 Yeah, I'm seeing some marks now here. I'll kick the meeting off. He may be just a little bit delayed. So we'll call to order the meeting for Monday, January 17th. Martin Luther King Day. And I see there's something here on the agenda. I want to take a moment to remember Martin Luther King and his plight to, you know, bring justice to all people in this country. Mark, there's a recording in progress. Reach out and he said that Derek Farnes has the road blocked, so he's going to be a little bit late. Okay. And I did write something and I asked Charlotte to put that on the agenda for Martin Luther King. Something you'd like to read? Yeah. Perfect. Just leave. You got the floor then. Okay. So I just, just some notes of wanting to take a minute to make sure since we are here on M.N.K. Jr. Day to honor and celebrate his life and legacy and his contributions to America's civil rights movement. Dr. King envisioned a world where all people felt valued, respected, and supported regardless of their sex, age, race, ethnicity, national origin, abilities, sexual orientation, gender, identity, economic status, education, or political perspective. He recognized that inequities and inequalities existed within laws, policies, and practices. And he and other civil rights activists advocated for change through legislative process. Like that's just important for us to recognize that that's what we're here working to do as well. They show free quality in human rights for black Americans, the economically disadvantaged and for all victims of injustice through peaceful protests, grassroots organizing, and civil disobedience. Though his life was tragically cut short, Dr. King's accomplishments impact us to this day. His successes continue to guide civil rights movements in the present and serve as a model for how we can combat injustices and inequities. A quote that stood out to me, it reminds us, reminds me of our work on the select board and goes as follows, the ultimate measure of a person is not where they stand in moments of comfort and convenience, but where they stand at times of challenge and controversy. His words throughout his time here, I think, I wish they would resonate worldwide, I'm sure they do in some countries, but there's so much mistreatment of humans to humans throughout this world, entire world. It's a difficult challenge to change, but he certainly put in a lot of effort for it. There he is. That's okay, Mike. So I'll let you pick up from here that way. We haven't really got into the agenda or anything just about to approve the agenda, so. I just want to add, I think we're very elevated to what Ben just said. I think we should have in the minutes that we dedicate this meeting to everyone in this country and in the world who seek to provide and all racial people will live together. And I also love that Dr. King believed it should be done in a nonviolent way, which I think is really important to his family. Nope, that's where we're at. There hasn't been suggested any unless Bill's got something. You good, Bill? I'm upset. I guess we're good. I'll take a motion. Second. Move to the second. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Okay. Incent agenda items minutes from January 10th meeting. Move the consent agenda item. Okay. Second. Second. Move to the second. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. So public comment portion of the meeting. I'm not sure if anyone's here or on Zoom that would like an opportunity to speak. This is for anything that's not on the agenda. We will also make sure that the public has an opportunity to speak to any agenda items. Is there anyone from the public that wishes to speak during this time? And move on to select board items. Consideration of possible repeal of the town of Waterway ordinance regarding the Act 250 review does again at which, is this specific to the, it didn't go into the paper? Yep. Correct. Yeah. So as I wrote in my memo yesterday or Saturday, this didn't get published. Steve is here. He can talk more to it. We did contact our attorney and he said, given what the law says, you've got to publish it again. You've got to actually readop that or, you know, make the motion to repeal that ordinance again. So Steve, I think I've covered it, but you can take it from there if you want. Sure. So this is kind of an unfortunate circumstance. And I communicated with Dr. McGoogle and Dr. Trosti over the weekend. I wanted to make sure they were aware. This was on the agenda. We were called back in the middle of November. You considered the repeal of our ordinance regarding Act 250 review designation. The repeal would change water bearing to, from a one acre threshold for Act 250 jurisdiction on commercial projects to a 10 acre threshold because we have subdivision bylaws. And so unfortunately what happened is we submitted a notice that our attorney helped us draft that had to be published in a newspaper, within 14 days of your decision. Well, in the newspaper, which is correct. That's correct. Thank you. So we submitted it early in the week, the Thanksgiving week. To the Times, I got a proof on Wednesday from their rep that we work with all the time on each notices. I approved the proof and looked in the paper early the next week. It was to be published in the Saturday paper on the 26th. So it was within the 14 days. I checked early next week. I couldn't find it. I asked Pam in our office who does the interaction around billing with the Times targets. He could try to find out if it ran or not because, you know, we didn't really know what I hadn't been able to find it in the paper or something. So anyway, we went back and forth with the Times artists. They actually billed us for the publication of ads. So there was a lot of uncertainty. Ultimately, last month they told us it did not run in the paper. This rarely happens, but unfortunately it happened. So I talked to Bill about it last week. We reached contact our attorney. He said, well, the state statute requires that the notice be in the paper record within 14 days of your decision, even though we had posted it in five places and everything we, he said, it needs to come back to the slide board and get re-approved and go through the process again. So that's where we are this evening. We put it on the agenda and what I passed out is the notice that you would sign. It's different than the one that goes in the paper. That's more descriptive about the ordinance that's being repealed. But this is the document that would be the subject of emotion to repeal the ordinance. And so that's great. Just so everyone knows and everyone is clear, all of the provisions of the law apply. So the, you have to, if you want to repeal the ordinance, it's as if it hadn't been done. So you've got to, you've got to repeal it again. It's got to be posted. It's got to be published. And we have to wait for 60 days before it becomes, before it's effective in there and 44 days that is out there for people to petition to overturn. So it's as if you didn't do this. And we feel badly slipped through the cracks. And so that's the way it happened. Just to be clear on the, the 44 day that would be a petition for a town-wide vote under repeal of the ordinance. But the petition doesn't take action. It just is a petition for a town-wide vote. Right. And there were no petitions. The last time we did this. So I would hope there won't be enough one this time, but it's just unfortunate. I mean, I just I'm the, I'm the only person who's not done it. I'm just I'm not the only person who's not done it. But I'm not the only person who's not done it. I'm the only person who's not done it. I'm not the only one who's not done it. I'm not the only person who's not done it. So I could go back to the, again, and that's a good thing. Doesn't actually mean we need to re-enter the discussion. It's just, we re-bowl and move it forward again. Can I have a second? Sure. I'm kind of. It's unfortunate that, you know, that we are back at the table with this thing again, but yet I, I'm kind of happy we are. Because I wanted, last time I voted no. explain why. I think things were kind of moving along a little bit too fast. It's not that I object to the fact that we're doing this. I'm more concerned about the fact that the one acre threshold just moves into 10 acre threshold with no changes of what seem to be fairly easy hoops to jump through for the one acre threshold. With the 10 acre threshold now coming into play, I'm concerned about the fact that the town has not, and it's no fault of any applicant in the past that has been upset about this one acre threshold, wished it were 10, and all several people spend a lot of money like cars and perils and other people like that spend a lot of money to get through the Act 250 process because of the one acre threshold. But I don't know where this process is in the planning commissions. I, if they're planning on reviewing the criteria of the one acre threshold that will now become a 10 acre threshold to do anything in terms of tightening up any of the, you know, bringing in some more criteria to deal with the things that probably weren't prevalent under the one acre, but now could be under a 10 acre. And as I said before, I think the reason this kind of was forced to the table this time is because we've got another applicant that, you know, is in that gray area where probably his project's not going to be a huge impact. And I think the town has hasn't had the time to deal with this in the past, the way we probably would have liked to have. So now, you know, we're taking a little bit of a risk, moving this into the 10 acre without any review of that criteria. So, you know, I'll probably vote yes on it this time, but I just wanted something to be in the minutes to explain why I'm not really 100% comfortable with it. And from the, from Steve, your perspective, Steve, is the planning commission, is it on their radar or is it not even a nation at this time? Yeah, Chris is definitely on their radar. In fact, Duncan and John came and spoke with the planning commission about this issue. We had a couple of very good discussions. I think Mary Cohen attended one of your discussions, or I know it was Steve Carter actually who came. And the planning commission, you know, has raised some of the same concerns that you have, Chris. And I think we do now have draft, you know, fight development by-laws. I don't think it's been enacted, but they're working right now, for instance, on the stage one, which includes some revisions to the design review by-laws that will deal with some of the historic issues. So I think they're working on some of the building blocks for stronger by-laws dealing with things like historic resources. The conservation commission is working with our planning commission around natural resources in some areas, such as the wildlife corridor, for instance. So I think it's definitely on the planning commission's radar. There's no question about it. I think the bylaw amendments take time, and especially when you're doing a comprehensive rewrite, and they have not gotten to site plan review, conditional use review. Some of the other reviews that are applicable, certainly site plan review to every commercial project, conditional use review, is part of many commercial application reviews. So I think they're definitely working on it, and it probably will be a while, but I think this will give some incentive to be honest for them to dig in. And with the discussion and with that need, I think that'll help bring that to the table, if you will, and to get some bylaws in place in front of you with the draft. On behalf of them, I know probably any of the commissions that we have in this town, they're getting more curveballs thrown at them than probably anybody, as far as what they're being asked to do in short periods of time. It seems like every time they turn around, they're about to pass some interim bylaws, or their scope of work never seems to be a blessing. Yeah, and they are working on issues that will benefit for housing, for instance, providing more opportunities for affordable housing and higher density housing. So I think they do have some priorities in the military, so we'll keep working on it. All right, well, I appreciate you talking about it. Yeah, no problem. And just so you know, I'm not sure if the board is aware of it. Steve and Alyssa and I met after another meeting here and we discussed exactly the concern you're expressing, which was, what is the planning commission's feeling towards this decision and does it put them in a position that they don't want to be in? And from what I got, my opinion was, yes, there's support that this is going to potentially force the planning commission to take on, but from a concern from the number of properties and what ultimately the impact of these seem to be where there seem to be a comfort at least at the table from that meeting that this is an okay decision to move forward with and the planning commission was willing to take on this as an additional work towards the rezoning rewrite and just the ability to have any concerns over this 10 to one acre distinction between when actually triggered. It seemed like there was a comfort level there that we could move forward and select for and make this decision and not necessarily put the planning commission in a position where they felt totally overwhelmed, like you're actually saying that. Yeah, there was a mixed view on the behalf of the planning commission where some members thought this was premature. You know, other members speak premature Alyssa. We're fine with it. So I think they didn't make a recommendation about this to the select board because they didn't have consensus around it. So that to be honest, that's where they are. But I think they're fully aware of the issue and will certainly work on these kinds of biological address some of these criteria that are currently addressed. I just hate to see at some point down the road, somebody come back and say, you know, you guys didn't deal with this now look, now look over and you know, but anyway, we can move forward. Fortunately, you know, the quality of development and proposals in this community to be honest is generally very good. I think we're fortunate and we got a proposal for the reconstruction of the stone shed right now, which is like beyond my wildest dreams of what might have happened. So, you know, I think we're really lucky at this time. We're lucky that people really take care of a lot of the older start buildings to a large degree. So there's always risk in any with privately owned property. Sure. That's the nature of it. I think in the DRV is very good and right now very strong, diverse and I think they try hard to keep the quality of development. I still, I'm still very much in favor. So, but my question is more of a technical one. I hate to say it, Times Argus screwed up. People all do screw up, but I think, you know, we're a customer of theirs. We should become the cause of that, that advertisement. Well, we didn't charge us for the, Well, going to Steve, you said they're very well, Well, I said there's a bill, but we didn't pay. Okay. But when the next bill comes out, I don't, I think this should be a freebie. Oh, they're still going to provide the service. Well, they're going to provide the service, but you know what, there's, you know, if you're a business, you know, this has cost us money because we had to consult with attorneys and stuff like that. It's not going to freeze it. So, you know, my personal opinion, Even if we get a discount or something like that, I think it's well worth asking. Any further discussion from the board or take a motion? So many help on the wording, but is it just a move to repeal the town of Waterbury ordinance regarding activity? Yep. Reviews as you mentioned. That's enough. Okay. I second that. Okay. Moved in second. Any further discussion? All those in favor can say aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes. Great. So what I'd ask you to do is take one copy, just pass it around and sign it and then we'll be all set. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. Discussing town meeting. This is pertaining to sounds like on a state level they've allowed us to do what we did last year and have the option of doing town meeting via Australian ballot. Yeah, Carla can fill you in. I've got some comments, but she should call you with the dealer. All right. So, similar to last just like last year, the house has set its fastest bill if you allow for all fair and valid. And we'll be with an information meeting 10 days preceding first first and then we're going to sign that legislation late last week. So it's not mandatory, but it's a lot of times are being still in person. Or we could go to all training ballot. So just so you know, there's a couple of challenges. First, you know, we didn't have town meeting last year, it was all Australian ballot. We had high participation. We had reasonably good reasonably good participation on the zoom meeting. So I think it worked okay. But I think we missed the ability to have discussion about things and make changes. The challenge for me this year, and it really isn't. Well, the challenge is that town meeting is on March 1. So next Monday, which is the 24th, you're going to have to approve a warning on the 24th. We're not going to be finished with all of our budget stuff until probably the 31st. After tonight, we'll have a lot better handle on where we're going to be. I've got some questions and some comments that I'll make later after we renew the budget. But we have some, we haven't talked about it yet, but there's a potential for some rather large, large expenditures. And are we going to just put those in the budget? We haven't decided whether we're doing it or not. But I talked last week about an appropriation possibly for the ice center. We've got the $600,000 that we, of our money that we want to give what I've proposed to appropriate to the EFUD. There's a few other things. So I just want you to understand that putting, it's pro and con, right? So if we have the meeting by Australian ballot, a lot of people are going to be able vote on those things. And that's probably a better thing than a couple of hundred people voting from the floor at our meeting on appropriations that are very large. It's just how much are they going to know about what we're proposing? So I don't really have a recommendation of just letting you know that I feel a little bit of angst about either one. And you know, who knows what the situation is going to be in March and how many people would be willing to come to a meeting in person, even if you haven't. So as I said, I don't have a recommendation, but it's just kind of those are things that you have to decide. You don't have to decide tonight. You will have to decide by Monday next week because the warning is going to help to say whether it's in person meeting or by Australian ballot. Right. But then as soon after the 24th is possible, I need to get the ballot printer. Oh, I understand. So you have to. It's, you know, but that's going to be a challenge anyway, because even if they decided tonight that they're going to have the meeting by Australian ballot, they're not going to have a warning tonight. And that's going to have to wait for next week. And I can check on timing. We technically don't have to start voting until February night, 20 days before. So I can check on timing with the printer. But the warning, even if the printer says, you know, well, you can wait until the first week of February. The warning has to be done by the 28th of January because it's only 28 days to February. And it's, it's a 30 day warning period. So we're in the biggest, the most challenging crunch possible because of the calendar this year. Because counting is my first. How far, what was the time for the information on leaving last year? 10 days. We had it on the Tuesday preceding. So Carla, you have all seven days. You have up to 10 days. We chose to do it on the Tuesday. You recall the voter participation last year versus typical town meeting. Typical town meetings are 7800. And I think we were at that. I mean, a little bit more because you really got the word out. Right. But the typical, yeah, I'm sorry. The typical town meeting though, it's 7800 people who vote by Australian ballot. We don't have 7 or 800 people meeting and discussing things from the floor. That's usually 150, maybe 200 people or something like that. You know, they kind of come and go. But at the peak time, we might have a couple hundred people in there. Is there any other votes? School votes or anything like that? There's going to be the school budget vote. Okay. So. How are we going to unify school districts? There's also going to be a ballot that relates to the Center of Vermont Career Center. They want to become their own district. And Harwood is one of the 16 districts that send kids to Spalding for the tech center. So are you going to have to set up voting booths for both of those? No, they'll just, voters will get all three ballots. Oh, so we will. Well, if we have an in-person town meeting, you don't have to set up voting booths. No, I meant if you could do all of that Australian ballot by Australian ballot. The districts will provide the school ballots. And they'll probably, there's a bill attending the governor's signature that will, we won't have to convene all the school ballots. So they'll be run through the fabulous Black Lives Matter for both Harwood Union and the Center of Vermont Career Center. So last year on town meeting day itself, you had to set up ballot boxes at the school. So, yeah, we still have to have in-person voting on town meeting day from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., which we'll do at the school. My major concern with an in-person meeting is that we get half the time for voting and town meeting gets the other half, so we're going to get jams in there. With Australian ballot, we just take the sprout and plant jams and it'll be pretty safe about how we think our purpose is. Okay, and it's for safety and health reasons, having it all Australian ballot is the best. And for participation on the issues, it's best. It's just the question of how much information do the voters have when they go and there's no ability to discuss. We didn't have a good turnout, though, at the information. The ability to discuss just comes. Ten days early, but there's ability to discuss. But not change. Well, maybe after tonight we'll get a better feel of whether there's difficult issues to deal with or if it's the budget is pretty cut and dry. Yeah, you know, that may help us decide obviously I'm dying to get back to the old traditional town meeting because I'm sick of these things and want to do away with them. And I'm ready to take the risk, but I know a lot of the people out there, you know, scared to death. Bill, can you give an example of what the town voters would see on a ballot when it pertains to how the E5 decision would read? Yeah, so there's two options, whether we have an Australian ballot meeting or we have a traditional in-person meeting. One option is you just put the money in the budget and it's just part of the, you know, $2 million general fund budget. And if it passes just like, you know, in the budget, there's a line item for Memorial Day, there's a line item for the senior citizen center. So you can just put it in the budget and there'd be a revenue and there'd be an expense and you'd have explained about taxes. Or if you wanted to, you could have an article, a special article that said shall the voters appropriate $600,000 of ARPA money to E5 for the purpose of, you know, improving their, its water and its water and or sewer system. This appropriation is offset by ARPA funds and will have no impact on taxes. That's how in the old days I can find new examples when we had bond votes, where you'd have a bond vote and it would say shall the town bond for $3 million to build XYZ. And such appropriation will be, in effect, netted out by proceeds of, you know, a grant or what have you. So there's a way to make it clear that it won't cost anything, or you can just put it in the budget. Those are the two alternatives. I'm much more in favor of some sort of a special article. Just, I think if you put it in the budget, a lot of people don't go through the budget to be quite honest. You know, you know, some people just will always, if it's an Australian ballot, always vote no for a budget because they're conservative. So some people don't go through the budget. Like, why the heck do I spend seven days a week for two months? You know, we go through the budget and I think they, they have enough trust in the select board and some people who know, but I think we kind of ferret out what the issues are. I think if there was a real question, I think when we're interviewed by the press and stuff like that, that stuff would come out. But I do think people, you know, I think like you get the school budget, you just hear about these big ticket items and you usually vote yay or nay. They don't go through the whole school budget. I'm just a realist. I understand. And there's risks both ways. Exactly. I think we've had a pretty good track record here. And I think the public does trust that the board and I know what we're doing. So putting in the budget, just as a line item in the budget, I think more than likely, these things can pass. But if the board feels happier to, you know, call it out as a special article and call attention to it, you know, that's your prerogative. But anyway, those are the two options. When in your mind, the board, when does this decision, the format decision, the domain and when does the decision about how we do the actual. Yeah, so all of these decisions really are going to have to be no later than Monday next week. Once you want to have a special meeting, you can call a meeting on Thursday the 27th or whatever the day is and sign our warning that night. But, you know, I'm hopeful that we can do it next Monday. So what will happen is Carla and I will we'll learn more tonight how you're feeling about things. But so if you're thinking, if you're all thinking that we're going to do an Australian ballot meeting as opposed to an in person meeting, if you know that now, letting us know that now will help us because Carla and I, I think, are going to probably have to write up two warnings. And if you if you if you don't know yet whether it's going to be an in person meeting, an Australian ballot meeting, we might have to do two versions of two warnings. So I think next week, one of the things if it's going to be an Australian ballot meeting, then we can bring a warning in that has everything in the budget and just the regular special articles that we always have there worth about $57,000 to special articles and everything else would be in the budget or I would have a budget with those things not in it and additional special articles. So we'll have to bring two versions of a warning to you. But as I said, even though I prefer an in person meeting, I understand there's a pros and cons to it. If you know now as a board that we're going to meet remotely, you know, the week before the meeting, and then just have us try about it. If that's what you want now, let us know that. And it makes it, you know, stuff less bones. The bill doesn't allow for any sort of an album of both, right? No. In between. You can't do a hybrid time. No hybrids. No. You can't have a hybrid because you're not able to and not able to verify who's voting by voice and everything else. So if you had a hybrid, you'd have the people have to be voting and then people on the remote wouldn't be able to vote. So it's either one or the other. It's either in person and you have to be there to vote or it's all Australian ballot and you get to show up with a better information. Is the information meeting strictly remote? Yeah, I don't know if the information meeting could be remote and hybrid. We'll have to look into that. So if we choose an in person meeting, anyone who's voting, whether they stay for the meeting or not has to go in person to vote. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they can always, for the Australian, there is going to be Australian ballot items anyway. All of the elections, the officials, the school budgets, there will be Australian ballot items and anybody can request an absentee ballot and have one mail, right? So the only thing that you miss if you have an in person meeting and you don't want to go in person, you miss voting on the budget for the time. The budget has to do with it. Oh, yeah, of course. It's too bad we couldn't gauge the public on their desire and where the other might fear is that this type of thing continues to move towards Australian ballot for, you know, it's going to put a stake in the heart of traditional town meetings. You know, just one more, one more bit of small town Vermont disappearing. It's unfortunate. But the decision on a state level is for a single year, correct? Yeah, it's just like last year, this normally you have to vote at an open town meeting to go to Australian ballot voting and then that stays in place until you then put it on Australian ballot. So you want to go back to, you know, an open town meeting. But because of COVID, the legislature passed this same legislation last year and this year, which will allow you to do it on your own motion. But next year, hopefully, Chris, this legislation won't be in place. And we'll have you out of these. Carla, is there, in your opinion, is it going to be excessively harder to do an in-house, a traditional meeting? No, that's what we've done all along. It's just the spacing out of, you know, providing enough space for both the voting. Yeah, and I haven't talked with my BCA because the way we've been handling elections during COVID is to spread out the whole gem and block off each voting booth as four spots for like these. And we've been walking off at least two, it's not three, it's only one person per booth. And if I do that, that's how meaning it just will be a really slow process to get voters through. Yeah, I'd hate to go through that all and end up having just a handful of people attended the meeting in person meeting unless. I love, I think that's kind of what Chris says. I think that's one of the beauties of Waterbury that we do have an in-person meeting. But I'm also scared as hell, you know, we don't know where COVID's going, you know, it's gotten worse. We don't know if it's going to get a little better by town meeting day. And I just don't know a comfort level. I'm curious, I thought Chris had kind of an interesting thing. If there was some way to kind of gauge about, we don't really have the time. Well, like a call in on a DVD or something like that. You don't want people to listen to that. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think it's going to be your decision. You just got to make sure. That's the point of us sitting here is that there's five of us and voted in to make these decisions. And I think the state recognizes that this option should be available because of specifically the safety concern. Right. So I think if the board, if everyone wants, either everyone can make a decision or I mean, I think I know where I sit. I think that I didn't hear any real constituent complaints about what we did last year in terms of safety. I just don't think the risk first reward. I mean, I agree with you Chris. I look forward to us returning to the auditorium and having a meeting day. But this is extending circumstances that I just don't think the risk makes sense. And I'm glad to hear we have at least as not more voter turnout. I think that was what I wanted to know before I kind of made a decision on where I expand on it. But if we think that we're getting this as much, if not more participation and not putting anybody at risk for putting everyone in an auditorium, for me that makes sense. My opinion is just going, having it as accessible to as many voters as possible. And it seems like showing about is what's going to do that this year in particular. So that that would be my vote or choice for most access. I'm just too worried about people's apprehension about showing up. As much as I would show up, I don't feel a problem. I feel everyone should be masked and stuff like that and go into a meeting. I think spacing could work. But I think there's a lot of people. We have a lot of older people in our community who are just going to have apprehensions. And I don't know where the pandemic is going between now and the beginning of March. And I think we just need to err on the side of caution. Yeah, I think the vast majority of the people that do show up at the traditional families are of the older generation. It is, it's not a young person. You three have already kind of made the decision, I think. So I think we're there. And Australia with with the information of me. And I think, you know, I think that we get a decision this evening, we'll just help the time of this move on every motion that needs to happen after that decision. I don't think, is there any reason to delay that decision? You know, you don't have to make a motion tonight because I think that's the consensus. Everybody's in agreement will prepare the warning that way and it will be worn. But I think everybody should know if you want to make a motion, you can. But you can't warn anything tonight because we don't have a warning. So just one more thing. The other unfortunate part is, will this be your last time? Well, it'll be the last time meeting that I'm a municipal manager. To have a traditional meeting and have you there and have people, you know, show their appreciation. Appreciation, I don't believe. Well, I think that, you know, for me, it's it's unfortunate. Yeah, well, it's it's unfortunate from my perspective to, you know, I missed it last year. And then because of the circumstances, it's it's much more even better this year. But I think it's the right thing to do. Yeah, we'll make that. So thank you. So no motion, but it sounds like there's consensus on. So I'm moving on. Manager's items. Okay, so Rachel Moons is here. She's the library director. She's right there. Christine Wolfe was here. So anyway, I sent out the library, the budget that the library directors, the library commissioners work with Rachel and me with. And I'm just going to let Rachel and Christine take it from here. And if there's help they need, I think it's really straightforward. Yeah, I'm happy to get started with this. It is pretty straightforward. I think everybody's hopefully had a chance to read the document that that Bill circulated. I think he laid it out really, really well. We are at this year in 2020, we're looking to request the tax appropriation of four hundred and five thousand five hundred and seventy five dollars to submit to the voters. This is an increase our total for post spending for twenty twenty two would be five hundred forty thousand eight and forty five dollars that would include the appropriations in the library trust fund as well as the funds we've received in the tax payers that total spending come out would be six point four percent of the twenty twenty one budget. Why are we looking for a little bit more funding? It's a couple of large lines that are needing to increase in the coming year. And it really is a necessity. We need to increase funding for our two MBOF line, which is the line that covers the operating expenses and building maintenance. Some people know that the library is I think it is fifty three percent of the town building complex here. So that's a fairly significant piece of property that needs to be maintained. And as Bill outlines here, there were some significant expenses when it came to building maintenance in the past year that we now need to sort of be planning for for the future as we move forward to sort of make up for the expenses that were extended in the past year. The other