Okay, I'm going to call the meeting to order that at 631. Additions to the agenda on the site board memo we have none. Does anybody else have additions. I warn you we have a very long agenda tonight so if you want to put an addition on. Don't do it. We have a few minutes December 5 2022. I have a few comments. Excellent as usual. The details on page to the rights bill beach item second line, if approved, please add Mr. O'Neill said comma, so it's clear that it's a representation from him. And just a grammatical nitpick in the next paragraph. Please take out the comma after 2023. And then is that our form is that our form, not to put commas after numbers. No, our form is not to put commas in between clauses that are not complete clauses. This is not a case of a run on sentence. So you're saying no comment for 2023. That's correct. Yeah. I'm not the third line I have on that paragraph. The second paragraph, the first line. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You have a comment. No, the second paragraph. Oh, down here. Get rid of the comma. I got it. Yeah. Yeah, I would just agree with the drafter of the minutes. I don't, I'm not going to die on that sword though. No, I mean, grammatically, you would need a comma if it said 2023, but he questioned the necessity, but it's the same subject in the final clause as it is in the first class. So there's no comment. And then, you know, I'm wondering. If you've been with us when we've had dissents in our vote, but our past practice has been to note the people who voted against something we do have non unanimous. Oh, because you want your name. Yeah, yeah, I want my name. Even if it's on that. Just after the number. And just after the one. Yeah. Then on the next page. The first paragraph under the discussion on 2023 town meeting. In the fourth line after you introduced town clerk look here. After town clerk, if you could just put parenthesis, capital T capital C closed parenthesis. Since you use the abbreviation early later on it's easier for the reader to go back and figure out where that came from. So she's parentheses quote TC quote parentheses. No quotes just parentheses. I suggest TC quote. I've never seen that. Do it all the time. So where do you want to put the town clerk to care. Town clerk parenthesis. TC closed parenthesis. And I'm suggesting it's quote TC quote. Yeah, that's that's legal documents. Isn't this a legal document. Yeah, I'm not sure. The way you probably is. Using the quotes or not. I don't care. Let's use the quotes. I'll put them in. Thanks. Yep. So it's per end quote TC quote, per end. Okay. I'm page four. And this is not a suggestion for a change because this is accurate how it is. It's my motion, but reading through this, I wish that I had phrased the motion differently. And I just want to bring that up for discussion. The problem is that we have a motion that refers in two different ways to the same thing. I'm sorry, Carl, where are you? Where are you? I'm sorry in the minutes. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Page four under the East Moncular Fire Department fund balance. Okay, thank you. To motion to approve transferring the remainder. Yeah. So we're calling. We're referring to the remainder of the balance and the total of $6,754. Yeah. And that is. I mean, that's according to the information that we were given. And I trust it is correct. But. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But interestingly enough, there was interest that came in. I'm not reflected in that number. There is a, there is a note on the TA. To let you know that there was an additional, I think it's $13. Note for this meeting. The additional $13 of interest. Okay. So the amount did change. So, yes. So kind of just said remaining balance, we would be covered. So I'm asking you tonight to. I'm not saying that there's an additional $13,000 included in that warrant. Okay. So you're saying leave out the amount. I'm thinking the amount is important to have in the minutes, but that should be up not in the motion itself. So in the body of the minutes, we discussed that there's a total of $6,754. In that fund. And then the motion would read. To transfer the remainder of the balance in the fund. To the East. So that's how I would like to do it next. Yeah, I'm glad you learned something. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we're going to correct it. Yeah. Yeah. And then finally on page five. For the meeting schedule. You've got the correct dates for January, but they are not the regular meeting dates. Each of them is a special meeting date because of the January 2nd holiday. Yeah. And a special meeting date because of the January 16th. That's it. Anybody else. That's enough. I don't want Carl to hog it. Why do they does. Who controls the computer to make that sign go away. And now. Oh, I can get it. If you. There we go. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Anybody have any further. Comment on this. Make a motion that we approve the minutes. From December 5th, 2022. And with the. Discuss change. Second. You've got the second. We'll say. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Thoroughly. He didn't have as an infection. For the two midnight. All those in favor, please say hi. Hi. Yeah, I. Doc. Public comment. Public comment. I don't see anybody raising their hands. It's that there's it. I think that. Don't connect you out. You're on mute. Are you public commenting on anything? If you're in the same room as Amy, one of you is going to have to turn off your audio while you talk, Scott, your speakers. Scott had no legit public comment. He accidentally hit the button. OK, good enough. Thank you. OK, right on time here, 640 budget discussion, telelog, public library. OK, take the floor. Do you want to sit up here? You don't have to. But if you'd like to, it would be good. It would be good. Well, I just think that you'd be a more part of the interview. I'll take a lot of things on you now. Yeah, you won't be on camera at all. Oh, we'll just sit here. If the goal is for everyone to see her. You can see my back. Yeah, we see your back really well. Sitting next to John would allow people to see your face. But we can see you from a distance in a different view.  I would not have to care. Do you want to stay here? Yeah, I can move forward. Well, because I've gotten a lot of people to play because of the force book. I didn't know that. Don't lie, buddy. I say I like it.  So I'm just pushing back inside. OK, all right. You ready to rock and roll? I think so. I mean, you know, to the extent that you're feeling good about being on camera. Yeah, that's a good thing. So I am Carolyn Brennan. I'm one of two co-directors at the Kellogg Humbert Library. But I have with me tonight Sarah Swift over here. Hi, Sarah. Hi, Sarah. Sarah is our new East Montpelier representative to our board of trustees. Jennifer Micah is finishing up her term at the library, has now finished up her term at the library and is leaving us. And Sarah is taking, looking forward to having her officially confirmed in January. So anyway, so she's here mostly to listen to me at this point, for which I apologize deeply to all of you. So we've had a wonderful year at the library this year. We did a couple of very important things. We updated our admission statement. And we have now an approved strategic plan for 2023 to 2025. I brought copies of the strategic plan in case anybody, I brought copies of the shorter version of the strategic plan, one page version, in case anybody would like a copy of that. I'm happy. I'll just leave them here. You can recycle any that they have longer. You don't want? Yeah. And you have the long version in your packets that has all of our action steps and benchmarks. And then I also brought copies of our annual report. Did I send them to you as well? Inclusion? Oh, they are not as big. Yep. Well, I will leave you for inversions then, unless somebody wants to. But yeah, so we had a wonderful, we're back to pre-pandemic conditions in the library. We're seeing tons of daily foot traffic. We're back now to our whole complement of programming. Although when I compiled our statistics and the report that's going to go in your town report, that's still showing our numbers being low for programming. It was still a hold out in effect from the pandemic. But now we're starting to really, again, see that return there also. Lending, yeah, lending is incredibly strong. We had over 350,000 print circulations, another 35,000 electronic circulations for digital resources. We're still, it's still a little bit of a dance around digital material for the library because I'm always conscious of the fact that once you get out of the City of Montpelier, you're the likelihood that you have broadband access diminishes significantly. And so I don't want to push too hard to switch our, we'll never really switch our print collection over, but I don't want to push too hard to spend money on digital collections and increase the digital collections until I'm sure that people can actually access some pretty reliably. So part of the reason that that number is not higher is because I have not pushed to expand that collection as quickly as I might. Do you have a sense of whether it's lack of broadband or just lack of familiarity with the format that has kept your digital numbers down besides you not pushing? Of course, I think it's a little bit of both, honestly. And there has been some fairly recent, it always takes people a while to get comfortable and familiar with using an app. And there are people like me that don't necessarily want to engage with yet another app for something. And so I think that it's probably a combination of factors. And I do think that we'll see it increase as we move forward. And that is something where I'll have to invest in our collection and I'll have to invest in our digital collection at some point. Right, because when it comes to books and magazines, I mean, the bandwidth for those is almost nothing. It's almost nothing, exactly, yeah. And but unfortunately, the cost for books not quite so much, but for magazines, digital magazine costs about 10 times what it's analog for what it's print counterpart costs. In some cases, it varies quite a bit, but we have a subscription to consumer reports in digital format and you can see back issues and everybody can connect to it simultaneously. It's an awesome resource, but it costs where a consumer reports subscription costs us maybe $40, it costs like $1,000. Wow. It's a significant, it's a chunk of change. Yeah, absolutely. Wow. Yeah, so, like I was saying, we're getting back to our new normal. We are, what else did I wanna say? We're seeing a lot more gap-filling and at other meetings, I explained that like, we have people that, we already see people who are experiencing homelessness or other forms of insecurity or benefits and security and as funding is changing really rapidly around some of those resources, kind of as we emerge from the pandemic, we're seeing a lot more people coming in and asking us those types of questions. Like, I can't get ahold of my case worker and I really need to know what's happening with my emergency rental assistance money because I don't know if I'm gonna get that benefit next month and types of questions like that. So we're doing more of that type of work. And then we had been doing for a while. We're starting to see some of our winter season behavior issues come back now, which we haven't seen since before the pandemic, which are always exciting. So, yeah, so it feels like a return to some sort of normal, some semblance of normal, which is great. Do you have, I mean, the sort of questions that you were just talking about, rental assistance. I mean, arguably reference librarians are trained to find any information, but do you have folks coming in from other community organizations to volunteer to help meet needs that are outside the normal purview? Not yet. One of the things that's identified in our strategic plan actually is making more community partnerships. And I've done some initial reachouts to organizations that do that work to see if we can get some partnerships. I'd love to have somebody who specifically deals with benefits or maybe specifically deals with even maybe like a mental health case worker. I would love to have somebody like that in the library at a regular scale. So we're working towards that. Yeah, and so, and then the biggest thing that we're very excited about is our strategic plan. But the other thing that I also wanted to bring up while I'm here, and I don't want to too much of your time is our, a number of years ago, we did a capital campaign called Give the Library a Lift to complete 25 mostly deferred maintenance projects. And we are now 20 down and five to go. We're getting very, very close to having all of those projects done, which is very exciting. Yeah, I mean, we're in great shape and we're as busy as ever. It's been kind of great. Yeah, yeah, very exciting. And so I'm here officially to ask you guys to put us on the town meeting warning for level funding with last year. So the amounts, $46,700, that's 46,764 dollars. And that's, yeah, as I said, the same amount that we requested. You did have a question. Yeah, I actually had to, but Carl asked one of my questions. Going back to the digital books that you've referenced, are there agreements or licensing agreements that limit the number of times a library can check out or allow folks to check out a particular volume before it expires? And if so, how does that inform your acquisitions policy when it comes to digital books? Yeah, of course. So yes, the short answer to that is yes. It depends on the title. It depends on the publisher that created the material. It depends on whether or not it's an audio book versus an e-book, but there are limitations to how many copies. By and large, our digital resources act. They mirror a physical resource. So if we would have one copy of a demon copperhead, for example, in the library, we might have one digital copy that is now circulating or hopefully, well, in the case of that particular book, we have multiple copies. But yeah, so there are holds lists. There are wait lists for digital items. There is a set number of digital items. And the way that informs collection development is very much the same way that it informs collection development and acquisitions for a physical title. If our holds list gets too long, then we have the capability to buy digital copies of an item that only our patrons can check out. So if I see some of those holds lists getting very, very long, then I can spend the money and purchase additional copies or additional loans of a specific copy or simultaneous uses. But in terms of the digital, for lack of a better term, book itself, are there any limitations on how many times you can check it out? I understand that only one person at a time can have access to it, but after you reach, say, 25 or 50, is it like a used book and it goes away? Yes, again, that depends. So some of our books act like that and some don't. It's frequently 40 uses per title if we buy a limited licensure. And so if you use it 40 times, then it goes away. Yep, unless I buy it again. Oh, I see. Yep. So I can continue. It's a way for them to keep making money, basically, without you using it too much, basically. Basically, yeah. And a physical book, how many times can a physical book go up the way it's treated, generally, by lenders? Probably double that anyway. If it's treated well, I think you could probably go out 100 times. And what's it cost you for the book? I mean, yeah, it depends. A digital copy. Oh, a digital copy. It varies really widely. But something in the neighborhood of $45 to $50, maybe. Not kidding. No, it's not like thousands of dollars or something like that. No, but it costs you about the same for a hardcover book. A hardcover book costs us maybe $15 to $20. Oh, really? So it's still cheaper. Oh, no kidding. That's your purchase price. That's our purchase price. Yeah, you're buying it. Processed it. Yeah, exactly. That is probably pretty similar. Yeah. Yeah. OK. So your finances are in good shape. That's what you're saying. Our finances are in very good shape. I think we're probably as solid as I've ever I've been at the library six and a half years and I think our finances are as or more solid than I've ever seen them. Yeah. We've put my co-director Jesse and my predecessor, Tom McCown, but really particularly Jesse and the trustees have put a tremendous amount of time into making our finances very, very solid. We're current on our audits. We're on a five-year audit cycle. We have reserve accounts funded. So one of the things that we saw with this last round of capital campaigns and all of this deferred maintenance that we're now finally just about to finish up, now we have part of that was to fully fund a maintenance reserve. And so now we have a buffer against some of these larger projects. So when our roof needs replacing, it's not all of a sudden a crisis in our annual operating. Right, right. Yeah, so yeah, so our finances are in really good shape. Yeah. But many businesses have had a lot of increased expenses in the last year. You've had those and you're able to absorb them. I mean, salaries. Yeah, I mean, well, so we're on our salaries when inflation went crazy in the past year. We didn't see that impact our salaries as much, at least yet, because our staff is unionized to our union shop. And we have an inflation cap built into our union contract. So yeah, so it capped out at the maximum. And the reason that that exists is to buffer against times where we have crazy economic swings. And it also assures staff during low times of inflation that they will get some sort of increase. Yeah, it's just steady. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a way to budget. And so we have seen increased costs. We're not immune to inflationary factors.  You're protected. Yeah, yeah. OK. Well, any more questions? My door's always open. If anybody comes up with anything, I love answering questions. Yeah, she's doing it. Bring them, bring them at me. Well, I think we're in pretty good shape. I mean, we appreciate the fact that it's a level-funded budget, which everyone will appreciate. And it's an appreciated resource. Yes, yeah. Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you. Thanks. By his popular aspect, are we best in class in terms of usage per capita? I did not actually calculate out usage per capita, but you guys are always right up there. Yeah, yeah. Pretty calm. Kind of pushing. Yeah, yeah. Pushing for compliments for that. I guess so. Your name in a minute. Why is it you? Well, thank you for coming in. Yeah, thanks for coming in. And our next budget discussion. We'll hopefully have seen your activity center. There it is. I'm here online. Online, that's good. I mean, whatever works for you. Online works for us. Can you see and hear me OK? Yeah, we can hear you when you have the floor. OK, thank you so much. I'm sorry I couldn't be there in person. I had my kiddos to contend with this evening. So I'm Sarah Lipton. I'm the director at the Montpellier Senior Activity Center, have been director for just over a year. I believe you probably saw my predecessor, Janet Clark, last year. So I'm really happy to be with you today for the first time. We have had quite an interesting year, the senior center. We had a lot of staff turnover this past year. And so it's been a lot of juggling to make sure that we're taking care of everything that needs to be taken care of. But needless to say, we've done a lot of growth in the last year. We've got a pretty full staff at this point. And we've seen a pretty incredible growth to our Feast Senior Meals program. We provide meals on wheels to Montpellier and Berlin, older adult residents who are homebound and need access to meals. And that doesn't really touch your community so much. But I just want to point out that it's pretty amazing what's happening right now in our community. The need for meals is increasing dramatically. We've had about a 70% increase in need for meals this past year. So we've been working really hard to figure that out. It feels like a big nut to crack in terms of funding and ability to provide all of the meals that are needed. But we're working really hard on it. And I feel really confident that in 2023, we will be able to figure that out. We have continued to be able to offer our curbside meals. And many of your residents come to those every week on Tuesdays and Fridays to pick up a meal and take home or share with someone they're living with or just to be able to have a meal. We did try to start doing congregate meals again. We're going to continue to try. It's really hit or miss. Similar to the library, we've had a resurgence of people coming back in the building. But at the same time, there's still a lot of reticence. So it's a combination of trying to respond to what everyone wants, which is to be able to come back and engage. But at the same time, making sure that we have a safe, healthy environment to offer for our older adult community. Our classes, which many of your residents attend online and in person, have grown. We have been able to just about double the amount of classes that we offered from the pandemic time, which I'm really pleased to see. We've got many new teachers on our roster and lots of students. We've, I think, I forget the numbers, but I think it was, we about doubled also. I think during the height of the pandemic, we had about just under 20 classes and about 300 people taking classes. And this past semester, the current one that's ending this week, actually, we have about just over 50 classes and over 600 students. So that's a pretty awesome thing to see happening, that people are really engaging in adult education, whether it's active living and wellness classes. We've got some dance classes on the docket. We have, I think, five or six different kinds of art classes, a whole slew of humanities classes, including classes over at the Savoy Theater, which a lot of people really love to do. So there's a lot of things going on. We also have a new Monday morning coffee and conversation drop-in group. We've got, oh gosh, so many new drop-in groups coming up in January. There's a really hilariously titled drumming class called the Rhythm Method. We have our trash tramps that are going out every Tuesday to collect their litter on the curb. We've got, I think, four different musical drop-in groups, at least four different game drop-in groups. We still have our Savoy Lending Library of DVDs. We have our books that we lend out. The list goes on. We've got a puzzle corner for people to take puzzles home. And we are also getting ready to start a new tech cafe. We've been working in partnership with the Montpelier High School and an organization called All Brains Belong who has been teaching high school students how to offer tech support and training to older adults. This is a very cool partnership. And so we'll be starting in January with a focus group under January 5th. So if you have anyone who wants to come and learn or let us know, rather, what they want us to teach them, then we'll start teaching them. And we finally have a volunteer through the Central Vermont Refugee Action Network actually who is helping us to onboard a number of iPads that we were gifted last year. So that we'll have those to lend out and offer tech support and training through those devices. Trying to go into my mental list. What are all the things? We're in the appeal seasons. We just sent out our appeal. We've got our monthly newsletter going on. We have a wonderful new as of this year, communications and development coordinator, Matt Wilson. Wonderful new staff in the kitchen. Eli Mutino is our new Feast Program Manager. Chef Shalonda James is our kitchen manager chef. We have a new part-time kitchen assistant, Robbie Plunkett. I think that's all of our new staff. And then we have a number of other staff that we're working with through the Department of Labor and also associates for development training. So I can pause there if you have any questions about our activities before I dive into budget land. Any questions? No, I'm firehosing, sorry. Oh, keep going, I think. Okay, all right, keep going. I'm rolling. All right, so yeah, we've been serving, we generally serve about 1,600 older adults in our community and it's not just East Montpelier and Berlin and Montpelier, but it's also, you know, Mortown, Calis, Middlesex, Worcester, who am I forgetting? Berlin, there's, you know, all of the surrounding towns come in and have been participating in our classes and our drop-in groups in discussion groups. Oh, I forgot the whole Ollie series. We have been hosting in partnership with UVM's old, I was at Osher, I just forget what it stands for, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. And those were very well attended this fall with 50 and 60 and 70 people coming out to hear an amazing array of speakers and presentations and those will get started again in February with a really exciting lineup of presentations. We've also been doing more collaboration. I'm a huge fan, I was excited to hear Carolyn talk about collaborative partnerships because that's one of my favorite things to build. And so actually I've been working really closely with Michelle Singer at the library on making sure that we're doing events together and in coordination and we did quite a number of this past year and we will again in the coming year. And we were also working with a new collaboration with the Pride Center of Vermont and the Rainbow Umbrella of Central Vermont group to offer more LGBTQ events for older adults. I think we're gonna be doing a drag bingo evening. We've got some queer poetry events and I'm also starting to work with the Summit School of Montpelier, the music school to offer, probably get started in maybe in April, a new coffee house. So we can have an open mic and drop in featured performers and folks from the community can come and present. So we've been doing a lot of collaborative work to really bring out what we do to more people and bring in more people who are doing similar things because we really feel that we have an incredible opportunity to be part of the city of Montpelier. We are one of very few senior centers that are actually run through the municipality and we're one of the only senior centers that's run that way and running a senior nutrition program. So we really feel like we have this incredible opportunity to be able to have a lot of impact for older adults in our community. And so what we're looking ahead at FY24 with the budget is we do need to ask for a slight increase, a 7.7% increase and that's because the city has been doing an increase around for each department which was at the baseline was 7.7, but they actually wound up essentially giving us an 18% increase in recognition of all the work that we're doing for the community which was kind of unheard of and amazing. So we're not asking you for an 18% increase, but we do need, but there's a policy in place with the city that if we are getting an increase from the city, we have to ask our surrounding and supporting towns for an increase as well. And really what that will go to is making sure that we're continuing to offer excellent programming for your residents. One of the things that I'm really invested in as I have these conversations with our surrounding towns is finding out what do your people want? Is there anything we can do in East Montpelier? Is there something that we could come out and offer to your community? Is there something that you would wanna do specifically with us? And I'd love to follow up and whoever it is I should have that conversation with have that conversation. I'm talking with Worcester for instance about doing events again at their old town hall and Calis as well at their renovated town hall. So that's kind of what we're looking at. And I'm wide open for questions. So you say level funding here and your request, but you're actually going more? No, I'm sorry. There's a, you should have the updated version. Oh, okay. I have that. Yeah, I have the 9,000. That's what I have. It says level fund. Yeah, and you have the 9,000 last year as well. Right, that was, so I did, so shoot, I apologize. I sent it to Gina last week or the week before. We, I did put together a level funded request and then I had to go through the city's budget cycle and found out about the increases. And so then I reframed and I had to and I apologize for that, redo my request and ask for an increase. You don't have the updated, you don't have those updated forms. Yeah, somehow I didn't have that. So it's 7.7% of 9,000. So it's, yeah, it's 9,700 is the request. Yeah. And every town is getting an increased request? Yes, every town is getting the 7.7 increased request. Yep. And I can tell you what those numbers are if that's helpful. It's all on my form. I can do the math. Okay. Okay. I'll make sure you all resend it to Gina. I'm really sorry. Yeah, absolutely. Not giving you a hard time. It's just that when you said, we're going to go with an increase and then I'm on the paper. Well, yeah, no, I understand. I'm like, am I going to open up here? I thought maybe I'll just see.  So I'll make sure you get those materials this evening. Okay. Any other questions? Well, if you can figure out how some of the other towns are approaching their seniors and coming up with activities that seniors want, let us know how they're doing it. Because I think because we're so close to Montpelier that seniors can more easily get to Montpelier from here than maybe they can in Calisthenes and some of the other places. But I haven't figured out how we find out what people really want. Well, they go to Twin Valley. They do, right, yeah. And that's the thing. Yeah, I mean, one of the ways that I've been trying to solve that puzzle is by having gatherings with folks, inviting people to actually meet me online or in person so that I can hear from them, what do you want? And a lot of what I'm hearing is conversation. People want conversation. People want to be able to, whether it's a specific topic like the Ollie lecture, a lot of people were coming out to that. Or last year, I forgot to mention one other thing we did. We ran a farm stand with events outside, both musical and educational events with the farm. We have the Montpelier Feast Farm that the parks department runs to grow food produce for our feast kitchen. And they had some surplus. And so we were able to offer like $1 for a piece of produce, but have events alongside that. And I think that what we're noticing is the coming out of the pandemic, the hardest thing that has hit people besides a lot of increased food insecurity is really the social isolation. So really looking for sometimes really even simple ways for people to come together. Could be a craft group. It could be a coffee group. It could be a book group. It could be something really simple that allows people to come together and connect again. And I think that's one of the main things. And the other component I think is volunteering, like working together for something. That there's sort of that common sense of, okay, we're doing something for good in the community. And I would be more than happy. I don't know if you have like a town hall kind of gathering space really, or I might have driven through all the parts of East Montpelier, but I don't know. Do you have a town hall space that we could create a little gathering at? Or not really? Not really, but sort of.  