 I move that the select board enter into executive session to conduct a grievance hearing pursuant to one VSA 313A1D to include the unified manager, town legal counsel and witnesses, the employee and his or her witnesses, and legal counsel and Robert Fletcher legal counsel for the select board. Thank you, Sue. Thank you, Don. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? The motion passes 4-0. We'll go into executive session. Okay, we're returning to session here. We had an executive session. My apologies for the delay in the start of the meeting. We had other business we had to take care of. So next thing on the agenda is agenda additions or changes? Greg, are there any changes? I just want to make sure we had a comment that people hear us now. Okay, no agenda changes from staff. Any from board members? No. Okay, we'll move on to public to be heard. Public to be heard is a portion of the agenda where people attending can address the board on items that are not on the agenda. If you'd like to speak during public to be heard, you can either raise your hand in the team's application or raise your hand in the room. Again, if you'd like to speak, please be brief. Please be civil. Please refrain from inappropriate language. Address your remarks to me, Andy Watts, as the select board chair. Please do not attack other members of the public or town staff. If you are attending remotely, please keep yourself muted and your camera off to avoid distraction. And also, please note that these admonitions or these requests apply to the entire meeting, not just during public to be heard. Thank you for that, Sue. Okay. Is there anyone who'd like to speak during public to be heard? I see one hand in the room. Come on forward. Hi, everyone. Irene Renner. I was out and about this weekend and someone from Old Tomp Road stopped me and reminded me they have terrible internet connections on some portions of that road. So as we get ARPA funding, and as I read headlines about how Vermont has just invested in tons of fiber optic cable, I hope you will keep them in mind. They pay a lot of taxes to live in Essex and they don't have a lot of services in those most remote areas of town. Thanks so much. Thank you, Irene. Any other comments during public to be heard? Annie Cooper. Go ahead. Hey, sorry to bother, Andy. Am I correct that the meeting just, I just came in and then the meeting started. Did I just get really fortunate? You got very lucky, Annie. All right. Thank you. Thanks for waiting for me. I appreciate it. Any other public to be heard comments? I don't see any hands up. There's one. Come on forward. Hello. My name is Axel Hansy, and I just wanted to oppose the mask mandate. I don't feel that it is serving our community. I think maybe an advisory or something like that would be better than the actual mandate without the support of the police to enforce it. It forces business owners to kind of police it themselves. And I just feel that like an advisory or something like that would be better suited for the community. Thank you. Thank you. Any other comments? I don't see any online. I don't see any hands in the room. Just scrolling down to see if there's anybody on the phone. I do not see anybody attending on my phone. So I'll move on to the next business item, which is public hearing. I'll open the public hearing on the proposed 2022-2023 fit budget, municipal budget for the town of Essex. Is that you, Sarah? It's me. Hi, everybody. All right, Greg, I'm also just going to share my screen. Is that okay with you? Absolutely. All right. And your face is over here again. There you are. Okay. So we have been working on the FY23 general fund budget for the town. We have gone through with department head requests to management management review a full day town budget day. Earlier in the fall or so in November, and we've had two work sessions on the budget to get us to where we are this evening. We've warned a public hearing for the FY23 general fund budget for a total of $16.6 million, which was a 4.6% increase over the prior year. Since then, we've had a couple of adjustments as things trickle in, but this evening we're going to be working with the document that was shared as part of the public hearing. And then we can discuss things that have changed since that point and we can go from there. So that $16.6 million that was warned at this point had decreased slightly just to just under $16.6 with a proposed tax levy of $14.9 million, which is a 4.6% increase over the prior year. And we're looking at approximately a 3.9% proposed tax rate increase over FY22, which is a result of the increased tax levy and a 1% estimated growth in the grand list. Earlier in the summer, we started with some goals of the Select Board as we went into budget season, and I want to touch on those briefly as we get into the details of the budget. The Select Board listed out a handful of items for staff to be working on during the budget process. The first one was continued emphasis on equity initiatives and mental health support through the budget. And we addressed this by adding a $30,000 appropriation to the equity committee in the budget. We're continuing the FY22 new initiative to pay stipends to volunteers on boards and committees. One vacant patrol position in the police department has been moved to police administration to serve as a community affairs liaison. And additional funding for the community justice center has been included in the transfer from the police budget to help with the costs of initiatives that are important in the community but aren't necessarily funded through their grant. Those are the ways we addressed that first goal. The second goal of the Select Board was to consider how we can address climate change in our programs and initiatives. We have reduced our administrative vehicle fleet from two to one. Both of those vehicles were already hybrids. The police cruisers proposed for FY23 are proposed to be hybrid or electric vehicles. And the capital budget that we'll hear about a little bit later this evening continues to include fundings for energy efficiency programs. The next goal of the board was to minimize the financial impact of potential separation through tightening spending, deferring or diversifying revenue. We have talked recently about the potential for going forward with more information on the local options tax. And we have scoured this budget for things that could be delayed or deferred, although as the board certainly has heard in previous meetings, many things were delayed or deferred while we were waiting for the result of the merger vote. So some things have come due and we really need to include them here to get a move on. We do have the dissolution of consolidated management and consolidated finance and beginning the transition to separation of those departments have impacted costs in this budget and as we go through we'll hear about some of those. And lastly, the board discussed addressing the impact of potential separation by continuing to work toward tax equity between the town and the village. There are no new cost sharing initiatives in this budget. The Public Works MOU continues the way it has previously with the stormwater as well, the transfer between the towns and the village for clerk services and for the Brownnell library are still intact. No changes have been made to those and nothing new has been added for FY23. And we're looking on the screen at the summary page of the budget transmittal which has our combined summary revenues and then our summary expenditures by department. I want to point out up in the top section here I can zoom in a little bit. That we do have some reductions in non tax revenues. Previously, the village was contributing toward the manager salary HR directors, Valerie and the village enterprise funds were contributing toward the finance director. Those items are no longer happening in FY23. Those are causing a reduction in non tax revenue sources. And specific to FY22 the village enterprise funds have also funded some contributions toward IT services as well which are, which have been removed here. Over the last year, the community development department has undergone an overhaul of the rate structure and the rates and fee structure, which is reflected in the revenue line for community development as an increase in anticipated revenues coming in as a result of that project. Additionally, the parks department parks and recreation went through an overall of Indian Brook pass process. And that has also resulted in increased parks non tax revenue coming in. We've already seen that happening in FY22. The clerks department also seeing an increase in non tax revenue sources. These are coming primarily from the increase in the per page recording fee that the state passed down a couple of years ago and also the ever increasing volume of recording that we see coming through. From a high level overview on the expenditure side. Some of the large dollar changes year to year that likely jump out as we're looking here. The first is police. I want to be very clear that this is not all an increase in police. Some of it is a shuffling of the way we account for property and casualty workers compensation and unemployment insurances looking down the line at how the police department is going to be funded between the or looking down the line at the at the work that the select board and the trustees have been doing on a police agreement and the way that those costs are going to be determined each year and then allocated between the two entities. I have moved the police specific insurance costs out of the finance department budget, which is where they have been accumulated in the past, put them directly into the police budget. So that they're easier to call out for future future versions of ourselves when we are costing that contract. That's also causing this sharp decrease up here in the finance department budget. The next largest department specific increase year over year is in highways. There's actually the overall public works budget change is about $150,000. There is some shuffling of personnel with Dennis's retirement and new staff coming in. We have a $70,000 increase in the transfer to the village for highways, which falls under that existing highway MOU. We have about $60,000 of additional costs for storm sewer maintenance with some new projects planned in FY 23. Following on the heels of those two large numbers are health and human services budget is showing a considerable increase that $177,000. This is a result of an increase in the requested appropriation from Essex rescue Essex rescue was at the board meeting earlier this week discussing with the select board, their needs and how those dollars were arrived at. Since the publishing of this document, we have received an updated request from Green Mountain Transit, which is an additional $33,000 in change to their requested or to what we had in here as an estimated appropriation. So after the public hearing, you know, we can talk about the impact to the budget of that change. I have the spreadsheet loaded with that. Next, let me reference my notes here momentarily to see where I wanted to head after this. As far one of the things that we talked about most years that I don't want to neglect this year is the use of fund balance to offset costs. This year we have $300,000 of fund balance coming in in the general revenue. As a general revenue to offset the tax levy. Last year we had increased that to $400,000 from the hundred $100,000 that we had been at as a response. To Kobe, we're now working to step back down from that spike to a more reasonable range. There are two other places in this budget where fund balance would I bookmark these pages where fund balance is proposed to be used. One of those is in the police department. The police department is having FY 23 is a three vehicle replacement year. So they have two vehicles, two vehicles, three vehicles, two, two, three. And so now that we have that one time cost, but it's not never your cost. We've pulled in some fund balance of about $70,000 to offset the cost of that third vehicle so that we can smooth out the cost of the vehicle replacement line in the police department budget. The finance department also has use of fund balance budgeted in it $61,000 so between the there's a 300,000 the 70,000 and then $61,000 for a total of $431,000 of fund balance booked as revenues in this budget to offset the tax levy. I'm going to hop over to the finance department. While it's on my mind. Finance department as we discussed is showing an overall decrease that's mostly because we're moving the police specific items for insurance out like we just talked about. We are pulling in some fund balance this year to help offset some staffing changes. We are moving toward. Separating the consolidated finance department. We are currently hiring a village finance director and Courtney bushy is the new town finance director. And we're working toward the ultimate goal of having two three person departments in separation, three people under the village, three people under the town. We're working toward that in phases and the first phase is hiring that other position and then contracting in some assistance to. To pull apart the database to redesign procedures and as we do that we're holding a secondary position in the town. We're going to be filled once we make some more progress down that road and that is why we're pulling in fund balance for now to hold that position without. An undue burden on the taxpayers while we make it through that period of time. The other costing center that is most significantly impacted by separation initiatives this year is the administrative costing center, which houses HR and management for the town. We did as we discussed a few moments ago, the $120,000 contribution from the village is no longer coming in a shared employee revenue in this costing center. Although the overall is approximately the same because we have reduced one position on the management team after recent decisions made by the board. Those finance and administration are the costing centers that are most impacted by separation initiatives this year. And until such time as some of the other MOUs are unwound, those remain the same as I already mentioned. Let's see, reference my notes one more time. We hit goals, highlights, separation, moving insurance use of fund balance and it says ask for questions. So at this point, I would be happy to field any questions. Or continue on my cell box. Also, you all know that I could talk all day. Okay, Sarah. You're welcome. So since this is here, we'll go we'll ask for public comment. Anybody in the room. Any comments? Irene, come on up. I have two main concerns. One is that from porch forum is funded by the town and although from porch forum sells itself as a public good, it sets rules and it boots people off of its platform. And I know a number of people who have been kicked off the platform and I don't think that's right for the town to support something is not publicly available. I know that the town puts out information there and thinks that people are seeing it. It's not just because people aren't reading it. It's because they don't have accounts anymore. My second concern is the fire department. We saw the chief come in and plead for enough coverage for two people, I believe it was for DM. Other departments have been having problems keeping personnel. I wish we would heed his warnings. And take into account what he's saying and believe him and fully fund the request that he's made this year. Thank you. Any other comments in the room. Questions. Anything any comments or questions online. Thank you. I just want to clarify, will there be a chance for the public to ask about the capital plan? Or is that a separate public to be heard opportunity after that that is presented. The capital plan is an as a separate business item is the first business item after this public hearing. Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Andy. Where are we with the fire department? I know we had some discussion about paid on call. There was a request for a certain amount of support for that. And we added some back in how much did work where we end up. We ended up. So there was. We ended up with a full year of one 40 hour per week daytime per DM position, which is the 41,000. Which is $41,600 increase. In the salaries line on the year. So if we were to add the second one in that would add, it would double that amount in the budget. Okay. And Charlie, you're here. Your request was for two. Was that, or was it for four? I can't remember. It was for two. Okay. Okay. Thank you for that clarification. And Sarah originally in the budget, it was one, but starting in January. Right. That's correct. And so when we brought that to budget day, or when we bought brought that back to the first work, one of the early meetings. It was clear by the reaction of the select board that that was not acceptable. And so we pulled that back to July 1 with just the one position at this point. Okay. Thanks, Sarah. We're having public comment. Is it related to this? Go ahead. What would, Sarah, what would be the impact of adding a second starting in January. Starting January to be about $20,000. Thank you. All right. Any other comments or questions on the, the public hearing. All right. Seeing, seeing none. We do have another discussion later about the budget so we can revisit any of these questions. At that point, any of those comments. I think we have a motion to end the make the motion that we end public hearing on the proposed budget. Thank you, Don. So a second second. Thank you, Sue. Any further discussion. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Motion passes for zero. We'll move on to our first business item, which is presentation of proposed fiscal year 2023 capital budget and five year plan. Dennis. Good evening, everybody. Thank you for the very familiar binder that yeah. I'll start with the binder. This is kind of the meeting to introduce you to the capital plan. You've got the cover memo that talks about holding date for public hearing and for adoption that later dates but obviously any questions that you want to ask tonight are fine. I thought I would do a very quick overview of just how this is organized. I'm hoping that it made it on the Internet. My server and phone service was out today so I couldn't check. But if it isn't, it will be there. What's there is a cover memo to the board talking about requesting approval of the plan and a schedule for adoption. The plan we developed this year is different than in past year. It's the same book, but it's quite different between Sarah Courtney and staff myself. We use the quest to go budgeting software to develop the meat of the plan. However, the quest to go budgeting software doesn't really provide a good basis for explanation and for summary. And so Sarah Tandy went back to use her Excel spreadsheet. So part of this is the quest to go budget software and part of this is the Excel spreadsheet. So when you go through that, you just have to remember that it's we're working towards one document and we hope to have that. I think there are better ways to present this. There's a lot of numbers and not a lot of words, but the words, if you get into it, you kind of get an understanding where we are. So the very first document is the Excel spreadsheet. It's fairly long, but it identifies what we have as projects. And each one of these projects where there's a project description on the Excel spreadsheet is covered in the very back of the book where there's a section on project summaries. And those are the project summaries that come out of the quest to go software. So that's kind of the track between the two. But if you wanted a little more detail, you'll probably find that in the back under the summaries on a particular project. But the summary on the very first set of spreadsheets is the project description. And Sarah can go through this later in terms of what the various lines across it mean. The very first document in there is a one pager that basically shows under our major headings where we're allocating money for this year. And I wanted to start with that one and kind of explain where we are. And I think we've got the start off with an estimated balance, which is the first column, which is what we have in our accounts. And I believe those are as of 632 estimated are additions that are coming from the two cents capital tax, and that's about $535,000. So you can see where that's been allocated within a broad category, let's say buildings. And then if you go to the Excel spreadsheet, you can go into the buildings accounts and see where that money is actually allocated. It's interesting that the next column over is the operating or capital equipment transfer budget, which is money that is budgeted in the operating account, but transferred over to the capital account. We do that in all our equipment, so that we put money from our operating account away. We actually purchase our vehicles out of the capital account is the way to keep that amount from greatly jumping up and down every year kind of is a float that allows us to keep it at a general level level, general level. So if you're keeping track, the operating fund transfer is about 19% of the total. And the total spend is $2.84 million. That's the second column over from the right on that chart. So we're the operating fund transfer is about 19%. The two cents capital 10 tax is about 19%. You skip a column and you go over to additions and transfers. And I'm going to let Sarah explain that in terms of if we get into that that's not my bailiwick. But the next one is because there's a lot of other money that comes in towards the capital plan for and most of those are in the form of grants. Not all, but some are. So if you're over here, you can see the 175, the 1,0569 and the total is 1,744,000 third column over I was ahead of myself 101,744,000. And that's 61%. So 61% of that capital spend this year is really largely due to grants and using developer impact fees. I was curious. So I kind of compared that to last year to see you look at all those columns, buildings, highways, how do they, how do they shake out year to year. And it's really dependent upon what projects are in the mill. And the largest project we have is in stormwater where we've got a major stormwater project that's coming up this year. And that will come out of the capital fund. And that's most of that cost is coming out of grants, some local share. And so this year stormwater accounts for actually 60% of the total capital budget expenditures. Last year, that stormwater was 11%. So it's very dependent upon the projects we have. Buildings last year, for example, were eight, excuse me, buildings this year were 8%, last year there were four. Highways last year was 8.6, was 35%, I'm sorry, wrong column, 35%. This year it's almost 9%. Equipment last year was 40% almost. This year it's 17%. So it really varies year to year based upon what we're buying, what we need, which vehicles are replacing, what money's coming over. So it isn't a constant amount going in each year. Like, we're just going to put 40% into buildings. It can't work that way to get the work done that needs to be done in the community. So it will vary from year to year. The other thing that a difference from this year versus last year in those percentages is last year we included all the water and sewer capital projects in the capital plan. They're not funded by the general tax rate or the two cents. And so we will present that as a separate, I wouldn't call it a capital plan. It's more a future planning for sewer and water facilities, whatever you want to call it. When we do the water and sewer budgets, which usually come in January and February. But it's really not appropriate because it's not really coming from the general tax base. So we've deleted that. So last year's number for expenditure, if you include, if you take out the water and sewer budgets, it was only $1,079,000, where this year the estimated spend is $2,800,000, most of which is one large stormwater project. And so as we go along with these, we've tried, for example, and I'm going to, this is philosophical, but we've tried to put money away in the stormwater account each year so that when these big projects come, we're drawing from that reserve and using that as a match for grants as opposed to hitting the community with, oh, by the way, this year we have a bill for $1,569,000, where are we going to get the money? So we've tried to plan for the long term on these projects. We've been doing that for a long time, but it's not perfect and it's not really complete. It's a good plan, but it's a plan in progress because I think we need, what I tried to do this year in the memo was to present that we have some larger long term needs that we're going to have to look at and satisfy. And right now, we just don't have the funds to do that. And so we need to do a little better look at what's coming down the pike three, four, five, six years from now than we have. And so that's part of the approach I think heading into next year that I'm going to try to start on before I leave and maybe get as long as I can into it to get better and more complete reports from all the staff, mine included. We did a highway maintenance plan and we tried to do that about every five years. With merger, separation, all the issues we've had to deal with, I haven't been able to get to that thing. The last one was done in 2014. You need to have that updated before I leave, so that's in place for my successor. So they at least have a starting plan for the next five years. We've made a lot of progress. I read through it today. I was curious. A lot of those projects in there that we thought were problems we've taken care of now. But there's more. Traffic changes, businesses come, businesses go. And we've got to update those things and make it more a complete part of the plan. Last time we did that was 2014. That's too long ago. And I think if we look at each one of our staffs, we're all in the same boat. And we're a little bit behind the eight ball and that's just being honest. We need to catch up on that. So we have a, we give the board a better long term look at what our needs are rather than we've kind of concentrated in the last year or two on short term needs. We need to get into a different time frame or different in mind frame. Yeah. And like Sarah, I can, I can talk forever on this. So I've got to watch how long I go. So you'll see in the, so the first binder is that Excel spreadsheet with all the projects listed and various columns and where the money's coming from. Second project sheet kind of shows you what staff put together in terms of requests for use of the two cents, the new money in the capital plan. And what was decided, we're going to actually fund out of those, those monies. Now you'll find in there when you go through that, that there's a couple projects at the very end for specifically that we're asking from the capital fund fund, not out of the two cents, but out of the undesignated reserve. And again, Sarah has a good handle on that. She can give you what that number is. But the four projects that we would like to take care of and get done. One is the four water tower roof. I know it's historic building. It's not going to be a building that we're going to take people up and show them what it looks like looking out of the tower. But it's historic building. We feel it's important to to Essex. The historic society is on a lot of revenue raising, but we're still short. And with an infusion from the undesignated fund, we could fix the roof, fix the window frame and secure that building from further deterioration. And that to me is the most critical part. Forget about the stairs going up. Forget about repointing the granite. Let's at least keep the building for the future and for future generations by getting the roof done, the windows making that sound. The second one is we did not include in the in the two cents was we know that work has to be done in front of the library. It's deteriorated at the point the masonry there where it needs to be repaired. It's going to be tough to do. It's going to be expensive to do because the bricks that were used then are a different