 I knew it the moment you bring out a couple of things here. You got it? Yeah. OK. Welcome to the Essex Junction trustee meeting. And to the select board meeting. And I will call the May 14, 2018 select board meeting to order. And I would like to say to the trustees, please join us 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. Welcome, everybody. And if you haven't signed in, please do so. If you have your cell phones that you could put in the silence, or at least buzz, that would be great. We appreciate it, thank you. And I think we have, we are going to, do we have any agenda additions, Evan? Just one, it was emailed to you electronically, but it's a comment from trustee Andrew Brown that would go with the reading file, item 7A. OK, great, thank you. And I note that trustee Andrew Brown and trustee Lori Holtz and the Kent Holtz Center are going to be a little late tonight. They should be coming in soon. And so we will, do I hear a motion to amend the trustee agenda with the addition that came in? So moved. Wait here a second. Second. All in favor? Aye. OK. We need to do the same for select boards. So I've entertained a motion to include 7A. Is there any other changes that we might need? I'd like to ask to rearrange some of the items under item 6. Just because when reading the documentation, it feels to me like a more logical progression would be to take the bottom four topics, D from G, and rearrange them a little bit. And I would suggest the following rearrangement. So after A, B, and C, if we could discuss letter G, and then D, and then E. It just felt a little more logical to do them that way. OK, so we have the changes for the select board agenda is to add Andrew Brown's email for 7A, the reading file, and then to modify the agenda so that we go A, B, C, then G, F, D, E. I have a motion for, right? Is that correct? That's correct. I'll make a second. Thank you. I'll accept it. OK, we need further discussion on many of the agenda. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. And else, do I hear a motion for the two to make the same amendment to the trustee agenda? We'll hear a second. All in favor? Aye. OK. Good, thanks. And there's a lot of items on the agenda. So if we still get a little bit stuck and confused, which is extremely likely, at least from my perspective, just let me know if something's not clear. So we have no presentation, so I think we can move right on to the public to be heard for any questions, or is that correct? Yeah? OK. So I would invite, I think what we'd like to do, Max and I discussed it, what we'd like to do is any comments that anyone has now would be welcome or questions that are not on the agenda. And then I think if we could go through sort of halfway through the joint meeting agenda, and we'll take a break at D, and I will, or Max will, we'll both ask if anyone has any questions about anything that's transpired so far, any comments, any statements, because I think it would be a little difficult to go have public commentary after each one of these. We don't want this to go over into tomorrow. So I think we would try to, we'd like to do that, and I think it would be more efficient. And also, you might hear someone say something that you're thinking of saying, so is that OK with everyone? Does that make sense? And then at the very end, we will also then have a public to be heard session two. So we'll make sure we have ample opportunity for public comment. But there's a few sort of business-like things we want to move through in that room too, but that's OK. So just part of the question, you were saying that somebody said a comment and somebody else wants to speak next and agrees with that comment and just say, I agree with the prior. Yeah, please. Yeah, yeah. So do we have any, like we did, or like you're going to be any motions to put forward in the first three or four items? Yes, I believe there would be. So then we're not going to take any comment after we gone through. Well, items we approve motions, not anymore. Well, up to D, because I think if we look at them, I mean, for example, item A is really a question for the select board and trustees in terms of the management goals. I don't, I mean, if someone has a comment about it at that point, but you want to allow that, you want to have to do that. I would give so, yeah. OK, for any motion, I think we need to be able to speak. OK, that's a little different than our team, but that's, you know what, it's a joint meeting. Let's do it. OK. So OK, then you want to have a joint meeting. So you would like to have a public comment after each one of these, is that what you're saying? Any one that's likely to end up with a motion that we need to consider, I think we need to consider about it. Yeah, OK, I just don't know. I can't guarantee that we're going to have it. Yeah, OK, I think before we pose a motion. OK, well, if someone has a comment or a question, then I guess we can just be very open about it and say if someone has a comment, then raise your hand and we'll recognize you. Is that OK? Is that good? As a practice, this little board will have the discussions. And then before a motion is put forward, then that's the time. OK. If there's once a motion's on the floor, typically our practice is to not take it anymore. Sounds good. Let's do it that way. OK, thank you. All right, so we won't do that. And so then the next step would be to have an open couple of minutes for any questions or comments from the public on something that's not on the agenda tonight. Anyone out there want to make a statement or comment or a question about something that's not on the agenda tonight? OK, seeing none, we will proceed. All right. The first board or business, if you don't see it, the select board will indulge the trustees. We have an amendment to the village's open burn and enforcement ordinances. And Evan, I'm going to hand it over to you very briefly to sort of go through this. Do you have the new language in the background? Yes, we do. So you have the new language in the background? Yes. At the last village board meeting, there was, except I'm the only one who doesn't have the language. I've got it, actually. OK, if you don't mind. Well, I'd give you the synopsis. We had the ordinance language. And there was a comment from Irene Renner, who was in the audience, to take a look at the language and use some of the words. So we went back to the interim village attorney. And just I believe it was today he provided some new language. So we have that new language in your memorandum. And if you are in agreement of that language and approve the ordinance, it will go into effect 60 days thereafter. Let me read the new language. And this is section 1302, open burning. In the municipal code, the village's municipal code, Chapter 13, regulation of public nuisance. And I'm not going to read the entire ordinance. But the new language includes, leaves cannot be burned. And the restrictive languages, quote, in no circumstance shall an otherwise permissible fire be allowed that creates, in the discretion of the village, or to designate a public nuisance. End quote. That's the revision. And then the other piece that we really wanted to get to was to put a little bit more teeth in the existing movements. And so the fines, the first violation would be zero. There would be no fine. It would just be a warning. The second offense would be a $250 fine. Third offense would be a $500 fine. And fourth and subsequent offenses would be $750. So for trustees, I think we mostly got through this. I think we gave the nod to the whole concept. So this is just sort of tidied up a little bit. And so the decision for the board of trustees, warning right here, but you've got to go ahead and read it. Well, basically, it's right on our amendment, I believe. I recommend that trustees amend chapter 13 regulation of public nuisance in chapter 9 enforcement as recommended by the unified manager, interim village attorney, and fire chief. Right here, a second. Second. Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Thank you. OK, we're done with that. Thank you, folks, for the board. And so now we are on to the joint meeting with the Essex Select Board. All right, I'll let you do the first one next. OK, item 6A is the Determined Goals and Evaluation Process for the Unified Manager. We've discussed this actually many, many, many times. But what we need to do is have these goals in place in time for our next joint meeting, June 14, to approve. There's, in our homework, we made a number of suggestions on how to do, how to decline these goals. And in order to get them to a point where we can review and approve, there's a recommendation that we form a working group of municipal members from our group to propose the goals and objectives as well as the evaluation process. And then bring that back to the boards for review and to start the discussion. Yeah, I mean, I think that what the issue that I understand it for the two boards is that we generally accepted the ICMA evaluation format in their language as that would sort of be the base. And then we also said there would be, for the manager, three goals to achieve specific goals to be achieved by next February. And the nature of it, we've had different ideas about what those goals should be. Should they all be, should there be six, should there be five, should there be three? How many should there be? Obviously, we need a reasonable number and an achievable number. And it was also put forth that maybe one concept would be to have a one mutually agreed upon goal, and that each of the boards give a village-specific goal and a town-specific goal. But I think those are the questions that would be addressed by a subcommittee. I think that would be the idea that the subcommittee would wrestle with these questions and look at the definition that we put in for, is it smart, I want to say? Yes, smart. And the acronym for that, and smart goals, and then given those different parameters come up with a recommendation on behalf of both boards that they would give to us in June. So fairly short time frame, but that's on loop. Right, right. And so what we'd like to do is to find a subcommittee who would work on that. And I think a, you know, I don't know if that's reasonable. We could do it ourselves, but we kind of thought that maybe a subcommittee of two of each board members working on this could probably meet one or two nights and make sure it would come back with a recommendation. Does that sound reasonable? During the day, whatever. Any time that would be up, when they meet and people would be there at their discretion. Now these subcommittees, when they meet, it would be warned, even though it's not a quorum of any one board, but to make sure that the public is fully made aware, we want to make sure that they're also really, really smart. I think, we have a little bit of a difficulty because two of the trustees are missing. And I'd like to nominate one of them. I think that's a good idea. I think that's what we're doing. Can I just ask a quick question? I think we may come out of tonight's meeting with more than one working group identified. And so I'm questioning whether we need to have four board members, maybe just one from each board, just to spread the work a little. I'm just curious whether anyone thinks that's stupid. Lots. As the committee is made up of equal numbers of people from each district or not yet identified district, I'm fine with however many we decide. Let me, let's go. If I can, let me just quickly look ahead and anticipate maybe a couple of what some of the other committees might be so we can get a sense of that, okay? If I look at, I kind of thought that looking at all the words and defining the words around governance, that might be something that some small subgroup could be. And again, not a lot of people, but one trustee, one selectman would work on that. There might be top three priorities to be for consolidation. And these are things that we've submitted. These are ideas that we submitted. So a lot of this would just be one submitting, consolidating all those. So there might be, so I'm anticipating there'll be probably two, maybe three other small subcommittees. So do we want them to just be two people, four people? Is that right? Is that the decision? I'd rather see at least two from each to get those. And I don't think these are gonna take a lot of time to do. Such a suggestion. There's not gonna take several meetings. And then I guess at the end when we see all committees and it looks like it is too much burden for, maybe we can come back and see which of those committees maybe we could relax. Okay. Does anyone have any comments about, let's go through the first one. Anyone have any? I'm not in favor of forming subcommittees to do a lot of this work. I think we should work together as a large group and work through these. I also don't wanna commit myself to more meetings. I will not volunteer for any of these subcommittees you're proposing tonight. Okay. I just, I think the idea is that we need to get, we've been talking about the manager process and just getting through it. We need to have some kind of firm decision by June, which is a few weeks away. So, okay, I'll back off a little, okay. I'm fine with right somebody else proposing the evaluations scheme that we use for our municipal management. The ones around governance, I'm not interested in participating. Actually, I don't wanna do the other one either, but my greater objection is for the ones around governance, I think we should work on that as a larger group. Okay. Well, why don't we see if we can get through the first one. Let's get through the first one anyway. See if we nominate a subcommittee to put this evaluation process together and get back to us by June. Yeah, again, in our homework, people have suggested what it is that they wanna see for goals. So it would be just this small group to be able to assimilate those into a proposal then to reform. So they wouldn't really be creating new ones per se. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I completely understood the homework and didn't, what I did is okay. We have this handbook for the evaluation of municipal manager, which has a list of goals in it. I wrote those ones down because we've already approved those ones. Yeah, and that's sort of a management piece. And then there was a goal piece, right? There's sort of two parts to the evaluation and that manual sort of focuses on the one, the management piece. Right. So I misunderstood the homework assignment and did not reach forward to other goals. We have, the select board has, last time we had a goal working session was September of 2015. So they're pretty stale. So I would have thought that we maybe could have had a, it's too late now to bring it up, but I guess a goal session before tying them to, I understand there's a bonus involved. Yes. Yeah. Which I just heard of today. Well, that's in the contract. Yeah, it's a contract. It's everybody's copy. I know what I, Hmm? Everybody had a copy. Okay, I guess I didn't read it. I'll confess I didn't read it. That's okay. I'll go find it. I'll see if I can find it. I'm not sure I have, but I'll look. Well, and as far as, I don't think anyone. So I thought, I personally thought your homework responses were great. So everybody had some gaps there. No one did a perfect job. No one gets an A plus. I think the thing is though, what I, my response is in terms of the select board's goals is that we kind of are in our uncharted territory in the sense that the trustees might also have some goals and it could be profoundly time consuming for each board to assign all of their own goals. So we were trying to come up with some kind of a, a synthesis that's, I think that was the concept. Might it be problematic if one or two people are assigned to a committee to condense these goals and yet there are maybe opposing goals or goals that people on the committee don't like, but it doesn't mean that they're necessarily bad goals. How do we tease out if we don't talk as nine people? Well, one idea or another idea could be that we have for the joint boards overall goal and we had a big discussion last meeting about one that's in the future, becoming one municipality. What we could do is have that plus maybe one or two goals specific to the village, one or two specific to the trustees or to the select board, but have that defined and we can discuss that and make sure that that's really our overall goal and then it probably would be wise to say, Evan, here's our joint vision here. What can you do to support that in the time we have going forward? And then the subcommittee could work with him to make sure that those are consistent with that overall goal that we set. Just going back to my previous career in goals and objectives. Goals and objectives are set annually. You're evaluated annually. When you're talking about obtaining a goal of a unified community, you're talking down the road, who knows how many years, right? So to set a goal like that, we're talking about an annual evaluation of our manager. So why are we evaluating our goals that are unattainable in the evaluating period? So that doesn't make sense to me. The other aspect of this that I'm concerned with, we look at goals and rewards or incentives or what have you for accomplishing tasks set out, but on the other aspect of that, what about disciplinary action? How do we treat that? How is that addressed in goals and objectives? And goals and objectives in evaluating someone, it should be done in a period so that it's not just we do it annually. We have to, we should have, you know, quarterly evaluations so that he's aware of his deficiency so it's not waiting until the end of the rating period to evaluate somebody and say, now you failed to do this, you failed to do that. It really needs to be very structured. And I think that there's a lot that needs to be looked at. And I'm just looking back on my experience and what I've had in my work. Yeah. I just want to come in real quick. My comment didn't mean that, that all the work it's done this year, it's just saying what pieces can get done this year which support that longer term goal? Okay, Scott, why don't you just interrupt here. Let's go back to understand what we have already agreed upon. We've already agreed upon and that we will do an evaluation at the, in February. That's when the anniversary for the hiring is. And that we will use basically the ICMA format. We've agreed with that. And then, in addition, we said there will be a bonus associated with the successful, or not successful, but the performance on some specific goals that are agreed upon by the two boards and the manager. So that's already set. I don't think we, it seems like you've got a pretty solid framework there already about what this task is. And now it's just sort of filling in some of the details. And I think the details really are more about the goals being directed towards the bonus that's going to happen in February. And I would also just add that we have to consider that Evan is handling two board meetings, four board meetings a month, plus a joint meeting every month, and has already set out a very ambitious schedule for aligning policies and practices. And so, you know, we don't want to on top of this be adding a huge amount of work that needs to get done. I think that that's just my observation, Elaine. Keeping in mind that we wanted to have smart goals that are specific, measurable, and achievable, and relevant, and time constrained, out of all of the goals that folks submitted, including the ones that Andrew sent, in my opinion, the only one that is truly measurable is the first one you submitted, George. Which is? Which is alignment of town and village policies and procedures, aligning all policies and procedures would not be achievable within the remaining years. So I believe Evan should designate a specific cohort to be aligned. Everything else in this document that folks submitted is, with the exception of Andy's really excellent list, which is already included in the evaluation, are aspirational and somewhat prescriptive and more guidance. I can't measure whether Evan uses his gifts or whether, you know, I can't measure whether, well, there's a lot in here that are very subjective. I would rather see, I would rather look at the plan that Evan submitted to us for alignment and choose some goals from that, because Evan has already put a great deal of thought into what he thinks his work plan's gonna be for the next year. And perhaps we could just put two or three of those as the goals, because then we can specifically say, is this 40% completed? Is it 100% completed? And we will have to measure. Everything else in here feels really subjective and difficult to measure. And that's why I go back to the whole issue of the having a subcommittee, because it seems like this could be something, this isn't something that we could probably get through tonight, we could, but then we would not be able to get through anything else. So assigning a subcommittee to go through the very stuff that you're talking about and see what they come back with in June, that might be the way to go here. It sounds like a subcommittee to me. Would you like me to attend with the subcommittee? Sure. And also I would offer, if you want the HR director, Travis, there, he had offered that if you'd like his services, he would attend. I think that would be helpful, because it would help make these things that aren't smart goals into that format, perhaps. That would be very helpful. And maybe for Trustee Karen, I like the idea of getting feedback during the year. I don't think it's fair either to an employee or anybody else that you wait for the day that their evaluation is and any money is associated to tell them they're not living up to what you expected. So any feedback, whether it be quarterly, semi-annually would be appreciated. And one of the comments that I made to the chairs today was, I'd be happy to, I hope you can hear me. I'd be happy to do a six-month update or something close to that in February and maybe take it out six months and do an update, but it's not like also we don't work together all the time, but that type of thing is appropriate. And whether there's three goals or five goals, as long as they are somewhat tied to the main mission of what you guys are trying to achieve. So if the town and the village have top priorities, those should be at the top of my list. And so whether it is downtown development or the Essex Center plan, or we have staffing issues that need to get through. And I still have a lot of people to meet and get to know about operations and how people feel, et cetera, et cetera. Those things can't always be quantified, you can say, hey, we have pushed the ball this far and this isn't, but I would say that also, don't tie things to approvals by a board that I'm not responsible for. So if we bring things forward to you from a staff perspective and you work on them, but you don't approve them, it's nothing to do with whether I brought them to you or not. Now, what level I brought them to you and whether you felt they were ready for action, that's different than that. So I would just suggest that you can't put those in as goals. You'd have to be cognizant that some of those processes may take well over a year. Alignment is gonna take, but the question is, how far did we get? Is the plan right? Is the ball moving in the right direction? So I offer that. Be happy to sit on those and have staff join us. So can we move on to a designation of a subcommittee? And I think for this one we'll say two people from each board. Is that reasonable? All right. Tell them who they represent. Do we have volunteers? I would, Mr. Chair, but the month of June, I would not be able to give it the attention that it needs or deserves. So I'm gone for two weeks on vacation. We have nothing. What's left of it? May as well. Right. We do it. The same. I'm just saying, I would love to, but I cannot in good conscience. I also, I would offer. Can we text Lori and Dan? Lori and Dan. Lori and Andrew. Sure. I'll go, I'll hear a nomination for Lori and Andrew. Can we'll be amended later? Yeah, we can amend it later. Are there any other things you'd be interested in? It is. I'd also wonder if we can involve members of the public. Who would be interested in this? Well, the subcommittee meetings will be warned and public comment should be taken. But you don't want the public comments. Right, we're going to have two and two in the staff. For an evaluation of the town manager. Two is done. They pay his salary. Yeah, but they're not sitting board members. I mean, the manager is, we manage the manager and I think that we should be the ones who decide what the evaluation should be. Don't you think? Just asking. Okay. Public comment should be. Sure. We are so good. So, did you say you would be one? I would be one. Okay. And then I hear that Lori and Andrew, why don't you do your select board first? I'm fine. I'm up. Yep. And he doesn't want to. It doesn't really. Okay. It doesn't really leave a choice. Thank you, Mike. Okay. Looks like we have some, I read them out. Thank you. I appreciate it. And do we want to nominate, to promote Andrew and Lori? And then we can end it. Actually based on their experience and what they do, I think they both be excellent choices for them. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Done. Don't worry. We'll be fine. Well, so be it. Andrew, you're on a committee. We just put you on a committee. Figures. You're on a manager evaluation committee. We'll fill you in later. We're thinking only like 15, 16 hours. It's gonna be great. It's gonna be great. It's gonna be emotional. Okay. Well, you each board needs a look. Do you want to allow public comment? Before we put up motion on this? Of course. Yes. Is there anyone in the public would like to make a comment on what we just discussed about the manager's evaluation? Hearing none. I would entertain a motion to appoint Irene and Mike to the evaluation process for the Unified Manager subcommittee. Do I have a second? Second. Any further discussion of appointing Irene and Mike to that subcommittee? Hearing none, all those in favor, signify we're saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Any more passes? Five, zero. Do I hear a motion to appoint Lori Houghton and Andrew Brown to the manager evaluation subcommittee? Submult. Wait, here's a second. Oh, second. Okay. Can you second yourself? Can you do the, okay. He didn't make the motion, he could second. Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Congratulations, Andy. Yeah, thank you. Just, I will send out, we've been really starting a use of doodle poll to find dates and times when people can make it so this week you will be getting a doodle poll of possible dates. Sounds good. And all I would say is be sensitive to Selectman, Plagueman's. Absolutely. Is he scheduled in June? Oh, we're gonna try to get this done by the end of May. Yeah, it'll be done. Okay, so do you want me to take the next one? Sure. A discussion about the trustee select board and staff work plans for alignment. And we can, should we do staff or trustees against select board first? What would be? Well, let's see, what's on the thing? Let's do the trustee and select board first. Sounds good. First, I think, yeah. Okay. This, a lot of you, some had different comments, different ideas about this. And so I'd like to, I'll just sort of throw the floor open, I think to all of us to have to discuss or to thought of the different plans for alignment. And this is, let's keep it in two sections. One is the, we want to make clear, one is the staff's staff presented a whole sort of process for how they're going to approach alignment. But then the two boards also had some comments and thoughts for how to approach alignment. Anyone want to go first? I'm just going to throw out an observation that the trustee slash select board portion of the work plan depends heavily on opinions regarding governance. So I'm wondering if that's going to end up getting combined into our conversation about general governance. That said, I thought that Evan's plan was terrific and ambitious. The plan for the staff is ambitious but manageable and I'm all for it. What about the trustee's select board? I think that's going to change and form so many times that I don't have a lot to say about it right now. Sorry. That's all right. Yeah, I agree with Elaine. I couldn't really tell the difference between people sort of expressed ideas about what we should do, where we should go. And it wasn't, I didn't really see a clear delineation between board plans for alignment and board thoughts about governance and how to proceed and discussion. So that was me. And if I missed or misunderstood what someone was saying, my apologies. But I said pretty much the same thing. I couldn't really tell. If you don't mind, I would take a moment and I don't want to digress, but I did make a comment and I will direct this to Irene and allow you to respond to Irene. But I know you've made multiple comments about representation. I started by going through the town charter and the town charter has no, does not allude to a village. It does not allude to voting districts. The town charter simply says all selectmen shall be elected at large, period. Sub chapter two paragraph D. It doesn't refer to anyone who has special interests. I think I said in my comments to you that village, the citizens of the village who are citizens of the town fully support with their taxes, every single department, every single process that the town does, every single asset that is owned by the town, every shovel, every book, every library, every swimming pool, every single thing that the town owns, it was contributed to by the taxpayers of the village. There is not a process or department that the town operates that village taxpayers don't contribute to. And so I would say, village taxpayers or your constituents