I'd like to officially call the meeting to order, whatever time it is, a little after six, one minute after six. The legal voters in the town of Granville are hereby warned and notified to meet the Granville Town Hall Tuesday, March 5th, 2024 at 6 p.m. to transact following a business. So I am looking now for a motion to move Article 1 to the floor. Is there a second? Second. Second. Can you hear me, okay, Lou? Article 1, to elect all town officers as required by law. A, to elect moderator for a one-year term ended in 2025. Annominate Kelly Ufrol. Second. We have a nomination for Kelly. Raise your hands, she's right here. Anybody want to know who she is? Second. Anybody else want to throw their hat in the ring? Move the nomination seats. How do you second that? If there's no objection, we'll close nominations. All in favor of Kelly as the moderator say, aye. Aye. Opposed? Not me. Thank you so much. All right, we have more business to attend to. Just so you all know, my name is Kelly Ekron. So as we move through the meeting, just be aware of my name's Kelly. And as we go through, I'll also ask for names because I don't know everybody's name. As we move forward, B, we're going to move on to B. So the next election that we have here is to elect a select person for a three-year term ending 2027. This doesn't need to be done by a paper ballot. We're prepared with a paper ballot. Do we have anybody opening the nominations? Yeah. I'd like to nominate Mike Aramow. Mike Aramow, okay. Robin seconds. Okay. Any other nominations? Nominations seats. Nominations. I move to close nominations. Second. All right. We don't need a paper ballot. I move that Cheryl writes one paper ballot. We can't do that for this. No, it's unopposed. We don't have to do it. If it's unopposed, there's only one person running. We don't have to do it. We have to avoid voice. Voice. And then we can file one paper ballot. All those in favor of the nomination? Aye. Any opposed? I had a bite bite. All right. Congratulations Mike Aramow. It's life worth it. To elect a second auditor for a three-year term ending 2027. Anybody move? Who is that person? Robin is the end of her term. Does she want to continue? Are there any nominations? I'll nominate Robin. So we have a nomination and a second for Robin. Any opposed? I do know that Robin would welcome if someone else wanted to do it. I'm just saying. I don't know if it happened. I don't know if it should work. Who seconded that? Aye. Okay. Sorry. Any other nominations on the floor? I move nomination C's. Okay. Any second? I'll second it. So Robin has been elected. Oh, we have to paper ballot. All those in favor of Robin? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right. Robin Hagerman. Three-year term. Thank you. All right. The next point of business is D. To elect a first constable for a two-year term ending 2026. Any nominations for constable? I nominate Mark Belial. Mark Belial. I second. Seconded by Roger. Any opposed? Any opposed? Any further nominations? I think that's good. Any further nominations? It's harder than it looks. I move the nominations C's. All right. Let's open it to the full vote. All those in favor of Mark Belial? Aye. Any opposed? All right. Mark Belial. The next point of business is E. To elect a second constable for a one-year term ending 2025. Any nominations? Anybody want to move that? Well, I would nominate the president. Jeff Lombra. Long road. Jeff Long road. Does he got an admirable job? I think he does. He's kind of a watchdog for over in his little neighborhood over there. He don't like people around. He's the first one that's lived for generations. Jeff, just for reference, the second constable that we've elected doesn't have any law enforcement authority. He's just wanted a point of contact for us. He's a great contact, I believe. He does a good job as far as I'm concerned. Since he's not here, I would elect him. I move nominations, please. Do we have a second? Okay, all those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? All right. Jeff Lombra is elected. Does the second constable? Point F, to elect a delinquent tax collector for a one-year term ending 2025. I'm nominating Indianum. Indianum? I second. Any other nominations from the board? I move the nominations, please. All right. All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? All right. Nancy Meadham is elected. Linked tax collector. For the next year. Point G, to elect a second cemetery commissioner for a three-year term ending 2027. That's my term, I believe. I think it's me. Who are you? Open nominations. I nominate Mark, if you will. I second that. Any other nominations from the board? Any motions to cease nomination? So moved. Second. All right. Four votes. All those in favor? Mark Belial is the second cemetery commissioner for a three-year term ending 2027. Say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right. Congratulations, Michael. Aye. All right. Okay. Quick point of business. I just wanted to, as we opened up the meeting, I went directly to the elections of town offices, but I do want to just kind of put some points of order into the meeting. So first off, again, to which you all know me, I'm taking over Roger. My name is Kelly. I'm pleased to be the new moderator for the town. According to state law, we are governed by Robert's rules within our meetings, but there are a few things within Vermont state law that also are important to our meetings. First of all, only warned articles will be addressed during the meeting. Once an article has been decided, whether it will put it up or down, it cannot be reconsidered after the assembly has taken up work on another article. And also, while Robert's rules require a majority vote with a paper ballot as we go through, it does request for people to request a paper ballot if that is so needed. If that is a concern, raise the concern. And I repeat to you, work with that. Can I see if I show up hands? Anybody in the room who's not a registered voter in the town of Brando? All right. Anybody who's not a registered voter, just please understand. We've not had you vote on any of the articles that we're assessing or we're addressing tonight. And we are going to enude. Do you want to allow the state reps to sign first and talk? Sure. Do we have anybody here? Do we have any non-voters, anybody who's representing the state that might want to address before we start? I was just about to write you a note. I'm Senator Ruth Hardy. And I'd love to get an update on people like that. Sure. Great. That's great. And the theater. I love it. I don't know where to stand. You can stand over right here. Right here. Yeah, that's fine. That's good.  You're the one talking. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Thank you, Ms. Moderator. And I'm Senator Ruth Hardy. I'm one of the two state senators that represent you here in the Addison district. And I am trying to attend the town meetings in this corner of my district. I was at Hancock this morning, Rochester last night. So here I am in Brandeville. And thank you for allowing me to speak and for having me at your meeting. I wanted to give you a little update on what we're doing in the legislature. And I'm happy to answer questions if there's time, or I can just hang out in the back of people on a chat in the hallway. But at the beginning of the session, we had three big priorities that we wanted to try to address. Housing, continuing to put funding into housing and also do regulatory reform to allow for more housing to be built, especially in town centers. And there are several committees that are working on housing. I am not on any of the housing committees, but there are still several committees working on housing. And I can give you a little bit of information on that if you want. Also, public safety. And public safety can be defined in various ways depending on where you live. Public safety here in Brandeville is probably very different than public safety conversations in Burlington. But our judiciary committees are working on a variety of sort of criminal justice reform issues and public safety more broadly speaking issues. And then the third one is recovery and resilience in the face of flooding. And that is obviously a lot of towns were really impacted last year in July in particular, but also in August and in December with flooding around the state. So those were the R3 priorities at the beginning of the session. Fortunately, school funding issues have kind of reared their ugly head and that has sort of taken some of our time as well. But in the Senate, we serve on two committees, and I serve on the Health and Welfare Committee that's been doing a variety of bills. And one of the things that we're going to be turning our attention to right now is the opioid epidemic and trying to figure out more ways to really address that head-on. I also chair the Government Operations Committee, and that's the committee that I wanted to give you a little bit more information on. We have been doing a bill about the government response to flooding and natural disasters. And a lot of what's in the bill is really how can government be more effective at preventing and responding and recovering from flooding or other natural disasters. And it includes things like making sure that our first responders are well-prepared, well-trained to see at least one first responder, probably several in the room. I saw an ambulance on my way here. Pardon me, two of them left because of the ambulance. And included in first responders in our bill are public works employees because during flooding a lot of times the water system employees are the first people on the scene. I wanted to make sure that they are in the loop and they're included in the planning and in the training. And also in the benefits that first responders get should there be an unfortunate tragedy or a death relating to a first responder during a natural disaster. We also include provisions to improve and expand our first alert and 911 system to make sure that everybody is in that system and that it also translates for people who are deaf or hard of hearing or don't have English as their first language. So making sure our response systems are working better. Evacuation routes, shelters, a lot of different things that we had to unfortunately employ last year. There's also a grant program for municipalities to apply for to improve their infrastructure to prevent future flooding. So there are a number of things in that bill really related to our government response. The other thing that our committee is focused on is updating our open meeting law. So as you know all public bodies, your select board and others have to follow open meeting law to make sure that you all have access to those meetings to participate and to watch what your elected officials are doing. During the pandemic, we allowed those bodies to meet fully remotely and that expires at the end of June. So we're trying to update that to provide a little bit more flexibility for some of those boards to continue to meet remotely. But for the main boards, including select boards, to still have to meet in person so that people have a place to go to watch those meetings. And even if some of the people are participating remotely, there's still an in-person location. That came after a lot of testimony we heard from select boards and school boards and people from all over the state about it and really came to a compromise that we think everybody can live with. There's a lot of towns, including possibly Brandville, that doesn't have very good internet. So having all the meetings remotely was really hard for people. Yeah, great internet. But there's some talk about requiring us to have remote access. That is not going to happen. That would be harder for all our public bodies to... From a lot of people, I can tell you, the Vermont League of Cities and Towns did their job well. We heard from a lot of towns, we got testimony actually from your neighbors in Hancock and Rochester about that as well. There was a moment where we were considering requiring hybrid, but we backed off on that. But you still have to have an in-person location. What we do, and if somebody wants to call in or somebody can go out with the snowstorm and we certainly allow that, but we do not have remote access for all our meetings. Right, exactly. You won't have to unless somebody requests wanting to call in, you have to accommodate them to do that. So that basically sounds like you're doing what we are going to ask you to do. But we needed a great big zoom in the whole vineyards. You don't need that. Every public meeting would have to go by that. That would be a burden. Yes, we heard that loud and clear. So we got you. Thank you. So those were two of the big bills that we worked on. I just wanted to touch on school funding because I'm sure you've all heard, or many of you have heard about the possibility of large tax increases.  