 So we're missing only one at this point. So I think I'll, it's just a little after seven and I will call a meeting to order. And we do have the minutes for December 1st, 2020 is their remotion. This is great. There's two joys tonight. Yeah. Yeah. The other one's going away. I'm having technical difficulties. Okay. Two of one of me is more than enough Jeff. I was going to say, just make sure you, you make the right one go away. I'll be right with you guys. I got to get a power cord and hopefully this other one's going to go. Well, I will wait for Joy to come back actually. Okay. I'm kind of sort of here. Okay. What are we doing? Moving to improvement minutes? Yeah. Yes. So moved. How's that? With one of the seconds. Yeah. Yeah. Second, Jeff. Okay. There's 10. Page two. I love it. Kudos. We're on page two of the minutes and page three. So hearing no corrections. So those in favor of approving the minutes of December 1st, 2020, raise your hands. One, two, three. I'm staying. Oh, you were there. I wasn't there. Oh, the first one. Okay. Yeah. Sorry. We have five. So we've unanimously approved that. We do not have the minutes from last week at this point in time. So we'll have those next year. And we're now down to public comment. Eric, is there anyone out there who wishes to make public comment? Yep, Terry. I've got a Kailin McCamp. Kailin, I'm just going to unmute you. You'll be able to speak to the board here in just a moment. I'm hoping Kailin. Hi, thank you. So it's actually myself and my husband, Scott. We just wanted to chime in and say that we really support adding some funding for a town energy coordinator into the budget. And we're really excited when the energy plan passed and we just know that without the expertise of an energy coordinator there to see it through it's unlikely to be able to move forward and Vermont is behind a lot of other states in making these actions. So the local leadership is really, really important to advancing energy goals and climate action. And we had 96 people sign a letter over the summer saying that they supported the energy plan and specifically the hiring of an energy coordinator as part of that. So just a reminder and would love to see funding for that. Anything you want to say? Yeah, just kind of seconding Kailin's thoughts. You know, lived in Williston most of my childhood and then of course went to college at UVM back to Williston. So just have a strong connection with the community and I really feel that we could be a leader in this to push Vermont and our town towards a more sustainable future. So it's definitely something that I'm interested in and getting a budget together for. So I appreciate it. Good, thank you very much for your comments and we'll be doing the budget in detail after tonight. So when we come back in the new year, we'll start going through it and as well as having a public hearing on the proposed budget. So thank you for your comments. Thank you. Thank you. So anyone else who wishes to make any public comment tonight? Nope, I'm not seeing anyone else, Terry. Okay. Then we can go on then to the report of the Chittenden County Chittenden Community Television annual report with Megan O'Rourke who is a channel director. Yep, I'm going to connect Megan. I think she's under Lauren Glenn's login here. So Megan, I'll get you connected here in just a moment as a panelist. Yep, she confirmed it in the chat. Welcome Megan. Hi folks. Hi, Megan, quickly. Go ahead. Hi. So thanks. I trust that you've all received the memo that I sent via air. We have had an interesting year as you all have as well. I am here to answer any questions that you might have. I'm willing to also just give you a rundown about town meeting TVs year, but I guess I'll just start with asking if there are any specific questions that you have looking at the memo? Probably not at this point in time, but perhaps you can give us a brief description of what you've been doing for us over the course of the year. Then we may have some questions about what lies ahead for us. Actually, if you don't mind one quick way, how's Scott doing? We haven't seen him in like seven months now. I know. Well, his house is very clean. And he misses you all greatly and he has been doing some, and we'll get to that. He's been doing some community coverage for us. So as you know, town meeting television is the government access channel for seven communities in Chittenden County, Williston being one of those. And we are a government access channel that also provides community education support, community television coverage. We do election coverage, legislative coverage, and we are all, we are administered under the umbrella of CCTV. One of the things that you'll see in my name, when I, oh no, I guess I logged in as the Lornglenn account, but one big change is that we have dropped the channel 17 from our name, and we are now just going by town meeting television. And this is going back to May after a long series of litigations with Comcast. And we could go into that in any detail that you'd like, but the long and short of it is that Comcast moved us out of the tier that we had been in. So the channels that are most familiar to you are probably channels 15, 16, and 17. And all of those channels were moved to a new, what's called the peg neighborhood in the thousands. And so if any of you have Comcast still and you wondered, where did they go? We are now on channel 10, 87. And what we have heard from folks, we got probably about $3,000 from Comcast to do the work of promoting that channel change, which we have done a lot of work. The part-time marketing person that we have on staff has done a lot to help folks understand that. And still I'm hearing from people that they, did you disappear? I had to reprogram Ryan remote. I had to, I couldn't find you. I don't know what happened to you. So that was a big thing that happened in May. One thing that's kind of interesting, the first video that we shot and it's not a municipal meeting, it was the opening of the YMCA. So that's an example of like the kind of community coverage that we do. And we renegotiated contracts last year with each municipality. And part of that was to do some community coverage in addition to the regular meetings that we cover. And so just a little bit of irony that our first meeting was the YMCA and we had to kind of, it was a packed house with hundreds of people in the room. And I look back at it now and I go, oh, wow, that's a different timeframe. And then we did town meeting coverage and we then went in March on the 13th remote with all of you. And I will say that we've actually covered all of the meetings that we normally would have. Ironically, it doesn't take a lot less time. Maybe it shaves off about an hour of drive time. And our staff has done a pretty amazing job of working, of transitioning all of the work that we've been doing to a remote workflow. And so some examples of that, the obvious thing of recording and streaming and titling and archiving meetings seems pretty clear but we've also worked with community producers to record programs. In Zoom, we've done some in the field recording with folks, I think we've done some coverage of other kinds of community events. And I think, Ted, you were in one recently that we recorded that was a Vicki lecture. And so part of the work of recording the kind of interstitial community programming that goes into our local democracy and archiving that for the future has been really important. In addition, we do internships. So we try to, I guess, get the most for our money. What other way do you put it? Is when we are working on something, we are thinking how can this also be a teachable moment for folks that we are bringing alongside us? And it's not lost on me that half of our current staff came to us as interns or through some sort of educational programming. So that is really important in building the community that in building our workforce but also in the work we do in the community. We recognize, so getting to the ask, the financial ask. So the big part of our fund raise, our funding comes from Cable Subscriber Revenue. And I think we have seen in the last five years, if I'm gonna try to remember this correctly, it's a 7 to 10% drop in Cable Revenue well at the same time, healthcare costs and staff costs continue to go up. So this is not something new to anybody. And we recognize that we've been working for probably, we've known that that was happening and we've been working for 10 years on trying to figure out ways to diversify our funding. So we do fundraising, we do grant writing. We have gone to the legislature and there is a PEG study committee that the legislature has pushed forward to figure out how to fundraise, how to fund PEG in the future. And then we also are coming to municipalities to help us pay for the specific part of the recording of those government meetings. And that's what's outlined in that memo. And we are asking for a flat. We're asking not to increase what we've asked for in the past, we're just asking for flat funding. I recognize Williston has, is you're in a tougher spot than a lot of communities that are relying solely on property taxes. You guys are probably gonna see a different hit than other communities that we work with. So I guess I'll leave it there. Hope I haven't taken too much time. Can anyone see the disembodied sense of speaking from your kitchen? Such an odd, so odd. Maybe you're all used to it now, but. So I'll leave it there and I'll ask if there are questions from that. Okay, thank you. You answered my question because I was looking at the document regarding the budget and it's always nice to have it flatlined if not decreased, but we do appreciate the services that we have received in the past from your organization. So are there questions for Megan? Megan, what's, you said the decrease in cable revenue. I don't understand your business well enough to under, understand what that means, what's happening? People are watching TV on Netflix and Roku and over the top streaming services. And that's not regulated in the same way that cable is regulated. Cable is regulated according to the, I think it's the 1992 Telecommunications Act that requires basically that the cable companies give a portion of their revenue in the form of a franchise fee. It's what, if you get cable, you see it. It's listed as a peg fee and that is given back to the communities for the, and in Vermont, most of the communities choose to do what we do here, which is into community production of municipal meetings or studio production or independent television production, the peg public educational and government access. And people are just not, less and less people are subscribing to cable. Interesting, okay, I did not know that. And what does peg stand for? Public educational and government access. Okay. And just as I'm looking at your page two of the memo. And I had assumed, because we're calling our budget fiscal year 22 budget, but the amount that you're looking forward to have included in our fiscal year 22 budget is what you're calling fiscal year 21. Yeah. All right. And I am good, thank you. Any further questions for Megan? I just wanted to say the thing that I did that was on cable recently, I didn't know that was going to be on cable. Sandy Baird was the organizer and she forgot to mention that that was going to be on. I just want to say I in no way would have dressed as comfortably as I was for my close-up that night, but no harm done. Okay. I think it went well anyway. Yeah. Yeah. I think, yeah, the remote world is making a lot of people surprised in a lot of different ways. So, and you guys, you have Jim and Eric in that he can balance the technological needs and the, you know, and we really appreciate, you know, I think Eric takes advantage, uses the service that we provide you all and recognizes that, you know, what we're doing is shepherding a public resource that is yours to access. And I appreciate that Eric does that. I will just add that one last page on this document that is about hybrid public meetings. And I do want to underscore that the opportunity gained here in this last nine months is that we have allowed the public to interact with folks in a different way. And we want to make sure that that is able to continue past the pandemic, right? We want a pandemic proof our meetings. So we want to figure out with you how we can allow the public to call in or participate remotely, even when you come back to being in the same room together or if, you know, three of you want to be in the same room together or four of you want to be in the same room together but somebody, so you see where I'm going with this and to that last page is a proposal for a hybrid public meeting. Originally it approached Eric about supporting some of that out of a capital budget. We actually have gone ahead and used some of our own capital money to purchase that and we would like to install it in January or February in the Williston Town offices. I mean, the Williston Town Hall as a test case for making this work. So we will work with Eric with your permission on moving forward on that. And we're not asking for any resources at this point to support that. Thank you. We have had more participation during the pandemic than we ever had before with people listening in and actually doing some public comment for us. So it's been good. And we anticipate with our budget process we seem to have quite a number of people interested in this but we've really never had anybody in a meeting before around the budget. So thank you. The question for you, we do have Jenny Lyons as part of your board. And how often does your board meet and what sort of things do they discuss? The board, so I have in my job as channel director which I've been doing now for about two years I have been less involved in the trustees meetings. Generally they meet, they're scheduled to meet at least once a month. And that is they help us set policy, they help decide contracts. Today we had a meeting discussing, so we have a contract with the municipalities and then we also have a contract with the cable companies and we're about to renegotiate our contract with Comcast. So they gave us advice and then sign off on decisions around that. So they're really, they're the oversight and the public arm from the municipality. Good, thank you. Any last questions from Megan? If not, thank you very much for coming to our meeting. So thank you. Thank you. All right, take care. Thanks, bye. So we have about five minutes before the public hearing and perhaps Eric or Joanna do a manager report. Sure, Terry, a brief report this evening. So I hope I can fill the full five minutes but I'll at least take one of them hopefully and we can also look at other business here for that. Pleased to report to the board that the town has been awarded a $12,000 municipal planning grant to support providing illustrations to update the Village Master Plan. You may recall this application was approved just over a month ago. And Matt shares with me that this is the first municipal planning grant the town has received since the year 2006. So it's a good effort by our planning department, Emily Heyman and Matt Belanger to get this together for us. And see, that is just about all I have on the manager's written report. We have made a new hire in the