 I'm going to call the meeting to order at seven o'clock. Welcome, everybody, to something new that we're trying out for the first time with the TV here in the meeting room, with three members of the board here, one distant, remote. And Ted, Kenny, will be absent from the meeting tonight. So we'll move on to the minutes of May 18th, 2021. I'm looking for a motion to approve. I'll move to approve the minutes for, what is that one? May 18th. May 18th, yep, 2021 as presented. Let's do a second. I'll second. And we have a second. Looking at page one and page two and page three. Did you want to mention the item number 13? Yes. Item number 13, the spelling of poor house should be changed to P-O-U-R and a space house. That adjustment. And page five, under the motion at the top of page four, I beg your pardon, page four. The motion at the top of page four should indicate that Jeff abstained from that. So the motion will be unanimous for zero with one abstention. Hearing no other corrections then, I presume that Jeff, you're abstaining from the vote on this because you joined us very late. Yeah, I think just as you guys were basically saying goodbye. So yes, I agree. I should abstain. So all those in favor of approving the minutes of May 18th, 2021, say aye. Aye. Aye, three. And one abstention from Jeff. So three, zero, and one. And moving on to public comment. If there's anyone in the listening audience or viewing audience that wishes to make a public comment on any issue, this is their time to do so. Don't see anyone in the chat who would like to make a public comment this evening, so we should be set. OK. Then we can move on to interviews and appointments. And we have two different. We have four people interested in running for the library board of trustees and two people interested in the Chittenden Solid Waste District. And I think we can take the four that are interested in the library board first and welcome them to join us remotely. Yep, I'll get them connected right now, Terry. And I see everybody at home. I'll just be connecting you momentarily here. Just you'll be you'll be reconnected in just a moment. See, Sherry and Justin, Steve and Barbara, can you hear us OK? Sure can. Hi, Barbara, are you there? You just need to undo. Yes, I am here. OK, we can hear you. Terry, we've got all four connected here. Good. So what we're going to be doing tonight is interviewing all four of you at one time, asking you to give a brief statement of your interest in running for the seat on the library board of trustees and giving us a little bit of your background, even though we do have your applications in front of us. And then we'll go on from there to asking you individual questions one at a time. So I think what we'll start out doing is I'll ask you one by one to do exactly what I said. And we can start with Sherry Westman. Good evening. Thank you for the opportunity to interview tonight. I'm glad to be here with you. My, as you know from previous interactions, I have a background in public service and a background in local government. And I love being involved in my community. One of the pieces of my experience in government was with the City of New York, I worked at the Office of Management and Budget with the Cultural Affairs and Libraries budgets. And I know that might sound like it's really different from a single-town library, but the system is very large, but each individual library serves the community in a similar way to any other library in any other town or community, including providing, obviously, books and other services for borrowing, but also allowing people to have access to the internet. And job searches and community meeting spaces. And I, as I've mentioned in other interactions, really believe in spaces for people to come together and gather as communities to learn from each other when they maybe have differences of opinions. And I think libraries are just wonderful resources within a community to do that and having some experience with libraries and also having visited our library a lot. I'd love to participate and be a part of the board. Thank you. Steve Shepard. Sure. Hi, everybody. Nice to see you all. Just a couple of thoughts. I mean, I want to echo one of the things that Sherry said. I really agree with her point that the library is more than just that. It's more than the traditional role that it normally plays. I actually believe that libraries today are probably the only truly public space that communities have anymore. And as a consequence of that, I think libraries have been called upon to become much more than what they have traditionally been seen as a repository of books. I mean, to Sherry's point, they provide internet access. They provide a place for health care consulting. They provide help with technology. They provide programmatic material where it's important for people and so on. I had an opportunity a few years ago. The nature of my work is such that I spend a lot of my time traditionally before COVID outside of the United States. A lot of my work is in the developing world. And a few years ago, I had the opportunity to work with a group of folks in southern Africa, just north of the South African border, to create basically a community center that would bring three villages together. And the only thing they shared was their 58-book library. And what we ended up doing was dragging broadband into the library. And that library became not just the library, but the community center, the local clinic, the school, and a gathering place for everyone. And those three villages essentially became a single community as a result of that. And jobs were created, skills were created, because of that fundamental library nexus that kind of drove everything. And I see this library in Williston becoming that same kind of thing. And I want to be part of it, or I'd like to be part of it, because I see it as a place that has great potential and a great future. But it requires a lot of community activism, a lot of community involvement, and a great deal of communication to make that happen, to help kind of help people understand and appreciate what it's all about. Thank you. Thank you. Justin Kuhns. Hi, good evening, everyone. And thanks for the opportunity to speak with you about this position. I was mostly driven to apply for the position, because I do love the Dorothy Ailing Memorial Library. I have three children myself. And we frequent it often. And I was also kind of feeling that call to community service and try to find more ways where I could get involved in the town of Williston, and also within my homeowner's association, where I live here in Williston. I'm a St. Michael's College graduate, 99. I've been in Williston since about 2016. And my daily work, one of the things I think I could bring to the trustee position is information technology angle. I do software implementation here in Vermont for a local software company. And I do also think that I could help to represent the voice of families with children that also enjoy the library as much as we do as well. Yeah, thank you. Thanks. And Barbara Schossi. I'm sorry, my picture isn't there. I don't know what happened. I am not technology minded. I'm retired. I haven't worked in a long time. I've used the library extensively during the pandemic for porch pickup. I have lived in Williston for 21 years in the same condo community. I was born in Vermont. I have no children or grandchildren. And my past work experience involves bookkeeping. I was development director for the Discovery Museum. I've written grants. I've done press releases. And I've been a volunteer coordinator for Vermont Public Radio. But that's all old stuff. And I'm old. I've got white hair. Since you can't see me, you don't know that. But I do. And that's my story. Thank you, Barbara. Did you years ago work for the Department of Health? Yes, I did. And I worked for Cathedral Square, Williston Woods and Whitney Hill and Gardner's supply. For seasons, Gardner's Center right before it became Gardner's supply in North Country Tile is where I worked in Burlington, in Williston. I've had other jobs in retail in Burlington and VPR and the Health Department. Good, thank you. So now I'll open up to questions from the board for all of you. And if whoever has the first question will start and go in reverse order. Any one of the questions? Jeff, how about you? Yeah, OK. I'll start. The guy at home. This question, I think, for everyone is some more than others have. You've talked about your vision for a library or maybe how a library fits best in the Williston. My question gets a little bit more specific. And it's along the lines of what areas do you think the library is not maybe providing a service or a function it could? And then the opposite is as technology and we grow, what area maybe should the library no longer provide a service or a function that it currently provides? Your thoughts on that and tied into that is have you had a chance to read either in the town plan or through the library itself their vision for how to grow and your thoughts on that? So a little bit of a loaded question, but hopefully it works for you and me. So we'll start with Barbara. This evening I read the minutes of the last library trustees meetings and the plan through 2023. And I don't know the resumes of the librarians. I have spoken with Jane and participated in Zoom conversations with Jane, the library director. I've donated books to the library and I found them very responsive. I think that the library should continue to keep its doors open and not rely so much on technology, primarily now that COVID is over, but have that as an adjunct. I'm wondering how much federal money is going to be coming in. And I'm also wondering when the census demographics are going to be released. Those are my primary questions at this point. And I saw as part of the plan that the library is trying to figure out what to do along with the select board as far as a new library facility and a community center for the town of Worlestone. Thank you. Justin? I guess I had a couple of things come to mind. I do think now that we're reopening post-COVID, I think that it's going to be very important strategically for the library to focus on community events and really bringing people back together again and trying to encourage that as much as possible. I think we'll see a lot of the community and patrons to really be interested in this and support the library with those events. And then again, maybe this is a little bit personal, but I think that my family, my community, I live over in the Brenwoods Indian Circle and Taft Farms area. We have really taken advantage of the bookmobile. I think that's a great service that you don't really see in a lot of other places. At least I haven't. A lot of other libraries offering that. I think it's a little bit unique to Williston also. So I think that's another area of the community. I think that's another area of focus and of interest for the library. Thank you. Thanks. Steve. I'm actually fairly happy with the range and breadth and depth of the services that the library provides. I suppose I could come up with a few things they're not doing. But I think the more important issue here is that I'd like to see the library do more informational outreach to more deliberately. And I hesitate to use the word, but I will anyway, a little bit more aggressively let the community know everything that it has to offer. I am always astonished. And that's a well-chosen word. When I walk through the library and I see robotics programs and projects and I see the diversity of children's programs going on and the programmatic content around workshops and that kind of thing, my concern, and I realize this is a little bit anecdotal, but I don't think as many people know about all those programs as they should. And I think if we did a better job of letting the community know what all is available, we might see greater use, greater utilization of the facilities. In terms of the other end of that question, I think that needs to be really turned over to the community itself. And they need to be asked, what could we be doing, or not doing, as the case may be, that you would like to see in terms of enriching our community? I think to Justin's point, there is a grand plan ahead, if you will. There's a lot of good work that's been done by the town of Williston in terms of the role of the library and so on. But I'd like to see more community outreach and involvement to help us better define what that looks like. Like I said, it's more than a library. It's not just a repository of books. It's a repository of skill and knowledge. And I think if people knew that better, we'd get better uptake, better use. Thanks. Sherry. Hi, thank you. Most of my experience with the Williston, with the Dorothy Allen Library is bringing my kids there, going to the crafts and the story hours. And I will say that I've been, I've found a lot of community at the library. I found community with my kids. I've found that they did events geared toward the kids that were great, both inside of and outside of the library. Even during COVID, they did the movies outside last summer, which I thought was really a wonderful way to allow people to gather still in a way that was safer given the conditions and what was going on with COVID. As we appear to be exiting that, one of the things that I feel like I've seen some in the community this year, it's hard to say in the community. Most of what I've seen in the community has been on Facebook through the Williston Parents Group. And I don't really want to be on Facebook. And I find that that's one of the few places that I get information that, and I guess the school bell. And I agree that there could be some increased communication and dialogue and reaching out to the community to find ways to connect community members, both with the community at large, with services that they're looking for, and with services that they need. I've seen people reaching out on Facebook for work opportunities. And I've seen people reaching out on Facebook because there are food boxes that are being offered. And I would love to see an opportunity where there is more communication and less of it is through Facebook. And I think that perhaps the library is a really good place to distribute that information and to offer people a place to connect with other places within the community. One of the things with my kids when they were younger that I was always trying to figure out and had a hard time with was ways for them to be involved to help in the community. And I always thought that the library might be a place that could connect people in that way. So I would love to see just more connections, ways to connect community with services that they need or ways to connect people within the community to places to help out if they have something to offer to the community, no matter the age. I also think especially in the last few years, there, and especially with the silos of the internet and social media there, it feels like there's less interaction of people who I think would be for our communities, we would be better off if we were dialoguing together. And I think that the library is a good space for that. As Steven mentioned, there's information and there are resources. Obviously there are books and there's learning and there's such an opportunity to enrich ourselves as individuals with resources in the library. But I think it's also a space