 a select board meeting for the town of Essex for Monday, November 6th, 2023 to order. First item on the agenda, are there any agenda additions or changes from staff? We do have one from staff. And that would be to, oh, are you there, my green? Go ahead, I kept talking over you, go. Yeah, we'd like to add one at the end to talk about contracts for executive session, please. Okay, everybody hear that? Add a second executive session for discussed contracts. Is that it? That's it. Any addition or change requests from board members? Kendall, anything? Okay. All right, so next thing we need to do is approve the proposed or vote on approval of the proposed agenda amendment, which would be to add a second executive session just to discuss contracts. Need a motion? Oh, I make the motion, I'm sorry, that we approve the agenda changes that was presented. Second. Thank you, Don, thank you, Tracy. Any further discussion? All those in favor of amending the agenda, please say aye. Those saying aye. The motion passes 5-0, we've amended the agenda. Next thing on the agenda is public to be heard. Is it time for those who are attending the meeting to address the board on? Just a clarification, since we do have a remote member, do all of our votes have to be by roll call? Only if it's not unanimous. Okay, thank you. So, okay, if you'd like to speak during public to be heard, it's time for those attending the meeting to speak to the board on town business that's not on the agenda. If you'd like to speak during public to be heard, you can either raise your hand in the room or use the raise your hand feature in the Zoom application. If you move your cursor down to the bottom of your screen and hover over the reactions button or click on it, it will give you the opportunity to raise your hand. So, if you would like to speak, please raise your hand. I'm seeing hands in the room. Lorraine. Hi, thank you, Chair. A couple of questions. One, I see in Essex Junction that the seniors got word that the space that the seniors for the town and the junction have been using will no longer be available. And so as running in terms of our RAC department and opportunity, are we gonna look at any spaces here to host things like bingo and cards and the programs that were being held there? I'm concerned for our senior citizens. And the other thing I was trying to find out was if I can have an accounting and a quantification of how many people have died in our town and in the city from overdose deaths in 2023. I sent a letter to Greg and to Sharon Kelly, our health officer and I didn't hear anything back. So I'm just trying to get a handle on what we're looking at in terms of the problem, the public health crisis. And I see in the packet and the monies that are gonna come out. So there's more monies to be distributed for the, from the Purdue settlement. Just wanna make sure that we're using the money and seeking the money in a way that's gonna help us and that we make sure that we use metrics, the show that whatever we're doing is working also appeared to me from some of the things that I was hearing that there's training that is also involved in some of the funds that are to go out and just wanna make sure that leaders in our community will receive that training to understand what the money's for. Because we're already seeing in the country some shenanigans in terms of how some of the monies are being applied. So just those two questions. Thanks. You wanna respond? All right, please. Hi, Lorraine. Yes, we are aware that the senior space, the town and the Essex Junction have a shared services agreement for senior services that expires on December 31st of this year. Our recreation department is looking into space to allow to continue some of the programs that are offered to seniors, the cards, the bridge, stuff like that. They have some promising leads and hopefully we'll have something more formal soon. As far as the overdose deaths, Timmy Getchell sent you an email back. I can double check tomorrow. I was copied on it, so I know it went out, but we can double check to make sure you received it. The long story short is that we don't really track those deaths. There might be some resources at the state level, but locally and at the town of Essex, it's not data that we have. All right, thanks, Greg. Sorry, Andy, may I speak to that? Yeah, go ahead, Lauren. So the data that, how I found out was I go through the weekly police logs and the untimely deaths, and there's a lag time on the portal, or certainly because they have to wait for toxicology to confirm, so there's a lag time often on the deaths, but that should be certainly in our police logs. Certainly I see that Burlington has that information as well in terms of the hotspots, and if we're not collecting that data, are we going to make sure we collect that data? And one of the concerns I have is there's overlap between the fire department and the response, and concern about the bill that we're gonna get as well from first responder from Essex Rescue, if we're not handling this in a way with data and understanding what the problem is and what the needs are. So are we gonna try to get our public safety people together so we can figure out what the data is, how we can access it and how, when the monies do come in and hopefully we're applying for those monies, how we can utilize it in a way that's effective? Thanks, thanks. All right, thanks, Lorraine. I have to digest what you're asking for a bit. So thanks for your comments. Margaret Smith. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Okay, thank you. Speaking of police logs, I don't normally look at the police log, but I've been wondering about the fire across the street from the pious church. And the only thing they say on the news is, well, they're looking into it. And there's been nothing on front porch form. And I, you know, it's a block away from my house. I'm really concerned. So I don't know where to get more information. And as far as the senior center, I think it's just really sad that the city rec department is taking this step to close it down. This is one place where citizens from both town and village could meet in a non-confrontational manner. And if the town pursues a space for the senior center, I'm hoping that seniors from the village will also be welcome. And I understand there's some concern about the issue of the senior bus too. So all things to be thinking about. Thank you. All right, thanks, Margaret. With regard to the fire, yeah, I don't know how to, I don't know that there's more information available. And say at this point, there's no more information available. Sorry, Margaret. My understanding that the residents that were living in that home both were able to get out safely, but the home itself was a total loss, I think. I assume the investigation is ongoing with regard to the cause of the fire. Yeah, I would say from driving past it, it looks like a total loss. Anyway, well, I'm just wondering where and when where we might look for more information. Anyway, thank you. Okay, thank you for your comments. Anyone else like to speak during public to be heard? They don't see any hands in the room or online. So let's move on to our first business item, which is the Winooski Valley Park District annual report, FY 25 budget presentation. Those were. Where do we sit? Sit up here. If there's more of you than there are chairs, feel free to grab another chair and introduce yourselves and welcome. So thanks for having us today. I'm Nick Warner, Executive Director Winooski Valley Park District. This is Larcha Cody. She's our operations manager and has been with Park District for 12 years. And Jeff Tice, your trustee who has been very ably guiding the ship. And thanks for having us here. Obviously, because of the pandemic, our visits have been less frequent. It just rolled me back in the game. First thing is I wanna promise you, I'm not gonna walk you through the 52 image PowerPoint that I sent. I just sent that because it was a nice piece we put together for a 50th anniversary celebration that we had recently. And for those who aren't familiar with us, that just will be a great way to get up to speed. Most of you know who we are, but we're a hybrid municipal corporation, regional municipal corporation and 501C3 non-profit that's owned by the eight member towns that we work with including you folks. And currently we own 18 parks and for 1,750 acres of property. It is all managed 100% for conservation. All the properties have some form of permanent protection on them. So they are all properties that were completely vetted before we obtained them that they could stay in permanent conservation. The parks within your town include Woodside and Overlook. Essex Junction owns a piece of what Woodside? They have a smaller piece needed in there. But the whole idea of the regional park agency is we're able to create a lot of efficiency in terms that we have three full-time employees. You see two thirds of our full-time staff. Our third employee, Tim Larnad, our park superintendent has been with us for 22 years and he is a huge reason why we operate as well as we do just in terms of his ability to maintain such a large portfolio. I'll give you just some quick features and certainly I'll keep it quick so you can have questions. So the last few years have been extremely challenging but also presented some really interesting opportunities. When COVID hit, no one knew what was gonna happen when pretty much the day that the governor issued the stay-at-home order, our parks filled up astonishingly. So we had one day in Colchester Pond where we had over 100 cars. We were the place to go during the peak of the pandemic where it was safe to go and recreate. We thought that those numbers might dwindle but they have not. People are still using our parks. People would never walk trails before that we see out there are still doing it. So that's the silver lining with COVID is a lot more people are doing pass-about door recreation. And of course we were impacted by the flood event this year. We had nine of our parks completely invaded. Woodside was the deepest water. We estimate about nine feet of water over top of the park there. Just really interesting hydrodynamics of that curve in the river and the way that the flood worked. But since we are an organization that manages these lands as floodplains our overall impact on all our structures and infrastructure is less than $30,000 most of which is insured. So it really, we've had a lot of discussions with our trustees and it did actually weigh before the flood in that our organization began as one to protect scenic vistas and now we're very much in the flood resilience and mitigation business with 51% of our assets are in floodplain and we're a unique organization that we embrace that. So we're gonna over the coming years as we look at acquisitions and expansion that that is something we're gonna be very focused on. Really pleased and now we have eight communities obviously with Essex Junction they've been just so you know they've been great and very supportive and we have all our eight trustee chairs filled for the first time in a long time. So I'm thrilled about that. It's a very dynamic and diverse group of folks. Over the last several years we've added Durway Cove Park which I actually talked about in this from and also 10 acres to the Colchester. On natural area we're looking at a new park in Williston a 29 acre parcel. We're in negotiations now over getting