You're with Hancock and Granville or in the school district together, right? So there's a little bit more time for your school district to prepare. And second, because you're a tuition-only district, you don't have a lot of flexibility. You sort of have to pay whatever the tuition is, unfortunately. But what we passed a bill a couple weeks ago that removes an unintended consequence of a bill that we passed a few years ago that was making school districts sort of add more to their budgets and raising it up a little bit more. We've told them they need to back down and a lot of school districts have. So that has decreased the tax, the potential tax increase somewhat and that we're going to continue to work on it. So hopefully by the time you all vote on your budget, I'll have more good news for you. But we know it's a huge issue. We know that it's something that we have to continue working on. It's sort of a perfect storm with inflation and the cost of health insurance and the federal funding drying up for schools, but the need is still being there. And the property value situation and the common level of crazy being kind of off-kilter because of the pandemic. So just wanted you to know we're continuing to work on it. And what we did a couple weeks ago did help lower the potential tax increase. That's what I got for now. If you want, I can answer questions or I can just have you back for a few minutes in case anyone wants to come and talk to me. Give a couple of minutes if anybody have any questions. If not, thank you, Ms. Hardy. You're welcome. Thank you all. I hope you have a great meeting. Thanks, everyone. And please reach out to me if you have questions. Thank you. Is there anybody else who's here? With that, we're going to move on to Article 2. This is the select board report. We hear that and act upon the same. And for that, does anybody want to move on? I'd like to move Article 2 to the floor. I want to thank the senator for coming tonight. We usually get a rep that comes from over in Randolph, but it's great to have a senator. I don't know if last time we had a county senator. No, thank you. Well, it's my pleasure. It was really an honor to be here. Thank you so much. And I'm going to take a picture because you look so blue up here. We don't allow that. Everybody, happy town. Thank you. I want to thank Rachel for three years being on the select board and certainly Roger first. We're still one of the smaller towns in the state with under 300 people. I mean, we live on all contractors to do everything. You know, our only paid people are our town clerk and senator. You know, we have no real paid kind of staffing, a lot of road stuff and we'll get into that just a little bit. But I really want to thank the contractors that are local that help us out with all the work that we do, that we have to do. Two rivers out of regional commission is the local regional planning commission. And they help us both on municipal and road work with grants and getting our request for proposals out contracts and also that they're very helpful. This, this building, I think is finally pretty well stabilized for the point of while. We did the steeple a couple of years ago and that should last us another 40 or 50 years with some painting that will be required. This summer we had all both the upstairs and downstairs windows have all been redone. We had a grant from historic preservation that got storms on them all now. And I think we're finally airtight and the envelope of this building should last for a while. We are bound by being on the National Historic Register. And so that's quite a few complications and requirements when we do this stuff. We're in the midst of getting grants for handicapped accessibility. This building does not conform to handicapped accessibility requirements. The front door and the stoop needs to be redone. If we ever want to use upstairs, it needs to have some kind of accessibility to an elevator, a chair rail or something. And we're doing a complete overview of what really needs to be done for handicapped accessibility. Hopefully we'll get most of that paid for with grants. The town clerk and treasurer got new computers this year and that was paid through ARCO funds, which are the pandemic relief money that was given to the state and the towns. And we'll get a little bit more on how we're spending some of that money in just a few tooth. The fire department needs the building down there. We're looking at trying to find some grant money to put water and sewer in there. It's tough to have a public building without a bathroom. And so that's ongoing. And again, we're looking for grants to help us with that and stay tuned for that. We're really lucky to have two meeting places that people can access this building right here for parties or weddings or whatever. It's open for residents to rent it. And also the corner school, which has been renovated and has Wi-Fi and events that can be held there. So that's another great place to hold events. The select board report is on page 15. We can always use volunteers. We need so many more people out of our 300 people in town. You know, it's tough to find people to fill positions and help us out. We've got 16 miles of class three dirt roads and they're pretty muddy right now. I am hopeful that this being our third mud season, it's only the beginning of March that maybe we're beyond the worst. I think the frost is getting out of the road. There's a nice hole that just opened up a mess than hell. So be careful. You see cones there and we'll get that tended to tomorrow oil. But when we had major problems in December with mud, you know, and try to do as best we can, trying to get repairs and stone and whatever is needed.  This winter done a great job and, you know, we were in a three year contract. The price obviously did go up, but we're in a three year fixed contract on that. And I think that's going to be, Shane elbows done a great job. And, you know, unfortunately we didn't get a whole lot of snow or fortunately we didn't get a lot of snow. I don't know which ever side you're on with that. But I don't think we're over with that yet anyway being the first week in March. We follow the town's procurement policy. We go out to bed with most of a lot of the work we do is with state grants that we get. And accounting is paramount to make sure that we have all the eyes dotted and teeth crossed. We have a no match grant from FEMA and the state to take out dangerous trees. On the side of the road you'll see some orange blazing on these trees. We were hoping to get that done before winter. But these are trees that are right in the road either blocking right away or a sight distance where they're actually right in the road. So hopefully we'll get those taken out this spring. You know, we do general maintenance all the time, grading the roads. You see, you know, it used to be like twice a year now. It seems three or four times. We've got to go out and grade it. The gravel pit here in town, we're still hoping to get gravel out of that pit. But we've had to truck gravel over from Middleburg. And that adds time and expense to doing all of that. The Hanley Road, which is over in East Grandville, which is part of us. I don't think anybody from East Grandville is here tonight. But all 20 or so people that live over there, that's in a flood plain. They get flooded bad. We've met with the river guy over there and trying to come up with a, again, trying to get grants to help reduce the flooding that's there. Hanley Road is about a half a mile, not even a half a mile long, but it comes right up across the railroad tracks under Route 12A. And it's a pretty dangerous spot. So that road has to be maintained also. We still struggle sometimes with some of our visitors and Airbnb's and just people coming from down south that don't have cars that are good for our back roads even in the best of times. But not much we can do about that. The class four roads, our roads go up into the National Forest. One big thank you to Vast that built two bridges last summer. So that now Kennedy Road, you can go all the way up to the government road and it's all connected. Whereas until they put those couple of bridges in you couldn't get through. So and the town goes all the way up to the government road. If you ever have any questions on the roads or you know, we'd love to have people go out and help clean out their ditches in front of the yards and keep the culverts flowing. It's always a challenge for us to do that because like I said, it's pretty much all contractors. And the only other thing I want to leave with is that we are going out to contract and we're going to repave our paved roads. And we're going to add 100 feet onto the bottom of the puddle duct in Guadalupe where it comes out of Route 100. So that that should improve it greatly. We're going to be paying for that using some ARPA money and some capital road project money that's been carried over over the years. So we should be in good shape for that. Richard. Yeah. All this turmoil we're having with roads, I'd like to report a tremendous success.  I don't know, 15, 70, 500 yards. That was one of the worst spots on that road. I know because I personally graded it myself for three years in order to get out. And that is the only way you would be terrible about it.  That is perfect. There's not a single puddle, rut or anything in that section. So you've demonstrated something that really works. I don't think I got to say much more. Thank you for that. We're not at this point yet. We're not quite at that point yet, but sure. But I actually just wanted to ask you to say that I wanted to commend Rachel Gregori for her service as a slide board member. Thank you. Are there any good points of discussion related to the slide board? Before we move on to Article 3 of this point. I'd like to move Article 3 to the floor. Second to motion. All right. Article 3 is on the floor. And Article 3 dished out the town of Prandtlville to accept the budget of $405,886 to meet expenses and liabilities of the town and authorize the slide board to set the tax rate sufficient to provide the same. And with that, discussion? Now I'll ask what is this? Yes. Yes. To answer what that is, I'm going to take off my moderator hat for a moment and put on my auditor hat. On your chairs, you will see a report, which is an amended report to reflect the actual year-end P&L statement for the town. There was an error in our system with a new report that was printed and published in our town report for the year. So pages 21 to 23 in the town report, this is to amend that report to have the correct information. There were some trial-adjusted entries that were made that affected the report that was in here. And just to be completely honest, it was just an error. The actual report is reflected on up here. And this is what's in here. From the audit perspective, myself, Robin and Roger, audited the books this past year for 23-23. And physical year NA-22-23, we did not find anything significantly different from this report. And the adjustments, the same looks different between the report that's on your chair and that we've updated online as well. And what's in the town report was reflected in the actual monthly statements. So, honestly, this is such a correction. Yes? Hello, I'm really glad I'm here. Peace. There's not a single question. So the first, I have a question. So, the first one. And if I'm looking at your, that wasn't new, audited, it looks like you want to make a real difference. Is the fact that there now, office, outside audit, wasn't budgeted? How often do you normally budget for audits? We had that budgeted just for that year. So that was the first year that we'd had an outside audit in many years. And it's something we will probably do on a routine basis. We don't have it scheduled. We decided to do a formal audit when a long-time treasurer, Kathy Werner, retired and we had a new treasurer come in mid-year. So that's why we paid that money to have the full audit done. I mean, I'm all audits. I was just wondering why. And it's not my budget for the next. So we're going to go with that crap-fuck local audit, which is kind of a great job. Moderator has that one. I had another one on the, and I hope this doesn't cause a big problem, but the right page. Here we go. Page 18. I don't think that is right. Page 18, the total should be $406. And $6 off $520. Which comes from page 16, line 5080, the website for anything. Page 16. Page 16, line 58, the total for the fiscal year, just coming fiscal year because we want $60 on the fiscal year. Oh, yeah. And then on line 90. 