 Do we have the recorder going? In a moment. Moment. We soon will. OK. We soon will. I'm sorry. I just don't know what I'm talking about. Hello, Lori. Hi. That's all right. Hell to be popular, isn't it, Lori? OK, I will call the select board meeting to order. And I'll call the Essex Junction trustee meeting to order. We'd like to invite you to rise and join us in the Pledge of Allegiance, please. And if you could remain standing afterwards for a moment. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Well, you're all standing. Today being a national day of mourning for the passing of our 41st President of the United States, George H.W. Bush. I'd like to offer a moment of silence. We could? Thank you. So I'd like to welcome everyone to tonight's joint select board trustee meeting and ask you to be sure to sign in, if you haven't already. And just to remind folks to put your phones to silent, if you would, that would be greatly appreciated as well. And Evan, do we have some items at our table? Two items. One of them you have seen, you received electronically. But just in case you didn't have a chance to see it, it's the Recreation Co-Location Summary. It's a memo from Ali Baill. Isn't your packets, but it came in late? Just a hard copy, just in case. The second item is a memorandum update to the approval of joint minutes based in the town charter. This is a memo from myself. Andy brought it to my attention that the town charter does not allow the minutes supposed to be approved at the next select board meeting. So this is an update to that. If you accept it, I'd recommend moving the item 6A, the reading file up to business. You can speak to it more then, at which point. You could table it or take action if you wanted to. But I'd like to at least be able to present it to you. OK. All right. Anything else? Eileen? I don't certainly understand. We have a full schedule. OK. So those are for the? Discuss communications. I guess it would be 5E. 5E? 5E. OK. OK. All right. So I need a motion to approve amending the agenda to include these items for something I said? For 5A and 5E? So moved, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mike. Any further discussion about adding these items to the agenda? Hearing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes 5-0. And I'll make the same motion for the S-extra. Any further discussion? All in favor? Both the select board and trustees on items not on the agenda. Is there anyone here tonight wishing to speak during public to be heard? If you could state your name for the record. And I saw Margaret Hanford. Hi, Margaret Smith. And I'm going to say the same thing I said at the last meeting. When Elaine was speaking right now, I could not hear her. She's sitting in between two microphones and didn't get picked up. So it's not coming through the speaker and it's not coming back here. So it'd be nice to hear everyone. So the request would be to try to lean into the mics since we're sharing them? OK, thank you. That would, I couldn't hear you. So I handed out a paper copy of a memo that I sent to the boards over the weekend regarding communication of the governance process. And so I just handed out a paper copy of what I emailed everybody. Thank you. You're welcome. I'm sorry. You told me that specifically and I didn't listen. OK, Jerry. Yeah, I don't know whether the town is in the process of finding a new library director. But I would suggest that it might be a good idea to offer that position to Wendy. I don't know her last name. Who's the director of the Brown Hill Library? And the libraries. Thank you. For the record, you're Jerry Fox. Jerry Fox. In the town. We all did. OK, is there anyone else wishing to speak here in public to be heard? OK, I just want to take a moment to say thank you to Andy for sharing anything with the ukulele prior to the meeting. So thank you, Andy. It was really fun. It was my first solo gig. So I'm pretty happy. Next time maybe put. OK, if there's nothing else for public to be heard, then we're going to move on to our business section of the agenda. And that's an update on alignment and co-location of recreation departments. And we have room for Brad and Allie to come up. Maybe for a moment. That'll be great. Yeah, maybe you can come up here. Yeah, drag another chair over. So you two had come to us in the past saying here's an idea to co-locate both rec departments. And we gave you the thumbs up to say, yeah, go investigate. And I know you had set up a series of meetings and discussions between the two departments. We've read the memo with great interest. But we'd like to, if you can give us an executive summary there and we'll go from there. October, our timeline to meet with, can you, can everybody hear me? Sorry, no. So when we met back in October with you all, our schedule to meet with staff in kind of our subdepartments was spread out until about March timeframe. And with our budgets due this time of year, we sped up the process so that we could snag some meeting time tonight and give you a better update. So we combined all those meetings in the last six weeks or so and had some really successful meetings of the minds between park staff and our program staff, which involved after school general programming, senior programming, as well as IT and HR and finance. And we also had, there were 13, 13 of us in mid-October that took half of the day. And we did a tour of some facilities and we had all completed a strengths assessment. And so that was really neat. From my perspective, we haven't done that on the 81 Main Street side. And it was really nice to either affirm a couple of things or learn a little bit more about ourselves and then compare our counterparts with each other. And in our opposites. But we found that with a lot of programmers, a lot of after school programmers were similar, general programming, administrative assistants had their strengths that were kind of similar and in line. So it was just a really neat morning together and everyone is just in a really great mood about this potential opportunity and coming together. So that's kind of a recap. OK. Brad, did you want to add anything? I think ultimately, if you've read through here, you'll see that this is basically our executive summary of these meetings and our recommendation to proceed. We think it is wise, efficient, smart. We'll serve the community well. We'll provide for one stop shopping. We'll allow for a much better collaboration between our departments. And we kept going through these meetings and we didn't know how they would go. And we thought at some point there'd be a roadblock, or like we can't emerge IT systems, or HR is going to put the hammer down, or finance is going to tell us we can't do, or admin is going to tell us we can't do it, or our staff is going to put their hands up and say, this isn't a good idea, I'm scared, I don't want to play. And that's not what happened every time. We found that everybody's on board and supportive, and we're all ready to proceed. And there were- This is about co-location. It's not about- Correct, yep. Solidation, right? And so some questions that did come up. It was having to remind everybody in each conversation that there are still two separate entities, still collecting, still operating, still running the parks, the programs, all of that. It's just we're all together in the same building. It's similar to having finance all then it being an afterthought. Okay, so how about we open it up to questions from either board here? I'll start off. This has probably absolutely nothing to do with co-location, but I'm just curious, because in thinking about this, we've heard a lot about people coming in, going to one place and wanting to come here, and then they have to go to Maple Street if they want to register in the village in the town. How many people register online? I'm surprised to hear that this is still a going concern that people need or want to register face to face. I would have assumed that by 2018, just about everybody does it online, but that's not the case. Do you see that changing or is this always gonna be like this? I think from our, from Essex Parks and Rec, we have about 67% of online registration, whether that's with an Indian Brook pass renewal. Or a program registration, but certain things have to happen in the office, like a new application in the mail. So there is that percentage and working with the seniors more so with a lot of senior programming, just like Luanne sees them right in the center, we see certain populations and certain people come in. I have a question, some comments? So I'm looking at the microphone. Thank you. In looking at the second bullet point under administration, all residents of Essex would be considered residents for all rec programs operated by both EPR and EJRP. So does this mean that the increase for outside of the village residents, that town residents currently pay is going away so they're no longer being charged extra money for doing EJRP programming? Certainly we had that conversation and Elaine's correct that town outside the village residents who currently are considered non-residents for EJRP programming who pay higher fees, non-resident fees and also sometimes are not able to register at the same time as residents would be considered residents and from our standpoint to achieve all of those efficiencies and simplicities and then have somebody stand in front of you and say, oh, well you're a resident for this program and a non-resident for this program and say, oh, the non-resident, it really took the wind out of the whole, all the sales to all of a sudden be telling people that they can't register at a certain time or have to pay more. So we feel strongly that in order to do this successfully we need to have one communication of people and that's their residents if they live in Essex. I'm gonna have to apologize because I'm being rude because I'm leaning into the microphone away from you. The question is, I know in a prior conversation I think I recall that the fees that you charge for non-residents were used to subsidize residents who couldn't afford programs. I'm just wondering if you're gonna have a significant impact by doing away with the non-resident fees. So that's not exactly accurate. I just wanna make sure we're all, yeah. So in, we have an expense line in our general fund budget for scholarships. It's budgeted at $4,000 a year and it's available to village residents to apply for that money. Separately, we collect non-resident fees and there are revenue line in our general fund budget. So where it would impact things is we have had to, in anticipation of co-locating we would reduce our non-resident fees by about $7,000 next year. So instead of budgeting 20,000 and non-resident fees we're planning to budget 13,000. And the remainder of the 13 is other communities, residents who come. Yeah, town outside the village residents comprise about 35% of our non-resident fees. So the other 65% are coming from Williston, Colchester, South Burlington. Could you also, we talked a little bit about the co-location and what the village is going to offer the town in ways of facilities and how that works out? Yeah, I mean, essentially if we're co-located we would, it's all considered shared space at that point. So we met today to talk about the use of of our multipurpose rooms, of our Aspire multipurpose slash workout space. So we would meet as a programming team right now. We have a programming team at EJRP. It would be expanded so that it's one big programming team who's producing one brochure. And if they have a need for space and we had space available, they would use EJRP space. Similar to if Memorial Hall was needed or Sunset Studio to offset if we continue down the co-locating road, then we use all of those things together on availability. And so that the EJRP is not losing any program space. You know, no one's losing anything that they already have. Just could be a change of location. Very. I'm curious about the swimming pool at Maple Street Park because I know it's incredibly popular. Will outside the village residents have equal access to that or will that be restricted? No, again, town outside the village residents would be treated as residents and have access to the programs as residents and pay the resident fees. You expect an increase then in use of that pool by doing this? You know, we talked a lot about this. We don't know. I mean, we can't tell you why people currently do come to the pool or don't come to the pool. All we will do is, what we always do is watch trends and community needs and adapt and create systems and pricing around that supports what the community is seeking. So. That can adjust. Okay. Lori. I have two questions. On the flip side can, I'm assuming village residents can go to Sandhill Pool. Anytime. Good. Not now, it's cold. But, yeah. I don't want to go down. Actually. You know, I know it's a. No change, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's no change. Okay. And then the future alignment says we believe that the recreation impact fee that is currently administered in the town should be adopted by the village. Can you just tell me a little bit about what that fee, how you get the money, what it's used for today? In the town? For, so the rec impact fee is collected by the community development department with any residential development, new construction that comes along. So there's a calculation and based on how many in a dwelling there will be is a certain fee added on for that development. And then that's collected. And it kind of sits in its own little piggy bank. But really, you know, right now the way that the rec impact fees are, it can be used in any way that the community is impacted based on the growth of the community. You know, it does have to be, it's a policy that does need to be refreshed and updated. But we're currently using the study as it had been done. And then that's saved. It does need to be used within a certain time or it goes back to the developer. And unless there's a like a district clause of a rec impact fee, which there isn't right now, that money doesn't have to be used directly on that section of development. If that's not really where, you know, if it just means we're having a lot of more, a lot more people come into the community, then the pool may need something. It doesn't mean that the pool has to be right there. Okay. And does it ever help with things like, there's more people in this one section of the community and so sidewalks are needed? Or is that taken out of? Well, normally you would see the impact fee to build a new park or to build an addition or build additional parking to a park. We just recently used it to, are using it to upgrade the doors at the senior center to be handicapped, accessible and electric because we're seeing a growth in the seniors use of that center and we need to bring the building up to code. So that was a use, but you'd see it in either building a park or a new playground set that has expanded use for, say the population that is using that park or could be using the park. Excellent, thank you. And then, sorry, I have one more. Sorry. That's okay. Add to the sidewalk question. The town is considered doing a sidewalk impact fee, in which case we back out a little bit of the calculation that goes into the rec impacts fee. Like Ali said, The fee is outdated. The calculation only went up to I think 2013 or 2014. So the rec impact fee itself is due for an update, especially if this extension starts to pay into that as well. It'd be great to have the village look at the sidewalk impact fee too. And my third question, and I promise my last one, and I just wanna make sure we're clear for everyone who might be listening that co-locating still means that financiers are separate and therefore the debt we are still paying on the pool will still continue to only be paid by the village, which is up soon anyway, correct? Yeah, FY20 is the final payment. Okay, thank you. And on the money aspect, we've already talked to Vermont Systems, who is our rec software provider, and it's easy to keep our cost center codes the same that they are, and Lauren and Sarah have been highly involved in that, and they'll make sure that things stay separated as needed. So with the conference room becoming the potential office space, can you just make sure that, are we talking about the small conference room, right as you walk in, or are we talking the big multi-purpose room? Perfect, perfect. And then with, I see one of the portions, talks about having a new position before communications. I just wanna put a plug in of, communication is absolutely key, but I would rather see it not be within just recreation, but a broader municipality as a whole. So of course we need it for recreation, but we also need it for many other things too. So if we're looking at a communications person, I'd rather see that town, village, however we wanna say it wide. And we've had some of these conversations with the administration in the last few days, and we've grappled with the same issue, and REC is such a different beast than most other municipal departments in terms of we're selling things. And so our needs tend to be much broader as well as much more specific to certain groups that we're targeting certain programs to, as well as more immediate in terms of cancellations, closings, change of locations, new brochures coming out. So it would be interesting to have that conversation of how that would all integrate, but certainly we have expressed some fears of having somebody offside at another location who's trying to coordinate our communications that are happening multiple social media posts per day, front porch forum posts, website updates, emails. There's just a lot happening. Absolutely, and similar to a public