That you'd want to have. The town hall- Well, I would be very open to a longer conversation about what we could do together. I'd be very happy to help create some more engagement. I was thinking maybe a short survey of town meeting might help. Yeah, for sure. Sure, the people who go to town meeting generally fairly- Yeah. So they'd be wanting to fill in, maybe do like a five question survey or something. Something open-ended as well. Yeah. But it looks like you've got less people from East Montpelier now. You said 87.  That's just the reality of what happened. We were down to very skeletal operations. And that was before I was there, but it was very, very limited what we were able to offer. And so 2021, we're sort of slowly inching back up a little bit. And then it's been this past year, 2022, that we've been able to really expand again, but I still, as I mentioned, there's still a lot of reticence for coming out to things. And it's just slower.  So it feels like people are sort of, even though COVID is definitely still real, I have two staff members out with it right now. And it's totally still real, but it feels like we're inching our way, just the way the library was describing, inching our way back to not pre-pandemic levels, but a sense of, okay, we can do this again. We want to come out again. So yes, the numbers have been lower, but it still feels like there's a lot of people coming in and engaging with things. Yes, Kyle. Speaking of bringing things out to the community, Sarah, you mentioned a couple of times in your report. I'm not sure whether you mentioned in the fire hose just now and I missed it, but the village initiative that you've got, I find very interesting. And you say in the report, you're thinking about expanding it to East Montpelier. Can you tell us more about that, please? I sure can. It's a slightly unfortunate update though. So the village model that we launched in 2020 was by hiring an AmeriCorps service member to operate the program, which we called MSAC at home. And we had an AmeriCorps service member for that year, 2020 to 2021. We had one for 21 to 22. And then this summer, when we were blasting everywhere that we were looking for an AmeriCorps service member, we got zero applicants. So the program is a bit at a standstill. However, we have two possible ways to kind of get around not having an MSAC at home person to organize it. The tech cafe program that we're establishing with the high school and all brains belong and some support from the refugee community, that's gonna enable us to do some of the work that the AmeriCorps person was doing, which was offering tech support. So two years ago, our AmeriCorps service member, Andrew Griffin, who was awesome, that was the primary function that he filled was doing tech support for folks. And so without him there, and last year our AmeriCorps person didn't have any tech experience, so she really didn't do that. So we're really happy that we've got this collaboration coming in very soon in January to start kind of bringing back that component. And then the other thing is we're actually just about to apply for a grant through Meals on Wheels America, for a at home repairs project, which is another component of the MSAC at home program. And a volunteer just came out of the community actually, really generously, he's retired and he retired to this area so that he could be a volunteer carpenter. And so he actually of his own generosity went and got himself paid for his insurance. And so starting in January, we will have him in place as long as we can get this grant to pay for materials, then we'll have that to be able to offer out to the community. What our hopes for MSAC at home are, if we can ever find an AmeriCorps person again, is to be able to build a cadre of volunteers from within the community, who then go out and do at home support services, whether it's repairs at home, or I just can't reach this thing on the top shelf for putting up blinds or whatever kind of random service project. So that's just at a standstill until we can find another AmeriCorps person. We've kept it in the budget. That line is it still in the budget so that we're hopeful for the future to have another AmeriCorps member. And we suspect the reason is a combination of housing shortages and the high cost of living versus the super low cost of the wages that AmeriCorps offers. So we're a little bit on pause, but kind of not entirely answers your question. And thank you for that. And just for context, the Village Initiative is, as you say in your report, it's an aging in place initiative to help people. Exactly. And it's part of a network of a couple of hundreds of such villages around the country. It is, yeah. And we're part of the Village to Village Network and we have a new database ready to go once we have someone to run it called Help. Is it Help My Village? Oh, no, Helpful Village. So we're ready. We're ready. We just don't have the person. OK. OK. Any more questions? We're just running a bit behind. So we've got a lot to present. Budget discussion. So any more questions? No. Sarah, that's fine. We're good? Yeah. OK. Thank you all so very much. Thanks for coming. And if you can send us those updated materials. Absolutely. Yep. Thank you. Thank you. OK, so the next budget discussion is Center Vermont Health and Hospice. Home Health and Hospice. Health and Hospice. Not home health. Vermont Health and Hospice. Home Health and Hospice. Home Health and Hospice. I am glad to be here in person. It is home. I'm glad to be here in person. Yeah. Do you want me to go ahead and have an opportunity? I prefer it, but you know. It doesn't matter to me. I'll see you. Sarah. OK. OK. Thank you so much. Thank you. OK, I'll see you here. So it is home health. OK. What was that again? OK. So. Yeah. Thank you for having me this evening. You're very good. You're Sandy Roe. Yeah, sorry. Hi, I'm Sandy Roos. I am the president and CEO of Center of Vermont Home Health and Hospice. Very familiar with some of the faces both in the room and online. So I have a short presentation to go through. I'm going to skip through some of it. I'm not going to read it all. A lot of you know us and who we are and what we do. Yeah. So anyways, so first thing for just about our mission, I'm not necessarily going to read the mission to you because I think you're pretty familiar with that. But one thing to keep in mind is we are mandated under regulation for designation and operation of home health agencies in the state of Vermont. And what that means is we have to accept all referrals for home health, hospice, and choices for care programs. So if we get a referral, we don't really have the option to say no. If we do say no for regulation, we have to hire lawyers, figure out why we're saying no, go through a whole process, and more than likely a survey will be on our doorstep the next day. So pretty tight rules. It also limits our ability to negotiate with payers to a degree. So in a hospital setting, sometimes you can say, we're not going to accept these rates. And we're not going to sign the contract until we can negotiate better for home health and hospice based on these rules that I just mentioned. We can't do that very easily. So right now we're working with one contract that is paying us $100 less per visit from here to all the other payers. And it's pretty ridiculous. And it's a small number of individuals that we serve with that payer source. And we lose a half a million dollars on it for 36 people. Out. So yeah. So just some things that are happening from that perspective. For East Montpelier residents, we pretty much have serviced a little bit a few more individuals than we did last year. And I have a couple here. We have seen an increase in long term care clients that we serve in East Montpelier. Those are individuals that we really want to keep home. This program is really that last step before they have to actually go into some sort of facility. So that's really maintaining their independence, personal care attendance, serve that population. We saw a 43% increase in those individuals this past year. We also saw an additional last year we saw the same, but also an increase in our maternal and child health services. And we'll talk about those services a little bit later. But those are really services that follow a pregnant mom. Pre-birth, all the way through pregnancy, really works with the individual on parenthood, works with a child, developing healthy lifestyles. We follow those children, some up to two years old, depending on the program, some up until five years old. And we certainly partner with a lot of other community providers with that care. Just over the past several years, we've increased the number of patients served for e-smile failure by 28%. And we also increased the number of admissions by close to 40%. What's an innovation? Where somebody comes on to care for an episode of care. It can be 30 days, 60 days, sometimes it's longer.  So it's counted twice, whereas patients serve discounted units. Thank you. So innovation. So some of our work is we try to be innovative in our telemonitoring and telehealth services have been significant, especially through the pandemic. We were doing telemonitoring starting in 2007. The interesting part about this program, it is not reimbursed by any payer. So this is a program that we've chosen to invest in for lots of reasons, and certainly paid off during the COVID pandemic. But it allows us to keep eyes on individuals. Sometimes you can call a client and just check in on them. You can't see their face. When you're on telehealth, you can visually see them, and that speaks volumes to a nurse that can assess that. We have been working to develop different programs with our physician and hospital community. The latest one we developed was an evidence-based program in collaboration with Central Vermont Medical Centers cardiology team. And their team actually has access to their patient panel that we manage under our telemonitoring program, which is great, because they can go in and document notes. We can go, you know, they can see everything we're doing so we can really collaborate and coordinate on these by-risk patients. Most times, these are individuals that are going back and forth to the hospital. We want to keep them out. This particular, these individuals have heart failure and really we look for signs of exacerbation or they're having weight gain or retaining fluid, et cetera. And really the goal is to work with the physician practice to draw their blood, first thing in the morning, we monitor that, we implement diuretics and there's a post-monitoring and we try to keep them out of the hospital. So we do this very post-monitoring over four to six days and we just recently had another success. So keeping them out of the hospital, keeping them at home, being able to do that real-time, kind of really individualized care is really critical. So it's very much in the early stages, but we're seeing lots of success. So how are things like this? So we actually raise dollars for fundraising and we use some of our town funding and then we also use some investment from our investment portfolio. Next page, care to help families thrive. So this is about the work related to our maternal and child health program. These programs are Medicaid funded or paid 40 cents on a dollar. It was a little bit higher last year, this past year it was a little bit less, which isn't unusual for Medicaid. And we're also doing another collaboration with the physician community at Central Vermont Medical Center related to perinatal visits. So ultimately the OB practice follows these individuals and then the maternal and child health nurse comes in at about 30 weeks. They may be working with them up to that point. And we do at no cost to the client or provider because some insurances don't necessarily cover this work, but it's actually something that really helps set the tone for that parent and that child moving forward. And it really focuses on perinatal mood anxiety disorder with mom and also sort of the determinants of health. Because there's been studies that found that the mood anxiety disorder, post birth, really shows up and things kind of start to spiral down in the family environment. So we're working with a practice on that. We make necessary referrals to other community providers and to our physicians. And we also provide lactation support to those moms who are really encouraged for us eating. And then just some other programs. Ultimately, this is the internal early childhood sustained home visiting program is one that provides nurse support to families with parenthood, with pregnancy, post birth, and follows that child up to two years old. There's another component to that program that follows the child up to five years old. So really based a lot on family needs and what other things they have, whether they're followed up to two years or five years. And I think this all goes back to these programs are really about trying to start a healthy lifestyle for that child. We hear more and more. We have to invest at a young age to prevent chronic disease in the long term. So this was some of the basis of how we originated as a DNA actually many, many years ago. We were very involved with the schools and their programs from a nursing perspective. So it's really comfortable circle that then we kind of switched a bit more to elderly, older adult care. And now we're kind of back and really focusing on these children. So it's all under one umbrella and we can make those shifts as the need arises. So what about that program and our collaboration? Our community partner of the year with the family center of Washington County. They're a significant partner in this maternal and child health works, which is great. It seems like the individuals and the partners and providers that work in this program really do it right. And trying to like model and replicate this across the healthcare system, I think would be awesome. We haven't gotten there yet, but hopefully we at CDHHH can use some of this model to implement in our other programs. We certainly do a lot of outreach and education with our CDHH services for community partners. And vice versa, we work with Washington County Mental Health. They've done a lot around first aid mental health training for our staff. We have staff that are in homes with individuals that have mental illness for a long period of time. They need that support and help. We also try to work with other partners to make sure we're not duplicating effort. And we can really kind of say, okay, we can do this. You can do that. So we can really be a good steward of the dollars that we receive. And then also we made an investment over the last couple of years in the complex care coordinator and that mirrors a little bit of what you'll see in a physician practice. We have so many individuals that have so many needs. I'm sure you've heard this from many others that have come in front of you and just being in the community. But she really works with most of our complex, the highest complex clients.  