 I was elected earlier this month, the town meeting, Lauren St. Hilaire, who was served for two years and was reelected to a three-year term, and Terry McKay, who's beginning his 19th year on the select board, was reelected to a two-year term. Congratulations to both of you on your reelection. Thank you. And I was looking for some fun information to share before we get started, and Wilson's gonna celebrate its 258th year as a municipality in June. I've always been interested in history, and I thought it'd be interesting to take a brief look back at what was discussed at town meeting day 60 years ago on March 7th, 1961. So I did a little digging in the vault this afternoon to look at the 1961 annual report. And one thing I caught my eye was Article 7, approved from the floor to extend the construction of sidewalk from the corner of Maple Drive and Route 2 through Wilson Village to the Catholic Monastery parking area, and this came in with a price tag of $600 to $700. Yeah. That's a lot. The town also approved raising $155,000 of taxes to support the General Fund, Highway Fund, Library, Fire Department, among other services and organizations. The grand list was $1.89 million, and the town greater earned $409 through outside earnings as the revenue was booked in the report that year. Wow. Couple facts of the business that was conducted about 60 years ago by town. So what was the town budget again? Well, I can see the town raised about $155,000 in taxes. Oh, in taxes, okay. And it looked like it was done a little bit differently then to approve an operating budget. There are different tax levies for different areas of town, so. Okay. But I won't hold the virtual gavel any longer this evening, and I'll get to the business here. I'll call for nominations for chair of the select board. Nominate Terry McKay. All second. Are there any other nominations? If not, I'll declare the nomination process closed. Hearing none, it looks like we're ready for a vote. So all those in favor of electing Terry McKay as chair of the select board, indicate by raising your hand. I see four hands raised, so no opposed. So congratulations, Chairman McKay. I will hand the virtual gavel back over to you. Thank you, Eric. I appreciate that. And thank you, members of the board. So the next item of business, of course, is to elect a vice chair. So I'll open the floor to nominations for vice chair. Are there nominations? Yes, I'd like to nominate Ted Kenney for vice chair of the select board. Thank you, Gordon. Sir, second. I'll second that. Seconded by Jeff. Is there any discussion on that motion? Seeing none, all those in favor then of electing Ted Kenney as vice chair, raise your hand. One, two, three, four. So we have done, we have done it. So thank you. And we'll have a lot of other stuff to take care of later on in the meeting. But we'll do, as usual, the minutes of the last meeting which are the minutes of February 16th, 2021. Is there a motion? Movely accept the minutes subject to modification. Is there a second? I'll second. We're on page one then. And I have under number two of the minutes, we have to correct the corrections. The next to last bullet point talks about other business, changing the house government operations committee to the house government committee. It's just the other way around. It was changing the house government committee to the house government operations committee. And the next one was under executive session, change Terry McKagney to Ted Kenney. It's just the opposite. So Ted raised the thought that the language said, McKag closed the session, but then we can change that to chair McKag instead. So those are just the opposite of what they're in the minutes. Page two. On page two, I had a thought on number eight that the comment was made by the select board on not supporting a group with a political radical agenda by flying the flag. Wondering if that would be more accurate of supporting a group with an alleged political radical agenda. I believe that would be good. I'm okay with that. Also, page two, page three. Here are no other corrections then. All those in favor of approving the minutes of February 16th, 2021. Raise your hand. One, two, three, four. So we have taken care of that. It's now time for public comment. If there's anyone in the listening audience who wishes to make the public comment, this is the time to do so. Eric, anybody out there that indicates they want to make public comment? Yep, I see Nathan has his hand raised. I'm going to connect you in just a moment here, Nathan. One, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Oh, great. I just had a question about how the new vacant position will be filled and if you will be seeking any public input for that or if you do you need anything from the community that we can help with in that regard? We'll be talking about that later on in the agenda, but yes, we're going to be advertising it certainly. And we will be looking for other suggestions from the board as to how we should be doing this. Certainly input from the community would be welcome as far as how we go about doing this. And my hope is that we will have interviews sometime early April and make a decision at the second meeting, no later than the second meeting in April if all things work out well. Great, thank you. That answers my question. Good, thank you, Nathan. Anyone else? Nathan, could you share your last name for the minutes? Yes, it's Nathan Andrews. I'll set, thank you. Thank you. Any other public comments tonight? I don't see any at this time, Terry. Okay, then we'll move on to item number five, which is the outdoor consumption permit. And I reckon you're going to lead this off but we're also waiting to have a representative from the Burlington Beer Corporation. Yep, and I see Joe is logged in. I can just give a brief introduction for the board. Burlington Beer Company is applied for an outdoor consumption permit using its patio space. Now this is for the current license year, which is set to expire April 30th. So if this permit is approved tonight, I've included it on the outdoor, this outdoor permit on your next agenda item acting as a legal control board for the license renewals that would be effective on May 1st. Breweries obtained all necessary permitting required for this outdoor space and staff has no objections. And I'll connect Joe from Burlington Beer Company, just a moment here. Joe, I'm going to connect you and you can share your camera if you choose. I'm going to promote you to a panelist. Joe, you're muted. There we go. There we go. So if you could identify yourself in the company's name and then give us a presentation. Yep, Joe Lemna from Burlington Beer Company just here on behalf of the Provisional Outdoor Consumption Permit. As Eric said, all the paperwork has been put in order. The outdoor patio was approved by the Select Board back in 2019. Bruce Hoare has also done the Williston SOAR allocation ordinance and that is dated October 15th, 2019. So this is going to be the first summer that we get to finally use the deck. Any questions for Joe? Joe, hi. Jeff Harris here. Usually our questions are along the lines of ensuring whatever the rules are followed in terms of consumption of beer, underage drinking, that type of thing. So my question is along the lines of given this is going to be an outdoor patio, how will you ensure that beer is only consumed on the patio and that there isn't going to be the ability for underaged or I guess the other one would be inebriated people to be served a beer out there or whether it's served by you folks or whether it ends up being somebody buys a beer and then serves it the beer they bought to somebody else. Yep, so the patio, the only entrance to the patio is from the taproom space through a double door. There's a eight foot tall wall on one side. The two other walls are 42 inches high. So somebody would have to literally jump over a wall to get out and in. So the only way is coming back in through the taproom and so you can only get to the deck via the taproom. We do have a surveillance camera out there and as well as it's a huge glass window with the double door there. So the taproom members that are busing tables, cleaning things will have constant eye on what's going on on that premises. Okay. Any other questions for Joe? And all our staff is first class certified trained so they're aware of all the rules pertaining to Vermont, alcohol serving rules, carding and the seriousness of their responsibility behind the bar. Okay, good, thank you. In order to get that, they've already been trained as well, I'm sure. Yep. Any further questions? I'd be ready for a motion if you are prepared to do that. I'd move to approve an outdoor consumption permit for Burlington beer through April 30, 2021. Is there a second? I hear a second. I'll second. Sorry, just discussion on the motion. Very none. Well, those in favor of the motion raise your hand. One, two, three, four. Good, thank you. Thank you, Joe. We appreciate it being here tonight. Thank you. Do we see, Eric, is there a possibility for a lap since it does renew on May 1st based off the Vermont DLC calendar? But it did sound like it was on the schedule for the meeting in April. So that basically will renew it for May 21. Actually, the board's gonna take it up right now. So I doubted it to this next package to be renewed. So it should be seamless for you, Joe. Perfect, thank you so much, Eric. Good evening. Thanks, and we will move on to the next item, which is the liquor license application renewals. And Eric, do you wanna just briefly go over those? Yep. So you have included in your packet as we've done in the past year at the town a summary of renewal applications. There's been no violations in the last year. I checked with the chief of police on that. Shouldn't, oh, here we go. My notes here. I left the applications out over the weekend in the town hall if any board members wanted to take a look at