 Having said that, we'll call to order the first meeting of June 2020 for June 1st. And if everybody's looked at the agenda, unless somebody's got something to add to it, I take a motion to approve the agenda as written. I'll make that motion to approve the agenda. Second. Second. All those in favor of approving the agenda as written. Say aye, please. Hi. Hi. Mike. He's still. I'm not Mike. Trying to connect, I think. By voice. Okay. Well, we'll move on. Consent agenda items. Minutes. May 18th meeting is the only thing on the consent agenda. Somebody like to approve that. Consent agenda. We can move along. I would approve the consent agenda items and minutes of the May 18th meeting. Okay. You want to second that Katie. Okay. Katie's second today. All those in favor, please say aye. Hi. Hi. Yes. Okay. All those in favor, please say aye. Hi. Hi. Yes. Okay. Public. Is there anybody here from the public? Hey, Chris. Yes. Mike, hear us. Mike, can you hear us? If you can swing, wave your hand. Apparently not. I see him talking into the phone there earlier. Right. Can you hear us? Yeah. He's trying like heck, but he's not connected. You don't have a form until you go. I can give him a shout, I think. I'm here. There he is. Technology. I've zoomed the zillion different times, but when I hit computer or audio, it says your browser does not support using the computer audio device to use zoom install the latest version. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I'm here. We got you now. Maybe you wore out your zoom. Okay, we've gone through approving the agenda and a consent agenda. We're onto the public. Sounds like Lisa, are you there? Because I have Lisa Scalati up there on the board, but apparently she's not there. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Oh, there you are. Hey, Lisa. Hi, folks. Chris. Yes. Who else is joining us by phone other than Harry Shepard. I guess there is a couple of the people, isn't there? I'm not. I'm on both phone and so I could see you on the computer, but my computer does not have audio and video. And we have, it looks like two more people. Hi, this is Hadley Laskowski from the Valley reporter. Oh, hi, Hadley. Hi. And what other person perhaps. Is that your phone number, Mike? Yes, that is. Okay. 2446290. That's me. I see me in two different places. Okay. So we're at the public. Is there anybody from the public that wishes to speak at this point? Yes, not. So we'll move right into the select board items. Development review board interviews. There's. Two positions for. Development review board to two year positions. One is a for an alternate. And one or one is for. Full term. Both full terms actually just one's an alternate ones. One's. Full board member. Full board member. Yeah. And Patrick Cheryl and Harry Shepard are the two. People interested in those positions. I guess we'll listen to Patrick first and see what he's got to say. If you'd like Patrick. Tell us why you want to be on the board. Sure. First of all, thank you all for your time. So my name is Pat Farrell. I live at five Parker court. In Waterbury, which for those of you who don't know. It's behind L service center right next to the fire station. So. My neighbor and who I know is very active in the town is concerned about my ability to stay up late enough for these meetings. That's how exciting my life is. So. When I told her I was interested, she's like, are you sure you will stay up late enough. Yeah. So my wife and I moved here from Buffalo, New York about three years ago, and we picked Waterbury over. Anywhere, you know, anywhere out there because we had been traveling here for, for years and loved it. And just love the community. Love the people love the businesses. And we both work for the state. You know, I work right in town here and, you know, you know, I think at this point. You know, we're going to stay here and I view it as like a duty to be involved in the community. If I'm going to, you know, live in it. And, you know, some things I've done to this point, I was on the organizing committee for the Waterbury arts festival last year and was going to be doing that again this year until it got canceled. So, you know, I think it's going to be a, a pub crawl around Christmas time to benefit the central human society. So we try and do, you know, Fun things that, that, that get us involved, but I feel like this is a formal step to, to, you know, making a difference in the community. And that's, that's why I would. I'd like to, I'd like to be on the board. So. Any questions or. Any comments? I would say you can. When it comes to. Doing things fun. You can talk to Mike Baird. He was on the DRB for quite some time. And I could probably bet you that. It wasn't so fun at times. That correct, Mike. It's a very good board to be in it's really, you learn a lot about the community and especially. It's a very can do kind of, you see what projects and it's a really good board to be in. You know, it's a really good board to be in. You know, It's a really good board to be in. You know, It's a really good board to be in. Your. Development in, in the, in the community. So I like that you're dedicated to a service. Thank you for, for saying that. I myself served several years on the DRB. And that's how I kind of dip my toes into. Getting involved in the town. And. And the meetings are not always all that riveting, but. It's a, it's a necessary job. And, you know, if you've got a good attention to detail and you can be patient with people, it can be quite rewarding. So thank you for stepping up. Absolutely. And that's what I, you know, I definitely look at it as a, you know, dipping the toe in the water of. And a great opportunity to learn about. Waterbury because, you know, I. You wouldn't want me sitting in the train station, talking to people about the history of the town right now. So I definitely need to learn. Okay. Any questions for Pat? Any other questions. Or questions, period. You have a good recipe for Buffalo chicken wings. Yes. Yeah. I have a good recipe for a lot of things, but definitely. We could do some wings. Good deal. What, what are your. Views on, on development as a whole. Are you. Hoping to see more preservation of open land. Economic development. As far as. As far as it's, it's, it's, it's important. It's important to the community versus overbuilding. My view as a native or monitor and a lifelong resident of. Waterbury and this area. I'm a little worried that. You know, we may end up overbuilding ourselves. But I think that's the point where it become, we become too much like Williston or some of these other places that would just, it would break my heart. And I would think it would ruin the quality of our community. But that's just my personal opinion, even though I'm in the construction industry. And that's why I probably feel the way I do is because. I see what's happening. I'm on the front line. And I try to tell people that. You know, so it's a double-edged sword for me and it's how I pay my bills, but I also am a native or monitor and I, you know, the landscape is very important to me. So I guess to answer that question. Part of what attracted us to Waterbury was the, you know, the sense of history. The. You know, how it looks when you're walking down Main Street. And so, so I think. You know, I think the development should be, should be done with that in mind. And there's, there's, there should be a balance between, you know, progress and preserving what makes this area unique and special and preventing what you talked about, you know, with, you know, where we lived in Buffalo, we had. A Walmart at one corner of our street, a Target at the other and a Wegmans and a tops at the, you know, facing them, you know, those are both big grocery stores and, you know, we couldn't get out of there fast enough because it's just gross to look at. So, you know, having some sort of balances is really important, but also understanding the need to, to have economic development. What's your background in like knowing about construction standards, environmental law, those kind of things. Do you have any background in either? I don't, I, I would have to learn it, which I'm willing to do. My background is in, in human resources. And currently I work for the state as a change management professional for it projects. So I, you know, I have a lot of experience with dealing with diverse opinions and getting folks to work together, but as you know, I would have to learn the laws and regulations. Do you feel comfortable looking at building plans and specs and those kind of things? Yes. Good. Anybody else wish to ask Pat anything? Does it appear to be so Pat will let you off the hook and we'll put Harry in the hot seat for a few minutes. How about it, Harry? All right. Well, thank you. I similarly and have been thinking about trying to get involved a little more with the activities in the town. I think I know most of you folks, I'm pretty active. With the water, Waterbury Rotary Club for many years. I live on Jenny Davis road, which is out the western side of town by the Bolton Dam. And I work for the town of Stowe's the public works director. I'm a experienced civil engineer. And I think the position on the DRB is something that I could provide some value to, to the town and help to try to be a productive member of the board and hopefully help guide prudent development in the town. So how long you've been a member or how long you've been public works director for Stowe, Harry? 