As I look into the attendees, I see that Amber is here. I see George is here. I see Raj is here. Dan is in. Dan is in as well. Grace. So we have the trustees here. So with that, I will go ahead and I will call the Village of Essex Junction Board of Trustees meeting to order for Tuesday, March 9th. Mr. Manager, do we have any agenda additions or changes tonight? We do have a possible one if you're amenable. Marguerite, were you going to handle it? Yeah. There you go. If you would like to add discussion on potential action on voter petition. Voter petition was received this evening late this afternoon. Thank you. And before I get into it, are there others? That's all I have. No, I believe that's the only thing we have if that was not enough. So in looking at the agenda, my understanding is that the intention of the petition is for a request of the trustees to have a vote on separation should the merger revote not pass. Correct? Essentially, yes, that is a separation. So since it's something that is relating to that revotes, it makes me think that it should be something that we have earlier on in the meeting. And I'm looking to other trustees as a part of this conversation. It makes me think we wanna have that possibly before that broader discussion to at least introduce it. Andrew, I'm gonna, for some reason on my meeting software, my raise hand thing has been replaced with a happy face. So I don't know what's gonna happen when I do. You might just get a happy face. So I was gonna raise my hand. So yeah, I agree with you. Let me see what happens with the happy face. How about it, George? If you agree with me, make it a happy face. Oh, you disagree? Make it a happy face. Make it a different face. Did anything work? It's like a hand. You got a hand. Happy face would work okay too. All right. So my proposal is to have the petition go in front of, or the petition would be 5D. The current 5D would then become 5E and so on, things would move down. And I would further propose that the tree committee portion just go to the end of the other pieces of business. Is that a motion, Andrew? That's my proposal. Does anybody, before we get into the motion, does anybody have a better idea from the trustees and Roger hands up? Yeah, I mean, I was gonna say the opposite. Let's maybe hear from what people have to say and then add the, because we know what the petition says. So if we're gonna, on that topic, if we're gonna take feedback and then we're gonna discuss and then we're gonna discuss, it seems to me having heard from what the public wants to say and what you all want to say. And then, because like I said, we know what the petition's asking, so. True. Just a thought. It doesn't have to be that way, just. So instead put that petition as after the annual meeting, after the annual meeting running, I mean, probably before. I would, I was thinking before, but after the discussion on, after D, but before the warning discussion. So let's go through this. D will remain as it is, E would become the petition, F would become the annual meeting or F is the annual meeting and G will become the tree advisory committee. And then then H would be the executive discussion. I guess that's what I'm proposing. I'm good with it, trustees. Okay, that sounds good. Great. So Raj, you had that wonderful game plan. Do you want to make that motion? Can I say so moved? For me. As long as Kathy has it. Kathy, do you have that? I saw the thumbs up. I do. Great. Great, so Raj, did you want to do that? I move that we add the petition as I'm going to say it out. We add the petition as five E. F stays as it is and E moves to G. And the discussion regarding legal steps becomes H. We have the motion. Is there a second? I'll second. I think George beat you to it, Dan. So the motions on the table. Is there any further discussion from the trustees on this? Hearing none. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. I vote. Anybody oppose? Great. Thank you all that passed unanimously. So now we have approved the agenda and that brings us to the portion of public to be heard. During this portion of the meeting, this is where there are any items that the public has that are not already on the agenda. This is a time for that, for that to happen. The way this will work is if you're using Microsoft Teams towards the very top of your screen, you can have a raise your hand feature. It looks like it is a series of emojis at this point. So if you could use a raise your hand, that would be appreciated. You can also type into the chat feature that you would like to speak and I will make sure to recognize you. For those of you joining by phone, I'm going to prioritize Microsoft Teams users for now and then we will get into those who are calling in. And again, just as a reminder, if this is something that you would like to speak to the board about something that is already on the agenda, you will have the time for that. So this is only for items not on the agenda. So again, now is that time? Of course. So if you have any questions, please go ahead and raise your hand. There is a hand up. Carlin Smith. Carlin Smith. All right.  Go right ahead. Hi, Andrew. I was curious about meeting formats and I was curious if these style meetings follow Robert's rules like the annual meeting does and if there's any conflict with the Vermont open meeting. So we don't use strict Robert's rules of orders in the way that we do an annual meeting to. So no, it is not the same process and it is not the same rules. In terms of a conflict with open meeting, I don't know of any, none have been raised to us. Okay. Just curious. Mr. President, can I ask him a question? You certainly may. Harlin, what makes you think that and what might your concern be? As I guess in the amateur, trying to follow municipal rules and local government rules and doing some reading, I noticed that Robert's rules would generally allow for members only to speak and any non-members would be required to ask permission and then they would have to be able to allow them to speak. Not that I am looking to negate any residents within the village of speaking. It would be more of a meeting management tool that I was considering. Okay. Thank you. I really appreciate the clarification. Andrew, do you want to, maybe a pine or you want me to touch it? So my opinion on that is I would not want to deviate away from the current practice that we have been doing for as long as I've been on the board without the opinion of our attorney, especially with regards to not allowing a member of the public to participate in public meetings in the sense that my understanding of open meeting law is that the public has to be allowed to participate and neither the public nor participation is necessarily defined. So from my understanding, that's where I am at. And Harlin, we do use Robert's rules mainly as a backstop. We ask that citizens who are wishing to address the board address the chair and the chair decides along with the board if it goes somewhere else, but that is in general. And so in my three years here, the board has been more open about accepting public comment in certain places, even if it's not strict adherence to Robert's rules. So thank you for your question though. So long to see your hand is up. Yeah, Andrew, I think if I just want to clarify, I think what Harlin is referring to Harlin, you're saying in the public comment section, we would only ask have Essex Junction residents speak, is that correct? That would be a correct statement. Okay, I just wanted to get that. Not that anybody outside of Essex Junction couldn't speak, but they would be required to ask permission and then there would be a vote. Okay, I just wanted to- Just as Robert's rules would go along. Yeah, when you said members, I just wasn't sure who you're referring to. I can tell you that in the distant past, that used to be the practice at trustees meetings, but we got away from it because I don't, I mean, at annual meeting, people are voting from the floor and you're having an influence on the vote. We're not doing that at a trustee meeting. So I don't know how we decided to just keep it, make it wide open. But I haven't, as Andrew said, I haven't heard of any conflict the way we've been doing it. Okay, I was just asking the question and curious as to if there was a difference between the two meetings. I appreciate all the answers. Thank you, Harlin. Are there any other members from the public who wish to address the board about a matter that is not already on the agenda? And again, for Microsoft Teams, for those on the phone, I will ask you in a few moments. Okay, there does not appear to be any hands raised. So we will move away from Microsoft Teams and go to those on the phone. To those of you on the phone, go ahead and unmute yourself if you would like to speak to the board about something that is not on the agenda. Seeing nothing, hearing nothing, I will go ahead and assume that there is nobody on the phone who wish to speak to the board about something that is not on the agenda. So as such, we will move away from the public to be heard portion and on to business item 5A, a presentation of our fiscal year 2020 audits. Take it away, Sarah, I assume. I'd be happy to. So everybody, like I told, I mentioned a few weeks ago, we are finished the 2020 audits. I know that Amber has read it cover to cover. I'm super excited about that. I'm happy to give out more gold stars to anyone else who's taken the time to do that. But tonight, Bill Keiser is here. Bill's our lead on the auditor from Cattell Brandigan and Sargent. He is going to give you an overview of how it went this year and answer any questions that you guys have. And obviously I'm happy to answer questions that you have as well tonight or at any point when you get into it. So I'm gonna pass it over to Bill to talk a little bit about the audit and then we can answer your questions. Thank you, Sarah. Like Sarah said, I'm a manager for Cattell Brandigan and Sargent. We were on site in Essex to do the audit the last week of October and we were able to finalize the audit and get drafts out and approved by Sarah and her team in January. For the 2020 audit for the village, we issued an unmodified opinion, which means it's a clean opinion with no issues noted. Similar to the past few years, the village did have a single audit requirement, which means there were at least $750,000 of federal related expenditures this year. Reported on the schedule of the... The civil power plus the space. Bill, can I just interrupt you for a moment, Bill? You've muted yourself or you have been muted because somebody else from the public started to speak. Am I good? You are good now and if I can just take that moment to say for members of the public, if you are not speaking, please mute yourself. Otherwise, we have to mute you and everybody else and that will interrupt the meeting flow. So please keep yourself muted. Thank you. Go ahead, Bill. Sorry, Andrew, where did I leave off? An unmodified opinion. Okay, so yeah, we issued an unmodified opinion for the 2020 audit, meaning there were no issues. The village did have a single audit this year, which just means that there were federal related grant expenditures of at least $750,000. This year, the village had 1.2 million of such expenditures. Most of this was Department of Transportation monies available in 2020, mostly spent on the Crescent Connector Project. There were also additional monies received from the Coronavirus Relief Fund that were part of that 1.2, as well as some equipment that was purchased by the fire department and reimbursed by FEMA. Report four of the single audit documents at the back summarizes the results of the single audit and we noted no significant deficiencies, material weaknesses. Basically, those reports state that the internal controls for the village are sound. We didn't know any issues. I would like to state the one nice thing that the town and the village of Essex have is very experienced governmental staff in the accounting department, as well as a staff that has been with either the town or the village employed for numerous years. So there's plenty of experience in the finance department that we've noted over the last few years. Lastly for the single audit, I will say the reports state that the village of Essex is a low risk audit. All this means is that we're only, the program that we're auditing has been audited for the last few years and we're only required to test 20% of the expenditures. That being said, because it's construction project related, the invoices are much larger than 20%. So we end up testing much larger volume than that. If you are a high risk entity, auditing, it wouldn't mean anything other than that threshold would become 40% of testing requirements. You will notice if you flip through the footnotes, which it sounds like some of you have, we did have a prior period adjustment this year. All that means is that prior year equity was restated due to something that changed in the prior year that was brought to attention this year. This necessarily wasn't brought to our attention this year. It's something that Sarah had made aware, we've all been aware of. In the REC fund, which is a proprietary fund, there are deposits received throughout the year for summer events. And those deposits in the past had always been recognized as income in the year that they were received rather than being deferred and offset against the expenses in that following summer. In the past, we've tracked this issue. However, the change from year to year has always been very small. So an adjustment was never necessary to defer these revenues. With COVID, of course, this year, participation was down. Therefore, the amount of deposits received were down and the change ended up being $130,000 difference between the 2019 what would be deferred revenue into 2020. So we ended up booking this adjustment. In the end, the books are stated more accurately by doing this. It's just that it wasn't materially misleading in prior years the way things were happening. One thing you will notice, so if you look at the proprietary fund financial statements, this did create a small deficit within the recreation fund. I reviewed this with Sarah and in 2021, when those funds are released to revenue, that deficit will wash and going forward the recreation fund barring other future issues with COVID and lost revenue should show a surplus fund balance going forward. The government wide financial statements are stated on the accrual basis, which you would see in most non-governmental audits. The capital assets are part of the fund balance. There's $21 million that aren't available for spending for the village. You'll notice also on the balance sheet, there's no cash. This is simply because the town holds all of the cash for Essex. You'll notice the due to due from on the asset column for $6.5 million. That technically is the amount of cash available to the village of Essex, barring obviously the merger vote did not go through. So if the finance departments did fully separate themselves again, that money is available in the town. So that funding could be sent back to the village without any issues. The village does maintain its own accounts receivable for utilities. It does also have some grant receivables on the books as well. However, property taxes are all maintained also by the town. So you won't need to notice significant receivables in the governmental side of that government wide financial statement because the property tax portion is not there. Over on the fund financial statement, this is more of a modified accrual basis of accounting. This is more similar to a cash basis financial statement and more along the lines of how the general fund budget works that's voted on an annual basis. Property tax ARs, like I said, are recorded in the town and therefore there is no 