 30 on my various devices. We have all the trustees in attendance. I see Brad, Wendy, and other staff here as well. So then with that, I will go ahead and call the Village of Essex Junction Board of Trustees meeting for Wednesday, May 11th to order. Thank you all for being here. And we will go into agenda additions or changes for tonight. I know I have a couple of additions for the agenda, but does anybody else have any proposed changes or additions? I'll let you go, Andrew, and then I just have one in case you're, but you may be covering it. So the additions that I have are various emails that we have received from community members over the course of the day to be added to Business Item 5D, the discussion of one Main Street Park. Those are emails from Annie Cooper, Bridget Meyer, Susan Swagger, Andy Colvos, Emily Mack, Raysa Mehran, and Connie McDonald. And does anybody else have any? Sorry, I thought you missed one, sorry. I just saw a Business Item 5J discuss out and about in essence. Oh, yes. Thank you for that, Brad. What is it, 5J? Yes. So then I would entertain a motion to amend the agenda. So moved. Second. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Raj. Any further discussion on that? Hearing none, all in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, please say nay. Great, so that passed unanimously. Thank you all. We will now go into the public to be heard portion of tonight's meeting. So this is a time of tonight's meeting where if there are any topics, questions, concerns that members of the public have on something that is not on the agenda, now is the time to bring those up. If you have any comments you'd like to make, that do pertain to the agenda items, please hold on and we'll make sure to have time for those then. If you're using Zoom, please go ahead, raise your hands so that we can recognize you and provide time to speak to the Board of Trustees. And as the Zoom meeting is doing that, anybody in the room have anything else? Allen, please come right up. Okay, good evening. I'm here for the Waste District budget presentation, but I did get a call the other night or the other day from somebody in the village offices who had said that you guys had discussed appointments, ongoing appointments coming up, and that you decided to appoint village residents to the county boards and whatever, and I totally understand that. I stand ready to be your rep if you don't get somebody to stand up to take that position. But it's been four or five years, I guess, since I've been the village rep and it has been good to have those extra votes together in one bundle when we come up with things. But so if you have an issue, do not hesitate to give me a call. Thank you very much. Thank you, Allen, please. I want to, for those who have tuned in and don't know, Al Nye has been our representative on the Chittin and Salvid Waste District for five years now, Al, right? And he's also represented Essex Town. So he's done double duty and he has done an excellent job and he loves that job and he I think has had a fantastic benefit. One of the mainstays of that whole board. So we really appreciate your effort on our behalf, Al. Thank you. Absolutely, thank you. So there's nobody else. Virginia, did you have anything for public to be heard? That's not related. There's things on the agenda, but nothing's coming. Great, thank you. So going back to Zoom, I'm not seeing any hands up there for members of the public who wish to speak to the board about something not on the agenda. So then we will move off of public to be heard and onto the regular business items. First of which we have business item five A and hello to Ashley Snellenberger and welcome. Thank you. Appreciate you being here. Look forward to what you can bring to our community as well as not just professionally but also coming actually to up to the area. Yes, my family and I are very excited to move to Vermont. Great, and you're picking a great time of year. It's much better now than it will be in about eight or nine months. We're actually looking forward to those eight or nine months when we get some snow. Right now in Arkansas, it's 90 degrees today and it's about 70% humidity. So we are very much looking forward to some cooler weather. You will definitely get that, yeah, yeah. If you don't mind, I'm just, I'm not sure how much has been shared with everybody. If you just don't mind talking a little bit about your background and that'd be great. Sure, I'd be happy to. I am from Arkansas. I've lived here my whole entire life just in different cities throughout the state. I'm married to my husband. We've been married for 18 years this weekend so it's exciting time for us. We have two children, Olivia who is seven and Roman who is three. My education, I have a bachelor's degree in journalism with an emphasis in public relations. Throughout my 10 years of experience working, I've worked in the medical, nonprofit and education fields. Most recently in the education fields, I was the communications coordinator for Russellville School District for five years. And then I've been consulting for the Van Buren School District where we are now for the past couple of years. I have extensive experience in public relations, media relations, graphic design, pretty much anything to do with communications I've done in one of my roles. I've been the single department head and only person in my department in almost all of my positions. So I have worn many hats throughout my 10 years of experience. And we are just very excited to be moving to Vermont and being a part of the S Extension community and being Vermonters. Great, well, again, we look forward to it. Happy early anniversary. Thank you. And I hope you will find it as much of a joy to live here as we all do. I'm sure that you'll find the schools, parks and other amenities library here that we have to just be fantastic. So look forward to seeing you and meeting you in person. Thank you, we look forward to it as well. Thank you. Anybody have anything else? Good job. See, Andrew, Ashley started last week and she's doing a great job. It's difficult, obviously, to start remotely. Not to mention, I'm not a great manager remotely either. So she has been traversing the waters. She's done interviews with all department heads. She started today in posting the city manager position and as many places as we're advertising. So she is active and involved and we're looking forward to, you know, her continued support up from remotely. And of course, when she arrives, she'll start June 13th there. Great. Well, Ashley, thank you again and hope you can enjoy the rest of your evening and looking forward to some cooler temperatures once you come up north to something that's more bearable. Yes, thank you guys so much. Thank you. Take care, Ashley, thank you. And so next on our agenda of business item 5B to consider the approval of the Chittenden Solid Waste District FY23 budget, I see a note in the chat from that's Sarah Reeves from CSWD will need to reschedule due to some traveling issues. Seeing that we do at least have Al here as our representative. I'm not sure if, at least if there's something that you also would like to share at least in the interim or if you'd prefer to wait until Sarah, that's completely fine as well. Just while you're here, if there's anything that you want to make sure we hear that way we don't, you know, ask you to come back again if it's not necessary. Sure, no, I think thank you so much and I apologize for the disruption. Sarah is on the road and she thought she was gonna be able to make it and somehow traveling has not been conducive to that. I would just say that the materials that we sent you sort of cover everything that we're doing, the big initiative that we'd love to come back and discuss more or give you more information is really about that the materials recovery facility, we are discussing and going to go out for a bond request in the fall for that in November. And so that is something we're sort of prepping. We've mentioned that several times I think previously and the goal would be of course to take a 1990s facility and bring it into the present which leads to a lot of potential exciting opportunities. So I would really, if the time is available I would really love us to be able to come back and walk through the budget. Not a lot of surprises but we're really excited about some capital improvements that we're doing and then also the bond that we wanna discuss. So if there is a room on the next agenda we could definitely make that work. Great. Happy to make that adjustment. Yeah, I was planning on coming to this week's meeting before I knew it was the budget meeting because the board has been moving forward with as I said the capital projects and the two things that are important to remember is that we do not tax or ask the communities to provide dollars to the waste district. The finances come from the disposal of trash and the recovery facility that we sell materials from. So as Elise said, we're going to be going forward with a bond. Wanted to make sure that the village was comfortable with that. Right. And it's no different than like the water district that goes out for bonds and don't tax the community. The members of the community do get tax because they pay drop off fees and those kinds of things. But otherwise it isn't a direct impact on the, so it, but we still are talking about it and discussing it and whatever, but with the November election that looks like the time that go forward. It also includes the bond probably won't, but we're probably looking at a new administrative office also after COVID came along, living in a raised ranch with, you know, it's been modified to hold, you know, 30, 35 people. The ventilation systems aren't there and those kinds of things. And the other big project that we've got doing is we are bringing water onto the site where the materials, organic materials facility. We've been trucking water and buying water, but we're going to extend the water to that site and so it'll be able to provide sprinklers for the new Murph and those kinds of things. Alisette, is the headquarters still on Redmond Road in Williston? It is, yeah. I've been in that, I'm surprised you're still there. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I didn't realize that. Okay. We have the property. It was all part of the purchase for the landfill when we're trying to buy up the neighboring properties and whatever. So both, there's a Velco, if you go to the Williston drop off, there's a Velco site up that they built a road up in the Meadow there up to a storage area. And they'll both be in that immediate vicinity. We are moving forward with the design of the Murph. Nice. That'll be great. I mean, from what I recall in the memo, the fact of, or the capability to expand recycling opportunities instead of seeing that recycling symbol in the bottom of, say, that milk container that I had to throw in the trash, always feels wrong and always second-guess myself, but yeah, the ability to help expand those opportunities would be fantastic as well as, we've learned a lot from COVID and making sure that the people who do good work have opportunities to breathe clean, healthy air is a very important factor. Yes. The new Murph would also improve conditions for the workers that are there now. If any of you have toured our recovery facility, which I really encourage you to do, you'll see that it's a dirty job and it's a cramped job and bringing in more technology to assist with that would sort of free them up to do jobs that aren't as labor-intensive. Also will make the facility sort of, more comfortable to be in. So there's excitement around that. And then also just something that's usually interesting for select boards is our solid waste management fee. So that's the fee that you're charged or haulers are charged when they bring in materials to our facility is not increasing this year. So there's no need to tap into reserves. We don't need to, the fee will stay the same. So that's something that's always usually very interesting to select boards since that is Alan had kind of indicated, can roll down to residents who are paying for hauling services or things like that. So very exciting year for us. We're really excited about the improvements and thanks for Alan for bringing up the administrative building. I've been working from home for two years since COVID hit and because I work in that, I call it the Brady Bunch House. And there are 25 of us that are piled in and I'll just say from previous experience, colds would rip through that building really quickly and we'd all get very sick. So the district has been really awesome at taking care of its employees during COVID and making sure whatever improvements they could do to improve safety for us has been great. So I as an employee of CSWD have been really excited about the admin building and moving forward with that. And I think it will also offer other opportunities for the public to be able to interact with staff a little better than we can now. So thank you. That's great. Can I ask a question? Can I ask or either Elise or Alan a question? So we are not gonna vote on your budget tonight. Is that gonna hold you up or do you want us to vote on your budget tonight? If you would like to vote on our budget tonight, you are welcome to. If you feel you have enough information to do so, it will not hold us up. These meetings are going into I believe June at this point. Alan, I don't know if you remember what the drop dead date is for us to get to have the vote, but if you feel comfortable to make up based on the materials that you've read, I'm happy to have you hold a vote. If not, we are happy to come back and we can walk you through the presentation that we have. That's one of the things I was just gonna offer is that frankly in going through the memo, which is very thorough, the only thing I wanted to even comment on is how thoughtful I believe it is about the Murph expansion and that bond capability. But again, that's a completely separate issue. The budget itself, as you said, if these aren't going up, it seems like a very reasonable budget. I don't have any other questions. And so I guess I would also ask the trustees of if you don't have any other questions or anything else that you feel you need to know in order to improve the budget, I'm fine having to vote tonight. So that way, you all don't have to come back again. That would be good. Okay. The other thing I was gonna mention is that another significant change in operations. I don't know if you remember, we used to have a thing called the Recycle Zone at the Drop-off Centers. Yes. Yep. We did away with those about three years ago because of safety concerns, the fact that people would put stuff in there that really nobody wanted and we ended up paying to get rid of it. But so the one town that was really upset with that was the town of Richmond. And they came back to the board and asked us to put it back in and whatever. And we as a board had decided that we weren't gonna have those there. And so what Richmond did this year is they went out and contracted, put out a bid and contracted for Drop-off Center Services and Cassella won the bill. So Cassella is running the Richmond Drop-off Center now. And it is a different operation. It is not a CSWD Drop-off Center. And I've heard comments out