them when they stopped by. There's only one change in ownership in the last year. It was the quarter by Merritt Hotel Restaurant, now owned by WLBT associates instead of L&C Wilson beverage holdings. In addition, it's been the past practice to authorize the town clerk to approve license applications on behalf of the board. So you have 42 motions to consider this evening for those two orders of business. You sent out an email today adding one more to the list that we had in our packet. Oh, yes. Sure. Thanks, Sarah. Yeah, that came in and the town clerk shared that with me today. So I've updated that list to include the Fairfield and their application. So any questions for Eric on the renewal applications? Just one quick question. I hope Eric, you mentioned that there are no violations you checked with the police chief. I would have thought you would have checked it with the, I don't know what it's exactly called, but the liquor control board. Yeah, I know that they would reach out to us directly on that usually. And I checked with the chief to make sure there was nothing that hadn't made it to my office. I got it. Thank you. Any further questions for Eric? There are two recommendations for motions. So we don't have to go through the process of signing all of the applications like we used to do years ago. And so if anyone would like to make a one or both of those motions, it would be helpful. Move to approve the liquor license applications for the year beginning May 1, 2021 and ending April 30, 2022 as listed on the applications list dated March 16, 2021. And further, I would move to authorize town clerk, Sarah Mason, to sign approved liquor license applications on behalf of the select board. Is there a second? I'll second. So any discussion on the two motions? Hearing none, all those in favor of the motions, raise your hand in two, three, four. Thank you very much. We've taken care of that and we can move on to the audit report if Shirley and the representatives from Sullivan Powers are ready. Yep, they're both logged in, Terry. I'll connect Shirley and Fred from Sullivan and Powers right now. Hi, Fred. Good evening. So I see Shirley here as well. We're gonna leave this off with just a few comments and we'll turn it over to Shirley. Sure. So we have Fred Diplesis with us this evening. He's a partner at Sullivan Powers, the town's new auditing firm. Worked with us for the FY20 audit. The boards received a copy of the audit and management letter for review. That's Fred to go through a number of topics with the board this evening. I know, to my knowledge, the board hasn't had the auditors present a lot over the years. So I do it as an opportunity for the board to ask questions of the auditing firm and for Fred to go into some of the details here as they perform the audit. And we have Shirley here as well, who's our lead staff member in the audit each year and Shirley will share some information as we go here. And I know Fred intends for this to be interactive. So if there's any questions for the board to feel free to ask as we go here. So I'll turn it over to you, Fred and Shirley. Fred, well, I first, I'd like the select board to have as much opportunity to ask Fred questions as possible since this time is limited. But I would just like to say, and the select board has heard me say it before, I was just extremely happy with the staff. I learned a lot through this process and they certainly brought up a lot of accounting issues for us during the process of the audit. So overall, a win-win for, I think, for the town especially. But Fred, if you'd like to go ahead and start and present. I will, thank you, Shirley. I know it was a good process for us as well. So as Eric and Shirley said, if there's any questions, you know, stop anytime and I can go through those with you. But what I'll do is just give you an overview of kind of the audit process, what the deliverables are and then just do a quick walkthrough of the audit report and then see where we are at that point in time. So these are your financial statements. They're prepared by your staff. We work with Shirley to, you know, add some footnotes, revise some things, but they're basically your numbers. These are not our financial statements. What our responsibility is, is to provide an opinion on those financial statements. And that's done in accordance with generally accepted auditing standards, which is based on our license with the state of Vermont and its national standards. And secondly, in Vermont, it's also done in accordance with what are called government auditing standards. And that's through statute. So any audit that's done on a Vermont municipality, those that do them, and every school district has to be done under government auditing standards. And that's actually a higher level of standards than a regular audit of any for-profit business because it also includes a report on compliance with laws and regulations and internal control at the financial statement level. So what comes out of the audit is the traditional financial statements. And that's, you know, a lot of material, about 80 pages, a letter of recommendations and then a report to the board that basically tells you how the audit went. So those are the basic three deliverables. On page two of the audit report is the key paragraph, and that's our opinion on the financial statements. And what it is, it's a clean, unmodified opinion. And what it tells you is that you prepare and present these statements in full conformance with generally accepted accounting principles for governments. So you're following all the basic rules and regulations for governments, and they're quite unique. They're a bit different than what you would see in any for-profit or nonprofit financial statement. You will note that there were some correction of errors. So in doing this audit, we found some things from the prior year that needed to be corrected and there's a footnote explaining what those corrections are in the notes. As we get in there, you'll see that footnote. And what that indicates is that we really went back to that opening equity and there was some adjustments that we felt needed to be made and they were agreed to by your staff. And so this audit reflects those. And with that in place, it doesn't affect our opinion. So our opinion is not modified. This is still a clean unmodified audit, but we need to point that out to you. When I first go into a town or an SEC-issued financial statement, what I typically read starts on page four and that's called management's discussion and analysis. And as it's titled, it's written by management and it is discussion and analysis. It's required supplementary information. What our responsibility is to make sure that it includes everything it's supposed to include and that the information in there is consistent with what we have in the audited numbers that follow. So in seven or eight pages, you get a real good sense of what happened in the town during the fiscal year. It's mostly a narrative format. There are some summary financial information. You can add charts and graphs if you want. And so it's very readable and you can get a really good sense of what happened during that year in a kind of a quick synopsis that precedes the audit report. Following that, starting on page 12 are the financial statements. Page 12 is a really combined condensed statement in that position or balance sheet. It includes all of your governmental activities, your general fund, your special revenue funds, all your capital projects, and then all of your business type activities, your water and your sewer and your storm water. So I don't spend a lot of time on this statement. This statement will look more like what you would see in a for-profit audit. It includes all of your capital assets, your infrastructure, your roads, your bridges, your buildings, your equipment. It has all your debt. It includes your share of the unfunded Vermont Municipal and Royal Employee Retirement System debt. But it's not a lot of use, frankly, because you tip most towns and schools really operate on a fund level. And that's what I'll try to focus on. And that's really starting on page 14. So in a government financial, you're focusing on the major funds, but every fund is included. So you'll see that your general fund is the major governmental fund of the town. And when we get to the enterprise funds, the water sewer and storm water fund, other major enterprise funds, all the other funds are listed. So every single fund is looked at. And you'll see schedules in the back, schedules four through nine that spells out each of the individual funds, but they're consolidated to here. The general fund is the one that is kind of the focus that everybody looks at in terms of how do we do for the year, because that's where your budget really falls and where you end up. And you're gonna see at the end of the year, your overall fund balance is a little over four million. Some of that is restricted, some of that's committed, and some of that's assigned. For instance, 780,000 of that is money that you basically gave back to the taxpayers in the budget that you're living in right now. So when you set that tax rate, you said, we've got a surplus, we've got more than we need, we're gonna give back some. And I think in your 21-2 surely, there's probably another large lump of money that's going back. I don't, I forget that number, but I think it's closer to a million even. Yeah. So, but what that leaves you is the other side unbalance of a little over $2.8 million. And that's about 25% of your 21 budget that you're in now. I always look at two things. The GFOA, the government finance officers typically recommends kind of a starting point of 20% of annual expenditures. So you're right in that range. The other thing I always look at is to make sure that you've got enough money to get through until your first tax money comes in, your tax calendar, your first