 Let's kick this meeting off for January 20th, 2020. Agenda approval is the first thing we need to do. If everybody's reviewed the agenda, nobody wishes to add or change the agenda. I'd take a motion to approve it, please. Make a motion to approve the agenda as written. Second. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Since agenda items consist of the minutes of January 13th meeting and a liquor license for the Thai Smile restaurant and the Butler Street pizza. Make a motion to approve the consent agenda items. Second. Any further discussion? All those who wish to approve say aye. Aye. Aye. Public. Pretty absent in the room tonight so I don't think we'll be using up any time for that. And it's like we can jump right on to budget process. The CIP first and then kind of go backwards. So CIP, highway, and then the parks. I didn't write a long email this weekend. So I didn't write a long email this weekend but I did write a quick email. And if you read it, what I indicated was as I did the operating fund budgets I was able to come to a tax rate of 51 cents which is the same tax rate that we had last year. It's 51 cents almost exactly if we get a 1% increase in the grand list then it's marginally higher than that if the grand list doesn't move at all. And I thought that when I started the process that I would be able to do that with the general funds if I ignored the capital fund except for the fact that I tried to increase the money that we were sending to the CIPs. So when we get to the, we've already talked about the fire budget the highway budget, the regulation budget tried to increase the transfer to the CIPs by in the three to four percent range. Inflation is running a little bit more than 2% for the last 12 months in December. So I was pretty happy with that but I was concerned what I was gonna see when I got into the CIP funds. As you know, we've done quite a bit of buying in the last several months. And you indicated that you would like to do more as far as paving and the like is concerned. And when I first kind of ran the numbers I was a little disappointed and then I started thinking about it and I said, well, I shouldn't be surprised at this. You know, although we've been trying to incrementally add to the transfer into the CIPs if you think about the highway fund alone think we budgeted about a $533,000 transfer last year from the highway fund into the three highway related CIP funds. And we spent a half a million dollars for paving just about, so it leaves $33,000 for the rest and that kind of situation has been going on for a while. So let's just look at the CIP budgets and you don't have what I have in front of me except what I have in front of me just has some notes on it to myself. So starting in fund 70, you can see at the top in the revenues I've budgeted for a 3.4, 3% increase in the transfer from the highway fund from 288 to 297,865. And then the pilot payment, the 82,000 was really lower last year, I mean higher last year when we looked at it but we sent $16,000 to the rec CIP because that was kind of underwater. But from 82 to 100, that's a 20% increase but that's kind of on a low dollar amount. But anyway, those revenues together are about seven and a half percent higher than it was last year going into the paving CIP. And then for the expenditures, we've got the half a million dollars which is mainly set for April street. And maybe we can Howard Avenue and then to pay $57,000 worth of debt service on the Perry Hill bond. So that fund at the end of 2020 will be underwater by about $382,000. And as I've said before, we've got funds 70 through 75 and some of them look like they're in big deficit positions. Others look like they're in fairly significant surplus positions. And they all round out to at the beginning of the year, at the beginning of 19, if the budget came out to be exactly as we planned, we'd have about $30,000 in the CIP funds all together. So if you think of it that way, $30,000 to start the year in the CIP funds and in the paving, I mean in the highway fund, we're putting 550, I think, 548,000 into the CIP funds and then we're spending a lot more money. So you can see why we are where we are. Moving down to fund 71, you can see in red there over in the 2019 actual column, there's a state grant number there and it says $100,000. There was 76,500 budgeted. The 76,500 budgeted was 75% of project to do a culvert on Perry Hill was 60. No, that would have been something $1,000 was the grant and then a $24,000 grant to do some work over on Little River Road. The Little River project costs significantly less than we had estimated. So the grant on that is about $13,300 and then I think we'll get at least $100,000 from the Perry Hill project. That project ended up costing significantly more than we budgeted. We knew it would. We had an estimate from the year before but FEMA kept saying, well, this is about an $80,000 job and we said, well, let us bid it and then we'll redo the numbers and when we bid it, it was $150,000. I was gonna show you, I thought it was 150. So I'm thinking there that when it's all sugared out that we'll have a grant of at least 113,350 maybe a little bit more than that but for right now, I used $100,000 as an actual number for 2019. Knowing it would be low, I wanted to underestimate for the purposes of making the tax rate as bad as it possibly could look. In 2020, the red zero there for the state grant is again, a conservative number. We will apply for a structures grant to try to do a project on the bridge at Dr. Murray's on Guptell Road. If we get the grant, the grant would be about $136,000 but as I've indicated in the past, given the state's spending in Waterbury with the Main Street Project at 2% share of what's going on there for the locals, I'm skeptical that they're gonna give us a structures grant. So I didn't budget for it. If we get it, it's a little bit of a gravy. So if you move down the Main Street Project, excuse me, Bill, that'll be two years in a row that we've slid on that bridge. I didn't say that we weren't doing the bridge. Oh, okay, no. I'm not counting on the grant. But we didn't get the grant last year and you're thinking about it. I haven't got to the expenses yet, Chris. Oh, I apologize. Oh, no, no, it's fine. So the zero up there on the state grant is I'm not anticipating getting the grant. We're gonna apply for it. But if we move down the page now. Sure. You see the transfer from the Highway Fund last year was 155,000 this year. It's 158,875, so it's 2.5% increase on this one. And then moving down to the expenditures, the downtown project, we budgeted 100 this past year. Turns out the town share is gonna be about 159,800. You know, it's just an estimate. There's no way that you know how much progress will be until they make their progress and you get a bill for 2% of what they've done. And frankly, J.A. McDonald worked longer than I thought they were gonna work. They worked right up until almost Christmas. So our share was 159,853. And that's a net cost there for us. The 2% share that the local community paid was about 222,000. And the difference between 222 and 159 or 160 almost is what the water and sewer paid. So what we do is the town pays the bill and then the water and sewer reimburses. So 159,853 last year I've got 190 budgeted for this year. McDonald is pushing hard. They wanna try to finish. I don't think they'll finish. But I've got 190 here right now for 2020. The sidewalk repair is in red. So... Bill, am I reading the rest? I see 130. Yeah, I was gonna say where. So I told you, you have a different one than I have. I've got that one here. So 130 is what I had yesterday. But after getting the final bill and everything else and working things up, I'm thinking 190 is probably gonna be a truer number. Is that in a different email or is that just not? I didn't email it. It's just here. And I didn't make a photocopy of it because I knew you would all have what we have from yesterday. Is that 190 even? Yeah, that's what it's probably been for a while. Into the mic, please. So $38,000 for the sidewalk replacement. And the state is scheduled to repave the roundabout project this year. So the roundabout up to the limits of that project down route two toward Butler Street, this way a little bit and up the ramp a little bit and the roundabout, that's a state job. They're gonna do that this year, I guess. And when they met with us, they talked about whether or not we wanted to include any work along the road there. So we've got $38,000 in the budget for sidewalks. We asked the state to include in their project, in their bid, to replace the sidewalk that runs basically from Maxi's, I think it's from Maxi's that way, maybe a little further. Part of the sidewalk on the side of, for the north side of North Main Street there. You and your street side, are you thinking? Yeah, the Butler Street side. Oh, okay, so you're down past Maxi's, down past the old Valorantall. Yeah, that end there. Okay. So we've asked them to include that in their cost, hoping that it would be cheaper than we can do, but I don't think it's gonna be. So the other day when I met with Celia and Woody, what we said was we'll ask the state for a price on that. If it's a good price and their contractors can do it, we'll have them do it. If it's a $50,000 cost, we won't do it. And we'll do the other side of Winooski Street this year. Last year we did, or two years ago I think it was, we did this side of Winooski Street. And if we, the plan was to do $38,000 on the bad side of Winooski Street this year. But I've got it in red on my spreadsheet here because there's a lot of spending here and we haven't talked about the tax rate. So if I had to, as much as I hate to, if we had to cut the $38,000 for sidewalk, would be cut. The next line down, Chris, is the $170,000 for the bridge at Morris. And so my plan right now, so you don't have to read this whole thing now, but bridge number four is the one that we're talking about now, Alec has put together this memo, if you will, that lists many of the bridge needs. Bridge number four is the one that we're talking about. And you can read that later, but it ranged from about 143 to 170. I'd like to try to do the $170,000 project, which is to get the six inches of pavement off the bridge and then pave back from the approaches of the bridge and then put only three inches of pavement back on the bridge. It would be cheaper if we left six inches of pavement on the bridge and then had to kind of build to that, but that leaves 36,000 tons, I mean, 36 tons. Of dead weight on the bridge that really doesn't need to be there. So if we're gonna do that, I would prefer to do the whole project and get the bridge back to the way it should be. Austin gave us that price last year and he just, he ran out of time, he didn't get to it. So we didn't cancel that project, it was just that he didn't get here to do it. So that's in there for now. If you move down from the 170, you see $46,000 of building improvements. We had to buy a new lift for the highway garage that's already been purchased, that was $10,000. The old lift didn't pass its safety inspection, so we got the new lift already. The roof on that building should be replaced. It's $36,000 to replace the roof. Burrell has, the warranty ran out a few years ago, Burrell's done a good job of kind of patching it, maintaining it, but it really should be replaced. And we can move the spending around, we could put it in the highway budget if you want, but either way, it's $36,000 of spending that I wasn't, it wasn't that I wasn't expecting it, it's just that I'd forgotten that the highway