size today. And so that's got to be worked out. And so you don't have something that in front of the library that looks like a mismatch of brick patterns. But we can we can work that out. So that's a second project. Public Works Equipment Replacement Fund. We look carefully at that in detail both Sarah and I and realize that we did not have enough funds to essentially keep that fund solvent through the future. So we're asking that $35,000 from the undesignated fund come out of that. And the last one is the police and fire rely heavily on the radio equipment that are out on Brigham Hill Tower. And that equipment desperately needs to be upgraded and that request was for $100,000. So that's separate from the two cents that's in the undesignated numbers, but that's the requests that are before you. The next group of pages is the financial accounting for each account that we've got in there. Some of those are closed out because we finished projects. But it's the funds that were in those accounts as of June 30th of 2021. So that's a historical what do we have in the bank before we started this this physical year. The next one is one that comes about as close as you can to a narrative of the capital plan. It's something that I've tried to provide every year. It's it's the written information on what each of these accounts has what the plan is currently as when this was written, which is about a month ago. So those projects are pretty current in terms of what's being funded, what's planned to be funded, what we've spent, what we've done with the money. It's if you want to read through and get a good handle for projects, that's probably the document to use. The next page is definitions, some of which are out of date, but at least it's there. And the last page are the summary pages on each of the projects. That's the document. And I guess I'm open to any questions or how you want to proceed. I think in the cover memo, we outlined that we outlined the projects from the designated account. I do want to I guess I do want to complete my logic on the on the dollars. If you ask me right today, what are our two biggest needs in the community going forward. And everybody has maybe their own wish list in terms of what I'd like to see done. But stormwater is one of them. And that's a requirement from the state. We have a permit to do certain things over the next, it was 20 years, we're now down to 17. That has a fairly large price tag with it. The report that we got that we had done up, we're having a separate engineering firm check because of the cost. But it came out to be about $5 million worth of improvements, plus or minus. And so if you start to take a look at that and you said, OK, if we started today and and that's not including the big stormwater grant, where you're doing this year, that's future grants that we need to get and future dollars we need to get. Even if we get some grants, and I think my assumption was we get 50% of the dollars in grants. That yearly cost of the next 17 years is $300,000. We're putting away 150. So we're half of the amount we should be putting away so that those charges can be built. We can meet the permit requirements and complete everything over the next 17 years. The other one is buildings. And I think, you know, we've talked about that. I know the far chief has talked about his building. There's certain buildings. And again, this is staffs recommendation to the board. And the expectation is not all these are going to be built, maybe. And maybe not all of them are going to be built over the short run. But they are needs. I'll start with my department because it's part of this public works is separated. I'm in a different building or water sewer departments in a building or highway departments in a different building. Aaron and all the rest of the crew and another another building. And yes, we have internet, we have phones, but it's hard to communicate and work when you're in different places. When you're running our kind of an operation where everything's kind of interdependent and everyone. There's always been a plan to add two bays to the highway garage. Close to where we have our sand pile and that we can add two bays on there pretty easily. The plan originally was to use that for expansion of the highway garage. I don't really think that's needed. But what we could do is the building that I'm in is partial office, partial sewer and water building. We could take the sewer and water department and put them over in the building with the highway department, put a mezzanine so they have offices and they have a place to work out of. That gets them out of my building. I think most of you are familiar with where my office is. My building could be refitted pretty easily as public works offices complete. Aaron, Annie, the whole staff comes over. The building does not have to be expanded. It has to be turned from a garage into office space and be done. It's not that expensive. That puts all the public works where it belongs. On-site with the highway department, on-site with water sewer and everybody's in one location. It's a better way to serve the public. It's a better way to do our job. So there's cost if we were to do that. So those are the first two. Our salt shed quite honestly at this point is, if you've been up there and looked at it, it's partial concrete, partial wood. The wood is leaning and the concrete is coming apart. When you put salt against concrete and you do that for 25 years, it gets into the rebar and there's large cracks in the building. It would be ideal if we could expand that salt shed so we had a year's worth of salt supply. That's what the state does on their highways. That allows them to buy their salt the year before, keep it on hand, keep it dry. When the salt market goes up and down and all of a sudden, oh, you're ordering it? Well, it's going to take us a couple of weeks to get you that back in. That's not a place we like to be in in the wintertime. Not as far as the public's concerned. It's not like, oh, we're sorry we can't keep the roads clear, but we can't get any salt. That's not a good answer. The good answer is build a large enough new salt shed back there that will handle that salt for that period of time. Again, it can be done on-site. Crowds aside a little bit. Doesn't impose any more on the neighbors, but allows us to do our job better. So that's another one. A new fire station, which I think Fire Chief has talked to you about, the need for that. That's a big expenditure, but it's a needed one. If the fire department were at some point to get a new fire station, public works, highway department, especially the maintenance portion could move into that building. We'd reuse that building. We would not give that building up. So we've kind of thought of a way to make the system work, but it can't be done in the absence of funds. Just can't. And the last one, and I think Allie's talked to you about this in Parks and Recreation, with the move that had to take place this year, it's not an ideal location for her to run her whole operation. And if she was co-located with some form of indoor recreation space at the same time, and probably a future pool replacement up at Sandhill Park, that's an ideal location for Parks and Rec. So those are things we'd like to see. Does it mean we're going to get them? I don't know. That's going to be a decision on this board of future boards and the public, but their needs, and you start to add that up just on buildings. That's $15 million. And that's not, and that's in today's dollars. And I just did a quick calculation on the left line of them off, but at 4% interest over 30 years, that's what I use as a debt retirement, that's $867,000 a year. So if you take the $867,000, you take the stormwater of $300,000, deduct the $150 we're already getting from the two cents, you're probably two or three times the need of what you're getting now in the revenue from the two cents on the capital tax, and from grants, and from developer impact fees. Assuming that you'd fund the rest of the capital program, kind of as it's funded now, some for highways, some for equipment replacement, that would kind of remain in place. But these are needs in addition to what we've got. I'm not trying to scare you. I'm just trying to present a picture that this is how I see it. As we go forward, or as the town goes forward, those are needs that at some point in time are going to have to be met. That's my pitch. All right. Thanks, Dennis. Any questions from the board? Go ahead. One quick question. I was looking at that. The funding from the two cents. And everything was very well explained and easy to understand was for the police station. There was a $50,000. fiscal year 23 item that looks like it was a new item that wasn't in fiscal year 22. And I couldn't connect the dots for that. We have a project at the police station. We are that police station has now been up five years, four years, three years. I remember crime flies. Seven. It's flying faster than you. What we found with the new building, and I don't think this was in anticipated by everyone, but we found in the new building was that the windows have a dual purpose and they have to be made that way. One is bulletproof glass. I hope I'm not giving any secrets out, but it is. And then there's the regular glass for the thermal protection. What's happened is that moisture has gotten caught between them. And today we had Tom Yando as our building engineer. And he we tried some things and had a contractor try it and it works. And that is to basically provide, take the framing around the window off, provide ventilation, essentially drill holes in and allow that so that there's more free air exchange. Because what it's done is it's basically created mold around the windows. And we've had a history of mold problems with our buildings. We don't want to start with a new building and go through that all over again. And so we tried it on one window. We let it go through a full summer just to make sure that it would, and that's when the problem arises that would work and it did. But now we've got 21, 21 more windows to do. And so that's, we took that estimate from the first one we did and multiplied it out and said, we need to do that. We need to do that now. And that's that's the kind of stuff that just, it just comes out of the blue and happens. And we're going to say, okay, how are we going to pay for that? Thanks. Thanks to any other questions. And through this a few times. So I guess I will then go to the public for comment. Anybody in the room. Come on up. Identify yourself. Thank you, Marcus. I'm the president of the Essex community players. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So, therefore I have a question about Memorial Hall. Looking at the description, if I can get a little bit more understanding around what the project is. I know that there's a project for the longterm. For an expanded 1200 square feet on that structure that's been discussed for some time. But in the project description, there's a lot of work to be done on the front entrance. So I'm going to go through some HVAC work. As well as some safety work to the front entrance. It's my understanding. We just had the work. There was just recently worked on in the front entrance. I thought we had completed the HVAC work. Maybe I don't know that there's more to be done. I'd also like some clarity. If you don't mind. Around the statement of until separation is finalized. I'm curious about how that relates. To the projects at hand. Since. I don't believe that the village. In any way has direct impact outside of. I don't believe it has any direct impact on the status of this particular building. But we do know that needs work. And I just want to say thank you for. Acknowledging the fact that there's monitoring on the floor. So those are my questions. Thanks. I tried to answer them. I think I can. We've we've put money in the operating budget. For maintenance of Memorial Hall. So that's there. The question was do we need to put any more capital funds into Memorial Hall this year. And. Obviously there's probably a time lapse between when we prepared this and when work got done. But as far as I know that we have. We have a lot of work to do. We have a lot of work to do. Taking care of the HVAC stuff as far as we know it. We do have some concern about that wall that we're watching to make sure that structurally that's not a problem. That may cost us some dollars. But we thought that there was a minimal need to put the kind of capital money that we had there. In past years. So there's. I think $2,000 we estimated we put in. Figuring that that might go towards. The door work I think what we plan to do for some of the door work is to. Go ahead and. Look at whether we. Do some additional work in terms of the elevations at the front. We've got to check that. Tom's on vacation this week. So I'm not sure I can get a hold of them, but. And I'll have that information for the next meeting. There may be still some work that we've got to do with the front entry. And that's why we've left some funds in there as well as fixing the wall. But the major stuff that we had to do, one of the major things we want to do is put a small kitchenette in there. And that's done. That took a lot of the funds that we had your mark for that. I think. If I'm not mistaken. Let me just check. Real quick here. Give me a second. A building project. Let me just take a quick look. There are. There's still funds. In the account for Memorial Hall. I'm looking at the funds. There's about $12,000 left in that account as of June 30th, 2021. So we'd be adding $2,000 to that account. But right now the only plan would be for any of that work around the front stoop. And for that structural support for the wall, if we have to do it. If other things come up, then we would use that fund for that purpose, but other things we did this last year from a maintenance point of view is we painted all the trim around the building. We also replaced a lot of the slate on the roof under the capital program. That was done. So we've done a lot of work up there. So this was a year. And maybe we didn't have a proper account