We have that little stand to move. The big hand to move, actually, right? First item is for the public. Anything that's not currently on the agenda? Pickers. That's good. Next, we have approval of the agenda. If I may request from the board one change that did not make it on the agenda is the ratification of the select board granting the authority to the town treasurer to send tax bills out. The board had passed this via email. The board members come in and sign the letter. So we had signatures and we would just need to have it ratified. Thank you. Can we just add that to the consent calendar? Sure. Ratifying the treasurer's authority to send out tax bills to the consent calendar. The other thing, since we have people here for a variety of things that are scattered all through the agenda, is if we come to an item and we have nobody waiting on it, we might bump it to the bottom of the agenda just to keep the crowd portion moving. So we might put stuff on hold and move to it later. And I'll probably cross a few things out. I can't do one part of that list. No, not really. I've been known to when I scribble all over it, though. Great. A motion to approve the agenda. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstained? Motion carries. Next, we have the consent calendar, which is meeting minutes, warrants, cemetery plot, and ratifying the board's motion to give the treasurer permission to send out tax bills. Return. All right, I move. We approve the consent calendar. Second. Motion and a second. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstained? Motion carries. New business. First up, we have a briefing from EC Fiber. We have five. Just to share some information with the board, this is a part of the ongoing conversation regarding the request to establish a ready district within a neighborhood of the town. For the board's request, we reached out to EC Fiber and invited Carol, the executive director, to come in and speak to the board about EC Fiber's work, some of their priorities, and then also to speak briefly on potential relationship, if any, between EC Fiber and a ready district. Do we have Carol? Perfect. OK. So EC Fiber is the East Central Vermont Telecommunications District. And it's a district of 24 towns at which Randolph is one of those towns. And its mission is to build Fiber to the home internet access to all the premises in those 24 towns, but starting with those areas that are at least served. And so the areas that are densely populated with cable have a choice already today, whereas other areas do not. And so we're building the outskirts before we're building the town areas. And we have been building in the last three years, or two years, 250 miles a year. Our intent is to have 1,400 miles of fiber complete by the end of 2020. And that would include all of the outskirts of Randolph. So the cabled areas we will get to after that, we understand the need to have a competitive situation in those areas. And so that's not, we certainly will cover those. But that's at the end of our initial build. We've built 700 miles thus far. We have another 700 to go. It's been a great process.  And when we were in that process, you know, this kind of spider web effect. That's where we were three years ago. But now we have whole towns built. We're continuing to build whole towns in the most rural areas. And the outskirts of towns, sort of the donut of the town in other areas. So this past year, we announced that we would be building in 2019. We have to always be 18 months in advance in order to get access to the poles. But in 2019, we'll start construction in four towns to complete those towns. But then an additional 80 miles of fiber will be constructed in areas just like these areas, meaning areas in which there is a great need, but not because it can't. It's not the whole town. We left these 80 miles to make sure that we could cover some of these areas that have a great need. But they're in towns that have a cable franchise, but not necessarily in these areas. But in any case, our commitment is to have all of these unserved areas finished with the fiber to the home solution by the end of 2020. And so that's the direction we headed. Our capital build of our finance with revenue financial municipal revenue bonds. We don't ask the towns for any financial help in doing this. We have been able to receive revenue bonds for three years in a row. I think it's right around $30 million thus far. So there's no individual here in this town that is taking a risk. And we all know that once we're complete with these builds and are settled as a district, then the conversations within the district will be about, do we lower rates? Do we provide for those that are more economically struggling so that everyone can have access? So what is it that we're going to do after we complete the builds and we have excess revenue? So that will be the step that we look at. In 2021, we'll be looking seriously at a different business plan for the cabled areas. So just to give you an idea, in the unserved areas, our take rate is generally about 40%, 50%. And it costs us about $30,000 a mile to build. In the cabled areas, it costs us about $40,000 to $45,000 to build a mile, $40,000 to $45,000 to build a mile. And it's about a 17% to 20% take rate. Yes, they're more densely populated, so it's a whole different business plan. But that's our intent is to start looking at that and then we get to that point. So when I look at this district and the purpose of the district, I'm a little concerned that there's a similar reason for wanting to create the district to get this area covered, which we will be covering. And to make sure that you understand the timing of trying to bring something like this together. So when I said it takes at least 18 months, it's because it takes at least nine months to a year to get permission to be on the utility poles. So even when you start the process after you've collected all your poles, after you've done the design and engineering and you've submitted your pole applications, it could be a whole other year before the current utility pole owners allow us to be on the poles, to license us to the utility poles. And then it takes another six months or so to build in a given area in six to nine months. Think about 250 miles. So it's a long process. And by the time you would just start this process, we would be done again. I guess that would be my take on that. Now, sure, there are some things unknown. You and I both don't know what this is kind of. Hopefully, we won't see it in the future. What we learned in the last bond revenue bond market is because of the changes to the economy and some of the taxation, we were actually able to sell our municipal bonds in less than two days because there aren't a lot of municipal bond offerings out there. So we mostly, the entities buying our municipal bonds are insurance companies, financial institutions, those types of long-term investment. So if this ready district wants to come in and be created and it would give them the ability to basically tax themselves or charge a fee to themselves to pay for this infrastructure, what's the downside to us allowing them to do it? That they are spending funds that they don't need to spend. But it's their money, right? It is. And if it were to occur, then that would be an area that would be covered and we wouldn't need to do that. So they're kind of helping you by getting that area up and going quicker so you don't have to then focus on that. You can focus on the other area that needs to be taken. What would have to happen is they would probably go out with an RFP. Others would respond. And there's no guarantee that we would be their choice. And now you have this entity responsible for utility and looking for an operator. Unless they choose to have a Comcast or CCI be that entity. Any other entity would be looking for an operator. So it would either do one or two things. It would either start to be helpful to us because that's not funding that we would normally be using at this time. And if they chose to go a different route, then we would just remove it from the district. And there would be no need to it. They would be served like the cable areas, right? If they don't need rest to be filled. So it doesn't really have a negative impact on you. It allows you to focus your resources somewhere else if they're going to answer there. But you end up in these towns, which the towns are all part of, you end up with a economic development district that's different than the rest of the town, that's different than the rest of the 24 towns that we serve. So it's all together a possibility, but I don't know why individuals would want to raise money and pay for that by way of taxation of some sort when this is a network that would be built without that. If they can go out and get somebody to work with them and install it so quickly, is that an option for you to go out and work with these other entities that can get the lines installed quicker? Unless you're dealing with the entity that owns those poles, then the option or the opportunity to get it done more quickly is slim. Because any other entity, besides those that own the poles, will need to do their survey, do their engineering, submit their applications to be on the utility poles and be at the mercy of the utilities to get that worked on in time. And so that's the reason I explain that because whether they create the district and it's done and they've created it and they've raised funds, you're now looking at the middle of next year by the time I'm just being realistic here. Unless of course they know of somebody now who has that funding available. And then another 18 months from there and you're already at a timeline that we would already have done to work. If that was in your priority queue. Every area that's not a cabled area, densely populated cabled area, we do go through some cabled areas because we have to go through them to reach these other areas is in our queue to be done by the end of 2020. So do you have a map that might show us what you've applied for permits for in a timeline? So they go, okay, this is where we're going next this year. This is where we're going after that and this is where we're going to do that. Do you have something like that? We know that we're down to, so list off the towns that are being built currently but under construction. And you've created some network here so somewhere as it must be mapped out. Right, it's not mapped out. It's mapped out a year, 18 months in advance. A year in advance. But that's something we can take a look at. Right, so in the next year, 2019, the construction will begin in Versa, Sharon, Royalton, Tunbridge, plus 80 miles of network which hasn't been decided but will be before November 15 of network in exactly these areas. So towns that have a cabled center but need access on these outskirts. But this road then, this district must be on that 18 month plan. Yeah, so there are two things about this district that are quite interesting. I have a couple of maps I'm gonna leave with you. One is a map that shows, you'll see, and I'll leave it with you, and it shows blue dots on it. And these are the locations that the state of Vermont has determined are in need of high-speed internet access. And when you look at those areas, you'll see exactly where they want this ready district. The second map, and this is one of the reasons is how we determine where we're going next, is the same area, and the red dots indicate who has expressed interest in EC fiber. I'm gonna say there's a little bit of marker study going on here too, right? So we know who has expressed interest in that area for EC fiber, and the two things that we look at when we determine where to build next is how many individuals in that area has expressed interest, and how much of a need is there. So when I look at the two maps and overlay them with each other, there's certainly a need, and the state of Vermont has identified that as a need, but there's not a vast majority, the yellow dots, by the way, are premises. There's not a vast majority of people expressing interest. And so if there had been, it might have been on our risk server. So how do you determine if there's, so do these people call in to ask this power? No, they go online, they subscribe, they send out postcards in the past, and put ads in the papers, and we did a crowd fiber campaign two years ago. So do they call in, or do they mail something in? No, they can go online and just subscribe. There's no, So if none of these folks have the internet access, they'd have to do it during the day at work or something like that. So then we will enter, we have done that before. Most people have access at work or at the library or someplace else, but it asks questions in which we want them to commit to, and it's not a commitment, like a financial commitment, but it says we understand someone will come to our house to do a survey, we want them to be aware that we'll be doing that, those sorts of questions that they need to answer. At the very end, it says I've answered all these questions on the best of my ability and so on. So that's why we like them to do the subscription. So I'm looking at that area and seeing a great need and not a lot of people expressing interest. Some, but not a lot. So as a proportion of the houses that needed that expression of interest is low compared to other places? Right, so when I looked at where we're going to build, I'm looking at need and expression of interest. And when I say that, it doesn't mean that they won't get built, it just means that those areas that have a greater need and a greater expression of interest get built. So is it fair to say you have 80 miles of cable you haven't decided where it's gonna go yet and if these people suddenly lit up your website, you might see that become a top priority for the 80 miles? Let me tell you a really quick story, and this just happened last week. It is an area in Hartford, believe it or not. It doesn't have cable. We call it the Jericho region, but it's really the area north of 89. And some individual put out on their listserv that we're looking at where we're gonna build these next 80 miles on Thursday of last week, and we have had 30 subscriptions, 33, since Thursday in that region. So yes, that could occur. I've been looking at this region for quite some time. It's not just the Randolph region. It really, it's Bethel and Randolph based on where the utilities come from. And so it's northern, Bethel, and southern Randolph. So that's been on a horizon. It's about 47 miles of fiber. If I include east of 89, it's 57, that's a fiber. But it's not an impossibility, and it can be done in two trunks, but all of it will be done by the end of 2020. Assuming the utilities do their work, even if I give them a year. So sometimes these projects extend, but that's a way of all, let's have them done by 2020, the end of 2020. Gotta be careful. Yeah, yeah, it's a big difference. Yeah. So I, you know, it doesn't matter to us whether you decide that the economic development or the development area, it makes sense here, but I'm just telling you where, I see fiber is having a lot of work there. All right. Any questions? I just have a question that kind of follows on Trini's question about whether I hear Carol saying that by the way, I'm any delegate from Randolph for EC-Fiber, so. Carol and I share a lot of information, but I hear that EC-Fiber would not be hurt by whatever the town decides about this district. But I wonder if you look at the perspective of Randolph as a town, would Randolph's chances of being picked in the next round for an all town buildout be adversely affected if another area is kind of plucked away, the way Comcast has plucked away some areas? We would focus our efforts on those areas that are not served, that are not served or underserved. I think