10 years. Is there anything that you've seen happen up there that perhaps you wouldn't want to see here or you'd want to see here in this town? I didn't mean to throw it there. No, that's fair. They're very, they're different towns in a lot of ways, even though we're neighbors. You know, Stowe is a resort community with a economic engine that relies on heads on beds. And Waterbury's not quite like that, although maybe has grown that way in some regards, but it's certainly not as intense as it is in Stowe. I can't say that I've seen anything done up there that I, you know, there's stuff that's done up there that's at a different scale than what would likely be appropriate in Waterbury. You're not going to have a spruce peak type of development, you know, here in Waterbury, although the differences with Waterbury is the relationship to the transportation systems in exit 10 and, you know, being the crossroads, right, the commercial corridor that accesses Stowe and links it to exit 10. So I don't think that I've seen anything in Stowe that would be inappropriate in Waterbury for projects that would be of the kind of scale that might occur in Waterbury. I am a proponent of economic development, but I also recognize that things need to be done with balance, and I, you know, hope to avoid, I hope to work as a member of the Board to avoid adverse impacts to the butters and the public in general. Join us, Mark, or trying to. Yeah, I'm here. So we got Harry Shepard on and Patrick Farrell. They're interviewing for the two positions, full time in the alternate for DRB at this point. Patrick's already spoken a little bit about why he wants to be on the board and Harry's in the seat right now. You have anything you'd like to ask either one of them. So once I came in late, I'll just recuse myself on a vote, but I guys, sorry, I'm late. That's no problem. Is there any other questions for Harry, anyone? Harry, your civil engineering background will come in invaluable on the DRB. That's probably something, you know, from being on the DRB for a long time. I think that's a skill that could be greatly used on the, on the board. So. Okay. Nobody else needs to pick Harry's or Patrick's brain for anything. We can. Move it out moving forward with. Motions to appoint them. This is where it becomes difficult for the board because it sounds like both of you people are very interested in taking the positions. Okay. Obviously one is an alternate. And so I'll ask either one of you right up straight. Would either one of you prefer to be an alternate as opposed to the full-time member at this point and. Make the board's job easy. Or we'll have to. Vote. I'll just make a comment. Okay. I'll just make a comment for both of you. From being on the board for a long time. We always use the alternates almost as regular committee members. You know, you don't. You're not any. Almost less of a board member. And many times when someone's not present. You'll just slip in as, as a member. So. It's not being an alternate is nothing. It's not being a full-time member. It's not. Not regard as something. And then when a seat does come up, you're probably going to be appointed as a full, full board member. So. If anyone. You know, wants to get in the easy way and alternate is. Basically you're, you're on, on the DRB, just as you would be a full member. I would offer that I noted that Patrick had applied before I had, and I'm willing to serve in the alternate capacity. Okay. So Mike, what you're saying is then basically being an alternate is not. Just a once in a while thing then. No, we always had the alternates would attend every meeting that they could. And. Would participate, you know, they just, you know, if they were in the alternate slot, they just wouldn't participate in a vote. We saw several people do that and did it quite well. And, you know, eventually they wound up coming on, on to, onto the board. So. You know, I'd look at that alternate slot is basically you're, you're a board member, you know, for you, you're contributing, you just may not be voting at some particular meeting. And it's probably the best stepping stone for becoming a full-time member because you basically are next in line. What you're saying. Exactly. Yeah. And a lot of times during the summer when the weather's nice and nobody wants to sit in the community room at a DRB meeting, it becomes quite essential. To have that extra body. Yeah. There's many a time that we need, we need an alternate to, you know, not that we would have a problem with a quorum, but to have a full board on, on slate. So it's usually, it's most of the times you, you know, you're there, you might be voting members anyway. Well, Harry, I can honestly say you made our job a little bit easier. I appreciate that. So if somebody would like to make a motion to a point. Patrick Farrell as a full-time DRB member and. Harry Shepard as the current alternate. We can let these people go have their dinner. I'll make a motion to approve Patrick Farrell as the full-time member on the development review board. Shepard as an alternate member. Is there a second to that motion, please? Second. 80 seconds. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none. All those who wish to approve the two new board members, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Congratulations gentlemen. I wish you all the best of luck. Thank you very much. Thank you all and have a good night. Thanks for stepping up. We need all the help we can at times in this town. Okay. Got that taken care of. And now it's all your ballgame bill. Okay, Chris. Thank you. Good evening everyone. Good to see you. And feels like early April again outside. That's good or bad, but it's better than 93 degrees to me. Tax due dates. I did send out an email yesterday afternoon. I hope that you saw it. I guess it was actually. Order 10 last night. So that's. A little bit past yesterday afternoon. Okay. The tax due date. We are recommending that we have only one tax due date this year. November 13th. The voters approved two installment. August 14th and November 13th. But as I indicated. With the deadline for filing income taxes and the homestead. We have been informed by the tax department that. Communities that have tax. Taxes due in August. We'll likely not have. Information from the tax department in a timely enough basis for us. That deadline. So Karen. And I have kind of kicked this around a little bit with Carla. I just wanted to. To talk about whether we should just push the, the August payment into September. We talked about having one due date, maybe in October, splitting the difference. But, you know, one thing that happens as far as. Moving the, the final due date up from. November into October. That could be problematic because there's a number of people out there that, you know, start saving their taxes. For this year, the week after they paid last year, and they're counting on 52 weeks of being able to put money aside. And if you move the. Tax date up by a month. You know, they're going to have to scramble around to find that money. We talked about, you know, pushing the first date out. That's a little bit more doable. But frankly, a number of people are still struggling right now with their businesses still being very. Short as far as revenues are concerned, there's