for it in the verbiage, but this was a year to kind of hold off and back off any more major work about Memorial Hall. But there are funds there if we need to dig in a little deeper and do some more. We just weren't going to put more. In the past, we put more money into Memorial Hall each year. And this year, we just decided that where we had to make cuts, we would. And that was a place we just reduced them out going in. All right. Thanks, Dennis. Any other questions or comments from the public? Hey, so, uh, Dennis, this is, this is an information discussion here. You're not asking a thing here. Um, the only thing that. The memo covers is to try to set a schedule. Right. I think that. I think that's a good idea. Good or should be done tonight. So that. Um, the schedule said. Proposed that tonight we would present it. January 3rd. Again, you do a review and discuss. Uh, a second time, if that's your desire. On January 18th, hold a public hearing and then hopefully on January 18th, adopt the capital plan. Following that hearing. So it's trying to set the schedule up so that we would get everything. That comes out of the meeting tonight. All right. Thanks, Dennis. I guess the question I guess for the board, then is given that it may be. Easy or different. I mean, I was going to say easier. To use the binder to review rather than trying to look sideways on the computer. We want to have the opportunity to look through it before the next meeting and then ask. Essentially more detailed questions or, or maybe we don't, but we want to do that. Or we. We want to have Dennis come back a second time or someone. I would appreciate. Review with it was very difficult to. It is the information in the packet. That's, that's why we set it up this way. So you'd, I wanted to introduce it. Maybe we went too deep tonight, but we want to introduce it tonight and then give you guys a chance to look at it and then go through it and bounce it back and we'll try to answer the questions. All right. I do have one question when you get a chance. Go ahead. Dennis, in your experience, what's the inflation factor. Nowadays. In say buildings and. I mean, I was just looking at the cost of lumber. Just, just in that what's, what's kind of going on in your. Estimation of. Inflation factor. It's changed rapidly. Inflation factor. If I were doing this this year, last year I might have used a two or 3% number. I used four just as a, as a guest on it. It's probably higher. I mean, anybody that's doing any work on their house. Try to find the part. I have a neighbor who waited six months for the kitchen because the corner cabinet didn't come in. And they were doing their dishes in the bathroom. I mean, that's the kind of thing that's happening today. That's not necessarily an inflation factor, but it's a really good indication of. The supply chain is, and that does affect prices. I was surprised this year that some commodities that I thought would be through the roof, salt being one came in reasonable. Oil is now the last day or two started to come down. On the market. So again. You know, I think the anticipation is with COVID few people are going to be traveling and some of those things are going to come down. So it's really. I mean, it's one of these deals. You know, with inflation, it's six or seven percent right now. Construction is probably in that range. Is it going to stay that way. Or more than the next year. Boy, I wish I knew because that would be a great investment. I could figure that out, but. You just don't know. And then you have the federal and state monies. Sort of. Cascading sloshing. Into the system and. Yeah. And we're not going to have. I mean, this is. I won't go off on it, but it is. I mean, there's. There's very few. The staffing at the state is not adequate to handle all these dollars coming in. That's a given. In my view, just from talking to people, that's a given. So then it goes down to the next stage. OK, if we get grant money, we've got to be able to use it, which means we've got to write grants and be able to handle them and manage them. We can probably do that within a normal range. But now you go to contractors. Where the contractors going to find help to do that escalation of projects. And if they do, what's going to happen? Well, that price is going to go up. Because in the past, you put out a bid and you might get six or eight really viable contractors bidding. But if they're all busy and you're the last guy in. Your bid all of a sudden is double X. And they're the only bidder. What do you do? And I think that's what we're going to end up finding with some of these grants is it's going to be very hard to get all the work done, whatever that work is in the time frame has been given us to get it all done. Because we're not going to be able to push it through the pipeline. And I think that is going to drive up prices. Thank you. I see Harlan Smith's hand up. Yeah, when I was. Thank you. When I was going through the descriptions, there's a notation there about Indian Burke Dam. There was a money and work put into it in 2004. And then there's a notation that it would need more work in 10 to 15 years. And we're beyond that mark. And I'm kind of curious if somebody has an update as to the condition of the dam, what repairs were thought to be needed and are they in the works of being done? I can give a good answer to that one, Harlan. Thanks for asking that. Yeah, Indian Brook Dam is. Alley parts and records really directly responsible for the dam, which is maybe one thing that I'm glad public works isn't, but that's okay. We work with around it anyway, but. What's. It's one of those dams that the state has looked at as being. A high risk dam. Just because the nature of how it was built in the way it's I mean it's not leaking and causing any issues now, but it's a high risk dam. And they came out with a program just before COVID hit to provide grant funds to communities. For them to hire a contractor and do an in depth study of the dam, as well as about 10 other dams in the state. COVID interrupted all that. And so. Alley has gone back to them. Just within the last couple of months to find out is that grant still available? Are you going to do this? And the answer is yes. So that's going to come back at us to look at that dam. We do know that one of the issues with the dam is that if we get around this, we've actually come up with some novel ideas that would work if we had to do it. But you'd like to be able to really control the elevation of that that dam. And unfortunately, there's a valve in there that's, you know, I don't know how old that's inoperable. So you can't really do the control of the elevation like you should. Just to fix that. You know, do you send divers down to replace it? Do you put a new structure in? Do you drain it? There's a whole bunch of issues. Hopefully, if they do the study on the dam, we'll have a better answer. Probably going to involve some divers looking at it and some other things. And then actually taking a look at the structural integrity of the dam itself. So that hasn't been done yet, Harlan. We know it's got to be done. It's time to do it again. We've been putting away dollars every year to kind of look at it. But if we had to go in and really do major work in that dam, again, those dollars really aren't sufficient to cover all that. I appreciate the answers. Thank you. All right. Gabrielle Smith, you had your hand up earlier and you had asked about making comment during a. Apple discussion. Yeah. Thanks for coming back to me, Andy, but. I'm going to hold some of the questions that might have for the public hearing later in January. Okay. All right. Thanks. Thanks. All right. Sounds like the consensus to the select board is yet we would like to talk about this again on the, on the third. And I think we're okay with the schedule you proposed. Yes. Okay. Great. We'll see you again. Great. Yeah. Thanks. Thank you, Dennis. Thank you. Okay. Moving on to the next business item discussion and protectional action to adopt the fiscal year 2023 budget plan. I'm going to turn it back to you, Sarah. Back to me. So next up, I know. I had mentioned early. Before I started going. Through everything that we did have an in a. Adjusted request from Green Mountain transit. That should be factored in. I'm interested if the board wants to make other adjustments to the fire department budget. So my first question to the board is. Are you interested in holding a second public hearing? You're not required to do so. But if we're going to do that, I'm. Interested to know if that's on deck, or if you're comfortable with. Works working through those adjustments on screen and the Excel workbook with me. And then moving forward. I'm getting this budget wrapped up to be warmed for town meeting. Right. So last year, because it was the first. The first time. The town was using Australian ballot or voting. And the, you know, In the past, there was an opportunity during town meeting to make a motion to change the budget from the floor, which is no longer available. So we, we allowed a second. Are we. We offered, or here we had a second. Public hearing for the budget. And so I guess the question here is, I know. Maybe we want to have some discussion first. But the question about whether to have a second public hearing, as Sarah said, it's not required. We are, we did one last year. We don't have to do on this year. If we don't want to. Any thoughts on that? Do we want to have a discussion first? And then address the question of what, I don't have a second hearing because if we change the numbers. That's awesome. Just curiosity. How, how. Much participation was there in the second. So. Uh, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, as I recall. Over both public hearings, we had one person that, that, uh, made comments. Um, and we did make some adjustments based on that. Um, It was just one individual. Yeah. Over two public hearings. Yeah. And it was, he only participated in one of the public hearing. So the other one, there was no comment. Tracy. I think my preference would be since this is a holiday week for many people. Um, And we did start this process early this year. Uh, I don't think there's any harm that could be done. Uh, by holding a second public hearing. Uh, some folks may have missed it with the hustle and bustle of, you know, at being a holiday week for many. Um, so I guess my preference would be, let's just hold a second public hearing if we get input. Great. If not. We just adopt. Yeah. Do we know when the. January 24th. January 24th. Okay. So we have. Uh, we have meetings on the third and on the 18th. So we'll be in plenty of time to do that. Okay. So we could. So we would potentially. Yeah. Right. So if we're also going to have. I don't know what else you have an agenda for those first two meetings in January. I guess would be the question room. I would, I don't exactly know what we have on those meetings, but I do think the budget's one of the top things we do every year. And if you warn it and people come great. If you warn it and people don't come. They had their opportunity. I'm sorry to be that blunt, but you don't normally. Go wrong by asking your citizens if they have any questions about your project. The other thing I was going to mention, sorry, I see your hand up that there are reports that the state is. Looking to do exactly what it did last year. It is going to likely pass legislation. To do town either allow people to postpone town meeting to later. In the fall. Or do exactly like we did where you can do it with Australian ballot. I believe that is going to be introduced as one of the first things. In the upcoming legislative session. So. Thank you pretty much right back where we were last year. So that opportunity to do things from the floor. Is going to go. From the budget standpoint, I think it's already gone away because the town voted to do the budget. But if there's other questions. They would write which would be asked from the floor, they would instead be. I just want to do it on the third versus because Dennis is coming back on the 18th with the capital plan. So we have a we're going to have a public hearing on the 18th right for capital so you can do the. Not doing that to public hearings one after the other. Early. Yep. I was just going to see if there's any other board comment for Charlie. My other question is will we be able to send. I have a couple of questions for Sarah. Is it okay to send them to her after tonight's presentation. Or we can just talk we can talk about him in this meeting. I think they're I think we do want to talk about the. The fire budget. And that's one of them. Yes. My whole thing is I want to see the fire department's request met as chief coal requested. And the other one is did you make the statement that we you took. You're paying for training for a financial manager for the village. Did you make that statement. Out of your apartment. Did I say it with my words or did I write it somewhere. That's what I'm wondering. I thought that's what I heard. Yeah. That's what I'm wondering. We had not. No. The. The part time sort of the transition plan includes. Having. Someone. You know. Work through. How are we going to divvy up the databases. And the finance agreement that the select board and trustees are working on. Is. Touching on how that's going to be funded was my understanding. Okay. Was not my intent. I don't believe she said that. But then I thought I heard it. I just wanted to make sure. Thank you. I think we have a consensus that we want to have another public hearing. Our preference would be to have it on the on the third so that we're not having. The budget and the capital. The hearings in the same. And then I'm going to say we're going to. We can now have a discussion about the budget. If you want to change the number. Right. So. My only question is a. I think. I agree with Tracy's comment about we're in kind of the holiday season. But are we enough out of the holiday season on January 3rd. To. You know. Well. Go ahead. Sarah. We normally so. Sue and prior years at this point, we would have not even had budget day. Right. So we would have come back from