This is a position that's also only has a small amount of reimbursement through the Accountable Care Organization, one here in Vermont. But what we've found is it really helps our staff going into the home because there are so many complexities you can kind of take that and say, hey, let me do it, you do your visit. You do the coordination you need to and let me do the rest. She touches over the year probably 1,200 clients. She currently probably is touching 300 clients on a given period of time and really collaborates with the community and knows the resources and how to connect individuals to those resources. And then just a little bit about our history with our partnership with East Montpelier. In 2021, 93% of total votes were in favor of our request was the same in the prior year. And I think it's been fairly consistent over the years. We're really happy to have that. And really, I think we have a strong collaboration with our East Montpelier EMS team. Certainly through COVID, we learned a lot and did a lot together so we could help them be able to just go to calls that were truly for emergency services and then cases that we were involved. They give us a call and say, hey, every time we go out, we got a suit up in Polkier. That's not making sense. And then we can't go to emergency services. So how does that work? Somebody calls 911 and it calls to the EMS. It might be like a whole queue. Yeah, so sometimes it might be a lit process. Sometimes it might be an individual that is on a program where we see them more frequently. So it's like, hey, we've gotten several calls, lots of times we go, there aren't really emergencies. So how can we work together to try to support this individual to prevent them from calling? So you prevented the need for the EMS to come up. Yeah, we monitored the numbers here in Berry City. We actually just kept through implementing this program through COVID. And we've been in front of the city council and we had reduced the significant number of calls that were considered non-emergency. I'm surprised and delighted that you can do that. But my understanding was that they were required to respond to any requests. I think, and they have to do what they need to do. But ultimately what happens is if they know we're involved and they're getting called a lot, it's like, okay, stop, wait a minute. Good. What's happening? So I think it's in the very baby stages but we've done it with Berry City and we've been very successful. So we've wanted to try to replicate some of that. And we've worked with this team with Hasbro's protocols for Hasbro's patients and what is the transport situation, et cetera. So we think we have an opportunity to work with the team that's really willing to try to make some change. So I've read a little bit about some of your staffing issues just like a lot of people are having. Do you think that continuing forward, considering your budget, what you pay, so on and so forth, that you're gonna be able to meet the needs of the growing needs? Yeah. So one of the things that we did because staffing was so critical to our services is we had a lot of traveling clinicians that killed us financially. In 2021, we spent about 1.4 million on traveling clinicians. In 2022, we're gonna double that. Bad morale, not always a good fit.  In this year's coming budget, we actually are making a significant shift for our director of staff. It has already been initially approved by our finance committee but we're investing in our employees because we want people that live in this community to serve our clients. And certainly, we rather keep the money in Vermont too. Instead of hiring like family nurses from Louisiana or something. Exactly. That's expensive. 13 weeks spent, really. And it services our faculty. Right.  Yeah, so kind of why we need town funds. We recently got hit with a significant Medicare decrease. This is actually the largest one we've had in quite a while. We've had a 42% reduction in Medicare rates since 2011 until now. And now they recently hit us with an 8% reduction. It was gonna happen all in one year. It's gonna happen over two years. For our agency, it's a half a million. So when you lose on Medicaid and you lose more on Medicare, you start at zero. Wow. But our finance committee wants to take some of our savings and really make a huge investment in increasing wages for our direct care staff so that we can be competitive or at least a little more competitive to the hospital setting. Because in central Vermont, that's really the umbrella. You think they're sure that it really look favorably towards that sort of thing because it prevents people from having to go to the hospital. It's just substantially more costly than it is for people. Yeah, exactly. So we lobby with our federal delegation. We recently met with Becca Ballant. Our association has met with Peter Welch, Senator Lapey, they're very supportive. They're very supportive, but there's not a lot of action. We're this big in the scene of this big. So we're really making a huge effort at our association level, let alone at our organization. We recently had a legislative breakfast as to where can the state help when you're mostly federally funded, right? With Medicare and there are ways they can help us whether they do that or not will be another story. But certainly we're looking for that and we're hoping that that'll work on there. Most of the people you help are people who can't leave their homes or people who can't periodically leave their homes. What I'm leading up to is have you made any additional efforts or have you initiated efforts to work with like Twin Valley Senior Center and the Markeler Senior Center because that'd be a great place to see people do blood pressure check them out and see how they're doing. So from the community health perspective, we have done a lot of that work in the past. What we've had to do based on some of the pets is really look to see, okay, where can we provide that service? Where do others provide it? When we do partner with the senior centers, we actually do foot care clinics. Yeah, okay, we've experienced it though. It's like going crazy. Right. But I or just love that we have them and they're really for that real community health part of what we do. We did all the work with COVID. We still do foot clinics from the perspective of like we used to do a lot of blood pressure screenings and all of that. But if we partner, sometimes we will partner with a senior center, the different organizations to actually go out and do something like that. It's a bit small in the bigger scheme of things now. It's a medical model. So really in our budget process too, where we're really looking, we need to increase our home health program, which serves those older adults that are funded Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance. We have a small amount of private insurance. So the ability to class shift to those contracts is pretty much zero than that. So that's kind of in our world, a little bit harder. Built of our hospice program, we find that individuals that end of life don't tend to get onto that program to really benefit from it soon enough. Of course, it's the really center of subject, but ultimately hospice is about life, not about death. And I think so much of what we see now as somebody goes on hospice, and then they pass in a few days. So as much support that we can give the family is great and we get a lot of positive feedback, we'd like that to be a bit longer. So I just got a quick question about that. So you look like you're asking for level funding. Correct. But you're taking on your savings with the funds, the increased salary, so you've got to pay people. So it sounds like a little bit of a fact shoot, as far as your budget goes. Right, it is a little bit. So we're not against supporting the central Vermont home and hospice obviously, but you think this is going to be a level funding and then if it doesn't work out, then next year it's going to be a big ask. Not necessarily, no. So what we'll really have to look at is, I don't use programming. What we'll really have to look at is programming first and if there's programming we don't get reimbursed for. Yeah. Can we silence that first? Thank you. If there's programming we don't get reimbursed for, then we really have to look at that and see what the impact of it is. Which is what happens. Yeah, yeah. And then in addition to that, we do all services. So there's a lot of V&As that don't do, like in Vermont they do, but outside of there. So we're really going to have to look at that. Yeah. I certainly was presented with, when doing the budget, we might need to cut this.  There are things that we can do to prevent that right now. It's a tough environment though. Yeah, it is. I mean the traveling nursing is definitely a good idea to get that going. Yeah, and we'll probably still have some, but we don't want to have them at the level we have them. And it's really, it impacts the morale of the staff. Yeah. Well, I think it's a good idea of what you're doing. I mean, no question about it. I just question of wisdom of taking it out of your savings. Yeah. It's almost better to ask a little bit more money of the towns. Yeah. And then we'll kind of buffer that. Yeah. Everybody's not afraid to do that. Right. No, you're welcome. Yeah. And it's vital, this is vital service. So people understand if you, if you ask for a little bit more money, you know, incrementally, it's not that it's a big shock and need to work out. Yeah.  We wouldn't necessarily come with this huge change. No, no. Because we understand. Yeah. We want you to continue your work. Yeah. So if we could go online. Our contribution, and that's maybe 10% of the cost of employing a nurse for the year. Ballpark. Right. Well, I'm just, I'm just concerned that their path of funding is not sustainable. It's just, but we'll see. Right. I mean, you know more about your budget than we do, but. We've always been in a place where we've been good stewards of our dollars. So it's allowing us, you know, to earn a lot better place than some of the V&A's in Vermont. We may see some go away. But it's shocking to think that Medicare, Medicare funding is dropping. It's outrageous. It's outrageous. It makes no sense. It makes no sense. And we do. It makes no sense. We did lobby at the federal level. I can't stand it. Yeah. So. Yeah. I'm pretty persistent. My person out of many, but, you know, our association has really taken a significant stance. And we're hoping with some changes in the federal delegation that it'll get a little more attention. I mean, the delegation isn't necessarily on the, the committees that have a huge amount of impact, although Bernie Sanders is going to be assigned to a committee that I think can help us. Well, let's hope so. Yeah. So when you say half a million dollars in Medicare reimbursement cuts, is that nominal? So we're working on a budget. Our primary payer is Medicare. So currently, I think we are grateful. I know we are break even with Medicare funding. So it makes it negative at that point without any increases. When we did our initial run of our budget this year, we modeled out a $3 million operational loss. And we have since worked with it to get it down to about 2 million. And we projected over the next couple of years we could potentially break even if we can make some changes in the revenue we take in certain areas by also balancing the wage increase. So my question was about that $500,000. Is that nominal dollars or is that inflation adjusted dollars? That's just nominal. That's nominal. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Well, we have to move on to the next, but I'm sympathetic to your fine defiant. And I'm hoping that your optimism is going to pay off. But we'll see, I guess. Yeah, we've been around a long time. And I feel good about our board and our finance committee. Oh, good. And the work we did to come up with what we've done. We used an external consultant this year that is an industry expert. He's actually working with several. V&A is not only in Vermont. Actually, most of them are outside of Vermont, but in New England. And they're successful organizations like ours that are serving just as many people if not more. And just really looking as to where do we get lean and where do we, you know, where can we increase revenue to offset some of those expenses? So the next few years are going to be tough. Yeah. That's what I think too. And the thing is that you're doing a great service and there's a huge need for it. And it's not, that's not going away. Right. That's not going away. That's what an aging population is. It doesn't take sense with Medicare. No, it doesn't. In an aging population, there's going to be an increased need. So it's like, hmm. But I guess we'll see what happens. 42% of Vermont's populations is reaching at least the age of 50. Yeah. That's crazy. So there's going to be a substantial increase in people. Oh, yeah. Well, that's about years. Yeah. I mean, I can't understand why, how these federal agencies can cut on it. Yeah. This misplaced priority is a lot of what they do is they look at the revenue side and they have to keep it budget-natural. Yeah. But they clearly haven't looked at the outside. I mean, the age inflation alone is over 8%. They give money to causes. Age inflation. Oh, I think you hate the aging population. Well, it's the most interesting discussion when we've got other people, unfortunately, to talk to. But thank you so much. And I'm looking forward to next year. Yeah. We've got good people to talk to. Yeah. Great. What's that? A lot of great hair. Yeah. Well, thank you for coming. And thank you for all the work. Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, OK. The next item is the World RPG. Yeah. The GMT Mountain, the GMT. So Jesse cannot be here. OK. Received an email, headed up in the family. So cannot be in attendance. I'm not sure if you're Jamie Smith. I don't see a Jamie Smith on, so. Jamie Smith. That's a GMT. Both of the organizations are requesting a level funding. OK. And have provided materials to clean a certain view. Yeah. OK. Well, I'm comfortable with the funding, for sure. Yeah. Being on the town ballot. They've been on the town ballot for more than years. Yeah. We're very comfortable with putting that on. Yeah. Yeah. And review the documents that are later. We've got documents that we can review, so. Yeah. Jetty was very upset. But I'd like her to know that the board would certainly understand that. Absolutely. Oh, we understand. And the board would appreciate that family time is more important in this situation. So. Yeah, yeah. And we're very comfortable putting it on the town one. Yeah. We always have a very robust conversation at this level. And we sometimes do at the town meeting. And we have the same question that comes up over and over again. Always. We have. And we always say, do you double count? Yes. And when Kyle always says, well, I pick up the boss and I'll kill him. Are you challenging me? I was like, do you spot clear rosy? Is that correct? Good. He says it just like that. Green Mountain Branson has a line in the funding request committee as well. And people look at that list and then they get the other article and they say, why are we doing it twice per GMT? So that'll come up again. Always. Yeah. Always does. But that's fine. OK. So the next one is Twin Valley Seniors. And that's with Gene. It looks like he's got. Gene is not. Are you saying Gene? He's not. Gene is not available. I'm George Bolenbach. I'm the treasurer of Twin Valley Seniors. OK. I'll try and answer any questions you have. OK. Our request for funding is based on a couple of things. Look, I'm the treasurer and numbers are my game. Part of the problem is that our income has gone down and our expenses have gone up. OK. For example, last year, the last fiscal year, our expenses increased by 12%. And our income was down by 23%. Wow. And we're still trying to provide the same services and increase our services to the community. It's a difficult time. We've not asked for an increase in the past years. We're just seeking an increase to really recognize that the cost of doing business has increased. What are the funding sources that have gone down? And do you know why they have gone down? Same question I was going to ask. Part of the funding decrease has been in donations. And that may be due to tax things that have changed. The other is that in COVID, we received a lot of money. There was one time thing because of COVID, and it's not there anymore. That's a big part of the problem. So how does that compare to the year before? OK, in the fiscal year that just ended 9.30.22, we were down 12% or I'm sorry, our expenses increased by 12% for the year. Our income was down 23%. But that's figuring COVID money was no longer available. Right. And that's