 Good evening. Today is Wednesday, March 27th, 2024, and I would like to call to order this regularly scheduled meeting, hybrid meeting of the Board of Commissioners of the Chittenden Solid Waste District. First item on the agenda is the agenda itself. I have one point, one change to make, and then I'll ask other commissions, do they have any requests to add or change anything? We have a request to move other business to before the executive session. This is a courtesy to our television folks so that they can wrap up their evening a little bit early. So if there is other business, just be on notice that we'll be doing that before we go into executive session. Beyond that change, are there any requests for additions or changes to the agenda? I am hearing none. I don't have a full screen of all the commissioners, so I can't see you. Maybe we can change the abuse mode so we can see everybody. But if anybody has a request, rather than raising your hand, just please speak up. All right, I'm hearing none. So the agenda will be followed with the one exception again of other business. Item number eight will appear, will be taken up before we go into executive session. Next item on the agenda is the public comment period. Are there any members of the public present by a phone or zoom? There are none here in the CSW conference room. There are any members of the public. This is your opportunity to address the board. I am hearing none. So we will close the public comment period and move on to item number three, which is the consent agenda consisting of the minutes of the January 24th, 2024 public hearing and the February 28th, 2024. Board of commissioners meeting also program updates, memos, finance report, and the second quarter financial report. Any requests to pull any of those items from the consent agenda? I am hearing none. Therefore, the consent agenda will be accepted as presented in the board packet. And again, right now, we're only seeing, we're not seeing the full panelist view on our screen here. So if you. John, can you change the view to gallery up on top there? No, you're so over to the left. To the right, it says view up. Okay, now we're good. And I can see everybody if you happen to be raising your hand. Again, the consent agenda has been accepted and we'll move on to item number four, which is the solid waste management ordinance, which appears on page 27 of the board packet. And at this point, I will turn it over to Sarah to lead us through this part of the meeting. I'll pick it off, but then I'll also turn over to Josh to answer any questions or to expand on what we're going to have a conversation about. So as we've been discussing with the board and with the finance committee since this is November, when we presented the proposed budget. We are intending in this budget to increase the solid waste management fee from $27 per ton to $30 per ton. And the budget that we'll be discussing later in the meeting. Does contain $30 ton as solid waste management fee. But in order to make that change, we do need to change the ordinance to amend the ordinance to reflect that. And the reason is because we happen to have in our ordinance. Where we specifically state the dollar amount of the solid waste management fee. So anytime we need to change that fee, we do have to go through the change process. So currently the current language in the ordinance section 8.2 amount of fee, the solid waste management fee is $27 per ton. So the request, the recommendation is that the board adopt a change to the solid waste management fee to say, replacing the current language that I read with the solid waste management fee is $30 per ton. And the change we're requesting that the change not take effect until July one. So it would be a little bit longer than is spelled out in the law, the law requires I think it's a 60 day waiting period, but we that would be a little bit longer than that. The board adopts this fee tonight. And so we're recommending that because this is essentially an administrative change, a change to the fee, it is not a change to anything regulatory. It's not a change to any licensing processing or anything that would require or where we would want to do some outreach to get some input. It really is, you know, again akin to changing a tipping fee in the budget. We are suggesting that because we have already discussed this this potential fee change in several meetings. I've not got them listed here. November 15, February 14, February 15, February 28 that we simply move ahead with the adoption tonight of the change in the ordinance. And it is different than how we approach changes in the ordinance that are again, regulatory in nature or our policy changes because this is administrative and we have already discussed this and received some verbal comments from Kasella back in November. We feel confident that the public has had a good number of opportunities to talk to the board, to be at a meeting and to discuss the change. And stash twirly, it is within the board's ability to adopt the change. And then at this meeting, it is a publicly worn meeting. And from there, if the board were to adopt the change tonight, then we would go on to all the public notification requirements is spelled out in the statute. Josh, have I left things out or do you want to add No, I think that pretty well come to that. Okay. So I'll open it for questions. We can open up for questions. At this point, we will. There is a motion at the bottom of this section of the board packet. Once that's read into the record, we'll also have a chance for questions and comments. Paul Stable, your hand is up. Yeah, just quick question. We had discussed possibility and pet or at least in the budget meeting of changing the way we do this. I said, I think it becomes part of the budget process. Have we decided not to pursue that any further or do you have any comments on that, Sarah? Yeah, we just talked about that. And I think that would, I think that takes more conversation. I would rather have a longer discussion about that in particular. We do still still feel that it would be appropriate to move changing the fee into the budget process. For all the reasons that we've discussed in the past couple of meetings where, you know, again, there are far more opportunities for the public to comment on on budget changes than there would be in an ordinance change. However, because this is the only item being changed, we felt it was appropriate to just address it this one time is this one kind of one off item. And it's very straightforward. There's, there's nothing ambiguous about it. It's not a kind of policy item that needs debate or discussion, certainly discussion, but not necessarily debatable. And we thought that there are other changes to the ordinance that we would like to see made in over the next six months or so. So having a larger discussion about what those may look like and then doing larger changes within the next six months, we felt would be a more appropriate use in addition because we do are including the fee in the budget. We did want to kind of line up everything so that I could get out into the community should the the board authorized the budget to be distributed to our member towns and could then say that this the board changed the ordinance. So what is reflected in the budget is reflected through the board's decisions where if we went to public comment period that would change the process a little bit. I would not be able to go to the member towns with a budget that was kind of a pending dollar item, particularly with something that's so large. And so it just through that process a little bit, a little bit up in the air. Should the board decided they're not comfortable with approving the adopting the language tonight, we can certainly accommodate a lengthened timeline on the budget transmittal to our member towns, but it seemed like kind of the stars were aligning to just take care of this one thing. And stretch totally it is it's certainly allowed this uses process. Okay, thank you. It sounds like it will consider it further in the future. So that's fine. Okay. I mean, I'm very comfortable with this proposed motion. And your hand is up. Hi, I just want to start by saying I'm also very comfortable with the proposed motion. But my question is, and I think if it's okay to comment on this, maybe you haven't prepared this kind of a comment, but I think the board might want to hear this. I was thinking about, I don't know really what the impact is on the budget of this $3 increase is. But when I have spent time looking at the budget and see all the major things that are happening from the increased cost of the MRF. To the increased cost of the closed landfill to the potential for PFAS regulations and all these sort of like, whoa, type things. Was there any consideration of increasing it more than $3? And would you like to flesh that out in any way so that you didn't get caught short? That is a great question, Ken. And we internally, the budget team and I briefly talked about it, but then went back down to $30. And we felt that the increase from $27 to $30 was manageable for our haulers easily explained as far as why that jump. Even though it has been quite a long time since we've raised it and higher would not necessarily have been out of the realm of possibility, the increase represents approximately $400,000. No one can verify that math, but it's about that increase. So if we were to go up to, you know, $32, $33,000, so you could ish double that. So that if we went up to $33,000 would wipe out the potential for needing to draw down that little bit that will need to draw down in the budget for out of the reserves. However, that would be a sizable jump. The last time we increased this always management fee, we increased it by $5. So it wouldn't be out of the realm of discussion to do another $5 increase after such a long time. We wouldn't, you know, say no to that. Again, it would certainly balance the budget for fiscal 25, but we felt from, you know, a stakeholder perspective. That a $3 fee would be more than accepting. And does Leslie have anything to say? I kind of feel like she'd be a good person to say like, yeah, this is not the, you know, you're not doing enough or something. I don't know if she's here or not. Yeah, no, Leslie's not on the line today. I think you're right. My hunch is she would likely agree that last time with $5, say this time is $5 would not be too large of a leap. It would still not have us be the highest solace management fee out of the districts. We wouldn't think at that point we second In the, in the fee, second or third. So, so I think she agree. I think she would likely support that. But I put that Okay, well, I'm just going to say, you know, I just threw it out to give it to you if you wanted to bring it up. I completely just trust what you all have decided together. And just I'll leave it at that. So at this point, I just want to point out we have not yet had a motion. We're just kind of in the informational discussion stage. Once we have a motion that could be amended To change the dollar figure or the potentially the process for approval of this, but I just wanted to be clear where we're at in this discussion. Other preliminary questions, observations on this matter. Marty, your hand is up. Yeah, I'm completely comfortable with this. And although it's Does sound like More money would be a good thing. It also Is I mean, my memory is what's been discussed at previous meetings has been a $3 increase. In other words, to the extent that we're Relying on the fact that this has been discussed before. I guess I feel Somewhat constrained by the previous discussions of $3, but I leave that for others to comment on I think we're ready for the motion if somebody would care to make the motion. Want me to read that into. Oh, yes, please. Yeah. Be it resolved that the CSWD Board of Commissioners hereby approves a change to the district's solid waste management ordinance section 8.2 amount of fee Replacing the current language with the solid waste management fee is $30 per ton. This change shall take effect July 1, 2024. So move Westford. Oh, second. Second, I'm thank you, Henry. It's been moved and seconded to adopt the resolution to increase the solid waste management fee to $30 per ton effective July 1, 2024. So any discussion on the motion. I'm just going to call up for the record that NOLA has posted a comment saying that were this fee the right be increased by $5 comment went away. Another $2 it would be 255 dollars. We know the $250,000 on top of the already. But personally, I would kind of echo what Marty has said we have, you know, the public has been aware of those who have paid attention that we've been talking about $3 and I would say we're duty bound, honor bound to act on that figure rather than a different one. We're not hearing Sarah say that we need a higher number to make this budget work. My sense is, you're very conservative. I wouldn't say no. We both will have a conversation later. Right. But I think your credentials as running a tight ship and not asking for more money than you think is necessary in order to make our numbers work and balance our budget. I think that comes through loud and clear. I would also point out once it were this to be approved. I believe then the, the new solid waste management team would be $30 per ton, no matter what we do with the budget in the next step. Correct. As of July one, as of July one, that's right. Just again for everybody to understand. And then one final comment as Paul was asking, there had been discussion further about changing the methodology of, of future changes to the solid waste management fee that is not on the table that is not in this, in this motion that is for another day. So by voting on this motion, it's simply to change the solid waste management fee to $30. Further questions or discussion on the motion. I am hearing none. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And you oppose say nay. Any abstentions. Kelton's you're voting no Kelton correct. What have I recorded. Yep. Thank you. Thank you. I believe while there are any abstentions. I will declare that the motion carries and the increase has been approved. Thank you all very much. We're now ready to move on to item number five, which is the FY 25 budget adoption. And again, I'll turn it over to Sarah to initiate the discussion. Oh, I'm sorry, did I get this. I'm sorry I'm out of order here. Nope, you are correct. I just have a different packet. Yes, we will move on to the proposed budget. John, are you able or someone able to bring up the PowerPoint. It's the name you send that to you. Is it in the folder. I know that too. That's not. Sorry. 25 minutes ago. Well bring that up. I can start on chat extemporaneously. So this year's budget is, is one that is very, very tight. Again, it feels like I'm bringing you tight budgets for a couple of years now. There's good news and some areas where we want to focus. So the good news is that there again we're not calling for any municipal assessments. No per capita fees. So that is something that we haven't done in many, many years and generally would only utilize municipal assessment for kind of paying down debts that we are not able to pay through user fees. Many of the other districts as always districts and alliances do utilize per capita fees as part of their, their budgets. We do not. So we are again not calling for a need for any municipal assessments, which is a good thing as well lead up with good news. Thank you. So that's good. And I forgot to put in our mission. So I'm going to skip right over to number three there, John. So, so this is basically how we're presenting our budgets and folks who are familiar with looking at our finances every, every month and so on finance committee and the exact board. We look at the budgets through income statement and our balance sheet. So we're looking at revenue as is coming in calling it an income and then the expenses and then also we look at the assets liabilities net position reserves as well so essentially two components to any budget. Next piece. So here's the overview. We're looking at after the cost of sales comes to actually say cost of cost of goods. We're looking at gross profit, income revenue at just under $15.8 million and total expenses at just over $16 million. So we're seeing that we will have a shortfall this year for the first time in a long time. If, if everything goes according to this exact budget at the very end I'll tell you why I think it's likely to be different. For transparency and for budgeting purposes. This is what we're looking at initially at having a slight shortfall. But this is what the income looks like. So this is kind of our buckets right so when we talk about where do we receive our income, you know where does everybody come from. This does tend to change and shift. So where you'll see the difference I think from past budgets for folks who've been on the board for a little bit is in that dark blue sale of materials. That number is the big number the big wedge the big piece of the pie that is the most volatile. This is the one that we don't control, you know that really at all as far as you know how much we're going to be receiving from the MRF for our commodities goes up and down on a monthly basis. We have control over the price that we sell our compost and then we sell our paint that, but the bulk of that sale of materials is from the MRF. And so, you know we had a boom year a couple of years ago that was out of the blue. So in that year, the percentage of income for sale of materials was probably double that figure within the mid to high 20s. But in normal year, I think if we're looking at a kind of a normal year where do you want to see that. I'd love to see that closer to between 2024% 25% of our income, being that sale of materials. So it's management fee. Similarly, about 25, 2425% with tipping fees or user fees, making up the bulk of our revenue. And that's, that's where we'd like to get to. So because that sale of materials, really the MRF materials is so much out of our control. That's, that's the tricky bit, but you know, I'll talk a little bit more later on on how I think we're going to try to manage some of that. What you're not seeing here in the income are the little teeny tiny things that didn't round up to 1%. We have a couple of things in there that are small numbers. So the total doesn't necessarily add up to 100, but the money does. Similarly with expenses, doesn't quite add up to 200 on percentages, but the smaller ones kind of fall off. I wanted to show this to so that you can see kind of what the bulk of the expenses are. And when we say materials management, that is the fees, those are the fees that we pay to the seller to Myers to would come to to move, literally move our materials either to market or to disposal. So those are essentially our hauling fees and fees that that we pay to fees we may pay it and other facilities that remains the bulk of our fees that are expenses. Payroll expenses are climbing. And that is the second now is the second largest one is always the second largest component of our expenses. They are climbing as they are climbing everywhere. And I, you know, I don't necessarily think that's awful to have the payroll be such a large chunk of the overall expenses. When you compare the percentages to other municipalities in the country or even in the region, it is not at all unusual for wages benefits payroll expenses to be fully if not more than half of the expenses of a municipality. We are always striving to keep our payroll expenses down as much as we can. We recently in the past year or so moved to a lower cost to the district benefit plan. Few years prior to that we increased the employee contribution to employees contribution to the cost of their their plan. We didn't want to keep increasing that that cost employees, because it is just a, you know, a negation of any gains they would see on their wages so. And we're still unusual in that we are requiring employees to contribute towards the cost of the benefits so there's still there's still some potentially some room to move, but the health care is extraordinarily expensive. Now the payroll expenses did jump this past year because we, and I think the board for this, we did have a large cost of living adjustment last year based on inflation over the past couple of years, and that is being moderated back down. As you'll see in this budget, and the payroll expenses again in the budget, we generally come in when we look at our actuals for fiscal year under our budgeted amount. And that can be for a number of reasons, not fully utilization of the health care benefits, maybe we didn't make a couple of hires. There's a few reasons why that might come in someone might change their plan from family to two person to one person. So there are a number of reasons why the payroll expenses do tend to come in under budget, but we have to budget, as if everyone was going to be on a family plan as if we were going to fully hire although we intend to hire. So, while the payroll expenses in the budget have, you know, are almost up to 40%, likely will come in below that. But it is an increasing, an increasing number, and we are not alone. So this is just the, again, a comparison from last year to this year. And, you know, the numbers, everything is up revenue slightly cost of goods is down actually quite a bit. But it is up slightly and expenses are quite a bit. And this is again the wages and benefits, it's budgeted over 6 million, we likely will come in just shy of that. But when you're looking at the total compensation package that is opportunity employees, it's about a 5% increase and that is again wages, salaries and benefits over fiscal 24. And again point of comparison the fiscal 24 cost of living adjustment was 7% and this year we're proposing 2.81. And, you know, again just comparison on the operating budgets, which I have if you can minimize that. If it goes to. Oh yeah, there we go. Yep. Yep. All right, thank you. So the operating this is so we're dividing between operating departments and administrative departments. So this is just the overview for operations alone. Next place. A couple years ago we added operations administration to capture. So basically the folks who are are not dedicated to only one department so they're not just working on docs just not working on or etc. And essentially that is a director of operations who we're intending to rehire this year in fiscal 25, our assistant director of operations Brian and our construction project manager Kaley. So we're continuing to anticipate, you know, very solid income and, you know, reasonable expenses, the almost entirety of that expense is the contracts, the operating contract with Kasella. And as the board made recall from last year, the operating fee the processing fee went up quite a bit last year when we negotiation of that contract and we are now in that renewed contract where the increases will be according to CPI increase. So the same, the same thing that we use to calculate our COLA is the same increase that we are applying to increases at the processing fee at the Murph. So that kicks in mid year that increase will go into effect next January as well. But it is it does go up according to whatever the last 12 month average will be in December. We are budgeting a we're increasing the tip fee by $5 to $90 a ton we are we're now really at the cusp of the market range and we say the market range for the tip fee. We're talking in the Northeast region so Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, upstate New York. And the market range can fluctuate because private sector can change their, their tip fee month to month to to manage expectations with the commodity sales. So we tend, we don't do that. We plug in a number, excuse me, and we hold that generally we hold that we wanted to hold that for the entire fiscal year. The market range past year has been anywhere between 85 a ton and 125 a ton, usually a little bit higher. Now, I don't believe lower than 85. So if the market range is in that 85 to 120. We're, we're comfortable that we are there and still on the low end. We are budgeting revenue from the fire sales a bit conservatively and we'll talk a little bit more about that at the end. Welcome back up to hazardous waste. Thank you. So then this is the environmental depot. And again, the increase to disposal costs is the material management section of the budget. We are receiving an increase to the, it's called the SWIP grant. So that's our solid waste implementation plan grant from the state. It hasn't gone up in many years. It is going up quite modestly by 5000. But the remainder of this budget is subsidized through the operating reserve. And this is done so that we can accept household hazardous waste from our residents at no no fee, no charge. And the organic recycling facility. So we're not budgeting a tip fee this year at the increase. At no tip fee increase at the or we're not budgeting a tip fee increase. We are also not budgeting an increase of inbound tons per se, but we are working on that. That's another factor that is a little bit volatile. We are seeing cost of goods increasing. And again, that is the items that go into creating compost, creating garden mix, creating topsoil. So those components, the part of the recipe, those prices keep going up and it's actually looking into some pretty inventive ways to bring that cost down. So that that number may be different, which is exciting. I was looking at a pilot program working with some local companies were not ready to