to accept the agenda as amended. So moved. Second. Second in all in favor? Aye. As normally are custom, we will open up the floor to public comment or inquiry related to items not on the published agenda. Yes, Hallie. I just want to update or make sure that I have the approval that Dr. Henman is now a member of the recreation committee. So he should submit a letter of interest to the select board so that we can see his interest and review it on my phone again. So I'll tell you the point by the select board. Yeah. And it's great if you have his interest, you should share that with us. Okay. Thank you. The written letter or email would be great. For the other public comment or inquiry, so hearing none, we will, we had a set of agenda for 615, start our discussion about the budget. We have a regular meeting to hold after that. I don't want to necessarily cut out anybody from the public that would attend at 615. So does the board feel like you would like to move on to some of our other items like the town manager's report and start our public information meeting at 615 or do you want to just jump into it? I'm okay with moving forward. There's a few faces that I don't see here yet that I would think would be here. Mary. Mary. Lloyd. What? Are you? Hold on moving forward. Yeah. Do you think you have less than 10 minutes of discussion? All right. So then let's hear our point. Do you need anybody from here to come in? I'm sorry, Mary. I can just, we're shuffling things around to make sure that we have enough public interest. Do you need any of your committee members to be here? All right. All right. So we'll hear Mary's and just move her one more forward and then we'll... Okay. I'm seeking approval of the select board to allow a committee to be formed to further explore possible options for the building property. And there's a reason why you don't, why the conservation commission wouldn't follow that? Well, the conservation commission is definitely interested. As one of your statutory authority, do you have the ability to evaluate conservation properties that take action on those on behalf of the town? Right. There are some other parties which are interested too. We've talked to the White River Connections in St. Louis. They have resources to help with that. And also White River Partnership. Mary Voss. So I would like them to be members of the committee. I don't know how many people we want on it, but it seems like maybe four or five is more. I don't think that the board has any problem with exploring the possibilities of conserving that property. I'm just concerned to be redundant. There's no reason I think that the conservation commission doesn't, I think they have authority to interact with other organizations, particularly those that could be assisting in funding such a project. I guess I'm not exactly sure why it would be in the virtue of the conservation commission to just move ahead with this. And part of it- It's also the purpose of requesting this is so that you as a select board are aware of our interest and what we're interested in doing. Yeah, yeah. As much as anything. I'm just not sure that we need to appoint another committee. I think that we could say, yeah, go ahead and work with those organizations and let us know what the end result is. Part of the idea here was that she wanted to pursue the property and funding and the cost from the current owner. And the conservation commission and the current owner hasn't got a real great relationship. Yeah, that could be resolved. I mean, you have absolutely, you have state legislative statutory authority to take on this action. You don't need the select board to review your interest in conservation of property. And to ask these other groups to join us, that's- Yeah, I mean, they aren't going to join you, and they're going to join us in the same long as organizations. They can join in the effort and they can, whatever funding, scheme, and formula ends up being the result that's potentially purchased the property. I think that is entirely illegal without us breaking them in as part of the committee. I'm just making sure that under the statute, you can formulate your own subcommittees in there to do an award prospector.  These other organizations, for example, the River Conservancy has the, have the structure to do such things as part of the conduct of the case. Yeah, yeah. That's what we're interested in. Do not break your basis, which we do not. Right. So- Actually, we've tapped into that, clearly, yeah. We've tapped into that resource, clearly, I have to be- Yes, we've already had a discussion on that. Yeah, well, I made that connection to that purpose, so I'm not a dissent behind it. So we just need to move forward as we are. Yeah. But I think it's great that you've updated us. I think it makes a lot of sense for the town to agree to hear what you have to say about it. Yeah? Well, I mean, that's one of the things that's confusing. You know, the Conservation Commission is a town committee, as if it's a subcommittee of the town, and it is, but it's been actually given, enabling legislation from the state of Vermont to perform certain duties in conservation in the interest of the town, so that it's not, your actions are not interfered by the political fickleness of a select board. You actually have the thought. And I would say that that would be an important, this is exactly the kind of example of a project that fits into that category. So you can move forward with this in the best interest of the community. So we're getting a pretty good crowd. There's still only 10, but thank you very much, Mary. You're welcome. I want to give them another five minutes to get here and we can hear the town manager report. All right, so everybody that's come in, we're just moving ahead with our normal scheduled agenda because we arranged to start the information meeting at 6.15 and we want to wait to make sure that everybody who wants to be here at the beginning is here. So we've got five more minutes. We're going to move ahead to the next agenda item, which is our town manager report. So my report is in your packet. Couple of highlights here I've been, so we applied for a grant about a year ago for the painting of the steeple on town hall. Yeah. So we went out to bid, keep it going out to bid before I'd started and we got only one bid back and it was pretty high. So I've been exploring other options. I think I've finally got a local painter out of Randolph, I believe, who's bid on it and it's going to be within budget, to be below budget actually, and we'll not only get the lower part, but we'll get the top part also. So I'm putting together, or they're putting together all the credentials and their insurance and all that so we can send it to the state and have them approve it. If they approve it, then we'll go forward with it and we should be able to get this done summertime. So that's exciting. We found out that it's not lead paint that's on there, it was the other paint that was used before and it has failed. So they're using the same material that we had called or Keith had called Benjamin Moore Paints and got recommendation on what to use. And this painter said that's exactly what I would use. So as long as they meet all the state's requirements for historic, they've told me that they've done projects at the local colleges. They've done historic buildings at the local colleges. So as soon as I get there, what's that? I'm familiar with them. All right, yeah. So we'll see if they come back and are qualified, we'll move forward with them and they'll get that done. So that's exciting. Thank you. So as far as the utility department, we're just kind of moving forward. I will be having a meeting on the 28th myself and our engineers and Tim Mills will be having a meeting with, with Aldridge and Elliott to start the water master plan. This is that document that if you remember, we'll put together that tells us where our system's at or our system's going, what sorts of capital improvements we need to look at, rate structures, all that. So we have a kickoff meeting with our engineers on the 28th to start that whole plan. Bridge 33, I'm actually working on another grant the next year's structures grant. If you remember this grant was, we'd originally gotten a grant for this for the entire project, engineering, design, and construction and engineering came in more than we thought it would. So I talked with the state and they said, why don't you just reduce the first grant down to engineering costs only and then get that engineered and then we'll go out to bed next year with a new grant. So we're, I'm applying for that. We should get that. Shouldn't be a big problem to get that. And we'll be able to get it next summer, hoping to get bridge number 33 fixed. And then for anybody that doesn't know that's the high bridge in Millingville. Yeah, and it was, it's been categorized or it's been, I think it was two years ago, it was inspected and they found that the footing was undermined and it had some structural issues. So this is a grant to repair that bridge. Unfortunately, it'll mean it'll have to be that road will have to be closed for probably a week or two, but we'll get that all figured out as we get there. Let's see, the property that we were just talking about the bill of new property. So there was a proposal that went to the DRB about a foreplex, I believe it was, that was that they didn't pass. So he is going to be appealing that decision in environmental court. So I've got the paperwork on that, but it's just kind of an FYI on that. Other than that, I don't really have anything else. There's some other things I want to discuss later on, but as far as kind of the operations and how things are going, we're just trying to keep up. Let's get up with mud now. That seems to be the issue of the day. Yeah, thanks a lot. All right, well, that's a good start. It's filled in the gap, it's 13 minutes after six. Yes, Mary? Yes, question about that last point. When, I remember that there was a discussion after the appeal of Dowler General's proposal, which was denied at the local level, and what was learned is that the town of Bethel didn't have some, I don't want to minimize it, but didn't have some special designation paper in the state, has that been done? Has all the administrative procedures not been done exactly, so why are people in it? Did you want to speak to that? So has it been done? Well, the reason why the second one wasn't done that way is because it had already started. Yes, but I'm asking really in light of this one, is it real? He's saying it was not followed in this either because it had already been started. He had already filed the permit prior and it had begun without using administrative procedures. Yeah. So it's the same, it's under the same understanding. But we are working towards moving to that and having everybody sweared in as a... And we also do have, I mean, we have full transcript for the proceedings, so anybody who did testify, who was test of moaning, was pertinent to the decision of the DRB who will be given an opportunity to speak to that as an interested party. Can I ask you a question about that? Yeah. There was a question last time about interested parties. Do those people who already spoke, are they able to speak through the town rather than make themselves become interested persons? I don't think that's right. You have to testify directly. If the hearing goes forward, you have to present yourself because this hearing will follow administrative procedures. In other words, each person who speaks, if what they say is to be considered evidence, it has to be presented in person. As an interested person. Yeah. That's... They will not be allowed to speak through the town's lawyer. That was a question last time. No, these have to be witnesses. You have to testify as a, quote unquote, expert. All right, any other questions? Because I would like to start the budget information meeting. Great. Thank you. All right, so this has been a discussion in the board for quite some time and I'm really happy to see so many people out tonight. I'm gonna turn the meeting over to Chris Jarvis who's taking our lead on this and he'll lead you through it tonight. And I'll take you through the, I kind of divided up into three parts tonight. So the first part I just wanted to go through was kind of the board where we're at, where we're going. And the second part would be getting into the budget itself. And the third part would be getting into the line of credit or the deficit that we've heard about. So Theresa at any time, if you need to jump in, let me