collection is around August 15th. So that means you're operating for about 12.5% of the year, 45 days or so, until you start getting new money. And so that's about 12.5% of the operating budget. So you've got an adequate fund balance to get you through your tax cycle and to be there to manage the tax rate. I mean, that's really what's important is to have the cash flow ability and to be able to use it to keep any rate increases to a smoother level. I mean, the worst thing that I've seen in towns that don't have a reasonable fund balance is that they have to have spikes in the rate. And so the rate increases are inevitable, but if you can keep them smooth and steady, it's much better. And having this kind of a fund balance lets you as a board, and then as a community to be able to do that. Moving on, the enterprise funds are all on page 17, your water, your sewer, your storm water. They all have very healthy unrestricted net positions. Some of that money is committed for future capital projects, but they're all in good shape. After that, on page 21, there's a lot of footnotes. So there's almost 30 pages of footnotes that describes who you are, what your accounting policies are, gives a lot more information in terms of your cash, your investments, how you protect that money, what your receivables, what your debt is, what pensions you participate in, just a lot of information in there that's designed to help the readers and users of the financial statements understand more about the town. Going back into the audit, there are very detailed schedules of your budget actual. Starting on page 51, this is the budget that was approved by the voters, then amended by the board under their powers. And the original budget shown, the amendments are shown, and then compared to the actual results. So this is the reflection of the budget as was passed and then what happened. It was an interesting year, that's an understatement. But in spite of that, if we look at the revenues, you budgeted to take in about $10.5 million, you took in almost 11. So I'm on about halfway down on page 52. So you did about 393,000 better on the revenue side. And this variance is here and there throughout, but in total you did better than expected. And then on the expense side, you budgeted to spend 11,494, using up 900,000 approximately, a fund balance after adjustment, but spent only $10,570,000. And so again, you did better on the revenue side, did better on the expenditure side. So rather than using up fund balance, you actually added to your fund balance about $400,000. So considering all the uncertainties that we faced a year ago at this time, wondering what's gonna happen to rooms and meals, sales taxes and collections or receivables, you got through the year in real good shape in terms of budgeting. And obviously there's a lot of variances, that's normal. I suspect there's probably more variances than in an abnormal year because of all the things we had to deal with, but in total ended up in real good shape. Moving on, there's required schedules on page 64 that show your participation in beavers. There's been a lot of talk in the legislature about funding pensions and what they're gonna do about it. Beavers is not one of those pensions that they're talking about. This is relatively well-funded. At this point in time, over 80% funded. Based on the actuaries, estimations, they don't think other than minor rate increases, eighth of a point here or there that there will be more than enough money to pay all retirees indefinitely. A lot of that has to do with the source of funds. They get it from you. So this is totally funded by the cities and towns as opposed to the state teachers and the Vermont employees who are funded through the legislature and those are woefully underfunded and we're gonna be hearing a lot more about that. But this plan is actually in pretty good shape, but you are required to show your share of the plan. Page 65 through page 69 or 70 are all the other funds of the town. So every fund is tracked separately. Every special revenue fund, every capital project. So it's all included in the audit report and tracked and shown. And then at the end is the report that I alluded to earlier, the report on compliance with laws and regulations and internal control. So this is required under government auditing standards. We had no compliance issues that were noted. We did have some findings. What is also required under government under auditing standard is to include management's comments related to their plans and related to those findings. And so that is bound right in the audit as well. We've reviewed those. I know a lot of these were discussed during the audit. Most of these, frankly, were unusual accounting issues. Some of them related to your participation in a water tower project or capacity rights or the beamer's pension or things that were just kind of different. And I think that has surely indicated earlier, we've tried to, as we go through, talk through these so that we expect that most of these will be dealt with during the next audit. There are some processes like the review of journal entries that you could go back and do retroactively. So most of these things, even though you don't hear about it until during the audit, a lot of them are year-end issues. And so our expectation is that when we come in this year that having gone through a year that most of these will be dealt with. And we're certainly available at any time to discuss these even before the year-end. So part of what we provide is access to our firm for questions. It helps you, we think, but it also helps us because it keeps us up on what's going on in the town. So the other deliverables is a letter of recommendations. It includes the same recommendations that are at the end of this audit and then just other things to think about. A lot of those are policy issues, documenting your control system, which is generally good. And so it's just a matter of documentation and just other things we want you to think about. And if there are any specific questions related to those, I would be happy to go through that as well. And then the last letter is just a report to the board that indicates how the audit went. And it went, it went really well for a first-time audit. I mean, it's always there's a learning curve. We've audited over a hundred municipalities in this state, but everybody does some things just slightly differently. So, you know, even though most of the things are the same, there still is a learning curve from our perspective in terms of what we need to understand. But it went smoothly considering that where the audit is out. We had no coercion, we were cooperated with fully and I think everybody enjoyed working with the staff. So that's a lot of information. I've done a lot of talking. I don't know if there's any specific or general questions about either audit procedures or anything in your audit that I could answer. I'm not sure if the rest of the board wants to hear them or not, but it would be helpful to just give a brief overview of the deficiencies, one through five, which I think were minor and then the others that just so we know that we know what you're talking about is because we're not financial people. Nope, that's fine. So there are some loans that you have made through the years to various nonprofits primarily for development of housing primarily, I think. A lot of these loans are experiences that they're not collectible. They're not even really intended to be collected. It'd be nice if you could get them, but the idea was that this was money that was granted to you, you packed as a pass through to these communities. It is a loan agreement, but as these loans have become due in most communities, what we found is that typically, not only do they not pay them, they typically come in and ask for more money because that's about the time they need to do major renovations or rehab. So what we really said is that if these loans aren't collectible, and that's an estimate and that can change, but based on what we know today, if they're not collectible, you really should book an allowance for uncollectible loans. Doesn't mean you're writing them off. It simply means you're recognizing the fact that you may not get that money. And we don't wanna overstate what your position is. We'd rather frankly be on the conservative side rather than so. That was the first one. The next- Can I interrupt Fred or Eric? This is the best. Could you give me an example of that? That it sounds like we're being a pass-through entity or something. You are. What you are. Eric, can you think of an example so I can place it? That's like the resource grant we're gonna hear about tonight. Okay. If these will score, those have a DCDP passers. Yep, they all will. Ted, in the resource, the most current one we have, so on my list of things to do is chat with the state. So for the resource one, and there and those grant agreements, there's specific time period. And then after that time period, if resource does everything it needs to do, then we essentially can remove the loan and remove the allowance from our books, but the older ones are caught and maple tree place. And those are a little bit different in the way they were written. But so eventually we'd like to figure out how to just take these off our books. Cause as Fred said, we're not gonna get repaid this money. It's just a, you know, it's really a grant. Well, as he said, a grant to us and we pass it through as a loan, but it ends up as a loan in our books, but we're planning on recovering it. Yeah, no, never, thank you. Yeah, and there was a list of those on page 32 in the report actually. So if you wanted to see specifics, they are there. The next one and the fourth one are similar. And that's that you're buying shares of either the wastewater treatment facility or the water tower rights and sewer capacity rights. Those have very specific accounting rules