where people can come together and enrich ourselves as a community. And so I would love to see that. I spoke with Jane a little bit and asked about the job searches because I know that that's something that the Brooklyn Public Library was doing. They were making a really big effort to connect people who were searching for work and who needed opportunity to create that space where they could use the internet and where they could use other resources that were available that they didn't have access to at home. So I guess the other thing would be making sure that people in the community know that if they don't have access to something at home, like the internet, the library can be a useful space for them to connect with other resources they need. And I don't know that I would get rid of anything at the library. The resources I just think are so valuable. I love the library. I just love it. Thank you so much. Are there further questions from the board? So thank you all for all your passion that I'm hearing of things that are going well and reporting out on things that you would still like to promote. My question, I think is short, but might be hard. If you had one wish for the library, what would it be? We'll start with Steve. I'm gonna go back to what I said a moment ago. I want it to be a place where people look forward to going as often as they possibly can because it offers so much enrichment to their lives. I mean, I'm not trying to sound sort of Pollyannish here, but I want it to be that nexus, that community center point that a library should be. And I think we can do that. I mean, I think as an organ, I mean, I know that the board is doing a great deal of that. I know the town sees that as an opportunity, but I've seen it as my colleagues here have as well as my fellow candidates, I'd like to see that. I'd like to see it be a place that people think about first when they think about Williston. Thank you, Steve. Justin. I guess I'll mention about kind of the interest in sort of increasing the number of community events that the library puts forth going forward. I think that would be great. And I also think that even though the porch pickup was something that came as a result of COVID, I'm very curious to kind of see if there's interest in keeping that as an option going forward too, because it's convenience. And I think, you know, we all have busy lives and there's times when we don't necessarily need to go into the library, we just need to get the book that we really want. And I'm kind of curious to see if that'll stick around. Thanks. Thanks. Sure. I think as a parent of still relatively young children, and there's probably something there, but my wish would be something that could draw me in for me. I would love to see something where people who are often doing things for the rest of the people in their household can have that draw that brings everyone together, where everyone can do something, but also where there is a connection for people who don't know how to fit it in sometimes, who don't know when or where it's their place to get into it. It's easy for me to say, oh, an opportunity for my children, I'll get them into that. It's harder for me to say, you know, seek out an opportunity for me. That's why I'm doing this. I want to be involved, but you know, this is a different level of commitment than just the one, you know, the one-off events that might bring someone in who wants to be connected occasionally, but can't really make a long-term commitment or doesn't know if they want to, something that really reaches out and brings people in who aren't already seeking it out or want it, but don't know how to find it. Thank you. Barbara? I'm concerned about underserved populations who can't necessarily make it to the library, who are homebound, which I am much of the time, who I support Dottie and really, really hope that some federal money comes through the town that will pay for another Dottie. Dottie number two, to go out in the community, to the elderly and to young children in areas where they're latchkey kids, where they go home from school on the bus and their parents are at work. And I think it's important to get a physical book, particularly for young children, picture books, which I've donated quite a few already. Well, not quite a few, but a number. Into children's hands, I started reading at a young age and I am not comfortable with reading books on the internet, particularly. I prefer to have them in my hands and the library's been good about that. And I must say the library staff has been amazing. They've responded to my questions. I've asked them about where the book mobile goes and I made suggestions about where it could go. I've made, they gave me a copy of book pages and I ordered those books and most of them and suggested others and they bought them and they have the books in their collection now. I just think a book's a precious thing. A computer is a precious thing too, but a book is a very, very precious thing to hold in your hands and you can't see what a picture looks like that an artist has drawn or really understand the text that an author has written in a picture book for children unless they can actually hold it in their hands. I guess I've sort of rambled here but that's me. Great, thank you all. Thank you. Yeah, thanks Barbara, that was a great statement. Any other questions from the members of the board? I didn't hear any more questions from the board so the, when you proceed with this is that we will please the interview with, for this board at this moment we'll be taking this up as more or less the last item on the agenda, which is scheduled for around nine o'clock tonight but it may be a little bit earlier than that. You're certainly welcome to listen in at the rest of the meeting but if you wish to and it's a very, obviously it's an open meeting and our decision will be made in public so if you wish to reconnect in or stay with us and for the length of the meeting that's fine but I would anticipate we won't get back to doing this until probably 8.30 or so. So thank you all for your willingness to take part in town government and will listen. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks. And so we'll move on then to the next part of the interviews and appointments and that is for the Fitton and Salomon Waste District and we have two candidates for that particular position. And I'll get folks connected in just a moment moving some folks in and out of the meeting right now. Sherry and Justin I'm just moving both of you back to attendees and our two candidates for CSWD connected right now. Can both of you hear us okay? Welcome. We have two candidates next to Calvin Bogasi and I played and what we'll do is to ask both of you to give us a brief summary of why you should be on the Fitton and Salomon Waste District board and a little bit about your background and we do have your applications in front of us and we'll start out with Kelsen. Thank you very much and thank you guys for allowing me to interview for this position. So a little bit about myself. I graduated from UVM back in 2017. I'm not initially from Vermont but moved up here for school and moved away for a little bit after graduation then ended up moving back up to Vermont just because it's where I wanted to be where I enjoy living all the activities I like doing. So I moved back up here and moved to Williston about and the last year I bought a house in Williston and moved here a little bit about myself. So graduated from UVM, been staying involved in different local groups. I advise a group at UVM's campus as well as last year I got to serve on the Walk to End Alzheimer's committee, the Walk Planning Committee. So that was an awesome experience. Really what I kind of brought me as CSWD board is so I do work for Kisella and I have been attending the CSWD board meetings for about two years now just kind of seeing what they do every day. And when I was on, I really wanted to find something volunteer-wise that fit my interests and fit my expertise and kind of what I see is that the CSWD board has an incredible mission and really has a lot of resources to carry out that mission of helping reduce waste, helping to educate residents across all of Chittinay County. And obviously with Williston, they play a very special part because we are the host community for their different facilities and for facilities that they're looking to possibly expand or increase services. I just see a lot of opportunities with upcoming decisions are going to make. And I feel like since my job, I'm an outside sales rep for Kisella. So a lot of what I get to do is I work with business owners every single day. I work with members of the community. I really hear where we're struggling as a community, especially with our waste and really what we're struggling to reduce our waste. And I truly feel that every Ramona wants to do the right thing. Sometimes it's just really confusing what the right thing is. Really confusing what belongs in recycling, what belongs in compost. And I think it's a constant battle to be able to educate people and to be able to provide those resources. And definitely excited to be here. Happy to answer any questions that you guys have. And thank you for the opportunity. Thanks. Mike, you're muted. I think Mike can't hear you, still can't hear you. We're having problems. Mike was hearing you. It looks like you're muted. Oh, he's going to leave and come back, I think. First on, so hopefully we'll get him back here in just a moment. Can you hear me now? We can. Welcome back. Yeah. I don't know what it is. A lot of times I got to check out and come back in and I can talk. How about the camera? Is that under Eric's control? Or let's see if I can do that. Okay. Yeah, sorry about that. Thanks for having me here. I've been involved in town and government for many years. I served on the representative, the Champlain Water District for quite a while. I was on the zoning board for quite a while, two terms in the legislature. And while I was in the legislature, I also served on the Lake Champlain Committee. Governor Douglas appointed me to the Board of Professional Engineering, which I chaired for six years. But for the last 14 years, I've been working out of town for a company over in New York, managing construction projects. And so I've been really out of town and out of touch with the town for quite a while, but I recently retired and I've got time on my hands and wanted to get back involved in helping out town government. And I saw the listing in the observer a couple of weeks ago and one of the things that piqued my interest was the solid waste district. I'm a civil engineer, graduated from Cornell in 1975. I've been a professional engineer. And so this was one of the things that I thought I could be useful in bringing an engineering background and perspective to the solid waste district to make sure that they're running things as efficiently and economically as possible and try and help them with that. For example, they're over there on Avenue C at the recovery facility there. They crushed glass and for whatever reason they haul it all the way to Winooski to use it in the asphalt plant, whereas we've got an asphalt plant right on Avenue A and I don't know why it gets hauled over there, but things like that that could be investigated further. I thought I'd like to get involved and help them as an engineer. Thanks, Mike. So I'm opening up two questions from the board for the two candidates. So short-term and then also long-term, what do you see as the most important issues or priorities facing the Chittenden Solid Waste District? So we'll start with Mike and then go to Keltan. I think that the main thing is getting their recycling operations tuned up and organized. I know there's a lot of people out there that either they don't care enough or they don't know enough or for whatever reason are not participating fully in the recycling and now with the new program for composting. Those are the kind of things that needs to get developed better and get more community involvement and outreach. Yeah, so I kind of have two for each of those. Short-term, I think obviously kind of what I hit on initially education, outreach, that's going to be a forever goal. That's definitely a big priority, but on top of that, GuessWD as of January 1st next year will no longer accept compostable products at their Green Mountain Compost. So I think that's a big pressing issue in my opinion that there's a lot of business owners, a lot of people in the community. I mean, if we look at businesses in Williston alone, you have LISP, you have Healthy Living. I know Eli Lesser spoke on their call when they made that decision. So I think it's a big conversation around what can we do so that we're not jumping back on sustainability goals of all these companies and going back to single-use products so that we can still work to use compostable products that people are willing to pay more money to do the right thing, but how can we make it so the right thing doesn't create a bad product for CSWD in their compost. And as far as long-term, I think there's two big things that I kind of identified. Obviously, the MRF, they want to build a new MRF, so that's a big decision on how do you build it for the next 40 years so you don't need to build another one. But then the other question is, what can you do with the old building? Is there a way we could offer some sort of specialized recycling, say styrofoam or something that's not currently captured in the zero-sort recycling bins? And then the last piece kind of hit on what Mike was hitting on with glass recycling because that's obviously a hot-button issue. And recently, a company called Glavill moved into Vermont and they pretty much make recycling, they recycle glass into glass foam insulation. And my question is, how do we continue to incentivize companies like that to come to Vermont so we're not trucking our recycling products, especially heavy products like glass out of state or because not all of it can go into road base. And not all, so how do we find good outlets that are local and incentivize local outlets like a company like Glavill to move to Vermont so that we can recycle our material that we produce in Vermont, that we can recycle it in Chittenden County or just right outside. Thanks. Other questions for the candidates? Jeff, I'll ask a question. My question is along the lines shift gears a little bit and I wanna try to understand what you view as your role as being a commission member and what that means in terms of how you will represent the town, Willis-Dan and kind of, I guess as I think my question through how might you reach out and who might you reach out to figure out, what is it you should be representing as Willis-Dan's representative to the board? So first question is, did that question make sense? And hopefully yes. And then what is your answer? Well, sorry, will it kill them? Yep, yep. No, I actually called Eric about this and just kind of getting engaged for what Jeremy had done in the past for the town as well as what he would like to see going forward. And I think the biggest thing is obviously I do work at Cassel, so there are going to be certain conversations I would have to recuse myself from to avoid a conflict of interest. That's not something obviously I wanna get into any conflicts of interest. But I think really with talking with Eric, it's communicating with the board and being