 The check-in line is emptied out so we can get started as soon as everybody sits down and quiet's up just as a reminder. All the voters are supposed to sit in the front section and anybody who's just observing and not voting would sit in the back section behind the rally. I'm Steve Eustis, your moderator for the evening. And we'll get started here with the introduction and the local venture cruise 6689 from Essex Junction. We'll come down with the colors so that we can do the Pledge of Allegiance. If you'd like to come down, please. And please stand. Please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. I'd like people to remain standing for a quick moment of silence to honor veterans, first responders, and also noting the dedication to Ann Paeta and Dave Clo in the town book. Thank you. Now we're going to do the National Anthem sung by the Essex High School. Chamber choir. Please be seated. Thank you. Next up, I'm going to have the select board clerk, Elaine Hanny, come up to read a short statement. An Invocation on Civility from the book All Those in Favor by Susan Clark and Frank Bryan. Can't hear. How's that? Okay. Thank you. We are gathered together in civil assembly. We gather as a community in the oldest sense of the word. We gather to come together and try to make decisions about what is right and what is wrong. Let us advocate for our positions, but not at the expense of others. Let us remember that there is an immense gap between saying I am right and I believe I am right. And that our neighbors with whom we might disagree are good people with hopes and dreams as true and high as ours. And let us always remember that in the end, caring for each other in this community is of far greater importance than any difference we may have. Thank you for being here this evening. Thank you, Elaine. Next up, I'm going to introduce the select board chair, Max Levy. Thank you, Steve. I would like to welcome everyone here to tonight's town meeting. It's a true honor to be with you all. I hope everyone had a chance to enjoy the community dinner that was held in the cafeteria beforehand. Great. Glad to enjoy it. For those that have we little ones, the parks and rec department is providing child care this evening for them, and hopefully many of you took advantage of the senior bus tonight to help you get here. So to help the public be informed about town meeting, the budget, and some other important topics, the select board put together some Q&As about the budget and other topics that we went and did some outreach events, knowing that it's difficult for people to come to our meeting, so we try to go where you gather, and we went to the high school at many sporting events, and hopefully we were able to share some of that information with you there. That information is in the back of the room tonight. We do have Q&As about the proposed FYE 2020 budget. I'll be going over Q&As about the governance of Essex and Essex Junction. The select board and village trustees have been talking about governance change, perhaps, and you can read about those discussions in there. We also have been talking about a firearms ordinance and possible changes to that, and there's Q&As in the back of the room related to that as well. We do have a very short survey. It's about three questions that we'd love for you to fill out tonight and drop off in the back there. It's about town meeting, just to get a few of your thoughts before you leave. And I want to thank Channel 17 for doing some live streaming. I think it's HD tonight, so that's great. What I'd like to do next is introduce the select board, and I'll start on the end with Irene Renner. Next to Irene is Andy Watts, then Elaine Haney, and she is our clerk, and Mike Plagueman, who is vice chair. And then to my left, I'd like to introduce the head table. And we have the unified municipal manager, Evan Teach. He was here last year as well, after being in Essex for, I think, three days. So it's his year anniversary. Next to Evan is Sarah Macy. She's our finance director, and next to Sarah is Greg Duggan. He's our deputy town manager. Then next to Greg is Susan McNamara Hill, who is our clerk. And we have Kathy Innesworth, who is our recording secretary. Tonight, I'd like to also recognize some distinguished guests that we have in the audience, and from the village trustees tonight. And if you could just stand up for a moment, we have George Tyler, who's the president of the village trustees. There's George, hello, George. We have Andrew Brown, who is the village vice president, hello, Andrew. Dan Caron, I know, is here tonight somewhere. There's Dan, hello, Dan. And Laurie Houghton, who is also a village trustee. And also one of our state reps, I think this is her second. We have some additional Vermont State representatives here tonight. We have the freshman, Mary Beth Redmond, there's Mary Beth. And we also have Linda Meyers, representative Meyers, hello, Linda. Another special guest, and hopefully you were able to meet him in the hallway, was Wes, and he's the newest canine police dog. So I hope you had a chance to meet him as well. Great, great, great. So I'm going to turn this back over to you. So we'll go over the annual meeting instructions, and then we'll get started. So Robert's Rules is the basic rules of order for this meeting, except for where Vermont law takes precedence. This body cannot change state law, but it can change Robert's Rules with a two-thirds vote if desired. All motions, remarks, and discussion should be addressed to me. Please stand up, wait for one of the two microphones, and then give your name, and speak in a loud voice so that your comments can be heard by everyone. And the recording secretary needs to get everything down as well. An article must be moved, seconded, and restated by me before it is under consideration where any debate can begin on the article. Articles may be amended, and amendments amended once. Amendments must be germane. A division of the House can be requested by the moderator or one voter before or after a voice vote. State law allows seven people to request a paper ballot, unless this body has made other arrangements at the beginning of our meeting. Debate may be cut off by a motion and two-thirds vote by calling the question. The person making this motion must have the floor at the microphone. Reconsideration of an article is allowed by state law until we reach a point in the meeting where another article is under consideration. This means if you have voted down an article, a motion can be made to reopen consideration of this article by a person on the prevailing side. However, once I have placed another