 First, before we get started, I just want to remind anybody that make sure that you sign in at the sign-in table. Big turnout tonight, so I just want to make sure we catch everybody's names. And then either during public comment period or we're going through the town meeting budget, just make sure that if you want to be heard, just raise your hand and then state your name for the record Make sure that all of us are there accordingly. So first on the agenda is to approve the agenda. Anybody have any additions to the agenda? That liquor license I gave you. So under, so Lisa, we have the Champlain Farms Liquor License to approve there. We're also going to add a Sanborn license as well. So just gave you the Sanborn license. Yeah, so we'll be doing two licenses instead of ours. Chris? Yes? We're looking to go over on the town meeting. Does that have to be in there in case we're out of the public comment or later on? I think we can just include it either at the beginning of the budget session or at the end, you know, whatever you mean. I think everybody, is that good, everybody? Just a question. Is the Sanborn liquor license also a second class? Does that matter? No, I don't. No, I don't believe in this. No. OK, so is it possible? Anything else to be added or amended? Do we accept the agenda as amended? Second. They are all in favor. Public comment inquiry, if there's anything that's not on the agenda for this evening that anybody would like to bring up, now's the time to do it. Nothing to add? No. We're here and done. We will move on to the budget information portion of the town meeting. I'll just kind of run through. I guess what I'll do first is I'll just kind of give an overview of the budget and how we put it together. And then we'll go through the not each line item, but we'll go through each department. And I'll just kind of go over any, if there are any changes one way or the other, a quick explanation of what those changes might have been. And I'd like to get through all departments before we take questions. And then we can take questions and come back on time for anybody. But sometimes, as we go on, some of the questions get answered in other departments. So we will get started. So again, the idea with the town budget, and we've talked about it the last couple of years, is we recognized a few years back that there were several ticket items in the town that we were struggling with that had been not well cared for in the past. And trying to future budget as well as take care of any of our past skeletons, we tried to formulate some sort of gradual increase rather than a steep curve to take care of some of these. So we've had this idea of about a 3% raise is kind of what we've been looking for here over the last couple of years to get to that section. We believe that we have ample revenue to run the town properly. This spring, it was a little more difficult because we had the spring flood, which everybody saw in the town meeting report. It was in around $1 million of the work that we completed this year, of which there's an e-wrap amount that we have to pay, which is about 12 and 1 half percent of that, as well as we have some FEMA projects that will be carried over for this coming spring and summer that have been in the works that didn't get done last year. So you'll see in this budget, normally when you have an emergency event like that, you have two years to retire your deficit, in this case, to retire the e-wrap percentage you have to come up with. So rather than waiting two years or rather than financing the debt, we decided to pay the debt in the budget this year, knowing that we have more to come for next year. So when we get going, we'll show you what that number is. So quickly, we'll just start off with the revenues. Revenue-wise, the local revenues we projected would be up $39,000 over a year. Over, the majority of the revenue changes come in and around the property tax and the things. We've been kind of the delinquent taxes because we had a huge amount of delinquent taxes in the town. So what we've been trying to do is to budget last revenue each year for the delinquency taxes. But we've also, there's been an average of penalties and interest that we've been collecting off those taxes over the last couple of years. So we have kind of a more stronger three-year type average number. So moving down to delinquent taxes by increasing some of the penalties and interest is a majority of the revenue changes that we have in our budget. So the revenue total, up $39,000, do you have anything you want to add to that, Teresa? Majority of those revenues really don't change a whole lot. We've had some success at the direct area. It's not a large change based on a $2 million budget, but we've budgeted another $2,000 and increased fees for the recreation department next year. But the majority of it was at the tax collection and the things. The getting into the cost and the things, starting off with public works, the biggest change in the public works personnel and the things was we had one individual retire and it's been decided that we're going to carry a seasonal position, but not a full-time position. So I guess instead of saying in and around, we have one half of a position left now. We're carrying a seasonal position to do plowing in the wintertime, which is there's no benefits paid out to that person. And then in the spring, summer, and fall, we'll have a half a person last on the payroll. So that's kind of the main piece there. Town on equipment. We've budgeted a slight increase there, $10,000 in and around. The majority of that is really just on two items. One is repairs. And the second item is just the diesel cost anticipation for this year of increasing. So hired services. So we've changed this a couple of years ago in the budget. We've had roadside mowing and a few others that we were doing hired services. The previous town manager wanted to bring that in-house to do it. Again, we're going to move it from in-house to out-side again. So we budgeted $9,000 for roadside mowing. There's a couple items in here that, again, trying to get into the futuristic end of things of items in the town that have been not as well maintained as the past, like ditching, tree cutting, sweeping. So we're going to bring those back while making some of those as new ones to try to get a ditching program so that we can, every year, we can do either so many miles or certain projects as we found out with the spring flood event. There's a lot of our roads that could use extra ditching or materials for those ditches. So we're bringing back some of that with the hired services. And the material-wise, we had probably peaked our budget with the materials there on last year's budget. A lot of that was kind of based upon the budget cycle that we're going through and the way in which we are applying materials to our roads. So we've changed some things around with the materials. Overall, the materials were down $20,000 from last year's budget. Majority of that is salt. We've decreased the amount of salt that we're using on our roads. But we've also, at the same time, we've increased our sand budget to make up for some of that salt. And then we've increased our gravel budget by $9,000 to get back into a good five-year cycle on doing our gravel roads in town. So those were the main. And you'll see the item in there for the e-rath. So the e-rath, 12.5% piece that we're responsible for this year is $118,000. And save that little piece as we get going on the budget. But $118,000, if that spring event didn't happen, that $118,000 is 6 cents on your tax rate. So that's a big chunk of money. The other public works really not much has changed there. What you will see is based on the schedule of payments for a certain piece of equipment, the Highway Trust Fund will still have its allotted money. But there are no payments for two of those pieces of equipment for this coming budget. And that was kind of included into the capital plan of replacements. But we'll, in this current budget, we'll be working on probably be getting a new truck. We don't know yet. But we'll hope in the equipment committee is going to be the first week in March and sort out some stuff. So even though there's no payments in our overall capital equipment fund, in order to keep our equipment fund whole over the course of what was the average on that was the eight-year replacements of those trucks? Yeah, but because they bought two in one year, that's kind of goofed us up. So we're going to have the committee meet the first week of March and say, this is what we have. This is what's wrong with every piece of equipment. This is the age of so much money we have. So what are we going to do? And so I've had some ongoing conversations with some of the members and hopefully we'll sort that out and have a better, more definitive equipment schedule in the future time on board. There was also some added work for the cemeteries. We have some fence repair to do with the Fairview Cemetery, as well as some wall repair to do with Cherry Hill Cemetery. And what Cherry Hill one has been kind of ongoing for some time now. So we have a lot of money in there to do those repairs. So that's the end of the public works. Fire department-wise, not really a whole lot of changes in the fire department over the last year. The same with the Constable's department, kind of slight changes in the Constable's department, one we added some uniform money. Not really much change there. The recreation department budgeted a little bit more for some wages. You'll see that the wages, the wage increase is pretty much offset by the added revenue increase. Parks and public places, some things are moved around a little bit here. We moved some wages. We moved some extra wages to the Parks and Public Places that comes out of the PW budget. Yeah, just try to do a better allocation of actual hours worked versus, and try to shift a little bit to make sure it makes sense, that the hours being allocated for parks was accurate as was public works, as was water. So we're able to tweak that a little bit this year. And the other thing that we added here was increase the budget for the landscaping. There was, so the landscaping throughout the town, especially the garden down at the three-way intersection for many years has been mostly volunteer, donated. And it was, that last year, there really wasn't a whole lot that was done. But we do have some citizens in the town that are willing to help with some donation time. So they've done a smaller match to the money that we put in here. But we budgeted up $2,500 to kind of maintain the green spaces that we have throughout the town. It won't be 100% funded by the town, but it'll be a larger percentage funded by the town that had been in the past. That was the biggest change there. Municipal office, you'll see that for the most part, we'll say it's one less person in the office. It's probably, you know, if we were at the school system, it's probably like a 0.6 or something like that. But we're, so we have one position that we didn't hire back, but then Detroit has kind of a modified position from WREC and doing some finance and stuff in the mix law office. So instead of hiring a full-time person, that we were able to kind of keep someone busy that we have locally. So that's most of the changes there. Of course, anytime there's one less person, there's one less person to pay for health care and all the other trickle-down pieces. Town halls, you know, slight decrease from last year. Some of that's just really, last year we did the steeple repair kind of officials. We were going to vote in on an increase of money there for all of us, but we decided okay. You decided we didn't. So that basically is flat out a new increase, I think was the fight for money or something. The Listers, you'll see the Listers is up for something. The Listers is up percentage-wise. It says 47%, but it's really at $10,000. The reason behind that is so we have, we currently have three Listers. And up until doing the budget here, two of the three Listers, one's new and the other two would like to. One already resigned. One resigned and the other one wanted to resign, but has now decided to stay on at least temporarily. So we put some money aside in there in case we have to have any type of auditor services externally to cover potentially not having three Listers. So there's been some money that's been set aside on that just in case we need it. The government operations haven't changed a whole lot other than we added a little bit extra to the auditing services because now that we had the eRAF money, there'll be extra audited pieces that we'll have to pay for. I believe that we might get reimbursed some of that through FEMA maybe, but you know, when you take on a million dollars with the FEMA accounting, then it's a little extra audit. Yeah, it's like $5,000 more. I'm not sure this number is quite covered, but I have been talking to FEMA and federal highways to see if we can get a single audit that we're going to be required to have paid for, but I'm not sure. In the past, we've never changed, like when we had the large Irene event years ago, I was looking back and there was never any audited changes. Even though we found out years down the road that it cost us three times the amount to audit, I can't remember how much money we had for that period, but it takes a lot longer. The other piece is we added $5,000 of capital improvement reserve fund, of which some of that money will be used right now into doing some engineering, exploring at the current town highway department to see, you know, can we build something there or not. That's going to be one of the bigger ticket items that we'll be carrying over for this year and I think that will be the public works building and what we're going to do with that. This is kind of the first phase of doing some exploration over there, hire a little engineering to see can we build something in the same footprint or how big of a footprint can we build? Do we have the news over there? Can you do a soil, produce some soil warnings and see what we got? Appropriations, human services slight increase, other than those, the White River Valley ambulance has gone down from last year. It's kind of tricky with their budget because ours is on, you know, ours is on July 1 to June 30 and theirs is on a January to December. So we've had some years where we did quite budget enough and they did catch their increases and we've had some years where we've budgeted much. So this time, Teresa was able to get a little better picture of what their true increase would not be. So it looks like we'll have a little savings there and then everything else is pretty much even. So then, just kind of