know. The only thing I'd like to do is just hold questions towards until the end. Because my guess is probably going through this. Some questions will be answered ahead of time. We'll be able to flow this through. It's not, if this was a meeting just for the budget itself, we'd probably have a lot of time to do it but being that it's an hour slotted, I think. I'd like to try to keep the meeting prompt and do the questions towards the end. But definitely at the end we'll have enough time, hopefully for everybody to answer any questions. So I'm kind of looking through this. I mean, this was two years ago, well, we'll be two years ago next week is kind of the reason why I got on the board. Not to speak for my colleagues that are on the board, but some of the reasons why I got on the board was I didn't think that the town was moving in a positive direction. I didn't think that the budgets that had been handed out in the past were accurate. I also didn't believe that the town's people's money was being spent efficiently. And I'm sure my colleagues on the board here probably had some of those same thoughts on they had run as well. So just, you know, I've been on the board for two years, which I think I'm the second in the rankings. Five people in two years. But, you know, a lot has happened in one year. The last year this board has done a lot for the town. So a few points I just wanted to bring up on that is, you know, we have identified as a board that our budgets are not accurate for the services that we have been providing or the services that our taxpayers want provided for them. And we identified that last year during our budget and we're making those stats. Last year we went in a three set increase as well as this year was our goal was to do a three set increase. And I'll show you that here coming forward. The other thing was, you know, the taxpayers money, you know, my money or money was not being spent efficiently to do work.  And the other one that's starting to rear its head is, you know, our budgets have been burdened by uncollected revenues from the town. And I'll get into that in a moment, which is, you know, monies that are owed through utility and taxes. So the board here over the last year, well, two years now on budget, this is the second budget that kind of most of us have been a part of, we have been constructing realistic budgets. Realistic budget in the past, you know, was, and you can see it, you can go through your town meeting handouts, booklets every year, you can clearly see, and this is the points I used to make, is if you have a line item that cost you $10,000 every year, but you only budget $5,000 every year, you're going over budget, you're not within your budget. So we put together a realistic budget for the town. We also spent a significant amount of time this past year, a lot of time this past year on reorganizing the administration and getting it to perform an efficient manner so that for every dollar that we put in as tax money, hopefully we're getting a $1.10 back or $2 back or something. I mean, I really don't believe in the past that we were getting, you know, a dollar back for a dollar or more than that. So some of that was done with Greg being hired as a 10 manager. We spent a lot of time going through that and finding the right candidate, which we believe we have. That came with opening the new position of the finance manager through Theresa, and as you can clearly see, a finance manager was something that the town needed in the past, not just an assistant to a town manager. You know, we needed somebody to add financial experience that can audit the books and make sure that everyone was supposed to be doing. We've had now for a couple of years, and then we've had a full-time bookkeeper. Doesn't sound like a lot, but there was many years we didn't have a bookkeeper. The audits are being done on time every year. You know, these are things that you would expect to be done, but there was a three-year period. In the 2012-ish area where there was no audits done for a year. There was a hired new road foreman as well as a new crew person from town. So we're, you know, we think that we've got our team in place to go tack for these going forward. And the last, maybe five months since Theresa's been on, we've had an aggressive enforcement of collecting our past revenues that are due for the town. And these were things that we've had policies in place for years. They just were not enforced. So. Can I just. Yeah. So along those lines, one of the things that this board's been working on for five years is job descriptions, performance evaluation and professional development. And that had never been done prior to 2013. So what Chris just described in terms of the last year and a half of administrative change and performance is a direct result of that. And we're, we're looking forward to seeing that continue to improve moving forward. And the other thing that we're getting now that we never had in the past is we're getting monthly or sometimes twice a month, we're getting cost reports broken down by the departments so that we can see where we're at and we can make adjustments as we're going. And believe it or not, the department heads are actually getting those now. And you would think that department head wouldn't get their cost reports, but that was never done in the past. So, I mean, these are some of the steps that we've taken to get an efficient administration in this town. The budget first, this kind of talk about overview on the budget. The proposed budget for the town is $2,360,121. And then once you deduct out revenues raised other than taxes, the amount to be raised by taxes would be $1,943,517 which is in the morning. One thing to take note, a lot of these figures when you're talking by, you know, the cent increase for your taxes are dependent on what the grand list is. Our grand list actually went down a little bit this past year, so we took a little bit of a hit there, wasn't a big one, but a little bit of a hit there. So that's just something to think of.  Or, so what I've done is I kind of get down to the apples to apples comparison of how much is our budget really going up? Is I take out all the extras and what I mean by the extras is the items that we will be voting in on top of the budget during town meetings. So that would be a human services piece of 23,250, White River Valley ambulance of 127,890. We have two fire department pieces. One is for fire department maintenance for the building, which is 10,000. And the other one is the fire hydrant schedule, which is 5,500. And then the last piece is the line of credit piece, which is 100,000 minus six. So those items, those five items there equal 267,546 dollars. So if you subtract that number from the amount to be raised by taxes, that gives us what I call the town's operating budget of 1.675 million dollars. So that's what our operating budget would be for starting July of this year. To compare apples to apples on that, last year's budget was 1.617 million. So our operating budget has gone up by $58,600, which is three cents. And I can tell you that when we started, it wasn't three cents, it was five, six cents. And we've looked through line item after line item to figure out when we spend anything, what is gonna be the most sufficient or best thing for a buck on all these items. So just kind of to compare that, our operating budget has gone up by three cents versus last year's operating budget went up by three cents over the year prior. So just to kind of take that, put that perspective. Out of the $58,000 that our budget has increased over the last year, just benefits alone for our town workers. So the benefit piece was $82,000, okay? So our total budget went up $58,000, but our benefits went up $82,000, which is health insurance. Now to kind of break that down a little bit, Theresa and Greg did a good job of, well, we went out and found another healthcare provider that provides just equal healthcare as we had before and we were able to absorb some of the increases. So when you're talking about the healthcare, if you go through Blue Cross or one of those, they set their rates based on calendar year. So they'll say 12% increase for the 2018 calendar year. However, our operating costs start in July. So we have to take six months of the operating year to figure out what our increase is gonna be in healthcare. So what we had done is we had switched carriers and we were able to not have to take that 10 or 12% hit for the first six months of this next operating budget. However, on the back end six months of the budget for 2019, we have to build in some sort of premium increases that will happen, so we've done that. So $82,000, now I will tell you that the $82,000, if you break it down, a smaller amount of the $82,000 is actual increase in someone's healthcare. The healthcare is probably going to go up about, once you factor in everything, it's probably going to go up five or six percent. The biggest pieces that happen is an example, let's say you have somebody that works for the town and they don't take the town healthcare and say they leave and we have to fill that position. And if we fill that position, and then the person that comes in takes the healthcare, but not only takes the healthcare, but probably has a family plan, right? That can be a huge swing. That could be a $30,000 or $40,000 swing just by one person coming in with benefits versus non-benefits. And that's kind of what we saw this year. We've had, like we just talked about, we had a lot of positions that we just filled. And some positions we filled, we filled all these positions to be to the benefit of the taxpayer. However, some of the workers have have elected to take healthcare where some in the past might not have. So that was a challenge. But we did have $82,000 in increases and we put $58,000 of it forward as an increase to the taxpayers of the whole. The other thing that we added in, it's not big, but a lot of our items really didn't change a whole lot. We moved some things. We took some hired services that we're gonna start doing ourselves. We shuffled some things around. We added some more into legal. Legal is one of those things when we're talking about why is the operating budget overrun every year? It's because if you go back every year, we budget $10,000 for a lawyer to go fight something for us, right? And if you go back and look on that, every year we're spending $30, $40, $50,000 to fight legal battles. And the other thing that we have to protect ourselves so we need some sort of realistic budget on legal. I will say that just about every case since I've been on the board that has been legal that we've fought, we've won, but it's cost us a lot of money to do that, to protect our town. So just kind of a little bit of the breakdown on the budget there. So we have the three cents. That's the operating budget. Increase over last year, we're talking increases. There's three tenths of a cent increase in the White River Valley ambulance over last year. I will say that that's a pretty modest increase because that's the first real increase we've had from them in five years. So it wasn't really too big. The human services increase is two tenths of a cent on our tax rate. What we had found out, just kind of a short story, is for so many years, taxpayers in the town have been using these services more and more every year, but we have not been paying our fair share. Every year, if you go back and look through it, it's level funded at the same amount to one the year prior to the year prior to that. And our ridership or our applicants to go to these services that increase drastically. So we have to make that adjustment. And then if you add in the two items through the fire department, that adds up another eight tenths of a cent increase over last year's budget. And then the largest increase would be 5.1 cent increase, which is the line of credit to be retired. So that kind of opens us up to, let's talk about the line of credit, right? So the published amount on the line of credit that we have seen is, or that we have all seen is 1.725 million, that was the amount that was published. We believe in working through Therese, feel free to jump in. We're still owed some monies from the state. And once the rest of that money comes in, we're gonna be somewhere in the 1.2 to 1.3 million dollar. So kind of myself, again, trying to figure out, well, okay, so we're at 1.2 and change million, where did that money go, right? I mean, that's my question I'd have if I was sitting in your seats, which I have in the past, said. So the first piece