works water main break and needing to let people know about that before traffic starts to hit. Absolutely. And we are many needs. They probably have one of those a month, and we have five of those a day. And so that's, I think, the difference. And we also think it's really important to have one voice, if there are two people or three people in each separate department that are posting things, and one's doing this avenue and the other one's doing that, and it's just this, it's a mixed message and it just looks murky. But if we would co-supervise that position, but that individual would be getting things from our parks staff and our programming staff and the childcare staff and so on. So it would really be someone who is really well connected to every staff member between the two departments. I'd like to circle back to the finance part again. The programs that the village and the town have now for fees and all that kind of stuff are two different systems, correct? Okay, so can you dig a little deeper on how that's gonna work? Are you gonna combine codes but still keep the money separate? Or how is, I'm still not entirely clear on how that's gonna work. So, you know, as we look to the fall brochure being the first thing we co-produce together, it will be 32 pages instead of 16 and 20 from the two. It'll have both of our logos, but inside you won't know which program belongs to which, we'll only know it internally. So all of the fall programs that we did last year or are planning to do next year, internally when somebody registers, they will go to that, our pot of money. And when they put their programs in the brochure, even though they'll be side-by-side and in the same sections, their programs will go to their budget. If we, what we think may happen is that we may develop some new joint programs. And if that happens, we talked about creating a new enterprise fund where the revenues are shared as well as the expenses. So for the typical user of, I'm leaning again, leaning this way to the mic, I'm sorry. The typical user of REC services that will look very much like a merger because you said you're gonna have one, you know, your programs are gonna be on a list, you can't tell who's offering which. And most of the, in all of the continuance of separation will be among the, you know, who pays, you know, how things are paid for and who works for whom and those sorts of things. And I understand that we're anticipating or our outlook is that we'll use the budgeting process to get authorization from voters or buy in from the voters or whatever the right term is. My question is because the town and village budget timelines are out of sync with each other, do we have concerns about one going one way and one going the other? Just raising that as a concern and do we need to communicate what we're talking about here to, you know, early or, you know, I'm just just worried about the whole hornet's nest of past REC experience coming back up. If the, you know, trying to figure out the right way to say this without offending anybody. You know, we didn't go through a lessons learned the last time we went through this. Is there anything there that, you know, we didn't, we're not considering here when we, you know, if we move forward with this to make sure we're not causing a problem or concern with residents. I don't know if any of that makes sense. So your question. So my question is about the budgets if one passes and the other doesn't. That's part of the question, right? You know, I mean, we, you know, in a town meeting situation, you always end up with a past budget. But then there's a question of, right, what goes on during the meeting. And then if there are, you know, I have heard folks say in this meeting, you know, in past meetings that, you know, the town voted no to a merger. And this certainly to the typical user looks like a merger. Everything's, you know, a lot of the, a lot of it's still in the back, you know, he's in the background of the stuff that, you know, we're going to need to sort out if we're going to make it a true merger at some point or whether, you know, how that will move forward. But I, you know, I don't know how, if we're going to, we're going to end up with a publicity nightmare or whatever with regard to how we handle this. I just want to make sure that we're careful when we move forward that it doesn't look like a back room deal or, you know, some, some, you know, you know, words have come out before about, about this. I just want to make sure we're careful. Allie or Brad, do you want to comment on any part of that? Okay. I mean, I think looking ahead and being optimistic, the goal in both of our departments as it currently is and to continue that way is to serve the customers. And most of them are residents and then we serve the non-residents. But we are serving people and that will still be what we do as our priority and we're making it, we're giving them a convenience by being in one spot. I mean, just this, it's Wednesday and we've had about 10 phone calls just this week asking us questions about EJRP. So now we're all going to be in one place. So we're providing another convenience for our customers. I think the difference is before it was that convenience plus a different structure and the structures internally will stay mostly the same and we're still just wanting to provide to those who, who we do our job for. If I can add to that a little bit, it may, maybe it will look like a merger from the outside and that's something I think that the boards will have to speak to and staff will have to speak to when the questions come up. The boards have done a good job in the past doing Q&A sheets, getting ready to town meeting where you can explain stuff like this. But from a bigger level, the boards have said that you want to keep moving towards consolidation, towards alignment. Evans come in, one of his big things with fresh set of eyes on the whole process is alignment and actually lining up policies, procedures, fees, stuff like that and having the different departments do that. The ones that are consolidated like finance now as it is. The ones like recreation, I keep telling Brad and Allie that I give them a ton of credit for taking this initiative and bringing it forward and coming up with the plans and having the meetings. That they're doing their directive from on high to what can you do to align departments, consolidate departments. The best way for them to do this that they're seeing, I'm supportive of it, I think Evan is too, is to get into one place where they can more easily share ideas, figure out the brochures, the fee structure, stuff like that. And if it gets to the point of merger, it'll be that much easier for them to do it. But at this point, it's not a merger, it's the alignment consolidation piece. Allie, did you have your hand up? Yeah, I just wanted to ask what checks and balances will folks see you using as you progress toward moving one department into the other's location? I think recent history has shown that there was a big credibility gap just a couple years ago when you presented a very similar plan, similar in many ways. And I think a lot of voters need a lot of reassurance that this isn't the same thing or just the same thing reworked. I think I saw Mike before, did you have a hand up? I did. Come to Andy and Elaine. I guess I'd just like to take a minute for a quick review of fairly recent history. I think everybody here will recall that when we decided to go to the voters and talk to them about a new police department, one of the big gains of that, aside from the pit that they were working in, was the operating efficiencies that they were gonna gain by having everybody in one building. Instead of detectives up near Hannaford's and the police down here and just a complete shortage of space. But moving all of them to one building was an increase in operating efficiencies. The same thing on a smaller degree happened here when we renovated this building. The whole idea was to have the ability to have departments get together and be able to have that same gain of operating efficiencies. I see this as nothing different. Absolutely nothing different. You have two different departments. Yes, it's a little bit different in that regard. But the gain in operating efficiencies is gonna be huge. And to my way of thinking, it's gonna fire away. There's gonna be bumps. There's gonna be stuff to work out. But I think in the long run, the gain in operating efficiencies is gonna fire away the bumps. Thanks. Thank you. Elaine. I think the difference between what, a few differences between the rec vote and this situation, the biggest check and balance is that the budgets are not being combined. And so the town residents will pay their budget, village residents will pay their budget. So I don't know, unless I'm misinterpreting the checks and balances that you're asking about, but that back end is a significant, that is a significant standard procedure that will not change. And so the residents are not going to be charged more because this is happening. They're not gonna be charged less because this is happening. But the town outside the village residents are being included in now without being charged extra fee. So I think that's a goodwill gesture that makes a lot of sense financially as well. And the other difference I think is, if I recall correctly, we talked, the recreation process last time involved the creation of a third governmental entity that would have taxation authority and a separate board. And there was a lot of voter concern and confusion about adding a third layer of government to our community. And that was what people didn't want. And that's not happening either. So I'm thinking that this is what it is on face value as we're co-locating. And I appreciated the comparison to the police department. I agree, Mike, that's very similar to what we're doing here. Yeah, I just wanted to just clarify that I think it's these two boards problem to deal with regard to explaining to the residents what we're doing and why we're doing it. I think Brad and Ally have done their job. And I think it's up to us not to, I don't think we should put it back on them. To be clear, Elaine and others. What I'm talking about is guarding against group think. I'm talking about being absolutely transparent. I'm talking about a very slow process because only slow government can be good government. There were all kinds of things that came up, six, eight, nine months into the process that showed residents there was some very questionable behavior going on at the highest levels. That's what I'm talking about. Exemplary behavior on the parts of everyone here who is accountable to taxpayers, not reaching HR policies, showing us checks and balances at every turn and how transparent and honest and ethical you are being because those were some of the hugest breaches of trust that many voters saw. As a user of the services with a 10 year old son and a husband who still goes in to sign up for everything, I will be very happy to no longer have the hour long conversation of, well, where do I go? Who's brochure am I looking at? What online service am I going to? So I think the work you have put forth is wonderful and solid and I look forward to the transition. Thank you. I would also just like to appreciate that this is fairly slow in the sense of we're talking about co-locating with two completely separate budgets that would be approved by two separate boards, possibly a chance we'll talk about later coming together to approve potential budgets together. But we're not saying Brad and Ali go create a whole new entity. We're saying come back to us if we need to make budgetary changes, let us know otherwise keep doing exactly what you're doing. So thank you for taking this nice and solid you are. Anybody else? I agree that the operational adjacencies that you'll get from this from a user perspective can, it looks like a very, the potential to have a very positive impact to be able to align your program so that they're complimentary and not just complimenting by accident or you know, we're after the fact but actually be thoughtful in that. So I see this as a potential positive for the community and I do thank you for taking the initiative and going through the process to bring this forward at this time. So since there's no other questions on the board I'd like to just open it up to the public if there's any questions from the public that you'd like to just raise your hand and we'll recognize you. Jerry? Karen Fox again, I was emphatic against the previous proposal me entirely because it created another level of government. I see absolutely nothing wrong with this. That's one person speaking their own mind. Thank you Jerry. Anybody else? Margaret? Nobody's talked about daycare and one of the issues in the past has been that people in the junction were eligible to apply to the daycare programs that they run and people in the town were not able to take advantage of that. So I don't know whether that's even been thought of. I'm really concerned with moving in together because it looks like cohabitation. It looks like it's becoming one person and people on the outside won't be able to tell that it's two departments. They'll think it's just one department. So they say they'll stay in separate but it's not gonna look like it from the outside. It's gonna look like they've merged. They've got one budget, maybe two budgets but one brochure, one person, one website. How does that not look like one rec department? So the voters very clearly said two years ago don't merge and yet here we are and to me they may say they're not merging but it sure looks like merging to me and we renovated this building so that there would be space for the town rec department that I guess was money wasted because it's not gonna be used for our rec department. So oh and I wanted to tell you my daughter-in-law takes my granddaughters to the junction pool because they have waiting pool that they really like. So for whatever that's worth, it's one of the draws of the junction pool. Ali or Brad, could you comment on the daycare piece? I know you've talked about that already, thought about it. I'm not exactly sure which child, so there are a variety of childcare things if it's after school daycare. It was infant and toddler daycare. Okay, yeah, so EJRP operates a preschool at a Park State School. We have two classrooms, a three, four, and a four, five room. Currently we, non-residents do, so town outside the village people do have access to that daycare. They do pay a non-resident fee so and they also, we prioritize enrolling residents first. So by doing this, town outside the village residents would have greater access to and a decreased cost for that daycare. Would they have equal access? Yes. Is it equal access? Yes. Okay, okay. Anybody else? Diane? I think this is a brilliant idea. Could you stand up please so people can hear if it's on a microphone? I think this is a brilliant idea and it's the long term coming. I was on the recreation advisory group when the Mabel Street pool was renovated. And this, which way did we go? Has been going on even before that, okay? The two departments collaborate always on a lot of different programs and now they'll be talking instead of on the phone to each other. They can be in the same room face to face. The amount of collaboration will continue only to the benefit the entire residents of our community. Thank you very much for doing it. Thank you, Diane. Anybody else? Okay, so there's no motion yet. So we appreciate the update. There will be some slight adjustments to budgets because you can have some efficiencies. For instance, with the brochure, although you have one brochure, it's not gonna be, it'll be twice as large. Not necessarily, but the postage will be one instead of two. And again, we'll be identifying more if we really are going to be co-locating and finalizing budgets. One automatic cost savings is, we're both separately hosted from Vermont systems in the cloud. And we would be one system, one maintenance fee, one hosting fee instead of duplicating that in areas. And that's the 7,800 that was mentioned in here as a quick automatic that we know of. But there's still a lot that's unknown. I have a process question. So what is the process? You're looking at me, so I'm assuming you're- Yes, I'm assuming you're telling us the process. So we have this information. I'm assuming it goes back to the two respective boards separately for discussion or I guess I'm just curious where we go from here. Well, good question, because that's why we created joint board meetings so that we didn't go back to each one. And then you have a comment and they respond. And then the town has a comment and they respond maybe differently. And that's not what you thought. So my point would be that I guess is that a joint board meeting, which is also why we are asking for joint budget meetings. Okay. When things have effects in both budgets, it's not appropriate for one to just act and not the other. So that's why we wanna start bringing things that have joint impact, not that they're together, but they have impacts separately and together. So I would say at a future joint meeting, this will come- For the budget to finalize because all of this will be part of the package that goes to voters, correct? Yes. Okay, thank you. So nothing else then. Thank you for that discussion. And again for your initiative to do that and bring it forward. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks, thank you. Okay, we're gonna move on to the next business item which is 5B and I'll ask, do you wanna- Yep. Okay, I will take it over. First of all, I wanna welcome and recognize Dan Richardson who's joining us here tonight who is our special attorney for advising us on issues, all things consolidation and governance and charters. Thank you for coming Dan and everyone's gonna get a chance to ask Dan questions in a moment. I'm not gonna go through this line by line. I'll just give a very brief synopsis of what we've done. I think most of the board members are aware of what the committee was charged with. We saw our charge as to come up with a number of possible governance options, governance change, reconfiguration options which we worked on. We put together a crude list. Then we, with Dan's assistance, we went through it and got legal advice, got his legal insight about what would need to be done. Some of the thing, one of the options was eliminated because it wasn't gonna be, it wasn't legal, it wasn't something the legislature would approve. I would say at this point what I'll do in a moment is let each of you, we can just sort of discuss all of these and also invite any of the board members who haven't but who weren't on the committee to share any thoughts that they had about it and add anything. I would say that right now what the subcommittee would like to do and Irene and Elaine and Max can correct me if I'm wrong. I think what we would like to do probably is at least have another go around. I think we kind of feel that we, this is a little bit, the document you have in front of you is a little bit unpolished. We would like to maybe work on it a little bit more but with your input, I think at that point what we see ourselves doing if you scroll back through the document and we made up a little flow sheet, the idea is that we would use this as a basis for creating some kind of a public engagement survey or document that we would, I believe, should go into every home in the community. Perhaps that's not what other people think but we would use this as a public engagement document, let everybody in the village and town look at these, give us their feedback, give us their insights, maybe create a survey form or they could, we could have some kind of a structured feedback on it and then we would take that feedback and from there try to pare the whole thing down into hopefully one option which we would then go back out with to the community for a vote but the public engagement piece would have that allow two way conversation would allow us to understand what people think out there and it would also be telling folks out there what we're doing, why we're doing it and so forth. So that's kind of the thinking. I just wanna answer two, we've had two concerns that we had going forward that I think it might be reasonable for me to just quickly mention. Irene has been very concerned about the fact that she would like to have had a presence distinctly and specifically for just for people from outside the village to be involved in the subcommittees work. The rest of us Elaine and Max and I just had a lot of problems with that, it seemed like it was kind of being a little bit selective and kind of pushing people who are village residents who are also town residents not allowing them to participate. Irene can present that argument in a moment. Andy was concerned about financial data and why were we asking for financial data and I wanted financial data because I had noted that in the past, all past merger efforts and consolidation efforts, the very first question and I went back over last night, we're just talking about recreation. I went back over the minutes of the meetings and over and over again what were people asking, they were asking how much is this gonna cost, how much is this gonna cost, why can't you tell us how much it's gonna cost, why is it gonna cost more in the town and lower in the village? So lots of questions about finances. So I thought it was important and appropriate for us to have that worked in right at the beginning. I think at this point, hold on just one second, what I'd like to do at this point is sort of loosely go through this but also take note of the fact that Dan is here and Dan can answer any legal questions that you have and I'll stop there. Thanks, Andy. I need to highlight that because the financial data that was provided includes the taxes paid by my employer that when we get to that part of the discussion, I need to recuse myself and leave the room. Gotcha. So I'm just gonna say that I don't understand at all how the taxes that my employer pay are relevant to the choice and you can't tell me why. Otherwise I'd have to leave the room but. Okay, I won't. I don't wanna be involved in that discussion. I know exactly why too. And so, yeah, the fine. Tell the others. But I object to the fact that it was included because it then excludes me from the conversation and because I do not believe that that particular taxpayers' taxes are relevant to the choice of which governance model we choose. So, sorry. I do wanna add one other thing and thank you, Andy. I didn't mean to put you on the spot. One other thing we did was if you scroll down through the governance options, we also made up a list of some way of evaluating each of these and we went through the exercise and Elaine put a lot of effort into doing this and we, the four of us evaluated them on the basis, further back, you went past it. Yeah, well, that's it. Yeah, but we each independently went through and ranked these about just to have a sense of where we were, how we thought about them. And we kind of debated whether to include this piece with this document. The reason being is that, as Irene has said, we don't want to seem like we're biasing any decision that we're favoring one option versus the others. We really want genuine, transparent, objective public feedback on these. And so we're a little hesitant that if we go forward with a document saying, well, we think option, whatever, X is better than option Y and for this reason and that gets out to the public, it could bias the vote. On the other hand, there's probably a very good argument that you have nine experienced elected officials sitting here in our opinion, I think collectively we probably have about 30, 40 years experience sitting on these boards. Why not include our opinion? So again, that's something that we thought would leave up to the full boards to discuss. How much do we want to include our opinion or do we not want to have our opinion included? We thought that would be an interesting point to have the rest of you discuss with us. Thank you. So I guess what I'll do is I can throw it open and say, invite anyone to start asking questions about option A, option B, C, why did we include it? And if any of you have any questions, I can take you through it. Yep, go ahead, Lori. I have more questions for Dan. Yep. So I don't know if you want to start there. Yes, let's start there. Okay, so option, there are two options. Option B, which is a new single charter community with a single board. And then, I apologize, I don't know, there's a new single, and then option E is a new single charter community with a single board in voting districts. My question for those is around the tax rate. In both of them, in the options, pros and cons or whatever they're called, we talk about merging in those and equalizing tax rate. So my question is, if we created the new single charter and the new boards, do we have to, at the same time, tackle the tax inequity, the budgets, the money piece of it? Or could we do it in increments where we say, well, we think we should have one charter because of the type of community we are and we're gonna create a new one, this is gonna be our new board and it might stop right there. Is that possible? And I'm sure. Thanks. And a version of this question came up in a subcommittee and I didn't have a nice Pat answer, so I went back and did a little bit of research. The answer is that you can make adjustments for, and let's think about debt in two different ways. There's sort of long-term capital debt, like the, I think the recreation department was talking about retiring. I think it was a debt on a pool. That type of debt, that can be handled in one way and you could create a plan that would do that so you wouldn't force the new entity or the other entity that haven't enjoyed that or voted on that, they wouldn't be burdened with it, it could be retired in one way. But I think the real question is sort of ongoing obligations, could you keep certain services that were delivered in town outside the village or the village separate as you went forward? And in fact, under statute, it does allow for special taxes, for special services, to certain districts. So you could keep that separate. So it's really a policy question from your point of view. And you take, for example, the rec department and the question is, right now you're maintaining it in the same way that you could after a merger, which is as separate budgets, separate tax sources, under 1483 of Title 24, would you wanna do that forever? And that would be, I think a policy question that these boards would have to wrestle with, but the answer is that yes, you can have, for example, if inside the village you do sidewalk planning and you don't do it outside the village, you could have a special service and a special tax that would relate to that, it would have to be laid out in the charter plan. In the charter, so it would have to decide before we get too far into the process. Right, and both the charter and what I would call the merger plan. So I mean, what you'll develop if you do go forward generally is two key documents. One would be the charter changes, but the other would be sort of a master plan that would outline this and explain this to both, and that would be what the voters would be reviewing so that they would understand because having push charter changes through, I can tell you that it's often hard to explain it to anyone who hasn't spent time drafting it, what exactly things are doing in those charter changes. So having a plain language plan is, and in fact, statutes call for that to have that type of plain language plan that would lay out how these things would be done and then the charter provisions themselves to effectuate it. Okay, thank you. Can I ask a follow-up question if anyone's ready? Are there any options that were discussed in the subcommittee that would allow us to merge the governance but not merge anything else right away? No, the problem becomes one of representation so that if you merge a board into one, I mean, it would pose difficulties and this is one of the, oh, sorry, this is one of the issues that we, I suggested was not a workable option because you have your charter, you have your, each of you, the town and the village to merge the governance of the two creates representational issues, who's elected, whom, and what are they actually representing? Thank you. Well, Dan, now, option D, we said we could have the village become a special district. Right. And if the village remained a special, if we designated the village as a special district, it could have separate taxes. You could assign separate services, municipal services that just apply for the village and are only taxed within the village as a way of achieving some of the things that I think both of you were just talking about. Is that correct? Right. And a special district would be, it's often a way to go for municipalities that are keeping not just certain services separate but really larger departments separate and a special district is really, Waterbury is probably the best example currently that has done that, where they've taken some of the village services and they've converted them into the special utility district to manage and to run those things. I mean, a special district creates its own governing body and it has its own management structure. It's just for a limited purpose. But the sort of breakthrough that I had in research from our subcommittee meeting was that, for some of these smaller questions, which I didn't have the support for, looking back into Title 24, there is statutory authority for such special taxation of certain services that do not extend to the other sections of the merged municipalities. Oh, here it is. To continue on that same thought of when you have a special district and in all cases, I think, from what I've looked at, towns that have special districts, their representation is all elected at large. So there's no unique representation for that district. There's no unique elected representation for any of those districts. Is that correct? And that the at-large governing body decides all of the budget issues for that town, including the special district? No, not necessarily. And again, I just hate to pick on Waterbury, but they have their own elected body that's separately elected from that special district that does the act of governing. And a lot of times, what will happen is with fire districts or special districts, they'll have special elections for those trustees. Yeah, it does, it does. I guess I hadn't, I guess I keep flipping back to the Union Municipal District, one where you've got multiple entities, but you can have an entity within an entity that has its own board. Right, and that's a different creature. Union Municipal Entity is between two municipalities. Right, and often doesn't have, they would appoint, so the Public Safety Department, Central Vermont has that. And you actually specially elect some of the representatives of that from each of those municipalities, but they also send representatives from their various boards. This would be an actual chartered special district, or at least it could be, for that purpose. So how would that differ from the way the village operates now? Sorry, how would that differ from the way the village operates now? It sounds like we're just changing the name, but it's basically the same creature. You know, the idea of a special district is an idea of a limited, so that, I mean, they came out, for example, fire districts, their job is to manage water. It's not to provide police service. It's not to provide fire departments. It's to provide one thing, or to provide two or three things. And so special districts are often limited in their function. They don't provide general governance either, so that they're really focused on that service. And they're newer creatures. I mean, these special districts are not, you know, that's a trend, and especially, you don't see it in Vermont so much, but certainly out west. There's a lot of special districts that are created, but, you know, Vermont has them as well. And I guess another example, and this was created on the state level, was the regional special districts for solid waste. And that's their job, solid waste, so that the town does not have to dispose of lead paint and other nasty things. They do it. Dan, can you remind us, I think I have this right in the committee, you told us that a town is at large, a city has wards, a town select board, all of the members are elected at large, and a town doesn't divide itself up into smaller districts for the purposes of representation? Generally it doesn't. And what I was getting at, I hope I was getting at this point, was that as the default rules for a town, it's at large select board representation. So, you know, they have everyone from three to five to some places have seven. It's all at large representation. South Burlington I think is a good example of something that calls itself a city, but still has a select board, so it's at large representation. But cities traditionally have been broken down into districts, and I've called them wards to separate it out from other uses of the word district, but specific voting wards, that's the way Burlington, Montpelier, and I believe Rutland have divided up for their governance because you have dense population, but it may not be uniform in the same way that a town does in their voting, so they will create these districts to make sure that each area has a voice. And generally, you'll have specific voting districts, and you can either have at large council members and or an at large elected mayor that will represent sort of the whole. But that's generally what they do with cities because of the population. Can I ask a follow-up question? So what you're saying is in general, it is not the practice for a select board to have voting wards or districts? No. So to follow on to that, could we create a town council and remain the town of Essex, but have a council that has those specific wards? Yeah, I mean, that's a possibility. It's just not traditionally done, but if that's what works to make this, there's that possibility. So it's the name of the entity, it's the name of the governing body, not the legal makeup of the municipality that determines that? Yes, you know, and the idea of a, I mean, traditionally towns because of the uniformity of the population haven't required voting districts, generally it tends to have, it either is a urban or rural or suburban makeup, but the idea of governance, there's nothing that would require. And again, this is where you get into the ability of the legislature to change the governance structure of municipality. The default and generally what's worked is the select board model. And that's the vast majority of cases, but if there were specific reasons driving a decision, there's nothing preventing the legislature from ultimately approving, if the voters supported a district-based or voting ward-based representational system. Okay, just follow up on that. So there's an option E, where we have a new single charter community with single board and voting districts. So that allows us to remain a town but have representation based on two wards. So am I missing something? No, it would, I mean, the one thing I guess and don't get too stuck on the name, city, town, village, because those are really, there's no legal requirement where if you're a town, you have to have