All right everybody, I will call the Essex Junction Billage Trustees meeting to order for Tuesday, June 25th. Please join me for the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you all for coming today. If you have not yet done so please do sign in. Mr. Manager, do we have any agenda or additions or changes from staff? We do, we do. We're going to have an additional handout for item 7A at your place is. And then I believe we are going to ask to remove something from the consent agenda item. And then do you want to do that in the meeting or are you going to do it now? I'll just do it now and do it all at one point in time. What I was going to request is that we move 7B, the town of Essex and Village of Essex Junction Housing Deeds Assessment and Action Plan to 6B. The intention of that frankly, I need to recuse myself on that vote. So that way George can run that portion and we can move on to everything else on the consent agenda. Does that have a motion? Yes. OK. I'll sign with a change from Evan. I'll second. Any further discussion? All those in favor please signify by saying aye. Aye. Anybody need a post? Thank you. So now is the point in time for the public to be heard. So if there is anything that is not on the agenda that somebody would like to briefly discuss, now is the time for that. OK. Seeing nothing, we will go ahead and move on to item 5A, public hearing on the FY20 utility rates. So I'll call that public hearing to order. And Sarah, would you like to take this? I would. Thank you, Andrew. OK. So we had a brief overview on last time. And I've come back and I've tidied it up a little bit. I've added some additional information that I'm going to go over all of it again, this e-thing. So there are three categories of enterprise fund rates that we are looking at here in the village. There are the village resident user rates as water, sewer, and sanitation. And the change there on the average user who uses 120 gallons per day is looking about an 8.2% increase or $38 on the year. The second category of rates is the large user water rate. And that is decreasing by 3.85% from 0.078 cents per 1,000 gallons to 0.075. And that's the rate that's charged to our large users. Currently, we only have one large user. A large user is defined by somebody who uses more than 2.5 million gallons per day. That's currently global boundaries. This rate is adjusted annually once we reconcile actual usage and estimated unaccounted for water. And the decrease is primarily a result of less than we anticipated for unaccounted for water, which is things like fire hydrant usage, hydrant flushing, large water breaks. The final category of rate is the wastewater treatment facility wholesale rate. And that's increasing about 5.73% from 2.983 cents, $2.983 per 1,000 gallons to 3.154. And that's the wastewater treatment facility rate that's charged to the town of Essex and the town of Williston for usage and the wastewater treatment facility. I'm going to head into some historical information as we talked about last time, and then look at that PowerPoint that shows a little bit about each of the segments. So looking at current actual rates, so fiscal year 2019, as compared to the surrounding communities for water and sewer, can we turn one of these screens to the clock? Maybe that one. Is this bigger? OK. Is everybody ready? Go ahead. Go ahead. It's great. Amber, just get ready to raise that. So we can get out and change that. Is this how you guys hear what we have? No. It's OK. It's OK. Dan, can you see? No. It's been there before. I'll just send me that one. OK. Yeah, we have an internet as well. OK. So looking at average water and sewer customer for the surrounding communities compared to the village of Essex Junction, we're looking at a resident who uses approximately 120 gallons per day. And as you can see in the chart, the village of Essex Junction is the lowest of the surrounding communities. The town of Shelburne is the highest at almost double what the village is. We are, I was looking at the average of these, which is somewhere between Willison and Essex Town at $632 on the year. The midpoint is $612. The village is currently at $470 on the year. The proposed changes to the rates would take that just over $500 on the year to about $509. Give or take some change. So can I ask a question? And I don't, you may not know the answer and don't because I won't ask you to specifically look at it. But back at our joint meeting when the representatives from the Champlain Water District were here and they were talking about their change in management. And I think Max asked, why are the villages, Essex Junction's water rates, not the sewer rates, but the water rates so much cheaper than the towns? And the response had something to do. It implied that because we are pass through for global foundries and sell it to the wholesale that we get some kind of a break on our water rate. And I, for the life of it, I had never heard that before. And I didn't understand what he was talking about. And he was kind of fuzzy about it himself. So do you have any thought about that? I absolutely do. So in the moment, I didn't jump in. But I think that there was a disconnect there. I think so the Champlain Water District is talking about the wholesale rate that they charge all of their communities for water, which is, to the best of my knowledge, the same. And I think Max was talking about the rate, the water, sewer rates that the town of Essex charges its users versus the village of Essex Junction charges its users. Lauren Morseau has recently gone in depth into those budgets and pulled out a number of reasons why those are different. They relate to primarily three different categories, which are personnel. And then the way we budget for capital savings in the village versus the town budget's depreciation expense, which is a non-cash expense, but has a similar effect to us budgeting a transfer to capital every year. But the amounts of those are slightly different. And then we do have in the village, the large user that is global founders, they pay for the vast majority of their water just at a straight pass-through rate. There is about $100,000 in the water budget of revenue from that large user rate that I referenced earlier that's going down. So we do have a concentration of revenue from that one large account. But I think when Max asked that question in the other meeting, I think there was a disconnect between the question and who he was asking it, and so they answered that and was received. And I have all that information from Lauren that I intend to compile as we start talking more about the taxation plan to talk about those two things hand in hand and see what's happening. OK, thank you. You're welcome. The bottom of the screen shows this information in a bar chart. Love charts. Some of the additional information we talked about compiling with a 10-year history. And so I thought that was a great idea, except I didn't do 10 years. I did the last seven. So one of the things that happened in the village of, which is pretty close, seven. One of the things that happened in the village starting in fiscal year 2014 was that there was a change to the rate structure. And during fiscal year 2013, there was a large water and sewer usage rate study done by Aldrich and Elliott. And there was a change in the structure of the rate. And it went from completely based on a per cubic foot or per usage charge to a split between fixed charges and usage charges. So the starting point for this analysis is fiscal year 2014, which is the first year of the new rate structure so that we could get a pretty more comparable numbers from there on out. So there's a lot of information. There are a lot of lines on this chart. But these are the different categories of residential utility rates broken up into water, the wastewater shipment facility, and sanitation. Those are the three enterprise lines. Each of these has a fixed component and a usage component. And the budgets are broken down in a percentage manner. So in the water fund, 50% of the total budget is raised with fixed charges. And the other 50% is raised through usage charges. I don't remember the other two off hand. I think I get into it, but I'm not going to guess. They're like 75, 25, and then 60, 40 approximately. So this shows over the last six years the dollar change in each of these rates and then the percentage change in those. You can see in FY17 and FY18, the wastewater treatment facility rates went down. And the sanitation rates went down in FY18 as well. These were a reflection of a varying amount of usage coming from the other two entities, an increase in the usage from Williston and the town of Essex and the wastewater treatment facility, since that's a tri-town facility that's shared between the three towns. And then I'm sorry, I can't remember what caused the drop in FY18 and sanitation. So you can see they're kind of all over the place. They really follow precisely along with what's raised in each of the budgets. Any questions on this before I move on to more similar looking charts? So is that looking at 18, 19, and 20, or at least 19, and 20, are those the increases we should be expecting, year to year, from here on out? From here on out, oh, if I knew that. I mean, they just seem high. They are high compared to the prior years. The average rate change in the wastewater treatment facility is about 2%. The average is a little bit over 3% in sanitation and about 5% in water. If I look at those averages for the total cost, I'm going to flip to the next chart really quickly, because I feel like this is a little bit more digestible. This is for a property using 120 gallons per day. And so this one is going to show the total cost on the year for each of these three components. And the bottom line is the sum of all those. And as you see, the percentage is across the years. 5%, 2%, negatives, negatives, 5%, and then this one at 8%. The average of all those is 3%, which I think is a reasonable average when you look back over the years. I know that the Champlain Water District tries to keep their annual rate increase right about 3%, regardless of the budget, so that you have a nice, steady, predictable change in rates and not these up and down fluctuations that happen when something goes awry in the budget. Sarah, could it also be that some of the fixed charge increases are also due to an increase in capital expenses to help maintain and repair and replace? Absolutely. So I have one more quick chart, and then I'm going to move back into the PowerPoint, which has a nice high-level summary of what's changed in each of the plans. I just didn't know if that might help to answer why some years is higher than others. Yeah, and then that combined with the interesting dynamic of the Ways Hartree Facility with the flows. So the approximate, the average flow from the town of Essex, the village of Essex Junction, and the town of Williston shifts which percentage of the budget each of those towns pay. And it does that through changes in the residential rates in the village versus the wholesale rates. So as one might go up a little on the other zone. Like I said last time, I am just scratching the surface of this very complex issue more so it did come in and help calculate these rates. So that should, does everyone feel comfortable? I do want to point out here that the rate changes, and this is another one of a lot of numbers. I'm sorry, there's so many numbers. There just are those three funds that the changes in the budgets and the changes in the revenue raised by village rate payers. So it's the revenue raised by village rate payers that's the driving factor behind what the rates are. That those, the percentage change in those year over year are correlate almost precisely with the rate changes. The bottom line here is the total rate by rate payers across the three funds. And you can see over that same period of time those averages are, that percentage change is very similar to what we saw previously. About 5%, 1%, and negative of 3%, that's six. And then almost a 10% overall revenue increase. And that's higher than the rate increase because we do have new accounts on the year. So I apologize if there's a lot of numbers in these, there's a lot to digest. But I'm gonna move on to a more high level overview unless there are some more questions about this granular specific. My line, okay, cool. So as I started with, we're looking at, and this is the residential rates, the combined utility rate is an 8.2% change over the previous year, looking at 0.0343 cents per cubic foot of water used plus a fixed rate of $77.16 cents. Oh, there are those charts again. They fit so nicely there. Maybe I plan to start with this spreadsheet and I think I'll see you in a minute. So that's made of water, wastewater, and sanitation rates. So from the water side, this is a change of 7.4%. This one, the fixed charges are 50% of the budget and the usage is the other 50% as I mentioned. This fund had almost an 18% increase in the operating budget this year. And that was primarily due to a $50,000 increase in the transfer to capital reserve. This fund is only about $500,000. It's about, it's $680,000 of the operating budget. So that strips out the global boundaries passed through. And so $50,000 increase in capital is a significant increase on, I'm gonna say a small number, but when we talk about millions and millions of dollars, that is $50,000 on a $600,000 budget is quite on an increase. The other component of the increase in that fund comes in with increase is in health insurance costs as a result of new staffing and other personnel costs increases. And in conjunction with that 3% increase in the Shamblin Water District wholesale rate that we talked about was talking about leveling rates over time. Next up is the wastewater treatment facility. This one is just looking at just the wastewater rates. It's a 10% change and this fund fixed charges for 65% of the budget. There's a lot of property, plant and equipment down there. And then 35% are covered by the usage charges. There was about a six and a half percent increase in the operating budget coupled with an increase in the percentage of flow that's attributable to the Village of Essex Junction. So that balance I was talking about from the town of Essex, the Village of Essex Junction and Williston as the flows change, the percentage of the total that each pays for changes. So the flows went up, the overall budget went up and there was a decrease in other anticipated revenues. So there's the septage discharge. So when the haulers come and discharge directly at the plant we're anticipating about a 10% decrease in that revenue line item. So as other revenues decrease, the amount that you see raised by user fees increases plus the overall budget and the shift of the flows. The sanitation fund is about a 7% change. Sanitation fund had a 10% increase in the operating budget which was driven primarily by increasing health insurance costs and personnel costs. This fund also has an annual increasing amount being contributed toward the wastewater treatment facility upgrade debt, which helps sort of smooth the effect of those large debt payments over time. In the sanitation fund, the fixed charges cover 75% of the budget and the usage charges cover the other 25%. I'm gonna stop there and ask if there are any questions on those three rates. No, I think I would suggest that one of the audience has a question, I don't know. Are there any questions that we have? Oh, sorry. Sarah, you've done a great job. You can ask for questions from the audience. Please. Because there are any questions from the audience, now would be a great time. I think we're all set if you wanna keep going. Thanks. All right, so the nice category of rates that we have is a little bit smaller than all of that