the revisions have been made. Again I sent this out probably a week ago with that. I haven't received any additional comments back on that yet so I'm just looking looking to the board for any further comments or a revision approval to issue this out as the latest revised personnel policy. As everybody had an opportunity to look through it. Yes. Yeah I haven't yet but what I've looked over what I've seen I'm good with yes. What were your thoughts Flo? I think it's fine. I didn't see anything that stood out to me in terms of needing any changes looked good overall. Thank you. Again the biggest change was the addition of the transitional work section and the addendum as well and then there were some minor corrections as far as spelling and verbiage and things that I just cleaned up a little in it as I went through it. So that was the biggest. Okay I didn't get a chance to read through it thoroughly. Did we have a section that addressed? Okay we can always amend it too. Oh yeah. Perfect. Any other comments or questions on it? Should we add does the board feel comfortable making a motion or would we prefer to wait until we have a full board? I could go either way. It might not be a bad idea to wait and make sure that John's had a chance to review it and if you haven't had a chance to look at it in its entirety maybe we should wait. I would agree. I would want to look. I have looked it over and I haven't just haven't got my mind wrapped around it that much so I'd like another opportunity to look at it. Okay Brad any thoughts? No moved to table the table this item till next meeting. Second. All right any discussion? Those in favor? Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Authorization to file three state revolving loan program applications. Tom would you like to speak to these? And incidentally there was one on the agenda that shows the dollars to be determined. Tom has completed that exercise and it's 81,000 so you'll have that information as well and I'll let Tom speak to these. Hello everyone so yes this is part of the clean water state revolving loan fund program. I think Vince may have sent out to you the email that was sent out to municipalities. It talks about three full of point projects. You may recall we just did a clean water state revolving fund. It was like we did a couple months ago and you may recall that on the list is the first one and the third one on the list deal with three acre storm water programs in the town and if you may recall when we the town received its new town center designation it was conditioned it was a conditional approval and it was one of the conditions there was a handful one of the conditions was that the town downtown one of the Berlin mall campus is on and one at the center of what medical campus is on so so with these dollars would allow us to do is to at at really no cost to the town except administrative time to get storm water planning done in our new town center and get that section of the conditions taken off of that permit so those are the those that's the the first and third bullet points there are two two storm water ones the other one the other one of the other bullet that the state is offering 100 percent subsidy on our village center wastewater projects you may recall that last year that the planning commission applied for an AARP grant to look at developing a community-based wastewater treatment system in the village of riverton riverton is a is a designated village center in in berlin and they did not get awarded that grant through AARP last year but now these there's dollars available through cling waters 100 subsidy to to do that at least at least the initial planning phase of that in in the village of riverton so there's really no downside to the town of berlin the i think vinces may i think maybe asking to if you agree to these projects to approve to let him sign these applications on behalf of the town this so somewhat competitive process let's first come first serve is our understanding gets the dollars so quicker we get our applications in the quicker that we may have a chance to receive these projects getting fully funded from from the state so yeah so these projects are guaranteed to be fully funded is what you're saying that's that's what the we've been told in our loan application we said we're accepting the money on it on the basis that it would be a hundred percent funded from the state that's fantastic now my other question would be with the central remont medical center campus wasn't that excluded from the new town center it it uh it was with the statement that it could be brought back into the fold once storm water is done okay come this this uh three acre impermeable surface for storm water that that hundred percent isn't that just for design planning and design okay because i know we for the we applied for the park to join with the town and we still haven't heard back on that and that's going back six eight months ago now day this program was just announced maybe two weeks ago so oh so it's a whole different program because before it was a 50 percent yeah it's it's the same program but now they're offering a hundred percent if you look i think it was um either friday or monday um no sorry i think it was either thursday or friday of last week i sent an updated email it might have even been today actually that uh that shows the details kind of an overview of that new uh package that tom's talking about that just went into effect that's why we're trying to uh move on this pretty quickly to get in there yeah it's a good it's definitely a good thing it protects the the watershed so yeah absolutely well i don't think we could approve for a town administrator's sign on behalf of the t so what was that exact amount again 81 thousand all right does anybody uh have any questions no i think i think i understand the program uh because like i said it was a 50 matching thing at one point uh and it was uh for three acres of impermeable surface to protect the the the watershed uh so i think it's a good thing and uh i would make a motion with the to to uh approve that to be signed by the town manager to get it in as soon as possible second with the numbers that you know the 81 instead of the two to be determined yep uh any other uh comments all those in favor hi hi motion carries thank you thank you perfect thank you all all right next up we got brookfield road signage and parking discussion yeah that's on here again um you know that it was talked about at the last meeting but there were two members not present so um it's on there again for further discussion we still have one that's probably uh pretty passionate about it as well it's not with us tonight but uh yeah i mean i think we should i mean i i that's been an ongoing discussion we've had in the past and i'm not sure what the right answer is um people tend to park right in front of no parking signs there um but do we really want to have people tow it or ticketed for for utilizing that area i mean i don't know right right so i can speak just briefly on that i've done i've done a little bit of homework on the uh on the and the parking that's currently in place there as well with the signs um the additional signs are something that we'd have to consider obviously there's uh there's some guidelines to go by on placing those um but i think what's what's left if the board so chooses is to define where we want to place those signs like the the crest of the hill by the darling hill trail right when you come up over there if there's a car right there there's walkers in the road somebody's in trouble right so so it's it's it's that i think again my opinion i'm not a law enforcement expert um the way that the ordinance is written it seems to be enforceable uh now uh from a speed limit in parking so um you know they could they could start ticketing people um should we desire but again i'm waiting for confirmation from the chief on that as well right now he has to review i would also ask the chief i mean i'm not an expert on rhoda so what what i mean they must have a fair amount of training on you know safe practices so i would assume that they would be able to identify areas uh that that we should probably mark or that are more than others is he working to identify that as well for us no we actually have uh i i guess i'm i'll hang myself out there on this what i'm doing that with the uh with the orange book and the state guidelines there's a very very good document on uh what to measure and how to measure it uh to determine some of that as well so i i'm in the process of doing that and then uh once i have that some recommendations i'll be bringing them to the chief to take a look at um to get his feedback on and then uh you know i can probably present something um in a couple of weeks to the board to say we should put additional speed limit signs in this location no parking signs in this location you know but i gotta i gotta measure it out it's got to be so many feet from this and that and so on to begin the guidelines so so i got some i got some field work to do to get that in for detailed information to you so that's looking for a motion to go ahead with the enforcement of these issues and then leave it for the chief to get back to us or do you want to hold off on any kind of motion about enforcement of the ordinances well again it's um it's really up to the board but my my recommendation at this point is that we keep talking about it to keep driving it if if the board agrees to move forward with that i'll do the field work um and then uh work with the chief and we'll come back with a solid recommendation including if he believes there's any um changes that need to be made in the ordinance to make it uh fully enforceable that they're comfortable with as well um so that's i guess that's the direction that i'm looking for tonight is go ahead do the do the field work get the detailed information come back to the board with a recommendation for you that would be if that makes sense it does to me it seems like after uh because i remember the last meeting with the road form and you know when it came to grading and everything else they were having problems you know even in the winter doing plowing and stuff like that because of the enforcement of those so i mean my opinion would be to let's move forward with this uh because it seems to be an ongoing issue and i gotta tell you it's not just brookfield road i've had uh three calls on richardson road and one call believe it or not on on uh coups uh as well so i'm gonna look at i'm gonna look at all of them um you know that they're they're talking about some sections should be reduced to 25 instead of the 35 that it's at now um but i'll use this one as kind of my template to do the field work learn it and understand it better and then i'll take it to the next uh probably the richardson road would be next because that's the one i'm getting the most calls on now um and do the same do a similar exercise excellent for you thanks for your work vance definitely thank you vance any other discussion