90, 20. The cemetery building. Website maintenance. 3,500 and 3,360 is $480. That's $470. That's $110.  I think we found our next job. Well, I did do business. I did work at NYCC. And I was together, I guess I was curious about the buildings and grounds. The only thing I had really sizable increases of the cemetery building and the buildings and grounds. They're up like 40%. I'm sure there's a story I was going to know. We had to go out to bid again, and that's what came in that. But we are into that budget right now, so I wasn't going to go through it line by line, but thank you for pointing that out. I'm a little embarrassed that we have some spreadsheet errors in there. At least it's not huge. So if you look through, go ahead, Roger. Well, I'm just concerned that he pointed out some small errors. How would we go through in the proposed budget and check if there are larger errors? Well, he's on the proposed budget, yeah. We're on the proposed budget, yeah. But I'm saying, I mean, there's a budget that would begin July 1st. I think it's important to remember, everybody, that a budget is the best guess of what we're going to spend on each line. They are not etched in granted, as some people might think. And at the end of the year, some things will be over and some things will be under. If it's a municipal item, then it goes back to the tax base. If it's over and if it's under, then it gets carried forward to the next year. The roads get dedicated as we vote every year to put into a capital fund. So that whatever is either plus or minus on the roads ends up in the real capital account. And these are all done through Excel. I'm surprised that he's got some errors. I've looked these over pretty closely. I didn't catch it. I think what we can make of that, there's a couple of adjustments right now and have a different bottom line vote. Or we can leave the bottom line vote as it was warned. I'm not sure what we should do with that one. I think if we make an adjustment to what wasn't warned, we're limited on about the percentage off that we could be. So it would have to be diminuous. Otherwise, we can only address the one article. The question I have is, is there in the final column of the proposal or is it in the add subtract column? The error is just that 144 versus, you know, which way is in that wrong? It's going across into the proposed budget. So we're right now off by less than $200. Yeah, it's less than $200. $120. Is it in the favor of a lower? It's more. But I agree. But it's not just a guide. This is not a really good thing. But thank you for coming to this grant. You're going to be voted on next time. If we need help. I was just wondering if it pertains to this, because it's a line item in our appropriations that we would be given $1,000 in the regular budget. But then article seven is asking us to vote on whether they're going to become a tax-free building in town, which is around $500 to $600. Depending on how much more improvement happens to it, it's the way it can be taxed on. So that would be, that we would be giving $15 to $16. It's just making that aware of when that vote comes that it's already been given money in this vote. Can I address that question? Sure. So first of all, we've always been tax-free. And in fact, we are final with C3. We don't actually have to come to the town. I need to ask for it. So that has always been true. Secondly, really glad you brought up our guests. I don't know. I don't know why it keeps coming up every couple of years, because it isn't actually necessary budget. But the second thing is the reason that we increased it this year, and you can read about it on page 47, maybe. The Court of School, yeah, 44, we are finally at a point where we're unable to offer some real program. And last year when we talked about this at the town meeting, it was, you know, a question came from the floor if $500 is in fact enough money for what we are trying to do. And we didn't raise it at that point. But this year we came to the town to say, in fact, our operating expenses just for like utilities is about $1,200. The town has been very generous. We really appreciate that people have supported the Court of School. We've gotten in the last, since 2019, a lot of grant money to improve the facility. I want to point out that there is a handout back there with a schedule of programming that we're hoping to run this summer. So we're really trying to make the Court of School into a real community builder. So the extra $500 will be going towards that programming and also to help offset that $1,200 cost. I really don't want the appropriation number at all. Yeah, no, but I appreciate the opportunity to talk about the tax thing, because it has always been that way. We've been a number of profits since the beginning. Next, what is your name? Marilyn. Marilyn? Yeah, I didn't go to town meeting last year, but I think last year the Court of School Resource Center asking for the $500 was a warning article. But this year it's a budget line item. We decided to put an item along with all the other donations that we make as a town. So we didn't have a separate warning article to show for that. Roger. Yeah, I'll just speak on behalf of the Court of School. I'm the president of the board of directors. And we did encourage the select board to have it as a regular line item. And I'm always curious to know, does anybody here object to the mission of the corner school or is something we can do differently? I think we should invest in a fence. Months flatter down. Yeah, right. Because we're really open for anyone who wants to combine and take a look at what's been done. We've been working on that building for almost 14 years. Cheryl, was the select one when we transferred it from the town to the nonprofit? For a dollar. I have a picture of Cheryl holding the dollar. So I would just say to anyone here who has any kind of idea for how we can go forward or any skeptical opinions, please let us know. Do you plan on being open more often or having more than... Please do take a look at that handout. And we are getting to the point where we may be able to be open in the winter but it's still very expensive to keep that building in the winter. We have a heat pump. We have one heat pump with two heads. The main room is not well insulated at the moment but we've got a grant from the council on the arts to put storm windows in the summer and then we'll work on replacing the tent to the roof. Once we do that then we can continue insulating the walls but we have to do... Most of our funds come from the Division of Historic Preservation or matching grants or the preservation trust. So we do plan to be open May through October this year and maybe if it's warmer in there because of the storm windows we might be able to be open all along. Do you have any regular hours or just for when you have the presentation and the puncture? It's a completely volatile organization so I suspect for the future it will be... You have Wi-Fi. We have free Wi-Fi and you can access it just by sitting right out in front of the building in your car if you want to. Or if you want to be inside the building you just have to get in touch with any of us from the corner so we'll let you in. And it's great high speed internet and it's there for the benefit of the community. Which part of that $1,000 is going to no cost that. Any further questions? My name is Diana. I had a question about winter roads. There are strong LWOs and they take a massive job and I think everyone's really happy with it. But the increase from $50,000 to $68,000 it's a 36% increase over the current year budget. Is that written into the three year contract? It should stay the same for three years. There's no escalating clause at every end. And we did go out and bid on that and that was the low bid. I think we were probably getting a deal at $50,000 and we were not getting the quality that we got in this year. So for 2022-23 it was $50,000? This is his first winter so it's this year. So before this it wasn't him? So that's the biggest increase in our budget. It was $18,000 increase on that winter contract. Six month contract. The first snow for the last snow. They take down all the trees when they come down. He's responsible for the sanding and keeping the snow wing back which has been better than I've ever seen it before. I think because the snow now is mostly in the ditches there will probably have a little relief from a real bad mud season but we're right in the midst right now. It's a little early. And sweeping up the sand at the end of the season too. Any further discussion in the back? This isn't a discussion. The lowering clause is going to close in 12 minutes. We're going to call in five minutes to see if anybody's building a tunnel. So we'll meet them. Good. Any other questions on the budget? I think we've hit the highlights on the we try to keep it as close as we can to this year's budget. We talked about mowing in and the plowing are the two biggest increases. Thank you very much. I got a question. On the, let's see, item. The sand in the ground. On the roads. Cut. 813. 15. 18. Okay, let's see. Gravel you have. $50,000 in there. Yup. Item. 52020. Yup. I've been asking the question probably for almost two years that the bull mill owes 12, $15,000 in gravel. And I don't understand why we don't ask for it and or else reduce. Get the money and so we can get a tax break on some of this stuff.  Can you want to talk about that the gravel? We will get the gravel out of that pit. It's the same story. We're we're going to get the gravel out of that pit. It's been taking some time to the working are getting their active 50 permit. However, we're going to get the gravel out of there. Whether or not they have the active 50 permit and it's coming this spring. We just have to get a little bit bigger pile so that the guy that comes in crushes it will actually come down and crush it. Then we can take it out. Wouldn't that be legal to take gravel when you don't have a permit? We have a flooding that happens throughout the area. I don't like it any more than you do. But we need to we need to get some closure on that part of it. I don't know why it's taking the time to get the permit and it shouldn't take this long. I looked on the active 50 site and there's a lot to do with well water engineering and all that stuff. Wouldn't it be easier just to get the money from the contract? The the problem I had had the conversation with Jeff about that and if it doesn't come to fruition then we will get the money. It's not It's been going on for almost a year. There's talk that there could be up to half a million yards of gravel still there and hopefully he'll get his permit together and we'll be able to get our gravel locally. It's less expensive locally and certainly a lot less environmental impact than having all the trucking going across 125 to middle barrier in other directions. We're trying to be patient with him but as you said we will get that gravel this year so it'll be a wash. It doubles the cost of the truckload of gravel to go and get it in the middle of the barrier or the water. The trucking costs and the diesel so we'd like to keep it low if we can. We're not involved in the permanent problem but hopefully that gets resolved and we will get our 700 or 800 yards this spring. State of Vermont turned off our stormwater rain path when we were no longer a manufacturing place they decided to do that we did not decide to do that and now we have to go through the whole process again to get it back on to get the grant to go back because the building is still there even though it's not being used as a manufacturing place anymore and it's not something that we ask to do. It's something that they get on their own and now they want us to pay for it all over again to get it back so he's working on that and we're trying to get it to go through the state rigmarole and that's what it's happening and we can get you a check and you can supreme somewhere else. We did do some work down there to help implement that. All right any other questions on our budget? Anybody move to I'd like to move to the question. Question? All those in favor of adopting the budget as stated usually you can actually say the number. Just in point of order you should read the order. The book and then ask for a vote. Shall the title of the grand vote to accept the budget of $486 to meet expenses and liabilities of the town and authorize the select board to set a tax rate submission to provide the same. We'll go to vote. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? All right. I'll move. Article 3 and next we'll see if anybody will we're going to take a recess so anybody to move to take a recess for 15 minutes. I'll move to your recess. Okay. So people ain't going to vote. We can check on the issue. Next question. Can you please So cool you I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure That's a good idea. You want us to grab the bird? Okay, we're going to bring the meeting back to workers. We're going to move on to the next article, which is Article 4. Shall the town of Brande will vote to authorize the treasure to apply ace or plus remaining from the highway budget's current fiscal year into the highway capital investment funds? Any second? Second. Alright, any discussion on that? No discussion? I think it was mentioned earlier that this and one of the other, Katie, can have pluses or minuses that they can be carried over to run an account. Is it typical to have hundreds of dollars in this? The highway funds have to stay dedicated to highway. And municipal can be used on either highway or municipal, although we keep it pretty well separate. The municipal budget, if there's a surplus or a deficit, it gets carried forward to the next year. The highway goes into a separate capital fund, which we have about $150,000 of capital funds in there now. A lot of that is due to not being able to get the gravel over the years. We will be trucking it if we have to this summer, because we really need to get gravel on the roads. The 700 yards that are owed is just a small amount of gravel that we need for our roads. A tenth. A tenth. Not going to do it all in one year, buddy. Any questions? Good question. Move to vote. All those in favor of adopting Article 4? Aye. Any of those? All right. I would like to move Article 5. Great. Article 5, shall the town of Granville vote to increase the highway capital investment funding amount of $6,000 for the purpose of repaving town roads? How much? How much is in that capital investment fund? That will be $36,000 as of July 1st. Including this $6,000? Yes. The paving of the roads, the contract that we have is for about $130,000 to do the paving. Close to 140. We did get four bids for that, which was amazing. That was the low bid. Pike Industries is going to be doing it, which the big pavers in the state of Vermont sort of surprised that they bid on it. But they were also the low bidder. They would get that done. And this article would just help us pay for the paving. The rest of the money that we need for paving will come out of ARPA money, the pandemic relief money, and our capital surplus in the highway department. One more question. How much is left of the ARPA funds at this point in time? Right now we have about $90,000 in ARPA funds. We bought the computers for the office side of the ARPA funds. I'm hoping that we can use some of that money for math for our handicap accessibility project. But I think we have to have those ARPA funds committed this year. So I don't know how fast this handicap accessibility granting is going to go. But if not, we'll use it either for... We can use it for other budget items, set budget items, or we can use it to help us pave the roads. But there won't be any impact on taxpayers. And was that my July 1 when you said... By the end of the year, by December 31. Thank you for that clarification. And those ARPA rules have changed all throughout.  It's nice the federal government gave this little town $90,000. You know, they gave a lot more based on population. And, you know, that money was very tightly scrutinized when we first got it a couple of years ago that you could only do this or that with it. Now they've opened it up that you can offset budget items and other issues with federal money. But you've got to use it by the end of this calendar year or you lose it because back to the feds. I had a question about the overall capital in Colorado. Is that entirely for paving or is that also for wrapping? The main part of what we've had to carry forward over the last couple of years is the gravel. We've been remiss of putting gravel down on our roads. We've been doing colorful work. We've been doing sections of roads. But our roads need, like Ken would say, how many thousand yards? About eight. Eight thousand yards, he says, okay. So that five is for paving and gravel. Right, right. Dedicated to roads. We did a calculation a few years ago to figure out how much gravel per year would take to maintain the roads and onto a steady maintenance program. And that was about thirty-two hundred yards for the amount of miles of roads that we have. And we've been going backwards for the last few years so we need to get caught back up. Any other questions? Okay, I have a question. So this is my last urban question. And is the value of the select board to determine how those monies are used? Do you have to bring that to us at all because it's completely up to you? It's up to the select board. Is there a possibility that, like, do we have to, like, read the agenda for the select board minutes in order for us to know when those are being allocated? Because it's a lot of money and there might be people in town who would be interested in how that's going to go. We've had our call on our select board agenda every meeting. So, you know, we've been looking to predict the project. But you haven't dispersed a lot. The only thing that's been dispersed out of it is the number of monies. Yeah, we've been talking about it since summer about potentially using it for the ADA acceptability because it seems like that's something that at this point should be here. Other bigger towns I know have formed, like, subcommittees with citizens and having it almost, like, in a grant style, like, a simple formulated form. That's for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I don't know, you know, with the 90,000... I would... Overall budget of about 400,000 dollars now, so that's about a quarter of our budget. It seems like it would be something that the town would want. Yeah, I would love if people brought other... I mean, I know I'm stepping down, so I can't say much. But I think it would be great for people to chime in and, like, have backing up meetings of what they really want the ARCA funds to go to. So that's not just three people deciding where that 90,000 is. Does the 90 have to be spent or just plans to be spent? Because I imagine forming a committee and voting on it may make it more difficult to have it. Yeah, I don't... My understanding the latest I've heard is that it has to be committed in contracts by the end of the year. That we can't just say, well, we want to use our handicap accessibility next year. So, you know, there's... We've had it on our agenda at the board meeting and we've talked about every select board meeting and anybody's got better ideas by all means. There is still time. Okay. Any further discussion on Article 5? Any questions? Call the question and move to vote. Call the question. I'll second that. All right. Article 5, shall the town of Grandville go to increase the Highway Capital Investment Fund in the amount of $6,000 for the purpose of refaving town roads? All those in favor? All right. Any opposed? All right. So moved. You're the last year to see that for a while. I think we'll move Article 6. We'll move Article 6. Second? I'll second that. Article 6, shall the town of Grandville go to increase the Municipal Building Investment Fund in the amount of $5,000 for the purpose of re-painting the municipal complex? Any discussion on that? Any questions? Call the question. Call the question. Okay. Shall the town of Grandville go to increase the Municipal Building Investment Fund in the amount of $5,000 for the purpose of re-painting the municipal complex? All those in favor? All right. Any opposed? All right. That is passed. I'd like to move Article 7. Article 7, shall the town of Grandville go to exempt the Karners School Resource Center from property taxes for five fiscal years beginning July 1st, 2024 and ending June 30th, 2029. Any discussion on that? Call the question. Sounds good. Okay. Moving to the town of Grandville shall the town of Grandville go to exempt the Karners School Resource Center from property taxes for five fiscal years beginning July 1st, 2024 and ending June 30th, 2029. All those in favor? Any opposed? I'll move Article 8. Great. Article 8, shall the town of Grandville go to authorize property taxes be paid to the treasurer as provided by law in four equal installments with due dates beginning October 14th, February 13th and May 15th. Any discussion on that? I'd like to just ask just a question to the could the dates align a little bit more with the state federal estimated taxes or is this kind of I think those dates are set up so the town clerk's office would be open. Right. Oh, that's right. Yes. Any further discussion or questions on that? Any further questions? Okay. I second that. Great. Article 8, shall the town of Grandville go to authorize property taxes be paid to the treasurer as provided by law in four equal installments with due dates beginning August 15th, November 14th, February 13th and May 15th move to vote all those who are in the equal Alright. That was fast. Anybody I'll move article 9 Second. Great. Article 9, shall the town of Grandville go to authorize property taxes will bear interest at a rate of 1% per month or fraction thereof for the first three months after one and one half percent per month or fraction thereof from the two due dates of such tax pursuant 32 Vermont Statutes VSA 5136 Any discussion on that? That's right. Call the question. Alright. Shall the town of Grandville vote that overdue taxes will bear interest at a rate of 1% per month or fraction thereof for the first three months and thereafter one and one half percent per month or fraction thereof from the due date of such tax pursuant 32 VSA 5136 Was it a favor? Any opposed? Alright. That is passed. And? Any motion to bring a proposal to transact any other business to come before the meeting? Any other business that anybody would like to bring forward? I'm sorry. I know. I just want to know this wonderful to see lots of younger faces in town. That's the first thing I want to say. But it's also a little sad to not see some of the older faces in town. I was involved in why we moved this meeting to the time that it now is. But I begin to wonder if we're excluding a lot of the elders in our community who find it hard to come out at dark and I'm just wondering if that's something we might want to revisit for next town meeting the time of day that we have it. I'm just putting that out there. I also miss the days when we used to have a real community supper around town meeting and I just want to put that out there that it would be really great to really think of this as a community event or community proper. We had a supper when we had a school meeting Alright, well I'm well aware. And how much do you call me