 Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the April, the fourth meeting for the Waterbury selection. I wish to welcome all of you. Again, try to keep all discussions on point and limited discussions. If there's any questions, we'd be more than glad to enter those questions. First, we could have a motion to approve the agenda. Can I ask to add liquor license for Hannah and Tyce? Thank you. Second? Second. Thank you. Any discussion on the minutes? If not, all in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? None. Motion passes. We now go to the section on public. Public is the portion of our select board. If I could have a motion to approve the consent agenda items for the liquor license for Maxi, Zambarn, Old Stage Coach Inn, Protec Brewery, Freakfolk Brewery, Jim's Pizza and Stowe Street Cafe. And Hannah the Wood. And Hannah the Wood, right. Thank you. Any discussion? If not, all in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Motion carries. Now we'll go to the section of the meeting where it's for the public. This is for any items that are not covered under a warrant agenda item. If you have a short thing that you want to bring to the board's attention, we would love to hear from you. Is there anyone who wishes to speak? There being none, we'll move on to select board items. We have a presentation by the Central Vermont Prevention Coalition. And we were just joined by Olivia LaClaire. Okay, she's on. She's on. Yep. Okay. Introduce yourself and tell a little bit about the coalition. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Olivia LaClaire and I'm an AmeriCorps VISTA and I'm serving as a rural community organizer for the Central Vermont Prevention Coalition. And so our coalition is made up of many nonprofits in the substance use realm. We are an interdisciplinary collaboration of professional organizations and agencies working in prevention, harm reduction, disease prevention, treatment, recovery and restorative justice. The Central Vermont Prevention Coalition is working with the Central Vermont Medical Center, which is actually the backbone of our coalition and a strong member of our coalition. So in 2019, we received a three year grant from the federal government to address the opioid crisis here in Central Vermont. And one initiative that has come out of our coalition is the organization of these drug and alcohol community forums that we have put on throughout Washington County. So far we have organized two and we have two upcoming this month. And these forums really come out of critical time as drug and alcohol use and overdose rate rates has have increased dramatically during the pandemic and every part of her month. So specifically alarmingly the youth substance rates have also increased in the past few years and this is something that we address in our forums. So I'm here tonight to invite you all to the community forum for the Harwood Unified School District, which includes Waterbury and this is on Wednesday, April 27 from 6 to 730 via zoom and then we also have an in person option, which will be at the Waterbury Municipal Office. And basically I just wanted to come here tonight to let you all know about this important event as influential people in your communities, your attendance would be really greatly appreciated and you all also know best how to promote in your town. So any insight on how to better promote this event or any questions that you think should be addressed or here tonight would be great. Thank you. Yeah, are there any questions by the board. Yeah, what time is it going to be on Wednesday, the 27th. Yep, 6 to 730pm. What's the format for the forum is there is a panel or how does that work. Yeah, so we have a group of panelists that are all members of our coalition and we have people with lived experience we have community prevention recovery and doctor actually from UVM and basically they speak about resources available here in central Vermont. And then we also have time for which is an open forum for people to ask questions and work together as your brainstorm and how we can make your community a healthier place and that's pretty much like the format of the night. Have you posted the meeting on front porch forum. So we plan to do so, whether, whether forum gets a little bit closer in the month. But that's a great idea and definitely that will do for sure. Right. I'm sure the Waterbird roundabout slash reader will probably post that in the calendar events. Yeah, that would be great. Any other questions any questions from the audience. Any questions from zoom line. Thank you Olivia for telling us about this most worthwhile project. Awesome. Thank you so much. Okay. Next item on the agenda is the change request for pollinator garden. See anybody here. So I'll pitch it for them. So back in January, a gentleman by the name of Patrick kitchen sent me an email and he works with an organization called be the change BBE. And he said that this organization is working throughout the state to encourage the enhancement and saving of pollinators. They've sent out an email to most towns in the state they're trying to get 251 acres, if you will, of pollinator gardens planted that would be one in town if they were completely successful. So they're asking the town to each donate some land and I have clarified they're not asking us to donate in fee simple the property. They're just asking us to donate a parcel where pollinator garden could be planted and they suggest this could be a space from a school and a park under utility poles. So I passed it off to Bill Woodruff and said, you know, if we were going to do this is there an opportunity to be involved in this kitchen did indicate in January that they had 25 times already served up. So I'll pass this map around, which is a map out here and the blue area that is shown there is where Bill Woodruff is proposing that this pollinator garden could be planted. And it includes the banking between the parking lot and the playing fields and then some of the areas on the side of the parking lot and out near the ward garden and the other garden that we already keep out there. So, you know, Bill emailed it back and said, here's a map of some possible lands that could be utilized. The soils are good. It sits next to community garden space and recreation fields. It's in an area where there are many other trees and plantings that could benefit from attracting some more pollinators. Here at the office we have serviceberry, pothrow, lilac, flower, ground, blueberries just to name a few up here. So, and then he talked about the fact that this is a high use area in the good weather months with recreation and library use out there. So he said the program would be noticed by many. So we need the select board's permission. I don't see any downside here that this is unused land. I believe they're going to do all the work in terms of getting it ready and prepared. So if your inclined motion could be made to allow this to happen and if you don't want it, that's okay. How large of a space is the actual garden going to be? I'm not exactly sure. I know there's a lot of areas. I can't, I don't know the square footage of it, but it's a fair piece of property that doesn't have any real other use on it at this point except part of it once in a while gets burned by an apartment. We wouldn't have any, it's kind of like almost like planting wildflower. It's nothing that we would have to maintain. Give a hand up, Mike. Sorry about that. I wondered if Bill could show us the map but just from the conversation I'm understanding it would be like behind the library in the village. Is that what your, or be the changes is what you're proposing? I don't have the map available to put up on. I have another question comment too. Oh, thank you. I just wanted to say that I'm really familiar with be the change. I didn't realize this was on tonight, but I spend a lot of time in Boulder, Colorado and be the changes really, really active out here and it's something that I would love to have to be involved in. And what's cool would be the change is that you can start and then you can expand so that pollinators have, you know, gardens and areas that they can connect with in a really mindful way. So I just wanted to say out loud that in the past year or so, there's actually been a fair amount of discussion about pollinator gardens and areas up in Waterbury Center, and I just wanted to advocate that the hope Davey Park would be an awesome awesome spot to actually do a pollinator garden that would be the one that be the changes talking about, and then also which dovetails into the work that the town is going to do with the natural area is that the natural area is in fact a whole pollinator area and has many, many opportunities to have those pollinator areas reinstated and restored. So, I just wanted to say that and I think it's a great idea. Yeah, I was just looking at the map. It does include a very steep embankment, which would not be appropriate for telling, but I would guess that they would understand that and only till the flat area. Yeah, I'm not sure, you know, this is the area that we've identified. I talked to Bill about that. The grave is steepest in here, I believe, and it quite developed as you go further, but, you know, we certainly won't let them do anything that's going to be dangerous. What's the process, if approved going forward, would they work with Bill? Yeah. Yeah, we would just let them know that we're, the select orders approved it and then we'll work with them. If there's a significant change to that plan, you know, they may not use the whole area that we've outlined here. That's just a rough outline. I think it's a fairly straightforward project that will require us to be just involved in some of the planning. I don't think we're going to be able to do anything about what works. I'll move to, that we accept the proposal for the be the change request. Do we have a second? Thank you. Any further discussion on the be the change on request for pollinator plan? Is it one year or two? Well, I think they're perennial, so it's going to be, I don't think they'll need to come in. No, they're perennial. Oh, pardon me, thank you. My gardening knowledge. Any other questions? Not all in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries. Thank you. Okay. Can we just switch to reappointments in the CB fiber discussion? Just flip those, go to a point of Linda and Chris Shank first before we have a discussion on CB5. If no one has any objections. We have two existing people who are on our delegates to CB5 are Linda Gravel, she's the delegate and Christopher Shank, he's their alternate delegate. They've both been active in the process and I open it up for any discussions. I don't believe we've had any other known interest, so we have to appoint them this month. Any questions for either Chris or Linda? I have a question. Sure. The CB fiber have a term of your reappointment? Okay, so it'd be to April 30th of 2023. So it's yearly, every year we would reappoint a delegate? And that would align at work. Yes. I didn't know CB fiber had their own thing going on. Any questions specifically? I know some of you were not on the board when we previously had both Chris and Linda introduce themselves more formally. Linda was here at the last meeting. Right. Linda, I'll move to reappoint over them for one year in the term of office. Thank you. One second. Thank you. Any further discussions? I will say as a point of information we did not advertise these positions at all. That's who I know Carla has advertised for other boards. We did not. I know and I understand and second as I support the motion I think Linda and Christopher have stepped up and are in the weeds and we should reappoint them. But I just want to say as a process I'm glad that we are aligning the terms and then I would assume you could follow the same process as we do for our other boards. But again, thank you Linda and Chris and happy to have you. It's an honor to share the residents of other areas to try to get them better into that. It's a real honor. Okay. We have a motion and a second. If there's no further discussions, all in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? None. They have both three appointing. Congratulations. Thank you. And thank you for your service. We didn't want to have as a follow-up to our last discussion. And I probably want to hear from Katie Chris first because we heard a lot from Linda at the last meeting. You know, we did have some concerns about that the appropriation and what CV5 was doing was to create a whole other network and not just reaching those that are underserved. Maybe Chris, if you could start off. Because I know we spent a decent time. Yeah, yes. Yes, we've worked quite a lot together. And I apologize for not being there. It was under the weather this morning and I didn't want to bring anything in. So I apologize upon all stuffed up a bit, but. Thank you. I want to make it clear that CV5 or does not have a single goal. We have we have multiple goals and their prioritized goals. And I think, you know, when you look at all of the goals and I'll touch on those in a second. You know, there's a sequence to them and there's some interdependencies between them. So the goal that you're that you're referring to is is bringing internet to the underserved community. So those individuals who have no internet service or very poor internet service options today. The number one goal is to serve those individual homes. However, that is not completely sustainable all by itself. You can't build out a multimillion dollar network to serve a handful of households. So, you know, additional goals are to provide competitive, high quality, high speed, reliable and expensive internet to the residents to all residents of our member towns. And obviously we want to prioritize those individual homes who are underserved first. So when, you know, I'll try not to get too into the weeds here but the, you know, there's a there's a high level network design and then ultimately there's a there's a detailed network design that needs to be built out. And you have to keep the end goal of serving everybody in mind. And you have to serve everybody if you want to make it. Makes sense, you know, you have to, you have to be able to serve everybody in the end to to offer competitive services so Comcast doesn't just get to charge whatever they want because they know you don't have a choice. And so, as we build the background backbones through the different areas that those backbones are going to are going to cross neighborhoods that are perfectly served by Comcast or are consolidated. So if those individual homes decide that they would like to pay to connect their service up, well that would be an option for them. But ultimately the goal for CV fiber we will be putting money first to build out internet service to those underserved communities. Does that answer the question. I'm happy to go into more detail if you like. Again, I think the big issue that was raised at the last meeting is looking at this is recreating a whole nother fiber network that we basically have in town with, you know, taxpayer support. You know, I don't mind in free enterprise, you know, a competitor looking at being another service and providing an alternative and hopefully being a competition. I think competition is good. But I think the concern that I think a lot of us portrayed is that we're not necessarily we're recreating another whole network, not necessarily reaching just to reach the underserved. And I think that's where taxpayer money is concerned. No, I just said it's three million dollars for the 72 million dollars. Three million dollars for, you know, the mouth of it's a lot of money, you know, tax taxpayer money that we're looking at doing and I know you're looking at just $75,000. But some of the other grant money and stuff like that does wind up becoming taxpayer money in other ways, you know, via all our taxes. I mean, these funds are these