 And when you buy a car you should get a single charger to go where you have it. I don't know where you have it. I don't have my own. I'm guessing I should go back to the most part. That would be my first answer. Electrification is a weakness. Electrification is a weakness. Electrification is a weakness on fossil fuels. We just did a big news press release. Today's conference. Yeah. Thank you. Hello Scott. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me? Hello. Testing. Check, check, check. One, two, three. Hello Scott. We're here. We all gathered here today. Can you hear me now? I think I can hear myself. Okay. Sounds pretty good right now. Okay. Thank you. Hi game. Oh boy. Beware. I'll sign those two because we don't have a pot at the moment. Oh, I didn't sign yet. Oh, so we didn't sign. What about Annie and Patrick? I know that Annie's coming. I just don't know where she is. Patrick didn't say anything about not coming, right? Mike's on. The pot is 57. It's 57. What am I doing with this? 30 seconds. How'd you make it? Did you tell Elaine or Patrick? Patrick. Good job. Probably having trouble getting back here. So you're going to make that a challenge for you? Yeah, I'll suggest it. No, no, I will ask the questions, but they won't change my decision. I think Patrick's coming in right now. I think Patrick's on his way in the door. Good evening, everyone. Thanks for coming to the Monday, September 9th, Town of Essex Select Board meeting. Please join me for the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Do we have any agenda additions or changes today? I would like to make one change. I'd like to request that the Select Board move consent item 6C, Approve Use of Capital Funds for Essex Free Library Repairs into a business item. I just want to update you on the estimate that was included. It's a little bit lower than it probably should be. So I wanted to bring that to your attention. Can I get a motion from the Board as to, are there any other agenda additions or changes? Anyone else? Can we get a motion to approve the agenda as amended? So moved. Second. All those in favor of approving the agenda as amended, please say aye. Aye. Now at item 4, Public to Be Heard, this item is for anyone in the audience who would like to speak to the Select Board about something that is not on the agenda. So if there's anyone here who has something to say that they'd like to share but it's not on the agenda, now would be the time to do that. Looks like it's all here for agenda business. So thank you. Our next item, 5A, Approve Amended Rules and Regulations for the Mountain View Cemetery. So come on up, Jenny. Yeah. Have a seat next to Kathy. Right there next to Kathy at the end. And Fran, thank you for being here. And one of you could take Dan's spot because he won't be here for the early part. So you've been busy. We have. So thank you for allowing us to come before you. I'm Jenny Willingham and I'm an assistant clerk here as well as a staff representative for the Mountain View Cemetery Commission. With how this all happened is with the untimely passing of Gary Tomlinson who had organized and maintained and did everything with the cemetery for generations. The town was in a position to take over the cemetery to have any idea. I know when I first started here, somebody would come in and inquire about the cemetery. We would just say go see Gary because we had no idea. We didn't have any forms. We didn't know who was being buried here. It was just a... It's not to anybody's fault. It's just the town needed to have a better understanding since it is a town-owned cemetery of who was being buried there, who's purchasing lots. There were lots being sold between people. So there really was a lot. Our last rules and regulations were in 1986. So we... as a commission with Fran being the chair, Fran King-Horn has done a great job. We developed a whole new sense of rules and regulations for the cemetery, including residency requirements, uniform lot size. We have procedures in place. So instead of being a deed that we were issuing before as part of the clerk's office, we now have a certificate of burial rights because it's not a deed. It's the right to be buried in the cemetery. So we've aligned our prices. We came up, like I said, new forms. Interment orders are now required. If someone plans to be buried there, we will have an internment order in place. We will know where they're going to be buried, where they're tracking if they're a veteran, just so we can put for Memorial Day, we can put a flag in their honor. Who gave permission? So we have all these forms, affidavits of heirs, work orders, so now a contractor needs to present a certificate of insurance to the town prior to doing work in the cemetery. So we've tried to make this a procedure where nobody ever did not do this any longer. Any commission, at least we've established a place where we have protocol and we have a procedure and we're just trying to track lot sales, who's being buried there, enforcing the rules and regulations going forward. And like I said, here's Fran, who's the chair who, you know, the commission, I have to say, just is very dedicated and I really enjoyed working with them. They're putting forth a lot effort just to make this right and we've been in contact with many other towns and cities trying to make sure that what we're doing is right. The rules and regulations were I sent them to Bill Ellis, who is the town's attorney for his input on our draft. So we went back and forth for a month with that, but we were very appreciative of his assistance in helping us. So Fran, what has been the involvement of the cemetery commission up until this point? Well, a lot of what she said we've been working on until Gary Tomlinson's the previous sexton's passing last July, the commission which I was on, I wasn't chair, but I was on, we were meeting two or three times a year at somebody's house, but with his passing it was just a great time to reassess how everything's been done. And so we now meet monthly in the town office and a lot of what Jenny said is what we spent most of last winter just contacting other towns, other sextons to find out how they keep their records because the records here were really confusing. Gary and his father before him were the sextons and basically everything was hand records. It was just an old system and so it really needed to be looked at again and we needed to get really organized. So we spent the winter talking with other towns how they do it, comparing the prices for our lots to other towns and so forth and then decided we needed some updated rules and regulations as well. Thank you for doing that work. Does anyone have any questions for Max? Yeah, I want to thank you for updating, taking the time to do that. I have just some things I'd like to recommend changes to this just to make it more clear is now the appropriate time to do that. Just to the proposed bylaws that we have before us. And if we can go to your page 3 starting with number 9, it talks about Essex Cemetery Commission. I'd like it to or consider it reading a group of volunteers appointed by the select board instead of a group of appointed volunteers just to make it clear that they're appointed by the page 3. Can you tell me what section? Oh, up at the top. Number 9 of definition. The bottom right, it has the page numbers. Okay, so again, a group of a group of volunteers appointed by the select board and then at the end there just to add upon select board approval. So any changes to the rules and regulations or appeal any current rule or regulation upon select board approval? Because we don't expect the commission just to do it on their own without, right? That's correct. Okay, and then going same page number 13 on internment it says the act of burying the remains of the deceased in the earth. Does that also apply to the columbarium? Actually, I did learn something. The word internment does is defined by someone into the earth and it's been a few months. There's another word for columbarium, but it was so confusing we decided just to use internment but you're right, it's something we didn't correct in this. So we will take out the earth. Because we have little niches in the columbarium. Okay, excellent. Thank you for pointing that out. And then if we go to the next page on page 4, if I can continue. Of course. A, just a question. The hours of operation will be from May 1st to December 1st so it's closed throughout the winter. So can visitors still come though? Visitors can come, but there are no burials. And the roads aren't plowed. So you could park at the beginning right and walk in there. And then to C where it says drugs and alcoholic beverages are not permitted in the cemetery. Can we just say illegal drugs? Because if somebody has heart medicine or whatever, you know, it's fun to have in there I think. Same page, number 3 B, where it says no vehicle can be operated at a speed in excess of 10 miles per hour within the cemetery. Do you think it's worth saying except for emergency vehicles in case there's an issue there? Is that getting too... I think it might be too big. Okay, that's fine. If we go to the next page on page 5 where it talks about littering of any type or dumping of litter within the boundaries is prohibited within the cemetery boundaries as opposed to over the boundaries. Well, you did a great job so it's easy to pick apart stuff after somebody did the hard work. And then number 6 the commission sets the fees for the Mountain View Cemetery upon select board approval right? Isn't that required? So again, just to make sure it's clear to the commission that it's not there they can recommend, but it needs to be approved by the select board. Okay. While we're on that, if you don't mind Max I tried to look for those fees and I didn't see them on the Web Cemetery website. Are they not up yet? We have those actually, we do have to move those. They are on, if you visit the Town Clerks, if you visit our site, we do have forums at the bottom right hand corner of all cemetery information and cemetery related documents. I pulled up the Mountain View Cemetery like page and it has a map of the cemetery but there was nothing about the cost for plots or anything. It's basically like four lines right now. If you go before that there's a bunch of stuff on the page before that. And then on page seven, number three under Cemetery Lots, I guess that's section five three. It says the town of Essex and its employees collectively and individually as well as the Essex Cemetery commission members shall be held harmless from any liability due to damage, destruction or injury caused by, but not limited to, I think is kind of a typical thing you would add there. And then I'd like to recommend where you strike being that it's a governmental cemetery. And I wasn't sure what common enemy means in that sentence. That was part of the ones where we looked at other rules and regulations that was in there. Bill said just that's fine. I don't understand it but he says it's all right. Okay. Let's see. Is God sort of a vernacular for a freak accident or odd thing that we can't explain? Well, I know that insurance companies have that but being that it's a governmental thing, I'd like to separate that. I mean, that's my recommendation. I'm not saying you have to take it. Okay. Let's see. And on page 13 this is a real nip but it's if you could be consistent in the use of feet or inches versus the quote, single quote or double quote you know just to be consistent throughout would be I think appreciated. Okay. And I guess that's it. So those are my things. You can take them all apart. But again, thank you for going through these and redoing them. Thank you. Were the fees increased with this revision of the bylaws? No. They were put in place a couple years ago. They had it there at the same time. The previous commission actually had also investigated the cost of our lots compared to other towns. I think probably three or four years ago I guess they had increased it by $100 for three years. I think it's now $550 for a lot because we were way under what everyone else was charging. So they increased it by $100 for the last three years but we have not changed it. Andy. Just back on the Max's first comment on page three, the number nine definition there according to our charter the Cemetery commissioners are appointed by the manager by the select board. To see the difference between elected versus appointed and his response to me was if they were elected they have a much larger jurisdiction over... Our charter says that the manager appoints Cemetery commissioners. It's not the select board's purview to appoint Cemetery commissioners. It's specifically says in the charter that they're appointed by the manager. So Andy, you're asking to not make the change. Rather than just to say to add in there appointed by the select board I don't know whether we want to say appointed by the manager the town manager or municipal manager or whatever we're going to because if we put appointed by the select board it's contrary to our charter. So I just... Yeah, I'd like to be consistent with the charter. Good catch, Andy. Then perhaps it should say appointed by the manager. When I was appointed I just met with David L. Yeah. And I know others on the commission the same thing happened. My husband had to come in front of the select board. I don't know what... Andy's correct that it belongs to the manager's purview to do that. So those changes, Max will change those too to upon... Appointed by the select board. What about the fees though? Is that... So they didn't change the fees. I know, but it says that they have the right to make those changes but that is still upon select board approval. Is that correct? That I think would remain the way you edited it. Okay. But the other part about the appointments... Should be the manager. Yeah, that was a good catch by Andy. Thank you, Andy. Anybody else? So the recommendation is for the board to approve these amended bylaws. So if we were to do that this evening we used to make a motion that says that we're recommending the approval of the revisions as amended this evening. So if anyone would like to make that motion... I move that the select board approve revisions to the Mountain View Cemetery rules and regulations as amended. Is there a second, Max? Okay. Any further discussion? All right. Seeing none, all those in favor of approving the amended bylaws and rules to the Mountain View Cemetery signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? All right. Thank you for your hard work. Please tell the commission we really appreciate it. Can I just add one thing? Absolutely. I just want to express our appreciation for Charlie Cole, who is our volunteer. He's a sextant. That's a great thing. We've asked Charlie to track his hours because they are countless. It's a big job. From marking the graves to information. And so we, hopefully at some point in time we can talk about our budget and find a way to put in a little money. But we are very grateful for Charlie. Okay. Thank you very much. Greg? I just want to quickly give credit to Jenny and the Cemetery Commission for the past year. For 16 months, something like that. And then a ton of work, really getting organized. This is just a small sample of what they've been doing. I just want to make sure they get credit and kudos for all that work. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Evan? I would absolutely echo that and the hard work that all of them, including our sextant, which we had to look up what that actually meant and did. So we appreciate that. We take this very seriously and solemnly of what we're doing. And we want to make sure that the people who are buried and turd and Columbined in our facilities are well taken care of and well managed. And thank you to your committee. And one last item in terms of the charter, the town manager appoints with the approval of the select men, the Cemetery Commissioner. So I guess I recommend their appointment. It still comes to it should come through here for appointment. Thank you, Evan. So then how did we amend this? Do we say upon select board approval? Sorry, I appoint and I bring them here. So it's still the approval by a select board. Okay. Section 117602. Well, I think instead of saying manager, it should say select board as originally suggested, though. Is that correct based on what you're reading in the charter? The town manager shall appoint with the approval of the select men. So then my original one. Would you like to... Well, we just voted and approved. What's our parliamentary procedure for this? I would just say that candidates will come through me. I'll bring them to the select board. That's how we do it. Thank you. Thank you, Fran. Thank you, Jenny. This is our business. Item 5B, discussion of proposed application for recovery housing at Fort Ethan Allen. So we have guests from the Champlain Housing Trust and Vermont Foundation of Recovery. Thank you. So what we'd like to do because we have quite a large audience here for this topic. Our guests are going to present to the board their plans. The board will have a conversation questions back and forth and then after we've had our conversation because I see that there's quite a few people out in the audience. Can I have a show of hands of folks who want to make comment? Is there anyone who plans to speak regarding this topic or you're just here to watch? Okay. So we have two or three folks. So you will have a limited amount of time at the end of this discussion to make a comment. So thank you, everyone. If you wouldn't mind introducing yourselves, there's four of you now. There were two a minute ago. So please introduce yourselves. I'm Amy Dimetroits. I'm the director of real estate development for the Champlain Housing Trust. My name is David Regal and I'm the executive director for Vermont Foundation of Recovery. And I'm Michael Monti, I'm the chief operating officer of Champlain Housing Trust. Andrew Ghani, I'm the director of operations for Vermont Foundation Recovery. Thank you so much for having us here today and to talk about our proposed recovery housing project out at the Fort, Fort Easton Allen. And I also really want to thank you for being flexible with the public hearings. There have been multiple public hearings noticed starting on August 19th. We changed that one in response to neighborhood meetings. We had a neighborhood meeting and it was clear that we needed more time to engage with the neighborhood concerns and questions. And we have had a second meeting about that. This was to be a warned public hearing but the notice didn't get printed in the Essex reporter. So we do now have a warned in the Burlington Free Press there was a warned meeting for the 23rd. So that was when we were hoping that we would come for a public hearing on the 23rd about the grant application that we're requesting. Excuse me. I want to provide some general information to the Select Board tonight about what our proposal is. In 2016, CHT, the Champlain Housing Trust purchased 12 buildings with 31 apartments on Easton Allen Avenue in Fort from UVM, which was using it