a permanent access to that property. Also potentially a park in Winooski Memorial Park on the river and a couple of small properties in Burlington and sort of an outside chance for a South Burlington Park. We're not in the business of you know rabidly going after new properties. Everything is very nuanced and very incremental and very deliberate. So it takes quite a bit for us to obtain a property. We do a lot of investigation into whether we can afford it, whether it's appropriate, whether we're taking it out of potential development all those things. So it's quite a process. And you know really the issues for us now in terms of management is the heavy use, the post flood erosion on our shoreline. We've lost quite a bit of shoreline and we own a number of historic buildings. We're going after some grants now to do some restoration. We have historic buildings at Colchester Pond and in Burlington. But we've been very pleasantly, I won't use the word surprise, but just very the support of the towns for the last few years even through all this stuff has been tremendous. And we're very pleased about that. And we are working hard to keep our budget tight and only aspirin incremental increases each year. This year is unique in that we made a strategic decision which is that we put a line item in our budget or income from other sources. And it's kind of the chicken and the egg. We decided actually something I presented to my board is our towns have been asking us to look for operating capital from outside of usual source which is you guys give me this money each year. And we know there's money out there and if we don't make plans to go after it, we're not going to get it. So I put a line item in the budget for $20,000 worth of income from other sources. And we're already actually preparing application now and also there may be a point where I come back to you to talk about asking for some kind of state support. In the past, we've had some state support in the early odds for I think four fiscal years. We had some money directly from the state. So we're keeping our operations as tight as possible. We're leveraging as much money as possible. We carry note that and we're incrementally expanding and like I said, we have a highly engaged board of trustees that keeps us focused on our mission. That's the overview. Do you have any questions or concerns about the budget or the report that we sent? Any questions from board members? What's the flood damage to getting assistance from the state and the flood relief funds? We got three, there are three sources. One is we got a grant from the Vermont Community Foundation. The second was election and playing based on program gave us a grant and those two together amount of $15,000, which was substantial. We now have claims that we've issued with passive our insurer and which they've indicated they're going to pay. We're put into this large flood pool and it has to go through all this. But we actually didn't qualify for some of that money because we didn't suffer economic losses in the traditional sense. So we did look at that funding. We also registered for FEMA right away in case we found something severely undermined that we needed to repair a bit. Frankly, the amount of damage we suffered was not significant enough to go after FEMA and we think we're actually going to come out of this probably bed even after we get reimbursed. Thank you. But that's a great question. We looked at everything, especially early on. Thank you. Yes. Any other questions? I was going to ask about FEMA. Yeah. Can you see anything from me? Kendall, you got any questions? Yeah, I was just curious if you guys were set up where you could accept legacy donors? As in, you mean individual donors to our system? Yes, exactly. Yes, we are. It's not, honestly, it's not a path that we actively pursue. The reason being, the main reason being that we are totally relying on our partnerships with the various nonprofits that hold the easements on our properties and provide us funding and frankly, teams of people to help us do our work. So it's kind of a, we're not actively, you're not going to get a letter from us asking for your annual $25, but we are set up as someone offered us that we could accept it, but it's not, and frankly, it's not an active thing that we do. But we are a 501c3, so you would realize the tax benefits. Okay. All right, thanks Kendall. I got a couple of questions. You mentioned that this is the first time you've had a revenue line item in your budget. I thought you've been working with doing contract work with a couple of the communities previously. Yeah, this would be like a fifth source of revenue. We've got the town revenue, we've got the contract work, which we're still doing. We also have lease income from our various tenants and farmers. Then we get occasional donations and then this would be a fifth source of revenue. Okay, okay, so that's an additional revenue line. I misspoke. Okay, no, no, okay, I get that. In your presentation, you talked about invasive species and I know we have concerns about that as everybody does. We've had, we just recently had a a cleanup event at Indian Brook Park and I think there were some challenges with the weather and getting a number of volunteers to help out with that. I don't know if you interact with your member communities to support those kind of activities. Yeah, we should coordinate. There's some really good folks out there who are doing work in the state level and regional level but it's a little bit like going uphill all the time in terms of keeping at it. As part of our regular maintenance operations we're constantly dealing with invasive species at different levels. It's gonna be really interesting to see what our parks look like this coming year after the flooding as well because that changes the whole ecology of the woods. But poison parsnip is a big deal, buckthorn, honeysuckle and the crew is constantly going after those in strategic places and every once in a while but fairly frequently we get large groups that come in and do volunteer days and help us out in targeted areas. And Lauren works with a network called the Wildways which is a Berlin's network to coordinate all the in-owning outdoor rail organizations and it's been hugely successful in part of what Wildways does is organize groups too but to do this kind of work. So we'd be happy to coordinate that. It's a really great community of people that work on stuff. We do have a member of our conservation and trails committee here, so I won't please hear you. Awesome. You're hearing this. Okay, thank you for that. My other question I've asked you before, Woodside has a canoe access. The actual access is a quarter of a mile from the parking lot. Yes. Anything you have, I understand you can't build a road further out toward the river there. I would, yes, I don't know. Yeah, and it got pretty impacted by the flood. That's what was always one or two. So yeah, I know we actually talked about this a lot last year after our last conversation. There's a lot of if we had physically more parking space down there, if the shoreline was different characteristic, it would be a lot more appropriate spot. Still a lot of people take their boats down there. Do they really? Okay. Not a lot, but I mean, we see two or three people every year, including I guess one guy with an engine, he pulls the boat, the gate and drags it down there. But it's, all kidding aside, I took another look at Google Maps and getting in the water around here is tough. We get that. So I'd be really intrigued to see if there's other ways that we could be more proactive to get boats down there, but the shoreline itself, and Tim reminded me that it's really a tough spot and it's a sharp curve in the river. And that's one reason the water was so high there. I learned a lot about hydrology from this and it kind of came up in seshes as the rain events happened further down south and the weather came up. The water went up and down and carved away the shoreline pretty significantly. But I don't mean to beat around the bush, I don't think it's a great boat access point because of that. We could certainly do more with infrastructure down closer to the water, but that implies that we have the infrastructure up, the parking lot to support the extra parking, it's currently parking is not a good situation. One thing we wanna do, and gentle to this, is work with Declan at St. Mike's, who's done a tremendous job of converting that 300 acre parcel on the right as you come in into conservation. If you knew that, but it's now under wetlands easement. It's no longer being farmed for porn. There's a rough trail system out there. That's Declan, the cave at St. Mike's has been working on that, but they don't have parking, they don't have proper signage. So we have a general agreement that we're gonna get together. We wanted to see what the new state building was gonna look like down there. I actually approached them about parking and they said, no, you can't knock that space. So it's just if we had more parking and the shoreline was more accommodating, it could be a good spot for it. It does become a management issue in terms of having a gate and the dawn to dusk. It's doable, but just doing slight upgrades to the existing situation would be tricky. I think that would be a tricky thing. Okay. All right, thank you so much for thinking about it. Yeah, I didn't know, but I was struck at how you look at the river and you look at the surrounding communities and there's not a whole lot of places you can put a boat in the water. Yeah, I get that. All right, then the last thing, can you talk a little bit about what your ask is for this year, for the FY 25? Sure. Great, so our total budget, operations budget is 495, 555. We've asked our municipalities for about 414,000 of that and your share is somewhere. 