highway department and we're fully staffed in the police department as of today. So sort of positive staff used to report. Very good. Maybe just a couple of things under other business. We, the charter changes have been drafted by the legislative council and have been sent back to Jim and Aaron for their review and approval. And essentially it suggests a rewrite of the proposal we put in last year. And so nothing much has changed with that. The person who drafted the bill has listed the problems that he sees with at least two of our proposed changes which we anticipated. And the first one is the constitutional problem that the charter changes are asking for the ability to change our charter if any other town changes it in a particular way without having to go back to the legislature. And he has called that into question for the committee in the legislature to look at when they do it. And the other one is the proposing a charter change to do something different than the legislature did last year on contract bargaining and the proposal for a resolution step that we currently do not have. And the charter change would not go along with the legislation that was passed. So we'll see what happens in the legislature that'll be now it'll be ready to be introduced as during the first couple of weeks of the session and hopefully the committee of jurisdiction the government operations committee of the house will take it up and do whatever they're going to do with it. So that will get that on its way anyway. There's a couple of things that are other business that will take a little bit more time but we're getting close to 7.30 and I think we can start the public hearing on the grant close out on the community center. So if Amy Dimitromitz is on the line we can bring her in, I'll read the morning. Yep, Amy I'm getting connected right now. There's Amy here, good. So the town of Wilson received $100,000 from the state of Vermont for a grant under the Vermont community development program, BCDP. The town of Wilson select board will hold a public hearing at 7.30 p.m. on Tuesday, December 15th, 2020 to obtain the views of citizens on community development to furnish information concerning the range of community development activities that have been undertaken under this program and to give effective citizens the opportunity to examine a statement of the use of these funds. So Amy, welcome to our meeting and perhaps you give us a brief overview of how this all came about and what happened and we can go and open it to the public for comment. Great, thank you very much. I'm sorry, I'm kind of struggling here for a minute with my screen. Can you all see me? Yes. I was gonna try to share my screen. And maybe Eric can help you with that? Yeah. Yeah, Amy, it should have permission. If you go to the bomb that that share screen, the green box, there we go, something's happening. You got that? Yep, there you go. All righty, thank you. So thank you very much. I'm Amy Dimetruits, I'm with the Champlain Housing Trust and yes, I wanted to report on the town of Williston's VCDP grant that was used towards our project called the Old North End Community Center at the Old St. Joseph's School in the Old North End. I actually first came to the Williston Select Board was in December of 2017 to ask for the town support. We finally did get the approval for the, we got the allocation of $100,000 of VCDP funds in December of 2018. So since then, a lot has happened. We are complete with the project. The former St. Joseph's School has really been turned into a thriving community center. There are three floors. This was an old Catholic school with three floors and there are just a plethora of community organizations that are now occupying that building. And I'm gonna go through them. Up on the top floor is AALV, that is a program, a nonprofit that works with immigrants and refugees, helping them get connected with the services and supports that they need in order to be successful new Americans. They serve immigrants and refugees across Chittenden County and Vermont, many of whom are living in Williston, which is one of the reasons we did approach the town of Williston to support this grant application. It is, although the building is in the old North end of Burlington, it really does serve people throughout Chittenden County and Vermont. AALV provides help navigating access to different services and housing, employment training, ESL classes, citizens classes, childcare, mental health training. They really provide an amazing array of services for the newest people of our country. On the second floor, we've leased that out to the Burlington Parks, Recreation and Waterfront department of the city of Burlington. And they sub-lease to a number of different organizations, including Jerry Mary Theater, the Hindu Temple. They run a senior center there. They have a large gym on the second floor that serves as a indoor recreation, as well as a meeting space. And it also has the theater for very Mary Theater. Also, Vermont Adult Learning runs their programs out of that building as well. And then on the ground floor, we have a daycare center of Robbins Nest Daycare, which has been there for 35 years, doing high quality daycare and childcare. Again, they've got many families there who are originally from Williston. So they also serve Williston residents. We also on the ground floor have the Janet Munt Family Center, which is a program that provides, it's a parent-child center that provides parenting support and a high quality preschool. There's also a large event hall on the ground floor that is space for all sorts of community meetings and events and celebrations. So it's a very full building. The building, as we knew right from the start, it's a great old building, as you can see. It's beautiful, but it was extremely outdated. It hadn't had any kind of renovation since the 70s and really needed significant upgrades. So we put together, oops, I'm sorry, I wanted to, so we put together, it was an almost a $9 million project and you don't need to look at all the details here, but I just wanted to show you that it's a $9 million project. It was a $2 million acquisition price, $5 million worth of rehab. We put together a very complicated financing scheme here that included a program called New Market Tax Credits that brought $2.4 million of equity to the project. We also, the Champlain Housing Trust undertook a capital campaign that raised $2.4 million from the community to support the project. The city of Burlington used their own CDBG funds, which is the source of VCDP. The city of Burlington put in $477,000 of their own CDBG allocation. And then of course, the town of Williston went to the state of Vermont and was successful in requesting that $100,000 grant from VCDP. So these are the sources. And here's what we did with it. Here was the building when we started. And one of the major, most impactful things we did was we opened up all of those front windows. If you see here, the panels above the windows, we were able to open those up and put in full-sized energy-efficient, historic windows, really great impact just on the street. We also made major improvements and renovations to that marble structure on the front, the entryway. We were very committed to retaining the historic character of this building. That was very critical to us. Even on the sides, we weren't able to afford to put in the full-sized windows, but those are energy-efficient windows on the bottom below the panels. So energy efficiency was a high priority of this project as well. We also put in some landscaping and park space and playground space for the preschool and family room. Again, with the windows on the ground floor, there's these old historic windows that had been retained and we made improvements and renovated those windows. So we could keep that historic character but increase the efficiency and longevity of those windows. Another big project was a parking lot. Other exterior improvements that we made that aren't as exciting are a new roof with insulation, again, energy efficiency being really key. On the interior of the building, we again retained the historic layout and materials. We added five bathrooms to the building. We also installed on the ground floor for the event hall a large commercial kitchen, which is serving the event hall. It also serves the daycare and the family room. And we've also now been able to provide that space for Meals on Wheels. So Meals on Wheels volunteers come here daily to prepare meals and pack them and bring them off to serve seniors throughout the county. We also installed a new elevator to make the building accessible. We installed a sprinkler system you can see here in the hallway. We made fire safety upgrades to the gym and theater including insulation underneath the seats and more sprinklers. In the classrooms, we installed entirely new heating system and air conditioning for the first time ever. We brought air conditioning to the building. We used very energy efficient heat pump technology to provide both heat and air conditioning. We also upgraded the electrical systems throughout the building including energy efficiency lighting. So those are the improvements that we made to the building but I think what's most important and the reason we did this is because of the community. So here's the classroom, but what really matters is what happens in those classrooms. There's all sorts of things happening ESL classes, citizenship classes. We have the theater where teens are putting on a show with very merry theater and all grades and even an adult show. Here's the seniors doing an exercise class in the gym. Again, the gym having a public meeting with kids and the mayor and adults. Just, I mean, it's kind of nostalgic at this point looking back at these group photos but this is the type of building that we've been able to create here. The preschool, they've got the quiet room in their rumpus room. The preschool has been able to continue to operate through the pandemic making friends. These are the before times but the event hall holds weddings, fundraisers, the monthly neighborhood planning assemblies, political meetings happen there every month. They will again after the pandemic. Donations of coats that they're being able to provide to the new Americans and people throughout the building. They have made AALV in particular has been operational throughout the pandemic. They've COVID-proofed their offices. They're continuing to provide services to the most vulnerable in the community making sure that they have the resources that they need. The site has also been used for pop-up COVID testing that is especially useful for the immigrant population because this is their community space. They know that this is a safe place that they can trust to go and get the testing that's needed to keep the whole community safe. And someday, we hope again, we'll be gathering here is the playground with the family room. It's just an incredible, really is an incredible place for community. And we're gonna get back there again someday soon. So construction is 100% complete. We paved the parking lot the last thing in July of this last summer. We've already met the projected beneficiaries. So with VCDP funding, they'll give you this federal funding and you're making a promise that you're gonna serve low and moderate income residents. We had projected that just with ALV, we weren't counting anything else in the building but just ALV would serve 750 folks. And in fact, even with COVID, they've served 830. So we've met that beneficiary. In terms of VCDP, we have not yet requisitioned their funds. Eric and your attorney, the town attorney and our attorney are finalizing the subgrants agreement for signing hopefully this month that will requisition the funding by the middle of January. And that'll be the end of the VCDP project. The building obviously has been complete now for a few months. So that's my final project presentation. Good, thank you very much, Amy. So this is a public hearing. If there's anyone out there who wishes to make comments or ask questions, this would be the time. Eric, is there anyone looking like they want to do that? Let's see. Someone raised their hand. I've got a Carlo Karstens. Carlo, I'm gonna connect you to make a comment just a moment. Is it okay now? Yeah, but we can hear you. Hi, Carlo. Hello, everyone. I'm actually here, I was here early because of the library but I'm really glad that I was able to see this presentation because I think it's wonderful what you've done. I'm very happy that Williston is a part of it. And I just hearing, actually, it was very touching and emotional as you can hear, but especially hearing about the Janet Mont Room because I know Margaret Mont was just a beloved teacher for so many kids in Williston. And I'm sure that it was part of her legacy to have this Janet Mont Room and to hear the family name brought up again in this really joyful, beautiful building is really touching and brings in another Williston connection to the whole building, which I think is just lovely. So thank you and thanks for all that you do there. Thank you, Carlo. Anyone else, Eric? I'll just kind of say a last call. Anyone else make a comment? Just raise your hand or type in the chat, please. Okay, I think that's all the comments for the public hearing, Terry. Thanks. Before we close the hearing, is there any questions from members of our board? Don't see anybody. I had the opportunity. Go ahead. Well done, that's all. Yes, I had the opportunity. The tour of the building before anything was done to it. And you can see the possibilities now to see the final project is amazing. There was supposed to be an open house, I believe in April, which of course didn't happen. I had to look forward to going to that as well, but this is a great tour. So thank you. So if there's nobody else who wishes to make a public comment or questions, I would entertain a motion to close the public hearing. Move to close the public hearing on the VCDP Old North End Community Center Project. Second. And we have a second. Is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none. All those in favor of the motion, raise your hands. One, two, three, four, five. So thank you. Thank you, Amy, very much for your presentation. We really appreciate all the hard work that went into having this done. That's a great project. Thank you really so much for all of your support. Appreciate it. Thanks. Bye. So now we'll move on to the library trustees annual report. And we're expecting Steve Perkins, the chair of the library board of trustees to be on the line. And there's obviously it's good to be members of the board of trustees listening in as well. So Steve, welcome. Need to unmute Steve. There we go. Now can you hear me? Yes. Great. Thank you very much for having us here. Tonight, we look forward to answering questions that you may have about the library operations as well as the proposed budget. I believe that's the piece that's on tap for tonight. So I believe Jane is here with us and I just wanted to say a few words before introducing her to answer your questions. It's been a very interesting year for the library, obviously as all of us. And I know has continued to provide many services to the town of Williston in the best way they can. Certainly under