significant increase should be around personnel expenses. We've had a lot of turnover at the library as folks know including myself and I think we had three other fires in the past year. That means that some of those were nick resignations and then some of those firings we've had to to increase the funds that are being spent on those salaries a little bit to get people to get those salaries up to kind of market standard for libraries in the vicinity. And then for the coming year, we also have to plan for we'll see kind of an interesting line for part kind of fate, which has increased the fair amount and that covers what we call some substitutes who cover for librarians when they're out and I don't know how much time all of you spend in the library, but you may know that we have a staff member who's pregnant who's going to be out on the tour maybe week for a big chunk of the coming year. So we need to prepare for for her absence. So those are the only really major increases we're requesting. You can ask me about any of the other lines that you see anything that you wonder about, but I really did try to maintain fairly steady rates and on those lines, because we really are kind of catching up, you could say, for what the past couple of years look like. And in fact, our year-end fund balance in the library is about $16,000. So that's nice to be able to kind of take a little bit of the burden off of the taxpayer for the coming year. And that's kind of a long and short of it. If anybody has specific questions, I'd be happy to answer them in just in here as well. What are staff numbers this year compared to last year? I think two factor in all the part-time people and such. That's where one of our increases is and that's mostly due to some salary increases. Staff numbers are the same number of people. Yeah, we aren't looking to increase staffing at all this time or even increase hours of staffing. I am very much hoping that this year the library will be open every week, just like normal at four hours and so far it's looking good for that. I did put that column just to the right of the 2022 proposed budget in where it says no leave. I was just trying to show you that there's really just kind of an offset that if there wasn't somebody that was going to be on long-term leave or family leave, that line item instead of 227, 860 would be 233, 285, but the $10,000 line would only be 48 hundred. So it's not quite an exact wash, but I just wanted to let you know that it's not a big savings and the fact that the part-time pay is up a lot isn't going to hurt us. The part-time pay last year was, you can see that same thing, it was twice as much almost as what was budgeted, but it was up less than what the regular pay was down, the regular pay was down because we had so much turnover, so they kind of balance each other out. I'm feeling more confident now about salaries that are matching. We're getting there, yes, I think that's with the turnover and that also means we've hired folks who have more of a structural library background, which is great to see. So we really kind of hope that the professionalism of our full-time librarians is wonderful. And hopefully we'll help us with that, Jim. I really hope so. I think so. I feel really good about the team we have now. People seem to be very happy there. It's just a great environment. I think we're looking good for this coming year. So overall, the budget increases. I got some scribble notes here. It looks like somewhere around plus $40,000 with a $30,000 draw from the earth trust. Well, the budget last year was $580,000 and it's $548,000, so that's about $32,000 increase. And as Rachel said, it's about a 6% increase on the spending side. And they, you know, I did ask the commissioners to try to up the transfer from the trust a little bit. So it went from $14,255,000 in 2020 to $26,365, and $21,000 involved $30,000 this year. And, you know, it's a 10.7% tax increase. And there's no way of getting around that. But I did put next to that number there that in 2020, the last year that we budgeted prior to COVID, that the tax ask at that time was $484,430. So essentially, you know, $1,100, $1,200 less than it is now. So the tax rate went down in 2021 because we had so little spending that happened in 2020. And we had a big beginning fund balance. We had almost a $41,000 fund balance because the spending just didn't happen in 2020. And we basically brought all that fund balance forward and was able to drop the taxes significantly. So it's, I look at it as we're kind of back to where we were. If you say, you know, if a tax request in a period from 2020 to 2022 went up $1,200, I'm up $485,000. I mean, the $520,000 budget would be pretty happy about that. So I think it makes sense. So my question, I guess, is to take additional funding off of the portfolio to their trust fund. Yes, from their fund to water this increase down a little bit. How does that, is that anticipated to do the same thing next year to keep that in place? Or because if it's a one time, you know, intrusion of money now next year, it'll have to be made up some other way. Well, the library trust funds, I didn't bring the balance sheet, but it's, it's at about $650,000 close to that. So, you know, $600,000, 10% would be $60,000 and $30,000 is about a 5%. So they're taking about 5% of the trust fund and sharing it with the taxpayers. That's the same percentage that we're doing with the tax stabilization fund. So, you know, they could take more. I mean, if you say, well, we're only going to give you, you know, $480,000 of tax money or, you know, split the difference between last year and, you know, give them $460,000, then the commissioners have to make a decision whether they're going to cut the budget or increase the appropriation from the, from the, from the trust fund. The concern that you have with that is that the trust has been growing. We haven't had a correction in the stock market in a long time now. And if you take a big amount out now and then it corrects, then, you know, you're going to, you're going to, you know, drop down. Now, they have, I worked with the commissioners and they did rebalance the fund. They've got, I don't know, about $140,000, $150,000 of that, of that 650 or whatever it is in cash right now. So, the whole, the whole trust fund is not at risk. They've, you know, they've taken some of that cream off the top, so to speak. From my perspective, looking at it, Chris, and I know it all adds up and we haven't looked at everything together right now, but we'll get to it. The tax increase right now, if everything that I've gotten would be, you know, less than, less than 2, less than 3% across the board. And there's some, there's some discussion I want to have with you without, with other revenues. So for me, when I put this budget together last month, I kind of zeroed in on the $30,000 number to try to keep the 2020 tax ask about the same as it is going to be in 2022. So it's about $1100 or $1,200 more in 2022 asking the taxpayers than 2020. And to me, given everything that I see, universally, it it makes sense. But you're the board. Christine is here. She hasn't said anything yet, but that's, that's kind of, I mean, our job is to ask questions. So I'm asking questions. And I know that that's, you know, that one comment about, you know, what happens next year, there's other things at play. I'm smart enough to know that. I know, smart enough to know that they may not spend as much money next year. They may, they may have additional revenues next year, which would build towards, you know, satisfying this current ask with something other than, well, appropriations from their, from their fund. I'm not sure how much more revenue they're going to generate. The library, if you look at the revenue line, you know, there's a $285,000 tax repress, the $30,000 trust fund and everything else is less than $5,000. And, you know, the grants that are available to the library are in that, in that lower range there. So there's not really going to be any chance for any additional revenues. Can I stop you? Yeah, sure. Chris, was your question on the $30,000 line on the trust fund a thought that it should be a higher lower? No, that wasn't my, my question is you're satisfying this increase in the budget this year with money from that fund. Okay. Which previous year was $26,400 this year, $3,000. So the difference there is $37,000. It's not, it's not like it didn't exist in the previous year. The difference between the two years and currently if I'm wrong, it's about $3,700. So it's not that that didn't exist in the previous year. I just want to make sure of that. It's, it's not that you went for that $30,000 increase was found within the trust fund. The trust fund already was contributing to the budget in 2021 at a rate of $26,365. This year proposed $30,000 question marks seem to be partially, can the fund afford $30,000? It sounds like it can. It sounds like it follows the rule of law somewhere. What we do for tax utilization. But your point, current year taxes, is it a increase in the raising of taxes from $38,000 to $485,000. Right. I mean, I remember last year, yeah, I remember what happened last year and they ended up taking additional money from in their, in their fund to, because we weren't, I remember correctly, we weren't able to give them what they asked for last year. Well, we went, we went from $14,255,000 to $26,000. So almost double. But that was done because we wanted to try to knock the tax rate down last year. We didn't know where we were going to be. And we were trying to have that tax rate be lowered last year. The trust money is the public's money. It needs to be used for the benefit of the library. And I think, you know, taking out 5% or something like that. Is it, I don't have it. Christine, am I right? Is the trust fund $600,000 or is it less than that? I can't remember. It would take me a minute to pull up the exact current number, but it's, it's, believe it was around five, close to six, but not quite six last time I looked. I can get it. So I'm not, maybe I misunderstood what you were trying to ask, Chris. So are you just asking questions or do you have a recommendation to change some? No, because I think last year, like, like I just soon see this year that, you know, we've gotten a budget proposal, you know, given to us and we'll have to put it into the mix of the rest of it and figure out how it's all going to sugar out. But I'm just trying to get an understanding that it, I guess I misunderstood the, I thought that the $30,000 was an additional take from that fund to try to satisfy, help satisfy the increase. It's, it's a small increase. Any time of the morning, Stanley Bell? Yeah. Can we go a little quick? Yeah. Yeah. One other curveball, I guess I'll ask or talk about is I, at the last meeting, I believe I did mention something about increasing the maintenance fund for this, for this building and other buildings, but, you know, specifically, we had a fund here, we've eaten that up. What can we do about putting a lump in there that we can build on? I mentioned $50,000. That come into your grand scheme, as you were looking to sell it. Yeah. So I can pass this out. Bill, the MDO, that's supposed to be representative of only annual maintenance or is there a CIP component to that? No, there's no CIP. Yeah. So the Morgan Stanley portfolio is at the end of December, almost $640,000, $637,791. So this MDOF, which is fund 76, that's, this is where we pay for the operation and maintenance of this building. And the two main revenue sources are the library and the general fund. You can see $169,000 from the general fund and $194,000 from the library fund. And, you know, that those two revenues together end up paying for the maintenance of this building and the debt service on this building. And if you can see, Chris, that new equipment line item on the expenses, where it was $20,000 last year, and we didn't spend anything. But if you look above that, a couple of lines, you see building maintenance. We budgeted $37,000, but we spent $50,000. So putting the $20,000 in the new equipment fund in this particular fund, if everything had worked out all right last year, we would start to build a fund balance in this fund to be able to be used for the building. So we started 2021 with a negative fund balance of $16,000, $16,600. And I was hoping that we would end 2021 at $369 in the black and then keep doing that. And over a period of three or four years, it'd be up to $50,000 or so. You're always going to have something that happens. But unfortunately, that first year that we tried to put that money aside, we spent more in the heating plant of this building. And knock on wood or whatever this is. I think for right now, we've got all these systems fixed. Whether they'll break tomorrow or not, I don't know. So I am trying to get money into this month, Chris, but I think putting it all in there all at once, it's got to come from tax money to do that. And if you don't want to have the taxes grow up too much all at once, you have to do it incrementally. Now, there's other things that we'll talk about. We've got, as I told you, at the first meeting in January, I alluded to a little bit last week, there's some means by which we might infuse some cash into these budgets. But I want to talk about that later because these are operating budgets and departmental budgets that we have to get through. But with the ARPA money that's available, we have some options to us that I think can be considered, but it's not time to talk about that. So just so you know, I mean, you probably saw it, but I signed a $5,000 bill for me. Yeah, and it's in that $50,000. Must have just occurred, you know, probably just occurred a couple of weeks ago. So there's $5,000. No, no, no. That bill is already in that $50,281. Oh, yes. This is from last year. I've already adjusted the budget to take care of it. My bad. That's a reasonable point. I'm just telling you that. Well, yeah, I guess my point was it's, you know, there's still issues that are coming up there that are eating at, you know, eating on our pocketbook. So that went in the building maintenance. So my fear is, you know, I remember back when the whole building process took place and we talked about a 20-year bond versus a 30-year bond. And my concern was that you know, you made the comment that people 30 years from now should be helped pay for this bill. And I made the comment that yes, they will be in fact having to replace windows, having to replace heat system, having to replace the roof, having to replace the area. So they're going to have their share of that, that we, you know, for the most part don't have right now. So that's why I think my, from my perspective, why I wanted to shorten the bond to 20 years versus 30 years is to try to, you know, look ahead to save those people better to be dealing with this building that money anyway now because they're going to have other things on their hands to deal with probably new parking lot paving and many other things. So my concern to want to build on this sooner than later is because how long we've been here now? It's all your years, six years, five years. Yeah, six, no. It's clock sticking out now. We're keeping up with this. I mean, there seems to be going to go wrong, but we, we spend money. We, we maintain the building. We're not like just leaving it go to pot. I mean, I'm right now, my house that I'm living in is 25, 26 years old and I'm having to literally read over again. And, you know, so it's just a fact. And I guess I'm just trying to prepare. I understand. Yeah. So I guess what I'm asking, if you want to put, I've got that line item that's got zero in there as a, you know, hoping that we're going to spend zero. So if you want more than that right now, then the taxes for the housing will have to go up. That conversation will come when we get towards the end of this. I think I have a question. This is maybe my naivete. You mentioned the part time, which are they fully vested in terms of do they get health insurance today? Good. Paying for the retirement system, if that are. I don't think so. Well, anybody who works 24 hours a week or more on a permanent basis, they're part of the retirement system. Okay. If you work 30 hours a week or more, you're eligible for health insurance. Now, most of the library staff don't take health insurance. We have at least three, maybe four eligible and only one takes it. So if everybody had to change your part, you know, the budget could go up $100,000 like that. So, but if you're scheduled to work 22 hours a week, then what you get is your hourly wage and you get sick time and you get vacation. Yep. Thanks. Other questions from the board? I have one question. I guess, you know, we look at, we're able to grow a rec program through, you know, bringing in more programs, but they also increase revenues. Is there anything from a library standpoint in your opinion that obviously COVID creates an additional difficulty surrounding programming? But is there a revenue opportunity there? Right now, actually, with the Vermont Children's Trust Foundation grant, so that's allowing us to bring in some higher ticket program presenters and we'll be able to do that. Generally, what's available to us when it comes to programming grant money is it brings in a, it can bring in a short term, you know, presenter and do a few of those series of programs. So last year, we had one from the library association that allows us to bring in the public grant. We ended this for a fantastic, very powerful program and also allows us to have a panel discussion about refugees in the area. So we are always looking for options like that, but they tend to be one time single purpose funding. So they're great for adding to what we already have for a basic programming, but they are, you know, we have to keep going back and applying again and getting more funding and targeting what we're looking for in a given year. So that's definitely always on my