60 day reserve or accounts receivable for those property taxes. Down below, you'll see the equity restrictions. These restrictions either are committed, non-spendable, which is made up of prepaid expenses and... It's pulling up there, prepaid expenses and inventories as well as assigned and unassigned. These are all broken out on pages 28 and 29 of the financial statements and they're all available to be spent in future years. The current year unassigned fund balance, the village has a rule in place where 10% of the next year's budget expenditures, that unassigned figure cannot fall over, be over that. And right now for 2020, we are right on that 10% threshold of the 2021 budget. So we are within our fund balance policy there. And overall the fund financials for the general fund, the village did end up with a positive increase in fund balance of $211,000 in 2020 fiscal year operations. That money, like I said, is available to be expended in future years going forward. The proprietary fund financial statements, these are business funds and they are meant to be self-sustaining. They aren't funded by property tax revenues or other funds raised within the general fund. The water sanitation and wastewater funds all showed income for 2020. In 2019, there were losses in the wastewater and sanitation fund. The big thing this year that made up that difference revenues were up. This is due to both rate increases and usage increases with utilities across the board. Many of our audits this year, we're seeing obviously usage increases just because a lot of people working from home and even though COVID was only three, three and a half months in for the 2020 fiscal year, I do think there was a slight increase in usage over that last quarter of the year that we noticed. And then as I mentioned, the recreation fund shows that deficit. There was a small loss overall. Partially this could be blamed for COVID if you compare the 2019 financial statements to the 2020 statements. You'll see that revenue was down as well in 2020. Again, it's only three months of COVID but that could have been a factor there. Overall, we did pull out that $300,000 from equity that I discussed before and we're gonna pick that up next year and hopefully alleviate that fund balance deficit. As far as the footnotes go, we did add a footnote for the unknowns related to the COVID pandemic that existed as of June 30th and still does today. Other than that, there are no new accounting requirements that we had to disclose this year. More than anything, there are a few requirements coming down in the near future. A lot of those have been delayed due to the pandemic. So I think maybe in two years, we might start seeing some of these additional accounting changes, but right now we have nothing to worry about there. In the back, you'll see the supplementary schedules after the footnotes. Those are just budget to actual schedule for the general fund is a required information that needs to be included. And this will give you a good idea of what was voted on for the 2020 budget and how the actual performance fell, whether those specific line items were over or under budgeted expenditures and revenues. In the other supplementary information, you just will see the combining schedules that link back to the fund financial statements. But nothing new there compared to prior years. That is all I have if there are any questions. Thank you, Bill. Sarah, is there anything you wanted to add? No, it sounded great. Thanks, Bill. So I have a couple of questions and one of just the onset, Bill, can you just go through what the audit process is in terms of what do you review? I know you had mentioned that with the single audit, you did 20% on the federal side. What does that mean and is that all that you look at? No, absolutely not. So basically, we start the audit probably in September. We start planning for the audit, doing analytical procedures, looking at last year's files. When we're on site, we basically go down the entire balance sheet. Everything from cash, accounts receivable, accounts payable, we go through, test various invoices, trace things back to what you referred to as the income statement. In regards to the single audit, a lot of that testing is entailed as part of the capital expenditures testing. That's probably the highest volume of testing we do is within fixed assets. We have to pull details on all of the repairs and maintenance accounts, search for capital assets that things of that nature, get them depreciated for the government-wide financial statements. Basically making sure internal controls are sound, accounts are being reconciled on a monthly basis. During the audit this year, like I had mentioned, we had no issues with accounts that weren't being reconciled. During the audit, there are some adjustments that Sarah and Courtney brings to our attention, but that's just a timing thing where they're still working to close out some of their accounts and reconciling some things on their end. While we're there just before we start, we might get some adjustments, but that's all that was made, at least in the 2020 audit. And Bill and his team have an uncanny ability to come in and find the mistakes that we overlooked almost immediately. But, you know, Andrew, can I also tell you what's involved in the audit? Yes, sorry if I missed something. No, I mean, I don't know what you guys do besides tear our house apart for a week and then leave, but we, I know that Courtney is actually starting now looking, you know, getting prepared for year and stuff. So now that the budgets, the bulk of budget in last year's audit is finished, we will start in earnest looking through what's going on in the current year and starting to look for assets and getting all of our schedules and reconciliation files rolled forward for next year so that as we close out the year, we can start to look at things. And then the other kind of challenging piece in government is that we have this modified accrual period, which is says that any revenues that come in in the 60 days following the end of the fiscal year, we can recognize as revenue back. So we pretty much closed the year on June 30th and then we wait for two months before we can really get going on what are the final numbers. So that puts us at the beginning of September and then Bill and crew are coming in in October. And so it really isn't, it becomes an ongoing process that really ramps up there in the summertime. Thank you for that. So just a couple of other quick questions. So given the review that you've had in the fact that, you know, the town and the village we have one finance staff, one finance process, so essentially one finance systems, do you have any concerns about the capability of understanding which dollar either revenue or expense belongs to which organization? No, actually. So that was a concern a few years ago when the finance department was brought together, but we've honestly in three or four years have not had an issue where one expense was noted for the town and it was actually recorded to the village. Internally, it's one GL with a segregation of 100 account numbers, account numbers that start with 100 for the town and 200 for the village. And all of the invoices that we review, part of our internal control checks are that they're stamped and coded appropriately. Obviously those invoices are sent to the village or the town specific to what they, the purpose of the expenses. So that is something we're looking at. As far as AR goes, or accounts receivable, sorry, the state sends reports that reconcile back to all the grand lists. And there is, we do a full reconciliation that our Sarah does a full reconciliation of the grant, the two grand lists and how the property tax revenues are allocated between the village and the town. And again, all of this stuff is double checked and backed up to the published grand list as well as the information that's received from the state confirming those grand list numbers. So we do have that third party verification as far as the revenues go. Thank you, Bill. That was the last of my questions, Sarah. Is this something you want to add to what you just mentioned? I do, yes. I think Bill brought up a really interesting point that maybe we've not spoken about between me and the board or the board that I brought up to the board is that our account number structure lends itself to keeping the two separate even though we're using one chart of accounts. And the reason we're able to do this is because governments use fund accounting. So each of these funds that we're talking about already, water, sanitation, wastewater, rec programs, rolling stock, capital fund, right? The list goes on. They are each their own separate set of self balancing accounts. So each of them is already treated as if it's its own entity for which we have to account for and they have their own asset liabilities, incomes and expenses. And we do that through our account number structure. And so from my perspective, all of the town funds and all of the village funds, they're all just all of the funds under my control. And so the account structure allows us to keep them very much apart, but we already have that structure in place because of fund accounting. So that's it. Thank you for that. I suppose full transparency and disclosure. I think you have already discussed that with us. I honestly wanted to ask those two questions for the benefit of everybody else watching this who may not have already been privy to the information. No, it's all good. You can ask Bill Bill all night and you know I love talking about accounting. Oh, I know. But on that, I see George's hand is up and to go right ahead. Oh, thanks. Sarah, I get a hasty because I didn't read the whole audit but I did read the juicy parts. But I'd like to ask Bill, since we have such a large group here, if you could just quickly, very quickly, it'd probably be just for all our elucidation, read total, explain on page eight what total net position means for the year 2020. What is that about assets and liabilities? If you could just quickly explain for all of us what that refers to, thanks. Okay, so total net position, George, are you looking at like for the general fund 2.4 million? 2.4 million? Yes. Yes, so that is historical earnings that are available for future spending. Like I had noted on the ballot, I think the place that this is broken out the best is on the balance sheet. Right. Where you'll see the net investment of capital assets of 1.9 and the 541. That's basically the historic earnings over time that have been built up. I think that might not mean so much for everyone. More so, I think if you, well, so page eight you had mentioned is the proprietary funds. Right.  I'm looking at governmental activities, business activities and total government. And for 2020, just what total net position means, how do you define that? What does that describe that? Yes, that's your historical earnings that are still available to be spent. Oh, okay, thanks. Yes, sorry. And that's right now 34,807,000 dollars. Yes. You don't have any more memories? I mean, I'm just shocked. That's it. All right. Extra gold stock. That's it in total, but that also includes all the proprietary, that combines everything. Everything, right? Yeah. Good, thanks. Trustees, are there any other questions for Bill or Sarah with regards to the audit? All right. Well, seeing none, I believe that is all and there is no further action that we need to take on this tonight. Bill, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate you being here. Thank you, everyone. Bye bye. Have a great night. Yes. And if there are any questions throughout the year, please have Sarah reach out to us. We're happy to help. We'll do. Thank you. All right. And that will bring us into consideration of the request from Champlain Valley Expositions for Water League Abatement. I'll start off. Thanks, Andrew. So I put together a memo. I'm going to share, and I drew a map. Oh, perfect. Thank you. Let's start with the map, please, Marguerite. And then I will give a quick high level about what happened. And then I see Tim Shea and others are here. They'd like to add anything and then allow the trustees to ask some questions. So this map is not to scale. This is not necessarily the way the water flows through, but in order to get a sense of what's going on, I needed this visual. So what we have here is the letter A and the letter B. And so the Champlain Valley Expo is on a private water system that serves the Expo and then previously nine properties have gone down to seven now, but we're going to start with the original nine. That's what was in place when this event happened. And the water flows from Pearl Street. So the little circle-ish, I can't, I don't know how many sides it has. With the A is meter A. That's the master meter that comes in off of Pearl Street that reads the water that flows through. That water flows through the Expo, feeds various spots at the Expo, and then goes through these other nine accounts. We have this setup as a ganged meter in our meter billing system that takes the reading from meter A. It subtracts the sum of all the readings from one through nine, and it builds back to the Expo the difference of those two. And then you add all those up and that equals what flowed through meter A. One of the, so about a year ago, we believe, there was a leak not on Expo property, but not quite to any of the one through nine properties. As you can see, I put a little red spot on this map just to show you that the leak happened on the line, in the grounds, outside of the Expo property, but before it hit these other accounts. What ended up happening is this went on for quite some time. This is very sandy soil. The water was just going back in the ground. It wasn't going up into anybody's basement. It wasn't bubbling up to the surface. It was really just the bills that were coming out that were indicating something was wrong. And because of that setup that I just described where Champlain Valley Expo gets billed everything except what goes through those nine meters, they were getting billed all of this extra usage to the tune of over an additional million gallons during 2020, a time which we know there was very little happening at the Champlain Valley Expo. So this leak was discovered, it was fixed in December. The one of the things that we've done since then to make sure that we can track where the usage is happening is we installed this meter B that you can see at the other end of the Expo parcel. This gives us one more layer of checks and balances in this gang demeanor billing system. So we can tell, okay, if the sum of this equals, we can figure out where the usage is happening and if it's happening on property, off property, and if it's off property, then we need to look for another leak. So the group approached Evan and myself about this issue because like I said, we're talking about a million gallons more than their average usage on a not average year. And so we helped, I helped put together some calculations and talk to the group about bringing this to the trustees and ask the trustees to weigh in on one, two, or three potential pieces of abatement. And so one of the things, so we looked at three categories as you noticed in the memo and that is consideration to not charge the sanitation or sewer usage on this water that leaked into the ground. The second consideration is to pay the wholesale rate as opposed to the retail rate for the water that did go through the meter. And then the last is related to the fixed fees. So quickly in the village, the water and sewer bills are a combination of fixed charges and usage charges for all residential properties. Those fixed charges are based off of one equivalent unit and equivalent unit is assigned for every 100, for 120 gallons of use per day. In the village commercial or commercial residential, so rental properties are assessed the number of equivalent units once per year based on the usage over the prior year. So once a year in June, we look back on all of the accounts, well, not manually, but there's a program that looks at all the accounts and recalculates the number of fixed fees. Because of this water leak, the Champlain Valley Expo's number of equivalent units jumped from 41.4 to 67.7. Again, after a year that was anything but average. And this is causing the Expo to be billed an increased amount for flat fees on every billing starting from July of 2020 through this coming June of 2021, unless of course the trustees are willing to consider reducing that as part of this abatement request. So there are three pieces that the trustees are asked to consider, which I just outlined, one, two or all of them, that the refund amount, if they were all to be approved is listed here. And then if the trustees were to authorize that, I would also need to adjust the March bill, which just wasn't quite ready to be included in this and we wanted to start talking about it. So Andrew, I'm gonna pass it back over to you. I know Tim Shea is here. The folks who live in those little boxes number one through nine are here as well to answer any questions.  