38,471 dollars. Thank you. There it is. You beat me to it. And every year, I publish the saying that allows you to see how each town is calculated and it's still done based on population grand list. And it's about a, it's just a couple percent more than last year. We're trying to keep it as tight as possible. All right, any other board member questions? I just have one comment. No, you brought that up. So I was thinking about that earlier, but how do you come up with the values for each town? Oh, they're published. So I get the population. Well, like the percentage of, like I see that each town is in charge of the same percentage. Yes. So just curious about for usage or parkland or? No, it has nothing, it has strictly to do with the population of the town and the grand list. So this, if you look at this deeper, you know, it takes the total population from the Census Bureau and it takes the total grand list from the state of Vermont, the equalized grand list. Equalized grand list, right. And then we do a calculation to see what percentage of each of those the town realizes and then normalizes those two percentages and we come up with the amount. It's an effort to try to be as, I don't know if the word is progressive in how we tax our towns as possible. So it's a calculation that we do. So Essex grand list is a percentage of the entire county's grand list that entirely the members. The members, right? The eight tests, yeah. So like in your situation. I'm point by the. Yep. Pass of chin and county. Of the eight member communities. Of the eight members. Right, yep. Awesome, thank you. Yep. Any other board member questions? So I would, yes. I would just follow up on that with that. Do you have any kind of record keeping or anything that does actually tally what population from what towns actually uses your facilities the most? Just out of curiosity. I would expect that like Ethan Allen once said 80% or 90% is probably from Burlington. I just wondered if there's any way you track any of that. Because we do not charge admission to any of our parks. So a few years ago, we did a project where we did some interviews and so forth and found a pretty broad cross section. But we do not have that data. We could generate it would require we didn't get our survey and having people out there with clipboards. I mean, it's something we could certainly generate. We're actually heading that direction until Castleton shut down their survey program. They'd already done some work for us. We wanted to get some of the data, but we don't. Okay, thank you. I would follow up on the Woodside question about the canoe access is that I would think with the flooding, you might have an opportunity to rig up a little bit better canoe access just because it is so far and a lot of places that have canoe access have realized that people are going to use them whether they're good or not. And that sometimes they can be better for the river if you have a really good canoe access. So thank you. Thank your point. Yep. Okay, any questions or comments from the public? I don't see any hands in the room or any hands online. So we are having our an all day budget session next Tuesday for this your line item will be included in that discussion. And so we'll be considering it. And thank you for taking the time to come and talk to us. And thank you for your service. Thank you for your really, really appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, moving on to business item five B discussion with zoning board of adjustment. If I may, as Nick is walking up to join us here. So there's an item later on in the packet tonight discussion about select board interactions and communications with volunteer boards, commissions and committees. Nick is our first test case and first volunteer to come ahead and start that conversation. So it's really part of a bigger effort to have the select board communicating with the boards and committees and kind of figure out everything from how are things going? Do you have any budget requests coming up in the coming year and just a general check-in? So thanks to Nick for being the first one to step forward with that. Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm excited to provide a little bit of this to money tonight regarding the needs and wants of the zoning board. And thank you for having us. So. Are the needs and wants of the zoning board? Okay. Well, yeah, I was invited to have a discussion with the board or with the select board. And so we can go line item of the items that you sent out Doug or if Mr. Dugan or if you just want me to provide a little bit of testimony, I'm not quite sure how the discussion should move forward. Yeah. So we're learning how this is gonna work too. Okay. And so however you're more comfortable with, I guess, you could certainly share your thoughts about how you think things are going with your board, whether there's anything that the select board can help with, whether there's any communications that could be improved, whether you need anything from us. There's also, I know there were questions in there about a stipend program, whether that's being helping encourage people to participate, however you want to go and then maybe we'll ask you a question. I have a suggestion. Maybe if he explains to the public what the zoning board does and goes from there, a lot of people don't know. Right. Sure. Sure, I can do that. Why don't you start that way and then work into. Absolutely. The zoning board of adjustments is a semi-judicial body of town members. And what we do is receive applications from community members that want to develop land, their property, their home, their business, that may fall outside of the zoning regulations that the town has set forth. And so with that, if somebody wants to build a fence, that's a little higher. If they want to build a garage a little bit closer to their neighbor that's unblack and white, not allowed, they have that opportunity to appeal to the zoning board of adjustments. And we hear those applications as they come forward. Okay. So as a zoning board, what would you need from us to further your ability to perform here? Something I think that could be helpful is timeliness of the reports that come to board members. The applications that the town receives are processed through the zoning administrator. Sharon and Alexia do a great job, but I know that their time is stretched. They are stretched very thin of their workload. And so sometimes board members don't receive packets or the information that's necessary for the upcoming meeting until a couple of days before the meeting takes place. So it takes a little bit of time, crunch for board members to capture all of those pieces, review the applications, and due diligence for the upcoming meeting. And so with that, I'm not sure if it's a staffing request that I'm asking a budget increase, whatever the case may be, just helping support our staff in getting those in a timely manner. So do you have a, there's a clock start once a request is submitted that you have to have a response by a certain amount of time or is there a... Zoning administrator usually receives the applications and the clock could potentially start on certain projects. I know that they have to do their research in order to create and complete an application or from the town's perspective. And so that takes a lot of time for each application that comes in. And so if it's a couple of weeks before the scheduled meeting, it may be processed in time, otherwise it would likely follow the following month. You have a specific work plan or do you have things that are your role one of interpreting regulations and ruling on? Yes, absolutely the latter of those two. We don't really have a set agenda. The agenda is set forth for us by the number of applications that the community supplies. So when they contact the zoning administrator and town staff, the applications are processed, like I said, in a timely manner and then once they're processed and ready to go, then they're placed on the agenda and we're notified. Board members are notified. How often does the board meet? Board meets as needed on a monthly basis. It's the first Thursday of the month if there are applications that have come to the town. If no applications, then no meeting. Generally we have, I would say an average of one to two applications every month. Sometimes they, in slower months, we might not meet for a while. Other months, typically beginning in April and running through October, we receive a number of applications for every meeting. I have a question, but it's kind of for both us in. Yeah, that's fine. I was just curious, like, and this is for my education, but is the zoning board involved at all with the town plan, is there work that I should say this, should or could be doing, that's not just revealing applications? Is there any need for that? I mean, I don't know, I don't know if we have the planning involved with town plan and all that planning commission. I don't know if there was anything that they're requiring from the zoning board for the town plan. We communicate somewhat regularly with the planning commission because our roles are similar in respect to town development. And as far as the town plan, there was discussion about the role of the DBA, the Development Review Board, DRB, that the town voters approved last election, and my understanding is that the state of Vermont legislature did not approve it. So now the zoning board will remain its own entity, the planning commission will remain its own entity instead of being combined as the... They haven't approved it yet. They haven't approved it yet. Yeah, because it's a two year, the legislature's a two year cycle. They've promised us they're gonna look at it early in January, so. Okay, okay, so it may change. You shouldn't assume that it's off the table. Okay, it may change. So at this current time, do you feel you have enough members serving on your boards due to the work that's required? Right now we are fully, we have full membership, five members, and I think that we do good work and we have ample opportunity for everybody to ask questions of applicants, ask questions of staff, so our meetings run generally one hour for a quick and easy application, I would say, up to a couple and a half hours for further discussion applications. Thank you. I have another question to follow up on that. I can jump in a little bit. Go ahead. Have you guys ever had an attendance issue or you haven't been able to hold a meeting? Not during my time. I would say that we've always had a quorum of staff, of volunteers. And so in the last five years, six years, we have not had an attendance issue to where we had to cancel the meeting. Having said that, we did have a shortage of membership for a while, a long while. So now only in the last couple of months, I think we have a full member board. Thank you. Gracie? Yes, Hey, Nick. Hey. So working collaboratively with the Planning Commission, how involved are you in zoning bylaw discussions thinking that a ZBA is more, you have the potential to identify pain points, unintended consequences based on the nature of the applications that you hear. So just curious if there are conversations ongoing on the zoning regulation updates. We had a good number of discussions, I would say about a year ago, whenever we were redeveloping some zoning regulations in the town. Since then, planning and zoning has, I would say step back in some of our communication because of some of the changes that were being proposed and the separation of the town and the city and the village. And so some of those discussions have been suspended, I would say, for the last months or so. And so I think there's an opportunity there to restart those conversations, see what the board feels that are necessary and redeveloping the zoning board regulations for the town. Thank you. Thanks. Kendall, you got any questions or comments? Yeah, I would just follow up on Ethan's question about your attendance at your meetings. As I know a lot of communities are actually watching to see what our experience has been, paying stipends to get membership increased on commissions and boards. So I would be very interested to hear your perspectives on that. Sure. I believe the majority of the board had been serving long before we implemented, the town implemented stipends for volunteer time. My understanding and my belief is that it's a, it's a nice perk, but it wasn't necessary. I think it was more to incentivize the newer membership that we were trying to bring in for those missing board member vacant seats. And so since then, now we're fully boarded and I think it's, like I say, a nice perk, but not paramount or absolutely necessary for continued service from our current board. Thank you. Anything else? Thank you for sharing with us. Yeah, glad to be the guinea pig. So I do have a hand up in the room. Is there a question or a comment? Is the public about the comment on this? Yes. So I'm actually the garage that you spoke about looking to put it up against the property line. And what I will say is I had a great experience