talk about that quite yet, but it's looking promising. We are looking at reducing the cost to process and would so that has some really great long term potential benefits down the road, potentially at some point could be a revenue stream right now it is not it is simply a an expense reducer. But that will that will kick in this year. We're hopeful also that will be able to receive a grant for some of that equipment, which will help offset those costs. And again, you know, this this is also a little bit volatile as far as we don't control this early whether people are going to buy from us we always sell through material which is wonderful. But we don't control whether they will or not. We did increase this year the costs are pricing on our material, and if the increases were born by the market which was good news. And drop off centers. So no increases to back fees at our drop off centers. We, as I mentioned in my memo mid year this year we did marry up the, the match the increases that we had made to increase the back fees in July. We did not at that time increase the larger bulk pricing for things like C&D and we did that just recently so there's there are no additional increases to back fees to C&D at all the drop off centers. We are aiming to open to reopen Burlington. The location on Pine Street in at the end fingers crossed and Brian I talked about this today figures guys at the end of June of this current fiscal year so kicking off the next fiscal year, bringing trash services back to the Pine Street location. We are reconfiguring that site for better flow for greater safety which was really key factor in the inefficiency of the site, and we are limiting materials there so it's calling it fast trash plus, which is the basic so taking trash for cycling good scraps and scrap metal. And we're not utilizing the scale, we will be just accepting bags so all of our sites will be bags and will not be having access to the scale in Burlington. Additional costs for the drop off centers are again we've got to take a look at our strong water infrastructure, but we are showing a small, small net positive so that will go into the operating measure. Property management. This has always been a break even and because we are getting out of the rental business we are showing a loss here, the just the one remaining property that middle property in the building on Flint Avenue. Bio solids is a basically essentially a little bit more than pass through for us we do receive some small management fee for acting as the fiscal agent there's only a few of our member towns that are part of that that contract. We just extended that contract for five years that was in effect this past March I believe. No, January this year. So that is going on for the next four and a half years. And that is only for those handful of communities that have wastewater treatment facilities that have opted into that contract so really once we finish with negotiating the contract it's it's a billing function and there's not much more to be done there. We do have a biosolids reserve. So the money is that we invest in that are in that fund. We did invest some of that money and the interest that was garnered from the investment of the biosolids reserve is put back into the biosolids reserve to help grow that that fund closed landfill is again the budget that manages the activities around maintaining our closed landfills. These costs continue. They continue to increase with LA source of revenue so all of the expenses are paid out of that closed landfill reserve. A, the one of the reasons that we are increasing the solid waste management fee is to have a steady stream of revenue into this reserve because the only way that you find them let the closed landfill reserve is is from when the landfill is open. It hasn't been open for 28 years so we're needing to put more money into this reserve. The EPA has has just issued the notice for rulemaking for drinking water standards and for CERCLA, which is the Superfund law. And I'm going to be taking a look at that and seeing if there's opportunity for us to comment, but that is going to dictate how we need to treat the PFAS that is in leachate and what that looks like. So that is why we are actively now wanting to add more money back into that closed landfill reserve because we do not know what that cost is going to be to treat that material. And maintenance and roll off and and again where we are now treating this in the budget similarly to the way we treat the administrative functions, which is as a service to to the district. So this budget will now instead of being allocated across the operations programs is funded through the operating reserve. So those are all the operating operating budgets. And this is the administrative administrative program overview. The major component of this is the solid waste management fee. It is the only source of revenue coming into this particular program, and it does fund the majority of the programs in the department. Again, this is just kind of who we are. There's not much to, again, the only revenue is that it's always meant to be and this is just going to go through what it covers and these are the changes. We're looking to add a software developer as we're getting even a bit more complicated that that is possible. And in anticipation of wanting to have a better handle on inbound material of the mirf when we move to a new mirf, and then just working on our existing structures and modernizing those. We have another department in the administration compliance. So looking at adding a little more money into legal services. Again, ordinance changes, we're going to look again at flow control and having them do having our lawyers do another kind of look at, you know, just the authorities and confirming our ability to work through flow control if needed. We've also added a compliance coordinator to the budget. He started this year, but formally in this year, this coming year. So there will be three people in that department. Finance, the main revenue additional revenue and the finance is we booked the interest revenue into this department. And we're looking at it. We're budgeting 120,000. We did just re up our investments for the six month Treasury bond, because the interest rates were still pretty decent right around 5%. So those will mature in September. And we will be paying very, very close attention as to what the Fed decides to do towards the end of the year and if they do decide to drop rates. The going wisdom if there is any is that it'll be closer to the end of the year. So these may mature right at a really great time to be able to lock into hopefully another pretty decently sized interest rate so we will most likely again in September roll those over. So again right now we're getting about 5%. I'm really lower. And then the money market is 1.9 or something so anything over that is great. Next. And then we're looking into this budget increase to marketing advertising costs for educating around the new Marf. And this is just a very, very quick overview of the capital projection. There was a larger conversation. Actually I think it's probably in it is in the packet on the capital projects. And that is really just kind of show you where our balance will be. Should everything happen. And that line that is new is the second one works in progress. And we so that that are projects that sometimes our projects carry over. Sometimes our projects carry over over multiple years. So for example, a project that was was budgeted in fiscal 23 but we didn't get to until maybe the end of 23 and leaked into 24 we didn't get to until 24. It was still accounted for in the balances in 23 but not expense until 24. So we want to show kind of what is in literally in the works that has already been prior proved that we are anticipating needing to pay out in this upcoming fiscal year. Next. And this is the reserve transfers in and out. So, you know transfers from so we're decreasing the reserves. And this is what we're anticipating where the decreases are going to come from. And I want to, I want to point you again as always folks to the community cleanup fund. We, we have not yet ever exhausted that 95 in one single fiscal year. We would definitely like to do that. So I want to continue to encourage you throughout the year to be looking for opportunities to utilize your community cleanup fund dollars. And we are happy to give you your, your total is at any given time. But we really want to see those those dollars used up. They are growing. And so I do want to thank the commissioners who are actively involved in and looking for different projects. We have not yet quite even cracked 50% of that. So we want to use more of that. And I'll get to you in a moment. Thank you very much. And this is like the last slide. So, when we're talking about needing to draw down on the reserve so that was that that's small. It is small, but I don't want to hide that it is a shortfall. If again, everything goes completely according to how it is budgeting. So where are we conservatively under budgeting where we conservatively over budgeting under budgeting on Murph commodity revenue so that average commodity revenue. It goes up and down. For example, the first two quarters of this fiscal year the average commodity revenue rate was around $55 a ton. It's shot up in December shot up in January shot up in March. The average for the first week of March was $110 a ton. So, you know, we're averaging 75 for fiscal 25. Could it come in over that it could, but because we don't want to overestimate revenue. The forecast is, although it was prior to yesterday with the unfortunate accident, it was that there would be continued to be strong average revenue for the next six to seven months. So leading into a hopefully robust first two quarters of fiscal 25, which was not the case for fiscal 24. So, so cautiously optimistic, however, conservatively under budgeting in downtown as well, we slightly under budgeted, I think, but we did secure contract with Addison County Solid Waste District for their 4200 tons. So we know that that is an additional amount coming in that we did not have last year. So I think there's potential for additional working with additional sister districts on similar arrangements. So I think we potentially could see either the same amount of tons or a little bit. And again, the RF, we're working on increasing our times there. So we're conservatively budgeting that. And I'm not sure how EPR reimbursants will change due to the new laws and when those might kick in. So there could be, it won't be a lot, but it could be a little bit more on EPR reimbursements. And as we mentioned, where do we over budget. So we overestimate on wages and benefits because we want to be make sure we're fully representing that program. The traveling training. We, we don't routinely spend that budget. And that is something that was mentioned data finance committee, a couple of times and I definitely take that to heart. And I've mentioned that to our management team to continue to find opportunities for utilizing our traveling training budget. Really the training is important. And we have increased it. So we're going to be hopeful that we're going to utilize that fully. And then as I mentioned, we do not fully utilize our community cleanup fund, but we would like to. So with that, that is the overview. And I did see the Ken had had a raised hand. Hey, I don't know if you could go back to that slide about the reserves, because that was my question was about and if not, I'll just ask the question. Oh, am I muted. Yeah. Can we do the slide or not. We're trying. There we go. Towards the end. Yeah, second to last, I think. Third. Yeah, third to last. Yeah. Yeah, so the reserves in the up and down and reserves are the hardest thing for me to, to catch up on on the budget. And when I see the operating reserve, decreasing by 600,000. And I'm trying to figure out where that comes from. And I think you've told me that where that reserve money would come from would be excess income. So then I think, you know, where does excess income come from? And I'm not exactly sure that I understand if, if it's ever going to come. I saw the drop off centers had 200 grand. But I was thinking I'm kind of going around in circles because I know that money is going to the post closure landfill, then there was talk about, well, the, we're up, we're upping the solid waste management fee to help post closure. But solid waste management fee is also what funds this operating reserve, which is going down. So I'm kind of thinking like, what's our hope or expectation with this kind of budgeting that are these reserves going to stay at a certain level or reserve, something that go away over time? How do we think about them? Excellent question. Thank you. And so, so the