Thank you, Sarah. And I will admit that I don't know who lives in boxes one through nine. So I'm not going to be able to use your names. I will apologize in advance. We've been hanging out on this team so much there. I see all their faces and names pop up. I would ask, is there anybody either from CVE or the Willys or boxes one through nine who would like to add anything that you wanted to make sure it was added? And I see one hand up. Go ahead, is it Giles? Giles, yeah. So just Sarah did an awesome job in summarizing and has done an awesome job in helping try to remedy this whole thing. I would make a note that in that box B, which is, it's a manhole, that was put in, this whole thing was put in 30 years ago in 1990. And there was a meter that was in that manhole that was supposed to be read by the village so that the calculation that Sarah mentioned, which is 100% an accurate assessment of what was supposed to happen, could be done accurately. So the number of gallons that went through Pearl Street, that's an accurate number. The number of gallons that went through the nine households, that's an accurate number. But there's no way to prove how much went through that meter, that manual meter, because it was never read. And I'm not putting blame on anybody. It's just every, I think my father is the only one who's around who was around when the thing was put in place. So everyone at the fair is new. The village people are new. The many of the owners of the nine properties are new. So it's understandable that some of this information wasn't disseminated to the current owners of the nine properties and as well to the village people as, and that's not a group, the village employees and also Champlain Valley employees as well. So if that meter had been read, there would have been a better way to prove or disprove everything that we think is true. But I just wanted to mention that that meter has now been replaced with a RF meter so that when the meters are read here on the farm, that also will be read. And now we'll have an accurate representation of, just exactly what Sarah said, now there's only gonna be seven because the two people, Colvoord's storage place and Norm Smith's law place, they opted to go with the well because the cost to fix the line all the way to their place was cost prohibitive. So now there will be seven properties that are fed off that RF meter that's sitting in a manhole in the box B that Sarah represented there. And so going forward, we actually now will have a very accurate way to assess the usage at the seven properties, the usage at Pearl Street and any Delta that might take place. And I also was given a quick lesson on how to read the meter. And I will be doing that probably every other week just to see if there's something else that might alert us that something's going screwball before it's read every four months now. It used to be every quarter, but now I guess it's every four months. So just wanted to fill in some blanks there. I do appreciate that. Thank you so much. And from a personal note, I have no problems if you refer to us all as village people. We are what we are. Was there anybody else in numbers one through nine or CDE if you'd like to add something? Yeah, Andrew, I would, Tim Shea, I just want to thank Sarah and her team for spending the time to help us out here. And quite honestly, had we not been shut down for the summer, I'm not certain we wouldn't notice this. We almost fell out of our chair when we got our water bills for the second and third quarter, because we've been, as we all know, shut down and our water bill was higher in 2020 than it was in 2019 for the second and third quarter. And that's when we knew we were on to something. So, and I think the Willys and the folks that on the private water system for their willingness to kind of get to the bottom of it. The good news is we fixed the leak on December 6th, I think it is, and I would say our water usage has gone down significantly since then. So I appreciate the time here this evening with you folks considering this. Thank you. Evan, was there anything you wanted to add? Just want to let the board know that it was great working with the Willys and Tim Shea, but before this request came to you, we wanted to make sure of a few things. One, the water was not going into our treatment plant. Therefore, we were not treating ground, whether it's groundwater or not, this water was obviously not going into some basement or drain or a toilet that was leaking. This was a verified leaking into the ground. So that was something we wanted to do. Second, we asked each and every property owner to check with their insurance company to see if their insurance carriers covered for this. And zero for nine, they do not cover these things. Although in my past, I have had people with insurance policies that did cover this, but I think mainly because it caused damage on the property. So the other thing is that we did require, at their expense, they put in a new meter in the spot on your map that's B and that it be radio frequency read so that when we drive by, we are able to pick up that meter because it's somewhat in a remote location for what we do and where we're going. They agreed to all of that. And therefore, we brought this request to you but knowing that that water did not go to the treatment plant and was not used in any operations that would make us believe that they should get charged for those units. So we are supportive of the request, or at least I am. Thank you, Evan, for the game. And I don't think it'll set a precedent in the future. Thank you for that. Are there other residents in that one through nine, numbers one through nine that wish to speak on this? Sarah? I just wanted to mention that when I made the calculations, I compared the 2020 build usage with the average of the prior two years. So to get a sense of how much was actually leaked and because we didn't have the data from that meter B, we don't know exactly how much was leaked but because we know that 2020 was less than average at CVE, it felt like a reasonable starting place to say the difference between what was built and the prior two years average is at least how much was leaked. And so my analysis includes that amount. How much more was leaked? I'm not sure, but we had to start somewhere. Thank you. I will also just take that short interruption there to remind people that if you are not speaking, please make sure that your microphone is on mute. As otherwise, we get that type of feedback. And if you are a member of the public who wished to speak to this item, I'm gonna ask that you hold on until the board has had a chance to talk. And so as such, if you just don't mind putting your hands down for now, I will make sure to ask for public comment when we get to that portion. So I just have a couple of quick questions. I think quick questions anyway. The water line or where the leak occurred, that was a privately owned area, correct? Or privately owned line? That's correct. And you have verified that the water that did leak did not go into the wastewater treatment plant, did not go into the sanitation section, and that the abatement that was being asked for as far as usage is not the water that was leaked. So there is no request to abate the water that went through from the water charge. Is that correct? Mostly, yeah. So there's a request to abate the full usage portion on sanitation and sewer is one of the three components. A second of the three components is a request to consider charging the wholesale rate on water, which is what the village pays to Champlain Water District as opposed to the resale rate, which is what we normally charge on water. So that's a second of the three components in this, you know, for individual consideration. Right, I just wanted to reiterate and make sure that it wasn't a request to just not have there be any fee for the water that went through. Gotcha, correct. Great. And then my last one is, should we do the abatements? I assume then the costs for that get spread across the rest of the ratepayers. Is that correct? So not necessarily because when we calculated rates for this year, we look at a rolling at, so when we calculate rates, we look at number of equivalent units in existence at that time. And at that time, this account was fewer. So my rate calculation did not factor in that spike in equivalent units from 41 to 67. And we also use a rolling three-year average of actual usage. And so any spike in overall system usage that this leak would have caused back in June when I was doing rate, when we were doing rate setting would have been tempered by using that rolling three-year average as opposed to just what was an effect there. And so when we set the rates based on the budgets, what this would cause is revenue in excess of budgeted or anticipated because that usage wasn't excess. And so it will be a refund out of that revenue pot and there's no cost to other users on the system. Also because we're considering this before we're gonna calculate rates for the client here, again, none of these outliers would be factored into that rate calculation. So I may have taken a simple question and made it complicated again, back to back. Andrew, let me know if I did that. But I think it might answer to you as no, this does not have an effect on other system users. Thank you, Sarah. And I appreciate your capability to take the complicated and bring it down to my level. Much appreciated. So I see there are hands up. I think Raj was first and then Dan. I'm still digesting what Sarah said. And so I'm thinking she answered my question. So I'm gonna sit for a minute and let Dan go. Okay, my basic question is, my understanding from what you said, Sarah, was the meter A down at Pearl Street existed prior to the leak. Meter B, if I'm not incorrect, is something that was put in subsequent to this. Incident to create another checkpoint for the water going back through the fairgrounds to those properties on the other side, correct? There was a meter in that meter pit. It was a manual meter. Someone had to get down in the pit and read it. And the village didn't do that on the private line. At this point, that meter has been upgraded to be one of the radio read meters. And we've set up the CV account to have a second meter gang, which is a little bit crazy, but it's gonna automatically do it from here on out. That's, you explained that. But so then my misunderstanding, I guess, where, I assume that red spot you made on the little map there, I was under the impression that is where the leak occurred. That is not the slay where the leak occurred. Oh, it is. So basically that red spot is it's on the line off of CBE's official property, right? So CBE's insurer said, we're not gonna pay for a water leak that wasn't on your property, but it was before any of the other meters. Okay, well, the other thing is now my question is, we've had water leaks before on village property, as we all know, over on Maple Street, was a very large leak a few years back. But anyhow, is this just something from over age related where in the pipes? Or is this where maybe some excavation work was being done, somebody was doing something? And that's, is there any kind of investigation done to look into what's going on? Because if that section there at first, because of, as I see Mr. Willie is nodding his head, because of age, well, then obviously that's not the one section. They replaced the whole line so that there's not gonna be another burst down the line. I mean, that's what I'd like to know. I'll let Tim or Giles or Giles take that. I know you described digging lots of holes on your property, but you're better suited to answer that question than I am. Okay, so this is Giles. So yes, I worked for a couple of weeks with Jeff Weston and we were trying to put in curb stops to try to isolate where the leak was because the whole farm sits on mounds sand. And he explained to me that, I mean, the leak could be two inches from where they dug and you would never know it. So what we finally decided was, well, we know where that B kit is, that manhole is. If we turned off the valve there, the meter stopped. So we knew the leak was on the right-hand side, so the non-CVE side of the line. And so Jeff gave me two options. He says, we can keep digging holes and try to find it or we can just dig a trench and replace the line that we know has the leak. There was about a 200 foot section of line. We knew it was somewhere there. So we just dug a brand new trench, put in a brand new line, upgraded the line to that. He had some special name for it, it's blue. So it's the newest stuff. And then as soon as that was put in place, the meter went back from spinning like it was going all like crazy before this. And then it stopped and started to go at a normal pace. So, and like Sarah said and Tim said, the actual volume of water going to the seven properties now was very normal. It went from this huge spike to almost nothing overnight. Good enough, thank you. Amber, go right ahead. Sarah, I'm wondering if you might be able to speak to historically how these types of situations have been handled for the village, specifically abatement. Well, there has been one other that has come up to the trustees since Lauren retired. And that was a leaky toilet in a residence and that was denied or declined. That didn't have an effect on any sort of equivalent units, but that usage, the water came in through the meter and it went down through the treatment facility. I do know that Lauren had told me about one within the last eight years that was approved by the trustees. I thought earlier today to dig it out, but I didn't, but I did when we did the last one so like what does my memo say? And that one was approved and it was an off, it was like a leak that didn't go through the system. And so there is precedent to say, well, you can prove that this water did not go into the sanitation or the wastewater treatment facility. And that meets a reasonableness test to not be charged the usage rates there, but we do have to pay for the water because we buy the water before we sell it. So those are really, so I don't have a long list of examples, but those are the two that I have in my mind. I will tell you that from time to time, I speak with a business owner who maybe has a business in the village and their tenant has changed say from a restaurant to something that uses less water. And because of the equivalent units are reevaluated once a year based on that prior year's usage, you may have a situation where you have