for graduate student housing. We converted 19 of the 31 homes to condominiums and we've sold those to homeowners. So that's the Easton Allen application. We retained three of the apartment buildings with 12 apartments total. So there's three buildings each with four apartments. Those don't have any income restriction. They're owned by CHT but they don't have any rent or income restriction right now. This past spring we were talking with the Vermont Foundation of Recovery folks about how we could support their work given especially in the face of helping them to expand their services, to find efficiencies so that they could expand their services across the state. And we looked at these three buildings and thought this could be a really good opportunity for them to co-locate some of their other homes and be able to get some efficiencies of scale there. So that's how this project came about. So the plan right now is there are the three buildings. It's 1005, 1006, 1007 We are planning to have the two buildings on either end converted from four apartments each to two apartments each. So there will be two larger apartments and those will be run one for women one for men as recovery homes and David's going to explain how they're operated. So there won't really be any exterior changes. It's just the interior changing those. The middle building would remain four two-bedroom apartments and those would be used as an opportunity to bring parents who have lost their children through their abuse and their disorder back with their children. So it's a way to reunify families who've been sort of torn apart by these issues. All of the current tenants who are living there would need to be relocated. We would be working with them over a number of months to first of all understand what their needs are for a relocation home to identify where they could move and what they'd be happy with pay for all of the moving expenses including security deposits and setting up utilities. Paying also a rent differential if the location that they move to has a higher rent, we would pay the rent differential so that it remains affordable for them. We have, CHT has 2,000 apartments within Chitton County that we manage there's 30 that we worked with the town of Essexon at Cedars Edge on Suzy Wilson Road and we have a number of others in the fort on the Colchester side. But we'd be working with folks that wouldn't have to necessarily move to apartments within our portfolio that could be anywhere in the market and we'd work with them to identify what their priorities and preferences would be. We would continue to own the property and we would enter into a master lease with the Vermont foundation of recovery. And David's going to explain how recovery homes are operated and managed. Good evening everybody again thank you very much for the opportunity to be here. I know we're on sort of a short timetable so I'm going to do the best I can to cover sort of how we operate a Vermont foundation of recovery in an efficient manner and then certainly welcome questions to be able to clarify things as the evening progresses. So at Vermont foundation recovery we currently operate six recovery residences throughout the state of Vermont. Most of our recovery homes are for six individuals they are gender specific and that number six is chosen for a specific reason recovery residences really work because of the connections developed by people and the peer-to-peer supports within the homes and so you need to have enough people so that those connections are available and people can develop relationships and form bonds and support each other. But you don't want to have so many people that it becomes unmanageable and we really try to foster a family like atmosphere and have people work together within the home. So the six person home seems to work very well we've been doing it for about five years now and we have folks come in who want to be there so it's absolutely 100% voluntary. People seek us out. Typically it's after treatment but not always and so they say, hey look I want to live in a place with other people who are I know on the same path that I'm on and I know that it's going to be a safe environment as I develop the necessary skill sets in early recovery to become stable in my recovery but also I want to be able to develop the life skills necessary to be able to successfully live independently and so we have an interview process, we make sure and ask questions and try to get to the heart really the major determining factor is if somebody is committed to their recovery if we believe they're committed to their recovery then typically they are a good fit for our recovery residences and we have them come and join us so I think it's important to note that we do have paid house managers for each one of our recovery residences typically 10 to 15 hours a week per recovery residence in this case we are talking on the outside buildings of having separate recovery residences on the first floor and the second floor so they would each have somebody that was on site and working with the folks living in the home our house members 10 to 15 hours a week each we also are supported by volunteer mentors at each one of the recovery residences they are not paid but they are typically people who are in recovery themselves and are able to be there to support the home all of our house managers we really function each of our homes in a very very similar way and so they are able to support each other as a team if something is going on at one home where some members need some support but that particular house manager doesn't happen to be available at the time any one of our other house managers are able to fill in and help support those members the next layer up is Andrew is our director of operations and he supports all of our homes across our network and really supports our house managers in doing the best job that they can do and there is myself as an executive director and as a 501c3 tax example organization we have a board of directors who also helps to be supportive as well so to date we have been operating pretty successfully in terms of we really don't have responses by police departments and fire departments to our homes I think you can probably pull information on our locations and get the results of that you know we our average length of stay is about five months we try to get people to the point where they can successfully live independently and so for us we typically look at people being able to transition into their own living spaces at around the year mark like that's our goal it doesn't always work that way we all come in in different places we all grow at different rates so we respect each individual's process but we do want people to be living successfully on their own people are required to work volunteer or be going to school a minimum of 20 hours a week in order to live in one of our recovery residences so we want people out active in the community contributing paying taxes giving back to the communities that we're in so it's voluntary we want people who are committed to their own recovery folks choose what recovery path makes the most sense for them and then we hold them accountable to that recovery path and then we hold them accountable to a standard of living within the house so that they can develop the life skills necessary to be able to live independently I think that's sort of it in a nutshell I don't know if there's anything else anybody else wants to add and certainly open to questions I wanted to follow up with the timeline of where we are with the project and what we're looking for going forward so we have started the process of applying for financing we have made an application to the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board and what we want to ask the town of Essex to do at the public hearing on the 23rd is to consider applying on behalf of this project to the Vermont Community Development Program that is a HUD federal HUD funding that comes to the state to support community development and affordable housing and only municipalities can apply for that funding so any projects that are conceived of by a non-profit need to be supported by the community and then the community actually makes the application we though as the Champlain Housing Trust try to minimize the amount of work that that takes from your staff so we will prepare the application we will prepare requisitions we will prepare any sort of reporting what the town needs to do is review those applications make sure that they line up with what your intention is and then account for the funds once we requisition them they come to the town and then the town passes them over to us but we try to minimize the impact on staff and town time the project can pay for the town's legal expenses and we can pay for the cost of a single audit and my understanding is that this would potentially push you into the need for a single audit and that can be covered by the project we've also included a $50,000 $50,000 of our request is for some storm water improvements there's some storm water issues in the neighborhood currently and we would be targeting that $50,000 to that there are also some ongoing sewer issues in the neighborhood this grant wouldn't address that but we are talking with your department of public works to see if we might be able to come up with a way to solve some pretty serious ongoing sewer issues in the neighborhood so we may be coming back with those sorts of concerns at a later date we're hoping for approvals of the financing in the fall we would need to start moving tenants out say in February we'll be able to move into the recovery homes over the summer that's just broadly sort of our proposed time frame so if there are questions and comments we're happy to answer we've got the four of us here to respond I have a few questions if we apply for this grant in your stead as it were the $700,000 if for some reason we aren't chosen or we don't get that this project in some sort of like reduced capacity or are you reliant on this to sort of go ahead what often happens is with a project like this we need to go through two rounds so what we would hope is that if we were not successful the first round we would come through on the second round we would certainly look at ways that we might be able to you know reconfigure the project to see if we could move ahead in some format it's very critical funding as the project has been proposed okay and you had mentioned so with 12 existing apartments I'm assuming so that's roughly 24 to 36 people living there right now give or take how many people will be coming in in total for the I just kind of want to get an idea for if it's a big population increase, decrease yes you're right so there's 12 apartments there say 2 to 3 24 to 36 and we're talking about 32 so it's roughly the same amount of people who are going to be coming in and going through their recovery and you had mentioned some of them potentially with families or children who are being brought in have you talked to the school district at all about having children who are going to be in the school year who are coming from a high rate of trauma like homes sometimes the school district is going to need to put extra resources towards that and certainly I'm sure they'd appreciate any sort of heads up that you can give them that their district is incredible at working with kids who sort of have a background like that but just the more they know coming in then the better that's a good suggestion we haven't done that but we we're still working on figuring out how to do that piece of it of bringing the children back with the family so that will be a part of that process it's a good point so I think one of the things that's important to note is that that center building won't actually change because it's currently four separate two bedroom apartments and so we as part of our model currently we have group recovery residences for six individuals and then we have transitional apartments because we found that people often just like making the leap maybe directly at a treatment living totally on their own is pretty daunting and sometimes very difficult going from the recovery residents to living on their own was challenging for some people as well so we tried to offer up this sort of added step in the process of having a transitional apartment where you know people sort of had a little bit more autonomy a little bit more personal responsibility but still attached to Vermont Foundation recovery and still had support from us as they made that so that when they did go to step out on their own they were really accustomed to what those expectations were going to be and very comfortable with what they would need to do at that standpoint to be successful so that center building will serve as transitional apartments as it currently stands and as we sort of work out how we're going to do this family reunification and work with children and explore things with the school districts and whatever other supports are we're going to partner with the experts on children and so that may be DCF DC Children and Families and you know we actually already work with one of the field directors out of the community and so you know figuring a lot of those pieces out that stuff will come as we figure that part out and that's a great suggestion along the way and then I think the last thing I have is that so you had mentioned you had 31 buildings and 13 of them already converted so this is three buildings I mean we're talking about obviously there's a change in the neighborhood itself you know maybe the make up but it seems that you have 19 buildings worth of other people that aren't going anywhere 19 homes it's like 12 buildings but yes okay great thank you so I'm in support of the concept of recovery homes and appreciate the work you're doing for a very it's important work unfortunately the need is really out there for that before our public hearing though I would like you touched on it a little bit David about the impact to our police and rescue and perhaps even fire so I'd like to see some data of surrounding communities that did they see an extra increase in call volumes on that that'd be important for me to understand and also are these affordable housing units that you're converting to this are not now they will be part of the reason why we're doing this is because we want to make the pricing available at a really good price so that they could then have some ability to really be stronger as an organization so affordability for recovery homes is a really critical issue identified by the state of Vermont as the most critical issue for the creation of recovery homes and so we're stepping up to do that I know there's a shortage of affordable housing in this area and you had two meetings with the neighbors and I know you got a lot of questions and I believe you're going to respond to those questions before a public hearing could we get copies of those questions and your responses and that would be very helpful for me we're hoping this week we're hoping today certainly by Friday we're going to send it out to the list of emails that we collected at the neighborhood meetings as well as through your subgroup that would be really important to have Leslie do you have data you don't have to show it tonight but maybe you could bring it next time about the property value impact, does it go up, does it go down, does it stay the same do you have any data to show what might happen to the folks who are owning homes there and now this is going to be a little different than what they anticipated when they bought their home and I'd like to know how they're going to be impacted financially there's an emotional thing I don't know how to measure that there's several different studies that have been done throughout the U.S. and we can definitely get you to say one of those but again I'm in support of the concept of recovery housing and I understand the need out there and I appreciate the work you're doing we just need to make sure that it's the right place at the right scale thank you thank you and you're the application you mentioned that there's some cost savings associated with consolidation bringing from I think it was Barry St. Albans, I forget what that maybe but it doesn't talk about closing those facilities it's later on in the application it says those are still going to remain in place I understand where the consolidation savings comes from if you're not closing anything else so we would actually be relocating so we would be those homes that are currently in operation the folks who are living in those homes would literally be relocating to the buildings at Fort Ethan Allen so the cost savings comes from the fact that I mean frankly we've been operating for about five years now and that meant that we needed to start with the homes that were available to us at the time and so we got into rental agreements with people who have mortgages on those homes as private landlords and so when we looked to working with folks like Champlain Housing Trust it's just a much more affordable and well maintained property to be able to be occupying as an organization and so we would be closing those homes and moving them to Fort Ethan Allen to reduction across to the organization too and that's essentially where the efficiencies come in I got the distinct impression from what I read that everything was staying open but I guess I misunderstood now we're shifting and as part of the shifting there are savings associated with it thank you anything else Andy? Max, my other question I only have a comment these are really complex and extraordinary things that you're doing and that we are discussing they're complex in so many ways my cousin Kathleen went to many recovery houses and she was not successful for a long time and it was when her recovery housing was within a community where she could feel like a normal person and feel valued as a person that she was ultimately capable of making her life work in her favor in a way that has been ongoing for her for now 30 years and so I'm very aware of what both sides of these or their complexities of it and I'm grateful for all of us to have these conversations I'm just waxing on but it's a lot and it's great that we're looking at it and exactly what you said Max about the dynamics is so important I'm not really helping this one, sorry thank you actually David if you would describe how you deal with behaviors within the households because I think that's really important especially around police calls and the safety of the residents not only in the homes but then it kind of spills out to the neighborhood that the neighborhood is safe absolutely so there's a few different layers to that we have guidelines and they're written guidelines and we call them not the membership policies essentially, member policies and I look to Andrew because Andrew is the one that oversees all of our homes and he is day in and day out elbow deep and trying to help people that has been for the better part of the last 10 years and so when it comes to the homes themselves he is by far the expert and I would venture