 I will call them into order at 7 o'clock. First item on the agenda are the minutes of October 4th, 2022. Is there a motion? Move, we accept them subject to modification. This is your second. Second. Page one, page two, page three. Though I'm hesitant to change it, my name under it says motion by Ted Kennedy, second by Great D'Agostino. Even though you are. We can keep it that way as well. I like that. Under the same item number eight, under the discussion, it states that Gordon-stated building height continues to be a concern. And then it goes on with a vote. One might conclude from that that that's why Gordon voted against it. And if I remember the discussion, I thought you were clear in saying you weren't voting on your opinion about the form-based code. It was how you believed residents felt about it. And I wonder if the record should reflect that. Yes, that was my words. And it should reflect that. Good, thank you. I guess it should indeed. You said that. Anything else on page three? Page four. Here are no other corrections. Then all those in favor of the motion to approve the minutes of October 4th, 2022, say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right, moving on to public comment on general issues. Is there anyone in the room who wishes to make any public comment on the issue? Is it on the agenda or not? Greg, why don't you come up, identify yourself, and tell us what's on your mind. Good evening. My name's Greg Marino. I'm the lead principal in the Williston schools. I'm also a Williston resident of 15 years. Thank you for this opportunity to address this board. I'm here on behalf of CVSD superintendent, Renee Sanchez, who couldn't be here in person this evening, and the CVSD board of directors to inform our Williston community about our ongoing strategic planning process. According to the Vermont School Board Association website and research on public school boards, a school board should regularly assess its performance, set goals, and implement systems to monitor progress. This ongoing cycle enables the board to fulfill its role of providing a high quality education to all students and ensuring that taxpayers get a good return on their investment. In addition, this cycle of continuous improvement serves as an example of effective strategic planning. CVSD is now five years post-consolidation from when our four K-8 school districts and CVU had separate school boards and districts. So our board and administration strive to create a coherent shared vision for our teaching, learning, leading, budgeting, and safety planning. To do this, we need the expertise and support of school employees, families, caregivers, students, business owners, and other community members to determine in what areas the district performs well, could improve on, or needs to stop. Additionally, we need to know what path our community believes we should take over the next five to seven years. Finally, we want people to dream big. We will reassess the strategic plan after the first two years of implementation and adjust it as necessary. We are undertaking some community outreach. So we ask for your participation or feedback. First, we will have one more in-person strategic plan community forum in October. On October 27th at 6 p.m., our Vermont School Boards Association facilitator and the superintendent will help lead attendees through brainstorming protocols. Additionally, we will have a strategic plan virtual town hall to update the community on the plan's progress. This town hall is scheduled for November 9th at 6.30 p.m. Second, you may see the superintendent, other CVSB administrators, and some board members out in the community over the next few weeks, excuse me. In front of businesses or knocking on doors, passing out small survey postcards, the postcards will contain information about the plan and a QR code linking you to our survey. Finally, please complete our strategic plan survey. If you cannot attend the forum or the town hall, you can find it on the CVSB website or Twitter page. Thanks again for this opportunity to address the select board. Thank you very much. Could you just repeat those two dates? I'm sorry, I. Absolutely. October 27th at 6 p.m., is the strategic plan community forum and the strategic plan virtual town hall is on November 9th, 6.30 p.m. Good, thank you. Where's the 27th? The location is not listed here. Okay. I'm sure there's an entire page dedicated to strategic plan on the website. Good question. That's fair. Thank you very much. Thank you. Anyone on Zoom who wishes to make any public comment? No one on Zoom, Terry. All right. Then we'll proceed to interviews and appointments. We have five candidates for the community center scoping and library assessment that is to be made tonight. I believe we have four in the room and one on Zoom. Yep. So it would make it easier probably if the four of the room would come to the table here where the microphone is. If you don't mind sitting relatively close to each other and I can move the microphone in front of each of you who once we get to ask you to speak and answer questions. Can I apologize in advance? I have terrible cough from my allergies. I am not sick, but I cough from what I say. Certainly understand. And if you speak as loudly as you can, this is not an able find microphone. It's one that just records for the TV for Zoom. So tonight, we do have one on Zoom as well. Yep, good. I'm married, Clary, but you connected over Zoom. Okay. Good. So my usual protocol is to ask each of you to give a brief description of your background and why you would like to be on the particular committee that we're talking about tonight. And so I will start off the questions with that in mind. And what I'm gonna do is to ask in order John Butterfield, Lynn McClinic, Murray Clair McGovern, Molly Court, and Sally DeTulio to answer that question. And so John, if you would, give us a brief update. Okay. My name is John Butterfield. My wife and I have been Willisons residents for the past 37 years. Currently, I'm a trustee of the Old Brook Church. I also served on the initial Willis-Benangian planning committee. Before retiring two years ago, I worked as a licensed professional engineer. The last 33 years in my engineering career, I was a principal at a consulting engineering firm in South Burlington. Throughout my career, my primary area of work was with buildings and building systems. My experience included planning, design, construction, startup, commissioning, and operation of a number of different facilities, including government, educational, and manufacturing research. I feel that the value that I can offer to the Community Center and Library Studies Steering Committee is my experience with facilities planning, design, and construction. I envision the work of this committee as a step-by-step planning process. And I look forward to it being considered. Thank you. Lynn? Yikes. OK. So I'm a little bit stuck. I have lived here for a year in Burlington, and I've been a sub-member for four. I think he's 30 years, 36. You meet me. So one of my first introductions to Williston was taking my kids to the library. And that was how I saw we have an incredible community. And I helped with the, when they were doing their building, I was involved with that with the library. Then I actually, I will say I'm a mother that got a chance to teach. So I've been taught at CVU, and then I taught at Williston Central School up until the year before last. And it was really quite a privilege for me. And I, in growing up where I'm in living, where my kids grew up, and where I work, I got to see the possibilities of Williston. And I remember a long time ago when I was on the rec committee talking about a community center. And I know that from working at Williston and running open gyms, we need to have a space. We have lots of spaces, and we've piecemealed things. And I'm thinking big. I don't have the experience that Mr. Butterfield has with planning, but I have ideas. And I think that Williston is worth something big. And I love the library center we have. But I think we are living in a time where we don't have a place for kids right out of high school to go. We don't have a place for middle age, older people. And I think we need to have a center. And are the two together? I don't know. There's possibilities for us to do great things right now. And I would like to be involved in it. I'm a little bit scattered. But my heart is for Williston. And I think that there are so many possibilities that I've seen through working in the school and through being involved with the recreation committee and being involved in the library. So I would love to be considered for this. I know it's not a little task, but I really do think Williston, you guys know it because you're on the select board, Williston's worth it. And if we don't put the time into it, what happens to Williston? So there you go. Thank you. I'm going to switch to Zoom now. I'm very clear. Hi. Thank you. First of all, thank you for giving me the opportunity to join via Zoom. I have had a cold for the last 10 days. So it's great to be able to still participate. Unlike the first two folks, I'm pretty new to Williston. I've lived here since October. And I'm not new to Vermont. I grew up in Vermont. I left the state for a number of years in my 20s. And I returned for graduate school at UVM in physical therapy. And I most recently was able to buy a home in Williston. I feel really, really, really lucky in the current housing situation to be able to do that. And I'm a mom of a four-month-old. So I'm really looking forward in terms of thinking about the community that I want to be raising my daughter in. And I'm looking forward to serving in general in Williston. I'm learning more about the community that I'm in. I'm learning more about my neighbors. And I'm excited, really, really, really excited about the idea of a community center. I come from a background in other parts of Vermont. My mom and I was in first grade campaign, started a campaign for a community center and rec center in the town that we lived in. And I worked on that for 10 years. And then it was finally realized 15 years later. But so I think that's sort of like a personal motivation. But also, I do have experience in the town that I lived in Colorado working on the rec department board and being sort of a sounding board for projects that went on, including new parks and facilities, including pool at our local, actually, elementary and middle school. It was located within the middle school. So I have some experience in terms of being a sounding board and guiding that process of developing new facilities for communities. I also had a great experience being part of, in that community, what we called Vision Leadville, which was a whole community brainstorming session in terms of thinking about what our community needed and what our priorities were all across the board and then moving forward with grant funded projects that supported those priorities. And when I think about where we were in that community and how that kind of is similar to Williston, we had just exploded in terms of population. And there were a lot of different interests and a lot of different types of community members with different backgrounds. And it was pretty exciting to get everybody together and come up with that vision and then kind of see the action over the next five or six years. I think in Williston, I was looking at the stats. And from 1990 to 2010, it increased by 72% in terms of population, which is insane. And less so in the last 10 years, but it just seems like a really exciting time to think about that and to try to meet those needs. It feels like the library has been doing a great job from what I have heard and we're also ready to take next steps. And I personally am pretty biased towards a facility that would provide opportunities for intergenerational activities and as a physical therapist, lean towards recreation and physical opportunities is great, but also across the board. I think I bring my own biases, but I'm also experienced in sort of gathering community data and learning about what the priorities of a community are. So that's what I would try to bring. My experience is completely different. I've only lived for a short time. We moved here eight years ago, so we retired. My husband's tease, I like the cold. Like, laughing, I love the cold. I moved here and realized there was nothing. I had no way to meet people. I ended up going back to work because I was miserable. I thank God for Kismet, which does senior activities. It had saved my life because it meant I could meet people. There's nothing for seniors here. I found it very difficult. And when I heard that they were thinking of making a community center where seniors would have activities too, it really hit home. I mean, because I'd never been in a place where they didn't have a senior center or anything to work with for people. And after meeting people finally, I found that most of them were in the same boat I was. None of us had anybody to go to meet anyone, and it was very difficult. So that's why I'm interested in this. And I think that we need a bigger library for the kids. I worked with kids. I was in the school system. I worked with after-school programs with kids. They need more for the kids, too. I read on front porch forum just recently that somebody was looking for activities for a young child. And they thought, don't they have anything at the library beside Story Hour? There's nothing else for kids to do. And I mean, they need this center so that people can do things. It was a tough time coming here. I almost made my husband move back to Connecticut because you just can't meet people if you don't have any way to go. And that's why I'm interested. Thank you. Sorry to tell you all. How can I beat all of this? I've been in Williston 35 years, 36 years. I worked at the school for over 30 years. I see there's a need for after-school activities for the children. I