radar. We're looking forward to this in a research program. But you don't charge users? Yeah, of course, we're surrounding like, you know, we've been able to find a nice balance of growing our rec program through fees that don't increase cost, but I didn't know if like, I don't know, obviously the library, you want to make sure that the town has it's accessible through as much of it as possible. What are their ways to increase any kind of, there's more of a discussion work around revenues and is there a way to increase revenues? I mean, obviously, like from years, there's not a lot of revenue other than people from other towns or other, you know, rather revenue opportunities that should be considered. I don't know if the library will allow people to know whether that's the answer or not. Well, traditionally some libraries charge fines for already books and that's a revenue stream, but we actually chose to not do that a few years back and in efforts to be more equitable and make the materials more accessible to people without without that barrier. So, but it's a good question and something that you can certainly think about. Going along with Mark's kind of question, I know some groups, some libraries have like a fringe of, you know, water, they have a fringe of a waterbed library and you could then run some sort of a fundraiser kind of dinner auction or something. I know right now it's very difficult time to do those things because of COVID, but maybe looking at, let's hope that by this year, yeah, this year we're out of COVID and things are a little normal, you know, maybe something like that could be something that a lot of us should. We have a very active trans group. They are just wrapping up their anger. You know, last year they did very well there. They fund primarily things like a lot of our digital resources. We've been chatting a little bit about some of those articles. Yeah, so again, attendees and targeted items. It's fantastic though because it does allow us to experiment a little bit and try some new resources, see how the public takes to them and decide if this is something that's worth building into the budget going forward or not. But they're hoping to host a larger fundraising event this late spring, early summer, depending on how things are going and if they can have an in-person event. So Mike, the other challenge, and if you look at the revenue at the top of the page where it says revenue about a little more than halfway down, it says donations. You see $11,327, almost $328 of donations were made. But if you look down at the bottom of the expense side, you'll see purchased by donations, which is the same number. And when people donate to the library, they're generally donating to get something more, not just to, you know, to reduce the taxes. You make a donation to see something more happen. So what we do, and you don't see it here, but probably in 2021, probably the library director, and that would be Almey and then now Rachel, of that $11,327. So it was probably eight or $9,000 that was actually spent to buy something in 2021. And at the end of the year, it was still about $3,000 left. And that $3,000 was transferred out into fund 14, which is a second reserve fund that the library has. So I think, you know, challenging or talking with the commissioners about how that fund 14, which we don't have here, the trust fund is fund 16, that $600,000 plus and that funds that fine. But they do have another reserve fund, if you will, that is filled mostly with donations. And maybe some of that money could be spent at some point to help offset some things here. I've always thought it was best to show all the spending, however, in the operating budget, because the public really should know that it takes this much money to run that good library. If you're doing spending over here off on the side and people never see it, then they think that they're getting what they're getting for too low of a price. So if that fund 14 money is going to be spent, what I would suggest happens is that there'd be another transfer into the operating fund, and then that additional spending would get shown. But they do have the friends. They did a great job of fundraising when this building was being built. They had extra money left over. They used that to do a number of things in the library that wasn't paid for by tax payers, and they still have some of that money left. So any other questions for Rachel? I would ask you though, if you could make a motion to say that the tax lending for the library will be no greater than $485,557, but that's, if you're going to make it lower, if you don't want those tax, if you don't want that tax levy of $485,557,575, the commissioners either have to cut the budget or come up with some more money somehow. So I'd like that. Is there a specific challenge because the library has a separate commission versus the state law with regard to libraries says that public libraries, even if they're municipal, are operated by the elected commissions. They are the trustees of the library. The library staff is the only staff in the whole town that I don't get to a point. So the commissioners hired Rachel, the town manager doesn't have any control over any of the library staff. The commissioners are the trustees of the library trust fund. They make decisions about how that's invested and how much they want used to contribute to the library. The law says that the select board can tell the library commissioners how much taxes they can have to use for the library. Once you make that appropriation, I mean, the public can change it if you had open time meeting, they could make the motion to reduce the tax level. If you have an Australian ballot, they can just vote no. But if the select board, the select board can tell the commissioners how much the tax levy is. And at that point, they can do whatever they want with that money. You don't have the ability to go in and say, well, we don't want you to spend $29,000 on books, make it $20,000. Can't do that. All you got to control over is the taxes. So the request is that we do a motion that says that the town will, as we go through a budget process, will not allocate less than 45, 575? Yeah. Unless the taxes are lowered by some other means, not through the trust fund. Less or more, right? It won't be more than 45, 575. I'm asking you not to make it less than that, because that's what, if you make it less, if you cut that to 460, then they either have to cut the budget or they got to add trust money. So 485, 575, unless the select board finds another one. So don't bother making a motion. But can we at least wait until the end of the night? That's what we get last year. Well, I'm just trying to help the library commissioners because if you don't, unless you're going to come up with money from some other source, if you decide to lower that, I just don't want commissioners to have to cut the budget or to raise the trust fund. If you come up with other money to infuse in there, that's okay with me if you want to reduce the taxes that way. But to be fair to them, their budget is 548.45. So I just want them to be able to call a special meeting if they have to. Again, can we just wait until the end of this evening when we hear highway planning and stuff like that? I think that would be, until we kind of see what's there. And then we could, I have no problem with making a motion. All right. Okay. Planning department led it. Okay. Do you want to wait until Danny comes back? Sure. Okay. Oh, a million dollar question. Very difficult. Yeah. The last person that you appointed, Eric Wilson, stayed with his current employer. Yeah. So what we're planning on advertising at this week, and then the planning commission would do interviews at their first meeting in February. That's the plan. Yep. So we're just, so their first meeting is the second week? It is. Yes. Yes. The, well, it's like the 14th. Yeah. Yeah. This is like the second week. Steve, would you ever consider everything else in our municipality and seeing if there from certain people would be interested in coming over to our side? Well, that's a really awkward thing to do. People do. It's like NFL. Well, the middle person that you appointed was the Zoneman spirit for talent Richmond and he responded and he has said it's left Richmond for a different job. He did. He did. Yeah. I have no idea. I haven't been required, but luckily they have an intern who's doing a Zoneman spirit. But anyway, there's nothing about the search and. So the the planning budget is before you. I sent along the justification page that Steve had given to me and I put a note in there by memo that he's justification was done prior to, you know, the. So what I've done is for the 22 budget. I have included the entire ask that I W. So $32,600 down on that bottom line would have was 17 last year. They asked it to go to 23. And then they asked for $9,600 of beautification money. So I put that whole ask on revitalizing water very long because Karen and Steve and I had talked and last year was $5,000. Some of that money was always some of it was spent in collaboration with so everything that I W is going to have anything to do with I put in that bottom line $32,600. So that is their entire ask. I did drop steams beautification line from $5,000 to $2,000 because I mean to $3,000 because that that $2,000 I thought was overlap. So it's it's not a it's not a drop of $5,000. It's because there's some things that we do with beautification. So that's what net because that's what I was really confused looking because I remember that $9,600 number from our W. So that's what's netting out. The $9,600 is in the 32 six at the very at the bottom of the budget. Yep. See that. Yep. So that's $23,000 for their their regular general operating budget plus the $9,600. Okay. So that's location and I dropped our own beautification line by $2,000. Now there's things in that beautification line of our own that like the new maker park up on Sto Street. Our W doesn't do anything with that park. That's something that we have to deal with ourselves and then it's Steve's $3,000. So with that, I'll stop. I'll let Steve kind of go through everything else. I think I was pretty clear about the Zoning Administrators. Hey, it's it's about a $50,000 annual pay is what we propose for that about $24 an hour. But because the person won't be coming on until and we took the year, it's going to be a little bit lower. So anyway, with that, I'll let Steve go through more and then we can ask questions. Okay, that sounds good. So what I'd like to do is just hit the highlights in the budget and then give a chance for you to ask questions. And I also wanted to talk a little bit about the client department work plan for 2022. I didn't have time to do an update to my work plan that I normally do, but I'd like to give you some some highlights on that. So Bill also talked about the legal line. And so maybe we'll well let's let's start from the top of the non what I say, what I call non pay related items. So professional service. We're still working on updating the nomination for this new historic district for this historic district. So that one, he's still in there that project and get finished this year. So we're planning on having adults finish that in 2022. They're currently working on the stone shed project. So my hope is penalty and angle we can work with them to get that project wrapped up. We did take some of it. Oh, we did. We did. There's only about $1,400 left in the contract. So the bulk of the work is done. We're just trying to get it finished. Okay, the green mountain byway project is the $500. This is the six pound byway. It was just water burying. So the waterway conservation commission, I think maybe when you were on my commission, Mike initiated this project. We now brought in the four world county towns from Morristown over to Cambridge. And that's really a marketing group, very dynamic group, I think that revolves in water buries involved with Laura Brett, who's our secretary. So I think that's been a real fruitful collaboration. So as they're new planning director Sarah McChain, who lives in Waterbury is actively involved as well. Is Laura Waterbury's representative to the byway committee? She is one of the committee members. Correct. And then I'm involved and then there are a couple other people who are on the email list, but Laura and I, my head, this is still involved. So there are a number of Waterbury people who are very involved. So the legal services line, we've been involved in enforcement issue on Moody Court that's been resolved. That involves some expense, attorney expense, because it had to go to court. That's been resolved. We haven't healed up by the mountain trailhead of a subdivision there that's ongoing with Glenn Anderson, the neighbor. So that's ongoing, we're going to have some additional expense and monitoring that we're not litigating ourselves. It's really between the landowner who permitted the three law subdivision in the neighbor, but the town, we always try to defend our decisions. The decisions that the developer view board makes, that involves attorney time, monitoring things. And we have some ideas of maybe a way to help settle that. We don't know if that will work or not. So we'll have some ongoing involvement in that. We just find in this day and age that we're preactively seeking legal advice. It really helps when we work with things. A good example was this Act 250 ordinance where we need some legal help writing to notice. It just works much better to be proactive. I don't tend to ask for a lot of day to day advice. DM was much more willing to pick up the phone if she had a question. So I don't tend to do that, but we do have a set of circumstances. If I did all the bylaw, we'll be needing some legal help along the way. The wild coward is really the enforcements or appeals of decisions. And the one thing, the Grayson appeal up on Sweet Road. Unfortunately, it may have changed now, but the person who appealed was representing himself, which ends up costing all the other priorities a lot more money because the judges bend over backwards to try to help somebody do his pro se. And, you know, motions are a lot longer and, you know, emails and everything else that have to be read. So it's a challenge. We're hoping he's going to hire a attorney. There's been some discussion. Anyway, we'll see how that all goes. So Bill, I had some discussion and he's proposing a $10,000 wine item. This is a little less than what's projected for this year. I think that will hopefully be added. But I think advertising expenses have gone up. We try to use the Waterbury reader for almost all of our notices. It's very reasonable. It gets into every mailbox and widely circulated Waterbury. But we've been very active on the development review board. We've just in terms of permanent activity and had to use, had to do quite a bit of advertising. So that's showing some increase also. Employment. Employment. That is a huge chunk. We were advertising seven days at like $400 some value. So notice. So we'll try to do things a little more reasonably just go around. But still, we're really making an effort to get the word out in a whole variety of sources of seeking minority applicants and so on. So while you're talking about abuse, but you think that this, I just lost the line. You think of that $2,000 even knowing will be advertising for Bill's position. You think that will still be able to cover it? Bill's position. That's all for the assistant planning. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. That's okay. We are advertising again this year. We probably won't advertise in seven days, but still it's an expense. And I think it won't be quite as high as what's last year. So yeah, 2021 year to date was quite high. So Bill, well office supplies, somehow like I missed last year. So that should be 650. We do buy lots of paper. A lot of it is paper. But anyway, we're still paper-related society. Bill talked about beautification. We assist the garden club. The river runs through it. Garden club with the purchase of fliers every year for their projects. And we're doing some work on new vapor park. Now that the bridges have been reconstructed to do some planting there, just make it a more appealing park so we can get more utilization there. Training and tuition, we're hoping we'll go back to some in-person. I will be traveling today for three state operas this fall. So we'll see how that all goes. And once we bring on a new assistant, we'll be some training there. We do provide funding for all the new board members, planning commission members, conservation commission members. If they want to do training, we offer to pay. And we do pay for those trainings that are through the multiple lake cities and towns. That's typically where the training expenses. Mapping. The planning department splits two different mapping expenses with the assessor's office. They are our tax maps that are both digital and in paper. So we have a consultant that, those those we put $1,200 in and then the assessor's office put $1,200 in. And then our online parcel mapping system, we have consultant and paragraph associates that maintain that. And that utilizes the parcel mapping that has other layers. It's very actively used. We use it as a staff. We encourage local property owners, people in the real estate community, development community, and they do utilize it well. So it's a great resource. And then there's some additional mapping that is done by the Center for Regional Planning Commission. So we've got that for $400 in there. $1,200 for each of the two different mapping systems and then $400 for the Regional Planning Commission. They do maps, for instance, for our unified development bylaws. We're developing new zoning maps. So those that get developed, revisions are made and so on. The Regional Planning Commission dues has been growing up each year. So that's the actual figure that we'll spend on our dues. We get a lot of service out of the Regional Planning Commission, transportation, advocacy for our projects. And they work with Green Mountain Transit on transit planning. I mentioned the zoning assistance. They do 12 hours a year of mapping as part of that. So it's a good... I'm currently the chair of the Board of Commissioners and chair of the Transportation Advisory Committee. We sort of rotated with two-year terms as chair of the board. So that's one of my last two rounds there. And it's a good... We have a very good leadership group and it's strong with a representative of each of the 24-ounce that are in the Central Mart region. Let's see. So from my Economic Development Court, they support, for instance, IV computers as applied for a veggie grant. They call them to help. They're looking to build an office building. So it was awarded. Place the theater. It was awarded. It was awarded. Yes. Yes. Thanks, Bill. So the Central Mart Economic Development Court supports local businesses with funding for business development. There's a good example with IV computers. One of our very successful local businesses, by the way. So let's see. News or different association news. Travel. We're hoping to get back. There was very little travel. I traveled to one province for two days. But we're hoping to get back for some travel. And once we hire an assistant planning administrator, we're in the first sense of get out of the community, do more enforcement, be more proactive. So we're anticipating more travel costs. I can only spend $80 or $50. It was two trips to Burlington. That was it. This year I'll drive to Maine for a three-day conference. But yeah, that's all it was. Not much with COVID. Not much driving around. And I don't charge. If I'm going to venture a driveway, I don't charge. Okay. So the office equipment, we're in good shape there. Conservation Commission, we do a $700 budget each year. Some years they have spent all of it. Some years with COVID. And I think they're just not actively developing materials and things of that nature. So just so you know, Danny, that $700,000 gets transferred out of the planning budget. And it goes, we do have a conservation fund. And that $700 goes into their fund. And then they last year they had a budget of about $500 or $600. So the money show is spent here. And it just moves it into the conservation fund. And then they have some other revenues. But they didn't do much in 2041 either because of COVID. But that's why that line is always going to be 100% because it just gets transferred. And then Bill talked to you about the revitalizing water barrier. And one of the, this may be rearing what Karen talked to you about, but we're working with Mike Loschiavo, the main tanks that aren't here and the tanks around it out to really take over some of the activities that volunteers have been very involved with putting up the garland, taking it down, putting up the hanging baskets, watering those which we did last year. So I think it really is helpful. We're trying to kind of reduce the burnout level on volunteers. We've had a very, very active volunteer cadre. I'm going to be retiring here from March. I've been very involved in the whole volunteer effort. So I think this is a really more sustainable approach. And so that those funds will help revitalize water barrier, pay for some contractor support for these beautification projects. The value of the volunteer effort that we've had has been huge. So we're kind of transferring some of that dollar value from a volunteer. Yeah, we still have volunteers. We're just not going to assume that things are required to get up on the way. Right. Some of the riskier stuff. You can see there that the budget is up $18,290. $15,600 is that line item right above that, the appropriation to revitalizing water break. If you net out the savings of $2,000 for the application, that's $13,600 of the $18,290. And then the difference, really the difference is the legal money. It went up from $1,400 to $4,500. So to add $4,500 to the $13,6 should never be close to that $18,290. There's a few other little finer things. But it's essentially a level funded budget this year. The zoning administrator line isn't fully funded though. So a year from now, the zoning administrator line will be over $50. So I think I want to open it up to questions. And then I just kind of comment on a few different work plan items. But while there's fresh in your mind, I wanted to see if anybody has any questions, comments? Well, let me mention a few things and a few big questions. That's fine. So in the work plan, there are just a couple things I wanted to highlight. We've had some discussion of the rewrite of the zoning regulation. It's so-called unified development bylaw. The planning commission is working on a first phase. It's going to be the whole geographic area between Interstate 89 and the Winterspie River. So it includes a full four area of the village. So we have a lot of our housing stock, if you will, and a lot of our economic development includes industrial area number two. So they're working hard on that. I think making some real good headway. So we'll have a draft hopefully within the next six months or so for you to take a look at. I think we posted on that. And then I want to talk about a couple other projects. The Emerald Ash Board Management. We had a very successful grant. We took out 20 large dashboards that were in those highway right away and then processed them into firewood that we sold for donations. To the Waterbury Neighborhood Fund and to the Rotary Club's charitable fund. So that was all done with not the tree removal. Eric Potter did that. Potter's tree health care. But then the firewood part that was all volunteer based was the tree committee members and the Rotary Club members. The tree committee's been very active. It's a very good group. Michael Schiavo has joined the tree committee, which is great. And so we have applied for the one grant that you're aware of that would be for tree planting on Railroad Street, not the Hope Baby Park. I think we've got a good chance of getting that. Then we may ask for a grant application that would go in in the fall, but probably not happen until next year. That would be some additional ash tree removal along in the highway right away. So we're really trying to be proactive. We're also treating ash for Emerald Ash Board. So that's been done through the Highway Department and Cemetery Fund as well. Just a couple other things to highlight. In the floodplain management program, our floodplain management working group has been, it's really not been active just because of other priorities, nature reconstruction and so on. But we're still very active with the community rating system, the FEMA program that provides a discount for the property owners who pay flood insurance. Back in May of 2020, we renewed our CRS community rating system membership five years from our initial application. And we went from a level nine to a level eight, which is a higher level. And they go from nine to one, one being the highest. And that now provides 10% of discount for those that pay flood insurance. So it's a direct benefit to people in the community. We have a whole bunch of different programs related to flood hazard regulations, conservation of floodplain area, outreach to both applicants, landowners, the real estate community, the banking community, educate them about floodplain issues. So I just want to let you know by the end of this month, I have to do the annual report so that that will be happening and we'll make sure that it's taken care of to keep up that membership. We talked about the Green Mountain Byway and Colbyville Bikehead Project is waiting on the bridge work. They probably hear about that some point under highway or that's in that bridge, which is the bridge on Stow Street, just before you get to Route 100 intersection is in the so-called scoping phase that VTrans is doing. We've done 12 warnings. So we're hoping once that bridge has gotten to the report, I know of the recommendation of the consultant. So that once the scoping is done, then it can go into design and construction and then we can do the sidewalk project. So that's all those pieces are still being put in place. So other than that, I think I know you've got more to do tonight and the final request if anybody has any questions or just had a question on the asterisks. Are they taking the mature ones now because they're mature, but is there a higher risk that the mature trees are prone to the animal's act for? Well, what we did is there have been any sign of the animal. Yeah, we haven't found any animal that's poor. So when Eric took down the trees, he didn't find any. So we've definitely been lucky. But we didn't inventory that was wrapped up in well, 2020 really, of all of our roadside ash of any size, you know, about, you know, for six and two. And that's about, we inventory about 600 trees that are all in a digital available online. And we picked out 20 trees that were dead or were in fair or poor conditions. So the idea was to target those that should come down. Part of the rationale is try to get ahead of the curve before I'm going to ask for a get there to the richman, the volunteer, it's, you know, fairy town, it's in my brother's town. So, the idea is to be proactive. And then the other aspect is once an ash tree dries, and I think you would know this as well as anybody, Chris, they get very grilled. And they're more costly to take down. They're more dangerous because you can get all my land from there. So the idea is to try to remove the ones that are in poor condition before they really get out. Does that answer your question? People looking, keep your hands up. Okay, well, thanks. And, you know, I really appreciate all your support for finding out and we'll hope that we have better luck with the cannabis. We'll see you back here. Thanks. Thanks, Steve. Moving on. So, Celia's not going to be with us tonight, given the weather outside. I gave them all day. Here I am. As I indicated in the memo, the spending is up 6.3% last year. Taxes, 8.6%, 8.7%. If the transfer to the capital fund stayed the same, that would drop the tax rate by a couple of percentage points. It's pretty much a level funded budget. The pay lines are up. We addressed that last year and I told you, you know, we made some incremental changes in 2021 and I'm budgeting for some additional pay raises for municipal staff around the 3% level and that's reflected here in this budget. So, the 409,000. There's a little decline in health insurance because one less person could get and there's been some other changes in terms of the plans that they take. The lines that are significantly different really are kind of right in the middle of the page. The equipment name next slide, which was $32,000 in 2021 and we spent about that. We spent $32,000. I save this every year but there's going to be bills coming in. These actual numbers are going to change a little bit, but I'm not going to worry about it anymore. If they come in and change between now and the time that we're finished with the budget, I'll update the numbers and I've already added some things that I know that are coming down the pipe where I already know the expenses there. But that equipment maintenance line, although we spent right about what we planned to spend this year, it's up significantly. It goes to $49,000 for next year and Celia included. I sent to you this sheet of Celia and the reason why the jump is so big it's partly because of the cost of parts and labor. Chris was talking about it just before getting started, the supply came issues, nothing else that we know about. But it also just happens that every year there are certain vehicles that require a little bit more in terms of the regular schedule. They hit the whatever number of hours or the number of miles and it's just that in 2022, we have more of them, more of the pieces of equipment have those higher asks this year. So I'm hoping that might be a long way to go down, maybe a little bit next year. But that's probably the line that has the biggest real variance in it. I mean between excuse me Bill, between the two equipment maintenance and vehicle maintenance, you're $21,000, increase just those two items. Right. And I was going to move down to the vehicle maintenance next, same kind of thing. I think Celia actually yeah Celia had asked for $30,000 and I bumped it up to $35,000 just based on kind of well we had one truck at the end of 21 that had some problem. And I'm not sure if it's fully, some of the issues that it was in for will be posted to the 21 year and then there's probably some things that are going to be for 2022. So I bumped that up $5,000 from what she asked just because I think that one particular truck is going to have some on the expense that wasn't included in her budget. The other line item that is is the public works director line that went from $32,000 to $42,000. And that's just the function of the amount of hours that Bill Woodruff and Alec Custney work. They provide me spreadsheet at the end of the year. And they, you know, the total number of hours. So Bill Woodruff is a salaried employee. So it's 2,080 hours. And then he tells me how many hours he worked in the various departments that I just multiply those hours by paying a benefit rate. And then what we do is we charge it back. So the cost in 2022 really is to compensate for what you did in 2021 because there's no way at the beginning of the year that you're going to know exactly how much you're going to work. I think that line item will likely go down Main Street even though we were at the end of the project. There was a lot of administrative stuff with Main Street. There was a lot of inspections. So he spent more time on Main Street than he had in the prior year. So anyway, I think those are the line items that I know that are significantly up from last year. And then of course, the bottom line there, the two capital fund line, I've increased it by 5%. But it's about $30,000 increase from what it was last year. That's just to fund the CIPs. I think that if we can do that and still keep our tax rate reasonable, it's good to make those transfers to try to get ahead of future means, as we've talked about in the past. I did pass along with the most list kind of detailed line item list for the end of that. Right after her CIP replacement schedule, she's listed the jobs that she hopes to do in 2021. So notice that even though it's a Class 4 road, we're going to try to do some work on Ring Road. This year we've had lots of requests there the last couple of years. And we're not going to be able to make it perfect. It's a Class 4 very narrow couple of places to work, but I'm going to do some work in the ditching and the ditch lines. And then some erosion control in the ditches that I've stoned, the hydro seating. There's several culvert replacements, one of those on Ring Road as well. Danny just again, since this is your first budget. And the last week that they do the highway violation certification. So when you signed that violation certification, you might not have gotten it. So the town is responsible to fully maintain Class 1, 2, and 3 town highways. Those are most of our roads, main streets to Class 1 highway, Stowe Street's Class 2 highway, which indicates Collector Highway, and then most of our other roads like Neel and Platts Road or Ring Road, Ripley Road or Maple Street, those are well Maple Street's a little bit of a collective. But anyway, those are Class 3 roads. We were responsible to do maintenance on those roads all year round. Class 4 roads, we don't provide any winter maintenance on Class 4 roads, and we don't have to do anything for the roads except keep them passable. It used to be that they referred to in 1967's reclassification by the legislature, and that's where that passable comes from. But we're required to maintain the water courses on those roads, and we're required to make sure the road still exists. Class 4 roads, Woodard Hill Road, which is off of Little River Road, Ring Road is a Class 4 road, Middlesex March Road is a Class 4 road, Part of Magnus Way is a Class 4 road, and there's a couple of others that I'm probably not remembering. We typically don't do much on those roads, but because we have to make sure the roads exist so people can get to where they want to go, and more and more people have started building on Class 4 roads. It used to, when I first came here, you know, almost everything on Class 4 roads was a can, you know, now we have lots of houses, expensive houses on Class 4 roads. So if we have a big rainstorm and the road washes out, which has happened on Woodard Hill Road a lot more often than really any other Class 4 road that we have, we've got to spend a lot of money to put it back. So we do, from time to time, some work on its Class 4 roads to try to alleviate those damages and try to make sure they don't happen. So anyway, that's her, this list is the projects that will be funded through the operating budget. If you want to take note of the little five or six paragraph explanation at the end, we have had a terrible time. We weren't able to paint any center lines last year because we can't buy a paint project. We don't want to do it, which there was no paint available. And as you can see there, paint is very expensive, culverts, the costs of culverts are caught up and the supply chain issues that we have both in terms of just getting material and price increases on a reality right now. So anyway, that's really all I have to say at the moment. You can fire away at me with your question. I'm surprised I didn't see an increase in salt finite in it all. I've been watching when I'm signing orders for an increase there. I haven't seen it yet. It's only $1 a ton. I'm not sure how long that'll last, but I'm surprised the supply chain issues haven't impacted that as well. But we're also trying to use less. I'm not saying we are using less, but they're making an effort. Am I