who live in the village have a 100% interest in everything that the town does. And I can't really see a basis in law or in terms of finance for singling out some subgroup any more than I would say, if we locate 81, we say 81 Main Street and the police department are located in the village, that that gives the village people because it's their geographically located in this part of the town, some kind of a special interest. I think really what you're talking about are people who are not currently being taxed by the village to support village services. I think that's really more accurate description of what you're saying. Other than that, I don't really understand what you mean by a group of people who have a special or a separate interest in all the citizens of the town. So I invite that was my thought on it. Don't really know what else to say. Well, I would say we can look to the school district for a shining example because they just merged and yet they have set aside certain seats for the different geographic districts because they're very different things going on. For example, there's busing outside the village, there isn't inside the village. There's a much more rural district outside the village and so that they chose when they merged the school district to maintain those district origins of their board membership even though the members vote at large on every single issue. And I think what we've seen over time is that actually there was an eight cent highway tax charged only to outside the village residents for decades, which the village was not paying. So that is a group of assets that were paid for by people who do not live in the village. So I think it's problematic to say some of these statements that you've said because they're not true. What statement is the first thing? Can you say what portion, what assets are owned by the town that the village did not contribute to? Well, for example, the highways, as I said, but there's other things that have been problematic because we've had no representation. It hasn't even been a year since the question was asked by members of the outside the village district if they could somehow retain the dozens and dozens of acres the Essex Town School District owned at that time were about to be turned over to a merged district and the town of Westford held an election to retain their land assets and it passed and they retain them. The Village of Essex Junction, Pellet and Election, retained the Park Street School at least because their voters were allowed to vote on it. And when I brought up the question, it was shut down from many angles, including my own board but also by the Essex Town School District when I believe they should have been standing up for the people who owned those assets until January, until July 1st of last year. So it's not just what is currently owned, it's a history that if you look back in time there's been a lack of representation that has been problematic and I would hope that we would be able to see not just what exists or what doesn't exist, but to look back in history and to see why in fact it's been so difficult to merge and perhaps we'll see that that lack of representation those extra charges for highway expenses are part of a bigger picture of a lack of representation that we can now remedy by looking more broadly at what is and what should be and make this aspirational, not just a continuation of the past because we know the past has not always been successful when it comes to talking about combining the design. I believe the reason it hasn't been so successful is we don't have equal teams at the table. We just set up a board with three village residents and one outside the village resident to evaluate the town manager's criteria. So to put forth criteria for the town manager's valuation. So as many times as I say this, somehow it keeps happening time and time again, we have these committees of what I would call lopsided representation until we have equitable representation and we understand what that means and then we make it happen. You're just perpetuating everyone who doesn't pay attention to that is perpetuating this imbalance that will come back to bite us because it continues to do so over time. Okay, let me just go back. I just wanted just for clarification. I was in the room actually back in the 1990s. I remember the day when the select board made a decision to impose the highway tax and why did they do that? Because they looked at the taxes coming at the fact that the village was being taxed to support, purchase, build, plow, a pave, all of the town roads outside of the village and the town was contributing $0 to do anything of that nature inside the village, zero. The village was contributing approximately half of the town's capital fund that repairs all the roads, pays for paving. The town was contributing no dollars from the town general fund coming back into the village. The select board at the time thought that that seemed a little unfair, which it wasn't just a bite, that was euphemistic. It was profoundly unfair. That's why they put in a highway tax. I would also go back to the question of what the school district did, which I just said. That's fine, but that's a charter they created. We can only go on the basis of the charters that exist. Right now there's a municipal corporation called the town of Essex and every single person who lives in the town of Essex is a shareholder in that municipal corporation. It's like Microsoft. If everybody, if we all own shares in Microsoft corporation, we all get to participate equally or depending on our share, but we all get to participate in the Microsoft annual election. The fact that some of us might also own an Apple stock does not diminish or in any way prevent us from, if you own Microsoft, from participating in Microsoft shareholder elections. And really that's the way the law looks at it. That's the way it is. We can't do anything else to designate some other group is in my view, not only unethical, but it's obviously illegal. With the charters the way they are today. The way that they are today. We've already put that in as some of the things we know we need to work on, which is perhaps districts or representation as one of the things we're gonna work on. So the charters don't allow you to do that today, but that doesn't mean they can't be amended to allow you to do it in the future to take care of it. Have you already identified that at any time? And that's the point I was trying to make. The thing that you're, the very thing that you're talking about, which is representation and from our perspective, unequal tax distribution is the very thing that we're talking about. That's the essence and the substance of what we're trying to get at. And so I think it's important to say, let's get at, let's get on with the business of working at it. But I think saying, bringing in some other group that the charter does not recognize and the village charter certainly wouldn't recognize, I don't think that's appropriate. And just to keep trying to say that, I think it's sort of sidetracking this event. I'd rather see where we can go with this and see if we can't work this out. I think we can if we don't put out misinformation. And when you say things in print like this, that there are no town assets and things like that that have not been true over time and shouldn't be true today if we were paying attention to these things, I think we need to show greater awareness of the history here and talk more about how we're gonna change things to help the 11,000 people who live outside the village want to buy into this new vision because otherwise they will be lost and they will set up their own overlay district, perhaps and have their own Board of Trustees which they're perfectly able to do that. It's perfectly legal. The village did 125 plus years ago. If the outside the village folks have to do that, maybe they will. I would hate to see that happen. I thought we were moving together. I'd rather not see another layer of government but if there's tone deafness in the boardroom to the plight of the actual majority of people living in the town over the fact that they can't get equal representation at any committee meeting where we're talking about this stuff. They aren't recognized when we ask, gee, can our assets be retained? Can we have a vote? So the school district doesn't get them. Oops, sorry, no, you don't have representation so you're not gonna get representation. That's not fair to them and there's this series and this history of unfairness and speaking about the town outside the village as if it doesn't matter and unless we give it weight in our conversations and talk about how it does matter and how it will matter, then I think we're setting ourselves up. I get it, but you're explaining something that the school district does with what the two municipal governments do and my point, this is very simple, I mean, is that folks out on Sand Hill Road, you've got constituents there, you've got constituents on Old Stage Road and you've got hundreds of constituents in this building right here. And they are worthy in deserving of your representation as well. They have 100% of your representation as well. That's all we're saying. I'm saying that on their behalf, you know, your constituents in the village need your equal representation. They've had it. I've done lots of tax equity stuff over time, but I haven't seen any representative equity in the last five years and that's why I'm now talking on their behalf because the tax equity's happening, the representative equity is not. Let's see, thank you and I didn't mean to, if I gave a fence, I didn't mean to. Can we please just continue this conversation? Absolutely. And we are, this is the fourth straight meeting, I believe, where we've had this conversation. So can we please stop talking about what's wrong and what we wish could happen and do the work because we are actually working on it and let's just keep moving, please. When I see misinformation, I need to call it out. And that's the only reason I said it because you highlighted it and I wanna make sure people go away with the impression there's disagreement as to whether it's actually misinformation and within opinion. Okay, Andy. There's still a little bit more than a penny of highway tax left and where does that money go, Evan? I think it goes to capital, right? It goes to rolling stock. Yeah, right, so there you go. All the trucks that are run by the town highway department were paid for out of that tax that was only paid outside the village. What percentage of the truck out of a $100,000 truck? More than zero, you said zero, George, come on. So I agree with Irene on this that it is somewhat misleading to say that there are no assets. And it's a good point because a penny of tax, right, I haven't thought through, you've got 1,500 trucks. How much of that was actually bought using the town outside the money highway, your town, the town outside the village highway tax. I don't know, and I'm not gonna ask staff to go figure that out, but I had the same concern. I wrote the note down here that that, and I've already told Evan and Greg that when we set our tax rate, I'm gonna ask that we eliminate that highway tax altogether. I don't know why we have to continue it, but. I would just like to remind everybody that in Evan's recommended work plan for the staff, he suggests that the staff continue to work on the public works alignment, which has to do with that highway tax because it funds rolling stock. And the recommendation from the committee that reviewed the public works consolidation was that we pay attention now to the finances behind, the revenue and expenses behind public works. And when that happens, we will have a very detailed explanation about where that highway tax is coming from and where it's going. But I also want to remind folks that when we shifted the public works budget from the village into the town, the way we offset the increase to town outside the village residents was to eliminate six cents of the eight cent highway tax at the time. So we used that inequity to balance the books for both the residents in the village and the residents in the town outside the village. We did not want to hit the residents outside the village with a massive tax increase. So the way we solved that problem was to lower the highway tax. And so when we look at the public works consolidation in the future, hopefully very soon, we need to remember that there is that 1% or whatever's left of it, 1.1% left, that may be something that we can use to offset increases on the town outside the village side as we even out the expenses and revenues for public works. So I think that tax is very important. It's a very good point because I just wanted to stay on it a little bit. I don't want to be laborate. But again, from our perspective in the village, our capital fund that pays for all of our paving is 100% paid for by the village. That's all these streets out here that everybody drives off. We pay 100% of the cost and we're also contributing approximately 50% of the cost for paving and maintenance of the streets in the town outside the village. So let's be clear about when we talk about fairness, let's be really clear that we understand that there's different visions and different perspectives of fairness going on. And I think that was very important when we talked about equalizing the cost of now sharing the cost of taking care of all of the town's roads and making it equitable. The village wanted to make sure and we were absolutely on board with the fact of reducing that highway tax and not having not saying as a way of offering the impact on town outside the village voters. So we were sensitive and we have always been sensitive to that. We don't want to hit and upset it multiple times. And I think that's why the big work I see before us is how do we get over this tax equity business without hitting town outside the village voters with a giant tax increase? We've been talking about that all along. That's the work, that's the hard work ahead of us. And we're very sensitive to it. I ask that we move on, please. Let's do it. Okay, so we would be then the next, does anyone from the audience, I guess we should ask for questions or comments. Yeah, Johnny Egan? Yes. And I read something there when I was reading the minutes and it was, I think it was a suggestion by Mike, Plagueman. Yes, sir. That there would be one 10 member select board made up of five at large residents from the village and the town served staggered terms. And that seems to me to be excellent. You know, equal representation, staggered terms. And if we could get to that with the next charter change, we'd save a lot of energy and steam. Otherwise, from our perspective out here, it's a like power struggle between individuals. And George, I agree that with equal representation, that there can be good representation with things as they are. But the perception is that it's uneven. That's