funds are coming from, you know, government grants and arguably from taxes, no matter what. And, you know, whether or not TV fiber uses it to build out, you know, internet access to underserved Vermont communities, or we, you know, we fatten the wallets of the Comcast executives, you know, that that's ultimately up to the people who decide what they want to do but, you know, the say that there's already, you know, fiber. Yes, there's already fiber but we can't, you know, if you if you really look at the single family dwellings that are underserved in the Waterbury, you know, area, there's 86 homes. That's really what we're talking about 86 homes. Now, it would not be sustainable if we were to build out a fiber network to serve a six homes. That's just that's just not realistic. So, going back to the goals. The first goal, like I said, is to is to build out service to those who are underserved. But if we just had all even if we had all 86 of those underserved households, paying for service. That's not sustainable. We need to continue going and it's also not doing a service to the rest of the town of Waterbury who, you know, potentially are behind it. I mean, there's 86 single family dwellings that are underserved right now. Yeah, we had Linda how many, how many signatures do we have on the petition. Almost 150. Almost 100. Yeah. So nearly twice as many people signed it so it's not just the underserved who are interested in, you know, in this service. There's those communities who are locked into a Comcast option and Comcast, you know, Comcast doesn't care about your rates are going to raise them as as they can. Whereas an organization like TV fiber, the more the more service that we build out, the lower the cost is for everybody. If we grow, and we bring our costs down. That's that's the whole point of a CUD is is to pass that savings on directly to the subscriber. So not only are we serving the underserved, but we're providing very valuable competition in the area and enforcing those, you know, large telecommunications companies to be honest. Chris, I'm wondering when you talk about what would be sustainable. I'm wondering what is your model how many subscribers do you expect to have to have to have a sustainable system and what would be the rates the monthly rates for those subscribers. Those are always the questions that we hit that we get. So those, those specific numbers are kind of, you know, guarded secrets, you know, within for, you know, competitive reasons you can't, we can't get those, you know, give those out. I can, I can tell you we're not going to be charging $20 a month, and we're not going to be charging $200 a month, you know, so it's going to be somewhere in the, I'm sorry. It's going to be a range 20 to 200. I mean, yeah, but it's going to be somewhere in between there and obviously the goal is to get is to get the rates as low as possible. And so, you know, as CB fiber is really starting this year, you know, we're going to have, we're going to have subscribers, our first subscribers go live later this year. We're going to be working off of those off of the grant money. You know, the money that that that we have in the bank today. And at some point there's going to be a transition from using that grant money to, you know, to move on to subscriber rates, but I can't speak to the specific details and the numbers of subscribers and I am on the finance committee, but I don't have all those numbers memorized nor do I know exactly which ones are for public knowledge. So, Chris, maybe, maybe you would have had it if you haven't been able to come tonight. One of the questions that I had was, you know, is there a map that we can see you've got it. All right, so there is a map. So I apologize. You've got a map, but no, that's fine. Those are the underserved. Right. So, so how much of the how much of the 72 miles is going to have to be built in order to serve the 86 single family properties? Do you know that? I don't have that specific number because this, the $75,000 that we're talking about is not to build out that network. Those funds are being allocated through grants. The $75,000 that we are asking for of ARPA funds gets us halfway to building out the drop, you know, the final run basically from that backbone to the house. And we need about $150,000 to do that for these 86 homes. And, you know, because of the match, you know, if there's still funds available, if Waterbury were to commit $75,000, the match will get us to that $150,000 and then we will be able to build those drops out. Okay, so I want to turn back to Linda. Did I understand you correctly last week, or two weeks ago, Linda, at the last meeting? You said that there's already fiber that's up Ring Road that serves all of the public highway ring road. Not CV fiber. One of the. Concast. Concast. So I learned that from one of the owners up there. All right, so Ring Road is a private road, I mean, is a public highway. And I thought Ring Road wasn't served, but if if you're correct, you're telling us that there's already fiber on Ring Road. So are we, are we asking to use public money to bring a drop from the public highway up somebody's private driveway to their house? Well, I'm not on the board, but to me that's like. I hear Bill Loudon there. I kind of feel the same way is especially you use the Ring Road as an example. Most of those people are means and, you know, if this was more of a low income, you know. With your grant money, you can specify if you only want those who couldn't qualify for low income equity program that's being put together for the whole state. That we could specify that the grant money only to use for underserved people who qualify under some low income test. That's right. You can actually add to the, remember I gave you a list of different things that you could just suggest. But you can specify whatever you want the money to go for. If you wanted to go for the drop for low income people, if you wanted to go for the drop for children that are in school, for example, who are not on the internet or have a low quality internet right now, you can make a specification on exactly how you want the money to be. If you want to put money towards the backbone, if you want to put money towards the drops, whatever you want to put money towards. But then going back to where our original discussion was going, we talked about, you know, a whole new fiber network. And I have no problem funding in our town people who are underserved who don't have internet options. I guess we have a little bugle. But I do have an issue with funding people of means who, you know, I don't think we should subsidize. They made choices by living where they did and I think that's kind of, it is a public policy issue. And also, ARPA funds, it's not like I know everyone here is ARPA. They think ARPA money is going, you know, is going to be everywhere. There's only going to be a certain amount of money and we're going to have a lot of priorities for those ARPA funds. So, that's what concerns me. I would say both of your concerns, Meg, I think we could address as we decide to move forward regardless of what we decide. The concern being where the money goes is something we have control over to make decisions. And the concern about the amount of money, you know, we can specify if it's a $75,000 ask, we decide to move forward with that. The cap that we put on, it's a one-time allocation to a CV fiber for this amount. So, I don't think, I still think we all have a lot of questions, but in terms of those two large concerns, they're very manageable, things that we can deal with. I would echo Danny, just speaking for myself, I think it still continues to be interesting. Candidly, I don't have enough information tonight to make a determination on us awarding the funds. I would say holistically, as has been brought up, and I know we have two items on the agenda later this evening. A more holistic conversation about ARPA is certainly something on fire on as opposed to one-off connections. I want to be respectful of Linda and Chris. I would say that, again, I personally do not feel ready to vote on this particular $75,000 allocation in particular because it does require, and Linda, correct me if I'm wrong, when we commit the funding, if we were to choose to do so, we would have to give those specifications about, I have the stuff you have from last week about, you know, drops and who it does and things like that. So, I feel like I don't feel ready to address the question of if we're committing the funding, and I certainly wouldn't feel ready to address the question of even more specifically how the funding is. So, I again appreciate Chris and Linda, and I see Tom has a hand too, so maybe we'll get to him. I know it is first come, first serve. I don't know if you have updates on if other towns have chosen to pursue the matching funds, but otherwise personally I feel like I would need more time and information before I'm able to make a decision. Roger, before we go to Tom, do you have any further input? Yeah, I recognize that in the 21st century having access to internet is really a requirement to function for all purposes. So, I support the effort. I really question whether there is a constituency or not. Signing that petition really does not say that you're going to be ready and willing to sign up for a CD-Pyber. All it says is that you support going forward with this initiative, and I saw lots of names on that list of people that have no particular interest themselves but want to support the initiative. So, what I'd be interested in would be if you could come forward with a constituency of people saying, we're underserved, we're qualified for the low-income equity program, and that we would appreciate the town's support in getting this access. If that were something that you were able to put together, then I'd be much more interested in supporting this initiative. Thank you, Roger. Right now we do not have a way to qualify people for low income. That has not been established yet in the state of Vermont. It is under investigation right now, but it's going to be months, months before really it comes to fruition about how to go through the process, how to do an application for low income, how to be qualified for low income. That might take a year or more, and the matching funds will be gone by then. So, unfortunately, I cannot offer you the list of those who qualify for those restrictions. And the list of unserved is not available to the public. I have given you the addresses on the map, so you have an idea of the different locations, but I really can't give you the list of constituents. That is private information. Linda, wouldn't it be because I know I work a lot with low income populations managing programs, wouldn't it just be based upon their tax returns and you would have some sort of a I would guess, but I'm only guessing Mike, I would guess, but I don't even know if they've determined that yet. The EC fiber is working on this. Her name is Holly Grishner. I think I gave her email and the website for that in the papers I gave you folks. If you want more information about what's how they're proceeding, because I knew you'd be interested Mike. Tom's been waiting patiently. Tom, do you want to add something. Yeah, just a couple of thoughts. Thank you. Thank you. I think it came up at the last meeting. And I take that as meaning there's going to be a separate cable below what already exists on the telephone lines. So there's an aesthetic component to that where many views are already impacted by lines on polls. And to add another one. Have to consider that. They are the vehicle at the moment. But CV fiber describes itself as a multimillion dollar organization. And I'm just curious what the CEO salary is for CV fiber. We don't have a CEO. Well, you're, you're trying to hire one that's my understanding. We just hired an executive director. Okay, same difference. What's the salary. I don't know if that's public knowledge either to tell you the truth. So it is public. Yeah, the, the salary range for that position is between 100 and $120,000. Okay, that's quite a bit above the poverty line. So, you know, you got to, if you're serving the end of the year. You're going to have to mark it a little better. Thank you for your input. Any other. I have one more question. Did you learn any more about the application process? I remember at the last meeting, we weren't clear on whether who would be actually submitting the application and the timeline for that. Did you learn any more about that or know where we could find it for a committee fund? Yes. Yeah, that was at the very end of the conversation. I am not at my house at the moment, so it has to do with, basically, in the letter. You have to specify the email and you have to specify how you want it. And there's a paragraph in the Act 71 of the request for proposal that was written about matching funds. And I think it's on page four. Then I send you the Act 71 document. Yeah, I know that. In the email. I'm probably around page four. It talks about how to go about matching funds. And there's one paragraph there that says exactly what you have to do. But I think it's a good idea for you guys to have a discussion about how you want the money spent. Because you can make any restrictions you want on these funds that you have to allocate. And I agree with Mike. I think we should be giving it to the high-income homeowners who can afford to do it themselves. I think you guys have a reasonable plan there. I agree completely. And I think there's two points that I want to make real quick. Number one, this is the second clock. We're talking about $75,000 worth of powerful funds. And that translates into essentially a free $75,000. So we can double our money. But the clock is taken there. And the more times that we take, which obviously you need to deliberate to make sure that you make the right decision. So the more time you take, the less likely it will be that those funds will be available. And the second thing, I think it would be a good idea to come up with a very clear, easy, hard-line way to determine whether or not the homes would be included in that. And it could be something like home values. He said anything over a million dollars would definitely not be, or something like that. But something that's a little bit more right now available. But you can write it in however you want, like Mr. says. You specify whatever terms you want on it. They just need to be clear. So Linda and Chris, can we have, if we want to specify that we want our money used for, to provide service for underserved households that meet a certain income criteria, not a full build out? Would that be something that we could do? So I think that, you know, there are a lot of municipalities out there in Vermont, hundreds. You know, we've got 251 cities and towns, and then there are, you know, innumerable villages. There's fire districts right across the river. Duxbury-Mortown Fire District Number One was organized to build a water system because the private company that ran a water system over there couldn't afford to raise the rates to the level that he needed in order to do that. So the folks over there created a municipality and they used the public laws in order to finance the construction of a system and they probably went to U.S. The U.S. Rural Development to get a loan to build that out and, you know, they used the full faith and credit of the grain list of those areas in that community to float that bond. And then they paid the note back with revenues that they generated from selling water to their customers. We belong to Capital Fire District Mutual Aid, which is a municipality that has a purpose to provide dispatching services for public safety organizations that don't have the wherewithal to do it themselves. So the city of Montpelier has 24-7 dispatching that they dispatched their police fire in an ambulance way. But that, you know, to have 24-7 dispatching, you need the equipment and you need