 All right, so at 7 o'clock, I'd like to call order the special meeting of the Waterbury Select Board on Monday, the 31st of July. And I'd like to start again by recognizing everyone that's been working on the flood recovery. I think you've done a remarkable job. The place looks relatively great compared to other towns in central Vermont. And just like to recognize the tremendous effort that everyone's put forth to. And the first item is to approve the agenda. Do I have a motion? Second. Okay, it's been moving second. Any further discussion? Hearing none. All in favor say aye. Opposed? Any abstentions? We have an approved agenda. Next we have the Consent Agenda items. We did have a meeting last Friday and had a few other emergency meetings to discuss issues related to emergency management. Resulting from the flood, those minutes are available. And then also a couple of other permits. So I have a motion on the Consent Agenda. I approve the items listed on the Consent Agenda. Second. Moved and seconded. Any further discussion? Hearing none. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Okay, the Consent Agenda is approved. Next I'd like to have an update on flood recovery efforts. And the first item, sub item is the appointment of the flood recovery coordinator. So I have a motion. You want to do discussion first? Okay. If we want to do a motion for discussion, I would move to appoint Tom Drake as Waterbury's flood recovery coordinator. Second that motion. Okay, moved and seconded. Further discussion. The background. I guess I'm happy to start and then I'll defer to Tom or others. I guess I would say. I want to give a big acknowledgement to Liz Schlegel who's not in the room tonight, but her. Liz, myself, Danny numerous town staff, we have to thank all the town staff again for all their support Karen who's been feeling all sorts of phone calls at the front desk. And many people as we can see, still from the stuff in the room, we've been doing things with dehumidifiers that are rented and equipment and supplies and mobilizing volunteers. Volunteers are incredible. Again, can't say enough about the folks in Waterbury who are willing to show up and help. It does also require coordination to match both those who are in need and could use volunteer support to those people who want to help. So that's a role that's been done in a variety of interim ways in the kind of two to three weeks. Imminently after an emergency by people with other full time jobs, but it was not a sustainable model. So recognizing both that meeting to have a point person who can be in charge of particularly for Waterbury candidly as we move into this next phase of more long term recovery. Recognizing that there still is needs and places that volunteers can plug in, but also a variety of long term municipal projects. And recognizing that many of us who have been doing the work cannot do it for the foreseeable future. We would love to hire someone. So I guess I would say Liz brought up Tom. He's been already, I think, hit the ground running and been in and out of the municipal offices for the better part of this whole week. Staff volunteer shifts this weekend. Both lives on Randall Street and knows the community from his prior role. So I think would be an incredible fit. And we'll say just personally thank you for your willingness and interest in this position. If you choose to accept it because I think it's great to just recognize capacity as a piece of this puzzle. There's a lot of different pieces and we're figuring it out. We're going to have someone who can help day to day and have those of us who have been answering the Waterbury help email less stress that someone is going to email with something really concerning and urgent. And none of us are going to see until we're out of work at the end of the day. I think it's a really important role. I would say just we've talked with Tom, we've talked with Liz and others and would certainly want to hear from him and others. But that's some gentle to you. Tom, do you want to add? It's nice that there's someone who's a member of the community and deeply involved in the recovery effort and clearly has the skill set to do this. So it makes everyone's life easier. It's one of the steps up is where we do the job. So it's, I think it's a great choice. I think again, it just makes our life really easy to have Tom here. Tom Drake, do you want to talk about your experience and your interest in the position? Liz, the one thing you didn't mention was, you know, I was one of those two at nine o'clock three weeks ago. Tonight, you know, I had eight feet of water in my basement so I can relate from the inside and what it feels like to get flooded and I read in, you know, now again, four years later. So I think, you know, just being the principal across from middle school for 14 years, I know a lot of people and I know where the roads are and stuff like that. So I just happen to be at a place where I have the time right now. But I can see even, you know, from today, we just had a few volunteers and, you know, our needs are getting shorter but changing to more kind of like you said, long term thinking, you know, the rules going to change. So, you know, the few of you three weeks ago tomorrow who just like jumped in and ready fire aimed it, you know, was amazing. And I think, Danny, unless you were here this week, you know, like, huh, it's actually calm around here. Yeah, like this last three weeks ago, no. So it is starting to, you know, fade out. So what Tom, Elle and I talked about was, you know, this is not a full time job. It's not as needed. And he said, no, just make sure you don't milk it. I said, trust me, Tom, I've got to find my own job and I've got like still like people visiting my basement and stuff like that. So I'm not doing that. So yeah, I can see it being busier times than others. But I also can see it being, you know, when the conversation shifts to more mitigation, more, you know, getting involved in that kind of thing too. So I think it'll be, you know, a piecemeal part-time job. And again, I'm reading the email and organizing the stuff. So stuff won't slip through the cracks, right? And I don't think it did before because of the efforts that went out here. But it would be easy too if you had a whole bunch of cooks in the kitchen. Makes sense to me. Lou Schlegel would do a great job in the coordination effort. Left to go on family vacation to Cape Cod. She took with her a list that we received from the state of 211. People that had called in on 211 and there were water delivery residents indicating that they had been impacted. And did she have time to transfer that 211 data to our grand list data? She, yeah, she crosswalked them and highlighted the ones on the 211 list that, you know, she made notes like, you know, we talked to the person but we didn't check that house or we, you know, didn't check either the person or the house. So we're following up on that list. But it's a big list of 211. I think it, you know, we didn't push it as hard to understand as we could have. But I think it's a good clearinghouse for the future. Right. And just to say out loud, like again, some of those more long term tasks are saying, like you just did things as they came up, but getting those more final numbers about who and where were impacted and to what extent. And that's a lot of what's in the 211 data of some folks are, you know, we're not saying there's an imminent, you know, need for support at my home. But I got X number of inches, you know, in the basement up in the center or something like that. So being able to tabulate all of that information is just one of the many things that it would be wonderful to have staff support. For moving forward. Just learn in the last day or so that there is a 211 app that's being rolled out that will be able to get where you can see people. You know, essentially fill out their information and get to see it in real time. So that's the usually helpful for the next emergency you run into. And hopefully up on the next few weeks. All right. Any further discussion on the motion? Hearing none. