 in order to keep on schedule, we'll do that. So if everybody's ready to go, good evening. I'm Terry McKag, Chair of the Williston Select Board, and I'm calling this information meeting to order by Gala. Welcome to the first and hopefully the last in non-town meetings. Due to the pandemic, all worn items will be voted on by Australian Valet, and they'll be decided tomorrow. Along with me, those Select Board members attending tonight are Jeff Farris and Gordon St. Hilaire. I anticipate that Ted Kenny will be joining us momentarily. So each year, the annual town report is dedicated to someone or some organization. I'd like to read this year's dedication before we get into the meat of the meeting. So this year's annual report is dedicated to the people of Williston. We have all pulled together in what has been a very trying year, from mask making endeavors to food drives, parades to virtual parties, neighbors helping neighbors and caring for the community has been constant. Our town government, schools and private business have all made numerous adjustments over the past year. The patients in grace with which Williston residents have handled the limitations and changes due to COVID-19 has been a testament to the character of the community. Thank you, Williston residents, for the continued understanding and assistance to each other as we get through this together. So now town manager, Eric Wells will explain the warned articles and present the budget with funnest director Shirley Goodell Lackey. So Eric, it's all yours. Thanks, Terry. And good evening, everyone watching from home. I think we've got just over 30 people joining us this evening. So it's great to connect with everyone tonight. I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen. I'll have a presentation that we go through and then we'll have some time for questions at the end here. Can everyone see my screen board members? Okay, I mean, we're on the right track. So what I'm gonna do when we get started, Emily Heyman from our planning department is serving as our Zoom facilitator this evening. And I'm gonna toss her to Emily for a minute and she's gonna go through some of the Zoom logistics here. So Emily, I'll toss it over to you. Thanks, Eric. Can you go to the next slide? Yep. Cool. So everyone who's joining in on Zoom by computer or smartphone, you have a toolbar at the bottom with the chat option, use chat for Zoom technical questions if you're having trouble hearing or seeing the meeting. Press the raise hand button if you would like to ask a question or use the Q&A box to ask a question or provide a comment. For our one telephone participant tonight, you'll wanna press star nine on your telephone to raise your hand. If you raise your hand, we'll let you know when you're unmuted and you can speak. To optimize your screen view during screen sharing, at the top, you should see a green bar. Click view options and side by side. There's a invisible separator when you hover over between the screen share and the videos. You can alternate your view. You can also alternate your view between gallery view and see everybody or active speaker only. Again, if you have any other Zoom technical questions, drop a question in the chat. Thank you. Yep, there we go. Thank you, Emily. And I'll jump into things here. So tonight is our public information hearing for town meeting. This is usually when we'd be at the Wilson Central School for our town meeting, but due to COVID-19, things are a little bit different this year. So I wanna remind everybody that voting will take place tomorrow in person at the armory from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. And absentee ballots have been out for a few weeks now. And as a reminder, if you need to return your absentee ballot, it will need to be brought back by 7 p.m. tomorrow night to be counted in the election. So as Terry said, I'm gonna go through the articles on the warning here briefly this evening, and then we'll have some time for questions at the end. So these first two articles, you'll usually remember, these are voted from the floor at town meeting. Because we can't meet in person this year and we can't conduct any voting business over this virtual hearing, these are gonna appear on the Australian ballot. So article one sets the date for tax payments, August 15th, November 15th, and February 15th. These are the usual dates that town tax payments are due. Article two asks the voters to accept the reports the town officials has presented in the town report. And what I'll do this evening is I'll make a brief report on items from the last year. If you'd like to see the full town report, we have it available on the town website. And we also have some hard copies available at the town hall if you're interested in having a copy. So let's look at some things that have happened in the past year. And the first thing I'd like to do is remember a number of residents who've passed away in the last year and recognize their service to Williston. Just wanna make a few comments about the folks that appear in the report this year. Deb Beckett served as clerk-treasurer on the Board of Listers, the Zoning Board, Justice of the Peace, Trustee of Public Funds, Cemetery Commission, and many other volunteer roles in the community. And at this time last year, we were able to honor Deb at town meetings. And I know that meant an awful lot to her. Also wanna remember William Cabana and Gerald Cajew who served on the Planning Commission, Charles Coney who served on the Board of Listers, Ruth Painter who served as a library trustee, a brick church trustee, Justice of the Peace, town service officer, and was co-founder of the Wilson Observer or the Wilson Whistle as it was known back in the mid-80s when it was established. I wanna remember Bill White this evening. Bill served on the Zoning Board who has also served as the town clock winder for 20 years. And if you're not familiar with the town clock, it's located in the steeple of the Federated Church. Bill's careful stewardship and ingenuity was vital in keeping this over 120-year-old clock functioning at a very high level. It has to be wound at least weekly. And