for the residential and that's the large water user rate. And so the village defines a large water user as fortunately in order to count, we use this more than 2.5 million gallons a day. Currently, the only one we have is global foundries. A person, I don't know. It's a very clear definition, it's fair, it's fair. And this rate is calculated, so this is, so the water that global foundries uses gets sort of this bill straight for it. We pay for it and then they pay directly what we pay for it. And then this is on top of that and this is 13% of the water operating budget plus a proportionate share of the unaccounted for water tier. And that gets reconciled at the end of the year. So we communicate with global foundries up front. What do they expect to use during the year? It's been pretty stable the last couple of years and then we reconcile that at the every six months and at the end of the year, we reconcile their bill for the whole year to make it what they actually used. And then we factor in the unaccounted for water. And like I said, that's fire hydrant use, fire hydrant flushing, any large water main breaks. We had a very low unaccounted for water this year. We didn't, the way, because of the way hydrant flushing fell during the planned year, or it's not the birth of the living health insurance, but during this year, we actually missed the hydrant flushing both times and then we didn't have any large water main breaks like we did the prior year when we had that big one over by 81 Main Street that shut down the offices for the day. So given all of this information, there has been a decrease of almost 4% and the large water user rate from 0.078 per 1,000 gallons to 0.00. Are there any questions on this from the board? All right, are there any questions from y'all? Thank you. And then the final category of rate is the wastewater treatment facility wholesale rate. And this is the rate that's paid by the town of Essex and the town of Wilson for treatment of sewage from those human beings. And again, it's based on estimated flows and budgeted costs. And there are, this is also reconciled at the end of the year and adjustments are made if necessary. This is a 5.7% increase over the prior year and this is a result of the increase in the wastewater treatment facility budget. Are there any questions on that? Are there any questions from anybody in the public on the presentation thus far? That's the end of my presentation. Great. I have to say, since I missed the first one, I didn't get a chance to say at the last time, the way you've run through this and the way you just delivered this, it doesn't seem like you've only been here for a year. Well, you did miss the last one. Oh, good, thanks. Yeah, you seem like you've done this a couple of times. All right, good. Thank you. Appreciate it. I appreciate that. So if there are no comments from the public on the utility rates, I will go ahead and close the public hearing on the FY20 utility rates. At which point, we can now go on to 6A, the, as I'm losing my screen, the warning of public hearing for the FY20 water budget in rates. Yes, so thank you. So the trustees have a policy as part of the large volume water user rate setting process that they will hold two public hearings. And so I would request that the trustees consider warning a second public hearing for next week. And are there any questions from the board about doing so? Nope, no. Somebody want to make a motion on it? I do. I'll second it. I guess I would make a motion that the trustees warn a second public hearing on the FY20 village utilities rates for Tuesday, July 9th, 2019. I'll second it. Is there any further discussion? All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Anybody opposed? Great, passes unanimously. And so now we will go on to the new item 6B about accepting town in, town of Essex and village of Essex Junction housing needs assessment and action plan. And to do this, I am going to recuse myself in this conversation as there is a conflict of interest that may arise given my employer. So at this point, I will step into the audience and George, you can take over 6B from here. So I will, the housing needs assessment plan was, I think we looked at it at our last joint meeting. I think we discussed it, we had a full presentation about it. I think everyone was there. I wasn't there, but I watched it. Okay. Was it the last meeting? And the only thing I'll say about it, I'll just make a motion really quick, but I think it recommends that we form a housing committee, but I think that's probably gonna require some more elaborate discussion between the trustees and the select board. I don't think we're just gonna, on this further moment, create a housing committee. We'll have to figure out what that actually needs. Okay. So I will make a motion that we accept the town of Essex and village of Essex Junction housing needs assessment and action plan. Second. Raj seconds. Any further discussion? All in favor. Aye. Opposed? Okay. So that's approved. And Andrew, you can take back over. Did you even say? I didn't go too far. Thank you, Josh. Okay. So we can now go on to the consent agenda. I will make a motion that we approve the consent agenda. Is that good? Great. Is there any further discussion? The only thing that I would say is again, I did miss the last meeting and I know that there was an appointment to the tree committee at the last meeting. Traditionally, when we've done this, we have had the people who are seeking a reappointment to come. We had the chance to interview. And I would just request that for the next time that this comes around, that we have that opportunity again, given that just it is a fairly important part of what we do, especially now we have two new board members. If the community's vision for our community has changed, we should have that capability of saying, yes, these people are still the right people or maybe we need something different. Well, we could still, we can reappoint, but we could, we wanted to invite the new appointees and then just meet the new trustees if you wanted to do it. I'm not suggesting that we do it, but if you thought it was, we could do it down the road at some point. Personally, I frankly, I'll be honest, I'm saying it for our two new members. I have no problems with the people who are currently asking to be reappointed. I just don't want to take that opportunity away from the two of you. So I'll leave that up to you two. You have to come. You may need to do that. So. Show up early to stay late. Right, exactly. But I think their appointments are for July one. So. Timing's a little short on this. Right next time is next time to go. I appreciate the sentiment I find with these two, but yeah, it'd be great. Generally. So hopefully next time, maybe late May, have them come in. So we have a motion and we have a second on the table. Is there any other further discussion on this? Great, all those in favor, we can touch agenda, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Anybody opposed? Great, you can go ahead and move on from that. Going to the reading file. And with that, are there any board member comments? I will make a comment that I, this is in reference to Kristen Humberger's email and the, her notifying us that they're not gonna go forward with the STEAM Fest this year. And I think we had put Village Funds aside for that. And that's not really the issue. I wasn't surprised when I saw Kristen, we were at an event earlier in the year. And it, she kinda gave me the vibe that it was something she had a lot going on. And I know that these things, like the farmers market and STEAM Fest, it takes a lot of energy. And when we're relying on volunteers, even though we are providing some of the funding, it's still a lot of volunteer time. But I think these things are really important and I, she recommended that we maybe look into having an arts council. I go back and think of why we started doing these, some of these events early on. We did the tree lighting, the training hop, the farmers market and then STEAM Fest. I mean, it was all about trying to bring people into the Village Center. It wasn't simply about holding an event. It was trying to bring people into the Village Center and generate activity and have a sense of community. And it's concerning to me to see the farmers market now STEAM Fest. Like they're starting to get peeled away. So I'd like to recommend that we, at some point, we put this back onto the trustee agenda and have a discussion about this and maybe even formalizing this because I think the interest in STEAM Fest and an arts festival and an arts council and things like that, I think it's still there. But it shows you what happens when you are relying on volunteers. And that is meant in no way as a criticism. It's recognition that they have lives and they have very busy schedules. And we probably need to take it more under our, have it be more of a permanent situation and under the Village Government too. And maybe share some of this with the town as well. I agree that working with the town with this, because I mean, it's just that everybody to take grand cakes and... I think it's a great idea. Yeah, so why don't we, I'd like to recommend that we put it back on the agenda at some point and not to just the future and have a discussion about it. Yeah, I think that makes a fair amount of sense and take a little research on that, maybe have some ideas. Possibly some point in time this summer. Yeah. I think it'd be a great thing to have the a member from the Economic Development Commission Yep. Committee, excuse me, maybe president for that conversation too, I think is a role there. Yep, exactly. Very good. Good point, Josh. Great. Any of the trustee comments? Okay. So we are, at the end of our trustee meeting, it is one minute before the start of our joint meeting, so how about we just give, take a few minute recess while we wait for the select, or while we allow the select board members to come on up and then we will reconvene. Sounds good. Great. Thank you all. Hi. Hi. Hi. How are you? Good for us. Good to see you. Yeah. I got some sunshine. Okay. I'm not supposed to, did I? I'll try. It's a purple one here. Hi. How are you? Okay everybody, so I will go ahead and very slowly call the trustee's back to order. I'm sorry. And I will call the select board meeting to order. Great. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks for having us. So going on to agenda in addition to our changes and Mr. Manager, do you have any from staff today? Nope, no changes on this one. Okay. I know that there's one that I would like us to consider and that is if we could move item 5G in the appointment of the alternates of the governance subcommittee ahead of the determination of the role and authority of the governance subcommittee so that speaking for myself, I personally would rather appoint alternates before empowering the subcommittee for more work. I'll make that motion on behalf of the trustees. Okay. I don't know, should we approve all agenda item with the same changes at the same time or at the same time? I have no idea. I would do it all at the same time, yeah. So are there any other changes? Yes, I would like to make an adjustment to the description of business item 5H. Approval of calling about consolidation is not going to be a vote or an approval. It's just a discussion and a heads up. So we're not voting on item 5H. Does anybody have anything else? Okay, then from the trustees, is there a motion to approve the agenda? I'll make that motion. Okay. Is there a second? Thank you, Amber. Good. Any further discussion? All those favorably signify by saying aye. Aye. Anybody oppose? Great, thank you. Can I have a motion from the select board to approve the agenda changes? So we're moving 5G before 5F? Correct. And changing 5H to say discussion of calling about consolidation? Correct. Then I move that we amend the agenda accordingly. Is there a second? Okay, thank you. Any discussion? All those favor of amending the agenda signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Okay, so now we are on to the public to be heard. So this is the point of the time of the meeting in which there is something that somebody would like to discuss that is not on the agenda. Now would be the time to do so. Yes. I read on our 15th fresh lane. I cannot envision a fair merger plan coming out of a meeting that has eight village residents with not eight town outside the village residents without a fair negotiation. We may just well wind up with a lopsided merger plan which happened in 2006. No matter how much money we spend marketing this plan, how can voters be expected to approve a plan that will not be equitable and build harmony in years ahead? Is there anybody else? Yes, I'm Kim Chase, 39 Road Street. I went to check out where the meeting was going to be because I once wanted to attend the meeting. It was going to be here, but then it was not. I was on Main Street. And so with the merger, I am not on Facebook and I'm not on Front porch forum, but I do read the Essex Report like religiously. And so has there been a vote already passed or have there been a vote planned to have people vote on? And so when I checked out the meeting, I saw the T-shirt or something related to that. And I was somewhat offended by the graphic. So I don't know, just because of many things like gender inequality, you know, the dynamic that many, many things that I won't take your time off with, but I'd be happy to express my concerns to people. But, and then I was thinking, well then, if there, even if I missed the announcement that there was going to be a vote and I wanted to become informed, I would hope that the people that I helped to elect inform me rather than persuade me. And so that is a concern. Thank you. If I can just quickly talk about the date portion. There has not been a formal announcement to say that on this date, here is what people are going to be voting on, but rather, we have discussed about having a goal for this process in which we are working towards. But you have T-shirts already, which to me is a vehicle for persuading people. I'm not gonna call it propaganda, but in other words, if you already have a slogan in mind, then to me, you've gone past the point of informing people and announcing to them what their choices are in an equitable way so that they might inform themselves. And yet, it's already a campaign of what to in fact persuade people of the right way to vote, which to me is a big conflict of interest. So I would hope that there would be more of an apolitical stance of the elected officials, again, that I helped to elect. And also I do find the graphic offensive just because it represents very conventional, very narrow gender roles. And many things, again, I won't waste your time, but the wedding ring and the diamond ring, the diamond ring, a woman is expected to wear, the children should be trod, but the man doesn't, but he's expected to pay for it. Diamonds are almost always sourced very badly. Human rights, so many things. If I may, thank you for your comments. The work session that we had on Saturday was primarily, while a public meeting was primarily intended for staff and elected officials to kick off serious discussions about a potential change in governance. And I can assure you there were no intentions behind the color of the t-shirt or the graphics on the t-shirt. It was rather. I know I stumbled into it, but it just. I understand what you're saying. I can sense that your feelings are hurt. And I just want to assure you that we are not trying to propagandize anything. And tonight's meeting, I think, will be very informative for you because we'll be talking about the kinds of outreach that our boards are legally allowed to do. We are certainly not allowed to propagandize or bias anybody's votes or decisions. And