a number of people that aren't working. So pushing it to November completely seems the best idea. I almost recommended that we push it even later into the year, but we do have to think about our revenues a little bit. And we have a limit on our tax anticipation borrowing from the bank. And I don't want to. Limit if we don't, we don't need to. We have other borrowing that we plan to do, but I try to push that off as late as possible so that. A principal and interest next year. We're doing it with. We're doing it with. After tax collection money rather than. Money. So our recommendation is to have one tax due date. Number 13. The legislation that. House and Senate in one pillar. I've approved and the governor has signed a lot of select boards to make a change. So I'm not going to be making the changes. But I'm not going to be making any changes. I mean, I'm not going to be making any changes. I mean, I'm not going to be making any changes. But if we're making any changes, I mean, I mean, I mean interest for. The earlier due date. So you don't have to make any decisions about penalties at this point. You still have the authority to waive those if you want. If we just set November 13th as a due date. There'll be no interest before that. So that's our recommendation. And would there be any repercussions if for some reason people decided they wanted to try to pay their taxes sooner? Obviously it's gonna help us with borrowing less if we can get people to do that and it won't mess up the bookkeeping part of it in any way. Oh no, I mean, as soon as the tax bills grow out, normally our tax bills would grow out in the first couple of weeks of July. They have to go out 30 days before the first due date. So in a normal year, we would send out tax bills around July 10th or so. And very typically, once the tax bills grow out, people start to pay. The joke is that elderly people come in and pay their full tax bill the day after they get it. And when we asked them why, they say, well, we don't wanna die and owe taxes. So let's get it out of the way. We'll take anybody's money anytime. If people wanna come in now and pay taxes, Karen has the ability to take that as a prepaid tax and that's not a problem. So this doesn't cause any bookkeeping issues for us. It will push off our revenue stream, but we're dealing with that anyway and I think it will be better for the taxpayers and for our shop here. I certainly don't wanna try to keep the August deadline because if we do that, we're certainly gonna have to print a whole bunch of corrected bills because of homestead filing that comes in late. So the August deadline is not possible at all. Any other questions for Bill at this time? Bill, I'm all in favor of moving the date to November. The one thing is how much is it gonna cost us an additional borrowing just to move that? Is it gonna be a substantial amount of interest that we're gonna pay? Well, I didn't calculate that, Mike. It's not a huge, we budgeted for debt service. We budgeted $5,800 for interest for tax anticipation borrowing. So even if it triples, it's $10,000 more. I don't think it's gonna be anywhere close to that, but we'll be able to manage the interest rate. It's 1.8% that we're paying on that when we borrow the money. And I don't see that as a major obstacle. That's all I'm concerned with. I think it's a good idea for people, but again, as I think what was presented, if we could have people, if they can pay their taxes early to help the town mitigate some of the borrowing, that'd be great. So Bill, is that a term like a short-term notice sorts that's based on the fact that it gets paid off when at the end of November? Is that how that works? And what happens if, for some reason, taxpayers, let's say a small percentage, 15, 20% small, but it's not huge either. Don't have the taxes to pay, then what happens if we kind of override our limit? So back in March, I think it was the support approved a line of credit from the People's United Bank. I think it was a $1.8 million line of credit or $1.4 million line of credit. And we pay interest on what's outstanding. So for several weeks, we went by, we didn't borrow anything, no interest. We borrowed $50,000, we started paying interest on that. The line of credit, I believe, has a like early December payoff date. And typically we end the year with about a 98 or 99% collection rate. We do quite well in a normal year in terms of collection. I expect it will be a higher delinquency rate this year. We came into the year with a fairly healthy fund balance. So we would have to have delinquencies that are in excess of being equal if we end up with a balanced budget at the end of the year and the expense side. We would have to have delinquencies that exceed a couple hundred thousand dollars that we had in the bank. We will be borrowing other money for the fire truck and things like that. So the likelihood that we can't pay this tax anticipation note is small. But if it should come to pass that we can't pay that note, then we would have to work with the bank what they call current expense borrowing and then we'd have to fund that deficit for next year and plan on it next year. The world won't end if we can't pay it off. My expectation is that we will be able to pay it off, however. I didn't know if there was like a penalty, if you don't make the deadline or whatever. No, I mean, there's no penalty. Certainly the bank wouldn't like it, I think in a year like this, given the circumstances that all municipalities and all governments frankly are facing, the bank would understand we're pretty good credit risk for the bank. They've never, we've never missed a payment, never missed a payment of principal or interest to any of our creditors. So I think that would be okay. And it's unlikely that we'll find ourselves in that position, Chris, unless it's a really, really bad ex-collection. Chris, just to give you a little comfort, I'll put on my old banking hat. People, bankers, when they lend to communities, it's based upon the good faith of the community and banks never worry about those because it's very rare that a community goes bankrupt. So they're always willing to work with community in a shortfall and especially this year with COVID, you may see that banks working with communities who do have shortfalls, but I tend to doubt there's gonna be any financial problems with any financial institution, with municipal lending. Well, the skeptical side of you, Chris, when Mike says that the full faith and credit of the municipality is behind the loan, that means the bank knows the law says the select board has the unlimited ability to tax the grand list to pay the loan back. So you can raise the tax rate as high as you need to raise it and the people have to pay it or you can take the property away. So, there you go. Yeah, let's hope it doesn't come to that. Yes. You'll have the rioting like they do out in Minnesota or wherever. Okay, if there's any more comments or questions there on the tax due date, we can move to our next item. No, you gotta make a motion to set one tax due date. Okay, I didn't realize we were doing that at this meeting. Yeah, I think it would be helpful if we can set the date now. That's how it's for November. We'll have to set a tax rate at the time, but I think it would be good to get the information out. There are already people calling Karen about tax payments and everything. It'd be good to have the information out there. So what date do you say in November, Bill? 13th. Okay, then. If somebody would like to make a motion to officially set the tax due date for 2020 on November 13th, we can move ahead. And if you'd have the motion, we can fill in the language, but I'd like your motion to have the same language that the voters put in saying that the taxes have to be paid in hand by when the office is open and everything else, so that there's nobody that comes in and says, well, November 13th, I got here at 10 minutes of midnight and still the 13th. So we're gonna have to move then because I don't have that motion in front of me. Yeah, you don't have to worry about it. If you just acknowledge that you're gonna use the same language that the voters approved at town meeting for that due date, we can fill that all in. There you go. Not you, Nat. We can see your mouth moving, but no voice. Yes. There you go. So moved. Thanks, Nat. All right, is there a second? I'll