to say in the state of Vermont and potentially the northeast but we've got pretty clear policies and guidelines for how people can behave and a lot of what this is about is helping people to have some accountability with compassion for maybe the first time in a very long time and it's important that folks understand what is acceptable behavior and what is not acceptable behavior and there's a very frank conversation about that and so when we have people who are taking any actions that put the other folks living in the home in danger such as returning to use or any sort of even talking or threats of violence or acting out in any sort of that way we promise people when they come to us that they're going to have a safe place to live and so we have to help that person to get out of the home for the safety of the other folks who live there and figure out what do they need for support and how can we help them to move forward on their journey so we do take the safety of the home and the safety of the neighborhood very very seriously because if we didn't we wouldn't actually be helping anybody and so the other thing that I think is important to remember is that we specifically don't have people living in the homes 24-7 because it is their home and it's about scaffolding so if somebody is there 24-7 then you start to rely on that person to solve every problem with every interaction in the family really you don't learn the skills to be able to do that on your own and so all of our folks are available but we want the House members to have that culture defined by them and to hold each other accountable as much as possible and because it's their sobriety it's life and death for them like they take it very very seriously and so they're aware when somebody's off when something's not quite right when something's going on and they let us know and then we can come in and provide the support necessary to resolve the situation so it is quite a dance it's complex like you had mentioned and it's one of those things that seriously the members of the home take seriously and as a result it ends with very very little impact on the community in a negative way and it ends up actually being really positive and contributing to the community it was interesting for us as landlords we can't monitor the behavior of our tenants in the way that these folks can because we have a landlord-tenant relationship so we can have stuff going on in our own homes as a homeowner you can have behaviors going on and there's no way to really have a check on that behavior but through this program because they're not tenants they're members and because the sobriety of the other members in the household are threatened by any sort of behavior or any sort of drug or alcohol use they immediately leave the situation which is way more controlled than we have on our apartments that statement you said about the compassion it's an accountability with compassion board members do you have any further comments or questions? so having had this conversation and Greg or Evan do you have anything you need to share? well I know the chief is here and Jill is here and Charlie is here we did have a meeting with the parties to hear this before it occurred because we had a lot of the same concerns and wanted some of the questions answered chief for you do you want to come take my spot? yeah well while we're waiting for that transition what are the other sources of financing you're using for this besides what you're asking the town to be a fiscal agent for? Vermont Housing and Conservation Board we did make a request to UVM we have some existing debt with UVM we're asking them to forgive some of that that would reduce our overall costs and the other one was sorry it's an AHS related agency of human services related grant fund I can't remember the name of it it's AHS and BHCB BHCB and we'll get more if we need some additional funds we'll look at other sources we can just make up some other acronyms sorry it's our word it's understandable everybody's world at this level thank you you're on if I default to Jill first from the CJC to chat a little bit about her involvement with the CJC as it relates to this then I've got some information for you thank you Jill Evans from the Community Justice Center and as you know one of the roles that we provide in this community is to help people who are reentering their communities after having served an incarcerated sentence and housing is absolutely a key issue for people that are reentering many of those people reentering also trying to lead a sober lifestyle and so I mean just generally the idea of sober housing is something that the Community Justice Center supports wholeheartedly and are actually really excited that the thought that it might be coming to Essex because that's something that we have struggled with is finding partners in housing for people coming out of prison so I also come from the Department of Corrections background of 30 years and working with women and children impacted by incarceration and you know partners for people going back to prison or picking up or committing new crimes is a lack of safe stable housing and without safe stable housing people can't get jobs and jobs are another thing that really mitigate the risk that people present to public safety so I mean I understand some of the other broader sort of concerns and that sort of thing with regard to the impact and the dynamics but in support of it. Thank you. I should also say sorry. We actually were approached by the partnership of CHT and V4 to help bring Community Voice into the process so last Thursday we were part of, we came to the meeting that they were having the second time with the people who live in that community and provide sort of a facilitating role so that lots and questions and concerns and support that people from that community had could be brought out to be shared and responded to. So I'm going to pass around and I apologize because I did not have this prep for the meeting because I was doing some of the things that Max was talking about. We kind of got pulled into this at the end of the game and I'm going to tell you as a police chief I was a little concerned. I'm happy to tell you today I've got less concerns. We had the opportunity to meet with these folks today. I didn't finish up until this weekend which is why you're just now getting this memo to get some of the stats and responses back from other facilities and other communities that have these facilities to talk about what is the impact and what they are seeing for crimes increase in crimes impact to the citizens that are living there you know failure in the systems you know how is this potentially going to affect us so I've got a memo for you what I'd like to do is if I can read it for you it says the police department learned about the proposal third hand and was initially fairly concerned about the potential impacts of the community to include possible increase in demands for municipal services such as police, fire and rescue that are already stretched then specifically we were concerned about potential for increases in crime illicit drug activity calls for service that these facilities can bring in a community if they are not planned, placed and run well. We were also concerned about what we heard of other low income housing opportunities in exchange for this program I'm happy to report over the last couple of weeks the police department staff has attended several meetings and spoken with some subject matter professionals that have alleviated most of our concerns for the record the police department does in fact support recovery programs and housing if they are planned placed and run well we can't give you an impact because we don't know right now cost to the fire department potentially us I think that would come with time and you're going to see that in my recommendation at the bottom what I would tell you is we have run some stats for communities we were initially looking at a model that was comparative of Maple Leaf Farm and there's some pretty significant numbers for impact for police response and rescue response and that and meeting with these folks and talking with some of the other subject matter experts it's not a comparable model what we have got for stats is basically almost no increase for the last four years from these folks and actually I got off the phone on Friday with Jackie Corvall who is the opiate director embedded with the Burlington police department basically runs opiate recovery for Chittin County and is connected to the programs is connected to the police departments and trying to solve this problem and Jackie said you got the best group of people in the state that could be coming into your community in the programs that they run what I would tell you is what I heard from them and it's what you were just talking about is the one of the big things that's a concern for us is a landlord-tenant relationship versus they call it a membership in a landlord-tenant relationship the tenants have rights and if you have a problem with that tenant you're going to spend some time some money some attorneys fees on removing that person from the property as we have been told in this program it is a membership that they have membership rules so you'll actually see in part of my recommendation at the bottom is I think that helps because what we're hearing from the other agencies that these folks are in is if there's a problem they're reactive to that and the problem is removed and it doesn't allow to continue to be a problem in the community that's the type of relationship we want to be in so if they've got the ability to move folks out if there's a problem there that we can substantiate is a problem I think that's where then the neighbors I feel comfortable the neighbors could speak up and say we're having an issue and we're going to get a response from that Jackie has told me that if you're going to have a facility and a group running it these are the folks to have it so my recommendation would be I'm a little concerned about 32 beds we would respectfully request that this be phased somehow our recommendation would be is maybe half of that to start with give us six months or give us a year to be able to see what the impact is do a study come back and be able to give the board a recommendation as they start to grow again that's just our recommendation but I think that then gives a smaller footprint it also gives the community and the folks that live there a little smaller footprint to be able to see before it gets too large that this is going to work and it's going to work well and I don't know if this is possible but working on an MOU between these folks and the select board that if the condition of membership versus landlord-tenant changes either by their rules or by a court order in other words someone comes back and appeals that and the court says no that's actually a landlord-tenant relationship that the town would be able to consider any future growth that it wouldn't just be an all or nothing because once you get into a landlord-tenant relationship you are now going to and I think the folks from the housing are nodding their heads and going to tell you you have a much bigger issue and certainly the police department being able to deal with that it's basically an eviction process which is difficult so I would tell you we're in support of it the numbers that we are seeing appear to not be where these folks are in the homes that they're doing are not impacting as far as police resources and rescue resources in a significant way so we're in support of a trial. Thank you both for your comments your considered comments and maybe one other comment at our meeting with them about a week ago we also had Colchester PD here we invited them while they don't have any standing in this particular comment they do have other housing on the Colchester side that they're a little concerned with the proximity but in general they seem to be one they were pleased that they were invited two they understand what is going on and it's needed in the area so and then I know that we have several residents in the audience and the other thing is that while they're not necessarily on a deadline tonight their funding is from the funding request goes to right and there's a possibility that they will not get funded this cycle that was it's always a possibility and then from a staff standpoint we would be required to do a lot of the financial transactions through this agency and have a single it's called a single audit we do have other grants too in particular that are large dollar grants this is going to put us into a single audit it is going to have some staffing issues in terms of timing and some other things so if the select board does seek to approve this while they will pay for a proportionate share of the single audit it is still going to be staff timing to do this but again you make decisions for the community what's best you had said it's going from the community development program not VHCB it's both the one that we're requesting here is from the Vermont community development program not requesting the town to ask for funds through the CDBG program that is the CDBG right but the money that you're asking the town to act as fiscal agent on is through VHCB not through it's through VCDP we don't need to talk with the town we can apply directly to VHCB and as I understand this and you guys can verbally confirm or not all your heads you are not asking for a monetary commitment from the town other than to be the agent and do the single audit which you would be reimbursing us for that's our arrangement other than your staff time which is valuable right the VCDP program likes to see that there is what they call an in kind contribution and that's just counting up your staff hours and calling that a contribution thank you is this development going to serve Essex residents okay it will serve others it won't be exclusively Essex residents but it will absolutely yes Charlie hi there good evening I'm Charles Cole the fire chief for the town of Essex I've listened to chief Carries and we spoke briefly before the meeting and I do support his memorandum and a request to phase this in to see what the true impacts are I've heard tonight where we've talked about impacts to stormwater and there's money to fix that and we've talked about audits that are going to be required in staff time and there's money there to reimburse it our department both the Essex and Essex Junction Fire Department which operate first response agencies as well as the Essex Rescue we're volunteer so we leave our jobs to cover these calls so it would be helpful to understand the true impact because the group that you have there now the low income group that live there currently there that's it the group that's coming in is much higher at risk group for health care concerns they're addicted that is a health care problem so I hear you say that you've got staff there 10 to 15 hours a week to manage them so the other 145 to 150 hours a week who manages them when you're not there they're going to have to call on services if you're not immediately available that will impact on our services if they're in a crisis can I just clarify that it's 15 to 20 hours per house which is six members so that means if we're going to have what is the number of well four recovery residents so four recovery homes means there's going to be four house managers which means there's going to be a total of 15 20 hours per house manager so we're actually talking about you know 60 hours that are actually going to be there so does it make that more sense okay and then we do have you know we are available 24 hours a day that was my next question do you have resources? absolutely I think the other thing that's important to clarify is that while we help to support the house members we don't manage anybody again they're voluntarily folks that come to us they're folks who are going to be living in the communities anyway after they come out of treatment and the question is do we want folks living in a place where they're surrounded by their peers and where they're supported by people who are familiar with what they're going through or do we want folks again living in our communities and will be utilizing the same resources who are not supported and not living with their peers and not in that type of environment and so I think it is also worth you know similar to thank you very much for taking the time and finding out kind of what has gone on over the last several years I think you know certainly it would be great to do the same thing with first responders and compare you know how many visits have there been of first responders to our homes over the last four or five years so in Essex you have had one? well there was two one was police one was fire department in the last ten years that I can remember and there could have been more but that's all I can remember and then comparing those to you know have records of how many calls there have been to the same you know neighborhoods over the same period of time and you know because I think we appreciate the concern and you know we want to make sure that we're good partners when it comes to it so for sure so just to clarify would you guys be amenable to the chief's suggestion phasing in 16 at first but we appreciate that point of view totally but we have to think through we have three buildings you know we do real estate and we want to support the program so we have to think through what does it mean when we do one phase two phase three build one building two buildings three buildings later on what does it really take we know that what we thought had in place really worked we may think about whether we can do two or whether we do one and two later on that kind of thing we appreciate sort of that point of view but we need a little more time we're hearing it tonight so is that something you'd be prepared to comment on when you come for the hearing Annie are you sure well I don't know if it's appropriate for me to say my thought and I don't mean I just am thinking so it's not meant to be offensive I'm wondering if maybe there's a flow that happens when you do the housing as you set forth which might be harder to produce with the stage idea with the phase idea I think it's a combination of both how the real estate works which is you know mortgages payments to combination how the program will work so I think we had to sort of both of those together that's going to work how we do the building I think you make a good point that I think we both have to sort of evaluate and look at and sort of think that through before we'll be able to comment from either side but certainly appreciate that I also don't think that we're going to just like you know we get to houses and the next day there's going to be 36 people there I mean like there is going to be a little bit of a process because I mean that's a lot at once so there would be a little bit of a period of time anyways okay we've had a you're welcome thank you for coming all three of you appreciate it we've had a pretty good discussion I know there's folks in the audience