just the perception that needs to be addressed in overcome. So I think the charter change to, you know, five and five would be good. There's gonna be a lot of work to be done with this new board. And the more members, the better on it. And the chances are with 10 people that they will be able to make decisions and not be in stalemate. I'm from the town and, you know, on the issue of the tax, I wholeheartedly agree there should be the same tax for in the village and outside the village. And I think it just simply, you know, just have it staggered over several years. I don't know, maybe five years. And I think people from the town, I think there's a good chance they could accept that. And it'll be a little easier. But I think there has to be that equality of payments. And I think there's gotta be the one village or the one Essex, I mean, the one Essex. Thank you. Thank you. Very good comments. Thank you. I don't know if I have it here. Several people, Todd. Here, Jerry, Bob. What this is all about is that the town's future is becoming the village. And the village's future is becoming the town. Because 25 years ago, there were a lot of farmers here who didn't need a water system and didn't need sewers. But everybody out there now needs water and sewers, just like the village has. So we need to take the long view. Someday, this piece of land that went to the school district is a recreation area and it has forests. And someday, maybe 50 years ago, from now, maybe 100 years, there will be synergy in moving the forest of the village to the town of the forest, the town of the village. I don't know what it's gonna be, but there will be a con time when there's synergy to bring those two together. It's certainly gonna happen today, but it will someday. And we just need to have the long view and understand that all of these problems will, in time, find their own solutions. Thank you, Jared. Thank you. You, George, had said that there were no provisions in the charter for, you know, needing to have representation by two different entities. But is there anything in the charter about consolidation? And if not, I feel that's pretty overarching new, you know, concern that's happening. And maybe with merit kind of a revisit of, you know, if that's not part of the charter too, there's no precedent for consolidation. Yeah, I don't wanna necessarily respond and I invite anyone else on the select board of trustees to respond. There isn't anything in the charter, but there are state laws about, I mean, in the charter of merger or consolidation, but there are state laws that say what you have to do, what two communities need to do if they wanna merge. There's a process laid out. But you said there's no precedent in the charter, but yet, you know, the state does have a precedent. The state does have a precedent, but I don't, that's not something that would be, the charter just lays out the authority and the legislative authority of the charter. It doesn't really, it would be unusual for a charter to contain language of how it's gonna dissolve itself, basically, I haven't seen it. My point is, you know, that if this is, it's gonna necessitate a very big change. And that the charter couldn't have anticipated that. So that's why I'm feeling this needs to be considered. And also just a quick, you know, I felt very marginalized at the last meeting of the select board as a resident of the town outside the village in terms of, you know, not, I know everyone's working on this, but I felt like a lot of ideas were just totally shot down without consideration. And basically, I guess I'm still not clear why this whole idea of equal representation is seems to be antithetical to, you know, what you're all trying to do, moving forward, working together, everyone is concerned about everyone else. So yes, and yes, why is the idea of having equal representation of those, the two entities somehow against everything else? Because that's the impression I'm getting from a number of people. I think our last joint meeting, we talked about long-term goal, like what Jerry was saying, long-term being one municipality with one board and with addressing that representation issue. And maybe it's just about timing, you know, thinking about when to do that, maybe doing that earlier than later might be the way to go so that, you know, we could have that addressed earlier in the process. But if the charter doesn't allow you to appoint representatives that haven't been elected, you know, you don't want to be violating the charter. But that doesn't mean you can't change the charter to enable that. And that will be the way down, you know, let's stay legal. Yep, Evan. And I would venture to say that that's part of the work of this group. Yes. And when you talk about your work plan to bring it full circle, is to have this discussion. And I would pose that you could probably spend more than two hours on just this topic. Yes. Which you're gonna get close to soon. Yeah. But it's this topic and tax equity, representation, tax equity, that's your work plan. Staff is going to shoulder a load at the staff level with your guidance, of course. But, you know, how do we align what we're aligning, what we're trying to do, what we can share, what we can align, share, consolidate, and then be ready for merger, should it happen. And I know some people don't like to hear this, but even if someday you don't merge, but you're aligned, and you're sharing, and you're being good stewards of the tax money of the village and of the town, you have taken this so far. And maybe to Jerry's point to use an audience member, 25 years from now, somebody comes up with a better mousetrap, or the issue of the day compels you to do the full merger. Fine, you'll be ready for it. You'll be so much closer than you have been. So that's the thing. So I would say, I love this conversation and so that's your work plan. Yeah. It's been spelled out for the most part. And when we asked you for your top priorities, if you look on your list, you'll see that those always tend to be in the top five, tax equity, representation, you know, voting process, public engagement. They all seem to come right to the top, whether they're somebody's first, third, fourth, they're right in there. So I just say, you know, this is just my thing. Pick the things of your topics and in these meetings, have your discussions. George, you had a very good, interesting concept in one of your answers. I believe Irene, some of her positions are right in line with some of those things. And it's about a timing. How you get from where you are today to where you want to get to when you get time for that big vote out into the public. That's what I think is really at issues. How do you get from where you are today in today's charter into tomorrow in a charter change? And then maybe, you know, everybody said they only wanted one charter change. You may need an intermediate step and get there and then get for the big change. That's just from an outsider. Thank you, Evan. Just one quick comment. Yes. Your name, sir. Mark Banks. And I want to say that I appreciate and value different points of view in public discussion, especially when they were respectfully made. I think both Irene and George accomplished that. And I don't care if it's a second time it's come up in meeting third time, fourth time. I think there's always value in sharpening your thinking about those issues that comes through confrontation, respectful confrontation again. And I, as a member of the community, appreciate that and I hope that continues rather than get stopped in some fashion. Thank you. Thank you very much. I have one other point to make. Let's be kind of clear, which might be on it. Let's be kind of clear from this discussion that the charter needs to change. It needs to change. I live outside the village and I do not have adequate representation nor does anyone else in the TLV on this board. There are one board that represents everyone in the town and one board that only represents part of the town. That has to be different in order for this to go forward. I've wanted to see consolidation for the 30 odd years that I've lived here. And it will not proceed unless there are equal voices at the table. And there haven't been there needs to be. So if the first change has to be a charter change to make that happen, then that's what you need to do. Yes, ma'am. Mary, I'm here. So I would recommend the first thing to be done is amend the charter, make it equal representation and it's going to make everything else just flow so much more easily. Okay, should we move on? We're going to move on to the next item. Do you want to answer the first one? I don't know. Can I make another comment? Yeah, I'd like to say that I fully support Evan's proposal for the staff work plan. I think it's an excellent proposal. I want to make sure that he says many years back. And please continue that work. And I think that most of what we consider the select board work plan is kind of divvied up in the rest of the agenda. So that's harder to discuss. So I just at least wanted to comment on that. Yeah, let me go back over that because I don't want to skip over that. So everyone happy? Any additional further comments about the staff alignment plan? I mean, it's general right now and I think it's going to be more specific and I'm going to imagine what the evaluation process is going to get even more specific. Evolve this. Yeah. Again more. Understand. Okay, so now we can move on. Do you want to do this one next? So item six C is we all use words like a tax equity and culture and a number of terms that we don't necessarily all we think that they mean one thing to everybody but they may mean different things to folks. So we identified a large number of words that need to be defined. So the homework assignment that was given was to put it what we believe each of us, the definition is of these words. It was consolidation, culture, governance, identity, levels of service and quite a few of them. And reading over the definitions you can see that yeah they do mean some different things to different people and I've experienced that in my work life too when you were people from different cultures you can use the same word but they sure don't necessarily mean the same, it's similar but they don't mean exactly the same. So in order to make sure that when we're using words which are very powerful that everybody understands what that represents. So because again the homework came back and there's a lot of ideas as to what these things might mean that the thought was we could have one more subcommittee to take these multitude of ideas for what the word should be and come up with something that's a hybrid of some sort that the subcommittee could agree on that they could then come back and propose these definitions to the larger board rather than try to wordsmith things with nine of us here I think it would be, it would take a meeting in and of itself so more than that. Yeah or more, so would that be okay way to proceed if we could do one more subcommittee if people were very passionate about words? I know Annie doesn't want to do it, Annie. I'm concerned that we're gonna have to use other words to describe these words and it's gonna turn it and could potentially turn into a complete rat hole of defining the definitions as long as the words that are in the definitions as well. So I'm completely frustrated by the... Do you have a suggestion? No I don't. Well my suggestion is that we move on and talk about the words as they come up rather than having individuals and this group spend a lot of time trying to beforehand come up with this long list of words that are gonna be described by other words that may need to also be defined. They never end in a cycle of definitions. Dr. Seuss, that's great, okay great. I totally get what you're saying, Annie. I participated in a lot of facilitated conversations and I've led some facilitated conversations and one of the most important exercises that groups do together when they're embarking on a conversation about something difficult is they define common terms. So I think this is the right way to go. I do think we need to define these. I'd be willing to be on that subcommittee but I don't think it needs to be a very lengthy process. One or two meetings and then we come back to the board with the recommended definitions. Okay, Larry? I found this very handy to have a glossary of each word and then who to find it as which because I saw very different definitions for example for tax equity from people who live inside the village versus people who live outside the village just as one example. So I would hate to lose any of that color. I would just like to see anybody who didn't get the homework in in time to have all those definitions or anybody else who wants to add words or add definitions in here and have this handy, something that we bring to every meeting. So when we talk about something we can look up and say okay, I recall you saying tax equity was this. Do you still believe it's this? So that we understand when somebody's talking about tax equity how they receive it. I don't want to lose that because if it means different things to us now coming up with a common definition still may not be the way that we reference it in our own lives. To you? Okay. Well that said, yes, but we have the freedom to define these words outside of the dictionary. We can define them in the context of this conversation. So, and I would think the goal of this subcommittee would be to make those definitions relevant to this conversation so that we don't lose the color. Can I ask both of you a question? I'd like to hear you both your thoughts. I noticed in looking at them they felt there was kind of a general, some of the words were, we took it upon ourselves to come up with our own definition and we put a lot of our own spin, our own political thoughts into it. In other words, we went on Wikipedia and defined word and it's, you know, I think I said we're a success, the opposite of failure. I think a lot about that one. But so what would you, if you wanted to consolidate, which of those is valuable? Should we, I mean, do we wanna have a list that actually defines, you know, according to the Dick Miriam Webster or do we wanna have a list that is our thoughts, our individual thoughts about what these things mean? What are both of your thoughts about it? I'd be willing, I think it would be worthwhile to synthesize the interpretations of these words by each of the members of these two boards, so that we're not losing the perspective of various people. And I think if we just go with the dictionary definitions, we will lose those shades of opinion. Irene? I don't see any to use the dictionary definition for any of these. I think if people want over time to modify their definition as they have new awareness, that would be fine, but I'd rather keep the glossary. For some reason. Dan? I hear what Andy's saying. I think it can get very, you know, we can start with