able to, okay, there's big decisions coming up. What does the board wanna do? And being able to one provide what we talked about at the board me as well, at the CSWD board me and bring that back to the board and say, okay, here's what they're presenting. Here's what, from my experience of working with different business owners, here's what I see. So what's our decision as a town? What decision do we wanna make? Because at the end of the day, it's really up to the select board to make the decision, especially on these bigger items. It's more, my job is to go to the meetings and be able to report back on here's what I see. And I think what I was looking to do was after every meeting provide just a little snippet that you guys could share in the manager's report, which is something that like here's what's going on. And not every meeting is going to have a lot going on at it that really needs to be talked about, but still at least giving the select board the full points on here's what we went through, here's big items coming up, or hey, we need to make a decision by next meeting on this topic, what do we want to decide? Here's what I've seen. And I'm happy to attend any meetings as well that I need to, especially when it comes to those larger decisions that will be coming up around organics diversion facility or around the new Murph, or even around any, if they decide to make any charter changes, like even my opinion talking about like the effects that not accepting to postable products will have on different businesses in town and different residents, and just being able to keep everyone aware on those type of big changes. Thanks, Mike. Yeah, there's not a lot that I can add to that. The main thing is trying to get a sense of what the select board wants and wants to have carried across to the solid waste district. It's certainly a matter of communications and being in touch, and the best thing I could promise is the same thing that a report after every meeting, letting you guys know what's going on so that you're informed also. Thank you. Other questions from the board? Well, one question I don't mean to dominate here is, tonight we're going to be talking about the CSWD's budget. Have you had a chance to look at it and your thoughts on it? Oh, sorry, wasn't like. I have not. Okay, and fair enough. It's, I have, I attended their meeting where they did their review of their budget. That's definitely a tough question looking at it. I mean, I think obviously it's a large budget. I think that what I'm excited to see is they're making some capital improvement projects that are saving them money long-term and they're really, they've done a good job making a lot of their programs paid for themselves rather than subsidizing certain programs. So they're Organics Recycling Facility or Gangster Version Facility really working so that it's not subsidized as well as same with the drop-off centers as well working to help, instead of subsidizing those with their other programs to make it so that they really hold their carrying costs. So I think they've done a good job and they've made a lot of great improvements with the Organics Facility. They brought in a Windrow Turner so they really cut down on labor time as well as can put out products a lot faster and then even coming up big capital projects they're going to be moving the water lines over to their Gangster Facility rather than where it stops currently on Redmond Road at Global Foundries so that they're not paying as much money to truck water a quarter mile up the street. So little stuff like that that process improvements that can help save money in the long-term. I mean, I haven't dug into their budget but that's just kind of what I got from their past few meetings here. Okay. Thanks. If I could follow up if you don't mind and I don't mean to dominate a conversation here. There used to be maybe, I don't know if that's really the best way to put it. Maybe still currently there is a philosophy that said you want to incentivize recycling or waste diversion and de-centivize disposal. And one way to do that was to make things like recycling or food waste drop off free of charge and then you subsidize that through your fees that you would collect for disposal materials to be disposed of. And I guess simply asked, do you agree with that philosophy or should that philosophy change? And, you know, briefly why? You're asking this of Mike or both? Both. Both, oh no, both. Okay. Let's start with Mike. Well, that's, I can't see that there's any fault in that really because that's really what we're trying to do is divert as much as possible out of the landfills and the expense of the landfills. And, you know, there's carrots and sticks to human behavior. And so, you know, we're not gonna change the people we have to take them as they are and incentives matter. And I'm telling you. That, I mean, it's a tough question. Really getting down to, I do agree that you have to incentivize doing the right thing. I mean, I think you already look right now it is incentivized in the fact that there is a per tonnage fee on trash that's collected in Chittenden County. So every ton of trash that comes out of Williston, no matter who creates it, there's $26 that go to incentivize CSWD's other programs whether it's their education, whether it's their buying, whether it's their murder for marketing material. So they already do incentivize it. I think it's tough because at the end of the day everything is recyclable just at what cost. Everything could be recycled. It's just where do you send it? How do you collect it? How far are you shipping it? Like are we shipping it all the way to Texas to recycle it? And really what's the environmental benefit to recycle? I mean, it's definitely tough. I mean, I think the big thing is how do you also look to put the cost back on producers rather than just on and incentivize it that way, incentivize it where if you're buying a product with more trash, like in its packaging with worse packaging, how do you make that product cost more than the company that's investing in products that use less packaging? So I think it's really going to those ERP laws and putting those in the state house so that we're incentivizing, because at the end of the day we can't put all the onus on consumers to do everything. I mean, we really need to be making those decisions at the business level. And I mean, the consumers need to be making it with their purchasing decisions on purchasing products that use less packaging and incentivizing. I mean, there's a lot of ways to incentivize doing the right thing, but yeah, money's definitely a big factor. If it hits you on the wall, you're going to change your decision. Okay, good, thank you. Any further questions? Well, Terry, it seems like maybe it's appropriate time to ask for that question that traditionally falls on me, which is a conflict of interest question. And in this case, Kelton, you've already addressed it to a degree. I think we all know that Cassella and CSWD, there is the potential to be conflict of interest. So in addition to the question, which normally ask is, how would you recognize it? What would you do about it? In this case, in Kelton's, in this case for you, Kelton, I think that also extends to would it undermine your ability, your needing to recluse yourself, your ability to be an effective commissioner. And I hope that's questions, okay. I don't mean that in any negative way whatsoever, but I feel it's important to get at least your perspective on that. I want that. No, and it's definitely something that I expected. And I think at the end of the day, conflict of interest only arises when some information I get benefits Cassella, puts Cassella to advantage to anybody else. And I don't think, I think if you look at it most of the time, I attend all those meetings. I know everything that's happening at all those meetings and all those conversations. So I don't think there's a conflict of interest in 99% of scenarios. I think there's certain information that when they go into executive sessions, like, yeah, I probably shouldn't attend certain items. I don't think it'll hurt me in representing the town because in most major decisions, what they decide to take at their Murph doesn't affect Cassella differently or how they decide to build the Murph. It benefits the entire community. It benefits every resident, every hauler, every everyone who decides to get rid of stuff in Vermont. So in same with most decisions. As long as I go in with that mindset and I'm not going in trying to get insider information. I think that most of the decisions they make are public record and conversations that have a public record and are really just, I get to go in with the level understanding and expertise of the industry that it's a lot harder for someone else to have that doesn't really understand the intricacies of recycling markets and how the different laws in Vermont. I actually operate the Dissolve Waste Implementation Plan for the town of Fairfax as well as the town of Lowell, Vermont. So what the CSWD is tasked with carrying out their SWIP, I work with different towns to help operate that. So I feel like it can help bring that level of expertise to the board. Okay. And Mike, your response? I don't think I have any conflict that I'm aware of. Now that you're retired. Right. I'm making it hard on the air. Any further questions for our two candidates? No. Very none. We will be making this decision later on tonight. Currently, we're scheduled to do this at nine o'clock. It might occur earlier than that. You're certainly welcome to listen into the rest of the select board meeting or to tune back in later on, but not before 8.30. I'm sure by the looks of the things that we have going on on our schedule. But thank you both for coming tonight and being willing to work for the town of Williston. Thank you very much. Thank you. So we'll move on then to the Chattin and Solid Waste District fiscal year 22 budget. And we'll have Sarah reuse the general manager of CSWD talking to us remotely. And Sarah, I see I'll get you connected. And we also have our current alternate commissioner, Kailin McCamp, as well as me. Kailin McCamp will be on as well. I'll see Sarah. So welcome, Sarah. And we had you on our agenda a couple of weeks ago for an overview of what's happening at the Solid Waste District. And tonight we're talking about the budget. So if you could give us a brief description of what you're proposing, we would be appreciative. Absolutely. Thank you very much. And I appreciate your time. As you mentioned, my name is Sarah Reeves. I'm the executive director for the Chattin and Solid Waste District. And for anyone who may be tuning in, maybe new to Chattin and County or new to the district, CSWD is a municipal district created in 1987 to oversee and manage solid waste generated in Chattin and County. And as you heard, we are governed by a board of commissioners who are volunteers. And each of our 18 cities and towns represents someone to our board. Our mission is to reduce and manage the solid waste generated in Chattin and County in an environmentally sound, efficient, effective and economical manner. And as mentioned, I'm here to talk about our fiscal 22 budget. When I come to talk to folks about our budget, I like to talk about how both we are funded and how we are not funded. I think it's important to understand both. So we are funded in three main ways. The first way is through user fees or fees. And those are fees that we charge our customers directly from materials that they bring to us to manage or to sort. So to our drop off centers or to our materials recovery facility. The second source of our revenue main source is the solid waste management fee. And that is a per ton fee on material that is sent to the landfill and Coventry and we charge $27 a ton. The third main area is on material and product sales. So those are from items that we collect, sort and produce for sale at our facilities and then ship out to the market. So things like our compost products or local color paint and the recyclables that are sorted at the MRF. We are not funded by property tax dollars by local income tax, local sales tax. We do not assess a per capita fee to our member towns. So we don't receive anything directly from any of our member towns as far as revenue, all of our revenue generated from those three main areas. And we receive some grants as well, but nothing directly from our cities and towns we do not send to a bill for our services. So the fiscal 22 budget, we are anticipating revenues in the amount of $12,954,793 and we're fairly certain that that is a conservative amount and I will talk about why we feel that way in a moment. We are looking at total expenditures after capital allocations of $12,323,072. The remainder between those two will be divided amongst three of our reserve funds, our Soloway's Managing Free Reserve, our Bio-Solids Reserve and an Operating Reserve. We are not anticipating raising many fees this coming year at all. In fact, we're only raising fees at the compost facility slightly on inbound food scraps. So we're raising that from $60 a ton to $65 a ton. And then the fees on Bio-Solids are raising slightly and that only affects the members who are participating in the Bio-Solids program and it's a pass-through and it is directly related to the amount of material that is generated. So there's an estimate on the amount of material generated and then that's how the fees are determined. All of the other fees are remaining the same. So no increases at the Drop-off Center, no increase at the Materials Recovery Facility. So the reason I say that we're anticipating that this is going to be a conservative revenue estimate is that we are expecting to have robust sales in both the compost program and in the MRF and similar to what we saw last year. So last year as a direct response to COVID, we sold through our compost products in record time. We are selling through our compost products again in record time this year. We are sold out of most of our compost and we are expecting to have another similar good year in the spring of calendar 22. And that was directly related to people being home, starting gardens, building gardens, growing and enlarging their gardens and that has continued. Similarly, we experienced very robust material sales out of the MRF last year, which is the complete opposite of what I've been talking to you about over the past two years. And that is also a result of increased demand in part due to COVID for paper products, cardboard and other recycled papers. Cardboard, obviously people again were working from home and being home more and ordering online and receiving things in boxes, just driving up the demand for cardboard. Also a lot of products that are made from recycled paper, such as paper towels, toilet paper and wipes, were in high demand. So those drove the value of the materials that we produce which is good news because 80% of what we process in the MRF are those fiber products, those people products. So that was a real boom to us last year and that demand has continued. In addition, you may recall, we've been talking about the capacity to manage those materials domestically was increasing and that has continued even through COVID and through the last couple of years of economic crisis and up and down that capacity has increased. So we're seeing that we're starting to feel that the benefits of that capacity coming