reserves, hopefully should never go away. Right, that is, we want to be very responsible when we're managing particularly municipal budget to make sure that we always have enough money to cover such to cover our operations for a separate time. So always have money reserved, literally reserved for that purpose. And when we talked about establishing our priority list for reserves, a couple of years ago, we set up what we call we're, you know, locally calling a waterfall effect. So we have our reserves have a priority listing. And so, and a minimum and a maximum. So the minimum, for example, in the solid waste management fee reserve is three months of expenses to have that be our minimum and a maximum of six months of expenses. And the reason that we had the minimum of three and maximum of six was, you know, if we needed to, for example, establish a per capita fee, we would need X amount of time to kind of go through that process. So we figured if we have six months of solid waste management revenue and we had to issue, you know, it's due to per capita fee that would give us time to go through that public process. Other reserves have similar means and max. So when the solid waste management fee reserve, for example, hits its max, then anything that is not needed to bring that reserve up to that maximum amount will then trickle into fall into the next priority reserve, which is the operating reserve. Some of the excess revenue, which is basically revenue in excess of income in excess of expenses. So you've got your income coming in. And then you've got your expenses that are then, you know, telling against that income, and that was left over what in the private sector will call profit is called your revenue and excess of expenses. We can direct that from operations into the operating reserve. So that would be where the DOC excess revenue would go. The operating reserve is basically funded through excess revenue from the MRF. And so it was partially seeded with MRF excess revenue, excess income, and could be seeded with solid waste management revenue as well. It kind of has both. No, you can probably explain this much better than I had. I also just wanted to add that this is this waterfall effect that we're calling it. It's not something that is a policy. It's a, it's a procedure, basically a guideline that we've created. So if in a single year, we decide that we don't need to use funds or we don't need to increase funds within one of the reserves, we can move that money somewhere else. So I just wanted to clarify that it's, it's not something that is set every single year. We, Sarah and I look at, you know, where we're where we stand and decide, do we actually need more money in the landfill post closure and the operating reserve is going to be okay this year. We don't really need to put more money into it because even if we reduced it by almost $600,000, there would be well over a million dollars still sitting in that reserve. So if what we needed at the end of this year was to move most of that $300,000 from the solid waste management access into the landfill post closure, we can do that. And can I'm happy to go through the waterfall effect and just how we sort of move those funds around at the end of a fiscal year or if more members of the board also want to be part of that discussion. I'm happy to have that conversation with whomever is interested so that you can have a better understanding of how we move those monies around at the beginning of every fiscal year. And I have a mini a mini discussion of that in, in the packet so in, not in the letter, but in the overview. So if you're on page standby, please. So the reserve funds conversation starts on page 12 of the budget packet. So not of the board packet by the budget packet the supplemental one. It does look at our show the reserves and kind of how they are set up. Rachel. I'm sorry now I'm trying to find page hall because I was curious about this. So I understand that it's a you know, a sum of money, and then each, you know, there's a maximum in based on all these little buckets of money. But and that that's fungible based on how that money then needs to be prioritized but that if you put all those little buckets in a big bucket, how that changes over time. I think is my question here like, does the reserve is it generally the same based on those min max. And then how the water flows out of the bucket to get you to zero. Is that static or is there a lot of change year to year in what that total bucket pool is. This certainly change and with the main change being that the, the largest contributor of excess to that has been the Murph. So, as, as the fortunes of the Murph rise and fall. That is where any kind of excess that is outside of the max of the reserves that is affected by that rising and falling. And there are a couple of reserves that are what we call restricted. So the restricted reserves, the money that's in there can only be used for that program. So the biosolids reserve, for example, is a restricted reserve only the biosolids program can access that money for its needs, the clothes landfill reserve. I have restricted that reserve, it used to be unrestricted, it used to be accessible. And that is not a best practice. So when I came on board I restricted it. So that means that the money and that that fund can be used and is used for expenses and an annual during the year for associated with that reserve, but it cannot be used for anything else except for that function. Everything else, like you said is is unrestricted and can be used for any of the needs of the district. We have also assigned some of these reserves so you'll see on that page 13. And again, this is 13 of the budget packet where some reserves are assigned. So the operating reserve, those funds that are in there are assigned to the operating programs. They are not restricted to the operating program. So if we need to use operating reserve money for the clothes landfill, we could if we needed to use it for biosolids, we could need to use it for capital, we could. But it's where we're trying to kind of dedicate that that for that program. And then there's an undesignated fund. It is unrestricted and unassigned. And that is where before we set up this structure. Basically everything else dropped into that reserve and it had this very large balance, which didn't make sense. Because it really should, that should not be a large balance. You shouldn't have, in my professional opinion, a large amount of money that is that has no purpose. We want our money to have purpose. So that one does have a minute of max. So when that undesignated fund reaches that max, then what NOLA and I would do is we would blow any money back up and the next reserve back up and that priority is capital. So the goal is to continue to make sure that any of the reserves is robust that that one is capital is pretty complicated. And I was wondering if we if I could request some visualizations around this be included, which I'm not seeing in this report. It would be great to see for the unrestricted funds, change over time and even maybe a breakdown of what the different funds and if they're restricted or not over time. Um, well, if they're restricted there, they're not going to change. Do you mean like how much is going in and out and how much is being used or. I'm not sure I'm not understanding the question. So I created visualizations for my job. So I'm trying not to be too specific with this request because I think both with your knowledge command of that would be able to create a visualization that just make it a little bit easier to intake the information you're imparting here. So I would love, you know, change over time. And then if you can add in some information about what the different buckets are that that would be helpful in a way that would be helpful to understand that would be appreciated. Okay, so you're just looking for a different view of the information. Yeah, I don't see that kind of total bucket change over time data here. And then additional information about what the buckets are would be great but not necessary. And then later maybe to get more clarity. Rick, your hand was up. Yes, thank you. I'm sorry actually Katie I think did I notice your hand up first and then we'll go to Rick I'm sorry. I'll defer. Yeah, thank you. So back to the legal fees slide. Question about why we're talking about flow control again and if you're talking about organics or. MSW what what's the. I'm not really sure is there a conversation about why that was going to be a discussion again or. Sure. So, so flow control has been in our ordinance for for recyclables for a number of years. Last year, the board admitted the ordinance to add flow control potential needed to to organics as well. So, what we're looking for the attorneys to do is to just provide a an updated view of what is going on in our side of Vermont in the world. Not the world but the United States and to just make sure that should we have a need to implement or enact flow control that we are in good legal standing. It's more research on that. I'm Katie. Okay. Thank you. Rick, we'll go to you now. Okay, thank you. I like to ask about the Murph tipping fee increase and the $90 level. And by way of introduction, I have no objection to the $90 level. I think that you budgeted it uncomfortable with that. That's totally fine. However, we've talked. I mean, we all have a pretty good understanding at this point of the process for changing the solid waste management fee. What is the reasoning about not changing the Murph tip fee during the year? Is there any sort of process around that clearly it's not in the ordinance so it's a whole different matter. I ask partly because it feels like we're pegged at the bottom or the bottom end of the range of Murph tip fees that are out there. There is some margin there in the event the bottom falls out of something and we need to shore up some income somewhere potentially. In theory, we could raise the tip fee, but it sounds like the practice is not to do that. So you just talk about that a little bit. Sure. And yeah, the practice has been to not to not do that. Partly it's a function of being a municipal entity and wanting to preserve stability in our fee structure for anyone who is affected by our fees. And I think we could probably talk to a great sense of nervousness if we were to act like a merchant Murph or a private Murph and be raising our tip fee on a or lowering because that also happens. It rises and falls, as I said with with the whims of the commodity market. It does provide them stability to that to that point. We could always enter into a municipal contract with the city of Burlington to guarantee a tip fee or tip fee range. Should we feel that it makes more sense to operate as a merchant Murph or a private sector Murph with regards to tip fees. The, the, the other controlling factor is when we change the tip fee, we have to provide Kasella with, I think it's 45 days notice in advance of changing the fee because they then need to change it in their systems and it's not always seamless. They operate the scale on our behalf. That is a bit of a controlling factor makes it a little bit tricky, but it's, it's not. It's, it's not, you know, a limiting it's a limiting factor is not a reason to not do it and we have the past several years had had to change to raise our tip fee a few times in one year actually I think we raised it twice in one fiscal year. The, which would have been three times going up once in July one, and then twice in that following spring, because the bottom crashed out of the commodities market. So, it really has been more of a past practice and a nod to our largest municipal customer, which is the city of Burlington, and keeping a fee. The name set for the fiscal year, but there's nothing saying that we need to do them. Thank you. I'm going to recognize Kelton next as can I see your hand has been up and I do want to give all commissioners a first bracket asking their questions, then we'll cycle back to you and Kelton go ahead. Yeah, more of a comment, is that fine. Sure. All right, I just, yeah, I just want to say, first off, you know, thank you guys for all the hard work in the finance committee and staff to get the budget. You know where it is today. I just, you know, feel like I have to say, you know, coming this meeting as a resident of Wilson, I'm just torn, just seeing both our town budget and our school budget go down this year. I've been reading in the past month or two months, reading constant front port forum posts about people struggling to make ends meet about, you know, the rising costs of living here in Vermont about talking to people I know young people looking to leave the state. And I just, I just feel like I have to make the comment that I would love to see us go back and