I started doing is taking away what I know, right? So the first is, let's look at the revenues that are due to the town. And this, in this, when I go through this, I'm gonna try to break it up. Obviously I can't tell you where every single penny or every dollar went to, but I have Therese and I and Greg have kind of looked through to see where we believe things were at. And this is over almost 10 years ago. So revenues that are due, as of today, there's still $322,000 that's due for taxes that haven't been collected. And there's property tax. There's also $145,000 in utility fees that have not been collected. So right away you have $467,000 that what I like to do is deduct that off that 1.2 that we just heard about, right? So I'm trying to flingle that down to figure out where this money went. The next big item that comes up on the last 10 years is we had the flood event of 2007. We had Campford Road that took substantial hit at that point. And there was some other areas in town that got hit really hard. The problem that you have when you have those localized flooding events is we don't get reimbursed at the rate like we would when we had the Irene event. Estimated from looking back between that flood event, not only what it cost us to have contractors to come in to fix these areas, but also that also cost our public works more money to do some of the smaller areas that we did ourselves. There was about $400,000 that was taken out as a line of credit to do this work. Irene, when I got on the board, I kept, I asked, Carl Contesto, I've asked, I don't know, 20 times probably in the last two years of what the number is for Irene. What's the number for Irene? You know, I'm thinking, you know, Carl and I used to think it was probably $600,000 or $700,000 that Irene cost us, right? It's a big number. We were all told it was gonna be a big number, right? We did, overall, Irene, we did $6 million worth of infrastructure, I won't say improvements, infrastructure replacements, and in some cases were improvements. When the FEMA pays, basically, you have a 12-inch pipe, put a 12-inch pipe back in, right? But you gotta think, if it was a 20-year-old pipe and now you put the new pipe in, there is some sort of improvement there. So the town did $6 million worth of infrastructure from Irene. We also, just to mix it in at that point, we had gone ahead with our recreation program plan that one of the steps was to do the pool and the pool house was part of our steps. One thing that we were able to get done through an alternative FEMA project was to reconstruct the pool house, which was done. So the wreck building, with all the Irene damage, the total amount burden on the town was $57,000 in change. So out of $6 million, $57,000 in change is our obligation for Irene. That's based upon the governor coming out and saying that the most of the town's burden would be a three cent. So that's what the town of Bethel has a burden for Irene only. So we're taking all these away from that $1.2 million number that I said earlier. So at the end, it comes down to what I call subtotal $370,000, where did that money go, right? So that's where I'm left at the bottom. It was $370,000, where did it go? Don't know, I can't tell you. Can't tell you where all those pennies are. What I can tell you is, coincidentally, I had 10 years worth of town meeting annual reports at home. So I just started skimming through them and looking at it and just kind of looking at line lines. And you can see that what we were budgeting and what our actual numbers were not lining up. Now, it doesn't, it sounds like a lot of money, $373,000 left over, but over a 10-year period, that's $37,000 a year of over budget or under budget. And some of those things can be just like we talked about. It could be legal. It can be all these things that we don't see coming that happen. The other thing I wanted to add was we went back as far as 2007, is that correct, Trice? So 2007 to now 2018 is the timeframe that we've been able to look through to see where money went. So we had, if you look at, there was a handout that was passed out, out the back table. It kind of breaks down by the year. It's called Financial Overview 2007 to 2016. So don't, don't necessarily read into the number exactly because that's just a snapshot time at that period where we're trying to compare them. But what it will show you is you can see a trend of where the negatives were growing larger than there's no positives, right? And also there's a list of lines of credit. Yeah. A bitual practice of maintaining a line of credit for deficits spending. So from kind of looking through this, the first kind of line of credit, say you start to see, is the $400,000 that was taken out. And it was taken out during the flight of 07 to do that. And then you kind of look, so you have, you have the line of credit was taken out to do some of that flood repair work. Again, you're going back and you're looking at these budgets that were crafted that weren't necessarily managed correctly in a way.  We had a three-year period where we didn't even have an audited budget, you know. We went three years without an audit in this town. And I don't want to use the word perfect storm but in around that same time that we didn't have a three-year audit, Irene smacked us. And when Irene hit us, we had to take out a massive amount of line of credit to pay for these infrastructure rebuildments. And you know, I think, you know, kind of I wasn't here at that point, but you know, I think what's happened is there was a lot of mismanagement of the line of credit at that point. And there was a lot of FEMA projects going on. You know, there, I don't know how many we had at one given time, but it was probably too much for one person to sit there and manage. You know, maybe hindsight what it is. Maybe what we should have done as a town is hired a part-time person to just do the FEMA stuff. Because all I've heard since Irene is, well, we don't really know exactly where we're at for FEMA, well, probably should have, right? Yeah, that was the answer that we all got as a, I don't know. And the other thing over this 10-year period is we had an increase of people not paying either their taxes, their property taxes, for their utility fees. So all this kind of comes together, and now you have a line of credit that's due that hasn't been hired long-term debt that's still short-term debt that was. So the amount that we're gonna end up retiring is in the 1.2 and change area, and the amount that we'll have to pay back this year is about $100,000 towards that. Now, just keep in mind that that won't be $100,000 each year because we also have to pay this year what's included in that 100,000 is the interest payment that's due on the short-term loan that we have out currently. So we're gonna be paying a short-term loan interest payment to the bank this year plus the long-term retirement piece. So next year that 100,000 might be 77 and change or something like that to retire this. I can open up to questions. I'll write them down. And if for some reason we can't answer them if they're really, if they're a macro level question it'll probably be pretty easier to answer them if they're more micro level. Theresa and I, we can write them down and we can research them. I will say one thing that this board has tried to do and you've probably seen is to be very transparent. We provide a lot of information out to the taxpayers. To see pretty much anything that we see for the most part now. I know in the past that wasn't always the case. Yes, Mary. Can you elaborate a little bit, Chris, on what or what you all think that termed mismanagement of the line of credit translates to in the day to day or month to month payment and bills. Would it be that a contractor says it's gonna take us 50,000, we offer 50,000 dollars to fix this stretch of road. Does that mean that they double their fee and the town never looked at it closely and just paid the bill? What is encompassing that word dis-management to you? Well, I think that's a... What kinds of things? Yeah, it's not a simple question to answer but what I'll tell you is it goes a couple of different ways. So I think they were like we talked about in the past that we're not what I would say accurate budgets. So if every year you're lying, whatever line on it, if you have a line on it every year something that you do every single year but every single year it's over what you budgeted. Wouldn't you think that the next year that maybe you would budget a little bit more for it? And you can go back and you can look through the inner reports where there's an item that kept running over running that kept using the same budgeted amount for the next year. I mean, if every year it costs us $50,000 in attorney fees then don't you think we should budget $50,000? No, we'll budget 10,000 thinking that we got our rosy covered glasses on and things are gonna be good that year. And that wasn't it. So there was no realistic, what we call realistic budgets for the last 10 years. We're trying to get to there. The line of credits I would say weren't necessarily managed as efficiently as they should have been. And line of credits are very difficult to manage because you have to take the town to operate has to take line of credits out for various different things. There's a certain time every single year that we have to pay the school even if we don't have the money, right? So you take a line of credit out maybe in quarter two because you have to pay the school their 100% money for the year. Now, at that point in time the town's only collected maybe a quarter of its taxes for the year. So you have to take the line line amount on that. Other cases can be you take line of credit out for a project, right? Like we were just talking about. And maybe that project was a $30,000 project that turned into $38,000. Now it doesn't necessarily seem like a lot of money. It ran over by $8,000 and our budget's two million, right? So it doesn't seem like a lot of money but it's kind of like that thing, you know, your household budgets, right? If every day you go down to the store and you buy yourself a coffee in the morning and it's only $2, right? But if you buy it every single day that adds up. Yeah, I think there was so many of these little overages in the budget that added up over time that weren't being corrected. And I'd like to expand on that since I have been on the board since 2015. And some of the quote, we're using mismanagement in a term in a sort of a factual way. We're not meaning that this is, it's not a derogatory use of the term but there are several different lines of credit building at different times all together and there are a variety of different deficits. The uncollected sewer fees, sewer and water, also some capital projects in those systems that needed to be funded out of the general fund. There's the overrunning budgets like Chris was talking about. There's the desire of managers, people in the administration and the boards to present budgets to the people that are palatable and the desire to actually adhere to those budgets as throughout the operating year, yet there are demands for services throughout the year that are legitimate. And so there may have been, and I know there wasn't because this is what I've been dealing with since I've been on the board is trying to get some clarity about how we can maintain discipline around the expenditures. And there hasn't been, you know, there hasn't been since actually before I even sat down in the year that I was elected I asked the town manager at town meeting what the scope of this, particularly at the time it was called the Irene debt, what that scope actually was gonna be for the town because we needed to know what we were gonna come and do. And there was genuinely never a clear answer. The management, all of the management that has been in place has been, as far as I can see, working as hard as they could to come up genuinely with numbers that they could give us so that we could have a clear picture on that. And we weren't getting it. I think that that's what I'm thinking. That's why we're calling it mismanagement is just that it was not managed accurately or clearly or proficiently. And that's why I keep coming back to what I said before about the professional development in our staff because as a volunteer select board we're actually dependent upon the professional staff that we hire. Some of us can and we do need to dig down into these things but if we don't have access to the inner workings of the finances because of the capability or the challenges that our management