online. In fiscal 22, we are anticipating another very big capital investment year. We had a large capital investment year last year as we were expanding the compost facility in anticipation of the final throws of Act 148 with that July 1 deadline with all foods grasping need to keep out of the landfill. So we're continuing with that expansion. We have completed phase one of the expansion. We're now looking at phase two, which would be to change the approach that we have into the facility to give a longer queuing line and to bring the vehicles off the road faster and sooner. And then we're also looking at making improvements to several of our drop-off centers, scheduled improvements, starting with Milton, also working on some projects at Essex and then the spring at Richmond. We've also made some improvements this past year and we're going to continue to take a look at them in Williston. We pulled food scraps out of the main area. So if all you have to drop off in Williston are your food scraps, we've created a separate line for that to make it very easy and we have to go into the main center. And we're looking at as well, re-adapting how we manage the special waste. So the e-waste, compact version bones and things like that to make that safer, smoother, easier, better user experience and just better for our employees as well. So that is in the works of the next year or two as well. And we're also beginning our permitting and design work on a new Murph. We've been talking a lot about the need for a new Murph. And in June and this month to my board, I'm bringing to them the basically the go no go. So if the board approves this project for us to go forward, then we will be bringing that back to our communities in much more detail. You have a one pager back and forth, come back in your packet about the project. That is just a brief overview with the board's approval then that kicks off the next round of education information. We don't have the money in the bank to pay for a new Murph. So we would be looking to issue a municipal bond. And that does mean we need to come to our cities and towns and have residents vote on that bond. We would not be asking our cities and towns to pay for that bond. So we would be paying down that debt for a combination of revenue sources. So first those user fees, the tip fees. If for some reason that wasn't enough to cover the bond, we supplement that with the sales revenue from the material that we sort. If for some reason that's not enough, we would supplement that with the solid waste management to revenue. But we don't anticipate having to go that deep. So again, more information will be coming that your way should we go get the go-ahead for that project. We would be looking to bring the question to the voters in the November 2022 election. So the next general election is what we're going to do for that. And lastly, I wanna make sure that everyone is, I'm reminding people to their community cleanup fund and to talk with your commissioner and to present projects to them to do in town. Every community has their own bit of money. And well, it's just really pretty good about using their community cleanup funds that does reset every July one and replenishes. So you would just, and the ideas can come from anywhere in the town and you just talk to Kaylin, you would talk to your primary commissioner and put the project together, submit receipts and you pay back. So it's pretty easy. I wanna get that money out to the community. So I know that was a very quick overview. So I would love to throw that out to any questions that you may have about our budget or about CSWD. Thanks very much for the overview. And I think Kaylin is on the line as well. And can you tell us whether you have looked at the budget and do you support it? Yeah, thank you. So as you know, until just yesterday, Jeremy Halsey was the primary commissioner and he was really tied in, but he did give me an update and I attended the last board meeting and I do support the budget. I think always Sarah and CSWD are really fiscally responsible and thoughtful and yeah, I fully support the budget. Thank you. I'll open up the questions from the board regarding the budget. Questions, Jeff, you usually have questions regarding the shallow ways to speak to each other. I do, I'm not as prepared as I usually am. I just got back traveling yesterday and picked up my packet today. So if there's any way in which I could defer, I did quickly go through it. I did have a couple of minor questions. I mean, the fact that you're not increasing fees tremendously or a lot says a lot right there. I'm on page E2 and I just wonder if this number is correct where it talks about the number of FTEs in the table on the top. And it says 5.5 and that just seems really low. So yeah, so that is specific to the COMPOS program. Okay, okay, okay. The one, and I think you have a complicated budget. One of the things that's different, I mean, I have enough trouble getting through our town budget and I understand that one pretty well now for me to get inside of your budget and really figure it out just is not really possible for me to do. I think you've tried to a degree to give us the main points but if there could be a reader's digest version of the budget, that would be great. I think some of my questions are actually about the planned facilities which Sarah and probably Kailin, as you know, I have interest in, maybe a bias about might be an accurate way to put that. And Sarah, I believe we are gonna be talking sometime in the future about that. I didn't catch what you said about how you will pay down the bond. I don't necessarily, I think, you know, the MRF probably does need to be replaced. The 18 to 20 million dollar seems like it'd be in the ballpark for that type of a facility. I don't deal with MRFs, but I deal with wastewater and water treatment plants and if there's any correlation there, that number doesn't seem unreasonable. But you mentioned how you would be paying those bonds and I principle an interest on that and I didn't catch that or I didn't understand it. Yes, I'm sorry, thank you for asking the question again. So yes, so the lever that we would use would be the tip fee or the user fee. So that would be the fee that we charge to haulers who bring the recyclables to the facility for sorting. So what we would do is we would take a look at, obviously all of the operating expenses. So what are the operating expenses and the debt repayment will become an operating expense. So we would add that in there and we would say, okay, of the operating expenses, what is payable by the tip fee keeping in mind that we do want to continue to remain competitive in the market, we can't charge $120 a ton if the market around us is charging 100 or 90. So we would take a look at our position relative to the other MRFs in the market. And we would talk about the other MRFs we're talking about the wetland MRF, the Cassellar Runs, Mervin Albany, probably a couple of the MRFs in Massachusetts, take a look at what we call our MRF shed. So like a watershed, there's a MRF shed. So we take a look at that. And we would, the understanding of the operating costs are plus the cost of paying back the bond. And we would most likely do a 25 year bond, you're doing number of 25, we would stretch it out as long as we can and then adjust that tip fee accordingly. If that would put the tip fee out of market range, we would keep the tip fee within market range and then we would fill in whatever's left with revenue from material sales. Right now, the revenue from material sales is generally goes into our MRF capital reserve. So with the newer MRF, you're not gonna have, need a million dollars to fix the roof and the tip floor and the walls. And you're not gonna be replacing a bailer for 10 years. So we'll have some space to be able to backfill and supplement the tip fee with the material sales. So that would be where we would generate that, that bond payment back. I forgot to mention that we have also applied through Senator Layte, his office for an earmark. Granted, never guaranteed, but it hasn't happened in 10 or 12 years. So we couldn't let the opportunity pass. So we do have a preliminary application in for that. But again, the plan is for the municipal bond, we're not gonna put the eggs in that basket. We'll put the eggs in that basket. Okay. Yeah, I heard earmarks are back. You mentioned the reserve and right now, it sounds like there's not a lot of money in the MRF reserve fund. And probably the reason is, is because you've been having to invest in just keeping the MRF going. Did I hear correctly or am I misinterpreting what I heard? So I don't know what you heard. So I can tell you what I know. So what we do now is we no longer have siloed reserve funds. I read that in your, yeah. Yeah, we have one capital reserve. So what that makes us do is be very specific about longer term needs of the district. So we're no longer just saying, well, this is my little DOC money, that's my little MRF money, that's my, no, we look at all of the capital needs across the district and then we prioritize. So because we had been prioritizing compost very soon, that will no longer need the capital and then it shifts to other priorities. So we continue to do low level capital work. Every year there's work, whether it's some construction work or whether it's rolling stock or equipment. That is ongoing, but that's also planned and known. So for the larger projects, you know, again, it's taking a look at just how you, you know, we're sure the fire department does the same thing, please do the same thing. You take a look at, well, what's coming up for the next five years? What are we looking at 10? It's about how long I really want to go out. And then now where we're looking at capital and approaching capital is looking at it in its totality. And so if compost has a banner here and there's no need to have money in a standalone compost capital reserve, it goes into the overall capital reserve. The Murph has been subsidizing all of the capital needs for years. So by doing that, it just creates more of a pool that we can then meter out as needed. So in our capital reserve, we do have, and there is a standalone document on the capital reserve, but we are looking at a very heavy spend. So, you know, if we were to do absolutely everything that we have on the list, we're looking at about two and a half million dollars. We do have that in the reserve. We have about five million in the reserve for capital. Over the next five years, we will be spending that down. So one thing I've also charged our board with, specifically our finance committee, is to look at our reserve policy to make sure that we are allocating the dollars properly across the different reserves, whether it's biosolids operating, solace management fee capital, those are our main reserves, closed landfill has its own, but that is separate and standalone. And just to make sure that we are properly funding those reserves as we go. Again, you know, knowing that investors and projects coming out, had we thought about it 10 years ago, we should have, could have, maybe should have, established a new Murph capital fund and then just putting money in specifically for them until we got to a certain amount, whether it's 10 million or 12 or 15, whatever it might be and said, this is what we're going to use specifically for this. That wasn't how we did things, you know, 10, 20 years ago. So going forward, that's what we want to look at. And that's part of the reasons for making sure that none of the reserves are overfunded. For example, I think this always mentioned the reserve is overfunded. So that money needs to be redirected, redistributed amongst the reserves so that we're having a better sense of where we may be lacking and what we might need to do and how we might need to adjust. Okay. It sounds to me like what's going to happen when it comes times to bond, you're going to have to bond for essentially the whole cost of the Murph, you know, plus or minus, maybe a little bit, but essentially that's okay, which is fine. That's a fine answer. I just would like to understand. Yeah, there's a possibility of a zero interest municipal loan through a private funder. It's about $5 billion. So we would still need to bond for the remainder. But, you know, we are looking, shaking all the trees. Yeah. Interesting. Do they do? Okay. Yeah, just interesting. Okay, I think that's it for me. I'll move to approve the fiscal year 2021 Chittin and Solid Waste District budget. It was your second. I'll second. It was your discussion of the motion. I, hopefully this isn't a problem, but I'm going to abstain because I don't think it's, I'm prepared enough to vote yes or no. Thank you. I'll just mention, Terry. I just, my mistake, there's a typo there. It should read fiscal year. Oh, that's my fault. So the motion is to approve the fiscal year 22 budget. All those in favor of approving the motion that I, aye. Aye. Yeah, three, and Gaffer of stating. One abstention. So we have a positive vote of three, zero, one. So the next item on the agenda is the Oak Hill Estates Water System discussion and we're not going to be doing that tonight. The, one of the two presenters is unable to be here tonight to do that. So we'll move on and we'll reschedule that for another meeting. And we'll move on to the police dispatch staffing report and we'll welcome onsite, Gifoli and Lieutenant Moore and Eric, I'd like to start out a little bit. Yep. I'll give a brief introduction and turn it over to our police. There's been some recent changes in the staffing level available on state. This caused our department to examine an additional reason. Dispatching prior to a long one option. Staff has brought to my attention and we're evaluating in the shorter term adding a potential third dispatch position. We're also evaluating their initial viable options to address this. As we've talked about before, our longer term dispatch solution need to be a topic of discussion, including your agenda packet of the memo from Lieutenant Moore that he'll walk through and more detail this evening. We've also included an analysis of our fund balance projection from Shirley which she can address to the board. Go here. And thinking about potentially adding a third dispatch position FY 22, that's not in the budget. So if the town and the board were to decide to go that direction, the fund balance would have to be utilized to operate expense. Just as we're taking a look at it, those appropriate for the financial plan. For the discussion this evening to be mainly informational, I'll pass it back from the board on the option of adding a third dispatch position. The additional information requested. It's time to a policy decision. No questions on the board, I'll turn it over to you. Hearing no questions at this point. Delman, take it away. And good evening and thank you for allowing us to attend this meeting this evening. We believe this is an issue that needs to be addressed as quickly as possible. I look at it as a liability issue. I will not, you know, I'll have kind of more speak about the specifics and then entertain questions from the board about why we're going this direction. So I'll further do, I'll put more to the presentation. A little bit different us coming in here. Thanks, welcome. I know that everybody was privy to Gary Taylor back in January. So this isn't a new topic, it's just that new situation. Going through this