see what we could do to come to sharpen our pencils a little bit and come with revised budget just because I'm seeing our towns make these tough decision our school tough decisions. I know we, you know, we've done you guys have done a great job and I don't you know I really believe in the work that we're doing, but I just, I feel like everything I'm seeing everything I'm reading for the town of Wilson representing the town of Wilson I just feel like I have to have the voice that on behalf of our constituents. And I understand completely. And, you know, I will just remind the board in the public that we are not increasing drop off center fees, which are an immediate impact to our residential customers so that is staying the same we are not increasing. And we did add service to a number of our towns we added service to Milton and we'll be adding service back into Burlington. So we do recognize that we are an affordable option for a lot of folks and we take that responsibility seriously. So I do I hear you and thank you. Ken, we'll come around to you for another question. Great. Great, I'm glad. I'm glad we're still on the slide. Use simple questions on the reserves I think. So in general, it's a big pool of money, but it's in different buckets to support that is there when there's not enough money in the budget. Is that the, is that right basically. These pools are to support when the budget falls short. Yes and no, yes and no. Like the landfill closure is being decreased because we needed some of that money from the landfill closure reserve. Well, the post the landfill close landfill reserve has always been the bucket of money that was used to pay expenses for activities around the close. Like that. That's its own. Oh, oh, okay. Okay, I get it. You're right. That's its own thing. Does it Matt doesn't mean anything that our total reserve decreases 711 and our reserve increases for 28 in other words does it mean that about $300,000 is kind of disappearing from our overall asset. Is that normal based and is that normal. No, I would, I'm going to defer that question that's a more technical question to you. You're hopefully I can see if she's still on but yes. So, so based on our net loss, it will be decreasing our overall, let's say, equity, which is where our reserves sit. So that is, that is correct. It is reducing by about 300,000. So, the number has mentioned everything goes exactly as we've put into the budget, but we've seen in past years that unfortunately people don't typically use the full 95,000. So, the expectation is that maybe we would get see maybe only 40 or so that would reduce our loss so that it wouldn't be quite as close to 300,000 as it is now. There is some other changes that we may see like the Murph may have some more money coming in from the material. But yes, the idea is that that loss that we're seeing would reduce the total equity that we have available to us. And can I would say that I've been here for almost four years and this is unusual in those four years. In past years, we have actually seen a lot of excess and it would basically that's what Sarah was saying is that it was sort of sitting in this on designated space, and we moved the majority of it into our capital so that we had a pretty we have a pretty robust capital reserve right now. So the hope is that next year the material sales will increase or maybe some of the costs will become more steady and we won't continue to see this cost increase and we can begin to put money into our reserves again. Thank you. Thank you for clearing that up. I don't see anybody else's hands up. I would just jump in now and point out that the benefit of all the board members and understanding that the responsibility for really digging into the weeds at the board level is falls to the finance committee, which is comprised of Paul Stabler, Leslie Nulti and Rick McCraw. And they've spent an awful lot of time going through not just we've spent a lot of time tonight on the reserve balances and on our balance sheet, but also in line by line in the operating budget. Paul I didn't give you a heads up but I'll give you the opportunity if you want to offer any comments about the process that the finance committee went through. Yeah, I'll just say a few short things. First of all, we held a all day session with staff on Valentine's Day. And it was really good discussion. We had some questions, good questions for for staff and some suggestions. For instance, one thing we suggested to I think originally staff came with a what was it 85 forget the ACR close anyway we suggested you raise the ACR by $5 per ton and staff went back and looked at that and did and did adopt that so things like that, you know, we did we did discuss and again, it was a great process. Thank you, Paul. Right now we've been discussing the presentation that Sarah has made we do not yet have a motion to adopt this budget. So it would be a motion to basically authorize the budget to be transmitted to the cities and towns so this board doesn't actually adopt the budget we have to go to our members communities and then they authorize the budget to become an act. So last last year's motion was to accept the FY 25 budget as presented, meaning that then we can take it out to the communities. So I would at this point welcome a motion to accept the FY 25 budget as presented in your board packet. So much a lot. Second lines were. Thank you. It's been moved and seconded to accept the budget proposal as presented tonight. Certainly an opportunity more for discussion on this proposed budget. I guess Sarah just walk us through for the benefit of the full board and the public who might be looking at this at some point, how this budget then really gets approved. Right. Right. So once the board accept the budget and then essentially authorizes me to go out to season towns and from there we have 45 days for all of our member towns to approve the budget and when so so I go and present each one. And it has been made much easier with the advent of hybrid meetings and remote. I used to get in the car and then go to each each council or you select board. And it so they will then have they get a packet just like you all do is there opportunity to ask questions like you have. And then they either voted up or down. And we need 10 of our communities to pass that budget to authorize the budget when we have 10. It is then approved for adoption as of July one. Each city in town has one vote. So it's not a weighted vote. It's each one is is has the same same equal vote. So if they do not authorize the budget they do not approve the budget. They then have the opportunity and actually must submit to the board the reasons why they are the specific reason why they are declining to approve the budget and to say this is what we would like to see changed. So it has to be a very specific item in the budget that they want to see change or for example, they don't want to see an increase in the salaries management events and that's not a good one. They don't want to see an increase to the morphotopy. They would say we think it should be something different or we think it should be $80 or $50 they would have to transmit that to the board and they have a very short window. I forget how much time they have to do that but they have a very short window to submit that that objection. So the authority and the power to approve this budget ultimately rests with the towns with the legislative bodies of the town. So either with the city council or select board. Thank you. So we have a motion on the floor here as our questions comments further discussion. Again the motion is to accept the budget as presented tonight. I think we're ready then to vote on this. All those in favor of accepting the budget, please say I and raise your hand. Hi. Hi. Opposed please say nay and raise your hand. Nay. Thank you. We've got that recorded. Are there any abstentions? I declare the motion then has passed and the budget has been accepted and authorizes our then spend a lot of time meeting with every authority every town and city authority to review the budget. And Amy will maybe works on that schedule she prepares that and so she will she works with your clerks and arranges the time for me to go to the meetings. She will send out ahead of your your city or towns day the day that it is so that if you want to attend you are also more than welcome to be there. And actually I encourage you to be there as their your community's representative. And then you can make a comment you can discuss you can just listen whatever you would like to do, but Amy will send that notes out so when she sends out the packet to the clerk. She always copies the commissioner and the alternate on that email. Thank you we're now ready to move on to item number six on our agenda which is the organics recycling facility that was scheduled to begin at 715 were two minutes over but I'm sure we'll be able to make this up. Well. So we'll turn it over to start off with Dan I take it that he'll walk us through this piece of tonight's business. Yes, thanks for the opportunity to talk about this on a budget night I know it can be a lot to try to take in all the pages associated with the budget and then switch gears and think about something else but thank you for being willing to do that. And the good news is that we don't we're not looking for necessarily necessarily any decisions being made tonight it's for information only at this point unless the board feels so inclined to move forward with adoption tonight. The goal in this process is that we have something in place if not tonight than a month from now at the next board meeting so that by July 1st we have plenty of time to work with all the haulers who all organics to our facility and make sure that they are fully aware about all of the pieces of this contamination policy which they hopefully are already because we've been in conversation with them but that they can start really realizing what the impacts would be. Depending on the levels of contamination reaching our facility and make some use our services and resources to actually limit the contamination before we start enacting any fines starting in July. So this has been a long time coming we've been working on this I think of the memo I say for over a year it's been actually we have a memo of a draft contamination policy that is many years old. And we've really been spending a lot more time on it over the last year and getting input from all sorts of folks across the country who have similar policies or have contamination policies that can at compost facilities and other jurisdictions as well as talking extensively with both haulers throughout our community as well as individual generators some of the larger generators and really trying to find all the places where contamination policy makes the most sense where we will have the most impact in the ultimate goal of cleaning up the organic stream that is coming into our facility. So as mentioned in the memo we have taken a lot of steps over the last several years to improve the quality of our outgoing material. We have bought machinery we have modified our process we have hired personnel, including our new full time quality control and contamination reduction. Staff Allison Smith who's with us tonight and Kim Stacey's also with us tonight in case there are questions specific to our policy as they have been very instrumental in its development. But through all of these changes though we are where we've made huge progress we have still we're still struggling with a huge amount of non compostable products that come in our doors or through our gate every day that we are open. And so we we know we've recognized this for a long time we now finally have in place language that we think is going to be effective at helping reduce the amount coming in. So just a quick background or a refresher perhaps that we take in food waste from all over Chittenden County and beyond but mostly within Chittenden County. The majority of it comes through our gate through private third party haulers. And it is collected at restaurants cafeterias grocery stores schools and other institutional sources. And because we don't control the hauling we have very little control over the quality of what gets to us without something such as this policy. So we are completely reliant on the haulers for the majority of the food waste that comes into to do the job and do the work of kind of policing the quality of what's coming in. So we've heard in those discussions with those haulers that without a policy in place that has some sort of stick you know if it's or some sort of financial penalty that they have very little power in affecting change for their own customers where the generators where this food waste is being produced. And such as such we we've come up with