for anybody that hasn't added it all up, the net revenue increase from the first part of the budget is $39,000. The net cost increase of the budget is $94,544. So once you offset the revenue with the cost, it's a net increase of $55,544 in this budget. And a couple of things I just want to point out, based on the budget as it is right now, it's a $55,544 net increase. That's 2.8 cents on the tax rate. But you also have to understand that of that, $118,000 of ERAP responsibilities has been paid for in this budget. So I guess you could look at it, if the spring flood didn't happen, which is about six cents, then could the budget have been three cents lighter? Type of deal. So the tricky thing was one, trying to be responsible for our ERAP obligations without having to retire into some sort of long-term debt and try to keep going forward with futuristic projects for the town, try not to lose the momentum that we have in the town and try to keep it as affordable as possible as possible as kind of the thinking behind the budget. So there will be more ERAP next year, because the ERAP that this wasn't calculated on would be the final Penelabridge. The Keyvine slide. So those are some pending items, just with the RFP out today for the hydraulic studies. So there will be some more of the 12.5% on other stuff that we haven't included in that number yet. We don't anticipate it to be as high as it was this year. It still depends on that final bridge, doesn't it? No, our hope is certainly not. Does anybody on the board have anything to add to the budget at this time for any questions that people may have? Okay, do you have any questions? I have a question about that. I will keep it until we talk about the skateboard part. Okay, yes. I have some comments and questions on the budget. Okay. I'd like to start with, do you sort of go together, works personnel, town building equipment, and hired services for equipment? Hired services for about $62,300. And I try to subtract some of the cost out if you subtract out some savings and wages, health insurance, that brings it down, but then under town building equipment, you're adding back in for telephone, gas, oil and grease, and diesel. If we're wanting to subcontract some of this work out, aren't these people using their own equipment and why would we have an increase in diesel and so forth? So I estimated the increase in diesel only because it seemed like our bills were getting higher, so I didn't take into consideration that you're right about the fact that we were going to put out roadside mowing and that. So that's a good point. I didn't think about that when I was coming up with that. I just seen some things about the cost of diesel, possibly increasing, and there's always this hesitation there. And so I know obviously the good thing about diesel is that's where the fire department gets their fuel from us, so does the constable, which is gas, but we billed them back for that. So I figured if I was a little bit high, then I was a little bit high, but I didn't take any out pollution, so I didn't think about that when we're putting hired services out. We also got to think, when we're doing the budget too, and a couple months behind. 18 months out, yeah. So when we started putting this budget together in September, October, we had the embassy in Iraq just got attacked, and we saw a little bit of fluctuation at the pumps here, and we had to build the budget at that point to go to print. So I think there's some opportunity there as long as something doesn't happen in the world economy. Seems like right now because of the coronavirus and everything else that's going around, that's going to push some of those commodities down for a while, but when we built this budget, that wasn't really known at that point, so there could be some opportunities there. And the access for hired services was attracting some of those savings. It looks to me like it's still going to cost us about $29,000 or more. Well, one of the things in here is, so obviously we're outsourcing the roadside mowing. That was a big bone and contention last year. People were really unhappy. We had borrowed the roadside mower, so we could have another town to allow us to use. But with that came some caveats. You can only make one pass. There was only certain things you couldn't do. And by not replacing someone full-time, that means that ties up two people for a month, almost three weeks to a month, so it kind of makes it a little less efficient. So there was that. The other thing is there is one project in hired services, so you can see that it got increased from 1,000 to 20,000 on some contract work. That's going to be a one-shot deal, which is going to be this year. So that is not an item on the hired services that's going to continue to feed that high. The other thing we had in there, too, was livery stable and Avon storm drains. That's $15,000. So what we had tried to do was, because we were doing the big road project, was this 2.8 million that we're going to do for the water line. We were trying to build in the Avon and livery stable storm drains, try to take advantage of the fact, we were mobilized and things like that, but the cost was too high. So in this case, it was actually 10 mills who came up with it. It was a good idea. He said, look, why don't we pay for the engineering of those projects? We couldn't do the construction because it was another couple hundred thousand dollars. But every once in a while there's grant money to rivers that applied for something. It didn't pan out, but they might be able to get it in another couple of years or let me know about it. So we're thinking if we could get it engineered, then we would have a shovel ready project. So when that grant money became available again, we could do those things. So that's also a one shot deal in here too, is to try to get those in there. But we looked at it, we had it on the budget discussions. We talked about it several times, about trying to figure out how we could come up with the money to pay for the storm drains additions while the roads were open. It was a big knot on top of the e-wrap. So that's why we didn't. So there's $35,000 there of one-time projects for just this coming season. How often do you build about seven months or twice? Once. Yeah. And again, like Theresa said, it was really nice of one of our neighbors to allow us to use the piece of equipment. But it also came with strings of, we felt that we couldn't do the proper mowing that we would like to do. We also had to do it in the non-favorable time. And the work that was done, not really because of a work crew, but just because of only being able to do one pass. It was kind of not done as formal as we'd like it to be done. And then as going away and taking that one person back out of public works for the summer, it's going to be one less person to do work. So it just made sense to hire that back out again. The other thing we did in here too was add ditching, which we really was adding ditching, contracting it out. It's a bigger machine and they can go out and then we can bid it by the foot. It's just going to be easier. We did look at the option of leasing a machine, but by the time we leave the machine, get one of our guys used to using it. We're kind of a little bit losing some of the progress we could make. So, and especially after the flooding and there's still as anybody, I can see Joe Russo over there knows we need some more ditching work done. So by putting it out and bidding it out by the foot, I think it's something that's going to gain us some momentum in the town at least first early on the road. Well, I've often thought it would be a good idea to look into subcontracting some of this stuff. Yeah. So I'm not against it, but as long as it doesn't end up costing us more to register for a semester, we're going to tend this this year. Yeah. Plus two, it's always good for us because it transfers the liability. So it's, you know, as you know. Under materials that ERAF Yeah. If we amortized that for three years, we would have practically no increase in taxes. Right. But we have to pay it within two. Oh, we have to pay it within two. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Because it's FEMA. Yeah. We've got to eat it within. We have to pay within two. Just like that final Canelo Bridge, we have to have it done within two years or they won't give us reimburses for the temporary bridge or the final bridge. So there is a timeframe there. So, yeah. And then you would also, you know, take on some interest that would be a part of that as well. Yeah. And the interest is, I know. Well, they're creeping up. I mean, they're not. It is. It's just, you know, it always gets me losing. We're still holding that, that $1.4 million, you know, and so it always. And we, and we did, you know, and the board, we did talk about it several times on the different versions of the budget on the budget on, you know, do we, do we just retire it? Do we take a chance and put it out for two years? Right. But knowing that we were going to have another ERAF piece coming this year, that we felt that it was most responsible for us to retire it this year, well, we could rather than take on a payment for this coming year. And then having another one that we would, you know, maybe have to take on a payment. Plus we got, you know, the water bond coming. So, you know, we got, we'll be an increase in water services. So we're just trying to be as most responsible as we could with retiring the debt. Because we also had to take, we borrowed money, we had to do a line of credit to keep us so we could pay the contractor. So I have like a five, just, I have right now, I think it's $5,000, probably seven by the time we pay an interest on a line of credit that we needed to use to get the FEMA work done. And so it's a, you know, it's one of those things. I mean, I will say that, you know, to Theresa's credit that, you know, it was, the spring flood event was smaller than it was Irene. However, it was managed a lot better than it, you know, than the town prior to, you know, we already received the money for the Federal Highway piece, which was the, the Camp Road that was all done through Federal Highway. So that was 100% funded. And then, you know, Theresa's done a good job of putting together all the other work that comes under the FEMA umbrella. You know, I mean, I think we all saw, when we had Irene there, there was, you know, we retired a very large debt there a couple years ago because of, you know, how that was managed. And I would say right now that we feel very confident on one, that all the projects have been put to bed. We know that payment is coming and we have our finger on the pulse. And at this point we're just trying to be responsible and take care of the debt that we do have. Yeah, we've met with the FEMA first and every week. Chris and I did some more final work and she's putting finishing touches on our last project to be submitted. The only money we've got back so far was Federal Highways. We did get back some on the debris removal on the line of the bridge. But so, and plus we have an agreement with Mascoma because they were unhappy about the Irene situation that when we borrowed money as a line of credit this time as soon as we get money back, we pay them. So I just made, you know, we just made a large principal payment because we've got the Federal Highways money back and then that bridge debris removal so we gave that money right to them, right back. So trying to, you know, so I just, we just made a large chunk. We drew 750,000 and we just made a $100,000 a month payment to the principal. So trying to be responsible about keeping that counter-raps. I have another comment on government operations. I was going to listen, it didn't seem to add up right. So I had three times gone through the line items for this particular budget. And I come up with $125,925 instead of $140,425. All right, I'll have to, I don't have my original spreadsheet. What's your number, Lucian? One what? I come up with $125,925. All right, I'll look at my, I have the original spreadsheet on my computer. I'll have to look. That's for government operations. Yeah. Okay. So I don't know unless I had a formula wrong or something's hidden that I don't see here. So I will look, but thank you because we can make that correction. And then the next one, appropriations which is local cleaning services and the ambulance. I come up with $161,838. All right. Not $164,933. Okay. I'll look there too. I don't know. I mean, I'm using Excel. So I don't know if I added something, but thank you. So that would be a nice savings of $17,000. Yes. And I went over it three times. Well, I'm sure you did. That's good. Well, I'm glad someone's doing it because... What was that number again Lucian? $161,838. So I can look and see because I noticed something earlier a portion of the guy giving the number was there because the correction was gone. So I will look and see, but that's... Thank you. Hopefully I don't find anything in there and your number's good. Hopefully I'm right. I hope so Lucian. And I have one who will have to leave and that'll be done. Under the Recreation Facility Improvement Fund we keep putting money into that fund year after year after year. It never gets spent. It just sits there the entire of taking our money and putting it in that slush fund and then it just sits there. Plus I think there's a mistake for 2020-21 on page 54 you'll have annual appropriation to $15,000 but in the Recreation Budget I think it's everything. And I wish we would just stop rushing money into that slush fund until they start to spend it. And I think the board at some point put a cap on how much they could spend on the skateboard part with $50,000. Yeah. So now they haven't spent that yet and if a different $10,000 appropriation this year they'll have a $129,000. Well sitting there. You're after year after year. So we are working with them to move forward with the master plan there. So as we all know that there is a master plan for the entire recreation site. And some pieces have gone forward with it and then the skateboard part has kind of been stalled. There has been directive and we're going to be meeting with them right after this piece this evening. So out of that money right now we have to keep funding it because as soon as the skateboard part goes through or doesn't go through we do have there's basketball and tennis and there are other pieces to that plan that we need to, again, we're trying to keep the bell curve of funding because we wouldn't want to just cut it off and say no funding this year and then ask for $20,000 next year, double it or something to get to the whatever basketball court, tennis court, whatever is going to go