 I think I'm people roll and over time here just just like usual. So I think we can get started. I want to I'm Steve Eustis your moderator for tonight's virtual town meeting informational hearing our first all virtual meeting of this magnitude. And I welcome you. So, as you've seen the agenda flag, we have a few things to go for go over in the beginning, just like usual. And I wanted to call the meeting to the order. And I just wanted to confirm with Tammy that we're all set to go. Pledge of Allegiance. And we're going to, as soon as Tammy's ready, we'll play that in the background and everyone can participate. Pledge of Allegiance flag of the United States. Which is one nation under God is visible. For all. And you can stay standing. The next up, we're going to play singing of the national anthem. And you can, you don't sing along. You can just because of the echo. But you can enjoy that. Missing the volume Tammy. We can all read lips though, so it's okay. Give it a moment here. If it doesn't work, that's okay. Just trying to do our best to emulate the normal town meeting pageantry at the beginning. Perhaps we'll, maybe we should skip this for now. And if we figured out we can come back to it. So, next up. I wanted to have our select four clerk. Vince Franco read the statement on stability that we read every year to remind us to be good participants. Can we hear all right. Yes. All righty. We're gathered together in civil assembly. We gather as a community in the oldest sense of the word. We gather to come together and try to make decisions about what is right. About what is wrong. Let us advocate for our positions, but not the expense of others. Let us remember that there is an immense gap between saying I am right and saying I believe I am right. And that our neighbors with whom we might disagree are good people with hopes and dreams as true and high as ours. And let us always remember that in the end, caring for each other in this community is a far greater importance than any difference we may have. Thank you for being here this evening. Thank you, Vince. With that, I'd like to introduce the select board chair and Lee and Haney to introduce the others. Thank you, Mr. moderator. Welcome to this year's town meeting. It's an honor to be with you here tonight and thank you to all of you who have joined us for our first online town meeting and for participating in your local government. Thank you to Tammy Getchell, Linda Mons, Rob Paluba, Greg Duggan and Evan Teach for all the technical information to make this online meeting possible. Help inform the public in advance of town meeting about the budget and valid items, the select board information booklets on each topic to every Essex household and held several online forums. Additional information about the budget and merger was made available on the town website, the village website and greater Essex 2020.org. Information about the Champlain water district bond vote is available at Champlain water.org. Thanks to town meeting television for recording and live streaming tonight's meeting and for helping the select board throughout the year with online meetings. I'd like to introduce you to your elected officials and members of the select board. Pat Murray vice chair. Pat, you want to wave. Hi, everyone. Vince Franco clerk. Hey, Andy Watts. Hi, thanks for coming everybody. And Don Hill flurry. I saw Don here. So, yeah, Don wait. Okay. I'd like to introduce our town staff senior staff. Evan Teach unified municipal manager Sarah Macy finance director. Greg Duggan deputy town manager. Good evening everyone. Susan McNamara Hill town clerk. And Kathy Ainsworth, our recording secretary. I'd also like to recognize we have many distinguished guests here this evening. We'll start with the village board of trustees, Andrew Brown president. George Tyler vice president. And Karen. Hi, everyone. Amber Tebow. And Raj Chala. Yes, George. Hi, Elaine. Hi, George. Sorry about that. There are also several members of our state delegation here this evening. Representative Mary Beth Redmond. Good to be here. Representative Tonya V. Hobsky. Hi, everyone. Thanks. It's great to be here. Representative Lori Houghton. Hi, everyone. Good to be here tonight. Representative Karen Dolan and Alyssa Black are unable to be here at this time. Representative Black will try to get here after the Westford town meeting. I'd also like to recognize any and all of our community volunteers who might be here tonight. Thank you for your continued service to Essex during these difficult times. Thank you for your dedication to our community. And Emily, if we were at the gym or excuse me at the auditorium, we'd be giving you all a standing ovation right now, but thank you for your service. Now it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you our special guest, Congressman Peter Welch. Welcome to Essex Congressman virtually, you know what it's great to be there virtually. Let me just say, before I get down to business, what a thrill it is actually to be even at a virtual town meeting to start up with the pledge the anthem, and that commitment to civility. I mean, it's, it's so important, you know, we in Vermont, we tend to take that for granted. But in January six, I was down here in the capital in the gallery when, you know, two things happen, there was a mob attack as you know. And, but the two things that were so disturbing for us is one, it really was challenging the acceptance of the outcome of the election. Because, you know, anybody involved in town politics knows elections are, they're, they're fiercely contested, and people have strong points of view. But what we know is that you win or you lose, you know, you'll fight another day, and you have confidence in your town clerk and that the outcome is the outcome. Certain humility, I think that we have to have in a democracy where even as we advocate fiercely for what we believe is the best interest of our community. We understand that other people have different points of view. And any of us who've been in this for any length of time has experienced the realization that you know what, she was right. And that was wrong. We may not like to admit it, but we have to that's part of it. And it's such a thrill for me to participate and see that spirit alive. So thank you for that. And I got to say, I think that the way we do things in Vermont and town meeting that spirit, we need more up down here. And the things that are going to be really, really important for you in the town, your representatives, your select board, and your in your school board, the eight package that we passed in the house, you know, this is to get us through and we've got great opportunity here because the vaccines work, and people are getting vaccinated, almost three million a day. And people in Vermont are getting vaccinated. And we all know that's absolutely essential to getting back to any sense of normalcy and then having an economy that's open up and allows us to have a self generating recovery. But President Biden's major focus has been to help us get from where we are to across that bridge where we're all vaccinated. And there is part of that is going to be help to individuals in Essex and that's those $1,400 checks. Part of it is going to be extended unemployment to folks in Essex who are unemployed. And they're really trying to figure out how to pay the rent. And part of this though is going to be $600 million that goes to the state of Vermont. And we made a decision here, and I was the strong advocate for this to try to give the state very significant flexibility, because we have particular challenges in Vermont, our agricultural sector, our nonprofit sector, our performance spaces, our restaurants, things that really are important to the vitality of the community. So flexibility means that your representatives who are with us today, and the governor can be making big decisions. But also, there's money in this that goes directly to the towns. And again, with good deal of flexibility. So for instance, Essex in the bill that's passed by the House. Now I want to qualify with you're about to hear, because this is what's in the bill I voted on, but it's now in the Senate, and it can be changed there. But there's about $200 million that we come to from our municipalities. And under the bill we passed, and I hope it survives, 2.165 million will come to Essex. And that means opportunity. But it means the wisdom of your leadership and your voters, about how best to use that to help recover and do things that will be helpful in the long term for Essex. Those are local decisions where there's going to be a lot of debate, but it's going to take a community wide effort to take full advantage of that to maximize the benefit for for the for the people in Essex. Also, a $5 million is slated to go to the school district. Now, all of us want our schools to be open. We want our kids back in school. We want everyone there, our students, our teachers and the staff to be safe. And there's a recognition here in Washington, that in order to open schools safely, schools are getting we're going to schools are going to need to do things to cost money. It takes everything from in some cases extra staffing to making adjustments in the physical spaces to things like ventilation, but some things that are immediately doable but do cost money, and some things that may take a little longer, but do provide future protection. So, there's been a big this big commitment here, and I see it as my job, Patrick's job and Bernie's job. Our job is to try to get those resources back to our state, but then to our local communities as well, where the really hard decisions how do you open a school and how do you do it in a way that is safe how to make the micro adjustments, given your physical plan and facilities. How do you do that so that can be safe those are hard discussions and hard decisions. And if we get resources back to you and I think we will that's going to give you some latitude to make decisions that do cost money without burdening your property tax base. But I want to say to you that I fully appreciate what a challenge it is for local communities, but I also want to say that I think you can do that job far better than Bernie Patrick and me can or the federal government can we just don't know those micro decisions. And everything that you do is going to be about the better than your children, everything you do is going to be about the safety of your teachers and your students. So this bill. It's making real progress. We hope will be acted out of the Senate next week, and then signed by the president by March 14. That's the hope. But we'll see what happens. So thank you so much for allowing me to be present with you. And I wish you the best of luck and facing the challenges ahead. Thank you. Thank you so much for your time. Good luck. Well, I believe we had do we have time for a question or two. Yeah, I think I think we can allow a few minutes in case anybody has a question. If anyone has a question for Congressman Welsh, I think we have time for two questions we were told that was the allotted thing we could do. Raise your hand using the zoom toolbar. Maybe we're good. We'll give it another 30 seconds here. Okay, someone's fumbling for the button. Yeah, and it can be on anything, but you're letting me off a little easy here. We're saving the tough questions for you. We do appreciate your time joining us tonight. Well, I appreciate you letting me part of be part of this and I wish you all good luck. Steve, we actually in Mr. Lady, we have a hand up from Smith with the name iPad. And if the speaker could please identify themselves for the record, that would be great. That's that's Peter. I think Congressman welch. I guess the hand raised function does work. He's testing us. Yeah. So we all set. Good luck to you guys. Yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you, Congressman. You have a thank you. I see there's a hand up. Ken Cigarillo has a hand up. Here's now it yet. I go ahead, Ken. Thank you and welcome. Thank you. Judging from all the activity that took place in the capital and a lot of it was instigated by social media and a lot of ways activated by social media. Exemption for internet social media hosting companies any movement in that area. Well, you've identified the real challenge for democracy, you know the social media is built on a model that it tries to excite people to hit the link. It hits there are the more advertising Facebook does, and the more revenue they get so it's a business model it's literally based on controversy. That's not as opposed to discussion as opposed to the kind of discussion you're going to have tonight at the town meeting. So what to do about that is very problematic because we've got First Amendment rights, but we also have democratic discussion being debased. There's a number of proposals that people are thinking about one is, what do we do about this section 230 where these media platforms don't have any obligation for the responsibilities that say a newspaper has the Essex reporter, where if they publish something defamatory they could potentially be liable. There's other questions about having rules of the road that might be applicable to some of these platforms but the discussion on that is beginning, and I think it's overdue. So the answer is, you've identified a problem, and more and more people are agreeing with you that we have to do something and the challenge for us is figuring out what that is. Thank you very much. Thank you. And I think our second question is going to go for Betsy Dunn. Go ahead Betsy. And remember to unmute. Okay, can you hear me? Yes, yeah. Well, great. Congressman Welch, my question is about broadband. The money that we're getting from the federal government. And is that only used for the infrastructure and I'm wondering if infrastructure includes the star bright star bright star light. That's the satellites that Elon Musk or someone has put up in the, up there in the ozone to have people in our rural communities be connected, because it's very quick it's much better. Well, two things when the broadband money that's in here is really intended. Well, let me start with this, we need broadband in all of rural America, and we need it in Vermont, and I'm the head of the rural broadband caucus. And what I found since COVID is that folks who were resisting our advocacy, by the way, a lot of my Republican colleagues come from rural districts, and they're really much in agreement with me. And that the case we were making that we need rural America to have broadband that now has been proven with COVID because you couldn't go to school. You know, it's not just kids doing homework, it's kids going to school, you couldn't do work and you couldn't get healthcare. And what we want to do, not just in this bill with some additional money that will help hotspots and help schools, but in the infrastructure bill that we hope to do soon after this is get enough money that it will be deployable into a lot of America for the build out of broadband. But what has to be done, you know, you raise this with with the starlight is that local communities who have particular circumstances, you know, in Indiana is flat, and Vermont it's not. We want to work with the local communities that are putting together some of their own groups as consortiums, and where their focus is on serving the citizens of those communities, we want to work with them on what is the best way to deploy it. So, you've mentioned starlight, but that may work. But that's a decision that I can't make that's a decision has to be made locally by people who are going to have to live with the outcome of that decision. So your legislature that would do that. Yeah, there'll be a lot of activity with the legislature but also towns are creating in Vermont towns are coming together to have consolidated districts and it's much like what happened with electricity. You know in the 1930s there was no economic case to get electricity rural America, but there was a social case to be made for. The business the big companies could care less about getting electricity to rural Essex that right there was no money in it. But on the other hand the citizens and electors in Essex surely like to have the lights on. So, many rural electrical cooperatives were created where their interest was to help folks locally as opposed to some of these big conglomerates that could care less about what's going on locally. And in our approach we want to duplicate that model, so that we have real accountability and real opportunity at the local level. Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you and I don't want to take more of your time so let you get down to business. Yep. All right, thank you Congressman and thank you for those questions. Yeah, thank you. All right. Before we dive into the meat of the meeting I will do my usual instructions of the meeting adapted this year for a virtual setting. All right. So here we go. This is an informational hearing to discuss the articles being voted on by Australian ballot for the 2021 meeting. As such, there will be no motions amendments or voting at this meeting pertinent information on this meeting agenda reports etc are on s6.org slash 2021. All attendees must remain on mute, except when recognized by me attendees can get in line to make remarks by using the raise hand tool, or by using the chat to type that they would like to speak. People will be queued in order of request. Every 10 to 15 minutes of discussion, a couple phone calls will be recognized. All remarks, questions and discussion should be addressed to me. Please wait to be recognized before unmuting and speaking and then give your name and speak and allow voice so that comments may be heard by everyone. If you have a reasonable length meeting discussion on articles one and two will be limited to one hour each and public to be heard to 30 minutes. The select word presentation at the beginning of each article does not count towards the discussion limit. If the discussion on article one does not use the full hour, the unused time will be added to article two. As in our usual town meeting each person should plan to limit their time to two to three minutes so that more people have a chance to speak. As in past years, I will not be specifically timing people, but will encourage people to wrap up if they are speaking too long. My role as moderators to help you ask your question or make your point. If you need help, please let me know. Above all, as we heard before, please be civil and respectful of your neighbor's opinions. Lastly, the chat window is only to be used to ask to speak type your first and last name and that you'd like to speak please don't put comments questions or have conversations inside the chat. With that being concluded. I'm going to move on to article one. Got the warning here so I can read it exactly. Article one is about our budget. The town adopt a budget for the fiscal year July 1, 2021 to June 30, 2022, as recommended by the select board in the amount of 15,926,128 dollars. 