 I now have 630. Oh man, do I have to go up there and try to figure out how to get that time down? On camera. On camera. It's going to tell me I have to point near Colorado. Maybe you're in a recess. Yeah. Well, I'm not doing it tonight. Grab one of the row chairs. Oh, that's right. We have a building's manager now. Figure out how to. All right, good evening, everybody. I will call the Village Vessex Junction Board of Trustees meeting to order for July 23, 2019. Please stand and join me for the presidential legions. To the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God. Indivisible with liberty and justice for all. All right, so everybody who's in the audience, if you have not yet done so, please do sign in on the form over on the table. Mr. Manager, do we have any agenda additions or changes? We do have two additions tonight. We have a memo seeking approval for either the village president or the unified manager to sign Crescent Connector easement agreements with the railroad. That would be 6B. And then a warning of a public hearing for the village plan. That would be 6C. I will move that we add the two items just discussed to the agenda for tonight. Second. Is there any further discussion? All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. And be opposed. Great, thank you. So now is also the moment for public to be heard. This is a point in time on our agenda where if there is something that anybody from the public would like to talk to the board about that is not on our agenda, now is the time for that. Otherwise, we will take public comments on agenda items when those arise. And if you can please state your name for our record. I just want to be clear is are we talking about the dog ordinances tonight? So what we're going to do is we first have this trustee meeting and then after that, the select board will join us for a joint meeting. Then we will get into the dog ordinances. So not for another half an hour. OK, all right, thank you. Anything else from members of the public? OK. Hearing none, we can move on to 5A, the public hearing. And so Evan, would you like to take this away? As soon as I come here, I'll be confused on 5A. 5A being the hearing on those amendments that we adopted to copy on the plan? Yep. Yeah, Melanie, that's right. I was like, wait, Melanie's going to take this one. Could you go right where Patrick Murray is? The four times that Robin said he was not going to be here. He did one more time to tell you. One more? Yeah. And that Melanie was? Yeah. Here. Thank you for being a Melannie. Good evening, everybody. I'm Melanie Needle. I work at the Chinatown Regional Planning Commission and have been working with the village to update the comprehensive plan. I believe that at the last trustee's meeting, Robin gave you an overview of the changes that were made to the plan. So everybody's up to speed on that. Since then, two comments have come in on the plan. One is on page 70 of the draft comprehensive plan related to wastewater treatment capacity. I worked with Jim Dutress in the village on updating this data just to bring it more up to date. So that was really the only change. Did you, did everybody receive this prior to the meeting? OK. And then so the other change is adding another map or visual to the comprehensive plan. And that is the map of the Crescent Connector alignment just to strengthen the reference and have this contained in the comprehensive plan. And also, the report by Du Bois and King is heavily referenced in the plan. And currently, as the plan was written, there is no link to the document to the Design Five Corners Implementation Plan. So another comment is to just create a link to this document so that we have a stronger reference to the Design Five Corners Implementation Plan. There are numerous statements in the plan that reference this. And currently, this is on the CCRPC website. It may also be on the Village website. So I think just creating a stronger connection to this plan would be good. And that was all I have heard as far as the comments since the hearing has been warned. And it sounds like Evan informed you that another hearing on August 13 needs to be warned as well. So that's. And that is on the agenda now. Yep. OK. And that's it. Any questions? So we, OK. And so can you, in terms of for those of us who have not been as involved in this process and may be hearing about even what the comprehensive plan is, could you just give a brief overview as to what a comprehensive plan is and how it relates to our community? Sure. So every municipality that is doing planning and zoning is given the authority to plan and zone in the state has to create a comprehensive plan. And it's updated on an eight-year cycle. The comprehensive plan basically sets the stage and the foundation for the policies that the municipality is going to implement. It's also an overview of existing conditions within the community. So there's a lot of demographic information, information about schools, narrative about condition of natural resources, the direction that transportation infrastructure is going to take. So it's basically the community's commitment to land use planning, transportation planning. So it's very comprehensive. For sure. Yeah. And so the update began in February of 2019. So it's been kind of on an aggressive schedule. And the plan was the focus of the plan update was on items that were necessary to bring the plan into state compliance, including language about highest priority forest blocks, which is a project of the Agency of Natural Resources. So doing that brings the plan in compliance with, I forget what the act is. But it's the Forest Integrity Act that the Agency of Natural Resources worked with the legislature to provide more context and protection and conservation to ensure forest remains intact. So there was a forest piece. Another piece of it is, again, linking to the Design Five Corners, so bringing in all the latest local land use and transportation plans that have gone on since 2014. Design Five Corners was one of them. The bike ped work is another one. We worked very closely with the town to develop the Enhanced Energy Plan for both communities. And the town approved that in June. So now both entities have an Enhanced Energy Plan, at least in draft form, as it stands. The flood resilience section was added per state requirement to talk about hazard mitigation and flood resiliency. So it wasn't a complete overhaul. It was an update to touch on those specific areas and also to update the data so that the existing conditions are most accurate. Does any board member have any questions? Just to tack on one thing to what Melanie has said. Part of the decision to not do a full comprehensive update with the COMP plan for the villages with the intention of when the town plan is due for an update in about four years, six years? I don't know if you remember, Melanie. I think the town plan expires in 2024. So when the town plan is due for an update to do one comprehensive plan for the entire community on that schedule. The only comment that I had was the map that was there or the plan that's included is a preliminary plan. Just to change that. Diane Clemens, I am one of your planning commissioners. Thank you. I will say that Melanie is her proposal to include the implementation plan versus the design plan's original study. If you are going to include one, I request that you include both. The planning commission had a long discussion way back when in that very aggressive schedule as to the merits of the two. The implementation plan has a lot of conjectures which the planning mind came in. The planning commission is not 400% because of the aggressive nature of action because our plan says we will consider a lot of things dealing with it. It has to exploring how this will affect the community. The implementation plan expects a complete green light on this project with no whole bar. So that's my personal opinion on that. So if you are going to include one, please include both because quite frankly, the community should indeed see both pieces because the design five corners original study is what we were going on as opposed to the aggressive implementation report. So we do not have 100% of that implementation report in there. There are many items that the planning commission included or Robin included in that comprehensive plan. The aggressive schedule quite frankly, my personal opinion, did not allow us to do a full review of things. So if you do indeed find some errors or typos or whatever else, please feel free to correct those. I'm only so good. It's such a vast pace. So that would be my comment on that. Just to summarize your suggestion being that the original design five corner study is what the planning commission had discussed, had debated, and wanted to be included, not the implementation plan. Yes. And I would suggest that since the discussion and Melanie's suggestion is that you include both pieces or access to both pieces, so the community is informed on both segments and not just the two different ones. It does not have a complete data or background. It assumes that you know some stuff. I want to clarify. I appreciate your comment. My comment and my note about adding the design five corners implementation plan was just mostly related to creating a hyperlink. And I apologize if I've confused the two projects. And it's your plan. So it makes sense to include both. I don't think it's a substantial change of the plan. I was mostly just coming from the place of we talk about the design five corners project. We have the plan. Let's just create a stronger reference and hyperlink it. I'm going to actually put amber on the spot. Can you clarify a little bit? You know what I'm concerned about is that I don't have the two in front of me, so I can't on the spur of the moment. I just want to make sure that by doing what Diane is suggesting, we're not canceling something out. There's not a conflict. We wouldn't be introducing some kind of a conflict. Talk about a preliminary plan and then a finished plan. I'm assuming there are some significant differences. And so what are those differences? I can't tell you right now what they are. I haven't seen it. Do you have any thoughts about this, Amber? Are you talking about the design five corners? What you're saying, Diane, is the original draft of the design five corners and the implementation plan for the design five corners. You want those both included in the comprehensive plan? You're going to include one and include both. So that people are indeed fully informed as to what that project is. The implementation report. There are two different reports. The implementation report assumes that individuals know what the design five corners project was and how it was conducted and what the results were. And so it just takes the next step. It does not include what that process was or what the results were. OK. I mean, I'll just say that this discussion happened when I was on the planning commission. And I remember there was a lengthy discussion about the difference between the two. So I mean, I understand where Diane has come from in her comment. I think maybe it just makes sense for the board to take a look at both of those and to kind of we don't have to decide that tonight. OK. That's what that's all I was getting at is that I'm not I'm not prepared to make. This sounds like a pretty significant addition. And I'd like to have some time to analyze what we're talking about here. And I think we have that time, right? I mean, we've got the other hearing, right? Something can be added to the next hearing or does this does this have to be does the draft have to be finalized tonight? The draft doesn't have to be finalized. Well, no, it does have to be finalized tonight or within the 15 day window for the hearing process. So the hearing is August 13th. So we have the schedule meetings between now and then but before the 15 day period. Yeah, but the warning is going to appear in the newspaper or the warning is going to the Essex reporter tomorrow. So you want the plan to be available to the public at the time that the hearing is available in the newspaper. So the so I don't know when the Essex reporter comes out. Is it next week? Every Thursday. That's every Thursday. So come out next. So next Thursday would be the. So this needs to be decided upon by next Thursday. And then. You also need to consider like whether something is a clarifying change or a substantial change. If it is a substantial change, you may need to warn another hearing, which could cause the plan to be going to expiration because the current plan that's in effect expires on August 23rd. So what about if we just revert back to what we had originally, which was no hyperlink to either one? Yeah, and it'll just say that it'll just be as proposed by the planning commission. Right. And I will also offer that this came into play because there was a question that I had received from Robin Pierce about whether there was a visual of the Crescent Connector alignment. And what I found was in the Design Five Corners implementation plan. And so in that thinking, I thought that it would create a stronger connection to this plan as opposed to just tacking the map onto the document and so making a stronger connection. Can I ask if I can? I know Dan's had his hand up for a little while. I was going to say just what Amber brought up. Melanie is saying something about the hyperlink thing. Hyperlink, the comprehensive plan has to be in print form. Not everybody has access to hyperlinks. So you can't really put a hyperlink on a piece of paper and somebody, that means nothing. So we really won't be able to use a hyperlink. We'd have to print out the entire implementation plan and the Design Five Corner plan or whatever Design Five Corner project. I'm wondering if we can, instead of being so specific about it, if I'm understanding this right now, I'll be sure to answer it. But is there a way to not link to the plan but link to a place where all of those documents exist and try to get us out of this a little bit? In other words, where the implementation plan on the draft exists? So instead of being specific to one plan, say the plans and the drafts and everything that can be found here. Is that? It is possible, yeah. I mean, would that get us sort of out of this or just revert back where it was? I mean, it sounds like one's background and the other one's implementation and it's really hard to understand the implementation if you don't have the background. Is that what you're saying? I don't, I mean, the question I have, Diane and please don't take this the wrong way, is this, are you representing the entire planning commission making this recommendation or just yourself? I said it was personal. Just personal. I mean, that's the, you understand my dilemma. And you understand what my question is. This came to us as it is. And I just read it today, okay, because I hadn't seen this. Okay, this is brand new to me. Right. Okay, and as Amber has noted, there was quite the discussion on this plan. In fact, it took up most of the meeting that day. Right. So hence my surprise to see this today, so I came today because this is a hearing to say what I'm saying. I would also just say the fact that a planning commissioner hasn't seen a finalized conference of planning from the trustees is a little concerning from that sense because this is what you do on a regular basis. I've seen everything, but what you're, the new attachments that Melanie is included for you today. I have not seen them as part of this document. I have seen them in passing and in discussion, but not as part of this document. And when is the planning commission next scheduled to meet? August 1st. So it was a lengthy, it was a lengthy discussion of the planning commission, was anything resolved? How was the, was there a consensus on how to deal with this or was everybody sort of separate? The document that you received without the current document. So the idea was to keep that stuff out. Or it was fine without it. It was what I'm reading, it was fine without it because otherwise it'd be too specific and you might be held too much to it. It's up to interpretation. So does excluding it pose any harm to the plan, future developments, or depending on the impact, excluding what? What are we excluding? The implementation or the initial draft. My understanding would be the implementation plan designed by forms. Without it, does it say? We're excluding the hyperlink, right? So currently the language says consider implementation of the design five corners project. And Diane and Amber are correct. We did have a one thing discussion about having it say design five corners project. I brought the comment about hyperlinking it here in response to a comment that Robin received about the map in the plan. And the only map that I could find about the Crescent connector was in this plan, this one. And Amber's pointed out that map's not accurate anyway, correct? It's not, I guess it says preliminary plan. I'm told that there is a final. So I don't know. I haven't sat the two side by side to compare them but it looks pretty accurate to me. The reason why I believe the document is not final is because we don't have the agreements with the railroad yet. Once we get the railroad, probably fingers crossed any day now, we would have a final document. But again, we're in the timeframe of that we are in and that's a legal timeframe. So I might suggest that if we do have it by that date, it's not a substantive change. Easements change by inches, not by large amounts. And you wouldn't be able to tell that on the map anyway, unless you had the meets and bounds. It's just a depiction of where the road is going to be. Sounds good, I'll explain. Right. What I'm hearing is if you accept the change, we are likely going to miss the warning dates and therefore be out of compliance at the end. So you have to decide whether you want to add this change or keep what the language that we've got and the documents that we have and then go to your second and final hearing on the 13th. Or we do, we go back to what was proposed by the planning commission. I see those are the three options. An amber, I see your hand amber than Dan. So if I understand correctly, the two changes were just the addition of the map and the wastewater section. So I think, I mean, personally speaking, I feel fine with approving the wastewater section. And then let's just leave the crossing connector and hyperlink and all that discussion out of this. You know, I was just going to say the same thing. I think I have no problem with existing, you know, with that the wastewater portion added the other section rather than getting out of compliance concern over the language. I don't think it's substantive. I don't know, George. I'm just on understanding and you were saying we're going to remove the design five corners from the entire comprehensive plan. How does it get put in there? No, we're keeping it in there. Keep the draft as proposed by the planning commission. The only addition was to add the hyperlink which was the map. Just the map. Yeah, just the map. So we just wouldn't add the map and all the text would say the same minus the wastewater section. Okay. Okay. Great. Okay. From a planning commission member, I would look to Diane, I would look to Amber, from your perspectives, what does that, how does that sound to both of you? I would say as long as the hyperlink is there, the planning commission anticipated the wastewater treatment. We knew that Jim was working on it so we anticipated that. The inclusion of the map is probably to the benefit of everybody, but the hyperlink, I would say put it on the village website in the planning commission department. And that would probably be just fine so we can look for our comprehensive plan or our land development. They'll look for that document as it's referenced in both. So as I look at our motion that we have or the recommendation in front of us, what we're talking about is scrapping number one, the graphic of the pressing connector alignment and keeping the update slash edit to the wastewater section. Yeah. So my assumption is that would then not require a substantive change. It doesn't require a whole other rewarning and aligns with whatever. Just need the warning this evening for the August 13th. So let me just make sure that I'm clear because I'm the one who has to make the changes. So we're