article before you, no more action can be taken regarding the article at this meeting. State law prohibits consideration of articles that have not been warned. This means you cannot take binding action at the end of the meeting, under the public to be heard. My role as moderator is to help you accomplish the business you intend to do. Please raise your hand and ask questions if you don't understand what is happening, if you think what is happening is wrong, or if you want to do something but don't know the technical way to do it. And please tell me if I'm ruling improperly. Above all, as we just heard a moment ago, please be civil and respect your neighbor's opinions. All right, time to get started. Article one, shall the reports of the officers be accepted? Do we have a motion for article one? Paula Duke moves article one. Is there a second? Andrew Brown second. All right, we can begin debate on article one. So the report of the officers is the book with all the reports on what's gone on for the year. If you have questions on a particular line item, what have you. And the select board chair would like to make a quick comment on one error. Thank you, Steve. So if you have your book with you tonight, if you could open it up to page five, it's the letter that I put in there from the chair of the select board, if you look on page five down to line eight, I just have a small correction I'd like to make for the record. And it begins where it says the select board also plans to implement a registration system for firing ranges. I need to change that word implement to consider because no final decisions have been made on the firearms ordinance change. So for the record, it should say the select board also plans to consider a registration system for firing ranges. Thank you. Notified of one other correction. Yes, on page eight of the town report, Patrick Murray should have been listed as a justice of the peace. There's a corrected version online and there are correct handouts at the front. I just wanted to. So page eight, there's a justice of the peace that was not listed online. It's correct. What's the name? Patrick Murray. Patrick Murray is a justice of the peace. All right. Does anyone in the audience want to comment on anything in the report? We've got a question. Please come down to the mic and when you make your comment, please make sure what page you're on so that people can follow. So just now when you told us about page five, I just could not find the line you were talking about. Okay, it's line eight from the top on page five. I'm sorry. Page five line eight. So all right. Any other comments? Okay. If there's no other comments, we can vote on article one. So an aye is to state that you're happy with the report and we'll accept it. And nay is that you aren't happy with the report. All those in favor of article one signify by saying aye. Oppose nay. Article one passes unanimously. All right, so now we will move on to article two. Shall the town adopt a budget for the fiscal year July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020, as recommended by the select board in the amount of 14,730,649 dollars. Do I have a motion for article two? What's the name? Steven Craig. There you go, got it. Is there a second? Tim German had the second there. All right, so normally the mover of the motion gets to be the first to speak. The select board chair would like to give a brief presentation on the budget to fully inform everybody. Okay, so as I've done for the past, I guess, four years, we've put a presentation together. I hope it's relatively brief. But we wanted to walk you through what the highlights of this year's, what's in this year's proposed FY 2020 budget. So what you see here is a list of town services that were previously consolidated or aligned with the village municipality with their services to provide greater service efficiencies in service delivery for the entire community. And the select board and trustees meet on a regular basis to talk about areas of mutual interest, including service delivery. At the top there, the bus and the senior bus and the police, as you know, they were consolidated quite a while ago. The unified town manager was done in FY 2014. And then many other services have been consolidated over the past five years. Last year, in the budget that was approved, the fire departments were aligned as far as the pay and training, their ground strategy and tactics, both departments continued to retain their own separate budgets. So that's a look at what's been aligned or consolidated. And then what's in this year's budget, what we focused on is the Rec Department's alignment. And that's actually co-locating with the village's Essex Junction Recs and Park at 75 Maple Street. We're not talking about consolidating the two departments. They both, as with the fire departments, will retain their two separate budgets. It's really just about aligning the two departments so they can work more closely together. And the benefits are numerous. With the co-location, there'll be one rec office, one phone number, one combined brochure. There'll be one website, one recreation system. And hopefully it will eliminate the confusion of which office to go to for recreation services. So that's also in this budget as far as alignment. Looking back on the work that we've done with consolidation and what kind of savings we can point to, it's not just about savings, it's about also finding ways to have greater efficiencies. And we found a lot of them. But we also wanted to see can we put our fingers on the actual dollars that may have been saved with consolidation. And you see them before you, the main categories are up there. And they're savings both between the town municipality and the village municipality. And again, you can see that significant money that's been saved just by working smarter together, sharing equipment and manpower when and where needed. So if we want to look at the savings through consolidation that's in the current budget, again working constructively together with the village trustees, just in this budget alone, you can see that the town has saved significant money. And that's not money that gets generated, it's just money that doesn't have to be raised in taxes because we are working smarter together. So what were the objectives of our budget? And here's a look at the main ones. First, we wanted to make sure that we can continue the quality service delivery that we have. And last year, if you were here, there was a discussion about the police department and that they were understaffed. And there was an article in the paper about that as well last year. And