with the board. I think if the town is looking for input, there needs to be a lot more support for the individual community members who are looking to do this. I tried to do it myself. What I was asked for by the board was to get surveying, elevations, a ton of stuff that would have cost a lot of money when I was just trying to get a five-foot variance to build an additional bay to my garage. We talked about the grant list. Those are all things that will increase the value of the grant list. And it was not easy for an individual community member to try to just propose a project on their own. A comment was made by one of the board members that they've been told by lawyers they can't actually approve any variance requests, which after everything I went through to hear that, it's kind of frustrating, right? Like I'm trying to, I bought a house. It's set up in a lot a certain way. I have one in its face. So I'm asking for five additional feet. And I'm being told that I should have considered building on the backside of my house down in an embankment and put a driveway around my house. That makes zero sense. I think there are a lot of things that the town could do to make the development a lot easier and additions, building the property that we already have and increasing its value. They were great, but I think the town could do more to have that office that when I forget, Sharon. Supporting that office and ensuring that community members know what is required, what is expected and what to anticipate for that variance request. I gave what I thought was good and showed up and was honestly blown out of the water with what was being considered and talked about when I thought it was a simple five feet. So I would say that. I think they are being underserved by the support they're getting from the town. Thank you. Let's grab your name for the record, please. Thank you. Yeah, sorry. I should have asked for that. Any other comments or questions from members of the public? I don't see any hands either in the room or online. So thanks, Nick, thanks for your discussion. I don't know, was this helpful at all, do you think? Or I guess, is it? I think so. I think so. And I hope that it was helpful for the board as well. Yeah, select board. It was. Great, great. Okay, thank you. Thanks so much. Okay, let's see. Moving on to our next business item, consider approval of public works winter operations plan. Aaron. We're going to skip winter this year. I would like to, yeah. If our economy could handle it. Shouldn't be an option. All right, the issue before you tonight is whether the select board will approve the winter operations plan for 2023 to 2024. And re-sign the winter policy resolution. We're going on over 35 years now of this document. Annually it comes before you folks to get approved. This process serves many purposes, noted in the introduction of this document. This year's plan, I also did place this on the website again in draft form with all the edits and the track changes left on to see what changes had been made. Again, as some of you may know, we do have an internal version. This has a lot of private phone numbers for our highway crew, call signs that I'm sure other departments wouldn't want out in public. So we leave that document set aside. We don't put that on the web. If any of you would like a copy of it, I'm sure Greg and I can make that available for you. In general, this year has remains pretty much unchanged from last year. We made a few edits in the document to try to break away and remove some of the village of us extension references in there. I think we did, Dean and I did a pretty good job getting most of them out of there. I think one was identified. In the ordinance section, I believe that's in an ordinance. So we really can't remove that until that ordinance is updated. So that's something we may wanna put in our to-do list, Greg, moving forward. We did decide to stick with the public alert status portion of our operations. It's something that's carried over from the pandemic. I think it was a good tool for us to use to kind of help the public gauge when our plow trucks are gonna be out there and what type of response we're gonna have for any storm event. So we continued on with that. And this year, we did receive a formal request. Every year, we usually get maybe two or three request phone calls regarding expanding services, expanding sidewalk plow maintenance or sidewalk maintenance. We usually tell them and our response back to them is make a formal request to both the public works and the select board. We give them the dates of this meeting. And we also offer up the opportunity for them or invite them to come to any of public hearing for our budget sessions. That's where this work should be identified. This year, we did have a request to maintain some of the sidewalks in Pinewood, Section H, which is Stonebrook Circle and Evergreen. This request was after our 2024 budget was approved, so we're running on the 2024 budget now. So I think we could entertain their requests. The board should entertain the request. I have looked at this year's budget and what we have budgeted and I did get a quote from our contractor who does some of the other sidewalk maintenance work in the town center. They do some of the work in the woodlands as well. And this may be able to, we may be able to absorb that in this year's budget, but ultimately that decision to change that would be up to the board. Again, we do have a resolution in there for you to sign and request that the select board consider approving the winter operations plan tonight and re-sign that policy. Is there any questions, comments? Any questions? Go ahead, Don. So how many requests do you usually receive a year to for additional sidewalks? Three, four, a handful. Because I mean, maybe when I first died on the board, I thought because we had a shortage of help in time and equipment that we couldn't grant any more of these requests. This is what I remember hearing, I thought. This one may make sense though, Don. It's close to the woodlands. Ultimately, it's more money that we don't have necessarily budgeted in the 2024 budget. It would be done by a contractor too, right? Yes. Yes. So it's not our staff that's doing it. Yeah, and quite honestly, our sidewalk plow this year will be manned by some of the parks and recreation maintenance crew. We don't really have a body to put in the sidewalk plow this year. Very good. Yeah, and just, Don, to elaborate on how a contractor could do it because part of the woodlands is plowed by a contractor and there is a connecting path through there that contractor could theoretically get from the woodlands to this area easily as opposed to having to load stuff up, drive to a new neighborhood. Okay, that's what I was. I don't know everything else. Yeah. Now, because that area of land at one time was controversial about people going through there, is that going to be a problem for a snow plow operator to get through? Sidewalk plow is four feet wide by eight wide. That's an eight foot wide multi-use path. But the plow itself, as opposed to it's not driving, we're not driving vehicles through there. It's not, it's like an open up for traffic. Okay, that's what, okay. Because I know that was a hot button issue at one time about going through there, so. Isn't that path maintained in the water or anything? For fire access? No. No, it's not. No, it's maintained by the current contractor because I know he does, he has private contracts to remove snow for driveways down in Pinewood. But it just makes it more convenient for him to have that path maintained so he does it on his own accord. And then my follow up question of that was, was there any bus related, busing related issues brought up in that request? They know, I don't know that neighborhood specifically, but I have heard before that in some of those neighborhoods where the bus doesn't go to every house, they stop at a corner. I think that's part of the problem. I didn't know if that was, but in that request specifically, or? I believe the request was, do you have a copy of the letter, Greg, they'd have an attachment that I sent an email earlier today. It was in our reading file back a few meetings ago. I just didn't see it. Well, it's basically for maintenance. Here is Mr. Makesh Kumar. He's the president of Pinewood Manor Section HHOA. About 40% of the homes have school-age children and the farthest distance to the school bus pickup point is about a half a mile away. The sidewalk could also be used, but extensively by others for walking and, you know, maintain it so they're not walking in the road. I think that's one of their big concerns as with a lot of other residential neighborhoods is people walk having their children walk in the road to meet the bus. Most of our sidewalks that we do plow, as part of our plan and winter maintenance, we take some of that into consideration, but we also take into consideration in the safe routes to school, the actual sidewalks that are gonna be utilized for children walking to school, those all are maintained by us all winter long. As for the residential neighborhoods, our putting bodies in the equipment, our budget, we just kind of have to have that balance between what the needs are and what we have for resources to meet those needs. So that's where we're at at this point. Like I said, I did look at this year's budget and it possibly could be absorbed, but it wasn't planned. So any type of non-planned event, it's hard to say whether I'm gonna go over that line item in my budget for next year, for next year. I know we can't speak for what's gonna happen in the next six months, per se, but we did have a pretty mild spring where we didn't use as much salt as we had anticipated. You said that there is some cushion there. No, what is budgeted this year? What is budgeted this year for contract of snow removal was $40,750. This year's contract for snow removal was around 36,000. I don't remember exactly what it was, but also in that 40,750 is an extra 1,500 for emergency rental of sidewalk plow equipment. And this request, I did get a quote from our contractor and it was approximately $4,100 for the year. So how would that work with Public Works? Any surplus from Public Works wouldn't remain for Public Works or it would have to come to us and we'd have to put it back. So, I think it's been until this year, that we're out of money, right? All right, but could you take soft money and spend it on that? But then Greg has the discretion to shuffle money around within line items. If we approve. Anyway, as well, if things are short in one spot, you've got more in another, but then when you get there, right, when you get to June 30th, if you get any money left over, it becomes a fund balance, which then we have all that discussion about. But so that's the, I didn't hear a recommendation as to whether we should consider this. It sounds like it's possible to do it without overrunning the budget, but who knows? I don't know if I'm answering your question. I'm just curious if that would, I mean, I know we were looking at the overall plan, but is that in the approval of this plan? It is not. I did not put it in. I would like to request that the board, if they so choose and they want to add that section, knowing that it may or may not have minimal impacts to our operating budget this year, we could make those changes and put it in the next or in this year's plan and then publish that as our operations plan. So