I'll set. All right, so I'll call the Monday, September 13th, 2021 select board meeting to order. Any agenda additions or changes from staff? None from staff. Any from the board members? Okay, no changes. So we don't need to approve any changes. Next item on the agenda is public to be heard. This is a point in the agenda where attendees can address the board on issues that are not on the agenda. We have a couple of things I wanna say first. We have a long agenda, so I'd like to ask you to be brief if possible. Also please be civil. Like to ask that speakers are reframed from using inappropriate language. We do have some families that watch the meetings together. I'd also like to avoid any inappropriate language, please. Address any remarks you have to me. Please do not attack others in the meeting or other members of the public or members of staff. You have any issues with the government, please address your comments to me. I may interrupt, as you're speaking, either to try to get you to move along to your point or to try to correct something that incorrect you may have said or to get clarification. Anything that I've missed, I should bring up. I think audience communication. We had some problems last week with people not being able to hear us because they're hearing from the audience. Oh, yeah, good point. You're not talking. So if you are attending remotely, please keep your microphone muted so that you don't step on what other speakers are saying. Also members present in the room, please don't shout out during the meeting. If you have a concern, please raise your hand and I will try to address your concerns. Also, if you are attending the meeting remotely, please leave your camera off until you're speaking so that we don't take up bandwidth for others or go to the meeting or add distraction. Okay, so having said all that, I'm closer trying to get into the meeting. Please sort of come to the microphone and state your name. My name is Kent Koptyuk. I live on Osgoode Hill Road. I've been an Essex resident since 1982 and I've got two things I'd like to discuss. One, I've been on a lot of public committees over the years, downboards, zoning boards, planning boards, firefighter association boards. And this is the first public meeting I have ever attended that was not started with a salute and fledged to the flag. And I'm very disappointed in that. Number two, with Chairman Watts, I know my wife spoke with you this morning. I was on Essex Town Fire for over 13 years. Firefighter, EMT, I'm a ski patroller at Smuggler's Notch for over 10 years. I was a wildlands firefighter for the federal government in Arizona back in the 70s for the Canadian Forest Service in the Yukon Territory in the 80s. And I'm a fire department in Lee, Florida for over 10 years. So I've been a volunteer firefighter and a paid firefighter since 1974. And I'm appalled, I've been driving by town hall now several days and I'm just appalled to not see the American flag on our flagpole. And I was extremely disappointed to not see it at half-mast on Saturday, Patriots Day, in commemoration of all the lives lost on September 11th, 2001. I cannot believe that our town would do this. We have two fire departments in this town, the village department and the town department. We have a ladder truck that the call had been made. I can guarantee you that 20 men would have been here and with them in a matter of hours. With the ladder truck to replace that flag, they would have paid for it out of their own pocket. They would have repaired the rope, put a flag up in time for Patriots Day if anybody had been or warned about it. I'm retired from the department, I'm not active, I don't come into town very often. So I just noticed this on Friday and again on Saturday and Sunday. And I'm just, I really want to express my disappointment in the town leadership here. My wife made a number of calls this morning. She got a number of different answers. One was the flag was damaged and had to be replaced and was on order. Another answer was that the rope was broken. The town manager was on vacation. The assistant manager was on vacation. She got all kinds of excuses, but no answers and nobody willing to take responsibility. Again, I want to emphasize my disappointment in the town's performance here and I really hope that we can do better going forward. Thank you for your comments. Greg wanted to respond. Yes, please. Mr. Coptic, thank you for speaking and I do apologize for not flag not being on the mast, on the flag pole right now. I did speak to your wife this morning. It is a number of those reasons. Unfortunately, at the end of the day it was for planning on our part or timing on our part. The flag was damaged, it's been repaired. The board to raise and lower the flag is also damaged and broken.  We'll have the flag back up. But I do apologize to you. I apologize to the community. It was a terrible timing on our part. We go over site that we should not have missed and recognize that. And I thank you for speaking up and we'll have the flag up there in a couple of days. Thanks, Greg. Betsy. Betsy Dunn, I've a resident since 86 here. I only have one question. And it's about the cannabis committee that you have. And I'm wondering if they started to meet and if so, when do they meet? And when they meet, are we allowed to have community members present during the meeting? You know the answer to that? I do not know the answer to that. Staff and response. It's an informal committee. It's only met twice at this point. It's a couple of select, well, one select board member, Don was recently appointed after Vince Franco stepped down. It's one trustee. It's the community development directors from the town and the village, the town planner. It's a representative from the Economic Development Commission. So far it's met when people can meet. It's hard to get all those schedules together. Usually in the daytime, usually in the morning, but we don't have any sort of formal schedule, formal meeting time. It's more to start talking about how do we hear from the community and get input and advise the select board and the trustees going forward. I guess I'll have a follow-up if I can. Yes. So could you put that in the front porch form? So I'm certain that you know before a day beforehand that you're gonna be meeting the next morning. Could you put it in the front porch form? So people who would be interested to come and hear what they're saying? We haven't had a public meeting about it yet. It's just internal at this point to try to figure out how to do that public outreach and start to get the input from the community. So the meetings are not open. That's what you're saying. Correct. It's just working group at this point. Hey, thanks, Bessie. Thank you. Okay, any other comments from the public in the room? Okay, I see Rachel Lazat's hand up online. Rachel, go ahead. Thank you. I realize that public to be heard is not a time for back and forth. So I understand that. However, I do hope that Chairperson Watts might address the intent and background of the Vermont Digger, his quote in the Vermont Digger article of 81921. I will quote, "'Town officials are not even having those discussions with the residents in detail yet because it would scare people. The citizens of Essex, both the town and the village deserve an answer as to what that means and I hope you'll address it." Yeah, I can respond to that. I was misquoted there. The discussion that I was having with the reporter was with reference to town employees. We are certainly not talking publicly about any cuts. We aren't talking actually have not even had any non-public discussions about where to make any cuts or if we need to make any cuts. So it was the town employees that we were concerned about having concerns about the continuity of their jobs. That was the context of that comment. It was, I believe, quoted incorrectly in the article. Does that satisfy your question? Oh, sorry. I was trying to adhere to not back and forth, but I think that, you know, obviously the quote was stated if the reporter is quoting you and if it was staff. I mean, I think staff probably deserves those answers too. As soon as we have some of those discussions and have some clarity on direction, then it certainly will be public but we have not have those discussions. And I guess that's as far as I'm gonna go. So thank you for your question and your comments. Hey, I see Mary Post's hand up. Hi, thank you. I had trouble getting in, so I just wanna make sure you're in public to be heard, right? Yes, we are, Mary. I did see that you were trying to attempt to get in a number of things. Okay. Anyway, I'm just curious. I would really like to know when members of the select board knew that there had been a big falling out between the two heads of the record committee. You know that I saw the email where it said that the name now, but our rec person was kind of kicked out of the rec department of the junction. And what concerns me is I wanna know when the select board members knew about this and because we went to two meetings, one was at Memorial Hall, about Memorial Hall. The other one was about the tree farm and it was just incredible to me that during both meetings, no one seemed to know that there was even a problem. And we're going to have open conversations and the citizens knowing what's going on, I think it's a real problem. I'm not saying that we have to know if there's internal squabbles between the staff, that's none of our business. But when we went through all of this time talking about these two issues and then already somebody must have known, it must have at least been Evan, that there was this big falling out. So I would just like to know what people knew about it. Thank you. Mary, we'd have to do an investigation to figure out who knew what and when. So if you'd like that information, could you submit a public records request for that? We'd have to, like I said, we have to do some investigation for that. I can't think of my head when I learned that. Okay, I'll do that. Thank you very much. Thanks, Mary. Okay, any other public to be heard? I don't see any other hands up. Scroll down and see this anybody on the phone. Anybody on the phone? I'm sure that, okay. Did you want to make me comment? Yeah, I just, we haven't yet approved the agenda. We made no changes to it. So we didn't need to change. Okay, my question was going to be since we haven't taken action to approve the amended. I have problems with this. To approve the agenda, would it be appropriate to add the Pledge of Allegiance and give the agenda and approve the agenda? So there's interesting, I think we'd need to have a discussion about that because there's concern about the fact that not all attendees of the meeting might be members or might be citizens and or the phrase under God being in there may cause some concern with some. So there's equity questions that I think we need to have a full discussion about with the length of our agenda. We can have that discussion at another time. Okay, thank you, right. Yeah, we have not had that discussion about that. Any other comments? Okay, move on to the first business item or the public hearing, public hearing about application to the state of Vermont for recovery housing program grant 2021 under the Vermont Community Development Program. We have some folks talk about that. Is there anything else needs to be added to that introduction? All right, Amy and Dave speak and if there's anything to add, we can try to jump in after that. Really quickly, this is something that the select board had seen about two years ago. That application grant application ended up not getting funded or approved by the state but there's another opportunity for the same project different grant funding opportunity. And with that, I'll let Amy and Dave take over. Hi, I'm Amy Dimetruits with the Champlain Housing Trust. I apologize for wearing the glasses. I had eye surgery. I need to keep the glasses on, apologize for that. My name's David Regal. I'm the executive director of Vermont Foundation of Recovery. Welcome. Thank you very much for holding the time for this public hearing and for considering our requests once again to apply for funding for a great project that the Champlain Housing Trust is doing in partnership with the Vermont Foundation of Recovery at the Fort to provide recovery housing for folks who are suffering with substance abuse disorder. As Greg said, we were here two years ago. It was almost exactly two years ago. We held a public hearing and the select board voted unanimously to support an application for the Vermont Community Development Program funding. It's federal funding that goes through towns. We were to be heard and considered at the April 2020 funding hearing and that got canceled because of the pandemic and they've only just recently received some additional funding that's specifically for recovery housing. And so that application has just opened up. So that's the funding that we're asking that we apply for here. Again, the town would have to apply on behalf of the project. And the public hearing is out of date now because it was two years ago. So that's why we need to hold another public hearing. Essentially, the project has not changed but I know the faces here have changed in the last two years. So I'll give you some background about that. In 2016, the Champlain Housing Trust purchased 12 buildings with 31 apartments along Ethan Allen Avenue at the Fort from UVM. It was married student housing. We converted most of them 19 apartments I mean 19 homes into condominiums for sale and those were all sold. But we retained ownership of three of the buildings with a total of 12 apartments, 1,005, 1,006, 1,007. And we were trying to figure out what we wanted to do with that. At the same time we started conversations with V4 about their need for recovery housing and it seemed like a perfect fit. So what the plan is and the plan really hasn't changed since we proposed it two years ago. The plan is to utilize these three buildings. Each of the two end buildings would be two recovery homes each, one on the top floor, one on the bottom floor and that would require some renovations so that we can connect two apartments per floor and make them into one larger home. So each of the end buildings would each house, one building would have two recovery homes for men, one would have two recovery homes for women and the center building would retain its four apartment layout. Those would be for transitional apartments, for folks who are ready for more independence and also an innovative approach that V4 is looking at of reuniting families where one of the parent may have a substance abuse disorder is working on sobriety. This would be a way for them to be with their families while they work through that. So that's what the project is. It's for recovery housing. It's a total of 32 beds but it's eight