15,926,128 dollars. With that before we begin our discussion again we don't need a motion to begin discussion since it's a hearing. And the select board chair is going to give a presentation on the budget, and then we'll commence discussion after that. So go ahead. Mr Chairman. Yes, is there a point of order point of order please. I've heard to a raised hand option in the toolbar. I have none. I have none and I wonder if others are experiencing the same. Thank you Bob, I appreciate that question. So if you look at the reactions I think there's a raised hand under underneath there. Okay. Thank you. Yep. Thank you, Mr. moderator. I am going to share my screen, going to start the slideshow. Okay. Can everyone see that Steve can you give me a heads up on that. I can see it go ahead. Thank you. So I will walk us through the FY 2022 budget, which goes from July 1 2021 to June 30 2022. Let's start with a list of town services that were previously consolidated or aligned with village services to provide greater efficiencies and service delivery for the entire community. Police and senior van service were consolidated many years ago. In 2014 we began sharing the position of unified manager. In the last several years we have consolidated multiple other departments. In FY 19 we aligned the fire departments pay and training. Both departments retain separate budgets. In FY 20 Essex recreation and parks department relocated from 81 Main Street to join Essex Junction recreation and parks at Maple Street. Both departments retain separate budgets. There are no new consolidations for FY 21 or 22. There are other services we share. The town of Essex shares the wastewater treatment facility with the village of Essex Junction and the town of Williston. The town pays for the services of Essex Rescue, Green Mountain Transit and Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission for all residents. These are not services actually provided by the town. We share health insurance, employee benefits, buildings and property maintenance and economic development services. In addition to the improved services achieved over the last several years through consolidation, we have also achieved significant savings in taxpayer dollars. Since FY 14 consolidations have saved Essex taxpayers over $3 million. These are taxpayer dollars that would have been spent if these consolidations did not happen. In addition, the town and village are sharing equipment and human resources whenever possible. These figures are the lowest estimate and are the most easily quantifiable. Other less tangible savings have also been achieved through efficiencies and improved practices. In FY 22, those savings will continue. More specifically, in FY 22, consolidation savings to town taxpayers will total $333,022. Coupled with the savings to the village of $383,776, together the community will see additional savings in FY 22 of $716,728. Another way to say this is that the town budget would be that much bigger if these consolidations didn't happen. In FY 22, we will continue the savings we've achieved from the previous consolidations. These savings are passed on to town taxpayers in the following ways. This year, consolidation savings are reducing the estimated tax rate from 0.5387 to 0.5264. Without the consolidation savings, the estimated tax rate would be 1.23 cents or 2.09% higher. This would have been an additional $34 on a $280,000 property. These are the objectives that Select Board had when creating the FY 22 budget. Ensure continued delivery of quality services to attract and attract and retain quality talent in all departments. Improve economic development efforts. We wish to establish and better maintain business resources and relationships. Focus on savings and anticipation of future capital expenses. We want to plan how to spend taxpayer dollars most efficiently. And to minimize the impact on the tax rate. These are the new or enhanced programs proposed in the FY 22 budget. Funding for police body cameras and associated software. This investment will enable greater transparency in our police practices. Two new positions economic development coordinator, which is half time and previously approved assistant manager, which is full time. The inclusion of the village highway rolling stock costs and the elimination of town highway tax. This change will equalize the tax rate charged for heavy equipment across all town taxpayers and also eliminate attacks that has been charged to town outside the village residents only. Funding for racial equity and inclusion work and funding to pay stipends to all volunteer board and committee members. These two investments are part of the commitment the Select Board has made to improve diversity and equity throughout the community. Planned increases and operating transfers to capital to support updated replacement schedules. Let's review the overall details of the budget. The total proposed budget is 15.97 million. This is an increase over FY 21 of 0.51 million dollars or 3.9%. The estimated increase in the tax levy will be 1.8%. Now let's look more specifically at what the increases are in the FY 22 budget. Village stormwater and highway comes in at 205,369 dollars. Regular personnel cost and benefits 151,881. The two new positions I mentioned will cost 93,156 dollars. Paving and stormwater construction 39,860 dollars. Building maintenance 39,500 dollars. Facial equity work and volunteer stipends 32,250 dollars. Transfers to capital 26,000 dollars. Appropriations for Green Mountain Transit, County Tax and Human Services grants 14,650 dollars. Other increases and decreases total 8,673 dollars. So the total increase in the town budget in FY 22 is 593,993 dollars. Let's review more closely what the staffing changes are in salaries and benefits. Total salaries will increase $193,545 or 3.1%. This is primarily due to raises and step increases in our employment agreements. $60,350 of that is driven by the new positions I mentioned earlier. We're funding the police department personnel budget at 97% rather than 100% to account for vacancies. The total change in benefits will be 51,492 dollars or a 1.9% increase. 2021 insurance rates were lower than anticipated so the FY 22 budget was adjusted using those lower actual rates. One of the new positions will have benefits. We'll look more specifically at those two positions. The full-time assistant manager is a full-time equivalent and it was previously approved by the select board for a total cost of $77,706. That position was filled at the beginning of February by Marguerite Ladd who joined us from the town of Cambridge and welcome Marguerite to the S16. A halftime economic development position will be $15,450 and this position was created out of a former full-time position. This position will work with the Economic Development Commission and with the Community Development Department. So the total change in staffing is an addition of 1.5 full-time equivalent for a total cost of $93,156. Let's review the impact these changes will have on the tax rate. Remember that in FY 21 the tax rate did not change from FY 20 because the select board held it level due to COVID. We also established a two-week grace period and lowered the late payment penalty. Note that the top portion of this chart is for the town inside the village properties. The split is there to show the impact of the village rolling stock being moved into the town budget and the town highway tax being eliminated. In the town outside the village, taxpayers will see less of an increase. This is because while the tax rate for rolling stock is being equalized, the town outside the village will still see a reduction because the highway tax is being eliminated. As a result of eliminating the highway tax, the town tax rate for properties outside the village is increasing less than for properties inside the village. Now the overall assumptions for these figures are that the average residence is valued at $280,000. Grand list growth will be 1.25% and we will use $409,500 from fund balance to offset tax increases. Select Board fund balance policy is to have a reserve of up to 15% of the general fund balance. Over that 15% are returned as revenue in the proposed budget. There is no guarantee year to year that this type of revenue is available to add to future budgets. Now let's look at the overall picture of where your tax dollars go. A copy of this pie chart is available on page 51 of your annual report. It shows that for the average Essex home of $280,000, the total estimated municipal tax bill is $1,530. Keep in mind that this is only the municipal portion of your tax bill. The budget I'm presenting today does not include the education budget, which is handled separately by the Essex Westford School District. Your tax dollars provide 24-7 public safety and dispatch service, 24-7 fire protection and first responder services, 24-7 ambulance service, and 24-7 winter plowing, as well as the maintenance of approximately 110 miles of roads, 91 miles of sidewalks and paved paths, 95 miles of water lines, bridges, 30 buildings and vehicles and equipment. As well as our outstanding Essex Free Library, senior busing and the senior center, public transportation from Green Mountain Transit, infrastructure projects, savings for future capital projects, and much more delivered by a talented and dedicated staff. That is our proposed FY22 budget. We thank you for your continued generosity and the support of the town budget, which allows us to maintain the high quality of services that make Essex such a great community. I will now turn it back to the moderator who will moderate questions about the budget. All right. Thank you, Elaine. And I think you can stop sharing for now. There we go. So it's, and if you happen, if someone brings up a particular point on the budget that's in the annual report that everybody was mailed a copy of and wants to cite the page or line item that is helpful for people following along. That being said, it's 812 on my watch. So we'll get started on discussions and you can ask a question, make a point, however you'd like to do it. And, and again, you can raise your hand or type in the chat window that you'd like to talk. So I'll entertain the first person who would like to speak. And I know there were some questions on the raise hand and hopefully people have found what they needed on that at this point. Is there anybody that's on the phone that wouldn't have access to the raise hand or the chat window that would that has a question or point they'd like to make on the budget. I see there's only a couple phone calls. Most of the people are dialed in from from a computer or our pad. So they have access to the features. We're waiting just to get people that second in case they're, you know, it's a new technology for some people give them a chance. And I also want to thank everyone for their patience. As we work through things and deal with technology and all of that. Nothing ever works perfectly, especially the first time to a meeting this large. Right. We'll give it any last chance on the budget. So perhaps we can close that section of the meeting. And we can allocate this time to the to the merger discussion. So, if I'm reading the article to which we'll now move on to article to states shell the town of Essex adopt the plan of merger of the town of Essex Vermont and village of Essex Junction Vermont data January 11 2021 and the proposed charter for the merged municipalities copies of the plan of merger, including proposed charter provisions are available clerks office at 81 Main Street. And there's offers ways to get more details. So that's article to as written in the warning. And with that, the chair was going to get a presentation as well before we start discussion. So Elaine, you can go ahead with that. Thank you, Steve, and I will be joined by Pat Murray and Vince Franco on this presentation so I'm going to share my screen. I want to do that. Make sure all my settings are. I can see your screen. It's not presentation mode but I can see it. That's okay I just needed to fix a setting there. And now we will begin. And that's a presentation mode now. Thank you, Steve. I really appreciate that. So this is the plan of merger for the town of Essex and the village of Essex Junction. And as I described earlier in the budget presentation we have had many consolidations to date. And I'll start on this slide with in 2018 unified manager Evan teach began his service with the town of Essex, and the select board and trustees began meeting on a regular basis monthly. And at that time the select board and trustees appointed a governance subcommittee, which was an existence for two years. The subcommittee is began work on drafting the merger charter in 2019. And today we are here talking about the merger plan result of that committee's effort and the effort of the select trustees, and the many different variations of public input that we've had, and attorney services as well. So now I will turn it over to Pat Murray to continue the slideshow and Pat just let me know when. Go ahead and awesome. Perfect. So, why are we considering merger. Well, for one, one government, rather than the two separate that we have now with the select board and the village trustees will provide more transparency going forward. We'll be able to consolidate to one set of ordinances, something that our police officers have requested for some time to negate the challenges that there is an enforcing two sets of separate ordinances within one community. The new community would have Australian ballot budget voting. This is something that our voters approved in September, excuse me, in November. And is included here just as a reaffirmation, because it is in the new charter that we will continue Australian ballot budget voting going forward. As we are here today, and you can see town meetings will become informational going forward. We'll be voting rather completely on Australian ballot budget the next day. We'll have one land development code and finally more organized and consistent community planning going forward into the future. Next slide please. A merger allows us to have one unified community with one common vision. It sets its course together on a number of issues that we have come across over the years. It allows us to better streamline and anticipate problems with racial justice, introducing equity and safety into our community. It allows us to become a more welcoming and inclusive community. No longer will there be separate which side of the line do you live on. We'll be able to address housing that meets the needs of our entire community for individuals that want a more urban setting. And for those who want a more rural feel to their homes, you'll be able to have that Essex provides it all. The community and economic development will be able to be unified going forward allows for the preservation of open space and stewardship of the environment in a complete town plan. We'll be able to continue with our first class recreational facilities indeed hopefully build upon them as our wreck departments would come together. And finally, this allows for us to build resiliency and sustainability as we would become effectively the second largest community within Vermont. And Vince, if you would like to take over. Thanks. We're going to talk about some of the benefits of merger. These are some of the benefits village residents will see from merger. Tax equity. Excuse me. The goal is after 12 years for everyone in our community to pay the same tax rate for all services provided by the town. Predictable representation. An even numbered board of six members assures that for the first time, both town outside the village residents. Excuse me. And residents in the village will have an equal number of representatives on the select board. Initially it removes an extra vote needed for the village budget and election of village trustees. These are some of the benefits town outside the village residents will see from merger. Again, the village residents, the town outside the village residents gain predictable representation with equal number of board. Equal access to services and programs once offered by the excuse me by the extension wreck department with no village priority and no additional fees for town outside the village residents. The town outside the village residents will have more say in spending, planning and development in all parts of the town. Recently the time and it's, I'm sorry. Yeah, recently the time and it is contract with the YMCA and began receiving childcare services from EJRP, which offers five star childcare that the YMCA did not, which also costs less. The change we made permanent with merger. Please. Our plan is the high quality services that both the village and town currently provide. We are committed to continuing that high quality of service. Also honors our two communities identities by keeping this the name the town of Essex and including an unincorporated village of Essex junction. Now Pat will speak to some of the challenges of merger. Take away Pat. I think as we all know, we anticipate that there would of course be challenges related to any merger plan. If identified for primary ones. First, it would be a way to integrate the three and a half million dollar Essex junction tax levy into the $15 million town of Essex budget. We want to maintain the high quality of municipal services that we currently have, and that