 As I look into the attendees, I see that Amber is here. I see George is here. I see Raj is here. Dan is in. Dan is in as well. Grace. So we have the trustees here. So with that, I will go ahead and I will call the Village of Essex Junction Board of Trustees meeting to order for Tuesday, March 9th. Mr. Manager, do we have any agenda additions or changes tonight? We do have a possible one if you're amenable. Marguerite, were you going to handle it? Yeah. There you go. If you would like to add discussion on potential action on voter petition. Voter petition was received this evening late this afternoon. Thank you. And before I get into it, are there others? That's all I have. No, I believe that's the only thing we have if that was not enough. So in looking at the agenda, my understanding is that the intention of the petition is for a request of the trustees to have a vote on separation should the merger revote not pass. Correct? Essentially, yes, that is a separation. So since it's something that is relating to that revotes, it makes me think that it should be something that we have earlier on in the meeting. And I'm looking to other trustees as a part of this conversation. It makes me think we wanna have that possibly before that broader discussion to at least introduce it. Andrew, I'm gonna, for some reason on my meeting software, my raise hand thing has been replaced with a happy face. So I don't know what's gonna happen when I do. You might just get a happy face. So I was gonna raise my hand. So yeah, I agree with you. Let me see what happens with the happy face. How about it, George? If you agree with me, make it a happy face. Oh, you disagree? Make it a happy face. Make it a different face. Did anything work? It's like a hand. You got a hand. Happy face would work okay too. All right. So my proposal is to have the petition go in front of, or the petition would be 5D. The current 5D would then become 5E and so on, things would move down. And I would further propose that the tree committee portion just go to the end of the other pieces of business. Is that a motion, Andrew? That's my proposal. Does anybody, before we get into the motion, does anybody have a better idea from the trustees and Roger hands up? Yeah, I mean, I was gonna say the opposite. Let's maybe hear from what people have to say and then add the, because we know what the petition says. So if we're gonna, on that topic, if we're gonna take feedback and then we're gonna discuss and then we're gonna discuss, it seems to me having heard from what the public wants to say and what you all want to say. And then, because like I said, we know what the petition's asking, so. True. Just a thought. It doesn't have to be that way, just. So instead put that petition as after the annual meeting, after the annual meeting running, I mean, probably before. I would, I was thinking before, but after the discussion on, after D, but before the warning discussion. So let's go through this. D will remain as it is, E would become the petition, F would become the annual meeting or F is the annual meeting and G will become the tree advisory committee. And then then H would be the executive discussion. I guess that's what I'm proposing. I'm good with it, trustees. Okay, that sounds good. Great. So Raj, you had that wonderful game plan. Do you want to make that motion? Can I say so moved? For me. As long as Kathy has it. Kathy, do you have that? I saw the thumbs up. I do. Great. Great, so Raj, did you want to do that? I move that we add the petition as I'm going to say it out. We add the petition as five E. F stays as it is and E moves to G. And the discussion regarding legal steps becomes H. We have the motion. Is there a second? I'll second. I think George beat you to it, Dan. So the motions on the table. Is there any further discussion from the trustees on this? Hearing none. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. I vote. Anybody oppose? Great. Thank you all that passed unanimously. So now we have approved the agenda and that brings us to the portion of public to be heard. During this portion of the meeting, this is where there are any items that the public has that are not already on the agenda. This is a time for that, for that to happen. The way this will work is if you're using Microsoft Teams towards the very top of your screen, you can have a raise your hand feature. It looks like it is a series of emojis at this point. So if you could use a raise your hand, that would be appreciated. You can also type into the chat feature that you would like to speak and I will make sure to recognize you. For those of you joining by phone, I'm going to prioritize Microsoft Teams users for now and then we will get into those who are calling in. And again, just as a reminder, if this is something that you would like to speak to the board about something that is already on the agenda, you will have the time for that. So this is only for items not on the agenda. So again, now is that time? Of course. So if you have any questions, please go ahead and raise your hand. There is a hand up. Carlin Smith. Carlin Smith. All right. Carlin, your hand is up. Go right ahead. Hi, Andrew. I was curious about meeting formats and I was curious if these style meetings follow Robert's rules like the annual meeting does and if there's any conflict with the Vermont open meeting. So we don't use strict Robert's rules of orders in the way that we do an annual meeting to. So no, it is not the same process and it is not the same rules. In terms of a conflict with open meeting, I don't know of any, none have been raised to us. Okay. Just curious. Mr. President, can I ask him a question? You certainly may. Harlin, what makes you think that and what might your concern be? As I guess in the amateur, trying to follow municipal rules and local government rules and doing some reading, I noticed that Robert's rules would generally allow for members only to speak and any non-members would be required to ask permission and then they would have to be able to allow them to speak. Not that I am looking to negate any residents within the village of speaking. It would be more of a meeting management tool that I was considering. Okay. Thank you. I really appreciate the clarification. Andrew, do you want to, maybe a pine or you want me to touch it? So my opinion on that is I would not want to deviate away from the current practice that we have been doing for as long as I've been on the board without the opinion of our attorney, especially with regards to not allowing a member of the public to participate in public meetings in the sense that my understanding of open meeting law is that the public has to be allowed to participate and neither the public nor participation is necessarily defined. So from my understanding, that's where I am at. And Harlin, we do use Robert's rules mainly as a backstop. We ask that citizens who are wishing to address the board address the chair and the chair decides along with the board if it goes somewhere else, but that is in general. And so in my three years here, the board has been more open about accepting public comment in certain places, even if it's not strict adherence to Robert's rules. So thank you for your question though. So long to see your hand is up. Yeah, Andrew, I think if I just want to clarify, I think what Harlin is referring to Harlin, you're saying in the public comment section, we would only ask have Essex Junction residents speak, is that correct? That would be a correct statement. Okay, I just wanted to get that. Not that anybody outside of Essex Junction couldn't speak, but they would be required to ask permission and then there would be a vote. Okay, I just wanted to- Just as Robert's rules would go along. Yeah, when you said members, I just wasn't sure who you're referring to. I can tell you that in the distant past, that used to be the practice at trustees meetings, but we got away from it because I don't, I mean, at annual meeting, people are voting from the floor and you're having an influence on the vote. We're not doing that at a trustee meeting. So I don't know how we decided to just keep it, make it wide open. But I haven't, as Andrew said, I haven't heard of any conflict the way we've been doing it. Okay, I was just asking the question and curious as to if there was a difference between the two meetings. I appreciate all the answers. Thank you, Harlin. Are there any other members from the public who wish to address the board about a matter that is not already on the agenda? And again, for Microsoft Teams, for those on the phone, I will ask you in a few moments. Okay, there does not appear to be any hands raised. So we will move away from Microsoft Teams and go to those on the phone. To those of you on the phone, go ahead and unmute yourself if you would like to speak to the board about something that is not on the agenda. Seeing nothing, hearing nothing, I will go ahead and assume that there is nobody on the phone who wish to speak to the board about something that is not on the agenda. So as such, we will move away from the public to be heard portion and on to business item 5A, a presentation of our fiscal year 2020 audits. Take it away, Sarah, I assume. I'd be happy to. So everybody, like I told, I mentioned a few weeks ago, we are finished the 2020 audits. I know that Amber has read it cover to cover. I'm super excited about that. I'm happy to give out more gold stars to anyone else who's taken the time to do that. But tonight, Bill Keiser is here. Bill's our lead on the auditor from Cattell Brandigan and Sargent. He is going to give you an overview of how it went this year and answer any questions that you guys have. And obviously I'm happy to answer questions that you have as well tonight or at any point when you get into it. So I'm gonna pass it over to Bill to talk a little bit about the audit and then we can answer your questions. Thank you, Sarah. Like Sarah said, I'm a manager for Cattell Brandigan and Sargent. We were on site in Essex to do the audit the last week of October and we were able to finalize the audit and get drafts out and approved by Sarah and her team in January. For the 2020 audit for the village, we issued an unmodified opinion, which means it's a clean opinion with no issues noted. Similar to the past few years, the village did have a single audit requirement, which means there were at least $750,000 of federal related expenditures this year. Reported on the schedule of the... The civil power plus the space. Bill, can I just interrupt you for a moment, Bill? You've muted yourself or you have been muted because somebody else from the public started to speak. Am I good? You are good now and if I can just take that moment to say for members of the public, if you are not speaking, please mute yourself. Otherwise, we have to mute you and everybody else and that will interrupt the meeting flow. So please keep yourself muted. Thank you. Go ahead, Bill. Sorry, Andrew, where did I leave off? An unmodified opinion. Okay, so yeah, we issued an unmodified opinion for the 2020 audit, meaning there were no issues. The village did have a single audit this year, which just means that there were federal related grant expenditures of at least $750,000. This year, the village had 1.2 million of such expenditures. Most of this was Department of Transportation monies available in 2020, mostly spent on the Crescent Connector Project. There were also additional monies received from the Coronavirus Relief Fund that were part of that 1.2, as well as some equipment that was purchased by the fire department and reimbursed by FEMA. Report four of the single audit documents at the back summarizes the results of the single audit and we noted no significant deficiencies, material weaknesses. Basically, those reports state that the internal controls for the village are sound. We didn't know any issues. I would like to state the one nice thing that the town and the village of Essex have is very experienced governmental staff in the accounting department, as well as a staff that has been with either the town or the village employed for numerous years. So there's plenty of experience in the finance department that we've noted over the last few years. Lastly for the single audit, I will say the reports state that the village of Essex is a low risk audit. All this means is that we're only, the program that we're auditing has been audited for the last few years and we're only required to test 20% of the expenditures. That being said, because it's construction project related, the invoices are much larger than 20%. So we end up testing much larger volume than that. If you are a high risk entity, auditing, it wouldn't mean anything other than that threshold would become 40% of testing requirements. You will notice if you flip through the footnotes, which it sounds like some of you have, we did have a prior period adjustment this year. All that means is that prior year equity was restated due to something that changed in the prior year that was brought to attention this year. This necessarily wasn't brought to our attention this year. It's something that Sarah had made aware, we've all been aware of. In the REC fund, which is a proprietary fund, there are deposits received throughout the year for summer events. And those deposits in the past had always been recognized as income in the year that they were received rather than being deferred and offset against the expenses in that following summer. In the past, we've tracked this issue. However, the change from year to year has always been very small. So an adjustment was never necessary to defer these revenues. With COVID, of course, this year, participation was down. Therefore, the amount of deposits received were down and the change ended up being $130,000 difference between the 2019 what would be deferred revenue into 2020. So we ended up booking this adjustment. In the end, the books are stated more accurately by doing this. It's just that it wasn't materially misleading in prior years the way things were happening. One thing you will notice, so if you look at the proprietary fund financial statements, this did create a small deficit within the recreation fund. I reviewed this with Sarah and in 2021, when those funds are released to revenue, that deficit will wash and going forward the recreation fund barring other future issues with COVID and lost revenue should show a surplus fund balance going forward. The government wide financial statements are stated on the accrual basis, which you would see in most non-governmental audits. The capital assets are part of the fund balance. There's $21 million that aren't available for spending for the village. You'll notice also on the balance sheet, there's no cash. This is simply because the town holds all of the cash for Essex. You'll notice the due to due from on the asset column for $6.5 million. That technically is the amount of cash available to the village of Essex, barring obviously the merger vote did not go through. So if the finance departments did fully separate themselves again, that money is available in the town. So that funding could be sent back to the village without any issues. The village does maintain its own accounts receivable for utilities. It does also have some grant receivables on the books as well. However, property taxes are all maintained also by the town. So you won't need to notice significant receivables in the governmental side of that government wide financial statement because the property tax portion is not there. Over on the fund financial statement, this is more of a modified accrual basis of accounting. This is more similar to a cash basis financial statement and more along the lines of how the general fund budget works that's voted on an annual basis. Property tax ARs, like I said, are recorded in the town and therefore there is no 60 day reserve or accounts receivable for those property taxes. Down below, you'll see the equity restrictions. These restrictions either are committed, non-spendable, which is made up of prepaid expenses and... It's pulling up there, prepaid expenses and inventories as well as assigned and unassigned. These are all broken out on pages 28 and 29 of the financial statements and they're all available to be spent in future years. The current year unassigned fund balance, the village has a rule in place where 10% of the next year's budget expenditures, that unassigned figure cannot fall over, be over that. And right now for 2020, we are right on that 10% threshold of the 2021 budget. So we are within our fund balance policy there. And overall the fund financials for the general fund, the village did end up with a positive increase in fund balance of $211,000 in 2020 fiscal year operations. That money, like I said, is available to be expended in future years going forward. The proprietary fund financial statements, these are business funds and they are meant to be self-sustaining. They aren't funded by property tax revenues or other funds raised within the general fund. The water sanitation and wastewater funds all showed income for 2020. In 2019, there were losses in the wastewater and sanitation fund. The big thing this year that made up that difference revenues were up. This is due to both rate increases and usage increases with utilities across the board. Many of our audits this year, we're seeing obviously usage increases just because a lot of people working from home and even though COVID was only three, three and a half months in for the 2020 fiscal year, I do think there was a slight increase in usage over that last quarter of the year that we noticed. And then as I mentioned, the recreation fund shows that deficit. There was a small loss overall. Partially this could be blamed for COVID if you compare the 2019 financial statements to the 2020 statements. You'll see that revenue was down as well in 2020. Again, it's only three months of COVID but that could have been a factor there. Overall, we did pull out that $300,000 from equity that I discussed before and we're gonna pick that up next year and hopefully alleviate that fund balance deficit. As far as the footnotes go, we did add a footnote for the unknowns related to the COVID pandemic that existed as of June 30th and still does today. Other than that, there are no new accounting requirements that we had to disclose this year. More than anything, there are a few requirements coming down in the near future. A lot of those have been delayed due to the pandemic. So I think maybe in two years, we might start seeing some of these additional accounting changes, but right now we have nothing to worry about there. In the back, you'll see the supplementary schedules after the footnotes. Those are just budget to actual schedule for the general fund is a required information that needs to be included. And this will give you a good idea of what was voted on for the 2020 budget and how the actual performance fell, whether those specific line items were over or under budgeted expenditures and revenues. In the other supplementary information, you just will see the combining schedules that link back to the fund financial statements. But nothing new there compared to prior years. That is all I have if there are any questions. Thank you, Bill. Sarah, is there anything you wanted to add? No, it sounded great. Thanks, Bill. So I have a couple of questions and one of just the onset, Bill, can you just go through what the audit process is in terms of what do you review? I know you had mentioned that with the single audit, you did 20% on the federal side. What does that mean and is that all that you look at? No, absolutely not. So basically, we start the audit probably in September. We start planning for the audit, doing analytical procedures, looking at last year's files. When we're on site, we basically go down the entire balance sheet. Everything from cash, accounts receivable, accounts payable, we go through, test various invoices, trace things back to what you referred to as the income statement. In regards to the single audit, a lot of that testing is entailed as part of the capital expenditures testing. That's probably the highest volume of testing we do is within fixed assets. We have to pull details on all of the repairs and maintenance accounts, search for capital assets that things of that nature, get them depreciated for the government-wide financial statements. Basically making sure internal controls are sound, accounts are being reconciled on a monthly basis. During the audit this year, like I had mentioned, we had no issues with accounts that weren't being reconciled. During the audit, there are some adjustments that Sarah and Courtney brings to our attention, but that's just a timing thing where they're still working to close out some of their accounts and reconciling some things on their end. While we're there just before we start, we might get some adjustments, but that's all that was made, at least in the 2020 audit. And Bill and his team have an uncanny ability to come in and find the mistakes that we overlooked almost immediately. But, you know, Andrew, can I also tell you what's involved in the audit? Yes, sorry if I missed something. No, I mean, I don't know what you guys do besides tear our house apart for a week and then leave, but we, I know that Courtney is actually starting now looking, you know, getting prepared for year and stuff. So now that the budgets, the bulk of budget in last year's audit is finished, we will start in earnest looking through what's going on in the current year and starting to look for assets and getting all of our schedules and reconciliation files rolled forward for next year so that as we close out the year, we can start to look at things. And then the other kind of challenging piece in government is that we have this modified accrual period, which is says that any revenues that come in in the 60 days following the end of the fiscal year, we can recognize as revenue back. So we pretty much closed the year on June 30th and then we wait for two months before we can really get going on what are the final numbers. So that puts us at the beginning of September and then Bill and crew are coming in in October. And so it really isn't, it becomes an ongoing process that really ramps up there in the summertime. Thank you for that. So just a couple of other quick questions. So given the review that you've had in the fact that, you know, the town and the village we have one finance staff, one finance process, so essentially one finance systems, do you have any concerns about the capability of understanding which dollar either revenue or expense belongs to which organization? No, actually. So that was a concern a few years ago when the finance department was brought together, but we've honestly in three or four years have not had an issue where one expense was noted for the town and it was actually recorded to the village. Internally, it's one GL with a segregation of 100 account numbers, account numbers that start with 100 for the town and 200 for the village. And all of the invoices that we review, part of our internal control checks are that they're stamped and coded appropriately. Obviously those invoices are sent to the village or the town specific to what they, the purpose of the expenses. So that is something we're looking at. As far as AR goes, or accounts receivable, sorry, the state sends reports that reconcile back to all the grand lists. And there is, we do a full reconciliation that our Sarah does a full reconciliation of the grant, the two grand lists and how the property tax revenues are allocated between the village and the town. And again, all of this stuff is double checked and backed up to the published grand list as well as the information that's received from the state confirming those grand list numbers. So we do have that third party verification as far as the revenues go. Thank you, Bill. That was the last of my questions, Sarah. Is this something you want to add to what you just mentioned? I do, yes. I think Bill brought up a really interesting point that maybe we've not spoken about between me and the board or the board that I brought up to the board is that our account number structure lends itself to keeping the two separate even though we're using one chart of accounts. And the reason we're able to do this is because governments use fund accounting. So each of these funds that we're talking about already, water, sanitation, wastewater, rec programs, rolling stock, capital fund, right? The list goes on. They are each their own separate set of self balancing accounts. So each of them is already treated as if it's its own entity for which we have to account for and they have their own asset liabilities, incomes and expenses. And we do that through our account number structure. And so from my perspective, all of the town funds and all of the village funds, they're all just all of the funds under my control. And so the account structure allows us to keep them very much apart, but we already have that structure in place because of fund accounting. So that's it. Thank you for that. I suppose full transparency and disclosure. I think you have already discussed that with us. I honestly wanted to ask those two questions for the benefit of everybody else watching this who may not have already been privy to the information. No, it's all good. You can ask Bill Bill all night and you know I love talking about accounting. Oh, I know. But on that, I see George's hand is up and to go right ahead. Oh, thanks. Sarah, I get a hasty because I didn't read the whole audit but I did read the juicy parts. But I'd like to ask Bill, since we have such a large group here, if you could just quickly, very quickly, it'd probably be just for all our elucidation, read total, explain on page eight what total net position means for the year 2020. What is that about assets and liabilities? If you could just quickly explain for all of us what that refers to, thanks. Okay, so total net position, George, are you looking at like for the general fund 2.4 million? 