 Throughout the day, I've asked them to hit really the highlights that budget any major variances in the line items from current fiscal year to the next fiscal year proposal and operating capital leave space for any questions from the board. And I try my best guess on timing, but I've got everyone else on cell phones. So we'll keep it flowing the best we can. Yeah. Great. So. Great. Well, good morning. Morning. And I'm happy to say the library is back to pre pandemic level of service, which took a while and we in FY 23 we had over 45,000 patrons visit, which was up 22% from the year before we circulated 128,000 items and programming attendance was 11,900. So that was up 7% from the previous year. When we look at ourselves, compare ourselves to other Vermont libraries, the department of libraries issues, annual statistics, public library data. We looking at that data for FY 22, we serve the 13th largest population in the state. And we rank fourth in circulation and we rank number one at attendance and programs that year. So we're pretty busy happening place, which is great to be. Of course, our challenges continue with space constraints as well as and continues to grow, which you've heard a lot about through the scoping study. Our events space are beating space collection size and accessibility to collections are ongoing challenges for us. Our outreach program has developed into a very robust program using dotty the book mobile to visit neighborhoods. The circulation at neighborhoods was up 86% from 2019 and visits on board were up 81% from 2019. So she's been doing a lot of other outreach outside of those statistics as well at events like trunk retreat. The outreach library and works all year round to visit homebound and senior communities to give them the library services that some of them can't get because they don't drive and they don't have access to public transport to get to the library. So that outreach piece really is filling a gap and it is at capacity as you know it's on a 27 hour position. So that's something to look at as a challenge going forward. So jumping into the operation budget. The proposal is 4.47 overall salary and benefits represents a 5% increase. Can people say what page they start on. 83 which I was happy to have page numbers this year in previous years. We finally figured it out. I broke them down because we never knew where we were. So yeah, just to highlight department salary and benefits overall 5% increase that includes an additional request for an additional 250 substitute hours. We have received feedback over the years that especially young families and seniors would like the library to open earlier at 9am. Currently we open at 10am Monday to Saturday. So by adjusting staff hours and the additional 250 substitute hours we would like to implement opening at 9am starting after Labor Day. So hopefully that will you know will obviously it'll add 6 hours a week to our operational hours. The jumping ahead page 84. Just to highlight a few things on the books line which is obviously a major line for us core to our mission of literacy and like lifelong learning. There's a 5% increase here. I just the digital resources at 35200. That's a 17% increase from the previous year. The challenge with the digital resources are publisher models and increasing prices and also increasing usage. So from FY 22 to 23 we saw 26% increase in e audio book usage in the library and that's a trend nationwide that people are really enjoying e audio books. Obviously as that happens our traditional formats like books on CD usage is declining as CD players aren't in many cars anymore. So every year we look at that budget and kind of shift more to the streamed. That's one big change print continues to be robust and strong. So you know we we budget for 5% 7% actually each year on that. So overall with the shifting we were able to keep the increase on that line to 5%. Bookmobile in a small increase there as she ages. There's more maintenance required page 85. Computer applications. These are our software or catalog software and that it's always a difficult prediction with software. Again we were lucky we were able to keep it to 5% as Microsoft designated us as a nonprofit and we're now getting the office 365 suite for free. So that saved us $1500 which was nice keeping that that line at 5%. Telephone I think that's a broader issue. Yeah telephone is primarily we have POTS lines we have first light fiber and the POTS line play no television telephone service. They're copper lines and they just keep going up I mean three times a year. Since I've been here they started at $35 a line they're now $100 a line and you just going to notice that they're going to increase them again. So that is the majority of the information phone service. And we are moving our fax line over to the same line and I think that will save a little bit. So that's that's in progress. You have a fax line. Anybody have those anymore. Well yeah no you do for banking and health. That's the only way they'll they'll send and receive information. So the library having a fax line is key because most people don't have a fax line and staples charges a lot to send per page so it's pretty regularly used. It's part of the training when new students come on. The building overhead lines there's actually a 4% decrease overall on these lines because the town custodial services and benefits have been moved back to the buildings and grounds department. If it hadn't been for that probably would have been about a 5% increase on the line overall. And that that's about it that I wanted to highlight for the. The building overhead lines there's actually a 4% decrease overall on these lines because the town custodial services and benefits have been moved back to the buildings and grounds department. If it hadn't been for that probably would have been about a 5% increase on the line overall. I wanted to highlight for the operations any questions questions from the board. So what was it overall 4.47% and the major changes you're adding by shifting employees around you can add an hour but you need a sub to make sure that you can cover everything when you do that. Yeah, being open an extra six hours. Yeah, you know, it means we're open 55 hours a week. So it's just spreading out and having those extra sub hours will will help. Trying to recall the cost for that was $4,000. Yeah, 3875. Yeah, so I think it's a big game for small amount. You being the first one you get this question maybe it's for Shirley, but I actually I'm kind of surprised at only 4% increase given the health and everything health care and salaries and benefits. Did somebody like shift? Yes. Yeah, there was quite a long time assistant director retired and you know, there were other other shifts. So that accounts for that. That accounts for that. Yeah, I shouldn't have said anything and just said, well, look the library could come in a 4% what's wrong with everybody. Yeah, things go up and down. Yeah. Other questions. Did you have any new and exciting things that you really wanted to add and then Eric said no. You know, we're a little bit kind of in limbo with the, you know, scoping study and looking at the future. So, no, I really didn't this year. It was real focus on thinking about the future of the facility. We just added staff last year, right? Yeah, we added the assistant director position had been part time and it went to full time. So that was a big change for us. And it has really, really helped just all around having that that jump from part time to full time. Great. Other questions. Jane has one capital item, the bookmobile. And I don't know what page this is. I think it's the last page of the capital last but not least the book. Yep, page. 84. Okay, so the bookmobile has been in operation since 2016. With a predicted 12 year life. So we're looking at replacing replacing it in FY 28. In previous years we had been putting 87 hundreds in the capital fund towards a $90,000 replacement after contacting three manufacturers this year. It was clear that that is wasn't going to be enough. The costs I got varied from 170,000 to replace with the current model to 250,000 for a sprinter van, which is kind of the future of bookmobiles. So the request here is for 20,000 to be put aside with funding available in FY 28 of 136,000. The difference between those there is some trade in value for the current bookmobile and fundraising efforts would make up the difference. Any of those options electric. All three manufacturers I talked to said electric is not a great option at this point. It's obviously something will look at it. It's more expensive. The problem is that with such a heavy load static load all the time, you just be in the cold weather you'd be constantly charging. Our outreach librarian went to a conference the association of bookmobile and outreach services and yes there is such an organization. And it was wonderful it was like shopping for you know they had the bookmobiles there and they had and she talked to a lot of colleagues from across the country and obviously talked about electric and the experience so far and maybe it will improve has been the electric vehicles are a challenge for this kind of use. So use it for outreach and I'm familiar with the summer, you know, daddy going around the neighborhoods but in the winter we use it for the homebound is up to we're saying in the winter. Sarah uses it to go to the preschools and so she'll take the carts of books off the bookmobile and wheel them into the preschool. They don't actually get on it, you know, logistically it's. But it is operated year rounds and the next generation sprinter vans are a little bit easier to operate year round because it's easier to get the carts on and off. Because I would just. This might be the kind of thing where you could get a grant for the electric part of it like school buses they have a lot of grants out there for. Because there's so much more expensive than regular school butts, but people really pick up the difference for you sometimes. So, since you got a couple of years, maybe things will change. But yeah, I mean, we'll obviously look at everything. This was like a preliminary. Yeah, yeah, we'll definitely be looking at everything. Other questions. Okay, well, thank you for your presentation and thank you for everything you do. I mean, the libraries. Like most popular, popular person in school. Anyway, thanks. Thank you, Todd. Thank you. Thank you. Police chief. Morning. Morning. Was running a little late and I was coming down one road realized I was going a little over the speed limit. It says maybe please won't pull me over on the way to. But I slowed down anyway. As long as you slow down. Was your license plate. Would you like me to start on my capital? Do you want to go to the regular budget regular budget? Okay. We're starting on page 123 is basically what the department has for services overview. Some we don't do right now because of manpower shortage. But once we get up to full strength and the addition, you will see us implementing. Pretty much evident on the. The sheet we have here. So it's quite a bit, you know, it's just the, you know, getting back out to the neighborhoods, they would watch programs. You know, different type of trainings we want to do. We get a lot of calls on internships. It's something that we really need to look at, you know, and try to set up a program that we can use as a recruitment tool. So, you know, it's just, it's kind of hard to try to do everything when you're limited and pretty much 90, 95 to 98% of your services. We call them for cross the services. So it's in the books. It's a plan. My, my report basically is pretty much seems like it's the it's ground hard. You know, it's that we're short handed and we try to recruit and we do recruit and then we're short handed and all that. And I think we've got a good program in place with sending the offices and my administrative assistance to a recruitment retention class that was put on down in Massachusetts. They picked up a lot of good ideas. I was at one yesterday basically for our chiefs and sheriffs put on by VLCT through their legal counsel understanding the rules and all that. So we now have five people that are actively trained in the new standards of recruitment and retention. So going forward with the study by Colonel Baker, I think we'd be able to, you know, pick up some good candidates and all that. I field a lot of questions from the chiefs yesterday about the study. And I always say that, you know, if you're interested in coming to Wilson, watch the news and watch the newspapers and see which way we're going to go. Basically, I'll highlight each section. The big, you know, shows everything on one page at 125, but we'll start on 126, which is our administration. And pretty much you look at all the budgets, usually budgets are probably 80 to 85% personnel costs and then the rest is day to day operations and incidental costs and all that. So the big, the big bulk of my budget is my personnel costs. And then the administration includes myself, patrol commanders, which is legal tenants. There's only one in there right now. We'll wait and see what the board decides during this budget phase. There's not much large increase in this line other than, like I said, the personnel costs on the next page, the building maintenance. Pretty much evidence pretty much close to it. We're trying to, and it's in that capital plan about our building now will be 17 years old, almost 18 years old. We're finding that, you know, things don't last a lifetime when it comes to construction. So we're finding, especially our HVA system needs to really be watched closely. So we've started a part of the capital plan, but we've developed a good relationship with Riyadh as pretty much our standard to come in and look at what's going on in the building, making recommendations first. So we need to make replacements. We believe we've got a good company doing the research for us on that. And when you walk around with us, you saw, you know, how the building is designed. And basically it's four sections in that building. So it's different, you know, the heat time, high in one area, it's low in the other area, it's medium, all that. Same thing with the air conditioning and all that. But like today in here, you know, turn the heat down and all that. So that's what we're watching and all that. We've made a lot of changes in our system inside there and with the growth. So it's going pretty good. Our communications department, if you're well aware of it, that we relocated our dispatch from Sierra to Essex. It's worked out very well. We do meet every so many months to, you know, sit down, discuss how we're doing there. It's a really plus for everybody when you're able to have two dispatchers on. Our dispatchers are now cross-trained because here, when they were in this building, they were just police. Now they're cross-trained over at Essex. There's police, fire and EMS. So that's a plus for them to have additional dispatchers. We're currently down one dispatcher for our side. And so our two dispatchers are really hustling. Ashley, my administrative assistant, fills in as much as she can. So I'm not going to talk long-term because she has to go home and get rest because she's working. So I thought I would walk fast. But we are advertising. And like I mentioned, the team we have is that does all our recruitment now. And we're assisted by Eric's assistant, Erin. So she's really working with us closely. We did the applications, the questionnaire and all that. So she's helping us along as she gets the application in. She streamlines them and gives them to the team that does the interviews and all that. So hopefully within the next, you know, next maybe two months, we'll have a third full-time dispatcher in position over there. So, and it'll take a burden off everybody. And a lot with communications, if you look down at the bottom of 128, these are all our technical stuff, computer communication that goes around. So there's a lot of stuff in there, you know, antivirus, email accounts, VALCOR is our record management system. That is part of the state system that we go on. It doesn't cost us anything other than incidentals to keep it operational for licensees and all that. Is that the system that Jim Baker was complaining about saying it wasn't really any good? Yes, yes. Do we have a proposal to upgrade that? We're on the, you know, unless we go on our own and that creates a bigger problem. The statewide system. You know, some, some there's, there's free outside the state, there's three agencies there, not on the VALCOR system, the system that we were originally on. And there was a time when I first started that we were actually on two systems at the same time, VALCOR and Spilman. And then we went to Holy Spilman. It's a state-of-the-art system. If it's built out correctly and you have all the trinkets on it, but free is free. So how can you say no to free? Well, you can if you're talking about adding a dozen positions because, and you're doing it on no data because you don't have any data that's useful. So that's a problem. If we, when we do get to the point of adding a dozen more police officers, it would be really nice to be able to say, this is why, as opposed to. Well, that's why Colonel Baker recommended a dedicated analysis. But still get to have the good data in there. Yeah. Well, again, there's a way of figuring that out. So that's what that person would be doing. He's looking at what was, you know, dispatched as and what was, the old system was you would dispatch on one type of call. And then when you're done with that call, you verify whether it was the same call or is it a different call. So that's where you'd look at the correct data. That doesn't happen here. Unless the officer tells the dispatch what it needs to be coded as. So again, you know, that's, there's a meeting coming up a week from Monday with the governor to talk about public safety. So I'm not sure where that's going to go, but there's a lot of people that's concerned about VAL4. So, you know, we'll see what happens with that. You know, I had a system down in Massachusetts that, that I could go into my office every morning and just print up and they'll tell me everything that happened in that last 24 hour period. And so many call, if you called me up and says, chief, you know, we have, you know, I want to know how many, you know, radar operations you run on my street. I can tell you the date time, how many people we stop, where from and all that. Same thing with, you know, so it's just, it's, it's, you know, we're limited to what we can do. And if we go on our own, the course would be astronomical for our own CAD system. I know Hotfit has their own regional dispatch down there. It's Hotfit, Windsor and Norwich and they're on Spillman, but they're not on the, the main brand. There's like a, a smaller Spillman CAD system. So you don't get all the trinkets, but you still, it's a bunch of shit, a lot of one. So. What's Burlington on? They on Velcro? They're on Velcro. Because they seem to have a lot of data in that report they had. Maybe they just collected it before the report. Well, they have a dedicated person that does that. Yeah. So you think that the system may be capable if we had the personality. Yeah. And we can have the IT person and does a lot of, he does a lot of data for the, the traffic stops and he actually, actually will go back into the system and look at every traffic ticket that we've written every morning to make sure it's coded correctly before we send it to the state for they can have it for their data collection. But we're tying up a supervisor to do that. Yeah. Investigative service. Again, this is the plan to have a BCI, we've always had this, but we've never had it funded. You know, so since I've been here, and that, that's kind of like. It really exists if it's not funded. Does it really exist if it's not funded? Well, again, it's there and I, every time I see it. What? It's authorized. Yeah. The biggest change is our Chittinac County