every year until we bring roles? How do we decide? I think it can be decided that we post a warning next year time and place. I know we used to put it in a warning to have our town meeting next whatever. But I don't think that's required anymore. And if we put up that question now people have time for a beer or to share that and maybe bring forth ideas over the next We've talked about Saturday we've talked during the day but then people work on it. It's a conundrum but this is a small I heard from people that stayed more in common tonight because of the bud. The bud? The bud. It's kind of small. I like my directly. It's project. If I could go on with this one about the idea of continuing it with the way we sort of have it. We wanted to maybe try to say 5.30 until 6 o'clock but what about we can have some younger, more adept people in our community to provide transportation to the older people that maybe don't want to be the ones driving before our own little fairing service to get some of the older people to come to me. If we start to say at 5.30 if we could do something like we did today just find a logical point where we could break and still have some kind of a plot lock gathering that we would get a time frame of how long it would last maybe half an hour or 45 minutes it would still avail us of that socialization that I think is very good in all of the things that have transpired over the last years and I still think we should be out of here by at least an hour to say like 8 o'clock or something like that. I just want to thank Cheryl and Nancy for the snack. Yes. Before we close the meeting Christian. Regarding the time in the meeting it's because we now have both I can't make it on a Saturday or you know it's really nice to work with them and see them through to other times but meeting is with now 6 o'clock it was comfortable but you know I'm going to get out of work till 5 at the Manor Valley so I hate to see if it turns into a day meeting it's still only a 2 hour meeting or 3 hour meeting depending on what's on the docket so it's when it's combined with voting that would shut down some voting for some people that were trying the day or on weekends It's a canal drum. I wanted to personally thank Robert and also for all the help and helping we prepare for this as well as wish you a happy birthday. Oh! I'd work as well. So if you haven't noticed also those of you who have pets we are having our annual rabies clinic it's March 27th in our usual place the Hancock Firehouse from 5 to 7 so I always pass whatever and then some of the town clerks I'm not sure if Cheryl's there I'm not for sure but we'll be able to register your dogs as well so just see where it's the cheapest way to do it not bad to be there we've got all that stuff If any of there are points of business that anybody would like to share before we adjourn alright, well thank you all I have a question so there's some discussion about like teenagers coming on local talent stuff I don't know if we want to maybe encourage that to get some younger younger people started I had that for the first time 16 year olds 16 year olds for both it's a great idea I think that's good we'll get to it next year alright did anybody move to adjourn? I'm mostly to adjourn alright thank you so much see you tomorrow


I think in just about every single case, Candida is self-diagnosed. And what's crazy about Candida is a few years ago, only a few years ago, it wasn't viewed as something real. And if you go to a doctor, especially a gastroenterologist, and say you have Candida, they're going to dismiss it, put you on proton pop inhibitors, and your health is probably going to get worse and worse and worse. So when people are having those digestive issues or brain fog, they start googling their symptoms and Candida comes up and then they think that's what it is. And then they'll go to all of these doctors, usually never end up getting better. Some very high-end, holistic doctors might be able to alleviate symptoms, prevent things from getting worse, but medical doctors especially are not trained in nutrition. And they don't have a super extensive understanding of biochemistry involved in nutrition. The practical experience is important too. Some of those doctors will have clients where they help their digestive issues, but most solutions have been discovered by people with the issue themselves. Now I've done videos on iron in the past, probably half a dozen of them, explaining how it can damage the liver, how most people have access to iron stores in their body, but most of the time it's a past deficiency of synergistic nutrients causing the body to not utilize iron properly.  And if you don't know what Candida is, it's a strain of fungus, yeast in your gut microbiome that normally occurs in smaller amounts, but it can grow out of control in certain disease states. And by disease states, I mean something is wrong with your health. And younger people, it'll happen in people in cities drinking a lot of alcohol, following horrible diets, they're exposed to a lot of radiation, there's a lot of alcohol, sugar, undigested food in their body, and they're a cumulative toxin, so Candida in a way is almost trying to save the day. Iron will make Candida worse. And some of you might be wondering, well, what about all these carnivore dieters that cured their Candida? The carnivore diet is a band-aid. Might work for a few months, might work for a few years, but when that person's digestive problems come back, it's going to be that much harder to fix it with more iron stores and whatever sort of liver damage the carnivore diet causes. Whether you're eating a steak or iron-fortified cereal, multivitamin, the Candida will hold on to the iron from those foods and grow, grow, grow. While I'm assuming Candida is working in a protective capacity to attempt to clear the excess iron in your body, you'll still feel horrible when it happens. Even if Candida overgrowth is the best thing in the world from a healing your body perspective, you will feel horrible, horrible, horrible. And it doesn't just apply to the foods you're eating. If you have excess iron stores in the liver and the iron's being released in the bile, that will also fuel the Candida overgrowth as any other heavy metals or toxins can also do when they're excreted in the bile from the liver. So the first study we have is iron at the center of Candida albicans interaction. Iron is an absolute requirement for both the host and most pathogens alike and is needed for normal cellular growth. The acquisition of iron by biological systems is regulated to circumvent toxicity of iron overload as well as the growth of deficients imposed by iron deficiency. Opportunistic pathogens such as Candida albicans are able to adapt to extremes of iron availability such as the iron replete environment of the gastrointestinal tract and iron deficiency during systemic infection. See albicans has developed a complex and effective regulatory circuit for iron acquisition and storage to circumvent iron limitation within the human host. So the study claims that Candida is an opportunistic pathogen. The researchers not seeming to understand that Candida is a normal component of the gut microbiome. And by finding that Candida can function in various levels of iron saturation, we can assume Candida might not actually need iron at all itself. But yeah, if the person is sick, weakened immune system, destroyed gut bacteria, their body will succumb to Candida in extreme circumstances, almost always under medical care with antibiotics, high radiation environments to remove the body's natural defense systems. Next up we have fungal iron availability during deep seeded candidiasis is defined by a complex interplay involving systemic and local events. Changes in renal iron distribution were apparent early in the infection process before large fungal lesions had developed and significant tissue damage was incurred. So deep seeded candidiasis is a very severe fungal infection where the Candida has migrated to major organ systems, the spleen, the kidneys and mortality rates are very high despite receiving antifungal medications. So that Candida in your gut can actually branch out through the intestinal wall into other parts of your body. Now in that study, if they found that iron distribution was altered in the kidneys before the fungal damage occurred, how can the Candida be viewed as the problem? If the Candida was the issue, the fungal infection would have been there in the first place and we would see the kidney damage before, not after the Candida is there. I would guess, as I've said several times now, the Candida is migrating to organ tissues to attempt to help the body detox toxins and heavy metals. Think about it, you have a lot of toxins in your liver, the Candida starts growing, it's trying to pull the toxins out but you don't want to fix your diet, you are still consuming toxins. Those toxins continue to get stored in the liver, continue to go to the other organ systems. The Candida is just growing and growing and growing, trying to detox those toxins and eventually it's going to migrate to pull those toxins out of your kidneys, pull those toxins everywhere. So hypothetically, if you're perfectly healthy, zero toxins, the Candida will go away which most people don't get to that point. Candida albicans requires iron to sustain hyphal growth. Iron uptake genes are induced by signals that can support prolonged hyphal development in an iron dependent manner. So hyphae for fungus are like roots for a tree. The Candida uses them to branch out to those other tissues in the body. If the Candida can't develop hyphae then it theoretically can't infiltrate other tissues, maybe just a smaller amount through the intestinal wall. There's a lot of stuff to ask here. So we know iron excess. Any toxin or metal excess can cause Candida issues and people do have Candida without iron overload. Those frutarians, vegans, I mean they somewhat have some iron but we know it's possible to have it without a complete overload. Assuming you have some sort of other toxin load or nutrient excess, I wouldn't be surprised if Candida overgrowth actually resulted in iron toxicity itself. Can the Candida be so overloaded with other toxins that it cannot hold onto the iron as well? I don't think any studies have really been done on that. A priority system, maybe they have from that priority perspective of what the Candida is going to go for in the digestive system first. If too much iron comes out of the liver but there's also an excess of halogens like fluoride or other toxins like chemicals, what is the Candida going to grab onto first? The metals, the chemicals, what's going to get reabsorbed? So the point is you have to make drastic lifestyle dietary changes for pretty long periods of time to fix an issue like this where there would be so many toxins in the body. My main point is if you're having Candida, if you're having digestive issues, there really isn't a quick fix but if you get yourself on the right track you should be feeling a lot better very quickly within one to two weeks. So I put some websites over there guys for the first time. We have consultations on frank-defaun.com, Water Key for the best probiotic on frankies-fewrangefoods.com. We have Masticum available on organsupplements.com, the antimicrobial that's least damaging to the liver, and we have Wi-Fi protective clothing on Wi-FiShilling.com which is also incredibly important for gut health. Now hypothetically, if you had a good probiotic, if you were taking Masticum, if you had this protective clothing, Candida would not have happened in the first place but the catalyst, the combination of all of the negative factors that most people put themselves into, the situations, over and over and over again then you have these severe health issues that you really have to buckle down on every single thing. So thank you guys for joining me, hopefully you've learned a little something and you've enjoyed this video. If you can please drop a like on the video, leave a comment down below, subscribe so that YouTube can unsubscribe you next week, and be sure to check that notification bell so they don't notify you of my videos. Thanks again guys and I'll see you for tomorrow.