sticking with the wastewater edits. Those are fine. This map is not getting included and that I can work with village staff and make sure that the design five corners implementation plan is linked on your website. If it isn't already. That sounds reasonable. And your logic for putting the map in hyperlink in there the first place was just just briefly what foot. Robin had mentioned that he got a comment about the map and the plant and the implementation plan not being in the comprehensive plan. It's not the only mention of design five corners it's not the only mention of the present connector. Correct. No, there is a lengthy discussion about the design five corners project but he had wondered whether the alignment was in the plan and wanted to get it in the plan. And it is in the plan in the form of consider the implementation of the design five corners and there's lengthy discussion about what that is what the impacts are what the benefits are going to be. So all that's still in there. Yes. So, yes, I think we're all on the same page. Yeah. Sorry. It was just trying to address that comment. I apologize if it further confused things. So would anybody like to throw out a motion to align with what we just discussed? Really? All right. Amber nothing. So I would make a motion. The trustees include the update slash the wastewater section revision as provided in the memo to the municipal plan and approve the final draft plan in preparation for the trustee's final hearing on the municipal plan August 13th. So there's a second Raj. Is there any other discussion on the motion? Yes. So because the village is it's a hearing process for the comprehensive plan and also the enhanced energy plan it's important to say and enhance energy plan in the motion, yes. So I would accept your friendly amendment to add in except the Essex energy plan energy plan. The exact title is, it's the Essex community enhanced. Yeah Essex community enhanced energy plan. Yes. So adding that after the comma that's following municipal plan and before the word and. Yes. Okay. I would accept that friendly amendment. Raj would you accept that friendly second? I would very happily accept that second. And second that. Great. I need a further discussion on the motion. I'm gonna say I'm gonna vote nay cause I would assume that the link is in there for a reason and I would like to have a more robust discussion but there's not enough time. So I'm gonna say nay but I'll be the lone nay I guess. Is there any further comment? All those in favor please signify by saying aye. Aye. Anybody opposed? Nay. Great. Thank you. Thank you for being here and thank you for helping to shepherd us through this process and look forward to seeing you on the 13th as well. Yes. Great. It was my pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. And so going on to the addition of 6B, the connector road easement and construction maintenance agreement, should I assume Evan, this is you? Are we on 6A? See if you can go past that. So the public hearing is now closed on that agenda item. So yes, now moving on to 6A. I apologize. So sorry if this is gonna be a little confusing. So we have a public issue is to warn a public hearing pursuant to 19VSA chapter 17 to determine the property owners through whose land the new section of railroad street, a portion of the Crescent connector project passes or butts are entitled to damages and the amount of those damages. So this is a public hearing. It is the second part of the Crescent connector warnings that are required. First was the easements. Second one is any compensation for their boughs. We are looking to have that meeting. I believe it is August 29th at 6PM. As you're saying, this is only for the compensation. This is not to determine the need, as that has already been determined. And it is, as a motion will say, is only for those that have not come to an agreement yet. Correct. Correct. Does anybody have any questions, comments on this agenda item? I will make a motion that the trustees warn a public hearing for Tuesday, August 13th, 2019 at 6.30PM at Two Lincoln Street, Essex Junction to hear comments about the proposed amendments to and readoption of the village. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm reading the wrong one. Sorry. I'm on the wrong one here. It's on the electronic one. Yep, yep, yep, yep, sorry. I saw someone else have it on. I got it. Yeah, right here. Sorry. I'll make a motion that the trustees motion to conduct a hearing pursuant to 19 VSA chapter seven to determine if property owners through whose land the new section of Railroad Street, a portion of Crescent Connector Project, passes or abuts are entitled to damages and the amount of those damages. By decision and order dated July 17, 2019, the village board of trustees ordered the condemnation of the new portion of Railroad Street, which is to be located beginning at a point on Park Street, approximately 875 feet south of the five corners intersection, then extending north along Park Street to the New England Central Railroad NECR Burlington Branch along the east side of the NECR's Burlington Branch and crossing NECR's main line, continuing north across Maple Street and then along the existing alignment of Railroad Street to the intersection of Main Street. The village board of trustees will determine damages only for those parties who have not previously been provided an easement or come to an agreement with the village as to damages. Is there a second? I'll second. And is there any further discussion? All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Anybody opposed? Thank you. So now we can go on to the new agenda item 6B, the connector road easement and construction maintenance agreement. So in past out tonight is a memo asking for the village board's approval to have the village president or the unified manager be able to sign said easement agreements with Genesee and Wyoming. We have been in negotiations for quite a while on this railroad crossing and the easements necessary. We are in the belief that we're at the final stages and we want to get this done quickly. If they agree, which we are right at the precipice, we do not want to wait two or three weeks for it to come back. So Claudine Safar, the village's attorney has recommended that we give the village president authority, if he's not available with me, the authority to sign those agreements. I'm below 99.9% sure you're going to be available and I'd rather you sign them. I have no out of state travel plans anytime soon. Good. So I have to wait. Let me give it a shot here. So I'll move that the trustees give the village president and the unified manager the authority to sign the easement and C&M agreements with the railroad for the purpose of securing temporary and permanent easements and a maintenance agreement for the connector road once the village attorney and village staff undertake a final review and sign off with same. Is there a second? Second. Is there any further discussion on the motion? All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Anybody opposed? Thank you. And 6C. Last but not least. Go ahead, Evan. 6C is the warning of a public hearing related to the comprehensive plan that you just adopted whose long title I didn't write down. But if somebody could do that, that's what 6C is, and that would be for August 13th. Someone else take a shot, please. Are you guys having over there? I've done a lot of seconding. I just want to make sure that there is a mistake. One of the trustees warned a public hearing for Tuesday, August 13th, 2019, at 6.30 PM at 2 Lincoln Street as obstruction. I hear comments about the proposed amendments to a readoption of the village best extrotions comprehensive plan proposed as a community has to address. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Anybody opposed? Thank you. So we have now moved on to the consent agenda. I move that we approve the consent agenda as presented. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Anybody opposed? Thank you. We now have the reading file. Any general board member comments? I'm going to make one quick comment. I had a constituent convincingly and passionately discuss with me the idea, the question of why are there video recorders, cameras at the Maple Street Park? And I said, I don't believe there are. And she said that, and I know Dan's going to love this issue. And she said she could get me a petition for as many signatures from parents as many signatures I wanted immediately to put safety cameras into the park. And she said, do we understand that there are hundreds of kids walking in and out of that park all day long? And there are elementary school age kids walking down Maple Street into the park. And she thinks that a lot of parents would be very upset to learn that there are not video cameras at that park. So I would like to suggest that we put that on an upcoming agenda. I can just for a quick reference, I know for a fact that there is at least one camera that points to the main entrance of Maple Street Park from the buildings that point to the parking lot. I don't know about the side entrance to the basketball courts if there's one there. But it could be at least beneficial to have, if Brad or somebody else at EJRP could draft that up and let us know what the current state is. I just want to make a comment on that. Be comfortable discussing it if there was a method for the deletion of the tapes. Very short time, Parry. Very short. I don't think that I think we could find just as many people to sign a petition saying they've got enough video surveillance. No, I'd just say that this subject came up, I don't know, 10 years ago, eight years ago. I was on the Rec Advisory Council at the time. And this issue came up. I brought, I support the idea from my background in law enforcement that it's necessary for so many reasons to have that available. And there's so many things in this state have been done retroactively that it really, it's terrible. I mean, to take some tragedy and say, now we're going to do something rather than be proactive. So yes, it sounds like a future discussion around the current situation, around how video is stored, maintained, and or deleted for a future agenda item. Thanks, Andrew. Yeah, thank you. And if we're going to have that discussion, I'd like it to include video cameras, perhaps license plate readers. I mean, if we're going to go into the overall discussion, we should have the overall discussion in terms of retention, especially. I think if we're going to do that, that's going to have to be something joint. When you're talking about plate readers, you're talking about law enforcement. The police department for our community is governed basically by the Select Board. We're not there. And as far as what they do with their vehicles and equipping their vehicles, that's a whole different bag right there. Probably have to be a joint discussion anyway, because they're co-locating at the rec department now. So it's. Yeah. Yes, I will really note it. Thank you. Were there any other board member comments? The only other one I would point out is I wish I could do it exactly what the award was, but I know we received a bike-friendly community award. I think bronze. We kept our bronze level status. We have some action items. Some of them I think we can get to. Some of them we may not be able to do just because of the nature of our community. But yeah, they were the feedback. I'll let the bike walk committee. They're going to discuss this thing next week. I think the feedback from the League of American Bicyclists, I think I got the name wrong, was very positive about what this extension has been doing, so I think it's great. I certainly appreciate the work that OU and also the whole bike walk committee have done to help improve the access and the safety of our bike walkers in the community. Darby and Ricky and Robin were instrumental in getting us the information for that. So it was great. Any other comments from the board? Evan? OK. So we will, that's the end of the reading file. We have no executive session. So what we will do now is we will take a brief recess while the select board joins. And we will reconvene for a joint meeting with the town select board and village trustees. So we are on break. Great. Thank you, everybody. Welcome back, trustees. We are still in session, although now we are in a joint meeting. And welcome to, I will call the town of Essex Select Board meeting to order. And we will start by asking if there are any agenda additions or changes. Evan or Greg? You have three items in front of you. They all go with item five, business item 5E, update from the governance subcommittee, and have some comments from the subcommittee members reacting to the governance survey from KSV. Receive a motion from the select board to approve these additions to the agenda. All in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? All right, thank you. And from the trustees, a motion to accept? So moved. Is there a second? I'll second. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Anybody opposed? Thank you. So now we're at the public to be heard part of the agenda. This part happens for anyone who has something to say to the boards that is not already on the agenda. So if you're here to talk about the dog ordinance, that's coming. This particular part of the agenda is if you have something to say to us that is not on the agenda. Is there anyone in the audience who would like to speak? Got it. OK, thank you. All right, our first order of business, before we go into our first order of business, we have a little bit of sad news. We'd like to share former select board member Dave Rodgerson, long serving select board member and planning commissioner has passed away. And we just wanted to acknowledge his long and excellent service to the town of Essex and honor him with a moment of silence. Thank you very much. Dave will be missed. The first order of business is to discussion of proposed changes to dog licensing and control ordinance by Chief Gary. And while Chief is getting settled, I'd like to guide you through how we're going to do this. Generally, when we have a discussion of this nature, will we know that the public is here to talk about it? Chief Gary is going to introduce the topic and his recommendations. The boards will discuss those recommendations amongst ourselves. When we've reached a point where we're ready to turn the mic over to the community, you are welcome to speak. Can I get a show of hands as to how many of you are interested in speaking on the topic? Keep your hands up. So each of you will probably be limited to two minutes to speak because there's quite a few of you who want to have something to say. After everyone's had a chance to say something, the conversation will come back to the boards. And just a reminder that this is a discussion about an ordinance. It's not a negotiation of any kind. We are working on making amendments as recommended by the police department. So let's begin and hold on to your comments until we're ready to open the floor. Thank you. Chief, would you mind getting us started? As you heard from me at our group meeting a few weeks ago, part of the priorities for the police department is to start getting some of our ordinances aligned between the village and the town so that we are enforcing things consistently, no matter whether you live in the town or the village. One of the issues that we've seen over the last few years is some limitations in our ordinance that allow the police department to take enforcement action on dogs, dog owners for violations. Right now, state law allows us when we're dealing with dog bites, to deal with dog bites that relate to bites for humans off the owner's property, if they seek medical attention and there's been a break of skin. That's our only enforcement authority outside of the ordinances that we currently have for things like lease law. We've been seeing an increase for a few years. We typically are seeing about 20 to 30 dog bites to humans per year. This year we're seeing a significant amount of increases on aggressive dogs that are not biting humans, which means we don't have the authority to have a dog hearing and set conditions on dog owners or the dogs. So we saw this as an opportunity to request an update to the dog ordinance. What we'd like to do is you've got a draft that has been submitted to you for your consideration. What this draft does is it actually sets some guidelines in reference to dog violence outside of a bite to a human. So basically would allow if we had a dog on dog violence or even aggressive dog, someone could file a complaint with the municipality and request a dog hearing, present the evidence the same way we do with a dog hearing, a vicious dog hearing, and then the boards could choose to take actions, set restrictions, that type of thing. The ordinance also fills in some loopholes where we've had problems in the past, and you see some of those in the memo that I sent to you. So my goal is just to provide the draft so that you can take a look at it and not obviously making decisions tonight. And then any feedback that you have, I have a few questions out to our attorney. One of those questions specifically is by statute when we have a vicious dog hearing, if we have a complaint that has to go back to the legislative body that's responsible. Right now all of those are going to the select board. Right now and we do that basically because all the registration comes to the town for all the dogs. We have a question into the attorney of can the village do that? Can they waive that and allow the board to do it? My question would be, do you want to do that? If you have a bike that happens in the village, do you want the select board having that hearing and making that decision for you? Do you want to set up a board that's made up of groups of those people? So there's some questions out there that I think need to be answered. But I think this draft fills in a lot of the holes and also allows us to take more enforcement action that we haven't been able to take in the past. Any questions that you have? I'm guessing there's quite a few questions. Would you like us to ask them now or do you have more to share? That's basically, yeah. The intent was to get you a copy of the draft to be able to take a look at. I know I've answered some of those questions. Again, however you want to, if I can answer them now, if I don't know the answers, we'll get you the answers. I have some questions if I may just start right off. In 4.04.010D, it talks about running at large. Does that include when a dog is on a leash? My intent for asking is there are dog on dog, dog on people, aggressive acts that happens on a leash and I don't want to exclude that. Right, it's technically we have a dog leash law in Essex. So what we're trying to say is yes, it's gotta be on a leash unless it's off the owner's property instead of the way to be. So just when I read, running at large, that sounds like the dog is already off of a leash. So if that could be, if that statement can even just be removed, so that way it can just be more inclusive of if the dog is on a leash because we shouldn't, I don't think we should assume that everyone's gonna follow have the dog on a leash. Do you want me to just go pass any grammatical errors at this point? Yeah, if you could let us know then we'll. In that same section, so four period zero, four period zero, one D, second to last line, there's a semicolon missing between the words assault and or, I don't have a lot of those, it's not my strength. Yeah, if you want to send the grammaticals to us, that's fine. And then in, so non-grammatical, in four period zero, four period zero, four zero, there's references now to a domestic pet or wolf hybrid. Whereas in early, in the definitions, it talks about dogs as canine and wolf hybrid. Is the, my assumption is intent is that it should be dog and not wolf hybrid as dog is more broadly defined, whereas wolf hybrid is more narrowly defined. That is way the current state law is written exactly that way. So we can clean it up so that it's consistent. Okay. That's what you're asking. Yes, I would assume consistency because it would, yeah, and then similarly, that's also the introduction of a domestic pet. Does that need to be defined? Are we talking courses? Yeah. Okay. Right below that section A of that previously referenced section. When I read that, it