the wordy, trying to do wordy and trying to define the word used within the definition of a particular word. But I think we're not necessarily doing this for us, we're doing this for the public. And we need to do it so that the public understands it. So when they read that as what is tax equity, what is quality of life, they understand what quality of life means. Just as much as I said in the last meeting, we need to make sure the public is understanding of what's going on here and we're not misrepresenting things and not changing things so that they're bounced around different. Oh, they said this. Now the slide board said this. The trustee said this. What's the real message here? We need to keep it concise and simple. Okay. Thank you, Dan. Just to add, if I could for what Mr. Karen just said, I think Randy's, Randy, I think Andy's comment about this turning into a rattle is entirely possible. And I'm gonna struggle to say this exactly the way it means, but the 10 of us or the nine of us are one thing. If we invite public comment, as we always do, you are gonna get so many different variations, different than what the nine of us have come up with. I'm concerned that it's gonna become a little loop where we just continually chase our tail. I don't do not want to not invite public comment, but there has to be a point where it ends. You're talking about for a subcommittee public comment to Smith to define these words? No, I'm not necessarily thinking of that. I think in order to move the process along, I think the subcommittee needs to do their work, but at some point the public is gonna need to weigh in and we need to invite that. But like I said, Ms. Banks may have one flavor of the word culture and there could be three or four other different ones all different than what we've got here. None of them are wrong. It's just that it's gonna muddy the water something fierce and it's gonna slow us down. Andrew, I wanted to say on the page of Andy the thought of having a subcommittee to do that kind of work and I see it just being a giant wheel continuously spinning at the same time. I don't think we can really come together and really be on the same playing field unless we have a common language and a common understanding. Similarly, I really see us struggling to get to a common end goal. Well, how about Elaine? Would someone, we can have a subcommittee of one, who else would be on the subcommittee? And would this be, would you be on that as a trustee or a selectman on this subcommittee? I think as a selectman would be fine. Okay. I can, I could volunteer to be on it but Irene, do you want to participate in this as well? But that would be, let me see, could we, would that definitely be interesting? Oh, that puts us in an interesting position. Wow. So you could participate as a trustee and a selectman with Irene and I. It'd be a four person. So why don't we have Elaine do it as a trustee and I will do it as a subcommittee. Is that good? That's fine. And let me, and let me get to the, I just had a thought what you were talking about and I get it, I get what you guys are saying. But why don't we let, let's see what they come up with, bring it by the board, then we agree with it and then let's see what the public says at that point and then we can revise it accordingly. Does that make sense? There's a process? It does. Yeah, I think a common language is important. Okay. Not just for us, but for the public. Okay. It may be that of this group of words that there's a handful of them that are much more important to define because there's much more confusion around them than others. I think we can all get around the concept of a couple of those words. Okay. Evan, is it? Yeah, just again, enjoy the commentary and I enjoyed the definition in common language. I throw this out that six months from now you could ask to revisit these same words and see if they're still valid, see if they need to be tweaked, see if the public has given you anything that makes you think slightly differently or differently. You may do that, but at least you're playing off the same playbook and when you say this, it means this, if you were using the word in a different way, you might get something to go with, that's not what we agreed upon. What are you talking about now? Okay. Good comment. Just curious, if we're gonna take this language, these words, and are we ultimately looking to incorporate these into a potential new charter and then you're gonna have to take in the fact that legal, you're gonna have legalese and you're gonna have legal, this is only just in the process, during the process it's just a process. Yeah, it's a financial process for us. Just wanna make it clear for everyone, it's not gonna be held through these. And just one more moment. I did this with the staff. We had a bunch of same words. When we're talking about alignment, we wanted our definitions of what we meant by certain topics. What did this word mean? What does this word mean? So that when we go out to the departments and to the employees, when we say X word, this is what we're talking about. You've already done that? Can we see it? No. I mean, sounds like that work may have already been done. Well, that's what it meant to us. But it should be the same. Some of these topics we didn't use some of these words. But we also, again, we wanted to define success. But if you're defining alignment for the staff a certain way and we come back with a totally different definition, not okay. So we want to be on the same page as the staff. The word alignment. Excuse me. Consolidation. But my point is we should all be speaking the same language. Not just us. And we've had nine or 10 people in the room. Took us a good hour and a half to go through all of them. But we had also had some these pre-words bring together. Then we commented on it. Okay. Okay. I'll take anyone in the audience have a comment question about this. Robert. I'm just gonna follow up on one word from our fans again. The one word that's missing that I think might be a unifying term to define is community. We talked about consolidation. We talked about, you know, a lot of other kinds of place. It's the aspects of community perhaps, but I think that's a vital word. We're thinking about living in Essex as a community. Yeah, I'm surprised it's not in there. Yeah, me too. We have culture. Okay, well then anyone, do you want to add it? Yes. Okay, sure. Thank you, Mark. Thank you. That was a great chance. Yes, great. Let's reach my J.I. again. I make my living as a professional communicator. I work a lot with technical documents. A lot of what you're saying sounds like you're trying to create a glossary of sorts. There are many, I work a lot in the energy industry. And there are many terms that can mean a number of different things. It's just how they're applied in certain circumstances. Just think of the different sizes of electric utilities. But saying that a definition of glossary, how you define certain terms depends on what you're trying to do with them. And is everyone here clear about, is there an ultimate goal that we're trying to achieve? Yeah. And it's, do you state that, Max? Yeah, I think as, oh, sorry. Yeah, we talked about it at our last joint meeting. It was the long-term view, and we didn't say how many years that is, is for one community, one municipality, one board. So these words, as we talk about the process on this journey, we're just trying to come to a new common language. So there's no more, there will be no more of that T-O-V-T-I-V-M-R stuff. As a vision for the future, yeah. And again, Rich, we hadn't talked about timeframe, but yeah. Okay, there doesn't need to be that clear a timeframe. But the way you define these words depends on where you're going with them. Any other comments, questions? Okay, so I will make a motion that we appoint Elaine Sokchak to represent the trustees on the subcommittee looking at the integration and definition of the words. Second. Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Okay. And I'll entertain a motion to appoint Irene Renner to the subcommittee that defines the common use words around governance and consolidation. So moved. One, two, I second. Second. Thank you, Andy. Any further discussion about appointing Irene to that subcommittee meeting? Subcommittee meeting. We're none. All those in favor signify to sign up. Aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, Mr. President, thank you, Irene, for stepping forward for that as well. Okay, thank you, Elaine, for doing that. Yeah, I'll do the, item D is. G. I'm sorry, we're skipping down to G now. Thank you, Max. Thanks, I would, I would applaud it right ahead. So now we have discussion about general ideas for governance and representation. And that's me and you leading us. Do you want to lead off on this? If you want me to do it? And we can sort of also open the floor. Why don't you lead off on this one? You had, you want to just, yeah, jump right to the input, you had an idea? I had an idea. It was a, I was being a little facetious, saying it was an excellent, amazing idea. It was going to solve all of our problems. But I did want to, I did want us to put an idea out there so we could begin to have a discussion about it. My idea, probably if someone could, Lauren, could you get it? Do you have the, the illustration I made? My idea, and it needs a lot of work, was a charter change, a recommendation for a charter change sooner rather than later. It would, I'm sorry, which would amend the two existing charters but not abolish them. And it would say that each charter is to be executed by a, ultimately a seven member council made up of basically former trustees and selectmen, but moving to a point where you would get three people from, maybe from a town district, three people, maybe from a village district and one at large, but that's a, that's down the road. My immediate thought was if we could get this charter proposal to the legislature this year, and this is all hypothetical and it's got a lot of work to do, and it was enforceable by July of 2019 that all the existing, all the current holders of seats in the village, on the village trustees and the select board would be formed or unified into this, this council and would become the council's responsibility to execute both the existing charters. Now, why, why do I want, why did I suggest this idea? First of all, staff has said they need several years to do, to do alignment and policy alignment, procedural alignment correctly, to do best practices and go through it carefully and do it the way I think we all want it done. So that's several years. Secondly, if we try to do a charter, we have to understand and I think all of us do, but it's important for everyone to understand. The charters are the glue that holds the whole communities, both these communities together. They enable and designate a taxing body, the entity that owns the assets, the charter designates who they are. The charter holds everything together and so if you dissolve a charter, you better have some place for all that stuff to go and we don't have a place for that stuff to go. We're saying it's gonna take several years to figure out where all that stuff to go is. But in the meantime, are we going to keep meeting as two boards doing our usual two meetings per month to handle our own stuff and then also meeting once a month or whatever as joint meetings in order to have an up-tempo way of moving this whole alignment and governance discussion forward. Doing something like this means that we just have one board. It would just be the nine of us who would be and we would execute the village charter. We would execute the town charter. We would meet twice a month. We would do our regular duties and then we could also talk about all this governance stuff, alignment and tax equity and representation and we could deal with it piece by piece and support all the subcommittees that might be formed. It would cut staff work time in half, I believe. I think I'm not sure it would cut in half, but I think it would be significant the diminishment of staff work time. We could even begin to look at things and this might be a possibility right now of having one annual meeting, one budget, one vote. We might even be able to get to align the vote if we had the village and the town lined up on the same base to have it go with the school. So we could conceivably within a year or two years have all of our votes something we've always, all of us have said we should do. We could have all our votes on one day. We could have one annual meeting. I'm trying to think of all the other benefits and we can get into the discussion. I didn't want this to become the focal point of this meeting. I think it's something that it's just a concept. I wanted to throw it out there. Something for us to entertain. The two big hurdles that I see are, and let me anticipate, there are lots of them, but the two biggest ones are it would mean the trustees suddenly are joining with the select board in executing the town charter. The trustees had not been elected to a board to execute the town charter and suddenly we would be doing that. So that's a hurdle. Conversely, it would mean that three people who do not live in the village, who do not pay taxes to the village, who are not village citizens, who currently could not serve on the village board of trustees, would suddenly be able to execute the village charter. That's unprecedented. So both of these, both of those things are hurdles to get over, but it would mean we have to trust each other. We have to take a leap into the dark. We have to be willing to say we're gonna give this a shot. And if we both said, as we did at our last meeting, that we ultimately see a consolidated board as the goal, well, let's see what worked. Let's see if that might not work. Let's try going with the consolidated board. And when we consolidate the board and suddenly the trustees are looking at all the things that the town needs to look at, like representation, and suddenly when the selectmen are looking at all the things that the trustees need to look like tax equity, suddenly our perspectives change. Suddenly we begin to understand each other a little bit better and we keep the conversation moving forward. A lot of questions about it and it was an idea that would need a lot of work, but I wanted to throw it out as a concept. Could help address when it comes to really talking about tax equity. Absolutely. It was the one, yeah, together. Andy? I think you say this is a temporary realignment. So what's the, what would? The end goal would be that I would see is that this council, this realigned council would have some over a period of like two years or so. Understand that they're working towards a final consolidated solution. And what that solution looks like it is, I can't, I don't think any of us can say. If we could, then we'd know. But the idea is that would be a temporary realignment of the two boards. And I think you might need to do that because the