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? All right. Tom, congratulations. Thank you for your service. Thank you for volunteering. One side note, I talked to a homeowner today about how some union street that three weeks ago tonight the resident who was just panning, right? That's how he was living there, just left. And the place has been locked up since, you know, so that hasn't been touched. So I think, you know, I hear a lot of, oh, wonder is so far ahead. I think in general we are. Because maybe it was a re-experience or we have smart and hardworking people here. But, you know, there are still houses that are on top. I'm meeting that homeowner at noon on Saturday. And you can see what goes on, you know, because that's been sitting there for three weeks now. Yikes. Can't be good. Kane, you had some recommendations on steps to be taken. Not for the immediate, right? We now have Tom drink, thankfully, to oversee our immediate cleanup. My suggestion would be that the board consider creation of a committee who would be tasked with preparing us for next time. Outline, you know, not as clear as I could have made it. But essentially their job would be to get us ahead with supplies, get us ahead with preparations. And then when we need to go into recovery mode, they could act in the manner that our current flood recovery team had been doing with gathered volunteers and dispatching them to the needed areas. So wait, there's going to be another time? I think it would be in 100 years. I just consider, you know, with 200 year floods in the last 12 years and the acceleration of climate change, we can expect this to happen again and we need to be prepared for it. I think Kane's idea is a good one. I kind of was on Senator Sanders' phone call and I tried to talk more about as much as some communities are really suffering now, but we need to, just every community needs to talk about resilience as much as they do about, you know, immediate cleanup and recovery. I don't know if he would be willing to do it, but usually the emergency management director would probably, should be probably leading a little bit of that charge, Gary Dillon. I don't know, you know, I know none of us probably have spoken to him, but, you know, that's probably the first place I would think of asking, you know, having, you know, I know being also an emergency management coordinator, I've taken the emergency management director's course, you know, it has a lot of that background already. Absolutely. And that to me would be a natural. Oh, I'm not suggesting that we leave anybody off the table. Right. I'm suggesting that we create a committee who works with the emergency coordination that we already have in place for natural disaster specifically. And I think that's one of the reasons why we did so well this time, because I hate to say this, you know, we didn't probably want to have the experience we had with, you know, I read the first time, but I think that taught us a lot of lessons which we brought to this recovery effort. And I think we've done a lot better, a lot better than a lot of the other communities I've seen. So I'm wondering if perhaps Cain, you and Mike could flesh out your idea a little bit more and bring it to the next meeting? Sure. I'm going to be glad to hold it down, so I'm done. Absolutely. All right. I don't know if I'm in the motion for that, but I think we'll put it on the agenda for the next week. All right. Anything else before we get into dumpsters and materials pickup and services? I think I have just a couple of notes just for general updates. And Tom now, I'm feeling outdated because now Tom's been here and I haven't been here for almost 48 whole hours. But some notes are just, you know, that was covered is the recovery efforts moving largely forward from that big scale to some smaller main priorities such as mold prevention and mitigation. In individual citizens, ongoing needs like Tom mentioned, specific houses that have specific needs, data collection reporting and then looking to the future. I think we have like, I love Cain your suggestion and I think including the right people is really important. And we have some emergency management stuff written, but a lot of what happened was because it exists in people's brains. Because Liz Siegel has done this before because Bob Butler has done this before because Bill Sheplick was on the street and ran into us. And so I think what's going to be really important is getting what's in people's brains onto paper or the computer or whatever it is so that it's there for the next group and not depending on that same kind of idea. We also started to encourage volunteers to go and help in other communities who meet it and who aren't where we are just yet. And if anybody who's listening or sees this is interested, you can reach out to Tom or to waterburyhelp at gmail.com. And just continuing to say out loud that the FEMA Disaster Recovery Center set up at the armory open 8am to 7pm, 7 days a week. And then Tom, are you still looking for a couple of dehumidifier locations or you've got? I think we're looking for two. Okay, so if I'm just so that it's in the minutes, in the paper, etc., the rented or borrowed dehumidifier is the big, big ones. If you have one, be in touch. If you haven't yet because there are still a couple that we're not sure whose basements they're in. And a note today, Monday is the last day for appliances at the Stanley Watson lot. So no more appliances, tires, metal, etc., should be brought to the Stanley Watson lot. It's going to be cleaned up and municipal use of that lot is officially ending. And then that brings us to dumpsters, etc. Danny, I had a question. There's what looks like a set up for a skating rink or something at the end of that lot that blocks off the exit. Do you know what I'm talking about? Like going towards the horseshoe again? I saw. I don't know what it is. They've taken the accumulated silt and created berms all around it and put down a liner as though it's going to become a skating rink when the weather changes a bit. But I just didn't know if that was permanent. One of the two Tom's should call buildings in general services. But I don't know. No I do. Don't have to be municipal. That's the question. And I should just add I did participate in the FEMA discussion for towns this afternoon. They went through how towns apply for assistance for any project costing more than $3,800. And so we'll be we certainly have one project right on Winooski Street. That's why we'll go beyond that and probably some others as well. So probably getting an update on that subsequent meeting. And how about the other dumpsters? Are they going are they done as of this week? So that's what we're working to vote. I think the vote is for tonight. Where this weekend I think we're down as of this weekend. I think we're down to two. I think the rest were taken. That was the information I got, but I haven't had a confirmation that was done. Yeah, Randall streets is gone. Okay. So I think we're down to either one or two. And then our goal is to vote as a board on how much longer we want to fund having those one or two here. And I don't have the update on if it's one or two. Sorry. There's two. They're still two. Perfect. Thank you. Okay. And I think Bob Butler's recommendation was to go to the end of this week. To the end of this week. Right. Which seems like a reasonable discussion based on what I'm observing. Tom, maybe I have something to add. I think that's right. Just want an arm ring. We're on almost right now. I think another week should be fine. Okay. All right. Do I have a motion? We've already gotten the one out of the cider house. Yeah, that would have been included. Yeah. Yeah. So then I move to continue town funding of the two dumpsters in town through Friday, August. Anyone? Friday is the fourth. So should I say that or Saturday? I don't know when they would get picked up. I want you to make it through Saturday. Okay. Through Saturday, August 5th. Do I hear a second? Second. Any further discussion? As a general statement for the public there for flood impacting folks. Thank you. Thank you. They are a municipal resource. That was, if you read that after I read your report, like the one thing we did, it did really well. We got the dumpsters right away. So we're keeping it up and recognizing Tom Drake already shared that there are still folks who are flooded impacted who have not fully cleaned out. So just that is the purpose of what those dumpsters are for it. And we appreciate everyone respecting and using them in that manner. Through the fit. Any further discussion? Hearing none. All the bearers say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Okay. We've got two dumpsters until Saturday. Yes. I just had a quick question about the road just now. When Danny mentioned the appliances being finished at Stanley Lawson, you said Monday. Do you mean today Monday or next Monday? Today. So today they're done. They've got them all in the dumpster and gone. And to your knowledge, the slurry pin thing, I've got some pictures of that. That's not town. It's a state thing. And that's Tom. Do you have his public work? It's not us. I talked to Bill Woodruff and he said that the slurry that was coming out of those vector trucks when they were sucking the mud out of the houses, that that was being stored down by the ice center from our public works department. So I was surprised when I saw that there was this other area over there by the appliances thing. Are they putting it there? But maybe that's the state that's using. That's doing it. I don't know. Well, we'll get a clarification on that. That's all right. And the two dumpsters that are allowed to remain one on Elm Street. What was the other one? Did you say? I don't know. Today one would be on Union. Okay. It came from Bob Wilder. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. And Roger, if you just want to say I love those. Also positive is police now in the middle sex for anyone who needs it run by the state. Correct. Okay. I don't have an issue on that. The old police barracks. I have that in the latest update on the website. I've passed it along. It's at the former police state police barracks. For residences and for businesses to bring hazardous trash. Okay. That just opened a couple of days ago. So just this side of exit nine. Yes. Yes. Okay. Great. Thank you. All right. If we're done with that, I think I'll open up the public comment. There's an opportunity for anyone that has comment that is not covered in the ward agenda to have something. Yes, sir. I'd like to bring up the issue we're having on Waterbury Center right now on the. Can you come sit up here? Yeah. Introduce yourself. My name is Chris Lackey. I live on 17 Hunger Mountain Road in Waterbury Center. How do you talk about this? So basically in Waterbury, we have an act of our sinister right now. He's been released from prison since he's been released from prison. We've had to have our fire department go put out two fires. One was at the gentleman's residence last night. Another burned down his neighbor shed. I obviously am scared as many neighbors are, which is why they're not here. And the bigger problem we're experiencing is the state police aren't responding. Last night at 2.30 a.m., I believe. I called 911. Reported that my neighbor had left his house. Was beating his car to death. Basically just violating all of his terms of release. And the police chose not to respond. Given there was a fatal crash and he's on pillar. And there are two state troopers that cover Washington County, which is large. That's from Roxbury to Waterbury. I guess what I'm here for tonight is to reconsider having some sort of police here in Waterbury. I know that's nothing that can happen in this meeting. It's going to take further discussion. But this is definitely a huge issue in people's lives in their houses are in danger. The state police are doing all they can. I've been in touch with everyone I know. And I'd basically just like to ask you guys what your thoughts on this are and how you might see proceeding. How do we make our community safe? Have we support the state police? You know, is it signing a contract with a sheriff's department? What is it? Because right now it's not safe. And the other thing is is media attention to this. I guarantee most of you in this room hadn't heard of it. Or at least hadn't heard that he's still active. And is at home tonight. And we will be calling the police later tonight again because he'll burn something else again tonight. And I'm his neighbor. First of all, we do empathize with your situation. And I at least was aware that this is under active investigation. My understanding is that he's being called in tomorrow, which may not be fast enough for everyone. But I guess my impression was that the state police prosecutors are moving forward with this as fast as they can. That's my personal understanding of it. There may be others. Tom, do you have an update on this? Can't hear you. So our daytime trooper officer lead were focused on this today in preparing for a court hearing tomorrow. So I believe the hearing tomorrow is about conditions of release. So, you know, maybe that he's found that he's violated the conditions of release in which case he may not be that large, which might be a good outcome right now. The reality is when you said there's only two state police in central Vermont. That's entirely true. And I think that's been true for a lot of years for the nighttime. Our contract with the state runs through June 30 of the next year. So we'll actually start talking to them pretty soon about extension. It's essentially it's two officers that split shifts for about $400,000 to give you context. And that number really hasn't changed in three years. So if the state would add trooper, if we were to add service to the contract, you know, consider 200, 220 grand somewhere in the other costs for one additional trooper to be assigned. We could talk to the county sheriff's that additional coverage. I'm not casting as versions of our county sheriff, but county sheriff's in general, for a number of years now have been the subject of a lot of headlines for a lot of negative reasons. So I'm really worried about really furthering our relationship there. Still right now. I've tried to talk to stuff a little bit about considering maybe a contractual option with Waterbury to provide some services and they're down for the officers right now. Really. And everyone is down officers right now and the state police are our smallest thing in many, many years. So, I'm not sure we have much ability for getting about the money for a minute. I just don't think the officers are out there. If you gave me a, if you gave me a, if you doubled the town's budget, it's good for the police force. Money, no object whatsoever. So be an awfully hard test to accomplish right now just because the general lack of police. Everyone is, is paying officers right now more than way more than they were envisioned just a few years ago and hopefully now the market is the market. People respond to that and what people want to become officers, but it's going to take a lot of time to sort this out and get us in a position where we could actually increase our police services, whether it's on our own or through a contract. Of course. So I had, it was on a project, a state trooper stopped by looking for a gentleman. He had, he didn't know if we'd seen this particular guy. And I had, my son and I both had a two hour conversation with this police officer. He told us some things that were pretty upsetting about the internal issues going on within Vermont State Police right now. He told me that they would prefer that he just go hide somewhere for the day. He said if I didn't do nothing all day long, they would be happier about it. He said the justice system doesn't want to deal with prosecuting. It's all about the whole last couple of years since George Floyd's death. It has just imploded the policing system to the point where the people in the higher ups don't want to rock the boat at all. So we're paying for coverage and I said to him, so my tax dollars are going to nothing basically. And then let alone the things I've witnessed ongoing either on the interstate with people just absolutely flying you to never see police presence. We talked about the number of state police officers that they're down from where they were and the inability to recruit more. He did just hire a few more and his concern was that they're now hiring people who are not qualified just to fill the hole. So from the sounds of things, this problem isn't going to get better. And to spend money on more police officers, I kind of questioned what we're going to get out of that cost if they're told to basically stand down. Yeah, and I can support that too. I spent most of my day today talking with Officer Regler in Berlin and at my office in Montpelier and this guy is completely beat up. I mean, he's like, they gave me a search warrant. I found everything. I thought it was over. They found more than they thought they would find this guy is now back out. And he's so disheartened, he doesn't even want to be there. Talking to the 911 operator last night was like, basically she said to me, well, Waterbury chose not to have a police department. That's kind of unfortunately the attitude right now like, hey, we don't have enough resources. We just can't help. Tough. And I mean, I think we all kind of grew up as kids like, oh, call the police and they'll come and save you in a violent situation. And, you know, unfortunately, that's not true anymore. And I guess the other thing I would ask is this like word to put their minds together to figure out what we can do for these families if this guy doesn't get put away tomorrow because it won't end until something catastrophic happens. And that's you can talk to officer regular. That's what he told me. Yeah, again, is terribly unfortunate situation based on what I've heard. Evidence is pretty convincing that the individual has run afoul of the conditions of release. I'd be very surprised if this individual is still at large tomorrow. But we will follow up. Yeah, I don't want to disagree with that right now, but I will tell you a story that officer regular told me that is true. So not to bring up a sort of subject, but the Jody hearing trial, when the DCF worker got shot. Her daughter soon got in trouble after that. Her daughter violated her terms of release 70 times and they dismissed all of them. So just so everybody's aware that even though somebody does violate their conditions of release, even though it says they can be brought back to jail. The likely bet is that won't happen. They'll get another 8 by 10 piece of paper and that says what they can and can't do and they'll go throw it away when they get home. No, I'm not saying that is what's going to happen tomorrow, but I'm saying don't not read about it as a community. I mean, you know, this guy's kind of experiencing a crisis himself, but there's a chance that you might not. Well, and I'd just like to note that the press does play a role in like the congratulate Lisa Skegliotti for covering us. Bring it to the attention of the public so that that may indeed have an influence on the results. Yeah, Mike. I have a ton of sympathy for you. I used to be until it wound up folding at the beginning of this year. I was one of various representatives to the Central Vermont State Police Advisory Board and the State Police Advisory Board. A lot of people weren't. Yeah, I was showing up, but a lot of people weren't showing up. I think and we hear from the police that