talks about when such pet has bitten a person, there's no reference, I don't see a reference in that section to a animal-to-animal violence or animal-to-animal aggression. I only see animal-to-people aggression. I'm sorry. So four periods, zero, four periods, zero, four, zero. As I read that whole section, but in particular A, I'm not seeing anything in there that's referencing animal-to-animal aggression, only animal-to-people. Right. So that first section is actually the state law, the second section potentially vicious dogs is the animal, or animal-to-animal. Period zero, five, zero. Yes, I believe. That seems to be procedural. Zero, five, zero explains what to do if a potentially vicious dog misbehaves, whereas O4O describes what the misbehavior is. And it refers to biting a person that does not refer to biting another animal. Yeah. I noticed that too. And then throughout the documents, there seems to be the words municipality and legislative body are used. And then in later on, I see where it talks about select board and trustees. So again, just a consistency standpoint. And then my last one in section four, period zero, four, period one, three, zero, where it talks about unclaimed dogs in disposition. I would really just implore us to not have a dog be destroyed simply because they don't have a home. Between the amount of non-killed shelters that exist and a personal philosophy, a homeless being shouldn't be killed. I'm done. Any other trustees? Thank you. Really? You got mine. Okay. I just have one, I don't question so much about this, but the only thing that concerns me is that we go through a lot of discussion, you're gonna go through an elaborate, and I think very necessary revision of all this, but someone moves into the community with the dog. How do they know that all these regulations are in place? How do we reach out to that person? And I'm not asking you to tell me that. I'm asking, I'm just sort of rhetorically I'm asking because that's really what's happening. We can put very stiff penalties in place, but if people don't know about them and they're not really careful with their dog, then it's too late. So yeah. That can be said to anything, George. Any law on the books, whether it's state statute, local ordinances, anywhere in the state or the country, I'm not saying ignorance, but lack of knowledge of the law, the law has to be there, it's available to the people and they come, they're subject to the ordinances, registration of your dog, when you do so, I mean, the onus falls on them to do that, figure that out. It doesn't fall on us. I mean, we provide the statute, we provide the ordinance, and then it's there for them to read and whether they comply with it or choose to be oblivious to it, and I'll get it, that's on them. Yeah. I mean, I guess, baby, in terms of just getting a license, do we want to increase the, you know, have a more comprehensive brochure or, you know, informational thing when someone comes in and gets a license? Do you know that if you're out walking your dog and your dog bites another dog, you could be fined this amount of money? Yeah, that'd be helpful. That'd be an excellent thing. The thing I'm concerned about that I get is that we're saying that, and now are you going to hold them culpable based on the language that somebody at the village or town offices says something? You agreed to this, we told you this, does that hold them liable or? A copy of the ordinance when they file their license and yeah, they're culpable. Then we need it signed on the document. We'd have to go through that. I'm saying, when I'm saying the line, well, if you're going to hold them culpable for the actions of their dog and say that person, whatever, you come in, your wife has a dog, you're doing it, it just, I think it opens up a big thing of who's, you know, when you start saying that, I think. I don't, we don't need to solve it tonight. I just wanted to raise the issue. I think that you've got to try to communicate, if we're going to do a lot of changing, you need to try to communicate it. Couldn't the license just have reference to where this document is so that they can look it up? That's a possibility. Are you made aware that it is yet, exists? Yeah, you had your hand up. I feel like, maybe like a pamphlet, that's informative, but not alarming. That's thorough and then provides, like Max is saying, links. And also, I don't know exactly how it happens, but realtors when they sell a home in Essex could provide, just, I don't know what we share with realtors, but shouldn't it be that Essex has some kind of like, welcome to Essex packet that goes with buying a home or renting a home here? I think that would be on the part of a realtor who wants to have good customer service. They could provide that, but I'm not seeing what the problem would be, is if you fill out your application for a dog license and you get a copy of the ordinance. These are the rules. And yes, you're culpable if you break them, or your dog breaks them, so. Roch? Yeah, I think, here's the dog park. Here's the dog park. Right, here's the nuance of Indian Brook. There are places where you can take your dog. Even a couple of waste bags. Yeah, I think they get that when you get your life. Yeah, it's got a question. Waste bags. Oh, Pat. About the definitions for potentially vicious dog, I realize that, and I personally feel that the, what we have now, the status quo isn't really working for us, but one thing that it is is very specific about the dog has to bite a human, it has to break skin, it has to be medical attention. I worry a little bit about chases in a menacing manner or threatens to attack, because that could be two people walking down the street, their dogs cross paths, neither of them touch, but maybe one barks at the other. And there are individuals that I've seen who walk around in Essex or who go to the dog park. We have very protective about their dogs and we'll absolutely use that as an excuse to bring that to a board, you know, bring it up in front of a full board. I'm just wondering is the broadness of potentially vicious dog too broad in this instance? I mean, it feels like it to me, but I also, admittedly, I'm just kind of throwing a grenade with no solution. I don't know if I have a real good way to narrow it down, but it does seem that this is really open to a lot of interpretation. I agree with your observation, Pat, and I also want to tag onto it. What is the difference between potentially vicious dog and vicious dog? Because they both cause fear, they both chase, they both, you know, the vicious dog definition includes unless the person is trespassing. Those two definitions seem very, they seem like they should be one definition and to be a little more clear. Andy? The vicious dog one comes from the state. It's very specific. We've dealt with it a number of times on the select board. It's very specific to dog biting a human, medical attention, police report, request for select board discussion. So that comes from the state statute. So I don't think we can change that. Okay. I think that the question, though, is right, that the clarity of potentially vicious, right, whose judgment is gonna say, whether or not this is worthy of a hearing. Yeah, that's, I agree, that's a struggle and I don't have a solution either. At least I'm not the only one. Are we talking more about a dog that experienced that displays a pattern of potentially vicious behavior? I mean, that would at least, I had an incident this morning where dog ran up to us and my dog got really defensive. Nobody got hurt, nobody was gonna get hurt, but I get your point. The wrong person that happens to and then one complaint. If there's a dog that's demonstrating a pattern of complaints or demonstrating a pattern of that, that might be a little more reasonable or we may be able to act on that more reliably than, but I get, I totally, I completely get the intent because that is a problem. And I think we all agree with the intent. I just think that the potentially vicious dog section, I mean, I feel like it needs to, there needs to be some concrete action that a potentially vicious dog has taken to be labeled like that. I just, some of the words menacing manner are threatening are just so broad, which I realize is difficult because sometimes it's gonna be one off incident and one dog is going to attack and then kill another dog. And I understand that's horrific, but I also think that we need to air on the side of caution in how, you know, how expansive we create this definition. I think it depends, it's very subjective if I'm an elderly person and a dog comes at me or if I'm walking with my four-year-old daughter and a dog comes at, you know, the size of the person, the frailty level of the person, whether they're afraid, how do you know that they're afraid? But they're feeling menaced. So I wonder what we can do here. I mean, certainly we can, I mean, that's the purpose of the hearing. Is to hear from the dog owner and hear from the people. What is the experience, right? And then you folks make the decision about whether or not you believe that dog is vicious or not. If you want us to do it, then it becomes subjective, right? And, you know, we can take the complaints from people and if we get three complaints, but what happens when the bite happens on the second one. So that's where. So that's part of what that hearing process is, right? When we do it now, when we have someone that comes in, the person who owns the dog comes in and gives their side of the story. The person who feels that they've been threatened gives their side and you folks make a decision about what is accurate and what you should do. So we're willing to, we just need a solution that we can enforce consistently, both in the village and the town, that is gonna solve some of this for us. Getting back to what George said about and what we've been discussing about our ordinance here. A lot of people are coming here as well as going to other areas in Chittenden County with dogs to dog parks down in Waterfront in Burlington. Right up here on Park Street, or I'm not Park Street, I mean at West Street. West Street, there's a dog park there. People from other communities are coming here. So people from Williston, people from out of state. So they're not gonna be aware of our ordinances. They're gonna be, so we really to think that we're gonna be able to get this message out to everybody and the potential for issues to rise. There's no easy answer to it, just to clarify that. Maybe on a different topic. Same topic, different with different channels. Different to that. What we're talking about here is taking the village ordinance and the town ordinance and making them identical. My question is should we only approve one ordinance and delete the village one so that there's only one ordinance that applies to all? That kind of comes to the question of whether you wanna deal with, or whether, sorry, I'm looking at the wrong you. Whether the trustees want to deal with vicious dog complaints and these other complaints, which we've, the select board's been doing all along. But if there's only one ordinance, this part of the merger and all that, right? Why have two copies of the exact same thing? I know it makes it easier to enforce. Why not just have one ordinance and have one board deal with the issues, unless you really wanna do it? I think that's part of what the chief talked about when he first introduced this, is that one of the questions he has to the attorneys are can one board do this for both communities and then do we want, do we trustees want to retain this for ourselves? Do we want to have the select board do that? I think that that would probably, I'd personally like to wait until after we hear from an attorney who says, here's what you can and cannot do. So we already have dealt with vicious dog complaints from inside the village. The select board already has. So it would be a change in practice to have the trustees do it. So just as a point of reference, I'm not saying my way is the only way to do this. I'm just just asking the question, should we just get rid of one of the ordinances and only have a single ordinance? I think also from the administrative perspective that residents are used to coming to the town to register their dogs if they're doing it all along. You've got the dog, the animal control officer is a ton of believe and I can't say that I have a sense of burning desire to handle this. They're really pink. They can be really painful. You don't mind. Chief and I also had a conversation about the animal control officer. We are having a change in that personnel. And maybe chief, you can go into a little bit of the conversations with the officer about what we're trying to achieve in the next phase of dogs in the village in the town. Yes, so we did not renew our contract with the animal control officer and actually our retired officer, Chris, actually is taking over the animal control officer position in September. And so she will basically be doing the same duties but full time, actually working part time for the PD. With that, what we're gonna get is we're gonna get better enforcement. Chris has already integrated into the community and what we're looking for when we've talked with her is more proactive work, rules and regulations, more enforcement and reference to leash laws, all that type of stuff. So I'm excited about her with that position. I think we're gonna see a bang up job. And I think we'll again see consistency about how that's done across both communities. We also talked about maybe doing some brochures, doing some more web presence. Web presence, outreach to the community. Chris is open to all of that stuff. Say to, reference to what I haven't just said and what Dan brought up, would better signage. I mean, obviously we're gonna need to update some signage at Dog Parks at Nianbrook. Tree Farm is kind of up in the air. But other places where people tend to, I mean, that would probably help us, right? I mean, if we could get you guys some, or get the community better information. Absolutely, and we can put something again on the webpage, I think a pamphlet when you get licenses is a great idea. We can have an FAQ section about dogs, both on the clerk's page and on the PD's page. I think there's all kinds of stuff we can do to better inform the public. But we need that set of rules that we can work with. Annie? I am very excited about the, oh my goodness. Andrew is doing such a good job of calling out the sections. The picking up of waste. Yes. I think a little signage in that regard is good. And it's really important that so many kids are playing. Like I really would like to see us really take that seriously. I think it would be a brief amount of time. We'd have to take it very seriously before people just started to like roll into that for real. Am I bringing up something silly? No, gosh no. It all of a sudden got low. And then my other thing about the noisy dog. 15 minutes. I'm just a little curious. I think it's great. I think that dogs barking incessantly is terrible. You can't think, you can't get work done. I'm just thinking about the volume, pun intended, of folks in Essex who have dogs that bark a lot. And what that's gonna look like. To bring that forward at 15 minutes, that thing. So that's not new. Oh, we had that. That is the standard that we use now. Okay. Sorry. And the issue is a male man walking by, the dog's gonna bark at that, right? Yeah. Another animal in another door yard. So usually by the time we get the osser up there, the osser stops. And we set a 15 minute limit. The dog is barking continuously for 15 minutes. We consider it in violation and we'll issue either the warning or the ticket. What happened now? I'm sorry. No, that's okay. So we do that now. So that's not a change in it. So we don't think it will change that much. I think we may get a little bit more enforcement with our new ACL. I'm wondering if on that, so in the beginning of, in section 010G, we talk about nuisance or annoyance for 15 minutes. What about hours? What if someone's got a dog that's out in the backyard at two o'clock in the morning in their barking? So that's actually covered by the, I mean we could add it to this. It's actually covered by the state law in reference to noise. Okay. Is that in here too? It's not. Okay. So we could actually add that if I feel that that's what you want to see. I would just reference that statute though, rather than writing ourselves. Right, yeah. Just take in the state version. Absolutely. Right, because not all dogs bark for 15 minutes, but when they're let outside at after 11 p.m. and before 5 a.m., then they're barking. The problem is, is when they go outside and you get one bark by the time we get the officer up, it's kind of a conversation we had in just a minute ago. Yeah. It is pretty subjective. You get a neighbor that's mad at another neighbor. I think it's more of a consistency thing. Right, it is. It is. Yeah, yeah. So we go up in the 15 minute works pretty good. And normally where we run into a problem is if we're on an evening shift and we only get two officers on the road and we're dealing with a domestic. Sure, yeah. We can't and the animal control officer isn't working. We can't get someone up there, so. That's fine, but I would love to see the state. Yep. Noise. Noise in the nighttime. Yeah. I have two other questions. One relating to dog waste. I don't see it in this, and I don't know if this is a health officer question, but what about properties with excessive levels of dog waste on the property? And in terms of, you know, you just giving that one the Jerry, right? Is there, we've gotten complaints about that too. People not picking up after their dogs on their own property and then run off and smell and appearance and any thoughts? Jerry. That would be a health officer. Okay. We'll have to do a little investigating into whether that's something I'll chat with. You want to answer now? We'd love an answer now if you have one, Jerry. Can you stand up and tell us your name? Jerry Furkey, health officer. Town of Essex. It's a variable thing. In the condo complex, because it's considered as rental housing and not just rental housing, but it's a little different interpretation. I'm better right here, but if dogs pooping all over the back lawn, which is a lawn that's owned by everybody in the condo complex, better way of putting it, that can be a violation. I see. On your own property, it gets a little touch and go, whether we have any authority over that or not. On the sidewalks, we'll win the public right away. The police have some authority over that now with the village ordinance, the way it is. Okay. We're all in favor of that. Yeah. Okay, thank you. That's helpful. I have one other question. When you go to Indian Brook, there's a sign at the entrance that says your dog has to be under voice control and off leash and in my personal experience and at the many, many emails I'm getting, not a lot of owners have their dogs under voice control. Is there room, are there precedents for dealing with those owners who are asked to curb their dog but don't? I'll give you an example. I had a wonderful golden retriever. Everyone thinks golden retrievers are absolute marshmallows and they are except when they're defending you. And so I always kept mine on a leash and a short leash. And I had a person approach me with their dog and I held my dog back and I said, please don't approach us. I don't want you to hurt my dog to hurt you. And they're like, oh, she's friendly and took off the leash and the dog came and my dog attacked her dog. No, not listening. So how can we ensure that people are understanding we really mean it when you need to keep your dog under voice control? My opinion, the New York should be leash only. Because you cannot at control dogs are good dogs. Dogs are dogs. Okay, and they're gonna act out. We deal with a ton of bites and complaints at Indian Brook. And the problem is, is it'll take us 10 minutes to get up there. We have people that refuse to give their name that disappear into the, and we spend hours trying to find them. My opinion is the solution is to that is there's no off leash up there. Cause on command doesn't necessarily pee. And you can't guarantee it. I was at Indian Brook, I wanna think the very last time I went there and a person pulled up and they had a kind of a van and it was a business they take care of dogs and they open