know there's after-school activities that I do on a Thursday. But the rest of the week, they should have other activities for kindergarten up even before that. I agree with you about senior citizens. I see nothing here for them. I actually also teach out at Access to CBU. It's an evening program. The school can't accommodate seniors during the day. But I do get a lot of seniors in, and they always said they were interested if anything came up during the day. I've had people with grandchildren ask me, could I teach a class for a grandma and me or a grandpa and me during the day? And I said, I don't know where we could do it in Williston. And I knew in the past there was talk of a community center. And I was all on board for it. I don't know where it went. But I would really love to see a community center here. I would love to see it get integrated with the library. I know the library is used so much. I can't think of anything else I want to say. But I'd really love to have a community center here. Good. Thank you. So I'll turn it over to the board for their questions. And what we'll do is we will now stagger the responses. And John will not be first this time. But it looks like Lynn probably will be. And we'll go down the line that way. Everybody's going to have a chance to go first unless we have no more than a couple of questions, which I can't believe. So who would like to ask the first question? All right, I'll start. One of the big priorities for the steering committee and for a community center is engaging the community in the process. Obviously, we want input. So we'd love to hear your thoughts on maybe how you think we might manage to engage the larger community and get their opinions and get them to weigh in. So that's not easy. But it is possible. So I think one thing is like you have what Greg said, if you go into the strategic planning for the CVSD, is you have people that are willing to go and talk to communities. If you're in a neighborhood, not everyone is, but if you're a neighborhood, there's homeowners associations, and they're coming to meetings. So I think that's one way. I also think that town meeting day is another way. I know that we don't have the turnout that we used to do, but there still is town meeting day. And so you have the information going out about voting. And so I think you can put information out with the town meeting agenda. I think you have to offer nights where there is a conversation with the community, either going to school, which loves having people go in, where there's an informational meeting, or seeking input. But I think it's not going to happen if we don't go out and seek neighborhoods, seek people, and let it be known that Williston has a great opportunity right now to do something good for Williston. And I'm not saying good things have been doing, but this is something that can bring the community aspect of Williston. I think backward needs to be in stronger than it has been. I mean, I don't know. That's not easy, Greta. What you said is not easy. And it requires legwork. Can't we hear what I want to say? Mary Claire is next. I think Lynn's totally right that it's not easy. And I was thinking about, in general, the general strategic plan fatigue syndrome, where it's hard to be involved. And it's hard to also leave your regular routine and show up. And this particular, I think, concept is pretty ubiquitous in terms of hearing everybody who's here tonight, you all bring a passion for this topic. So there is people who will come out of the woodwork, I think, for this kind of thing. But like Lynn said, having a lot of opportunities at different times and different places I think will be important in different, both virtually and in person, so that we can meet as many different people in our community as possible. And probably the challenge will be time. And I think another big challenge is presenting things sort of in the right order, I might say. There's going to be a lot of pushback in anything in terms of funding. And people will be worried about that and being upright about sort of thinking about ideals first and going from there. And maybe even separating those conversations. And I think about the way that, for example, land trusts and other organizations in Vermont get public input. And I think it's challenging, even in this world of media. And I think that having some in-person brainstorming sessions are really valuable. And I personally think it'd be great to at least incorporate some of those as described by the guests earlier tonight too. Do they still have PTA meetings at the school? His family's his partner. Then talking to the young parents there is a great way to get them interested. If you go to a PTA meeting and talk to them. In seniors, there's lots of different places where seniors do go or even come to the library during the day and have them talk to them because most seniors don't like to drive at night. I'll be honest. That was my hardest thing was getting here. But there are places where you can meet. And you need to talk to people one-on-one. I mean, you really have to face them because you know what? If you don't, they're not interested. Meeting, I live in a community and it's a great way. I mean, we're mostly seniors in my community. And I was talking to them all. I mean, all my neighbors about it, saying I was coming to this meeting tonight and why I was coming. Because we need to have something. None of us, most of us out of state, we don't know people. So we talk about it a lot in my community. You need to talk at different communities. There are a lot of condo associations in this town now. And when I started, we first came here 20 years ago. We got a place that we came on weekend. So it was much, there was not a lot of condos here then. But they all have associations and I'm sure they'd all be willing to come and let us talk. Doesn't make a difference. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Shelley. A lot has been said that I agree with totally. Leg work is huge. Getting out to the associations, the condos, maybe hitting up the grocery stores, sitting on a Saturday morning when a lot of people are, because I'm lovely retired now, I'm just retired. I could do during the week when a lot of the senior citizens come out to different places. I know there's a family page on Facebook that I see a lot of posts on. That might be a way to get out some posts. I don't think telephoning is going to help because most people don't answer their phones now. So there's, I think leg works the biggest thing. Sean. I totally agree with everybody. This has to be an outreach that we can't expect people to come to us. Some of the other folks that I think when you reach out to and are the staff, what does the library, what does the library, if you ask Jane Kearns, what would you need to do a better job on what you see the need is? Operations and maintenance, what does our town operations and maintenance, Bruce Horror, and his folks, what are they expecting? The public safety, fire and police, what are they, so getting input, not only from the most important who are the users of the population, but also the other stakeholders that are involved in the successful operation of this building. Thank you. Next question, Gordon. First thing, everybody here for putting, you're stepping into the ring, so to speak. My question is two parts. One is access. I've been, I was born and raised in this town. I went through a lot of the programming and feel very fortunate to have participated in those things and had a lot of mentors over the years. I've heard you talk about young children, middle aged, and I will call maybe the other piece of seasoned veterans. How would you maybe think about programming till, like we talk about community, how would you like link some of those ages together because it would be really cool, I think, to have some tutelage of people that have been retired for years to come back and just help foster like some learning, whether it's a read aloud, whether it's something in the community. Like what do you vision for? It's kind of a loaded question, I know, but for programming to kind of link the age groups that could be possibilities within this. So that makes sense. Mary Clear is up for this one. I think that's a great question. I want to like kind of step back and answer part of that and then answer your direct question. And it's just that I was thinking about, I work in Winooski at the Winooski O'Brien Community Center. And I work next to it technically, but I walk through the main part of the community center to get to my job. And so I've been there for four years and just observed what having a space can mean to communities and like the, there have been things that are really successful there and things that have been not so successful there. I don't think that's something we need to model off of, but it strikes me that it's important to have more than space. It's important to have that programming because if you build a beautiful space, you still need to have people who run things. Does that make sense? They have a whole bunch of kids who hang out there after school, but unfortunately there's chaos because there is no structure to any of the programming or at least to that window of time. So taking a step back, what I have as you and for Williston, I mean, I think that there's something to be said for having people in the same space at the same time doing programming directed towards their individual groups and age ranges. And there's definitely the sort of like informal things that happen from that, having people in the same space at the same time. But I think it would be great to have official, whether it's mentoring programs, whether it's cooking classes, whether it's something similar to the CVU extension kind of programs, but hosting them closer to home where they might be, people might be able to get there more easily. I think those would all be great ideas for a community center. And ideally we would have spaces where maybe there's a kitchen or maybe there's a classroom type space, maybe there's more comfy coffee house couches type space where you could have speakers, you could have slideshows, you could have various different formats that might invite that opportunity. And I think as we were to move forward, we need to identify obviously key stakeholder groups like I think is it John that was talking about who are those people that will be on the ground working in this facility and what are things that people have brought up in the past and what's the institutional knowledge there and sort of ideas that those people have and what will that look like for them? Who will be working in this space? Who will be not just attending it, but also working there? Yeah, and what are their priorities? I guess that's sort of where I would start to answer. I'm not sure if I directly answer your question, but I think, yeah, yeah, I mean, there's a myriad of things. Molly. I think older people working with little kids, you know, the elementary school kids and reading with them, helping them with homework after school is a great way thing to work with kids, I mean. And seniors like to do that. I've been in that school program. Every volunteer I had was a senior because they like working with younger kids. And it's a nice thing to, if we had a place to do it, it'd be nice to do. If seniors out, if they have a place where seniors can go on their day, they'll stay and work with kids after school because they're already there doing things. And I mean, in having a kitchen, you could cook with them. I mean, there's so much you could do if we had a center to work with. I mean, that's what I was looking for. As she said, she works in Winooski. I served in Winooski, but for the eight years I was here up until just this year because I had nothing else. I loved it, but you need to have a place to go to work with kids. And you need a place for the seniors to go and do things too. The only thing we have for seniors, other than Majang every other twice a month is a bag lunch and reading a book. Well, if you don't want to do that, there's nothing much else to do. There are no senior activities. Have you answered the question? I forgot what the question was. The feedback is good. Okay. Oh, Sally. I agree with her. One of the comments that did come to me was a grandma or grandpa in me cooking class. Bring your little ones and come into the center and cook with them. I like reading with children. I actually do mentoring with a fifth grader once a week too. So I know children love to be with older people, not that any of us are older, anything. So I really enjoy doing that. And I think that if it's there, they're gonna use it. They're definitely gonna use it. Thank you. John. My experience is to get, to create these links and these cooperation is through call it mission focused. I'm very active in youth aviation activities in the state of Vermont. And this past, as an example, this past Sunday, we had women in aviation hosted at Beta Technologies. We had 104 young women who attended. And we had everything from 90 year old retired pilots, military, the guys that fly the women that fly the dark helicopter, the Medevac. And it was really, I thought, great because we brought a whole wide segment of people and ages together. But the glue that held it together was this thing of, in this particular case was, the aviation aspect. And so I think getting the focus is a great way to create these links. Oh, thank you. Lynn. Okay, so that's a great question. Thanks Gordon. And I think the different ways, well first you don't need to recreate a lot of things because the school right now has the inner gen program where they use the school and the library and kids that are in fifth through eighth grade go and they read a book with a senior citizen and then they come and discuss it. Or it's not necessarily a senior citizen but someone that has time to do this. So they have that, which is, I think your kids were involved