under the brookfield road signage and parking moved table moved table to next meeting second any other discussion all in favor hi hi you're pushing me brad next meeting it's gonna be like this meeting only different okay all right we get a irish hill bridge discussion i had asked let this get put on the agenda there was a couple of bridges for the vast use i i walked up the uh the trail with the conservation commission along with vast uh i think last weekend or well the weekend before um kind of looked at looked at some of the areas that bridge is in really bad shape we've had uh we've talked about the the approval of the irish irish hill bridge um and then we have the black road bridge that we need to do the vast is willing to um the way it would work with the vast trail is if we had vast paid for the bridges they would own them and if the trails were were shut down or whatever they could theoretically remove the bridges in conversations that i've had with them um and i my i thought that it would be good if the town owned those bridges so regardless they could wouldn't be removed if if the snow would be all lost at us um they've agreed to contribute a lot of free labor and they've also vast has also said they would do a lot of the excavation work including water bars uh we i think they they worked well with the conservation commission on that um and we have some invoices for the materials because that's all that is going to cost the town um the 10 foot wide bridges spanning they'll they'll the design would carry the groomers so emergency vehicles such as a side-by-side would easily have access the total cost for both bridges for the materials other than what is being donated is about six thousand dollars and that 10 foot wide bridges and i don't know josh is here he can probably amend a little bit more if the boy has some questions i thought it would be best uh since it wasn't going to go through the snowmobile clubs and it's a town asset um if we i i didn't know exactly how we'd want to handle it but i have an invoice here from fontaine if we chose to get it uh it's two thousand five hundred fourteen dollars and thirty two cents for the hemlock for bridges for example um so it's a total i i didn't know if it would make sense to to get invoices then as the materials were being picked up if it were approved to have diane cut a check i'm not not a hundred percent certain how the board would feel about handling that but um we've talked a lot about the bridges uh the the bridges in pretty bad shape i don't know if anybody from the conservation commission or the select board or josh wants to comment at all on the topic um feel afraid my my question justin is um i know that uh initially when we're talking about it we agreed about uh three thousand from the conservation committee budget for the bridge um the other thing i'll throw out there for consideration um considering this is again just my thoughts it's um it's really for recreation the rec committee uh does have a have a budget with some funds in it uh we may want to take the balance uh of the three thousand the other three thousand from the rec committee budget um as well to to cover that and spread it out over the two committees that was one of my questions is where would we find the other three thousand because i i remember i recall to prove we approved the uh conservation fund three thousand um okay is there anybody you want to talk i mean has anybody talked with the people is there anybody here from the rec committee not from the rec committee yet uh but there is from the conservation committee wendy lin is here tonight yeah and vince pretty much said what we are thinking is that um we've had three thousand approved from our funds and would like to see the other three thousand come from someplace else elsewhere yes exactly yep that's that was one of my concerns uh i think i think if this were to be approved we could just basically all the bills that we're going to get are pretty much 50 50 um or we could itemize it separately but it's they're basically identical um brad how would you how would you think that if you were going to make a motion on something like this to approve each individual vendor how would we do that it's pretty calm i would just take and do it as the project and then as we get here you'll die and could cut checks well um if all you're buying really is lumber there's lumber there's some hardware from allens there's you know they there's going to be some concrete work we don't know if we're going to you know until you actually get it set up if you're going to use blocks or you start digging or whether you're going to form a little bit but you know it's all going to be underneath you won't see it but yeah well i mean if you're using multiple vendors uh usually of course when we do this it would be like you'd hire a contractor to do it and let him worry about paying the bills all right and keep track of the invoices and pay them as they come in we still have to approve them right they're going to i think the way unless we run it through the the snowmobile club they'll need payment when they go pick it up it's going to be the issue i i cannot issue a check unless i have a warrant that's approved first so i'd have to have a warrant but what i would suggest is a lot of these places the town has an account with for instance alan lumber i don't remember what the new name is but we do have accounts there so if it's companies we have accounts with that would make the most sense you know charge them to the town uh you'll get approval from from us i think it's it's going to be fontane forestry alan lumber and carol concrete it'd be actually rk miles no yeah right for alan yeah and we do have an account with rk miles and carol concrete not fontane but if he is willing to or this company is willing to you know wait to get payment until it's the check has been approved by you guys then you know that would work i'd think he'd be willing to take and do 30 days okay so i we could also i have the exact amount for fontane right now to in front of me okay i hope that makes any difference um you know that may be ready to take out so that's $2,514.32 and that's for the hemlock for both bridges okay that's not sales tax included right because we don't pay sales tax correct good okay except from sales tax on there and i yep so that that's uh yeah um and that might be ready to get picked up um um wendy lindy did you have anything else on the bridges or any yeah i just guess one question if it was to go over budget um where would the funds come from on the 3000 out of our funds right we we yeah the select board approved the use of three thousand dollars on that um it can be priced everything so we priced everything out it it shouldn't go over if it goes over um we'll have to we'll have to find a place i mean it'll be probably i'm not sure it could even be uh five percent over it i can hear somebody talking but i can't yeah hold on hi wendy that was that was me there you are hi josh hi wendy oh so um i i did call the places back to make sure that they were going to hold their prices i didn't call for the hardware because that was just a small amount but i did call fontein and they were holding their price that they had given me last fall so i i have actually called and had that number they're going to start getting that milled out for us and that could be ready within like a couple of weeks um so so we are hoping to maybe uh get that invoice approved from the select board now so then when the time comes that i go and pick it up that i can pay that invoice you know pay them for it so i guess i've got one question we were discussing some bank work also um whatever group i was walking with when we did the walkthrough they were talking about um needing to widen up the um the portion of that goes over the old stone culvert which is right to the west of the bridge is that going to be an additional cost or nope that's all stuff we're going to be able to use right off the the materials right off the land there we looked around remember we looked and found some rock files and we were just going to kind of stack some uh natural rocks right there for the the width okay and then um as far as are you gonna do that by hand or are you renting it would be done with uh both by hand and with a machine okay and that will be no additional cost for the machine no i think that um vast was going to try to get a grant for stuff like that and for going up and doing the um water bars in the ditching you know where we had to do some ditching up you know and i think they were going to get a grant from vast to do that wendy lenn in the in the conversation that i had we uh would vast it they would they would own the the bridge if they paid to install it um or they paid for it so what what what when i talked to david and those guys what they thought would be a great idea would be if they covered the excavation work so typically they would have paid to install the entire bridge right but if the steel access were shut down then they would have the ability to remove the bridge yeah um so i thought it was in a conversation it seemed like a much better fit for everyone utilizing that area um if the town owned the bridge got some volunteer labor um and then from what david said they would the they would cover the excavation for us okay i'm just trying to protect the conservation fund you know should there be additional expenses that were that's that's all i'm asking questions about right now yeah yeah no i understand um the conservation fund uh i can't guarantee that what the board would determine would be the best avenue for the money but i i'd say it's fairly well protected and we want to preserve that for you it's not our intention to come back and say hey we're gonna have to take another 1500 dollars from this fund our intentions are to utilize exactly what we're we're saying we will up to three thousand dollars um and hopefully it's less that'd be great yeah just just and along those lines can we get copies of the uh invoices sent to diane for the for the file and you'll know uh what to expect is coming as well yep i can well we don't have invoices on uh everything yet as far as the like the blocks um but the the fontain the millwork the hemlock um that that's a big one the big yeah and that the other ones we have accounts at rk myles and carol so that'll that'll that'll work i can absolutely get this this dropped off or emailed over to uh diane asap the the fontain forestry uh and millwork invoice great thank you it might be a good idea just to uh to get an account set up with fontain because in the future we may need some lumber it'd be good well i think we'll set up it wouldn't hurt and if it's simple and easy then then absolutely i mean did this bridge is going to need maintenance we must have other bridges right brad well not like this the only other wood bridge decking we have is um is uh glennis road wow good inventory what's that inventory but well i mean they replaced that deck 12 13 years ago i think and they did