 on this in April or this year? I haven't heard. I feel like I heard years ago that Stowe was not going to opt in, but I don't know if that's just a yearly decision and they needed to wait for the bill to pass, but I haven't heard anything about Stowe, if anyone else has. I haven't heard about Stowe. I've heard, I think there's quite a number of towns that are going to be putting it on the ballot in this manner, just from talking to some of the other folks involved advocates, they're working with dozens of other towns, they're looking at put this on the ballot this year, and I would imagine there's there's quite a few towns. I know I think Stowe voted early on, but I don't know if they've considered it. It wasn't after the legislation was passed, that may impact things, and so I think I want to say Watesfield is going to consider it on town meeting day. I know Middlebury is, and then in terms of tax rates, pretty average. Maine is really low, it's about 10 percent, and Vermont is 20 percent, and it's fairly average comparable to like Massachusetts. I think the anticipation is that tax rate will start to go down, but also bear in mind a lot of that money is going to educational programs and funding gaps in the educational system, like after school programs and prevention. So there's going to, this is funding, you know, again to kind of Chris's concerns like there is money, part of the deal here with the governor and with this process was that a lot of money is going to prevention programs, substance abuse prevention as part of this tax revenue. Are those programs that exist now and it would be bolstering those budgets or are these new programs? I'm not exactly sure. I'm not sure if they really know either. But it seems like more times than not with any of these substance that are being introduced in, you know, alcohol has been here forever. Marijuana has probably been here this is about as long. Seems like as time goes on, there's a bigger and bigger need for substance abuse programs, rehabilitation abuse programs. But I wonder if the benefit really outweighs the detrimental costs. Chris, could I just address that for a minute? I work with a number of patients here through the collective and we've definitely helped a number of people off of opioids in significantly harmful situations through cannabis therapy. And I know that it's not the easy answer. We're used to doctors and authoritative people telling us, hey, take these medicines and you'll be okay. And we've seen a decade of epidemics. I literally just saw some data today that every single year we still are hitting 60 plus thousand opioid deaths. So this is something where I accept what you're saying, the concerns of the sort of degrading quality of life, the sort of degenerate side of what we see of drug use. I would say that we could use cannabis on so many more lifting levels in ways that are very positive as far as a community presence and also help people receive their therapy and their medicine that keeps them from opioid addictions and needing free needles and all of the really plaguing things that society looks at and says, this is stuff we need to get rid of. So I hear what you're saying. I would just say that there's another level to it that hasn't really been narrated in the press. And we're having a lot of advocates come out and tell us, here's these stories. And it's not just, I have a friend, Natalie Welch, her daughter has a very advanced form of epilepsy, and it's called LGS. And she didn't benefit from cannabis trials, but many in that community do. So there's a medicinal piece of it for sure. But just even from a recreational wellness perspective, when you have people engaged in a healthy lifestyle and not turning to harder drugs, I think overall the society benefits. I'll leave it there, but I've just seen the power of cannabis and transitioning people off of those things that you're talking about. All I can hope for, Glenn, is that maybe this one time that I'm proven wrong. And I do have my reservations as well, Chris. You know this. I think I've been here long enough to see some changes that make me uncomfortable as well as far as what my kids now have to statistically deal with on the roads. But I think together we can create solutions and shared some of those in the past. So I think we're on track to make a few of these come together, and hopefully that we can reduce those death statistics and harm rates. So I'm on that journey. I hope others for this are on that journey as well. So Oh, I got Mark. Thanks, Glenn. Any other discussion on this or we're going to move on to the other select board items? Bill, do you need us to, it sounds like there might be enough to vote this on to the, do we need to make any kind of motion this evening or should we just? I don't think so. We'll just prepare the language, you know, for all the articles that we need, and then the select board can decide which ones of them will go on to the one. So you don't have to do anything tonight. Sounds good. Thank you for those who joined the meeting for that. Next on the list is the online Lister data. Mike, is this from that email we received from the appraiser gentleman? Yes. Yeah, so I'm sure most of the select board members got an email from a appraiser saying that he does not have access to information that he typically has in some other towns. Told us we needed to get with the program. Yada, yada, I responded with thinking that maybe we did supply that information, but he pointed out we don't. I emailed Steve and asked him, I don't think I got a response of what exactly was looking for and how difficult this would be. So I don't know if anyone has that answer tonight. Or Bill, I'm not sure if you saw that email. I didn't. This might be more something Carly knows about than me. Yeah, so I didn't see his email, but I understand that he was concerned that we didn't provide Lister data online. Yeah, he was looking for, I think it was more than what we have instead of just the card. I'll bring up the email when we're discussing this, but it looked like you. Mark, would you want me? I have it right up. Yep, go for it. I could read that. It says it's from an ad evaluation group from mine. I've been talking to a lot of homeowners in Waterbury who are not happy with the town's decision to not provide online data for Lister cards. It's time to provide this service to your residents like other towns. This is public information. Having to pay $1 for a card, print a check, then pay postage when all you need to do is have it available. This causes delays in refinancing and sale closings and is an undue burden on the financial arena, not to mention the disruption of time for your employees. Burlington, Montpelier, South Burlington, Essex, Fairfax, Milton, Morrisville, Warren, Wadesfield, Newport, Hartford, Highgate, et cetera, and soon Stowe all provide this information. It's an easy fix. Time to get a little modern and transparent. Ed Lacry, certified general appraiser. Okay, so I will say that if property owner wants a copy of their Lister file, I will email it to them for free. Currently, if a professional needs a copy, they have to pay a fee, which I will also email them without payments during COVID. That being said, Dan Sweet did some checking with our vendor for the system, and we can get a lot of Lister information online for a one-time fee of $800. They may not contain everything that the Lister files here contain, but I think it would be sufficient to meet his needs. And he is the only one that has complained. He's complained to me as well. Carl, real quick, could you give us a short description of what a Lister card contains? It contains all of the basic information on your house, not just basic. It's pretty in that the year built, the year you purchased it, square footage, the assessed value broken down by land, by other stuff. It's quite detailed information. It's all the property data, Chris, that basically determines what your taxes are. And it's pretty much general use around the state. That's what determines people's taxes are based upon. I mean, does it go into the depth of telling you what square footage of your house is, how many bedrooms, how many bathrooms, quality of your, quality of your. Talks about quality, talks about depreciation, you know, percent good or whatever they call it. Basically, all the information about your property. You know, 800 dollars isn't a lot of money to do this. And if Carla and Dan, you know, have the capacity to get it up there, maybe it's something that we can do. I don't think this is the problem that this gentleman is suggesting it is, as Carla just said. If you called or emailed Carla tomorrow, she would send you that document by email. So it's hard to say that it's holding up anything because anyone can get their own at any point. We deal with all kinds of other realtors and appraisers. And as far as I know, we're not getting overwhelmed with these complaints. So that's just kind of for information. But certainly, you know, more and more public records are available online for people to look at it two o'clock in the morning when they can't sleep. So, you know, we could get it on there if we need to. Carla, that 800 dollars just gets the information online initially. But is there an ongoing cost to maintain any of this? Or when we, how does that work ongoing? I don't think there's an ongoing cost. We have to confirm with Dan. And I will say that there would be a nominal loss of revenue if this is available online. But it's maybe less than 500 bucks a year. Yeah, I understand because I used to be an appraiser. And, you know, it's always difficult when you have to get Lister cards. And, you know, usually, you know, back in the day, you know, appraisers made frequent visits to all the different town clerks when they were getting sales data. Now we're in the era of, you know, electronic information. To me, it just seems I know it's not a big thing, but it would make things a lot easier for a lot of people, you know. And yes, if you're, you know, sometimes, you know, we're in a fast paced world where appraisers need information. Sometimes, you know, sales want to go quickly. That will help them get an appraisal done, you know, expeditiously versus having to go requested, especially if say if it's on a weekend, you know, they're gonna have to wait till the beginning of the week and then it's sent out. So I'm all for and then put to me, it's also takes the onus away from our town staff from doing that, if it's online. And it's very transparent. But there's often times that they need a deed, a tax bill, other information. So you put one piece online, you still got things with five pieces that you're gonna need. You're 100% right. They may need, but