is experiencing then the only recourse we have is to work toward improving that professional delivery of services. And so coinciding with the building of this deficit has been this growth that we've made toward management that can actually provide this detailed information to us so, sorry, that's what I see as mismanagement. Just a minute, like Joanne had, oh, Ellie. Am I remembering correctly that when you were talking about these figures, did we overpay or the school, wasn't there a year that we paid twice? Paid twice to the school, is that part of the figures? We took that money back, thank you, Penny. Oh, okay. That's why the school ended up in their days. Oh, because I thought I remembered. Yeah, Joanne, oh, and we are taking this so if people could say your name for us. Oh, I'm sorry, Ellie, I remember. Joanne, I wanna ask about the audits. So you had mentioned, Chris, now the audits are done on time, what do you mean by done on time? What is a reasonable amount of time from the end of the fiscal year for getting that final audit report from your auditors? Sure, Therese, you might answer that one. Normally you should have it by now. Normally you would have the auditor would come in in June before you closed the fiscal year and then they would come back again possibly in October and generally you have it published right after town meeting. Usually it does come out about March and right now I'm still waiting for the draft. I haven't seen it yet, but I am the converse on a regular basis. So we're, when, very just concerning here that there was a period of three years without an audit. So how are we going to ensure that we're having audits done yearly and that they're done timely and that the results of the audit are being looked at and understood by both the management and the select board? What is the process that's going to be put in place to ensure that that happens going forward and not dependent upon who is sitting in a particular position? Unfortunately it hasn't allowed who's in this position. Well, so I think, again, I know that Therese, you know, I know that Therese a reason for not kind of looking back and trying to pick apart like how did this all happen? But it is important to identify the systems that failed us in the past. And so I'm trying to say if you're saying to me that it's kind of dependent on who's sitting there, we need to make it independent of who's sitting in this position. And just before Therese answers that question, but that goes back to the board and one of the things that we had identified, which when Greg came in as a town manager, he had identified as well, is what we thought, we changed the organization structure a little bit of the town when we went through here. And instead of having an assisted town manager, we decided that we had this in our mind, Greg came and after Greg had a little bit of time here a month or so, he had said, hey, this is what we need. And this is the same thing we're thinking is, we need somebody that is gonna have their hands on the financials at all times. So not to put Therese on the spot, but you need to have somebody, a finance manager, director, we tried all these different words, what we were gonna name that, but we need somebody full-time looking at the financials. That's not just looking at the financials, looking at your operating budget, where you're at currently making sure that your audits are getting done and the time will be fast, but it's also collecting your taxes and collecting fees. So Therese is the person. So would it be fair to say then that part of the job description for the finance manager would be to is to make sure that an audit is done every year and is completed on a timely manner? I mean, would that be a reasonable job? It is part of that. Okay, okay. But do you see what I'm trying to get at? I do. And there's a good answer to this, because what you will see is the select board hasn't seen many financial policies that they will see. One of them is an audit policy. The second thing that this board has not had and will be seen and receiving is our current auditors, Sullivan and Powers, and they will give us an engagement letter for three years. So you can always renew it. The other thing that this board will see is actually meet the auditors. Fred DuBlessis will come down and speak to the board. But we will, so there'll be an engagement letter, so it'll be ongoing so you can do a renewal and there'll be a policy that says that the select board will eventually adopt as one of their financial policies and sure that says we will be audited every year. And once you get on a roll like that, then it's a lot easier. And I think that someone did, I've been calling around to get past audits and I think at some point they were back audited but I still kind of need to figure out who was who because Bethel had somebody for a couple of years and they laughed and then someone knew. So we have established a good report with the auditor and we're gonna stick with them for a while. Would you be helpful? The process was for those three years there was an effort to get an auditor but the statewide municipal auditing market was basically, there was a vacant, what would you call it, a dead spot or a desert on that. We weren't able to secure. And I think unfortunately my recollection of it is that the ones that were available were not preferred. And it wasn't that those that three year period wasn't audited, it wasn't audited efficiently in the time, timely manner that we could use that information for future budgets. I mean, it has been audited but it came, they did, I think when it finally got done they did four years with the audits, right? They did the current year plus the three back years but that doesn't help you after you've already moved on for three years, right? Yep, yeah, Joe. What is the plan to get the money for the back taxes and a water and sewer that's out of control? I can't believe that people got so far behind and nothing was done. Yeah, so we three years ago instituted a tax and delinquency collection policy. It was enacted one year and it did slip by us last year with the previous town manager didn't follow through on the tax sale and basically we're one year behind but we have that policy and our finance director is committed to moving forward with that. She's been issuing late notices and working toward it, taking action on every one of those accounts. So I can let her follow up a little bit more with the specifics right now. So when we came, so coming to that little different, you know, so we started doing water sewer once we saw, you know, obviously I'm just wearing your collection situation. So water sewer, we started looking at that and I found out that apparently in Buffalo they weren't, you should be issued obviously of your original bill than a late bill.  So we actually just put that notice out for the first time a couple of months ago. So that will be our process is we will. I think part of our hardness is it was published and this is probably the first time we have ever issued that.  So what we will do is that we will and that is going to happen but what coming in and you having such high delinquency rate and people not seeing some of these notices. What we have been doing is, you know, handwriting notes on bills, talking to people, doing inserts and getting a lot of people to call back and make an arrangement.  If we don't have a payment arrangement in place that hasn't been being followed, people's water can be shut off.  No, you can.  Well, that will be something that we may discover. We think that some of that is hyperbole as well. I'm not sure that it's that factual. There's a lot of rumors about what we can and can't do but we have shut offs for everybody. But that might happen. We might find some places that we have shut offs installed. And so then that becomes part of the priority for the work of the water department to get those taken care of. Same thing with taxes. But we don't, it doesn't have to be the action but we do need people to understand that if we've got this kind of delinquency then we can't be providing those services. No, I understand that. So far by actually enforcing the policy that we have in place, and this is only over a short period of time of the last four or five months since Theresa's been here, we've had a very favorable outcome with collecting written. So, I don't have the exact data but I would say we're collecting at a 200% rate than we were. So we aren't getting some of that back now and we're going through the procedure right now. Obviously we don't want to shut people's water off and we don't want to do tax sales but right now what we are doing is we are following our policy and the people that do owe money are getting notified and going through the proper channels. And what it does is it's bringing people to the table to address the issue that they have. And so far, correct me if I'm wrong, Theresa, but I talk with Theresa in all the time. So far it's been very favorable on working through this. And she said several times and she knows that there's no way you can get money from people if they're not paying the money and she's willing to work with people to find a way for the money to come in. And that comes with starting the conversation. I have a question on mine at South Royalton. He's put the water on the water thing. He has a delinquent list of everybody that hasn't paid their sewer and water or whatever. He was at the shop one day, I said, when you're head, he said, I'm going to put a note on somebody's door. They got 60 days to pay them though or come down and make arrangements. Yeah, that's what we're doing with that. We're following the state statute kind of out, that's how you got to do it and that's what we're following. And she sent out, so it said you have to send out that two pages on pink paper and you'd be amazed how well that works. We had a lot of people come in and make arrangements. We're also, I've got the water department looking for curb stops. So come springtime, he'll be looking for the rest of the curb stops. But you know, but that's things like that help. I think even when people see that there's somebody in their yard looking for a curb stop, that helps to kind of push the boat. But we're following the, we're following the procedure that's been put in place through not only through this board, but through the state also. And when I had talked about, one of the things that we had identified as a board was putting in an efficient administration in place. Efficiencies, everybody usually thinks of cost, but it's also on the collection act too. I mean, and, you know, we were not efficiently collecting what was owed to the tent, you know. And it is, you know, we're great. It's good to have Theresa and she's got a lot on her plate because when you spend a long period of time of not collecting and someone gets way behind it, it becomes challenging. So, you know, we are working through those case by case basis and the goal is to work with everybody and get everybody so that they're gonna caught up in a safe manner. But we are working through that. And we just, it's only been four or five months, but we've really come a long way since then. So. And Theresa just recently contacted a lot of mortgage holding banks too and let them know that the people that they're financing are not doing what they should. So there's been some, I think you've got some calls of people that are potentially refinancing and things like that. So these banks are aware of the issue also. Yep. Chris, I'd like to get back to somebody's numbers about the line of credit we're gonna have to refinance. We're gonna end up with $1,298,220 approximately that we are going to have to refinance long term. Yep, okay. So you said we have about $58,000 left to pay towards infrastructure repair from Irene, but I got something from. No, that money there would be what? That's our town obligation. It is our town obligation. But I have a financial statement here which says that the town share of the total budget is almost $6 million. The town share that we had to spend because we didn't get full reimbursement was $337,875. So have we not, has the town not paid a substantial amount? No, we've paid. We've paid and we're waiting for this number to come back to $146. I have to look over here because I have to look at my all the projects, minus the money, minus the three cents on the grand list, minus the money from the state FEMA. So due from Bethel will be, we'll get to the bottom line. We're not there yet. But we will eventually get to the $57,425. But so this was