Bill engineered an exercise bike attached to a box of rocks using a pulley system for the winding to take place. So next time you're nearby in the village, take a look up at our town clock. It's illuminated with some lights and it's been keeping good time for the town for over a century in our village. So we had a new member of our town staff this year of the four-legged variety, Duke, our K9 comfort dog. Duke is a black lab donated to the Wilson Police Department by Boonefield Labradors. His assignment is K9 Comfort Dog. Our officer, Matt Cohen, is his handler and he manages the K9 Comfort Program which is the first of his kind in Vermont. Let's share a little bit about Duke's mission. Duke provides interaction during investigations involving children or adults to reduce anxiety and increased communication between the adult or child, victim or witness and investigators. Duke also provides comfort for people during times of crisis and provide aid and comfort to individuals, groups and communities impacted by violence, tragedy or traumatic events. This program is funded entirely through donations both in kind and monetarily. Duke is also very active on social media I've seen and he shares his work on a regular basis. And I'm told March 5th coming up this week is Duke's first birthday. So I wanna wish Duke a very happy first birthday this evening. We also had a number of retirements in the past year including late town clerk, treasure Deb Beckett, town manager Rick McGuire and fire chief Ken Morton. Between the three, they had nearly 80 years of combined service to the town. Each made a profound impact in our community in many ways in trying to sum up their service in the slide but not do their work justice. I wanna say it was a privilege to work with each of them and I just wanna take a moment to recognize their work this evening. If we were in person right now this would be a good time to clap. I'll clap at my desk here at town hall and invite you to do the Santa hall. The select board renamed the meeting room in town hall to Beckett McGuire meeting room last fall and the fire department has dedicated engine one to chief Morton. There's some new and familiar faces I wanna highlight. Chief Aaron Collette was sworn in as Wilson fire department's third chief this past September. And we also had some recent promotions in the fire department. Captain Tim Geary was promoted to deputy chief and senior firefighter Prescott Nadu was promoted to captain. These occur just in the last couple of months. Town clerk Sarah Mason was elected last March after serving as assistant clerk for a number of years and Mary Gratton was hired as town treasurer last April. I was selected as town manager last June and sworn in last July after serving as assistant town manager. And it's an honor privilege to serve as your town manager in our great community of Williston. Next I wanna recognize our town staff and their dedication and creativity this past year especially. In this past year, as we mentioned is one that's been defined by COVID-19 and it's been a year defined by change. We had to close at the town hall to make it by appointment only nearly a year ago. And the resilient town staff was faced with a challenge of continuing to provide town services in many different ways. So I've got a couple of examples this evening to recognize dedication, creativity and ingenuity of the town staff. I should mention this first photo as it appears the annual report was our public safety community made last year a formation to recognize the community with their various public safety vehicles that was last summer. So first we had a new town drop box install and this was vital in helping out with especially the November election and for folks be able to drive up to drop off information for the town. You see in one photo of our public work staff installing the drop box and in the other photo the town clerk Sarah Mason with a ballot. And next, as we mentioned we switched to zoom last March to find a way to make it work for everyone to still meet virtually on town boards and committees. And I had no idea what zoom was until about a year ago at this time. I think a lot of people may be in the same boat and Emily who's helping us tonight I wanted to recognize her to be able to get zoom up and running for us last March and troubleshoot how to make it all work. So thanks Emily, you took that on and made it all work for us here. So it's very much appreciated. And next I want to highlight we were able to share and connect with the community in different ways in the past year. And we saw a lot of our town staff take the social media to share information about the town. So I pulled a couple of screen shots from some social media videos that were out there. You'll see the first one and I should mention these are all available on the department Facebook pages for folks if they want to check them out. Our fire department did a tour of the fire station and you'll see featured here in the screenshot our firefighter Chris Farner who led viewers on a tour of the station. You'll see the tour of a police car and you'll see officer Sarah Bell featured in that screenshot. And we had story time with youth librarian Jess George and she did a number of stories for the community. And in addition, I just had time to mention a few things tonight that we were also able to get online payment systems put in place. Notary services taking place on our picnic table behind the town hall and virtual recreation programs just to name a few more. But I just want to recognize town staff because town staff made this all work when your whole world seemed to change in just a matter of days. And by trying to continue services and performing them at a high level our creative town staff was able to get the job done. So I just want to recognize them this evening. So next I'm going to go into article three which is the town budget. And joining me shortly I'll get surely connected our finance director. But first all to start out I like to take a step back before the fine details and just look at what a budget is. A budget's a plan. It includes the services to be provided the cost of