that's a yes. So in the same way that we would put this center of Randolph towards the later end of our builds, we would put that out there as well. So to put that in perspective, is the town might be hurt somewhat in its chances, but on the other hand, the people in that new district would presumably get some service sooner, or at least they think they would, and might get a section of town would get better service than the rest of the town may be hurt. That's how I'm choosing to carry it. If they chose a carrier that already owns the town. How would the rest of the town get hurt? Because the rest of the town wouldn't get service. It's just that one portion of it, the rest of the town would still be shown as not served. Is it a volume of unserved that you have to have to focus? No. What this, I mean, when I look at this area, and I look at the way the utilities speed this area today, some coming out from Bethel, and some coming down from Route 66. So from that intersection, I, you know, it takes out a piece of the town that may indeed serve other areas. I don't know if I can explain that correctly, but your utilities follow a certain pattern, and now if we build to this edge of the district, right? And yet the utilities speed, the same utilities speed on the other side of the district, that creates a challenge. So it's similar to if I'm going to feed a piece of Randolph and have to go through the center of town, and there are some areas I don't have to do that. The situation is a little different in Comcast because I'm one pull away from Comcast and I can't get service, but I'm right down 66, and there's other residents in the same boat there. So, but you don't have a plan to come that way, so. 66 between what and what? Between Randolph Center and say the interstate. So I'm one pull away from Comcast. Can't get Comcast to connect me. So Comcast doesn't go all the way to the interstate? No, Comcast goes right up 66, and they've got one pull over here, and they're serving one residence, and there's two more beyond us. They won't service. I had a conversation when I talked down, when I went to Windsor to chat with you folks when you were talking about communications when the governor was there. And I've heard nothing yet. No one's gotten back to me about it. It said, oh, well, maybe we can help fix that. Well, then nothing's occurred. So, but you folks aren't going down 66, are you? At this moment in time. Right now you're not. No, but for us to serve, you're more familiar with your town in many ways, and you know, I look at it on a map all day long, but for us to serve the area that's sort of north of 66 as it comes into town. Right. And east of Frayn Tree, we'd have to go down 66. And so we will be doing. You'll be going down 66 eventually. Because right now you're going across the interstate bridge north of 66, correct? We're going up much further north. Right, you're. Cross over much further north. You're on the crossover right up above. And that was part of the. That was to pick up those neighborhoods up there. And that actually was, the funding for that is through the broadband business. District, through the state, they built that. We have 48 strands of fiber on it, but they built it. My question. Just one other thing. So I guess what you're saying is by the end of 2020, this area where folks want to create a possible ready district, it's going to be served by EC fiber one way or the other. And so the residents in that area, they're going to have access to fiber through EC fiber, sometimes between now and then, no matter what happens. Provided they haven't contracted with someone else to bring them fiber to their home. Okay, and so if they do, then they could pot, then they would have to wait until you start working on the districts that the areas that were already served by, by some sort of broadband. But they would get it eventually. Yes, great. Thank you. Next up on the agenda, we have the board candidates for the school district. This is a part of an ongoing conversation. The, as a reminder, we've had two members of the OSST board design and a part of the process mandates or at least requires input from the select board. So I've been working with members of the OSST board. We have Paul Putney here today. The needs agreed to answer any questions. We also have, I've seen at least one member or one person who submitted a letter of interest. And then also we had an email message come in today from someone expressing interest in the position as well. But, you know, I'll leave that to Paul to answer questions about their required process. So yeah, I'm Paul Putney and the vice chair of the school board. And potentially we had two people set down in the process in order to, the process in order to fill those is they need to select board for our town because we have three towns. If it was from another town, Brookfield, for example, Brookfield would select it. But in this case, it's Randolph. So we need three candidates need to be well down to two. You make, you say we like these two people to be the candidates to fill the slots. And then our next school board meeting we would appoint those two candidates. As long as there wasn't something that we saw that and said, you know, hey, these two candidates are unfit to serve. But from all we've seen, I was unaware of the fourth person, but the three people that have made the names look like they're fine professionals and would do fine on the school board. We have no reasons to not accept either one of the three. The only one that stands out to us is Ann Kaplan just because she was on the board already for a number of years and knows the process. And we already have two new board members from the last election. And so we'll have two more new ones. It'd be nice to have somebody who was previously on the board to help us with processes and stuff. So we'd have essentially one new board member instead of two brand new board members. But otherwise, there's all three of the candidates. I can answer anything if you do have any questions. So the fourth candidate, how that, does that tell me a little bit about that process? How did you solicit? Well, so the school board put notices out on the Herald and also other sources, much of the value used in other places. But the notices went out. It was a 30-day period to submit interests through email or through regular posts. They received several, I believe three, some three this morning. I noticed an email message that had come in, someone who was expressing an interest in participating in the email message. Elaine Millington had been CC'd. And so I encouraged the candidate to reach out to Elaine so that they can become familiar with the process. At that point, I didn't feel it was my place to say, well, absolutely apply because the school board had set a 30-day period for so many people. So I'm not sure if they've had the opportunity. I know Elaine replied to the email, but I don't know if you've met with the person I spoke with at the time as well. So that's the fourth person. You know, and I don't know how the school board would like to handle that. Or if at this point, it would even be considered because it's beyond the 30-day period during the 30-day notice period. What's your preference with the fourth person? I think I would prefer just to pick one of the three that's already that we're aware of just because. Maybe that's the golden one. What's that? Maybe that's the golden one. I couldn't even go in one, but the three we have seem to be fine. They're professionals, they have won. Using their resumes, I assume they will let they be fine. I don't know what makes a better candidate. Just kidding. Yeah. There's also an election in March. There will be an election in March. So these are appointees until March, and then in March, we'll go through the ballot process like everybody else. Okay. So this is just filling out a tour until March. Yep. Got a couple you want to throw on the table? I'd like to vote like survivor here. I agree with Paul, but Anne Cappen is an obvious choice. Given her experience and desire to serve. But that seems to be... I think she'd be well rounded out with Ashley Lincoln sitting beside her. Was that a motion? Just trying to move the agenda. Yeah, I agree. I would tend to be with you on that. Other thoughts? Is everybody happy with the resumes, or do you want to ask any questions? I see a few of them here. Comfortable. A motion? Is there a question? Yeah, I make a motion for Anne and Ashley Lincoln to serve on the school board. I'm sorry, you said Anne and Ashley. Yep. I'll second. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstained? Thank you, Paul. Thank you for your consideration. Next up, we have the Meekle Street review. Just a reminder to the board, this has been an agenda item that had previously been discussed. The board had reminded staff that the project has not yet been finalized. It has not been a direction that has been set for Meekle Street. The project, although we are currently working with our engineering firm, to investigate some of the problems that may exist, to investigate some of the issues that are ongoing, there is still no direction set for Meekle Street, which is one of the reasons why the board wanted to have this meeting, to invite residents from Meekle Street and then also from neighboring streets that may have some effect due to this project, so that they can share something. But we have received email messages from residents on both Highland Avenue and Meekle Street. In your packets, you will have a compilation of email messages from residents on both roads. Marty, our town engineer, asked me to remind you that in her effort to compile all those email messages, she excluded all the pleasantries, so she wanted me to let you know that it wasn't residents being rude. I'm not saying hello, it's just the nuts and bolts. And then also, these comments are up to date, up to 4 p.m. today, so if any resident sent an email message after 4 p.m. today, we were not able to compile those email messages. I know I didn't receive any after 4 p.m. and Marty left the office at 4, so she may have, but they're not in here. We also would like to share with the board that we have a representative from our engineering firm, Du Bois and King. We have Chuck Goodling at the back. He is here to answer the questions that any board member may have regarding movement of poles or narrowing of roads or any other portion of the project. So the struggle we're in with this one, if I understand correctly, is Maple Street needs to be reconstructed. Can you speak louder please? Yep, right on it. The Maple Street needs to be reconstructed. The right-of-way that we need to reconstruct it with sidewalks, we don't own. And in some cases, there's utility poles in the way that would prevent us from even being able to do it without paying also to move utilities from those and taking property from the residents on that street. So our option is to reconstruct it with no sidewalks if we leave it to a traffic. The other option is to look at changing it, which was suggested during one of the meetings with the Maple Street neighbors, of changing it to one way, whichever direction, which would allow for the road and the sidewalk within that right-of-way. And the challenge is that should that road go to one way, a portion of the traffic, not all of the traffic, would find its way down some of the other streets, which mostly would be Highland Avenue. So I'm sure that there's other reasons for the Highland Avenue folks not to want this to happen, but because their kids wanna play basketball in the road, probably isn't a valid reason. And that's one of the other ones that kept coming through in the emails. We have a pretty hefty rec program and a pretty hefty highway budget that just rebuilt that road. So I gotta say that's probably not a good excuse to not do it. But somewhere there needs to be a compromise because it's an area, Maple Street is an area where a lot of people walk. And right now where they're walking is in the road. And a portion of the sidewalk on Maple Street is horrible. And if I understand the history from the historian on the street, it was put in when he was a child. So we can imagine how old that sidewalk is. That is payback for your comment about my age when I got here. Have we brought both of the neighborhoods together to look at what's there and what the challenges are to see if, and it seems to me there's gonna have to be some give and take between the two if this is gonna work. Right, from my understanding, this is the first time when both neighborhoods, both Maple Street and Highland Avenue have been brought together for this one particular issue. Maple Street has been engaged in the process from the beginning. Our reasoning at this point was to also include some notices to residents on neighboring streets just so that they are aware of what's happening. And this is when we really learned of some of the major issues that they are seeing from their perspective and wanted to share with the board. But to answer your question directly, no, there's not been an actual meeting where residents have been invited just so that they all are in the same room together. We can have our engineer and town staff at the same meeting and potentially work out a compromise or at the very least get everyone to understand what the challenges are. And that's something that we, if the board chooses, can do. And I'd like to see what that means. If we go one way, going away from Gifford versus one way, coming towards Gifford, what's the difference in the traffic flow? Where does the traffic that goes the opposite direction, where does that traffic go? And they've got models that they can run that kind of show how that will disperse. We are currently working with our regional planning team. They have been delayed in being able to perform certain traffic assessments. Stop right there. We are expecting to have one done very soon. And we will have more data to review for traffic on Maple, identify how much of that traffic is commercial, how much of it is just local traffic. That process itself should take roughly about two weeks. And we are hoping to have it done relatively soon. Don't want to put a timeline on it in case there is some delay on the part of our regional planning commission, but the goal is to have that study done very soon. Seems like if that's gonna happen potentially that soon, that'd be nice to schedule a meeting for people who are of concerns from those two streets before we move forward. I agree. I think that you need to study. I think you need to set everybody down and figure out what's needed and go from there. I don't know anything about what the right of way is. I'd love to know what's the situation? Why can't we buy more right of way? Can we buy more right of way? Is that an option? You can always buy more right of way for a highway. It's called eminent domain. I understand that part, yes, I got that. I get that, but that might create some struggles here. So the question is, I'm not sure. I don't have enough facts or information to make any decisions on this until after we do the study. Certainly would like to see all that. I do know that we get down, we can build the business down there. We get a lot of visitors coming in. They're not familiar with the area. They'll miss the Beendle Road coming from exit three. Most of them come from the south side. And I know a lot of them are traveling up to Maple and turning in for them into Beendle. So I don't know if there's some options for different signage or visibility on to being able to get some of those businesses that may reduce some of the traffic overall down through Maple and Highland, whichever way we go. But I don't know if it's Siri or Google or who it is bringing them that way. There's certainly directions in the down Maple right now. We've