what we think is going to work well. And we have set some financial finds that we hope are going to meet that goal of, you know, inflicting just enough pain that people will pay attention and make change, but not so much that it's overly burdensome. And so, well, I think I just want to start by opening it up to questions we do have some some slides that we can share to help answer some of what I guess are going to be the questions I can go through basically the real basics of this are that we are using volume metric thresholds to determine whether or not to impose a penalty and this was after much much trial and error and in counting individual contaminants but this is what we landed on and that's the slide in front of you that shows what the those levels of threshold are. So it's anything over 5% contamination gets some sort of charge, and then over 10% contamination is deemed excessively contaminated and has the option of being relocated from our facility to landfill disposal. And so that's that's the basics of it there's more more to it than that of course. But if. Sorry, I'm going to go back briefly and just say that we also recognize that in addition to much of the food waste that does arrive at our facility which is actually quite good. In general, there are a few specific generators or haulers that are just time time again some of the more difficult ones and those happen to be schools for perhaps obvious reasons that school, you know when you've got a cafeteria full of hundreds of kids all putting their materials into one bin, it can be hard to control that. One of the kind of targeted areas of this another common issue we have is that we will have because these haulers usually have routes and they pick up lots of material from lots of facilities. They may have, let's say 40 different stops on their route and 39 of them could be pristine but then they get one route or one stop that happens to throw in a couple of bags of trash in the wrong bin and then suddenly you instead of just contaminating one stops food waste you have your contaminating 30 generators food waste and so we built in mechanisms to deal with that, mostly in the form of incidental what we're calling incidental contamination, where it's a lesser fine but are targeted for particular ways that are highly problematic and you can see the list there of those identified items. And then lastly the cumulative non-response is a mechanism that we're implementing to make sure that folks who are repeat offenders who probably have you know particularly some of our larger generators with larger budgets and might not be moved by a $50 fine some mechanism for basically start growing that fine over time to make sure that it is responded to if it is a particularly offensive contaminant that that is not resolved. So I know that's mouthful and probably a little bit hard to follow but that is if you look through the memo there is a flow chart both both in very hard to read font but then also in a standalone attachment at the end of the memo that shows kind of how we go through the process of when a load arrives determining what the level of contamination is and therefore what finds to attach to it if any and one last thing before we open up to questions is that the intent and all of this is very much not to assess fines we are not budgeting for revenue associated with this contamination policy we don't want to be assessing fines for any of this what we want is clean food waste and we think particularly in working in conjunction with our outreach department that we will be able to target some of these more problematic sources and and that working with the haulers who now have kind of this stick that they can pass along that we can work with them to to fix the problem ones and therefore not contaminate the larger stream which again is by and large very good. So yes I think we'll open up to questions if we've got three folks raise their hand we're going to go into order Tom then Margie then Rick so Tom you're first. Okay, how was the percent contamination determined. That's a great question and as you can imagine it is the difficult thing unlike. You know like saying a lab setting a sample of something and you can just measure out the individual components very quickly and easily come up with your number where here we're dealing with very. And as I guess material coming in from that can be very different depending on the source. Sometimes it can be very it can appear to be a soup very liquidy other times it can look like what's in that picture and be very much not a soup but it's always different and so we started down the path of actually counting every contaminate that we could find in loads and I should also point out that we've done and mostly Allison over the last many months has. gone in the one who's waited through these loads sometimes with actual waiters and counted the individual components of contaminates which is not a fun job so. We're very grateful for her helping us develop this but so we started by counting individual contaminates and then after many many many. Of those examples we were we well a we realized that. Ongoing counts were going to be very difficult for the volume of food that comes through our facility so actually counting every individual piece of cutlery was not going to be sustainable rather we needed some some volumetric method and so we devised a way to. Bring volume known volumetric containers starting with the count so we did this I don't know maybe 15 different times or 20 different times and then filled up buckets measured both the. Waits and volumes of all the contamination compared it to the weight and volume of the incoming loads and. Kind of established a rubric of what the visual 5% or 10% threshold look like and we then back check that after we develop that and it's been pretty close it's. You know it's there it leaves a little bit of interpretation for determining what 7% versus 8% certainly but. It is very clear what is a 10% contamination load for instance compared to a 5% contamination load. So it's and that is kind of in line with how it's done in other parts of the country where nobody's counting individual contaminates because there are. In some of these loads there are thousands of individual contaminants. It's similar to how it's done at the mark as well that's true the contamination policy was was kind of modeled after what the board approved for the mark contamination policy so to be consistent across policies correct. Margie then Rick then Liz then Paul Stabler. First I want to express my complete sympathy with this idea as secondly it just pains me sometimes to look at what is in the wrong bin and public places but anyway. So I if I understand you correctly the haulers want this. Is that fair to say. They all understand it very much and they I I don't know what any any imposition of of a fine. I don't know anyone would do they want it but I think or at least they wouldn't want their customers to ever hear them saying that they want it but they they like the ability to pass to have us be the ones. Cracking the whip as if it as a word and and then being able to say like hey they're they're charging us for this so now you really got to stop. And so they like that there's a mechanism that will allow them to make some changes. They know they're all competing in an open marketplace and they are very reluctant to ever say no to customers I think in general and so this gives them a mechanism to kind of push back and say hey we we really want we appreciate you as a customer. And we're glad that you are diverting your organics but it's just not working out for instance I you know hopefully that's not going to be the outcome but but it could get to that point. And hopefully what would happen first would be like hey they just charge us $70 this month for your load we know you know it's got your name on the cup or on the whatever we know it's coming from you or driver sees it every week. Work with us or let us work with you or let us bring in CSWD's specialist to help figure out how we can solve this ongoing issue. So yes I think they like that they like that it's not them pushing it and they like that there may be some beneficial outcome for everybody. I don't know that they'd like the idea of being fine. Right that makes sense so they anticipate a follow up kind of education or conversation process that will improve outcomes here. Yes and and presumably CSWD can also be helpful in you know to them I suppose in doing that education anyway. Yes for sure in fact we have some you know we've been working on this long enough and then we've been talking with hollers long enough that we've already have some early success things that give us some hope. There were some individual schools that you know in talking to the hollers and looking you know week after week really well this is this Tuesday afternoon load from this route is really tough. Do you happen to know which school because it's obvious that it's school material like what's in this photo. Not too many places generate that many chocolate milk boxes and they were able to tell us well yeah actually that's I'm not going to say it on TV but the there are particular schools. Other schools that do better jobs and others and we have an incredible school outreach staff person within the district who knows a lot of the personnel who work in all these schools and she was desperate for this information because she's had great success in the past working with custodial staff and teachers and administration and individual schools in developing programs where they do a phenomenal job like you would not believe the difference coming from a school that tries and doesn't does well. There's a school where obviously there's something that there's less something's not working right and or maybe they just don't have the program in place and so she's been able to go back to those problem schools and say hey we're we've got some information we've got here some pictures pictures go a long way. And they like look at what's showing up at our as compost at our compost facility and they are often a gas to see what is coming from their own school or place of business. And and yeah they were they're able to make some change and we were able to see some immediate change. Some of it is not immediate. Some of it is going to take longer and we think the financial component will help speed things up hopefully but if there are even though even without imposition and just and just more conversation with the haulers and trying to figure out exactly where they're coming from we've seen some early success because people do really want to do the right thing even you know particularly school kids don't like they they're the ones who are I think you know not feeling great when they find out that their school compost effort is is yeah not as good as the one down the you know one town over. Yeah, thanks that's very helpful. Yes, Rick and then Liz. Dan I sympathize with you having to deal with this kind of issue. I was struggling with the fact that the problem seems to be with generators, yet the fines are going to the haulers. I think you largely filled that gap with what you were just saying as to how it is that penalizing the haulers can be leverage to affect change on the generator sign. Is it safe to say that in the majority of cases. You really can track the contamination back to the individual generator. That's a that's a tricky one to answer there it every hauler is very different in terms of both what they collect what their types of accounts they have even what type of collection vehicle they have how big their loads are and so it's very. Let's start with one of the smaller residential ones that you may have seen popped popping up in the last several years. After Act 148 came into full being they they go through and pick up five gallon buckets one at a time and then they actively dump them into larger containers and they can see pretty much every single thing that goes into one of those containers and then you know they. They wait until their vehicles full and then they bring them to us and you know they probably have 100 stops on their route or something and yet they know they could tell you with confidence pretty much where every contaminate came from. Whereas some of the larger hauling companies who have the larger vehicles and might have I don't know maybe 4050 stops on a route. They are often tipping the bigger carts which you know are in addition to not being translucent or just have a lot of material in them and. They some of them do better job than others in terms of like flipping lids and seeing what it looks like from on top. Some of them actually have cameras on board and they can see is as material gets dumped into their the hauling body. And then once it's all commingled we