up the van, the dogs took off and then she had one dog on a leash but the dogs were all just running just took off into Indian Brook. I'm sure they were not under her voice control. So, I, yeah. Pick up after your dog up there. Do you think all of those would be picked up after? No. That's right. That is, sorry. That's the other inconsistency between, among many, the village and the town. The village does not allow dogs in their parks. Maybe Street Park, you're not allowed dogs. The only place that you're allowed to have the dog is at the dog park. The town allows Indian Brook and Saxon Hill and this is where you're also in the town getting some complaints and a lot of things up at Indian Brook. There's a rule that you're supposed to have a dog on a leash until such place as you get to, that's not being, and we really do not have the ability to be everywhere at the moment somebody does something. We are 36 square miles. We do have bike patrol. We have some other things. We cannot be up at Indian Brook all day and all night for things like that. And by the time you call and by the time we get up there, nobody's there, nobody recognizes anything and everybody's long gone. Would changing that fall under the purview of parks, the parks department, or should we include that as part of this update that we're doing here? Because I don't think that there's any ordinance about it. Is there or is it just like a general? I think if we were to add it to this ordinance, we'd also have to add it to the parks ordinance in a similar way that we made changes recently. My gut feeling is that it seems like there's, I mean just rough straw poll, but it seems like most of us are kind of in agreement, maybe. It's also, it is mentioned as the exemptions. It's in here. Oh, right, yeah. 4.040.080, part B, are the exceptions, which are A, Saxon Hill Forest, B, Indian Brook essentially, C, the dog park and D, hunting with the owner. I would not mind striking the exemptions then. Is that all? Not all of them. Not all of them, but. I'd like to be careful about the Indian Brook in Saxon, that there's plenty of responsible dog owners. I mean, the way we approach swimming at Indian Brook with our dog is she's on the leash unless she gets in the water and she's in the water. At the water, she's off leash. If we're walking her to New Brook, she's on leash. If she comes out of the water, she's with me, she's on leash. I mean, there are a lot of people like that, and I would, before we start removing some of these privileges, we consider things like maybe there's a time of day, maybe there's an hour, maybe there's, and that's hard to enforce, I get it, but if it's a weird time of day, maybe we just have to accept it, or we just say, you know, we're just gonna adjust, explore how to adjust them without taking it away completely, because we have very few resources here in closing, for instance, the ability to walk your dog to a tree farm. I just think we need to be cautious, and maybe also let the Saxon process work out before we start. Before we start impacting that with this. If that's to be done by parks. If we start restricting and not having some place else, like in S Extension, there is a dog park, there isn't one in the town, so. And, you know, the business that's bringing their, there's a lot of dog walking businesses out there, guessing they don't have an Indian Brook permit. So, I mean, you know, there are ways we can kind of address some of these problems, but I think I'd be very cautious, there's gonna be just as many people, I think, upset that we're removing something they enjoy at Indian Brook, and it's definitely a problem, but. I would definitely want to give that more attention, and I really appreciate the suggestion of, you know, not having a permit, if we have someone at the entrance saying, do you have a permit, and they don't, they get turned away, that takes care of a truckload of dogs coming to the park. But I also want the fact that we're having this conversation to be an opportunity for public awareness, that it is entirely within our control to restrict dogs from, put dogs on leash in Indian Brook, and at Saxon Hill, and it's an option we can take if things don't improve. Because the volume of contact we're getting from residents about this is crazy. It's way more than I've ever seen for anything else, Pat. Chief, do you have rough numbers about how many dog-on-dog attacks you get in a, no, okay. No, just to share- And the reason I have numbers on humans is because they're mandatory reported. So we have some, but I would care to guess that it's half of what actually happens because someone will have an incident they'll not call the PD, and so I wouldn't care to guess. How many are there? I can tell you it is a significant change in the last two years, and particularly this year. We've had multiple complaints about these dogs. What is up with that? Okay. Is there any indication on why, or maybe where that, without having information on the vicious dog person, you're not gonna know where they're coming from. But I mean, is there any way to know why the spike? I mean, is there any guesses, nothing? I don't. Yeah, okay. I've heard an interesting proposal that one of the reasons this is happening is because people are bringing in rescue dogs from other places, from all over the place, and not necessarily understanding or knowing what the dog has been through prior to that and any behavioral issues that might have occurred before they owned the dog. And so, the activity that they can't predict. So, I thought that was a very interesting observation. Yeah. A lot of rescue dogs around, so. Has everyone had a chance to weigh in on the topic, Andy? Section 404040, section E talks about the authority to enforce a dog ordinance. It needs to come from a special or annual meeting vote. So, my question is whether we can, as a board, change this ordinance or whether it needs to go back to a town-wide vote or whether once we have the town-wide authority, we can change the ordinance however we want. That's the. I'm not sure that's what that says. It says the procedures provided in this section shall not apply if the voters of a municipality at a special or annual meeting duly warned for that purpose have authorized the legislative body of the municipality to regulate domestic pets or wolf hybrids by ordinance that are inconsistent with this section. So, if the voters decide we want to do something different, that's what the vote's for. Otherwise, Chief. But I do have that question in the belt. Can we make an update to the ordinance without having to go to vote? Can we update it? Because we already had a dog ordinance. Well, that's what we're doing now. We're going through the hearing process. Right, but my question was does it have to, exactly what you're talking about, does it have to go to a town-wide vote? So that question has been submitted to Bill Ellis. I may have heard it wrong, but yeah, thank you for passing that on to Bill. I have another question. Absolutely. What is it? Oh, actually it's a clarification. I had asked the question about that there's no, in a vicious dog situation, there's a time limit you have to have a hearing within a certain number of days of the complaint for the potentially vicious one. I'm not anxious to have a time limit. I just want to make it clear to you that I'm not asking for a time limit that I just wanted to understand that we intentionally let the time frame out. So that's one of the challenges we have. In a vicious dog hearing where we have a bite, we only have the legislative body, only has seven days to have that hearing. Which if you've just got done a meeting, a trustees meeting or a select board meeting, that's now going to mean a special meeting. What we're shooting for is potentially on this potential vicious dog hearing is that we wouldn't adhere to necessarily that seven days as maybe a 14 days, which would give the window to potentially make the next select board or trustee meeting if we needed to. Obviously if it was an emergency, we could call a meeting earlier, but what it gave us was the flexibility to not be held to that seven day requirement. Just curious with Indian Brook, because of the size of the park up there, I know under state statute, Game Wardens law enforcement that we could shoot a dog that's chasing deer or chasing animals. There's a lot of wildlife up there. As we said before, the dogs go out, the dogs are picking up the scent, they're going after whatever. And do you deal with, I'm curious what the numbers are with the amount of dog chasing deer or animals up there and dealing with that. Game Wardens, maybe be more aware of that. I'm not aware of any. It is, what it is is usually two dogs that are off leash or one dog that's on leash and another dog that's off leash and that's exactly what happens is the person with the dog on the leash doesn't want the other dog near them. The person thinks they're under voice control, the dog comes over and he's either aggressive to their dog or to the human being. The person gets upset, I want your name, I'm not telling you the name. They walk away from each other, they have words, we get those calls. We've probably had seven or eight this year already. We'll have 20 by the end of the year, just from Indian Brook. People are not being, and we have a lot of people that are following the rules up there. I've talked to Ali about it. It's real tough because people, that is a place where they go out and they can get the dog off leash. So, we just have a real time, hard time enforcing it up there. It's, yeah. So has everyone had a chance to weigh in, ask their questions, make their thoughts known? So with your approval, I will open the floor to the public. They've been very patient. So again, hands up, who wants to speak? Okay, I'm going to stick with the two minutes per person. Evan, would you mind being our timekeeper once again? You want to go front to back or something so we can keep it? Right, so, try to go in order from front row to back row, and please stand, tell us your name, let us hear you nice and loud, and remember. So when you are getting close to the two minutes, about 20 seconds after, I will say 20 seconds, which is the phrase for wrap it up. Thank you. Yeah, and if you have something to say that someone else has already said, just agree with that person, let's try to keep it moving along with different things to say and stand as you're able. If you can make your voice nice and loud, that would be sufficient as well, but do remember to state your name, and we'll start in the front. Ma'am. Hopefully, we can be, or having faith in Chief Gary that you'll do that, and I'm excited about Christine being the new AOC. I think she's the good person for the job. I had an incident on the 26th where my son was walking my dog on public street, on Park Street, on the sidewalk, and a dog came out of a house, was not leashed, immediately attacked my dog, took three people to get their dog off mine. My dog was a Greyhound, which is a large dog, and rushed it to the vet, but it didn't make it. So it was very traumatic for my son, who has, you know, he has some special needs, so for him to witness that, and then go to the vet and then see the dog die. It was, it was horrendous. I know the dog has done it before, because their, the owner's daughter said, when the police said, did your dog do this, bite another dog before, she said no, and the kid said, Mom, don't you remember last December, the husband took the kid in the house? That was it. There was no police report on a prior incident, because a lot of these incidents aren't called in. A lot of dog on dogs aren't called in. I think probably you're aware of that, but they are more prevalent than we know about. Just last year at the end of my street on Abinacke, there was a dog killed, another dog, they were both leashed. So it's, it happens, and it was, it's just very traumatic. I mean, to think that, you know, my dog was on the race track for six years as a champion racer, and came through one's skates, no broken bones, and then dies on the public sidewalk. It's just heartbreaking. And it was, I've just never had anything like that. I've been a lifelong resident of Essex. Was here before there was lights at the five corners. Thank you Mrs. Robinson. Really sorry about your dog. I know, I appreciate your letters, but I implore all of you to please do something about these dogs. There are dogs that are coming. Thank you, Mrs. Robinson, your time is up, but thank you for, and feel free if you have additional comments to send them to us, we'll be happy to receive them. Thank you. Thank you. Who's next? Course. My name is Sarah Quinn. I actually was a 34 year resident of Hinesburg, I'm the resident of the charitable. I am a professional dog person. I have done it all. I've worked on dangerous dog legislation at the Hamlet level, at the town level, at the state level, county level state, and nationally. What I would like to see, what is the new step in doing these laws is what we call a dangerous dog law. This covers all dogs, whether it's a Chihuahua, a Greyhound, a Pip Boat, whatever. When you say vicious, it sparks such this guttural thing in people. Vicious, vicious. It's a dangerous animal. Any animal has a potential for harm. Just like anyone who drives a car has a potential for harm. Maybe they drink, maybe they don't. Maybe they weren't paying attention, they were texting. So in almost all of these cases that you've discussed, it's failure to control. So they have not controlled their own animal and it has allowed contact with another animal. The rescue situation that you speak of is what we call muck rescues. You pull up to one window and you order your little doggy and you drive up to the next window and you get it and you go home. A lot of these dogs are uns- as a behaviorist and a trainer for 40, some odd years and I won't get into it all. I see this all the time. People come to me and tell me how wonderful the dog is and I take one look and go, that dog should be euthanized. That is a dangerous animal. That is gonna cause serious harm to another animal, to a person, to a whatever. 25 seconds. Okay. So I would like, first of all, make sure that you all have a copy of the state statute and we'll read that through because there are two different things and I would like to seriously see Essex to propose a dangerous dog law which we are also proposing at the state level. Are you with the particular organization that's proposing this law? I'm retired now but I kind of got involved through Susan and through a rescue group there that I've heard about it and this is my life. This is not what I do. This is who I am and so anything I can do to help us all live together better with our animals, I do horses too. Perhaps a sample of that law would be. I was gonna say, what I would like to provide you with is a draft of a dangerous dog law that I feel would work for Essex. That would be great. Thank you. It'll be the same one that we proposed to you. And this is what's happening nationally. Thank you. This is what's happening. So this is the state of it. Thank you. Who would like to speak next? Ma'am. Sandra Farrell and I live in Heinsberg but I've been involved with adoptions, the Greyhound Rescue of Vermont. And one thing that I need to say and I think Sarah touched on it a little bit is that there are a lot of groups out there that quote are rescue groups and you could put out a shingle and say I'm a rescue group but you need to know the dog you're putting out. And that's what's happening right now is that a lot of dogs are being put out without the group really knowing the dog. And the second part of that is the owners are responsible for knowing their dog. And I think all of you know that people know their dogs. You know if your dog is vicious. You know if your dog is dangerous. You know if it doesn't like children. You know if it doesn't like other dogs. So it's your responsibility to keep it away from those incidents and not let it go up to children. Not let it be unleashed and run out to a cost to another dog. I think this is really important that the onus is on the owner. And I think people need to understand that. That they are responsible for their dog's actions and hold them to it. So that's all I have. Everyone from the front row. They've had a chance. Second row. Mitch Stern Essex Town. I'd like to play an audio clip and enter it into the record. What is your audio clip? You'll hear it. I'm guessing this is at a certain time of day that you want to call us to our attention. Morning, noon and night. Three in the morning this goes on. Two in the morning, eight o'clock in the morning. No, the dog doesn't bark for 15 minutes but it keeps me up nonetheless to the point where I don't get enough sleep. I can't function the next day. I've talked to the owner. The owner doesn't walk the dog. Takes the dog out, has a cigarette. The dog sits there on a leash and of course barks at everything that walks up and down the street. Refuses to walk the dog. That's animal cruelty. We don't even address that here in this state. It's addressed in other places. That should be addressed. This is not a dog problem. This is a people problem. Back a long time ago there used to be things called common sense and common courtesy. We don't see much of that anymore. We'll get a lot of agreement on that. And we need to send the message. We meaning the community needs to send the message to these people that this behavior is no longer acceptable at all. And there should be very strict rules and very strict penalties where if you can't keep your dog from barking, then the dog has to go. 30 seconds. You can't have this. And I wonder if Essex is really on board with this because I checked this person if the dog is registered and the town told me no, he's not. And then the police said yes. The dog had a license on the collar, yet I checked today in the records and the dog's not licensed. Counterfeit license? I don't know, but something needs to be done because we're not even getting the job done for the ordinances we have today. Hi, I'm Gail Cummings. I'm resident of Essex Junction. I'm here to support Susan, but I just wanted to say we have three dogs. We have three hounds that are on leash dogs. So we don't go to Indianbrook and we don't bring them to the dog park. You don't know what you're running into. It's a risk you take when you go to a place like that. But I want to be able to walk the streets of Essex Junction with our dogs and not get attacked. We actually had a grayhound who was nearly killed a few years ago, the same situation, an owner with a known aggressive dog who just slipped a leash, got away, and almost killed our dog. So that's what I want to be able to do and what I'd like to get out of this is have you help us be able to walk the streets of Essex Junction with our dogs and it feels safe. Thank you. Next row. Lindsay, what's your last name, please? Thank you. I've worked in dog rescue for over eight years. I've owned aggressive dogs. I can say that Vermont has the highest rates of dogs for household women in the country right now. And I think that the rest is brain dogs and I'm sure we've been to that. I think in the state right now we're bringing 60 to 70 dogs a week. Our rescue in particular, we temperament test all of our dogs before they come up and that is the dogs and the humans. Certainly there are dogs that come through once in a while that have aggression issues. They go to homes that have criminal background checks. They go to homes that are screened that have vet and personal references. There are responsible rescues out there. Fortunately, because there's no state oversight over dog rescues anymore, you can actually have animal cruelty charges and continue to run a dog rescue, which one of our local dog rescues has currently. The few points I want to make as a dog owner, I have a right to walk my dog, whether my dog has dog aggression or is friendly with other dogs on a leash and not have to worry about another dog friendly or not coming up to me. So if my dog's aggressive and you're friendly off leash, how come it's up to me? Your dog's off leash. I'm following the law. My dog's on leash. Who's responsible then? So I think it's very important that we clarify that any owner that has a dog, whether it be aggressive or not, that the dog on the leash is protected from the behavior of any dog approaching them. The other thing I want to bring up, there's a preventative role in all of this. We can slap people with fines all day, but then the day we're not educating the public. In the situation that happened to you. 30 seconds. And what happens to a lot of people. These, it's created by tethering your dog out front. That dog specifically tethered it all hours of the day. 22 states in this country have anti-tethering laws. And the reason being that it causes hyper-reactivity, aggression and restraint. So that when that dog is off leash, it's like a bolt out of a gun. The door opens, the dog walks past and they shoot out like a bullet out of a gun and they attack that dog. The owners have inherently created that aggression by tethering their dogs outside. I have a list of all the states that have anti-tethering laws. I'd be happy to provide. You could leave that with us. That would be great. Thank you very much. Would like to speak next. Sir, you've had your hand up for quite some time. Bruce Griffin, I have been to one of these meetings before. I know that I will again. I have a lot of respect for your citizens for making the effort to come here. As far as this board goes, there is not a backbone among you. You talk and you talk and you talk and you do nothing. Mr. Griffin, do you have something to say in regards to the ordinance? Could you speak to that in your personal remarks? I am old. I don't have time for this. I don't have time for much of anything left. I'm severely diabetic. I have the right to walk on the street without being assaulted by a dog. All it would take is one good dirty dog bite to my leg and I'm well on the way to having a limb amputated because I'm severely diabetic. All I want is a safe place to walk on the streets and I don't feel that I have that right now on a public street or in a public park that I pay for with my taxes. So I just have one question for you, two questions. Do you know the difference between right and wrong? And if you see something is wrong, will you do something about it? Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Griffin. Ma'am. Hello, your honors. Thank you for allowing me to speak. My name is Holly Nagnus, Ms. Robinson. I give you my sincere condolences. I'm so sorry for what happened to you. I'm here to talk about public safety, about the safety of our pets and our children and our toddlers. Aggressive dogs, statistics are through the roof. Many sources, I won't cite them all. And they hurt a lot of our animals every year. Now, my Sebastian was a toy poodle. He was 10 pounds, he was blind. He was 15 years old and I loved him. Like, nothing in this world. And he loved me in this, you know, a Stafford Shire terrier did this to him. And I apologize for showing you something graphic, but I had to see this and my Sebastian had to live through this. In January of 2015, when it was very cold out, I have Sebastian on a lead and he was trained. He would go do his business and come back in. So I opened the door, he runs to the grass. I closed it because it was below, well, it was like zero, not to let the heat out. And so my neighbor came with his Stafford Shire terrier and attacked my little dog. And so it tore his throat open. So I took Sebastian to Bev's immediately and they put him into emergency surgery that morning. And the vet, who's a man who went to medical school told me that it was common that pit bull breeds take the dog and shake them back and forth to kill their prey. And he separated the skin from my dog's neck. There was nothing I could do. I called the police, there was nothing I could do. $800 vet bill, the neighbor paid $150. But the point is that dog Bella could be walking out somewhere and attacking other pets. So please do something to protect pit bull and dangerous dog and wolf dog attack the animals. Thank you. Thank you. Has, ma'am. I'm Mary Post from Essex. I just want to say that I have two little dogs and I like to walk them at Indian Brook but I've stopped doing it because a lot of times the dogs that are off the leash come running up because they're friendly and they want to sniff noses and that's great, but it's scary for a while until you realize that they are friendly. And I just think that you never see the owner come around to say, oh, don't worry, don't worry. And it's just kind of, I just think that maybe Indian Brook would be best served if we kept dogs on leashes. And then we can all be more comfortable. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. Tamara Clark. It was very interesting what you were saying here, but one person says dog attacked another dog. Another person said dog and another dog killed it. Okay, we have three dogs. We walk on the street, my dog gets attacked, guy has this dog on a leash, my dog on a leash, they just start fighting. What should we do? Just stay here, do nothing? So what's the procedure to stop dog's fight? We don't have guidance on that for you at the moment. It depends on. It's just something, right? It's just, I can't. Hold on. Okay, so you can address your concerns to the board and we don't have an answer for your question at the moment, but it's an excellent question. But maybe you just want to do in situations like this because dogs are dogs, they're gonna fight, okay, not today, tomorrow, but it's gonna happen. No matter how much fine it's gonna be, no matter how much we talk about it, it's gonna happen. Even if they are on a leash. So please teach us what to do in situations like this. Let's keep our dogs safe. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anyone else who has anything to say that has not spoken already? All right, we're gonna close the public hearing portion of this meeting and bring the conversation back to the boards. Thank you everyone for taking the time to share your stories. This is a stressful topic and we'll do our best to address what we can with the means we have. So thank you. You're welcome. Auntie, do you have, looks like you have something to say here. You're good, okay. Does anybody have any additional? Dan. No, I'm just gonna comment to what we've heard. Multiple people and I agree with the comments of making it requirement that they keep their dogs on a leash at Indian Brook or wherever that you have control. To say that you voice control over any wild animal that can easily, it's ridiculous. It is ridiculous to think that that's the only way. If I may, the only thing that I would just wanna add is from personal experience in the comments that we've heard, I wonder if Indian Brook could be explored as if there were a particular section of Indian Brook that had a off leash in terms of if that is something that may assist with those who want to have their dog off leash, if there's a portion that can be confined as an off leash area, but the rest of it being leash only. And then if a dog is off leash in that area, that that's a violation. Some type of a creative mix where people can still run around the path without fear of being attacked by dog off leash and or had their dog be attacked off leash. So of course. Raj. I think Annie was pretty sorry. Oh, sorry, Annie. I don't know if you already said it, but you know at Mills Riverside Park, when they first started that, they worked out beautifully. People were so excited to have that space and it was near the water and you could do it and everybody really respected it. Over time, I think it's gotten a little murky, but I don't know if it's holding true. Does anyone know right now? Cause I'd be curious. I hear it's going pretty well. Well, then it's not a bad model. We go up there because it's reliably. Separated from people. Because you are separated from the main area. I know what you're talking about. We're across. This doesn't have the traffic. Isn't that the traffic? That area is a little, they chose it because. Well, you've got the, you've got the Browns River right there. People are going, yeah. We don't have a, I can't think of an area that we have a, where there's a river, almost like you're saying like a moat around, you get on the dogs kind of, up in the river, it's kind of up into the left. And you go way back up into the, you go kind of away in the less desirable part, frankly, of the park. But yeah, I think the bottom line is, I think Indian Brook is going to bear more discussion on how, what kind of creative solutions can happen. I don't think that with the community of size that we can have one, 200 yards by 50 yard parcel. Maybe we can do like even odd gas days, dog days and non dog days or something like that. I'd like to add one thing. I think I could be, maybe I'm not quite getting it. Maybe Jerry can add and enlighten me here, but I believe that sampling Indian Brook for fecal E. coli, it goes, it skyrockets in mid summer. It's not from humans. Right. And it's, that's the other issue. It's almost to the point sometimes, I guess, I maybe I shouldn't say this in public, but you, people swim in Indian Brook and I think you'd have to be very judicious before you, if you jump in there in August or September. Test are taken regularly. Am I correct? I think maybe it was Jim Jutris or I'm not sure where I heard this, but I know that it's a significant problem, isn't it? Test are taken quite regularly to the swimming areas at Indian Brook and the test have been coming back consistently. Okay. Okay, all right. There's a lot of movement water up there because that's the spring fed area. And along with the boat launch areas, a few places like that gets a little stagged at times, but they do test us every week, I believe, yep. But you are correct. We do have a problem with people not picking up their waste there and in many other places, even though the town and the village give out free bags. Also the creative picking up of poop, leaving it on the sidewalk and continuing your walk with the intention of coming it back for it. I don't get that. So. The letter of the law, not the intent. Right, right. Can we just, one more thing to discuss before I think we're ready to wrap this up is the fines. So did you increase the fines from what they were? I'm gonna tell you, actually let me answer that question when I have to find out for you. And those are basically said as a starting point. They can be whatever, typically what happens when we deal with violations is the first violation is a warning and then it progressively goes up and then there's a difference between the paid amount and the waiver amount if they don't, if they fight it, it typically is a higher rate. So waivers like no contest, right? That's. Right. So that's I think why you see the. So I just, I'm curious, we had the dog hearing a couple weeks ago and a young woman had gone to the emergency room because she had had puncture wounds and she had some medical bills. And then we have Mrs. Robinson, whose dog was killed and the fine was $50, which was what's on the books and that's how it works. I'm a little concerned with the fine not being commensurate with the damage done and what the owner has to pay for should they have to go to the vet or should they have to go to the emergency room? So I'm wondering if the fines need to be higher. So I have an email into bill with a question pertaining to can the boards issue as part of a hearing process, an additional fine, and then you always have civil recourse, right? So. Yes, you do. So you can sue somebody to recover your medical or the. So I'm waiting to hear back from Bill in reference to, can you issue, can the boards issue a fine separate? If we already have a fee structure, is that going to cause a problem? So if you had a hearing and you said, you know, $50, even though you've been warned twice, we don't feel that that's efficient. Can we shmore? Yeah, I'd like to understand how we're going to handle the exceptions and what we want to do in Indian Brook, because it seems like we should at least consider some changes there. I don't know what they should be though at this time. I wonder if we should ask chief to make the changes that you heard. I saw you writing a lot down. So make any further amendments you want to make so that we can continue to work on this ordinance, but then we have a separate topic for discussion at a future joint meeting for what to do at the public areas. Yeah, oh, absolutely, yeah. Annie, you had something. I think, I don't really know what I think, but I know that I am concerned about a dog that is tethered for extended periods of time. I don't know what I think because I know some tethers are designed for emotion and I know that some people are very responsible and respectful about it, but I know that it makes me a little nervous, tethering. It makes me a little nervous, but I don't have anything more than that to say. Hopefully the woman who had mentioned that did leave the resources that she mentioned so that that way if those could be distributed to us all, that would be greatly appreciated. Maybe at our next, the next time this comes up and or if the chief wants to do extra homework, could incorporate some of that. I'd be interested in seeing a sample anti-tethering ordinance or statement just to see is that something we should incorporate now? I think that might be worthwhile, Evan. So for tonight, the best thing for this is to give the chief direction on what you might wanna see and what you definitely don't wanna see in an ordinance. And I think in terms of Indian Brook or Saxon Hill, leash, off leash, or no dog at all. While you may not wanna do it tonight, you should give him some direction because if he goes and writes this ordinance as no dogs and you say, oh, no, no, well, maybe just on leash, might as well give him the direction if you have an opinion tonight. If not, he can leave it for discussion for the next round. It was brought up earlier, whether that was a parks department decision or whether that was an ordinance decision. And so what's the verdict on that? That's an ordinance decision. It is, in my opinion, it's this select board's decision as to whether town property should allow dogs on leash, off leash. The recreation department will follow that direction. I think the general consensus was, don't touch the exceptions now, the exemptions, but we should talk about it in depth in the future meeting. So I don't, Pat. I mean, I would be the exception to that. I've been at Indian Brook with my dog on leash more than enough times to have dog owners who do not have a dog under voice command come up to my dog who does not react well to sudden movement or, you know, someone coming towards him. I mean, I hate to use personal anecdote, but if it's happened enough times that I don't go to Indian Brook anymore and I'm a pretty patient person, then I feel like I am comfortable making the decision now. I mean, I personally- No, I understand completely because the same thing has happened to me personally, but I'm not ready to make that decision now without more public input. And we didn't warn it. Well, I mean, in terms of changing the ordinance, we could do that, but I would much rather have- Yeah, but the ordinance as proposed doesn't have any language associated with changing. Well, some of the- We're asking Chief to make all sorts of edits at the moment. Yeah, yeah, I know, but for the purposes of the meeting we had tonight, people in favor of having their dogs off leash didn't seem to be in evidence here. So I'm not sure that it was clear that that was a possibility that could- I see. No, because what was put out in the package as this is the proposal doesn't say anything about changing on or off leash. So I think we need to have it more explicitly stated if we're gonna have that discussion. I do think we would need a special conversation just for that given the popularity of Indian Brook. At the same time, I don't think we should exclude dogs at Indian Brook until there is a solution in terms of what they then can do given that the only off leash place at that point in time would be either Saxon Hill, if that were to continue, or the dog park, the one dog park that our community has. So if EPR could look into is there a plot of land that could have a path to it that could then be maintained to make sure dogs could run around in there, then is that a viable solution? Right. Having a response to that would be helpful. What do we have? And is there a creative response in terms of voting, boarding, and swimming with your pet? I mean, what's the, and this is gonna sound really ridiculous, but it does work. Like, if I walk my dog onto my paddle board and take the leash off him or 10 feet offshore, is that still illegal in a leash-only situation? She's not gonna swim at 30 miles an hour to get something. It's not ridiculous. It's what we do in our community and our pets are a part of our lives. And so we wanna make sure that we have, make allowances for people to do those things. But we also have the safety of the others to take into account. And whereas, again, I'm saying these things, acknowledging there's a big problem. Andy? I was just gonna say that we could save half of us a lot of effort if we make the decision whether it's, we're gonna have one ordinance or two before we go too far down the road, because then we don't have to have two boards in broiled in this that may kind of come up with different answers. I just wanna, you know, although, although I guess the trustees don't necessarily have any more say than the general public with regard to what we do at Indian Brook, we're kind of having this conversation now as if they do. And so I'm just, I'm just. That's confusing. I would like to venture that in the spirit of alignment consolidation that we do this together and that whether we have a single ordinance for the town of Essex or an identical ordinance for the village, perhaps we can think more deeply about that with the staff and come up with a recommendation for our next meeting about whether we should do one or two. Maybe there's a resource in the village that can be located as well. I mean, so we don't have dogs in our parks, right? Another dog park. Maybe there's a, maybe there's another. Yeah, I mean, I don't want it. We don't allow dogs at parks in the village. I wouldn't want it if we say, okay, we're gonna do what the town does, then we would have to allow dogs in there. So no, I wanna, I think this need, we need a lot of discussion. But you all need to have the discussion yourselves. I don't wanna influence your decision whether or not you wanna have your own ordinance. I'm not saying that that's the case. I just wanna, if it makes more sense to have one, then let's do just one. But now that you've kind of clarified for me that you have your own issues, own positions on your own. It's not so much village statutory versus town. It's population density in the village much, much. Obviously, it creates a whole different level of concern than in the town. So in the town, you might wanna have areas where you're not quite as strict. I don't know, but I think that's, yeah, more discussion is needed. Yeah, yeah. All right, so Chief, you've heard a lot. I saw you take a lot of notes. Thank you very, very much for bringing this to us. I appreciate it, thank you. You're very welcome. And thank you again to audience members who contributed. We will revisit this in the very near future. Wow. So we are now moving on to agenda item 5B, a discussion of funding sources and budgeted EJRP non-resident fee revenue. Sarah, were you the one who was going to discuss or introduce? Yes. I was just gonna say. That's what I was gonna say. The one that bears discussing jointly. So co-location is upon us, and I think approximately seven weeks. And part of that effort is coming out with the joint brochure this fall. In working on that brochure and in discussions with Brad and Allie, the logistics of having one SXY fee for EPR programs and then a non-resident fee. And then separate SX fees and non-resident fee for EJRP programs as they sit side by side in one joint brochure have come to a head. And I would like we, Allie, Brad and I, would like to bring it back to this group to talk about some potential solutions that hopefully balance the goals of co-locating and aligning those fees and presenting more of a unified front, as well as respecting the village decision to include some outside the village SX non-residential fees in the revenue budget for the upcoming year. In looking at, so I wanna hit a couple, these are gonna seem really very boiled down given all of the conversation we've had up to this point. The