 Court members ready? Better hoping it has an alibi. Elaine? That's a good answer. Irene? I had run against you again. I'd be really concerned about having that day. Oh, yeah. Mike, ready? Ready? OK. I will call the December 18, 2018 select board meeting to order. And we'll call the Essex Junction trustee meeting to order. And I invite you to rise and join us in pledge of allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. I'd like to welcome everyone to tonight's joint meeting between the village trustees and the select board. And just remind those at the table and in the audience if you could put your cell phone to silence. That would be much appreciated. So it doesn't disturb the meeting as we go. Additions and changes. Greg, are there any? No, we have hard copies of the memo for items 5A and 5B if you wouldn't need some, but no other changes. OK. And those came out in soft copy. They just came out after. Oh, right, right. OK. Great. Then hearing none, there's nothing to approve there. So we'll go to public to be heard. It's a time for the public to speak to the trustees and select board on topics that are not on tonight's agenda. Is there anyone here tonight wishing to speak during public to be heard? And Margaret, if you could just state your full name for the record. Lean in. Thank you for that constant reminder, Margaret. OK. Anybody else wishing to speak during public to be heard? Nope. Or Evan, did you? Well, you want me to do more? OK, so for the people in the audience and for the people here, this is Lauren Marcell's last night meeting after a very long, productive, wonderful career, both the village and now the town. That's why she has decorations at her desk. If you gentlemen would do the honors, we have a couple of things for Lauren tonight. I'd like to add that, Lauren, besides finance, some of you may not know that Lauren was also the village manager for almost a year. And survived. Co-manager. Survived. And I'm going to do this. So Lauren, we also have this beautiful cake. We'll eat a little later, but I need you to at least come up here. Let me step away from the knife. And then when we take a break a little bit later, we'll do that. And also, if you'd like to say a word or two. Without the knife? Watch that. That's it. We're going to add them over here. Or you can just talk numbers if you want. No, no. That's where you come for this. I just, I've got a lot of mixed emotions. And thank you so much for giving me this honor and for saying such nice things about me last night. And I know that I'm leaving in, yeah, good. Thank you, Adam. Thanks. I know that I'm leaving the organizations in wonderful hands, Sarah and Courtney and Dennis and Evan and Travis and Greg are just the smartest people. And they're going to just do a wonderful job. And thank you very much. I've had, it's been a great ride. I'd like to just say, for us, on the trustees, Lauren came over to the town several years ago. But for us on the folks in the village, Lauren for years and years and years was our rock. I mean, I can't, just can't say enough. She knew the answer. Ultimately, when you were trying to figure something out and you went through all the different sources, you would go to Lauren and she would actually give you the truth. And boy, we're really going to miss that. Although we understand other people tell the truth, but they can't quite get directly to it the way Lauren always could. So much appreciate it, Lauren. Thank you. Such a wonderful person, too. Just such a fabulous person. Thank you. And thanks for taking over when Doug left. After so many years he was here, we're a little bit concerned. You know, losing that kind of knowledge. And but you took over beautifully. And we had full confidence. And you never let us down. And we really appreciate all you guys. Thank you so much. My bad. Whoops, that's kind of a big one. Just take the whole pack. Great. No, no. So we'll start into the business items. And there are several things that we need to talk about today. And George and I were talking about how to have the best way to perhaps go through this. And we're thinking that it'd be nice to hear from Dennis and Lauren and Sarah and so on of these items and be able to ask some questions. We'll kind of go through them all. And then we can have sort of an open discussion because it's really the totality of all these things that come together that really matter. You really can't look at them completely independently. So if that's, is that reasonable? Kind of go through that way. Then with that, we'll start out with 5A, the budget format changes and consolidation of accounts. Set. Sarah or who? I'll start. Dennis? OK, great. After we made all the chair moves here, we started out this fall very early, working on budgets for a lot of reasons. And it wasn't really what's in the budget. It's the budget format. And how to change the budget format so that it fixed some of the problems that we've seen over time. Lauren's been here, like you say, a long time. We've done a great job. I've seen it from the public works section. And Sarah's seen it from the very smart, let's convert this. We sat down very early and said, well, let's tackle a few things. And I'm just going to give kind of an overview. And then I know Sarah's going to get into some of the details of it. And then we'll come back to some other issues. And all the three of us just jump in any time. One of the things that we found, we started with the highway budget to look at that. I don't know if it's the easiest, but it's the one that probably needed the most to be tackled. It was the hardest. It was the hardest. We found out as we get into it. And I presented some in the memo. And I think it's worthwhile just going slow enough to go through them. I'm not going to read them, but I'm just going to kind of paraphrase what's there. In some of the highway accounts, I can think of at least one. In the Public Works Administration thing, there was a line item for $100 for furniture and fixtures. There was another one for other objects. I'm not really sure what that was. I know what it is. It's the tapes we use in the field and those kind of things. But the very small dollar items amongst a million dollar plus or a couple million dollar budget. And a lot of the small items never get used. They take up space in the budget. And so the first issue was, well, let's look at those. The other thing we found very early when we got in, and we've all been, those of us who've been here a long time, we've been guilty of doing this, things migrated into accounts where if you looked at communications, you'd find some communications in one place like the cell phones. You might find pagers in another place in the budget and a different line item. And they really belonged in a communications account, not put in other boxes. So that was kind of the second, and we kind of do this all at once, but this is kind of the second piece of that, fewer accounts. We wanted to reduce the number of accounts. That was important. So you have a better, you can look at the budget and have a better understanding of the budget without getting into all these small items. When we started to get into it, we found that the numbers, and I won't speak to Lorna Sarah's job as finance people, but we still are running two sets of books. And we will be four until some decision is made to where we go or maybe before we're forever, they're forever running two sets of books. But those accounts were not the same in the town of the village, the numbers. And so it's very confusing when you're trying to figure, well, what's one community spending on this commodity or this service? And what's the other when you're using different account numbers? Now, you can, the account numbers, and they'll explain how you get to, so one is a village number, one is a town number. We're not combining the accounts, but we're going to use like account numbers. So that when there's an account number with a certain suffix or prefix or whatever you have, you right away know, OK, that is that particular service, or product or commodity or whatever line item in both the town and the village. So a lot of things we had to go through and figure out, what were the names that we were using for these various things in the town? And they weren't always the same. They didn't always describe the same thing. And in some cases, they weren't necessarily the same thing, but they were very close to the same thing. So we did that. We went through that process. In the town, we've always reported historically, benefits is just one line item. In the village budgets, it was split out, social security, retirement, health benefits. We decided to set up within the budget in the town highway department, similar line items so that you could track those items, retirement, social security, all the rest of the benefits that go with employee costs. It still comes out in the end, I think, in the budget that goes and kind of identify what they are and not have to go to a bunch of different sheets to figure out what those benefit packages were for a particular category of employee. Finally, and this is the one that led us to the next piece, a lot of the building costs were embedded in other works accounts. And the Energy Committee brought this up in terms of just wanting some basic information about electrical usage and heat usage and things like that. And we had to dig. We had to dig into the accounts, because again, we weren't using the same account numbers. Things were in different places. And we early on decided that it made sense to pull those building account line items out of the specific budget in highway and put them into the building's account. So that if you had heat for the Public Works Administration building, it didn't belong in the Public Works building. It belonged in buildings electricity. And Sarah came up with some very smart ways so you can still track what the electricity is for that particular building. But if you want to know what the town is paying for electrical costs for all its buildings, it's in one place now. So that's another format change to make things more understandable, usable, and also for us to review what our costs are and to figure out what needs to be changed, where are we going, where can we make savings. It's just for the, you know, I've done budgets for 30 years. When we leave, it's going to take somebody a very long time to figure out where to put those costs. And we think, again, with Lauren leaving and somewhere down the pike, I'll be leaving, it's important to get that history back into a simpler package that's more understandable. So that's where we got with highway. We then, and I don't want to get too far into this because Sarah's got to get in this. The prior buildings account that we had didn't include all the building costs. As I said, they were tucked. They were tucked in parks and rec. They were tucked in the police department. Part 81 Main was in the building's account. But they were all over the place. So it was hard to obtain time consuming, hard to look at a history. And then we had the same problem. Village in town, different numbers for different things. Electricity, we're using different numbers. So by taking that and fixing all those pieces, we've come up with what we believe is a much better format. It took us a long time. Quite honestly, as we track these things, we were hoping that at the end, when we did the budget, that we actually had tracked stuff correctly. Because you had last year's numbers. And you knew what you were going to go to for the next year. But you wanted to make sure that when you transferred those numbers all over, you didn't lose any of the data. And I won't say it's perfect, but it's pretty close. It is pretty close. Thanks to both of them. And so with that, Sarah, do you want to? Definitely. This is a great spot. So I'm going to pull up a spreadsheet on the screen. We're going to take a look at the town summary workbook. I'll make it bigger, sooner, because this is the one that I've been in the most today and the most familiar with at the moment. So one of the early on formatting changes that we've made and that you'll see in the documents that are distributed to you as part of the budget process is the village budget sheets and the town budget sheets now look exactly the same. So the account number is always in column A. The account name is always in column B. You both have FY17 budget and actual, FY18 budget and actual, FY19 budget history. They all, every sheet, every department in both communities follows that same format. They're also in the same font, which makes me really happy. It's a little thing. It's important. Closer, it sounds like it's. I just want to make sure. Can you hear it in the audience? Thank you. OK. So I'm going to flip to highways here. I guess I can move over here and zoom in for us. So Lauren and Dennis sat down and took the first pass at the two highway funds. And what is where and where should it be? Where does it really belong? What should this be called? What's the new account number? And I wish I could share with you their original, like, 11 by 17 ledger page notes. But I'm not in the business of making people cry on Tuesday night. So we're just going to start here. One of the things that you'll notice in each of the budgets is when we did something to consolidate or make a change in accounts. And this is right now I'm talking about in the two highways budgets when we changed a name of an expense account or we changed expense account number. So for