it with um pressure treated 3000 from the conservation with 3000 from the rec committee uh for this these bridges for the construction of the the black road bridge and the irish hill bridge so i'd be willing to make that motion um that 3000 came from the confirmation committee and 3000 from the rec committee um for those two bridges uh to be installed by the vast group i think i think that covers it and and the vast group is going to be looking for hold on can i get a second so i would say uh up to 3000 dollars uh from each they're going to be about the same um construction so up to 3000 yeah that's all i would but i think we're good do you zach do you think that covers it brad yeah but i mean if if for some reason you for some reason it goes over um i'm just trying to think well i would just i would i would go with what you've got if it goes over it won't be by much correct i have taken uh diane do you have any idea where you could take and get a $500 for something like this i'd have to look it up brad to see what else we have you know we might have other reserves that i haven't really touched yet but off the top of my head right now i don't know i mean i i recall i was just thinking that i mean if if this is going to be used um for hiking biking etc you still have that bike path account we do and and i think i also think there's still some additional funds in the rec committee budget as well yes i think we're probably good with 3000 dollars i'm fairly positive that that's going to be well within the budget for a bridge but if it were to come back up i think it would we would know in the next we'd have plenty of time for a meeting brad yeah but i mean as long as as long as you can see that um see the uh those bridges being used by a bicyclist you've got i think 40 000 in the bike path phone i don't remember exactly how much we have in it but we do have a good amount yeah i thought it was more like 35 but it could be more wishful thinking on my part so that's separate from the rec funds at this point yeah it is it's it's we use some of that money to uh to help build the bridge it goes from route two across the u32 property right so i mean that money's been sitting there um for quite a while back when they were talking about uh putting the bike path along the rail track from Montpelier or Agway roughly up to through DeBerry and uh of course the trains uh they uh the trains have started running again hauling granite and so the the the use of the of the rail right-of-way has gone out the window so we still have the money in the in the account but we don't have any place to spend it and if you if you use these bicyclists use these bridges as part of the trail then i would say you're good to go on that yeah so so what are you are you saying that we should use the bike path funds instead of no i'm just saying use the bike path funds if you go over budget okay i guess a question comes up if if um if the bike funds are available maybe we should take a little bit out right now would that be a possibility and reduce what's coming out of the conservation fund coming out of the rec funds well i would think that we would stick with the original plan since i mean i remember you guys were going to spend five thousand to start off with on this bridge because it was during covid and we weren't sure where the money was going to come from so part of that was situational but yes you're right no i i understand i think that what i would what i i think that the the motions the way it's made is is good and that we have bike path funds available that we could look at for maybe future projects up there um any other discussion all right all those in favor all right i didn't hear anybody else the knife from uh i said i okay all right motion carries um conservation commission update vast and add immense support discussion as we know two weekends ago um and there was a lot of people there so it's hard to say what was being said in different groups but um vast was very interesting helping with um some of the drainage issues the bridge um it's not clear what they need to do this year and what is maybe more long term i'm not sure whether just justin or joss have a better feel for that um part of it um but there are a lot of interested people and then we also did a walkthrough through the town forest on um the thursday after that and didn't see any major problems um the only thing is that it does go through a very rich um area with spring ephemerals and it would be nice if any maintenance that's done to that area was done late fall um just so that that's protected and we really need to keep other people off that trail during the summer during the spring um there's a lot of plants in there um and let's see what else i think that's about it from us um i can't really speak to the administration support you know once we're through the management plan i think our work's going to ease off but i don't want to speak for phil and that one was that the uh my thought with the interaction was it was a great walk up through there uh with vast um and i thought that it seemed once we had some good discussion going on that it was going to be very mutually beneficial that you guys were very willing to work with them and they were very willing to accommodate what you thought would be best uh uses or best best practices on the trail so i was really encouraged it was very encouraging and i appreciate your time doing that they were very very helpful and they were seeing a lot of good stuff so i agree so uh wendy i i have one question um you did the walkthrough on the uh south south of the tower um we were looking for approval to get started on that so we were going to get started on doing this trail we're gonna want to use this trail this this winter so there's quite a bit of work to be done so we're looking for approval to uh get started on that so i i guess i'm not clear on what work you see needs to be done when we walk through it we look it look like there need to be some branching on some trees and some um downed trees removed um yeah and that's about it but we were just waiting for the green light from from you guys you know from the conservation board yeah i think i think the process is that the management plan gets approved and then you can have the green light and the management plan is going to be um to the select board on the end of the week and then we've got uh the meeting on the 17th um and as far as going through on the town forest again you really need to wait until the spring of film rolls her are dormant again which is going to be late summer on that part i mean the rest of the trail the the ridge line is okay and the darling trail is okay but that section is through rich hardwood forest and the plants need to go dormant before you walk through there a lot um yeah you know because i was expecting to be contacted and uh be able to join in on that walk through and then you could have pointed out to me the spots where you have issues and then we could maybe work in areas that didn't have the issues so um i'm a little concerned that you didn't get a hold of me about that because i think i thought i said that i would be available to go with you um i i thought time they tried to call you we made a very last minute decision because of um the weather and everybody's schedule um but you know we could arrange to go up there again if you would like to do that the whole area is rich hardwood forest um and you notice you're on an existing block road as well correct that's what i'm saying you know from our perspective it looks like what needs to happen is some of the trees need to be branched um and it doesn't look like there needs to be any groundwork at all and there's a couple of um blow downs that needs to be removed correct doesn't look like a lot of work okay but we're ready to go yeah we'd definitely like to get uh through and just uh take a look at all that as well you know just so we'll know what we need to do this fall if you if you want us to wait until this fall okay well i i think it needs to wait until it's dormant we'd be glad to walk through with you um again we wanted to get something done before the management plan and we were running out of time um yep okay so um and then like i said we made a very last minute decision to go okay um one other question i have is for diane if she was going to um get that account open at fontaine saw mill sooner than later if yeah if somebody gives me the information to call fontaine i can call it tomorrow okay that would be great yeah okay so you can email that to me or call me with it then i'll start working on that perfect thank you nyan yep excellent um thank you so the just for clarification this management plan um that um that you got a new one uh that doesn't i'm just trying to think that covers that doesn't cover the burlington forest section does it uh the protected areas we've already got approval for for the use uh of snowmobiles in there i do want to do this the right way i'm just trying to make sure that that everything can get it be accomplished as far as working on the trail system up up towards the tower that what's preventing them from starting on that if they if it's if there's availability is there anything preventing that section of the trail wendeland um i mean technically the management plan is supposed to be approved um before the work starts i mean well the management for all intents of purposes in the management plan we're currently operating on there already has that use approved in it though i don't know yeah there's nothing that's really going to stop you i mean you're going to approve it on the 17th um vlt is going to rubber stamp it um okay and then what about so as far as the areas of concern with that you said you wanted uh vegetation to go dormant um if those were existing logging roads and there's not a tremendous amount of uh traffic through there i'm just trying to trying to figure out when i guess i don't know how much work need to be done do you have a map did we is it the same trail system that josh yes let me see i may have a and i'm just curious if there's certain areas um because if it's really just trimming limbs and and trees that are already down i would think you know that's not going to get a lot of heavy traffic in use so i would i would be curious to know how that would differ from just property maintenance in any other area you know it's not like we can stop people from walking on it um if they're up there hiking on it as it is so i'm just trying to or biking i'm just trying to figure out if there's a way that we can do it and do it in a way that won't won't damage anything sooner than later that's all well i guess i mean right now it's in the peak of the infomerals um the whole area is rich hardwood forest um you know so there's not this one little spot it's all of it um if you wait until towards the end of the summer with that section then you won't damage the plants that are in there you won't damage what's going on there um late august september yes and there's not that much work to