apartments, if you will, eight homes, separate homes. There's no the renovations that we need to do and this application includes renovations. It's some internal changes and configuration changes, not really anything on the exterior, just general repairs. In March of 2020, so just before this application was supposed to be heard, we did receive funding from the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. We also received a $200,000 grant from the Hale Foundation. So we've been making progress, even though this major funding source ran into a roadblock with the pandemic. In the meantime, starting last summer, we did begin master leasing some of the apartments to V4, so they have been running some recovery homes, not in the ideal situation because we haven't combined units and David can talk a bit about their experience there. Sure, so first and foremost, this is really born out of some necessity for Vermont Foundation of Recovery. We started back at the end of 2013 and really you start with what you know. So we were renting buildings from private landlords that were willing to give us an opportunity and all of that went really well but what we found is that those private landlords really wanted to pay their bills and pay their mortgages and do what they can to get fair market value for those homes that we were renting from them and it really created this necessity for a partnership with another mission-based organization that they're experts in brick and mortar and making sure that homes are in good condition and maintained really well and what we wanna do is work with individuals. We wanna help to support people who have a substance use disorder and are looking to be as healthy as they can possibly be and recover from that substance use disorder. And so it's a great partnership and even though we weren't able to access the funding right away to be able to do the renovations that we're ultimately looking to do, it did make sense for us to start this partnership in alignment with the phasing plan that was laid out when we met with you folks before and we did start with 12 men. So like one of the buildings on the end is functioning effectively in the same way that it will in the end just without the interior renovations being done. And then the middle building, the top floor is a recovery residence for six women. The bottom floor is still two separate transitional apartments. So we're occupying two out of the three full buildings and that third building is still being utilized by Champlain Housing Trust. And the idea is that we will approach the construction project starting with that building and then do some shuffling around to be able to do all the construction and buildings that aren't occupied. So that's kind of where we are. We're really grateful to be a part of it. We're really grateful to all of you for allowing us the opportunity to be here tonight and I'm happy to answer any questions if folks haven't. I will just follow up by saying part of the phasing plan that was requested by the select board and the chief of police back in 2019 at this point was that after we occupied half of the units that we check in and see if there were an undue burden of emergency calls. We had that conversation that check-in there've been no emergency calls to the property. So we moved ahead and finished filling the second building. The two thirds of the project is full although at that point in the phasing schedule it was sort of open that we could fill out the whole thing. We haven't done that because we're waiting to be able to do the interior renovations. In terms of this grant application I will say there will be some time required from town staff but CHT will take on most of that work. We'll fill in the application, we'll do the reporting, the requisitions. I've been working with Greg and now with Oviso on making that as smooth as possible so that it doesn't really place an undue burden on your staff. The application is due September 21st. It would be heard in front of the Community Development Board in November. We'll also be going back for additional funding from VHCB. That'll be in December. So we won't really begin the renovations until January or February if we are successful in getting the funding. Okay, thank you. Any questions from the board? One. Go ahead now. When you first started the project I knew that some of the neighbors were very concerned with what was happening. Has that worked out amongst the neighbors down here or is it not going to help? No, so I actually received a really nice communication. Even the neighbors that were most vocal about it were very clear from the beginning that they weren't opposed to recovery housing. Their concern was for the people who were already occupying the building and they reached out to me, I don't know how many months ago it was now, but they said, hey, we wanted to let you know that again, we weren't ever opposed to folks with substance use disorder. We're really thrilled that they're here. We have had no issues or concerns at all and just wanted to make you aware that they utilize a picnic table that from a distance looks to be a little bit in disrepair and hoping you might be willing to work with Champlain Housing Trust to have that being a little better condition. So to the best of my knowledge, I think that we're in good shape in terms of those relationships. Any other questions? Yeah, so I was here last time we came through and I thought it was a great project and still think it's an amazing project now. At that time, we were basically acting as a pass-through for the grant. So you said minimal amount of staff time for this for what would be really a great, maybe good. And then I also saw, could you or maybe, I don't know if it would be best for Evan or maybe Dennis to weigh in, but I did see, and I think that this was in the proposal before $50,000 towards our own infrastructure needs there. I don't know if you could talk briefly about that so that Essex also gets something out of this. Yes. Yes, there are some stormwater. There's some stormwater ponding on the direction, so confused, not on Ethan Allen on the behind the building. So there's a little playground and near the community gardens. There's some stormwater ponding that happens there because there's a drain that has been crushed. And so there is $50,000 in this budget to replace that drain. Great, thank you. Okay, any other board questions? Seeing none, I think this is a public hearing. I'll go to the public and I'll start with, I guess the online hands up first. I see Margaret. Go ahead, Margaret. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Okay, I just wanted to let you know that in between when people are speaking, the sound is clear, but the minute people stop speaking, there's a whole lot of a white noise, which is just very odd. But my question is that when this came up, there was some concern about the people who were actually residing in those buildings that had to be moved out. And I just wondered if there was any feedback or information on what happened to those people and were they successfully relocated? Thank you. Yes, I can answer that. We've worked very closely with the original tenants to find them appropriate relocation homes. Because there was such a stretched out timeline, there was no pressure. We were able to work through as units became available in our portfolio. We were able to work with them to get in. We paid for moving expenses, utility hookups, and any difference in the rents from where they were living to where they moved to. So we slowly moved folks out over time. And I think we did it in a very respectful way. We also did it in the federally required way, which is the Uniform Relocation Act. So we had all of the paperwork in order to comply with that ordinance. Thank you. Katie Ballard. Thank you. My name's Katie Ballard. I'm the chair of the Essex Housing Commission. And I'm here to read a letter from the Housing Commission. Dear officials of the town of Essex Select Board on September 1st, 2021. Amy and I apologize. I am Demowit Demetowitz of Champlain Housing Trust address the Essex Housing Commission regarding a grant application to the Vermont Community Development Program for the Fort Ethan Allen Recovery Housing Project, which requires approval from the town of Essex and Select Board. The proposal consists of the redevelopment of 12 units and three buildings to be converted into six units to create a family environment and support structure for people in recovery from addiction. One of the buildings will be for men in recovery. One building will be for women in recovery. And the third will take a new approach to family reunification with one floor of the building for families and the other for transitional housing. The Housing Commission and the unanimous vote of four to zero voted to support the concept of Champlain Housing Trust proposal manifested in this letter of support to the Essex Select Board. The Housing Commission was created in 2020 to support the needs of all Essex residents as outlined in the Housing Commission's mission and rooted in the Essex Housing Needs Assessment. We believe that this proposed redevelopment of property at Fort Ethan Allen is consistent with our need to provide a variety of housing tenure options to meet the needs of the range of Essex residents, many of whom struggle with substance abuse disorder and need opportunities to recover in their own community. We strongly support the efforts of CHT allow a local nonprofit in addressing the housing needs of low income and marginalized individuals in Vermont and a strong track record as a responsible property manager. We value both the organization and its residents as part of the Essex community and encourage the select board to support their application. Thank you. All right, thank you, Katie. I don't see any other hands up online. Any comments in the room? Questions? I don't see any. So procedurally we close the public hearing and then move on to the business item. Okay, so I'll close the, we need a motion to close or just go ahead and close it. Thank you. I'll just close the public hearing. Thank you, Don. Second. Thank you, Tracy. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Opposed? Okay, motion passes 4-0. We've closed the public hearing and move on to business item 6-A, which is to consider approval of the application of the state of Vermont for recovery housing program grant 2021 under the Vermont Community Development Program. So any further discussion needed here? We need a motion. Do we have a motion to say? I think it's an awesome idea. Yeah, I think it's fantastic. Thank you for coming back. Do we have a motion? I made a motion that we approve the application to the state of Vermont for recovery housing program grant 2021 under the Vermont Community Development Program. Okay, thank you, John. We'll have a second. Thank you, Tracy. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, motion passes 4-0. Thank you very much. Thank you. Best of luck with the application. Thank you. Okay, moving on to the next business item, interview and potential appointment, Steven Dowd, Conservation Trials Committee.  So we'd like to give you the opportunity to introduce yourself. Tell us why you'd like to be part of the Conservation Trials Committee. We'll open it to questions from you. Let me give you my Essex background. So I taught at Essex High School and then also the set of a technology. I started in 1969. I taught there for over 40 years. I was also an English department chairman, taught English for the set of a technology. And along the line, I've worked closely with the natural resources program. I know Brian Japp. I work with their logging program. I'm certainly confident with the chainsaw. I live on Indian Brook Road. Before Indian Brook was a park, I've also coached for over 40 years. I coached cross country and track and field. I took my cross country team there as a community service. And we used the trucks and things from Essex High School.  We climbed down below that dam. We hauled all kinds of tires, everything out of there and cleaned it up. And then people looked at it and they said, hey, this place has some potential. I'm not saying that we created the park, but people looked at that place much differently after we took truckload and truckload of junk out of there. I live, as I said, I live on Indian Brook Road. I have hiked everything around Indian Brook. Bushwack, but I know all the trails. I know, I read the report about the foresting there. So, but having hiked it and looked at it, I truly understand what that report's about. I've also hiked Saxon Hill. That's an extensive property. It's unbelievable resource. So, you know, both of those things I have an investment in. Again, knowing Brian Japp and knowing that forestry program, their natural resources program, I've listened to that curriculum. I understand the background. I think that I would be a tremendous link. I am not volunteering the Center for Technology for anything. However, if anybody was gonna make a connection with Brian and the things that I read in that report about foresting and about labeling trees and about, you know, identifying species, that's exactly what he does with his students. So the idea that this is a venue for them to be able to teach from, I think it's a workable experience. So, I'm invested. I wanna be on this thing because the Indian Brook is the gem. I was ready 15 years ago, there was gonna be a meeting about actually the current developer who's developed along Indian Brook Road was going to develop down at Indian Brook Road. I was ready.   That's why I'm here. Thank you. Any questions from luck board members? I get your commitment to the trails. What about the conservation part of this? Well, actually I read both reports. You know, I certainly would be invested in the conservation portion of that. I'm retired. I walked into Indian Brook every single day. I mean, it's just but my wife and I just walked the road with my dog. So my ability to understand more about the conservation portion, I mean, my time and my willingness to do that and my present knowledge from being involved with the National Resources Program, I think I've been a good position to work with that. And I have the interest to do it. I'll tell you, they also talk about foresting and about intelligent foresting at Indian Brook and sale of wood to the public. So when you read that report, I mean, that's kind of in the background of that report. I think that's a great idea. So we're not talking about cutting, we're not talking about intelligent foresting and then moving it to a place where people could buy log length wood, cut it, haul it off in their trucks. I thought that was a great idea. I also, I go there all the time, I swim there. So the last couple of years that algae bloom has been a problem. I mean, so it stops you from going and swimming there. I can't stop anything but I sure have an interest in learning what's fostering this beyond just climate change, taking a look at the sources coming into that bond and what might be contributing that way. I have an interest and I have some time. Any other questions? Last question, but kudos for the CTE connection. Pop Trout Resort there has been great. And I was on the regional advisory board for CTE for a few years. So I think as you mentioned, any connection that you can make even to some of the existing students or the remaining faculty that's there from your tenure, it could be a great connection. That's part of the committee. I mean, it's interesting. English teacher for 40 years. So what do I do when I go to CTE most often? I work with a building trades program because I get to learn. They're great guys. And I work with their natural resources program and their mechanical program. Good students.  