this type of government or if you're city, you have to have this type of government. Traditionally and generally, it's true. Towns have select boards, cities have city councils with districts, voting wards and mayors. But if you choose to call yourself a town and remain so, you can do that. And you can change the governance structure based on your needs and the needs that the voters determine to be applicable. The only caution I have, and this is generally out of a conservative lawyer's nature is that any time you reinvent the wheel or change the wheel radically from a circle to a square, you should have a good reason to do so, not just simply for the sake of let's see if this will float or roll as the case may be. And so I would certainly caution you that you have these existing models for a reason they've generally worked. If there's a reason to change them, then that's fine. You have that power to do so, but you should look. I had tried to ask this question previously and I think a different question was answered than I asked in my written questions. And you've mentioned that you can have an entity, a town, a city or whatever, that has a board that runs the entire entity and then have a district inside it that runs itself with its own board and I assume then you could also have another district that's the rest of that town that also has representation, its own representation, right? So that's kind of one of these scenarios here. I think it was A, right? Was, well, that was one of them anyway. So my question that I asked, that I would try to ask was, and I think there was a proposal at one point to have a situation where you had a board that runs one part of the town, a board that runs one part, the other part of the town and then those two boards merged together to run the whole thing, right? Was what scenario A had been, I don't know if it still is. My question was what was proposed there was that the individuals that made up those two district boards would then constitute the whole board and my question is, can you be elected to a district board position and a town board position with a single vote? Did you understand what I'm saying? I think I do. I know you can be a seat on each of those if you're elected to each of those individually. Right. But creating the vote at the one, can you be elected to two governing boards with a single vote is the question? So essentially setting up and I'm not trying to change but make sure I understand what your question is so I answer it is the idea of you would essentially create two municipal entities, the village and the town outside the village. Or two villages. Or two villages, recall. And then you have a town and the idea that the governing board for the villages would be elected directly by the citizens of each of those. And then those trustees would then automatically become the select board for the town over it. That's my question. Town council. Yeah. The select board, they're not like that at large, right? I mean, in theory, I think that's a possibility. The one concern that I would have sort of off the bat is how would you control one village from either expanding or changing their representation if they're separately chartered? And I think it would require, well, essentially what you're creating is another level of government. And obviously that's the question you have to pose to yourself, but could you do it? In theory, we do similar types of things where we send members of select boards or city councils to regional planning commissions and other boards that... So they're appointed and elected to those positions. Right. But I mean, it's one of these things that sort of the boards themselves, but you could set it up that way. It's one of those things you can do it. Okay. Dan, one of the things that we talked about, and maybe because we're on camera, you mentioned Mount Pilier and the state legislature and how they view these things from villages and towns. Could you maybe recap for everybody how Mount Pilier looks at certain of these options or not specifically, but over the past, what they've thought of? Well, they've had no problem challenging towns or cities when they've put charter provisions before it that the legislature doesn't agree upon. And that's the sort of number one rule about municipalities is that we are creatures of the legislature. And so the legislature has the final say. And both the government ops committee in the house and the Senate tend to take very conservative views of, they want to make sure it works. They want to make sure that it's supported, that it's sustainable. So they do tend to ask a lot of questions. They do want to make sure that it's clear, that it's laid out. They want to, it would certainly require any change is going to have to require making sure that the government ops committee understands the purpose of it, why it's happening, and what benefit is rendered upon it. Because if the legislature doesn't see a benefit rendered upon the community as a result of it, they won't approve it. And there have been many charter changes that have died on the government ops floor, not even brought up to a vote. And the great example of course is, the city of Mount Pilier owns Berlin, or the outside of Berlin Pond, except for one strip. And they were governing Berlin Pond under an old public health order from the 1920s. There was a Supreme Court decision that said, that's not good law, you can't do what you're doing, stop. So the city of Mount Pilier passed a charter change amendment, said, oh yes we can. And they brought it before the government ops committee, and the government ops committee, hearing testimony from both the city, from other people, from voters, from people in Berlin, from ANR particularly, let that one die in the committee floor, because it was inconsistent with their other principles and other ideas. So even though it had overwhelming support from the city of Mount Pilier, they weren't going to advance it. And I think that, does that give a summary of along the lines of what you're hoping? Pretty much, and you also said that they don't like pitting one town or village against the rest of the state. Right, right. And causing a problem somewhere else. Right, you know, I mean they have to, they have to look at the municipalities as a whole. You know, so that if, you know, one municipality is causing the other discomfort or pain, they do have to, you know, that, well, and certainly because it's a legislative process and open, anyone who wants to object can come in and give persuasive testimony. And you know, so you can have one community saying, we want to change this charter and do this, and it affects another community in a negative way. You know, Mount Pilier says, we just want to send all of our sewage straight down to Winooski without treating it, you know, by charter and Middlesex says, hey, wait a minute, you know, they're going to hear that testimony. And even if all the people of Mount Pilier, a hundred percent approval for this, you know, the legislature is going to say, yeah, but that causes a disproportionate impact outside of your municipal borders. And so that's certainly something that they look to as well. Not withstanding Dan's warning to not try something just for the sake of trying it, I thought it was kind of a fascinating discussion that we had about how towns do decide to become cities. And it was, and it's pertinent because I think the four of us were surprised that when we started ranking these, the concept of creating a city with a mayor, I won't say where it went, but it went pretty high, or higher than I think any of us expected it would have. So I'd just like to, maybe it might just be enlightening, Dan, if you could just talk about that. Why is a city with a mayor and we talked a little bit about a strong mayor and a weak mayor in a city council, what are the benefits and the drawbacks of that versus a town of about the same size with a select board? Sure. So I think it's first important to really start off in talking about the difference between a strong and a weak mayor because there's a very big difference between the two of them. A strong mayor is the picture you have in your mind about like Bill Daly, the mayor, the strong mayor who runs a town. And the best example in Vermont, of course, is Murrow Weinberger in Burlington who's a strong mayor in the sense that he, that's his job. Every day he goes into his office, he has power to appoint staff. He effectively is both the city manager as mayor and that's a strong mayoral system. The weak mayoral system is often called the city manager mayor system where you still have a city manager who does the day-to-day operations of the city and the mayor has more limited power but still important powers. So City of Montpelier is a good example of that. You have a city manager, Bill Frazier who's been there for a long time and he does the day-to-day running. He hires, fires, appoints department heads and does staff organization very much like you have here. The mayor of Montpelier presides over city council and she has powers to veto but she actually doesn't vote on legislation until there's a tie or unless there is a tie. So if there's a proposal before city council and it passes 6-0, she doesn't cast her vote or 5-1, still doesn't cast her vote only if it's a 3-3 but she does have certain veto powers over certain legislation. And what a mayor based system does, strong mayor is different and that basically what you're doing is you're wanting, and this is the older model is to incorporate a certain political accountability in the day-to-day management. That comes with both pluses and minuses. The plus being that just as in Burlington you see when people are dissatisfied they can cast a single vote and change a lot. The downside is that it's a very technical job and not everybody who's elected mayor and not everybody who ends up serving as mayor is necessarily someone with that background. And so a lot of times you see in strong mayoral systems either a lot of the day-to-day activities notwithstanding the fact the mayor is the mayor handed off to people who know what they're doing. Or you have a lot of germold and the possibility that a mayor with a very strong agenda that may or may not match the will of the citizens or even the structure of the city can create issues for better or for worse. What happens in a mayoral system too is that the mayor himself or herself becomes the sort of at-large member. They're elected from the city or town as a whole. And creating then voting districts and these wards what they do is it gives the ability to have different interests represented. So in a case like what you have where you have some lines that have existed really historically whether or not those change at least from today you can say we're gonna create districts so that everybody has a voice. And so that the counter example I can offer is you live here in Chittenden County. Your state senators all six of them are elected at large. Some people think that's great. Some people probably don't think it's so great but I can certainly say that all six of them don't necessarily represent all of the different constituencies in the most populous county in Vermont. You know so it's not the differences if you had representation from districts then conservative Milton might have a stronger voice or liberal Burlington might not have as strong of a voice or Chauburn might have a different say in these things and you would have this difference and it would create different voices. It is neither I can't say that's a better thing or a worse thing it's just a difference. And the same thing with wards is that it gives people the opportunity to have voices in these different districts. It has the downside in that it can perpetuate the differences you know if somebody is elected from the village and they see the village as their turf and what they have to represent then they become vested and making sure that the status quo or the benefits that they see having being held by them remain with them. And so some of the more trade-offs that you might from an at large broader view may not happen. At the same time that may be really important to preserve because you know you're entering into a new creation and obviously people want to make sure that they're not lost in the stampede or that there is some you know change. And the best example I can give of that fear sort of coming to life is City of Toronto. A number of years ago expanded the corporate limits of Toronto to include a number of different suburbs. So the core of Toronto is a very liberal you know as you would expect from an urban center that urbane sort of liberal core and it was now surrounded by much more conservative suburbs enter Mayor Rob Ford who was elected from you know the constituency at large that was dominated by these conservative suburbs and it's still true today. I think his brother is actually Mayor now and it's because there will always be in Toronto a dominant voting block by these particular neighborhoods. And so you know having a city council make sure that while that may exist you know the core doesn't get ignored or have no voice at the table and those are reasons why they'll often have districts. So I think that's sort of a meandering overview. I don't, I'm sure I didn't touch upon every one but I think it gives you a general sense about what the differences are. Other questions? We all know where White River Junction is and it's not actually an entity right? So what's the, what's going on there? I mean it's, Hartford has five, what five villages, four libraries, they got the list here, five cemeteries, two water districts, two sewer districts, seven historic districts and three overlay districts. But it's a, they've got Quiche and White River Junction are both in that town, they're unincorporated, they still exist, everybody knows where they are. God bless them. What's the, is there something we can learn there? Well, you know, it's one way to go. We can do that here. You can do that here and it's, you know, it's interesting in that in the town charter of Hartford it does call out the various unincorporated villages. That's an interesting, that's not what you have here. It is a sort of, it's a kind of merged entity where you have these unincorporated villages, unincorporated areas, I don't know specifically how they, how they have managed that because I haven't represented the town or given them, or haven't sued them lately. But, you know, they have these very different, these very different areas. And clearly they have some planning that highlights them because if you bend a White River Junction you see that they've poured a lot of time and money into making that viable and workable downtown. And, you know, there's, there's state money there, there's, you know, town resources that are being put into it. They've attracted some private entities like the Center for Cartoon Studies. You know, and the question is, how have they chosen to balance that with the other parts of Hartford that are less rural, less urban and more rural? And that, that would really be, you know, something you can talk with them about. And it may be, it may be a way to go. What it certainly shows is that simply because something is not incorporated doesn't mean it disappears. We still have Montpelier Junction in the city of Montpelier. It does not exist as anything other than a sign and a train station, but it persists. And people still talk about going out to the junction but, you know, practically speaking, it doesn't have any separate. Yeah, it's got, it's seven, it's got seven select board members elected at the hard shift around those five. Yeah. And, and that, you know, and, and again, you know, that's something that they've chosen to go, they either inherited it, and this is a classic from our problem, is you either inherit these things or somebody makes a choice at some point and it's such a difficult, terrible process. You never go through it again. Yeah. There's some sections of the town actually succeeded from an adjacent town, I think at one point too. So there's been some trading of territory. Yeah, yeah. One more. Go ahead, Lori. Sorry. One more, and I'm not advocating for this, but could village residents vote to turn off the lights and become part of the town without town outside the village residents voting? And what would happen? Just to solve your chart. Yeah. I mean, what would that, we talked about that and part of it is in unknown, they could choose to disincorporate and just simply no longer exist. As a village. As a village, as a municipal corporation. It's kind of similar to what happens when a business decides to dissolve. They'd have to come up with a plan and certainly the legislature in approving that dissolution would have to approve. Any, you know, what are you gonna do with the debt? What are you gonna do with this? What are the assets? Where are they going? I mean, there would have to be a plan. Now, would they have to seek approval from the town? My best read of this is that no. But they would have to come up with answers to those questions. One thing I just wanted to make sure my understanding isn't incorrect with option G where dissolve the village charter. Where it starts to explain how option G changes the status quo. I think there's an assumption here. I wanna just call out where it says that consolidates all village departments and services into existing town government. If we dissolve the village charter exactly to what our attorney is telling us without changes to the town charter we're making an assumption then the town would take that over. So if we're gonna move forward with this option I think we need some clarity to either call out and say and have the town take everything over or have