in it too. So. Wouldn't be surprised. There's that and there's the mentoring program which are two examples of times where we bring people together. So I think one thing Gordon to think about is when you look at our recreation program, which is great, all the time we set up programs many times it's set to an age. And I think you have to kind of change the system and recreate it and say, well, okay, you wanna play frisbee golf but so don't I. We can have a certain time where anyone goes. Doesn't make any difference what the ages is. Cooking is brilliant. Reading is brilliant. There's so many different things that we can do. I think this community such as there's an opportunity to find, you have to find a time that works for both kids and different age people. And it's not necessarily, I mean during the school day it doesn't work. During the summer sometimes the works could be weekends but you have to find a time where we have a common interest aviation and it's going on in this area which is that's a brilliant idea. I think you find a common interest that people have and rather than have it geared towards, okay, you've gotta be six to seven. And there is, by the way, there is a purpose for having ages together for certain activities but we shouldn't have our whole life be with just our age because really in the real life when you're together with your friends, your families, you've got people of all ages and we've all learned to play together and really I think about the playing aspect but I know that the intergen program was awesome. The mentoring program is awesome and it's this community center I see provides an opportunity for us to take care of Little Gordon and for you to feel like you're important. And that's all ages. I think we can find a way for all ages to get together and I think you have to have it be a focus point which up until now, I mean it hasn't been a focus point because we've just tried to provide programs for different people and a lot of times it's through the library, it's through the rec department but there is a lot to happen. We have a lot of accesses and availabilities around here but to have a community center where we could bring people together of different ages I think would be pretty incredible. So I just think we don't need to separate. And I like that you're thinking that way, Gordon. Thank you. Thank you all. Next question. I want to start my question by saying I'm very much in favor of this project and I really want it to happen and you folks are incredible so thank you for your participation. I say that because my question is probably going to be more like a eat your vegetables kind of question. Whenever we have a big expansion of town government, like this, we've done this with the fire department, we've done this with other agencies and departments, entities and departments. One of the things that I'm always concerned about is that we have to pay for it. We have to pay for the ongoing cost of it and property taxes and sales, the 1% sales tax that we get, which is very up and down. So this is a scoping study so I'm wondering if I could ask what are your thoughts on the getting a process in place where we get input from people as we're going forward as to what the level of volunteer participation would be and any of you have any ideas for a structure going forward for recruiting basically free help for the thing to be run so that our ongoing cost isn't prohibitive. So Mella, you're first. I knew that, let's go. A lot of people want to volunteer. I mean, I ran a program for 15 years for at risk kids after school. We were all volunteers, including me who ran it. People are willing to volunteer if it's for a good cause. And if you get to them the right way, they're going to do it. She volunteers at the school. I mean, I'm just volunteering until this year. And I didn't know about the school program. I'm going to talk to you about it afterwards because people are looking for things to do and if it's a good cause, they're going to do it. You just have to approach them the right way. I came from Connecticut, it was a bigger town, I will admit it. But we had lots and lots of volunteers. People were so willing, I had to turn people away. So if you do it the right way, you will get people to do it. Even old people like me. Sally, you're next. I agree the mentor program at school is so well run and they have no problem at all getting volunteers. If with mine, it's what day would you like to do it and what time. So if we go out and we ask people, when is it you would like to volunteer and get actually time frames of when people could be there. It would be wonderful. The other thing is, I don't know if the rec department would have to oversee it. We obviously would need someone there during the time that it's open. Or who would oversee it? But hopefully there'd be someone there to ask questions if someone has questions while they're there. It could be open maybe only certain hours or it could be open weekends. But I know there's a lot of people, I agree. I know I can find other people that would volunteer. They got me to volunteer. I've done many different volunteer jobs over the years even while I worked. And I know there's people out there that would love to volunteer. Within my own neighborhood, I know there's many people I could probably go out and get to volunteer. By the way, John. Another thing is the agencies that are already active. For example, there's H-WEL, which is an agency in this area that caters to senior citizens. And they continually host programs at senior centers or community centers at other towns. And we just are participating in one in music. So they have the resources, they have contacts. They're ready to host a senior luncheon, for example. Come in, you provide the location. They will bring the resources in. So that's another thing besides asking for individual volunteers. Is other agencies or associations that are interested in working with the community further to accomplish a long mission on purpose? When? So let me think, how do I want to approach this? First of all, I think if you take a look at what John was talking about is one really good way to look at it. I think it was a long time ago when I was on the rec committee. We hosted a senior jamboree. It wasn't through age well, and I apologize, I can't remember who was through. And it was so well attended and it became very apparent that there is populations that we're not taking care of. So I think you're right. There are lots of people that want to volunteer and the trick is, this is me thinking, the trick is you've got to find what's your area of interest, Ted, that you're so passionate about, that you're willing to say, I want to give my time to this. And there is, this community's got vast interests and people that are willing, I think, to volunteer. It's more than volunteering for an hour though. It's got to be you're committed to what you're interested in. So it can't, I mean, I know that the library be, you can't throw everything on the rec committee because they're overworked. But I think you have, you'd have to have a group of people who would include the rec committee that is one of the jobs is getting people that are willing to volunteer. But to get the volunteers, I think you have to have a program that would stir an interest for someone to say, you know what, Tuesday night at 5.30, I'm willing to go over and I'm going to give an hour to learning how to skydive. Because I think that's what Williston needs to do. So I think if you find the interest and then you get people that are committing to it, I think that's the key. Finding the interest and finding people that are committed to giving that time. I think there's people that want to do it. I think you have to be careful that you don't always ask Sally to do it because you get burnout that way. The real beauty of this, and I love that you're thinking about this Ted, is that for this community center to work, it's a total community effort. It doesn't mean just the building. It means the people that are, because the building we need, but it's the people we need. I mean, that's why we're doing it. We're doing it because of people and we're doing it for services. So I think finding people that want to give time, but I think also your key is finding the interest that they might want to do. I mean, you have to sell the community center. And selling the community center is just saying, I'm not coming over just to do hopscotch. I want to do something else. So that's what I think. I think finding the interest, because if you look at all the programs that have been successful with the rec committee, it's people that are, well, the sports programs are kids, parents that are helping out their kids, but like Sally's cooking, it's she's interested in cooking and she wants to turn other people onto that. So we have people who also don't want to do that, but they don't have an avenue to do it right now. This could be it. Thank you. Very clear. I think what many of you are pointing out is there's a big difference between having volunteers who run programs in a community center and having volunteers who run a community center. And it can be much easier to find people who can run programs. And for that, I think, and really actually for both of those solutions, I think we could go to like not reinventing the wheel. John pointed out there's a lot of organizations, there's a lot of stakeholders in our community that exist already, that we should be working with from the beginning. And hopefully that will be one way of achieving the volunteers needed. I think there's also a question of scale. And as the project moves forward and it becomes clear what it will involve, is this something that is going to have something like a pool? Is this a library or is this a rec center and library or is this a library with a kitchen? And are there ways of funding besides grants and besides tax-based funding, can we invite people from other towns where there's a bigger contribution if you live outside of Williston, but it's free if you're from Williston. I think we would need to think about budget on a bigger scale and learn about what other communities do because this is not the first community center to be built in the US, these exist. And I think we can learn from those and find out what they do and also look at Williston, what percentage of this should come from taxpayer dollars? What percentage of this like the operation expenses, not just the capital costs, but what percentage should come from events every year? What percentage of the budget should be or what percentage of sort of like workman hours do we need to be volunteer? I think we need to do a little bit more investigation and sort of, yeah, learn from other places what that can look like and go from there because we will need some of those to be paid positions. It does not work. There will be volunteer burnout if there are not paid regular positions that organize and that, yeah, that are consistent. Thank you. Jeff. So this committee, I've always envisioned, or I shouldn't say envisioned, but I just get this idea it's gonna be a tough committee and not tough like hard to be a part of, but because what you need to accomplish is pretty big. And a piece of that is all the diversity of information and perspectives and ideas and demands you're gonna be hearing. And I thought this before we started these interviews and your answers have only reinforced my feeling there, the diversity of what you've talked about tonight. So my question and then I wanna add, I really liked Lynn's, I don't wanna single Lynn out, but I like the comment she made about think big. But we also have to remember that there's gonna be some financial restrictions on this also. So if I could boil that down to a question of, are you capable of taking this wide diversity of opinions of what's needed and that diversity of opinions is gonna be whether we need a pool. We've certainly heard that many times or expansion of the library. It may not be one facility. It may be Wilson really needs more than one facility. Maybe we shouldn't just focus on a big building. There might be, we're gonna also need, I would ask you to think outside the box too. So the question I have is, are you capable of taking this huge bubble of information you're gonna be receiving in helping formulate it down to something that is somewhat concise and affordable. That might be the way I put it. So hopefully my comment, my question makes sense. Good luck answering it. Sally, you get the opportunity to answer. Lucky. I agree with you. I know I have a son who lives in Williston and when he heard, I told him what I was doing, he said, vote it down. That was his first comment and I was like, but you haven't even heard what I'm talking about. And so- That's part of the diversity. It is. And I know we're gonna hit roadblocks. I know it's gonna be tough. It's gonna be, we're gonna have to kind of do a little bit of this and we're not gonna please everybody. It's not possible to please everybody. So I'll do the best I can or the group will do the best they can to try to balance it, to make sure we're not taking too much money out of people's pockets, but also giving people what they would like and taking it from there. I know if we go big, it's gonna be a lot of dollars. Hopefully there's grants or something that we can grab on to. Maybe not, maybe. But I just know from my son's comment that if he gets to vote on it, he'll vote it down. So how sad is that? But I'll convince it. But it's gonna be a tough job. It's a very, very tough job. So I'll go into it with open mind, smiles and just keep going and write down everybody's comment and take note and say we'll do the best we can. John. This is an iterative process and I think it's important to distinguish between what and the how. What is, what do we want? What are our expectations? And the document that's typically used in the industry is something called the owner's requirements