that's one thing that's good. And you know what, to be quite honest, a lot of people, I think that's good for transparency because when they look at what their tax appraisal is, it will give them, if they say, well, Johnny Jones taxes of this minds this, and they could look at a list of card and say, hey, his taxes are lower, but has more square footage is considered in better condition. You know, that could be a reason where someone would want to grieve their taxes. And I think they're justified, you know, if, if that's there. So I think the transparency is something that every homeowner, you know, again, most homeowners aren't going to even look at this, how many people ever even will think about grieving their, their tax appraisal. I think that we would be kind of jumping the gun by overreacting to one complaint at this point in time. I mean, Carlos telling us that, you know, her phone isn't ringing because people are complaining about this all the time. And you know, the average homeowner can just get an email to them anyway by Carla. So that doesn't matter. Yeah, I think we'd be overreacting by, by making a purchase for a new system based upon one person's complaint. Well, I kind of asked around because I do know appraisers and this is becoming an industry wide standard. So that's why I'm very much for seeing the transparency and going online. I don't, I don't think, yes, it's one person kind of complaining, but I think this is something that's happening, not just statewide, countrywide, you know, Vermont is way behind the eight ball on a lot of valuation. You know, you look at most states, they don't have town by town, you know, valuation. It's all you go to a county registry and everything's available for an entire county there. And all those are becoming very electronic are, you know, as much as I love our town government type system, it gets very difficult to maintain all these records on a town by town basis. So anything we can do, I think to make government more transparent, I think is a plus. So may, you know, I know this is this is the only email we have received, but I wouldn't be surprised if you spoke to people in the appraisal community. I think this, this is a like-minded sentiment. Yeah, I hear you. I was thinking of a similar comment, but I do agree access to information is important. If it was maybe over $1,000, I'd maybe be more adamant against it, but 800 bucks not ongoing cost. I think I would actually support it just to knowing that most likely make things run smoother and take less off a car, you know, less employees from Carla. I don't know. I think I'd support $800 spend on this if it doesn't have an ongoing expense. But I don't also think we have to make that decision. I think maybe we decide whether we put it down the road until we get more complaints or maybe make a decision this evening. Maybe we should have something with the appraisal board, see if they think this is a real issue, you know, statewide. And maybe that's where, you know, you know, the appraisal board is going to have a lot more rounded opinion than one general appraiser. Katie, go ahead. I was just saying that I'm hearing and I'm agreeing with both sides of this, but I don't think it's the most important thing right now. So I'm okay with, we're acknowledging that this isn't the most expensive thing that we could put it or update it later on right now. But I don't think it's the most important thing that we're discussing or voting on. Carla, where is the information? If somebody does want this information, how do they know they can reach out to you and get it if you're a homeowner? Is that information on the website? There's partial information if they look up their property on our personal mapping system. Yeah. But other than that, there's not anything that says how you have all this information on your house. Call me for a copy. Yeah, I mean, it'd be interesting. I almost maybe Carla, I forwarded that email to the entire board, but if you wanted to respond stating that, you know, homeowners can get this information for free by reaching out to me directly and just see what his response is. And yeah, I'm fine kicking this down the road and that's been 800 bucks. So yeah, like I said, there's not too many homeowners that ask for it. And if professionals are asking for it, they often need more than that. Which since COVID, we are emailing everything. So they don't even have to come in. They don't have to get eyes on the land records. Carla, are they charge $1 per every every Lister's card they ask for? Right, with a minimum to two dollars so all they want is a Lister file and plus and two bucks. Okay, because usually they're going to ask for several at any time. Yeah, I think we move on. But yeah, we can continue this discussion and this is something after town meeting we could it's not something that's that urgent. But I think, you know, I think it's something reasonable to talk about and when we have more time after after town meeting, you know, this could be something we could take up. Okay, sounds good. We are moving on considering conducting annual meeting by Australian ballot motion needed. I move to authorize, I guess the town clerk to institute whatever actions necessary to conduct a town meeting being vote by Australian ballot for the year 2021. That reasonable motion. Is there a second? Second. Any additional discussion or changes that need to be made there? If not, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Select board. I'm not sure which one's D, but we're either going to move our let's move errors and emissions letter data December 31, 2020. Is that work bill for the next item? So, Carla may actually have this information, but I spoke with Dan Sweet today, our paid appraiser and when Malone Superior properties bought the properties that Cura Green Mountain owned, the Cura Green Mountain owned a solar array that was sold in the deal with Malone and Superior development. The Listers failed to change the name of the owner of the solar array from Cura to Superior, so it's an error on the part of the town. It won't cost anybody, won't cost the taxpayers anything, it was a $210 tax bill that got sent to Cura Green Mountain that should have been sent to Superior development. The wrinkle is because it's late, there's an $8 late penalty that's been added to it, 4% late fee. So, what I'd like the board to do is to acknowledge the error, direct the Listers to change the error so the tax bill can be sent to Malone or Superior development, whatever the name of the company is. And we'll just send the $210 bill, not an additional $8.50, I think it was. Would anyone like to make that motion? I'll make a motion that we take away the late charge in acknowledgement of our internal error and send out the tax bill at the original amount minus the late fee. Is there a second? All right, the motion's been moved and seconded. All those in favor, please say, oh, sorry, any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. I believe the next thing was going to be the discussion of some interim zoning bylaws for the downtown. So the board had this discussion a couple of meetings ago. Steve, the planner was in on the discussion, Ken Belgo, the person in the planning commission, the vice chair, they were all on this meeting and there was a lot of discussion about where the planning commission is in the process of upgrading or updating the zoning bylaws. There was some discussion by Jason Wolf was at that meeting and there was some discussion about how the bylaws that we have right now impacted a particular project that he was applying for permit for. There seem to be kind of general consensus among everyone that we should try to correct this sooner than later. At that meeting, if you listen closely at the end, Ken Belgo suggested that the planning commission thought would be in a position to get at least the downtown portion of the new bylaws out by the summer. I was expecting at that point that somebody was going to say, can we do anything any quicker than that? And it just kind of languished there and that's how we left it. There was a little bit of discussion at the meeting about the potential for interim bylaws that the select board can adopt on its own. So I've had several conversations with Steve. I don't have the authority to direct the planning commission or to even direct staff to prepare an interim bylaw for the select board's approval. The select board really is in control of that process. So I think if this board was interested in having the downtown district and having an interim bylaw that would allow some expanded uses from what is there, from what's currently allowed, if you direct staff to draft that bylaw and do so as expeditiously as possible, I think we could probably have something to the board by the end of this month that might be able to adopt sometime in February. And I just didn't know if that was something the board was interested in doing. And this is just for the zoning district of downtown commercial? Yeah, I think, you know, Steve talked about this particular process with the planning commission at the last meeting. He sent an outline to me. Did he forward anything to the select board last week? He was on vacation. And I know I didn't forward it. But I think more than just the downtown district would be a pretty big kind of bite at the apple, so to speak. And it seems like the downtown district is the pressing one at the moment. And, you know, you've got to be careful about being accused of spot zoning and the like. But we have adopted interim bylaws in the past. We did so shortly after the flood to try to get some, you know, give property owners in the flood district some ability to do things. We did an interim bylaw to allow development at the state complex to go forward. And we ended up with a new state complex for it. So we do have some precedent of using interim bylaws, you know, closely written and targeted to solve some issues a little bit more expeditiously. So yeah, I think it's only the downtown that we could do and get it done this month. If you want more than that, it's really going to drag out, I think, and you might as well wait until the planning commission just finishes. Yeah, I mean, I personally don't see it as spot zoning because it's changing the rule book on the entire zone. So you're not really just picking an area and town and changing its zoning. You're just sounds like he was running into a problem trying to take on everything at once and running into some hiccups there. And I'm sure this is going to help that project. But I know there's some other ones that ran into some issues like hair salons that have been trying to go into some spaces. So I'm personally in support of moving