example, in the town budget, we had an account called taxes, licenses, and registrations. And we decided that these items, they're very small. The annual budget is less than $500. The actual average is even less than that. But this is one that should go into either a larger account or a different account. This is what Dennis talked about, consolidating some of these really big notes over in column R, which is titled Notes in Both Budgets. That says here we've included this in vehicle maintenance supplies and training where applicable. I think some of the registration, one of the license might have been a notary license since we moved that to training. So we've tried very hard to make details of where we've moved these things. And if we had changed the account number as well. So down here in the town, we now have a account called capital outlay. This is for items that are more than $1,000, but not quite fixed asset level and don't really belong in the capital fund. Please don't ask me for an example. But this was formerly ended in 0.741, machinery and equipment, but we've aligned the village highway department and the town highway department both have a 0.891 capital outlay. So those are just some of the examples. In previous spreadsheets, I've noticed that each of these account numbers has been given its own primary key. It's been given its own line item number. So it'll say in the summary sheet, for example, capital outline might be line number 25. And then that corresponds to some backup sheets. Those line numbers are manually delineated in the spreadsheet. Each of these items has an existing primary key, which is its account number and it's unique for each of the accounts. So you'll see in each of these tabs, so each of the summary sheets, all of the detail sheets on both sides, I've gotten away from manually creating a new unique identifier and I've used the account number. It's a few more digits, but I'm hoping that we can get more familiar with the proper account numbers so that we're all talking the same language. Dennis had noted that up here in the town, you previously would have seen group insurance, social security, retirement and other employee benefits all lumped together in one line called benefits. One of the things that's important to me to see in a budget workbook is something that mirrors the audited books that I'm working with every day in the NEMRIC system. Cause that's the official record. And so one of the things that we have in NEMRIC in the ERP system is each of these is broken out and tracked separately. So that was the driving force to breaking these out. I do think that once we get to annual report, we'll do some consolidation to make it look more familiar from prior years. So there are four qualitative characteristics of accounting information not to geek out too much, but two of them, one of them is consistency and one of them is comparability. And so what we've done here was we've made a big push to make them comparable between the two entities. And at first we might have to give up a little bit of consistency because we're gonna make a big change and then over time it'll be more consistent but they'll also be more comparable. So overall I think this makes a lot of sense. Any questions on the easy part? Okay. Don't go too far, Lori. Okay, I'm back. I'm a little mad. So the other thing that Dennis mentioned is that we had building stuff everywhere. And as you all have heard and you all know, we also have buildings everywhere. In fact, we haven't quite honed in on what the actual number is, but we're up in the upper 20s at this point with some locations having multiple and some we didn't even know we had till we like Google mapped them and we're like, oh my God, we own that. So we've tried to pull those in. We're really trying to get a sense of what are these assets cost us? What do they take from us? What's going into them? What are we forgetting? What are we neglecting? And so who's responsible for not financing? And so we started to pluck out some or all of those buildings costs and put them into a new buildings budget. So I'm gonna move over to a smaller budget for illustrative purposes, not smaller font but just fits a little bit better on one page. And so this is the library budget. So the library is a great example of a department that had a building that was responsible for all of its building costs. So in this new format, I'm gonna make it a little bit smaller real quick so you can see what it'll look like on a sheet. We have sort of the operating budget up here. I'm using back in again with subtotals and historical subtotals as well. Now, if you were to take last year's budget and look for these numbers that are the new operating subtotals, you're not gonna find them because what I've done, what we have done is we have lifted these particular accounts down here and we've moved them to a newly created buildings department. So if you take these new subtotals, if you add in the amounts that were moved to the buildings, you can tie back to what the prior budget documents have and all of the accounts that have anything moved or any of the departments that have anything moved on the town and the village have this crosswalk at the bottom. So that's what I'm calling this. Where was it? Where is it now? So these are the accounts that we lifted out of the library department. And this is where they live now in the newly created buildings department. So now for the magic, the buildings department. So Dennis said we reduced the number of accounts. We did reduce the number of accounts but then we blew it up in buildings. So we have about 85 new accounts in buildings in the town and about 56 new accounts in buildings in the village. And it's just gonna be awesome once we get them all established. So I'm gonna switch over here to the buildings fun. Well, what it really does is it lets us know what each building has. I'm getting there, I'm getting there. Come on. I don't know. It takes you a little while. It takes you a little while to get to the point but just like, bask in the light of the spreadsheet. So. So. So. So. So here's the new buildings department. And as you can see, it's enormous. But there are, what I'm gonna do here real quick is I have this set up with filters so that we can really quickly see, we can slice this data two ways. But I'm gonna slice it right now, I'm gonna slice it on totals. And so these are different subcategory totals in the buildings department. So right now I can tell you that while we pay water and sewer on the town owned buildings, on average of about $6,600 a year, average is over there in column S. Repair and maintenance and on and on contractual services, that's things like our cleaning contracts, gasoline, that's all the gasoline that goes over to the highway garage that everybody then goes and builds up. At telephones, general supplies, it's like building's maintenance, general supplies like toilet paper, et cetera. Right, okay, good. And sir, just one thing, just as an example, the combination of things to make the confused even more, we had another account in highways that was fuel, lubricants and oils. And that we may wanna change the title because it's more than gasoline now. We moved all the fuel and lubricating costs into that gasoline account. Because it is, it's, what do you- So in the village we have an account called gas, grease and oil. So we've got some separation and some future, how do we fix this issue? But from a cost perspective, the increase that when you see in the budget for example in gasoline isn't just the cost increase for gasoline, it's the crosswalk in the town of those other fronts of that account. Because for us, whether it's your pumping gas or you're putting oil in the engine, it's a fuel product. So anyway, not to confuse you, but there are some, besides this, there's some crosswalk stuff inside this as well. Yes. So we've done what we've done in the account numbering structure that I want you all to see. We'll pull water and sewer as an example. So here are all of the water and sewer accounts by building. So over here in the account number structure, the first three digits of every account number is the fund number. It's one 10 for the town general fund, two 10 for the village general fund as an example. The midsection is what I like to call the cost center, I think. And we have changed, and usually that's departmental, like 41510 is finance and 41320 is admin. And 41940 used to be buildings. And so what we have done is we, sorry, maybe a little too deep in the details, but this is really the stuff that keeps me coming back every day. And then the last three digits, believe it or not, the last three digits are the object code. And we've assigned every single building a unique object code. So for example, 0.010 is 81 Main Street across all of these categories. And the library is 0.011 and so on. We did the same in the village. And every single building has a unique identifier. So if we ever consolidate those two departments into one, whether it's an internal service fund or it's we actually merge and we have one set of books, we can continue using all of these account numbers. And what we've done with that cost center in the middle is you just saw we had water and sewer repair, maintenance, contractual services, natural gas electricity and so on. We've assigned each one of those a unique cost center. So now 41941 is all of our water and sewer accounts. Anyhow, this is all the background information on how we can slice this in multiple ways. So now we're looking at all of the water and sewer accounts. I can clear this filter. And if we wanna know, cause we were just talking about the library, what the library costs. I just filtered it by everything that's going into the Essex free library and we can look real quick here. 31024 is the sum of those numbers. Oh, but I didn't do that one. Hold on real quick. Oh, the magic trick is not as good when it doesn't work. 24, something, something, something. It's hard to read. 26369. This is the part where we need a drum roll. 26369. So that's what we pulled out of it. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you guys. Magic is the trick. And so that's why it's packed. So one more thing in the building department and then I'm gonna turn it back over to Dennis. If he has anything else to add, is there is a, the entire crosswalk is summarized on the bottom of the building's apartment page. So like I said, we used to have a building's apartment. It was 41940. These are all the original accounts that were in there. They are subtotal. These are the fire accounts that were moved in the library counts and so on and so on. And those all sum up and those all tie back to the new history that we're showing because one of the things that we did is we lifted the history in the vast majority of these accounts so that we can have comparable information year to year. Okay. That's all for now. Well done, Sarah. Very impressive. So Evan, will the actual spreadsheets be what's distributed to us in the packets or a PDF of them? So my plan is to send you a locked down version of the spreadsheet. I was gonna say if you do say that, it may get locked, yeah. And a PDF, because the PDF has all like the detailed sheets and all the request letters as well. Only finance gets to change the number in the document, the actual document because we can't have too many, we can't have more than one version out there. Only finance, well, I can't even change them. And you wouldn't want it. Just for sure, we can't do it. And you know that. So, and in the village just so that the trustees know that Lincoln Hall was taken and made into the building's fund. So that's what you'll see in the village budget. So it became, went from being just Lincoln Hall in Park Street School to having all of the building's information. And the other thing is we created a finance department in the village to house the accountant and the workers comp and the unemployment and the liability insurance for all the departments except highway. So that's what you're gonna find there. So will there be an executive summary for the annual report that goes out? So that's gonna look different too, right? Maybe, we can talk about that. I could, we could certainly take this information and make the annual report still look a lot like it always has. So that the constituency has something that is familiar to talk about. So, but Evan has given me a draft executive report, it's 18 pages for the town. So there will be executive report information. Thanks. I think the crosswalk is only important for this year because once everybody understands where stuff is gone and it's there, that whole set of data will disappear which will simplify things in the future a whole lot. The thing that I really like that Sarah's come up with, which is great is that this way, again, and not to be too repetitive but electrical costs for Lincoln Hall, you can pull it out. Electrical costs for the highway garage in the village, you can pull it out. You want total electrical costs for everything, you can pull it out. If you want all the costs to maintain Lincoln Hall, you can pull up electrical, gas, natural gas, whatever and go down through. So you get a better handle on what is it costing us to maintain those buildings? What's the energy efficiency of the buildings? And you can track that over time by moving this stuff around. The last footnote is in order for me to use this, I've had to print it on 11 by 17 paper. I'm a paper person and even then I've got to use a