why I sort of key in on the expenses, which are similar from year to year, being increased by 12%. Yeah, but your income fluctuates, sounds like. As an example, the drivers who deliver the meals on wheels to the community, they don't charge. They're not paid for their time, per se, but they are reimbursed for their mileage. And from year to year, the increase was 49% in what we paid in reimbursement to the drivers. It's utilities for the facility increased by 18%. Yeah, it's just an example or not an example. It's just the fact that everything costs more. And we really don't have the increase in funding to offset these increases. Well, we certainly understand the inflationary pressures everyone deals with. I'm sure Quinn Valley deals with them just like everyone else does. OK, so any more questions of this, Treasurer of Quinn Valley Seniors? We're kind of familiar, pretty familiar with it anyway, having a few meetings on this here. Oh, yeah. And when we support in general what the organization does for the seniors needs more clear and more else. It's awesome. They have a huge meal program. They have exercise classes. They offer a lot. And we've always been very supportive of Quinn Valley. So we have no problem with putting this on our town for the morning. Thank you very much. We appreciate that. Yeah. Any more questions? I don't see any. OK, we're good to go. Well, thank you for coming in and waiting for us. I agree that I have no problem putting this on the town meeting warning. But you know, we are bored and we speak as a group. So I'd appreciate it if you just say that we have no problem putting it on the work. I just asked everybody if they had any questions. Thank you again. And you're insane. That's different than deliberating. OK. Well, does anyone have any objections to putting this on the morning? Thank you for the correction. Thank you. OK. Well, I guess we'll we don't have any questions. Thank you. We haven't decided whether to put it on the warning yet from what Carl is saying. But thank you for coming in. No, I think all we have to do is just say we don't have a problem with it going on the work. Well, you know, I don't. But I probably don't. I don't know. OK, so I guess it's unanimous. It's unanimous. Everybody out of the bill, what about Judith? No problem. OK. No problem. OK. And Amy, we haven't heard from you. I just said no problem. OK. She just coughed and no problem. OK. Had problems, but not that. Thank you. Thank you. We probably ought to move on to the next slide. Yeah. And just that Jamie Smith was without power and just got power. We were calling and sent emails that Jamie had joined. But I did respond to the email, let both know that the board was comfortable with the organizations what they provided. But Jamie, we'd like to hear them. I just wanted to hop on in and thank everybody for that support and to let you know that based on what I sent last year, which was 36 rides, the ridership in Eastmont-Hillier on the special services has increased significantly to over 600 rides last fiscal year. So yeah, it was a huge increase in that special services in the US2 commuter ridership just on the run that we operate was over 600, which was down from previous fiscal years. But that's still sort of in line with what we're seeing with the pandemic. OK. Anybody have any more questions or Jamie? This has to do with the item before. Yeah, sorry for being late. That's all right. I'm sorry. Glad you got your power back. I know it's off and on, so I'm happy to. Thank you. OK, so thank you for tuning in. And does everyone agree that we should put this on the town warning? The RCT request, I think we are going to pass that. We already did. We're going to pass that. We want to make sure. OK. OK, so we're going to move on just because we have a lot of people waiting. The Twin Valley Seniors has done. Let's do this. The next report we have here. And Carl, just so you know, I have that. That means something after the meeting started, but it's on the website. Yeah, thank you. So the next item on agenda is the Lister's year end sports. So Judith and Amy, this is on the website. I loaded it on the website while the meeting while we were in the meeting. So you may need to refresh that page, but the attachment is on the website now. OK. Maybe we approach the bench. Sure. We're just reading over your report. Oh, go ahead and read it. But you can approach the bench. Are you? Is there something you would like to say? Well, it's a really come on up. Yeah, just the high points are the Lister's compiled list of the second to this year is to give you an idea of the scope. There were 92 transfers and 36 of them would seem like they're down the sale. So they're going to be part of the equalization study that affects our CLA this year. And I keep refreshing that equalization study website on the tech department page, but they haven't posted it yet. I think they're a little late this year, but so we don't know if our CLA is going to trigger or require reappraisal yet. But it's in the next distant future, so we should be anticipating it. Yeah. And we've got like $135,000. And so it ran with three appraisal funds. So we're funding that as you go on every year with money from the state. Why should that usually cost to have the basal? Well, usually, I mean, last time we had $2,009, so we can't use that as a judgment.  I remember, it seemed like it was more than $2,009. $2,009? Yeah. But do you know how much it cost? Not my cost? Yeah. No, I don't. It was over $100,000. It was over $100,000 back then? Yeah, I think so. Boy, I don't remember that was that much. Well, we can look it up. I can look it up for as long as we can. Well, I'm curious, but the kind of artwork had one that had every appraisal done in about four years ago. So we didn't get that much. Well, yeah, something's good in that. It was like $85 for the number of parcels we had. Oh, $85 per parcel? Yeah. Oh. Yeah. What, over $1,200 parcels? It was $1,200. That's $100,000. Yeah. Right. There you go. Well, just often. I mean, they do a site visit to every single one. And the ones are, you know, the same. Well, I guess we've got money to do that. Yeah. Right. We sent out 110 change of appraisal letters. We had only three grievances. I feel pretty good. And 104 current use change letters. Most of the time, all the kinks have been worked out over the time where it goes out. Work on tax bills. You can look at the list here. The brand list, I printed out the final brand list. And I compared it to the as-build, which is the one that you were given in August, so you could set the tax rate. And I swear I'd have to check this number, but it is 21 cent difference between August 8th and today. Because even though the tax exemption for Trin Valley was increased, so that decreased the brand list, there were other changes that increased it. And the difference was 21 cents on the municipal side. It was $450 on the education side. And that's because the elite HS-122 homestead decoration filers increased their value. Well, you know, something you should know about, which is the Dolly Jumpers. We reviewed all the tax exempt properties. And that one stuck out because he was voted. And normally, when you vote it, you vote for a 10-meter period. And then you're required by statute after that 10 years expires to re-vote every five years. And this one was voted in 2002, 2001, 2002, back with that, March 5, 2002. And you can see it. I underlined the part. On the floor, it was amended to say, so long as it's used for non-profit recreational purposes, the town basically said, we don't want to keep vote on this, just as long as we keep using it for that. But really, the statute says it's going to be on the line every five years. So we think it should put it on the line. Because technically, we can't extend them. I wondered what that was. I mean, I wondered who owned that. It's the trails and the Dolly Jumpers. And we thought about giving them tax exemptions. I thought it was the trails. But I didn't realize that Dolly Jumpers was ahead of you. And the problem with us granting them tax exemptions the way we did between Valley is that they have to do 401C3. And the trails is, but the Dolly Jumpers is a 401C7, which is the recreational thing as opposed to Pius Charleau. So they don't technically qualify. The Dolly Jumpers. But then you do call her voting. And it's a $2,400 value to that property I looked at. But what's the tax about $2,400 loss? Not very much. Not very much. $1,500. Yeah. Right. So $2,800. $2,800. Exactly. Well, a little bit less. So it doesn't seem like a big problem. No one cares. But I was wondering who owned that. I'm like, who owned that old piece of property there? Because I see cars parked there. Is that where they're going on the trail? The opposite of what you mentioned. So the checkerboard place. Yeah, exactly. So we're creating something. Years ago. Checkerboard. Yeah. I remember it there. I remember it too. Holy cow. We should be a nursing one. It probably is one. Don't say a lot of, you know. Yeah. Okay. So then on the second side there. So what are the consequences if we don't vote on that? Then we're going to have to charge them to be looked contact every year. And if we don't do that, we just continue our current practice of not charging. Our district advisor knows about it. Yeah. As we asked her about it. So she's going to be honest. Okay. She's going to get that 50 bucks. Yeah. And she's going to get that 50 bucks. Yeah. Yeah. She's going to get that 50 bucks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Okay. So. Nobody asked us for opinion about the budget. But we said. Your guys are doing the budget. So probably ought to speak up. So. We've been looking at our file cameras over here and realizing that three of them are fireproof. And that's when we keep all of the land records that we really have to protect. And the reason we're doing this is that it's not a real fire. It's not. Fireproof. And in the participation of all the people that are produced as part of this very great as well. And their fourth bunch of fireproof because we can barely show the photos and so long as we've done now. So that's a possibility of like a 2024. You know, budget thing, maybe. I have a question about that. I mean, we spent a lot of money in our communities. And then money to digitize the records that are in the safe. going to ask if these were such important records. It's my understanding that important liable land records need to be kept in a vault. You can't suggest that. I think Rosie, I think we need to have a discussion of whether these records are land records that are deemed, if they're that important. They're not like the deeds and the permits, but they are listed. So we figured we're supposed to protect them. If they appear in a fire for some other reason, are they on numbers? No, not the ancient history, not Rosie's old handwritten cards and stuff. The value got picked up and put in, but the camera system when we do the crossing, that happened in 2009. I was part of that because I helped listeners do that rephrase a little, and we all learned how to use camera that year. So that's how far back camera goes. And the numeric has, well, how far back does the number go? Two thousand? So that number can be helped, should all be backed up by an L. But how important is a history of appraisals? Yeah, I get, we had questions and they asked, you know, what was our taxes or what was the assessment back in, you know, right in 1950. We found it. But is that important to be able to find that? I mean, it's great that you have it, you can answer that, but how much do we want to spend to be able to preserve that ability? Sure. If you're reading cabinets, they're not really, they're not, they're only fire blooper, it's in and out of time. So if something is that, I would argue that the fault is likely where it should be housed. Or we should go through that to determine what piece is apart from those files should be shifted into the volume. If anything. Yeah, I mean, I, this is something I'd like to talk to Rosie about, to keep her in the landbriker instead. There's no room in here at all. Yeah, sounds like, yeah, well, I know that, but I mean, but I don't know, it's, I don't think I'd be right to be a level of kind of lander because it's not a perfect response before in her build. It's just that we wouldn't want to lose all these things, that's for sure. How, how challenging would it be to digitize those records? I think that would cost more than a file cabinet, right? Yeah. All right. I mean, the question is asked in the context of realizing that you said, Gina, that fireproof file cabinets only protect her so long.  Okay, let's move on. Okay. It sounds good. I mean, you know, yeah, we can, we'll make it under advisement. We'll make do without it if we don't get one, obviously, so. Right. Well, maybe you'll get one. Just an idea. Hey, stand us around the corner. Okay. The second thing was, well, when we were doing the Twin Valley, you remember, Seth, when we were doing the Twin Valley appeal, they filed a grievance. We have like two weeks to make a decision. Yeah. And with the select board meetings spaced out the way they are. When we asked to, we could have a conversation with the lawyer, we couldn't get permission from the select board at a meeting before we had to actually make a termination. So we thought, you know, it could be just like a couple hundred bucks. There's, you know, we've got like an allowance or something. We have to call the lawyer because we've got a question right now and we can't wait for two weeks for a select board meeting. Is there, you know, some way. I think we decide we should write to the town administrator, you know? Yeah.  