specification or owner's project requirements. So you gather information and you put it together and then you look at the how. How are we gonna do this? And what inevitably happens in every project is the what? All the expectations exceed the budget and the practical. Then there's this trade-off of really trying to decide what's the most important? What do we really gotta focus on? Because ultimately what's gonna happen is this project or projects is going to sugar down to what the town can afford and what the residents are going to approve. And that means not everybody's gonna get everything they want. But, and that's where communication is important. As we put this owner's project requirement together and we get all these requirements and we start documenting them and putting them into this document. And then as the design professionals and the town starts looking at us as well, we can't afford this, we can't do that, but that's communicated. Not gonna be, not everybody's gonna be happy, but we are going to be working towards what is the most important and what can we afford? When? Well, actually as this process right here when I first applied for this, I thought this is a big deal. And then as I'm listening to everyone talk and I'm listening to these questions, it's become a bigger deal. And it's not, this is not gonna be easy. And I have said, can I do it? And I think I can. My main thing is thinking, Wilson's worth this. And it has to be done right. Am I the right person? Well, I don't know. But I am doing this because I think, I do want to think big and I do think it's more than one deling. I'll be honest with that. And I think that we can do this, but we have to approach it carefully. And we have to be thoughtful with what we're gonna do. Well, do we really need to have this other piece? We already have something that works. And I think we have to take an inventory of what Wilson has and what Wilson can use. And what do we wanna add to that to make this center that could be pretty, pretty gigantic for Wilson. So it's a big job. And I don't know if I'm the right person, but I will say I would do my best. That's all I can do. Mary Claire. Just unmute. I think one of the things that I keep coming back to in my mind is the question of, okay, so what is our scope? And sort of what is the goal right of this committee right now? I think you guys have alluded to there's multi-steps of this process. And we have to start somewhere. And there's a ton of excitement and energy and clearly a demonstrated need. And there needs to be clarity around that need. And then you're right, we do have to kind of figure out what we want and what we can do. And I think there's gonna be, I get back to this leap of, if we go bigger, there's a point where it becomes self-sustaining. And that's a question I have. It's a question I've lived in communities where there were community centers where you could have a birthday party. There was a walking track. There's a pool. There's a gym. There's Pilates classes. There's chair yoga. And it was $28 a month for a citizen, which is like pretty incredible to have access to all of that. And not necessarily coming from a huge taxpayer base. So I know that these things are possible and I know that I've seen them. And I think in terms of like coming back to this project and this community, you're right, we need to be really clear with our communication. We'd need to figure out as a committee where we're even starting and thinking about what is our scope? Kind of define those roles and communicate that really clearly at every step of the way. Because it is the kind of thing where we'll just snowball. And I think totally right in terms of funding, there's a lot of people who would not wanna be paying for this out of their taxes. And so being creative is gonna be important and looking for those resources and being really clear about where we are in that phase, I guess. And where we are in the process and what we're looking for so that people don't just sort of like voted down before we even know what we are capable of and what the actual details would be, how much, what would the numbers be? Because we have to kind of learn and figure that out and that will take some time. Thank you. Molly. We're gonna have to do the best we can. I don't know. I've never been on a committee like this before. I'm really interested in this. I wanna work hard on it and I agree with you. I think we need more than one building probably. And it's gonna be a hard task, but you've gotta convince the community that it's worth it. That's the hardest thing to do because it isn't gonna be expensive. We're gonna have to get grants. We're gonna have to find the money to buy, pay for it. We have a lot of retired people which you know which are unfixed incomes. To me, I think it's worth raising our taxes to do because I think it's an important thing. Not every senior's gonna feel the same way I do. And but I think it's an important thing. And I think that we're just gonna have to work as a committee and see what we can do and how much we can do. We don't know until we stop. That's the thing. We don't know until we start working on it as a committee. Thank you. Any last pressing question? If that, thank you so much. Our task now is to select four from the 10 folks that have applied and will be back our next meeting in the first of November to interview the other five. And I'm hoping that we can make a decision that night. In the meantime, there'll be six of you who won't go forward, but there's lots of other opportunities in town that we're looking for volunteers for. So thank you so much for being here tonight. All of you. Thank you. Thank you. John, my daughter attended that event on Sunday. And it honestly was one of the best times entirely. Thank you so much for volunteering for that. She's on level in terms of mathematics and she can at least do it again and get the flight hours in and then alter it. Okay. Yeah. Can I ask you a quick question? Are you ready? Yeah. Excellent. Yeah. Now that we're in the loop. Go ahead, Mary Claire. I just have questions about the mechanics of the committee and whether there will be other people who are, you know, a select board member who will be part of it or four seems really small to me. And so it was just the reasoning for that number and what the mechanics of it will be. Four community members at large, then a select board member, a library trustee and a recreation and parks committee member. And then the towns working with the architectural consulting for Black River Design and they've assembled a team that also includes civil engineer and a community outreach engagement specialist as well. Thank you. Is that the same company that worked with the park at Allenbrook? Right. I think so. Different firm. Similar objective. Okay. Great. Thank you. Yeah. So we'll move on to the fire department staffing operational update and I'm just gonna leave this off and then introduce Chief Collette. Thank you, Terry. So this evening, I think just about a year ago, almost today, the board received a report from our fire department and our consultant AP Triton on analyzing where our department was and our service delivery. And then I'll say that one of the major components of our last FY23 budget process was looking at increased career staffing in our fire department. We were able to, after support at the meeting, hire those nine new firefighters, EMTs, put them through a rigorous training academy last spring. We had those nine new members join the department on shift in June. Now we're looking at really operationally what that means for the community after three full months of having that level of operation. So Chief Collette's here this evening. He's led this effort from the beginning. Great for the select board in the community to hear how things are going. Things are going very well. So the Chief's prepared a good presentation this evening and I'll get that up on the screen and he'll walk everybody through it here. Super, it's my pleasure to be back here, like Eric says, about a year later after we came to you, you know, really in tough times, tough times for emergency services and our ability to serve the community. The, the pride that I want to share with you tonight probably cannot be relayed in just a simple presentation. So what I'd like to do is take you through a little bit of some background here. Unfortunately, Eric, I was realizing after that I sent you the PDF so we won't show the video, but there was a little bit of drama here in the opener, but that's fine. We'll get beyond that, you don't need that. For those folks that are on Zoom, don't know me, my name is Aaron Kolei, I work as your fire chief and it's my honor to sit here tonight. The first slide that we're going to go over, Eric, if you could pull up that. It's just really the data of where we sit today. This is a snapshot that is the foundation for all of the other metrics that you will see here in slides that follow up. This is a quick view since January of the incident responses for the department for this year. That runs through September 30th, so that's when we hit stop and then started to work some of these metrics. We're about, I apologize as I have to put my glasses on, about 120 calls ahead of our prior year to date, so an 8% increase at the time of this printing. We were at 1,500 and just about 1,550 responses. We continue to show a little bit of an increase in the number of EMS runs that we do versus fire and that's basically, that change is centered around the way we capture incident reporting in the fire department. That number used to be higher because we were capturing incidents such as burn reports or excuse me, burn permits as a fire incident that was no longer counted as emergency incidents in the fire department, it's a separate system. So 37 fire responses of all types so far this year and 1,000 plus EMS runs, false alarms are at 272 as you can see and there's a sprinkling of other service calls and good intent calls in there. So we've done a lot better job of capturing our metrics through better incident reporting. We ran out a new operational guideline that helped guide and trained our personnel on how to actually follow the National Fire Incident Reporting System and that's where this metric comes from. The next slide please. So a little story on June 1st, we still had to increase our staffing. We had hired the personnel but they were in recruit academy so they had not gone on shift on the 1st of June and this is an incident that happened at the intersection of Industrial Avenue and Essex Road where the motor vehicle crash with a vehicle on fire and you can see this is an actual video that was taken by a bystander. The staffing for that day is one firefighter on the engine so a single fire officer on the engine and two firefighters that were staffing the ambulance. When units arrived on scene this is actually a two vehicle crash. There is a full-size pickup truck that's about 200 or so yards down Industrial Avenue with an occupant still in it and this vehicle is well involved in fire and we don't know where the driver of this vehicle is. The video shows the fire officer pulling a hose line by himself. He's also operating the pump. He's also running the incident command function summoning other resources, additional resources to the scene. I was still in the firehouse that afternoon or that evening and heard the call, heard their level of distress and responded from the station to the incident. Next slide please. So we talked about critical staffing as part of the study the AP Triton had done and so this was a real example of this. The operator of the vehicle had been assisted out of the vehicle by bystanders. When I showed on location, the hose line was off of the truck. The members that were on the ambulance didn't know where the patient was and their priority was to try to get into the car to make sure that somebody wasn't trapped in the car that was on fire. They donned their fire gear and SCBA and then went to operate the hose line. They started applying water on the car just as I was pulling up to the point where the bystanders then came over to draw their attention to the person, the patient that they had pulled out of the car or assisted out of the car. I don't know which is more accurate. That patient had been pulled over onto the green belt where bystanders were attending to them. The when seeing the level of injuries of that occupant, now that fire crew that was now suppressing the fire, trying to check to see if there was anybody inside was pulled away to do emergency medical care. At that time, I donned my personal protective equipment in an air pack and started extinguishment of the vehicle to the point where we could do the primary search of the car to see if anybody was still trapped inside of the car. Enough of the fire got knocked down that we could see that the car didn't have any other occupant to it. And at that point, the car was destroyed. There was nothing else to save. It was brought to my attention that there was another patient down on the other vehicle. This all unfolded. We hit working incident tones for the department and we ended up having two patients, two off-duty call staff firefighters respond later on to the scene. The deputy came in from home and one call staff firefighter responded. Next slide, please. So what did that mean for us for the department? So what happened, as I said, the occupant of the car was assisted outside. The fire suppression crew initiated that extinguishment and then were pulled away to treat the patient. The fire extinguishment was delayed. Even then, when I took over the fire extinguishment, we didn't put that fire out because I went to deal with patient care for the next patient in the other vehicle. The hospital does a trauma report with a quality assurance team. And so they tell us when we don't meet the trauma benchmarks. And so this call, we didn't meet the trauma benchmarks. And so the