there that, you know, we have people now going to Williston and going to Essex rather than going to the Drop-off Center at the end of Route 170. Interesting. There's a significant change in our operations. I noticed that the last time I was over at the transfer station was what, last weekend? And that was the Drop-off for the, like old books or old, you know, chairs, whatever. Now you can put your fluorescent bulbs and other types of unique trash or whatever for recycling, for processing. Yeah, the hazardous waste stuff. Yeah, that's nice. It's set up, it's set up. But if you approve of the budget tonight, that'd be great. Thank you very much. Thank you. Trustees in the room, David, George, any other questions, comments, concerns? No, I would only just like to make sure that if we approve of the budget tonight, that we have you come back at some, at your convenience at this point. That would take the pressure off and then you can go back when it's convenient for everybody. And I would like you to give you more time to talk about the things that are happening there during your budget. Raj, Amber? Yeah, I just have a question that's talked about a little bit amongst people I know. What is the lack of trailer access now at Essex a COVID thing or is that just a traffic pattern thing? What's the, I, it's the same issue. With the, you know, with the cars backing up to the drop off wall, the trailers going through and backing up and putting it in the bunkers is, it's felt that it was not a, you know, not a safe operation. And safety is an item that the district takes really, really seriously. Yeah, thanks Raj for the question. And Alan's correct. You know, it was unsafe in that way before COVID, but as COVID hit and we had to really look at our facilities and how best to space people out and make it safe for everybody. It was an opportunity for us to really look at the drop off centers and what we could improve safety. And so that hairpin turn in Essex does make it difficult for people who have trailers were backing up. Some people, not everyone is not as great with moving their trailers around. I'm sure that's nobody who's watching here. You're all excellent trailer drivers, but, you know, it does hold up traffic. It does have a safety issue. And so, you know, that was the reason for the trailer ban at Essex and some of our other facilities. One thing that we have not yet mentioned, but the drop off centers, the board, our board is looking at the drop off centers and the future and sort of what improvements can we make with the drop off centers? And that could be anything from layout to the way, you know, what we're servicing at those locations. And I'm sure that trailers, because we do know that a lot of people, they're very convenient for a lot of people, you know, that will be part of the discussion, but currently the way Essex has laid out that that is one of the big challenges. So Alan is correct on that. Yeah, just the issue is it kind of leaves out people with smaller vehicles or non pickup truck vehicles and it ends up being an additional expense for them now that they have to, you know, find a hauler or find another way to do it, to deal with their, whatever they have to bring to the dump. So I totally understand the layout thing. Yeah. Yeah, there is, and Rush. Well, Austin. Yes. And that's what I was going to say. We know it's a farther ride for him. So that's not ideal, but we do have locations that are allowing trailers. I think Milton is also one. Michelle Morris is online. So I'll look for her to nod. But yeah, so like Milton is also taking, depending what part of Essex you're in, that might be a more convenient location than Williston. But again, as I said, I think all of that will be looked at in the future as we sort of reimagine and re-envision the drop-off centers. So definitely, Rush, your feedback. We have heard that from other members of the public and we'll definitely take that into consideration as we move forward. Thanks, appreciate it. Amber, was there anything that you wanted to add? Great. So with no other questions, comments or concerns from the board here, I would entertain a motion to, for the Village of Essex Junction Board of Trustees to approve of the Chittenden Solid Waste District Fiscal Year 2023 budget. I will move that the trustees approve the CSWD Fiscal Year 23 budget as presented. Second. Thank you, George. Thank you, Dan. Is there any further discussion, trustees? Hearing none, all in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Those opposed, please say nay. Great, so that passed unanimously. Thank you, trustees. Al, thank you. Thank you. Elise, thank you. Sure, thank you so much everyone. We really appreciate it. Take care. And next, Business Item 5C to discuss a transition to Planning Commission and Development Review Board. As this is coming up, I do just want to make sure to name that I believe we're gonna have a shorter conversation than was initially intended. As I understand it, the Planning Commission members may have just learned of this conversation today or yesterday, which is not a great way to have a joint conversation on a topic such as large as this. And so I suppose for tonight, if what we could do is talk at a fairly high level, but more importantly, what I'd like to have us trustees discuss is how and when to reschedule this meeting too, so that we can have this in a relatively short term, because this is a time July 1st is coming whether we want it to or not, and we can't delay that. So whether we want to ask the Planning Commission to come to our meeting in two weeks or whether we want to go to theirs if they would be so kind as to have us or whether we want to set up a special meeting just for this purpose. So with that as in- When's their next meeting? Do you want to tonight? Their next meeting is the 19th. Our meeting is the 25th. I'd be willing to go to theirs if it's just to get them all rolling. If they would have us, you know, maybe the first half hour would it take more than 35 minutes, half hour? Yep. I don't mind. Yep. It's a big day, but we would love to have you attend our meeting on the 19th. We will put you first on the agenda and we will schedule half an hour to 45 minutes. And if we use it all, great. John, I appreciate you timing in. I hadn't seen you on the meeting yet and I was really getting concerned about having this conversation of even inviting ourselves to your meeting without asking you. So I appreciate you being here. Yeah, no, I learned about tonight's meeting and agenda with us on it today. So sorry about that. I just was some confusion on the staff into this getting all the messages across. But yeah, we know and expect this joint conversation to happen. I'm ready to answer questions and discuss tonight to the best of my ability. But in fairness, we should have the whole group together. I do appreciate that, John. And I honestly agree with you that of course we value your opinion. I think it might be best to have this conversation with everybody so that way all voices can be heard. And so we're not just making that lateral decision. So unless anybody disagrees, I would be okay tabling this until, John, again, if you're okay with us joining you in the 19th. Yep, that'd be great. Does that work for staff and everybody else? We just scheduled ourselves to have a meeting on the 19th because we have unfinished business on our update of the land development code so the committee has agreed to meet on the 19th. It wasn't normally scheduled. So it's already a special meeting for us. You're more than welcome to join in. I just add one thought while we're pondering, anticipating and thinking with great delight this meeting we're gonna have. There's a recommendation for a significant change which was that be that planning commission and the DRB would be five member boards. Planning commission right now was seven member boards so that would be a change. And there are pros and cons there and I'm just throwing that out that that's one of the things that's a topic of discussion we might wanna be thinking particularly the trust, I don't know. But yep, is that, is that significant? That's not really a big thing for us. We were five, we went to seven hoping it would improve our ability to get in and keep a quorum at every meeting. So there's really no magic to the numbers. Okay. That's good to hear. Yep, great. So trustees, staff as well. If there's any burning comments, concerns before we table this, then. Yeah, Andrew, I'm sorry. We thought we had informed all members of both of those bodies back on May 3rd and there was just a misunderstanding of how our email system works. So I apologize for that. It wasn't for a lack of attention. It just was a misunderstanding. So sorry that we need to postpone but glad we can join them next week. Yep. Thank you, Brad. So then we will table this conversation for a week. John, you're joining us. I was all ready. I'm loaded. I'm ready to go. Well, and so as we move to the next agenda item we have Business Item 5D and a discussion on the one Main Street Park. Robin or Brad or somebody? Where are you going? That's Robin. Sorry, Brad, what did you say there? You're up, Brad. Oh, okay, I'm up. So this is a second iteration of the park that came to the trustees after the charrette which wasn't attended by many people. I wrote down here who I thought it was. It was Evan and Eden, Uiso, George, Diane, Diane came late, Kevin Collins. I'd like to thank John Aldermas there because he seems to be at everything but I can't remember whether he was there or not. So perhaps he wasn't. It's an overlay of quite a few things. Diane wanted a water feature so if people had her dogs they could drink some water when they were in the city center because they're not permitted to do that at the Memorial Park across the street and Main Street. Evan wanted some shade for any entertainer that was on the little platform or indeed if people just wanted to sit there during the daytime, it's not something that's just exclusively for an entertainer. I had a couple of conceptual thoughts that weren't design elements in themselves but seem to work into it. I thought we're Essex Junction, we're a trans city. We're also famous for bricks so I thought it'd be nice if there were elements of not the wheels, that was some brick thought would be a good idea. I thought there'd be elements of real lines and New England Center Railroad said we could have some real lines and then brick for brick yard and so on and so forth. General design terms, it's considered nice to have a quieter space. This doesn't quite show it, it's a very young hedge. The way noise works when it hits a wall, it jumps up and over it and can travel quite a distance. But when it hits vegetation, vegetation almost acts like a muffler. Rick has some blocks here, granite blocks here which are seats, they just look like rectangles or actually seats. This was also something I believe, I know that Rick met with at least two people from the Trade Advisory Committee, Warren and Nick and I believe Warren and Nick had a spirit discussion over how many trees should be on the site and this is what they came up with, so this is selected by the Trade Advisory Committee. I think Anne Doteley, Rick told me that Bridget had spoken to him as well but I don't know, it was just, we were at the train station last week and he mentioned it. The only other thing that I'd suggested that made it into the plan was I thought that the paving for the park should bleed out onto Main Street, not onto Middle Street. That's because in an ideal city world, all of Main Street going right out to the center of the five corners would be along so we were prepping that side off the park to step straight into the lawn. Now the area in question will be lawn, will be at least four times, not five times larger than this little park so it'll be a substantially larger space. It's unusual called a pocket park, generally pocket parks are infill between buildings. They often have buildings on two sides, not three sides. When we had the charrette, I actually pulled out some famous pocket parks, larger ones like Pilly Park in New York, one of my tutors once did, which is now the John F. Collins Park on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia and we pulled out one in Boston. This looks very Burr and sparse at the minute. Eventually it'll be enclosed on two sides. Probably there'll be a new building going with the Firebird Cafés and then is it the Ice Shave truck? Is it the minute? That'll be another building as well so it'll be enclosed on two sides. The idea of being then at the quad space at the back, which doesn't look like a quad space at the back, here really, would have a hedge on two sides. Remember that that hedge, the long side of the hedge will not be facing a green space or pedestrians or the place where trucks come through. So this was Rick's interpretation of what he was given. We do have remediation funds. We could scale back this but still keep enough to utilize remediation funds because I mean, the calculation is done to the square foot of soil removed and everywhere underneath any paving will get, I think it's an orange fabric, which will have words like, don't you dare dig here on top of it? So if the pavers ever lifted, people know that nothing could happen here. So that's it. It's really one small part of a jigsaw that's gonna take quite a while to put together. People have said to me, well, we'll never close off Main Street. People always said to me, we'll never build the connector road and we'll never get any money for the train station. So if you keep knocking enough doors, good things happen. So that's it. It's a design by seven people. There's a few concepts that are there still, the one I like the best actually is paving, bleeding out to the curb that way. When it goes to the lawn, then it's a plaza to lawn. Another thing it does is it takes out the curb cuts that some people seem to think are there so they can drive up the front door of the Faber Cafe to pick up the takeout. So it's a bit of a safety issue as well. And obviously the street lights aren't shown for the traffic lights that's on there on it. So that's the scoop. The hedge notionally would be eight foot. That's shown at about five foot. So it's not really a closure as such. And then there'd be a building on the east side. And the idea is that there'd be Wi-Fi. Annie, I think Annie must have been at the meeting or afterwards she said it'd be nice to have Wi-Fi in the space when you're sitting down. So that would be there too. Any questions? Thank you, Robin. Just for context as we're talking about this, the last time when we discussed this plan for the corrective action plan, I believe we were at a fairly conceptual stance so that way we generally knew what the plan would be. What I'm understanding from this though is now we're at a point where this would be essentially a final design. And that's what you're looking for so that way we could move forward with actually building this park. Is that correct? Well, from my perspective, I'd like approval to do the remediation. The Reyes platform, one of the reasons it was in was that it's over the point where the tanks were. That's the most polluted soil. So we wouldn't be touching it. We would be capping it. But if it cannot, the other idea, of course, was that it'd be a