You better be ready and on your game. But I love it, because that's what we do. And I agree, CTE is a tremendous asset to the community. Thanks for mentioning them. Thanks, Pat. You already answered my question. I usually ask what unique thing you think you bring to the committee. And I think you already talked about your experience, your background, your dedication. Is there anything else that you think you have? Have you been to the extension of that? Have you been to any of the committee meetings? Do you see any improvements that could be made or? I have come to community meetings for, I mean, I don't know many of you recently, but I mean, I've come for a long time in town meetings. And I've woken up, I've woken up at school board meetings. I thought it was, as a department head, I thought it was quite interesting. Some people would criticize the budget. And actually some of my friends at the school said, boy, as a department head, if anybody ever wanted to save money, Steve doubted us a guy, because I would do everything I could to use the resources that we had. In addition to coaching forever, I currently run all of their track meets. I'm the meat director, I'm the meat director for the Essex Invitational, which is actually the New England Qualifier, the largest meat in Vermont. I will always be invested with that program. I actually, my granddaughter wanted to run youth track. So I helped coach youth track this summer. I had a great time. So for as long as she has interest, I'll be a youth track coach. So other sideline thing, yep. All right, thanks. So there are three seats open. We have two candidates tonight and there's a density of third or are there other? There's more, there's another three, I think maybe even four letters of interest that have come in recently for the three seats. Okay. Okay, so I guess. We had a good conversation. Did I have a good conversation? Were you with the gentleman that I had a conversation with? Were you speaking to Darren, maybe? Yeah, I had a great conversation with the gentleman today. His indication was that COVID and other things caused the number of seats to open up. And I guess that's it, but I was a little surprised that there would be that many seats. I've kind of watched this for a while. The committee and the number of openings and stuff. So when I saw that many openings, I was just a little surprised, but I don't need to know much more information other than the fact that let's fill them and do a good job. But it sounds like I don't, we haven't had a discussion about this, but there seems like there's six or so candidates for three seats. Yeah, yeah, I could at least four, I'd say. It's not five or six. I have to double check the emails I came in today but there's a few. Okay, so I don't know, Slickford, we want to wait until we interview all the candidates before we make any decisions. So Steven, I think we definitely appreciate your coming in. Yeah. Your enthusiasm certainly did shine through with what you said, but as we've seen, you know, has come to light here, there's a handful of candidates for a... Right. Look, I appreciate your consideration. I appreciate it. Good work there. Thank you. So we'll, once we've interviewed all the candidates, we'll... Great. Thank you so much. Sounds good. Thanks for coming in. Thanks. Thank you. We are trying to schedule the additional interviews throughout October 4th. It's the next meeting, so hopefully not too long of a delay. Yep. Great, great. Okay, next item of business is a similar discussion with Ken Signarillo. Come on up, Ken. Good evening, Slickford and staff. Good evening. Give you the opportunity to introduce yourself, express your interest. Why do you want to be on the committee and then we'll open up the doors. I don't think I need too much introduction. Why did we be on the committee? Well, I attended the most recent meeting and found that my education and experience could serve the committee well. And I made a few suggestions right off the bat and they're well received. So I think I have a lot I can offer. Thanks, Ken. Any... The extent of it? That's fine. She is. I'm sorry. I don't know. I'm here. One select board member recently suggested that, hey, volunteer for something. So here I am. Okay, okay. Any questions from select board members? So your background is in forestry? I have a bachelor's degree in forestry. That's right. So how does that serve you on the trails part of the committee? I would say it doesn't. I think there's a lot of folks that are on the committee already that are very trails oriented and not that many that are into actual forestry oriented. So I think I'd fill gap actually. Any other questions? And I'd like to go ahead. Ms. Signor, I would say that certainly at points you have had a contentious relationship with certain staff members. There have been instances in the past and meetings where you called into question their competency or their capability. We place you on this committee, are there going to be assurances that you're not going to be attacking our staff while on it? I don't remember ever attacking staff. I certainly could give Sarah basically a call and see if she feels the same way. Please do. I have no other questions. Thanks. So Ken, my usual question, I think you may have already answered again also is that what specialty do you bring to the table? I know we have had, we have had heard some expression of concern that conservation is given a little bit of, isn't given as much attention as the trails are by that committee. That sounds, that's the... I think I could fill that gap. Or you'd like to fill, you'd like to have. I'm not particularly interested in the invasive species.  Now I don't know if anybody's noticed, but there's quite a load of egg masses on trees, both urban and rural. And they hatch next spring, if we don't have a wet spring. And they will defoliate the oats pretty thoroughly. And this will be the second season. That could cause some serious damage. So one of the projects that I suggested right off the bat was we should be doing a survey to identify where you have heavy egg mass, be prepared to spray. There's a bacteria spray that can be done if necessary. The state's apparently looking into it and we can provide that information, I think just by getting a public outreach going, getting a survey, getting a systematic sample. And that would be great. Plus, I believe in community outreach. I think you've seen the ability that I have to mobilize public. And I can actually get on the urban side. So if you go out with the committee for the Emerald Ash border survey, a lot of people are very interested. They walk their dog. They see the egg masses on the trees. In the urban setting, they can actually be mediated by removal, if you know how. I'm very keen on these invasive species. There's a knotweed everywhere. I see it everywhere now. And there are ways to get rid of knotweed that are very innovative. Goats, then covering with tarp. So I really am into the conservation in that regard. Thank you. Any other? Can I ask a question in reading your application? What is biometrics forest biometrics? Biometry used to be called forest menstruation, but they got rid of that name. Now it's called forest biometry. That's the analytical aspects of forest, like measurements, inventory, sampling, statistics. That's what the thing is. Well, that's why I suggested the sampling of the egg masses. It could be a great thing to do. It'd be like geocaching. I think the public would be very keen on going out to locations and counting the egg masses and then producing a GIS map of the heat map of where the infestations are. All right, anything else? All right, Ken, so you heard from Steve, and we wanted to interview all the K&As before we make a court release. So we'll get back to you in a couple of weeks once we've completed those other interviews. And thank you for stepping forward. Happy to do it. Thanks. Okay, I'm moving on to the next agenda item, presentation, discussion of potential changes to public nuisance ordinance. He's got that. Lieutenant Kissinger is online, I believe. Yes. All right, go ahead. So the proposal we recommend to the select board is adoption of the public nuisance ordinance. Currently, the town does not really have an ordinance that encompasses all the things that are listed in this public nuisance ordinance. Believe the ones that are only currently covered are public nudity and open fires, which we found in a different section of the town ordinances. So everything on this public nuisance is pretty much new presentation to the town. And are you asking us to, for questions about it or what? Yes, if you have any questions about the ordinance itself, the way this came about was some of the things that have come up over the past years that were not backed by ordinances. Most of the ordinances of the town are derived from 1996 and have not really been updated until recently. Go ahead, Greg. I just remind the board and the public of the adoption process for ordinances. Once the select board is ready to adopt an ordinance, when you award it in the newspaper, we've worn a public hearing. You determine the terminology is that you give it passage and then you're worn for a public hearing. If there's no changes after that public hearing, you can give final passage. If the ordinance takes effect once it's adopted, unless you specify a different date. So with what Lieutenant Kissinger is prepared for you tonight, I hope you have any thoughts, concerns, comments, the police department and staff can then work together and make any changes to present to you at a future meeting and sort of be the rest of that process. That is to get the initial reaction, initial impressions and prepared for adoption. Greg, any, go ahead, Don. I have to say, I really liked what I read. It's been a long time and coming. And this will help your officers, is that correct? And it also lines them up with other ordinances. It will, this just allows us another level. Not necessarily we have to write fines, but it gives us another intermediate step before we take any criminal action if we decide to go that route. It also gives us something to back up. So if we tell someone, hey, you need to quiet down and make them aware, educate somebody first about the new noise ordinance. And then we have another level instead of going to write to criminal charges for noise at night time. We can issue them a civil ticket if that warrants it. So it's just another level, it gives us more options, not necessarily we always have to take criminal action or civil action in an issuing ticket, but it gives us something to enforce what we're educating them on. Any other questions from board members? Yeah, Rob, I had a question about two specific mentions as part of the dog, dog. Okay. That's okay. One of them was falsifying the breed of dog. It's something to do with that, a problem that's happened. And if so, I guess I'm just curious.  No, no, you, please. It's not necessarily the residents that are doing that. This came up with the previous chief, chief Geary, where we had an instance where the local shelters, when they're trying to get rid of a dog or find a home for dog, they don't generally give the correct mix. They call it a mix instead of saying it's a certain breed. That's what we're trying to kind of limit a little bit if we can. There's nothing that the residents do with more of the kennels trying to get homes for dogs that would normally probably not find a home because of their mix or their breed, so to speak. Okay. All right, and I did have a question about the six foot leash on sidewalks, but I actually thought myself through it and I think that makes sense. So I think that's my only question. Yeah, actually the six foot came up with one of the last couple of sessions of select board where resident brought up problems with Saxon Hill Park and dogs in the parking lot. I think a six foot leash would allow better control of a dog in those restricted areas versus having a longer leash gives more control of the dog. That's where the six foot came from. Got it. All right, thank you so much. You're welcome. Good to trace. I had a question about the violations and penalties. I have had conversations previously around the rationale behind them resetting each year. So if someone hits the red on say December 30th and then there's another offense on January 3rd, is there a reason why that should drop back down? Did they stay at that higher level? It kind of gives an incentive just for the month changing. Correct. That is set by statute as a calendar year. We ran the same problem with winter parking that happens to us every year. July or January 1st, we have to start back over at ground zero. And I believe the wording from the legislature for authority is it's a calendar year, not based on the fiscal year. Okay, thank you. Don, did you have another question? No, okay. The other question I had is I did email to you earlier. We often see comments in say front porch forum about noisy cars and vehicles. I think you answered that the measurement requirement, the measurement of the loudness of noise is not required in that case. Is that the correct way? Correct, that's express prohibitation. So any noise from a vehicle would be a violation. The sound meter is more for someone complaining about noise coming from a business or a residence down the road. And it gives us something that's not subjective, it gives us an objective way to determine whether or not there's a violation. We ran into this in the junction over the years where someone would complain and it was always objective to the officer whether or not it was a violation. This takes a little bit out of there and it gives us a standardized criteria in which to measure if there's a violation or not. So do we have the equipment needed to do that or do we rent it or how do we deal with that? We currently own two, but we have to send those out for recalibration. So that would