I guess you would make your recommendation would be as amended, we approve the plan as amended. Yeah, so we could approve this. We could approve the winter operations plan. There's two ways we could do it. We either approve it and then have another vote to say to add whether or not we want to add the additional snow plowing or we could have one motion that says approve as amended. So at some point, I'll ask the question of how we feel about doing it. I was just curious what the... It's not explicitly in this document. If we approve it as is, then this additional plowing won't happen. I'll make those adjustments to the document. We have to make two decisions here. Kendall, any comments you have questions you want to make? Yes, I have quite a few. I know you get more flies with honey than vinegar, but there's going to be a lot of vinegar in this one. I think it's shameful that the town plows fewer than a third of its sidewalks. You require these developers to build these sidewalks, people, and it isn't just school children that use the sidewalks, it's just people. People need to get in and out, go up and down safely during the winter. If we build them, we should maintain them. Now, I know that the town can stand behind the ordinance where if anybody gets injured because the sidewalks don't maintain, it's not in a town, but I just don't think that's the way that you should approach things. I also know that you can change or make an ordinance where you could require the residents to clean the sidewalks off in front of their property, but I have a feeling that would be way less popular than just anteeing up the money that the town should have years ago to maintain all these sidewalks. You contract out for some of them, you could contract out for all of them, or you could get the equipment that you need. I think this is the most exclusive thing that the town of Essex currently does now. It's elitism by only choosing to plow some sidewalks based on a subjective measure. So, I mean, especially when the town makes no, they don't even complain about maintaining private hydrants. So if the town can maintain private hydrants, the town should be able to maintain public sidewalks. So, I mean, you could just fix the budget. You've been short changing the public works for years and years. You've got a management plan that says that. You've been short the money. Get them the equipment that you need so they can maintain the sidewalks. Thank you. Any comments or questions from the public? Anybody in the room want to come? And I know your hand had gone up. I'll just say your name again. Just want to. I live in Stonebrook Circle, the neighborhood in question. Getting questions on the microphone, please. Yeah, thanks. I came here tonight primarily just to speak in favor of adding that to the town plans, no removal plans. It's a newer neighborhood. Sidewalks are very wide. They fit everything I believe, the requirements for the sidewalks in order for them to be plowed. There are a bunch of school-aged children that walk around the neighborhood, run around the neighborhood. It's a select board member Lawrence's point. The safety issue is definitely a concern. And our neighborhood is also used as a common walking area for a bunch of pinewood because of those nice sidewalks, especially in the summertime, as well as Lang Farm coming down that path that connects the two neighborhoods that allows that snow plow to come through. They already do utilize that. One of the questions I have is specifically says on there, no motorized vehicles allowed, yet that individual takes their tractor up and down it in the winter time for their private contracts. My question is, is that $4800 taking into account that they're using closed access to make a profit? I wonder if there's some negotiability there and you could reduce the cost because they are using a town access point in order to shorten their run to, wow, private houses as well. So I think there might be an advantage to saying, hey, more than welcome to use this, but when you go into this neighborhood, just do a quick loop and we're good to go because all it is is a single circle that you go around, not looking for the entire thing to be plowed but a nice four-foot path would do wonders for the safety and the security of the members in that community. But yeah, I would highly urge the select board to dig a little bit into it and I would ask that you vote in favor of it because I think it is something that is important to the vibrancy of our communities. That's a reason why a lot of people move to Essex. So thank you. Thank you. Anyone else? Lorraine, I see your hand up. Yes, a couple of years back, I also had a huge safety concern as my husband and I were dropping something off at Blodgett and the sidewalk on, I think it was Allen Martin, which was clearly not plowed. There was a little kid who was shorter than the snow pile on the side of the road and had to walk in the road and it was very dangerous. And I've heard, I remember when the busing situation came up, I remember there was a resident here that said, oh, the kids don't walk and give me that chicken and the eggs. A lot of kids wanna walk and can't necessarily walk. So you don't, it's hard to know which happens first. Are they not walking? Because the sidewalks aren't plowed because it doesn't feel safe to go down the road and we're trying to increase walking. I think that we need to really invest in the safety of our children. And so the parents don't have to worry about it as well. I came from a town in New Jersey where we were required to shovel our own walks and clear the walks. One of my concerns for that when we did it was when people get too old, they can't necessarily do it on their own and they can't necessarily afford to get them cleared. That is one concern I would have about allowing to a model of residents clearing their own walks. But I do believe it's a public safety issue and should be viewed that way. Thanks. All right, thanks, Lorraine. Anybody, yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't see your hand. Come on up, come on up to the table and introduce yourself and yeah. Yeah, I just wanted to kind of add on to- Could you state your name please? Yeah, my name is Mukesh Kumar and who sent the letter to the town office. I just wanted to add two more points beyond what Aaron and Kyle already mentioned. One was access to the school bus. Yes, we do have bus coming to one side of the neighborhood. So this sidewalk plowing will allow the kids in the neighborhood to walk on the sidewalk and get to the bus. So that's one point. And second item that Lorraine brought up was the safety item. I've been in that neighborhood from the last three years. I was coming back from work late at night one time and I almost was getting ready to hit one. One person was walking on the street and it was kind of shocking to me that I was driving carefully and all that but people choose to walk on the road because sidewalks are not cleared. And so it's both safety issue for the older people and the younger people. And also the third point was the sidewalks in this neighborhood are wide enough to be able to go safely. Thank you. Is that one more point if I could add it real quick? There are a couple of sections in this neighborhood that do not sit in front of a house. So even if everyone within this community shoveled their own section, there are a couple of no man's land essentially that would still cost people to have to go out on the road or people taking over an amount of their extra time to shovel these past. So that's another consideration. It's not where every single section of sidewalks is directly in front of someone's house that you could easily say, this is your responsibility. I would add that as well. Yes, sir. Come on up and dignify yourself. Peter Gray, I'm also from the Stonebrook. Oh, Peter, how you doing? Yeah, good. Yeah, there's one section of the sidewalk that has no green zone between the street and the sidewalk. And consequently, the plow just plows all the snow in there. So that's snow in that area. There's no way anybody's gonna clear that out with the equipment we personally have. It physically couldn't be done with the snow blower. Anyway, I just want to point that out there. And that section is several hundred feet long and it's right on the back side with kids gotta go walk down to get to the school bus. So it's a particularly dangerous portion of the road too. Thanks, Peter. So I've heard a lot of comments about kids walking to the school bus. Do we, is the contract say that's gonna be done before school starts? So if there were one. Because I know, I know we don't, the town itself doesn't guarantee that our side. There's no guarantee that it's going to be done in time for the kids to catch the school bus. We have a prioritized way we actually maintain all of the roads in the snow removal of town of Essex. We rank them, we try to get all our main roads and arterials complete first. Then we branch out into our residential neighborhoods, get the main drags into the residential neighborhoods complete. And then we go into cul-de-sacs and removal of snow. If we have the ability to put someone on the sidewalk plow, it's not a matter of equipment. It's a matter of having the bodies to actually operate the equipment. Then we do it and we'll go out as soon as we get the rest of the stuff done in the store. So there's definitely, I like to say that there's probably a better opportunity that it would likely get done in a reasonable timeframe by the contractor than we would be able to get to. I'll just make a comment to that, that if you plow a sidewalk, even if it's three days after a snowstorm and you plow it every snowstorm, you're not gonna have three feet of snow on the sidewalk. And if there's a substantial amount of snow, you're gonna have that one day, no school, if it's that severe. And then my second thing would be for us to think about this operations plan as we move towards the 14th for budget season is maybe the town needs to add a position in the budget to hire somebody around the sidewalk. There's a lot of sidewalks. That's just something to note down. I don't want to bring it up in our conversation. During the discussion, yep. All right. Sorry, did you wanna add something else? Mr. Warren's already been my point about compounding. Yeah, yeah. After the snow is a freeze off, it turns into ice. That's the biggest safety concern. The late snow, when it freezes and falls, it's not gonna be a good thing to do. Yeah. And I, my observation is my neighborhood, which is plowed is that many people still walk in the street even if the sidewalk's been plowed. I guess that's their choice. And again, there's, I mean, when we do maintain our sidewalks, there's no guarantee that we're gonna remove all of the snow off of the sidewalk. It is going to compact the freeze thought and there will be ice on the sidewalks. There's no clear sidewalks policy to the town. So we do our best to maintain what sidewalks we do plow, but there's no guarantee that there's not gonna be ice on. Okay, as I said before, there's two questions before us whether we wanna approve the winter operations plan and whether we want to include the, or amend it to include the additional plowing and requested that we wanna go forward. Do you wanna make two votes or do you wanna make one vote with proposed amendment? Sounds like Kendall's in support of that too. I'd like to add that too. It's gonna be easier