enough people and it's a half a million dollars to do that. So our town and other towns in this community got together and created that municipality, Capital Fire Mutual Aid and, you know, we pay $65,000 a year to get dispatched. In this case, and I think this is where I think maybe we cross paths at the beginning of this process where, and I'm not advocating for against anything right now, but I'm just trying to put it in context. I think when we advertised for delegates to CD5ers, it was to serve the unserved and the underserved. And I think there was an expectation, I'll only speak for me, but that there was going to be a way to use this municipality to reach out the backbone, if you will, of the system to areas that the private companies didn't think was worth going to. So, Comcasts and Consolidated meet a certain number of people per mile or however they do their calculus and they say, well, if there's only three houses every four miles, we're not going to run a cable out there because it costs us this much to do it and there's only so much revenue at the end of the line. So I think that there was maybe an expectation on part of the former select board that we were going to be joining this to try to get cable to places where it didn't reach now. And you could do that in a couple of different ways, right? You could go to Comcast and to Consolidated and say, how much is it to run a cable out XYZ road to serve those however many customers? You won't do it because there's not enough revenue at the end of the line to pay for your infrastructure, but if we pay for the infrastructure and then all you have to do from now on is to service the cable, fix it if it breaks, then it's worth it for them. So I think we're maybe talking in a monopoly here. What's that? You're describing a monopoly. Well, I don't think there's a monopoly. There's two companies that provide the service right now. I'm just trying to say that I think there was some expectation that we were going to help build cable to places where it doesn't exist. And that CV fiber running a whole network was not necessarily in our calculus. I'm not saying it's a wrong thing to do because certainly, you know, I'd love to pay a lower cable bill than I pay now. But I think we're talking about using the numbers that Linda gave us last week, $3 million to build 72 miles of cable, which would allow CV fiber, whoever they are, to offer service to everybody. So it's a $3 million subsidy to CV fiber to get their system out there and now they can compete with two companies that have already done most of this. So I'm not saying it's wrong. I think that's where the rub for me and maybe some of the people who had asked that question last week. At least I'm here and now we have no consensus to go forward at least today. What I would recommend is that each one of the select board members address questions to Chris and Linda and who'd be ready at the next board meeting down, you know, and you'll express some hesitancy to go forward today. Well, I guess so just two points I would make is one, I think on this $3 million, I'm not on any side of it, but the access to waterbury taxpayers is $75,000 of ARPA funding. They're a municipality. They can't touch our tax money otherwise. So I just want to say, like, whether you think that a good use of federal funds, we could come up with whatever use of federal funding. The $3 million is separate federal funding they're going to pursue. And our question is around our ARPA money. So that's where the delay aren't trying to be in. I will say I was at the meeting where we voted to join CB Fiber and Dwayne Peterson came in and said, among other things, this state is pumping a lot of money into broadband through grants. Wouldn't it be great if my home municipality of Waterbury could be part of taking advantage of that? I just want to say, like, that was part of what it came and the board at the time voted. So, again, I mean, I think I want to hear from Chris and Linda. I think if we do want to move forward at the next meeting, I think we probably need to have a little more coordination between our liaison board creating criteria around, I feel like, this underserved thing keeps coming up as something where maybe there is some consensus. So is it that we would support a potential allocation? I think that's, again, there's kind of the two buckets. Are we going to CB Fiber and then if we're going to CB Fiber with what specific strings attached? And I don't know if we have consensus on either of those questions. Yeah, and something that I do want to point out is, like, I went back to read some of the materials from those original meetings when we, the former board voted to move forward. And these numbers were in there. The length of time has gotten longer, obviously, if things have changed throughout with supply chain, et cetera, et cetera, and cost. But so I think something I want to do is maybe forward to you to some of those original materials that you may not have been able to see when we did vote, knowing that we voted to go forward. We elected these folks to represent us with CB Fiber just seeing what we made a decision based on to help us move forward. If we want to, so hard without discussing, but I think the two big questions are what you said. Do we want to move forward with voting on allocating our funds and what are those means or what are those restrictions? I think it's important to know that, like, the restrictions that we might come up with, you know, Chris was suggesting, information that's available now, like home, what was it, the value, the home value. I don't know that we're going to be able to ask CB Fiber to ask for people's income. There's restrictions around those kinds of things, and that just might not be feasible. So as much as we love to put some of those restrictions, we might need to think about information like home value or something that's, you know, accessible. I know I've worked for 31 years dealing with federal programs. If you have a qualification, you could ask for income. CB Fiber, not us. I know. But I think they can, because if it's a qualifying thing, they can ask for it. The point is I just don't want to assume. I want to make sure. So if we're going to make a requirement, I want to follow, be able to back it up. I can't believe that you can't ask for some income documentation for any kind of municipal program because otherwise, I said, oh, my income's $30,000 a year. I don't believe any program runs on something that someone states that they say that, even if they sign, you know, kind of an affidavit. I don't disagree. I just need to find out. Make sure. And as a person who's thrown out 19 pages of paperwork from one of those programs, they're not a low-wit, and I just want to say it like so. I also, I mean, I'm back to what Linda provided us at the first meeting. So this was a number, again, because we need to fill out the thing on summary of where the investment would go. This says the average cost to connect each address is estimated at $17,050 estimated cost connect all under certain households, blah, blah, blah. I mean, this is saying to connect only the single family dwellings is $150,000. So again, we have this, is that the 75 plus the 75 match with one of those, one of those houses doesn't want it. Again, I think we need a little more information about if we allocate it and then there isn't a use. Does it go to general belt out? Well, it just, again, I just wondered. Yeah. We should specify that. If one of the houses doesn't qualify for, let's say, the property values that you need to specify as the main point, then you should specify where you want the money to go otherwise. Like, you wanted to make sure it was in town among streaming the cable, or doing the detailed designs for water burry, or, you know, there's a lot of construction type of things that have to go on in water burry. That you could say in the dominant nature criteria here, moving into this other bucket. I mean, you folks are the select board, you have the determination, and maybe it's that I've just spent too much time managing water sewer systems, you know, which are utilities, public utilities. Spending $75,000 of aquifers to help build a network. Now, if they talked about the $3 million, and if they talked about that they're going to build a duplicate network back when they first came here, and I missed that, I apologize. I'm not against that. I'm just wanting to make sure that we all understand that's what is happening. From my perspective, I think building a network, building the infrastructure is certainly the purview of a municipal. Running it from the public right of way, up any driveway, or I don't care if it's 10 feet or 3,000 feet, I'm not sure it's the public's responsibility to get the line to where the house is. But that's that, so this is clarifying for me. I think we've passed this to death. I think we have some information. If anyone has specific questions for a window or press, you know, we have their emails. And I think we're going to be able to do that. Window or press, you know, we have their emails. And I think with some, a little bit of research, we may be able to come to some consensus maybe at the next meeting. Are we there? I would like to recommend that you send your questions to Waterbury at cv5.net because Christopher and I will get that email. Thank you. Great. Thanks. Okay. And I do appreciate all the interest that you were showing and that you were asking all the right questions. So thank you so much. Thank you, Linda. Thank you, Chris. We really appreciate your service to the community. Thanks. Thanks. We want the next agenda item. Discussing select board priorities for 2022. I'll ask my fellow board members, maybe it will go around each one. What they see is what priorities for this coming year are. Sure. And I'll say in general, I asked to have this on the agenda because I think it's important to have kind of a general framing conversation. I think we certainly have plenty to do in terms of just kind of, you know, obviously the priorities supporting how we can. I'm going to go ahead and talk about that. We talked about last week, the manager search is going to be huge and I don't want to. I know that's going to be time and resources. So that certainly is on my radar. Something that's important. We also have the email about recreation studies. So again, that's a time. What is the first one? Municipal manager. As the top priority. Yes. The piece that I alluded to a little earlier tonight was around ARPA funding. Obviously we have that later on as a tone thing, but I would just say in my mind kind of akin to CV fiber, there's like two things, which is why I'm just, you know, I understand we have separate work. I'm making sure we're meeting whatever requirements we need to meet. But then I guess in my mind, it's a conversation about like input and strategic planning, which is, you know, do we have a board want to solicit input? Some have done committees. Some have focused it on a topical issue with the variety of programs. We could do a bunch of random programs. You know, again, it's not to make a commitment, but I think at least personally I'm interested in having a broader conversation about the opportunity of the ARPA funding and what we want to do about it. And if it wants to be on the topic. And I guess the only other piece, again, that's like a full plate. So I want to be clear. I don't think we have time to like do a million things. But the one other piece I would say just has someone in particular who's about to resign from the planning commission. I do think thinking about our relationships with our various boards and committees is important. And just to say, as I just said, my intention is to resign from the planning commission. I know we advertise positions and we'll work on appointing them, but we also have numerous other boards and commissions. I know you all met with some of them during budgeting, but figuring out if and how we as a select board want to relate to them. And incorporate them in our work. And when I would just say in particular that doesn't exist, but I think you all did approve is housing. If I can add more things, but just to say a housing committee has been talked about, I'm not certainly an interest for me. So I know that's more than enough for a year, which is why I brought it up in terms of us all meeting time or conversation. But that's just a few blocks. We're going to have to meet every week. I'm gay. Everyone's really concerned about my Monday nights. I'm gay. I think Alyssa hit the highlights. As I understand it, our primary function is to take care of the town's finances and how we spend our money. So I'd be most interested in anything having to do with that. But yeah, I think that those are the big ones for me. One of our constituents brought up the conditions of the road, which is a seasonal issue, but serious one. Something that we need to hear a bit more about. Yeah, the two big pieces for me was I'm really looking forward to the conversation about our administration and compliance to learn more. I think, you know, might you express that concern of like, it seems like a really big, it is a really big amount of money. But it will go away. So I think rather than, you know, just playing it by ear, we have that conversation soon and think about priorities and also how we want to learn about our priorities and the town community priorities. And then boards and committees is something that I've also talked to Alyssa about over the past year, tried to attend at least one commissioner board meeting for each group. And I think I'd love to talk more about, more with all of us about how we want to go about trying to be more present, knowing that, you know, autonomous is super valuable and stretched thin. But just seeing the interest and availability of having an ear and voice and, you know, being a part of those meetings a little bit more going forward. Thank you. Much like most of you, big priorities are, one is the manager search. I think I can't, you know, underestimate how important that is that we kind of get that, that's kind of going into our next topic. But then also... I hope you can't overestimate. It's going to be hard filling Bill's shoes. I'm not going to pull any punches. You know, you know, high level job searches are no fun. And to get the right person, you know, hopefully we're going to have another person that's going to be here for 34 years. But in this kind of job economy, if we get someone for 10 years, I think you're going to be very happy. I'm also very much in tune with the whole ARPRA process. I think it's really important that we kind of, you know, there's a lot of money, but it's easy to spend, you know, you start spending money and it's going to go. We have a bunch of money already with eBud, you know, that's kind of, you know, ready, you know, spent. I do encourage all the board members as I sent you. There's going to be the ARPRA training on PLCP. I encourage you. We've had on as Alyssa in the select board essentials. Even if it's the same thing, they went through a lot pretty fast. And it's something that we have to keep our eye on the ball. I'm really concerned about that. Thank you for several of you who brought up the thing. It's one of my priorities is to attend every board and commission and kind of not a planned visit that I'm going to come just kind of show up and say, and also not only boards and commissions, I would like to meet with some like the highway department and stuff like that. Just say, hey, what are your concerns? You know, what do you want from a select board? I think that's really, really important. It's not just the boards and commissions. It's a lot of the, I know it may fringe a little bit upon. I don't think it's going to fringe upon those responsibilities. I think he does a great job managing staff. But I think we should hear from them on what their concerns and where they are. I too, and I don't know if we're going to get to it this year