so in this budget, we addressed the police. We also are focused on being able to attract and retain talent. I told you about the alignment that we're doing in the rec department. I'll get into what we're doing for buildings a little bit later. And we also know when big items that will need to be purchased, we can plan for them in the future. Well, we worked in this budget to make sure that we can put money aside for these known large expenses that will be coming up. And of course, it's on the bottom, but it's not the least important. It's to make sure that we can minimize the impact on the tax rate. So if we look at the numbers for this budget, the total proposed budget, as you heard in the warning, is $14.73 million. That's an increase of $370,000 from FYE 2019. If you do the math, and actually I think it might be a little lower than that number, but it says 2.58% increase in the operating budget this year compared to last. When you look at the impact on the tax rate, and that's taking into account revenues and other things, it's a little over 2% increase from last year. And again, from the previous chart where we saw some savings due to consolidation, that's money that we didn't have to raise in this particular budget. So let's drill down a little bit and see what drove that increase of the $370,000. So we'll drill down in there. And here's a list of the majority, the items that had the largest increases. And as you can see, salaries are the major contributors making up about half of the increase over last year. And you can see how the others ranked in there. But salaries was the biggest one. So we're going to drill down a little bit further and to understand what drove the change in salaries. So when we look at salaries and benefits, and that includes the seasonal or part-time staff, the changes are mainly due to raises, step increases, and some staffing changes. And you can see that whenever you have a change in your salary line, the benefits change too. And that's kind of a volatile number. It depends on who's leaving if they're retiring and they left with a family health care plan. Benefits overall cost can drop. And if somebody came in with just a single health care plan, you know, that's lower than a family one. But the total benefits change in this budget actually went down by about 1% compared to last year's budget. And I want to spend a few moments on this particular page. There's a lot on it, and it's about some proposed staffing changes. First, I need to make sure that it's clear that at FTE, which is written up here on my chart, that everybody understands that that means full-time equivalent. And one FTE equals one employee working full-time, so a 40-hour-a-week person. And it's just a way to be able to normalize headcount when you're talking about headcount. So in the police department, as I mentioned earlier, as part of our objectives, we wanted to address the fact that we were low on the number of police we had. And for the most part, they've become really reactive to calls for public safety services due to that low staff level. And it's difficult for them to find time for proactive policing details such as speed enforcement, which we often get calls requesting for business checks and community policing. And as I mentioned last year in the budget, we added two additional police officers to help address this. And today now, with those two additional, if you look at similar towns as Essex, we have 2.1 officers per 1,000 residents. I mean, the neighboring towns have 2.1 officers per 1,000. Essex currently, with these two new ones from last year, are 1.45 in Essex. That doesn't mean we're trying to get to 2.1, but it's just to give you an idea where we stand compared to our neighbors. So in this year's budget, it adds an additional two new officers to help enable more proactive policing. And these two new officers, plus the addition of a part-time dispatcher, actually cost in this particular budget this year was $30,500. And that was done by taking an unfilled lieutenant position and converting that to two patrol officer positions. And we had two long-term, wonderful police officers. Ed Pirro and Kurt McGlinnis retire very recently. And with their retirement, we were able to bring in three patrol officers, so more boots on the ground. And the part-time dispatcher was added to ensure that dispatch coverage was maintained. So there's about two and three quarters FTEs in the police. And here we go down to the next bullet, and that's in the IT department. Our IT department currently supports about 160 users over many locations throughout the town and in the village. And last year, if you recall, a new tech position was approved to help provide more user trainings and enable further efficiencies. But I'm proud to report, we're proud to report that our talented IT department has really stepped up to the plate. And said that they can actually handle that workload without the addition of this new tech position that was added last year. So that one FTE comes off saving significant money, because again, our crack IT team was able to step up to the plate and cover that. And then in the community development, the administrative support was full-time. And it's believed we can do that on a part-time basis. So that dropped by about half saving some about $48,000 in salaries and benefits. And going to the top right, we're adding a part-time buildings manager. We have about 30 buildings throughout the town, including in the village that are in the municipality that need care. And right now they're being cared for by the people who are in there. Usually the director of whatever department is in there is taking care of it. What we're looking to do with this part-time buildings manager is to coordinate and centralize building upkeep to be able to be a little bit more proactive. And look at the contracts for perhaps HVAC and have it controlled across all of them, perhaps getting a better price for that kind of work. So we're looking at doing that as a part-time job. There was discussion about maybe it needs to be full-time, but the consensus was let's start at half-time and see how that goes this year. And if more is needed, we can address it at that time. And last but not least, in the recreation department, we're adding about 0.55 FTE. And that's in the form of a senior center coordinator. And that senior center is rapidly growing membership. And the number of folks that sign up for the rides on the senior bus goes up weekly. We're also looking at adding a part-time communication coordinator for the rec department that's going to be co-located. And that part-time position will be