little bit higher if people were listening to the high school band or something. And the idea of being at that end was it's narrower there. You'd want the audience to be in the widest part. But we could then, from my perspective, the most important thing is to get the remediation done. And if we can give Miles, the engineer, the environmental engineer, the calculation he needs to calculate how much soil comes out, it does in a way constrain what we do later, but only if we take out more soil. Anything we put on top. I mean, like the rectangle boxes that benches that Rick has that are just huge, huge pieces of granite, I'm gonna guess, so nobody's ever gonna lift them. You can see one through the trees there. If you look at the two trees instead, you can see the corner of one. And there's another picture that Brad showed. Thank you, Brad. There's another picture of Brad showed. And you can see just to the right of the, yeah. And then there's one behind. Oh, no, sorry, Brad. Well, you can see it here. There's one there to the right. That's it. Now, Rick did make a few changes. He thought the rest area wasn't wide enough of bad played. So the last time this trustee saw it, it is a schematic. There were steps on three sides, but Rick felt that maybe the bad member got excited. He might fall off, which is another reason the wall was at the box and then we get too excited and fall off. And also, I mean, if that hedge is high enough it's sort of fun, it's a water feature and it's really, it's a mini-pilly park. And if anybody wants to Google that, you'd see what I mean. And it does create white noise. And with the white noise and the eight foot hedge and no vehicles on the west side of the plaza, it'll be a very pleasant place to be. You know, not everybody wants to be out in the open and we're giving people two choices, not just one. Thank you, Robin. So I'm still not sure though what the answer was to my question about our... You trying to say I should run for politics or something? I'm not going there. So are you looking, are you, are we at a point where we need to basically approve of something that is very close to a final design so that that way the engineer knows how much soil needs to be disturbed? Is that where we're at at this point? Well, we could say we want to remediate and X more yards of contaminated soil. We'd have to tell them where we want that to come out. And really this, if you look at it from the environmental engineer's perspective, this is a flat plane. How much soil are you taking out and how much good soil am I replacing it with? What goes on top after that? He doesn't care about it. This is a two-phase project. You've got the remediation and they leave it ready to do the construction. So from my perspective, I want to be able to give the, we've already had an extension of our grant from CCRPC and Mike gives another one, but I rather not keep asking them. My perspective, as long as we can get an answer in terms of how much soil we're taking out and where it's coming from, that would be enough for me at this point in time rather than make a decision that we don't have to make it. Okay. So just again, for clarity, the only thing that we're looking for is how much soil needs to be disturbed, taken to then put stuff on top. Yes. So anything then that would go on top of things like pavers, as long as they don't go under the ground, doesn't really matter. Yeah, that's why you see one, two, three, four. It's a good picture to put up, grab one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. They are benches, essentially. Right. And there could be another 12 there and they could be smaller or larger. I'm going to interrupt you for a second. So things like the number of benches doesn't matter. The type of benches doesn't matter. Things like bike racks doesn't matter. They're just going to go on top of the ground. As long as they're on top of the ground. Things like number of trees, that might matter. It would matter. Right? Yes. Things like, if we put in a playground equipment that requires a six foot deep, concrete, reinforced thing, that would matter. Yes. Okay. Thank you. That's what I was looking for. So then things like cost at this point, again, aren't going to be known if we're not even talking about the final design. No. And the remediation is covered by the CCRPC grants. There's no cost to the city for remediation. Thank you. So then I'm going to go past a couple of the things or questions that I had because they're not going to pertain to today. I know earlier on, and it's been a while since this came up. So if this has already been answered in our last meeting months ago when we talked about this, I'm really sorry to everybody. But last, I remember there were some concerns about the type and number of trees. And there was, I believe we had asked for the Tree Advisory Committee to be engaged in helping to determine that. So how has the, or had the Tree Advisory Committee been engaged to this point? They met with Rick and they selected the number of trees and the location of the trees. Okay. Any, okay. Were any other committees involved like Bike Walker Planning Commission? Not to my knowledge. I mean, I've been just in contact with Rick asking him how things are coming along. The trustees asked him to produce a plan that was sufficient to move the park forward. And I know he met with Warren and Nick and as I said, I think he met Bridget. And Rick used to be on the Bike Walk Committee so he may very well have contacted him, but I honestly don't know. Okay. For now, I'm all set with my questions. Andrew? Yeah, Raj. Robin, does the soil calculation is that impacted by size, location or existence of that bandstand? No, because it's sitting on top. Okay. Well, there'll be a foundation for the brick wall. That's it. I mean, I guess the lawn is the first time I'm hearing about the fact that the potential closing of Main Street has a design. So I'm a little, I'm just surprised. And based on that, I'm surprised the bandstand would be there because if I picture it with this big lawn, then the bandstand that we're building here is seems to me to be completely out of place. The original sketch. The grand scheme of the closing of Main Street and how that all orients. You know, it would seem off the top of my head that the bandstand that whatever we built would either be in the middle or it would face back towards railroad with its back towards the intersection. Leaving a majority of the space open for whoever's gonna experience that. The original bandstand was on the original sketch was in the middle of Main Street, notionally close to the road that goes in front of the TD Bank. And then it was pipped north of that up just past the entrance to Martins. And south of that going into the intersection of the five corners was lawn. That's a substantial piece of lawn. Again, I just don't recall any of this conversation being remotely firm or, you know, if there's a conceptual sketch about this is something that would be cool one day. That's one thing I'm just not sure. Yeah, that's all it was. It was part of the original sketch that showed the connector road. It's in my lure somewhere if you wanna come look at it. All right. The only reason that matters to me is, and I guess we don't, as Andrew just pointed out we don't really need to get into that except perhaps for the 20 square foot area that that brick foundation will be on if it's there or not, I guess matters tonight. That's what I'm a little confused about. Right. So for, you know, if I read all the email I've gotten and the thoughts that I had initially when I looked at this, I have a lot of questions about how it runs right into the road right now and we could be one to 10 years away from closing Main Street if we ever do it. That is so far from done, although I'm 100% for it right now but we have a lot to do before we get there and a lot of testing to do before we get there and the Crescent connector has to work. Should, but you know, that has to work first for a period of time. Yes, they won't make us do a study as the connector has been in operation. So I'm just trying to figure out, as Andrew was saying, you know, I guess it would be better to err on the side of taking out more like planning for taking out more soil as if the bandstand were there but I don't feel like I want to approve this design if we don't have to. So we could put, we could put, we could create an area with new soil. That's trees in it that could have the trees replaced by something else in a litter date or something like that. That just gives us options and the reason that the charrette people wanted to, having to bleed out to Main Street was that if it ever got closed, they wouldn't want to come back in and redo a portion of it again. That's the only reason. I mean, there were some good, there were some good points, I think made in a couple of emails that we got in terms of safety and how that would work, especially since this is still a pinch point for students going to school and on. And again, we're years away from closing Main Street. So, I don't know if I'm the only one in our group that's trying to figure out, I sort of feel like we have to overestimate how much we want to take out and plan on that because we have no idea if we want to put more greenery in here or the bandstand stays or doesn't. So I guess Robin, I'm wondering like, should we take this design and then add 15% or 10%? I think that's a good idea. I think you can, Rick- Just get you going. Yeah, Rick will come up with a number for soil removal. He can work with the trade advisory committee and say, when you, it's one of a few trees that people were saying about grasses, grasses, they're good, pluses and minuses. He could work with the trade advisory committee and say to them, if the bandstand wasn't there, what would you want? And then we can do, he can do the calculation and that's what the remediation can be. Raj, are you all set or are you thinking? I guess so. Yeah, come back. Sorry, I'm good for now. I'm just trying to process. Sorry. I guess I'll say one more thing, Andrew, because it's silent, but I guess not that silence is bad. No. But I guess whatever, first of all, I don't know that seven people on that day could consider a definitive charrette is sort of my feeling on that, but it certainly was awesome to get the input from the people that made the time to be there. So I guess what I'm wondering is what should we pad this with to give us the opportunity to get a little bit more input without slowing this down too much because A, we don't want to lose the grant from CCRPC. We'd like to get this done, but I think people still want to, I think there still needs to be some work to the designs. So without slowing it down, how much padding do we need to do to this calculation to get you what you need, to get it moving and still retain a little bit of flexibility without going overboard. I think the answer to that is Rick meets with the Tree Advisor Committee and they'd say put in three more trees, although Warren, I think five was Warren's max, but if they could put in a few more trees. And then Rick works at the calculation for how much saw the new first trees. And... Hey, Robin, how close you're saying, there's gonna be buildings, probably two. How close? What's the standoff, John? I don't know if you can, what is the buffer gonna be between the side of those buildings and those benches? Because I think that, if they're 20, if they're the distance of the firebird front door, that's one thing, if they're 10 feet or eight feet, that's a completely different design consideration. Right, and they're not easy to move, but the same machinery that places them can lift them. Right, but it does depend on what you want. I mean, do you wanna put a different barrier there? I mean, do you wanna put it, do you wanna orient it differently if there's gonna be a looming four-story building with an eight feet of it? That changes the feel of the pocket part completely. So, I'm not trying to delay this, but it's one thing to say there'll be a building there, but what is there? Yeah, I think, you're right, Rash. And I think the idea of choosing those was they're not tethered to the ground. So they could be placed anywhere so they didn't have to be part of the calculation. And I'm sure there's lots of other types of benches that are heavy enough that you need four people or five people to lift one. So if it's the aesthetics, I'm sure that can be dealt with. But I think it would be prudent to have something that the casual passerby at three in the morning can pick up. Cool, thanks. George? Yeah, I guess I'm gonna generally agree with Raj. I think that we should go for the soil remediation and probably do air on the side of too much in anticipation of giving us the maximum latitude. But I think in terms of the finished design here, I think it needs some other kind of round of public input. I'm not exactly sure how that would happen, but I think, and also just given the level, the high level of interest we've had in it just because, you know, it's almost like, where have you been? But it's better late than never, and it's great. But and since we have so much now current community energy, I would like to suggest that we figure out how to quickly, you know, nimbly, without losing the energy and the passion that I'm seeing in the emails, see if we can funnel that into a direction where we can quickly get a little bit of a design that more people are happy with here. And if that means waiting on the stage, I think that'd be fine, or having a bigger community discussion about the stage and where that should go. If you don't mind, Andrew, I think, because I think we have so many new people who have tuned in and given, it might be a little bit helpful if I took a minute or two to give some background here. First of all, if you, and Raj, if you look at our comprehensive plan in the Design Five Corners planet, it sort of shows the entire finished area with a pocket park here and with Main Street blocked off and with the area built out. And that's why the initial idea of this was that you would put a pocket park in there now that would serve to provide shade and a place for people in the downtown to come and eat and gather and so forth. And then eventually as the Crescent connector gets built and we then close off Main Street, then this would just sort of lend right over. The idea was to have Veterans Park on one side and this piece on the other, almost like bookends at the top of a pedestrian area. And my thought was that the stage or platform would go in there some because there would be more room for it and would be sort of more natural area for open. So if I, let me just give a little quick background for some folks, the Crescent connector, some people have said, well, why don't we wait till the Crescent connector is built? First of all, the Design Five Corners anticipates is built, it anticipates the Crescent connector being built. The current municipal plan and downtown design plan that's in our comprehensive plan anticipates the Crescent connector being built. Right now this year we're gonna be changing all the railroad crossings and that's gonna be this year. And then after that's done, which is gonna be a massive undertaking, then next year the road gets built. So if we waited for the Crescent connector to get built, we're