a restaurant in there for a year using a lot of water, they leave, your equivalent units are reevaluated, they go up because they're based on that prior year usage and then you're charged that higher flat rate for the next year, even though your usage is down. And so we end up just, it's a timing thing. And so I have spoken with one, at least one that I know of that I can think of offhand, business owner in the village who had that particular issue where their tenant, the nature of their tenant changed and they had to pay those fixed fees for a year after that tenant went out. This different, not a leak didn't come for abatement, but since that is a component of this request, I wanted to bring it up. Roche, go ahead. Yeah, I just, a bunch of my questions have been answered, but I just wanted to verify what I think I heard before. So none of this will impact rate payers and across the board, right? That's what you said earlier. That's correct, yes. If we do all three, it doesn't look like the dollar amounts are gonna have a wide impact on the overall budget, but again, it's not, I just wanna make sure that was, that I understood that, thanks. That's correct, yeah. So Sarah, my last question with regards to the wholesale rate, my understanding why we don't charge everybody the wholesale rate is because it costs the village money to operate the water and to sell the water and to do the billing. And so that's the intention of charging something above the wholesale rate, is that correct? That is correct. So the wholesale purchase of water is one line item in the water budget, but then there's also salaries and benefits, capital contribution to the water capital fund so that the village isn't a good place to do capital improvements when the time comes, utilities and other things. And so that all goes into calculating a resale rate that we then charge everybody. Great, trustees, are there any other questions before we go to public comment? Okay, so if there is anybody from the public who wished to comment on this item before the trustees make a decision, now will be the time to do so. So if you are using Microsoft Teams, please go ahead and look up towards the top of your screen and you should see what looks like a sort of smiley face and a hand. If you hover over that, you can raise your hand. That'll let me know that you wish to speak to the board. You can also type in the comment feature that you wish to speak and I will make sure to recognize you. I will ask if you only, or I will only recognize people once during this portion. What else is there gonna say? And for those of you on the phone, I will come back to you afterwards. So I know I saw John, I'm gonna butcher the last name. No, I'm good, I actually raised my hand. I'm not used to this format. I think Andrew froze. Yeah, I think Irene renters hands been up for a while. George, do you wanna take over for Andrew for a few minutes?  I'm not sure you got it out. No, George, I'm all set. I had accidentally hit the high five hand, not used to this format yet. Okay, great. And as long as Andrew was frozen there, unless he's holding really still. Evan, the problem is I can't see, I'm not set up to see everybody's hand who can use it. Irene renters. Yeah. Nope, she's not mine. Thank you. That it was an accident, so. Okay, so we see no hands. No other hands. Okay. Andrew, are you back online? Okay, maybe he's not. So trustees, any other questions, concerns, anything else? And so I'm gonna, I'm sorry, I'm gonna put the, Sarah, maybe you could put the questions back. You could do that. I've got another PC screen here. I'm trying to find it, but if you could do that real quick, that'd be great. Can you see it now? Okay. And so the request is that we, do you want us to make a motion on the abatement or you want us to make you, I'm gonna read this here. George, I'm back now if you guys can hear me. Okay, go ahead, Andrew, take it over. Yeah, sorry if I missed public comment. No, we're all done with the public comment, Andrew. So we are ready to make a motion on the recommendation. So what I was going to say, for me personally, I am okay with one in three for number three or for number two. I would propose to not abate that one, just in the sense that we, it costs money for us to do this work, us being the village. So for me, I would be okay with one in three. Other trustees? George, go ahead. Yeah, I am in favor of abating all three. I won't go into all my reasoning, but for the second movement, I would be okay with abating all three requests. Other trustees, would you like any further discussion or do you wanna go ahead and make a motion? I don't see any other hands raised. Somebody, George, if you wanna go ahead and make a motion, go ahead. I will make a motion that the trustees approve all three abatement requests or the CVE water abatement. Thank you, George. Is there a second? Second. Thank you, Dan. And is there any further discussion from the trustees on that motion? I would just say I'm going to vote no on this and it's not because I don't believe in it. Frankly, it's just number two. I would not abate that one personally, so it's the only reason why I'm gonna vote no. The others I think are personally reasonable. So if there is no other discussion, all those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed? Nay. Because it wasn't a unanimous vote, we'll have to do a roll call. So George? Aye. Dan? Aye. Amber? Aye. Raj? Aye. Andrew, nay. So that passed four to one. And thank you all for being here, especially those of you who live and are impacted by this. We appreciate the extra clarification that I know I didn't have in advance. So thank you so much. Thank you very much. And I'll add, you really don't have to stay for the whole rest of the meeting if you don't want to. You will not be offended. I will do. Thank you very much, Sarah. You did a great job. I appreciate all your help. I'm happy to help. Thank you. All right, have a good rest of the meeting. Take care. Thank you. And that will bring us into five C, consideration of approval of noise waivers for amplified events at CVE. Is there a member from the staff who was going to reintroduce this? I was under the impression Robin was joining us tonight. You are correct, Evan, as usual. Take it away, Robin. Hi, the trustees had some questions. I have for Tim Shea. So Tim and I had a discussion. I added some of the answers into the memo. You may also have other questions for him. We went over the reasons for it. Tim said that he would follow the usual protocol for any events that might happen at CVE when they had amplified events two years ago. This is trying to catch up with what happened in 2020. Not only did they not have any outdoor events that were amplified, but also indoor events where they would rent out their space for soccer tops and so on. Didn't happen because the space, for instance, that Nordic normally used was taken up by the state as an overflow hospital space and then also for vaccines. So basically, 2020 was a dead time for them in terms of revenue. And they're trying to get right side up again by basically, for one better phrase, squeezing two years into one. Any questions? Thank you, Robin. And so just a little bit of additional clarity for those who weren't here last time. The request is for up to 50 events, for amplified events to be considered tonight. And this is also assuming that the events actually occur. They don't have the events booked yet. This is just to have the option. Right, right. Things turning around. Yeah, Raj, go right ahead. Hey, thanks. Hey, I had sent a question in about, so overwhelming support when I asked a bunch of people about this, but there were two big concerns. One of them was noise on school nights and the other was traffic, especially weeknights. The impact on people getting through Pearl Street, you know, rush hour, getting kids, getting out from work, all that stuff is what I heard can be significant. And so that was a question I had put in via email. I don't see anything mentioned here about it. And it was basically asking, people were wondering about the two-way entrances and exits. And I guess I would say, you know, for when possible, you know, and thinking about this, I realized that it may require two entrances to be open and that would be more staff and more police and more expense. And I asked this with that understanding, you know, out there, you know, in the open that it is probably more. I wouldn't think it would have to be every night, you know, and maybe there's something you can think of at the CV, Tim, that, you know, obviously, if there's like an odd week where there's more than a couple shows that maybe that could be a consideration that could be, you know, I don't think the intention there on my part or anybody's part is to make it every time. You know what I'm saying? And I guess the other thing I heard from people was school nights. And I'm looking at the calendar that technically would go to June 10 because school ends on a Monday this year, I think, boring snow days. So that's a Thursday night, you know. So those are the only two things I heard. Otherwise, everything's addressed here. And you know, the school night thing, I think people, I heard all kinds of times. So I'm not really gonna suggest the time. Feels like 10 might be too late, but my kids are older now. So I just put that out for conversation. Thank you, Raj. One quick thing I just wanted to point out was the, I see here, one of the bullets being that all of, moving forward, the first event would be high school graduations. They don't anticipate any events on school nights. Dan, I believe your hand was next. Yeah, no, I just, my thing is I agree with Raj as far as having two points of egress just to make it easier on traffic, but I assume depending on the number of attendees, it may not be necessary. And I almost feel like maybe that's something that they already can handle without us saying they have to do it because it doesn't serve the purpose to have them like Raj said, the added expense of either flag-bearing people security people out on the street or police there for something that's so small. That's it. Thank you, Dan. Go ahead, George. Tim, rough estimate. How many thousands of people have been vaccinated at CVE so far? Do you have a rough estimate? Yeah, I appreciate the question. As of last weekend, it was 25,000 here at CVE. And we're averaging about 1,000 a day. This past week, this past Friday, we hosted one for the VA as well. Get upwards of 1,500 that day. So it's five days a week and we're proud to play a small role in the recovery. And you're gonna be vaccinating about 1,000 people a day for something like the next two or three months. Do you anticipate? Yeah, we haven't got an official word from the state yet, but I think two or three months is a reasonable time. I think when they may step back from here, but again, we don't know that date yet. Yeah, I'm digressing a little bit, but I'm just trying to make the point of imagine if CVE wasn't here. Thanks. Thank you, George. Tim, it seemed like you wanted to say something on that one. I'm happy to clarify the questions on traffic. We would anticipate, again, this has yet to be approved from the state as far as capacity issues. So a lot of it's hanging upon that, but a capacity looks to be about 1,500 people, which in the scheme of things, compared to other events we have here, it's pretty small. But we would, just like we did even this past summer with the drive-in, which was a couple of hundred people, we open up V-gate, of course, our main gate, and then what we call E-gate is the one on our northwest corner on 2A. And I would anticipate this, we would open that for these shows too. One, to minimize the traffic on Pearl Street, but also to just some guest experience and also from a public safety issue in the event you needed to get vehicles in here when we have something going on, the added gates just works better all around. And just confirming if we did move forward, the high school graduation would be the first events. And we've met with Essex High School, CBU in South Burlington, they love the idea there. I don't wanna say desperately, but they're looking for a, it was pretty special what they were able to do last year with the drive-in. So this won't be the drive-in, but it could be something special that they are really looking to do for their students. The seniors who have had a not so special senior year. Yeah, I'll just jump back in about the traffic thing. I'm happy just making that something, we request that you keep in mind. I don't think with those numbers and the numbers to have that is helpful to have those. So I don't feel like we need to put that as a condition at all. I think it's just something that if it can be done, great. But again, I think there was overwhelming support that I heard. So I'm all in favor. Thank you for that, Raj. And I do wanna clarify one thing. My earlier statements was that the request was for 50 events. The request is for 30 additional events. CVE already has 20 within the agreements that already exists. So this request is for an additional 30. So I just wanted to make sure that my statement was corrected there. One of the things we talked about last time, Tim, was about notifying area residents of when these events would be. Did you have ideas in terms of how you may be able to do that? Also in terms of a timeline? Yeah. We can certainly look at, is it front porch forum or the Essex Facebook groups? We have a mailing list of neighbors here and I'm more than willing to do if it's mailing every couple of weeks, as far as option. We don't know what the schedule will be and it'll be changing. I don't see a scenario where we book and act tonight for tomorrow night. So we'll have a bit of a runway to notify folks. We'll certainly put information on our website but I know not everyone's gonna go to our website. So I think that the mailing is probably the most effective piece and we can get that out like you said a couple of times a month as the schedule evolves. Great. Yeah. I think if you could do a mailing like every two weeks or so to the neighboring residents, I think that would be great or that list that you have. I think it's like 250 feet away from the property, something like that. We expanded it last year and Evan can speak to it better than I but we've always notified our neighbors of what's going on. It was the abutting neighbors and I think at the request of the trustees last year, Evan correct me if I'm wrong, we expanded that to a greater list to notify them of activities. Yeah. Now it's a 250 foot radius of all the property lines but I think the request is still the same. Maybe pick a length of time, maybe every two or three every month, maybe something like that you send out to those people just what the schedule is for the next month. And then your electronic sign is also working. Is it not? Yes. And we will list things up there too. Amber, go ahead. I also, I think you mentioned Tim about front porch form, if you could include that in the notification as well. And I like to see something on the village website. So when you, I guess basically when you finalize that letter, maybe even just the copy of the letter that's going to a butters, maybe the village can throw it on the website just in case, you know, folks happen to be looking there as well. Trustees, any other questions or comments before we turn this over for some public comment? All right, same process as before. If you are using Microsoft Teams, please go ahead and raise your hand. Let me know that you would like to speak. You can also use a chat feature to let me know that you would like to speak. And for those of you on the phone, please hang on and there'll be a time for that as well. And hopefully this time my screen will not freeze so that I can recognize you. So Chris