second. My father seconded it. Any further discussion? Seeing none, hearing none. All those who wish to approve the new tax date as number 20, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Okay. Discussion need for animal control officer. Goes around, comes around. Did you all get my memo that I sent out last night? Yep. Okay. We haven't had an animal control officer really since Mr. Town over in Duxbury. There was one woman, I can't remember her name, Carla, but there was a woman who owns a kennel up on Campbell's hump that agreed to be the ACO when Mr. Town got finished. And she didn't last very long because she evidently didn't think the phone was gonna ring too much. And we haven't had one. And I think that was last fall, right, Carla? Yeah. Right, that was Andy McMahon. And actually, I think she thought the phone was gonna ring too much. She thought sort of zip underplay the amount of work we had to do. Yeah, that's what I said, that the phone rang too much for her. Yeah. So anyway, we do not have an animal control officer now with the warming of the weather. More and more people are outside, dogs are out. We've had a number of calls, a number of incidents. We have a whole lot of people kind of up in arms about when the dog park is gonna open. Now that's an EFUD facility. And just as an aside, I talked to Nick Nado, the REC director just before the meeting. And we have taken steps to open the dog park, but it's very limited. It's one person and one dog at a time. The CDC is still recommending very tight restrictions on dog parks. So anyway, there's a lot of people out and about with dogs and we don't have anybody that can respond to complaints or concerns, whether it be barking dogs or dogs chasing animals or dogs fighting with other dogs or bad interactions between dogs and people. We need an ACL. I'm already the deputy health officer that takes way more time than I really can spend on it. I don't wanna be the ACL or deputy ACL. And the last couple of weeks, Carla and I have spent a lot of time dealing with animal stuff. As you could see from my email, we really have never paid an animal control officer. And that may be one reason why nobody wants to do the job because it's a thankless job and get paid for your mileage and a small stipend for taking a call doesn't seem worth it to me. So I'll stop there and let you folks discuss it. Anybody? Well, we had an ACL there at one point, Peter Tumel, and he probably brought things under control in his short of timeframe as anybody had in the past that I can remember. And I don't do Facebook or front porch form any of that stuff as of yet, but I've been told by a few people that there's been many, many comments on those forums about dogs and complaints about dogs and I guess it seems to be getting out of control again. I'm actually doing work for Peter Tumel. I could let him know that, depending on what the board decides tonight that that position is open again and whether or not he might be interested in it. I mean, the board needs to decide whether we're gonna... Correct. We wanna fill the position. We need to advertise for it. We can't just hand it to somebody. I would certainly... No, I would want him to apply. Recommend advertising and maybe as early as your next meeting there'd be somebody available to potentially appoint position. No, I just would ask if he might be interested in applying for the position again. I wasn't... No, no, I understand. We turned the job over to him. He may already have a full plate anyway. But it's more, what are we gonna... If we advertise for the position, people wanna know what the compensation is. Very few people are gonna do something for nothing. And we had a couple, the last couple, Zebtown and the one from Duxbury, we didn't pay them anything. Zebtown said he didn't wanna be paid, but we didn't have very much that we could offer. And I'm concerned that that's part of the problem. I mean, how does the rest of the board feel about what's going on in the town as far as dog issues, good, bad, ugly? Do you think it's getting to a point where we need to up the ante to try to get somebody on his ACO? Yeah, go ahead, Mike. Okay, thanks, Matt. I have a couple of questions. One, maybe for Bill, if he knows what other towns pay their animal control officers, I am a little concerned about paying $500 a month. I don't know, that just seems a little rich, but I have never been an animal control officer. I know you're faced with a lot of different issues. I think we may be seeing a little higher amount of animal issues, maybe due to some COVID stuff. People may be because they're not feeling they're able to get out, they're letting their animals out. So I don't know if this is something that's a short-term problem, and we had, I know there was a person who wrote to all the board members about that the dog park not being open, that would probably potentially maybe help a little bit where they would have some place to let the dogs kind of roam around. So I know I said a few things there, but I'll let anyone respond or Bill could respond on me. Average cost that other towns may be paying. Yeah, I don't know that, Mike. I do know that Chris, I believe was on the board the last time that we wrote the dog ordinance. Maybe it was done just before he came on, I can't remember, but we have a pretty robust dog ordinance now, very stringent, dogs are allowed in parks, but they have to be on leashes, they can't be on playing fields. And I look out my window all the time and there's people playing with dogs on all the fields. And if you're going to have an ordinance that says that, and right now it doesn't really matter much because there's no sports on these fields. But the idea is you wanna keep the dogs off the fields because you don't want the dogs defecating in left field and then somebody's out there diving for softball and they're in it. And if you're gonna expect that to be enforced, you need somebody who's gonna be willing to walk across the field and confront someone and you know how it is even with police. As time goes forward, there's more and more people that are more than willing to say, hey, you know, I don't agree with this a lot. The guy who wrote about the dog park, you know, this is public land, you don't have the right to close it, I'm gonna use it, I don't care what your rules are, you know, that's not a town facility, but that's kind of, you know, I think that's still an outlier kind of attitude, but it's certainly there's a much greater willingness to get in the face of somebody who's in a position of authority than I remember certainly growing up and early in my career. That seems to just be a little bit more of the MO of people these days. So maybe 500 is too much, you know, that's $6,000 a year, but you know, if I spend 40 hours doing it, you know, in a couple of week period, if I spend a week, you know, that's a couple of $1,000 of my time that's being spent and you know, you gotta add Carlos time to that as well. So I mean, it's not 40 hours last week, I don't mean to imply that I spent 40 hours in the last couple of weeks or not, but when I have to get involved with these kind of things, it's an opportunity cost, you know, I'm doing this as opposed to something else that I can be doing. And if we're gonna have an ACO, I'd like a person who has the skill set, the temperament and the, you know, the time and will be willing to put into it. And I think you get that when you offer somebody some reasonable compensation. And again, maybe 500 is too much, maybe it should be 250, 300, I don't know. We can advertise and see what we can get, but the point is we gotta do something different than we're doing now. Yeah, the only reason why I say 500 may be too much is you look at what the compensation for a lot of other, you know, positions are and they're a significant amount less granted. As you said, you probably have to have an idea, not like a law enforcement background, but you know, dealing with people who have dogs off leash and stuff like that, that's a tough thing. People get pre belligerent and you have to have the right person. So, you know, I don't know what the right number is, but I'm just thinking that $500 is maybe a rich, maybe half or 250 or 300 a month, I think that's probably a more reasonable level. Mark, are you able to speak here? Yeah, I just threw it in the chat. You know, if we did it on a weekly, if