Well, any professional service of money in that professional service, there can be any professional service relating to, well, legal costs. We just need to know. That's the difference judgment because when we tried to do it before, said, no, no, we can't just fire the, the attorney. We have to run through somebody. You have to talk with a, with Gina. We have to talk to Gina. Well, I don't think we've actually in the past gone to the select board for those type of activities. They kind of went through the town administrator. Yeah. Yeah. We just need a separate process that work. And they go, it works better if it's kind of administrative here all the time. Select board has meetings every few weeks, blah, blah, blah. So it's, it's the only reason it's coming up is because the partial statutory status of the twin valleys tax exemption was unusual. We don't have any other like that. We wanted to just make sure we were on the right track. And this, this one now is a condo, which we don't have any condos in town. We have one of the co-housing. Yeah. But they're starting to file deeds. And we want to make sure that all these moving parts get settled in the right place. Right. So we understand your concern. We want to set up a process that it's going to work in the future. Yeah. So going through the town administrator is probably the best way to do it. Okay. That's good. So just to be clear, the request from the listeners was to have a budget line item for professional services. And we want to say now, we have a budget item for professional services for the town as a whole to get clearance from the town administrator to use it. Well, we have, we have, we have a budget line for professional services. Right. They're just asking how to access it. How do you access it? Yeah, how to access it. Exactly. So we just didn't really clarify the process before, but I think that we have now. Okay. So we have a line for GIS tax mapping services and it's been a $4,500 budget. And we noticed that in the proposed budget, you guys are looking at now. You've raised it a little bit. It seems fine. It seems like we're staying within around that range. So we're waiting for another invoice to commence. So I can't say for sure, but they seem to be under budget again this year too. So that's good. And then we were looking at our salary. We had some strange unusual things happen this year, like new staff needing a lot of training and then senior staff being out for 10 weeks. And so new staff had to sort of scramble and take twice as long to do things because everything was the first time. So the first six months of this year, we worked, I think it was like 30 hours a week. Didn't you figure that out? 30 hours a week? It is. Yeah, I told you that earlier today. Right. Yeah. The average has been 30 hours a week. Right. That was 23. But we had originally before Ross went out, we had originally, we would each work like three days a week. And we would always have one day where the three of us are here, and a couple of days when there's two of us here, because the whole purpose of having three listeners is when you're making a change of appraisal on somebody, you want to have a second opinion and get at least two people agree. So it's a good working practice anyway. And there's enough work to do. But that would be between 15 and 18 hours we've gone forward. And in January, February is mostly the site visit. And I mean, at the end of February, we start on the visit. So I mean, it's, in January, 10 increased. Yeah, good. Okay. Because in January, we were going to be working on a report. Speaking of the town report, now I'm putting my order hand on for a second. Okay. Because I asked Larry Brown printing for what they estimated the costs of our book would be this year. And it's gone up enough that we've always been under budget, but I think we're in danger of getting over budget unless you raise it about for 2024. But I wanted to have a telephone conversation with them and understand it because it seems like it went up like 12%. It seems a little high, but I don't know. Maybe that's what it is. Or maybe they kept it artificially low coming into this year. I don't know. Yeah, but 12% is in line with the license. Yeah, I know. So that means that their quote this year was like $5687, plus postage last year was $5,045 for the same thing. Wait, let me think. 56, yep. Nope. I'm comparing 56 through apples and oranges here. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so $600 more. And let's see, budgeted amount for it. Sorry, I forgot to write it down.  Oops, I got it. Town report printing and mailing was $5,800. And your level funding at $5,800 in 2024, he's saying it's going to be $5,600 this year up from $5,000 last year. So I just don't know. We might be under, oh, plus postage, excuse me. Yeah, so that's the TIS cost. Postage is another $250, at least. And I don't know what postage went up, but it was like $250 last year. Yeah, postage went up, too. So if you add $250 to that and you're up to $5,900, you're over budgeted. $5,800. Yeah, but you might want to just throw another couple hundred bucks in there for assumption. Yeah. Because we're talking about 2024. This is the 2022. We've got 2023 is going to go up and then 2024. Yeah. Okay, so I don't know how much you want to raise it, but just keep that in mind. Yeah. Okay, I'm done. Okay. So that's the result. Anybody have any questions? Are deaf? Or she's right here? Yeah, well said. Yeah. Me too. Carp. Do it. Amy, got questions or deaf? Okay. Thank you, Deb. I'm good. Thank you. Yeah, I don't think we've ever had a lot like that, but I can remember. Well, maybe I missed that meeting. You know, this is the last chance to do errors and emissions. So we thought we'd better get them in gender just in case. Yeah, it happened. Great. Appreciate it. Appreciate everybody that the other. Okay. So we're going to move on because we're running a little bit late. We've got people waiting. So the next thing on our agenda is e-small peer fire department meeting recap, which I couldn't attend, but who did attend now? You did, and I attended. Oh, that was it? Yeah. Well, I'm sorry that I wasn't there. I wasn't there. But so what was the big news? I would say just a couple of things, but I'll leave the bigger news for the end. When we began the meeting, the callous select board reminded the e-small peer fire department of an ask from our last meeting, looking for trend data over the past three or five up to 10 years for calls, what the nature of the calls were, and so that we and also EMFD can see if there are any trends. For example, are there more calls for falls or falls on the stairs? Is it more oriented towards older folk? That was a general request. The second item that came up as we basically went over the budget, and one item that the callous select board asked about or was curious about was building one, which they represented the e-small peer fire department has to heat, but e-small pealier uses part of the building. Is it fair for e-small pealier, excuse me, for callous to pay for the heat if e-small pealier is getting a benefit, blah, blah, blah. We have chocolate grater, blah, blah. That was a question that was raised. I didn't know if it was our building. We allowed e-small pealier fire department to use it. I didn't have that history, but I wanted to bring it to the board to, we might want to. So the answer is yes, or are you just saying? Town owns the building, and we're also using part of it. Yeah, I thought it was a town-owned building, but I didn't want to make that representation until I was served, so I think that will help answer that question. So how does that help answer the question about the heating costs? Well, their question was, is it fair that e-small pealier, excuse me, that callous has to pay heating costs for a building that's housing a town vehicle? Right, and how did you think that question should be answered? Well, if we own the building, we're more than contributing our share for the cost of storing our own vehicle, and if the, so anyway. And is heat needed for the town equipment that's kept there? Not particularly. If they want to separate it, they can. The fire trucks need heat because they have big tanks of water. Yeah, I don't know what that was kept at there, I assume it's just about freezing. Yeah, I don't know what it is, but there is some heat, it's not, you know. There's a heating bill there. Okay, Cal, the fire department, the emergency services does pay the heating bill. Yeah, and we each pay our town share towards that. So the big deal was the budget regarding staffing, excuse me, funding for salaries, which I wouldn't call salaries. They're actually stipends for the, what is it called, total salaries, which are actually the salaries that are paid. No, of the employees, they don't have any employees that receive benefits. Everyone that works there and receives any funds receives a per diem, and they can't afford to pay benefits. They had two folk who were, it's difficult for them to meet the staffing of two people at the firehouse 24-7. So they're proposing a budget that reflects the change from the information they provided to us, and that would be an increase in the salaries. They're proposing a total of seven and a half percent increase, and what they're proposing is that for the remainder of fiscal year 23, the East Montpellier fire department will absorb that increase, but then for the fiscal year 24 budget, they're looking for Calis and East Montpellier to pay their proportionate share of the increase. So I think, I think it was about $14,000. Gina, if that's correct. Okay, it was like $14,500. Yeah, about $14,500. And the reason being, I mean, they currently pay, there are four different levels of EMT type staff. The first two, which are the lower level licensed EMR or basic EMTB, only make $15 an hour. That's their stipend, which is fairly low. You can make more than that at McDonald's. EMTA earns $18 an hour, and then the highest level is a paramedic, and they currently earn $20 an hour. They've lost one person to Barrie recently, to Barrie City, because they just can't compete. They want to maintain the staff that they have and let the staff know that they're valued and they want to keep them. So both Callis and I said on behalf of East Montpelier, we would bring it to the select board to see if they would authorize. I think it makes sense. I think it's the policy of East Montpelier to make sure that staff are paid well enough to support themselves, or as much as we can afford to pay them, but recognizing that these people are providing an important service for community. The other kind of topic on that was Callis was talking about Golly. Can we provide an incentive or bonus that people that live in our town who volunteer with the East Montpelier fire department? That might be something East Montpelier wants to think about, but I don't know how many people residents of East Montpelier are on the East Montpelier fire department, but that's just something they were talking about. I don't know if they would do it or not, but they were just discussing that. How much of a safe end did they get annually now? They don't, I don't think. With all they have historically. Fire department? Fire department members get an annual safe end. Not pretty much. They get $18 per call, and if they attend 50% of the meetings and trainings, and I don't know what that number is, but it's not large. Some hundreds of dollars historically. I forget how much it is. Yeah, they didn't give us the amount, but in order to qualify for it, you need to attend 50% of the meetings and 50% of the training. There's a volunteer stipend, but and again, you can get $18 per call, but a call could last for hours. So Gina, if I forgot something or got something wrong. No, you got it. I think the only thing that I emailed the select board about, and this was after the meeting and not mentioned during the meeting, was that Chief Larry Brett resigned in December 12th. That's the only update. Yep. And Albert control is the scope with Albert last week. Right. Oh, so, okay, got it. So this isn't something that we should be worried about. Larry residing. We've got it under control. Okay, good. Good to know. The whole thing is escalating out of control compared to what it was envisioned when they first came to the planning commission and select board about having this and on service in town. It was presented much differently than what it's involved into. It's involved into a very, very expensive organization for the town to support. And when it was first brought to us originally, it was going to cost us nothing, but it's evolved into a lot different. So I mean, So did Larry resign as a result of the cost? No. Oh, okay. Thank you. The department is pretty small. And I think there was some, what I hear, like fourth or fifth hand, there's just people just weren't happy. And he just decided to resign and step away. Retire. I don't know if you can make everybody happy. You know, it's a small group. And I guess some policy decisions that were made that upset some people and I think probably Larry just gets to go. So what does worry us is this is a service that we pay for in town. And but it's largely out of our control as far as the fire chief goes aspects of the staff and it's spiraling out of control now. There's people going in as a fire chief. We don't know if that's going to work. And so we may want to take a hard look at this business model sometime in the future and maybe take it more into the town's jurisdiction. But that's a whole huge change that we may have to do because it seems like there's a lot of dissension over there and it does concern us because it's a service that we pay for. And it costs us a lot. Yeah. And just by way of history, the Spongebob Department was incorporated in 1964. And when I came to town around the turn of the century, there was tension between the fire department and the select board over how to provide services, how much town oversight of the fire department services there should be and that has continued. I don't know what the story was between 1964 and the turn of the century. But it's been a conversation and we've had conversations about looking at alternative ambulance services to bring in to be stationed at that facility. Yeah, there's been a lot of options looked at. Basically, it's getting more expensive. But I think the town residents as a whole like to have the town ambulance service kind of here. They like that. They like having a service. So we have gone along with the increased costs, which are way more than ever were envisioned when it was first started. But residents seem happy, but I still think that we have to take a look at it. Yeah. And we're having a hard time finding people to man to service and operate the equipment and make calls. That's on the fire side of it. On the ambulance side of it, they envisioned it would be volunteer when they first came in here. Yeah. Now it's $400,000. It's just so much money required and people have to be paid. And there's a lot of factors that come into play that have made things change. Understand. But on the other hand, we have a duty to look at that. Well, for sure. I have a question with what's going on with it. So anyway, we don't have the time to do it now, but thank you, Judith, for your thorough report. Yeah. I wish I could have attended it. I definitely will try on the next. I expected to attend it, but you too were attending. I just want to say about Larry Brown that Larry Brown has contributed untold hours to the fire department over the years. He's been one of the most active members in the fire department for a really long time. And the town owes him a great debt of gratitude for his many years of service. His meetings, I thought, were the ones I attended. I thought, very professionally run. I thought he was trying to make a lot of some inroads on making the department a little more professional. And yeah, I don't know. I really don't know what happened. No, I think it's all internal board stuff. Yeah. David Delcourt called me today about this topic. I don't have any information other than that he resigned. So I don't know if he will get some information. So I don't think so. We asked not to be. We don't have any time to work, yes, in case he does. But I don't have to be contacted. That's right. So we can only. Well, maybe we can respect what he had to say. Yeah. Yeah. Well, feel free to pass on what I just said today with him. He calls you again. Yeah. Okay. So I think we should move on just because we have other people waiting and it's not getting any earlier. Um, let's see. Review central month solid waste management annual summary financial report FY 2024 for cap assessment. It didn't change. It's consistent with prior year of $1. Okay. Good. Do you have anything else to say? Um, the executive director or general manager resigned. What? She's going to be leaving January 6th. What? Oh, she's the one that replaced Catherine Jen. Yeah. Yeah. Kathleen. Yeah. Kathleen. Right. You got the job for a while? Well, a couple of years. Oh, she was that long? All the time flies when you're in a pandemic. Oh. The just one thing I want to note in here, it shows that they're going to be over budget, you know, or under funded by $157,000. And but that's the way it's been showing the last several years, but they never are able to staff fully. So they have good benefits. They have good pay. Yeah. And if they have a few positions that are open, they end up with a surplus. But the surplus is only on paper because they ever get staffed up. They won't have a surplus anymore. They probably have a deficit. Right. Yeah. But the deficits on paper. Kind of. It's there. It's there as if they are fully staffed. Right. Exactly. Right. But they're not fully staffed, so they don't really have a deficit. Right. But they will have a deficit if they get fully staffed. Got it. So they're moving ahead with their household hazardous waste facility. We're trying to negotiate some prices on property. Oh, good. And they want to move ahead with that. The, you know, all that stuff is an executive session stuff. But the point is that they have a person that's going to be just filling in as general manager who's the assistant general manager. And we're going out for a search for new general manager. And so if anybody's interested, you want to be general manager, that's from our solid waste district. I would recommend just getting your application in. Okay. So then you're resume. Okay. So yeah, I want to throw out there some information about the solid waste management district and our new representative in the house, Ella Chapin. I had a meeting with her a week ago or so to talk about, primarily to talk about issues from Vermont Lego cities and towns that wanted her to be familiar with. But I also brought up the issue that we've talked about a number of times, the solid waste management district and the fact that it's easy for town to leave the district or threatened to leave the district. If there's something that the district's planning to do that they don't want to be part of and pay for. And that resonated strongly with her. I'd forgotten this, but she used to work at Central Vermont solid waste management district. She has personal experience in witnessing this. And she definitely knows that that's an issue. So if we want to be part of a discussion with the legislature about that, we've got somebody who will listen with experienced and receptive ears. I think it's a little ridiculous with the state funds organization now. Anyway, if you go to some other states in different counties and have their own, like North Carolina, the county that my kids live in, that county taxes people to get rid of their waste.  