and Nancy Chacoin, I see your hand is up. Go right ahead. Hi, Andrew. You guys are doing a great job dealing with this on Zoom or Microsoft. And I also am completely supportive of CVE trying to make up for a lost year. My biggest issue is it's kind of like a blank check. So these discussion questions, all those things pertain to all 50 potential events. They're all gonna end at 10 or 10.30 based on the night. There's no fireworks. They're all gonna adhere to the sound agreement. Did you ask me, are they all going to adhere to the sound agreement? I'm asking if they're all going to be heard that adhere to the ending at 10.30 or 10 o'clock on weeknights and no fireworks. I would say that based on the answers that CVE has provided that yes, they would and it could be a part of the motion. Not just the addition of the 20 that they're allowed under the noise agreement. Everything moving forward would follow the sound agreement as has been agreed upon. Yeah, but under the sound agreements, we've had two-day-long waivers. That's not what we're talking about here. So if I'm misunderstanding something, if you'd like to go ahead and maybe restate the question in case I'm misunderstanding. Well, in the past, for example, they've had the Volkswagen thing. And that went for two days overnight. And I'm just saying, because that's one of the first 20, they're not going to be able to... What are those parameters? Is the parameter that all the events will end by 10 o'clock on a per-fume night? Or I mean, at mid-week or 10.30 on a week? So I think I hear what you're saying. You're asking about what are the parameters and the parameters are the sound agreement. The parameters are the timeframe that we would set forth as within this memo. No, the parameters are not in the ground. So thank you, Chris. Hang on a second. Dan, go ahead. Yeah, I think what Chris is trying to get at, he wants to apply the same terms for this waiver for the 30 to the existing 20, if I'm not mistaken. Is that correct, Chris? You want all the limitations in these extra 30 applied to the previous 20 that are approved, which I don't know if we're capable of doing that. This is just for the 30. We're not addressing what's already there. That's a separate agreement. This is an addition to it. We're not, it doesn't, as far as I'm reading it, maybe somebody else can clarify that. Well, so am I talking? You are. The way that I'm also reading this, Dan, is that as the bullet says, any requirements from the sound agreement between the village and CVE will be adhered to. Right, he's talking time. The time has yet to be determined. It says here, there's a 10 PM curfew midweek, 10 30 PM on Friday and Saturday nights. Andrew, the previous 20 though, I'm saying, he's saying take the same time frames and everything wording here and apply that to the previous 20 that they already had, which doesn't actually fall into concept. The requests is for 30 additional. That is the request, it's for 30 additional. The request has nothing to do with the previous 20. So Doug, do these the things that were in the discussion notes apply? So, I mean, basically can they do the Volkswagen thing, which is a two day affair and is that okay? What I will say is in full transparency, I don't know. What I do know is that if it falls within the previous 20 events that have already been agreed to before today, then yes, if it doesn't, then no. If it's something that would fall within the capabilities that we are being talked about today but that are being discussed right now, then yes. And if it doesn't, then no. Okay, so you're saying that they can have 20 events, which similar to what they've done in the past, which have often been multiple day events and no, so once they use up there, they could use those 20 any way they want. I also will point out that agreement has expired. It expired in 2020. So there is no agreement. That was a- So to prevent a very lengthy back and forth, Chris, could you ask your questions? We can then answer questions and then we'll continue back. So go ahead. Are any of these 50 events that you're approving going to be and after 10, 30? Go ahead and ask your questions, Tim. Do you have any others? You mean Chris. I'm sorry. Chris, go ahead if you have other questions. So keep going. So that was my first question. Are any of them going to end after 10, 30? I don't want to keep going into a back and forth, Chris. So if you just want to get your questions out, then we'll answer questions after. Are they all going to be monitored? None of them going to, none of the 50 going to have fireworks. And this is all based on an agreement. It is no longer in place. It ended in 2020. I want to say, I really want to support CVE. I'm completely on board with them. I think they deserve to be able to do more stuff.   Tim would do a great job of communicating it with all the neighbors.  I can't, you know, if you have a concert at, or an all day thing at CVE, yeah, that restricts what I can do as a neighbor.  But, and I'm willing to put up with that, because I do want to support CVE, but I don't want it to be, you know, a surprise. Thank you, Chris. Did you have other questions or? No. Thank you. So Raj, I see your hand is up. Is it something quickly in response or can I keep going with more public comment? I think it's, I think it'd be helpful to ask this for this particular point of the conversation. And how do these, can someone remind me, are there differences in what we see here for the 30? What are the significant differences in these 30 versus the previous 20 that have been approved? In so far as timing, I see here that this 30 says sound agreement will be adhered to, social distancing will be adhered to. So what, Tim or Andrew, what to, you know, to get to Chris's point, are there significant differences between the 20 that have been approved and the 30 that are being asked about? So before we go there, if I may Raj, I'm sorry for interrupting. The reason why I am is because I don't want to have different processes for how we engage the public in our conversations today. And so later on, one of the things I'm gonna be explicit on is that everybody's going to get the opportunity to comment once, but that we're not gonna have the kind of back and forth that we've just had in this topic. Because otherwise, frankly, I don't think we're gonna be done until, you know, two or so in the morning tomorrow, given the rest of our agenda. So what I'd like to do is I'd like to receive public comment, like to receive the questions. We will then close public comment and public questions, and then I'll answer them. So if there are questions that are predicated upon some of the answers, just please have the questions come out, I will take them down and then we will address them. So that's why, and I'm sorry, Chris, if I'm being a little curt, I just want to make sure the process is fair for everybody. So, and also, Raj, sorry for cutting you off. That's another question that I have down here. So Chris, were there others or are you all set? I think that covers it. Great. Thank you, Chris. There was another hand up and it appears it has gone back down, but if there are other members of the public who wish to speak to this item, now is the time to raise your hands in Microsoft Teams or type into the chat feature. And if there are none, those of you on the phone, if you'd like to comment or have a question, please go ahead and do so. Okay, I'm not hearing anybody on the phone, I'm not seeing any other hands up or any other questions. So we'll go ahead and bring this back to the board. So from the questions I heard, I think one of the things that will be very beneficial is having that overview as to the 20 versus the 30, in the sense that the 30 events are the ones that we are being requested up today and the 20 are the previously agreed to. Evan, is that something that you, Evan or Robin, is that something what did you want to address? Would you restate your question? I lost track for a second. Yeah, that's good. What are the differences between the approved of events within our agreement with CVE that we currently have as well as the requests that we have in front of us? Robin, do you want to take first crack? Yeah, there's really no difference. The solid agreement stipulates what has to be done for them to keep within the protocols of the agreement. These are just 30 additional events. It's a one year thing. That's it. They've already said you're going to monitor them. They've said to times that they're going to start and finish. And the statement was for, I think, three, three and a half hour period. So that's not a two day event. So I think that addresses Chris's question. And this is really just, it's a makeup year for last year. And there's no adjustment to anything that's agreed in the signed agreement. I think we can incorporate it in the signed agreement if you want, just approval. Approved compliance with the signed agreement or something. That's what you want to do. You're seeing Robin that all the other agreement, the other 20 events that they have an agreement to have during the year are limited to the same timeframe, Friday, Saturday night, midway, curfew, whatever, all exactly the same as this. I find that kind of hard to believe. I see Tim shaking his head. Tim, I think Tim has his hand up. Yeah, if I could. Go ahead, Tim. I look at what we're requesting this evening are 30 additional and don't impact the existing 20 that we have. And it is signed off on, Chris, I could send you a copy we signed off on that a few weeks ago there, I believe. But this, the way we look at these are 30 additional with the, I know it was important about the hour of the curfew for the 30 additional. So it's 10 p.m. midweek, 1030 on weekends. And I don't think that's consistent with the existing 20. Thank you, Tim. So one of the things that Robin, you had mentioned was that the events would be two and a half or three and a half hours or so. I don't see that within this request here. Well, seven to 1030. Right, but I don't see a start time. So Tim, is that something that you're asking or that you were asking for is a specific start time? No, I wasn't. We just really focused on curfew, stopping at 10 or 1030 for the additional 30. For the most part, with the exception of those high school graduations, this is gonna be a seven o'clock showtime and it's done by 10 o'clock, maybe 1030 in a weekend. But I don't anticipate much day activity. Not to say there won't be any, but I don't anticipate it. Thank you. And I just wanna be clear. I had mentioned that we were only gonna be having a public comment where people speak once. So Chris, I see that your hand is up, but I'm sorry. That's why I had asked if you had other questions and if they were predicated upon other answers. Raj, I see your hand is up. So I still don't know how this differs from the first 20. It's the first question. The second question is, how are we supposed to differentiate if they are different between what event is scheduled from the first 20 and what event is scheduled from the second 2030 if they're different? I mean, did the first 20 events he book and how are we gonna keep, if the terms are different and if it's materially different? I mean, I'm only curious if it's materially different. And for me, that would be, I don't even know what that criteria would be. I didn't even think that they would, I thought this was just gonna be 30 more just like they were before. So if there is a difference, I'd love to know, is it significant? Are the other ones 11? I just, PM that kind of thing. Or do you know what I'm asking? And then of course, how do we account for that? You know, because if it's just, well, this one works for this criteria. So I'm gonna plug this in and call it out of the first 20. That seems, I don't know how that would work. So I don't wanna drag this out, but it is a, you know, it could matter. I'm not sure if that's something that Tim, if you wanna address or Robin. Yeah. Oh, I'll defer to Robin if I'm happy to speak. Go ahead, Tim. Yeah, I'm trying to think how we can answer it as clear as I can be. We can certainly allocate these sound, if approved, these 30 to the concerts taking place on the midway. And I'm not trying to gain the system at all. I'm just trying to see how it's clear I can be. The only time I see us going beyond 1030 is if the fair occurs. And we're planning right now, the fair will occur with no grandstand acts or no big rack. There'll be music in there. So we need sound waivers for, but the fair could go on to its traditional timeframe. We were done by usually 11 o'clock or so. The concerts are done before that. But I don't see any of these shows, you know, going, they wouldn't go beyond 10 o'clock midweek, 1030 on weekend. Now, certainly during the fair, we're going to go beyond 10 o'clock midweek, as we always have, right? But I don't see any of these, these shows will not go beyond the 10 and 1030 as outlined. So, no, John, I just want to- Yes, thank you. I understand what you're saying, and I hear Raj, but there is no way to really to say when. We're just saying you're getting an additional 30 and if he uses all those, but what I think more so is you're going to have to indicate, you know, whatever, there's, you know, if you go beyond 30 events with, that are beyond 20 events that go anywhere outside of these parameters that, you know, then you're using those other 20.  Yeah, correct. And I, you know, with the events going on here, a lot of the events, I probably, you know, won't use all my 20, what I said. You know, look at what you said for the past, those events are not occurring. So once you have 20 events that exceed these, the limit in this permit, you can, you're held to only events except all of these guidelines. It's as far as I read it. Correct. And I will say these concerts series were posing in the midway. I don't care what permit I use. I'm not going to, I'm not going to run it past 10 o'clock midweek, 10, 30 of the week. It'd be foolish of my part to do that. Knowing that that's the terms we're talking about right now. Thank you, Tim. A couple of other things that I know we're asked about. So we had the monitoring of sounds and as it states within the request, the requirement from the sound agreement between the village and CBE will be adhered to. That would also work for these 30. Evan, the sound agreement that we most recently had, that was just done the last year. Yeah. And I have now a total signed copy between Tim and the village. And that expires when? 2023. Okay. As the request says, we are not requesting that fireworks be approved for any of the events and that again, pertains to the 30 that are being requested of. Yes. I'll touch on that. Tim and I have an agreement. He will not ask and I will not approve. We just, fireworks are just not working. It's just, it's more trouble than it's worth. Especially during the week. We have an agreement. He will not ask and I'm not approving. Great. And just looking back down through the list. The other ones were from previous trustee comments. So trustees, were there other portions that she wanted to, trustees, were there anything that I missed that you saw and or were there other comments, questions from trustees at this point? Andrew, I'll just make one comment. I believe that the signed agreement has not made its way up to the website. We will get that up this week. Thank you. If there are no more questions, someone wanted to make a motion. I'll make a motion that trustees approve this one time request for 30 additional amplified events in 2021. If the state permits such events this year with the caveat that all events shall comply with the sound agreement that is in place between CVE and the village. Second. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, George. Is there any further discussion on the motion? Hearing none. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Anybody opposed? All right. So that passed unanimously. Thank you all. Thank you for the comments. Tim, thank you for being here to help answer some of the questions. Thank you for your work. Thanks for your support. I appreciate it. Absolutely. And thank you for the thousand a day getting vaccinated and the testing if you all have done. It's greatly appreciated. Thank you. So that now brings us to the discussion on how business 5D, discussion on how the village should proceed based upon the merger vote. We are now at 813. We've been doing this for a couple of hours. We're about to enter into something that I think is going to take another lengthy amount of time. If the board is OK, could we take about a five minute break before we jump into this in case any of us want to get some water and move around for a moment because I think we're going to be here for a little bit. I don't care. I'm ready to go, but I don't care. I understand that. All right, I'm going to be selfish. I've got to go. I need to buy a break. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to say we're going to take five minutes. You know what? If you just mute your image and you just carry your device with you, you can probably hear everything. All right, Dan, that's enough. So I will go ahead and I will just say that we're going to take a five minute break. My class is 813 at 818. We will be back in session and I will be muted. Sounds good. I'm not seeing any other trustees. Feel like I'm alone. Sorry, I needed that little lightheartedness. So we have Amber. We have Andrew. Do we have Dan, Raj or George? I'm here. I'm here. All right, thank you, George. How about Raj or Dan? I see Dan is on hold. Thankfully no hold music. So before we officially come back, I would like the board to be here as I have a question on the process of this before moving forward. Yep. Trying to stall to give Raj and Dan enough time to get back, but I also want to respect the fact that we have more people in attendance now than we have had at any of our other meetings. So don't want to delay that. So with that in mind, I guess we have a quorum present. So I will go ahead and say that we are now back into the trustees meeting. Thank you, everybody, for the pause and the break. Greatly appreciated. So trustees, my question to you is typically when we do this, we introduce a topic and then the board talks, we go over all the comment and then the board talks again. What I'd like to do is I'd like to just briefly introduce this. I'd like to, then at that point after we've introduced it and set up some guidelines, then go into the public comment portion. Receive the public comment, close the public comment when everybody has finished and then bring it back to the board and decide it can go from there. Does that work for you all? So I just want to be clear. So you're going to open it up, you're going to go to public comment and then public comment session will be over with and then the trustees will speak. Is that it? That is my request. I don't have a problem with that. Amber, what do you think? It's fine with me. Roger, Dan or either of you back and have an opinion on that. Is that for, is that for the next two or three? Yeah, that sounds fine. Is that for the next two or three items and the whole merger related? Certainly for the next steps from the vote, as far as the petition, I would like to turn that one over to the petitioners as they would be able to present it to us better than I think we can, or I can. Sorry, I missed the initial comment. So the request is what I'd like to do is do things a little differently for at least this first portion of the next steps based on the merger vote, where I'd like to basically introduce a topic, then turn it over for public comments. Once the public has commented and has concluded, bringing it back to the boards and moving on from there, instead of having the board speak first. Andrew, can I maybe just wanna just throw something out there. Do you think that maybe a quick trip around the board with each of us very quickly, just outlining our thoughts like 30 seconds because it might give the audience some flavor of what we see, but I don't care. If the rest of the board doesn't wanna do that, I'm fine. I'm fine with your format too, either way. I'm good with anything. I'm good with what you've said. Go ahead, let's hear what the public has to say. All right. So with that, essentially this topic as it says in the agenda is a discussion on how the village should proceed based upon the merger vote. I wanna just go ahead and try and frame this a little bit, set some expectations in terms of what to expect, a little bit of also what not to expect. So with that, one of the things I wanna make sure to remind people that the most important part to remember is that there are a lot of emotions and personal feelings that are attached to this topic and that what may be a brilliant idea to one may contradict with another's values. And to please remember that we are all neighbors and to address the questions and statements to me, questions to other residents are not allowed. Name-calling and or disparaging comments about others are also just not acceptable. After I introduce this topic, we will go ahead and go into the public comment portion and I will go ahead. Is Andrew frozen again? I think he may be. Okay. Okay, this is problem because I don't have his access to see the hand that raised hands. I will be your eyes for you, George. Okay, you know, Evan, you can absolutely, so we were just about to start taking public comment and Andrew was asking everyone to be civil and I will double that. So I think with no further ado, I would maybe, I don't know how to impose some order on this. I could, maybe we just launch right into it, but I would just try to caution everyone also maybe with some thoughts that if try to keep your comments to... You're stuck, George. I think basically what Andrew was saying is that if somebody has a comment that is similar or the same as somebody's already commented, just say, I agree with so-and-so what their comment was so that we can move the process along more efficiently. Andrew's back, I think. Now George is back. Hi. I think it would be great if you are not speaking, take your camera off. We can hear you just fine. And you get to speak once. You're gonna get a couple of minutes. You don't have to repeat everybody, whatever you said. Just say you agree. So I'm back, if I can take things back over. Yes, sir. I don't know what you last heard. I'll try to make this brief. So I think as Evan was just saying, when it's your turn to speak, please if you agree with what somebody else has said, please simply say, I agree with what the previous people have said. And go ahead and use their names if you would like. If you have questions, that is exactly what this is for. Please ask your questions. But I ask you to ask all of your questions. Get all of your questions out. Get all of your statements out. Once, and I will be keeping a running list of the questions. If you want to make a statement, that is also fine. Go ahead and make statements. I have also been asked about what about, or what about non-residents and whether non-residents can speak. This was addressed a little bit before that with my understanding of Ramon's open meeting law, we have to require all of the public to participate or to allow for all the public to participate. Basically, I think he's gonna allow for public outside of the village to speak, but he's gonna start and focus on the village. Once he's done with that, then I think secondary would be people from outside of the village. Okay, that makes sense. Do we have a time suggestion? I don't think there's any time. I think it's just people should use this common sense and try and be respective of other people. We don't wanna be here until five tomorrow morning. Yeah. But let's try to limit it to two minutes. Use that as a guideline. It doesn't have to be strict two minutes, but if we could try to keep it within two minutes. And how about, is Andrew still frozen out? Yes, he's frozen. And Raj and Amber, you're both still here. So we still have a call. Okay, Andrew looks like he's coming back. It looks maybe for some reason where it keeps swapping out. So maybe we should just launch into it and get it going. And Evan, do you know who had their hand up first or can you recognize a hand if you could call that out for me? I've been coming in and out. I currently only see Marcus Serta. Okay, well, let's hear from Marcus. Marcus. And Andrew's back. Okay, good. Marcus, you're muted. Marcus, you're muted. Marcus, quiet. Give it a shot, Marcus. Yeah, a little faintly. If you could speak a little louder or maybe get a little closer. My apologies. Okay, there you go. I'm used to the other mic. Anyway, I'm sorry. Okay, so let me first by saying that obviously we all need better internet. Sorry, Andrew. Let me say that as a resident of the village, my immediate reaction to what occurred was to scream separation. We need out. But after taking a deep breath, after giving it some thought and considering what our next moves are, here's what I recommend that we as the village do and the trustees put forth. I believe that the trustees at this time should consider and put together a committee or two in order to look into separation as an option because of the fact that I believe what we as the village need to understand in totality is the ramifications of that in its totality. We have talked about it. We have gone over numbers. We have gone over many pieces of it. But I think there's lots of minutiae here that still need to be worked through and the public to understand as well as obviously the public needs a solid opportunity to comment and participate. So we need a strong amount of outreach. The public forum is nice, but obviously we all have limitations on our time. There might be within another committee structure more of an opportunity for the public to participate and outreach from that committee and or the trustees to the public for that dialogue to occur. But again, I really want that committee to a committee to spend time and look at not just the financial ramifications, where are we going to put these people? Where are we, where are our town offices? Where are these, where are our police? Are we sharing? What are we sharing? What are we potentially not sharing? Look at all of those options in a separation situation. Are we 100% completely severed or are we talking about continuing to share some pieces of the town with the town? What does that look like? And I think that in tonight's discussion, it would be totally inappropriate to talk about separating now. It would be inappropriate for us to do that. Even in the short term, I think it's gonna take us a little bit of time, hopefully not a year, but hopefully we just take a breath, consider this option in its full detail and we do that with a committee that's focused on that. Nothing against what the trustees are doing or the good work that you do, but obviously you have a lot on your plate to keep the day to day going. We should have a committee that's focused on this piece of the puzzle to bring back to the trustees later on a recommendation in full detail so that again, we as a community will have participated and the trustees can then make a solid and informed vote later on on how the village moves forward. Thank you, Marcus. I appreciate that. So I see that we have moved on to public comment. So are there others who wish to speak? Please go ahead and raise your hand into using Microsoft Teams. Great, so Matt and Margaret, I see your hands. I would also ask that if you have finished with your comments, please go ahead and put your hand back down. Otherwise this is gonna get pretty loaded pretty quickly. Thank you for the opportunity. Can everyone hear me okay? Great. I'm obviously the Matt part of Matt and Margaret. I'm excited to be the first one to be able to say a great thank you for all the hard work that the trustees have done. I can't imagine how much work this has been over the last several years to even come as close as we did to merging. And I just wanna thank you for all your hard work. And I know that you had not only the village at, you had the village folks in mind, but you also had the rest of the town in mind too. And I think that gets lost in some of these discussions. I have a question, Andrew, if you just wanna take this down and then answer it later. My question is, is that there's a lot of discussion that we need to have a revote in order to send Mount Pealier some sort of message to allow us to separate. So I think as a member of the community who wants separation at this point, I'd like to hear why we have to revote, why we have to spend the money on the revote. Do we have to send a message to Mount Pealier? Is that in the form of a revote? And would the money be spent starting a committee or starting getting some consultation from some folks and how to separate? Thank you. Thank you, Matt. And I saw other hands before and they appear to have gone away.  Otherwise, I'm gonna end up losing it.  So Mike Sullivan, I see your hands up. Go ahead. Mike Sullivan, the floor is yours if you want to unmute yourself. Yeah, that does help, doesn't it? I'm so conscious about not having it on. Thank you to the trustees for all the work in the select board for all the work. Both boards did a great job in trying to reconcile all the issues that we have between the town and the village. I wanna say that to me, status quo is unacceptable. If we have to, this is no longer. I'm paying over a thigh. I just paid my taxes today, over $1,000 more of the same value of a house in my house versus the same house in the village and outside the village. It is just an unacceptable situation and we need to move forward. And I believe the message to Montpelier should have been delivered already by the fact that the village has voted 70% in November and 80% in March here that we wanna be one equity. And if we don't, they should allow us to find it in another way. That's it. Thank you guys. Oh, I have one more thing. If we do separate, we get Sarah Macy. Oh, I hear that. Are there other members of the public who wish to speak on this item? Gabrielle Smith, please go ahead. Hey everybody, ditto on the thanks. I can't imagine. I know how I felt Wednesday morning and again on Friday evening. So a couple of things. I've lived here 15 years. Worked really hard to see this as a whole community and to help us be a whole community. And for me, this merger vote is it. I don't ever wanna vote on merger ever again. I don't want any of you to ever work on another merger plan. I don't want us to waste our time. So for me, the re-vote is about one last chance. It's one last chance for a clear choice. I think a lot of people are holding out their hope that they can keep that lower tax rate and keep the status quo somehow and find reasons to justify why that's okay. And that's not much leverage for us in negotiations. The hope is that somehow they'll be able to keep voting it down every time. So my feeling is I'd like to give, I'd like to give merger one last shot. I didn't want to Wednesday morning. But this is it for me. I don't wanna do this ever again. So if this doesn't go down, I'm all in for separation and I hope it works out for all of us. I certainly feel this way now about my community and Essex as a whole. I love this town and I love my village but I can't live with tax inequity anymore. It's not even about seeing my taxes go down. It's about living in a community where people are okay that some of us are paying unequal taxes that some people won't even acknowledge that we do. So my message to all is thank you for listening, keep listening, keep engaging us from this voter. I don't wanna do merger