2.4 million? Yes. Yes, so that is historical earnings that are available for future spending. Like I had noted on the ballot, I think the place that this is broken out the best is on the balance sheet. Right. Where you'll see the net investment of capital assets of 1.9 and the 541. That's basically the historic earnings over time that have been built up. I think that might not mean so much for everyone. More so, I think if you, well, so page eight you had mentioned is the proprietary funds. Right. If you look at, sorry, I'm getting a little off. I'm looking at governmental activities, business activities and total government. And for 2020, just what total net position means, how do you define that? What does that describe that? Yes, that's your historical earnings that are still available to be spent. Oh, okay, thanks. Yes, sorry. And that's right now 34,807,000 dollars. Yes. You don't have any more memories? I mean, I'm just shocked. That's it. All right. Extra gold stock. That's it in total, but that also includes all the proprietary, that combines everything. Everything, right? Yeah. Good, thanks. Trustees, are there any other questions for Bill or Sarah with regards to the audit? All right. Well, seeing none, I believe that is all and there is no further action that we need to take on this tonight. Bill, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate you being here. Thank you, everyone. Bye bye. Have a great night. Yes. And if there are any questions throughout the year, please have Sarah reach out to us. We're happy to help. We'll do. Thank you. All right. And that will bring us into consideration of the request from Champlain Valley Expositions for Water League Abatement. I'll start off. Thanks, Andrew. So I put together a memo. I'm going to share, and I drew a map. Oh, perfect. Thank you. Let's start with the map, please, Marguerite. And then I will give a quick high level about what happened. And then I see Tim Shea and others are here. They'd like to add anything and then allow the trustees to ask some questions. So this map is not to scale. This is not necessarily the way the water flows through, but in order to get a sense of what's going on, I needed this visual. So what we have here is the letter A and the letter B. And so the Champlain Valley Expo is on a private water system that serves the Expo and then previously nine properties have gone down to seven now, but we're going to start with the original nine. That's what was in place when this event happened. And the water flows from Pearl Street. So the little circle-ish, I can't, I don't know how many sides it has. With the A is meter A. That's the master meter that comes in off of Pearl Street that reads the water that flows through. That water flows through the Expo, feeds various spots at the Expo, and then goes through these other nine accounts. We have this setup as a ganged meter in our meter billing system that takes the reading from meter A. It subtracts the sum of all the readings from one through nine, and it builds back to the Expo the difference of those two. And then you add all those up and that equals what flowed through meter A. One of the, so about a year ago, we believe, there was a leak not on Expo property, but not quite to any of the one through nine properties. As you can see, I put a little red spot on this map just to show you that the leak happened on the line, in the grounds, outside of the Expo property, but before it hit these other accounts. What ended up happening is this went on for quite some time. This is very sandy soil. The water was just going back in the ground. It wasn't going up into anybody's basement. It wasn't bubbling up to the surface. It was really just the bills that were coming out that were indicating something was wrong. And because of that setup that I just described where Champlain Valley Expo gets billed everything except what goes through those nine meters, they were getting billed all of this extra usage to the tune of over an additional million gallons during 2020, a time which we know there was very little happening at the Champlain Valley Expo. So this leak was discovered, it was fixed in December. The one of the things that we've done since then to make sure that we can track where the usage is happening is we installed this meter B that you can see at the other end of the Expo parcel. This gives us one more layer of checks and balances in this gang demeanor billing system. So we can tell, okay, if the sum of this equals, we can figure out where the usage is happening and if it's happening on property, off property, and if it's off property, then we need to look for another leak. So the group approached Evan and myself about this issue because like I said, we're talking about a million gallons more than their average usage on a not average year. And so we helped, I helped put together some calculations and talk to the group about bringing this to the trustees and ask the trustees to weigh in on one, two, or three potential pieces of abatement. And so one of the things, so we looked at three categories as you noticed in the memo and that is consideration to not charge the sanitation or sewer usage on this water that leaked into the ground. The second consideration is to pay the wholesale rate as opposed to the retail rate for the water that did go through the meter. And then the last is related to the fixed fees. So quickly in the village, the water and sewer bills are a combination of fixed charges and usage charges for all residential properties. Those fixed charges are based off of one equivalent unit and equivalent unit is assigned for every 100, for 120 gallons of use per day. In the village commercial or commercial residential, so rental properties are assessed the number of equivalent units once per year based on the usage over the prior year. So once a year in June, we look back on all of the accounts, well, not manually, but there's a program that looks at all the accounts and recalculates the number of fixed fees. Because of this water leak, the Champlain Valley Expo's number of equivalent units jumped from 41.4 to 67.7. Again, after a year that was anything but average. And this is causing the Expo to be billed an increased amount for flat fees on every billing starting from July of 2020 through this coming June of 2021, unless of course the trustees are willing to consider reducing that as part of this abatement request. So there are three pieces that the trustees are asked to consider, which I just outlined, one, two or all of them, that the refund amount, if they were all to be approved is listed here. And then if the trustees were to authorize that, I would also need to adjust the March bill, which just wasn't quite ready to be included in this and we wanted to start talking about it. So Andrew, I'm gonna pass it back over to you. I know Tim Shea is here. The folks who live in those little boxes number one through nine are here as well to answer any questions. And I'm gonna pass it back to you, Andrew, to see where you'd like to go next. Thank you, Sarah. And I will admit that I don't know who lives in boxes one through nine. So I'm not going to be able to use your names. I will apologize in advance. We've been hanging out on this team so much there. I see all their faces and names pop up. I would ask, is there anybody either from CVE or the Willys or boxes one through nine who would like to add anything that you wanted to make sure it was added? And I see one hand up. Go ahead, is it Giles? Giles, yeah. So just Sarah did an awesome job in summarizing and has done an awesome job in helping try to remedy this whole thing. I would make a note that in that box B, which is, it's a manhole, that was put in, this whole thing was put in 30 years ago in 1990. And there was a meter that was in that manhole that was supposed to be read by the village so that the calculation that Sarah mentioned, which is 100% an accurate assessment of what was supposed to happen, could be done accurately. So the number of gallons that went through Pearl Street, that's an accurate number. The number of gallons that went through the nine households, that's an accurate number. But there's no way to prove how much went through that meter, that manual meter, because it was never read. And I'm not putting blame on anybody. It's just every, I think my father is the only one who's around who was around when the thing was put in place. So everyone at the fair is new. The village people are new. The many of the owners of the nine properties are new. So it's understandable that some of this information wasn't disseminated to the current owners of the nine properties and as well to the village people as, and that's not a group, the village employees and also Champlain Valley employees as well. So if that meter had been read, there would have been a better way to prove or disprove everything that we think is true. But I just wanted to mention that that meter has now been replaced with a RF meter so that when the meters are read here on the farm, that also will be read. And now we'll have an accurate representation of, just exactly what Sarah said, now there's only gonna be seven because the two people, Colvoord's storage place and Norm Smith's law place, they opted to go with the well because the cost to fix the line all the way to their place was cost prohibitive. So now there will be seven properties that are fed off that RF meter that's sitting in a manhole in the box B that Sarah represented there. And so going forward, we actually now will have a very accurate way to assess the usage at the seven properties, the usage at Pearl Street and any Delta that might take place. And I also was given a quick lesson on how to read the meter. And I will be doing that probably every other week just to see if there's something else that might alert us that something's going screwball before it's read every four months now. It used to be every quarter, but now I guess it's every four months. So just wanted to fill in some blanks there. I do appreciate that. Thank you so much. And from a personal note, I have no problems if you refer to us all as village people. We are what we are. Was there anybody else in numbers one through nine or CDE if you'd like to add something? Yeah, Andrew, I would, Tim Shea, I just want to thank Sarah and her team for spending the time to help us out here. And quite honestly, had we not been shut down for the summer, I'm not certain we wouldn't notice this. We almost fell out of our chair when we got our water bills for the second and third quarter, because we've been, as we all know, shut down and our water bill was higher in 2020 than it was in 2019 for the second and third quarter. And that's when we knew we were on to something. So, and I think the Willys and the folks that on the private water system for their willingness to kind of get to the bottom of it. The good news is we fixed the leak on December 6th, I think it is, and I would say our water usage has gone down significantly since then. So I appreciate the time here this evening with you folks considering this. Thank you. Evan, was there anything you wanted to add? Just want to let the board know that it was great working with the Willys and Tim Shea, but before this request came to you, we wanted to make sure of a few things. One, the water was not going into our treatment plant. Therefore, we were not treating ground, whether it's groundwater or not, this water was obviously not going into some basement or drain or a toilet that was leaking. This was a verified leaking into the ground. So that was something we wanted to do. Second, we asked each and every property owner to check with their insurance company to see if their insurance carriers covered for this. And zero for nine, they do not cover these things. Although in my past, I have had people with insurance policies that did cover this, but I think mainly because it caused damage on the property. So the other thing is that we did require, at their expense, they put in a new meter in the spot on your map that's B and that it be radio frequency read so that when we drive by, we are able to pick up that meter because it's somewhat in a remote location for what we do and where we're going. They agreed to all of that. And therefore, we brought this request to you but knowing that that water did not go to the treatment plant and was not used in any operations that would make us believe that they should get charged for those units. So we are supportive of the request, or at least I am. Thank you, Evan, for the game. And I don't think it'll set a precedent in the future. Thank you for that. Are there other residents in that one through nine, numbers one through nine that wish to speak on this? Sarah? I just wanted to mention that when I made the calculations, I compared the 2020 build usage with the average of the prior two years. So to get a sense of how much was actually leaked and because we didn't have the data from that meter B, we don't know exactly how much was leaked but because we know that 2020 was less than average at CVE, it felt like a reasonable starting place to say the difference between what was built and the prior two years average is at least how much was leaked. And so my analysis includes that amount. How much more was leaked? I'm not sure, but we had to start somewhere. Thank you. I will also just take that short interruption there to remind people that if you are not speaking, please make sure that your microphone is on mute. As otherwise, we get that type of feedback. And if you are a member of the public who wished to speak to this item, I'm gonna ask that you hold on until the board has had a chance to talk. And so as such, if you just don't mind putting your hands down for now, I will make sure to ask for public comment when we get to that portion. So I just have a couple of quick questions. I think quick questions anyway. The water line or where the leak occurred, that was a privately owned area, correct? Or privately owned line? That's correct. And you have verified that the water that did leak did not go into the wastewater treatment plant, did not go into the sanitation section, and that the abatement that was being asked for as far as usage is not the water that was leaked. So there is no request to abate the water that went through from the water charge. Is that correct? Mostly, yeah. So there's a request to abate the full usage portion on sanitation and sewer is one of the three components. A second of the three components is a request to consider charging the wholesale rate on water, which is what the village pays to Champlain Water District as opposed to the resale rate, which is what we normally charge on water. So that's a second of the three components in this, you know, for individual consideration. Right, I just wanted to reiterate and make sure that it wasn't a request to just not have there be any fee for the water that went through. Gotcha, correct. Great. And then my last one is, should we do the abatements? I assume then the costs for that get spread across the rest of the ratepayers. Is that correct? So not necessarily because when we calculated rates for this year, we look at a rolling at, so when we calculate rates, we look at number of equivalent units in existence at that time. And at that time, this account was fewer. So my rate calculation did not factor in that spike in equivalent units from 41 to 67. And we also use a rolling three-year average of actual usage. And so any spike in overall system usage that this leak would have caused back in June when I was doing rate, when we were doing rate setting would have been tempered by using that rolling three-year average as opposed to just what was an effect there. And so when we set the rates based on the budgets, what this would cause is revenue in excess of budgeted or anticipated because that usage wasn't excess. And so it will be a refund out of that revenue pot and there's no cost to other users on the system. Also because we're considering this before we're gonna calculate rates for the client here, again, none of these outliers would be factored into that rate calculation. So I may have taken a simple question and made it complicated again, back to back. Andrew, let me know if I did that. But I think it might answer to you as no, this does not have an effect on other system users. Thank you, Sarah. And I appreciate your capability to take the complicated and bring it down to my level. Much appreciated. So I see there are hands up. I think Raj was first and then Dan. I'm still digesting what Sarah said. And so I'm thinking she answered my question. So I'm gonna sit for a minute and let Dan go. Okay, my basic question is, my understanding from what you said, Sarah, was the meter A down at Pearl Street existed prior to the leak. Meter B, if I'm not incorrect, is something that was put in subsequent to this. Incident to create another checkpoint for the water going back through the fairgrounds to those properties on the other side, correct? There was a meter in that meter pit. It was a manual meter. Someone had to get down in the pit and read it. And the village didn't do that on the private line. At this point, that meter has been upgraded to be one of the radio read meters. And we've set up the CV account to have a second meter gang, which is a little bit crazy, but it's gonna automatically do it from here on out. That's, you explained that. But so then my misunderstanding, I guess, where, I assume that red spot you made on the little map there, I was under the impression that is where the leak occurred. That is not the slay where the leak occurred. Oh, it is. So basically that red spot is it's on the line off of CBE's official property, right? So CBE's insurer said, we're not gonna pay for a water leak that wasn't on your property, but it was before any of the other meters. Okay, well, the other thing is now my question is, we've had water leaks before on village property, as we all know, over on Maple Street, was a very large leak a few years back. But anyhow, is this just something from over age related where in the pipes? Or is this where maybe some excavation work was being done, somebody was doing something? And that's, is there any kind of investigation done to look into what's going on? Because if that section there at first, because of, as I see Mr. Willie is nodding his head, because of age, well, then obviously that's not the one section. They replaced the whole line so that there's not gonna be another burst down the line. I mean, that's what I'd like to know. I'll let Tim or Giles or Giles take that. I know you described digging lots of holes on your property, but you're better suited to answer that question than I am. Okay, so this is Giles. So yes, I worked for a couple of weeks with Jeff Weston and we were trying to put in curb stops to try to isolate where the leak was because the whole farm sits on mounds sand. And he explained to me that, I mean, the leak could be two inches from where they dug and you would never know it. So what we finally decided was, well, we know where that B kit is, that manhole is. If we turned off the valve there, the meter stopped. So we knew the leak was on the right-hand side, so the non-CVE side of the line. And so Jeff gave me two options. He says, we can keep digging holes and try to find it or we can just dig a trench and replace the line that we know has the leak. There was about a 200 foot section of line. We knew it was somewhere there. So we just dug a brand new trench, put in a brand new line, upgraded the line to that. He had some special name for it, it's blue. So it's the newest stuff. And then as soon as that was put in place, the meter went back from spinning like it was going all like crazy before this. And then it stopped and started to go at a normal pace. So, and like Sarah said and Tim said, the actual volume of water going to the seven properties now was very normal. It went from this huge spike to almost nothing overnight. Good enough, thank you. Amber, go right ahead. Sarah, I'm wondering if you might be able to speak to historically how these types of situations have been handled for the village, specifically abatement. Well, there has been one other that has come up to the trustees since Lauren retired. And that was a leaky toilet in a residence and that was denied or declined. That didn't have an effect on any sort of equivalent units, but that usage, the water came in through the meter and it went down through the treatment facility. I do know that Lauren had told me about one within the last eight years that was approved by the trustees. I thought earlier today to dig it out, but I didn't, but I did when we did the last one so like what does my memo say? And that one was approved and it was an off, it was like a leak that didn't go through the system. And so there is precedent to say, well, you can prove that this water did not go into the sanitation or the wastewater treatment facility. And that meets a reasonableness test to not be charged the usage rates there, but we do have to pay for the water because we buy the water before we sell it. So those are really, so I don't have a long list of examples, but those are the two that I have in my mind. I will tell you that from time to time, I speak with a business owner who maybe has a business in the village and their tenant has changed say from a restaurant to something that uses less water. And because of the equivalent units are reevaluated once a year based on that prior year's usage, you may have a situation where you have a restaurant in there for a year using a lot of water, they leave, your equivalent units are reevaluated, they go up because they're based on that prior year usage and then you're charged that higher flat rate for the next year, even though your usage is down. And so we end up just, it's a timing thing. And so I have spoken with one, at least one that I know of that I can think of offhand, business owner in the village who had that particular issue where their tenant, the nature of their tenant changed and they had to pay those fixed fees for a year after that tenant went out. This different, not a leak didn't come for abatement, but since that is a component of this request, I wanted to bring it up. Roche, go ahead. Yeah, I just, a bunch of my questions have been answered, but I just wanted to verify what I think I heard before. So none of this will impact rate payers and across the board, right? That's what you said earlier. That's correct, yes. If we do all three, it doesn't look like the dollar amounts are gonna have a wide impact on the overall budget, but again, it's not, I just wanna make sure that was, that I understood that, thanks. That's correct, yeah. So Sarah, my last question with regards to the wholesale rate, my understanding why we don't charge everybody the wholesale rate is because it costs the village money to operate the water and to sell the water and to do the billing. And so that's the intention of charging something above the wholesale rate, is that correct? That is correct. So the wholesale purchase of water is one line item in the water budget, but then there's also salaries and benefits, capital contribution to the