correct in seeing that she's looking to buy a currently great. No, everything grounds maintenance. That's I won't say it's down, but it's not up from last year. It was budgeted $6,000. I saw that myself and I saw that myself and I asked for why we didn't spend it since we asked for it last year. Yep, I don't have an explanation. She didn't know that she's asked for six last year, but was only asking for three this year. So a lot of that probably gets shifted into the budget for this building. So the ground Celia used to put money. If you look on this page and here where she's got her note about grounds maintenance, you'll see it says roundabout maintenance $2,000, multiple $1,000 and then roundabout municipal complex and very clever. There's no numbers next to those. She used to put in her budget the money to maintain the grounds of this property. And I, a couple of years ago, maybe it was at the beginning of last year, told her that no, that's in fund 76, the municipal building operating fund. So we do pay for that here at this building. No real questions. Can you remind me what highway flavor materials or revenue? Yeah. So we have, we don't have dedicated crews for everything. So when, when the, if they need work done on the roads and the cemeteries, the highway crew does the work. He leaves gravel and things and put it there. The cemetery fund pays the highway fund back. Okay. And it's the same. It's kind of like that cool cross charge line. So, you know, the highway crew helps get the pool ready at the beginning of the year. They wash it down, do whatever little maintenance and, you know, so the pool budget pays for that. So it's just, it goes from one municipal pocket to the other. That's all. It's just funding. It's funding. Let me ask, I noticed she said in her comments about the street signs, the limbo tree. Do we change that many street signs a year? No, it's just, I think that's just a comment. We don't change it, but every once in a while. Right. Something gets not over or something like that. Fortunately, it was, I don't know, it was probably five years ago where the, I never get it right. The standard for the signs. The state changed the standard and they wanted all the signs with higher reflectability. And I'm glad it happened five years ago. Now, we only change it like when some teenage kids, the old spandals, put them up on their bed and walk was me as a kid. So we're all set on the highway budget. Okay. The CIP budgets and here, of course, so let's, on the first page, and I didn't write any elaborate demos for the CIP because it's still, frankly, a little bit of a work in progress. And I thought it was fairly self-explanatory. So in Celia's budget, she did include her CIP items for under 70, and that's paid on 71, which is infrastructure in the vehicles. So let's just start with paying since that's the first one. We were awarded $175,000 grant in 2021 by the state of Vermont. But the award came so late in the year that it was going to be difficult. We didn't know we were going to get the money before we really had to move out to some scheduling and paving projects. So even though we had thought about paving Stowe Street last year, the grant came too late. So we did bless shill instead. The costs on bless shill for the paving were the 382,991. Most of that was bless shill and loans and trail. The 38,609 was paving from the main street intersection over the driveway on Stowe Street. So the $175,000 grant that was awarded is still in place. We had, I think, 24 months to spend it. So we will do Stowe Street in 2022. So that $175,000 is not a question mark that we've got. Yes, we've got that right. So, and then the highway fund, I'm proposing to transfer $325,000 or $20,000 into the paving fund from that highway $614,000 pilot on another budget for the full pilot amount that we've got this year. I'm hoping that we don't get burned. But I've got a couple hundred thousand dollars of more going into the general fund and then I'm proposing to split the $100,000 into three CIP funds, the paving fund, the infrastructure, the highway vehicle funding, the recreation fund. So anyway, paving for 2022. We're proposing to do Stowe Street, we'll use the grant, and then Hill Street, North Street, and Swayze Court, all of which are in the neighborhood of Stowe Street. Swayze Court and North Street are side streets right off of Stowe Street. Swayze Court is right across from the school, North Street is a little half-moon loop at the top of Stowe Street. Hill Street, I don't know how often you drive over there, but Hill Street is probably the worst street that we have in town right now. It needs to be done. So those are the proposals for paving this year. So I'm going to just kind of go through this and then we can come back. And then there's $55,000 worth of debt still to go on the very low note or bond that we had that was due on the 6th century, in 2024. I didn't think that that was the budget was there, but it's got a couple more years. In the infrastructure fund, that state grant that's highlighted in blue and the downtown projects, that's also highlighted in blue at $240,000. That is money that Karen Nevin spoke about last week, if your number should talk about the state amping up its grant program for downtown. The maximum grant you can get is $200,000 and the match for $200,000 grant is $40,000. So you have to get a full grant at $200,000. You have this kind of project with $240,000. So I'm going to be meeting with Karen and Steve later this week. She's going to talk about what she wants to do with that. It really doesn't impact our budget too much, because if we don't get the grant, we won't do the project. And if we get a lesser grant, if it's a $100,000 instead of $200, we'll have a $20,000 that's instead of a $40,000. So right now, the money is in the expense side at $240,000 to simply maximize the grant that we get. I don't have a project that I could tell you tonight. Next Monday I'll be able to tell you what the proposal is that they want to submit. I think the grant application is doing much. So then there's $184,000, $184,200 transfer in the highway fund into the infrastructure fund. The projects that I and we, Bill Woodruff and Siri and I all talked about. $113,000 worth of sidewalks that's Randall Street. If you walk on Randall Street, the sidewalks on both sides of the street are horrible. We've done significant upgrades of sidewalks in the past couple of years. We did a sidewalk on Walk Thanks Street two, three years ago. We did sidewalk on the west side of Louisville Street in 2020. We did the east side of Louisville Street in 2021. Randall Street. So I've got $113,000 in there right now. If when we get to the end, if we have to, that could be cut in half and do one side this year and one side next year. Like we did on the Louisville Street if we can't afford to do this. But for right now, if we can get both of those done, it would be a good idea. The culvert for $62,000, that's the large culvert on Washill Road that we didn't finish the paving project. We were going to leave the whole road not paved last year, but we ended up putting the base course on, but we didn't pay, we didn't do anything in the vicinity of that culvert. So we've got $62,000 for that, for that job. I'm surprised it's as cheap as it is. We had to get a hydraulic study done by the state. I don't have with me the size of the pipe that it needs to be because the pipe isn't going to be so necessarily so huge, but it's a deep, the book is deep compared to the road surfaces, you know, with a grain of the road. So we've got to do that project this year because we've got to finish that particular line. The building improvements, $45,000, you can see those on the on the sealious list, siding on the highway garage, some siding replacement, and some paint on the greater barn, finish replacing the lights in the greater barn, and then there's a water grid in the pilot garage that must be set in the stage. So $45,000 for that. Reservoir road, $200,000 right now is proposed. We tried to get this considered as a Pima project, but they said no, you can't get a point for any disaster that happened there. So this is the road that goes from 100 into the state park in Waterbury Center, right in the opposite of Colorado. And if you drive in there, you'll notice that the guard rail is really a curve now. The guard rails are just sinking the whole banking is sloughing out and going down. We thought this has been going on for a number of years, about, I don't know, it's a long time. Now, I want to say it's at least 10 years. There was some thought that maybe the water line was leaking. And B5, when Alec was the public works director, the bill to Waterbury Water Department, we actually discontinued the water line that went from root 100 down to serve the state park and a couple houses that are there. And we moved the water line up the hill, came from, was in Sunset, the first the neighborhood that's across from the center area. So Lakeview, yes it is. So Lakeview Terrace is served by the water system and Walter Loos is outside at the end of Lakeview Terrace. We actually went from, we got an easement from him, and we rerouted the water line and went down over there and discontinued the water line on the reservoir road and nothing changed. So it wasn't the water line that was causing in this bill to happen. Does the town road there go just up to the, up to where the berm is, you know, where they have to be? The town road ends right in the vicinity of that little parking area on the right. So we need to do something there at some point that Loos is going to just slide down the hill. And this is a pretty good estimate that I believe the Woodruff has asked, and maybe Kingsbury, about how much it would cost to do this. You know, does it have to happen in 2022? Probably not, but it's going to have to happen sometimes. So I put it in here and we can talk more about that later. So before you put this page, can you talk a little bit about having these unbalances that end so in the black and in the red, or the black and the comfort level from your perspective for scenarios like that? Yeah, well, what I haven't done, and I didn't bring the town report here, but so I've only shown you funds 70 through 74 here. In the county court, if 75 was there, at the bottom of 75, it says aggregate spending, aggregate revenues, aggregate revenue minus expenses, aggregate fund balance. So fund 70 through fund 75 had a fairly significant aggregate fund balance last year. So if you flip the page, Mark, that you're asking about that. Yeah, it's a fire vehicle. The fire vehicle CIP is way up. So what we're doing really is we used to have one CIP. It was fund 30 and everything was in it. Frankly, I think that's the way it should be. Rebecca Ellis was the driving force to breaking them apart because she wanted to know how much we had to put in these funds. But if you try to keep every one of these funds always in the black, you're going to end up having to put a lot more money inside than we've been doing. So we pretty much break it apart by fund, but we're still behaving as if it's just one fund. I will tell you right now, with everything that I've done, even though fund 75 isn't here, we need to put more money in these funds than I'm showing if we're going to do all these projects because otherwise it's a small deficit. And that's a little bit of, it's a little bit of a shell game because, as I told you before, we're pretty flush and cash right now. We've got lots of fund balances in a lot of different places. So would I be real worried if we went forward in 2022 having a year-end projection of a small deficit in all the capital funds? Not really because we've got the money in other places to cover it, but it's a reasonable point. So anyway, I did flip the page to just keep going. Fund 72, these are highway vehicles, and I did highlight both of the things you asked about. Chris, to me, the Harley rake, and I don't know why, but 15,000 for the Harley rake, she has 8,000. I think it's, she wants 8,000 to come out of the rec budget too. So I just put it all up here. The rec CIP pays for, it's rather than going into the highway vehicle, CIP promotes more. So I think the cost is $15,000 for the Harley rake. Here cost is $15,000. Again, I'll have to ask if it's 15,000. Anyway, the Harley rake, I've never heard of it before, one of the, I know the term York rake, which is often used on roads after raiders go and pulls off some of the stones and big cobbles. The Harley rake, they really like it for the recreation fields, for the infields of the softball field and the library field in particular, because they get it all prepared in the spring and then, you know, weed seeds get in there and they start growing up. And if you, they've got a rake right now, they drag the fields, but it's a pretty light screen thing that they pull across. And it doesn't really pull up the roots of the weeds that are important. So the Harley rake, it's an ask, do we need it? We've lived a long time without it and they seem to play baseball fine, but I just put it in here. The 10 ton roller, I have frankly, I have a bigger question about 10 ton roller than I have on the Harley rake. It's $68,000. And I think what happened is that because Jay Macaulay got one around, that's the big vibratory roller that was using on the Main Street project, they were generous and allowed us to use it a few times when we had things going on. Celia said that a number of communities now when they buy new graders actually buy a roller, not a 10 ton roller, but they buy a roller that can attach to the back of the grader that when they bring the road, when they do the final pass and get it crammed and everything else when they're ready to go, that they pull that roller along to just try to roll out the road. And the 10 ton roller would be available for that, would be available to roll fields and everything else. Again, I just put it in here, Celia's not here, Bill Woodruff isn't here. I'm not saying we don't need it or should have it, but I have questions about both of those. How many times do they use it and could we not just rent it for the few times that you might really need it? Yeah, I mean, you know, again, I don't think we really need it. We've lived a long time without it, I think it would be nice to have, but you know, there's pressures on the budget and you know, if between now and next week, I can get more information from them. I met with them on Friday, and if they were here, they could probably answer some of your questions better than I can. But I don't think anybody's like jumping up and down saying this is an absolute disaster. So you answered my question about the hardware, I was thinking myself, what would they want something like that for? I didn't answer that question. I just texted a guy who supposedly purchased one, but he can't get it for months and months. I had one used on a dirt parking lot of stone when I would have like dips in the dirt, they would come in and parlay right the entire parking lot at three levels. Yeah, they're used to pick stone, basically what it does, it's a barrel with a bunch of teeth on it and it goes through and basically kicks the stones into the bucket and loosens the material up, picks bigger stones out, loosens the material up, and then allows you to grade that extra loose material off. They put them on skid steers and do driveways with them all. They're fairly handy for somebody that's using them for stuff like that. The roller, I was wondering if it was an independent machine or if it was an attachment for the grader. No, it sounds like it was an independent machine. We're not going to be driving the gray around on the wreck shields, packing the tools down. We started to do something like the work that was done on the dumps all. We did that paving work, right? Some of that. We have a three ton roller, so for a paving job, the patching stuff that we do, the three ton roller, it's a pavement roller. We've had that Cygnus EIP. We replaced that, I don't know, five years ago or something like that. This is a bigger unit. Again, I'm not sure it's necessary. Where we restore it, that's the other question. Yeah, that's a good question. I guess my question is, is there a thought on this that this might actually save us money over time by taking on some more middle sized paving products ourselves? What's the use of this? Is it really for dirt work or is it for? It would be for anything. I think you could roll the wreck fields with it in the spring, just after it firms up a little bit to try to level wreck fields. I think they would probably, the way they were talking, roll some of the gravel roads after they graved them and obviously could use it for some paving jobs. But these are questions it seems like I need to ask them and bring back. Yeah, that's some more information. Yeah. When I know, when I see it, because I live on one of the dirt areas, that when they do the grading, I can see why maybe a roller would be helpful because if it immediately rains or if it immediately, the traffic pattern all of a sudden could ruin all that work pretty quickly. The rain really, if it rains right after they graved, it really streams it out. And she did mention the pull behind one on the graders, but our grader isn't set up for it. And I think that it would be, from what they said, that it would be a fairly expensive thing to retrofit. Well, that's where he's got one and I don't know that they use it as often. The pull behind kind? I think there's, I've seen one somewhere, it's on the front over here, not the back. All right, I'll get some answers to both of those questions. So moving on, there's Fund 73, fire vehicles, we don't need any. The debt is up. We refinanced, we had that $1.3 million finding a note. We refunded that into a 15-year bond. So a lot of, most of the deadlines in the CIP have been adjusted and jumped up. We've got four more years left on what was $266,000 of arms. So what we had was 