 Okay, we will call the October 15th, 2018 Select Board meeting to order and invite you to rise and join us in the pledge of allegiance. 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. I'd like to welcome everyone to tonight's Select Board meeting and just remind you to turn your cell phones to silence, please. We greatly appreciate it, and it was pretty hard not to sign in as you came in, but if you somehow miss that, please be sure you do get signed up. We need that for the minutes. So thank you. Okay, I'm going to ask if we have any agenda additions or changes. None. Good, okay. All right, before we get on to public to be heard, I just wanted to say that we lost a staff member just a few days ago, Ann Payetta. She was director of the Essex Free Library for six, seven years, was a wonderful part of the community there, serviced lots of residents, helping them with all sorts of research and loved books. We were very fortunate to have her, but she she passed recently. What I would like to do if we could just stand. I'd like to offer a moment of silence for her, please. Keeper of your thoughts of her family in your mind. Thank you. Yeah, we're going to move on to the public to be heard section. And that's a time for the for the public to speak to the Select Board on items that are not on the agenda. I know that a number of you are here for some for firearms and Alderbrook probably. But this is a time for things that are not on the agenda that you'd like to bring to the Select Board's attention. So is there anyone here tonight? Wishing to speak during public to be heard. Okay, so I hand if you could just state your name for the record and your address. Oh, you're just waving. Okay. Oh, hello. That's fine. Okay. Yes, again, if you could please state your name and your address. Okay. I'm done by this Friday. And nothing's been done about it. It's a huge possible single. Okay, sorry. Even rescue personnel couldn't go around one day. We get down our street. Well, I'd like to know how that's going to be fixed. Okay, Evan, is that something you could look into? Can I get those streets again real quick? The end of cohort and Blair Road. Right? Intersectional. Okay. Okay, thank you for bringing that up. Okay, anybody else wishing to speak to your public to be heard? Yes sir, if you could state your name as well. Yes, my name is David Scopin and I live at 11 Skyline. And I want to start, oh, I want to thank you for raising your speaker. I want to start by giving you a quote, future generations, please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum. Now, a lot of you have probably heard about what went down to Korea about a week ago when the International Governmental Panel of Climate Change released a recent study. We've got about 12 years. David, could you use the microphone right behind you? Hold on. Thank you. Anyway, we've got about 12 years according to this panel and this is not something that came out of the U.S. This came from the U.N. So it basically is scientists from all over the world. The report is very chilling and I think the quote is very meaningful because if we don't get really serious about doing everything we possibly can in 12 years, our children by possibly as early as 2040 may have the catastrophic effects of climate change. What they're saying is they thought it wasn't going to come on as fast as it is and they suspect it possibly as early as 2040, very chilling reminders of what is occurring may be present. And I know we all know about the ice cap melting. We've all seen the forest fires. We've seen the storms. We know about the record highs that we've experienced year after year. Now is the time to either prepare yourself to say to your grandchildren, I'm sorry, I was rolling drunk on petroleum or to do everything we possibly can, which is what I hope everyone in this room is prepared to do. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, anybody else wishing to address the select board during public to be heard? Okay, I actually have just one thing I'd like to say. For the past two dozen years or so, we've had the pleasure of having Sarah Michelle Stoltz as our recording secretary here on the end and sad to report that this will be her last official scheduled, last scheduled time to be taking minutes. She's done a wonderful job. It's not easy. Our meetings are long and we have many topics that we cover. You did a wonderful job and we will miss you and we thank you for your service. Okay, we're going to move on to our business item section of the agenda. And first up is business item 5A. That's approval of net metering contract with Green Lantern Solar. The business is Essex Sand Hill Solar, LLC. And Greg, you want an intro? Sure. So you've seen this conceptually in the past. It's a net meeting agreement. There's an array that's been approved. It's going up on River Road, 500 kilowatt array. And the town was approached probably about a year ago to see if we were interested in partnering with the installer and the company there to benefit from that solar and take that energy. Energy committee did a lot of research looking into this and kicking it off since then, gone back and forth on the contract that you have in your packet now. That's been reviewed and vetted by the town attorney. Ready to be signed off on. There's a few numbers that need to be filled in just in terms of basically which accounts are going to be taking which amount of energy. But that's something we can do administratively and basically looking for select board to authorize the manager to execute this contract. Then I'm happy to answer any questions about that. Okay, thank you Greg. Questions or comments from the board on this? Yeah, we've seen this in the past and now this is the contract. Looking to just allow the unified manager to execute it. Yeah, any comments, questions? You're good? Okay, what's the board's pleasure on this thing? I move that the select board authorize the unified manager to execute a solar net metering contract with Green Lantern Solar doing business as Essex Sand Hill Solar, LLC. Thank you, Irene. Is there a second? Second. Mike, any further discussion about authorizing unified manager to execute a solar net metering contract? Hearing none, all those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Your motion passes unanimously. Thank you all. That's easy. Okay, we're on to business item 5B and that's the approval of the winter operations plan 2018 and 2019 and for the past many years, Dennis and his team have put together a detailed plan about how sidewalks and roads and other things will be taken care of this winter. So we've had the opportunity to review it. We've accepted it a couple of weeks ago and I think you posted it on the website, okay? And maybe we can hear if there's any comments and today we're looking to then adopt it. You've got the memo that covers the winter operations plan. As you know, this has been a tough switch this year given the school busing issue and how that's changed. We've tried to adjust to that. Another sidewalk plow to hopefully fill in. We've also got. Can't hear. Right now. You have to try and do this. Are we okay now? There you go. Okay, I'll try to speak louder. We've purchased another sidewalk plow. It won't be in until December, hopefully, first of December, but in case it isn't, we've also got a rental unit that we're renting, it showed up today, was unloaded. It's not exactly a sidewalk plow, but it will do until we get the other one in. It appears now after going through some machinations with trying to find employees that we have employees to cover what we need. We lost an employee this summer. We've picked up a new employee, started today. Not quite as experienced as the old employee, but able to drive a plow truck, so we'll work with that. We've also got some temporary help that we're gonna use to help with the sidewalk. So our plan this winter is to put two sidewalk machines on the road to try to help out where we can. In the winter operations plan, there's a fair number of red marks in there, changes from last year, that have to do with, we're trying to pick up some additional sidewalk coverage where the students are gonna have to walk to school. We can't do all of them, but we've tried some of the dead end roads. We're not gonna pick up, but where they loop around. So we've increased that coverage this winter. It also causes us a shift for us. Most of our priorities in the past have been to open up Suzy Wilson Road with all the traffic, keep Sandhill Road open, keep Valley View Road open. We're gonna continue to do that, but now we're gonna try to shift, where some of the flat roads we've always done towards the end of the shift, the Tanglewood area, if you will, Maple lawn, some of those streets. We're gonna try to shift our priorities and do some of those earlier so that we can try to get them clear by the time the kids are walking to school, because there are some streets that they're gonna have to walk on. We've not dropped any sidewalk areas. There's some areas that we probably would like to expand to, but the infrastructure isn't there. There are some areas on the western end of town where they were built years ago. We're in the process of doing handicap access ramps, but some of those have straight curbs and you can't take a sidewalk plow off a six inch curb and expect that it's gonna survive that. So there's areas we just can't get to. There's also a lot of our older sidewalks are four foot wide. Our sidewalk plow will go five, which means we're gonna be tearing up a whole lot and that's common. That's not anything unique to us. Some of the areas in the past we've been able to fix that because we've plowed them in time that the grass has kind of peeled back at this point. There's a lot of neighborhoods that we would be plowing a lot of lawns out and in fact, damaging the equipment. So it's gonna be a transition year. Maybe we'll be able to get to do more next year. Price of salt has gone up appreciably. You saw that in the memo. It's a big surprise for all of us. We did get a lower price from another vendor and that latch onto the state bid price. That will be a minor irritant. It's not a huge cost increase that's gonna cause us not to put salt down this winter. But it is a problem for us. It is on the webpage. I envision this winter we're gonna get lots of calls from people. We're hoping the board approves the plan and we'll go to the trustees next week. The village plan hasn't changed much. Not as much as the towns with the walking issue. There are a couple of things that we feel are very important that we're gonna stress. And we put them in the winter operations plan for a reason. One is because now some of the bus stops are congregated into an area as opposed to in front of each house, there's gonna be more kids there. It's really important that that not be viewed as a play area. Plows and kids don't mix. When they're at the bus stop, quite honestly and be pretty blunt, they need to behave and not horse around. Our guys gonna be extra careful as they approach those bus stops. It would be really great if those bus stops were visible. That's not the town's job to make bus stops visible. But it is in terms of I think parents and kids wearing the right clothing. It applies the elderly as well as it does to people walking on sidewalks. In the winter time, you wanna wear clothing that can be seen. And if you have reflective indicators on your child's backpack, that helps. So those kind of things can be done by the parent to help protect children. We're gonna do everything we can to time our runs so that we're not at those locations when kids are either walking to school in the morning or in the afternoon. Usually we find in the morning, if we're on the roads at seven o'clock, we're not going anywhere. There's just too much traffic. So we tend to come off, do what we can early morning, three to seven, two to seven, get off, go back at it after that traffic clears out. I have the same concern in the afternoon when it gets dark, at three, three or four o'clock. If we have to be out there, we will, but we're gonna be extremely careful. It's gonna be part of our safety training. The last thing we want is any injury to anyone, either our vehicles, our plow drivers, or residents. So we're gonna do what we can, do everything we can to make it as safe as we can, but there is responsibility on the part of both the kids waiting for school buses and for parents to make the children visible, to be honest. Those are two things that really are out of our hands, but it can be done by other people. We'll probably put ads in the paper at that effect. We always put the ones about not making snow forts and snow banks and those kind of things, but we want to emphasize the safety part of what we're trying to do. Questions? Thank you, Dennis. Yeah, questions, comments to Dennis about the operations plan? All right. And your memo, Dennis, you mentioned there are tens of thousands of dollars that we're now spending clearing sidewalks because of the school changes. And I know the school merger was supposed to save money for school taxpayers, but to see municipal taxpayers now pay more, is there a way to have the school have some skin in the game before they make decisions like this that cause us and our budget to go up even as it lowers their budget perhaps? Have you been meeting with them or will somebody be meeting with them to make sure that this doesn't happen again? We've met with them periodically. We haven't, we've kind of approached that issue in a very general sense. I'll be honest, that's above my pay grade as I used to say in the military. That is a discussion that maybe should go on between those in charge of the school department, those in charge of the town and maybe even school board to this board, especially as we go forward. This appears it's a long-term change. It came on us rather suddenly. So there's not a lot that we can do starting in September rather than get employees trained up, get equipment ready, add equipment, do things like that. If we're gonna expand coverage, if we're gonna do other things, marking bus stops, those kind of things, those things could very easily be taken on by the school department. But that's not something the public work structure is gonna call up the school department and say, go do. That's gotta be at a higher grade than mine. And the request came in to help the school after the town's budget was already approved, set and approved. So this is trying to do as much as we can within the budget we have. That's correct. So there's a finite bucket of money, so some things will have to come down. Okay, thank you. Any other questions? Again, we've had, we looked at this a while back. No changes from last time, but did you get feedback from having it posted on the web? Pardon? I had one question. I had one question. That was the only feedback we had, but go ahead. All right, so yeah, my question was, there are some neighborhoods that now have both first and second priority sidewalks in them, and the question was what that first and second priority really means. Kind of two sides to the same question. I left all the sidewalks you're doing last year as first priority because they were the ones that covered the major routes like Susie Wilson Road along Route 15 where you just can't have people walking in the roadway. I mean, we've got to get out there and that's a priority one. That priority from last year also extended onto some side streets, but the intent of that priority was to plow to the center of a development so that people could get to that center. So those are still our priorities. What we did with the second priority was the ones we added to kind of take into account those areas where we knew kids were gonna be walking to school. So we added them as a second priority. In reality, once the sidewalk plow leaves the shop, there were going out and running routes. So in reality, it's not gonna change anything. The only event that might occur, and I don't know if we've ever had this happen where the snows built up so fast that we've gotta stop doing a neighborhood and go pick up some of the other streets. Generally when we start, we'll follow the routes through and complete the work and then move on to the next neighborhood. So from a daily operational point of view, one and two are in the box we're gonna do and we're not gonna differentiate between them. But if you wanna be a purist, you would probably say, yeah, if there's 30,000 cars on a day or 25,000 cars on Susie Wilson Road, it's probably got a higher priority than a road that's got 100 cars a day on it. But from a practical point of view, we're gonna cover those on the list. Thanks. Okay, any hands? Okay. What's the board's pleasure on this one? Motion, if you wish. Sure. I move that the select board approve the winter operations plan for 2018-2019, subsequent to hearing input from the public. Do I have a second? Second. Thank you, Andy. Any further discussion about approving the winter operations plan for 2018-19? Can't hear none. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Opposed? Motion passes unanimously. Thank you. Okay, while we have you here, I'm gonna go on to business item 5C. That's called, this is a response to driveway slope concerns and winter sidewalk parking on Alderbrook Road. Yeah, this is a one that's come up in a number of times since last year. I'll be honest, given what's occurred and the work that's going into it, it was an issue that once we got the complaint, we probably should have turned over to the police department and say, go for it. Because enforcement of laws is their responsibility and not public works. We decided to take that out of their hands to assist them and wrote letters to the people that were parking on the sidewalk over on Alderbrook Lane. Basically saying, shouldn't park there. It's illegal under state law. It's illegal under town ordinance. And we did it fairly softly. We didn't get the police to go after anyone last winter. We just kind of made our way through. This occurred late in the spring. Result of a citizen complaint. I've not provided the name of that particular citizen and I hope I don't have to. I don't think it's necessary. It's not intent to have neighbors fighting with neighbors, but when we get a complaint, it's gotta go someplace. So either it's gonna come to us to handle or the police department and maybe being ignorant, we took it on ourselves to try to resolve the issue. Since then, the individual, at least one of the individuals or two of them, I think came to a previous meeting and wanted to have this issue reconsidered. So we spent some time, actually quite a bit of time over the last week, two weeks, looking at what the situation was and we prepared a memo for you that stated October 10th that you should have in front of you. We went out, the very first thing we went out and checked on was what are the slopes and who had the steep driveways? There are many of them in town. There are many in the village. We just took those that were on Alderbrook Road. We didn't try to do a town-wide survey. I'm aware of a lot of others, but we just didn't do that. Some are uphill from the road, some are downhill from the road. I'm not sure which is more problematic, uphill or downhill. I live in an uphill steeply sloped driveway. As an example, I came home one night and got out of my town car, went to go in the house and the next thing I know, I saw the town car sliding down my driveway, catching the back bumper of my own car, which then caused it to slide down the driveway. That was about four years ago. Since then, I've made sure that the driveway is totally shoveled and salted so that that doesn't occur again. And I haven't had a problem since. That's anecdotal, but that's my own driveway. So there are some ways to handle it if you have to. So we looked at some options. And first of all, some of the steeped driveways I mentioned, not in Alderbrook Road, I'll mention them, Greenbrier, Wildwood, Creek Road, Windridge Road in the town, and I happen to be dealing with a village on an issue on South Street where there's a couple over there that are very steep also. So there's, we tried to think of any option we could that might be available to solve the problem. One of them was to legally close a section of the sidewalk. If a sidewalk section is closed, is it in fact a sidewalk? We wanted to run that by the town attorney, but we just provided that as one option. And then we don't plow that sidewalk this year. We may in a future year because of the issue of busing and what happens next year. But for this year, we don't plow that. We didn't have them for quite a long time, if at all. We would have to put up barriers. We would want the select board to approve that action because we're legally closing something that is supposed to be open for the winter. And we asked the town attorney for an opinion which we got today and we can go after that. Second option would be, and some of these are pretty severe, but remove the existing sidewalk on the south side, take it out and let people park on the grass where they want to park. You've got to do some ADA compliant sidewalk ramps on both ends, but that's possible. You could remove the curbing there and provide some additional pavement and sub-base to create a parking zone on the street so that you've got a wide enough area. Option four is a do nothing option. Option five would be to allow parking on one side of Alderbrook Road in the impacted areas for the entire winter. And then we had another one, which I guess was a 1A, which is if you're going to block it off and you want to really close it off, throw some soil on top and so you can't see the sidewalk, which is kind of ridiculous, but it's an option. We ran through some costs on those. The signage and closing is about $1,000. If you start to do fancier things like putting material on the road or on the sidewalk, it's a couple thousand. You start to rip up sidewalks, it's 15,000. If you wanted to add another lane, it's about 57,000. So now you still have two through full lanes and a parking area. Option four is do nothing. Option five to allow parking would be to sign it and that's a much smaller cost, a couple hundred dollars. So considerations and I'll take time to go through these. I think it's important. Driveways are private access ways onto a public street and they're exclusively the responsibility of the owner to maintain and keep open and not the municipality. That's been affirmed by the town attorney. I think it's also practical common knowledge because certain homeowners have had in the past a neglected to park on a public sidewalk and this didn't come to our attention. It doesn't mean that they have any legal right to continue this practice. Many other landowners on similar streets with similar steep driveways in both the town and the village have found ways to keep their driveways passable during the winter. Applying an application of deicing salts can keep these driveways open most of the time, if not all the time. When these lots were approved, we didn't have driveway standards through the community development office or the planning commission. This was kind of pre the development control era. So lots were sold and purchased and a lot of those older lots have steep driveways. Now it's limited to a 14% grade but it wasn't back when the lots were approved. The purchase of a lot with a steep driveway was again solely the decision of the owner who purchased the lot. We weren't, the town was in no way involved with that decision. Between the owner and the buyer and the seller. We were, owners were notified early in this year the problem they would encounter parking on a sidewalk in the winter. There's been adequate time for the impacted property owners to add fill, create a parking area and they're a lot adjacent to but slightly off the sidewalk. To my knowledge, no property owner has done this. There's a couple that are difficult but some would be relatively easy to do. With an increase the number of sidewalks being plowed this winter, there's likely to be an increased pressure to further expand the town sidewalk plowing next year and in the coming years. The area in discussion is a likely area for expansion of this coverage given where coverage ends today. It ends at Alderbrook and Greenbrier just right around the corner. There's also periods during the winter from early November to mid April when snow doesn't fall or it melts. So if you close the sidewalk we're not gonna be out there picking up the barriers and putting them back down every time it's nice out. Once it's closed, it's closed which means for the rest of that winter you're not using that sidewalk even if there's no snow on it. Legally it's closed. From an on-street parking issue this is really not acceptable and PD weighed in and so did the fire department as well as public works. Alderbrook roads 30 feet wide. We never plow up to the curb. We can't get that closer to destroy the plows. We don't, you know, if you've been plowing for five or six hours and you're tired and you've got a car there, we've hit some in the past. We've taken off mirrors. Don't like to admit it but it happens. The drivers get tired and it's dark out and things can happen. So you're putting the owner's car in a place where we're more likely to hit it. We come by with a plow, the snow's going where it's going and when it goes it'll fill in the car, it'll fill in in between the car. If you park on the road and the owner gets up in the morning and says I'm going to shovel it out, shovels it out and leaves. He's going to leave a windrow. He's going to leave snow on the road. It gets cold that day, gets down to 20 degrees. That's frozen hard. We can't go by and get that back up. It's there. It's probably there for the winter. So you're going to end up with an obstacle in the middle of the road on one side where some driver driver's going to come along, thinks it's soft snow, hits a nice patch and you've got a problem. So parking in the street is not an issue. If there had to be parking on the street, the only way to do it and it can't be done for this winter would be expend the money and actually create a parking space, another a third lane off the road and put parking there. It's the same problem is going to occur with people being plowed in, but at that point it's their problem, not my problem or not the public works problem. I think that by accepting municipal responsibility for a problem that legally rests with a property owner, we're going to be setting a precedent. And I think the town attorney weighed in pretty heavy on that. For further exposure on driveways with inherent steep grades. And again, and I hate to be repetitive, but this issue is not in the municipality's area of responsibility. So it may appear to be a simple solution to close the sidewalk as one of the cheapest options. It's a staff's position and I think the town attorney's clear position that section action may alleviate the problem for a few landowners, but it creates a very negative precedent for transferring responsibility from a landowner to the town. And so our recommendation, recommendation of PD, the recommendation of fire department and the recommendation of the town attorney is that we do nothing. Thank you Dennis, taking us through that. Appreciate it. It takes a long, but I thought you had a whole picture. It's important details in there. So I'm going to open it up to the board and see if they have any questions or comments. And when we're done, I'll bring in the public. Any questions, comments from the board? Okay, so Mike, then come to Irene. Mike. I don't have any questions. Dennis has done his usual great job of laying out the issues. I have to agree with option four. I think this is a do nothing as far as the select board is concerned. I think the property owners that bought along that road made that decision with their eyes wide open or should have. And it's not the responsibility of the town to rework ordinances and to violate state law. So my vote is that we do nothing. You know what they were, okay. I just wanted to thank Dennis and his crew for all the work that they put into this because I know you didn't anticipate having to generate options and measure dry waste slopes and things like that. I think the writing's on the wall. I don't expect the select board to go against the staff's wishes on this. I do hope that in the future, the planning commission will be more aware of approving lots of questionable integrity. I understand that we wanna keep the developers happy when they come asking to build houses. We wanna build more houses in Essex because there's always a high demand for it. And so the pressures on the planning commission to say yes. And yet the group that said yes in 1975 clearly could have said no if they were looking at the slope through the eyes of people now who would say no, that's too steep. And the same thing with the floodplains. I believe there are lots in the town village that are in the floodplain. And is it the homeowner's problem? Yes, it is. They bought in the floodplain but one could also say that maybe those lots should not have been approved for building in the first place. And for us to wash our hands of it to say, gee, it's like buying a house near an airport. I think that's a very different thing. Those are sort of ambient noise concerns if you buy a house near the train tracks. I think this is a really distinctive thing and it is on us to remind those of us who look at potential building lots to consider the integrity of the lots as well. Yes, this is water over the end. It is now the homeowners who are stuck in some ways. But I do believe it is on us to rethink what we do in light of this example. And perhaps we do want a sidewalk policy. Perhaps we do want to find a way to close sidewalks because after 250 plus years, I find it hard to believe we've never closed a sidewalk and maybe we need a policy of doing that going forward so we can when necessary close sidewalks. Thank you. I just want to comment that the Planning Commission, they apply the zoning regs to their, they don't have wiggle room beyond what's defined and what can and cannot be approved. And at the time, as Tana said, there were no regs at that time. It was purely up to the developer and the homeowner. So it wasn't the town that said, go ahead and do it. Mike? So I would just, I would take that a step further and now that we do have standards in place, I don't see where this is going to be an issue moving forward. I think this is an issue from 1975 that has suddenly come to the fore. And I for one don't think that it is going to resurface in other areas. Anybody else? Irene? I would just caution that yes, the Planning Commission follows the zoning regs and the zoning regs are developed out of experiences and things, but the energy committee of which David Scopin's a member, I don't think he's still here. The energy committee kind of scoffed several years back when members of the energy committee came to them and begged them to consider climate change as something they looked at very carefully when they had to make decisions. And then a few years later, there was a tropical storm and then the state insisted that some of those climate change things be considered. So what I'm asking is not for the Planning Commission, what I'm asking is for Planning Commissions and other committees and commissions at the town to just be aware of sort of common sense, what's ahead of us, things, even if they haven't yet been codified in law. Because I think having steep driveways in 1975, back when we used to get big snow storms, might have been a clue even if there wasn't a law in the books about steep driveways that someone on the commission might have said, hmm, maybe this isn't so smart. I understand they are bound by certain laws, but why not think beyond them? Thank you. Other comments? Questions? Okay, I'm up with the mind as well to, I feel for the homeowners, I understand, but I see it's their responsibility. So yeah, there's no other comments from the board, so I'd like to open it up to the public and if you could just state your name and go to the mic, yeah, to the mic is great. Thank you. Can you hear me? Perfect, thanks. I'm Deb Stender. I live at 8 Alderbrook Road. I'd like to state for the minutes, they'll be taking the minutes that it's all one word. It's not two