legislature in looking at something like this might say, you know, yeah, we can go with that for a little while, but as a permanent solution, we're not on board with this. Yeah. Could we consider doing it as a UMD instead of a charter change? A UMD. A Union Municipal District. And then you'd have an election to form it. The election would include appointing all of the current members. You could include those. And I don't know. I mean, we're kind of jumping down to the last item on the list is, what is it legal to do, right? Well, I don't think it, I don't want to. But since it's a temporary thing rather than, and the thing that the thing I worry about with making it a temporary charter change is that we get to that point and never step away from it. And it takes another 10 years to move to the final thing. And I recognize it could easily be five years, but if we're a UMD that has, you know, ways to get out of it for one thing, included if it doesn't work. I know there were prior discussions about UMDs and STDs. And so I just want to throw that out there as a possibility if it's a temporary thing. Well, my first thought of it just is, and I think let's discuss it more. But my only thought about it is, is that a UMD is creating a new level, another separate government. And I don't know what you'd do with the existing charters. The each charter requires that you have a private body to execute the charter. And so I don't know if you could have the two, the village and the town charters designate a UMD that executes the charters. I mean, I'm trying to take the path, at least resist to get this, you see what I'm saying? That's the last thing on our list, where do we need to get expert help? And municipalities have the right to negotiate with other municipalities to provide services. And so if the two municipalities negotiate with each other to have a single council govern them, they may be unusual, but there may be reasons why you can't do it. I don't know. That's a great segue, Andy. I think that one of the things that we kind of kicked around, we really met earlier today a little, is that maybe when you have a discussion on something like this, we have either the village attorney, the town attorney, or a special attorney present to be able to address these questions so that we're not doing things in the dark. We actually have an expert, that's not me, that says, oh yeah, this is something you could do. And by the way, I apologize, but you're using acronyms, STD. Union Municipal District, Special Tax District, are the two terms that have been used. So my apologies. The people at home may not, and the audience may not. So Union, you? Union Municipal District. It's enabled by state legislation that you can negotiate agreements between municipalities. So while you're not gonna solve it tonight, but the idea is that if you wanna continue some discussions of some areas, we would then schedule a legal authority to be present to be able to answer questions directly while you're here, so that you can get to the heart of that. Well, you may want to, they may not be able to answer your question on the spot. You might want to give it to them ahead of time and have them come and complain why it's a bad idea. It's not gonna work. Right? You don't know, do they? I might also recommend we invite someone from the League of Cities and Towns to balance out the local attorney with someone who focuses on that law statewide every day. I mean, the other advantage is that you can start to address these tougher issues if you have that equal representation. Nice. Earlier, we talked about wanting to do this later, but maybe it makes sense to flip it and do it earlier so that these other conversations can happen. Cam. I don't think this is uncharted territory. I think if we look around the state, you can see other communities that have done similar things. When you go down to Bellows Falls or you go to Waterbury, you go up to St. Albans. I can speak to a bunch of them that I've seen that have accomplished things similar to it, maybe not exactly the same, but very similar. So there is information or sources, like Elaine was mentioning, going to the VLCT Vermont League of Cities and Towns for ideas and support and to give us recommendations, maybe, where it's... Mike? As someone who was against a series of small charter changes right away and instead having something of substance that we could bring to the legislature, I like this idea. I'm willing to give this a try and go down the road and see if we can make this work because it solves the unending discussion of representation and by having that resolved, we can then move to the topics that the town's people and the village people pay us to take care of instead of continually batting around the same idea. So I am not afraid to say that I've changed my position. I think a change sooner or rather than later would be a good idea for this particular piece. Good, thank you. Bye, Mike. I'll be in after you, please. I guess I'm just stuck on the 10 member board because it does afford all the people here to have a seat representing their geographic district at the start or almost all the people. And I wouldn't wanna lose the wisdom around this table. I wouldn't wanna lose the wisdom we have around this table. I think going down to a seven or nine member board right away may work in the long term but I'd rather see five people from outside the village and five from inside the village to start and now we have the equal representation and you have all this knowledge and you're not losing anyone or forcing someone out who doesn't want to leave at this exciting point in our history. So I would urge us to go with the bigger board rather than this one. Yeah, I mean, I just, again, nuts and bolts of the thing that's something we'd have to discuss over the course of the next few months. And I think the first step would be getting legal counsel to see whether this concept or Andy's concept even can is possible, plausible under the constitution. If it is, and Dan seems to think it is then maybe, but let's maybe get the basics in line first and then work out the details. Andrew, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. I have to agree with what Mike was talking about and how as someone where I'd rather to see everything just get done, move on sometimes at this time. Unfortunately, but this would be a great step. This would be a great way to solve so many of the issues that we are getting past so that we can finally address some of the larger issues. At the same time, board competitions my only hesitation by having an equal number of boards is an equal number of members. That one point in time where inevitably we're all going to have a tie in other communities when that happens, you then have a mayor who will then preside over that and then break that vote. So that way you can come to a resolution. Yeah, I don't see that as a showstopper though because I don't know how many times that might happen but it could. It could. I wouldn't make that as a showstopper for us but it is good to know that that happened. I would just say I'd rather not see us go down the road of do we need to have a mayor who not need to have a mayor or just not have there be a 10 member board that would be an even number board so that way we don't get into that issue of stalemates. I'd like to say two things about stalemates and one is that if you've got things coming up to a board and you're voting 5-5, you've got bigger problems than an even number of total board members. We should never be that close on a vote. Second of all, I have a hesitate to have at large members if you look around at bodies like Senate's and House's representatives, they have district representation and everyone comes together and votes at large but they do not elect at large members. I think that's problematic. It gives one district a chance to have more weight at the table. I would not go for that. Well, Andrew, I don't mean to perjure us but you were born in the town outside the village is that correct? That is correct. Okay, does he count as to, can he be the permanent at large person? It's where you pay taxes from right now. Okay, all right. Sorry. So this is- Oh, no worries. I've got to work. It's okay. He's the only native on the board then. I understand. No, I just, her comment was it's where you pay taxes and it just seems like it's always coming back to taxes rather than representation because I'm seeing this, the town outside the village is much larger than the village. The town outside the village has unique centers, Essex Center, the Republic Horners or down by Pinecrest. Whether all those people have the same view or they get an equally representation on their board, their select board, they live in different parts of the town. It's unique. It's different. You can't tell me that people that live at the far end of Old State Road by Westward have the same needs or wants that somebody that lives over in Pinecrest has. It's different. So it's different for everything. So all of a sudden this whole thing of representation has become an issue when it becomes with the village. But what about the representation within the town itself as excluding the village? So that it just gets to me after a while hearing this. It just, it keeps coming back to that. So ultimately it seems like it's less representation, more taxes. Well, I mean, could I, what do you think of just the general concept though for right now, Dan, of saying if we did something like this and consolidated this. I support this. And then we wrestled with the whole representation tax thing, but as a unified board going forward, knowing that those are the kinds of things we have to work on. Is it something that is moving forward? This is a big step forward. I support it as Mike said. I think this would be a great way to, you know, a trial run per se. You know, it's, in many ways we look at this as a marriage or as a civil union before the marriage or whatever you look at relationships, whether it's municipalities or personal relationships, but you ease into things that, you know, you don't necessarily jump right into a marriage. You got to look at things. People do prenuptial agreements just to make sure that the financials. So I just, you know, not to, you know, but I'm just saying there's ways to go move forward. I think this is a positive direction. I like prenupt. I wasn't laughing at you. I'm laughing at you. No, no, I'm trying to make it just so it's common. You know, people understand. I look at this as a unified board with training wins. Yeah, you got it. I like that. And I wanted to just harken back to the TGIA process, which kind of stalled out recently. Well, a year and a half ago, maybe two years almost because there was a sort of a lack of trust because it was going to have one board appointing members of a commission because not all boards had equal power. And what I see this doing is, I think Mary Lou said getting the flow going. All of a sudden, if we had a unified board, then TGIA, at least the appointment part of TGA becomes completely new because all 10 of us have equal power at this table to talk about town like things. And I think that's just brilliant. Yep, yep. And Andy, can I bring up potential pitfalls? Yeah, absolutely. I'm sure you will. Go ahead. I just wasn't sure if that was agenda items or pitfalls. I thought that was probably not maybe the last agenda item here, but I guess we would, one of the things we'll have to wrestle with is questions of quorum. If we have this concept of you have to be from a specific part of the town or to be on the board representing that part of the town, there could be situations where you have three folks from the village and the at-large member who would be making a decision. So I'm not saying it's a problem. No, I got it. I'm not saying it's a problem. I just want to say that there could be perception of all kinds of things. I think you're making all the points, yeah. There's lots of bumps in here. I don't know exactly. We don't have the answers yet. That's just one thing to think about that we need to. What's another thing? The other thing is you mentioned one budget. I think there's three because before you unite, you're separating, okay? So if we do what's I think been proposed here, maybe I'm wrong. So maybe I'll ask the question. When you say town district, what does that mean? I mean towards, when I put it up there, that's ultimately what I would do where you'd go after maybe two years, you'd have a town district and I don't know if you'd say specifically a town outside the village district or the existing district that is the town. That would be a question that would have to be discussed and debated. Right, so those are just the concept that nobody has to give the details. Yeah, I'm not objecting to anything. I'm just trying to walk through some concerns that I have in that if you go to this situation where you have a so-called town outside the district and it's been said that there are some things that the current select board that does today that only affect individuals that are outside the village do you then, would it be appropriate and lawful to take the portions of the budget that are only applied outside the village and have those individuals only pay it? So there's another, you hear what I'm saying? I'm not just saying it, there are people. Because then at that point, if you have a town outside the village district voting on a town budget, I guess I'm gonna get all twisted up here because it gets. It's got a lot to, it's got a lot to do. Right, because what's considered today the town budget would be voted on by a different set of people. They're all town residents, of course. But my question, I guess, ultimately is do you end up then in some transition point here as you're working toward tax equity with a general town budget, which includes the police, for example, a town inside the village and a town outside the village budget, three separate budgets because of what's being, how people are represented and what services are provided to those individuals. Well, I would say. And then, sorry, and then, do you then have another quorum question of who gets to decide the town inside the village budget and the town outside the village budget? Is it everybody or only the representatives from that area? Well, I think we're getting a little, I don't think just for the immediate concept, the budgets would stay, the village budget as it is right now would stay as it is right now. Given the routine of changes, but you wouldn't be any changing, at least for the first year. And then the very questions you're wrestling are the questions that we would, but as this council would wrestle with. Well, I think that's something that some one of our experts needs to do. Tell us which way is the legal way to do it. Right. Absolutely. And I think when I proposed this about a month ago, my idea of how we would do it is that we would do it and I think when I proposed this about a