those services and the revenue to pay for those services. It's the best revenue and spending model with the information available. As you can imagine COVID-19 added another layer to this exercise this past year for town staff and the select board in preparing the budget. So we'll take a look at the numbers here. The operating budget proposal is just over $11.5 million. This represents a reduction of nearly $100,000 from the FY21 operating budget or a 0.86 reduction in operating expenses. The proposed property tax rate is level at 0.2750. As a reminder, the final tax rate will be set in July by the select board after the grand list is finalized in the spring by the town listers. So I'm going to connect to Shirley, our finance director now who will join us in this discussion. There you are, Shirley. Okay. You want to advance it one more screen Eric? Yep. There you go. So this is just looking at some of the larger variances in the budget year over year. We have an increase of 150,000 or 3.2% of wages. We have a 1.4% COLA built into the budget and a 2% merit increase. Would you say, hey, those already add up to more than 3.2%. And we also, if you look at the programs line that shows a decrease of almost 65,000 and that's primarily wages from the library. We just split out programs separate from the rest of the library operation. So that's primarily wages that have jumped back up into the wage bucket. So that's even more than 3.2%. So we do have a couple of reductions in staffing. One of the assistant clerk's position, full-time assistant clerk's positions was eliminated and we have something part time in the budget and that will all depend on what's happening with COVID and when we open back up. We also have a decrease in the recreation we had added in the FY21 budget, a full-time assistant in the rec department of the department of one right now. But because of COVID, we've held off in FY22 hiring and in the FY, I'm sorry, in FY21. And in FY22, we have pushed that hiring back to the middle of May of 2022. So that's the majority of the large items and wages. Debt service up 13.4%. There are three things that make that up. First is the 1.4 million for the new fire trucks that was approved in the March, 2020 at town meeting. Those fire trucks are due to arrive within about a month. We also have included in there 900,000 for debt related to the Muddy Burke culvert. Some of you might think of that as a bridge, but that's the bridge between Williston and South Burlington that everyone goes over and says, boy, this needs to be repaired. So in March of 2020, the voters approved 900,000 in debt to replace that bridge. And that is a shared project with South Burlington. And the other new piece to debt is we have 100,000 short-term debt for replacing the roof on the fire station with a 50-year metal roof as the asphalt shingles just haven't held up as well as we had hoped. Capital projects, big decrease there, but really that was looking through all of the capital projects, seeing what we could defer. Some of them were funded and completely funded in FY21 and we didn't need additional funding in FY22, but we certainly have looked at the capital projects to make sure that we are funding the things that we know are going to be replaced. And Eric has pointed out other places, but the town budget is available within the annual report on the town website. And if you wanna hop forward a step. So this graph shows you the percent of buy department, what makes up our budget. So I'm gonna just talk about a few of the large changes and the budget for this year. As Eric said, we only increased the expenses 100,000, but parks and rec is only 4% of the total town budget, but it has a 14% decrease FY22 over 21. And again, that is primarily related to the additional position that is now pushed off until the middle of May of 22. Planning and zoning, again, 4% of our budget, but also realizing a 7.1% reduction in the budget. And that is due to, we don't need as much funds and for consultants for the form-based code project that will be going on from 21 into 22. Clerk elections is only 2% of our budget, but also experiencing a 22% decrease. And that's the one FTE I spoke about earlier that the position has been eliminated and the related benefits for a part-time position. And the last one is outside services, which is 5% of the budget, but has a 7.6% increase. And that's the town's investment and it's the Chittenden County Public Safety Authority and it's our investment in the goal of creating regional dispatch. And Eric, those, I'm done and I'm gonna toss it back over to you. Thanks, Shirley. I get to talk about the other side of the budget, the revenue side of the budget. So I'll queue up the next slide here. In developing our FY22 budget, a primary area of focus was the revenue side to balance the budget. So first, I wanna share a look at how town services are paid for. There's a variety of revenue sources, including user fees, host town fees, local option taxes and property taxes. And COVID-19 has affected a number of revenue streams for the town. And you can think about it in a big three areas here, property taxes, local option taxes, and then town fees and other revenue sources. In any year, an impact on one of these three big three areas would require a close examination during the budget process. And this year we've had impacts in all three of those areas. We're hopeful positive news and changes continue with COVID-19 in the months moving ahead. But overall, this budget takes the conservative approach to predicting revenue. I'm gonna go through each of these big three areas in a little more detail now. First, the local options tax. We used information available to predict a $25,000 revenue reduction in FY22. And we did this by using data from COVID's impact from last March through December. We typically budget for our local option tax revenue using a three year rolling average. The good news, the sales tax revenue was as expected and little greater than budgeted in our current fiscal year during COVID. On the other side though, the rooms and meals tax revenue was much lower. What we did in our financial model is we scaled