so I hope that you'll feel like we are covering this equitably and share the information in an unbiased way. So I hope you'll stick around. You know who the image so that people like myself don't stumble into it. I'd like, again, I'm serious. They're on our t-shirts and they're, the t-shirts are here and people who own them, we may wear them, we may not. We apologize if it offends you, but it's not something we need to remove from any public forum. But I hear your concerns, and I'm sorry that you feel offended, but it is what it is and we need to move on now. So prospectually can I just ask, so if you were to wear them, is that already campaigning for a decision that you are trying to influence voters to vote in that way? That's that goes beyond education and more like. These two boards are advocates and we have spent the better part of a decade, various make-ups of this board, coming to the conclusion that a single unified town is probably the best thing for our town. It's our job to advocate for that and so I'm not afraid or ashamed to wear that green t-shirt with rings on it. Perhaps the choice of rings was not the best icon for the image and we probably will not use it again, but I can assure you that we will thoroughly vet and continue to reach out to the public on all the questions around consolidation, whatever form it may take. Thank you, one last question. So you say that the board is an advocate, so that's that you have a unity in that? We do not have unity yet, but in the end, after we've had a robust public participation process, after we've completed our research and after we've discussed it thoroughly amongst ourselves, we will vote on it together as two boards or individually as two boards before we move forward to go to the public and ask them to vote on something. There is not agreement entirely on both our boards. We have a lot of questions, we still have a lot of homework to do and we're at the point where we're starting to talk to the public about what they want to see and so things will fluctuate and change and we have not made any formal decisions as of this date. And I would be happy to talk to you about this offline if that's okay, but we have a long agenda. So if the t-shirt exists, people can wear them. If the board is, if everyone's unified, then I totally respect that because we have all together chosen democratically as stands and then it would become, well, I mean, maybe that's problematic as well, but if not everybody even agrees and it's still this, it seems like putting the cart for the course and you've got campaign slogans and signs yet. Yeah, we just have t-shirts. We don't have anything else. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, Ms. Bates. KS Robert Bates, Glenwood Drive. Couple of meetings ago at the government's subcommittees with KSV, I pointed out that they're, and they are outlined, there was some fairly loaded words like inequity of tax rates or inequality, okay. And semantics goes a long way in determining perception, public perception. I'm confused because for the last couple of years, at least, I guess more than that now, the village and the town outside the village have been moving towards consolidation. The M word was a dirty word because of the past history. At least that was my understanding, merger. Now it's being used interchangeably with consolidation. My concern is that there may be a lot of folks out there as good as this move may end up being. And I think I certainly support the notion of a unified community that when merger suddenly emerges again, be it on t-shirts or in the public forums or questionnaire or whatever, Elaine, you just used consolidation somewhat interchangeably with merger, I think. I think there needs to be some clarification because for some in this community, my guess is that's still a pretty loaded word, merger. So it would be really good for these boards to clearly define what language you're gonna use and what it means and how it's different perhaps from 2006, which I think was the last time, was that the last time we voted? So I just wanna make that point. As you move forward, some of you that have less history in this community than others may wanna take a look at how loaded that merger word may be. Maybe it's okay now, times have changed, but please just be aware of it, that it could be problematic. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, bye. Yes. Mary McCarland, scanner drive. I just wanna say that I thought it was a good idea to move forward with the people living outside the village and not people in representation. And anybody else? Thank you. We can now go on to Business Item 5A, update on website revisions. And so is this, Greg? Yeah, I'll start it off. I'm turning it over to Rob. Really just kind of a check-in update for the boards. Staff has been working on the design of the website. There's a mock-up behind you. Maybe you had a chance to look at it before coming tonight. Also included in your packet are the results of a survey that we put out just to get some feedback from the public. We still wanna set up some focus groups once this gets a little bit further along to work with dynamics and function out a little bit. You were talking about just yesterday about the... It's coming. I know, I can see it. I know, I'm just worried about your head. If you had a hair, it's all over the place. The bald guys would get cuts on their heads all the time. Hey, if you'd like to, I mean... No, no, I'm fine. I'm just... We're not insured for that, Andy. Sorry, sorry. Go ahead, Greg. I'm trying to do it. It's just like being in the office. Yeah. So we stopped the staff group working in this met yesterday. We kicked around some ideas. Basically what you see right now will be the landing page for the town piece of the website. The way... So the contract and city plus, there'll be basically four different header pages involved where they can have a little bit similar look but different headers, different buttons, different types of stuff. And different headers, what this refers to is these headers up here, different buttons down here. So for the various other departments, so we were looking at four different header pages. The four header pages we're looking at are one for the town, one for the village, which we'll probably keep in the back at this point. But whenever if the rent is ready to go forward, we'll launch that. One for the recreation departments, they have their busiest web pages go to recreation. They have a little bit of a different functionality than the rest of the website. And then library for the same reason. It's a free library. Brown and Alice don't have to be keeping their own website. So what you see now is it's pretty basic. It hasn't been built out, but it gives you a sense of what you can expect going forward. So that's pretty much it. We'll touch on some of the changes a little bit and just walk you through what we're seeing if you have any questions. So the original website that they gave us had some stuff that we've modified to make it just look a little bit cleaner, a little more simple. And as you can see, compared to the town's website, this is a much simpler, just overall visually appealing site. The ease of use is one of the key components and in the survey that was one of the common things that people were looking for was a site that was consistent, clean, but also was easy to navigate. Search function that was also strong. Whereas our search function now in our site, if you type stuff in, you may, if you're lucky, find it. Most likely you're not. So we wanted a search function that really worked for people so they could just come in and instead of having to navigate through the various menu items which still work and if people want to do it that way, that's fine. But if they want to use the search button, that's also a strong function that we're adding to this. So just some of the other features that we have, we have these news events down here or just this information that we want to present to people. This is also a carousel, kind of like similar to the picture where we'll rotate on reloads. We have the ability to do these pictures and make it so that they're themed with the particular season. So, you know, this. Which is coming soon. Next week. Next week. That's what you'll be seeing. But same with the news items. Right now there are these three things that they threw up there for the month. But as we add stuff, say we have five, six items, these will rotate through. So you'll just, when you come here, you'll see that if there's something new that you want to look at, this is just about to go to. A calendar of events. The various sub pages as well. People are going to have their own calendar. So if the right department wants a calendar for their events, it would be separate than this calendar. Some of the, some of those entries can be linked back to the main page calendar. So four bigger items. We have that ability as well. Yeah, I mean, we sent you the seniors if they had a page, they could have their own calendar. Yes, exactly. I think as we talked yesterday, the seniors would fall under the wreck page. But, you know, we're open to... But if they were a link, they'd have a page underneath and a calendar if they wanted one. Yes. You can't see them. Right. Come over. Hey, George. So are these going to be all Essex images? As a photographer, I'm curious. I've got it online, so why don't you just put it back to the audience? I'll put it back to the audience. I want to put it back to the audience. Yeah, we'd love to get a better photo library. Yeah, definitely. An attribution. Having your name on a picture is much better than getting paid. That's what I'm told. Daily. Annie. Could there be also, for example, a simplistic, that didn't come out right, like a clean path for a senior, such as almost myself, to be able to go, and it was seriously, to be able to go and click through to where they need to find, so even though that would be under the wreck page, maybe... The current senior center's URL. No, I'm just saying. So are you saying that the... Do you want to say what I'm saying? I think so. So what we're talking about is the... Getting back to the functionality of it. Some people are going to want to go, and they're going to want to click through government referees and senior centers. Some people just want to land on the... That's what I'm saying. Type in senior center and have it pop up. Yeah, I'm not sure... We'll have to talk about that, because there's so much information that you've got there on the homepage and really high real estate. I guess I'm just being thoughtful about my mom who's 76, if she's in Brooklyn, but if she were in our community and needed to find something, her best path is to get to the website, because I think that the utilization of technology is newer in the land of a 76-year-old, and it would be really nice if we could simplify that to the degree where they alone would have a faster path than others, if you had to. I agree with Annie. The UX experience for certain audiences is going to be really important, so seniors might need a one-stop click. Yeah. If they're currently using the senior center website right now, that URL is just going to be redirected to wherever that page lives within this site, so anyone that has that bookmark now when this changes, they're just going to click on that bookmark and it's going to bring them to the new site, but your point is valid too. I mean, if there's things that, as we come across them, and there's going to be analytics that are constantly run on the page, so if we find stuff that is being clicked or people are constantly going to it, it's taking two, three, four clicks to get to, we can then look at moving that to a more better spot for people to find quickly. I think I'm so in love with this implicit, sorry, I'm so in love with this simplicity here that my brain just really wants another layer of that for, are you saying that the right department would be through this or not, but either way, just it feels like maybe a second row of that, not to ruin your site, it's just I'm excited because this is beautiful, and so my excitement level about the simplicity of that makes me want to see a senior circle. So if we do choose to put them on the REC page, the REC page will look somewhat like this, it might, it will probably say whatever it says here, whatever that term is, but their buttons here are going to be different than these buttons on the front page, so that might be a better spot for that type of thing. I think I've made this more difficult than I should have been, I should probably stop talking. I'm just saying I want a senior citizen button that looks like that on the home page. That's all I'm saying.  It's beautiful, I love it. Thank you. Well done. The event has been really positive. Yes, beautiful. Can I point something out here? So you, so we're, this is the village of Essex.  The town of Essex owns 81 Main Street and the police station. Other than that, every piece of public infrastructure in this community is owned by the village of Essex Junction. Every street, every sidewalk, every waterline, sewer line, park, bridge is owned by the village, and regulated by the village of Essex Junction. Okay. And all the ordinances that are enforceable in the village of Essex Junction are under the jurisdiction of the Essex Junction government, not the town of Essex. So when we say the town inside the village, we have to be very careful we don't get carried away because the town's presence inside the village is kind of minimal. And yet here it's disappearing. We've just become the village of Essex. What's that? This is the village of Essex Junction website. Okay. And so there's going to be a village of Essex Junction website. Well where's the village of Essex? Okay. I just want to make sure we're not just disappearing in the whole community. I think the idea is that from the town webpage you can click on village of Essex Junction and go to the villages page without having to find it do a search. It's right there. It's kind of like a Niagara Falls kind of thing. Similarly right now on the town of Essex's website right in the center it talks about what Essex is inclusive of the village of Essex Junction that garbage village of Essex Junction is a link that goes to the village website. Okay. Good. Sorry. I got a little confused here. I came into a play. I don't think CIDIC Plus's terminology matters is a great term because it doesn't people don't think about it like a completely separate page. When I first heard Department Hatter all I was thinking was it's a dropdown but it's not that it's their independent pages that that are tied together they're ultimately one on the back end it's all you've seen as one on the front end you've seen four distinct pages so how they're interacting library would be those four distinct pages. Is it safe to say that what you're presenting us this evening is a look and feel and a navigation demonstration and that the content is going to be like probably the next demo that we get so this is just what it looks like here's what it's probably going to look like how do you like the look how do you like the look thank you so as we're improving that website we need to keep in mind that there's in rural Essex there are folks that don't have broadband access they have internet but it's relatively slow so I want to make sure that what we end up with doesn't frustrate those folks and have it not load pictures are too high resolution or something maybe that's going to bog it down but anyway I want to make sure that this will be functional for the folks in rural Essex too that don't have broadband yet hopefully we'll get there but they're not there today so we need to be cognizant of that some of the things that we've done to at least sort of address that this the