is the housing study. I think it would be good to have, you know, R.W. present the housing study that they've done and bring that to us. But, you know, that's a real big divide. And the other thing, which one thing that hasn't been mentioned, we probably need to discuss in addition to bills leaving and the possible, you know, merge with E5. Do we want to go forward with charter? You know, I have mixed opinions on should we go forward with the charter, but at least I think with the change, we probably need to maybe have some direction. Bill, do you have anything that you feel that we have? No, I just, I just want to remind everyone, and it's kind of, you know, get used to the cycle. But for Alyssa and Roger in particular, the information gathering that you do now will inform the 2023 budget. And, you know, we're in a situation where, you know, Mike and Danny and Chris and Mark Fryer and Katie worked. And so 2022 is kind of prioritized in terms of what we have to spend. It doesn't mean that we can't spend some time talking about things, but it's just the first priority for the manager and staff right now is to execute what the select board and voters told us that we're going to do. So, you know, we're going to, in the next couple of weeks, get together the RFP out for the planning study for the Hope Daily Park and for the Ice Center site to do the master planning that we talked about last year with members of the community. It's not on the agenda tonight. I'd like to start thinking about, you know, the RFP that Steve and Nick are working on will ultimately finalize with me. You know, it has a provision in it that there'll be a steering committee appointed by the select board to help review the submissions from whatever consultants decide to submit a proposal for the RFP and then also to help guide the consultant as we go out and look at these sites and gather this information. So, I'm not going to ask you to appoint the committee tonight. This will probably be on the agenda for the 18th, the next meeting, and we'll go from there. So anyway, there's plenty of things to do with regard to housing, just so you don't have a conference call with the folks from Down Street. They're not the profit that does a lot of housing projects in the state. They've got the Lab Hall property here. They've got the Stimson Grades Building. They're involved with the Seminary Building, all three of which have housing projects. They are interested in another project in Waterway and relatively near future. Certainly nothing will, you know, their information gathering and trying to identify how they might secure sites is what they're talking about right now. They are interested in both the 51 South Main Street site and the Stanley-Wasser Hall site where we originally had proposed to build this facility back after the flood. So, we'll continue to work with them. Kathy Byer has got a meeting this week, I think, with Josh Shanford who's now the Commissioner of Housing and Community Affairs and the people at EGS to talk about Stanley Hall, Lawson site. So, housing is clearly a priority. I think it's been identified by the previous Select Board for your information and the board members. We did invite and have a couple of folks from Down Street here last summer. We had a tour of Waterway with that several potential sites and they're excited about trying to partner with the community to do something out there. I want to add, does anyone in the audience either on Zoom or in the room have any further comments on did we miss any glaring emissions that we have with our priorities for 2022? It's a honest question. I'm in the dark a lot. Thanks. I just have a policy question. In the past year, there were several times that people identified themselves as board members of board chairs and then shared their opinions on social media. And I think it gets, when people see it on social media, then they question if the person is expressing a personal opinion or board opinion. So I'm just wondering if there is a town policy on as board members, how you present in your opinions on social media. Thanks. I was right in 1982. I try to stay off of social media for the most part and I always look at everything in the eye of the town first, not Mike Bard and I just believe in that. Even though I have my personal opinions, I always look at, especially in the eye of people who have less means in this community and making them as whole as possible. That's probably the only thing I'll look toward, you know, is keeping taxes at a moderate rate so people could afford to stay in our community versus leave. Otherwise, you know, maybe that's, if you call that a personal opinion, but I think that's a town related kind of thing. Otherwise, I look at, hey, we have everything, we can't even speak, the four of us here, we can't even have an outside conversation if it involves anything but having a glass of wine or a beer. I think Tom was specifically asking about a policy that the town has regarding our use of social media and Bill was confirming we do have one. I don't think any of us have it in front of us. But it can be, yeah, we can have an email, Tom, so that we can all. I was going to say, I think it's oriented. If I'm remembering correctly, I guess, yeah, it might not be one for boards or commissions. Well, so basically board issues are not discussed on social media by individuals representing themselves as as board members. Is that right? Well, I don't think there's a policy about that. Well, in my opinion, you're going to carry more weight in what you say because people will say, well, you know, he's speaking for the town. So I think you just got to be careful because maybe why maybe you aren't. Right here. That's it's on public record, and everything we say here is public record so I think that's, I just think social media can be to me my personal opinion can be dangerous and these so I try to, unless I'm on Facebook but on Facebook among for my, you know, friend distant friends all around the country. But other than that, I really stay off of social media. Okay, well, if there is a policy, I would like to see it. But anyways, thank you. Yeah, I think as Bill said, I think it's for employees. That's different than municipal representatives. Right. We can look into it and then go back. Maybe we could take a look at the municipal policy and then take it up for the next meeting. We're going to put that in the parking lot for next meeting. We might want to have a policy of not representing our personal views as coming from. Anything else on that? If not, we're 13 minutes late. Trying to get skipped home for the basketball game. We're going to move on to a discussion of the Mont League of Cities and Towns of our municipal manager search. 15 minutes late is close enough for the government. Don't give us too much time. You were skeptical about 8 o'clock. I was saying, I think it, but we're close. Well, thank you for having it on the agenda. Thank Carla for getting here. I was a little late. Call me in the parking lot when we take the afternoon off. And if you remember, I was here or our whole board was here after the fact. Last meeting where we talked about this and each board agreed to go forward with the LTC contract. I couldn't imagine trying to do it alone and things. And we agreed to each appoint two people to a search committee and things. And up until that point, if I had not seen the draft contract and any emailed it to us, which was the first. We have seen it. And I had emailed back to Danny and Mike that I was going to send it to each of our EFA members and ask for their comments and questions. And I made sure, Bill, too, that if we did that in a way that we were violating any meeting or anything. Sorry. The contract? I never received that. No, it's fine. I think it was on the last half of last meeting. Sorry. No problem. So I didn't want communications all about it that we can get in trouble with the meeting loss. So I emailed it to them and had each one of them email their comments to me. And I've compiled them tonight that I'm going to share with you and suggested to Mike and Danny that the select board had their comments and questions available for tonight. So with that, I'm going to share and pass those around. I just want to ask if you have a copy of this. If I received it, I didn't recognize it. I just want to begin it. We received it before tonight, or I haven't seen it yet. I thought it was the open meeting law that Danny might have sent it separately. I thought I didn't know. He's not here right now. So then I feel fortunate to get my copy. Yes, exactly. You were the special one last week. I will note that at the back of it, it said there was some documents that went with it that weren't attached to it. So I haven't seen, they said there was some community profile and some other things that were attached to it. They're not important. These are the summary of all our EFUD commissioners and things. Universally, we thought it was generally laid out the good steps and things and we really appreciate them doing that. One of the first comments was they needed to be revised to reflect that it's contract with EFUD as well as the select board. They didn't do that in the beginning there and things. And now we can walk through the, but they put the comments together sort of like a page. And their first comment was on the timetable. I think it's page five here. And in the front, they said step one and step two were one to two weeks to prepare advertising plans and things. A draft DOB description and a pay rate and position profile. I checked with Bill and I don't think we have a job description for the manager either as the EFUD manager or the town manager. Anyone if we had one from the days we hired it would not be close to what the job is today. So none of the EFUD folks have time to work on that job description and things that I assume we're going to ask for it to be prepared by BLTC. I don't know if that's something they're going to want to do or you want us to do. I think that would have been part of their responsibility. And to me, I think as we spoke last night on the phone, I think the town manager by statute has certain roles in the response. And I think the fact though, that's kind of our job description. Well, I don't think that's good enough. Oh, no, no, I understand going forward. That's not a good thing. We should have a more customized thing and we should have. Well, it should fit Waterbury because Waterbury is different than any other community. But there are some things that are just by statute that the town manager has to do. Those are more sort of authorities and things rather than a description of what's going to take to do the job. Right. You know, and I think part of our point is to clarify that yes, they're going to do that. I don't think one to two weeks is adequate time to do that, to have it looked at by us to be sure we've included all the jobs that EFUD has, that the town has. So to answer your question, it is part of what they do. The job description for the position needs to be updated as the very first step in the process. You know, it's work, they said, you know, in conjunction with the select board to formally vote and approve the updated job description. So 100% it'll be done in conjunction. And then we all will vote to approve it before they put it out. So the question is what, you know, the timing. One to two weeks is not. And, you know, we've been through some of us have been through things like this with Berger. Weeks and when they slip, they become months and pretty soon. But in defense, I think for my league of season towns, let's say their first rodeo. And they've been through these. And I'm not saying we're unique in a lot of ways, but I think they could get a raw template and then with input from the committee, I think they could decide. All right. How long is the committee going to take to get their parts in? I'm just saying this is not. I don't think this is adequate to keep aside. I understand. And they haven't heard anything from us. I don't know who, who talked to them to put the contract together with that marker. Yeah, this is just the like the proposal contract. So like this, we haven't signed anything. We haven't had that first meeting. So, I mean, I think, and we talked about having that first meeting so we can express and also ask questions. I don't know whether it's one to two weeks and then it's move on regardless. You know, that I think this is a suggested time frame and it takes about a week, you know, but I don't have some conversation. I'm just assuming they survive. They have experience. I know it's tough, but the committee is going to also have to take some responsibility to try to, I know how things sometimes are hard. Maybe it is a little short, but overall we can't keep on moving this process down the road because ultimately we're not going to have a town manager and bills going to be retired. Well, I'm not saying we need to move it around the road, but what the contract we signed needs to be predictable and that we can keep on track. And I haven't heard that from them. Well, I haven't talked to them and I think EFUD has concerns that that's not an adequate time to keep us on track. And maybe that's some questions for our first meeting. That's all right. Well, when I get to the end, I've got some suggestions too for what we do here. On page six, they have the estimate of the cost. And this was prepared January 28th. The world is a different place now than it was on the 28th, certainly in the price of gas and things. And some of the people that commented wondered whether these are, you know, accurate costs for today. Like even renting a car a hundred bucks and they've got a hundred to a thousand dollars for travel. It just needs to be looked at to be sure that it's accurate for the conditions we're in. We also had a, you know, what's the customized training at 450 with an asterisk? Is that per hour? Is that to the board, the select search committee? Or, you know, what, what does that entail? I think that they put that there. It's often the custom training is they form manager and select for roles and responsibilities. I think they have a specific training class that they would provide. Sure, but, you know, further on they've talked about training and determining what, what are the confidentiality rules that we want to follow in doing this. I think, you know, my personal opinion, we need some training in what, what are their confidentiality options for doing this and one of the advantages or disadvantages of each that we need to kind of set up in interviewing these people in the advertising here. So, I don't know if they've included, I think, an opportunity to do that. Having been on hiring boards, I think pretty much is the committee, you can't say anything. You know, you, you're in there and... I know there are questions you can't answer. Right. But, you know, something they don't want to know that they need to apply. Right. But I don't think outside the committee that really things are discussed outside the committee. It's discussed. That, that's what we're appointing e-fund commissioners and select board representatives. And, you know, as we talked yesterday, we probably want to have at a meeting of with, with the LCP, do we want to have a representative from, from, from the, you know, from the public beyond that, on that. And before I want to commit to that, I would like to hear what the pros and cons from BLCK, I think they could probably add a lot to that. And then, you know, some of them, the confidentiality actions that Skip was suggesting. I think they'll be able to answer a lot of the questions that are on... Well, yes, but these are the questions we want to have addressed before we sign a contract. You know, explain what it is and be reasonably sure we can meet the schedules and what our obligations are under it. And so, they mentioned a timetable here. I think we're going to, we would ask for a, once the contract is signed and