difficult circumstances for the staff, but people have been using it a lot. And then we look forward to getting back to some normalcy, hopefully by the end of the next calendar, well middle of next calendar year, I guess is what I'm hearing. From a budgetary standpoint, you do have the numbers that Jane put together. We certainly follow the guidance as was promulgated by the town manager, town manager's office with guidance from the select board. So no surprises in there. But one thing that we just wanted to keep, you know, at that front of front of mind, I suppose, or middle of mind for folks is that as Williston does grow and the services for the library are needed, you know, we are looking in the future that we need to probably grow our space and our staff to continue providing those services for the town. So nothing that we're looking at doing in the next fiscal year, but certainly a conversation that we will be having at the board level in the library. The conversation is within the strategic plan, which you all have as something for us to be thinking about as a town. So that's my introduction to the budget information. I'll turn it over to Jane. Hi, Steve. Welcome, Jane. Oh, hello. Good evening. So it was quite a year of transitions at the library. Of course, it was my first year as director and it was a very interesting one. The pandemic had an impact, of course, on operations, collections and staffing. And through it all, we did manage to stay engaged with the community, adapting to find new ways to connect and offer access to the collection. The silver lining of the pandemic was that we were pushed to implement a lot of new technologies and service models that will persist after the pandemic is over and will improve, have improved operations. So some of the things were, we moved our adult and youth programming online using video conferencing. We implemented a software program to offer the large summer reading program that can now be used year round for both adults and youth. We implemented online library card registration so new Williston residents can get set up with the library accessing e-books, e-audio books without having to come in. We were able to get them connected. We're circulating, still circulating our physical collection, obviously not at the level we were, but using contactless porch pickup. And we were browsing by appointment. We were up to 69 browsing appointments per week when we had to close down after Thanksgiving because conditions changed, but we certainly hope to ramp that back up at some point. So the feedback as we transitioned to offering our services and collections differently has been overwhelmingly positive. And I just wanted to share a few images and some feedback from the last couple of months if I can share screen, Eric. Yep, you should be able to Jane. Okay, good. Yes. Okay. So this was, we had a virtual cookie exchange this week, which is kind of typical of one of the types of programs we have. And this was some of the feedback patrons asked me to share at the presentation this week. The, hang on here. Craft bags for youth. By the end of October, we had given out 700 craft kits to children and youth in the community. They were hugely popular. And we started offering adult ones in October that are also popular. When we closed to browsing appointments a couple of weeks ago, we decided we needed to do something to help people browse. So we started a book bundling program where we do the browsing for the patrons. They give us certain parameters and we build a bag of books for them, basically. Our book clubs are continuing. Those were pretty easy to pivot online. And we have managed to keep people engaged in those. With us and with each other as well. The online story time, in the summer, we were able to have a few outside, socially distanced, but for the most part, we've been doing those online. And you can see this patron was pretty happy with that. We were so happy to have the bookmobile this summer. Even though we had to pull the books off the bookmobile in crates, we had these two young ladies helping us. And we extended bookmobile service through the fall and that really helped to engage the community, driving through with the horn going. I think people were pretty happy to see Dottie. And then someone, a young patron, enjoying our new book bundling service which has really taken off as well. So that was just a little bit of the feedback. Looking forward to the next three to five years, as Steve said, the town is growing, added 200 people in each of 2018 and 2019. And the space for the collections and the community are definitely going to be a challenge. The FY19 Vermont Public Library Statistics Survey came out a couple of weeks ago and it put Williston as the 14th largest town by census population in the state. And it had Dorothy Alling Memorial Library as 21st in square footage in the state for libraries. Happily, we ranked sixth in the state for circulation of physical materials and overall circulation. So that's pretty impressive circulation statistic. And we held seventh place for attendance at programming in the state, also impressive. The community wants the collection and wants programming and that sense of community. So that was just my overview. I don't know if you want me to jump right into the budget or... Let's undo questions from the board first of all and then we can, after depends on what we do with there, we can get into the budget. Questions from the board. Good. Nobody asking questions. Perhaps I'll ask just one. I was chatting with Eric just before we went on the air about the great success that the libraries had during the course of a pandemic. And would this have any bearing on the need for space because we've been talking about that for the past couple of years about increasing space for the library. And I got from what you said that there's gonna still be a need for increased space and staff to deal with it. Yeah. I mean, our electronic collections increase, the usage is increasing, but the usage of the collection and the space for programming is very impressive and still strong and we'll continue to trend that way. I think if anybody has visited the library on say a Tuesday afternoon or really any afternoon after school or have come down and attended some of the special events that in non-pandemic times happen almost every single weekend, you'll find that you can't even find a spot to stand in the library. It's so packed and then staff as well, whether the programs are virtual or happening in person, it takes staff to do that. And we have very limited staff workspace. I think that's one of the real limiting factors in our library. So we bring it up tonight just because we always wanna be thinking about what is the next three to five years look like? Again, not something we're thinking about for this next fiscal year, but it's worth studying and thinking about and the library board will be looking very closely at this over the next couple of years. Good, thank you very much. Jeff here, hey everyone. So could you explain a little bit what your thoughts are in terms of space? Are we talking about like a doubling of the building? I mean, have you, I mean, I'm just trying to grasp how big of an expansion you are envisioning. I think I can answer Jeff that no, we don't have that answer right now. And it is something that is within our strategic plan to be studying. So, we hope to be able to do that work and then come back to you and answer that exact question. Yeah, and totally fine, I just was wondering. And there's, I don't know how to correctly put this. So I'll just be a little bit blunt. There's no possibility that the library can stay within the existing footprint. It has to get bigger. I think that would be a great question for a master planner. And I think, when we do that work, when you say footprint, Jeff, is there opportunity to build up? I don't know, is there? Across the street, I don't know the answer to that. If we've kept it all one story in the within the existing footprint. Over the last five years, the library has done a number of space studies and has worked with consultants to do optimization of the space so that we can best use what we have. So I think we're maxing that out. Okay, that's a good point right there. Okay, all right, good. Thank you. So if there are no more questions from the board, we can proceed then onto the budget presentation. And Jane, I presume you're doing that. Yes. And we'll start with the operating budget, although I think you only have one thing in capital. Anyway. Right. Do you want me, you're going to share, Eric, the summary? Yep. There we go. Great, thank you. So the operating budget, it presents line items that are essentially level funded or slightly decreased from the previous fiscal year, except for the books line and system equipment and maintenance. So you'll note that special programs and computer reference services, wages and benefits have been moved in the proposed FY22 up to department salary. So they are lumped in there now. And program presenter and materials and system equipment and maintenance have been moved up under library operations. That was just to simplify the accounting and it was a little bit more logical. So for the books line, the increase requested is $2,000. And we would be using that to enhance our increasingly popular digital collections that I had mentioned to meet the needs of our current patrons, but also to ensure adequate growth for the new residents moving into town. So statistics in FY20 and FY21 have showed increased usage of e-books, e-audio books and streamed video. So of course some of this increase is related to the pandemic and the closing the library for browsing for a period. And that motivated a lot of our patrons to explore the digital collections and read digitally some of them for the first time. But even before the pandemic we were seeing this increase in electronic resource use and we expect the increase to continue. So just as an example, our Love Overdrive collection which is our major e-book collection. So an increase in usage of 31% from FY19 to FY20. So that's a shared Vermont consortium collection that we supplement with buying direct titles for our patrons to use which decreases wait time for those e-books. Our other major collection is Hoopla which is our only streamed video collection and that saw 300% increase in usage from FY19 to FY20. So that money would help us build those collections. The other increase is the system equipment and maintenance and that $2,500 would be put towards work with a web designer to make our website show off all of our wealth of content and resource. The DAMA website has used an average of 1,600 people access it weekly and we had an average of 80,000 visits last year. So the website is really our other front door our physical front door is very important but this front door is also very important to make sure that people can discover our collections and programs. Our current web design is reaching its eighth year which is pretty old and web design world and it's apparent that we need a refresh. We expect the cost of web redesign would be double that and we would be using some of our current donations to supplement that, to have a web designer look at our website. So any questions about? Any questions for Jane on her presentation or other things that are in the individual pages? Well, you did ask answer my question about why was the budget somewhat reorganized? So yeah, that's it on the operating side for me. So overall increases relatively modest by looks of it on total costs. Yeah, overall increases 1.8%. Of course, a lot of that is salary and benefits, but. Yes, yes, not much control over those. Any further questions before we do the capital budget? If not, I think there's just one thing on the capital budget and that's the bookmobile. Yes, the request is for. No, no. 3,500 I think. Yeah, it is the request is for 7,500 towards the replacement of the bookmobile, assuming a cost of 90,000 and assuming 12 years of use. The current bookmobile is set to be replaced in fiscal year 2028. So we have five years set aside already. Well, it doesn't seem possible that we've had it for that long, but yeah, well, it served us well. It really has. Yes. Any questions on capital? I think we're good then. We can say thank you very much for both the presentation from you and Steve and all the work that the board does and the volunteers and the friends of the library. And I always look forward to the yearly presentation from the library. So thank you. Well, thank you for your support. Thank you. Thank you very much. So we can move on then to the police budget. If she fully is ready. Okay. If she fully gets you connected and I'll get Shirley connected now too for the next couple. So welcome to chief and Shirley. I can see Shirley, but I don't see the chief yet. You just need to share your camera and unmute chief. There he is. What's the other guy look like? Well, welcome chief. And this is your opportunity to present the police department budget. So we'll start with the operating budget and then go to the capital legend. Okay. I'm sure it might be in two chiefs. So can you hear me all right? Hold up. Yeah. Basically, wow, I tell you it brings up my. Back to the beginning here. Sorry, I didn't write this page down at a time. Just be a moment. You doing the operating you said for us? Yeah. Well, good evening everybody. And yes, the the other gentlemen because my eye did much better than I did. But at the comment that my doctor did an incredible job. It took more time to get me ready for surgery than the actual surgery was about 20 minutes to do cataract surgery. So I was amazed. So hopefully by the end of tomorrow's business this little shield comes off, but it really helps out, you know, night and day clarity and all that. I'll go through my budgets and then I'll give an overview of what we've been doing during the pandemic and then what I see as needs for the agency over the next three to five years. In my budget letter, this budget is very conservative. It has not increased that much. You know, three, I think two major things here is that, you know, outside of contractual agreements with wages and benefits. And plus we finally in the FY22 budget we fully fund the 17 positions that are allotted here to the police department. Since I've been here in the three plus years we finally knock on wood. I don't want to jinx myself because it seems like I get blitz when we talk about it. But it's been a challenge to fill all 17 positions. And the makeup of our PD is that you have a chief of police, you have a lieutenant who's both a patrol and an administrative manager. We currently have three filled sergeants position. After the first year we will be testing to fill the fourth vacancy. This occurred due to the retirement of Sergeant Scott Graham back in July during the pandemic. After 20 years of service to the town. We have a makeup of patrol positions and a comfort dog position. As you go through the budget here you will see that there is no line item for the comfort dogs in our budget. When we presented this over a year ago we indicated that we'll do the management of the comfort dog therapy dog through private donations. And we have exceeded our expectation. I think we've exceeded the department's expectation