the new year and had budget day. And then. We would have had budget day. And then. We would have had budget day. And then. Ran around frantically to have enough time to discuss and ask questions. And so let's it feedback before we had to get that dollar amount. On the warning. And that dollar amount has to go. Has to be done and go on the warning by the end of January. I'm available for the meeting on the third. And after that I'm not. And so that may also. Be. A consideration. Yeah, I was just, if we're, if our goal is to. Enable more people from the public to participate in the. In the hearing. Will we get that on January 3rd? Just because we're. You know, it's. It's, it's. It's as much a part of the holiday season as today is right. Like just different tails on the other side or the tail, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My comment, but your, if Sarah won't be available on the 18th, then. That might be a. Precluding factor. Yeah, Charlie. Go ahead. It is. We have a meeting. It's not a town holiday. No. We're so we're, we're observing it. Yeah. Hmm. Oh, interesting. It's not a town holiday. So we didn't consider that. I don't know. Check. It's not observed by the state on that Monday either. The day before on Friday. What do we think we want to do? Do we want to have. We've, it's been on our calendar forever. If everybody has a holiday, they have time to watch the presentation. I'm sorry. Yeah, no, no. I guess personally, I'm good with doing it on the 3rd. Yeah. Anybody have a strong objection? I think we're doing. Very first is our holiday. So Friday, the 31st is the. Town observed holiday. We're good for the third. Okay, the third. All right. All right. So. Having said that. Charlie, you had your hand up earlier for something else. Okay. Okay. Okay. So, uh, with regard to any changes and any other, any additional changes we want to make to the budget, I know the, there's been some discussion about, um, Increasing the, uh, fire on call yet again. Uh, maybe potentially going back to, I thought there was a sue you had mentioned possibly a, a happy year. And I know others have talked about putting the whole year. I mean, between 20 and change or 41, something like that. Um, Is this something that the board want would like to entertain? I think 40,000 or so, either 20 or 40,000 back in, depending on what they have a preference. I'm getting for the whole year. We get a, um, definition of what those. Physicians would be doing what the, the roles would be. Um, as I understood it, it would be, you know, taking vehicles for maintenance, updating logs, um, updating training logs, um, things of that sort. Correct. And they first and foremost, they'd be available to answer medical and fire calls that come in during the times when we have the least amount of volunteers available. In addition to that, when there's time between calls, they would be doing maintenance activities, paperwork activities at the station. Any, any preferences with regard to a half year or full year? I could support either. I, but I do, I, I. One, I'm happy that we got it pushed back one pushed back to July, but I think we're still hearing that. That isn't really sufficient. So I could support either adding. A second person in January or for the full year if we want to try to include that in the budget. I guess this isn't really related to per diem, but I know we've had this conversation before, but Charlie, we haven't talked to you about it. So, um, just wondering what you see as sort of the best benefit as far as per diem or focusing on retaining the volunteers that you do currently have. I think in the junction, they're, they're focusing on, on that aspect of it as well. Um, do you see it as more, hesitate to say productive, but do you, do you think it would be make more of a difference to go the full per diem route as opposed to the full, um, increasing stipends and things of that sort route or what a hybrid, um, sort of meet both ends. Right. In the discussions I've had with my officer's team, uh, talking about those very things, it was brought up about, um, aligning our pay with the junction and advancing the hourly rate. And certainly that's something that we would all appreciate, but we felt that the more important factor would be to make sure that we have, uh, at least two staff on so we could continue to answer the calls. When we looked at the numbers of our EMS calls that we were not able to send somebody for those numbers are alarming and we'd like to change that. And being devil's advocate, um, with the amount of increase that's being requested by Essex rescue, um, is it a harm to public safety? If fire doesn't respond to every emergency call and allows Essex rescue to handle that. Um, if Essex rescue could handle every emergency in Essex, then you're right. It could benefit to just fund the Essex rescue team, but they're not answering every call in Essex. They're relying on mutual aid partners from outside. And we don't know when that's going to happen. We can't foreshadow that, um, the third call is going to be Colchester or the second call is Williston or what have you. Uh, there are days when Essex rescue has five calls within 30 minutes and that's bringing several ambulances in here. So we just, we really don't know when they're going to happen and we have seen many times where the wait times on scene before we get the transport ambulance there are up to 40 minutes. That's a really long time for people to be sitting there without someone there to help and Essex rescue is no longer doing the first response aspect. There was a time where Essex rescue members could jump calls, um, and provide that first response service if you will, and they're no longer doing that because they don't have the staffing and they would rather staff the ambulance truck. So they've got three ambulances than to send one person here and there. That's what makes it, that's why it's important for us and under Hill Jericho has also since started their own first response group to, to get EMTs there and initiate emergency care. Thank you. So, so basically the people you're looking to put in are also first responders. Yes. I ask a question, not about the fire. Well, let's, let's just maybe finish this. I, Sarah mentioned something about another increase and I didn't know what that was. And just to understand holistically what we're talking about. Is there an increase in the fire? No. You had just estimated their increase previously and then we got their actual request, which was another $34,000. So they're looking at a $46,000 increase over the prior year. No. So you said it's 36,000 more than what we had been previously shown. Okay. So when we, sorry, Charlie, I think we, I think we'll, we'll come back to that question. But thank you. Yeah. So we, when we, on budget day, we were at 6.4%. Right. For a tax increase. So you got us that we got, we got ourselves down with a lot of your help. Yeah. So we got ourselves down to 4.6. Yeah. And then for two, I'm sorry. So for overall budget, the bottom line. Yeah, we went from like 6.4 to 4.6. We tucked it down a little bit more. And now we're back to 4.7 on the bottom line here. It might be helpful if I, if you want to look at if I shared my workbook. With you. So read this. These, this is a working copy that we've been looking at for a long time. So I knew there was a lot of. You know, some of the adjustments in as they come in, there was a slight adjustment. The health officer pay is in there. The green mountain transit change. I just put it in additional for a full year of. Byron. Sneaking out. A full year. So the, the second per day and for the full year, just to sort of see what, where the numbers. landed and so we're back at 4.7 on the bottom line which is a 5% tax levy increase because of the loss and other non-tax revenue sources and that coupled with a projected 1% grand list growth is giving us a 4.4% projected tax rate increase which is about $65 on the average $280,000 assessed value properly. We were so before adding the additional the extra per diem the second per diem in that was $63 so to give you a sense it's about $2.25 for every $40,000 on the average home per year for every $40,000 change that we make so looking at that help or make it worse that helps clarify you okay with that that answer your but yeah i was just trying to understand you know and so i i guess sarah if i follow the logic if we instead of doing the second per diem for the full year and only did it for the half a year would probably be like a dollar increase on the overall that would get us down to 63 so i i i actually miss i miss folks so it's $20,000 gets us about $2 on the average assessed value increase over last year so that was not for the second one for the full year that was just the second position for a half a year correct so i put the full year in there we're at a bottom line of 4.7 percent i'm just talking in here just so the math will auto calculate um and it'll take a support 4.6 percent if we did a half a year or back to the 4.4 percent if we don't do the second per diem at all i'm sorry is 4.7 with both one year yes both that's correct and that's with the green mountain request also that's correct now are we gonna get an explanation of the green mountain increase because that's quite a huge increase in what they thought they were gonna want and what they are asking for yeah Greg do you have an answer to that i i just found out about that uh before hopping on the meeting so i'm not prepared to talk about it no i can reach out to them i do not believe they gave much of an explanation but i could be wrong enough but i will try to find out that's pretty large and then also you said it included health officer increase in pay i i have a hard time supporting that one i don't even know what the health officer is doing and i'm still waiting for that yep i've been working on that with the health officer with jerry furkey today and over the weekend um still trying to gather some more information but but basically their calls are increasing they're on 24 seven call um number of apartments have have jumped up tremendously in the past few years trying to get some more information to show you year by year just exactly what it's in what it's increased to um also talking to jerry and sharon about getting kind of quarterly reports to give all of us a better sense of the work that they're putting in for the community um and so what i uh could propose or want to propose at this point is um to start their the recommended or the requested increase uh halfway through the fiscal year so january 1st of 2023 um have some time to take a look at those uh the the numbers and the the projections and the trends to see exactly what increase is justified but at least it's on the books um but the the the idea that you're gonna postpone the public year or not postpone but have a second public hearing hopefully can get that information better and more information to you within a couple weeks um the other piece of the health officer pay is that sharon kelly she's the deputy health officer her pay should go up um she she came on at a lower rate than than jerry she was been training for the past several years she's up to where jerry is they're basically doing the same thing jerry covers in the village sharon covers outside the village um you know jerry's the the health officer so he's ultimately has the final say he's in charge but um proposed that sharon be brought up to about 90 of what jerry's making to compensate her and recognize the good work that she's doing and the fact that she's basically in charge of health health duties in outside the village um so they to get that caught up so that's part of it as well um but yeah with the the delay not the delay but the the second public hearing um can hope to get you some more specific information in a couple weeks uh but anyway so all that said that i just laid out um uh it would save about a thousand dollars from what was been budgeted off the health officers mine right now so you're talking about a reduction in what's compared to what by a thousand dollars starting it later small number yep so but it's something okay thanks yeah that was gonna be my question i don't i didn't know if i missed it in that one meeting i wasn't here for but uh oh yeah so i agree and yeah okay you know as far as everybody else tells us what's going on and we have this we're paying my money into something we don't know what i mean i know what i think they're doing but i'd like to know yeah no you're right and i think it's an opportunity to it that they're an entity of the state or creature of the state they're appointed by the town and paid for by the town but um they do a lot of state functions but i do think it's a good opportunity and a good time to get some more information and to get some regular updates from the health department our health department okay so any other any other comments or and then i was just gonna say i don't have a problem with pointing to 4.7 percent if it gives us the two full-time people at the fire station especially as a homeowner in Essex yeah i'd rather know somebody was there that could respond than knowing i have to wait like will listen did and the house burned down because they didn't have enough people to put on their truck Tracy you okay with two full years so sarah let's let's put in the the two um full year okay got it for the fire the only change that we kind of talked about here we do want would like to see more information about the health officer green mountain transit and and yeah green mountain transit yeah they have a formula that they don't really don't really divulge yeah um based on partly on grand list partly on i don't know i know it's on ridership it's not me i yeah i ridership i'm like remember i'm really i'm just saying that's all this is right it's a big jump and if it's based on well if it's based on ssda that jumps around year to year in big ways anyway because it's based on actual usage just from the previous year so that's a that's a well my but we don't i have to say that my concern is is that a lot of it may be because one they're short of drivers two they're using