we did 50 to 100 per week, it'd be 2,600 to 5,200 a year. You know, maybe we advertise it as a window and we see who comes our way and see who has what experience and maybe that's the window that we offer. I don't know if it makes sense to offer a window or we just need to set an amount, but I do think we need to have somebody in that position. I think there's quite a few dogs and another animal activity in town and if we're gonna have rules around it, I think we need some kind of enforcement arm to it or I mean, basically it's pointless to even have the rule. So, like always in the past, one of my bigger concerns is, you know, to Mike's point, you know, an ACO can sometimes get himself into situations that nobody would wanna be in, confrontational, volatile and sometimes dangerous. And, you know, the bigger problem for me is I don't mind paying the money to solve this problem if we can actually somehow solve it. You know, I think our hands are tied a little bit when it comes to enforcement, you can really get into the weeds on avenues that you'd have to go to get somebody to comply I wish there was a shorter, easier way of penalizing the bad people because it's always the violators that cost the good people money, you know, the people that do the right things and sometimes you walk out on the street or you're driving down the road and you see visually some people got their dogs on leashes and others got their dogs just running. You know, it's one thing to hire somebody to do this, but how do we either change our ordinance or maybe it means speaking with a lawyer about what we can do from a financial standpoint as far as finding people and making them accountable for doing the wrong thing rather than just taking, you know, good people's money and throwing it out a problem that you just can't solve. Carla? Yes. It's been a while since I've actually looked at the ordinance. Do you remember if the ordinance is written in such a fashion that the ACO can write tickets, you know, that we use the Judicial Bureau? I believe it is, because Peter had a book of tickets and I'm not sure that he ever wrote one because it's an onerous process, but... Yeah, I mean, I believe Carla's right. I believe the ordinance is written in such a fashion that the ACO has the ability to write a ticket for violating the ordinance. There's a section of fines in the ordinance. I believe there are what's called waiver penalties that, you know, if you agree to pay the fine without contesting it, you know, if the fine is 50 bucks, you end up paying 25. Those tickets, when they're written, go to the Vermont Judicial Bureau. You're supposed to pay the Judicial Bureau and ultimately some of the money will come back to the town. I don't think we should ever view an ordinance and its enforcement as a revenue source for the town. Whatever revenue comes back, offset the costs of having the ordinance. But I think it's a pretty robust ordinance and, you know, I think Peter did a pretty good job overall. I think, as we all know, you know, Peter's a unique individual and has a particular style and some people warm up to that and others don't. And, you know, I don't know, I talked to him months ago about this and my guess was that if it was something that he felt that he wasn't being taken advantage of, he might be willing to throw a tat in the ring again. But I'd like to advertise it and see who we might get. And if Peter, I and other people apply, then the board can weigh the options. But it should be a board appointment, I think. I don't believe that this is something that a manager appoints. Yeah. Well, I certainly wasn't looking for a revenue stream. I was just looking to how we can get the violators to stop violating without costing innocent people, you know, more tax dollars. That's just so unfair in my eyes. So. Well, I think, you know, Mark Friar's idea, we can advertise and we can advertise and say something to the effect. You know, compensation depends on qualifications, something like that, and we can negotiate. But I think it's gonna need to be a consistent amount of money in order to have the person feel like their time is being compensated, that it's not simply, they gotta wait for a complaint. I think we're gonna want this individual to do a little, I don't want to say patrolling, but I think the ACO needs to kind of be observant when they're in the community. And when they see a violation, they should intercede. So if they see somebody on the rec field or if they see somebody walking down the sidewalk without a leashed dog, they should stop and deal with it as opposed to, you know, waiting for somebody to call and complain about that. So I think that you want to have some compensation to let the people know that you're expecting them to be a little bit proactive as well as react. So I don't want to sound like I'm beating a dead horse. So my bigger concern, and I'll say it one more time, is that I don't mind spending the money to tire somebody to do the job and do it right. My bigger concern is curbing the violator, somehow getting them convinced that they can't, you know, the minute the ACO confronts them and tells them that they're doing wrong or whatever, and the minute he turns his back, they go back to doing the same thing, that's not getting us anywhere. That's just, you know, we're going to continue to throw money into an abyss unless we can somehow sting these people to the point where they finally get it and start doing the right thing. So I got no problems, you know, 500 bucks wasn't really off the wall for me. If it somehow made it so that we corrected the problems that we were seeing, and that's why I didn't know what kind of, you know, you seem to think the ordinance is strong enough. I think it is. It hasn't seen in a while, so I have to take your word for it. Yeah, well, I think, you know, tomorrow either Carlo or myself can send it out. I think you're the only one, Chris, that maybe has ever used it, but we'll send it out to all of you so you can see it. If you believe that there needs to be amendment to it, that's a process that, you know, takes a little time. I'd like to be authorized to go ahead and advertise for the ACO and try to deal with that aspect of it first. And if you want to tighten things up or make the ordinance stronger, that's a secondary step. And, you know, that will take a little time to happen, but if I remember right, Bill, and you can correct me, I thought we had instances where we were finding people and not, they just weren't paying the fine. And in order to pursue that, because I think at one point I'd talked about if they were residents of Waterbury tagging it to their property tax, so they'd have to pay it or be delinquent, but that seemed a little bit off the wall, I guess, to some people. Yeah, I don't remember those kind of issues. You know, it's a civil fine, it's a civil penalty. If you have to, you can take them to small claims court or go to court to try to compel them to pay. And I understand that, you know, the payment of the fines is important, but I think the first step to doing that is to get somebody who can be out there and try to enforce the ordinance. So I'd like to trade on that. And then when we hire the ACO, we can talk to that person about, you know, what they might be able to do and we can tackle your concerns in a second phase maybe. All right, yeah, somebody had also mentioned to me because I was kind of chatting about it there in order to pay for this additional expense to the town or at, you know, increased expense that we raise the price of dog licenses. And to me, it goes back to what I said earlier. I'm not looking to punish the people that are doing the right thing. I think that's set by the state, isn't it? And there's only a portion of it that's set by the state. So I think the board can increase. Oh, okay. Please. So I guess that that is an avenue that we could look at if we had to. To me, I'm a little bit concerned about if we do have a new animal control officer, and I think we probably should. I would like it to have someone who has a good sense of judgment. I hate to penalize someone whose dog's been off the leash once, you know, and I don't want this to be a big revenue stream. You know, if the animal control officer talks and explains, hey, you can't have this animal, you know, I'm looking at more of the habitual, you know, you know, abuser. And as