water capital fund so that the village isn't a good place to do capital improvements when the time comes, utilities and other things. And so that all goes into calculating a resale rate that we then charge everybody. Great, trustees, are there any other questions before we go to public comment? Okay, so if there is anybody from the public who wished to comment on this item before the trustees make a decision, now will be the time to do so. So if you are using Microsoft Teams, please go ahead and look up towards the top of your screen and you should see what looks like a sort of smiley face and a hand. If you hover over that, you can raise your hand. That'll let me know that you wish to speak to the board. You can also type in the comment feature that you wish to speak and I will make sure to recognize you. I will ask if you only, or I will only recognize people once during this portion. What else is there gonna say? And for those of you on the phone, I will come back to you afterwards. So I know I saw John, I'm gonna butcher the last name. No, I'm good, I actually raised my hand. I'm not used to this format. I think Andrew froze. Yeah, I think Irene renters hands been up for a while. George, do you wanna take over for Andrew for a few minutes? Yeah, John, did you, John, Raul, did you finish your question? I'm not sure you got it out. No, George, I'm all set. I had accidentally hit the high five hand, not used to this format yet. Okay, great. And as long as Andrew was frozen there, unless he's holding really still. Evan, the problem is I can't see, I'm not set up to see everybody's hand who can use it. Irene renters. Yeah. Nope, she's not mine. Thank you. That it was an accident, so. Okay, so we see no hands. No other hands. Okay. Andrew, are you back online? Okay, maybe he's not. So trustees, any other questions, concerns, anything else? And so I'm gonna, I'm sorry, I'm gonna put the, Sarah, maybe you could put the questions back. You could do that. I've got another PC screen here. I'm trying to find it, but if you could do that real quick, that'd be great. Can you see it now? Okay. And so the request is that we, do you want us to make a motion on the abatement or you want us to make you, I'm gonna read this here. George, I'm back now if you guys can hear me. Okay, go ahead, Andrew, take it over. Yeah, sorry if I missed public comment. No, we're all done with the public comment, Andrew. So we are ready to make a motion on the recommendation. So what I was going to say, for me personally, I am okay with one in three for number three or for number two. I would propose to not abate that one, just in the sense that we, it costs money for us to do this work, us being the village. So for me, I would be okay with one in three. Other trustees? George, go ahead. Yeah, I am in favor of abating all three. I won't go into all my reasoning, but for the second movement, I would be okay with abating all three requests. Other trustees, would you like any further discussion or do you wanna go ahead and make a motion? I don't see any other hands raised. Somebody, George, if you wanna go ahead and make a motion, go ahead. I will make a motion that the trustees approve all three abatement requests or the CVE water abatement. Thank you, George. Is there a second? Second. Thank you, Dan. And is there any further discussion from the trustees on that motion? I would just say I'm going to vote no on this and it's not because I don't believe in it. Frankly, it's just number two. I would not abate that one personally, so it's the only reason why I'm gonna vote no. The others I think are personally reasonable. So if there is no other discussion, all those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed? Nay. Because it wasn't a unanimous vote, we'll have to do a roll call. So George? Aye. Dan? Aye. Amber? Aye. Raj? Aye. Andrew, nay. So that passed four to one. And thank you all for being here, especially those of you who live and are impacted by this. We appreciate the extra clarification that I know I didn't have in advance. So thank you so much. Thank you very much. And I'll add, you really don't have to stay for the whole rest of the meeting if you don't want to. You will not be offended. I will do. Thank you very much, Sarah. You did a great job. I appreciate all your help. I'm happy to help. Thank you. All right, have a good rest of the meeting. Take care. Thank you. And that will bring us into five C, consideration of approval of noise waivers for amplified events at CVE. Is there a member from the staff who was going to reintroduce this? I was under the impression Robin was joining us tonight. You are correct, Evan, as usual. Take it away, Robin. Hi, the trustees had some questions. I have for Tim Shea. So Tim and I had a discussion. I added some of the answers into the memo. You may also have other questions for him. We went over the reasons for it. Tim said that he would follow the usual protocol for any events that might happen at CVE when they had amplified events two years ago. This is trying to catch up with what happened in 2020. Not only did they not have any outdoor events that were amplified, but also indoor events where they would rent out their space for soccer tops and so on. Didn't happen because the space, for instance, that Nordic normally used was taken up by the state as an overflow hospital space and then also for vaccines. So basically, 2020 was a dead time for them in terms of revenue. And they're trying to get right side up again by basically, for one better phrase, squeezing two years into one. Any questions? Thank you, Robin. And so just a little bit of additional clarity for those who weren't here last time. The request is for up to 50 events, for amplified events to be considered tonight. And this is also assuming that the events actually occur. They don't have the events booked yet. This is just to have the option. Right, right. Things turning around. Yeah, Raj, go right ahead. Hey, thanks. Hey, I had sent a question in about, so overwhelming support when I asked a bunch of people about this, but there were two big concerns. One of them was noise on school nights and the other was traffic, especially weeknights. The impact on people getting through Pearl Street, you know, rush hour, getting kids, getting out from work, all that stuff is what I heard can be significant. And so that was a question I had put in via email. I don't see anything mentioned here about it. And it was basically asking, people were wondering about the two-way entrances and exits. And I guess I would say, you know, for when possible, you know, and thinking about this, I realized that it may require two entrances to be open and that would be more staff and more police and more expense. And I asked this with that understanding, you know, out there, you know, in the open that it is probably more. I wouldn't think it would have to be every night, you know, and maybe there's something you can think of at the CV, Tim, that, you know, obviously, if there's like an odd week where there's more than a couple shows that maybe that could be a consideration that could be, you know, I don't think the intention there on my part or anybody's part is to make it every time. You know what I'm saying? And I guess the other thing I heard from people was school nights. And I'm looking at the calendar that technically would go to June 10 because school ends on a Monday this year, I think, boring snow days. So that's a Thursday night, you know. So those are the only two things I heard. Otherwise, everything's addressed here. And you know, the school night thing, I think people, I heard all kinds of times. So I'm not really gonna suggest the time. Feels like 10 might be too late, but my kids are older now. So I just put that out for conversation. Thank you, Raj. One quick thing I just wanted to point out was the, I see here, one of the bullets being that all of, moving forward, the first event would be high school graduations. They don't anticipate any events on school nights. Dan, I believe your hand was next. Yeah, no, I just, my thing is I agree with Raj as far as having two points of egress just to make it easier on traffic, but I assume depending on the number of attendees, it may not be necessary. And I almost feel like maybe that's something that they already can handle without us saying they have to do it because it doesn't serve the purpose to have them like Raj said, the added expense of either flag-bearing people security people out on the street or police there for something that's so small. That's it. Thank you, Dan. Go ahead, George. Tim, rough estimate. How many thousands of people have been vaccinated at CVE so far? Do you have a rough estimate? Yeah, I appreciate the question. As of last weekend, it was 25,000 here at CVE. And we're averaging about 1,000 a day. This past week, this past Friday, we hosted one for the VA as well. Get upwards of 1,500 that day. So it's five days a week and we're proud to play a small role in the recovery. And you're gonna be vaccinating about 1,000 people a day for something like the next two or three months. Do you anticipate? Yeah, we haven't got an official word from the state yet, but I think two or three months is a reasonable time. I think when they may step back from here, but again, we don't know that date yet. Yeah, I'm digressing a little bit, but I'm just trying to make the point of imagine if CVE wasn't here. Thanks. Thank you, George. Tim, it seemed like you wanted to say something on that one. I'm happy to clarify the questions on traffic. We would anticipate, again, this has yet to be approved from the state as far as capacity issues. So a lot of it's hanging upon that, but a capacity looks to be about 1,500 people, which in the scheme of things, compared to other events we have here, it's pretty small. But we would, just like we did even this past summer with the drive-in, which was a couple of hundred people, we open up V-gate, of course, our main gate, and then what we call E-gate is the one on our northwest corner on 2A. And I would anticipate this, we would open that for these shows too. One, to minimize the traffic on Pearl Street, but also to just some guest experience and also from a public safety issue in the event you needed to get vehicles in here when we have something going on, the added gates just works better all around. And just confirming if we did move forward, the high school graduation would be the first events. And we've met with Essex High School, CBU in South Burlington, they love the idea there. I don't wanna say desperately, but they're looking for a, it was pretty special what they were able to do last year with the drive-in. So this won't be the drive-in, but it could be something special that they are really looking to do for their students. The seniors who have had a not so special senior year. Yeah, I'll just jump back in about the traffic thing. I'm happy just making that something, we request that you keep in mind. I don't think with those numbers and the numbers to have that is helpful to have those. So I don't feel like we need to put that as a condition at all. I think it's just something that if it can be done, great. But again, I think there was overwhelming support that I heard. So I'm all in favor. Thank you for that, Raj. And I do wanna clarify one thing. My earlier statements was that the request was for 50 events. The request is for 30 additional events. CVE already has 20 within the agreements that already exists. So this request is for an additional 30. So I just wanted to make sure that my statement was corrected there. One of the things we talked about last time, Tim, was about notifying area residents of when these events would be. Did you have ideas in terms of how you may be able to do that? Also in terms of a timeline? Yeah. We can certainly look at, is it front porch forum or the Essex Facebook groups? We have a mailing list of neighbors here and I'm more than willing to do if it's mailing every couple of weeks, as far as option. We don't know what the schedule will be and it'll be changing. I don't see a scenario where we book and act tonight for tomorrow night. So we'll have a bit of a runway to notify folks. We'll certainly put information on our website but I know not everyone's gonna go to our website. So I think that the mailing is probably the most effective piece and we can get that out like you said a couple of times a month as the schedule evolves. Great. Yeah. I think if you could do a mailing like every two weeks or so to the neighboring residents, I think that would be great or that list that you have. I think it's like 250 feet away from the property, something like that. We expanded it last year and Evan can speak to it better than I but we've always notified our neighbors of what's going on. It was the abutting neighbors and I think at the request of the trustees last year, Evan correct me if I'm wrong, we expanded that to a greater list to notify them of activities. Yeah. Now it's a 250 foot radius of all the property lines but I think the request is still the same. Maybe pick a length of time, maybe every two or three every month, maybe something like that you send out to those people just what the schedule is for the next month. And then your electronic sign is also working. Is it not? Yes. And we will list things up there too. Amber, go ahead. I also, I think you mentioned Tim about front porch form, if you could include that in the notification as well. And I like to see something on the village website. So when you, I guess basically when you finalize that letter, maybe even just the copy of the letter that's going to a butters, maybe the village can throw it on the website just in case, you know, folks happen to be looking there as well. Trustees, any other questions or comments before we turn this over for some public comment? All right, same process as before. If you are using Microsoft Teams, please go ahead and raise your hand. Let me know that you would like to speak. You can also use a chat feature to let me know that you would like to speak. And for those of you on the phone, please hang on and there'll be a time for that as well. And hopefully this time my screen will not freeze so that I can recognize you. So Chris and Nancy Chacoin, I see your hand is up. Go right ahead. Hi, Andrew. You guys are doing a great job dealing with this on Zoom or Microsoft. And I also am completely supportive of CVE trying to make up for a lost year. My biggest issue is it's kind of like a blank check. So these discussion questions, all those things pertain to all 50 potential events. They're all gonna end at 10 or 10.30 based on the night. There's no fireworks. They're all gonna adhere to the sound agreement. Did you ask me, are they all going to adhere to the sound agreement? I'm asking if they're all going to be heard that adhere to the ending at 10.30 or 10 o'clock on weeknights and no fireworks. I would say that based on the answers that CVE has provided that yes, they would and it could be a part of the motion. Not just the addition of the 20 that they're allowed under the noise agreement. Everything moving forward would follow the sound agreement as has been agreed upon. Yeah, but under the sound agreements, we've had two-day-long waivers. That's not what we're talking about here. So if I'm misunderstanding something, if you'd like to go ahead and maybe restate the question in case I'm misunderstanding. Well, in the past, for example, they've had the Volkswagen thing. And that went for two days overnight. And I'm just saying, because that's one of the first 20, they're not going to be able to... What are those parameters? Is the parameter that all the events will end by 10 o'clock on a per-fume night? Or I mean, at mid-week or 10.30 on a week? So I think I hear what you're saying. You're asking about what are the parameters and the parameters are the sound agreement. The parameters are the timeframe that we would set forth as within this memo. No, the parameters are not in the ground. So thank you, Chris. Hang on a second. Dan, go ahead. Yeah, I think what Chris is trying to get at, he wants to apply the same terms for this waiver for the 30 to the existing 20, if I'm not mistaken. Is that correct, Chris? You want all the limitations in these extra 30 applied to the previous 20 that are approved, which I don't know if we're capable of doing that. This is just for the 30. We're not addressing what's already there. That's a separate agreement. This is an addition to it. We're not, it doesn't, as far as I'm reading it, maybe somebody else can clarify that. Well, so am I talking? You are. The way that I'm also reading this, Dan, is that as the bullet says, any requirements from the sound agreement between the village and CVE will be adhered to. Right, he's talking time. The time has yet to be determined. It says here, there's a 10 PM curfew midweek, 10 30 PM on Friday and Saturday nights. Andrew, the previous 20 though, I'm saying, he's saying take the same time frames and everything wording here and apply that to the previous 20 that they already had, which doesn't actually fall into concept. The requests is for 30 additional. That is the request, it's for 30 additional. The request has nothing to do with the previous 20. So Doug, do these the things that were in the discussion notes apply? So, I mean, basically can they do the Volkswagen thing, which is a two day affair and is that okay? What I will say is in full transparency, I don't know. What I do know is that if it falls within the previous 20 events that have already been agreed to before today, then yes, if it doesn't, then no. If it's something that would fall within the capabilities that we are being talked about today but that are being discussed right now, then yes. And if it doesn't, then no. Okay, so you're saying that they can have 20 events, which similar to what they've done in the past, which have often been multiple day events and no, so once they use up there, they could use those 20 any way they want. I also will point out that agreement has expired. It expired in 2020. So there is no agreement. That was a- So to prevent a very lengthy back and forth, Chris, could you ask your questions? We can then answer questions and then we'll continue back. So go ahead. Are any of these 50 events that you're approving going to be and after 10, 30? Go ahead and ask your questions, Tim. Do you have any others? You mean Chris. I'm sorry. Chris, go ahead if you have other questions. So keep going. So that was my first question. Are any of them going to end after 10, 30? I don't want to keep going into a back and forth, Chris. So if you just want to get your questions out, then we'll answer questions after. Are they all going to be monitored? None of them going to, none of the 50 going to have fireworks. And this is all based on an agreement. It is no longer in place. It ended in 2020. I want to say, I really want to support CVE. I'm completely on board with them. I think they deserve to be able to do more stuff. I just don't want it, you know, it's kind of, to me, it feels like I'm signing a blank check in that, you know, yeah, well, you know, we didn't say this and, you know, we can have a crazy event. And, you know, normally they would come in January, they would say, these are the events. Tim would do a great job of communicating it with all the neighbors. And, you know, I'm just worried that, you know, I'm going to find out, you know, I can't plan. I can't, you know, if you have a concert at, or an all day thing at CVE, yeah, that restricts what I can do as a neighbor. You know, I can't go out and have dinner on my porch, screened in porch. But, and I'm willing to put up with that, because I do want to support CVE, but I don't want it to be, you know, a surprise. Thank you, Chris. Did you have other questions or? No. Thank you. So Raj, I see your hand is up. Is it something quickly in response or can I keep going with more public comment? I think it's, I think it'd be helpful to ask this for this particular point of the conversation. And how do these, can someone remind me, are there differences in what we see here for the 30? What are the significant differences in these 30 versus the previous 20 that have been approved? In so far as timing, I see here that this 30 says sound agreement will be adhered to, social distancing will be adhered to. So what, Tim or Andrew, what to, you know, to get to Chris's point, are there significant differences between the 20 that have been approved and the 30 that are being asked about? So before we go there, if I may Raj, I'm sorry for interrupting. The reason why I am is because I don't want to have different processes for how we engage the public in our conversations today. And so later on, one of the things I'm gonna be explicit on is that everybody's going to get the opportunity to comment once, but that we're not gonna have the kind of back and forth that we've just had in this topic. Because otherwise, frankly, I don't think we're gonna be done until, you know, two or so in the morning tomorrow, given the rest of our agenda. So what I'd like to do is I'd like to receive public comment, like to receive the questions. We will then close public comment and public questions, and then I'll answer them. So if there are questions that are predicated upon some of the answers, just please have the questions come out, I will take them down and then we will address them. So that's why, and I'm sorry, Chris, if I'm being a little curt, I just want to make sure the process is fair for everybody. So, and also, Raj, sorry for cutting you off. That's another question that I have down here. So Chris, were there others or are you all set? I think that covers it. Great. Thank you, Chris. There was another hand up and it appears it has gone back down, but if there are other members of the public who wish to speak to this item, now is the time to raise your hands in Microsoft Teams or type into the chat feature. And if there are none, those of you on the phone, if you'd like to comment or have a question, please go ahead and do so. Okay, I'm not hearing anybody on the phone, I'm not seeing any other hands up or any other questions. So we'll go ahead and bring this back to the board. So from the questions I heard, I think one of the things that will be very beneficial is having that overview as to the 20 versus the 30, in the sense that the 30 events are the ones that we are being requested up today and the 20 are the previously agreed to. Evan, is that something that you, Evan or Robin, is that something what did you want to address? Would you restate your question? I lost track for a second. Yeah, that's good. What are the differences between the approved of events within our agreement with CVE that we currently have as well as the requests that we have in front of us? Robin, do you want to take first crack? Yeah, there's really no difference. The solid agreement stipulates what has to be done for them to keep within the protocols of the agreement. These are just 30 additional events. It's a one year thing. That's it. They've already said you're going to monitor them. They've said to times that they're going to start and finish. And the statement was for, I think, three, three and a half hour period. So that's not a two day event. So I think that addresses Chris's question. And this is really just, it's a makeup year for last year. And there's no adjustment to anything that's agreed in the signed agreement. I think we can incorporate it in the signed agreement if you want, just approval. Approved compliance with the signed agreement or something. That's what you want to do. You're seeing Robin that all the other agreement, the other 20 events that they have an agreement to have during the year are limited to the same timeframe, Friday, Saturday night, midway, curfew, whatever, all exactly the same as this. I find that kind of hard to believe. I see Tim shaking his head. Tim, I think Tim has his hand up. Yeah, if I could. Go ahead, Tim. I look at what we're requesting this evening are 30 additional and don't impact the existing 20 that we have. And it is signed off on, Chris, I could send you a copy we signed off on that a few weeks ago there, I believe. But this, the way we look at these are 30 additional with the, I know it was important about the hour of the curfew for the 30 additional. So it's 10 p.m. midweek, 1030 on weekends. And I don't think that's consistent with the existing 20. Thank you, Tim. So one of the things that Robin, you had mentioned was that the events would be two and a half or three and a half hours or so. I don't see that within this request