words as it's been put in here. So that's where my tax bill comes. I've lived there at Alderbrook for 25 years. We've never had an issue. We've never had our sidewalks plowed. You were speaking with that. Your snow plows for the sidewalks need four to five feet. Our sidewalks are 36 inches. So I waited, we got the letter from Mr. Lutz and I spoke with him in the spring about this and I waited until now to bring it to the select board because I wanted to see if we were going to need to have things plowed because of the change in the school bussing thing. They actually walk way the heck down the logwood to get their school bus. One, a couple of things that are brought up. We're not hindering the snow plows by parking there. You can see from this picture of my daughter's car, they don't plow anywhere near to the end of our driveway. I end up chopping ice and shoveling at least a yard into the road. So that's not an issue. Because of that and the slope of the road there from Mr. Levy's house down to the storm drain, which is between my house and number 10, I end up shoveling from the end of my driveway and chopping ice, four inch thick ice down to the storm drain, which is halfway between them because they don't plow very close to the end of my driveway. The sidewalks never open. If by some chance in the middle of winter we have that warm weather and the sidewalk is clear, I'm not parking down there because my driveway is clear. My driveway is sloped this way. It gets the afternoon sun. Usually within a couple of days, barring ice, last year we had a lot of ice. I can get my cars up the driveway with no problem. It's not a consistent thing. The map of sidewalk, plow route number one shows that the sidewalk plow stops at the end of Aldebrook where it meets Greenbrier. According to the winter operations plan, there's a lack of muddy. It says the town is not planned for nor does it have the resources to plow all the sidewalks in the town and also cover all the plow routes within any reasonable expectation of coverage or performance. And it says on the next page that they did obtain additional contract prices for the following sidewalks. Aldebrook is enlisted there. There are no budget funds to cover this cost. So if they're not going to plow it, I don't see that I'm inconveniencing any walkers. I think that I went through this memorandum but it's interesting to notice that we have a 21% grade. The options are, the only really viable option is option number one. I saw the very nice barricade that someone had come up with and it looked really great but why couldn't they just have a sign? They have signs all over the place that say parking man from December 1st to April 15th various depending on whether you're in Burlington or down here and they just have them on a simple signpost. I know that over the years many cars have taken down signposts so I'm sure Mr. Letts has a pile of half signposts somewhere in his garage, the town garage that he could just put a sign at the end of the road and just say the sidewalk is closed for that amount of time the same as the parking band. I don't see that it needs to be taken up and down after every storm that seems a little ridiculous. You don't take the parking band signs up and down. I agree that parking in the road is not an option because they don't plow the entire width of the road. They just kind of plow down the center of it if there is an emergency and the vehicles do need to get down there. Having a car even parked on one side of the road is I don't think a viable option. So there was that. They, we were notified Mr. Letts told me he was very, he spent a lot of time on the phone but he was very informative and I really appreciate that Mr. Letts putting a drive, a little parking area at the bottom of my driveway. The guys that came to fix, fix our sidewalk and my driveway this summer without telling you that they were coming said that it would cost upwards of $35,000. That's, that's not even legit. That's not even close to being within my budget to put in this. There are periods of time during the winter season when the snow doesn't fall or melt and people use the sidewalks when it's not snow covered. Sometimes, most of them walk in the middle of the road even in the summertime but as I said previously there's, we can get up the driveway we do. I just, I find this making a mountain out of a molehill. I really do. I don't know who the person who complained is. Mr. Letts doesn't want to say that that's his prerogative but if it's someone who doesn't live in our neighborhood it's not the beeswax. And if it is someone that lives in our neighborhood I would like to know what their specific complaint is because I'm not, I'm not hindering the snow clouds. I'm not hindering the emergency vehicles if they needed to come down. I'm not hindering walkers because the sidewalks covered the snow in ice anyways. So I'm not clear what the problem is for parking occasionally on a sidewalk in the winter. It's a state law that says you can't. It's also a town ordinance but it's also a state law that says there's no parking allowed on sidewalks. And I believe this let board can give a variance for that if they choose to do so. I understand that it's the state law and I see your point but they've never brought that to our attention before. I never knew until Mr. Letts sent us the letter that this was against the law. I don't go around trying to break the law. It just seems like if the police are going to come around and ticket me for parking on the sidewalk I think that their time and money would be better spent. Maybe looking at the people that glide through stop signs especially around where the schools are because that makes my heart a wreck. They would be better off with the people that drive 50 miles an hour down Mable Street past ADF. That, that's craziness. But I don't see where I'm harming anybody. Yeah, the reason why you were able to park there in the last 25 years is because the police don't go out and look for those violations but somebody brought it to their attention and then they had no choice but to go and see. Don't they have other things to spend their time on? The residents? No, the, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that snarky, on the police, they have a lot of stuff to do. The police don't go looking for those violations, I said they do not. But the reason that it came to their attention is because somebody brought it to their attention and then they had to look and see is this a violation? It is, they have to deal with it once it's been brought to their attention. But they don't go look for that. I really like the select board to grant variance for Alderbrook Road until such time as they need to plow it for the students that are walking to school. Then we would need to do that for all those other roads as well that Dennis highlighted. They don't go back to 1975 if they were built after the zoning change then it's not an issue. That was two years ago. The zoning change for driveway slopes. It was two years ago? I think so, yeah, about two years ago. I thought it was 1978, when I was looking through there. The slopes are very new in the rags. Okay, is that it? Comments, anything else you'd like to add before? We move on to somebody else? No. Okay, thank you. That was well stated. I appreciate the hearing from you. Anyone else would like to comment on this issue? Okay, I'm gonna bring it back to the board and say any other discussion, questions, comments? Irene? I'm curious if there are other streets you know where people are parking in the sidewalk at this time. That's not something I'm going out and checking. Be honest with you. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. I honestly don't know. And when just so everybody knows for clarification when we received the complaint, it was two parts. One part was your trucks are going too fast. Well, we have GPS now in our truck so we could check. And the second was, do you realize that people are parking in the sidewalks on Alderbrook Road? And I knew we had a town ordinance. I wasn't really clear where it went from there. So I had to do research on two things. One, get the information on the GPS on the truck to find out if they were speeding and I found they weren't. And then I talked to the police department and found out that there is a state law under motor vehicles that talks about parking on state sidewalks. And so once you receive a complaint, my training has been you have an obligation to answer it. And so that's what we did and that's what set this thing in motion. But we're not out driving around looking for violations. I'm driving around looking to see where aren't we plowing or we should be plowing and are we gonna get the kids safely to school and those kind of things. That's my primary concern. Anybody else? Okay, it'd be good to have a motion on. Do we need any motion if I can do anything about it? Yeah, I think, well, is that valid? If that's the will of the select board that no action be taken, then that's fine. Okay, okay, we do feel sorry that you have that issue to deal with, however. I'm sorry that you do. Could you ask this person if you saw them on the other streets in the town and make sure that nobody else is parking on the sidewalk? They have other things to do. I'm sorry. What I can say is I will talk with the chief of police as our police do make the runs. We wanna enforce our ordinances equitably. They will more than likely get a warning to let them know that the law exists and what they're doing, but if they continue to find them there, they will ticket them. Public safety is our number one priority, whether it's our fire trucks, ambulances, police cars and our kids getting to school. We do this. So we will, when we do go out there, the chief is in the audience tonight. He's hearing me directly. When our officers come upon it, whether it's either by complaint or in their patrols, the first time they'll probably get a warning. The second time they would get ticketed and beyond that, they would get towed. Dennis. And in addition, in a week and a half or so, we do our winter snow meeting and we put that in this year's winter operations plan about parking on sidewalks and our operators routinely call in if there's a car parked on the road in terms of the winter parking band. Again, we're not the police officers. We don't decide whether to ticket or tow. We just report it. And if our drivers are out there and find somebody's parking on a sidewalk, whether it's Alderbrook Road or another road in town, we'll report it to the police and at that point it's in their hands. But for the select board's information, I mean, I don't remember exactly the villages square mileage right now, but it's about five of the 36 square miles of the town. But the police patrol 36 square miles and any given night, we may have a couple of officers on duty, those types of things. With the call volumes that we have, we are not doing as many patrols currently as we'd like to. And I think we would say this has not been our priority of the last several years, but if we are gonna enforce it on Alderbrook, we will have to enforce it everywhere we see it. Okay, we're gonna move on. Thank you, Dennis. Thank you. We're gonna move on to business item 5D and that's a discussion of potential changes to firearm ordinance. Greg, did you wanna say anything about it? Yeah, let's give a brief overview of what you have before you. So following the meeting on August 16th at the Champlain Valley Expo came back from that and wrapped it up some proposed language to the ordinance in terms of where discharge would be, I guess expansion of no discharge areas where that would be focused on two areas at the discussion on the 16th of August. I was looking at Indianbrook Park and Saxon Hill Park, the 90 acre school parcel. Since then, as I started digging into this, I mentioned this at one of the select board meetings. I think I put in some emails to residents. Also realized that the Essex Tree Farm recreational facility was not included in the no discharge area. The village portion is, but the town portion was not. So out of that language as well to proposed ordinance changes. So basically the language and the ordinance that I proposed highlights those three areas with the tree farm. It would just be a expansion of the no discharge area. For the other two parcels, Saxon Hill and Indianbrook Park, there was discussion about which dates to limit discharge. Left that part blank for discussion tonight. The other piece in there is a 500 foot buffer around those public parcels. That was what was discussed on the 16th, but that's another change in there of whether you want to apply to just the parks or the parks plus a buffer area. I know there have been some questions about that. So beyond that, just some minor changes. We did notice that the language of the firearms discharge ordinance did not match up to the map. And I'll try to just show that. It's probably easier where let's see. This is the current map. And it's tough to see right here. Let me zoom that in. But the language that describes the area talks about how it comes down Colchester Road and then it comes in here before coming down like that. The map actually shows somewhere around here. The map actually shows this few parcels in here as being in the no discharge area, especially if you're adding in the tree farm made sense to me to include these parcels in here, the relatively small parcels. So I modified that language accordingly. Just wanted to call that out to your attention so you are aware of that change in what's written. But and then in section nine of the ordinance talks about parks that are have no discharge allowed. And it says that Indian Brook is the one exemption. Actually looking at the map, there's two other small parcels that meet the definition of a park. And outside of the no discharge area, one of them is Myers natural area, which is this little parcel. The other one was recently acquired the Horton property, which is about 50 acres right here. So I just called out those two as exemptions to Indian Brook Park as well. With that, I'm happy to try to answer any questions if you have any. Okay. First, I'd like to just address many of the people who are here tonight for this item. To talk about kind of how we're going to handle it tonight as we talked last time. So to reiterate, this luck board has received a lot of input in this process, not just in the past couple of weeks, but over the many, actually many years. More recently, we heard more from more than 200 residents over a six plus week timeframe in the summer with the help of a hired facilitator. They try to make sure we're getting input from both sides, you know, from all sides. There was a 2009 report from the firearms task force that we've had and considered. And again, we hear from residents throughout the years on all sides of this issue that came in still this weekend. I want to let you know that passions and emotions run deep in the community on this subject. It's, there are traditions that many people have that go back a long time that need to be respected. We also want to use some common sense in any changes that we do. So on August 16th, that was the time when we focused just on this ordinance. We discussed limiting the discharge of firearms on town properties of Indian Brook and Saxon Hill during certain times of the year. We didn't define what those times were. That's something I'm hoping we can do tonight. So no dates were defined. We also discussed creating a 500 foot no discharge buffer around the perimeters of these properties, but that's something we need to talk about as well. And there's no discharge of firearms will be allowed on the tree farm property at any time. That's the soccer fields there. So one goal for tonight is to have the select board define the buffer zone and the time windows, the time window that firearms discharge will be allowed on town properties of Indian Brook and Saxon Hill. And after the select boards define this window and the buffer zone, when that discussion at the select board level is done, we're gonna open it up to the public to hear from them. And I'll have more on that when we get to that. But after