be the only expenses to recalibrate those on a yearly basis. Evan, do you have a comment? So Lieutenant, if you have a car, it's usually the muffler that's been altered or something like that and they rev it up and it pops. Does this ordinance cover that type of sound emission? That's what it was intended for because we do have a lot of people that take pride in their vehicles and put after market parts on there, but they don't understand the disturbance it calls when it backfires because of the compression of the gases coming out of the cylinders. So that's what that was geared for is to try to eliminate that through education and if we keep getting repeat offenders then we could take some type of action. Go ahead, Grace. To follow up on that, the language state defect in vehicle or operation of a vehicle, if someone purposefully modifies their car to do that, is that still considered a defect? Not if it meets government standards. Like if someone, I guess you would call it a defect is if they took out the kind of like converter and ran a straight pipe, that would be a defect because that doesn't meet guidelines by Vermont inspection manual. Okay, so defect does not necessarily mean that something's broken. It's been potentially something's been modified to be out of spec. Correct. Okay, all right. So can I ask a follow up then? So these loud mufflers, they don't pass Vermont state inspection because of their emissions. So how are they allowed to be on the car? Which is being violation. I'm not sure how to answer that question. I'm not, I don't know about the emissions if the emissions are tested, like they are in other countries. As long as they have that kind of converter on there, that captures most of the gases or creates enough heat to burn those gases. And just the muffler itself before the exhaust exit is what causes the different variations of sound. So you can have a quiet muffler, you can put on a semi-loud muffler or you can go a full obnoxious muffler. Thank you. Welcome. This was one of the list of things that people really complain of them. And so this is the answer to giving the police a tool to address them. Because there are many, we have a few, but this is how they address it. Same thing with dogs.  And he happens to be off leash or on too long of a lead for the owner to address it. It gives the police a tool to address that situation. The other question about dogs that I have is there's a new definition in there of potentially vicious dog. Where's, this is beyond that, but correct. So we're adding in a new criteria. Yes. The reason for the potentially vicious dog is twofold. If someone's dog comes into the community, it allows us to make a complaint to the select board, either through a citizen or the animal control officer or police officer. We don't always necessarily know the history of a dog moving into our community. And some dogs act in a certain manner that could be potentially vicious. And this is one way to track that dog before something does happen. We can establish a pattern of behavior that we can present to the select board as far as this dog being potentially vicious before something does happen.  I don't believe there is not like there is to find under vicious dog for the state. Okay, so in a situation of a complaint like that, it would come to the select board of the next available select board meeting. We don't have to call a special meeting to address it if there's no, because a vicious dog you gotta do within a certain number of days of the complaint. Correct. Potentially vicious. We're not putting that requirement in. No, it is not. Okay, thank you. My other question is around, I think I made a confession to you yesterday or this morning that I, last evening I cracked a beer and then walked down the street to my neighbor's house. I violated our potential. My wife was walking next to me with a glass of wine. So we're both potentially in trouble there. I would not have said her. My question there is, is there a specific problem we're trying to address there? And I do understand and I, because I knew this was on the agenda, I have to also say that I did intentionally open the beer floor I walked down the street. But I could get away with it on my strength. Is it, you know, it's already, I think it's already illegal to have an open container in a vehicle, right? So, correct.  No, I was gonna, go ahead. I was gonna ask you what the, what the intent was. We're trying to look at all aspects of the community, especially the growth period that we're experiencing. And we also have other venues where permits are being granted to have concerts and other venues to get people out. So if they are to wander off those premises, it gives us a way to handle the situation. Again, it's not necessarily the thing that we have to take action on every time. We would prefer to educate people, but there are a few people who refuse to accept the education and allows us a way to enforce that. You know, the main goal is to have something that, if something does go beyond the casual education that we have something again to back us up, whereas right now, if we told someone, hey, you're off the grounds where you can have a beer, you need to go back and they say, no, we can't do anything about that. So it's just a tool that's available should we need it. And like I said, our first one to be is to educate people. We're not out there trying to write all kinds of tickets. It's more of an educational, but it's also nice to have a piece to back up the education. And a little bit of concern I have with some of that is the, you said that it's possible that it's not always enforced. I just want to comment, make sure there's no bias associated with how it's enforced. We are certainly going through discussions about equity and how it's enforced. We are certainly going through discussions about equity and so forth and in a situation where we're putting in place something that we may choose or choose not to break it forward or enforce that we don't, we aren't unintentionally establishing a built in bias of any kind. So you want to make sure that we're aware when we talk about, you know, bias training that these kind of things can also play into it. Correct. We can just like issuing of tickets is up to the officer's discretion under our current CADRMS system. We can identify any potential biases if we see an officer issuing tickets or issuing warnings to a particular race instead of across the board. That would allow us to identify there's potential bias there and make sure that officer gets retrained on the implicit biases that might be pointed out by the CADRMS system and reporting system. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? So procedurally, we're going to have a public hearing on this later. Do we want to take a comment now or what's the typical? Yeah, I think if there's any public comment that influences how you look at the ordinance or how the police want to consider the ordinance, do you have what I have now? All right. I've seen Margaret Smith's hand up for a while. So go ahead, Margaret. I'll get you best you know. Hi, thank you. I have two, two quick comments. One is that I've been over Indian brook where people are very reluctant to each their dogs in the parking lot. And if there's any suggestions to people who are there with their dogs leased in as far as how to handle that. And the other comment I have is that the stoplight at the corner of 228 and root 15 seems to be a place where those loud mothers like to stop at the park at the stoplight. And when the light changes, they like to gun their motors as they go up 128 knowing there's not another stoplight or stop sign until they hit Milton. And you know, I heard I've heard cars at 2am doing this. And it is pretty chronic. I can't recall that I've ever seen anybody with a radar gun there, although I'm sure it happens. But I'm wondering how to address the sound issue. I've had people say, oh, what a great spot. And then they hear the noise. And they said, wow, it's really noisy. So I like some advice with where to go with that. Thank you. Thanks, Margaret. I saw Betsy's hand next. So go ahead, Betsy. Thank you, Andy. I guess I have only one observation is that it's alcohol and given that there is marijuana as well that's out there that people can have. Should this be alcohol and marijuana kind of slurs so that you're not having to recreate? Because it's already legalized. Not that we're selling it, but it's just that it's legalized. And should they have the same kind of knowledge that this also applies to that? This is how it works. And these are the penalties. Just a thought. So I think it's already regulated at the state level that you can't smoke marijuana in public. Well, so is alcohol. I think it's already regulated that you can't go. Outdoor consumption. I found by town. Really. Yeah. Thank you. Hey, any, let's see where am I going next? Patty Davis. Very faintly. Oh, can you hear me now? That's better. Okay. So Mr. Kissinger, thank you for such a really nice ordinance. I love everything about it. I just want to point out and get your feedback. You too, Andy on. So one day at Saxon Hill, this woman, I just know her first name was Allison came out of the woods with a dog, you know, bleeding and bitten really badly. And she complained to the town offices and I don't know if she complained to the town manager directly. But what happened was the dog was loose and she was way out on the trails, you know, in Saxon Hill. And the problem is she didn't know that she was on somebody's private property. She was on someone's private property. The private property she was on, she apparently allowed Mallence Bay dog, like a dog, a group of dogs that this woman took care of. And she lets them loose. She's from Mallence Bay. I don't know the name of the outfit. And she lets the dogs loose, you know, to Rome.  Anyway, this woman that owns the Mallence Bay place, the dogs attacked this Allison's dog and she carried it out of the woods bleeding and stuff. And it was bitten. But the problem, two problems. Allison doesn't know where she is on the Saxon Hill property where it's town property or someone's private property. And she didn't know that her dog went off into this private property and that's how it got attacked by all these loose dogs from Mallence Bay, a business that a woman owns. Anyway, it's a real problem at Saxon because we have no way finding signs. People don't know where the hell they are when they're in the woods. And I really love your ordinance. So I don't know how you can address that. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Patty. I believe the vicious dog ordinance would cover dog on dog attacks. But the question about what property the dogs were on is not part of this ordinance that would be a parks and rec discussion. Or maybe, I don't know. Anyway, it's a big problem at Saxon and I've addressed it many times but nothing gets done. But I really like your ordinance otherwise. Thank you very much. Thanks, Patty. I think the reason I'm saying this is because I believe that Saxon Hill and India Brook are very large properties. It would be very difficult to... But I will certainly talk with Ali Bail, the director, about where certain signs could be placed adjacent to other properties. We have struggled since I've been here about dogs off leash. But people like to have them room free. And if you probably asked, it's 50-50. And I know that there are a lot of parks and other communities that do not allow dogs off leash. But we've just never really come to a consensus on this. Thanks, Evan. Mary Post, go ahead. Regarding what Evan just said about 50-50 and the dogs, when you take the 150% that wants to have the dogs off leash, that means that there's a lot of potential for biting and injury. The other 50%, it means that there's not the same potential and yet everyone can still be out with their dogs. So it seems to me that it just makes more sense to say it's about time that dogs need to be kept on a leash, including at Indian Brook, especially what's happened now lately to that girl, the young girl that got bitten. And I don't know if anybody's come forward yet, but the whole thing is just really too bad. And it's too bad for the dogs, too. Secondly, I can't believe I'm saying all this actually. But when it comes to the ordinance part about the open container, there's just, I have this kind of gut feeling that says I'm having a little bit of trouble with more restrictions maybe put on people, even though you say you would use it for education. But it would be there if you needed it. I would kind of rather wait until we really need it if it gets to be a problem and let's revisit it and then add it then. I personally have always only had good relationships with the police, so this isn't about that. But it's more about everything that's going on in the country now and how I think despite our best efforts, it's real easy to go after certain groups of people and even young people that may react in a way that's not good and is going to put them, you know, somewhere on a spectrum that they don't belong. So I would just rather we kind of chill it on that a little bit. Thank you. All right, thanks, Mary. I don't see any other hands up online. Ron, I did see your hand up. If I saw your hand up for a while, did you want to comment? I just wanted to comment that the village is also looking at very similar ordinances this and they're just about, I think they're going to be looking at it next week, I think for final passage on that. And that's where a lot of this parts of this come from is to bring this in line with that ordinance that's also being passed over there. So some of that is carry over from things that were also in that ordinance. All right, thanks. Chief, since we didn't get a chance to talk this week, I'm sorry, this will come out of the blue, but these are just mostly these are tools for the toolbox, correct? We have some issues with these, but it's not rampant. But sometimes you get some people that a warning is not enough. Yeah, well, that's correct. I mean, but, you know, these are a lot of these are as a response to things that have come up like the lieutenant said over the years, where we've come into issues where we didn't have something to deal with a problem. And, you know, in the case of the alcohol, you know, portion of the ordinance, that was as a response to a request and complaints that we were receiving from folks who were walking around mainly railroad and avenue area carrying alcohol. So in order to bring things in line, it's included in the town ordinance, but certainly, you know, it's another tool for us to have if we did have that issue. All right, thank you. Thanks. Let's see. I now see Lorraine Zillum's hand up. Go ahead Lorraine. Sorry. A late comer. Just a real quick question on the urination defecation and definition of public.   