here. Well, seven to 1030. Right, but I don't see a start time. So Tim, is that something that you're asking or that you were asking for is a specific start time? No, I wasn't. We just really focused on curfew, stopping at 10 or 1030 for the additional 30. For the most part, with the exception of those high school graduations, this is gonna be a seven o'clock showtime and it's done by 10 o'clock, maybe 1030 in a weekend. But I don't anticipate much day activity. Not to say there won't be any, but I don't anticipate it. Thank you. And I just wanna be clear. I had mentioned that we were only gonna be having a public comment where people speak once. So Chris, I see that your hand is up, but I'm sorry. That's why I had asked if you had other questions and if they were predicated upon other answers. Raj, I see your hand is up. So I still don't know how this differs from the first 20. It's the first question. The second question is, how are we supposed to differentiate if they are different between what event is scheduled from the first 20 and what event is scheduled from the second 2030 if they're different? I mean, did the first 20 events he book and how are we gonna keep, if the terms are different and if it's materially different? I mean, I'm only curious if it's materially different. And for me, that would be, I don't even know what that criteria would be. I didn't even think that they would, I thought this was just gonna be 30 more just like they were before. So if there is a difference, I'd love to know, is it significant? Are the other ones 11? I just, PM that kind of thing. Or do you know what I'm asking? And then of course, how do we account for that? You know, because if it's just, well, this one works for this criteria. So I'm gonna plug this in and call it out of the first 20. That seems, I don't know how that would work. So I don't wanna drag this out, but it is a, you know, it could matter. I'm not sure if that's something that Tim, if you wanna address or Robin. Yeah. Oh, I'll defer to Robin if I'm happy to speak. Go ahead, Tim. Yeah, I'm trying to think how we can answer it as clear as I can be. We can certainly allocate these sound, if approved, these 30 to the concerts taking place on the midway. And I'm not trying to gain the system at all. I'm just trying to see how it's clear I can be. The only time I see us going beyond 1030 is if the fair occurs. And we're planning right now, the fair will occur with no grandstand acts or no big rack. There'll be music in there. So we need sound waivers for, but the fair could go on to its traditional timeframe. We were done by usually 11 o'clock or so. The concerts are done before that. But I don't see any of these shows, you know, going, they wouldn't go beyond 10 o'clock midweek, 1030 on weekend. Now, certainly during the fair, we're going to go beyond 10 o'clock midweek, as we always have, right? But I don't see any of these, these shows will not go beyond the 10 and 1030 as outlined. So, no, John, I just want to- Yes, thank you. I understand what you're saying, and I hear Raj, but there is no way to really to say when. We're just saying you're getting an additional 30 and if he uses all those, but what I think more so is you're going to have to indicate, you know, whatever, there's, you know, if you go beyond 30 events with, that are beyond 20 events that go anywhere outside of these parameters that, you know, then you're using those other 20. I mean, so basically you got 30 that fit within, you got 50 basically that fit within these parameters and 20 that fit beyond these parameters, basically what it seems like to me. Yeah, correct. And I, you know, with the events going on here, a lot of the events, I probably, you know, won't use all my 20, what I said. You know, look at what you said for the past, those events are not occurring. So once you have 20 events that exceed these, the limit in this permit, you can, you're held to only events except all of these guidelines. It's as far as I read it. Correct. And I will say these concerts series were posing in the midway. I don't care what permit I use. I'm not going to, I'm not going to run it past 10 o'clock midweek, 10, 30 of the week. It'd be foolish of my part to do that. Knowing that that's the terms we're talking about right now. Thank you, Tim. A couple of other things that I know we're asked about. So we had the monitoring of sounds and as it states within the request, the requirement from the sound agreement between the village and CBE will be adhered to. That would also work for these 30. Evan, the sound agreement that we most recently had, that was just done the last year. Yeah. And I have now a total signed copy between Tim and the village. And that expires when? 2023. Okay. As the request says, we are not requesting that fireworks be approved for any of the events and that again, pertains to the 30 that are being requested of. Yes. I'll touch on that. Tim and I have an agreement. He will not ask and I will not approve. We just, fireworks are just not working. It's just, it's more trouble than it's worth. Especially during the week. We have an agreement. He will not ask and I'm not approving. Great. And just looking back down through the list. The other ones were from previous trustee comments. So trustees, were there other portions that she wanted to, trustees, were there anything that I missed that you saw and or were there other comments, questions from trustees at this point? Andrew, I'll just make one comment. I believe that the signed agreement has not made its way up to the website. We will get that up this week. Thank you. If there are no more questions, someone wanted to make a motion. I'll make a motion that trustees approve this one time request for 30 additional amplified events in 2021. If the state permits such events this year with the caveat that all events shall comply with the sound agreement that is in place between CVE and the village. Second. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, George. Is there any further discussion on the motion? Hearing none. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Anybody opposed? All right. So that passed unanimously. Thank you all. Thank you for the comments. Tim, thank you for being here to help answer some of the questions. Thank you for your work. Thanks for your support. I appreciate it. Absolutely. And thank you for the thousand a day getting vaccinated and the testing if you all have done. It's greatly appreciated. Thank you. So that now brings us to the discussion on how business 5D, discussion on how the village should proceed based upon the merger vote. We are now at 813. We've been doing this for a couple of hours. We're about to enter into something that I think is going to take another lengthy amount of time. If the board is OK, could we take about a five minute break before we jump into this in case any of us want to get some water and move around for a moment because I think we're going to be here for a little bit. I don't care. I'm ready to go, but I don't care. I understand that. All right, I'm going to be selfish. I've got to go. I need to buy a break. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to say we're going to take five minutes. You know what? If you just mute your image and you just carry your device with you, you can probably hear everything. All right, Dan, that's enough. So I will go ahead and I will just say that we're going to take a five minute break. My class is 813 at 818. We will be back in session and I will be muted. Sounds good. I'm not seeing any other trustees. Feel like I'm alone. Sorry, I needed that little lightheartedness. So we have Amber. We have Andrew. Do we have Dan, Raj or George? I'm here. I'm here. All right, thank you, George. How about Raj or Dan? I see Dan is on hold. Thankfully no hold music. So before we officially come back, I would like the board to be here as I have a question on the process of this before moving forward. Yep. Trying to stall to give Raj and Dan enough time to get back, but I also want to respect the fact that we have more people in attendance now than we have had at any of our other meetings. So don't want to delay that. So with that in mind, I guess we have a quorum present. So I will go ahead and say that we are now back into the trustees meeting. Thank you, everybody, for the pause and the break. Greatly appreciated. So trustees, my question to you is typically when we do this, we introduce a topic and then the board talks, we go over all the comment and then the board talks again. What I'd like to do is I'd like to just briefly introduce this. I'd like to, then at that point after we've introduced it and set up some guidelines, then go into the public comment portion. Receive the public comment, close the public comment when everybody has finished and then bring it back to the board and decide it can go from there. Does that work for you all? So I just want to be clear. So you're going to open it up, you're going to go to public comment and then public comment session will be over with and then the trustees will speak. Is that it? That is my request. I don't have a problem with that. Amber, what do you think? It's fine with me. Roger, Dan or either of you back and have an opinion on that. Is that for, is that for the next two or three? Yeah, that sounds fine. Is that for the next two or three items and the whole merger related? Certainly for the next steps from the vote, as far as the petition, I would like to turn that one over to the petitioners as they would be able to present it to us better than I think we can, or I can. Sorry, I missed the initial comment. So the request is what I'd like to do is do things a little differently for at least this first portion of the next steps based on the merger vote, where I'd like to basically introduce a topic, then turn it over for public comments. Once the public has commented and has concluded, bringing it back to the boards and moving on from there, instead of having the board speak first. Andrew, can I maybe just wanna just throw something out there. Do you think that maybe a quick trip around the board with each of us very quickly, just outlining our thoughts like 30 seconds because it might give the audience some flavor of what we see, but I don't care. If the rest of the board doesn't wanna do that, I'm fine. I'm fine with your format too, either way. I'm good with anything. I'm good with what you've said. Go ahead, let's hear what the public has to say. All right. So with that, essentially this topic as it says in the agenda is a discussion on how the village should proceed based upon the merger vote. I wanna just go ahead and try and frame this a little bit, set some expectations in terms of what to expect, a little bit of also what not to expect. So with that, one of the things I wanna make sure to remind people that the most important part to remember is that there are a lot of emotions and personal feelings that are attached to this topic and that what may be a brilliant idea to one may contradict with another's values. And to please remember that we are all neighbors and to address the questions and statements to me, questions to other residents are not allowed. Name-calling and or disparaging comments about others are also just not acceptable. After I introduce this topic, we will go ahead and go into the public comment portion and I will go ahead. Is Andrew frozen again? I think he may be. Okay. Okay, this is problem because I don't have his access to see the hand that raised hands. I will be your eyes for you, George. Okay, you know, Evan, you can absolutely, so we were just about to start taking public comment and Andrew was asking everyone to be civil and I will double that. So I think with no further ado, I would maybe, I don't know how to impose some order on this. I could, maybe we just launch right into it, but I would just try to caution everyone also maybe with some thoughts that if try to keep your comments to... You're stuck, George. I think basically what Andrew was saying is that if somebody has a comment that is similar or the same as somebody's already commented, just say, I agree with so-and-so what their comment was so that we can move the process along more efficiently. Andrew's back, I think. Now George is back. Hi. I think it would be great if you are not speaking, take your camera off. We can hear you just fine. And you get to speak once. You're gonna get a couple of minutes. You don't have to repeat everybody, whatever you said. Just say you agree. So I'm back, if I can take things back over. Yes, sir. I don't know what you last heard. I'll try to make this brief. So I think as Evan was just saying, when it's your turn to speak, please if you agree with what somebody else has said, please simply say, I agree with what the previous people have said. And go ahead and use their names if you would like. If you have questions, that is exactly what this is for. Please ask your questions. But I ask you to ask all of your questions. Get all of your questions out. Get all of your statements out. Once, and I will be keeping a running list of the questions. If you want to make a statement, that is also fine. Go ahead and make statements. I have also been asked about what about, or what about non-residents and whether non-residents can speak. This was addressed a little bit before that with my understanding of Ramon's open meeting law, we have to require all of the public to participate or to allow for all the public to participate. Basically, I think he's gonna allow for public outside of the village to speak, but he's gonna start and focus on the village. Once he's done with that, then I think secondary would be people from outside of the village. Okay, that makes sense. Do we have a time suggestion? I don't think there's any time. I think it's just people should use this common sense and try and be respective of other people. We don't wanna be here until five tomorrow morning. Yeah. But let's try to limit it to two minutes. Use that as a guideline. It doesn't have to be strict two minutes, but if we could try to keep it within two minutes. And how about, is Andrew still frozen out? Yes, he's frozen. And Raj and Amber, you're both still here. So we still have a call. Okay, Andrew looks like he's coming back. It looks maybe for some reason where it keeps swapping out. So maybe we should just launch into it and get it going. And Evan, do you know who had their hand up first or can you recognize a hand if you could call that out for me? I've been coming in and out. I currently only see Marcus Serta. Okay, well, let's hear from Marcus. Marcus. And Andrew's back. Okay, good. Marcus, you're muted. Marcus, you're muted. Marcus, quiet. Give it a shot, Marcus. Yeah, a little faintly. If you could speak a little louder or maybe get a little closer. My apologies. Okay, there you go. I'm used to the other mic. Anyway, I'm sorry. Okay, so let me first by saying that obviously we all need better internet. Sorry, Andrew. Let me say that as a resident of the village, my immediate reaction to what occurred was to scream separation. We need out. But after taking a deep breath, after giving it some thought and considering what our next moves are, here's what I recommend that we as the village do and the trustees put forth. I believe that the trustees at this time should consider and put together a committee or two in order to look into separation as an option because of the fact that I believe what we as the village need to understand in totality is the ramifications of that in its totality. We have talked about it. We have gone over numbers. We have gone over many pieces of it. But I think there's lots of minutiae here that still need to be worked through and the public to understand as well as obviously the public needs a solid opportunity to comment and participate. So we need a strong amount of outreach. The public forum is nice, but obviously we all have limitations on our time. There might be within another committee structure more of an opportunity for the public to participate and outreach from that committee and or the trustees to the public for that dialogue to occur. But again, I really want that committee to a committee to spend time and look at not just the financial ramifications, where are we going to put these people? Where are we, where are our town offices? Where are these, where are our police? Are we sharing? What are we sharing? What are we potentially not sharing? Look at all of those options in a separation situation. Are we 100% completely severed or are we talking about continuing to share some pieces of the town with the town? What does that look like? And I think that in tonight's discussion, it would be totally inappropriate to talk about separating now. It would be inappropriate for us to do that. Even in the short term, I think it's gonna take us a little bit of time, hopefully not a year, but hopefully we just take a breath, consider this option in its full detail and we do that with a committee that's focused on that. Nothing against what the trustees are doing or the good work that you do, but obviously you have a lot on your plate to keep the day to day going. We should have a committee that's focused on this piece of the puzzle to bring back to the trustees later on a recommendation in full detail so that again, we as a community will have participated and the trustees can then make a solid and informed vote later on on how the village moves forward. Thank you, Marcus. I appreciate that. So I see that we have moved on to public comment. So are there others who wish to speak? Please go ahead and raise your hand into using Microsoft Teams. Great, so Matt and Margaret, I see your hands. I would also ask that if you have finished with your comments, please go ahead and put your hand back down. Otherwise this is gonna get pretty loaded pretty quickly. Thank you for the opportunity. Can everyone hear me okay? Great. I'm obviously the Matt part of Matt and Margaret. I'm excited to be the first one to be able to say a great thank you for all the hard work that the trustees have done. I can't imagine how much work this has been over the last several years to even come as close as we did to merging. And I just wanna thank you for all your hard work. And I know that you had not only the village at, you had the village folks in mind, but you also had the rest of the town in mind too. And I think that gets lost in some of these discussions. I have a question, Andrew, if you just wanna take this down and then answer it later. My question is, is that there's a lot of discussion that we need to have a revote in order to send Mount Pealier some sort of message to allow us to separate. So I think as a member of the community who wants separation at this point, I'd like to hear why we have to revote, why we have to spend the money on the revote. Do we have to send a message to Mount Pealier? Is that in the form of a revote? And would the money be spent starting a committee or starting getting some consultation from some folks and how to separate? Thank you. Thank you, Matt. And I saw other hands before and they appear to have gone away. So when you have your hand up, please keep your hand up until I call on you. Otherwise, I'm gonna end up losing it. You know, I'm gonna end up losing your order. So Mike Sullivan, I see your hands up. Go ahead. Mike Sullivan, the floor is yours if you want to unmute yourself. Yeah, that does help, doesn't it? I'm so conscious about not having it on. Thank you to the trustees for all the work in the select board for all the work. Both boards did a great job in trying to reconcile all the issues that we have between the town and the village. I wanna say that to me, status quo is unacceptable. If we have to, this is no longer. I'm paying over a thigh. I just paid my taxes today, over $1,000 more of the same value of a house in my house versus the same house in the village and outside the village. It is just an unacceptable situation and we need to move forward. And I believe the message to Montpelier should have been delivered already by the fact that the village has voted 70% in November and 80% in March here that we wanna be one equity. And if we don't, they should allow us to find it in another way. That's it. Thank you guys. Oh, I have one more thing. If we do separate, we get Sarah Macy. Oh, I hear that. Are there other members of the public who wish to speak on this item? Gabrielle Smith, please go ahead. Hey everybody, ditto on the thanks. I can't imagine. I know how I felt Wednesday morning and again on Friday evening. So a couple of things. I've lived here 15 years. Worked really hard to see this as a whole community and to help us be a whole community. And for me, this merger vote is it. I don't ever wanna vote on merger ever again. I don't want any of you to ever work on another merger plan. I don't want us to waste our time. So for me, the re-vote is about one last chance. It's one last chance for a clear choice. I think a lot of people are holding out their hope that they can keep that lower tax rate and keep the status quo somehow and find reasons to justify why that's okay. And that's not much leverage for us in negotiations. The hope is that somehow they'll be able to keep voting it down every time. So my feeling is I'd like to give, I'd like to give merger one last shot. I didn't want to Wednesday morning. But this is it for me. I don't wanna do this ever again. So if this doesn't go down, I'm all in for separation and I hope it works out for all of us. I certainly feel this way now about my community and Essex as a whole. I love this town and I love my village but I can't live with tax inequity anymore. It's not even about seeing my taxes go down. It's about living in a community where people are okay that some of us are paying unequal taxes that some people won't even acknowledge that we do. So my message to all is thank you for listening, keep listening, keep engaging us from this voter. I don't wanna do merger ever again. So if this goes down, I'm all in for separation and I thank you all. Thank you, Gabrielle. John Ruel? Well, I think I'll reiterate what everybody else is saying. I think I have lived in a village now for, I mean, I grew up here more than 50 years and I know some of you have seen one or two merger votes but in 50 years, I've seen quite a bit more than that. And this discussion has been going on for decades, upon decades, the outcome for the most part has always been the same. I think the only vote that we should have is not a re-vote on the merger but a vote within the village only that we wanna separate that we are tired of the tax inequity that it's been going on long enough and it will allow us to go to the legislature if that's what we have to do to say, enough is enough. The people within the village of Essex Junction wanna change, retire to the tax inequity and we wanna move on. And if the town has obviously on a number of occasions, the town outside the village has not wanted to join us in a merger, it is more than clear that that is the feeling of the town outside the village. So the only vote should be do we agree that we separate? I'm done. Thank you, John. Genevieve, you are now up. Go ahead and unmute yourself. Okay, so I am not in a favor of a re-vote. I was extremely disappointed this time of all again but I don't think a re-vote is a good idea. It's just too expensive. A lot of people spend a lot of time and thank you for all you guys did. However, I think now it's time to move forward. I would, however, support some sort of sharing agreement as a separate entity. I think because Essex will be substantially smaller, that might be a good thing. We may have two different communities but we may still share some services. I don't think that's impossible. I think we've been working very hard at merging over the years. I've been living here for 27 years. Sometimes you just have to agree to disagree with the outcome and move forward. There's a lot of opportunities to be seen maybe sharing some services, maybe with Winooski or other area communities as well. And I think we should move in a different direction. Maybe in the meantime, you could last more than a year, keep the taxes in escrow. That would give us a very strong financial position. I don't know if it's legal or not, but that might be a thing to explore. Thank you. Thank you, Genevieve. And before we go on to the next person, I just wanted to again remind people that if you have already asked, if you've already made your comments or asked your questions, please go ahead and lower your hand. Also, if you are not speaking, please make sure that you are muted so