that forward and seeing if we can make some movement there. I don't know where the rest of the board stands. You know, several of us were at the planning commission meeting that was held just a little bit after our select board meeting. And Ken was kind of indicating they were looking at June as being able to get information out. And I didn't want to push them at that meeting. You know, I was, I was a little bit saying, yeah, we would like to see something, you know, especially we said that the downtown zone would be an area that there's probably a lot of agreement. And I know they have indicated they said there's some other areas in the town that there's more disagreement with. But then they said they talked about, well, they're saying, why are you dealing with one during the other? To me, it's an issue of get something done, get something on paper. And I don't think, as Mark said, it's not really spot zoning. It's just trying to get something that works. And that's what we're seeing. A lot of our problems is in the downtown where we can have some economic vitality, especially with COVID that we have some predictability for people who want to do things business and downtown. So I'm all for getting something done downtown sooner than later. So just a generic question, there's no fear of, well, you did it for them. Why can't you do it for me? Well, I mean, there's, there's always that possibility. I mean, and, you know, I think that's the proverbial bridge that would get cost if we get to it, you know, clearly there could be issues like that. But again, you hear from the squeaky wheel and all the squeaking that I'm hearing right now for the most part is in this downtown district. I know there's a little bit of concern on Route 100 with things like, you know, landscapers yards and contractors yards and things like that up towards Shootsville, up near where the sun common was before they moved down here. So, you know, you may, that may come up, but I just wanted to tell the board that, you know, after we had that meeting a couple of weeks ago, if we don't do any more, it's just going to play out through the planning commission process. And it's going to be months at earliest for that to happen. And if the board was concerned enough and wanted something to have happen in the downtown district, there is an opportunity to do it, but it's really the board that has to initiate it. And interim zoning is something that the board will adopt on its own motion. It doesn't have to come through the planning commission. I think it makes sense for when Steve, you know, does the drafting, he can share that with the planning commission and get comments before they have to make comments at the public hearing, you know, try to get any issues that they might see with it resolved, but it's really the select board process for interim zoning. So, if it's something that you'd like to do, I would recommend the motion directing staff to prepare an interim zoning bylaw for the downtown district as expeditiously as possible. And Steve won't get it done as quickly as he can. One more question, would these interim bylaws also address parking issues as well, pertaining to those businesses? Or is that part of that umbrella? Well, it could press. I mean, it's what the idea would be is to, in essence, draft the zoning bylaw for the downtown district, so where it might speak to parking probably should be in there. But I'm not suggesting that I have any of the language. This is really something that Steve would do, but it's more a matter of does the board want to see this happen more quickly than waiting until June or July? And if so, you've got to take this step. And I think you've got to take it now if you want it to happen. Chris, I think it has to address those parking issues because I know from my time, I'm sure Nat could echo this based upon all the projects that come through in the downtown area. It used to be when we had a village government, I think the village trustees allocated parking spaces probably five times over. Something that always bothered me. And we need to clarify parking when it comes to these projects, one way or the other. And I'm not suggesting that this is how it's going to happen, but there are communities around the state who have basically decided that trying to have parking requirements in the downtown district just is not a reasonable thing, because just of the same reason that you just pointed out, there's finite spaces, a lot of properties don't have, you know, they're built on 100% of the property, basically, there's no parking lot. So they just allow the business to exist, and people have to figure out where they're going to park on their own, as opposed to trying to say, you need 12 spaces, well, where are you going to get them? I'll go to the trustees, they'll let you put them on the street, you know? So I think that issue is even more prevalent now because Main Street is kind of near and completion. We've got a real idea of what we've lost or gained on parking, and as the downtown continues to, I won't say get more congested with businesses, but as more come in, and the loss and restriction on parking or the lack thereof, I think that it needs to be a part of the process in a big part. Maybe 51 South Main needs to come back into the picture here. Yeah, I know it needs to stay that way. Yeah, I haven't heard in the work they've done. I heard a while back, they were talking about going to Montpelier Approach and eliminating the parking, because basically, right now, the DRV doesn't know what to do about parking. So they point, they're going to point to the select board, and we're all, you know, are we going to stop a business project? Really, it comes out of business. I think residential areas are going to require on-site parking. But when it comes to a business, wanting to go into a space, and that they have a seating requirement base, or a seating and parking requirement basis, I don't know how we're ever going to answer those needs other than doing exactly what the village trustees did, which was bless them and hope that they can figure out how to do business with the current situation. I've been in business downtown for over 12 years. I don't hear it very often from customers. So I mean, I do know that there's conversation, but if you go into Burlington and you want to go eat on Church Street, your parking blocks away, I mean, I think it just happens with growing downtown, is that people end up not wanting to walk a block, but you end up having to walk a block sometimes. So I don't know what the solution is, but I'm interested. So you think it'll play itself? A little bit. The week will survive, or the week will go out of business, and the strong will survive. No, it's going to be that you'll see what happens on private land, right? So TD Bank, they turn it into a paid parking lot, and people start to find opportunities there. Eventually, I know in other towns, downtown districts have all come together and built parking garages, and I'm not saying we're there yet or anywhere near that, but that's where maybe you start to look at it. But I think to try where we already are, I think every parking space is probably allocated 10 to 20 times over. So I mean, where are we really getting to at this point of creating continual regulation talks about parking that is going to force them to come to the select board for us to basically say, throw our hands up and approve the project most likely. I don't know what we can do there. I think we're lucky to have some developers that have built overbuilt parking lots, private parking lots that have turned into kind of a public use. Even the new building next to the Legion has, I think, 33 parking spaces that they built, and I think that's over what their project would have originally required. Maybe you're wrong on that, but that sounds like a lot of parking spaces downtown that I'm a little surprised got built back there. So yeah, I think if you develop raw land in downtown and you have a business that you know has a parking need and you have land that you're not going to use for your project, I think it makes sense to build parking to try to start to build your need on your own land. So I think there's going to be a natural want and need to build as much parking as long as they need the need of wherever the business they're trying to build out. So I don't know, I just think that trying to go the other route, I always think it makes sense that if someone's going to sleep in a bedroom, that's going to be a place where they can park on that property or have some kind of agreement with a local property owner. But you know, it comes to short term business use where people are in and out of parking spaces on, you know, under two hours, not parking to, you know, for all day for your business. I think it's going to be really hard to continue to regulate and I know we have two people on here, or I don't know Chris if you're around the DRB, but I know Nat, Mike, I'm sure you guys ran into that struggle being on the DRB. Very much so. It's, I always got very irritated when the village government would allocate, I understand they wanted to keep economic development going. I'm very much for economic development, but they allocated spaces that were ghost spaces. They weren't there. And that put always put the DRB in a tough situation. So that's where I think we're, where we're wrangling with is what's the common sense approach in how we deal with parking versus have some sort of standard that we're never going to be able to meet and we're not going to be able to develop businesses. And I mean, if you look at what makes sense to you, does it make sense to, you know, this is probably a question for the planning commission, if possible, make sense to that any developing businesses to require them, it's possible, you know, surplus amount of parking, trying to regain perhaps some of this loss and overlap. You know what I mean? Like you just said, Jason Wolfe and Aaron Flint's project there by the, by the region, produce more parking probably than they require. That's a surplus, that leaves a surplus for the rest of the town and it would be unreasonable to try to get more of that with the future businesses that, you know, create new spaces in town. I think you just have that inventory raw land and then make a decision on how you're going to approach whether they can go right now. I think downtown like you might be able to go a lot like a lot line. And it's tough to say one property historically went a lot like a lot like you have some raw land we're going to force you to make parking. I don't think there's a conversation there. If you look at what the village did, they did buy, you know, they had what three parking