heard it from several folks coming to visit. We have, I can't share with the board is it, staff recently started looking into the possibility of reconfiguring the Beendle Road 12 south interchange to make it more easy for larger vehicles, larger commercial vehicles to actually be able to make that turn. I have not seen it. The left hand turn? The left hand turn. Yeah, so at some point if we reconfigure that intersection heading to travel in south, depending on what the traffic study says and what the board would like to do, we could add signage that has commercial traffic going straight down 12 and encouraging them to make a more appropriate left hand turn at the Beendle Road interchange. That would essentially prevent them from making a left hand turn on Maple Street or Highland Avenue. Just keep them going straight, turn on Beendle Road. There are some challenges there. We have to work with the state. We have to work with the local property owner. There wouldn't involve some involvement with the local property owner if they're willing to do that. But that is something that we're considering as an alternative or as an additional step to alleviate potential traffic on Maple Street or Highland Avenue. As long as we have an engineer here from Du Boisene King, can he give us an idea of if we do the sidewalk and a two-way street, what it's gonna do as far as infringing on property owners. I think that's the one big thing. If it's gonna come over two or three feet into my lawn, I'm not gonna like that very well. It's gonna be right into my garden and everything. And you get the same problem all the way down through. So I just would like to know how much it would be infringing because I don't think you're never gonna go through the cost of moving those poles, that's for sure. That would be prohibitive. So the biggest challenge right now is in portions of Maple Street, we only own 25 feet. And the road itself is 20 feet. So if it were to be a two-way road, I think it would be 24 feet. You're gonna have the road plus, then you've got the sidewalk, which I believe they were talking one side, not both, but in that right-of-way of 25 feet, in some sections, we lose seven feet of it to the utility poles. So we really only have 18 feet unless we do utility relocation. So it's a lot. It's not just a simple couple feet. I have just a question. Can you just, I'm sorry, I just need to state your name. Jack Cowdery. Jack Cowdery. Hang on, hang on, guy. Yeah? Were you, I'll set up, Jack? You went to, okay. 18 Highland Avenue ran off, and we've been there for 51 years now, and the road's been rebuilt a couple times. The last time through, we lost two or three feet. I don't know exactly how much, but of our front lawn, and including there were some markers down in the ground, but it's the pipe deal that property line markers, they went to. So they came right on to our property in good shape and put in a nice sidewalk. And I don't really know. There's no, been no impact study on traffic study at this time, which seems a little odd to me that we do anything without a study. And the impact on Highland is going to be significant. And I wonder if the board's aware of increased traffic usually drops property values. So I would expect to value all the property on Highland to go down slightly. If all of a sudden you double or triple the traffic. You know, I see no reason why I wouldn't. And there's a lot of information on internet studies from different groups, and they all agree, high traffic decreases value of properties. So that's one thing I don't go for. And the other problem is, why not fix the existing sidewalk? And Main Street Randolph has four driving poles between the sidewalk and the road. They're basically in a road. Why wouldn't that be an option for going down Maple? Same as you've got on Main Street. There's five or six of them that are actually in the road. So I don't see a problem with the sidewalk on the other side of it. That's an issue. So I think they would impact Highland in a negative manner as well as South Street to make that one way. I would prefer to go, you know, the existing sidewalk prepared and keep it two ways. Thank you. So right now what we need to do is pull the engineer in to look at the options, get the traffic study, and then take that data. My opinion, meet with both or anybody up there that wants to sit down, in other words, a public meeting or just the engineer in the town. Sure. Staff to do it and see these are what all the options are and these are the impacts. Okay. All that I will do is follow up with our Regional Planning Commission to ensure that they give me at the very least a timeframe for when the study will be completed. Schedule a meeting that includes all local residents, give them enough time to attend, give them enough warning of the time, and then speak to them about it and then bring the results of that meeting to the Select Board for future decisions. Okay. We're not, so we're gonna hold off on anything about what it'll do to us and whatnot. If you have a question about the process that we're talking about, we'll take that. My question is, Du Bois and King was hired, but have they done any planning as to what they perceive should happen? I mean, aside from the one leg, have they looked at the street you have, they come up with what they think should happen? You have a design? I think that's the question. Any kind of a design? We have designs available. We do have different scenarios depending on the movement of the utility poles, whether we take property, permanent domain, whether we don't. So there are different scenarios that we've discussed. There are designs that have been printed, but again, nothing has been finalized because the Select Board needs to hear from the community, understand what the challenges are, the traffic study before we make it final, before the Select Board makes a final decision. So yes, there are designs and there are issues with any number of them and the chair has mentioned some of the constraints of why a one way is being proposed, but yes, there are designs. Right, and I get that, but I mean, if we don't know what the designs are that are proposed, maybe it's something we're happy with. Well, we're asking them to take them, figure out these other designs, then get the traffic impacts from those designs to go with it and then come out and meet with you folks. So you see what all the options are and if we go with option A, this is where the traffic will move to. If we go with option B, this is, or if we just keep it the same and we have it two lanes, traffic's gonna stay where it is, but this means we gotta take X number of feet of land down through here, we gotta move these utility poles and the steps that means. Okay, so in the taking of land, is it an option to take an equal amount from each side in order to do a proposal? Does it all have to be one-sided or can it be equally split? So if you need four feet, can you take it two feet from each side? In some of these places, we're talking more like 10 and 12 feet. So it's not just a couple feet. So yes, you can look at both sides. You can, but you need everybody to cooperate to take it from both sides, right? So I can't have the first half of the road equally going and then the next one says, no, I'm not doing it. The road can't jot over and back, so we would need everybody to. I get that, but whatever design is approved by the residents, would it be equal? It could be equal. It could be all one side. It could go either way. And we can show it both ways, what it would mean. In some of them, I think it takes it right up almost to the porch of them to get the area. I think the road study is up a lot. Yeah, I think the study. We have a lot of traffic. Traffic study, I think is important. Traffic trailer starts at six o'clock in the morning, go until nine o'clock at night. Yep. Can you state your name please? I'm sorry, Sharon Lewis. Okay, any more questions on the process? So what? Oops, hang on. It was, Can you state your name so that we can get it? Yes, of course. James Owens, 35 Maple Street. Was my understanding from Marty's email announcing this meeting to us that decisions were gonna be made this evening? Is it now safe to assume that that's not the case? That's not the case at this point. Okay, and so there will, once the results of the traffic study are available, then we will have the opportunity to meet with the town along with people who live on Highland and the other neighboring streets and then can work with some actual facts about where or at least some good projections on where traffic is going to go and what the actual consequences are of the various design decisions so that people can say, okay, 10 or 12 feet of property that needs to be taken or X number of dollars that needs to be spent on utility pole relocation versus one way or two way, we'll have all of those facts available and we'll have some input in a meeting format, maybe not just emails before, and that will be part of the data that you use to make this decision. Am I understanding that correct? I would hope that that type of meeting would take place before it comes to us to make this decision. I'm sorry, say again. I would hope that meeting where all the stuff's there and everybody gets to comment and talk about it would happen before it will come back to us. For the record, that would also be my hope that you would have that information available. Would you like a consensus from the neighborhood so we'd know what direction to go here? That's how we're gonna get there is by having all the information and then maybe three or two or three or four options. And I think, I mean the gentleman who lives on Highland, I fully appreciate his concerns. I share many of those concerns but from the Maple Street side. And I think he and I and Bill and others, I think can come to a much better appreciation of what the stakes are once the data is more generally available. And some plants maybe. Oh yeah, and that as well. Can't leave the engineers. You gotta have them. You have to state your names. I'm Barbara Waldo. And I guess my question is why are we considering changing the street to one way instead of just fixing it's been two way forever? Why are we involving other streets? We don't own enough right away. What? We don't own enough right away to change it to reconstruct it even the way it is right now and meet today's standards. We don't own enough right away. Well I've done some research on the internet about one way streets and they don't sound that attractive to me because it says for one thing it makes it a through street and not a getting some play street but getting right through it. So traffic's gonna be going faster. They're not gonna be paying that much attention because they're going through, they're not going to it. And we have nothing on our street that needs deliveries from trucks. Nothing. We're in a residential section. We don't have the house fill on our street. We don't have anything that just needs deliveries. So to have trucks come down our street I don't know why, why would they? Fuel trucks. They don't have business there. We're talking about commercial trucks. We're talking about commercial deliveries. Well we'll get the data. Not the field trucks and not the mail truck and not the regular trucks. We're talking about all this extra huge trucks going through 18 wheelers, all this. From morning to night. Yeah. So honestly a question is why we're even, why we're considering throwing it over onto Highland when Highland just got fixed and has a new sidewalk, has a beautiful road. It's done why upset that road to do the other road. So we'll get the data. We'll get the traffic study. We'll get the options. We'll get another meeting set for you guys, the engineer and the town staff. And then we'll do it. We're talking about what one-way streets do to areas and how much it's changed that their people are not going there. Okay. Any more questions about the process? Anybody else? Nope, good. All good? Next up. Water and wastewater. Oh, well that emptied the room. Oh, that's a good looking group. So I'm pretty sure we can get them all together for like 18 or not. Do we have anybody here on the water and wastewater? Yeah, good. An abatement by, this is an abatement from Gifford and Wind River Allocation. We have a couple from Gifford here. We also have a water, a water and wastewater superintendent here. I guess we're landscaping that one. But I wouldn't like to point out, I made it to the board that there has been, well, in our most recent research with the most recent legislative calendar for the state, we have found that the state altered its, in some ways, altered its rules for abatement of taxes. It used to just be included an item in your packets here, which is this item. This is an official legislative session of this year. The change that happened was that the Board of Abatements previously mostly only allowed to consider or the practice was to consider abatement of taxes. In this most recent legislative session, we learned that the state law itself, 24 VSA chapter 51, subsection 1533, was altered to include property taxes and water and sewer charges. So what used to be the practice in town of having the Water Waste Water Committee reviewer question then sent it to the Select Board for consideration was changed by the state. So now these types of requests must be, well, at the very least, according to the list language, reviewed by also the Board of Abatement, which includes the Board of Civil Authority, the Listers, the Justices of the Peace, the Town Clerk, and Town Treasurer. So we can't act on this. No. No. Okay. Doug, I understand that you're here for this. It was something that recently. That's news to me. It's all news to me. We just received the revised bill. Must have been last Thursday from the town for the value that we discussed with the Water Waste Water Sewer Committee. And this is total news to me. Yeah. This is new because we just learned of it in our research in the process. But just as a reminder, the Board of Civil Authority, I'm sorry, the Board of Abatement also includes the Board of Civil Authority, which is made up of the Board of Selection. So. The Board of Selection, the 12 Justices of the Peace, and the Town Clerk is the Board of Civil Authority. The Board of Abatement is the Select Board, the Board of Listers, the 12 Justices of the Peace, and the Treasure. And you have to have a form of the Board in order to transit exact business. So it has to be a minimum of 11 people in order to do business. And they have to meet the criteria as laid out in 1535, 24, 1535. And it was gonna be a tough hurdle. Darn that state of the month. Hey, I only found out about that at a conference I went to, I was like, oh, I didn't hear about this. Why didn't I hear about this? So what's the true definition of that abatement? So we requested originally to abate the overall eight year bill. We discussed terms with the committee, the Waste Water Water Committee, to alter that to a three year and decrease it through a percentage based on how much Piper does do for the community. And we looked at the issue at hand and said that this isn't the sole responsibility of the Gifford team. And since it's not a true net zero abatement and it's a value, is that still the process that this needs to go through? At this point, there's a set of criteria that the Board of Abatement has to follow with any requests for abatement. Tonight. It's basically an adoption in the original request, right? What's the amount that the request is to drop the invoice by how much? Well, depending on the, if we take, well, there have been many price changes or rate changes from when this issue first began or when we have pinpointed the general timeframe and when it began to now. So the range of total cost for water services and wastewater ranges anywhere