 The Waterbury Select Board and the first item of business is to approve the agenda for the evening. So Matt. I would like to ask you a question there at some point about your information there that you sent on the police. The first question there perhaps at the end of the meeting or some point. Okay, we can put that under the manager's items if that works all right. Yep, do that. Okay. Having said that, I'll approve the agenda as it appears with the addition. Take a motion to approve the agenda. Okay. I'll second that. And that's second. Motion in second. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. All right. Next item is the consent agenda items which would be the minutes of the November 5th meeting and a first class liquor license and outside consumption permit for Pegasus LLC. Is there a motion on the consent agenda items? I'd make a motion to approve that consent agenda items. Okay. Matt made the motion. Your second Chris. Absolutely. All right. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. All right. Carla, you've got the documentation for the license. Next item is public. Any member of the public care to speak tonight? There being no takers. We'll move on to the preliminary discussion of the work grant trails and facilities as Steve wants to speak. And Nick Maynard here to brief the board on this item. Okay. Thank you. So I'm going to talk generally about the program. And we also have Dana Allen and Amanda McKay from Waterbury Area Trails Alliance here. And we've been discussing this possible grant for a couple weeks. And let me just give a little bit of background for the benefit of the Slack board and people who are watching or in attendance. The governor formed the Vermont Outdoor Recreation Collaborative. I can't give you an exact timeline, but I believe it was in conjunction with the last legislative session. It's been in existence for a year or so. And it's a representative group that includes the commissioner of Forest Parks Recreation, Mike Snyder. And it includes another state cabinet member. And then it includes members of the non-profit recreation sector such as Mike DeBonis, who's executive director of the Green Mountain Club. And then it also includes people from the private sector who either market recreation products or have recreation businesses and so on. Waterbury Trails in the Northeast Kingdom, the Burke area is represented and so on. So they decided to do a pilot grant program this year. And this group is commonly referred to as the VORAC collaborative group. And so the grant program is referred to as the VORAC grant. Our understanding is that in the initial round, it's going to be $100,000 worth of grant funds. And they're looking to grant this in either one or possibly two grants to communities. It's intended to be a demonstration grant with an economic development angle or aspect. Promoting economic development through recreation. That's really the mission of this group. So we've been working with Alyssa. And the grant is due in mid-December. So it's December 14th. So we wanted to bring this to you just in a preliminary way and find out if you would support it. And then bring back a final proposal with a detailed budget at your December 3rd meeting. So Nick and I have been working with Bill Sheffalk and Bill Woodruff to develop a scope for this grant. And this is unusual in that they have a check-off in the more categories that you can cover, the more competitive that you are. So any grant program has a game to play, if you will, or objective I think is probably a better, more political way to put it. So we've got a number of projects that we're suggesting. Some of these are current projects that we've been working on for a little while and some of them are somewhat new projects in recreation areas. So what I think I'd like to do is have Nick go over his projects and then I'll go over the trails-oriented projects and then see if those from Waddinger have anything to add at that point. Could you move a little of that mic over a little bit? Alright, so some of the projects that the recreation department has been working on or would like to see done, the lights out here and at Anderson Field have to get replaced at some point. A lot of the fixtures are out, they're outdated, they've been around for many years. So the new updated technology would save money on electricity, well not in this grant could cover that we think. I mean as Nat knows the pool building is going through sort of a renovation, like preliminary phase to accommodate the handicapped and people who don't know how to buy. It's been many years since that has been updated too. So in order for electrical work to be done, it has to be up to code and so this grant could cover that as well. And then the signs, the previous REC director Deb Fowler had already quoted signs to get replaced. She had gone through a permanent process to get two signs put up at Hope Davy, which I've been told it's still good. I just looped that cost into this grant too. It's kind of miniscule in comparison to the other projects but it's something in this grant. It checks off one of the check bosses that Steve was talking about making it competitive. So as far as recreation is concerned, that's the recreation department, that's the projects that we have included in. Yeah, I think it's important to be reminded what both Nick and Steve said is that a lot of the things that have been identified that are eligible for this grant are things that will be doing anyway. There are things that are in our budget to be done, capital budgets to be done in the next few years. So the lights, for example, we need to change out those lights. We need to get more efficient fixtures. If we can simply identify that as a need, show the fact that we're going to hopefully get a grant from Efficiency Vermont to pay for half of the cost of the lights themselves. If we end up getting this grant, it will save us money from something that we were already intending to do. And it's a bit unusual because most grants are not for enhancing or improving something that you already have there to give you something different. But I asked Steve a couple of different times and he said, no, we're looking to give this type of grant in order to facilitate this type of work getting done. So the things that Nick just said, it would be a definite money savings, cost savings to the town if this grant is funded because we'd be doing these things anyway over the next two to five years. Is there a match requirement with this grant? There's no stated match requirement. When we talk about the budget in just a few minutes, preliminary budget that we were looking at, we would recommend a match. So that