initial proposal for co-location was to align the fees for programs throughout Essex. In the FY20 budget, and I'm gonna talk specifically about the village budget, there's a revenue line item for $12,000 that EPR was previously paying for Sunset Studios. They were previously paying $18,000 for rent. They're now gonna pay $12,000 to EGRP to recognize the use of the existing facilities at EGRP. The initial non-resident fee budget proposal in the village budget was $13,000. And that was for non-residents, so people who do not live in Essex town or Essex Station. That was increased on a snowy Wednesday night, where I called in from home, by $7,000, which was the approximate amount that we were estimating would come from non-resident fees for town outside the village. In looking at the actuals for FY19 and FY18, 31% of the total non-resident fees come from the town outside the village. That would be about $6,200 of that $20,000 that we were talking about, that ended up in the revenue budget for the FY20 village budget. And that split pretty evenly between, if we were going to categorize the EGRP programs into two broad categories, which are licensed childcare and pool and everything else, split pretty evenly between those two buckets. When we look at licensed childcare and pool, and I'm gonna simplify that more by saying childcare and pool, both EPR and EGRP offer similar programs in those two realms. Similar, not the same. EPR is not a licensed childcare provider, but they do have camps and the like. In the everything else bucket, the two already work together to make sure that they're not providing duplicative offerings that compete against one another. They'll continue to do this as they work to have combined programs, combined brochures, and as they're working out of one space. Discussing internally, we staff would like to recommend that we split the difference and that we take those outside of, so the town outside the village non-resident level and keep that just attached to licensed childcare and pool, the arena in which the two have similar offerings, competitive, compete maybe, and where there really is a difference between the two as opposed to the everything else bucket. We would suggest that that happens by the select board offering to pay out of the town budget. And I recognize the fact that this is complicated because village taxpayers pay 40% on the grand list basis of the town budget. But that $3,000 be paid on behalf of the town outside the village residents to offset the non-resident fees for those other bucket of programming and allow us to have a more streamlined joint brochure and then charge those different tiered fees when it comes to licensed childcare and the pool. That's our recommendation and would like to open or let you guys discuss that. Thank you. I was gonna say I would now open the floor for discussion, but that's not really my job, is it? I know that this is something that I had discussed ad nauseam at previous meetings. So if somebody else wants to start off, I'm more than happy to have another trustee member start talking. I'll start talking. I'm never at a loss for words. I think that I think we endorse co-location. I think that's been, as I recall, that's something we've all thought was a good idea. We should try to move forward on it. We shouldn't let politics get in the way of families and kids having access to whatever rec programs they need and want. I have a good question here. Apparently the village is more desirable for licensed childcare, child care. That makes it a little bit more desirable than just regular day care. Why can't the town get licensed day care? I think that's something the town needs to work on. I'm not looking for an answer, but I'm gonna just keep coming up and I'm wondering since this is such a popular program and people from the village up, since it's entirely funded by the village, the Village Rec program, so there's a sense of ownership of the thing. And yet I think it's very desirable for all families. I'd like to make a suggestion that the town might wanna work on mimicking what the village does since we are gonna, we're looking for alignment, probably the best way to achieve it is to make sure that you have the same, that kids in the town outside the village have the same opportunity for licensed care. I'd like to raise that as a long range concern. I think that would be a great goal of consolidation and merger as we move forward is to have a single licensed childcare system for the entire town would benefit every family. I mean, we always look at it, and I don't wanna digress too much, so we get, let's talk, but you know, I think that there is a concern among village parents that they don't wanna see them, they don't wanna see their kids displaced because they have to compete. Since it's entirely paid for by the village, they feel that they should have some priority there. On the other hand, I like what you're doing here. I think it's a reasonable, mathematically, it's a reasonable, logically, it's a reasonable solution. So I'd be willing to support this to see where it goes. Ruff? I'm kind of coming at this from the other angle. We've heard a lot of passionate people that's knowing I, that were a little concerned. I have a few concerns. One, this feels like we're moving ahead, merging a department piece by piece when my opinion would be that while we're in this merger process, nothing gets changed. It's gonna be very hard to undo this if the merger doesn't work. I don't know where we go with the rec departments. We've already tried it once and then we have this. If the merger doesn't work, how do we back out of this if we want to? There may be some people that wanna back out further. We don't know. 41, 42%. I mean, it feels like it's only $1,200 of that, but it's, again, it's just, on the face of it, it's sort of a manufactured problem. The co-location was a great idea, but it didn't need to happen. The joint brochure is a great idea, but it didn't need to happen. It's convenient for people, but we're asking village residents to, it's very small money. It's probably a great idea, but it just feels like the timing's off. And those are my concerns. I'm not saying which way I'm gonna go yet. I wanna hear what everybody else has to say, but I'm leaning towards no. I just think we heard in the survey that we just did. Rec is very important. It comes up again and again, especially for village residents being nervous about merging the two. So I just think the timing's just poor on this, but that's just my opinion. For Dan Diler, do you wanna? I totally agree with what Raj said. I was on the Rec Advisory Council for a long time and heard comments from other members about how passionate they were about the programs and getting kids into the programs and being able to do that. It's huge. When you start letting in that many more, you're gonna be competing for openings. I mean, but it's cost too. So what it would be, when we start doing stuff that allows for, people outside of the village to sign up for programs, same time as village kids. That might be different though. This is more like just gonna do one Zoom, do a class and do that. No, this is saying we're going to have different fees for if you live inside the village, you pay one fee, if you live outside the village, you pay a second fee. And we're asking to have that tier where if you're outside the village, you pay more than if you're a village resident for, and we're asking to do that just for pool programming and license childcare, because those are really the arenas in which the two are very different. So for the bucket of all other programming, yoga, Zumba. I know those are the only ones I do. Tennis, soccer, basketball. For example, I think soccer, one of them offers soccer, if the other doesn't offer any soccer. So they're already trying not to compete. So what I'm suggesting is that for that bucket of programming, whether it's not duplication, that all of Essex pays a flat rate. But now you said pool and what'd you say? Child care. Child care, you're not speaking to what I'm bringing up. What I'm bringing up is the summertime, when kids are out of school, that was specifically the big issue. And I'm not gonna say the name of the people or some of the members that were discussing this, but they're kids in the summertime, when they're not in daycare, when they're working and there's no school, that's the programs. That's what I'm talking about programs. The summertime programs, that's what it is. It's those day camp programs, it's all that stuff. And you're not talking about that. Right, I'm not talking about equalizing fees for those. No, well that, no, you're saying. And that's child care, those camps. You're calling that child care? I am, I'm just calling that licensed child care. I don't call that child care, because I, you know what? That's what it is on the books of what we're talking about. So Brad calls it licensed child care. Camp Maple Street, Camp Reach, Village Kids, EJRP Preschool, and Maple Street Bullying Fees. And those are not my words, those are friends. Extra fees for non-resident. I'm sorry, that's my, I just, I know that this is on topic, so. So, if you think about it, Zumba class. Yeah. Zumba class, programs that are not child care, not pool. That's what we're asking to align and make it easier for people to do. I got your comment, Raj. And that's what we're asking, and that's what they're doing. And we know the other one's a bigger issue and people have spoken to that. This particular model is what the city of St. Albans did with the town of St. Albans. And it has done, according to them, more to foster unity amongst their communities than almost anything else they've done. And they've done a lot. But it has fostered that unity and it has brought the community together. Yes, I'd say I'm in support of it. I think it's a small thing to do when we continue to talk about merger and trying to make us part of one community. I also think it might be helpful to some folks because even though the fees are usually only a couple dollars here or there, whatever, that might fill some of these classes. More than, and tennis is now offered versus not being offered kind of deal. And I think Allie talked about that when we were at the strategic meeting. So I'm gonna throw my support to it. So I'll jump in now. With the duplicate programming thing, my understanding is that's already gonna be done away with. That if the town and the village historically would have both offered tennis, that that's not gonna happen this year because of the co-locating. And so there already won't be a duplication of programming. So if one would have canceled because there wasn't enough registration, that's not gonna be an issue this year. So the fees have nothing to do with it. When 3000, I think we can agree the money's peanuts in terms of what we're talking about budgetarily. From a policy stance in my humble opinion, when we think of this as a fee for service and purely as a fee for service, that does nothing for our co-location. It doesn't do anything for our culture in terms of trying to be one because the elephant is that administrative fee for EJRP programming, the staff who coordinated everything that somebody would attend, that the village would solely bear. So that's that 650,000 elephant in the room for EJRP. And to have the village pay the town taxes to then go back to the village to subsidize the non-resident fees, policy-wise it doesn't feel good, and is the major difference between St. Albans and Essex. St. Albans city isn't a municipality within St. Albans town. Similarly, or lastly, my personal frustration of when Evan Braden and I, when we talked about this before it came here, what we talked about was that 650,000. So to approve an agenda that comes on on a Friday with an understanding of what we're gonna be talking about to them, see the agenda item be completely different from what we last talked about, personally it doesn't feel good. I'm sorry to say that in public, but that doesn't feel good. As long as you let them reply. Be happy to. So to me, until we address the 650,000, the administration, I'm not okay with it. I'd rather see us work together towards merging to have just one department, to have one recreation for our community. Once we get to that point, then there are no non-resident fees for a town, for a village. We just are one. So that's where my sentiment is. We did have that discussion and my comment was that the timing being what it is, there's a budget already set. There is no 650,000 dollars in any one year to move something completely. It would have to be done and phased. Just as we were talking about in this merger of the two communities, there's going to have to be a tax, whatever you wanna call it, equalization, stabilization. The two tax rates is the goal of the communities to try to eventually get to one tax rate for the entirety of the community. So it's gonna take time. The thought was this is a small piece of goodwill and it helps to deal with customer satisfaction and customer use. It's a question. You can probably see the dividedness of the board members and so maybe it's just not ready. And then we could continue to work at this. In the coming budgets, we have tried to work with what amount of money is starting to work towards things this last year. It was $50,000. We called it for the clerk position which is actually here in the town, et cetera. And I think ultimately we need to get away from labeling where the money is designated and just get to tax stabilization and work on what you guys all just did for the better part of 45 minutes on a dog garden. It's the community and how which board wants to do what, which meeting. That's a better framework. This may just not be the right time but it is the time they're doing their brochure. Is your proposal for just the duration of the classes in this particular catalog or do we need to think about this again for the next catalog? The proposal is for FY20. For the whole year no matter what catalog. Because they put out three or four a year. That's a good question. I'm not sure you would. I'm not sure you would wanna have it, not have it. Right, that's what I'm getting at. That would be more confusing then. So I just wanna make sure we were talking about everything. And this is coming up now as opposed to waiting until our larger budget discussions and our budget goal discussions which include this phasing over time that Evan referenced because the brochure grows to print like next week. So thought one last time with feeling we could talk about it before it goes out. I would like to hear from select board members. Max had his hand up and he- I'm just wondering if we save ourselves time if the trustees aren't gonna accept them on your way or why we would talk about it. Because our opinion matters as well. So Max- I don't live in the village so I don't think I have them. Then you don't need to contribute. If you feel you need to hold back until you have all the answers you need but there's other select board members who have something to say. Max and then Annie. Yeah, I'm sort of on the same page as George. Maybe the timing's not right. That's irrelevant to me at this point because as a joint two boards we agreed on this co-location as a good thing to do. We also knew with co-location that we'd have one going towards one brochure. And now with the details here comes a little bit of a glitch that they're asking us to iron out. It's not even a big bump, not even a big one. And I see a stumbling on this which I'm kind of really shocked at. This seems like a no-brainer to me when I read through this because we already said we want to do this as both boards. We want to do the co-location, we want to do the same brochures. This is trying to iron out a small little wrinkle to allow them to enable them to do what we asked them to do. So I would be shocked and disappointed to see us not support this fix to allow them to enable what we asked them to do. Let's turn this toward his. What I would say to Indy is that as a select board member we are talking about EPR. And the conversation is very definitively about the offerings of EPR with EGRP. And so I feel that we as a board need to look at it that way, not just, it's not just the villages, it's not just. And Raj, I hear you about the co-location whenever it doesn't work, but already the brochures are being combined, you know? And so the trial of co-location is occurring. And if it doesn't work, that will have to be wrenched apart anyway. And I hear you also, Andrew. You know, but these are, this is Rick. It's our families, our kids, you know? So Indy, what I had spoken to him, I'm sorry, is that, yes, if you don't live in the village, but it's also about the town rect apartment and what that looks like for them and their work that they're doing. I was going to clarify a question, so. How bad, I mean, what is it, it is a small block. Is it completely impossible to get that, I'm trying to kind of picture what the brochure would look like, what a Zumba offering would look like to the different categories of folks that are trying to, you know, like. I love Zumba, by the way. As you said so, I use Zumba. And as a non-resident, you'd pay the extra fee? I do, I do. And would continue to pay the extra fee? There would be, did you want to answer his question? I'm just, I want to talk to him. After Sarah. For every, so every EPR program would have two fees, one that says ASICs, one that says non-ASICs. Every EJRP program would have two fees, one that says village and one that says non-village. So there are four different types of fees and they are dependent upon which program you're in. So if you wanted to, so yeah, you can imagine the iterations, I think. If you wanted to enroll your child in childcare and then you also wanted to enroll yourself in Zumba. Correct. You'd be paying different fees, non-village for child care. A resident in one area but not in the other and it would be extremely confusing. Pat's next after Sarah and then Annie. I'm assuming that the shortfall is because if I remember my brochure is correctly and I'm sure I don't, someone's gonna make it first. It's like $55 for like, you know, Zumba lessons for like the length of the program. And if you're an NSX resident, it's what, like 52 or something like that? I mean, it's a very minor difference. It depends. So the larger difference is the EJRP non-resident fees and those are either 10, 15 or $20 based on what the residency price is. So if it's a EJRP program that costs zero to $50, if you are a non-village resident, you pay an additional 10. If it costs 50 to $150-ish, you pay an additional 15 and over that you would pay an additional 20. So it's a tiered non-village fee. So would there be a mechanism to make up the shortfall where you just sort of bring the two differences in fees together to get a medium and then just have one fee? So I'm a user, not a rec administrator and I don't know what mathematical gymnastics they go through in calculating what the ideal fee is for all the programs and, you know, theoretically, just sort of balance out all the costs and then have that shortfall. This is what it is because honestly, if it's, and that's why I remember, because I seem to remember thinking one brochure, $10 seems large to me, but that may just be my poor memory. I think that at one point it was like a $55 for a class and then it was like $51. And you may be thinking about the EPR brochure, which is the Essex and the non-Esex as opposed to the EJRP programs, which I have Brad's tiers. Yeah, the EJRP programs, specifically the ones that are not childcare or pool, right? Yeah, $10, that does seem like a lot to only make. So that's only what, 300 people, valid themselves of those? 