the public has been able to say what they need, it's gonna come back to the select board at that time. And we'll then direct the staff to update existing ordinance accordingly with these dates for review for these dates and for the buffer zone if we want one at a future meeting. There's a long process before an ordinance can become law. Not only do we need to review the language as a board, we would then have a public hearing to hear from the public once again to look at what the actual language of that ordinance is. Then it comes back to the select board to see, based on that, do we wanna make any changes and so on? So it's a long process. Any potential changes to the ordinance as it relates to shooting ranges, however, we are not planning on discussing shooting ranges tonight. We at the select board decided to hold that off until November 5th, where part of that meeting will focus on the shooting ranges. So I just wanna make sure that that's clear about how we're gonna proceed with this particular business item. Is there any, are there any questions? Okay, great. So again, I'd like to then bring it to the select board here. We know we've had the opportunity to read through the language that was drafted. Again, we need to define the dates at which firearms would be allowed on these properties. And if a 500 foot buffer around the property of Indian Brook and Saxon Hill is something you wanna see. So I'll open it up to the board to hear what you'd like to do. Who would like to go first? Anybody? Andy. When we had the discussion at the last meeting, we talked about being consistent with different types, with different parcels. So we wanted to have the Saxon Hill and the Indian Brook parcels handled in a consistent manner. And then we also talked about the so-called blue zone where we said that was private property and we didn't want to make any changes there. So I am not at all in favor of the 500 foot buffer around the parks because then we'd be treating those pieces of property inconsistently with how we handle the blue zone. Do you wanna make any comments on the dates at this time or do you wanna reserve? Reserve on the dates, please. All right, anybody else? So we heard no buffer zone would be preferred on Indian Brook and the Saxon Hill parcel, right? And also the tree farm parcel because that also has a 500 foot buffer as well. No, no. Okay, correct. All three of them. Thanks for that clarity. Who would like to go next? Elaine? So Andy, just to confirm the same for everything. So if there were a 500 foot buffer on Indian Brook and Saxon Hill, then you would want one in the blue zone. Were you saying don't do it? No, no. I am saying no private property affected by this. Can I ask you a question? Is that okay, Max? You okay with that? I'm just looking for some clarification and opinion. The entire firearms discharge area that is not in question, the village and the other areas of that covers a lot of private property. So I'm curious to know your opinion on why that's okay but a 500 foot buffer in these zones is not. I have not said that that's okay. So we're, the discussion here is about the changes that we want to make around those parks. I did not say, I haven't said either way, right? I did not say that we should remove it from all private property. I'm saying that we please do not add it to additional private property parcels. So you're not questioning our right to do it. You just don't want to do it. I have not questioned that. No, the questioning the right to do it. I understand that there are arguments either way with regard to whether it's legal to remove the property rights of folks who own those properties and those 500 foot buffers. My position is that even if it is legal, it's not the right thing to do. Do you have any comments on dates or? I do, but I just want to wrap this part up. I am in favor of the 500 foot buffer on Indian Brook and Saxon Hill and the tree farm. And I wouldn't want to include it in the blue zone because of that is personal property, private property, and in the village there's all private property that's covered. I don't see, I think that property that's owned by our municipality has the ability to extend into private property for safety. So I'm just going to leave that at that. Regarding the dates, in looking at the fish and wildlife schedule for this year, realizing that the dates can change from year to year. If we limit firearms discharge to deer season, there are four different deer seasons that would apply. And in 2018 it goes from October 6th through December 9th. For simplicity's sake, we could say October 1st through December 15th would be a ballpark. Yes, ma'am? That October one is the bow and arrow. We're not talking about those. Okay, thank you, yes. Just talking about the firearms. Right, okay. The deer season's inclusive regardless of whether we do that are, they overlap with multiple other hunting seasons as well. So I would be in favor of allowing hunting in Indianbrook and Saxon Hill during deer season only because it does overlap with other hunting seasons, so. And if I were to. You want a window? Say some dates, would November 1st to like December 15th? Approximately? Yeah, yeah. Yes. I wouldn't want to do it earlier than that, say Halloween and when all the kids are out. Okay, so would that be something? I don't want to put words in your mouth. Right, well I appreciate you're correcting me with the bow and arrow season. So, right, youth deer weekend is the first weekend in November, so perhaps November 1st is the best start date, the ballpark start date. And an end after muzzle loader? Correct. So that'd be December 15th to be safe? Right, which would be about 45 days or one and a half months. I agree with Elaine. I think it is within our purview to do buffers around publicly used lands. I think that is a very clear distinction between public lands and privately owned property. So I do not have a problem with a buffer around the two parks. As far as dates are concerned, I think if we are gonna put that level of protection in which I believe is needed, I am in favor of expanding the season and would recommend that hunting season go from one November to 31 March as a proposed timeline for dates. Okay, so you say with buffer? Yes. Yep, I think I'm sure there will be disagreement, but I think there has to be some give and get on both sides, so. I'm okay with the dates that Mike proposed. So just to clarify, that's November 1st to March 31st, because I want the bulk of the users of the parks to not be hearing gunfire or feeling as if they're in the middle of a hunting zone, even though it will be better signed and from this experience, I hope everyone will have a raised awareness of the fact that there has been hunting all along there. I mean, use your mic. They can't hear you. You can't hear me? I'm sorry. I agree with the dates that Mike proposed. I think it's important to have the signage along with reduced access to hunters, which is, I think, new compared to what happens now. Right now, hunting's allowed all year round, except for that 500 foot buffer around the reservoir. Right, and to be clear, what we talked about also on the 16th of August was to maintain that current 500 foot no discharge buffer around the highland. I'm surprised at the dates that have been mentioned here tonight, because they're significantly different than what we talked about at the last meeting and I don't understand what's changed, but my understanding or my memory of what we were talking about was disallowing hunting during the peak youth season, starting June 1st until September 1st, and then allowing hunting other than those dates. So the hunting season that I remember is talking about at the last meeting would have been from September 1st to June 1st to allow all the small game hunting and so forth that was discussed at the last meeting. I don't understand why the dates have changed for everybody. Because we couldn't agree on the dates at the time. I didn't change what I wanted, and that was November 1st to December, so that's why we're having discussion tonight because that was not defined or decided. Several days were thrown out just like we're hearing tonight. So just to be clear, Andy, you're September 1st through June 1st. Yeah, September 1 to June 1st, that's what we talked about at the last meeting. Again, we didn't agree to that at all. It was not agreed to. That's why we're trying to figure it out tonight. Elaine. Andy, you're remembering correctly that we did have that conversation. It did go that far in terms of limiting it to just the most heavily used times. My concern at the time was, I wasn't entirely familiar with the dates of the hunting season, the full calendar of all the different seasons, and thought that the seasons did not overlap. And so therefore was concerned that hunting would be limited for various groups. But in looking at the dates in depth, I can see that there's a great deal of overlap with all the different types of game and small animals that are allowed to be hunted, especially in the fall. And so that's why I went back to my original stand of the deer season because it overlaps with hare, rabbit, grace, girl, grouse, and bear. So it overlaps with multiple seasons. I want to remind folks too that there are over 4,000 passes at Indian Brook. That's a crowded area of the town. A lot of also dogs running through there. I was just there this weekend and it was like a traffic jam. I mean, it was packed. And just because the town doesn't have an attendant there to take attendance during the winter, it doesn't mean people don't go there also and enjoy that spectacular place in the winter. So I was of the mind to say no hunting at all there throughout the year. But I understand there's a needed controlled deer population and one effective way is to allow the hunters to be able to help the town out and take care of that. But with so many people in that park throughout the year, I'm just trying to use what I see as common sense to say there's so many people there in a park that we're not saying people can't use it during the hunting season, the non-hunters, but I'd really think it makes sense to we didn't touch the blue zone, the private land. But the public land, I think we have an obligation to public safety and you can argue that, look, we haven't had any accidents. Great, can you guarantee that going forward in the future? Nobody can. I respect the hunters. I know they take class and I'd say 98% of them follow things to the tee. There's traditions going way back and deer hunting is a big one. This allows deer hunting to continue and it allows the rest of the community to enjoy that park without having to even to hear gunshots near them. I could go either way on the buffer, but I think if we could limit it to just the deer hunting, that goes a long way. We haven't addressed the shooting ranges and there may be some shooting ranges in that buffer zone. So putting the buffer zone out there may create some problems in the future until we look at that area. But anyway, that's why I'm thinking that the deer hunting, the November 1st of December 15th has a good compromise. But so far it's just two of us. We don't have a consensus yet, so we need to work on it to come up with some real dates. Right? The only counterpoint I would make, Mr. Chairman, is that after deer season and after long rifle, the caliber of weapon goes way, way down. And that in my view, that in conjunction with the buffer makes that safe in my view. I think that people will still be able to enjoy the parks. And like I said, the caliber of weapon is considerably reduced from deer season. So that's the counterpoint that I would like to get on the record. Yeah, that's why you're November 1 to March 31st. That's right. Elaine? I would just add that while I understand the caliber of weapon goes down, and that's helpful to know, usage of the park by people who do not use firearms continues the same way it always does. And it's a safety perception and a concern and people who use the space for recreational purposes from what I've been contacted by people, I've gotten emails, I've gotten conversations with people, they don't feel safe when they're recreating at a place where they hear gunshots. It doesn't necessarily matter what kind of gun is being used and it doesn't necessarily matter where it's being fired because if you're running or biking or cross country skiing and you hear that, you're not gonna know where it's coming from or who's firing it or that it's in a particular zone or that it's a particular weapon of a particular caliber. It's frightening. So from a safety perspective to make our residents feel like they can recreate without concerns for their safety, I think that limiting it to deer season and putting up proper signage would go a long way to ensuring the safety of the entire community because we are responsible for making these decisions for the entire community. Okay, to try to look and see where we have common ground, I can see that at least four of us are saying November 1st as a start date. I know Andy said September 1, but Elaine, you said November 1st and Mike and Irene, you also said November 1st, right? As a start. I was, my preference was what we decided last time, which was to keep the summer months clean, but. Okay, but I thought I wrote down. I will settle for November 1, but my preference was to have the three summer months. Okay, so let's say we have common ground at least on November 1st, maybe not ideal, but we can all agree to. And can we talk about the part? Sorry, not all. That the majority can agree to. Thank you, Andy. So what about the buffer? I think that I heard Elaine, you were saying with buffer, Mike and Irene, I think you also said with buffer. I didn't say. You didn't say? Okay, but Mike, did you said with or without buffer? With, but it is in conjunction with expanding the season. I'm not gonna vote for the buffer if we're gonna keep it from November 1 to December 15. Okay. If we got rid of the buffer, Mike, the 500 buffer and just did it to the property line, is that something that you could agree to bring in to the deer season? So that would be November 1 to December 15. If we got rid of the buffer, would that be a reasonable compromise? The property line of the park. Of the park, right. All right, so Elaine, that's reasonable. That's reasonable to me. With you to get rid of. You're willing to compromise in that way. Okay. All right, and I'm there as well. That's three. That's a no buffer, but no discharge to the property line and allowing discharge of firearms from November 1st to December 15, right? Okay. Andy or Irene, do you wanna? The public will be wearing orange during that month and a half. And I think it only gets easier to see people at Indian Brook as the snow falls, as the leaves fall, and as people are gonna use to wearing orange. So I'm not seeing a big issue with continuing, allowing hunting into the spring. Andy. I'm dismayed that select board members that showed support for shotgun small game hunting during other months have backed away from that. And I'm thankful for the compromise on the buffer, but I still won't support the proposed dates. In addition to defining the time window and the note buffer, I think we need to also, and I think somebody said it before, we said on the 16th, have signage at the different parks. So have the town develop policy to say what kind of signs and where they should be would be helpful. I'd also like to see the town develop an educational outreach plan regarding firearms ordinance, should it be updated to make sure it's clear to the public, whatever update that turns out to be. And again, if we go forward tonight, it looks like we have at least a majority of the board saying November 1st to December 15th without the buffer. We still have the public hearing process to go through. We're more input and we're not locked in until we approve it. So, but this at least gets us on the path to get there. It's not unanimous. I know, but that's, but before we do a motion, it was any other discussion from the board? Are there other items in this ordinance that we can discuss such as raising the price of the fines because I don't think a $25 fine