they're being beat down. You know, as you kind of say, it's Chris kind of saying, I feel, you know, we're in an environment. That sometimes policing is not popular until, as you said, when you need something. And I don't know in the short run what we can do other than hopefully the legal process will happen. And this person will will be arrested if he if he's, you know, a day consider a danger to the community. And I think, you know, we would support that as to long term what we can, you know, short term. I don't think we could only rely because we have our contract with the state police. I think long term. Yes, it may be the subject of conversation as to, you know, and I think it's discouraging from some of the things that I heard is that maybe they're being advised by higher ups is not doing things. I think that's just, I know because they're being beat down that they don't want to do things, but I think that's a role of what police do. And I think, you know, we as the public need to support state police, local police department. I know I've spoken to the chief of police. I guess he's now chief of police in Burlington. They're discouraged. And I don't play, you know, there's just not enough, you know, I don't know if there will ever be enough policing to discourage some of the people who are just doing no good. And I don't know, maybe we, I think there used to be neighborhood watches. Maybe that's possibly a part of solution to have neighborhood watches, you know, to patrol, you know, water buries and it's a way to, you know, help keep our streets safe. Otherwise, I just feel for you and long term, it's going to be, it's a big, big problem, you know, and with the fentanyl problem and stuff like that, it's just going to get worse. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Maybe it would behoove us directed at Tom to reach out to Stowe again and see if what it would take to see if they can answer call from Waterbury Center. They said Matt, they've got a manager and I've been dealing with him a little bit. They're just out of capacity right now. I forget how many officers they have, but I think it's something like 12 to 15. So these three is a lot. I mean, it's pretty troubling to me that at this point in time, it seems to me the only thing that we can convey is sympathy. You know, I expressed to that same police officer as I expressed to every police officer and I see one of you guys going to all get together, going to lay your badge down at the State House and walk out the door. Say, we're done until things change. It's going to take that kind of reaction before, and it conveys sympathy until you're one of us or the victim. Well, I can tell you right now, I'm not just going to stand by and become the victim. And it just blows my mind that we're continuing allowing this to fester and get worse and get worse and get worse. Yeah, listen. I would just say it is an incredibly challenging situation and I'm so sorry and thank you for coming and bringing it to our attention. As a select board member, the tools we have is we set a budget. We do contract for policing services that is in our budget that is a choice made to have more coverage. I recognize it's on the department and maybe that dispatcher thought that wasn't enough, but we have tried to provide additional support so that the existing state police officers aren't as resource. I'm hearing it's not enough. I hear you and right now the solution we have is that I have our manager saying that the officer we do pay for spent all day trying to work on this. That he's tried to call every neighboring department and that he's on the line. So I really am sorry because for me tonight that is what we can do. We can say that we have tried to pay for this. We have tried to call everyone we can call and please stay in touch with Tom so that if it's not getting worse, we can revisit it. But I am sorry that that's the tools I feel I have right now to address this. Yeah, I guess to Kane's point, I guess I would ask I think there's a lot of really great people in Waterbury and just having like a community watch. I mean, if something like a dangerous person is released in the community, you know, we call on our volunteers. Hey, can you guys drive around town? You know, this is the person's conditions of the release. You observe something, report it. I don't know the legalities of that. But yeah, seems like something would be better than nothing or at least trying something would show and give an example for maybe other people to follow. Yeah, and when we did have the state police in here just a couple of months ago, I asked what can we do for you? And he said exactly that report to us everything you see because we don't see everything. We can't do everything. So I don't think that that would be one measure that we can take. And just to close or in terms of just adding the tools that Alyssa was talking about and Tom mentioned, you know, when the new contract comes up. That's when, you know, months earlier, the discussion starts. So encourage you to come and that's as you can be a part of those meetings where we're having the conversations about what the new contract looks like, what other options are. It helps to have the conversation not just amongst ourselves, but amongst folks in the community who are impacted by what the decisions are made. So again, it's long term, just like anything would be. It's not immediate, but it's how we make the best future we can. Yeah, I mean, long term, so we prevent this meeting from happening in two years from now. Exactly. I mean, it's time to do something. Thank you. All right. Thanks a lot. You're welcome. Thank you for your attention. Anything else on the public agenda? It's not already on the agenda. All right. Let's move on with the appointment of the subject of Vermont Regional Planning Commission transportation appointee with two candidates. One is Doug Greason and the other is Mike Hedges. They're both. All right. Let's start with Doug. So I've started as Waterbury's representative on the Regional Planning Commission and will attend a meeting, a couple of meetings, that sort of thing. Earlier when I became that representative, there was discussion about me also serving on the Transportation Committee, and I was reluctant to do that because I was sort of, what am I getting into? And now that I've got a little taste of it, I think I could do a good job. The specific area of my background that I didn't really bring up when I met with you earlier was the several years I spent on the community advisory group for what turned into $175 million bridge project in Seattle through an impoverished community. And they were social and economic justice issues as well as construction issues for a complex drawbridge on very poor soil. So it was a very interesting experience, a lot of interaction with communities, regulatory bodies, engineers, and some of that is applicable on the Transportation Committee. I also probably have one of the more complex histories of commuting that you can have. My commute involved a bus, a ferry boat, walking, and a car back and forth both ways. So I got my fill of public transportation and enjoyed it, so that's an attitude that I can bring to this. And for what it's worth, it looks as though about a third of the positions on the Transportation Committee are held by representatives on the Regional Planning Commission, which is an interesting number, but I don't think it means much in that it seems to work both ways. And there are plenty of things for me to do on the Planning Commission if you end up choosing someone else tonight for the Transportation Committee. There's a lot of things I can do there as well. Any questions for you? Any further questions? I remember asking you last time if you would do it. Yes. We all got to take our time. Well, I've been signed up for something I don't think I might do. Thank you. Thanks, Doug. Good evening, everyone. My name is Mike Hedges. I've lived in town 27 years, I think. I lived in neighboring town for another 13 before that. I'm a retired professional engineer. I've done a number of things here in the community. I probably was on the Conservation Commission longer than any other person, almost 20 years. After Irene, I worked in the steering committee for the cross-connector trail. I'm on the steering committee now for the Green Mountain Byway. When I was on the Conservation Commission, I was really the one that pushed to make Waterbury part of that Green Mountain Byway because I wanted to bring attention to the Schutzville Hill Wildlife Corridor. I've got a fair amount of transportation background as well. I've worked with the Agency of Transportation for 41 years. I had bridge construction experience, roadway design, traffic design, bridge design, all those types of things. My last 25 years, I was fortunate enough to be in management positions where for 13 years I ran the Agency's paving program. About $100 million a year trying to decide what to do with a very limited amount of money across the state, 3,202 lane miles. We looked at it as a network that you can do preventive maintenance, you can do regular maintenance, you have to do some more heavy-duty things like what we're seeing out here where they're removing slabs