we know what the steps are, a new timetable that, you know, they're not going to do anything until we sign a contract. So, this timetable has had real dates, like May 1st, May 15th, you do this, and whose, whose job it is to commit to that task? Is it the search committee? Is it League of Cities and Towns? You know, who's doing what, when, that it has specific dates, so you could tell pretty much whether you were on track or you were behind and whether or not there was room to keep up. So, that's something we would want them to commit to doing after we've signed the contract. And just one note on that Skip, I'm just ballparking here. So, this is a 16-week timetable, so that's four months. So, yeah, I just wanted, in terms of timing, that's the other piece. I think just for all of us, if you wanted to have that buffer in there, it's going to be sooner. But again, we're sensing this, but just stating the record, I'm assuming we could start in then. I mean, that's getting into October following the 16-week timeline, which we think is aggressive. So, like, okay. All right. I mean, if there are estimating, they'll be done by the end of August if we get this done. So, four months is fair. Yeah, depending on. And that's, we talked about, that's the last select board. We ideally wanted to have the next person on board to spend some time with Bill, you know, gleams and stuff off from him. It's really good. I know when I left my position as program director, I spent a month with my successor, which was the first time it was ever done, and he was really thankful. So, we learned about it for a long time. You know, and that, depending on who you hire, how long they want to come to, there's a lot that play. Another one was, you know, these direct costs. Are they costs that the LTC pays and it's covered under ours, or are these part of the costs that we pay and they're outside the contract rate. It was a clear here, you know, like the candidate travel expenses. Are they going to pay for them? And then we, they're covered under the contract. You know, I think there's questions as to, you know, what was the 12,500 covering? Well, that kind of covers everything, but again, their costs, you know, if you look at the consultant, their costs are going to be running, you know, five to seventy-two hundred and fifty dollars. And then there are almost additional costs, which I think we're going to be paying for. Okay, it is a clear that that's what it was. And we also had a question, you know, how long do those costs hold if, you know, when it was an extra month, do those costs feel good and things that people have a question on? An agreement will outline terms and a not-to-exceed contract rate is what it says at the bottom of the page. Right, they have, you know, fifty to seventy-five hours and additional work will be billed at ninety dollars per hour. Page seven, you know, the job description we've talked about, you know, all these duties, and there's really two jobs here. There's the select more job and there's the effort. So it's really, you know, you're coming up with two job descriptions there. You know, in the salary range, there's, you know, two... Well, wouldn't you want to combine the job description as one? Well, I don't know. You know, I don't think we had agreed to that. I understand. We're kind of heading that direction and maybe... Well, I think you need to do two. Okay. Two job descriptions for one person? Well, yes. But, you know, if I could hire somebody else if we don't like this, that's being the double municipality here. And even when we get to the end, we talk about, I think we should have a contract with this new manager, too, that we don't have to bill, that I think the way the world is today, they would probably want a contract. If they want to, would want a contract. What are the performance things? Is there a probation period? You know, if you're going to get terminated, they probably want to know something, and I think you need two contracts. So if E-fund decides we're not happy, we're going to get rid of them, then, you know, the select board may not agree, but now you run into their contract, not ours. Totally understand. You know, that's a reasonable request, especially if it's not murdered yet. You just need to coordinate that. The process and what we, the LCT, could help support it, because there's nothing more fun than wonky jobs to apply for. Oh, well, you're funny, there's energy for one year, but anyway, I think the LCT will be a great partner in sorting out. You mentioned there, you know, the contract for the Montpelier manager was just in the paper recently as to what they're doing, and having that contract these days is more likely than, you know, not hopefully we, the city, the towns can help us with that. You know, we have an experience there. Another one was this position profile, that I'm, you know, that was one of the things that was supposed to be attached that wasn't that they would prepare. You know, we mentioned some education on this confidentiality prior to the process, you know, the screening and evaluating the applicants. We're glad to have that. Steps four and five, but oh, schedule the interviews, the interview questions, conduct interviews, and debrief. I think they had two weeks to do that. And then like the last one we had, we mentioned is having a contract and things that, you know, we're going to have to hire an attorney to help us with the contract and things. You know, it ought to be something I don't think we'd wait till we have, you know, selected the candidate, because that would prolong the process if you're trying to develop the contract at the same time. We know the things we would like to have in the contract. So if we've kind of prepared hours while we're doing the search, once you've made your selection, you can show them here's what, you know, our suggesting contract is there are things you would want in there, whether those were acceptable, you've kind of cut down some time on that. Well, many have wronged this gift, but Vermont League of Sees and Towns has a whole cadre of attorneys. Some of them are very special, some of them I know from our training were very specialized in human resource law. She's on her. Abby Friedman? I assume she's on her. She's on the... Yeah, that's who we are. In the proposal. Right. In here. But there were specific attorneys that dealt with human resources. And I would just assume, see, yes, they're going to, as part of their contract with us, they're going to look at that. You know, they're the human resource experts. And I'm not saying we don't want to just say sign right off, but then our town attorney could take a look at that. Well, who are you using for a town attorney? I mean, he needs to be a call. I don't think the LTC has done that. They're not going to... No, they're not going to look at the contract, but I think they're looking at... They're going to have some help in terms of human resource law and stuff like that. And I expect our attorney would be talking to them. But we need to take the initiative that our attorney is looking at it. And we want them to prepare it prior to, oh, well, yes, we're going to start on September 1st, but we want a contract. Well, you know, now it's three weeks to prepare a contract before he wants to start. Yeah, so we'll work on that in parallel with everything else that's going on and not wait till the end, yes. Does Eva engage the lawyer and attorney for this? Pardon? Does Eva have an attorney that's going to be working on this? No. We... It was Joan, the plane, on some things like how to build it. The other personnel attorney, you mentioned? Yeah. Scott Cameron had done some work for us. So that needs to be a discussion, you know, among us, who is their recommended attorney to work on this for us. So would there be any conflict at having the same attorney work for both of us? I'm not sure you would need two contracts. So you can understand what Skipper's saying, but, you know, I think the thing that you do quickest is to appoint your representatives and get this meeting with the LCT. But, you know, I don't have a contract. And I've never had a contract here. And I think it's more than normal now. There are other communities out there that have, you know, Blood Law still has a town in the village, I believe, and I think the same person is the manager there. You can work it out, I'm sure. But the two boards have to be kind of on the same page because that skipped seven minutes ago. And I used to say this jokingly all the time. This process is a little bit easier because back when I applied, there were three elected boards that had to deal with this. Those of those trustees and elected water commissioners from all the point of money. But, you know, I would, when we'd go around the room and for the priorities that you just did would have a joint meeting and say, okay, this is like where they have those five priorities and trustees have these five priorities and the water commissioners have those three priorities. So I have three number one priorities. Who decides which number one is which number one? So you're going to have to figure out a way to work it out. But I think Skip's right. You need to get going and get, you know, appoint some... And I think from my conversation with Skip is that the commissioners are meeting and they're going to appoint new people. I know in the past from the previous board and I'll leave this open, the initial representatives were going to be myself and Dan. I don't know if either of you two have any strong feelings for or against or would you like. You know, I think we should wait in terms of the public participation if we want a public representative to let the VLCT save what are pros and cons. But what's your bias feeling? More power to you. Personally, I'd be happy to have you two with more experience on the board, the representatives as delegates. And I think I'd appreciate being informed. Let's do what's going forward and I'd like to have a say in the final selection. As much as we can speaking to Skip's issue of confidentiality or something. Well, I think with confidentiality like they spell it out in there they put numbers instead of names on the thing. So we can discuss the applicants, we don't use their names, we just use number six or whatever it is. So they'll help direct us in that. Ultimately it's going to have to be the vote of the board, but certainly I cannot hire a manager. So I'm finally back to the board for final. I'm just, I mean I don't want to be sticking about it. I think it's like, I think it needs to move forward, it needs to move forward. What's our next step? So it sounds like the next step is approving this VLCT. I will say explicitly at the last meeting it was that Danny and Mike were going to have an initial meeting. It stopped tonight. So I'm just trying to, I thought we were going to have a broader conversation. I assumed that two people because of quorum issues, is it the possibility that both boards could be the hiring committee? I'm not trying to, I just, I don't know. It was about making all of those. I was asked to not have that meeting so that e-bug could have ample time to work at this. Okay, so then for an initial meeting, I think, okay, but just to clarify, because that was my point. I think we already made that motion. We did. I'm sorry. So if you want to reaffirm it, I think it's fine. Danny and Mike, having your meeting, it's awesome. Thank you. I think we kind of, I just wanted to make sure that you wouldn't do it in the first meeting. I appreciate that. I said, but. I'm just trying to understand it's just this question of the whole. You can't include them. We just wanted to read about the e-bug. Do you have any motion? Yeah, I don't know if they made one before. We did last. I think we did last. I think we did last. I just wanted to make sure with the more discussion that that was, where we're good with that. Municipal manager search. And we're going to explain there's been a number of discussions with the LCT to engage their services. The boards will have to decide whether there should be a resident member on the committee. The recruitment process was discussed. W. Shetla, front-minder conflict, and the LCT. There was no name. Danny said she will forward the VST contract to the boards and set up a meeting. Each board will designate two people to attend the initial meeting. Roger Platt made a motion to move forward with the LCT and engage the commissioners, second by CVNs, and pass on behalf of e-fud. Yeah, but it didn't make a motion. Yeah, you're right. That's right. You didn't make a motion to challenge Mike and Danny. I move that Mike and Danny represent this board on this manager search. Second. Any further discussion? If not, all in favor say aye. Aye. Okay. So Skip, you're going to, the sooner you can get to us with your two representatives, maybe Thursday. What my suggestion from this point with that schedule I gave you was to, I don't know, a few folks have any comment other than what's on here. All right. That's on me. I sent it to only e-fud and I sent it to you, so I'm sorry. The only real other things I had partial concern was some of the things that you already addressed. I'm not going to re-go over those. But the thing that I had, maybe I'm a little concerned and maybe that's going to come out with discussion with VLCT, how we're going to go with an initial search, which probably, as I said, by phone, e-mail, et cetera, but then how many people we want to bring in for interviews. And I know they talked about one to two or... Is that part of the contract, though? Well, that's part of their what was their outline of what they're doing. It would be part of their contract. Wow. Yeah, but I don't see us, we can decide now how many people we want to see till you see the application. Well, you... I would say I hate to look at very narrowly, we only have a couple of candidates. And I know you don't want to prolong the search, but it's always good to have a few candidates so you have a variety. Oh, there's many candidates as you can get. Oh, I know. Initially, you're going to do that. And they're going to wheel it down. But I think in terms of maybe like the final interviews, to me, maybe interviewing just one or two people may not... Personally, it may not be enough. The top of page 10 says the goal of this step is to take a large group of candidates, normally 5 to 10, and through interviews, reduce the number to 2 to 3 times. Sounds like a good process to make. So these are the EFUD comments that came from all of us. My goal was if we can to have a revised contract for your meeting on the 18th as to whether or not we can sign it or not, at least we can talk about it if it's a joint meeting. I would like to send these comments to Abigail tell them these are, if they're not the select board's comment, at least the EFUD, to look at the contract. How would it be modified to address these? We'll choose our two people on Thursday night, Thursday afternoon there, so that we will, they will have had these to look at them, then the select committee can decide whether we're going to do a Zoom meeting, we're going to go up there. After they've had a chance to look at the comments and what can they do with the goal of having a revised contract ready for your meeting on the 18th. But I think between now and then we, at least the four representatives should meet with that. The conversation was to have whether it's an in-person or a hybrid meeting, to have an actual sit-down to ask these questions in person, then we'll have a contract that everyone will. I think it's better to send them ahead of time so they know the questions and by the time I meet they can say, well this is no problem, I ask we should do this, that you're saving time totally understand. So what we need though and what we talked about last time, so realizing I'm sorry, I just want to send it next to you, but what I'll do is keep you apprised of the meeting date so that we can get your