picture that you see here the carousel that was cool rotate there's only two pictures right now we could set that up so it's a constant rotation so every 10 to 15 seconds you get a new picture that adds to the the performance of that person's computer you know computers here where there's high speed it doesn't matter but yeah if it's slow then absolutely another option that is presented to us was instead of still photos here we could have done a video and it looks really nice but I think it's just too much yeah it's distracting and it's a load on some people's computers and we're trying to we're trying to design this for the lowest common denominator when it comes to the pages of the hardware that it's going to be used on in fact one good example of this is this entire bar here where the quick bumps are we had to have that moved up had that moved out because the resolution on this laptop here was so low that this bar wasn't visible so all you saw was from this right here this line of the picture and it went all the way down to the bottom and a lot of people would go and scroll down but there's plenty of people that would try to design this so that you don't even have to think about it it's like oh there's buttons here granted it does cut them off slightly on this particular computer it doesn't give you the actual descriptions of them but you see the buttons are there and you know that there's something to go to just the picture below just the help of the search bar and is this being designed primarily for laptops or what about the mobile applications a lot of people are going to be using that and be nice to them we can actually look at what that's going to look so if you go to this would be or this is a mosquito responsive site but if we went to say the phone stay that's what you're going to get pretty similar you get into the iPhone X you can see it starts to bring up that quick button the quick button bar is that slideable it would be slideable up and down up and down so if you want to get to the other button that's not this way it's not this way oh show me that again sorry so you're designing it for all sorts of performance great okay that's wonderful thank you and I know I think I touched on this in the beginning but this is the highest standard of ADA compliance so that's why you'll look at some of the colors they don't pop necessarily but that's by design that's so that it's a soothing color for people that have problems with that certain colors can cause seizures and we want to design this with let's say of our no seizures yeah that wasn't one of the options up there we don't want people driving looking at their watch I know there's a lot of information and I want to see I want to see I want to scroll all the way up I want to see the yeah yeah oh that's great thank you Rob can I ask you a couple more questions back on the laptop version of the site up in the upper left there's a statement about signing in you can make an account you can sign in on the upper right is that for our residents to create their own personalized version of the website no it's not for that it is for the residents it's also for staff so the sign on function the verbatim we're going to change because it's not real descriptive we all decided it doesn't sound good it's not going to be real helpful for people but what that gives them is when they sign into that then if they set up their notifications so then they can tie in to whatever notifications that they want to rack, library so that'll duplicate the notify me button it's kind of one of the same the mock up here these buttons aren't necessarily what we're set a cell with I think are probably going to stay there there usually seems to make most sense but some of them might not and notify me isn't necessarily a good one since it's right above but also that's going to be like the staff's client so it's so there's two levels of sign on either your internal or your arrest and the report a concern how can that go to C-Click Fix it's going to be C-Click Fix's replacement this is Civic Plus was able to customize their engagement program or request tracking program for not just external residence reporting whatever there's problems but also they are going to design it for internal reports so for help desk software we're going to eliminate what we're using now so that it's going to be kind of a one-stop shop we'll go to the report building concern computer problem that's so far as you know there's certainly a lot more we can add to that okay and then my last question is actually a comment I really like the how do I that's a really nice functionality and you could choose the most common things how do I pay my taxes how do I get a dog license how do I do this that's a really nice function I think it's great that it's up on the high level menu yeah and if you can't find it in there you've got this search bar and then you've got administrative navigation as well so there's a lot of different areas where people can find data I think yeah thank you so when you're filling out when residents filling out forms on this to apply or whatever we'll have that automatic fill option in a way a lot of documents do on websites where you know it can automatically put in your email address and your phone number can this be able to do that that's a browser you're going to be signing up for isn't necessarily a repeat fillable form it's going to be just kind of sign in and create the account if you've been to the site before and went through it it'll start to fill you most likely it will start to fill that stuff in for you but it's not the type of form more than you're submitting it's going to someone and they've been taking it from there so if they come back multiple times it'll start to but you wouldn't necessarily sign that in again you would already have your account created and you just sign in using your password I think what you're talking about is more of a local browser thing that you sign in your computer is that right? Annie, you have another question? I have an amped up question of maxis which the more I think about it the more it would be it's a possible task but I'm going to ask it anyway I think I'm very wrong that this is possible I think it would be outrageously hard but I'd like to be a why not ask let's say I'm one of my neighbors who lives in Essex not me and then they go into can you go up a little bit there can you take that screen up slowly so they go into is it possible to win the payments and because you're signed in and you have an account I was an e-payment sender I'm just I'm wondering it would be exciting to imagine that if I had to go pay my water bill or whatever then it would save my credit card number well you don't want that no no no it's not like that it's just enough of it that you still need your backcode or something like that it's so much easier and it would probably if we were to do that we would use a plugin of a different vendor of course I'm not saying I want the town to have my credit card number there's somebody that works on this right the village is not doing this yet right we're not moving down this path yet you can pay your credit card or your tax bill on one though we've got the look we've got the feel we love it looks great we love it great thank you sorry yeah and as far as what we use for paying bills online it is a third party company because we don't want anything to do with storage that's how that all works though that's how that all works though no no you can tap to your data store locally it's not a good idea but I mean there's all sorts of requirements that we should have but could a third party thing could store it I have no more questions I'm happy to hear I actually don't have a question I have a comment so I'm going to be like the cranky old man ready but I mentioned this at our strategic advance and I'll mention it again now during the regular meeting because a few people weren't here which is that I think you guys do a great job with IT great job with the website respectfully I don't think that we need to cover this over 3 plus meetings of design like I think that once we get to give the guys a direction they can do the job and then come back to us at the end when it's finished again I love that you're checking in I love that you're trying to make it as user friendly as possible and getting as much input but it looks like you did that with the forms and everything I don't feel like we need to be consulted or hand holding you every step of the way when you're a professional so as Raj says we're talking late we're talking about not going in the weeds and here we are jumping in the weeds so just putting that out there that's one person's opinion excuse me some of these phone beeping or something you get in a really loud people I do hear it it's outside I hear it chalk outside it's a phone behind you everybody's nothing beeping I hear it so you're saying it's to the mics the website everybody cover your mic a second got it yeah I hear it we can hear it I'll volunteer that it's me ready I'll leave I said it first you can't hear yourself with the with the website thank you so then we can go ahead and move on to item 5b the follow up discussion from the strategic advance I know personally it's quite the it's feedback yeah can we can we so don't push it so hard damn oh my god this is excited alright we're going to take a five minute recess so we can settle down Don't okay Excuse me, are you from the I.T. department? I'm from the I.T. department. Do you need this number? It's my cheesy number case. I think you're right about the five minutes though. Well, we'll give maybe a couple of minutes for... We haven't used all five yet. Oh, this is the five minutes? This is the five. Yeah, we're in a recess. We were on break two minutes ago.  There's plenty of stuff up here to eat. Plenty of cookies and grapes up here if you need any. Oh, sorry. And cheese. Yeah. More cheese. Get that one out. Come on, sir. We don't need a bomb. It's all good. Nobody's gone now. Oh. Come on, this is it. Oh. I don't think it's a big deal. Well, I'd love to get two into the weeds. I was coming to say something. Well, I should have figured it out. You weren't there at the... I was like, sometimes I do get two into the weeds. Like the website. And then we did it. There's a lot of detail in the details. And then we did it. Yeah, we did it. And then we did it. Well, part of it is like, you shouldn't do it. This is hard to write. Well, we're going to be doing this. So I'll just say to him, take the lead on it. But I just got to ask him for the bill of... Okay, how's everyone feel? Well, I'm a little jumpy. Is our IT back under control mic? Or is your camera okay? Okay, we've lost our manager. And we lost Andy. Maybe only quicker. Don't worry, the camera was on. The mic is on. So why don't we go ahead and just bring this back around? We're just keeping it consistently under control. So, raining it into agenda item 5B, the follow-up discussion from the strategic advance. I know I found the strategic advance was a fantastic day. Frankly, I have no problems having spent that Saturday with all of you, from those of you that were able to join us. I know I greatly appreciated the work that staffed in, getting it all together. I greatly appreciate the consultants and the environment that they were able to create, the facilitation skills. And also, just the honest feedback we got from staff and the caping the ability to actually have a free-flowing conversation with staff outside of this formalized meeting and into an atmosphere where, frankly, I felt more on a peer-to-peer level in less of a board on this side of the room, staff on that side of the room. So I greatly appreciated the event. And as Elaine and I talked about earlier, thinking this is something that should happen again and not just being able to do it once, but to take it off and move on with our lives. And it was so worth the time. And we had opportunities on both the staff side and the elected official side to truly understand the impact of what the work we're doing right now. And for me, I came away with an even deeper understanding of what our work means to staff. They are working so hard. And a lot of what we're doing is making life more difficult temporarily, hopefully. Understanding things from the staff perspective was extremely helpful. I would like to thank staff again for being honest and spending their Saturday with us and helping us move everything forward because it was well worth the time. Does anyone else want to share observations? Ask questions. George and Annie, did you have questions for us? My apologies for not being there. Oh, it's totally okay. Okay, I have to say my sincere apologies and also formal. I really am sad I missed it. Is there anything you're dying to know that we covered that we haven't made you aware of yet? No, I'm sad I missed the experience of it. I don't think you can hear that to me, but I appreciate that it happened. It's beautiful that it happened. So Jen Nour has begun compiling the notes from the session and we will be getting those in the near future. Evan, do you or Sarah or Greg, do you want to share your thoughts on the day? First, second. No, I just echo what both of you said. I appreciate board members coming out. Sorry, that just happened again. I appreciate you coming out on the Saturday. Give it up to... It's been something like the anniversary search room. That's the Saturday of the year so far. I think staff has found it very worthwhile as well the feedback that they've gotten. Quick change to interact. We didn't really have anything specific for this agenda item. Just thought we'd put it on there not knowing how the day was going to play out. Wanted to have a chance to discuss it. Jen sent in her summary earlier today and Jen is already working with that. Working with Jen, coming up with a potential kind of strategic roadmap going forward that we can present to you. Staff, we've also kicked around the idea of doing this. Making this an annual thing and either late April or early May once the new boards take effect or reorientation. Reorientation takes effect in just kind of an annual strategic work session going forward. And I know hearing from staff personally I also felt it was great that we were able to hear that while there may be some things that we need to discuss and some things that might be not deal breakers but some roadblocks that we need to get over some hurdles that we need to get through but nothing that is insurmountable. And hearing even some of those solutions were also great to hear from the staff themselves. Great question maybe. Trying to get soon enough but on the docket either late April, first week of May start doing this, we have elections you might have new trustees, new select board members. It would be somewhat like an orientation session get to meet the names in the faces all in one room. Here's what has been decided in the past whatever, here's things please talk to us etc etc and just on an annual basis. Because one of the things that we talked about is okay, if there is a vote and it's positive if you want to call it positive or it says do this it will take several years to actually do that. Can't do it overnight and it may take a while to do it depending upon what that plan included. If the vote is the other way it still may take a while to talk about how things are going to go how people want things to go and how staff is going to do X, Y and Z. So it's a good thing to have either way. And so we enjoyed it we appreciated that so many people gave up a full Saturday what turned out to be a very beautiful Saturday but it was well worth it and as Greg mentioned we've had a little bit of opportunity to bump into some department heads who were there generally positive comments they really appreciated your interaction with