shared with the village trustees paying for part of that. So in aggregate, the total change in FTEs that we're looking for in this budget is 2.35 FTEs. At a total cost in this budget of a decrease of actually 40,500. Again, because of the reduction of the lieutenants position, two retiring police officers and coming in with three patrol officers and the IT department stepping up, as I said many times. So that's the proposed staffing changes. So how does this impact the estimated taxes? So with this budget, the FYE 2020, the estimated tax rate is 52.32 cents for $100 assessed value. That's an increase of one penny over last year. And if you look for the average taxpayer, and that's being defined as somebody in a $280,000 home, which is the average price of a home here. If we assume the grand list growth is a modest 1%, and for the past several years it's been a little bit more than that, but we'd like to budget conservatively. And the select board agreed to put $100,000 from the fund balance in as a revenue this year. Last year was 150, it's down to 100 this year. But when you take those assumptions into play, the increase for the average taxpayer on their property is $28 per year for the property. And lastly, I just wanted to show your Essex dollars at work. And this is a pie chart that's on page 48 of your annual report. And it shows that for the average $280,000 home in Essex, the total municipal tax bill is $1,465. And that does not include the education tax. That's the school takes care of that. So with that, you can see the public safety piece is about a third of that. And that gives you 24-7 police and dispatch services. 24-7 fire protection and first responder services. And if you look at the pie chart, you can see that there's a number by public safety that says 511. So that means out of the $1,465, 511 are going towards the public safety piece. Then if we move to highways, you get 24-7 winter snow plowing of streets and selected sidewalks. Maintenance of about 110 miles of both paved and dirt roads, 91 miles of walks and paved paths, 95 miles of water lines, a lot of bridges, I mentioned 30 buildings, a lot of heavy equipment as well. And if you look at highways, that's $311 of the $1,465. And then just to plug some of the others, the Essex Library is an excellent, the Essex Free Library, excellent place that offers educational programs and research assistance, senior busing and activity out of the rec department. And again, that's growing quite rapidly. We enable public bus transportation that comes through contributions from the taxpayers that go to Green Mountain Transit. And I mentioned that capital budget expenses and savings planning for future capital expenses, which helps keep the budget from being really volatile from year to year because we can plan out 15 years or so for our equipment and put money aside over those years so that when that equipment is needed, then we have the money ready to go and we don't have to borrow it. So all those services and more are delivered by very dedicated and talented staff to help deliver the services to the community. So I just wanted to give you an idea that you can see that highways and public safety take up more than 50% and then the others take up the remainder. So I hope that gives you an idea. I didn't want to take too long, but I hope it gives you a good idea as to what we went through to prepare this budget for you. And we'll see if you have questions. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Max. Who would like to be the first person to speak to Article 2? Go up to the microphone and state your name, please. Good evening, Mr. Moderator. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is David Keenan. I have two questions relating to the budget. As I was sitting down a week or two ago to read through the budget, I was going really well until I got to page 53. And under the finance and tax collection section, I came across line 100, which I had not seen in previous years, but certainly paid attention when I found out that the tax collection and finance department was spending $407,000 on insurance. I kept looking through other parts of the report and found that no other departments were paying anything for insurance. Figuring that the tax collection probably wasn't paying $407,000 for the insurance, I figured it had to be finance. And somebody in finance had decided to lump all of the insurance premium receipts together in one category. And I noticed they did the same thing in audit and put them both under finance. Now, was I mistaken in that? Is that in fact what is being done? Or is in fact the tax collection service paying $408,000 in insurance and nobody else is paying anything? Thank you for your question. So that insurance line, it may be labeled slightly differently this year, but in previous years it has also been there. That is workers' compensation insurance. That's property, casualty, liability, including elected officials liability, and unemployment insurance. And that's what's in that one line item with the exception of the fire department who pays their own workers' compensation insurance because they have an additional rider. Many of the benefits like health insurance, vision insurance, dental, life, short-term, long-term disability, and accidental death and dismemberment are associated with the benefits line in each of the departments right under the salaries. So that one, the $407,000 that you see in finance, that is really the umbrella coverage for all of the properties, the unemployment and the workers' comp. Does that answer your question? Yes, ma'am, it does. Thank you. I'm going to segue into my second question. As I was going down through the different accounts, I noticed pretty regularly you list salary first, and then benefits afterwards, and the benefits usually fell within the 30-35% range, which being in business, I know that that's normal. However, when we got to page 57 of line 289 and 290 in the highway department, I discovered that the benefits in that particular department amount to over 47% of salaries, and even more shocking when you go to the next page under recreation administration, you find that the benefits there equals over 61% of the salaries. Could somebody please explain to me how come the benefits are so blasted high in those two departments? Thank you. Looks like I'm up again. So I appreciate you going through and making those calculations, and I think that from an analysis perspective, it's a very important one. There are a couple pieces of information that are critical to more thorough analysis between salaries and benefits, and that is, in each of these