Unit for Special Investigation, QC. That's, that's been dropped almost $10,000. Again, it's, it's personnel. You know, not everybody can put people in there. So there's a lot of people working in there. And that's one of the things that, you know, when we put up people in BCI is that, that we would probably assign somebody to that unit. You know, we don't get many, those type of cases, but when you do it, it's, I believe it's. It's a feel good that we have our own people doing this type of investigation because it's in our community. And it's, it's that relationship, you know, your own police department's doing, you know, it takes time to, to dedicate that type of training. But, you know, it's nice to have. It's nice to have. Why is it so much smaller? They've downsized big time at that unit and, you know, they, I think a lot of agencies are not putting people in there. So this is basically, you know, to offset some of the across over the unit. I know it used to be that the towns were assessed a percentage fee or whatever the term would be based on the number of calls. And I thought that had not, that was not the case anymore. No. Which, yeah, because it's pretty unfair. Yeah. Okay. That's interesting and concerning. It runs the unit. You know, they had, they downsized their commands after overseas that. So in the bottom of page 130, we talk about expenses. Eventually that storage unit next to the garage outside will be gone, but when I show when it's going to get going, we're trying to figure that out. And the blood tests basically, we still haven't got an answer on that, but that's basically for DUI drugs. We've seen a very large uptick in people driving under the influence of drugs. It's not the old days of marijuana. You'd be surprised what we find in the systems that deals with heroin, fentanyl, methamphetamine, cocaine. And it's amazing. And some people have probably three or four of them in the system when we do so. Why there are only seven tests? Because we believe some of the money, some of the tests are paid for through the grant. And we're just still trying to get an answer for it. So seven is the number we've had in there. So that could change the next year where we actually know what, you know... You do more than seven DUIs a year though. No, it's not seven DUIs. Some weeks we average seven in a week. I was going to say, so this is just like a, you might make a decision that you need to do a blood test on. The vast majority of DUIs don't involve a blood test. The alcohol. The alcohol. No, no, it's just all drugs. This is all drugs. The next page, 131, is our patrol services. We currently are allocated for 15 patrol positions and two command positions, two administrative positions. We currently have 13 of those filled right now. And like I said during my presentation on Tuesday night that we have two in the queue. One definitely at the stage of interviewing with me and the town manager. And I've already spoken to her at the beginning of this week to tell her that with the holidays and our priority was getting Officer Dubois on board and get ready for the academy. That once we get that all taken care of after the first year we'll invite her in and the town manager and I will interview her and do a one-on-one with her. So we can decide if she should continue with the process. The, as you're well aware, we have a total of 10 units. Pro units, including our unmarked vehicles, uniform, mock units, my unit, the unit for the lieutenant. And really the biggest, the biggest cost, because when I talk, I'll talk about that in our, in my capital plan on that. But by us rotating the units around between two and a half and three years, we keep the mileage down. We keep the repairs down because it still falls under the warranty. And then when we, we auction them off, we get a good resale value on. So that keeps the cost down as much as possible. And that really the biggest cost is the tires. And we're looking eventually that we're trying to get, you know, where we don't have to change them twice a year. Like put the summers on. We're looking at, we're doing some trials right now where it's an all season tire to see how it operates in this, this type of weather and all that. You know, so that would probably keep the cost. And we lower the cost. You know, look, the fuel, it's, it's a juggling act. You know, because halfway through the year, we're looking at right now in an estimated 340, I think it's 349 on the pumps. But it goes high as four dollars, it goes low as two, you know, two and change. So it's, it's a flip of a coin and all that. The biggest, the change in the, and we don't, we don't, we, we have some money in the mileage there. But basically if we have a cruiser available, the officers will take the cruiser. The training, we've increased that because the training in the state is like pretty other than what something's at the academy. There's no specialized training. So I've been sending everybody out out of state. We're looking at, you know, Massachusetts chase the police have their own training unit. It's called Minnesota Police Institute MPI. I send people to those because it's quality training and all that. If you have a specialty like Officer Rick Reno, Sergeant Rick Reno, he's in school master's program for peer support. I actually sent him last year to this year to California to peer support training. So I try to send people out. I think it serves two purposes. It gives them a different type of training. The network is incredible. And again, it builds morale by sending him, you know, when I sent, I sent four of them down to Worcester for the recruitment and retention class. So we had, we had discussion yesterday with, with the director of the police academy. It's an ongoing, but there's a lot of transition going on at the academy right now with trying to get more people in there and all that. So I believe always that, you know, you can never have too much training. And so that's, that's what my plan is. I've carried this never, every agency I've been, been the chief in is that you need to go out, you know, and go to the state has mandatory training that we have to have. You know, we have, we have 30 hours of mandatory in that it's firearms. So we do our own firearms here. We have firearms instructors. We have use of force every, every other year. We have domestic violence every other year. We have fair and partial police and those, those are all mandated through the academy. So they have their own instructors, but we have to come up with the additional hours to make 30 hours and very seldom somebody just has 30 hours. They exceed that. So that's, that's what we're doing. I think it's a lot of value in having some training outside of the state walls, just a different experience. Maybe a bigger town, you're with peers who are working in a bigger city. It's interesting for people, I would think, rather than just, it's a small enough state that if you go to the same training with the same 100 people all the time, it gets a little insular. And that's how we found out about the comfort door program. Yeah, you know, they went, they were at Roger Williams University in a class and, you know, and they were talking about that. And we came back and we presented it and we, now we have Duke. There you go. Prince. Yeah. The next page is basically our programs. Community Outreach is our outreach personnel that we share with the surrounding towns through the Howard Center. As you know, in the, in the study, we're looking at having our own dedicated person. Our kennel, again, it's nice that we have a good system here where, you know, checks and balances or licensing. So if we pick up a dog and, you know, Facebook is wonders. Twitter is wondering because we put the face of the animal on and we get calls, we know who owns and all that. But we do have a place if we have to, if nobody claims a dog, it's, it's the lucky puppies over in Cochester. And I found out last week that they're closing. So Ashley has been tasked to figure out what other departments take their dogs and, you know, and see what that costs. Hopefully we can stay within this, this range of what it costs for the kennel fees and, and all that. And we, we have awards programs. We've, we started this year where people with multiple years of experience, anniversaries here, we do a little something special. We just started that. We had it for dispatcher Chamberlain and Sergeant Claffey. They reached milestone. So we did something special with sandwiches and all that. So we're going to continue that forward. Again, it's another row. It gets everybody together. And then our public service programs. That's basically our Halloween stuff and our trinkets in the lobby and brochures if we want to send them out. But the, the Halloween program is a big hit, you know, so it's, it's nice to have that in this community. And then the community justice center is, is our CJC in our building. Like I talked about is that we relocated them down the first floor of our building because that way they're not being chaperoned around the building. They don't have to be let in, let out. They don't have to be watched going through the, you know, so evidence worked out. It's, it's a, it's a positive for, for the unit there. So it's, it's, I haven't heard anything negative about it. What's the big jump board? We basically, what we do is we offset some of the costs that they don't get from DLC, but it's not personnel. It's, is it. And there's some personal costs baked into the grant. We at the town, hey, the, all the benefits and things that's not this state part, right? Like the grant doesn't cover the benefits for the staff. It essentially covers operations to a certain point and then we fill in that gap. Yeah. So I think the total program budget is around hundred and ninety or so. Yeah. And the town puts in this budget for next year, sixty two thousand. We estimate for the grant reporting about in times contributions based on building space and administrative time to. Mainly surely it's time to chiefs time to oversee the grant. We value that in kind around another forty thousand dollars or so. So kind of overall the town's the dust from the program at about a hundred thousand dollars for the operating budget and in kind. I have reached out. I think I should say the night I've reached out to Jerrick, sorry, Heinzberg and Richmond. They are primary users of the services as well. And their select boards are having a dialogue, my request to ask for a financial contribution towards the operating budget for the program. So they are discussing it. I know it's part of their processes right now as well. Do we have a, I mean, obviously we don't want to put a deadline on them because we're asking them for money. And if they, but whenever it might come in, that would be a good thing. But do we have a sense of when they might, will it be within this budget process so that we could factor that in. Yep, I anticipate we'll know, you know, as they finalize their warning for town meeting what what I did in my conversation with them. I put an extra ten dollars collectively from those two towns, maybe higher than that, but I try to take sort of the best of it. And we put that in our miscellaneous revenue line as part of that overall. We see more and more of the community justice program, you know, growing what studies show on the effectiveness of this. There must be studies that have been done. This is the alternative. They have their programs. They cheat. Chris Lee has the successes she has and all that from her. And again, it's, it's a good program. I sit on some of the circles and participate. It holds them accountable a lot different than what will hold accountable. And it's, as you notice in the paper, they're going to be able to work with people in domestic violence incidents and all that. So they're expanding their, their coverage area. Part of what we're looking for the future to the idea of the co-location facility and in taff corners areas to help that connectivity with the community and folks be served by the CJC. I have a tough time getting down to the village without access to a vehicle or public transportation. Working to expand that community outreach unit concept to really have a good partnership on that outreach front as well, continue to work within the police department. The community justice program is putting more of the cost of rehabilitation on to the towns from the state that an accurate assessment. I think it's, you know, it's that local partnership. I think it's spent, it's originally from a department corrections grant. It's working to get people engaged in a system in a way that's restorative to help both the victims and the people who were involved in the interaction as well. It's a really good process. It's certainly a good alternative for different types of offenses out there and it really keeps it at a local level. So it's certainly a model that that's proven and a good program. So it's a model that has been proven in other communities or studies. Well, yeah, it's been pretty much what by since 2012 2013 here in the community. The former chief shepherd, Dodge Institute of that and the green wonder Rick McGuire start the program here. So, you know, it's, it's, it's referral based on the officers, you know, connection with with the people they're dealing with. And there's certain cases that I refer to, you know, them cases get referred by probation cases get referred by the state's attorney's office. So it's a variety of places where these cases can come from. Public safety is just something I hear about from a lot of people in the community really concerned as the town grows with more businesses. You know, more meeting more police, police action, public safety, something that's really important to members of the community of Williston. To your question. I know that I was on the community justice board for seven years. There are many national and international studies about the efficacy of community justice and the reduction of recidivism amongst participants who go through that process. But it's also a victim centered approach. And so, you know, folks who have been caused harm. It's really focused on repairing that harm to them. And so instilling a sense of community and, and so again, really the benefits and the efficacy of it have been proven in many studies. I'm sure she doesn't have them off hand. But if you ask Crystal Lee, if you talk to her, she can, you know, give you, I'm sure hundreds of them. I think one of the other values is for juvenile to just have a silly myth that by going through the CJP restorative justice. Something so that stays right. I see the importance of that on juveniles. I, you know, I just, but don't understand about all the retail theft we see in domestic violence, if that's increasing. I hope that it improves upon that also. There's, there's, I will say a lot of the cases to are referred, or at least historically have been referred as part of potential like parole situations. So there is, you know, there are times when this is a condition of parole or probation on that they go through the community justice process. So they may have also gone through the court systems and still be going through the community justice process. Again, to prevent recidivism. So that then they build stronger connections to the community because when they have stronger connections to the community, they're less likely to cause harm. Thank you. Is there any this, I don't want to, I don't want to start a feud with other towns. But is there any that Richmond and Heinsberg are in our catchment area. And we have to take their, their cases. Even if they don't pay any money. Yep. That's the way it's been set up since the beginning. It's part of the grant part, right? So I think I've had good conversations with both managers, those communities and then they understand they're, they're getting a good service that they have to pay for. Yeah. Maybe we could do an in kind trade or something. I don't know what that would be, but send them some of our sewage or something. We swatter. We swatter. Yeah, we swatter. Let's do it. Yeah, because that just might have a dog kill. That is a bit unfair. One thing I was talking about with them is, you know, a methodology for allocation and you know, and part of this is you can look back at cases refer those communities, but the CDC also offers other services for the mediation services, things of that nature that aren't necessarily a panel based. So I think what I pitched to them was population based on the town's contribution, the 62,000 and also the in kind number to see what they came back with. They said we can have an involved in conversation looking at data points, but I told them basically, if your communities are going to support some allocation to start, that's a good first step. We can refine this. Actually, my two cents I've seen as a lawyer that this it does work a lot, but no system works perfectly. You know, the friction in the system right now is repeat offenders and people who are, you know, shoplifting because they're, they're feeding, you know, the substance abuse disorder. And, you know, I don't, I don't know that the restorative process by itself works for them entirely, but that's not, you know, that that's a separate issue from anything the town can control. So, you know, I think the, I think it's a great program that needs to be supported the other issues or things that we're going to have to work on as we go forward. And finally, on my last page of revenues. What we've done is trying to move up patrol out of the building more is Ashley has been certified to do fingerprinting now and been verification. So we're not bringing an officer in. So hopefully we'll be able to do fingerprinting more. And that's a that's a good source of revenue. And evident on court finds it's a football horn when, you know, that's decided, you know, when we get the money, we never know. We don't get any highlights or any heads up that you're getting money. We'll get a surely it'll tell us that we got some money or we'll get something so basically the money that, you know, we believe is pretty much is the fingerprinting insurance reports. The been verification. It's amazing, you know, how many videos that we have to duplicate for for the court system and all that. So it's a time for some of the effort. So to have an officer tied up to that actually has stepped up just like what the state police have done. They've removed a lot of the, you know, uniform people out of administrative position and backfill them with civilians to get people out. So that's keeping our officers out in the field without going back and doing this stuff. So it's worked out well so far. That's it on the. Chief on the tickets. Yeah. Is that what you were? Yeah. Okay. And just the number goes from FY 24 of $2,000 to $13,000 and FY 25. Yeah. Yeah, first quarter. If you look at the actual in 23 is almost 16,000. Okay. Again, it's wherever they get around to sending the money. Good to be king. We can talk about new positions now or later. I can mention that out of the board life. So on page seven of my transmittal. This is based on on the Baker report thinking about looking to build out the personnel in our police department things that that future framework. Jim's recommendation of where to start in this was to think about that second police lieutenant position to build out the community outreach unit. And for a police detective position, and that would be achieved by most likely having a current officer put into that BCI role detective role that we would backfill that position with another control position. So the operating cost numbers are inclusive of all the benefits costs as well for these positions. Again, on page seven was thinking about the cost in terms of on a tax tax levy. But, you know, that's more of the revenue side of things, but just in terms of the operational and the expense side of things. That's where those numbers lie. And that's some suggestion to consider here should the board want to add at least personnel in FY 25 of where to start based on Jim Baker's analysis. But now or January, I'm I'd like a little more information on the police detective position. I understand the lieutenant one. I think, but what, what does that by the town? It's in terms of what what the position does. What it does that we're not doing today. Sure. Basically, they do all the follow up work. They do major investigations right now each officer does their own follow up work. And if somebody today is the last day of the shift, they don't come back until Thursday next week and they have cases to follow up if they just sit there. So and, you know, do drug investigations dedicated because you just don't do a drug in one day. It takes time to search when they all do their own search ones, but all that. So this is more of an added position to do follow up work. And so people not waiting around, you know, they'll call tomorrow looking for an officer and then they won't come back. So there's no way of following that up. And it's, it's, it's necessary to, to assist us in going to court, people down court, work with other agencies or detectives on cases intelligence and things like that. So more likely to actually build a case against somebody, but also keeps patrol officers on patrol as opposed to. Well, the officers will still do their work, but if they know they're going on vacation and they need some work done, who's going to do it. If you task another officer on your ship and what happens to that offices. You know, if we have a major, major case, a death or something like that, we need continuity. We need, you know, we can't have people waiting to, you know, get a call back in two days, three days a week and all that. Why not? I'm just, I'm just saying it doesn't, it doesn't pay off if you're a victim of a crime and you're told you got to wait till the office comes back and you have some serious questions. At least the detective will be able to pick that up and sit down with you or do follow up for you. We have all information if we need to get statements from people, we got to do a different type of investigations. It's just, it's just a part of doing, doing business in law enforcement that you need somebody that knows, knows to meet with the other partners, the feds, the state. So it's hand in hand. And we see it every day where I'm getting calls or dispatchers getting calls and want to talk with the officer and I told that they won't be back for a week or they won't be back until, you know, there's nobody picking up their cases. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not challenging the decision. I'm just trying to figure out in my own head how I would articulate. This would be a big, one of our biggest ads. And so I just trying to articulate it. I might, I might need to follow up to get a little bit more because, you know, just to say, well, when the victim calls back someone will be there to answer isn't quite enough for, you know, $120,000. But if it's more likely to result in a conviction or it's more likely to keep patrol officers patrolling that would be something I think I could wrap my head around but you don't need to answer right now if you want to think. Well, no, there's, there's a lot that I don't want to say in public what they would do, you know, but there's certain investigations that need to be done in this community that we're not doing. I'll just put it that way. Okay. But chief, in terms of patrol officers being freed up, I mean, it's not that the patrol officers would actually keep to be the primary person responsible for a case if it's if it's something that needs further investigation. Am I right about that? Right, right. In terms of getting a search warrant, the patrol officer may be a significant part of an affidavit of probable cause, but he's not going to be the driving force who's going to have to take time off, go to Costello Courthouse, wait for a judge. That's going to be something he might have to do that he or she, but the detective is going to be the primary responsible, primarily responsible for that and that would free up the patrol officers. Right. The other thing is, is like everybody's pretty much a death investigation, not everybody's a primary, but if you have, you know, we had the incident where we located the skeletons and we had to bring people off duty to assist on that. A detective would be able to, you know, we had to reach out to the state police, their detectives, they come over with certain things that needed to be done to look at. You need to make phone calls, you know, you're on the phone with different states looking to try to identify that this person, you know, if you only have two officers on duty and somebody's tied up. On that, you only have one officer. You know, prime example was yesterday was they made two arrests within 10 seconds and for 45 minutes, we did not have an officer in town. They were both at the courthouse. A detective would be able to take those both down the courthouse and wait with them and keep the patrol units on the street. There you go. So more patrol officers on the street if I wanted to hear. I've been watching a lot of me TV. It's important that I state that for what I'm going to say. It's the difference between Dragnet and Adam 12. Yeah. I don't know what that means. Yeah, you're just, but you know, I said it's on TV now. I'm not, I'm not dating myself. That is available now. No, you are, you're totally are. You got to watch BlueBlood. So this may be asking you to choose your favorite child, but I know that Baker's report said the lieutenant was the priority. If we're going to hire like one position is that what would have the biggest impact on public safety in our town? Is that what have the biggest impact on your department's operations? So if you had to choose one that we funded for this year, would it be lieutenant or would it be the thing is, is that we, we have a vacant tense position right now that we need to fill for us. So that's a priority. And if we want to build this out and like Jim said, and we've seen what happened before that you have a study and you dwell on it and you don't take any actions on it. My recommendation would be to add a civilian position also, not just to put, you know, uniform positions, but, you know, Jim talks about the data analysis and, you know, you want the data and when are we going to stick that person in? That's a civilian position and that would help drive this. You know, we're looking at a storefront already at Maple Tree Place and it'd be nice to have it, but we have nobody to be in there. It's a problem. But I think, you know, I think the lieutenant to build out that so I could now we divide the department into a patrol unit and an administrative unit and there's certain criteria by both to do things. But I think we need to, you know, take the step forward and go with that. But I would like to have three positions rather than two. Right. So, but if we had to, if I'm not saying, you know, one way or the other, but if we had to do just one, would it be the lieutenant or the detective? I would go with the detective. Okay. And there are other other things to think about to potentially start on it. One position halfway through the fiscal year or something like like that to with the building out that unit. Certainly, obviously, the board of things. And the one thing on the, on the data side, I've put in for a grant application from the late center for partnerships, looking to have a graduate level in turn, perhaps be with us next fall to do some data analysis work across the town to kind of pilot that data analyst role. See if that gets funded or not. But that's, that's a one thought as a strategy to look at having someone in that role and what that role would do for both our public safety agencies and probably assisting our planning office as well. Because it's a chance to pilot with a, with a first best skills to see if that's how we would structure position. If we talk about it, the other night he was applying the cops grant multi year. It's a hundred percent, but it allows you to please to graduate with tax rate. Okay. With after these positions are ever a new position is authorized. On the detective, it sounds like it might be helpful. We have a job description that probably needs some cleaning up anyway. So we could do some work to share that with the board would be helpful in January to give you a good, a good scope of the position to help you have those points if residents are asking about what would this person do today. I think there's a lot to Mike's point, there's a lot of support right now for increased public safety resources, but if, but people want things that are going to make a difference to them on the ground. Not, not, not otherwise, not overhead. So we just have to make sure that we could translate anything we add into a greater presence or more effective policing. And we also have drop descriptions for the BCI position to what I'm sorry, detective position. That's the old me. How it's PCI so. Great. Exciting time. You want me to walk through the capital. Does anybody have questions on it that we want to just highlight that further further questions by the board before we go to capital. As the Essex Police Department found any value with their citizens police academy that they've been they've started last fall. I haven't talked to Chief Hogue at all on that, but I did have them in Massachusetts and they were hit. People like no, but what I see is that you run one of them and then when you try to get the second one done, nobody shows up. The thing is, is that you need people to do it and you got to do it where you can make sure you make it work. But if it's done correctly, it's a good positive piece to the relationship between the citizens of the town and the police department. I had a friend went through it and she thought it was she had so much fun. She thought it was a great program. Yeah. That was that was big. Long time or some departments to go in, but we're limited to people that, you know, we can each it and who wants to teach it wants to be involved. So. That'll be passed to the, uh, by the new lieutenant, the administrator will kind of come up with a program and take, take, you know, the lead on that. It just seems like really positive reinforcement of your police force. Now, same thing with our neighborhood watch program, you know, I came here, we got signs, you know, people asked to be represented and then people started leaving people who ran, you know, ran the program. We're here, you know, so. Priorities right now is keeping officers on the road. The answer calls. We value what you do. Thank you. On the new pages will be 23. On the capital. That's the 1st 1, then we jump up to 54. All right, I'm confused. My capital only goes to. Page 8 or something. This is a new capital. And I mentioned the way the back. The green highlighted. Yeah. Everything. There it is. The series to have 2 binders. Yeah. 1 binder. Okay, my green only has 12 pages. Look, and now I have buildings, buildings. Oh, yep. Yeah. All capital. Okay. Different sections. Equipment. Water. So, Thunder buildings. Thunder buildings. All right. You got it. But now we're on this page. Okay. 15, you said, right? 23. Oh, page 23. Okay. I got it. Basically, this is what I talked to my regular budget. It's the building. So, you know, I'm, you know, capital trying to plan for replacement of our AC unit, the furnaces and the roof. So, it's a, we, we want to make sure that. When it needs to be replaced that we have funds in there. To replace them. And we just started this. Current year. To build it out because. We figured, like I said, things don't last a lifetime anymore. Those units are at least 17 years old. So, I don't remember having to replace any buildings during dragnet. Yeah. They just didn't put that on TV. Why not? That's the most exciting. Now we move forward up to page 54. First, the first thing on there is our cruiser replacement program. Like I mentioned earlier that, you know, we try to rotate the cruisers between two and keep them two and a half, three this last round. We're going three because we didn't buy. We use some of the money in this to offset the. Changes. Okay. All right. As needed. We had some analysis and do this year with the time out is the MOU with the union last spring. There's going to be a variance personnel costs and one, one thought is seen. Do we need to defer some of these purchases to use that capital transfer to cover that. Add a personnel costs. We've had open positions. So they may be able to be picked up through that. So we're going to, we're going to true it up as we get into the new calendar year to see, to see where that lands to make sure we have the funds. So. Course wise. Cruisers went up about 20%. And it's just a very waiting game to when we'll be able to get cruises. You know, we have to order them by a certain date. Replacement. We try to get at least one to cycles of the equipment inside the vehicle to last and then replace them again. It's amazing what we carry in any cruises now. But the good thing is, is that we get a good return on our options on and usually it's, it's around $10,000. So it's a good offset there. So. By we're going to stay with the Tahoe's. The reason why it's, it's a larger larger vehicle for everybody. It handles all the equipment in it, you know, with our weapons, we have printers in there. We have mobile data terminals. So again, it's, it's, you're not crowded like it used to be so. And. You know, it's one of those things. The other thing is, is that with adding personnel down the road is that we need to stop looking at how many we start. You know, because not everybody drives a vehicle the same way. So if you run 2 people, 3 people on a cruiser, they all drive it a different way. The seats, it's 1 ways. You know, so. So, but I was going to ask how you'd, how you'd settle on 6 plus 4, 10 vehicles. That's something we just added over the years on people. We try to have a minimum of 2 people. My, my cruiser, it's only me, Lieutenant Sony. Lieutenant comfort dog is just the dog and the handler because nobody else wants to know. And then the BCI cruiser. So those are the 4 on mark. Okay. So it would be si, depending how many people we put in the BCI, you know, it could be 2 people down the road with they share a cruiser and all that. And then it's usually 2 officers per cruiser. That share. So it's worked out good that way. On page 55. It's our traffic safety unit. And the small little paragraph at the end of the narrative. If you look outside, there's a brand new blue trailer out there. It's our traffic safety unit. It's amazing the equipment we can put in there. Actually going to put solar panels on it. So it stays charged for an operation that crossed the town. Nothing. It was a grant through a governor's highway safety. So when we do the DUI enforcement or traffic enforcement, we set up in town. We have all these signs in it that allows us to notify people and all that. So. And if they can't see that on the side, I don't know what's wrong with us. We have currently, we have 4 trailers, 3 trailers that we put out through the community. That's how we gauge traffic in those communities. We also have a covert one that we can stick in neighborhoods that people and won't even know what it is. It gives me an accurate count and speed because people see that little trailer out there and it's flashing signs and they slow right down. Well, with the covert, it doesn't do that. There's no flashing lights. So Jean, be careful. I tell you, there was one on old stage, so maybe it's like, oh, I'm going a little faster than I should be. The next page at 56, this is our technology unit and tells you what we're planning to replace over the next few years. We've done a lot. We've, we've added cameras in our building town hall, the fire department now that we, we can monitor at dispatch. So that that's, that's a plus for the community. We wish the, the state AOT would put cameras and the busiest intersections in town to allow us to see things like when there's a crash, we can see, you know, but that's not going to happen. So we have three out of the top five intersections that are the busiest. Okay, most people think the little thing that looks like a camera is a camera when it's really just the emergency vehicle. Okay, don't tell anybody. The next next page 57 is our firearms replacement. We did that. Two years ago, a year and a half ago. No complaints from the staff on it. So usually we get, you know, at least seven to nine years. But as we keep them, you know, clean and those that have my problems, we place them. It's worked out good. I'm going to skip. Do you have body cameras? Do you assume we have body cameras? Is that in? Yeah, that's the next one, but I'm going to pull off on that one. So let's jump to 59 for us. And then there's our communication tower. If you turn from to a St. George wrote on to Oak Creamy road, look to your right. Like maybe not even a hundred feet up. There's a little storage area. It's gated off with rope and all that. That's our tower. And we're working to put it up a little higher to enhance our communication here in town. So that's a work in progress through the town manager's office and sergeant shepherd and. And the communication people. Yeah, the town entered into a 40 year lease agreement with her my electric co-op who owns the property with renewable terms that terms that 10 year increments after that last year. What we're looking at, this is in your, our proposals to consider is $50,000 for professional services for permitting through the public utilities commission to be 199 foot tower. Every college shared this is the one spot we can put it that is not in the flight path. Yes. The highest point so it's a critical piece of public infrastructure for the town to implement here. And then the last piece that you turn the page back to 58. It's our request to implement body one cameras unless lethal devices. We're pretty much the only agency I think here in Vermont that doesn't have body one camera we have in car videos, cruise cameras, but we don't wear body one camera so. Eventually the state's going to come around and mandate it that everybody has it. So we want to get ahead before we're mandated and allow us to look is we're looking at grants. Everton out there. We had it in my agency down down a mass while before we went to it. I have to look at everything to make sure I feel good about it. But we had a system down there that worked very well. It's a it's a very good deterrent. Out there when people see it. And, you know, the in car cruise videos we have currently now it does well, you know, when we make a motor vehicle stop, the lights come on and comes on. We're going to all services and all that, but this will give us more capabilities of doing that. So it, you know, by by allowing us to begin the process, I think it's a it's a officer safety issue for them. And a protection to the citizens of. The structure for these is a five year lease arrangement and we like this model to propose because. The data storage is quite robust for these and also. To cover things if there's replacements or repairs that need to occur. This lease, it's $30,000 a year for 5 years. You can replace the equipment at the end of that to the suggestion. This is a new piece of equipment. It's certainly take chiefs recommendation for where an agency doesn't have body worn cameras. They are. They're beneficial for the officer safety and for people engaged with the officer to have that to have that data information. So I'm my in funding this my initial suggestion was using her for the 1st year. We would then need to find other funding and following years, but it's certainly a starting point for the conversation, but the lease model seem to be the best. Recommendation here as opposed to buying the equipment outright and having to cover that data storage and any liability of things that's broken. Well, just managing that would be a nightmare. So. Yeah, the big, big girl and we're trying to figure this out. You know, when I went to ICP, the shared international chiefs conference that I met with a lot of the vendors. And, you know, the biggest thing is when you have to go in there and redact, you know, and some some people like the Burlington has a full time person that does it. You have some companies that have software for that. So we're we're seeing what is the best capability some some agencies use the cloud. And I'm skeptical about the cloud and all that, you know, so again, and with this type of, you know, lease is that they're changing yearly the dynamics of less lethal. So it'd be nice to have the five years you rotate everything and get a new set of equipment and all that. So the tasers and the cameras are all part of the least same lease. Yeah. Yeah. Some like it's axon. That's the big company out there there in car video and tasers network. So, yeah, so it's, yeah, this tasers some some tasers will have videos on on that. So it's good to maybe have one company that you deal with all the time. So, you know, like, Molarola, we looked at Molarola net. That's a good one because they have software for redaction. But again, you just it's not something we're going to just jump in a second. I want to talk to people who have both and find out what, what your pluses are, what your minus we see in the bump in the road is and all that. And then before we actually signed on the dotted line, then we know this. So, you know, if this is the okay, then I will task staff to stop researching and do testing. So is this 30,000. So it is or is not in the budget, the budget that it is in the budget that you transmitted. Yep, it's part of the capital with our best of funding. And sir, obviously with so much equipment and things, there's a lead time, I'm assuming because this is the least thing that, you know, if we approve this and, you know, for the FI 25 budget, they could get them pretty much right away once. Yeah. We go to a certain company and most of them haven't stopped because of the demands on them now. We're not the only state, you know, a PD that's never had a, there's quite a few agencies out there. But once we know the same thing with the grant, you know, we have to wait until March after town meeting after the vote. Then we can say, okay, we'll contact the cops office to get the grant paperwork going and all that, but they have you have to wait till it's been approved by even though the board might pass it and say, okay, we approve this. They want to make sure the vote has approved it. Of course. And that's it from the police department. Sorry, I went over my time. We started you late to any questions for the chief on either capital or operating. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for what you do. Thanks. Chief Collette. Looks like you've got a presentation. Cool. We'll be talking. Do you want to drive chief? If you have the PDF from yesterday? Yeah, I can just want to share the PDF. That works for me. I apologize. It wasn't supposed to be take this. My computer. They're wrong with the room temperature. You want me to turn it up at all? Good. I had a jury trial once where I was going to play a piece of audio that the jury had already heard in my closing argument. And I said, but this is what it sounded like in this moment, click and nothing happened. Well, you can all remember what it sounded like. Same effect. Let's move on. Don't tell us what happened. I won. Let me ask all this is going on. Does anybody need to take a five minute break? Okay. All right. Well, I wanted to start this morning and unfortunately truly stepped out, but I want to thank Shirley for her work and Eric for his work on this. It really is a team approach as we navigate this as you likely know, but Shirley is the rock. Really when it comes to helping put some of these numbers together. So I thought I would start out this morning. I have done this historically for Jean and Mike. I like this visual presentation. It just brings a little bit more to it. Hopefully give you an idea about where we're coming from your fire department. Eric, we can have the next slide please is built of 25 career staff at full staffing. We have seven career personnel assigned to our 24 hour shifts. And we run that down to a minimum staffing of five people on on shift. So that means that we could have a person out sick or a person on vacation and not have to hire back on overtime. That allows us to have three people that staff the engine company and two which work on the ambulance. The captain who is our training officer works Monday through Friday eight in the morning until four ish in the afternoon. He also rides on the on the fire trucks and helps augment the other staff. So Monday through Friday we could have if at full staffing potentially at eight folks that would be on the apparatus that has not been the case recently. And unfortunately we've seen now we have three vacancies in our career firefighter spots. We lost a member to PD. And the other two people are moving on for economic reasons looking at their career where they had opportunities for more funds, more income. In addition to the career staff that worked shifts myself, my deputy Tim Gary and our administrative assistant Christie Morrison work Monday through Friday as well. Tim and myself are both also cross state costs trained at EMS. And when staffing is at a minimum of five and we run concurrent calls, Tim and I will often be part of that response, including EMS. We have 14 call staff members will speak a little bit more to that in a moment, but of those 14 five have EMS certifications. Nine of those 14 service firefighter only and seven of those folks are in their initial training so it's not like they. It they came into us and we're training them and today is actually their live fire training exercise at the state fire Academy. It's my intent if I can get out of here at a reasonable time to get down there and watch them finish up their live fire exercises down to the Academy today. Only two of our call staff are trained to the level of driving our fire apparatus. Those are our incumbent folks. Lieutenant Whitmore and fire footer short sleeves. We provide our primary responses and advanced life support EMS. We staff that primary ambulance 24 seven three 65 for you. We augment that with the engine company so we when the ambulance transports if you remember before we hired the extra nine staff with that would only leave a single firefighter protecting the entire community and that firefighter would be alone on the engine. It's a risk that we're not really willing to take any longer with the potential that exists in the community. We run a two tiered approach so that the engine goes to help augment the ambulance on our medical calls that provides extra hands for lifting that helps reduce our injury rate for back injuries and such. It helps navigate that call and give a second set of eyes especially in the changing climate that we're seeing as you referenced earlier a month about public safety and some of these unsettling scenes. It's good to have an officer who supervises that scene and keep their eyes kind of on a head on a swivel approach to make sure that our staff doesn't get into a bad situation. We of course do fire suppression. We also do technical rescue, including extrication advanced auto extrication. Rope rescue at the operations level, which means that we'll go to a certain grade, but we won't necessarily do a pick off from height in a vertical setting and ice red ice and water rescue. We do a number of hazardous materials responses at the operations level meaning we can mitigate small spills but outside of that we rely on the state hazardous materials team. We respond to a number of the motor vehicle crashes across the community. We also prevent or work on our community risk reductions programs, which are fall prevention CPR to the public and other businesses in the community and delivering stop the bleed programs primarily through the schools. Ongoing vehicle and equipment maintenance and we perform our own station maintenance with the exception of mowing the lawn at the fire station. I spoke a little bit earlier about recruiting and the call staff. If you go to the next slide Eric. We work to get our name out in the community and beyond the borders of our community recruitment efforts. We participate in the Vermont's largest career fair that you may have seen advertised at the Champlain Valley exposition. We've done that now for two years in a row. We work in collaboration with the Vermont division of fire safety to help staff that they give us our booth. We actually didn't need to pay for our booth. They covered the cost of that booth for us to be out there and working in concert with them. We're trying to get people in the door through that. A number of our staff that originate as call staff employees later become career staff employees. So that's a vehicle for us. So we'll focus on that. You have the next slide statewide. We helped organize a recruitment drive this year of what we dubbed Operation Mayday. You likely saw the advertisements on WCAX television. We worked with gray media. We got funding from the state. We got an emergency preparedness grant, an EMPG grant to help fund this for the entire state. And where that was a statewide fire department open house where we looked to recruit folks. Williston fire department had the most successful turnout of any fire department in the state anecdotally given the limitations in data. We had over 15 people participate in that. And what we did is with the skill stations where they would participate in all the skill stations they came through. They signed a waiver. We took them through each skill station. Like you see here on the screen at the end, if they completed it all, we gave them a gift card to Dunkin Donuts. So we saw an increase in that. We saw a number of applications that would allow us to bring up that call staff number to where I presented it. Unfortunately, within the last just over 12 months and with two pending. We're going to lose three of those recruits to career fire departments other than our own that they're going to get hired out of there. I don't mind seeing that if we're the vehicle, I would have much rather kept them home here in our own department. But I understand that business is business. Next slide please Eric. Just a brief look at our data. Looking back here from 21, 22 and 23 ending on December 1. It shows accumulative data on the right hand side of the screen as you face it. So we're on track to clear 2340 incident responses this year, which will be the busiest year in the department history. We did a update of the way we record incidents on my arrival. Previous administration would record burn permits and other calls for service as an incident response. And I didn't feel like that was an incident. We moved to a computer based. Burn permit scheduler now it's done all online. And so those are no longer incidents for us. So this represents actual vehicles out the door responses for us. But fire incidents aren't all fires, right? They could be a fire. Yeah, so we use a national fire incident reporting system nifers recording. So this is anything that's not a 300 code. So then there's nine categories of incident responses. The EMS incidents are captured in anything in the 300 realm. So that would be primarily rendering aid to a person. Any fire incident would involve a hazardous materials bill of a vehicle extrication. Fire alarm response. Fire alarm response. Correct. Yeah, so that it was just cleaner than to me for me than breaking it all out. You see that when we do like an end of your summary, we'll break it all out. And it's on the quarterly report. The number of actual fires was a pretty small number, but there was a lot of fire. Exactly. And do you have what if you have what if you have to roll the fire truck and the EMS is that. Are they visit show up in both? No, it does not. It's not. So if fire incidents are the incidents at the end of the incident. So unlike when you heard she fully earlier about the dispatch to our fire, our RMS has the ability to say the situation found. So the end result here is you're seeing the situation found. So if it was anything related fire related with the suppression units were the primary response and it was dealing with that type of response. It is fire. If it was it does not separate EMS was when we went and rendered care. Next slide. Looking back at some of the data we pulled EMS incidents only so the Nippers 300 codes since 2020 that's 31.5% in the last four years essentially through December 1. And that numbers obviously headed north as we get the last 30 days here. Recorded on that graph. So that's quite a jump in our EMS service demand. I will say that it's not unique to our organization. You're seeing that in the greater Chittenden County area. Most EMS agency. A lot of that. I'm sorry. A lot of that due to overdoses. Not necessarily. No, I could break it out for you if you wanted to see actually do see it in the quarterly report. So where it says where we break it out of alcohol or drugs. But it is not necessarily that part of an aging population. Yes, sir. I didn't want to say that Mike, but yeah, it really is. I don't have the numbers, but I know within a year of my arrival when I looked at our 20% of our call volume was out of one of five. Senior housing responses. So 20% of our calls were having some relationships to rendering care to the aging population. They resemble that remark. So do we all. The slide before you is the concurrent call percentage. And what this captures is that any time that we're already on a call. This is the percentage that a second call will come in when units are already committed. We, I can't explain the anomaly of 2021 other than it was a busy year in some aspects, but we stay right around that 21% mark. So about a fifth of the time when we're on a call, another call comes in and where that comes in plays an important role is our ability to staff a second unit. If the units are already committed, we need somebody to answer that second call. We can do that when our staffing exceeds five persons. So if we have the sixth person or when the deputy or myself or the captain are there during the weekday responses, you, you will see us come out and staff either the second engine, the ladder truck or the reserve ambulance. The, when we're above five personnel, we staff the ladder truck, but if a second medical comes in, they abandon the ladder truck and take the second ambulance and we've been able to do that more frequently when we're above that five persons minimum staffing. I think you go to the next slide, Eric. I tried to look at we right now we don't have a filter within our RMS to allow us to break out the number of responses that the backup ambulance, the unstaffed ambulance, if you will, how many times that goes out the door. So this is raw data from actual numbers for that ambulance. You'll see that that high number in November, that's because the primary ambulance was out so that second ambulance was actually in services, the primary ambulance. So that's why I put the asterisk there. But those other calls with the majority of those other calls that you see through July of this year would have been answered by mutilate ambulance agencies, either Essex Richmond or South Burlington. And so when staffing has allowed when we're at full staffing, we can put that ambulance on the road a number that many more times. Chief that makes a big difference in time for response, right? If it's not coming from another community. It makes a huge difference in that, especially for critically ill patients and we've had a number of them recently where our staff really recognize the importance of being able to have no delay in getting that ambulance to the scene. I think about if your loved one was waiting because you were caught in one of those 20% concurrent calls and you're waiting for that outside ambulance to come from a mutilate agency that comes will initiate care, but you won't be able to transport that patient until that second ambulance gets there. It's mutual aid. Is there any money exchanged in that? Or is that just we're all in this together? The only time that there's money exchanged in mutual aid is we could of course bill. So when we transport in it, when our ambulance goes to another community, we bill as if it was our call. We also will bill on paramedic intercepts. So if we provide a paramedic level service to an outside agency that requests it, we bill that agency. There's a matrix within our area of different ambulance priorities to go to calls. They go down the list of who's available. Ambulance is still pretty much covered by insurance. So isn't it an ambulance transport? I know it's different than calling. I guess, how does that work? Not necessarily. Not necessarily. We can get into that a little bit further down here when we look at revenue. Next slide, Eric. So I just tried to highlight some key items here with the operating budget. This is the high overhead. We'll break this out individually on each slide, but salaries, equipment maintenance, IT, dispatch and records management and then training. Next slide. The large driver of the budget increase before you is reflective on the anticipated salary. As you folks know, we're in active negotiations on our contract with the firefighters union. And so this, this number reflect reflects are what our supposed liability might look like. Next slide. Equipment maintenance and repairs. So the advantage of having extra staff on is that we get to operate more equipment. The ladder truck. When, when Jeff was here, Jeff always asked us, you know, we, we bought a million dollar ladder truck who drives it. And in 2020, we didn't have a person to drive that ladder truck. We. So when we added the additional staff in 21, that allows us to get that ladder truck on the road. But that all comes at a cost, right? More fuel costs, more costs for training. I would say that we are out and active in the community with our vehicles. And that's part of increasing service delivery is maintaining the, that equipment. We've seen a bit of a jump. We have an aging engine that we continue to see a little bit of a heartache with with some emissions control. So, so much so that we've actually built that into this year's budget because we can predict that that truck's going to cost us between five and $10,000 because of the emissions control system. A lot of the things that you heard the chief talk about, it's lube oil filters. It's preventative maintenance. The actual replace swapping tires. That's a big cost for us. And the chief drives small vehicles. When you start putting, when you start having trucks that have 10 tires on them and having to switch those out again, it's a little bit pricier than that. One of the things that I'm not sure that you're aware of, but part of our risk management approach to the fire department and certainly we have a national standard that recommends this is that we have to do third party testing. So all of our fire hoses tested annually. So it doesn't burst on the incident scene. All of our ladders are tested. So we, we, when we pull people out of buildings or we're training or we're climbing up on roofs that the ladder doesn't fail that goes for both ground ladders in the aerial ladder. And then all of our pumps have to be inspected and tested as well for flow to make sure that they flow their capacity. So that's all part of service delivery, but it does come with a cost. So you see that kind of breakdown inside of that budget. Next slide, please. Information technology in 24. So we made a big leap from a basic records management software to a more advanced records management software. The product's name is called first due. We're actually that's not in part of this, but that's going to be part of the discussion here later on. We need to increase our security. We meet with our it vendor. We had a about a $10,000 grant to upgrade our firewall last year. Part of that ongoing work is to look at industry best practices. We didn't in the past actually