from roughly $16,000 to $89,000. So we would have to figure out exactly what fees commenced when and try to alter the total cost of the amount of. So can, if not to go the, try to circumvent the Board of Abatement, but I'm going to. And the Board of, because the select Board is also the water sewer board, correct? So if we put that hat on, can we accept in it, they listed quite a hefty amount of stuff they'd done, including installing sidewalks and whatnot, can we accept that as payment towards that invoice? Because that's not abatement because we're not writing it off. We're agreeing to accept a certain value for the work that they've completed to be credited towards their water wastewater. I'm not opposed to doing it only because the Water Wastewater Committee has already agreed to drop the invoice to 12,000. Yeah. And if we look at the list of the efforts they've done. It's a fair amount of money. I would have to check with the town's attorney to see if we could accept payment in compensation other than finances. It could be in work performed. I don't know if there would be precedence for that if there isn't. I'm pretty sure that we would be able to do it. But I would have to, I suppose at this point, if the Board were inclined to take that position, certainly decide to make a motion and pass it and then I could bet it could be dependent on the advice of council. I'd just like to say I was on that discussion in the sewer wastewater committee about this. And it was a very difficult process that we went through because there's no policy that pertains to this eventuality. And so we really trying to make it up on the fly as we're going along. I left that meeting feeling like we did not do a very good job with that. And I think that this deserves further consideration by the people who are looking into all the pros and cons and looking at what the law is and all this stuff. I'd rather see us really take a fresh look at it. So knowing the way the abatement process works, they're not going to make it. So that decision is one that says they ought to pay the full bill and have no consideration for what took place. Because they won't make the criteria for an abatement. Yeah, if I may share more with the board, the language in the recently updated subsection does specifically speak to abatements of amounts that have been generated. And in this case, there is a question of whether the outstanding amount between 69 to 89,000 has been billed or we just specifically have bills for the 12,000 that had been discussed during the Waterway Department. So we've only issued an invoice for the 12,000. I believe, Christian. I think there's an issue of invoice that you have brought to talk about. I think it's a proposal that you guys recalculated based on the values for the last 12 quarters. It came out through 11,000 and change. I do want to say in the process that they used, we are giving people pretty good method to steal water from us. That was one of the things that I, it was an afterthought after the meeting and it was like, we're setting ourselves up for a problem. It was one of the things that I came up with out of that, not saying that we can't do something too, after the fact I deal to avoid future issues with it, but just one of the realizations was to only go back three years and take 50% as the bill would set us up to steal water because all you'd have to do is go put it in your own meter and if we go three, four years and we don't catch it until that point, now you've just, you've paid for that meter and you've got to wait with a bunch. But that's one thing that I kind of left that. That was not our intention. I hope we prove that to the committee that that's not your intention. No, that's not, yeah, I'm talking about in general, we're giving people an option. Katrina, are you saying, I was in the impression earlier that you were saying it wouldn't make it through the abatement that it was because of the corner, but you're saying that it actually doesn't meet. Doesn't meet any of their criteria. And we're going to get any of their criteria.  They have to have moved from the state. So we're not going to get either of those. It's a person unable to pay their taxes or charges. They don't meet that one. An error by the listeners, which it's not. And on real property, real or personal property lost or destroyed during the tax year. And persons otherwise eligible for exemption due to sickness, disability, or other good cause as determined by the Board of Abatement. Or a mobile home that's been moved to another town. See one of them making it in on it. So either we define that we haven't invoiced it yet. So it's not anything that we can abate anyway. So the invoice is the 12,000 for. I think you look into that.  Cause if you say, go to the Board of Abatement, you're saying you're going to, you got to pay the full amount. Cause the Board of Abatement is not going to be able to do anything. I think it lands in our lap. That extra, that extra 250 bucks a year you get to make decisions like this. Exactly. 125 is just the water. Is that what it is? It's just water. Yeah, you get 125 bucks a year to get the water from the shore. God, I'm doing, I'm really breaking it in here. Early retirement. Almost. Put that on my social security check here. All right. It's a tough one. She didn't invoice it yet. So. Sorry, I turned out to be a dog. Dog full. Thank you. Hmm. This is really cool. I know it was an issue yet. For both of them, on behalf of the water committee has been sent, but that's not an important place. So, and then there's the question of, there is a question of, even if we expected different to pay the full amount, what is that full amount is not clear because the water rates and sewer rates changed during a period of time. Coming out of that committee, what's that? When you came out of that committee meeting, was it consensus, but 12,000 was the amount? It was consensus. Whether you feel good about it or not. Yeah, and no, it was consensus, but yeah, after we left the meeting, I really had a lot of second thoughts about it. It was one of the hardest meetings I've ever been in. Trying to figure out what the right thing to do is because we had so little guideys from any kind of policy. We'll send you guys a bill for $89,000. You send us a bill for $83,000 and we'll call it close enough. No, 12,000 difference. Well, yeah, but they're gonna come out ahead, right? We're gonna pay for the sidewalks. 12,000, no, $69,000, $99,000. That's for that solution. So, I'm just throwing it out there. The thinking of the committee at the time, we were thinking, well, if we were gonna make policy, because now it seems like we really do have to create a policy that covers something like this so that we don't have to go through this again. We thought, okay, well, if we were making policy, what would we do? Like, how would we make, what would be the policy? And so we took it upon ourselves to kind of do that thought experiment, but in a very condensed period of time, and I don't think we really did it justice. But the thinking that we did come up with was, well, if someone came to us with a bill, would we expect somebody to pay a bill that went back?  If someone has a bill from 1902, we would never expect them to pay that today. There's no statute of limitations here somewhere. If someone has a bill from two years ago, yeah, sure, you pay that, but somewhere in between there, there's a line that you draw that's kind of arbitrary. And in our thinking, in that one moment we said, well, three years, seems like a reasonable period of time to go back. And then if you go back three years, what portion of the bill do you expect to get back? Do you get back the whole thing? Do you get back more? And again, in that moment, considering the sort of the dynamics of that particular conversation, we decided about the half of it would be reasonable. And then we asked, and then we decided that it would make sense for there to be other mitigating circumstances, which we gave Gifford credit for some of the improvements which they've done in over the years, and we decided that we would divide it in half again for that. Again, at the end of that process, I didn't feel like we had really given it its due, that we didn't consider it as closely or as thoroughly as we really ought to have. So it felt pressure to kind of get it done. People needed to leave the meeting, and we felt like they needed to make a decision. If I were to do it over again, I would have said that now, even though people need to leave, we really should be not rushing this decision. And there's not, I don't think there was any reason why we actually had to make this decision on that particular day. We could have made it, because it's not another meeting and continue the conversation. I think that would have been a much better course of action. Have you heard from any of the other committee members? No, I haven't discussed it with them since then. So they may be happy with the decision. They may be. Joey, since you learned about this change in the rule, have you been given any- I was out of Clarkson Treasure Conference. But since you learned that, have you been given any insight as to why they put this under the Board of Availments? Because we can sell a property for delinquent water sewer charges at taxing. So the legislature changed the law that if you're going to be able to sell property for delinquent water sewer charges, then it should follow the same policy and procedure that is set up for property taxes. So they changed it so that the language becomes inclusive for property taxes and water sewer charges. And has a conflict of, or not a conflict of interest, but has a conflict been identified between us being the sewer and water commissioners versus them being the Board of Availment? Because I see a lot of Vermont rules that are changing lately that don't give consideration to all the impacts. I don't think the legislature looked at that. Not all towns, the water sewer commissioners are the same people. Most, well, a lot of towns it is, but there are some other places where they are not the same people. So I don't believe that they took that into account. Like I said, I only found out after the fact, and I was like, oh. So it's all new to me as to how it applies to water sewer charges. But if you're using the same criteria that you use for taxes, it's very narrow. You know, the language is very specific and the Board has very little leeway in making a decision. And even when they make a decision, they are never required to make, to approve an abatement. Somebody may meet the criteria, but the Board has discussion to not abate. You know, just because they meet the criteria doesn't mean that the abatement will go forward. The Board has the discussion to approve it or disapprove it. So does the rest of this rule have a process for exemptions or appeals? Because one of the things with moving the water and sewer to it, I would want to appeal based on failure of equipment. Why isn't that in there? And that's not for you to answer. I'm just throwing it out there. That he could appeal based on the water meter didn't work at Redron. Well, we haven't read it in eight years, we don't know. With abatement, I don't know that it follows the same process as it does with tax assessment fields. With tax assessment fields, taxpayers have the right to appeal to Superior Court or to the state appraiser to appeal the decision of the Board of Civil Authority. In the case of a Board of Abatement, I'm not sure if it follows the same rules. That's something that you'd have to find out about. If it did, I mean, I would suspect it would probably be that they would have to take some period of court because the state appraiser has nothing to do with the Board of Civil Authority. And to appeal to Superior Court it's like a $495 fee to file an appeal. Believe there is an exemption for a misread. So if there is a misread of the meter itself, I don't believe that would necessarily fall under this requirement. And that comes to mind because I did have a conversation with staff regarding whether a non-read for whatever reason, whether there's miscommunication between whether it was a primary meter or not meter, constitutes a misread. From my interpretation, a non-read doesn't constitute a misread, but staff felt that it could be a misread. So there are exemptions for misreads of meters and that falls under a different process than the Board of Abatement, that the challenge here is. But they're not asking for an abatement, right? The question before us isn't an abatement, it's whether they should be billed for the usage registered on the meter and if so, how much and on what schedule. So we're really not, abatement doesn't come into this unless we decide, what they're asking us to decide is how much should they pay? And what we're being told is that the Water Wastewater Committee met on that and set 12,000 rushed, not feeling good about it afterwards, I get, but the ball's in our court to say this is how much they should be billed for this incident. And then if they don't like it, then Gifford can abate it, at which point then it goes to the Board of Abatement, which, you heard the criteria, it's. That wasn't my impression when we were. Rosie. My impression was that the Water Wastewater Committee was doing an abatement, that we weren't figuring out what the bill ought to be. They don't have the authority to do an abatement. They can't do an abatement. Can, just to make a recommendation for. Yeah. For an amount, just for how much charge. How much charge, the way I'm understanding and is treating it correct and that at this point the discussion of the abatement is a step beyond where we are now. And that because we have not issued an invoice, because the town has yet to tell Gifford, this is how much you have to pay for us, or pay us for the usage, there is no invoice, there is no abatement request. It's the question that is before the slide for now is, the amount that is to be billed, whether that falls anywhere from the total amount to the amount that was recommended by the Water Wastewater Committee, which is 11,600 in charge. So what we know about this, if you look at the facts, is that the average household spends about $3,000 a year on their water wastewater. And we've got about eight years of this backed up. But the usage on the meter is totaling between 69 and 85,000. Not sure how we didn't get closer to that, but. It's because the wastewater rates change during the time interval in question. And we don't know what the, how, what the. Uses watch during those periods, right? Yeah, we don't know what the flows were during these periods. We have no idea what the usage was during the periods. We just know the total usage. But we know that if it was a home, and if we said this was a residence for eight years, $3,000 is 24 grand. Not sure why it's relevant for this home. It's just the comparables that she's got. How do you know it was $3,000 when the rates changes over those years too? It would be a range of $2,000 to $6,000. Sure. Because of the rate of water and wastewater change. I'm struggling with if the average home paid $3,000 a year, how did you get to 12,000? If you said for eight years, you had use as a hospital, we believe it came between 70 and 90,000. The average house, if you said the residence next door, paid $3,000 a year for those eight years, I would think the minimum that we would invoice them would be the 24,000, which would be the residential usage because we know they were above that. Oh, well, we know that they used at least 70, 69 something amount of water and wastewater. We know that's the floor because we know how much they used altogether based upon that meter reading. And we know that at the beginning of that period, what the rates were. So if we use just the beginning, the rates that were set at