Yeah, this stock's called Stronger Than Fear, Mental Health and Developer Community. That's me at the bottom, I'm Ed Finkeler. That's my organization that started OSMI Help is the handle. This is elixir days, if you didn't know that. It is March, it is 2017. We are hashtagging those two right now. And I wanna thank Prom for getting us here. The Prom's an organization I've been involved with for about four years as one of the speakers that they've supported. For about a whole year, Prom was the only way that I got around to speak at different conferences. And now, we are sort of doing a little bit of our own thing too with OSMI, but it's a cool organization. I hope that you check it out. It's an opportunity to have people come and speak. So this is a new conference, so who am I? Who it is, talking about. I'm the CTO of a company called Graph Story. We do graph databases as a service, if you're curious about that, talk to me some other time. I'm a web developer for about 20 plus years. Mostly I do PHP, JavaScript, some Python, I do DevOps, I do some design, I'm not very good at it. Things like that. I'm a dad, I'm a husband. Local community participants served on some school boards, things of that nature. Now, I do have a question. When I asked, hey, would you like to come to elixir days and come talk, I was like, okay, yeah, what's an elixir, buddy? I think I picked up some of those, play in Diablo. I don't really know what you're talking about. And then I read out, and I said it was Erlang and I stopped reading. So it's like, this is not for me, it's not. I did not get into web development to have things with colons and semicolons and different things and the lines and I don't know what the hell's going on with that stuff. I don't know, I'm not into computers like you guys are. Now, during my career, I have sometimes been called a webmaster. How many of you have been ever called a webmaster? Raise your hand. All right, you're about as old as I am then, perhaps. I had that title up until like 2010, which is really pretty disturbing, but academia doesn't move that fast, so. And I found that I've been doing open sourcing mental illness as a campaign since 2012. I've been speaking about mental illness in tech since 2012. I'm the founder and chairman of the board of the OSMI non-profit, 511c3. We started that in 2016. I'm not a doctor, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a medical expert. I'm certified in something called mental health first aid, but that's it, that's like a course you take for a day. So don't ask me to diagnose you or your children. I am here, though, to talk about what it's like to have a mental illness or a couple, from my perspective. And to talk about how mental health affects our community and our industry.  Now I feel like I really screw up the timing on that. So, everybody, who's ready to weep uncontrollably? All right, get ready for it, yeah! Come on! All right, because this is the uncomfortable audience participation session, so I'm gonna need y'all to clap for me. We're gonna clap in rhythm now. I got this microphone, so I'm gonna elbow it here and we're gonna clap together, let's do it, yeah! Come on, let's get together, we're gonna get pumped up, we're gonna do a lot of sales, we're gonna get out there, we're gonna sell those Glen Gary, stop, stop. I didn't, there's no reason for that. I didn't do it, I just did it to see if I could make you guys clap. I really didn't, there's no purpose to it. Thanks, buddy, I appreciate that. Keep going, keep going with your thing, man, I like that, we're gonna talk to you about volunteering. All right, but I do have some questions for you, so you're gonna need to wanna raise your hand, you're gonna wanna get that big big going here. Now I got a question for you, how many of you here wear glasses or contacts?   Anybody?  I'm sorry for you, sir. I think the entirety has failed you, I think.  Embarrassed that you have to wear them out in public? Any of that, anybody here? Maybe you should be, I don't know, depends on what kind of glasses you have, I don't know. No, that's fine. So we're pretty comfortable with that, we're comfortable with this idea of having an eye and ocular crutch that we generally, most of us have to use because in the good old days we would die by 30 and no one cared about our eyesight at that point and it also didn't matter if you read or could do math. So, okay, so glasses, not an issue, we're all comfortable with this, everybody has to do it, right? Everybody has to do that in order to cope in society to get by, to be productive, we have to do those things. All right, I got another question for you, something perhaps a little more serious, perhaps a little bit more morbid. Diabetes, my dad and my brother both have type two diabetes so I'm probably pretty much screwed in that respect, genetically speaking, but I'm curious about you. Now, let's talk about the workplace for a second. How many of you, no, you're not gonna go in there and tell them, hey, buddy, diabetes, but how many of you like you come into work and somebody's talking about diabetes, the topic comes up, would you feel comfortable discussing that? Not excited, not like this is, man, I haven't been waiting the whole time, talk about two things, that observer thing, an elixir, that I guess makes flow charts, and diabetes. That's not probably how that's gonna go over, but would you be comfortable if the topic came up? I would like you to raise your hand if that's the case. It's not the case I count you as not and I will give you an F. Okay, all right, so a lot of people, some people not, some people like that, it's kind of none of your business, buddy, I don't wanna talk about that. Now another thing, and diabetes is something that's common, but it can also be deadly, untreated, it can lead to people's deaths, it's a serious thing. Now, cancer, that's how I like to start off a lot of sentences. Cancer, I had a brother die from cancer the last two years, and I think a lot of us, maybe most of us have had cancer touch our lives one way or another, whether we've known somebody, whether we've had it ourselves, it's very serious. We've lost friends, family members to that. Now I'm just curious if you'd raise your hands. Again, maybe not excited about it, but if the topic, somebody mentioned something about cancer comes up at work, would you feel okay talking about it? I'd like you to raise your hand if you'd be okay with that. All right, so most people, all right, fair enough, fair enough, okay. All right, so how many people would be okay talking about mental illness at work? So a lot less, so I was under the majority, I would say, maybe we got 25%, 30%. It's interesting to see that juxtaposition. How about with your boss? Raise your hand if you'd be cool talking about that with your boss. Maybe about the same amount. How about a family, friend, something like that, somebody you're close with that you trust? More people, more people, not a surprise. I want you to keep thinking about that as we talk about this stuff. Talk about some of these very impactful diseases or groups of diseases and how we talk about mental health. So I want you to think about that while we're going through this stuff. Oh, I left my water bottle over there. PJ, this cable's not long enough, I can't get over there. Please retrieve it, thank you, sir. All right, very good, very good.  I don't even have to get up anymore. Just type in this code. Now back to me is my favorite topic. So I have two things, I've generalized anxiety, so I've been diagnosed with two things, whatever it means. I've generalized anxiety disorder, that's the first diagnoses I have. So basically what I describe that as I have fight or flight reactions when it's not appropriate. Now it's appropriate to have a fight or flight reaction, a major stress reaction, as anxiety response in your body. If a lion's about to eat me, that's kind of what human beings were designed to do. So if there is an imminent existential threat, we gotta do something about it. Either I gotta roundhouse kick this lion or I gotta run like hell to get away from this lion, neither of which is going to work, but that's the one you're supposed to have this reaction. All right, supposed to have a reaction like that, that kind of case.  And you start, in fact, different hormones go through your body, you get adrenaline going, you get all sorts of stuff going on. It's, your physiology changes in that. It's not just a thing, it goes just in your head. No, actually, it's everywhere in your whole body.  Now it's not appropriate to have that kind of reaction. When you're walking in, you're supposed to be walking into a bar to meet your friends, it's a bar you've never been to before and you don't really know sort of like what it's gonna be like when you walk in, you don't know how big it is. There's, for some reason, two doors, both on the front of the building and you don't know which one to go in.  Maybe you'll just go back to your car and sit there for like half an hour and eventually just drive home. I've done that. I've done that more than once. I've had that reaction. Because I got so freaked out because I didn't know what kind of situation I was getting myself into. It's not appropriate to have that when you're gonna take the bus across the way. I wanna go see some, I don't know, some ghost pirate or something like that around here, or something like that.  I don't know. And you gotta take a bus to go over there and you're like, you mean like by myself? So how does this work? Do I just give them a 20 and they give me change? I don't know. What is this? I have to get a car? I don't know how this works. There's very poor onboarding for public transportation generally. And stuff like that really freaks me out. When there's like rules and I feel like I don't understand those rules and I don't know how to do that, it is very scary for me to get in that kind of new environment. That kind of freaks me out a lot. And I have a strong fight or flight response in a lot of situations like that. Not appropriately. I know it's not the case. I know it's not the case that it's actually a danger but I feel it anyway. And I also have something called, which you may have heard of ADHD. Maybe you've heard of that. And I think there's a couple things that traditionally, this is something that stereotypically is associated with developers a lot. I don't know if it is actually more prevalent or not, but I have some of those things that I think are common. I have sort of trouble focusing. I tend to jump from one thing to another a lot. I have a lot of avoidance of less appealing tasks. And avoidance is sort of a, there's a gradient there, right? There's like, I don't really feel like doing that. I'll do it tomorrow. And then there's, I'm just gonna leave that bill sort of piled over here. And when I remember to do it, I don't feel like I'm not gonna get up off the couch to pay it.  It's not like I didn't have the money. I just avoided it and kept forgetting it. And that has happened to me before. What just like, or it's like, there's a task I have to do at work. Boy, I really don't feel like doing this task. I really don't want to do that part. And you know, maybe just for like two weeks, I just won't do it. Instead of like, I'll just push through it. So I do that. And then there's a couple of things that I think go along with that matter often commonly associated with ADHD that sometimes we don't think about as much or sort of in the common knowledge of the general populace is that I think a lot of people with ADHD have a really low frustration threshold. So if something is difficult, if something's confusing, things like that, some of us who have these, they're diagnosed with this condition, tend to get frustrated a lot more quickly. And our emotions tend to be more intense. So it means that when we get frustrated, we get really frustrated. Like ridiculously frustrated. There's no, it is in no way consistent with how frustrating this should be. It is not that big a deal, but we get really upset about it. And I'm really good with, this is sort of a fun combination of ADHD and anxiety disorders, is that I'm super good at constructing bad outcomes. Like I can make a connection between A to B to C to D to see these events and how they might play out. So constructing a hyper super bad outcome and then really, really focusing on it and just assuming that that is what is actually going to happen. And going forward with my life as if that's going to happen and being very, very, very stressed until something externally tells me, oh no, it's okay, everything's cool. Like, I don't know, some of us have probably always had that thing where say a boss or a manager or something has said, hey, when you come in on Monday to get something late Friday, it's like, hey, when you come in on Monday, we need to have a meeting. You're like, oh boy, that's a rough, uh-oh. That's a little tough. And that's not fun, but probably most of us have some ability to sort of distract ourselves from that and some ability to sort of take that away and say, okay, but what can I do about it? Well, that's a little weird, but okay, fine. I wish you would have told me what was going on. I will say, well, I'm losing my job. I'm gonna be homeless in two weeks. I will never get hired again.  