talking about 2025. And I would like to suggest that right now we could probably do something with this property over the next two years to get this done. And the Crescent, as I said, the Crescent connector getting built isn't gonna change the whole of what's going on down here, the whole gestalt of this piece. Again, if you don't mind me backing up a little bit, I wanna get just a little bit of history for some of the folks who are new. Back about 10 years ago, 12 years ago, we had a big community event called Heart and Soul. Heart and Soul of Essex and we had community values. And some of the values we had were a lively, sustainable, pedestrian friendly downtown that has coffee shops and bagel shops and reduced traffic. We then took those values and quickly, we had a three month long design share of an urban landscape designer, Julie Campoli, who translated that into something we called Design Five Corners. That shows sort of a comprehensive theoretical rebuild of the downtown. It featured having a pocket park right at this location. That was incorporated into our municipal plan several years after that in 2016. We knew that we needed public funds in order to make these improvements in the public space. So we went out at our annual meeting and we had a fund we suggested or proposed a economic development fund. And we specifically said at the annual meeting that it was for improvements in the downtown like pocket parks. And I know because I'm the one who made the statements and I had a picture of a pocket park in front of what was in Road Rescue, but it's now fire we're up behind me. So that was that those funds were approved. That was 2016 and those funds have been accumulating. And the reason I'm not, I'm not somebody who's gonna go in and tell anyone how to put, I don't actually care where the benches and the trees go. I'm happy to have the community tell me that. But my concern is that we asked the community for this money back in 2016. And this money's been accumulating in that fund, but it seems to me it's incumbent on us to get something done. If people voted those funds to have that, it's not, it wasn't a big tax increase, but they voted those funds to have this money there to make these kinds of improvements in the village center. It's kind of incumbent on us to get them done. COVID slowed it down. There's no doubt about it. And then last year, obviously we were in a horse race to get the city charter done. And we, it was sort of like, we threw everything out and we had to streamline. And we knew that this project was waiting in the wings, but now it's back. I'm glad to see a lot of community, passion and enthusiasm about it. The only thing I could ask you is that if we have a public input, please bring not just your passion for what you wanna see in the space, but please also have your passion for getting it done soon. We have two, we've, from since just since last year, we've had an additional, what, about 100, 200 more people move in. We have more people moving into the village center all the time. Every time I go by Firebird, this past weekend, no exception, every single seat is taken. People actually on Sunday had brought their lawn chairs. People were sitting in lawn chairs out on the hot asphalt, eating bagels and sandwiches. We can get this done. We have plenty of funds to get this done. We own the property. Don't just give me the passion about what we wanna see there, but give me the passion about the time, about getting this done. If we come in and have a design charrette and walk away with the final design, don't let us just pat you on the head and go away. And then we put the plan through the municipal meat grinder for two years. Call us up, stay on top of us, push us, make us get this done because this is not a big project. And getting this done will lend itself as the first step for the final envisioning of the comprehensive plan. It will also be a great thing to have for us right now. I know the folks over at Firebird would like this done yesterday. And so I would really like to push to say, whatever we do, please get it done. But I would support the idea of doing, allowing Robin to go forward with the remediation so we can get the ball rolling on this. And then maybe also have Robin and or Rick, maybe John Alden or put together, think of some kind of a new, another event where members of the community can come in, look at these designs perhaps as a starting point and say, what would we do differently? What would we'd like to see here? Some more picnic tables, a slight rearrangement, some other things like that. I think that would be incredibly helpful. And I think it would give people a lot of satisfaction that they had had some input into that. Thanks. Go ahead, Dan. I agree with what's been said on all fronts. I mean, Raj and George, especially, the idea of the pavilion right there and the remediation that would obviously cost significant money, I agree with more remediation of the soil. My personal opinion, I'd like to see more softening of the hardscape that we have existing in the five corners. And not necessarily a pavilion or a stage or anything there. We already have a beautiful open air pavilion right next to the library and a library. And we have some lawn and stuff there that could be utilized for whether it's a little band or concert or something. If it's off hours or evening, that's perfect venue, I believe, for something like that. This, I'd like to see more green. I'd like to see more softening of the, I don't want to see more concrete or anything that's gonna just increase the hardscape. More greenery and enclosing it a little bit to give it some feeling like you're not necessarily in the middle of downtown S-Extension. It's like an escape within the city. And that would require obviously more remediation of the soil, but I think it's every bit worth it to do that. As far as the band stage or anything of that, I'm not really keen on that. We also have a water fountain at Memorial Park already. So I don't really see the need to put that big expenditure for that either. Thank you, Dan. Amber, was there anything you wanted to add at the point? To be a loser? No, she's still there. So the only other thing I just wanted to add real quick, for those at home who may not remember, when George was talking about Design Five Corners, if you have an internet connection available, you can go to sxjunction.org, click on, or hover over municipal departments, click on community development. And on the left-hand side is a little tab that'll say Design Five Corners, where if you click on that, there are then links to two other documents, one from 2015, one from 2019 that talk about what Design Five Corners was, the process to get there, the plan moving forward, and a part of that does include, as was mentioned, the potential closing of Main Street, and in addition to that, I believe George, this is what you were referring to of that graphic that showed what this kind of a pocket park could look like. And that's also in there as well, just for those who, again, are newer to this or may not have been aware of that. The only other thing I wanted to put out there and before we go, I'd like us to get into public comment because I know there are some others who would like to speak to this too. It was on a call today with a resident who had asked about, you know, we created two committees pretty quickly to find a new manager, one of whom has already, I believe completed the work where the advertising for the new city manager has already started. And so once we figure out how to remediate as much soil as you possibly can to have as much flexibility as we possibly can, could there then also or potentially be a short-term committee of the community that could help with this process of helping to engage others, helping to engage the design. And one of the reasons why I think this is a fairly attractive idea is as we're going through a transition with a new manager, our staffing, especially staff like Robin who are likely gonna have a fair amount of work coming up with cannabis, with a development review board in addition to the planning commission in those transitions, it makes me think of if we could have a engaged group of concerned citizens who George, as you say, are engaged now, but also willing to get this done quickly to help lead this process to take some work off of our staff. Could I, I'm just, I hear you and I agree. I'm just questioning if we want a committee or you wanna have a kind of a design and I don't have the answer, but sometimes what would be more inclusive and sometimes a committee kind of grinds forward and people who might be out there and have a lot of energy to get involved once, they don't necessarily wanna get involved in a committee process. And so I'm just throwing it out there as a possible alternative that maybe we bid out someone to come in and put together a design chart, something like that and you announce it and you can have it be a hybrid. Again, I'm not trying to tell you, I don't know what we should do, but maybe a committee is the best thing, but you could have a kind of a hybrid event where it's both live and online and try to capture a big audience, maybe if you needed to do it twice or something like that. Sometimes you see designs done like that and it's a way of capturing more energy, right? Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you, George. So trustees, if you don't mind, I know that as we've mentioned, there are some emails that came in, those were put into the record already, but for those who are attending and would like to speak to this item, we can go ahead and turn this over for public comment at this time. I'm going to prioritize those in the room just because frankly, it's easier for me. So sorry about that, those of you online. So once those of you online start raising your hands, go ahead and do that now using Zoom and while you're doing that, Nick, I believe, well, actually, sorry, Nick, Brigitte, you were in here first. No, this is true. She wasn't here first. From the tree committee. She's just public. She's top liver. We've got a lot to say. You could hash that out later. I'm not gonna get in that one. Nick, you're standing, go ahead. Yeah. Well, the process has been interesting. The tree committee got involved last fall when we saw it being proposed and the trustees saw it and we had some concerns about the number of trees and knowing the conditions were there. And so we met with Rick back in, I would say it was probably October or so and told him what we thought because it is a really tiny space to do that. And what was initially proposed was about nine or 11 trees in there, which was absurd, just way too many. So we walked the existing outline and felt that five would be about max that we could do. So yesterday, and during the course over the winter, I contacted Robin probably three or four times to ask them about updates of it. But yesterday was the first day I've seen this. So we haven't had really much of an opportunity to look at it except see a pretty sketch and our concerns are always sort of down below of what has to happen to have a tree that's gonna be successful there. And so I'm still not sure what Rick has proposed in terms of removing. We gave him some ideas of how much we thought should come out and because the tree has to breathe still now we're talking about maybe sealing the entire thing in asphalt. So there has to be opportunities for the tree to get oxygen. And yeah, so that's our concern because we still don't know enough about it. And we're always wanting to plant trees. We've so far put in like 260 trees around the village but we want them to be successful and we do not want them to die or look terrible, which will be a terrible iso for that location. So we want trees that are gonna make it and enhance the property. And there are things you have to do and it is a very difficult location. And what we're not seeing too are any of the road signs that are there, the poles and other things that also impact visibility issues for trees of having to prune them so it doesn't. So I love trees and I love to put them in but I just want to make certain that it works. So that is my hat from the tree advisory board and we haven't had a chance to meet or look at this yet, we just got it. As a citizen now hats off Nick Meyer resident on Pleasant Street. I think there's some simple things that we could do initially to buy us time to see if Main Street is gonna be closed that would provide the shade and create much more of an architectural element of the big shade cause that can be colorful, you're driving down Main Street, you see this and right now most people there are going to eat. They're either coming from Firebird or across the street, the bagel place and they're looking for some shade and a nice place to be. Perhaps trying to incorporate some sort of screening with planters but again, we've got to be really cognizant of maintenance and upkeep of these things and there definitely has to be a water feature cause you know, village trucks would be able to come in there and water those things. So yeah, those are my thoughts. Okay, thank you. Thank you Nick. Bridget? I'll be sure. I'm just an ordinary citizen. There's no just. I know, so you all heard from me and it's certainly your decision. I want to emphasize how strongly I support green space and parks and Dan and I've talked about other areas where this could happen. I think it's a great idea. We need to do it. We're a small city, we're a small city and the more places to sit especially around our downtown especially is all these new restaurants at Bakery. I mean, we really need places. If you, I'm just walking over here tonight the line at the ice place and where do you go? What do you do? But my suggestion is to do a simple, a simple, lovely space where people can sit, where there's some shade, where perhaps there's some screening from the street if we can do that. I'm a mithion planters because of maintenance. I've done that here before as most of you know and I think we have to be really careful about what we ask public works to do and we have to be thinking about how much space the planters would take up because it's a really small space. I support your idea about gathering more public opinion. Andrew, when you first put this out on Facebook in September of 2020, I look back today. I think I sent you all this a long time ago but there were 65 responses. Today there were 45 when I put it out and people have really good ideas. They're simple. They're simpler than this design and people are for the most part not in favor of the bandstand wondering how often it's going to be used and thinking about how much space it will take up but valuable seating space and water features, will it really make a difference there in terms of noise? I kind of think not, although Nick's point is important there has to be water, there's somewhere if we have trees, shrubs, grasses, whatever we have. I don't know that this is valuable input but I could certainly, what I think, here's what I think going down to the center of town on a Saturday or a Sunday morning with a clipboard and gathering people's opinions without trying to influence them, that's hard for me but hey, I can try. I'd be happy to do that and there are other people today who came forth and said I'd like to talk