magnifying glass but it works when you get done because you can, the crosswalk is real easy to go back. What we've had to do to present our budgets this year is adjust our prior year budgets for those crosswalk numbers so that you really see, you're getting a true picture of what the costs are increasing by because in the old highway budget, well, let's take public works, we took out all the building accounts this year and transferred them over. So we took the building's accounts, I started it out of the previous years so you can see how those costs have changed and if you wanna see how they've changed. So all that information is there, it's just presented a little bit differently. Nice. Makes a lot of sense. I think that the big thing for us is to try to, and I think it comes down to the, there's some reasons in the memo for why the benefits of doing it this way but our recommendation jointly between the three of us is that both the trustees and the select board accept the format we're using as going forward as part of the budget process so that there's a short period of time between now and when you get the budgets and quite honestly the last thing that we would need is if someone said, let's not do it this way. We can recreate it, we can go back the old way but I think this is a much better way and so before we get those budgets to you we'd like some consensus that everybody's on board with what's been created for you. Okay, so why don't we open it up to the board for questions and see if we can get there. Any questions from anybody about the new format? The only thing I'm gonna note is that I already looked at the village budget and it actually does, I don't wanna tell you but you actually have used the new format so we're seeing it for the first time I was appropriately confused, so it worked but it took me, but I did get through it. The only thing I've gotta say is that I said is it me, because sometimes the chronological increases went this way and sometimes they seem to go that way and was that just me or did that happen somehow? I'm not, nevermind. On which line are the 83 pages? All right. Anyway, that's just my two cents. Anybody else? Personally, I like it, I think it makes sense especially if the old way of doing it didn't make sense it didn't provide useful information to staff. There were certainly line items we're seeing $300 here, $300 there, really didn't make sense from my personal perspective so that makes a whole host of sense and it's also appreciated to see that when you group those $200 ones here, $200 ones there knowing that that actual $400 is what it should have been and that there is no, just again, full transparency there is no artificial inflation of numbers so it's appreciated to have that crosswalk. Of course. Just so that you can clear, we started with the highway budget and that's the one we did this year and going forward, we're trying to align these budgets between the two entities. So next year we'll probably take a couple more because the stuff is all over the place. The other thing is we're trying to make sure that we group like things together from Village and Town. One department calls it something and they have three things in that budget. The other one has five things in it and they're not all the same. So we're trying to make sure that when we put something in a budget we know what's supposed to be in there and they're at least alike as much as they can be and we're calling it the same things. And that way, when and if we start working together closely we know which account we're putting things in and are we doing apples to apples or mostly apples to apples with a couple of something else in there. Yeah. I just like it because Sarah is so excited about it. Yeah. How can you not accept it? It can take it. How lucky are we that Sarah is working on this? Thank you so much. She loves her spreadsheets. They are powerful tools. I was impressed with how you were moving around there. You know you're Excel. Are you the best we have? No. No way. Courtney's. Yeah, Courtney's got me beat now. Scary, scary, what do you want? And she also likes really small font. Oh no. So if we're good, we've got a long agenda so we can... Well, but we should do a motion though, right? Yeah, I'll make a motion that the trustees accept the revised budget format as part of the FYE 2020 budget process. Second. Any further discussion on the trustees? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I would move that the select board accept the revised budget format as part of the FYE 2020 budget process. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Irene. Any further discussion about that? Okay, all those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, motion passes unanimously. Oh, I did mention that we're missing one member of the board, Andy Watts. He was unable to be with us tonight. And we're missing Trustee Dan Karen as well. Okay, so we're forward, forward. Yes. Just when we put the voices on the side and I can't see who's speaking so I can't acknowledge the motion. Lori seconded. Lori seconded. Thanks. Thank you. Okay. So what do we move on to, to five, business item five C? Buildings manager position? Dennis? I guess I'm back up. Greg, do you have that, do we decide to do that? I think it's just worthwhile for two seconds to show this. I went out this morning and I've missed a bunch of them but I wanted to kind of, we've got a lot of buildings in the town and the village and I just wanted to take some shots to kind of, I can't take you there from this meeting and show you each one, but these are the tree farm buildings and the buildings we have, this isn't to argue for against anything, it's just to kind of give you a broad overview of the range of stuff we've got. The old farmhouse at the tree farm on the left is boarded up, it's an eyesore, it's falling apart. We don't have a use for it yet so we can't put any money into it, but it's there. The storage building to the right of the tree farm was given to us, it's a very large, useful storage area, it isn't heated but it is covered and it doesn't leak very much. So that's a good one. But the mice enjoy it. And then you have some, excuse me, go ahead to the next one. We've got some really nice buildings but they're old and we've, the village has done a lot of work on them, they look great. They, like all the buildings in the town of the village have, from time to time, maintenance problems. Two Lincoln on the left and Brunel on the right. Right. So I'm just, this is just a broad brush so let's keep going, we'll go through these ones. Either way, Brunel will be 200 years old next year, I believe it is. Two Brunel. Oh, not Brunel, two Lincoln will be two, Lincoln Hall will be 200 years. This is the Village Public Works garage at the top left. Their storage building over to the right side. I took a shot inside with the trucks and vehicles in there and things are tight. I had to take a one on the right, picture on the right. That's the combination of power coming in, bathroom, storage room, you name it. Obviously, there's work that needs to be done there and we're doing some buildings need study to look at what needs to be done, but no, that's one of our older problem buildings. It is what it is. I'm not gonna make it sound better or worse, it's just what it is. Next one, Greg. New police station, great facility. Even though it's new, we've had a few quirks with that building that we've had to deal with. The one, obviously to the right, you've got the park facility, which is, again, a great, relatively new building in good shape. That's only one buildings of, Brad, how many? Three, four, you include the pool building and the back buildings and, yeah. I mean, a lot of buildings on that campus, if you will, that need to be maintained. Next one, this building on the left. New building, and again, even with new buildings, in the other room, we had a little crack up here across a part of the doorway. We could patch it, but we first had to figure out what's causing it. We don't wanna patch it and have it crack again later. Who knows? So those are the kind of things that pop up. On the right, you've got Essex Free Library. You can see kind of one of the concerns that we've got there is if you look at the entryway going up, it looks a little bit white on both sides of the doorway. That's assault attacking the brickwork on the outside of the building. Doing a pretty good job. We've used a lot of different chemicals to try to keep the stairs open for customers to use, but it's still a problem. Again, an older building, nice building. If you go back, one of the first projects when I was here was that was being rented out for a dollar a year to a local church, which is no longer in existence. When I went in for the first time, the roof was half gone and the pigeons were inside the building flying around. So you compare that to now, we've made improvements over time, but they still have to be maintained. So let's keep going. That's just a Memorial Hall on the left, Powell Museum on the right, historic building. Again, very old buildings. From time to time, lots of work that's needed. We have money being set aside for a new roof on Memorial Hall. Next one. What am I looking at on the left there? Fire Department. Fire Department, okay. Yeah, that was, the weather wasn't no good this morning. Fire Department. On the right is the public works office. Small old building with four people and almost no place to lay out plans, but it's a great little building. It has a dirt floor underneath it. So from time to time, you get visited by critters. But it is, again, it is what it is. That's the highway complex. I'm in that building to the left. It's the Water Sewer Public Works Director Building, a highway garage, another shot of it is to the right. The shot at the bottom is a little hard to see, but that's upstairs. That's where the guys have access to a computer if they have to do training. If you'll notice to the right, it's again hard to see, but there's a cot and there's lockers in there. So it's a combination eight by 10 room that if they had to, we've got one of our employees that lives up in Morrisville. If we have a snowstorm, he's got to sleep over. He's going to either sleep in his truck for a couple of hours or grab some sleep on that cot. That's also a storage room. So just a wide variety of facilities and these aren't, this is just kind of the tip of the iceberg. I just, I took what I could take in about an hour this morning, drive around quickly taking shots. Village fire. Yeah, because there's, I had a count of 27 and I guess I'm actually low. I was reminded by Brad that I left off the Park Street building, which is a substantial amount of square feet. I don't get down there. I don't even think about that building. And so it didn't go on the list. I grabbed the list in the assessor and I went through, okay, what do we own? What do we own? Which are the major ones? Not just the sheds, and I left that one right off the list. So it's one of those things. So one of the things that Evan and I had talked about a lot early on was our buildings and our need to maintain them. Okay, and our need to maintain them. So we have put in the budget and we thought it would be worthwhile to explain it to both boards because there are funds in both budgets earmarked for this position, for a building's manager position. And this is in an ideal world and we gave you a copy of the job description. It's a proposed job description. It's not final. In an ideal world, you'd find someone with probably 10 years of experience. Hopefully maybe has an HVAC license or an electrician's license or a plumber's license, something that maybe a small business owner that's done this, maybe a person who's worked for global foundries or IBM in terms of their building maintenance or someone like that who's got a vast experience in dealing with a wide variety of buildings who has the ability to manage the buildings, write contracts, get us from being reactive to proactive in terms of maintaining the buildings. Our entire process is reactive. Both Ricky in the village and myself in the town and Aaron and others, we react when there's an issue. With everything else between sewer, water, stormwater, maintaining roads, capital budgets, projects that we're doing, we're not out there going through with a fine tooth comb and buildings and looking at what do they need next? What needs to, do we have our service contracts for our cleaners all under one contract? What we found, we got into this just a little bit, just the tip of the iceberg was, again, certain contractors built the police station, certain contractors built this, but we have different contractors. We don't have any uniformity in terms of who we hire. And to a great degree, I'll give the police department as a perfect example. They've managed their own building maintenance, which again, do you want the police officers managing building maintenance or doing what they're supposed to be doing, which is police work? And that's what's happened to librarians are managing the maintenance on their building. They'll give us a call and say, we've got a problem, a leak, or the toilet's backed up. Can you come over? Yeah, we drop what we do, we go over and help them. But nobody's looking at that building long term to say, gee, that carpet's been there for 10 years and you know what to do to be replaced. Or the paint on the wall hasn't been there for such a long time that it needs to be replaced. Or as we talked yesterday at the Select