them and them with you. And we all managed to say super sacrifice at least 12 times I was super helpful as a new trustee it was super helpful as a new trustee to be able to read the reports ahead of time and meet the departments I had met before so that was great. Were there any other comments or questions? So then we can go ahead to 5C the creation of Why Merge Elevator Speech and Greg I see this is from you if you don't mind usually we just have you introduce it I kind of want to just jump on something real quick before I give it to you one of the things we heard a little bit about this at the beginning of the meeting I want us to focus on what we originally agreed upon when I say we what I'm talking about is back on April 25th of 2018 there was a joint select board meeting and there was a joint trustee meeting where during that meeting one of the things that we did is every single one of us went around the room and talked about what is it we're trying to work towards what is the end goal I want to keep in mind that at that time some of the people at the table now are not here and some of the people at the table now were not in that meeting but at that point in time as we went around the room every single member from both of those boards had agreed to the end goal of one board and one community there was one person who didn't agree with that and George I'm not trying to call you out the one thing that you had said is that you favored two boards but I think this is at the point in time before the subcommittee went to the work so I'm hoping that that actually can't happen I don't want to divert you but I just said I was in favor of one board but as an expedient to get us there I thought could we just quickly take advantage of an upcoming legislative session to see if we could have the two boards basically integrate the way we're doing it right now that's all I'm not going to call you out I'm just trying to show that what we had agreed upon was to work towards the end goal of one community and one board what we didn't agree to was a merger what we did agree to was a new community and so I say this because what I'd like to challenge us to do is as we talk about this elevator speech as we move forward with the rest of the meeting and even into our future meeting is to not focus on a merger it's not talk about why we merge but rather why do we want a new community why do we want one board why do we want one community given to some of the things that we have heard about the word merger what that may invoke for people also merger isn't what we agreed upon we did agree on one community so again even this agenda item of why the elevator speech I would invite us to think of a different phrase instead of merge possibly why have a new community why have one community if anybody has a better solution or a better option I'd love to hear it but before we get too far down with what's a elevator speech could be I'd like for us to have some agreement as to what this is that we're talking about I would agree that the word merger is unnecessary also I don't know that it can be called merger because I'm a resident of the town I live in the village I'm a resident of the town I'm absolutely a town resident just to be clear I am a resident of Essex town I live in the village and I'm a resident of the town so I'm as much a resident of the town as people who live above the McDonald's up by Essex and I'm a resident of the town so I don't know that merger is a word because I'm already a resident of the town I just also have a resident of the village that's confusing for me I think it's confusing for a lot of people I would love to see the situation where it was what's the word you used before a new community a new community which is us I think, thank you thank you for bringing that up and thank you for finding those minutes to help remind us what we agreed to at the start of this process I think we're going to find ourselves tripping over our tongues a little bit trying to dance around the M word and I don't want to call it the M word because it just sort of makes it sound like an evil horrible thing that we should be talking about so yeah, we need to find some more common language around what our actual goal is another term that Bob mentioned from the audience earlier and we've talked about it on Saturdays rather than saying tax equity we should probably be saying appropriate taxation or something of that nature because that way it just covers everything and it doesn't bring back it doesn't foster feelings of unfairness so earlier in this process last year the government subcommittee excuse me, the boards tasked myself and Irene Renner when she was a select board member to come up with a common set of definitions and it might be a good idea to put those back in our packets maybe for the next meeting just to refresh our memories and make sure that we're using common language that makes sense to everybody and that we've all agreed upon Can I turn to my thoughts? The only thing I'm going to say about Merge and I think Andy has pointed this out as well is that state statute and I'm sorry, let me apologize before about my tirade by S. X. Junction but I'm very hung up on the legal background that we want to do but we have to understand that there's this whole body of law that deals with merging a village in a town and it doesn't matter, you can't wish it away it's there and the word the legal word is merger it's in the state statutes and we can go if we avoid saying merger all the time and then we go to a vote in 2020 that vote has to be in legal language it's going to have to say merger and all of a sudden you're going to go wait a second, we weren't talking about merger and now you guys are asking us to merge so I'm sorry it's problematic it may be painful or troubling or difficult but the word is going to have to be introduced into the discussion at some point I suggest we inoculate ourselves slowly you're going to have to inoculate because the language that people are going to be voting on is going to say merger I think one way around that is to agree as a board that what we're doing right now when we say merge we don't mean what it meant to people who take it the way they're taking it from 10 years ago we mean coming together as a new community or whatever our definition is now and people are just going to have to understand that we have to use the word like you said it can't be the first time they see it and take offense to it but this is how we mean it going forward if it's used and people just have to understand that you know we we're talking about something a little bit bigger than personal feelings personal feelings that you know sure that they exist but you know we got to move on I think what you're looking for is why are we moving away from the staff's what's basically what's so bad with the situation now and why are we trying to change it I don't have an answer but I think that's really what we're talking about here we're trying to come up with 3 or 4 or 5 reasons why we want to change the way things are similarly along the lines of when we had Emerson who was here and the St. Albans crew one of the things that was utilized was a better Essex so whether it's going to keep going this is why we want to do this on Saturday we kind of had the discussion about during the vision discussion there was a bunch of things that were written on the white board gents put circles around the important themes I think those are the themes that need to go in here so I think that's a good starting point do we have a picture of that? yes so one more to get a picture of that Anne George I really find that what you said about the word merger is very valuable so much so if you could please succinctly somehow formalize that statement because I would really like to ingest that hard so that I think that's the smartest thing I have heard about that word and that would work for me to truly understand and so many people like myself I struggled for a long time to even comprehend everything and so that's such a clear factual situation that I think that's really important to good point just a quick second before just a quick second before I just want to make sure that the board has had an opportunity and then we'll absolutely have time for public comment just hold on a moment though I do want to make sure that is there anything else on the board's side we're supposed to decide it's still your job Bob please George I appreciate your explanation and I'm thinking that since the word consolidation has been used the last two or three years as I understand it in part because we were not changing the charters of either entity and merger is what has to happen in order to do away with the old and create a new so I think some connection between what has been going on with that kind of explanation would be really useful just to build on what you said thank you John sugar I think this unification is a great idea we should proceed that way and I think you talk about unifying the town and the village all the time and you can use that other word as infrequently as possible let the lawyers worry about that and just talk about unifying the town and the village well you can talk about consolidating but I'd like to unify them that symbolizes it coming together and that sort of thing one other sort of off the wall thing I'd like to know a way to get one of those t-shirts I think they're going to rapidly become a collector's item John I'm not sure who had their hand up first in the back I read in 2007 one of the options that was a transaction among people was something called Bennington option apparently Bennington at one point the village that dissolved their charter so there may be lots of legal ways to do unification and since we've hired or obtained an attorney to look into those options I would suggest that the garden subcommittee spend some time looking at the different ways that unification can happen because I'm betting that enough money and spending enough time could find a couple different ways to do this and find a way to do it without using my elbow Hi, I'm Annie from Watson I live on McGee Road and that is what I understand the town outside the village but I really find all of this annoying so hurry up and get this done however I do want to say as a town person or rural person that if I'm in the elevator with you here is a way to tell me how becoming one entity is going to benefit me or offend me economically, recreationally in terms of services education governance like I just as I'm listening to you folks struggle with the term and what's it going to look like I'm thinking yeah what about us and I know you get this so I appreciate what you're trying to do to clarify it among yourselves but yes we need to know that always is going to be a good name and I think a whole bunch of us would just like it to be over however don't rush it talk to us, let us know how we can contribute in the elevator yeah, tell us about the impact on us what's going to happen okay, thanks Thank you, the way that just reminds me quickly of utilizing the heart and soul values as how a unification, how a new community would then impact everybody by using these heart and soul values it's funny when you said that the heart and soul heart and soul do you know what heart and soul is go ahead well I don't think I will waffle on if someone can very succinctly say what heart and soul is for those who don't know do you know what heart and soul we want to grant a community, are you going to say it? we want to grant well I was so sad because I wanted to be on the committee, I was crushed crushed, I wasn't on the committee but we want to grant from the org family of 10, how much 150 and there was a lot of outreach to all of Essex to try to learn all the things we're talking about and deliver and so they came up with a set of values and there was videos still about that yep at my high school age son killed himself over oh sorry worked really hard on them and I'm grateful for that work and I'm glad that those values are something we're still looking at absolutely so we need to do a recommendation from each board yes Andy just wanted to ask the question of what we intend to do with this elevator speech I think the intention was that we were going to ask the government subcommittee to come up with a very brief statement that each one of us could memorize and be able to talk to our residents about why we are exploring unifying in some way okay so it's not intended to explain the final position because we're not okay someone says why are you guys doing this here's the answer two sentences talking about it and so we all say very similar things so that we all have common language and we don't it helps us work from the same place that was quick did you have your hand up? you keep doing that do any of the select board members have any further comments or questions about this business item? just very quickly when you are creating this the things that are important to me the economic reasons mentioning how a 21,000 member community purchasing power is just great potentially lower taxes for everyone public works we kind of know where the sidewalks are we don't have two different resources out shoveling wherever at different points of the day I think the economic ones the recreation ones those are the two big ones for me I would just like to hear something in that perhaps we could ask the board members or not to send what their thoughts are that they want to make sure that we consider as we vibrate straps are welcome straps are welcome Andy is going to start writing now direct them to ideas not that we will do all of that but I would like to hear from all of them and Andy has reminded us of the things that gen circle is still down to some level I know there is at least one picture but Dan the whole thing in terminology like George said legalese is going to have to be a certain way but as far as doing anything with elevator speech whatever you want to call it why merge I want to see maybe less of that and more of just the facts ma'am not really saying this is what I want this is a here's some options this is what can happen I think in some ways for the public out there they can perceive it as almost like we're pushing an agenda and I don't want to push an agenda I want to push information no agenda you make your decision, here's the past this isn't the first go around with this I think a lot of people are clueless to that I've been around this state this has been going on in many communities many communities have come together unify whatever you want to do it and we're still one of the holdouts and I think that's something that people need to be educated in the history of this all the things that it entails the woman that stood up in the back I think there's a lot of lack of understanding or just because they don't have the history they don't know what's gone on just as much as we talked at the beginning about having another retreat and another joint meeting that we did last week for the benefit of new members and everybody coming together just like we should be doing more so with our communities as a whole on this issue at town meeting or at village meeting we don't really delve into those we just kind of deal with the budget move the thing through is a question are there any other comments from the board ok so we'll have to make two separate motions from the trustees I would move that the trustees authorize a government subcommittee to draft a wide unify elevator speech or final approval by both boards I'll second is there any further discussion all those in favor please signify by sending aye aye anybody opposed thank you would a select board member like to make a similar motion I'd like so many it was not on a subcommittee to do what, Annie? what's the thing we did the other day so it's written