that way we don't hear the background interference. Tim Miller, go ahead. Thanks, everybody's kind of hitting the nail on the head. I think when you look at whether the argument is merger or not, I think the merger argument's kind of been settled. When you look at the vote count from outside the village, you had 3165 residents vote against merger. You had 1,215 residents vote in favor of merger. And I think that number speaks for itself. We as a village can want what we want, but it doesn't sound like the progress is there to be made. So I think it's time we come to the realization that what we may wanted wasn't necessarily the best case and it's definitely time to move forward as our own entity. And I agree with just about everything else that has been said at this point tonight. As far as the sharing of services, I don't know. I think if we're cutting the court, I think we should cut it maybe outside of working out an agreement with the police department. And I think that's, those are my sense for the evening. Thank you, Tim. Brian Sheldon. Brian, you can go ahead and unmute yourself. You're still muted. We hear you. All right, apologies for the delay. I appreciate the trustees offering myself as a guest here in the village as an opportunity to speak. But without commenting on whether a revote is or is not a good idea, I have a question. I've heard publicly and even here this evening that a reconsideration vote would be expensive. So I have a question. Is it possible to delay the vote for trustees and or the village budget under the emergency election law passed here in January? I believe if we did that, then we could hold a reconsideration vote at the same time. I'm not sure about the deadlines on the extensions on the edges of each one. And if so, would that reduce or eliminate the expense of such a revote? Thank you for the opportunity to speak. Thank you, Brian. Deb McAdoo. Deb McAdoo, if you can unmute yourself, you're up. Oh, okay, sorry. Okay. Okay, so I want to thank everybody who really worked towards this merger. This was a big, huge community effort and it was a long slog. And I thank you all very much. I was very disappointed by the outcome. But you know what? I know that we did our diligence. We did everything we could to create a patient deal for our so-called neighbors in the town. And I think that, I think we can move on now knowing that we did our diligence, we did our best, 19 votes, come on. So I think it is, I agree with everyone who has said it may be time to separate. And I like the idea of doing a study to make sure that we're doing it in a very smart manner and that we're not creating any unintended consequences. I'd also like to be able to explore whether or not litigation might do something to fix this because we haven't had. So I'm learning at least the realest stuff we want now. For those who are not, for those who may be on the phone or if I have not recognized you, please make sure your microphone is on mute. Anyway, I apologize for that. That's okay. So I think 19 votes have failed. So I don't think that the electoral process is going to bring us any fruit. And so maybe we should try the judicial branch. Thank you, Deb. Are there others who wish to speak to this? Micah, go ahead ahead. Yeah, just with some of the discussion about people saying that, this is settled that the town outside the village has made their opinion known. I think if we're doing this study that's gonna look at impact the more transparent and public we can make that both for the people within the village but also if we are gonna have a re-vote, I think there's a lot of people outside the village that were voting this as a, do I take a tax increase or not? And they're not seeing the details in the repercussions of separation. I think the better we can market that and make that very well known, that there are going to be tax repercussions either way with this that they need to consider that I'd like to see that publicized ahead of the re-vote if that happens. Excuse me, this is Kathy. I was wondering if Micah could state his full name for the record, please. Oh, sorry, Micah Hagen. Thank you so much. Thank you, Micah. Thank you, Kathy. Other members of the public who wish to speak to this item. I will go ahead and pause another 15 or so seconds in case anybody else wanted to speak. Otherwise, once we close the public comment on this, it is unlikely we will come back to public comments. So it's important that if you have a question or a comment, it's important to air that now. Hey, Andrew, this is Vince Franco. Hello, Vince, go right ahead. Hey, just as a resident of Essex, I want to say that I appreciate the work that you folks did as a board and all the time and effort that you put into the merger plan. And I don't want to see my town split apart. And I totally understand where everyone's coming from. But when I moved to Essex, I didn't move to Essex for part of it. I moved to Essex for all of it. And I know it's not my decision to make about separation, but, and I'm just one resident, but I enjoy the whole town. And I think it's kind of a shame that it's come to this, but I appreciate everything you guys have done. And I appreciate the time that we've all spent trying to make merger as equitable an option as possible for everyone in the town. Thank you. Thank you, Vince. And are there others? And that includes others on the phone. If you're on the phone and wish to speak, go ahead and unmute yourself. Sarah Michelle Stoltz. Go right ahead. Hi, I just want to say thank you to everybody. Gabrielle, I really, Andrew, I wanted to speak to Gabrielle through you, I suppose. I just really appreciate her comments. I also agree with Mike that status quo is unacceptable. And that definitely needs to be loud and clear. I guess that's all I wanted to say. And I also wanted to say that I appreciate all the chuckles in the beginning of the meeting. It was fun. Thank you. Thank you. And I'll take that opportunity to say that anytime we can turn this into a laughing matter, I'm more than happy to be there for that. So again, other members of the public who wish to address the board. Morgan, which if you don't mind just stating your full name for the record when you do speak. Morgan, the floor is yours. Morgan, we cannot hear you. You do appear to be unmuted. So I'm not sure what it is. Morgan, I'm not sure what's going on, but we cannot hear you. I'm not sure if you are using a microphone or like an external microphone or something else, but for some reason we're having some difficulty hearing you. I see you have now muted yourself. Maybe try unmuting and we'll see if that fixes it. Try now. Nope. I'm not getting anything. Maybe put it in the chat. Or is that not appropriate? Sorry. We don't use a chat for- Yeah, sorry. Yep. Just frankly, as with how much goes through there, it's not something that can be managed. Okay, sorry. Morgan, what I would also offer, this is not going to be the only time that we talk. This is not the only time to offer input. If you'd like, my email address is abrownatsxjunction.org. Again, that is A as in Andrew and then Brown spelled the exact same as the color at sxjunction.org. If you do have a comment, I am happy to share that with the rest of the board. So that way we all give your thoughts. Representative Lori Houghton, go right ahead. Hi, everyone. Just want to echo everyone's thank you. I know all of you have been working on this for a very long time. So we appreciate it. I am speaking for Representative Karen Dolan as well as she's on the call. Everyone keeps talking about Montpelier and what we will do. And I wish I had an answer. I can tell you this, that Karen and I will absolutely shepherd the will of the people to Montpelier. We have been talking to people and explaining what's happening here in Essex. Trust me, they know what's happening here in Essex. So we'll stay engaged with this conversation. We are happy to answer questions offline from people. Just let us know what, and trustees, obviously let us know what you need us to do. But we will do everything we can. Thank you, Lori. Thank you, Karen, as well. Morgan, did you want to try it one more time? Maybe not, thought I was going to shut up. Kenneth O'Connell, go right ahead. It's actually Jay O'Connell. Sorry, Jay, go ahead. That's okay. So I just wanted to acknowledge, I mean, we've been here before. There are people who have paid, I'm sure very close attention. There are facts and history that I assume bind and inform our next move. And so I really just think my question is what are those key facts and that we should understand? So not something to be answered here, but I've been watching lots of threads. There's just a lot of information and probably misinformation out there. So really what is it that, what are those key pieces of information that we should understand, that inform kind of where we go next? That's my question. Thank you. Thank you, Jay. I'm not seeing any new hands. Well, we take the time. Morgan, why don't you go ahead and give it a shot again? Nothing coming through yet? Yeah, nothing. Okay. Are there other members of the public who wish to speak to this item? Okay. I'm not seeing any other hands. I am not seeing other people in the chat asking to speak. So we can go ahead or I will go ahead and close the public comment portion of this. Thank you all for taking the time to speak, to stay as long as you have and for having the courage to speak. It's not something that is easy for everybody to do. So I appreciate that. I appreciate the many comments that I have heard which I took the best notes that I possibly can in terms of what was said. I certainly note that there has been a lot of appreciation for the work that has been done. A lot of what sounds like desire to certainly move forward, which is great to hear. Heard some really good ideas. So I really appreciate that. Some of the things I wanna make sure to address are the questions, which I didn't hear many questions and trustees, if after I answer these or try to answer these, if there's something that you feel I have missed, please tell me. As this isn't just, as I hope you are all paying attention as well. One of the first questions was about why do we have to re-vote this? Is this something that has to be re-voted for Montpelier in terms of must re-vote? There does not have to be a re-vote. There is a petition that is going around and that is a citizen right within the Vermont State Statutes and within state law. It's the exact same thing that happened in 2006 that overturned that successful merger vote into no merger in 2007. So I would say the re-vote would have to happen should the petition happen. If it doesn't, then the re-vote doesn't happen. In terms of do we have to do this for Montpelier? I don't believe there's any person who can necessarily speak for all of the legislature. Laurie and Karen I think can do a really good job of helping to direct us when we need it. I also think that they would hopefully agree that the tea leaves don't always work in terms of predicting what must happen for Montpelier. The other question that came through was, is it possible to align voting with the re-vote to reduce costs? And so when I see that, is it possible to align the potential re-vote should that come through with the village election? That's something that we can talk about later on. My understanding is that with the legislature's approval to move our annual meeting and our annual voting due to the pandemic, that yes, we can do so. And we will be talking about that later on. Laurie, I do see you here and I just again wanna make sure I didn't mistake anything as to what I said earlier about Montpelier. No, you are correct. We, Karen and I cannot speak for the rest of the legislature personally, I would say. If we have the opportunity to re-vote, I would take it because three times in six months, we'll say a lot, I think. But if we don't, if it's the will of the people to go away to separation or something else, you know, that's fine too. Great, thank you, Laurie. So, trustees, did you hear any other questions? Because those were honestly the only questions that I heard. I am seeing heads shaking, no, so great. I also saw some of the things I do wanna note that I heard. I heard things like move forward with separation. I heard, just going through the list here, you know, status quo being unacceptable. Many people talking about how this isn't the first time we've been here, but it is time that we move forward. Seeing that there are a need to make sure that we understand as a community, understand the questions being asked and understand the ways to move forward in terms of, I think it was Jay who pretty succinctly said it, what are the key facts which must be answered in order to inform our next steps and how we move forward? Certainly heard people who are pro-separation. That certainly came through. Some individuals who discussed, you know, moving forward with the re-votes. One thing I wanna be clear on the re-vote, that is absolutely not anything this board has any control over. That is nothing that will be brought to this board. That is something that is at the town level and so the town select board will handle that should the petition get there. But that is not something for this board. Was there anything I missed, Ford? Or are we, we wanna deal with it already, Robin? I mean, I don't know if we're including comments that were sent via email through our S extension email. I know that a couple of people expressed concern of a separation thinking that we should stay together for better together, but just so that's known out there. I also agree with the Andrew that I think somebody commented about the implications of separation on the town outside the village tax rate. And I think that's been clearly stated to the residents of the town outside the village. Maybe that this potential is an important chance after being maybe more informed about what separation that might impact them may change some people's minds about merger. Thank you, Dan. George, I see your hand up, your hand is up. I just wanna quickly say a couple of things. One being that in terms of moving forward, I certainly agree that there is a lot of information we don't know. I don't recall who it was that had said it, but there are such things as in separation, where are we going to house a new staff? Where are we going that we don't have space for right now? And we have not had a department for in years while we have had, we've had a manager, we've had a finance director. We haven't had an assessor. We haven't had a police department in years. We have not had our clerk back in a few years. We haven't had an IT department. We have that previously contracted out. We had various departments as we would have to then hire staff or input them somewhere. We don't know where they would go. In terms of separation, we have a whole host of agreements that exist with the town. What would that look like? And what would happen with those? I know we've received a few emails on dissolution. That's something that I didn't hear mentioned tonight that has a whole host of other questions with this solution, such as what do we do with everything the village owns? And when I say everything, I mean buildings, I mean equipment. I mean, what do we do about the staff that we currently have? Are they just let go? How does that work? Our wastewater treatment plant, which serves Essex Williston and Essex Junction, the town of Essex and Williston. What happens in dissolution with that? Also then with the agreements. So I say all that to say that there's a lot we don't know and that there's a lot that I would agree with an earlier commenter on. We need to do some research on this. So I also say that in a way to say, please be patient. This is a process that's gonna take some time. So I asked for people's patience while our cats go by. With that perfect transition timing, George, why don't you go ahead? Well, Andrew, I didn't know what your process you wanted to do. Do you want to just sort of go around the board and have us give our own sense of where we are and what we think? Or are you asking us to respond to specific questions you're asking? Why you want to just sort of jump get, I mean, I've got quite a bit to say but I don't want to interrupt your flow of what your plan was. I could talk about this for hours. So I would say why don't you, why don't we just do a quick around the room here between us, talk about initial reactions? If there's a question that you feel I didn't answer, please or want to expand upon and go ahead. Okay. Okay, well, I'll start by saying a few things. I want to lower my hand first. I want to start by digressing a little bit and reminding all of us and I think the members of the select board who may still be here or the message you get to them. We agreed a number of years ago to create a unified administration and they've done a great job. We've a unified manager. Evan's doing a great job. Sarah's obviously doing a great job. We've heard a lot this past summer about dignity and respect, human dignity. We have to have respect for our management team and our administrative staff. The last thing we need to do is put them in the middle of a village town food fight. So, and that just has to, we can't just, we can't put them in the middle of this and we can't ask them to take sides. Sorry, go ahead, George. So this is what happens to me. I take it George can be frozen for a little while. Can I go? Go ahead, Dan. All right. I mean, I've talked to people about this for a long time in some of our joint meetings. I discussed the members ceremony to do an example with the tax rates with the water. And I brought up the fact that I'd appreciate if we could present the tax implications with separation. I've heard a lot of things about people. We, Vince Franco called in and basically mentioned he was worried about losing the community he's here for all of Essex, I agree. I'm all for all of Essex. I've been for merger, I prefer merger to separation but status quo must go. The thing is, even if we were to separate the community to separate doesn't mean that we separate and we disappear. Everyone can still utilize Brown Island Library. The town outside the village can come down and utilize our rec programs. They're gonna pay the out of community fees. We can still utilize Indian brook. It doesn't go away. There's no walls going up. There's no barriers going up. We're still gonna be right next to each other and work with each other and share. People are gonna use our pool. We're gonna do things. It's just, it's not like it's not... Oh, George is back. Go ahead. I don't want to cut up. What are we buying back or am I... I got you in the mid yon by the way, Amber, just as I was frozen, the screen froze you in yon. I'm glad I'm putting you to sleep, kid. Thanks. That's great. That's a great sign. It's not you, George, I promise. That's thanks. But if I could, Dan, I don't want to interrupt you. But I just wanted to get that across, guys. We have a long, we have a commitment to our staff to try to not put them in the middle of this, okay? If I can, can I just sort of rant on about another minute or two? First of all, you're stuck again. But I'll continue, Andrew. So I think there's an impression that if the communities separate, that means we're no longer gonna be able to enjoy things we had. Dan? Yeah. Andrew and George are both frozen. So let's just hold on a minute. Sorry. Well, we've been playing this game a lot. And maybe we should have them do it without video at this point. Yeah, maybe they're very difficult. For everybody on the meeting, I just want to apologize for the internet issues we're having tonight. I know you're all taking a lot of time to be here and it's probably very frustrating as we figure all this out, sorry. Well, anyways, I'll continue to talk to you and Amber, but anyhow, we got a quorum anyhow, and we can continue. But my opinion is that I still prefer merger and I'm for this, you know, revoke. If we get the signatures required and that select board approves it, moving forward with a revoke. And Dory just stated that, you know, that goes that much further to showing that we, you know, to the legislature that we're trying for a merger. And obviously over a 63 year period, this has been a topic of discussion. And so I'm not, I don't look at it like a doomsday that this is the end of the world. We're going to be separate. It's going to be terrible. No, things will go on. It could be amicable. And obviously many communities come to our village to utilize our rec programs, our facilities, our library. And as we do going into Burlington or South Burlington or neighboring communities. So those things will exist. The wastewater treatment plant, the tri-town agreement will still go on. All the things, the police department will exist. I mean, if we have the internal agreement, I'm saying if the suffrage, the fire departments have MOUs, they do that anyway. So things that would continue on. I don't think it's bad as what I'd rather see a merger though. That's how it ended. So I'm getting a pretty clear message that maybe George and I shouldn't talk so much because we keep freezing. So no- Maybe you want to turn your video off. I don't know if it's- I'll turn my video off. Maybe that'll help. Hang on. It'll help your bandwidth. So I don't know who's up. If I could just finish my thought, can I do that? I don't know. Do I get frozen? And if I get frozen again, I'm going to keep doing this, okay? You're going to have to just deal with it, okay? So it was ever freezing me. It was ever freezing me. Stop it, because I'm not going to stop. Let me go. I had a whole bunch of stuff to say. I'll get to write a very quick thing. I is an alternative to separation and I absolutely get the passion around separation. Trust me, I totally get it. I totally get the frustration, the unfairness of it. I totally get it, folks. And I think if we do separate, if we did get down that route, obviously we would have to, we saw the audit we had tonight. We would have to do something like that. It would have to be a third party. I would not implicate staff in something like that. And you would have to get long-term projection, financial analysis, how does our position change? And you would also have to bring that and do that for the, I think the town as well, because if you went to the legislature as I think Lori has made it clear, there's no clear statutory process for separating a village from the town in a modern era. And certainly nothing like, nothing the size of Essex and Essex Junction, the legislature's never done anything like that. So they would want to know what's going to be the financial impacts all the way around. What are they going to be the political impacts, policy impacts all the way around? And it's good that you're moving, Amber. As long as you're moving, I can tell that I'm not frozen, that's good. So yeah, we would need a long-term analysis just doing a merger, a separation charter, wouldn't cut it. The other thing I just want to quickly say, besides separation, I would like us to consider, we were talking about alternatives, plural. And an alternative to consider is a restructured status quo. I know some people who are in the audience may not want to hear this, but I think if we look at the actual ballot and look at the result, consider the result, the merger was, which was going to cost everyone 24 bucks outside the village. That was defeated roundly, but a town budget that increased household taxes on average by something like $52, passed with flying colors. In that budget was the village public works budget and for the first time, the village rolling stock fund, okay? They're leading up to the budget vote. There were no recriminations, there was no fire and brimstone on local media or social media, no finger pointing, no one had their recitations dragged through the mud, no public records requests, it just passed. In fact, it wasn't a single question at a town annual meeting about the budget, but merger raised a storm. We also look at the election and I don't take anything away from the two candidates who ran, but the election broke down pretty much around village town lines. So the message I'm getting here, if we want to look at it is that, I think that maybe our neighbors in the town have been hearing it and I think maybe they do get the fact that we are upset and we're fed up with the tax inequity. And I think maybe the message is that if we solve it behind the scenes, as long as we don't, there's not a lot of public shaming about it, maybe we can keep working on this. But I don't think you can look at the ballot and look