Corps meeting last night, they've had a problem with kids taking paper towels and stuffing them down the toilet and the toilet backing up. The solution is probably putting those electric dryers on the wall so that you can dry your hands and get away from paper. Environmentally less of a problem and certainly less of a problem when the toilet backs up. And I know it's less of a problem for my guys when they gotta get the phone call and say, go over there and fix the toilet and oh, by the way, while you're doing it, clean up the floor. Again, they're truck drivers, they're operators who run water and sewer systems, but they're not plumbers. And so what we need is someone to coordinate and manage these buildings. So that's the basis for the request. We need to develop proactive maintenance plans, we need to get contracts that are more uniform so that we're dealing with quality contractors, contractors that can work in multiple buildings that we know, okay, we've got two or three firms we can call up that know the systems that can come in and fix those systems from day to day. So the uniformity is that. If you take a look at the buildings here, for example, and I thought about it today when I was up at the library taking a picture, they have an elevator. We have an elevator here. Brownnell has one. Pardon? Brownnell has one. Brownnell has one. So we've got three elevators. Who's doing the maintenance checks on the elevators not that we're, somebody needs to go in there as a maintenance manager and do those maintenance checks, but what company is doing it and what are they looking for? How often are they doing it? And I'm sure my brains are taking care of it and up to now Greg's been kind of taking care of it in this building. But again, he's got better things to do than worry about whether the elevator's working or whether it's been certified or looked at in the last year. It's not cheap. Benefits are expensive. The costs, the salary costs are expensive and I've given you what those budget costs in there is a rough idea. I think that when we went through the budget we were able to make other cuts in other places and do things so it doesn't have a big impact on the budget. But that's going to be up for you guys to decide whether it's a position you want to fill or not fill and there's a lot of competing needs. I think I'm just here to present the case. There's an argument that we need, we really do need this position. We need it in both communities and I think it would long-term benefit both communities. I think with what Sarah's done in the budget gives us a better chance to look at where can we make those savings and then have somebody who's committed to trying to make savings and reach a point where we don't have situations quite honestly like we had in this building where the building was in really bad shape if we ever got around to deciding what we're going to do with it and get it fixed. Because if you do the maintenance all along you may not have to get to that point where hey we need a new building. That's it. That's my pitch. Dennis do you know if the school district has a building's manager? They do, it's Bruce Berna, Bruce and he has a department of people that the school district has over a million square feet. So they have not only a director of the department but they have tradesmen. Similar to many things they can't close just because an HVAC unit is acting up. They try to be proactive, things break but they have parking lots, they have buildings, they have all kinds of systems and one of the things is they've offered us some guidance. In fact some of the job description was taken from some of their lines. Is there an opportunity to contract with them as opposed to hiring position but if they have a whole department there do they have the bandwidth to be able to take on this work? I can't speak for them. I mean that's something we can explore. I think the problem is that we've got, I think I counted 27 and with the school it's 28. I mean theirs is a, to a great degree they've got a couple campuses but I mean it's pretty central. We've got buildings scattered all over the place and a wide variety of buildings. Could they manage this as a separate contract? Maybe, I don't think we've asked that question. There may be another way to do it. It sounds like they have a whole department even. Well, we could certainly, if it's the board's wish that this is in need and acceptable in the budget mount we can figure out what we can do in the meantime between now and July 1 as to how to do it at least initially and or moving forward. I think it would be an interesting question at least to have it be entered by the school district but also keeping in mind the school district isn't just the high school or CTE. It's Essex Junction, it's Essex Town and it's West for underneath Bruce and his department. So also understanding the scale of if it's a million or so square feet, whatever hour 26, 27, however many buildings it is in the community, however many square feet we have and to use that as a comparison. One of the preliminary conversations was, you know, I don't know exactly, they're skill sets but I know they have an electrician. So the question is instead of us hiring an electrician, say, for the village in the town that's the one we're gonna use. We could go to the school district and say, we'd like to use your electrician, what hourly rate would you give us? Is that person qualified to do work? And I'm sure they are if they're qualified and then do they have the capacity? Some of that is what we'd be looking for. One of the other things we just go on and on. We do plowing, they do plowing. We do shoveling, they do shoveling. Where can we find a place that works for us? And Rick is not here tonight. But I know the village uses, oh now I knew that we use a Western to do some small lot work. And maybe we can work on how we can work together to get some of our stuff done. But in general, again, back to, we need somebody who watches our buildings, who plans for our buildings, who looks at things. And instead of having your assistant manager waiting for the roofing guy to come. And because we had a small leak on the roof right above here and wait for them. And he could say anything he wants to them. He wouldn't, half the time we wouldn't know what he was talking about. No offense. Just, you know, oh, let's see. Dennis, I'm wondering if for the salary that you arrived at for this position, did you do any comps to the other communities about whether they have buildings managers and what those, the salary for that person might be in South Burlington or Colchester? We did some just peripherally. We did not really go back to, there are some sources that we can go to to get a better number. We estimated in, I mean, in terms of that particular type of individual we're looking for and comparable salary, I think we're in that range. I don't think we're gonna be far out of that range. We can provide more backup to that. I know that VLCT has the salary reserve. I know Travis looked internally to us and where it would likely fit. And we also did some of it, but we didn't go terribly deep, but we're in the ballpark. And we can go deeper and provide you some information on that as far as what they have. And every community is different. Right. Different number, but we used to give an idea of what those other communities are paying for that. So those sources are there. And this is an exempt position. Yes, we believe it would be. Yeah, as Evan said, the hardest thing on this is the planning, the preemptive management of what do these buildings need? How do we set it up? Not necessarily the day-to-day work of what gets done. It would be nice if you had a handy person who could do certain things, but we're not expecting this person to do the building maintenance. We're expecting them to set up the contract so the building maintenance gets done with the right people and at the right cost. And so you can- And supervise. And supervise it to make sure that when it's done, somebody's following up the next morning to find out, well, did they really do what they were supposed to do or following up during the project? And that's the kind of, that's not a shared position with the school. That you just can't get that. What you can get, I think, is maybe the shared services, the one step below in terms of whether it's the electrician, the carpenter, whatever else, depending upon what the job is. And I think you may have to go to different sources. And there are certain things that this person would not do, for example. Wastewater treatment plan is unique. The facilities are unique. The pump stations are unique. Our pump stations are unique. We already have some electricians that we've used or ever that you can call them any time of day or night. They'll come out and they'll help you with a particular problem. Those aren't, those, as strange as it seems, our pump stations are probably the best maintained facility that we have in both community. Because we check them more often, we clean them out. You could go down and out with any one of them in the dry pit and eat lunch. I'm serious, and it's not, it's clean. They can't go down. No, they can't go down. Because you're being proactive on them. Because we're being proactive. And currently we're just reactive with the building. Reactive to almost everything else. It's, there's just not enough time on the plate for us to, there's a lot of things that you'd love to be able to get into to do if you had the time to do them. We just have not been able to break this on the building's piece. I don't see the reason not to go forward with this. This is something we're gonna discuss at our budget meetings separately right now. Yeah, I need to understand how it's impacting the village budget. What are we cutting in order to do this? And when you're reactive, Dennis, it's more expensive then, right? Just like the roads, if you don't maintain them and you have to rebuild them, it's a lot more expensive than if you maintain them. And this has the opportunity, again, to be proactive so that you could maybe prevent expenses down the road by fixing things before they break, right? Right. Because we have the two budgets in there. There's some in the village and there's some in the town. I don't think we'll possibly get you guys to agree on it. Well, Lauren, can I ask you what the village budget that I saw proposed budget is asking for 4.8% increase over last year. And do you have a sense of what the town budget is gonna be in terms of its increase? I mean, I think that, I certainly see the need. I'm not saying that, but as Lori said, we haven't sat down and looked at our budget and looked at all the things that are causing the increase. A quick look at it said to me, it's more than the typical salary and benefits that we usually see year in and year out that are more like a three or 3.2% increase. So there's an extra almost 2% increase in there. And I just don't wanna commit right now. I'd like to take a look at it and look at the whole thing and say, yeah, which we're gonna do tomorrow. And I'll anticipate the next subject and it's sort of like the same with some of the other things here. We just need to, we're a bit of, it's like, which one of these comes first? We agree here, well, then how does that lock us up in terms of doing something with the village budget? I don't wanna, it seems to me that has to be our priority, we have to look at that before we lock into something and say, well, we can't touch that because we agreed to that at the joint meeting. Do you know what I'm saying? So it sounds like it's clear that we see a need for it, but whether we can afford it in the different budgets is another story. Right, it's just, I kinda don't wanna get out ahead. I don't know whose budget goes first here. The joint meeting, how do we commit ourselves to that? But then are we locked in that we reduce our flexibility with our own village budget? So, yeah, Irene. I'm wondering, it says 40,000 of the salary would be paid by the town, 20,000 by the village. I was just wondering what the thinking was behind that particular breakdown, and then it mentions the cost of benefits, but I'm not sure who would be paying for all those benefits. So if you could just enlighten me, that'd be great. So the village would pay, I think the village is 30% of the salary and the social security Medicare that goes with that. The town pays 70% and all the benefits besides the social security that goes with the pieces in the village. It was a rough guess that we went into with how we would potentially split this up. I think the biggest issue for me for tonight was to be able to express the fact that there's a need in both communities to do this. And it's a position that could be shared by both communities to solve a problem in each one of them. And I understand you've got to go through the budget process and everything else and there's a lot of competing things, but in my view, this is something that we have to address at some point in time. It's important. You made a case. I think it's just that. And then the chips will fall when the budget comes through as to how you guys feel about where it goes. And I agree that the case is made. It's whether or not we can afford it. It'd be interesting to understand and Elena, you alluded to this a little bit what other communities are doing, not just the schools, so what South Burlington is doing, maybe what Manuski is doing, just to get an idea of how they're handling the situation and is there