would probably be in the neighborhood of 30 or 40 percent. But our understanding is that there's no match requirement for this program. It's quite flexible. It would probably make it a little more competitive if we have a match. Yeah, definitely. That's always the case. So we're recommending a match that could come out of the CIP. Has this grant been given out before? This is a grand big pilot programmer. Okay, so you can't look at a previous year. No, no. This is a new group that's formed. They consolidated their mission and this is a new program. And I think the idea is that it's a pilot and they would extract these communities to go on and talk now about the trails projects. And some of the work of this grant would set the stage for more implementation. So they really want to see a program that would move forward and have an ongoing economic benefit. So the trails portion of the project were anticipating three different elements. And two of them would be on the ground implementation. One would be more on the planning side. And the first is the community path that runs from Lincoln Street up to the golf course and Gulfville Road. And this path gets a lot of views at certain times. It's used by the gravel grinder race in the spring and then by Lee Peepers Marathon. Many sections are grass and someone poorly drained just because there's been a little work done over the years as far as any grading or additional gravel and crushed stone. So what we're recommending is to basically resurface that path. And we would use a crushed gravel base of about six inches and then about six inches of stay mat. And probably a 10 foot width something of that. So that it really would be serviceable, especially for these events. These are really terrific economic development drivers in the community. I think we can make a good argument that this path will have benefits and then day-to-day benefits to where we can really boost the use of that path and the connection, and offer a connection paralleling Room 100. Then the second project would be another signage project. I think you know we're going to be doing wayfinding signage in conjunction with the Main Street reconstruction. It looks like that project's going to be able to move forward. Bill can maybe put in on that later. And so what we'd like to do is have a complimentary wayfinding signage that would be in our park system. And it would basically be oriented towards wayfinding, especially for trails across Vermont Trail, the community path, and also for the recreation facilities for people who were coming in from out of town. So we haven't designed the system yet. We would program some money for graphics. But the idea is that there would be complimentary mapping, complimentary to the wayfinding kiosks that are part of the Main Street reconstruction project. And we would probably have some trailhead signs for both the across Vermont Trail and the community path with maps. Those paths have trailhead maps, but they're pretty minimal. So we really want to expand that so people can orient themselves. And then the third project is a follow-up to the Waterbury Village to Little River State Park Connector Trail project that we did, finished up in 2016. And we really need to take the next step to work with landowners more closely and develop either easements or agreements. And this is a project that we would work really closely with WADA along with the other two on-the-ground projects to try to get that project shovel ready so that we could apply for implementation funds. We're really not there yet. We've had some really good preliminary conversations with really all the landowners that are involved in the route we've mapped out that we need to take up the next step. So that would be one where we set the stage for future recreation, grant funding, grant implementation. So as far as the budget, I mentioned that the pilot has $100,000 available. We've done some preliminary budgeting and it looks like the total project at this point in time would be about $70,000. And we would apply for $50,000 in grant funding, I guess in hopes that another community, I think there's going to be a lot of interest in this program, would also be interested in the $50,000 grant. And they would do two pilots. I think that was a scenario that we could maybe encourage in our own way. But we don't want to get overboard on what we want to accomplish. And this would give us good solid funding for the pool building, which is going to be a pretty substantial project for the family and gender neutral bathrooms and changing facilities and so on. And it would give us good solid funding for the lighting project, including electrical installation and then more modest funding for these other projects. So again, this is preliminary. We wanted to get some feedback of some guidance and then we would work with Valissa and folks from WADA to develop an application to bring back to you on December 3rd. Mark, I've got a couple questions there. When you're here for a good time for it. I'm not hearing. Well, I said I had a couple of questions there. It's a good time. Yeah, go right ahead, Chris. Okay. How much ability for the lighting is this grant somehow tied in with the Act 54 there? Efforts to have 90% renewables by 2050. Is that what makes that eligible? The fact that we are upgrading them to a more energy efficient bulb? Yeah, I'm not sure what it's exactly tied to. The person that I've spent in contact with that, Efficiency Vermont, says that we get the max rebate per outdoor light fixture, which I think is $200 per light fixture. Yeah, it's 60 to 75% of what is used currently. So it probably is tied to, I just don't know. So Chris, it's not a direct tie in to that efficiency or the legislation as far as reducing your electrical input. It just happens that this is something that this grant will fund as an enhancement to recreation. And if we get the money, it's just helpful in that it will help us do something that we were planning to do anyway. The Efficiency Vermont grant, I believe, is independent of this. Even if we were not funded with this and went ahead with the lighting on our own, we would still be eligible for that Efficiency Vermont money. The second question was, Steve, did you say the budget amount for objects all together was what, $70,000? This is a current preliminary budget. We're still waiting for estimates on the electrical installation work for the lighting and the work in the pool building. This is preliminary based on various conversations that we've had with contractors and suppliers. So it would be about $70,000 and then we would aim for a $50,000 grant leaving a local match of about $20,000. But that could vary