at the events over the last year and say that we have a real strong signal from the town that they want to merge with us. I think that maybe it's not just about the money. Maybe it's about our local political culture. People just feel like they don't want to break up the status quo, but maybe a restructured, re-engineered, re-imagined relationship between the village and the town, something that we could work on with the select board within a limited timeframe, while we're also perhaps investigating separation so that we have alternatives. I would like us to consider that. I think that we need to consider all options going forward. I think a lot of the details about what's going to happen, what would happen if we separated with the wastewater treatment plant and the fire departments and so forth. I think we've kind of worked all that out. I don't think there is a great deal of mystery there. Yeah, we would have to spell it out. But I think before we asked the village community to vote on a separation charter, absolutely right. We would have to really have all of our ducks in order. And I think we would also have to know financial impacts on the town. They would lose all of the village residential property tax. They would lose all the villages business property tax. They would lose their revenue from global foundries. So it would have a profound impact on the town. And we can say, hey, that's not our problem. It is our problem. And I think the legislature would tell us that's our problem. The legislature isn't going to operate on the basis of emotion. They're going to look at impacts on both sides. So happy to get down the separation in looking at that, sketching out how that might look. But I would still not give up on working, trying to work together with the select board. I think we've come a long way. I think we've had a lot of positive signs. This adds a little intensity to it. There's no question about that. But I still think we need to keep our lines of communication open and try to work with them. And most important, let me go back to my original point. We got to be really, really careful not to put our fine management team in the middle of all this. Okay, thanks. Thank you, George. So Amber, Raj, do either of you want to go since you haven't gone yet? I'll just be very brief, because I actually need to walk away because I have something in my eye and I need to flush my eye. But I would really like to have a conversation with our legal counsel to find out what the next steps are from here. I feel like that's a foundation point for anything, because we can talk about separation. We can talk about anything else, but knowing whether we legally or not legally, whether we can do it is kind of where I'm coming from. So I'm just going to leave it at that for right now. Thank you, Amber. Raj? Well, I guess I'll just echo everything that's been said so far. I mean, from an emotional point of view, I'm incredibly frustrated. Both boards, especially staff, put an immense amount of time into trying to create something that I think we all thought was fair, respectful of the impacts, and really kind of set Essex up as a great community and set Essex on a great path for the future. And I think to be quite honest, I think that got lost in a lot of silly arguing and misinformation at the end. So I definitely understand what I've been hearing an avalanche of frustration from the community. People are frustrated and angry and they want to separate, they're done, and I don't disagree. But I have said for quite a while, I do want to know as part of this process we go through, and it's going to be a long process to figure out what the best path forward, like George said, the best of the alternatives we have, we're not done looking at possible consolidation. So I'll just agree with what everybody said, but I'm gonna say something a little bit different. And I'm not saying this is the answer, but I would like to know from people how much tax equity would be enough to not split Essex up. There's still areas to look in our budgets, in our services. I mean, how close is close enough for people to not see Essex split up? If we tackle the last remaining couple of things that we get, I don't know, let's just call it 95% there. Is that okay? So just one of those questions, as we're going through, Marcus suggested a committee to look into separation. If however we go about this, I think as George mentioned, we have to look at all the alternatives and try to figure out what, where we are, and really have a good sense for the village of is separation the right way or is it option B or C? But I definitely hear everyone's frustration and I hear just, yeah, I'm right there with you. Sorry, I didn't work out. Well, can I just make a quick comment? Yeah. First, the consolidation efforts here to date. I don't have a problem with what's, but we need to codify that in some way and you can't just go on this MOU of a wink and nod and handshake saying, yeah, we agree to this. That doesn't show a lot of people, a lot of comfort going into the future. You know, you get this, this just this little agreement and that's the problem. And I think as far as a business owner, if I'm a business looking to invest in a community and I see, oh, what do they got? Oh, they got these MOUs. They don't have anything. This is what the structure is. It doesn't give me a lot of comfort feelings. And boy, that's where I want to invest in a community that's that disrupted. They can't even come together and agreed on this. If we separate, we have our own autonomy. It's our own autonomous, you know, existence and the town outside has theirs. We still, all the things I said before are still able to share and utilize. The people in the town outside the village can still come to use our rec programs like they've always have. Nothing's going to change. The only thing is administration taxation will change. And I think it's not a terrible thing. I'm not saying that's the way I want to go. I'd rather see merger, but doing the same thing over and over again for 63 years and expecting a different result. I think not working. No, I appreciate you bringing that up. I did forget to say, I had the MOUs on my mind and I forgot to mention that, you know, whatever we do we have to get away from the contracts that can be walked away from, you know, like, you know those were, as far as I understand it, never intended to be permanent. They've worked out well, but you know, we know very well that they're very hard on staff to operate under and frankly, they're hard for both boards. I think, you know, that has to be part of what we look at too, you know, either we codify those somehow or we look at restructuring them or backing out. And- I don't, Raj, you're right. I don't think going forward with a lot of contracts is, you know, in saying that's how we're going to solve all this is the right way. I think we knew that and then we started going down the path. I mean, we started on merger back in 2018, you know, we've been at this a long time. And I think that we had kind of had it in mind that, well, if we hadn't gone with merger, we were going to look for some more permanent ways. Maybe, you know, get legal counsel to talk to us about some charter changes and you would put these agreements into a charter. So it makes a little more tricky to change it, but we just hadn't gone down that path. But I hear you and you're absolutely right. If we did continue, if we did go the path of a sort of a restructured status quo, yeah, we'd want to have a more permanent way of putting them in there. I agree. So in terms of next steps, now that we've all, we've gone around, one of the things that I've heard a fair amount tonight, not just from ourselves, but from the public comment was that there are alternatives. George, you're very clear to point that out that that is a plural. The other thing that I want to know is we've said a lot of feelings and I will also say it feels like we've said a lot of assumptions. We have some assumptions as to how things look or what we're lacking are facts. One of the things that hasn't pointed out is that we do, if we want to go forward to the community and say, how do we want to move forward? If I were not on this board, I would want to present it with what those options would mean to me. Not with assumptions, not with, yeah, we kind of have this figured out, but with facts. So one of the things that I would like to ask the board to consider, the board to consider is forming a committee to help do this research. And I know that there was some research that was done in terms of the governance subcommittee, back with the joint subcommittee that was created to do some research. I'm talking about the nitty gritty research. I'm talking about what do these options actually mean? This is of course after we hear from our legal counsel about what the available options are. At the same time, we could then also have a group who's working on outreach. So in my mind, we have a group who can help us to look into what these issues are, who can help to put facts to these issues, and another group who can help to inform the community about these issues. And the reason why I think that a committee could help out with this is frankly, I think of our own bandwidth. We also just talked about how we have some urgent matters to take care of, which are our immediate agreements. Those are things that we absolutely need to take care of. I don't believe that the five of us have the bandwidth to do the research into the available options and do the outreach. I also don't believe our staff have those kinds of that kind of bandwidth. I know that we have a lot of intelligent people in our community who can do a lot of this work with us. So I wonder what the board, how you would feel about creating two committees, one for research and one for outreach or possibly one to do both. I'm not wedded to having two. It may have one or two members of the trustees, but then have it be a citizen committee as well so that that way we can help to share the bandwidth and tap into the expertise that exists in our community. I'll go first. I don't want to cut anyone off. I guess I'll beat everyone to the draw here. I think it's a fine idea, Andrew. I would like to maybe, I would suggest you probably, I mean, I don't have a problem with committees, been on lots of committees. So I'm kind of a committee guy, but I may sit this one out, but I would only say that the governance subcommittee, we met for almost three years and compiled massive amounts of information. So a lot of that information, you're, if you're putting together some kind of committee like that, a lot of that information might already be available to them. We looked at all kinds of stuff and I don't know if Elaine and Laurie are still here, but Elaine and Laurie were both on the governance sub and Raj was too. And we did, we had Ann Janda, who came in and worked part-time for six months and went through all kinds of, got all kinds of information. So I would only say there's probably a lot of that, a lot of the footwork is already done. You're a committee, if they just got focused and really knew what they were looking for, probably a lot of that work is already there for them. Wholeheartedly agree, would not be a start from scratch. Right. I guess I'd support that. Yeah, I mean, I'd wanna see what the, what the charge is, we come up with something on that. And I will say I've had three people, two of whom spoke tonight, suggest the same thing. And I would love the idea of members of the public coming in and really digging into this and working on that. So Andrew, this committee and having people weigh in on it, obviously we're talking about the village, but is this something that we're sharing with the select board as well? So my personal feeling, and I wanna be very clear, this is my personal feeling is this is time for the village to talk and this is time for the village to figure out what we want. This is not a joint effort. This is a village effort. And so no, this would not be something that I would see doing jointly with the select board. I would see this as the village on the effort. I've gotta add something and maybe this is not appropriate, but I think it's important. We, this, the subject of a village town merger is a inflammatory one. It's a volatile one. And we all are, we all well remember, not very long ago, we put a citizen committee together to look at recreation. We had a joint committee to look at recreation. And they were vilified. They were, you know, they had their personal lives, their personal motives dragged through the mud. They were depicted in demeaning ways. And then at the end of the game, they had their recommendation compared to a venereal disease. So that was one of the reasons when we talk about merger, I was very hesitant to a point to, you know, we had a lot of calls. Oh, why don't you put a citizen committee together for village and town merger? Because I said, yeah, I know what, I'm not going to appoint a private citizen. We sign up, we're the trustees in the select board. We sign up for this stuff. We know that we're going to be called cheats and liars and scoundrels, but the average citizens that we tap to serve on committees, we serve on the tree committee or the planning commissioner. You know, they're not going to be subjected to the abuse, but when you put them on a committee that's going to be dealing with something with merger, you got to be careful because, and that doesn't mean don't do it, but you got to, we got to be careful. You got to tell them they're going to have to have thick skin because they're going to get, they're going to get, they're going to get criticized. And you know that that's going to happen. So that's something to consider. That's one of the reasons I didn't want to push, I haven't been a big fan of citizen committees dealing with village town issues since that very unpleasant experience. I wholeheartedly hear that, George, and completely agree with you. I think that in terms of that, what I call that research committee, that's why I see it as not a body that would provide us with a recommendation. That was one of the things that I know that the recreation governance group did is came back to us with a recommendation on how to move forward. I'm not looking for a recommendation, I'm looking for the facts. And then the facts that we can then have presented to the community and really engaged a broader community in the conversation of how to move forward. For multiple reasons, one of which is, I don't think that just the five of us are the people who should be determining how we move forward. Now, I think at least not in a vacuum. Yeah, I agree with that. And I appreciate George bringing that up because I remember that very well. And I would say that that's a good plan, Andrew. And if any speaking from that group has to be done, it really should be from a member of the board that happened to be working with them and not have a repeat of what happened before. I mean, it was ugly and yeah, so that's a great modification. Good way to look at it. So with that, what I would propose to do is I can work with staff on having a formal proposal for our next meeting. Hopefully we could then at that meeting make it final in terms of a charter to create either one or two committees to see this work through so that that way we can then start the call. Ideally, so that's our next meeting in March, ideally our first meeting in April. Hopefully we could then have interviews and just approve of people and get this process started sooner rather than later. I get it, I'm sorry, I just, I agree, Andrew. I don't want to tie it up, but I keep going back to the same thing. You know, your committee is gonna have to tap into staff resources. And the staff, our administrative staff is set up and committed to serving both boards. And we gave them the charge and we gave Evan the charge when he came in here to try to unify this community. And so we had to be, you know, we have to really be think, be a little thoughtful about what does it mean to say you're gonna create a committee that is going to be tapping into staff resources and the point of that committee, the mission of that committee is to gather information that will separate the village in the town. I have to think about this a little bit. I don't know, I'm just very concerned about putting staff in the middle of something, that's all. So I want to be clear, this isn't to separate the community. The point is to research the logistics around the alternatives. It is not to figure out should we merge. That decision of should we merge would be later, would be the engagement part of the process. I'm talking about researching. So how are you envisioning next week, the next meeting then, as you said, we'd look at a charter for that committee or committees. Is that when we would have a discussion about, well, let me preface that by saying, I don't want to limit their possible alternatives they'll be looking into. I want to hear those come back and that creativity come from that committee. But there will be some things that I do want on that list. And is that when we would discuss them? I mean, again, I don't want to limit them. I want creativity to come out of this. And I want to hear things we haven't thought of before. Erys, is that something you, how do you envision coming up with this mission statement for them and, you know. I wouldn't, okay, I was gonna make a joking comment. So I would envision that the way that this would happen is that there are only a finite number of legal options. It's not as if there is a giant spectrum or a rainbow full of options of how the village can move forward. I think that this may likely be more prescriptive. With that said, I would hope there would be one, maybe two trustee members on this committee where if there is an idea that legal counsel may not have advised on yet, but that is legal, that that does get researched and does get vetted through or does get explored. So I guess I would agree that it doesn't have to be 100% limiting in case there is something else that is legal. But ultimately, if it isn't a legal option, then I don't want to see anybody waste time researching it. Right. How large of a committee you talk at the end of? No idea. All right, and just curious. I mean, no problem with people weighing in, but the fewer people, the more focused more it's easier, but obviously, you don't want to have too few people. You want to reach out to as many people as you can, but I'm thinking like four, five, maybe seven at max. That sounds about right to me at the same time. You know, if we get 40 people who apply, we can windle it down, does a four, does a five or seven turn to nine. I think some of that we could figure out depending on how many apply or how many and the candidates themselves. So it sounds as if I'm getting the sentiment from the board that's at our next meeting, we can hopefully approve of or finalize a charter for the, for a research committee. Sure. Yep, Amber, you missed a whole bunch of good stuff. Well, to the record, I was listening to the entire thing. And I heard you all. And it was excellent, excellent. So just a quick question, Andrew. Yeah. The next meeting, are you gonna ask Claudine and Dan to attend as well? I don't know, maybe. If we want them, then yes. Do we need them or can we just have them weigh in and get comment from them from either an email or whatever, just if we have questions? I mean, as we're having an executive session later. I just want to say, my experience with lawyers is unless you have really specific questions, you're gonna pay a ton of money, you know? Thanks, George. Yeah. I'm okay with getting a memo or something, but I do think that's important that we get some direction from our legal counsel in the next week or so as to where we're going with this. I agree. I agree. I would agree. If it's possible for legal counsel to reduce that to writing, succinct writing, and get it to us before our next meeting, so that if we have any questions, obviously we're gonna get the packet ahead of schedule that we could pull them in for a discussion if we need to. Yep. After with that as an alternative. Good idea. Sounds good. And, Kevin, hi. Just a quick question for Amber. What legal questions do you want answered? You don't have to answer it tonight. If you wanna email them to me as we talk about what legal questions, like what are your options? Yeah, I think that that's the biggest question is where do we go from here? What are our legal options from this point forward? With that, do you want? You broke Evan. Yeah, I was thinking of how to do the question. You broken. I think they'll understand it, knowing the context, I think they'll get it. Yep. Trustees, any other questions or are we good on this item? All right. Are we gonna need to fund this committee? Possibly. Okay. I mean, well, that will depend because if it goes into the next fiscal year, then it would fit into that definition of a committee, which would receive the stipend that wouldn't start until and when the budget gets passed. And then, yeah. We could also, we could, I could talk with Sarah. We have, you have surplus funds, you could designate to this. George, I feel like there's something you wanna say. Well, I just, I don't wanna get up to the committee, but our, when you say, if there are any more questions or is that it, we're gonna leave this subject for what's next. I was saying, are we done with this business item? Well, I had one more thing I just wanted to bring up because we kind of dealt with it a little bit. It's a little bit of uncertainty. And so I'd like to come back to it. So as I understand it, we hear that there's a petition going around for a revoked for the merger charter. Is that correct? Yep. That's what I've heard. And that goes to the select board and I'm not, and I haven't heard if under statute they are compelled to hold a revoked. If they are, what is the warning period? How much time is that? Have we established that? And additionally, if there is a revoked for merger, I would like to point out that we had about a thousand fewer votes from the village in this last merger effort than we did in November. And if literally 25 people from the village had shown, 25 more people from the village who favored merger had shown up, we wouldn't be having this present conversation. So I'm just curious, we seem to have touched on the whole revoked issue, but then we kind of just skipped over it. And I know, I totally get, and I understand the frustration and I understand what's driving the whole separation thing, but that is something that is a dynamic and it's an important one. And I just wanted to maybe spend a little bit more time discussing it before we leave this subject altogether. Well, can I comment on that? Yeah. When you said that 25 more people from the village had come and voted or 27, I think it was 27 more than needed anyways, that's assuming that they're going to vote for merger. And there are people within the village, I know I've talked to several who are opposed to merger because as they expressed it to me, they don't want to wait 12 years for tax equity. They've been paying extra for all their life, or at least as long as they've lived in the village and they want, they're done with it. They want instant equity and sense of separation. So, you never know what you're gonna get. Sure, sure. Yeah, totally hear that. And I think Evan can address the logistics to your question, George. Okay, so I can and Susan McNamara Hill is also on the meeting. So if I misspeak, I want her to correct me. There is a reconsideration statute on the books persons have to get X amount of signatures, I believe it's 5% of the registered voters in the town that's about 820. You have 30 days from the election to submit the petition that petition would go to the select board because it was a town-wide vote. Yeah. A board would have to know less than 30 days and know more than 40 days warn a vote that would have to occur within 60 days. The issue currently at hand is there is an election scheduled for April 13th. That is the village budget, the village board of trustees and Essex-Westford school districts budget and their board. That's one thing. So if someone was trying to do that and they wanted to have it on that ballot, basically that would have to go to the select board who does, the select board does not have a scheduled meeting before that deadline. If it were to be received, a special meeting would have to be called and that they'd have to agree to put it on that ballot. That is, they're not required to, they are only required that it