in there. Once this money goes in, of that $120,000 in the fund, $50,000 of it is earmarked for the skateboard part. So they do have a budget, not to exceed. So there's not another line item in the whole budget that's treated this way. The line item in the budget is an estimated expenditure for this coming year and that's the only thing that's not treated that way and I just don't think it's relevant. Well, I mean, our goal is to motivate the Recreation Committee to move a shovel ready project forward if that's the skateboard, park or something else. Because as we all know there's more than just that there. There are other projects to do there as well as last year some of the trail systems were done. And then just to touch base on, there was a difference between $10,000 in the budget and $15,000 I think that was put into the fund page. Oh, I can see it, yeah, he's right. But that was the difference of the funding in the trails or not, remember? No, no, what he's saying is it was my mistake. When we got the number from the Rec fund I changed it in the budget and in the other line, but I didn't go back and change it in that movement. But I think there's some of that money in there like for example, this like we're giving $50,000 for the skate park but they had over 7,000 of that as donations that they had raised or there's a grant and things like that. So some of the money in that overall fund is donations that they've raised specifically for that project or donations that were raised specifically for the skate park or for the trails or so. But yeah, there's quite a bit of money sitting in there, you're right. My question that I was going to bring is to that effect that he's asking. What's the question? My question that I mentioned is what is a question on the county budget and it relates to his question. Can I ask that? Well, we were going to talk about the recreation of peace after. So it's related to his question. And the tough thing with these capital funds if that's either buildings or if it's recreation or if it's equipment because we have all those other future planning funds is the idea of those funds is to not get us into the short term thinking of, okay, we don't need anything this year but then we need $40,000 next year and have those peaks and valleys so we're trying to do that bell curve. So the right idea is to continue to fund the recreation department the way we have been doing it but we do need to get some projects out and done and we do understand and we are working on that. But we also did talk about funding it or not funding it this year. We decided to continue to fund it the way we have so that the other projects wouldn't get delayed. Decision there. Anything else budget-wise? Is there anything going into the recovery fund this year? Is it under-listed? I can't remember where it is. We did last year, I wonder if I even did that. I can't remember where it was last year. You know what? Last year, how do we do it last year? Let me find it. I can't remember. I don't remember where we did last year because we... I remember going on it and funding it in the town warning and then I don't remember when we put it under-listed. I don't see it in the list. But I would have had to put a number in there the last year. I don't see it either. What I don't see is even the description under the name which is odd because there should be a... I know one discussion we did have in regards to the... Under government operations, maybe that's why government operations is wrong. I wonder if it's under there. I don't know if the line got hit but the numbers still add in. We definitely discussed it. Yeah. At one point, we actually... Yeah, we were talking about not doing it. We also talked about increasing it. Yeah, but then we didn't. I thought of it. So maybe we didn't put money in it. I will have to go back and look at my notes but that's a good question. Rick, because we did talk about funding and then we talked about not funding it because we were so close to have to have in one that we were going to have to come up with money anyway. So I have to look because I don't see it here. So I'll look. Yeah, we did have a discussion because we are... I feel like we said it weren't going to fund it because we were so close that it wasn't really where it put the money in. Right now we're within... Realistically, two years of doing this and the reappraisal fund didn't even start... Well, there's always kind of a money from the state that comes in but the town had never set aside any local money until last year and we started off with $5,000. Last year was kind of a tight budget as well. But right now we're looking at... We probably need $80,000 to $100,000 in matching funds for that reappraisal and adding another $5,000 this year is not going to get us close. I know we talked about that. I feel like we took it out that we didn't do it because we were going to... I think with some of the other products that we ended up moving forward to fund it for $5,000 this year really isn't going to get you very far ahead because at this point we're just going to end up probably having to add half of it next year. Well, what we figured is we have enough money to start so if you got put on a two-year contract to your cycle, we have money saved so we could start making those payments and then we'd have to move into it that way because we weren't going to have enough and that's looming. I think that they decided not to fund it but I would go for it. And that looks like one of those that going forward because you do a town-wide appraisal of all should was every 12 years or something like that. So I think going forward if the town's piece of it is let's say $100,000 we got to work on a $10,000 a year re-appraisal money that goes into a fund and this time around we were on the back end of this that you're never going to catch up. I think it was good to start the fund because those are the things we're trying to to limit are those sudden increases in the budget but I think this one's going to be one that we're not going to be able to avoid unfortunately. Yeah, because it's already hands in here listed but we have $148,647 in there now so yeah, I think that was the case that you decided not to fund it but I'll double check. Any other budget information? Feel free to throw it out there. I'm going to go excuse me I don't know if this will be in the budget not before it's the call works and stuff we got down for $10,000 for the call works now is that going to be individually purchased as needed or we're going to purchase the call works all at one time is that $10,000 I'm not sure I'm sure you probably will do that I mean the Bethel Mills is good they honor the state pricing the state contract we get the state contract price from Bethel Mills just how many we buy I know there's a couple places that we have noted that need to be replaced so I think yeah, he's probably going to buy them as he needs them because if he bought them in Baltimore he didn't have the right size I think it'd be a problem but since Bethel Mills honors the state contract pricing I'm not sure there'd be any savings if we bought a bunch up front we used to have some codes that definitely need to be replaced that hasn't been replaced in three to four years for about oh yeah at least if you're right there's a bunch, there absolutely is I was looking at the if you go online you can go to BT Culverts and it has our whole Culver Inventory because now that Chris and I have gone through and done all the FEMA stuff I'm going to go in and update so you can see what's there I'm glad that we didn't even realize that we had that we're found and so plugged so definitely the push this year is to yes, replace some culverts for sure and to get all the culverts cleaned out the water's flowing the way it needs to so I know we have a couple on a list that we're going to be updated and also on the contractors that we plan to bid on stuff for indigenous stuff now we're not going to use those contractors that we have done this before we're not going to use those contractors to install culverts if we need although they may be working on that they have to replace those culverts because I was told one before that one of the contractors to replace the culverts just as much for them to do it as we would do the idea at this point is to do the hired services for equipment that we don't currently have so it really would be the ditching into things I don't want to say no that they wouldn't put a culvert in if it made sense if they were ditching here and there was a culvert there and it just made sense to put it in but the intent is to keep those separate that we would do the culverts in-house for the most part and then we would just take advantage of them having an excavator to do ditching more efficiently than we can and I got this is the one returning on the P-vine it's just as you come out of I think it's the Ford's place and you go down straight down then there's this metal culvert that got to the boroughs and stuff too there do we have a plan right across from that? Yeah right across from the fish action is that culvert do we have to replace that culvert or are we waiting on something from FEMA still Is that the culvert that had like the granite curbing that was out there so yeah that culvert isn't going to be replaced because when they came out and looked at it they said there was nothing wrong with the culvert all that's said was we just need to put some more stone there for the outfall and there's already they picked it up where there was some granite granite curbing for a lot of a better description there so we're not going to replace that culvert they said it was fine we just need to put some more outfall some more stone to break the outfall when it comes out so if the other side needs to be ditched a little we could take care of that in house but that's what I was told is that the culvert was fine no need in that if anything they just need to put some more stone there for the river but if you find some culverts let me know that you know they think that need to be replaced let me know and I'll happily put them on the list it's a challenging area because that bank keeps getting eroded it can be done but like saying we don't have that equipment to replace it so I know it's a difficult task to do but I'm just kind of confused because it's been a growing demand for a couple years now yeah no you're right because I've taken the FEMA people over there to look at it and so that was the and then again you know the idea on the $20,000 of ditching how we came up with that money is we we went with the mileage of roads that we have and said if we were going to do the ditching every seven to eight years how much money you know how many miles a year could we do and back that into some sort of calculation with say $125 an hour escalator you know but that doesn't mean that we have to do everything linear it doesn't you know if we have something that needs to be taken care of with some stone or something that we could grab that out of this higher fees you know if someone's going to do some ditching up the river road and then maybe put in a load of stone you know we have that money where in the past it ended up being a non-line item item that runs over that you have to make up somewhere else so we're just trying to make sure that we have some areas of that for the budget areas in there that we added was culvert or not culvert was guard rail because we didn't really have a separate line item for guard rail and so we did put money in there and since then I have spoken with someone at the state and they're actually there where we might be able to get some used guard rail and gave us a better contract place so my hope is we don't end up spending all that but I found that out after we got the budget going so so we found a couple in rows where we might be able to have some savings too so because you mentioned some of this work out we don't have to buy the equipment I mean I guess a roadside mower is one of them so I think excuse me we don't have to buy by subcontracting the same one of them is the roadside mower one of them is the bigger excavator because that was one of the things about ditching was getting a bigger machine so that prevents us from having to buy that too so that kind of makes it nicer and this would be areas that we would have to use a big machine I would say half of probably the roads in the town we can just do a greater ditch and we'll continue to do those with our own machine but there are areas on the side of the hill that we need to actually ditch with an excavator it may have to put a little bit of stone in it or something else and that's kind of what that item is intended for and that's what the group continue to do if they have to cut some greater ditches here we'll continue to do those ourselves if you haven't been on Camp Bell Road you know go up in the summer over to Camp Bell Road that's a good example of something where we ended up contracting out after the April flood because they lost a big portion of their road and we ended up putting in a bigger ditch deeper ditch and then stone lining it so that because in places up there we're carrying the water for so long so things like that definitely need a little bigger machine and on Christian Hill Road we had a subcontractor do that and we did a good job and we're looking at that too which is actually some delusion here Chris and I have been talking about that as far as I mentioned that to you the other day during the office was about Christian Hill and we know we need to do some paving but we know we have some water issues further up the hill and then I had talked to you about talking that we wanted to talk to the quarry but you had mentioned something on that road that they were willing to do oh okay I call it the slot as you go Christian Hill Road and then turn on Sanders Road and you go out and and and there's a very steep, very narrow winding place just before you get to I expected is it quarry? frozen roads yeah and I talked to the manager a couple of months ago they're still willing to come and do the drilling and blasting of the ledge that would be necessary to widen that part of the road so it's not so dangerous now which where is that what part? Wilson Road I couldn't hear what you said the intersection of Sanders Road at the top of this what I call the slot that's so narrow and trees I can get you the name and the number of people because they want to make yeah and that's what we were talking about Chris and I were talking about too was the fact that we're doing some of Christian Hill and we know we have water issues and we know we're going to keep repaving that we've got to deal with some of it and part of us too