issue department email addresses to all of our staff and we would kind of make them as a group and filter that to their private emails. And we found out that that was a vulnerability for us that you see some of the risks that happen out there now. So we're moving towards actually ensuring that all of our staff, regardless of their career or paid on call staff status have Microsoft Office 365 licenses. So we pay that monthly and maintain that for those folks. But then we also have the network maintenance agreement with the preferred vendor. And we meet with them and they are super about forecasting for us and say, you know, here's what we think you can do better. Here's how we can keep this more secure. And they've been a great group to work with for us. But it does come at a price tag. Just add to your office 365 change the way you operate now actually could take somebody's personal email and subject it to a records request. Because now you're have town email on somebody's personal email. This is what I alluded to a little bit earlier in the second bullet about the new RMS that first new product. We're in the process of building that out. It's taken us a little bit of a while to get that up and running on December 1st. We started the initial data entry into that. We're training all of our staff on that this week. We roll out the electronic patient care report. EPCR that product costs us. You'll see in the budget it says about 16,000 and there's a connection fee is about $20,000 a year just for that for that RMS product. The other big number in front of you is the dispatch. We contract with Shelburne dispatch. We had been paying a flat fee of $58,000 annually. Shelburne police chief. So the police department supervises that dispatch center. They sent us an email in mid November saying that they are going to increase our rate by 15 and a half percent. They didn't tell us the date that that would occur and they also said they were set up at a meeting in the future to discuss it. And we're still waiting on a response from then try to negotiate, you know, we're happy to we built some money. We built about 10% in into this budget extra. That was before we into before they sent us a letter of 15 and a half. So we're trying to negotiate with them on where that number is going to end up. We are the busiest agency for which they dispatch. With the exception of maybe Shelburne PD, their own agency without external. Next slide. $43,000 is in your training item lines. This is really about employee development and making sure that we stay current about 12,000 of this annually is dedicated to a paramedic level education. That's been our historic allocation to taking incumbent staff and bringing them up to the paramedic level. We divide that up between the number of folks that are interested in that. And this brings continues with that trend that we've been following. There are some new options in paramedic and that are coming available. We just had a new program that was will be offered in January of this year in South Roy, which is independent of the Vermont State Colleges program comes at a lesser cost. Unfortunately, we have no members that are interested in attending. In addition to the paramedic, we spend about $4,500 a year. We budget for about $4,500 a year for live fire training. So we pay the State Fire Academy to use the live fire training facility down there. They have to cover their costs for instructors, equipment, consumables, all of that. So that's what it costs us to bring the department down and do that live fire training in as much as that we can simulate that training at the fire department with theatrical smoke. It doesn't give us the same operational proficiency that operating under heat smoke in that live fires environment does. So I think it's money well spent. It keeps our folks fresh and prepared to address the realities of what's beyond the street instead of being a practice firefighting, if you will. Give me a really short answer of what's the difference between EMS and paramedic. So an EMT basic is I would say a basic level of provider who could stop bleeding, maintain airways, provide resuscitation, perform automated external defibrillation. The next step would be an advanced emergency medical technician. They can provide advanced airway, IV access, a number of advanced level medications, fluid resuscitation, and then the paramedic is really the gold standard of EMS where they could provide even more complex airway management, cardio version. They could start to really be practitioners as an extension of the physician with a host of advanced level medications to correct the illness that's sitting in front of them in the patient. So it's really what we, you as a community, you would prefer to see that level of that option. That's not to say that a number of our calls can't get addressed at the BLS level. Probably the most important thing that we do pre-hospitaly is provide psychological first aid and reassurance. When people call 911, they're not having a good day and they just need somebody to help walk them through that. And so regardless of what the patch says, the certification is that compassion and being able to help people navigate their emergency is probably one of the most effective things that we do, the most rewarding things that we certainly do. But that paramedic level service is the gold standard of EMS care, the extension of the physician, the extension of the emergency department pre-hospitaly. Chief, as you talk about training, and Chief Boley talked about it too, but we're looking at finance, I and the HRI, we're looking at training as a way to keep our people engaged, to keep them challenged and to retain them. So adding dollars to training I think is really important and it gives, whether it's a police officer or a buyer, the ability to make some choices in that training to something they're interested in and that hopefully will retain them. And there's more, there's part of this allocation for FY25 includes advanced level officer training so we can start to increase the diversity of their thought process. So we're not always thinking about managing a fire ground, but we're also thinking about managing people and managing situations and having a more global approach to the environment that we serve. Thank you, Sherwin. Here's my revenue. There's our, right, we always like to see this side of that. Like revenue. Everything else seems to be, you're asked, you're asked, you're asked, what are we bringing back? Well, so here is what we are bringing back and this is a true advantage of the increased staffing is to be able to address the number of medical calls that we're going on. And so we do bill for those of you that may remember we had a little snafu in November of last year. Our historic billing agency left us with a two week notice of separation and we were without an ambulance billing agency that forced us to quickly develop an RFP. We got that published. We had a number of vendors that came in. We chose that vendor and we've had good luck with them. They've been a great partner for us with ECP. ECP charges 4.5% of net revenue is what they get. We've had some vendors bill bid that product at 8%. So not only were they the lowest, but we've had good success with them. They've worked retroactively on that timeframe between November and about late February when they really got up and running maybe early March to retroactively start to collect that. But it does put us at a bit of a disadvantage to be able to forecast our FY 25 numbers because we had a gap. And so this really, we're surely worked her magic to see here's where our forecasting is. And I think this is a good number for us. If we continue on this, as you saw this 31% trend on EMS, that doesn't mean that we have a 31% increase in transports, right? So we bill on transports to move that forward. When we set the fee schedule in May, that's where we reevaluate. So we do a regional inquiry about what other ambulance services in the area charge for the different tiers. CMS allows us to bill at a basic life supports level on ALS one ALS two. So we take that and all of those have different fees. So for the more advanced service that that paramedic level service when we will initiate IVs and administer drugs and do things like cardioversion or manage pain. That comes that we're able to bill at that higher level. And this is what Aaron center for Medicaid and I'll get it wrong. Yes, but so I just wanted you to understand what that was that and as we work with DCP and get a lot more data from them and I'm still catching up with them as well because it's been so busy. But the data that we provide and like if I asked for some new data for your rent and within four hours they produce what I needed. So I think as we continue to work with the ECP that we'll be able to get more data. And part of that is when you look at the budget this year, we used to show like total number of calls and then transports. Now this all been changed to just actually love those calls are that we are transporting and able to earn revenue. But for people who are on Medicaid, I mean, we get essentially about 50% of what we do. So, and they are a big part of so gathering more data on that as well as we go along with DCP will be really helpful to help us. Just to echo that so even though I serve as your municipal fire department fire chief. That doesn't mean so we're active statewide in advocating for increases in that Medicaid reimbursement rate so I sit as the delegate for the Vermont career fire chiefs to the Vermont EMS advisory committee. And that committee is charged annually to provide a legislative report to the state legislature. And that's one of the recommendations that we're pushing is like, we can't continue to give get 50% reimbursement for a service that costs us 100% right. Right. So we we pushed that we saw a bit of an increase last year. And that's going to be a common theme again this year when we hit the legislature. That draft report I sit will work on the finish up that draft on December 15. This week we meet. That's the end of the items that I had for operating. There's no questions. I was going to move into capital. Questions from the board. Unless it's in capital, I just remember on our tour there was a lot of talk about communications or was it it. I can't remember we're standing in the front hallway having a conversation but I can't remember what it was. It was likely to talk about communications you heard chief fully speak of on the, the tower. This is that tower benefits the fire department as well. So we would share space on that tower. Okay. So that's going to be a big item. Just for your information, we, we can't be in a building in Taft corners and get outside of the building on our radios to talk to the dispatch center. So if you're, if I'm on this radio in a building in the, in the community center, I can't get out of those buildings to talk to the dispatch. That's kind of a big issue. Yeah. Dispatch and Shelburne and police dispatch and Essex. Yeah, we were working towards was the regional dispatch model through the public safety authority and that unfortunately has taken a, taken a pause. But part of this in us, thinking how we want to evolve our dispatch from an operational level is we need to have the capital investment in the radios as well. If we were to look at potential different partners in the future and how we want to configure that, whether it's other agencies and house agencies combining both in one, one place. It's critical that we get the infrastructure. So no matter who's dispatching from any location, they can tie into our, our local systems. I summarize that. Perfectly. And we actually are talking about it. In county regional planning this Wednesday morning at nine, where we brought up, we, we, we began a survey of the agencies again in the county to see if look at county interoperability and see what if we can't kind of reinvigorate that conversation about being able. It's, there's a better model out there. It certainly comes at a cost. But it's just about getting all the people to recognize that and get back on track with some sort of a regional dispatch approach. Sounds like we're in our part. We're in Chilburn. We're at six. Yeah, and the move to Essex, you know, fortunately, it worked out at this budget time last year. I was, I was sharing with the board, you know, we're, we had a, we had a pathway we thought to stand it up and we had multiple conversations about what that would mean for But ultimately, another town that didn't have the funding and that kind of started the domino effect for, for everything. So it, it worked out that we were able to partner with Essex with kind of this micro regional. Right. Barbara thought there was to show people who might be a little hesitant to that this is a mall that can work. If we have these micro partnerships, maybe they can ultimately combine to that main public safety authority and that this happens all around the country. They know how to do it. It's 2023. We can do the stuff, but changes the government. Also the legislature is looking at this as a statewide issue. So I think that helps put help put the pause on it as well because it's trying to address this as a statewide issue and not just a Chittman County issue. I was going to say when you said statewide, that's not always a benefit. Yeah. We also have representation on that indirectly through our partner agencies. So we meet with the Vermont career fire chiefs. And we work with the Vermont State Firefighters Association, who has an industry expert that sits on that statewide commission, if you will, to, to really make sure that our voices heard here locally about how to push this forward to advocate for it. Well, as much I noticed on page 109, it's the summary for fire. Our, our column header for FY 22, it says approved. I think that should be actual right. So those are the financial. Yeah, that's true. It's just a typo. But so those are, those are actuals in that FY 22 column there. Capital items to discuss with you this year for FY 25 include the fire station paving. Chief, is there a page that in the books that we could. I can tell you that it's on page 020. Thank you. Again, so this is the summary slide for us fire station paving the replacement of a command vehicle firefighter turnout gear firefighting equipment. And then at the bottom of that gene, especially for you, it's potential savings here for capital. Next slide. So we deferred fire station paving was supposed to happen here in FY 24. This is an actual photo of our driveway out front. So we need to help her get this corrected. So Bruce, we worked with Bruce or public works. Bruce has made the suggestion on how this gets mitigated. They're going to come in and grind this off and then retop it all. And it doesn't come without a fairly significant price tag. This is Bruce's calculation because I certainly didn't have the expertise to figure this one out. About $36,000 to be to work that and the manager's recommendation is that our funds be used to do that. Next slide will show you the replacement of one of our command vehicles. So Deputy Chief Gary and myself both have these Tahos. They're aging and certainly putting more miles on. We'd like to move forward with the replacement of the highest file vehicle to chief Foley's point about trying to get a return in on that investment. So we don't depreciate, have the depreciation value and just make it that we're going to have such a gap in being able to move that forward. So this would allow us to replace that. We originally had a great hopes of moving this to an EV and we haven't yet seen a good option for us to move that forward. One of the challenges that we spoke about here internally with manager Wells and Shirley and Aaron was that this is a response vehicle. So if we were going to be out and working on an incident scene, how do we maintain the charge status of that vehicle? We have mutual aid partners and certainly have good connections. I reached out the Burlington Fire there. Fire Chief operates a little bit different than us that he's not a responder per se. He doesn't have to answer calls because he has deputy chiefs and battalion chiefs underneath him. But he has a Mustang Mach EV and at a recent meeting I saw that he was not driving his Mustang and I said, what happened? And he's like, I didn't have enough charge to get here. So it was really brought to light like, oh goodness. I don't know that we can take the risk right now of not having the charge and that car to have a response vehicle. But as you know, like technology is changing every day. So if the next vehicle that we buy is not EV, that doesn't say that by the time we go to replace the next car that we won't have an EV option that's out there and has some reliability, some option. And this is on page 60 in your binder. Our current savings there is about 67 and a half. So this would add to that savings for the next fiscal year. Chief, it's not really a budget question, but what kind of mileage would you need a electric vehicle to be able to do between charges for the department to be able to use? I don't have the answer off the top of my head. I can certainly look at it. Thanks. Fire turnout gear. This is a... This is page... Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't put them in the... Yep. 66. There you go. Thank you, Terry. Really, this is an ongoing expense for us, but I wanted to just bring it, especially for Gene and Mike who may not have seen this before, and ask why does it cost us so much money for this turnout gear? The gear lasts as a 10-year lifespan on it. And so when we purchase it, we put it in as five years as a primary set. So we will use that for five years, day to day, and then once it hits that five-year mark, it goes into a reserve status. And what that allows us to do is when the primary set is out and because it's been contaminated on its incident scene, we run it through the extractor. This is the big washing machine that you saw in the station, the one that we're working to get replaced right now. That allows us to take that backup set and put that in there so we can work on essentially cancer mitigation by making sure our members are always in clean gear. The new paradigm for firefighting is, and I don't know why we haven't thought of this before because the culture drove up probably the ignorance, is that when we do fire suppression, when we go into a building and you think about all of the things that are within your own homes and now they're affected by fire, they've changed. So what happened to the chemicals that were stored under your kitchen counter? What happened to the other items? Your sofa that was fine, but now it's a polymer-based fuel that is degraded and has a high hydrocarbon footprint. When you think about that and you look at the prevalence, we're now treating these incident scenes truly as like a hazardous materials incident, which they would have if you had a chemical spill in your home. You would have thought that. But now we go in, we put the fire out, everything's black and smoked up and we don't think of it that way. But the new paradigm is firefighter safety needs to come first and we need to ensure that they're always working in clean gear. So when we go to a fire, that gear comes out, we bag it in specialized bags, it gets tied up. We wear our lay clothes or civilian uniforms. Back to the firehouse, we start the laundry process, the extraction process for cleaning that gear and we put that back up set of gear in service. So this allocation of funds allows us to keep that rotating that gear out there and it doesn't come without a price tag, around $4,000 plus to keep that gear to buy that gear. That's the next page. Just 68, yes. So the last bit here is firefighting equipment. So the self-contained breathing apparatus, that's the device that you see in the photo. These run in excess of $10,000 per set. We last purchased them in 2019. They were forecasting that these will need to be replaced. They go through a cycle with the National Fire Protection Association where they have a standard and they usually last about two standards revisions before the technology comes out to say, hey, we need to increase safety, we need to increase the flow capacity, all these other features that come out there. So we need to be able to predict that when the time comes to replace these that we have the money. So that's why there's such a big allocation there. The cylinder that you see there, that gray cylinder that contains the air at 15 years, that goes out of service currently. Like you have to buy a new one at around $1,000 apiece just for the cylinder. The next NFPA revision is actually due in 2025. We'll look to see what that looks like for the potential liability in the future for 2025. Now I'm going to ask you to go backwards for the fire IT server. 