must be done within 60 days, it is their purview as to when. But one last thing, since the vote was done by Australian ballot, it would be required to be done by Australian ballot for a recount. That's as far, that's what I know Susan has been nodding at me on the screen. So I think I got, although she's got, she's very dimly lit. So it's either that or it's a seizure. It's very romantic. There you go, Andrew, I got the lab. There you go. So it is a serious question. So that is the statute on that. Okay. And if I can, I'm sorry, Susan, go ahead. I cut you off and you, but you're muted. So that's easy to do. No, that's fine. And Claudine has now come into the screen. Claudine's here too. Well, Evan said everything the right way. So I am going to let you guys go on. Can I, just while I have you right here, Susan, I just wanted, my understanding is it has to be exactly the same charter. We can't get into renegotiating the charter, put a different charter on a revote ballot. I just, I'm pretty sure that's the case. It's a, it's either a reconsideration or a rescission of the original question. So you'd be voting on the exact same thing. Okay. Voting to overturn this, whatever it was. Okay. And, and I just want to point out folks, trustees. So we, without lifting a finger without doing anything, that is also happening. That's a dynamic in the background and that's an unpredictable component of what's going on. So we have to be thinking cognizant of that. We could be making plans for separation and everything. And all of a sudden we're merged. And then that would be it. That would not, you would not be able to redo that vote. Correct. Yeah. You can only bring, you can only revote on one, on an issue once per calendar year. Okay. So, okay. So I just wanted to make the point, there's, there's, That's fine. There's a lot going on. There's a lot going on here. That is true. Evan, did you have something else you were going to add to that? No, just, just the, well, yes, I'm sorry. So bear in mind, and I've had a conversation with the CFO of Essex Westford School District. So the other thing is, if for some reason someone, the select board or other would want to move the April 13th meeting, there's also rules on what happens if a budget fails. If a budget fails, there's another, you have to figure out why it failed. You have to change your, whatever you're going to do to change your budget if you're going to, and then you have to re-worn it. And I think that takes a minimum of 10 days and you can redo it. But again, it was done by Australian ballot, which means you're going to have to redo a ballot, which means you're going to mail out all these ballots again. So the school district does not want to go past the first week of May in any vote, because then that would at least give them one chance to get back in front of the voters before June 30th. That's their deadline. So, and Claudine, did I say that correctly? And Susan, did it sound correct? Yeah, thanks. It is very complicated. Australian ballot is a very good thing, except we mail out 16,000 ballots. That is 16,000, so there's 16,000 envelopes stuffed within 16,000 envelopes with a ballot inside. And in this case, luckily, I think it's a village on one side, school district on the other. So it's really just, so it is an endeavor. Plus we have to have the Board of Civil Authority and we need two polling places, one in the town and one in the village. So that it's not confusing where people vote, so. It seems in some ways we're starting to also get into our own village annual meeting stuff. So I just want to name, we're starting to get kind of close to that topic. I thought you asked me the rules. Yeah, I just wanted to also name that. Yes. Well, can I bring it back to the committee? Yeah. You know, I asked this with all respect to all of our frustration and passion around this topic right now with everything going on that we just discussed. Do we need to have that committee chartered and forms at the next meeting? Or I'm all forgetting things going. No time like the present, but I just wonder, you know, is there bandwidth for that right now? Or do we wait and see if that petition comes in and if the select board decides to act on it? Seems to me we might know by our next meeting, but just a thought. Yeah. We have annual meeting to get ready for and stuff so. So personally, I would like to not, or I would like to move forward. And the reason why I would like to move forward is so that we don't lose time. Should we need it? So I would rather just get the process started and then not need it, then delay the process and end up being a month or so behind. I agree. Okay, fine. So board members, is there anything else in regards to the discussion on how the bill should proceed from the merger votes? Everything's perfectly clear, Andrew. In all seriousness, do any of you have questions? I've been taking notes, so I think I could answer them. All right, so there's no decision that I've heard that needs a motion at this point at our next meeting. Expect to see some committee charter draft. And we will go from there. I also again want to thank all the residents who have stayed with us this far and who have participated. So thank you so much. And now I do need someone's help. Are we going now to the approval of the information hearing and the annual meeting? No, next, I have a petition. Okay. Second chair. I wasn't sure. So yes, now we're going into the portion where there is a petition that is being brought to us. I don't have all the details. I'm not sure if staff have all the details on the petition. Thank you. But I think that if the board is okay, I would like to actually ask if the person behind or if the person representing the petition was here, if they could present it to us. Hello, Annie. Hi, can you hear me? We can. Thank you. My voice is a little bit tired. I'm sorry. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. What I'd like to do is read the letter that was the petition submission today. If I may. This letter dated March 9th, 2021 to Susan McNamara Hill, Village Clerk, Village of Essex Junction, 81 Main Street, Essex Junction, Vermont, O5452. Dear Susan McNamara Hill, attached, please find a petition with the following advisory article requesting that the trustees hold a special meeting for consideration via Australian ballot. Shall the Village of Essex Junction advise the Board of Trustees that if the current plan for merger with the town of Essex does not pass, the Board of Trustees shall draft a charter to create the independent city of Essex Junction for consideration by the Village of Essex Junction voters no later than November, 2021. We advise that the charter shall not include any municipal districts, interlocal contracts, special tax districts, or other relationships with the town of Essex for the provision of village government services. The only exception may be for the consideration of police services. There are 416 signatures supporting the article from registered voters of the Village of Essex Junction, nearly 5.5% of the total number of registered voters, 7,579. We started collecting signatures on Saturday. We worked hard to get this petition to you so that at tonight's board meeting, Tuesday, March 9th, the trustees could consider including this in the warning for the ballot on April 13th as an advisory article along with the Village budget and board elections. While we recognize that we missed the 47-day window for citizen-led petitions items to be included at annual meeting, we hope that the trustees will add this article on their own accord. Citizen-led petitions with 5% plus signatures from registered voters do not come along often. While the Village voice on merger was clear in March and November, passing 81% and 74%, respectively, what isn't clear with any data is what the villagers want. If the failed merger vote holds, this advisory article will help gather the pulse on the concept of complete separation. We are also working on a petition for reconsideration of the vote on the plan for merger with the town of Essex. We have over 60% of the signatures needed for that to take place and hope to submit that petition as soon as possible. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me. Thank you for your consideration and for hearing the voices, for hearing the voice of Village citizens. Sincerely, Annie Cooper. Thank you, Annie. To the staff controlling the screen, could you put the text of the petition up just so we have it and can better be shared with the public? Thank you. So moving forward from here, and again, Annie, thank you so much for this. I'm not sure who best to answer this question if that is Evan or if that is Claudine. I know in my tenure, we have not had this kind of a petition. And so first off, I would like to know legally what must we do? I turn that over to Claudine. No, I'm gonna mute myself. So I think the issue to consider when you get a petition like this, which is being requested to put this on the annual meeting for April 7th is looking first and foremost that the board has to vote as to whether they want to add this because I think Annie is correct. They did miss the 47 day window that is required by 17 VSA 2642. So under that particular statute, there has to be at least 47 days before the meeting when the voters can add this warrant article for consideration at that annual meeting. That time has unfortunately passed. So what you're being asked to do is the next question is in order for the trustees to themselves add another warrant article to the annual meeting. It has to be not less than 30 days and not more than 40 days from the meeting which commences on April 7th. So if you wanted to consider this, the first question that needs to be asked is are you within that timeframe? So you would have to then notice a vote on adding this article and you would need, then how would you do that? You would have to do that by way of a special meeting which you need to notice 24 hours from today. And then the question would be, do you have the requisite 30 days that are required to be able to add that to the annual meeting? And I think unfortunately the answer is no because even if you had a vote to add this tomorrow, the following day would be day one. So that would be day the 11th of March and then counting 30 days out in your past April 7th already. So I don't think the time exists to be able to do this. So Claudine, I just wanna be clear on one thing. Our ballot or the elections themselves are supposed to happen, conclude on April 13th. Right, I understand that Andrew. I think it's one meeting though as I understood it from Greg last year and unless this is an incorrect understanding, the meeting actually commences on April 7th and on that day you address non-Australian ballot issues. As I understand it, the meeting then is continued until the 13th on which you address Australian ballot issues. So that is technically one meeting that is commenced on the 7th and then continued to the 13th. So I'm just taking a look at our next agenda item to for adopting the annual meeting. And I see just maybe this is just too much of a naming convention issue. I see that the 7th is labeled as an informational meeting and I see the 13th is listed as an annual meeting. And Andrew, below the information on how to join, it describes the 13th as the 2021 village annual meeting will be held entirely by Australian ballot, a public informational hearing on the articles to be voted on a village annual meeting be held according to 17 VSA. Yeah, okay, maybe that's not clear. Yes, I mean, we need to look at it because the language that I have from Greg from last year is the village voters approved. And it was a quote holding the 2021 annual meeting on Wednesday, April the 7th, 2021 to act upon any articles not involving voting by Australian ballot and to reconvene on Tuesday, April 13th, 2021 to vote for the village officers and transact any business involving Australian ballot. So if that was in fact what was voted upon, then it seems like it's one meeting and that meeting begins on the 7th and reconvenes on the 13th. So I thought though that the legislature had given everybody, all communities, municipalities the approval to change the dates regardless as to what the community had previously voted for or voted upon based upon the pandemic. That I can't answer that. So that may be the case. And so since it's just along those lines since we haven't officially warned the meeting and that's the next agenda item, is there then not time where should we want to change that date and or change what we officially call as annual meeting? That's the case, then you may have that opportunity, yeah. So it sounds like I guess one of the first questions is do the trustees want to move forward with getting this onto the annual meeting ballots? Is that correct, Claudine? Yes. I think then we also should kind of look at the language of the other question of itself. That would be something that I think merits some discussion. Go ahead, Amber. Just a quick question. This is a non-binding article. Just advisory, correct? Yes. Just wanted to spend the nature. Susan, I'm sorry, I see your hand is up as well. Yeah, I just wanted to be based on the change in the legislature to allow for COVID to allow communities to change their meetings. I did call the Secretary of State's office for giving all of you my timeline that I usually give every year for getting ready. And I said, we're doing it all by Australian ballot. It's normally on April 7th and then we adjourn to Australian ballot. What should we do? And he said, if it's all gonna be Australian ballot, you should warn it for April 13th, the day you would be adjourning it too. So that's what we've gone with. Okay, thank you Susan. He's the advice from Secretary of State's office. Appreciate that. So question to the trustees, do we want to move forward with this petition and having this, is this a non-binding referendum? What do we call this? I guess I would call it a non-binding advisory question. Okay, do we want to include what Evan just said onto the ballot? It's 10 o'clock at night. This is the best you're getting out of me right now. No, they've got 5.5% of the voters on that. I think that speaks to yes. So I'm not questioned 5.5% of my constituents. For me? Yes. Anybody oppose that? Yeah. So in terms of the language, I certainly, I agree that I think there are some points we really want to clarify here. I also want to ensure that it does not contradict the intent of the question either. So I would hope that, Annie, I hope you're still with us because I want you to make sure that this does not contradict with the intent. So as we have a copy of the petition, if it could be brought back up on the screen, that would be greatly appreciated. And if you could scroll to the portion that is indented a little bit higher up. Thank you. Okay. Claudine, since you're here and you are our attorney, what would you recommend with this in terms of the language? Just read it. I'm just reading it over one more time. So I think perhaps, I guess two questions came to mind when I read the question. First question is, is this something that could be accomplished by November 2021? That's one thing I was wondering and whether the board feels that, perhaps I would massage maybe the language a little bit of the introductory paragraph, just so it's a little bit more clear as to what the advisory question is. So shall, I think I would change it to shall the board of trustees or the trustees like this? So obviously we know the vote for merger did not pass. So perhaps that could be changed to shall the board of trustees draft a charter to create the independent. I think the intent. I'm not sure that that's what they're looking for, but they're looking to figure out whether the voters want the trustees to investigate creating a charter, is that correct? Well, from what Annie was saying, I believe the intent is that should the reconsideration vote fail, that this would then, this is for that purpose. So should reconsideration fail, then we move forward with an independent city of Essex Junction. Should the reconsideration vote pass, then this would be a move point. That's my understanding though. And again, Annie, this is your petition. So I would ask you to clarify that is in line with your intent. Andrew, will you do me a favor? What's that? You asked me a direct question, succinctly so I can answer you exactly. Do my best. Is the intent of the petition to be that should the reconsideration vote of merger fail, then the trustees are to create an independent city of Essex Junction plan? Thank you for being so clear. This petition has nothing to do with revote and just with the outcome of the merger vote with this current merger charter. We don't know if there will be a revote. We are currently at your table with this petition and this petition doesn't rely on whether or not a reconsideration occurs. This petition relies only on the language within the petition and the letter which speaks to this current charter and this current merger. So if there's a revote, that's one thing but we already have this current charter and that's yeah, sorry, I'm talking too much. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so there's that first portion Claudine that you mentioned of maybe taking the word shall, putting that in front of where it says the board of trustees after the comma following the word pass. Right, right. George, I'm sorry, I see your hands up. Hang on, hang on, I was muted on there. So this is a non-binding resolution, correct? Correct. We don't have to, you don't, so if we, I mean, this is really just polling the voters how they wanna go and if in the interim period putting this in and there's a revote on the merger charter and it passes even if the resolution in front of us right here we're considering passes overwhelmingly, we're not bound to follow through on it if some other event takes place, correct? I would follow that logic and say yes. Yeah, I mean, so that's why I'm just wondering why we don't just simplify and say shall the S Exjunction Board of Trustees draft a charter to create the independent city of S Exjunction for consideration and so forth and leave the whole contingent piece out of it? It seems like we're wrestling with that and I'm wondering if you really have to wrestle with it. That's a good question. I think some of that also depends on when this happens. If this happens at the same time as a potential reconsideration or if it doesn't, I think that that's one of the logistics. I think that that's also an important logistic in the sense that if I'm going to vote on something as a village resident and on one ballot it says should the trustees explore separation on another one it says should the community merge? I may be a little confused. Now I've said should the village pursue an independent city if merger doesn't pass, that at least tells me oh, I have two options here. This one is for merger, this one is for fit, this one is for an independent city. So to me, I think that that's caveat about should merger not pass, I think it's kind of important. Again, only if this happens at the same time or if it is not resolved by the time this happens which we don't know. So I guess what I'm saying is it seems like keeping that statement of or some statement thereof around should merger with the town of Essex not pass that should stay in there. Do other trustees have a thought on this? Feeling alone. So if it's advisory and the question is whether the first part about merger passing or not just needs to be in there if it's advisory, I think we get the gist of what they want as I understand that the petitioners are also going for a revote petition. So we know their intent, their intent is to merge. Should that fail in this? And although, yeah, I guess if the revote does occur it will happen most likely after this or concurrently. So yes, thinking it through at 10, 15. I mean, is any here still? Yeah. I think Andrew then you perhaps you could add that language at the end, perhaps you could, I think it might just be a little bit clearer than perhaps at the end to say, so the language would read, shall the board of trustees draft a charter to create the independent city of Essex or consideration by the village of Essex extension voters no later than November 2021 should efforts for reconsideration of the vote from merger fail. Sounds good to me. Good. Thumbs up. I think I heard Annie asking if she could speak. You didn't, I'm so sorry. I was thinking you couldn't see my hand and I didn't mean to interrupt or be rude. I'm apologetic. Go ahead, Annie. Okay. What I would like to say is that the language is intentionally advisory and non-binding. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. I think that we have a plan with Claudine's edits. It sounded like I thought I heard from most of the trustees that those edits sounded good. Did anybody contradict or disagree with that? Or are we keeping in the last sentence about what the created independent city charter does not include? I don't think that happened. I will keep it. Okay. Just making sure I understood. You need a motion. I assume so. Claudine. You're muted, Claudine. Okay. Sorry. So this just raises to me still the question of and I wanted to just quickly look at today's the agenda for today to make sure it was clear that you were voting on whether to add this to the warning for the April 13th. And if the meeting's being held on the 13th, we still have to make sure that you're within the 30 days for the 13th, which I think you are. And maybe if Greg's here, you could comment on that or Mark, I don't know if you've calculated that out. Yeah. He's here too. So yes. We are within 30 days of that date of that Tuesday, the 13th. And Claudine, to answer your first question, this was not on the agenda that was posted publicly and warned, but the trustees made a motion and to amend the agenda tonight to discuss if consider taking action on this petition. Oh, okay. And so that was done at the beginning of the meeting. Right. Got it. Okay. So that was amended then we can vote tonight on it and add it to the 13th. Okay. And before any motions or votes, I want to make sure it is clear that this is going to be advisory. I want to make sure however that gets warned or whatever that it is advisory and that Susan, you're able to do that. So, you know, however you do that in clerk world. Does that make sense? I hope. Hi. This Susan, the original language says advise, but I don't know if you've taken out that part. So shall the village get a subjunction to advise the board of trustees? That's why I want to make sure that this remains advisory. So since it is advisory, if we do a complete 180 and if we just keep the text in as exactly as it is that keeps the merger part, that keeps the advise part. I realize that it may not be, I'm sorry, this is insensitive. It may not be that the perfect legalese language is it good enough? Is that question to... Everyone wants to answer it though. I'm not answering that one. Claudette and your expertise, is that language good enough for the intent for an advisory question? Just wondering if we could say shall the board of trustees be advised to draft? Change that first line. It's great. So shall the board of trustees be advised that at the current plan of merger with town of Essex does not pass and so on and so forth? Well, or as we had had it before, so shall the board of trustees be advised to draft a charter to create? Should a motion for, should a vote for reconsideration? Should efforts for a vote for reconsideration fail? That's good. Sounds good. That sounds good. I'll move that. Okay, hold on, hold on, before that gets me. No, it's okay. I realize it's 10-20 now. Can someone restate what was just said? So shall the board of trustees be advised that the village board of trustees be advised to draft a charter and then the language remaining the same to create, till you get to number 21st and then comma should efforts for seeking a vote for reconsideration on the issue of merger fail? So trustees, how does that sound? Does it sound as if everything is clear enough that if you were in a voting place you'd understand that this is advisory and that it is contingent upon merger not passing? You're not gonna be able to, different people have different ability to understand. I think, you know, in the lead up to our village meeting or the informational meeting people are gonna be more aware and knowledgeable of what this means. Can we say, shall the village of S6 junction give a non-binding, make a non-binding request of the board of trustees? I mean, can we make it