right on the bottom ditto got it Annie has moved is there a second second any discussion all those in favor please say aye aye alright thank you and thank you government subcommittee yes thank you so we're all going to send you our thoughts yes we've got we're going to send it to Evan send it to Evan which speaking of the government subcommittee that would bring us to item 5d to have an update from the government subcommittee I'm going to defer it over to Max because I wasn't at the last government subcommittee but can I just point one thing out there were four members in the government subcommittee and we're the point people for the two elected boards who are handling the survey and focus group and sort of the outreach to the community about consolidation integration merger whatever we want to call it and those four members are Raj and me and Max and Andy and Raj and I are from the village and Andy and Max are from the town outside the village that's 2 and 2 it's equal just wanted to point that out now defer it over to Max so as vice chair of the subcommittee since George wasn't there as chair I ran the meeting it took place on June 20th at 7pm right here at 2 Lincoln street the first thing one of the things we did for the business items was we reviewed the draft survey with KSV and we went over the survey intro which is a few questions in the beginning we went over all 20 questions that were proposed we ended up modifying some eliminating others and adding others as well which we thought we needed for some clarity and we also talked about trying to schedule our next subcommittee meetings and George you weren't there but we selected July 18th at 7pm and then July 26th at 8am for our next meetings and so KSV can put that on their schedule to join us so hopefully that works for you we also received an update on potential merger website we didn't see the contents of it but we did talk about possible names and staff made a recommendation and we went with it I think we're going to be talking about that again a little bit later and then we we also approved the governance subcommittee meeting minutes of June 6th and June 13th we took public comment at two points in the process near the beginning and kind of towards the end and then that was a wrap and that was Andy Watz was there Raj, Jala and myself did I miss anything Andy or Raj? no we're waiting for I'm sorry KSV when are they supposed to be when do we see the draft back that's the next meeting right? I'm not sure we recall when KSV is going to come back we should survey tomorrow we'll have it ready tomorrow it'll be by tomorrow which is the reason why we have to have some of the discussion we need to have later about the roles of the subcommittee that's all I had on the update so we can then move on to 5B and approve the web address for the website are you going to take this one Raj? no I was going to stop but I'm going to wait for you I was going to turn this one over to is this Greg or Evan? yeah this is from Ann and she's not here so so speaking for Ann we're technically trying to create an information portal where people can learn about unification, governance change whatever you want to call it that's coming up in November 2021 I want to keep people informed I want to give them history so we're talking about doing a website that will have information about what's being proposed infographic about what's being proposed the process, the history of the town and the village and past attempts at merger and separation looking at the current government structures we can understand the status quo also answers to frequently asked questions we can be updated throughout the process as they come in and getting links to studies and reports that are associated with the current proposal we looked at what the options are to build the website amongst the short the fragmentation is that we use weekly created insight can be fairly simple fairly straightforward not too dynamic more just information although it's still user friendly and look okay aesthetically but really just informational staff looked at a few websites that would be the potential only for it and we've got another recommendation since then as well the government subcommittee took staff's recommendation for Essex merger 2020.org maybe that's going to change after tonight but the idea was the top two choices were Essex merger mode 2020 was a little bit shorter it's the guidelines that tech people suggest for typing in website life another idea that has come in since then is greater Essex 2020 the websites also available so the government subcommittee's recommendation was Essex merger 2020 but by no means we welcome to that thank you Rajee said you wanted to hold off if you want to ready I regulated to my thought after tonight's conversation I wanted to revisit the government subcommittees recommended URL I was based on tonight's conversation I didn't know if we wanted to reconsider the domain name for the website the word merger there if so few minutes ago we talked about it three six 2020 how about greater Essex 2020 which is the one that they reserved we're going to make that sort of a name that we're going to publicize somehow and use a lot or why would we choose that's up to you guys assuming we get to the next business all that thought just it would be my preference not to have a URL with the word merger as long as it doesn't say merger I don't care if it's greater Essex if it's unify Essex 2020 out of those they all sound good I don't mind if we those options and then the subcommittee were to go further from that Annie has a handle Essex 2020.org is available they've already done it I'm just saying no so we're only going to go with those choices that they've reserved what I'm trying to say is you don't need to search for that because I take care of it but I wasn't going to suggest one that we couldn't get so I had a quick look that's all I did I wasn't trying to do their job I do have a slight concern I love greater Essex.org a lot and I think it's great I have a concern what? I would love the joke if we said greater Essex it's great that's all well I fear that I worry that we love Essex already and I would hate to make anyone think that we thought it had to be you know what I mean let me explain the genesis of this so a couple weeks ago we had the pleasure of hosting Liz Gamache former mayor of St. Albans and Emerson Lin for owner of the Essex Reporter and Jim O'Rourke the current owner of the Essex Reporter and they shared with us their experiences about St. Albans when they went through their downtown revitalization and Emerson who was the editor of the paper at the time and the owner had explained that the parlance that the town of St. Albans began to use to describe the future goal of the community was greater St. Albans and we kind of liked that and we thought greater Essex encompasses the whole community and greater Essex I understand the reference that you're concerned about and that raises a red flag for me but if we it's what it is so that's a discussion for both boards to decide I think that if we're going to worry about somebody taking that I mean that's ridiculous too shouldn't you rate that I'm happy to hear it because I actually want it because then you could say make Essex you know but okay so I'd like to make a moment thank you Dan so we could either make a figure out the URL we want now or we could give some options that I've already or you could just say to the subcommittee you've heard some options I have to make a recommendation our task is to see what we're doing so you're going to have to limit it one Essex or greater Essex greater Essex um I think we're running with that greater Essex like it's been used pretty frequently in meetings since then so let's I can I put forward the motion go for it make a decision and don't waver I do have the select work review of greater Essex 2020.org for the address of the merger website I second any discussion we just went through Pepe the Frog recently at the high school and we're using the word great in association with 2020 I have some reservations about that I'm having trouble understanding the connection between a misconstrued event and a high school you've got a national candidate using using great the word great in an election in 2020 I think we're all better than that I'm not sure that I would make the connection I do it I don't think the connection is there I get the point but I just I'm not sure there's a I can see what we're saying I can also see Andy year one of ten and so if ten percent of the population says what is this you know it's related to this candidate is that what we're talking about here I can see what you're saying I think we ripped the bandaid off and leave merger in there I think we're fine with that we have a motion in the second on the table so you ask for discussion right right so I just want to make sure does anybody else have any discussion on the select work side Andy do you have any further comments okay so we're going to go ahead and vote all those in favor of using greater Essex me.org as the website for identification process say I all those opposed all right the motion carries four to one from the trustees I'll make the same motion for the trustees and is there any further discussion all all those in favor please signify by saying I anybody opposed okay thank you and so this was when we were going to move item 5G the appoint of alternates to the government subcommittee Greg did you want to Greg did you want to introduce this one sure and 5G the new 5G the old 5G appointing alternates so the question is whether or not we want to appoint alternates to the government subcommittee meeting we had meeting two weeks ago I want to say where only two members showed up for other reasons but it was just scheduling was tough there's only four members so if two people can't make it we're stuck without a quorum there were no decisions being made that night so it wasn't a huge issue it was more of a work session with KSB but it did bring up the problem of not having quorum having to make a vote at some point so I thought one option would be for each of the boards to appoint alternates to be able to step up when necessary and keep decisions being made and functionality moving forward and I did not explain that long enough to yeah I think the thing is if I can jump in Greg I didn't mean to I'd take it away but it was kind of I'm sorry I had to apologize it was kind of like a mutual idea on the committee because we're kind of tied to KSB at KSB's schedule and there and we've given them a lot to do and they've got three major pieces of work to get done by mid-October and when they're ready to meet with us we don't want to say okay our next meeting will be you know in August 15th or something like that we have to meet with them when they're ready and that caused some conflicts with just the four of us so we thought why not each of us appoint some alternates so that if I can't make it like I wasn't able to last week someone else can come so that we can kind of keep the ball moving forward that really is just the whole concept but we didn't want to do it separately we didn't want the trustees to appoint alternates without the select board doing it and vice versa so we thought we would hold off and do it all at once at the same table so we all agree on appointing alternates but if the subcommittee doesn't really have any power to make decisions it's really not going to slow up the process if we don't have it or we just can't approve the minutes really it's about the only thing we can approve I mean it's a good point it's just did we want to have if we have four slots there representing the two boards did we want to make sure that there's always representation from you know equal representation from the two boards always present at the table I mean I can't imagine it happening but for example if some night you and Andy can't make it well then we've got two village people on the subcommittee you know running the show and that might you know raise hackles so and vice versa so we just thought let's let's have alternates Andy? just to be clear if two village residents are at the meeting so also are two town residents and I really feel very strongly that it's the most valuable thing we can remember that those of us that are village residents are also town residents and we do and I do I can assure you and I think Raj speaking for Raj I think Raj does too but I think the thing is that we're trying to be as sensitive as we possibly can to all political concerns we're trying to depoliticize this thing to the greatest extent possible representing the board so even if it's you know if it were George and I we would not be representing there was nobody representing the select board so it's more about board representation than it's about the reason we're having the reason we're having this discussion is because with KSB as George said they're on a tight timeline there are gonna need to be decisions that are made that's the next item on the agenda but when can the select board give approval to KSB to move forward on survey questions on focus groups greetings on everything else it's a appointed subcommittee and if they are going to be given some decision making authority by the rest of the boards they're going to have to have requirements we think it's a good idea to keep things moving Andy I'm going to be consistent I didn't express my concern about having three board members appointed to a subcommittee with the risk of inadvertent violation of open meeting law by having a three-way discussion about town business or village business similar to the fact that we don't have email discussions right if if a regular member an alternate member attend a meeting then one of them tells the regular member what happened there then you've got a three-way discussion that has happened outside of a public meeting that's the way I view it I understand others have different views on that so I have again I'm being consistent in reservations about having three appointed members on a subcommittee with the potential of establishing a quorum outside of a warned public meeting rather than appoint alternates I would like to propose that we appoint Evan as a member with Greg as an alternate so that quorum can be established by having the presence of two appointed members two appointed board members plus one or the other or both with only one vote of Evan and Greg so that you can get you can establish a quorum by having two members excuse me I was interrupting you please continue the quorum would be established by two board members plus one member of staff if we were to appoint a member of staff to the committee also it's our committee it's our collective committee we can appoint whomever we choose to it so I don't think there's any restriction that the members of the subcommittee have to be elected officials I'm to avoid the issue of potential open meeting violation of a three-way conversation between members of this same board establishing quorum outside of an open meeting I prefer to have non board members appointed to make up the third person of a potential short quorum for a meeting I'm not clear on when would this three-way conversation take place that you're concerned about I'm not clear on how that happens so if we have a meeting on july 18th and I'm not there right and Pat's there on the 19th I call Pat and ask him what happened at the meeting that's a three-way conversation don't call Pat how do I find out what happened you don't have any personal contact with him I didn't mean to cut you off but that's what I'm saying I don't see a mechanism we would have to establish that other than voluntarily seeking that contact I don't see how it happens do you see what I'm saying Andy? Max has had his hand up in that amber I don't want to put Evan or