do um you need to branch it up and i think there's a couple of blood ounce um but to take atvs through there right now is not good for you know what's going on biologically um um and have a lot of people trumping through them most of the people who go onto that piece of property now um tend to stay in the lower sections there's not a lot of traveling through where the snowmobile proposed snowmobile trail is and we'd sort of like to keep it that way during the summer okay i was just wanting to get a gauge on it sounds like i mean we're going to constantly be touching base on this as we go and make sure everybody's coordinating and everybody's happy um yeah well it sounds like there's plenty of work to do with the bridge and by the time you get through with the bridge and that part of it then you move into this other part well i know that if there's any sort of excavation work or anything like that which it doesn't sound like there is uh they would probably want to do that while the equipment was on site obviously there's nothing like that it's not like the risk line trail where you've got drainage problems are there there's no it's all vegetated um i don't see that there would be any need to bring equipment into that area okay um any other any other conversation around this so that the the management plan was we had a deadline of the first right so we're not too far off from that um wasn't it the first of june was our original deadline i thought it was may awesome i thought it was originally may no we're we're bringing it to you ahead of schedule it was june first okay well i appreciate that um anything else wendy that you want to share with us um nope i think that's it thank you wendy thank you yeah all right fisher road culvert update yeah just real real quickly on that we're still waiting to hear back from chip we haven't heard anything back yet um so that's uh really starting to have an impact now so tom do you want to say anything to that one i guess not yeah no i'm coming on okay so uh yeah we we sent over a month ago we sent out the easement language to view ink we haven't had much feedback from them uh last correspondence that we had it was a text message chip was saying that's being worked on but uh so we're we have a in a backwater minds we have a an alternate design that would just eliminate the need of of needing an easement it's uses sheeting it adds cost to the to the project and i don't think i'm not even going to venture what the cost is right now our problem is that it's twofold we need this easement we need v-trans to to sign off on on the design uh so v-trans has had it for about six weeks now but it's once easement and um the design is proved by v-trans it's a it's a 10-week lead time to to order the structure so may 1st that gets us to the middle of july um we've got a bit this thing we got to uh and we have to be we can't work till after october 15th so if we don't get this done here in relatively short order i'm i'm not very optimistic we're going to get this done in 2021 and there's ramifications with that i think politically for the select board of of you know keeping that road closed you know another year so soon we gotta just fish or cut bait and and if anybody has any influence on with the folks from if you link we'd appreciate maybe giving a call and see if we can get something done here's here's what i'm going to recommend um i spoke to chip uh i think the friday before last meeting i was unable to attend we had quite a lengthy conversation uh he really wants to put all this in the path he wants to put he wants to be done with this is what he said so he wants to he wants to he wants to work with the town uh and he'd like to work with the select board um so i would like to invite him on i'm surprised he's not in here tonight um but i think we should put it on the next agenda and invite him in to talk about it he i see brad you're laughing over there he had you're supposed to gather a bunch of the information from the original uh easements and the history behind it uh he was going to talk to tell his dad a little bit um henry but he he claims he wants to work with the town he wants to have it so that we can utilize it he just he said he wants to uh he wants it to be fair um and there was an original agreement many years ago that i guess wasn't recorded so he's going to work on that and i don't know if did you see any purchase option or anything like that in our research tom no i i i didn't and and they never mentioned anything about that either from what he told me was uh it was a long time ago i'm not sure what year or whatever but they had come to an agreement with the town for the town to purchase that um and as funny as the story may sound the town sent 10 of the amount that they agreed upon and henry said i'm not cashing that check and return the check so they were going to work on some documentation but there was a there was an agreement he genuinely wants to work with the town i do believe it um so i think if we get him in on the next meeting and we have a as much information as possible we may be able to come to some sort of a conclusion about the best we can do at this point anyway again what you know there is a redesign to to just eliminate the need for an easement from them so but we don't know how much that's going to cost at this point so we don't know how much the length is going to cost either so anyways yep uh he's he has been invited to the last two meetings um i'm surprised he's not here either but um anyways yeah he asked if he could he specifically asked me if he could work with the select board so i wanted to bring that to the board's attention and see if they were willing to do that too so i think uh that's a good idea just and if we could get him in and talk with them directly because times of the essence especially on this concrete uh culvert uh if you look the projections i don't know how long they're going to hold these prices or if tom has prices but uh we're going to come into an area with concrete being a shortage this year it's already predicting it so the sooner we can get something done and sign down on paper the better off we're going to be thanks keep wanting to say tracy but i know it's dave yeah okay so for that one i've got a note i will uh i'll get that on the uh 17th meeting agenda thank you ventz i appreciate that um and then any information we can find in the meantime so that the town's well prepared i mean we did i do i do think yeah he was he knows that there was an option for the town to purchase it that we agreed upon at one point in time and for whatever reason that transaction didn't happen um so if we can find any of that somehow i'm not sure if he he may have some i can reach out to him as well um i think that that that's what we need to do so i don't know if there's anything on records or whatever rosemary may be familiar as well so yeah we'll take a look all right anything else on the fisher road culvert excellent approval of license permits vouchers and applications i have those in front of me so i will go ahead with that i make the motion to approve payroll warrant 21-22 for payroll from april 11 2021 to april 24 2021 paid on april 28 2021 in the amount of 44 133 dollars and nine cents also payable warrant 21 g 22 with checks 21092 to 21 120 in the amount of 57 129 dollars and 24 cents i would second that motion any discussion all those in favor hi hi motion carries all right next up we have minutes uh march 1st march 8 april 5th and april 12th and make the motion to approve the revised march 1st 2021 minutes can i get a second second any discussion all those in favor hi all right motion carries what do we got the uh march 8th move to approve the march 8th 2021 minutes second any discussion i just wanted to add that i believe there needs to be a revision to those minutes because i had made the motion to nominate brad for chair and that's not included it goes right from the initial nomination to brad turning the meeting over to you as the chair and i think that needs to be included as well and i'm not sure i don't think anything else was missing but that was got it i'll i'll take a note i'll uh i'll revise that uh flow for your comments and put that on the next next meeting and sorry about that actually i don't think i could vote on those first minutes i weren't there on the march 1st i wasn't in on that so i don't believe i could vote on that oh good point well even if you abstain david still uh there's three of us here for the quorum okay right i'm gonna change my to an abstain for that right so brad do you care to amend your motion at all with those changes uh i'm willing to amend the changes on the i got my phone back on the march 8 special meetings to include the nomination from flow for you as chair i would amend the march 8th meet uh 2021 minutes uh to include the revisions that the flow smith requested can i get a second on that second all right any discussion all those in favor all right motion carries all right now we have the uh april 5th 2021 minutes i make a motion to approve the april 5th 2021 minutes as presented second that any discussion all those in favor say aye all right i'm staying motion carries uh april 12th 2021 make a motion to accept the april 12th 2021 minutes second all right any further discussion trying to think if i was there yes you were okay yeah you were both of those last two brad one meaning i missed no well according to the minutes you were there enough for me all right all those in favor all right motion carries all right so we have committee and board appointment policy committee bylaws process uh discussion approval yeah this this one we've been kind of kicking down the can kicking the can down the road on this um it's been on and off since uh since february actually i'm just looking for comments or um acceptance to move forward with the policies this is in regard to all our committees and um and commissions into how they are set up to operate and also um the the bylaws for operation and the whole appointment policy uh that we go through to get people on those boards right so this this this is basically uh utilizing the subcommittees to vet all candidates but we're also the select boards also receiving letters of interest or or any interest uh from all the candidates as well correct correct as i get letters of interest or or members of the existing board get members letters of interest they get forwarded onto the board as well um i also think um i also think i put in there that they will um be at a select board meeting as well as part of the vetting process so my my big thing would be i'd like if it's not in there i would think that all letters of interest should be directed to the town administrator that it is that it is worded that way they should all come into me uh through whatever channel and then i bring them to the board and then you distribute them to the sub the other subboards right the yeah they'll go back out to the the existing board members uh and to the select board as well okay i mean i i think we definitely