And it's just, I'm just gonna pack my bags, fill up the tank and go to Mexico. There's nothing else left for me here in this world. So, and it turns out you get there Monday and it's like, hey, so yeah, how was that project going?  It went really well. Yay. And you're like, oh, thank God. Because you've been sweating the whole time and your whole weekend has just been a disaster because you've been anxious and depressed in combination of the whole time. So you're just in bed constantly, but can't fall asleep and it's just a living nightmare.  That's happened to me a lot too. So I take medication and every day I have to take some pills. That's what I do, I take, because I have these chronic things that don't, it's sort of like, well, we sort of adjusted things and things got better in my life and stuff like that. A lot of stress stuff that was going on was going away. No, I seem to be capable of just generating that internally. So that's been something that I've had to do for the last almost 30 years is I have to take some kind of medication every day. And I also see a therapist every month about now and I talk about how and why I do the things that I do and we talk about sort of what's happened since we last were there and challenges maybe we had, situations I was in where I didn't really deal with them the way that I would have liked and then try to come up with strategies to address those things. How can we maybe modify sort of my behaviors or some of the very quick responses that I have to certain kinds of things happening to me. And without going into great detail about it, generally I view my therapist as sort of a coach for my brain who helps me figure out how to maybe change how I react to things. That's how it works out for me. It could work out differently for you, but that's kind of how it works out for me. Now, one of the things to remember is that it impacts my work every day. My work as a developer, my work as a, I guess, a CTO, yeah. CTO, that's scary. It impacts my work every single day. There's not a day that goes by where I'm not quote unquote dealing with it because it is how my brain works and I try to modify that to make it more productive and less problematic through medication, through therapy, practice, through exercises, but it doesn't go away. And sometimes it absolutely gives me superpowers. There are certain aspects of the job I have, of the jobs I have had, that I am very good at because of the way my brain works. It is absolutely the case. You know, human being, people's minds are really, really good pattern-matching machines. We are very, very good at that. That's why we see faces on Mars is because of really, really good pattern-matching machines. So we're like, oh, there's a face right there. We're really good at that. I'm really good at that. I'm really good at making connections that other people often don't see. And so that, I just, there are a couple things that that helps with, it's good, I'm good at anticipating security issues pretty well, like, hey, if we do this on the backend, how does that impact, like, what a person's able to send into our system and how do we sanitize and validate that and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about how I behave and why I behave the way that I do. And that interests me, and it also interests me in then learning about what other people, why they do the things that they do, why human beings work the way that they work. And I often am very good at quickly empathizing with, say, how users will tend to interact with things, I think more so than people who are mostly backend developers, which I guess realistically I'm mostly a backend developer. I tend to empathize with users very well. I try to think about, can I put myself in their shoes and then I can say, okay, that thing, if they might want to do this, this affects this, this, this part of our application stack all the way up to the back. And a lot of people aren't necessarily as good of that as I am. I'm not necessarily a great programmer, in fact I'm kind of a shit programmer, but in general, I'm good at a lot of aspects of my job because of this. I really am, and I like that a lot. I'm glad, I'm really glad. It has been advantageous for me. And sometimes it absolutely ruins me. Sometimes it renders me completely unproductive and craters my day and I can't get anything done. One of the toughest aspects of dealing with mental health issues is feeling alone. You know, I've been to conferences with thousands of people and felt utterly alone in the middle of it, surrounded by all these people and felt completely unable to connect with any of them. Because I felt like I was incapable of acting and behaving normally. And I was the only person who felt like this and everybody else seems to be able to cope okay and I can't and I don't understand why. I felt incapable of living the life that I do of existing in this world that we live in. I feel, I felt like I often still feel like I always screw up and I always fail and everyone I love will grow tired of me and leave. I have often felt that way. And it's only in the past couple of years that I think I fundamentally started liking myself. I mean, I only needed 40 years to get there but that is fundamentally very difficult. And that is one of the hardest things that you deal with. And I think speaks not only to the nature of mental health and mental illnesses but also to the nature of how our society copes with it. There's a lot of people who feel this way. A lot of people dealing with similar things that I do or dissimilar but still things that separate them from communities. And we are social animals. There's no doubt about it. Now if we're talking about the worldwide community, just human beings in general and as we exist on this planet, one place we might start looking at is an interesting study called the Global Burner Disease of the World Health Organization. They conducted this in 2004, released it in 2008. And in that they stated that the burden of mental disorders is the largest of all disorder categories in North America. I'm gonna use my fun little pointer here. Greater than cardiovascular disease and greater than cancer. That the burden of mental disorders. When they talk about there's a metric they use to measure this called disease burden that takes lives lost and also time lost, productive time lost to a disease or a set of diseases. And in North America, the group that causes the largest burden are mental disorders. And this is a quote from there. In all regions, neuropsychiatric conditions, all regions worldwide, neuropsychiatric conditions are the most important causes of disability accounting for around one third of years lost to disability among adults aged 15 years and over. They are the most important causes of disability worldwide and a third of year productive years lost to disability comes directly from that group of conditions. That is a major impact, major impact. So we look at the tech community. Let's talk about the tech community for a second and we're all part of that probably would say that. Part of this tech community. There's basically no research done in it, essentially. There's very, I have looked at a couple, very small studies, social science studies that have been done, but there's essentially no work done in it. So, open sourcing mental illness does some of that. We took that upon ourselves because there wasn't good information. And we wanted to measure some of the things that sort of anecdotally we thought was going on. Well, what do we know about this stuff? So, we've done for two years in 2014 and 2016. We'll probably do one in 2017 too. We do something called mental health and tech survey. And this is data from our 2016 survey which is actually still open. And this is data that I just pulled down as of today. So this is up through March, is this March 2nd? I hope so. Let's say it is. And this just includes people in the US. And this just includes people who are not self-employed. There are differences in other countries about how medical care is provided. And primarily in the US, the workplace is your conduit for healthcare. You pretty much have to go through your workplace for healthcare for the most part. That's how our society has mostly set it up for most people. So if you're self-employed, it's a little bit different. That's how we have it here. Now even including this, that we still have about 700 responses. We had about 1500 responses in total in 2016. And these are, I want you to keep this in mind that these are opt-in surveys. So these are things that are gonna have some bias in terms of self-selection. Keep that in mind. But I think there's a lot of interesting things we can learn about this. So we've asked a few questions. I'm gonna show you just a few questions from this survey. Do you think that discussing a health issue with your employer would have negative consequences? And we asked about physical and we asked about mental. So with physical, 72% of people said no. Do not believe that there will be negative consequences for discussing a physical health issue with my employer. Maybe 25%, only 4% said yes, I believe there would be. Obviously that's gonna be very based on the physical issue they're thinking about. But it gives you an idea about attitudes towards those kinds of things. Potential fears, potential, we know what are you okay with discussing? Now let's look at what the results for mental health. Yes is about six times higher, 23%. No is about half at 36%. And maybe goes up to 41%. So only about a third of people could say no, there would not be any negative consequences. Two thirds of people said yes or maybe. That's a significant difference. Keep this in mind when we're talking about when we've learned about the impact of mental disorders, the impact that they have on productivity. Keep these things in mind when we're looking at these numbers. So a second question, would you bring up a health issue with a potential employer in an interview? I've been asked this question often about how do I deal with that? I'm somebody who deals, has a mental health disorder. How do I evaluate if a company is going to be supportive of me? There's legal protections that are in place that are supposed to help you, like the Americans with Disabilities Act. But how do you actually go about that, evaluating it without sort of playing your hand and somehow making it so you're not going to give people a reason not to hire you? Now with physical health issues, we asked about again, physical and mental health. Physical health issues, would you bring it up 24%? Only about a quarter said yes. And that's not surprising. Most people don't want to give a reason to not hire some. But a lot of these things you think, only no said 36% maybe said 40% depends on the thing. Some people are going to have issues where it's like, yeah, I got a bum knee, but I'm a programmer so it really doesn't matter that much. Some physical health issues that have nothing to do with their job are going to be impactful. Like yes, I might be interested in getting pregnant in the next two years. That's the thing that women have been taught not to say ever to potential employers because despite ADA law, there's a good chance they're not going to get hired. Now if we're talking about mental health issues, let's look at that and compare it. Only 7% of people said yes, they would bring it up with a potential employer in an interview. 