garage is now 22 years old and the roof is ready to be replaced. I mean, we paid the bond off two years ago and so it's right on target, you know? It's right where it's supposed to be. And then down below that is debt, into the Department of Interfund borrowing that we've been doing. If you turn over the page, highway vehicles, the sale of assets at the top of the page is, we've got to, I'll come back to that. So $92,250 is the proposed transfer into this CIP, that's two and a half percent higher than last year. Excuse me, Bill, where are we? I was doing the top of fund 72. You're on the right, it's on your left hand, right, right? Yep, right there, at the top of the page. Yeah, you got fund 73 is at the top of the page. Oh, yeah, huh? Oh, I'm sorry, there you go. Okay, sorry. Okay, so fund 72, 92,250 is the proposed transfer. $4,000 from the Parks Department, they send $1,000 a year and we use that to buy lawnmowers and things that they can share. The loan proceeds, 116,800, that is, we were authorized to borrow 125,000 for the roadside mower and the cost is gonna be 16,800. And then, so moving down, you see the cost of the roadside mower there, 116,880. Tandem truck is scheduled to be purchased this year. It was a, it's a 2013. All right, so 2014 and back when we put this scheduled together, back in 2014, the cost of those vehicles was $155,000 before any kind of trade in. Now, it's significantly higher. The truck itself is, the truck and the body all together is 205,341. It'll give us $57,500 for the old vehicle. So it's a $147,000 cost. I got 148 there, it's 147,841. So we have put the order in. Clerks gave to them. Clerks will order the chassis upon receipt of this signed order with the understanding that if the town meeting, the truck purchase is turned down, the town of Waterbury may cancel the order without penalty. So just like the fire trucks, if you wait until town meeting or 30 days after when we get the authority and then you put the order and you're not gonna get the truck until a year from now. So we're hoping to have this vehicle available to us late this year if for some reason we can't get this through the budget then the order will be canceled. So excuse me for interrupting, but 205 is that with plow and everything? Yeah, that's the whole line of the address. All the vehicle price is $129,000 and the body and associated equipment is $76,400, or total of 205,341. So that's the large plow truck? Yeah, there's six wheel trucks. So our expectation on those is about a five year use. That's a 10 week repair. Six years, almost seven. So 2014 and 2020, it's 2020 now, so that's six. We may have bought it in 13, I didn't look back to see when we actually bought it. It's a 2014 vehicle. And then the one ton truck, the 2014 one ton is also scheduled to go, that's $87,000. We have a one ton that we kept kind of two iterations ago and that's used by the summer folks who do the mowing of the ball fields and the cedars and stuff like that. So we've got one vehicle that's probably like a 2008 that will take the body off of that. That will probably just, and we'll put that body on this 2014 because the 2008 has a better body than the 2014. And we'll keep the 2014 to use in the cemeteries and parks by a new one ton and then we'll in the end just sell the chassis of that old 2008 vehicle. I have no idea what that's gonna bring in. So that's what the $2,500 is up there at the top as a sale of assets. So that takes care of highway vehicles. If you go on to your next page, which is fund 73, that's the buyer vehicles. We know the damage is there from what we did in the fall. So the transfer of 173.390 is 4% higher than what it was last year. There's the borrowing if we need it, all of it. And then coming down in 2019, we already spent the 460, 1,395, we haven't borrowed for that yet. So when you get to the end of that fund balance in the actual 2019 column, this fund has 24,467 dollars in it right now, even after that purchase of that fire truck. But if we buy another truck for 489.645, which we've already signed a contract to do and pay that service of $67,000, we'll end that with a significant deficit unless we borrow. So I've got the full borrowing in there and that fund will be $591,007 at the end of the year if we borrow a little hole in the hole. And then moving down into the fund 75 for the parks. This is where we had that Volrec grant last year that we didn't get. We ended up spending a lot of money on the lights on this field, but had to be done because of the code issues when we got into it. So the transfer of money from the general fund here is up by 10%, 33,000 from 30,000. So total revenue of 33,500. And then you have just a yellow mark on your page with no number in it, right? So the number that's in that yellow mark right now is $11,000. And that is for the roof of the pool building. I think you've seen that, haven't you? So the pool building really needs a roof as well. Now the pool, we use it eight weeks a year and it's a pool building and people go there to get wet, but when it rains, it leaks. And it really should be replaced when the wind blows hard. The shingles are coming off that. So we should place that roof. And then the $5,000 for the Armory Park up behind the school, that land that we transferred this recreation easement on up there for outdoor recreation. We indicated that we were gonna develop that into a little bit of a park. The school uses it quite a bit. They've got some trails out there and some climbing stations and the like. And the $5,000 is to do some thinning of trees in there. We took some trees out this fall. That was what the $1,400 was. There's some more that needs to be done. Then Sweet went up, looked at what needed to be done, put together a plan and gave it to a local guy from Duxbury, I can't remember his name right off the top of my head, but it was about a $6,500 project or so. And I'm hoping it won't actually cost quite the five, but that's what that $5,000 is. We don't absolutely have to do it, but it would be a good thing to get that job. So if you go all the way down to the bottom of your page, you see that you have an ending fund balance of negative $248,151. The things that I added into mine over here that you don't have on your list is right now is 318-406. I wrote in my email to you last night that we need to raise between three and four cents on the tax rate in order to get this budget to balance. So the operating funds kept that as a 51-cent tax rate, the CIP to do what we just described is gonna take between three and four cents. Now, if we get some additional revenue that I wasn't planning on, if we get the structures grant, which I'm really not planning on, and most of the things in the infrastructure side of things, I believe they're high estimates. The vehicle prices are pretty accurate. It's gonna cost us, you know, $489,645 for the fire truck, and it's gonna cost whatever I told you for the table. Those prices are really firm numbers, but even the paving and the bridges and the like, they can go either way. They're not hard, fast numbers until they're done. So that's where we are. I'll stop and let you ask questions. As always, there's way more to do than we have money for. We're making inroads, I think, on the paving. We've got a long way to go. You've indicated that you'd like to spend half a million dollars on paving. Alex's report there on structures and bridges. Before I got to the end of this exercise last night or yesterday morning, the bridges, instead of 170, I had 235 in it, and the 235 was, I was hoping that we could do this $170,000 worth of work and then pay for the design, I guess it was 237, pay for the design of this bridge over here on Main Street that we talked about a couple of years ago, and have Stan Tech get that bridge designed and then it can just sit on the shelf and if it takes three years or five years before you can do it, you can just redo the numbers and it's ready to go, if there's a grant, you can dust it off quick. But I took it out because I think we're pushing the envelope right now for what your comfort level is. So with that, I'll stop and you can ask some questions and we'll go from there. So the main reason why we ended with such a negative CIP fund balance 2019 is that fire truck, right? At least that's one of the major contributors. Well, it's kind of cumulative. We didn't expect, yeah, we thought we're gonna be buying two fire trucks this year, we ended up buying one last year. I think part of the reason, Mark, and it goes back to what I said at the very beginning of the conversation tonight, is that when you look at the highway fund, the transfer from the highway fund into the CIP funds is in the half a million dollar range for three CIPs, paving, structures, and vehicles. So we're transferring a half a million dollars and we're doing a half a million dollars worth of work just in the paving fund. And we never, you know, the half a million dollars that we've moved up to in the past couple of years, we didn't really jack up the transfer into the, we were transferring somewhere in the high $400,000 range and we would pay it into the 325 range or 275 range. And we bumped that up to the $500,000 range the last couple of years and we added 50 or 75,000. So we increased the spending by a couple hundred thousand dollars and we increased the transfer by 50 or 75,000 dollars. So it's kind of a cumulative effect. I think what it tells me when you look at, you know, here's the list out to 2037 for highway vehicle replacement. I got another list in here for fire department. Replacement that goes out to, you know, 2031. And then we've got paving and structures. And, you know, we're gonna, I didn't add up all of it, but the, yeah, cause you could, you should be able to build basically a schedule of depreciating assets and then basically estimating timing on replacement and future kind of estimate growth in costs and then start to figure out what each year we should be at least putting aside for, right, right. It's easy enough to do that. It's hard to put them on. Yeah, yeah. Exactly, I was just gonna say that the difficult part is the costs of all this equipment is growing at a faster rate than we have the ability to raise the revenue to replace it with. And when we started this, when we started the CIP fund a number of years ago, it was never the expectation that we were gonna be able to put enough money aside that we could just pay cash for things. There was always the expectation that it was gonna be a combination of putting money aside and borrowing. Yeah, I guess that's my first thought on just anything like Maple Street or Perry Hill is that it seems like a project like that, it makes sense to borrow, to amortize that cost over something that's so big because if we just do that project, there's so many of the smaller stuff that we're just gonna put off, which concerns me. No matter how you cut it, you're backing yourself into a corner. You're only gonna be able to leverage yourself with the issues that we have in front of us. You're only gonna be able to leverage yourself out a couple of years before that leveraging becomes one big nut. And you're not gonna, no matter how you do it, you're not gonna. We'll say a $500,000 spend that you amortize over 10 years and you spend 55,000 or 60,000 per year instead of 500 in one year. But when you start to overlap those, that's when you get into trouble to the point where now you're, and again, I'm always looking out further than probably I should, but you'll get into a situation where you're potentially could be borrowed out. Well, yeah, I mean, I understand that you have