town, you realize that Delman is unfortunately up to staffing levels so that that's creating some hardship on our nighttime dispatch, which is response to police. So this all started on May 15th, just kind of out of the blue when our on-duty supervisor at seven in the morning got a call from the Vermont State Police and it was one of their dispatch supervisors just saying, hey, we see you guys have four officers on, you don't have your dispatcher in at the time. When I say that our in-house dispatch up front in the main office, we have a new directive that anytime there's more than three officers on at any given time, we're not gonna be able to dispatch for you. That's what was relayed at the time. So our on-duty supervisor ended up having to take himself off duty. He stayed in the building in uniform but was not technically available to a dispatcher for calls so that way the staffing levels would stay at three under their new directive. This was a Saturday morning. Obviously, Chief and I both started getting phone calls throughout the day trying to figure out what's gonna go on here. So we'd start dealing with it Monday morning, first thing, I reached out to Captain Lance Burnham who's in charge of dispatching in this area, had a conversation with him. He relayed to us that never ever would we not have dispatching services. So we would never have unanswered phone calls or have officers out on the road and not be able to have a dispatch in line of communication. What was relayed to me was that they are pretty low on staffing. They are about as bare minimum as they can get. So when COVID first came about due to restrictions occurring inside the dispatch center, they had to take what they call a rover dispatcher off. So here at the Williston Peace App, they'll dispatch for the St. Albans barracks, they'll do Williston barracks, they'll do the Middlesex barracks and then a bunch of little municipalities all around. They used to have a rover position which would then fill in for those dispatchers for break times, busy times, whatnot. They took that position away. They planned on once going back to normal operating levels that they would put that position back in, but recently they've lost a significant number of dispatchers and now they can't even get to that level of staffing. And I was advised that getting back to the 2019 staffing levels in that Peace App is probably gonna be two years out. So we kind of find ourselves in a situation here now where we rely on the state police for more hours of dispatching than we actually provide ourselves in-house. So we are putting a pretty significant burden on them. Like I said, this town during the daytime hours, Monday through Friday and it's starting on the weekends, our phone lines are ringing constantly. It's for calls for service. It's for informational type situations, but it's getting busier and busier and the more businesses that come in here, it just keeps increasing. So we're finding ourselves at a situation here where we need to come up with a, not a fix-all solution, but something fairly immediately to try to help the state police with this burden. Without looking at actual numbers, I would say that we're probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest agency that relies on the state police dispatching in the state. Call-wise, I can tell you, I ran some numbers a couple of Fridays ago. The Williston State Police, they're officers, so the troopers that work out of the Williston State Police barracks, they also include the Lamoille County area. So there's some troops that are stationed in that outpost. The town of Williston, so our officers are almost 700 calls ahead of that Williston State Police barracks who we are relying on for our dispatching. So that's just kind of a statistic out there, just showing that the men and women here in Williston are busy. And that's not even including traffic stops and other things that are not documented as cases. Going forward once we enter into a new system for RMS, that will change so then it's all gonna be case-driven so those case numbers will go higher. So we are, we're fully staffed, we should be here shortly again for officers, so that's 17 total to include the chief and I. If we were to look at that new three officer on directive, I can tell you at this exact moment that we're at five. So there's three officers out on the road and the chief and I are actually on duty right now. You know, we're here, but for the dispatchers looking at their screen were included. So we have five on, I've relayed to the captain and I know chief has also relayed to their higher ups that we're working on trying to come up with some solution here to help them out. And that's kind of what brings us here tonight. So I did prepare this, I don't wanna go word for word, but I can definitely answer any of the questions. I tried to include our current dispatching schedule on here. Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., we have dispatchers in the front of the building. On the weekends, it's down to 10 hours on a Saturday, 10 on a Sunday, but that's only two dispatchers. So we have two dispatchers, one of the dispatchers may call out sick, one has vacation time, if the other one can't fill and we're starting to go into state police. If it's a pre-planned vacation or time off, sometimes we can get some help from our part-time dispatchers but they're all full-time dispatchers and other agencies. So it's kind of at the level of their schedule. If it's an early morning where a dispatcher called out sick and we can't get the other dispatcher in right away, we run into this problem. During the Monday through Friday, especially during the end of the week, we'll have, currently as it stands today, we'll have five officers to include Officer Cohen with Duke and the Chief and I, so that's seven. Puppled with this time of the year, we're starting to run into the really busy construction season, so we're getting calls from every construction agency that's working in this area to include all of Chittany County. So we're sending officers to wherever they need to be for private duties to try to help these agencies cover these. The state of Vermont has a policy that they try to abide by when it comes to construction. If it's on a state highway, they tell you how many officers need to be in there and there's one going over in the Colchester area where I know that the Sheriff's Department is having a system because they're asking for four to six officers a night. So I know in the next couple of nights we'll have officers over there, so that kind of throws off our staffing levels when it comes to the State Police Director. Chief and I looked at where we stand today, what our busy hours are here and the proposal that we believe would probably be the most beneficial to help alleviate these issues today, the quick fix, not the fix all, but kind of the quick fix, would try to add this third dispatch position. Our proposal would be to, by looking at the different call volume and the data that we have, would be to flip this person onto a, I say evening, but more of a night shift schedule. It could be a little bit flexible in regards to maybe four, 10 hour shifts or five, eight hour shifts as we go forward, just kind of seeing what the call volume may be. Obviously, the early, early mornings in this town is usually our quieter times, but that doesn't mean we have less officers on. It just may be less calls for service. So that maybe that three a.m. to seven a.m. timeframe is a little bit quieter. Usually those Sundays and Sunday nights are the quieter days. And then it's kind of sporadic, because we really just don't know what we're gonna have going forward. It could be a quiet Monday, it could be an extremely busy Monday. You just don't really know. But typically our Thursday, Friday, Saturday evenings, into nights are usually our busier nights. And sometimes they're even busier than the day shifts. It really just depends on what's going on. And the summertime come here, it is gonna pick up with people coming back out in the restaurants and stuff, starting opening up in the bars out of town. Our call volume is gonna start getting extremely high during those summer months. But with thinking about that, just remember in 2020, there wasn't much movement. So our call volume may be skewed a little bit, especially because we were light on staffing at the end of 19-ish and started building up. And now we're, you know, as of right now with the chief and I were at 16. And like I said, hopefully in the next month or so, we'll have that 17th position filled again. And obviously the more officers out on the road, there's more proactive patrols going on and our call volume will go up because of that. And then just at the very end, I did break it down what it would kind of look like. So where we currently stand for the call volume structure, let's just call one of the dispatchers, shift A and the other shift B. The reason it says Sunday to Wednesday and then Wednesday to Saturday is the dispatcher switch after six hours on that Wednesday. So one will come in from seven to one in the afternoon and then one to seven p.m. So that's kind of their flop day. And then currently what BSP is doing for us. And then the second chart that I did there is what this may look like with the new shift. So if we were to add a third position in the dispatch area, what that new shift would be. Like I said, for a while there on one of the night shifts, we were only running two officers. So some of the numbers may be skewed because the call volume was down, the officers were working in somewhere. We're a short staffed and usually if we are short staffed, we'll go shorter on nights versus days because the call volume is usually higher on days. So that's kind of a quick overview of the memo that I did up just to kind of put the bug in everybody's ear of where we're at. In short term, this is kind of our solution, especially if we want to continue to be good neighbors with BSP because there are gonna be times that we're gonna, even if we went with a third position, we're still are gonna rely on them to help us out because we're not 24 seven here at the department. So the request really is for one permanent position going forward. It's the simplest fix right now. There's a lot of moving pots here. We get the regional, we're invested in, but we don't want to get a phone call on a Saturday morning saying stick Joe officer on the desk and they're not certified. And that becomes a serious problem for us. So again, this buys us time. It'll be a flexible schedule with this person. So as I demands, we can move around or move around to cover certain nights that we can rely on just two officers on the shift, the beginning of the week, but at the end of the week where the demands are greater, it solves our problem right now, it makes BSP happy. Again, we're unknown with them because they're talking about charging us for dispatching. So again, it seems like evidence like cave in on the Williston PD's dispatch. So we want this fixed as possible. And I think it'll buy us a lot of time with that extra full time position. And I don't think that a lot of people understand how busy a dispatch, the dispatcher inside of a PSAP can actually get. So when we're talking about numbers here, it really doesn't show a lot. So say that we have seven officers on and there are during a day shift and we have to turn the phones over to the state police and the state police have with detectives on, they have eight to 10 between the two counties. And then they also take on the town of Richmond. And then they also take on department motor vehicle, inspectors that may be in the area. One dispatcher could be answering phone calls and dispatching for three different agencies and 20 to 25 officers. And that's just too much, especially in Chinatown, it is just too busy for that dispatcher. So I'll ask the board if they have questions regarding the proposal, then we can talk about how to pay for it. Well, an immediate question is, is when and how much? Though the when would be when you vote it as soon as possible. Okay, okay, and then there's also the question of how much. And then my corresponding other question is, thanks for all this information and pretty clear proposal. If I, I don't understand how dispatch works because right now you have two people filling a lot of shifts. And now we're gonna be filling more shifts with just one more person. Is one person really enough or do you really need two dispatchers, new additional dispatchers? Well, I think one works right now because it's a serious concern that we need to fill. We have some gaps there that we need by adding this, whatever else going on and shouldn't encounter the discussion about the regional dispatch. I've already advocated our own dispatch here in Wilson. I think we could fund it and make it work and encompass the fire department to join us. But that's something, that's a discussion down the road. Immediate concerns right now is that, tomorrow morning, the day shift is three offices and we had a K-9, that's the fourth, Josh and I are now we're up to six. If our day dispatcher calls out sick tomorrow and I can't fill it, we're in problems. We have three part-time dispatchers, two or full-time employees and other agencies that one's a part-time employee but a student in a college. So again, we're limited to that and we just can't take the officer off the road and say sit on the desk and answer the phone. It doesn't work that way. You know, 40 years ago when I began, you could do that. But with all the liabilities out there, all the regulations that we have to follow, we both, Josh and I, Lieutenant and I both agreed that adding that one extra body right now fixes an immediate concern we have that will cover the important shifts. And then maybe we try to recruit a few more part-timeers that pick up the slack. But I think this is the quickest fix we can get. And then down the road is that have the discussion along with the regional dispatch and see what else way we should go. Yeah, I think the thing is that the dispatch center is the core of any organization. No matter whether it's police, fire, EMS, public works, they run the operation. So when you call here or call 911, you want a person there that knows what they're doing. And the town manager asked last week about like multiple calls, you triage them. You know, what is the most important call and you deal with that, tell the other people, hang on, we'll get to your students possible. But if this, the phone rings 911, there's nobody in the seat in Wilson PD, then we got problems. Yeah, Jeff, and I know that you asked, you know, you really need to, I can tell you that Essex police department, they run four full-time dispatchers, but they have a healthy pile of part-time dispatchers that basically pick up their weekends is how they operate. I meant to ask the question, and not that I necessarily agree yet, but with, should there be two new dispatchers? Not why are you using two right now? Just to, yeah, I wanna make sure I'm clear. This turns the question around the other way. We are working, and not that it's gonna affect my decision, I just want to know what the potential impact is. And that is, we are talking about, how should Williston provide dispatch services? Should we do it through a regional program? Should we do it through our own? Should we continue with what we're currently doing? And that's an unanswered