about the amount of people's interest in donating to that. And the fundraisings we've done. We've done really two large fundraisers for the program. One is the T-shirt program. We also did one naming of the dog and we coming up with a decal for the dog, Duke. And then the slash from back in the beginning of October we did the PPE mask with the cancer seal, the hot, the red hot on it to donate towards the cancer units. And also have a Duke's picture on it. And that was a big hit on that. So as we go down through the budget on the very little increase of anything. Again, the first line administration basically the increase increases are very, very small in the area of administration salary and benefits. As we go down to the building maintenance and I'll talk a little more about this but basically the property, the insurance, went up and then we try to do as much level funded on each items based on previous years. And then the building maintenance, we've kept that for the last two years. What we're trying to do is paint the building. Nothing's been done for 14 years. So a little over a year ago we have daytime custodians when they have some free time to do some painting in the building. But we were talking about myself and the top manager looking at, we don't have a master plan on all our buildings here, like what we need to replace over the next few years. So we're talking about three to five years what's going to happen in the PD. But with the fight upon with the police department we got roofs, we got furnaces. Two weeks ago we had to shut down one of our furnaces because we had an older smell here in the building and we had a rise of the CO. We had positive CO levels and it turned out that there was a very large hornet's nest in the vent system that wasn't letting the vent open up 100% so it was backfilling into the area of the building. So again, we need somebody to come out and look at all our properties to find out what's going to cost to start replacing things. Replacing the roofs, replacing windows, replacing furnaces, you know, doing the floors and all that. So that's something that myself and the top manager had started discussions on that. Next one down, communications. You know, that dropped a little. Again, in the areas we dropped is the radio repairs. Even though, you know, the salaries have come down it's that we had to fill a full-time position this past year during COVID. So that course is down a little. Again, investigative services and I'll talk about this more at length in my projection for the three, five but we do not have detectives. That's what basically the investigation services. The course to that in that is the Chittin County Special Investigation Unit. Since we don't have anybody in that unit, we pay a fee to allow them to do our sexual assault investigations and they've done incredible work for us assisting us. We had a case a little over a month and a half ago involving two 12 year old juveniles that were victims of a sexual assault and they came out that early in the morning to assist us and ended up charging a 24 year old male that was involved in the incident. The investigation expenses is basically, you know, we still do a lot of our own detective work. So people use cell phones and all that. So we need to, you know, get into those and look for data. So that's what the investigation expenses are on that. Our patrol services, again, like I said, we finally made it to that magic number of 17. It has been a long challenge, especially in this day and age now. But, you know, it seems like it's like a roller coaster. You know, this is not the first time we've been at full strength back in 2019. We were 17 full swan officers for about 24 hours and then we lost positions. This past year, we lost two patrol positions in addition to two vacancies that we still had. So I was four positions down and it's just the dedication of the officers here reaching out to people they knew that maybe wanted to relocate or, you know, advertising, you know, we advertise in well over 30 colleges throughout New England and parts of New York on their employment sites. You know, we've attended job fairs throughout New England and parts of New York. So again, it wasn't where they just sat back and says, well, somebody will come in and one day we'll get up the phone. You know, everybody wanted those 17 positions filled and you know, you got to really look at that. You know, that it's the dedication of the employees that we have here that want this agencies to advance and go forward. In addition to the salaries, you know, we had to increase, you know, the overtime. You know, we have no additional personnel. So when I have vacancies on some shifts and like I was saying, like one shift now when he has a sergeant and a patrol officer they're one position down and it's one of the busiest platoons we have. It's the night shift. So again, I do my best to give them extra bodies to supplement their shifts. And hopefully within the next few weeks we'll have a recruit graduating from this current class. And I'll speak a little about that. You know, I keep saying we're 17 positions. You know, all the vacancies are filled but we will not be 17 sworn available positions until probably July of August of 2021 because we still have another candidate that has to go to the full-time academy. And it's scheduled for March of next year with COVID and the exposure we have going on at the academy right now that looks like be pushed ahead to maybe sometime in April. So it's 16 weeks and then post-graduate training. So we're looking at maybe August if not by September 1st, we're on paper and on everything else that we are actually operational 17 positions. So, you know, if you've been following what's going on in Burlington, you know, it takes, it takes us about six to eight months to recruit background, interview, test, everything to get somebody ready for a police academy. And if you fall in the timeframe of, you know, one already began and you can't get a seat in there then you got to wait at least another three or four months to get to the next academy. So you have to go through an old process of applications again and get a seat saved for them. So it's really, really, you know, long, long process. It's not, you can't wait to wave a magic wand. You know, it's nice to, you know, we've gotten a few recruits that came from other agencies. It doesn't cost us anything, but we still have to do backgrounds out of them. We have to do them through our field training program. So, but we don't have to lose them for 16 plus weeks. We started, you know, the current year of 2021 and this year with the gasoline, we started looking at the actual gas and miles and the amount. So we've got a really clear picture. And again, you know, we're not sure what the price of gas will be over the next 12 to 18 months. So we increased that line item a little more. And we back down a little on our training and our equipment. You know, right now with COVID-19, we can't do a lot of hands-on training, evidence through like we're doing tonight without what I mean here, evidence through Zoom. So like if you have to do tactical stuff or hands-on stuff, you can't do that now. So a lot of the courses we're attending right now is on Zoom. And so it's not cheap because there's a lot of people out there really pushing a law enforcement training. Community support, that is our, the next line item down special programs, that is our outreach program. It's dropped out, yep, yep. And I think because more towns are buying into the outreach program, I know Richmond, Hinesburg has decided to join. So again, it spreads out the course to all the communities, but that is very, very important to this community here. We use them a lot. They work with us very closely. They enjoy coming here. So again, it's really, really important to keep that program operational. And then basically the door control and damages, that's basically, we have a contract with a lucky puppies over in Cochessler. We able to board the dogs that we pick up and nobody claims 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. So it works out good. And then our community justice program that's housed here, that money, we're supporting two of the positions. There's only two positions there, but through the Department of Corrections, they were able to redirect some more funds. I believe so, Shirley, if you're here on, due to lessing our course to operational. We provide the office space here. And again, it's been quiet because they haven't been in the building since March. And I don't see them coming back to prior to the summer of 2021. So that's it on the police budget. Anybody has any questions? So questions from the board regarding the operating budget. Don't see anybody with questions. So perhaps we can go on to finish up the capital and then go to your forecasting. Shift over to the capital chief. It's all in the equipment fund. So we'll start with the chief's vehicle. Yeah, this is, each year we add to, we figure it's going to cost to replace the chief's vehicle. We've decided to, rather than five years, look at three years replacement, it will be replaced in the budget we're in right now, in 2021. But we build it out, so within after three years. And what happens is that that vehicle that I have will be transitioned over to the lieutenant for his vehicle. And then a new vehicle is, and then the unit that the lieutenant is using will be transitioned into the comfort dog program or BCI position. So, and that's how we build it out over the years. So the next expense would be the fleet vehicle replacement we figure it costs to outfit a full-time patrol unit, about $75,000. And what we try to do is eventually we'll have the same type of vehicle. We're going to the afford SUVs. That way when we buy a new one, we can transfer the equipment to the new vehicle. Usually you can get at least two transfer, like you buy one brand new, raw new equipment. And then when you recycle the cruiser, you can transition most of the equipment into the new cruiser you buy. So your costs will be limited. Next year in this budget, the FY22 budget, we had planned on replacing three of the vehicles, two SUVs and our pickup truck. But because of the miles being somewhat low because only one person was driving it, right now now it's two, so miles will go up. We've had low miles. So we're going to push that vehicle up until 2023. So again, so we're not burdening the town on that. So that's why, that's our plans for FY22. It's only replaced two of the patrol units. We believe it will work for us to do that. And this is how we play, if we did a side letter on it, so you can see what our plans were, how we did it. Again, in my three to five year plan, I'll talk about the replacement of the vehicles and what we're looking at. The traffic enforcement program, again, we've been working with the highway public works about speed monitoring signs and speed trailer. We've got two out there right now. We converted one to solar, so we can keep it out there longer. We also have a covert speed monitoring that does not look like anything. It looks like a box and it gives us the most accurate speed. So when you put a speed trailer out, people see the big white thing the lightest flashing, the speed is flashing and people slow down with our little covert box is that they can't see nothing flashing. What I wanna do is be able to build on these where some citizen calls up and saying, hey, on my street at this time of day, there's a certain type of vehicle, this color speeding and we can input that information into the speed trailer and give a time range. And if it comes and hits somebody with that color of the vehicle and that time of day, we will get an alert on it. So we know the person is telling us. So again, with all the new technology coming out, we'd like to get a third trailer because we're doing great demands on our website. We post a lot of speed data and what the, so if people are questioning on crime example, North Wilson Road or South Brown Hill Road, you can go onto our webpage and see exactly where the speeds are and where the increases are. So it's a very worthwhile investment we have here in this town. And police technology basically, this is something that we're currently working on right now. We started that in 2019 or late 2018 and early 2019 about installing security cameras around our property here. Town hall got a bunch of them and we just ran out of money to finish our project. So we decided to do it. We just applied for a grant on the site increasing that for $75,000. So hopefully, we'll grant it. It's through Homeland Security and the time law wrote the grant. So if that works out well and we have granted it, we'll be able to install additional cameras not only on these properties here, the town hall property and the police department, but we'll be able to look at the fire department because currently they have no cameras. So we'll be able to tie in the fire department here to the police department for monitoring. So, we'll give them added protection on their property. And that's basically it on the capital. Got any questions for the chief on the capital budget? Don't see anybody. So you were going to give us your projections for the next number of years. Yeah, let me just talk about this current year. I've been on this job law enforcement since January in 1977. I started as a B cop in Brooklyn and worked my way up to the rank of chief of police. This is my third agency. And I never thought that policing would change so much with COVID-19, how we operate. We started off with concerns about contacts and we had different levels of response. Level one, two and three. We're currently at level three again. This is our second time in the last probably four months we went to level three. Basically it's a lockdown, our building. We try to do evidence through computers, Zoom, FaceTime and all that. Trying to avoid contact with people that we're not sure of that. We don't fingerprint people anymore right now. When we make an arrest, we cite and release. If not, we refer them to the community justice program. Pretty much over 75% of our cases have been referred to CJC based on the recommendation of the state's attorney's office. Most serious crime will go to court. But again, the study is saying that if you have less than 15 minutes of contact there's a good opportunity, you probably won't catch it. But I've never fingerprinted anybody in 15 minutes. It takes at least half an hour to fingerprint somebody. So again, your hands on with somebody. So we've got to really be cautious. We received a grant in October. We did renovations downstairs in our officers room. We went from 200 square feet to 600 square feet. So we safe distancing the officers. Doors are locked, doors are shut. Everybody wears masks. You have to put gloves on, you have to put gloves on. The building is sanitized three days a week through our cleaning service. We never thought this would happen. Everybody was hoping that we'd get through the summer and come to fall, we'd be back to normal. And we can break bread, have a nice Thanksgiving and now we're looking and we will have a Christmas. So again, this is law enforcement 101. And hopefully with the vaccine being available, we'll get back to normal probably next year sometime. But everybody has