two options. One town takes everything over or we shut the lights off and goodbye. I'll let Dan answer, but I just wanna cut in and say if earlier, that's why I said this is not completely polished. I mean, we were kind of under time crunch to try to get this out. So we recognize it in a lot of the dialogue and the options and discussion. We wanna try to buff this up quite a bit. So you're right. You're absolutely right. But I didn't Dan wanted a response. Sure, and I just wanted to add that may and I think part of the reason why there wasn't more put into that is that that wouldn't necessarily require charter changes on behalf of the town. For example, if there's a rec department in the town and the village dissolves the town may elect to take over the assets of the rec department. That doesn't require a charter change. That would be more of a written MOU or agreement or asset transfer that could be done. It wouldn't require necessarily legislative approval because you already have a rec department. And so it's just assuming some of those assets maybe at fire sale prices. But part of that's unknown. And so there might have to be some adjustments if there's parts of the town charter or parts that the town would take over that they don't have the authority to do so. Yeah, my main point is that there's two options really with option G, which I think you addressed, Georgian. The other thing I just wanted to also mention is that in looking at this, making sure that we all understand moving forward, it's not only one option. There are a few of these options where you can actually combine a few of them. Absolutely, absolutely. So that just as we're talking about this, it's not that we're saying option A is great and that's the only one we're gonna consider or that option B is fantastic, but that option's like B and H. I think B and H could actually happen at the exact same time. Yeah, just to make sure that's our awareness is there. I'll mention another thing. Max had asked this and I was interested in it too. Right now, if we did nothing, if we decide to stop all of this silliness and just stay where we are, we have a number of MOUs. For example, we have a kind of a quasi consolidation of the public works departments on the basis of an MOU and we have a unified manager on the basis of an MOU and we ask Dan, how long can we keep this up with MOUs? Dan will answer, but it was not infinitely. We do have to probably come to some decision and try to do something with these. They can't become permanent documents and I'll let you embellish on that a little bit more, Dan. Sure, I mean, at a certain point, well, there's a couple of reasons why and I'll start with the more practical ones. I think the city of Montpelier case I mentioned about the pond is a great example where if the law changes and you're relying upon these private agreements that are kind of outside the law, you could find yourself without the legal authority to do what you're doing and it could come to a crashing halt. On a practical basis, the MOU is not a, it's not black letter law, as we like to say and so it's variable. That can affect things like bond ratings. That can affect the stability. One board that chooses not to renew undermines they're not compelled to renew or they could be decide we're gonna be harsh negotiators and change it in a way that destabilizes it and the other problem is, is that I think ultimately what both the law and the state favor are if you're going to make something like this permanent that you caught fight. So it's clear otherwise you end up with a great deal of confusion in for citizens and the state and it can hop along but the bigger it grows, the more complicated and unwieldy it becomes. So that was my general advice. Thank you. Any other questions for Dan right now? Okay, I'd like to, Andy, do you have something? No, I'm still debating whether to ask it. Well, there'll be more time. We can just, but I'd like to kind of maybe move us along to next steps and I think that what I said the general sketch of what we would like to do on the subcommittee is we would like to have another, we would basically like to keep it going but we are also cognizant of the fact that Mike and Andy and Lori, all the rest of you, Andrew, that you're also very interested in this and so we don't wanna hog the spotlight. If you wanna change the situation, if you think we wanna keep the subcommittee going or do you wanna do something else, have some other process, I'd like to just sort of get a sense of that right now. Any thoughts? Mike. I am all for, if there's one more meeting that the subcommittee feels that they need to do to polish this as to borrow your verb to polish this, I guess the suggestion that I would make would be, are there any of these options that can be consolidated in any way? Are they so close that you could consolidate them and instead of having eight different options have six? And then come back with that at the next joint meeting. Going forward from there, I mean, I would see the possibility of the group deciding where to go next, but it would be my hope that at some point we would involve the public with the ideas that we're considering. Max and I talked about this a little bit. I guess the idea that's being floated out there would be to create citizen committees. Again, much the same as what we did when we were looking for a new unified manager. I think that serves two purposes. It involves the electorate in a very definite way. And number two, that process worked very, very well the first time around. And I would think that there would be no reason why we wouldn't want to try to do that again. I would only add to that that I think one of the most important things we could do after polishing this would be for all of us to come up with a realistic timeline of what we want to accomplish because I can tell you, we started meeting back in July and all of a sudden it was October. And we were scrambling to put a lot of, I think this with everything else that's going on, this is a slow moving and there's a lot of documents, there's a lot of documents flowing around through email and we're trying to, on the one hand, edit them and on the other hand, not violate open meeting law. And it's a tricky process, it's a difficult process. So I think a realistic timeline would be the other piece that I would say we would want to do. Elaine. I would like to refer to the document I handed out earlier. Yep. I don't think there's any rush for us to do any of the work we're doing. And in the memo I wrote to the boards, I talked about the firearms discharge public engagement process, which is ongoing and has been for nine-ish months. I talked about the thoughtful growth and action process which went on for five months and reached out to 300 different people or obtained feedback from 300 different people. And I talked about the heart and soul process which lasted a year and reached over 1,000 people. And my point of bringing all that stuff up is that this process that we're talking about right now is far more important than all three of those other things put together. And all three of those things had paid facilitators and we invested a lot of money and time and effort in all of them and we got great results from all of them. So I don't feel like I'm in a rush to set up a timeline just yet and I don't feel like I'm in a rush to narrow down all these choices just yet. What I would like to recommend is that these two boards consider creating an RFP for a facilitator of some kind, either a business or an individual practitioner who has expertise in community facilitation for something of this magnitude. Go ahead, Andy. Come along. Okay. Ben-Laurie? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, where I'm gonna start, I guess, is looking at this colorful sheet with the, oh, there's my phone, with the yes, noes, and don't, noes and what assuming that we're gonna continue on the way we have, I think rather than focusing on the ones that have a lot of yeses, I think we should focus on the ones that have a lot of don't-noes so we can answer those questions so that rather than making a decision based on, and not that we're making a decision, okay, I'm sorry, maybe that's the wrong, wrong choice of words. But there are village special districts, as an example has 22 don't-noes on it, I don't wanna reject an option because the folks that we appointed to discuss it don't know enough about that topic and I don't want to, I just wanna make sure that we're not crossing off things because we don't know about them. The thing that we discovered, I think, when we put the list of the evaluation components, like safety, does it further heart and soul values? Does it do this? We realized that something like safety is a policy decision. I mean, any of these options, that's how much, whatever government entity you create, it's the decision of how much money that entity wants to spend on police and fire and emergency response and it would work with any of these. So a lot of these, it's not inherent in the governance structure, whether it improves communication. Those are more along the line of policy than on the form of government there is and so that's why we had a lot of don't-noes but I do agree with you. I think it's very interesting because ideally we all should have had exactly the same response to all of these and the fact that there's so much confusion sort of shows where we were and not understanding what we're saying and yeah, there's still a lot of work to be done here. Yeah, agreed. Another thing I think that to follow on with, discussion earlier about Hartford and White River Junction, I haven't seen any outreach to other towns that have done merger. I don't know if there's any plans for the group to do that. I think I'd like to encourage that, especially to talk to Hartford and understand what they do. Their town plan talks about all of their different areas. In fact, on top of their unincorporated villages, they have hamlets that they identify as well that, for example, butler corners or whatever could be considered a hamlet because it's got a history or something, yeah. So I'd like to encourage the group to go learn from others who have been through successful and failed mergers if that's possible. Just to understand why things were done the way, you get a feel for why things were done the way they were or not. The other thing, I know Elaine, you just talked about the previous efforts we've done where we've hired people to do work. March 24th, we had a day long session on this topic where we paid somebody to work. Not mentioned in here, by the way. But that information, other than, I think, the representation question has come out pretty clear. I'd like to make sure that we go back and review that and make sure that we're including the public comment that we've already gotten in discussion. And I'll circle back to what I was gonna say originally is I'm not crazy about going forward with a subcommittee for a couple of reasons, one that I've already been through, so I won't. Why don't you state, I mean, again. So, I feel left out for one thing. I'd like to participate in the discussions. I don't think it needs to happen in a hurry, and I think this is a very good forum. I've learned a lot from Dan here tonight in the few questions that he's answered, cleared up a lot of things for me. So I'm not agonizing over some things anymore. The other concern is the fact that the way I view it, we have three select board members in that subcommittee, and I still have a very concerned about the potential of open meeting law violation. Simple Cure would be to announce those, one of those is select board meetings, and then I have no issue anymore. It would also allow me to attend those meetings. I purposely do not attend the meetings because it's my understanding of open meeting law that if I do show up and I even listen to what you're talking about, then I'm a passive participant and that I'm generating, developing a quorum, because I can't claim that I'm there as a non-select board member if I show up, so. I would go back to Elaine's earlier comment. I'm not in any particular rush. I don't wanna make a rush to judgment here, but I would also say that coming back with a more polished version of the work that the subcommittee has done so far is our obligation as elected officials. I think before we involve the public or go through the money of hiring a facilitator, all of us have to know and agree on the options that we wanna put out there, and right now we are nowhere close to that. I think another meeting or two by the subcommittee and then a joint meeting to come back so that the entire committee, I do agree with Andy. I'm feeling left out a little bit. I understood the concept of a subcommittee. I think for the work that we're doing now and the work that you have accomplished so far, I think that was a good idea, but I think now it's time for the boards to get involved before we decide are we gonna do a survey? Are we gonna do a facilitator and then a survey? All of the what's next steps, I think have to be done by all of us. That's okay, go ahead. I'm learning from all of you, so you go for it, Andrew. Ladies first. Come on, come on. All right, talk to you. Couple things, so I don't feel left out, but I do feel as if one more meeting would be good to polish this up, maybe combine some things like Andrew and Micah suggested, but that it is our responsibility to now work on this as a group. I too have learned a lot from Dan and I think it's beneficial to hear everyone's comments and discussions and I appreciate the work that's been done so far because I think you have advanced us further than we would have gotten if we were doing this all together. I will also say though, I also am not in a rush, except I appreciate Dan's comments on governing by MOU and I really am concerned with our continued efforts and Evan's great job of continuing to consolidate and that worries me that we seem to be running on this path to consolidate, but we're all saying we're gonna take our time over here and what if we don't get to a conclusion on this side? Now what are we doing over here? So I think we have to keep that concept on track and together and realize that there might be some of us who start saying no to any more consolidation because we're not getting anywhere on the governance side. Good point, thank you, Lori. Andrew. So again, having you go, you've already cut out a few different sentences of what I was gonna say. So thank you. I do think that the subcommittee, the charge was to do the research. You're doing the research is not yet finished. So please finish the research and have a nice polished document. And then definitely I feel that we then need to have the conversation of how do we then involve the broader community in this? And in terms of the urgency, my only urgency is I said this before, November of 2020, there's gonna be a fairly significant election. We always talk about how we wanna make sure that these decisions are done with as much participation as possible, aligning that timeline, I think will help to make sure that at least we have the numbers for participation. My only concern though is I wanna make sure that we have informed as many of those voters as possible so that it's not just voting one line down and that those checkboxes are filled out as intelligently and informed as possible. Okay, very good point, good point. Thank you, thanks. All right, there's one more thing I forgot to bring up that I really wanted to mention and that's the number of districts or wards if we're gonna go that way. We currently actually, we do have three voting districts now from a state and a federal standpoint. We've got the two reps in the village, two reps in the town, then one up where I live in rural. And I think it may make sense to consider that two may not be the right number or right, discussion about redrawing lines and then you know, gerrymandering. I don't wanna get there, go that way. But I guess the main point is, you know, all of these scenarios that talk about representation talk about two. And I think we need to consider at least three, if not more. And that may be a way to get the odd number, right? Two, two and one is five. So it may. Good point, any other questions? So it sounds like I'm hearing that you do want the subcommittee to do the polishing here. And what I mean by polishing is to, as I think Mike mentioned before, maybe consolidating some of the options that are very similar if it makes sense. Perhaps identifying with each of these options what towns or cities or hamlets or whatever in Vermont exists and he's suggesting and reaching out to them because I think one of the things I'd like to also include with the subcommittee's effort is some pros and cons. And by reaching out to these communities that would help give us I think a good robust list of pros and cons that we could then bring back to the full boards and have a full discussion now with a more complete data set. Does that sound reasonable? George? Yeah, that sounds reasonable. I would only add that we may not be able to get that. There may be some that accommodate us. And I also wanted to add, I can guarantee you there's no community in the state of Vermont that has more experience with consolidation than us. All of them failed, of course, but we have, it goes back a hundred years. So we're kind of like the experts. Go ahead, Elaine. Dan, you look like you were gonna say something. The only thing I was gonna add as far as reaching out, you do have to be careful is some of these towns consolidated 50 years ago. So they may not have the memory, like reaching out to Hardwick would be fascinating except I don't suspect many of the 1963 charter merger. But we can learn the pros and cons of their