departments, the salary line is not only full-time staff, it's full-time, it's part-time, it's seasonal, any temporary help, and over time. And then Max was speaking about sort of the unpredictability of the benefits line. We offer the same suite of benefits to all full-time employees, but we have no control over when somebody comes in which level they choose. And the difference between someone choosing a single plan at about $10,000 a year and a family plan at about $30,000 a year is significant. If you have a small department, say recreation, that only has a handful of full-time employees receiving benefits, and maybe all of them are at a higher level versus highway, which has maybe a larger staff and a larger proportion of them have a lower level of benefits. So that's contributing to the volatility between the departments. I don't have more specifics, like a person by person information off hand, but I hope that answers your question. Well, actually, you used the highway department as one of your examples of a lower benefit, it's lower only to the recreation administration. All of the rest of them are between 30 and 35%, except for highway, which is very close to 48%, and recreation administration, which is very close to 62% of salary. Once again, the recreation department has a lot of seasonal employees that are in that line. So while you see the salaries, a lot of seasonals don't get benefits, so that's where you're seeing a variance. But again, as my learned colleague has mentioned, we don't get to pick and choose what benefits they take. It's based upon their family size. So you can even start in our organization as a single, hopefully find a significant other and be married. And now you have the beginnings of a family and then have your first or second, third or fourth child, and now you're in the family category. We love you just the same and you work hard. So, and then later on in life when the kids go on to college and get past the age of 26, you come off our insurance. It's just the way it works in our health insurance policy. Thank you. Go ahead. My name is Henry Gabor. I've come to these meetings many times and I'm always looking for lower taxes. And tonight I'm going to make a motion in a moment to increase the taxes. And I'm looking at highway department resurfacing our roads. We talked to the mic instead of looking around here. I did some research. Somebody told me that don't come up and make a motion unless you've got some data. And we have in the town of Essex, out of the 230 roads, we have 133 that are satisfactory. Now let's go right to the worst ones. We've got 15 sections of roads that are in a failure mode. We've got 18 in a serious mode, 33 in a very poor mode. That's 66 poor to failure, like 28% of them. Now I know we've had a very bad winter and as the highway department pointed out to me, we had 17 separate events of rain, melt, snow, ice and freezing that really does damage to the roads. But there are these massive amount of roads that I'm calling massive of that are very serious and very poor. I happen to live on one of them and I don't think this increase is going to get my road fixed this year, don't get me wrong. But when I see the highway out there putting coal patch in when it's five degrees out because the potholes are so bad, we're spending a lot of money patching holes that don't need to be patched, they should be fixed. And in further talking to the highway department, out of these 66 roads that are poor in failure, or even go down to the 33 roads that are in serious to failure mode, last year we surfaced seven roads. This year we hope to resurface seven more. Well, it doesn't take a lot of math to figure out that to repave just the failure and the serious ones, it's going to take us five years and another five years to do the poor roads. So I want to tonight want to send a message to our administration and the beauty of a town meeting is we can get up and discuss these things and make a point, we can all write a letter or so and you know, whatever. So I'm going to make a motion that we sounds like a lot, but I want to make a motion that we increase the budget by $100,000. In your market, I know they can spend it anywhere they want once we increase the budget, but I think they've always been good in the past about putting it into the item that I want and I want to see some more resurfacing. With that extra 100,000, maybe we can do 10 roads, which would only take three years instead of five to get the most serious roads fixed. And my math comes up that that's like a point, a six, eight percent increase to the budget. So out of your pocket, it's going to cost you less than $28 to do this. And we need to start breaking this curve of getting the roads resurfaced and in better shape, so we don't have to spend all this money going around putting patches in them when it's five degrees out. So I make an emotion that we increase the budget by $100,000. And that would bring the budget up to, where did I see it here? $14,830,649. Okay. And in the vote, I think the vote tonight is not just to add the $100,000, but to send a clear message that our infrastructure besides all the buildings and stuff, the roads that we all drive on every day are more important and we need to start fixing them up. Thank you very much. Okay. And did you get his name clearly? Could you spell your last name, please? G-A-B-T-R-E. Thank you. Okay. So we have a motion on Article 2. Is there a second to this motion? I didn't see who said it. What's your name? Okay. Gabrielle Smith. Okay. So there's a motion and a second. So now that means we're going to debate not the regular budget, but specifically this amendment only. And to restate the proposed amendment is to increase the budget by $100,000 to a final value of $14,830,649. Who else would like to speak to this amendment? Mona Shepard. I was just curious if you could tell me the exact... I can't hear you. Mona Shepard. Thank you. Sorry, I'm losing my voice a little. I was just curious if you could tell me the exact line item because I thought paving was in the capital budget and not in this particular budget. Could you clarify that? Well, and just to extra clarify, when someone is making a motion to amend the budget, they technically can guide and such, but you're not actually voting on a specific line item anyway. So I think the guidance that he provided on paving the roads is probably sufficient enough for the select board since the public isn't allowed to call out a specific line item anyway. I guess my question to the select board is where does paving show up in this budget? I thought it was in the capital budget. And in this