to do one vote. Are you ready for a motion? But Kendall has his hand up. Oh. Kendall, go ahead. Sorry. I have a couple of questions specific to the plowing plan. Number one in the question of the contract is that you utilize. I think one of them might be retired. I'm not sure. So you might want to check that list. I did have a question with the existing sidewalk plowing that you have is the 24 hour time frame that you give the clean and sufficient or would you like to go to 48 hours? The final question I would have for the sidewalks is would it make any difference to our existing mileage of sidewalks that we get to if you adopted what is in your plan where you plow one side of the street or selected streets, if you adopted that for everywhere there's a sidewalk you plowed at least one side of the road. Just general questions. Thank you. Do we plow two sides of the streets anymore? Just one, usually in certain areas like Susie will sort of do, we will plow both sides. Does it make sense? Some of the lower traffic roads we do not. But I can probably sit down and with our highway superintendent maybe have something for you folks for budget day. Kind of give you a total mileage of sidewalks in order to have full coverage. And I will make that edit candle regarding the contractor list and the appendix. All right. Motion. Yeah, I'd like to make a motion that the select board approve the winter operations plan for 2023-2024 with the inclusion of the neighborhood discussed here this evening. Candles amendment, the change name, maybe. You need candles and just say. Yeah, you probably better do a roll call on this one. And no, so I think, I think, Tracy, you said, including the additional snow plowing in the neighborhood, there was also another amendment with regard to the list of contractors in the appendix. That's the point. The list of contractors in the appendix, does that need approval or is that just a list of? It's just a list of contractors that I can make that edit and eliminate. It was probably an oversight on my part. Yeah, I mean, that doesn't subjectively change the winter operations. I wasn't sure. Yeah, okay. Okay, we'll have a second. Okay. Thank you, Ethan. Okay, so just to be clear, what we're voting on is to approve the winter operations plan with the addition of the additional snow plowing that's been requested. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, say nay. Nay. Nay. Nay. Okay, so we do need to do a roll call. I'll start with you, Kendall. Nay. Nay. Done. Nay with the addition. Aye. You. Aye. Tracy. Aye. And I was aye also. So, motion passes three, two. Thank you. And we'll talk again on budget day. Yes. Yeah, I'm sure. Okay. Okay. Next agenda item is 5D discussion about select board interactions and communications with volunteer boards, commissions, and committees that you Greg or I read. That is me. So this is something that's been on your work plan for the past year, year and a half of how do you improve communication with your boards and committees? Saw one example tonight of changes we've made inviting boards in. We've got a few more scheduled for the next few meetings. Still trying to lock down some representatives to come in. We have also over the past year, reconstituted the idea of having a breakfast with the select board chair, vice chair and the chairs and vice chairs of various boards and committees. We had a short notice one held back in June. So light turnout, but very well received. I think it's something that we'll look at continuing again next spring. Just looking at some of the stuff that the town has done, the select board has done over the past year or so. Tammy, Getchell really reinvigorated that idea of town beating being a day for presidents and the select board to meet with boards and committees, have a chance for them to showcase what they're doing. We'd like to continue that. Even though we're moving to informational town beating, still having the idea of a town beating showcase to highlight the town, highlight the volunteer boards and committees. And of course, each board and committee does a annual report that goes into the written annual report each year. And you spend a good amount of time in the spring advertising positions, interviewing candidates, stuff like that. So with all that in mind and with your broader goal of trying to figure out how to best engage with here from those boards and committees, I kind of took a look at a quarterly basis. Quarter one thinking that's that summer that's gonna be new board members are joining chance for reorganization, chance for each board to come up with its work plans for the coming year. Second quarter can be fall, continuing what we're doing with what you did with Nick tonight and other boards coming up. A chance to check in, hear about the work plans, hear about any budget requests and needs for the coming year. Winter is the lead up to the annual report, the town beating showcase. So more kind of written prep work there leading up to the town meeting. And in the spring, that's again, a chance to advertise for any openings, interview all the candidates who come forward. Some of them are gonna be new, some of them are gonna be in comments looking to get reappointed, a chance to ask about the work, why people are interested, what's going on then. And also the chance for the breakfast with the other chair and the vice chair. So putting that out there for considerations, see what you think about it. And if there's anything that you think is not worth doing or anything that's missing and should be on that list. I have some of the things I think is missing is kind of important. And we heard Nick say it tonight, is that the boards need to be able to give feedback probably to you or to the board as to how they're interacting with their staff member. You know, maybe that should be part of an evaluation that we do. Because I think it's important and we've, you know, another board I served on, I've experienced it and I didn't have, there was nothing we could do because the staff person that was assigned to the group I was working with didn't work well with the group, but there's nothing, you know, there's no recourse. So I think it's important that it works both ways. I think, you know, there's an issue we need to know. Yeah, that's a good point in this, maybe something just once a year, I can reach out to the chairs and just, check in and ask if they have any feedback about their staff support. Maybe not always the chairs. Oh, great. Because sometimes it's the Indians doing the work that have some things to say to. Sorry, just a feeling. I have a question now that Don just said that. But I know we were doing kind of like. It's all exit going, going, like people's experiences, like when they were on a quarter of a question, is that like, if we have somebody who serves, let's just say standard, three standards, three years, somebody who's three years on a commissioner committee, do we have anything in place where we give them exit form? We do. I'm supposed to do an exit interview for anybody that leaves any of the boards. I may have missed a few. We offered it as curious and we often offer it in a second. Honestly, it has probably ebden float in our commitment to doing it just based on staffing and what we are thinking of. Sometimes we have a number of people who leave and it's like, oh, yeah, we got to do this. Sometimes it slips through the cracks. It's something we've done in the past. And yeah, I had remembered. I couldn't remember if it was like something that we actually had a policy for or if it was just. It's just, it's just practice. I think it depends too. I mean, sometimes we've offered them and people haven't accepted. And then we sort of forget about it because people aren't taking advantage of it. And then it comes up again. And then if you remember, oh yeah, we got to offer this. And it's kind of hit or miss, but it's a good reminder to at least make the offer. Thank you. You're welcome. Same thing, Tracy. No, I just, I'm encouraged by what is being done. Understanding that these changes sometimes take cycle or two in order to see a difference. I'm appreciative of the work that's done. I could certainly add those two to the list to make sense. I know you got anything. I'd like to plan it as well as Dawn's suggestion. All right, thank you. Any comments from the public? Lorraine. Have a quick thought like on the exit interview. I think that's a great idea, Ethan. Thank you for bringing that up. The, Craig, I think there's things that I should be addressing, Andy, my apologies. There are things that we could automate, look at in terms of IT, like you could have standardized exit interview set up as a survey that could be auto emailed out when someone's done. I think there's ways that we can certainly make the workload easier for the staff in terms of bringing us into the 21st century. Thanks. Yeah, we do, Lorraine, we do have a standard list of questions that we asked. And the, there's a couple of missing links there, right? Whether, I'm the one that's supposed to initiate those. So I think the chair has been the one who does the exit interviews. And I may have, like I said earlier, I may have missed some. But yeah, if you automate it, then if there's a way to having, well, I don't know. It seems a little, you have to think about the question of whether sending out a form letter is the best solution. But we'll think about it. Thanks. Ken. And Signorello. So since I'm involved in two committees, one commission, one committee, I get to see a chance to see a difference in kind of staff support that we get. So I think that just like when I was in college, we all, when you finished a course in college, you filled out an evaluation form for the teacher. And that gave you a nice metric because there would be ranges of questions with like one to five scales and standard questions that everybody would answer, which would be very useful for the school to decide what teachers needed particular training or help at weak spots, whatever. I think we'd benefit from something like that as well. It should be done probably annually. And then on the town manager would know what staff members have weak spots, the training, help with whatever the issues might be. It'll focus on where the problems are. Something along those lines, I think, that would be quite useful. Thank you. Thanks, Ken. Anyone else? Stay on the seating in any hands? Oh, Tracy. Sorry. No, no, go ahead. Just had a thought that I had thought of during previous conversations on this topic, but is there a way that we could send a survey to all committee commission and board members and allow them to respond anonymously around the topic of stipends to see whether that is hitting the mark as far as what the intent was or not. Marguerite, do you wanna take that one? Yeah, sure. I think definitely a short answer. There's the technologically certainly a way. I think that's not the problem. I think the thing to consider to some degree, and this is not answering whether or not we should or should not do that. I think we're just beginning those discussions of how to get that information. That's one way to get it. It's also that sometimes the boards aren't the ones, that's one view of the information. So I think getting that is important, like it's a good point and maybe a survey is the best way to do that. We haven't figured that out, but that could be a nice lift that's using technology to help us there. And then the other part