reaching out to them and we know where they want and we kind of partner in places on there and then I forgot Wilson had mentioned that yeah he told me that a number of years ago they helped with Sanders Road down further actually it was just up from Oldson Road with the flat part there it's kind of marshy they said they helped by putting in some matting under the road so it might be worth getting them together and kind of sitting down with them maybe and Chris and I there are some trees that would have to be cut on top of this ledge but the road is so narrow that the road right away might take it there are some trees and all you have to do is cut them so no we need to partner with them I think if we're going to redo part of Christian Hill instead of continuing to throw good money after bat we've got some issues with water and kind of deal with the whole thing and maybe them too and they want it fixed too cause it's dangerous for the trucks oh that's great so yeah let me know I have a name up there too maybe it's the same guy I'm not sure I can't think of his name on the top of my head yeah well maybe good so I thought that was my allusion had mentioned that so it was great that allusion had reached out to them so that might be an opportunity for us to deal with a couple of issues on that road alright anything else budget wise I'll get you this from them okay thank you I have a question on the culverts they're going to be just for our road not driveway culverts right yeah just for our roads yeah cause I know you talked about cleaning some certain driveway culverts and I didn't think that the town did that we'll continue to clean culverts but we won't purchase culverts for driving that's going to be one of the pushes to get I made sure we put some money in the budget to get the rest of them done if I can see about pipeline or somebody to come in and get the rest of all the driveway culverts everybody's culverts open cause as we talked about if their culverts fail our culverts fail so yes by the policy that the slept ward had adopted a bunch of years ago to the responsibility of homeowners but if we weren't maintaining theirs there's we're getting plugged so we need to get them all open so the water flow and remind everybody it's easier for them to come in and clean the edges out with a shovel than it is for them to pay to have them lost I never were to mention it but it would help me oh my god yeah it's been tough so definitely something we need to do is for all of our sakes to get them open and flushed out well remember there's a fair amount of items in the town that require attention that maybe haven't gotten the attention over time and we can't write the ship overnight so we're trying to prioritize those and hopefully everybody sees that we each year we are increasing of what we're doing and try to be conservative with the budget at the same time so and you look at things like that's why we throw in something like guard railing nobody really realizes until you're out there on all the roads I know all the roads now but there's a lot of guard rail out there that is flat or not as safe as it should be and it's an item that we've never thought about doing unless something happened and someone took out the guard rail and then it had to be fixed so there's a lot of those things that never have been budgeted in the past that we should have some sort of budget in there to be able to do if it needs to be time Cecil had his hand up yes when are they going to do something with those driveways up on Canberra so the water don't run off the hill and freeze every winter there's three of them up there Canberra Cape Deep Griffins the Upper Comstock Road and Pellegrinos every time you're getting rain it comes right down into the road freezes across the blackout then they've got to put the saw well I'll tell you they're not the only ones when we were out this summer after April there's a lot of driveways that you're right they're not crowned they're not ditched and so I think we're going to have to notify a lot of homeowners because they probably were given once upon a time a driveway or curb cut and if never you're right they used to be a ditch right from the driveway coming off the hill right down where it's mailboxes now there's no ditch there and the water comes out into the road it's filled in it's the same up there what's it name it's the other end of Cape Comstock Road so yeah so now the water runs right down into the road every time it rains or thaws freezes in the road don't be an accident there one of these people drive on the other side of the road coming up through to get away from it especially there up the Comstock Road Bob Bath's road whatever you want to call it never bothered until Bob Bath built the road up there alright I'll make a note and there's no COVID across there no morning rules to have the cases so we can there is one COVID coming off that road it's to come off the old Comstock if you go to your right coming out the driveway there is a COVID there so it's a lot of jam right? no if you come out the driveway that it doesn't blow it no this is one of the Bob Bath's built the one that goes up a hill that comes down there is a COVID that comes right you come out and you make a right there's a COVID there that leads off into the one that runs off into the white's driveway see anything like that Cecil feel free to reach out the trees or yourself or any of the board members tell me the names and all like we said there are quite a bit of spots out there that could be done we're not going to get them all one day but we'll make a list yes come over to Gage Hill we got plenty of water running down over over these guffles we only got about that much road that's actually a guffle we could do some love I was actually out there because isn't that where the assistant town clerk Mrs. Marge Turner yes she don't either because Marge called once and I went over and you literally believe that it's bad if Marge Turner calls you you better pay attention I went over I did not I went over that day as a matter of fact shortly after she called and you could see it and actually talk to the road foreman about it so I'll mention it to him again because yeah because it's further off it's not raining correctly you're exactly right so I'll remind Alan don't you take the room off of my lawn I barely got in there it is there you go so yeah I'll mention it to Alan because I did I went over after Marge called last year and it was eating around her driveway but yeah I'll have the Alan so thank you I'll say it was kind of eye-opening I went around and managed a lot of the FEMA gravel road jobs this summer to see where we had water typically on certain roads that just daylighted into the road there was it just and they wanted to put it back that way in some cases we mitigated it and a couple of the roads we put in some extra culverts to be able to get the water to flow in the right directions because up in Saunders Road for instance the water that used to come down from the quarry just daylighted into the road it didn't go anywhere at that point we had to put in a drive culvert and some ditching to get it down the road so it could daylight into one of the wetlands there and that's what I would say is pretty common in a lot of roads and you wouldn't think until you've kind of driven all these roads or like Campbell every two to 300 feet you should have a culvert on a road that size so that it can get the water off and the culverts up there are every thousand feet so there's a lot of water that's got to go before it can hit a culvert but those are there's a lot of learning this summer and we were able to fix some of it and other pieces we have on our list to do coming so and Cecil's right there's definitely a list of people that we saw that were going to have to go back out and mail in letters and be like look they haven't crowned their roads they haven't ditched their roads all that water is coming and that was part of the problem in April the storm was coupled and there's some driveways that are big that are they're coming in and they're plugging our culverts because their driveway isn't crowned and we're eating it so we're definitely going to have to deal with that as well this summer too so anything else budget wise alright thank you yep yeah hold on we're going to finish up with Rick just some of the some of the town meeting day formalities just to make sure we're on the same page in a comfortable situation just wanted to go through and make sure that both Paul and Lindley if you guys are assuming are going to be running again to have somebody ready to nominate and I don't know if you caught it or not but there was a typo in this morning he has probably the correct so Lindley's piece is two year yeah just in case you didn't have a corrected version yeah she's not on number five it's a two year term which is right it's worn correctly worn correctly but the copies that went into the book were incorrect so she's a two year yeah it does say three I meant the one that was actually the one that was actually worn that went like posted in five places around town two years and the one that when the paper says two years but yeah it was a mistake in the past town meeting in the town of course we were trying to correct both things and I'm not sure too about the listeners who's running for what I don't know Judy are you going to run for Louise's three year seat and then she's going to run for the one year to finish out okay that's what I thought okay so where anyone to run for the purpose Louise I spoke to her tonight she's making a phone call to someone to see if he's interested but she doesn't know yet so if she finds out I'll have her tell you about that and that may be a situation where no one runs in the select board a point later here she has someone in the I'm sure we will not make it is that something that somebody can nominate from the floor of town they can but someone who wants to be wherever it's nominated they want to realize what they're doing getting it it's true that's what it's all about well we did have that two years ago we had an individual that was nominated and that wasn't there remember and that's what I'm talking about um that was a little blisters I've talked to Jason he's okay I haven't talked to Stan yet okay well I think they said back no saying they would do it that's right I had Kelly do it in advance of town so that you weren't Sam back I haven't talked to I think so we have to double check with Kelly and as far as talking on these various I'm assuming for article 12 yeah I'll talk about that with page 48 there corrected article 13 Kelly is printing them and they're going to be on all the chairs on the town meeting and also does anyone is anyone putting on speaking to that if you did it in the past yes I'll speak to that because I think there is something that needs to be made in an error we can see 13 that cut off for some reason no but there was an appropriation oh well the central of my council on aging we assume that they're going to stand up and request twice that so but they are planning on having some there and I think it might be Carol Ketchum who's going to stand up and speak and to double increase their appropriation to 650 to 13 I talked to Carol the other day you told me you wouldn't they're probably looking for somebody they probably will send somebody or just speak on if not the select board could do it you guys could make a motion I mean they should have I know she's trying when I called her she said she's trying try to make it important to have somebody come and speak to I'm assuming they'll be represented there do you know if anyone is speaking regarding middle yeah brick right brick right he said he would be there even though three of the four are on Sundays somebody will pick that somebody will figure that out that's fine it's just hard because you change them everybody if you can't have 150 it gets goofed up we give people extra time and 17 is that non-binding referendum you talked about right so I'm sure there'll be questions on that do you want to talk to that prior to or just answer questions as they come up well I think we should have somebody from either the board or from the town office that should speak in regards to the ordinance not just what's in the ordinance but also the formality of how that would be enacted if it you know I think it's simple it's an informational vote and then based upon the results there then the select board will take it up or not take it up I think one of the select board members should be prepared to speak on it but we can it's going to be the select board the select board has agreed they will do what the voters ask if they want they'll pass if they say they don't that's really the way they've left it we'll get somebody to do it if nobody wants to then I can do it I wonder if we should have more copies of it yeah there's some on the website too but I will that's true I'll have Kelly make more copies I'll make a note does anybody on the board want to present the ordinance or I don't see the heads going up and down I can if you don't want to I can if you don't want to but Kelly print extra copies trash trash I mean I have no problem doing it between Teresa and I we'll get done we'll take care of that and as far as other business I don't know if you anything that brought to you was the concern I haven't heard anything like last year we had a couple of things that were out there that never came to fruition but I haven't heard anything this year is anybody else on the board actually that's not true I did I did someone that I read I don't remember where is it the possibility that somebody might come about they talk about want to talk about the free table but that would not be relevant here because it's not a that's a different board so even under that it's not appropriate town meeting because that would have to go from the Bethel Royals and transfer station board but I have heard that possibility I guess the most important question was will you be running for the elevator position again because is there a reason why you're skipping over that or I guess you tell I asked what I'd ask yes this year anyway yeah alright thank you very much I think we have everything all our ducks in the row for I think so yeah Kelly has been putting out put out a note for pies and then but really as I've said before it's a town moderators meeting and I did ask Kelly to get a hold of a seven-starter yeah so I did and he's all set so thank you for asking I think everything's all set I know you're going to have kind of a crazy day because you also have your presidential primary that's one thing I wanted to mention just in passing I had questions folks came to me over the weekend