the haulers are definitely going to be the ones who are going to have the best idea about where stuff comes from so it's going to require ongoing communication with them. We the best we can do is generally if we see a clue grocery stores often in the past have had you know their logo on a label on a package on a bakery item and that makes it pretty easy. Or a receipt from a restaurant is you know might be in a thing so there's some detective work involved but really working with the haulers they're not going to know every time but they have a much better likelihood of knowing where a certain contaminate came from. And yeah so in terms of them passing on fines accurately it's not going to be without difficulty but because we don't do the hauling ourselves or yeah we are definitely relying on them to. For a lot of that that piece of it and we work with some of them some of them so sorry some of them haul single source streams like the university all comes in on one truck. The hospital food waste comes in on one truck. So that's very useful because those are large volumes and we can very quickly know what the contamination level is for a specific generator but that's you know for a smaller business. There's some more guesswork involved particularly on the haulers point from the haulers standpoint. Thank you. Yeah. Liz and Paul Stabler then Lee. Hi. I'm glad to hear that the kind of outreach team is finding effectiveness in going back to some of those schools and places that there's been a lot of contamination so that's really exciting. I did have a question though just about if you find that or has this been thought of of haulers who are you know continuously having to find say some kind of serial contaminators people who are just continually not getting it. Not picking up the idea that they could make change. Do you ever see that the haulers might stop picking up stuff from that particular entity. Do you like is another layer of beyond the fine that there would be just changes and behaviors of who will pick up whom on what route. So I just wondered if that's an incentive to say like you know if you keep doing this we're just not going to pick up your stuff or if it's too business oriented that that would never happen. Well I think that's going to depend very much on the hauler and again it's going to that would be up to them to make that determination. However we do still have folks within CSWV whose job it is to make sure that businesses are complying with all the rules and so if we we were informed and knew of a particular generator that was not complying with you know like. For you this board this body has been made aware when there is problems with recycling at a given business and so when we are made aware that there are means for following up but usually know it's going to be the excuse me the hauler who will have to do that work and make that determination. However we have heard from other can other compost facilities in other parts of the country that that indeed has been a very useful tool for the haulers is that you know they say we we have this big low we have this big route. When let's say we're picking up eight tons of food waste every Tuesday and we know that 95% of it is is perfectly good and you know well below 5% contamination but we keep getting dinged with this contamination and we've determined that it's coming from you. You've got you know one month probation to clean it up otherwise you're not coming back or we're going to drop you as an account and yeah it has been very effective to do that another in other areas it remains to be seen if that will be the case here but I. We're certainly hopeful that they will come up with that sort of. Policy for their own businesses where appropriate. That answer that answers your question is I think so Paul Stabler then Lee. Yeah I just have two questions. Probably quick ones first is do you see much contamination coming in loads that come from our drop off centers. Great question they are actually quite clean similar to you know we have a large receptacle at our facility again now after a little break during covid but. And yeah all of the CSWD collection facilities are largely clean not not perfect certainly the biggest I would say the biggest problems we have in those streams are. Bags liner bags that are not possible liner bags and that is. Mostly because we think you know mostly residential folks are using those services and they are going through all the effort to separate things out to begin with so they're probably paying a little bit more attention than somebody who's just eating at a restaurant and then maybe thinking about where to throw their material in the right bin or not. But unlike a restaurant who hopefully has gotten all the education about you know make sure you always use this right. Miner bag in your cart at the homeowner doesn't have that ongoing we can't reach all the homeowners as easily and although we hopefully will be doing some more outreach to this effect where we. Can try to prevent folks who want to do the right thing but are just going on Amazon and typing in the word compost bag and then maybe end up buying something that doesn't actually compost because there's some. Greenwashing in that sphere unfortunately so by and large very clean what we're seeing from the drop off centers. Okay thanks and then in other areas of the country that have implemented such similar contamination policy have they noticed an increase in organics in the trash stream and or would we be able to identify such an increase in our trash stream. Great question. I think that one is tricky because the most of the folks we talked to who have done this do not come from areas where there is a moratorium on on organics in the landfill so. There the incentives for complying are different. It's mostly out of goodwill or. Or maybe local jurisdictional. Programs that encourage extra other means but. So I don't know the answer to that in the other places I would imagine occasionally. Yeah like if there's not for instance if there was a problem business for the given holler who had given been given the warning. If they are in Kansas and. The other option is like a $20 landfill tip fee they're probably yeah probably would just go to the landfill. Here where landfill prices are much higher and we have a law that says you can't just throw your food in the landfill I think that the calculations hopefully are going to be a little bit different there and. There's not a whole lot of enforcement on statewide in terms of people not complying with the organics diversion but I think that could change over time. So I don't know we don't have a great mechanism for measuring how much food waste would end up in the landfill stream we other than occasional waste sorts done by the state. Or you know historically through by the district that says how much food waste is never we don't know if that is what the source of that is so that'd be really hard one to figure out I think but a great question. Thank you. Lee you're up. Yes, just listening to talking about the hollers and the different size hollers you know you get your larger commercial hollers residential hollers and you get your mid size. I don't want to mention any names but. Have you thought of you know with the holler outreach and the smaller hollers possibly seeing the contamination in like you said the five gallon buckets or maybe some of the bigger totes. I know in recycling you know they have the oops stickers is that something maybe that hollers can get and if they notice contamination. You know especially in like a five gallon bucket slapping it up sticker there's contaminants in here and did not collect it and maybe that'll I don't know if it'll incentivize them to you know be a little more. Specific on what they put in there and leaving the contaminants out but on the other end I don't know if it would. You know promote them throwing it in their garbage if it's not picked up that week but it's just a thought I had yeah it's a good question and it is that is heavily used in other areas to varying degrees of success we did hear from a program in Minnesota who. Kind of in the more urban areas of Minnesota where they were sharing of residents has been very effective in getting them to clean up their food waste streams with some version of the scarlet letter on their bins. And you know depending on the neighborhood if you if you're the only been with a red sticker on it or whatever it is then yeah you're going to make some change. I think it is a good idea. Hopefully our communications with haulers will will keep going up and up in terms of how much we're talking with them and we can bounce around ideas like that and figure out how we could support them to do that sort of thing. You know other places where Tom Maron I went to programs in Toronto many years back and they there they have you know it's all municipally driven franchise and they had in this in the region appeal I think it was outside of Ontario they had. A staff of I want to say eight or nine people whose job it was just to go around the city and look in bins before they got picked up. And check for contamination and apply the stickers and reject them before the truck got up so it's all it's all scale. I don't think we're going to be hiring eight folks anytime soon to do that here but it is a I think it's a great idea in certain areas it would be very effective. And your hand was up. Hey Dan. That's a great picture for your slide. It's horrible looking but if you have you know I do imagine that people going to the drop off centers using their green buckets being pretty good at at putting the right things in and I imagine maybe a school or a hospital being being much worse at this sort of proper separation. Have you had any discussion with the the haulers who service schools and hospitals and you know the big guys with the big trucks about whether fines of this amount would encourage them to take action for instance asking their drivers to take pictures of whatever they're about to dump into their truck. I mean I see Coachella trucks coming down the road here and on Greenbush Road with mechanical arms that just tip things into bins. They're obviously not even looking at the bins so it made me think they're the ones that are going to have to figure out who's contaminating. So have you talked to them about this. Yeah. Yes. Well a couple of important points I think are that there's a huge difference in the quality of food scraps based on the size of the hauling operation is our experience and even even amongst the larger haulers there's there's a significant amount of difference but you know by and large all of the smaller haulers who are doing the smaller volume pickups have incredibly high quality food scraps and like doing a phenomenal job. And for the reasons you just mentioned it kind of makes sense like when you get to scale and you're trying to do a huge route and you don't have time to maybe look at every bin you're going to miss a lot of stuff. And other important important point to note is that the Cassella pickups generally are not being composted in Chinatown. Those are mostly go to the de-packager and then to the go to enter with digestion so whereas we used to get all of that food waste. I don't I can't speak to the quality of that anymore because it's not it's not being composted just goes through a machine and then hopefully most of the contaminants are removed at that point. So slightly different aside there but so of the remaining big haulers it's we have been in communication with them and I'm losing track of the initial question sorry. Getting the drivers to incentivize. Oh yes. We have so in our discussions with them they have mentioned like they they're some of their drivers it can be it can depend a lot on who the driver is on a given day actually to because some of them just pay more attention and care more than others but we have we've heard we know that some of them are like. Yeah we know exactly which routes and which who are the problem ones and we're we're we're hope or you know we're welcoming this so that we can act on those individual haulers are sorry individual generators. I think it's it's going to be very interesting the next couple of months once we start the plan is to start sending out our load check reports. To the haulers so that they can see on an individual load they can see the photographs that are associated with that load and see what the monetary impact would be if they happen to reach that fine threshold. And then they can actually start passing that along to along to those individual generators before we actually impose the fine so the code is that we've got plenty of lead up time that all of that scare that might come with being fine. They got plenty of time to work it out and and do that education