does anyone have anything they'd like to speak about very briefly we are very late I see four people one two three four please stand up give us your name and address through the empty ones because there's a whole bunch of empty ones there that you could walk through and see what they are they vastly will improve them by moving them in because they will have the money to do so to do so themselves it's going to cost cht an extreme amount of money and I understand that it's not that we're not totally in support of it but we fully agree that it should be in stages it seems like a lot of people to throw together you can't tell me with the low amount of hours that somebody is going to be managing it if somebody does re-offend and re-use goes back to the thing and steals from somebody and it causes a chaos that one guy in two buildings over is going to be able to respond to that by the time he gets back who knows what's happening and that's fearful for myself for a lot of the people in the community I'm not saying that I haven't dealt with it I've threatened myself there's been people in my family we've dealt with it but I wouldn't expect the whole community to absorb something that vast that's quite a thing to absorb for any community in that amount thank you sir you had your hand up in the front yes you so my name is Jim Morgan I live on Dalton Drive and I have a couple of concerns the first is that well I'm a retired clinical social worker and although I understand we're on the bus line that's a neighborhood those are the only things that I've heard that I would like to know why this particular location is clinically appropriate for this type of housing what makes this neighborhood as opposed to another neighborhood clinically appropriate it feels to me as though we have three buildings that you're pushing low-income people out of to develop this and you know the other concern I have is that and I hate to say this I've said this at every meeting I've come to and we've actually now started a conversation with CHT but I live on Dalton Drive and CHT manages or controls one third of our condos we have old buildings and when we push our condo fees up high enough to cover the cost of maintaining our buildings we have literally pushed people into foreclosure and it has been my experience over the 27 years 28 years that I've lived here that CHT was an original partner to Dalton Drive but there has been little interest when the board has ever reached out to discuss how can you help contribute to the astronomical fees of keeping these houses up so that everybody's property value is maintained and it has just been since this discussion that they have been willing to enter into that discussion and that doesn't help me feel confident about CHT's involvement and I will simply say that it's interesting to me that we've been to two public hearings now and we have suggested that there is concern about property values and increase in any kind of crime and what seems to have happened here is the chief of police seems to now have that information from them and we call on a mailing list and we never got that so that goes to my concern once again about partnering partnering and it appears that other people have information that we're not given Thank you John, you had your hand up One vital question that frequently gets overlooked You say your name please Oh, John Shepard I live at 55 Greenfield Road David I know the answer to the question but it's you with all the altruistic does this work? Yes Okay, and there's someone in the back way back with the pan yet Hi Jennifer Larson lived at Dalton Drive for 20 years I'm also the president of the condo association at Dalton Drive So I just wanted to bring up a couple of points One is just a reminder to all of you that the Fort neighborhood is a cohesive community that just happens to have a town line through the middle of it and that's how we all view it it's a very we don't see the town line so much but I will say that as well I've been to both of the recent public meetings there is a pretty good overlap that people support recovery housing and sadly it's a strong need for it and repeated here what we're concerned about is that as we've heard that this is an upscale by five times of what B-Thor's current model is so that's one of our major concerns is that this is 32 units versus they're six so it's more than five times Second our other concern is the change of what it would be to our community and that this is a lot more like an extended state hotel so much like permanent housing or even what it used to be the grad student housing which was two to four years so that's a large concern and that by their model with 20% success rate of people staying beyond five months that's a turnover in that with that current number of 76 people over the term of a year which would be roughly a person coming and going from every week to ten days that's a lot and so and also what has been talked about is that when this doesn't work and people might have acting out as a result of that not working some of that might come on our community and that's what we're also concerned about and this was also brought up and she has talked about really finding funds to improve the sewers when they bought from UVM they realized because UVM was not a good partner either and didn't disclose fully that the sewers were not in good shape to say the least the other thing is that it is a big community Town of Essex knows a little bit about that because you provide the water service for the entire floor the systems there are 125 plus years old now and there's a lot of overlap between now the properties that CHT owns and Dalton Drive and so those impacts from those houses impact there's just sewer lines that overlap it's not a very well mapped system but there's direct overlap and the buildings with 107 is very close to the back of some of the end of the Dalton Drive for DDNA so those are concerns that we have as residents we did suggest also doing a smaller scale for those reasons that have been iterative and that could you do one building and not three so it's been nice to hear that spoken of again tonight thank you one more and then we really need to move on I'm Anne LaBerge I live on Dalton Drive and I would like to speak for the people who live who are being evicted for the people who are being evicted this is a wonderful diverse very very diverse neighborhood and most of them are CHT have the landlords CHT and they're they're afraid they're afraid and they've been held in this scary place for such a long time that they're going to lose their homes and it's it strikes me as you know community housing trust and these people trusted this organization they got homes many of them are recovering addicts many of them have had others have people who have come from difficult and they've pulled themselves up and they're really they're really wonderful neighbors our backyard is full of children running and playing and riding their bikes and to move all of these people out and scatter them around it seems so it seems so the antithesis of community and trust so you'll be providing us with your responses to all of your public hearings absolutely and I would like to emphasize two things before we go one is please well three please definitely provide some kind of modeling about what a phased in approach might look like and we would like to see an impact study regardless of what model you take so if you do phase it in or if it's all at once I think within a year after a year of the projects being started we'd like to see how it's outcomes how it's going and please also Pat's suggestion of contacting the Essex Westford school district I think that's kind of paramount that you do that too thank you for your time thank you for coming we are quite behind I would like to make a suggestion that we recess the select board meeting and bring in our guests from the village trustees Greg if you give me a moment yes Greg we do have a few people here to speak about the library thing I don't think it'll take very long if you can if it's okay with the village trustees it's okay with me but they've been in the lobby for an hour so can you check with the trustees for a moment Annie what did you I'm so sorry what did you need about the what I understand I was just being in lost my marbles so no it's okay thanks for coming thanks for contributing thank you chief alright with the indulgence of our guests we will move on to the library item that was pulled from the consent agenda and is now item 5 c take it away Greg so the library has had some leaking issues in the basement last big rainstorm a lot of water came in public works has taken a look at it they've gotten some estimates that the memo that I put in your packet estimated at about $50,000 worth of repairs speaking more to public works this morning it's more close to $75,000 it absolutely needs to get done we'll have to find money in capital but it's expensive but it has to happen so we can Dennis can probably explain a little bit more about exactly what's going on if there are questions but I just wanted to point that out rather than having it on consent agenda thanks Greg real quick the south side of the library was already repaired and we've already got the bill for that that was about $24,000 to repair that side you have to understand that the basement of the library is the children's library it's a stone foundation stone foundation is like a sieve there's almost no mortar between the stonework it's holding up the building and it's strong but it acts like a sieve we had a couple of serious rainstorms this year and the the rain got in on the north side south side we had repaired that was dry the north side was not dry and as we pulled apart some walls and looked behind it at the bottom of the stairwell and going down there was some serious water intrusion that got in from that side so we went at it two ways we went back to the company that actually tested it to make sure there wasn't any health hazards involved with it the health hazards were restricted the slight amount of material so it wasn't exposed to the air it wasn't a health hazard for anybody working there in the building but if you go in the building it smells wet I mean it's what it is the we decided to go at it from both the outside and the inside on the outside we excavated down to below the foundation we found an old drain pipe that was plugged and was actually going in the wrong direction and you have to understand that this was an old building it was reconverted to a library I think in the 70s if I'm not mistaken 80s so it's been there a while so the drain pipe was plugged it was going in the wrong direction as we started to excavate we found another drainage system that had been installed sometime in the past well before I was there there was out actually in the green space and we exposed that there was plugged pipes there was broken pipes we did it at all part got the outside walls cleaned we got the contractor working on the inside and that's going to probably parallel the cost on the south side it was $24,000 on the south side it was probably about $24,000 on the north side do the same thing on the inside they're taking it down on the lower portion down to the rock they're cleaning up the rock they're actually mortaring the rock they're putting a coating on the rock on the outside what we did is we exposed all the foundation we had a special spray unit come in and spray it stuff is hard as a rock it's similar to what you might use in your house if you're going to foam around a window but this is much different it's about 20 times denser that has mat suits on to put it on once they got done there's no odor with it but you can almost take a hammer to it and it's not coming off but to just protect things we're going to fill the liner when we close the landfill which is very thick material rubberized material we had enough of that to go down fill it with stone put a drainage pipe in rebuild the outside system we just got the bill for that that's $17,000 we've got two more things to do in the outside we want to put a gutter up take the water away so now we've got protection drainage pavement and by the time we get done the bill is going to approach $75,000 $24,000 on each side and about $25,000 for the outside work and it is what it is it will bring the building back there's no guarantees you can never guarantee with stone foundations but we're doing everything we can and we think that it should set the library up for the foreseeable future and the last thing that has to be done any questions? Andy? I have to disclose that my wife's a library trustee but I think I won't gain anything personally from discussing this or voting so I will participate in the conversation but my question is just before the rainstorm there was some work done outside what was the purpose of it and did it help or did it hurt? it didn't help and it didn't hurt we wanted to try to gain some time because they were going to work on the inside we paved about three to four feet away well the library has an overhang of about three feet and when the rain came down it was going six feet out and when it's six feet out is where the garden area is and the garden area is all earth all the way down so what happens is although we had pavement for three to four feet out all the water landed outside that landed in the garden area went down in the soil got back into the area any gardens in the future there we're going to have to put in some kind of planters and put it on top of what's there we want it to look nice but no more planting on that side let's get the water away from the building and keep it away so work has been done on the north and south side yes well the west side I should say that the north side extended around and underneath the stairwell for about three quarters of the way the north side we're going to go around that other portion so we'll catch the entire west side on the east side the actual foundation slopes so there are about three quarters that is exposed to the outside so that there's no found any water that says it's not going to come in from that side so we're going to go around the corner there's a room in the back there we're going to go around the corner and touch that up because that's still a little bit below grade but once we get above grade why are we looking at not using undesignated capital funds and instead letting the library capital fund go negative what was the thinking behind that Bueller cash is all in one place so the cash would be drawn from the undesignated capital funds and then we would backfill it that's really close backfill it with with designations over the next few years we could pull it from the undesignated pot you know six one half dozen the other okay that's fine any further questions so we'll have a motion to approve the use of capital funds to pay for repairs of sxp library up to 75,000 does that work second please second excuse me any further discussion sounds like it's needed work all those in favor please say aye aye closed sorry Bonnie sorry Caitlin hope it gets dried up soon just pray for no rain yeah thank you alright we'll move on to are you tabling the rest of the meeting at this point or recessing and moving on to the village trustees do you want to just do the consent agenda okay would anybody like to move the consent agenda for approval I'll move approval of the consent items with the select board comments second any further discussion Andy yeah we seem to be having a lot of I know we changed our replacement policy recently and we seem to be having a lot of you coming back with requests for early replacement I did see the response I just wanted to say this in the meeting you did respond to my question the email question that it's due to the fact that we still have older trucks even though we have a policy to replace things early we don't have the funds to start those replacements yet so some of these things are getting accelerated am I saying that right Dennis just about right so we should expect to possibly see more of these until our funding policy catches up with a replacement plan or what do we well I guess what I would say is we are really trying to follow the replacement plan we just wish some of our equipment would follow it with us before the engine went on a very expensive truck so one of the things that Dennis and I have talked about is trying to make sure that we are prioritizing which vehicles are best to replace even though they may be more expensive than we thought it is imperative that certain vehicles are available during certain times of the season if you have a large greater truck that is doing the unpaved roads up in the town it going down and having $30,000 of repairs is not helpful to our winter operations but it can happen anytime if we can accelerate them and make sure that they are done at the proper seasons we do the best we can but I know his guys do the best that they can to keep them on the road we are going to provide we will be working on an updated replacement plan there you go we have already started working on an updated replacement plan because we need a new schedule and I want to look out about 10 years come up with a better plan we may in fact lease some vehicles early but try to come up some of those vehicles that might be we get through about 8 years in those last 2 years we end up spending a lot of money on transmissions and engines and I would like to get them back into a better time frame so we want to look at that to say can we lease some to get some of those into an earlier time frame do we get a higher return if we trade them in early how much do we get in terms of that return do we get to talk to Sarah and say maybe for a year or two maybe we take some money from undesignate or something just as a suggestion to get us ahead of the game to the point where we have those trucks back into a better cycle so the last 2 years we are not spending $25,000 on an engine repair on a truck that we still need and you really don't have a choice because you have to put it on the road and we have to get away from that and get it even better than it is today so one of my to-do lists with Evan is to come back sometime before budget season probably mid-October maybe even early November with a revised plan that I hope I can bring it back into a quicker schedule so we don't end up I mean no one likes doing this we don't like coming to the board with these issues but we do need the trucks on the road when we need them in the winter time and this was a good opportunity of course the Class 4 road maintenance there was a policy discussion there was an assertion made in open meeting by someone that there was money collected from residents but not spent you just want to have the question answered on the record yes there is we have collected some money some of it we have spent we put back into the roadway but it goes into 3 2 or 3 I can't remember at least 2 1 for paving 1 for gravel road maintenance and 1 for annual road maintenance so there are 3 so we put them in those pots and as we need to use them we'll pick it up and use them associations got responsibilities