a unique way of dealing with it that we haven't thought of? Any other discussion points on this before we move on? So why don't we go on to item 5D? It's to talk about the highway tax elimination. Who's that? Lauren, take it away. Oh, I think Lauren wants me to do it, but. Yeah, that would be fun. Now that you're mentioning it. But since it's our last meeting. So we looked, when I say we, I'll say the global we of the management of the village, including finance and administration. It has been a goal of the town to eliminate the highway tax. You've gone from about eight and a half cents a couple of years ago, what's eight cents? Eight cents. Down to the last .011 left in the tax. Believe it ends up being about $165,000 $165,000 that's a tax that is only to the people outside of the village. It has been brought up a couple of times since I've been here, we'd like to eliminate it. We have some other reasons why we may want to do it. But so we looked at it a couple of months ago when we asked the town what some of their budget objectives was that was listed as one of the items amongst police officers and some other items. So, okay, you want to eliminate a tax. Well, it's $165,000 of revenue that comes in that has to be thought of how you're gonna replace $165,000 in a budget. And if you eliminate it, you got to figure out what to do with the money or the lack thereof of the money. We had other goals. The village and the town are working on whether you want to call it merger, you want to call it consolidation. Certainly you're working on alignment. And you have a memorandum of understanding for public works and highway and how that's going to get funded. And so we sat down and pretty much we stared at each other for a couple of minutes until the smartest person in the room, Lauren, said, wait a second, I've got some thoughts. Let me work on something. And she came back with the suggestion of how do we remove the highway tax and get to tax equity and start checking off some of the boxes that you have all talked about in your previous meetings. That's where I turn it over to Lauren because when she crunched the numbers and we have it on a big 11 by 17 sheet, sorry, Sarah, for the font. But we used adult font to show why staff felt this was the best way to address the issue. And when you see the tax ramifications, both... Holy moly. We have new copies. Yeah, we also have a brand new copy. And we only have giant paper with us. It's giant font. When you look at it in this giant font, you will notice, I don't know, but we should certainly make some more copies. Some of us share. I'll make copies. Oh, please. That big paper cost money in the share. Actually, we'll just do it like this. You'll see it perfectly. I'll share with George. I think... How does this work, Mike? Mechanics... So... Mechanics aside, the mechanics of taxation aside. If you look at the impact of removal of the tax and what we may or may not wanna do with it, you will see that the least impact to both communities is the one we've picked. And I'm gonna turn it over to Lauren a little bit. I know she loves public speaking, but maybe you can touch on that since you're better at numbers. If we eliminate the highway tax without doing anything else, the town outside the village taxpayer gets a relief of $13 and the village taxpayer tax load increases by $17. So that's, if you eliminate the highway tax and then you have to raise that $165,000 with the town general fund. And then if you just add the rolling, the village highway rolling stock to the town budget without eliminating the highway tax, then the town outside the village taxpayers bill would go up $14 and the village taxpayers would go down $19. And then if you do them both together, the town outside the village taxpayer would have an increase of $0.84. This is on a $280,000 home and the village taxpayer would have a decrease of $1.68. So it's pretty much a wash as far as taxes if it was done this way. Again, we feel that when we all go to most of the same meetings, the joint meetings and others, we have talked about tax equity. We've talked about sharing. We've talked about consolidation of services and how to work better together. And for us, it checked a lot of those boxes. One thing that we had stated in other places is if the town does transfer the money to the village, we change the MOU and both parties agree to the MOU, MOU Memorandum of Understanding between the two communities. We also know that eventually that Memorandum of Understanding has to get codified into something more permanent than that. But for the meantime, the money gets transferred to the village for rolling stock. That's one suggestion of what to do with the funds. The rolling stock fund was about 131, 134,000 in fire. These are four vehicles. These are, so the fire vehicle, which by the way goes to calls in the town. The town cannot do fire protection all by itself with the amount of calls that both communities are doing. The village covers about 80 to 90% of the calls in the town with the fire trucks that are paid for from the rolling stock. I believe the village's total looking at this year is going to be somewhere near 560 to 600 calls this year, 70 to 80% probably in that range in the town. The Public Works Department of the village plows all the major roads, route 15, 117 slash Maple and to Lincoln. All major roads used by town residents with village equipment. Can't do it alone. We work a lot together. Where did Dennis go? Did he leave? Darn it. There you go. We do a lot separately and we do a lot together. And so again, these are the mechanisms. You guys can decide whether we hit the mark, wanna do something else with it, but that was the rationale behind the recommendation. It was not a village recommendation. It was not a town recommendation. It's a staff project and our recommendation of how to address this issue. And then I and others will answer your questions. You thought you were gonna get that, didn't you? It's from the board. Lauren, can we just confirm? So the 84 cents impact on town outside the village taxpayer and the $1.68 decrease for the village taxpayer, that's overall, that's not the rate. It's like- No, that's just if from the tax bill to the person that owns the $28, $280,000. So this change will cost the average taxpayer in the town outside the village 84 cents? Correct. Got it. Per year. Per year. Right. Right, right. I'll say, I think from the village perspective, obviously this looks great. I speak now for my colleagues on the collect board. I'm trying to put myself in your chair. I'm saying, okay, my understanding is a village is going to decide on their own about what rolling new trucks, plows, et cetera they need. They have a, and we just talked about, let me, I'm gonna digress a little bit. We just talked about long-term maintenance and anticipation of costs and everything. Actually the village does that very, very well with its rolling stock. They buy a new fire truck. They have it figured out how many years are gonna get out of that fire truck, and they start tucking money away so that when that fire truck is done, they've got the money put away. Policy. So we're gonna every year take the bill for that rolling stock and we're gonna put it into the town general fund. But what's in that bill, that black box, that's decided by the trustees. You don't get that select board doesn't get to open the box. Now if I'm on the select board, I'm thinking, yeah, I'm not, yeah, this is kind of an interesting deal here. I don't get to open the box, we just pay for what's in the box. So I wanna say, I believe it's a great thing for the village as long as that's understood that the village policy for vehicle purchase is sustained because we don't wanna change that because we think it's a good policy. It's been working for years and years and we don't wanna see that changed. On the other hand, I can understand why my colleagues on the select board might balk at this. And I wanna just say from my perspective, I would say I, no feelings would be hurt if they said, we're not so sure about this. Just wanna make that clear to you guys. Anybody, Mike? Maybe a touch on it. The town itself also does depreciation on its vehicles. We do a replacement fund. I don't believe the village tells the town. We're not gonna get the dump truck with the leather seats and the really good FM. You know, we're gonna get the working, we're not gonna get the really high quality. We get the regular working. You're not getting the heated seats. Neither does the town. Neither does the village tell the town what vehicle to buy with its money part of the town as well. I think that's a trust factor. The other thing that I'd be remiss if I didn't say is, I also think that with the spirit of cooperation and having some of these joint meetings coming up in the future, you have some opportunities for joint purchasing. Each of you do not have to buy a $400,000 Super Sucker 5,000. In fact, you don't do that now. The town uses the village's vehicle. Over 30 times, somewhere like 30 days a year, the village gives its vehicle over to the town to suck up, catch basins and things like that. You both don't need to buy a $180,000 backhoe. You can share it. You could start working on what gets purchased and who purchases it. We just can't do that tonight, please and not tonight. We can get there with some really good cooperation with Dennis, with our fire departments, with the village public works. We can start working on programmatically what we're gonna buy, when we're gonna buy it in our programs and how to share them so that we save the taxpayers money, not duplicating purchasing. Yeah, I would be more comfortable if we could have that money from the highway tax instead of really just being the rolling stock in the village, but to have it for those shared items, which are quite expensive, I know, owned. And we wouldn't have what George referred to as that kind of black box that comes to the select board and can't really open it. And I think there's a number of needs for equipment like that that might be the right ones to get with that rolling stock. So I would prefer to see it go in kind of that direction where it's a joint owned piece. The other thing is the MOUs too. For public works, we have quite a few MOUs. In there, right, to have agreements between how we're gonna work together. And this would require some additional MOU. It was an amendment to an existing. And I know this was a recommendation from the Public Works Committee, the Future Consolidation Committee, whatever that was. Yes, it was. Anyway, so that was my main concern about it. If we could find the shared equipment that I think would, I prefer to see that. Elaine? So that's right, Max. The Public Works Review Committee did recommend that eventually the village rolling stock be added to the town capital budget and eventually some point in the future, the town and the village should begin to plan to purchase together. And I hope we go in that direction. I don't think that's the solution to this particular conversation right now because... What's not the solution? Well, so you're saying, correct me if I'm wrong or I'm misunderstanding what you're saying is you want, instead of having the village rolling stock come into the town capital budget, you are saying you want it to come into the capital budget only for shared equipment? I was saying, yeah. Now or in the future? Well, in this budget. Okay, so that being the case, then it would sort of be split between the village keeping a large portion of its rolling stock and then bringing over only stuff that we're gonna purchase together which we don't know what that will be. And then it sort of defeats the purpose of reducing the highway, doesn't defeat the purpose of reducing the highway tax, but it eliminates that alignment of minimizing the tax impact on both communities. We already have a precedent, a successful precedent of we've moved village voters approved and town voters accepted the village budget line item for public works coming into the town budget. So it's already there. And the select board has had two years of seeing that line item and being able to approve it. And the trustees have had two years of establishing that budget line item and sending it to the select board for approval. So I see this as the same exact thing. The village trustees and the staff together map out the rolling stock plan that we've always done and then it gets added to the town budget as is as a black box, not touchable by the select board unless it surpasses the budget threshold which because of this one time change. So I just don't think we should limit it to the things that we wanna purchase together because we don't know what those are yet and it doesn't satisfy the current situation that we're trying to do together here. We call it a black box, but we're actually able to look at it. You can look at it totally. It's just that we're not supposed to negotiate. It was a poor choice of rights. The village public works line item is not negotiable by the select board and this rolling stock fund would not be negotiable either but you'd have yay or nay approval should it bump up against the threshold. And so the amendment, the way it's written now is if it's below 6% increase, it kinda comes in as if it's above that. Exactly. Then there's room for the select board to say what's going on. Can we learn some more about why this number is higher than it's supposed to be? I just wanna, I concur with what Elaine is saying and I don't only add that. Right