and that type of thing. Then for another 10 years, I was the state's bridge engineer. I had a lot of experience there with bridges. Again, another $100 million a year. I was testifying before legislature on both of those assignments. I was the bridge engineer during Irene. There was a lot of attention on that position then. My last five years with the state, I was in asset management. We were making decisions as to what types of projects to trigger, how to budget them and how do you prioritize and get the best bang for your buck, that type of thing. That was a $500 million budget that I was working with. I was tasked with coming up with a budget system that was used by rail, air, public transit, those folks. I was able to help them put their budgets together. I had an extensive career with the agency of transportation. There are things I'd like to see through. I've been communicating with the project engineer on the Stow Street Bridge. I recognized that I hired the guy. I've given him some local intel as well. We have needs for sidewalks. I think the link bus system works great if you're trying to go to Burlington, but it doesn't work if you want to go to Montpelier. The hours just don't work. There's things I think that we could do. Last week's TAC meeting I attended with Steve. I helped host the group here in Waterbury and showed them a lot of the features and that type of thing. I knew half of the members that showed up for the TAC are people that I've worked with or consultants. There are quite a number of people that represent planning commissions and that type of thing, but there's a lot of civilians or whatever as well. I think I have an interest in it, a career in it, and I'd like to try to do more for the town. Any questions? No, just a relevant but not a question. Thank you also for your work volunteering since the flood and it's been much appreciated and evidence of how much you do care about the community. I just want to spread the gratitude. It was gratifying to do it as well. Thank you. May I say one thing? Sure. If I were on Slyport I'd be going for you. You haven't got the easy one yet. I know Mike is a pretty impressive resident. Uncle. Do we have a motion? I was going to start by thanking Doug for keeping into his role at CBRPC and saying that my general mantra is having more incredibly qualified folks that I had no idea lived in our communities and also sprayed concovium and did a million other things. It's just incredible folks who are willing to volunteer. So recognizing that you are already volunteering Doug at the CBRPC I would move to appoint Mike Hedges as water-braze representative to the Transportation Advisory Committee for Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission. I second that motion. Alright, moved and seconded. Any further discussion? Thank you both. Thank you both for volunteering. So let's move to the vote. All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Alright, congratulations. Thank you for serving. And we look forward to bridge updates. Sorry. I was half-joking but 2025 was correct, right? For the so-street bridge? Well, we headed, the agency had a lot of luck with closing down bridges and reducing the amount of right-of-way and streamed impacts and that sort of thing. So I think it's great that the town decided to close the bridge. But, you know, there's still the pedestrian access around it, the parking for when they do have to shut down the parking lot. There's issues out there, but I think right-of-way is going to be the big one. There's some pretty big impacts there. Thank you. Alright, let's move on to an update from Wasi. Hello. I'm Maggie Burke. I'm Waterbury Ambulance and Executive Director. You might have seen me here with Mark, our former Executive Director before. I started with Waterbury Ambulance in 2011 as a volunteer. My background is in nonprofit management. I started full-time with Waterbury Ambulance in 2020 and when Mark passed away suddenly in October of last year, our Executive Director, I stepped in his interim and moved into the Executive Director position after a search was conducted. A quick background on Waterbury Ambulance, we've been around for 53 years as a nonprofit organization unaffiliated with the municipality. We cover about 100 square miles. We are 24-7-9-1-1 response. We go on about 800 calls a year. Currently, that make-up, which is a little change, is about 27% of what we do is inter-facility and home transfers for patients. So bringing people from one hospital to another or home for hospice. We provide back-country rescue, community trainings like CPR, first aid, stop the bleed. We do car seat fittings and we also do other community responses during COVID-19. We provided 80,000 vaccinations and 200,000 COVID tests. So the state asked us to help and we stepped up and we're covering a lot of our region and throughout the state with a team that recreated over 200 employees. Most recently, we have a couple new projects we're going to be working on with the state. One is helping identify and inventory needs of the folks who are experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity. The folks that lost their motel vouchers, we're going to be doing some community service of checking in with those folks and seeing what needs they have that need to be met over the next little bit. As well as just last week, we were reached out to by the deputy commissioner of public safety to help with some of the flood relief by helping be a conduit between those folks who might not be getting their needs met in our community and in smaller rural communities around us using that impact that we had from COVID to build upon that as well as trying not to duplicate what's currently happening. So we're going to be reaching out and figuring out what needs aren't being met and what we can do to move forward in the future. Not just for Waterbury, but for those smaller communities around us that might not have as big a team as here serving them. Some changes we've had recently over the last few years is a decrease in volunteerism. You might be hearing that nationwide. Younger folks are having a harder time volunteering which has increased the per diem staff that we've put on. So on any given day of our 24 hours recovering, there's at least one paid person on our truck at any given moment. That has increased our response time out the door. We're four minutes out the door. Just three years ago, that time was seven minutes out the door. So folks are responding less from home, more from our facility. We increased to a paramedic level service on Sunday, June 11th. So great timing with the flooding, but we worked on an application with the state. We hired our first paramedic in April, Peter Fitz, so he's going to be our operations director, and that's going to allow us to provide a higher level of care to Waterbury, including narcotic pain management, better cardiac evaluation, in general when we've needed a paramedic in the past we've had to call for one from Berrytown during the 48 hours that we'll currently have someone on now we'll no longer have to do that. There's also an increase ability for us to bill at that level of care. So it's also kind of an increased revenue stream if available. We'll also be able to send that person from mutually to other towns eventually. So we've got a fly car that was donated from Twin City Subaru or 802 Subaru. So that's where that person will be running out of. We've seen an increase in cost of medical supplies, fuel, all the same things that I think other industries are seeing. And when we look at our budget, it's not a super pretty picture. We are looking at a negative $130,000 operating budget plan for this year. However, because of the COVID response that we've done and the impact of that that we ended a couple months ago, we're only at a negative $5,000 mark right now. So we're still doing okay, given what we projected. However, we won't have that COVID income, but like I said, were those increase in inter-facility transfers that we're doing, as well as some of these community response things that we're doing at the state will reimburse us for. So we're doing our best to take care of ourselves without having to come to the different towns that we serve to ask for additional appropriation money. But know that we are not, we don't have a great financial picture looking forward. The big exciting news to talk about tonight is our building project. We had plans to break ground in June of this year at our site on Route 100. We were working with Copley Hospital with their Mansfield Orthopedics Clinic. The plan was for, they purchased the property and we were going to purchase a piece of that property in order to build on. We put the project out to bid in April. It was a little bit delayed due to permits. We wanted to make sure we had all of our permits in place. And then as well as Copley got some USDA loans, which took a little bit of time to get in place. When the bids came back, in May they came back at a million dollars over what had been projected for the project. Most of that being site work costs. So moving dirt as well as a fire suppression system, which was $600,000, we'd have to put in a 25,000 gallon tank because there's no access to municipal