to stay positive. And everybody wants to do their work for the community. And I think we're doing that. Once we started back in March and April, we noticed a dip in crimes because a lot of the businesses were closed. A lot of the retail places were closed. Then we had a lull and the businesses started to open up. We noticed an increase in retail theft and crime. And the car breaks and all that. But the officers are out there. We're in every neighborhood possible. We still respond to crimes in progress. If we see any greasers, motor vehicle offense, we will stop them. But there's ways of how we deal with the public on that. If the person has a license, we can run them out in the cruiser. We don't have to touch their licenses. We don't have to touch their registration if it's in the screen. So again, it's being creative, but everybody is healthy. We had some close calls, but people understand that if one person gets sick, it affects the whole station. And we had one close call where we had to send people home. It affected another agency. So again, it's just you want to be able to go home and be safe. So we are doing our best. We have really very great support in the community. Every day I'm getting thank you notes, thank you cards, thanking us for what we're doing. We've networked with the Fire Department using social media. We're very active in that with our Facebook page. A Twitter page, our Instagram. We rebuilt our web page. And we've got all the officers names in there, what they do, what their backgrounds are. Every opportunity we can to be transparent in this day and age that people know that the Wilson Police Department is out there. So I really want to thank the entire board as well as the time manager and Shirley, I know her plate is full, but we all work together to give what the community of Wilson deserves. So, but I want to thank the board for their continuous support on the Police Department. Thank you, Chief. You were going to mention the person who's at the trading academy. And I read or heard over the weekend that the academy had been closed because of a COVID epidemic. And I wonder how that affects our person down there and the graduation. Well, again, you know, we were three weeks away and this happened, you know? And it creates a bump in the road because they were supposed to graduate next Tuesday, the 22nd. So now that the academy is closed and they won't reopen until after January 4th. You know, I'm not sure, you know, if it's going to, they're going to bring everybody back. The Celastic Academy met the current one here, the one prior to this, they actually, you know, they went through like three phases, you know, they were in class together and then they were sent home and did homework at home. And then towards the end, they brought them all back and quarantined them, pretty much locked them down for seven weeks to include all the students, all the educators, all the instructors so they could get graduation done. With this class currently in and our offices in there, they're missing their final exam and their final practicals. And, you know, so again, those are two big things. You know, you can, to get your certification, you know, you need to do that. So it's a day to day. I put a call into the interim administrator this morning, executive director, and have not heard back from him. But, you know, I know the place is closed. So we're not, you know, they're all quarantining. You know, I get, you know, daily emails from people there. But, you know, we want to knock on wood because, you know, that's until that officer is, good thing about our officer there, he's level two certified. So he's able to work the road, but he doesn't have his level three certification. So, you know, he can come back and do patrol work, but he's still level two, he's not level three. So, you know, that's the bump in the road. And then, you know, depending on when this class is completed, it usually takes at least two months to recycle the building to get ready for the next class. So right now it's scheduled for the middle of March. I believe it'll probably be pushed off at least another month. So probably April. So then you got to, like I said earlier, 16 weeks. And the good thing is, is that our officer Andrew, who's scheduled for that class, you know, we've been working with her to get her postgraduate classes all done. So when she does graduate, whenever, she'll be able to just go out into the road and they have to do additional training. So. Well, thank you. Other questions for the chief? Oh, I'm good. Yes, we're good. Thank you very much for all the hard work that the police department does. We'll be talking about budgets again next year. If I could just take like one more minute. Yes, please. We talked about three to five year plan. Oh, yeah. You know, you know, again, it's a work in progress. When I took this job on 2017, I basically told everybody until we get to full strength and see what our weaknesses are, what our strengths are, you know, I can't predict. But in 2018, when I attended your retreat, I gave a brief overview that, you know, I can foresee adding a minimum of maybe three to four more positions over the next three to five years. You know, and, you know, we're not sure what the new president's gonna do, the new Congress is gonna do about grants, you know, for quite a few years, we've had the COPS grant. So that would be an avenue that I would look at maybe applying for grants to offset our costs, you know, over three years, over three years span. I believe every platoon should have a sergeant plus three patrol officers. The time is growing. There's a lot of development going. As you look at the standards out there, you know, everybody says, you know, Wilson is a population of 10,000 for the census. But if you look at our daytime makeup, you know, our population goes anywhere from 20 to 25,000. So again, when they were discussing, I think when they're talking about the pyramid mall back in the late 80s, early 90s, they were talking about, you know, 25 plus offices for the town of this size. So again, you know, I think we gotta start looking at that, the growth. There's so many housing developments, you know, every house that is built is a projection of a minimum of three. Family members, possibly four or five million is moving to town. So, you know, we have a lot of buildings that are gonna be built. So that's a concern. So as we add to our department, we need to grow our fleet and we're looking at possibly adding possibly one more mock cruiser to our fleet. So I can have dedicated cruises for the like the supervisors and all that. So again, it's a work in progress. You know, I think come next summer when we get 17 position going then I can gauge better. So when we look at the 2023 budget, I'll have a clearer picture on how the makeup of the department should be. Thank you. Thank you, chief. Any final questions for the chief? No. Yes, for that. Thank you very much. Thank you. Have a good night and happy holiday. Thanks, chief. So if we can get the fire chief collect on the line, we'll be ready. Last but not least, fire. Welcome, chief collect. We're ready for your budget presentation and we'll start with the operating budget. Sure. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. For those that don't know me, my name is Aaron Collette for the folks that are sitting out there and watching this select board meeting in virtual land. I'm the newly appointed fire chief here started in mid-September. So this will be my first presentation. I appreciate your patience with me as I navigate through this. Let me start by sharing my screen. What do you see? You've got a couple powerpoint windows up, chief. Okay. Stand by as we move some of these out here. There we go. Came up in slideshow on our end now, chief. Okay. Thanks. What about that? Look good there? Looks good. Okay. Super. We'll get through that. So I know I'm coming at this a little bit different than some of our other department heads and I'm going to just rely on what's comfortable for myself and that's my fire instruction background. So you're seeing tonight the PowerPoint show of where we're going to be with the budget. I'll just take you through initially here, some of the services that we currently offer at the fire department. Primarily we're a fire and EMS organization. We have 16 full-time staff that's including our administrative assistant, myself, the 24-hour career staff and our captain. The department is supported by our call staff, which tonight we have approximately 15 people on our call staff. And I'll say this since coming through the doors here in September, I can't be happier with the people that we have serving this department. They, their commitment to the town, the commitment to the profession and their innovators, their forward thinkers, their people that think on their feet. And in a lot of ways they make my job very easy. So I just wanted to give some credit to our staff because they help me every day and you should be proud of what they do. Other things that we do for here at the department, fire alarm response, tactical EMS, including an Asher program, which is an active shooter, a hostile event response. We're working to evolve that program. In fact, we're going to roll that program out live later this week that's been in development for a number of years. And I'm happy to say that we're ready to move that project forward. I don't ever hope that we need to use it, but it is something that's truly the new reality as a need for service that a fire department that does EMS needs to have in there. Repertoire, if you will. And many thanks to senior firefighter Dave Ariama who's taken the lead on that. We continue with the traditional responses of motor vehicle crashes, elevator emergencies, hazardous materials and technical rescue, initial response to technical rescue. Community services that we see out behind the scenes are car seat installation, which unfortunately has been placed on hold because of the COVID pandemic. Dry hydrant program where we have a number of dry hydrants that we map and maintain across the town to use as water sources for fires that occur outside of the districts that are protected by hydrants. We have an AED initiative with that's our automated external defibrillators. Actually, this is something that you may have seen tonight. I'm not even sure. I didn't get to see the evening news, but we did work with the media today on this where we're gonna try to progress a media blast. We're working with a company called PulsePoint. We actually, that's a free app where we map all of our AEDs across the community. That AED service, anybody that had interest, there was an emergency, if they were in a location and saw someone in distress, they could go to that app and it would tell them where the closest automated external defibrillator was right on a map, which I think is the next step to trying to involve our community and community risk reduction. Many thanks to Tony Samanskas for Tony's work on that and coordinating that here at the department. We also work collaboratively with the school safety committee and Lieutenant Ryan Prouty is in charge of our fire safety plan reviews. Community risk reduction campaigns include fire prevention. You heard Chief Foley speak about the collaboration between police and fire and our social media. A lot of those messages are initiated by Prescott Nato, our public information officer and he has a great handle on that. You saw, we were trying to adapt really due to COVID in fire prevention month in October and our staff really knocked it out of the park with trying to include our community base in our social media campaigns and allow the public invited them into the station and did a bunch of media releases and informational messages during that time in a nontraditional format for the department. Another program that we have worked on here at the department is a fall prevention program. Again, this is another Tony Samanskas program, Tony worked with an agency to get nightlight programs to have nightlights available to install for at risk populations for folks that are transitioning from bed to the restroom in the evening. And actually we can provide free nightlights for them to navigate the way so they don't trip and fall. So your fire department's not just always answering emergencies. There's a lot of work behind the scenes that are happening across the organization and I wanna make sure that we know that. Moving on to the operating budget, you see a 1.4% increase in the operating budget and a 5.6% increase in the administrative line. And tonight I'm happy to let you know that we were able to move forward with the promotion of our deputy chief. And I believe you heard about this through town manager Wells, but yesterday morning I was able to announce the promotion of Captain Timothy Gary to the position of deputy chief. That promotion will be effective on January 4th of 2021. Tim comes to the department, really the rock behind here to support myself and provide me, he's helped me along the way to learn the ins and outs of the department in his role as captain. And I know he's looking forward to the new challenges that will be assigned to him in that deputy chief's role. In the administrative line, we also see that we've when Shirley and Eric and I were talking about breaking that line up and to actually look at what we're spending money on, we had in our FY21 budget under the office supplies account materials that were related to computers, computer software and computer software applications. And we felt it more appropriate that we actually break those out. So you'll see the addition of computer equipment, and computer software. So it actually represents what we're spending that on. And that's office 365, email services and IT support that we get through Dominion Tech. For the emergency preparedness line, we didn't change this line item. In fact, there was a lot of activity that occurred because of the police department's work here where the police department grant and chief only just spoke about this where they work to write their grant. That has in turn increased our operational capacity here at FIRE with a run of direct fiber optic line between police and FIRE to increase connectivity, which will allow us to build out our emergency operations center capability. So we'll actually have quick direct secure access between both buildings to allow communications to happen through any emergency where we have to ramp up our EOC, which is housed here at FIRE. That was funded by an Elger grant. And I know Shirley did a ton of work on this grant. I just wanna acknowledge Shirley's work. I've seen a lot of people that work hard in their career and Shirley is one of them. And so for all that she does for the FIRE department, I just wanna say thank you publicly Shirley. Moving on to the equipment line, the most notable change you're gonna see here was in firefighting equipment was our turnout gear line and hose. When I talked to Tom Manager Wells about this, we looked at our total firefighting gear inventory in about October. And when I started looking at that, we found out that about 30% of our gear is out of date. And you say, well, what does it mean out of date? Well, National Fire Protection Association, they have a standard, they set standards