related to accounting for those. You're literally, it's almost like an intangible. You're having to record your share of the rights, not only what you have paid today, but what you will pay to get those. And then we, in essence, depreciate those rights or amortize them over the period of their useful lives. So it's almost like you're acquiring an asset and the asset wasn't fully on the books. So they're unique kinds of transactions, but both of those needed to be chewed up and adjusted. And so those are two of the things actually resulted in some prior period adjustments. And they were on the books, but they weren't based on what we believe the accounting treatment was that they needed to be there. So they're on now, these will, in essence, go away. So whenever we have a maturity adjustment, we're required to inform the board governance of those adjustments. And so any adjustment we find, in essence, ends up in one of these points. And so because it was the first time through and we had to deal with these unique issues and propose adjustments, we don't get to make adjustments, we get to propose, then when we do that, we then have the responsibility to inform the board of why those things happen. So most of these are that, of that nature. They're adjustments that we went through, talked about there's unique accounting treatment, but then we have to show them. The Stormwater Grant Loan Program, again, was unique accounting for the Stormwater grants and loans. I think it had to do with all the neighborhood grants. Shirley, is that correct? Yeah. And so again, similar, there was just some grants that we had to adjust going back in to make sure that they were all in the books properly, not only the revenue side, but the pass through rights to them. Five relates to fund classifications. Under governmental accounting, they're very strict about what can be and what funds. Basically, you have your general fund and the basic premises is that you could operate everything out of one fund. And in order for it to be in another fund, it either has to be a capital project and generally a major capital project that would distort your budget. Little things you can buy and budget for them, but the major projects, you want to put them in a separate fund because you don't want those blips in a year or two when those things are happening to distort the general fund budget. And then special revenue funds can only be a special revenue if the money that their source from is restricted by an outside source or committed by the voters. And we found two funds that didn't meet those classifications. And so we had to propose that they be included with the general fund. So when you look at your budget actual statement, you'll see at the end, there are some reconciling items. We don't force them into your budget because you didn't budget for them. But when we show the combined general fund on exhibit C and D, we have to include them. And that was the cemetery operations and the post-town fund. They don't meet the criteria of being a separate fund under government auditing standards. So we had to reclassify those. And because we did that, we had to let you know that. And we talked about those in regards to the FY22 budget after going through the audit that we set this up as departments within the general fund now. Okay. Somewhere else instead of a different fund. Right. So 21, they're probably still a separate fund, Shirley. But again, that's not a problem. We can deal with that at year end. When Shirley does the financials this year, she'll know to put those in the general fund even though you're tracking them. And it's fine to track them in a separate fund. It's just for reporting. They have to be consolidated in with the general fund. I don't know if you wanna go on to the other ones in more detail. Yes, I think probably a big idea. At least just a little dialogue about that. Okay. So the unearned revenue just related to several federal forfeiture monies. And they were being treated as unearned revenue rather than just simply restricted. It's sort of a nuance, but they really aren't there. You don't need to do anything more to earn them. You just need to spend them. And so they're not that you haven't earned them and they were being shown that way. And so that was something we corrected again from the prior period and had to notify you. The allowance for double accounts is just simply recognizing that you may have some regular receivables that may not be collectible. And this is just to remind you that if you do, you just need to think about that. And to record an allowance, there's one on the books now. Each year you'd simply look at it and see is that adequate or not? Do we need to change it? And if you don't, then you leave it alone. The netting of revenue and expenditures had to do with some, I believe just some public safety equipment that was sold and then some new things that were purchased and they were netted. And so the netting of those just, you can't net, you have to grow something else to be showed gross. So even though the proceeds were used to purchase, it just kind of net it out and they can't, that can't happen. The net pension liability is a totally unique to municipalities and that's where you're recording your share of the state's managed pension. This is new about five years ago. I don't like it. It's the first time that there's ever been anything recorded on a town's books that you can't control. And I don't like that. I don't like the fact that whatever happens in the market, whatever the state, how they invest their money, you just, you don't get to do anything but pay in what that you're supposed to pay, what you do, which you have. And yet the volatility of this, even though it's well funded, it's still, there's still some number that shows up on your credentials, but it's a rule. And so we have to let you know that. And then the last one is simply having a second set of eyes on all journal entries. I think that a lot of the entries are reviewed, but I think there might be some entries made by Shirley that probably aren't being looked at. We had no issue with what the entry is being wrong. It's just a good control to always have that second set of eyes looking at everything. So I think that's it. So Fred, can I ask you a question about that one? Because I'll just say, Eric, I'm not picking on you, but even if Eric were to review them, he may not even know what he's looking at or understand what he's looking at. So in a small organization, I guess my point is, how meaningful is that? Well, the answer is you may not be able to solve that, but we're still required to report it. Okay. It's a weakness that may, and I suppose that if there was somebody who did have some financial background. And Eric might be able to. I mean, the issue is really just the ability to ask the questions. It's not so much you need to, it's more of a matter of you're gonna include description. And so, if it said we're adjusting these expenses out of the fire department putting in the police, I mean, he could say, okay, why? Well, this was police equipment, our fire equipment didn't need to go there. I mean, and so it's just simply a matter of most time just being, having the ability to ask the question. So, but if, you know, if he's not comfortable doing that, then maybe there'd be somebody else on the board or, but you're right, there were some small organizations that just simply can't overcome that one. And we get to repeat that year after year. Thank you. Yep. Yes, we've seen this on all the reports that I can remember over the years. Anything else, Eric and Shirley, that we need to talk about as far as the audit tonight? I just, Eric and I were talking earlier and the management letter which Fred was talking about earlier has, I just want to go back to see the language, other recommendations, but Eric and I wanted to come back to the select board later and talk about our plan to address those issues. We haven't done that yet. So, but many of the, I'll just say in summary, many of these are already on my to-do list, have been accumulated on my to-do list, but some of them are new and I definitely think everything on here is something we should implement. And Shirley, when you get to that, if you talk to Rick, we have examples of a lot of some, you know, you'll want to customize them to fit Williston, but we have templates and examples for a lot of these policies. And VLCT also has some pretty good templates and examples. Okay. So it doesn't mean you need to, you know, recreate the wheel completely, but. That's exactly what I was going to say, Fred. I have no desire when I can save time. I just assume do that. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Yep. Any questions from the board before we wrap it up for tonight with the audit report? I'll try to be quick. I have one kind of broad question and then one rather specific one. A broad question is, is I'm not a finance person. So I need this from the 30,000 foot view based on what I heard. I've not heard anything that I as a select board member should be concerned with. Fred, would you agree with that? I would agree with that. And, but I do think it is the board's responsibility to monitor those findings to at least check back with your staff to ensure that they are addressing at least the material weaknesses and significant deficiencies. Now I know they're doing that because, you know, as I said, a lot of them one-time things, but from a board perspective, from governance perspective, that's, it's not a concern, but it's just more of just a, just a matter of keeping track of that. Okay. And it sounds like we'll be meeting sometime in the future to go over staff's proposals. Yeah. I think Eric and Shirley have already have a plan to do that. Yes. Great. My specific question is, has to do with town assets? And you mentioned the town has a lot of assets, buildings, I assume some of them buildings, roads, bridges. Yep. And so I'm looking at page 12, and I'm assuming those assets show up in a line that's called other capital assets, net of accumulated depreciation. Correct. Is there a place where I can find where those assets are listed? Yeah. Well, if you go to page 34 of the audit, yeah, you'll see a little more detail. Okay. So that, those tie to those broader, larger numbers in the front, and then supporting everything in here are schedules that are maintained by the town that lists virtually every item individually with depreciation. So what, what we do is we look at, you know, we asked to see what are the additions? What are the deletions? We look at your accounts to make sure that everything, you know, that they're the larger accounts to see, you know, that the capital projects are included in the construction progress. We also asked to see what things have been deleted. So there's a bit of work to maintain the schedule, but, but it's all tracked. Yeah. Okay. So Shirley, do you mind a question, a specific one? And you may not know the specific answer, but you can probably answer it in, in, in concept. And the question is, for instance, if I came in and said, hey, could you show me what the value of the bridge on North Williston Road over the Winooski River is? Could you go find that? Maybe. Fred, and you're a lot more history with this. When did fixed asset accounting come into place for governments? Fixed assets were there pretty much forever, but infrastructure was, I think 2004. And it would have been built before then. Yeah. All right. And you choose a different bridge. Yeah. Like, I'm sorry, like when we do the Muddy Brook or the Industrial Avenue Bridge. Yes. So that reconstruction work, yes. I could show you the cost of that on a schedule. Okay. All right. And that's all I need. Yeah. And not that I'm questioning that. I just asked that to make sure I kind of understood how this is tracked, if you will. Yes. And it's all of the infrastructure that you maintain. And so, you know, there are obviously, you know, some state roads. Right. If the response is maintained. Right. And so those would not be on your books, even though they're in the town. Yep. So there would be town infrastructure that you're responsible for. Okay. Good. Great. Thank you. Yep. Any other questions? No, good. Good discussion. Indeed. Thank you. It was a very good overview. So I'd be looking for a motion to approve. I'd move to accept fiscal year 2020 audit report from the town out of the firm of Sullivan Powers as presented. Is there a second? One second. Is there any discussion on the motion? If not, then all those in favor of approving, accepting the motion as presented. Raise your hand. One, two, three, four. So very good. Thank you, Fred. We appreciate you being with us tonight and giving us a great overview. Good. Great. Have a good rest of the meeting. Thank you, Fred. All right. Hi, Charlie. Good night, Eric. Good night. So the public hearing in about seven minutes, I think we can go ahead and do the select board rules of transaction and the meeting schedule. Eric, do you want to just go over that briefly? Sure. So I provided the board a copy of the rules of transaction. The only edit I made from last year with section 5.2 and I put some language in there pertaining to the virtual meetings that we're in right now. And just speaking that meetings would be held virtually until it was deemed safe to go back in person essentially. So that's the one suggested edit for the board to consider the rules of transaction this year. Meeting scheduled. I discussed it with Terry, typically what the board's done past years, the meetings in July are a little shifted with the holiday and then just one meeting in August and the budget meetings. The schedule we've had the last couple of years in there. Nothing, they're changing days or times. So first and third Tuesday for the most part is seven. Okay. Any questions for Eric on that? I'd be looking for a motion on that one as well. Move to adopt the select board rules of transaction and meeting schedule dated March 16, 2021 for the term of the current select board ending in March, 2022. It was your second. Second. Sorry, discussion on the motion. If not, so those in favor of the motion signify by raising your hand. We have all four. I think we can probably go on to the local emergency operations plan. So I've provided a copy of this document for the board. This is updated every year by the emergency management director, which is the fire chief. Chief Colette's reviewed this with his staff and recommends its approval. Chief's on the meeting this evening. If there were any questions from the board on the local emergency operations plan. I did want to mention the chief attended a meeting of emergency management directors in the county recently and there was a request for towns to share these plans securely for the purposes of mutual aid. It would allow us and other towns to know what resources our neighbors had if we may be in need of them. Unless there's objection by the select board in sharing this plan securely. My thought is to go ahead and share with these other towns. So I've sprang to the board's attention tonight as well. I just had two corrections to make on the document on page 21. Contact information since Joy has resigned that will need to be at least eliminated for her name on that and her contact information. And the town health officer Cindy Thurston of course no longer has her work number here. And I believe she no longer has her home number. It's a cell phone number only at this point that her email would be different as well. Good to catch us Terry. As always. Any questions for Eric on this one? On that actually Joy is named as the select board alternate page 20, so. Page 20? Yeah. Yeah and as I look at this I see two of my phone numbers are off. You should just have my mobile number. Sorry about that. No problem we'll make sure all these get updated. Thanks for pointing that out with the others. And regarding sharing this document is there any concerns about that? I mean, I don't look at this as really having any confidential or material of concern. No, typically we, for the board this evening it's just a tribute to you individually. It's really not something we want to have out there in the public because it basically says what we would do in case of an emergency if there was someone we'll just see what the town was going to do if they had some ill intent. So I don't have any objection with sharing it with other communities securely as that would only help them and us knowing that resources are an asset available. Okay. So for, okay with accepting this, I need a motion. We're asked to move to the 2021 local emergency operations plan. Who's your second? I'll second. Those in favor of the motion raise your hand. All four, so we're in good shape. It's just about eight o'clock. So I think we'll step backwards to the public hearing on the BCDP grant closeout realizing resource and is Tom online at some place? Good timing, Terry Tom just logged in. I think he just wrapped up his own board meeting. So Tom, I see you there. I'm going to get you connected right now. Hi there folks, are you able to hear me? This is Tom. Thank you. So I'll open the public hearing on this and introduce Tom Longstress who is the, I believe executive director of realizing resource. Thank you so much. Tom Longstress executive or resource and nonprofit community enterprise. The project that the town of Wilson supported was we labeled our realizing resource. So thank you for introduction. I really want to just explain that we have completed the project. The project was the acquisition of the space at 329 Harvest Lane in Wilson. It seems a long, long time ago in a universe far, far away last January when we acquired the building, there's been a lot that's changed and happened since then, but we would not be doing as much work, training so many people and keeping so many things out of the landfill while relieving poverty if we didn't have that space. And so it was a lifesaver. The timing was great. The Wilson grant of the support from the VCDP program really carry us over the edge, allowed us to move forward with the acquisition of the space and complete our capital campaign. And it's really meant that resource was able to cement Wilson as the headquarters for all of our sites. We also have a site in Burlington, another in Barrie and another in Hyde Park. And we, like many organizations, had a brief shutdown because of COVID in March. We were exempt from the state home order. We were able to continue operating, but we closed our doors to the public because of the safety risk. And then we were able to reopen in May and early June in Wilson. And it's, you know, the demand, the needs from low income people have been tremendous. And the space, the Wilson space has really been perfect because it has that right mix of job, you know, classroom space, job training space and warehouse operating space where we've produced major appliances, we produce computers, we're an authorized Microsoft refurbisher and we're also a collector under the Vermont eWaste law. So I just, I think I wanted to say that we've completed the project. It's made a huge impact in terms of our efficiency and operations, the way we can support the entire state through distributing goods that come in from large donors, businesses who get rid of the huge amount of stuff that our other sites just can't absorb because they're not, don't have the volume of, and facility. So, and really then I'd love to just answer any questions that may exist about the program, what we're doing, how the space has made a difference. Before I ask the board for questions, is there anyone in the audience who has any questions or comments that you see, Eric? I don't see anyone, Tara, I know we just have staff and a couple of folks who've been listening from the beginning, but if anyone listening who has a question for Tom during the public hearing, just raise a virtual hand or let me know in the chat at this time. Let's give them a moment. I don't see anyone from the public who should make a comment, Tara. So, board, questions for Tom? No. Sounds great. Good job, Don, so thank you. Yeah, it's an asset to the town for sure. Yeah. Thank you, Tom. Well, I appreciate the staff support. It's been great working with Eric in his old position and I look forward to working with him like more in his new position. So, thank you to Town of Wilson and the staff with the town. And we're excited to get the VCTP. If any of you have had the pleasure of working with the state website and the forums you get to submit, it's really a joy and we'd love to bring more people up to speed on this great technology that's so much fun. So we'll be sad to not have to submit any more reports but appreciate you're allowing us to close it out. Yeah, so that's great. Thanks, Tom. Thank you. Thanks for coming today. So I'd need a motion to close the public hearing at this point. I'll move. There's your second. Second. Sorry, discussion on the motion. If not, all those in favor of the motion, raise your hand. One, two, three, four. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks again, Tom. And we'll proceed on with the rest of our meeting. So thank you. Thank you. Have a good night. Thank you. Moving on to the designation for examining and allowing claims or the warrant. So we would need in the past, we've had a person who was the first person to look at them and then we have an alternate as well. Anything to add to that, Eric? I'll just, I'll continue the practice as it's in the rules of transaction that after the designated board member approves the warrant, I'll share the full warrant with the board electronically for review it. Once we get back to meeting in person, we'll have it available for in person review as well. Sure. There's anyone like to volunteer if you'd be the desirbein and the alternate? Well, I just want to point out something. At the last time we did this last year when, or maybe it was two years ago when Joy first wanted to be the vice chair, we asked that this go along with that responsibility and not seeing a need to break with tradition. I am wondering if Ted would be able to leave his chair from time to time and do that. Yeah, it'll be easier with the social distancing working at home, but even after that's over, I can manage it. So yeah, the answer is yes. Great, and I'm glad to hear we're talking about when it's over in the sense of within the year, and that's great news also. So I'll take that as Ted is so I'll volunteer to do that and we need an alternate. Jeff, you have done it in the past. Sure, I'll be the alternate. But thank you, Ted. Yes, thank you both. Thank you, Ted. So we've had, we have filled, I think we need to actually need a motion in order to make that legal. Ted, I just wanted to say to you that you actually don't have to come in. Lynn will send everything to you electronically. So you don't have to make an extra trip in to sign the warrant. Can I electronically sign them? Yep. That's exciting. Can you see her? So may I have a motion for both the, the designee and the alternate? I'm not gonna move. I'm not gonna make the motion. I'm trying to find it. There's a resolution in your packet with the sublinks. I could suggest that you could move to adopt the resolution as presented with it serving the names of the designees. Okay. I'll move to adopt the resolution concerning designate for examining and allowing claims with Ted as the main. Designee and myself as the alternate. What else do I need to add to that? So I don't think I need to add anything to that. That's it. Is there a second to the motion? I'll second it. Is there any discussion on the motion? All those in favor of the motion raise your hand. One, two, three, four. Thank you very much. So it takes care of that one. We'll move on then to the revenue forecast update with Shirley. Yeah, I'll surely cover the majority of her memo she's prepared, but we'll have a couple financial updates here this evening and I'm pleased to say it's all good news. So hopefully that trend continues and Shirley's got an update on what we've been doing during COVID to look at our revenue and see what we are throughout the year. So I'll turn it over to you, Shirley. Okay. So within your memo, you might remember when we did it last as of September, month end, we were still looking for $86,000 hole to fill. Well, we're gladly reporting that we are no longer looking for an $86,000 hole, but we now are 316,000 favorable. So we've come a long way. And there's a couple of major reasons for that. First is the local options tax and Eric, did you put in, yeah, Eric put in the local option tax report in the materials, but the reason I looked at this, I looked at it in lots of ways and I am looking for my copy of it, here we go. So when we budget the local options tax, we actually look at it and budget it by quarter, even though you only see an annual total. So when the sales and use tax part of the budget for the first two quarters, we have collected 109% of what our budget was. And that just goes along with what we hear from the state saying that the online sales have just gone wild and we're seeing the result of that. For in coming up with the forecast using those actuals from the first two quarter, we're essentially just using the budget and that's probably conservative. But on the other hand, the rooms and meals tax, we have $138,000 in total collected for the first two quarters compared to a budget of 205,000. So it's a much smaller piece of the pie compared to the sales and use. So for the sales and use for the first two quarters, we have collected 1,564,000 compared to a $1,430,000 budget. So with that information, trying not to focus on history too much because our history is not a path we can follow right now, but looking at the actuals and where things have come, we are expecting that the sales and use tax for the local options tax will be maybe $15,000 under budget. So it is certainly turned around from what we first projected. So that in this and these numbers was a $216,000 increase from what we projected last in September. Some of the other big items in here are some new things. So we've mentioned them before, so I'm in this, the detailed report called FY21 revenue and expense projection for February 28th. On page two of that, we have the state aid, which is typically just our payments from the state for class two and three roads. So we also picked up another 43,000 that was a supplemental payment. And just looking at what we had budgeted versus actual, we had about $9,000 more. We're going to receive an actual, we only have one payment left to receive. So that was a $50,000 favorable variance. Miscellaneous income, the majority of that is fees we get from SD Ireland hauling out of the quarry, where they pay us so much per ton. So our estimate compared to budget is about $28,000 more than the budget based on what we're seeing already that's happened. And then I'm going to jump down to the FEMA, if you remember, we had the Halloween storm of October 19th. So you submit expenses and it can take a year or two years to see that revenue. So we receive 40,000 of revenue this year for the Halloween storm from 2019. A couple of big changes and expenses. The recreation department, I've kind of got these all rolled into one number, but last forecast we had like 195,000 in savings. And now we're at almost 250,000 to break that. That's a big number. So to break that, I sat with Todd and we went back through all of his revenue numbers and his expense numbers, but 64,000 of that is just the fact that we had, the plan was to hire a full-time assistant for Todd. And of course we haven't done that and we won't do that before year-end. So that's 64,000 in savings. There's another 173,000 in savings just from the camp expenses, from the various camp expenses. Some of them are just the payment to the contractor but with a decrease in camps that has affected the year. And then just the special events, there's like $12,000 savings there because we just didn't have any this year and aren't expecting any. We will have the fireworks, but that'll hit the FY22 budget. So Todd didn't feel like he'd actually have any more spending against that this year. Couple other items are end discretionary wages. We had an amount for the last union contract negotiation that we didn't end up using for 30,000. And then Chief Coletti went through and reviewed his call wages. At the same time, we were looking at FY22 budget and we brought those down a little bit, but for FY21, he expects a $40,000 savings there too. So those are some of the really big items that impacted from our last look after three months of the year. And now we have seven months of the year or eight months of the year have a lot more information. So all in all, we feel like the town is gonna, we're gonna end up at a very good place. Eric and I have chatted tonight as just to present this information. And we'd like to come back at a future meeting and talk about some of the savings and maybe what we might restore in this budget that we previously took away. But I think Eric, if you wanna sort of wrap that up with your thoughts, we'll come back with some items for discussion with the board. Sure, we were thinking perhaps the May timeline for us to really hope these trends hold and the way things are moving, hopefully they do, but I don't wanna make any decisions too early in this budget year, even though we're on the tail end of it. We'd like to bring back to the board, kind of where our projected position is and then look at what, if any expenses we'd like to go ahead that we kind of deferred. And I'm thinking still a very conservative approach here. It might be something for the board to consider like the environmental reserve funds, we suspended the funding in 21 the star that may be something, some form of allocation the board would wanna reallocate using these FY 21 dollars. But I think the variable to really, that we need to pay attention to is the grand list in the spring with the discussion with the assessor throughout this year to see where our grand list number lands and understanding the effect that could have on the tax levy for FY 22 and where the tax rate would need to be set if there was some dramatic shift in the grand list. Not saying there is or isn't gonna be at this point, we just wanna be cautious and conservative and having additional funds available helps to fill any holes there that we may need to look at for 22. Okay. Questions? Questions for Julian or Eric. Good job. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for the good news. We need that. But also good job. Thank you. Thank you, Sheryl. I recognize all your work last week and a half put this together. It's very thorough and it's a very well put together document. All the department heads are helping. Okay. So thanks again. We'll move on then to select board vacancy and how we wish to proceed with that. And we have only done this once in the recent past, but any thoughts besides what we usually do is to advertise it on our website in front porch forum. Anything else that we should be doing to advertise the position vacancy? I don't think there's anything else we should be doing about that. Although I do wanna, what's our, how will we go about doing interviews and making a decision and when would it be made and that kind of stuff? We could talk about that as well. And then the other piece, I assume this would be to fill out this year, i.e. until next election and then that seat would be up for re-election at the next town meeting. And I don't know if that's on schedule or if that would be early, but it probably doesn't matter. It probably should go to election at that point. Well, Joy's seat actually is up in next March. Okay, then it answers the question no matter what, yeah. And filling this would only be between now and next March. Okay, yeah, that's what I just wanna make sure, yeah. Yeah, okay. So my thought is, as I referred to earlier, that I'd like to proceed faster than slower on this and to try to get, depends on the candidates we have, get interviews in perhaps as early as the next meeting in April or certainly by the second meeting in April. And by the decision may certainly, if not then, but the first meeting in May. And now may not be the time to talk about this because we just don't know, but let's hypothetically say we were to get 25 applications. We wanna interview all 25. Probably not. I think we probably would have a subcommittee it's like a district town manager to sort out the highest qualified candidates. Okay, that's an interesting question. How is one qualified to be a select board member? In my case, they might argue. Would that mean that we would have the deadline of the next select board meeting or the one after that for resumes or applications and then after that we would decide whether or not we needed a smaller committee to reduce the number of people who would actually be interviewed? Probably, well, certainly we would have some education I think by two weeks from now as to the interest that's out there, maybe not totally, but at that point we can make some decisions about less screening committee perhaps. Okay. And the only point I'll make is two weeks it's not a lot of time. I'm not disagreeing with it, so it should be, sorry Eric to put this probably on your shoulders but it should be advertised as soon as possible in places like front porch form. I just pulled out the calendar the way the calendar falls that the board will meet next in three weeks. I can advertise this tomorrow. Would the board want to set just a firm, a hard deadline at this point for to have any advertisement? I would, I think that's the cleanest way to do it. The deadline would be a day or two before our next meeting so that they're in. My recommendation would be that all of the resumes get our applications or whatever we're calling them get sent to the board members before the meeting and then we can decide whether we need a subcommittee at that meeting. Yeah. And I'm assuming like that should the advertising make it clear that it's under the public records act that anybody's application is gonna be public record. I'm just, everybody now, you know somebody applies for something and they don't realize that everybody in the world is gonna be able to see that they made the application. Most of the time there's not that much interest in municipal board, but this is a bit higher level. So I don't know. Perhaps Friday, April 2nd is when I typically would send the board and pack it out for the meeting on the 6th. Okay. Perhaps the noon time on that day or by four o'clock even, I could have something like that. That sounds fair. And Eric, are you implying you might be able to get us those applications as either as part of this select board packet for the meeting on the 6th or soon after? In other words, we'll have time to look at them by the time the meeting happens. That's my thought, Jeff. If we have a day on that day, as things go, I'm sure I'll get some before then I might get some that day, but I'll be prepared to get them all together. Okay, good. Great. That works for me. Would, I guess in terms of application, we kind of have what we standard, we have a standard for the website, typically for boards and committees, but given that this is the select board position, are there any additional questions you would like to ask a potential applicant to review their... That's a very good question. I wonder, would it make sense to put together? I realize this is going to delay things, but put together a list of questions that they answer. Well, my concern with that is if we get too much into policy, then we're going past the characteristics of the person. And there are some extreme examples of that where that would be completely appropriate. If somebody, it would be an appropriate measure of somebody if their policies were racist. We wouldn't want somebody like that to even be considered. But on the other hand, I don't want the board to be saying, well, I'm going to make this up because we don't have an issue like this right now anyway. But, oh, well, what's your position on the acquisition of the new piece of fire equipment? I don't think that's something that we should be... Yeah, I see what you're getting at. It's tricky. So should it include something like because during the public election process, people get to explain who they are and why they should be a select board member. I wonder if the application should include a question along those lines. Why do you believe you... I don't know how to phrase it. Why should you be a select board member? That's not the right way to ask it, but it's along those lines. Does that make sense? So we have something we can... I think so. If somebody just sends in an application and says, I want to be on the select board, I wouldn't know, I wouldn't have much to go on. Yeah, I mean, a question, something along the lines of what personal characteristics would you highlight that would be useful to be on the select board and what motivations do you have for applying for the position? What would you want to accomplish, something like that? I think that's one you can take right from one that we answer on, you know, channel 17 when we're asked to run for those positions. That question exists already. Why are you running? Take questions. Yeah. Yes. You know, what do you bring as your background knowledge to the town and why do you feel that you should be a select board member? Good. Cut and dried. Yeah, I'm good with that. It gives a good description that we can at least work with, yeah. The famous question that sunk, well, it hurt Teddy Kennedy's campaign in 1980 when Roger Mudd asked him, why do you want to be president? And he stumbled through it and couldn't give a very good answer. Wasn't it ready for the question? Yeah. Yeah. I wonder what you think of that one. Teddy and Eric, do you have what you think you need? That's excellent. I can put something together, Terry, a document to send to you before I post it publicly. Appreciate the feedback from the board. Yeah. One other thing I can offer folks who are interested, I can offer some of my time to chat with them about being on the select board as worked in the past. And I did for one other person who was thinking about it this last town meeting, so. That's great. Good, thank you. Yeah, that's great. Make sure folks understand the role of the board and what the topic is, all those elements of it, so. Okay. Good. If there's nothing else on that one, we'll move on to Minerjee's report. So a lot of items, this manager's report, I guess it's been about a month since we've had a meeting. I'll touch on a few items from my written report here. And the first couple are financial, but they're good financial news. That's a report with President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan on March 11th, last week. It contains funding allocations for local governments with direct aid. So I, the Mulligan cities and towns had a listing I referenced for how this allocation dollars were going to be given to municipalities. And Willison's allocation is going to be a million dollars in this aid package. So significant amount of aid. It's early, I don't have a lot of further information at this point regarding any potential, what the uses may be restricted to when the funds are coming. I expect to have more information on this shortly as the rulemaking occurs for these funds. But I'll keep the board updated. I've had preliminary discussions with Shirley on this. And as we understand what the aid is going to be, we'll have a further discussion with the board about use of those funds moving ahead. But it's quite a