to be careful that you can't borrow for everything, but I think the larger projects, it just makes sense because I think the only reason that maybe we're under this pressure, at least under the paving, is that we're trying to do a pretty large project without borrowing. Well, I don't know if you recall the discussion that I had with the townspeople back a few years ago where I said, suggested that in order to really keep up with our paving problems, we needed close to a million four every year and we're less than half of that now. And to suggest that we could put in a million four, I knew it was an impossibility, but the reality of it was in order to keep up with that reasonable cycle, and again, it goes back to leveraging out your boring ability on paved roads when, like I said, equipment's one thing. Paved roads is another thing. You can get 20 years out of a piece of equipment. In a lot of cases, you can't get, boy, you're lucky to get 10 years out of a paved road. In fact, I spoke with a resident up on Neyland Flats the other day, the same gentleman that we did the Styrofoam driveway for, they remember that bill, and he started talking about Neyland Flats and he said, I remember everything you said at town meeting a few years back and he said, Neyland Flats is on its way down, downhill, big time right now. And I said, we've already had that discussion and I've already suggested that this is the perfect scenario for overlay, but unfortunately, because of the rest of the bad roads that we have by the time we get to this, unless we choose to slide that one in there somewhere amongst trying to deal with these other really degraded ones, by the time we get to that, we're gonna be in the same boat that we are with Maple Street and Barnes Hill and Guelta Road. Well, I think we're going in the right direction. We are, absolutely. The last few years. Absolutely, there's no question. There's no quick fix. We're moving in the right direction. So just to, I ended up quickly here, in the fire department, we're putting $175,000 aside and the wreck department, we're putting $37,000 in the highway department, it's $549,000. So we're putting $761,000 into the CIP right now and five-eighths of it is gonna be spent on Maple Street. And then the rest is gonna be all sucked up by the rest of the projects. So, as I indicated before, we can borrow between borrowing from the bank and borrowing from ourselves. You know, I was working on the tax stabilization report that I have to do annually. And I think I mentioned this before, but as recently as 2017, we owed from the CIP funds to the tax stabilization fund about $860,000. Now we're at $667,000. So we've got about $183,000 worth of capacity just to borrow from ourselves again. And we can do that. I don't think we're gonna be able to borrow everything that we need from ourselves. But I think it should be maybe a combination of some additional borrowing. But I'm not sure that I feel comfortable just saying, let's keep a $51, 51 cent tax rate and don't do anything else. Because if we do that, it's just gonna snowball. Yeah, I guess that's a good term for it. So I think we need to do a little bit more of a little bit of growth. And I don't necessarily think we have to go out and get, it doesn't hurt to get authority from the voters to borrow from ourselves. When the accountant does it and you look at that audit report, the money that we've borrowed from the tax stabilization funds, they just, it's called an advance of funds. It's an advance from the tax stabilization. An advance to the tax, on the balance sheet, it's from the tax stabilization. It's an advance to, and on the CIPs it's an advance from. And it just puts our money in the right basket so that it earns the proper interest on whatever we have in the checking account. And we choose to pay ourselves 4% right now. And we did that because it's in lieu of fixed income securities that we can't get. So I think we should continue to pay ourselves back at a higher than market rate, just because it puts some more money back into our coffers. But if you wanted to lower the interest rate, you could. But I think that we gotta get a couple more cents than 51. I don't know if we have to go to 55, but maybe 53, something like that. Can we step back a little bit and just talk about, let's just specifically talk about paving. So if we never borrowed and we said every year we're gonna spend, I'm just gonna use that number, half a million dollars. And every year we just plan on spending half a million dollars, half a million dollars. But if we borrow for a half a million dollar project and say it just for argument sake, it's $50,000, doesn't it make sense then that because of that debt and interest line, because you've amortized that project over multiple, that when you then put 500, not 450, because basically you've taken one project and you've put it over multiple years. But we're actually, we're not doing half a million dollars in paving, we're really doing, you gotta take in the Perry Hill debt as included in this year's budget as paving, even though the project's been done, we're paying for that. Right, so we're really not doing half a million dollars in paving, we've done 557,000, right. So we're actually, I just think we have to think about when we borrow that we've been able to take on a very large project, but it doesn't mean that that 500 number, I think you have to bring that debt into account there, right. I mean, I'm glad that, you know, if we can figure out how to make it work, but we're really, we're not just, if the previous years were 350 or 360,000 and all of a sudden now we're really, we're really at 557, we're not at five. I mean, I think that's one thing that we have to think about when we do take debt is I think, I don't know, I just think it makes sense. I understand Chris, what you're saying is, leave everything else that we do off, if we were just gonna pay Maple Street this year and pay our debt, and that was the only thing we had to do, we'd have to raise 557,000 dollars to pay Maple Street, right. That's really- Well yeah, that's part of what I'm saying, but also, so I understand Chris's concern on stacking debt. I would like to understand and see something that lays out the 1.4 million dollars a year based on, I'd assume, length, amount of road. I'd assume degradation schedules for each road and then estimated cost, I would assume that's where you back calculate 1.4 million. Is this a number that you've seen, Bill? You talked about it a couple years ago on the town meeting. So I mean, that is very, I mean, I totally agree with you, if that's the number then we definitely need to talk about, but I just would want to see that. My thing would be is if we don't borrow to do a project like Maple Street, it might not allow us to do maintenance stuff like Neal and Flats. So that's one of my concerns about taking large projects on without debt to protect the ability to have budget to do maintenance. Yeah, I get what you're trying to do here. My concern is walking us down a path that you might never get yourself out from under and when it comes crunch time to have to borrow something on something that we were unprepared for, outside of raising substantial taxes to be able to cover that borrowing. You're never gonna, this is, you know, paving is one of those things where it's secular, I guess, you know, it's cycle, life cycle and we can argue that is, you know, at its minimum seven years, at its maximum 15 years, 10 years is probably a more realistic slot because even at 10 years, even at seven years you're starting to spend money on maintenance, patching and crack filling and, you know, those types of things. So it's a very, under the conditions, circumstances in which we pave our roads, it's very volatile. It's not a secure bet as far as, it's something that, if you start to walk that path based on the paved roads that we have out in front of us that are in serious condition, we will be in a position to have to borrow every year. I think it's inevitable, but I'm just wondering if we should be borrowing on paved roads or if we should be borrowing on bridges where we know we're gonna get a better lifespan, you know, better amortization out of those types of projects and try to stick with paying cash for our paved roads because the life expectancy is either so even with our borrowing or even less than our borrowing, you know what I mean? The life expectancy. Could we take the. But the, I mean, it's a rub mark, and I agree with what you're saying, Chris, but as, you know, the aggregate number of being in the hole is the two. 286 or 286 or whatever the number was that I read a minute ago. So it really doesn't matter which one we, you know, whether we borrow and put it in the fire CIP or put it in the infrastructure CIP, it's just, it's that bottom number we've got. But if we think paving is causing the basically complete depletion of CIP then. Well, I think that I think I'm trying to have a bigger, I think that because we had this conversation at least five times in the past few years, but you know, I know I told you all back years and years ago when we first got the public works director in town, 12, 13 years ago, whatever it was, the board asked and Alec put together a plan and at the time it was supposed to be whatever $350,000 a year to pave, to keep up with what we needed to do. And the board chose to budget 180 to 200,000. So they were $150,000 or so behind and that kind of stayed in place. Incrementally it went up a little bit and then the last couple of years, starting with Perry Hill where we borrowed, we jumped up to half a million and we've been on the upper side of the high 300s to about 500 for three years or so now and the amount of money that we're putting into the CIP hasn't got up. So I'm not trying to blame it all on paving, it's just we've decided to try to catch up with our problem and we haven't increased the amount of money that we're putting aside. I think we can do a little bit of both. I'm just concerned to not put any more money aside and just rely on all borrowing I think is a low risk. So I'd like to maybe suggest an alternative. I hate to do this but under the circumstances I guess I'm gonna throw out anything at this point. The 148,000 for the new tandem, is that amortized out or is that just a one-time expenditure? Right now it's just a, any idea what's in line for next year's replacement of highway vehicles? Are we no better off next year? Loader's probably about 150. That's what it says here. That's what they got suggested there. I didn't know if we could take a look at that tandem and see if it's worth kicking it out another year. That would be two cents on the tax rate right there but I just, to put our problems off to them next year that's half the reason we're in the boat we're in. I don't think we should do that. Yeah. Because part of the problem is if you do that then the cost of the vehicle is gonna go up a little bit and the trade-in value is gonna go down. And they're gonna give you $58,000 for this truck. They're not gonna give you $58,000 a year from now for this truck. I totally understood that. Yeah, I mean that's part of the risk of doing that. I guess, we haven't looked at the operating budgets yet. What I'd like to get a sense from you about is if you kind of indicate how much of a tax increase if any you're willing to have for this year then between tonight and Monday next week I can put things together and say okay we gotta borrow this amount. We gotta, we'll raise this amount of taxes and we can go from there. I'm a little concerned if you don't raise the taxes at all