residents expect and pay for. We want to achieve eventual tax equity between those who live in the village and those who live in the TOV. And finally, we want to make sure that we're preserving the identities of both the town and the village itself. Next slide please Elaine. So a gradual timeline. Now, the town of Essex levies taxes on all town properties, which does include the village of Essex junction. The village levy taxes on village properties only. As a result of this, the average village property owner pays an additional $925 a year, approximately in taxes. By merging the town and the village budgets all at once, this would result in a single one time increase of $330 for town outside the village properties in one year. And all at once increase like that could also result in people coming to us for a desire for significant cost cutting that would negatively affect our municipal services, which undermines one of those primary goals of mergers that I spoke about to maintain our current quality of service. So we pro we adopted a gradual approach, keep tax increases for the town outside the village reasonable, affordable and predictable, rather than all at once charge. The 12 year timeline chosen for this coincides with the end of the villages bonded debt, and is the length of time preferred by most town residents who responded to the 2019 survey on merger. During this 12 year time period, effectively, the taxpayers of Essex junction would pay a portion of the tax inequity until it becomes even again. Elaine. Thank you. So, starting with the first merged year, the separate town and village budgets would become one budget. The cost of that budget that was formally funded by village only taxes would be frozen in phased in gradually over a 12 year transitional period. This will cause taxes outside the village to increase about $26 a year for the average property assessed at $280,000 village taxes would decrease about $35 a year. After the 12 year transitional period tax rates would be equal for all taxpayers. For any grand list growth, special taxing districts have been included in the plan of merger to help offset the tax impacts outside the village. One of those is a debt district to ensure that village debt remains with village taxpayers until it's retired in 2035. This slide is a summary of the total cost of merger. If the two entities were to merge all at once without any districts. Members on this slide are calculated based on voter approved FY 20 budgets and the final FY 20 grand list. Shortly, you will see slides that have been updated to show FY 22 figures. The figures have been calculated, assuming no future growth in the grand list in an effort to clearly isolate the impact of merging. The budgets are calculated by dividing the budgeted tax levy by the grand list. Therefore, any increase in the grand list results in a decrease to the tax rate. The mechanics are the same for the FY 22 updated figures you will soon see. You can see that if the two budgets were combined all at once the impact would be large, which drove us to explore a longer timeline and the inclusion of special tax districts. The primary benefits of spreading the tax change out over the 12 year transitional period are to lessen the annual impact to taxpayers and to leverage the growing grand list, which will also serve to lessen the impact over time. This table shows the annual change in taxes when the changes spread over the 12 year transition period, and the village is designated as a special taxing district for debt sidewalks and capital during that time. These are FY 20 figures. You will see updated FY 22 figures shortly. At the end of the 12 years these districts would go away. In calculating these numbers we assume that the dollars raised by the capital and sidewalk districts would then be included in the overall budget, causing one final increase in year 13. However, it will be up to the future select board as to how they wish to handle this. We chose to make this assumption to get a conservative estimate of the cost, but it's equally possible that the future select board could eliminate these funds entirely, which would eliminate the year 13 column in this chart and change the averages. These numbers were calculated with many moving parts, including the challenge of projecting future years dealing with new budgets during the process and the complex interconnectedness of the two budgets. This was no simple task. In calculating the total impact of merging the two budgets, we started with FY 20 numbers, assumed the first merged year would be FY 23 and projected out any known changes, such as eliminating expenditures that are in both budgets and accounting for decreasing debt in the town. In determining the annual change over the transitional period, we use the same method and factored in the known changes in debt. We attempted to eliminate any variables that were guesses in order to provide a simple conservative estimate. The most significant consequence of this will be that the grand list over growth over time will decrease these numbers. The town has experienced average grand list growth of 1.6% per year for the last seven years. This slide shows how the convergence would happen. When looking at this graph, the top line is the FY 20 annual tax bill for the average property in the village. The bottom line is the same for a property outside the village. You can see over time those two lines remain stable with the village being about 924 $25 more per year. The middle two lines show how the taxes for that same average property would decrease gradually over time in the village and increase gradually over time outside the village to meet at a midpoint at the end of the 12 years. Now this graph is a very simple example and does not factor in any grand list growth. Its purpose is to give the viewer an illustration of the impact of the 12 year transitional period. The town was asked to update these figures to reflect proposed FY 22 budget numbers. The next few slides reflect these updated figures. Now that we have an FY 22 proposed budget, which we will be voting on soon and is therefore not approved yet. We have created new slides. This slide is an update of the slide shown before now with FY 22 numbers. The update shows the average property of $280,000 is now estimated to have a total increase of $373 compared to the 329 using FY 20 numbers. Again, this is an estimate that does not factor in grand list growth or the impact of special taxing districts. We have also recalculated these figures to account for grand list growth and the special taxing districts and you will see those figures shortly. This slide is an update of the annual increases and decreases using FY 22 numbers. The yearly increase has changed from $24 to $26 per year for the town outside the village. The yearly decrease for town inside the village properties has changed from $34 to $37. The estimated average annual change based on the new FY 22 figures is a $29 increase for town outside the village and a $44 decrease for town inside the village. The estimated total increase for town outside the village properties is $373 and the estimated total decrease for town inside the village properties is $568. When we factor in grand list growth and the special taxing districts, these figures change. This slide shows three scenarios. The high range shows the cost, assuming zero growth in the grand list, and that the sidewalk and capital districts are moved into the town budget in year 13, causing a final increase. This slide is recalculated over 13 years. You can see it's the $373 total and the $29 annual increase from the last slide. For the village, the total reduction is $567 or $44 annually. The middle range shows the cost, assuming 1.25% annual growth in the town grand list and assumes the sidewalk and capital district funding is moved into the full budget in year 13. The average is calculated over 13 years. In this middle range, the total cost to town outside the village properties drops to $309. The annual average cost drops to $24. For village properties, the total reduction is $630 or $48 annually. The low range shows the cost, assuming a 1.25% annual growth in the town grand list, half a percent growth in the village grand list, and assumes that the sidewalk and capital district funding is eliminated in year 13. The average is calculated over 12 years for the town outside the village and 13 years for the village. This is because eliminating the sidewalk and capital district funding would have one final increase, decrease to the village, but no final increase to the town outside the village. In this low range scenario, the total cost to the town outside the village drops to $259 or $22 a year. The total reduction for village properties is $674 or $52 annually. The town has been asked to talk more about the cumulative impact of the taxation plan. This slide shows that the total amount paid by a town outside the village taxpayer over the course of 13 years will be approximately 12% more as a result of merger than it would be without merger, assuming zero growth in the budget or grand list. For a village taxpayer, this will be an overall decrease of 10%, looking at the sum total of all 13 years and comparing it to the same total without merging. This is not the annual impact, but an impact over multiple years. If you decrease or increase the number of years in the time period, those numbers would change. Over that same time frame, using the same assumptions, if there is no merger, a town outside the village taxpayer would pay $19,500 in taxes over that time period, while a village taxpayer would pay $31,200. The figures with merger would be $21,882 for town outside the village after 12 years and $28,213 for village properties. Now we will return to Pat Murray, who will talk about the sidewalk and other districts. Thank you, Elaine. So our merger charter includes five special districts. The first is the debt repayment district. This is a district that must be established to limit the repayment of the village's bonded debt to only village residents. So after 12 years, the village debt would be retired. This district cannot be renewed, and this district does not affect the cost of merger. The second, the tax reconciliation district. This is the district that allows the town to assess different tax rates to the village in order to help us phase in the cost of village expenditures over those 12 years. After 12 years, the village budget will have been entirely phased into the town general fund and the tax rate would then be equal for all taxpayers at this point. There would be no reason to reestablish this district and it does not affect the cost of merger. Next slide, please. Now, while the first two districts are required by the state, the next are ones that we've chosen to introduce. The sidewalk district. This district allows the town to raise taxes from village residents to pay for the same level of sidewalk maintenance in the village that village residents are currently paying for. These services are estimated to cost approximately $125,000 a year. This district reduces the cost of merger to the town outside the village residents slightly. Only village residents would pay these taxes during the 12 year transition period, and the goal is that we are attempting to lessen any impact for additional fees placed on to be residents. At the end of the 12 year period, the additional costs and service for the village sidewalks would come to an end. The elected board and community could seek to either continue the district or expand the district to include other areas of the town which would require a charter amendment and a community vote. Number four, our capital improvement district. This district allows the town to raise taxes from village residents to enable some village capital projects to be funded solely by village taxpayers. After 12 years, this district would sunset and moving forward the costs of all capital projects, both town and village would be paid by all taxpayers as town capital projects are currently paid. This district that also reduces the cost of merger to town outside the village residents slightly. Finally, downtown improvement district. This district allows the village to maintain its downtown designation. At the end of the 12 year transitional period, this district would end and this district does not affect the cost of merger. I do want to note that the downtown improvement district in the merger booklet on page 12, it does incorrectly state that the select board would have taxing authority for this district. It would not. However, it is not a taxation district. We've corrected it in the slideshows, but it has not been updated in the printed version of the booklets that people received. Vince, if you would continue please. Thanks, Pat. We're going to talk about representation and voting, representation voting and governance in the plan of merger. So after the legislature approves of the merger, the then current town select board and then current village board of trustees will merge into a single interim governing body for a limited time until elections for the new permanent select board are held. The proposed plan of merger outlines the creation of two new voting wards. Ward one includes all areas outside the boundaries of the unincorporated village. Ward two includes all areas inside the boundaries of the unincorporated village. In the proposed plan of merger, the new permanent select board will have six members with three seats elected by Ward one and three seats elected by Ward two. This governance structure differs slightly from the merger charter passed by the village. We'll have more on that later. Next slide, please. Three plus three is included in the proposed merger charter to make sure that the state legislature knows that this governance model continues to be the will of the people of Essex and should be used in the new merged community. And even a numbered board honors the proposed three plus three charter change that was approved by a townwide vote in March of 2020. Three seats for each ward shows residents of both newly created wards be equitably and predictably represented. Ward boundary lines can be adjusted in the future to address variations in population growth between the wards. In November of 2020, village voters approved a merger charter that included an odd numbered board with three seats for Ward one, three seats for Ward two, and an additional seat to be elected by all residents of the new merged community. We'll work with state legislatures to reconcile differences in the two merger charters. Back to Pat for some additional information. Thank you Vince. A few other assorted but equally important features. The name of our new community would be simply the town of Essex, the incorporated village of Essex Junction would then become the unincorporated village of Essex Junction, much like has already exists in our state village unincorporated village of White River Junction which exists within the town of Hartford voter approved Australian ballot for voting on the town municipal budget with one informational annual meeting in March continues. We would reorganize the town and village departments to reduce duplicative services, building codes, municipal plans, ordinances and policies. Our current town and village water and sewer rates are not affected by merger water and sewer costs, including repairs are paid by water and sewer bills, not by property taxes. The new town of Essex will own the Essex Junction wastewater treatment facility, which is a world class facility, as well as all assets currently owned separately by the town and the village. Elaine, if you'd like to wrap up our presentation. Thank you Pat. So we have talked about some benefits of merger but we also must acknowledge that there will be challenges. So what are some of the challenges of merger for the town outside the village. This would require merger related taxes over 12 years. Municipal property taxes for the average town outside the village resident with a house valued at $280,000 would see an annual increase of approximately $26 for 12 years. This would be on top of regular annual tax increases based on community needs. After the 12 years, the merger related tax increase would end and only regular annual increases would occur. After 12 years, town outside the village residents would be paying the same tax rate as village residents shared responsibility for all capital projects. After the 12th year of merger town outside the village residents will share with village residents the full cost and responsibility, all capital expenditures townwide. What are some challenges of merger for the village. The village residents will be dissolving their government under merger the village board of trustees and the village planning commission would be dissolved. They would be giving up priority for certain services. Once merged there would not be any committees that only village residents could serve on or services that only village residents would get to use village residents would no longer have first pick of EJRP programming. That is why the village residents would be eligible to become elected board members on the Brown Hill Library Board of Trustees. And also less autonomy. The village budget would no longer exist as something that only village residents could vote on. There would be only a single town budget covering expenses for the entire town, including the village that all town residents would vote on all ballot initiatives, including the budget would be townwide votes. Village residents would no longer vote twice on any ballot items. And what is a challenge for everybody potentially longer wait times for infrastructure projects. The town outside the village and village infrastructure projects lists would be merged into a single capital project list and priority projects would be selected from this prioritized list, resulting in potential wait times for projects. So next steps. We are pretty much at the fourth bullet at this point we've held two public hearings. We, the ballots went out in the mail in early February town meeting is happening right this moment, and we will be voting at the polls tomorrow. If merger passes the charter and the charter