about this with more people and I think that's what we have to do and in the end, we will have opinions of 100, 200 people that will weigh into your decision, obviously but beginning by remediating would be great and then moving ahead and this could be done fairly quickly like when Andrew, when you put that out on Facebook it was September of 2020 and here we are in May of 2022. We've already, we're already a year and a half after the initial and I'm with you, George it has to be done, we have to do something it's ugly and we have to do something. So I'd be willing, I'd volunteer to do whatever you want me to do, put me to work I'm finished with our segment of the manager the manager search and ready to do my next job so talk amongst yourselves and decide but there are other people too who'd be more than willing to do that. I think it's a great idea just to go down there and gather people's opinions who are there. So there, thank you, great. Thank you, Bridget. So we have nobody else in the room or public to be heard on this item, Marcus I see your hand up if you'd like to unmute yourself or is yours? Thank you. I want, I really appreciate the comments tonight and George acknowledging the history being somewhat familiar with the comprehensive plan what I want to comment on is a little bit of concern about yes, what I'm seeing on the screen in regards to what's being potentially proposed and I know this is not final but thinking about the long term of the space not just this corner but that whole space with Main Street being closed off. I think that if we're going to really talk about how this particular portion of space is used right now, we need to talk about it being flexible because I think in the long term something like a bandstand that might not be the appropriate space for it we should talk about what that long term plan looks like and really think that through. So I'm not in favor of where the bandstand currently is kind of be in place. I think creating a space here while I wish it were far greener than it's currently appears I like the fact that the benches while they're going to be very heavy are still movable. So this space with some good solid plantings with trees could be still flexible enough that in the long term we could reconfigure as that space starts to work itself through to the final result. The other thing that I wanted to bring up was again as a person who has studied sound I will say that looking at this picture and the hedge that is kind of being proposed a sound mitigation argument I don't think really holds up. Yes, if you're sitting next to the hedge it will have a little bit of impact but are you trying to impact the person who's sitting on a bench or are you trying to sound mitigate for the area? I think if you're trying to create a sound mitigating a space that really has some sound mitigation you need a lot more than what's being shown here. So it's not just me saying, here's my issues with this. I think that what I want to acknowledge is that I agree that some more conversation needs to be had. My thoughts are we need to be flexible in order to really create that final product of that final space that will be there. And I like the idea about a committee and I'm willing to help out as well. So I appreciate the time and allowing me to participate in this. I look forward to having this space so that I can go get a bagel or I can walk down to mark tones, whatever but I can enjoy that space. And cause right now it's not the space that it could be and I look forward to what that space will become in the upcoming years. Thank you. Thank you, Marcus. Arlen, the floor is yours. Yeah, can you hear me? We can. Yeah, so I'm gonna jump on the bandwagon of most people that have been there. I really liked the conversation of designing this park in a temporary moveable situation as much as I love the trees as well. And I think the long-term plan is to have trees being in parks and recreation. There are a tremendous amount of shade structures that can be erected that could be also removed and relocated at a later date as the parks become available. I like the idea of a committee and that committee also holding that one day for those people that can come in and have a lot of passion and wanna spend one day and then maybe the committee working through all of those suggestions that they may get in that one day. I have some other opinions about because I work in parks as you all know, the landscape that I'm looking at right here and I see some nightmares that I would like to bring to that committee. I'd be willing to be on that committee. And I would definitely show up for the one day event. Since this park has been talked about, I was disappointed in myself that I missed the original event that sounds like may have only had seven people show up. I think this is a really cool space. I think the future holds a really cool area as far as Main Street is concerned. And I think I agree with George, let's get something done with it. It's not the prettiest space right now. And I think we can do something, but we can put things here that we can move later maybe. And as far as a band stand, and I don't know, maybe this is out in left field, our fourth of July event, the Champlain Valley hooked onto a band stand and set it up for us for our fourth of July event. I'm assuming they're gonna be doing the same thing again for us this year, which means if we did plan an event in this park, there is a mobile stage that we might be able to get our hands on to do that type of an event until we have our long-term plan later on where we may wanna build a permanent structure. And I also agree about the noise. It's gonna be a little tough right now to try to mitigate much of the noise and it doesn't seem to be ampering the people that are scampering to that area right now to eat their food. So let's do something really creative quickly. Let's get something done with it soon to dress it up a little bit, but let's make sure we're building it so that we can connect it to what our future plans are very easily. That's all I had. Thank you, Harlan. Annie, go ahead, Laura's yours. Hi, thank you. Thank you, Robin, for your presentation. And thank you, trustees, for the conversation. The vision while kindly presented seems more conceptual and not fully finalized. I understand that we've said that, but the haphazard conversation which changed direction and ideas quite a number of times makes me very strongly feel confident that a committee is the smartest way to go and I don't mean the kind of committee that's got a chair and not a clunky committee, but an active committee that gets things done. As Harlan has said before, who's going to maintain the park? Where's the coherence and the collaboration? Where's the conversations that happen, not Rick going to the tree committee and then Rick going to the, it's a lot of, that's a lot of hot scotch and that's unnecessary. So in my opinion, there should be a committee. A vague idea is one or more members of the tree committee, one or more members of bike walk advisory, one or more members of staff from EJRP, it's a park, one or more members of the planning commission, Robin, one or more to three to four, however many residents, not too many people, one or more engineers, residents, Rick or whoever, four to six meetings, the bandstand space is not positioned well at all. It needs to either be seating space that can convert to bandstand space or moved back. It's just peculiar where it's sitting. What we learned without an about is that when we put the band right under the firebird sign, which sits directly back against the further most piece of this owned property with its ass up against toward Nomad, that gives us the best sound, but I'm not confident that a bandstand should exist there. So I like it that we can do it, but I don't know that it living there, but anyway, that could be for the, for a conversation in the committee. Then once you have this committee, which is an action-based committee, because we absolutely need to hit the go button, we absolutely need to use the funding and we absolutely need to get this done. So I'm talking about an active, like a committee that is activated on purpose, moving forward. The thorough and professional plan that gets decided upon within that space. And if you bring those kind of people together, if you bring those kind of people together, all of the people I've mentioned would have input from their neighbors and from, and they would bring to the table more than just their own idea. And that collaborative conversation, especially in these days of Zoom where you can have it in a way that works for everyone, then you come with a professional finalized plan. And that's when George, you bring the people to, sorry, that's when I agree with George, that you bring people to look. And I really think that we can get things done and we can get it done quickly. My idea for the committee is just, I just made it up, it's dopey or not, but really let's go and let's be mindful of who's gonna look after the park. Who knows what they're talking about this or that. And let Robin, whose ideas are fantastic, be in the room while the conversation's taking place. And then we get forward to an idea and the idea gets presented. I'm talking too much, I'm sorry. Yeah, I just feel that I'm nervous that we not do something just to do it. And then people are like, what the, you know what I mean, I wanna make sure that we're, that we go more slowly as we go, let's get going, but let's do it more slowly and let's be thorough and let's go. I'm talking too much, thank you, buddy. Thank you, Annie. I'm not seeing any new hands up. I'm sorry, I want to be on any committee. I will help with anything. Let me go, I wanna go, go, go with it, but I don't have to, thank you. Thank you, Annie. Seeing no new hands up. So we will bring it back to the board. Dan, why don't you kick it off? Yeah, regarding the remediation of soil and Nick brought up the very important factor of having water there for any plants, trees, what have you, bushes that we put on the property if we do so. Down on Pearl Street. I talked to Rick Hamlin about this when Pearl Street was redone. The strip where there used to be grass between the road and the sidewalk in many areas where it was narrow and the grass wasn't able to sustain itself because of the way the amount of grass or green area or dirt there. They put in a pervious semi-permeable surface. It almost looks kind of not concrete-ish but not asphalt either. But anyways, water can penetrate that surface. I'm wondering can something like that be done with this surface in the areas so that you have something that is stable platform for benches, chairs, what have you, but it's also semi-permeable. So when rain is falling or even snow is melting, it's going down through that surface. It's helping to hydrate what we plant there. Justin, do you have to be capped though? I'm not sure. I think it does. That's the issue. We don't know and I'm pretty sure it does. I think you really have to be, and that's something I think Robin or Rick, probably Robin's still online, but I think they could answer, but I don't know. I think it does have to just be capped. I don't know that you can do much with it other than cover it up. Okay. Well, if you put it up, say cover it up with concrete. If you contour the concrete, you have grades, you have some other things that can take that water that is going and send it to certain areas. That would be my other option. Robin, could you address that part? Yeah, I actually in charge, stone-like thunder. Yeah, it does have to be capped. Also, permeable surface, it's been around since the 70s. Sounds great, but it's very sensitive. You've got a document and stuff. It fills up with dirt. It's something you have to look after. It's a great idea. It works better in low traffic areas than it does in high traffic areas because it's worse down faster. The original sketch for this had bluestone papers in. If there's frost, heave, you just reset them. The water goes in between them. It'll go up obviously to the orange fabric, but it'll run somewhere. It won't just stay there. There's lots of options, but I really like the idea of taking out as much of the remediated soil. This we can't remediate as much of the soil as we can, but we have to do it in a measured way. So we're taking it out where we're gonna put something in rather than saying six months after the remediation, well, we know we wanted it 10 foot from the north, but we really want to put it in 10 foot from the east and that could get us into all sorts of trouble. Thank you, Robin. Go ahead, Raj. So yeah, I guess this touched, Robin touched on a minute ago, but capped. I mean, I'm looking back at the design five corners documents from like the 2019 implementation report, I think this is. So capped, I mean, can it not be grasped because in those conceptual designs in that report, it's always grasped only in the 2020 design that's on the community development page and that did it become Bluestone. So I'm sure there was a lot learned between the two times, but I'm wondering is, and I know we touched on this maybe two years ago or a year ago, the last time this came up, I just can't recall if the liner and everything else prohibits any grass from being there or was it just that the feeling was that grass would be hard to keep up? Go ahead, I guess that's for Robin. Yeah, the feeling was they wanted something that was pretty secure in terms of, if somebody's playing in it, if your young child's playing in it, they get around a little bit, they don't want them to have the potential to break. I mean, it's like an orange fabric. It's a warning sign. How deep is that? That's not going to be three inches below the surface, is it? It'll be, well, it depends if you put it under the Bluestone and the Bluestone might be two and a half inches and then you have an inch and a half. Yeah, but if it's grass and if it's soil, it's soil on top of the orange fabric, that's why the idea was to have pavers and to have, and when the trees are, it's completely dug out. It might be dug out six foot, four foot wide and whatever for each tree. But if it was grass, it'd be just soil on top of the orange cap, so to speak. I guess, so it could be or can't be. What they told us was they prefer it not to be because there's potential for a problem. Okay, I mean, you wouldn't want somebody like putting up their shade structure and hammering a stake down into the grass in that situation, I suppose, but... Stuff like that. All right. I think, I guess the point is, as we talk about this, as we heard public comment and people want to go out and seek public comment and we're gonna have a committee, I think it's important when folks go out and talk about this, I think it's important to have a very clear, and maybe there's a one pager that can be produced that we might already have that can be repurposed to help folks who are doing and having these conversations. So they can, when they ask people what they want there, they can also communicate in a very clear and concise and quick way. What would you like to see in this park? Understanding that we can't have the following because of these two issues, you know, because it doesn't do anybody any good to provide feedback to only find out later that can't be done. I think people need