And it funds the whole recycling program, funds everything, you take everything that you have and you take it to the place and you can dispose of it there. And I think in Vermont, I think they wanted people to be paying out of their pocket because they want them to feel the pain of the waste that they're generating than just having some money come out of your taxes. But the thing is, down there, they even have enough money, not surplus, but enough money available so that they can hire county employees to go out and actually complete this roadside screen. I mean, you see them out there every day doing work there. I think it's a great model to follow, except that here we have embedded trash haulers who don't want to give up that service.  So the person still goes around and picks it up. Yeah, for the same as what you mentioned. But I'm just saying that there need to be a different spending mechanism. And the towns, yeah, the towns are going out. You know what, the reason this hope for capital is down is that a dollar, it's ridiculous, really. How much would it get out of East Montclair? But where do you? $2,500. $2,500. You know, if East Montclair lost today, they would lose $2,500. What else are they going to lose? Yeah, right. So the point is, and I know by being on the board, if we mentioned raising to per capita, there's some towns that go, out of here. I know. I don't. If they raise that, I don't understand it. And I think it's so ridiculous. It's ridiculous. I agree. I have to go, not because, because I just think they don't, they're not living in the same world as the rest of us are living in. And I think that we need to do a better job of handling solid waste. And I think that doing it, having state funding change, alter that state funding to certain, so they have enough money to do what they need to do, we would have a hazardous waste facility. And instead of people throwing that into their trash and a canister throwing it in the trash and putting it in the bag and sending it to Coventry, it would be how dealt with appropriately. In the right way. And it's not going to be dealt appropriately until we do something different. But anyway, that's my, that's my soul. That's pretty interesting. It is. That's what I've learned out of being there. Yeah. I'm glad that they're at the table for us. Well, not good for my blood pressure, but you're all done. Yeah, I'm done. I didn't have to take, put all that down. Are you all done talking? Are you all done talking? Yes. I just want to follow this in here. I know, because you gave a lot right there. Just that John said something. You're not going to go into the pits and vessels like that? No, I'm not. No. But you, you got to have John in it. No, I don't. Yeah, I say Seth, but that. Yeah. Okay. So thank you for that report. Can we move on to the. Quickly, please. Discussion with planning commission chair. We're halfway through page two of five of our extended channel. No, yeah. Okay. Okay. I'll try to gain you some time back. Very nice for you. So, so stuff will go on the planning commission. We did, you know, the regional planning commission did approve the town plan amendment. So if we do have someone try to come with another cell tower, where, you know, we're solid on, you know, what the, what the rules are, what the plan is. Yeah. That's all good to go. We are currently working on the energy plan.  I'm not sure exactly. Back in day one. You probably passed away. No, I didn't. Yeah. No, no, this was basically the energy. Oh, so I, yeah. So, you know, Lindy Biggs and Court Richardson had been chairing it. Oh, yeah. Court is, you know, Court is no longer active. He's, you know, for, for health reasons. And I talked to Lindy about it. She, you know, we're, she is on the pain. There's probably a sense to disband and essentially reform the energy committee. We have been doing some recruiting. We have a, you know, your core group that is, that seems, seems interested, seems like there may be some leadership there.  Obviously, it's your appointment to make, but we sort of, we sort of figured that because we are the ones actually working on it, we should, we should do some legwork rather than just come to you and say, hey, get, so get us an energy committee. So we, yeah, so we can come in with, you know, and help out with that. So you got some names. We've got some names. We've got something coming in, going into the next signpost. We're going to try to do a little bit more broad-based recruiting as well. Yeah. But yeah, this one, I've got at least five people who are interested. Oh, right. Someone who was part of that earlier iteration that we did a lot of work. Yeah. We left to Lindy Biggs to put together in a town plan amendment. How much of that do we have now? So we, so we have, we have the old work that was done. I'm Tom Fisher, who was in the, on the original group, is interested in continuing on. So there is, there is some additional knowledge there. It's also the way these, the plans are written, really has changed. The place where a lot of the old energy committees work is actually going to live on, is there's a lot of stuff that got put into the town plan, really be, yeah, from the energy committee. So a lot of the transportation stuff really came from the energy committee. There's so about, yeah, yeah, he has, and they come, comes from the energy committee. And so that, those, I think, rather than have this entire separate plan, we're really going to revamp the, the cell, the cell tower sector was actually largely based on the energy, the energy section that came out of that. And I think it's sort of then going to go, go back again, are required for an energy plan to do that as a town plan amendment. So we all integrated. But basically what they want to do in order to have, with the big carrot for the town is having an enhanced energy plan allows you to, how do you say in the sighting of large energy projects. But there's basically a provision that doesn't, basically to prevent a town from saying, well, we're going to come up with this criteria, that criteria, and that criteria, and all of a sudden, oh, you can't put a solar farm anywhere to say, you have to identify enough land to meet your energy needs. If we, if you're going to be allowed to say, no, you can't do that. So for us to say, okay, we have certain areas you want to protect. Why haven't you gone and looked at the, at the Kaplan bill? Yeah, so, yeah, so correct me if something changed, or if I'm just remembering something that, but the idea is right now, if somebody comes in and proposes a large energy project in East Montpelier, we can't point to the town plan and say, there's something in here that, whether it's scenery or whatever, we can't say, hey, there's something in our town plan. That means public utility commission, you should not give these guys that certificate of public good. The PUC doesn't really have to pay any attention to anything in our town plan. Whereas if we do put that section in, then they have to give us, I forgive the term of art, is deferential, they have to pay attention to the town plan in their project, in their approval. Yeah, and the one case where we did oppose a large solar development loss, it actually wasn't about scenery, it was about the fact that it was a piece of land right outside the town center that had approved septic system designs on it, that we wanted that for development because it was one of the few places in the center to do wastewater. Okay, bro. Yeah, partly because we didn't have an approved plan. Yeah. So the other thing that we are looking at, just sort of looking at now, especially with having the energy plan starting to move more, having an energy community starting to move, we're looking at what else we should be working on. And certainly we're looking at whether there was, there's an item in the current town plan about doing a housing assessment, I think because the need for housing has become so much hotter than it was when we were doing the last plan to start, yeah, I think we want to start looking at that. And this image of talk, do we look at what needs to be done to support more senior housing or more affordable housing? And one thing we were thinking, I didn't know if this is something that you would say, oh, we've talked about this 14 times and it's dead. Do we want to do something looking at the septic capacity at particularly the village center about, and would it be helpful to have something that says, here's what we're zoned for to be able to build out to, realistically based on wastewater, here's what we can actually do in case, for example, in case there was grant money or state money available at some point and you need to be able to say, here's what we can do, here's what that could really mean for us. Well, we have done that, I don't know, 14 times. We've done that more times than I thought was necessary. I was part of one of the committees that looked at that. And at that time, we just found prohibitive costs. I think there were like three studies that were done. We found prohibitive costs for either decentralized wastewater treatment here in the village that would then, the idea is you'd have septic tanks at the houses, but then you'd have, because there were septic tanks first, you'd have very small pipes. Yeah. You could then go to a nearby field and use a field as a septic field. But that cost pretty close to the cost of bringing out the sewer from Montpelier. And Montpelier would love to have more users on their water and wastewater plant, because it's overbuilt for their use, but it cost a lot to extend the pipeline. And it was like six to one half a dozen or the other, and both were very popular. Now, at that time, we were thinking, okay, the era of the 70s and 80s, when the federal government was giving a lot of money to municipalities to put in water and wastewater, that's over. We aren't getting any money from the federal government. But now we just missed the vote on some art book funding, or some interest, I don't know if there's funding handing out to municipalities announced in the last month or so. We just missed the vote on. So maybe we should be in touch with our contact at regional planning or our contact at BLCT about federal funding to see if there are opportunities for using some of that, and dust off some of those old studies and see what information we might want to get to update them. Okay, I don't want to take too much of your time with the calls. It makes sense for me to touch base with you outside in the meeting just to try to get to some of that history. Yeah. And we're going to see if I can. We've got files on that. Yeah. And it was millions and millions of dollars. Yeah. I knew the cost was prohibited. I didn't know if there was something that could think about how to make the case, or how to push private. I hadn't realized there had been that much work done on distributed systems, and sort of like how to push private developers into doing this. I'll talk to you. Yeah, by a lot of analysis. Okay. What's maximum build up? We could expect the zoning here. Yeah. Developments and zoning, how much we could put over that to generate where we could build the system as well. Pretty easy, though. Okay. I'll touch base with you a bit. The last thing that we've been thinking that I sort of wanted to get your temperature on was, you know, we're, so we're looking at the next town plan will be due in, I think, May or June of 2026. So we're a few years out. But sort of, you know, thinking about if there's no, I don't believe there's anyone in the town, any group in the town that really sort of looks at the town plan and says, okay, so we put all these action items into the things we want to do. How did we actually do on them? You know, there I think 126 action items in the town plan. The planning commission itself has a role in about 40 of them. And so I don't know if it would be appropriate for us to sort of take on our role to sort of start to go to the other groups and say, okay, so here's a thing that was in the town plan. You know, have we had movement on it? Is it something that we want to take on in the next couple of years before the next planning cycle? Or were we a little too ambitious with, you know, sort of all these things that we put in? That's generally the planning commission will vet those action items. And say, oh, this didn't happen. Yeah. But you're saying you would go directly to some of the people that would be more responsible for those action items. And have them directly rather than just saying, oh, it didn't happen. But you're going to go to the committee and say, why didn't it happen? I don't. So I haven't really thought about it. It's exactly what it was going to mean. And honestly, I think there are certain things that we don't necessarily know, all the things that are happening. Right, right. And so I think, but I think it would probably be a check and to say, OK, so we had this, you know, in the plan. You know, does it, you know, does it make sense to key to keep it on the list?   Well, remember the process that Bruce stood up and did for a while with us? Where he identified the action items from the Vincorix town plan that the select board have responsibility for implementing. And then we just spent some meetings going through them and deciding, OK, what have we done here? Have we done enough? What are we going to do? Maybe maybe when we reconstitute after town meeting with the new select board, we should have a priorities in session where we look at the town plan amongst other things and say, hey, what are we going to do in the next year? Well, they can identify some of the items that they feel that they have some responsibility to and some of the items that we would have more jurisdiction over or more input and bring those to us. So we don't have to look through the 120. Yeah, and I think you do do a little prioritization of like whose brother primary, you know, for like, because we don't have the authority to like, to have final sign up. Like I think like almost everything the planning commission is listed, the select board is also listed on.  