Chris kind of said, is I hate to charge everyone, you know, because there are a lot of very responsible dog owners, you know, around. And sometimes every dog owner, their dog will get off, off leash or something like that. And those things happen. And I just don't want, you know, to be a real dog police kind of situation. I want it to be something that's, you know, a manageable kind of working. Yeah, I think those are all things you can touch on in an interview, Mike, when we, when we get somebody who might be interested, you can bring those kind of things up then. It's certainly a relationship that, you know, we want input from the select board. You know, it's, there's gotta be a lot of communication between the ACO staff, Carolyn, myself in particular, and then the board in terms of what the expectations of the public are. But I think if the consensus I'm hearing is we can move forward to advertise, we'll leave the compensation kind of open-ended and the board can decide that when the time comes to actually hire somebody. Well, to that point then, anytime we've advertised in the past, if there's no form of compensation suggested, do you think we'll get any more interested parties than we did before? I think we will. Anybody else out there that's joined with us here tonight that wants to make any comments on this? I would just say that I'm surprised that we had had someone already in place to do this. And I think that it is a big problem around here. I witnessed it just last weekend and I was walking down the street and I was near the park in the Frisbee Golf Course and people had their dogs with them off leash there all the time. They went across those fields and both those dog feces bag holders were out and the person hadn't bought a bag, so they just left it and said, oops. So I think it's a common problem. And I think $500 is a little steep, but I mean, if we look around other towns, see what they have. And then if we have interested parties who have had the position before, maybe give a stipend based on experience, but I think we should probably start out the lowest we can do. And then if the calls are ringing off the hook as much as you say that they are, then maybe we can go up on a yearly basis, but I agree that it's not Phil or Carla's job to do that after they've tackled so much already on town business. Well, I know compared to not much what we've paid in the past, $500 a month sounds a lot, but it's $125 a week. And if people are figuring they're gonna make, at a job, $15 or $20 an hour, they gotta take phone calls, they gotta go out in the middle of the night. It's really not that much money. You wanna pay someone so that they don't feel an abused to do the job. And if they get a call that there's a dog bite at 10 o'clock on a Saturday night in the snowstorm, they're gonna have to go out. So it's more than we're used to paying, but in the end it's with social security and everything else, it's $7,000 maybe. Well, if anybody doesn't want dogs on their property, there's a one, I'll give you a one tip. All you gotta do is get a couple of chickens. Because if they all the tax the chickens, you got right to take matters into your own hands. Well, hopefully we'll have some success with advertising and maybe kind of head in the right direction on this. Thank you. All right. Next on the list, Bill. I'm in the refund policy for the recreation program. Yeah, the town has a policy that if people sign up for recreation programs, you know, sign up, they start on town meeting day, they have to pay, I think it's a $50 deposit and they have to pay their full payment on a certain date. Some people have already paid that full amount of money. Some people have paid only the deposit. Some people have paid a little bit in between. We are having people who are asking to, who are canceling their children's participation in the program because of COVID, they don't feel comfortable having their kid go this summer and I think given all of that reality, that it's really unfair for us to say we're not going to give them a full refund. I would recommend that you amend the policy for 2020 to allow full refunds to be given to anyone who asks to have their child. Removed from the role of the WREC program before it starts and then once the program starts, if people at that point decide this just isn't working out, we don't feel safe for whatever reason. Once the program starts, I would say we would give them a refund on a pro-rata basis and if they go to the program on any one day in any week, that they have to pay for that full week. But it's really for the deposit that this is most applicable to. So in other words, your motion is gonna basically say that they get a full refund if they pull their child prior to the start of the program and then a pro-rated refund based on. Yes. Fund spent. Yeah. And I think in terms of numbers, I don't think this is gonna hurt us very much. As far as I remember from last talking to Nick, there were still people on a waiting list. I don't think that this is gonna hurt the town. I do think it's just the right thing to do for people in these circumstances that if they just don't feel like they wanna have their child attend, I think we should just give them their money back. No questions asked. So the guidelines from what I understand for opening daycares and not that it's relevant to this, but it is somewhat from what I was told. And I don't know if it's what truth is behind it, but Bill Minters daycare that he runs operates up there and still I forget the name of it was the only one that opened up today because today was the opening deadline basically. Apparently the guidelines were so stringent that a lot of the daycares around the state felt that they couldn't meet those guidelines. Do you suppose that direct programs would have similar guidelines? Yeah, Nick had been very cognizant of the regulations. He stays very close to what's coming out of the governor's office. There's lots of cleaning that has to happen. There's social distancing, how much space that they can take up. He is still quite confident that we can run the rec program. Looks like we're gonna use the Scout Hall over at the Anderson Field for the youngest of the group. The bulk of the elementary school or primary school program will be held at St. Leo's Hall. We've made arrangements with them. The ICE Center, by the way, did agree to host us if we wanted to, but Nick felt that the facility at St. Leo's, in terms of the number of classrooms that they had, it's a more centralized location was a better deal. And then the older kids will be at the Wesley Methodist Church. So we'll have three locations going and obviously the staff will have to be split up. But I talked to Nick this afternoon before this meeting and he's pretty geared up to and pretty ready for meeting the requirements that have been set for these rec programs. On an aside, a piece of good news. Nick had talked to me a couple of weeks ago and through this CARES Act and all the legislation that's passing or being worked on in the state, I told him to go ahead and apply for a grant and he did a good job in putting the grant application together, he got it in on a timely basis. We just found out last week that we were awarded, I believe it's $33,000 that we're gonna get and the grant is to help pay for all of the extra cleaning materials that we need potentially if we have to pay rent where we didn't have to before. I don't have all the details of that yet. I did not hurt that into the budget report that I gave you the other day. And we don't have a grant agreement yet but we have been told that we've received that. So I think we're gonna be able to run that program, Chris, okay, it's gonna be a little bit of a challenge but in general, it will be something that we can do. I'll be interested to see how the kids react, how they all tolerate the extra masks and all the other things that are involved in going to the rec program and how many of them will just, after a few days, they'll just say, mom or dad, I don't wanna do this anymore. Yeah, I'm not even sure whether the kids will be required to wear masks. The counselors, I believe, have to wear masks but we'll have to, it's like everything else with this. We'll just have to play it by ear and do the best we can and learn from it and work it out. Yeah, no, it's a totally new, it's gonna be a totally new experience