 The clock on the dock, a minute and a half after the bell rang. Julie, no, they're not here. So first on the agenda is to approve the agenda. Is there any modifications to the agenda? Is the executive session to talk about you? Okay. I didn't have anything to add. I'm only going to accept the agenda at the end of the day. Second. Any of you all in favor? Fine. I'll open up a public comment or inquiry and anybody here for discussion on anything other than what's on the agenda this evening? I just have one comment before we get to the budget. After the big heavy snowstorm we had in November, there were broken branches that lived along my road. I had to go and move about five or six of them myself because they really stuck out too far. And if a car coming along, I had to move over to have somebody come in the direction these branches might have whacked the car. After the big storm of the week or two, there was that same thing. And now today, there's a name along the side of my road. So I would like to ask that after one of these major storms, somebody drives the road and removes these branches. Let's have somebody do that. Yeah. I'm going to go for it. They typically do it. They try to cut it back to the road. But those apparently haven't been given. So I'll make you know what that's going on. Yeah. The animal. After almost all of the impact, they're going to be out and get a lot of chainsaws and the drugs. So let me see something. They cut it back. They don't cut it way back. They cut it back right out of the woods. That's the three-pronged thing. We'll go back and spring it up and bring it right away. Is that the case of the condition of the trees that you have on that road? Or is it just the seasonality of the storms? Well, I think it's because of your storms. Yeah. And the wind is very high, so it's more of an incident that is happening than normally. Just didn't know if maybe some of the trees are not in very good condition that maybe could take a lot of your spring. Well, that happens when one of the members of the power was out. Yeah. The power was out for three days. Yeah. So I think that is... I still see storms. Someone just asked them a nice study. Somebody can... Well, they spent, like after that one more old tree, they spent three days out with chainsaws. That's the type of things. But, you know, it's not a growing issue with the trees that we have, so... I'll just reiterate that you can take a look at it. Like I said, they all have chainsaws in the trucks, so that if a tree's down, there's a tremendous sticking out. They can do damage. They try to get out and try to back up. Anything else? You're done? We'll move on. Everybody's okay with it? We can move forward with a great deployment. So if you're good with that, are you going to wait next year for 15 minutes? So if you know us... In June. Good to see you guys all on this blustery evening. Just my follow-up of the visit. As I mentioned, I came back just before 10 o'clock. I'm going to move since here. Great. If we were able to move as possible. I first wanted to... I assume you guys were planning for a re-election this year? You are. It's helpful to have someone ready to nominate. Just so we don't have an awkward moment here where no one's saying it, right? So, just wanted to mention that. That's why I'm ready to do that for you. And then, in the discussion... Well, I guess before that, I was wondering if regarding town agent and grand juror this year, I believe we've re-elected that lady last year. I'm not sure. Town agents, both of these positions are kind of figureheads. I know Deb was, when she was practicing wrong, she was a little more involved in some of the goings-on. I know she had been at some grievance hearings and that sort of thing, representing the town. But we might want to consider... And now she's changed professions in the medical field. I don't even know how she feels about holding that position. But we might give that some thought between now and town leading us to... We might fill that in case they're needed. Well, that was one of the questions I had written down for this evening. We had talked about it a little bit as it will work, but how we will address this year and some of the absentee nominations. Because we seem to run into a bit of an issue last year with some individuals that were nominated from the floor that weren't there. In one case, the person really didn't have the interest in the position. In another case, someone got overlooked somehow through the process. So I don't think there's anything that we have in the policy that says that you can't be nominated from the floor if you're absent. But maybe we can give them a little guidance prior on making sure that the people that were nominated are ones that actually want to move forward with the position. It seems like it's always that whatever day of last year, someone stands up and not makes a move. Someone just sacks in and says, you know, here we go. And if nobody else gets up, then they're in for another year. Can you find out that they don't want to do it? So who's Carly the grand juror? I believe it's Laura Williams. And she, I know she's... That's how much we've talked about, too. So we should contact her. Maybe if you know someone who might be absent, you could approach somebody. I mean, their positions generally don't do anything throughout the year. They're just necessary. So as long as you can get on someone's moment to be nominated or accept an automation, it'd be great. Right. Here, I'll catch you in a minute. Right. The website says it's Deborah Lee. She's the grand juror and she is also the deputy. Well, that's what kind of got confused last year. Her name's Trevor. Her name got put in the wrong place, actually. And then she got voted in. And then we realized that it was actually the wrong office. So anyway, those two items, and we talked earlier on my earlier visit, Chris, you were going to have something to say for Article 10. Great. Meaning the budget. Just making it clear the following items are included in that number. So it's not confusing. At that point, can I also talk about those items at that time, or do I have to wait to another time? It's relevant. I mean, the biggest communications I just want to get out to the general public is just why we are warning them in such a fashion. You know, these are pieces that are typically in the budget for most of them But the way we have it set out now, if we don't use the funds by June 30th, then they're obsolete. In this case, making a reserve fund, we can carry those funds from year to year, if needed. Yeah, I think that'd be appropriate at that time, but I'm probably not going to let the discussion go into particulars. Right. Just a general review of what I would get. Because if not, I think we'll field a bunch of questions. Yeah. And it might come at each one of them. Right. I'm just trying to figure out how we can head that off and get the information prior to tackling each one of those. Or if maybe you allow me to talk on the first one, maybe I can answer any questions before the other three. We'll see what happens there. And during that question and answer period, you know, it's hard when you've got a microphone here and you have someone in the audience directly asking questions directly. Technically, they're supposed to go through the moderator just to make that separation so it doesn't get into an unhandled situation. So, you know, I let go a little bit, but I do remind people at the beginning that questions that have come through the moderator thanks for a clear reason. You don't necessarily have to answer every question. It's nice to use some time lists. You really don't maybe deserve an answer at this at that point. It's not appropriate. So, you just want to let a question go. It's certainly fun to your question. I think it's great in this town meeting. There's people's meeting. The only time people come to address a lot of these things, I'd like to mention that, especially as questions on the budget, if you guys start working on that in the fall, November, December, that's the time really to be here to flush out all these mining details. So, I'll address that as questions to pick up. But just what I'm saying is try not to get into that back and forth to some of them in the audience, because it can get out of hand. And that's really what the big items that I had are concerns. Because I said one of the questions, other than that, anyone wants to make pies or anything, we leave pies for the next time. For the coffee hour, Laura's usually headed that up for us and she's not able to do that this year. So, we'll go behind the hay ball on that. I've put a couple of notes down. So, I'll do a little dissertation on human services. Right. The other question. Right. Give a little background on that. That's good news for that. I think that President Kelly will do that wherever I put it. A picture of the Board in action. Because people don't necessarily realize that, even though we mentioned it. They've even taken the time to look through it. Before, which most people do. But it was good to see that in there. It puts a little relevance to what you're doing. It's old faces. How do people realize that these numbers aren't actually looked at and talked over? Because, as we know, the tendency, at some points, people want to adjust those numbers from the floor. There's reasons why they are what they are. I don't want to excuse coaches. I'm not going to try to adjust the numbers from the floor. We don't know. For the human service, one in particular, I'm not thinking of anything in particular. We don't know. They have a perfect right to do that. In the human service agencies in particular, at times when people want to give more or less or whatever. But we'd like to reiterate that these groups of all petitioning the Board, or the human service agency, committed to four of these amounts. And they've taken a number, tried to divide it up equally and what they requested. So, again, as we've done in the past, it's just important that they know that these numbers are all looked at. So the meeting flow, well for you, Rick, when we do have questions in regards to our article, first we'll ask a question. You'll give permission to ask a question. And then before any of us, maybe we'll jump in. Maybe if you give us some directive, at that point if we want to. Yeah, I usually turn to the board. Right. That way you don't get that back-and-forth banter that could develop. And then once we give an answer, then if it goes back to the floor, I guess we'll just wait for your direction. If there's a follow-up question, you can address it again if not. We'll just let it go on to the next person. Sure. We have contacted Seth, so I can keep going. It was Kelly that contacted me. So I will still be here again with microphones at the head table, podium, the microphone stand. I'm not sure. Carly had requested one up front kind of in the far corner in case somebody wanted to stand looking out. We can do that again. They used a little bit last year. The individual microphones, Carly's mics, you've never had good luck with people who've run those. And so we've offered it and really struggled giving people that actually follow-up question and do it. So we didn't mention that this year in any of our writings. So there'd be one there if, for instance, if someone's in a wheelchair or something and going to speak, but one way or another, we'll get a microphone to speak. So you're looking for a runner maybe to do that or go up there? Well, again, we did make that announcement. I think it worked okay without doing it. So I wouldn't worry about it this year. We'll see how it goes. As I say, Seth will have another button. We'll get it to someone if they physically can't get to the microphone. And there's also going to be an Australian ballot. There is a situation going on at the same time while in the lobby for the school directors, two school directors. The school budget meeting is actually on Monday night in South Royalton. And yeah, that's a situation that's in flux there regarding Australian ballot. South Royalton's always done it that way of what I should say. There is an article in the school morning to return that back to the floor. I'm not sure whether they'll South Royalton go for that. Whether, you know, depends on who's there for voters and how they feel, but they're used to doing an Australian ballot. We're not. We'll see where it goes. I kind of like to see it go back to the floor. I think we were talking about whether breaking it up so each town votes for their own representatives rather than voting for people you really don't have much interaction with. So that's all I have tonight. I look forward to seeing you all on Tuesday and you'll see how many of you also feel that you've moved and we get a lot of work done. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good weather at this point. Really quick while we have you here still and this is sort of a question for you and for the board. Is it worth doing sort of a public service announcement? The page sort of towards the front that has the detail learns. I know that when we were doing the emergency plan one of the points that was brought up was that a lot of people don't understand that they actually have to sign themselves up for this and I wonder if it's worth doing that as a public service announcement sort of drawing their attention to the fact that this page is in their book and it's a really smart thing to do but you have to sign yourself up. It's not an automatic. Yeah, I usually do stand a few minutes going over announcements which has displays that sort of thing and before we get into the meeting if someone wants to mention that make a note to recognize you or... I don't feel like I know any more about it other than that. It had come up in the meetings when we were doing the emergency plan. If you wish, I'll do that. I'll direct them to the page and make sure they're aware of that. The question is a tone agent. Does it have to be a legal... does it have to be a lawyer? No. To be a tone agent. Do you have a transcript from somewhere? I'm a statute. Probably don't have the Secretary's Gates website and there's usually a little blurb on there about all the life. But no, there's no requirement that it is anything more than a resident. Anything else in regards to the town meeting morning? Thank you very much. We will move on to the budget review portion of that. Do you want me to take the ball or do you want to take it? That's fine, whatever. I've got people all who have any questions. I guess if anyone has questions, ask away and I'll pick it up. I guess what we could do, those that are here, we could just go through maybe not on a micro level, but more on a macro level for a department and just kind of whites up, whites down, a couple of overview hot button topics on it. If anybody does have any questions or wants to go any farther into a certain department, just let me know. Can I start with a couple of words? That's the bigger question. I have a question. Under the property taxes, there's a lot of figures here, and I'm confused as to what the actual amount of the length of the taxes there are as a particular amount. So to find that, you would have to look at page and look at that. The length of the taxes on page 46. That's 46. That's not very good. There's a little list of the length of the taxes. That's on page 51. Sorry. There's a statement of the length of the taxes just like there was last year. So it tells you what the balance was as of the January 10th, 2019. So I tell you what the beginning are, what we paid, what had been collected through January 10th. So the balance was 201,000, and I went on to tell you that we turned over 151,000 to Stitzel paid in Fletcher for a tax debt, which we're having on March 19th at one o'clock. There's originally 14 properties, but I believe we're down to nine, maybe, because we have had some that have redeemed already. So that balance actually doesn't have anything to do with the budget. What we're budgeting is just we've been having this conversation actually christened all of us about what we do as we budget, we budgeted 45,000 taxes prior, which, you know, you're always collecting delinquent taxes. So it does seem a little bit odd because we don't put a number for property taxes because we haven't set the tax rate yet, and the grand list hadn't been finalized. So under those taxes is land use, which you know is current use. The money we get from the state is current use. Delinquent taxes prior is us making the assumption that we're going to collect at least $45,000 in delinquent taxes. And this number is going to eventually go away as our delinquent taxes all get collected. So that number over time will go down. You can see here it dropped at 5,000 this year. And then the penalty of interest is just an approximate amount that we think we're going to collect on top of the current taxes or delinquent taxes is what we're going to collect in interest in the penalty that gets charged and collected in the same year. So some of these things here please, it's just what you're estimating you're going to collect on this 201 Well, I'm estimating I'm going to get it all and try that but what we're trying to do is to get away from budgeting for collecting you know back taxes in the hopes that after this tax sale and probably another one next year that we won't have people holding us since 2012. So the only taxes we'll be collecting are on you know maybe only one year out instead of several years out. So eventually I think where I came from we may be budget 25,000 a year but you know you're going to collect more than that. Because once people are the May 15th payment comes around once you're you miss that someone misses that payment then we're quote unquote delinquent. The auditor doesn't really think we're delinquent until June 30 but that's when we charge the penalty because that penalty is after the May 15th payment is missed. You have to borrow Excuse me? You have to borrow $100,000 tax because the school gets their money regardless of whether or not we've collected it. So since Bethel has been carrying such an outstanding amount of delinquent taxes you know we've paid school and sure borrowed that's why we've put in such an effort to clear you know concentrate effort on collecting what was owed and taxes. So that's why it looks like that. Any other questions of your answer to the revenue or should I So Public Works is next in the book on page 33 so that budget is up 9.92% over last year so we're still fine tuning over time and I think that will take us a couple of years to separate out of wages but obviously you can see some of that increases here are are you know some of it's just general stuff. There's a new state of Vermont permit that got added that wasn't that much money so we offered cares and parts and tires from $41,000 to $50,000 general building maintenance on garage went up this year for this budget some of the bigger things rental equipment we have been in the past lucky enough to borrow a roadside mower from another town but if that doesn't happen we have to contend with salt went up from a budget of $68,000 to $100,000 so that was an increase obviously increased 5-way development from $110,000 to $132,000 so those are the bigger things. The other thing I noticed is that we did move that coal and coal Irene debt out of here into debt where it belongs because I don't know that wasn't actually any debt. Well I have some specific questions of this. Sure. First of all wages have increased from $7,000 to $26,000 or 14.8% Yep. Down near the bottom it says hired services supposedly would have a way of $17,500 but now when they are set we have put in overtime of $36,000 why so much overtime? We are actually reaching it this year what I did when I came up with the number of $36,000 originally I had just gone back and looked historically at what over several years to see what an average was so that's how I come up with a number of $36,000 last year and then we just decided to stick with that to see we've had a couple big winners to see how it plays out. The other thing that we are trying to get better about is budgeting for time which wasn't because of the personnel policy in Bethel's people get you know a certain period of time they get a payout for vacation sick time that sort of thing so since we don't have a surplus we are trying to get a little bit better about budgeting for that as an actual expense instead of taking hits like we have done in the past. My question is really about the policy of having so much overtime I've spoken against this year after year after year I don't understand why we have to pay these guys so much overtime and I don't understand why there's such a huge increase in wages over the years wages have increased about 3% a year on a compounded animal basis for these workers inflation has been about 2% since 2009 if you increase wages at 2% compounded animal rate just to keep up with inflation their wages are going to increase, they are going to double in 36 years if you give them a 3% wage that is compounded when inflation is only 2% their wages are going to double in 24 years this is the one thing that has always bugged me I've been in business all my life and in the private sector this would not happen so why is there so much overhead? I mean there are some things when the sun is shining they don't have to have to be sand so there's a couple of reasons that you can tag in after but a couple of things the animal raises are based on a 3% max there's like a 2% merit with another 1% built in depending on evaluation so there's a 3% max that each employee can achieve through the annual performance evaluation and merit process a couple of things that we did change about a year or a year and a half ago was the way in which we pay over time based upon some of the workers in some instances they'll work let's say they have to be out under 16 hours straight because of 2 feet of snow now we pay them over time after 8 hours we're going to have someone work for 16 hours straight working at all straight time it's just not fair to do that way so we did change that around at the same time we can be a little more productive on down time how did you change that around? we changed it through policy so yeah I want to we have changed that personnel policy about a year to a year and a half ago the carryover of all the overtime or all the sick time vacation time and this payout has stopped so we set a date certain which was the day that we approved this that anybody who's hired or even forward from that date will not be eligible for that huge payout at the end they'll get their vacation time like most other places do but they will not get sick time we also cap how much vacation and sick time you carry over every year we've stopped that so through policy we've made some of those changes another reason why this wage number has gone up is because we rolled that additional that other position that we hired last year last year we had a position that was basically somebody who was doing kind of downtown all those hired out services the mowing and some of the plowing a lot of things that we were sending out to be done we brought in hats so what is that 60% or 65% or something like that of his wages because they're split up between four different departments based off of what he does and how much time he does those so you're seeing roughly 65% of his wage in that number as well so that's why that's a little more inflated than it looks like before because there's really not a position in there now that position was offset by removing all the things that we subbed out so that's another reason why that number looks a little bit inflated it's because you've got roughly 60-65% of another position in that number there are reasons they're raised again off of a 3% it's a 2% well it's been a little bit cool it is but it's a 3% total roundabout but do you get my point about how if you keep raising wages even