back the income from rooms and meals gradually over FY22 to try to identify that COVID impact it would have over the fiscal year. Next, we look at user fees, investments and other income. A few things I'll highlight. Overall, when you look in this portion of the revenue, the budget, the revenue budget, there's a $93,000 reduction and a few significant items of note. The town's currently not sure what password services if any will be able to offer. So this had to budget a significant decrease of about $70,000 in this revenue stream. Another component is the town's investment income has been much lower this year due to the economy as well for town's funds and CDs and money market accounts. So using that information, we budgeted for a $64,000 decrease here in that revenue stream. These are offset sum by a $75,000 increase in recording of legal documents predicted due to the real estate market as we built this budget. Finally, looking at our third big three area, property taxes and the grand list. In starting the town budget process, our town assessor advised the budget using a flat grand list due to the current economic climate. This is a big shift as Wilson's grand list has grown typically one to 2% most years the last 20 years. The grand list again will be set in the spring of 2021 as is finalized by the Listers and that will determine the tax rate required to be set in July to raise the property taxes. So you're probably asking, how do we address all these revenue stream changes in the budget? You'll see the use of fund balance for property tax relief has been increased by about $76,000 and expenditure decreases account for nearly $100,000 to offset these decreases in revenue. We can look at it a different way here. Back to a visual example, here's the three big areas I was speaking about. We have our property tax makes up about 50% of our revenue stream, our local option tax just about a quarter, about 27% and everything else makes up that last quarter of the pie for the town revenue stream here to balance our budget. And Shirley, I'm gonna toss it back to you for some more discussion on tax rate. Okay, so I think we really wanna emphasize that with everything happening in the economy and the economic environment, this like board's direction was to keep the tax rate flat knowing that people weren't working, businesses were hurting that we needed to address those issues. So for this year, the tax rate is staying exactly flat. And what you see here, the $275 is tax on a value of $100,000 home. One of the other things we thought about is going through this is lots of folks have received the government funding and we don't know when that stops or when we put the budget together or what more folks will get. So that was another reason to really work hard to not have any increase in our tax rate. We wanna go to the next schedule. So here's our tax rate history. I think this shows the solid financial management of the town over the last 13 years, the tax rate has only increased 0.075. And even though the rate hasn't increased a lot, there's been driving the budget as the desire to maintain services while minimizing tax increases. And I think the town has done an excellent job of doing both of those things over the last, well, this is 13 years and probably longer before that. And then the very last chart is a quick one. So, Wilston, for the, at least the third year in a row when I haven't got data back further than that has continued to be have the second lowest tax rate in Chittenden County. And again, I think that goes to just looking carefully at our budget and, again, looking at those services provided and finding that happy medium to make Wilston a livable place. And I am going back to Eric once again. Thanks, Shirley. And before we open it up for any questions, if you're looking for additional information about the budget, please visit the town website, which has a number of resources including a detailed line item budget that goes line by line for our $11.5 million expense side and revenue side of the budget. If you go on the homepage or news briefs, there's a tab for information about town meeting. And also if you look in your annual report, you'll have a summary breakdown of the entire budget as well. So I'll stop sharing my screen now. This is the questions portion of the evening. And I'll turn it to Emily if folks have questions, I'll watch for them too and we'll just open it up. Yeah, one question so far. What was the builder's guarantee for the fire station roof? I think, thanks for that question, Stephen. I don't have that information readily available this evening, but certainly if you wanna provide your email address, we can follow up on that question. And a reminder to participants use the Q&A button or chat button at the bottom of your toolbar to ask a question or press raise hand if you wanna speak. Give it a couple more seconds here to see if there's any additional questions out there. And as a reminder, the polls were open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. tomorrow. And if you have an absentee ballot, make sure you return it by the close of the polls. Eric, I'll add to that while we wait for other questions. So if you voted at the area before, people came in the front door, out the back door. And this time we'll have two-way traffic because if you go out the back door, it's a dirt parking lot and it's wet and tomorrow's supposed to be really cold and it's very icy. So we just ask people to maintain distance because they will be going by each other coming in and out of the armory. And I see a question here, absentee ballots be returned tonight. And yes, the drop box behind the town hall is open. It's secure. You can go ahead and drop your ballot off this evening. And I see another question regarding the Muddy Brook Bridge and Sherry, yes, it is being worked on with South Burlington. That project's being, the cost is being shared between both communities. I believe Sarah Mason put out a, something on a front porch forum about dropping off the ballot at the drop box tomorrow up until, I think six o'clock in the evening. But Sarah's on the line somewhere out there in space