and we do it all with borrowing. I know we've got some capacity. I've already talked with the cemetery commissioners. The cemetery fund has been with me but probably $400,000 in the cemetery fund. I sold all the portfolios. I sold off some of the cream that we made in 2019 in the stock market. Many of our portfolios saw 20, 25% increases this year. So I took some money out just to guard against the fall in this stock market. And the 116,000 that we need for the Boatside Moor, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't just borrow that from the cemetery fund. We'll pay the cemetery fund 4% interest over the next five years. And be done with it. And we're not raising taxes for it. We're not borrowing and paying money to the bank. We'll pay 4% to the cemetery and they can't get 4% on $116,000 CD or money market. They can probably get half that. So there's some things that we can do to borrow from ourselves. That doesn't fix your bottom line number because you have loan proceeds of 116 to offset that spend. So all that does is a balance sheet shift. Right, I mean that in and of itself won't reduce this to three to four cents that I'm talking about. It's just a matter of where it goes. Can you remind us what a penny on the tax rate raises? Yeah, $75,000 or $74,755. About $75,000, $76,000. So can you give me an idea or give us an idea of what just for argument's sake, what four cents on a $400,000 house would be? Additional or total additional? I guess what I'm concerned about, I'll cut right to the chase here. At some point we're gonna be in the position where we're just gonna have to cough up the money. Now either we cough it up in a large amount or we decide to put it to the voters to raise taxes over the next couple of years incrementally to such an amount that it keeps us from having to borrow ourselves to death with the end result being the same anyway, that whether it be five years from now, based on the things that I perceive that are in front of us that you're not gonna get up, you're not gonna be able to borrow your way out of it. I'd rather put it to the voters if they, I mean, I guess you can't put it to two different scenarios, can you? You can't say either cough it up now or amortize it out, which would you prefer to do? So to answer your question, a $400,000 house at last year's tax rate, 51 cents pays $2,040 in municipal tax. And if you increase it by four cents, that's $160, so it goes to 2200, 7.8% increase, four cents. But that actually comes up to higher than 60, but obviously it's $13 a month, Terry. I think so. My fear is what are we gonna end up spending in interest if we keep leveraging ourselves out versus? I mean, the one thing is there is, I think what, half of our debt is owned by ourselves, so. Yeah, and the interest that we're paying to ourselves we're benefiting from because it goes into the, when we borrow from the tax stabilization fund. So to that point, as time goes on here in the short term, costs of vehicles, especially, are going up at a rate in which those interest payments to ourselves will help us counter those additional costs. And a lot of it's due to climate change initiatives. Just the whole remodification of the engines, three, tier four, tier five, tier four motors, fuel efficient, carbon free, or whatever, you know what I mean? Mission standards, that's one of the drivers that's pushing all these costs higher. So there is a benefit to borrowing from ourselves, but the payback, obviously, to us, the benefit payback comes when that money accumulates after a while, we have the ability to use it to pay down these rising costs. I guess a couple of things I'm thinking of are, when do we go through the next potential, well, I know it's coming, but when we reassess values of properties for the tax rate? So I talked to Dan, sweet, this afternoon about that, actually. So our common level of appraisal right now is about 94.5%, so that means we're, you know, five and a half percent below fair market value. Last year, I think the CLA was 96.2 or something like that, so we're losing about 2% a year right now. The law says that you have to reappraise if your CLA gets to be 85% on the low side or 115% on the high side, you don't ever have to worry about the 115%. So I'm thinking that probably, we reappraised the last time, I can't remember, it was 2013 or 14, and I think it's probably gonna be 2000. My guess is 2025, I talked to Dan today and I said, well, you know, he's got a Lister's Association. Next week, I said, you know, can you start putting out feelers? I said, when we have to reappraise, you know, what are we gonna do? We're probably gonna have to contract it out because he doesn't have the ability of the time, actually, to do a full reappraisal. The last reappraisal we did, you know, we actually hired Tom Vickery and we're paying him $50,000 a year and then two years that we did the reappraisal and we bumped that up, but Dan thinks we'll probably have to contract out with somebody and Dan could help. So I'll stop there because I don't know if you had a- Yeah, well, the reason I asked was just because if we do, you know, as we look at potentially messing with the tax rate, I just wanna make sure that wasn't on the backend of it that might see another bomb, I just didn't know the timing on when we might be looking at doing that. And then I guess- So the perfect will, of course, if you do a reappraisal and property values go up 10%, your tax rate will go down 10% and it'll be, it's the people that are further from the mean that have the problems, you know. Because from one year to the next, you just raise the taxes that you vote to raise and then you just apportion it through a tax rate against property values. So- So you have seen the rate go down. Oh, typically when we reappraise- It drops, okay. The rate will go down, yeah. You're still generating the same revenue because you gotta service the debt, but it's just a different- Right, it just maybe levels out the- Your appraisal goes down, your tax rate goes up, your appraisal goes up, your tax rate goes down, the ones who get hurt- But they mount out of pocket, it's still the same. The ones who get hurt are people out there that we're at 94%, but if your particular house is at 90% and there's a reappraisal, everybody else goes up 6%, you go up 10%, and then the tax rate stays the same, your taxes are gonna go up. So along with the question about the four cents or what it would do to the tax additional costs, do you have any sense based on what you've seen take place in our best scenario here at our education costs? No, you couldn't contribute any thought on that as far as what you think that increase might be as well. Well, we talked about it last week. Right, yeah. Any idea what that would accumulate on top of the 160? Is that the CLA paper? Didn't our CLA just get adjusted a little bit? Yeah, it went down a little bit. So do you remember from last week what the school tax rate? It was loaded on number five, which was the 1.2% increase that turned into a 1.2 million dollar budget savings. Yeah, it was around two point something, right? Actually, I might have it. Bill, have we ever read, you mentioned, and I know I've been on the board long enough to hear that comment of years ago the board was told, X, Y, Z amount of money needed to be put into paving each year to keep up, basically. Have we revisited that? Or have we even considered revisiting that? Having someone that basically can lay that out for us again. I mean, I feel like that's the one thing that I'm struggling with a little bit is that I feel like I'd feel much more comfortable pushing numbers one way or the other if I have data behind it. And I think the quick and dirty way I think to do would be to take the complete mileage of paved roads, divide that by a cost per mile average to pave and then say it lasts seven years and that would be a quick and dirty number, but it's probably not maybe the best way to go about it. But I guess I'm just trying to, I mean, I think I'm focused right on paving. I mean, my follow-up question would be back almost to what Chris was talking about. I'm not saying we do anything with the tandem, but again, with vehicles, just understanding, they have an exponential loss. We drive them off a lot. They lose significantly in the first year, second year is like the percentage each year of loss of value and basically the trading value for that one truck I think was 57,000. That year loss versus the re-beginning of an amortized schedule of a $205,000 vehicle, if you look at it on a yearly basis or the short term, there's actually a huge loss in that first year of owning the new one. And I know that you start to fight maintenance costs when we got into that a little bit with the fire trucks and trying to determine whether or not we were gonna go out and buy new ones, but I just as a board member feel like I have to understand that we're believing that we're doing our due diligence and I know that it's gotta be a conversation you guys have often, but how far are we willing to take out some of these vehicles, especially the ones that are of huge expense and where is that, I guess, sweet spot? Maybe that's what that is. Maybe the six years, the sweet spot on a tandem, but. And then a while, the paving one, I don't have a good answer on that one. When we first created the CIPs for the vehicles, you know, basically it's kind of straight line depreciation. So I built, you know, it's a pretty complicated spreadsheet. I haven't used it for a few years now, but you know, I'd plug in, okay, the cost for the vehicle is $200,000 that tandem, right? And then I put a inflation in factor on it of whatever, 2%, and took that out for six years. So $200,000 times 1.02 times 1.02 out for six years, and that becomes whatever, $265,000 for the new one. And then an estimate, you know, $60,000 traded value at that time, so we've gotta come up with $210,000 to buy that truck the next year. And I've done that, and of course, that's only as good as the next year's price increase if the price increases 3% instead of 2% you're behind the curve, right? And then, but what always happens, no matter what we've put together for a program, say we're gonna trade the vehicles every five years or every six years, or you know, some vehicles are five, some are six, some are 10. Every time that we get to a 2018, because if some are five, and some are seven, and some are 10, that's somewhere down the line, three of them are in the same year. And then it always is, well, can we push this one out and push that one back, and unless you can just say we're gonna live with the schedule no matter what. Well, that's the danger of almost these having the CIP buckets where it looks really bad in one bucket one year, but really, it's the culmination of all of them, thank you. We used to have the one CIP, right, just all together. So, we've got two charts here, and I'm not sure which one is, this is the lower chart where- What would be the harm in going back to the paving thing of just going back five or six years on tape? The amount we've spent coming up with some kind of a rough average. Well, the question is, are we keeping up or not? Because if we look at what we've spent, it might not be what we needed to spend. Right, I understand that, but we don't even know the mileage of paved roads. 