Right, but we are responsible and for some, you know, those are the ones that we should probably be brought to our attention so we know what to do. That makes sense to me. So you've been separating a little bit. Yeah. Okay, so I'm good. That's good. What else? If you want to blab about? Oh, I'm sorry. I point to, I understand that's what I have for you. No, that's good. Yeah. It's all good information, actually. Yeah. Does anybody have any questions for Zach? Thanks for coming in. Well, thank you for coming in. And you know, be in touch now. I have one little question on your energy committee. How many people are you looking to have on that? I think we're looking for somewhere in the range of five to seven. Yeah. Yeah. Good. And you've got some names, which is exciting. And then maybe I'll have a few more. Yeah.  And see what they are. Will you be, you know, vet them first? We certainly can. Yeah, we hadn't, I mean, initially we were thinking like, can we get, can we actually get anyone? And do we have at least one person who is interested in a leadership role? Yeah. We didn't want to be in a position where we had a whole bunch of people who were interested in being a member of the Energy Committee, but nobody who was interested in sharing it. So do you have somebody? I think so. Oh, okay. Well, I guess what we're going to be looking for, your recommendation basically. Yeah. If you feed that, then that'd be great. Yeah, okay. Yeah, we can certainly do that. Yeah. Sounds good. All right. Thank you, Jack. You're welcome. So our next item is discussion on FY 2024 budget development. And so just provided you a bit of a, I mean, I think, I think everyone and on the video kind of understand where the costs, what the driver is behind costs, primarily it's staffing, benefit costs, some adjustments for obviously higher costs a day, and then adjustments for the latest budget from the fire department for both fire and ambulance. I have reviewed the budget with Guthrie also for their section and then accordingly. One thing that kind of came up today, and the kind of thing Deb mentioned something about their hour, she asked me how the Listers were trending against our budget. And I said, well, you're certainly here more than for what the budget was outlined for. Did pull some history that and that's where she got the 30 hours per week that they were they're working on average 30 hours per week. It was budgeted at 23. I was also asked about what their rate increase would be because typically it's a 50 cents a year for their hourly rate. And I just kind of carried and followed suit with that. Of course, that's all of that is just a forecast and an estimate on any increases. Those will all be decisions made by the select board when the time comes. And the question was specifically raised about, the social security adjustment of eight, whatever percent. And I said, well, that's not what I'm currently, I'm assuming an overall 4% on average for the staff. I did only include the 50 cents for them. Again, that can change. And looking at the history for the listeners, the budget's been 23,000 for years since fiscal year 21. Their actual has been 17,000 in 2020, 14,000 in 2021, and 19,000 of fiscal 22. So there's some flexibility there within that $23,000 budget based on the hours that have historically been worked to where that the hourly rate could go up and still keep the budget somewhat constant. I was led from the discussion in the day to believe that maybe the budget needed to be increased, that after their conversation and report to you now, that doesn't seem like the direction that they're going in. So I just was bringing this to you guys because the conversation kind of threw me for a little bit of a loop today because I don't have any oversight management. You know, I see their time sheets. I sign off on them, but I have no, no. They're elected officials. Yeah, they're elected officials. So I didn't know what this process was in both groups and managing the budget for the elected officials. I think the, I think the select board has the, has the total control over those allocations. Well, the select board has the control on the budget. That's what I'm saying. So that's how you control it all. It's a back-up way to do it. Right. It's like, oh, you're going on the budget, better not do that. It's one of the few ways that one of the few mechanisms that the select board has for elected officials about the only, about the only way. And there was an analogous conversation in the year or so before, year or two before I joined this life board where the list case for increasing the current year budget happened for them because needed to talk with each other a whole lot to come to an agreement about do things, which is kind of analogous to, I think, what we heard today. And the select board, as far as I could tell, declined to act on the request. Right. And so I wrote all that you see in this memo prior to receiving anything from the listors. So it didn't come in until the meeting had actually started. So I think they got their heads around a little differently from what I was led to believe today. I got a call that they were seeking a higher budget and well, it looks like they were going over for this year, but that wasn't then the message that came to the meetings. The message I got was that had to learn and boss was out because he had a stroke. So she worked a lot of hours and didn't really know what she was doing. Yeah. Now she's going to work left hours. He's back. Yeah. And it seemed like that we would be smart to keep the budget where it is. Yeah. To get we. They say in their report is going forward. We plan to level off our joint combined hours. And we expect this will put us in line with our annual budget. Yeah. Yeah. So like I said, that was earlier today. So it had shifted and evolved, I think. So maybe you steered them in a productive direction. But so it just got. I just wasn't sure where to go with this if we needed, you know, what that process would be if we needed to revisit this budget. But I understand there's been training, but I mean, even with Ross being back, the hours have still been pretty consistent. They haven't really tweaked down too much just yet. So the listers are the only elected official. Hey, is that correct? The auditors as well. Yeah. I think so. Okay. Yeah, I think we better keep the budget where it is. Yeah. First of all. Is that fine? Yeah. We got to control costs. That seems like a way to do it. And again, I think if we, if there's a discussion to be had in the future, nothing that's mentioned tonight about the hourly rate, that's something in the nine pounds we can certainly. I do understand that out of the way. I agree. It's only 2.63%. And again, but looking at the past, it seems like there's actually flexibility. If you look, I think that if the hours normalize to what we've seen historically, it looks like there's some room to adjust that hourly rate and still keep the budget where it is. Right. So. Yeah. I wonder about the re-appraisal when that comes up. How many more hours the listers are going to need to put in for that? I can't even remember what should happen with that. Well, you would probably be funding them out of the re-appraisal budget. Okay. Well, the extra hours. Didn't we have an external appraiser come in? Yes. Oh, yeah. What would you have to do? You would have to. Yeah. When the CLA gets out, 10%. Oh, when was the last time the hourly rate was changed? Prey. An extra hour ago. What? Did you hear me? When was the last? Oh, sorry. When was the last time the hourly rate was changed? Am I frozen? Every year. It's been 50 cents, I think, a year or four. It's gone 50 cents a year. So what? I'm sorry. What is the hourly rate? I should know it, but I don't. It's $18. It's $19. Oh, it's $19. No. Yeah. I mean, most anybody does it. If the price is high enough, it would even pay to just go to a license appraiser. Oh, whoops. We'll get right back into that again. Just back into that. Because hey. You get better results. Well, some people say you don't. Some people say you do. Some people say you lose the local person looking at your house, but on the other hand, you know what, if you have an outside appraisal, you're having somebody objectively looking at your property, not looking at who you are, where you live, whatever, looking at the property that they're appraising. And there's other towns that have done it. It'd be great to contact Waterbury, Hardwick, any of those towns that have done that and ask them why they did it. One thing I learned in a conversation with somebody who does that for a list of living is that there's a hybrid model available that I wasn't aware of before. And that is you retain your elected listers and they participate in the tax appeals. But the work of maintaining the grand list is done by the professional. I think at Hardwick, they kept one lister to work as an interface and to actually be the kind of front person going out, doing the appraisals and stuff, but did not utilize any of the other positions. They couldn't sell them anyway. They couldn't find anybody wanting a job. And then the appraiser spends one day a week, or yeah, one day a week in Hardwick. And they pay basically the money they get from for the repraiser services, I think cover, plus their budget line item covers the cost for that appraiser to be there. And the whole idea here is that that appraiser will keep the grand list sufficiently supplied with data so that you don't have to have a reappraisal as regularly. Yeah, because the PLA is more consistent. That's what the argument is about, is that they're able to keep the appraisals higher and adjusted more quickly so that you don't have to have a more common reappraisal. Well, because that's $100,000 a year. Right. Yeah, that's a big expense. Oh, yeah. Over $100,000. Right, yes. If you keep a common level of appraisal more in line with sales, then you are not state mandated to have a reappraisal. So you're getting, that's the whole idea. You're getting a payback by having a professional service provided for it. So does that mean that between town-wide reappraisals, then the average person might get a letter saying, we're changing the valuation on your property because of sales in the area? We've seen what's going on. I think what they do is they will look, they will periodically just go in and appraise, look at the value of houses in particular areas, maybe areas where the prices have been going up and they'll see, well, how do your property relate to that property and that property that you've sold for this amount? That's exactly it. Well, so wait a minute. This is getting off subject. Yeah, we don't. That's right. Okay. Actually, I know a little bit about the subject, but let's not get into it. Yeah. Okay. That's a good question, though. But it's all changed sales, though. You can't change sales in the town. No, it has to be. And it has, it's over a period of time and it has to be end of hand, you know, when they call them, you might. Yeah, yeah. Arms length sales and some of these aren't. So, I mean, anyway, these. It's a perfect film. That's what they do. Okay. They know how to do it. Okay, let's go along with budget. I'm all tired out now. Don't write it on that. Hey, just say John talked about it. Okay. The important thing is here that you mentioned John's name. Okay. No, Seth's name. No, I don't know what you're doing. Okay, let's. Okay. Yeah. Budget film. Well, you guys tell me what, how do you want to continue moving forward reviewing the budget? So we're still going through it myself, but a little something. I see you a lot more every day. So what, what has changed in the last time we did it? Is that the orange line? Well, the orange lines are the change from the prior year. Really the change in the last we looked at it was highway budget went through costs with Rosie and then the fire department. Those are really the big changes.  So it should make it easier for us to zero in. Yeah. Pull it in. Can we drop some of the orange line? Are we okay? So for instance, the health insurance. Yeah. We know that. We know what that is. Yeah. Let's drop that. Okay. Okay. So. Yeah, the calculation. Yeah. I mean, that's cookie cutter stuff. We don't need to be going over that. I mean, that's probably time. Based on current staffing plan. I mean. Yep. Those are all calculated based on the salary. Yeah. And those are the ones that we can change. They got to be in the budget, but we don't really have any input on that. Yeah. So the ones that we need to look at that, that we need to have orange lines on the ones that there's going to be some potential potential need to be. Okay. Discussion. How about that? Okay. Okay. Yeah. Good. Okay. You know, like dental insurance. I mean. Yeah. All those are now live building. They're essentially calculations. So this is where it is. Yeah. Vermont State Police. That's probably not going to, we can't affect their 5.9% increase. Well, I believe that it, that kind of would be something for discussion and we could table it for the next meeting, but I, you know, I have had a conversation with Washington County, I think. With both organizations, we don't have to speak to them in March. Okay. But to potentially consider, I kind of threw that thousand to give us a little bit extra in the events we decided to split. Well, typically what happens in March is our call is Vermont State Police comes in and says, here's what we can do for you. Here's a contract. Yeah. We sign it and we do. So you've been in touch with Washington County already, correct? Well, it was only because there was an issue at the school. So they had your public think about those before. They were. They have a short staff writing about it. But they were, they were expecting to get in that conversation when they came by to speak about the situation about the school mentioned, expected to see some improvement in their staff and that they may have some capacity. And we know Vermont State Police, I mean, all law enforcement is trapped right now. So would it be something, so as issues arise, could we get a little bit more? We all know Vermont State Police will run their budget with that because they just don't have the people. For purposes of the budget, put in 5.9 percent. That's all we need to talk about. Right. Right. And then, and then with the sheriff, what if we have them in February?  When we. Yeah. But is this a realistic number? 5.9 percent increase. Depends on how many, how much they can actually spend, how much time they can spend in our time. Yeah, it is. So I'm. A lot of these are. Yeah, that's fine. But you know, I mean, you're asking what you think. You don't know. It's a big as you hope you don't use the money to. Okay. And sometimes we hope we don't have to. Yeah. Okay. So external audit, you've got 4.4 percent. Yeah, that's a complete guess. I just, you know, we technically can go and look for a new auditor this year. I mean, I don't know when the costs will be from some of their powers and we like them, but. So that's a good number. Office custodial with everything. Office electricity, you're just going with. Yeah, I'm throwing some adjustments. And they're going for 14. They want to do a 14.9 to that's fine. I mean, I'm just trying to make some suggestions to narrow our focus here on orange lines that we're going to discuss. Right. Where do you typically hone in with the budget that you dig into? We don't. Well, most of what happens with with the town budget is you see there's going to be annual increases and especially now they're even worse. But for things like. Insurance and power. Nothing. You know, a lot of these are all fixed costs that are going to keep increasing a little bit, but they are fixed because they don't go down. Yeah. And so we know that. So we just try to add in what we think will be the increase. And Washington is going to vote 14 almost 15 perce