that they have to take care of we'll work with them but we're going to use that money from the town's perspective to be done any other questions, comments on the consent agenda we did you have your hand up? just as a point of order for consent agenda items remember if we want to discuss them we have to pull them from the consent agenda don't we? if we want to discuss them and vote on them separately well for this particular a question is not exactly pulling it in do it however you want if I have a question I'll pull it out so there is a motion and a second on the table to approve the consent agenda any further discussion all those in favor? I opposed ok thank you for approving the consent agenda we are going to recess for briefly to bring the trustees in to start that joint meeting we'll come back to the reading file at the end of the joint meeting we take a 2 minute break while our guests arrive I thought the same thing I saw your face and then I was like oh that's what made you laugh I felt bad for you I could also see the screen it didn't look like that I'm glad to know that if you do watch it later on on TV no I won't thank you it's a terrible joke it is I'm nervous president Annie how's it going you have any good news? actually yes except for when I got a little too comfortable in your driveline of a while sorry sorry if some of the faces I was making were distracting actually I was listening to everything and I was fine take your faces I did once with Annie Sarah just because I could see her how funny was that about what's her name your friend I will call the village trustees meeting through the order welcome and thank you for your patience hope the lobby was comfortable we had a great time might want to think about putting benches out there alright do we have any agenda changes for the joint meeting or additions anybody no ok and is there public to be heard on items that are not on the agenda yes I want to take issue with two terms that have been used as part of the merger project first one is merger process and most recently heard that one of the governance subcommittee meeting the term process means that there's something going on a series of actions or operations that are to an end now currently there is no merger happening the best thing you could say really is that there's a merger question that's being formulated and studied so a better term I think than merger process is maybe merger study now I've spoken to a few people about merger and they actually think that there is a merger happening so I can tell that there is some misunderstanding about that currently so merger process implies that something is simply not accurate second term tax equalization so one of the stated goals of the merger study see how I get that merger study is tax equalization now this term is really pervasive I see it all over nine times in the most recent focus group report when you state tax equalization you imply that taxes are somehow unequal or unfair and that tax equalization will fix this that's really quite odd because all taxes currently paid were voted on by voters in either the village or in the town so granted the village is paying more but that's by choice there's nothing unequal or unfair about that so what is being proposed is not tax equalization it's tax shifting tax shifting of taxes from one population that voted for those taxes to another population that did not vote for those taxes a better and more honest term would be tax shifting so I assume that there's really no intent to leave the public into believing that merger is actually happening or that taxes are somehow unfair or unequal but for the sake of honesty and transparency these two terms should no longer be used since they can and are being misinterpreted by the public if merger process continues to be used I can only assume that this is intentional an intentional effort to gaslight the public into thinking that merger is happening even before a question is formulated let alone put to a vote and the continued use of tax equalization is an effort to imply that somehow the current tax structure is either unequal or unfair and must be equalized even though no one is paying taxes that they did not actually vote for thank you thank you and our first business item is the presentation of the building need study phase one no you can't does that run the show hello everybody is there an intro or do I just kind of dive in I can give a quick show so probably last fall we got permission from the boards to do a building needs analysis went out to bid and the idea is to look at the public works departments direct departments and fire departments in the town of the village look at their existing facilities and the space that they need currently and probably looking out about 30 years we got two bids back John with Scott and partners was a successful bidder and since then John has been meeting with the different department heads myself, different staff looking at the facilities and putting together a report of what the existing facilities are and what they might be he's now ready with the first phase of his report which he will present to you thanks all right so I tried to keep it very short for you as a summary but you can see I've got quite a bit of paper here if anybody wants to get into the weeds I think maybe a few summary statements and ground rules for tonight would be helpful generally I think I'm just going to let you ask questions I tried to put as much in the report as I could that would kind of get us all off on the same page but there are some assumptions that were made for the study that kind of create guidelines for it one was when we looked at each department individually and took information from those department heads or in the staff you know we didn't filter it completely as in no you can't have that or no that vision is not something that we're supporting we kind of put it all out there so to that though the other item is that the idea was that whatever staffing levels were currently in place or were projected for the upcoming years we would not also provide an opinion on that either way we would just let that ride and then as in other studies where some type of merger or some type of working together happens the idea that no staff disappears when that process occurs was also part of the study that's my shorthand way of saying that when actual you know if some combination of sharing services or sharing locations actually happens it's possible that there could be adjustments but it's not my position to make those that would be your call so what I'm trying to say ultimately is that there's some pretty big numbers in this report some of the municipal departments have been kind of ignored but you know we've all been going along and happy and things happen and the departments have sites and land and buildings and until somebody makes a good case to build something else or go new or increase the size of a facility you know the public doesn't really have any incentive to do anything so you can go for years like that and if there's not a big ripple like when did the town do the fire station last right well I did that it's 2004 maybe so I still have the bond brochure for that in my pile if anybody wants to see it we didn't spend a lot of money on that but it was a very exciting thing at the time but you know hey it's been quite some time already that's a long time ago and like other departments that's a very active department a lot of things happen the building gets some wear and tear if you build something that's not real durable materials you've done it a little cheaper than maybe other options eventually that shows up and that's very true with municipal properties, municipal facilities just like schools or anything else they take a lot of abuse and they provide a needed service and you don't go back to the well very often to get more money so when you want to do something you should be doing it properly and well so when we go through the analysis what we did and you can see that right in the report hopefully everybody has a chance to read it but we went and looked at all the properties and all the facilities and the departments that we had been instructed to review we looked at the current codes right so not the ones that were in place when the facilities were built but we compared them to the current codes what would you have to do if you were building today what should those departments look like what would be the ideal physical structure to support the functions that are happening in each of those departments and translate that into square footage you know how big should your office be if these are your functions all that went into the matrices right so there's a whole pile of these and mine are big because I can't read the small but we did each department individually town and village and then we also looked at combining them when all that's said and done compared to the square footage that you actually have now this is really the heart of the study for phase one you have except for the wreck department you have about half the space that you need if you were going to build new today so the rest of the study identifies some of the major deficiencies that you have that we saw in the various buildings and so I'll just go through briefly I'm not going to read all of this stuff but I'm just going to point out the various charts this was the chart that shows the square footage totals that are part of the study the numbers come straight out of the matrices and go into this and show that we have about 66,800 square feet of current building structure whereas if you were asking me to build new and you came to me and said here's our program and our function you have 114,000 most recently you noticed that when we finally went and did a new police station the existing police station which was this end of the room other side of the wall was about 1,800 square feet in this building and some other square footage scattered around and when you apply the functionality and the size and the current codes and all that it came out at what, 17,000 so that's what happens when you really sit down and look at what should be going on we also looked at other communities so other places like Williston and Colchester you know surrounding regional locations have all been building municipal facilities as well so there was some good examples of what right you know what our neighbors are doing when they need a new DPW for example I think that the square footage numbers that we're showing are reasonable I think that certainly we can talk about specific numbers and we're always happy to have differences of opinion on do you really need that officer could you do sure you can look at these pretty carefully but at the end of the day you're not going to make up the difference between half the square footage that you really should have so that's maybe a nice way to say that we've been ignoring some of these departments for quite a while and if you want to do something about it now you can see what the roadmap looks like to go forward that's really what the study is about if we're ready to start analyzing what happens with individual improvements or combined improvements this is what it might look like nobody says we have to do it today or tomorrow it's again a 30-year vision or more take all the time we need to plan these things out and do it right I did put a few dollars next to these so this is the other chart that's in there it just takes those square footage numbers and it rolls them through the difference between what you have today and where you think you should be you get a net cost if you say well I can't really use that square footage that I have today or I'm going to locate to some other parcel because it's not really in the right location then you'd be building 100% new so I've got that chart in there and my notes essentially say likely you'll end up somewhere in the middle there will be some places where you're just fine and some places where you know guess what it's time to move, time to consolidate it's time to diversify whatever it is the next piece that's a little interesting is that some of the departments are either already co-locating like the village and town rec departments are now all in Maple Street our analysis showed that it was a little tight just for the town alone so with all in the same means that some of these departments are really cozy and also that some of the things that we tried to identify in the report that like storage right well you can go find storage at remote locations and sometimes that's good but when we talk to the town staff especially they spend a lot of their time lugging stuff from one place to another because wherever they were that wasn't where their stuff was so in some cases that functionally is inefficient so the goal of you know making them both work would be to fix those kinds of things but it may still mean that co-locating is great the fire stations for example may not go that way because mostly for response time you need coverage within a certain period of time throughout the village and the town and that is questionably possible from one location so the next phase of the study will start to look at that you know is there some technical or functional reason like co-locating or having multiple sites is good or bad for some of these departments but it gives you a pretty good range of what's possible and the next question is is it reasonable or desirable or and then what happens when you decide you want to pay for it you know how does that work there were a couple of fairly interesting I'll put them on the desire list specifically some of the park requests coming from the village were included a building basically an indoor gym and maybe making the pool year round fascinating ideas that happens all the time in other communities it's one of the biggest draws that some community centers have the ability to swim year round and the ability for the community to offer essentially basketball that not competing with the schools because program wise the same kids who are different kids who are trying to play that sport their window of play is after school and before they all fall asleep so if you have a very active school program with a lot of teams it shuts everyone else out and that's a community issue not so much a school issue but it's a timing thing so I'm really interested to see the request that came out of the departments that are providing services to the community my kids have all gone through all these programs I know them programming well I know the facility well whether or not we're ready to take on a big bite like that and make some of these things happen again that's you guys on that side of the table so anything else I need to clear up for you should I tell you what the other phases are going to happen here do you want to hear about that okay so phase two we get to start drawing I will tell you that we've started a little bit on that already so what is the new fire station you know how big is it what does it look like when you actually take all this and turn it into a building alright so that's a fun part for us the numbers are great but that only gives us okay we got to satisfy these bases and put them all in one place so we're excited about phase two that's what is the new or a revived fire station for the town fire station for the village parks and rec DPW separately right town village and phase three we start looking at what happens when we combine that is there synergy, is there benefit and then phase four is pretty much just a wrap up of everything and we'll be coming back to you after each phase to get more direction and more input hear comments and have questions so look at this as just the beginning get to do this again alright detailed questions, specific questions big questions on your page I think it's four in that table that you talked about earlier you show that the current square footage is about 67k total with all the buildings but the need is more like 115 and is that just what's needed today or is that what we'll need in 30 or 40 years that's the projected total so all those numbers for required future are looking out as far as we can reasonably look out how far do those headlights go, how many years the study says up to 50 and my personal opinion is that's too far to be accurate so you can only project 10 years by state after that they think the projections and they'll go out 20 years but they get their confidence in those numbers gets lower I would say that it's more reasonable to be in the 20 to 30 year range with these things although at the rate of growth that we're seeing it's linked to housing starts and moves and the economy there's a lot linked in there but if we are planning and building our communities properly they could get really popular and it could go faster if we're less able to fully develop a sewer core we can't quite figure out how to put a five story building in five corners you know we may be slow so the pressure is out there the density should come but the pace is a big question I don't think and correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think this question is developed in later phases but doing this study do you have an opinion to give about which of these projects in theory might be the most important which one we should be looking at tackling first, second, third, or are you just here to present the numbers I always have an opinion I would love to hear it I'm happy to give you a personal observation again I'm a resident I've known these buildings for years I did actually we did our first study with Denison 2001 of the town DPW which I also have at the very bottom of my pile here my sense is that you could spend more you could spend a little energy on your DPWs without you know that they're really probably the hardest the problem with that is there's no big bang for your buck that most people will see from that they don't even probably know where the village DPW is so it's not you could do some great things for those like make the salt storage better or put the vehicles that are breaking down give them more cover some of them will sit out in the weather because there's nowhere to put them it's probably a good investment just for that reason but it's a tough sell because nobody is paying attention to that except Dennis so the next thing on the list for me would probably be to figure out what to do I think the town fire station has some issues first thing I do is put some exhaust recovery in there like tomorrow before tomorrow like order it tonight I can't understand why it's not in there it's just really something that should happen the village did there was a program at one time that was helpful for that grant money or something but whatever happened theirs is in the town doesn't have it they should have it parks and rec is tough because the village system is strong enough to carry both at this point we're seeing that evidence didn't somebody tell me if that's not true the park system is amazing the tree farm indian brook the two pools they're all great they really are fantastic amenities to the community they all took