is, because as we saw today with the DBA, the makeup of the committees don't always know, it's a sensitive topic. So they don't always know who's taking a stipend or who's not and maybe why they are. And so it's just trying to make sure, to your point, like anonymous, but also that they're having a comfort level around that. And the folks answering don't always know why this stipend policy was put into place. So also getting information from that side of things, but I do think that is, getting a 360 eval of the whole program, one part of it is just like we did to asking that question of the committees and making sure we can get what they think on it. And if they have other constructive ideas for it even of that nature, for ways to, if there are other barriers they're seeing to the issue that this stipend policy is not actually helping with those barriers. Is that, it's kind of a long answer, but short answer, yes, long answer. Yes, and not as easy as hitting center. Does that make sense? It does. I think. And as you can probably tell from Marguerite's comments, we've thought about it. It's one of those things that just hasn't quite made it to the top of the list of to do yet, but it is definitely on a radar. Anybody else? Do you need any clarification of anything that's been said? Any questions? No, I think I'm good. I can update this memo and add a few items to that list. And even if it's just a reading file thing in the future, just to let you know that it's on the to-do list for the year. I can get back. All right. And I'll follow up with exit interviews. We'll try to remind you when we hear that people are stepping down. Okay. Next business item is discussion and potential action to select date of informational town meeting. And I believe Tammy is here for that. Tammy. Hi, everyone. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Great. I have dropped off this meeting three times tonight. So I apologize if you lose me at some point. I'm here, I guess, just to putting together a timeline for town meeting, which in all of the events that happened in early 2024, a lot of the dates, they're important to get set now so that we have, that we're able to plan for publishing of notices and all of those sorts of things that have to happen. In your packet, I have a poll and that's what basically I'm presenting tonight. As you know, this last March, the town members who voted to vote on the budget by a filing ballot. And what that means now essentially is there is no vote from the floor. And the way that we used to do town meeting was like an informational type of piece. And then we would start town meeting the night before and then we would vote the next day. And now we have to rethink how we want to do that. The Vermont State Statute says that even if you vote, if a municipality votes to switch over to Australian ballot for their budget for all other questions, such as we have, that there is still the requirement of an informational hearing that has to take place within 10 days of town meeting day. So the poll that we sent out was to ask people, given the fact that because people can vote on the budget for Australian ballot, there may be a lot of early voting taking place, people requesting their ballots early, which they were a lot of that happening. There was a lot of that happening anyway, but in regard to the budget, the poll is asking people, I can do a quick rundown of those questions. What their preference was if they could choose one. And the first option was to hold one informational hearing the evening before town meeting day on March 4th. The second option was to hold one informational hearing the week before town meeting day, February 26th. Please note, this is a school vacation week. February 26th would fall within that 10 day period. And the third option would be to hold two informational hearings. The first would be an informal informational meeting that would be kind of tagged on to your mid-February, regular select board meeting possibly, which is February 12th. And then you would have your official informational hearing the evening before town meeting day on March 4th, which is kind of traditional in what you've been doing in the past. You could also do your town showcase that evening if you wanted to. The poll results, we had 44 people respond and a couple of people responded by email. Those were all included in your packet. The results, which the one that came out the strongest was the full two informational hearing. So this is for a point of discussion for you to ask questions and discuss, decide what you might want to do and hopefully set some of these dates down so we can put it in our timeline and plan for them. Thanks, Amy. Go ahead, Grace. Just one thing, and I apologize when I stepped out if Tammy already said this, we are double checking on the question about whether the informational meeting has to happen for the town charter the night before or if it can be within those first 10 days. As Tammy told you, the results of the survey are showing that people want to have informational meeting the official one the night before town meeting. So that question might be moot for now. And if you go that route, we'll still try to get legal opinion just to confirm and clarify. Yeah, the charter language says that we adjourn and to vote on Australian ballot the next day. So it explicitly says adjourn to the next day. So that's why the question of whether we need to have to have the meeting the night before that came out. So board member comments, questions, Ethan. I have a question and I should remember, but I don't. But what is our deadline for like our deadline that we try to set for approval of the budget? Would that interfere with the earlier date? So we have to warn, no, it doesn't change the date that we have to warn the budget vote, which is, I think it's likely gonna be the January 29th, whatever the last meeting in January is that we have. So it doesn't change, I don't think. You have to warn town meeting 30 to 40 days before. And so the informational meeting has to happen depending on the charter interpretation, either 10 days before town meeting or the night before town meeting. So that January 29th date that falls within that 30 to 40 day window of when you have to warn town meeting. Does that answer your question? Yeah, that was, I was kind of thinking that, but I didn't have the time to find the exact information on making sure that that was it. But that was kind of when I was reading through the survey of the poll. And I was like, well, if we had, I know we have a large list of things that we have on our goal list, but I was thinking if we had the, we went through the approval set town meeting, did the warning that it wouldn't be in my mind if we had a couple of small items to do and then we rolled into our next meeting, which I didn't look at what exactly the next meeting would be, but the 12th is what I'm hearing. Yeah, the 12th, yeah. So if we had, you know, some business items and then advertise it to be informational for going, just going over everything, then we could still do the show the night before, like last year was great. I'm kind of sad that I know we have the ability to do it again, but I was kind of sad that that was our last real vote as a four, but I think that that would be, I'm open to that if we did the approval, the 12th, and then the day before, and then obviously we had 10 meeting day, but I was feeling about it, but. So we need to approve the budget before that. Right, on the 29th. I don't know. That is what we need to learn. We need to have a public hearing. And it's at that public hearing, which is would be in January. Is it usually at the same meeting that we want? Yeah, so typically we'll, you'll approve your budget earlier in January. You have to leave enough time to warn a public hearing on that budget. Hold the public hearing. We traditionally have done it. You hold the town, you hold the public hearing and you approve the warning for town meeting the same night. So that would be the 29th. So you can, depending how the budget work sessions go, the meetings, I think are January, I forget, 4th, sometime in early January, that's when you could theoretically approve the budget, warn a public hearing for the 29th, have the public hearing, and finalize the budget in more in town meeting. If we need the additional work sessions, we can always schedule special meetings in January. Right, and the last opportunity the public has to influence the budget number other than to vote no for it on their ballot is at that public hearing in January. On the 29th. So the meeting that we're proposing on the 12th, and then on the... Town meeting night. Town meeting night are totally informational. There's no opportunity to change the budget in either of those meetings. It's the final public hearing and it's the last opportunity that anything can be changed. So yeah. All right. I just didn't know if you'd have enough time to put together a presentation. If we don't set it until say January 31st, and you've only got until February 12th, we'll do a presentation for the public. Is that enough time? I would say so. I'm trying to think too, because last year and in the past, town meeting TV always does its town meeting preview, and we always kind of use that as a dry run. We have a PowerPoint ready to go. Unless it's drastic changes that happen on the 29th, the number is pretty close to set. The services are pretty close to set. We're pretty close to set on any position changes, personnel changes. So hopefully by the time you get to the 29th, it's maybe a few tweaks of that. So you can do, okay. I just didn't know what went into the presentation for the 12th, what you're gonna want. I would think of it, I would think of it, obviously it's just gonna be your meeting, but kind of like the town meeting of years past, this would be a little bit less formal, sort of a dry run, first pass. I think you said it something, Ethan, but kind of like a, this is the presentation of what's gonna be a town meeting. It's the preview. You have an official informational meeting, then you have the votes. Right, and the one on the 12th can't be an official informational meeting because it's too soon. Correct. It's not within the 10-day window that you're allowed to do an informational meeting. So we have to do a second one. If we do one on the 12th, we also do a second one. So what are you gonna call them, one on the 12th? The one that actually applies in a night before. Unofficial information, unofficial town meeting preview, but yeah, we can work with it. And it's within 10 days, isn't that exactly 10 days before your time? Correct. It's within 10 days. So the day, the night before is within that window. We don't want to have it on a Sunday morning if we don't have to. Within 10 days? So you could do it nine days after? 