just 1% more than inflation do you see what happens? well you get into a tricky because you can't just look at inflation you have to look at everything else that's going on inside the market if we capped everything to inflation then we would say health care is going to stay with inflation well we all know health care is 11% a year so by giving someone a 3% pay increase they're still not even keeping up with school, health care and a lot of the other things buying an automobile and everything else I'm in the private sector we give our goal is usually 3% a year 3% but the other thing too there's a lot between that number as well so it's not that number isn't just the workers hours they're working on the road some of this is some of the liability in the past we haven't built into our budget some of the other liabilities that we have for instance let's say and Greg just hit on it but some of our older policies that a majority of our workers still follow under is if someone retired and they had X amount of hours of you know sick time and vacation time banked we would have to pay that out and we saw two years in a row where we had two significant very large payouts that we had to do so there may be this number so we're building some of that in it may not all get paid out if somebody doesn't leave then the payout doesn't happen so it just stays in there and goes on doesn't make 100 hours we have an employee that we're projecting might retire this year so we've put in that money and defaults are the old personnel policy we've put that money in there just in case so that if they were to leave we're not trying to struggle to find where this money is going to come so Lucia we're working on the liability that town still has under the old policy that we have to follow as well as we worked a year a little more than a year ago about amending that policy so going forward our new hires don't fall under that because we got into a lot of situations and these were a lot of the things that were getting us in trouble as a town in the past why we had the debt we had because so many of these things we had policies but we never carried anything into a budget so if all of a sudden someone retired we just had to pay about $13,000 and where did that money come from it just it got rolled so we're being more responsible and when we're finding these we're addressing them in the budget as well as we've seen we've been doing a lot of policy reform in the last year so we're trying to get ahead of it I have another question now we have these storms of course when they've got to go out and plow in San Antonio they don't have three or four days of beautiful weather they're not plowing they're not sanding what are they doing? they're fixing equipment they're fixing equipment they're putting back laying back shoulders they're I don't know maybe trying to treat like that tree one storm we have I can tell you that all over again it's been three days just cutting trees three days what? they took three days to what? they're trimming trees and branches and things on the road so a lot of times after a storm and you can go for the shopping time they're doing a lot of maintenance we've got equipment that breaks down it's stuff on the equipment to do that kind of work they're fixing chains they're fixing whatever although we have some plows that have issues but typically that's what they're doing or they're coming down on Main Street so on Main Street or whatever they're not sitting around anytime you're welcome to drive around with them and see what they do anybody you're all welcome and see what they do and how hard they work they're not sitting around or they're off because they've worked 30 hours or 18 hours straight has anybody ever looked into paying them a salary instead of by wages in other words a set salary so there are some days they might have to go out and work 10, 12, 16 hours but another day they could just take off just curious the challenge that we're having is right now in the market it's an employee market whenever unemployment gets so low like it is right now we're feeling that at my work as well as when you're at 3.8% unemployment it's very competitive marketplace for employees so you have to you have to come up with a good deal to get the same employees in because you're now you're really not fighting there was plenty of employees out there you could just hire whoever and now you're really just kind of like taking from that person rather than finding a new employee you're really taking it from that town or from that business so it's more challenging more competitive right now environment at least right now there's also a respectful law about non-exempt versus exempt employees over time I haven't dealt with it a little bit but I know there's something about that we're working on a skillet too if they have to work over a certain like if they work over 8 hours they have to work 10 hours or something oh yeah and I just wanted to point out a few things that I had highlighted under the public works and the things you know we are continuing I mean health insurance is always at least the last three or four years that I've been on the board it's always kind of our number one cost hitter on the budget we have we have done a fairly decent job on trying to curb that by we switched a vendor last year for healthcare costs so we you know you continue to have an increase in health insurance as well as retirement benefits you know and then that all comes with workers comp and you know all the other layers that are in there the one challenge that we continue to have is even though we have some fairly new pieces of equipment in town we're very challenged on some of the down time that our pieces of equipment are going through right now and in a lot of cases in some cases it's not it's not a direct cost to the town so the truck might go down now we're down the truck right and the truck goes to the dealership three or four days comes back with no bill because it was covered under warranty however that truck is out of service for you know three or four days so it incurs a cost that you may have to have someone come in to pick up you know an independent person to come in to pick up for that so we've been very challenged on that currently the we have started working on and we're going to be working on well I guess it all depends what the board looks like you know after coming in days but the goal is to have a capital fund that we have right now because as you can see that the building maintenance is continuing to increase by the year to the point where we're almost getting to the point to where we can start putting payments down on a building rather than shelling out $12,000 a year for repair of a building that you know is not usable anymore so we're really going to be looking at that very hard and prioritizing we did touch base on two sessions right before the budget but you can see that that continued that number if you looked at over the last couple of years continuing to ratchet up and and then there's just a you know in some cases there's just some things that have when you neglect to budget certain items over a long period of time at some point you're forced your hand to buy a new comm system or whatever it might be that you should have bought 10 years ago so those were faced we did have this salt issue with you know salt costs just across the board was a 15% increase on the cost of salt so using the same amount of salt salt has increased in some cases it's even increased more than that due to the salt shortage that we have in the state of Vermont right now so that that has been an incurred cost and and I just wanted to hit base touch base on the the highway rehabilitation money we increased that by 22,000 a year to stick with our our capital roads improvement plan that we have which is on the website correct the paving plan there's a lot of peaks there's a lot of peaks and valleys that plan so we have been in the $110,000 area for a couple of years now if you look at that plan and I don't have it available but that plan over the next 5 or 6 years is supposed to increase as high as 180,000 to do certain projects around the town what we decided to do as a board this year is to start instead of going for peaks and valleys trying to get more of a bell curve on that instead of asking the town for $160,000 next year we're going to ask for $123,000 this coming year so that we can try and curve that a little bit so we don't have those peaks and valleys as sharp so that those are probably the biggest ones I saw your hand back there I have a question up there what's the employee town percentage of your health care is it 20% right now the town pay 100% of the premium so basically they split most of the town pay and we obviously budget a higher percentage since we don't have a crystal ball not sure what we're going to get so I think we budgeted 10% and then this last year the lucky came in that I think it was 7.8% so obviously we are budgeting for an increase because we know the actual amount for the first 6 months but we don't the second I know that a previous board member was always complaining about how there were so much infrastructure that needed to be fixed and upgraded and so forth over the last number of years but the hurricane took care of that because FEMA ended up paying a tremendous amount of money to upgrade and not only to fix but also to upgrade a lot of the infrastructure like culverts, roads and so forth so I'm wondering after that why do you feel there is still such a need for such a large capital budget for road improvement so for talking just the the high rate rehabilitation that is strictly pavement only that's not culverts there are roads that's done anything else other than we had a study about 3 years ago so 2 years ago 2 and a half years ago we had a study that was done to put the life cycle of our paved roads with the mileage and our mileage is what 30 40 miles plus 1, 2 and 3 are 15.8 15.8 and 32,000 that's all paved roads yeah there's about 2 million dollars on the pavement so that was to take the life cycle of the roads with the current condition of our development plan so they have put a plan in place that we've been following over the last 3 years of the cycle like for instance Sandhill is a perfect example of a road that's on to be redone that's coming up and Sandhill is the one that's going to make the peak go up because that entire road is beyond just paving it needs nutrients and taking down the dirt and then crackling so there's some of those roads that we have that are beyond just putting a paving mandate on quite a few number of years ago when I was having to travel back and forth the state we paved the road with some they didn't do anything about the drainage and cores and so forth and now it's pretty much the way it was before when they repaid from the bevel to Randolph they spent a lot of time and money redoing all the drainage all the road and everything which in the long run is going to help to preserve the paving part when you do these new paving projects I'm suggesting that you ought to pay a lot of attention to maybe fixing some of the drainage along the road because it's going to help the road to last longer my little road, Christian Hill Road it was paved a number of years ago but nothing was done to any of the drainage and spraking up again we got it done back in 1990 that's more than a few years what? Christian Hill? oh no, it was done recently yeah, they did that one that was they put a skink around it no, they put a skink around it and this was like 2005 or 2006 like six years ago I mean usually I would say this will happen but most of the towns in the state of Vermont when you pave towns they don't do anything on the roads they don't ditch them they don't do anything on the state contracts, they'll put the time in there for ditching and things like that but the majority of the towns they don't get into doing any of the drainage improvements unless it's kind of a rebuild job where you get