input and questions before that so I'll keep you up to date. But what we do want to do is we have talked about asking them for a meeting, asking Abby and, what's his name, I'm sorry, who he wants to be in attendance so that we can give them options for a calendar days and times. Yeah, we'll know that on Thursday. Okay, so I will not be so I will, I'll reach so, okay great. But I would like to send these comments to them tomorrow, not to wait till Thursday. Sure, so what I'll do is let them know that we'd like to have a meeting, send some, send these questions in advance, no not, some will be coming before the meeting, and then let them know that on Thursday we'll be able to offer some days and times. Yeah. After Thursday, sorry, we'll offer days and times. It's likely to be myself at Natalie, Cindy Works, Bob's going to have a summer job inspecting dams and Lefty doesn't have email and stuff on it. Yeah. So, just a technical question for Bill, if we meet this committee, I know it's two from the select board and two from EFUD, I assume we're exempt from it's not a meeting. Yeah. Okay, it's not it because if we had a third person it wouldn't be a meeting. That's my answer. Just making sure. Because I'm saying we have two and two. Wait a minute. There's seven of them. Yeah. There's the reports. And should Alyssa and I send our questions to Danny? Yeah. That's probably where Adelaide comes through. Thank you. Hi, I was going to say to respect our use of the OCTs time. Yeah. I've heard of the four of you but maybe one point of contact would be good. Yeah. Okay. So we're okay with these sending me and I'll copy you on the email. Well, do you want me to send them since I've been asked about the meeting? Yeah. They're even. Okay. So I'd rather send them at this point. Okay. And if you've got some in addition to that. So what I would say is like some of them. And just because there are comments that doesn't mean they're necessarily going to do it. They may have some other options when we get there to talk about it too. Right. These are just the comments that get things started. You know, this is we've had this thing for better than two months. And this is the first contact of getting back to them. So. Well, the biggest problem has been the change of the board and stuff like that. That is kind of hampered. You know, we all but said we're not going to do anything until we have to do more. Yeah. Yeah. We're moving forward. Thanks. We'll get you back to the basketball game. Okay. And I thank you for no surprises tonight as you did last time. Although it was a good surprise. You're going to take some money, right? I'm going to surprise it. And Chris, he is here tonight when he did a good job there. I was pleased he mentioned my dog. There's a lot of things that are worth spending on being mentioned with your dog. And I've had a lot of comments and things from people since they've got in the newspaper. And it is. It's a pleasure to be in the same category as a two-time winner of the basketball game. Woo! The only two-time winner in history. Oh, there you go, yeah. So, thank you for going home and watch the game and we'll catch up on everything. That was awesome. I'm going to review your art. So, I'll actually prepare it. Okay. Let's move on to manager's items. We're a little behind. Bill, discussion of ARPA administration and compliance. All right, Nick needs to come up here. You're on our final cut, okay? So, thank you, Dr. for coming up. I heard both from Mike and Alyssa last week. They went to training at the LCT and not surprisingly, there was some conversation there about ARPA and we have a reporting requirement coming up as of April 30th. We have to report what we've done as of March 31st and the reporting deadline is April 30th of this year. So, the reporting period is from when ARPA was approved last March, March 3rd, 2021 through March 31st, 2022. We didn't get any money until the fall of 2021 and the money has been sitting in our bank and while we have made some decisions about how we're going to use our money, nothing has been spent as of now. We have, I think all of you understand that when we have town meeting there's a 30-day period in which we have to wait until folks have the chance to appeal any decision made at town meeting and ask for a revolt, if you will. So, the 30-day has just ended April 1st, which is past March 31st. So, our report is going to be basically we haven't spent any money. We will have this issue on the agenda for the next meeting as well, because as both Mike and Alissa heard, in the intervening time between when we received the money and we learned all kinds of information about how we had to identify lost revenue because if you could identify lost revenue, you were much, it was much easier to spend the money basically you transferred from the armored fund into your general fund and then appropriated. But you could only the rules were that you could only appropriate your armored money up to the amount of lost revenue that you could determine. And VLCT along with Nimrick who does our accounting software work together collaboratively and built a lost revenue calculator and in 2021 after we received the money I worked with Michelle Ryan, our bookkeeper and we put our 2020 revenues into the calculator and determined that in that particular year we had I think the number was somewhere like $350,000 range of lost revenue and I anticipated that we would have the same amount of lost revenue or their amounts between 21 you know in 2021 when I went to tell Michelle to put the 21 revenues into the lost revenue calculator I had missed the directed if you will the people at Nimrick told told Michelle she said well you don't have to use the lost revenue calculator any longer because Congress has well the Treasury Department has passed a rule and the rule is that all money is up to $10,000,000 that any municipality receives if you're a municipality like Waterbury as opposed to a municipality like Burlington and Burlington only one state that doesn't fit into the broadest category that we're in so what the rule says now is all our performance that you receive as a municipality can be used as lost revenue up to $10,000,000 and our share is going to be about $1.5 million and that's way less than $10,000,000 so at the next meeting we'll probably have an agenda item and I will ask you to formally make a motion to stipulate that we are going to apply proper money and use it all as lost revenue which simply means that we can use our normal budgeting process in order to make appropriations now we did that with the money some of the money that we appropriated at tell meeting $100,000 that we appropriated to the ice center I had plugged that in and that was going to be lost revenue the $600,000 that we have put in the budget and appropriated to EFOT that is an eligible expenditure so I wasn't going to call that lost revenue but I talked with Katie Buckley the BLCT APA Desire if you will he is I spoke with her last week and said it seems to me that we would be in the best position if we put everything in the lost revenue column and even the $600,000 which is an eligible expenditure there is much less over as reporting requirements so we will make everything lost revenue and going forward we will simply use our budget process to appropriate the money now that doesn't mean that you can't have public information meetings that you can't engage the public to say okay you know we still have whatever it is $900,000 about the funds left that's unappropriated how would we like to use them if as it was pointed out at the last meeting and I had confirmed this the select board is the final arbiter of how money can be used so the select board even in Vermont that's what my question was because in Vermont if you're a town like Waterbury is under the general laws of the state the select board recommends a budget to the voters the voters of the legislative body that actually appropriates the money so I didn't know if in Vermont that process had to be followed and the advice that we've been getting from Katie luckily there's no the federal government made the rules for this and the legislative body and the community is the select board so the select board is within its rights even you know at the next meeting if you want to appropriate $75,000 to CD5 or within your rights to do that but we'll consider everything lost which will give us the biggest flexibility and the least only risk reported requirement we are still required to appropriate all the money by the end of 2024 so we've still got almost you know two four years to do anything that way and it has to be spent by 2026 so those provisions still stick is it omega timeline provisions or are there still compliance provisions the compliance there will still be reporting there's reporting but because it's we're going to classify the lost revenue the allocation it's simply going to be we we spent this money so it should be fairly straightforward assuming that you can keep up with the constant garage of you know emails that we get from the US Department of Treasury that I have I forward a lot I forward a lot to Nick so is that calendar 2024 it is calendar 24 and calendar 26 so what I'd like to do and you might decide to wait until the 18th to do this if you want to think about it a little bit but back in July of last year on the 9th I went into the US Department of Treasury's portal and filled out the information that was required and last year sometime before July 9th the select board appointed me as the authorized representative for the town of Watering regarding to ARPA and you appointed Pearl on the town of Treasure as the secondary contact and I think I would like either today or at the next meeting if you want to think about it and talk about it because it's getting a little bit late now I would like to have and I've already talked about this with Pearl I don't think you'll be offended if you take it off of the contact list I would be deeply grateful he forged a nick and I hit the link so I think I think what I would like to do I feel your pain what I would like to do even now is to make Nick the authorized representative and make me the secondary contact and he didn't know I was going to say that until tonight I think we've been talking about getting Nick on here as a secondary contact I have two reasons that I would like to appoint Nick as the authorized representative and need to be the secondary contact one and this is the biggest thing for me is he's way better with electronic communication and negotiating portals and all the rest of that stuff than I am and you know he has been following some of these things but I think it makes sense I'm going to be transitioning away from here at the end of the year when I do leave then at that point maybe the board changes whoever the new town manager is becomes the authorized representative but for now for me it just would make me feel better if Nick was the authorized representative and he I'm putting him on the spot a little bit if you don't want to do that you can say no I'll be the secondary contact and I'll live with you a few weeks ago you already told me you were in oh I did I didn't think I said anything to you of course I've been finding out a lot lately that I forget a lot and you cited the technology piece as well that's absolutely the case so I'd like to I'd like you to do that I think it will serve the community much better with that and so do you have a question? we have a motion and then we can bring it here I'll move that Nick become the authorized representative for the ARCA funding and that Bill become the secondary representative thank you Roger do you have a second? second second a discussion yeah what what are the slide from you know actually just logging in and using the computer pieces what does that tell what does that mean? he's the authorized representative is the one that makes communication with the department of treasure and what it's going to mean now is that before Nick will start with Nick we'll ensure it's reporting that that has to be done is done properly and on a timely basis you know if Nick gets hit by the rec pass then we'll step up and do the job is it just annually reporting that? what's that? is it just annual reporting for the 5.5.7? um right now that's what I am aware of but there is as I said there's a continual oh they're communications communication that's going to come randomly that's how the ARCA funds work yeah and uh you know whatever the whatever the reporting requirements end up being it will be helpful uh you know we're already on the the portal but I think it's this email they sent out saying or maybe it was on last week that you know that they're not using the Dunn's number anymore they're going to identify so I know so the same thing all this stuff it just it just makes me start to shake we're going to say all of our heads are going to explode I think it makes all too especially with transition I think having Nick it's just such a smart thing to do you know whoever the new town man they may have another thought so we can just revisit it when that happens and I think it's also something with the whole discussion I think we're having next of you know the community service officer yeah we can we can transition to that so did you vote no no no but that was just my thought with that something within that family but no one has any questions we can bring you a vote all in favor say aye aye aye any opposed none motion carries okay so now we want to bring up the thank you congratulations yes congratulations thank you your new power your new power your new power you're a heart you're a heart you're a heart you're a heart you're a heart yeah and I would just say the reason I called Bill is because Katie Buckley was quite emphatic in her presentation that if you're taking revenue well I'll say it has to be this reporting period that must be done now and tend not to go back so that's just to say that's why I at least gave Bill a compliment yeah that's right I appreciate that yeah I appreciate that and I believe I have no no qualms when people call me up and say do you know that you have to do XYZ that's not a problem and now that you've appointed Nick I'm confident properly okay okay thanks if we want to move on to update on weight and salary arrangements like I said in confidence should we want to at first just discuss the next part of it um no no you can stay here I think so y'all got the memo that I have sent to you I apologize that it was Sunday afternoon before I got it to you I just got tied up last week as an aside I'm generally working now Sundays to Thursdays I'm taking my weekend as Fridays and Saturdays for the most part you know I work every day in some respects always the way it's been you know I will always do what needs to be done to get the job done I think you all know that already about me but I am um you know beginning even though we've only been in this building for five years I have you know 34 years worth of stuff that you have to kind of get through and decide what needs to be kept and I've been trying over the past well really we've got here to do a lot more filing electronically than I had in the past and I'm also trying to put um a good template in place where you know whoever the next person is understands that okay it's January and this needs to be done in addition to you know meeting every Monday night and meeting most Wednesday afternoons um and when it comes to you know February this needs to be done and you need to do this memo and you've got to do the um um the bond compliance with the bond bank before you know March 1st and so in order to do all the things I need to do to try to make the transition smooth it's a lot easier to do a lot of that on Sunday when there's nobody else in the building um and the phone isn't ringing so for those of you who are listening out there don't call me on Sundays um but anyway so if you find that I'm not here often enough on Friday for your lightning you'll