to understand when they're being asked. A lot of people are gonna say, I'd love grass. Well, that's not an option because, well, we'd like this. Well, that's, so going into these conversations, understanding first before they're carried out, what are the limitations of the site so that people can then provide a thoughtful answer that's useful because I hate to waste people's time if, and yeah, so that's the only comment I have of this. Following that feedback. Thanks, Raj. Go ahead, George. Yeah, I, you know, that's to just touch on your point, Raj, and that's excellent. I mean, that is the reason I'm just recommending that. If you, if we're gonna have a committee think, is that the right approach? It's fine, but just like there are facilitators for conversations, you know, in community events, there are people, and if John Alden is still online and certainly Robin knows this, there are people who are really good at architectural design and are really good at working with a roomful of people and getting a lot of input and translating that into a plan. That's, it's sort of like what they do for a living. And I'll tell you, even with the small group we had with I seven or eight people in the room, and we were all given a little piece of paper and said, you know, design your, you know, what do you, what's your ideal part? It was great fun, but guess what? We had eight completely different designs. And if you get 20 people, if we had 20 people and we would have 20 different designs. So how do you, I remember saying, well, how do you take all that and turn it into one design? And there are some people who are really good at that and they can do it quickly. So at some point in the process, you may want to engage someone like that. And that, and the other, the reason I'm saying it is that that person would be a professional who would probably understand about the need to cap the soil, the limitation on which you can have how many vegetation, how much vegetation you can have there, they would, they would have that technical knowledge. So the committee wouldn't have to go, you know, bumping into it and find it, that you would have a person who could really set, you know, certain ideas that come along, the person would say, well, sorry, we can't do that. It's a safety issue or something like that. So that's why if you're going to do it, I would, I would suggest we look for someone who can, can, can sort of manage and, and facilitate that. So, you know, a professional landscape designer or someone who does that kind of thing for a living. Go Dan. Regarding all this stuff, you know, I appreciate Robin's comments about having to cap it and such. Maybe what we could do is something, a hybrid type of park that combines artificial with natural plants, you know, wherever I've been in Vermont, Burlington, there's some examples of it when you go downtown where they have people sitting outside and there's artificial barriers that aren't as stark as concrete or brick walls or what have you, but they're softened with something that's artificial that won't deteriorate as quickly or be affected by the weather as much as, you know, plants would be, but also even, you know, synthetic turf. They use it in, in sports and the other things. There's other ways to think outside the box here. We could do it and still have that, but combine it with some kind of natural vegetation trees, bushes, what have you. So it's not, obviously we can't have it all, but think alternative ways of doing it. I think that might work for us. You can't dig through the, we could cover that concrete or whatever you wanna do, your cap with a softened turf that would look like grass, but be more durable. You could roll it up, you could do whatever. There's just a lot of things to think about. All right, so what I'm hearing and taking away from this is there's a desire for the plan to come back to us that would allow for the maximum amount of remediation possible. Not sure what that would actually look like, but Robin, that's your bailiwick. To come back to us at a future meeting, ideally the sooner the better, so that way we could get this started as soon as possible. And then from there, at a subsequent meeting, I think at that point we could further figure out, do we wanna committee, do we wanna use some funds to pay for somebody, we could figure that part out. But the key takeaway that I'm hearing is whatever we can do to make sure that as much remediation can be done as possible, which would then allow for us to be as flexible in the planning and design that we can possibly be. Go ahead, Robin. Yeah, I'm just thinking off the top of my head here. We might be better to design 12 trees and put in five or six. It would just give us a lot of flexibility. I don't mean more soil removed. As long as that then doesn't put us in any kind of jeopardy later on of the cap program telling us, you told us 12, now you must put in 12. As long as it doesn't require us to do that, then great. Because the last thing we'd wanna do is put in trees that are just gonna die. I think it's separate because the remediation is paid by the grant and the park is paid for by the city. So it's really two different contracts. Great, that sounds good. And hopefully we're not recording this, joke. Great, so trustees, I miss anything? I'm fine, I think that's all good. I mean, do we wanna make a motion for him to move forward with the remediation process? What is exactly we were saying for him to do? From my understanding, we need to approve of the plan, the conceptual plan for the remediation. So we need the plan to come back to us. Okay, sounds good. Is that right? Yeah, okay. Great, so at this point there's no, I don't believe we need a vote on that. So if we are all set on that agenda item, thank you everybody who came out to speak to this. Thank you to everybody who had emailed earlier. Please do stay engaged in this as this is only the remediation portion. The actual design will be coming up. So looking forward to ensuring you're all engaged in that process as well as that arises. We're gonna come looking for you if you don't stay engaged. We're gonna actually come and hunt you down. George, we'll find you. Yes. So next we will go into business item five. We are at E to discuss the city manager recruitment and hiring planning committee progress. Thanks Andrew. And I was trying to get jump in there before you moved on to the next agenda item. Sorry, could I just make sure I understand your expectations for next steps in terms of public input on one main street? Is it something you want to revisit on 525? Is it, I just, maybe I missed something but I just wanna make sure I'm clear about what your plans or desires are. I think if we were to revisit it when the conceptual plan comes back to us that that would, I think would flow well. So if Robin can come back to us on the 25th then yes, let's talk about the committee or consultant approach at that time too. Great, thank you. Yep. Thank you for the clarification. In terms of the next agenda item I'm gonna turn it over. I see Bridget is here and I, is Mike Plagueman here as well? Yes, Mike is here. So I'm gonna turn it over Andrew to the two chairs of the recruitment committee to provide an update as to their work. Bridget and Mike. Thank you, Brad and Bridget. What do you mean you're just a community resident? Here you are as chair of a committee. I'll be up here again for the celebration committee. Yeah, you have the documentation. You have the work we've done and you've seen it. If you have questions for us, I can't see that nor do I have it in front of me but we began with a survey. George, you and Mike, you can help me out. We began with a survey of the community members, staff, department heads and trustees. And the surprising, interesting and wonderful thing was that the priorities from all three from all of those groups were the same. Bigly but pretty, yeah, we're the same. So that helped us a lot in terms of writing our ideal candidate profile. George with editorial help from all of us wrote the community profile. And then we together, Maggie started it and we wrote together the advertisement. And it's out there as far as I know. We've begun to, we have several, I wanna say 20 plus places we'll be advertising. And then committee members are also going to have taken some individual places that we'll be advertising. So we did it in seven Monday nights. Really phenomenal work from everyone. It was a great committee moved right along. Only our last meeting was longer than an hour. So, pretty good. It's amazing what a group of committed people when given this opportunity can accomplish. If you have questions, I'm happy to answer them. All the information. If you want me to go over it, I can probably do it. But you can see the survey results, the community profiles there. The, I don't know if the advertisement is there. Is it Brad? Is the ad up there? I'm just gonna, I've got to bring up the page. So if folks visit our, if you go to the website up here, there's city manager. Is that not showing up there? One sec, let me switch there. Folks go to our homepage and click on city manager search. You'll see the ideal candidate profile and our community profile. And you'll see there's four documents that this committee has created at the job posting, the ideal candidate profile, community profile, and then the trustees actually did the job description. So those are all there. I did just check ICMA and it's listed there. And there, as Bridget said, there is a long list of places where Ashley is placing ads and started that process today and probably we'll wrap up tomorrow. We'll be advertising through June 12th and begin the review process starting June 13th. And the hiring committee is really now ramping up their work to sort out what the hiring process looks like. Great. That's it in a nutshell. Mike, Mike Plageman, do you have anything to add? Anything you'd like to say as co-chair? The only thing that I'd like to do is just it was, it was my privilege to serve with Bridget and Brad and the other members of this committee on this work. I think Bridget really nailed it when she said that we were all pulling in the same direction. There was a good division of labor, I think. And we got some very good feedback from the members of the committee. So again, my thanks, my thanks to Bridget and Brad. Maggie Massey was just amazing. And the feedback from the others, we never would have been able to do this without it. So that's what I would offer. It was my privilege to serve and I thank you. Questions, do you have any questions? You okay with all of this? I'm perfectly fine with everything that I saw in there. I equally was quite pleased when I saw that, how aligned we all generally were if there was food as we were looking for. So that was great to see it in all honesty. I had a little bit of a sigh of relief when I first read it as I was a little concerned about where that may go. Well, this is an example of what the citizenry could do if you give them this opportunity and I thank you for the opportunity. I know the committee does too. We'll look forward to passing it off to the hiring committee and they'll get to work. Well, selfishly, I greatly appreciate the work that you all did. In many regards, I think you did it faster than we would have. Frankly, this is only a comment on myself, better than I would have been able to do. So I greatly appreciate the many hands that made the light work of this and also the high quality work that has been done thus far. So I really appreciate your efforts. Oh, thanks, it was our privilege. Thank you, Bridget. An exciting time. So I don't believe we have a motion on this one. And I'm not seeing any hands up trustees, I assume we're ready to go to the next agenda item. What is the next agenda? Are we still on the hiring committee? City celebration. I do have a question in reading over this and this is for everybody. And I'm looking at, and I'm sorry, I get the recruitment committee and the hiring committee and I think the hiring committee is not the one, we were on the recruitment committee, right? And I'm looking at the notes from the hiring committee and I also looked at the notes from Brad here. And this is a bit of a technical question but what the next steps in the process are and if I can just go quickly, I'm gonna try to be quick, I know we wanna get on to the next thing. But the idea is the ad is out, applications are gonna come in, they will be accumulated in the Human Resources Office and then in June 13th, and this is what I'm getting to, staff will evaluate to get a top 10 which will be scored by a committee of staff and two trustees. I'd just like to get a little bit understanding what that means. Who are the two trustees? Is this Amber and me or what are we doing? And that's fine but my real question here is that I'm a little hazy here because let me get right to the chase. When someone applies for a job in Essex Junction, they assume that their application, their CV, their resume, their materials are confidential. They're not public records, it's not a public document. We don't share people stuck with the public. And in fact, we go out of our way to limit access to those files to as few people as possible. The manager or the human resources director in the appropriate department head. Here, I'm a little concerned that it looks like we're talking about getting lots of applications and who are these applications going to be shared with? Are they going to be shared with HR? And obviously since this is a trustee process, ultimately the trustees have to be able to see all the job applications. I mean, normally it would be the manager in charge but the manager is not in charge of this because the manager isn't doing the hire, the trustee. So I would assume ultimately the simplest model is that it's the HR director and the trustees are in charge of looking at the actual applications and having access to confidential data. And then we're talking about giving other members of the staff access to confidential data. Are we talking about giving members of the committee access to confidential, this application data? That's what I'm not clear about here. We're going to discuss later one of the... Are we discussing that later? No, we're discussing later, I'm sorry to interrupt you but I was going to bring this up later and under letter H, our consideration of approval of ethics policy, this plays into that. We sign an ethics policy, the confidentiality, the public don't. That's an issue that I believe is the issue that we really got to consider. And I guess what I'm understanding, and let me, I know you want it, it may be Brad and you're gonna, so maybe I'm just talking through my hat right now and you're gonna give me a simple answer and it's all set. But I just wanted to get this out because it looks to me like what's gonna happen is that it's just gonna be in-house, it's just gonna be elected officials and staff and limited number of staff having access to these files. And then when we get to the point where people are invited in at that for an interview, then you would say, okay, if you accept to come for the interview, you do so with the understanding that you are now gonna go, the veil of confidentiality is lifted and the fact that you're applying for a job here is gonna be open to the public. So members of