question. How does that affect our ability to hire or bring on a qualified dispatcher? If part of what we're telling them is, come join Williston, but we don't know how long they'll be, you'll be able, this position will be here for you. You just be honest. We just hired one, Ashley, not too long ago. She's been with us a little over a month, and we had that conversation before she accepted the position. You know, I don't think there's any other way to go about it other than just being honest with the individual about it. Well, good brief, excellent answer, thank you. Then my only other question actually is for Eric. This has come up in a different situation, or different whatever, well, situation, maybe that's a good way to put it. And I just want to make sure that we, because we have a budget that budget we're in right now, budget year that we're in right now that the voters approved, we're heading into a budget year on July 1st, also that the voters have approved, do we have the ability to add a new position? And if we're this far in the discussion, the answer has to be yes, but I just still want to make sure I understand. We do Jeff, and I'll have Charlie speak to the financial piece of it a bit. We've researched this quite a bit, and certainly we'll look at the fund balance, but understanding if you're having an operating function, we necessarily don't know if we're going to end up at the end of the year. So we could have some savings in the police department, end up paying for a good chunk of this expense, but if we need to have additional funds, the fund balance, it would be a question for the board to allocate for that purpose if it came to that point. But upfront we want to have a, certainly the board's authority would be to add the position and understanding that it may rely on some fund balance, but the board's also making necessarily what could be a commitment for the FY23 budget, not knowing what our horizon is for a longer-term alternative. And absolutely, I'm glad you brought that up. This is not a one-year type thing. This is a permanent, until we decide what to do with dispatch decisions. Yeah, and I'm looking at the camera to see you and I'm just trying to dress the full. Just thinking about regional dispatch moving ahead to, it's certainly something we're continuing to look at. I serve on the CCPSA board. There aren't any significant updates to bring right now. The board is working to try to obtain additional funding for capital investment for stand-up the organization. If I could come here tonight, saying there was a definite timeline and a potential bridge solution right now, I wish I could, but I spoke to our department about this. It's trying to understand what options may exist and also what we can control and meet a service need in the short-term. Okay. That's kind of where we are right now. Yeah, and Shirley will probably address what this likely will mean in terms of cost. Yep. Okay. We can talk to Harry when the board's right. We can have Shirley. So once we're through asking questions of the chief and the lieutenant family can switch to Shirley. Other questions? Yeah, just a sense of timing for getting someone through application process onboarding any bullets in specific training. Obviously you just went through this very recently so you probably have a pretty good idea what that might look like. Yeah, we do. We've already field called some people interested knowing that word of mouth we're looking at adding. So we're kind of set there. We would ask somebody who's full-time certified and trained. So we've got people coming in to start using the vacation time after a year of being locked down and not going to place. People want to get out of here and doing that. So we're trying to be as quick as possible but also as responsible as possible because we want to make sure the person that we have, like we were talking about, understand that this could be a one-year position and then we see what's with the regional dispatch or something else comes up. And so again, we want to make sure we have somebody who understands that this might not be a permanent position but it's a position that's going to help us out in the early times. But just like the patrol side, we've gotten calls from people from other agencies and that they want to come to here. They see Williston as probably the shining spot right now in the growth. So we offer a lot of possibilities. So we see what happens. But the sooner we can get that extra position filled, then it makes me a lot happier that I'm not getting a call at six o'clock in the morning or 10 o'clock at night that we have a problem because we can't put anybody on the desk and nobody wants a dispatch for us. But we have other plans out there that emergency situation but I don't want to use that right now unless we really have to. So by adding a new position, it might be just a temporary position but it's going to correct all our needs. I'm confident what Lieutenant has put together that it'll meet demands that has affected our relationship with the BSP and it lessens their burden on us. For quite a few years, we only had one dispatcher and then the former town manager, Rick McGuire talked about that and they had to add a second dispatcher because the demands of our calls for services have increased and now even with the pandemic our calls for services have grown up. We're growing, you look around this town, it's not going down and we have a lot of traffic that come through this town. Tonight, with and now we had two major accidents, Bolton's in the town, so you're going. It's not the quiet Williston that I remember 45 years ago when I used to be going over to Bolton coming through Bravo 2. Yeah and some of the numbers that I was running, I was just kind of playing around with data from the last few years and we're kind on that trajectory of about a 10% increasing calls per year. And that was fairly steady. I actually think that it's probably gonna go a little bit higher than that when we get back to normal. So this year and next year, just because our officer levels are holding stronger, they're holding higher, so you're gonna start seeing a little bit more in that. So I think that that's just kind of the trend that we're going in and the more businesses and residential areas that we haven't found, that's just gonna go even higher. Other questions before we go to find this is, I'm just wondering if you're switching up, it's the table Shirley or, okay. Yeah, so we can put you guys on hold and over in the waiting area. Oh, Jeff. Yeah, just one thing I was reading on page three just before we get to the proposal and the memo that was given to us, it talks about the Highway Traffic Safety Grants as well as private road construction details. And it's not at all a disagreement or anything, but I'd just like to know more about that. So very quickly, I can do it pretty quick. The private road construction details. So currently down Williston Road Industrial where the state's doing their big project, starting up here once they actually start digging here, they want at least one officer Monday through Friday down there at all times. So they'll hire us, it's built into the state budgets, usually depending on the size of the contracts, it's like 2% of the total cost of that project is for police assistance. The town doesn't pay anything, the construction companies pay that full freight so they pay for the use of the vehicle, the blue lights, the fuel, the officer and all of their benefits that go along with those hours worked. Charlie can talk more about that because she's really good at that. And the federal grant details. So there is a lieutenant over at the Chittany County Sheriff's Office who is the grant man for that. What he does is he runs that entire grant. So when you see, we call them sharp, so those are like DUI details at night where basically you go to certain areas that are picked. What the grant has actually been doing though because there's been low turnout in other areas because of just lack of staffing throughout the whole area is the town of the police department has actually allotted a certain amount of hours per month for our officers to go out in our own community and patrol our town on grant money, which in the grant scheme of things is the only a benefit to the town because it's an increased presence. It's based on safety concerns, so traffic accidents. So you sit at intersections, distracted driving which is like talking on your cell phone. And currently right now we're allotted 150 hours a month and that's broken up evenly between all the officers and I don't wanna say it's a brief roll but it's more of on their own time when they're not on shift. They come in, they don't really have to give us permission as long as there's enough vehicles for them to use and they're just an extra officer on the road concentrating on traffic safety but at the same time they are available to assist on calls. So there are a lot of hours that are for that. And the other issue is that we can fund a dispatcher to cover those shifts throughout there but unfortunately we don't have the dispatchers to do it. So if they came in tonight at seven o'clock and they work at the midnight, they're part of the state police and it means that they probably wouldn't be out there because the state police probably would tell us bring our own dispatcher. And so what we're telling these officers work in the shop details is that make sure that you're gonna do the operation. He was talking about. So the fee that we charge to the vendor, as Josh said, it covers the cost, all of our benefits and we actually have included an admin percentage in there to cover like my time to do the accounting, Lynn's time to run payroll, Mary's time to invoice the company so that the taxpayer is not absorbing any cost of that additional work that PD is taking on. So there's one question for you. Good, thank you. You're welcome. The next question you asked was how much would it cost to staff the position? So I just did an analysis for an individual who was either insurance benefits drive a larger cost than most of the other benefits and retirement. So I just costed out a person who was single, a two-person plan and a family plan. So the cost is anywhere from 74,000 to just under 91,000 depending what the employees needs are that is higher. So we're looking at an average of like 82,000, maybe 3,000 just for the cost of a new dispatcher. You good with that one? Yep. So with that, you good with that one? Yep. So with that covered, now we're gonna talk about how we pay for this. So you have this memo called estimated fund balance and I'll try to be quick, but I also want to make sure you follow the logic. So every year we're always talking about how much fund balance do we have available and how does that work within our fund balance policy? So what I did with this memo was I started with the unassigned fund balance from the audited financial statements. So what that means is when I say unassigned fund balance, it's the fund balance that's available for anything that either comes through the budget or the select board chooses, they can assign some of that to a specific use. And then we have what we call the assigned fund balance and that typically in the financial statements is made up of a couple of things. The dollars that we are setting aside in the next budget year for tax reduction or the fund balance that we are setting aside in the next budget year for capital projects. So that's you assign it and in the financial statements it's shown as assigned in the end of the previous year. So as we look at this memo, we're starting with the unassigned fund balance as of the audit where I'm adding the revenue forecast from the last forecast from last meeting in. So that's a revenue, but then I turned around and I reduced the revenue projection by the amount that we had the 500,000 for tax reduction because I really wanted to see what unassigned fund balance would look like without even considering that and whether we were gonna need any of it. And then I subtracted out the budgeted or I should say, yeah, budgeted FY21 expenses and then I added back the savings that we expect from those expenses. So best guess estimated June 30th, 2021 estimated fund balance is the 2,882,717, you see. So the next section I'm just talking about that difference between the assigned and unassigned fund balance. So the assigned fund balance for the general fund at the end of last year was $780,810 and that's broken down by those two pieces. Assigned for property taxes and for capital projects. So when we look at the FY22 budget, there are four different pieces of that assigned fund balance as laid out in the memo for tax reduction for capital projects, for capital equipment and for the CCPSA. So that's a total of 856,000. So I'm gonna say that the budgeted budget that difference is an increase in about 76,000 of the assigned fund balance. So I'm going back to that 282,000 number, subtracting out that increase in the assigned fund balance to say, okay, here's what we project, where we'll be at 6,3021 for unassigned fund balance and that's 2.8 million and change. So the next piece I wanted to walk through was our fund balance policy and we have that 10% floor that's based on the next year's operating budget. So that's FY22 and we have the 20% ceiling. So if you're comparing the 2.8 million to the 10% floor of the 1,157 and to the 20% ceiling is the 2,314. So you can see that our fund balance is still plenty healthy or our projected fund balance is really healthy and we're gonna be above the ceiling. So we have about $493,000 above that ceiling calculation. So that's where we're getting the funding for this position, for the dispatch position is from that fund balance. I guess I would just add, Shirley, that we won't know where we are throughout the budget year. So we could end up having reduced expenses in other areas of the budget. So we may or may not need to use that full fund balance depending where expensively ended in the general fund. Exactly. So questions for Shirley? Shirley Jeff here. As you know, I'm an engineer, not a finance person. So could I just restate what I heard and see if you agree with it? And the restatement is the fund balance appears to be very healthy and is more than adequate to fund a third dispatchers position. Great summary, Jeff. All right, thank you. You're welcome. Any other questions for Shirley? So staff is looking for feedback, not necessarily a decision tonight, but I guess the question is, is there any objections to proceeding down this road looking at a third dispatcher? No objection from me. So I don't see any objections to it. So that's good. And we'll continue to hear more about this in the near future. Great. Well, thank you everybody for being here tonight and sharing the good news and the bad news. Yeah, well done for all of us. Thank you. So we're on to the Fire Station Roof Project. And this is Eric and Shirley, I believe, I suppose. Yeah, and I can, or this was kind of teed up with the fund balance discussion, but try to be brief. I've got a memo and an update in your packet as well. But you might recall, we have in the capital plan for this coming fiscal year of replacement of the Fire Station Roof Project. The department sought bids recently and there was one response from Bannister Custom Exteriors. Bid price was about 126,000. We had estimated after discussions during the budget process