based on... I guess my question is that going to be asked as additional money as part of the budget for this coming year? Or is that something that you've already... is already in the budget? You know, is it going to be in addition to the normal budget? I'm just trying to get a feel for whether there's an increase in the current budget or whether it's kind of in there already. I think Bill's got an answer for us, Chris. It's mainly in there already. We didn't necessarily have a plan to do anything on this trail before this grant opportunity, but this is a decent opportunity. But as I said, the work that we contemplate to do for the lighting, the work that we're planning to do at the pool building in and of themselves in the signage is something that we were already going to be doing in the next year or two. So I look at this as a savings, Chris. There'll be a match, but it's not going to be as much as if we had to do it all ourselves, which is what we were thinking we were going to have to do. No, I'm not objecting to it. I'm just trying to get a figure in my head as to, you know, I've already got a kind of a figure in my head as to what we're looking at for, you know, the discussion we had here back a little while ago on truck replacements and paving of Loomis Hill. And we also got the police department addition coming. I'm just trying to get the numbers in my head as to what we may be looking at for kind of a whole increase for the next year. Yeah, well, I'm working on that too. I'm making some progress a little later in this evening's meeting. We're going to talk about some of those numbers. But, you know, there's certainly a work in progress and it's going to be January before we know them all. So just so that I can frame this the way I think I'm hearing it, it looks like the projects that Nick spoke to and the community path and signage pieces are something that you would be looking at to do solidly. The village to the State Park Access Trail is at a planning level point for this grant for further implementation later on. Okay. That's correct. This grant program is primarily to implementation, excuse me, but they do want to encourage planning for future projects as well. So I think that element is beneficial. All right. So what are you looking for from us at this point? You want to take exploratory steps, but what do you actually need? Right. I don't think we necessarily need a motion. I think we just need a sense of the select board if you think this is a good idea, if you want us to bring it back to you on the third with a more detailed budget and a proposal for a grant application. Right. Yeah, I'm very supportive. I'm excited about the community path and some research and signage, the way of signage makes a lot of sense. And I think if it gives us the opportunity to leverage some grant funding for expenses that we're facing anyway, that makes good sense. Yeah, I totally agree. I think it would be foolish not to explore it. Good. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Chris's comments about the energy efficiency of the lights. I think you could roll that in that you would be complying with that legislation and have a reason to do it. Next item on the agenda is the Waterbury Ambulance Service. Gentlemen. I'm going up to the table here. Introduce yourselves because I'll get your names wrong. We left the mic on for you. Thank you. Mark, is this the one that we, you had given me a couple of weeks ago? Yes. We'll update you just a little bit. Okay. So I sent this out to you folks over the weekend. I don't know if you had a chance to look at it, but it's pretty similar to what I shared electronically. I'm James Termanowski, trustee chair for Waterbury Ambulance Service. Mark Podger is executive director. Welcome. So if you remember a year ago, these folks came in and had a preliminary discussion. I've met with these two fellows a couple of different times and with Mark, along with representatives from the Duxbury and Moortown, the other two communities that are directly served by WASI, and they're here tonight to have a discussion with the board about where they are with their finances and how they operate to educate us and to share their concerns about the future and funding of this essential organization. So with that, have at it. All right. Well, we've prepared a packet for you with some general information. The first couple pages are not too much you haven't seen before. We did include, however, the transport summary as well as the illustration of the transports by towns from 2016 until the year-to-date. And as you can see, Waterbury is our largest user. In 2018, for example, we responded to 579 calls in the Waterbury alone. As with most ambulance services, most ambulance services in our design are facing budget shortfalls. The reimbursements are just not matching the expenses it costs to operate. For example, the Waterbury Ambulance, it costs us $999 of blood and sets pretty to operate. That includes a phenomenon that we call cost of readiness. We have to be ready 24-7, 365 days of equipment to hold that ready to roll. I'll give you an example. As far as the shortfall goes on the reimbursements, so Waterbury Ambulance charges $750 for what we call an ALS-1 call, advanced life support call. The Medicare reimbursement rate for that level call is $437. 20% of that is paid for medication. So just about 50% of what we charge. That same call for a Medicaid recipient, the reimbursement rate is $349 for that particular call. And we cannot back the patient for that. So we have to accept $349 for that call. Another issue that we are facing is with commercial insurance is paying the patient directly. And while most patients will turn around and pay us, we have a substantial number of those that don't. And back in three years ago, the Vermont Andrews Association, in which I am a member of the Legislative Committee, were successful in getting legislation passed, which basically says insurance companies need to pay the providers directly. However, they included words in there based on the terms and conditions of the health insurance policy. So the loophole that many insurance, private insurances are using is just that, putting in your policy that the patient will receive the check and pay. We are planning to meet with the Department of Banking and Insurance in the near future, discuss the women in that loophole. It was not the spirit of the legislation in the first place to allow that. Losses go from 100% volunteer to now one where we have two full-time paid staff, plus four for beams to cover the open ships. Calls are going up. The Q&A level is going up. Our protocols and our scope of practice is going up to include more