know that I've been here on Sunday but if there's anything that I need to do of course I will and if the public can only meet with me on Friday I'll certainly accommodate those kind of uh requests anyway um pay raises typically take place in April as I just said we've got a 30 day appeal period after a town meeting day so we get into April and um we now we have a good budget and for 2022 um I budgeted basically the first 14 weeks of the year at the old pay raise for employees and then um the next 38 weeks of the year will be the new pay so pay raises will go into effect this month and um I wrote this memo which is similar to the one that I wrote last year with some emphasis placed on what's been happening with inflation and you all know that you're just looking at the news and I I didn't go to look at the latest CPI numbers but you know they're the 8% range right now um you know back at the beginning of the year when when we were putting the budget together things were still in the 2 to 3% range and then you know it really started to ratchet up with the first the gas prices and the continuous supply chain issues and then of course the war and the crane has made it even worse um and we can't fix all of that all at once uh last year for Alyssa and Roger's benefit uh I did go to the board on a couple of occasions and say you know we've got to make some new year adjustments and even though they weren't really in the budget because we're frankly put under a lot of pressure especially in the public works departments where surrounding communities were offering starting pay that was higher than we were paying people that had worked here for 10 years doing the same job and you know it's it's not like they had to drive to Bennington to get that job you know it was within a reasonable community period so we did give some raises in November to the to the highway department uh on the EFUD side of things I had done some things a little bit earlier with the water and sewer employees and then in December I came to the select board and I said for the administrative staff I would like to to give them a small buff uh in December which would simply raise their base before we got into the new year and then calculate on that so um the ranges uh and if you saw those colors that I gave you um most of the ranges didn't change too much last year was the first year and probably five or six that I even had to come in and change the ranges we were all you know we were able to keep within that range that we had set a number of years ago because for the last several years before 20 mid-2021 you know inflation was almost non-existent it was at a 2% range so the ranges didn't have to get adjusted very much at all but we did adjust them a little bit last year and I've made some adjustments here this year um as I said the budget was built and um you know uh we don't um the select board does not has not typically set the individual wage rates for individuals the manager has been given that authority to do that um none of what I've written here is anything that we did budget for so everything that's on the page was included in the 2022 budget so there's no surprises there um so you haven't changed any of these based on the new inflation rate um no not for for now I have the what what I tried to say Roger was that we gave raises in April and we made a couple of mid-year adjustments to get them up here and then you know you can see what I I did say here that third paragraph uh you know this budget there is a wide-ranging pay increase depending on if you go employee by employee some as little as 3% those are the market so a 3% raise you know if I was doing the budget all over again maybe it would be a 5% but I've got 3% and that's what we we budgeted and that's what I'll do um doesn't mean that I depending on where things continue to go with inflation you know I could come back to the board again in September and say you know it's a strange place because for a long time I won't say it was an employer's market but we didn't have that pressure on us uh of the uh the increasing wage rates right now and as you know all of you know that you know there's lots of help watching science out there and there's lots of jobs people don't want to do um you know businesses um people don't want those kinds of jobs and they're in a position that they feel that they don't have to take them and you know we've got a lot of people with pretty good skills that are marketable in not only in other municipalities but in other private industries as well so I'll try to stay on top of it I haven't seen that so any questions about that? some of we have already kind of discussed last year so what? we've discussed it last year yeah but they were I understand but it was at this point even though I think what Roger's question was leaning to with the most recent kind of inflation I don't think we're in a position to change radically change the structure because we have a budget kind of in place for the year right it is sort of an extraordinary situation that was not predicted four months ago right and I think what we're going to have to do is to be nimble, flexible whatever you want to call it and just keep our eyes and ears open and you know I will be very communicative with the board as I was last year if I face these kind of difficulties and you know of course the later in the year that you make adjustments the last impact that has on the current budget hearing that we're in so and you know we've done that in the past too we did it last year make some adjustments at the end of the calendar year that won't really impact the budget but gets them to a new base and then the next budget will be more requested for next budget so we don't need any more of this no I would I would ask you to make a motion to approve the pending ranges that are here because the yellow was new from last year we have a motion so moved thank you I'll second it the motion second a further discussion I don't have any other concerns I guess that was my question and you answered to some extent but you don't have any concerns about retention I have I have I don't have any known concerns but I don't know that there's trouble you know I'm hopeful I as we all are you know the Federal Reserve is picking up interest rates I'm glad I'm not a mortgage but you know that's that's a that's a way that you try to bring in inflation you know we've been hearing that there's a lot of the inflation is kind of a temporary phenomenon based on all the stimulus money and it's going to start to ratchet down and then of course the Russians through Ukraine into the next a couple of months ago now and then we'll see so we'll we'll pay attention to it and if I hear that there's trouble I'll obviously talk to the board about it but I think for right now I've been I believe transparent with the staff they they I think they know what to expect in terms of raises and both of them any further questions if not all in favor say aye aye any votes or any carries so with regard to Nick might be talking about that so that's okay and I explained here that Nick's going to move from from a non-exempt position which means he gets carried over to an exact position that he supervises more people more regularly Nick and I are in the process by the way of getting ready to get a advertisement out for the new full-time recreation person that's been budgeted for we didn't quite get it done on the next whiteboard meeting we'll bring the job description to get you to approve the job description for the new employee but I think we're going to advertise for it before the job description is formally adopted by the select board because we're hoping to have that person start in May sometime so that's just around the corner and we'd like to get that person hired as soon as we can Nick has been actively working with me trying to you know as you all know I think Nick just received his doctorate degree he's very interested in administration and and learning the ins and outs of municipal government I think he's decided he wants to make municipal government his career at least for his part down the road as somebody his age can see but he's made a commitment there and we're meeting on a weekly basis right now helping him understand a lot of the issues with regard to finance borrowing working with the auditors which is always a joy and the just the various things that have to be done on a budgetary basis and I think my hope here is that with by imparting this information to him notice I didn't say by imparting this information to him you know somebody else will be able to help in the transition as I move out and frankly we're trying to figure out what what title I should provide him the director of recreation community services is what I put on your the memo that I sent to you and that's to recognize just what we budgeted for this new budget so he's going to have another full-time recreation employee he already manages and supervises the all the seasonal recreation staff does a good job at it like this I don't have to deal with all those how many of them 150 16 just I cramp I am signing the time frame so they wait when someone comes so anyway and then we're the budget also contemplates a community service officer that we budgeted to come on in July so Nick will be working with me on that to come up with the job description and my plan was that Nick was going to supervise that person as well be the director supervises so that position will be a direct report to this director of recreation community services we talked about the outward administration already you know we can have a title that's that long I'm still thinking about what we might propose so if you want to think about it yourself if you can if you want to talk to me or if you think about it you can do that as well but we'll we'll revisit that but I just want to make sure that nobody has an issue with it that you think that it's a reasonable thing to do and I think you know we've got a a good employee here and somebody that is interested in taking leadership positions and roles and I'm grateful for that I'm still disappointed in the select board and you know not the current people because none of you are none of you are here Chris Yens was here at the time but you know when when Leanne Yens retired as our bookkeeper I recommended to the board then that we should hire if not an assistant manager at least the finance director and and the pushback was well that's another position and it's more tax money and you're doing a great job at it just keep doing it and it's like okay wanted to try to build some transition because I knew at some point there's going to be a whole bunch of people leaving this organization and and you know I thought about it again a couple years ago and then the pandemic hit and that just kind of threw everything into a turmoil that we were laying off people we were staff and trying to cut expenditures to because we didn't know what was going to be happening with revenues so I never really visited that the that opportunity wouldn't have been a good look at that point in time yeah but we're in a different place in time now and you know I'm not you know I can't tell you how many months and days and weeks and minutes it is until I retire I'm not that anxious to retire because I still like this job but I guess I'm trying to just let you know that you need to think not only about replacing me but just having some a stable of good people here that hopefully will stay around I agree I think it's a I think it's a something when I first got more of the time for you that what you did you know the curse of being good at your job is then you have to do more and then not have you know more so I think having more staff having people who are here with institutional knowledge having good leadership and management and we were growing town so if we ignore that we're going to be in big big trouble especially with losing you so yeah I think it's really important to have have some foresight just like we talk about people who are competitive salaries because they're highly skilled it goes hand in hand with that I might have been I agree with Danny I saw that first hand in the USDA where we were in aging ages you know we were very capable ages but a lot of people closing in on retirement and I said you've got we've got to look at training and giving people training opportunities to get into leadership roles and it's really important as that kind of and I think we're going to see we're seeing this right now in our town we're seeing a breakthrough kind of leaving our town you know being more steep headed up yeah you know there would be a few others that are going to be probably not that far behind but it's something that you have to look at you have to plan you have to give people opportunity you have to enrich what their experience is and some some people don't want to you know that's I hate to say that you know leadership is can be tough you know the buck stops here sometimes but so anyway if you just think about it for the I think it's something we're going to be definitely thinking as I said you know feel free to have a conversation with me even with Nick I'm not opposed you said before you wanted to be with the highway department I have mixed feelings about board members feeling you know with with it's one thing anyway I'm not opposed to it we can talk about that but I'm letting you know that I'm okay if you have discussions with me we're not doing I wouldn't do anything to exert your I understand you don't want to know you kind of want to hear from these people and sometimes they feel like they feel like the select board is just out there and sometimes they hey the select board may actually care about it and that's that's one thing it's not about what your job is what we may be able to offer them okay so that's what I wanted to say Dan right now so there's no action necessary tonight you want to say anything you're sitting here really quietly so my stack of training material that Bill and I have gone through is already this big and it's only been less than two months so there's a lot there's a lot that Bill does that people don't realize be a sponge all right soak up as much as knowledge as you can four years I have then so this is way more keep dying than what we've done before okay okay so can I get the you're good you're good you're good it's up to the board the last item on the agenda is about investment portfolios and investment policies and funds if you want to talk about it tonight Ken we're going to have a budget report at the next meeting if you want to you know put this off it's your choice it's it's I thought Bill's mental was pretty good you know describing things I don't know if he had questions or if he wanted to do something now or let me let me hand this out anyway I'll bring this to you with you and I didn't unfortunately I didn't have the the doubt sheet which is the talk sheets there yes see that so I the balance sheet was for my office updated yesterday and so I I held the whole thing for you Bill just tells us what we should be looking for as we review this and I don't know if we need a detailed discussion maybe I could wait until we have a budget review next week next meeting and I don't want sounds great okay I always did didn't say one for yourself no I I had I made six copies and I kept one for myself I've never seen your moments I know it's a good thing we got Nick in here just All right. Do you all have more than just one? Why don't we do this next time? I'm thinking like a man, too. I don't know. There should be, you should have four balance sheets or four. Yeah. I'm only seeing three. I don't know. I think there's a one balance sheet. We can go over it next time. One, two, four. Wait one session. Wait one session. Wait a minute. I'm still doing it next time. The girl looks like Anne. Take a seat. I want Roger so much time. Suggestion? Suggestion? Suggestion. Intense viewing. This is the norm. The norm. As long as we can get