their buses for transporting kids to school because of lack of school bus drivers so i'm not sure if that's influencing their needs for more money to put more transportation in place that's my concern yeah part of it yeah i'm sorry yeah no would you like them but to be invited to the meeting on the january third or would you he can be okay with a written explanation do you have a preference i'm okay with a written explanation as long as it explains why it's such a huge difference if they're following that same formula that's when the difference is so large yeah okay it might be nice just to let them know that there may be questions so if there are having someone here may be advantageous so do we have a rough on their board yeah we're also like like sarah mentioned we are usually not even starting process of this time i remember the days of two meetings a week on top of our regular meeting another big binder and another big binder even bigger than i all right anything else you want to take a comment from the public that we actually we already did we just had a public hearing so i guess we're good to go on we should probably go ahead and move on since since we already had a public hearing on the topic all right so staff satisfied here sarah do you need anything else i do not thank you very much thank you sarah all right all right um okay next on the agenda is discussion and potential action on tentative agreements about shared services between the town of essics and the independent city that's junction is the is the stormwater agreement the only one that we have here that's the only one that's in there yes um and so the the question there was i had asked about seeing the list the list of small projects um it was included it's included very clearly in the capital plan and i'm satisfied with it anybody else have any concerns or questions about the the small capital um do we need to yeah the the motion that um the last meeting was you approved a contingent on approving the list in the capital or the list of small projects so would recommend that you approve the list um and also just wanted to draw attention to there there was clause in the stormwater agreement that says that the two parties may work together and continue to pursue funding and grant opportunities and projects so approving the list should not preclude opportunities in the future oh right it doesn't say these are the only things that we could put that work on together i got you okay but it does say that the current ones will end at the completion is that the the um the mo u ends at the end of their so-called transition year but that doesn't preclude us from starting a new mo u or collaborate and in the the agreement that were we signed says that right we uh the intent is to collaborate in the future uh where it makes sense okay um it also says that if the small small capital fund or projects aren't completed before the end of the transition and more money is needed both parties will contribute for um grand list percentage of the grand list basis yeah all right do we have motion language yeah i'm just gonna make it up um i moved at the select board approve um approve the current stormwater capital project list second thank you bracey thank you don you got a comment too yeah all right do we need to say as it does here as part of the stormwater agreement between the town of sx and village of sx junction does it need to be within that context i would be more comfortable with that in there too i was thinking the same thing sure all right so that the the motion would read that the uh the select board approved the list of approved stormwater projects as part of the stormwater agreement between the town of sx and the village of sx junction so moved second i'm sorry i did not have that part on my yeah so don did you second that yes okay so thank you tracy thank you don any further discussion okay all those in favor please say aye aye opposed okay motion passes for zero there's no need for executive session on there on that for that so we won't do that later uh moving on to the next item discussion potential action to take formal position on separation of the village of sx junction from the town of sx i can speak to that um so uh all indications that the legislature is going to start taking a look at the charter change from the village um early in 2022 uh also suspect that um the town well he invited to send representatives to testify whether that's the select board or the chair of the select board um and thought it might be useful to have a statement or position or some talking points um if you ask questions about it so there's a memo in your packet uh there's no recommendation to take a position per se but some things you might want to to recognize or put into a statement or acknowledging the results of the votes um uh acknowledging that the vote was in the village it was in townwide um acknowledging that the select board and the and the trustees have been working together to create the shared service agreements you're continuing to do so based on uh the the resolution to work together amicably we got the exact wording from a few months ago and any other concerns or points or um raise or whatever just any other aim points that you want to include and mention so at this point kind of just providing some some framework and let the board discuss happy to take it back and draft something for review at a future meeting um would recommend this january third meeting again just thinking that the timing is coming up quickly but wanted to give the select board a chance tonight to talk about it and see if you wanted to get anything a bit more formal all right thanks great so any balance questions go ahead see i i saw all your responses an email and i like the statement that you had in your email oh that the are we going to read it says uh we the select board do not want to stand in the way of separation of the village from the town though we will do what we can to limit the impact to the remaining town right and so i think i think part of the discussion that greg is asking for is is the part about limiting the impact as to what do we want to say about that is one of the things i think we need to think about um so and i i think as i've kind of i think i've said a number of times the the the potential steep tax rate ramp increase um after the transition year um could be one but there may be others so i don't know what are anything board members want to make any comments concerns do you want to how do you think we should approach this or do we do we want to you know take what greg has in his memo plus the the sentiment of we don't want to stand in the way um as a you know feedstock for a proposal from staff for us to review and consider our next meeting that was kind of what i was thinking was the bullets that are here plus that sentiment that you know we have to be considering also you know the future so you you would say that we as a select board acknowledge the results of the village vote we acknowledge the fact it was not a townwide vote about separation we acknowledge that the select board has worked with the village board of trustees to create shared services and agreements and will continue to do so until completed i would say because we need to get them completed and um any concerns about separation and its potential impacts would that be financial impacts or are there others it could be others okay and it's been okay and then andy's statement that we're proposing well that is andy's statement about okay being thoughtful and doing what how we proceed so that we limit the overall impact to the town that remains right i'm fine with that general flow of events is to have stuff draft something that meets all these little points and bring it back for full discussion so do we do we want to also include are there any other tripping points that we want to include that that maybe we you know the the the one i guess that comes to my mind is at what point does the and i know this is a i'm i'm trying to say this so i don't raise anybody's hackles um the the the village wants to become a city on July 1st but then we the but the the budgets to support that first year are the village and town budgets that were voted um and and i i have no problem with this with the city's saying that it wants to be a city on that date i'm not no problem with that but from a voting standpoint who gets to vote the next march um also that november we need to have elections for because it's a it's a it's a general election year we need to have elections for justices of the piece and we need to have a voting district that allows us to vote for future for the town justices of the piece and the city needs to vote for their own too um so i don't know if i don't know if statutorily something has to happen to allow i don't know if you'd call it a temporary voting district or whether the city is the city and then therefore their their own voting district by that based on that i just want to understand that there's no impediments to us electing um justices of the pieces in november and then having only folks who live outside the village vote uh at town meeting um well by their their charter definition depends uh sorry um describes their physical look or their physical boundaries is that correct and that they become a city thereby leaving the rest of the boundaries will still remain in 8-1 so 8-1 will still be that voting district when when when patrick and i sat with our um 8-1 and 8-3 legislators they were questioning whether what that really looks like whether there's a whether they can really really be a city then or if it's at the end of that fiscal year and i'm not i'm not saying i'm not trying to judge them and say which way it should go that would be a legislative call it wouldn't be a exactly and that's why that's and you know i know that they said don't go with with a question like that but i think we need to make sure that we don't end up in a corner with that with only having well and then we need to know where redistricting is going to and that's not a done deal yet right and that's going to have an impact won't have an impact to the town voting you may end up right with multiple right multiple polling while the way the way it's proposed it will have an impact if it you have additional polling places but uh yeah um but it's a question of who votes and and the authority to vote in november and in march i just want to make sure we have that clear um well that would be on one of your can if you're going to list all the concerns you could list it under your concerns yeah and the the other the other one is again is this the steep tax potential steep tax rate increase and i don't know you staff is working on look what that's going to look like we don't have that disclosed quite yet i guess um hope to have something again for you in um at that first january meeting for some a little bit of time to review it beforehand and so the the thought um that may arise is is there a way to have a smoother transition of the of our tax rate um you know is there you know we we we tried to to put together a finance agreement we just we we were we pushed a lot on it but you know it turned out to be um no but no value from the standpoint of there's there's not a lot of financial transaction associated with that agreement and then finance came apart because of staffing changes um which would have been a five-year transition which which i think would have helped some of the um the tax ramp um so since those are no longer there and there's really no other you know assessor is there um through the reappraisal that's a fairly small number uh police is there um you know for you know currently you know the 10-year agreement so that's a that is a big one but that's that's not a that doesn't get to the goal of you know the it doesn't it hits part of the tax increase but uh and and it keeps it out for quite a long time forever hopefully um but the other ones went away so the question i guess is whether we want to ask the legislature for a payment and lieu of taxes or something like that we haven't really talked about that um as a board um the other i guess the other possibility is that we want to have a these kind of discussions in executive sessions so we can bounce ideas around or is that a we didn't we didn't say we would do that but and we may not have the right people around to help us with that um we were to do that but any thoughts around impacts or what we might want to say i guess i'm i'm just back up a couple of steps to understand what the purpose of this documenting a formal position and at what level do we need to document that formal position is it at the sorry forest level is it at the the tree level is it at the leaf level what what's the so is the what's the desire so is the intent to put together something to actually read the legislature or is it less than that um i think it's somewhat up to this select board we haven't testified we um i think three and three was the three plus three charter change was the last time that um there was an invitation to testify in front of the legislature and and that seemed to be um extra of statement and answering questions um i think looking at it in this in the sense about the separation it's just the select board has been working with the village um trustees to to get to a place where um hopefully set up both communities for the future but there's never been a formal position there's never been talking points have been laid out um just to give you at least at minimum the forest level and outline to go down there and answer questions um say where the town stands rather than just going in blind essentially so i guess it could be to to whatever level you want um start of the forest and if you want to get down into the the trees perhaps um the leaves i don't know if that's really necessary unless there's a really really big couple of leaves you need to point out but yeah at least getting your getting your thoughts in order before you're asked to speak about it yeah it's an expectation that we're going to be asked if we're okay with it and if you think about it you're gonna hopefully ask someone from