the town pool more work than the village because it's older the water depth is a big problem at the town kids don't dive shallow anymore they don't forget to dive deep in the shallow end racing so for meats which is a huge thing my kids swim there's nothing like the energy at us nothing the point is it's a safety issue now and for whatever legal reasons it could impact or may be impacting your swimming programs in the town so again your schedule meets for the village but I don't know how that works I'm not trying to tell you how to run everything but there's some scheduling there so I don't know it's hard for me to spend more money on the parks when I look at the other pieces that seem to need a little attention so that's my personal two cents thank you I'd like to preface my statement by saying that I am personally no longer working with the rec departments with my swimming this is a very honest statement but as I sit here and we talk about the housing for the recovery housing and things like that one of the most valuable resources that you can give to any community is year round aquatics there are so many reasons why and one of the most valuable things that I personally learned is that the children that go through the school program the camp Maple Street the children that go year round through activities where they are constantly safely and as a group given access to water in so many different ways through lessons, through field trips through afternoon recreational swimming and supervised like that watching children due to the consistency which they have access to community water is unreal and not only are you making your entire community safer and catching all the children in the pigeonholes that won't learn to swim you're going to create a high school where everybody can swim you're going to create parents in the future where they can swim and conceptually in closing either or both pools is one of the most valuable things you can do it heals hearts, it heals souls it mends emotions there's so much to be had by it and what John is speaking to about the swim meets is that this past summer there's a rule where the town of Essex swim team which is 110, 120, 150 strong at the sand hill pool could not do their swim meets at the pool because their blocks face down into right so figuring out your aquatics has far reaching effects for children's emotional states for less aids in school there's so much to be had by it that I feel personally that it needs to be prioritized and that's without my hands in it which I wish they were but they are not so to me yeah okay the but like the impact upon our community is great any other select board members have comments Andy? okay I guess my only question is is there anything you need from us tonight to move forward although it sounds like you already have with starting phase two so my assumption is no the only thing would be if you had comments about the specific numbers because the numbers of square feet that are required to meet the program is what will drive this next phase which is really laying out the building so if there were comments about you know for example covering a pool or even the neighboring desire to have a gym we're not arguing about even 10,000 square feet here although they're big buildings ruffle anybody's feathers if you square feet off but some of these other ones you know there might be more synergy that's possible if we're co-locating and I think what's going to happen is the individual sizes are probably fine but when we start to look at them combined I would like to believe that we're not just adding those two together we can do stuff like share bathrooms and share conference rooms and so forth and I don't need your input to tell me how to do that but if there are other functional ways that you might see that those combined facilities could be better shared that would be helpful Dan, do I add your hand up? Yeah just when John said something about the numbers so the numbers I'm just curious he indicates square footage as far as acreage for the facilities obviously the buildings and structures are those premised on a single story structure or are you talking multiple stories obviously it depends on the use of the building what it's going to house but obviously like we were saying in the 5 you said something about a 5-story building the 5-story building you have the density so you can put in 100,000 square feet but in a smaller footprint because you're going up and I'm just saying it's a pretty short answer but yes it does matter how many stories so the two places that we've started looking at them already are the fire stations and the really the DPW because a lot of that space is driven by the truck base, the apparatus base that's one story I'm not putting anything over those but we can stack the support spaces so then you play the game with okay these are all public buildings the public goes to these buildings on occasion for one thing or another you know touring the fire station come on you're going to have every kid in the whole school district going through these buildings at some point so the dinners, the open houses all this kind of thing you want your public in these buildings so how do you do that and still protect the sort of the business end of them where the staff and the firefighters who are doing things with equipment and machinery so there is some two sides to it but we can do some stacking so yes but DPW for example even a big building is dwarfed by the size of the outdoor yard that they need parts and pieces that get stored in reserve for you know my sewer line broke I need a piece of pipe you know well that's not going inside the building that's going outside somewhere and we need to make sure they can get to these things and have ready access to them so the site size is kind of a thing Dennis and I have been spending a little bit of time trying to work that out you know what other people have what stuff do you need covered what stuff can be uncovered what do you need you know those are all factors but the acreage available you know it's a little bit of a fuzzy number but not real you know the smaller you make it the more difficult it's going to be to operate properly you need ten acres and you need three acres you know we can come down on that ultimately it translates into if something's going to move like if we decide that the and that's that we as everybody that the town fire station and the town DPW which currently share a site if it turns out that that isn't the best way to go forward and one of them moves now you're looking for a parcel how big is that that's where it comes in I don't know if this makes sense to ask right now but on some of these square footage numbers you know community space short hand short you know we use some of the police station as a great room or two do some of these numbers include some publicly accessible space like that that can be multi-use we design and we will design the fire stations and the parts and wreck buildings all have a significant conferencing space in the community space so the fire station is a little tricky because they get a little proprietary on their training spaces and things where they you know have a lot of specialty equipment out or they do a lot of training with their own people I know that if you talk to the village the village has a nice training room upstairs in their fire station I bet nobody knows it's there the town has a nice training room in their facility and it gets booked so much but the firemen don't always know you know if it's in use or not they show up for something and somebody's there so when we've done this before for other communities we always put that space in something that isn't quite in the inner side of the fire station it's available and out more in a public realm but control of it really should be in the fire department's so that they have kind of first shot on so right now we're really tight with space right and some places are tighter than others are you able to put a projection forward sort of like a time line to see when certain departments will actually be completely or almost dysfunctional because of the spacing so that it might help us what Patrick was talking to prioritize which things we need to do first I love that question because I don't have the answer right now but now that I have the question it gives me something to hone in on and that's some of those projections like I don't really think staff has you know I'd like to jump in we just got this report some of us just got it a couple days ago really having you know dove into those types of things I think a lot of it depends on some of the criticality if it's a real word criticality of what's wrong with the building like we weren't thinking of spending $75,000 on the SX3 library last week two weeks ago but the weather decided we were and so a lot of things I want to talk with our architect and what our staff is about prioritizing some of the things to stabilize our buildings decide again how much money do we want to put into a 40-50 year old building and then what's its future and then you need to study to start having that discussion I took his comment about the exhaust system I don't know if you exactly know what he's talking about there's a pose at the S6 junction when they turn on their trucks that exhausts to the outside when S6 fire does it it exhausts into the building and stays in the building until they open the door that's not what's supposed to and so but are you going to put $50,000, $70,000 into an exhaust system and then turn around in a year and switch locations you kind of have to think about what we need to do and when you do do I think we're going to change our fire department location in a year? No. Two years? No. Five years probably a good investment regardless that okay and is it portable to the new building haven't really had a chance to sit down with John or any other staff based on Yeah, I didn't think we'd have the answer tonight but it was just the bill's going to be huge and is there a way to get information to help us prior? With that, some of the building systems that John is familiar with is bank for buck and also code the other thing I would say to all of you is we tell everybody in the village and the town to follow the codes and etc we need to set that example as well including AVA So far the study has been looking way out but that's why I like the question well what about what's right here, is there a way to and so yes, we haven't started that at all That's an easy question. And we haven't even addressed parking at some of these facilities Yeah For those who have been to the pool and have to park about two blocks away and walk into the pool at the village I don't even really know if Sandhill has enough parking either for its tournament matches Oh yeah, I have so many ideas I can help John, it's great I have so many plans Are there any questions or comments? Thank you very much John Welcome Hey John carry my seat back Thanks Alright We're going to move on to your 5B introduction of taxation plan That's a lot of it That's a lot of it It's nice I'm going to refrain from opening the spreadsheet What? I want to start There's that microphone I got one, thank you Oh you're getting yourself more water So I want to start out by saying that my goal is to provide us with a framework within which we can discuss a very important question And that question is if a November 2020 vote yields the result that we are to become one government how and over what period of time do we move from the current tax rate structure to a tax rate structure which has one rate for everybody in that new merged I do not have a magic wand I'm sorry I'm so shocked And I don't have an earth shattering new idea that nobody has thought of before in order to get from here to there Without employing basic mathematical mechanisms that are required when we take one piece that's higher and one piece that's lower and we come together at a point of convergence that is somewhere in between the two There are things that we can do to shift that over time and there are things that we could talk about doing that would shift it up and down a little bit on the y-axis but we're really talking about coming together at a point between the two with that said the first thing I'd like to do is start with an overview of where we are right now and I've used FY20 numbers for a basis these are all budget numbers they were all approved this spring at town meeting and village annual meeting and they are in effect as of July 1st on the left of the screen there's the town budget overview the town budget is $14.8 million that's total general fund expenditures that's supported by two general pots of revenue non-tax revenues which are just shy of $1.3 million and those are things excuse me such as fees for services in the clerk's office there are highway funds that come from the state and some recurring grant revenues that's a pretty small pot the rest whatever the differential is there is funded by property tax revenues and that's $13.5 million and that's in the town budget and there at the bottom we can see that the town wide grand list is $26.4 million so there's $26.4 million into which that $13.5 is divided to come up with the town general tax rate on the village side of things the total village budget that's total general fund expenditures of that non-tax revenues are $1.6 million and I want to be very clear here that non-tax revenues include $1.25 million of actual tax revenues but they're town tax revenues that are then transferred to the village and that is for the highway and storm water budgets in the village library and a contribution toward the clerk position the remainder of that budget $3.5 million is raised just on that village portion of the grand list which is the $11 million I'm going to make a note here while we're looking at these numbers that the village has debt that's specific to the village that's about $300,000 of that $3.5 million and when we start talking about taking this that is the property tax revenues in the village and slowly moving it over time into the larger pot that $300,000 approximately is segregated from that so one of the base assumptions that we're going to talk about is that the village debt will stay with the village taxpayers who voted that debt until it sunsets in FY2035 oh it's a little small from over here but this is the current tax rate structure this is what you'll find if you log onto either of the websites and if you compare this to your tax bill you'll see this information there as well on the left hand side are the different tax rates and they're segregated into two columns one for the town outside the village and one for the village and any tax rate appearing in both of those columns apply is originated out of the town budget and is applied to that entire $26 million grand list that we saw on the previous slide there's a note off to the side about how much each of them raises and I'm not going to go through all of that oh I'm going to let you know that there's so I'm going to just briefly touch on what each of the different rates are and where it comes from so the town general tax is that the town general fund tax rate so what's left over in the general fund divided by the grand list and then is applied to all the properties to raise the funds necessary to fund the budget the second one on the list is a town outside the village only highway that's 1.1 cents that raises we had budgeted it to raise $165,000 a town grand list came in higher than anticipated the town outside the village grand list excuse me came in higher than anticipated and that's raising $168,000 on the year the town capital tax is two cents that's raised on the entire town grand list and that funds the town's capital program which is separate from the general fund that raises $528,000 to share tax agreements are for the education portion of the additional amount on the veteran's tax exemption and other farm non-approved contracts so that just goes right off to the state then the village general tax is the village equivalent of the town general tax it's the general fund tax rate just the village and then the village has a special one penny economic development tax rate so to start off there's a it's complicated to get a good base for comparison purposes what I really want to do there's there are many variables that we could talk about and we could talk all night about them which I really don't want to do but so what I'd like to establish tonight is a baseline model which I will be referring to as the zero growth model and there's certain inherent assumptions in that model and one of them is that we should simplify this rate structure the best that we possibly can so that we have a really a stripped down place to start from that's easier to understand and I would and my assumption is that we would do that by first as you can see there are three rates that appear in just one of the two columns and not both and those are the ones that we need to hone in on and ask what are we going to do with these in over what period of time and so one of the assumptions that I've made into this zero growth model is that we would eliminate these two before before we merged the two budgets and that leaves us with what do we do with this 3.5 million and we're back to our question so now, oh I'm sorry John do I just slip the kid oh I don't know how to go back I can't see I can email this out as well I do, oh Craig okay go ahead one more could you flip two forward for me Craig alright I apologize if this seems a bit too obvious but I think it's really it's a great visual and it's been in my head for a few weeks now and it's the best thing I can come up with I'm so excited right now to demonstrate water Annie I can dive in because as one lowers the other rises and it's not like two completely separate communities coming together you know in one village dollar is not the equivalent of one town dollar every action affects the other so imagine with me if you will please that this bucket left by Essex Park and Rec when they co-located is the town-wide grand list and this line here this water level is the town only amount raised by property taxes this smaller bucket is represented oh I didn't do it right okay we need to displace the water before we get our baseline physics Greg and I talked about this a lot last week this is our water this is our baseline I didn't hear it alright so this bucket here you can see it through the side is representative of well can you see my line? here we go this is up here alright and so the differential here between the bottom line and the upper line that's the village taxes that's the 3.5 million dollars raised by village taxpayers only everything below this bottom line is raised by everyone so imagine if you will we become one and we still have to raise all of this H2O it looks like that if we do it over one year or we can do it slowly over multiple years but regardless of how many years we do it over displace sure sorry I did there wasn't enough water in there but this line is higher than it was before it's not right in the middle because one village dollar