incident got flagged and came back to us and said, what happened? Why did you fall short here? We didn't get the patient to the hospital within the 20 minute benchmark as the level one trauma center expects us to do. And so it was a real eye-opener and we have to defend that now. So we have to defend that to the trauma team. And so we write the narrative to explain why we couldn't do that. And we put this exact incident, explained that to them with the staffing challenges. And then so they appreciated that perspective. They often didn't see that. I'm gonna, this is the baseline. This was one of many incidents that we were really operating in the deficit and not performing and not giving our citizenry the level of care that they deserve. Next slide, please. So what the data shows is since we put the new staff on, they went on shift on June 13th, not everyone was fully vetted in operating all of the apparatus. We still needed to get them trained in the daily operation of EMS and fire. So it wasn't until July that we actually started incorporating them. We were writing heavy oppositions, meaning we were writing three people on the ambulance to try to train them into the crew chief role in the ambulance, the inner working of the hospital, all that extra extra. But by July, most of that had been worked out. And for those people that had a skill set that we could vector, we use them to maximize their potential. The graph on the left, which says Mutual Aid Given shows the trend in the demand for service outside of our town. So I'm not saying that anyone town is more vulnerable, but I would say this shows that Chittenden County and in the greater area, the demand for service continues to rise. So I believe I explained to you early in the presentation last year, is it almost becomes a domino effect where we will go to back up a community such as Richmond or Heinsberg or Essex. And then the next thing you know that next call comes in and their ambulance or their fire department is in our community. We kind of chase each other around. So the demand for service continues to rise across the county. This was never more evident than last Friday when the hospital went on diversion for a period of time. And they actually call us and said, listen, unless they're super sick, we want you to take them to a walking care clinic. And so that has not happened in the recent past for UVM Medical Center. It was a very real fact about how, what the status of healthcare and pre-hospital healthcare looks like in Chittenden County right now. What I want to show here on the right graph is the mutual aid received. And this is where you can start to see successes. So historically we're running over 20 requests for mutual aid through April, May and June. And most of those are EMS calls where we had to summon the outside assistance for mutual aid ambulances because we had concurrent calls and couldn't staff a second ambulance. We changed our operational matrix in July and I'll take that, I'll show you that here later on in the presentation. But you can see the dramatic effect what happened once we put that staff on where the mutual aid received dropped to an all-time low for the year of four requests. And we saw that again in September. I wish I could say that that's happening again here in October, but we've had some staffing challenges at the firehouse with a couple of members out on leave right now. But even with the August numbers, we see that trend line continue to decrease. And that's because of the ability to meet the concurrent call demand. Next slide, please. The concurrent call demand for the year is about 34 or 35 concurrent calls per month. So that means that on average, 35 times a month, when we're on an incident, we're out, another call comes in. So that continues to hold true for the most part. If we can take it to the next slide, I'll try to show you exactly what that means. So even though the concurrent call numbers continue to have a high number of overlapping incidents, our demand for mutual aid resources into the community showed that decrease with only four 11 and four again in September, that was a gap that we were able to address by cross staffing apparatus and putting a second ambulance in service or having a second staffed apparatus to be able to address another fire response. Next slide, please. So this is a bit of a busy slide and I'll try to take you through it so you understand that the top line shows the incident responses by month with the number. So around 170 or so incidents responses per month is our average number. And I apologize because I'm colorblind so I think that it's orange or it may be red. So the solid fill graph that you see there, that's career staff incident hours. So hours of commitment on an incident by the career staff and showing what they're doing. So you see that spike when the career staff started to go in when we increased the staffing with the minimum staffing with the new nine hires, you see that spike up there with the two tenths if you will. And the July number dipped down a little bit as you would expect because the number of the demand for service actually dropped in July a little bit. The blue filled graph at the bottom there shows actual call staff hours. And I put that there only for context to say that call staff aren't doing the majority of the work. It's really the career staff that continues. We continue to have a decline in call staff participation. The response from home model is honestly limited to a couple of people and we continue to endorse or encourage a shift model where call staff would come in and ride a 12 hour shift when they have availability. We're asking our call staff to do that at least twice a month for 12 hour shifts. But the burden of that exposure shows that the career staff are the folks that are out answering the call. Next slide please. The call staff payroll chart, you saw this chart back in November of last year when we shared it to you. We just updated that with current call staff payroll and to show where that number has gone. You see a spike in November through January and February of last year where we actually saw call staff payroll increase. Well, I'd love to say that we found the solution to increase call staff participation but what that was was members of the call staff that were on the fire department that were vying for the full time career positions and were showing up and trying to do a lot of extra work. That's what it was. And it was limited to a couple of folks. And so once they got hired, though that anomaly brought that crashing back down so that trend line continues to follow what had shown us historically. Next slide please. So the following slides will be some examples of successes. This is the two firefighters on the right. I'll just take a moment of personal privilege. This is their first fire. They're like the first fire that they've been to. And so we tried to capture, this is a mutual light fire in the city of South Burlington where this ended up with four fire departments on scene that you probably saw on the news. But that is just these folks were well trained, well prepared, got off the truck ready to work and went right to work to help property loss. The competency, the capability they demonstrated there is the same competency and capability that they are gonna demonstrate for us tonight. So they were the kudos to the captain and all the staff that worked to make our recruit academy a success. So taking into what that new staffing model looks like, the town assigned a new memorandum of understanding with IFF local 4611. They, we operate a five person minimum staffing where we staff three personnel on the engine and two personnel on the rescue. Each shift has seven personnel assigned. And then with the day staff, you get the captain, the deputy and myself, if everybody's there. What happens is that we'll start with the five and then subsequent staffing will go into a float pool if you will, they actually, their PPE kind of sits in between three apparatus. If it's a second medical call, they pull their gear and they go to take the second ambulance and we staff the second ambulance. If it's a second fire, if it's a fire response in a hydrogen district, they staff the ladder truck. If it's a fire response in a rural district that has no hydrogen, they staff engine three, which is the water supply truck. So we're able to put that water on the wheels on the road immediately. We did this in concept and we wanted to gather some data to see what that hard numbers looked like and we continues to see successes with it today. I'll take you through some of the operational benefits on the next slide. What does that mean? When we were able to staff engine three, that means that we show on location with 2,500 gallons of water for the initial fire attack. That's plenty of water for a one or two bedroom private dwelling fire. That means that we can have the majority of that fire extinguish with the water that shows on location there. That's a 1,500 more gallons of water than we've had in the past and its ability to put it right on the road. The second ambulance is kind of a no-brainer, right? That means there's no generally in the arrival of the mutual aid ambulance. We can initiate immediate patient care. We can wrap, continue rapid transport. There's a continuum of care. So once you establish rapport with that patient, you don't have to then say, I'm sorry patient, I'm gonna introduce you to this mutual aid ambulance crew chief and they're gonna be the person that's gonna take you to the hospital now. Often you've been there, you've established that rapport for up to eight minutes, 10 minutes, 12 minutes with that patient while you wait for that second ambulance. This is just a much nicer way to do business, a way to treat people correctly and ensures that we meet the quality assurance indicators for the trauma center. Ladder four, Jeff, you were on me about this, like who's driving our ladder truck? We've got a million dollar ladder truck and nobody to drive it. And so we're solving that problem through this new matrix. Allows us to get the aerial ladder there, ground ladder, search and rescue, rapid intervention which we pointed out in the AP Triton. Technical rescue equipment, we're still working to outfit that truck with technical rescue equipment as the budget allows and ventilation. You see us roll on fire alarms, fire responses now and we're actually able to operate to some more increased efficiency and deliver a better product, a safer product. Next slide please. Here's some examples of how we've been able to meet that operational need. This is a commercial vehicle versus a private personal vehicle crash, so that's a roll off dumpster, a compactor dumpster, that's a heavy truck. That front axle of that truck is completely removed off of there. So you have a bunch of things going on. You have an injured driver of the passenger car. You have an injured driver of the truck. You have a hazardous material spill that's active. That truck is actually leaking both diesel fuel and oil from the motor because of the damage that's gone on. We ended up with this incident staffing, engine one and engine two. Both that day we had split up for some training and ladder four was coming back from an incident. It's actually a mutual aid fire that we were in Dunning, I believe it was the town of Shelburn or South Burlington. So that's why ladder four had four personnel. That was, there were some recalled people from the career staff that were on duty there that day. But when we showed on location, we were able to establish and command, organize the scene, treat the two patients that were involved in the crash, control the hazardous material spill, control the fire suppression liability with a suppression line. Traffic control was also an issue, as you can imagine on this busy intersection. And then we also established a liaison with Vermont DEC because of the hazardous materials spill. And then we had to work on the hazmat remediation plan. So all of these things happened and it was like the first time we all came back and did like a post incident analysis and said, oh my goodness, this is how it's supposed to work. And so a great success and a great learning point for all of the staff. The next slide takes us to a more recent event here on the 29th of September. Maybe you saw this on our social media page. This is a commercial vehicle fire on the highway. This truck is hauling pallets of five eighths oriented strandboard plywood. And it has a cover on top of it. The truck's 30% involved on arrival. The aluminum from the truck is actually melting onto the highway. And we were that day, engine was staffed with three. The rescue was staffed with two. The deputy, because it was in the daytime, came out of the office. He operated engine three. I came out of the office. I operated ladder one or ladder four because it was a tractor trailer. We didn't have any other information. Often you need to use the elevated master stream for that tractor if it's a box truck. We were able to staff all those apparatus where we formed incident command, performed traffic safety. We had a dedicated apparatus operator. We had two fire attack hose lines and we were able to mitigate this incident. There was other fire units on scene, the South Burlington Fire Department sent an engine and an ambulance only because the truck that when it started on fire was in South Burlington. And bonus, stopped. It was in our community. So, but we didn't need their resources. We ended up saying, hey, we got it. And thank you very much. So an anomaly where usually they would have been to the scene where we actually could handle this with our own resources. And this is a great mentoring opportunity here. You see one of our senior fire fighter candidates, Eric Martins, who's now mentoring in the incident command role on this with myself working right beside him. So in our short staff profile, this is nothing that would ever been able to