existing structure. And that's, you know, I'm happy to help you with like looking through the existing charters because many of them do have those transactional provisions. I've already done that. There's 13 of them. We'll reach out to you, Andy. Okay. I just wanna confirm with the boards in general that if the subcommittee goes back to the drawing board and does some editing and combines some scenarios and doesn't combine other scenarios that you're not thinking that when we do that, we are making decisions on behalf of the boards as to which scenarios are most appropriate and that we are not ranking them in any way. And that if we do consolidate some options together that the boards recognize that when we're all together again, we could pull them all apart and reassemble them. I just wanna make it very clear that the subcommittee is not making any decisions on behalf of the community. That will not bring any recommendations to the boards. Thank you. At one point, we got a memo from Evan talking about the top three goals that we all seem to have from a very long list that had been generated and it was tax equity, equitable representation and economic stability. So I would suggest that as we go combining or rearranging and finalizing what we wanna present to the drawing boards that we keep those in mind and make sure that each of our options at least addresses those. Thanks. Wholeheartedly agree. I would like to add that, so that colorful list up there has on the left column, a long series of criteria that we, the question was that we were all supposed to answer when we rank those scenarios was does this particular scenario meet this criteria or help accomplish it? And so narrowing the list is a good idea because those are more specific things that a governmental entity could address as opposed to does it meet public safety? We don't know, it might, it might not. So I wanted to get back to that comment about the don't know. So it wasn't that we just didn't get it, it was that we really couldn't tell whether this particular scenario would address that particular criteria. So our criteria need to be adjusted, not the scenarios, we're not our answers. I would just like to second Andy's comment about remembering that we had a very long meeting with many, many residents on March 24th and there's incredibly valuable data though that we need to incorporate. Well, maybe what we could do is if someone, staff could pull that out and, you know, just pull the document out and get the comments or somehow consolidate the comments into some format that we could then, you know, bring on to the subcommittee and then when we get back to you, we include that with the package that we bring to you. I can send those to you too. Any other questions from board? Am I, so I just wanna, we have one hand in the audience and I, but before I answer, I just wanna get, I'm hearing generally that the consensus here is that the subcommittee should go back and have at least one more shot at polishing this up, finishing this off. And we'll, the subcommittee members can figure out on our own when we wanna meet and how we wanna meet and all that. But is that, I'm hearing that from everyone good with that? Andy, and I understand, I don't know what to say. I think we've had the dialogue, you had the dialogue with Dan. Anything that you, that we can help you with to assuage your feelings about select board meeting versus subcommittee meeting and warning it. I'm not, it's not within my capacity to help you there. I'm, we're just, we're acting on the advice of the attorney in terms of warning so far. But staff and Andy and Dan can have that discussion a little bit more if there's something else that can be done. I just would like everyone to be comfortable about as we go moving forward. What you're gonna do is warn it as a select board meeting, I'm fine. By only understanding is that if we warn it as a select board meeting, then all of a sudden a whole other things have to happen in terms of minutes and, yeah, I mean it, well, I don't know. So that's, again, that's what I say, it's up to staff and you and to work that out. The select board has just put off finalizing in some fashion the firearms ordinance till after budget. Season and I would suggest that we also put this off until after budget season. I think we're gonna be quite busy between the holidays and the budget and maybe in April when your meeting is done and your votes are done, we can pick this up again. Yeah, I agree. And also we haven't even gotten to the, we owe the unified manager in evaluation and that is gonna be a big discussion. We're gonna try to have that tonight, I think, optimistically, we're gonna start talking about it and then. Start talking about it. And then, but that's gonna be a process and then you're right. We can get it done tonight, that's fine. Yeah, and we have. How did? Yeah, we have budgets coming up. So we are gonna have to, I don't see us jumping right back into this at least for like a month or two. The regulations are rightsized. Okay. Is everybody in agreement with that? To pick it up after budget season? Something like that, maybe. Is it our next joint meeting in February sometime? It is, yeah. So maybe what we should do is say, yeah. But we could review the Polish document. We certainly have a lot of other work to do that's not governance. You could talk about my evaluation. You can start putting up goals for next year, which would start basically March 1st. We can talk about joint budgeting, some things that are going on. And we can also talk some strategic planning town and villages to where you want to go, whether you ever merge or not, but where do you want to go? Right. Let me just say, so the, is it, Arvina, you saying that the subcommittee shouldn't meet until after budget or we should not bring this back to the joint boards until after? I'd love to see the subcommittee be able to focus on the budget and the other things that are on our plate right now. Okay, well let's have a, let's have a separate, can we have a separate conversation about that? Okay. Yeah. If that is the decision made, what I would like to see by our next joint meeting is a timeline from the subcommittee of when they will meet, meeting set. Okay. So that it's not April and now we're starting to schedule our meetings. Right. Okay. The timeline would be great. Okay. So that's February then? Yes. Okay, so I will just state for the record, I'm not sure that we need to have a formal vote. So the consensus of the board is that the subcommittee, just want to state for the record, the subcommittee will continue with the process for at least one more go around to finalize the government governance option list and bring it back to the full board and then the full board will then decide on the future course of action in terms of public engagement and timeline and so forth. Is that correct for everyone? Yeah. Okay, thanks. Yeah, we've had someone with their hand up and so I'm gonna take a question from the audience. Go ahead, Bruce. Hi, I'm Bruce Post from out there, as somebody said earlier. Dan, Rob Ford's brother is the Premier of Ontario, now the Mayor of Toronto. Sorry. Which is truly a frightening thought. Secondly, there was a book written a few years ago called The Paradox of Choice. Consumers are presented with so many choices, they get that deer in the headlights look and freeze and can't make choices or then go back to what's most familiar. So I just think they're, I would never put out a survey with 10 different choices to the people of Essex and this is not Brexit, but you're treating it like Brexit. It is not that complicated. We've gone through this stuff before in my lifetime. And I think Andrew setting it for November 2020 is a good idea. But you're going through contortions. What do you want to do? The old Arab saying if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. What do you want to do? Reaching out to Shaftsbury or Hardwick when you're a municipality of 21,000 people, I don't find particularly useful because their circumstances are different. So I don't see why you have come to some two or three options. You can then entertain discussions among the public of facilitators, surveys, public meetings. But this is just, Bruce, I think we agree with you. That's what we're trying to do. But what we're trying to not do is fail because as you mentioned that, and I was right there with you with the others and they failed. And what happened is we're trying to learn from past mistakes and not fail. That's probably our most important goal. Why do you think they failed? Well, I prefer not to discuss that right now. Well, leaving that off the table then, you're taking out a central thing. I mean, my wife will say, all those crybabies in the village and Mary's a lovely person. They just want us to pay more of their taxes and they want to keep their own separate identity. Which, and then you keep doing that through inter municipal agreements at MOUs and at some point maybe somebody will catch on to Montpelier and say, wait a minute. You know? But we've already shifted taxes to people like me who live out there. And I don't have any say over the village matters. I barely have any say over the budget because we keep so many people out of it. So do we want to have a community that comes together that can try to reach some efficiencies that obviously will have some shifting and tax burdens that can be phased in over time? This is not rocket science. As I said, it's not Brexit. And to say, you don't want to discuss why things failed in the past is to overlook something that's very important. I've just met tonight right now. Oh, yeah. Okay. I think, yeah, Iris, I'm going to share. Iris Banks. So I was at the meeting in March and towards the end here somebody said, oh, yeah, let's kind of look at the comments again. I can tell you the vast majority of people felt very strongly that we needed equal representation. I feel strongly that we should have that in the subcommittee. And of course, going further, I think scenarios kind of sounded like what was discussed or thought about. I think that meeting might have been the catalyst for the subcommittee, but the equal representation piece, I haven't heard anything. I don't know what, it feels like that's everything else now is being considered. And maybe there's a lot about merger. There's a lot of scenarios being discussed, but what happened to that idea? And I guess I haven't been to the meetings, you know, very many meetings. So I don't know, maybe I'm wrong and there's been more talk about it, but I haven't been here, that's true. Another kind of question I had was in terms of, you know, Montpelier saying, you know, no for major changes, but we're talking about equal representation. I think that's important. I wonder if there would be, that would be considered. Why are we talking about this change? It might be different than a concern that's maybe seen as, you know, trivial. Anyways, I guess I just wanna say that rather than it feels like this sort of equal representation might kind of come after everything as an afterthought, I thought that was the most important part of the meeting in March and I'm disappointed that it doesn't sound like that's really on the table. I don't know, unless I miss something. That's it. In the options, Iris, if you look, there's several of them in there that talk about different boards and districts and so on. So that it's covered in there, if you take a look at it. If I might, as Max just put out, a lot of the options are talking, if you talk about district or you talk about ward or you talk about all that, is actually talking about representation and equalizing the representation over 36 square miles. But in that 36 square miles, there's dense parts and there's wide open parts. So however you have to think about how you're gonna do it, you can have the same one square mile out north of 128 and 15 and you might have 150 people that live in that one square mile, but if you take one square mile in the village, you're gonna get 3,000 people. So you either have 3,000 people in one ward and 300 in the other. That's not equal representation necessarily how people think of it. So the boards wanna think about all of that. So they have been doing it and they've taken it very seriously. In fact, most of the months has been spent talking about representation as well as what will it look like and what are the tax implications of merger, alignment, consolidation. And also then to Bruce's but how Brexit aside, how long do you take and how much can people accept of some tax increases to equalize town and village for the services they want and how to do it. Yeah, I would like to confirm something Dan said. My name is Jerry Fox. I believe you said that even if the town voted to village, even if the village decided to dissolve, they couldn't dissolve unless the state, the legislature approved that. Right, because that would represent a charter change. Thank you. Okay, any last hands from the audience? Great, good discussion. A lot more to happen in the future on this. So we need to move on. We have a lot of work to do yet. So I'd like to move on to the five C and that's determination of a process to evaluate unified manager. Greg, did you want to pick that one off? Sure. So part of the governing responsibilities of the two boards is to evaluate your unified manager. Heaven's coming up on a year of employment at the end of February. Over the summer, a subcommittee formed and came up with recommended some goals of which to evaluate him. The boards agreed on four of those. Time is coming up now to start to look at how to evaluate Evan on those four goals. Staff has come up with a couple of options of how you can do that. One is, because looking at February is when you should be doing this at the joint meeting, is when the evaluation should happen. Either having that subcommittee come back together that presented the goals and present a way to evaluate Evan and bring that to the board in February or to have staff come up with some options and staff has done some of that work in the past back when Pat Scheidel was here. Also just in terms of when Evan was hired, some options there and bringing those evaluation metrics to the board for a joint discussion in February. So those are the two options, happy to consider others but to keep you moving forward and make sure Evan gets his evaluation on time. We should at least talk about the process tonight. That's a contractual obligation, just that we do that. And as I mentioned, it would be great if at that evaluation or really soon thereafter I had goals for the next year instead of getting them later in the year and only having a couple of months to actually get them done. I didn't want to, board, other folks talk, but what are some of the thoughts here? Yeah, Mike, Andy. Let's staff get recommendations to us. It's our job to do this now. I don't know disrespect to the subcommittee that put the SMERC goals together, but they don't have to do that. I think it's a good idea to do that. Put the SMERC goals together, but they did their job. They did it very well. It's our job now. So number two, it allows us to get after it in time and be able to give him his evaluation on time. I agree. Which I think is important. I think it's a good, very good point. Andy, did you, your thoughts? Yeah, I was gonna say if the subcommittee wants another go at it, I'm fine with that because I hate evaluating people because I like everybody's sense. Yeah, me too. It is hard work, Andrew. I was just gonna say that one of the central tenants to us being in these positions is that we evaluate our manager. And while I like subcommittee work certainly has its time, I don't think this is one of those times. I think that it is incumbent upon all of us to evaluate Evan within our role as elected officials. And frankly, with the goals, I don't remember them verbatim, but I seem to recall that they're fairly easy to measure and that it wouldn't take us that much time to really figure out whether he accomplished them or not. And so if Evan were to come to us with those goals, how he felt he did, we can comment on that, meet without him, then comment how we want to evaluate him, have him come back in and have the conversation. I don't think it's gonna be that difficult. I just wanna raise one point with, and I'm sorry, I know we're meeting jointly, but I'm gonna speak to the trustees now because we have a little bit of a different deal in terms of evaluating the manager. And I'm a little bit of a quandary because we wanna, joint stuff that we've done, unified managers are joint higher and we wanna talk about this, but on the other hand, there is a difference and the difference, let me state it, is that in our charter, we are allowed to talk to staff and our charter says, you gotta go out, it doesn't have, we don't have to, but we are allowed to go out and talk to department heads in the village and say, how's the manager doing? Because and the logic is, if we only see things through the perspective from the perspective, how do we, if we're not allowed to talk to staff, how do we know what kind of a job the manager is actually doing? I mean, in the working world, 360 evaluation, and that's the concept, the town doesn't have that, you guys don't have that, you technically are not allowed to talk to staff or department heads. So I mean, I sort of throw it open because I actually think it might be valuable for us to talk to village department heads and staff and they're all, they're a pretty sophisticated smart group of folks and I think it might be very valuable for Evan to hear what they have to say. It's worked well in the past, it's never been bad, it's always been pretty positive, helpful stuff, but on the other hand, that's something