the beginning of the period. That brings it to the 69. Yes, exactly. That's a good opinion. Good reduction. Is the committee working on a new section for their rules? And what to do next, Ken? So we calculate this the next time. We sure need to. We need to be much nicer to have a policy for this and not be making it a mess on the floor. So do we kind of take this the other way so this doesn't happen again? Do we have an inventory of all our water meters out there? And I'm gonna assume no because this is the second time in three years that we found a new one for Gifford. Right? So I imagine it's happening somewhere else. So do we have a way to check what we're metering and what we're putting out of our reservoirs? Wouldn't that be the easiest thing? All of a sudden find 89,000 gallons a year or something? Would it be nice to put in a lot of leaks? Well, yeah, I know, I get that on the leaks, but. Our meter reading system is too primitive. It boils down to. To go around, you literally have to read the entire town every day. Probably, we're gonna go for probably at least a week so you get some numbers to compare and then you'd have to do a week of pumping. You couldn't read the entire town in a day. It's just not possible. It takes us two days for two of the routes to read it. And then we're dividing the three routes. Our meter reading system is just not capable of it. I like it. We have the best inventory we can on meters. This meter was purchased in October of 2010 by Gifford. I tracked it back to Census. Census showed it when it was build-aid and it was billed to E.J. Prescott and it was delivered to E.J. Prescott on October 14th of 2010. And then E.J. Prescott billed it to Gifford on October 15th of 2020. So that's the only fact of where that is. The only other fact is is that Joe Losey was one in charge and he did know our process, which so I'm kind of shocked that he didn't do all the paperwork. He should have, you know, the guy that was a formal water wastewater superintendent should know what the process was. I'm not looking for instantaneous comparisons, but if we took numbers over a year, we could get within 5% over two years. We should be able to get to 2% or 3%. And the more you take the average numbers, the more we can compare it to be able to say whether over the last two or three years that we're missing a significant amount of revenue. We have been welcome. Welcome. Sorry. No, no, go ahead. Marty did do that in comparison to, I don't know if she gave you guys that chart or not, but she did a comparison. There was three meters there of price. And when they added this one in, it was for their surgical wing, correct? To what amount? To for sterilization water. Instead of sending it through the softener system, not up there, they added that in to go up there. So then now there was four meters. There was a drop of about 180 some odd units between those three meters when this one came on. So it kind of falls more on this meter average is out to be about 202 a quarter based on assuming it was installed as soon as they got it and starting with, I believe the December 2010 war. And it was installed, that's the two active meters right on that wall, that photo was attached. Did they go read the other two meters? Yes. And this one's right beside it and they didn't read this one? There is one item that I did point out during the Water Waste Water Committee is the potential crossing of language or word usage in that, in that same meeting, we had a different representative who said, this was a primary secondary meter. And I said, listen, that could have been the cause of a problem or that could be cause of this problem continuing in that we continue to use the word secondary when describing a meter because in our wastewater water committee or in the wastewater water world that could mean secondary, I don't have to read it. But then the argument is, well, I said primary secondary. And so that's still continuing now and it's something I pointed out during the meeting and I said, let's drop the secondary all together. This is a meter we have to read. So it could have been a continuation of that problem from then to now. And that went down, water reader, meter readers were to show up. Someone said, this is a primary secondary meter. Our staff heard secondary and left it alone. But we don't know. How many water mains are going in to Gifford? Two. Sounds to me like there's enough to go around on this one. If we've got a committee that rust or not rust, but we came up to 12,000 and we've got a hefty amount of improvements that Gifford's made that really sidewalks the amount of responsibility. So I actually had a question on that, that the two and a half or three and a half pages of contributions slash outreach, I guess Doug or Ash, I'm not sure who can answer this, but hours volunteered are awesome, no, you're wrong, but to me, everybody has this, the community should be volunteering hours to the community, right? So put a price on those or not, I don't know. But what I'm having trouble understanding is like, is there a difference between contributions and outreach? And the reason I ask is, contributions, you guys can go on and do these prevention conference leads for, is that a reimbursement from the federal government or some grants that you guys are getting to do those, right? One, and if they are, then that's a net zero to me, right? Because it's good that people are doing time, but you guys are getting reimbursed for it, so it's not really a contribution. The sidewalks and that stuff, that all makes sense to me. And again, the outreach, the 10 time for the farmers market and the concert series are all awesome things, which I think should count. But I'm having a hard time to really put a true value to this and separating labor from materials and what is reimbursed to the hospital as grandmoney versus out of the goodness of Gifford's community outreach. So I don't know where that line is. Yeah, and the other issues here are also that, all these things are things that Gifford did, what they would have done anyway. And if they had been billed properly during this time, they would have paid those bills without question. And we're asking now is just the wastewater district to absorb these costs. And the benefits that are spoken of here are benefits to the entire town or perhaps even the whole region. And we're asking the wastewater district themselves to foot that whole cost. Some of those, you're right, but the sidewalks and paving Maple Street and doing the survey of where the utilities are located, those are town responsibilities. Sure. So those I think are hard numbers that we can work with. I agree with all the other stuff is. Right, we're still asking just a portion of the town to then absorb that cost, not the whole town. Well, could you say it's kind of a long way to talk about it? Yeah, I get you. So what was the recommendation, 12,000? Yeah. 11,000. 11,000, almost 12,000. So whenever that number is, I'm gonna make the motion that we use that number and that's what we will build them for. I don't personally, I don't have a good feeling what that number should be. I mean, I don't know if I have enough information to be able to. Well, I'm gonna put my trust. The 169,000 did this. And they came back with it. 19,000 down to 11,900 seems like a huge delta to me. And I don't understand why. Because it was halves to halves to halves. If I can add another really potential advice to the select board is, there is also the option if the board does not like the recommendation of the Water Waste Water Committee if there are some feelings about the process. It can send this back to the Water Waste Water Committee and have them take a look at it again, come back with some more hard numbers, have more detailed focused conversation that I could ask our Highway Department to put hard facts numbers on sidewalks, streets, that type of information. And then have another recommendation brought to the select board again. There's no reason why the select board would have to accept that recommendation now. If they're only to send it back and see what they've got with these specific questions that need to be answered. Yeah, because I mean, $69,000 and you mean just subtract this sidewalk off, $83,000, I could be bringing it to zero right there if we consider that as a reduction. That's what I said earlier. I know, but there's no math behind it. Well, there's no math. I understand there's no math and I understand that somebody's gonna carry the load but I think like Trini said, there's enough blame to go around here. So my suggestion is just take the 12 grand, that was the board, whatever it was and just move it forward. And we can wipe this off our plate and be done with it. Yeah, I'm not. So the Water Waste Water Committee decided in these situations to only consider charges for the past three years and only bill 50% of that amount. In this case, they also recommended reducing the amount by an additional 25% for their overall contributions to the community. Bottom line recommending billing of 11,687.13. So if they've decided to go back three years, bill 50% of that amount and then take a reduction from what type of guidance do we wanna give them? What do we not like? It sounds like a dark board to me. I'm sorry, it just came back. It's probably darks again. Yeah, I mean, again. Yeah. But I don't know, you were there. I mean, I would be comfortable having the committee review it again. It's not a rush, right? No, they're not going anywhere. And Howard Gifford feel of the invoicing for the 12,000. Yeah, that's all. But it's a substantial chunk of money for the waste water. You would feel comfortable with that amount? I mean, it seems like it'd be worth giving it a good due process since we are not really in a time margin. I asked him if Gifford would feel comfortable having invoiced for the approximate 12,000. It's clear in their comments in here that they feel the town's got some skin in it. I think we do.  Where you're misled or you're misunderstood? I'm sorry, Chris, I didn't have the history on it. You're saying Joe was a part of Gifford when that was installed in 1940? Okay. Oh, he was? Yes, Joe Glossy had left. He left the town and ran off. Water Waste Park superintendent went to Gifford. He was in Patrick's position when he was the facilities manager. And also, if I did give this impression, I would like to apologize, but I didn't mean to give the impression that Gifford had done anything to attempt to mislead the town. No, I don't say that. I just wanted to make sure that I stress that it could have been a language usage that at Gifford maintenance meant primary, secondary, you should read it. And in Randolph, water or wastewater meant you didn't have to read it. So, if I did give the impression that Gifford was trying to mislead the town and the wastewater department, I apologize, that's not my intention. I didn't get that impression. No, I'm fine, that's not the case. What do you want to do? Well, I don't think there's an easy way to calculate it any way you should look at it whether you go over an average. And the only way you can accurately throw a number at it is to build the entire amount and I'm not sure that's fair either. So, if Barry was to make his motion again, I would probably second it. Oh, I'll make it. So, my motion is moved. I just think that over the years we've done a really poor job with things like this and we need to figure out a way to reduce the possibility of it happening again. Because this is the second time with them for a significant amount of money again, which was our fault again. I don't agree that it was our fault again, though. If their employee didn't do the proper paperwork for the staff, then maybe somewhere, right, fault, but not, certainly not all. Is your motion still live? My motion's live. I'll second it. The motion and a second to invoice for the 11,000 and change or 12,000. What was the motion for? The 11, whatever's on the sheet. 11,000 and change, 87, 13. Yeah. Give me a second for that amount. One motion and a second. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed? Nay. Stage. Motion carries three, two. Next up we have Wind River Wastewater Allocation Request. This is, the request that has come in to the panel that was also considered by the Water Wastewater Committee and is sparing from a previous decision that the Select Board had made to make it more, make the town more business friendly to alleviate some of the water, wastewater connection fees. Once the Select Board had taken action to alter some of the impact fee language that previously existed who were approached by Wind River Environmental in an effort to try to purchase additional allocation in wastewater, because that's the industry that they are in. And so the Water Wastewater Committee reviewed the request and made several recommendations. I'm not sure if Larry, if you'd like to speak a little bit more about the feeling of it. This was much easier. It was, this felt like a very straightforward request. Given the nature of their business, it seemed like it just really made sense to work with them to come up with this, to come up with this agreement that we did. So I, there was really no contention about it. Everybody was very comfortable with it. And I feel strongly that we should take the advice of the Wastewater Committee in this instance. Some of the just to clarify the specific requests would be to grant an additional wastewater allocation up to 13,999 gallons per day. And that amount is by design. Company and our Water Department has learned that anything above that amount would trigger a federal requirement. So the maximum that they're interested in is in the 13999. But we do have current language in our ordinances that if there's a specific amount of time that is given to a company to pay off their total allocation fee, if they don't meet that timeframe, then the company loses the total amount that they have paid toward that amount. So Wind River's hoping that one of the requests is to grant them a variance to the existing language that says if they paid 99% of what they were supposed to pay within a five year period, but can't pay the rest of it, the remaining 0.01% until five years in a day that they don't lose the 99% of the amount of money that they've already paid toward it. They'd like to have that amount just contribute towards the allocation that they requested. And get the allocation on a prorated basis. Exactly. Could we meter their outflow? Oh, that's a good question. Is that how we would know? No, we only, well actually per day, right? We knew we were gonna ask the same question. We do, we meter them. They actually have a special wastewater meter that we go over and we check it quarterly to make sure that our reads and their reads match up. They actually report to us daily. Or well, I guess they would send a report weekly. Weekly. They measure daily. So yes, we are fully aware of how much they discharge to us. I was just thinking about billing nightmare. It would be if we didn't somehow have a way to measure that. They took care of that. I think my confusion, Chris, if I remember correctly, it is the residents that we don't measure the wastewater. We take their wastewater up to the water.  This would generate a considerable amount of additional revenue for the district if the board were to take the recommendations of the water wastewater. Any questions? Yes. Motion? Make a motion. Sulfur in water. A second. Motion in a second. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstained? Motion. Okay.  