that the village passed in November will both go to the legislature for their consideration for reconciliation and approval. Next, you can find information about merger on our website at 6bt.org as extension.org or greater s6 2020.org, and at any time you can reach out to the members of the select board with your questions and concerns. And I believe our phone numbers are also posted on the town website. So feel free to reach out. So now I will turn it back over to the moderator to moderate the discussion on the merger plan. Thank you for your time. All right, thank you for all three of you for that presentation. My watch shows 11 or 846 p.m. And obviously we didn't have discussion on the budget so that allows up to two hours of discussion for this. So again, same thing you can queue up. I see there is a hand up for Mary post. I'm going to unmute and go ahead, Mary. Thank you very much. One thing I'm concerned about is the phase in of taxes over 12 years. We did ask the question of Elaine earlier, if since this would be something that she said they hoped for that actually, it could be changed in a year. What it takes is someone to try to have a drive to change the charter. And we picked out when I say we, it was just my husband and I picked out a house of someone I won't say a name who is quite up in leadership in the town of Essex Junction. And he has a house that's quite expensive like several, you know, a lot of people in the junction do have a house or a condo. And we figured out that if he and his wife decided to do the phase in, they would save $6300 on their taxes. But if they decided they didn't want to, and they decided to try for a charter change which they could probably get quite a few people who would make the same kind of savings to try to change this. They would save $12,000 a thousand dollars a year. So I just want people to know and I would like Chairman Haney to, again, tell the people that this is true, like she did before, that this is something that they're hoping for, but it is not necessarily going to happen. In one year, a group of people could try to get that charter change and Essex, you know, town outside the village members was suddenly have to pay a much bigger tax bill. Thank you. Thank you, Mary. So Chairman Haney, did you want to respond to that. Yes, please. So I do recall being asked whether the terms of the taxation plan could be changed. And it is true that a charter change can occur. What needs to happen with the charter change, however, is it needs to go through the select board, it needs to go through the voters. And so any change that is petitioned to be done to the charter has to go to a public vote. And so we would have to go through the public hearing process and ballots and all that and have the entire community approve that change. All charter changes to municipal charters must be approved by the legislature. And so that change would have to go to the legislature as well for their approval. And as we are aware, that is a very long process. My understanding with the way the House Government Operations Committee works is they examine the charter changes that come through. And my understanding is that charter changes that would have a significant economic negative impact on communities like a sudden change that was suggested by Mrs. Post. I can't speak for them, but they are going to investigate very closely whether it's something that would negatively impact the community financially and they could turn it down. So I think what I'm trying to say is that while it is true the charter can be changed, the hurdles to actually accomplish such a change are quite high and there are many. So that's my answer to that observation and I appreciate the question. All right. Thank you very much. All right, who would like to speak next? If I may, I see Betsy's up hand up. Is my mic on? Well, you're supposed to ask Mike. I didn't see your hand up and I did see Betsy's hand up first. So we can cue you next after Betsy. So let's go to Betsy first. Go ahead, Betsy. Thank you. So I have two questions are pretty quick. When you talked about the sidewalk districts, I think that was Vince who brought that up. So that's where I guess I could put this question. Today, the town budget, we take 130 million, 100, $1.3 million from our budget and we pay the entire public works costs for the village and that would include the sidewalks. So why is this sidewalks thing there for them anyway because we're already paying for that. They don't pay for it at all, we pay for it. And the other thing I wanted to know was when you said about the reorg for the town outside the village and the town inside the village that departments with duplicate services would be evened out. Does that include managers within those departments and the upper echelons in those departments because that's where the real servings are gonna happen. So if you have the fire departments or the libraries, you take one head and you would get rid of the other two which is a common phenomena in almost all mergers that I've ever heard of when a business takes over another business. They either use their guy from their HR department and they get rid of the other HR department or he becomes a assistant to the other person. But they don't maintain the same salary structure and I think that's where you start to see services that we gained some money out of. And the last question is about the wastewater. I only just recently heard about this and the wastewater, we share it with three entities, the cost of it, Williston, Us and the Junction. Are we all paying equally for that? Those are my questions, thank you. Thank you, Betsy. Who's gonna respond? I know she mentioned Vince but there's also Elaine to respond to that. I'm taking some notes. I'm gonna try to tackle them but hopefully Evan is in the audience and will be there to help out if I stumble at all. So for your first question, Betsy and thank you for your three questions. The first one is the sidewalk district. So yes, the town does take $1.3 million and return it to the village for public works. The thing is that was a vote that was approved 2016 by the community, the village public works budget was transferred into the town general fund so that everyone was paying evenly across the board for public work services in the entire community. So village residents are also paying part of that 1.5 million and it's going back to the village as an even expense so that town public works is being paid for the same way as village public works. So that's the first thing. But then how does this sidewalk district work then? Well, I'd be happy to explain that. The village trustees introduced the idea of the sidewalk district because they wanted to do two things. They wanted to guarantee that under merger the level of service that they expect regarding their sidewalks would continue. There was no guarantee that if we had merged without something like that, that the new town would continue to plow the sidewalks the way the village wants them plowed. So they asked to have this district. But the other reason for that district is to offset the cost of that additional attention that is given to sidewalks in the village so that the town outside the village residents for the 12 years of the transition don't have to pay for that. So that is why in the $125,000, we know what that cost is because the village has told us that it is the cost of two full-time people plowing the sidewalks for six months of the year. So that's why we're able to identify that $125,000. Your second question was... Managers and savings. Oh, managers and savings. Evan, why don't you go ahead and talk about that one and then I'll tackle wastewater. And Betsy, thank you for your question. Yes, over a period of time, the town along with the town manager are going to take a look at the entire organization. And as we align and merge the two departments, there is a very good likelihood that we are not going to keep two managers from each department. We do, however, have a particular mantra that no one loses their job over merger. We do have a lot of work to be done and on several years to do that. So we will be looking at when there are opportunities of retirements or people have moved on or other activities that we have that meet people skills, we would look to reassign people into those roles. One of the things that we would look to do in the coming years is we would hire particular consultants to review those departments and give me some guidance on structure as well in that case. So that's pretty much the outlook there. And yes, of course, we would always be looking for savings. That is one of the goals of merger is that we would use the ability of the two communities to come together and find those savings. And then the last one was wastewater. I believe your question, are we all paying equally? And the answer to that question is no. The communities are paying by the amount of flow to the treatment plant. So we have all bought a certain amount of capacity in the plant. And so our rates are different based upon that flow and the cost to, well, what's the word? Treat that flow before it goes into the Winooski River. That's it. Okay, great question. And then there was a third question, Elaine. So Betsy, can you remind me, you asked about the sidewalks, you asked about the wastewater treatment, what was your third? The manager's budget. Well, and the manager's, we've got all three, Steve. Okay, excellent. Thank you very much. And before we go to Mike, I had, there was a question from someone on whether they have to have video or not. And nobody needs to have video if you have it, that's great. If you don't, that's fine too. You can just go ahead. So no one should feel bad if they don't have video. So that takes us to Mike Sullivan. Go ahead, Mike. Hi, Steve, thank you. My answer is my response point here is to Mary Post. Mary and to all of it, all of the town, I will work as hard as I do for this merger as opposing any change in the 12 year, 13 year mitigation of taxes. I would not at all, this is what I'm voting for. This is what I want. And fair is fair. And that's my, that's my assurance, Mary. So if you say, and you can hold that, hold me to that. Okay. Thank you, Mike. That takes us next to Elijah, Massey. Thanks very much for taking my question. I was just curious if someone could speak to, it was referenced in the presentation on the merger, the creation of two separate wards with three representatives from both the unincorporated village and then the town outside the village. And then the difference with the plan that had been approved previously by the village residents, just the process that we might be looking at in terms of reconciling that three in three and an odd representational format into the future. I know it's not set, but I'd be interested to learn more about what that might look like in terms of the natural process. All right. Thank you, Elijah. I'd like to answer that, Elaine. Elijah, thanks for your question. So if merger passes, we would be taking the charter that the village approved and the charter that the town approves to the legislature. The house government operations committee would be reviewing both of those together and they have the ability to adjust them, edit them, make changes to them, reject them, keep them. They have a lot of authority on that. So I don't have an explanation as to how specifically that process would go, but I do know that they would request input from the select board. They would request input from our elected representatives to the state house and they would work with us to iron out the differences. Perhaps I could ask representative Redmond who might be willing to shed a little more light or representative Bihofsky who sits on the house government operations committee to shed some light on that process, please. Yeah, I'll start and then maybe Tanya, you can chime in. Yeah. I mean, Elaine, as you've described, that's exactly what would happen. Is all of that would go and we have already been in touch with our members on the government operations committee letting them know that the vote is coming and that we will be bringing something to them as a result of the election. So they are prepped, they know about that. And yeah, essentially 11 members of the government operations committee will take testimony and really study the charters and the issues, ask a lot of questions. There'll be opportunities for folks from the town outside the village to weigh in and share their views and then they will make a decision. So, and Tanya, Bihofsky sits on the government operations committee. So I'll let you chime in as well, Tanya. Absolutely. Thank you, representative Redmond. I do sit on the government operations committee and we have had conversation about the various different things coming our way. And as everyone has pointed to, we will take testimony from multiple stakeholders. We will hear from the legislative council lawyer who weighs in on charters. And the real purpose is to make sure that we are getting at what is the intention of these charter changes. A big part of the reason that the committee doesn't wanna make changes without all of that testimony is because we don't want to have to guess what we're trying to get at. And so we will bring in all of the stakeholders and members from outside the village and the village to try and craft something that meets the needs of everyone and is constitutional and legal and all of that. We do have a day that we really devote to charters and in more complicated charters, sometimes it's more than just that day, but we try to hold that after town meeting day in the anticipation that there will be a lot of towns with charter changes. And that way we can really focus our energy and our thoughts on the various different charters and keep our lawyer from having to bounce back and forth. We bring him and just hear testimony about all of the different state charters, but the goal isn't to make changes for our sake. It's to really get at the intention and what will best suit the needs of everyone in the town. And obviously there's multiple options on the table based on what the outcome of the vote is. So I look forward to hearing an update from me as we learn what the outcome of the vote is as to what the next steps of the process will be in terms of coming to government operations, but you will be hearing from me. All right, thank you to both of you for answering that. Okay, the next person, Greg was going, they had trouble speaking, so Greg again was going to voice their question. Thanks Steve, I have a question from John Alleyong and I apologize for any mispronunciation of the last name. Mr. Alleyong said he's in both the town and the village and he had a question and a comment. He'd like to know what current expenses will be reduced over time and said that with mergers expenses usually drop and organizations operate more efficiently, please discuss. I want to take that question, Elaine. I'll give a very basic overview, but I'd like to also ask Evan to step in for this one. So going forward, there are still four departments that have not been consolidated. So we would like to look for savings in terms of not having to hire people for two different departments in those cases. There are also things like purchases that we will not have to make because we'll be able to share everything. So for example, if we need a fire truck, we will only need to purchase one fire truck. The village won't have to purchase its own, the town won't have to purchase its own. That's a savings at about today's dollars of about three quarters of a million dollars. Same thing with snow plows, about $150,000 that we can save. It's the savings of things that we do not have to duplicate if we are merged together. But I would like Evan to talk a little bit more specifically because I know he has a lot of ideas about this that will make a lot of sense. Thank you, Elaine, and thank you, John, for your question and your perseverance to get your question through to us on this Zoom call. I know for everybody, some of this is very new and challenging. So thank you, everybody, for your patience. We'll try to get through all this together. As Elaine mentioned, shared equipment is a big thing. We do a lot, we buy a lot of very expensive equipment. A ladder truck, fire truck in today's dollars, is $1.2 to $1.4 million. A very basic plow truck is somewhere around $160, $165,000. So we would be looking in our departments to eliminate duplicate equipment that the village has and the town has. And so when they come due, we would only buy a new one for the department, not two. So those are some target areas. When we have retirements in our departments, we are gonna look at whether we need to replace that position at all. We wanna look at efficiencies of what we're doing. Right now, both the village and the town have water and sewer divisions. We would look at those divisions to see, over time, do we need all of those positions or can we reassign somebody or if somebody retires, do we need to fill those positions? Earlier there was a discussion on the manager's department. Yes, currently there's a manager and two assistant managers. I will tell you in the future, as things start to coalesce, there may not need to be two assistant managers or, well, let's put it this way. Sooner or later, I might retire. And so the town may look at the assistants and say, one of you might be the town manager and the other will be the assistant and they'll eliminate one of the positions. These are all the unknowns at the time, but things that I would be looking at, in the four departments that have not been merged, there are certainly department heads on both sides. Obviously, ultimately, there won't be two full department heads. You may look at put somebody as the assistant director for a time being or you may reorganize. I've even had conversations with some of the people already about what their future may be. So as we go through this, it's not day one. It's a long-term view of how the village and the town work together as one government. And one other thing, we also have duplicate boards and commissions. So while they don't really get paid much, there are gonna start getting statements. We'll