spaces or parking lots downtown going to Burlington. You have parking garages maintained by the town. I don't think that, I don't know how to approach it, but I don't think, I have a feeling that we're going to the, what we're going to be presented with if we did this at the end of the month, I have a feeling the parking rights are probably going to be similar to what we currently have. I don't think they're planning on changing that, but I think a long-term discussion we should be talking about this. I remember Chris Parsons there when he was going to when he was going to reconstruct 51 South vane there, he offered up a surplus amount of parking for, you know, if you could get more people to do that type of thing, we might recover some of our losses, you know. Yeah. I love the idea of incentivizing that and figuring out how to incentivize that. I think that would be a great way to approach this. Yeah. I'm for it. I think, I think it sounds like, Bill, you're looking for a motion or to ask this on the planning commission. I know at least two projects that have run into issues and it sounds like these were going to be addressed in the rework of the zoning anyways. So to accelerate just that portion of the zoning as an interim, I think interim is the right thing to do. So I would be in support of a motion if anyone else is. Yeah. The motion should be to direct staff to prepare interim by-laws. You don't have to ask the planning commission to do it because it's your authority. So just if you want to do it, make the motion to direct staff to prepare interim by-laws as expeditiously as possible for consideration by the select board. And Steve would present well ahead of a meeting the changes that were made so we would have time to review. Yeah. I mean, I think the process is, you know, he'd draft it, he'd share information and then we would have to, I believe there's a actual public hearing that would have to be warned and, you know, it's probably 15-day warning period or something. So it's probably into February before you could hold the hearing. And if I remember correctly from when we did the interim by-laws for after the flood, they they're effective upon passage. So you could close the public hearing and approve the by-law and they're in effect. So if you want to do that, somebody should make that motion. So Carla, do you have Bill's suggested motion? Yes, hang on, where did I put it? Say if you do, I'll so move it. Sorry about that, hang on. You're just missing it up. Oh, I got it right here. Yeah, I got it right here. Motion to direct staff to prepare interim zoning by-laws as expeditiously as possible for review by the select board. There you go. So moved. We have a motion. Is there a second? Second. Any further discussion? All those. Wait a second. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Moving on, I believe the manager's items. Set interest rate for fund borrowing recommended 2.75%. Right. So we we have borrowed money from ourselves. We started doing that, I don't know, probably five years or so ago. We borrowed money from the tax stabilization fund for the greater for the power truck in the fire department, some of the infrastructure projects that we have. And when we did that, we set the rate to borrow from ourselves at 4%. And the idea was that paying ourselves 4% to the tax stabilization fund that was in effect creating our own fixed income portfolio to generate money in that tax stabilization fund that we could then use to transfer to the general fund. We've done that for a number of years. I think we started doing that in 2014 and 4% was a reasonable rate given what we were able to borrow from the bank at. But now for two reasons. One, back last March when COVID hit, just because we didn't know what was going to be happening and we're going to try to, you know, reserve as much cash as we could, the select board approved the recommendation I made to cut the interest rate to 1.85% for the balance of 2020. So we paid ourselves 4% for the first quarter of the year, 1.85% for the second, for the last three quarters of the year. And we just paid ourselves principal and paid, you know, our loans down two weeks ago. I'm thinking for the same reason, we're trying to keep our tax rate a little bit lower, trying to meet the 51 cent target that we have. And even though it's internal borrowing, I think we should recognize the fact that we just borrowed over $1 million from the Community National Bank at 1.55%. So my recommendation is for the select board to set the inter fund borrowing rate that we have to lend to ourselves at 2.75%. That's still a very good rate of return for the tax stabilization itself on cash. And then you can't buy a bond right now, a corporate bond and get a 2.75% interest rate unless it's kind of a junk bond. I think we're better than a junk bond issuer right now. We're paying ourselves and we've got a history of doing this. So I would just recommend the select board authorize inter fund borrowing at 2.75% for 2021. Does anyone want to make that motion? I'll make a motion to recommend inter fund transfer of, how do you want to put it? Just say so. Thank you, Bill. Is there a second? All right, any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. All right, moving on to budgets, recreation. Okay. I'm going to try the screen share again that we worked on last week. Can you allow me to do that, Carla? Nick Nado, the REC director is here with us tonight somewhere, right, Nick? You're here. Oh, there you are, right in the middle of the screen. So, Nick will, I'm going to put up the REC operating budget right now. This is what I sent out the other night on Saturday. I sent this and the CIP out. And I'm going to just let Nick kind of run through this quickly. I sent out to you the three memos that he sent along with these two budgets. There's a memo that speaks to the operating fund, which this is. There's a memo that speaks to the capital improvement fund. And then there's a memo about a purchase of a van. So, Nick, why don't you quickly kind of go through the three REC operating budgets. I've included the PACS budget here that you and Celia have worked on. Obviously, we're still in COVID and Nick is still trying to be nimble right now to try to meet needs of the community. You know, on Saturday, we found out that that your book primary school was going to be all remote this week. I'm not sure if Nick was able to amp up and move more than one day a week this week. But anyway, Nick, why don't you kind of take it away, tell the board where you are, what you're doing currently, and then how this budget will work from your perspective. Okay. Yeah, so I guess a recap of the year. As you know, we ran summer camp in a bunch of different locations. Logistically, a bit different than what we've had before. It's looking like, you know, as of now, we're going to have to run camps similarly, depending on regulations and vaccinations and whatnot. But we had to cancel a lot of our mini camp programings. That's like our, you know, like our central Vermont hoop camp that we host across at Brook, many of our science camps, all of our science camps, our soccer camps, our tennis camps, basically any of the smaller programming outside of the summer rec day camp, we had to can for this year, our off season lessons in the winter spring. We did the winter last year, but spring and fall we had to cancel. We were able to move swim lessons to the state park, Waterbury Center State Park, and offer eight weeks of lessons up there. They're super, super popular. They ran well. We were able to do it safely within the American Red Cross guidelines, along with the CDC's guidelines. Then we extended summer camp two extra weeks, just because school wasn't opening up and parents were in limbo about what they were going to do with their children. So we had probably about 75%, 70% of camp still enrolled in those two weeks. So we were able to minimize some of the locations we needed to fit all those pods, but it was still a significant amount of children. And then we started the rec academy, which was Monday through Friday, and it allowed children up to 15 children to come to the rec building. We had stations set up. We got a donation from Vien's Excavating to redo the floor. So we had one week in between the end of summer camp, of the extension summer camp, and one week before the academy started. So myself and a couple of the staff that stayed behind renovated the entire rec building list completely different inside, put bigger windows for air ventilation, the new floor. Yeah, we redid the kitchen, did it very, very, very inexpensively and with the donation. And so the building looks way better. It's way more accommodating for year-round programming, especially because we knew that we're probably going to be offering the child care program throughout the year. Academy started Monday through Friday, children come, get their homework done, get their zooms and get on the Wi-Fi. I kept on college students. Staff, most of them are teachers, are going to be teachers, and then you're student teaching or they're going to be student teaching. So this was a really good opportunity for them to practice teaching children. And it was a good opportunity for the kids in the community to not be stuck at home, trying to teach themselves, but having some extra support that a lot of other kids aren't able to get, unfortunately. We ran it until school went to four days in person, Wednesdays off, and we've run Wednesday's Rec Academy ever since. Last week we ran a vacation camp Monday through Thursday because of school break. We weren't able to get, we weren't able to add a couple of days this week because of staff availability, just because they had planned that they were going to be off and I can't run it solo, but we're still running Wednesdays. And I guess, yeah, I guess we'll move into the budget if that covers some of the significant programming we did this year. The pool was closed last summer, and so myself and the Rec community come together and decided that we really need to push for it to open this year, and I think we can open it. Within a very similar operating budget as we had last year for a number. Mimim wage has increased in one of my memos. I discussed how it's increased significantly again to 1175 for this year, and then looking forward it's increasing to 1255 for 2022. I had come to the select board before, I'm not sure Katie was on it then, but the going rate for a lifeguard is pretty significant. Nowadays, it's other places are offering $13, $14, $15 an hour to get lifeguards just because they're so hard to find. We're lucky we have an amazing pool director Keith McKenna, very likable, we're able to retain a lot of staff. Even