for about a $100,000 cost for this project after consultations last winter. Likely as similar we saw with the Muddy Brook Bridge Project, the scarcity of contractors and price changes are likely driving the increased cost here, rising cost of materials is anticipated to continue in the coming years, in the coming year. We'll be transitioning this roof to a standing seam metal construction. Our staff recommendation is to proceed with this project using Bannister Custom Exteriors. Waiting another year will likely increase the project cost and the risk to the damage to the building that could result by weight ink to add additional expenses moving ahead. Reference for this one contractor where I'll very positive the Fire Department reports. So might recall our initial recommendation to pay for this during the budget process was to consider short-term borrowing. And as we've looked at where some of our expenses are gonna be for FY22, we see what we believe is a better solution to look at this evening. There's a memo for me in the agenda that summarizes funds in the FY22 budget that are no longer gonna be needed for debt service due to a recent change in a bond payment timing. So we went to Bond Sale in early March for the fire truck bond. And when we put the budget together, we anticipated we would have a principal bond payment coming up in FY22. But as a result of the Bond Sale, that payment's not gonna be due to FY23. So we have some funding in the budget about 99,000 that we could use just towards the roof project now. We had put some money in to pay down a short-term note on the roof. There's the principal payment we don't need to make for the fire truck. And the interest payment we do need to make for the fire truck isn't as high as we budgeted. So this option allows us to use cash on hand in the budget that we have that is an expense we won't need in FY22 to use for this purpose. But as you can see, the bid came in a little bit higher. So what staff is asking the board to consider this evening is to authorize using a portion of the undersigned fund balance that surely just summarized to cover the full cost of this project. Our recommendation is it was about 126,000, but it's unknown where the price of metal is gonna be. They go to construction. So we're trying to build in about a 5% contingency for that. The motion that staff has put forward for the board to consider this evening, builds in that extra 5% asking for about $32,000 from the fund balance to be assigned towards this. Eric's Eric, any questions for Eric regarding the proposal? Eric, how old is the roof? I believe it is 14 years when the building was constructed. And that shingles, correct? Yeah. And there's no kind of warranty of any kind that was by the original construction. Yeah, we checked into that and looking at the options. Yeah, certainly we wanted to see if that was something we could pursue. But that's not a long time. And I know, I had to ask the question. Yeah, yeah. It's certainly one of the first things we took a look at. And this looking for a standing steam metal roof, we believe this will last. Oh no, longevity wise, I would certainly agree. I just, yeah. We'll take care of that. Yeah. So Eric, Jeff here, I'm not at all opposed. I am a bit surprised by the, it sounds like the bid came in, but it isn't a firm bid because we had to add that 5% contingency to it. Is that correct? Yeah, there's a provision in the bid talking about what the price of materials are gonna be. And I've discussed this with the chief and if we choose to move ahead, if we could, when we get a contract together, kind of put a firm parameter on that. So it's not just kind of an open escalation cost that we can understand what our maximum liabilities gonna be. Cause we don't know, I know the price of metal, like all commodities right now is changing on a daily basis. Yeah, I just, this is the first I've heard where somebody's actually said, here's what I'll agree to, but it's, you know, there's some float in it because I don't know what my cost exactly are gonna be. So I'm not willing to commit to a firm price to you. But, you know, that's what it is. That's what it is and we have to deal with it, I guess. Yeah, yeah, we're hoping we can put some guard rails in to just understand what our liabilities gonna be. Yeah, okay. Any other questions for Eric, we are in this? I was going to mention one thing, I think it's including the fund balance amount, if they don't have the calculations and the assets, but with our fund money checks are written, we can go back and calculate our cost of revenue and so Eric and I were talking about if we do that calculation and then money would actually fall into the fund balance. So that will go into the fund balance. Yeah. There's a nice complicated formula that the federal government has put together for us to take a look at. Of course. The other question was, I'm looking for... Yeah, but for a motion, I just, I'm gonna go back, I don't wanna be stuck, but I just wanna look at, I know metal is a longevity for sure. Are we getting any like warranty on this one on how long that will be? And if so, what is it? Because you go back to the other one, you know, you think about shingles and I've done a lot of jobs myself and they have 20 year, 30 year, 40 year shingles and 14 years, so it sounds like a lot to me. So I don't know if you know that answer or not. I haven't asked a question. We have the chief on and he's been working with the vendor a little bit closer. I could see if the chief knows the answer to that. I know he's come up. Chief, I see you there. I'm just gonna, I'm gonna connect you. Hold on just a moment. Welcome chief Colette. You're on a question for the fire station roof project. Not sure if you heard it or not. I did hear it and I was trying to drop back to get my VPN to work and I wasn't quick enough to get that but we certainly did include that and I believe it's a life, I know that it's a lifetime warranty on the metal, on the metal roof. The difference is the paint warranty on the metal I believe is either a 25 I think it's a 50 year paint warranty but I'm not a hundred percent. I can get back to you, but it is lifetime on the metal roof. Okay, thanks. You're welcome. Any other questions for, is there Eric or the chief? Very none, I'm still looking for a motion. I'll move to designate up to $32,000 from the unassigned fund balance for the fire station roof replacement project in fiscal year 2022. Zero second. I'll second. Motion made and seconded. Is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none. All those in favor of the motion say aye. Aye, aye, aye. Okay, we have four ayes on this one and to move on then to the user fee and charges scheduled for fiscal year 2022. We approve the budgets for water sewer and stormwater at our last meeting and the request is now to implement the charges to implement the budget and we have Bruce or on the, I think we will have shortly if not yet. Yep, Bruce is here, I'll connect him and then we have chief Coletta as well. He has some ambulance and department fee recommendations as well, what if Bruce connected right now? I don't know if Bruce's dog will make it. Yeah, haven't seen him for a while, so who knows? So just give us a brief description of your, on the memo that you wrote regarding the three budget requests. Okay, this is the time of year again to set the rates. These rates were shown in the budgets that were approved. The increase for the water rate is going to $5.10 per 1,000 gallons. That's a 1.39% increase. A sewer rate going to 749 per 1,000 gallons, I'm sorry. And that's from 712 per 1,000. And that increase is about, yeah, 5.20%. Basic use of charges are being increased based on the CPI of 1.40 residential water would be 5.82 per quarter. Commercial water would be 11.65 per quarter. And the sewer rate basic user charge increases to 1.601 per quarter. And I'm glad to say the stormwater rate is staying at 4.25 per ERU for this year again. So that's, I think we're on our sixth year of the stormwater utility. So we haven't raised that since we started. Thank you, Bruce. Any questions for Bruce on the proposals? Really the only question I have in, I think I know the answer, but I'm still going to ask it is, we really don't have a choice here. We have to charge these rates to meet the budget. That's what the budget was approved on these rates, yes. Yeah, okay. Any other questions for Bruce before we move on to Chief Colette and his request? There is, I'm sorry. There's also the connection fees for water and sewer that are increasing, but they're increasing based on the CPI with what we've been doing every year for those rates. So residential water is going to be $7.19 times the number of gallons. Sewer will be 817 times the number of gallons. And that's the same whether it's residential or commercial. And then there's affordable housing, which is 359 times the number of gallons for water and $4.10 times the number of gallons for sewer. Which again, all based on just increased by the CPI 1.40%. Thanks, Bruce. Questions for Bruce on that? I don't hear any. So let's move on to the request from the fire department and Chief Colette. Good evening, thank you very much. So the fire department took on a project in 2020 where we reached out to neighboring EMS agencies to pull what their ambulance assessment fees were for different services. And so we pulled seven of our neighboring ambulances to see if our fees were in alignment with what was going on. And so what we found is that the average fees for the neighboring communities, we were under that in some areas. We also found that those other agencies actually do a la carte options where they would bill individually for like an IV start or cardiac monitoring or oxygen application, which Williston fire is not advocating for. We never have done that. We're not asking to do that. But so we found that we were even low on that. So we've just asked to bump up some of our service level feeds for our different healthcare common procedural coding system service levels. So we would move our BLS non-emergent charge from 575. We'd increase it by $25 per call to a new charge of 600. The BLS emergency rate would go from a current charge of 700 to 750. Then current average for the seven agencies we've pulled is just shy of 770. So we're still $20 shy of the average. The ALS one non-emergency rate, and we currently charge 725. We're asking to increase that by $25 for transport to 750, which is several hundred dollars less than other agencies, but not all agencies actually charge for that rate. The ALS one emergency rate, we're currently at $900. We're asking to increase that to by $50 to 950. The ALS two emergency, which is like a paramedics level of intervention or something more dramatic. We're not proposing to change that at this time. It's currently $12.985. And I think that's, it's such an infrequent call for us. It doesn't make sense to try to increase that rate. The current mileage rate, we charge $18 per loaded mile. Then we found that the average in the area was 19. So we're asking to increase it by $1 to that $19 per loaded mile. And we're not proposing any changes to the AEMT or paramedic intercept, which are both fixed at $250 today, so that we're not looking for any changes there. The other changes that we recommended is currently we have set fees for vehicles. And they're listed out there on your fee schedule, such as a UTV with a truck and trailer. Currently the rate is listed as $90 per diem, meaning a day, but there's no definition of what a day is. So do I get $90 for a two hour detail, or do I get $90 for 24 hour detail? And so when I look at all of the way that we actually charge these fees now, my recommendation to town manager and to you folks is that we actually look to a uniform method of fees. And what I'd like to do is adopt the FEMA rate schedule for vehicles and equipment, which is already listed. And then we would just then have some sort of an industry standard by which to use reference. So when things that could work out in our favor is if you were to charge for any vehicles in a natural disaster, you would already have adopted the FEMA rate schedule. So current and that prospective rate. And we would already be following the FEMA rate schedule. Right now we don't have any guidance on it. And so I'm looking to adopt that level of guidance. The standby rate for EMTs currently is set at $50. And you heard Shirley talk a little bit earlier about increased cost for that and administrative costs. We're looking to increase that to $60 per hour. So as an example, the UTV truck and trailer rate that we spoke of earlier, which we had at $90 per day, we'd actually looked to actually move that from a per day cost, adopt the FEMA rate cost that would come out to $40.64 per hour and then we'd build actual hours. So this really tries to set a uniform policy for us for billing, it allows us to capture vehicles or equipment that we may not think of listing because it wasn't something we had ever envisioned that we would need to actually look for reimbursement for. But if we adopted this method through the FEMA system, then we could quickly reference it that most current widget, if you will, chainsaw, an aerial ladder, a fire engine, and we would have an industry standard rate and we know what that is. So we had some validation behind our decision. Thank you, Chief. Any questions for the Chief on the proposal from the fire department? Chief Jeff here, my question, how are you? My question about the proposed ambulance rates, my understanding is even these rates don't reimburse the department for the full cost of running an ambulance. So it'd be helpful for me to understand what is your philosophy about what rates Williston should charge and how much of that full cost should the department be able to recoup through the rates it's charging? Does that make sense, that question? It does, and I tried to discover that by reaching out to our billing agent, Jeff, to have a better idea of it to see, because we're really fixed by the Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement rates. So Medicare will reimburse only at 80% of the allowable, of their allowable, and Medicaid will reimburse on their fixed amounts. So while we could set a rate today for any one of these services that I've listed to you, Medicare and Medicaid have fixed amounts, so we'll never be able to recoup actual costs. We'll always be behind. I look back at fiscal year 20, and just as an example, the adjustments were close to 42% that we had to make for the differences between what we billed and what Medicaid and Medicare would allow. Okay, so the concept really is to be consistent with what our neighboring departments are doing. And that's about the best we can do, if you will. And I don't necessarily believe we should recoup all that funding back. And stated differently, running an ambulance is a cost to the community, but the benefit of having that obviously outweighs the cost. Yeah. And in some part of that, Jeff, is why we won't pursue the a la carte individual fees for oxygen and all of that. You know, I agree with you. We have a duty to our public. Yeah, okay. So we'll try to recoup what we can, but sometimes, you know, we're gonna have to eat that cost of the service. Okay, good. Thank you. That's helpful. Any further questions for the chief? The motion that is being before you, or which hopefully will be before you, covers both the user fees