the town government to come speak what and normally it would probably be the town chair but what authority does the town chair have to speak on behalf of the board if you haven't discussed those issues can he just say what he wishes maybe but it would be much better and more organized if he or she explains the positions as was discussed and when they get questions answers in that vein of what was discussed and if it wasn't you gotta wing it because you're possibly only gonna get one opportunity to speak maybe two but that'd be that'd be interesting if you have a second chance to speak it's because they have further questions not necessarily something he said originally they just had more yeah we probably can't ask for a signal right you can always ask but i do know that we have more to discuss on tier two that it's also going to impact a potential impacts so maybe it that part should be done in executive session so do you have things you want to discuss now about those agreements those tier two agreements or do we have a discussion we haven't right i'd rather do it have we seen that here too we don't see we need to finish doing brad's memo yeah we just saw it i laid out right right and so yeah um we don't have a joint meeting again until the 24th and i don't know if that's going to be we have no idea and nobody's indicated when the legislature when you know they they said they're going to go in january and we haven't i haven't seen anything about a projected date i'm sure they are already working on what they're going to say and i really don't want us to go in there flat-footed and you know i mean when i i'll confess when i went in and did the three plus three thing i wrote the thing myself and i got asked a question and i would totally totally blew it uh because i had no idea what to say and um and and you know we could it could still happen with this too because you have no idea what anybody's going to ask and and it's hard to at least it's hard for me to imagine the frame of every uh uh every person i'm like that that garaff's going to even ask a question so maybe a suggestion over the next couple days give some thoughts of key points that you or concerns that you might have like for instance the remainder of the town should only be one voting district or something like that where so that you are not having multiple polling places within the town that would be preferred sort of top and tree level stuff and if you get a little bit lower than that so be it but sort of create your top three or five issues talk amongst yourselves and then create a position based upon those at least and you could do it in the third and if you need to go and do it in executive session we could properly warn it um i could almost guarantee they're not meeting before january third no no no does that sound like something that could get started staff could also put some thoughts into that i mean i know greg and i just i would just say that you know again all the things you've said but you want to get into some granular stuff about voting districts about remainder about time about tier two agreements all of that impacts the remainder of the town and then i would also suggest as you have guys have all said is as you've been going through this you have been the town select board that has a village inside it and have looked out for all the interests of your residents and you would continue to do that until such time as they are independent because that was what you were elected to do all right so um i suspect there may be some people who want to make comment on this in the public you need a public comment yeah all right um any public comment here in the room yeah thank you mr chair can signorella um when i vote at my voting place i already have to specify which voting district i'm in so i don't really think that that's much of a concern you know go to your voting place you'll have a map you'll say i'm in district so-and-so you'll be handed the appropriate ballot so i don't know that that's a major issue that's it thanks all right thanks god uh so elise hello elise serda troublemaker number two um so i i just i have a little concern about what's happened here so it sort of feels like a bomb was dropped on the community with this item being on the agenda especially after sort of the history of what's been happening uh between the vote uh public hearings held in august that did not seem to bring out a huge uh influx of anti-separation movement from either the village or the town um and then sort of now a request for a position document um after you've been working on mo use with the village for a good period of time so i understand the need to prepare yourself for going to the legislature and talking about uh you know sort of what has been happening but when i hear a request for a position that means a position that means not sitting on a fence but do we support this do we not support this um and i'm a little concerned that that's sort of doesn't seem to be the discussion it's sort of like you're preparing for the legislature what you'd like to say but that's not a position so when you're talking about this i encourage it to be in the public forum not an executive session um and also just keeping in mind you've put this into the public uh uh conversation now you can see by the amount of people we have on the uh waiting to talk about this that uh i we just encourage when you say position that means a position so i'm curious to be uh as to what that will be after all the collaboration thank you thank you iran thank you iran is there a reason that the door to the meeting room is closed i thought this was an open public meeting i do not know i can't see the door from where i'm sitting i didn't know it was closed thank you i don't know if this belongs in a separation agreement or if this is out of line but i'm wondering if the health officer for the village and the health officer for the town will be separate once the operation happens okay thank you um i heard the chair mentioned earlier that taxation um who's going to vote on what budget is important to you i would ask that you also consider representation it's important to me that our charter reflect the fact that once separation happens there shouldn't be people sitting on the select board to my feeling that still live in the village and right now our town charter does not allow for someone once they leave the area once they are no longer part of the town to be forced to exit the select board state statute covers that thank you i did send you the reference thank you right um the town outside the village exclusively has lacked not only a vote in this issue but it's lacked exclusive representation in this conversation so if the legislature who is not as aware of how the town and village fit together is told that the select board has agreed to these separation agreements what they may not understand is that no one has negotiated exclusively on behalf of the new town and i think that's important you've had a village resident on the select board this entire time and his very presence has likely influenced how you voted and discussed it as has even more strongly the fact that you are elected by the whole town right now so the town outside the village that is the people who will be in the new town have not had any representation i think it's critical for the legislature to know that and to remember that as they look at these agreements thank you thank you iran any other comment from the room hey go online annie kuber and thank you for the opportunity to speak um last week at our last meeting you had a back and forth conversation with iran renner during public to be heard answering her questions as she asked them and that went on in fairness i asked for the same treatment this evening um my first question this evening is how many emails in the last two weeks andy did you receive from residents asking the board to take a visit i do not know i'd have to go look uh they it was probably uh there were five or six today and yesterday there were five or six today five or six yesterday combined five or six all together it was it was uh less than two handfuls so and and the majority of those um that requested what position did they ask the select board to take please uh i don't know i didn't take notes on specific words that were used uh i'm sorry i do not i i can't i i don't want to put words into people's mouths any um that none of none of them said do not support it but there were varying degrees of language that were used um some said don't stand in the way some said i don't know no okay fair thank you um um i'm i'm confident andy um that you recall my impassioned plea during the merger revoked discussion um where i legitimately begged for the select board to take a position on merger um you personally along with the rest of the board um outright refused to do so at a time when your voices could have changed our future you sat still and you sat silently now as we are in the wake of that decision of yours as a board of your silence you're being asked again to take a position and i ask that you take a strong movement forward on behalf of the residents of the town who live in the village who have voted very strongly in favor of separation and who also voted very strongly in favor of the other and i think it's time that you stand firmly somewhere andy to be polite and respectful to have your your constituency thank you all very much for the opportunity to speak all right thanks andy steve used this by there you hear me all right thank you andy and the board for the opportunity to talk um as you know i was uh some people may know i was on the board of the trustees back in 99 we had our vote worked through the legislature on the separation vote then mediation with the town select board and um and we were you know all told to work together and then um the village and town spent many years working together on the merger um and then it ultimately failed with once you know in the village was very in favor out of it outside of the village very against it and so then um we had our vote to separate and um because we kind of want to do something and um i think your comments that were first i haven't seen but was discussed on not standing the way but limit impacts or whatever i think that is a good sentiment in my mind um because i don't think anybody wants to like you know hurt people or anything so let's try to you know come up with something that is good for um for that and i think the negotiations from what i've you know read about and meetings and things like that seem to be reasonable and so i think that's all good and um i just wanted to say that you know with all we've been through all these years and how strong the votes were i'm hoping that you can go with what you were describing as you know not standing in the way and limiting impacts and obviously there's going to be some questions and things like that that's all to be expected and hopefully we can all work through that either the legislature doing something or the boards together doing something before or after or both um but anyway that's uh my thoughts all right thanks Steve right thank you very much yeah lorraine's alone hi thank you andy and thank you board for uh allow me time to speak um i was hoping i'm confused because i see what you stated as a position that you're not getting in the way um which makes sense to me since the town did not get to vote i was hoping that the position would be that if you were going to take a position that the town would have to vote because how as a representative of the town can you take a position on something that the town didn't vote on that is such a strong and important process so um yeah um i'm not i'm a little confused as why this is being asked for now um given that you kind of are reiterating what you said before and i would love us to be able to put on the ballot and actually have the town vote on it i suspect if we did separation would pass and we'd be kind of done and then the legislation would have a clear direction from the whole town instead of just part of the town which actually none of the town they got direction from the other municipality but not from the town municipality so i would appreciate if the position was that we all got to vote on it thank you for your time thanks larian andrew brown thank you andy um please know that my comments are my own and i am not representing the board of trustees with my statement so i hear that i hear the statements of not wanting to get in the way with separation and my statement is if you don't want to get in the way of separation then do not propose any changes to the charter we've been meeting for months and now literally a few weeks away from when we expect to go to the legislature is when a phased in tax approach is being brought up adding a phasen approach to lessen the tax increase is not what is in the charter and would put the select board against the will of the 88 of village and town inside the village residents who voted for separation this will impact the ability of the charter to go through the legislature i ask you to please not include any such statement or request of the legislature otherwise separation will be put in jeopardy also a previous select board put forth an effort to combat separation in 1999 please keep in mind the amount of money village residents have paid to the town for services we are not eligible to receive as sarah macy said september 28 2020 during our joint meeting village taxpayers are paying for services they are not eligible to receive and are paying more for some services that they and town outside the village residents have equal access to this means the town outside the village taxpayers are paying less than the true cost for some services essentially village residents have been subsidizing town outside the village taxes for decades which far surpasses the tax increase town outside the village residents will experience please remember you are elected to represent the interests the interests of all of sx residents not just the future town outside the village so again if you don't want to stand in the way then please have a position of