there were going to be three things going on at the same time that day you have the presidential primary you have the voting for the school directors and that would be happening out in the elementary school lobby all day long and then the town meeting itself right Pam is really the one that's going to have her hands full right she's going to have to jump right in and help out Friday Monday nights school meeting Monday night Tuesday all day is voting Tuesday but it's in Bethel thank you that's right yes when you were talking about the skateboard can I say something before you start talking about it or are you going to be here for a little better well I'm going to be here but I'd like to say what I've said before to start discussing what I'd like to do is recognize the when we get to it recognize the recreation committee just to kind of go over where we left off last time then we can get some if that works for you okay so look no no I understand that and I got you so we'll when we get to it so we'll move on to the recreation committee and it will just kind of where we left off last time was okay okay I just want to clarify we did last last select board meeting because you and we've all agreed that the voters gave us 50,000 and that's what we've been working with and then anything about that is the grants and the fundraisers that we've been doing right so what my confusion is is how I got the 57,000 total funds over 57,000 is by taking the fundraising and the expenses for the fundraising and the design from the Spon Ranch for 3,000 this is the 50,000 that you've guaranteed us this is the grants that we've gotten and this is the total from the expenses and fundraisers right we matched do you want to agree on that but my confusion is what page page 54 because you said we don't get any improvement for this project that we've come on 54 in the year 1819 you've listed out of the improvement fund 3,000 for the skateboard part design yeah that was what we paid Spon Ranch yes but it shouldn't have been fundraising because you're saying here it's a confusion that you're saying you're taking out the improvement fund how are you giving us any improvement fund oh well this recreation is all the money this is the same part the trails the swings out of the improvement fund that's confusing oh well I guess it was just a term I meant because all your money went into the improvement fund even your donation so I was just trying to be clear when I took the 3,000 you could see so much well because if you're not giving us letting us take the 3,000 out of the improvement if you're allowing us to take the 3,000 out of the improvement then we could be having 60,000 instead of 57 oh well I separated out the skate part specifically for the skate part so that's how you got 57 instead of 60 is because you already spent 3 yeah so I try to break out your expenses but it's not very clear here if it's in the improvement fund because we're thinking you're giving us improvement fund well it's it's not under fund raising right well I mean I would have had to do this huge breakdown as to every expense it did come out of this I just wanted to not be confused well you're stuck at the 57,000 yeah I get what you're saying I could have added more detail Joe do you have something that you wanted to talk about? I can speak remember last meeting we had I guess if anybody got in touch with the Randolph to find out why they didn't have their skateboard park Tuesday morning they were in a process of being sued or they got sued and they had all the signs up that said skate at your own risk and she said that did not mean anything so it's an accident waiting to happen well I have to say Mo went and spoke to the town manager and it was kind of the same thing except it wasn't your take on it was that the skate park was deteriorated and that's why they may have got sued they'll tell you can he can tell you what Adolfo said yeah he just said that the old skate park was by a wooden whatnot yeah but the woman I talked to she said those signs didn't mean anything he didn't tell me about a lawsuit which probably he wouldn't in a way if it was being mitigated I don't know I just think I think that part of it could be exactly as a combination of what things I mean it could be the fact that yes they had signed a job but if the thing was deteriorated and that person could prove it then they would get sued because it would have been their responsibility to maintain it so absolutely but who's to say you know I mean what happens if a kid comes over there with a bicycle and starts doing dumps and everything lands on his head well I mean the tough thing is it's no different than if we whatever someone's over there skating on it right now and falls down and you know blows out their knee it's the same thing or if we had a basketball court and someone fell down to hurt or you know if the town was spelled to be liable we'd have to pay our deductible of a thousand dollars when I was a kid we had all that stuff but nobody sued me about it I know, we're a different world that's why you have like a notice up that says assume your own risk basically I mean that's what those kind of places are and while you carry insurance at the top it's deductible if it becomes necessary can we just take a review over something I mean times have changed interests have changed I just hear more negative than positive and it seems like if we're going through with a skateboard park we're catering to a rather minute group if there's even a group out there that's just my input I'm not saying it I mean it's such a small select group I don't even see anybody doing it anymore I think it's just the way times have changed and we just kicked a skateboard park around and around I mean it's been about ten years now you know it has been less than four well it feels like ten and it took it took five years to do the pool house things take time so I guess right now anyways in regards to the skateboard park is you know the skateboard park was part of the master plan for the recreation committee that was informally voted upon by the townspeople so it wasn't the select board skateboard park it's not the recreation committee you know so I would say on that end of things if the townspeople weren't aren't happy with the master plan the way it is now then it would be up to the townspeople to um to congregate and petition to have that done but it's not going to come from here um I do that so I mean that's going on town interest that I've talked to and I guess some of them do you have young children do you have young children or children in school because I mean that's the thing is like oh well I talked to people but are you naive to assume that you talked to a full selection of the populace and it was 2017 when we voted in a town meeting I believe remember it was like 124 to what was it barely that there was an overwhelming vote on 125 well I mean it's on the agenda so I think tonight is the night 125 to 26 so there and that sounds like a mandate to me that the people of this town voted that they wanted a skateboard park because they voted to put money into it I make a choice not to have children because this town doesn't offer the main thing but I have a nephew I have small kids in a pan 11 yes they are skateboarding they're gonna be drinking they're gonna be taking drugs somebody's gonna get hurt it's not fair to say that one bad act as well as a bunch of people are not gonna do anything it's all over you go to G-line park they're taking drugs walk down this is a completely separate issue it's irrelevant in the fact of what the space is meant for we can't take the problem that is a genuine yes problem that's encompassing an area and say it's a reason not to build a space for kids to go to something positive but you people soon that's why we have insurance we live in fricking America that's what they do unfortunately alright so well now let's bury the hatchets the way I see it right now is there's a few things so the plan was voted on by the tax people I can tell you that I'm not in favor of the skateboard part but I'm in favor of making sure that what the citizens of the town of Bethel voted on is what moves forward I have other ideas but I'm not gonna put those forward that's for the recreation committee you're going to town the thing is is that what you would like to do the issues we have with the town of Bethel right now is we don't have enough committed people that want to get on the committee so what I'll say right now is if you look at the recreation committee it's made up of two people okay well you're not helping yourself okay you've got more so what I'm saying is so the stalls is there's a couple issues here so one we don't have enough you know a committee like the recreation committee should have you know seven people on it it has two to four at the most right now mostly it might be three but mostly two people on it and when you have a committee that's struggling like that it's hard to move forward the plans because now it falls on the back of one or two people to do all this at the same time we have been we have been spinning our wheels on the skateboard park for far too long and we are getting to a resolution on that of either you know move it forward put it on the shelf and move something else forward because there's more to this there's more to the recreation area than it is just the skateboard park there are other things that everybody wants to see there and unfortunately you know in our society that there are a lot of things that can happen at any you know recreation area that someone could fall down get hurt there's the opportunity for people to do things there that they shouldn't be doing and you know that's why we do have insurance and that's why we do have a constable but you know skateboard park or or whatever you're still going to have probably some activities going on there that we don't want to have happen so so this evening we're just you know we're working with the recreation committee last time you know I think we got through where we left off last time is the budget is $57,000 for it if there are other items that you can fundraise between now and then and you want to add to that we were fine with that the biggest hold up at this point was the soils that were that we hadn't exploratory dug over there to figure out what we had because there were some concerns from the board members on you know not wanting to put an investment there and then find out that the soil is not right for it and maybe possibly run into an issue like Joe where we build a skateboard park a year from now it's all cracking now it's a safety issue and a kid gets hurt so I guess that kind of goes full circle I know this past week when I was at the office they were actually out there digging the information that at least that I had from the work crew was once they got to about two and a half feet in the ground that about two and a half feet then there was okay two feet two and a half three feet there's some clay there so at that point the recommendations that I had talked to Therese about in the office was to follow that information up with the pictures to Mr. Parker to find out does that information change his scope of work or his bid because I think the last thing that the board wanted to do was invest money into something have opened up and then find out it's going to cost X amount more to you know to lay the foundation because the soil is there so and I just do that I sent the email to Jane and Therese saying that this is what you found which was a breakdown and asked to get a hold of Mr. Parker and find out what it's going to do with us and then Jane has already had that down in the smaller one and I did because Carl Russell works with a lot of dirt and wood I got Carl's email but it's irrelevant now because we dug where the skate park is this is the one I got today can I present it from whom Carl no but Carl wasn't there yeah we dug I know I guess at this point he said it's not good it's nothing like that here's the mitigation board oh that's what Carl is saying okay there's a mitigation plan yeah but I guess at this point has the information from the exploratory digging got to Parker and then what is the response from Parker at this point the response is as much as the soil this is being geological issues below that are outside his wheelhouse that we speak with some soil people and see what he said consistent with what Carl Russell suggested in that email we can take the clay out and replace the soil Michael thought that was a reasonable idea Carl thought that was a reasonable idea and I thought it was a reasonable idea before he saw his email so how does that where are we going to get the material so the clay mitigation how does that impact the initial quote that you are working on in your budget we've got 19k from town mayor tower we can play with a lot of trucking and excavation we can use soil donations to clean the field and we get the clay out of there and then we have something that we can put in place have it in place before Michael even shows up to do the work his key emphasis was that it become packed in it's not like we don't have a compactor but if we had to use to compact the soil we're talking about a budget dirt so what you're saying is basically it's like we're already promising 20,000 and in kind we really couldn't come up with it because we didn't have the material he's saying have the town excavate out down as far as they need to what are we going to excavate with our excavator and haul it off and then we're going to have to bring it in I mean that little that's not a appropriate for that type of work town doesn't have a compactor can we dig out that size that skate park with the equipment that we have we don't have that we don't have that it's all it's all it's not dealing to it out of stone but the digging bucket should be getting up but we dug it last Friday with a piece of our equipment and we dug it Richard dug it on Friday I missed it was there any clay involved yeah there was clay that's what we dug put a topsoil dug a couple feet of clay and some more gravel but we dug it Richard dug it the other day in front of the swing set where it's going so I'm assuming we it might take us some time but we could dig that out with what we have but I think what I'd be looking at what I'd like to see is well I mean this just talks about how to mitigate it but doesn't doesn't solve the right it's not going to say right now I recommend to dig down four feet and put four feet in the material I guess that's the information that I would like to see as a board member is how far down do we have to go you know if we hit clay at two feet does that mean you know two feet and then the clay layer is I don't