though the pool was closed last summer, we're going to have some returning staff to staff the pool. We're definitely going to need to track some more lifeguards somehow though. I've budgeted this budget line equates for an increase of the minimum wage and me setting the advertising rate at 1250 for a lifeguard. Obviously we'll pay a little bit more if we get someone who's had years of experience, but the reason the budget line for that only increased by a thousand dollars is because I don't anticipate we're not having winter lessons, they would have started a week ago and we canceled those so it equates for not having those, but it does factor in that we tentatively will offer spring swim lessons, a summer pool schedule that's scaled back just a little bit, which is where we save a little bit on the payroll just because we're expecting less summer camps this summer. It's going to be mostly our camp using the pool, maybe a summer camp here and there, but I don't anticipate large group field trips to our pool and then hopefully having some lessons in the fall. So that's the budget line for the pool. Yeah. Can I interrupt you? Why don't you just share with the board your thoughts about weekends right now for the pool because that also is the reason why the regular pay line is only up a thousand dollars even though we have substantially increased minimum wage. Yeah. So the pool director and I looked at the data we've collected over the past few years and found that last year we cut back Sundays because there's three people on average a day showing up and in order to staff the pool we have to have a minimum of four staff on just to cover the different zones and the front desk checking people in and whatnot. So we cut Sundays last year and then looking at the data it's less than eight people a day it averages on Saturdays. It doesn't even come close to covering the cost of payroll for that day. We'll continue to offer Saturday lessons at the pool. Those are really popular because they're not the eight lessons you need to get for your swim lesson in the span of two weeks. It's eight weeks you can bring your kid on Saturdays for the summer and that works really well for people out of town or people who are busy during the week and they'll come they can have those lessons in the morning. We had like 25 people enrolled. We maxed out both classes not last year. The pool was closed the year before. So we want to maybe expand the lessons and keep the pool open until 12 on Saturdays just for lessons in adult lap swim but this factors in for not having the rest of Saturday open to the public outside of the adult lap swim in those time frames just because at most we're seeing eight people on a Saturday but it was usually less than that. So no Saturday or Sunday public swim? Public swim but we're going to advertise obviously depending on you know regulations and whatnot. Advertise special events so you can rent the pool like say you have a household say COVID's really still really prominent this summer and you know two households or something that are allowed to be together want to rent the pool for a birthday party. We're going to advertise that it can be rented for those types of things and we'll staff it as a bit like as needed. So you know if it's a party of 25 renting it you know we'll have two lifeguards on and then I'll be there. So it's a different way to make money for the pool and it obviously depends a lot on COVID but it's something we didn't want to just like forget about the weekend and offer that asset especially if we're going to get it up and running you know for that 10 weeks span in the summer we want to try to squeeze as much revenue out of it as possible and hopefully that's an opportunity that will people will hop on. Is that good for you Bill? Yeah good so I think we can move down the programs. Yep so a significant increase in the summer day camp program unlike the pool we can't really scale back camp hours it's they're set they're very much people rely on those hours to work and we'd probably lose enrollees if we if we offered less child care time. So the summer camp program a lot of our staff we do start out minimum wage you know obviously our senior staff will give them more than that but with minimum wage increasing almost a dollar combined with then getting returning staff above the minimum wage because some of them right now are getting paid like two year staff are getting paid less than the current minimum wage for this year that just went into effect in January or a few days ago. It counts for a little bit of an increase above minimum wage so they're not you know a second or third year staff isn't making the same as a first year staff coming on. So that that's the most significant increase in the programs budget and the programs budget line. The next line down is mini camps that's those are like the the soccer camps the basketball camps the other things we run throughout the year Water Bear the Water Bear Academy is listed under there too projecting that to run one day a week until the until early June late May early June area is why you'll see an increase in that revenues reflect the increase because the Academy isn't free right we we ought to charge a fee for it it's affordable but we're not making tons of money but at least I think it covers it covers what we're offering for this program. Outside of that the significant decrease is you'll see field trips I completely nixed that from the budget this year typically $4,700 it most likely was going to be more last year per se transportation at a stow is what provided our our field trips for transportation and with the larger camp we were having take two buses and it was it was affordable with them they're very reasonable they charge us the school rate no one in the area came close you know I had quoted before we made the camp larger to see if we could get a better rate and I found out quickly that Percy's charging half of what you know other transportation companies are charging uh with per se transportation sold uh is sold to the moral valley transportation the the increase for field trips as we used to is going to be it would be more than $4,700 and I don't see this summer even if things start to get back to normal I don't see us responsibly hosting large field trips for the camp and so I just we're not going to do field trips like we we didn't do field trips this last summer instead I've increased programs by $1,500 they can't programs underneath field trips that line is specifically for items services or entertainment directly relating to the summer camp so maybe we'll bring in you know we usually piggyback off the library's programming in the summer they bring in like a nature guy he has birds kids get to put the bird on their their arm um you know there's there's certain there's a magic trick thing so we're thinking maybe instead of going to the entertainment we'll bring the entertainment to us so that's my thinking for there um we'd like to get field trips back next year and uh that's a very popular um part of our program kids like it because we go to fun places like the lake monsters and the in the very quarry and different state parks that they don't usually get to go to so um it ties a little bit into the van but if you know if we had a van in my van memo it talks about pre-existing programs and um being able to go on smaller group field trips uh for our summer camp is possible with that um but outside of that we could bring entertainment in um you know biweekly or whatnot to get some you know get gives a little bit more of a mix up from the normal day to days uh i'm gonna interrupt again here so uh you and i have talked and we're showing here right now almost the 15 and a half percent increase in the cost of running the the programs they're not just summer programs but all the programs um and i don't have i i did send out to the board your memo today for um for revenues um and i don't have it in front of you what what were you projecting revenues for um program uh let me just pull it up real quick for many camps i was um for many camps i know i uh fit around 15 000 um which is more than what we're expensing in the pay line and i don't anticipate we'll be paying much more for um actual materials for it we've got everything we need for the academy um for day camp uh in 2020 we had projected that we would pull in $95 000 um uh just a comparison in 2018 we had budgeted $55 000 for income so it's very quite significant um we took in $75 000 last year and i'm projecting somewhere in the middle i'm paying that $85 000 um for day camp this year um for some folks working at home and not needing child care and others needing it and also you know recommending not increasing prices this year right yeah so i i i understand that um we're projecting a little bit less revenue and we're we're maintaining the cost or increasing it um but uh i don't think parents right now in this climate can afford an increase in our camp and they might they might just say i can i can save money if i just keep my child at home it's not worth the increased cost that it is um i would it's definitely um on the docket to propose an increase of programming fees for 2022 but uh i i didn't feel it was right to increase for 2021 given the climate um if the board has any questions uh certainly go ahead and interject um just to make sure that we're all on the same page this budget that nick is proposing is is his you know uh he's squeezed where he thinks he can squeeze this is the budget that he'd like to see us have for rec programming obviously this is what we're discussing tonight uh we're in week one or one and a half of uh of another you know three weeks or so of of budget uh crunching here and we may have to come back to this to to adjust it but i do want to let you know that i i think nick has tried to take into consideration the needs in the community especially given covid and um what we can reasonably do um you know the uh the rec administration budget the next one down is up less than 1 percent the full budget is about you know three and three and three quarter percent so there's an increase here um and we may have to come back and revisit this at a future meeting but um i i think i just need you to know that i that nick is trying to put together a program that he thinks meets the needs of the community um so with that if you have questions the the rec administration budget i don't mean to try to push things along but it's pretty straightforward very similar to to last year's budget in the end result a little bit of a raise for nick there i think he certainly deserves that um and a little bit less going to the capital fund but do you have any questions board members about the programming and