month ago, my idea of having the five different representatives from the five different, from the two different districts was that because the village has things like a recreation district right now that it needs to manage, it could vote as those five people within the auspices of the council, as we do here, you know, you can warn a separate discussion for the trustees. You could warn a separate vote for whatever that subset is called. They could act on something before or after the meeting and the same thing with the outside the village representatives could warn and vote on things. But the 95% of what we're doing at the table every week, all 10 of us, would be the town's business. And I think that, again, if it can be legal, would be a way to maintain what we need to maintain until we bring everything together, right? This would be a temporary route. However long it needs to be temporary, right? However long it needs to be temporary, right? But the goal would be to get to that point. But we've eliminated meetings because you're meeting within the context of the council and the select board is meeting within the context of being the council. Yeah, whenever. So at the beginning of the meeting, like if this was enacted at the beginning of the meeting, we would do like we did here, we would open up the trustee meeting, we would open up the select board meeting, but then we would all be equally, have an equal vote on the decisions coming up before that council. And they would be spending and policy decisions for the village and they would be spending and policy decisions for the town. Yeah. I still have a mental block with that concept because in my opinion there is almost nothing if not nothing that the town votes on, that the village doesn't have something to do with. Even if it's the budget for the town cemetery, there might be someone who lives in the village who wants to serve on the town cemetery. I mean, I still struggle with the idea of a separate district for the town just voting on certain things for the town because the village still pays for all of that. So I don't want to get in the weeds now, but I'm just struggling with that. I don't see it. I understood. I'd problem to it. That's the crux of the issue, but we are in a better position to solve that doing this, taking this step first. Oh yeah. Change our perspective and give us a better understanding of how to solve this. Is it perfect? Absolutely. Yeah. Andy. To respond to that, maybe I wasn't clear on what I was saying is that if there are, I understand that right now, absolutely understand that the folks in the village pay the town tax rate. The question is that if there are things, would it be appropriate to take some of that load and shut it back outside the village? Is the question, if you've got representation that's specific to outside the village, they should have the opportunity to vote for things that they want to pay for that you don't. They should have the right to generate their own and add their own question items just like you do. So the village can vote to put up a new flag bowl anywhere they want. People outside the village should also be able to vote to put up a flag bowl anywhere they want and pay for it themselves and not ask you to pay for it. So that's why I'm saying you need to have the opportunity if you're going to have, if you're going to retain the right to, the village is going to retain the right to spend their own money, tax themselves and spend money the way they want to. Folks outside the village also have the right to, if you're going to do representation that way to vote to tax themselves and spend the money that they want to. And then you will also have a town-wide budget. That's why I'm saying there's three budgets. Can I respond to that? Yeah. So now I understand what you're saying and I get that. What that sounds like to me is a single town with two incorporated villages. And is that even a thing legally? What I would rather see is one budget. And we don't have a recreation district. We have a rec department and we don't have a library district. We have a library department. So we're identical in that respect to the town. So I would much rather make it less complicated and not have... I wouldn't want to take a temporary super complicated step and then the next step would be the simple one. I would rather do the work up front to get to the simple one. But in the meantime there are still departments and ordinances and things that apply only to outside the village which have been for so long forsaken and so isn't this an appropriate time to recognize those and to deal with them. We just ask the New Orleans that it's only for the village. Exactly. Now if we suddenly consolidate what happens? No one in the town because you're going to... Does the town going to follow that order? We already have. We have our own. But they would have to be... We would have to align all the ordinances. All the codes. How does that stop? All I was going to say I think that if we're going back to our last meeting and how we talked about one board, one community, I was inferring from that one budget, one voting community. If that's where we're moving towards then we just need to keep in mind that's what we've already talked about. And so in conversation with the experts, the lawyer, whatever it's going to be, I think it's how we use this as an intermediary, as an intermediate step to get us towards that point. And so if what the expert says is well the only way you can do this is by having a whole new municipality with a whole new budget, then that might be going against what we talked about so then maybe that's the best way to go. But I think we need the experts before we continue going down the rabbit hole. The idea is just this overall concept to say let's see if we can do this sooner so that we can have these more difficult conversations together as one board. After hearing from an expert about whether that's going to help us get towards our end goal versus further separating. That's right. Yeah, is there anyone from the public that would like to speak on this topic? I saw Jerry's hand. So Jerry? Whoa! Sorry, Jerry. No, it's those village chairs. They just sometimes tipple. So excited to what one I want to say. It really is an example precedent for what you want to do. Burlington has districts but the Burlington Council works on the city budget. So that's really what you're talking about. So what scares me about this is that it perpetuates the current situation and it flies in the face of what our goal was that we expressed last time of one town, one budget, one voting at large. How you sunset this is scary because if you say it can only last three years, well, it might take five. On the other hand, if it's going to take five, how do you provide for that in the way it sunsets? It doesn't go 50. That's the part that's interesting. Got you. Good point. Thank you. Anybody else? Other comments? So can I? Sorry, Iris. Iris Banks. Yes. So I think that's really a good idea. It's positive. And I think what's been said, or Andy said, I guess, that it five and five, but you are all agreeing on the larger goals. So I think it's a plus to be working together. And I think it might get you there sooner. Right. Appreciate it. Okay. Anybody else? Rich. It's very interesting. I'm happy to see it. But you shouldn't be deterred by the fact that you might have an even number of people on board. The last, not even really, negotiations I've been involved in involved solar panel installers and utilities. And they had to come in agreement. And there were an even number of people on the outside. And it wasn't supposed to be 11-9. Everyone had to agree on everything to move forward. Because it was about them. It was about the community and delivering electricity and meeting state statutes and all of that. So the fact that you have ten people, you both shouldn't be six to four. They should be ten zero. They should come to a decision. Ideal. Thank you. Thank you. Hearing no other, if any other comments, but I'd like to, I think that the point of this was achieved, which was to stimulate conversation and get us thinking about something in specific. So what we, I think Evan said this deserves, obviously deserves its own meeting to really get into the nuts and bolts and what it does immediately, what it would do down the road, how it would work, so forth and so on. So why don't we schedule a future meeting for further discussion on the table, discussion about this for now and in the meantime, and maybe we could do a little preliminary legal work on Andy's idea about a UMD and also the concept that I presented of having with the Charters allow this to happen, the existing Charters allow this to be amended this way. And then have someone from VLCT and maybe a cohort of lawyers come and sit with us and talk about this and it'll be expensive, but well worth it. Are you thinking about our next meeting on the 14th of June or do you mean sooner than that? You think sooner? I don't know. I don't know. I've insist. I'd like to give the audience an idea of when they might come back. It's exciting. You don't want to miss the next comment. I know, but it is going to be hard to get people lined up for meeting that's all, you know, I need to, I need to line people up. So I would venture to say it could be certainly the July meeting or something like that, but I need to get... We don't have a July meeting. Let's let it incubate and think about it and let's do the youth doodle and maybe we can get something going sooner than that. Does that sound good? It could be, but I want to make sure the VLCT reps could come and talk, you know. So you could do the preliminary homework to see about VLCT and the attorneys, what might work for them. Then we could do a doodle around some days. Great. Okay. Good question. Do we not want to ask our village and town attorneys separately to do any of the homework on this concept? Sounded like we all just talked about how... Yeah, no, that's what I'm saying. I think we should. And Andy had a concept about saying how about if we created a uni municipal district that served the two charges. Is that what you're saying Andy? Sorry, I thought I understood what you were saying. It's only looking at the uni municipal... No, no, no. The two concepts. And giving opinions about each and what's more effective and that sort of thing. Yeah, Andy. I think, like I said before, I think it's great. I hear what you're saying, but I also look into the audience here and looking at Lauren and I look at it from a financial standpoint and county standpoint is a nightmare, I think. It is the ultimate storm, you know, to try and... Andy was talking about a uni municipal district, whatever, but to separate and decide, you know, for tax purposes, I'm assuming when you were talking about that, the people in the village outside of... or the town outside the village having a separate tax, you know, for projects they're going to do outside of the village and they vote on that so it affects them different so that... I assume that's what you're talking about, the tax equity aspect of it would be accomplished in that way? It's a possible way to do it. That's not where I want to go. Okay, okay. All I'm saying is we, and the whole question is if you change how representation is, you have to have the same side of the villages outside the village. I think for right now, in terms of Lauren's workload, it would be the same. If you keep the two charters, then you've got two separate budgets, but I think it would streamline it in the sense that you might... the budget deliberation process of the boards could be streamlined and it could certainly be streamlined for staff because they don't have to go through it once. They wouldn't have to be servicing two different boards. Lauren, the budget preparation would, under this immediate model, would be the same because you've got two charters, they both need a different budget so nothing's changed, nothing's different. And by the way, the other sounding point is no one... I mean, it doesn't solve tax equity, so no one's taxes are going up or down. Everyone's taxes are going to stay the same. That's where I just misinterpreted. I'll tell you... In Andy's scenario, I just misinterpreted that as being when he gave the compare center the analogy of they want to put a flagpole up outside and I assume that the funds to pay for that will be set, the funds set aside for that because he said three budgets. So out of the budget for the town outside the village and in effect, in fact, the town within the village. We're not there yet. There's clearly going to be... scary things to have to deal with. The key overall concept, though, is let's see if we can get these together, get together to really work out a tough question. I agree. I think the residual highway tax, if we don't immediately get rid of it, could pay for quite a few flagpoles. Because we're already collecting separate taxes from outside the village residents. We have a topic about areas where experts should be hired and I think the other expert that I recommended besides a governance expert is somebody to help us with the finances. Somebody who can look at the taxation structure, the expenses and just say, okay, here are some places where you can adjust and here are some places where you are going to have to do something creative. Somebody who... I don't think anybody in this room has the expertise to work with us on the finances in such a way as to establish tax equity from the mathematical standpoint. So I would ask that once this... if we go to this first and it could be possible if we start the public works conversation that we bring that person in. But that's the other area that I feel like we don't have any expertise in the room that need a lot of help. And I just want to mention I was supposed to have handed this out at the beginning of the meeting. I am sorry, it's Evan's illustration of budget. Does this still work with this? Someone with this. So this was Evan when we came up, here. So, yeah. Something to think about. It's a concept that goes with this concept. If I might. I would like to refrain from what will be easier or harder or whatever right now. This concept was in a pocket on Friday. It has not been reviewed in any way, shape or form. For its efficiency, effectiveness, legal mobility it's a very excellent everyone who used in your it's a good concept. It's a great discussion. I have no idea today what its impact is to the staff that have to administer it. Haven't had six minutes to look at it. And back to consultants as part of the discussion with anybody like legal cities legal council or finance expert. That's what I would ask them to do. What does this do to us? And what does it mean? Because as we see with consolidations and things sometimes something gets lost in a translation or a word in a charter and it ends up doing something you didn't want it to do. So we want to make sure as we go through this we understand with