stuff that we can do, hence higher charges that we incur. So what we are looking at, we're looking at a per capita rate of $18.83. And compare that to other areas per capita from around the state vary from anywhere from $60 to $3 at the Randolph down to $4.22 in Iraq. We have also been doing calculations included for various income contributions, the capital-west payment, the building, et cetera. And we also discussed, in light of this incorporation request, that our bylaws would be adjusted to reflect the appointment of one representative from each town that you serve, and that would be appointed by the select boards of the town. We already have representatives from each of the towns that we serve, but they're voted in by the members. And the members are people who are traditionally volunteered for WASI. They are the membership of WASI. We've also included in the back of the packet our 2018-19 budget. The registration of our half improvement plan as well as the balance sheet. So we see our budget in the next two last pages. And then our balance sheet, which is primarily capital reserve. And in the last few years, although it is capital reserve, we've had to use some of those funds to take the operating expenses. Okay. Now, it's clear from looking at the numbers. The bulk of the services that you provide are to the Waterbury community. And it's pretty clear from everything. And also in looking at the types of calls and what results in transports and everything, it's obvious that the bulk of your work is with serious life care. So no questions with that. We have Chris Viennes on the other end of the line here. Chris, did you have any observations you wanted to share with the group right now? Yeah, actually I do. On the bulk of the sheet, it must be it's been updated a little bit from 18, I got $18.78. What you're saying is $18.83. But the incoming, I guess, is the incoming credit. Is that something that you carry? It's going to be an expense to you every year, obviously, or expense to somebody. Wouldn't that just be part of your budget rather than you're basically saying that your shortfall is $70,000 and your water storage per capita is almost $100,096,454? Then you give us an in-time credit and that drops us down to $40,000, basically. Are you still having to try to dig up that $56,000? Are you considering it as a loss kind of but you're still going to be able to put the bill on it or is that just the normal part of your budget? So they don't pay those expenses. The dispatching is easy to explain in that when the red phone system went away a number of years ago, the fire department was switched to Capital West for dispatching and we rolled the WASI dispatching into that. So when Capital West did an analysis of their rate structure and then determined how much they were going to bill each town, it was a combination of grand list, the number of fire calls and the number of ambulance calls. Back in the day, and I can't remember right off the top of my head what year we first moved away from that, Waterbury's bill from Capital West and I'm just picking numbers out of the air now was $65,000 and we had a number that said the ambulance calls are worth whatever and picking another number was $30,000. In those days, Waterbury paid that expense to Capital West and then we sent a bill to WASI because they didn't want to burden the taxpayers at all so they paid their dispatching. Sometime right after the flood, Ryan Lindner and John Kiefner came to me with a select board and said just what Mark and we're being told now that our expenses are going up, it's harder for us to pay these expenses so they asked could the town pay the full dispatching bill. So we pay their dispatching bill which means we're paying the bill for dispatching not only in Waterbury but in Mortown and in Duxbury as well. It's the whole bill. So the look at the in kind and you see WASI's share of Capital West charges, that's the best estimate that I have as to how much WASI is responsible for for the bill that we're paying. So we pay that now. So what they're offering to do is say we're going to recognize the fact that Waterbury's already paying something. The building lease value and maybe Mark remembers the square footage and the numbers that he and I exchanged but we have a building, how many square feet is it? A couple thousand square feet. The town has provided that to WASI and we have a lease with WASI. They paid us $250 two years ago and that takes care of their lease for 20 years or something like that. So Mark and I worked together and just said, okay, if we were going to be leasing this property to them and actually asking a market rate for it and I kept it on the low side of the market rate but we figured that the lease value of the building on an annualized basis would be $20,400. So those are not expenses that they necessarily have. I think their true budget shortfall is $70,000 and they want to raise $70,000 and whether they backed into the per capita fee or not, they understood that Waterbury was providing in-kind payments to them that the other towns weren't so to cover the $70,000 shortfall they kind of did some backwards calculations and came up with this $18,300 and that works out that Duxbury pays almost $25,000, Morton pays about $5,400 and you have to pay the rest and I think... That the municipality has covered it kind of just struck me odd as to why it's there at all because that's been an ongoing thing and it's kind of part of the system that's currently in place. But if you didn't recognize that, Chris... Figure, I guess. Chris, but if... Chris, Chris, if you didn't recognize that, Chris, we would be paying more because if you took $70,000 and you divided it by the population of the three towns, it would be a different number and Waterbury would be paying more than we're paying. We are already paying the $36,000 for the dispatching is a hard number and they need to give us credit for that. If they didn't give any credit for this, they would spread the $70,000 over the population between the three towns and we'd be paying a higher amount. That's what I'm saying, that $56,000 is showing the recognition of those expenses that we already paid. Okay, I'm all set. Okay, thanks, Chris. Just a curiosity question on the part of your current structure and what you see in the future. I'm well aware of how the volunteer and basically public safety involvement at all. It's a tough field out there trying to attract people in and retain them. In Vermont, my understanding is that the model that we have here in Waterbury is one of the models that's there. There's another model that kind of incorporates being a subset of fire departments and the professional