happen. We ran a number of concurrent calls and we continued to do this. We just grabbed this snapshot. One of the tenants sent me an email. He knew we were going to do a presentation on this and said, listen, I don't know if you've paid attention to how busy we've been all day, but we've actually been taking that resource pool and we've been running both rescue one, rescue two, and we're alternating calls because why one truck is, one ambulance is dedicated at the hospital and not available, that next call comes in, the engine goes out, first response, the staff that was on the resource pool has gone over and they'll staff that second ambulance. So on this day, we had these four concurrent calls and we were able to meet every one of these calls with our own staffing profile. So, and we didn't have to wait for an outside resource or an outside ambulance. This is a more dramatic fire. This is at 1.30 in the morning on September 8th. Incident gets reported in as the garden shed next to the home is on fire. The occupant of the home doesn't know that the garden shed is on fire. The neighbor sees that the shed is on fire, they go over and knock on the door and alert the occupant to get out. The then call 911 is called someplace in there. The fire is auto exposed onto the dwelling so the house is now going on arrival. So not only the garden shed's going, but the house is also going. That day we had engine one staff with three, the ambulance was staffed with two, and engine three was also staffed with two, even at 1.30 in the morning. So we had a full shift of our seven firefighters. This went to an automatic working incident. The police department showed on location, said you've got fire showing, this house is on fire as well. Lieutenant on duty upgraded it to a working incident. We put a mutual aid engine in our station that evening. But when we hit the working incident tones, we had three personnel respond in from home, including myself. This fire took us through to about 4.30 in the morning where we were committed. But the property loss versus the property saved and making sure that really the hero here is the neighbor. Don't let me misrepresent that we did anything dramatic other than stop the loss of the property and stop that to really this section of the home. The shed is a total loss. But these on any other day, if we only had a single operator and two people on the ambulance, this means a delay in water. When they showed up here, the truck, the tanker truck offloaded 1500 gallons of water went back down to Hurricane Lane onto the hydrant system, refilled their truck and came right back up. We were able to handle all of that with the staff that we had on duty, which is part of what we recognize as a risk, but here was it really happening out in real life. And the crew felt elated that they were able to help this property owner. And that's what I have. Thank you very much. Questions for the chief comments? Seems to be working. Great success to you. Yeah. Yeah. How's the, how's it feeling within the fire station in terms of, you know, we had discussed that, you know, with the new addition, it would be close to capacity for the fire station. How is the, how does that feel? It's been very positive with the exception being that we have some folks out on leave right now that, and then we had a resignation of an incumbent full-time staff. So we're trying to fill that. So we are kind of back at a little bit of a deficit and you don't realize it at the time what that extra single person means on that, but it does carry back a little bit. So it's, even that one person has placed this back, you're like, oh man, we saw how great it was when we're at full staff of seven and then even dropping to six or running at the minimum of five. You know, for instance, today, I think we're on incident eight or nine for today and they would really love to see that if we always had that seven. But we're, I would say that the staff understand this and feel like they're able, they've been finally given the resources to start being to do their job more effectively. Sort of related to that question is, if I understood, I think it's the first slide you showed. It's, there are three shifts. There are. Could you explain like how many staff are on for each shift so I could get a better sense of? Seven persons assigned, seven persons assigned to the 24 hour shift, but with vacation time or sick time, we will run down to that five. So you will have five on duty every day. And that's per that agreement with the. The memorandum of understanding. Okay, okay. And that in turn has allowed you to man the equipment essentially as appropriate. It's headed in the right direction. Okay, interesting correction there. It's headed in the right direction. And I only say that, Jeff, because we're not operating at that seven every day. Okay, right. So right now we're able to get that out. We'll get the three on the road. And for the daytime responses, there's been a number of times where the captain and myself will pair up and will be the people that staff that second ambulance or the captain and I or the deputy and I will be, like I said, the deputy took the tanker truck. I took the ladder truck. That still happens. Is that ideal? No, but we're here. We want to serve. We want to do the right thing. And the administrative work can wait. We're going to deal with the emergency at hand. Okay. So how critical would you explain that having seven always available is? I'd love to be there. I mean, we could dive into the data and let it speak for itself. Okay. I mean, you see it there. You see it with that last structural fire where we were able at 1.30 in the morning to have that dedicated tanker. Right now, tonight shift, we're at minimum staffing of five. You will see a dramatic delay if that truck gets on the road or if it gets on the road at all. Let me ask you a question slightly differently. When do you envision we'll see additional staff in the budget? Is that a fair question? I don't think so. I don't think so. Well, here's what I'll say. I'll say that we are trying to increase our capacity through the expansion of the call staff. I would say that if the call staff trends continue to decline and we don't see an increase that we may be back at some point in the future. And let me explain my question a little bit. There's the issue with the call staff. We also had, I'm going to call it the issue. That's not the right words, but it was somewhat risky to ask for nine new staff in one budget year. But I also recognize that we aren't there yet, if you will. You explained that in your answer. So what I'm trying to get a sense of is what is your opinion about how much of a priority should it be for the town to bring on the new two staff per shift? And then I'm trying to project when might that happen in terms of, because it's always going to happen as part of a budget. When is that going to happen in a budget? And a little bit of, tonight we're going to start talking about the schedule for the budget. It's not that far away. Oh my God. I was looking for a little preview for what I might see in the fire department budget. Yes, so you won't likely see, you're not going to see a proposal for increased staff in the next year. I think we need data to drive that. And just like the data drove where we went here, we're going to need more of that data. I think we need experience in our data, not just a brief snapshot of our data. We looked, and so in working on the budget today, and trying to look at forecasting of EMS demand in the community, as Eric knows, I like to delve into Excel, and Excel has a forecasting feature. Let's use the forecasting feature. The problem with Excel is that Excel can't predict what the other factors for our community, such as community growth. And it doesn't know that, right? And so the more development we continue to see, the more demand that we see for service, then we'll continue to have to match that. Town Manager Wells has challenged me to say, hey, let's, we need to know where that is, and how the demand for service equates to staffing, and how it's going to directly impact. So we won't be behind so far in the future. A piece of that for me is demand for service is a piece of it, but the other piece of it is the safety of the staff. So I guess that's a piece of the equation also. So that's exactly why we're running three persons on the engine and two on the ambulance, and not deviating in saying, all right, we're gonna run two persons on the engine and one person on the ladder truck, because what you lose is operational effectiveness. We know, and the science can show, that when you have three members on the engine, and if the ambulance is available for a total of four members that can put a single line in operation, that they can do it much more efficiently, rapidly, more effectively than when you, if you were to run that engine with simply two people, one person that's gonna run the pump and the other person that stretched the hose line, and maybe somebody else that wants to do ladder work. The science shows that the quicker that we get water on the fire, the outcomes improve, and that's why we run that staffing model so aggressively. We need people on that first-do engine to get quick water on the fire. We need people on that first-do engine and ambulance to address our EMS concerns, to initiate rapid resuscitation of our critical patients. We've seen an influx of high-acuity EMS patients, which I can't explain to you here because of some of the personal health information and what those calls, but we've seen some very sick patients lately, and the benefit of our paramedic program and increased staffing has directly impacted the way that we're able to treat those patients and give them a level of care that they haven't seen before. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. Good, thank you for your presence. Thank you very much. Thank you. Great. So we'll move on to motor vehicle and traffic ordinance amendment, and Eric will leave us off, and Aaron Fickinson will give us an update on the criminal. So you have before you just evening some initial proposals for some amendments to the town's motor vehicle and traffic ordinance. Aaron's been the lead on this, working with department heads. She's prepared a memo and some possible redlined changes in the document. Aaron's gonna walk through the memo she's prepared, and this is a essential first reading for the board. So staff's looking for feedback. The board like to pursue an amendment process, and if so, this would be back on your agenda to consider a public hearing after that. So I'll turn it over to Aaron. So welcome, Aaron. So, hello. Eric gave a preview of how this process started, and it also included several department heads. So we had police, fire, public works, and additional staff that helped with the internal review. At some point, we also had to work with the Vermont office, or excuse me, I'm probably gonna not get this right. The agency of transportation to just get some confirmation on some miles that were, or excuse me, speed limits that were posted. In the ordinance itself, really, there's just a couple minor changes. The only really substantive change that I'll call dear attention is that we're recommending that there be some towing and storage fees added. And those fees were based on police called several towing agencies in the area to get what the going rate was. And without those fees listed in the ordinance, they had been going by the state limit, which was $20 per tow at the time. So they've had a real challenge finding towing companies to come and help them with the enforcement of towing. Appendix A is really mostly housekeeping edits. Again, it reflects some changes to the miles per hour, and that was just so that we are doing what the certificates on file with the agency of transportation have listed. We removed two speed limits that were listed as 25 miles per hour because for the ordinance, they were not necessary to include in the appendix. For appendices B and C, we just added stock yield signs and traffic control signals that had been placed since last time the ordinance was reviewed. For appendix D, there are four new suggested designated no parking areas. I can go over those if you'd like. Most of them are really from an angle of making sure that emergency vehicles can get through. So you'll notice that there's a addition of Governor Chitton-Inroad is included. And that's also near the Hadamout Outdoor Family Center. So there's been a lot of parking in that area. So we're just really trying to make sure that our emergency vehicles can get through. One, no parking area on Zephyr Road was removed because there was actually a physical change to that section of the road that made it where there is no parking. So it's no longer needed to be on the appendix. And the rest of the changes were really formatting consistency and just trying to crack some clerical typos and such to make sure that everything was up to date. And I'd be happy to answer any questions. Any questions for Aaron? They all look great and it's a lot of work and thank you. The, I was a little concerned with the change in section 10.2A winter parking. First of all, I didn't know that there's no parking on Willison Town Streets from December one through April one from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. So that was a good educational moment for me. But the part that used to read vehicles in violation of this ordinance may be towed away at the owner's expense in the event of a snowstorm or the event of past violations. And that's now been stricken. So now it's vehicles in violation of this ordinance may be towed away at owner's expense. So my thought is, you know, if somebody's having a Christmas party or it's Christmas Eve at 11 30 p.m. And there's a car parked on the road in a, you know, development like my development lawn would drive, that car could be towed. That's correct. Just because it's on the street. After 