case... That is correct. Thank you. All right. You're welcome. I'm John Warmer, W-E-R-M-E-R. Spelled it Warmer last year, hurt my feelings. How many miles of road are marked as serious failing? Because you said it was seven. Seven roads were marked as failing, right? All I know is what I got in my email back in the... Let's try... We should be having the discussion go through the chair. How many miles of road versus how many roads themselves, right? Because if it's a mile-long road, that's really different than three 10-mile-long roads. Let Dennis answer that question. He's the public works director. I'll try to answer that one, but I do want to answer the previous question that was raised because I want to make sure everybody understands. There is money in the capital budget for paving also. We put it in both places. The money in the capital budget is primarily for major road work. And it's in both places. Usually the capital budget, we try to obtain grants and match those funds. And that varies from year to year. There is additional money there, and we use both those accounts. And the individual was correct. It's 185,000 in the operating budget. And this year, if you go to your report on page 49, and some of this money has been accumulated over the year to year, so it isn't all from one year, but we are going to do... We hope to do about $224,000 worth of work in the capital budget as well. So it is in both places. Sorry about that. What we do, we have some material we put in the table in the back, and maybe before you go home, you could pick that up and take it with you. But we do a road management plan every three to five years. The last one we published was in 2014. We did a road analysis last year with the village engineer, town engineer, and the regional planning commission. We walked all our roads and evaluated them using a relatively newer system. And the data that we did was that we do have about 15 sections of failed road. So when we talk about roads, I do not have it in mileage in front of me, but I do have the list of roads, for example, that were failed. We had 18 sections that were serious. So in some of these roads, they may not be the entire roadway. They may be a four or 500 foot section of a roadway. So it may be the solution would be to essentially go in and maybe grind and repave a portion of the road, but not the entire road. So I don't have the lengths for you, but I do have the roads that we've identified and those are the ones that we're trying to do. I think the other important factor is that when you look at the material that we put on the table in the back, it's relatively inexpensive to overlay a road. A 30-foot ride road is about $19 a foot to overlay. That's prices we estimated for this year. If you want to rebuild a road totally, which means taking off all the asphalt, removing about 18 inches of material, putting filter fabric down and redoing it, it's about $133 a foot. So when we reach a point where our roads get to total reconstruction, a lot of the roads that float at the top of the list, you may end up doing two or three of those in a year because they're so bloody expensive. And part of the strategy is to try to catch those roads and overlay them at $19 a foot rather than rebuild them at $133. So whatever dollars we get, we'll put to advantage. Not all of them will go to the worst roads because if we did that, we may only do three roads a year. So it may be a combination of two or three of the worst roads and perhaps seven to ten of the roads that are in the next category down or so. That if we overlay them, we'll get another 10 or 15 years out of them, hopefully before we have to go back and do more work. It's not an easy process to figure which ones to do. And it's always not necessarily customer complaints. It's trying to decide where to spend the money wisely so that you get as much done with the dollars that you have. And this year, as the individual indicated, it's been pretty rough. And I live in South Barlenton and wrote in South Barlenton. I was bad at Essexon and Barlenton, they're the same. So we're going to have a fun summer trying to fix everything. I hope they answered the question. Thank you, sir. My name is Linda Sundtup and I just wanted to ask, what effect you believe that the possible addition of the proposed amount of funds could have this year, this coming year? The impact would be that we can go farther down the list and pick up more roads. We do know, believe it or not, all our crew isn't out necessary plowing. We've had a number of us have been out the last week when it was actually fairly nice out walking the roads. And we have identified some roads that really weren't on the list, but have started to come apart that really need to be addressed. I can almost list them off, I won't. But for one of them, I will give an example. And that's Suzie Wilson Road from around the Kellogg Road intersection back to just beyond the gas station. Never really expected that one to get as bad as it has this winter. But it's gotten worse and we can't wait for the next winter to fill it with pothole patching material. We're going to have to go in there. So it wasn't on the table to be paved, we're going to have to do it. That one will probably be expensive because, as you know, with 20,000 cars a day going down there, that's got to be done on either evenings or a Sunday or something like that, which drives up to costs. But that's the kind of thing we're going to look at is there may be some sections where we hadn't planned on doing something, but they really, really need to be done. So if we do get extra money, we'll put it to that. If not, we will probably delay some of the ones that we were going to just overlay to go after the worst ones to get them fixed. This is the year we have to do that. Thank you. I guess I would add to that just any money that you put to preventative is a lot better spent than $110 or $130 to reconstruct. So the money which we are not advocating for, which is coming from the floor, is we would put it to the roads that need the most maintenance that will do the best good to keep us from having to spend the heavy dollars reconstructing. That's my book, Dennis. Thank you. All right, go ahead. My name is Keeley Schell. I can spell that or you can look it up in any school board related item. Keeley Schell. I understand the concern about our roads. And I was just thinking, however, that our select board members and our town administrators have put a lot of thought into prioritizing and asking for our money for the projects that they think need to be done this year. I can think of a lot of things in our community