firefighters associated with that. Is there another variation that's out there that we're not aware of? Unicially owned. Independent service such as the one that has their own ambulance service which is not part of the fire department. Do they face the same struggles with staffing and everything? In the wintertime, I run with Northwood. Myself, I live there. In the wintertime, it's great because you have the Norwich students there. Beautiful. So, am I correct in understanding that you've made arrangements with the other two communities as far as items on their town meeting ballot? Or just left more town? Okay, so you're having the same discussion? Absolutely. Based on what Bill had provided us for previous information, it looked like there were a couple of avenues for that. I do think that this is an issue that the voters need to weigh in on. Your service is invaluable to the community and really folks in the community have to make the decision where they feel that would fall. The only issue that Bill had was about the general practice that we've had with requiring petition in order to get on to the town meeting ballot, but my sense is I wouldn't be inclined to bother with that. I think this is clearly an issue of concern for all of us in the community and simply adding it on makes good sense to me. Yeah, I agree with you, Mark. At first, I had inklings of maybe just approving it ourselves, but after a little bit of thought about it, I said it might be a good topic of discussion and transparency for the voters to weigh in on this and give them a stake in the game as far as the decision-making. I wouldn't think that, you know, just speaking for myself, I wouldn't think they would turn this down in any way she had performed, but it'd be good that they at least have the discussion amongst themselves along with the board at that time to reinforce it, you know? Your budget year is July 1st, did you try it? So if we pass this town meeting in March, the payment that we made will be after July 1st for the 18, 19 fiscal year. And you are meeting or have met with the other towns, right? Yes. Good. Yeah, no, I agree. I think that making them go the root of the petition is too much and I wouldn't recommend that. So we'll put it on our warning and we'll move from there. So just so you know, Chris, I was half-white before, if you took the $70,000 that there in the hole and you simply divided it by the number of people in the three towns, it's 6, 7, 4, 6, it'd be about $10.83 per capita and then you'd have to multiply our population of 5136 by 10 and it would be about $53,000 that we would be paying as opposed to the 40,000. So it's... the fact that they're reflecting what we're already doing for them is helpful to us and it's the right thing to do. I agree. Thank you very much. Is there any next step that we need to take? Just come to town. If you're prepared to speak to the article, I think it would be helpful. Do you have a pre-town meeting? No. We have all our fun in one day. Yeah. Some of you live in Waterbury here, so you can come. I think people will really appreciate being educated about this topic. It's important. Thank you. Thanks for your work, too. Thank you. All right. Moving right along, manager's items. The preliminary conversation concerning the 2019 budget. Yeah, this won't take too long. Chris, I don't know if you looked at your computer, but I did send you an email. I think my wife was working on printing off those six sheets. I don't know if she... They're not all that important. So we're going to start with those budget sheets first. So if you just take the top page off and turn it over for a second, we'll just look at the budget sheets. As I said earlier, I have started working on the budget and making some decent progress. And there's just some things that I want you to know about. As in every budget, there's expenses that are overspent and there are others that are underspent. The revenues are kind of a big part of the equation because obviously we take our expenses and subtract our non-property tax revenues from them to determine how much we need to raise in taxes. So the budget sheets that I have, I just want you to see a little bit of the good news, I guess you could say that we've received from the revenues and mainly from the state, excuse me. So looking at that first page of the general fund, which is Fund 11, the property tax line at the top, that fluctuates, that goes up and down based on downloads that we get from the state constantly having to do with whether somebody has a non-residential or residential property and it changes. Unfortunately, the changes don't affect any budget except the town's general fund budget. So the highway budget will get all its money, the library budget will get all its money, the school budget gets all its money and usually more because most of the downloads end up costing more to the education. But we only sent a bill out in the one bill in the summertime. Individual bills get adjusted, but any variation hits that general fund property tax line. So right now we're down, at the end of the year we'll hit a button that will turn the bill amount into an actual received amount and then we'll have delinquencies to collect. It's not unusual for that line to be well below 100% at this time of year. But moving down the page, the village administrative service fee, they owe one more quarter's worth to us and when they pay that, the $100,000 line item will have been met. Pilot, we broke the pilot up this year. If you remember, we put $200,000 in here, which is more than we had last year and we put the balance into the paving fund and we'll get to that in a few minutes. The reimbursement from Forest and Parks Recreation for all of the forest land that we have, Putnam State Forest, Mount Mansfield State Forest, we're actually going to, we have actually received already about $11,000 or so more than budgeted, so that's a plus. The V-Trans Liaison State Grant Line, where there's a check mark next to that. I'm not sure it will go all the way up to $49,000 but it will go up, that's the line item that we pay fire out of and whatever she spends will come in. So that will go up further. So just with the village and the, or year to date, that other governments is at $587,717 and at minimum it's going to be $611,840. So we're going to have a little bit more revenue in that than we anticipated. And then over on the second page, we haven't transferred the amount from the reappraisal fund yet. So our revenues in the general fund are going to be a little bit higher than anticipated, which is always welcome news. Moving forward, I just showed you fund 12 and I think on the back side of that, you'll see