11 p.m. Even if there's no snowstorm or event of a past violation. That's correct. In practice, the police are very good about giving a warning for the first offense. So you don't get, you don't only get docked or either towing over a fine. I can speak from experience when people have visited for a weekend. Terry, I can just see cars outside your house. Well, pass midnight. Yeah. Got another call at McCaig's house. The board can go either direction on that one. There's a parking band in place, but there's one too. In practice, or who won't have a need to remove a car unless there was a wind drop or patients. Over the board wants to codify that. There's, I don't staffs open to the language either way. Well, I see your point. And whatever the right word is sympathetic towards it. So I would like to consider maybe some language there. Erin, I've got a couple of things. If you don't mind. No problem. Article five D, the first point I'm going to make is there was recently a Williston resident who was killed riding their bike. And that maybe was in the back of my mind as I read this. And I wonder if it talks about in regard to current road conditions. But I'm also wondering if it could be expanded to other users of the road, such as pedestrians, who have a right to be there. I can explore adding language. I know that we have to be careful with state statutes and such. I totally get that. We'll definitely look into that. And so yeah, thank you for bringing it up, and thank you for doing that. And then my second comment about article five, D, is the second sentence. Speeds that a reasonable person, which obviously doesn't mean me, would believe to be too. I just wonder, is this something that really should be in our ordinance? Because it's so subjective. Yes, it's so subjective. Somebody, you might have me, who is starting to, my driving is starting to slow down, unfortunately. And what might be reasonable from my perspective to somebody else who is a reasonable person might be different. So I guess because it's so unenforceable, do we really want it there? I agree. It feels when I think that sentence could just be removed entirely. Yeah, that would be mine. Yeah, I don't think, yeah, there's no, there's nothing behind it in terms of like enforcement. So and it does leave too much open to interpretation. Well, if I could play devil's advocate, the statute, I mean, there's a crime of negligent operation of a motor vehicle. That jury instruction says that in deciding whether defendant operated his vehicle in a negligent manner, you may consider Vermont State law concerning the following rules. No person shall drive a vehicle on a highway at a speed greater than a reasonable improvement, than is reasonable improvement under the conditions, having regard for the actual and potential hazards then existing. Drivers have a duty to maintain proper and reasonable control over their vehicle. So it's a common standard in law. It's usually, I would say, if this is ever actually going to be enforced, that it's going to be enforced because somebody was just doing something crazy and objectively unreasonable. So I don't really have a problem with the language on that. But I see your point. I think it was going to stay in. I think the part that I take objection to is really the idea of a reasonable person versus a reasonable speed. So the language you're mentioning is it's a reasonable speed or it's an unreasonable speed. And this one saying there's some arbitrary reasonable person who's determining that this is a reasonable speed. So if the sentence were to stay, no vehicle will be driven at unreasonable speeds given existing road conditions or something, so that doesn't matter. Erin, what are your thoughts on this? I think that meets in the middle. I don't know if that would be correct when state statutes are. I think that that is a creative way to keep it, but also make it read better. Just to clarify, though, the statute that is 23 Vermont Statute Sanitated 1091 Negligent Operation Standard for Conviction for Grossly Negligent Operation shall be gross negligence examining whether the person engaged in conduct that involved a gross deviation from the care that a reasonable person would have exercised in that situation. I mean, that's all over the law, reasonable person. We could run this by the town attorney as well. Yeah, in which iteration of the life of this ordinance it appeared from and get an opinion on that at the board. I just remember I forget what it was, some TV show or documentary or something, whatever, it was talking about strange laws that are on the books. I won't go into examples. Moving on to Article 9, C. And it's the concept of through truck traffic being prohibited. And I wonder if that should be extended to our class 4 roads. And the reason I bring that up is I remember a resident emailing Bruce a picture of a tractor trailer that tried to drive down, I assume because that's what his mapping function said was the shortest route for them, tried to drive down Governor Chittenden Road and got stuck on the part where it turned into a class 4 road. Obviously the ordinance isn't going to necessarily stop that from happening, but perhaps the ordinance would cause a sign up that would say through truck traffic prohibited because you'll probably get stuck and you're going to have to spend a lot of money getting yourself unstuck. Yeah, and that. Welcome to the gap. All right. Yes, I love that sign. I'm like only $2,400. We can sort of look at that. I wonder if it's in the weight regulation article right now, whether that may be appropriate in our law. Maybe not the weight regulations. OK. And then let's move on, if you don't mind, to Article 11, which is in particular the new fees. I'm not at all opposed to the new fees, nor do I think they're unreasonable. But the only question I have is the storage fee. And when should that start? It seems to imply that it starts the first day. And my thought on this is we have that Christmas party example. It was snowing pretty heavily, and the person didn't maybe shouldn't have drove in. Maybe was unable to get their car before it got towed. Should the storage fee, should there be a reasonable amount of time for the person to go get their car before the storage fee is incurred? I guess that's my question. And that might be a day or two. After two days, a storage fee will be charged. I think we have to ask the towing companies what their storage fee policies are, because they're the ones who are towing their vehicles. Oh, housing it. So I'm happy to look into that and figure out what their policies are. But I don't know that we can. And it may be different for each. So that's an interesting question. These fees that are charged for towing and storage, are they paid to the company that does that, or are they paid to the town? Paid to the company. The company. OK. I think if there could be a situation where, for every reason, this would come up in circumstances where public parks need to get through and the car was there and we needed it to get towed. And I think in the past experience of the fee being so low to charge, it wasn't going to cover the cost to have the town. Yeah. OK. And I guess I'm just trying to understand the fee. Is that something we're going to negotiate with these companies who might be called? No. This would be a set fee for the town so they would know going to that tow what the fee would be. OK, the company that actually, and so some companies might just say, hey, I'm busy tonight. I can make more money not getting that car, OK? Theoretically, at some point, no towing company would respond because they're all like, no, that's not enough. OK, I'm just trying to understand. Well, theoretically, we would review this frequently enough to hopefully prevent that. We talked about this section a little bit too, where we had in the ordinance currently shall adopt reasonable towing fees applicable to all towing situations. So we could codify in the ordinance with a number or the other alternative would be not codifying in the ordinance but adding it to the board's annual fees. And then if we were getting in a winter and we're found out they're charging $200 a tow right now, the board could amend that fee schedule as opposed to the ordinance amendment process as well. I'd actually just assumed it would somehow get added to the fee schedule we do. And then, of course, my biggest question, Appendix A, how I was so disappointed to see my road, Governor Chinden Road, was not on this. Now, I understand there's the 25-mile-an-hour thing where it's not listed in Appendix A. But it was still very disappointing to see that my road was not important enough to have been, at one time, on Appendix A. Well, we added you to Appendix D. You did. Thank you for that. And that's it. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions for Aaron? So what we're looking for is, well, I guess the simple thing is, is there any objection to going forward to bring forward a ordinance amendment? No. No. For me. OK. Good. Thank you very much. Thank you, Aaron. So now we move on to destruction of town property with Aaron. Destruction was the word about a town attorney that could be a soft word here as we think for this situation. Well, I have to admit, when I first read it in the agenda, I was just like, oh, somebody did something to destroy some town property. Exactly what I told Eric when I first saw it. I was like, even though I've read it several times, every time I have that thought. So this is a situation. I read the board over emails as well, but I'll certainly give an overview for folks listening here. We found as we've been looking at our tax records finding in October 2012, the town was a successful bidder of a 1995 Redmond New Moon mobile home, which is located at 5394 Williston Road during a tax sale. In October of 2013, the one year redemption period passed. At that time, the town did not take action to record a tax collector's deed, but speaking with a town attorney, since that redemption period passed, the town was the successful bidder on that property. Essentially, it spent town property for that period of time. So we've recently corrected this by filing a tax collector's deed. I worked with the town attorney to do that last week after taking possession of legally of the property. I should preface, the property is not currently occupied by anyone. The former owners is not in the property. We secured the property last Friday. Make sure all utilities are off. The door locks are changed. The keys are secured here in town hall. And well on site. And police had also visited this location in the recent month or so. Staff observed a number of conditions, not sanitary conditions at all within the structure. That is the town's property. Pile of garbage throughout the structure, boards over windows, locked installation, maybe some waste. I won't describe it in clear detail here, but just certainly in a situation that warrants some attention here. And given that we've learned it's our property, the board has to think through a couple of potential options moving ahead here. So for the town attorney's instructions, the board can listen to destroy, remove, relocate property of the towns at any time. You'll see before you a suggestion is to motion authorize the manager to undertake that process. Staff is not currently aware of any interest of anyone associated with this property formally to take possession of it. The person who formally occupied the property, the town is sent to the attorney's office to notify them that they do have any personal possessions remaining, giving them until the end of the month to make arrangements through the manager's office to remove those possessions, either personally or a family member to do so under supervision of rules and PD. I'm not sure that will occur or not, but we want to give them notice to have an opportunity to do that. If something did come to my attention in that period of time, if there was interest in purchasing the property from the town, certainly listen, I'd bring that back to the board. I'm not confident that's going to happen, but it may be something that comes up. That would be a different process for the board. If it's conveying town property, there's a notice to have worn a 30-day hearing process and for that process to take place there. But for the board to consider this evening, if you're interested in authorizing the manager to look at removing this property, public works has been looking into having someone come on after October 31st to assess the property and what it would cost to remove it. There may be some opportunities for us to get, if it does seem to be brought through a scrap yard, a recycling yard for the metal materials may yield some offset for the cost to do this. Also CSWD has some community cleanup funds I could look into to see if the town may be able to use that just as opposed to an operational expense here. So certainly a situation. I appreciate staff's brings to my attention recently. And our attorney's office are flagging this as well, but I turned to the board to see how you'd like to proceed with this piece of property. Questions for the earth? Well, I absolutely agree. The only issue I have is that the word destroy in the motion. And I think I would prefer to use something like appropriately and cost-effectively dispose of. Yeah. Well, it destroys it sounds. We're going to take a sledgehammer to it, you know. It was one of the key parts of the motion in my mind, but we can do it your way. No, let's hear it. Oh, you like that word. I don't think we've ever had a motion that uses the word destroy. Well, I think if anyone's going to move then and it's got to be you who offers that. Jeff should do it with his words. Just out of curiosity, how much acreage is a small lot? So much for the lot size, but this only extends to the structure, not the lot beneath it. The lot beneath is owned by a budding neighbor in that area. Town has no land interest in