23? But if we could go back five or six years and find out how many miles of road we paved or repaved or ground and rebuilt, the portion of the total, and then we come up with kind of a dollar average of something that needed serious work like the rebuilding of something from the base up and then something that just needs to be ground and skimmed, you know, we could get an idea. Most of our paved roads at this point are at the point of the worst case scenario, reconstruction level, total reclaimed, grind and reclaim, basically reconstruct, and then repave. Well, I think that- We've done a lot of our short sections. That might be the case on some of the heavily traveled roads, where we have a lot of paved roads, you know. We just basically overlaid East Street, I think, Butler Street, those kind of streets. We're not going in and doing complete, we might mill it, but we're not doing a complete reclaim on all those roads. What I'm saying is that a lot of our, we've really hammered the crap out of a lot of our shorter, less traveled roads. To try to catch up, you mean? Yeah, you know, so we're down to basically the big nut ones now that dominate our paving list. And then the other thing is too, I mean, do you recall when we had the discussion about the bridge over here? Was that a seven-year life expectancy or five-year? Can't remember. Little might remember. I knew it was either or, you know, I think it was five-year best scenario in the seven-year or worse. By the train trestle, the bridge that we were presented with, trying to remember exactly what it was. Right here by the roundabout, just before it. Under the trestle. Thought it was a, when we decided to kick that out, it was a five-year life expectancy or seven, I forget. And we got to be encroaching on that. So I'm wondering what'll happen, when that. The concrete deck and construct new deck, early 2016 construction estimates for $350,000 estimate for $2,413,000 for that bridge. For 2020? Yeah, that's this year. So if we kick it down the road, another three to four years. Right, I mean, is there a. It went from 350 to 413. I guess my question is there a limit as to how many years we kick it out before it's condemned in the brook? So in 2019, the homestead school tax was $1.68.2 and for number five for this year, it's 174. So it's like six cents increase in the school tax. So four cents represents 160. You'd be probably in the two and a quarter range. Yeah, yeah. So two and a quarter and 160. So if you make it 10 cents less than, right? Six cents for the school and four cents for us. 10 cents on a $400,000 home. That's right. How many other, I mean, you started to go through the list, Chris, of these the Maple Street, Butler Street, the list of the like the large Guptall. Right now, unless I'm mistaken, we've got Blush Hill, Burns Hill, Maple Street, Guptall Road. That was the other one you just mentioned. We're taking care of Maple this year. So next year, there'll be Blush Hill, Burns Hill, Perry, and we did Loomis. So we'll have flats at some point. And Loomis, we took no debt. So the only debt within that CIP is Perry. When's that expired, do you remember? About a 10-year note or? 10, so 2025 or something like that. That's about halfway through that. So that's, I mean, I still, I mean, I totally understand and respect the comment about concern on taking on debt, but I still just think that if it's five different roads that we're talking about, and maybe at times we can pick them off without taking debt, which we did it with Loomis. If we're looking at this year, concerns surrounding a school budget that might force a large increase and we can take Maple Street in debt, I just think that it needs to be considered. As that goes on to say a 10-year, five years out, Perry falls off, you're starting to look at, I mean, and that's where I have to really understand what ultimately we should be spending a year, because I just, my concern again is, I'm gonna state is that I'm concerned on taking a large project and not being able to do the smaller ones that also need to be addressed, especially any maintenance work. Because if we took Maple Street as a bond, or put Maple Street out for debt this year to a vote, when would we even start paying on that next year? Yeah, if we, if we, if we, there's two ways to do it, but we would have to pay some interest at the least next year. If you don't pay your principal, obviously, it costs a little bit more in the long run, but if we were to do a bond vote, we would get the money late this summer and our first principal payment would be, if we borrowed money just from the bank on a straight five year note, our first principal payment would be a year from whenever we borrowed the money. When we did, when we did the Perry Hill project and what I've kind of contemplating on the fire trucks is we borrowed $500,000 from the bank in 2015, let's say. I don't remember if it was 14 or 15, but we borrowed money from the bank, the half a million dollars to do Perry Hill. And then the next year, the select board made a motion to convert that note into a bond and the bond bank paid us a half a million dollars. We paid the People's United Bank off a half a million and we paid them interest. So in that first year, we made an interest payment, no principal payment, and then the 10 year organization started. So Perry Hill, the project is actually being financed over 11 years. So let's take Perry Hill for example then. So we're gonna have a certain life expectancy of that road. What is the expectation starting from when we did that project a couple of years ago of when the next time we would need to address that road and what would be the sweet spot of taking a road like that and maintaining it and can you get into a rhythm of overlays or do you eventually, I mean, I guess I don't know, I still don't fully understand the feeling that like, I know how to maintain these roads, right? Not always a different idea than me, but from my perspective, what I would hope on Perry Hill, we've started, you know, done some crack filling and stuff like that already to try to lengthen out to protect the investment that we have. But I, if we could overlay that somewhere in the 10 to 12 year timeframe after we paved it, I think that would be a good scheme. Yeah, it'd be a good, you reconstructed it basically in say 15, somewhere between 25 and 27, if we overlaid it, I think that would overlaid the strut. Is it, do you pull the surface off at all or do you just go right over it? Just go over it. Just go over it with a couple of people. But I guess, I mean, that's a scenario that we'll have to play out in 10 years when that, you know, when we see what kind of condition that roads in at that point. It's about five years from now. Yeah, yeah. But that, you know, ideally, he's right. Ideally, you'd like to overlay it after seven years, if you could. But I don't think we want to be paying a bond for three more years plus overlaid. That's my concern. It would be nice if we could get on a schedule if we had to borrow, say, for Byron Sill, I mean, for Maple Street. If we had to borrow from Maple Street to amortize it over seven or eight years, as opposed to 10 or 12, it would be ideal. Well, that's where I just want to make sure that we're, you know, basically when you say ideal, are you saying that if we don't do it at year seven and we do it at year 12, it's going to have a significantly shorter lifespan? No, it's not, I'm gambling that in year 12 an overlay may not be possible. We're in what year on Neal and Flats right now? Any idea? We must be in year six or seven right in that ballpark. I think, and ideally, we need to be overlaying that right now. Well, that's, if you would let that road go another five years, you can forget overlaying it. Well, that's, so this is a great example of my concern of, say we took debt on Maple, debt on Maple to overlay Neal and Flats to protect that investment. And, you know, we, it's a year delay or whatever, somewhat of a year delay, but it saves that other investment of that other road. And then, you know, in four or five years, Perry Hill's debt falls off. You know, to me, that's a better way to start protecting and being set up and looking at the long-term strategy, even if you pay a little bit more on interest, you're not fully rebuilding roads. I just, I, you know, these decisions are made in these couple meetings sometimes, and I'm just concerned. Again, I go back to the fact that the chickens are coming home to roost and either we got a belly up and bite the bullet to try to get back to where we need to be and to a more manageable state. It's gonna cost us out to Gazoo here one way or another. And I'm more concerned about overlapping debt. That doesn't, that outlives the life expectancy of the project that we're borrowing it for. That's my bigger concern because- We're not talking about doing that, are we? I mean, I guess if you put a road on a 10-year and it needs to be overlaid in seven, that's a problem. Yeah, and especially, I don't know if you've been up Maple Street lately. I mean, that road is problematic. It's, you know, there's a speed bump every 25 feet. It's, there's something going on there. Isn't this, there's water that runs- Yeah, ground water. Yeah, it's high, it's a high level ground water during the- Now is that when we're talking about redoing Maple Street, is there anything that's gonna address some of that or is it just- Not really, you know, there's a couple of color words that'll be changed, but that's water table stuff. Yeah, it's water table stuff. It's not really gonna be able to- Only one way to do it and we can't head in that direction. So- Does it start with an F? Yeah. So what you're saying is, all things be, if you could, you're saying, let's pay a half a million dollars and borrow that to do Maple Street, and then spend another, and I don't have the number of discredited number. 200,000. But another 150,000 to overlay- Neal and Flash. As long as I understood, if we don't do that decision, what's the expense down the road? See, like, I think those are the, tipping points that I feel like are, and I think it speaks to your point of your concern over that road or roads like that, that we've invested this money and there's an opportunity to overlay and get a significant number of years out of them and then your per year cost is going down significantly for those roads, or it's just letting them go. Which, I mean, I guess once they go, like Maple Street, for example, has probably been gone from the ability to overlay for a significant number of years every year, similar to the truck conversation of you pushing another year out and another year out, but eventually, you know. Everything piles up. Well, yeah, but I just, so trying to understand what the right strategy is. So there's two ways to get more information that you're kind of looking for. One is to, you know, have Alec try to do a much more comprehensive program. I don't have what he did, what we looked at a few weeks ago with him, but he's done that. It's not every single road. The other way, I mean, everything costs money. You can hire an engineering firm and have them come in and do an engineering study and pay them $50,000 to come in and tell you what to do. The downside of it is, it's $50,000 that you could have paid a certain road with. And the second reality is that when the five of you get off the board and you present that plan to the next select board, if they don't fund it, then, you know, we've been there a couple of times. So can I ask you this? Maybe we're having this discussion for how to fund this thing for no reason. Is there a way of proposing this to the taxpayers at town meeting in a two-way scenario of, number one, will you authorize the municipality to spend X amount to pave Maple Street? First question, second question, how do you prefer to pay for it? Borrow, amortize for whatever scenario you