 Welcome to the public forum and karaoke evening, so we'll be ending this right here. Well, I'll take it off and hand it to you once. You do not want me singing karaoke. We're going to call this life board meeting to order. First on the agenda is public comment. This is anything that's not on the agenda. Seeing it any will move into the agenda. Which is all Trevor. I'm just going to do the quick overview. I got nominated by not stepping back fast enough when it was time. So we'll just do a quick overview. There's a lot of familiar faces both in the room and online. All these materials are available online as well. And then I think the idea is to open up feedback. You've got three members of the board here with you tonight. Two of whom serve on the police services committee. Got another three members as I look around the room of the police services committee. And the chief is here as well. So hopefully we can cover most of the questions that come up and or take in any of the feedback. So the basic overview of where we are right now is that we are. There is a proposed budget for a fiscal 25 that's been warned. That will be considered on March 5th. There's a couple of different process points along the way. There's an information meeting and hearing on Monday. There's the town meeting event on Saturday morning the second and the vote itself. Voting day is March 5th but absentee ballots are available now. If you see Emory who's here with us he can his office can set you up and you can vote early but not often. All of those are up there. That budget is based on one of the three models that we covered when we were here in November. And that the police services committee looked at. They basically looked at three models existing district expanding district and townwide district. So those were the base budgets we built. The FY 25 budget that you see before you has some further refinement. We got more detailed numbers back on things like insurance workers comp costs those types of things. So those are incorporated. We also added a plan to cops grant and staggered the hiring of an additional officer to try to create a little bit of mitigation of cost impact. And so there's a full year added officer and then essentially a half fiscal year added officer. So there's two officers that enter the mix which would give us four plus chief and there's an admin and there's still a little bit of park time officer capacity in there. It's only a couple of hundred hours a year. We aren't really utilizing that in a significant form but it's there in case we find somebody who fits what we need and has that sort of yearning for a few extra hours. This also pairs with you. There's some draft committee recommendations on the website as well that the slick board scene layout some of the process element. They talk a little bit about why the existing district model is here before you this year talks a little bit about everything that went into that conversation. There was some talk about an expanded district vote. There was a basic map drawn of one idea. I would sort of stress that that was an idea. There was an additional conversation about does that make sense? Do we do what we do with the sewer district where you move it? We got feedback from the listeners office that it's easier to do full parcel boundaries in terms of determining who's in and who's out. So that's where those maps when you see kind of the squiggly lines were following parcel lines. So I suspect there'll be additional conversation on that. And we got to a point in January where we had to warn something for March in order to be operational on July 1. There's a timing element to all of this as well. Other things in the recommendation include there's a social work crisis worker, some money in there to support that as a program. There was a lot of talk about a school resource officer. Doesn't seem like that's going to be in the mix, but certainly a conversation point to continue moving forward. And then there are other elements about the budget itself. The general fund payment for service, for example, is still in the FY25 budget. And there's a little bit of talk about other coverage options. What's happened in law enforcement? What are the municipal needs for law enforcement that we're seeing pop up? One of the things that really changed from a year ago to this point is it was highlighted how many communities are in a similar spot regardless of size. And that there's a need that is beyond the capacity to serve, whether it be the number of officers for their own department or regional partners that were or weren't there before. And so we're seeing these conversations everywhere. And what that leads to is maybe at some point in the near future, there's a chance to participate in, say, regional policing conversation. But that's a few steps and a few mechanical issues away from where we're at. That's the brief overview. I'm looking at the committee and the board members to see what they want to add to that. This is all at RandolphVT.org. Look at the sidebar on the right. The first two should stack at the public forum from November. All of that's still up. You just got to scroll down a little bit to get there. So it's all available. Call that as under the police department tab. I think that's sort of the quick and dirty update of where we are. I'm going to stay up here not because I'm the moderator, but because I'm the tech guy as well. So I'll hand this out to you all. And maybe just one quick thing. We see a lot of familiar faces and we have a lot of new ones. But when we think about who wants to talk to you, we can focus on those who haven't participated as much yet. I'm going to go to those now just to make sure everybody gets a moment. At this point, we're going to open it up for questions that folks have about what's coming before the voters in March. We'll start here in the room. Students from anybody online? Yeah. This is Joyce Mizuko. One thing with the budget and the line item for the amount to be raised by taxes from the general fund. There has been created some mechanism for tracking the costs to see whether or not the types of services provided from the police department to the areas outside of the police