down to the dirt and they look at it and some of the unforeseen maintenance it prolongs your product so I complain about this budget but I know if you're a little budgetized the public works one is always the easy one to hit because that's the largest component of the budget and usually it's under the biggest microscope so we have the next piece we have and you'll see that there are some increases in the fire department this year we had again some of these things are I won't say some majority of the increases for the fire department this year are items that should have been included 5-10 years ago that every year we're saying we'll get one more year out of that it's just kind of all coming to a head you know if we want to have a professional service as we should for fire then we need to have certain items to be able to do that as well as there's a lot of regulation that keeps coming down from federal and state authorities on this is what you need to do to comply of course they don't usually give you any funding to do that but they're very good at saying yes and now we need to figure out a way to do that so in some ways what we've been doing over period of time is you know not really cheating the system but trying really what we can but maybe isn't meeting regulations and now the state the federal government is really cracking down on the regulations on things so like for instance one was the breathing apparatus that we have traditionally and correct me if I'm wrong traditionally the breathing apparatus is that we get our second hand we get them from another fire department when they're done and they're reconditioned and they're like new to us but that's how we've been on the current costs in the years well now the regulation is to the point where you know each individual firefighter needs to have their own breathing apparatus that is that is especially set up for just that one person so that's one of those things that is kind of it's not something that you really could say well we'll get to that next year because if something happens that's a safety issue so that's the $7,000 increase which how much was the total yeah so how much was the total amount for the apparatus $39,000 so we were forced with $130,000 $140,000 with the equipment that needs to be purchased or else we can't fight fires anymore luckily there's a grant out there that is going to take care of everything except for $7,000 so it's a 5% match so really a really good deal but it's $7,000 increased in the budget there's a few other things being that like the telephone is pretty much doubled that is because that doesn't do with the internet right basically the way it works is we've had $600 computer that we got 15 years ago in every fire report we have to go on to the first which is the national fire incident reporting and you have to do that by law that's how you get your grants well I did it out of my house for years and years and finally passed responsibility on to somebody else and we have to go home and do it all the time because we have no wifi and it would be nice to do it when you get back to the station after the call because it's a pretty intricate thing you have to do instead of we do fill out sheets but instead of trying to do it we'll let them build up and do 10 at a time it's also the possibility it's also our emergency operations backup center so if something happens at town office they move to the fire station and there's no wifi which shuts everybody down so there's some of those things again you know certain regulations that we have to comply with as we see with the constables department as well that you know they make all these regulations that don't really help you out on the financial and we did try to put in some good notes especially in the fire department because you know it's specialty to a fire department so it helps it to understand what I saw when we said it cost each person a day which is really cheap it is for 24 7th fire service it is cheap I'm glad you read that part 10 but along with the apparatus all the fire department members have to get fit tested which is which is a cost there's some other equipment that we haven't really budgeted here in the past that just hoses and things like that so coming around to get it all done here my next question is about the constable do we have it? question 2 well it's not hard when it's not much of a budget I said it's not hard for to jump up quite a bit where it's a low budget did we have any more questions in regards to the fire department the board or anybody in the audience you know let them off that easy how do we do that public anybody want to practice so the constable budget is a little bit different this year a couple things to come to light this year one is that the constable qualifies for retirement the town of Beppel participates in the state retirement so he qualifies for that so that was something that we hadn't budgeted for in the past and just realized so that's a new addition some software and computer upgrades that hadn't been budgeted for in the past is in here the other thing is you had an animal control contract with your local vet for years but you never budgeted Greg and I would get you know the bills would come in and we're like well where are we going to code this because of your your dog ordinance if a dog went there someone has to pay that bill so we decided we put it in a budget actually a budget for an expense and put a number in it this year and see where we came from it could be campus Friday and so then you know it's housed there for a little bit the Humane Society would stop and this year of course we budgeted $5,000 for the cruiser replacement fund obviously that's the big number and that cruiser replacement fund there's a plan for that so there's even a capital plan in here for that and that we worked out to figure out this like we're decided they were going to go with a used vehicle and not a new cruiser so that's how we increased the amount and it's and it tells you what the plan is for the cruiser so that's why it was such a big jump because in the past you know they haven't budgeted for cruisers I don't know if they should want to do but maybe they weren't going to replace it I'm not sure you'll remember right Lucian how long have we had the new cruiser for our second or third year with the new one and remember that one year we had quite the little spike when we had to go by the new cruiser how long second that's on page 20 Lucian there's the capital cruiser for your replacement plan so so the past, the last cruiser that we bought came from Bradford the one we got then Winhall so it came from Winhall, we purchased that second hand and then once you have to again conform to the regulations and have the equipment and everything else put in it we ended up spending close to 20,000 we spent it was 7500 for the vehicle and another 3,000 for the bearings and lineless lances you were left right so we figured doing a cruiser every 4 years and we budgeted some money for fit up just in case you weren't as lucky to get something if you're life hard with some other things what can you strip off one to get to the other so sometimes of course again this isn't like us buying a new cruiser the last cruiser came with 780 780 is something like that how many miles did you put on? it's about 90,000 right now right so 1050 1050 the good thing about the replacement fund too is before how we did things we put money into the budget and if we didn't use it by the end of the physical year then you couldn't carry the money over with putting it into a reserve fund for instance we can monitor that reserve fund so if we put $5,000 in it to start this year and say we put another 5 in the next year our anticipation is to replace the cruiser in 4 years but we don't know maybe we'll be able to get another year out of it and that might be the case but we don't have to put any money in the reserve fund but at least it gets a flow of money going there so that when we have to do it we don't have a spike it's kind of a rationale I have a question about that getting back to the salt say next year you don't have to use nearly as much as we have to use this year do you put whatever is left in that line item into like savings or something as credit towards the following year so kind of the way we'll say salt and gravel because it kind of all goes together is it's no different with the state of Vermont their budget starts off with with winter maintenance and then depending on how severe that winter is we'll tell you how much money you have left in your budget for the springtime and do other stuff so if we have a year where we use a little more on the sand and salt we'll probably do a little less gravel on the roads and if you have a year where you do a little less sand and salt then it gives you an opportunity to do a little bit more gravel on the roads now we have line items to say this is what we're budgeting usually it's up to like sand we get our sand up front so we have that all up front that we'll do for the wintertime and in the salt usually we'll get all our salt at the same time because we don't have a salt shed so we have to pick up salt periodically throughout the year and hopefully I would say this winter has been pretty pretty expensive compared to I overheard the state of Vermont PR guy talking about I don't know what they were they threw a number out there I wanted to say 6 million 6 million dollars over our winter maintenance so so it's been a very tough winter so I would like to think that next you would buy less salt than we bought this year you know well in a lot of businesses when you budget for something so large such as $700,000 for the salt if they don't spend it they're going to carry it towards a credit which would help the budget from going up and up and up and up what will happen to it is it would go into the undesignated fund balance so if once Bethel has the luxury of actually having the undesignated fund balance what you can do is in what I've seen done before is at the say the next town meeting we could vote to put it right on the morning to say will the voters of Bethel take $1000 out of the undesignated fund balance and move it to X you know you will have that option but right now you don't have one so once you have a surplus it's really up to the voters you can decide how you're going to spend that you usually keep a little bit of a cushion because you're budgeting out 18 months but you're right in the perfect world you'll have something in your undesignated fund balance and you'll be able to vote it out but it depends maybe they outspent on salt but they over what is something unforeseen happened because you're budgeting out so you have that cushion there one year we built a salt shed out of because we had a great like a really easy winter so we didn't have a lot of overtime didn't have a lot of stuff so we actually built a building out of that said roll it into the undesignated fund balance so it depends but you're right which is not exactly what will happen to it and the winter is really the winter dictates our a very large majority of our public works budget so if you have a tough one like we had this year you're spending that budget or above budget and then if you get one like I think it was about three years ago we had a late winter and that's money that comes back but also we'd like to get to the point where we have an undesignated fund balance so that then you don't have to do short term you know borrowing either so at times when we have to go and borrow for $100,000 you know to pay the school to while we're waiting to collect taxes if you have an undesignated fund balance then you don't have to do that as well but you know our checkbook doesn't usually say you know we have this money set aside it's usually saying this is where we're at so we're trying to get to that positive end of things a few months ago for my own knowledge I went back I think I had budgets back to like 2010 and I followed the average increase in budget and