for the industry. And so NFPA standard 1851 says that fire protection ensembles shall retire after 10 years from data manufacturer. So currently 30% of our gear is out of date. So out of all of our inventory. Now to be clear, what we've done is prioritize so that the responders who are out on apparatus right now have gear that is in date. But I can't say that's the case for all of our call staff or any of the backup sets of gear that our members have. So we need to set that as a goal. We can't afford to have our personnel operating in gear that's out of date just because of the sheer liability of that. So we need to keep our folks safe. And that comes at a cost. So moving that forward, we have mapped out the needs of the department. This again is driven by Lieutenant Proudy. And annually we're hoping to purchase seven sets of gear annually. And I'll just take you through the next slide here which shows you what those costs look like. So the average coat with the specifications that we're purchasing today currently by FY 22, we expect that to cost $1,900 per coat. The turnout pants and an escape belt will be around $1,500. A fire helmet is 400 fire boots or at 400 firefighting gloves at 120. And a firefighting barrier hood is 120. And you say, well, what is a barrier hood? And really the fire department in the industry over the last several years has realized what we've assumed for a long time is that every fire we go to is essentially a hazardous materials event. And we are subjecting our firefighters to carcinogens. So this firefighting barrier hood has another layer inside of that material to try to protect our firefighters from having their skin absorb any of those carcinogens. This goes hand in hand with the need to launder our gear after every incident that we have in any contamination. So we have what we call an extractor in the firehouse. That extractor is essentially a large commercial washing machine that essentially cleans all of our gear of any contaminants and carcinogens. Well, why that turnout gear is in the machine though our firefighters need a backup set of gear. So most of our folks have a second set of gear available. It again may not be compliant. It may not be in date, but we need to work on that. So that is something that we worked on to develop a more robust capital plan. And you'll see that later on as we present capital needs. The other thing that we moved to capital was fire hose. As I came through the door here, we've had a number of fires, which Chief Morton tells me has been the anomaly. And so he doesn't know what happened since I came through the door. But one of the first fires, I said, all right, we're gonna turn over the hose and wash the hose, hang it up and put the new hose on usually off the rack. And unfortunately we don't have spare hose on the rack right now. So we identified that need and we're gonna try to start plugging away at that this year through our operating budget, but truly in the future, I've asked to include that in our capital plan. So we have fire hose available on the racks. We can actually replace it when we have incidents. Other things that we're working on here, again, I told you that our staff is a group of innovators. We're currently evaluating our hose and nozzle layout. We have an assortment of different nozzles and hose configurations across our engine companies right now. And it's just not a good way to do business. If you're trying to train a number of folks on fire flows and how to run a complicated fire pump, I'd like to have uniform nozzles, uniform flows and uniform hose configurations across all apparatus. So we have a set pump discharge pressure and that it doesn't require an advanced degree to pump some of our hose line. So that's a project that an entire shift is working on led by Lieutenant Soper and Prescott Nato. So great work there in trying to evolve a uniform deployment of our resources, which it only makes logical sense for our staff. For SCBA, we have a normal SCBA plan through the normal operating costs include maintenance or any repairs that may need to occur through damage that occurs or what have you on things that are not covered under warranty and then annual fit testing costs. Chief Collette, before you move off that previous slide, is it okay if I ask a question? Please do. Great, thank you. So I have, I'm an engineer and so my question is gonna show my lack of understanding of how you fight fires. But I would think that when you're fighting certain types of fires, particularly if they're involved the ladder truck versus let's just say a pumper, I shouldn't say just a pumper truck, a ladder truck versus a pumper truck, you would wanna have higher flows, higher pressures. What am I missing? So what you're missing is we have hose diameters that vary, Jeff. We have an inch and three quarter diameter hose. We have a two inch diameter hose. We have a two and a half inch diameter hose. So each one of those hoses has capacity, if you will, for total flow. And depending on what you put on it for a nozzle, you may or may not optimize the flows on that. Or you may see that an inch and three quarter hose with a different, what we call bowl size, which would be the interior diameter, right? So this is specific to a manufacturer because they're all trying to sell a better mousetrap, if you will. So you can get equivalent flows from an inch and three quarter hose from a certain manufacturer to another manufacturer's two inch hose. And so I wanna make sure that we actually deploy a set model across the organization. Inch and three quarter hose with a 150 gallons per minute of flow, either through a smooth bore nozzle or a combination nozzle, which is one that allows it to spray out like a shower curtain, a shower headwood, but have fixed pump discharge pressures. And that's all based upon the friction loss in the lengths of hose, the lay of the hose. So you're certainly right. A two and a half inch hose off the back of the fire truck with an inch and an eighth smooth bore is gonna flow about 265 gallons a minute, where a bumper line on the front bumper of the fire truck with an inch and three quarter is gonna flow 150 plus gallons a minute, 150 to 185 gallons a minute. I wanna have that uniform across the department. Hey, I mean, certainly your call. Does that mean you'll be buying hose from just one manufacturer? I, you choose a manufacturer because you like their range of products and that's what you stick with. Yeah. So we've looked at a bunch of different hose manufacturers and with each type of hose, Jeff, there comes the ability to actually maneuver that hose or the, and I'll say the word is the hand of the hose, meaning that if you under pressurize the hose, it has the likelihood of kinking and it reduces the flow. So if the wall diameter or the construction of the hose is subpar or is not self-correcting and it's going to kink more often, you may buy a less expensive hose that unfortunately is going to kink and, but in fact, it won't flow that because it kinks on every corner you go around. And I've yet to be on a building fire that we don't make at least four turns as we navigate that nozzle through the building. So we actually buy high quality hose that has the capacity to withstand kinking, has durability to it, a stronger life expectancy and keeps our firefighters safe. I ran into this in the city of Burlington where we actually had, we bought a budget hose that unfortunately didn't meet the needs of the department and we had, we worked out a negotiation with the manufacturer where they replaced the entire fleet of hose that we had ordered because it was subpar. So our staff is looking at that right now and I expect them to make the recommendation to me next week about what that hose is. Good, thank you. You're welcome. Facilities, a couple of things that I appreciate what Chief Foley said here was we added a preventative maintenance schedule plan to the boilers. As I understand it, the boilers had to be replaced in the recent past. And so this will help ensure that we not cut off guard with the boilers and their upkeep, their annual upkeep. And you heard the police chief also speak about the need for drywall and painting repairs. So as I've come through, I've seen that the station is settling and there's a lot of cracks in broken joints on the drywall across the station. So we're working to have that repaired. There's some money in the FY21 budget but we're gonna prioritize that so it's a continuous practice of trying to get those repairs fixed over the next couple of years. So you'll see that that's in there. Jeff here, again, that's a pretty disturbing information that the fire station is settling. Well, I'm not sure. How bad is it? So you'll find that there are a number of cracks, Jeff. And what I've learned from the staff is that there's a difference in the drywall types that were put through here. And I think it had to do with some of the commercial settings of the building, meaning that you may have had harder drywall on the lower half of the wall to prevent any damage from scuffs or anything where somebody might kick it or hit it as they're navigating through the hallways. And the upper section of the wall may have a different type of softer drywall. And so those joints in a couple of areas are starting to separate and you see the cracks at the tape joints. Okay, so this is more aesthetics than it is a structural issue with the foundation. That is correct. Okay, just the way you initially described it had me worried. Yeah, no, it's actually the sheets themselves on the wall. Okay. Yes. So we'll move on to wages and specifically the call staff and I'll just dive into it here. So I've pulled some data out of our records management software. So we've seen this decline and this isn't a decline that's new to Williston fire. I did some informal research on this and you see this trend across the state across the country, but we're seeing a true decline in our call staff. We have 16 members on our call staff. That includes dispatchers and five of those are new hires that came on board in October. So they have zero training. We've got them enrolled in the state fire fire, excuse me, the state fire account of me is firefighter one program that started as an in-person program until COVID struck the class where we had some real risk of exposure. We had none of our staff were affected by it directly, but they did have positives in that class. So that moved to an online platform. So our five students are learning in the online environment which as I shared with you before or excuse me, I shared with our staff before it's very difficult to teach our folks how to do fire extinguishment totally by online. Here are some of the trends that we're seeing. This is the number of call staff that are on payroll. This takes us back through 2016 and you'll see that decline across there where I think the peak of call staff in January of 2016 was at 34 persons. USOT's reach an all-time low of September of 2020 at 12 persons. And actually since this graph has been produced, I had a call staff member submitted resignation. So this is down to 15 actually tonight. Okay, do you envision a department without call staff? I don't. Okay. I think we need to have call staff to supplement the career staff. We need to have call staff there for our larger incidents especially our larger duration incidents to help augment that initial arriving career staff force. This goes hand in hand with the number of personnel on staff but this is really the budget itself and this is the number of hours paid to call staff. You can see that decline where at the highest point it looks like a July of 2016 we're just shy of 1,300 hours in that month to just under 200 in October of 2020. Hours that we're paying the call staff. Now I'll fully admit some of this is driven by the current pandemic where we're not conducting in-person training. However, we've had done two online programs in the last three weeks and we've had some of the best attended online attendance that I've had since we've come here. We had 16 persons on our online training last night which was offered by the Vermont State Hazards Materials Team and I believe we were at 13 or 14 folks that were in our online training platform two weeks ago. So we are seeing some attendance there. It's really just a matter of numbers of personnel and their availability. Here you see another data point where I pulled out the total number of personnel responding to building fires out of our records management software. And I'll say this is that this number of personnel includes any dispatch personnel or people that are sitting in the fire station. So it's not necessarily hands-on boots on the ground at the incident scene. In 2017, we were able to put more than 10 people at some point in the incident on the fire ground three times. In 2020 or early, we have not done that. And then I'll break out on the next slide what we've truly done for all numbers here in 2020. But that's a pretty alarming trend that you see numbers of three and four persons that are responding to a building fire. The benchmark for the building fire response we're on scene is 10 persons in 10 minutes. And that's why you see that red line at the 10 persons across that graph. Here is the 2020 data. This is all building fires through September 30th of 2020. And we've only met that once August 14th and that was the fire on Redmond Road that we had at the facility at Redmond Road. These are numbers that concern me and we need to advance this. I wish I had better data. I'd really like to be able to produce the response time for the second arriving piece and the later arriving pieces. And I'll get into that in a little later on when we talk about dispatch and dispatch services. Chief, one thing I would walk away from that previous slide you have is you're looking for more of the professional staff, firefighter, EMTs. Well, I'll say, Jeff, that all of our staff I would consider professional. I'm sorry, I didn't mean it that way. Well, I understand. I would say that our career staff, we need to work on our career staff and to increase the number of persons that are sitting in this fire station available to respond. You're always are gonna find me to be a stickler for increasing staff and the thing that unsticks me is safety and this would be a safety question, a safety issue I would assume. It is. Okay. I know that most of our call staff are not driven by financial incentive. It's truly about giving back to the community but this was some way to try to incentivize call staff participation. And I say incentivize, it's really meant to meet the predicted minimum wage requirement that we see coming out of the state for fiscal year 2022 of 1255 an hour. So they'll start at that rate and then they'll get their incentive pay for folks that have additional certifications or qualifications as determined on a department pay scale. The average call staff pay rate will move to 1438 per hour for all our call staff. Despite this, because of the current call staff numbers, we have not increased the wage line on the call staff. So that still sits at 75,000. Transitioning to the FHIR and EMS training budget. This budget was heavily influenced by the work of Prescott Nato who helped me guide me through this about the needs and the vision of the department