water at that site. So really between the site work and the fire suppression system, it was $1.7 million of our, you know, $3.4 million project. So the building committee chose to take a pause and reevaluate the project and say, you know, this seems like an inappropriate use of donor funds if we go out and raise another million dollars just to move dirt and put in a fire suppression system. And we surveyed our friends in town, spoke with Tom, and we actually were able to identify a site in town across the street from Subway behind the Sonoco station. Formerly, I guess, part of the Pilgrim Park, you know, it's owned by Wayne Lamberton and his business. We were told by pretty much everyone that they wouldn't sell because they don't sell properties very often, but they said because it was water barrier ambulance, they would be willing to sell to us. The purchase price of the property was about $100,000 more than we had for the other piece of property, but there's a potential to maybe subdivide that piece of property and sell to a neighbor who is interested in purchasing it. So we also, in that whole process, we did do value engineering. I kind of missed that part. I'm going to go back through and see what we could take out. I've got some beautiful brochures that have some great masonry and things on that. We got rid of all of those things, tried to do whatever we could to really bring the cost down in the building and couldn't get them to a point where we were comfortable. Currently, we're in a preliminary research phase. So we're looking at the... We're looking with a civil engineer and with the architect to see if our current structure will fit on that site. Right now, it's looking like it will. There is some flood mitigation. Obviously, that's the hot topic right now. Part of the property is in the floodplain, and we didn't actually get a great picture of what that looked like during this flood because the culvert behind it was clogged, and so all the water got redirected. So we did see that it did not flood terribly during this time, but what we would do is actually lift the building up a bit to mitigate that, and the portion that we would have most of our living area and is not technically in the floodplain. But like I said, we're still looking at it to make sure that it is something that's going to work for us. Some of the challenges we have is that we've ordered a brand new ambulance that is supposed to come in. One of the ones we have is limping along right now a bit with increased costs due to that limping, and the current technology of truck is not like we're ordering something that's super expensive or outside of the norm and it won't fit in our current bay, and it's supposed to arrive in the fall. So we're trying to figure out what we do where we can put that truck until we get to a new site. But we also figured taking this pause and looking at this new property, this is a project that's going to influence us for the next 70 years. Why put ourselves out of business or put ourselves in a financial strain to continue looking at the site that we're currently looking at versus taking a minute to pause and look into the future. So there's definitely going to be a lot of work that we have to put into it. The other piece that's pretty hard for us is that we don't have adequate facilities for our current staff. So right now there's no sleeping facilities, no laundry facilities, no beds, and we have folks on call there 24 hours a day. So it's definitely, we're asking a lot of our providers who are in a building that's built by high school students in the 1970s. They did a really wonderful job for the 1970s. We're really grateful for this space and we're really grateful to Waterbury for allowing us to be in that space, figure out a way to move forward to build for our future and to have a facility that meets the same quality of care that we're providing to our community. So any questions? I'm ready. Do you have a timeline for when you expect to close on the property? Yeah, we're going to do a intention to purchase. So we wouldn't purchase without all permits in hand and Wayne is willing to give us that ability to make that decision. The hope would be to purchase the property and build starting in the spring. Spring 24. Correct. Just a quick question. What response I know, because I used to be a program director at USDA Rural Development. In the community's facilities program, did you get a puck? Because I know they have both a loan and grant. I don't know where Waterbury stands now in terms of what your eligibility but if you looked into... I did. There was a timeline with that one where we had to be shovel ready in order to put it in, but we weren't quite in the spot. So the timeline didn't work out at that point for the project. Where we do stand with our fundraising is for a $3.4 million goal, we're $200,000 away from that and we think that's attainable. That's what the additional costs. We've done some evaluation of what the loss in moving sites will be in terms of work already done or permits already paid for will be, but it still seems like it's less than the $1.7 million. But I do anticipate probably our budget going up from $3.4 million as we go down the future. Use the congressional offices. Put pressure. That will help you. Absolutely. I think Tom's support of the project, he's been checking in with us and helping in whatever way he can and helping guide us through the process. Any other questions? Yeah. So you're potentially thinking about building the same building down here that you were up there. Correct. What was it about the site costs up there that was there any specific aspect of the site costs that were overwhelming? What was that differ from what you said? The site there is flat. It's on municipal water, which is huge. We don't know that it's built already, but the site we were at, we had to build a road, bring all the utilities up it, and then we had to do a significant amount of groundwork in terms of flattening the space and getting a lot of dirt had to be moved out of the space. In the value engineering, we found other places of dirt, but it really was a lot of someone from my team who knows a little bit more would give a better answer, but it was just a significant amount of moving dirt. That's what I do for a living. There you go. And the other piece is so much higher. We are planning when we move to this new site to put the project back out to bid to a few different construction companies for the overall project. I mean, to think that I don't know how long it's been, but it was before Irene when we rebuilt the two fire stations and we rebuilt both of those for 3.25 million or less than that and how you're looking at over, you know, you're saying that obviously you think that the cost is going to be in excess of what your target is right now, so that puts it in the 4 million plus hopefully not because the building that we're building is decently modest, you know, we're not putting in anything that's 3.4 million and it came back at 4.6 and the majority of that increase was predicted to be $250,000 worth of groundwork and it came back at $950,000 worth of groundwork. So that was really the number that put us over the edge of saying, you know, we kind of did with increased labor costs or some sort of increase but that number just seemed inappropriate to move forward with and we're just being good stewards of our donor's money. We want to make sure that we're making the right choices even if we have to pause. Okay. About your truck, your new one. Yeah. Have you or we reached out to get a donor? It certainly has been talked about but we're fooled. Okay. The Amels has, when we were in the process of building, we weren't merged as a town and a village at that point. And the fire chief in the town, David Jenison had said, look, we will have one bay that we're planning for the future and at that point, the back country could put their truck in there but now they have their truck and they have their trailer and they have some other stuff. So we really just don't have any room. Gotcha. There is also a, we keep a lot of supplies and equipment so every time we go on a call we have to come back and restock our truck. It has to be heated and especially moving to the medic level service, we're going to have some, you know, drugs that are really locked up. So yes, that definitely has come across but it would be a challenge to be restocking that truck from as far away as even the Maple Street Station but doable given putting a crunch. I'm sorry, go ahead. No, and Gary's obviously going to be a support of us. Yeah. With their back country pickup I don't want to say it's not an emergency but there's time. So it's behind our smallest truck our smallest engine and they can pull that out because it's a smaller automatic pull their pickup out, put our truck back in. If it's an ambulance that is more emergent and that's going to take time and we certainly can't put it in front of the fire truck because then we've got to move an ambulance before we pull the fire truck out. Logistically from my perspective having an ambulance in there isn't the ideal solution. Back country truck is working. Yeah. All righty. Any further questions? I was just going to say thank