I'm just going to come up with new names for companies. I am. You got it? I don't want to go under. Oh, no, I'm telling you. I'm going to go over it. I'm just going to come up with new names for companies. Oh, so nice to meet you. Yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you. Very nice to meet you. Thank you for that. Nice to meet you. Good job. It's nice to meet you. Yeah. Well, if I may just have Chris before you go. Yeah. If I may just share with the board that Chris has been with the water wastewater committee for, not committee, department for a number of years and has been in the head for two years now. A year and a half. A year and a half. So he, my manager is all doing a great job. But Chris has really found opportunities to make the department more efficient, more effective. We are finding these problems because Chris has been really pushing his team to do that and regularly come up with ideas and suggestions for how to make his department better. So I just wanted to share that with the board of his good work. Thank you very much. Chris. Next up, we have the assembly permit and banner for the rec department. One of my other really good directors is here to talk about some of the activities that she is proposing and she's been working part with the community on building density in the village and in the business districts. And some of these assembly permits are hoping to do just that for different events. So I will, if the chair would be okay with what asked Heidi to speak about this. Sure. Okay. Heidi? Sure. Last month I brought it to your attention. So this month I'm bringing the permits up and so I'm just here if any of you have any questions regarding the events that are both being proposed. The safety scene, there is that change of closing down the street alive. It is for the safety of the kids and also to create more of a community sense. And then the winter lights parade as well. There are different road segments being closed though. Yes. For each of them it's different. The safety segment is the segment of Main Street. Yeah, and Pleasant. Yes. And the parade is much smaller than the 4th of July. Worked out with the lieutenants. The lieutenants got, I always forget how to pronounce it. Huh? Clue. Clue. Clue. Clue. We walked through that parade route and he was very satisfied with that. So working with them. I did communicate also at several meetings with Bill Morgan, now with the highway. He mentioned that he is okay with all that as well. He just probably would recommend having no parking signs on one side of Merchant Road just to help out those big trucks if they need to turn on there. And since these are two, well safety and closing down the streets, it's a new event and the parade is a new event. Kind of. I did tell both the sheriff and the highway that I would be putting out more signs on the light post on Monday. So giving citizens residents notice three days in advance that and businesses, they're all aware of it. But at least people will park there on a regular basis. A three day notice that we are closing down the streets for Halloween from four to six. And then also for the parade, giving them enough time because it is a night parade. So I think that I'm used to doing those signs before. I know we haven't done that, but I think it's very important to bring that and put those signs up. So giving people notice that we do need it cleared out. So hopefully that helps out too. And the signs will also be on some of the main businesses like the banks and stuff like that. And they're all for it. Some of the conversations that spurred additional work with the sheriff's department were part of communications and Shannon and Heidi have had with our fire chief in the village. So he had some specific questions about movement within the village, how things are going to work, and again much of the work that has happened since those communications are directly related to conversations or email exchanges that have had that have happened because of communication between our team and the village fire department. And they're all on board. Everybody's okay? Well I'm still, I've been out of town this weekend so I need to follow up to see if all the questions have been addressed. I have not heard from the fire chief. I've sent an email. No major concerns? I have yet to let Jay know about the updates. Okay. So he signed approving one just from the other. Nothing out of the ordinary. Okay. Let's get a way around. Yeah. And we'll see, you know, the safety scene, we'll see how it works. If it works, great. And if it doesn't, then we'll put it back the way it was. We'll put it on something else, right? Yeah. We'll put it on something else, but we are willing to give it a try. I think people are very excited about it. Sounds good to me. The emotion for one of these, we're comfortable with both of them. I'll make a motion to approve both of these permit applications. And the banner. And the banner. Okay. Motion in a second. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Thank you, guys. Good day. Good day. Thank you, honey. Next, we have a briefing by Bernie. We have our representative from McFarney here today. And we also have Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley, I'm sorry. McFarney left long ago. My coach still says McFarney. Okay. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. He's having a good idea to share some general information with the board of two matters. One is more recent development that the town was notified of and also just some general information about the town's investments. That's correct. So for the record, Chris Doobie with Morgan Stanley, who was acquired by... Smith Farney was acquired by Morgan Stanley back in 2008, 2009 timeframe. We've been assisting with your town investments for some time. In a portfolio, people hear companies like Morgan Stanley and Smith Barney and Merrill Lynch and the others and often think that we're looking to take risk. In your portfolio, we've really been risk averse because these are town funds, these are public funds, and that's been the premise. So we have had a portion of the dollars, just a small portion invested in the equity marketplace, but by and large, the majority has been in fixed-income instruments and navigated the waters pretty well. With three-year rates of return, you've got four different accounts, each one having a little different desire for rate of return, but the average rate of return over three years has been around 5% a year. So fairly mild kinds of rates of return, but that goes with the very conservative risk profile. I will say that over the past three years we haven't done much inside the portfolio because it's been working. That does mean that the equity portion, just because equities have gone up, have gotten a little bit bigger in the portfolio, so a potential consideration would be to sell off some of those equities by some other fixed-income instruments, CDs or something else. Timing of the maturity of those goes point in hand with the second announcement that was alluded to, and I'll get to that in a minute. Our thought process on the marketplace right now is you're looking at fixed-income rates going up. It's causing a headwind against most fixed-income instruments, and the tailwind we've experienced in the equity marketplace seems to be having some volatility this year that is causing that to sputter a bit. So some movement of the portfolio into things that have set maturities is indeed a recommendation. Why set maturities? Even if there's fluctuation in those price held to maturity, you get your dollars back, much like. And in many cases, for some of our other institutions, municipalities, we've been doing certificates of deposit for that, so essentially just what you're hearing, FDIC-insured certificate of deposit for safety's sake, given the current market conditions and market volatility. But as part of that, Morgan Stanley and doing a legal review of the municipal marketplace is actually exiting the marketplace of assisting municipalities in these investments. And the biggest component of that is the fact that at the same time we're helping municipalities invest their dollars. We're also helping municipalities issue fixed-income dead instruments, municipal bonds. And we see that as a conflict of interest, and we want to exit the marketplace so we don't have that conflict of interest. We can't be on both sides of the transaction. Clearly in your case, we're not investing any proceeds of municipal bonds, but it's in general we're exiting the space. So the only municipal clients that we will have going forward will be retirement plans, essentially. Pension plans, 457 plans for government. Some governments have 403Bs. And so that notification you received formally last week, we are clearly not going to leave you in the lurch. We're going to be here as you search for translations. Happy to even act as sounding board as you're going through an RFP process if that's what you decide to do. We can't run the RFP for you, but we clearly can help you with appropriate questions. We can help you with vetting the solution set. If you'd like us to look through proposals, we're happy to do that for you as well. You'll find that the national investment houses have all made this decision. We were actually, as I understand it, the last one to move in this direction after most of the others did that two and three years ago. So all in all, the experience has been exactly what we wanted for you from a rate of return and a risk profile, because working quite well for my personal satisfaction would love to be able to continue helping the local community. We're just not in a position to be able to do that. We're exiting it on a national scale. So that exit is 180 days from a letter that was sent out October 1st. So you do have some time to find and research solutions. Some of the other municipalities, we've been doing this in a staggered format. Some of the other municipalities we've looked to have found good homes for their investments at local trust departments, local banks, and some independent investment locations. So things like Trust Company of Vermont, local banks that you live and work next to all day long, are certainly in a position of helping you with this. And they're not folks who are in that municipal bond space, so there isn't that conflict of interest potential. In your case, there has been no conflict of interest to be clear, but we have to, in this day and age, we have to just move completely away from anything that even optically looks that way. What's our target for that fund? Or like how long we intended to have it out there? Well, we don't have... It's basically a combination of things, but Joyce, do you... The plan was established back in 1999 from the landfill depreciation funds from the closure of the landfill. And at that point, we had, I think, around three million that we invested. Right now, we're down to two million something. Two point one, I think. The largest part of it is in the depreciation fund, but there's like, I think, 800,000 that's in the closure fund, which is meant for paying the expenses for the closure of the landfill. And because when we originally established that, they were estimating that we would have to monitor and report up to 20 years. After we established how much we had in the fund, we found out we, I think it's now up to 30 years that we have to monitor it. So we ended up having to put more money into it to be sure that we had sufficient funds to cover us to, I think it's 2030 something. That we have to have sufficient funds for monitoring and paying for expenses related to the landfill closure. So over the years, we've used those funds as a means of supplementing our capital construction funds, using borrowing some money, or actually using some money from the funds. For a while there was like 100 to 200,000 per year we were taking out that we were using towards highway projects and other projects so that we didn't actually have to bond for those particular amounts. Since then, we've done more bonding than using funds from the landfill depreciation fund. So we still have a sufficient, a significant amount of money in the funds. It originally was targeted to go out to, I think some of the investments we have go to like 2025 or something like that. We have one particular one that was set up for a balloon payment on a bond payment, which is coming due, I believe in November. The balloon payment is a little over $200,000. We originally invested less than that, but the fund grew so that we had actually quite a bit more and we've actually used some of the excess of the funds for other projects. We had voter approval to use the excess funds for other particular projects that we have for the town. So going forward, because we have a target date of March 29 that we have to move the funds to something else. We have locally, we have Edward Jones, we can approach them to see what they can or cannot do for us. I know that when we originally did the whole process of soliciting different entities for investing the money, we did actually contact a couple different banks that had brokerage type services within their business model. So we can probably approach some of them. Peoples United is one of them, but probably we would not go with them because we do actually have bonds with Peoples United. But I believe Northview Law has a brokerage portion of their business and I believe there's a couple other banks that have similar things. So we can approach these different banks. When we do our RFP we can go to the banks, we can go to Edward Jones and just see what they have available and what they can do for us and go from there. I know that Adolfo is looking at restructuring some of the funds that are in those investments to try and either grow them more or to reallocate how we're using them. There are some funds that are specific because some of the investments are for Brea Park, which was for basically their income generating investments so that whatever money is being generated from them are being used for expenses related for upkeep and what not, Brea Park. There was also money that was specifically for the playground that was invested. I think we've actually spent the money but we haven't liquidated the funds so the funds are still in the investment. Basically we haven't done a lot of activity. It was set up and we've let it ride and it's done very well for us. Like Chris said, most of it has been set up to be very conservative but to give us a return. It's not necessarily a whopping return but it's significant enough that we've actually made money on various different funds and actually have been able to use the excess to do other things. The type of investment it's in is it in a pooled investment so you would actually liquidate what the holdings are? Most of them would be transferable to the institutions that you've just talked about. So you wouldn't necessarily have to liquidate but listening to whoever your next advisor is if they have different ideas that you want to pay attention to, if you were to liquidate they are all liquid, meaning they're all easily transferable to the institutions that you want to pay attention to. So it's not a very much anytime you want it to. So nothing is tied up. It's not an American family specific fund that they're setting in. No, not at all. We would not do that. The funds are a variety of different funds. There's a couple of different American capital funds. There's the Thornburg investment. There is Franklin fund. There's a lot of equity. Some of the investments for the landfill closure are in like Eli, Lily, and what's the other one? You're drawing like Alan. I don't know about that. I wonder if they did so well. Some of the items that we would hope to bring to the board at some point in the future is, one, a proposal to establish a town of Randolph infrastructure bank so that we, because we have this after we've put enough money away to complete the closure of the landfill, which Joyce spoke about roughly about $800,000. It would relieve us with over a million dollars. Establish a town of Randolph infrastructure