10 days before. Within 10 days before, okay. It's not a pleasure. Try your situation. Kendall, any comments you wanna make or questions you wanna ask? I like SAS proposal with the 12th and the night before. I do have a general comment when it comes to polls like this. It's not really off topic because polls are very important. You only got 40 responses out of 11 residents. I would suggest maybe you consider some kind of a program where you reward residents that answer so many surveys over a year or so, but I mean, really, that's not a very representative sample of the community. So I would just note that. Thank you. All right, thanks. The other board comments, go ahead. I will just give credit to the fact that the poll was posted and it was in the newsletter and on the internet. I mean, you guys did a great job as far as reaching out. I just think that Kendall's point and getting people to be involved is more of a different conversation, but I do appreciate it. I found it. All right, well, we have an opportunity to get more input here tonight. If anybody has any comments and any members of the public wanna comment or ask a question about. Is this the emotion or not? It's just okay. I don't think. I mean, you gave it a recommendation, but we're... Yeah, it wouldn't hurt to... How about... Take a motion to at least set the informational date for March 4th. How about if I set... The motion would read, I make the motion that's... Sorry, I was asking for public... Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't hear that. I'm sorry, Andy. Sorry, Andy. Although, you know, I'm sorry, I may be interrupting you for no reason because I don't see any hands. No, that's fine. Sorry, go back here. No, I just thought you said there wasn't any public input, so I just moved on. Sorry about that. So I'd like to make the motion that the select board accept the recommendation to set the hearing for February 12th, 2024. It's an informational meeting to be held at the regular select board meeting and March 4th as the date for the informational hearing. Informal. Informal, sorry. You're good. Yep. Informal informational meeting. You sit here and... Oh, sorry. Second, Tracy, thank you for the second. Any further discussion? Okay, all those in favor approving the recommendation of staff, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Say nay. The motion passes 5-0. Thank you so much for that. Now, moving on to the next business item is discussion about clerk and treasurer responsibilities. Yes, this is something that I believe Kendall, you had brought up recently about do we need to separate those two functions for a number of years, certainly as long as I can remember the Essex has had a clerk slash treasurer. It's been one position. That's not the case across the board in Vermont. I think for different towns do it different ways. Separation of duties in some cases. Some towns have an elected clerk which I think plays into it. Staff and I did some research into looking as to whether or not it's the right setup for Essex if we either should change or should change anything. Looked at BLCT, got some legal opinions, our finance director spoke to a couple of auditors who do municipal work. I'd say the long and short of it is that as long as the duties of the clerk and the treasurer have enough checks and balances and are separate enough, that's the main thing. I do feel confident we have that in place. Can get into details if people have questions. But basically, I think what we have in Essex is sufficient but certainly if the select board feels differently it feels like you want to have a different system in place. We can look into that. It is a charter issue where the manager makes recommendations to appoint the clerk, to appoint the treasurer and the select board approves that. So I think you can certainly do it a different way if that's your preference. But I feel confident in having the checks and balances in place with what we have. But if you feel differently, we can do it a different way. I guess I would wonder what Kendall's concern was first. Kendall, you're welcome. Yes, I would just note that right in this memo, it says directly that the finance director spoke to two municipal auditors, both of whom emphasize the importance of segregating duty, of segregating duties, but did not feel the split of the town clerk, treasurer position was necessary. And I assume that's because of the controls and everything that Essex has now. So that's my main concern. It's pretty common. There's been a lot of incidences all over the place where the person taking the money should not be the one signing the checks. And it doesn't look like we're doing that. So. Thanks Kendall, any comments? I will say for point of history that the town clerk's position and the treasurer's position used to be elected offices. So, and then we went to the town clerk was appointed, but the treasurer was still elected. And then they combined them, so. Yes, and the follow up on that, generally people went to those two separate positions because one takes money in and the other sends money out. The more eyes that you have on it, the less chance you have of any improprieties. So Greg, I think in the memo that you provided, it said that there are three to five people between in the chain of approval of any expenditures. Yes. Yep. We have a whole electronic system. If anyone's curious where invoices get uploaded, they go through three to five people sign off on them before they get approved and then the check goes out. Our treasurer, our clerk treasurer can sign those checks. She's not the only person who can do that, but she's one of them. And last thing I forgot to mention is that VLCT has a chart of incompatible offices. Clerk and treasurer are not incompatible, if not on that list. Other comments, questions? Comments or questions from the public? Any hands? So do you need anything else? I think we're all set. I guess, I guess, does anybody have any objections? I don't know. I haven't heard anybody words. No, I would just like to thank staff for looking into it because it is of great concern if the protections aren't there. Thank you. You're welcome. And it's a good question. It's a good concern. It's a real concern in a lot of places. I do feel confident that we have those checks and balances in place, but thanks. All right, moving on. We have two additional business items, both which will be taken up in executive session, one about real estate and the other about contracts, so consent agenda. Make the motion. We accept the consent agenda as presented. Thank you, Don. Do I have a second? Definitely. Thank you, Ethan. Any further discussion? All those in favor of approving consent, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, say nay. The motion passes 5-0, reading file, any board member comments? I would just like to thank the Essex County Fire Department for a wonderful job they did Saturday. They're hard work and I'm glad that no one was hurt. Thank you for their service. Great. Just a reminder to the board and to the public, we have the first all-day budget workshop on next Tuesday, November 14th. We'll be ready for it. If you have any questions ahead of time, it always helps to get those just so we can prep department heads and staff and I'm in a little as best prepared as we can be. Starting at 8.30 a.m. Correct. Now ask your questions. Here? Yes. Andy usually asks if you're going to feed him, so are you going to feed Andy? Yeah. Just Andy, though, but yeah. That's what he usually asks, so I wanted to make sure. Are you new? I have a comment. Because I realized it like three minutes ago, but we didn't read the resolution into the record when we improved it. The road crew. The road crew. Yes, we have to read that one, but Kendall wasn't here. The clerk's not here. Oh, it has to be edited, but usually we always read it. You know what? We didn't include signing that resolution in our motion that we did earlier either. So as former, or as past clerk, if you want to read it into the... Did we do that? Make a motion to actually sign it. We neglected to click that in the motion. I saw a sitting there and I said, hey, I'm supposed to read that. Oh, Kendall's supposed to read that. All right, so resolution, be it resolved that the slack board of the town of Essex adopt the following statements of policy regarding winter snow and ice bearing operations. One, notwithstanding the circumstances involved with changing climatic conditions, the town will endeavor to keep town roads, designated walkways and municipal parking lots in a reasonably safe condition for travelers. And two, town employees will endeavor to exercise reasonable care and diligence in the performance of their duties, consistent with the intent of the current town of Essex Public Works, winter operations plan. And three, travelers who use the town roads, designated walkways and municipal parking lots are expected to demonstrate due care and reasonable caution, especially under adverse winter conditions. Executed at Essex Junction on the sixth day of November, 2023, the town of Essex Select Board. Thank you, Ethan. I will make the motion that the select board approve and sign said resolution. Okay. Thank you, Tracy, for the second. Any further discussion? All those in favor of approving and signing the resolution, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Those say nay. Hey, thank you, Ethan. We'll take care of that little business thing. Those of us that are here can sign it. We'll take care of the clerk's duties for you there, Kim. All right. Thank you. All right, yeah, yeah, yeah. I make the motion. So, I wanted to make a comment I wanted to make. There was something in the Essex News newsletter about meals for seniors and the opportunity to donate, make a donation to provide a meal either anonymously or I don't know if it's how that all works. I actually asked the question about there's no information in there on how to make that donation to me. I will look into that and see if you can get something on our front porch form in Facebook. I take it. I took ours to Parks and Rec office. There is a post on the Parks and Rec Facebook page. There is a link to WebTrack in order to sign up for that. Okay. It was posted on the community page as well with a link to the site. Okay, thanks. Great. Great. Thank you. Any other comments? All right. So now we're going to do motions for negative section. Okay. Oh, sorry. I have to do this all up tonight. I move that the select board enter executive session to discuss the negotiation or securing a real estate purchase or lease options in accordance with one VSA section 313A2 and to include the town manager, deputy manager, director of public works, community development director and Gail Henderson King of Hoyt Burke. Thank you, John. Do I have a second? Thank you, Ethan. Any further discussion? All those in favor of entering the executive session, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Those say nay. Motion passes 5-0. And for our second one, I move that the select board, wait a minute, make the motion. Sorry, this doesn't read right. So there are two motions for this next one. You can make the motion that the select board make the specific finder. Okay. I make the motion to select board make the specific findings of general public knowledge of contracts to place the town as substantial disadvantage. Second. Thank you, Don. Thank you, Tracy. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Those say nay. Motion passes 5-0. I move that the select board enter into executive session to discuss contracts pursuant of one VSA 313A1A to include the town manager and deputy manager. Thank you, Don. Do I have a second? Second. Thank you, Tracy. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Those say nay. Motion passes 5-0. We'd like you to come back with any motions afterwards. So now no motions coming back. So thank you all for attending. We will have executive session probably here. I and the folks that need to online, but this meeting is over and we will adjourn from here, but don't expect to make any motions after.