Greg in that uncomfortable position of accidentally getting political we need to keep them the heck away from that so I think it needs to be other board members and I would say not just one alternate but a second alternate and the responsibility of the person that can't make the meeting would be to contact their alternate and say tag your it if they say sorry I can't either then that board member needs to subcommittee member needs to go to the second on it if that was not available we need to let the chair of the board and Evan know that maybe we're not going to have a quarrel and I would recommend that we just look at the minutes you don't have to have a conversation at all just make sure you read the minutes before you go there and I think we can avoid the concern that I think Andy pointed to I was basically going to say the same thing that Max said I wouldn't support adding staff and I think that we can we run that risk at any given point opening the can of having any discussion which meets the definition of a quarrel even just now so I think having an alternate and actually do we need to you kind of hit on that Max but if George can't go can you just call me and say hey can you take over for me and if I can't then Dan can or just keep going through can we all agree that we're going to pick up the back for the rest of along the way do we need to say Amber's an alternate we're all alternate well yeah I'm happy to do that Amber I just didn't want but I didn't want to just have us unilaterally do that without having this discussion going so maybe a point of clarification Andy thank you for bringing that up you also don't necessarily have to call a subcommittee member you can call myself a Greg both of us one of us attended the meeting too but you really should not go through communications outside of meetings of that it's okay one-on-one for a board to do that because there's five but in a subcommittee setting with such a finite number you probably should avoid that so I thank you for bringing that up I really like Amber's idea a lot that that your board is your subcommittee contact one and then when that person takes responsibility for that meeting you're you're not on the job of it until the next time you go to a meeting that's that or do what Evan said and why don't we just make it a free-for-all and appoint everybody and warn them all is select board and trustee meetings and anybody who wants to can go that's where we're going I think there's no place to call that requires a forum that requires more than just two you want three meetings and you cancel the ones that you don't have a forum for it just seems like we're all going to be participating in it because I may choose to just say I don't have to go to any more meetings Amber, I don't think the goal is that the original four that were selected that they're going to just arbitrarily say I don't want to go I think the intent was push comes to shove George cannot make it can I stand that forum so that we don't lose any traction I mean I think it's the exception not the rule Annie we could also put a rule in place and I'm sorry George if George doesn't come to ask number we need to drink a new I just think it's not can I move forward can I just offer an observation this is just in the event that someone's absent I don't know that we need to get this elaborate, Dan I'm just echoing what you're saying but the whole thing is the idea that we have this formal meeting like was brought up before the whole thing is you're not making decisions it's not going to be a forum where this is a subcommittee just to bounce off ideas to go to the board as a whole to a formal meeting not to make it a meeting make decisions at another meeting we have enough meetings with joint meetings these meetings among the regional planning commission those things, there's many meetings out there so I think we're just we've written the weeds as we discussed last Saturday I think we should, you know, move along they are so one of the next thing one of the next agenda items is going to be to authorize potentially to authorize a subcommittee to make decisions with regards to outreach so they may make some but at that point in time I think that we're all saying about how we can appoint an alternate somebody can't make it, whoever that is maybe it's Roche this time, Roche can't make it Roche calls somebody else and then we go yeah, let's leave it sorry I would leave it at one you know let's keep it as formal as possible everybody wants the continuity everybody on the committee wants the continuity this is hard enough trying to play catch up when you can't play catch up when you're going so I I think this is also probably a fairly limited amount of time the schedule is going to I hope through this first couple phases of this work it should regulate and I think our next six weeks look fine so really we're not talking about a whole I don't think we're talking about a whole lot of time maybe through September so we're already scheduled out in July so you know I think one alternate if that meeting has to have a decision made it doesn't happen why wouldn't we want to do two openings so we can see who the primary one is because maybe that person says yeah I would suggest we do a first and a second one that's not on her note and that way our chance of having all four people there are much harder Andy? is the intent to fill all absences or only one two absences result in lack of form try to say that again so if Ryge isn't there and three of us are there there's still quorum of the Southern Committee so we're trying to fill all absences or only if Ryge and I aren't there then you have no quorum but I guess the question is which one does it come from I answered my own question so you're saying the intent would be to fill four seats just to make sure do we just want to establish quorum or do you want to fill four seats the problem with only filling quorum is then you have an imbalance if you have two people missing you need two to open so it sounds like the consensus is to appoint two alternates not consensus it sounds like a direction I'm sure so from the trustee's side who would like to be the first alternate Amber Dan, either of you want it not it oh glad they stepped up Amber do you want second alternate or do you want me to take it I guess I'll take it so then I would make the motion for the trustees that Dan is the first alternate for the government subcommittee with Amber being the second alternate any further discussion all those in favor please signify by saying aye is anybody opposed thank you would any of the select board members like to nominate themselves to be the first alternate Annie Annie is the first and can we have a nominee for the second alternate I actually work Thursday evenings so I might not be Thursday I don't think we have a Thursday I don't know you'd be the second alternate you'd be the second alternate the chances are really strong he said he's not going he said we have Annie as first alternate Pat as second alternate any discussion can we second that slate of nominees second all those in favor please signify by saying aye aye opposed thank you okay so going on to what was 5F is now 5G to determine the role and authority of the government subcommittee Greg you want to do this one again you're welcome as we just discussed there might be sometimes when the government subcommittee could be in a position to try to make a decision to keep things moving forward particularly with the public engagement and outreach project that KSB is working on just for instance review of survey questions they need direction they need some sort of approval to go forward once those survey questions are finalized before they go out they need some sort of approval to put them out so rather than waiting until the next joint board meeting and getting full board approval the thought is to get the government subcommittee some additional responsibility to be able to authorize KSB to move forward they're essentially acting as a steering committee for this process rest of the board is okay with them getting formal approval to KSB the next piece of that is KSB they have a schedule set up that was earlier in their packets prior to this agenda item but moving forward and as we talked about they have a really detailed schedule every few days they're looking for what they need to do so one of the ways to do that is to authorize staff to give a set once the subcommittee is basically signed off on it and I'm not looking by any means for staff to take over this project by just the interest of cutting down on meetings and keeping things moving maybe staff can get the sign off on it yes that was what I was talking about so for instance the last meeting they met with the governance subcommittee on the survey questions there was an editing session with the board with the governance subcommittee and the public had a chance to weigh in staff took notes KSB took notes they're going to be sending in their final version tomorrow does the governance subcommittee need to meet to say yes that's what we talked about or do you entrust staff to say yes that's what the governance subcommittee had approved so that's consistent as to why this would be for you to try to keep things expedient try to keep things moving forward on a tight timeline I was just to say I'll start and say I totally am in support of giving the governance subcommittee that authority to do that we have a ton of stuff to do in this process that micromanaging every single piece of it is going to get bogged down so I'm okay with limiting it to at least just talking about that for tonight KSB work and so with this are we talking about the authority through to the completion of the KSB contract are you talking about phase one only face up to phase two what's the time factor here if the request is I if it's up to me I would say I'm kind of torn I don't want to necessarily lead the bias to discussion in any way but I would say my understanding is that it would be through the the length of the current contract with KSB because they've got a qualitative survey quantitative survey and focus groups and for which they will need they might need immediate decisions and so it would be pretty much for the length and I would only add that I think the four of us on the subcommittee will make every effort that we can to come to the full boards about major decisions when he can do it but for example after tonight's joint meeting if KSB calls us tomorrow and says here's something we want to do we just had this and we have this change we don't want to say okay we can't give you authority to do that until the middle of July because that's when our next joint meeting is so it's kind of like that but if they do come forward with something that they need a decision and it's after next joint meeting then that would be a good thing to bring to the full board if we can't we'd make every effort to try to include but you know so it's sort of like you got to kind of trust us a little bit to make the right judgment here it's not going to be a finding the other things clarify to people you're not talking about more funds more tax dollars being put towards something just so people don't think that this small subcommittee is going to be making some kind of you know decision on funds being spent that decision would be made correct that's one of the public knowledge that's a great clarity anybody have any other comments, questions, concerns KSV is asking for feedback every week between now and beginning of August so it would be very difficult to get this whole group together every week we just talked about the whole other alternate issue is there a motion from a trustee member or there are two motions maybe do you want to address this one motion at a time give it a shot okay give it a shot I think we're looking for a motion probably from one of the trustees who's going on the subcommittee I would guess or an alternate only one of us would have to come on there you go I'm gonna do it one at a time one of the time I will move that the trustees authorize the subcommittee to make decisions as the steering committee for KSV for public average second is there any further discussion all those favor please signify by saying aye anybody opposed thank you the next one of I'll make a motion that the trustees authorize staff to give final approval to documents vetted by the subcommittee second any further discussion all those in favor please signify by saying aye anybody opposed thank you again since I'm the only person in the select board that's not on the subcommittee I'm going to make the motion that the select board authorize the subcommittee to make decisions as the steering committee to KSV for public outreach is there a second second all those in favor opposed alright and I will move that the select board authorize staff to give final approval to documents vetted by the sub-governance subcommittee second all those in favor please say aye opposed alright thank you very much thank you and so we are have full conference for the subcommittee so moving on now to 5-H the discussion of the column about consolidation and Elaine did you want this I'll be happy to take this one so as I mentioned earlier in the meeting we were given a great opportunity by our friends at the essence reporter to have some real estate in the newspaper to share information with the community about our efforts and in the form of a column so we have we were thrilled to get that opportunity and in your packet right now is a draft of the first column which I wrote and Andrew edited with me and while we are not looking for approval of the column per se we would like to ask both boards to give their approval of or at least give the consensus that the chair and the president speak for the boards so this column has been offered to us on a weekly basis as long as we need it and we're still working with the reporter in terms of how long they're allowed to be but it's an opportunity to communicate with the community particularly since as one of our guests in the audience said she reads the reporter religiously so we absolutely need to be able to communicate this is a great opportunity and another column is about the survey giving people a heads up on what it is and a very very brief intro as to how we got there and to keep their eyes open for the survey and to please participate when it comes about so I would like to hear from we would like to hear from both boards your thoughts about a column and moving forward that the chair, the select board and the president and the trustees write these columns with potential guest appearances by subcommittee members or other people that are relevant to the topic over time and this is going to be one of our primary methods of communicating with everybody and the columns themselves can be repeated in front porch forums so that we can get a little further out in the world for people knowing about it that is the proposal Max? That's pretty impressive to have that opportunity to allow us to do that and I think trying to do these letters by committee is futile you to represent you're the voice of your different boards so I agree that we put the trust in you to be able to write these that we could all do. I agree I think we voted you into your positions and I trust you that they actually both of you. Conquer completely although I will know Colin and the audience I'm still not getting my Essex recording I've put it up now to two separate owners of the Essex recorder and I'm still not getting it so some of the partners but I mean it does bear in mind that I don't think anyone on my street gets it like if we are realizing this I would like us to know that this is actually getting to all of Essex because I'm not even rural Essex like I'm five minutes down the road that way if I walk so I do think