 On Monday, the 6th of November, we'll call the Board a special meeting of the SREC Board for an informational meeting on the 2023 charter vote. The first item on the agenda is to approve the agenda, but I have a motion. I move to approve the agenda as presented. Seconded. Moving seconded. We do have a quorum of three. So, any further discussion? Hearing none, all there is aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? All right. The agenda is approved. And the next item is information meeting about the December 5th, 2023 charter vote. And this is the second meeting earlier last Monday with about 15 people attending. Showing some interest, certainly. And Tom, at that meeting, you did a nice summary. I was wondering if you would mind hitting us again with the general, what this is all about. Just fill it up. Yeah. Over here. Sorry about that. So we've got a later crowd tonight. I'm still going to give you the full presentation, like it or not. So before I get into it, some of the history, we first talked about the charter, the first meeting after town meeting day. Did not make it into the minutes, but I had notes where there was a brief conversation. Cane, in fact, raised it. On April 3rd, I was directed by the select board to formally begin research and planning for a charter. On April 17th, there was the first real presentation in discussion. Had another conversation in May, sorry, in May in a long meeting. And then there was some charter work scheduled for the summer, which we hit the pause button briefly because of the flood. But we took it up again in earnest in August, and here we are today. Some town charters are really expansive. Pages and pages, St. Almond's Montpelier, Barry had 30, 40 page charters. In many cases, those charters just recite state law, which I never quite understood because the purpose of a charter is to vary from state law. So I never saw a point in repeating state law. In the end, a select board decided to keep the charter pretty short and simple and to focus on really two points. So the first is the manager's authority, and the language we came up with is shown above. One particular issue that happened in the past year, and it's happened before, is that if there's a vacancy in the planning and zoning office that we have, those positions have to be recommended to the select board by the planning commission. The volunteer board, they don't necessarily have the time above and beyond their regular weekly meetings now to go through a long interview process. It's especially awkward when it's the zoning person because that person really works with the development review board, not the planning commission. So you have a volunteer board involved in the hiring process of an employee that really doesn't even work for that board on a regular basis. So this essentially clears it up and gives that authority to the manager. It also retains some authority with the select board. So department heads, going to the bottom below it, the department heads that are hired have to be approved by the select board. Its intentional language there with a form of approval is not defined. So it's about the relationship between the manager and the select board. It could be that the manager wants to hire someone who's well known to the community and the select board says go for it, and it's informal. And it could be that it's a much more formal process, but it's up to the manager and the select board to work that out at the time, and I think that makes sense. It doesn't pin us down to one model per se. The other sentence is about hiring and firing. Subjects of the manager's discretion are really based on current and past practice. And you can go ahead and move on Karen. The meat of the charter I think above and beyond that is about the local options tax. And the local options tax can actually be broken up into three questions. You can do a general retail sales tax. You can do the room and meals where the alcoholic beverages. We decided to pose it as one question here. Long list of towns already have these taxes in full. There's a shorter list of a few that just have a chunk of it, one or the other. A couple of people have asked if they think it puts us at some sort of an advantage or disadvantage, 81%. But the reality is all our competitors have this already. Still in fact past there is just last year. So I don't think it puts our businesses at a disadvantage to have it. I think it puts our residents at a disadvantage on how the revenue source, when they're paying it effectively everywhere else they go. And Waterbury is a tourist town. I don't have exact data to show what portion of this is paid by non-residents. But I think we can all agree it's pretty darn substantial. You can go ahead and move on Karen. So this just shows current rates and what adding on 1% would do. I did get a question over the app since the last meeting about the cannabis. And it does certainly apply to that. That's not what's in here, but that is its own set of tax rules and rates. Applies to everything that your retail sales tax applies to. It does not apply to motor vehicles. It does not apply to groceries. It generally doesn't apply to clothing. I believe there's some luxury items of clothing that it would apply for. We do get the Airbnb's, the short-term rentals, and we do get it applied to internet purchases. Sorry, did you say it doesn't apply to cannabis? It does apply to cannabis. It does. And you can go ahead to the next slide, please. So just to think about this, these are just the categories. I've got 18 years of data here. And quick question, and Skip might know this. Skip, how much do you think our tax rate has grown over the last 18 years? Not our rate, but our tax living. I don't know. It's been 5% on average. So three of these four categories are above that 5%. General retail is about four, just to give it a little perspective. But I like the fact that the town is tying some of its revenue and future to some categories of growth that have exceeded our historical growth in taxes that could help put some downward pressure on the rate. Now, the tax rate has grown less than 5%, because our grand list also grows usually about 1% a year. Just going a little further, taking those numbers and forecasting. So all I did was I took those numbers for 2022, and I started forecasting in 2025, and I used half of the historical growth rate to be conservative. I chose 2025 because there's a process to get the local option tax passed. If the charter vote passes on December 5th, it goes to the legislature. The legislature has to approve it. The governor has to sign it the next session, and then it takes the tax department two full quarters to implement it and begin collecting it. In reality, people would begin paying it January 1, 2025. We quit revenues that year. But in total, the forecast is about $650,000 in 2025. If that were purely done to reduce taxes, that would be over 8 cents on our rate. So pretty meaningful from that perspective. So for a home value of 300 grand, that 8 cents is about 250 bucks a year. I'm not promising 8 cents of tax reduction in two years. I can get to some of the things we can spend this on later. But the point is that that 5% historical growth in our tax level, I think is going to be tempered in a meaningful way, not for one year, but for the long term as a result of the local option tax. It will be tempered, and we'll also have a substantial budget for buying things, paying cash that will help keep