the pool budget in particular i do i do first i want to make a comment uh nick i think you've done a phenomenal job uh with all the kind of crazy things that have been thrown your way the rec program i think was kind of could have been in real chaos if you didn't provide a lot of leadership so i want to really really come board for for what you were able to do the whole hard thing is it's very difficult i know as someone who came up with budgets with covid your budget is really a crapshoot we don't know what's going to happen with being able to have a pool program rec programs etc we don't know if covid's getting better worse or indifferent you know you know what i might want to see is maybe if we could have like plan a b c and d depending upon what happens in our community and that's you know i think you know it's a fairly lean budget you know there you are taking advantages of some you know some things such as purchase of the van to help the program along but i think we need to kind of you know have some maybe fallback programs on what we're going to do if you know covid really rears its ugly head and we're not going to be able to have the programs that we really want to so that's really my only comment i think you know you were dealt with kind of a lot of circumstances and it's really hard to put together a budget not knowing you know covid's just you know is a wild card yeah i think i think mike uh if you look at the screen now i i'm showing you the revenues there and our budget was for 2020 was that it was going to cost the taxpayers $256,000 almost $255,000 to run the rec programs and it turned out that it it's going to cost about 185, 190 maybe by the time we get all the last bills paid in January it might hit $200,000 but you know our expenses were down considerably right and this really shows how big of a drag on the expenses the cool is you know we our cool expenses were $70,000 less than we budgeted but our you know our cool revenues even though they were down you know we were only anticipating taking in 45,000 and we took in almost almost a quarter of what for you know 20% of what we budgeted so you can really see from this it's the pool is the real sinkhole when it comes to expenses for for recreation here i don't know that that's ever changed has it bill it's a sinking hole i think it always will be as long as we have it because you can only operate it really you know 10 weeks a year if you really push the envelope you know you could for die hard you could run it into you know mid september but we'd have eight people going to the pool if we if we did that you know but anyway mike i think i don't think that it's probably cost effective for us to have mixed spend time doing another budget for plan a b and c i think he's he's got all those things in the back of his mind he's working with his staff people and if covid throws another curveball at us i think you know he's proven that he can be creative and somewhat nimble and we'll do what we can but i think that you know he really doesn't have a lot of time to create three what if budgets but i understand your thought you know i understand what your point is go ahead mark it was just me i was gonna say thanks uh for the kind words before and um that this this budget is based on if covid like the camp's gonna run as if like it did last year which was i would say pretty worst-case scenario uh there we've projected i projected revenue our expenses higher than than anticipated and i've made it very lean i've cut where i can um and uh and uh we've projected revenues to be on the conservative side uh the plan b and c would be better scenarios where you're going to see either the same amount of expense or less and we'll have increased revenues i get you're right covid is going to determine that but what you see here is is plan a worst-case scenario based off last year well i best think will happen um i think it can only go up and then if for some reason it's tragically wrong and bill said said it perfectly we'll do what we can but if it doesn't fiscally make sense and it's not as fiscally responsible uh if that isn't outweigh the the benefits to the community we'll probably won't run certain things or run certain things differently to make sure that it meets the the need of the taxpayers so yeah that's a good point nick so this program budget is kind of assuming two or three locations potentially for running the program again right so if things work out and we can put everybody back under one roof at the at the rec building this should be lower expenses with similar revenues right exactly exactly in the 15 i think it's whatever bills a 15 increase for programs part of that is because the the mini camp line has gone up you know $7,000 but that's reflected in the revenues for that line item because the the rec academy pays for itself um factored in there a few other smaller camps might be able to run but but just some of those costs are reflected in some of the revenues i get that it doesn't even out this year um but it's conservative estimates on the revenue side hopefully it's better christ did you have something yeah i just wanted to say that you know throughout this covid thing your nicks kind of been like a guy running with a bear set up with a bear on his right right on his butt and uh he's managed to move to the left and right every time the bear swipes at his butt you know and i commend you for that um thank you it's unfortunate to see that not begrudging anybody a pay increase but i i think there's been a consensus out there that pay increase maybe doesn't necessarily have it's the minimum wage increase necessarily going to have it's uh projected uh benefits i guess time will tell but i think we've lost a lot of what we were trying to gain back there and our fee increases i understand your reasoning for not uh hacking those back on immediately um under the circumstances um and at the end of the day i'd be curious to know if these impacts on the minimum wage increases are going to be beneficial or through throughout you know what i mean because uh it's going to attack businesses as well and the only uh reaction or the only action that they can take perhaps is to uh raise their costs so uh the end of the day is everybody just stepping up the ladder one wrong and not gaining anything or uh things stay kind of status quo but everybody just stepped up a rung you know um so that we'll see how that plays out in time here my other question or a question was uh the van is there any type of liability issues there taking that on ourselves our and i mean bill can speak to it but our umbrella policy would would cover it we have a pretty good policy right now for rec because we rent a van um so you know i make my staff that the senior staff that are allowed to use the van go through a driver defense course um we would obviously implement a policy for a van uh for the rec it's a little bit different than the highway department where they just kind of clear their background check and they can come on and and uh drive any of the vehicles if they have a cdl um you know there would be um just because a lot of our senior staff are in college or or you know keep is my age so um you know we have that lined up and we have a policy about transporting children as is so it wouldn't be anything different than what we already do um outside of our rented vehicle or our personal vehicle um i'll say something else but yeah i really don't i don't think liability uh would be an issue chris um we already as nick indicated we do rent the van uh we do rent a vehicle now i'm not sure we transport kids in it it will clearly will impact you know our insurance rate will go up incrementally for the day and uh the the liability insurance policy for the rec programs would probably go up incrementally um i think the biggest question that i have about it is you know how do we pay for it um right now i'm going to take this memo down there's a good transition maybe to be um to the rec program uh to the rec program cip so last year we did we did spend our 11 000 or so on the roof repair of the of the building this little work that we had scheduled to do up in the area up above the armory behind the school we didn't do because of covid and maybe we'll do that this year but the um field improvements here i believe since i didn't have a place for it that's where i put the no here's the van here 275 and then the field improvements would be the parking lot and the one baseball field and one softball field right there yeah so $60,000 worth of expenditures out of the cip in 2021 which would include that van looks like we're going to end the year with about $23,000 in a fund balance in this particular cip to carry that forward and um um i think your memo and i think my email suggested that uh albertson's is planning to make a donation it's it's an unrestricted donation nick that you that you are suggesting we should use for the van or are they saying they'll give you $1,000 to the van i secured the grant uh with the with two um proposals to spend it either on a van or if we didn't get the van approved it would suck it would help rec programs in in general so we can um we can use it in the rec department as as fit i you know but i did write the grant as if this will help further programming in waterbury through uh through a van purchase okay so it's more the bigger question chris for me is you know the what's the one term expense of of a van the van that nick is talking about i know he's investigated a little bit but it's not brand new you're thinking a couple years old with under a certain amount of mileage and you'd hope that that that particular van would last what six eight years ten years what do you think uh they would it would last do you look at the colleges that travel with the similar vans it's the last 10 years but um depending on our use could last more depending on the remote road could last less even though even though it's used 10 years from the purchase date even if you buy your use now yes we're going to go slightly use we're only talking about in the last four years uh we're going to buy it ideally under under 20,000 25,000 miles um anything older when i don't think would we're not really saving the money the van costs a certain amount to begin with and the new ones are really expensive so um i i think would be okay with uh those parameters i mean if you can restrict it the summertime use you might get 10 years uh you put it into winter use it's uh if it's back in zb drastically shortened right are you looking are you looking at nick like a 13 passenger maxi van that kind of a thing yeah for uh for transit is what we've rented before for our hiking and fishing camps um they have all the kids that we have in