from his perspective outside of my short tenure and I appreciate the work he did on that. So the vision is about $10,300 for in-person training, something new to the organization that I would like to bring is actual live fire training days. These trainings are required through ISO and we've got to do it outside at the FHIR Academy. I know Chief Morton has done a lot of acquired structure burns through the department. This will take us to a controlled setting at the FHIR Academy where I envision partnering with Vermont Air National Guard Fire Department and the South Wellington Fire Department to cost share and allow all of our staff to operate at the training academy in a controlled environment and a safe environment. But also we work with them in the mutual aid capacity so it allows our members to network with their staff as well. So that's a vision for fiscal year 22. Our EMS continues to be the bread and butter of the department. We run about 1,000 EMS runs a year. This continuing medical education costs, this is a paramedic cost share outside instructor delivery and continuing education to account for keeping our members fresh on EMS. $4,000 is included in physical training props. There are a lot of props that are out there that allow our members, it's difficult to get acquired structures. So what a prop does is allows our members to replicate situations that they're gonna find out in the street at a low cost and not have to wait for the next building to be torn down. So that includes a commercial door prop with multiple lock designs, including a padlock, forceful entry for padlock, some cutting. So we actually teach our members how to cut with circular saws. And then we have a roof prop outside of the firehouse but it needs to have some modifications built up. So there's some money for the lumber there and the replacement of some of the modifications we would do on that. You'll see $5,700 for officer development and non-traditional training platforms. As I said before, we've adapted to the COVID environment with our online training. We bought some new subscriptions with software developers and simulation software in the last couple of months. And this continues that because we're having great success with these software applications. The nice thing about this is it doesn't take, it takes the department and it exposes us to a greater audience. So it doesn't have to be some parochial education where I only teach the department what I know or our own members only know what they know. This gives us exposure really virtually across the world to modern fire tactics and fire research and some, you know, the leaders of the industry really are sitting at our fingertips on a video platform in front of us. So some of the new things that are out there include the simulation software where it allows us to take a photo of a building or multiple photos of a building we can apply simulated smoke, fire, victims and actually challenge our people on strategy and tactics and what if you encountered that? And these are real buildings that we put into the software and could simulate it here with our current conditions. And it's been pretty fantastic. I've seen the group work with that software in the last couple of weeks. It's a new program for us, but I'd like to see us continue that software in the future. Dispatch services, one of the new items that you'll see here is that we used to pay dispatch on a per call format. So each time that Shelburne Dispatch would hit a tone for us we would have a fixed amount that we would pay. In speaking with the Shelburne Town Manager we were working on a fixed cost negotiation with Shelburne Dispatch of $58,000 which is about $2,000 more than the current year which I think will be in line with what we're asking of them. Shelburne would then, it wouldn't cost us per call. So we wouldn't have to reserve the dispatch or reserve having them tone the incident for us because we were fearful of a couple of hundred dollars fee for service. One of the things that I've asked Shelburne Dispatch to do and they've been great to try to help us do this is to build a CAD link to our records management software. And what that means is that Shelburne Dispatch is works with a program called Spillman Technology. Spillman is the CAD technology that is run by the state of Vermont through the state of Vermont Public Safety. Unfortunately, what I've since learned is and I knew that they were going through a transition where they had a request for proposal on a new dispatch CAD is that the state is reluctant to allow us to move forward with that CAD link because of the current transition and RFP. They have tentatively awarded it to a different provider, a different CAD provider. So we initially thought that this would be a quick project for us to get evolved. Unfortunately, we're finding that we are, we're the tertiary entity here where we Shelburne Dispatch is the parent organization, but they're really not, they're the child and Vermont State Police and the Department of Public Safety is the true owner of the Spillman CAD. They will not let us move forward with that CAD link. So I hope that they're able to settle this out by fiscal year 22, and then we will be able to run that link through with whatever vendor they select. That cost estimate was $3,000. Until then, we continue to write our reports manually and we have a very difficult time capturing the unit responses for our later arriving apparatus. Shelburne Dispatch at this time only has the capacity to record the arrival time of our first due piece. So whatever the first unit on scene is, that is the unit that is recorded in the records management in the narrative, and then we transcribe that into our records management software. There is no way for them to document when the second engine, the second ladder, the first ladder, the second ambulance, any later arriving apparatus at this point into through the CAD without evolving that capability. So yeah, it's something I'm not accustomed to, but I look forward to the day we are able to evolve it. Yeah. The Dispatch Services Active 901 subscription Active 901 is a software-based app that resides on, it's not specific to smartphones, but many of our members actually have it on their smartphone. And this is a backup to our traditional fire-based pagers that tone our members out. So this is some redundancy there. A lot of folks rely on that. It's a good service. We've done some modifications since I've come through the door including evolving a multiple alarm notification. So if we hit a working incident, you could, maybe you're in a meeting or something with staff and you don't wanna hear that every EMS one that comes across, we actually built this multiple alarm notification that has a breakthrough on silent feature. And that'll allow our staff to be notified, it'll actually break through when your phone is even set to silent to say, hey, there's an emergency in town if you're available, please respond. It's a nice feature to have. Chief Jeff, just a quick question on the previous slide. It sounds like the fire equipment does not have GPS units on them so that, you know, for instance, when it left the firehouse, when it arrived on the scene, et cetera, et cetera. So you're correct. We don't have what I would call AVL technology, right? Automatic Vehicle Locator. I'd love to have AVL technology and closest unit dispatching, Jeff. I think that if you look at a robust CAD system that that's a component of it. So you'd have closest unit dispatching. So you'd be able to say who's the closest available ambulance and send that to that emergency. We don't have that capability right now. We have, informally we have, through the active 901 subscription, you can go into a map and you can attempt to look at it to see if another apparatus is coming but it's only gonna be apparatus that has the app up and running. So it's not reliable. Yeah, okay. Looking at the revenue side of the house, EMS revenue, we left very conservative. We looked at the impact of COVID and not knowing where we're gonna be at. I'm happy to say that there are some great strides that are being taken today. As you saw, the first rounds of the vaccine were rolled out. I'm proud to tell you that Williston Fire had one employee, the first EMT that I know of, one of the first EMTs in this area, the Chittin County area that participated in that vaccination, which I can't say enough about the hospital and their work on getting this rolling out. We have a plan over the next three weeks to get all of our staff that has EMS certification vaccinated, which if you would ask me, even in September, when will I see a vaccination? When do you think it's gonna come to emergency services? I would have never guessed that we would have been here tonight to say that on December 15th, we had our first staff vaccinated. So exciting news for us. And I can't wait until we can get this out to public and have members of our lay citizenry protected and start to put this all behind us. That being said, we left that EMS revenue a relatively conservative at 360,000, which is very close to where we're at today. We'll pause to ask if anybody has any questions on operating. None more. Okay. Moving on to capital, you heard last week when Shirley was talking to you about fire department needs, she said that I would bring you up to speed on the fire department roof. We looked in September, the staff here said, hey, we need to take a serious look at the fire station roof. We had three vendors come in to the department to look at the roof. And each vendor actually put forth a bid. Those bids ranged, but I think the high was 130,000. And the low was an asphalt shingle replacement roof was at 60,000. And I'll take you through that a little bit more in the next slide. But the reality is the asphalt shingle roof that's on the station needs to be replaced after 14 years. My recommendation, and I'll show you this in the next couple of slides, I'll take you into it a little bit more detail. So just bear with me. Other items here that are unchanged in capital budgets include paving where we deferred that money for fiscal year 22. The boilers were also unchanged in that fire annex which is an area where the command staff cars are parked. We deferred that in building modification at this point. One to meet the potential COVID impact that happened here in FY21. And I think we can put it off safely in FY22. I have some other ideas about how we're gonna meet our storage capacity for our records. The phone system is outdated in the station. It took me a solid eight weeks to find somebody that had the technology and support to actually change Chief Morton's voicemail to my voicemail. And I'm not kidding you, it was one of the biggest frustration. I reached out to anybody that I knew that could help me with phones and we were able to finally navigate that but even simply to try to change the times and keep the times up to date with the time changing. It was weird to have an antiquated phone system. As I understand it, the phone system was actually donated to the department when the station was built. And so it wasn't actually part of the station bill. So it was used when we got it. So I'll look forward to that replacement that's a $14,000 upgrade in fiscal year 22. Before. Okay, no mind, sorry, you're gonna address it. So some of the, here's some of the photos of that. The roof and the roof system and the asphalt shingles that you see that just weather checked and I don't know what the tech word is on it. If it's delaminating or defacing but you can see how they're falling apart up on our current roof. The three vendors that we had come in, we had them bid it for a standing scene metal roof which has an average life expectancy of 30 to 50 years. I would tell you my gut tells me it's higher toward that 50 year life expectancy. But I would have also told you that I didn't expect an asphalt shingle to only last 14 years. So the asphalt to have our roof done over an asphalt in the estimate is at 60,000. If we were to upgrade to the standing scene metal roof with that 30 to 50 year lifespan is $100,000. And that includes some protective ice damming and preventative measures. So we don't have ice slide off of the roof and injure people. So that's been my recommendation moving that forward. Shirley has done her homework and has made the recommendation. We'll just incur that through debt on a five year note through a bank. Okay. And chief has the decision made to go with the metal roof? I guess, Eric, if you wanna speak to this, it's my recommendation that we go to the metal roof because it just seems to make financial sense to me if we're gonna continue to see a $60,000 investment every 15 years, as opposed to a 30 to 50 year lifespan where we actually increase that longevity. So that's the one that we push forward, yes. Yeah, that's my recommendation to the board as well. Ultimately, it's the select board's decision how it would like to proceed here. You certainly might have my support on the metal roof. Looking at each capital budget and as it deals here now, not with buildings, but their command vehicles, we've made no changes in our recommendation on the command vehicles. That's our car one and car two. We'll continue that current schedule. The fire utility vehicle, which is a plow truck on the TV, we actually reduced that line by $2,000 to make it reflect on our potential need. I'm not sure that we need as much there. So we reduced that 2,000. The defibrillator replacement replaces not only the fire department defibrillators, but all the town, the defibrillators that we have placed across the town. So the ones that are in the town hall and then also in the police department, we manage all of those because obviously I would consider us to have the technical expertise on those. So that project continues to replace the AEDs, but it also replaces our 12 lead devices, which are the more tech savvy devices that our paramedics and advanced DMTs can use for diagnostics, much like you would get in the hospital. And those machines come at a very high price. Fire tools, meaning the hydraulic rescue tools, those are the tools that we use for our vehicle extrication. Those average in cost between $30,000 to $50,000 a set. So that's why that's in capital. We're making this a recommendation of no change. We continue to that current funding. The fire IT server with no change and we reduced the fire radio budget by $12,500. The fire SCBA compressor note was no changes as well. What's new in capital budget? Our turnout gear, as I said before, has transitioned to capital. The need to purchase seven sets annually with that 10 year lifespan and to cycle that through to get rid of the 30% that's out of date runs around $4,450 or 4,440 per set. So that's why you see that in capital. And then we've also added $5,000 a year for the fire hose. And once we get a better idea what FY23 and 24 look like, once we build that inventory up, my guess is we'll be able to sunset that number a little bit but we've just got some catching up to do. That's why you see that number so high. So now I'd like to transition into the vision. So one of the things that I've tried to share with Cal Manager Wells is this, is that I would love to work on a community driven strategic plan for the fire department. I think that I could