is not equal to one town dollar but it is coming together at a point of convergence between the two so what are our options we get to decide how many we get to decide how many years we want to spread this action over F by 23 24 25, 6, 7, 8, 9 you know we could also decide we want to rip the Band-Aid off I don't think we want to do that but certainly that's a discussion point the other things that we don't have any control over are the size of the bucket as the bucket grows the water is distributed over a larger base asterisks notwithstanding the fact that more people more houses, more roads, more land so there are things that we just can't know done with the water for now but I'll keep it handy and we can go back can you go back one side to the zero growth model and I hope that we can establish this as our base point for conversation as we move forward the zero growth model in my opinion is the best way to isolate just the effects of merger separate from any normal growth projections so once we start saying okay, assume we're going to come together over three years the debt's going to stay separate we think expenditures are going to grow 4% a year we think the grand list is going to grow 1.5% a year we start to get all these things really layered into and then the spreadsheet spits out a number and it's really hard to tell what that number means because there's so much fed into it so the zero growth model helps us to isolate just the effects of merger it assumes that the grand list remains at FY20 levels not a dollar more, it's not a dollar less it assumes all expenses except debt also remain at FY20 levels the debt numbers that I've used in here are actuals I went back and forth on that a little bit but it is important on the village side of things because as I noted earlier the village only debt would stay with the village tax base until it expires in FY35 the town debt unless there's additional incurred would all expire the year before in FY34 alright, let's see what this next one shows oh, the dip again backwards okay, so this is identifying the gap what is the differential between that bottom line and the point of convergence before the two between the two in the village it is a 20% decrease in the municipal taxes and if you live in the town outside the village it's a 21% increase that's slightly lower than numbers we've talked about before because that strips the debt out of it and previously we had just taken the whole amount and mushed it in these are the dollar figures when we talk about an average property value we often use $280,000 but I wanted to layer in some other values this is the math these are the numbers and now we get to talk about what is the best time frame to implement this over we can't lessen the total impact by doing it over a longer time frame we don't lessen the total impact by doing it faster this is what it adds up to you do it over three years it's approximately the town outside the village a $280,000 house this is a baseline increase of $330 to the municipal taxes we do that over three years it's $110 each of those years again for a total of $330 just more gradual three was easy math I have more math on the next slide some of the time frames there are a number of time frames up here and really I think the decision point will be what is the time frame we want to hone in on and then we can get many more specifics out and start to play with some of the options we have which are limited but there are a few I'm not going to read through all of these numbers 12 years is on there because it aligns nicely with the debt I do think one of the things that we should definitely consider and this is kind of jumping from the simplistic zero growth model into an option but I do think we should consider taking the fund balance in the village and designating it into a debt sinking fund to pay at least that last payment which would align the sunset of the two debts so 12 years well a while we know you get it I'd like to ask the boards well I guess I'll run through these charts and then I would like to ask the boards different questions at this point so you all have the presentation you have these numbers I think I made them big enough to read I asked Evan to review it for that purpose this is just the average annual increase or decrease and so for each of these I looked at a spreadsheet that had you know for the three years what is it in your one two and three and I averaged those three numbers so it changes slightly as the debt is steadily decreasing ooh yes the graph this is another visual of the water bucket this one is the annual increase or decrease in the zero growth model for a $280,000 property value over 3, 5, 10 or 12 years the seven is out of this but as you can see we are coming to the same point of convergence it just happens over a shorter or longer period of time our graph is the same graph but bars I know and the colors colors were great up next so that's great that was the increase or decrease year over year but that's not the whole picture because if that's your increase or decrease so my taxes were going to increase $330 but they were $330 to begin with that's a bigger deal for me than if they were a different amount so this next it's broken out into two slides because there's a lot of data here right now we're looking at the town outside the village and this is average again annual municipal tax amount so looking at that top line the $280,000 value home so assuming the status quo but again with the zero growth so let's say we change nothing but the grand list never grows the budget never grows your average annual amount of taxes would be that $1,500 right there and then they change slightly over the different time frame so I just want to make sure that I'm clear when you look in the merger block your average over 3 years that is 3 years added up divided by 3 over 5 years added up divided by 5 so the denominator is why where why is the number of years sorry again on the village side of things and this will compare what you can see here is that it does decrease but over the longer time frame the average amount is higher here we go again coming to the same point of convergence between the two the yellow line at the top is the status quo over this time frame zero growth model and the green line at the bottom is the zero line for the town outside the village zero growth model and what we do is we come together in between the two purple lines on the bucket in between the two lines on the graph at the same point but it just is more sudden or more gradual does the board have any questions who was smart enough to hire you I'm serious you're amazing this is a great Lauren is the answer to your question and Lauren also helped create some of the base models to work with and evaluate the different assumptions and variables so it's been a team effort your enthusiasm and what a pleasure agreed other questions I know it wasn't part of your processor to look at this but I'm just curious looking at a whole different set of numbers the numbers if the town outside the village would become its own separate from the village municipality in the village would become its own separate municipality no more co-locating anything separating everything how the numbers go when you pull away the taxes paid to the town outside the village from the village and put that money back to the village because the village town outside the village and it pays the village what happens so I have looked at those numbers I like to call that the full divorce and divide model and it's actually a percentage why it's approximately the same the villages go down a little bit more than they would this way and here is what that involves the village would not have a police department would have to play for police services we would have to figure out how to split Evan in two and make him functional or hire a second manager currently the finance director position is paid for out of the town so we would have to figure out what are the finance needs we would have to look back into the village there's IT human resources assessor was the other one that we lumped into that to analyze what would that cause shift and clerk what would that cause shift backwards be that's just approximate I have a spreadsheet it was an older model it hasn't been put into this model which I'm happy to pull out but that's your answer the perspective of looking at what the village wouldn't have they would have to make up the difference correct but have you looked at it from the perspective of what the town won't have when the village leaves as much as you're saying we won't have a police department the town outside the village will have a police department that they're going to have to pay for all the services they're getting subsidized by the village will have to be all on their dime so that's something to think about they're going to be wanting to have some assistance with so my first statement was that the result is very similar which is the village taxes still go down over 20% and the town outside the taxes still go up over 20% and I wanted to make sure you knew that it wasn't just me reallocating the grand list numbers into existing numbers I did that and looked at what other pieces had been moved around that was not a statement oh well now you would need this it was more of a research appendix to my other statement I just want to make an observation it's interesting that even though there's no right up front explanation for the fact that they both it seems like there's some underlying mathematical algorithm that work there we just don't want to spend too much time thinking about it it's just earlier in the day it's fun but it's because this I mean it's because I gotta do this over by the sink because it's gonna be messy where's another bucket it's because this bucket of water yes I appreciate everyone's enthusiasm with the visual it's taking me ages to figure out how to do it you know Bill Nye would be envious of this I love Bill Nye he really feels the same way about this bucket this bucket the first time she did it it was in my office my spatial awareness it's not great this bucket now becomes this and both of these have a purple line so the village's purple line it's a little bit off than it measure but the village's purple line wait a second we've taken all the water in the bucket but we've divided we've taken the basic the bottom part was spread out over this whole bucket so it's the same amount from the town budget but it's in a smaller bucket and then the village is the same it's a little bit lower I'm sorry my ounces are off but I think that's conceptually what is the underlying the underlying the underlying math is physics whatever you want to say but yeah I'd be happy to do numbers with you George I'm best before noon though think Pat is the culprit it was actually more kind of a tag along to what Dan was saying with the separate model remember as well there's also a massive tax rate in here that gets ignored for municipality which is the school rates and the school rates themselves were higher in the town than they were they were lower in the town than they were in the junction before the merger of the school districts occurred and now the state just set that rate for us there was no voting or anything it's the same for all of us if we divide again that's no longer going to be the case which means we will have an unknown tax rate once again because the education was always done separately until two years ago thanks for that well I mean the school tax rate is like 1.53 for this year I mean that's more than because they set the tax rate for the community period period and that's I think what we want to just keep in mind is that whether it be merger, separation or there are going to be ramifications beyond even the municipality taxes that we need to kind of keep in the back of our I mean I'm sure you are no it's not in my mind please don't make me edit and your total budget is I mean the total is like 81 million and then with what we pull in for revenue we pay about 61 so small small number changes end up being large dollars extremely large, yes Annie I'm just thinking about Dan's question and with the police department and I know I knew this information but I have forgotten it how would that even work because the police department is located in the village or is there something about the land that like the building is located in the village too right I know I don't even really think that it's I mean I guess it's a very good look at really what we've already gotten done because it's I think it would be I'm curious as to what Evan is trying to say it's been your combined police department for over 40 years right so I really right that's what I was trying to say is 40 years you built a building together for the size of the community for the community for the dog community 36 square miles with the close enough to the right number of police officers and dispatchers and records clerks and holding cells together now if there was the separation model the village would need a police department they could go to the state troopers Waterbury city Waterbury village it's a great academic exercise talk about this and it's 945 I was posing that not necessarily for this but for the community to hold so that this is being looked at because the questions are going to come from the community as a whole not from necessarily the boards right here I'm not trying to start a big debate here but I want the people outside to be aware of it and the impacts of this I totally understand where you're coming from but we are so far down the road of consolidation and it's our responsibility to do what's financially responsible for both communities and so I think what Sarah is pointing out is a very basic baseline and I'd be interested in hearing what levers the few that there might be that we could possibly pull on to adjust this basic model that you have can I add one thing though I just we had previous presentation you're talking about keeping spending municipal spending to 2020 level our previous presentation I just called for $25 million in new expenditures you know I thought about this before when I saw the agenda tonight I would like us all to ponder this and staff in particular exactly I want to use a big word incongruity there's an incongruous thing going on here and I don't have a conclusion but I'm just saying $25 million and I want to jump right in before this is the no more comment not going to be labor the point at all no I want to go back I'm sorry Evan I'd like to get this out go back first that this is not the only model this is the baseline this is the foundation for our discussion so that we can isolate just the effects of putting these two existing budgets together over time otherwise I mean my hair was practically on fire I don't think I could even put it on a powerpoint we need a bigger screen so this this is where we're starting and I'd like us to home get out of your turn Evan that's where this is the base one of the things that we talked about is in and of itself hey $32 a year that doesn't seem too bad this is zero girl zero zero grand list zero budget growth on top of this you have to think about what is two or three or three and a half percent contractual obligations any future projects that you just saw out of your 25 million is going to go on top of this so when you think about what you might want to consider for the town outside the village you might want to consider what and we didn't want to get it you know you start doing into that and then you have to start doing assumptions and then you have to start adding more things in there and her beautiful chart starts and going in all different directions all up but in different in different elevations so we wanted Sarah to be able to present this as a there's there's an amount of pain and there's a tolerance to pain people may want merger but how badly or how quickly and in some of the focus groups they've said hey I'm in the village I'd like a tax I'd like my taxes to be whatever the word anybody wants us to use but I'm okay with waiting and some have said no let's they've made comments not knowing any what these numbers would look like that's fair now you're starting to see these numbers and then the question would be where does the public feel about it after this is a great starting point this might be so this is a great starting point to educate the public as to where we're going to start from and then we can continue to educate the public as we learn what the levers are and then the predicted impacts of upcoming increases and to remember the fact that this is just a very moderately sized piece of the pie of all of the property taxes that we pay because like Pat said we pay school taxes too Andy forward three slides I just it's just the thing I want to and I Sarah I think you understand what I'm going to hear is the the thing I get concerned about is that we share when we share this with the public they've already seen it is that this number looks like a smaller increase it looks like if I wait 12 years I'm going to pay less taxes but it's because it's a smaller number it's not reflecting the the final number is the same in all cases right yeah the denominator is larger which is right the mechanics of the average 12 years yes look at this misread I think that numbers look like they're getting smaller the farther you go on time I know it's just because of the way the math was done in a chart that shows I sent you that too right forever excuse me I haven't finished my sentence if you you unless you want to allow an interruption no we don't I understand that if you put down every single year one, year two, year three, year four all the way out to year 12 it would be a grossly under you know you couldn't show the chart very easily I just worry that this is going to cause confusion saying that year 12 has a small number in it you know 12 years has a small number and 3 years has a big number and none of them are the final number right the final number is 1535 plus plus the change and I can pull that out and I would like to respond if you're okay with that we have to start with something and I think regardless of what I put up here it could be misinterpreted and you know I try to be as clear and concise about the assumptions going in and the math behind it as possible but also put it in a simple version so that we can grasp it and we can talk about it here this is my hope for our next steps and I think this is going to address some of those concerns and also make it so that next time we talk about this it's going to be Excel which is so much better than PowerPoint my hope for the next steps is there's another survey coming out and I believe that that survey is going to try to hone in on what time frame is tolerable and whether it's the results of that survey that we get that time frame information back from or this group decides what time frame is tolerable from there we can hone in on that specific one or two columns and get really granular and then also talk about the specific levers we can pull which are few I want to just run over them quickly and that's the last I