need that to have a policy and procedure in place for that and we don't currently and this this appears to me to be like at least a good starting point not i will tell you i i plagiarized the daylights out of it from the recommendations of the Vermont leagues of cities and towns i didn't come up with this all on my own so we never gave you credit for all of that but okay and it's the same same with the bylaws i think it it's it's and my intent is once once these are finalized and i have the board's approval i will meet with each of the committees and commissions to roll these out and go over them with each one of them okay i'll make a motion to accept the uh procedures and policies put in place for adapting oh let's see sorry about that um make a motion to adapt the procedures for the committee appointments as discussed is explained by vince second and the bylaws please and the bylaws any uh any further discussion all right all those in favor say hi hi hi just one thing to know all these great things that you're approving um dianne's gonna go crazy sending things out for signatures oh yeah just a reminder they all need to be signed dave that was a good one i'm proud of you buddy um all right round table flow do you have anything no thank you though brad nope dave no i i think uh no i think i'm all set actually right now all right i've got two things i want to talk about real quick and round table uh number one is uh this one's pretty simple are you guys how you guys feeling about getting back to uh in-person meetings i'm okay with it i mean i've been vaccinated it's been more than two weeks um i don't think we crammed too many people in there do we i think we can safely do it according to the governor's guidelines um but i i wanted to make sure the rest of the board was in favor of that or at least the majority of the board was in favor of that we should say right um flow brad i mean we don't need to make a decision but if everybody's good with that i'd like to at least start offering both um moving forward the other thing that i wanted to talk about real quick was um i was liaison to the fire department last year um and dave's taken over that this year um and they are working on they had they'd promised us a uh a potential merger study um and and i was supposed to be delivered prior to town meeting uh it hasn't even gone out yet that i know of um and so i'd like to start working to kind of maybe bring everybody together in these different departments so you know we have the fire department we have the planning commission i mean it seems like every week we have a state revolving loan program applications and i'm not 100 certain why uh or if we're anticipating more next week um zoning uh we have a lot of development that's going to be going on hopefully in the next 20 plus years in the town of berlin and i want to make sure that all of our departments are able to keep up with the growth um without burdening the taxpayers i mean we're talking a lot of businesses um this should be really good for the taxpayers and and it should help make berlin keep the tax rates low it should keep it affordable um so in some of the discussion i just want to say see what um everybody's thoughts were on on having the liaison for the the police department and have the police department in at least once a month and have it scheduled to have the the road crew in once a month have the fire department once a month planning commission meet once a month we we have all that um you know i can tell you that i think that we do you guys know what the fire department does puts out fires hey exactly uh do you know what they deal with you know what their challenges are um do you know how they're how they're planning to grow with the town instead of just coming and saying hey we need instead of 350,000 we need $550,000 this year you know because that could very well happen so i think what you know some of the things that i would like dave at the next meeting and that you guys can tell me what your thoughts are but you know the fire department who really does what over there there's a corporation there's a um and then you know they deal a lot with false alarms do we have an we had an ordinance we had adopted brad right as you recall i believe so and uh it was it was for the false alarms so so i'd like to work with them to to see how we can um sort of and you know enforce that or support them with that and the other question they had that they they were curious about was they had we had talked previously about us uh maybe diane taking over some of the the accounting practices for them um and i'm not sure if we're ready to do that yet or not uh last i had thought it was once we hired a town administrator um so now that we have a town administrator i'm curious if now is the time so vince what i what i'd like to do is have the start a rotation where we have these you know the fire department included along with these other boards uh obviously the conservation commission's been very active but it would be nice to have a kind of a state of the union or state of the board for for us so that we we can better understand what's going on sure um so you took one for the one committee commission or department per meeting i i think that would be if we do anymore it's just going to be going to be a lot don't you guys agree the how many how many of these commissions did you want to uh come before the board at any on any one month we're going to have all of them we're going to have another hour or two on each meeting just voted to that right i would take in i would suggest that you have a committee come in um how many committees were you thinking the fire department conservation conservation are you talking recreation um highway department police department highway and the police are kind of already baked in there aren't they i mean we we we talked to them on a on a fairly routine basis maybe i'm wrong i was thinking more like when's the last time the planning commission came in to talk to the select board there's probably seven committees i think including uh the emt group if we include them there's probably seven committee or commissions on the list uh that we're talking about it's uh the rec committee public works planning emt economic development uh conservation and potentially the cemetery commission so the the emt and the fire department would be under one wouldn't they well the emt the emt's are hired separately from the uh the the rest of the squad is hired separately from the fire department right the third contract so yeah there's that's seven and then you're talking about the highway group and uh the fire department so let's focus let's just focus on a couple right now maybe like the fire department's a good one um public works planning commission the emt like you're saying that the conservation we're going to have so much involvement that we don't need to invite them in for a special agenda i don't think anytime soon so that when you're talking about the ambulance service for the for the town correct okay so i it might be a good idea to understand that and part of the reason for that would be we pay them a pretty significant amount of funds for them to and i know that for what it's worth i don't know if we're getting a great deal an exceptional deal a mediocre deal or a terrible deal but i do know that it's convenient to have your ambulance housed up in the four corners when you're doing billable transports outside of your town emergency covered services as well um and i i mean i don't i assume that's what how that works i i can't speak for certain but it would be nice to understand what they have for calls uh in a day and what are berlin calls oh i just i just need clarification here because i think we're there's two separate ones we have the town emergency management team and we have the uh contracted ambulance service yeah okay well you want both i don't think the contracted ambulance service is probably going to come in but i was hopeful there he has the the manager of that has come in before the board on several occasions you just have to invite him it would be nice to invite him okay i don't know that we'll be able to have them ongoing but i my intention would be to have whatever the frequency that we determined be that you know maybe every every other month the fire department comes in and joins us for a meeting we kind of get a state of the union from them um and perhaps the ones that couldn't come in maybe they could send us a report you know just an ongoing report well and and i think that we can get especially to that ongoing report area but i i think we're gonna have to have some dialogue first so that we know what we want in the report so get relevant data and information that that we can use and understand um so so i think we'll start with the fire department at the next meeting um and they'll have the the answers to the questions that we've asked we can also ask them some other ones i mean they are they're volunteer organization that we we need to support but they also we need to support them they need to support us the way we need to and and i want to make sure that as the town grows they grow with us and that's that's a tremendous concern of mine at the moment um i will have sorry about that justin i will i will have some reports for the select board once i get acquainted with uh you know their procedures and what's going on uh it is going to be very important with with the way berlin is growing to make sure that the fire department has what they need to to just to cover our needs and it's going to take a little bit of digging just to to see how they operate and stuff and well i think dave i think i think what we would be asking you to do as the liaison would be to let them know what first and foremost i mean we can't expect you to come up with that information give them a heads up that we're going to expect this information at the next meeting which i know they they are anticipating being at the next meeting uh so give to let them know that we're this is what the board is asking for um and just relay that to them and ask them if they need anything from us but but and also do your own digging but i think most of the questions that we're going to have to start off with are going to be something that we're going to need responses from them on and and and not so much uh many findings or whatever you might come up with i think which very important we're going to have to give them information uh whether it be from the public works board or what's going on with the you know the new town center and uh and and and you know making sure that we have the ordinances in place and possibly help them uh with billing and and and some other things down the road to help them be more efficient or to to know that we're all headed in the right direction i guess is what i'm i'm trying to say right and i think we need to do that with all the boards so that if somebody just were to step in here they would know right where we left off or as close to where we left off as possible all right that's all i had uh do we have an executive session tonight vince yes sir sorry all right so i will uh contract your personnel then sorry contract your personnel personnel are you expecting a vote at the end of it so probably we're gonna need some direction a decision okay i'm moved to uh adjourn select board and then enter into executive session i'll second that any discussion those in favor all right big motion cares give me just a minute to move uh orca and the guests to the waiting room they are back in excellent since there's since there's going to be no action taking i i move to uh adjourn second any discussion all in favor hi we're adjourned thank you thank you all have a great night everyone very to keep you guys waiting for no action dave thanks for asking the question brad what's that thanks for asking the question though have a good one thank you good night good night good night