64. Thank you, Charlie. So right now we have a physical server within the fire station. As I indicated before, we worked with our vendor to try to bring our system up to industry best practice. And what they've recommended is that we move to a cloud based data storage. We have about 20,000, 18,800 set aside right now and fire capital for this IT storage. They're looking at to make sure that we don't have systems within the fire station right now that are tied to the physical server, such as what we have is called trip lights. So at night when a fire alarm comes in when an emergency response comes in, not only do the tones open up the radio within the station so we know, but the lights also come on in the station so the members know that there's a call. If we have to make sure that that is separated from that IT, from that server in order for us to move this forward. If it is separated or whatever the mechanism is that we have to separate that, we'll be able to remove this physical server and then go to a cloud based service for us. And that would just be part, there won't be any added fees. So this would actually sunset. So we've got our fingers crossed as they explore that. Okay, so now I'm confused. Are you buying a server or you're not buying a server? We don't think we're buying. You don't want a server? We don't want one. Right. But the money is in here in case you do. The money is in there because we currently have one. So this was forecasting to replace that server and if we were to transition to a cloud based, it would essentially take us about this 19,000 to convert to the cloud. Okay. So it would really be a, we, this count would be net zero. And then this would move to the operating account. Yeah. It capitalized the cloud, unfortunately. Well, we get so much range. To which stuff in the class. This is the current ambulance that we were slated for delivery in 2023. You may remember that that was delayed. Excuse me. It was slated for delivery in 2022. We took delivery of it here in 2023. Ambulance build time today is greater than three years. So the date of order, we won't see a truck for three years. So we would need to order the replacement vehicle in 2024. County calendar year 2024 to have it delivered for fiscal year 27. They looking at a 5% compounding cost. So predicted predicted excuse me for a 2027 delivery, which would be fiscal year 2028 that truck would be approximately $495,000. Plus winter tires. Plus winter tires. Yeah, that's what it was. They're busy. They're worth it. But yeah, it's one of those gulp. How did we end up with a half million dollar ambulances? Eric, I hadn't thought of that in terms of the warning. Like it's in here in the capital budget as a 27 item and we don't. You know, we would debt fund it, but wouldn't we really have to have something on the warning in order to even put that purchase order in? Chief and I chatted about that a little bit. I think where we landed chief was waiting for 2025 for, for that to place the order. Correct me if I'm wrong. So there's no money exchanged at the order either. Right. Right. Just that we need to have the approval to even put the right in. Right. So we'd have to, we'd have to refine that with the vendor. Eric to see. But this was the, this is what was set forward. Yeah. Yeah. So part of that is these long lag times for equipment and, you know, wanting, wanting approval to eventually borrow the money three years down the road once we deliver the equipment. So that's kind of what we're. It's a tough spot to be because you should just be able to, you know, you get your borrowing authority, you do it, right? You get it later. You know, that next fiscal year. So we're seeing this in a lot of different pieces of equipment right now. For the ones that we borrow money for, probably just amulets as the fire apparatus. It's probably going to be a change in just timing for the town to think about to get that authority for future borrowing that maybe two or three years down the road. And you'll see the same on the next slide when you look at even a fire engine. Two and a half year build time for a fire engine. Oh, it's the change the demand like they're just a backlog of communities waiting to sit in this queue with manufacturer. And then with the bonds to we would go to bond sale. Typically the year we're going to get the equipment delivered. And then that first year, you can just have an interest payment and then the following year you can start your principal payment. Surely have the option to start your principal payment in year one to but sometimes we can, we can lag that if we want to. There's options there. Take that can down the road. Yeah. So this so in 2027 this would become your new primary ambulance the ones currently your primary ambulance becoming backup ambulance and the other one out the door problem. Yeah, so it would we're doing this trial run by keeping that that third ambulance and reserve right now because we've watching this trend for demand for service. And we've actually seen the benefits so far when these trucks have to go out for maintenance we pull that other truck out and that allows us to answer the concurrent. EMS call right now if even to put the tires on that ambulance, right, it's out of service for the day. We're down to one ambulance. So in the second EMS call comes in. If we don't keep the third reserve, you can't even answer. We can't go to that call. We can't transport that patient. How long do ambulances last. I think we have an eight year cycle. I'm not on a different page. Eight year. So you're getting. Something you were expected now or shortly that's been delayed some vehicle. It's here. Okay. The ambulance came this year was supposed to come last year. Okay. So you need another one in three years. We would need to order it for this for FY 28 when it's on. So you get one in 20 what year are we in 24 and you need another one in 27. It would be in 28 on that at the halfway point. At that four year could you get to fiscal year to fiscal year 28. Okay. There's the four you're kind of replacing the other one, not the new one. Correct. Yeah. We would replace the oldest one. Right. Yes. Maybe something I'll circle back with the town attorney at the board like me to just think about this borrowing lag timeline. And see if it might be prune for us to think about a question in March. If it. If we, if we're, if these three year replacements chief is that what we're still continuing to see. If we have the borrowing authority, we can at least set a contract for a build and delivery date. And then we would exercise the bond sale the year of delivery. Like, I'd feel more comfortable in placing a half a million dollar order. I think it makes sense. I mean, if we're ordering, we're committing to buying it. And if we're committing to buying it, we need approval. So. Right. You can probably cancel an order, but. But. But is there any other vehicles on up for the morning this year? No, that might make sense. The ones we typically just bought these fire vehicles. The other ones like the public works vehicles are in those sinking funds. Right. The next slide has the. Fire engine. I'm sorry to some point me to the page. I'm losing the vehicles. This is not going to be anywhere other than the apparatus grid. Which is at the end of their page. So this is slated for replacement in f y 29. And just wanted to bring to your attention. That it's a two and a half year build time. So, you know, as we forecast this, we used to figure that these trucks were going to be around 800,000. They're forecasting that by the time we order that truck to be 1.25 million dollars for a fire engine. That would likely need to be ordered in late 2826 to be delivered in that 2029 time frame. And we'll this could change a little bit if the manufacturers Q slows down the demand for production. Here in your engine emissions change due in 2027. Is that going to be a capital need them. Is that something major. So it would that would mean is essentially potential changes on that and price tag. Or what the motor on the vehicles cost. Because of the emissions control restrictions that they that they're anticipating, you know, we're always looking for a more green approach. And this is what they just wanted us to be aware that the emissions control standard will change in 2027. So these motors will have more emissions control, which will likely drive the price up higher. But it doesn't mean you have to do anything. We won't have to do anything. No, it doesn't know it would be anything pros any prospective orders. The state right now is dangling carrots to farmers to replace their old tractors and new ones. More emissions. What are they with better emissions control. Yes, you know, new tier one tier two diesel engines. That's why I bought an old one. So with all the new growth that we see a cat corners coming in. The next five years is going to require a ladder truck the next new fire truck. Our ladder truck was just delivered in the last couple of years. So no, the current truck is going to be able to address that as the as the buildings go up higher. The building codes become more stringent. So even though we build higher the skeleton of those buildings as more features for us detection sprinkler systems and stand pipes and potentially fire pumps. Meaning that with inside of the building, they have to have the ability to get the water to the tallest part of that building within the fire code standard as it goes up. So that works in our favor. You know, just think about municipalities that the ladder truck isn't always necessary to reach the tallest part of it. And how do they build skyscrapers they build it with having all those protections within the building compartmentalization. So the fire stays small fire stays in one room. The sprinkler contains that fire to that one room the smoke detection. The egress stairs that has more features because they understand the risk of those building fire in those buildings and see get higher. They put more fire protection in those buildings. So the current ladder truck that we have is has the. I'm not going to say the tallest reach because there are 130 foot ladder trucks that exists out there, but it wouldn't be practical for us to have 130 foot ladder truck. So ours is 105. So the new form based buildings that the town is proposing in the growth district, whether they're two stories or four stories, they would be everything. I guess the code would be sufficient. Well, now we're getting kind of in the weeds a little bit Mike in that the code actually doesn't hit the high rise standard until about. I think it's an occupied story above 70 feet or right around that 70 foot mark. So we meet. I think really that's deputy chief Gary's role is to work in concert with the state division of fire safety to make sure that's why we have the fire safety plan review, which is a select board policy to help make sure that we're active in that development process. So that those buildings will have the sprinkler systems will will ask for something more than that right we'll say. For instance, if you're going to build this building, we and it doesn't have a fire pump, we want to be able to connect into the sprinkler piping and the stamp pipe piping the stamp pipe is the. Hose that goes up inside of the stairwells that allows us to bring our hoses up and just connect and get water out for fire suppression in the stairs and not have to bring 400 feet of hose up through the building. So we work to say we need that within 100 feet of the fire hydrant and where we're going to park our fire engine. So the person that's out running the pump can just put a hose to the hydrant and then put a hose into the building to supply that system. That's something that Donald Wilson can demand or is that state level that we have no control over the we work to enforce your select board policy to read to have them have that dialogue with. So far we haven't got a ton of pushback on it. But all the developers, the standard is doesn't change. So they say when that fire department connection is has to be on the building, the designer of that the architect of that building may say, well, I'm just going to put it over here because there's a hydrant 100 feet from it. But it's not going to be where we parked the fire truck because it would be great if we had the other fire three fire truck staff and that would be not not a problem, but we don't have that staffing. So we'll say, I understand that you designed it to that to the code and it meets the code. But here's our limitation. We only have one fire engine showing up at the scene. If we only had that one engine, we really need that fire connection to be where we're going to park that fire truck. And the developers and the architects are have been so far very receptive to our need. They just move that in the location within the building before they build it. I would think if there was a fire and a building like that, it'd be a three, four alarm fire. I'm six alarm fire. You'd be surprised. Again, that's where it goes back to compartmentalization. So this building as an example, right, we have a we shut the doors every night to make sure that the fire doesn't spread throughout this building. If we can keep a fire to a small area by just shutting the doors and using that compartmentalization, it keeps the fire small. That's why we use, you know, the level of sheetrock here, if you will, or the drywall that's inside of there or protective egress stairs have increased duration where they protect us. They have double protection. So when people get into those stairwells that they have an area of refuge against fire. The sprinkler will often the sprinkler was never designed to fully put out the fire, but allowed in the occupants to escape. The majority of the time we can get fire suppression to the point where we it doesn't extend beyond that. The challenges is the unpredictable is when a contractor comes in and puts breaches through the fire protection. Right. They start drilling holes in the in the walls because it's easier for them to run their system through there. That's what we need to be out and enforcing through fire inspections and insight visits. That's usually HVAC systems HVAC or plumbing. Even it now is just being able to run it systems through there. Right. If you've seen any of the common hallways, if you've seen any of the new construction, you'll see baskets that look like shoots on a conveyor belt. And that's just all the IT infrastructure. The new state police barracks on top of the hill here is just full of IT infrastructure that runs through the skeleton of that building. It's impressive. I think the this last slide. I just thought this was a great action shot on the highway talking about we have a staff, a minimum staff of five people on duty every day. But this is we can't facilitate you right to your point if we go to the second and third alarm we need those extra resources. We we will never be robust enough to handle all of those big size emergencies and its partnerships like this. This is when we were covering a multi vehicle crash. South Burlington fire was committed on a fire. And so this is Burlington fire and us on a car crash on the highway last year to show that, you know, we actually cover each other here and the resources that we have in our mutual aid partners. It doesn't need to be Burlington Essex, Essex Junction, Richmond, Heinsberg fire in South Burlington. We all rely on each other for those large responses. And this is just kind of showing them. Yeah, we couldn't even see the highway to try to get back. We could not. It was one of the scariest nights ever. They're all smiling. They're all smiling. Jean noticed. Yeah. You know, in people's, that's the nice part about the job is that they, they take pride in what they do. And I think that's why they're smile. And the last slide that you see should be just a question slide. I think I asked interrupted you to ask all my questions. As you should. Okay. All right. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Thanks for please express our gratitude to the department. Absolutely. We'll do. When my tool shed caught on fire, I was amazed how quickly you all got there and how many of you there were. Yeah, I think the international guard. You posted most of that. I was, I was busy. John and I. Truck won't start tractor won't start. We're, we're, we're busy. But we, it wasn't enough. You guys got it out inside. You know, I won't be a slide here. I guarantee it with my wife. I was grateful to see you guys. I'm just proud of myself as I brought my own capital budget with me this time. I think I went two years in a row. Oh, yeah, I'm doing capital today too. Surely. Yep. Hey, Matt. Hey, Matt. How you doing, Mike? Good yourself. Good. I think it's a busy tree day today. Better to get it now before they all get wet. Yeah, I think. Excuse me. I got my wife and three, three people working. Are you having people cut trees this year? Yes. Yeah. And so 10, I think 10 yesterday, yesterday afternoon about an hour. So. So a bunch. I've got everything. I've got a cat that was a kitten last year who's now 14 pounds. And as part of his presentation this morning, after the very large planning and zoning budget that he has to walk. To spend most of his time on his growth report that he worked on with Emily Heyman, our fellow planner. Hey, it's definitely not only is it not nearly as interesting as fire trucks and police. You know, everything they were doing through, but it's right before lunch. I know I'm between the fire department and lunch. I'm going to talk a little bit about this. With, with, with my 4% of the town budget. But I'll, I, as Eric said, I'll, I'm going to. Work through the budget stuff, barely efficiently answer any questions you have and then talk a little bit about this growth report that we've been doing the last couple of years in this year's version of it for you. So great. Just start with the planning and zoning operating budget. Okay. So our revenue projections a little bit lower. This for the upcoming fiscal year, just based on what we think our current and, and recent past experience has been. The revenue, you know, tracks with the economy tracks with just sort of volume of activity in the town. And I think it's just been a little bit more volatile lately because the projects that generate large permit fees. And they just kind of happen in their own time. So, you know, you get a big commercial project like a U-Haul site development or the site development next door to U-Haul. We just took in the quote unquote big permit for that. And you just never know those, those might start, you know, three years before construction, they start conceptual permitting and work in front of the DRB. And then you're not sure when that big permit, that big fee is going to come in. So we just wanted to be a little bit more conservative about the revenue side of what we see in the planning office there. Can we change fees? Was that one of the first things I did? We changed the fee structure or something earlier? Yeah. So in the, in the, for the current fiscal year, what the select board changed, the most fundamental change was to put more residential projects into the flat fee category. So that's really trying