that that would be different from, that would be a difference in the process. So I don't know how you want to, if we, how to handle, I didn't even know how to talk about it here. We have to have a separate conversation with the trustees or go ahead, Laura. So I was gonna, I was gonna bring that up as well because I see this evaluation in two parts. One are the four specific goals that we created that we can be very objective, is that the right word? Right. Objective on how we measure Evan but I think with every evaluation should come the piece that we do in the village and I think especially with Evan being new that it's, it would be hard to all of a sudden not do that. The select board didn't agree or jointly agree that there's this management piece. Okay, it was like two parts, it was the goals and then there was this management piece too. So in order to do that, is it necessary to have discussions with department heads, perhaps it is. And if it is and where the select board is to go through the manager before staff, I don't know how we would get that feedback. So we have two, so there's two, it's a two component, you're seeing a two component evaluation goals or one thing, we do that jointly. Right. And then in terms of management, we would do that separately. Well, it would be part of the evaluation. I thought it was two parts. Didn't we agree to that or no? I thought we did. Just gonna say, I don't have Evan's contract memorized but there's a 3,000 dollar bonus tied to the evaluation. What I'm not positive is I think it's tied to the evaluation, this is the MOU between the town and the village for the unified manager, that the evaluation is to be based on those four goals, with the metrics of those four goals. Now, to Lori's point and Max's point, I think he can still talk to department heads and staff to evaluate his managerial component and give him feedback on that, but. It's not part of the financial. That's fine, I think that's fine for us. I think that's, we just wanted to, but I also, I didn't wanna talk, I was concerned about the trustees talking about this separately from the select board. That was really my biggest concern. And I caught that. And what I would say to you is I welcome you. The reason that you're not supposed to talk to the staff is about day-to-day operations. You are not to direct the staff, hey, go do Jimmy's driveway. And you're like, no, we don't do work on private property. Go do Jimmy's prop, we don't do that. I direct the staff. In my evaluation, I'm absolutely comfortable with you talking with department heads. I'm not so sure rank and file staff are comfortable doing certain things. And then maybe as time rolls on, we develop a process. We seem to like the word survey tonight, where people can say things, but they may not be comfortable saying them if their name's attached to it. Either way, I've been through a 360, I'm okay with them. I'm a big boy. Somebody's got something to say, let's hear it. And so I'm giving you permission and select board if you wanna reach out to department heads as part of a process. We have to define that process so it's not just a free-for-all, obviously. You wanna ask the same questions of several of them, whether you're gonna talk to all of them or pick a few, but there's 17 of them. We don't want all nine people asking staff these questions. We need to focus what those questions are and then have George or two of us or some defined. Just if it helps at all, I'm looking at the town charter and what it talks about is exactly what Evan is saying that the select board can't direct staff. You can't evaluate staff. Nowhere in here does it say you can't talk to staff about Evan. So while it doesn't directly give you the permission, it doesn't say you don't have the permission. I would only add, ours was put in there specifically because in the past, there was a manager who said, oh no, you cannot talk to staff for anywhere, you cannot talk to staff to evaluate me. He was of that opinion. So it was put into the charter to persuade him that actually we could. And the computer said, okay. Yes, they did. There's another president there. I know exactly where some of this comes from. I mean, if the manager is the one creating a morale issue, if the managers, you'd like to find out, yeah, I'm okay. And just give me all their names and what they said and we'll, no. Well, we're not gonna shovel your driveway there. You sure put a lot of snow into it. So we have all those questions and process down already in the village. Should we just share it with the town and see if it's something they would accept to do the same tweak. So how do we do that? Because we have a joint meeting in February when the evaluation is supposed to be done. We need to do all this other stuff in advance. You have the documentation, right? From your process? Right, yeah. Somewhere. We can take it off and we can get the questions and get it over to you when you can just look at it. And see, I mean, you wouldn't be bound by it. You can add Libit, edit it as you want. You don't have to stick to our process. And when we talk about it at a select board meeting then, whether or not we agree with these, how do we do that? But kind of why we tried to make sure it got it on tonight's agenda so that you were all together to talk about it. I seem to recall when we started this process at the trustees that you shared with us a list of questions that you were going to go talk to all the department heads about and were we okay with that? And we summed off on it. Right, I hope we can find it. It's in the vault somewhere. Someone's previous evaluation. We should have those records. We should have it. So again, if we find those, we send those out for us to review. And there's some pieces to it that somebody doesn't like or wants to talk about. We have to have the opportunity to address that. I think Susan McNair Hill might have the records because she was our HR director at the time. I guess I just want clarification on what we're talking about. Are we jointly talking about the goals and working those and each having and doing our own assessments from the management standpoint of... Village town. What I care about. Yes. So I don't think we need to... We care about all of it. So yeah, I understand. But what you're responsible for. We're responsible for that as well. And so if you've got a list of a process that you've used and you can give it to Greg, Greg and give it to us, select board meeting, can we can talk about it and do whatever we want with it. We don't have to go back to you to say, hey, we don't like this question. No, it's just something. You can make up our own questions, use your questions, follow our own procedure to get those questions answered and provide the feedback to Evan independently of what you do. But if I can... Except for the four goals that we do need to have a joint thing. Question for the village. How do you do the questioning of the department heads? Do you just have one of the select board do it versus five? Thank you. I appreciate that. We've done it different. I think one year we split it up, didn't we? You've always done it. The problem is we kind of... We didn't do it last... I think we didn't do it last year with Pat. We did it twice, but then... One was an online survey too, but then we... And then I think you just meet with the department heads. So you can keep doing that. I would really rather... But I'd rather it be consistent. If it's going to be, say, the chairs, then have the chair of the village do it for the village department heads, or whatever they... Whatever two people get put into this horrible role, they do it, and then they compare their notes and move forward, but... It was really focused on getting some statements about this and this and this, and then I believe I showed it to the department heads to make sure that as I was transcribing that I didn't mix up their words, really, you said that, really said that. No, we edited it out, and... Yeah, I know. Just for the consistency, and everyone was happy with it, and then we brought it to the man here. I've worked for seven member boards where they've had two members, the village president and another member, or two do this and they make a report. It gets done some places, they just do it by the village president or the town, it's like either way you do it, but if you're gonna go talk to however many department heads, if all of them or some of them, you've got 17 to go talk to, so if that's what you're gonna do, plan a lot of time to be able to get to all of them in schedules and stuff like that. I mean, I don't extend the dialogue, but for the town it's a bigger task because you've got extra departments that we don't have, and so, I don't know what to tell you. I have a question on the process for the four goals. So, you're gonna send us the information, and we come in with our own evaluation ready to discuss, or are we meeting as a board beforehand? I don't know, I don't know. The joint meeting is in February, so my thought at this point is that we would get you that evaluation material by early January, mid January, so you have a chance to review it, come up with your own evaluations, and then, yeah, meet jointly in February with Devin to give him the evaluation from both boards. But it's our own individual evaluations because we haven't met as a board to just- That's how I'd be seeing it. Okay, thank you. So if the select board, or you could send the questions that you've come up with to Greg, can we put that on an agenda, next agenda, say? For the select board to look them over, make sure that those are what, do whatever adjustments we think is appropriate, and then we can decide at that meeting who's gonna be the one to go to talk to the department heads at that meeting. All right. And then just sort of the last piece is, you have two and a half months, maybe a little bit longer. Start formulating goals for 2019. Four or five of them, something manageable, for me, not for your sake, yeah, for me. And keep it in the same vein, they don't have to be the same ones, but I'm sure you guys can come up with a whole list, both town and village, and then maybe at the next joint meeting where sooner we can cement those goals. Let me just make sure everyone on the board is good. Yeah, go ahead, Andrew. I would personally, when you come in for your evaluation in February, I'd like to see you come in with a couple of goals that we could then use as a building block. Yeah, good point. Okay. There's nothing, there's no harm in you recommending some goals. Could we have that before? Yeah, I know. In the right meeting? I could provide you some goal thoughts. Any other questions about this from board members? We had a hand in the audience, so I'll take that now, Diane. Okay, everybody's CCSU, which had three member districts. We had an evaluation document for the superintendent, which included his or her goals, which they self-evaluated and got it back to the chairs and those with respect to the three districts. They then had a discussion at the individual board levels, brought it back to the CCSU level, and then we had to chat as those nine members that were on the board at the time. And then the evaluation came from the CCSU board, not Westford, not SES Junction, not year 46. You've worked that through, but that's what the school district did. So if that answers your question as to meeting by yourself, and Lori says it's gonna be my questions, yes, Lori would have to fill, just to pick on you for a minute. Lori would fill out her evaluation, come back as the village trustees, and then eventually you guys would meet jointly to discuss how you individually as a board had made discussions. Because at the CCSU level, there are only three members from each of those boards, not all five or one or however or six that those boards couldn't work the prize though. So it narrows it down, but you wanted to have each board member reflective of. So if you can imagine how North East Kingdom, they had 30 people evaluating the superintendent. Oh, God. Yeah, yeah, okay. And then having already 15 show up at the board meeting as a representative's up. So each board member gets their input on that same instrument that you're using to evaluate. And yes, it's used generally at that point, it was the agreed goals for the year that they were evaluated against, plus the goals for the district as to what was going to, at that point in time, it was not continuous improvement, it was called a strategic plan, but nowadays for school districts it's called continuous improvement. Just so we have the right terminology and how it's translated from one to another. But that's what we're talking about. If that helps you make your decision. Well, it's a good analogy because you had different elected boards representing different districts, all evaluating one four honcho in the middle. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. So that's a different process than what we just did. Different process, big process. Big process. The CSU Board usually met either every two months or a quarter late, so. I'll see if our, that's a good thought. And I'll see if our crack each other part and can put something together quickly to get some materials to each boards, whether it's in December, early January, then maybe that would give enough time for the boards to meet separately at the end of January and kind of discuss together before coming together jointly. Sounds good. We can also drop everything else we're doing to take care of this. I mean, it's your money. No, it's not about the money. Come out at some point. Okay. Our crack HR staff of one. He's really good though. He's really good. It's 100% more than there were here about two years ago. Okay. Before Pat left, maybe a year or two before he left, we each got a binder called How to Evaluate Your Manager. So there's a lot of paper that's already been allocated to this and some has actually still have it. Yep. Any other questions as far as this goes? Are we good? Anyone clear? Good. Okay. So we are gonna move on to a. Discussion about scheduling. The joint budget meeting. Yeah. Greg, you wanna kick that one off too? So as you get more and more intertwined with the budgeting process through consolidation, hopefully we'll plan ahead better next year and put this on the agenda while ahead of time. But we are noticing some areas where we think the staff thinks would be worthwhile to have the two boards get together and discuss some of the joint budgeting items that are coming up in 20 or fiscal 20. And that could be some of the rec department stuff you heard earlier, highway tax and the village highway budget, senior issues, other items that might come up. So hoping to get you in a room together. I know it's another meeting on short notice, but hoping to get you in a room together to take a look at these things. Scheduling is a little bit tricky trying to fit something in prior to the trustee budget day. Not a whole lot of time in there. I know Andy at least has some conflicts that makes it tougher. One option, and Irene pointed out that the Board of Civil Authority meets on this coming Monday. So one option is to do it on December 11th, which is before the trustee meeting. Andy would not be able to make that. Another option is to leave it in the hands of staff and schedule it better next year, but we do think it's worthwhile to at least get some feedback and give some options for the budgeting. The BCA meeting starts at 5.30. Okay. Right. And that, hey Les. I'm not available that night. Yeah. And we have a fairly massive trustee meeting on the 11th. Yeah, so, I don't know what to tell you. Yeah, it's, I saw the agenda today. So the 13th doesn't work? I mean, we could do it. I'm not saying no, but it's gonna be a long. I can't do the 13th. I can't either. And our all day budget session is the 19th and I am, I would not change that because that's hard, that's, we have to do some results to schedule that thing and I'm not gonna change it. What about the 12th? I'm not here, but I, you know, someone has to miss it. Well, you know, the other thing I'm gonna raise, Lori, is Dan is, Dan, our other trustee is gonna be in not in Vermont for another month. Really? Yeah. So he's gonna do that. So we need. No, he's working. He's working. He's working. About the 17th or 18th? The 17th is a select work meeting. I can't make it anymore. The morning of the 15th? The 18th is open. I can't make the 15th. 18th? Tuesday the 18th. It's the only day I've got. Which day? The 20th is the only day. It's the only free day for Andy. I mean, how, how, can I just get a sense guy? How, how critical is this that, you know, for, for staff, how important is it that we come together? What, what's gonna, what would, how, what bad thing would happen if we don't do this? Well. The highway, the highway tax is probably the big one. You've gotten the preview memos. It could be done separately, but it's a pretty big concept and. Give her a mic. These issues affect both budgets. It would be nice to have a consensus that we're going forward with them. But you know, we'll get the, the village one done. And then the, the town says no. I mean, it's just, it would be good to have. You may be another example. There's, right, the building fund and the, the building superintendent. That's a interesting issue. The highway tax and the rolling stock issue. There are percentages that go forward on who's paying for what. And we're doing it, thinking we're doing it the way we think you want to do it. But if you change it, it, it has repercussions in both of your budgets. And so that's why we want to make sure. And then me a copa, we probably should have thought of this, I don't know, but with a bunch of other things to do this earlier. And then maybe even next year, we do it more as a pre-budget meeting. But we don't sometimes even know what the independent departments are thinking unless we give them that direction. So it was just something that was like, wait a minute, this highway tax thing gave us the thought of, wait a minute, we need to talk to both of you. And it's a whole lot easier to talk to you when you're together than to talk to you when you're separate. If there are time, the joint meetings that we do now, we're saying that as long as there's at least four members, then let's go forward. Let's do the same thing with this joint budget meeting. And if everyone can make it, and if Andy can, unfortunately, then we'll do it all. Well, let's see if we can do it right now. 12th on the 18th. I'm out of town on the 12th. So who can do the 18th? Okay, it looks like we haven't enjoyed. Okay, so December 18th. 630. Here? We'll have to check and see what's available. Bless you, Mike. What time? 630? And Andy, as always, if you do send in comments, we will include them. Sorry. Yeah. Okay, so let's do the 630. And you'll tell us where. We don't know where, yeah. You just have to make sure the A room is available. 