now what's in the village rolling stock is stuff that it's a list of vehicles that they started putting together probably a decade ago. So you can't go in and start taking stuff out of there and say well we don't need this truck, this truck, this thing, we're gonna try to put stuff in here that's just for joint use. I think it would be too hard. I think you're talking about adding, you'd have to anticipate that I think and look at it a couple of years out from now starting to do that. Can we get Dennis to comment? Anything I'd like to mention is that the rolling stock funds are very predictable when they're set up. Right. And if this goes about, at some point in time, I'm not trying to look at a decision just to explain, that we've looked out in both cases, 15 to 20 years for what needs to be purchased. And in most cases we've included inflation costs so that it's not just in today's process that's been in 15 years. And an engineer jargon brought that back to a present worth and then spread it out to an evil annual payment. So that there's a predictability to that cost. And that's what we ran into when we tried to do the MOU on public works is you need that predictability. That's why I'll get a number that's fixed, 6%. But if you have that predictability and if you would write that into the MOU, that black box doesn't really become a black box because what it says is you've got a defined plan and you've got a defined plan in town and you know you can predict what those costs are. The agreement is to go forward with this. It would be a way to predict what those costs are, keep it within a certain range of costs, but still allow each community to manage its assets. It's just an observation, not having done our own and have a look at what Ricky's got. It's the same, yeah. No, I get it, I appreciate that. Thank you. I was wondering since we were just talking about a shared buildings manager if this highway tax amount could instead be put toward the highway manager, or sorry, toward the buildings manager and not deal with the rolling stock question as of yet, but address the critical need to have someone manage the buildings. So what you're saying is instead of doing, consider them separately and so instead of eliminating the town highway tax, keep it and apply those funds towards a new buildings manager for the full community and then separately consider whether or not to move the rolling stock from the village into the town budget line item. I would like them to be separate decisions, but I think the amount of money that's currently collected doesn't need to come from just outside the village, right? There's gonna be some savings there and I would need help from the finance people to actually work that out. I'm still not necessarily clear on what you're asking. Can you go a little further? I'm not sure I'm tracking either. You'd keep collecting the highway tax, but instead of putting it towards town rolling stock, you'd put it towards the building person, the building individual. Flexible, I just wanna look at other things that the highway tax could do or not do besides the rolling stock and consider them as two separate things. Can I, I'm sorry, I just have one technical question, Lauren. Looking at the village budget, the 4.8%, that anticipates the rolling stock moving into the town general fund, is that correct? If it, now let's say if the, I know I don't wanna put you on the spot for a number, but rough estimate. If we don't move the village rolling stock into the public works budget, what is the, what are we looking at in terms of a village budget increase? What does that add? The budget is the same. The budget doesn't change, but the tax rate is what is affected. The tax rate, okay. The revenues coming in from the town. So right now we're looking at 1.5% increase in the tax rate with that coming in without it, we're 5%. So that's the difference. It's the, the tax rate. So it goes from 4.8 to five? No, 4.8 is the budget increase. The tax rate increase is 1.5 to five, okay. I mean, it's, It's very much. You see what I'm saying is we're kind of, it's significant and we're kind of jammed up in terms of what goes first, because if we don't, I mean, you can understand, we haven't passed a lot of budgets that a budget increases like that. I don't think. Well, we haven't looked at the budget yet and you haven't decided if there are other things but that's what's being presented tomorrow. Those are the numbers. Beautiful flowers. I can't dispute your numbers. Those are the same ones you said to me earlier today. Do you need to have a decision about this tonight? What's the, what did you folks, what did staff have in mind? Do you want to, now that you've presented it. The recommendations were in the memo. To, that would be. It would be ideal if we had an answer. If we don't have a decision, we need what we and when, and for when to get a joint answer. So one of our issues is every, if we do something, it impacts both budgets. So if we don't do it when you're together, then we have to shuttle it back and forth. So if you make an amendment or a change or a thought, how do we go back and forth? That's also the reason why next year we want to try to do this type of meeting before the budget starts and we can start working on directives and hash certain things out and then figure out what the monetary is then trying to do it last or next. We have presented it to both boards already. So we were hoping you'd have a chance to think about it. Questions for Max. Max, I was, as you know, I was unable to attend last night's board meeting. I believe this was a topic of conversation. Am I right? You did not, it was in the reading file, but you did not discuss it. Okay, well, I was wondering what Andy Watts thoughts might have been since he's not at the table today, whether he had anything to contribute. I guess we don't have that information. He has submitted some comments originally when he talked at the last joint meeting. The funny part is during the budget, priorities discussion with the town, he said he was looking for the highway tax to be eliminated. At the last joint meeting, he kind of talked about how he had made peace with it. That's close to what he's got. Words in his mouth. But that still does not address how the tax has come about, how it's been addressed since then and what the town wants to do with the tax. You are your taxing residence, 0.011, for what, you have the choice of what to do with it. The village is under an agreement that they're not supposed to ask or add capital rolling stock. They're not, they were not the ones who wanted to make the request, but they don't want to make the request and put the town in a bad position to ask. That's a guess and a procedural thing. So I think Andy, I think, well, and Andy regrets not being able to be here, but I think we go back to about six, seven months ago when you talked about what your goals were. One community, one board, tax equity, some and proper representation. I'm probably missing one or two others. Think about how this gets you to that point. I have a complete agreement with you, Evan. I'm a little troubled that and the trustees will meet tomorrow for budget day and I'm sure this will be a significant portion of the conversation. I don't feel comfortable giving an answer tonight without the select board having had a public conversation that included Andy and the public. I really, I'm sorry, because I know the urgency and- It's fair enough. If I'm recalling, and I think just, if I'm recalling Andy's email I saw, because he addressed it to you and me and Max as chairs, I think he sort of said the same thing I just did a while ago. How can we say yes to this since the village hasn't had its budget meeting yet and that's gonna impact whether we do this? I think that maybe what I could ask the trustees to do is for us to give some indication without, as you're right, you're absolutely right. We don't wanna put the select board on the spot in a public meeting since they particularly haven't had a chance to really mull this over and dig into it, but maybe the trustees, we can give some indication. Do we support, would we support this if the select board said yes, would say oh no, no, no, no we don't want this or what's generally the feeling here? Andrew, do you wanna talk about that for a second, Lori? Yeah, I'm all for it. Okay, Andrew? I'm all for it. If we're trying to come together more, this is a great way to further come together. I mean, I think with Dennis's explanation and the understanding, I mean, the concern that I had and I will say that Dan Karen who's in New York couldn't make it to the meeting tonight, he had the same reservation, he just, we did the public works department, they have, they're the ones who decide what kind of stuff they need. Sure. But as long as that's maintained, then we're for it. And so maybe I can throw some option in there. Sounds like, except for Elaine right now and I don't wanna put you, mainly supportive of doing it with the right language in the agreement. Second, while there will be a budget impact to the village, from what we have in the budget now, I would, I'm gonna go on a limb of the town here for a second, Max and others. If it came out to not be the entirety of the tax, right now you have 0.011, if it ended up being 0.005, right? You cut it in half. You did half of it this year and you did half in the future. It'll have a tax rate impact. It'll have a budget impact, but not the whole thing. And so these are some of the things so if the town came back to the village and said, hey, look, we're really only comfortable at half this year. The village would probably say, thank you. And we understand. And then you'd have to adjust your budget, how you decided. But that decision can't wait too long. Yeah, we'd be reviewing the budget the first meeting in January and select board will have met probably before that. So, you know, maybe in the final village budget isn't due to be approved until the beginning of February. So there is some time. We've got flexibility. I just wanted to raise some of the issues here and I think it was, so. And so if you don't mind, when you can get back, I have Andy's comments right here. I'll read them to everybody. Two quick things. One being, I would be interested to at least here or at least I'm assuming maybe staff in the sake of time would also be interested to hear what the concerns are with going forward with this so that that way if it's an MOU thing that can be addressed or if it's a financial piece that needs to be addressed, there's time to plan for that. Since that is the intent of today's meeting is to have those conversations aired and we did have the weekend to read this. At the same time, I also recall our last joint meeting. I believe Andy had said again not wanting to put words in his mouth since he isn't here saying, I understand I can't be here. You guys can make the decisions and I'm paraphrasing. So just because somebody isn't here, I don't feel that that's necessarily the reason to not move forward with things. Absolutely, agreed. That's why we agree that we need at least four people. Right. At least four. Oh, Mike, you go ahead. I've already seen it. No, it's all right. Just two small observations. One is as a trustee, I fully support this idea. As a selectman, I fully support this idea. I am particularly grateful that it is arising from staff because we rely on the staff for their expertise and they have the objective of this proposal under both hats. My concern is just that the select board hasn't had the time to publicly process this. That is my only concern. We're talking about an 84 cent increase on a tax bill. So I don't wanna get stuck in the weeds here. It's not really about the tax rate necessarily. I understand, absolutely. It's the whole concept of the moving the stock over. But as I said earlier, we have a precedent. It's been successful. So, yep. Mr. Chair, would you go ahead? So Lauren, is it safe to assume that if we went back to Evan's earlier suggestion of doing half this year and doing half next year, is it safe to say then that that percentage increase in the tax rate would be more along the line of three basis points? Yeah. Okay. I like this idea because I think it gets us one step closer to the goals that we all articulated before of having tax equity. And I think I commend staff for coming up with this and having it as close as it is. I have to echo Elaine, 84 cents on a $280,000 house. I'm pretty sure that that's not gonna be too big a deal for most people. Yeah, I think it's not really just the rate. I understand that. I understand that. If you wanna talk about the black box that we can look at but can't touch, I trust the people, I trust the trustees. I mean, I'm a village resident that serves on the town select board. I mean, I trust the trustees. I think, I told Andrew about this before. I think their plan for setting up rolling stock in that type of thing is excellent. Yeah, I don't have a trust issue at all either. If I can, I know this is semantics. It's not a black box, it's a queer. It's a spreadsheet. It's a spreadsheet, it's in our village packet. It's already on the public, it's on the village's website. You can see exactly what we're on metaphor. This life board would be walking through that stuff. I'm just saying from that sense. We can even put it on the website. We have internet access, we could pull it up right now. It's a black box with trucks in it. It's a clear box. Perfectly clear, you see, right through it. The other