and the charges from the town departments as well as the far department. Be looking for a motion. I'll move to adopt the municipal user fee and charges for fiscal year 2022 as presented. Is there a second? Second. And second. Is there any discussion on the motion? If not, all those in favor of the motion say aye. Aye, we have four. Aye, so that takes care of that. We're now on to the permit fee schedule for fiscal year 2022. And Matt Bologna will be joining us remotely to discuss this. Matt should be connected if there is. Hi, I see. Hello, Matt. Evening. So we're up to the permit fee schedule so you could just briefly go over that with us. Sure. So you've received a memo from me outlining the proposed changes for fiscal 22. Changes related to our administrative certificates, these are our certificate of compliance inspection certificates are not actual monetary changes just changes in the way we describe them. So the fees aren't changing but what happens with our certificates of compliance is the base fee is actually paid at the time that someone applies for a permit but we get requests for either extensions, additional site visits because we go out and find that something's not in compliance with permit conditions and know that we're gonna need to return or requests for rush inspections where someone is requesting an inspection fewer than four days in advance and they've got a closing coming up and they really need to get us out there and we often have to push something else off on our schedule to go do that. Driving out there, usually hoping we don't find anything that's gonna cause us to say no and really disappoint our applicant. So it's just breaking out those additional fees and making it clear what they are because that's how they're actually paid rather than looking like a more expensive certificate you paid with the permit then you can pay the extra fee if you'd like to have the rush inspection. There are two fees on here that we're identifying as new. The first is related to file research to be performed by staff. This is a really infrequent request that we get. It usually comes when a property is changing hands and a permit research firm from somewhere not in Vermont files what they will call a freedom of information act request or sort of a kitchen sink request give me everything you've got about such and such property and most of what we do with a request like that is we summarize what we have by looking in the file briefly and encourage the requester to send a local title searcher in if they'd like to have a hard look through the file. Occasionally what we get back is someone who says, no, I really want you to do it for me. Having that debate with somebody more than 25 minutes we might as well just agree to do it but agree to do it with a written estimate for our costs. And so statute does allow municipalities to charge for the performing of file research. We would propose to follow that. The proposal is if we go over a half hour it's $25 an hour that's below the lowest billing rate of the lowest paid staff member in the office. So we're not trying to recapture the whole thing. Just be able to estimate a reasonable fee particularly if somebody said, give me everything you have on Maple Tree Place or please perform a thorough examination of the Maple Tree Place files and tell me if this one piece of paper is there or not. So we'd just like to be able to respond to that sort of a request with a reasonable estimate of what we think it's gonna take us to do and say, are you sure you wanna have us do it or would you like to reach out to somebody local and they can probably do it for less. So about twice a year we would like to be able to respond with that. The other fee and lengthy note is related to specific plan. Specific plan is something that comes up fairly infrequently. Some select board members might remember that this was a process used in the addition of an allowed use to the former Pine Ridge property for the New England Theological Seminary, NETS. We currently have a specific plan application underway for NECS, New England Chimney supply off of Commerce Street, proposing to change some zoning boundaries. And we are finding that done carefully and thoroughly as anticipated by the bylaw and the statement on shared costs. There's a fair amount of staff work involved in a specific plan. On and off there's been a $1,000 fee identified on the fee sheet, but it's used so infrequently that it actually wasn't stated on the sheet anymore the last time we went to look for it. More importantly, we did find records that allowed us to charge it for the pending one. But more importantly is some of the language in that statement of cost sharing that a specific plan is an undertaking in which the town may wish to retain expert testimony or independent oversight of testimony given by experts prevented by the applicant on a number of issues. And that the intent of specific plan is for that to happen at the applicant's expense, similar to someone who pays engineering fees for oversight when they're adding a piece of public infrastructure through the public works review system. So with the particular specific plan we're reviewing right now, the applicant is preparing a sound study to look at noise that might come with an expanded industrial use. We don't anticipate needing to have them pay for oversight on that, but we would like to have the statement in there. So when we're prepping with an applicant who's thinking about going down this road we can be clear about where those responsibilities will lie. And thank you, Matt. Any questions for Matt regarding the requests from on these permit fees? No, sounds good. See any questions? So I'd be looking then for a motion to accept them. I moved to adapt the permit fee schedule for fiscal year 2022 as presented. Is there a second? Second. Yeah, a second. It's very discussion on the motion. All those in favor of the motion sign the five I say and I and raising your hand three, four. So we've taken care of that. We're up to the volunteer reappointments and Eric has given us a list. Yep, and as in prior years there's a number of folks whose terms are up for renewal and I've reached out to all them over the last couple of months and these individuals have all expressed interest in continuing their service to the town of Wilson. It's a very appreciative of some folks have served for many years on these boards. So I've checked with staff. We, you may recall we adopted a volunteer policy a couple of years ago and one of those items is meeting attendance. And I didn't hear any concerns from staff about attendance from any of these incumbents to be concerned with. If our staff recommendation is for the board to consider reappointing these individuals to another term and a motion and reflects that. Thanks Eric. There's a questions for Eric regarding the list. Don't hear any questions. So I'd be looking for a motion. I'll move to reappoint for another term. Individuals currently serving on town and regional boards and commissions who have expressed an interest in continuing their positions as indicated in the report dated June 1, 2021. That's your second. I'll second. Any discussion on the motion? If not all those in favor of the motion say aye and or raise your hand. One, two, three, four. So we've got a unanimous vote on that one too. So now we're up to the point where going back to the appointments for the library board and for the CSWD. And as I did for the appointment of the, for the select board, I'd like to get to the top two as a straw vote as to eliminating at least two of the members that were before us tonight. And then we can have a discussion about the final two. So I'll ask Greta for her top two. Sherry and Justin. Sherry and Justin. Yes. And Gordon. Sherry and Steve. Jeff. I have Sherry and Steve also. And I also had Sherry and Steve. So we've now have the two top contestants of Sherry and Steve and looking for comments regarding either one. Anybody? I think they would all do, have done an excellent job and I really commend them all for having applied and being interested in this role. Sherry, you know, has a very clear interest in public service to our community, has a really strong background in city management and so forth and budgets, which I think could be a valuable asset to the libraries. Thank you. Any other comments? I just wanted to say thanks to you both. You obviously have a clear passion for what you're willing to serve for. I think either one of you would be very good candidates for this position. I would lean towards Sherry just with her background and what I've heard this evening. Nothing negative towards you, Steve, at all. I just feel like Sherry stood out to me. Thanks. Other comments? Jeff here, you know, did a what Greta and Gordon just said about thanking all four candidates. All four would have done a great job. The passion was pretty, pretty evident. I'm actually in favor of Stephen and really basing that on the clarity in which he provided his answers. I think he really has a clear vision and I guess that's the swaying, the swaying whatever factor for me. Thanks. My comments are similar. They're both great candidates for the job. I was impressed with the background of Sherry regarding her past jobs in New York regarding her work with the libraries there, which certainly are more extensive than we have here in Williston, but certainly brings a lot of expertise to the position if she were to be appointed. So we've all expressed our opinions. Is there a motion for either one of the candidates? I'd move to appoint Sherry Weston to the Library Board of Trustees until town meeting 2022, when an election for the unexpired term will be held for the provisions of the town charter. It was your second. Second that. So now we have a motion made to appoint Sherry Weston to the position during discussion on the motion. This puts me in a slightly awkward position. But I just to fill you in, I certainly think Sherry is great, so I'm not gonna vote against her. I'm not gonna abstain, but you know my preference with Steve. Thank you. Any further discussion? If not, although it was in favor of the motion, raise your hand. One, two, three, four. So it's unanimous and we have appointed Sherry. And if you're out there in the remote land, congratulations Sherry. And Steve, we look forward to your continued activity in town events, as well as the other two candidates for the position. But now we're at the Chittin' and Sellers Solid Waste District, the two candidates that we have before us. And be looking for anyone who wishes to comment on either candidate. You ready? I was, as with all the candidates for a library I'm very impressed with both Kelton and Mike. I think that they would both be an excellent asset to that commission. Kelton stood out for me. I understand there are some issues, you know, where he may have to recuse himself, but his education, his experience, his ideas on innovation and technology, I think really stood out for me. Thanks, other comments? But it was very clear to me that, sorry, I'm gonna get the name Kelton. He's on top of the industry, makes sense why. But I do worry about the conflict of interest aspect of it. And if that's gonna impede his ability to be an effective commission member. My suspicion is he'll be outspoken, which is good. And he understood, I thought he gave a great answer about how does he represent Williston? So I'm curious what others, if others see the potential for conflict of interest to be a barrier to Kelton being the commissioner. Other comments? Again, both candidates thank you for throwing your hat in the ring for this. I do feel both were very well spoken this evening. And I would agree with Greta around Kelton's, definitely innovation and being involved in the day-to-day operations of what we're looking for. I do share Jeff's concern on the conflict of interest, even though it might not come up as much as Kelton might think, I do think it's gonna be somewhat of a barrier. And that is a concern for me as well. Yeah, that being said, I'm still weighing on my decision. I think Kelton answered a question fairly well as far as conflict of interest goes and believe that he has a wealth of experience in the field as does Mike. But I think that Kelton would handle the any conflict of interest well and recuse himself when there's the occasion to do so. But though he would be my choice. So given the comments, any further comments? One quick question, not a comment, quick question. If Kelton does need to recluse himself, can Kailin step in? She could do that. Certainly if he were to be at a meeting or hopefully he would know in advance that there's gonna be a conflict and he would ask Kailin to sit in. Okay, that helps with my concern. Yeah, so I'd be looking for a motion. I don't wanna mess up the last name, but I will move to appoint Kelton Bogaski to the Chittenden Solid Waste District Board of Commissioners for a two-year term through May 31st, 2023. Is there a second? I'll second. I don't think we have a second. Any discussion on the motion? If not, all those in favor of the motion raise your hand. One, two, three, four. So it's unanimous there. And we're now up to the manager's report. We'll be brief this evening. Thank you. We're gonna get into the late hour here, but just briefly, you have the finance report for April from Shirley. So in the interest of time, unless there's a pressing question for Shirley, there's any questions I can, staff can follow up with those as well. Local option tax report for the last quarter returned very well. We're seeing ourselves above budget as we plan for three quarters of the fiscal year. So we'll be interested to see where we end up here, to close the fiscal year, but all good news on the local option tax fronts for something that was very unpredictable about a year ago. So good news to report there this evening. And we also, the Colvert we mentioned, the money Colvert project, the structures grant, we have received it for $175,000. We're trying to learn just some rulemaking with that and implementation. So hopefully we will be coming back next month or so saying that we'll work to decrease our obligation for that project for Muddy Brook. And the discussion will be how to fill in the remaining gap. That was good news. And then finally this evening, we've debuted our new hybrid meeting system. I just want to thank town meeting TV for all their help. This is a pilot project and they selected Williston to be the town to pilot this effort in. And this is the first ever meeting. So we've just about made it through for an extra long meeting. So I just want to recognize that. And that's how their staff is here. And for the board, just to please provide any feedback to me as we move ahead. This is very much a work in progress still with having a television. We'll likely have some different setups here. We'll have the full board here. Maybe about one having the public back in as well. But kind of through all the different, all the different possibilities tonight. And it seems like it's worked pretty well. So addressing the board's feedback moving ahead and we can chat offline as well. Good, thank you. And I echo Eric's comments regarding our TV crew here tonight. Technical support, I appreciate it very much. Is there any other business to talk about tonight? Hearing none, I will declare us adjourned. Thank you all very much. And good night. Hi, Jeff. Hi, Jeff. Good night. Good night.