the public, i.e. the committee, the recruitment committee, the hiring committee, those people will now be in a lot of numbers, a lot of members of staff. So I'm just trying to raise, understand what we are the confidentiality kicks in and maybe you can answer or maybe you haven't thought about it. I believe Amber and or Brad will be very well suited to address that and I think Amber's hand is up. Okay, great. I'm not sure that I'm well suited because actually this particular line in the memo struck me as inaccurate based on what's been happening in the hiring committee. And so my understanding, and I don't have the timeline and the process right in front of me, but my understanding was Brad and Colleen are going and Wendy are gonna take a look at the applications that come in and then get those to about 10 to move forward to the next level. At that level, the 10 we're gonna be reduced to five based on some additional essay questions that were being provided or actually looking at the essay questions that are provided that are in the application, sorry. So at that point, the people that are reducing those to five, my understanding was it was a hiring committee. At that point, then it goes on to the department heads and that committee to reduce the amount to three, which then comes to the trustees. So I guess to answer the direct question, my understanding was the hiring committee was gonna be privy to applications in order to do their job that they were tasked with. If they are not tasked with that portion, I guess the question is, what is the hiring committee doing? So I'm happy to jump in and Amber, I have not been a part of obviously the hiring committee meetings. And so I tried to connect with Colleen and get updates. So what I've written in here was my understanding of that committee's work to date, which was prior to your meeting on Monday night. So if things changed or this was an accurate, this was my interpretation based on our conversations. I think this is an important distinction that we went back to when these committees were originally created, that this isn't a be hiring committee, it's the hiring committee planning, the hiring planning committee. And so they were designing the process with which we would evaluate. And so my understanding and interpretation all along is that they may or may not have a role ultimately when community members are engaged in the process, which community members should be engaged at some point. But they were not the actual committee that necessarily was gonna do that unless that's how they appointed themselves. So my understanding was that staff it would be and two trustees, which I was assuming would be Amber and George would be involved in applications. And then department heads and interviews up until we get to the top three. And only once we got to the three finalists would we then engage the community members and staff beyond department heads. And so those top three would, if they wanted to continue in the process would be told and made to understand that the next steps in the process are public parts of the process and that there would be a citizen panel of some sort and a staff panel. I don't know the details of how those were gonna look like. That's kind of what that hiring committee I think would be sorting out is what do those panels look like? And then ultimately those top three, those panels or situations where residents and staff can contribute to and evaluate those evaluations would be sent on to the trustees. Thank you. That's really helpful, Claire. That is helpful. Thank you. So to get to your, George also to get to your question about confidentiality, generally when someone does apply for a position like this, remember when we had this conversation however many years ago that was in the last go around, there is a portion of where things are confidential. But once somebody does get into the actual in-person interview conversations, that's where generally the employee, the person seeking the job has already informed their employer or should have by that point in time because it is public and it would be known. So at that point, I don't believe that a committee member or somebody would need to sign off on any confidentiality agreement. If we wanted to bring in members of the public in this initial screening time, which I don't think we necessarily want to do, that's when we would want to have them sign off on something. Yes, we are bound to the ethics policy or staff obviously are as well. Okay, that clarifies it for me. I just couldn't quite tell from the language here. How it all worked and so my question and I would also just question, just to your last comment, even if we decide we think we can have a committee, we can share something, I would want to maybe check with the village attorney to make sure that we can. I don't know if we can just extend our liability coverage that we have as elected officials and staff has to a committee that we appoint. Do you understand what I'm saying? I don't know, even if our policy says we can do it, the law might say, yeah, that's great, but the law said, yeah, actually do that. So I just want to be careful there because public disclosure or personal information could be a bit of an issue for some people. You're abruptly harmed someone's career. For sure. Yeah. No. And then I had one other question. Can I, I'm sorry, I'm sorry and I know we've got stuff to do and I ask for your indulgence here. Well, I'm sorry, I'm going as fast as I can, man. I know, okay, hang in here. Hang in here with me. I am looking at this and so, and I just, this is just for the trustees and I guess I'm being, I'm going to be at the ground level. Amber and I are going to be at the ground level going through the initial batch of the hundreds of applications we're going to receive for the manager's job and then whittling them down and everything. So I'm going to see the whole thing, but the rest of you, Dan and Andrew and Raj, you're going to be out of the process, out of the loop, until the very end, according to this. And then you see the final three. Now that means that as far as I understand, you're not, you could have, I guess, if you wanted to see all of the applicants, all of the applications, is that, would you like to do that at the beginning or are you saying you're, you're okay with Amber and I and staff, Wendy and Brad and Holly sorting through this and you trust our judgment. So to not jump the gun quite yet. Amber, I'm curious, was the hiring committee going to ask the trustees what we were comfortable with or are you doing that for us? I believe that I essentially did that when I sent the email showing you guys what the direction was that the hiring committee was going in and basically said, do you guys have any questions, concerns? And that timeline showed really that the rest of the trustees weren't going to be brought into the process until those three candidates were identified. Great. Thank you, Amber. So now to more directly answer your question personally, I'm totally fine with it. Okay. I wholeheartedly trust the four of you to continue to do the great things that you do for our community. Okay. So George Amber, I trust your judgments, our department trust theirs as well. I'm going to, I just want to anticipate that. We don't get to the final three and then the three of you go, hey, you know, just out of curiosity, let's see that initial pool. And then you go, well, wait a second, why didn't we interview her? And you're trusting that you're going to be okay with this. You might have a different opinion here. Oh, Raj, it's okay. So it's naturally, why wouldn't it? Cause it's, you know, it's eight 30. Why wouldn't you have a different opinion? All right. Yeah. I guess, you know, reading through this, Amber, I completely, I'm full disclosure, completely spaced your email. So now that you mentioned that, I do remember thinking I'd have to get back to Amber with my feedback and I didn't. So I apologize. So you get it now. I think a compromise here would be, and I do, you know, have trust for my fellow trustees, future city councilors. I think this step where the top five candidates get whittled down to three by department heads, I think I'd like those, I think I'd like their feedback and have the five come to the trustees. Yeah. I think that's where my comfort level is. I have some concerns generally. I am personally fairly particular with some of what I'm looking for. So I think that's where I'd like to trip this up a bit. I loved it. I want their feedback very much. I think that one of the number one things we've heard for a long time is that that hasn't been sought in past hiring and I value it completely. But I think that the, that step of whittling out to, I think that the five of us can get it down to those three to move on with. If that's what, that's just my opinion right now. So Raj, are you suggesting that where it currently says the top five candidates will be interviewed by department heads, it also says, and trustees? No, I think, I want the top, I understand how we're whittling it down to five. This has to get whittled down. I get it. I simply want the department heads, simply it's just like saying, just I apologize. I want the department heads to provide their feedback based on those interviews, based on that experience. I want to know what they think. And then I want us as a board to take it to, to take it to the next level. I don't want, I guess I don't want to be just presented with three. So after, after three or four rounds of whittling it down. And if that creates too much chaos in the process, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, you know, demand it. It's just, at all. It's just something that I want the feedback from them. I want to know what they think. I think it's incredibly important to hear from people when you, when you're hiring someone that is going to be leading, yeah. So you're, you're suggesting your comfort level would be that after the staff, the department heads have interviewed the top five that the results from that and the other conversations come to us and the five of us, then identify which of the three to be interviewed by a resident staff. Yeah. Okay. It shouldn't be that big a bomb to drop in this. But if I'm not considering, but if I'm not considering something, please let me know. Yep. Go ahead, Brad. You know, obviously you all can do whatever you choose. The charge that was agreed upon for the hiring committee was, and the final bullet was to provide a process that results in up to the top three finalists being provided to the trustees for ultimate consideration and decision. So you're obviously welcome to change that charge at any point. I would just say that that's been their mission since they were created back in March. And I guess my only other comment or question would be what metrics would you use if you're not actually interviewing the candidates to select the top three? I mean, the way that we would normally do that is that those interviews by department heads would be scored. And then there would be a conversation afterwards to make sure that the scores align with their actual interpretations. And ultimately a final three would be selected. So I guess my question or confusion would be around what other metrics the trustees would use that the department heads aren't if you're not actually in the interviews to make that determination. Thank you, Brad. Before I get to Dan or George, Amber, I wanna get your input especially as I believe you're one of the co-chairs of the hiring committee. Yeah. Yeah. So we have discussed as the hiring committee there is gonna be some form of metrics that we were gonna provide to the department heads to use as Brad said, like that is the process. One thing that we did discuss and then said it doesn't make sense to do it was we talked about taping the interviews, videotaping the interviews. But when it came down to where we stopped having that discussion was the people that are, the five people or 10 people that are in the room interviewing the person is the one that's making the decision. So why do we need to tape these interviews? But now if we're saying that the trustees are not in the room and they're going to be making the decision then maybe that has to come back to the conversation. I don't know, I'm just throwing it out there. Yeah, again, I'm not gonna sit here and demand it but we're doing that with the three anyway. So I'm not sure what the difference is from doing it from the five but we're taking all the feedback from not being in the interviews to not being in any part of this process along the way but we're applying that to the three finalists but we're, so I don't see the difference in applying the same data we're given for the three to the five. Again, if nobody else feels this way, we can move on. It's, I don't wanna drag it out, it's just how I'm feeling and we can go around the room real quick and say here and now and move on. Raj, I agree with you but if we're gonna do that then it has to be prior to the staff interview that we're able to view the five, whittled down to five, those candidates prior to being interviewed by staff, the trustees are able to look at their, what they have for information about them and discuss it amongst ourselves, maybe an executive session or what have you and then have our two representatives go forward with the process beyond that point. That's where I look at that maybe if that's possible. I'm happy with any of these things. I mean, I just had early on a sort of a compromise position where the top five candidates will be interviewed by department heads and then presumably the committee of staff and the two trustees make the decision of the three out of the five. That's the plan here. But I'm wondering at that point, if the trust as a compromise of the trustees could also then just in executive session meet with the rest of you guys and say, hey, here's where we are. We started with these five. Staff had these interviews and these are the three candidates that came out that everyone likes and here's who they are. You know who they are. And see if you agree with our decision. And if you don't, then you could intervene at that point. Why go to that point, George, and come back to us and say, see if you agree. Why not precede that process with us? We get a little down to five in the process. The five prior to being interviewed by staff are presented to us in an executive session. Then we can exchange opinions and then you and Amber as members of that go back and then that's next step of the interview with the staff and everything with our input to you. So it's just that, I think that would be a better process. Well, I think I think I'm regretting this. I think, you know, playing that out, George and Dan adds one to two weeks. And so then in my head, I'm going for what? So having taken up 10 minutes, nine minutes. You know, weighing the delay that this will cause in terms of having to go through that process to facilitate that, I'm going to back off and just pull back my suggestion. So sorry for taking 10 minutes, but as it's gamed out, listening to Brad, Amber and George and Dan, I'm not certain it's worth the delay and the extra steps and the hoops to jump through in order to have these conversations and to do all that stuff. I'll take it back. Okay. I'm open