district. Equally amount of money that's being appropriated. I know that somebody else has already asked for information to see if they could see if the dollars that are being raised are being used appropriately. That the funds are not being used to support the police district without actually being spent for the residents outside of the district. The other question is when you create the budget and you create this light item for a revenue to come from the general fund into the police district. Has those people in the police district who are being taxed has that rate somehow been adjusted so that they are not being taxed twice for use in the police district? So I'll take a stab at this and then maybe there's a chief in a town manager that can help me with this a little bit. So have we set up a so many widget so many dollars format for that? The answer is no. And here's some of the logic behind this. When you create a police district or a police force in Vermont, you automatically sign them up to back up everybody in the area. So there are a certain number of hours that that police force is going to spend backing up the Vermont State Police backing up Northfield PD Orange County Sheriff. I'm sure there's others because you were in Tumbridge one day. And when you look at that service and those roles that they play as well as, you know, you look at the service that's provided outside of the police district. That's all backing up the Vermont State Police, right? That's their primary district. So if they can't get on that call or they need more than one officer or whatever and our folks go, they're backing them up. When we look at that level of service and where that need is the logic behind the number for the general fund to transfer over. Did we have any basis for picking that number? Nope. It was a guess. Remember, we created a police department in five months. Four months, five months. About six weeks. Well, yes. So the first line that we chose 100,000 that everybody looking at in the current budget was kind of a guess. We knew about what happened under Orange County, but we didn't have the total thing. So when we look at that service, the conversation was kind of around the fact that it's not really fair that only the police district absorbed that cost, right? It's not their cost because it's not serving them, but because they have a police district that's serving everybody and the majority of those calls that they go to out of the district, if they go, are in the town of Randolph. So we're able to capture the data now. It is being captured. It's being reported on the town website and on the police department's Facebook page and whatnot. So the data is coming in and we'll know what that is. But how do you put a value on that backup service being there and that skill set being there in the response? You know, I could come to your house for a call and it ends up your child dialed 911 by mistake and I'm there 15 minutes explaining to him kind of what happened. Or I get there and there's an intruder and I'm there four and a half hours, right? So there's no way of knowing, but when I call, I want that person there because that need is there. So I don't think there's an easy way to say so many widgets, so many dollars, so much for a dollar amount in a contract. I think the contract that we'll see end up being discussed to put in play for the access to those funds will be more of a, this is the level of service. And either the types of services that will be provided and this is the dollar amount that that value is tied to. And I don't see that as double taxing. It's another dollar amount that the entire town is picking up. But in a sense it is double taxing because police district is also being taxed the town amount too. Correct, but they're also providing that service outside of the area. It's different hours. It's different. We're not paying Scott twice in the district and out of the district to go to that call. It's $1 value raised and maybe when he gets all done, it's a grant that paid his time for that also. But, you know, there is a different level of service and that level of service is the entire town saying, we recognize that this police district has been set up and one of the roles they have is to back up all the other law enforcement in the area. And since part of our town is covered by the state police at this point, the district's backing it up and it takes some level. The other alternative is to let the entire amount be raised by the police district and that part just didn't seem fair. Marty. Go ahead, Marty. Sorry, can you hear me now? Yeah. Okay, thank you. I actually want to come back to the issue you were just discussing but there's something else that's on my mind first. And that is that as I read article five in the town meeting warning. There's a conundrum there and I'm not sure, given what you just said and and what the structure of the budget is I'm not sure how that conundrum can be resolved. What article five says is that it asks the voters residing in the police district, who are the only ones who can vote on the police district budget of course, which is a total expenditure of $728,737 of which an estimated 465,237 shall be raised by taxes and estimated 263,500 shall be from non tax revenue. Well, unless I'm not able to read the budget, which which Trevor I'm sure makes is probably true. But the 728,737 includes the 125,000 to be raised in the general fund for transfer to the police district at some time. So, it's really not 263,500 is raised from non tax revenue. Because 125,000 of that is tax revenue, it's from the general fund. But when I go in and pay my property taxes. I don't pay some mop for the general fund and some amount for the police district. I play one amount for the entire bill. So I don't understand how we can mean it's misleading to tell the voters that 163,500 of the 728,737 is going to be raised from non tax revenue. When in fact 125,000 more is going to be raised from tax revenue. It's not going to be raised by the in the police district. It's going to be raised townwide in the general fund. And of course, as I've as I've long said, I'm often said during this last year and a half. Somebody subsidizing