this. OK. Oh, interesting. Wow, very interesting. OK. When I was in college, a long time ago, we had one of the guys had an old car that was no longer drivable. We had a harsh smash at that time and charge people, I don't know, 25 cents a whack with a sledgehammer. And that's a good way to raise money for the town. Obviously not. So if there are no other questions, there is a motion suggested. I move to authorize the town manager to take action to appropriately and cost effectively dispose of a town owned 1995 Redmond New Moon mobile home located at 5394 Williston Road acquired through a 2012 tax sale. Is there a second? Second. I'm sorry, discussion on the motion. I love the name of the mobile home, Redmond New Moon. I'm glad that's in there. Very no further discussion. All those in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Next is the town values policy and Eric. So this is my first pass on drafting this. You've never recall the board's recent discussions for a DEI statements for the town by our community group led through the STJC. So we had some core values on our website for a number of years and the origin of those is unclear. So I took some of those from the websites. I've incorporated the community DEI and anti-racism and I've worked to craft a draft policy for the board's feedback. As you recall, the process we're looking at is for establishing these town value statements and then working to have a community engagement process led through the CJC that Chris Ali is going to lead to look at how to visually represent these value statements. So certainly the commitment to DEI and anti-racism is important, but also trying to think are there any other values we want to make sure are ingrained within this policy, at least from the start. It can certainly always be amended down the road. This is the starting point. Erin worked on this with me. She's been open for the board's feedback here, and if you want to proceed with this, we can get back on the agenda with any of the suggested changes here. Anything anyone would wish to add to this? My two thoughts, one were including some sort of language about reviewing. We had talked about it when Chris Ali was here, reviewing how we are doing with upholding these town values periodically and finding some sort of metric for that review process, because I think that in and of itself is an important piece. And then my other was just a language thing on 2.6.1. I'm not, it's a personal preference, but outside the box it feels very just too maybe open-ended or I don't know. I don't love that language there. If it was creative problem solving or something, but yeah, outside of the box just. It's too open to interpretation. Yeah, I think I see your point and really the key aspect of it is driving for excellence and serving as a resilient programmatic government. So the focus really needs to be on that, along the lines of staff will, and maybe not staff. That's not right, because I shouldn't be singling out, but let me see how the other words are written. I think that's what we're trying to get to here. So why can't we just say innovation and striving for excellence and serving as a resilient and prognotic government? Why do we even need that? Yeah. And that may sometimes be inside the box. That may sometimes be what some that's what we're striving for, right? On the box, under the box. It was a legacy phrase from what was on the website right now. So we can easily strike it. What's the new phrase of the day? Upstream thinking, maybe? And this is a question, I'm good with this, thank you. I like the way it sort of flows with all these different values, is we have an ethics policy, and does this or should this tie into our ethics policy? And one answer potentially could be is, I don't wanna say I know I didn't take the time to go look at our ethics policy, but possibly combine the two, because they have some similarities on the other hand, maybe they should stay separate. Yeah, I can look at that, Jeff. I think it may actually be an ordinance, too, that we call conflict of interest, but it's also has some language about ethics for some, maybe I'm wrong. Let me double check. Oh, yep, here, no wait, ethics code for administration of community development program. Like, I can look into that. Why don't I bring this back to the board? Okay. Any other feedback? My only other thing, and I mentioned this previously, and I had a conversation about this, and I don't know that this, again, is the right place for this, but I do, the land acknowledgement still, I feel like that is, I wanna keep bringing that up just because I do feel like it's something that we are missing as a town. So, whether or not this is the right format for that, you know, that's fine, but. I had a, Chris Lee transmitted to me a draft land acknowledgement last week that our equity partners have been working on. I chatted with the planning director a bit, and one possible location may be in the town plan as well, and certainly up to the select board, but one potential avenue I've suggested was a conversation with the planning commission as a possible amendment to the town plan as well, but certainly where the board. No, no, I mean, I think that could certainly make, that certainly makes sense, yeah. Okay, thank you very much. We'll move on to the personal policy amendment for remote work, and Eric has a memo here for us. I think everyone's probably experienced remote work in some fashion, Eric. Yeah, last couple of years we didn't know what Zoom was, but now we all too much know what Zoom is. So we've approached this throughout the pandemic. We certainly had to change quickly in March of 2020 and throughout the time through the, call the peaks and valleys of the last couple of years, we, since I became manager in that summer of 2020, we've kind of progressed and made things work. I think it was last, end of last winter with the surge where we had some voluntary, I should back up. We went from having everyone remote work that could for a period of time to graduating, having people back in the office to then starting within the office. It's a familiar story in every workplace that has an office environment to some extent. So last winter during the surge, we did some optional work from home for positions that could do it one day per week. We didn't have necessarily a lot of people take us up on that, but it was kind of a, it's an operational test model for a month to see kind of how that went. And looking ahead and thinking about what our workforce is looking for and trying to balance public service and public governance, I think there's a place for it to something great here. It's important to me that every department is always adequately staffed. Anyone from the public can walk in and talk to a real life person at any moment while the town is open for business. But I think there's some room to allow it with some parameters. And I spoke with the town attorney about how we may want to approach this. And for the board's consideration is you could amend the personnel policy to allow the manager to basically set the, to allow remote work, but we would, a lot of caveats there that could be, could change at any time, be a short duration of time. The goal of the language is to make it very flexible and give the manager authority to clot back or adjust it as needed. So I can see if the board wanted to adopt and codify a remote work and town personnel policy that we would come up with an operational procedure. We have some good examples of how other towns are approaching this. And then we can see what's working, what's not. And from a staff level, the manager could change some of those parameters as we work through this. But my vision would be to really collaborate with department heads on this. I'd want any request for remote work to be approved by the department head. They'd have to make that recommendation. It could be something maybe one day per week for positions that are appropriate. But at the same time, the department head finds that arrangement isn't working. We would need to adjust and end it, that it needs to meet the needs of the organization overall. But I think we're finding in our employment environment as well as we work to recruit and retain staff that they talk to their friends, to talk to their neighbors and seeing if there's not a remote work option. That's something that people weigh. And certainly there's positions that it's not possible. You can't cause snow or respond to a public safety emergency remotely. But there are some positions that I think it makes sense for. And we could mindfully look at how that may occur here. But I'm just looking at the board's feedback on that option. Any thoughts on the mind? It seems to me like remote work is here. Let's stay in some form. We need something in writing. No, totally supportive of the idea. That said, I do see some difficulties because you're going to have some departments and probably shouldn't, you know, I mean, let's pick the fire department. I mean, you know, work at home probably is just as impractical as you can get. And maybe in the planning or the manager's office, it would be a lot, whatever the word is, easier to have somebody work at home on some sort of a basis. And that might be viewed as being, I don't know what, you know, unfair or something like that. That's what I see as the issue, but I'm totally supportive of the idea. We run into some situations too. Maybe someone's getting their car worked on and or Comcast is going to be here between eight and 12, I don't know where it is, and they could do some work that day from home or they have a kind of a set day per week. But to see that, I look at that as a difference. These ad hoc type days that happen because of something like that, you know, somebody's got to be home because Comcast is coming. All I know is they said it's going to be in the morning. Who knows, it actually may be towards dinner time before they actually get here versus somebody who comes up and there's an agreement where it's like every Thursday, you know, they work at home, which they'd look at as a real benefit and a reason for them to stay with them now. And I should mention, this would not cover employees who are covered by collective bargaining agreements, police and fires in the United States. Oh, interesting. Okay, yeah. Which we know, decisions wouldn't lend the remote work, but our administrative staff and fire and police, there's certainly opportunities that there might be some remote work that pose position. I hadn't thought of it from that angle, the labor agreements. Other comments? I think that makes sense, yeah. Yeah, good. I expect we'll see this back then. Yeah, we'll bring it back in a couple of weeks. Good luck with drafting it. Yeah. The town attorney. Yeah. And where the town managers report. Let's see, just a couple of quick items here now we're over time. I've got the select board's retreat scheduled for November 29th. Abundant Sun will be leading that for some equity training. We'll have one of their team members in person and another of their partners over Zoom. She works in the United Kingdom and Greta and I met Jude at our cohort kickoff a couple of weeks ago at town fair. So I had a good experience that day and I think the board will enjoy that training. Just wanted to confirm the time. They're recommending after some email last week maybe 6.30 if that works for the board that night. It's probably a two hour training, 6.30 or 8.30. And would it be your vision? It would be like here? Yeah, it would be right here. We'd zoom them in here. We'd have one person, the board would see the food ahead of time or something. I could let me know I could bring in pizza or something right for that. 6.30, that's the recommended time. Is that all right? Yeah. Sure. Good. Which date? Yes, 29th. Tuesday, November 29th. Tuesday, okay. Yep. And then I've included in your packet, as Jeff alluded to, FY24 budget. Departments are wrapping up their proposals and I've got meetings scheduled with surely through the end of the month. As usual, the plan would be for me to transmit those budget binders that you look forward to every year for that first meeting in December. So we try to get the numbers done by Thanksgiving and the binders right at hand out either the Friday before at that meeting on the first meeting in December. I've kept the similar structure as previous years. Note some early start times. We would, you have the transmittal overview on December 6th, a dedicated extra meeting in December, starting at six o'clock to go through a bulk of budgets. December 20th, some regular business starting a little bit earlier and then additional departments around it out, public hearing and on January 3rd, preliminary deliberations, an extra meeting in January for deliberations if needed and then looking to finalize the warning and adopt the budget to go to town meeting that third Tuesday in January. So I just feedback from the board as the schedule and format work for you again this year and there's departments listed in order right now but that conceivably changed based on staff availability as well. That's it? Yeah. Okay. All right, carry on. We have other business, we have at least one thing to take action on and that's something that Eric has for another bank resolution. Yep, it's a, and I can, everyone wants to see it, I can pass it around but a corporate authorization resolution similar to what the board approved a couple of weeks ago for a community bank, what we're doing is adding the manager, myself as the second senior for you on these bank accounts at the back of the treasurer. So I would forward, just to consider a motion to adopt the resolution as presented and then Terry can. Any questions for Eric, I'm looking for a motion. Any discussion on the motion? Eric, you know the fine print, right? Yeah, if not all those in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any other business we had to take up today? If not, and we adjourned, thank you.