and perhaps she can verify that. Sarah says an emphatic, yes, in the chat. Thank you, Sarah. A few more minutes and we will close this meeting, but if you have more questions, please ask them now. Sarah says she'll check the ballot box at 7 p.m. You can use it all day. If you think of a question after this evening, I'll be in the office all day tomorrow for to give me a call or an email. Make sure your questions answer before you vote. So I think at this time, since we are going to go to the school budget, I will close the, or germ the informational meeting with my gavel again and turn it back to Eric to introduce the next panelist. So thanks everybody for participating. Thanks everyone. And we'll have some folks joining us from the school board here in just a moment. I'll get each of them connected and select board members. I'm going to do the rare task. We're on a meeting and move you away as panelists now. So I'll move you to attendees and feel welcome to stay on as an attendee if you like. But I'm going to get our school commissioners connected. I can see each of you in the chat. So just be a moment here. Eric, it does look like we have one Q and A question, but I think it came in right as Terry closed the town meeting. Yes, I can follow up with that Ryan tomorrow. I'm just taking a look at your question now, but I'll make sure your question is answered. And let's see, I'll move Terry, then I'll see how we connect our school board. Well, Eric, you're good on my end. Yep, I'll stay in moderate. Thanks Emily for helping out. All right, bye guys. Good night, thanks. And good evening everyone. Anyone else joining from school staff? Angela, I want to address them. It's just the three of us, Eric. Okay, perfect. What I'm going to do here, I'll kind of go into the background and I've got screen sharing. And I'll make screen share for anyone on the panel if you have anything to share. And I'll watch out for questions here as we go. Perfect. So I'll turn it over to our school board members. Thanks. Well, I am Jocelyn Adams and Angela Arsenal and Erin Brady are also joining. We're three of four Williston board representatives on the CVSD school board. And we want to share, I'm going to pull it up right now. Hopefully this is my first time doing it. Can everybody see the slides? Okay. So there are about 20-ish slides. There's quite a bit of information on each slide, but we're just going to touch on the main points. I will get started if it'll let me. Here we go. So the CVSD mission is to develop citizens who learn actively and collaboratively, think creatively and critically, live responsibly and respectfully, contribute positively to their community and pursue excellence. If you've ever been in any of our schools in Allenbrook or Williston Central School or CVU, you would see this in many of the classrooms. Normally when we're doing town meeting day and we are at Williston Central School, I believe it's on your way into the auditorium, but this is really what centers us for what we build our budget from year to year around. As Eric was speaking in the beginning, 2020 has definitely been a unique year. We are very aware of the challenges that the pandemic has impacted on residents and like what the town of Williston was sharing, we also, the school board had a goal of trying to keep the budget changes as flat as possible, understanding how difficult this has been for our town, our state, our nation. Interestingly, there has actually been a lot of COVID-19 funding has come towards the schools. And at this point, Gene Jensen, who is our COO, has shared with us that we're actually in pretty good shape with regards to everything we've had to put in place for COVID. We had to change the way that some of our classrooms were, well, all of our classrooms were set up that included some actual glass barriers around certain desks for some kids. It included some air purifiers, included masks, it included extra buses, it included a lot of things, but luckily, through funding from the federal government, a lot of those purchases that we have had to make and will have to make for the upcoming school year as well have been funded, which has actually really helped us with our budgeting this year. Some points of prod for Williston schools is that we feel that we really try to place a priority on the physical, emotional, and social health and well-being of every student and staff member. At this point, and I realize that not everybody has children in the schools, kindergarten through sixth grade has the ability to go to school Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays in person and is remote on Wednesdays. This means that they engage with their teachers online. Our seventh, eighth graders, and the ninth through 12th grade currently either go to school on Mondays and Tuesdays in person or Thursdays and Fridays in person and then attend school the other three days remotely. This is really has to do with the fact that the health guidelines that have come out of the agency of education for Vermont and the Vermont Department of Health have said that for children sixth grade and younger, they can be three feet apart in the classroom and if they're in seventh grade and older, they have to be at least six feet apart. And we also had new this year when the school year started an option that we call our Virtual Learning Academy where students could opt to be 100% remote. ABS and WCS, and this is a few years running, our PBIS exemplar blue ribbon schools, our ABS and WCS teachers continue to contribute to their field and are recognized for excellence. We have an emphasis on community service and students helping those in need through their class efforts, I'm including our eighth grade challenge that all students participate in. We have been focusing a lot on outdoor learning and we recently this school year have hired diversity, equity and inclusion coaches in all of the schools in CVSD, but that also of course includes Allen Brook and Willison Central School. Some CVU high school points of pride, CVU students raised just under $35,000 for their 25th annual penguin plunge. It takes a village and we are very proud of