somebody. And I don't think we can figure out who at this point. But when I look at the police records for calls on the website of the town website. Only five months available at this time from September of 2023 to January of 2024. Only about 8.2% of the calls are for in the town and exactly. As you said, they're mostly to backup the state police. And yet, the taxpayers in the town who are paying for about 60% of the general fund are putting 60% of 125,000 dollars into that that level of service which seems impossible to justify that much. And I, I looked at every invoice from the Sheriff's Department over the all the years Orange County Sheriff's Department serves the town of Randolph. And there was never a time where they spent anywhere near $25,000 even outside of the outside of the village. So I think article five is misleading. And I'm not sure if it passes that it's justified. And for these reasons, I'm going to vote against the general fund. I probably vote for the police district, but I'm going to vote against the general fund because I think this is misleading and misuse and I think as I've also said before, it flatly violates the terms of the merger agreement, which was passed widely by both the town and the village and ratified subsequently by the legislature and is the constitution of the town of Randolph. So for the way the articles are written away the articles have long been written it's a common structure for the articles. This is a common municipal article structure. All of this money is tax money at some level unless it's from a fee. So when you look at the general fund budget, which is written the same way and has been for years, you'll see current use payments, you'll see pilot payments. Those are tax dollars. So we use this as the construct to try to denote what's raised locally from property taxes. And then that's a catch all category. It's all tax money. So are all the questions misleading? Have we been doing this for years this way? Have all these towns been doing it this way? This is the kind of asinine argument we keep getting. This is the way that these have been done for years. So just to clarify one thing and Emery, maybe you can help me with this. I arrive at the town offices to vote. I walk up, you check out my name. I'm in the police district. Correct. So the construct of the question is in the police district. That's the amount of money that's being raised in taxes for that by that district specifically. Correct. Yes. Okay. So I think that's where the confusion is, Marty. It's not that there isn't. I'm like, I don't think I'm confused. I think it, I think it says. Hey, I'm sorry, go ahead. The confusion is in the, in the way we have to warn articles and how they're voted. And it's not saying that you don't probably have a point that we can write a whole dialogue, but we're not allowed to. We have to have a very specific guess or no question. And so on this question, it's in the police district alone should that amount of money be raised from taxes to fund a portion of that $700,000 budget. In the general fund side, then you have the question on the total of that budget, which includes 125,000 in this coming vote. If I may, may I continue. In the secretary of state's office, there is an entire file of several hundred pages surrounding the time when the merger agreement was consummated. And at the time of merger agreement was consummated. We created a separate fund for the police fund. Part of that had been paid for out of the general fund because it was a townwide department. Well, it was a village. Now it was, it was, it was not separated, but when they, when they agreed to the merger to protect the vote, the voters outside of the police district and to protect the voters inside the police district from this crossing of the line between the two separate services being provided. So service for police outside of the district and service for the police only in the district and only paid for by people in the district. That's why they created the police fund so that there couldn't be this kind of greasing of across across the bomb boundaries, shifting money back and forth where it can't be trans, transparently evaluated. And you're asking us now to vote for $125,000 from the general fund. And you can't even tell us how much has already been spent from the general fund for police services outside the district. It's just not rational. It's just not a rational system. So do you think the board should have asked for another 125,000 out of the just the police district to cover services that are provided outside of the police district. No, I don't think you should be providing services outside the police district because the merger agreement says you can't. Unfortunately, Vermont doesn't allow us just to say, whoops, you're at the border, we gotta stop. And if we want the state police to back us up inside of the district, we kind of have to back them up outside of the district. Those are all good arguments for a townwide police department. Well, and we're working on that, but we're not quite there yet. So did you have other questions? No, that's fine. Thank you. Okay. Are there any others? Jane, can you just clarify that we're that extra 263,500 non non non tax revenue. Where was that coming from? If you look at the budget that's out there, it shows you under police department flood revenues and it's a variety of grants and tickets. Okay, bigger printing. Oh, okay. Oh, from that. No, I know. I probably should know. No, that's fine. That's other things like that. Okay. Well, not seeing any more questions or comments. I'd like to thank everybody for coming. Um, and looking forward to seeing you all again on January on January 26. Monday, there's a public information meeting. That's for everything that's on everything. I'll just use that. That'll be a hybrid like this, but town offices will be the physical location. And then the Saturday events at 10 at Chandler. And then voting day is Tuesday. But we're hoping to have this pretty well hashed by them. So folks can have all the information they need. With that, I'll entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. All those in favor? All right. Thanks everybody for coming out.