discourages anyone. If I can comment on that, I think as a whole, there's a lot of fines in different areas that all of them will be looked at. Because if they're not acting as a deterrent, which is what they were set up to be, it's worth looking at. I think that's something that we ought to put on the front. Not, I mean, on the list of many things to do to look at that. Is there anything else there? Yeah, just some simple wording. Right now it says, this nice paragraph that Greg wrote about the dates during which the discharge is permitted at Indian Brook. Right now it says, shall not apply to the hunting safety zone described in section nine dash eight, blah, blah, blah. If we're gonna refer people to another ordinance, I wish we would at least encapsulate what that means. So maybe we could say the discharge of firearms is permitted at Indian Brook Park, shall not breach the 500 foot hunting safety zone or should honor the 500 foot hunting safety zone. But to make people go digging up a second ordinance to figure out just what we're saying there, I think is unnecessary. I'd rather be more transparent. Thanks. I think as a practice what we said because those ordinances do change over time to not have to change multiple ones, we often just reference them as we do with state law. When we do. Okay, so any other comments before I open up to the public? Mike. Tell me the procedure again here one more time before we open it up to the public with, well, will there be a motion and then we open it to the public or do we motion afterwards? Emotion afterwards, very well. Because our practice has been if there's a motion on the table, then we don't invite the public. And I think it's important to invite the public. Okay, so this is the time for public input. As always, please keep your comments respectful and brief and focus on any new things that we haven't heard, although we've heard quite a bit. And please do not interrupt or have any side conversations while others are speaking just to show the person who's speaking in the utmost respect that they have our attention. Direct all your comments to me as chair of the select board, please. Not to anybody else in the audience or at the table. Speakers will be given a limited time for their comments and if time runs out, either I or Evan will as politely as possible cut you off. It's always irritating to be cut off and it will always seem impolite, but it's to be respectful of others' time. If anyone before you says something that you wanted to say, it's perfectly great to say ditto for what that person said or I agree with that person. And the select board will listen to what you have to say, but we wanna let you know this is not a negotiation and it's not a dialogue. We will hear your comments and concerns and know that we may not produce the outcome that you want. And we know that's painful, it's actually probably excruciating for many people. But we've listened to input, we've read input, we get emails every week from a lot of people on this and we go through those and know that the select board's job is to try to balance all these things and there's opposing sides, many sides and there's no way we're gonna make everybody happy. But we're gonna do the best we can to balance the interests of their safety and rights and tradition that we try to balance. Again, I know it's painful to watch it happen, but it's our job to make these decisions and we invite your input tonight. So if I could have a show of hands so I know about how much time each person can be given, who would like to speak tonight? Sure. Well, as Annie was saying, we wanted to treat both the same, the Saxon Hill and Indian Brook. So it would be the same dates and no buffer on that. And the only difference with the tree farm is there's no firearms anytime and again, no buffer on that. Okay, I don't think I was explicit on that, so thank you for having me clarify that. Okay, so one more time, show of hands so I can count you. Please, one, two, three, four, five, seven, eight, nine. Okay. Yeah, how about two and a half minutes per person if you could again, direct your comments directly to me. And this is for Essex residents. So we're gonna ask you your name and your address to make sure that it's, you know, speaking at the meetings, this is the residence meeting. So I'd like to alternate, you know, pro and con but I don't know what's in your head, although I do know some. What side you're on. So again, if you could please be respectful again of just listening, no side comments and stick to the two and a half minutes and we will as politely as possible cut you off if you do go long. Okay, so who would like to be first? Yeah, yes, ma'am. Well, we'll do the best we can to keep it brief but it's really to hear your, you know what we just said, we said Indian Brook, Saxon Hill, no discharge except during November 1st and December 15th. Tree Farm, no discharge at all, no buffer. Yeah, the buffer we were discussing but we decided not to do so far was at the property line of the Indian Brook parcel, Saxon Hill parcel and the Tree Farm parcel. There's a boundary line of town property. We were talking about extending beyond that property line 500 feet of no discharge during the time defined. But what we changed to was there would be no buffer so no discharge would be just to the property line of these three town parcels. Does that answer your question? I'm sorry, yes, yes, there's this five, good point. At Indian Brook, at the High Watermark, there's been, for many years, 500 foot no discharge buffer along the water. During this November 1st, December 15th, there's still a no discharge in that 500 foot buffer around the High Watermark as there's been for the past many, many years. Okay, yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't include that. Yeah, I guess we'll start this way and we'll go to the left, I counted nine. So if you could please step up to the mic. State, Patty, sure, state your name for the record and your address so we know you're a resident, which with you we do. Thank you, Mr. Chair, I'm Patty Davis, Hillside Circuit, a circle with Essex and I've made it real short. Basically, Saxon Hill Road, that's my baby. I run every day 365 days. So I am going to report Title 19, BSA, Section 304. It applies to all roads in all districts. Please make a note of that, the Planning Commission of Essex. I'd like them to know that because I did a lot of research on the zoning. Title 19, BSA, Section 304, it shall be the duty of the select board of the town. I'm looking at you. To see that the town highways are property laid out, constructed, maintained, altered, widened, and operated when the safety of the public requires that emphasis please. All town roads, public town roads. Saxon Hill is a class three public road. In addition, I had a no shooting some sign at the beginning of it when we moved here. In accordance with the provision of this title, the select board is potentially liable if someone is hurt. You know that I'm sure. Number two, at risk of its decision here being overturned on appeal because the reasons I'm about to discuss, a 25 foot buffer on Saxon Hill Road, a pedestrian road is clearly unsafe. You know it is a pedestrian road. I just gave Max Chairman, sir, 76 signatures from 10 days that I left up at the end of Saxon Hill Road. And I would like that back at the end of the meeting because I'm gonna leave it up to do a statistical analysis. 30 seconds. Okay, municipal borders, greater than 200 feet. Shelburne, Proctor, Killington, Wolfson, Grand Isle, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Georgia, South Dakota, Pennsylvania, two deaths on the same day, 11-22, 2017. Last couple days ago, French Alps article, I have the website, a 34 year old biker shot and killed by a hunter. The mayor in the French Alps put a temporary ban on hunting in the French Alps. Thank you. Thank you, Patty. Okay, yes. Chuck Vile, 210 Chippin Road. Very quick. I was on the Dine Ordinance Committee nine years ago. As you know, my career was with Vermont Department of Forestry Parks. I was largely involved in wildlife forestry. I am intimately associated with the land at Indian Brook and Saxon Hill because I worked on them as a forester. So my concern is that when it comes to safety, that was a very paramount issue with the department. And I was with the department for over 40 years. In that time frame, we were very safe. One of our folks was very severely wounded. He was done there, killed. The wound was caused by an out of control dog. He was attacked and severely mauled. His stomach ripped open. He almost died. He did come back on active duty. He never fully recovered. We've had another dog incident that's close by where one of our folks was attacked by a dog in a trailhead parking area. He had a gun. He fired morning shots. That gave the hint to the dog to skid that off. So when you're talking safety in the woods, tell me about it. And the point of it is that I've worked with hundreds and tractors all my career. They're very safety conscious. And I believe, yes, the 500 foot buffer around the reservoir, fine, and agree if no buffer beyond the town lands, it's up to the landlord to do it. And I can tell you that from anywhere that land up that way, good habitat has been created. We want to maintain it. And for the benefit we keep in mind too is the hunters, enders and trappers. 30 seconds. Okay. That basically nobody paid their way, but they paid for a lot of group habitat work. So just keep that in mind. Thanks. Thank you, Mr. Brown. Okay. Yeah, now I'll go to the gentleman in orange. Yellow. Yeah, very heavy, yeah. Sean McEwen, 21 turn very rich. So I'm kind of disappointed that I wasn't here on the 16th. It got changed from what I originally heard because I would have known more about the buffer stuff. So a couple of things I'd like to point out. So one, I understand that September 1st, they weren't worked out well, but a lot of us don't go out hunting small game until the leaves are off the trees anyway. So I would have you consider a little bit more of possibly in October and maybe a little bit after December because squirrel hunting and things. But a lot of us don't go out in September anyway because you can't shoot partridge or squirrels when the leaves are on the trees. Very difficult anyway. So you got like a month there of September that you don't even really go. The other thing is I was an alternate on that board and I remember John Workman came in and he was involved, he talked, he was involved and when they bought the reservoir, they specifically talked about it would be open for hunting. So that was something that took place when they bought it. So I want you to remember that. Saxon Hill is a different story when I got purchased. It wasn't that way. And I'm glad that people are thinking about that. The other thing is I'm adamantly opposed to a buffer zone around the property. The tree farm, you're affecting me personally because that's our property. But I've shot a lot of deer within probably two or three within that 500 foot buffer zone. But my back was against the property line and I'm shooting in toward the property. And if ever I was shooting back toward, it said there's a hill or something that I'm shooting into. So it sounds good, 500 foot buffer, but you're really affecting some people that are paying pretty good property tax. And I know that I could probably buy beef for a lot less than when I pay for property tax, but it's been a tradition, that particular piece of property's been in my family for three generations. 30 seconds. My grandfather bought it back in the Depression. All of us, my father, my brother, my two dollars, one of them's gonna hunt this year, but the other one's got a couple deer. So it is a personal thing for me. And I'm sure everybody else who owns property around those other pieces to have their stuff affected. Thank you. Okay, yeah. Igor Polanov, 198 Shaven Road. I just wanna make a note. I'm really thankful that the board has been appreciative of hunters and people doing recreation, shooting sports and trying to accommodate us. I know it's a hot issue. One thing I just wanted to bring, I don't expect the members of the board to be firearms expert. I'm not a firearms expert. I probably spend a lot of time online reading about it more than you guys. One of the discussions about calibers, folks talk about let's calibers. It's not really sort of correct, you guys, but it's not really the size of a caliber. I can fire, say, a 556 rifle. The bullet is about a little bit smaller than this pen. And well, beyond 500 yards, and I can fire on a shotgun, like a 12 gauge, the Duffentink, which is about the size of a nickel. And I would feel pretty comfortable if somebody was 100 yards away firing in my direction. I'm probably not gonna get really injured. So I just, I understand you guys don't really have time to research, but you guys have advice offered by the wildlife, Fish and Wildlife. You guys got members of the police department. So before you discuss caliber sizes, I would just advise, and in terms of, like say, small game hunting with a shotgun, I would advise you guys to do a little bit more do research, no disrespect, man. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, who's the next over here? Ma'am? My name's Deb Woldermuse, and I live on Deer Crossing Lane. Come up to the mic, please. Sorry. And in 2015, we had very soon- Could you restate your name, please? I'm sorry. Deb Woldermuse. Deb Woldermuse. I live on Deer Crossing Lane. And around Christmas time, 2015, one of my neighbors had a bullet in her home, and that's one of the reasons that this whole process got kind of revamped. And what I'm not seeing here is anything that I can tell that addresses the public safety issues, as you mentioned, for that's so important for our neighborhood. And when that happened, you commissioned former Chief LaRose to do a study, and he made some recommendations. And I'm not seeing that reflected in anything that's going on here. So I just wanted to bring that to your attention, so you remember that because it is, we have a safety concern in our neighborhood, and we have that incident, and I know it's just like, it's still concerning to people, so I just wanted to be sure that that was still in your mind. Thank you. Hey, anybody else in this area? Okay, Mark. Mark Redmond, 11 Marion Avenue. This is a report, speaking of Chief LaRose, this is a report he wrote two years ago, September 6th, 2016. Firearms Discharge Ordinance, I'll read a few sentences. The ordinance hasn't been revised in many years. In the time since the ordinance has less reviewed, much change has taken place. For example, the population has grown. There's been a significant buildout in permitting for future. There are several trail network throughout the town of proposals for more. Naturally, the probability of a fire projectile striking a person or property has increased significantly over time, particularly since the ordinance was last reviewed and revised. It is recommended that be modification to the current Firearms Discharge Ordinance. The safest approach would be to prohibit the discharge of firearms completely. He gives a second or third option, but says they're less safe. It is recommended that all firearm use be prohibited in the area containing Indian Brook and the adjacent Winooski Valley Park District. It is also recommended that all firearm use be prohibited in the Saxon Hill Forest area. I thought Brad LaRose was a good police chief. I believed in him, I trusted him. If this is what he's recommending, I think we should follow it. If you're gonna ignore your own police chief's recommendation, which I don't think you should do, but if you do, I would limit it to November 1st to December 15th and include the buffer. Thank you. Okay, did we get everybody? My name's Kaki McGeary. I live at 32 Baubalink Circle. I just want to echo what Mark said and support that 100%. I appreciated Evan's comment earlier that public safety is the number one priority. So I thank you as a select board for taking up this issue and considering these changes. If you're not going to take the police chief's recommendation, I appreciate the spirit of compromise