our class of 2020 who are going to graduating this year and it couldn't have happened without our larger CVU community. CVU band members had a concert outside, they weren't going to let the weather get in their way. And also I know that this was shared far and wide on social media, but CVU was named one of the ESPN's top five unified champion schools for 2020. So looking ahead to 2021 and 2022, and I will say that this is probably one of the biggest questions that we have been feeling from parents is that we built our budget with the assumption that our children will return to school in person five days a week for the 2021-2022 school year. We're really hopeful with a mixture of the coronavirus vaccine. Hopefully we'll be readily available to all, although I believe for students it will be a little bit time after. And then still implementing things like face masks and some social distancing that we will be able to get our children back in school full time. This slide, we show it every single year and it's just supposed to be a reminder that we, although we really jump into budget work, usually starting in October up until about this point in February, March, depending on one town meeting day falls, it really is a year long process that we engage in. Our budget goals have to do with supporting the implementation of the CVSD mission and vision, which was the first slide that was in this show, this slide show. Meet or exceed our education quality standards and in a few slides, some of those standards will be shown. Implementing key initiatives, implementing and continuing to improve budget process and then doing all of this at a cost that we think that our community can support. So some assumptions, one that I already, oh, I'm sorry, I'm not on that slide. So for assumptions, our budgeting process assumes a return to normal in-person instruction for all grade levels. Salary for teachers and staff is still in negotiations. We know that benefits, so things like health insurance are going to be going up about 10% this year. Utilities and fuel are per US EIA forecast and that Worker's Comp in our other insurances are going up also a little more than 10%. One thing that I think makes our district special and I know that other districts try to do this as well. However, as a parent myself, I know that I have friends with children in other districts who are in much larger classes than my children, is that we try to keep kindergarten classes and up through third grade, under 20 children in a classroom per one teacher. And for fourth through eighth grade, we try to stay under 25. And so for next year, for the 21, 22 school year, we believe we're gonna have about an average of 18 in kindergarten, 18 for K through third grade. That seems a little redundant. And 20 for fourth or eighth grade. I do wanna make a note though, that with COVID for this year, we did see a slight decrease in students attending full-time, well, in-person schooling, I should say. Some opted for remote and some also opted to go to private schools and or homeschool. And so all of our numbers are actually based off of last year's numbers. And that's actually something that the agency of education is also figuring out our numbers as based off of two years ago rather than this past year as it's an anomaly for what we would normally expect to see happen. Instructional program budget highlights. So some differences from last year to this year includes funding for director of equity inclusion. This is something that we have been striving for for over a year and are very excited. We are gonna be soon starting interviews for this really needed position. Continuing improvements to the intervention framework in literacy, supporting the CVSD class size policy, which we just went over, including a placeholder for one additional teacher to be deployed if needed. Align with the CVSD equity and autonomy goals, align with educational quality standards and align with key points from the budget thought exchange, which if you don't have children in the schools is something you might not be familiar with. It's something we've been trying to implement over the last year where there's a general question sent out to community members and people can just write their thoughts. Other community members can read them and then can rate them. And it kind of gives a sense of what the community is thinking and feeling. Operational budget highlights. So we've had a decrease in electricity, oil and fuel diesel costs over the last year. We've had no change to staffing. Debt services included funding for voter approved $6 million bond for food service. It assumes that we're gonna have a return to business as usual in school meal service. I just wanna take a moment to really give a shout out to our food service employees. They have since we shut down in March gone above and beyond for our students, making meals when children weren't in school, delivering them, allowing families to come and pick them up, bring it through the summer, doing it over breaks. Even for February break, they put together these huge boxes of food to make sure that families were not gonna have to worry about food insecurity. And it's just in my personal opinion, a real point of pride for Williston. Full supportive ongoing technology and security and privacy initiatives, enhancements to hardware and software based on fiscal year 21 experiences. So the factors driving an increase. So we are going from a little over an 82 million budget to about an 85 million budget. So we have about a three mil, just under a $3 million increase. And that's roughly due to just under a million dollars going towards salary increases for our teachers and staff, about $800,000 for health insurance, about $195,000 for other benefits, $66,000 for district initiatives. And this really has to do with the new director of diversity and equity that we are currently actively hiring for. Adjusts under $100,000 for supplies, materials and energy, a little over $22,000 for debt service and a little over $800,000 for special ed. And I would like to just point out that special ed is something that we are mandated to pay for. It's a federal