that could benefit from an influx of $100,000. You know, if somebody said, what would you give $100,000 for? I might think of something to do with the opioid abuse crisis. I think there's a lot of things that we could throw money at if we just think of it tonight. So my inclination would be to go with the budget that was presented to us. But that's just my comment on this. Thank you. Who else would like to speak to the amendment? I'm Mitch Stern. So I've heard from one person, it sounds like we have a real disaster. And I heard from the public works person that it's handled. So I need to know to make my decision, are we OK? Or are we going to be really driving on some really bad roads and it's going to be very dangerous? I mean, is the budget that's in place that we are going to decide before the amendment, is that going to take care of us? And it's an opinion call that I need you guys to tell me. I know you're going to want the money. I mean, everyone always wants money. But I need to feel like are we OK or do we really have a disaster that we need to head off? OK, and can you restate your name? It's Mitch Stern. Mitch Stern. Well, if you want. The money we have in the budget, as Dennis said, we prioritize what needs to be done. This has been a worse winter than some others. But there are funds that if there's a complete disaster that we would tap. So we put this budget together based on the input from the Public Works Department. And we think what we presented is what is needed to answer your question. So you feel it's handled with the budget that we have on the floor? More money, you could do more. But I don't think we have a disaster on our hands. We always have roads that need attention. OK, thank you. We work with the budget to try to handle it and being sensitive to the taxpayers. All right, thank you. Go ahead. My name is John Rodenberg. And I just did a little bit of math here just for reference. My wife and I are living on one income well below the median income. And I detest taxes. However, we live on West Street. And major potholes have developed recently that every time any large vehicle drives by, the whole house shakes. And so I can absolutely see the value in preventative maintenance. Just as I do preventative maintenance on my vehicle, so I don't have to pay $85 an hour at a shop, I also see the benefit in preventative maintenance for our roads. And doing some quick math with that extra $100,000 the gentleman has proposed, if the road required complete reconstruction, that $100,000 could only do 751 feet of roadway. If we prevented that at $19 a foot, that would do only 17 feet short of one mile of roadway. That's 5,263 feet. Personally, I would rather see that my car doesn't fall apart. And I have to pay $85 an hour to do something that I cannot do myself because I didn't want to pay $20 extra in taxes to take care of this problem. Thank you very much. Anybody else like to speak to the amendment? OK. Looks like everyone's said their piece. So we can go forward and vote on the amendment. Now, we're only voting on the amendment, not the budget. So let me restate what we're going to do. Amendment is to raise the budget by $100,000 so that the total budget amount will be $14,830,649. So if you vote aye, you're voting to increase. If you're voting nay, you're keeping it the same. All right. All in favor of the amendment, signify by saying aye. Aye. Oppose nay. Nay. I'm going to call for a division. So what this means is that we'll have people stand yeses first then the noes. The board will count. The board of civil authority will count the vote. So all those in favor of the amendment, please stand and stay standing until you're told I tell you to sit down. It sounded more even than that, of course. What? I don't know. I let you guys handle that. Who called the OK? OK. Perfect. Thank you. Making sure it wasn't random. All right. So all those against the motion, the amendment, please stand. It's going to be close. Don't take back. I don't know. Are you going to bring down the answer to me? Or I think it's in the back corner, right at the check-in table with a sheet of papers. John, in the back corner. Well, good to sit. Good to sit. You may sit down. All right. The results of the vote, those in favor of the amendment, were 138. Those against the amendment were 96. The amendment has passed. Point of order. Mr. Moderator? Yes. Point of order. With all due respect to our board of civil authority, there seem to be some confusion in the counting. I'm wondering if those numbers really do add up. I was going to say, does the board want to make a statement to that? There's confidence that the numbers that you receive are written down. I understand your point of order. Do you feel confident in the numbers? OK. Thank you very much. All right. I'm going to let that go then. And it's also a difference of over 40 votes. So it's not like we're talking a couple here. All right. So Article 2 is now amended to read. And we're going to then continue debate on Article 2. Shall the town adopt a budget for the fiscal year July 1, 2019, to June 30, 2020, as recommended by the select board and amended here, in the amount of $14,830,649. And no, it does not. So this is just what we're, there was just a point of order on do we need a motion and we don't. So now we're just continuing to discuss the budget with the amended value only. So at this point, you could talk about any point of the budget or make any other motions. Go ahead. Linda Myers and I probably don't need the microphone. But in the presentation, Max talked about the police force and that indicated that we were getting five more through this budget. Two and three. Two was a replacement. Is that what you're saying, Max? A total of 2.35 FTEs. FTEs. But we will have five more officers working. Total of, will the FTE? No. No. No. This year, we're adding a total of two additional officers than what we had in our roster. So we're adding two positions and a part-time dispatcher. OK. Then my question is, how far are we away from the full compliment that we feel we need for the town of Essex? Let me speak then. Well, we haven't, we haven't quite that. I mean, when you go to people's numbers and averages, we do want to look at the future, but I'm working with the chief of police on that number. And we've been working more on where they're working and how they're working than adding more numbers. OK. Thank you. All right. Anybody else that would like to talk to Article 2? I don't want to keep people too long. My name is Will Dodge. I'm the chair of the Energy Committee. And I think overall, it's a really great budget. But even though I just