be looking to combine those committees and there'll be a little bit of savings there. So it all adds up, but overall, our whole goal is to keep the service levels as high as possible, the community as safe as it can be, to be as welcoming as it can be in terms of the people that live and work here and then working with our residents about their needs. So I hope I've answered your question. Steve, did you follow up questions from Mr. Aliyan? Yes, go ahead. Yes, if we have numbers and if we have figures by departments, I don't wanna presume that anything was answered by Evan just now. No, no, we do not. Okay, thank you. All right, next. I'm sorry. And Steve, if I can add something here. Yeah, go right ahead. This is a very difficult conundrum. Do you talk about people's positions which basically equates to their lives and their livelihood before you take a vote? And if the vote is negative, you have really done a whole lot into those people because you've shown whether you are or you are not gonna keep them. So I think what the boards really wanted to do was say, look, nobody loses their job because of merger. Let's go through the process. Let's honor your service and then over time look for opportunities. That was a challenge and it remains a challenge. Thanks, Steve. All right, thank you. All right, our next speaker is Chris Byrd. Well, thank you for being able to answer my question. My question concerns the population figures of these two words we're talking about. Do we have an estimation of what those populations are because we have a constitutional mandate that from Avery versus Midland County that if we have special districts, we have to have equal representation. And is there a remedy for that should the village or town gain a surplus of population over the other? Thank you. Go ahead, Elaine, if you'd like to answer that. I don't know. Chris, that's an excellent question. Thank you for bringing it up. So the words would be, as you heard during the presentation, the geographic boundary of the village as it exists now and then the boundary of all of the other parts of the town that are not in the village. Currently we are waiting for census figures to adjust to understand exactly what the populations are but currently the populations are very, very close in number. And so there is a certain percentage that voting wards need to be within before we need to adjust boundaries to make sure that proportionality is being honored. Like you said in the constitutional amendment that we must have the proper proportions in each ward. So in the charter, we do specify that the wards can be changed based on population and that they must be changed based on population if one becomes bigger than the other. Excellent, thank you. All right, thank you. So our next speaker is Mitchell Stern. Yes, good evening everyone. I live next door to the neighbor from hell. Some of you may also live next to such a neighbor. A recent incident occurred which is highly disturbing. This neighbor's friends with and hires a handyman who has apparent anger management issues. While he was snow-blowing my driveway, this handyman, Mr. William Bigelow crossed over to my driveway. He shouldn't call out any names like that. Identify people by name like that. Okay, he crossed over to my driveway and assaulted me a lawful senior citizen without any provocation. While I suffered some pain from this, I fortunately sustained no permanent injury. The police investigated in the case was submitted for prosecution. I do not know what status. I am annoyed because this individual has repeatedly trespassed on my property over the last few years and has verbally threatened me for the last two years. The police did not respond to these incidents saying that they do not get involved with trespass and verbal threat issues. But aren't these Vermont state laws too? It bothers me that if there was quality police involvement early on, I would have not been assaulted. This neighbor will continue to bring this person back and put me in danger. What am I to do? How do I protect myself? Do I need access to a weapon? How is Essex providing me with a safe and healthy environment? This neighbor also owns two large dogs who are not walked or exercised, who bark all day and night out of frustration. Despite having double pain windows at my house, the loud barking wakes me up at night and even prevents me from being able to have a phone conversation. Essex and Vermont laws are clear about dogs being a continuous nuisance to health and well-being of neighbors. Outside of conversation, nothing has been done even though laws are being violated. How is Essex providing me with a safe and healthy environment? Mitchell, do you have comments about the merger? Yes, I'm getting to that. Well, okay, let's get to the point, please. Okay, I shouldn't be too much longer. This neighbor has put up a fence which peaks at 10 feet above the ground, blocking light and air circulation. I feel like I live next to the Berlin Wall. Does everyone understand that Essex town has no zoning requirements for fences? I was told by Essex zoning that a fence can be as high as 40 feet since this is not covered. How is Essex providing me with a safe and healthy environment? Now there are other issues and time does not allow me to bring these up right now. My point is I pay a lot of money for municipal taxes and I get little to no support from the town of Essex or the select board. Interestingly, I've heard similar stories from other frustrated town residents who may or may not be here tonight. At the end of the day, the question is not whether we should merge the town and village. Instead, the more important question is whether the town of Essex is serving its taxpayers and providing for everyone's life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, or is it just a tax collection agency which does little to serve its residents? All right. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. All right. I may Steve respond. Go ahead. Just really quickly, Mr. Stern, I'm really, really sorry to hear about the incident that occurred. And I'm very glad that you're okay, first of all. And you and I have spoken many times and I understand the very difficult situation you are in. And I just wanna let you know, we wanna continue working with you to see what we can do to resolve the issues that are going on in your neighborhood. I believe Chief Hogue is present in the meeting. It won't be appropriate for us to have a conversation about your particular situation at the moment, but I'm sure I can speak for Chief Hogue when I say that we are very unhappy to know that you are experiencing these situations and we will work hard to continue to help you resolve them. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Our next speaker is Patty. Yes, hi. Patty Davis, I'm just, I just have a question about charter changes. And my question is, when you were talking about the sidewalk district and to Betsy's point, when Betsy was speaking about the 1.3 million that gets spread out over the town and the village for the public works and those kinds of needs, my question is because there's so many details with our town being rural, suburban and concentrated like in the village, if we think of us as one already, one town, I feel like we already are one town, what will it take if we wanna make three districts, say we wanna have just rural, just suburban and just the village that it is now three districts because I'm in the suburban district and I feel that we need a sidewalk, we need sidewalk plowing now, not 12 years from now. And if we are having a savings of $2, are apparently, this is, I won't quote where I got the figure from, but $2 savings on our tax rate for, you guys are keeping that 125,000, obviously for your sidewalk district because you're used to having all your sidewalks plowed because the kids walk to school, kids are walking to school near the schools right here in the suburban area. And if we were three districts, then it would just be the suburban area and the village area that needs a sidewalk plows and maybe our area would have to pay a little bit higher tax, how would one change the charter? Do we have to go through the whole thing again for a vote, you know what I mean? Like anytime there's a charter change, Dan Richardson said, you have to go through it all again. We'd, we have to wait 12 years before we could vote on having our sidewalks plowed in the suburbia. That's my question. Thank you, Patty. Eileen, would you like to handle that question? Okay, I think Patty, so you're basically asking how we change the sidewalk district if we wanted to? Yes. Do we have to go through the long process of a charter change? Can we work these details out before the vote? I guess not. Okay. So, Evan, please go right ahead. Patty, very good question. My understanding, having talked with our merger attorney, Dan Richardson, is first we have to go back to the reason the district is looking to be created. It was to maintain a level of service that is not necessarily provided townwide. So the village does sidewalks in a grid pattern. They want all the sidewalks cleared by 730 in the morning. It is not that the town is not, is not concerned about sidewalks. It is not made the same way. There are a lot of sidewalks in the town that we are going to have a lot of difficulty in plowing because they were, they're four foot wide. There are electrical boxes in the way. There are poles in the way. Having said all that, it is my understanding that if a neighborhood or neighborhoods wanted that level of service, staff would review it, provide an estimated cost and the town government through its own authority could create a district for that service. Yes, may I please add something? No, not at the moment. Who is this? I'm sorry. I just want a big black pig in my car. Fantastic. So it is my understanding that by ordinance, a town can create a sidewalk district with boundaries and set its cost and taxation on an annual basis. But again, back to the reason the town and the village offered the sidewalk district in the village was more to give the residents of the village an assurance that that level of service would continue. All right, thank you. We got that. All right. The next speaker is Annie Cooper. Last speaker. Excuse me, Steve, is there any chance is there someone that I can go after for a second? I have a dog predicament. Sure, we can, I'll skip to the next speaker, which is Will Dodge. I thank you. I really appreciate being given an opportunity to speak. So I'm speaking both as a resident of the town and as the chair of the Essex Energy Committee, which covers both the, it's one of the committees that covers both the town and the village. And what I wanted to say is I both appreciate how much time all of the work involved in merger has taken, but one of our, one of the things that the committee does is to try to help implement an energy plan that was adopted in 2019 by both the town and the village, and that has a whole range of requirements, priorities, goals, chief among them, achieving certain energy targets for the town, dealing with efficiency, switching fuels away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy. My concern is that in all of the merger documentation that I've seen, that priority of trying to deal with the energy needs for what is gonna be the second largest community in Vermont, doesn't end up being addressed. I'm hopeful that that's because merger is a vehicle to get to better service delivery, better resilience, better focus on things that people care about and not become kind of an enterprise onto itself. I don't pretend to understand the mechanics of the merger, half as well as other folks do, but what I can say is that I feel like the time and investment of energy has been huge such that we can't focus on things like the energy plan for the energy committee or some of the other work that all the great volunteer committees in both the village and the town have been working on. So that's all by way of saying that, regardless of how this outcome of the vote is tomorrow, I hope we can start to focus on other things sooner rather than later. Thank you. Thank you, Will. Victors, any points there, Elaine? Will said it great, perfect vehicle for that. Yeah, and just a side note, again, if anyone is obnoxious or not following the rules established as we've noted a little bit in chat and such, we have removed people from the meeting. We need to all remain civil and respectful of everyone's time. So next up, we have Annie Cooper. If Annie was done with her issue she had was preventing her from being in her turn. Annie, are you there? I am here. Thank you so much, Steve. Nice to see you all. It's a pleasure to see all the faces. It's just a pleasure to be here and a privilege to live in Essex. Thank you all so much. I'm thrilled to hear that Will Dodd went ahead of me because I'm in a complete agreement. I'm, my goal when I run at merger is exactly as Will has described. I see it as a joyous, forward, efficient in every way. Well, I mean, there's many ways that we can, of course, we're human, but in all the ways is so that we all may carry on and move forward together. And so I see merger like that. I would like to echo my Sullivan statement that never would I allow that we would all vote for merger and then somebody would dismantle it so that they could pay so much less in taxes for reasons that are at greedy. That's not cool. That's not what merger is supposed to be about. And I would stand totally shoulder to shoulder with anybody arguing against that. My one question is could someone please tell us what it would feel like to staff to their ability to do their job if we were to merge? And I'm enthusiastic for merger and I hope it passes. Thank you so much. Thank you, Annie. Did you have any comments there, Eileen? I think that's an Evan question. Okay, go ahead Evan. Annie, could you repeat it please? I missed the ending. She was asking what the experience of merger might be from the past perspective. Annie, go ahead. Yeah, I'm sorry, I was talking really fast. I was talking. I was hopeful that someone could describe what it might feel like because what it might feel like to work in a merged community versus the strategies needed to work now. I'm just curious as to if I was a member of the staff of either the village or the town, what it might feel like to have a merged community from my workspace of being a staff member. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Annie, for clarifying that. I guess I'll, two things. I don't wanna purport to know how individual employees will feel. Some will like it, some may not like it so much. So I don't know how to go there. But I will speak to one voice, one direction, knowing what your community board wants, working for one board, not having to sometimes go to two different boards and maybe potentially getting two different answers in two different directions. We'll set it very well. We have a lot of things to be working on. There are a lot of issues that come and go on an annual basis. I'm currently sitting in my office and one of the top issues is coming up is marijuana. Are we gonna opt in or opt out? In one community, you're gonna make one choice versus the village may wanna do one thing and the town outside the village may wanna go a different way. We have large issues like stormwater and stormwater permitting from the state. Do we wanna address them together or do we wanna do it separately and not have any efficiencies in that realm? So I think staff would love to be able to have direction and work together and do great things for its entire community and not have to necessarily worry about boundaries. I know Ron is here. He could tell you things in the chief of police. You know, where you are depends on what ordinance you have to go look up. And some of our ordinances are different. So you're allowed to do something in a village but you're not allowed to do it in the town. It can get to be very confusing. But otherwise, I think that it just boils down to wanting to get after the issues of the day and the future and making sure that we are cost efficient and effective in the services we provide. All right. Thank you for that verification, Annie and Evan. Thank you. And I'll just as another reminder for people that wanna speak a second time we have to get through everybody who wants to speak once and wants to speak the first time first and then we can recycle back. So the next speaker is Brian Sheldon. Hi, thank you, Steve. And thank you, select board for this opportunity to speak. First, I wanted to thank the board and the citizens of Essex for all of our hard work on this issue in the last two years. I believe that the plan as proposed is a good compromise and it's fair to residents of both sides of the village border. I support it and I hope everyone will join me in voting yes tomorrow. That said, I share the concerns with the previous concern of a previous speaker that pointed out that any words that we draw must have the same population. I just looked up the 2019 census estimates and if my math and Googling is correct population of the TOV is 11,300 and the population of the village is 10,600. If those numbers hold yes, the village and the TOV districts are approximately of the same size. Of course, we're waiting for 2020 census numbers to count to come in to know for sure. But if those numbers hold, I think that those districts would be constitutional under the principle of one person, one vote. One of the many reasons I'm supportive of the merger charter is that it contains the ability to redistrict any new words that we draw as a population change. But to me, that begs the question. If merger does not pass, how would redistricting occur under the 3-3 proposal that passed in March of 2020? Thank you. Thank you, Brian. Is there any comments you need to make, Eileen, on that? Brian, just from Brian, you're asking how would redistricting occur if merger didn't pass but the charter change we passed last year did pass. That's basically what you're asking. So- Yes, it already passed, right? So- Right, but passed the legislature. Yes. I'm gonna punt on this to say that we would still be required to comply with the U.S. Constitution regardless of whether we've merged or not. And so we would still need to rely upon census figures to determine the populations of the two wards. And then we would need to take steps to redistrict if they varied too much from the percentages that's allowed. Okay. All right, thank you very much. The next speaker is Irene Wenner. Thank you, Steve. Thanks, everybody. I would question some of the statements that I've heard that consolidations have minimized duplications and that you've found efficiencies in service delivery. Essex for decades has run its government on a sheet string. Taxpayers and board members who preceded me in this town would have never stood for much less paid for efforts being duplicated, and they were not. Streets in the town weren't being plowed by two different departments. Two planning commissions weren't deliberating over the same development approval. Two zoning boards weren't determining where a single waiver would be granted. In fact, the village and town governments each had and still have their own spans of control which don't overlap with the other. I understand that some folks choose to believe that consolidations begun in 2014 did something more than save money on the backs of existing staff, but that was not my experience. For example, although the town and village had similarly named departments such as the town clerk and village clerk, they weren't duplicating efforts. If you registered to vote in one office, you didn't register to vote in the other. And when the two offices were combined at town hall, the same number of staff were needed to serve a growing number of residents. There was no duplication nor was their savings. Similarly, the town and village managers had similar duties, but one managed the town's affairs, attending meetings, the hiring and firing staff, and the other did so for the village. When one person took on both roles, his workload essentially doubled and I for one decreased my interactions knowing how full his plate was. Was their duplication resolved? Hardly. Was their money saved? A little. Was there better management of either entity? Doubtful. Thanks. Thank you, Irene. Is there any comments from that Elaine? Okay. Looks like the next speaker is Ken Signorello. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Is my volume okay? Yes, it's just fine. Thank you very much. A couple of statements I heard Mr. Moderator that I would see clarification on. I heard Chairperson Haney say that at the end of the 12 years, the tax, the merger tax rate would end. I believe it would continue and just be added to the overall tax rate. It would just not stand alone. I've seen and heard a number of analogies used to characterize this merger plan. I've heard it compared to a mortgage, a cable bill, as roommates, you name it. One used early on was that of a marriage with two parties bringing or not bringing different things into the union. This plan of merger has uncertainties and promises, some overt and some implied, some of which upon careful examination, I believe are precise but not accurate. Some issues have been identified through due diligence by a single select board member who was less prone to rush to the altar without carefully checking the prenup. So if a wedding is the analogy, I believe this marriage as proposed is most like a Las Vegas wedding. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but the morning after, things may look a little different. It's not too late for a proper wedding at the location of your choice. I'll be voting no on this merger plan. And if it fails, I hope we can negotiate a prenup that includes an equal number of representatives from both districts who are the actual parties in this marriage. With the town serving as a pre-marital counselor rather than one of the parties which it really is not. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. I hope to hear about that clarification. All right, thank you. Elaine, are you going to provide that clarification? Sure, I'm pretty sure that what Ken you're referring to is my statement that after 12 years, the merger-related tax increase would end. Yes, exactly. Well, the tax increase of the additional approximately $26 a year would no longer be continuing to be added to the tax bill. That's what I meant. But that last increment would, the total of all the increments, all the 12 years would continue on, but not increase, that's what you're saying, I believe, yes? That is what I'm saying. It would be cumulative. And then at some point, an additional change due to merger will stop at the end of 12 years. The increases will stop. Thank you. All right, thank you. And then, let's see, I've missed who is next. Looked away for a moment here. Annie's already spoken, so she goes. Lisa Allen, you can speak next. Hi, everyone. I'm, this is Gil Allen, her husband. I'm speaking on my own behalf. We just share the same account. Yeah, I just wanted to clarify that one point I think Elaine already made, and that is that the transition of taxed raise, more tax rise ends after 12 years. So I'll avoid the theatrics that just skipped to two questions. The first one would be pertaining to the question of the rise in taxes over the next 12 years. You know, we're no stranger to the fact that our taxes continue to rise every year. And I saw some accusations on Front Porch Forum and whatnot that savings from the merger of certain services have never really been realized in the form of a reduced tax rate. In fact, taxes just keep going up, and why is that? And I think we all know that that's because the rise in taxes is outstripping the savings that we've gained up until this point with the merger of services. So the one thing I couldn't get from the report, which was I was trying to glean from it is where does the majority, what is the greatest contributor to our rising tax rate or our tax base, both in municipal and school taxes over the past say five to 10 years? It's always been my impression that it had to do with benefits and particularly health benefits to salaried employees. And I'm not taking them down a notch by saying that. I mean, it's part of the expenditures, but that was always my impression. So that's my first question. Where is the majority of our tax rise going to year after year? And then the second question I'm gonna ask is if this merger doesn't go through, what's plan B? Like if we're not going to transition our tax, we're not gonna transition to an equal and more equitable distribution of tax burden from the town and the village. What do we do next? Do we, does the village separate? And if the village were to separate, I've heard a lot of conjecture about what that would mean. What would that mean to town of village taxpayers if the village were to separate? Two questions, sorry. All right, thank you, Gil. Eileen, would you like to address that? I'm actually gonna defer to Evan on the driver of tax increases. All right, go ahead, Evan. Oh, thanks. And I'm also gonna ask Sarah if she's available as well to chime in, but I could tell you having been here for just a couple of years, capital costs is one area that we look at, but mainly it's employee salaries and health insurance. Health insurance is, what was it? Last year we had to end up changing carriers because we were looking at a 15% premium increase. So we switched from Blue Cross Blue Shield to MVP and only got I think a 6% increase, but we spent a lot of money on health insurance. Sarah, are you able to help me as well on that? Yeah, so hi everybody. I, the largest single expense in either the town or the village budget is personnel cost. So salaries, overtime, health insurance, retirement, bike and beddy, that makes up approximately half, give or take a few percentage points of either of the general fund budget. So that if you were to categorize expenses out of those budgets into things like personnel costs or other professional services or capital expenditures, paving, supplies, utilities, the largest single component is personnel costs. And so every time there are contractual changes or plan level changes, benefit changes, those are it's really the first thing that changes when we develop the budget spreadsheet. So I hope that helps without going into a lot of detail off the cuff. Okay, okay. And then the second question was what is plan B? Yeah, well, what would be the alternative and what would it look like to the town or the village, town outside the village if the village were to separate? So what I'm going to do is talk a little bit in very broad terms about a potential plan B or alternatives. The trustees have said that should the merger vote not pass, they will have a conversation with their residents to talk about what the next steps are. So we are not going to prognosticate on what the village is going to do if merger fails. But what we can say is that we are going to continue to work with the trustees as our partners to keep our sex affordable and to ensure equitable services that are accessible by all and are paid for as evenly as possible. And we can continue working on that. If merger fails, that does not become the end of all work that we do on trying to make our taxes equitable and our services accessible to all in the equal way. In terms of the cost of separation, I know that we have had some very back of the napkin, back of the envelope calculations provided by the town. Evan, I don't know if you want to talk about those a little bit, but there are so many unknowns as to what would happen if we're separation were to happen that we can't necessarily give you a really strong picture of that. Evan, that's not a great answer. So Evan, why don't you help me out? I will tell you, I don't normally like answering questions starting off with, it depends. It depends on what separation actually means. Does it mean, as Mr. Signorello said earlier, if you want to call it a full divorce, are you married and you're getting a full divorce and you are, you're not sharing anything. Both parties are just gonna walk, whatever it is, walk away. I don't know. We currently share a police department. I don't know. That's up to the two parties to decide what does that mean and where do we go from here? And it's up to the manager to administer it. I can advise them, but they'll need to sit down and have a long discussion about what it means for the two municipalities going forward. And that's all I can say is that that conversation would have to be had. And I think, as Elaine said, and I did hear this from Andrew on the village board, the village is gonna need to talk to its residents. And I would also suggest that the town select board also do the same and have forums with the residents. Am I allowed to ask one follow-up question in response to the answers? Could you do me one favor? Could you speak up just a little bit? Am I allowed to ask one follow-up question? I think it's okay if it's quick. It's quick. So as Sarah was alluding to, if personnel is the largest growing expense of both the town outside the village and the village, and merger were to mean a slow merging of employees and personnel expenditures over time through natural attrition and retirements, wouldn't that be the potentially greatest cost savings moving forward? If it occurs, so I will say this, there's caveats everywhere. Is the village and the town gonna continue to grow at its current rates? The village is putting up about 400 apartment units over the next couple of years. The town itself has been growing apartment units and houses and subdivisions. So you're going to be looking at growth, growing into the merger, and then you have employee costs. But overall, if that is the direction that the then select board adopts, which is keep headcount low, no other increases find savings through attrition, then that's the direction. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you. And I just remind you, I think it was two years ago that the citizens at the town meeting asked us to add police officers, which we have tried to do. We've added police officers and then we had attrition. So those are the types of things that happen in our organization. But thank you and very good question, Gil. Okay. All right, just a time check. We're exactly an hour in at this point, my watch is saying 947. So we have another hour to go. I see several people, five have their hands up a second time, maybe it's six now. No, it's five. I haven't turned off Gil's hand yet. Is there anybody else? I don't want to have people discouraged from raising their hands, seeing those raised hands. But again, we're waiting for the first time speakers before we recirculate back to people who've already had a chance to speak. So I see a P. Baldwin now. I feel like to speak next. Thank you. This is Tish Baldwin speaking. And my question goes to the representation. And from what I read from the House government operations was that they are not inclined to approve an even number of members. They feel that, or they say they indicate, research indicates an odd number of members make better decisions. So I know we've heard from two representatives who said they'll take evidence and listen to what the town and the village have to say but I'm wondering what the likelihood is that they would approve an even number representation on a board. Thank you. All right, thank you, Tish. Does one of the representatives want to answer that? I'm certainly happy to jump. Oh, go ahead. Well, I just want to speak to it because I was involved in this rotation when it came up last time. And then Tanya, if you want to jump in. So when this was brought forward as a bill last session, this question was brought to government operations and the response that we got back from the vice chair and chair of the committee was that, yeah, there isn't, this isn't a precedent in Vermont that most select boards are odd select boards. However, they were willing to consider it and take testimony, investigate, take a deep dive into it, understand the intent of the community and go from there. So never did, you know, when I inquired last session when the bill had been brought forth, never did I receive any indication that no, it was absolutely off the table. I'm not sure how that rumor got started, but no, they'll take a look at it just, you know, hoping to understand what the intention of the community is. Great. I will add, you know, going in on the government operations committee this year as a first year legislator, I certainly made a point to get to know the background and to connect with my chair and vice chair around the background. And I would echo what Mary Beth is saying that there has been nothing said that that can't be done, it won't be done. Really the hope is to get at what is the intent of the community. It isn't common, but it is not, there's nothing, no reason why it couldn't be done. And I certainly, you know, I'm one of 11 votes on anything, but I don't see it. So I can't predict what's the possibility that it'll pass, but there's no reason that it couldn't pass. And I haven't heard anything from the leadership within the committee that they would block that passage. Okay. And just any of the other reps wanna say anything since we have five, I figured I should open that. Laura, you're muted. Hi, this is representative Houghton, sorry. I'm not feeling well, so I'm gonna keep my video off. I think it's just clear that we will have to whatever happens tomorrow, we will have to bring it forward to the government operations committee. And as everyone has said, they will do their due diligence. I don't think we can speak for them. Okay, thank you. All right, I can last call for any of the other two reps. Okay, all right, we'll move on to the next speaker, which is Sarah Michelle Stoltz. Hi, thank you very much. Can you hear me? My video was my sound wasn't working too well. Yeah, I can hear you fine. Okay, great. So I have two comments that I wanted to make. My first comment was in response to someone who talked about there not being any savings with consolidation. And I think that's what I understood she said, which really doesn't make any sense because for years or recent years, the select board has made presentations while this person was actually on the select board. And there were at least one or two slides really detailing the consolidation savings. And there were many employees that came and talked during budget presentations that listed out specific savings and efficiencies in certain departments. So just wanted to let the public know that. Second, I just wanna say that I proudly support merger. I really feel like when we put the entire community together working with the expertise from citizens, positivity from the many wonderful people in our community, the many ideas and the total collaboration between everyone in my experience when that has happened. And I think we have amazing people and both in the entire community, I just think in my experience, it's always been better. So I wholeheartedly support it. And I ask that everybody reconsider voting against it. I think we have a lot more to gain. So I guess that's it. And thank you very much for taking my comments. All right, thank you, Sarah, Michelle. All right, that is the cue of the moment for first time speakers. Is there any other first time speakers? Okay, I see Marcus Serta has raised hand. So go ahead, Marcus. Thank you. Thank you so much for the work you're doing tonight to run this meeting. Thank you to everyone for attending. It's great to see such a good turnout. I wanna just simply say that it's been said so much better by many others before me and explaining this. And I really do appreciate the vigorous debate you've had in this community. But at the end of the day, after considering the fact that I would like to see a tax system that is equitable for all of its residents to have a board that is built with equitable representation, I think that this particular merger and the current charter before us is the best foot forward to move this on for our community. And I'm supporting merger and I will be voting in the affirmative and I hope that other community members do as well. But again, I just wanna acknowledge that I really do appreciate the community participating in this debate. I appreciate the fact that the board and the village