630. Yes, no, 1830 on the 18th. 630, we will let you know which building it is. Got it. Pizza slash a salad will be served. That's enticing. Switch back. Oh, now you're in? That would be better. That would be better. We're not feeding your entire family. That's fine, I just worry about me anyway. Okay, so December 18th at 630 TBD is the date. And dinner or pizza and salad. Okay, great. You are. Oh, Andy, that's right. Won't be here unfortunately. All right. Won't be the same. So we added an item 5E and that's, we moved up from the reading file, the approval of joint meeting minutes, right? Yeah. Okay. So I was distracted during that discussion. Can we move something from the reading panel? Or is it that you can consent? What? That's right. I just, I suggested to you that you can move it from the reading file. I would like to discuss it. You can move, you can adjust the agenda. I meant the agenda at the meeting. Whether or not you want to take action on it or table it based on the information, I'll leave up to you, but I would like to bring it up for discussion and the option of potentially action. So this is talking about how we're going to approve joint meeting minutes, rather than doing it separately, which is really awkward because you end up with two different sets of minutes out there for the same exact meeting, right? And so, and the charter doesn't limit us by having the joint board approve the joint minutes. Is that right? Only in so far. The charter in any point of the south, that's a nice catch. Staff had the brilliant idea of just waiting until the next joint meeting to approve the joint minutes because we have had instances where changes are being made to one set of minutes or the other or both and those aren't getting shared. Tambi's noticed it. The new assistant to the manager, she caught one where one of the changes was who made a motion. So if it's a word here, word there, it's not that substantive, but if it's who's making motion, there's two sets of two stories of history happening. That's a bigger issue. So our idea was to just wait and delay the approval of the joint minutes until the next joint meeting, but then we realized that the town charter says that the select board has to approve the minutes at its next meeting. Town attorney said that unless you want to violate the charter, that's the rule. So I can walk through, again, we've got some options. This is the updated memo, we can keep doing it the way it's done and approve the minutes separately at the next board meeting for each board, then you continue to potentially have differing sets of minutes. You could approve them separately at the next meeting of each board and then send the corrections to the other board so they have a chance to see those and that they might make their changes. That goes back and forth and it becomes even more of an administrative nightmare than we have already. Another option is to have the select board approve the minutes at the next select board meeting. The village charter is not as restrictive. So once the select board minutes are approved, we could bring that to the next joint meeting, let the trustees review the changes or review those minutes and offer any changes for both boards to hear at the same time and then the select board can reapprove. So we can break the charter and wait until the next meeting but then you're breaking the law, essentially. Or we can keep doing what we're doing. We can keep doing what you're doing. And the differences are some punctuation and spelling and a few words are added here and there are sometimes even a line but sometimes but sometimes it's a legitimate error that one board catches and the other one doesn't. So staff recommendation is that the select board approve the minutes at its next meeting and the trustees wait until the joint meeting. I'm gonna make a snarky comment, is that okay? All right. You know, the select board, you do such an awesome job with your minutes and you guys are really into minutes that I'm sure anything you do would be fine with us. But can I make a serious observation? The very first time that Dan was here, we over at Lincoln Hall, we asked him, Dan, do we have to keep meeting as separate boards or when we get together, does it constitute an individual board that can have its own sort of rules? And he, because we really are thinking of consolidating and doing a lot of stuff together. And Dan said, yes, you could do that. And then we said, great, we're gonna keep doing the way we've been doing it for the last couple of years. But it was an opportunity and I think it was an opportunity here for us to think outside the box. And maybe if we acted as a subcommittee, we could check with Dan and maybe if we declare ourselves and not a subcommittee, a joint meeting, maybe we could have our own minutes rules. I would look into that. I would like to throw that out there as an idea. It might help staff out in terms of minutes instead of saying when we meet jointly, we still have to maintain the same rules as the trustees and the select board and maintain for all their other meetings. We might be able to streamline things a bit if we just were willing to think outside the box. Just an idea. Elaine. I just have one possible refinement to one that might make it a little simpler. Number three, if the select board approves the joint minutes at their next meeting and then you bring the approved version to the next trustee meeting, not the next joint meeting, but the next trustee meeting. Yeah, that's fine. And then that's the end. Yeah, that would work too. So I mean, that's option two. The catch there is that if, or it's option one. But it's option, yeah, the catch with that is if the trustees make any corrections to the minutes for any reason, then you either have a different set of minutes or it's start, you have to bring it back to the select board. Yeah. Can I just ask, good. And therefore we can't post it. We shouldn't post it. Which is five business days. We need to post the draft, no matter what. We can post the draft, but we can't post any finale. Philosophical question, what happens if we break the charter? You're setting a bad example of breaking the law? But let me just, I think like the minutes, let me just ask. I mean, Lori as a representative of the entire legislature, what's the harm? We will be in Switzerland. But I'm just trying to get at, I'm asking, what's the harm? Is it that somebody from the public will say that you're not following the law? Yes. And someone will say that, I can guarantee you. You don't have to follow that law. We don't have to follow this one. That would be, yeah, it could be very, very precedent setting. I'm too tired to think outside the box tonight. All right. So I suggest the one where you all approve it at your next meeting, and it comes to the next joint meeting. It's easy. I think it's easy to say that. It's the easiest of a bunch of bad, not very easy options. Thank you though. Thank you for coming to a decision. But I would check the thing out with Dan and see if we can't get around a lot of this just by saying, yes, yes, we can meet as a separate entity. We don't have to follow the rules of separate boards. That's what he seemed to be saying to us. It's a possibility. Give me a formal motion as well. Do you want to check? I can eyes over that option because it raises the whole question of about Elaine having to vote twice. And we've told the public that we won't do that. That she can abstain from one of them. Let's go with the not outside the box tonight. Okay, let's stay in the box. So we should do a motion in the middle of the box. We're gonna take a motion. And the recommendation that was written is basically what he said, right? Okay. I would move number three for the select board. Second. Okay, do we, as written in this December 5th argument. Okay. Any further discussion about the approving option number three for how we handle joint minutes? You don't know those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay. That's five zero. Okay, I think that we need to make a motion for the village. I'll make the same motion for the trustees. Okay. Second. Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Thank you. Sorry for butterling through that, but I appreciate it. No need for executive session, right? No. I would move we adjourned. Elaine. I hadn't brought that additional memo and I would just like to briefly request because I know it's late. The other thing I wanna emphasize is that that will work. And I took the liberty of drafting a press release about what the subcommittee has been doing coming from the two chairs of the two boards. And I would like at some point in the very near future, thank you, to have a communication of some kind from our boards go out to the public to share what we're doing. Doesn't have to be what I wrote, but I think we should be starting to share what we're doing, at least providing an update from these bodies, not necessarily waiting for others to cover it. That's all. You feel free to discuss what I wrote or not, or write something yourself. When you're saying it should be going out? Well, I mean, what I did write is very neutral and brief and vague, which is what most press releases are. And it talks about that we had a joint meeting on December 5th, so it could conceivably go in next week's paper if we wanted to do that. But I just, whether or not it comes, this press release is used or something else happens, I feel strongly that we need to start consistently and regularly communicating with the public what we're doing. Could I, I know it's late, I know it's tired, I know we want to stay in the box, but okay, but I, you know, Elaine, obviously you spent the time putting this together and I'm just asking, I'm wondering if we can't just all just take a minute and read this and give Elaine an answer yesterday. It looks to me like it's pretty neutral. I don't think it's walking any political lines. It's not an answer for me. It's like, if you're happy with this, then you and Max need to submit it. But I want to make sure everyone else is comfortable with it. Is that, could we do that? You're comfortable with it? Okay. And I agree we should. Okay, Andy? So sorry, maybe you need to clarify what the question is. The question is, Elaine wrote this as a press release for what the, about the governance, the thing, this governance stuff that we've been doing and she would like to actually release this to the local media as it's written. Do I have to allow it? You need to read it really fast. No, I've read it. Oh, is it okay? I'm going to have a sentence that I object to. Oh, okay, sure. Go ahead. You want me to say it? Yes, please. I was going to feed it to her quietly here. Uh-oh. Third from the last paragraph says the subcommittee did all the initial research. And I spent the whole weekend reading charters and provided that information to the subcommittee and as far as I know it's never been used, but the sentence. The other thing is. So before we get off that, we can strike that, right? Yeah, we can strike the whole paragraph out. You can strike it if you want. Absolutely. Just take the whole paragraph out. I'm going to rewrite it. I'm going to have to take a few days to do that, because I'm not going to do it. I would just take the paragraph out. The other, yeah, I guess for you. The other. I can revise this quickly. The other concern I have is that we don't come across saying that we're doing this. Oh, sorry. Yeah, the microphone got away from me. I don't want us to come across as saying that we've already decided we are consolidating. I mean, this is a discussion. This is a, we're exploring possibilities and we're certainly, I think, somewhere in there needs to say that we're very interested in getting additional feedback from the public. That's what it says. I don't, I'm sorry, I didn't read it, but I just want to make sure that it's, although it may be balanced, it also needs to not be a sales job. It needs to be an informational thing. And I'm sorry, I don't have recommendation for how to change it to make it that way, if it is or isn't. But. The next to the last paragraph says brings, addresses everything you just said, I think. Then it should be at the front instead of at the back of the press release. I think it should be earlier. I mean, I think we should very early, quickly say that this needs to be a public process and we need to make all efforts to not have it be a sales job, to have it make sure it's an informational. I mean, we had, I mean, we've been through this in other scenarios where we put out things to the public and then there are all kinds of concerns about, well, this word is biased or this one is in or maybe I'm being too picky here, but I think we need to have some more eyes on this than those of us, than the ones, I read it quickly this afternoon, objected to that one sentence and I don't, maybe I'm going on too long. I'm not ready to say, so I'm okay with publishing it immediately. I respectfully disagree. To put this in the middle, first of all, this is the first one. If this was the second or third, then I would say, fine, let's go to that next step. But I think this lays out the history of what we've been doing for the last five months and at the end, I wouldn't change a thing. We're excited to move on to the next stage of this process and begin to engage the public. Quote, once the boards jointly decide on which scenarios are the most promising, it will be time for the public to consider them. I don't know how you say it any better than that. Again. Given what we talked about tonight, I think this is a little premature. It talks about both boards discuss the committee's findings and next steps. Well, yeah, but the subcommittee's going to meet one more time, so I'd really like to hold off until we meet one more time and then have a more updated communication to the public. And I also feel like the month of December is not the time to be engaging the public with something like this. In the dull terms of January, they might pick up the Essex reporter. It's a lot harder for people to find time to really read something substantive and I want people to really focus on getting this. I disagree. Sorry, I disagree. What I think I'd like to do is I'd be happy to update this a little bit to say that, to adjust what Andy suggested, but when the subcommittee meets again, that's an opportunity for another article to update them on the next things we did. We need to constantly communicate what we are doing to the community because they're not going to know otherwise. Yes. And so the second from the last paragraph says, we are excited to move to the next stage of the process and to begin to exchange and begin to engage the public. Tyler said that will be a true statement in a month. We're not moving to a next stage because the subcommittee is still working. We are not ready to begin to engage the public because we have not whittled those down and presented them to the joint board. So I do feel this is a little bit of a change. That I can definitely edit, that that would be accurate and I'm happy to make that change. You, do you, does the select board meet next Monday? When are you meeting? No. We meet on Tuesday. We meet on Tuesday. The select board's the 17th. So what would be your plan for editing in this and getting Andy and Irene on board? Well, I mean, I could turn this around tomorrow, but I don't know if either of them would want to look at it before it was part of a packet. But if I could send it to you guys after I've edited it, as long as you replied individually to me, that would be fine. Everyone else good with that? Yes. Yeah. Were you going to send it to everybody and not just... I can definitely do that and then folks can respond individually so that we're not engaging in group think. And not everyone will be engaged to read it in December, but I'm sure a lot of people will. I think we just need to make the point of actually communicating. That's a start. I think what would be really helpful is after each joint meeting, we make a point of communicating something. Okay, so we're done with that one? Yes. Okay, thank you, Elaine. Yep. Thank you. All right. So no executive session required, right? So we can entertain a motion to adjourn? I'll move to adjourn. All right, you don't have a second? Second. Okay, I'll make a motion for the trustees to adjourn. Second. Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Okay. Hey. That was a... Quite a meeting. That was a meeting. That was a meeting. That was a meeting. That was a meeting. That was a meeting. That was a meeting. That was a meeting. That was a meeting.