to reflect the level of effort of labor. It takes the staff to review those. Someone can do a very expensive finished basement or kitchen remodel that happens to move a wall and require a permit. And it really requires almost, you know, a handful of minutes of staff time to process that. So we were charging some higher fees on those things that we've dialed back. We balanced that with some sort of different tiered fees around some of the DRB informed based code reviews that are a little bit higher. And we also not quite related to permits, but we firmed up the ability on large projects for us to ask the applicant to pay for the legal review related to planning, which they've always done on the legal review related to public works matters like, you know, new public streets or sidewalks, but not some of the other legal review that we're going to be getting into, especially as we start enforcing affordable housing, covenants and things like that. So we've taken some of that cost that's just been coming out of our operating budget and pushed it into a fee category. So we'll keep monitoring that and see if we've struck the right balance there. But all of that plays into that revenue picture. On expenditures, our budget does not change fundamentally year to year, but everything gets a little bit more expensive. So my first two categories where there's some kind of an increase are training and conferences and subscriptions and dues. Training and conferences is necessary to maintain certification for our currently three and maybe eventually four American planters, certified planners. They need to do about 16 hours of training per year, 32 every two years on a variety of topics, including legal ethics, sustainability and equity now are all included in that. We get a really nice training package through the American Planning Association and our local chapter here with Vermont planners. So that's what that's for. We do also use that budget to offer training to members of the various boards and committees that the department staffs. So we are willing to take a committee member and send them to town fair or some other local training opportunity that's going to help them do their jobs. And we've had a few take advantage of that. So that's what that category supports. Subscriptions and dues are going up a little bit as well. Those folks who are certified planners, get that certification pay to maintain it through the American Planning Association. We also maintain some GIS geographic information system certification for the folks who are good at doing all of the computer mapping that we do. And then lastly, we're working to return to sort of our pre-COVID budget around professional services. This is where we've typically contracted either for some of our planning help, but mostly document storage and scanning as we move into making more and more of our records available digitally online and eventually transition to a more digitally based and interdepartmental permitting system. So you heard a little bit from Chief just before me talking about some of the interaction with developers and really getting into the nitty-gritty of site plan review. And in the next couple of years, we really anticipate needing a more robust software package that lets us share pending permits with especially fire and public works in a way where we can all see what each other is doing rather than burning up shoe leather and tire rubber between the buildings, trying to pin each other down. Hey, have you had a chance to talk to this developer about the width of their driveway or the location of the FDC? We'd like to move that into something that's more accessible in real time and also accessible by the applicant so they can understand, oh, my permit application is still marked incomplete and I understand why and I understand who I need to talk to to finish that up. So that's where we're headed there, but we do still have a bit of scanning to do. I take as a model my home city and our neighbor of South Burlington. I was recently demonstrating their document storage system to a co-worker saying, you know, here's some things about it I like and don't like. I said, let's put my address in. And lo and behold, there was a new record and it was the 1968 sewer connection permit for my house. And in 15 years, I've never known where the sewer line really was. And really just putting in my address, there was this picture that the fellow had drawn when they put that in. I said, well, that's great. Now I know where to dig if something goes wrong. Now you know where they planned it to be. Yeah. So, you know, that is really useful and provides some service. That's what we're really working towards on there. And then finally, maintaining our budget around miscellaneous planning studies. This is where we support our unified planning work program assistance we get from the Chittenden County regional planning commission as well as other outside help. FY 25. At the very beginning of FY 25, we anticipate doing the last bit of work on the town plan that we're working on right now, which will be the document design and publication and, you know, really making that plan as accessible and usable as possible to citizens and decision makers going forward. So want to make sure we have a little bit of funding in there to do that work. So we have a really attractive usable town plan that, you know, will then exist for eight years and be out there. So that's what most of that's about. Pause for a second. Any questions on the planning department operating budget? Where was the, so I didn't use a consultant to help with the 2050 rollout. Yes. So we used some of our planning studies money in FY 23. To support a municipal planning grant application, which we were successful in receiving and the consultant services that we're using right now take us through the public engagement phase of the town plan. So all of those round table events, the survey inputs that we're getting the maps that people have put stickers on North Star planning. Our consultant is compiling all of that. They're going to produce what's called an engagement report that says, here's what everybody told us about the town plan. We should have that in the late winter. And then the planning commission and select board and others can use that report as something to refer back to as we start identifying all of the goals, objectives, and policies in that plan draft. So is that in planning studies or you tell me it was paid for by a grant? The match came out of planning studies and then the grant is extra. So I think it's about a $32,000 project with $26,000 coming from the grant and the balance coming from our planning studies or buying item. Anything else or I'll move on to capital? Yeah. So capital, what I'm here to talk about comes out of our conservation planning function. And there are two sheets. They should be pages 48 and 49 in the capital improvement program. Starting page 48. These are items related to the cat amount community for us. So. You'll see the items running out 2025, $2,500, 2026, 7,500, 2027, 20,000, et cetera, leading to a total in here of $55,000. And the major projects upcoming at cat amount are dealing with the new access trail from Governor Chittenden road to southern cat amount parcel. This takes the access away from the, it's being adjacent to the home that's, that's off parcel. There's some stream crossing structures that need work on some of the existing trails and then further out in the future. And we always kind of, you know, sort of puzzle over what to do with this, the issue of the sheep barn. This is a structure that's on the town property that's part of cat amount. It's a historic structure that cannot, you know, on a regulatory sense simply cannot be removed. But it's difficult to find a use for it that would really justify investing a lot of money in fixing it up. That said, we leave it out there as a question mark and, and a budget item should the town decide that that's worth doing. You know, we can do some, it's kind of like the Brennan barn for folks who are familiar with the town's interactions with the Brennan barn over the years. It's spent some money to keep it standing. And you kind of, you know, that at least lets you make a different decision about full restoration later on rather than just letting it fall down. So that's, that's the sheep barn item there. Any questions about what's up at cat amount? Unless you're proposing we get sheep. Use them for invasive species removal. Maybe a goat purchase. You have to get them plant identification. Selectively remove things. The other, the other capital items are on page 49, just on the very next page. This is the town trail management fund. So this is what we use for facilities in all of our country parks. And you see some upcoming projects. They're working on the smoker trail boardwalk and then more of punch and work in mud pond punches being those wooden structures that keep you from getting your feet wet and muddy in the wet and muddy portions of the trail. So I know this fall they pulled a bunch of old pressure treated punching out and have started some of that replacement work at mud pond. A new word for me. Yeah. I learned something new today. You know what a fan was on Thursday night, but now I know what a punch. Now you got a fan. You got punches to cross the fan. Yeah, so, you know, this has been really terrific for us to just keep this capital fund going. And we do have a prioritized townwide trail inventory and assessment that was prepared for the town in 2020 by SE group. So we have our to-do list of projects. We kind of, you know, we'll just keep working through them dealing with the most pressing and important ones over time using the funds that go into this, you know, across the next five years, total hundred and $2,500 fund. We've really, it's been really terrific working with trail maintenance in this capital fund and going back to operating for a second where we do have our seasonal trail stewardship position. You know, we've had, we've been very lucky to have, and the same person for the last couple of years doing that work for us. And for, you know, just a few thousand dollars to have one person who goes out during the summer and is focused on trail maintenance and mowing and being responsive to citizen concerns we get when something's not right. And that really lets us keep doing the work we do in the office knowing that those things are taken care of and knowing that we've got some feedback into how to prioritize our capital efforts out there. Something we'll touch on too with the recreation parks this afternoon is our recreation impact fee is Sunsets 2025. So we'll look to do a study to extend that fee, thinking about that coming up in part. What we've talked about is that fees covered our community parks but not our country parks. So we could think of how to encompass in the impact fee study country parks as well and coming up with a new impact fee there. And we have this really great plan from that was done a couple of years ago. So having that revenue stream from impact fees might help us also look to tackle some of these in a shorter term as opposed to just general funds and grants that we receive. And I won't, I won't list all through it, but if you're in your capital program binder starting on page 38 there's a list of recent pending projects related to the country parks there. So you see a summary of the work plan that we're working under with that funding. Do I have that right that it's in your capital binder? Yeah. We only have one minor. 38, yeah. Okay, good. I printed excerpts so I don't have the content. I didn't want to make a whole one just for today. So if there's not any questions about that I'll move into the fund part. The growth report. Just one question on the. Where's them? When do we talk about the fund that we put money in buying property? The ERF. Yeah. Yeah, it's in the outside services, but. And we're talking about using our funds this year, but so it wouldn't be in here, right? That's part of the it's in the outside services operating budget. But certainly if there's a question about it, Matt, Matt's office helps to see that. Sure. Well, I learned on Thursday night when I went to the thing that they threw around some numbers, which I thought was really helpful for someone as a number of person that the, that there's a certain number of parcels they have their eyes on. And if they wanted to purchase them all over 10 years, paying about half of what they think they're worth, it would be $150,000 a year. If I have that right. So that ring a bell. Yes. You know, fundamentally a lot more than is typically put in the ERF. And. Two things about that. One would be, I think there's a real opportunity as we write this next town plan to talk about what the town's long-term strategy might be around. Purchasing open space and how to, how to do it and how to prioritize it. That said, there is a really good priority parcels list. You might remember when we talked about the Glazer project, we said, well, it's, it's on the priority list. It's number 39. And there are other parcels that are, you know, back beyond that that are undeveloped that, you know, you still might want to purchase if the opportunity came up, but. They showed this was at the Wildabout Williston event. There was a bar graph showing annual contributions to the environmental reserve fund. Sort of, you know, starting in around 1992. And, you know, that's, that's gone down a little bit. I'll caution that that, that graph was not inflation adjusted. If you did that, the trend goes down, you know, quite a bit more. And of course, if we graph the cost of land per acre, that that's gone up, you know, and that said, when we use the environmental reserve fund, we're usually using it to leverage other money. We're usually not using it entirely towards the purchase price of something. And, you know, that's an important part of that strategy too. So money is important, but also the robustness of having, you know, a conservation planner and a conservation commission that can work and make those partnerships with those other organizations that were that were in the room. You know, Thursday night, like the trust for public land and Vermont land trust, all of that helps us achieve those land conservation goals. I drafted the number certainly lower than I'd like it to be. I put it at $10,000 just based on where the bottom line was being a discretionary reserve fund for the board to allocate funds to certainly up to you as you want to finalize this budget where you want that number to land. And at that point, thinking with the next town plan, how we want to fund that moving forward every year. It's been a basically a general fund allocation that gets transferred into that reserve funds. It's really a lot of different ways to think about that in the future. But when we had a lot of expense pressures, I dialed back the discretionary reserve just as I was putting the bottom line together. But certainly that I don't want people to think that reflects upon a negative opinion I have on that fund. It's a great tool to townhouse to just try to balance the budget. There's a lot of a lot of lines to look at here. Right now there's a 470 votes. And I think we have an invested in CDs and market funds, so get returns from that as well. All right. Well, let's let's talk about some predicted growth. So the first thing I want to call out about the memo you receive is this is the third year staff has prepared a memo like this trying to, you know, make some educated guesses about how much new growth and development is going to be coming in the town over the five year life of that capital plan that you look at and, you know, gives you some more context when you're thinking about budgeting, although we don't really talk directly in this memo about budget impacts of this growth, you know, can answer some general questions about that. This being the third year we've done this, it's also the first year that we decided to take a look back and see how our predictions were bearing out and, you know, if you've read the memo, I say it a couple of different ways that our predictions are generally overly optimistic. We tend to predict growth faster than it actually shows up. And we've tried to adjust our predictions a little bit based on sort of our experience of, you know, how long from DRB or site plan approval to actual occupants does it really take in a lot of these projects for things to kind of get going and what is their typical pace once they do get going. So we tried to adjust some numbers in the per project tables that are in this memo based on some of those experiences. Also acknowledging that, you know, we're in a pretty remarkable environment right now. We're a couple of years out from COVID. Interest rates have more than doubled in the last couple of years. Costs of labor materials and land have all gone up. And, you know, that's going to show up a couple of ways. It shows up in the, you know, vast over prediction of new growth that we made for last year. You know, we're halfway through just about FY24, where we thought we would see, you know, pretty significant number of new growth. We thought we would see, you know, pretty significant number of new units 172 for FY24. But as I wrote this memo, we'd only seen 10 so far come in in the first half of the year. Things are really slow right now. Things are really slow, but there's quite a lot of projects that are sort of in the works that could get going over the next couple of years and that could gain some momentum over the next couple of years. That's what those tables are about in this memo. So using all of that information and also in the background knowing that the average household size in Williston is continuing to decrease. So we lose people from town because households get smaller. And that erodes some of the number of people in total we might experience new in town over the next five years. So the top line takeaway, these predictions lead to an estimate of 625 more homes and 920 more people in town over the next five years. That's about just a hair over 2% growth across five. Those 2% annual growth across those five years, which is a little faster than we saw 2010 to 2020, which is about 1.64%. If I had to guess is my 2.1% a high or a low estimate, I think it's still a high estimate. Just not all projects even get off the ground. We assume in this estimate that they do. So something to think about there. And then thinking about commercial growth based on what we have, you know, at least site plan or preliminary site plan approval for and what's in the works, about 300,000 square feet of building footprint and about 430 PM peak hour trips coming online in terms of commercial growth, PM peak hour trip is a vehicle trip in or out of a new development that happens during the busiest hour between four and six PM Monday through Friday. So when everything else is at its busiest in Williston, this is how much busier the new development makes it. And so it's, it's here. Not because I'm expressing a really significant concern of new traffic from commercial growth, but it's just a way of measuring intensity. When you talk about PM peak hour trips, it helps you understand that a 300,000 square foot mini storage building is very different from a 100,000 square foot retail store. One, one brings a lot more intensity, a lot more demand for service to the town than the other. And it's not always directly related to their size. So context for that square footage number. So as I said, you know, we've, we've overestimated in our, in our prior predictions, you know, our 2021 prediction said we thought in FY 23, we'd see 200 more units. We saw 38. Our FY 24 prediction was 172. And so far we've seen 10. We're, we're again, we're in a lull right now. And then I mentioned that discussion of demographic change and shrinking household size. So, you know, the thing to think about to understand that is if, if no new dwellings were built in Williston starting today, the population of Williston in