trustees, everyone in our government has been working hard in order to provide as much information as possible so that again, we can have this discussion. And I appreciate the fact that we're gonna have this opportunity to vote on it. I'm looking forward to seeing its result and hope that this merger will pass. Thank you. All right, thank you, Marcus. All right, we've got another new speaker in line, John's iPhone. Yes, thanks very much. I'll just echo what was just said by Marcus and briefly say, I also, I'm John Turborg, I live in the village and I also support the merger and mostly just wanted to acknowledge the hard work of the select board and many others on the call for not months, but years. I'm perhaps in some ways a pessimist. I think it's a very steep uphill battle on this one, but I guess regardless of the outcome, I think everyone should feel very gratified on what's been started here. I look back to the rec committee vote of a couple of years ago. It's a highly complex issue. It didn't pass at that point. This is so much complexity. So it's a lot, a lot of going into the headwinds up waters on this. And I just want to thank everyone for their work in spite of that. And eventually we'll get to where we need to be. John, I missed your last name. Could you say it again for the record, please? Yeah, could you give your last name please, John? I think you said Sherborg. You're on mute. There we go. Turborg, you can hear that. Yes. Could you dispel that? Sure, I live in the village. It's T-E-R-B-O-R-G-H. Thank you. Okay, got it. Thank you so much. Gotta have the official record for the meeting. All right, so again, we've got some duplicate people going for second time. Is there any other first time speakers who would like to talk? Okay, the way I'm going to handle second time speakers is I'm going to take them in the order that they queued up as well. But after each second time speaker, if a first time speaker has gotten in line, then I will, after that, I will then move to them before I go to other second speakers, just for fairness. So circling around here, and I've also have been there, we don't have anyone on a straight phone, like as in calling in on a landline, not an iPhone. So that's why I have not stopped to check the phone lines in case anybody was wondering. So our first repeat is Mary Post. You may speak now. Go ahead, Mary. I think you're on mute still. I'm trying to on mute. You're good. Well, you were there for a moment. Go ahead, go ahead. And what am I now? I can hear you now. Okay, good. Thank you. Okay, first a couple of things I want to say, and I'll be fast. And then I have a question. Number one, I want to say, Mr. Eustace, I've never really paid that much attention to you before and I'm glad I voted for you because I think you're doing an excellent job. So thank you very much. Secondly, I've heard a lot of talk about how if we merge, we'll become the second largest community. We are already the second largest community. Merger's not going to change that. My question is, and it's a true question, not an opinion. I just don't know. I've heard that there are a lot of issues that come up that we haven't really gotten any actual information on or numbers. And one of the things that I'm concerned about is the infrastructure costs that the junction might be carrying. How is the junctions infrastructure? Are we going to be shocked as the outside of the village residents to find out that all of a sudden we have got a ton of problems that we're going to have to help pay for? And I just want to know the answer to that. Thank you. Thank you, Mary. Elaine, would you like to answer that? I think actually Evan would be a great person to answer that. Excellent. Go ahead, Evan. Pass the buck right over to you. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. I've heard that same question and we don't have a quantified number to this. But if you can think about something differently, the town has 100 miles of road. I think the village has less than 50. The town has more sidewalk than the village. The town has more structures like buildings than the village does. The only thing I believe is older in the village is the water system. And even that's been replaced in sections in many other places. So again, we don't have a quantified number for that. But when you kind of look at overall, the tax rate for the community would be shared equally and the priorities created by the town select board with the input of the citizens. And so where the money needs to go, that's where the priority is. That's where the money needs to go. So I can't answer anything definitively about aging structures and capital. But in general, we try to keep up but things are aging in both the town and the village. Thank you. Does one quick thing, Sarah, you're here and Dennis, do you have anything to add to that? I do have something to add. I don't have the calculation handy but I can tell you that the FY20 financial statements have just been finished and posted on the website. And one of the ways in which a financial statement reader could determine the average age of capital assets including infrastructure is to look at the footnote about capital assets. And if you take depreciation as a percentage of the cost of those assets, I can't pull it off the hip. I wanted to jump in and answer. You can get a sense of how depreciated are our assets. So how far along are they in their estimated life cycle? And that can give you a sense of where we're at with those assets. Those financial statements also have a lot of information on the balance sheet about the assets and liabilities that would be consolidated under a merged community. So I hope everyone goes and reads them. And I'm gonna, and I'll throw one last thing out. This is a, sorry, a very technical term. There's something called a PASER rating. I think it was last year, we completed a review of all the town streets and all the village streets. And you get an average score of your paving and how it rates. And I believe the village and the town are about a 10th apart. Somewhere in the six, three, six, four range out of 10. So in general, our paving is aging about the same. Thank you. I can add, I was asked to add, so I'll just add something that, yes, we did do that study and the roads are about the same as Evan said. The village has done an excellent job of keeping up their utilities. The town has as well. We all have older pipes in the ground in a lot of locations. The town has them and the village has them. We have some very old pipes in the town that extend into the old fort, which go back to the 1900s. The village doesn't go back that far. But we both have issues we have to deal with in the future. But we're on pretty much common ground in terms of where the infrastructure stands as far as condition goes. There is a difference in terms of numbers, in terms of quantity, but the conditions are not dissimilar between the town and the village from a public works perspective. Thanks. All right, thank you, Dennis. So that answered your questions, Mary. Thank you so much. All right, the next person would be John along. And I don't know, Greg, are you going to be voicing that question again? No, I believe John is able to speak this time. Okay, great. Go ahead, John. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. Okay, first I want to thank Greg for posing my first question and the excellent answers I received from the panel. I also want to thank the board and all the members who have worked on this plan, which I strongly support, okay? But I want to make some comments and some point which will make your case stronger, okay? I have been a member of the town and the village for over 45 years and have worked with many of the administrators, many of the departments over time, and I have received excellent service from the hardworking people in both the village and the town. But I think I was looking at, I got in late into the meeting and I was looking at some of the numbers and some of the numbers seem to show a tax burden to the town over time, okay? And I think you could make a stronger case unless you did this. If you go into each of the departments and you project the potential savings and the efficiencies that would be realized over time and you will find that with these figures, I know Evan mentioned some of them and Elaine mentioned some of them, you will find over time that that tax burden that you projected for the town taxpayers is going to be very low and probably there would be, it would almost be zero. So I think if a board, I don't know if you have time to do this, but if a more detailed analysis is done, you will see that that amount is lower than what was shown, okay? I also, as I mentioned earlier on, support the merger strongly because around 45 years ago, I asked the question, why did we have the village and the town operating and I pay taxes at both of them, okay? So I also want to, I heard some comments on our police and the other department and I want to strongly support the work the police are doing. It is extremely difficult given the resources they have and the amount of issues that come up in the town. Let's see, so as I said, I strongly support the merger and also the ex-tank, all the committee and also all the excellent workers in the village and the town for the work they had been doing and the work that Evan and others are doing for our town and the village. Thank you very much. I did not plan to speak, but I thought maybe I'll see you a little. All right, thank you, John. Thanks, Steve. Yeah, all right. The next, I haven't seen any other new speakers. So the next repeat speaker will be Betsy Dunn. Thank you, Steve. So to the question and separation, back in October, I think it was October, it might've been November, but in the fall, we had a meeting with the representatives and with the trustees and the select board presenting their view of merger. And at that time, George Tyler said that separation is really not feasible due to financial viability. And I think that's relating to the police department and the public works is what he was saying. And my other question about the police are, when you do a contract with the police every three or four years, whatever the rotation is, is there a me too clause for the people who are not in that union? That's one. Two, the question of the also with the separation is there's there a question on the constitutionality of the MOUs. And the third thing I wanna say is with representation, one person, one vote, well, we never got to vote on the three plus three plus one. So it would be very difficult for the legislature to say, well, we're gonna go with that when half of the people didn't vote on it. Thank you very much. Thank you, Betsy. Any comments, Elaine there? I'm just trying to catch the, Betsy, can you, you had a question about the police contract and you had a question about constitutionality. Could you please? Yes. Representation, when the village had their vote last year, because that was in November, it was a three plus three plus one. And the town did not vote on that, the people, the TOV. And for the legislature to choose that over three plus three when everyone got to vote for that, would be very difficult. And I would bring up the constitutionality of that because one person, one vote, which we didn't get. And then with the constitutionality of the MOUs, I have heard there's a real question about their constitutionality. Which MOUs are you referring to, that was by me. All the MOUs we've done to consolidate other departments. And that's a problem that he was speaking to as well, I believe, thank you. Okay, thank you, Betsy, for clarifying. Yeah, let's figure out the order here. I'm happy to address. Okay, go ahead, Evan. Well, as to a Me Too clause, the police department, if you're talking about the police department contract versus other unions, no, there are no Me Too clauses in the police department contract. However, for true transparency, people in the police department that are not in the contract, let's say above the rank of sergeant, they too get similar raises because if they don't, then we get salary compression above the rank of sergeant. So they have a Me Too, okay. No, no, no, they do not. But we give them similar raises to stay away from salary compression. It's not in any contract. Thank you. You're welcome. Yeah, more on that, Evan. Who's speaking? Me. Oh, hi, Steve. Did you have a meeting, sir? I know I wanted to direct to one legislative question if you're finished. I am. Okay, perfect. Just for one of the reps, I believe to paraphrase, can the legislature adopt a charter change, whether or not some portion of the community voted or didn't vote on something. I believe that's a paraphrase. You got that. Yeah, this is a representative Redmond. I don't, I think that's a legal question and I wouldn't feel comfortable putting myself in the position of answering that. And again, I think all of these questions will come before the committee and they take great time and study in looking at these questions. So, I think it's an excellent question, Betsy, and one that they will consider, but I wouldn't feel comfortable making any kind of guess at where they might land on that. Okay, any other information from any of the other reps? This is representative Yehovsky. I just wanted to say to Betsy that I would be happy to reach out to our legislative council and ask some more questions on that and update you. I also am not a lawyer and don't want to put legal information out, but I'm happy to get it for you and find out. Thank you, Tanya. All right, it looks like we have a new first-time speaker. So, I'm going to take a break on the seconds and go to William Graham next. Hello, thank you for having the hearing on this issue. I've lived in the Essex Junction for about a year, but I've worked here, I've worked in the Essex for around five, six years and I'm very happy to be a part of the community. I really, I'm in support of the merger and I'm really hopeful that with the mailed out ballots that this will be a large portion of the community will vote and participate and that this vote can be very representative of how people feel. And I just want to support the vote, my mailing out ballots for the future post COVID as I believe it allows more participation from the community and I think a stronger community. All right. Well, thank you very much, William. Okay. Next up, we've got a repeat for Patty. Go ahead, Patty. Yes, hi, thanks for taking my call again. And Steve, you're doing an awesome job. I wish we could have you at every meeting. Anyway, I wanted to speak about interlocal governance. The reason I want to throw that term out is there's a town in Maine that was in a similar situation with a village and a town area and then a really rural area and they divided actually three, they made their area three different towns. One only has 2000 for a population and then the other two towns have larger population. So this question really goes to Mary Beth Antonia. When you asked the question that Betsy just asked a couple of minutes ago about half of the town not voting on the three plus three plus one representation model that the village charter has, what my question is, would the government operations committee even consider if a few citizens brought up a choice of interlocal governance should this merger not pass? And because I know that if this merger does not pass and the village wants to separate, we would still all have to vote. I would think the village would have to vote, the town would have to vote and then we would all have to vote. Well, this is how this interlocal governance model works in Maine. They have equal representation in three separate areas. And then they all meet four times a year and they all vote together on what they want for the entire area. It's called interlocal governance model. And I know it's a new term and I know Vermont does not have it but I wanted to share that because it's sort of thinking outside the box. And I guess my question is, is that something that someone could bring up to the governance committee just as a new word and a new concept? That's my question. Sure, thank you, Patty. Do any of the reps wanna respond to that? Patty, as a member that sits on the government operations committee, consider it brought up. I'm happy to dig into it further and let's see what happens. I think we don't know the outcome of the vote tomorrow but I am certainly happy to talk with our legal counsel and look more into that as a model if we find ourselves needing it. Right, thank you. Thank you. Okay, the next, I don't see any other new people. So I'm going to go to repeat Annie Cooper. Hi, thank you very much. Steve, I always vote for you. We're very lucky to have you. And I don't mean to be stupid but I didn't mean to be silly but so grateful for all you do and you always keep us even killed and respectful and I really appreciate you. I didn't mean to be funny. I meant to be serious. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. So what I wanna bring up is like physics or like humans, right? If we take all of this energy that's currently, no more jury, yes, you know, this conversation has just been going on for so long now that if we could take that energy and combine it and go forward merged, there's so much on the horizon that we have not even begun to dream about and go towards. And so I implore my fellow residents who have not yet voted to please vote positively for merger because it's a dream that's just starting to happen. And I guess I don't really wanna ask the question. Is somebody give me a, I would be curious to ask for a percentage of how much our local government spends has spent for the past three years discussing merger. But I don't wanna put somebody on the spot but that's my point. I wanna make a point that the discussion of merger is costly and expensive and it's killing our souls. Thank you very much. All right, thank you, Annie. All right. And without another new person, we're going to go to repeat Chris Byrd next. Thank you again. My second question is what provisions if any of the charter are able to be changed after the vote? I'm asking because there was an article in the Essex reporter and it has a select board member, Andy Watts, saying people keep, and this is the quote, people keep telling me we'll just adjust it afterwards. He said in one of the tenants of going into this is we're setting up these districts and we're not going to mess with them because they're part of the deal. That's part of what you voted for end quote. So what like a part of that question, if Mr. Watts wants to discuss that quote is what is the it that he's referring to is that just the words, the definition of what the words are or is that the whole charter itself? Okay. Thank you, Chris. Andy, would you like to answer that question since it was a quote that you had made? Chris, it's good to see you again. Haven't seen you since Boyce counts. Good to see you. So, Chris, to answer your question, I think actually Elaine touched on it earlier that there is any aspect of the charter can be changed as long as you follow the process. And it is a rigorous process. But the quote was specifically referring to the taxing districts. I've expressed a lot of concern about the sidewalk and the capital districts specifically. And those were the two districts that I was referring to in that comment. All right. Thank you, Andy. Okay. That takes us to the next repeat questioner is Irene Renner. Go ahead, Irene. Thank you, Steve. I'm just looking at my notes from some of the things I've heard tonight. I'm curious that we haven't heard a lot about the costs of merger, but I do appreciate the question from Annie Cooper a few moments ago. I believe there was over $100,000 set aside fund balance that was used to pay consulting fees, merger project manager, the 48 page booklet and other things that have gone into the attorney, the merger attorney and so forth that have been part of this. But I would defer to you to give me the final number on that. Back when I was on the merger task force in 2005, we noticed that there were costs to merging. They had a similar plan back then in the select board in 2006, said that merger would not save money for the town of Essex for at least 10 years, if ever. And so I wish that this time around officials had been a little more forthcoming as to what the costs of say merging the comprehensive plans are because we know there are costs to merging and yet I haven't heard a lot of those details. Another comment I heard tonight was that we're already that we will be sharing equipment and providing mutual aid, but we already do that because we're nested communities. And in fact, we do a lot of mutual aid with communities that we're not what nested with. So I think it's kind of a misnomer to say that when we're merged, we'll be sharing equipment and providing mutual aid because I think that already happens a lot. And it has been happening even more with the consolidation that's in process, for example, with public works. I heard the chair say earlier that the village asked for sidewalk district. So I would ask everyone to ponder, what did the town outside the village ask for? And in case you weren't on the select board as I was in March of 2018, when dozens of residents came to an all day meeting at Essex High School, the answer to that question is the town outside the village asked for equal representation at the table to determine the future of Essex. And in the interim three years, as I repeated that request, both as a board member and as an audience member, I was told the town outside the village doesn't exist. Well, if the town outside the village doesn't exist, then how can the town outside the village be asked to shoulder a tax burden for services that town outside the village folks have never voted for and often don't use? Separation is not on the ballot. I would just like to remind people it's a vote to merge or status quo. I heard the manager say earlier that he would consider hiring consultants to look for savings. That really struck me as kind of funny. I thought Merger was gonna save money if we're going to hire consultants to help us find savings. Doesn't really sit so well with me. Finally, a lot of numbers have been crunched. I've been very fortunate to have a friend along this merger path who's very good at crunching numbers. And we've determined that tax equity has already been achieved. We've also determined that the savings, the $3.4 million savings that the chair has posted on our front porch firm that have gone to the town have actually only gone to the village. So if I could direct your attention to nomurgernow.org, we've got all these things laid out and I would appreciate any feedback that you've got on them. Thanks so much. Thank you, Irene. Elaine, did you want to respond to any of that? I think there was a couple of questions for you, I thought. You're on mute. There were quite a few statements. I didn't quite detect any particular questions. I will stand by the town's calculations regarding consolidation savings. And as I showed in our budget presentation a little while ago that the consolidation savings are split between the village and the town and we can itemize them quite clearly. So I believe that we have done a lot of, we've done our full responsibility in sharing the kinds of data that we need to share with the community on this topic. Okay. Thank you, Elaine. So with that, I don't see anyone in the queue. We have 20 minutes left on this topic if needed. Oh, it looks like we've got Scott or Robin Moore would like to speak as a first-time speaker. So go ahead. Hi, good afternoon or good evening, Steve, at this point. Can you all hear me? Yes, I can, Scott. Perfect, thank you so much. First of all, I want to thank you again. And for those of you that don't know me, full disclosure, Linda Myers is my mother-in-law and Marty Myers is my father-in-law. God rest his soul. So with that in mind, my mother-in-law lives in the town outside the village, which is not in and of itself, it's own municipality. My wife and I, Robin, live inside the village. I moved here to go to high school because this was the best high school in the state at the time we moved into the village. And at the time, I didn't know where the village line was. So I know that I went to the town to visit my mother-in-law. I didn't know when I crossed over. So as someone has said earlier, this is one community and I am in favor of merging. But the question I have is, first of all, when we look at all of the numbers and the amount of time and energy and effort that is spent, has anybody done any sort of calculations as to how long we have spent on this issue? I know we talked about the money spent for merger booklets, things of that nature. But does anybody have an hours spent estimate? That'd be my first question. Then I had to follow up if anybody happened to have that a guesstimate in thousands or tens of thousands, just out of curiosity. Scott, I don't think we've ever done an accounting of the amount of hours that we've spent on it, but it's been a very, very long time. I can say just, there's been discussions or votes and such all the way through the 1970s. So over 50 years, it doesn't take a lot of hours per year to add up to a big number. We started in 1958 and tomorrow's vote will be the 19th time our communities have voted on some form of governmental consolidation. So I think that leads to my follow-up question, which is, isn't it about time that we just merged? Thank you very much. I appreciate all your service and I will stop talking. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Scott. So we've got two more repeat people in line now and I'm gonna go to Will Dodge. Thank you. I just wanted to say that I wanna speak, I realized that under the proposal that's being voted on, we're gonna keep town of Essex and village of Essex Junction and that's okay. But I just wanna speak in favor of the term greater Essex. I think it's a wonderful name. I think there's nothing wrong with being great and there's even less wrong in trying to be greater. So I'm hoping that over time, maybe that name will stick. That's my brief comment. Thank you. Thank you, Will. All right. And the next speaker will be the second time for Ken Signorello. Go ahead, Ken. There we go. I have double mute, so I have to be careful. So I would like to fill in a little gaps there. Patty Davis had brought up this concept of an interlocal arrangement and I just wanna say that if this merger vote fails, it's not the end of the world. It's failed before. We've tried this many times, hasn't succeeded for one reason or another. There are issues here, just as there have been before. Something else will come along and a new idea might be just a ticket. And that's what Patty was referring to. It's an arrangement between three towns in Maine. What they've done is created a pseudo government, an interlocal agreement between the three individual towns. They're still separate towns. They have their own select boards. They make decisions for themselves, but they get together, make a 15-member board. It's just like us, five select board members. They all get together. I don't know what their frequency is. She has said once per quarter. I didn't see that. Doesn't matter. They decide what they will share jointly and that unified interlocal arrangement takes care of those things. So what this does is it lets the individual towns keep their own individuality, whatever that might be. If one is more rural and one is more urban, they can maintain that. Their planning departments might not be in the interlocal agreement. They're separate. They may not want to have fire stations be in the interlocal agreement. It might be too big of an area. Various reasons for some things to be shared. They share likely things like an assessor. Police might make sense. So the point I just want to make is that there is a possible plan B. And if we go that route, I just hope it's something different that we haven't tried since 1958. It's either separation, merge, disillusion, and none of those have worked for us. I think we need something different. We're unique. Rarely does the town and the village both grow. We've had that benefit. IBM has brought that to Essex. It's created a situation now where we're competing to some extent. And that's where a lot of the angst comes. And I think we need a new solution, something different. Thank you. Thank you, Ken. All right. We're down to the last 13 minutes here. If there's anybody else that would like to talk. And I just, as a statistic, just for fun, we have had 21 people get a chance to speak and nine of those were able to speak a second time. So thank you to the people participating and also for all of the staff, select board members and our representatives in Montpelier for answering questions. All right, I see Annie had her hand up again for a third time. Is there anybody else who would like to speak a first yet? A first yet. And then perhaps we can wrap up after this just so we don't have the same few people speaking too many times here. Annie, did you have a quick comment? Yes, very quick. I'm so sorry before when I was talking about, I meant time. I meant how much time we were dedicating to the conversation of a deep consumption of time. And I just wanted to clarify that when I realized I hadn't said it like that. Thank you. Thank you, Annie. And same thing with John Turbog. Turbog, did you have something quick? Yes, thanks a lot. For a second, for a second time. Sure, thanks very much. I just was gonna follow up with the, another sort of number crunching angle, different perspective on the same things that's been shared before, but that was about the increase of the $26 a year. That's likely to be probably a good deal less than what the natural increases over time of taxes are, I'm guessing. I don't know if anyone wants to speculate on that, but my guess is that as people have said before, it takes, it's expensive. There's healthcare increases. There's lots of costs that increase every year. That's likely to continue to get the great service that we have. And another way to characterize this is that the, for the next 12 years increase time outside the villages, likely to be a lot less than what is essentially the needed increase in taxes over time. All right. Thank you, John. All right. We do have a first time speaker queued up, Elise Serta. Hello. Long time listener, first time caller. Hi everyone, and thank you so much for the time this evening. One thing I just wanted to be brief, I think we can all look at numbers and spin it whatever way we want. We've certainly heard years and years and years of that, but really what matters to me is fairness. And I don't feel it's fair the way it's set up now. And I think that's why we keep revisiting this. If it were fair, the village wouldn't keep coming back. It's time for a change. It's not time for status quo. Can we look at the last four years and what we just debunked as a nation? Status quo doesn't work. And I'm for merger, I voted for it. But if merger doesn't go through, I'm not standing for status quo. I'm standing for disillusion or separation. And the town needs to consider that when they're choosing a vote. Thank you. Thank you, Elise. All right, last call for this topic. Okay, I'm going to close this portion of article two at 10.36, so we got an hour and 50 minutes into that. And now I'm going to go on the last two items. Article three is just me listing what's going on. So as part of the vote, we'll be voting for officers. Just a great piece of paper here, excuse me. So there's three positions to be voted on in article three. One is moderator and I'm the only person running for that position. For select board, we have a three year seat and there's two people running, Tracy Delphia and Elaine Hanning. And there's also running for select board for a one year seat. There's also two people running, Don Hill Flurry and Mark Nadu. So remember to, if you haven't already voted, that's also going on besides article one and two where we've had our presentations and debate on. So that takes us moving on to number nine in the agenda, which is the public to be heard. And so this is your chance to talk about anything related to the town of Essex that did not have to deal with the budget or with merger. So we could avoid those topics and this would be a time to bring up anything else that might be of interest to those gathered. So same thing, just raise your hand or write in the chat if you'd like to speak. We've all gotten the hang of it by now. Okay, I see Ken was the first in line here. So go ahead, Ken. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Have you ever noticed that on old stage road, all the mailboxes are on one side, all except one? That's number 243, Norma and Don Strickland, both in their 80s. Their neighbors were concerned seeing them cross the road to get their mail. With some arm twisting, they convinced the post office to let them have their mailbox on the side of the road where they live so they won't have to dodge traffic. I met the Strickland a little over a year ago. theirs was one of the many doors that I knocked on. I remember following signs through their garage into their cozy wood heated kitchen. It was cold where they were working, whiling away the time on working on a puzzle. Now these are the kind of folks that are really rooted in Essex. They've lived here for more than 50 years. We're in a trucking business, paid taxes and are aging in place. Now I called them this morning and I asked them if they knew about this meeting and if I could help them attend remotely. They are obviously not online. Remote meetings certainly have made attending more feasible for some people. We tell ourselves that remote meetings are more accessible than in-person meetings. But I can't help but think about the Stricklands and others like them. You'd be surprised at how many there actually are. Our Monters who have weaved their entire lives into the fabric of Essex. And now because of COVID, cannot participate in meetings like this. When I asked Don where he was getting his local news from, his reply was from prayer. These remote meetings might feel inclusive and convenient for those of us that either grew up online or work online. But I fear we are leaving voiceless those with the wisdom of age. Thank you. Thank you Ken. Anybody else who would like to make a comment? Anything involving the town? All right. One last chance. I know it's already late. So, we've got a Waka Sanoyama. You can go ahead. So you have any- There's really news about the Crescent connector that's supposed to be built. Elaine, do you have any news on the Crescent connector? I do not because that is under the purview of the village trustees, but I think Evan could certainly provide the information. Thank you for your question. We are working with the state and the railroad on some issues. The road is funded and we have one particular property owner that we are in some discussions with about some purchase of right away. Once that is complete, we are looking at a fall start for the road. The railroads will upgrade all the railroad crossings in and around five corners. And we have some, we have a lot of utility work that will start the project. Hopefully that answers what you need. But it's looking like potentially fall of 2021. All right, thank you, Evan. All right, and the other last questions. All right, with that, we can, I'm going to call to adjourn to the Australian ballot voting at the Essex Middle School and Essex High School tomorrow. I think people know which ones to vote in. It's the usual places. And also, if you haven't turned in your ballot and did fill it out, you can bring your ballot there already filled out and drop off. So I wanna thank everybody for participating. And even though we weren't actually voting from the floor like we usually do here, I think we still had excellent attendance. And even with the challenges and some challenges that Ken had brought up at the end there. So I think given the pandemic and everything going on, I think a lot of people worked hard in the town, government to make this happen and a lot of rehearsals and things to make sure it would go smoothly tonight. And so I wanna recognize all the time and effort that went into making this successful. So thank you all. Steve, you did a great job keeping us all on track. Thank you for being an excellent moderator. You're welcome.