what they call, I was redoing their FEMA spreadsheet. So I redid it so that we could put an Excel that I could work with because it came as a PDF. So this $279, which is the town's share, you're right. I took all of the total project amount minus this money that we've received so far, minus our three cents on the grand list that the state is gonna pay us, minus that same 53 from the state, minus FEMA. And then there was an adjustment that I'm waiting for that's coming out of this final project that should put us down to the 57. So you're right, our town's share originally would be the $279 out of pocket. But what I should have explained is after this, then the state came out and said, oh no, no, we'll make you a three cent town. So we would have been on the hook for the full 27,279,000. Well, it wouldn't have been the three cents. Yeah, you're right, sorry, I'm looking at it. That's just a large project, you're right. We would have been on the hook for the whole 337 until the state of Vermont said, no, we'll only make you pay three cents on your grand list. So if my numbers are right, we would take the 337, subtract the 240 and be left with a right over the number. Lucien, you are correct. Where had the governor at the time not came out with the proposal, that's how much the town of Bethel would have been held responsible for out of that $6 million. But being that the governor had come through and said that nobody would be, we would be a three cent town. So that would be the most that we'd be burdened as long as we adhered to the regulations and everything else. I should explain that. Yeah, and they're still, I mean, just like trying to get government money and it's slow, they like to take it, but they don't like to give it back to you fast. And we still have money that's owed to us that we're still collecting. So going back to that one point, almost three million, we're only going to be liable for another 58,000 approximately. Right. Then we go to the delinquent taxes and utility payments. That comes out to latest figure I have is 467,000. Yep. So that theoretically or maybe in fact, came out of that 1.2 million, right? Correct. Okay. Yeah, that's all part of the line. So that leaves a lot, that leaves even more money than I thought that seems to be unaccounted for. Well, you might not have heard him because it's the acoustics in here are tough. There was, he also is saying that he's subtracting from that about $400,000 for that big flood event that we had or that you had in 2007. And then he's saying the 57, which comes up close to your numbers, which leaves an amount which he's saying he can't, you know, we're not totally accounting for except for overspent budgets in the conversations that you and I have had before. Yes, the acoustics in here are not great, are they? Yeah, that was a little hard to follow. So that's the other number that he took off from there was that. Right. So we have what, about 400,000, that's not accounted for? Yeah, about 370,000. Yeah, he came, yep. Okay. Which if you go back and look at 10 years with the budgets, it's about $37,000 a year that was overspent. Now, I mean, that doesn't necessarily mean it was, like Carl said, doesn't necessarily mean it was mismanaged, it could have been, you know, I know what, two years ago we all of a sudden had to put in that new system up at the state garage, probably up to the town garage because the state passed a law saying that we had to do that and we only had what, a couple months to do that. So that was $15,000 that we hadn't anticipated that we had to go and do. So there are some of those. There was money coming and going out of, or maybe not coming and going, but there were several different locations for the money to be paid back that was being used to offset different expenditures with these different lines of credit. And I know that the answers that I was getting made it clear that there were too many moving pieces to get clarity to where that money was. They weren't having the kind of internal auditing on a year-to-year basis that Teresa's desiring. So they weren't saying, oh, there's the $37,000 from this year and they were bringing it to the front and highlighting it so that it could be deducted from the budget or included in some kind of a repayment. It was just somehow in the cloud. We were told in the previous town management administration way back that the extra that we had to spend on that 2007 flood was getting paid off, I believe, at $50,000 a year. There was like $400,000 or so.  It was in the budget. Did that money not go towards paying that off? Well, that's what we're saying was kind of hard to follow what we may have actually made it off for several years, but there were times in which the highway department overspent the budget by $100,000 or more. So it depends on, there was just, if you add up the other amendments, that should be considered just something around where we got it here. What was the public works like? Yeah, excuse me just a minute. Well, yeah, the public works budget from like 2005 through 2010 was overspent by $2,394,000. The only thing you have to be careful of with that sheet there, Lucian, is now, could there have been overspending? There absolutely could have been, but the other thing that that sheet there doesn't capture is if you, let's say, if you set your budget today for $100,000, right? And then we find out the day after town meeting that we get a grant to go fix a bridge that costs $50,000, right? That's gonna show up in your next year audit report showing that you spent $150,000, right? So it doesn't necessarily mean that that was overspent $2 million. Now, maybe that was overspent by $370,000. You might be right there. But unless you kind of go back and look at, did we get more revenue that year that was not anticipated to offset some of that? It becomes tricky. I mean, I think one of the things that boils down to is there was too many moving parts for the administration that was in place during this time to manage correctly or efficiently or however word we wanna put it. And that was the reason why we really pushed to have a, instead of going again to get an assistant town manager, we went to get a financial person of Therese so that we can make sure that this doesn't happen and that not only is our cost being looked at, but our revenues are being collected. Okay, well, for instance, at this $467,780 at the moment of the link with taxes and utilities. It's gonna be part of this 1.3 million refinancing. Yep. If we start to collect on this, are we gonna be able to credit that somehow towards town expenses so we can maybe lower future expenditures and taxes? So correct me if I'm wrong, Therese, but so if we collect, just throwing that, say we collected the whole thing, right? That would go into our undesignated balance for the town, which then you could with permission from the select board, right? With permission from the voters. You could, so let's say magically we collect all this money in one year. So we could next year take that money because what happens is it gets put into an undesignated fund. We could take that $467,000 and apply it to the principal balance of the 1.2.  I mean, you can do that. There's no doubt, yep. You can do something. But it doesn't, but you can't, as you're getting it, you can't make like an extra loan payment. That's not the way it works. So we can't pay, we can't like, say, okay, we're gonna spend $50,000 less on the highway apart from the express, we can't sure if we have $50,000 that we're gonna spend on the plight of the taxes. We actually need to keep our budgets segmented, moving forward so that money is paid where we owe it so that we can get to a point where we are no longer carrying this deficit so that then budget funding and expenditures are going to be moving forward. So if you, there's- There's a lot of things that are officially delayed. Or officially what? These late, I mean, you're just- Yeah, but what's wrong with that? Oh, because that's what we've been to, actually. No, the attitude has been, and I've heard it tonight, that in previous budgets, we were overspending. And then the next year, we try to budget the same amount or a little bit more but then we'd overspend again. And the attitude here as well, we were never increasing the budget enough. How about the idea of scaling back expenditures and taxation somewhat and going in the opposite direction? Yeah, that's an ideal that we're all aiming toward but we are not and the administration has never been the reason why services have been provided beyond the scope. It's the people in the town who desire or demand services and there are emergency expenditures that are required. So we have the road system we put in place. We have state laws that require us to maintain a third class standing. So you have an issue with the road. You have people who drive over that road who demand class three maintenance. So then you have to upgrade that road in a particular April or a particular September. And those are the kinds of expenditures that we're talking about. This is not just people being liberal about the expenditures. This is the entire town has to understand that every time we come to the town meeting and look at a budget, they have to carry that sense of frugality forward throughout the year. They can't just keep hammering the town office with demands and then expect that somehow we're not gonna overspend. So the town has for many years voted in what was considered to be a reasonable budget but we've just shown you that over 10 years, even though the voters thought they were spending a legitimate amount of money, they were actually spending way more. So you know- Also, Carl, the budget on the island head is actually, which is funny, but looking over the budget in the previous years, the budget has always been increasing, three and a half, 4%, 5%, every year, way beyond inflation. And we spent even more than that. Well then there's something wrong. Yes, I understand that that has a lot to do with the people we're going for. So if I could just tag on to what you were saying, Lucian, is two things. So I won't speak for the board, but from the conversations that we've had at the meetings, I think we're trying to do this in two ways. One, we understand that the, based on the services that the taxpayers have asked for or demanded, our budgets haven't been as accurate as they could have been. I'm sorry, they haven't been accurate. So however, at the same time, we believe that we were not being as efficient as we could have been with our money. So we're trying to take that balance between getting the right budget, which it's not gonna be this year and it's probably not gonna be next year. We're working on it. We're trying to get that good harmony between everything. But we're starting to see that we're getting more bang for our buck, right? We're being more efficient with our money. And so that we can, instead of just raising the taxes, maybe we can meet in the middle somewhere. We're raising a little bit of taxes, but we're being more efficient to get those services that we desire. If you stay around, you may experience that because Greg has an issue he's bringing to us tonight about expenditures within the highway department that highlights the creativity and the discipline that he's brought to this position. We're gonna be discussing ways to fund the emergency expenditure that we're facing. So in the past, it hasn't been that way. And I think that as we're moving into this winter, we've heard, well, we're halfway through it, we've heard a lot of discussion this winter about the delivery of particular services. And a lot of that has to do with our manager and our road foreman metering our expenditures and our provision of services. Because they're very much aware what the budget actually says. And we haven't just been throwing manpower and material at the situation because it's been demanded. So that's what I'm getting at. I don't mean it as sexual individuals calling down, but there's a standard of expectation within the town that when there's snow on the road, it needs to be cleaned up. And it can't always be that way. Well, I've heard some of the things that have been done now with the road budget and so forth. And I think it's really a good thing. And I also read in the paper about people complaining about the level of maintenance. But my understanding is that when a storm hits, the crew goes out there and just keeps plowing until it's all done. And if they go over eight hours, then that's what they go over. They get paid over time for that day. But they still, as