total would decline. Kids move away. They don't come back. People have more and more spare bedrooms. Households get smaller. It's just, just reflective of the demographic change that we have happening in town. And that said, you know, what we're seeing for new growth, if you were to look at some of these projects and think about what they look like, the trend continues towards smaller, smaller homes and more homes that are part of some kind of multifamily structure, whether that's a row home with two or three or four or, you know, an apartment building with 40 or 50 or 60 units in it. We're seeing more of our new homes are coming online in that sort of pattern as opposed to single family homes on lots. So that's that. As, as the board is, I'm sure quite aware the world has changed a little bit in Williston around our growth management system. We now have this inclusionary zoning path that's an alternate path around growth management in our bylaw that may change things a little bit. You're not seeing that reflected in these project projections yet. Just because we don't, we haven't really had anybody propose anything under those new standards yet. But we don't think it's going to fundamentally change sort of the rate of projects coming in or the rate of units coming online. Some of that remains to be seen in the next couple of years, casting that against sort of the reality that they're not making any more land in Williston. So the easier parcels to develop continue to be developed. The harder ones continue to sit there and there's fewer and fewer of them every year. So there is also some natural limitation that when you start looking at the map and Melinda had a great map when we talked about inclusionary zoning showing, you know, remaining large developable parcels in the residential zoning district. And there's just there's less and less land out there for development to happen on. And, you know, we're more likely to see that shift to redevelopment or multifamily on small parcels or infill development. So the first table, table one in this memo is the growth management demand. So you've seen a version of this pretty recently. And it goes nicely with the map on the next page showing the growth management areas. Demand to build homes in the green part of town, the agricultural rural residential zoning district is very low. There's not a lot of new homes coming online out there. Very much by design by design of the town's growth management system, but also it's zoning and also it's more assertive pursuit of conservation easements and open space protections in that part of town. So I would look at all of that, you know, that only only 11% of what's being made available has been has been requested out there. As a good thing. The town's planning is working well there. In the growth center, similarly, you know, we're closer to 60% of what's available being requested for new dwellings there. Again, we're in a bit of a lull. And this is, you know, multifamily is a new development for folks to start thinking about in places like Taft Corners. The form-based code is new. There are some projects coming through the pipeline now that will, you know, develop there, but it's still not nearly the full amount the town's planned for. And then you see that humongous number in the middle, the sewer service area outside the growth center. So this is our residential zoning district and our village zoning district. Lots and lots of projects wanting to build way more units than the 20 unit per year limit can really support. And, you know, that's just kind of the last couple of big parcels like Glazer, like Summerfield, you know, a portion of Catamount Golf Course coming in with, you know, somewhat denser projects than people were building when they were building places like Bretton Woods and Southridge. And also we're seeing those projects being scheduled out over a much, much, much longer period of time. And we'll reflect that in the prediction tables coming up. What are these little buildings on the map? So little buildings on the map represent projects, new residential projects. And this was for the five-year period of 17 to 22. So each of those little buildings is some kind of residential, either structure or residential subdivision approval. Like there's one black building in the bottom corner of the red part of the map in the growth center. That represents new dwellings at Cottonwood Crossing. And the size of those buildings is scaled to the number of dwellings that are in them. So you see more buildings and big projects happening in Cottonwood, Finney, My Lot Realty Project at the corner of Night and Day Lane is another one of those larger ones there. And then if you were to go into the yellow part of town, there's two little clusters of lots of little ones representing the Northridge Project and the Creek's Edge Project that came online during that five-year period. And then of course you see little tiny ones out in the green part of town. Each of those is one single family home. So a sense of scale of where they're distributed and then if we just did one little house for each thing happening in the growth center, they would overlap each other and we would fail to communicate. That's where new dwellings are really being created in Williston. The great volume of them is being created in the growth center. Good thing we named it the growth center. The growth center, yeah. I think generally just a positive takeaway that good planning and decisions the town has made are bearing out the way the town wanted them to. So then table two is the prediction table. So those top line predictions for number of people in homes come from the sums on this table where we really actually look at the projects that are in the pipeline and try to make some predictions about when sort of certain portions of those projects are likely to come online. So starting up in the top of the table, the orange rows are the growth center rows. You see some attempt to predict what more might come on from cottonwood crossing starting near the top. Finney crossing at the very top has one last residential building. We predicted 40. We've been in communication with them recently. It's actually probably going to be 38 instead of 40. Still might be something that would come online in FY 28. Cottonwood has one residential building. They're about to occupy probably in January. You've all probably seen it under construction. And then they'll really be moving into a different phase of the project that they're likely to be reworking a little bit based on the form based code and meeting some different design standards. And we really don't have a good prediction on that. We know those units are available in the growth management system. They've been allocated. We know that cottonwood owns some of the sewer allocation necessary to build that stuff. But there may be a pause just related to them thinking about, well, what all do we really want to build here? What's working in there? So that I could easily see that pushing back. The annex project is the new residential project just getting underway with infrastructure in the last month on the former Essex Alliance church parcel. The total estimate unit estimate here for the next five years is one of the bigger numbers on the table. 172. Imagining the first of those coming online in fiscal 26. And the way we came up with these numbers is we imagined some single family and town home elements of the project building and then one of the big apartment buildings in the project building each of those first two years. So that's how we get to 66 for those first two years. And then it tails off a little bit. And then we have at the bottom line of the growth center, the three J T mixed use building. This is a proposed six story building in the form based code district. It would be basically the front lawn of the TV bank building. And then we have a two-story building. And then we have a two-story building between between that building and route to a we're going under project review committee meeting for that next week on Friday. But it's a 59 unit residential building. With a mix of one and two bedroom units. And it's actually also proposing that 20% of those units be perpetually affordable at 80% of the area median income or a little bit more affordable. And then we have a new project building that we're going to move forward successfully. We thought that might show up as occupied in FY 27, beginning of FY 27. When we move into the sewer service area outside of the growth center, you see some project names. You probably recognize there and maybe one or two you don't. I'm assuming that occupancy might start around FY 27. And we'd see those 18 per year come online. Summer field is that former catamount golf project. And again, we just sort of assign, you know, 10 and then 15 units coming online per year after that. I will note that these numbers of units per year are a little high compared to what we typically experience from our development community. So creeks edge is the most recent project that built the very, very fastest and it was more like 10 or 12 a year out there. Northridge, the other most recent project has been, you know, fundamentally slower than that with its 39 units. Northridge has about five units left to build at this point. And we predicted of those, we might see the final four come online in FY 25 during the period of this estimate. Other projects, Michaud, you might recognize it's the one south of Mountain Dew Road that would connect through to Meadow Run with its street. It's got a big for sale sign in front of it right now. We've spoken with some folks who are interested in moving that project along. So we do expect it to go, but there's been a bit of delay there. And McCullough is actually the parcel right adjacent to Michaud that is coming just into pre application review with our DRB in the next, it's either next week or two weeks from now. I can't remember. So another small residential project there. And hence our prediction. And then down in the outside sewer service area, effectively the agricultural rural residential area, you see we have a mix of one and two unit projects. And we've sort of tried to figure the build out there. And the one thing I'll just say across all of those projects is when people do these sort of one lot or two lot sub, you know, create one or two new lots through a subdivision in the ag rural district where you need to drill a well. You often need to build a significant driveway and build a septic system. All of those things are quite expensive new homes, building new homes in the ag rural district is quite expensive. And we tend to see these lots get created. And then it's very difficult to predict when they will actually build. It can happen right away after the subdivision is planted. It can sit for five or more years. And collectively that just means you experience a little, a little trickle of single family homes out there every year. So that's what that prediction reflects there. Are all of the 27, 20, 29. Projection in the sewer service area outside the growth center. We need a new name, by the way. They, have any of them already received their. DRB allocation. That's just more than 20 in any given year. So. Yeah. So. Summer field has most of its allocation will be returning to seek the rest of it this year. And the Misha project has all of its and obviously Northridge has its and what, what these units per year projections reflect is when we think someone will actually build. Yeah. Most of these units had a window where they could have started building several years ago, but, but haven't either because the infrastructure has not gotten off the ground or the unit's not been sold. I think for example, Northridge is actual growth management allocation would have allowed the whole project to have been done two or three years ago. They just, they didn't get off the ground nearly that fast and they didn't build nearly that fast. And that's actually our, our typical experience. We used to have a much stricter window of approval around growth management where units expired. Right. You had to go back to the DRB to reactivate them that we, we recommended in the select board at the time, changed the bylaws around that because what we found was most people need a bigger window to build in than, than that five or even sometimes 10 years. And it was an awful lot of work to hold those public hearings just to say, okay, you can still build it. You've got another five years. So we gave up maybe a tiny bit of predictability by doing that, but it gave people a lot of flexibility. And, you know, the truth is the, the build out of what gets allocated in growth management or plan for approved is really, really lumpy. And it's based on factors that go way beyond what the town controls. Any other questions about the residential build out? And then I'll touch on commercial real briefly. Great. So, you know, I talked a little bit at the beginning about predicting new commercial development. You know, one thing right off the bat to understand is that some commercial developments take years to work through review and approval and to actually go and build. And there might be something that comes in the door tomorrow that's not on this table that I don't know about that's, you know, in the ground a year from now, it's a little bit more difficult to predict. But the table you have in this section is everything we we know about that is anywhere from, you know, underway and likely to occupy starting in FY 25 to, you know, we've had a pre application or some kind of preliminary review. So, you know, you see a mix here of commercial and industrial projects. Still quite a few industrial projects or, you know, projects in the industrial district like, you know, car dealership type things and things like that. The biggest things we'll see in terms of square footage are mostly industrial, the GPA LLC site. This is three large industrial spec buildings coming online in the next couple of years adjacent to the big U-Haul. On the other side of U-Haul is the project we refer to as more U-Haul. It's under construction right now. It's a big storage building. The exception to the square footage happening in industrial would be if you, you know, if you look at square footage of total floor area, the hotel going up at Finney Crossing right now is actually a pretty big building. You know, it's got a 15,000 square foot footprint in four stories. So, that's 60,000. And that's underway right now as well. Any other questions about any of these projects or, you know, if you want me to take a guess about what else might show up, I can, but it'll be a guess. Okay. Everybody usually wants to know about Aldi. Is it really happening? What about the friendlies that just got sold? So the friendlies that just got sold. Nobody's asked us any specific questions yet about what they want to do with it. In a general sense, we think that it's likely that someone will remodel the building that's there and reuse it for a similar use. The form-based code allows you to take a building like friendlies that's not conforming to the current code. You know, it's not pulled up on the street. It's not multi-story, all of those things. It allows you to take a building like that and add an addition of up to 20% of the floor area and just kind of continue to have it without having to, you know, move the whole thing or demo the building. The sense I get from the commercial realtors we worked with on that was there was more interest out there from folks who would do something like that or a remodel and a reuse, probably as a restaurant, than there was interest from somebody that I'm going to, you know, bulldoze the site and start from scratch. It is under the form-based code, but really under any zoning at all. That's a tough lot to redevelop. It's got a funny shape. It's got a lot of street frontage, not a lot of depth and access from two-state highways that the state would probably never approve today. You know, because they're uncontrolled left turn accesses and you've probably experienced somebody making that uncontrolled left turn across route two. Not a lot that VTrans can do about it because it's there, but if somebody went in and fully redeveloped it, there might be an in there. So it's more likely on a site like that that's difficult to redevelop that someone's just going to kind of recycle it. What about maple fields? Interesting question. Most of those come with a fueling alter, you know, a gas station. Gas stations, because of their drive-through nature, are so functionally difficult to approve under the code that they're basically not allowed. So if you're going to do something that where the product involves driving through, that drive-through element has to be completely screened from the public right-of-way by the building. And Friendly's, the building is essentially at the back of the site. So what you can't do is just go put a pump island on the front of the site and turn it into a gas station because that would be not compliant with the code. Thank you. Yep. Keep thinking, Mike. Well, the group that bought it, it's what they do. Any other questions about growth? You know, my closing thought on this is we give you these numbers, we don't give you a lot of discussion about how these numbers might actually relate to budget and demand for service from the town. And I'll just note that, you know, what we see and what we think is that depending on which department you're talking to, having more people in town means something very different. You know, if you've spoken, you know, with our public safety folks who are spending an awful lot of time dealing with retail theft at box stores, there's basically no connection between the number of people who live in town and retail theft at box stores. So there's not a big change in demand. Somebody like the library may very well have a more of a sort of a scaled relationship between, well, if there's this many people in town, this is the kind of demand for service the library is going to see. In the planning office, population of residents, if it was all single family homes, we'd have more permits for pools and decks and kitchen remodels when it's more multi-family, we have less. So more people might change what we see, but what kind of home they live in might be more the difference there. So we don't really talk about that a lot here, but when you're thinking about, well, oh, there's this new big something coming to town and you're thinking about your budget, it's worth thinking about, well, you know, what does that mean in terms of demand for service and therefore budget in the town, different things are going to relate to the town really differently that way. Of our goal with thinking more about data here, you know, max offices work, I've asked the police to get the last couple of years to help us start to think that way and think how is this going to affect our ability to deliver services. So I'd like us to get to a point where we have a real good analytical model where we understand these different impacts of different parts of town and how it's going to affect services. So we can take that proactive approach, whether it's adding new police officers, new firefighters, some additional planner, library staff, things of that nature. I don't think it'll be perfect, but I think we can be innovative and creative and think about that. Hopefully start to do some data work, maybe a graduate level intern to help us unpack some of those ideas will help start building some models out there. Great. Thank you. Thank you. I'll get out of the way and go have lunch. I had Sarah scheduled for 12.45. I can text her to see how much time you want for lunch. How much time do we want? She usually doesn't take very long. How much time do we want for lunch? Scheduled for half an hour. Is that accessible to people? Yeah. I'll tell Sarah to come closer to one, and she's usually fairly quick. She'll be here to take up the public work stuff. She's told me so we will adjourn for until one o'clock.