our legal experts and people that it is in fact what we expected it to do not something else. That's all. So we took I met with George earlier today and Max. We always tend to try to get together to go over meetings that George was kind enough to give us a concept and then we tried to put it into your graphic and the real idea was that this is something you could think home. Think about as you notice on the back there's a bunch of pros for we to do cuts. Think about this and add those because again I want to make sure we are talking about the same things. We're really just talking about phase one we're talking about phase one and then what happens after that we'll see. Can we move on? Yep. So that was and so we're talking about the priorities discussion sorry. We only talked about one possibility about how to go forward. Yes. We did. Do you want to talk more? Yeah. And other possibilities to continue on as we are and run the alignment that Evan has proposed and as things become aligned I think there will be things that will be more easily consolidated that we can then shuffle budgets around appropriately and we could I mean it certainly is a valid alternative to continue on the way we are and I recognize that there are you know seems to have raved a lot of excitement here tonight as a way to get to potentially accelerating things but I don't want to discount the possibility of doing it more slowly. Yep. It just doesn't adjust the representation piece with this other concept at least. It could if it's depends on how it all shakes up. If I could jump in the reason the problem I'm having let's say right now we're working on public works consolidation but the village public works employees are part of the village association they work for the village of Essex Junction and town works for the town of Essex their trucks and equipment are owned by you know at a certain point you hit a brick wall in consolidation we hit the legal wall that says these are two separate entities and you haven't merged anything at the top so how far can you keep going with consolidation to be answering to a town employee I we haven't really thought about that or a town person is now going to be taking orders from a village supervisor we you know that's again whistling past the graveyard with some of this stuff right now and I think to keep throwing it to keep trying to consolidate things without addressing the more substantive issue of assets and who owns what is it I'm concerned about that so that's why I'm thinking if you allow the two charters to continue to exist then you get yourself some breathing you don't have to deal with those questions you can do some other things but I agree with you we do need it we probably need some I think what Andy is doing is part of a brainstorm one of which is in hypothesis testing you have an option to pursue and then you want to know to make sure whether there could be any change so it's okay any other comments on this before we move on okay so we're going to move on to the next one which is it's 6F printed agenda which is a discussion about the top three priorities to be accomplished by consolidation yep actually no it's identity I'm sorry isn't it identity areas where it's the most it's F go ahead and go for it so discussion about the top priorities to be accomplished by consolidating so again it was part of our homework what is the recommendation we had some different ideas and I think the I thought when Max and I talked about this and thinking about the meeting is we would do something somewhat similar to the words we would try to consolidate them although we don't define that word but I think in this form we're going into the traditional sense of consolidation consolidate the ideas into a single list and then there's overlap and try to wordsmith it into not to eliminate anyone's idea any of the priorities but also and I think Evan suggested we don't do three maybe we do ten we just basically just take all the things that we've said are our individual priorities and put them all into the into one big list and then where there's overlap and the potential for combining some of them do so I don't know if that would require a subcommittee I'm happy to do that or I'm happy to appoint another subcommittee any that's sort of the thought how we would approach this and again this would just be a tool it's not something that's you know profound it's not going to tell us exactly what to do but it's just background information that we would all have and if we say we're being respectful of each other we would all look at these things and say these are the thoughts that we all have and these are all the things that we want to see accomplished as we go forward so we would have that in our back pocket going forward I agree with that approach I think synthesizing all of the priorities from all of the different of selectmen and trustees is fine almost all of them have the same exact thing on them with one or two different it's not a big job I don't think it's a big job I think maybe if someone combined them all into one document and eliminated the duplicates and we looked at it one more time I think we'll be there could I suggest the Navy staff to do this could you or Greg I don't think it's a huge I don't think we're asking for substantive changes to just take the priorities and just put it all into one I mean pretty much none are is that good everybody everybody good good going along to 6D then which is determine whether to establish subcommittees with missions and responsibilities around governance and consolidation I think based on what our conversation just was but it's not time for that yet I think we need to hear from experts first but there might be some other ideas I don't want to quash if someone has another idea for some kind of another subcommittee that does something associated with all this anyone have any ideas we could have a subcommittee of subcommittees we have three meetings before that's just dealing with subcommittee work is this limited to governance and consolidation we already talked about the others well I expanded a little bit on it when I submitted my homework I truly think we need a committee on economic development I think on economic development but that's can be done independently can currently whatever I think these boards need to come together and talk very specifically about economic development but not within the I mean this you can't avoid talking about being consolidated you talked about that but it's a topic that desperately needs attention and I know we're very preoccupied but at some point in time we have to start talking about this that illustrates that there's a lot of other work that still has to get on while we're focusing a lot of energy on this not to be on a serious note and not to but briefing on what Andy said is we had talked about the idea of looking at all the existing committees and commissions that are in the town and the village right now the energy committee the tree committee the bikewalks committee maybe not time to do it right now but would it be fruitful eventually for all of us to look at all of these committees that are existing and meeting in throughout the town and the village doing all kinds of interesting important and worthwhile things for example the tree committee to be combined with the trails committee because it seems like there might be some natural overlap it's a conversation a conversation those two are combined recently so thoughts about that does that generally seem like a good idea to do that, Irene? I think that's a great idea because we already had an economic development commission we had a group in the past which is still hanging out on the org chart to set up a third one seems like we need to pull together what we've got and maybe give them more direction or maybe they need to talk to us more so we know what they're doing because I think they're working really hard but I don't want to have any extra committees I think Andy's got a good idea to have a good idea of committees I could recommend I noticed a lot of raised eyebrows just put this on the back order for now and we'll talk about it, develop it a little bit more I couldn't even name all the committees that we have going right now in the town of the village so it's about aligning and possibly consolidating maybe make a list of them and at an upcoming meeting we go we wouldn't do it we could get those committee members to talk to each other and the advantage is then if there were fewer of them because they were being combined we might be able to add staff to help with the workload I mean if we can get them done it would be staff presence staff presence I'm not giving Greg Morgan a staff presence no no no he's asking for that I think staff would like to be present at these to help guide and give them perspective and maybe because they're not in our organization every day what's going on in other committees that they could be aligning some of their projects so if we could consolidate that that would be an additive and then actually even when we do that we should talk about how we can have communication between the different committees as well because there's often overlap in synergy that we could identify and that's feedback that I've gotten from many of the chairs and committees that they'd like to see more you know working together so which item is there we are the very last one let me take a pause here anyone in the audience where we're slowly losing folks but anyone remaining in the audience comment about anything with this which I'm so far yes Diane in your communication effort the village is already sending out minutes to other committees as a planning commissioner get a variety of different minutes from Patty I don't know if that reciprocal is happening in the town perhaps you might encourage staff to send them out to various committee members so that that communication is facilitated to send minutes that vast gaggle of committees that we happen to have on the page for both the village and the town to send them out to the boards and then they get into the minutes of the meetings my encouraged attendance at various other places other than the nightly things that I do thank you very much I know that for example Jericho has subscriptions so I'm subscribed to their select word I'm subscribed to their energy committee but I can't do that so it would be lovely if we could do that have subscription based the village has subscription based stuff right to get the minutes from whatever committees I signed up to get them will you get money for that it's not working for the newspapers why should we start but one of the by the way one of the things that Steph is working on is looking at our website and our websites we have yes we get a lot of websites but also with its functionality and one of the components is how do we do notifications and things so that could be part of one of the things we would look at having people be able to sign up for certain types of minutes instead of them always having to come to the website to download a minute when you upload a minutes it would then send it out to you or give you a notification that a new set of minutes is available those types of things we're looking at there are many websites if there was some way to reduce that there's at least 5 maybe there's some savings there that might enable better functionality and again one of the things we're looking at there's at least 5 websites there are 5 hosting agreements we would have some issues with whether certainly not and then when we go eventually to do and taking money from people via the websites we could do things remotely we want to make sure we have one company taking our money going to finance instead of 5 companies taking any money and all that stuff and then we can unify our messages and we can unify what we're trying to get out and I appreciate Rob our IT director working on this along with staff with Darby and others, Greg and others because again we're looking at efficiency and effectiveness when we have RAC out there and we have there's a real opportunity it's the Wild West website stuff so then I guess we move on to our last item which is 6e on the agenda identify areas where experts should be hired to inform governance and consolidation I guess we kind of already talked a lot about that that was I think the reason we put we transposed this I agree with Andy also the other expert we should consult with is a library whenever it is we get there it's the departmental libraries so I've heard libraries, finance government structure tax equity taxation assets assets but you're not going to go out and get experts on all these things right now this is just I don't think that find some things as we move through this question for the boards we have a town attorney and we were assumed to have a full I'll be making a recommendation on a village attorney to take the place of Mr. Barron are you comfortable with them one or the other working on issues sometimes together sometimes you ask one and not the other are you okay with that a third person working on some of these questions that is not affiliated with town or village they may have expertise in it one of the firms that we interviewed but are not selecting were pretty good in this area but not so much in it they got beat out in general village town, municipal work one of the things that they seemed very good at was consult merger type stuff people get all the town attorney said this versus the village attorney said this versus a neutral third that just said I reviewed it this is my position take it for what you believe it's worth that sounds like a reasonable way to go we're looking for the right expert we don't want one just because there is a good idea expert expert okay do you want to open it up to the public for this last one any comments about expertise that we think we may need to hire in any final thoughts folks we're all good we all talked out so we will be the next step we've got a meeting in June we have to wrap we don't know when we're going to continue the discussion about the models of this but we'll try to get that on keep that going we want to keep the fire going on that so and be thinking about it send in your thoughts but remember keep in mind I wouldn't go too far until we get some legal opinions to even if these things are using a fowl of the law alright well I thought it was a great meeting again I thought our last meeting was a good one and if I gave offense to anybody with my strident comments my deepest apologies I did not need to but anyway very productive I thought good discussion very diverse lives do we need to approve the reading file no content so I will entertain a motion that we during the association trustee's meeting second need for the discussion all in favor aye second second thank you Mike well as favor see if I'm saying aye aye thank you to the members of the audience and thank you to those members of the board step forward to be on the meeting thank you