far as I can understand, have the same level of maintenance and snow plowing as we had before. I'm sorry, Carl. We're plowing. I think it's probably somewhere about this thing around. We're plowing twice where we used to plow three times. We're managing the overtime and we're managing the storms so that we're not actually just, like I say, throwing manpower and material at the roads. I don't know, but I don't think it's going to be final. Well, so that's what I'm saying. So some of this is not clear out front. But the truth of the matter is we've been managing our crew much differently under this administration. But again, I mean, we didn't have a lot of forward thinking in this town for many years. It was all about balancing the budget based upon what our pockets. We had a very near sightedness in this town. And we're gonna see more challenges between everybody that we're gonna have to get together to address that have not been planned for or looked at for years. Not the scary all, but we have some water tower issues that we're gonna have to rectify. There is a town garage that's falling apart. There's a lot of things that were not done with forward thinking in the past. And where we could have probably, it's gonna cost us more money now to do it than if we would have been saving some money over a long period of time. So it's managing a bunch of different transecting lines but something that because of the water delinquency has led to discussions about the cost of the water system. And obviously not all the town taxpayers pay for this, only the people who use it. But it's a good example of the history of financial and capital planning in this town. There are a lot of expenditures to maintain something like a water system. In 1949, the town decided that it was gonna modernize and upgrade and we voted as a town to take over what were three different private water systems. There were private water delivery systems in the town. And the town contracted with an engineering firm to evaluate those systems and to project the cost of capital investment to upgrade the system to provide the kind of modernization that a water system would provide. There was a recommendation for a reservoir above ground or gravity feed. It was basically a built reservoir in a stream in a high elevation. There were several sections of the private systems that were recommended to be rebuilt or to be replaced and with new systems. And I think the other category was the cost based on a professional construction firm doing the installment. That was followed up by a select board report to the town recommending that we not build the reservoir, that we not replace all the existing private water systems and that we actually do the work with the highway department at the top. So it saved a substantial amount of money right off the top. And it was attractive to the town and the town voted in the place. But that's exactly the kind of process that our town has had for many, many years. And there's nothing wrong with making do with what you have, but when you put into place a system that 70 years later is still suffering the chronic abuse, basically, of neglect because there's never been, no, they had an opportunity to get ahead of that system and to create a capital plan to maintain a highly functional delivery system of water to the municipality and we didn't do it and we still are there. And you look at our roads, you look at our town Raj, you look at many, many examples in this town. We're not made of money and we're not talking about spending money, but we're talking about recognizing where the expenses are and how we today can make plans so that people in 40 years can see how we got from where we are now to where they are so that they understand those expenditures because really, I'd like to see them spending half of what we're spending instead of us spending twice of what somebody else could have spent. And I know it can be done, but you have to plan it. And unfortunately, it's not just a Band-Aid we're taking off, it's a big cast. If there's an item in the budget, gap improvement reserve fund, it was special voted in 50,000 last year, it's in the budget this year. I would like to see this town on more of a business. Instead of creating a slush fund that we don't know how we're going to spend, if you think that the town garage, oh, I'm not done, wait a minute. It's not a slush fund, we don't know. No, wait, I'm not done. If you think, for instance, that the town garage, excuse me, it's my turn to talk. If you think, for instance, if you talk about the reality, it's not a slush fund, we don't know how we're going to spend. Well, you don't. It's a capital improvement fund. It's a capital improvement fund, but for what and for how much? And as I was saying, I would like to see the town run more like a business, which would be if you want improvements in the garage, you get some money together to hire an architect and or engineers or somebody to come look at it, do a plan, figure out a plan with specs and drawings, they come back with that, then you bid that out, then you know exactly what it's going to cost to do what you want, and then you come to the taxpayers and ask for the money. This is going in the opposite direction. We've, in Lucian, I've spoke about capital planning and what he's saying isn't inaccurate. I mean, that's how you come up with a capital plan as you look at all your projects and you have planning studies or whatever the term may be to figure it out, to come up with the plan, which is something that hasn't been done yet. I refer to that as a capital building, but you call it whatever you want. So that plan has to be developed and it hasn't been developed yet, but Lucian is correct. Obviously that's the way you would develop the plan and then you have the money and you decide as you move forward what the need was and how much you needed to get from each place. And frankly, I haven't been here long enough to see if you've already done a study on what you need. We have to have a plan of $50,000 is not the first expenditure. It's close to $100,000 or $200,000. I was on the several, the, in a way, the ability to build it was a matter of having funding available to pay down expenditures over time so that the money would be available when the expenditures were needed. So, I mean it, so what the capital improvement fund is for is it's that, what we just talked about is that forward thinking in the tent. So what we're doing right now is we're putting aside money into the capital improvement fund for designated projects, five years, 10 years down the road so that we don't have to go to the taxpayers and say we need a million dollar garage and we're gonna bond it this year. And then, I mean, the idea is we want this really nice bell shaped curve to our taxes, right? We don't want the, you know, up, down, up, down. I mean, we want something that we can budget our lives around. And that's what this capital improvement plan is. And we have, the capital improvement plan is published and it's not detailed but it has some set projects in place that we, I'll say we, the town, would like to see or needs to be replaced in the next X amount of years. And those are things like the town garage and things like that. So rather than five years from now come and say that we need a million dollars to build a town garage, what we're doing is we're putting aside money now. So that, what we can do is when we wanna start engineering it, we can start engineering it. We still have money in that fund. That fund is no different than the funds that we have for highway equipment funds or fire department equipment funds. It's no different than that. It's forward thinking. It's let's get ahead of things rather than come to the taxpayers down the road for a substantial amount of money. So maybe what we have to do is we put money into the fund and five years from now we come to the voters for $750,000 to bond rather than half the bond, a million dollars. That's the thing behind that. Mail it to you. I have to find it. I haven't seen this one, I guess. So I'll look for it and then. Well, I was going to say we're gonna need a bond eventually anyway. And we published portions this year, I guess we were looking at thinking it was something different. So I'll have to look and see what I have and get attention. And the truth of the matter is we can't run up $500,000 aside if we spend any money we want. Right. This is $500,000, it was to create the main placeholder, it was to create a fund that was for capital improvements and associated with a capital improvement plan. And without that fund line item, we don't have any money in that, and we have no, by creating that, we've created some legitimacy to the capital planning process. Yes. Taking care of this line of credit, this is amounted under one of our to take care of previous deficits up to what year or deficit we were talking to. What do they go to the end of last year, 2017? Well, I mean, the period of time that we went back as far was 2007. So everything from now back to 2007 was the time frame that we went back to. Well, no, I guess I'm saying, like, so for example, if I look, okay, if I look on page 33, and I look at the budget and then the actual amount spent up through June of 2017, there would appear to be some over-expenditure. I mean, has the board identified whether we went over budget last year with last year's budget? And is that being taken into account of the amount of money we're gonna be borrowing to retire these deficits that are all of the costs? Yep, it includes that. I just spoke to them last week to get the final number, because I guess I didn't see in the draft. But that was my question. What are we left with once we finance and move this payment, this line of credit into a long-term debt? And what he said was it would be about 1.2 million. I don't have the exact number yet, but basically we'd have no, we'd have become, it'd bring us to a zero balance as of June 30. We'd have no surplus, but no deficit. Okay, so then hopefully the idea is that at the end then of every subsequent year, you have a handle of what your deficit was. If we overspent, we know what it is. And you should know what it is. You should know it once a month. Right, okay. Yeah, and you definitely, you should know, yeah, definitely, I don't want to be surprised by deficit. I should know going through the year you can see if someone's off-trend. That's the great thing now about how the department heads are now coding their own bills and they're getting copies of these reports every month so they can see where they've seen it. And if they have questions they can ask, and then obviously, and it's something we discuss, is if you have to overspend online, then how are you thinking about where you're going to underspend something else? Because the budget isn't a suggestion. This is where you need to end up at the end of the year. So it certainly has been an education process just within the town. But no, so at my, we should beat it. By June 30th, you're going to come to a zero balance as of June 30, 2017. And then this year, we're keeping a eye on through the year. Thank you. You're welcome. Of course. Yeah, so the board is getting, we're getting monthly reports. At least monthly progress reports now so that we're able to review that deficit and more surplus, so to speak. But basically, we're skimming, it's tight. The management is working to make sure that we're under budget. But we had a system that, even your department heads didn't know what their budget was, right? I mean, so it's kind of hard to manage your department if you really don't know what your budget is, right? I mean, if you have one person who kind of controlling that whole budget rather than, you know, if you have six department heads, then that should be up to the department heads to manage.  So we're, since we started doing, or since Theresa and Greg have started actually getting the department heads, their budgets, I mean, we're seeing ownership. There's an ownership into it.  