thing, if the concern really is about ownership and I assume that's probably part of the concern. Again, that can be addressed through the MOU. The MOU theoretically could say something to the effect of as the town has paid for a vehicle, then you can own the vehicle. I'm okay saying that. It doesn't have to be as each vehicle comes its due as it's been fully paid for. Sure, that becomes under town ownership. As again, we're trying to move further towards alignment and consolidation. So if we can just kind of pull ourselves out of the political side as we can, these are problems that can be solved. Absolutely. And especially through things like the MOU. We just may need some more time to see what that draft language may be. So do you have the committee? Are we not ahead of the game on this and need to see the entire budget before having this discussion and approving anything? Question mark. Is the intent that the rolling stock and highway tax changes have to be linked? Given that the average tax implication of this change is less than $2 on either side, why does this need to be a joint discussion? Also, there's a typo in the memo in the cost section where it says 84 cents. Actually, it says zero, eight, four. It's supposed to say 84 cents. So, yes, either he wrote that wrong. He's right, great. Yep, he's right on, he's the man. I do not agree with approving any changes in this meeting. I believe each board can and should make their own decisions with a view of their entire respective budgets. Has the village finalized their budget to be able to say that the highway increase is 15.2%? We haven't gone through point-by-point. No, they have not, because they haven't gone over to the budget or touched it in any way. But that's what it would be going into the discussion. I didn't think the trustees have had their budget meeting yet. I believe we should not approve the increase until the trustees have a complete proposal. Can I just say one quick thing? I have a bit of a concern that we now can't follow up with Andy. That's correct. To have a statement read that we then can't follow up with and or hear from him as to whether he may have a different opinion based on what was just said. It's unfortunate. I agree. And I think the other thing is you have all agreed that who comes to these, as long as you have four, that's good enough for the discussion and where it goes. And for decisions if they need to be made. But this meeting was, I don't wanna say hastily scheduled, but it came about, it was slotted in, not everybody could make it. Obviously, Dan is out of town. Andy is not available. But we felt this meeting had to happen sooner rather than later to get input so that we could make, allow you guys to make decisions with as much information as you had at the time. And again, maybe me a little bit slow on the uptick. I would hope that, and Greg and I talked one quick, we talked about this already, about when next year we have this meeting, we're thinking somewhere in the late September, October range, so that we can really get to the meat of issues and then give us some time to come back to you when you're together so that you guys can jointly decide certain things that affect both of you and not even equally. And I use that term. They don't affect you equally. The town's tax base is higher. It's got more to do. So when $60,000 does not affect the town nearly as much as the same 60 in the village because of its tax base and the fact that the, The only thing I'm gonna say with that strategy is if we said we're gonna have the meeting in September, October, you'd come up with some new ideas in November and screw it all up. Some better ideas. Some better ideas. But it would be a clear screw up. So this is more of a broad statement I'm about to make. So this conversation is really a good indication, a good example of why I've struggled with the way we've consolidated. I've been supportive of it, I'm voting for it, but I feel like we're in this place now where it's really hard to keep moving forward without some of the big decisions being made. And I'm just gonna use this as an example. This is a tough decision for the select board. I get it, or they're 84 cents, it's 84 cents. I've gotten emails and phone calls and have been stopped on the street since we collectively had the discussion of co-location. Specifically from village residents who are saying, we're fine with opening everyone up as a resident. We wanna be one. We voted for merger for the rec departments. Yet now we're allowing them to be considered a resident without any money coming into the general fund. It is an entity that the village pays for solely. So these decisions aren't just one little piece of the puzzle, it all comes together. And there are gonna be pluses and minuses on both sides. So we have to keep that in mind. Agreed. So I think the devil's in detail on this. I mean, the concept we kind of agreed to, right? And that was the recommendation from, again, that committee. And I'm not really against going forward. It's just, how do we do that? Maybe what Andrew had said, you know, even that as a rolling stock gets paid through the town general fund, is it possible for them to then become town assets for everybody to own? I mean, that's a possibility. That would alleviate one of the concerns that I had, for example. I don't know if that's a problem for the village. Well, the only problem I can say, I don't know if it's a problem, but I know that a lot of the time, they part of the cost of financing a new plow is they sell the old one. Part of the cost of buying a new fire truck is they get $80,000 for the old truck. So if they don't own that, then they can't, unless they could steal it from you. But if they don't have the title to it, then again, you're sort of complicating their financial picture a little bit. I don't want to say it's necessarily a deal-killer, but I know that that's how they operate. Yeah, we do the same. Yeah, so if they're buying a new truck for half a million, a new thing for half a million dollars and it becomes the town's, then they can't turn it in. They can't get the resale value. So then the cost of their new, the next thing that they're getting goes up. On the MOU and how you define it. May I? Yeah, yeah. I would say that that's a future goal, Max. Yeah, that's something. That someday should we pursue furniture or consolidation all the way through that eventually we will own equipment together. But I think it is very premature to, if we're going to move the rolling stock fund in, we're just moving a line item, we're not transferring ownership. And there's other assets that the village owns as well. And what would that do? How would that impact? I think we're putting the cart before the horse with that concept. I don't disagree with it. I just think it's really too soon to talk about the town owning village assets before we talk about the town's investment in those assets. I would just further, as a village resident, I would be happy to say that if for eight years, the town wants to pay $100,000 a year to support an $800,000 fire truck, I'm happy to say you own the thing and we maybe have it stored over at the village fire department for space sake, for safekeeping. Same thing with a plow truck. If it's $500,000 and for five years the town wants to pay $100,000, it can be owned by the town and used by both communities as we're looking to come together. And we have the professional staff to help determine this vehicle needs to be located over in this section of the community. You pay $100,000 this year. You now own every single fleet of vehicle or every vehicle within the fleet of the S-Extension. But rather as time comes. And again, I think these are some of the details we could work out through an MOU where there would be that equitable conversation of if they've paid $800,000 to support this, they probably should own it. Yeah, and that's talking about 100 and whatever and then owning all that stuff. Yeah, so the MOU, I'm sorry to say, I think there's a path forward. We just have to be careful about how that MOU gets done. And then you have to question, do you really want to do the MOUs if we're on this path to merger? This sort of all becomes moot at that point. Eventually, but I really think we have to transition slowly. Process question, meaning my process question. So tomorrow we're going to meet as trustees to go over the village budget. In my mind right now, we will need to have two budgets. One that says we're going to move the rolling stock into the town budget, or we're not. I mean, that makes it difficult for us to determine what we do going forward. So I just had to state that. It's not having had some of the previous discussions, I think hinders our ability tonight to make the decisions we need to make. To make the rest of the process easier. Yep, agreed. Agreed. It's just, but we're feeling our way with all of this stuff. So do you anticipate tomorrow us kind of going down the path of two? I think we're going to have to kind of look at that. Absolutely, because, and then again, the fire department had a, they had a truck in the rolling stock budget and you moved that, that got moved out of the rolling stock and that's now in the fire department budget because I first saw the fire department budget went up $120,000. Wow, that's, they got a big pay increase, but it turns out you just moved the fire truck into that budget. It went from miscellaneous transfers down in. So it's all good. We'll figure it all out, but we probably will have to have two budgets, maybe even tricky. Maybe three. No, it's going to be tricky. So what could the select board have, you know, it's discussion on this. I'm going to turn thoughts. I'm trying to think, I think. I'm free Christmas day. No, I'm not actually. I think we had penciled in probably the second budget meeting. So I want to say Thursday, the third or fourth of January is when we have you down for. Fourth of fourth is typically only we do public works, highway. So we have discussion then at that workshop. He's right. It is the third. It is the third. Man, the first is Tuesday. It's some time either the third or the fourth. Okay. And then maybe we'd have a better idea at that point. At least you guys had a very good discussion. You brought some things on the table. The village is meeting tomorrow. We're going to figure it all out. Yeah. At least you're not yelling at each other. And, you know, it's, I know, I'm just, you figure it out. Again, I think the concept is good, but the devil's in the detail. We haven't really had a chance to talk about it. Now, sort of, sort of going forward, Lauren and I have been talking and Sarah a little bit about this was a complicated piece. After this, I don't know if there's any complicated taxi, you know, there's no, there's no highway tax that's just in the town and not throughout the entire community. So that kind of takes that part away. Everything you would do from this point on is sort of more straightforward and doesn't require complicated math and four spreadsheets. Would you say five? Aw. Let's make a spreadsheet for Sarah. Oh, I thought she said five, I was like, whoa. Would you say that, like, for example, the town budget has impact fees that the village budget does not have? So would you say that that's a less complicated conversation than this particular conversation? Yeah, okay. Certainly could be, you know, the town does collect impact fees for its new growth. In different impacts, et cetera. That's not a recurring amount of money, but how it uses those monies is generally acceptable by law. There's prescriptive ways you can use impact fees. But if you just think about the village, the town, this one cent is about 100 and one cent in the town is about $140,000, $550,000. The grand list goes up a little bit, et cetera. $150,000 is one cent a year being moved between the town and the village just from zero to 150 towards tax equity and other goals. How you do it, where you do it, a much simpler conversation than this particular one and could be done well in advance in September, October as goals start doing and sort of back to Lori, what's the plan? How are we going to move the next couple of years and then also get to when you're ready to do a governance vote and a merger vote? How does that look? We're interested in that too, because we don't, we'd like that certainty of what we're working on and what the goals are and then much shorter conversation, we hope, because it'd already be talked about. Okay, should we wrap this one up? Yeah. I don't think we're going to get to conclusions. Okay, so when we move on to business side of 5E and that's the rec department co-location, Brad and Allie, do you want to say room for them? Yeah. I hear the station has some free space. I don't know what person Chewie is here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Do you want to give us the overview there? Of course. So the first item that we wanted, well that we're going to talk to you about together is revisiting the co-location aspect and how that pertains to our two fitness and wellness sort of studio spaces. So EJRP has Aspire and EPR has Sunset Studio up off the center road. And Brad and I met with two of the programmers recently to look at the schedules of the two facilities. And it really works out naturally where a lot of the programs that EJRP offers for fitness and wellness are in the mornings. And a lot of ours are in the evenings after childcare hours which then also remain gives availability to the village kids after