the camp and the proposals that i've put together for the other programming would fit um the same type of deal uh without needing to obtain a you know you get over 15 passengers you have to get you know if you get one of those mini buses you have to have a class b i think or something so right different license right which i've also floated pass bill renting a school bus and i would get my cdl but i can't do everything like that so but uh no i i the the van stretched out over its lifetime uh i think i could get these programs that i've put together and even more uh potential to to help cover the cost of it throughout the long term um and it definitely would expand programming quite a bit um per water barrier and there's definitely just since i've come on there's always been a need when i got on and i think it's only increased now um it's something i would really uh like to see happen especially before you know i leave at some point but um it's uh a major it'd be a major asset and a lot of other departments our size have something similar um and i wouldn't have to use my truck for every every recreation and limited related thing in town so okay looks good uh appreciate your efforts so is at the moment then is there general support for for this cip with the van included yes no i'm asking the board miff and i would say so i'm all for you know what was proposed i think it's a very comprehensive budget he's put together here and uh i can see the hard work he's put into it um i'm getting some part of it yeah i agree neck i think you've done a great job through dealing with covet and if you if you think that the van's something that will help you with your work and you think you can manage expenses i'm supportive yeah i think that'd be the only sticking point right the whole budget would be a question of you know uncharted territories there with his van and i would work out but you know i'll take your word for it that you've done enough research on it that uh you've done pretty well with everything else including that wreck building there your efforts in personal efforts in uh restoring that thing i got faith in you appreciate it i would point out to uh bill not the throw you under the bus but bill had a budget line for his car um and his didn't make any money so uh this i projected to be similar uh spent expenses but at least we're making money with it so okay nick thanks thank you okay um so nick you can stick around if you want but we're going to move quickly to the general fund budget let me call that a screen share again okay so as i indicated in the memo that i sent you last night i've been working on the on the general fund budget as well well all the budgets right now um i've looked at revenues in terms of where we are for 2020 as the year is ending i haven't really started to put together any of the revenues for 2021 yet so i'm just showing you this general government budget i don't intend to spend a long time with this tonight because we're going to have to come back to it and make adjustments but um you know if we look down here the general the general government budget is up 2 percent right now the public safety budget is up about four and a half percent this assumes that we get a new contract from the state police and this number here actually probably won't quite be that high uh this this is a five percent increase i think over over what we pay now so right now our cost to the state police is 365 $100 on an annual basis this 383.55 is a five percent increase on the 365 but for the first year if there is a five percent increase whatever increase the state police asks us for and we end up agreeing to will only be for half a year so this 383 is probably higher than it's going to need to be but uh that's what i have right now the fire department budget is essentially flat it's up less than one percent and the dispatching is a number that i still have to confirm it's close to that but i think it might be a little less and then the health and social services this we're still without an animal control officer uh we advertised for that $450 a month plus $17 an hour for calls haven't had any takers on that as of late but last week i did get an email from a i believe it's a woman um and she wanted to talk to me more about the position and she told me that she called me sometime this week so maybe there's somebody interested um you know it'd be nice if we could find the right person who could help out as a health officer or a deputy health officer as well we did have a combined position for about five minutes back in 2016 i can't remember the name of the guy who who was willing to do both but unfortunately he left town shortly after he agreed to do it so that didn't work but i'd really like to get an animal control officer because we do have some complaints about it they diminish in the winter but you know i'm the deputy health officer as well so i got a colleague got a fax over the weekend from urgent care there was a dog bite so you know i have to spend time today dealing with the dog bite issue it's my busiest time of the year it'd be nice if somebody else could do that that kind of work for us um and then the pool and programs and rec administration and parks i just plug the same numbers that we talked about with nick in there and uh we talked about the planning budget a couple weeks ago with steve that's about three percent less than uh what it was in 2020 as far as the budget is concerned it's obviously more than we spent because you can see here under the zoning administrative that shows that dina was furloughed for several months in the early part of covid April through uh through july so um there are a few things that have changed there and gone into other budgets so it is a little bit lower debt management um this 105 is really a placeholder right now it's it's going to be close to that it's you know one principal payment later than last year on this building so um the cost will go down slightly and then this interest expense we did spend more money in 2020 on uh on uh short term borrowing um more than uh more than twice as much as we budgeted it's a small budget amount and it's uh relatively small expense but uh the expense was for a couple reasons but the main reason the expense went over was because we delayed the uh the tax installment all the way till november so we didn't have an august payment so we had to continue borrowing money to pay expenses through almost into november before we got our taxes and then of course the uh we reduced the amount of taxes that we were planning to collect so we did spend a higher amount and this uh 93 25 that i budgeted right now i just took the two numbers together divided by two so it's an average uh it'll probably be more than well it's hard to say the interest rates have come down pretty dramatically again and we're entering this year with significant more money in the bank than we had at this time last year because of the million dollars 142 million dollars we just borrowed but anyway that's what that is and then the special articles just assumes that everybody that got funded last year will get funded carla it is this project independence that went to fight right that's correct a lot of distance in june so they contacted us earlier this year and said don't send them the money because they're going out of business so uh we saved up too bad so anyway um i know that's kind of a brief a real quick look at this you can see here that if this budget was adopted right now three million eighty two thousand three eighty for a budget number uh about sixty seven thousand sixty eight thousand more than we budgeted a year ago it would be a two and a quarter percent increase and i know that the general fund this fund when we when i add revenues here we're going to be in a deficit situation in the general fund we're going to have a sizable um surplus in the highway fund and the library fund is going to have about a 40 thousand dollar surplus so those two surpluses will will offset some of the general fund deficit that we're that we're running this year um how much of it i don't know um so i don't even want to guess right now if we're if we're close to the 51 cent tax rate but um i think we're we're close enough that i'm not fearful that we have to make whole sale cuts and services right now but uh it's a little too early to just make that as a blanket statement so um we'll withhold judgment on that all for now at the meeting that we have next week and for katie who's new to the select board we typically meet every week in january to deal with the budgets we've got to get all this done by the end of january the first day of february or so at the latest so we will be meeting um on the the remaining three weeks of three mondays in january the 11th the 18th and the 25th i'm hoping on the 11th that i'll have good enough information about what came in for 2020 revenues um therese has left the meeting i think now um my biggest concern for our revenues for the general fund is what's going to happen to the three significant revenues that we get well four significant revenues we get from the state pilot is the big one that i'm concerned about you know we had uh we had um you know well over 300 000 of pilot revenue this year forest and parks revenue was a forest and park pilot was around a hundred thousand current use which is not really you know it's replacing tax money but it's still a revenue that we get from the state that was in the 80 thousand dollar range so you know pushing pushing a half a million dollars from the state even before we think about uh 115 or whatever it is that we get from uh in the highway fund from the state so i'm talking about maybe you know 600 000 of state revenue and uh uh my expectation is that the the revenues especially that generate the pilot payment are off significantly that's the one percent local option taxes and that's uh significantly dependent upon uh rooms and meals and restaurant receipts in the 14 pounds that have local option tax and my guess is that those tax revenues are down significantly so um we're we're not out of the woods yet in terms of what 2021 revenue are going to look like and how that's going to impact because you know if you lose that revenue the only place you can make it up is either raise taxes to replace it or or cut services so um i'm hoping to have a better picture on the revenue for 2020 at the next meeting and and then i'll be reaching out to the legislature and vlct to try to get some you know preliminary information from the state about what pilot and in those things are looking like typically we don't hear about that kind of stuff until may or so when the legislature is ready to adjourn and we we don't get the final absolute here's what