taxes from 2010 forward to like 2016 maybe or something those budgets were increasing with an average rate of 7% a year and the taxes were increasing with an average rate of 7% a year and I figured that if we kept up at that rate spending of taxes was going to double by 2024 so we might think about that in 14 years spending and taxes went up that most people's personal budgets that they have to spend on their property taxes are probably increasing at the same rate yeah I know it's something to think about in the future I hear you because when I purchased my home in 2007 here since 2007 well when I purchased my home it was $4,000 in taxes a year and now it's $6,200 so just in 11 years it's gonna be officially over 50% so like you were saying it's tracking but it's getting harder and harder we can get off the topic but it's getting harder and harder because there's all kinds of things being done it's going to get very expensive for us my country's 1975 was $400 now they were almost $5,000 wow everything's getting expensive everything's getting expensive it's very challenging but the last couple years we've tried to reduce 3% this year we're all aware of it we don't want to raise taxes we're trying to make this as realistic as possible and keep that percentage as well as we can and probably one of the best things over this course of the year as a town we finally have a handle on what certain items cost us for a year in the past maybe things weren't coded correctly to a certain department now when you buy tires for the truck then it goes under that phase and you have that you know what it is so that you can budget it or if we have payout retirement we know how much that is so we can budget for that so we have a pretty good understanding of what entails the budget now now it's just making an accurate budget that we can live by and that's kind of the first budget really that's pretty accurate on coding costs and knowing what certain items really cost us keeping track well with a new town manager financial person what changes like now like the department I'm the head of the department I have to go in every week every two weeks depending on the building look at every bill approve every bill and put it in the category it goes that was never done in the past right up until just a couple years ago I knew what my budget was and I got to town before it so things have really come a long long ways just in the last how long have you been here and we're seeing subtle improvements before it used to be the fire department used to buy the fuel now the fire department has fuel at the public works building so we're saving money on that but in the past one department talked to the other department and you know filling out fire trucks for you know more money than it should have cost you when you could have went to public works to that so yeah those synergies and when department heads actually have to look at what they're buying and how much it costs them and coding to something they're being responsible for their budget we've also got a purchasing policy that we improved a few months ago too so that regulates how purchases are made who is allowed to do what and what comes in front of the town the administration and so I think that's going to help a little bit too we've got purchase orders that we've implemented so there's large purchases those actually come across my desk before the purchase we designate who can go to what stores who can go to the stores and buy things so we're trying to make things as possible as transparent as possible and you know its capability is really what we're looking at here I think it's all good I think we've really seen realistic numbers that's what we were going for because when Theresa and I first started we just didn't know what was actually included in these lineups we just had no idea and you can't forecast based on those bad numbers so I think now we're really getting realistic numbers so the board one thing I really appreciate the board doing over the past two years is hiring the management that you have especially to do so and I know that you've read and I don't know exactly what to say to you I'm sure it's worth every dime that's it definitely the restructuring of the offices has been very beneficial to the town as well as probably more efficient running you know having one person really just concentrating on the financials of the town where in the past that ended up just being one of many tasks for one person to do it allows Greg to go and work more with public works in other areas and Theresa to really spend the time which is what the town really needed was so much to just look at books all the time so that's been a big big help for us did anybody have anything else in regards to the constable department the recreation department really is level-funded other than the last last year they had $20,000 that was appropriated for the the recreation improvement fund and this year based upon the the fund strategy they only needed $10,000 to be put into that fund this year so there's you take the $10,000 out that's basically the difference in the rec department this year okay and what's one of my pet peeves I just happened to go to the minutes of the recreation department the minutes basically said still after four or five years they hadn't come up with a plan or a budget for the skate park they keep asking for more money year after year after year it just sits there so I'm sorry go ahead so I was just going to say that can't we just well maybe at the meeting I can do this can't we just stop this fund until they have a plan to decide how much money I mean what they're going to do with the money that they already have and I'd like to know how much money they do have set aside that I mean it's a little bit of a convoluted question but I can try to answer it the best I can the we just have to understand that the the recreation department improvement fund is for the recreation department so that is it started out with pool house improvements and things like that and then there's anything from the skate park the tennis courts there's a basketball court ice skating trails things like that so there's more than just a skate park what has been confusing is over the last two years is how they had prioritized the the master plan was the skateboard park next in line and there's been there's been many developing issues in regards to the skateboard park either through some cases a grant not coming through or having to go and redesign it based on budget so it's it's been shredding water and really it's been moving in a possible forward direction so the board we didn't meet with them was that back in October October so we did meet with them last well we met with them in September but we had the same question as the board was where are we at what is preventing us from moving forward can we take a different avenue can you jump on the next piece and we're do probably great after town meeting day to circle back with the recreation department because there's been some information that has come forward here in the last couple of weeks with another one of the grants that we had applied for that we're not going to get so now you know don't want to speak for us or them but now is probably the time where we need to revise it over there so we haven't had that opportunity to do that as a board yet so I was at the last meeting I think it was last week it was last Tuesday or Thursday whatever it was basically what had happened was the so the board had in that budget that you see on there there is a balance there the whole of that balance is not dedicated just to the skatepark it's for a lot of things the board is actually if you did a motion to approve an allocation of I believe $15,000 out of that fund for the skatepark out of that fund that doesn't empty the fund but $50,000 out of that fund has been allocated for that skatepark now they have a design which is much higher than that so we went out for a grant we did not receive that grant it was roughly roughly 50% of the funding for this skatepark because we didn't get it at the last meeting there was one more grant that they wanted to try for so that's what they're working on now they're working on one more grant application and I'm actually going to send the project out to bid so that I know what the line item costs are for each each element so that if if something happens with this grant they can go back and look and see what will that $50,000 pay for probably going to find out it doesn't pay for much and they're going to back it I think the discussion I remember basically what I heard say was that this is kind of our last chance for the skatepark right now if this grant doesn't come through we probably can't get a real good design then maybe we need to move on to something else and then come circle back around later on to the skatepark so I think they're coming to that same conclusion as you are it's been so many years of nothing happening whether it's because of budget or whatever but they're at the end of the I think they're at the end of the road if you will and this next grant does not come in like they wanted to then they're going to look at something else well I'm glad to hear you put it on right yeah with that yeah because there was always a question as to how much was there not much important numbers that were going back and forth we put a combination notion of a number that can come out of the thumb to use towards it as well as a cap on the square footage right so we didn't the other thing we didn't want that to happen was some private donor gave him a half million dollars and built a 10,000 square foot skatepark so it had to be under 5,000 so it has to be under 5,000 square feet and I believe it was 50,000 50 is what the town was and I'm also working with them on a capital plan so we've got all those elements of that master plan the skatepark the tennis courts and all that well each element I've got a capital plan that I'm trying to put together with them so we can see each year how much we're going to be asking for and how that's going to work out down the road because this year they basically said 10,000 because we don't know it's 20 last year so but if we can get a roadmap and get a capital plan and a capital budget put together we'll know exactly how we need to allocate and ask for those funds and they just recently updated the master plan because they had to update the permits yeah they moved it around I would assume that they're going to put something together for town reading day Booth or I don't know I would expect them to have some sort of plan there because that would probably be a hot topic because you know on the red master plan but I think they're getting to the point where you want that they've been kind of they may be slow long enough but this doesn't work out it's time to go on to the next one and circle back around later on so the money you see allocating to this fund they already have the money for the skate board prior so this is for other things part of that master plan because we don't want to get into the situation where we put zero on it and then next year I ask for 20,000 you know double or whatever so we'll continue to try to get that bell curve I've watched this fund over the years and it just started out as a line item we had to go to it for $5,000 and then it went to $10,000 and then it got put into the permanent budget and it got in there and then went up to 20,000 and to me I'm sorry and it went higher than that one year with the paper whatever that year but again those funds are not just for one finger for the entire master plan any other questions in regards to preparation for parks and public places you know the biggest mover there was we had we had some added street lighting costs last year I remember I was about $5,000 with the the LED LED lights that we put in that's probably the biggest mover in this budget downward there are some other small subtle items but overall the budget sounds about $9,000 on that