for a lot of people and I hope it works out well. Nat, wanna say something? Good luck, Nick, on socially distancing kids. That's gonna be, I think that's gonna be a challenge country-wide in camps and stuff like that. That's gonna be- Yeah, it will be. So we do need a motion to amend the policy to allow full refunds. I'll make a motion to amend the existing refund policy for the recreation program to provide for full refunds of their deposits. I'll second that. And included in that motion, Mike, is for the pool as well. We're gonna talk about the pool in a second but could you include the pool in there? Sure, I would include that. Okay, thank you. What's the pool thing? The refund policy applies to the pool as well as the rec program. Yeah, motion been made to revise the policy for the recreation program and the pool for full refunds and prorated refunds, full refunds prior to start and then prorated refunds after it's in session based on time spent. Motion's been made and seconded. Is there any further discussion? Can I just pass, Bill? What was the reasoning for like the Ice Center's change of heart in letting us use their space, you know? Well, I don't think it was a change of heart, Katie. I know that the Val reporter reported that the Ice Center said, no, I believe when Nick and I talked was that when we first, when I first approached board members, they were positively disposed towards it. When Nick talked at the board members' request to the manager of the rink, the manager did have some concerns and was asking questions. We hadn't resolved it all by that meeting, but Nick and I went down to the Ice Center. I think it was two or three days after the meeting and we met with three of the board members along with, I can't remember the rink manager's name right now. Jeremy. We met with four people, including Jeremy. Jeremy had some questions and, you know, some concerns, but I think we all, everybody answered them. They were on the same page. They came back to us and asked for $250 a week for, you know, so that they would be able to cover some of their expenses, which I thought was a reasonable number. And, you know, we were moving to come back to the board and say, yeah, that's probably something that we're gonna do. We had, someone in the community had reached out to us about working with St. Leo's Hall. So at the same time, Nick was talking with the folks there at St. Leo's, and when he looked at the property, they've offered us the use of the space and just told us like a donation. That's what the Methodist Church does. I think we paid the Methodist Church $1,000 or something last year. So, you know, the money is not the issue. So anyway, it was nice that they offered and the possibility we may still ask the center if we might use the facility. If there's a forecast for rain, and you know, we know that it's gonna rain for a couple of days, if we can get in there and maybe show some movies, it would be nice. But I think that given that we're probably not gonna be there full-time, that probably won't work out because they're gonna wanna do some work on the facility and the like. So anyway, that's where we are. Real more quick question for this grant. Just talking about the Ice Center, we need different facilities that we're gonna have to operate out of. That money will help go towards the additional cost of the setups of all that too, as well, is that correct? Yeah. All right, any more questions or comments here before we move to close this one out? All right, motion's been made and seconded. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Thank you. It's not on the agenda, Chris. This could either be under recreation stuff or budget stuff either way. We talked at the last meeting about the likelihood that the pool should be closed. I spoke to Nick again before this meeting, the number of children that, or the number of participants that can be at the facility now has been raised from 10 to 25, but that still includes staff. We're coming up on the time where we're gonna have to put money into the pool, clean it, get new water in it, do repairs to it. We're probably actually a little past that time. I would like to recommend to the board tonight that you just make a decision to close the pool for this year. We've already lost a number of lifeguards. We have a difficulty with staffing now because they were needing answers about summer jobs last month. 25 in the pool at any one time, including staff that's gonna limit it to about 15 people. Our rec program won't really be able to use it because most of the participants are gonna be a long way away. Yeah, they could walk to the pool, but they're not all gonna be able to be in the pool at the same time. I think the time has come where we should just say for 2020 the pool is just not gonna happen. So I guess the first question I wanna ask is you just bring it to mind is if the summer happens to get hot or unusually hot, what means do we have to make sure that these children are protected from the heat either through air conditioning units or sprinklers or I mean, is there as Nick thought about that as well? I mean, I know some of these facilities are probably not equipped to. Yeah, we don't have air conditioning in any of them. If it really became a blistering heat wave, we might have to just tell parents we can't take anybody today. The Wesley Church and the St. Leo's, a lot of that is in basement space and that stays cooler. All right. You know, we will have Nick reported when he was here at the last meeting that we're working with the state park to have access to the center of state park facility and that we will, and we're hoping to be able to offer swim lessons there. And I know Nick is kind of planning now, it doesn't help on the spur of the moment to get cool, but he's trying to plan now where parents might be told, okay, on Thursday and Friday next week, you drop your kids off at the state park and we're gonna use the waterfront for the camp for that day. But I think we're just gonna have to, like everything else, Chris, just kind of pay attention to what's going on and if it really gets that hot that we have to worry about kids, you know, with heat stroke and stuff, we'll just have to, we'll have to cancel it for that particular day, I guess. Yeah, I just, you know, Memorial Day weekend was a bear for a lot of people and I'd just be concerned putting them in facilities that don't have adequate means of keeping them, keeping them safe. So, okay. So, would you make a motion to close the pool then for the summer? Somebody please. That's staff's recommendation. Bill, real quick, and what about the swim teams? Do they all know that this decision's coming? Yeah, I think the swim teams have already canceled. There's no way they can meet those requirements, Mark. Okay, thanks. So, I mean, you're making the motion, Mark. I'll make the motion to close the Waterbury pool for the summer 2020 season. Somebody like to second that, please. Second that. Motion has been made and seconded. Any more comments? Questions? Being none, all those who wish to approve, please say aye. Aye. Aye. All right. Chris, in response to your, I know you're concerned about kids, but there was a day back in the day when we were kids, there was no pools. People took them to the river and cooled off. Yeah, we were just allowed to go to the brook. My mom did. I'm not that she didn't care, but... And even in the rec program, there's the reservoir. Both the day use area and the one up by the campground. So, even if we had to pay a few dollars to get them up to the campground area, that's probably worth it. Yeah. We'll figure it out. You will. Yep. Okay. Budget up. All right. Thanks. Yeah, there's really not much here, unless you had questions. I did not load this into an Excel spreadsheet and give you a projection for what the end of the year looks like. I just wanted to let you know where we were standing at the end of May. On the budget, the big news I've already told you is that we have a grant to help give us a little bit more revenue for the rec program. We are 41% of the way through the year, almost 42% of the way through the year. We're about 19% of expenditures. So, we're kind of reining in. The spending has been working. As I said, the payroll, it's about 34.5% out of a 41.7% budget, but that's trending more steeply downward now because for the first 13, 15 weeks of the year, we