mandate and there's, if we have students who have special education needs, we need to meet those needs. And it's not something that we can really play with the numbers. So at this point, we are proposed budget is about a 1% change with revenue. And I wanna point out that it was actually gonna be closer to a 3.5% increase. And one of our articles is asking for us to use about $2 million from our general fund to apply it to this year. We really, as a school board pushed back on the school district and on ourselves, we wanted to try to keep the budget as flat as possible and didn't think that our communities could really stomach a 3.5% increase. So one of the articles is asking that we can use a larger fund balance than we have in the past. We had the money for it. And we actually ended up saving, I believe it was about $1.6 million last year when we, because of shutting down things like not doing field trips, not having to bus students day in and day out, food costs and things like that. And so we know at the end of this year, a lot of that money will be replenished. And also when we consolidated a number of years ago, we had a tax impact that was supposed to be an incentive for us. So the first year we got 10 cents off, then it was eight, then six, then four. And for next year, we have two cents. And this is actually our last year of being able to get this incentive, but it really helps this year for tax purposes. And so in Williston, it is true for our whole district that it is flat, but in Williston, with our common level of appraisal and the estimated homestead rate with CLA applied as well as we know it from right now, is that there will actually be a slight decrease in taxes. And just because I'm someone who likes easy math, if you own a $500,000 house, it means you'll see a $20 tax decrease this year with due to the school budget. This just repeated what I said about the consolidation incentive. This is our last year getting it. Also just because I am someone who has a child in the school, I did not create the slideshow, but the girl that is closest to us, with her back to us with a multi-teal jacket is my daughter. This is her first grade classroom. And until the weather really got cold, this is how they did most of their school meetings, other class meetings until a lot of their learning. So there are nine articles on the CVSD ballot tomorrow. The first four are ones that we would normally do our annual meeting and they have to do with naming the moderator. I actually have it here. To elect a moderator, to elect a clerk and to elect a treasurer and naming our, and authorizing us to use debt service for our revenue that we are expecting to have. Number seven, eight and nine. So number seven is our school budget, which again is just over $85 million. Article eight is asking that the voters allow us to use our fund balance, which again was just over $2 million and this is what is going to allow us to keep the tax rate flat. And article nine is funding for three new school buses. We try to keep an average life, I believe on our buses of about 10 years. And so instead of having to purchase a dozen or a couple dozen buses at one time, Gene Jensen, our COO has a plan to divide that up over years. And so we're asking for three diesel bus funding for three diesel buses. And if you may qualify for an education property tax credit, if your household income is less than $103,250 and this is the information, if you want to see if you can benefit from that, please go tomorrow to vote if you haven't already voted by what's it called by mail, which I actually have done. And before I open it to questions, I just want to see if Aaron or Angela thought that I missed anything. I don't think you missed anything, Jocelyn. I would just, one thing that I just learned in the CVSD meeting a couple of hours ago was that we're actually purchasing gasoline powered buses. That was something that Gene shared with us that one audience member asked if we were, I think the question was implying, are you going the electric route? And we do have two buses coming to the district. They're actually coming to Williston electric buses as part of a pilot program through the state. But electric buses run about $300,000 each. And so the facilities team has done some research and found that the gasoline powered school buses actually have lower emissions than the diesel powered buses. So we will be purchasing those this year, if the bond is in the article. Thank you for correcting that, Angela. And also should be noted that we had to pay, last year we had to pay the same amount that we would normally for either a diesel or a gas bus as part of that funding source. So we already actually have paid for those two electric buses. So we would like to open it up for any questions if there are some. And I can start sharing. I don't know if you see the chat, there is a question about field trips. The question is in Williston doesn't FAP funding cover field trips and not the budget. Yes, so that is a great question. And so yes, I'm actually part of FAP and I will say that FAP does fund a large percentage of the field trips. However, I do believe and I might be misspeaking and I know that Greg couldn't make it to this meeting tonight, but I do believe that the school does use some funding. I believe it's from like the principals, like the principals each have a small amount of money that they can kind of control and that can supplement with school buses and some of those other costs. But yes, FAP normally pays the bulk, helps cover a bulk of the field trips. And hi everyone, I think as host I can connect folks who want to speak to ask a comment. So I see Brian Forrest has his hand raised. Do you want me to just go and see him? Okay, Brian, I'm going to connect you to talk just a moment. Am I ready? Yep, there you go, Brian. Okay, good evening. I'm the Brian Forrest in the town energy coordinator and I'm wondering why in light of all the climate catastrophes we're experiencing on the news every day that the school board has chosen to go the route of saving dollars rather than investing money in weatherizing their buildings in going and choosing to