fund 13. We're going to probably be right on the money on 12. We will have a little bit more payment from that highway labor and materials line. The WASI fuel was up a little bit. The two main revenues in that fund are the property taxes in the Vermont state aid where we haven't received the state grant yet. If we don't get it, we didn't do the project. Fund 13 is the library. They're slightly higher than what they budgeted. The library fund is probably going to be over expended though. We did not plan for or know that Mary Kasamatsu was going to be leaving. When she retired, she had some leave time that we had to pay out and we hired another director and we had some unanticipated expenses there. The next fund, 48, we'll come back to that. That really goes with the memo that I had you turn over at the beginning so you can put that with that other memo and we'll talk about that briefly. In the paving budget, fund 70, and this is good news. The transfer into the paving CIP from the highway fund was 288,000 as budgeted. The transfer from the reserve fund that we had, that was the old roundabout fund, was a little bit more than we anticipated. And then the pilot proceeds, we thought we were going to get $270,000 of pilot money. We put 200 in the general fund which we budgeted, but the pilot payment was actually almost $282,000. So there's another $12,000 that went in and I put the excess into the paving fund. If you wanted to go into the general fund, I can switch it back, but I thought since we're gearing up for some major paving, having some money here would be helpful. On the expenses for paving, the Class 3 paving, and I believe I put this in a memo to you in my town managers report that I also sent out, we did all the paving we had planned to do plus more. We did Hollow Road this year that was not in the budget. On Whizzle Mountain, when we got up there, it turned out that while we had the water and sewer departments adjust all the manholes and water shutoffs and valves and the like, and then the highway department adjusted storm drain manholes and catch basins, and we rebuilt a lot of those things. So the public works crews worked pretty closely together to get all that done. When we got there, it turned out we didn't need to reclaim anywhere near as much as Whizzle Mountain than we had anticipated. So we did more paving than we had planned. There's more black top down on the ground. There are more streets right now that are smooth. I won't promise they'll stay smooth for 100 years or even 10 years, but we did a lot more paving than we anticipated and it didn't cost us anywhere near as much as we thought. So we budgeted $550,000. We spent $374,000. That will all drop to the bottom line. So between the revenue that we have, and I didn't look at the unbalance coming into the year. I didn't have time to do a full analysis, but we had higher revenues than anticipated. Significantly lower expenses than we anticipated. So that what we carry forward into next year will be higher than we expected that it would be. So that's good news for next year. I'm not saying that we won't have to finance if we pave Umis Hill, but we've got more resources in the paving fund already than we thought we would have. So I'll stop there. If you have any questions, anyone including Chris? Chris, you probably don't have any information to look at to have any questions, but was... I've got the information in front of me and I don't have any questions. The only comment I have is that in a perfect world, it'd be nice to leave that money in the paving CIP and not, again, in the perfect world, not have to use it as part of the financing for any additional paving that we were thinking about doing next year but use it as on top of so we could, if possible, do even more next year. Well, it's going to be hard to... It's going to be hard to do more than we've already thinking that we're going to do next year. I mean, that's a pretty aggressive project to get all of Loomis Hill done the way that we're anticipating doing it. We can have this discussion later, Chris, and the money is going to be staying in the paving fund and whether we want to use the money to reduce the financing, that might be necessary or if we want to just leave it there and do more later, either way, it's an asset in the paving fund and we'll have an opportunity to discuss how we'll use it. I'm pleased that we were able to do more than we thought this year for less money and that gives us options going forward that we didn't think we were going to have and we can have the discussion how we're going to use it later but it's an asset that we have that's a little bit unanticipated and that's good news from my point of view anyway. Absolutely good news. Yeah, we'd just echo that because I know the year before we weren't able to achieve even what we had planned to do and we bolstered it this year in the hopes that we would be able to get more done and we did, so all around that's a good success. We did and we didn't spend as much as we thought. Anyway, the other information and I know if I could see Chris's face I'd be interested to hear what he's thinking. We did get some news the other day the Main Street project was put out to bid by V-TRANS as you know it's a V-TRANS project. The bidding was on Friday and the estimate was 25 to 30 million dollars. There were four bidders for the project. J.A. McDonald was the low bidder at 21 million dollars in change. So that's good news on two fronts I think. One was only slightly more than the 20 million dollars that was estimated several years ago and it was not as high as they were fearing. So the 21 million is a good number. J.A. McDonald is the company that did the roundabout work. They were excellent contractor to work with. This project will be run by V-TRANS and their relationship will be directly with V-TRANS and the V-TRANS inspector. Our people will be obviously involved in the background and will be very much in tune with this job. But at 2% of 21 million the local share is about 420 thousand dollars which is a little bit lower than we were estimating. I'm still working now to divide out from the 420 that the local is responsible for how much of that is water and sewer. I think the last that I was talking with Barb about she thought she had identified about a million and a half dollars of water and sewer. That's something that we may discuss a little bit. If that's the case, if it's one and a half million for water and sewer the E-FUD would be responsible for 75 thousand and would be responsible for 345. If it's a little higher than 1.5 million their share would go up and our share would go down. The 345 thousand, if we just accept that as our