ever again. So if this goes down, I'm all in for separation and I thank you all. Thank you, Gabrielle. John Ruel? Well, I think I'll reiterate what everybody else is saying. I think I have lived in a village now for, I mean, I grew up here more than 50 years and I know some of you have seen one or two merger votes but in 50 years, I've seen quite a bit more than that. And this discussion has been going on for decades, upon decades, the outcome for the most part has always been the same. I think the only vote that we should have is not a re-vote on the merger but a vote within the village only that we wanna separate that we are tired of the tax inequity that it's been going on long enough and it will allow us to go to the legislature if that's what we have to do to say, enough is enough. The people within the village of Essex Junction wanna change, retire to the tax inequity and we wanna move on. And if the town has obviously on a number of occasions, the town outside the village has not wanted to join us in a merger, it is more than clear that that is the feeling of the town outside the village. So the only vote should be do we agree that we separate? I'm done. Thank you, John. Genevieve, you are now up. Go ahead and unmute yourself. Okay, so I am not in a favor of a re-vote. I was extremely disappointed this time of all again but I don't think a re-vote is a good idea. It's just too expensive. A lot of people spend a lot of time and thank you for all you guys did. However, I think now it's time to move forward. I would, however, support some sort of sharing agreement as a separate entity. I think because Essex will be substantially smaller, that might be a good thing. We may have two different communities but we may still share some services. I don't think that's impossible. I think we've been working very hard at merging over the years. I've been living here for 27 years. Sometimes you just have to agree to disagree with the outcome and move forward. There's a lot of opportunities to be seen maybe sharing some services, maybe with Winooski or other area communities as well. And I think we should move in a different direction. Maybe in the meantime, you could last more than a year, keep the taxes in escrow. That would give us a very strong financial position. I don't know if it's legal or not, but that might be a thing to explore. Thank you. Thank you, Genevieve. And before we go on to the next person, I just wanted to again remind people that if you have already asked, if you've already made your comments or asked your questions, please go ahead and lower your hand. Also, if you are not speaking, please make sure that you are muted so that way we don't hear the background interference. Tim Miller, go ahead. Thanks, everybody's kind of hitting the nail on the head. I think when you look at whether the argument is merger or not, I think the merger argument's kind of been settled. When you look at the vote count from outside the village, you had 3165 residents vote against merger. You had 1,215 residents vote in favor of merger. And I think that number speaks for itself. We as a village can want what we want, but it doesn't sound like the progress is there to be made. So I think it's time we come to the realization that what we may wanted wasn't necessarily the best case and it's definitely time to move forward as our own entity. And I agree with just about everything else that has been said at this point tonight. As far as the sharing of services, I don't know. I think if we're cutting the court, I think we should cut it maybe outside of working out an agreement with the police department. And I think that's, those are my sense for the evening. Thank you, Tim. Brian Sheldon. Brian, you can go ahead and unmute yourself. You're still muted. We hear you. All right, apologies for the delay. I appreciate the trustees offering myself as a guest here in the village as an opportunity to speak. But without commenting on whether a revote is or is not a good idea, I have a question. I've heard publicly and even here this evening that a reconsideration vote would be expensive. So I have a question. Is it possible to delay the vote for trustees and or the village budget under the emergency election law passed here in January? I believe if we did that, then we could hold a reconsideration vote at the same time. I'm not sure about the deadlines on the extensions on the edges of each one. And if so, would that reduce or eliminate the expense of such a revote? Thank you for the opportunity to speak. Thank you, Brian. Deb McAdoo. Deb McAdoo, if you can unmute yourself, you're up. Oh, okay, sorry. Okay. Okay, so I want to thank everybody who really worked towards this merger. This was a big, huge community effort and it was a long slog. And I thank you all very much. I was very disappointed by the outcome. But you know what? I know that we did our diligence. We did everything we could to create a patient deal for our so-called neighbors in the town. And I think that, I think we can move on now knowing that we did our diligence, we did our best, 19 votes, come on. So I think it is, I agree with everyone who has said it may be time to separate. And I like the idea of doing a study to make sure that we're doing it in a very smart manner and that we're not creating any unintended consequences. I'd also like to be able to explore whether or not litigation might do something to fix this because we haven't had. So I'm learning at least the realest stuff we want now. For those who are not, for those who may be on the phone or if I have not recognized you, please make sure your microphone is on mute. Anyway, I apologize for that. That's okay. So I think 19 votes have failed. So I don't think that the electoral process is going to bring us any fruit. And so maybe we should try the judicial branch. Thank you, Deb. Are there others who wish to speak to this? Micah, go ahead ahead. Yeah, just with some of the discussion about people saying that, this is settled that the town outside the village has made their opinion known. I think if we're doing this study that's gonna look at impact the more transparent and public we can make that both for the people within the village but also if we are gonna have a re-vote, I think there's a lot of people outside the village that were voting this as a, do I take a tax increase or not? And they're not seeing the details in the repercussions of separation. I think the better we can market that and make that very well known, that there are going to be tax repercussions either way with this that they need to consider that I'd like to see that publicized ahead of the re-vote if that happens. Excuse me, this is Kathy. I was wondering if Micah could state his full name for the record, please. Oh, sorry, Micah Hagen. Thank you so much. Thank you, Micah. Thank you, Kathy. Other members of the public who wish to speak to this item. I will go ahead and pause another 15 or so seconds in case anybody else wanted to speak. Otherwise, once we close the public comment on this, it is unlikely we will come back to public comments. So it's important that if you have a question or a comment, it's important to air that now. Hey, Andrew, this is Vince Franco. Hello, Vince, go right ahead. Hey, just as a resident of Essex, I want to say that I appreciate the work that you folks did as a board and all the time and effort that you put into the merger plan. And I don't want to see my town split apart. And I totally understand where everyone's coming from. But when I moved to Essex, I didn't move to Essex for part of it. I moved to Essex for all of it. And I know it's not my decision to make about separation, but, and I'm just one resident, but I enjoy the whole town. And I think it's kind of a shame that it's come to this, but I appreciate everything you guys have done. And I appreciate the time that we've all spent trying to make merger as equitable an option as possible for everyone in the town. Thank you. Thank you, Vince. And are there others? And that includes others on the phone. If you're on the phone and wish to speak, go ahead and unmute yourself. Sarah Michelle Stoltz. Go right ahead. Hi, I just want to say thank you to everybody. Gabrielle, I really, Andrew, I wanted to speak to Gabrielle through you, I suppose. I just really appreciate her comments. I also agree with Mike that status quo is unacceptable. And that definitely needs to be loud and clear. I guess that's all I wanted to say. And I also wanted to say that I appreciate all the chuckles in the beginning of the meeting. It was fun. Thank you. Thank you. And I'll take that opportunity to say that anytime we can turn this into a laughing matter, I'm more than happy to be there for that. So again, other members of the public who wish to address the board. Morgan, which if you don't mind just stating your full name for the record when you do speak. Morgan, the floor is yours. Morgan, we cannot hear you. You do appear to be unmuted. So I'm not sure what it is. Morgan, I'm not sure what's going on, but we cannot hear you. I'm not sure if you are using a microphone or like an external microphone or something else, but for some reason we're having some difficulty hearing you. I see you have now muted yourself. Maybe try unmuting and we'll see if that fixes it. Try now. Nope. I'm not getting anything. Maybe put it in the chat. Or is that not appropriate? Sorry. We don't use a chat for- Yeah, sorry. Yep. Just frankly, as with how much goes through there, it's not something that can be managed. Okay, sorry. Morgan, what I would also offer, this is not going to be the only time that we talk. This is not the only time to offer input. If you'd like, my email address is abrownatsxjunction.org. Again, that is A as in Andrew and then Brown spelled the exact same as the color at sxjunction.org. If you do have a comment, I am happy to share that with the rest of the board. So that way we all give your thoughts. Representative Lori Houghton, go right ahead. Hi, everyone. Just want to echo everyone's thank you. I know all of you have been working on this for a very long time. So we appreciate it. I am speaking for Representative Karen Dolan as well as she's on the call. Everyone keeps talking about Montpelier and what we will do. And I wish I had an answer. I can tell you this, that Karen and I will absolutely shepherd the will of the people to Montpelier. We have been talking to people and explaining what's happening here in Essex. Trust me, they know what's happening here in Essex. So we'll stay engaged with this conversation. We are happy to answer questions offline from people. Just let us know what, and trustees, obviously let us know what you need us to do. But we will do everything we can. Thank you, Lori. Thank you, Karen, as well. Morgan, did you want to try it one more time?  Kenneth O'Connell, go right ahead. It's actually Jay O'Connell. Sorry, Jay, go ahead. That's okay. So I just wanted to acknowledge, I mean, we've been here before. There are people who have paid, I'm sure very close attention. There are facts and history that I assume bind and inform our next move. And so I really just think my question is what are those key facts and that we should understand? So not something to be answered here, but I've been watching lots of threads. There's just a lot of information and probably misinformation out there. So really what is it that, what are those key pieces of information that we should understand, that inform kind of where we go next? That's my question. Thank you. Thank you, Jay. I'm not seeing any new hands. Well, we take the time. Morgan, why don't you go ahead and give it a shot again? Nothing coming through yet? Yeah, nothing. Okay. Are there other members of the public who wish to speak to this item? Okay. I'm not seeing any other hands. I am not seeing other people in the chat asking to speak. So we can go ahead or I will go ahead and close the public comment portion of this. Thank you all for taking the time to speak, to stay as long as you have and for having the courage to speak. It's not something that is easy for everybody to do. So I appreciate that. I appreciate the many comments that I have heard which I took the best notes that I possibly can in terms of what was said. I certainly note that there has been a lot of appreciation for the work that has been done. A lot of what sounds like desire to certainly move forward, which is great to hear. Heard some really good ideas. So I really appreciate that. Some of the things I wanna make sure to address are the questions, which I didn't hear many questions and trustees, if after I answer these or try to answer these, if there's something that you feel I have missed, please tell me. As this isn't just, as I hope you are all paying attention as well. One of the first questions was about why do we have to re-vote this? Is this something that has to be re-voted for Montpelier in terms of must re-vote? There does not have to be a re-vote. There is a petition that is going around and that is a citizen right within the Vermont State Statutes and within state law. It's the exact same thing that happened in 2006 that overturned that successful merger vote into no merger in 2007. So I would say the re-vote would have to happen should the petition happen. If it doesn't, then the re-vote doesn't happen. In terms of do we have to do this for Montpelier? I don't believe there's any person who can necessarily speak for all of the legislature. Laurie and Karen I think can do a really good job of helping to direct us when we need it. I also think that they would hopefully agree that the tea leaves don't always work in terms of predicting what must happen for Montpelier. The other question that came through was, is it possible to align voting with the re-vote to reduce costs? And so when I see that, is it possible to align the potential re-vote should that come through with the village election? That's something that we can talk about later on. My understanding is that with the legislature's approval to move our annual meeting and our annual voting due to the pandemic, that yes, we can do so. And we will be talking about that later on. Laurie, I do see you here and I just again wanna make sure I didn't mistake anything as to what I said earlier about Montpelier. No, you are correct. We, Karen and I cannot speak for the rest of the legislature personally, I would say. If we have the opportunity to re-vote, I would take it because three times in six months, we'll say a lot, I think. But if we don't, if it's the will of the people to go away to separation or something else, you know, that's fine too. Great, thank you, Laurie. So, trustees, did you hear any other questions? Because those were honestly the only questions that I heard. I am seeing heads shaking, no, so great. I also saw some of the things I do wanna note that I heard. I heard things like move forward with separation. I heard, just going through the list here, you know, status quo being unacceptable. Many people talking about how this isn't the first time we've been here, but it is time that we move forward. Seeing that there are a need to make sure that we understand as a community, understand the questions being asked and understand the ways to move forward in terms of, I think it was Jay who pretty succinctly said it, what are the key facts which must be answered in order to inform our next steps and how we move forward? Certainly heard people who are pro-separation. That certainly came through. Some individuals who discussed, you know, moving forward with the re-votes. One thing I wanna be clear on the re-vote, that is absolutely not anything this board has any control over. That is nothing that will be brought to this board. That is something that is at the town level and so the town select board will handle that should the petition get