What is Play Now? It is a new revenue stream where you have to do very little extra work that lets you make money reviewing products, games, anything that you make videos about. Let me show you how it works. Do you remember making these videos reviewing What the Fast, a product that helps you reduce latency for gameplay? Every one of you who made videos linked to the product, and I'll show you one of the videos right here, in your description. See? Link to the product. Now let's say I click this link, which I'm about to do, to go to the website, and I buy the product. Does the person who made the video make any money from that purchase? No! Why? Because there's no way for What the Fast to know who to pay. Play Now solves that. We will give you new links in your shiny freedom dashboard, where you'll be able to get all of that revenue when someone clicks your link and gets the product. In the dashboard, I'm showing the dashboard to you. Look behind me. You will have a new tab right here called Play Now, as well as a Play Now section in the left menu, where you can get these products. And then when you make videos about the product, and you put a particular Play Now link that we will give you, not this link, then you will get paid when people click that link. Now it'll still take you to the product website. There is no difference in how it behaves. The only difference is we can now track the click to the person who made the video, or wrote the article on a blog, or however you decide to promote the product. That is what Play Now is all about, and that is coming very soon. We have the integration done with What the Fast. We will have more integrations with many other products in the future. Tell us in the comments below what you want us to get as a deal for you, so that if you've already made videos or want to make videos about a product, you'll be able to add a Play Now link to make money from people who click your link and get the product. Is that cool? Is that a great idea? Are you already doing that in some other way? Tell us in the comments below. Now let's get on to reviewing your channels. I want to start with a very unusual spotlight today, and the spotlight is here. Daily Asgardian News yesterday wrote a comment, actually four hours ago, that said, hey George, I'm new to the Freedom Family. I have 36,000 subscribers, so he's not a small channel. Why am I reviewing a big channel? Because this one will help you small channels grow to become 36,000 subs. So what has he done? That's unique and special. Let me show you. This is his channel, and I'm going to play one video to show you what I mean. Roll it. And for son of own, as long as there is life in my breast, I am running out of things to say. Are you ready? It's terribly well balanced. Well, if there's too much weight, you lose power on the swings. So what is the tip? Comedy! What he does is he takes popular movies and creates unique clips that make people laugh, and then he gets 188,000 views on this particular video in the last five months. And is that allowed? Well, of course, because you're not showing the whole movie. You're showing very short clips, and you're adding your own unique value, music, to make it funny, or skits, or a parody. That is allowed to be done with commercial content. Does that help you to hopefully grow to 36,000 subscribers? Tell me in the comments below. But one tip I have for you daily as Guardian News. Make a channel trailer. Feature those most funny clips that you've done in your videos. Your current channel trailer is just one of your videos. It isn't a channel trailer that tells me what's special about your channel, why I should subscribe, and doesn't show me any clips of your best moments. So try to do that. Here's another great tip by KratosOrianPlays. To help you grow faster, you should do this in your comments on all of your videos. And that is, index the exciting moments with time codes. If you notice, I do that as well. Whenever I launch a video, I write a comment with a time code to index exciting moments in that video. For example, this one. Roll it! 150,000 subscribers. We just crossed 150k subscribers on youtube.com slash freedom. Would you have seen that point in the video if I didn't have this comment? Many of you wouldn't, because it's a long video. It's like 13 minutes. How many of you watch it end to end? Probably very few. And his last comment was talking about reaching the five-card limit. That's exactly what happened at 11.45. Look at that eye up there to visit Elise Talks. Now you notice there is no eye because I ran out of the five limits. So one, two, three, four, five. But look, there is a new one that youtube ads contribute subtitles in CC or English. I did not add this card and clicking it takes me to a section where I can combine, where I can contribute my subtitles. I can type English or whatever language I choose to help add subtitles to this video. How did that get added? That is in the info and settings section of each one of your videos, advanced settings, and then check this box, community contributions allow viewers to contribute subtitles and closed captions. That option right there is what enables that card in your youtube cards. Did you know that? Tell me in the comments below. I have been asking you to send me links to your first videos on youtube, your youtube age, how you were born on youtube, and your best videos to see how much you have grown so we can all learn and grow together. Because that is the spirit of freedom. We help each other grow together as a family. And I want to feature TriGamingHD who sent us his very first video on his first channel followed by one of his newer and better videos on his new channel and he has grown tremendously. Let's see what he's done in his very first video which is right here. Roll it! And that's essentially it. It's a 22nd video published January 29th 2012 a long time ago and let's have a look at his new video that he's improved. Roll it! So he's got an intro now. Apart from another video now today. He uses youtube cards. A little different. We're actually doing a gun game. And he has commentary.  Yep like that. I know I was going to suck. I knew it. He adds comedy. He's got commentary. A lot more exciting and engaging compared to the 22nd video that he started with. Can you see this in yourself? Have you added commentary or a nice intro or certain effects? Like if you looked at the very beginning he had an after effects. Apart for another video. You see how he brought one transition to the other? Those are the kinds of things that help grow your channel faster because they're eye candy. They're the stuff that make you stand out among the crowd. How many other people do that type of transition at the beginning of their videos? Very very few. In fact I've never seen it before. It's unique. So that'll help you grow faster if you take tips like that. Let's have a look at your channel TryGamingHD.  Here is your channel. You have nice branding at the top. It's very clear what your name is. You have a Black Ops 3 giveaway from nine months ago as your channel trailer. That's not good. Create a channel trailer that shows everyone what's unique about your channel and answers the question why should I subscribe to your channel. Let's have a look at your playlist. You're showing popular uploads and that's it. You should really have playlists for all the kinds of games you have on your channel. Organize them into playlists so new people can see what you're all about. Put your best videos into a playlist. Put your Call of Duty videos into a playlist or different kinds of Call of Duty videos so we can all see what you have. Hope this helps. The next before and after that we will feature today is by Cajun Tinkerbell who said, okay, okay, okay, I will do the how old I am, my YouTube age. My very first real video was July 2014. Here is the link. I didn't even show my face. One of my favorite videos I have done is this one. So let's look at the first video. Roll it. Okay. I'm getting the elf. So it's an unboxing video. Let's skip ahead. And it looks like you're unboxing a beauty product. Okay, well it's neutral so I probably will. And it was published July 18, 2014. Have you done unboxing videos? Can you see how we can improve this video? My first suggestion is at the very beginning explain exactly what you're unboxing because it starts with snipping and okay. Today we're going to unbox this beauty product. It's from this company. Let's go. Isn't that a better way to start unboxing videos? So for those of you who are doing unboxing videos, introduce the product right away. Now let's look at your latest video, one of your favorites. Roll it. I got hot sauce in my back swag. So you have a very pretty intro. You start the video with a little bit of comedy to catch the audience's attention. Great. Cajun Tinkerbell. Hey stinkers. I remember to actually say it so I wasn't that drunk the other night. You weren't that drunk the other night. Let's have a look at what this video is about. Fire. As I exhale, my stress and fear dissipates with a smoke, leaving beautiful positive energy, creative energy in its place. This image. So this is another unboxing video and it's a lot better than your first one.  Well done. Keep sending us links down there in the comments below to your first videos and your best videos so I can feature the ones that will help everybody grow together so we can all learn from each other. And I will be making more videos about Play Now as we roll it out. I hope you're excited for this new revenue stream and new way to promote products and get paid when people buy the product after watching your video. And who am I? I am George Sunpai. George Papa George. Many other names that the Freedom Family has given me and I am the CEO and founder of this beautiful wonderful family called Freedom and you've been watching and we will grow together as a family because this is the Freedom Family. You are part of it. We are all part of it and we're all growing together. So grow with us and partner with Freedom. That Play Now button right there on the video bar is all you need to click to get started.


Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Open Belgium. I want to quickly thank our three main sponsors, Mono Design, Microsoft and Agentschap, Binalands, Besture. But now I really want to give the floor to Freya and Lien. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. And welcome for our session. I'll quickly start sharing on my screen. All right, now we should... Yes, now we see my screen for our presentation about Probe. And Probe has a second title, Policies fit for humans and machines. So we can deduce from this that Probe is about policymaking and for policymaking. We first need the policymakers, which you can see here. These are policymakers from Gens, within the middle are a mayor and the president and vice-presidents of our city council. And then, on the other hand, we also have the policies themselves. As you can see here from the last city council, we have some policies themselves. But you can see that they're quite difficult to read. Nevertheless, they are important for everyone who is in Gens, which includes everyone who lives in Gens, who works in Gens, who visits Gens. And to get a more clear example or a more clear view on how these policies are important for the people who are in Gens, we've constructed three fictional examples of people who are interested in the policies to start this presentation. The first person is Sophie. So Sophie is 39 years old, works for a bank. And she also lives in Zwene-Arden, which is a part of the city that you can see here. And Sophie is a happy member of our community and she's interested in information about roadworks that are planned in her neighbourhoods because this influences her commute to work, this influences her daily life. So she wants to know more about roadworks. Then she's also interested in big construction sites in Zwene-Arden if a company wants to construct a new building or if anything will change about the view of Zwene-Arden the way it feels. And then lastly, she's also interested in events that are organised nearby because Sophie also really likes to party. I think you can all relate to that right now. Then our second fictional example is Mo. Mo is 53 years old and works for the city council, the people you saw in the first slide. And to prepare for a council meeting he needs information about previous policy decisions that have been made about certain subjects. He would also like to have information about similar policy decisions and about the history of the subject to be able to properly prepare for the city council meeting. And then lastly, we have Alex, 25 years old, volunteer for an organisation that's concerned about the environment. And Alex is very interested in funding opportunities to be able to start projects that are good for the environment, rules and regulations from the city of Ghent and policy notes and viewpoints from the policy makers. This is where the aldermen, the schepenum state what they want to do and the next coming years where they want to go, what they want to achieve which is very interesting for organisations. Now, if you remember from the first slide the way the calendar is, the way it looks like it's very difficult to get the information out of there for Sophie, Mo and Alex to get this information from the websites. So, this is what Probe wants to change. Yeah, so to tackle these challenges we started our project Probe. Probe stands for Proactive Open Barrett van Bastur proactively opening up the information in local decisions. This is a city of things project so it's funded by Vlaio and city of things programme and smart city applications so that's what we're trying to build here. Yeah, for real. Next slide, yeah. The main goal of Probe is to make the information of local decisions easier to find, easier to search and also easier to access and with that goal in mind we will be creating a new application and this application is both for internal stuff and as for external users. So, as an internal tool there was the use case of Mo. He wanted to prepare for his council meeting so that's a feature that Probe should support but at the same time we are also reaching out to the citizens of Ghent getting them more involved into policymaking and making them more familiar with what has been decided by our local council so Probe is really a project about being more transparent as a local government. The way we want to achieve this is by extracting as much structured information as possible from the decisions and the structured component plays a very important role in our project because the more structured our information is the easier it is for machines to understand it and the easier it becomes also to reuse in different kinds of applications. At the same time we know that lots of interesting information is actually residing into unstructured components. Often the entire context of a decision is published as an attachment to that decision so as a Word document or as a PDF and we also have for instance audio and video fragments of the local council so they are a real challenge because they are unstructured and with Probe we will try to explore how we can gain insights from these unstructured components as well. The two main technologies that we will be using in the project are linked open data and artificial intelligence. This is how the project was structured. It consists of five main pillars. The first one, the ASIS analysis we started a year ago in the middle of the first lockdown. The main goal there was to have a look how does the ASIS architecture look like what are the current applications involved in the publication process of local decisions how does the information flow what linked open data standards do we need to take into account. Then the next two they're really the core of the project. We have on the one hand a user research track which is a kind of major brainstorm that we've had with lots of potential users. We've interviewed many of them in a one-to-one interview and we'll also be sending out a survey. On the other hand we have a more technical work package so we'll be screening the wish list from the users and then we will try to translate this into a more technical roadmap and this roadmap then will be the driver for our implementation process. So these two both the user track and the reference architecture they're being approached in an agile manner so we've done a first round of interviews now we'll start creating a UI wireframe of our application we'll be going back to the users until we are satisfied with the blueprint of our application. Once we've finished the user research and reference architecture there will be a proof of concept by November this year and if that proof of concept is successful then we hope to implement a solution in 2022. Next slide. Okay, let me start by quickly guiding you through our current application landscape so you can see a screenshot here of our web application. The URL is at the bottom of my slide so abesleutforming.gen.be This is an online website it's open to everyone as a citizen you can easily consult what has been decided in the different councils meetings of the city. It also has a calendar view as you can see which meeting is taking place when you select a particular meeting then you can see the entire agenda and there is also a streaming functionality so if you want to hear how our politicians are debating about certain topics in their Lucius Gantt dialect then this is a must. Next. This is more in detail what kind of information is made public so on the left you can see the different types of councils some of the information is already available from 2013 other content has only been published quite recently making information about decisions publicly available can be done at three different levels and there is a Flemish decree that determines exactly what must be made public on our local website so either we publish only the titles or a summary of the decisions of the entire content. For some of the meetings we already publish the proposals even when they are in a draft status but others only get published when they are formally approved and as you can see we also have a quite broad coverage already of live streaming. The content that you see on our website is also published as linked open data it's published in RDFA that means that the contextual information and the semantics is embedded directly into DHTML and this RDFA is also harvested by the Flemish government because our way of publishing the information on our local website fits into a larger program LBLOD Local Decisions as Linked Open Data and that's a program run by the Flemish government and their aim is to build an ecosystem where all information from all local websites in Flemish is harvested LBLOD the program is built on standards and linked open data and the two standards that are used in the exchange of information towards LBLOD there are two standards of the Oslo program so the open standards for linked organizations program and in our case it's the application profile Publicassie Besleut and Mandat and Databunk so they really describe the core model in which decisions and meeting minutes and mandates should be expressed so finally we're talking about linked data so that means that we not only express our semantics in a formal way but we also try to link it up to other databases in the case of Ebesleut forming where possible we reuse the URI of the central database for mandates and also the URI of the Flemish codex yeah okay I'm publishing linked open data in the source application where the information resides so as we do here for Ebesleut forming this is totally in line with our overall linked data strategy that we have in Ghent one of the guiding principles there is that we try to adopt an interoperability first strategy both on the semantic level meaning you try to express the meaning of data preferably by using standard vocabularies but also on the technical level so we use really interoperable formats and both semantic and technical interoperability are two very important conditions if you want to integrate with different data systems so the fact that we publish already linked open data in the source application and not transform the data to linked open data in a process afterwards this adds up to the fact that we really want to encourage a kind of decent centralized approach of managing data so managing the semantics should be done by the data owner and our motto is to collect data only once and to reuse it wherever you can so by making the data interoperable you of course want to stimulate the use of your data you make sure that your data can also easily be reused and an example of this is of course a human friendly interface as we have right now okay so this was rather theoretical I'll try to demonstrate this with an example it's a pretty famous example for the people in the room who are from Ghent where are the sheep and no I'm not talking about the outer piece of Van Eyck but actually about real sheep the kind that is doing some grazing on green meadows they play an important role in Ghent in eco grazing and they're really famous because they have a sheep tracker and you can follow in real time the position of a herd of sheep that is walking around the city and the data are also available as open data on our open data portal by the way but there actually has been some local decision making about the sheep so if you look for sheep on our website you will find some decisions as you can see here yeah so here you see the meeting minutes of the city council it's not really clear but you can see here who was present at the meeting when the decision was published who voted in favor or against etc and you also see the link to the live stream this where are the sheep this has to be translated to a model and this is a more detailed view of the Oslo model I will not explain it into detail but you can see some core concepts here on the slide so which council meeting it is which items were on the agenda who voted in favor who voted against a description of what was decided and what was the motivation behind it for example yes next slide and this is then how the rdfa looks like so you see how the semantics in yellow it's indicated how the semantics is embedded into the html so it's added at the level of attributes so you can really see how the model is published on the html page okay so this was a rather quick introduction of the as is application I think it's now time to hear what our users had to say so the three fictional citizens that we presented at the first part of the presentation are actually based on results we got from our user research it's just the English term I constructed for Hebrew and so in our user research you want to discover what the needs are of the people who are interested in the policy decisions so the first goal of this user research was to determine like what do you need how can probe make the interaction with policy decisions easier how can we make it more straightforward but on the other hand also is there an added value that we can create through