68% said no, maybe it's down to 26%. Far fewer said yes, far fewer said yes. Now if we look at does your employer provide resources to learn more about mental health issues and how to seek help. A key aspect of the fact that the workplace is that primary conduit for healthcare and if people are going to seek out help, oftentimes the employer has to be in a position. What we found is the employer has to be in a position that they are providing resources, helping people, encouraging people to seek help. Yes, only 30%, no was over a third, don't know was a third. So two thirds of people over, two thirds of people said I don't know or know my workplace doesn't provide resources. And that is a key aspect of why people don't seek treatment. Another slide here. Do you feel that being identified as a person with a mental health issue would hurt your career? I think it's a really fundamental question you get to the matter of it. If you're identified that way, is that going to hurt your career? Of the people surveyed, only 12% said no, I don't think it would or no it has not. 88% said maybe or yes. Think about if that was a thing, if I was identified as a person with diabetes would it hurt my career in tech? You'd be like what the hell? That is absolutely incredibly discriminatory. It is also incredibly discriminatory in this case. But the fact is that most people are afraid to talk about it. And again, this is a self-selective survey but this is an interesting thing that we found. Again, self-selective survey, you have to keep that in mind with it. But of the responses that we got, and this is including US people who are not self-employed, have you been diagnosed with a mental health condition by a medical professional? And in the responses we got, we had 56% of our responses said yes, they've been diagnosed by a medical professional, with a mental health condition. To give you an idea of the baseline that most people, most studies put it at in say the United States, is 19 to 20% of the general population, is dealing with a mental health condition in a given year. I would suspect that the actual rate is lower than this but based on these kinds of numbers, it would also indicate that it's probably higher in the tech community than it is elsewhere. And more of a problem than the tech community than it is elsewhere. And regardless of that, regardless of that, that this is reported three times higher than the norm, at the end of it, sick workers don't work or they're significantly less productive. If you're sick, you don't work as well. It doesn't matter what you're sick with, you don't work as well. So it's in the interest of organizations to help these people. Do you want productive employees? Then maybe you should help them be healthy. If you don't help them or you contribute to their problems, you make it more likely that they're going to have mental health issues. You're in fact hurting yourself. And I ask that question, so what is the upside? What's the upside other than trying to change your workplace, trying to adjust those kinds of things, trying to change some of those numbers that we see, those fears that we see? What's the upside other than just being, I don't know, like a normal, nice human being who cares about people? Because it benefits your organization and everybody in it, because mental wellness means better employees, period, end of story. Employees feel valued and secure and work more effectively when employers demonstrate a commitment to their wellbeing. When I think about the jobs that I liked the most, it wasn't the work I was doing in general. It was the people I was working with. Did I feel like they had my back when I had theirs? Did I feel like I could trust them? Did I feel like they genuinely had my best interests in heart because they wanted me to be healthy and happy? Those are the jobs I love the most. I've always loved them most. The place I work right now, that's the kind of environment we have. And I will continue to do everything I can to make sure we have that environment as we grow as a startup. I think most people feel that way too. When we talk about jobs we liked, we talk about the people we worked with. When we talk about jobs that sucked, we talk about the people we worked with and what it was like. It's not, oh gosh, I had to do Java. I can do shitty work if I like being with those people. I can do work that I enjoy or don't enjoy or whatever. I have to, a job gets bad, Brad, anyway, but sometimes. But people wanna work with you if you put that kind of thing out there. More people wanna work someplace that respects them fully, that doesn't ignore their well-being. So if you demonstrate values, if you demonstrate values that your organization cares about the well-being of its employees, is genuinely concerned about it and takes actions appropriate to implement that, you're gonna get better employees. People wanna work for you, but change is hard. Change is difficult. We're scared, we don't know what to do because there's a lot of, boy, I really, I think most people in general want to do the right things in these areas, can see why you should be doing those things and have no clue about what to do because they have no training and we don't talk about it, so it's very hard to find information or resources. We might be afraid of endangering our workplace. I, as a CTO, I make a mistake, maybe that could really screw us up. Opens us up for a lawsuit, maybe. Maybe that's what HR tells us. A lot, especially when lawyers start getting involved, they don't want you to do that. I've heard plenty of stories about HR setting up policies that very clearly protected the company and made things more difficult for people to seek help and to feel trusted, or feel like they can trust their folks, but at the same token, we're also afraid of losing our jobs or not getting our jobs. Look at that, if I think that I'm gonna be labeled as, if I'm known as somebody with mental health issues, how many people feel like it's not going to impact them negatively, 12%. So at OSMI, we're doing a lot of work in that respect. Handbooks, things like that, but here's three things I can tell you. Right now that you can go, you can download right now to start changing things. The first thing is you can get our handbooks, as we know, I just talked about them. We have handbooks for employers and employees co-written by people who actually know what they're talking about, a mental health professional who works at, a psychologist with a PhD who works at a Silicon Valley startup, and also co-written by an organizational psychologist. Now, two of them are for navigating ADA laws that deals with mental health in the tech workplace. One for employers and one for employees. Then we have a third handbook that specifically is about how to create supportive workplaces that promote mental wellness. Nobody else is doing this kind of stuff and we're putting it out there as Creative Commons Licenses is available for free. So you do the work. You wanna make a change, you do the work. We've made those resources available. Secondly, speak openly about mental health. You have to fight that stigma. That does not mean that you go and you way, way, way over talk, excuse me, over share, like I do, my therapist says I have a confessional personality, she is correct. But you can talk about the subject openly, the same way that maybe you talk about, you might be okay talking about diabetes. Something like that if that comes up. It might not be your favorite thing in the world to talk about, it might be something that you have a lot of hard emotions associated with. But what I have found and I believe is absolutely the case is that my ability to speak openly about these issues, I have been told directly impacts people's willingness to discuss it and seek help on an individual basis. You have a great deal of influence on your social groups and the communities you choose to participate in. So you've got to use it. You use that influence you have. Even if you think you don't, you absolutely do because we are social animals. And if somebody demonstrates that they're not afraid, the rest of us are less afraid. I hit the wrong button. Thirdly, and I think this is just a key thing, this is not something that you'll find in a great training manual or something like that. Tell people they matter. Because lots of us feel like it doesn't matter, that we don't really matter. Tell them how they impact your life positively. How strong and how great they are. Maybe you admire them. If you think about Sitback, it's like, wow, just amazing stuff. One of the other speakers at the speaker dinner last night told me about some stuff that has to do with his life and how he's put together his family and some of the choices that they've made. And I immediately needed to tell him that what he is doing is very special and very important. And I told him that because I didn't know when I was gonna get a chance to do that again.  So I needed to tell him right then. I needed to tell him because he needed to know. Because probably not a lot of people just go up and tell him that stuff. Everybody needs to hear these kinds of things. Everybody needs to hear that they matter. So often we feel like we don't. Well, what, I'm, and we think, you think about it, it just plays into everything, imposter syndrome, willingness to participate in the communities. I'm not that big a deal, da, da, da, da, da. Most of us tell ourselves those kinds of things.  You matter a huge amount and you have a huge impact in the groups that you associate with.   And I've had to do a lot of work internally to do that, to tell myself that I do matter, but it sure helps when other people tell me too. And I guarantee you, there are lots of people you know who are in the exact same boat. They've probably never told you. They don't reveal it, they're afraid to, but they are in the exact same boat. Well, I wanna bring this back, talking about sort of what we do, how we do it, all this kind of stuff. We've only got a couple more minutes, I know. Communities are about people and not code. Sometimes you think to yourself, is that really true? Well, we're all here at this electric confere about this stuff. You know the thing that I heard that people are saying about what was so great about the community? Is that, I don't know, some dude never heard it. What's his name, Jose?  And that's what they really like about this community. That's what matters. It's not the code, it's the people. The code is a MacGuffin. The code is sort of the thing that brings people together, but the community is about the people and how they interact and how they support each other. So we're talking about our community here. We're talking about our colleagues and we're talking about our friends, our people, those people who work in tech who enjoy these kinds of things together. This community, our community, our chosen folks, our chosen families. And these folks suffer in silence. A lot of them suffer in silence and sometimes they disappear. Sometimes we lose them and we're left to wonder and regret and try to understand why that happened. And there's some that we can save and some we can't. But only fear allows this. The only reasons we allow so many to suffer in silence and the only reason we don't save more of our kin and more of our kids is because of fear. It's the only reason. So you've got to choose. We all choose. You and I and everybody in here chooses. We can choose to give in to fear. We can choose to hide. It's easy to hide. It is comfortable to hide. It is comfortable to be silent and it is comfortable to be quiet and hide from these things. I know, because I do a lot of hiding. I do a lot of hiding. This stuff is not for the weak. This is not for the indifferent or those who are content to be comfortable. But we can be in action with action and we can meet confusion with understanding and we can meet indifference with compassion. If we choose to be stronger than fear. Thank you very much. Thank you.