voted for a tax increase on myself, I do think about the fact that we've got to start doing things to ultimately reduce some of the costs. And specifically, I think about energy. And I look at some of the things like on page 54, line 164, we're projecting the cost of gasoline to go up. It seems to me that we've got to try to do more to make that go down. Not just for cost reasons, but also to think about trying to not be quite so addicted as we are to gasoline and see if maybe we can try to at least electrify or use some other different fuel for the town's vehicle fleet going forward. The other thing that I notice is that we have as projections for both natural gas and electricity on a lot of the buildings, projections that are going down on some buildings and up on the others. I'm sure there's good reasons for that. But my concern is that ultimately they should be going down on all of that, given how much, how many leaps and bounds we've been making in energy efficiency, the fact that we've got a great institution in efficiency, Vermont, that can really help with a lot of that, and especially the fact that we're getting, at least for now, a part-time building manager whose job it is, and we as the energy committee would volunteer, to work with that person to try to bring all of that down. So the only point I wish to stress is that that really does need to become a priority for the future to try to bring some of those costs down. Thank you. All right, thank you very much. Anybody else want to speak to Article 2? Well, you got to go to the microphone if you want to call it, or I was just about to say I didn't see anybody else talking, so I was going to move forward. Sounds like the same sentiment anyway. Everyone said their piece, so let's vote on it. So I'm going to restate the article as amended before we vote. Shall the town adopt a budget for the fiscal year July 1, 2019, to June 30, 2020, as recommended by the Select Board and amended in the amount of $14,830,649. So an aye is in favor of that budget, and nay is against. All those in favor of Article 2 as amended signify by saying aye. Aye. Oppose nay. Nay. The ayes have it. Article 2 passes. OK, now that takes us to the next point here on Article 3, public to be heard. And I'd like to make one announcement first. And I want to first say, as a reminder, Article 3, we are not allowed to have binding actions taken. You can comment on things or things you want the Select Board to focus on, look at, answer questions. And I want to also point out Article 4, the voting tomorrow in the usual places, schools, where we have three elections. Moderator, one vacancy for one year. Select Board, two vacancies for three years. And Champlain Water District, one vacancy for three years. And to start off, Article 3, we're going to have a Select Board member, Mike Legman, make a statement. Thank you very much for this opportunity. I promise I won't be long. Tonight is my last town meeting that I'll be on this side of the table. And I wanted to share a few thoughts with you. First of all, I want to thank all of you for the privilege of serving on the Select Board. It has been my honor to serve Essex. I've had the honor of serving Essex for the last 17 years on several committees, commissions, and then the Select Board. I have enjoyed each and every one of those assignments. The PC, the Planning Commission, the Design Review Board, both of the police building committees, and then finally six years on the Select Board. I'd be lying to you if I told you that I didn't have a couple of those assignments that were particularly satisfying. The siting of the police building was one. Acting as the liaison between the general contractor and the Select Board when we renovated 81 Main Street was another, and then finally, the work that we're doing to date as far as we've come to date with the consolidation work. Those two buildings, the police building and 81 Main were in desperate need. This community needed them both. We needed a new police facility. We needed to renovate 81 Main, and I'm just, I'm really glad that I was able to play a small part in that. We would not have been able to do those projects without your support, your, not unanimous, but your three to one margin of voting for the bond and allowing us to repurpose the extra money from the bond to go toward 81 Main Street. We couldn't have done those projects without you, and we thank you for that. I thank you for that. So tonight, I say thank you very much for allowing me to serve. I've told Evan to give me a month or so and then if he feels that there's an opening someplace where I might be able to make a contribution to give me a call. Thank you very, very much. Okay. Who would like to be next to talk about Article Three? Yes, Article Three. Go ahead, Tim. Good evening. I'm Tim German and I'm here with a whole bunch of people from the Essex Community Historical Society. We didn't have a page in the book this year, but we do get a lot of support from the town and all the people here we have for years. And we just wanna say thank you to the select board and to the community for all your support over the years. And I'm gonna introduce Jerry Fox, who's got a few more things to invite you to come see us. I'm Jerry Fox. I'm another one of the board members on the Essex Historical Society. I wanna invite you guys to come visit us. We're open in the summers on every Sunday and most Thursdays. We'd be open more Thursdays if we had more volunteers. And so if you like history and if you like old stuff, come and see us. Our email address is on page 41. If you have questions, we try to answer them all and we wanna welcome you. We're always looking for extra volunteers. There's more things to do than we have board members to do it. So come help us out. Thank you. The Powell Museum, right next to the Essex Free Library, the old little white school. And again, Sundays one to five and come visit us. The last thing I wanna take a moment of personal privilege because the guy who just spoke has been a friend of mine for 40 years. And he is the very definition of public service. I mean, he has for so many years, quietly, first the planning commission, the select board, a whole bunch of other things coaching. Mike, we really thank you. We're gonna miss you a great deal. Thank you, Tim. Anybody else like to speak? Looks like we're out of speaking. Who would like to make a motion to adjourn? All adieu. Dan. All adieu. Moved. Who was second? Dan Cairn was second. All those in favor of adjourning? Signify by saying aye. Aye. Oppose nay. Meeting is adjourned. Yes, that was Dan Cairn. All those in favor of adjourning?