you, it's just clear how much work goes into this and I just really appreciate that you all are being such thoughtful stewards and recognizing that it's probably hard news that no one wants to hear but just you just provide so much value to the community so just wanted to say thank you the fact that this you know we essentially have a municipal ambulance service through you all for your private non-profit being very clear. We don't want to confuse anybody. But just it's really appreciated so thank you for the update and we'll stay in touch and I would also just say our fellow Edward Fry utility district commissioners are probably thrilled that you're trying to be on the municipal water. Yeah. I would just like to add a personal thank you for having that testing site rolling for that good chunk of the pandemic there. It was useful to me and it was useful to the Waterbury Center community and you guys were there the whole time. So big, big gratitude. They boosted me today. There we go. Good. And Zach already called about how to coordinate volunteers. It really does happen in real time about how to Maggie, thanks for the update. Thanks for coming in. Congratulations. You did a good solution. Thank you. All right. Next on the agenda is update on the housing task force. Hold on. I just entered notebook three in my two years. I didn't think I'd be publicly celebrating but here we are. Now I have to get my housing task force agenda. So we met. This will just be an incredibly brief update just so folks here it is. I put it in the new agenda. So what's happening? The group is now meeting on the third Thursday from six to eight. Just mostly the credit should go to our chair or Joe who has just been a total data researcher and just done a really big deep dive on what work would be useful. I will say the group talked about the flood and impacts on housing just acknowledging that there were both short-term emergent needs and not as housing is getting rehabbed but it's just something impacting the housing stock in Waterway. So we want to be aware with it. It felt like the general takeaway was that the flood recovery coordinator position and Tom would probably continue to be the front lines of that but folks could engage if they were interested. The three pieces that the housing task force was looking at moving forward with it was updating housing data from the municipal plan. Our municipal plan is dated and the housing data is actually from 2010 and we just talked about it has changed literally in the past month so the group has already done a read through of state and federally available data and saying let's make sure we have the updated numbers and then we can tweak that even more with what we know on the ground. Some work on looking at where available places are to build more housing before we're doing work on kind of knowing the playing field so to speak. Mark Camillo does some of this work in the economic development world but kind of in the same world of housing where can we put housing and then looking at talking with folks who do the actual housing development both on the kind of nonprofit and for-profit sphere and starting a conversation to say what could we do to help make creating more housing in Waterbury possible for you and then the last piece I would say is we talked about public support around zoning and just knowing that another piece of our work is bylaw updates and again we know the planning commission was already working on that they've updated us on that but there's certainly overlaps in that world and housing and just recognizing that making sure those are clear when we talk about zoning updates is important. I think that's it. For our big next steps we're having a working meeting if anyone wants to come in and dig into data on the third Thursday in August. For the comment on the housing task force update. All right, Melissa, thank you very much. Really credit to Joe. I just can't give Joe enough credit for how he did to the meeting. You guys are a homework champion. Okay. The next thing on the agenda is the decision on the dog bite hearing at our meeting on the 17th of July. We did hold a hearing on the dog bite which our Animal Control Officer was not able to resolve and we heard from both the owner of the dog in question and the budding land owner took testimony since then we've entered private deliberations on this issue and went and did a site visit to look at the housing question and based on that we have a decision earlier today and we will be directing the town manager to issue a letter to the owner of the dog with our decision on a proper restraint and that the letter will be out within two days. Any further questions from the board? You're not detailing what the restraint is? No, we figure that that will be in the letter. It will be clear what the requirements are. Yeah, I would just say we will issue a letter giving the conditions for this specific dog hearing that we had which go beyond just restraint so there's the conditions for the owner of this particular dog to resolve the dispute we took testimony on as two pieces of general information, Waterbury has an existing leash law that applies to all dogs in town that will also apply to this owner and also as you Karen were kind enough to find for us per state law everyone also needs to have dogs must have collars with tags at all residents so I guess I would say that yeah we will issue that which does include restraint but also includes other conditions for this particular thing in writing and not FYI for all just around restraint for the leash law and collars. It will be asking to revisit this in three months for this specific case. May I speak? Sure. Because I did as you well I'll know I sent an email to the owner and all the individuals that were here in attendance that night just to alert them to the item on the agenda so with the exception of Jordan everyone wrote back and said you know I can't be in attendance but please let me know what their decision was so I guess my ask is what would be sending those letter the letter that that Amy receives will that be something similar drafted to those people or how are we relaying to them the neighbors your decision. I mean Tom Tom lights yeah can we see see them memo, memo regarding next steps actions sent to the person and CC all the property owners like you would for like a DRB decision. Sure. I'm asking you. That's what I had envisioned. Tom we can't hear you. Tom we can't hear you. He's not. He's not. So we will issue a copy to the putting land owners other interesting parties. All right we can coordinate with prior to the posting of your minutes so that you have it all ready to go. Okay. Yeah. And what do we have on the next meeting agenda so far? Well Oh yeah. I don't remember anything we talked about. And I can go grab one of like if you have any easier than testing a bunch of tired brain cells. You're so awesome. That's perfect. Great. Karen's away. Yes. Try to keep the light. As a general statement pertaining to WASI just Mike and I were muttering about it over here but Mike because he ran USDA and I now do USDA grants for work towns that may be grant eligible or loan eligible. Grants are obviously great free money but it's based on socioeconomic so water braids only loan eligible. So just to say they can get loans to help but their goal in the whole project was not to have loans. Just to say Maggie's certainly doing her homework with regards to what grants where they can apply for and be eligible for and unfortunately just not all of them apply. Successful fund raise. So I think she may be right that finding remaining $200,000 would be feasible for her for money still but there might be other demands on that. Or at the time there was a discussion about beef at the time. I mean sorry UDAG loan not that it's our purview. If they're connecting to water. Right. So if you can talk to the EFUD municipal manager about that They're doing other important things with the funding too. I don't mean to pressure. That's a loss about a loan and I think the loan is probably last resort. We'll have to see what the final members come in with the last project. The loan wasn't I didn't have enough money to get him over the finish line if he wanted to. Ta-da. Karen it's on paper in front of us. It's phenomenal. Wait I get two? Well there's two meetings in August. I'll be here for neither. So it's not as long as we're all together. Yeah well that is. If you have anything to add it will make that like that much more thank you. Public Works update How extensive do we expect that to be? Yeah. 20 minutes. I gotta work on the dates sometimes. Bill wonder if it's on vacation. Okay. Good for him. So maybe a different date for that. 21 Bill is Woody is back on Oh yeah right before the meeting. Yeah give him some time. 21st. Introducing Katerina She's out next week as well. Yeah. All right. She moves to the 21. All right. Can we get three strikes on this? Is the FC group going to be ready? Steve and the study committee meet this Thursday? Yeah. Yeah. She's out next week as well. Yeah. She moves to the 21. Can we get three strikes on this? The study committee meet this Thursday? When I believe on their agenda is adoption at our sorry. Recommendation of the final study to you. So I can check with the SC group if they'll be ready on Monday. To present. Okay. So we've got one. Still for the notice. All right. Okay. I'll be here. Yes. And you're not going to be here. I won't be here on the 7th though. I'm not mad about all this. Anyone else have suggestions? The committee that I suggest. I had a flood response. Flood response committee. Natural disaster. Natural disaster. Natural disaster. Natural disaster. Natural disaster. So a document was started. At the beginning of all this. I'm not sure if it got widely publicized or used yet, but I will put that a little while, but I know myself and a few others went into a Google doc where we jotted down notes that were long-term ideas. And then to me. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to start talking about long-term ideas too. Yeah. I would argue we should have flood responses in agenda item. It could be both like short or as an agenda heading. And you could have like Tom Drake's imminent. What are the volunteers doing? I still would love some sort of after action review. I don't know if it's too soon. I didn't, I felt like this got alluded to when Kane's idea came up. The lot worked well. Dumpster's worked well again. And Danny's point of getting that out of people's brains and onto paper. To the extent it's appropriate to do that in a public meeting as opposed to a different venue that could be on. Yeah. Tom's lights. Sorry, the two Tom's. The long-term ideas for us to prioritize. And then Kane's. As one of those ideas, yours can be much more flushed out of here's a whole specific thing. We can also, you know, combined. Combined in Connor. You know, if we, it would be much easier to expedite going forward if all the ideas, you know, for future happenings were thrown into one pot. Kane, you may want to take a look because we have an approved local emergency measure. I've read it. Yeah, and it got thrown out the window this last time around. So it's good to do. And some pieces didn't. And that's a good dialogue to have. Yeah. So that's an hour? Well, there's also mitigation. Right. Right. So maybe just response in general. But I think it would be helpful to itemize these just so that we cover those bases and decide which fit into the type of work that you're talking about and maybe things that fit into other administrative slots. Agreed. But like who is doing what and responsibilities and do we have enough staff to cover it? Does it become a Tom Drake? Does it become Tom Lights? Do we have other needs? You know, that could be. Yeah, I think all those are worth discussing at the next meeting. I'm sorry, Danny won't be there. I'll type of as much as I can before then. Okay. I think I heard. Yes. So there's a agenda item called flood response and then there's more or less three bullet points. One is flood recovery coordinator update, natural disaster response committee and mitigation. That sounds right. Okay. I just wanted to make sure that I got it all. Thank you. And we're leaving FC Group for the time being as first on the agenda. Yes. If we don't have staff, I feel less bad. If Woody was doing a presentation I was going to propose we let Woody go first. Yeah. Okay, let's do it that way. We'll do SC first and then we'll... Oh, I guess we have. We won't have Karen. Tom Lights is on for the ride. Tom Drake would be the other. How long he wants to spend? Well, you can put flood response stuff first and keeping with the themes in the last one. Do we want to... You know what else I haven't shared? Yeah. Sorry. Your damn audit reports are on my desk. Oh. You thought we were all excited about that. Sorry, Tom. I don't even think Tom knew that. They came in last week when you were away and they're still sitting there. We want to learn each significant fine. I didn't even open it. I'm happy to share them before you all go. You can take them home. But they're on my desk. Okay. I was going to ask for going back over flood response and where we're at, what we're doing next do we want to invite Liz Schlegel? Certainly it would be helpful to get her take on what worked well and what could have worked better. Yes. Who's inviting Liz Schlegel? I can. Okay. Well, I guess the question too is like are we doing the after-action in the meeting? Because I would also argue we should invite Woody, Tom. Oh, you're right. I know. Maybe it's not the right thing. Let's move it out. Yeah, we can do long-term. We can do long-term and mitigation I think sooner than it would be good to encourage folks. Yeah. We review it at a later meeting. I just think we should get long-term on the road right now so we can get there sooner. All right. So we'll do after-action review on the 21st. If we're going to cut it down, let's do this flood response first with Tom Drake's report and then we can do the AC Group. AC Group's not going to be short. That's going to be a lot of input. I think we can probably get through this in 20 minutes or so. Move on to AC Group. Does that sound all right? Mike? Just just a note. On the 21st, I may or may not be here because of this post-surgery. Oh, well. So the needs were... I might be on, depending upon how mobile I am, like maybe I'm, you know, maybe they'll give me one of those little scooters. How mobile, how medical you are. I think they already talked about either walkers or crutches or stuff like that. I said, like, I could use my ski pole. Oh, so they'll do surgery and you can still walk on it? Depends upon, yeah. It's going to be a very little need. Yeah. They want you to exercise as much as possible. But, you know, they have a whole exercise plan for you. We're only doing the pre-exercises. Just in terms of other things, I'm just saying out loud that I'm seeing on the 21st we have the presentation of the Charter to the Public. Does that still feel realistic? We also have this question about a meeting during Labor Day. And then, I guess, in light of tonight, do we think we need a public safety agenda item at either of these meetings? I mean, it seems like the most imminent concerns are things Tom is triaging as manager, but from us, big picture planning and response. Are we ready for the Charter presentation? Well, it was for the 21st. I just realized how much we just moved on to the 21st. So I just wanted to raise that when we do that presentation. That's probably... I think there's going to be a significant public input on that. Agreed. Well, I think we can get through how long does a public works update usually take? Katrina's intro should only take 10 minutes. Let's decide that next meeting. Hello, I'm a Charter. I have a meeting this Wednesday with RW about their W.A.D. Waterbury Area Development Committee meeting. I'm going to talk about the local option tax at that meeting and I understand Mark Fryer is pretty keenly interested and is also on that committee and wants to talk about it. So that might inform just what happens at that meeting. That might inform the Charter conversation. In my conversations with Mark Fryer, he seems pro. With conditions. With conditions. Let's just be updated by then. I think we're all set for the agenda if there are other items that we can bring to my attention and Tom and I will go over it on Friday morning. Thank you. You still here? Friday morning I'm here. I think we've covered any other items before on the board. If not, I will entertain the motion to adjourn. I'm my only other. Just to say about Mark, they emailed us about planning commission. Do you think that's worth putting on the agenda? We don't have to invite them, but we can do it on the 7. Just they share the timeline for their rewrite. And some select board questions. I'm just saying if we're feeling light for the 7 there's always zoning. Uh-huh. Even though it's 15. Though if we're doing AC group, I guess I'll wait. I'll wait when you have the AC group presentation. I'm just saying out loud that that's a thing. Yeah, I did respond to her. She said, I don't know, everyone was copied on Martha's update. But she has decided she met with the AC group and decided that the planning commission would meet every week in order to hit their goal of having the zoning rigs for phase one completed in time for the public session. And said that we were excited to get the information and thanked her for her increased level of effort on this. I didn't know that she needed to have anything directly in front of the board at this point. No, not necessarily. I guess I would just say I as a board member am aware of the fact that we are rewriting regulations largely for the portion of town that was just flooded and that I would anticipate that we'll receive a lot of public dialogue that I'm already receiving. And so to the extent we need to have board conversations about that to inform the efforts that they're working so hard on. I would just hate to see it work wind up somewhere where we're not all on the same page. So just making sure we're doing that as much as possible. Okay. But I agree. I don't think it necessitated immediate. I think that we've got time based on the schedule that I saw to address that a little bit down the road when we have more information about what's going on here and what they're developing. All right. I have a motion to go to move to executive session. So moved.