And then they're thinking, you know, and these guys now are thinking, okay, we just spent $2,000 on a tire. Where can we make $2,000 up to try and balance this thing? And those conversations are actually happening right now. I don't want to, I wasn't in the office before, but I'm willing to probably send something like this. We had to spend $2,000 on a tire. Let's go get another one of the great states. And the budget's off the way, $2,000, right? And I think that there was no ownership in it. And one other, not a question, but a comment. So I noticed, I read in the report about the, the rationale behind the request for the $5,500 for the two hydrant replacements and the $10,000 for maintenance at the fire department. And it's more of a comment. It just seems like those are things that we need to spend, we need to do this. We need to upgrade those higher hydrants and it sounds like there's a plan to do two a year and we'll keep doing two a year. And there is maintenance that's required at the fire department where things are gonna get really, they're gonna get worse, not better. So it seems like those expenditures should actually be not a request to the taxpayers should we fund this, but more of a statement from the board and from the management that we need to spend this money. So I guess I'm just gonna ask the rationale behind putting it up for a vote to the public. Hopefully the reasons for doing it would be apparent. But for education and discussion. These are not what we're considering to be frivolous expenditures. We are showing the 3% increase on the bare bones budget. We have offered these other items because we know they're expenditures, we believe that they're important, but people have to understand what it costs to run this town and we need to have these discussions. It's just like the human services items. So it has been our decision on this board that rather than lumping these things into the line items in the budget, we've had opposite responses. People saying you're just hiding these expenditures in the budget and nobody knows about them. So it's a town meeting, it's a democratic process. It's our largest gathering in the town of people who are scrutinizing the expenditures of the town. It's an opportunity to have this discussion from the floor. So it's mostly a democratic process. But it also, I think, from a budgetary standpoint, Chris has said it already. It gives us an opportunity to show you our adherence to the bottom line on an absolute basis of a functioning budget. Yes. My name is Cynthia Lini Chi with New Property Owners and I just wanted to commend you guys because the difference, you know, we're sort of new to Vermont, new to the town hall, you know, towning process and the open select board meetings. So I see a big difference from a couple of years back and just the responsiveness and some of these details coming out more. I know it's going to be really painful. It's probably going to be more painful going forward with some of the challenges I think everyone's going to face but I feel more, let's say, confident in the direction the town is taking because I think the people are stepping up. It appears to me to take responsibility for some of these issues. So I just want to thank you. Great, thank you. So we are about 20 minutes over the 7.15 cutoff. I think it's an important thing. It's a great opportunity to have this many people here and to have the questions that you've asked but if there are a few more questions, we would take them. Otherwise, we'll move on to the rest of our meeting. All right, great. Well, thank you very much. Take five, take a break for five minutes. If you guys want to hear what we're saying, we're going to have to stop talking. So we've got part of the way through the town manager's report. We got all of your staff report, basically the high points were already covered. We had Constable's report was in the packet. I got a chance to see firsthand today the creation of the Constable's report. So it's a pretty interesting high-tech tool that he's using to craft these. Yeah, that seems to be changing as I go. We're learning a lot. He said there's, Mark, are you still here? There are what, two more towns, two or three more towns that are in it now? Yes, three more towns. I shouldn't say it's being modified as we go along with new ideas, stuff that we need, certain requests. A lot of stuff you guys can see, but Greg can see it, but we have access to different type of reports and reports that I have to file every year. Of course, traffic stops now. It's part of the program, so it's getting high-tech. Yeah. Well worth the dollar, that's for sure. Yeah, good. Well, good thorough reports, sure. So, then that leads us to minutes and communications. We have the select board minutes from February 12th, regular meeting to approve. I didn't get a copy a little bit of that. You didn't get a copy? No, we got two of the recta problems. Uh, what? Somebody get two. We got a good letter, all right. Well, I didn't see anything. Anybody else get the minutes? Yeah. I moved the acceptance written. All right. So, uh, too small? Too small! That approved, yeah. I didn't hear the second. Oh, okay. I got a phone on the protest, so I don't have any. Seconded. Seconded, all right. All in favor? Aye. All right. All right, now they've been accepted. All right. Yeah. Other communications. We got another committee minutes. We got a letter of recommendation for Mark. We got a letter of resignation, right? From Brad. Brad. So, it just sounds like he's moving to the DRB if we get a letter of interest from him. And that basically moves us into other business. Moe, you want to start? Yeah. It's all over the place, I've known for the last three years. Less town politics involved, things get done down there. So, I would like to suggest that if we look down the road that there wouldn't be a sweat board member on the board, be it all people that we choose out of the public. From both towns. From South Welton, to Rolton, when she was there. We discussed stuff that, there was one lady there from Rolton that she hadn't spoken in two years and she was asking questions. Yeah. So, I mean, there must be some kind of intimidation, maybe, I'm thinking. It seems like, I mean, it seems like it doesn't, I mean, if the changes move forward that we've been talking about, I think part of the reason for having this sweat board member on the committees now has been because this is still very much just a problem, some city area of the town. Right. So, yeah. I understand that, but I'm saying that when we move forward, I think it would be a good idea to just have it three members at large. And I served for two years and it's time for somebody else to serve, take my place. If I wasn't a sweat board member, I would be willing to serve. Yeah, we'll keep that in mind. Oh. But we have got, so that leaves, but our next meeting, we've got to find two people to fill that position. Because Jen Barlaman is, our last meeting, she said that was her last meeting. Yeah. So, first meeting after town, after town meeting room, you did. At least get one person. So, we'll have to put an ad out for that, yeah, we got that letter from Jen. Yeah, a couple months ago. Yeah. So, we do need to find a replacement for that position. Have you got any response about the list, or anything? I think there are a couple of people that love Luisa. Yeah, Luisa's got an idea of people. She asked me about one of them, I'll put a book in here. Other than that, we haven't got any feedback. So, we need to advertise for the joint board. What open position? Well, yeah, we had a representative, Jen Barlaman, who... So, we have two opens for her in Bethel. Well, we have a select board member who feels that she'd like another person's job to do, and then we also have a citizen. So, we've got two open, is it, we can? Okay. We'll do it after, you want to wait and do it after the town meeting? Well, yeah, we typically appoint, or reappoint, positions after town meeting, so... But their next meeting is two nights after the board's next meeting. Yeah, so, sooner you advertise for a position. We just need one citizen for the Solid Waste Advisory Board, and then one of us will be appointed based on the current... Right, yes. I just, Jen, I brought that idea up during my discussions with... Sandy? That didn't go over very good, did it? It didn't go over very well. Well, that's part of the most point. Yes, intimidation, you know, intimidation. Keep that on your mind when you're reviewing these, Dr. McDonnell. The only thing is, is, you know, and I mean, unless Royalton went into it with the same mindset of, it would just be towns, people, and not anybody from the select board, I mean, you're almost, if they're gonna keep a select board member on it, then we probably wanna keep a select board member on it until that happens. Down the road. We could come up with a brush. Trace was there.  Yeah, but basically, the bottom line is that, moving forward, it should be a topic for conversation. Yes. We should figure out what the pros and cons are of that and see what the board would make. The current document doesn't stipulate any board members. Nope. No, it doesn't. It doesn't state an board member's candidate. So it doesn't, it just leaves it open then. It's just a board comprised of three members from each town. And the perfect candidate would be somebody in the business sector, so you mean, because when we get going on the new proposals, you know, it's gonna be a business down there. Yeah, you're right. Well, I appreciate that, and it's good to have that feedback. Let's move to you, Chris, and your other business stuff. Oh, well, which just, as probably all of us had read, front page of the, the Herald was talking about Randolph and, you know, I don't know if they go through with it or not, but they were considering the option of opting out of the White River Valley Ambulance. You know, there's a lot going on in Randolph right now, so I don't know how much traction this will have or not have, but just wanted to throw that out there as maybe, you know, between now and at least through town meeting, something for us to think of if Randolph does opt out of White River Valley Ambulance then it wouldn't affect us immediately because our budget would be set for this coming year, but it would affect us for the next budgeting session, which, you know, what worries me the most is if Randolph did opt out, we're the second largest town. So we would then be the first largest town and we would be picking up the larger percentage of the money zoo. And I know in the past, the town has done some studies in regards to our own, having our own ambulance services and based upon the amount of money that we pay currently, which is what, $127,000, it makes more sense for us to be in the alliance right now. However, I don't know, I mean, if Randolph leaves there's $300,000 that someone's gonna pay for and if ours goes up by X amount, maybe it is smarter for us to have that. I don't know, but all I was just gonna say is maybe we should probably right now should just put it on the radar. Let's see how town meeting goes, because they vote theirs in just like we vote ours. And if nothing happens, then I think we're good right now because we've done the studies in the past to show that our best bang for a buck is being in the alliance. But if they do opt out, I think at that point we probably want to put together some sort of, I don't want to use the word committee, but we should put together some sort of study and figure out what that would mean for the town of Apple because- Well, we do have a town of rep and it might be good to prep him, maybe you'll know. Because I think there was another town that dropped out. It wasn't, someone else had dropped out. Because they were close last year, right? Williamstown. Yeah. Well, one of the things that I guess is on the table is transport and that's a huge fund. So not just picking up the funding from the other towns but potentially losing revenue. Well, I don't want to say that that's how they make, their money because they're a non-profit, but they- Oh, that's a big part. But if they did pick up the transport and the things, there would probably be a bigger percentage coming our way to begin with. The other thing that has been thrown out there is it sounds like that what Randolph's trying to do is get the Alliance members to pay a bigger share is what I'm kind of reading through the lines here. Just like every other- The other thing that I think that we have to figure out is we pay our current share usage in the formula. But we need to look at this but I think we pay even more than that because the facility sits on Bethel land and if it's a non-profit, I'm willing to say that they're probably not paying any type of taxation towards that. So in a sense, we're probably paying a larger share to begin with being where they reside. Just something to think of if we have to get into that, you know, who's paying what for the services? But I mean, normally I would say this is probably something that goes away but it seems like there's a lot of things going on and Randolph between Sue and the state