and can do attitude, but I feel like it needs to be grounded in some public policy, public safety, facts, evidence, something, not just trying to make everybody happy. We do need to protect everyone who uses those parks and also the homeowners around them to hear that there was a bullet in somebody's house is terrifying. I just, I don't know if the buffer should also include distance from homes in addition to distance from a lake. So those are my thoughts. Okay, yes. My name is Ed Wilbur for 21 Browns River Road. I'm in the Northern Park. That's not going to be currently affected by this as of yet. The problem I have is small encroachments on my rights. I think as a landowner, I'm constantly feeling like my rights to do things on my own property are being limited by people that have a fear of the unknown. They are not educated about firearms issues. This is kind of a reactionary issue. We've heard concerns about people that don't like the sound of gunfire. Like I said, I'm almost in Westford. I can hear the gunfire at the range in Underhill. So I think if we're talking about noise suppression, we have a bigger issue at hand. This country since the National Firearms Act back in the 20s has limited suppressors. If we were talking OSHA violations in OSHA standards, the first thing that would happen is that every gun that's sold would have a suppression device on it so that we weren't deafening ourselves. We'll wish you practice. It comes into home defense as well. The silliest thing for a home defense weapon is you're going to have a loud flash and a loud bang. You're going to deafen yourself. You're going to blind yourself in a home defense situation without that. So those are some issues I think that we brought forward in the future. Certainly not part of this discussion. But it does come into play in terms of people hearing gunshots and being concerned about that. Again, that's not something that we can really do away with. We have other surrounding towns that do allow shooting. You can hear the shots from miles and miles away. If we're going to be limiting certain weapons in our shooting areas or our non-shooting areas, things like bird shot can safely be shot in a wooded area at much closer distances. There's not the danger of hitting somebody or hitting a house. I fully agree that I would be concerned if I did have a neighbor or I found a gun and shot lodged in my own home. That comes to the personal responsibility of the people shooting. If somebody is shooting in their backyard range and a stray bullet does hit someone or something, there should be serious consequences for that. And those need to be addressed. Thank you. Thank you. Sir, what was your name? Ed Wilburn. Ed Wilburn, thank you. Yes, this is the last one. I think I counted nine. My last one? Brad Kenison, 112 Bixby Hill Road. I have to agree with you. There's thousands of passes at Indian Brook Reservoir. Most of those people use the reservoir in the summer months, June, July and August. They don't man the booth. I believe it's by mid-September or mid-October because it's not economically feasible if there aren't many people that are using the park. Nearly the number they're using it is in the summertime. So I'm kind of appalled that you're eliminating small game hunting in the park in the fall and up and through the turkey season. And I think you should reconsider that issue. If you're concerned about the noise of bullets and shooting and discharging of firearms, you know, snowmobiles make a lot of noise too. And they bother residents. If you're gonna close off, you know, the parks with most of the time, maybe, private man owners should close off some of the trails. And so those aren't accessible because snowmobiles are noisy as well. Thank you. Thank you, Brad. Okay, we counted nine hens, nine people spoke, but you all came here. Is there some that didn't raise your hand before or wish they had? I don't wanna miss anybody. Okay, we have one. So if you can come up to the microphone. My name is John Diego. I live in the 141st studio. I've done a hundred of mine in my entire life. My family, come back, my father, great father. I'm pretty familiar with weapons. I went to a military school, but I am no means an expert. But any weapon you have can be dangerous if not a huge crop of it. And it's tough. When you focus out to try to be a bit of this sort of music task. And, you know, I've, you know, I just met Sean in Culein and talked about honey on his leg. You know, he knows where he is when he hunts, where he's shooting to. He has a large track of land. I get concerned as a hunter of hunters coming on to a track of land they're not familiar with. And that's when it can be much more dangerous. My nephew had a bullet into his house in Virginia even in a development. They found out who was shooting. It was three quarters of a mile away in his house. My house, I found two arrows in my riding wing for my horses during both seasons past. My brother, he was probably four years old, was shot in the neck down in the village by somebody who was really mad at him. What I'm trying to make is that accidents happen. Whether it's just a freak accident or it's an eclogym, these things happen. And everybody needs to consider that when looking at these potential changes in this witness. Because we don't want to make a change and then something else happen. Yeah, we could, but that's basically it. Thank you, Jeff. Okay, we're gonna bring it back to the board. And we've heard a lot of passionate comments here from 10 folks who decided to speak tonight. Is there any additional things you want to bring up that based on what you heard today? And now again, we're saying November 1st to the 15th, no buffer on this parcel as we talk about it. I just want to respond to something that was said about buffers around residences. Any resident can establish a no shooting zone around their own property. There are very specific rules about how you can do that. So anyone who wants to establish that kind of around their home. What I didn't say is I'm constantly impressed with our community. And I just wanted to say thank you to the speakers and to the audience during this time of how polite and respectful you are. Even though you're feeling this incredible passion inside you, you're very respectful to us and that's greatly appreciated. So thank you. Patty, we already brought it back to the board. What I wanted to just comment on something that John said at the end there too. If we decide to do a change, I don't want anybody to think that you're safe. There's still risk involved no matter what changes we do to try to get towards something that we consider safer. This is by no means guarantee of anyone's safety. You have to use common sense. I'm just saying that the comment was that if we make a change, we're gonna be preventing any accidents. And I'm saying that accidents happen. And even if we have a change of the ordinance, it's not gonna guarantee anything. Just wanted to make that clear. Okay, so back to the board. What about the deer crossing piece? Is there anything that we can address there? We don't really know where that bullet came from. That was unclear in the report. When you talk to the officers, I don't know what can be done there. Any comments about that? Harry? I believe we're aware that there's a shooting range in the Saxon Hill area. And so I think that's a topic that we will also be discussing next month. Should be raised to be on November 5th, okay? Mike? I have to agree with the gentleman that just left. I didn't mean to be inflammatory. I just wanted to make sure people don't think we can make people safe. I know you well enough that I'm really positive you didn't mean it to be, but it came out that way. I apologize for that. Thank you. Okay, there's no other changes from anybody. We will ask the language then in the ordinance to be changed to say November 1st through December 15th to allow discharge of firearms. Keep the 500 foot buffer around the high water mark of no discharge at any time. And no buffer on any of the parcels that we talked about. I understand that's not a unanimous decision, but this is a tough one. Again, we're trying to weigh all the things we've heard and come up with what we think as a board is the right direction. So clear? What, if I could get it back to you just to make sure I have it? Sure. November 1st to December 15th discharge would be allowed on the Indian Brook and Saxon Hill. 500 foot high water mark hunting safety zone remains in place and there is no 500 foot buffer or any buffer around the public parcels. Correct? And no shooting yet. At the tree farm at any time with no buffer. Mike, comment? I believe we had language in there from the earlier meeting about requesting of staff. For signage? Well, for signage is one of them. But number two, I think we had talked about monitoring development and we had talked about a three year time period. We had talked about a five year time period of putting a metric together to be able to track development and decide what that cut off was going to be so that we could revisit that again. Okay, I remember that differently. But is that what? Any? I remember it differently too. I remember that we said no metric but that we would review the ordinance again and I thought it was five to seven years. Okay, that's what I remember. My apologies. But the point is, it's gonna be, I wanna make sure it's in there. About the review every five to seven? Yes. To look at, yeah, just a review. Okay, then there's no other comments. I guess we'll move on. Thank you all again for being respectful. I'm sorry I didn't need to get so passionate about letting you know that we can't guarantee anyone's safety. We do our best but it's not guaranteed. What do we, Scott, we're gonna take three minutes. Okay, we're gonna go on to business item five E and that's discussion of budget goals and process for fiscal year ending 2020. Evan, do you wanna keep that one? The other night at the joint village board, select board meeting, we discussed priorities but prior to that, we had asked the, as part of my role as village manager, I asked the village board to go through this exercise and so it's just, if there was anything on your to-do list for the upcoming budget and give staff that opportunity to look into it, we thought we'd give you the opportunity to do that and I'll touch process second. So if there's any big 10,000-foot goal that you're thinking or goal for this year, I'll give you one that came up at our joint meeting is adding police officers for the community which we started last year but if that's a continued goal, please say so and other, obviously through the year, many things are said but if you put us on the right direction, that would be great. Okay, all right, let's open it up. Ideas, Irene, your hand came up first. I see a request here to add another senior bus. I would just request that we somehow increase pay or do something to make sure we have enough drivers to staff the two buses we have every day of the week before we look into getting a new bus. May I add to that? I agree we should explore the busing for seniors but we should also explore whether contracting out to a company to handle that duty for us would be more affordable. I don't know, I just wanna know that, I know that training the drivers and the insurance liabilities that go along with that are expensive, is there another alternative? The one comment I wanna make though about our hired staff to do it, they are, we call them bus drivers, but they're ambassadors. I've watched them at work, it's just amazing how helpful they are and good nature they seem to be. They'll go to pick somebody up at Hanford's and put the groceries in there and actually then bring them into their house. So they're more than bus drivers. They really are ambassadors. Question. I don't know but do the buses that ferry the people around it, does that require a CDL? Ours do not, ours do not. It does require a flexible schedule and very good nature and Max is correct, the customer service that our drivers exhibit on a day in and day out basis and the care that they give for their passengers. I'm sure there are some companies out there that will claim they can provide that. I'd put our drivers up against any company. But I understand the question. One of the things from staff perspective, in terms of seniors trips, we would like to look at some options for that so that our drivers are available for their routes. I have a few. When it comes to the additional police officers, we know that when we compare ourselves to other communities for how many officers per thousand, we're certainly below. That doesn't mean that the other towns are at the right level either. But my point is it's clear that we need additional officers. It'll be good to know if there's a way for us to determine how many we're short by, not by comparing to other towns per se, although that's a metric we can look at. But from our internal perspective, what number would be the optimum one to be able to do some proactive work that's not getting done and whatever else you think isn't happening? So we can see that and then maybe come up with a plan about how we could staff that over time because we probably can't do it in one year or two. But if we knew where we were going, we could figure out a way to get there. That's one for public works. If there's any additional costs, we think the school's gonna kind of drive us because public safety is key. And if there's an issue that we need to do a little bit more plowing or sidewalks or the road, it'd be good to know what that is. That's not, hopefully not a big amount. Any costs associated with co-locating the rec departments if that turns out that feasibility study looks good? Is there something in there that we wanna make sure we put in the budget? What about the 81 main sign? Is that an eyesore for long enough? Is that something we wanna look at? Do you wanna do that another time? It's ugly, but if we don't have the budget for it. It'd be nice to see about what that might cost though and might not be that ridiculous. Anyway, that's just a thought. Estimate isn't gonna cost you anything. At least an estimate. Okay, estimate the sign. I thought that was already done as part of the renovation. So you might just wanna check the records. Was it electronic? Was it proposed as electronic or static? Well, electronic would be awesome. Did you remember? I'm being told that Doug Fisher have looked into it so I'll have to do some research. Yeah, I think we said we didn't wanna include in there, but I could be wrong. It'd be best to be in research. Pain sandwich boards, electronic sign. Sandwich boards are in violation of village code. Message you wanna present. And I hate to make a bad joke, but if you're sitting in traffic, bumper to bumper, you might as well see three messages as you go by. I'm just. But if you're going 25 miles per hour, you're only gonna get one message anyway. I have a few more things to say. Right, Chief, if you're going 25. So we heard that to take care of each building, it's sort of up to whoever is working in that building to do. And that's probably not the most efficient or effective way to do it. So I think I recall talking about a superintendent for buildings, perhaps. It would be interesting to see if that's something that we wanna include in the budget that might help us spend the limited dollars we have and maintenance and so on more effectively and allow the people who are in the library say to do library services as opposed to roofing and septic or whatever they're doing. Any. And maybe let the police chief actually be the police chief instead of the building superintendent. He's here. That's why I'm using it. You want to? We just said let's put Dan Richardson on retainer so we need to make sure we have the funds there. I don't know what the number would be, but something like 12,000 I would think is probably in the ballpark. And then we have the opportunity now to do the budget a little bit differently than we have in the past. So we might wanna think about saying as far as an operational cost increase in percents. Now, we haven't done that in the past. We've always said, no Pat, we