know put in half do we have to dig out four feet and put all four feet of new material and then what is what's the quantity of material I know we can talk about donations but my fear is that we start a project on the hopes of donations and then all of a sudden it gets on the backs of the taxpayers that's my fear they can't just be filled with soil they're just going to be in a drainage type of situation they're just going to be in a hard tank good clean gravel or whatever you just can't put dirt back in what you taste that was wrong how many cubic yards how many cubic yards three hundred fifteen yards three hundred fifteen yards as a twenty five by eighty five by four foot deep hole so we could haul it out and then what would have to be maybe some material maybe some drainage pipe I'd have to read Carl's email and then you can see but obviously drainage, ditch gravel and then it's going to have to be compact we'd have to rent a compact or get it compacted properly for him I'm sure I have to pay no I have to pay I have to be an engineer I'm actually looking for someone to do soil pouring because I have three people that I'll put calls out to you know I'll put my RFP out I'll put a crisis but I don't I'm sorry I don't I mean you could probably get an excavation contractor and then maybe a lot of those guys don't know exactly what they're doing have a trance and can tell you exactly what you need to do whether or not they're going to put their name on if something happens it's another but when I spoke to him I pulled up five minutes before I walked in here he said he's pretty confident that we could do 12 by 80 for 50 by K he's optimistic that we could do 16 by 80 for 50 by K he's cautiously optimistic that maybe we could do a 20 foot by 80 foot for 55 K and that's with a simplified 8-quits section on mark he said he really needed to sharpen his pencil on that that's what he's up to in his field to be able to parallel path this we find the expert and say hey what we need to do to make this work and try not to spend a minute in the process I mean I think one option here is the I guess the way I would look at it is to get a local contractor to go over there and look at an area that we're talking about that would be the foundation let's say with some of the soil information that we have and say you bring Dylan over there and say Dylan we have this 20 by 80 piece that we have here and here's the soils that we have here we're thinking about boxing this out four feet putting in four feet of new material what do we think that this is going to run us oh by the way we can do all the hauling of the stone whatever those in kind things are and see what that price is if we can mitigate this thing for you know four or five grand I think you're fine but if it becomes this big large number then obviously it cuts into the overall budget of the part I could get two guys over I could get Dylan and just like anything you build it starts with the foundation built correctly then you're just wasting money on building you know a cement pad on top of you know I could get a couple prices to do the 20 by 80 and four feet deep I mean I can take somebody I can get a couple people we're also making assumptions based on how big was the hole that was done the other day he went down six feet and you know but you're looking at a hole as opposed to any well I it was an area of like a couple of bucket that was all he just took one test board right but he did five feet from there could be less or more could be worse or better I mean I can't have him dig up half I just had him dig up a good trench in front of we had him do a trench in front of the swing sets I'd have to ask Alan the length of that because I don't know where I could ask Richard have you assumed that it's three for two or worse and you dig a 20 by 80 by four foot hole and put the proper compact material in there you're probably yeah so I can get I can get a price on that I mean I could get I mean I gotta think that we could probably between hauling the stone and maybe even potentially buying the stone through some of our gravel budget we could make that work but I don't think that I don't think we have the equipment to properly excavate and compact material so I can get again if we put if we excavate that out put material in and then don't compact it correctly then we're going to be in the same issue that we would have had if we left it clay so I can get to I can get prices on excavating it out right I can get two prices to excavate it out put material in and compact and I can get two prices on that with two phone calls I can get a DR color yeah he's out with surgery right now he has a compact I can get two prices I'm sure these other guys have compactors but I can get two prices on what it would cost to dig it all out but in the last likeward meeting you said that the in kind was not equipment and it was not material but let me get I can get two prices before the next meeting no problem so how much is this going to delay everything are we going to run beyond the timetable when he won't be able to do it this year we're still trying to be but I mean if if we've got something done here that might take a month what's that going to do for your time schedule he can start work again in July yeah still get it done March 10th so our next select award meeting is March 10th I certainly will have a cost for you by March 10th of how much it would cost to excavate and put stone there and contact it and I could ask him to break it out so that we knew if the stone and tell him that we would haul do your point I think we might have a month to lock in to reserve that's a guesstimate but in speaking with him the fact that he hasn't rushed us a set of numbers to lock in and give us a little time to respond where that means putting it for a feed put in two lifts so I can so I could get that two lifts and get the stone in there and get the price and I'll have them do the stone separately let me know what it is that they would want well I mean if we did the stone and the trucking of the stone there you know the stone is roughly around $5,000 with the stone you know and then you know trucking of it you know I mean I know we have a lot of it budgeted anyways but you know if you were a contractor trucking wise you're you know you're another you know $15,000, $200,000 so you know you're probably $7,000 and in kind I know we talked about you know towards a 20 or whatever but that's um but it's but if you have somebody with the right equipment they can go over there and estimate that in a day and the next day you bring your gravel in and you know it's probably only a couple of days project well I can get prices I can tell we want the stone, the trucking, the combat, the digging all those prices separately plus you know they're going to charge us to mobilize and um so I could ask for those prices and then we could look at it to see it I'll tell them what type of stone whether or not you're going to pay for the stone yourself and then um we do the trucking and they're basically just doing the compacting, the digging, and mobilizing but I can also see one of the guys I'm going to get a price from owns a pit so maybe he has that type of stone and we can get a good deal on it because what type of stone are you thinking the size? Yeah I would if someone made most of them around here make like an inch and a half or an inch and a quarter but the stone would probably be ideal but because you're going to put in four feet okay but I think you know even though I know Parker's ready and we kind of have our budget figured out but I think it's critical that we make sure that we make sure that the foundation is done correctly because if it's not we're just going to be sitting here a year from now going alright we got an estimate here for X amount of dollars to repair all these issues you know so that we don't get sued or whatever you know as far as we look at these bills do these contractors know the stability of what they reinstalled? they're not going to they're just going to come in and dig it out four feet with the stone in and um yeah they're not going to so we need to look for a piggy type which is the last one that lives in Bethel I don't know anybody who's I don't know did anybody who was involved in the conservation who was fighting in the double general we had a lot of really expertise people I wonder if there would be anybody in that pool that might have enough expertise I know I don't know nobody they're not going to stand behind if a thing cracks later I know when Parker's first estimates there when we were doing it there a couple years ago that he had some drainage money put into his figures because he was talking about doing this way on the backside and we know we have to deal with that drainage on the backside of the slab it was a different location I mean we have an engineer I mean they're pretty tapped out I think doing the water project I can't ask Mike to do that I could ask Du Bois and King but they're going to bill us for it to come in and take a peek at that because John's doing another project for us right now but um it's also no matter what the use of concrete damage stealing that's probably true we didn't get Du Bois and King to do this massive planning Vermont Integrated Architecture they're not engineers, they're architects well they're I've been cracking that engineer working I wouldn't know um but so Dave's saying anyways it's probably a lot of it is to how much rebar and you know he's doing concrete and what the base looks like as long as the soil's good and the base is prepared it's probably not going to I mean they're always some sort of working or settling but I can get a price on this anyways I can't find you an engineer in the next two weeks to go I'll call you out I'll call you out but I can definitely get two contractors in their chain and I can get pricing on that so I can get two contractors and I can talk with them and see what they'll say as far as how they'll stand behind it or whatever I can ask so the standard is to have and then they hooked up to the septic the town's septic would an engineer have been involved in that just for the design of the septic but they wouldn't because they were just connecting to the oh yeah will they stand behind this I think at this point we're just kind of looking you know can we have a local contractor go in there and just dig it down to the frost line and then put good sub-base material in there unless we wanted to get into you know a PE design thing that will take time and more money and it's going to cut into the budget you know so we're saying 20 by 80 by 4 I can ask them if they'll stand behind it for a year but I don't think they will but I'll ask them on that I get to guys within two weeks for sure it's a board thing we're going to investigate in for you do you have an engineer can you know but we feel confident that if we based on the information we have now if we just went out there and and boxed out that 20 by 80 or 20 by 100 spot and put you know take four feet out and put four feet in well I'm wondering we've only dug a small representation of the overall footprint so what's going to happen if we go over to the other end of 80 feet and then six feet of play well they're going to do four feet right I mean they just replace the whole thing right but what's going to happen is four feet number I don't have to answer that but typically you need to go down as far as your frost line so I mean your typical frost line is four feet you know greater than four feet it's not going to be a lot of variables on what the winner is going to do to it the clay rules well we know it's not going to be a hard estimate we're going to be asking them for an estimate and obviously it's going to change what they hit but at least it'll give us a ballpark right Mo of what we're give us a ballpark of it we've been dealing with this for four years this all should have been settled before now you know who knows and maybe maybe one end of it's more gravelly or sandy than the other we could have been in a pocket of clay for all I know for where we were digging so we could dig so we'll just they'll give us an estimate obviously if they run into something else and we appreciate you doing this because we had it in a different location and we because people in the town want to save the field we moved the location it took us at least a half a year we found that out that we had to go for a permit to do this so I know it's been taking time but we've had things like having to move into a different spot having to get a different movement having to you know and not knowing what the soil was you know we've had different information at different times so that's taking us we started we weren't allowed to work on this until the summer 2016 so it's been three and a half years and like I said the pool house took four years but we haven't replaced anything that took out from the pool house we don't have a basketball court we don't have a tennis court we haven't taken out are we just going to wait for another five or six years before we finish out whatever was in the plan for that place well we'll keep working and keep you know like Chris said we're having a small little committee and we're doing what the voters voted on and ask us there seems to be a lot of other kids that have a basketball court down there so we're just going to throw them out and buy them a skateboard or something but according to our survey we did a survey four years ago and the top thing was of a safe place for kids to ride bikes that was the top that was the top one and so what we have done because the kids wanted a safe place to ride bikes that we took it it was a safe place for bikes was 46.6 percent okay that's what they wanted the new pool house was 40.9 percent a team center was 35.2 we realized we couldn't do that the hiking trails was 34.1 and we've been doing the hiking trails the tennis courts were 30.1 and the basketball was 29.5 so so we took we took the skateboard part interest and we took the big item for a safe place for kids to ride bikes and we combined it into this design for kids to ride bikes and teenagers to have skateboards I guess my only recommendation would be being that it was 34 years ago since we have done one not saying to get a delay the skateboard park but it would probably be in the committee's best interest that the pool is going to be opening here sooner than we think maybe get that plan out and about so everybody can see it again if that's maybe staged at the pool house and then maybe get some feedback this summer on the individuals that come on what would you like to see next and people might say hey I want the basketball court maybe put out that master plan that was