that this is going to be extremely useful but we also maybe need to check in and see how widespread that whole delivery of the recorder is If I may just piggyback real quick near neighbors as somebody who lives within a condo complex on a street that has another seven condo complexes on this one street and I've spoken with representatives from each of those condo complexes that none of us get the recorder that's also partially why when Elaine says it's going to be shared on from porch forum many of us do at least get that it can't be put on Facebook there are multiple avenues that we can utilize to help share this beyond the recorder which while you greatly appreciate the opportunity to do this but recognize that there are still others that don't get it they're also available at 81 main yes I mean I go and I take out the principal every week so I'm not as concerned about myself because I'm also sitting here but I know that my neighbor with her three kids and nobody else in the house she's probably not going to take the time to every week drive down to the town offices and pick up a copy of the baby I can well now that you bring it up I didn't see but you know they are people who are going to vote yes Amber go ahead Amber oh I was just going to say you can put on that newly designed website that we're going to be launching yes it should go there too yeah can these be stuff to need GRP and EPR mailers can some of these things get out in other ways that we have already to reach people I would want to make sure well we will do our best to make sure that the content is factual and then if that's the case we can share it with EJRP and EPR yeah we wouldn't want it to appear well I mean we wouldn't want it to appear that way in the reporter either that's right if it's okay for the reporter no I understood but using a municipal email list for that purpose you have to be careful I think this is a great idea I think your first column is terrific just remember active voice yes no passive short sentences void adjectives right with verbs okay we did talk about the word charter and sort of foreign to people so if there's a way early on that you can define charter a different way we have 72 weeks between now and November 2020 so we have 72 opportunities to really get into if we wanted to really get into the weeds just like we're not supposed to Annie I have a question for George oh what years did you write for the SHC reporter I'm sorry what years did you write for when to win oh god it's sort of I tried to blank that probably from to to right before 9-11 when was that 2001 up until 2006 2007 was your picture never but your name was like on the left and the column went like this am I right yeah so I didn't know that you were you and then you said that it was like oh my god I made George Tyler it's okay do any other board members have any comments or questions Irene you've been patiently waiting thank you I noticed two references to all over the town and village every corner of the town and village and to honor what Annie was saying earlier because the village is inside that town geographically I would hope that we would just say every corner of the town all over the town I wanted to in this view it's a fine line to walk about understanding village town we don't want people to be confused by that kind of relevancy got it thank you John did you have something I thought I saw your hand yeah I'm a little bit confused about this column it's a column that's um written by the trustees and the select board yes by the chairs Andrew and I Andrew and I will write it yes um and this is on the subject of the unification we're going to hope to cover a variety of topics that touch on it to answer questions and to inform people what about all the other opinions that might be of the opposite nature that's where the letters to the editors column goes so everyone is welcome to submit their opinion to news at ssreporter.com and it will go in the letters to the editor section every week you're welcome to do that that to me doesn't sound like I have a lot of questions around that'd be something I would wonder about column and the newspaper I think that's great for you guys and the opportunity but I'd wonder about the newspaper and their ethical responsibilities to fair and equal reporting sounds like they're giving type of stuff and it would be like giving one candidate in an election a whole lot of column space to one side of a viewpoint we feel that way this column will appear and we're going to do our very best to be factual we're going to present pros and cons of the things that we discuss the reporter is still entitled to do its investigative journalism and report things as they see it it's also an example it was done in St. Alvin's and that's why they offered it to us they did it up in St. Alvin's they had an opportunity to do a column reservation so it's a precedent they've done before they offered it to us and I think we'll all work hard on being impartial absolutely one thing you said that just kind of threw me you said pros and cons I understand what you're saying but that could be interpreted in multiple ways pros almost as if pro is a subjective thing with an individual your pro maybe my con I assume that pro I don't know factual I think that's the the whole thing is you're just going to bring out facts of what was brought up about discussing we'll make sure not to just do positive things if I said it that way maybe that would be a little bit more clear Evan you have your hand maybe one thing we don't own the newspaper sir I know so if the newspaper wants to find another source for for whatever reason they are free to ask that person or persons to write a column we're not saying they can or can they're just giving us the opportunity to write I think it would be quite ambitious to actually make 72 weeks in a row but it's a goal but again Colin he's here in our audience he comes to a lot of meetings and he goes out into the community as does the S6 reporter I hope they do find some people that want to write is it any? it might help I'm sorry I'm not sure it might help to understand the origin as Elaine was saying we're all sitting here and the leaders so the newspaper and the local government are all here knowing how they worked together and they brought up the fact that they had a column in the newspaper and so that set a stage I believe for how this came about and I think it might feel better if you either maybe saw that on the channel that's with the origin and so I think it would feel hopefully less abrupt or concerning if you knew that I don't know I just only saw a strand through my head so I threw them out here in front of everybody we appreciate that I don't want to even be seeming like a poison pill not at all I want the t-shirt still just Bob and then Max I think you had a question I was going to say to avoid the pros and cons business if you just focus on the process I think that would do it for you right now KSV it starts Monday their survey how many people know that well that's what the point of this column is the only vehicle that people know right now is Front Forge Forum it's too late to get it in this week maybe it is a reporter but my point is if you focus on this fairly tight process survey focus groups the follow-up survey you've got to do I almost would like I'm a visually oriented person I'd like a schematic that might speak to people at the top of your column that would show the process between now and the first of the year we are actually that wouldn't appear in the column that we were talking about tonight but our project manager is currently designing a graphic to share with the community about the timelines because some of us are visual learners and that's a lot more easy to understand I think that would keep you out of the weeds of taking the perception being that you are advocating something that maybe you're not at this point eventually you may want to do that down the line thank you I was just going to ask what are you guys looking for a motion from us or what kind of I think it was more a sense of the board that you guys are okay with that thank you for taking it home and if any of you have topics that you want covered or if you want to be byline on a particular week please let us know Andy so if I choose to write an article is there a vetting process we didn't vet this one so I was just wondering what's the process for doing that when I submitted this column to Greg for the packet it went to Evan and Ann and Greg and they all read through it and that's kind of the informal vetting process that we have in there serving as fact checkers to make sure that we're not going too far a field and for accuracy so if I had a different column then you would submit it to them as well and you had sent this to me as well before I got to staff what I would also encourage is if you want to send it to both of us in addition to sending it to staff so I have a different criteria than this one I'm just trying to make sure we're following a consistent process Elaine and I were the ones who said yep, this looks good go to staff, great, it's in then that would be the same vetting process of Elaine and I look yep, that looks good, goes to staff yep, that's great, it's in just to be clear because I don't know what the trustee's policy is it's like we're as a policy that we need to identify that if we write something that we have to say that it's our opinion if there's never been a discussion of an official vote to say that it's the select board has taken a specific position I'm just reminding people of it that's why our communications policy was in the packet to remind us of that and while not a select board member I would absolutely still respect that that's what the policy is and it would be my best to follow the policy sorry, I couldn't keep my motion we couldn't watch you two I didn't want you to if you weren't going to talk, why would you be here I mean I think we're good thank you all for that discussion so moving on to the consent agenda I'll make a motion that we approve the minutes of the June 3rd 2019 meeting and is there any further discussion all those in favor signify by saying aye aye can anybody oppose, thank you can I receive a motion from the select board to approve the consent agenda the select board has already approved the minutes oh pardon me, thank you come on makes that even easier so going on to the reading file as part of that the board member comments I will make the one very quick comment that further down in the reading file you see there's an email from Liz Gamache my apologies for resurrecting this, I'm not trying to flog a dead horse we're still in the formative stage on the governance subcommittee before we looked at 12 different governance models one of them was a mayoral two different mayoral models we didn't think anything we didn't think anything was specifically wrong with them but we just didn't pass them along because we just said we're not no one's been talking about a mayoral form of government and we don't really have experience with it so we just sort of let it die but I remember thinking at the time it is interesting that if we do unify our governments we truly will be the second largest it's questionable whether we're the second largest community in the state right now since we have two governments and each have separate lines of authority if we do unify we absolutely, in every sense of the word will be the second largest and yet all the other large governments in Vermont are mayoral have mayors with city councils except South Burnett they have a select board and a council it just struck me at the time I don't want to get into just starting at the time I wish we had a mayor in here to say here's what I see the advantage of and then when Liz was here they still have a there's still the town of St. Albans that has a select board and a chair and I thought she would be in a good position to kind of give a contrast so I took the liberty of asking a bunch of questions about mayors and what her experience was and I think I sent it through you to first and Evan I didn't want to take any liberties but I thought it would be interesting to see what she had to say and I thought her responses were pretty interesting so I would encourage everybody to read her email I'd just like to add to that at the time I was on this government subcommittee when we were vetting those choices and I didn't understand why we didn't keep city the city of the mayoral model on the list I don't see much of a difference between I don't see much of a difference between select board and city council and I like the fact that a mayor is elected at large no matter what and then you can have wards all you want but at least one person is elected at large I'd be open to what you consider here or whatever you want to do but I just think it's an interesting idea especially for our size we hadn't thought about was that there's a mayor's council in Vermont but you have to have a mayor to play but she said they're very successful in lobbying the state about issues that come up in diverse communities larger diverse communities things like housing and the opioid crisis and community development the impact in smaller communities and lobbying the state to get aid and support for large communities a much bigger platform just an interesting plan considering that model might be a way to help Essex advocate for itself as a larger community which is what we're here a long time after you said that I had coffee with a mayor from another community and asked them similar questions of the benefits Does anyone else have any board member comments? Annie? I agree with you I wanted to bring up something that I'd like the governance subcommittee to talk about going forward our friend Mike from channel 17 has approached the management of channel 17 and me asking about what channel 17 can do to cover our work expanded coverage of some kind Mike suggested an awesome man on the street kind of process where he's interviewing residents and getting some feedback from all corners of the community so if I might hand that idea off to the governance subcommittee to perhaps think about how channel 17 could be another avenue for us to communicate with the community about what we're doing I think it's a brilliant idea channel 17 has been has served us well over the years and I'd love to give it a try It's a great idea Everyone's doing this Max has the red shirt on today I would be happy to help with that No we appreciate it Mike it is a great opportunity we really do appreciate it At least granted It's a very good idea Just not sure what we would write Mike's got a proposal I'll connect you all by email and we'll go from there Are there any other board member comments? Hang on a second I just want to make sure if there's any other board member comments Okay You want to try it? I didn't know what you were talking about We were again we were not for tonight but we really appreciate how these meetings have been going together with board and select board and we're trying to be very sensitive to the number of meetings and so we've been kicking around the idea of maybe sometime in the future after the discharge ordinance in the town it's done because that's going to be long meetings is do we do we think this is working and or an idea of the second phase of this is where we go to two meetings a month joint meetings first one is village or whatever and then the town joins in later the second one is town first joined in later and then the other government subcommittee that's always agenda with two meetings a month and they're scheduled to figure out what days you want to have them on whether they're going to be Monday first and Tuesday second or just pick a day you've checked your charters you're allowed to decide your meeting schedule but you would