1.366, I believe, was our initial five-year note. We refunded and turned 1.1 of that into a 15-year note and the remaining 266 that we paid off in five years, the first payment of that was made in December. So we've got four years to go on that note. That was, that was for the two pump trucks. It was for the two, it was for the two pump trucks. It was for the roadside bowler. There was a couple of other smaller things. And basically, I moved it around into different funds, where I thought it made sense. So some of that, oh, the other one's Main Street was, you know, the three-year project. Our local share of that three-year construction project, we'll pay that over the next 15 years. And then Fund 74, again, nothing in here, but this is one of the places, Chris, that we are trying to build up that fund value. So transferring $27,250 to this fire station fund last year, we spent $8,000 on the Maple Street station, that siding cost a little bit more than we had planned. So we're trying to build some fund balance up in this fire station fund. But then for the fire station, is it the fire operating budget? So that's really it for now. I just had a quick question on the reservoir road. Who did the evaluation on the fix of that? And is there, do you have any information on what they're thinking that there's anything there? Yeah, I'll have to bring back more information. I know that we've had, I worked on that thing years ago. We had some shitting out. Some of the people came and looked. I think we had some engineering work done there. Alex been involved in it. And as far as the work itself, I believe they got an estimate from McDonald and perhaps Kingsbury. And I don't know exactly what they're going to do, but they've got to get down here to book and try to stabilize that total somehow. I think I talked to you earlier about it before the meeting started, but the vaccine mandate at the United States Canadian border, one of the things, two of the things that they said would impact, pretty fact, our country pretty significantly is healthy and that's all we see. Hopefully we'll be able to move forward without infrastructure projects without too much additional costs and too much delay. Maybe we had a question. Yeah, I missed it because I wasn't here for Gary's presentation last week. What is the improvement? What was it? There's like a small building. Looks like it's just been put up back there. Do you know anything about that? The cement siding on the street building that's the cement party plank siding and manufacturers recommend they won't warranty it if you don't leave it in space, like an eighth of an inch and then caught between their joints. You're supposed to put a piece of metal flashing behind. Of course, when you leave the siding apart, it's exposing what's behind there, whether it's location. You're supposed to put a piece of flashing in behind there. The contractor only put membrane behind there, which has fallen out in a lot of the cases, exposing the material behind it. I don't know what they did to fix that, but then had to re-cock the joint. I've used that product several times and I said the hell with the manufacturers recommendation, I put it tight together. I've never had a problem with that, but not only did they leave the gap, but that stuff on their extreme heat will shrink even more, so just combat some problems like that. We noticed it there a while back, one was an interesting, you know, it's better to stay on how to replace the sheet behind it. That's what that cost went for. So, I haven't finalized the REC CIT budget. One of the things that I was struggling about was you and Dan and Mark were at the REC committee meeting last week and they're talking about, you know, this master planning of what they feel. We've also got folks from interested in the state market and they're talking about master planning at the ICE Center. They're just trying to figure out, you know, how are we going to get that in the budget and the other things that they're asking for in the REC budget. So, I just ran out of time, especially after I had to go deal with that repeating issue. So, I'll bring the REC budget next week. I'll get the REC CIT budget next week and I'll get some answers to some of these questions about the roller and the ring and the $200,000 for the reasonable road and hopefully we'll be able to put things to debt. What I'd like to do right now, and I did not bring paper copies of this, but if Carla can put up the general budget that we looked at a couple weeks ago, which is the general operating budget, funds 11, 12, and 13, I just want to show you a couple things. So, here it is right now and the three budgets with all of the transfers for the REC CITs and everything else, there on the right, you see in 2021, $2,172,485 was the tax request in the general fund. To the left there in the proposed 2022, right now it's $2,112, which is down almost $60,000 for last year. And then the highway budget in 21 was $1.4 million. Right now, what we just looked at tonight is $1.55 million. The library budget was $438,000 and it's $485,000. So, if you approve this budget right now, as is with no other changes, it would be a 2.7% increase. We need $112,435 more this year than last year. I think we're going to have a fairly reasonable increase in the grand list. I think it'll be more than 1%. So, that will translate into a 2.7% increase in the taxes, in the tax rate, I don't believe. But I want to show you some things that I built into this where I believe that this might be too high in terms of taxes. Now, one thing I just told you that to balance the CIP funds, we're going to need more transfers in. So, that will make the 2022 column go up a little bit to do that. But you can see here for the pilot line last year, where the yellow highlight is, Charlie. So, the pilot line $160,000 was budgeted in the general fund last year. And I think in the CIP fund, we budgeted $20,000. We put the $20,000 into the CIP fund. So, we budgeted $180,000 last year. We got $330,765. So, this year, I'm budgeting $350,000 right now, which might be a little high based on the three. Well, we got $350,000 last year. That says $254,000. Well, it says $250,000 there, but that's through $105,000. I got you a point. I'm going to add that. He's stating that there's $20,000 that's not represented here. So, it's really... So, last year, we got $350,765. And I'm budgeting $350,000 again right now, $250,000 here and $100,000 to the CIP funds. So, if you scroll down parallel, go down to the one... Chris, for example, or the rest of the board, if you had mentioned on one of these that said pilot for revenue was $35,000. What was that going on? Savings was $35,000, I think. Yes. So, if you bring it in, that's how that hundred comes into the CIP's revenue side. Well, Bill, can you repeat... I'm sorry, where the $20,000... where the $20,000 went from $350,000 to $330,000. CIP budget, pilot, $20,000. Thank you. And then he's got $35,000. So, it wasn't a transfer. It was... We budgeted for $160,000. We got $330,000 there and $20,000 went into the CIP. So, I was talking about $250,000 here. So, that would be a $90,000 increase in general fund revenue and it would be an $80,000 increase into the CIP's because it went from $20,000 to $100,000. Bill, why not just represent it as the full payment into that line item like line 16. So, say it just said $350,000 and then increase the transfer. You can do that. You know, that's... That's right. I know, but for, you know, we understand this program. Right. I know exactly where you're going. In general, in public, and I said, where is this $20,000? It's not easy to understand that. Right. So, if you want to do that, we can do that. I understood that as $250,000. You were budgeting $250,000 and about $250,000 or $200,000 and it's going into the CIP. That's what I was thinking. No. This is just notes for you. So, if you think that's clear. I would think that's clear because, you know, I think in terms of like normal town people looking at our, you know, when they get the budget and know what to look with, that they're going to want... I would like that to be very clear what we're calling it for pilot and I feel like without we're being right there in that line item, they might think that the $20,000 or $35,000 coming out of that, not in addition to. That's fine. If that makes it clear, I'm happy to do that. A couple of clicks on the computer. So, the same thing with current use there, right in the middle of the page, just to the left, right there. We budgeted $35,000 last year. We got $106,000. So, I'm budgeting $105,000 this year and the line right above it, Forest and Parks, $30,000 was budgeted. We got $91,660,000. So, I'm budgeting $91,660,000 again. Both of those changes were state level changes that we had nothing to do with and all of a sudden, we just got work. Well, no, we budgeted less. We got $90,000 in 2020. I was fearing that we weren't going to get state appropriation. So, that's one of the reasons, and we do spending as well. The state grant retrans liaison, that money's going away, that was what the state was reversing us for what Bob Farrow was doing. So, that's the loss of revenue, but we have a fairly significant loss of spending as well. If you go down to the next Sound Clerk service fees and all that stuff. So, this is where the rec revenues are significantly higher than they were last year. And remember, those rec revenues offset spending, but if the revenues don't come in, the programs won't be run, the selling doesn't happen. So, it's, you're not going to be able to eliminate all of the spending, but if he's got that mini-camp, he's got $81,500 there as proposed revenue. And if something happens and we only get $50,000, we're going to have a corresponding reduction in spending. So, that's not very risky there. If you move down to where the yellow highlight is currently, so from Tax Stabilization Fund, we budgeted $50,000 for transfer this year. We didn't we didn't take it in 2021. We talked about that last week. I do have $52,600. Chris, if you just pass these around. So, in effect, our, when you see this, I'll wait till you all get it. So, on the front page there, that was the, the total gain that we had in the, you can see in the income and expense report. We had no expenses. We didn't transfer the $50,000, but we had a gain of $54,578 in interest in security gains. So, if we, and if you look at the second page, you'll see there down toward the bottom of the page where it's one, two, three, four lines up from the bottom. The fund balance at the end of the 2020 in this fund was $997,728. It's up to $1,052,000 now. So, if we had transferred the 50 last year, it still would have been, we would have had more of the fund at the end of this year than we had at the end of last year, and we still couldn't transfer 5%. So, our fund balance moving into 2022 in our general fund is $50,000 lower than it needed to be. We chose not to make that transfer. If we wanted to make it, we could double our transfer from this year. It's a lot. Shouldn't be the same as if we did it last year. And this handwriting here just, it's from my information, just telling us that we don't have a lot at risk right now in this tax stabilization of only 12% of that $1,052,000 is inequities. The rest is in fixed income or cash. And the interest on investments, is that available loans to us? The interest on those loans? Part of it, yes. It's also interest we've got bonds and other fixed income. But yeah, the interest that the CIP funds are paying to us, so you can see there that $499,300 of where it says advanced to other funds up at the top of the range, you see it? So, that's tax stabilization money that has been actually linked to the other CIP funds and they're paying 2.75% interest to us right now. So, 3% of $500,000 would be, what, $15,000? So yeah, some of that interest is from the other funds, but can I ask you a question before we get to the Q&A area? I lose track. So, based on what you have budgeted your way at the top, you said if we pass the budget right now, here's what we're looking at. What you're telling us right now is part of that. Yeah. Okay. Yep. So, it's not if we add this in with it. No, no, this is all, everything that I'm going over now gets us to that point. And that's also including this taxation, doubling of it. No, just $52,000, if you're saying that we could take that other 50. Yeah. So, this is what I'm going to get now. So, let's not look at those two lines in blue and pink yet or red. Caroline, go down to the Special Articles budget, which is down several pages. So, you just went past it. No, I didn't. So, in the budget that I, at the top of the page, where I said that we had a 2%, 2.7% tax increase. So, here, there's our $57,000. So, last year, our Special Articles were $56,900. You can see the friends in the reservoir here when I've got a petition, we paid them $1,000 last year, but from the general fund budget because they didn't have time to go out and with COVID and everything else, we just put that $1,000 somewhere else in the budget. But they went out, got signatures, and they're asking for $1,000. So, $56,900 was what our budget was last year. You know, one of those gets $3 instead of $5. So, $56,898. So, with this additional $1,000, that would be $57,900 in the budget. This is $50,000 that I just threw in there right now to deal with planning at Pope Davey. You know, Mark and Danny were here at the Rec and Community meeting last week. They have a $35,000 budget on a fairly loose scope right now that I think needs to be tightened up. So, $35,000 there, and I added $15,000 if we needed to do some planning down at the ice center spot. So, that wasn't in our budget last year. That's five sevenths of a cent on that tax rate at the top. Here's the $600,000 that I'm proposing that we pay refund for the mobile home park, the water lines there, and here's $100,000 that I'm proposing to the ice center that we talked about last week. So, there's $750,000. Now, go back up to the revenues at the top, Carol. Yeah, I don't know why that thing. So, right here, I've got as a revenue from ARPA. So, we've got $775,000 right now. We're going to get another $775,000 sometime in the next couple of months. So, we're going to have $1.5 million of ARPA money. That's $600,000 if we transfer out of the ARPA fund into the general fund, that will offset the money to be fund. So, there's no no impact on the taxes for that $600,000. And for that, I hope we can end up merging with two communities together. But, you know, the EPUB commissioners have already said, even if we don't merge, if we get that money to them, they'll give the time to revolve in one fund. The pink line that says transfer in from ARPA for lost revenue. Okay. So, I've told you a couple of times in the past, the rules that go along with ARPA say that you can use ARPA funds for a limited amount of things. No surface transportation issues. So, no roads, no bridges because that's in Biden's infrastructure plan. But you can use it for water and sewer and solar and, you know, hydro and geothermal or whatever you want to use it for. But there's a provision that says if you can prove that you've had lost revenue between 2019 and 2020 and between 2020 and 2021, you can use ARPA money to replace that lost revenue. So, I've done the calculation already. I should have looked at it before I came in here tonight to have the exact number. But we have several hundred thousand dollars of lost revenue just between 2019 and 2020. I haven't done the 20 to 21 yet because the 21 budget is just being finalized now. So, that lost revenue provision says that you don't have to have any special public meetings. You don't have to have any special votes. You can simply use that lost revenue that the ARPA funds to replace that lost revenue basically using is as if you collected those revenues in the past and it was part of your fund balance. So, we could move into this line item there that says transfer in ARPA lost revenue. If we put a hundred thousand dollars in there, that offsets the hundred thousand dollars going to the ice center which isn't funded right now except for taxes. And if you put that in there, then your taxes at the top are going to drop by a hundred thousand dollars. If we put more in there for lost revenue now above and beyond that hundred thousand dollars to the ice center, let's say we've got I think it's three hundred and something thousand dollars that I calculated in lost revenue. And it's like a whole tool that was built by our accounting firm, NEMRIC and BLCT and the government finance officers of America all built this tool. So, I'm confident that it's accurate and correct. So, we could put on that line any number that adds up to not exceed the lost revenue and I've only done the lost revenue calculation for one year right now. So, we could put money on that line and we could easily get money into the capital funds to raise the fund balances and those capital funds that we're concerned about. So, the bottom line question I have for you right now is what is your hope for a tax rate for 2022? Do you want to keep it at what was it last year, 53 cents? 