come to the department and I could make suggestions, but my vision would be biased, but it would be myopic if you will. And I think that it would be great to actually get some external stakeholder buy in to actually have the community talk about what they want of their fire department. So instead of me telling you that we need to have X number of staff as our full-time staff and X number of call staff or whatever the programs and services that I may have as a vision, it's truly organic and it's driven by the people that are the public that we serve. And this is offered to the department by a group that's the Center for Public Safety Excellence and they would be able to come in and do this program and actually evolve our three to five years strategic plan for us instead of me developing it internally with that potential bias. So this is some of the services that would be offered out of that community driven strategic plan. And I won't read it necessarily to you, but it does help us with the traditional SWAT analysis that I'm sure all of you are aware of, but really maybe there's some service gaps that we never realized because we only know what we know as an organization. We haven't evolved there yet and we look at opportunities across the community. Maybe there's something there that we could help address. So, but it really sets the vision, the strategic initiatives and goals for the organization moving forward. It gives us essentially it's a roadmap, but it's a roadmap that's driven with input from both the internal stakeholders, meaning the career and call staff as well as the public themselves. Staffing is, as you may have led to earlier as I'm showing you all the slides about the client and call staff, staffing is a real issue. You know, NFPA, as I told you, they established standards and standard 1720 is the organization and deployment of fire suppression and EMS operations by volunteer fire departments. And even though we have career staff, we actually fit into this volunteer fire department standard. And so their guidance here and the staffing response time and we tried to give Eric a shout out and he tried to get some work and Melinda tried to get us some work and we got a planning about GIS mapping to show the saturation of the town and it really comes down to the saturation of population and density across the town and to show what our minimum staffing numbers if we were to actually be 100% compliant with this NFPA standard, what it would look like. Unfortunately, we couldn't find that. We reached out to the regional planning group and they didn't have it mapped either. It's something that we could work on in the future to help guide our decision-making processes. I think this, I think that data drives good decisions and informed data with good metrics helps us make informed decisions as community leaders. My gut tells me, and you heard Chief Foley speak of this earlier, when you have 25,000 people traveling through your community every day, I'm not sure the census of 10,000 is accurately represented about as it relates to our risk. I drove through Taft Corners this evening and I was glad to see that a lot of folks were out and about, but I was also thinking we had a serious EMS run going on where the members transported the hospital that left a single firefighter staffing an engine tonight while the ambulance was transporting that patient to the hospital. So for all those people, all those headlights, all those folks and choppers, that staffed engine had a single person on it. So it's gonna be that single person, the call staff and myself if I wasn't doing your presentation tonight. But I just, I think that we need to be upfront and to say in the future, we should set this as one of our goals to increase that. One of the other programs that we'd like to work on is a dedicated fire inspector position. The deputy chief's role in his, the deputy chief's promotion will be tasked with helping build that program out to get the foundation laid. Manager Wells and myself have worked to establish a working group on this and we'll have a more formal product for you later on. But I think that this is the needs of the future. I, since coming through the door, I'll tell you that I've requested the state assistants from the state fire marshal a number of times. I've called the state police fire investigation unit no less than three times for assistance for events of significance across the town where we needed. We just didn't have the capacity. We don't have the certification. We don't have the expertise. So we've had to rely on them. But I'll also say that I'm aware that the division of fire safety, the fire marshal's office is challenged every day to meet the demands of that program. As an example, I asked about, I asked if we could get a number for the occupancy load certificates across the town for all of our assembly occupancies. And they're unable to produce that which I've thought was odd that I wouldn't be able to get that from them. So I think there's a lot of room for improvement for us here at the fire department to be active in pre-fire planning, to be active in the fire safety plans review, maybe evolve an apartment registry with a valid inspection program. So we can catch any of these fire safety issues ahead of time. And to take over the time of sale inspections which I've had that discussion with the state already and they're on board with allowing us to do that. But these are all projects that I see as projects coming up. As it relates to dispatch, I'd like to evolve our ability to capture data. I said to you before that I think data and good metrics helps us as community leaders to drive decision-making processes. We can't do that without increasing our data. And through dispatch, that's one of the ways we're gonna do that to have accurate response times, have accurate unit times. We need to improve our radio communications infrastructure. I know the PD has a lot of great foundation work done on this already. I look forward to working off of Sgt. Shepard's plan for that. I know that he's got a great vision. He has the technical background to help us move that forward but we have gaps now in our ability to communicate that I think can be approved on. Other services that would happen through a CAD would be formal run cards and that would tell us what units actually deployed on an incident and based upon risk. So if it was a simple stubbed tow, you wouldn't send an engine every time. It would simply say ambulance only. Or as opposed to a building fire, it may not pull just the Williston fire department the building fire on a regional dispatch model may pull Williston fire, South Royston fire from my air guard on the initial response. So that seamless request for mutual aid. The in-vehicle mobile data terminals, we currently don't have that capability where we can actually have dispatch information transmitted right into the apparatus. This is something that I think we should have as a goal. AVL service, and this goes to your point, Jeff, about vehicle location and being able to track that. So that would be GIS integration with closest unit deployment model regardless of agency. So if you're going by a medical run and your unit shows available, then you'll get sent to it. So we can actually put responders on emergencies as quick as possible without the barrier of, oh, it's not my jurisdiction or we're not crossing this line or what have you. It just, it makes sense. It makes logical sense for getting people, getting trained responders on incident scenes. Other ideas that I think we see coming town-wide electric employee timesheets or the equivalent of some way to manage this, we've adopted a software here at Fire since I've been here that works on a staffing software where we can actually start to track people prior to, and we're continuing to grow that capability. We haven't moved away from written timesheets, but at least that is work in progress towards advancing that capability. So we can actually document all this electronic and then just export at the end of the period, a CSV file that we can forward off to payroll and have that automatically populated with a couple of clicks of the button as opposed to all the work that goes into manual validation of employee timesheets. Integrated document sharing platform with planning and zoning. We met with the team at planning and zoning and just trying to get ahead of this as the town continues to grow, I don't wanna be labeling buildings different in my records management software than the staff at planning and zoning are. So we could use the same unit identifier, the same numbering system, and we knew what property we were talking about, what building we were talking about, and then we would be able to look back through those archives for any changes that have related to either planning, zoning, or fire prevention or fire safety improvements based upon that common operating platform as opposed to building silos and having the fire department say, oh, did you look at property ID X, Y and Z and it'd be a completely different number at planning and zoning. And the final thing I would say is, comprehensive finance and budgeting software. I currently rely on Shirley and Lynn to help guide this for me. I don't have a way to actually look with a click of a button about where my budget is. At any given time, I have great help in Lisa Steadman and her role as my administrative assistant. So Lisa keeps great books on everything that's related to fire, but unfortunately, some of those things, Lisa doesn't track, we don't have the ability to track such as our overtime costs. And I'm not accustomed to not being able to click on my actual budgeting software and see what my daily liability is through a common operating software platform for finance. I think that that's another thing that I would be an advocate for. So maybe a little bit different format than some of our other department heads. I appreciate your time. I look forward to your support as we push this FY22 budget forward. I appreciate your confidence in your selection of me as your new fire chief and continue to look forward to working with you and the town in the future. Thank you very much, chief. Very comprehensive report. It's nice to have new eyes. Take a look at things in town. So I appreciate that. Any final questions from the board? Hopefully one quick one. The proposal for the inspector. The previous versions, we looked at that pretty much the revenue that would come in would pay for that program, if you will. Is that still the concept? That would be my model that I would push forward. Yes. Okay, good. That's it. Thank you very much. Appreciate your input. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. John. So we're on to the last thing is other business. And I think the only thing we have here is to a short discussion on the letter to the legislative letter that Eric sent out to us today. Yep. And apologies for a little tardy with that. I pulled elements from Bill Himan's previous communication of the board and framed it a bit. Bill did get back to me this afternoon. He reviewed it and decided a couple of minor adjustments, but I would just ask the board for any feedback. And I can finalize that with Terry and look for a motion from the board to approve that. And just to back up a second, this is looking at the issue we've discussed regarding commercial property valuation and the CLA moving ahead. We've had a good dialogue with our legislative delegation and this letter coming from the select board would be to the leadership in the legislature to alert them to this issue as well and just have a number of eyes on this issue as we say as a statewide problem moving forward. So what I've been looking for years to do is to review the letter, send recommendations for revisions to Eric and my intent would be to send the letter to the speaker and the pro tem of the Senate to the majority leaders and minority leaders of both the House and Senate to alert them that this is really not just a Williston problem, but a state could be a statewide problem but certainly a lot more towns than just Williston. So if I think I'd be looking for a motion tonight to for me to sign the letter once it's been reviewed by and recommendations made by members of the board. I would make that motion. I'd move that we approve or authorize the chair to write the legislative leadership in line with the letter that has been presented today by the town manager subject to edits and revisions. This is the second. I'll second. It's a discussion on the motion. I'm in support of it. I just want to point out the numbers in that letter are very scary. 30% the impact on taxpayers, which I believe is only the municipal side. It does not include the school side is, is I mean, it's huge. It's a very scary number. Yeah. Especially Jeff, Jeff, to your point, the education side calculation here. And there's really this runway of this coming legislative session to look at some of these policy tools like increases to help mitigate that impact. So we're hopeful on our delegation and well aware of this now. I've made other managers aware of this and the LCT advocacy as well. So we're hopeful that Wilson's kind of leading the way in this discussion right now. We need this momentum as the session starts. And I have to assume Williston would be probably up there near the top of municipalities that's impacted by this effect, if you will. To bill with our grand list is about 40% commercial. And that's that's by the waters. Well, thank you for putting it together and getting it ready to go. I won't have any comments on it. It's other than knowing it's scary numbers. I won't be able to provide much help. Any further discussion on the motion? If not, I'll lose some of the motion and raise your hand. One, two, three, four, five. So we're good on that. Any other business that we need to talk about tonight? Tara, I just mentioned briefly as we close. So we've wrapped up all the department budgets and if there's any information the board would find helpful from the manager's office as you begin your review and deliberation on the budget in the new year, just please be in touch. I'll get that together for the next packet. And surely we'll have a report for the fifth on the fund balance as that'll be a key component of the revenue conversation moving ahead. I thought I'd give a quick update. You heard Aaron talking about the grant. So remember a couple of months ago, we talked about the large government expenditure reimbursement grant that we applied for that was like 252,000. So the final reimbursement was due on Friday and that went in and the combination of our three reimbursements was just about $9,000 lower than our grant. So that allowed, the two big projects there were the police department renovation to be able to allow the officers to be six feet apart when they're there working and the emergency operations command center, the new fiber optic line that Aaron was talking about that was put in there, but tons of supplies and PP&E were purchased through that grant. So hopefully most everything will be approved. Nice. Anything else? If not, then happy holidays to the board and to all of our community members who are watching tonight or in the future and I'll see you next year. We are adjourned. Good night. Happy holiday.