voted on and then say what would you like to see next you can put a little box there so people can write what they want to do next master plan that was approved by the select board in 2013 there is no basketball court but we have listened to voters or people coming to our meetings and saying different things about the original plan there is no basketball court no I'm just saying because in the high school now that's the elementary school you can put it there with little boxes and have people write a note and we can have it at that day or some meetings and how to do our basketball yes there is there is one and it is the one there and you guys have basketball for nine months of the year and they're playing basketball so that was in the top priority when we made up the master plan because we knew there could play basketball for nine months of the year I would just say as a committee regardless of what your committee is you want to get the input from people as often as you can and being that it's been some time no reason why we can't well one you can get the information out in front of the people again on this is the plan you voted on four years ago and oh by the way what would you like to see next that way because you would think the committee is going to want to know what to go next once this let's say the skateboard park is being constructed you're going to want to get going on the next phase of it right input on what that next phase should be or what people want to see you know and you know there's a different group of kids in the school now because you have Royalton coming over to do middle school so there's a different flow of kids people have moved in and out of town you know there's it's a fact it's becoming a fact skateboarding is going to be an item in the summer Olympics you know they're having the summer Olympics this year and that's going to be an item in the Olympics for the first time so it's becoming a kids I have two students of mine that are five years old and they got a skateboard for their first time I've got six kids and over the next 15 years they'll be using this thing so anything further in regards to the skateboard part this evening so we're just going to table it again and make an agenda item for March 10 unless anybody wants to move forward the way it is currently I can't vote yes until I see more information I agree with Dave so we'll get the information in regards to what it may cost us to properly do the review underneath this lab okay I'll give us some time to get some quotes and then figure out what could be in kind versus what would have to be charged out isn't the top foot of this Michael's spec anyway do you specify 12 inches of stone the top of it is what they do that was like 12 inches so if we're taking 40 down and you want to be quoted Michael's spec stone 3 feet of the field does that sound right or what the sentence means because oh okay so he was going to put in a foot of stone it's part of the skateboard okay I'll make a note so right so I just need 3 feet of stone from night in my quote okay 3 foot of stone Parker installing did he say what it was in there and just said stone it was just one but it was just one he didn't give us a dimension to the stone I don't think he just said stone I don't know no it's not the size of the stone maybe I'll look at this thing okay I'll look in there there was nothing in that on the size stone that he was putting in yeah I didn't think it said the size not all changes now because before you're going to put a foot of stone in then you probably would use 3 quarter but if you're going to put in 4 feet of stone you're going to use bigger stones so it's going to be probably too much might as now so it would reduce Parker's estimate is what Shane is saying is if we put the 4 feet of stone in it would reduce Parker's estimate right so we'll be the tenth the tenth I think it's the tenth they were just looking at the calendar okay I was just checking here double check so you won't be here I will be here alright it's March 9 sorry you know why because it starts over here it looks a little funky okay so we'll table that for the ninth okay any further discussion any further comments to that alright so I'll get that spent and then just shoot them to you guys I'll call to you alright and then kind of related item here we have coin drop request for the rep committee so they're looking at doing it for July 11 Saturday from 8 is that 8 or 9 9 to noon so I did double check with VLCT so you would fall under our insurance however there are specific rules that you were given so do you have a plan to borrow signage and more vests and all that yeah I thought I would in a historical scenario find a power and they're doing I thought I would when they did the historical society might let you borrow their signage okay just so you got the list right okay perfect but you are covering for our insurance so I did double check that okay thank you very much and we have the date and the white church April 24th or a big dance fundraising so so everybody is good with the coin drop that fits into the schedule and stuff that's available for coin drop so I have to entertain a motion to allow the Bethel Recreation Committee to establish a coin drop for July 11 from 9 to noon and to allow it looks like myself to sign it second okay favorite do you have the original and this is part of the the the money for fundraising for this people we just want to make sure that's on the application I will know but that's just I'll make it I didn't do it, Kelly must have wrote this yeah I will just put a little note on here money is what is okay I just wrote it on the application so alright anything further on the coin drop good moving on public record inspection, copying and transmission policy alright so this is the one right Paul? yeah alright and so we got to drop VLCP does a great job at doing all their model policies and so I had gone got the model policy and then gave it to Deetree and Pam to sit down and go over and actually it was a really good exercise because there was some questions that Pam had and Deetree and so I was able to explain a couple things to them so it was actually a good idea and so I think it's pretty clear on clear as mud in some cases public records can be a little tricky because in some cases you would not you would want your lawyer to review at first just because maybe it's your email well it's not all your email and some of it may be not for public record I mean 99.9% of what we do is all for public consumption but there are certain times depending on what the ask was that you would have to have a review but I think that VLCP does a good job and Deetree and Pam that few times and went over it what do we currently do? there's no policy in place right now and there's a statute obviously I mean I get public record requests frequently from like this one software company for example every quarter I know I'm going to get this request and I release them basically a document that shows all their checks and who you wrote them to etc and stuff like that so sometimes you get it and it's pretty easy some of the public record requests if you want a copy of minutes usually not a big deal but I have had in the past in the last 15 years when you have big ones and they want to know all sorts of big payroll dump information and obviously not social security numbers, birth dates but a lot of information so sometimes when you consult an attorney does the statute allow us to charge for information? it does and that's outlined in here it lets you know a lot if you don't have a fee schedule then it goes back to the statute really is just the cost so you have to figure out if there's 500 sheets and a ream of paper and how much ink so you can't gouge people because that was a problem for a while people wanted electronic record or maybe a copy of body cam footage and people would charge them like 50 bucks well it didn't really cost you 50 bucks to make it so there was a little copy up thrown in there for that I just went and got two certified birth certificates today and I'm thinking how did they come up with this fee? well that is the state of Vermont because it took the lady maybe 5 minutes to do it they charged me 60 dollars and I'm thinking is that the new fee? I don't know that was the fee in Claremont, New Hampshire oh New Hampshire maybe in Vermont it used to be 10 dollars and I think it might have just gone to 15 but I'm not sure I have to double check with PAM but for vital records I think the mind is that when now you print them off and do the software before you make a copy onto this paper that was really less than 10 cents and it was time but the state sets certain quick fees at a specific price like recording a deed, a plat, etc vital records and all that but I didn't know if anybody had any questions or concerns, typos, mistakes or anything like that no I didn't have any questions I think it's good that we have a policy in place I mean it's not like we were freewheeling it there was a statue in it but still this is better it's clarified yeah exactly and it is if you have to create a record which means you're taking several documents to make one that becomes a pain but you're a good Paul I was like we're doing this Paul wants it it reminds me it was last year at the spring, summer select board this came up so it's good but it's not right now it's clear as a month right when you're weighed into statutes but it was nice because you did have to take into consideration I think she had some forms behind it which are good because if it's a lawyer who's come into research all the time you can't really burden them or yourself with too many forms but I thought they did a nice job alright, anybody want to make a motion to accept the public record inspection, copying and transmission policy for the town of Bethel? it's okay all in favor? alright and here's the smart it's Aditri that has cut me a good one without words draft on it but I need to make sure last time I forgot I only had one draft on it for a brighter policy and next on the sheet we had the appointment of Lauren Elmore to the energy committee so I gave you guys a note that we just received today that wasn't in your packet so she did write you a very nice letter that I put on your space because we really gave it to me so sounds like she experienced, she likes it and as you know you have people looking for committees looking for people move to a point okay, all in favor? alright that's right last I checked that the energy committee had quite a bit of members on it they're doing well I think they had a couple of people and you reappointed some actually we might have a couple of new planning commission members, huh Mr. Marshall we actually invited a bunch of people and we had four people come and I'm hoping three of them will come back Doug was there going why am I here but his wife was there so we had three we had four people come and I'm hoping we can put you on a committee right now Doug Marshall to the recreation committee don't play in the air I just want to say I talked to Mr. Marshall last week he was very excited about meeting all the planning committee did you just retire you have all this free time free time free time alright then we had two liquor licenses I got one in my hand you got the other one right so we have a Champlain farm second class liquor license and then we have one for what is first branch first branch no I know what I haven't seen his same thing a second class he's selling wine must be yeah we've done motions on these before we just signed them well we've been having new motions it's nice to have them in the minutes because the liquor control board if somebody comes in we can say exactly when we approved it so that when Pam sends the license to DLC if there's any sort of thing later it's nice to have them in the minutes just for clarification as to when you approved it I think it's Sanborn Enterprises it's probably a DBA yeah do you need separate motions sure however you choose get you two on the record I've moved to approve the Champlain farm second class liquor license so I'm second stealing your thunders trying to one up all in favor all right remember Paul we're signing this in the approved section this time I'm going to let I'm going to vote for the second motion I move to accept Sanborn Enterprises liquor license all in favor aye second both of us approved approved yes Paul tried to pull it fast one last time he seconded it didn't he disprove that didn't he he's sneaky you gotta watch it and then we have the USDA rural business development grant I guess you're looking for a motion to have have me sign this yes this is for the $7,500 that we're looking for to do the advertisement for the businesses while it's going to be tricky because we're going to get the money a little bit later so once the project starts we're going to work on it you have the original on that I do, right here move to approve you have to authorize him to sign maybe authorizing the chair to sign second all in favor it's the grant application it's a resolution basically it's just saying that they had a newly-worn meeting with an affirmative vote said that that the resolution has not been rescinded or amended and that I'm authorized to submit the application sign all the forms for the $7,500 this is actually a formative vote of 5 $7,500 no I did technically vote I know while you got it to say well noteworthy, I'm noteworthy well it doesn't have to be one person could have sustained that's true but yeah all right, town managers report so I'd like to say this really, Lucian Hinkle was here he's been kind enough to offer to assist me with the town garage project and he's going to, once we get the RPs out he'll help me review stuff for the soil warnings I explain the situation, what's going on up there and he's kind of, apparently he's done that for someone else before so it's very sweet of him to offer and I took him up on it for sure so let's see, a lot of this was stuff that we did tonight water line project is out to bid so it's moving along we'll be opening it is no, March 19th March 19th, I think it's 18th or 19th it's opening bid Tim is going to open them so at that following meeting which is March 24th I'll just be asking the board to award the contract to basically whoever the engineer that way we stay or maybe even have myself and another person like Chris Jarvis to look at it because we're going to be needing to do that before the next meeting in April so there's going to be a little bit of timing but that's what you pay them for is to make sure they're going to go through all the bids, make sure nothing's missing all that, so that's out to bid I just put out the hydraulic study for Pinello Bridge so