really, really clear? I mean, you know, somebody could walk out and say advise, well, I told you to, I mean, if you're asking, do I think it's vague? Do I think it's vague? I mean, to somebody that hasn't been doing this for the last 35 minutes, could be. You know, they could go either way. So, you know, not to blow this up but we can be really, really blunt you know, shall the village of S6 junction, I don't know how to put the word non-binding in there but you know, yeah, I was thinking about that for a second. Susan, if I can ask you a quick question. Is a non-binding item like this something that when it is on the ballot is it under a heading that says non-binding or is it just listed with everything else to look the exact same as everything else on the ballot? I do not have the expertise to answer that. I'm not really familiar with non-binding articles. I don't recall ever having one on the ballot in my time. Sorry. No, fourth shot. How about you lead in with by a non-binding resolution shall the S6 junction Board of Trustees so forth and so on? Beautiful, George. Man, you're good with words. Well, it's late. So I've got an easy audience. Does that make sense? Does that work? Sure. Okay. So Cathy as the minute taker do you feel that you understand what was what we have? So I believe I'm at the point of no return. No, I'm just kidding. Shall a non-binding say that one more time, George? Yeah, I will. By a non-binding resolution, Alma, shall the S6 junction Board of Trustees draft a charter to create the independent city of S6 junction for consideration by the village of S6 junction voters no later than November 2021. Perfect. Thank you very much. And then the rest of it as it's written there. Has written. Okay. So I think we have to add that should the effort for reconsideration fail, right? Yes, that's what I was going to say. I'm sorry. Yes, it's sliding, but after November 21 should the comma, should the merger vote fail? Yeah. How about instead of should, how about in the event? Yeah. No, I think should is better. Use action verbs. Whatever. Sounds good. It's too wordy. Kathy, do you want to? I've got it, if you know as I'm going to make sure that I check it and recheck it before I get the minutes out. But yeah, I think I've got it. Okay. Trustee, is there any other? Hang on one second. It's not really about Kathy. It's important for the minutes. This thing really needs to go to Susan so that it could start going to the printer. It's more important that Susan has the language. Well, it will be put in the warning. So whoever's finalizing the warning, is that Marguerite? I'm not sure, but I will do it for now and I have the language. So I have it and I can email it out so that everyone has it. And I use the warning to order the ballots. Right. Okay, that's great because so between Marguerite, me and others, I think we have what you said. Yeah, I have it and I'll add a draft to it and then I'll send the warning around to make sure it looks okay, you know. So you can. Plus this is on tape. I was just going to say, just make sure to write down the four hour and 18 minute mark and that's what we got here. I did do that. Thank you very much. Disregard the first four hours and 16 minutes. Okay. So we need a motion on that. All right. Thank you. The trustees accept the request for a petition, non-binding petition, you know, with the language as discussed to be placed on the town meeting, Australian ballot. Village meeting? Sorry. Totally hear you. Thank you Dan for the motion. Is there a second? Second. Is there any further discussion on that motion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Anybody opposed? All right. Annie, thank you for your work on this. I believe you said this started on Saturday and I'm honestly blown away and quite speechless at the amount of signatures you've been able to get such a short time period. Can I tell you something? Yes, yes please. It felt like a party of community. Like it was just, it was such a beautiful experience and it felt only like people coming together. It was just constant feeling of community. I saw people I haven't seen in 10 or 15 years. I didn't even know that people knew me and it was just beautiful. And so I would like to take a moment to say to our community that thank you, all of you, for driving to all the places that the petitions were and thank you so much. It was so fun and thank you all for your hard work this evening, eloquent, elegant. Thank you all so much. You guys are question. Thank you. Thank you, Annie. Thank you, Annie. Appreciate the compliments of 1030 for being eloquent. So Claudine, with the petitions, so we have agreed to put it on to the annual meeting warning. Are there any other steps with this petition that we need to take now? Okay, so I just want to make sure if we, so we think the answer, have you moved the annual meeting then to the 13th or is that? That's the agenda item coming up right after this. Okay. This petition. I just want to make sure we're done with the petition before. Okay. No. Yep. Okay. I think you're fine and then I just wanted to make sure that that was being moved to the 13th so that when you did have enough time, you've got it already moved. I think we're good. Great. So now we moved the tree committee portion and we are considering the approval of the informational hearing and annual meeting warning. So I believe the, so here we have some of the logistics in terms of April 7th meeting, being a virtual meeting, similar to what was done through town meeting with the annual meeting taking place, being proposed on April 13th, also being done through Australian ballot. You can see the articles that will be that are on the warning in addition to or now having the addition of the petition that we just had. So one of the things that I wanted to bring up as we had heard earlier is clearly one of the biggest unknowns is this reconsideration vote. And so one of the questions that we need to answer is do we want to keep April 13th as a date that we vote? As I have mentioned, I know that the legislature has given communities the capability to move the date of their annual meeting, even if they have been previously voted upon. So we could choose to keep annual meeting on April 13th and whatever happens with reconsideration happens. The other thing we could do is we could pause and we could not approve the annual meeting to happen on April 13th, wait to see what happens with the reconsideration vote and align the village's vote with the reconsideration vote. The downside of doing that is should the reconsideration petition come forward in the next couple of days, it is possible for the select board to warn the reconsideration on April 13th. Can I ask a quick question? You can ask whatever you'd like. Oh, really? Yeah. Evan alluded to the school board, I guess I'll, if I can ask Evan directly. You said, sounded like you were alluding to the school board being open to the possibility of moving, but they wouldn't want to go past. I believe you said first few days of May. First day of May. First, okay. So it sounds like there might be some synergy available there, but how do we, that's a lot of moving parts that we can't count on. And the second question would be for whoever can answer it in COVID times with what the paradigm we're dealing with now is the state paying for this mailed ballot for the revoke. And I think I know, but I don't know for sure. So I don't, well, more importantly, I want to know if management knows or Sioux knows. Yeah, there is some money available to reimburse expenses due to having to mail all ballots out to all, you know, if communities choose to mail ballots out to everyone, we can recoup some of that money. I don't know how much is available. I plan on submitting something for the town election. I don't know if there'll still be money left to do for the village, but it's a different entity. I don't, I mean, I can apply for that also. So that, and I don't know how much is available, but I would definitely try to get some reimbursement from the state. And I guess the only reason that would be important is if we did a different day from the, if, I mean, that's again, the revote is a town vote. It's a select board problem in a sense, but aligning everything. Yeah, I doubt that there's money available for multiple votes, but I think I can get reimbursed for at least part of the cost of one of our votes. Go ahead, Evan. I have a procedural question to Claudine. Go ahead. If the meeting is warned tonight for Tuesday, April 13th, but then new information comes to light and the village slash school board want to move it from the 13th, what is the procedure to move the meeting back? So as far as I understand, if you want to change the date of the meeting, you have to warn the question of postponing the meeting and then vote on the issue of postponing the meeting. So you can actually warn the meeting for the 13th as proposed and if some new petition comes in in the next couple of days and the select board takes action on it, and you means the posting requirements for the warning of a new date, you could do so. And then one other thing we need to do would also be if we need to move the meeting on the 7th of April or do we just need to re-warn that? We need to re-warn that if we move it. So can you repeat your second question? There's an informational meeting scheduled for April 7th. Do we also need to move that meeting or just if it's warned it could stay? Yes, I believe you have to move that April 7th. I think tonight you should vote to move that informational meeting on the 7th to the 13th because I have a concern that that is one annual meeting with the informational portion of it starting on the 7th and reconvening on the 13th. So I think you do have the ability to move that meeting but you have to vote to move that meeting from the 7th to the 13th so that this all works so that the timing under 17 BSA for this warning going out for this being within those 30 days at the addition of this warrant article works. I see we have questions from Susan and Greg. Yeah, does that make sense? Go ahead. I'd go Susan. Yeah, so the 13th is the annual meeting. It's a biostrarian ballot and it's being held on the 13th because our normal annual meeting is April 7th. That's when we're having the informational hearing that's required to be held when you have an Australian ballot annual meeting. That's the informational meeting. It's not the annual meeting. Okay, as long as that's clear, I was confused it's just the language that got voted on last year sounded like that was the beginning of the meeting and then it would reconvened on the 13th. That was indicating we wouldn't have still be dealing with the pandemic, I think. But I mean, I did check this out with the elections director in the state. And this is recommended. So my question stands, we keep Wednesday the 7th as the informational meeting, we could warn the 13th, but if sometime in the next week or so, new information comes to light about a re-vote. The village board can re-warn, do all the proper processes, re-warn the 13th to a later date, which is agreed to by the town select board, the school district and the village. And possibly Westford. Does that sound? You just have to warn it. You'd have to notice it correctly to then warn it to a new date. That sounds like an out of the box idea. I like it. That's the non-moyer. Because the only way around it is, if not, then you have to warn the 13th tonight. And you do. You should warn, I think, and Greg's more of an expert is, you should warn the 13th tonight as long as you have the ability to move it, if necessary. And I believe the secretary of state has given that ability, but the rules are you have to go through a notice and a warning. Amber, why don't you go ahead? Are we expending any funds that we would essentially be having to spend twice if we do that approach? I think the only thing I can think of is if you're actually paying for an ad in the report or something. Yeah, you're paying for an ad. The ballots will get printed, but the actual date of the election is what's moving. And as long as you don't have to print ballots, what you would print about, as long as you don't have to do extra mailings, you shouldn't, but I can't guarantee you aren't gonna have no cost. I don't know, last year when we moved it before we ordered any ballots or anything and the ballots had the date of the actual meeting, I'm unclear about voting in May with ballots to say April 13th. What's the, can I ask what the lead time is for you, Sue? Like, so if we warn the 13th, how much time after today, what's your drop dead order? So, we can't just go and go and go obviously, but how does our ability as we approach the 13th to re-notice vote, change that date, coincide with your need to order ballots? That, that depends. Oh, if you signed, if you approve the warning tonight, I would be asking the printer for a proof of the ballot tomorrow or Thursday. The school district clerk is gonna be doing the same thing. And then we coordinate it so that the village school district vote is on the same ballot as the village municipal vote. It's a few moving pieces. No. But so how long could you wait until you had to make that order? We have to have the ballots in our hand 20 days before the election, which doesn't really give much time when you're mailing them out. I try to get them as early as I can because since we're mailing them, but if we mail them 20 days before the election and expect people to mail them back, that's pretty tight. So what I'm getting at, I guess, is like how much time do we really have to wait? If tomorrow ish- I would want to order ballots. We've got 34 days right now and we need 20 days to mail them out minimum. Do we have enough time? I guess we do have a little bit of time to wait. How much time do we need for a notice 24 hours? For a meeting? Yeah. Yeah. So 24 hours for that. So what I think I'm hearing is in order to make for, if we had to change the date, I think we would need to know that by the, by Thursday, this will Thursday, the 11th. And of course the school board would have to have time to get together and do the same. Yes. Yes. You'd have to have them on board with everything. And I know they were meeting today. I don't know if they were meeting for the start of If already signed there morning last week. I guess what I'm trying to figure out is what's our, what's our last day? What's the day we, the last day we'd have to notice this to make all this work minimum 20 days for the ballots. Yeah, it's hard. I mean, it's get the proof back, approve it, and then it's at least a week shipping to get them here. So Susan, do you, do you think that if Thursday comes that you can wait until then to approve of having the printer print the ballots? Yes. Yeah, Thursday would be okay. And by Thursday, I mean like end of the day Thursday. Yeah, I mean, I'm like by the end of this week. Yeah. So let me interject something Andrew. So for if there is a petition for reconsideration that goes to the select board, they do not have a meeting scheduled this week. They would have, we would have to call a special meeting which requires 24 hour notice. We don't have a petition in hand. So if it came in tomorrow, the earliest a select board meeting could be, would be Thursday, probably at 6.30. Can I chime in, Andrew, Mr. President? Sure. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know your hand was up Greg, sorry. That's good. Yeah, so I've got an email, it's act one H48 that temporarily allows municipal legislative bodies to change the date of the annual town meeting to a later date. I'm trying to read it on the fly. So Susan there, Chloe maybe you're more familiar. My quick reading is that a board can change the date of an annual meeting right up until the day before the annual meeting. That gets into the whole questions about there's a ballot printed, what's the cost gonna be? We're gonna have to, to warn these things in newspapers and spend that money. So I'll, hoping to be able to have some more expertise on that than me. And then as far as getting the petition in time and how that boils into it, I'd almost, my interpretation be that the trustees just voted to put that on the ballot. I think that the petition with the ballot signatures requires them to put it on the ballot. And again, I deferred to Claudine for legal interpretation of that, but the trustees voting to put that on the ballot do we need to have the official petition? Sorry, I don't have great answers, but just trying to raise some questions that maybe helpful or not. So we can push way out, but if it's a mailed ballot, that's not really feasible. I mean, really the 20 days is getting them out, getting them considered, getting them returned. Is that kind of, yeah, that's tough. Especially if that ballot is changing. Right, so it seems like basically we have this week and by the end of this week, we need to know, are we gonna keep it on the 13th or otherwise we need to warn a special meeting to happen what, no later than Friday. Sounds like it. But even if we move, even if we move it, then the school board has to move their vote. And what's the word? Well, so it's just the school board. Westford already met. So doesn't Westford vote on the school board? Yeah, but that's not their municipal meeting. It's not their municipal vote. It's just the school. Okay, I see what you mean. Sorry. It's part of it. Yep, apologize. New Town Clerk is involved in running it, but it's the school district vote. Okay, sorry. And so the only thing that I was gonna say to that is, yes, we have traditionally done the voting with the school district. It's done a great thing to limit the number of times that people have to vote, but we don't have to do it with the school district. That there's no requirement that we have to do that. It's just gonna come. And the other thing, it's not the whole idea of going to vote back in the day before the COVID was people having to drive, travel, go back and forth, home in places. Everything's gonna be in your home pretty much. I mean, two people make sure. Yeah, we saw that just now with only 42% back on the merger vote. So that doesn't give me a lot of confidence right now. If what we're trying to do is get a high turnout, simply mailing it, well, 42% is a lot for us for a mailed ballot that was a little low. So I just had ballots printed to be mailed out to everybody in the village for their village and school vote ballots inside it, which is gonna stay on the outside of the envelope. Village and school ballot enclosed. I'm gonna have to use white out on all of them. I don't know. Well, that's not good. So if I can summarize, it seems like what we need to do warn the meeting for the 13th and trustees be on your email. I can call each of you if necessary. If we need to do something before the end of the week. Makes sense. That sounds about right. Okay. Do we need a motion? Yes, I'm just trying to get, someone has the warning up. Do I need to amend this motion to add the petition question? Because above it, the recommendation says is basically I move the trustees approve and sign the warning for the 2021 informational meeting and annual meeting. But that's what it says, but there was the question of, from Claudine of, do we have to move the informational meeting? So all we're doing here is we're just doing the Australian ballot 13th part of it, right? So that language is good. I would like if Claudine is still with us to confirm. Muted. The memorandum has six things, not the added petition. So I just wanna be clear. Yeah. Yeah, cause right, we didn't have the petition. So we will need to make sure we know that. I'm satisfied of it. The annual meeting is taking place on the 13th. I think my confusion arose from some language before and so I'm fine with the annual meeting is taking place on the 13th and I'm fine with that. And we need to add a number six that has the advisory vote, right? With the addition previously discussed. All right, so I move the trustees approve and sign the warning for the 2021 informational meeting in annual meeting. I'll second. Thank you. With the addition. With the additional article number six that's not on this memo, you have to add. Okay. Do you just wanna amend that, Raj, to include the? Yeah, I'll accept that friendly amendment to include item six, the citizen petition for an advisory vote. George, since you seconded, are you good with that friendly amendment? I'm second. Yes, and I'm good with that. Okay. Is there any further discussion on that motion? Can I interrupt for just a second? Yes, you can. I would move article. So what the current article six would become article seven. This is usually the officers at the end. I think what Raj was referring to is within the memorandum, there are five bullet points. And so I think he was referring to just another bullet point there. Right. Is that right, Raj? Correct. Great, thank you. Yeah, you order how it needs to be ordered. So any further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Anybody opposed? All right, pass unanimously. Thank you all. Are we in the tree committee now? We are. We're in the tree committee. We're almost there, people. I'm gonna sign off then you don't need me anymore, correct? We're gonna need you in a few moments. Oh, you will? Okay. For executive session. Got it, I'm hanging on. This part will be very quick. So we had a non-resident apply to be on the tree committee. They're an advisory committee. We have non-residents on the housing commission. We just needed to decide whether we wanted to allow a non-resident on our committee. I think I captured it. I'm good with it. I think he's well-qualified. I think that this precedent has already been set. I think he's grand per se. Oh, go ahead, Amber. Amber. I was just gonna say that I think that the fact that he still owns property in Essex Junction, I mean, he's not, he's a non-resident, but he's a property owner. So to me, I think that that's the distinction. If you have one or the other, then that's good for me. He still has a vested interest in this town. Yep. Yep. Anybody wanna make a motion? If you put it up on the board, I'll make it. I can't remember. It disappeared. There's no motion. It's for discussion. Do we not need to make a motion? Or just at our next meeting, make a motion to approve of the individual? I think that the latter. Yes. We have to approve the individual at the next meeting. All right. Great. That's easy. Where are we now? So the executive session will do that after the consent agenda or after we finished everything else. So that brings us to the consent agenda. Motion to approve the consent agenda. Second. Thank you, Amber. Thank you, George. Any further discussion on that? Hearing none, all those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Anybody opposed? Okay. And reading flyer with board member comments. And I just have an hour and a half worth of stuff I wanna pontificate about. So anybody? Okay. No. Hearing none. Evan, anything you wanna share before we? No, sir. I just wanna thank all the people. There's still quite a few people in this meeting that's stuck with us. Yeah. Thank you for coming. Yeah. Thank you all. I'll say this lightly just saying that at least it's not killing 10 back in 2004, 2006 where they moved to secede from Vermont and become a community from New Hampshire. Yep. Thank you, Mr. New Hampshire. I'm here that well. They had the huts to go back to. All right. I will go ahead and move that the trustees make the specific finding that general public knowledge of confidential attorney client communications made for the purpose of providing professional legal services to the body would place the village at a substantial disadvantage. That's motion number one. All those in favor, please signify. Oh, sorry. Can I get a second? Second. Any further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Anybody opposed? Thank you. Motion up two. I move that the trustees enter into executive session to discuss confidential attorney client communications made for the purpose of providing professional legal services to the body pursuant to one BSA 313A1F and to include the village attorney and unified manager. Second. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Anybody opposed? Lovely. Are we coming back? We are going into a different link. We will not be coming back to this link. So all of those who have been in attendance, thank you for your patience. Thank you for sticking with us. We really appreciate it. Hope you have a good night. Night, everybody. Thank you, Kathy. Good night, Kathy. Take care. Thank you, everybody. Do you have the executive session link?