the municipal office now if you went through pollution over your last 10 years this is probably the first year that the municipal office is going down so again credits to Greg and Teresa and everybody else in the office here but a combination of really them taking over and putting the administration in that they have in place right now it's very efficient as we've been seeing lots of good positive comments about feedback of coming in and doing business in the office so not to mention right now having a good foot on collecting back payments and taxes and things like that seeing a pretty good use of that the biggest movers on that was we went down on a position right so we lost a position and we didn't actually I wonder why you've had to hire a per keeper well we had a really odd we had kind of a for a few years there you know in between Dell leaving and Keith coming in for a while we had a lot of moving parts there we had the town manager assistant manager bookkeeper and then it always seemed like the bookkeeper would leave so there was a weird formula there for a while and I think we got right now the right formula in place which seems to be working out for everybody so the wages are down which also brings down the health insurance I mean even though there was an increase in the health insurance we have one less person on health insurance so overall it comes down is this your ocean last year we budgeted that was my recommendation and I was wrong I had only budgeted about 70% of the HRA liability because I wasn't sure what the store ability was spent and this year we budgeted for 100% of the HRA liability because I wasn't sure what the use was going to be so this year so that's another reason that the insurance isn't quite apples to apples it's because we did go from 70% to 100% of the liability this time so I got smart that's going to crunch those numbers so I just want to let you know if that was going to be there so I think that's the biggest part of the municipal office and if I have any questions in regards to that again that's a department well when we get back from town meeting day working forward with the capital improvement plan which the capital improvement plan really is going to address some of the issues that we have with mostly with the public work building but we also need to talk about how the town office comes into that picture so if we end up we have been discussing as a board of almost at this point for the amount of money that we're putting in maintenance a year at the public work building that we could almost be making payments on putting a new facility in there to almost make payments on what we could almost make payments on a bond payment for building a new facility at the public works because you know really we have $12,000 a year that's just going nowhere just plug in holes but when we do that we have discussions that we're going to need to talk about with some things that the municipal office that will need some care because obviously if we do a public works building we're not going to be able to do a municipal office for a period of time so in some way there is some money in the municipal office right now that is really just kind of plugging some holes too heating system that building needs some money but we're going to wait to address those concerns permanently once we figure out what we're going to do with the public works building again we're working on a capital plan for that too for all of our facilities interest rates are still really low and we're probably going to stay low but it would probably be a good idea we're going to issue bonds and so forth to the moment as fast as possible so we can take care of that just as low interest rates I think Vermont just had their bond rating downrated once and I read it might cost the state an extra 10 million dollars for any bonds that they have to issue so sooner or later you know well that will be one of our biggest items that hopefully has a board that will be looking to tackle this coming year when we really get into the capital improvement and defense anybody have anything else on this plot town hall costs are slightly down mainly that's it's mostly level funded it's just the we had had some extra money in there for building repair which went to painting the tower which finally got done this year town officials went down slightly the the listers ended up going up of that of course when you're working with a a small budget it doesn't take much for it to go up 19% combination of that because there's there's some services that need to be upgraded with mapping and computers to do that with they also had this past year if I remember right a portion of the year not all the listers were working all the time so that was 100% being funded at all times for those who made the differences there and government operations this one had a little bit movement on it government operations is kind of a tough budget in some ways because it's not a it's not a budget a lot of times that we 100% have a handle on when it comes to what I mean is there's a lot of things in here like tax abatements for instance you don't know what the town is going to do for tax abatements for the year as of so far we have like this past one we have $5,800 in tax abatements I believe the last budget we ended with $8,000 in tax abatements so trying to put a number to that in the past we did put a number to it was this $100 or something like that so again just trying to do an average of what abatements in the town have been which the two year history of abatements the average was $3,600 so again it was all these little items that add up every year that was kicking the town from Bethel's budget every year when you don't plan for these all these little $3,000 items all keep adding up so that was been updated for this year legal is always again it's one of those that you just don't know you could have haven't seen it in a couple of years but you could have a year where you don't need any legal or you can get into like we had three out of the last four years where we had three different legal issues in the town that cost the town a lot of money to fight those town was victorious in all three of them but it cost a lot of money last year we had briefly increased we went from $15,000 to $25,000 in the budget to increase that based on what the three year average had been we've had a little bit more successful year with the legal end of things so we get chopped a little bit out of that budget the auditing services which in the past have been an absolute mess in the town based on trying to catch up with previous audits instead of doing one audit we're doing three audits we had I believe the year two years ago it spiked at $53,000 with audits it hit that year but it wasn't for all that one year with the audit another positive of having the makeup in the town now is that we are caught up with our audits and we are caught up in a way that the auditing service now has confidence in us to give us a lower rate so Terese was able to make a deal with them and I believe is it two or three year deal for $20,000 a year so we're in the past even a single year audit for us was $25,000 $30,000 but a lot of that was things weren't ready for them when they came in they had to go chase a bunch of work and now it's all done ready for them so that would save us some money we had a couple of things in here it's good that we are doing the tax sales but with the tax sales comes so there's being the amount of tax sales that we have right now there's an added cost to do that so that's in there and then we had a commitment to the energy committee which the $7,000 that's in there right now is a matching grant for that correct Greg? so if the energy committee gets the grant then it's a 10% match and that's the 10% match if they don't get the grant then they know what is that for, better connection grant what do you think? I think the energy committee they're going to speak on this later on I don't remember what all the specifics are about but it's they're working I think they're working with the downtown people on this right? yeah my recollection is they are, I can't talk to them I can't let me get the specifics I'll get my review if you want I can't remember exactly what I'll have to look at their presentation when they came in and I'll talk to Jose but I know he's going to be there as well to speak on that they're not trying to get any grants that we have to match for something well this is a 10% match 10% well again you know this one's kind of two problems with a combination of towns are supposed to be having certain committees in their towns and one one of which is that's being pushed pretty hard in the state of Vermont is the energy committee so when we had started the energy committee which was three, four years ago now this might be the fourth year on the energy committees that sounds about right there were certain projects to come with that committee one of which was this one so these are kind of prior commitments that we had with the energy committee that for these grants and they're doing some other ones we probably heard about talking about a level two charging station for electric vehicle which is another one of those which is almost a 1% grant very little on our end of things but I believe that Jose was going to do or have information available with everything that the energy committee is doing currently yeah so they want to put in a solar rail where the transfer station is that would power these charging stations I don't think they already put a solar rail in there there's a solar rail system in their joint venture between the town of Bethel and the town of Royalton that is at the transfer station but they have been looking at buildings, you're right, and they look at the fire department here just to put in solar panels this better connection grant with the energy committee we had put money aside in last year's budget for the same grant and one, they didn't receive the grant last year but two we got confused with how much money we needed to set aside and we only set aside 50% of the match so we put $3,500 in it last year which if they would have gotten the grant last year we would have been short we thought at least we have to have the matching funds right up front this wouldn't happen to be a matching grant so if they would have gotten it last year we wouldn't have had the matching funds to have that grant but they didn't end up getting it they've reapplied for this year and if they get it then like last year they didn't end up spending the money so it would be the same this year if they don't get it I'm pretty sure it's a planning grant and I believe it's for the multimodal yeah it's with B-trends that's what I was but I think but I think there's there's a couple other things that are in here and they'll also be on the warning that's in here as well Lucian the ones under the conservation commission and the other one is under re-appraisal fund so the conservation commission each year if you went back through the prior year budget you'd see that we we do have a line item each year for the conservation commission which in the past I believe it's $2,500 that we give them as a committee each year to work on certain projects the difficulty with that again is if we give the conservation committee $2,500 and they don't use it by June 30th then then it goes away or in some cases let's say they do have a project that they want to do but it's going to take them two years to do it they can't transfer that money from one year to the other so that's why we've asked to designate a fund to them so that if we if we allow them $2,500 and they see that they want to do a project but they want to wait three years to collect their money to do it then it's given again it's doing that bell curve or not one year the ask for $7,500 and the extra two zero and we're actually kind of in the process of working on a conservation land agreement that kind of would work on that so we just want they want to be able