that rate a bit lower, the trajectory growth a bit lower for the long term. So just a little more. The select board did adopt a policy about how to spend the local option tax funds. They adopted a policy intentionally rather than putting it into the charter because if it's in the charter, it's a law. So if there's any desire to pivot, the law has to be changed and we're back in this room going through the same process. So four buckets were chosen. The first is payment of existing debt. We've got our debt service for the town on an annual basis is about three-quarters of a million dollars. And most of that debt is here for the long term. So paying some of that down is an option. The second option is just paying cash for all or a portion of certain capital expenses. A great example is the fire chief. A town meeting day will be in front of you asking for a new truck for a little under 400 grand. With the local option tax in theory, there's cash to buy that. It doesn't necessarily need to be borrowed. Economic development and community vitality. A lot of examples that can fall within that bucket. I'll give you a simple one. The conversation today was someone who talked about the town substantially expanding downtime beautification. So that means things like a very, very expensive holiday lighting. Not just in Rusty Barker, but throughout the downtown. That means, hey, it's Halloween. All of our decorative lampposts should be decorated with corn stalks and things like that. And we should have a seasonal theme. That's probably 50 grand a year based on budgets from other towns. That's pretty substantial investment. You know, you're two thirds of a penny on the tax rate. Those conversations are really theoretical. They can become a bit less theoretical with a revenue source like this. And then other investments that can generate some long-term savings. A lot of examples there, the great example is if you drive past, it's not a town, but if you drive past our waterworks, there's a big solar field. There's a long-term savings from that. The town is looking at, in the next few years, some software updates. Part of it is our accounting system is decades old, and that's a pretty substantial investment, but that's going to yield some long-term efficiencies. So there's sometimes options where they're costly up front, but they're going to generate a savings, and this is another potential to do it without having that one-year bump in the tax rate. Some of our challenges on the horizon, affordable housing. I'm glad to see that 51 South Main was ultimately approved, but that's still a process to get that off the ground. There's still work to be done, but there's still my senses, community desire to go above and beyond that, keep investing in affordable housing. Paving. So our paving budget is $405,000. I set to the Public Works Director this spring, and I want you to spend every nickel. Don't go over, but spend every nickel. But asphalt is up 40% over three years. Our paving budget is not little. We've level-funded it, so it'd be nice to bump that. I'd love to see a paving budget that's $600,000 or $700,000 a year, two years from now. Two fire engines. We've got two older models. One of them the Chief would like to replace next year, pending voter approval. The other one is not super long for this world. So two big capital expenses coming up. Never mind that Public Works Director generally wants to buy a new piece of equipment every year, whether it's an excavator or a cloud truck, but F550s these days, full chassis, the full package we need are about $150,000, so another meaningful expense. And then policing. Our contract with the State Police is about $400,000 a year. That contract expires June 30th. I've actually just last week started the process to begin renegotiating that. I think the State Police really view this contract as a unique entity that works for us both, and I think they're really community-minded. But their costs have gone up over the past three years. There's no arguing that. So they're going to want some part of the increase. Never mind the fact that at some point there may be community demand to add to that, whether that's through the State Police or it's from other service. But the cost of policing is going up substantially nationally, not just in Vermont. Our costs are likely going to rise with that. And then flood mitigation. There's a lot of grant funds out there that we're actually beginning to seek to pursue flood mitigation efforts. But sometimes you've got to do the work on your own. Sometimes to get certain grants, you've got to advance the funds on your own. You've got to pay for the engineers of a hydrologist to make yourself more competitive to show some local investment. And all those sort of professionals are not cheap. And I think everyone who argue will agree there's continued work to be done there. That effort probably never ends. And we can go ahead, Karen. So just some closing thoughts. Looking at it 2025. Assuming that's $650,000, which I think is conservative intentionally. So most of our debt is long-term, but we've got some shorter-term debt through local banks that we could pay off early. So if we paid that off early, spend about $250 on that, and we save some interest, that $250,000 is cumulative, so it's not in one year. But if we do that in one year, we have about a penny and a half on the tax rate. And then that carries through for the next years. We could buy that fire truck and not finance it over 10 or 20 years, but finance it over two. Save a lot of interest long-term. In rough numbers, if we bond $370,000 over 20 years, it's 20 years at 25 grand a year, which is a half-million dollar total. So there's $130,000 in interest. And that's out of our super borrowing rates, which are much lower than what you, Ryan, could borrow at. Interest rates for people buying homes, buying cars if skyrocketed. For the town, 20-year cash is still 3.5%, 4%. But nothing cheaper than paying it all fast. So if we did those two things, we would have a 2025 budget with a tax rate very similar to whatever happens in 2024. I'm not going to guarantee you a no increase, but those two things would have a big impact. And there's still 200 grand left over. So those are just a couple examples of what could be done in 2025 when this could first kick in, assuming everything goes well. And of course, there's a year between now and then. So an awful lot could happen. That's just some examples as I see the world today. And that's all I have for the presentation. I'm happy to take any questions. All right, so thank you. Questions for the board? Sure. General Babak, any questions, comments? You got us. That's why we're here. And voting for this is already open. You're at the municipal office between 8 and 4.30. And on the 5th of May, it'll be open right here in this room from 7 a.m. till 7 p.m. Correct. Yes, you just follow the audience. Yes. Well, very comprehensive. Unless it's now any time, I'll send you that. All right. Well, Skip, do you want to wait until 7 o'clock for the rest of your team to arrive? Oh, yeah, hopefully they'll be here. And I've got to print something for Wilson anyways. All right. Well, if we can adjourn this meeting, then we can open up the next one at 7 o'clock so that I could go get the card that I forgot at home. Make it push on time. I move to resume the select board meeting at 7 p.m. OK. At which time we'll open the joint meeting for the utility district. All in favor? Aye. All right.