estimated cost right now will be over three construction seasons, two and a half construction seasons. So we're going to have to factor that into our game plan as to how we fund this. I don't know yet. I haven't been able to get into the weeds at this point and I'm not even sure if anybody could. I don't know how much of the costs are front loaded in the first year versus the second year or the third year but all in all it's about as good news as we could get in terms of the price and I think we've got a really good contractor which I hope will bode well for a fairly smooth project. They did an excellent job on the roundabout. Any observations, Chris? No, that's great news Bill. The issue of what's going to be our cost over the next three years, I mean if we just kind of cut it down to center and said it was a little over a hundred thousand dollars a year I'm just again trying to keep in my head constantly what we're going to be faced with so the discussion we had a while back about Pave and Loomis Hill, the new trucks and highway trucks that we're going to need and with the police department additional costs there and now tonight's discussion with the ambulance service so if the additional police department is 185 over what we've paid this year plus another 40 from the ambulance that's two and a quarter and if it were a hundred, even numbers, a hundred thousand would it be safe to say we're going to be... I'm not ready to make a prediction yet. There's a lot of things that's going to be factored into the equation. I've got all the things that you're talking about already kind of in the hopper and I'm working towards it. If we're lucky maybe I'll have some preliminary numbers either the first or more likely the second meeting in December but I'm working to get as much of this information as possible and there are some revenues that will be going up. The pilot payments, the formula for pilot payments have as one of its factors tax rates so if our tax rates go up all things being equal the state uses a higher tax rate in their calculation and they would pay us more. I didn't bring next year's budget but that Forest and Parks money at 6368 is going to be higher next year than it was this year even though it was already $12,000 higher than we budgeted so there's some things that will be working in our favor they're certainly not going to make up $150,000 worth but I'll have more information in December but all the things that you've identified are already things that I'm working on pretty hard to try to solidify the numbers on. Okay, excuse me. If you go back to the memo that I wrote to you this is a discussion that I've been starting to have with the library commissioners a couple of months ago and I thought it would be something that we should at least talk about from the town's perspective. This memo basically lays out from 2006 to the present what we've transferred to the general operating funds from the town's tax stabilization fund and the library's trust fund and as you can see especially if you look at the town in 2006 we had prospective budgeting at the time so we would kind of look at what was happening in the markets look at past performance and pick a number that we thought we were going to hit as far as a number that we were going to be able to transfer we budgeted $25,000 in 2006 it had a really good year and we actually transferred $64,000 then the next year we budgeted $53,000 in the market it still did pretty well but it didn't do as well as we thought and we transferred $31,000 then in 2008 we had the financial collapse and basically from 2008 through 2011 we had planned to do nothing and then we got hit by the flood which caused even more consternation so for five years we didn't transfer anything and then in 2013 and 2014 we kind of made up for lost time we transferred some big numbers that were outside of the formula that we had typically used and that was all given discussion that the select board had with me at the time and we picked those numbers and did it in order to help buffer the tax rate a little bit and then in 2014 we actually changed the way that we calculated the formula we actually looked at the performance that we had in the current year so we looked at the performance in 2013 and then applied the formula and said okay in 2014 we can transfer $55,000 so we budgeted it and we transferred the exact amount and since 2014 you'll see that both in the library and in the town tax stabilization fund which is on the left hand side the actual transfer was actually the exact amount of money that we budgeted the library there was some rounding errors but pretty much dollar for dollar that we budgeted was transferred what I started talking about with the library commissioners because they had a pretty hefty transfer last year $35,700 they had a particularly good increase in their portfolio the town had a good increase but not quite as good because the town's portfolio is significantly higher than the library's and we were able to transfer about the same amount of money so in both cases a little more than $35,000 was transferred and it was based on the formula when I look at this I'm just a little concerned that even though we're looking prospectively now or retrospectively now and we can hit our budget number exactly there's still volatility from year to year we transfer $44,850 in 2015 and then in that year the market doesn't do well and we don't transfer anything the next year we transfer $28,000 then this year we transfer $37,515 and it's looking like for 2019 if we apply the same formula we'll probably not be able to transfer anything because the market is down right now so we don't have to make a decision tonight I'm sending this off to the library commissioners as well they make the determination from their trust fund but I'm wondering rather than apply this formula if we should maybe just look at averages and say for the next five years we're going to transfer I pick the number for the town $25,800 and for the library $15,000 put that in the budget both funds are frankly robust enough that you could transfer $25,800 even if the market had an average down year and then if the down year was like 2008 and it was 50% you could adjust that in your next year's budget and say you know we really ought not to take anything out of this because it took too big of a hit so we can talk about this more as we get into the budget season but what I'm trying to do is be able to consistently plan on a certain amount of money and you avoid that swing because when we went from $44,850 in 2015 and dropped to nothing the next year everything being equal we had a four sevenths cent tax rate increase that year because we just