to have a fund established so that they can use money when they need it not necessarily say I've got to find something just to spend it on this year and then Teresa do you want to talk just a little bit on the re-appraisal fund which we did have created a capital fund a few years ago for the Act 60 money so all's worth saying is to just start bolstering that because at some point you're going to need a town library appraisal and sooner possibly than later and it's going to cost you a couple hundred grand you don't have the money set aside to do it so the good thing to do is to obviously is to increase what Act 60 is giving us and then the good thing is you know if you enter into contract with someone it might take them a couple of years so hopefully we'd have our down payment our first few years of payments and just trying to budget for it I should say about having capital funds and certainly the town I came from we had some pretty well-established capital funds it's nice because we ended up borrowing from ourselves instead of getting a tax anticipation note so we'd borrow from ourselves and pay those funds interest so there's other bonuses for that you know with a reappraisal fund that's all in my opinion you're getting to the point where you need to have you're going to need a town library appraisal because it seems like you have a lot of this and property values be nice to kind of just redistribute them amongst where it needs to go so I think you'll be seeing in a few years and unfortunately there's limited companies that do town library appraisals so certainly it's more expensive and has been passed and it's one of those items that we haven't been budgeting for that we should have been putting a little bit of side each year for are they on a 10-12 year cycle something like that I mean it's driven by the state depends on a couple of factors on what you're what is your last one in Beville I can't remember someone has said that it's been more than a few days it's been a few days about that but it's something that we should have been something like that so it's by the time you start looking at the factors of your three-year sales comparatives and those sorts of things that will tell you and the state has certain mandates to certain numbers of certain percent they're respecting you again we're just trying to limit those peaks to that bell curve anybody have anything else on either the list or the government operations what is that question on the Red Cross who's in charge of that now at the recreation on the Red Cross Shelter all because the only reason I say that is a different emotion in a second well whoa right I looked at it for probably six months and we had full time to do it and the reason I asked is it's a different entity now like when I went in to do the local emergency management plan with the new school board and all that it's all completely different the agreements aren't the same you're not dealing with the Bethel school board anymore so that's just something somebody should be appointing to follow through on before something happens because it's not just the Bethel now it's the whole supervisory union White River Valley so it's a little complicated well maybe maybe we can add that to the town as well as the strength of silk we never did Karla did a great job Karla's not doing it anymore but the paper I just don't want to see the town okay we got to open the Red Cross Shelter and now it's not just the local it's there's also been a lot of change over at the Red Cross themselves the little time that I was looking at I think I talked to four or five different people different layers and no they're not doing this anymore and now you have to talk to this one a regional one and this is a New England one and in the way I see it it's going to be we call it the Red Cross Shelter but it's really the Bethel Shelter we're going to have to take care of ourselves what's going to happen you may get some supplies or something catastrophic but other than that if we needed short term God forbid something happened to the folks home or something and we needed it it's going to be on us but that path isn't very smooth right now with the school that's good something worth looking into before it happens right in our face I mean I think they'll be very cooperative I don't see any issues it's just not just the local now it's the whole yeah we're putting in future L&D also we did that over well we're okay because we did but when I went where we were having trouble was the only contact information we had for the school was the school's number and if there's any kind of emergency that doesn't work so interestingly I went met with the board and it was interesting because now you're dealing with another old town it really doesn't have anything to do with our LEMP and there was questions you know like they said well why would we care if there's any kind of issue with the school if you're a school board member wouldn't you rather know what's going on instead of having people start calling you and go I don't know and they all were on board 100% and they actually were going to I mean Bethel is one of the few that's got theirs done in the state so they actually enacted it so South Royalton would be the same but I see the same thing happening with the shelter it's now a union school not just us so I think as long as there's clear communication yeah we can bring it up to the town yeah I'm sure you're interested but we're definitely lacking on volunteers currently for different positions so I think if you can get one person to spearhead but as Paul found out I don't even know if I would mess with the Red Cross as much as well the problem is the problem is if you go under there umbrella they'll walk in one day and say okay they're taking over but in the meantime those first few couple of days before they show up as a way where we don't have the organization to be able to keep the thing going to start it up then they take them a couple of days to show up with their troops the only way they're going to show up is if it's another routine I agree anything small but your center has to conform to their rules and regulations right down BING BING BING BING BING BING they're all right to air-struck the Red Cross as themselves thanks for bringing that up the other thing I want to say before is I hope that whatever valley anyone's represented in for battle, wherever that is shows up because two years in a row there's just that general question and no one can answer and then tell on me I have no idea right so that would be just going to tell who is Neil still can you reach out to Neil and just make sure he's in attendance if able to they're still pursuing in Randolph they're still pursuing an other option in Randolph as in the paper last week they're looking at changing their ambulance association well the long and short of it and the monotonous Randolph doesn't want to pay the same as everybody else they want to pay half the price and have the rest of the town but they also have the biggest shares and most calls and from what I've seen in the background to get another ambulance company to come down what's going to be any different you're going to have to have two ambulances the cost I don't think at the end of the day the cost would be much different if they pursued something else it's just always a casting point to try to get in as where the valley holds the ground every town pays the same per person so why is it you know why do you let somebody else pay less and then the rest of the towns absorb a higher cost right and we had that conversation I called to the webster to find out that's why your the warning says up to a specific amount because their budget wasn't complete and we were I was very concerned about Randolph what they pull out and what they're going to do about they're on a calendar year budget excuse me they have a calendar year budget and I've been sending you this stuff I mean if you read the accounting report and under the way of the valley section the amount of calls I mean their hands down more than almost all the rest of the towns put together you know they are the biggest user of the system what do you get there the appropriations was pretty much level funded from the year prior and human services is up a tad anything you wanted to speak on human services and things no just we had the usual numbers of applicants there were three that didn't apply or requested either didn't request any money or said that they weren't going to request money this year but they would like to stay on the list for future requests and we had a couple I think there were two in here that we actually gave a little bit more to and it's all based on there's a lot of numbers that's based on their financials but the bottom line is how do they impact the actual residents of the town about it we asked them for specific numbers how many people in Bethel does your agency help and that's a real critical part of the whole thing we have some that are county wide or statewide agencies that don't really have a big impact on Bethel residents per se but there are some that are all Bethel residents the senior centers the after school programs things like that have a real big impact on Bethel residents so they get a little more consideration and then we try to balance it with the budget too we don't want to go crazy with the spending so there's quite a bit that goes into the consideration I just had one more question myself here on this $1.44 million debt and thanks that we have to help Teresa if you don't mind I'm going to say that Teresa told me that she had recommended to the board they had a 20 year term on that note and the board decided on a 25 year term I didn't have time to come to this meeting to figure it out how much more interest we're going to have today I can't remember we did have a pathway to that and we talked about it the thing that the board did say was because it was a tight payment at the time we were starting to do this we were renewing that note in November so we weren't falling into budget so they wanted a little one of the things they did say is we can see how the budget looks next year maybe we budget a principal payment to try to offset the difference but I did have all the numbers at one point but I don't have them with me Lucian obviously it was more but we actually had a good discussion about it because it was tough in November known with the crystal ball we had started budgets but we weren't ready to make a big decision but they did say that so we kind of put that in the minutes and it was in the minutes that future boards might be willing to make payments on the principal it was a tough decision at that point again we had to make the decision prior to getting our budget done and I believe if we would have went with a 20 year no it would have increased this year's taxes by another penny you're probably right so I don't have the long term interest the one thing is that the note that we did take out on it that we can make advance payments at any time on a principal without penalties I guess the way we were looking at it as short term it would benefit the town by a penny on the rate however if we do get into some instances where we have some undestimated fund balance at the end of the year the next year we could appropriate some of it or if we have a year where the budget's looking good we can always put some extra money aside to it so there's some good options because not all the time when you take out a note like that actually quite often when you take out a note like that there will be penalties to make extra payment on the principal so it was actually a good I don't know what we've gotten in that but I don't know what the total interest would be over I do have it right here the total interest? I don't like it so it looked like a 20 year was 497,577 a 25 year was 629,639,37 so yeah versus 30 years what was the difference on the 20 to 25? the payments, yeah the payment went from 82,9 to 97 so 15 so it would have been