bank where we could borrow from ourselves, pay ourselves back, and prevent from having to go back out to the bomb bank because then we're locked into 20, 30 years' worth of debt service and payment. And if we were then to just ask the town to lend us their money, pay it back, we could complete infrastructure projects in a much faster way, and we would then always have that same pool of money without having to pay a debt service. Like a pool? Yeah. So it could be a new reserve account. It could be a different way. Fix it, and that's the money that you could probably fix it. So if created the proper way similar to our emergency reserve fund where monies are used than any leftover or surplus for the previous, for the following year is used to reimburse that account, we can have a similar system with this particular project. A lot of the town's annual taxation goes to pay for debt service and it's tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to pass on these bonds. And if we switch to a model where we borrow from ourselves, not set ourselves up in these funds where they are two or three years out of maturity, but we can cycle these funds on a regular basis, we could do a lot more with that money. But that's for a different man, because Joy's brought it up and there is an option. Yeah, but just a little more about that at some point. We have a lot of questions. Great. All right. Thank you. Thanks for the heads up, Chris. You learned a lot about our town today. You did? I do a lot of these readings and I use them. I miss it. And Chris, what was your last name? Dewey. Dewey. Dewey. Dewey. Dewey. Thank you. We have a couple of questions about the proposed agreement from New England Central. Anybody here on that item? No one from New England Central here today. What are people waiting for? You're waiting for the EV charging stations, which is in the grants. Anybody else waiting for a specific item? You're here for the duration? Yeah. No, the one behind you? Okay. I was here for the road issue. Okay. The process? I'm only talking process on that one. That's all right. Okay. All right. Let's drop down and talk about EV charging. Do we have something on that? Here. I'll make you sit here the rest of the way. Only if you're going to go cook dinner. I missed my first ring up here. Okay. I've been working with the R3 group and just the R3 committee and learning from them about this particular grant that's become available. We asked today, help us by doing some research, working with Reed Mountain Power, continuing work with John Copan. He's been leading the R3 process. And the group has sent to the select board their findings. So in your packet for this particular item is the grant or at least the introduction portion to the grant. And then also cost breakdown of what it would cost the town through its 10% contribution if the select board order approved us further investigating this potential option. And so we have representatives here to speak about it What's before you, since you already have it, largely says what we would like you to know. If you've had a chance to read it, I'm not going to belabor it. We've already heard about this several times before from an old program that never got adopted and one or two months ago we came to give you some warning that this was coming. And it's really more of an opportunity to let the town know what's available and to make what we think is a kind of a no-brainer recommendation. But it's something that the town and the select board can take a leave that really is not a huge monetary item or a revenue generator either way. It's more of a way, as I see it, to give random amounts of branding statewide and even regionally if you count the traffic that might be coming from Quebec, which is real big in the EVs in the near future. And also to give us a reputation as maybe a leader in this direction. So, yeah, I'm going to leave it in that and let's see what happens. What are you coming down to for locations? Well, so we thought we'd like to hear any input that you guys had on that, obviously. This isn't our program. This is a town program and the investment in our community and ultimately we'd be looking to select board to be a player on that front. And so just some of the locations that we've mentioned here in the spreadsheet are Town Hall, Summer Street, Pleasant Street, and Prince Street as ones that we've identified. And we've just thought about that from a business standpoint for parking. We've thought about that from an electrical hookup standpoint. There are some parameters to the actual EV charger and what it needs to meet. It has to be handicap accessible, various other things like that. So that's why we've identified those locations. Obviously it's not in our town, so we've looked to any insight on that front. I'd say just it's a 10% match for municipal owned property and doesn't really get any better than that. If you look at the numbers for the growth in electric vehicles, I know 80% of this board drives trucks, but even electric trucks are coming out too. I'm looking at an electric pickup by workhorse. And so I think it would be really important for Randolph not to miss this as an opportunity. From a marketing standpoint, we've talked to people in the community and kind of pulled folks. We don't have any hard numbers on that yet about whether they would support it, business folks, people along Main Street and whatever. But it'll show up on your Google Maps, on your Waze as a place where you can charge a vehicle. And I think for the downtown of Randolph, that would be a good thing. But as a forward-thinking community, I think it's also important. And we hope that you guys will approve the opportunity for the town to apply for the grant. And I think through the R3 process, there's a lot of resources in terms of helping make it happen. So I want to say two other things about location. Put this in the context that whether the town does this or not is also going to be very likely Charter stations, at least two at Gippard, maybe four. Two at BTC. And I don't know the locations exactly for any of those. The supervisory union somewhere, probably at the tech center, is probably going to do it too, but they're a little bit behind in their planning. So all these other entities are gearing up for this November 30. I think it is deadline for the RFP. And there's resources that will help the town do this application, but it's still going to be some commitment by the town. And you know all about how those applications for the state work. There's plenty of paperwork and any kind work. And any kind work does count sometimes for the 10% match, by the way. The other thing I'm going to push a little bit on location that the town is going to do it, giving us any direction tonight or in the very near future of not waiting until the next meeting would help. Because I think we could give you a more actionable proposal. There is no proposal that's ready for action tonight. That's mostly because the vendors that go with the RFP process are not really known to us yet. There's pieces of the program that are still emerging. So we're not asking you to do anything tonight, except if you have some direction about which of the spots we've identified or maybe the other ones that seem most likely we can focus our RFP and further explore feasibility there. On the spreadsheet, you have two level twos at Town Hall, and then you have one level three and one level three at Town Hall. Is that one level two and one level three? Yes, it is. So what's it supposed to be? One, two, one, three. It ends up costing around $8,500 for the town to put in a level three for an annual operating cost? Here's the scoop on level three. This is driving me crazy. The level three is clearly to me going to be the wave of the future and what is going to be probably standard in a pretty short period of time. It's kind of like the software world where it changes every few years. But right now, to look at those prices, it's like $85,000. It was something very high for the level three chart. It's DC, so it's a whole different power setup. It's a relatively enormous amount of power that gets dumped into essentially change from one device to another. And so it takes a very different set of infrastructure and the device itself that does it. And I think it's just not very much in the mainstream yet. So the prices are high. And if you also look at the annual consumption prices, I just don't get it. Maybe some of the engineers can explain it. But it should be, seems to me, about the same amount of power used to charge a battery, whether it's fast in one hour or long in six or eight hours. But they make it seem like it's a lot more power. So you get the conversion factor. AC to DC is going to be the challenge. So there's a price you pay on energy loss during that plus if you're drawing in a shorter amount of time higher current that puts a higher load on the entire system rather than doing a slower charge. But I 100% agree with you that the level three stations are going to be the common. Those are going to be the standard. They're going to be the standard. And just think about, OK, now I've got to come to town and sit there for three hours charging my vehicle versus 30 minutes. Right. You know, there's a used factor there too. And I would argue that, you know, an example is if you go down to West Lebanon and look at the, I forget, is it the Walmart parking lot that has the test that they've never used? Yeah. Right, because you've got to sit there for three hours and charge it. Right. And there's not a lot of people that are willing to do that. There's people who are promoting the level two charges, this kind of the standards that most towns are doing because it's going to bring people into town and people are going to stay and shop. I'm not sure I do believe that. I don't think coming for a six hour charge is all that attractive. It's not going to draw hurt. That's a hotel. Employee is different. That's the hotel. The hotel is going to be a level in that level. We don't expect somebody coming to spend an hour or two in the village. For overnight, we're an employee coming to work. Yeah. It's a whole different boat. That's a different thing. So I think the right thing if we were really proactive would be to bite the bullet and pay for the expensive one. But I have a hunch that with these prices, we'd be doing it prematurely. It's going to be cheaper soon. Where does your cost come from? Where are these generated? It comes from a deposit. For the same revenue. We're charging the same quick charges. We are a six hour charge. If you can come up with some better figures, we're all for it. I can give you more accurate numbers. We actually installed eight level twos in a parking ride in Rockingham last year. So I can give you some better info. Sweet. Yeah, because they seem very rounded. They're all the time. This park and ride went in. Are you going to charge the same for a level two charge as a level three charge? Well, that's another thing that is unknown. The revenue is the same. That's the information that we had. And it doesn't make any sense. You're going to be able to charge probably five times as much on the thing. But you're not going to charge more than a tank of gas, probably. So it's going to be somewhere more than the five dollars, but less than $30, I think, is what you're really going to charge. I'd like to see your numbers. I mean, I'm not for this. I just don't know what level we need to be at. So I have no problem sending them off and saying, hey, let's move forward here, but I would love to see your numbers that you guys had. I'll reach out to the owner of Shreve that did the project for you. And I think this is a super great opportunity for sure. My challenge is the location is picked. If one of your two benefits are drawing customers of downtown and creates an image of Randolph, that's a poor looking town. That's all great. You're at the town hall off of Main Street, where it's not visible even. Right now, people are going to have to search for it and all that other stuff. And I know Google's there. Don't get me wrong. Trying to get it out in the open, visible, et cetera, would be, I think, a huge benefit. Yeah. The merchants are wicked against it. Nobody's going to build Main Street now. They can't be against it. Well, you can't put it through there. No, it's not handicapped. Just plain. Yeah. Perfect. Anyway, you're going to have them anywhere on Main Street because they get rid of the handicapped spots. It's not handicapped. Isn't there a handicapped access there? You've got an 8-inch curb. You've got to have a quarter-inch reveal or less. So the only place that you can put them is where there's actually handicapped spots already. So you'll have to get out of the handicapped spots to put them on Main Street. So you're looking at right a municipal lot, the bigger lot, because it's not handicapped, accessible. There's a good number of reasons why. We'll have to be able to super-attractive right after that. We also don't want poor services. Somebody who's handicapped needs to be able to use these phones to drive. These old pickups who no longer can park there because there's an EV charger there. So I think I agree with you 100%. I think there's probably some compromise that we can make through signage to make them more known. I mean, there is great parking out here. But Prince Street may be better, who knows. But we'd just love to communicate with you guys more on this matter and bring you some better information for next meeting. And ones have to be applied for by? End of November. End of November? Number 30. We've got a little time. All right. But do you have to pick the locations at that point or are you just submitting the application and you can leave the locations? I think we will have to probably fix some locations. The application may have that question. Okay. Well, I'm certainly, yeah. All right. Well, I'm all for it. So I'd say keep moving forward and see if we can make it happen. Is there any data on how the charging stations get used in terms of whether they're spread out or bunched up? So it's like if I was coming to town. One here, one there. I would love to go to, like, I would think one spot where there was a bunch of them, knowing that at least maybe one of them is going to be free rather than going to one spot where there's two of them, and they're both taken. And then I'm like, oh, where's the other one? I drive around. I know those are taken. Oh, there's the one that's free. Like the parking garage, you know? Wouldn't want four parking garages. You should have one so everybody knows where it hits. Correct? Yeah. The difficult, yeah. We can look for some numbers like that. The difficulty is it's like Burlington would be a place that has those multiple chargers in one location. Of course, we're on a way different metric than Burlington. So we don't have that same foot traffic. What are you feeling? Are you feeling that there should be one location? I mean, that would be my intuition. I just don't know if people have, you know, done any data out there about it. Mine's the same way. I think it should be like one location. If you had two or three or four or whatever, you had the ability to expand if you needed to. It would be also something you should think about. Because you might want to expand that same area as things progress. That's a good idea. Would the board be opposed to maybe the R3 committee reaching out to the other partners in the town that are already considering installing these in different locations and potentially asking them to partner with the town so that, you know, I think the challenge is that if these stations are put on private property or on nonprofits, the rate is different than if the town were to use municipal lots, much lower contribution. So we could, the board would okay with it. And