put together or bite the bullet and put it on your tax rate and be done with it. Can we do that and let them decide? Yeah, I think you can. There's two ways you can do it. Probably the cleanest way is to have two articles on the warning and take the first one, which would be, you wanna spend this money and borrow, have that be the first question. And then, I think you could do it either way. But typically we have a motion that says shall the voters authorize the select board to appropriate up to $500,000 to pave Maple Street and to authorize borrowing on terms and conditions that the select board deems best. So when they give you the authority to spend, they also give you the authority to borrow, but you can make that authority to borrow that the select board can then decide whether it wants to borrow. If you get the authority to borrow a half a million and you decide to borrow 200,000, that's okay. You could decide to borrow nothing. I guess I'm interested in letting them make the choice as to how it affects their pocketbook with an explanation as to perhaps a little bit of view into some of these other paving projects that are yet to come. The difficulty, I think, is do you want to exclusively have it focused on, and it's like, we've got this deficit in five capital budgets, aggregately, and when the CIP was first established, the vote was, shall the voters authorize the select board to bond up to, I think, 10 years for $650,000 to establish the CIP fund and then do these particular projects. So they just gave the select board money for the whole thing. And from a financial standpoint, then, are you suggesting that the problems we face from infrastructure managing our equipment replacement could be better done from a fiscal standpoint if it were put back into its whole or are we gonna jeopardize some aspect of these individual CIPs as they currently are and come up short, if we're robbing from Peter to pay Paul, does that put us, how does that affect us? I don't think, I'm not necessarily saying that we should go back to one CIP. Effectively, that's what we have because when you look at this, fund 70, we can go back several years, fund 70 has been underwater for a number of years now. I mean, we budgeted for 2019 a year ago, we budgeted to spend $370,000 in revenue and spend using Mark's calculation $628,000, which includes $50,000, $50,000 of debt service. And if we did exactly what we planned to do last year, the paving CIP was gonna be $300,000 in the hole. It's just that we had $400,000 in the buyer CIP and it washed it off. So we're in effect using an aggregate CIP right now. These CIP funds, they're all borrowing from one another as they all have lean years and robust years in terms of what gets spent or not spent and they all fluctuate up and down and they're borrowing one from the other all the time. But we're pretty close to the boat. If everything worked out right to the penny in 2019, we would have ended with $30,537 in the bank. And now this year we wanna pay $500,000. So we can't do it without borrowing just by putting what we're putting aside. So from my perspective, as much as I hate either scenario borrowing or raising taxes and just being done with it, if I had to choose one of the two, I'd rather just rip the Band-Aid off and say, raise the initial taxes, pay for the son of a gun and let's go into next year with a cleaner slate because next year we're gonna be back here facing a similar set of issues that. I guess my question on the Band-Aid is, are we just trying to get that CIP number to zero? Is that? Well, I don't want it less than zero. But zero, we're pretty close to zero. I mean, we were pretty close to zero for 2019. And to get it to zero, I can do a little work and I think a three-set tax rate would be able to get it to zero. I mean, my goal is to keep on the paving progress that we've been able to muster up in the last few years here that we're still underfunding, in my opinion, but yet we're gaining ground. But our, and again, I've said it a million times, our roads are at a point where I don't know if they can, they certainly can get worse, but from a cost perspective to repair, can they get worse to the point where they're gonna really cost us a lot more money or are they just at that point where there's only one way to treat them and it's the most costly way to deal with it, whether they're as bad as they are now or if they sit another five years in deteriorate, you know? Yeah, I mean, I think I'm not trying to dig my heels in on the non-movement of the tax rate, but I think even if we do take the position of saying we're gonna look for a higher tax rate, I still think I would want an answer on the number of roads that if we don't do something like an overlay to address them next year, we'll lose the opportunity to protect them. I think that's something that I need to understand because if the answer is yes, and these are the roads and we need to do them next year and this is the future money we're saving and if you don't do them, then I'm gonna say that we should still consider borrowing from April Street and do those projects. Looking at the bigger picture, I think is what I really need to understand there. And I don't know how quick Alec can do that kind of work or I mean, I don't know, you- I think that's why I said, I think the simple solution is, you know, it may sound a little bit complicated, but put it to the voters and let them decide. And they may say, you know something? Our taxes are going up high enough. It's too complicated. The difficulty of those is that I don't know, you know, the actual ability to get more than a half a million dollars worth of work done. Sure. You know, because we're already, you know, Woody and I met with Celia the other day and, you know, she's already scheduling to do stuff on Maple Street early in the year. You gotta change culverts and everything else and I'm not sure we can do a whole lot more than Maple Street in this year. But if you put up to the voters to borrow on Maple Street and then you could drop that paving to 300,000, right? Because you're basically- The paving is, all it's gonna, the paving, the budget, the expense side has to have what you're gonna spend. Because you're gonna get the money reimbursed to you later as a- Half a million dollars is gonna have to go out. You're just gonna, you'll have money coming in. If you're trying to squeeze an overlay in here, I don't know that that affects the highway department at all, it's spent on kneeling flats. They would just come in and overlay it. That doesn't necessarily have to be the same company to do Maple Street as well, but- Well, you get a lot better price here. Well, obviously, sure, if they can squeeze it in, but if they're overbooked and, you know, that's just, that's a question that'd have to be answered by them, but- I don't think between now and when we have to have this ready for going to the, you gotta sign a warning next week. And I don't think we're gonna be able to get much more than we have. I mean, Alex, give us a report now, I can sit down with Alex and Woody and say, on this sheet that you have here, is there anything that we could overlay? You know, it's not just the paving that is, you know, are we gonna do the roof on the highway garage? Are we gonna do the roof on the recreation building? I think we gotta buy the vehicles. So, you know, we could probably pick another road and, you know, we've already talked about how and how and if we can do that one while we're laying up there. So, between now and next week, there's not a lot of opportunity to do a whole lot of analysis, that's for sure. Yeah, again, I'm gonna stick to my guns there. If there's any way we can put this to the voters to let them make the choice that I- What's that choice again? To either amortize out Maple Street or now is Maple Street in itself gonna take the three cents? The four cents, three, four cents. When you look at the bottom of the page that we looked at together, to get the thing, to get the CIPs to zero, what was the number that we had there? 318-406. I think what you had was 248, 151, and I had three, something higher than that, right? Four, four cents, 406 was four cents. So, to get to zero, we either have to borrow 318, or we gotta raise 318 or a combination of both, right? And I kind of thought we'd be doing a combination of both. I was thinking that maybe one or two cents, tax increase, and then some borrowing for the other 150 or whatever it is. If you want to have more in the CIP at the end of the year, and we do all these things, you're gonna have to raise or borrow more. So, there again, that's another, if you add a crystal ball, you could look into it, interest rates between now and next year, cheaper to borrow this year, cheaper to borrow next year, you don't know those questions. Well, it's hard to borrow cheaper than this year. It might go up, it's not gonna go down. You just made a good point. It's unlikely that the interest rates are gonna go down significantly. And of course, and again, I'll say it again, my concern is borrowing on something that deteriorates so quickly, in the problems leading into that, if you continue to have to do that. And then there's the economy, you know. So, if we borrowed, we got in this CIP, you got $36,000 and $10,000 or $11,000 for moves. So, right there, you can, if you borrow for 10 years for $50,000, and the moves are gonna last 20 years. So, it's not all paving. Everything in this thing that we're looking at isn't something that's gonna deteriorate and be done in five years. You know, the tandem and the one ton, you know, they're gonna last five to six years. We can borrow for those. You know, you can borrow whatever the sum of that is for five years, advertise that over five years and they'll, the trucks might last six years or so. That gets you a little bit of money. It doesn't have to be that, you know, it's we just need to borrow or raise about $300,000. We've got to do at least that. Does Main Street project fall off in 2021? Main Street project has, in 2020, whatever this number is, 190 and then in 2021, it will be 60 probably, and then six. So, there'd be a significant fall off there. And we didn't borrow for that, you know, and that, the town's cost for that, the project cost is $21 million, the local share altogether, all in on participating costs and everything else, it's $482,722 on that, the town's share is about 365. So you could borrow $365,000 and just saying it's to pay for a 50-year Main Street project because they're not gonna be back to do Main Street for 50 years, I guarantee it. It's taken 30 years to get this done. So you could borrow that just for that portion of it. I mean, I guess in the end of the day, when we're looking at what the actual, I think that the town portion of the property tax compared to what the school portion is, that $13 on $400,000 at the 4% increase to get what we need to get done. I hate saying it, but it's probably not. I mean, I think we have to seriously consider it. I mean, if we pose it to the voters in a kind of a two-part scenario, are either gonna give us one of those options or they're gonna nix it right from the budget. No, we're not spending this money, period. Yeah, and if we go in and they say we're not spending this money. Which is pretty unlikely because our roads are in such a condition that you can't continue to ignore them, just you're beyond that point. I mean, I- So the, you can calculate and do it. So the school tax is 75% of the tax rate. The town's 24 points. If we raised it to 55 cents, that's a 4% increase and the school goes up to 174, 55 to 229, the