just less than a penny on the tax rate unlike if you were early in the process so what was the difference in the interest so 629,6 minus 497,5 so it was like 132,000 so what if there was no we could make payments on the principal alright anything else? government operations human services the we did see that the well we did see for quite a few years in a row I want to say it was three or four years in a row but we didn't really see any adjustments to the White River Valley Ambulance last year I remember last year it was a 5% increase that sound right? last year last year's budget and this year they had gone up again it's it's complicated because we're we're on a physical year from July 1st to June 30th they're on a calendar year budget so trying to budget in some of their perceived increase costs for the later six months I guess we've taken a bit of a conservative view not knowing exactly what the and we did the 3% because at the time they just have that weird it's not like the same amount each month on top of it it's right and then they update any time we weren't really sure so that's why the morning says up to the likelihood is that it'll be less than the number that's printed there but well now you know honestly we could take a look I was more to do that stuff in the budget that the emails that I get from them and see what their final I remember years and years ago I wanted to make a change in the fiscal year and it created a lot of confusion and then the confusion the budget would really put well it'd be difficult because a lot of your funding that you get from not a lot but you get funding from the state and identities like that that are on a physical year so if you did go to a physical year then you would be playing that game on your revenue how does that revenue fit into your your budget that would be a wild ride the debt services you'll see that there's quite a bit of changes there just on the retirement of certain debt last year we had last year we had to not only make our first payment but we also had to pay our our last interest payment from the previous note so we were if I remember right the interest only was like $20,000 payment that we had to make so that was the last song this year plus we paid down this year on the note to bring it in the 1.7 to the 1.4 we finally got all our money from FEMA so we put all that money towards it but yeah so we even dropped which we had said last year we said was going to drop so we paid off so we're known on all the this is where we moved that debt financing and it didn't make sense how the public works but it's down to 0.2% but it's going to be paid off to the bottom Theresa maybe you told me about that 1.4 that you got 3% for a certain number of years and after a few years you can review it they gave us a 3% for 10 years and then then they're good to us they'll monitor the rates if they see it they could freeze it for us and if for some reason we ran into a pile of cash we could buy it we could put it down in the principal and then we'll see what the amount is to refinance again could you change the term of that at the 10 years? because that would be really worthwhile $132,000 more interesting I mean we have some flexibility with it we can pay extra principal payments towards that and then at 10 years we could refinance it if the and it's hard too because you have so many unknowns with if you're going to do or when you're going to do a new highway public works building and you're waiting for the water so we're going to master plan to come in and there's still a lot of moving parts to figure out how how do you pay for everything and not in fact tax is all at the same time so I just wanted to sum it up with the budget going through the numbers overall the cost the cost on this budget is up $39,269 from year over year at the same time our revenue source is down $19,310 so the net difference the town baffle is $58,579 which based on using is just under $0.03 so it's $2.98 or $2.99 so that's where one more could you get the grand list well I mean the grand list is probably well the grand list isn't going up it's going to go down by a little bit so yeah that's based on using I used that number was just slightly in the last year's grand list because I think last year's grand list was like 6 2 or worse I just used $19,609 pretty close what's happened with that large previous Vermont Castings facility I've taken that it's empty is that right? Castings is still in there yeah I don't think I don't think that buildings being used 100% from what I understand they'll use them like 20 or 30% of the buildings I don't think 20 employees in there oh okay so we haven't taken a hit on the grand list because of the the freight the bag going down it's always a possibility I see where you're getting at but yeah not currently well thank you very much anybody have any questions thank you any questions on any of the budget cost no we have the meeting minutes for the 11th reputation on the select board we have to maintain but I've never heard we have an attitude the last line on the first page says as water commissioners they have some attitude making a decision latitude latitude I don't know I feel like some days I have some attitude I think it's correct I think it's correct I'll stand by his statement well I don't understand we should take them they out because they sound that bad you know don't implicate all of us in this we missed one earlier in that bill two lines two lines not being said I believe I should be back oh yeah okay wait there's no more creamage for you oh I think you're playing creamage I know I just organized a thing oh boy it's kind of strange not well I get to sit there and you never win it's like a judge's jury yeah she was the one that kind of got me I see so where is it that that I would entertain a motion to approve the maintenance of the 11th as amended second I don't know I believe the motion literally seconded approved as amended yeah correct alright we had the full brochures so we're trying to get this rent we want to have it for how many days we're also going to have it for a whole day we've already started our assignments for classes things like that and a lot of people are interested just kind of give you some great the same thing that looks incorrect or wrong let me know although it's literally too late so I'm going to be a little successful here I really think she's already lined up all the family fun nights I hear you volunteered me as a judge yes I did I was I was I get to judge food I guess it's okay I don't think we are the food is my payment so yeah just take a look and see anything that needs to change or whatever let me know like I said she's already got a lot of people that are ready to sign up there are people writing out of town that have told her they're going to be there or tell me they need to sign up for classes so it's a very good job we had a nice board Matt that was from December if you notice that I really want to be just here and I think maybe I don't know what you think should we announce something and tell me about meeting somebody who is to fill that board that board is incomplete right now we're short running we're open too are you? oh you are it kind of works but it's not a full board either way so talk to you guys if you want to announce until taking we'll take the applications for that whole position we've had it posted for two weeks and I've got no response I think that's a responsible thing to do is to make an announcement I think your better opportunities are at town meeting day I don't want to label everybody but more of your responsible citizens do come out for a meeting day and probably more out do want to be part of the truck committee then relying on someone to read the paper I wonder if somehow if we could maybe just get a quick little write up of you know these are all the open positions that we have and if in some way we could have a pamphlet print it out and people could grab it and look to see if there's something that maybe we need wreck people then someone could come in and say hey, oh I wouldn't like to be on the wreck like Mo's idea of having a page that goes on every seat people sit there or when you register that's a lot of work we'll just give them out give them out when they're on get their badges that's what I can do because we're on the path we all have to register to get in there that's a good place for them in there just give everybody that register and just throw on all the positions we have available if they don't like it they can never use it on your vote I mean probably every committee could probably use that we'll never have too many yeah plus the ones we know about do you want to do you want to know what we've been doing down there to the transfer station this last meeting you have to take a minute single-sort compactor it's pretty much on its last legs if it gets below 30 degrees it won't work out that so we've got a new one coming for $20,000 which we had budgeted for last year and the as you fill your trash in the truck sitting there you're filling that body the motor went on that so we've ordered a it's a it's a great big bucket you know so you slide your forks into it like that just like what they have for whenever but anyways that was cost $2,900 that was cheaper than rebuilding the motor on the trucks so it's just a bin and then around the forks you have six yards which is more than a dump truck so you won't have to bring it over all the time exactly but that was cheaper than fixing the motor on that well that truck was pretty old it was an 82 just a little bit it sounded like it was buying it and it was free time I wouldn't buy it if everybody went so a question for you Mo I think I've asked you before I noticed when I'm doing the payroll since you're down the guy that retired Roger so the hours to the other folks who work in there just 187 hours you know some of that was when the manager the chat was ill for a while are they looking at filling that position again I noticed he was not ready to do that it was a big thing because that some of the hours well there's I can't get into that there's a reason for that actually according to to our interlock agreement we're supposed to be going over the works for the sale that hasn't ever been followed yep it's supposed to be according to the interlock agreement it's supposed to be like we do here it's supposed to be agreed upon by our board and then brought up to become creditors of the cap charts the other business okay I would like to ask the board to consider leaving the one day elementary school event at the pool of this year so not a lot of money but money that wasn't budgeted and they just got the new fees in and presented to Andrew what that was going to be and they're something they've done with the kids for several years and just never cost anything and gave them a surprise I would like to ask the board to raise that fee for this year and I think part of the reason behind that is they weren't prepared for it plus they don't charge us anything in these facilities for town meeting day so it's kind of a company I think it was 370 yeah the room rate of the charge is $3 okay sounds like a good tradeoff to me yeah no problem and then we can revisit it another year I'm specifically saying this year if they know it's going to be there they could put in their budget for another year do we need a motion from the board I would like to have one just for the time okay I'll entertain a motion to waive the fee for the school's spring day at the pool come on second okay all in favor does that balance their budget now get the whole thing and make up $1.5 million very good we'll get to start I'm shocked it's going to be a fun day let's see any discussion to enter executive session minutes from any discussion in regards to the conservation commission meeting minutes any other business those minutes basically reflect what we are taking that's pretty close I'll entertain a motion to enter executive session that's a motion that's a motion