 Across Vermont, there are many communities that have a town with a village nested within it. And generally a village is formed when it needs to provide services for itself that are not needed in the outer areas of the town. That's the case with the village of Essex Junction, which was formed in 1892, to serve itself in terms of sidewalks, fire protection around the area of the train station that had grown up back in that time. Fast forward to 1953, 1952 when IBM came to Essex, the population in the village had been larger. And since the 50s when IBM arrived, the populations have evened out to the point where the difference in populations between the town outside of the village and the village itself is about 100 people. How we got to put in the other petition was that we were setting up meetings and we were watching and noticing that the town outside the village, even though it has half the population of the town, had not really any way of voicing its opinions or its needs around the joint board table because the joint boards consist of five village trustees who represent the village only and five select board members who are beholden to the entire town. And so you're left with 11,000 people who have no one to speak for them. And we thought since the merger plan was going to cost the folks outside the village a considerable amount of money and that's what's under negotiation right now, maybe those folks needed to have at least an equal say at that table. That's exactly what this charter change mechanism is all about. It is in fact that people bypassing their select board. It's a statute mechanism that's in the state statutes that if 5% of the voters decide to change their charter, contrary to what the select board might like, they can initiate that process. The implication of this three to three is that there's this inherent challenge on the board right now. One of the concerns is that, as you can see under 2019 on the far right, there are three residents of the town outside the village, excuse me, of the village on the select board. Village residents are our select board or town residents as well. But up until that date, we did not have that many people from the village on the board. And so this situation has been concerning to people that they feel that because there are only two residents of the town outside the village, Andy being one of them, that they are not represented fully. But the fact behind that also is that there are not, in our experience, we have not had ties or votes that pitted certain residents against other residents. And in fact, we did some research and in the last five years, the select board had 882 votes and 94.9% of them were unanimous. I started agitating for a different representation model back in 2005 when I first got into local government. I noticed that the select board was made up of five members of the outside the village region. And that struck me as odd because I had friends in the village who essentially had no voice on that board. And you can say that those five people who lived outside the village were representing, at least theoretically, the people in the village. But I would say that until you live somewhere, you probably don't have as good a grasp of the issues as people who do live there and people who can speak up for that point of view. I continued to work despite the fact that I've had petitions, I've had ideas of interesting configurations of the board that I proposed. And it occurred to me once I saw the school boards ingenious solution to this, that this might also work for the select board. There are four from the village, four from outside the village. I thought it could be modified to three from the village and three from outside the village and work very well. And sure enough, when we took our petition around, it seemed to resonate with the folks we spoke with as well.