10, 15 or 20, depending on the cost of the overall program. So Camp Reach, Camp Maple Street, Swim Lessons, I think those are all probably, get you $20 and then however many sessions you have in kids and I don't see it being terribly difficult to. Yeah, I mean, I just, it seems to me like it would just be eliminated to just in the brochure create one fee that's an intermediate of the two and then shortfall covered. Like, I mean, am I crazy to think that? We're not asking to change Brad's whole rubric of how he does it. No, but I mean, they are coming asking us because there's particular difficulty with them saying, resident fee, non-resident fee, village or non-village. Like it's just, if we want to eliminate all four of those terms, just create the one fee and bring the structure together. Not because non-resident also wouldn't, the other non-resident is Williston, Colchester, Richmond, we're not talking about them. We're talking about just the town outside the village and that designation. Annie, you had your hand up. I mean, it's still gonna be wonky because you gotta do the licensed child care. You gotta, I don't know what the format is gonna look like. Do you have a copy of the format? No, I wish I did. What's the difference in the budgets? So village taxpayers, we paid something like 650,000 for each RP's base budget and what's the town one? Is it about the same? So in the general fund, each RP is about $650,000. That's administration and parks and facilities. And their program fund budget, which is wholly supported by program fees is just shy of $2 million just for reference and that does include pool programming and just give me a second, I'll grab the town one. And Patrick, while she's looking at that, happy to have those conversations through the next, in prelude to the next budget season, but... Right now they want it. Well, right now it would be more chaos than you could imagine to try to change any of that, especially in an existing budget. And some of us have enough chaos going on. The town rec is just shy of a million dollars in the general fund, although 165,000 of that is senior activities, which services the entire area. And $140,000 that is the town pool, which is in the general fund, not in their program fund. Does that help? So the EPR cost a million dollars to run, that's all the parks. That's administration, parks, pool and senior activities. And then that's out of the general fund, so levied against the tax rate. And then EJRP was about $650,000, and that's just administration and parks. So based on that, 650,000 is a burden to the taxpayers within the village. And just rounding it off, round numbers, you're saying a million dollars, 400,000 of the town rec program is village dollars. So you're talking a million dollars out of a million 650,000 is village trustee dollars, roughly. So if I can, just a couple other comments. If we're good with the tax portion, I want to get back to the comment about the brochure and with regards to co-location. When we last agreed, we agreed on co-location. And we knew going into it that there was going to be a brochure that would come out that would have fees that would need to be addressed. Yes, it's a small wrinkle. From the sounds of it, it's two columns. It's resident and non-resident. These are the same two columns that exist for pool programs, that exist for childcare programs. It's just now they're gonna continue in all other programs. That's what it has always been. What there has not always been is this town paying for the non-resident fees and doing away with it. So that's the new portion as to what we're talking about. Just to remind people, when it comes to actually paying, I'm assuming on the back end, somebody taking the cash knows this is EJRP, this is EPR, and how to do all that stuff back there. So keeping in mind that this is a year's worth of decision-making here in terms of what the staff is proposing. And we are talking about a small dollar amount. And I realize that the principle of the matter is that village residents pay their taxes for the administration of EJRP. And in addition, they pay 42% of the administration of the town's ERP. I get all that. I would like to just ask each one of us to philosophically make the leap that we have bigger fish to fry. And this is the groundwork that we need to start laying for compromise on REC. And as we know, we're gonna get comments from residents, why did you let this happen? Or why didn't you let this happen? Or why are, and we've had comments from the public, it's not Brexit, it's not complicated. We need to get past this. We need to just make a decision. I'm in favor of the solution that staff proposed. It's the simplest, it addresses the time constraint and it gets us a little further down the road on the conversation. I'm not gonna belabor the point, that's just what I feel. Are we having a vote on this? I think we need to, so thank you for that. So from the, and before we get there, I do know that, and thank you again for waving your hand because I know that you wanted to, I know you wanted to speak. So if the board's okay? Yeah. Please. I just have to say, I hope you're gonna get comments from the audience because otherwise I would have spoken at the beginning. So I have a question, I think you need to split the childcare up into licensed daycare that happens during the school year, which only the junction people are allowed to register for and summer programs. In my book there's a huge difference between the two and right now they're all lumped together so I don't see how you can do the math as to who gets what for childcare without making that distinction. I thought that, yeah, nevermind. I think it's just important to note that licensed childcare is a year-round situation that involves even this summer, those things are licensed childcare year-round. So those are the programs that the town outside the village residents are not eligible for, period. No, they're eligible, they just have to pay a little extra. No, they're not, they're not allowed to register unless junction folks get first vote. That's true. Well, right, right. If there's any spaces left. Right, because junction residents pay for it and town outside the village residents don't, that's why. Have access to those. They don't pay for it, so they don't, right. And when it's open, then they can pay an extra fee if there's openings. There's also camps, please go ahead. There's also camps offered through EPR in this, there's also summer camps offered at the Sandhill pool and through the town of Essex, I'm kind of talking. That wasn't what I was referring to. I understood. I'm thinking about my grandchildren who are not eligible for daycare through the junction. Can we clarify that, Margaret? Because the village residents get first dibs and they register. And then after that first dibs period is over, it's open to the public. And if other people, whether they're town outside the village residents or Colchester residents, then they can sign up. The town outside the village residents are not restricted from having access to this program. There is no restriction whatsoever. It's just a benefit that Essex junction residents get to go first because they pay for it in full. Is this friction is availability? Yes, based on payment. If the town outside the village residents paid taxes that went towards EJRP, then there would be no dibs period where someone gets to go first. That's the whole point of the larger conversation of merger that we're trying to address is to make that go away. Sorry, go ahead. No, it's all good. So from the trustees, to get a sense of the board, I know personally, I'm just gonna vote no on it, listening to the residents who came out in that cold, snowy day who said, don't do this. I'd love to hear the rest of this. I think that was making it more of a permanent fix to that. My recollection, maybe I'm wrong, but this just for the fiscal year, you know? It starts with precedent. Yeah, I hear what you're saying. I totally hear what you're saying, but you know, it's, we've already started a precedent in many other ways, maybe not quite to this extent with public works and other things that we've been doing already. So I look at the consolidation efforts, merger, whatever you wanna call it, to this point, we've already done a lot. So I don't see it as that big of an issue. I would say that even if consolidation doesn't happen and the status quo arrangement between the village and the town continues, I think that we shouldn't have politics get in the way of this. I think that kids should have access to whichever programs they want. I totally, I'm a little concerned about some, some unclarity here about what is licensed daycare and what isn't. And I wanna just make sure that we would not be eliminating or prohibiting village kids from having first dibs on that because it is, I know it's really, really important to a lot of families. I've actually heard people say, it's the whole reason I moved to Essex Junction. So I don't wanna, I wouldn't wanna do away with that. But as I understand it, for example, if there's an archery class in the village and it's one fee for village and town residents and a different fee for people outside the Essex community, I don't have a problem with that. I get the money situation. I would only remind everybody that not too long ago, we took the entire Essex Junction public works budget, $800,000 and moved it into the town grand list and town voters supported that. That was an enormous savings. So I don't have a problem with this. I would support it. Do any select board members have any questions or comments regarding the dollar amount, where it might come from, the procedure, anything like that? Andy, did you raise your hand? I'm struggling with whether I should ask the question an hour a week until they have a vote to know whether or not we have to have that discussion. Just Amber and Raj, just to... Did they have a... Yeah, Andrew hasn't finished going around his... While I understand the mechanics of what you're saying, I don't wanna stifle select board conversation on a topic in the event that it comes back around again. I can always comment after the motion is made, after our motion has been made, right? You're welcome to comment whenever you like. Max, do you have something? Yeah, where would the 3,000 come from? So in the last few years, the revenue, actual miscellaneous revenues have been greater than budgeted by at least a couple of thousand dollars and so my suggestion would be to be a transfer of that. We could also designate existing fund balance, a transfer over, which is reflective of taxes already contributed by both entities. Open to suggestions, but for that, those are my top picks. Amber and Raj, are we saving more than $3,000 by cutting one brochure for potentially three or four brochures? I'm sure we are, I don't have those numbers. You don't have to, but just pretty good that. Yeah, absolutely, and by using one rec track system and having one person answer the phone calls and having one person process all the invoices, and I mean, the savings are immense and the increases in efficiencies and collaboration and chances to collaborate and have repetition so that we don't have this office closed because there's a snow day and every single person, all three of them, have to be home with their kids on a snow day. I mean, the benefits to having them in one location far outweigh, I think, this cost and then it is one of our top budget goals to help to do similarly with rec departments and what we did with Public Works. So to recognize this is a service for all the community and how do we get that reflected in the taxes? I've already read it on my support zone, I'm going to stick with that. So my then only other ask is 3,000 sufficient considering that 41%, 42% comes from the village anyway? Or just keep it as it is. Somebody wants to make the motion as it is, go ahead. Okay, I'll move that the village of Essex Junction accept $3,000 from the town of Essex to cover the estimated non-resident fees that would have been paid from town outside the village people to EJRP. So that town outside the village people will be treated as residents for EJRP programs except licensed child care in the Maple Street. Second. And is there any further discussion on the motion? All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Everybody opposed? Nay. Motion passes four to one. Zero. Thank you. May I have a select board motion? I move that the town of Essex pay the village of Essex Junction $3,000 to cover the estimated non-resident fees that would have been paid from the town outside the village people to EJRP. So that the town outside the village people can pay the resident rate for EJRP programs except for licensed child care and the Maple Street pool. May I have a second? Second. All those in favor, please. Can I comment, please? Of course. Any discussion? So I guess my couple of comments, this feels like a little bit of bait and switch because we were told Brad sat right over there and said that there wouldn't be any changes. And I understand Snowy went as things changed. And I thought that things, or I think that things potentially should have come back at that point and the discussion could have happened then. But that's water under the bridge. My concern, my question I'd like to have, I'd like the motion to be amended to say exactly where the $3,000 is coming from. Our budgets are already set. It's not, you know, we're not asking anybody for any additional money. We're already going to collect those $1,200 from people that live in the village. We already have a budget. We're not going to add any more to it. So we're going to collect the money from the taxpayers regardless of whether we do this or not. But the question is, where is the money going to come from? I know Sarah pointed out a couple of options a little while ago, but I think because we already have a set budget, that money is going to have to come from somewhere within our budget. And I'd like to have more clarity on where it's coming from. So just to be clear, you'd like it part of the select board's motion if you're of acceptance. Where is the money coming from? Yes. So you'd like to make a friendly amendment to the motion. But I think we have to have a discussion first as to where that needs to, where that's going to come from. Do you have a preference? I have a preference. We've given three options. Do you have a preference? Sorry, I didn't listen to your question. Because I had my preference, but nobody lets me vote. Well, one of the options is existing fund balance. We could designate existing fund balance to pay for it. Another option is in FY 18. And then I'm anticipating also in FY 19, we will recognize miscellaneous revenue, so not classified receipts. So this is stuff like when we have scrap metal and we sell it, it goes there. Or when people pay, bounce check these, it goes there. That has come in over budget by FY 18. It was quite a bit of money, $45,000, which was some forfeiture funds from a whole other discussion. But I expect that that would be a good spot to transfer some funds out of that revenue raised in excess of budget for non-classified items could be transferred from the town to the village to pay us $3,000. Or fund balance. It's not like that one. Is that, have those funds been counted as part of fund balance? Or are they separate? They were in FY 18. They will be once we talk about that FY 19 fund balance. This has been the trend, so I would anticipate it. I'm less crazy about that. I'm not crazy about taking out a fund balance, because I think we need to look at fund balance as a big picture. Yeah. What I'm saying is, don't decide what we want to do with that based on priorities overall, not just for this. I'm really not in favor of that. So I guess my recommendation was we'd need to take it somewhere from our parks and rec budget. We could loan you the money from the village, just a little bit of interest charge on it, OK? That's a third option. Just 42%? It's just $3,000. And then what was your explanation as to where it should come from? So my recommendation originally was surplus funds, because it's already been taxed to the entirety of the town, including the village residents. And therefore, this year, that'd be appropriate in next year's budget. One, we could see what the impact is during this year. Next year, we can budget for it appropriately. The other idea is program fees. The current town, I believe, runs a deficit currently. And so I don't think we want to make it that. So either the first one, which would be surplus or second, with our miscellaneous revenues. And this would, in this particular moment in time, be considered miscellaneous, because we didn't think about it. So Andy, are either of those two sources acceptable to make your amendment? I'm unwilling to make a decision about fund balance without seeing the bigger picture. That usually comes in several months from now. Historically, we waited until after the audit, so that we know exactly what those numbers are. He's of use for the evening miscellaneous revenue. Is that? Didn't you just say you don't want to do miscellaneous revenue? No, I thought you said you didn't want to do miscellaneous. Because it gets folded into fund balance. It's part of the fund balance. That becomes part of the fund balance discussion. In prior years, what I'm saying is that I would anticipate, given the trend over the last few years, the actual miscellaneous revenue has been in excess of budgeted miscellaneous revenue. And that there would be a reasonable expectation that that would continue, though it might not. But that we could take from those funds and transfer, which is $3,000 out of the parks and rec budget. I, well, the thing is, OK, if I could make the proposed amendment, and it could be refused. So I would propose then that it comes out of the approved Essex Parks and Rec budget, because we have an approved budget, and we don't have a clear picture of all of the fund balance to make an informed decision about appropriate priorities for that fund balance. So then your amendment to the motion would be moving that the town of Essex pay the village of Essex Junction $3,000 out of the parks and recreation budget to cover the estimated non-resident fees, da, da, da, da, da. Yes. That's your amendment. That's my proposed amendment. Yes. Max, do you approve that proposed amendment? Because of the late hour. I think it's unnecessary, but I'm going to allow it because I want this to move forward. OK, so we have a motion on the floor and a second. Any further discussion? All those in favor of the amended motion, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. All those opposed, the motion passes. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. I think we can get to this next one very quickly. I see FY20 village tax rates. All right. Yeah. Just Sarah, go ahead. What's the tax rate? OK, so in your packets, there are two memos. There's one for setting the village tax rate and there's one for setting the town tax rate. This is sort of one of those items that relates to both boards, but kind of separately, there's no harm in doing it together. So I think to start with the village tax rate. So the bottom line is that the proposed FY20 village tax rate, so this is the village general fund tax rate only. This does not include the one penny for economic development is 0.3206. So that's 0.3206 cents per $100 of assessed value. This is a 3 and 1 half percent increase on the tax rate from the prior year. In our earlier calculations during budget season, we projected a slightly lower amount because we were using a 1% increase in the grand list. The grand list only increased 0.3%. So that was information, that was data that we did not have available at the time of budgeting. And historically, we've used the 1% figure. It did not come in at that. OK, so I will move that the trustees set the FY20 village general fund tax rate at 0.3206 cents per $100 of assessed property value. Any further discussion? All those in favor signify by saying aye. Anybody opposed? Thank you. Max, it's up to you right now. OK. I will. I'll go over the town tax rate setting. So there are two grand list figures that relate to setting the tax rates in the town. There's the townwide grand list, which did increase 1% even. And then there's the grand list as it relates to the town outside the village, which is used in the highway tax that was left in the budget this year. And that increased 1.6%. 