if the committee were open to speak with these partners and say, well, we could potentially have two or three parking spots in a municipal lot that has space available because we may have a car that's abandoned there and we can get rid of it. But they would then fit the bill for it because now they're paying less per device because we're using municipal property. So it's more of a partnership. I think some of theirs, they have the Giffords, the schools, BTC or the tech center, they have people that are there all day. So level two makes perfect sense for them. Our issue is going to be that of one level two and one level three option is probably the better way to go because you got some employees or folks that work for different businesses that would... Well, I think we heard explicitly that the state wants even not mixed the type of entities so they don't want to municipal with an institutional but because of the different amount of co-pay and the subsidy for them. And that's, you know, locations are pretty different to the question. Can I inject, I don't know the protocol here, but what about asking Tom Cooper or anybody else that we know in town that has an electric vehicle, what kind of input they might have as their location doesn't work? Shannon's going to want your name. I'm Martha Haffner. Thank you. Yeah, so we've been trying to pull folks on that front as well. Most people who invest in an electric car either know that they can turn it at work or... Or they're making the investment at home station, right? The ones that think they're coming to town are going to be more like, you know, come to shop or coming to go to Du Bois and King or, you know, somebody's making a trip into the community, right? And the other thing to keep in mind, I think, is that when someone is coming to charge, they don't necessarily need to charge completely, you know, from a dead battery all the way to a full battery. They might be okay with a 30-minute charge that gets them another 20 miles up the road, you know, to where they need to go. So it might be okay for certain people, at least, to have access. They might find a level-two charger to be perfectly adequate, even though they're only spending an hour shopping or something like that. You're going to want to condition the battery, right? If it's good, I want to go from dead to full. Otherwise, you use the full capacity. Not only to come to town or come to that. That's the type of attraction. You typically don't want to discharge those batteries from a Google Maps standpoint. If you're doing that too often. I agree. Just coming in to top off. If the board is open to this, I could continue to work with the group to nail down some very specific answers to questions that the board may have. We can do a lot of preliminary work between now and the next meeting of the select board. And if at that point we provide the board with satisfactory answers, the board can then authorize me and staff to work with the group to apply for the grant. But between now and then, we could be working on everything we need for that moment and then we could meet and pull it together. And then we'll have some very clear answers for the board and hopefully help make that decision. That's a good idea. Thanks, guys. Let me know when they make one. Thank you. Charge your truck. I'm waiting for those big seminars. They have some... Come on. I know. I've been watching that, following that for a while. Okay. Proposed agreement from New England Central. So the town staff has recommenced a conversation with New England Central over the condition of Railroad Street. We shared with them photographs of what the road looked like before. Jack Cowdery actually spent... He and another resident spent some money to grade the road, make it a little better than it was before. So... Was that where that recent work came from? Yeah, it was Jack Cowdery and another member of the community. We have had, on a regular basis... Are they property owners? Jack is. So a portion of... A portion of Railroad Street is currently Class 3. It's the eastern portion of Railroad Street. So essentially, almost by the real estate. By the real estate portions. Yeah, the homes, the apartments. I believe it ends where Shane Niles owns the burnt-down property. I don't know. I'll have it backwards. Yeah, the other side. Yeah, it's not ours. Yeah, and it's private from Al's Pizza and Curves We have approached again New England Central Rail and asked them to work with us. They have pulled together an agreement that puts a lot of... It requires a lot from the town. It requires us to put in a guardrail that would prevent any plowing of snow to end up on the tracks. It would require the town to run maintenance plans or maintenance of the road plans with New England Central Rail to make sure that what we do doesn't affect their rail operation. At this point, I had these conversations in New England Central Rail. I bring the agreement to the select board so I could at least have some input on what the board would like for me to push back on. They're open to negotiating. They've already agreed to not charge us the $365 a day or a year fee or at least but if there were any other points that the board wanted me to bring back to New England Central Rail, we could do that. I just wanted to let the board know that this conversation is ongoing and is there... On the Class 3 side, is there currently a guardrail on that stretch? There is none on that portion of... That's their land too. It's not our land. No, but I thought that was... Oh, the Class 3 portion is also theirs? Yeah. There's a map at the back of that portion. So we can plow that section? No. We do, but we can't. We do, but we can't. We do. We do just because we want to. Because we have for years. Nobody's told us not to. Yeah, because I was about to say because the other section, this past winter there was a huge pile of snow right in the middle of it, that whole stretch from Pleasant to Main Street. So... What's wrong with the status quo? I mean, as long as we can stop putting a big pile of snow... So we have no... It's not legal. None of it's legal for the town to be using right now. It belongs to the railroad. And so, and there's... The upkeep of the road itself isn't being done by the railroad or by the town. So when it rains, the water's running right into the basement of the Curse building. And somebody's got to fix it. So... And with... With the grading that was done by these private parties, did they do so with permission of the railroad? I doubt it. No, they even walk within 50 feet of the centerline and you need a permit. They didn't have flaggers. They didn't have anything. They had nothing they needed to be doing. Okay, he just did it. So one of my communications to the railroad because they're insisting on a guardrail, I said, well, if we work with you and you don't insist on certain things, at the moment anyone can do what they're afraid of, which is plow snow onto the road or onto the tracks. So they're asking us to perform certain steps in order to prevent certain things from happening, but I reminded them that could happen now. We're just trying to help you and I think they're just worried about the long-term legal portion of it, which is why they're so focused on this agreement. What's the cost of the guardrail? I'm going to say, what's that figure out of? We have a general estimate of for that section of road between $5,000 and $10,000, roughly about $7,500. That I received from Chuck from D&K and it was just more of like just the basic estimate. So is that the whole stretch from Main Street to Pleasant? Yes, on that side of the road. The whole reconstruction through there to address the stormwater issue and all that is a lot more. So the issue that's gone back to the railroad because adults will share this with me and I went back to them and I'm like, hey guys, there are issues yours. This is your liability and you need to get in here and fix it. What the town's offering to do is step up and lease this land and keep it maintained and help you with this issue. So it's gone back to their property folks and some of their upper to look at them participating in the cost of addressing this liability on the drainage problem. All they're going to do is put fill in there and slant it to the ditch in the railroad and then it won't be usable by anybody and we don't want that. So if we want that to be a three street and we want it to be able to connect the two we want it flat semi flat, slant it towards drainage. What was the cost of the whole project? I remember do we have a number on that? I don't have a number on the total cost for the road just on the card rail but the road itself would require some stormwater reversing and some catchphrases and something. Can we just drop jersey barriers on it instead of guardrails and make them happy? Yeah, I mean because it's movie zero when you plow the plow blade will float on the guardrails right out of the way. So is this going to be a one-way road because I don't think we have 24 feet between the right of way and the curves building. It's going to be a one-way road, right? It says it's 295 right there but then they get this encroachment here. The original intent was it would be one way going towards Pleasant Street and then back street would be going towards Mean Street. So back street so you make merchant's road two-way. Take out all the parking. Getting late. Okay. That's hopefully wide enough to be two-way. No, it won't be. No, it's not going to be two-way. So you just pick a direction probably like you said going towards Pleasant Street. But remember back street's not a town road either. No, Samuelson's not. I think you want to keep that street. At least in this case the road's probably going to be okay because in the worst case scenario Samuelson's down. They have visitors from people who use that road. I'm sure we would have to speak with them about the one-way directional because right now people are using it. Does it affect the trash guy click turtle? Yep. It already does, he just ignores. Yeah, I know. So what if we leased it and just turned one end and the other end into two separate parking lots? With no through traffic. Because we already got two one-ways 50 feet away. Put a charging station in. There you go. Two birds. Two birds. Perfect. I want to make that emotional. Put some people up to solve the problem. You can come and drop the trash after a car. What are you going to need a level for?  They need parking. And the other section is in front of Al's Pizza which needs parking. That lot is often full of cars coming and going. That's actually not a bad idea. Parking. No parking, right? I could reach out to them. I do know that they have, although they don't feel that they would exercise it. But I do know that there are a lot of things going on. There are a lot of standard clauses that is included in their proposed agreement days. A 30-day cut and run. So we can do all this work. And they can be like, all right, see you. What do you mean by that? That they could just give us 30-day notice of the ending of this agreement and then the town would have to go away. And the railroad then just takes a lot more reason to make them pay for a portion of the improvement. I could try stressing to them that what they're afraid of can't happen now even if they're operation. And I could continue to do that and ask them to pitch it. Well, the request for them to pitch in is before their leadership. We're just waiting for a response. They could just say, we're just going to close it's all traffic, right? And they could fix their stormwater issue and that would be the end of it. So there's incentive for us to I think there's some value in the parking situation. I mean, this has always been, you know, this Alice Pizza situation, that's kind of like a little tough situation there. There's always that, curves, and, you know, there's always a problem with the parking. So, that's a great idea. It was mostly joking, so I'm glad you like it. I don't think it's a joke. Actually, I think it's actually a good idea. I have driven through the movie theater when it was, you know, still open and there weren't any parking spaces. There were no parking spaces. The whole section of North Main or South Main at that point. Could you have the staff look at that and see how many parking spaces that would create? I'm going to fill in the parking spaces on the railroad side of that. Yeah, just if that was, yeah. What could we accomplish there? I mean, we theoretically could use more downtown parking spaces.  Looks like it would only be a few spaces there. I don't know. It would be nice to see them. It's not wide enough to do. You've got 29 feet. Probably can't do it. Not both. But I think there's usually six cars from the railroad crossing gate down to the Curves Building about on a busy lunch. What's the length of that? I don't know. 350. There it is. There's a lot of cars parallel parked down there. Right? That'd be 17. Parallel or angled. I don't think you could do angled, but I think parallel you could get 17. Is it wide enough from the edge of the Curves Building to the line they're drawing? I don't know. I don't know what that dimension is. You could make that, that could be no parking area. I figured it out. The curve could be no parking. You could probably still pick up 12 parking spaces. But that distance is pretty good. You could do that. People will still drive through there. People will still drive through there. Yeah, you could. Yeah, they will. They'll drive through there. And then we'll be driving out of the park inside the other, right? So, what do we really need for you right now? What do you need from us? I wanted to really just to get a sense of the board if you were interested in me pursuing this and if you, as a board, were interested in having me pursue it, what options you wanted for me to investigate. Like a parking lot. A parking lot, I can have staff drive through the area, see how many spotangular could fit in. That obviously was not an option that I was considering until now, but I could actually reach out to the railroad and say, this is what we're thinking about. This is what we'd like to do. Continue to push them along with the decision making for the proposal that they pitch in a little bit more or pitch in anything at all. I just wanted to get your guidance. So, when they do the traffic and we get to have them look at how many cars are going through there today? I don't know because it's private property, but we could... Maybe you just have an account of how many lead main street and how many can't show up on Pleasant Street? It's 29 and a half feet. So, a parking space is 20 feet. In length. So you're 29 and a half feet, is 9 and a half feet enough to pull out and swing? No. How wide? 12 wide, right? Well, it depends. So, I was participating in a conference call on these EV charging stations and I think I know where the little quip came about the diesel trucks because my comment was as we continue to change our look of our downtowns, we continue to make our parking spaces smaller and we continue to accommodate these little vehicles forgetting that a good chunk of the residents require trucks to do their jobs for their work and we're starting to cut them out of being able to park anywhere. It's just... I mean, I settled in the DRB for I don't know how many years and the big joke between me and Mr. Manning who used to be their facilities manager was that he kept saying we don't need these big parking spaces and I said, I'm going to look at what we're driving up there because we do.  Well, I just said how does it have a 10 by 20 space for an angled studio? They're both 20 feet out and 22 feet long. But because of the angle, it's 20 feet. And what does it require, though, for clearance for the cars to make the swing to... Well, typically the l