school tax is 75%. It's gone down the price. Because it used to be- 85%. No, no, it used to be, less than it used to be like 70, 30, 65, when I first came here, but it's going the wrong direction. I don't know. Billy, you said you came into this meeting and think you could explore an option of like a two percent increase and then some borrowing to lower the impact. Maybe we need to just look at that. Yeah, I don't wanna belabor this. I mean, either way, you're footing the bill. Just, I'm trying to head off some overlap in the coming years. At the end of the day, it's a fact. We're gonna have to pay the bill. There's no getting out of the cost of operating this town. Period. So let me ask a question a different way and I don't know how I feel about it yet, but when we used to borrow for trucks or anything that we borrowed for five years, I would go to the bank and say, how much to borrow $100,000? We've got authority to borrow it for five years. Give me an interest rate and give me two ways. One, give me a flat interest rate that's good for five years and the second one was give me an interest rate for one year. And we always took the interest rate for one year. Let's say the interest rate for a year was 2% and the interest rate for five years was 2.5%. And I can't do the math in my head, but every year, because you paid off 20% of the principal, next year you would be borrowing 80,000 instead of borrowing 80,000 at the two and a half percent or whatever the higher rate was, you'd borrow 80,000. And even if the interest rates went up incrementally, you were still paying lower interest than you were before. So, we're borrowing from ourselves right now for the purpose, for two purposes. One, because we need to finance it and we can't just pay cash for it. But two, we've got a lot of money sitting in the bank and we can't get a good fixed interest rate on those loans and I mean on that, on those portfolios. And what we were ending up doing was having too much money above what our policy said we should have in equities and not enough in fixed income. So in order to kind of rebalance the portfolio and have a reasonably good paying yield on that fixed income portfolio, we're paying ourselves 4% on the loan. Now this isn't gonna make a huge difference at all, but maybe for a couple of years for these loans, we can pay ourselves back 2% or 2 1⁄2% to give us, it's a couple thousand dollars difference that we'll pay ourselves. And as long as we're paying ourselves interest at a higher rate that we could get leaving it in a similar investment of similar risk, we're doing better for ourselves. So we've got some capacity to borrow from ourselves and you know, instead of paying 4%, we paid 3%. That's what, 25% reduction in interest rate, right? 30%, something like that. So I can put together some scenarios, but the other, I was hoping that when we got all said and done that if we would have a tax rate increase of maybe 3%, 3 cents, I would be happy about that feeling that I kind of did my job. If you want, I can go back and get you some information by Wednesday and Thursday this week. So you have a little time to think about it if you wanna call me and talk about it, you can do that. But we're gonna have to make a decision one way or the other by Monday. And Chris, Karla and I can work on some language for the articles and if you wanna have, if you pass this, then you pass over that. If you don't pass this, you take up that and hopefully one of them passes, right? Yeah, I don't know that one wouldn't pass. It just gives them the ability in their own mind to know what they're gonna be dealing with and whether they wanna just be upfront and deal with it or if they wanna try to stretch it out because they're the ones that are foot in the bill while we all are. But there's a lot more of them than there is of us sitting here. Bill, what is the transfer this year out of the, yeah. And you know me with debt, I hate debt. So that's why I prefer to just rip the band-aid and pay the bill because I know there's gonna be another one right behind it next year. And maybe next week too, Michael'd be here and he could put his two cents in. Right, but without debt, we would have been paying a million dollars for fire trucks. What would that have done to the tax rate? What's that? The million dollars we took for fire trucks this year. I mean, you have to take debt for the large single year investments. Right, those are the types of things where you can amortize them out long enough to get your money's worth out of them. Yeah. I don't know if you agree with that. There's a balance for sure. Right, well, as I've said many times, when something has a life of 10 or 20 years that you know has that life, I think that's the way that you should pay for those because it spreads it over the cost of the life of the building or the improvement and everybody who's using it is paying for it. But there is certainly when you have to borrow and pay 10 years to afford something when the thing has a seven year life, then that's not good. Right, but I mean, like you pointed out, I think the ability that, I mean, unlike a lot of other towns, when we're taking on debt, not all of it's sitting with interest being paid outside of the municipality. We're capturing that interest, which is hugely beneficial and you said we paid down that one, that debt $200,000 and the interest from those loans has gone into back into that fund, right? I think it's going to get the debt. Let me get that quickly. I think that's a really important thing that we just have to remember is if he's talking about taking 100 or 200,000 in debt from ourselves at a rate of 3% that we couldn't get safely get outside of, if our investment strategy says we don't put X percentage at risk within the market and you have to move to cash or find lower risk options and the lower risk is us investing and it changes yearly based on basically what our needs are for that specific year, that's a pretty, that's a pretty huge opportunity to continue to make this whole number work because eventually you pay that debt down and it's now sitting back on your balance sheet as cash or whatever else and you can borrow against it again. I don't disagree, I'm just, we got a couple hundred thousand of capacity to borrow against ourselves right now and I guess my fear is that, well my preference is to hang on to that ace in the hole till perhaps next year when it might be more important to us. But we're paying down every year, so we're recouping those opportunities to borrow once again, whether it's our own debt or other debt and he's laid it out in that whole debt service and that's where the million dollars that we borrowed for fire trucks isn't as impactful as maybe we thought it was because we do have debt that's expiring. I mean, I think it's very important to, I think that's what he's going to get right now but it's important to understand how we're taking debt and when and how and I agree with you, sure, I totally understand. That's why I want us to make sure we're looking 10 years out on our 10 or farther on vehicles and paving and all that stuff that's kind of in buildings and infrastructure and all of that is so important to start to build those schedules so it shouldn't be surprises every year. We should know for the most part when these large expenses are coming at us. I mean, the fire trucks we did, we knew they were looming. Yeah, I'm just, question to myself and I'll throw it out there loud is, I'm curious to know from a fiscally responsible standpoint if let's say the economy goes into dumper here in the next two years, are we better to have the capacity to borrow then or in order to try to solve the problems that we're faced with or are we gonna be smarter to just try to ask the residents to pony up when the economy's, that's just a question that I run through my head out of curiosity, I'd like to know, I kind of like to know what that answer is. What changes in terms of on our side when the economy goes down other than? Well, our capacity to continue to borrow, how, where is the limit for us as far as, based on the population in the town and the ability to absorb debt where's that fine line when it gets to the point where people just can't afford it anymore and the economy drops off, what's the better scenario at that point? So do we over leverage ourselves now in the next couple of years and put ourselves at risk or is that not a risk, those are just questions that are hypothetical to some degree, but certainly could take place if we weren't careful. I just don't wanna box us into a corner. So if we, right now we owe ourselves $667,000, so for every, if we dropped the interest that we paid ourselves by 1% from 4% to 3% would save us $6,800. What's the total value of the? Total debt. Yeah. It's a little over five million. Did we? So we're not gaining, we're not gonna gain any real benefit from cutting a couple of percent. Well, every $6,000 that you just saved, you know, you do it 10 times and you save it 10 times. What were you gonna say, Mark, sorry? Oh, I was just wondering, because the initial, the way this thing originally started was basically debt, right? You took $650,000 in debt, so that CIP was originally sitting with a $650,000, no, right? Well, if you want to take the time and put the scenarios together and plop them in front of us next week and we'll be under the gun to have to make a decision and we got a week to think about it. And I'm not here next week, unfortunately, but. Huh? Come on. In Canada. You've been a long time up there. Most of this week? Yes. I think we're gonna have a meeting. I just want to try to get stuff to you before you leave. I'll have my phone and everything. I leave once in the morning. And, yeah, of course, I'm headed up to pollen tomorrow for the rest of the week, but I can be in touch or you can be in touch with me. I know I owe you an annual report that I'll have to you in time one way or another. Yeah, it's in my pocket. Are we doing the parks and highway budgets tonight? It's up to you. I mean, I've sent them out. They're pretty much agents. Let's really look at them quickly. Do you see it? Do you see that salt's highlighted? Yeah, and now's the time to maybe deal with it. All right, so on the highway budget, standing at the top, we had one employee that was on extended disability last year about six weeks, I believe. And while he was not here, probably people had to pick up the slack and then we had a pretty hard winter last year. So we spent, you know, the total overspending in the highway budget comes to 29,441 in 2019. 27,000 was overspent in pay. So, you know, everything else was basically right on the button. Let me see. So if you go out, I printed off enough. On that pay line proposed for 2020 is 382,500, which is about $8,000 less than we spent last year. If you go way out to the right, if we didn't have any overtime at all, the budget would be 357,125. And that's for this year. Last year it would have been slightly lower than that. It's probably unrealistic of me to expect that 363 would be a good number, but that's the number that we plugged in there. 