supporting the passage of the city of sx junction charter with no conditions thank you all right thanks andrew Gabrielle smith hey everyone thank you andi i've um just learned about this being on the agenda today i know it was worn last week um and i've been a little um gone back and forth on what i want to say tonight because i'm actually honestly a little baffled why there's a need for you to all take this official position the um you you've all demonstrated your position over the past five months four months negotiating in good faith with the trustees for the purpose of facilitating separation so i don't understand why you need to take a formal position who that is for is that for i don't know is that for the purpose of the legislature seeing that you voted on it and are you looking for a different purpose which is to prepare yourselves to testify for the legislature which was this topic of conversation so um as a resident of the town i have been really heartened at your um clarity of commitment to our community to help us move forward to a place where our communities could be separated um and on unreasonable terms that are clear and are doing the best that we all can to untangle the evolution of the past hundred plus years so i'm not really sure what the intent of your vote is if the intent of your vote is to simply kind of ratify your behavior over the past five months the votes you've taken the decisions you've made the time you've spent the time staff to spend the time we've paid for legislative count for um legal counsel to come to the point on the mo use i i guess that's a fine action to take um if it's for any other reason i i guess i don't really understand why now why why is this necessary now to take a position um when your position seems to me clear based on all of the um energy time commitment and decisions that you have all been making since the separation vote so i i guess i'm i'm a bit unclear on why this is being brought forward now and um what what the intent or purposes that would benefit um our community thank you thanks gabriel uh somebody named rachel you could give your last name before you speak sure this is rachel is on liz ott um i also learned of this uh today and i apologize i haven't read up uh very much on it however i feel like i have to say something here um you know as a resident of the town outside of the village i certainly can't you know when when i think about this deep deep down endorse separation i know all the reasons why the village deserves separation and uh how unfair this has been but when we really think about this you know merger was that clear path forward and this select board allowed it to fail with inaction complete in action and almost to the point where it's sabotage merger and when this board um is in front of the legislature i would implore the select board to finally be honest with us this and and everyone this board allowed that misinformation machine inside of the town to run wild in the tov and now the town outside the village has to pay for that we have to suffer and the reason why i believe that we deserve answers is that this separation will negatively impact the tov and i understand all the reasons why we we don't get a say and we don't vote our chance was with merger and this select board allowed it to fail thanks all right thanks rachel you're back adieu hi everybody i'm really kind of glad that i'm following rachel because she broke my heart um like i told you last week there are people in the town that i love and i have family and friends there and i don't i don't want to do any harm but i also don't want to supplement your town anymore so i guess the one thing i wanted to say is that dan carried a long time ago kind of used an analogy of a divorce and ironically this is the 41st anniversary of my marriage that ended in divorce so with that i just want to say please work together let us try to make sure that we get the best for everybody there are going to be some losses there's no way to go get around that i think if everybody wants the orange let's look at who wants to appeal who wants the orange and how much we can work together i would also like to say that payment in lieu of taxes is alimony and i don't want to pay alimony we both have jobs we both have good incomes and let's figure this out for the sake of the children aka all of the residents on both sides of the issue and finally the only thing i want to say is that the only thing worse than paying two tax bills is paying for two divorce lawyers thank you all right thanks deb um margaret smith margaret margaret we can't hear you okay oh there you are there you are okay um two things one is that the town the the the new city of sx junction needs to remember that for many years ibm helped subsidize their tax payments so that they were much lower than the rest of the town and um and i'm and now i'm forgetting the second one oh and and the merger vote probably would have passed had not the village trustees insisted in in adding um an odd person to the new um governing body so that there would be three town representatives and three village representatives and one at large which they most likely would ensure that the village would have an an unequal vote so that three plus three plus one addition to their um the village charter made a lot of people really nervous um so the village complaining about high tax as well it was the other way for quite a long time thank you all right thanks margaret thanks margaret any other margaret can you bring yourself thank you hi andy thank you for uh taking my uh well um i want to i want to support andrew brown and gabriel smith and they're both their statements they are accurate and correct um uh as to the vote townwide um it i understand the point that the town did not get to vote on the separation it is somewhat problematic but god knows this whole um combined situation is such um as to the last thing is to ibm uh supporting the village and certainly the village turned down the uh um request some of the town to merge understandable and attitude but not necessary in the um the present um i also want to thank andrew for you uh and andy watts for you for um for your even-handedness and the select boards um i'll tell you procedure that i've seen so far as to being even-handed and i do understand why you may want to have a formal position to present to the legislature it is important and um so far what i've heard is an acceptable situation thank you all right thanks mike anybody else harlan smith andy thank you um uh i probably should have wrote this down earlier when i was thinking about it but um i'll just touch base on my email a little bit that i sent to the board um i think all of the votes all those separation votes and all of the um merger votes have been for this community uh screaming for change um and in the last three votes that we had it shook out that the change uh should be separation um i hear a lot that the town hasn't had an opportunity to vote but in in a sense they have um and i know i'm going to get a lot of people that are going to disagree with this statement um depending on how you look at it uh but if we were voting to be one community and we voted against being one community then we're voting to be two which means we're voting to separate um i i like the idea as i listen to this more um i like the idea of you being prepared to say something to the legislature um and i would hope that it would be in the interest of saying um that the select board is not going to stand in the way and is going to continue to work with the village um to protect both municipalities uh equally so i appreciate everything that you guys do um i don't envy the positions that you guys are in sometimes uh but i would encourage you as you're putting this statement together for the legislature to be supportive of separation um and and eager to continue to do the work so that it works for both communities thank you all right thanks harlan yeah i don't see any other hands up mouse might just leave scrolling down to see if there's anybody on the phone i don't see anybody okay i'll bring it back to the board any any response anybody wants to make anything or additional comment so i think the uh path forward here is i think over the next couple of days they just send stuff to greg and evan about if you have any other you know things you want to either talk about whether to include or consider ramifications of different things um i think i've listed out the few that i had um and then we'll uh we'll discuss this again hopefully on the third and maybe by then we'll have some of the information about the potential tax impact to us and we can also talk about if there's ways to mitigate that you know other than what i had suggested the you know trying to extract more money from the village um over the city um which yeah i understand this the sentiment around not wanting to do that on either side we can avoid it um all right anything else we need for that okay um next thing on the agenda is uh we will be going into an executive session to hopefully finalize a contract and then a consent agenda i'll make the motion that we accept the consent agenda as presented okay thank you don thank you sue any further discussion those in favor please say aye aye opposed okay motion passes four zero uh reading file any board member comments um i do want to bring up that uh sue and tracy and i had a discussion and email earlier today and so i just want to disclose that that came up the reason it came up is that we're noting that some emails from residents are getting thrown into our spam filter and um the discussion was the fact that three at least three of us are seeing that i've forwarded a number of those to our it department um and also and so they're investigating trying to understand why some uh emails are ending up uh in in our uh in our junk folder so that was a discussion we had i wanted to disclose that we had that discussion and that and the action that's going on around it um and ironically it was it was mask to skip mask questions about masking and it was questions about the the taking a position on on separation where the two things that have gone in actually no it was one of us about fire department too wasn't it so there were there were a number of topics so well and i just want to make it very clear that there was no discussion about the actual contents of those it was just the fact that hey this one to your junk mail folder please be aware it was this discussion about the fact that things were going into the into the junk mail not the content that was going in yeah and can i just add that we are we are we've kind of changed our operations and when we're in our email we are looking at our junk email so we are seeing those emails i don't want people to think that some emails might be going to your junk in there okay and i'll uh i'll clue pad in on that as well and so i know tracy you've forwarded some that you found the junk and i think you did you so we did one too and that's how the three of us got into the discussion so so anyway the discussion was about the fact that things are going in the junk man not the content of the things that were going on the joint right um i'd have a comment that i would like to thank the staff of sx town and village and wish them all a merry christmas and a happy new year thank you da happy to pass that on i got you thank you yes all you do all right anything else i did i did mention to staff that february 23rd we have a meeting which is the wednesday of vacation week i may or may not be on an airplane that day um that evening so i may not be available for that was that you know just just wanted to make sure that we actually need that meeting when we get to that point um because we it's the it's the meeting immediately prior to town meeting um when you say vacation week that's like school vacation the school vacation week yeah yeah we in the past often have not had a meeting but we did find that it was helpful to have a final meeting in preparation for town meeting if we needed it so i think that's why it's on like partly why it's on the calendar and it's on a wednesday because the monday is president's day and tuesday there's a village meet the village trustees have a meeting so we always move to wednesday when we're regional scheduled i'm going on too much about that anything else okay then uh we need a motion to go into executive session i have it but just a question who is going into executive session with us is only the select board um wow i move that and then i'll go ahead no go ahead i move that the trustees this is trustees yeah you have to change the select board i move that the select board make the specific finding that general public knowledge of contract negotiations with an employee would place the town at a substantial disadvantage second thank you sue thank you tracy and before we vote though um bill ellis did tell me he was going to send me an email he did and i was just wanted to make sure that he's not asking to be in the meeting he is not okay just wanted to make sure of that okay sorry any further discussions all those in favor please say aye aye opposed nay oh no i didn't say nay i didn't say i meant i meant opposed say nay so i did not say nay motion passes four zero second motion thank you i move that the select board enter into executive session to discuss contract negotiations with an employee pursuant to one vsa 313 a18 second thank you sue thank you tracy any further discussion uh we will uh hopefully be coming back to make a motion to finalize this um scott you don't have to stay um we will rejoin the team's meeting in case there's anybody who's um still on and we'll come back down the room you flip the workout logistics of the computer i can stick around okay all right all right um and then the other thing for the um did we did we say aye we didn't vote oh we didn't we didn't we didn't well i guess i was still having discussion about coming back okay we don't need to i i don't need to keep going all those in favor please say aye aye opposed okay motion passes four zero we will adjourn to coming upstairs i'm back thank you for everyone