Does that fall under that at all? Good question. I believe it does. Let me double check really quick. Part of throw that one at your Rob. That's okay. That's okay. Hey, I'm really cool.  Find that question then. The way it's currently written it does not cover residential. So this would be all public spaces. So if the board would want something to cover that, then that would have to be written in there. This is only in reference to public places. So if you're in some tight neighborhoods like we are, and you can see it publicly just because you're in your driveway. Yeah, I don't, I don't know what to do with that. Yeah, again, this, this has come about where we've had people actually do that in front of restaurants. So we have to have something that we can deal with it. But as far as someone's private property, I don't think it's going to have to come from powers to be. I appreciate the feedback. Thanks, Rob. You're welcome. That's a good question. All right. Thanks for bringing it up. Right. I don't see any other new hands up. Comments from the room. It's like word comments. Do you need anything from us tonight? No, what I would say is though, you've heard your own conversations in that other public, if there's anything that struck you between now and say your next meeting, please let us know. We'll send it over to PD. But other than that, it sounds like you've had been satisfied. And we'd like to finish out this process. So we could both put it out to public hearing. I don't know how that goes. We didn't warn it tonight to take to take any action on it. So we'll get it on an upcoming agenda probably October 4th. Hopefully to take action to give it preliminary passage and more in the public hearing probably for two weeks later for final pass. They have to do a thing. I think you have a fair number of things to talk about at the moment. I'm not sure if you want to add one more thing to the agenda. I would like to get out of the way as soon as you can. If the rest of the board feels differently and you want to take it up next week or two at the joint meeting, I can bring that up. I can, I follow the logic. I think that when we hold a public hearing on this, it is a dog related issue. Since it's going to come out, it's going to be one person who shows up or potentially 20 people who show up. From what in my experience in the past, it's been people get very passionate about dogs and leashes. Yes. But to warn it, that's not the same as having, you're warning the date of the public hearing. Right? But it's still an opportunity for people to weigh in at that first review. No, not at all. Like I said, I agree with you about the passage. I just think that during a joint meeting, we are probably potentially paying ourselves into a two hour long conversation. Thank you. Okay, so move on to the next agenda item. Okay. Moving on to 6e, consider approval or preference. Alternative for scoping study for improved pedestrian facilities and stone water infrastructure. Angle would dry. Aaron here. Hi. Can you hear me okay? Yes, we can. Okay. Thanks. All right. So, uh, the town received a grant to conduct a scoping study to look at ways to improve. Pedestrian facilities and stormwater infrastructure on Tanglewood drive between Woodlawn drive and Cindy lane. Currently, there are no pedestrian facilities in this section and the stormwater infrastructure has deteriorated. And there is also erosion at the outlet of the stormwater system. Um, at the end of burn haul a road. So all of those things need to be addressed. Uh, the grant was through the Chittenden County regional planning. Uh, Commission's unified planning work program. And stand tech was the select, was selected as the consultant to conduct the study. As part of the process, we identified five alternatives that were narrowed down based on public input. Uh, Israel, and the city of Chittenden County. We identified five alternatives that were narrowed down based on public input. Uh, Israel Maynard is here from stand tech and he will presenting the bet be presenting the background of the project and the different alternatives. And the goal, um, is to resist to is for the select board to endorse, um, alternative five as a preferred alternative of the study and allow staff to move forward with implementation. So Israel will go more in depth with, uh, the different alternatives so that, um, you know, it's like work and understand what that means. Um, Israel is on the line. I don't know how we're supposed to do the presentation. Is he going to share his screen? Awesome. There you go. Thank you. Yeah. Can everybody hear me? Yes. Yes, we can. All right. Thank you for the introduction, Annie, and I'll jump right into our slide show that we have. Um, so first off, just introducing the full project team from Essex town. We have Annie Kastandi, um, Dennis Lutz, and then from CCRPC. We have Brian Davis and Chris Dubin. I believe Brian's on the call, but Chris is not. Um, and then myself from stand tech. Just a quick project background. This is the location we're talking about is Tanglewood drive between Cindy, Cindy Lane and Woodlawn drive. Just to give you a quick orientation on this map. Here's the middle school. Here's the park and fire department. Um, Sandhill road is right here. The focus of this, as Annie mentioned was bicycles, pedestrians and the stormwater management. The existing condition in this road is a speed limit of 25 miles an hour, a roadway, a right away width of 60 feet. The road has 16 foot lanes and four foot shoulders in both directions for a paved width of 40 feet. There is parking on the street occurring. The area is entirely residential with schools and athletic fields on the south side of the neighborhood and a park and town pool on the north. The existing condition of the drainage system as, as was mentioned, it's, it's in, it's in pretty, pretty rough shape in certain aspects. Um, the, there has been projects in the past to help out at the outlet. As you can see on this picture to the left, it is a stable outlet with new pipes, but downstream is very heavily eroded with, with significant channel incising and, and as you can see some slope failures are occurring in that, in that channel. So the purpose and need of the project was, you know, to address the drainage problems, provide inviting pedestrian, pedestrian travel route for the residents. Um, and then facilitate use by all age groups, experience levels and trip purposes. So let's jump into the alternatives for every scoping study we do. There's a no action alternative. Um, in this case, the no action alternative included a, a pavement overlay, which is, is a maintenance that's, that's kind of needing to happen regardless if we do anything about pedestrians or stormwater. Alternative two that we looked at was narrowing the roadway width and using the, the additional width for a five and a half foot green strip in a five foot bike, ped path and stormwater treatment in the green strip. Alternative three was maintain the 40 foot roadway, stabilize the outlet erosion and extend the closed drainage further down to, to fill in some of the, the eroded area that I just showed in the previous pictures. Alternative four was maintain the 40 foot roadway width, use underground stormwater storage to reduce, reduce peak flows to the outlet. Alternative five, which is the preferred alternative, which is to maintain the 40 foot roadway, use stormwater filtration practices to, to treat stormwater quality and then stabilize the outlet, erosion and extend the closed drainage to a more stable outlet. So just going a little more in depth into these alternatives. This is the across section of the existing roadway. And in this case, alternative one, it would just be paving. We could do potentially add pavement markings to designate the shoulder as a pedestrian and bicycle area. Alternative two was the most extensive work. This would narrow the roadway down, add green strip with stormwater treatment, and then a five foot path on the, on the side. Here's alternative three. This maintains the full width roadway on Tanglewood Drive, reline the pipes for to increase the design life of those stormwater pipes. A few of these drainage structures would be replaced because they're in really bad shape and just need, need replacement. And then we would be bringing in fill to fill in this eroded channel and extending the closed drainage down a bit further to an area that's more stable so that we don't recreate this issue after we fill it. Alternative four was adding storage structures along Fern Hollow Road to, to detain peak flows, which would result in a reduction in peak flows at the outlet to, to reduce the likelihood of further damage to that channel. And then alternative five, which is the preferred alternative is similar to the previous 40 foot alternatives would be an overlay, relining the stormwater pipes, replacing a few of the structures. And at the end of this closed drainage system, we would be building a underground stormwater filtering practice to treat water quality. And then we'd be filling in this outlet area where it's heavily incised and has slope failures and extend the closed drainage down to the stable area a little further to the north. We had a quick evaluation matrix here that just kind of summarizes the benefits to each alternative. And with a rough project cost that includes right of way planning engineering and a little bit of extra reconstruction cost escalators. And as you can see our preferred alternative does address the drainage problems. It doesn't really technically increase active mobility because we're not, we're not changing any of the pedestrian accessibility along Tanglewood in discussion with the, the residents they felt that this, that the wide road was allowing them to use this as a pedestrian area, even though it's not specifically designated as one. And that was one of the big drivers for, for going with alternative five is that the feedback we got from the, from the community in this area was that they really liked this road the way it is. And they did not want to see it narrowed down with a, with a separated bike and pedestrian path. So as you can see, we also reviewed some of the potential impacts, which would be traffic operations. As you can see, none of our alternatives were going to be an impact of traffic operations. The volumes on this road are exceptionally low. It's a no outlet area where there's, there's not a lot of through traffic or no through traffic. It's all, all residential commuters for safety. There was only an improvement in alternative two, where we, we're separating pedestrians right of way. None of these required purchase of individual right of way. And environmental, as you can see, most of them, there was no impact alternative three in five, where we're extending that closed drainage system. There's the potential for a minor wetland buffer impacts, which would could potentially require a state wetlands permit. And then cultural resources. We did have archeological and historic review done by, by a sub consultant. And there was no historic or archeological impacts for any of these alternatives and no utilities other than stormwater would be impacted. I guess with that, um, thanks for your time and, um, any questions. Okay. Thank you. Um, questions. Go ahead, Don.  So that what's the purpose of adding a speed table? Yeah. So, so the community did, um, indicate that speeds were an issue here on occasion. So they, they did feel that it might be a spot where they would want a speed table. And in this road is fairly straight and very wide. So it does lend itself well to people traveling above the speed limit. So the feeling was that this would be an easy low cost way to, to deter that trace. Yeah. I also had, um, noticing that there were a lot of public comments around speed and knowing that, you know, they were trying to open streets in spaces lend themselves well to folks, you know, pushing the envelope on speed. I was curious if there were any other traffic calming measures that you could participate, um, to sort of address that issue knowing that it's a, it's a problem. Yeah. There were, there were a couple that were, were considered. I mean the, the, the big one that was considered was just narrowing the road, which was alternative to, but that it wasn't, it wasn't highly, um, thought of, I guess, so to say by the, uh, by the residents in this area. And they felt that the speed is occasionally an issue, but wasn't, wasn't constant. So we, we were, uh, of the mindset that the striping, maybe striping the lanes a little narrower and adding some speed tables would go a long ways towards reducing the reducing speeds in this area. I wasn't aware of, um, crosswalks and bump out sort of to not narrow the entire road, but just at, uh, specific places, um, had been thought of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We did consider bump outs. There are no crosswalks on this road because there's no pedestrian facilities. We, we talked about bump outs, but the impact to the drainage system is where you had a bump out, you're, you're essentially creating a low point. So you need to add additional structures. Um, that would be pretty costly. And then there's the addition of the, uh, the maintenance. Once you add bump outs, it makes the plowing very difficult. And that sort of leads into my, my final question is, since this is a grant through CCRPC, um, if there are no improved pedestrian facilities, is that affecting the grant in any way? I can answer that. The answer is no. Thank you. Uh, it was a lot of mention and I don't have real clarity around it. Uh, Dennis, could you give us like a cliff notes version of what the, uh, talk in several of these, uh, notes about the 40 foot road and it being necessary for fire or emergency vehicles to be able to travel down it? I guess I've seen it mentioned a couple of times in here, but I don't have any sort of clarity as to what that means or why it's. Necessary in that particular section. It was. Yeah, I'll try to keep it simple. It was brought up in connection with the development of the talent of, of this role, which took place a few years ago. Um, because it is a very long road and obviously, uh, there's issues about access back there. And I think staff did indicate I being one of them that the wide road would facilitate, um, fire trucks getting back to that particular development. It's not critical. It's not in the grand scheme of things. It's not a critical issue. Um, we have many 30 foot ride roads that the same thing and that could be reduced to the 30 to do that. However, I think the general consensus was that the 40 foot was what the residents in that area wanted, um, serves a purpose. I don't think that there's any part of the study that relates actually to the access by fire trucks or police or anything else on a 40 foot road. Um, 40 foot roads generally