school and garden groups that go to Aspire after school. Thank you. So it's really making one facility of the same purpose filled all the time. Or at least much more than they currently are separately. Putting us on campus with EJRP staff along with our programs is a really good feeling in the discussion of all of the buildings that are spread out. It's consolidating that aspect and it's also saving the program fund on SS Parks and Recreation side money because the program fund is losing $20,000 with rent and utilities for Sunset Studio. And in order to recoup that program fees would have to go up I thought he was gonna move the microphone for me. Can you hear in the audience? Can you hear me? Okay, kind of, okay, Margaret, sorry. So we'd have to really increase the fees of our programs and that would really deter a lot of people from being able to access the programs that are offered for the reason through recreation departments. So with that brings a transfer of money from the program fund that I manage over to the Village General Fund to assist with the building and facility needs in regards to cleaning and utilities and general use of Aspire and that our lease for Sunset Studio is coming up in June of 2019. So we would look to have a conversation if this is something that we're going to do with our landlords about kind of continuing it through summertime until we officially move, but that way it would be a combined facility space for the two of our departments. If we don't collate, locate that and we lose Sunset Studio, you know, we both rely a lot on school space but the access to Aspire wouldn't be the same. We would still be renting space from somebody else and it would be EJRP rather than us co-locating and co-habitating campus facilities together. Brad, do you have anything to add, Brad? No. You nailed it there, Hallie, good. All right, questions? Sounds like a great idea. Wonderful, okay. Yeah, she's pretty straightforward. Anyone? Nope. Related topic, but a little bit different. Space, like gym space, school space, seems like it's getting worse. Is it because we're having more difficulties with the school since the merger or just that there's more stuff going on and it's harder for some programs to happen? And I only say that from personal experience where my son's activities have been canceled or switched because they just can't get the space. Just curious thoughts. Brad? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's been an ongoing issue for a while and especially in the winter months, it's really, really challenging to find indoor space. And so, I don't know as though anything's changed necessarily with the school's merging, but there's just a lot of demand for childcare, for sports, for school activities, oftentimes throw a wrench in things, especially over the holidays and then there's winter concerts and so all of those things combined. We have in our budgets to do a facility feasibility study to look at the recreation needs in our community and see what those needs might be. Thanks. So this 12,000 comes out of the program fund which is not out of the general tax fund, right? That's what you're generating from your programs. So that's the 12 that you take from that fund and put it into the village general operating to help offset the cost of co-locating. So it sounds like everybody's fully on board. I think we're able to come to agreement on that one. Well, all right. I like what the source of the funds is coming. The source of the candy, you know. It's a duly notice. We're paying someone rent and we might as well pay ourselves. Exactly, exactly. Good way to put it. And again, it's not coming out of the tax revenue, it's coming out of the program fund so it's kind of neat that you have it set up that way. Okay, I guess we can be done. Great. And then move on to the next one, all right? Five F, the senior center request. Yep, sounds good. So the senior center request is going to come up tomorrow during the village trustees budget meeting, but it will also be impacting the town budget as well. Through all of our alignment conversations in the mix of regular budget conversations, you know, we had mentioned in one of our meetings with you all that we were looking to co-supervise a couple of positions once we co-locate. We have recently received a retirement notification from our senior activities coordinator and this was all in conversation prior to that, but the co-supervision is gonna bump up a bit on the new hire once we get that person in. So it's not gonna be something that's waiting until September necessarily. So that's kind of the fast track on that aspect, but we're looking to align the position titles between, you know, we have a program, we have program coordinators on our side, Brad has program directors on his side. They all basically do the same sort of work capacities, streamlined in certain categories. And so we're looking to change the title of the senior activities coordinator to a program director of senior activities and move that position to the same level as our other program coordinators and directors. So it would be a salaried position in as an exempt status in the union. And Travis did, you know, did the research to make sure that this position would fall under the Fair Labor Standards Act that it could be exempt and we weren't gonna go against anything there. And then also on our budget side, Essex Parks and Recreation, we are looking to add a part-time paid staff program coordinator of senior activities eventually for the senior center and general senior activities for the entire community to streamline programs and events and trips with those two staff between the two departments. And they would be town employees and then the program director of senior activities would be co-supervised and evaluated and managed between Brad and I. And so at the end of the memo, it does talk about an increase in salaries and benefits, but overall the senior budget portion of Essex Parks and Recreation's overall budget would increase only by about 10,000 due to other changes in the overall number. Questions or comments? That's a good make sense. Yeah, yeah. I only have the, again, I think it makes sense to agree with you, Mike. I just have the process, again, the process question of how do we approve a budget since we haven't approved the formal town-village budgets, how do we approve a budget that's in the town budget? Ken, we can't really do that. So I understand it's all the employees of the senior center are in the town budget. This is just, I guess on the village side, informational, but it's not. It's in your building. It's a community-wide function of town and village. And we just wanted to let you know that that's how staff use it, how it's done budget-wise, what its impact is. And the real question that, you know, is we look at the activities of the senior center. We know what Luanne and the hours that she was putting in with the trips from a staffing standpoint. We didn't want somebody working 50, 60 hours a week. Two, we need some backup to be able to do. Somebody gets to go on vacation, have a sick day, et cetera, et cetera. We need some of that and some flexibility. Unfortunately, we're not proposing a 20 or 40 hour a week position. We are doing some things because we have some other priorities as well in the town budget, in terms of police officers and our fire department alignment. But we could certainly look at how to do these things. We did have a meeting yesterday with several, a couple members of them and talking about trips. We'll continue to go on as they've been going on. We would look to have those trips be done predominantly by coach or something of that nature if they are outside of this service area. That's something our insurance courier is concerned about as we are and the hours that our drivers that are actually employees of the town have to drive versus professional drivers of coaches. And I do know that there's a couple of members from the senior center here in the front row. And so that's what we're just trying to do. And we're also dealing with the departure of Luanne through her retirement. So I think that Brad, Ali, Travis and others have put together a good plan. Having the position be exempt takes it away from specifically 40 hours and specifically a typical work day of eight or seven. Well in the town it would be 730 to five which that position didn't work that hours either. But in general you're supposed to work an eight hour day when you are exempt. That goes away. You can work as many hours as you can or want to or need to. But we don't have, try not have people work 50 hours every week and nights and weekends. So we're looking for that flexibility. So it is a town and a village joint venture. Evan, I was just saying but you have a recommendation here that we approve this budget. I'm saying we can't approve a budget tonight. You're recommending that we approve when we get to the budgets we approve them. I think, and in general I think do you approve of the concept? Yeah, gotcha. Do we need a motion for that or can we just get a consensus? I'd go consensus. Everybody on board? I'm seeing head nods all around. All right, very good, moving forward. They sat here all night, I don't know if they have. Yeah, you've been here all night. Did you want to make any comments or? First of all, I just wanted to see what was going to happen. You say your name for the record. I have a lot of communication going on here. Could you say your name for the record please? Oh, my name is Ann Marie Dennis. Thank you. Just a member of the town and of the senior center and have been also a moment of the volunteers for the phone for this band, which are a different issue. But just wanted to see what was going on in order to keep the rest of what's, how the senior center's gonna look in the future. I was a little concerned when I did read how the budget was set up. You agree that the current staff person is doing a lot of overtime, and so you say, okay, we'll give her a little help, but then we're gonna add this job and this job and this job to her. So where is that help gonna be? Doing all the extra jobs? She's gonna be assigned and she's still gonna do 50 hours a week? I don't see how that's gonna work. I mean, I've worked with other staff people in the past and if someone's already working overtime and you agree that they need help, but then you give them three more duties to do, how the hell am I gonna accomplish it anyways? You're disapproving another disaster to happen. It's not gonna work out as well, especially when you're talking about trips and you're saying that the new trip plan coordinator, the program coordinator, is going to be doing all the programs that these two departments have been doing. So what happens to their budget that they're paying for them to have staff people to handle stuff for the seniors? What happens to their staff people? Are they gonna lose staff people? Because the new coordinator that you're proposing in here is gonna be doing it? I don't, I just saw a lot of problems when I started reading all of this, you know? Yeah. So I just wanted to see what's going on. Okay, thank you for your concern. All right, well, we appreciate that, yeah. Okay, anybody else wanna make a comment? Okay, then I think we're okay with five F for now. And you wanna just touch on five G? We need an executive session with both boards to talk about a real estate matter that is on jointly owned property. I will make a motion that the trustees enter into executive session to discuss the negotiating. If you could, could we do one thing? I think we deal with, just go through the reading file. Sorry, sorry, I'll tell you, I haven't finished, so I don't really have a motion on the table. Sorry, right here. So we're gonna go into the executive session later. So we'll just open up the reading file then for board member comments or the list of shared positions and budgets with percentages. Any, anybody wanna make comments on the reading file? I have a wonderful holiday season. We didn't get that, that's why I did this. We only got the next thing. Good night. Merry Christmas. Is it in there? Yeah, it's the last page. It's not in my, it's not in my, anyway. It's after the motor for example. I know it's not important, it doesn't matter. Just keep going, don't worry about it. All right, does anybody have any comments about the, or questions in the reading file? About anything? Nope. Nope, nope. Okay, then George. Okay, I'll continue. The trustees enter into executive session discussing the negotiating or securing of real estate purchase or lease options in accordance with one VSA section 313 parentheses two and to include the select board, unified manager, deputy town manager, finance director, assistant village manager and assistant finance director. Second. Any further discussion? All in favor. Aye. Aye. I move the select board enter into executive session to discuss the negotiating or securing of real estate purchase or lease options in accordance with one VSA section 313 parentheses two and to include the trustees, the unified manager, the deputy town manager, the finance director, the assistant village manager and the assistant finance director. Thank you, Mike. Five seconds. Thank you, Ari. Any further discussion about going into executive session? You know, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Five minute break. Something's gonna say, you're gonna take a few minutes break. Yeah, why don't we take a break? We're not leaving here until you finish.