have to say so grand list growth which we don't actually really control but grand list growth in absence of budget growth will minimize the impact budget growth in the absence of grand list growth will exacerbate the impact so any combination of those two depending on how they fall will be able to do this other variables are introduction of new revenue non-property tax revenue sources the one that comes to mind most frequently is the local option tax staff is not recommending pursuing that at this time or as part of the plan of merger but I do think that something to explore and discuss looking at the last three calendar years the Essex as a whole because it's not segregated out would have received approximately $1.3 million a year had we had the local option tax examining other non-tax revenues which have a very small impact or really look at the expense and the service side of things I know we don't want to cut services and I also know that there's a higher long term cost to current low taxes you know like when we look at deferred maintenance costs or we keep staffing to a bare minimum and then we get to a point where we can't tolerate it anymore and all of a sudden we need multiple people and it seems like a big jump but we've been holding it artificially low so that's challenging as well another thing that came to me as I was driving here this evening is that I know a few other towns do is a rental registry program where there are rental inspections and associated fees that help go to offices but all of these things are much bigger conversations and require us to hold it on one time frame so that they can be layered in and have a good meaningful conversation about them I'm done thank you thank you if I may just in regards to what you're looking for tonight again this was just a discussion, just the introduction of the decision tonight correct, no decisions, please so did the board members really have any other questions or comments on this? Sarah, thank you Irene, do you have a question? I appreciate Sarah mentioning I appreciate Dan bringing up separation and then Sarah saying that you began to crunch numbers do I understand that? I did a preliminary a few months ago and I would love if you would indeed cost that out I think the buzz is growing around separation considering that it's just about the same cost will only increase the interest in people finding out more about it and to Patrick's comment with all due respect I would never suggest separating the schools now that they have successfully merged and they have equal representation and things seem to be chugging along just fine with busing happening and all those things we could have a merge school district just like Westford is a separate town that's part of our merged school district I don't see any reason why the town outside the village could not be part of a merged school district just to clarify, if we did that though the tax rates would be different because Westford is under a different tax rate than Essex Town is so if Essex Town separated Essex Town and Essex Junction Junction would have one tax rate the town outside the village would have one tax rate Westford would continue to have one tax rate those are different things and who could calculate those for us probably that's probably something to send to Brian and Don it's good to know where to send folks thanks the great thing about finding out the separation cost just about the same as merging to me is that we're having trouble some of us getting representation at these meetings at the table people outside the village namely very shut out in general separation would yield the things that we don't seem to be seeing that merger will provide it would provide equitable representation for the town outside the village folks if they became the new town of Essex it would separation would provide appropriate access to the resources that the town outside the village folks are paying for and it would provide the local control that both the village and the town outside the village have been seeking for years and have not been able to get because we haven't unequal number of people on the select board and they seem to be elected at large making it for unequal representation anyway you slice it as for the police department question the police department could become regional and could provide services to towns like Westford and Jericho that have had so much trouble in recent years getting coverage from the state police that's adequate and as they add population I think it would be fabulous if our Essex PD could serve many different towns and we could all pay in like we pay into the regional planning commission so again I would caution us to not think inside the box this is a wonderful opportunity to think out of the box and in fact to leverage this survey that we're talking about sending out in October and to inform the public and educate them are you aware that separation costs about the same as merger and you would have the following advantages if separation happened how do you feel about it now finally just mentioned that we're in the process of educating the public what better time to educate the public with all of the options separation status quo merger that should provide the numbers behind them and the pros and cons from a neutral standpoint of all three of those options thank you it's important to me to say just one final thing I apologize I just want to be really clear it was a really rough preliminary how are we going to model these different things out that I was referencing that's fine I can go ahead and see next item is this is item 5C update from the governance subcommittee you want me to do it am I doing it? you are mad I'm happy to do it and I'm going to start off by saying Sarah you're right once we figured out a time frame for phasing a phase in which time period we want three years five years I wish we could have a purely mathematical answer to that question but unfortunately it's going to be a political answer and in the long run I think ultimately we're trying to gear this survey up to get to hone in and try to get some idea of what a preference would be 3, 5, 6, 10 12 year phase in but at some point it's just going to require a political leap of faith and it's going to be something that this board is going to have to decide we want to say as Raj has said rip the band-aid all of it once everybody gets the same tax increase or do you want to go to the extreme and say have a 12 year maybe I'm misreading that or a 12 year or somewhere in between that's one of the answers we're going to try to get one of the questions we're going to try to get a little bit more information about with this survey anyway so we met with Andy Annie I met with Max wasn't available with KSV and Dave Treston last week we went over he did a pretty good job drafting out a survey and we spent a good deal of time revising it going over some questions it's I don't think you have a draft the latest update of the draft because we were still a work in progress but we are going to be meeting with Dave again on Thursday and he's going to show us the finalized version of the survey that we have revised and the idea is if we can wrap it up on Thursday it would go out the following week and it would be out there and people would be available it would be available for people to take it for three to four weeks through the end of September and into October and what we decided was in order to give Dave more time he was going to come back to us come back to the government subcommittee with the results on the 17th tabulated results and we have a joint meeting scheduled for the following week so we kind of thought what's exactly the point of Dave coming to us with the results and then we're just going to come to you with the results several days later so why not have Dave come to the joint meeting and present the results to everybody because you're going to have you're just going to be awestruck and have all kinds of questions and wonderful thoughts about the results of the survey I think but there's going to be there's a little bit of an opportunity for some revision of the survey between now and Thursday and I don't know if any of you had some thoughts about that and you all be welcome I think to come and sit in the audience you can't participate on Thursday no they can't do that? of course they can do that you would be? I don't know what to say on the one hand we did discuss the idea of having everybody participate all ten of us participate in the questions but I think we also the two boards came to the decision that you would trust the government subcommittee with this task of creating this survey so that's what we've done and that's what we intend to continue to do and if all goes well we should get it out the door by Thursday night I want to maybe mention one or two things it's late and I'm sorry to keep you here one of the key things that we had we learned that special districts we started out thinking a long time ago when we first came into this idea of looking at merger that one way of addressing the tax differential between the village and the town and buffering a big tax increase that might happen for people in the town outside the village would be to create some special taxing districts and use the idea of a special taxing district to say for example each part of the community would have their own library and parks district and they would raise their own funds for library and parks we would have a special recreation district or special library district etc we've found Dan Richardson has really looked into this and realized that you really can't have a special a perpetual special taxing district for any reason other than to have a special taxing district the Vermont model is you can have a downtown a special taxing district for downtown improvements for programs activities infrastructure improvement and so forth in a downtown there's no model for having a recreation special permanent special recreation district or library district or something like that you can have a utilities district but the model that we had thought of probably isn't going to happen and not something probably not a model that we can offer in a merger proposal to the community so probably the only way we can buffer any tax increase any make up the differential between inside and outside the village is to build into the merger proposal a timeline for phasing in the increase that being said we probably still you might be able to use a special district model but you'd have to somehow designate the entire village of s-exjunction in its current configuration as a downtown I think that sounds like what what Dan is saying and how that would work and exactly how you would work it might be something we'd want to pursue but probably too complicated I think just to wrap it up the idea here is to try to give us a sense of what the community is going to tolerate in terms of a tax increase what they would like to see and hopefully that will give us some answers so that when we begin the really complex and critical task later in October and into November of really trying to put a merger proposal together we will be able to use that information to tell us what kind of phase and period we want to see and did I have some committee members, did I leave anything out? Can I just clarify because I feel like being on the record these days I need to clarify the ripped the banded off strictly referred to combining all services and nothing to do with taxation with merging REC everything would be merged I just want to make sure that I have no opinion yet on taxation on band-aids so George just to clarify when the government subcommittee started meeting last summer we went through 16 different models and we vetted all of them we talked to the attorney about all of them and then we came to the boards and said having vetted all these choices including looking at separation for a little while we are concluding that we should put two choices before the voters full merger and full merger with special taxing districts and those were the two models that the boards agreed yep you should keep looking at those those are the ones we're going with because we vetted them all and now we're taking off the table the special taxing district merger with special taxing districts I don't want to say I don't think you when we put that on we had a very different conception of what you could do with a special taxing district our understanding and what Dan Richardson has told us what we originally had in mind isn't going to be workable you could still have and I don't think you'd want to do it I don't know how to do it for the town but you could conceivably have it for the village to say it's a special it's a downtown district it's a special district so there's a tax rate that's community wide but then there's an additional tax just on people who live in the village to support some aspects or elements of it being a downtown but you'd really be kind of stretching the definition so I don't I don't think we normally necessarily have to take it off the table as of yet but it looks like it's going to come off the table but we can still have a little bit of a discussion about it if we want to guys the way I understand it is what George is saying basically to have separate taxing districts you need to have a different service level and you can do that with the downtown district because that district is going to need additional lighting or additional sidewalks or additional tree maintenance whatever it's going to be but Dan's advice was that it's really really hard to say that you're going to have a different service level of recreation for instance a different service level of library when everybody in the community has the same access to those programs and then what I was going to add to it is very similar to the school district when you have a community you have a tax rate you don't have different tax rates for the same community the state will allow you to do that as part of a merger plan more than likely for a period of time until they become one rate they are not going to let you have a perpetual separate rate that's not something they tend to do the other thing I mentioned at the thing through our thing so any merger goes through the state they review it in the government and ops committee and any time you put anything in your merger that then falls into the committee of someone else other than government ops they get purview of it they the advice is if you do that don't try to establish new law in the state stay within some boundaries of what they would expect and see know how to do it and because every time one of the examples was voting not so much like if you wanted to give other people voting rights that don't normally have them like if you were to put that in your charter that is something that is going to make the state uneasy and therefore be problematic so what they're trying to say is try to stay within the lines of what they would expect a merger and the law to look like I would say that the idea hopefully from the survey if we get a sense that folks that respondents in the town outside the village say I'm comfortable with phasing in the tax differential over five years if we get a sense that that's a majority feeling and then that having a unified tax rate for all the community we can achieve it that way it's not going to be an impediment to getting merger approved that generally people would approve the merger under that circumstance that's fine the town outside the village say look my perception is that people in the village are have they've got sidewalks they have extra service and I don't think we should ever be paying the same tax rate I think we shouldn't ever have to pay as much taxes as folks in the village do if we got a sense that that was the case then I think as an aside we would need to educate people that really all of our services are pretty much equal I don't think village services are available to people in the town if they want to come down here and use them we can put that aside but if that was the case if people in the town outside the village a lot of people said I really feel that I should never have to pay the same tax rate as folks in the village then we might want to go to the special tax district downtown thing and say okay let's drag this out and see if we if we think that sentiment, that feeling, that emotion in the town outside the village is strong enough and prominent enough and widely spread enough that it's going to be the reason to defeat the merger but otherwise merger would be acceptable then we can drag out the special district model and see if that might might help buffer some of that but that's kind of the that's the only scenario where I can think of if you want to look at something like that anyone else have any questions for the government subcommittee thank you thanks George we have a consent agenda would anybody like to make a motion on the select board to approve the consent agenda approve approval of the consent items with select board comments is there a second any further discussion it's just the minutes of August 27th all those in favor of approving the consent agenda please say aye aye opposed thank you trustees thank you Dan second thank you George any further discussion all those in favor please signify by saying aye everybody opposed thank you no worries any I just want to be interested any comments from board members about the reading file I just want to make sure that people do notice the memo Sarah especially as we're going to be getting into budget season hard to believe yep since there's no further business for the joint meeting I would entertain a motion from the select board to adjourn the joint meeting so moved can you see make one adjournment well so the select board still has business do you want us to adjourn you guys go right ahead to adjourn and we'll stick around thank you Dan any further discussion all those in favor please signify by saying aye anybody opposed have a good night select board thank you trustees enjoy laying all we have left on the select board meeting is the reading file so oh and there is something for all select board and trustees to sign in this yellow folder so you guys stay a little bit later just like a minute going to take it out there so you guys can do your thing I'll take this out there so we can Madam Chairwoman can I have a motion from a board member to reconvene the select board meeting so moved second second all in favor aye and the last item on our agenda was the reading file does anybody have any comments or questions regarding the reading file we do we have a special meeting for the purpose of discussing the firearms discharge ordinance has that been warned yet September 16th not officially no it will be do you know where it will be hopefully at the high school but I'm waiting for confirmation so that will be determined seven o'clock thanks for reminding us of that Andy any other questions or comments from the select board hearing none I'll take a motion to adjourn I'll make a motion to adjourn is there a second all in favor aye thank you thank you