you're going to get in pilot until usually september we get a memo from the state uh so we're going to be flying a little blind when it comes to our meeting time i think but i'll try to get the best information i can from the legislature so with that unless you have specific questions i think we can put them off until next week if you have questions if there was something that you saw right now certainly ask you but waiting the week is probably best bill i have a question um since we we we voted tonight to go to australian ballot how is it going to work with like especially the special articles i know we have typically grouped the ones under a certain amount together are each one of the special articles going to be voted independently or are we going to do that same kind of triage treat the ones under a certain dollar amount um as a lump yeah that's i think really a board decision but that might be best informed with a little conversation from carla um obviously she's going to have to know because she's going to have to get ballots printed and right i don't know how much can fit on a two-sided ballot i assume you don't want more than a two-sided ballot but i suppose it's possible to have more than two pages if you need it it's it is possible to have a two three or four-sided ballot um to have particularly or read everything that's on it regardless of the number of pieces of paper you put through it i don't know i talked to bill about this a little bit but i was thinking in fairness if we can we should list them individually but that's your decision have each one done have each one of the charities being voted on individually yeah yeah because it's not like town meeting where someone could say you know i i elect to you know withdraw this particular one because of xyz right you know you don't have that option you know with australian ballots right so um i think when does the warning have to be signed carla uh it has to be posted by the 20 friday the 29th so you usually do it monday proceeding yeah so maybe the maybe what we could shoot for mike is carla and i can work together and kind of have a template of what we think the ballot's going to look like and bring it to your meeting on the 18th okay that way you can review that if you need it changed carla can adjust it and bring the final one to the meeting on the 25th yeah i've already gotten started on that and i have been in touch with uh the programmers sounds good bill the only question i got is uh maybe maybe you covered it maybe i was off in another land there while you were talking about it but uh county taxes that's a pretty good jump well it really it really isn't chris um so the county taxes you can see i highlighted it uh they sent out a notice during the covid time that said if you wanted to save cash in 2020 that instead of two payments they'd split it into three so we were supposed to pay 63 355 in 2020 in two payments of about you know 31 500 each uh we actually split it into they they they are they offered us the ability to split it into three payments of 21 000 each so we paid 21 000 back in uh july we paid another 21 000 in november and we'll pay the final 21 000 in in march so it's it is a it is higher here but the difference here is part of our fund balance now so it's really a wash and and they let us save the cash and at the time i didn't know if we might need it so i said we'll put it off they're not charging any additional interest and the county tax bill uh if you take the 21 000 away from the uh 85 520 you know the county tax went up about i think it went up 80 bucks or 100 bucks so it's it's really not that that thing yeah but good eyes legal tax legal services that's yeah so in 2020 uh you know in 2000 let's see 2019 in 2019 we spent 49 hundred dollars i think in 2018 we had budgeted like eight thousand dollars after we did the uh cell phone power and we spent you know 80 grand over three years i think it was we went for a couple years and we were budgeting like 800 a month and then for two years in a row we didn't spend it so we cut it down to 5600 last year most of this spending if you remember the whole grew haha that we had in march about who got to appoint the school directors and the school board was you know doing all kinds of different things and we ended up having to do a lot of the research and pay for it so that's what this expense was and the 12 000 is it's a thousand dollars a month and it's understanding that that 12 000 might not be enough depending upon how much we have to fight on this hunger mountain child care center so and i figured that might be what it was yeah okay well on your budget because i saw there was um a significant decrease for the memorial slash fourth of july celebration i assume that's because i assume they're talking about either a very scaled down uh celebration is is that the that the fact no the fact mike is that uh just the opposite of the county tax we typically pay north star of fireworks we pay them in january because we get a discount if we if we pay in january so we pay them 10 500 in january and then the fireworks were canceled but they had so little revenue they said look could you let us keep the money because we don't really have it to return to you and uh in 2021 we'll we'll give you your fireworks display so the 2250 here is what we would pay to the american legion for memorial day and veterans day and stuff like that and we've already got 10 500 sitting on deposit with the fireworks company got you you were going to say something about your uh i was going to say something here about this nbof this is part of the money that we send the fund 76 uh this pays the expenses for this building that is split with the library um and there's a bunch of calculations that i have to make with regard to bill woodruff's time um and how we spent that time in 2020 uh so this is i'm assuming it's going to go up we've been having some additional problems with the heating system here we had to get norway the electrical contractor who worked for rearc when the building was built um and we've had some issues the last month here but frankly it goes back to late last year it seems like they finally got it because unlike last week when it was uh 62 degrees in my office it's 73 degrees now so um this i think may be low at this point in time given what we've had to do but um we'll adjust it when we get more information if i remember right we didn't we didn't put radiant heat in there right i mean as a backup yeah because i had asked about that when the design phase was whether or not we should put radiant tubing in the slab as uh no possible emergency backup this other heat system didn't hold up um yeah i turned out there was some some i don't know some defect in in one of the electrical lines they weren't getting the right amperage coming through from the outside unit into the into the main computer station upstairs and they had to pull a wire through and of course when they designed it they didn't design they they tried to pull it but the the wire was so big and they didn't have a good pull box so they had to put a different pull station in and pull a new wire in a different direction so anyway it is what it is for the moment so is that it for tonight as far as this stuff goes is for me all right so next week on the 11th i don't know if it's kind of resonated out to the board but there's been a lot of a lot of questions and comments and concerns expressed to me over the past especially the past six months about the senior center and how they're operating and you know obviously COVID has hit them so uh Justin Blackman is the new uh board president there for the waterway area senior citizen center so i've asked him to come in to talk to the select board about the seniors you know we we give them $30,000 a year um and we've given that amount for a long time there as far as i know they're not asking for an increase but i'm asking him to come in to just kind of allay some of the commute community concerns that have been expressed to me i know that the uh waterway around about there has printed an article about the senior center and had reached out to me for some information also next week we'll talk about the the cip budgets for paving uh infrastructure um highway equipment and fire equipment there shouldn't be anything in the fire equipment budget but i'll include that just in terms of fund balance and stuff like that we've already taken our first crack at the highway budget but we'll do those things next we kind of get a good sense of those kind of big ticket items and then hopefully some fine tuning between the 18th and the 25th to get us to where we need to be the library folks will probably come in if they have to come in probably on the on the 18th okay so the only thing that i have left mark if you don't if the board doesn't have any questions about budget is we need to go into executive session uh briefly tonight again about the hunger mountain child care i sent out an email again giving you those two um those two um motions that need to be made and i would ask that you authorize dan and liz carla if she wants to she doesn't need to stay frankly i'm not trying to chase you away carla but there's not going to be any uh decisions that we have to record lish lago the chair of the bca is here i would recommend that we have her come in as well as dan and myself and carla if you want you can stay if not you can you can leave i don't think there's anything real new for you to hear but so anybody that's savvy would zoom if i just pause the recording after the motions are made and if i leave will i get the recording in the morning yeah okay i will wait for the two motions and i will pause and depart so orca and lisa will have to leave after the motions are made i moved to find that premature general public knowledge of the town's litigation strategy in the h m cc tax appeal currently pending in the vermosa period court civil division would clearly place the select board which has which has control over such litigation for the town at a substantial disadvantage okay for a second that can all those in favor please say aye hi hi please make the second motion uh in light of this finding i moved to enter executive session to include the town clerk if she wants town appraiser and town manager to consider pending litigation to which the town is a party so also uh to include the chairman for us it's the authority of this and to also include the chair of the bca linds schiegel is there a second okay any further discussion all those in favor please say aye hi hi okay i'll pause recording and thanks for the release orca can you leave please thanks carla carla don't leave until orca is gone yeah they're on auto i'll get them out you can boot them