are not being built in residential developments that haven't been built. Probably this may have been one of the last ones that was built way back, uh, you know, in the 1970s, 60s and 70s. Um, it doesn't, there's no harm in having a 40 foot wide road. Um, we thought in this case, we started out, we might be able to reduce it and put pedestrian facilities in. But the neighborhood spoke spoke up in terms of what they wanted. And in terms of the issues there, we do have, uh, we have, uh, in fact, already proceeded with some of the work, meaning we repaved that section this year. Um, maybe it was last year, it was out of this year's, out of last year's funds. So it's been repaved. Um, we are putting a white stripe down the side. So that we'll be able to, um, have from a traffic travel point of view, at least a four foot zone on each side, which will kind of act as a pedestrian corridor. Uh, cars can still park on the road. It's not a bike lane, but it's a way to essentially visually, at least when the snow isn't on the ground. Have people, um, view this as a somewhat narrower road. Um, I'll go back to the bumpouts and the, uh, speed table. I'm not a favorite speed tables, but again, this is an area where the residents wanted to have some form of speed control. It would do the same as the bumpouts at the location. We're thinking of, we did not put that in this year with the paving, um, paving budget pretty tight, but, um, this project is one that would extend over a number of years. Um, I say that because we paved the road. We'd be adding the speed bump to that. Um, another year we will go in next year. I believe we've got planned. We've televised the storm drain. It's suitable to be lined. It's an old metal pipe. Um, we're finding that most of them are getting at the end of the useful life. So we're going to line that. It's very feasible to line that without having to dig up the road to do it. We checked some of the catch basins. Some of them do have to have worked on of them. Some of them don't have to be touched at all because they've, over time they've been modified. Um, so that's a second phase of the work that will take place. And then ultimately, I think we'd look for grants from other sources to handle the stormwater piece, which is down in the front hollow. Um, that's a fairly expensive part of the entire project. Um, we would look as grants come available to us because we not only get the flow reduction, which helps the erosion, but with the treatment that we put into it, we'd also get some fossil free mobile. So, um, it makes sense to kind of do this in about two or three parts may take us four, five years to complete the whole piece, meaning the stormwater, um, and all the rest of it. But our plan is to, if this is approved, go forward with those other elements. Um, you know, we've already started the repaving. We thought that was necessary this year. So we did that, um, irrespective of whatever may come from the alternatives. All right. Thanks Dennis. Um, I guess Mike, Mike question is along the lines of the sizing of the, uh, the stormwater infrastructure, um, with no outlooks of, uh, more frequent heavy rains due to climate change. Have we sized things appropriately for the future? Um, with those, those considerations in mind. Yeah. So the, uh, stormwater management manual, the state manual was updated recently as 2017 and they did increase flows, um, based on projections of future, future increases in the storms. So for the water quality event that we, we typically refer to as the first flush or the, um, the storm that it's going to happen several times a year. It went from a 0.9 inch an hour rain event to a one inch. So, um, so there, there has been a 10% increase at a minimum recently built in. We haven't oversized anything above that though. That's, that's kind of just based on the state guidance, what we're going with. The other, the other comment I want to make is, you know, there's a significant, one of the, the biggest erosion problem other than the nasty soil down there is the significant drop in elevation. And so although it's not shown on the plan, one of the ways to achieve some of the reduction in elevation is to essentially use hydraulics, meaning instead of sloping the pipe down, you drop the pipe into a structure that water then drops. Let's say eight feet in the structure goes down in a pipe that's relatively flat drops another eight feet in the structure. So what you're doing is reducing that hydraulic head so that when you get down to the point where you want to put in a treatment system, you've got a much reduced velocity of flow. So it's easier to treat that water going through the project to the high runoff now. And that gives you the capacity so that you can basically design it so it's a, I hate to say this, but probably slower moving treatment system rather than just flushing it out every time the heavy storm comes along. And then with the fill at the lower end, once you get to the lower end where it's flatter, mother nature can take care of the erosion at that point, at that point, once you provide some of the mediation to the hillside that have already eroded. All right. Thank you. Any other questions? Any other comments from staff? I'm going to go to the public comment. Go ahead Betsy. This is where I live. And the 40 foot was we wanted to maintain it. We weren't looking for a speed bump. We asked to slow down the cars by putting in stop signs. And we thought that would be adequate and probably cost a little bit less because you wouldn't have the snow plows coming in and hitting it and digging up that speed bump every year. I don't know how that works. Do they know that's where they are and they lift them? I don't know. But I think it's a great project. I think I'm excited about it being done. And we didn't do the road from Woodlawn up to Cindy Lane. It was just done up to Woodlawn. And so this whole section hasn't had anything extra done to it yet. So that's good. But the Fern Hollow does need to be done desperately. That's a real problem because people on Cindy Lane are losing their backyards to it as well because of the erosion. Thank you. Okay. Thank you Betsy. And I understand that for the stop sign question, there are federal regulations around that that kind of ruled that question out, right? It's not so much federal regulations, but it is. You go to the Federal Highway Safety Administration and you use all the Bibles and all the traffic stuff. You need to meet certain warrants to put up stop signs. And some of those warrants are controlled by volume of traffic. And there's no, nowhere near the volume of traffic out there to justify stop sign. And stop signs should not be used for speed control. That's kind of written in all engineering and traffic Bibles. They should be used specifically in those higher traffic installations. And so that's why we did not go with the idea of stop signs because they really should not be used just to slow down traffic. That's not their purpose. Their purpose is used for different reasons. And that's when you have more heavily traveled road. Oh, there's criteria that just aren't met out here. Okay. The other thing about the 40 foot road, why we want to keep it that way is that some one access to all of the Tanglewood area, all the way back to the very end and all the side streets that we have, there's over 180 homes back there. And legitimately after 125 year folks to have a second access. And they're having the 40 foot road in case there's a tree down or something, there's more potential that a car emergency vehicle could get through there. Because if one of our big pines came down and someone had a heart attack back there after wood lawn, no one's getting back there until that gets taken out of the way. Thank you. All right. Thanks, Betsy. Any other comments in the room? Let's see. Aaron. Hey, good evening, folks. I also live in the Tanglewood development. I was set in for the initial presentation. So I wanted to thank Israel and Dennis and. Annie for showing up tonight and giving this presentation again. A question I had for Dennis, you hit on a little bit with the speed tables. I think in your initial presentation, you said that you kind of saw those going both ways. It was kind of 50 50 in some cases. It reduced speed in other cases. You actually saw the opposite effect that it was an increase of speed probably after the speed table or folks sped up. So I just want a little bit more oration if you have why that option was chosen.  Speed bumps are the ones that there are much shallower, if you will, shorter. And we've kind of resisted putting those in. They, I've found those, the study that was done did show that half the time they're effective and half the time they're not. We have a couple of speed tables in the community and speed tables are a little bit different because it's a much wider, broader surface. And it's gentle. You can come up and over it, but it's the width of, you know, six to 10 feet. I don't have a standard in front of me, but it's a substantial width. It's not that high, but it's enough that if you're going too fast and you hit it, you're not going to have an accident. But the next time you go over that, you're probably going to slow down five miles an hour. And it's not quite the same effect as a speed bump. We, we don't universally like to put them in a lot of places, but again, the community wanted to have something out there, the local community that lives there to address the issue of speed. We thought that was a viable way to do it. And give it a shot and see what happens. Speed bumps are not that expensive or hard to put in. And a lot of times these are worthwhile to do. And if after a few years, the community says, Hey, it's not effective. We don't like it. We've taken some out. But it's that, that people who live there want to have something for speed control. To me, that's the appropriate item to put it at that location. And let's see how it goes. We're open to try things. Cool. Thank you for the clarification. I appreciate that. And just on the overall width of the road. I appreciate you guys had a really tough decision to make there. As someone who drives in and out every day, you know, I have to drive slowly because a lot of times there are kids who are in the middle of the road or trending toward the middle of the road. Sometimes because there are cars parked in the side of the road. So I mean, there's pros and cons both ways to having the wide road versus having a sidewalk. So thank you folks very much. And I'll see you guys in the next one. Have a wonderful evening. Thanks, Aaron. Mary post. Go ahead. Thank you. First of all, I want to say that actually speed is always a problem. It's not just once in a while. And a lot of times the speed is not just from our own neighbors or their, their kid's friends that come in, but it's the delivery trucks. Even the garbage trucks sometimes just really fly around in the middle of the road. And that's a constant issue. I'm a little surprised.  Dennis said that, um, yes, stop signs do slow down traffic. Well, therefore if we know they stopped traffic and if we know most of the community is begging for it to be slowed down, why can't we have it? I mean, just because it's, it's a lot of traffic, it's a lot of traffic. And I think that's a good point. All the manual say you don't need a stop sign because you don't have enough people. Well, we have enough people, kids and children here that, um, I think warrant a stop sign. Also, it can be a little in a cut. There's one spot where there's a curve. Uh, and when the sun, the different times of the year in the spring and in the fall, it's almost impossible to see somebody on the road because somebody is warranted.  And, um, there was one other thing, if I could think of what it was. Um, oh, yeah, if they put in a sidewalk, it was pointed out that in the wintertime, time, the snow piles would be throwing snow on that sidewalk in the course. It wouldn't be plowed. So then we'd have even the narrower area for the kids that walk to school. So that's why the community really wants to keep the 40 feet. Thank you so much. All right, thanks, Mary. Bruce, post. Yeah, hi. I'm going to try to repeat too much what's said. I want to thank the assembled group for the effective discussions we had. The first one was at the fire station in person. The last two, I think, online. And I really appreciate the give and take we had. Just a little background on the neighborhood you've heard about the 40 feet. I don't know why the developer put in a 40 foot road. I think this is one of the first real subdivisions in the state of Vermont. For many years, it was an IBM ghetto. But there were regs or in the town planned that if you had over 50 homes, you needed a second access. Well, I think Betsy said we have over maybe 180 homes. When that developed, when we bought our house, we were told by Jerry Furkey, then the zoning director, that no one could build behind us. They'd have to put in a second access. And that would be very expensive. Lo and behold, the town worked in an agreement with a developer. The town owned two lots that they got through tax sale and they wanted to sell those lots. So there was an incentive to develop. And the findings were, because the road was 40 feet wide, there was plenty of room for emergency vehicles to have access. So that development was conditioned on having a 40 foot access. And now to narrow it after that time seems to be going back on a justification for increasing the size of our neighborhood. So that's just a bit of the background. It's just not people prefer it. There was a definite reason for maintaining it. And the town used the 40 foot width as a justification for expansion. And speed is a problem at certain times of the day, not all of the day. But some of these people speed, they speed. And we live on the corner of Cindy in Tanglewood. We could see them going. We can see them going. And I appreciate the fact that the town is willing to try a speed table. And let's see how it works. I know there are standards, but this is not a federal rule or federal road. We don't get federal financing for it. So federal regulations don't govern it. There may be some standards of use, which Dennis talks about. But they're not the same as regulations that require something. But thank you all. And I thank the group for listening so actively during these many discussions. All right, thanks Bruce. I guess I should clarify that when I said regulations before I should have said standards, you're correct. There's no regulation there. It's a standard. All right. I don't see any other hands up. Any other board member comments, questions? Okay, so you're looking for approval here. Approval for Fert alternative? Five. Five. Any other motions? We'll move to this left board endorse alternative five as the Fert alternative for the Tanglewood scoping study and to allow staff to move forward with implementation. Thank you, Tracy. Do you have a second? A second. Thank you, Pat. Any further discussion? You're none. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Any motion passes 4-0. Thank you very much. To the next agenda item presentation and potential action on speed limit study on Osgoode Hill Road. Indi, I'll go ahead. We were asked some time ago and I apologize for the delay in getting this, but with every speed study, there's a series of acts that have to be taken to do a speed study. If you're gonna certify that speed study, these can go into court at some point in time. If there's ever a question about whether it was a correctly adopted speed study. So we follow a standard and that standard is contained in a bunch of documents I've attached. In the material I sent to the select board, I attached a document called methods and practices for setting speed limits. It's report put out by the Federal Highway Administration and ITE, which is the Institute of Transportation Engineers and basically lays out how you do traffic studies. And in this case, it's an engineering traffic study. It covers a broad number of things. It takes time to do and especially in this case, the road is 2.4, six miles long. It is a rural road. It's a gravel road. It is a collector road. It's a through road connects on into Westwood. 128 kind of at both ends of the roadway. But there's a series of things that go into the traffic study and I'm not gonna go into the details of them, but just to go over them. An adequate stat traffic study should cover the road surface characteristics, solar conditions, the grade, alignment, and sight distance. We did that. It should cover the 85th percentile and that's done through taking traffic counts. And in this case, because the road is so long, we did the traffic counts at three different locations along the road on different dates, trying to cover areas at the far end towards Westford, at the areas at the near end towards the Essex entry onto 128 and then towards the middle portion of the roadway. So we would get kind of a cross-section of what the speeds were. And I'll get into that in a little bit. There's a portion on roadside development and culture. What the roadside is, you know, who's there, mostly residential, signage and safe speed for curves and other hazardous locations within the zone. Parking practices, pedestrian activity and any recent accident experience. And then you combine those things and come back with a recommendation. And I will go to that recommendation. It's probably not what the residents would love to have, but my recommendation, quite honestly, is that there's no action to be taken. It's a 35 mile an hour speed limit. The actual traffic numbers showed that the 85th percentile when these numbers were taken. And I have to apologize. One of the delays was we had construction, town construction up on Hanley and Catella and we wanted to delay the traffic counts until we got that construction equipment off the road.  But when you look at the numbers, the 85th percentile speed is 42.8 at one location, 40.9 at a second and 41.5 at a third. And so the question is, if that's the 85th percentile and that's, if you go to the books, that's the standard to be used, but they also indicate in the standards that you can waive that five miles an hour either way of that. And with the type of roadside conditions, the fact that there is pedestrian activity on the road, you know, my recommendation as a professional engineer and I had Aaron review it, because he is also a PE and Annie took the data and she's a PE. So we had enough minds in on this that we could keep the speed limit at 35. Now, what does that actually mean also in terms of the traffic counts? And that isn't in the data, but I just want to give you an indication. And our recommendation is enforcement. I know that it's hard to do that, but you have to understand the average speed out there that was recorded at all three locations. Well, at one location was 35, another location was 38 and the third location was 35. So the average and the 85th percentile are right in the range for setting the speed limit correctly. Is there a problem out there? Yes, there is. The slowest speeds that were recorded and I'm not sure who's doing the slowest speed were seven miles an hour at the three locations. I'm not sure how it recorded someone going seven miles an hour, but someone was and this isn't winter. However, at the other end of the spectrum, the fastest speed recorded was 85 miles an hour, 75 miles an hour and 71 miles an hour. And traveling at that speed on this road is definitely unsafe in my opinion for the driver and probably for anyone along the roadway. You could set the speed limit for the driver who's doing 85 at 10 miles an hour and they still would be going 85 miles an hour. There are certain people that will just do that. I have taken the data. I sent it off to the police chief earlier today. I wanted to make sure you had that because it does indicate when those vehicles are traveling at those speeds, they're not late at night. They tend to be mid afternoon, sometimes mid morning. Someone has to be out there noticing which car or cars are going 70 miles an hour, 85 miles an hour. And it can be a joint process of enforcement. One would be for people to notice the car. That's it under the police department. Even if the police can't ticket them, they can perhaps talk to the driver and maybe some discussions person to person will get them to slow down in that zone. Again, that's a very high end. That's the exception. The average speed again is 35 and the 85th percentile is 40, 41 miles an hour. So at this particular point from an engineering point of view and it's something that I feel the board has to recognize. If you have a study, which we've done and you have a speed limit that's established by the study, I think you have to accept that. And I hate to say it that way, but the bottom line is the last thing you would want someone to do if you reduce the speed limit out there to another number, someone might say there's no basis for the reduction and end up in court with basically a copy of our speed study. And that ticket would probably go out the window. So I think that one of the downsides of doing a speed study is you get what you get. You get to study with the data that it provides and it may not be where you wanna go with the numbers, but it is what it is. And I think that once we've done that and confirmed that, I think that that's essentially what has to be done with the road out there and that is to maintain the current speed limit. And then I'll keep quiet and answer any questions. And thanks Dennis. Any, no, wait, we'll have the board talk first. How did you know Aaron wanted to add anything to Dennis? Oh, I thought you, there was so many behind Aaron had his hand on, so I'm sorry. I'm fine. He wasn't, yeah, okay, okay, so. But Aaron helped with the study, I didn't see it. Any comments or questions from the board? No, I think, yeah, so it's pretty straightforward. Yeah, and my comment is thank you for following through with this. I know, like you said, it's been, it's come up a few times in previous meetings and specifically requested. So thank you for doing that. So there's no comments from the board, then go ahead. All right, thank you. Again, I'm Kent Coptia and I've been a resident on Osgoode Hill for 30 years. Dennis, thank you for conducting the study. I wasn't aware it was going on. I did see the traffic counters out there, but I didn't realize the extent of the study. I could not agree with Dennis more. It's not an issue of a speed limit on Osgoode Hill. 35 miles an hour is a good speed limit for that road. The issue is the people driving the road itself and we need enforcement. I've, there've been a number of times when Essex police have been out, particularly when the buses are running and they have ticketed a few people driving through, but I think we need more of it. You know, I've seen people driving on that road at 50, 60 miles an hour, even more, even faster than that at times. So, again, I want to reiterate, it's not a speed limit issue. It's a user issue and we need to enforce the existing rule rather than reduce the speed limit. Thank you. Thank you. No comments from the board. So the recommendation is no action. So I think we're set then. Should we get back to those that requested this, since they don't seem to be here this evening, they'll let them know that we've completed it and the decisions we made? I'll also talk with the chief about his availability to do a little bit more enforcement. We certainly have plenty of neighborhoods that have asked us to do it. We are short of officers, but we'd also ask the residents, if you recognize the car and the owner, please feel free to let us know what we should be looking for. We won't give up your name, but usually aid ticket tends to stop the practice for a little while. And we would surely hate to have to pull someone out of a ditch. If they went too fast and get it off the road. So you could be helping a neighbor. Thank you. So Kathy, I see your hand up. Is there a specific question you need answered? Yes, thank you. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. I actually, there was a little glitch in the sound on this end. Could the resident of Osgood Hill, who made the comment restate his name or could you give me his name please? And could you spell it? It's Kent, K-O-P-T-I-U-C-H. Thank you so very much. Okay, Kathy, thanks for asking. Ron, I see your hand is up. Yeah, I think Evan pretty much covered what I was going to say. However, we understand, especially from the data that Dennis has given us, we understand better now, when we should be there and to use our time most efficiently. And that's the biggest thing for us. We have, speed is our number one complaint that we have as a police department. And we're doing our best to address all of those. We were up on Osgood Hill this morning. Our traffic officer was up there and then had to leave to go take a minor traffic complaint or a parking complaint in the village. So he wasn't able to stick around for very long, but we do understand there is a problem and we'll try to make an effort to take care of that. All right, thanks, Ron. Okay, I think that finishes that item. Moving on to the next agenda item, 6G, consider approval of retainer contract method of procurement for all projects. 39,999 and under. Dennis, Aaron, Aaron, got it. Go quick, memo before you tonight has been provided to you folks for information regarding the use of retainer contracts as a method of contract procurement for what we deem are small projects and that number it could range from anywhere from 5,000 to the 39, the 40,000, under $40,000. As I said, public works have been working on this for some time now. The genesis of this was back in 2019 FEMA storm we had in dealings with some of the folks at FEMA. They told us that the use of kind of material contracts were kind of not going to be accepted anymore as a means of procurement. We do have an emergency portion of our purchasing policy which allows staff to go ahead and make purchases or procure contracts regardless of emergency situations, washouts, culverts if it was imminent harm to the public. But what this is gonna do for us is kind of solidify a list of folks we can actually contact during these emergency situations to get these services done. If you wanna take a look at the attachments I can kind of go through the process. What we would tend to do is go out with a formal bid. Basically trying to solicit the contracts, retainer contracts from local contractors or any contractor really. I modeled this off of heavy construction but quite honestly this is a process we would likely use for some of the trades with our building's manager. We spoke at length at this and sometimes what we find is we don't have the bench out there on contractors and sometimes during construction season, summer construction season what we find is it's pretty slim pickings to get three quotes. Sometimes we end up with two. Sometimes we end up with none. So it's kind of a way for us to have another tool in our toolbox to have a list of these folks that we could date. This is a statement of work. This is what we need to get done. Give us the price, we'll do this. So we're kind of avoiding that long lengthy process of going out to bid or soliciting three quotes especially during emergency situations. It's a no-brainer time is money and also time could be the means of getting the traffic restored in a proper manner. If you look as one of the attachments to the bid, what we would be doing is looking to secure a two-year contract with these folks, sign an agreement with us which would allow us to issue statements of work. This would be attachment B of that bid. And in this, we put the need, we put what we want done, any requirements and they offer up a price. And we accept it or deny it and move forward. The state has used this with a great deal of success. Other municipal entities have and we're looking forward to having you folks approve this method. It would make our lives a lot easier especially during these emergency situations that I just was discussing. So the recommendation to you folks would be to approve the retainer contract method of procurement for all projects under the $40,000 threshold. If you have any questions. Thanks Aaron, any questions on the board? I had one question in the sort of master agreement. Is there any, I heard you mentioned two years. Is there any standard timeframe for review or adding different vendors or moving different vendors and just reviewing that master agreement? Yeah, I did have the town attorney take a look at it. I was looking at it, I reviewed it before the meeting today. There is one addition we do need to make to it and that is to put in that agreement, the two year contract limit. I think over time, since I've been here, I've found that we tend to review contractors as they come in, we kind of have a good idea and a vibe and a feel of what certain contractors can offer us, what their limits are. And we use them accordingly. And I think at that two year window, that review process on contractors we do use and have under retainer would be reviewed at that time. And we figured, I felt and also the attorney felt that a two year window is a good opportunity for us to figure out where they stand with us. Yeah, I just didn't see that two year timeframe and what was in the packet, so I wanted to make sure that that was on the radar and it was okay. Yeah, thanks, go ahead. Yeah, it's more of a clarification than anything else. So I've heard you say, you know, you want these for emergency services. And I guess maybe what I'm concerned about, I don't really usually get this nitpicky about language, but I did have some concerns like, I know that right now, Evan is town manager, you have the ability to authorize purposes or fund release under a certain amount. I guess I just wanted to make sure that since our recommendation is that we approve this for all method of contract procurement for all projects 39, 9, 9, 9 and under, that's not going to interfere with your ability then choose projects on your own recognizance. I'll let Aaron go first. I guess that was one catch that I also found was I'd like to remove that all projects to projects. That's kind of all-encompassing, because quite honestly, there may be a small project that's happened, we estimate at 30,000 that we don't really want to go that route. We want to put it out on the street and get a selection of contractors that way. We would probably be using this retainer contract services ultimately for a few heavy construction contractors and also some building trades to take care of minor repairs weren't there. Nothing that's going to go above and beyond them. So we had a conversation.  