wanna maintain the same level of services, and then we'll cut if where we think it needs to be. But what about giving Evan more direction to say X% no more than we wanna see the budget come up and come in at a certain level. Now, you might have to go beyond that if our priorities are in conflict with that. And we have union contracts that kind of drive the majority of that. We say we want more police officers. We say we wanna, you know, so, but he may be able to balance it with other things if we give him that direction. Is that something you wanna try this year which we haven't in the past? Really? I would just note that in general, the trustees over time have done directed Pat to do 3% or cost of living. So, you know, we've been a little bit more specific in that respect, so it wouldn't be unusual. And that's operating budget to operating budget. That's not tax rate increase. No, no. That's always a little different. Budget. Okay, so by doing that, that would be consistent with what the village. I think so. Yeah, I would double check with George on that, but I think so. I sent a long list of items and the last one on the list was that for FY 2015 to 2017, our budgets were underspent by an average of 423,000. And if you look, that's the last six years. We're underspent by a little over 300,000. So there's, it's only, you know, it's on the order of three to three and a half percent that we're underspent. It's a small number, but it sounds like a big number. You know, the amount of money that we're collecting in taxes that we're not spending. I'd like to take that into, you know, have that taken into consideration on the overall budget. But I don't, you know, I don't have a specific place that it would come from, right? So. If you mind. Yeah. I took that to heart and I think that while we strive to get our budget closest to what we predict, I think the chief would have traded his surplus for the officers that he was vacant, that had vacant when they happened. But at, at even at 98% effective efficiency accuracy, we still would have ended up with 200, let's see, it's 140,000 every 1%. So you would have had a surplus of 280. If everything went right, everything went your way and we still had some things that were. So from a step perspective, we do try for that accuracy. The second thing is, as I understand it, and I've read the budget a little bit more recently, you don't actually fund a contingency. You use your 15% reserves that are undesignated. And so I would say that staff does a really nice job of making sure we don't go over budget. And you guys and the public get the benefit of having a very healthy reserve that can weather the times that you are really gonna need it. Like if you do get that storm, like Killington did a couple of years ago, where it washed out roads and you're talking hundreds of thousands, if not a million plus dollars to replace sections of road. Or like what happened to the village just this last winter where you had a major water main break that was hundreds of thousands of dollars and you gotta deal with it right then and then. That's when your reserves are really there for you. So there's a balance with that. I think we need to be kind of of it and try to strive for that 98, 98 and a half percent. Yeah, because we do have a fund balance policy and we're floating close to 20% when our policy is 15. And we struggle with giving that money back because we don't like to give money back. And one of the things that I would like to look at- We wanna build that up faster than we have to. I would like the Select Board to look at where some of those funds should be designated. We are doing some space needs studies. For sure it's gonna come something to the effect of not only in the fire department, but in the public works garage. I believe they're dealing with a 1940s era building. I don't know what it's lifespan is gonna be past this, but I wouldn't suggest it's another 60 years. So those are the types of monies you're gonna need to start allocating either to studies or ways to address how to keep those buildings as long as you can. On that note, Evan, in the past, the town has reserved, for many years, reserved money for the renovation of 81 Main. So I mean, is it time to formalize a similar program and set aside some carryover funds for the next wave of buildings that we're gonna need? I will also give you two other areas. We have several people getting close to retirement. We have, people have accrued vacation time and sick time that are in their contracts for that. We should make, that's a liability on the town that needs to be paid. Second, oh wow. We have buildings, we have that. We also have, wow. It'll come to me, I apologize. So the policy with the fund balance is it's anything over 15% that's not designated. It gets designated. That's not the money that gets put back to as a revenue. It's only the undesignated above the 15. Irene, did you? Yeah, I have two small things. One is certain committees would really like to have small budgets with which to do things. So if we could include some of our committees in budgeting, that would be great. Also, I believe channel 17 is gonna require considerable amount more of money from us this year. So just so that we're aware of that before they show up and ask for it. They'll need, they're going to ask for 12,000 a year as opposed to 6,000 a year. As well. I had mentioned that at the, excuse me, at the trustees meeting, I'm remiss in not bringing it here. So I can explain why that is now or are you? Well, we're talking about the budget, so this is. Okay, sure. So channel 17 is funded almost in its entirety by user fees that are generated by Comcast and Burlington Telecom cable users. The tendency of society now is to use, to do cord cutting. They're not subscribing to cable. They're going directly online to get their programming. And so they've seen a significant reduction in the amount of subscribers. And in this past fiscal year, it has resulted in a $50,000 decline in revenue. And another significant change, which is a one time change, was that general accounting practices have changed so that telecom companies have to report their bundled services differently. And so they removed about $25,000 from the column of funds that go to the public access stations into a different column. So we took a large hit, one time hit as well. So the resulting request is going to be that we increase our contribution to $12,000 and then going forward, hopefully we will do an annual increase of a predictable 3%. All right, I think we'll go. No, your head up. No, go for it. You're mentioning retirements triggered something that the discussion that I had with your predecessor at one point was the fact that we have in our contracts, the ability to accrue a large payment at the end, but we never budget for it. There's two things to consider there, right? As one is there a way to budget for it, and Pat Coy's claimed that there wasn't. And that was one of the advantages of having such a substantial fund balance was that we could make those payments out of that. I still, if you have a hurricane come through and you can't afford somebody's retirement, you're borrowing money to pay for something that I don't understand why we can't budget for. And so I know this is probably not a contract here, but I really think that next time we do these contracts we should consider some way to turn that large lump sum payment into potentially an annuity rather than a one-time payment or an installment payment or some way to make it more budgetable so that we don't have this three people retired that you don't expect, and suddenly you've got this huge payout that you've got to deal with with no budget behind it. Thanks, Eddie. Mike? I was gonna just do a variation of that same thing. I really don't want us to put ourselves in the position where we have a deficit balance going. I mean, we do that at the state level. It fries my cookies every single year. And I just, we have always been very, at least in my six years here, we have always been very responsible with our money. And I just think whether it's Andy's suggestion that maybe it becomes a negotiating tool when the contracts come up or whether we just plain set aside money for it and Elaine's idea was a great one to start accumulating money for some of the buildings that we know are gonna go down sooner rather than later. I just, I guess those would be my suggestions. I hate deficit funding. And come within two or 3% of the budget is pretty impressive on a $14 million budget. I did remember the last item. You may want to consider using your surplus as some, if you go forward with the village and consolidate, you may wanna keep some of that money to feather in how the tax rate will affect the residents. It will, it can be used in that way. I believe we already use a little bit of our budget to do that. So that was the one I forgot. So just a question, when will we have the audited amount for the FYE 18? The auditors are in our office right now, but I could tell you that we will have a surplus. It will be six figures, a strong six figures. And the auditors aren't the actual ones who tell us what it is. We actually know what the number is. They just verify it. So I don't wanna put any number out there, but I have a good idea. And when we talk about our next topic, I'll give you a better idea. So what about the idea of a percentage? Maximum increase, or targeted maximum increase. Is that something you're comfortable with or you wanna do what we've done in the past to say, you know, same level of service except for these areas that we just increased and then come up with that hit list of items that staff decides that these are important, but if you're gonna sacrifice something, sacrifice these first. And that's what we've done in the past. But it might be an opportunity to do something a little bit different to make it more targeted for staff to come up with a budget that would be more in line with where we know we wanna be anyway. Where'd you know? But I don't wanna see an 8% budget or even a 6% budget. I'd be happier with, you know, I get nervous when it gets near four. I think our voters would be appreciative of knowing that we're working within a certain increase amount. And even though the board, when an unexpected increase occurs, the board works very hard to walk it back to a reasonable amount, it's still a shock for residents when they find out about the initial price tag. So working within those confines, I feel is responsible and it's what, 3%. I would go closer to four. I believe the town is taking on some of the village expenses with all this consolidation. So I don't think it's realistic to match the village's goal. Not saying we need to match it, but having a cap or a target is good. So three, we're here at four. So we're not that far. We're having a targeted amount again. Given that usually the biggest piece of our increase is salaries and benefits, I'm struggling with 3%. I don't think you can't get there because you're contractually obligated to give people raises. You can't get services. Probably bigger than that. You'd have to cut something else, right? Or not add the stuff that we've just asked you to add. So I think we got to see the number and work back from it. Even saying 4% is tight if you're trying to add a person. That's true. I don't know how to do it. But I think if we can say four, and we already talked about these other things we'd like to see in there, then they at least know kind of where our heads are and then they can come up with some kind of proposal that tries to honor both in some kind of compromise way and then we can just maybe hopefully just tweak it a little bit from there, as opposed to the way we've always done it. I think this is an opportunity to do something. I think, Evan, that's how you've done it in the past, right? Usually the board gives me direction of where they think and we talk about the same things you've talked about. Hey, here's what you said your goals are. Contractually obligation, blah, blah, blah. We get through all that. Say now here's your goals. Here's what you said you wanted to achieve. Here's where it is at 3% and here's where it is at 4%. And here's where you start reaching your goals. At the Village Board meeting the other night we talked about the capital plan. And this is what you're doing. It's 7.5% increase, which is where you said you were comfortable with. But you go negative in three years. Here's where you are at 10% and we show you what your options are. In a total budget that's a little bit harder, but we can give you some ideas of where we land at a base budget where we add which are priorities and where we get everything. And you'll probably at the end of everything you go. All right, let's bring it down to we don't get everything, but we get enough for this year and keep that ball rolling. We do have our priorities. And so as long as you stick to some of those, we'll get you a good balanced budget that shows that we're meeting your goal as many of your goals as we can. Say four, is that a number? Four, I see four. You said four. At least two. Elaine, you said three. You okay with four? I'm happy with four. Our target is five. All right. We've given quite a Christmas list. All right, so we talked about these other goals and then we said if we can target four, can you do some kind of magic to make that work? Exactly. That'd be amazing. It's the team. Okay. All right. Any other things for the budget? What about the way we do the review? I mean, our book is big. Our budget is not big. It's a lot to look at. I mean, we really don't want to go into the weeds so we do want to stay sort of at a policy level. But we ought to talk about how we want to do the review, whether it's a regular, you know, multi-day time and we've done Mondays and Wednesdays for the first couple of weeks and so on. But I'd like to hear your ideas. I mean, first, so her hand and later mine. Oh, I didn't. Are you going to have one? Nope. So I think we've been quite efficient about going through the budget in recent years and I was a little surprised to read what I saw was some implied inefficiency or maybe I read this wrong. But I think that spending nights with three or four department heads each, given the size of the town budget, given the responsibilities the town has and continues to take on more and more each year, I think that gives us a chance to be really focused and prepare for and talk about certain things without trying to swallow the whole elephant as a former select board member used to say all in one day. It's a huge budget and I like dividing it up into bite-sized chunks. I actually agree with that. We used to do Monday, Tuesdays and I didn't like that. So we had Monday, Wednesdays so that you can have a Tuesday to get ready for the Wednesday and break it up because it is pretty big. At least for me, I consider it big. But, Mike? I wanted to try doing it in a day just to try it. Because I'll tell you, all the evening meetings. It's stuff on staff. It is, yeah. But I think I'd like to try and do it all in one day like the village does. I think with enough advance warning, people can plan for it. Yeah, so let's try something new. One man's opinion. I read. So it occurred to me that as I was reading this, functioning less on small expenses that when we get to town meeting, people go line by line and ask for stuff. And I just personally wouldn't feel prepared if we didn't have the chance to ask specific questions of specific department heads as we have in the past. But then again, that's my comfort level. Elaine? Just to share my experiences in doing it one day, I realized that the village's budget is smaller than the town's budget. But we managed to squeeze in all of the departments. And what I find valuable is that what I learned in the morning from whichever department heads come first, I still have in my head in the afternoon when the other department heads are there. And it's a holistic view of the entire budget, which is very helpful. And I'm not saying that it's not possible to remember these things from meeting to meeting, but it's helpful to have it encompassed in one day. That said, I certainly understand that the