1.6% over the prior year. So additionally, on the town side of things, we calculate out the local agreement rate, which is 0.0019. That's remained unchanged from the prior year. The local agreement rate is the amount that needs to be raised by all taxpayers in order to pay the education taxes on non-approved contracts. For example, the state allows for veterans who are 50% or more disabled to apply to have the first $10,000 of their assessed value exempted from all taxes. Localities can then vote to increase that up to $40,000. Essex has done that. And the state says, great, go ahead, but we still want the education taxes on that $30,000 differential. So that 0.0019 per $100 of assessed value raises the amount that's due to the ed fund on behalf of those non-approved contracts. That remains unchanged from the prior year. So the town general tax rate is 0.5067, which is a 2.74% increase over last year. The local agreement rate is 0.0019. All of these are per $100 of assessed value. That's exactly the same as the prior year. Capital tax is still the 2 cents. And then the town outside the village highway tax rate remains stable at the 1.1 cents, so the 0.011 per $100 of assessed value. This is also slightly higher than what we originally talked about at budget time, because if you already recall, from the floor at town meeting, the budget was increased by $100,000. So any estimates that I gave on estimated tax rate prior to that did not include $100,000. Are there any questions about the tax rate? That's the easiest thing I heard tonight. Any select work numbers, questions? A couple of years ago, we approved a bunch of money for future tax reductions. It's identified as fund balance above our 15%. There's $18,721 in there that we previously designated, given that there's a comment in here that says that the tax rate is higher than what was projected. When we did our budgeting, I would like to increase the amount of revenue that we include from the $100,000 that's currently proposed to $118,721 to give those funds back to taxpayers and get them off our books. It's not new money. It's money we collected a couple of years ago. I've been sitting there. I'd like to give it back. You've asked for that multiple years in a row. Can we have just a reminder as to the responses to that in the previous years, why we've decided not to do that? You want me to take this one or you want this one? You can start. The practice of using property tax dollars to then lower the property tax is a bad practice. I believe the town is trying to work its way out of that practice and only tax for the money it needs for the operations of that given year. Plus they take the surplus funds and designate it for other projects and capital thereafter so that you are then not taxing the residents again for work. So it's really that's the process. The $18,000, if I understand it as where Sarah probably comes in, it's because somebody added the $100,000 as well is doing this. I think that the $18,000 would better be served in a capital usage. And there's a lot of uses for it, but that's the discussion. And will that be a decision or something we vote on in the future when we're doing the budget as to how to assign fund balance? So this particular $18,000 was assigned out of last year's fund balance. Assigned fund balance is a designation made by the group at this level and can be changed by this group as well. It does not need to go back. It can't be changed by management, but it doesn't need to go further than this group to change it in the future. $18,000, I think it's more than $18,000. Do you remember exactly how much? $18,721. OK, so I just plugged in $18,500 into this spreadsheet because that's what came to mind. That's an additional $1.96 shaved off the average tax bill, average tax bill is defined as $280,000 home on the year. We have some big projects coming up, especially dependent on the results of the November 2020 vote. If the future finds us working toward getting to one tax rate across the community, I would like to see us have all the tools in our tool belt. And I think that this is one of them. My professional opinion is that it's a, while it's great politics, it's not great policy to use prior your fund balance to offset tax rate to your after-year, because once you do that, you have to continue to do it unless you climb out of the hole. The exception to this would be for one-time items. I would respectfully request the boards consider keeping this in the arsenal for future projects, such as equalizing the tax rate, if that's appropriate to say. So we have a policy that says, if anything, over 15%, we either have to designate it for some other purpose or designate it for future tax relief. We've already designated these dollars for future tax relief. And Evan wants us to get out of the habit of using these dollars. So if we get them off their books, we don't have that habit anymore because they're gone. So I adamantly think that we really ought to give that money back. I know it's only $1.69. I think what Sarah is saying is we get it off our books by assigning it to capital. No, I would adamantly be against that because we've already assigned it. We've already told the taxpayers we're going to give it back to them. So we have tax rates to vote on. Do we have any other comments about the rates that Sarah has presented? OK. Pat, do you have any questions or comments? OK. So can I have a motion regarding the town tax rates? I move that the select board set the tax rates for fiscal year ending June 30, 2020 as follows. Town general fund tax rate at 50.67 cents. Local agreement rate at 0.19 cents. Town capital tax at 2 cents for a total municipal rate paid by all village. Residence is 52.86 cents. And the town highway tax rate at 1.1 cent for a total municipal rate paid by town outside the village of 53.96 cents. And I have a second. Second. Thank you, Pat. Any further discussion, Andy? I'd like to offer a motion to amend that motion to increase the amount of revenue against the tax rate by $18,721 out of the fund balance that's been designated for that purpose. Does the board agree to that amendment to the motion? I can make a motion to amend the motion. And you need a second, and then possibly, and then to vote on it. And if it fails, then we go back to the original motion. Thank you. Is there a second to Andy's amendment to the motion? Seeing no second, the amendment fails. The original motion is still on the table with the tax rates that are as presented by staff. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? No. OK. The motion passes. Thank you. Looks like we are on to 5E update from the governing subcommittee. OK. I'm going to make this really fast. I think that we heard from Dave Preston. I think I'm assuming everybody knows where we are in terms of the survey results and everything. And you've gotten the those of us on the government subcommittee heard from Dave last week, but the rest of you have gotten the results of the survey. We anticipated that there probably wasn't going to be a lot of time at this meeting to analyze and discuss this massive survey. So I think what I had wanted to do was, first of all, we said we will put off a general joint board discussion of the survey results to our next joint meeting, perhaps. And we can also have Dave attend that meeting because there might be some technical questions about how the survey was taken. He gave tidbits and highlights of some of the comments, but he has all of the comments that went into it. We're going to get all that data. So I think this would be the time when we just briefly update you on where the government subcommittee is, but the rest of you, in terms of the general discussion, I think we could hold off until our next joint meeting. Is that OK? And so with the government subcommittee, we are meeting again on Friday morning with KSV to begin work on trying to hone some questions for the actual focus groups. The focus groups are going to take place in mid-August. So we've got a little bit of time, but not a lot of time. So we kind of have to get going. And so I asked the other members of the government subcommittee to analyze and come up with a couple of questions, some direction of where we should go with the focus groups. KSV has some of their own discussion there. And that's going to be sort of the fruit of the basis of how we get some questions to actually bring to the focus groups. But in the meantime, I would say for the rest of you, please read the survey and come up with your own, maybe come up with a couple of your own questions. Where do you think? And remember, the focus groups are, we want, the purpose is to get information for us. That's the whole point. We want to get information. So we want them to talk about stuff and we want to get information back. So I would ask the rest of you to come up with some questions, some ideas for the focus groups after having read the survey. And then I guess you would send them to Greg and Greg can then pass them on to us. Okay. That doesn't have to be done by Friday. As I said, we're going to be working. This is a work in progress. We're going to be doing this over the next two weeks with KSV. So you don't all have to get it done by Friday, but it would be good if you got it done as soon as possible and get it on to us. And then the other, I think the other big piece of news is that we finished the screener for that KSV will be using to screen people to decide who goes on to the focus groups. I believe that's finished work out. It's out. I've seen it on Facebook. Right. And so that was the other piece of work. Just fine tune that. And then we also heard from Ann that beginning to look at the informational website. And I don't know if anyone's had a chance to see it. Everyone has it, everyone's seen it. And it's looking really good. I think it's got some good graphics. I think it looks really eye catching. It's informative. Again, a work in progress. And I think one of the other things that you'll see when you read the survey is that there's a great, a very significant amount of misunderstanding from throughout the community about how Essex Junction and Essex Town are organized, where the taxes come from, where they go, who votes for what, and which is all good stuff. It's great stuff because it tells us where we need to put our resources into educating people. And we're the, so with that, I would only ask you, again, the four government subcommittee people, we each wrote a little blurb. And I don't even think we need to go over this tonight. I think what I'd ask you to do is please look at it. Look at what we wrote and get back to us, see if you agree, disagree, like it or not. Andy. I only have three of them, Mr. One. I only have three of them, Mr. One missing. The four of them are stapled together. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Sorry. This is, the front one is mine. Oh, I printed my own. We're tight like that. I didn't realize there were two separate ones. We said, if we wanted to be stapled together, right there. I printed my own copies and realized that these were different than the ones I printed. Yeah, we didn't realize. That's OK. That's OK. It's understandable because Max sent me his and then I forwarded them both to you. So it was just not a big deal. Roger's just coming. Because the thing is that they're both brilliant. No, we go to the same place. They belong together. They belong together. Is that why they're different fonts? Yes. Was that the? We're just messing with your head. You did. So, sorry. Yeah, so I would, it was that we're in the packet. But for the governance subcommittee, I think we need to do, we all should make sure you do read these and because we have to be ready to go on Friday, Friday morning, right? Friday morning. Right. Is it here? Is it here or Lincoln? I don't believe it's at Lincoln. I think it's at Lincoln. It'd be good if it was at Lincoln Hall because we could get coffee easier. Which is important, I think, for that meeting. I have the meeting. Sorry. We'll figure it out. So, governance subcommittee, Andy, Raj, Max, want it? No, anything you want to add? Everything good? It was actually a fabulous, I mean, that the results are really, really great. I mean, a little confusing, but 690 plus people, really big response. And with that, I will stop talking. Thank you to the subcommittee. Yeah, I would really like to thank all of you for you have been doing a lot of work. And this survey, I can't believe the response. It's just outstanding. I think it's the best survey we've ever done in terms of... No. No? No. We did one in the village. We had... Oh, the paper one from many years ago, if that's true. Still, an outstanding response rate and I'm looking forward to reading your analysis and thank you for all the extra work you're doing to pull this off. You're welcome. One tiny thing. In agreement with George, the fact that there are people who are confused and we can point out that, and we address it, I think people will be all four things that clear the confusion. So I think that's great. Anybody else have any comments or questions about the reading file? I have one thing I want to bring up. Pat. For the reading file, the proposed day for the joint meetings, the first Tuesday and the third Tuesday of the month are school board meetings and that would make it extremely difficult for me to be here. What do you think about Wednesdays? Wednesdays are CCRPC meetings. But not like... Not every, but the third Wednesday. Not the third Wednesday. I hate to be a stickler too, but I also work Wednesday and Thursday nights. Okay, well... A Monday or a Tuesday. Sounds like Mondays. Right. I guess we put this in the third... Or even the second, fourth Tuesdays I could do, instead of the first and the third, if Tuesdays are like the desired day. Great. We just wanted to put this in the reading file just to put it on your radar and see if it was something that you wanted to continue to talk about. It sounds like you do, which is great. Rather than try to figure out schedules, maybe if you want to send me days that you can or cannot do and other conflicts and we can share and I can craft that and work with something and try to bring something more specific to the next joint meeting. And what was, listen here, is really just meant to be illustrative of what we have in mind. And not like this is our suggestion, but okay. To continue that conversation, I'll brush with, I think, at the last joint meeting or the one before. So in the reading file, there's a presentation of the Essex Police Recruitment video. There was... It'll be for a minute and a half. There wasn't a link in here for us to watch it ahead of time, so... This is the sneak peek. He's a genius. I didn't want to send the link out and then have everybody have it. It's the honest reason. So, but... We are committed to providing high-quality community policing services. Has this police been an emergency? It is the purpose of the Essex Police Department. To uphold the law fairly and thoroughly. To pursue and bring to justice those who break the law. To keep the peace, to help reassure and protect citizens. To be professional, to follow the industry. We must strive, so far as we can, to reflect the priorities of our community and the action we take. To well-find the criticism with the willingness to change it. I hope you'll join us. We have a free PSA spot in front of all the movies. Pretty cool, Chief, thank you. Good luck. Hope it yields all five positions. Okay, Bruce, did you want to make a comment? Yeah, four points. I'll be brief. Today on the French Port Forum, I saw about volunteering for the listening groups. So I filled it out. I said, do you want to belong? Yes. Then are you a former member of the Select Board or trustees? And I said, yes. And I hit next and it said, thank you. Good bye. Mary took it. And she got beyond that. So I want to know the rationale. Who made the decision to exclude former members of the trustees and the Select Board? Who made that decision? And I want to know the rationale, please. I can answer that for you. Go ahead. We made the decision as a group at the governance subcommittee level, I believe that was, and the reason was there were audience members who objected to the possibility of select board members and trustees taking the quiz, taking the survey. Okay. Now, watch. Excuse me for the focus groups, for being members of the focus groups, excuse me. Audience members objected. Yes. And so based on some audience, I wanted to participate. And I'm an audience member. I've also contributed a lot to this community in terms of my involvement thing. So what was the rationale for excluding select board members and former trustees? What's the rationale? I think there's two that hopefully I can offer that might help. One is the concern that because elected officials are so deeply involved, and this would be current elected officials, are so deeply involved in the process that somehow we might skew it with our opinions or providing additional facts or something. Additional facts? Well, I get it. And I think also we wanted to give an opportunity for not the usual suspects to be parts of these focus groups so that we had other volunteers who might not have spoken up before. There might be planning commission members, members of the board of civic zoning, members of the board of civil authority, members of the trails committee who feel passionately about issues have a lot of information. They're allowed to participate. I am not. And I find that discriminatory. Okay? It's discriminatory. And what are you pointing at? There you go. The objection came from someone in the audience and so that's why. I don't understand. Okay, I'll go on. I just find it discriminatory that as an upstanding citizen of the town of Essex, I am prohibited from participating while many other officials on commissions and things like that. Even employees who are residents can participate, but some reason I can't. So I'm a second class citizen. I've looked at the greater Essex thing. You talked about the history of mergers to go back to 2006. My just 2000, or 1974 interesting article on how Essex junction overwhelmingly turned back mergers. And then in 1982, the same thing. So the village inside the town has a history of being against mergers until very recently. That would be an interesting thing to study. Secondly, on that report, there was a quote about Hatfields and McCoy's to serve a result. I think that was me and could have been somebody else. I do know I made that. And it shows you the limitation of these reports because my reference to Hatfields and McCoy's was not necessarily the merger generally. It was creating a voting district for village folks and a voting district for town members who are not in the village. And that's where I'm objecting, setting up more Hatfields and McCoy stuff. I would like to have a copy of the public document George distributed from members of the governance committee. And I'd also like to know about the t-shirt that was distributed on your June 22nd meeting. That is a public document. And so I'd like to have a copy. I'd like to know how it came about. Whose idea was it? Were there any public funds used for it? So I'd like that too. Because it is printed material. So we had a couple other objections about the t-shirt and I'm just gonna say what I said back then. It's a t-shirt. It's printed material. It's promotional material. It's printed promotional material designed for a strategic work session that was open to the public. But as you know, when organizations get together to embark on a large project, they do things to encourage unity and to help build the theme of the event. And that t-shirt was an innocent opportunity to brand what we were doing amongst ourselves. There's no meaning behind the color of the t-shirt, behind the wedding rings on the t-shirt, behind the language on the t-shirt. It was simply an opportunity to have a fun way to make all of us feel like we were on the same team as we were moving forward. It seemed to me to be a promotional item created in some way. I'd like to know the background. So here's a request for public information. I think you can respond. Are you with the paper? Yeah, you can have a copy of it too. There are laws. You've talked about transparency. There are laws I'd like to know. I'm a citizen member, I want to know. And so there you go. I've taken my time. Thank you, Bruce. So. That's the end of the reading file, I believe. That's the end of the reading file. We don't have an executive session scheduled. So unless there are further comments or questions, I will accept a motion to adjourn from the select board. Please don't move. Second? Second. All in favor of adjourning, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Aye, I move the S-Extension Trustees adjourn. Any further discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Thank you. Raj, seconded, George. I seconded, sorry. All right, thank you very much. I'll give you a pass. Is that yours? Yeah, that's yours.