that's out after meeting with FEMA and the state to see what they would accept so we could keep the cost down so that's out to bid and if you said we finished the final measurements and photos for FEMA so let's see, Jessica is reviewing one last project and then they'll be going all out for peer review so that will be good and so the summer looks like we're going to have a busy construction season for the summer so we're going to be having the $2.8 million the water line which is going to go from basically the speeds down towards the parsonage near Bethel Mills Peabind slide that will be out, I've got an email today from John Ashley at Boise and King we're putting up some finishing touches that project will go out to bid then we will be also doing some other graffiti under the bridge that will be moved but as far as other construction projects will also be putting in the final Canelo bridge so someone has moved into the house so we're going to have to leave the temporary bridge up and then but there's enough room to leave the temporary permanent bridge in so that will also be happening this summer I've also have waited through all of the pit details for Placy's pit found the plans that Bruno and Associates had done the survey it looks like they are out of business now so I'm going to get another surveyor to come in in the spring and just shoot the grades to see what's where we're at with that I'm hoping that I'm going to find the really big piles of topsoil there so that I can cover the pit with materials from there per the Act 250 permit so we're going to see how that goes that pit technically we have two years to close it so I'm going to have someone come in and shoot the grade to see how much of that we can do in-house but basically my plan is to not take any more material out of there the cost is prohibitive giving them $5 a yard, us doing all the work 350 to crush it, ridiculous I could have it delivered for 11 and keep the guys busy doing something else so we're just going to close that thing and get out of there you know most people make probably a buck or two not five bucks a yard so I will know more about that once snow melts and I can see what we actually have down there but I've read all that to 50 permit talk to Jeff Gillman a little bit but it's very specific about that pit that material is supposed to be crushed to go directly to a project can be stored for a little bit at the town barrage but there's a lot of timeframes, a lot of caveats on that permit it cannot be opened commercially and a really small window so I think the best interest to us is to close it and get out of it and frankly we never should have got into it not at that price it doesn't save you any money, cost you money by the time you did that 250 and everything else so we'll be pretty active outside that's projects that we're going to be getting done some of those, the pit hopefully can be closed by the road crew but it's going to depend on what it is and what we need for what we need for equipment to close it large bulldozer then we're going to end up bringing somebody else in so it may end up having to get a price some of it maybe this year and some next it really depends what we're going to find there and how much of it actually was touched so but obviously p-vine goes out to bid vanilla goes out to bid, those are FEMA projects the water line goes out but then there's a list of work for the road crew we'll be doing this summer for other issues obviously grading some roads that need to be built up that's one of the reasons that we budget some extra gravel this year, some things to be found over the last summer going through all the FEMA work and seeing that yeah, cutting some brush yeah, definitely well there was some stuff taken down last year while they were doing tree trimming so they're going to be going out this year they're going to be out doing that and chipping up some of that stuff that's in the woods just chipping into the woods or whatever so doing the soil borings at the town garage so that we can see what we're dealing with there and then we'll start the process there to get an architect to come in and we're going to need an architect to do some of that just to get us through the permitting process obviously focusing on it will be a metal building and we're talking about changing the location of the building a little bit but that becomes a trick because on one side of it if you're looking at it on the right is a septic system and on the left there's another holding tank but we may be able to go on that side because you're going to need a full-on oil-water separator to come up to code now so it's probably okay if we take that out I don't really want to touch a septic system unless the cap is so clean but besides having it palm this year what about that tree removal at Cherry Hill you got that on your list tree removal at Cherry Hill he did it oh he's gone that tree's still there what's one that I thought Cecil had it removed was there when I came on my way down Tony? oh alright well I'll talk to Cecil maybe we'll get a different one yeah because he and I talked about it last year and I thought he had to take care of it but you know what there's money in the budget for bigger trees that the road crew can't take down but I'll make a note to ask Cecil about it because he was in last year and we discussed that I said do you want me to get a couple of estimates he said no I will and then he did I guess I just assumed since he never came back that he took care of it so Cherry Hill tree and he knows which one it is if you're up at the flag as you can see it okay up at the flag laying right out under the where I drive down to see my books alright so I'll ask him about that off the walking hurts me well I'll ask him about it anyways but now that we have the budget house meaning there's money in there for bigger tree removal anyways we also just thanked Derek Aldragetti he helped the road crew the other day that a resident had come in it was concerned about it was a really big one so he came in and actually did that at no charge and the assisted the road crew took that down for us so that was very nice of them so it will be a busy, busy, busy summer outside which will be good get some stuff done so oh listen to you wow hey that is over my head listen rain sleet or hail yeah we'll just be working in the mud is that water lines going in no matter what well I'm wondering if you say you ain't good enough that's right so the only other thing I had was actually a question for the board I was speaking with someone today this is regarding water bills so I'm not sure currently if I have a resident who might make a deal with them you know just charge them interest but not penalty especially if they're making a payment plan and they're paying on a regular basis and they're trying to catch up and we'll make these agreements with people but I'm curious about if the board would allow us which is something we don't normally do is not to charge interest and penalty to seniors on payment plans for water sewer that are on fixed income or social security that was a question I had an issue today with a lady who's making a payment plan and she's each month but because she's you know always she's behind because she's you know pays per month and so we don't charge her penalty but she still is getting interest charges and she's on a fixed income and so I'm not sure how the board feels about that I usually I wouldn't use penalty as a carry just like you know what if you can make this payment we won't charge your penalty but you'll have to pay interest and kind of do that but when you have someone who is staying had making regular payments I was it's hard to know you know I mean we don't there's not a lot of opportunity that we have to assist seniors on social security or on fixed income and this topic came up today with someone who is you know making regular payments she's not behind she just kind of breaks it down so she's you know so she's not like a month behind so it's not a big deal in the sense that she doesn't have some huge balance because she doesn't she just likes to do all of her payments in a budget that way because she is on a fixed income she can go out for that so you know I don't know I told her I would have to talk to the slut board and you know we kind of had a little bit of leeway in the past with penalty and things just to make deals with people so that they can pay you know get them caught up but I wasn't sure how you felt about that by case basis do you feel to leave it up to art my discretion or do you feel like you want to have a set you know policy on something like that maybe allow us a little time to yeah think about it talk it over and think about it my initial explanation is not to just set a policy but maybe to gauge a case by case you know puts a little more on us on you but you're already doing a lot of that legwork I think we set a policy that people can take advantage of that and it is and it's hard to to know you know I mean fixed income for me is social security or you know having a limited income and so you know it came up today and I was dealing so I'm not obviously she was you know she was upset because here she is trying and she's doing a nice job make a payments and you know I'm billing her penalty or not the penalty but the interest and you know it's hard because yes I know what the power company would do and this and that but you know you're just trying to be also giving young people buying properties to make money a free ride for six eight nine months yeah which helps your grand list in the end because of the value of the property and then it raises the grand list so I know it it's kind of one of these things isn't it I think there's a just gave that one person you could probably give this lady the rest of her life it's hard there's pros and cons you're always trying to find the sweet spot and but anyways with something we think about I can put it on another um agenda but I think you get another month of interest for that lady and you know that topic just came up today so I just wondered so that was it unless you have any questions for me the only question I had was well looking through the budget status report this wasn't on our end it looked like ours was shaping up pretty decently but looking through the solid waste department looks like they have some overages going on there with labor, retirement yep hazardous waste and recycling fees both of us should think that they're probably a couple of pieces of equipment and this may be a little bit I'm not sure because usually when their bank comes versus when this comes that may be a little behind by a couple of weeks but I'm on their fees under their revenues but I don't want to swear to it but yeah labor, FICA, METI retirement, health insurance all that for them is going to be up because the facility manager that retired, Chet Brown when he retired Jen had come on earlier part time and then full time so you have overlap a good month plus you had Chet's payout because he was one of the final people I think we have two left that had a significant amount of sick time or vacation time that we're getting paid out so this budget is going to become tight right there and I've spoken to the couple of members anyways the BRTS board talked about you know probably going to have to look at they're going to have to look at bag fees etc they've got to be looking at whatever they can do between now and June 30 if that's overtime anything like that because your labor is already over 10% your retirement is over by 25% well I will say that one retirement was not going to be able to do anything about the retirement at this point it wasn't budget right in the first place so we are going to take another stab at the solid waste budget that's in the town report we need to look at it again because we just found out like since the new manager came on there's a couple mistakes that enough money wasn't budgeted in the period but no you're right there's definitely there's going to be equipment maintenance and Rome wasn't built and he can't fix all can't write the ship as Chris says in one check which he's writing here I mean hopefully there's some efficiencies coming out of yeah that might help offset some of the extra cost but the equipment's going to be more because we've long done four years there hasn't been a no service done at all at all nothing so we've had no track up there correcting doing service work any warranty work that's available to cut costs there was no no service done for three years and you had a couple breakdowns too right yeah so she had to bring somebody in yeah but other than that everything else looked good from what I saw Alan and I went over his budget the other day he was almost about a couple things so we just talked about it he denied some things that he could where he was going to find some savings so he and I did talk yeah I think he's pretty much got all his materials all purchased for the remainder of the winter yeah he just barely got some salt that bill may not be in here but I think is what he told me we're only at 60% right yeah and I also just billed the constable in the fire department for the diesel so his is a little high but that'll there's some money that'll be coming because we just billed them for any of their gas and diesel but he did look at a couple things that he was he's over on sand but he knew he had a good savings and salt we had the select board meeting minutes from the tent for something else to ask her about the letter from Mary is that just a lot of words missing the one she just I mean I just got it a lot of that just changing the wording and stuff to some of that and you could take that into consideration if he passes you could look at that again because that thing policies don't draft but yeah she was kind of her to spend some time to say yeah it was definitely thorough she should have came to I know she said and I think she says that I'm sorry basically that she had but it was nice of her to go through it she should have worked so those are concerned you could look at when you go to pass the depending on the vote excuse me so the select board meeting minutes anybody have any issues with the way they're written or are we good to make a motion to approve the minutes for February 10th okay all in favor all in favor other communications we had the comments there on the on the ordinance hand I'd recommend it's conservation commission minutes nothing from the constable solid ways for any other business to come before the board big audience out there alright so entertain a motion to enter executive session to discuss the employment or evaluation of an employee so moved second all in favor I just like to ask that you