Two years ago, Halloween now. We get hellish rainfall for about maybe an hour, whatever it was, we got a deluge and it washed out some of our roads and some driveways and a lot of things. So who's calling all these contractors that move heavy stone and whatnot? Everybody is calling them. And as you can see in this current economy, supply demand, all of a sudden the cost of heavy stone or trucking starts bumping up. What we're looking at is, no, we want a services contract. We know what you charge in a normal way, blah, blah, blah. We know what you can do, how you can do it. You have the right personnel and we have a contract with you and that's what you're going to abide by. This is one way of doing it. Two, pre-qualifying people. If we need something like HVAC work or we have a blown roof or we have something happen to one of our parking lots, we have the contractor already pre-qualified, pre-reviewed, we know what they can do. We know their work and we can get to it when we need to get it. That's part of what I know about this as well. In a situation where we find ourselves several times, you don't want us calling around. We want to be out there doing it and calling socials saying, we need you out here on Osgoode Hill Road or whatever road you could think of that has incline issues. India and Brooke, you'd want us out there. We've been pretty lucky dealing with a lot of these storms and having the ability to have some of our residents that own construction companies that are willing to help at a moment's notice. Again, this kind of formalizes that process. Not only with the town, the town of Essex and get it through performance with our purchasing policy, but also with some people. That thanks for reminding me. The FEMA and their rules, you do not want to miss or not check a box or have them come back and say, geez, sorry, we know your project, but we're not gonna allow this because you didn't have the unit price or you did it this way and we wanted that way. It's too expensive to get that one. And there are many layers of FEMA review and they will definitely kick something back that they don't feel. Thank you for the question. I'm absolutely fine with it. Sorry. I was just wondering if you want to weigh your decision more towards local contractors or whatever you think. I can't. The process, we offer it up. This bid would go to everybody on the street. Whoever. There's a convenience factor there, yes. Let's kind of keep it above board. It would have to go to everybody for our policy. So Evan, you commented on that there's a FEMA requirement that may drive us to need to do this in order to qualify for some. They have particulars about means and methods and bidding. And this gets us through that qualification. Okay, so it's not just a convenience thing. It's also a kind of a requirement for FEMA. I mean, and also the convenience factor is that we have the ability to rely on found factors when we need them. We're not waiting a month or two to get things done. We can actually go to them and say, what will you do for this work here? Give us a prep. Okay. All right, any other board member questions? Well, it just it makes sense to front load that after the process when you're ready to go when we're so ready when you need it. All right, any other staff comments? Let's see one hand up here in the public in the room. Go ahead, Kent. Come on up. Thank you. Kent, copy it again. I haven't come to one of these meetings in a long time, so I haven't talked to him so much in quite a while. I think it's a great idea in the contract of the self-driving business. Just for a point of clarification, this is a contract, two years contract. Is there any stipulation in there that you will award someone who's contracted with a certain amount of work over that two years period or is it just a contract on their capability? So you're referring to the statements of work? Yeah, okay. So the bid process is gonna be, we would select the three lowest bids of the overall lump sum for like one hour per time. That's what I thought for a pretty good point. We would select those to go into an agreement. So the statements of work is kind of a first come, first serve type of, hey, we would fire it out to all three contractors on retainer. And the contractor that responds first to that statement of work would be offered the work if we couldn't agree to a cost or we would go to the next contractor, okay? But you say retainer, but they're not actually being paid anything until you award some. Correct. Thank you. All right, thank you. All right, I'm ready to make a motion. You wanna do that? Make a motion that the select board approve the retainer contract method of contract procurement for all projects, $39,999. Thank you, Don. Do I have a second? Awesome. Thank you, Pat. Any further discussion? Okay, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, motion passes 4-0. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Aaron. All right. Moving on to the next agenda item, discussion about appointment of new select board member. Greg, you put a number together. Yeah, short memo update on that. You are all available. The four of you board members on October 5th, it's a Tuesday. So we're gonna schedule the interviews for that night. We should have received a invitation from Linda to do that. So just to make sure it's on your calendars and for anyone in the public who's paying attention. Beyond that, we did this about a year ago, a little over a year ago in 2020 when there was an opening on the boards. There was a list of questions that the board asked the candidates at the time. It was all done in public session. The questions were scripted. They were not, they were made public ahead of time. That was the process the board went through. There was 15 minutes permitted for each candidate. So if that's a process you wanna follow the questions that were presented a year ago were in your packet for review, some modifications suggested based on where we are now versus where we are a year ago. So willing to take any feedback on that tonight and be ready for the interviews on October 5th. So one thing to make clear, I think for the public is the deadline for submitting a interest letter is the 20th. That's correct. That's what's on the website that I saw. One week from tonight would be the deadline for expressing your interest to participate in interviews. The interviews are on, you've said October 5th, I assume 6.30, depending on and then going to however long, depending on the number of candidates we get. 15 minutes for candidate is what we've done before. So what board member comments? Right, wow. Yeah, I know two of you here at the table participated in that, we're interviewed in that session. Any reason to change how we've done it before? We previously had actually assigned questions to select board members so that we had specific people asking the same questions to the same, or to each of the candidates. I mean, as the chair, I would certainly ask for the opening statement. I don't know, do we want to go through and assign these? Do we want to? So have we received this prior? So they would know what's next? Quick questions were available at the time so they can. Yep, and we also did not, we allowed people to stay in the room while other people were answering the questions. Can I say something about that? Sure, yes. The time you get to me as the 9th or 10th person, I've heard everybody else's answers. And by your tone of voices, you can tell what we're looking for. I mean, it didn't influence what I answered, but it could easily influence the way people are answering. You're listening to everybody else. Yeah, did we select a random order? I can't remember how we selected it, the reasoning for doing it. And if you remember pre COVID, we had a couple of candidates interviewing for this one seat on a board. We'd always ask one of them to step out. A year ago, it was in the midst of COVID and we were doing everything online and it was gonna be really hard to. Ask people to leave and then invite them back.  I think it's. But just so you're all aware of it, I think that's good to know. Yep, yep. I know that face, you look out of the field. Okay, so, I guess the other thing is I thought that the equity group was gonna consider whether additional questions or changes to questions should be covered with that. You know, if that's. They have not seen this. I will make a note, should we run it by them? So, I guess I kind of, I almost have a feeling that maybe we should just, you know, kind of one through four and then we can do one through seven on the questions and it's unless you have a burning desire to have a specific question that you're asking. Okay, we'll just, okay. Once we have, I guess the equity group review these for any changes, then we can have the, we have a meeting before that and the day before. We have joint meetings, I don't know if you need to, I don't know, add any more to those meetings. I think we're at about five or six. So, yeah, so I guess you're okay with if we get modifications to these questions, we just assign them out to folks. I don't know what we do if we get a new question, do we want to have a discussion about whether to ask the question? We're going to go right back. We think we'll be on the point of adding a different question. Oh, you said definitely we're going to have some more questions. We'll have to. So, just give you some quick 15 minutes of candidate, eight candidates, two hours, then discussion. So, do you have time to add a question? Yes, probably. Do you have time to add three in-depth questions? No, but you want to be consistent with your candidates, give them an opportunity to state why they applied their understanding, et cetera. And you all have now sat on boards. You've been in school boards, other boards, you've been on every board that they've created. You said so. I just said I was old. So, again, if there is a particular question you want to ask, make sure you ask it of all of them and follow up questions and then be really respectful of them. Okay, being in front of anybody having any issues with a lot of assigned questions to people and if we've additional or added we can either, if anybody strongly objects to any additional questions that were added then we leave them out or we change the, we don't know how we change the wording. Maybe individuals can work with Greg to sort out language questions. We don't have a group discussion. We can't have a group discussion between now and then unless it's the day before. I don't, you know, we need to have the questions up with candidates before that. The packet will go out beforehand and put the questions in the packet, but we can also discuss on, you can discuss it on the Monday night. And if there's anything major you want to change and just bring it up to other questions, yeah. Yep, okay, okay. All right, so no action is needed tonight other than agreement on how we want to go forward and if there's okay with it, all right, we'll go, we'll do that. All right, thank you. Moving on to the next one. There's two executive sessions. One is to talk about the separation discussion and the response that we got from the trustees and also the number of suggested documents from them in the packet that we'll need to have some discussion about and then the other is a personnel discussion that we'll cover when we get there. So moving on to consent. We want to move approval. We'll make a motion to accept the consent agenda. Thank you, Don. Thank you, Tracy. Any further discussion? Will the favor please say aye. Aye. All right, the consent agenda approved unanimously. Reading file, any board member comments? All right, hearing none, let's go back to the executive session motion. So how many do we have here? I have the two with the bill. So we are not having a discussion about appointments for the two board interviews that we did. That one, that's a six aye, one. Does that got it up? You want me to go ahead and read it? I got, I move it to select board and make the specific findings of general public knowledge of contracts and confidential attorney client communications made for the purpose of providing professional legal services to the body to place the town at a substantial distance. Thank you, Don. Do I have a second? Second. Pat, any further discussion? Those in favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed? And I move that the select board enter into executive session to discuss contracts and confidential attorney client communications made for the purpose of providing professional legal services to the body for fill in a one VSA 13A1A and F to include unified manager, deputy manager, and counselor. Thank you, Don. Do I have a second? Okay. Thank you, Pat. Any further discussion? Those in favor please say aye. Aye. Motion passes for zero. Okay. Then the other one. Move that the select board enter into executive session to discuss the employment of a public employee in accordance with one VSA, section 313A3 to include the unified manager, deputy manager, official manager, or deputy manager. Thank you, Tracy. Do I have a second? Second. Thanks, Pat. Discussion here is, are we, do we need to come back in the session after this? That's unlike, I don't think we're gonna have a decision. Only if there's anything you wanna say publicly about the draft MOUs with those shared services, but there's no action that needs to be taken. Yeah, we won't know that until we have the discussion. Right. And so, yeah, I guess we may or may not come back into the, yeah. It's just saying something. It's not making action on. Right. And I don't know. I don't know how long the executive session's gonna be, but it's not gonna be 10 minutes. Right, right. Okay. Any other discussion? Those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, motion passes 4-0. We will move upstairs for the executive session. Go ahead.