a mortgage. I think in the interim one, the bill comes back. It's not kind of on the agenda, but me and Danny both got an email today from a... Oh yeah. ...Carrie Phillips. I was baffling. I was going to email Bill later. It basically was titled 19 section 1109 and 1110. And I looked those up. They were all Arbamon statues, dealing with kind of roads. And she said, hello, select board chair and vice chair. Is it accurate to assume that this having been posted? I can forward it. I used to give me back at this stage. You all have different... Each one of you has a different thing. Oh! We have my stuff. I left this stuff on the chair leaving out of my office so I wouldn't forget. This is the updated one. So this is the balance sheet and the investment portfolio for all four funds that we have. Funds that we have investments in. So we won't spend too much time on this. Bill, I was just talking about... I don't know if you know. Me and Danny both received an email from a Carrie Phillips about title 19 section 1109 and 1110. And which has to do with... I looked it up. It has to do with roads and kind of... And a brief question was, the lowest select board chair and vice chair, is it accurate to assume that this having been posted to the town's website means that it has been filled with the Waterbury Select... filed with the Waterbury Select Board and is effective in the town of Waterbury? I'll just forward it. I'll forward it to you. I'm going to forward it, I'll copy you and then we'll go from there. It was kind of weird. It has to do with roads and stuff like that. Roads have been posted for months. It's like abusive highways. It's good. I don't see what she's getting at. I'm going to forward it to the manager and then we can deal with it. Yeah. Okay. So back to the investment stuff. So the memo that I gave you gives a description of the four funds that we have that are reserve funds. And then I sent the investment policy as well. The Veterans Monument Fund and the CC Fisher Fund, both kind of come under the general objective, or the general policies here of the investment policy. And then the Tax Stabilization Fund and the Cemetery Fund, the Cemetery Commission, has had their own investment policy that I did forward here. And the policy also has the Caucus Fund still in it and the town by best of itself in the Caucus Fund, a number of years ago now. So we don't have that any longer. The Tax Stabilization Fund is the fund that helps provide revenue to our general fund budget. The other funds, the Cemetery Fund, obviously it's only used for cemeteries. And then the CC Fisher Fund and the Monument Fund are even more narrow uses for that. I suggest that at some point in maybe in 2022, we ask Gary Dillon, the fire chief, to come in and talk about the CC Fisher Fund a little bit. As I've said, that fund was established by the Village Fire Department years ago. It was really established by the fire in May. It was a fund that they set up for themselves. And then I think what they found out was that I was working with a lot of the village's money at the time and doing a pretty decent job of investing it. So they said, well, why don't the village manage this? So the village took it on, we invested in it, and then when the departments merged, the town and the village departments merged, the town got the money. We don't use the money nearly for anything. It hasn't been like just a couple thousand dollars that's been spent in the last time. It was spent in 2013. And I just think we should understand who we're holding it for and what the uses are for that money. Can I come to the parking lot, Carla, to invite Gary Dillon to come at some point? So you see this your fund? Yes, thank you. The other funds are pretty self-explanatory. One thing that is starting to raise its head a little bit in municipalities and the state, and it's an initiative that Ted Brady, the new executive director of the LCT, has begun to talk about. And it seems likely after EFUD meets at their annual meeting in May, the quid pro quo for the $600,000 of our property that we're going to give them for water projects, they're going to turn over their revolving loan fund to the town. And that revolving loan fund has about $1.7 million of assets in it. 1.2 of it is wiped out, but there's $600,000 of cluster mines that's in cash and investments there. And a number of communities have reserve funds and some of them have revolving loan funds, but there's been some talk about should that money be invested for things to benefit Vermont more directly than they do right now. So if you look at the tax stabilization fund, for example, if you look at the balance sheet, that's fund 48 so that the balance sheet will start with 48 on the left-hand margin. Does everybody have that? So if you look at the balance sheet, you can see there's $472,768 in investments in that fund. And you can look at the Edward Jones statement right behind it and see 472768, and you can see that we have three corporate bonds. We've got a number of mutual funds, American funds, mainly. We've got a Davis fund, a couple of Franklin funds, and then the Goldman fund is a money market fund. And then you see down at the very bottom, well, halfway down on the second page, we have a protective liability that's worth about $221,000. And then if you go back to the balance sheet, if you look back on the balance sheet page, you see that there's $77,886 that's due to other funds. That just means it's in the checking account. So this tax stabilization fund has $472,000 invested. There's $77,886 in the checking account that belongs to the tax stabilization fund. And then the advance to other funds, the $499,300, is loans that we have made to ourselves. So the tax stabilization fund has loaned money to the infrastructure CIP. It's loaned money to the fire equipment CIP. Rather than going to the bank and borrowing that $500,000 and paying interest to the bank, we're borrowing it from ourselves. And we did that a number of years ago because we couldn't get any good interest rates on fixed income. You know, those bonds that we have there, you can see that financial debenture, financial corp debenture, it's paying 7.25%. But it's also going to mature a year from November. The nation's bank one is going to mature in 2025. Back when we bought those bonds, those fixed income securities, we were able to buy bonds from corporations at 4%, 5%, 6%. Some of them we got really good buys on things like that. But of late, you know, the last five or six years, corporate bonds were paying 2% if you were lucky. And it wasn't worth tying up that much cash for 2% for, you know, 10 or 15 years to buy a bond. So I came to the select board and they said, what if we buy bonds from ourselves? We'll pay ourselves 4% interest at the time. We graduated it down with a hand etiquette to 2.75 or 2.5 just to kind of save a little bit of money for the taxpayers. But we've been paying ourselves back and that has been helping to buoy this tax stabilization fund. But one of the ideas that's being thrown out about now is, well, and I don't think anybody, including me, would recommend doing it with all of this money that we've gathered at the Jones, but maybe of the $472,000 that we're investing at the Jones, should we think about putting, you know, 5% of that, 10% of that. So, you know, $50,000, $80,000, should we invest that with the Vermont Community Fund? Should we invest that more, you know, in organizations in Vermont that will turn around and make investments in Vermont communities with Vermont businesses? You know, when we get the UDAG fund, you know, we've made lots of investments to local businesses. We've lent the Ice Center. We've lent Max's restaurant. We've lent the Blue Stone restaurant. They paid it back. You know, they went out of business. They sold the building, but, you know, they paid us back. Stow Street Cafe. We have a number of the new bell block on Stow Street. We've lent money to them, very old partners. So we're making investments with that money into the community, but we have a lot of that money also invested in corporate bonds and stocks and mutual funds. And I'm not suggesting that we should move completely out of that universe, but should we talk about maybe investing in some other things? Is there a reason why we couldn't use some of the tax stabilization fund to loan, say, for a housing project that Housing Vermont would want to do? We certainly can do that with the UDAG funds and with the CDBD funds. So these are things that I just want you to start thinking about. Some of it will require some conversations with attorneys to make sure that it's legal to do certain things, but it's an idea that Ted Brady threw out. I've also asked them to think about is there a way, and VLCP tried to do this about 25 years ago, but we buy our property and cash with the insurance from Vermont, New York City's property and cash with the municipal fund. We buy our unemployment insurance from the LCT Bureau. We used to buy health insurance through the LCT, but we buy that directly through the marketplace now. But those two insurance trusts, passive, they probably have 60, 80, maybe 100 million dollars of money that they have to have for their reserves to make sure that they can pay their claims and stuff like that. And they have invested that money and they use a money manager. And I threw out to Ted Brady, he said maybe we should use VLCP as a means for municipalities who have money to invest, that we could invest it through VLCP using your money managers and using the professional help that they get to do it. I mean, I've done most of this for the town and EFUD using the local Edward Jones office. I think it's been very successful. I think we've got a good record. But there's an expense to everything. If you pool with other municipalities and you get the same benefits of pooling that we get from buying that insurance, that you can be investing in your fees are much smaller than what you pay if you're doing it directly yourself. So there's just things that I'm asking you to think about. No positions are required tonight. We will probably work on updating the investment policy. I noticed the other day there's some things and I think it alludes to Yankee bonds. What's that? There's a mention of the village on the HR. I don't worry too much about that. But there's certain things in here that maybe we've probably we've never purchased as a security but maybe we shouldn't have the authority to have some of these things any longer. So I'll be taking a stab at that. But I'd like you to think when it comes time to amend the investment policy if there is a way to invest in something from bond and I don't mean, you know, Jerry, Dr. Pepper or even Ben and Jerry because I'm talking about the wanted community fund, those kind of places that are lending to small businesses so anyway. So all I need to say for tonight I think if you have questions about any of these portfolios certainly ask me. Just so you know I do try to stay on top of this pretty closely and it was dumb luck but in February of 2020 for most of these funds and the village funds and even the library funds I said, you know, the stock market has been at an all time high and we should kind of rebound. So we took a lot of money out sold a lot of securities and put it just into cash and then in March of 2020 the pandemic hit and the stock market tank and I could tell you that it was really great if I had pushed it all in then but we didn't. But I have just a couple of months ago with the Edward Jones office down the street here so if you look at the tax stabilization fund it's page three or five at the top under mutual funds you'll see it says there's a Goldman F.A. government fund that's a money market fund there's $86,000 there right now and a couple of months ago there was $100,000 and we're doing we're buying back two mutual funds right now and basically a dollar cost the averaging basis so there's like $7,000 a month that we're buying securities and at the end of the year we'll still have something and I've got a whole memo that I didn't bring with me but all of these funds are buying systematically into the market now and you know if you want to talk about the makeup of the portfolios at any point you certainly can do that it's not my money it's the town's money you should review these things look at it if you have questions about where our money is you can certainly raise those questions and if you think well you know we should rebalance or we should have less invested in more in cash those are things that we can talk about we've got the information here now that you can look at and if you have questions about it if you're not very familiar with investing and you want to sort of promote you can certainly come and talk to me about that I'm not an expert but I'm getting some I'm pretty experienced in investing that surprised me in a lot of those categories that in our risk tolerance proposal that we were in moderately aggressive and I know for myself that's probably where I am and I was surprised to see that the town would be well if you read the investment policy especially for the tax stabilization fund you know this is a fund that we have in perpetuity and you know it says up to 50% of the portfolio would be invested in common equity or mutual funds and we need to rebalance it and you know and then no more than 20% of the portfolio should be in any one particular fund so there have been times I've come back to the select board like five or six years ago and said you know what if we keep 50% in equity mutual funds and keep 50% in cash and then fixed income fixed income isn't paying anything so the select board said okay go ahead I recommended well let's buy some blue chip mutual funds that have companies that are paying big dividends you know so if you get a 3% dividend you know that's something that we can talk about for the tax stabilization fund it says risk tolerance moderate to moderately aggressive that's allowable that doesn't mean you can't have some in something more aggressive than that it's just so those are things you know I would encourage you to look at the policy and if you're concerned about it we can have a conversation but the tax stabilization fund is something that where we built this up to a point now that a few years ago the voters changed the policy with regard to taking money out of that fund up until about three years ago if the portfolio went down in any given year we weren't allowed to take any money out the fund is worth over a million dollars now so the talent said that the authority is there to take up to 5% of ending balance of the fund in any given year so even if the portfolio goes down you can still take money and put it into the into the general fund and if you're going to do that you've got to be able to have some ability to actually make some money you're not going to be able to take a lot out if you're only earning fixed income and it's only earning two or three percent so I try to watch it but we have a pretty good experience it's just that I'm more aggressive than like my wife is totally conservative but I'm more aggressive but I always spoke with municipalities that we want to take maybe a little bit more of a moderate maybe moderately I think that's the only way to make money is if you're more aggressive because I would say the country is only as strong as the stock market if we were and that's why we don't have investments in the CIT funds anymore three years ago we used to have investments there we backed out of that completely we don't invest anything in our general reserve funds so the ones that we are that we have investments in at all are funds that we don't use on a regular basis and are there to provide some backup so it's a conversation is there any further business to come before us if not motion to adjourn it'll so move second motion is second all in favor say aye aye I think I have a $50 and I was just saying it's on our website but you may remember it thank you