didn't get anything so that's just something for your consideration as we start heading into budget season the fund 48 that I told you goes along with this simply shows you that to date we've earned $10,000 of interest on the tax stabilization fund but we had $11,190 of unrealized losses and that was actually through October 31st and November has been worse the market was down to 400 and something points earlier today so I think the unrealized gains are going to be down and in a normal year if it turns out that we don't transfer anything to the tax stabilization from the tax stabilization fund unless we have a return that's greater than 3% the first 3% stays with the tax stabilization fund the next 5% gets transferred to the general fund and then above 8% we split on a 60-40 basis leaving 60 in so in a year that we lose money we clearly don't make a transfer or we haven't so anyway this is just for your consideration if you have questions now I can answer them but it's just to think about a lot of times investing philosophy tends to lean towards a long view anyway so using a larger block to make your adjustment the only thing for me would be having that circuit breaker piece in there that if things consistently were down that we would shy away from that I think the sense that I have with this board is that conservative enough that that would be the case I mean the fund itself started at $644,000 if it ever went below that we were prohibited by the action that the town created to set up the fund from going below that but I didn't bring the town report with me and I didn't print the balance sheet but we were in the I think the year started and the fund was about $935,000 so we've transferred from the fund about $520,000 in the 27 years that we've had it and the fund is still it's about $300,000 higher than it was when we started and we've transferred $521,000 into the general fund for the benefit of the taxpayers so it could certainly withstand in a normal down year $25,000 transfer we would miss the really big transfers in the up years but in the year that happens it's great but you kind of set yourself up for even if you have an average year the next year you set yourself up for loss okay the last item we had was Chris's piece with the police reporting so Chris why don't you go ahead yeah thanks Mark I was noticing on the information that you sent the percentage of the calls that our contracted police force had entertained and of calls that I'm trying to pull it up here real quick percentage of calls that middle sex kind of handled that 43% of the middle sex troopers and 57% of the resident troopers I was curious to know is it an assumption that at some point the resident trooper graph or portion chunk of the pie might be greater or is this the result of simply a result of the fact that our resident troopers aren't on in those specific times when the middle sex troopers are doing some of their calls you know what I mean it's kind of a two fold thing in this month one of the troops was off for vacation time so he missed seven work days so that's basically a week's worth of one shift that wasn't covered the focus on tracking that really is is to show whether or not we really need that presence in the community and when you're seeing the amount of workload that the troopers that are assigned here are it's pretty clear that it's worth having them around the piece about it is the difference in the response time and the fact that they cover calls that probably wouldn't get any sort of response otherwise but the other side of the coin is that we're still looking at at least 20 to perhaps 40% of the workload in the town that occurs outside of those hours that we've got shift coverage and folks just need to know that there's activity that is taking place I think Bill and I had talked about the prospect of trying to get the lieutenant here for our meeting on December 17th and we can get the perspective from him on what the feedback has been on both sides both the resident troopers and the station troopers I know when I talked with them during the last month it's still a very positive thing having the resident troopers here takes immense burden off the station troopers and even with that the station troopers when they do come here it's kind of like a new experience and I think they're a little more engaged in just the perspective of oh we've got to go to another Waterbury call my concern was that this graph would deter middle sex from wanting to continue with this program because I didn't know if their expectations was that the resident troopers would be taking more of the pie but the way you talk it sounds like they're working in their favor already anyway it's been the feedback that we've been getting tomorrow night I've got the community advisory board meeting so I'll have better information on that but I think if Lieutenant White can join us at the December meeting we'll all have a chance to have first hand discussion just as Mark said Chris we have a day and a half that we don't have coverage under this contract we don't have any coverage from the resident troopers on Sunday and then on Monday well actually it's more because we have only a half a day on Saturday so it's probably about 23% of the work week we don't have a resident trooper on anyway just in those shifts and then we're in the hours from 2 in the morning until they come on at 7 or 8 you know those those 5 or 6 hours when everybody's home in bed if there's a call then it's going to be middle sex that takes it so you're probably pushing 25% of our time we don't have a resident trooper on anyway and then as Mark said when somebody's on leave time they're on vacation the contract if one of the troopers just goes on vacation for a week the contract does not contemplate that they fill that in with another resident trooper if somebody went on vacation they just put somebody in to fill them while they're gone no they don't also suggest maybe that based on this graph if a lot of the activity is happening on that half day Saturday and the Sunday is that safe to assume no no because it it has variability and what we've got for numbers I'm not able to parse that deeply into it but I have seen on occasions where the resident troopers are on duty here there may be one or two other troopers from middle sex that are making traffic stops in the area so I've seen activity that shows a double up like that okay alright so you're welcome so we are at time for adjournment is there a motion to adjourn I will make a motion to adjourn alright and Matt's got the second alright well Chris good luck with the rest of your trip yep you all have a good Thanksgiving thank you I'll see you when I get back