and yeah we've had great feedback actually in that it's been him mostly and folks from other departments have been meeting. Most recently with some of the bigger haulers and it's they've been really good meetings and we're we're actually quite hopeful more than we were more recently so. And you haven't other photos of contamination. Now let's look at John if you look at the next one we got with the next three slides to look at these are just kind of examples of what these different levels of contaminants are so this might be helpful. So this is what a five to 10% by volume contamination load looks like three different examples of it. And they're they're all so hard because you can't really you know without being there at the time. It may be hard to tell what it is you're looking at but the one on the right particularly you can see there's all those containers again that's probably all from a school. We've got some milk cartons and some food fruit cups we see so many of those and again this is a great example of a load that is probably most like 8095% perfect and then they got they picked up one or two schools and they're probably like two or three bags that were just completely riddled with plastic. So that would be a really great one where they could take the right you're this is a contaminated load here's the new fine. They'll know exactly who to apply it to and who to send that to and and hopefully we can see some you know actionable change. Go to the next one done this then is what an excessively contaminated loads might look like and you'd be forgiven if you thought you were looking at trash with some food mixed in because that's kind of what these look like. And the good news is is that these are incredibly rare. We don't see these very often and there's some stories behind all of these, which happened to all come within the last year, you know, but I wouldn't be surprised if we get five of these in a given year, and that's with us receiving how many in a week like 20, 20 to 30 individual loads per week. So, no, more than that. Anyway, so these are really rare. But what happened here, for example, the one on the right was material that we get from a local coffee producer and somebody sent us the somebody put the wrong material in that container and it was obvious and you know the holler knew it as soon as it dumped. And so that that never really happens, but it happened that time and we haven't had a mechanism to reject them historically. So now we will. The one in the middle was from a grocery store that typically actually goes to the D pack. And so the fact that it has all the trash in there maybe didn't matter, because it was just going to go through the machine and do that thing. But they that was that was shut down for a few days. And so they asked if they could send all the food waste loads to us. But I don't know. I don't think they meant to send this one to us. Anyway, so that one had a lot of trash and then the one a lot they can't remember the specifics but it looks like again like school waste primarily was the driver there and it was probably one of the smaller school waste routes and so it just comprised a larger percentage of the total blend. And then last one for examples of this next slide is just advance one more. These are just examples of some of the some of the really problematic things that we regardless of how clean the rest of the load is or how big the load is these we really don't want them in there so these are all on our list of incidental contaminants and the bottom left might be obvious that's, you know, why we don't want we probably imagine why we don't want glass in our system like unlike big pieces of plastic which mostly we can screen out with our technology downstream glass just keeps getting smaller and smaller and shinier and shinier and anyway, we don't want that in there so the upper left is an example of something that has been an ongoing issue where we have many tons of really high quality material that makes great compost and then a few bags of trash thrown in and it's this is one that comes multiple times a week and almost without fail. It will be this mix and so we, we've been told that once we have some financial incentive in place that this one will be this will go away because that's all this company needs to make the change. Anyway, so that one's hopeful and then bathroom waste is another very common one. You can imagine what that could be unfun for those folks for Allison and Kim and others have sorted through these and have to discover all surprises that come in those and and usually that's in a situation where people are trying to do the right thing but we've determined that bathroom waste even for folks trying to do the right thing almost always has some undesirable additions in with it. And then lastly the hypodermic needle we're trying to avoid those as most folks and so we're we want to wait a flag you know not contaminate a whole load and charge a lot of money but but just be able to raise a flag and say hey this load and something in it that was really problematic so please address. Dan, I've got a couple of questions for you. Yes, a quick one. I know you talked about human waste is pet waste an issue. Um, that's a good question. It depends on who you qualify as a pet. We accept small animal manures without incident typically, but we, we do prohibit dog waste and cat waste so that is most pets that would be arriving. And that would count as incidental. It would and we, you know, I don't know that we would see it necessarily and so I'm sure it, you know, particularly if you think about how much yard waste we get and you can imagine just the volume of dog, mostly dog poop that comes to us in that form. So it's not that I think that was less troubling for us. We don't see it as much when we're doing our low checks. But we do occasionally see a diaper or multiple diapers or, you know, those are those are the ones we are more worried about. Next question. Do you anticipate any kind of an appeal process? Um, I don't know what this again, but basing this off the Murph, we, I don't know if that ever rises to the level of appeal, but I think the first step would be likely then talking to Sarah and then going to the exact board. And so I would guess that's as far as it would get, but I don't, I don't know, you know, it's the fact that we've already engaged with all the haulers and and and they know it's coming. And we're, we're really wanting to not charge fines. I think they understand that. And so as long as we are, you know, they're willing to work with us. I don't think. The appeal process comes in with the compliance process. So if they, if it got to that point where someone is really not cooperating, Dan could decide that he needs to turn it over to compliance for compliance action. So there's, as we know, there is a very prescribed process for folks who are subject to compliance action. Got it. My last question is just to get a sense of scope. So you have an excessively contaminated load. Ultimately that could be rejected. And you say, no, you've got to take this over, put it in the landfill. Just want to understand that it looks like $150 per ton charge at your end. They still then have to pay all the fees associated with disposal of this material. No, the $150 would be on top of our normal tip fee, which changes over time, but currently $70 a ton. So it's, so it's a, in total, they would be paying us $220 a ton, which would more than cover the cost to transport it to the transfer station and then pay their tip fee for landfilling. I just wanted to get a note about how much it's on top. Sorry, Henry. Yes, you've got a question. Yes, sir. This didn't do much for the haulers, but as far as the drop off centers, I don't know if you do this, but maybe you offer to go through people's recyclables to spot check them. I mean, you could all because, you know, I've had questions like, gee, is this recyclable and you look and you're not sure. Okay. And just, you know, just offer. Hey, if you want to. Well, whatever. I think it's pretty obvious what that would do and just just put it out there and see if you have any takers. Yeah, we have talked about doing some education at drop off centers where particularly again, again, the issue there mostly is around liner bags. So I think that would be a very effective way of reaching a lot of people quickly. But the outreach department also, you know, they and they, they go out and do and as well as Josh and Jeanine and now Ethan go out and actually check on businesses and do spot checks along the path, both at the source of generation occasionally and and then also when they arrive at the facility. So there's, there's multiple levels for interacting with with folks and and doing some of that education to avoid some of this for sure. Okay. Thanks. Dan at the beginning you said that you were presenting this it's in the packet for for discussion only my strong recommendation would be we've had a lot of information here I think it's important for the missioners to kind of digest this and not not take action tonight on a resolution where we bring this up next month that's with your target date of July 1st you have time to implement for the education piece and the proper fear warning to stakeholders. I think if by late April we get to the point where we have an approved policy then that still gives us two months to full months to and a practice and and, you know, ample time to provide and remind them again not that we haven't already done it but say hey now that there's fines associated, please use our services and help us help you not pay fines. I think there's been a lot of information here I think it's important for us to just kind of take it in. Sometimes haste makes waste. Sure. No, no we've and let's let's give this due consideration, but certainly open to our eyes to the scope of the problem and it's really nice to hear one that we're not in the business of assessing funds just to make money but it's really to improve the quality. Yeah, of diversion. And that you're working so well with the with the hauling community to implement this. So unless there are further questions or comments. Henry your hand is still up but that may be just related to your previous question. Did you have one more. No, we're good. Then, with everybody's indulges I think we're ready to move on to the next item on the agenda which is actually again going to be other business. So any other business to bring before the board tonight before we enter into a, what will likely be a brief executive session. Tom your hand is up. I just want to know what was the public reaction to the DOC closure last Saturday. I did hear one complaint from Jericho in writing, or did see one right. We had to be one person comment negatively on our Facebook page. And then I received an anonymous complaint. So I don't know if it's the same person from Jericho who was not happy. So to, but we also received on our Facebook page, a couple of comments from people saying that they were glad that we closed and that they appreciated that we take our employees safety to heart and wish that others would do so. Okay, any other other business saying none I think we will then entertain a motion to enter into executive session. Do we have language please to read into the record. Motion that the board of commissioners of the Chittenden solid waste district go into executive session to discuss contract negotiations with the city of Burlington. Regarding the Flynn Avenue property and contract negotiations with the town of Williston regarding the host town agreement where premature general public knowledge would clearly place the district. It's member municipalities and other public bodies or persons involved at a substantial disadvantage and to permit authorized staff, other invited interested parties and the solid waste district attorney to be present for this session. Any before we move to a motion. Can we ask the call in the person on the phone to identify themselves please. There's an attendee who looks I don't recognize the number. It's Calton I had their pop in my car. Okay, thank you. Perfect. So we don't have anyone from the public so we don't have to leave the meeting will just stop recording. Recording stopped. Well, I haven't turned it back on. We haven't done the motion then recording in progress. We I don't think we had them did something was it moved. I'll move it south Burlington. Second, Sherlock. Thank you. It's been moved and seconded that we enter into executive session. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed say nay. Any extensions. We will now enter into executive session by turning off recording closing the doors and asking any uninvited parties of which they're probably done to excuse themselves. Have a quick question stopped. I'm not.