382, it's a, I think it's a closer number, but it's still less than we spent in 2019. I'm hoping we don't have somebody who's out because even though you don't pay that person for a number of weeks, when everybody else gets time and a half to pick up the slack. You notice, Chris, you pointed it out last week in other budgets, the Highway Fund is the biggest fund, except for the General Fund where payroll lies and workers' compensation is based on, it's based on a rate per employment category. So we pay 44 cents per hundred for administrative workers' comp, but for Highway, it's like $8.75 or $9.28 cents per hundred. So we lost 10 grand right there and just in a workers' comp increase. And then moving down the page, everything else is really within a few percentage points of each other, the building maintenance line. It's 13% higher than it was budgeted for last year, but that's $2,000. It's not like 13% equals $100,000. It's a couple thousand dollars. And the salt line, I highlighted that. You see what I budgeted last year? I went back five years a year ago and a year before that and a year before that. And I kind of budget the average. Now, obviously that works against us a little bit because things cost more now than they cost five years ago in terms of price per ton. The average five-year average for salt, including 2019 and 2015, was $50,916. But in 2015, we must have had a really mild winter because we only spent $25,000 for salt that year. So I budgeted 58,250. It's significantly lower than what we spent in 2019. Celia would tell you that the fact that winters are getting warmer causes salt used to go higher because if it's 32 degrees and it snows, it's really slippery and you put salt on to get rid of it. And she said, if we had winters where it was 20 degrees all the time, you wouldn't have to salt at all. So it's a risk to budget that little but it's a $6,000 risk on a $1.6 million budget, $1.7 million budget. So there's not really a lot here that I think you can tamper with, but if you feel you can, have at it. I usually emailed that out but I forgot this time so we can just have a paper copy. That's a weird question on workers' comp but those policies held by just regular third party insurance companies. We get our insurance through the Relay of Cities and Parents. I can show you that even though it's going up, we get benefit of ownership of the company. Well, yeah, I thought that was the case because I know that that I know what they even someone told me that I could basically become my own insurance at some point and I thought that's how that worked to a certain extent but I wasn't sure. Well, we're owners but there's 200 members of the Property Insurance Trust that VLCT operates and just like every other insurance out there some towns have good experience, some towns have bad experience and the formula by which they send you a premium includes your experience as well as what's happening in the marketplace. It's just been a couple of bad years for us, unfortunately, and it's cyclical. Hopefully we'll have a couple of good years coming up but it does hurt in a single year to see it done. 10,000 lower increase, 40% increase. So I think I'm gonna just throw this out there. Obviously I still have concerns about the sand and salt use as a whole. So I think what I've decided to do is this conversation where we're gonna have this spring that town meeting focusing on climate change initiatives. I think I'm gonna maybe try to delve into that a little bit with the general public at town meeting and talk to them a little bit about my concerns about that and let them convey to me and the board what they're interested in doing, if anything at all and if they choose to continue to not wanna address the impacts of that, then you probably won't hear me ever talk about it again. But if I get an indication or if we get an indication that they're interested in perhaps trying to somehow regulate it a little bit more, and I think maybe the board should consider addressing a policy to try to deal with the use of it. And I know it's a touchy subject because the major concern or the talking point is safety. So I get that. Right, and you know, as much as I love town meeting, we're gonna have 150 people there. Right. I'm just thinking maybe it might give us some indication as to how they feel about it. How is it normally addressed on a town because a lot of the articles are based on monetary voting. What, how does that typically work for you to just wanna talk about a subject or are you, I'm just trying to remember an example of something. How do we, how would that be approached? The only way that it can really be approached if you're gonna have something done in this year's budget is that when the budget is talked about, you talk about it and then you, if somebody wants to amend the budget to reduce the amount of salt, or you're looking to leave the budget alone for now and just get their sentiments and create a policy for going forward. Right. Okay. I mean, I'd prefer to do something about it this year, but. Is that brought up in the end of the meeting in the other, other, I just, I'm just trying to understand what you're talking about. Yeah, other business, other business. You know, they can't find you doing anything, but that can advise, certainly could advise the select board that you can take a stand next year on it. I mean, if this, if this can be part of the climate change discussion, which I think it should be, because it's impacting the quality of the water and the soils, and I think that. I'm talking about doing it in the article that, correct. Correct. That Kathleen Day and those folks. Yeah, I don't want to, I don't want to wait to the end when everybody's history. I think that's a good spot for it. Yeah. Okay. So. Is everything all right on the highway budget otherwise? It's really a maintenance budget. It's 3.8%, 3.9% higher than last year. I forgot the workers' cost increase, you know, almost right on the line. Yeah, I'm always concerned about the increases in the pay line, you know, because that's never ending in it. Just seems to accumulate too quickly. Okay. And then the only other budget that we hadn't looked at was the parks budget, which is on the page. And again, it's, last year's, the budget was 94,530. This year, it's proposed at 97,730. There's a few tweaks I can make throughout this general fund budget between now and next week. But there's nothing different or new here. So, any hard questions from anybody? Well, you're almost through another one, Bill. Appreciate your work. Almost. And I wanted to, again, commend you on that letter to the school board there. I think it, I think, I think it helped. Is it appropriate to ask, I am wondering just on that. I totally, I don't fully understand the email you. The scenario of the school board member not voting and then is that something we should just talk up line or should we talk and can we talk in this? We can talk. Yeah, can you just explain a little bit there in terms of a decision to basically non-vote and explain your expectations of what we, I guess it's just a little new to me to fully understand that problem. Yeah, so I just reacted to what Caitlin wrote to me. You know, I sent the letter that you all signed and then the next day she sent me an email and said, budget five passed and even though we didn't specifically say budget five, that was the one that you kind of, you know, hoped that they would gravitate to. And she said, and this was the results of the vote and she listed everybody's name that voted I and the ones that voted no. And then she just said, I as the chair abstained. So if you looked at it, it's weighted voting. So the thing passed like, you know, 50% to pretty slim margin. 39% or something like that with an abstention. And I did the math and if Caitlin had voted yes, it would have passed 60, 40 basically. And if she had voted no, it still would have passed 50 and a half to 49 and a half or something like that because her vote is worth 9.85% of the total. So I just wrote to her and it was from just a personal observation from my point. I said, why don't you vote? I said, you know, you're not the lieutenant governor of the state or the vice president of the United States who by the constitution is prohibited from voting unless there's a tie. You're one of my representatives and you didn't vote. So, you know, we're supposed to, Waterbury is supposed to have whatever the total comes to 34% of the- Delegates? The vote at Harwood and she didn't vote. So I kind of called her on it and I think I emailed everybody her response, which was, well, you know, Robert's Rules of Order says that, you know, there's rules for small boards and for large bodies and a large body, it says that the chairperson typically doesn't vote unless their vote is gonna change the outcome. It's not a tie, it's changed the outcome. On a small board, Robert's Rules of Order says, everybody should vote because there's only five of you or three of you and if you didn't vote, it's hard sometimes to get business done. So she said, you know, I've decided for this board, given the contentiousness of this newly established unified board that as the chair, it's easier if I don't vote unless my vote is gonna change the outcome. So I felt a little better that, you know, she's not just reserving her vote for if there's a tie, she would have voted if it meant it was gonna flip from yes to no, but I still think for a board of, you know, 14 people that when you're, you know, you're elected chair by your colleagues, you know, and why would anybody from Facedon ever agree to be the chair of the board? If they're not gonna, if they're gonna be the chair of the board and they're gonna be expected not to vote, that means Facedon doesn't have a vote. So I think it's a little bit hard. Yeah, I tried to understand her point. Obviously from what we read and heard and understood that it is a divisive board. And to try to manage that as any chair would be difficult, let alone if you create animosity by showing your vote, you know, in favor of the town she represents, I get that, you know, that's gonna make it even more difficult to work with those other people later on. So I understand that, but I also agree to your point as well, you know, my wife said, why is she a board member then? If she's not gonna, if she got on there to represent us, then why didn't she represent us? Right, but it almost, it almost, if the board is gonna have that philosophy that the chair shouldn't vote, it almost means the water brain representative on the board has to be the chair because if you're from any of the other panels, you're gonna give up what you're gonna watch if you don't ever vote. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but. Is it, and those votes, they go down the line and she's the last one to vote or how does she know that her vote's not gonna count? Yeah, I think she probably does some math beforehand and you know, says, well, these set of people vote yes. So I'm, you know, I didn't ask that, but I'm sure she's kind of got a strategy just to make sure she has to pull the trigger. So it's important for the public, especially in Waterbury and Duxbury to pay attention to this whole school board process because of the vote, because of what it entails and because of the valleys pushed to change, either get that vote voted down or change things at the legislative level. If that's even possible, I can't imagine how it could be, but you know, the resulting impacts of movement in what I would perceive as the wrong direction could cost the taxpayers a shit ton of money down the road. And I mean, sooner than later, you know, not too distant future here. So it's important that the public stay on top of this effort by the school board because it could either not impact us as much as we'd hope it wouldn't or it could really impact us, depending on the way the votes go. So that's it. Are we all set? Motion to adjourn. You want to stay here for another hour or five? All right, all those in favor? Aye. Aye. Thanks, Carla. Thank you very much. Thanks for everything. Thanks for everything.