significant amount of money that may have quite a few different possible applications here, but also that can be used to just consider to hold our strong financial position with the unknown. I think that will be, that's a good approach to look at here. So the other piece, it shows with the board, just in an update last month, but our Lamp Light Waterline project, there's good news there as well, the state of Vermont's informed me that the full million dollar subsidy that has been designated for this project that was approved by the voters last November for them in the bond vote. So these subsidies are applied at the start of the debt repayment. So if the project comes in under our $2 million project estimate, we receive 75% on the first a million dollars and 25% on loan amounts above. So this is what we were hoping for to start this project where the town would have half of the estimate project cost forgiven. And this actually, this project is out to bid and bids were received today and we're waiting for the engineering firms validation of the bid. But all good news there as well, because it will end up saving the water utility users, user fees over time or base fees, rather, that's why we structured it to repay that debt. Great, good news. Yeah. Yeah. So I wanna mention, we've issued an RFP for fire department staffing analysis. We had some preliminary discussions on this last budget process, looking at kind of longer term with staffing in the fire department. Chief had brought that up during his report. So we're gonna be looking at the consultant to analyze our future needs and public safety to help us analyze what those service delivery needs may be moving ahead. So I hope to have that report completed later this summer and presented to the board proceeding the FY23 budget process for some further discussion on that service delivery. We've also started to think about the Independence Day celebration. Yeah. The recreation committee's met and the fourth of July falls on a Sunday this year. So the rec committee's outlined it with events on the second and third with a strong caveat if we're able to hold them. If we're able to hold a parade in fireworks, we're looking on July 3rd for those on Saturday. And for the fireworks, we looked at that alternate location down off Marshall Avenue near Walmart. I've approached the landowner and they're very receptive to holding the event there if we wanna move forward in that fashion to have more kind of drive-up parking. It's a number of other elements. We have to get FAA approval if we move forward there because it's in the flight path too. So we're working on that, all these little, all these details here. But we're hopeful that we'll be able to provide some type of fireworks display this year, but we'll kind of wait and see. Also this night, a number of other communities typically have their fireworks on July 3rd. So that might alleviate some of the concern of a lot of people coming to Williston if we were the only show in town for lack of a better term. So we'll keep an eye on that one, but Todd and the Recreation Committee are hard at work planning for what we could be able to offer this summer. Then I wanna mention, you'll have the enterprise fund budgets for consideration in April. And for the sewer budget, I had a conversation with Bruce and Essex officials on additional capacity purchase. This last budget year, we were in the last year of a 50,000 gallon capacity purchase, 10,000 gallon increments each year. That was the final year. And the Essex position at this time is that they're not ready to commit to any future acquisition by the town of Williston for sewer capacity. What Essex would like to do is kind of look at what their needs are moving forward and discuss with Williston what our needs are and potentially look to have, if Williston is going to purchase additional capacity, have that be one final purchase and not additional incremental purchases. So where we left it, we agreed that we would study this with the three communities needs moving ahead. And I hope to have another discussion next January or February and have our planning departments discuss. Each department does its own iteration of what we call our attachment A. So kind of look at that projected use moving forward and hope to see if there's an opportunity for the town to discuss additional capacity purchase, what that may look like in the next cycle. So when you receive those budgets for FY22, we won't have a capacity purchase included at this time. Yeah, this is understandable, interesting. And to me, it means we need just, this is a further reason or points out why we need to plan for the future to understand what amount we have and how long, asking it in a crude way, how long is it gonna last and what we're gonna do when it's gone. Yeah, so we had a good discussion and keep moving that discussion along and hopefully have a report for next year on that. And then finally, we probably saw some signage out there but the Route 2 Industrial Avenue project is getting underway. I think they started cutting some trees there but that's been a long discussed project to it's a state project to improve that intersection. And we also are doing a water line replacement as part of that project and the state's managing that project for us. Replacing a water line that goes from Route 2 to Avenue A. So the- And Eric, if I remember correctly, that water line replacement is on our dime. Yep. Okay, and so we have the- Bruce will correct me if I say something wrong here but that's my understanding. Yeah, okay. Oh, Bruce is raising his hand. So I'll connect him for a second. No, there's the hand. Go ahead, Bruce. Okay, it's not totally on our dime. Oh, okay. Anything that was in the right of way is on us. Anything that was outside of the right of way where they've taken more space, it's on there. Oh, interesting. So some of it's ours, some of it's theirs. So just out of curiosity, any idea what the percent will probably end up paying of the total cost for the water line? I think it's almost a 50-50 split is what it comes out to, Jeff. Well, that's very good news, because at one point- Don't quote me on that. 300, it's our shares in the 300 to $400,000 range. When we were talking about this years ago, when this idea first came up, the intersection improvement was gonna require the water line be replaced because V-trans was, would not guarantee that they could protect it during construction. We were looking at that being our cost totally. So the fact that V-trans is gonna, part of it falls on them, they're gonna pay for a significant part of it is very good news. Yeah, they treat us like any other utility. I mean, if we're in there right away, just like we can ask a utility to move, they can ask us to move. But when they impact right away, or easements that we were using already, they don't have a right to just say move. Yeah, okay. Good news. Well, a lot of good news tonight. We need more meetings like this. Haven't we been leading away for this project too, for a number of years? We have. Yeah. Yeah, and Bruce remind me, sorry, others may not care about this detail. This is the asbestos cement pipe that is gonna be replaced. Yes, most of it's AC. Yeah, okay. All right, good. Thank you. Thanks Bruce for the clarification there. The last thing I'll mention is in that area, be a lot of activity because we're anticipating a U-Haul facility on the former Roebert property that's been permitted to Spain. They'll be beginning their construction as construction season as well. So there'll be some clearing there for that project on the other side of the road. So a lot of things going on that in the town. That's all I have for my meeting, Terry. Good, thank you. We're on other businesses or anything under other business before we go into executive session? Just one thing real quick in our select board packet was a authorization to sign approved liquor license applications with our names on it. Yes. I assume we need to sign that. Yep, oh, thank you, Jeff. Yeah, there were about three or four documents that we will need some board signatures on, including the rules of transaction, that document and one other. I left them with Terry to save them a trip back into the town hall, but I'll leave those out on top of your mailboxes. And just when you're able to come by, if we get three signatures, we can file those away. Is there any need for those to be done before we would pick up our next select board packets? Let's see what they are. I don't believe so. I think you've made a motion tonight to authorize the town clerk to sign the liquor licenses, so. Yep, okay. If I could check on that at the board line, me too, but I'm not too concerned. If you happen to find out there is, would you just send me or send us an email? Otherwise, I'll forget. And you'll have to send me an email no matter what. Sure. Anything else under other business? If not, then I would entertain a motion, actually two motions to go into executive session to discuss the confidential attorney plant communications. Ted, you muted. Sorry about that. It was really good too. I would make that motion and ask that we, within the motion that we find the premature general public knowledge of confidential attorney client communications made for the purpose of providing professional legal services for the select board would clearly place the select board at a substantial disadvantage. And I would further move that we enter into executive session to discuss confidential attorney client communications under the provision of Vermont statutes annotated section, title one, section 313A1F and invite town manager, Eric Wells and public works director, Bruce Horr to join us. Zero second. I'll second. Any discussion on the motion? All those in favor of the motion, raise your hand. See the animus. So we were going to executive session as soon as we can get ourselves reconnected. All right. I'll send that link in.