there. But that is not something for this board. Was there anything I missed, Ford? Or are we, we wanna deal with it already, Robin? I mean, I don't know if we're including comments that were sent via email through our S extension email. I know that a couple of people expressed concern of a separation thinking that we should stay together for better together, but just so that's known out there. I also agree with the Andrew that I think somebody commented about the implications of separation on the town outside the village tax rate. And I think that's been clearly stated to the residents of the town outside the village. Maybe that this potential is an important chance after being maybe more informed about what separation that might impact them may change some people's minds about merger. Thank you, Dan. George, I see your hand up, your hand is up. I just wanna quickly say a couple of things. One being that in terms of moving forward, I certainly agree that there is a lot of information we don't know. I don't recall who it was that had said it, but there are such things as in separation, where are we going to house a new staff? Where are we going that we don't have space for right now? And we have not had a department for in years while we have had, we've had a manager, we've had a finance director. We haven't had an assessor. We haven't had a police department in years. We have not had our clerk back in a few years. We haven't had an IT department. We have that previously contracted out. We had various departments as we would have to then hire staff or input them somewhere. We don't know where they would go. In terms of separation, we have a whole host of agreements that exist with the town. What would that look like? And what would happen with those? I know we've received a few emails on dissolution. That's something that I didn't hear mentioned tonight that has a whole host of other questions with this solution, such as what do we do with everything the village owns? And when I say everything, I mean buildings, I mean equipment. I mean, what do we do about the staff that we currently have? Are they just let go? How does that work? Our wastewater treatment plant, which serves Essex Williston and Essex Junction, the town of Essex and Williston. What happens in dissolution with that? Also then with the agreements. So I say all that to say that there's a lot we don't know and that there's a lot that I would agree with an earlier commenter on. We need to do some research on this. So I also say that in a way to say, please be patient. This is a process that's gonna take some time. So I asked for people's patience while our cats go by.  Well, Andrew, I didn't know what your process you wanted to do. Do you want to just sort of go around the board and have us give our own sense of where we are and what we think? Or are you asking us to respond to specific questions you're asking? Why you want to just sort of jump get, I mean, I've got quite a bit to say but I don't want to interrupt your flow of what your plan was. I could talk about this for hours. So I would say why don't you, why don't we just do a quick around the room here between us, talk about initial reactions? If there's a question that you feel I didn't answer, please or want to expand upon and go ahead. Okay. Okay, well, I'll start by saying a few things. I want to lower my hand first. I want to start by digressing a little bit and reminding all of us and I think the members of the select board who may still be here or the message you get to them. We agreed a number of years ago to create a unified administration and they've done a great job. We've a unified manager. Evan's doing a great job. Sarah's obviously doing a great job. We've heard a lot this past summer about dignity and respect, human dignity. We have to have respect for our management team and our administrative staff. The last thing we need to do is put them in the middle of a village town food fight. So, and that just has to, we can't just, we can't put them in the middle of this and we can't ask them to take sides. Sorry, go ahead, George. So this is what happens to me. I take it George can be frozen for a little while. Can I go?  All right. I mean, I've talked to people about this for a long time in some of our joint meetings. I discussed the members ceremony to do an example with the tax rates with the water. And I brought up the fact that I'd appreciate if we could present the tax implications with separation. I've heard a lot of things about people. We, Vince Franco called in and basically mentioned he was worried about losing the community he's here for all of Essex, I agree. I'm all for all of Essex. I've been for merger, I prefer merger to separation but status quo must go. The thing is, even if we were to separate the community to separate doesn't mean that we separate and we disappear. Everyone can still utilize Brown Island Library. The town outside the village can come down and utilize our rec programs. They're gonna pay the out of community fees. We can still utilize Indian brook. It doesn't go away. There's no walls going up. There's no barriers going up. We're still gonna be right next to each other and work with each other and share. People are gonna use our pool. We're gonna do things. It's just, it's not like it's not... Oh, George is back. Go ahead. I don't want to cut up. What are we buying back or am I... I got you in the mid yon by the way, Amber, just as I was frozen, the screen froze you in yon. I'm glad I'm putting you to sleep, kid. Thanks. That's great. That's a great sign. It's not you, George, I promise. That's thanks. But if I could, Dan, I don't want to interrupt you. But I just wanted to get that across, guys. We have a long, we have a commitment to our staff to try to not put them in the middle of this, okay? If I can, can I just sort of rant on about another minute or two? First of all, you're stuck again. But I'll continue, Andrew. So I think there's an impression that if the communities separate, that means we're no longer gonna be able to enjoy things we had. Dan? Yeah. Andrew and George are both frozen. So let's just hold on a minute. Sorry. Well, we've been playing this game a lot. And maybe we should have them do it without video at this point. Yeah, maybe they're very difficult. For everybody on the meeting, I just want to apologize for the internet issues we're having tonight. I know you're all taking a lot of time to be here and it's probably very frustrating as we figure all this out, sorry. Well, anyways, I'll continue to talk to you and Amber, but anyhow, we got a quorum anyhow, and we can continue. But my opinion is that I still prefer merger and I'm for this, you know, revoke. If we get the signatures required and that select board approves it, moving forward with a revoke. And Dory just stated that, you know, that goes that much further to showing that we, you know, to the legislature that we're trying for a merger. And obviously over a 63 year period, this has been a topic of discussion. And so I'm not, I don't look at it like a doomsday that this is the end of the world. We're going to be separate. It's going to be terrible. No, things will go on. It could be amicable. And obviously many communities come to our village to utilize our rec programs, our facilities, our library. And as we do going into Burlington or South Burlington or neighboring communities. So those things will exist. The wastewater treatment plant, the tri-town agreement will still go on. All the things, the police department will exist. I mean, if we have the internal agreement, I'm saying if the suffrage, the fire departments have MOUs, they do that anyway. So things that would continue on. I don't think it's bad as what I'd rather see a merger though. That's how it ended. So I'm getting a pretty clear message that maybe George and I shouldn't talk so much because we keep freezing.  I don't know if it's- I'll turn my video off. Maybe that'll help. Hang on. It'll help your bandwidth. So I don't know who's up. If I could just finish my thought, can I do that? I don't know. Do I get frozen? And if I get frozen again, I'm going to keep doing this, okay? You're going to have to just deal with it, okay? So it was ever freezing me. It was ever freezing me. Stop it, because I'm not going to stop. Let me go. I had a whole bunch of stuff to say. I'll get to write a very quick thing. I is an alternative to separation and I absolutely get the passion around separation. Trust me, I totally get it. I totally get the frustration, the unfairness of it. I totally get it, folks. And I think if we do separate, if we did get down that route, obviously we would have to, we saw the audit we had tonight. We would have to do something like that. It would have to be a third party. I would not implicate staff in something like that. And you would have to get long-term projection, financial analysis, how does our position change? And you would also have to bring that and do that for the, I think the town as well, because if you went to the legislature as I think Lori has made it clear, there's no clear statutory process for separating a village from the town in a modern era. And certainly nothing like, nothing the size of Essex and Essex Junction, the legislature's never done anything like that. So they would want to know what's going to be the financial impacts all the way around. What are they going to be the political impacts, policy impacts all the way around? And it's good that you're moving, Amber. As long as you're moving, I can tell that I'm not frozen, that's good. So yeah, we would need a long-term analysis just doing a merger, a separation charter, wouldn't cut it. The other thing I just want to quickly say, besides separation, I would like us to consider, we were talking about alternatives, plural. And an alternative to consider is a restructured status quo. I know some people who are in the audience may not want to hear this, but I think if we look at the actual ballot and look at the result, consider the result, the merger was, which was going to cost everyone 24 bucks outside the village. That was defeated roundly, but a town budget that increased household taxes on average by something like $52, passed with flying colors. In that budget was the village public works budget and for the first time, the village rolling stock fund, okay? They're leading up to the budget vote. There were no recriminations, there was no fire and brimstone on local media or social media, no finger pointing, no one had their recitations dragged through the mud, no public records requests, it just passed. In fact, it wasn't a single question at a town annual meeting about the budget, but merger raised a storm. We also look at the election and I don't take anything away from the two candidates who ran, but the election broke down pretty much around village town lines. So the message I'm getting here, if we want to look at it is that, I think that maybe our neighbors in the town have been hearing it and I think maybe they do get the fact that we are upset and we're fed up with the tax inequity. And I think maybe the message is that if we solve it behind the scenes, as long as we don't, there's not a lot of public shaming about it, maybe we can keep working on this. But I don't think you can look at the ballot and look at the events over the last year and say that we have a real strong signal from the town that they want to merge with us. I think that maybe it's not just about the money. Maybe it's about our local political culture. People just feel like they don't want to break up the status quo, but maybe a restructured, re-engineered, re-imagined relationship between the village and the town, something that we could work on with the select board within a limited timeframe, while we're also perhaps investigating separation so that we have alternatives. I would like us to consider that. I think that we need to consider all options going forward. I think a lot of the details about what's going to happen, what would happen if we separated with the wastewater treatment plant and the fire departments and so forth. I think we've kind of worked all that out. I don't think there is a great deal of mystery there. Yeah, we would have to spell it out. But I think before we asked the village community to vote on a separation charter, absolutely right. We would have to really have all of our ducks in order. And I think we would also have to know financial impacts on the town. They would lose all of the village residential property tax. They would lose all the villages business property tax. They would lose their revenue from global foundries. So it would have a profound impact on the town. And we can say, hey, that's not our problem. It is our problem. And I think the legislature would tell us that's our problem. The legislature isn't going to operate on the basis of emotion. They're going to look at impacts on both sides. So happy to get down the separation in looking at that, sketching out how that might look. But I would still not give up on working, trying to work together with the select board. I think we've come a long way. I think we've had a lot of positive signs. This adds a little intensity to it. There's no question about that. But I still think we need to keep our lines of communication open and try to work with them. And most important, let me go back to my original point. We got to be really, really careful not to put our fine management team in the middle of all this. Okay, thanks. Thank you, George. So Amber, Raj, do either of you want to go since you haven't gone yet? I'll just be very brief, because I actually need to walk away because I have something in my eye and I need to flush my eye. But I would really like to have a conversation with our legal counsel to find out what the next steps are from here. I feel like that's a foundation point for anything, because we can talk about separation. We can talk about anything else, but knowing whether we legally or not legally, whether we can do it is kind of where I'm coming from. So I'm just going to leave it at that for right now. Thank you, Amber. Raj? Well, I guess I'll just echo everything that's been said so far. I mean, from an emotional point of view, I'm incredibly frustrated. Both boards, especially staff, put an immense amount of time into trying to create something that I think we all thought was fair, respectful of the impacts, and really kind of set Essex up as a great community and set Essex on a great path for the future. And I think to be quite honest, I think that got lost in a lot of silly arguing and misinformation at the end. So I definitely understand what I've been hearing an avalanche of frustration from the community. People are frustrated and angry and they want to separate, they're done, and I don't disagree. But I have said for quite a while, I do want to know as part of this process we go through, and it's going to be a long process to figure out what the best path forward, like George said, the best of the alternatives we have, we're not done looking at possible consolidation. So I'll just agree with what everybody said, but I'm gonna say something a little bit different. And I'm not saying this is the answer, but I would like to know from people how much tax equity would be enough to not split Essex up. There's still areas to look in our budgets, in our services. I mean, how close is close enough for people to not see Essex split up? If we tackle the last remaining couple of things that we get, I don't know, let's just call it 95% there. Is that okay? So just one of those questions, as we're going through, Marcus suggested a committee to look into separation. If however we go about this, I think as George mentioned, we have to look at all the alternatives and try to figure out what, where we are, and really have a good s