buy electric school buses, pay the cost because this is an imminent problem. And I don't see the state has a comprehensive energy plan. We're trying to get to net zero by 2050. And I don't see the school directing any of its budget towards this goal of the state. And we spent a lot of money on educating our children. I don't see the school board working to protect their future. Did you address that? I can take a stab at part of that if that's, if you, I don't want to, you guys jump in, ladies jump in if you want to, but thank you for that question, Brian. I will say that a lot of what we do, what we've seen from a facilities update and facilities improvement point of view is really focused on weatherization and improved efficiency of our buildings, some of which are quite old. We just were lucky enough to, to, you know, that Williston Central School received quite an extensive renovation two years ago now, I think. And I know a lot of that work was in the kind of the non-cosmetics, you know, not the fancy stuff that you see, but inside the walls and ceilings dealing with weatherization and ventilation and things like that, energy efficiency. I would say that as far as the buses are concerned, it's not necessarily a school board decision, but certainly something we could talk about, bring up. I think when it comes down to it, there are quite a limited number of levers we have in our budget as far as controlling costs. And you're right that that is, it's one of the places we've turned and we can certainly revisit that, not for this year's budget per se, but I hear your concern and I hear what you're saying that being better stewards, all of us being better stewards of our children's future beyond their education is part of our responsibility. Yeah, and I would just note and add, Angela, I know that Jean Jensen, our Chief Operating Officer has talked about, we're in a pilot program so that we can really test the technology. It's fairly new. We're in a cold climate. We have a lot of hill routes for our buses. So it's certainly not ruled out for the future. And we did take the step of being one of the few schools put into the pilot program to try it out. So hopefully there will be more coming down the line, but we can't invest in more before we've tried out the first couple and know how that works for our district and what the challenges might be. And Brian, to your point, similar to the renovation that Williston had, Shelburne had one, I believe, the year before. And I don't currently know exactly where in the process we are, but prior to March of 2020, the next school that was slated to have a lot of the improvements that you're talking about was Charlotte. There's a very big, it's a multi-step plan because there's so much that that building needs because it's been built over time and very old. And it's none of it's like the stuff you go in and you get your wowed by because it looks like it's this modern school. It's all stuff that's gonna be behind the walls, with windows, the outer shell of the school. And it's actually what we have to do in phases is we have to first seal the envelope. If I recall correctly from the tour that we went on, is sealing the envelope before we can even get to some of the other things. And so to your point, I think that everything you're mentioning is very important. And as Angela had said, it's definitely something that we can go back to the board and speak to to see what is currently actually happening and what areas can we afford to try to make some changes in? Joslyn, could you also want to go back to the board and ask them if they would create a council to get to school to 90% renewables by 2050, like the rest of the state? That's definitely a conversation that we can have. Great, thank you. I am not seeing any other questions in the chat. If there are any other questions prior to voting tomorrow, I would recommend that people can go to our website to CVSDVT.org slash budget. And you can see our annual report, our annual warning, our budget audits. And we actually have, I believe this presentation or a similar one, we tailored this to be more about Williston rather than the entire district. But anything that I shared should be in those slides as well. And I think, I think if there's no other questions, I think that we are, we're finished. All right, thanks for joining us this evening, everyone. Eric, thank you so much for having us really. Where I'm told we're the only town, Williston is the only town that welcomed the school board to their meeting this year. So thank you. We're happy to have you every year. Thank you very much. Looks like you have one more question Oh, yes, I believe it's just under 10% Sherry. I think it was 9.8% for health insurance alone. And so, benefits, salary, and special education are really the three things that we really can't change very much just because they are what they are. And we have to pay those things. So the health insurance question is such a big one and it's extends far beyond the schools and the school districts. It's the challenge somebody was asking about, health insurance costs and health care costs, excuse me, increasing almost 10%. And that's a challenge that businesses are facing that municipalities are facing, schools are facing. And the challenge to our healthcare system writ large and frustrating certainly as school board members for one that we have zero control over but has such a large impact on our budget. It gets speaks to the larger need for some pretty systemic health care reform and health care policy reform in our country. But we couldn't give you, nor I don't know could the healthcare industry give a real clear answer as to why exactly the increases so much every year. But I'll stop before I editor to our lives anymore. All right, it looks like we'll wrap it up there. Thanks for joining us, our school board members and everyone who tuned in from home this evening. So reminder can go on both the town and the school websites for additional materials to review as you prepare to vote and remember to vote tomorrow if you haven't already. So thanks everyone. I'll wrap things up here and have a good evening. Thanks.