52. We went from 55 to 51 and 20 and then we I think it was 53. I think you know we didn't maintain it. We bumped it up. So, if you want to have the same tax rate, you can do that. If you want to have a reduced tax rate, you can probably do that. If you want to live with tax rate that increases by a couple percent, you know right now as I told you inflation is going about five percent right now and at some point this money is going to kind of go away. So, I think maybe at best you'd want to keep the tax rate exactly the same. I don't think you're going up two percent. Anybody would complain about it but what I'm trying to tell you is that you've got some flexibility and you need to if you tell me now what you want for a tax rate then I can work over the next week and bring that back. But there's some of these things that we can do that won't cost the taxpayer anything in terms of its taxes right now. Can I ask you the question there? If you're going to claim lost revenue and you're saying you're saying that you can claim lost revenue from 19 and 20 would that be because you budgeted so much less in the revenue lines coming from the state? No, I was going to say it because we ended up getting what they do is they look at, they're not worried about what you budgeted for us, they're worried about what you got. So, when we looked at our 19 so the the way this tool works the revenue that we received for 2019 which was the year before COVID right the last quote unquote total year we had the revenue is all there and let's just say it adds up to five million dollars. The next column says actual 2020 doesn't say budget 2020 it says actual 2020 and it basically compares the revenue of column A to the revenue of column B and if column B is lower than it was in column A it's lost revenue but the way the federal rule is written you'll love this Chris because I don't know how much life the federal government. If your revenue stream didn't increase by at least four percent they consider it a loss so you could have a million dollars revenue 2019 and it should have been up four percent so if you have a million what's four percent of a million forty thousand so if you have a million thirty nine thousand the next year you've got a thousand dollars revenue so do they allow you just to make up the difference or do they allow you any number you want? Yeah, you're allowed to make up the difference. So this is why back in December the night that I announced that I was going to retire if you remember I said that this ARPA funding had the ability to help us be transformation and one of the things was the deal with NIFA and one of the things was trying to put the ice center on a footing that allows them to continue on as a private not-for-profit I was speaking about by the way they're going to come here to talk to the whole swipe board next week on Monday night so you don't have to worry about only two of you are going to be able to hear from them and ask questions so anyway I'm kind of looking for some guidance from you right now what are you looking to see for a tax rate I'm not asking you to approve the ice center thing tonight you kind of indicated before at least Mike said well if we're going to do it it should be a special article that's where I am but you did it already that can be done without without any pain to the to the taxpayer and if you don't use the money the last revenue money it's okay um you know that that $1.5 million that we're going to have from ARPA and if you do appropriate the $600,000 to refund you're going to have $1.1 million after that you're going to well you haven't till 2024 to figure out how you want to use the ARPA funds we're not going to figure it all out in this budget season I would recommend that you know once we get through this budget season we'll it'll depend we're going to try to write a charter to merge the communities maybe you push off discussing how you introduce the ARPA money until 2023 and you've got a couple of years to decide how you're going to use it if you don't have to use it all this year and you don't even have to decide how you're going to use it all this year you've got to decide by 2024 and you have to spend it by 2026 it's a crack another stupid question by you budgeting $600,000 for E5 budgeting $100,000 for the ice in it is that your way of creating lost revenue in a sense no no that's my way of spending some spending no I'm saying it's not creating lost revenue so that you can use the ARPA to replace it it's not revenue that's an expense revenue was revenue was revenue we can't really bring it on to our books and so we have a legal way to follow the rule of spending so basically he's doing is he's spending $600,000 to E5 and then bringing that in as revenue offset I just said no no no but it's not creating lost revenue see this see this column assume that said 2019 up here right so go down to the bottom of that column the bottom of the revenue so right this is all this is revenue right it's not spending anything right that's tax money grant money recreation fees and everything $3,067,000 so let's say that was let's say this was the 2019 column for revenue let's say this is the 2020 column for revenue no spending three two four eight three oh six seven so round it off you know $250,000 of lost revenue right so that's the it's revenue that we didn't collect now you have the ability to spend some of that revenue so you can put it in to your revenue reimburse yourself put it in to your through the ARPA money yeah you you use the ARPA money to replace that revenue that we had before that you lost and it's available now for you to spend okay so so it's not putting that if the $600,000 and the $100,000 weren't line items before they are now there was never any revenue source for either of those but you but but I'm using we have had losses you're gonna spend some money we've got $1.5 million of ARPA money sitting there it can be used for infrastructure things water sewer solar housing probably you can't use it for bridges you can't use it for paving you can't use it for culverts so that's where the $600,000 comes from so you take you can say and if we didn't have lost revenue right if I went through that exercise and there was if we had not lost revenue between 2019 and 2020 we couldn't do this we couldn't use it this way we would have to work with the public we'd have to say well we're going to do XYZ water project or XYZ sewer project but the federal government has allowed you to use that to make up lost revenue so all you have to do is go through your normal budgeting process which we're doing now Chris you could use that lost revenue for anything we could throw a party for bill you know with that money you know well I wouldn't recommend well I'm not being a little facetious but you could do anything you know once you show you've had that loss then it's basically it's like your money and that's why you decide to do it and that's why I'm saying that the $600,000 there offsets the spending that I posed to E5 if you put $50,000 or $100,000 on that pink lining that would offset the spending that I proposed for the ice center but but the $600,000 is not lost revenue spending that's spending for water infrastructure every time you do a spend like that there should be an offsetting expense so that that take your line item fits the category of that the blue line the blue one fits the category so you the red one give it to an organization and you know you could probably make the ice center fit the category it's a not for profit you could do it but I you know I was trying to see I thought we could fund the ice center that $100,000 without using any ARPA money at all and I think I proved that you can't I mean it's right now we've got a a modest tax rate increase not using any ARPA money for that $100,000 in the ice center but if you don't want modest tax increase you can put $100,000 there if you want to get more money into your CIP funds you can put some more money on that line item and and it's fine so we have a lot I'm trying to say we've got a lot of flexibility for the first time really well can you remind the board so two percent just to the board now two percent is a one one cents on the factory so it would be the 54 cents in your mind and for how much that would be in terms of additional revenue well I two percent go up to the very top just when we're talking through these different scenarios so if you go to the very top you see that the tax rate the tax increase is $112,435 right yeah 12,435 divided into 4,039,610 is 2.78 percent $112,000 depending on the grand list raises about $80,000 so that would be what a penny and a third something like that so I'm just trying to get an idea of what you want your tax so if we put that 100k in as the reimbursement fund we would be able to approve this budget as is without the tax increase yeah if you put the $100,000 on that line coming from effort to fund the ice center yield that $112,435 we dropped off to $12,435 and if you wanted to put more money into the CIPs which I think we're going to need to do even if we take out and if we take that $200,000 for the reservoir load out this year you probably don't have to put a lot more money in the CIPs but at some point you're going to have to do the reservoir load right so um I guess my recommendation is that I don't think it's a good idea to lower the tax rate below what it was last year because if you lower the tax rate you give up that tax revenue and at some point you're going to have to raise it just to get back up to where you were so I wouldn't lower it but well I have maybe a procedural question I can't remember how we did it last year and all those special articles we talked about you know some of the things going in special articles there's some of the small special articles how we used to town meeting group them we didn't do that everyone has a yay or nay yeah that's what I thought I just couldn't remember we can't you can but this is fair yeah I it's I wouldn't do it no I think it won't tell them together I think we did count meetings so we could bring a hundred thousand dollars of lost revenue into this budget to basically land at 53 cents again and well I think you if you brought a hundred thousand dollars into this budget then you're going to have a if you have a grand list increase you know so you might end up with you'd have a lower tax or so what did you say the portion for this year is seven what would you say and right now based on what you proposed you're spending most of the 775 but when the other one comes you'll still have a billion dollars this year but I guess to complete my question if you were to bring the hundred thousand just this is what's known to discuss around grand list growth because maybe we can do 53 cents and just hope the grand list covers that short all right but basically after the conversation next week with the i-center please aboard feel like we want to put a special article request of a hundred thousand dollars to the ice center and it gets voted down that just means that we would have revenue tax it wouldn't change our taxation rate because that would be as a part of the voting right yeah if if from my the way I would do it is if if we've got a hundred thousand dollars coming from our quote and a hundred thousand dollar special article to the ice center if the hundred thousand dollar special article fails I would transfer a hundred thousand to the ice center is probably going to be one of the more controversial things and I think at the special meeting you really need to explain well you haven't even decided if you're going to do it well I know it was we decided to do that I'm just saying you know when you have big numbers big numbers come with more well unless they're big numbers like a whole budget where people can't understand them but when they know a single item they know what it is and they have opinions for against a lot yeah I understand and that's and I think that's that's where I was feeling on that level I think if we had open county you can explain it better and make people understand that you're not going to be this isn't going to hurt at all I mean you can write the article in such a fashion that people should know that it's not going to add to the tax burden but there's still going to see that hundred thousand I still get to see the ice so it might not be so I understand yeah I would think it'd be more inclined to believe that for some reason that county's not in the ice center you know that's hard anytime you have a big number you know anything from 15 to 30 thousand dollars people will have more and that's and that's why you know I mean I put it in the special articles right now but it doesn't have to be in the special article it can just be in the budget and remember the school tax rate I'm not blaming them but that's probably going to go up so does anybody I mean I think we all realistically would love to see our tax rate go down but ideally even if our tax rate went down if you're going to see the school go up you're going to see a net payment increase but you know but last year I know you know I do you guys just surprised me all the time because last year we went from an approved budget in 2020 that required 55 cents we cut it that year and raised the 51 cent tax rate I came in here with a budget last year at 51 cents didn't have to go up and you said well we can't have a tax rate that we've got to add something because you don't want to just you know have to go up double in the future so realistically it put it down now no but I love that um you know maybe by this time next week I'll know what the 2020 loss revenue is so that was a question to me as long as it's time for money available well the aqua money is there the aqua money is going to be $1.5 million you have to go the interesting thing about our family we all have that big animals on our well I'm thinking bill I wouldn't want to know where it's for $600 but sounds like you know originally this idea sounds like it was really going to be the $600 basically you acquire the asset of e-fud and get the revenue alone on I just want to understand exactly what that $600 is and what it really seems like it's legally because it sounds like this is a project that's going to go over that standing construction component of the water system of the trailer or some of the other projects I just want to understand that we go into town today that that urge is really going to be in place right right right the proposal that I made was $600,000 for e-fud to use the water project in exchange for the and that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's sorry to do this but the last thing that the last meeting we had when I said I don't recall taking taking the water and sewer contract you're getting fired you recall along and what I said was when I had that idea that was what it was going to do I think that that exchange alone is it's worthwhile I don't see that the problem is anything the problem doesn't have any risk in any of it but but if you read the memo that I think that there is it goes on to say and oh by the way I think the next step of this should be commercial and e-fud was they don't they want this and does that urge come in it well I mean I guess it couldn't come in any possible because maybe we would if we paid them anything we'd be in our references and we'd work right right right right right right so this is just the beginning of that also because the resources live in separate entity the our property came into town in the only way that you can access it is through our property without wanting to do that right right right so so I'm trying to bring a 53 cent tax rate yeah 53 cent tax rate probably raises more money than a good chance this was going to be the foreign list rate so yeah I'm saying that I really I wanted to support it a little higher personally I don't think we need you exactly no one might be able to afford money to balance and as a chance depending on what happened this budget that you might not have without that tax utilization again I'm trying to show you don't know you don't have to see where we're going right right right right so for our money we need to speak to infrastructure the ability of that money to be used for infrastructures is it infrastructure in the broader sense or is it certain that it is what I know that we can't do with it except for the lots of revenue and aspect of it is that you can't use that for what we typically on the outside of the infrastructure so you can't use it in any circumstances so loans bridges that kind of stuff you can't use at all except if you can show us revenue and you can just live in your capital fund and then transfer into your CIP so we will be able to bolster our capital funds with this lost revenue there's more lost revenue than this hundred thousand dollars that are proposed with ice so I think and you know might be a good idea once I figure out how much the lost revenue is and I don't have a whole other kind of should be this would be out of revenue but I'm hoping that that the money system but you know the lost revenue you might want to get that into your budget and into your capital funds now and then it's it's there it's there to change the rules and do you want to motion with the CIP scheme to go on the most from the library most of the rest of the year yeah and I think based on what I just said now there's no great reason to thank you thank you Okay, it's a very interesting discussion. Thank you guys for all your effort that you put into all this. Thank you very much. I'm going to let you know, 60. Thanks again. Okay. And then, we don't need to make the most of the music. I'll say it like that. So, let's look at the record. We intended the record. The record is going to be providing a proposal for agreement between a group that feels like it's going to take some understanding and you're at maybe the council. Okay, on whether or not you can make an agreement that it's not on the validity of any sort. And I'll do this, but a lot of work and a lot of discussion into every minor agreement. It seems like most of the folks who are participating in this all agree to basically it's not going to be a law or anything like that. I do whatever I want. I hope maybe it's going to be a specific plan. I think there needs to be discussion on committees like that and conflict of interest. Discipline again at that meeting in terms of the ability to get through gender. That's the picture of the town. That's the picture of the town. I really don't think there is a problem. I think that was before. I think it was one of the better. I think Mark and I are there a little more order and this is faster than you. I'm just going to go through the board and not be able to maintain its numbers. Anyone here? Both of you are here? I don't know.