town budget is quite thick. We do take the time to talk with every department head in great detail. And some department heads bring staff. And we have really good conversations about what the departments need. They're very honest with what they need, with what they can give up if we tell them to. They are used to working within an X percentage increase window. And so when they come to us, that's already there. And so we don't have the necessity of parsing through every single line item to find, we entrust the staff to do that. And they do it to the letter. And we have good conversations about goals at the same time and about challenges and hopes for the future. So we do, it's a long day, but it's important. And I find it valuable to do it one day. But of course, what the board's preference is, is what's best. Eddie? Given the length of the book that we need to look at, generally I don't, I only read the sections that I need to read before the meeting where it occurs. I don't, you know, if the intent is that I have to go through the entire book before we have the first meeting, you know, that's a, swallowing the elephant. Yeah, absolutely. So I wouldn't mind doing more content at each meeting, having fewer, but again, that adds stress to the staff, that adds stress to us. We do also have this 11 o'clock rule that you can't go past 11 o'clock without unanimous consent. And I guess I would be born favor of continuing in the fashion that we have before, because it's easier for me to be familiar with the content because I don't have to read it all at once. I think I would shortcut, if I had to read, I would skip a lot of it, if I had to do it all in one shot. Evan? One, thank you for your comments, I understand. One question, we kicked around this in other places we've done this, where we've only done an electronic version of the budget. We, I've talked to staff, they spend a lot of time putting those books together. And all of it is electronic. Is there a possibility that we could provide you just the electronic version? Yeah, I thought that's what we decided, we were gonna do this year, last year was the transition with the tablets and we said the book and I thought this year we were gonna say just the electronic one. Research has shown that reading comprehension is much higher with a piece of paper than a screen. So my preference, if I, as a select board member, I'm supposed to be looking at a budget on behalf of my constituents, I wanna look at it in the best possible way for me to unearth anything in advance of town meeting that might be questionable or need to be pulled out in more detail so I would request paper. In all my years of doing this work I've never had a paper budget. It's always been electronic and anything I needed I printed myself. So. But I think we've made it a policy that say for the meeting notes you can have it electronic or you can ask staff to hit the print button. That's your call. Four of us wanna do electronic and Irene needs the paper then. We'll make it. We'll do that. I don't mean to add tons of clerical work. I have old budget binders. I can sift things into the proper places. Feel free to give me a stack of paper and I'll sort through it in staple and whatever I have to do because I don't wanna cause extra work. That alone is a huge time saver is not. Oh yeah. They'd be from line one to line a million or whatever it is. That's great. We will give you a try. Okay. So we good? It sounds like at least three of us wanna keep doing the multi-day one. I can't even know. But maybe someday we can figure out a way to do that. And it's a transition year, right? This time it'll be all electronic so that's the way. So maybe we should ask everybody to pay attention this year and take notes and think of ways to improve the process for next year. I like it. Sure. Okay, anything else we need to do on that one? You good? All right. So we wanna just intro F for us, the discussion of employment of public officers and that's in the executive session. That is the topic of executive session. Okay. Point of order. May I just ask, should we move the executive session after the minutes and the consent agenda? Our practice is we'll just talk about it here just to a high level and yes, we will do it at the end. Absolutely. Okay, then we're gonna move on to 5G and that's the minutes of October 1st, 2018. I would move approval of the October 1st, 2018 minutes with select board member comments and questions. All right. All right, we'll start with page one. Oh, sorry, thank you. Thank you, Irene and Andy. Okay, page one, page two. Sam, on line 63, we can just say the usual admonition was provided. Yeah. Yeah, the chair gave the usual admonition. In the past we usually write it out but if you could just reference it, it's usual now. Anything else on two? I just have a question. Do we have a policy with regard to how we name select board members? I just noticed that it's not a problem for me that it sometimes says Andy, sometimes says Andrew. I don't know, do we have a, do we... I bet if you said what your preference is, we could let the... I don't have a preference. I was just asking if there was a... Anybody anywhere? In the past, I just followed what... I'm trying to remember what her name was. I did them for so, so long. But the former select board, I just followed what she did. So it's been a certain way, Mr. Watts, Ms. Runner for many, many years. So this was a different note taker, right? And so I just noticed that sometimes it says Andrew, sometimes it says Andy, and I don't know if we... I don't care, but it's... We could make a policy to say Mr. or Ms. if that's what we want to do. And that's kind of how it's been. I don't care. Want me to pass it along? Yes, please. So that we're consistent, I guess, yes. Yes. Does the select board have a preference of Mr. and Mrs. Would you prefer first name, last name? And I'd recommend it's just to practice rather than a policy. But certainly I can, if there is a preference, I will pass it on to the new recording secretary and we can start doing it. Firstly, I've been fine when it says, Mr. Watts or Mr. Levy and Ms. Runner or Ms. Sopjack. It's just inconsistent here. 81, he's Andy Watts. And 76, he's Michael Plagueman, but in other places, I think Mr. is used. So if Kathy's just made aware of that, I think it'll be fine. So is that the select board preference then to use the Mr. and Ms. titles? Okay, how about that? With the exception of when we do motions that we've always, I think, put the full names in. Yeah, that's right. That's true. So you would specify. We can say that except for motions, put the full name. Right. Sorry. No, that's good. That's good. All right, page three, page four, page five, moving on to six, page seven. Okay. Awesome. All those in favor of the select board minutes of October 1st, 2018 with select board corrections, signify me saying aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed? All right, passes unanimously. Five, oh, thank you. I have a motion to approve consent agenda. We approve all the consent agenda. Let's, that we approve the consent agenda with select board member comments. All right, do I have a second? Second. Okay, any comments on the check warrants of October 5th or October 12th? You're in none. All those in favor of the consent agenda, signify me saying aye. Aye. Aye. All right, passes five, oh, unanimously. Any comments on the reading file? So I included and asked staff to put an email in here that I sent to Evan and Greg copied Max after the meeting, the joint meeting last week. The one of the concerns I wanted to bring up in that meeting was that the so-called subcommittee has asked for a long list of financial information. And I failed to understand how that financial information is relevant to the subcommittee, so-called subcommittee when the mission of the so-called subcommittee is to determine the legality of different options of governance. I understand that there are certainly legal implications to finances, but I don't think the exact dollar amounts are necessary, especially from a historical standpoint. Seems like a lot of information was asked for. Evan even agreed to pay overtime to collect that data. And it looks to me like justification for one choice of governance over another and it's not related, I don't believe it's related to determining which of the scenarios are legal or are possible. I don't believe that the mission of the so-called subcommittee is to come back with a recommendation, it's to come back with information and facts about the different governance options. So I was, and beyond that, I was dismayed that we didn't have any conversation about governance in that meeting and that I was told that my only way to put to the so-called subcommittee is in writing. I'm concerned that we've sacrificed transparency for the sake of meeting expediency by not allowing conversation. If the intent of the agenda item was to only provide a report from George, it should have been in the reading file for comment only rather than being listed in the agenda with the phrase in parentheses, no action. I think that's an inappropriate use of the agenda. Before I go to Elaine, I just wanna say that the subcommittee was appointed by vote, by the select board. It was, I think Irene moved and Andy, you seconded the creation of this subcommittee. I'm a member of that subcommittee. I am offended every time I hear you call it a so-called subcommittee. You may not agree with it, but the board decided and you seconded the creation of it. So if you could please refrain from calling it a so-called subcommittee, it's a legitimate one. We created it. I would appreciate it. I find that you're belittling the work that we're doing and I don't think you mean to do that, but that's how it comes across. So Elaine. Max, thank you for saying that. I agree 100%. Regarding the fact that we didn't get to discuss the subcommittee's activities at the joint meeting, I understand your frustration with that, Andy, and I would not, I don't think that our purpose is to restrict board members' questions or comments to print only. I recall asking at the meeting that one of our upcoming joint meetings have just the governance conversation on the agenda so that we would have enough time to talk about it at length, and I think that will happen, and I think there'll be multiple subsequent opportunities for both boards to discuss it at length. Regarding the objection to the subcommittee's requests for information regarding finances, I think our subcommittee would be extremely remiss if we did not investigate the costs associated with various potential governing scenarios. I think the public requires us to do that kind of information gathering, and it may be that, for example, I know there's concerns that if both communities were to become one community, would we only have one vote on, say, CWSD or CSWD or CCRPC, and in the case of CCRPC, would that imply that we would be forfitting millions of dollars in construction grant money? I would wanna know that before approving any particular scenario, and the subcommittee is not going to say, we're not gonna do this one because of this financial impact. We're doing the due diligence that's necessary for both boards to find out the financial impacts of these scenarios and bring them to the boards for further discussion. I think it's absolutely essential that we gather this information. Other comments? Irene? I appreciate your comments, Andy, about the data. The trustees at their last meeting spoke in person with Charlie Baker, and he insisted that there would be no difference in any way that he could foresee. So I really would like to not keep hearing about that particular issue because I believe it has been put to bed. Any other comments on the reading file? I have one on page 258, just a reminder that November. Excuse me, page 258? I'm sorry, the last, sorry. It's on my thing, 258. It's the last page of our reading file. It's just the, it's a memorandum from Travis about meeting schedule and events. It's November 5th. It's a regular meeting, but it's gonna be a little bit irregular. We're gonna have it in a different venue. Probably hearing in. Correct, attorney. I just wanted to make you aware. Go back in here. If I could chime in on that same item. I believe the, I didn't pass on the notes to Travis quickly enough that the April joint meeting is gonna be in the 10th, not the third. So if you notice that typo, that is a typo. I'm sorry. Andy. The 10th? The 10th. April 10th is not gonna happen. The joint meeting will be April 10th, not April 3rd. April 10th, not the third. Right, got it. Turns out that's town. Village meeting. Sorry, the other comment I intended to make about the back on the topic I referenced before is I'm worried that we are traveling down a similar path that we did with rec governance and that we have a committee with potentially questionable standing doing work that's trying to go into a predetermined solution. And I'm, again, very concerned that I can only submit my comments in writing. What do you mean question to stand yet? Well, there's, I'll say it again. There's a quorum of the select board appointed to that committee, which makes it a select board meeting. I've always been told by Vermont League of Cities and Towns that it's your presence in the room that constitutes quorum, not your participation and so although I understand that our town attorney has said it's legal, it certainly is legal until someone challenges it and maybe gets a ruling in the other direction if that's where it goes, but it's your presence in the room that causes quorum, not your participation. And so I still stand that this subcommittee is so-called subcommittee. I'm gonna use that term. It's the subcommittee that was voted on- Sorry, I'm being interrupted. And okay, so the next thing I'm gonna say is earlier this year when we talked about conflict of interest and our orderly conduct of business, we talked about the possibility of having the select board chair relinquish the gavel when discussions are about a committee that that individual is a member of. And so the next time this board talks about the governance, so-called subcommittee, I'm gonna ask that we consider removing the gavel from the chair and turning it to this vice chair because of very evident bias that's been shown in this meeting and others. Any other comments or the review by Elaine? I just wanna address the concern that the subcommittee is heading towards a predetermined conclusion. As frustrating to hear from a fellow board member, we do not have the authority or the permission to make any conclusions about anything. Our goal is to bring to the boards a list of potential scenarios with the least amount of harm to either entity, either the village or the town. So how a predetermined conclusion can be determined from that where we're bringing a menu of choices after doing due diligence. I don't understand, but I want to assure members of the board and the public that this subcommittee is being conducted with the utmost care. And we've hired an attorney who is widely considered to be one of the experts in all of Vermont on municipal law who will guide us and to ensure that we are doing the right thing. Anything else besides governance in the reading file? Okay, very none. Then we need to move on to executive session. So I would propose we go to some other tables to allow Scott to break down. Did the move to enter into executive session? Yep, yep, yep, yep, thank you. Yep, we need to, yep, a motion to enter in. Do you have it? I'll move it to select board, enter an executive session to discuss the employment of public officers to pursuant to one BSA sections 313A3 to include the unified manager and the deputy town manager. And the police chief. What about the police chief? Okay, and the police chief. It's not on the motion. Second. Thank you Irene and Elaine. Any further discussion about going into executive session? Or that's motion one. Are there two motions that we have to do? Just one. Just one, okay. All right, any further discussion about going into executive session? If you're none, all those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Okay, motion passes unanimously.