and everything else. So I would say as a, you know, if they did pull out the size will increase that we'd see would be several pennies on the tax rate. Yeah, I agree. So something maybe, I don't know who the right people are inside our town to maybe start putting together another study on how much it might be if it came down to it. I've heard a lot of people on the fire department have been involved with these discussions for a long time. Hopefully, hopefully it doesn't, but I mean, I know in the past it's more benefit for us to be in the alliance, but. Could it be able to be thinking about where the next big bone expenditures is coming in? Yeah. All right, so speaking of which. I move we go into existing. Oh, no, we're not going to hear it. Oh, that's true. Well, I got the first thing is I was just handed this. Oh, yeah, this is an application from Verizon Wireless for a new telecommunications facility up on Deering Road. By state law, they're required to give us advanced notes before they file their actual application. This is just their advanced notice. Putting us on the word that they're proposing this. What we've done in the past with this is we've waited to live on the actual application and then we review it or have our engineers review it and provide any comments that we might have. But this is more just kind of FYI that they're proposing this and it looks like it's gonna be a pretty big tower out on Deering Road. So when I get the actual application, I will bring that to you and we will. That's probably right at the town line. Well, I imagine to be up on Baldy or what I call Baldy behind the Wakefield Place. Yeah. Because that was all the time. The town line's gotta go right through there. Pretty close, pretty close. Yeah, I can't tell from this. But when the application comes out, the actual application will take a look at it and see if we have any comments or any issues with it and submit those. Okay, great. It isn't my only one. There is one that goes down and eventually comes to the Marshall Road. Yes. It used to be. It used to be the Marshall Road all the way to Mark Smith. All right. So I sent an email out today, early this morning, about a need that has arisen over the last few days. We've, Allen's known about it for quite a while. I've been telling him about it, but we've got trucks that have any tires in the back. Really badly. The one time had recaps on it and Allen came to me on Friday and said, hey, take a look at these. They're bubbling up. There's tread out. You know, just falling off of them. And I said, well, can you limp through, you know, can you limp through until we can figure out how to get some money? Well, Saturday, two of them. Two of them popped. You're going to go one on the side of the blue. Yeah. Popped on it. One blue blended back off the bridge, you know, and overnight it's sitting in the garage, the other blue, because it actually had the bubble. I thought it was the one that popped. Yeah, it went on the side of the blue. So, some of the Saturdays, I took all the pieces that they put in and some of them, I'm trying to say, people would be all tired because of the chords coming out of the tires. How old are these tires? I don't know. How old do you think these tires are? I don't know. I heard, since I got here, and one set was a set of recaps. On there. On there. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to start. And he's been running recaps on the one-ton also. I think it was a... Exactly. So I feel like we're kind of throwing a good money after that here. But, so what I proposed is I talked to Alan and we went through how much it's going to cost to just kind of get him ready to go for the rest of this year. The one ton would need all new tires, fronts and backs and all that. So that's six tires. And then the other dump trucks, we figured 10 tires total, right? We had eight rear tires and two fronts. Two front. Two stirs. Yeah. So Alan went and got three different bids. It could be included in that version. There was three different bids in there from three different companies. And Rouse seemed to be the best one and they actually come down and they will mount them here. They come to us instead of us taking them off and having me go get them. So we know we need, we haven't had too much right now in our budget. We've had equipment breakdowns and things like that. So I instead of continuing to spend and going over our budget what I was proposing, I was looking at the capital plan trees that we're looking in. And a couple of things came up that maybe we just shift some of the money around and purchase these tires. It is a capital fix. So purchase these tires, at least part of them, out of this current budget that we have. So a couple of things here on your list. The first thing we found was that next year, there was actually a payment shown on here for the F550, which is not there. This truck will get paid off in March, I believe. So that's actually $18,000 that we actually had projected to spend next year that we don't have to. It was a one extra payment. Yeah, so we've made that adjustment. It's not in the budget, but it's in the... Right, it's in this. Okay, yes, yes, exactly. So that kind of started kind of looking about, well, what can we do here? The other thing I noticed was that in 2022, they have a replacement for the Grader. I think that's way too soon. I talked to Alan and I talked to others, and I've typically seen these, especially Graders, they don't get nearly as much use and they're not kind of beat up like some of the other... Well, they're pretty heavy, they don't please equipment, do they? Yeah, usually 20 to 25 years for a replacement schedule on something like that. We have a little lost them for 35 years. The main thing, though, is to keep alert, because the point was there's a sweet spot where you end up trying to drag out a piece of equipment that's number one, costing you time because you're not making... You know, I do think it's needing repair or something. So that's the reason why I think that this was sort of like sort of the best possible time frame to repair it. Then you've got a brand new piece of equipment and it's... But so I have no problem with the idea of extending this. I think with the way we maintain them on a daily basis, now they're greased, they're oiled out, it's being done, it's not unreasonable at all to think that they can last 20 years. I really don't think that's unreasonable. With, you know, we have to get them all boarded, we have to get some tires and things like that. But it's basically another five years. Yes, yes, yes. So anyway, so what I just gave you is kind of a hand scribbled idea of what the implication would be of buying those tires. So to buy all the tires, to buy all of the tires we're looking at, it would have been 16 tires plus some fronts and all that. We were looking about 10,000 more. Alan thinks we'll just get away with just buying the 10 for the dump trucks and then the six for the one time. And that came up to $5,500. That's Rouse coming here, doing all the work and coming to us and doing all the work. So what I just wanted to show you was what that would be, kind of what that implication would be on the capital plan, the long-term capital plan and how that would shake out. I've also got some other ideas for another piece of equipment that we might be able to use, utilize also here. But for the meantime, what I'm asking for is to see if the board would approve the expenditure of $5,500 out of the capital, the trust fund, highway equipment trust fund. I believe that's what they account for. By shifting the replacement in cause of a greater five years. Well, and actually eliminating that extra payment, there was an $18,000 more payment that was not there. Well, we're going to have to do something because there's two things here. I mean, we don't want a loaded truck going down the road and blow one side and cause a serious problem somewhere. And we don't want trucks to. But I think being creative like this makes a lot of sense and I don't think it's unreasonable. It's not just that, oh, here's $5,000. We can move this out of the way. I think that this message is a missing feeling. One question I've got.  Yes, sir. That's when I heard you tire life tremendously because they're running on pavement with a full load. And I'm actually talking to the guys and we're trying to cut back on the changes. Since I've got here, they've got really, I've ran these roads, the back roads, and some of these those like McIntosh and whatnot. Just sliding backwards with a full load on you, it's pretty narrow. So therefore it becomes a safety issue as well. So I'm not against using the chains, but at the same time I'm telling the guys, really take the time. I mean, if we have to take an extra hour out of our day to take them off or put them on using their judgment, they do so.   Their tires are always bald. The only reason is because the change they get on that. Just eats them. Eats them. And that's part of the problem with these recaps that I bought. Right. Because it just, yeah, you don't want it. Yeah, we just, you know, we got a month off of it. We got a month off of it. I have a question. So is there some other type of chain that you can run that? Yeah, we've always run just a straight cross link. Yeah, what he's talking about is they've gotten the extra half way to spikes, while the amounts that you're lifting the tire parts telling you to go around and on is helped to waste a month. Yeah, I understand. I'm a hammer for a monitor. I have no tire chains. I was curious about this. But do you really want those running on your pay throats? That's my point. That's what I'm gonna say. I'm saying. You're breaking down your tires and your roads at the same time. Oh, I got you.  Oh, okay. I've never heard that expression before. So I was just, I was thinking about a different chain. I was just, I don't know. Well, so I mean, it's one thing to have them on when you're running over dirt or on frozen ground. But when you come off of that pavement, he's talking about taking the time to stop.  Oh, that's interesting. And I realized that there were well, there's different kinds of crossroads. There's different kinds of crossroads.   But it, and it doesn't take that long to stop taking them off. Exactly. So it's rather than running back, or it's actually running out with a full load with the chains on already. So was this more of a, the method in which we are going about using our trucks, or is this, go back to some of the deferred maintenance things that we've seen in the past? I don't know if it's the deferred maintenance. We were using the cheapest thing we could get our hands on. Right. Because we're over budgeted. Because we're over budgeted. So we're using recapped tires at last one month that are, I don't know, what two thirds the cost of a regular tire?  Plus the downtime. Plus the downtime. Yeah, well, I mean, we had to actually, so Saturday, Sunday morning, we had to call Dylan in, because we had a long time and it was sitting there with two flat tires. We couldn't get tired. We called around, he called all over the place, trying to get tired. And nobody happened, nobody happened. We can't get him until this week sometime. So. Well, I appreciate the creativity of the animal. This is exactly what we're looking for. Well, it sounds like you're so happy to look at the next day. Oh, he did. Oh, look at the time. With the red, right? That's the one that happened. Just something to think about for the future, we're kind of using the same concept to aid in buying this equipment that we really, really need. But that's going to have to wait until we see what happens in town. Yeah, it's not going to, I don't know what they say. So today, I just, I just, you do it, if the board is okay with this, just approve this expenditure of $5,500 out of this, this account of the Highway Trust Fund. So move. Second. Yeah, all in favor? Aye. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. It's great. And, you know, in this way, this is the part of the capital planning. I think we have the projected costs laid out, so you have the opportunity to look at that and scrutinize it, and then you put it in there and you change those numbers and you project it forward so everybody down the line sees what the decision was and how it plays out. That's exactly the whole point. Well, one of the points. It gets everything right. All right. Move we go into a separate session on bigger matters. Okay. Anybody want to second that? Second that. All in favor? Aye. Thank you. Stand back. So we won't be making any decisions.