were normal. So the fact that we've kind of tipped it down by six or seven percentage points is pretty good. We don't have any real information on revenues yet at this point, still working or trying to get information from the state legislature about what's gonna happen with regard to some of our big non-tax revenue sources that come from the state, the pilot, the current use of forest and parks reimbursements and we just don't have information yet on that stuff. So I'm relatively happy where we are on the expense side of things. I continue to ask department heads to be careful about spending. We did bump up the hours in the highway department. They've been working 20 hours a week, four of them. I had Celia call one of the laid off highway employees back starting today and all the highway employees that are working are working 24 hours a week now instead of 20. So with one coming back for a full 24 hours and then for others, 16 hours more for those four others. So that's mainly to try to make sure we have adequate staff to take care of the essentials on the highway and then get the grass cut, the roadside mowing is begun this week now. Actually, I think it started last week, middle of last week. So we're still moving in that fashion. My expectation with regard to the municipal office is maybe leave it as is for the month of June. We're starting to get a little bit of pressure from some of the professional folks, surveyors, engineers, certainly paralegals and lawyers to try to get in here for some work. But I think we can leave the building as it is right now, maybe through the month of June and Carl and I will be working together. We'll let you know, but be open. I think we'll probably go kind of in reverse order of what we did when we closed. We didn't just all of a sudden close the doors, close the doors to the general public, but then allowed for appointment visits by appointment only by a specified class of people. So when we reopen, we will probably reopen to appointments only for those engineers or lawyers that need information mainly from the vault. Continue to monitor what's coming out of the governor's office and we'll see where we go from there. As I said before, keeping a handle on the expenditures, I don't wanna say as important as health, but from the perspective of whether we're open or not, the health aspect certainly is paramount. If there's no other issues with health, we've still gotta be careful with how much money we spend and the easiest way to do that is to continue to restrict hours that people are working. The point in benefits with the additional $600 a week that people are getting for unemployment that extends through June 30th. So the people who are out, you know, I've talked to a couple of them, most of them miss working, they miss interacting with people, they're not being harmed too detrimentally. All of the people that we have laid off who are receiving it, so that's good news for the financial front for them. So that's really it about the budget. I did send you the full balance sheet. We already talked about this at the beginning when we talked about the tax due date, but on that first page of the balance sheet for Fund 11, I mentioned in my memo, you know, as of Friday last week, we had $5,600 in the bank. We already borrowed about a million dollars in anticipation of taxes. You know, from Michelle, the bookkeeper today, we're gonna have to borrow another $100,000 tomorrow the bills that were processed this week. So if you have questions, certainly email me and I'll get back to you. The only other question I would have would be the paving of Maple Street. Has that progressed at all? Or has it kind of gone down the drain completely? No, no, no, we're still planning to do it. Okay. It's, you know, nothing different there. We have applied for a paving event. I think it's very unlikely we'll get it. If we get it, we're gonna have to seek bids from at least three vendors. If we don't get it, we'll just negotiate with ST Paving. I think that's our best option for right now. But that will happen, Chris. And it's not gonna happen probably until Labor Day-ish, but we'll get it done. Okay, I just was curious if it had progressed in what the timeframe was, but if you're saying it's that far out, then I won't pester you about it again. No, no, no problem. I know Bill Woodruff has met with the folks at ST Paving and I think he's met with the people from Pipe, so we're getting at least two or two prices. But ST right now looks like the best bet, but we're gonna do that project. And was, I know at one point we talked about maybe doing some core samples. Is that still on agenda or we kind of nixed that? I don't remember. So core samples where? On Maple Street there, because there's so many consistent frost heaves in that road, we talked about having some core samples done to see what might be causing it. Cause my fear is that we're just gonna result in the same thing after we pave over it again. Not that we could have the ability to. Yeah, I have to check with Bill Woodruff on that. My recollection was that was something Alec was gonna look into and Alec has been laid off right now. So. I'm sure we talked about core samples. Yeah, I remember it now. Yeah, so I'm just curious. I'd like to know what they think the problem is just because, you know. A lot of money to put down on a road just to have to turn around and have the same problem again. I hope you've done that for a lot of years with a lot of different roads, so. Well. Okay. Well, it was a good meeting. The Zoom wasn't so bad. Obviously we all like to be sitting in the same room, but I guess playing the Jetsons is the next best thing for the time being. So everybody have a good night. Take a motion to adjourn if somebody'd like to. I have one question before we adjourn, Chris. Yeah, go ahead, Mike. It's a question for Carla. I know I've had a few people ask, I know you're really good about doing, you know, notarizing documents. With the town offices closed, I assume you're not notarizing things other than like attorneys coming in or something like that for, you know, legal work? No, we're close to everybody. Okay. Not accepting any appointments. We are not accepting any appointments. So you're not accepting that? Where can I, if I get those kind of things, do you know other notaries in the community? I've been referring people to one of the two banks of the drive-thru. They have no reason. Look, that's where I would have with the banks, but I didn't know what the drive-thru if they'll do it that way. Yeah, they are. I've heard that both the field savings bank and the United Bank are. Does Kenny Drugs do notary services? I don't know. Okay, because a lot of drug stores have that service. So I had one more quick question there and then we can be done here. Bill, this is kind of aimed at you. The school budget vote, if a new school budget vote comes to surface here because of the COVID issue, what happens if we get a abnormal reduction in votes on this thing, on this new budget? I mean, if a very small fraction of the people vote on a school budget, how can something like that move forward unless you have a consensus from us, you know, at least 51% of them? I don't think you're gonna come close to getting 51% of the checklist to vote on the school budget. I don't believe there's any requirements, Chris. I know that the old village of Waterbury, they had meetings where they would seek authorization to borrow a half million dollars and the trustees and the water commissioners and one member of the public were at the meeting and they voted from the floor and did it. I think that if one person votes and it's a yes, I think the budget passes. There are no foreign requirements. You can have 800 people at a town meeting or you can have them 2,000 like we had in March because it was a primary, but this vote will definitely lower percentage for sure. That just seems wrong on so many fronts, but anyway. Okay. Is that it for everybody? I know it seems wrong, but the old village, the decisions are made by the people who show up still holds. Yeah, that's true. If it's that important to people, all they gotta do is call up and ask for a ballot mail to them. It's not really that hard. Yeah, good point, Bill. Good point. Okay, motion to adjourn then. All right, good night. Thank you all. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye-bye.