probe then a second and a third goal of this user research was first to gain support if you have the stakeholders if they're interested in the project and you have their support it's easier to get the results you actually want and to also construct a pool so once that we've been able to develop certain things and we want to do this in an agile way so we communicate back and forth with the actual users about the products that are developed in probe and this is an overview about the people we've actually interviewed so on the one hand there was a civil servant so the people actually worked for the city's administration that we've interviewed such as the residents of the city council the management support service who are most close with the policies participation communication departments and then more thematic departments and on the other hand we also interviewed some external stakeholders such as the press who is also very close with the policy making process members of the advisory boards some citizens someone who has a café etc and now what have we learned from this we've seen that knowledge about the decision making process is actually quite quite good especially for civil servants they know how a decision making works where they can find stuff however with the external stakeholders there's a lot of variability there are people who are more acquainted than the most civil servants with how the policy making process and then there are people who don't even know that there is a public website for instance and then we've seen that most people use the regular tools such as the epislate forming and also the regulations that are on the website of the city of Ghent but some of them also have some custom software or other websites where they find information then the main results we found like the main conclusions up to now because we haven't quite concluded everything is that a more intuitive search would be a great help that's something we've heard from almost everyone we've interviewed then a link between related policy decisions so when you look for something a certain policy decision you can easily find something that's related that's about the same subject there's also a need for receiving notifications for instance Sophie, if a road work is going to take place in the streets next to where she lives she'll get a notification about this there's also quite some interest in the spatial implications of policy decisions which location do they have an impact and to be able to look for themes such as mobility, environment etc so these are the things that we want to do the results of our research but what are the technical needs for this so I will try to translate this to some more technical components you can show them on the next slide so these are the technical components that we see but this is really work in progress, it's a first draft we've only started this work package in the beginning of the month so the next coming weeks and months will be devoted to exploring this more in detail maybe for the next open belgian session we will have more definitive schemes so this is a first draft of technical components so maybe the first one more structured data next slide so the first thing we'll need to look into is to define the scope of data that we will be using in our pilot probably we will be adding more structured data than the ones that we are obliged to make public on our website according to the Flemish decree content of meetings such as the Q&A and the committee meetings they are also available on our website we are not obliged to make them publicly available so we will evaluate how well they fit into the Oslo model so that will be probably the first thing that we will need to look into also we will need to determine how far back we go in history, will there be a cutoff in time but what is sure is that all of the structured data will be harvested into our knowledge graph and for this project this will be a virtuoso triple store next slide as I said before the challenge of the project will be to include the unstructured content we have for instance audio and video recording as you saw and within that recording component there is also functionality that allows to translate the speech even the dialect to text so this means that these recordings might be a very rich source to add to our architecture and another type of unstructured information are word documents or PDFs of course so you can see an example here so here are my sheep again this is a document on the sheep that are grazing in the grasslands of Bourgoyen-Ossimiersen so if you are able to extract the term Bourgoyen-Ossimiersen we might link it up to a location but we could also link it up to a theme such as ecology or eco-grazing and if all these concepts become interconnected we will allow for a much richer way of query next slide so these kind of things it requires that the information that is presented in a text form can also be processed so we will need to define in the project patterns to really understand the semantics the context of the text for further processing and then natural language processing is typical the area that might solve these kind of challenges so extracting terms from unstructured content trying to determine their meaning and according to some predefined categories classifying information such as time, names, location that is what we will do in the named entity extraction component but we will also be extracting metadata for instance from the PDFs or the words or text from PDFs so these are all done in the knowledge extraction part of the architecture next slide linking to other data sources via URIs might also be an important feature in our future architecture so in our current solution we already use whenever possible the URI of the central database for mandates and for the Flemish codecs but depending on the use cases for instance if we have user stories on extracting location concepts we could easily imagine that we will also try to link up to for instance Crop which is the base registry for addresses or to the generic platform for public domain information which contains information about road construction work so these things are still to be defined but it will be a very interesting feature as well then the project definitely will benefit from a good search engine I think one of the feedback elements in our user research was that the current search on eBus loadforming which is an exact word search was too limited so we will be exploring as well whether we can optimize or searching algorithms use for instance fuzzy search synonym search to help the user to find what he or she is looking for and then the last two components they have to do with the interfaces that we will be building on top of it it's clear that we want to make the data accessible in an open standardized and machine available manner so for our knowledge graph our Sparkle endpoint will be available and we will probably also look at the JSON API to make the data available for other applications and then last but not least we will also be implementing of course a user friendly UI on top of it what exactly will end up with that will be determined in the user research track it could for instance a bot with AI where our bot is capable to answer complex queries so what this will be defined the next coming weeks all right so as you've heard by now I already read the beginning of the project so we started defining what we want but the biggest part of work is to come so this is a high level overview of the timing of the next steps that we will take so in April we will launch the user research and we will communicate results on the website then from April till June we will explore the market together with the Agentschopp-Binlands-Bestuhr because they have similar interests as to extract information from policies and from September on the actual development will start and the project is launched in October 2022 so what can we do now if you are interested in policies from the City of Agentsch you can fill out our survey I will paste the link in the chat in a minute and then for me one of the most important things to mention as well is that we have to do this project we need a team of people who are very capable with very specific expertise the people from the team here from the city side that's from management support office and data and information and from the Stryknel Nehe team web and also it's an amazing team so if there are any questions we are here I see a question from Isabel I think you can start looking at it do you maybe want to can we give the microphone to Isabel I will also try to I can unlock the participants yeah okay cool because I did not entirely get the question Isabel is still there yes but everyone entered in listen mode only so they have to reconnect to the audio if it takes some time okay okay sorry it's typing yes hello I'm back sorry for this welcome back very interesting presentation and I was wondering if you maybe you did not because that's your roadmap at the end but is there any intention to apply that to the COVID measures as you know there's also kind of policies there's been quite a lot and as a citizen if you want to know which measure applies to you as a certain point in time it's almost impossible and so this kind of tool you are you've been describing there would be extremely useful if we could transform all these policies which are in different sizes or measures it is something you can put into a virtual assistant or a bot so that I can query a bot and say no I want to go to the restaurant today in that place can I go to the restaurant? I think it would be a very good application I think concerning restaurants I don't think restaurants are in the policies but I think it would I think it's a goal to make it possible that you know for instance with the face masks that it's easier to know where you have to wear one or what is the policy right now so I think no if you are interested in developing a use case around that in an international organisation called My Data with My Data for Pandemics where we look at how we actually want to use a virtual assistant with machine readable rules to actually support travel go to school, go to work whatever you may dream in the context of pandemics and I think your tool behind would be extremely useful so happy to have further discussions Yes I think that's a good idea it's quite difficult to understand sometimes there's just like waves in the sound of the microphone but yes I think it would be very good to continue that conversation somewhere because it sounds very interesting I'm not quite sure whether we can help it probably for that but maybe we can it will require for instance that we also extract concepts of location for instance you need to wear a face mask in the shopping pedestrian area then we need to be able to locate really what that is it's a very interesting use case I think for our future tool I'll send an email right away thank you any other questions or remarks I'll also paste the link for the survey here yeah intuitive search it's a broad term of course we're all thinking of a google-like search but things we want to explore is like of course synonym search fuzzy search so that takes into account proximity of terms and things like that so these are searching algorithms that we will be exploring into the project if there are no further questions I would suggest to maybe stop the recording and we can leave the session open for a few more minutes if people do come up with more questions we can still answer them but I will already stop the recording okay


To be in with a chance of winning my weekly Destiny 2 beta call giveaway, simply drop a like on the video and leave a comment down below. What is going on guys? Today I am back with another Destiny video and today I bring you this top 5 luckiest kills of the week, but let's get straight into it. In at number 5 we have a clip sent in by EricBR. Now we've seen these many many times, but to me they just don't get old. Wow! Wow! A shot that I gave! Wow man! No, but it was triple collider man! In at number 4 we have a clip sent in by Dylan1995. Now this is crazy. The range on that fusion rifle is just not right. Number 3 we have a clip sent in by MidwaySuperio6. At first this guy thinks his misplace is grenade, then this happens. We have a clip sent in by NoEfforts. His name literally says it all. He took out the whole team with ease. At number 1 we have this quite impressive clip. Now for sure this isn't a triple collider or even a collider headshot, but it's still extremely lucky when you're 4-4 and you're playing against good PvP players. Over time, if you can't kill them, capture the zone. Dig this moment in. You weren't it. But guys, that is the end of this top 5 luckiest kills of the week. If you enjoyed the video, leaving a like is much appreciated on my behalf. Don't forget to submit any baddest clip you've got to the email or just a link to the top of the video to discover a new option. And I will as always guys, see you on that next one.