to, too. You, you, you, you. I don't think it's different. I go back to my original point. Amber and I are going to be engaged from the whole thing all along. So it's just the three of you, the your comfort level. That's what it's about. Well, obviously we're sworn to, we have an ethics policy we're sworn to. I'd be interested to see my, personally myself, the five or obviously I'm not going to try and, you know, go through the whole thing for 10 people, but I mean, it's, it's a narrow, it's a narrow field of five people just to read through everything that they present, bring to the things before, not to be necessarily right there with the interview at that point, but discuss it with you at some point. I don't know how we could do that, you know. I think the two, the two trustees who are doing this, we absolutely can have an executive session to talk about personnel. And this could be one of the topics of conversation where right after the interviews can debrief us, let us know what you thought, why you're recommending the people that you're recommending. If there's anything glaringly of concern, we could always just say, well, hold on a second, let's, let's revisit this. I certainly, and I'm, Raj, I know you mentioned about causing a 10 minute delay or whatever. What I don't want to have us do is find us in a place where we're recreating what other municipalities have done where they then end up not agreeing on a candidate and starting this process over again because the process wasn't necessarily agreed to to begin with. So I'd rather we spend the time upfront to agree as to what we want to make sure that we don't then redo this again. So I think George, what you're saying about that, that compromise, it makes sense to me. And at the same time, I just also want to make sure that Amber, you're not hearing this and please pass this along to the committee that we're trying to micromanage the work of your committee. Cause I hope that that's not how this is being received. Yeah, I would echo that. I mean, if anything, this is more about my comfort level with them and then is about trusting anybody else. We could play it by ear. And when we get to that point, it's there's no harm if Dan at that point said, hey, I'd like to sit in, I'll zip it up, I'll sit in and I'll just watch the interview. How goes? There's no, I don't see any harm in that. So we could just play it by ear to see how things are going and how we're feeling. I mean, would that be a problem? I don't, I mean, as long as we said, Dan isn't going to be Dan or if you said, actually would like to jump into the process and just sort of watch the interviews. I think that if we have somebody who, one of the trustees that wants to jump in on it, for one, this is again, we don't get to do this very often. It's very important to our community. And it's one of the few things that's defined within our roles as trustees. I think that, yes, we have that right. It's just, if one wants to, we would need to then ensure that the others also have that same opportunity. Again, though, I would just ask that if we're asking a committee to come up with and empowering a committee to come up with a process, we also let them do what we ask them to do. Well, just to add to that, if there's three of us there that's meeting. Oh, that's true. Yes, we can't do that. Just so you know. Okay, nevermind. Well, that and the fact that, we're asking the department heads to interview them. We should give them the space. I never intended to intervene in that a department head conversation with a candidate is going to be different if we're sitting there listening. And I want them to be empowered to have to have that conversation and to have that experience where it is, they're having that opportunity. And I want to be present to impact that. So I don't, that's why I said in the beginning, I think that the only thing that's changes between the three and the five is just getting the raw data for the two. I don't think it's, and I, but again, what I don't want to do is add a requirement that we have to space this out longer that we're going to delay the process that we're going to add more steps that are going to put us off our track. So, got my video was off, sorry. So, George, I think your compromise is good, I guess that people are comfortable with it, but I don't, but again, I don't want to extend this out. And I want to make sure that department heads, you know, have the full opportunity for consultation that we could, we take it at full weight. And I think our presence in those interviews would be detrimental to that experience. And I don't intend to change the process that much, you know, where we're inserting ourselves. So that's all. Thank you, Raj. Go ahead, Amber, or your hand was up. Yeah, I mean, I don't, I never anticipated that I was going to be sitting in those interviews. And the one thing that I said to the hiring committee that I'll repeat here is that I do think it's important that it is not one of these interview sessions where you've got 45 people interviewing one person. That's incredibly intimidating. And I think that Colleen and Wendy and Brad can put together a committee that's small enough that makes sense. But adding, I mean, Dan's point is correct too. Having three of us there becomes a quorum. But I do think it's just unnecessary. I will admit that I am still a little confused. And so if we can just recap at the end, like Brad typically does, because I need to take this back to the hiring committee and I'm not really sure where we're at here. Sure. Thank you, Amber. Brad, did you wanna recap or would you like me to? If my only recap, I guess I have not heard a clear change in direction from what's been presented. So if the recap involves a change, I think you should do it. I can restate what I think the plan was. If there's a change in the plan, I guess I would need to better understand that. No, I think that really what we have on the screen largely has been agreed to. One thing that I did hear is Amber saying that she didn't think she would be one of the two trustees. So again, I think that that's something that will have to come back to us when we get to that point in time as to which of the two trustees it would be. The only change that I think that I have heard is that after or before the top five candidates go to department heads, we just have an executive session to discuss what has been received to date. That is, I believe is the only new thing that I heard out of this that there was general consensus on. Amber? Just to be clear, I am happy and did think I was gonna be continuing through with this process. I just didn't realize I was sitting at the table doing interviews. There's the difference. Gotcha. Thank you. And Asian. And so correct. I agree with you, Amber. What's outlined is that the department heads will do the that Amber and George or two trustees would be involved in the application review from getting 10 finalists to five finalists. But then the top five finalists would be interviewed by department heads. And based on those interviews and the feedback from department heads, final three would move on to a community panel, a staff panel, and then the evaluations from those two events would all be part of the package that the trustees would receive. That sounds good. Thank you, Brad. Sweet. So... Go ahead. I'm sorry. I'm just trying to clear. Is there a check-in point that is referenced now at the five? In terms of the why the top five to be interviewed were selected, just that check-in at that point. Yeah. Okay. So yeah. So there's it. Got to five. There's a trustee update on top five. Right. So how that 10 got dwindled down to five. So if we're good, I do see a hand up on Zoom. Annie, go ahead. Thank you. I know I've been very annoying with my hand going up and down. The unique position currently is that the five trustees are the decision makers and the five trustees are also the final end of oversight and that dual capacity, in my opinion, denotes a necessity of the ability to lay eyes on every application. You don't have to take action on it, but your eyes should be able to see it if you so choose. So all of the applications that come through, and especially because you have the... I'm sorry, I'm missing the word. The legal reason to not talk about it, the confidentiality agreement, I'm sorry, I got lost in that. So I feel as a resident that I am most comfortable knowing that every single application that comes through the pipe is plausibly able to be seen by you if you so choose. Whether or not you need to have a discussion about it with someone else doesn't matter to me. I just want to know that all five of you can lay eyes on those at any time because you are decision makers. Yep. We voted into power, into power, into your seats. I didn't mean to act like power was a thing. And then secondarily, there should be videos of the interviews and you all should have access to look at those. I agree that it doesn't need to change the process except I agree 100% with Raj at the five to the three thing. But at all times because you are the decision makers and you are the main oversight, if this was a business, it would be insane for you not to have eyes on all of these things at all times. So I just want to know that all of the trustees have access to all of the applications that come in at all. I don't care if you look at them or not. I just want to know that you can if you feel like it. And then I want to know that you've been visibly capable of watching the process all the way through. And I agree that it doesn't need to change the nature except the five and three I agree with or even from the 10. But it just doesn't make sense to me that you wouldn't have access to everything whenever you felt like it because that's your job. Thank you. Thank you, Annie. So I think we are ready then to move on to the next agenda item, which is five F and to discuss the city celebration in parentheses S for celebrations. Yes, I believe Elaine is here. And so we can turn it over to Elaine. Hi, I'm on Zoom. Hello everyone. Thanks very much for giving us the opportunity to talk about this very, very fun piece of business. It's not quite as dry as Pocket Parks and city manager contracts and the such. So just as a refresher, you had asked the members of the steering committee of our village, our voices to continue our work towards the establishment of the new city by working out some plans for celebrating the event, culminating in all the large efforts that we did to get to this point. So, and you had allocated up to $40,000 for this purpose. So our steering team met and we had lots of great conversation about what this might look like. And what we ended up talking about we, you had given us a directive to not replicate what's happening on the 4th of July. And after learning more of the details of what is actually happening on the 4th of July, we realized that we were kind of going in that direction. So we changed course and instead want to propose to you a single formal event followed by a year's worth of programming. And we thought about this because a corporation that is celebrating its anniversary or its 40th year in business or whatever, they take the whole year to celebrate that. And I think this is a great opportunity for the city to establish its new identity with the residents and provide wonderful opportunities for the residents to engage with each other and with it's our new municipality or new designation. So we are proposing a formal commemoration on July 1st the day our city takes effect. And as you see in the memo on Seaman Field in Maple Street Park and they would involve kind of the traditional municipal ceremony kinds of things. We'll invite statewide and local dignitaries will recognize officials who participated in the process and got us through the process. And then we, in our research during the process of learning about merger and separation we discovered that the first petition submitted to the village government to separate happened in 1958 and there were 14 people on the petition. That was back before you needed a certain percentage of voters to make something go on the ballot. And there are some of them that were still with us today. So we thought it might be a really interesting touch to invite them to join us and honor them for sort of getting the ball rolling for us, even though it took us so long to get to the finish line. We also thought it would be a really neat idea to do a time capsule. There is no better time than a very special occasion like this to establish something like that. So we thought we would solicit ideas for what to put in the time capsule. I highly recommend that everybody watch the episode of Parks and Rec that has to do with time capsules so that we can avoid going down that path. But that's the plan, the suggested plan for a formal commemoration. And then we think that it would be a good thing to just have activities that go the rest of the year through June 30th, 2023. And they can have all sorts of formats, history tours, bike tours, civic, everything that should have a civic participation aspect to it. And it can involve EJRP and the library and all the other departments. And tapping into successful events we've done before, gather at the table, community dinners, story core, story collection, like we did during Heart and Soul, storytelling events. But we also think this is a good launch pad for certain sustained community efforts that could be kicked off during this year celebration but then carried forth into the future as a way for the new city council to remain engaged with residents going forward and to have residents be engaged in the future of what the city is going to look like. So for that, we suggest things like creating a new neighbor welcome packet and allowing the trustees opportunities under this umbrella to have planning events like you were just talking about for the Pocket Park at Five Corners, perhaps revisiting the whole Design Five Corners conversation that we had several years ago. And forming the beginnings of a downtown alliance and other opportunities to build an awareness and an identity as a city. So those are the possibilities that we would like to share with you. And I'm happy to answer questions or ask questions or continue the conversation. One important aspect of this is that we will need some kind of volunteer group to oversee and facilitate and plan this year-long process. And ideally that committee could, once the anniversary years or the establishment year is over, can carry on to do these other sustained efforts. And so become more like a city of Essex Junction Boosters group or perhaps the foundation for the downtown alliance. But at any event, that group should be something that a group that comes together and works with the trustees is appointed by the trustees and carries forth and can steward that budget and do the planning and the implementation. So I would love to hear any questions or comments and how you'd like to proceed. Thank you, Elaine. Bridget, is there anything else that you wanted to... No, Elaine covered everything. This is the, these are examples of what we could do but forming a committee seems like a good idea to see us through the whole year. And the committee may have other ideas, other great ideas. This we just threw out and these particular ideas. And Elaine and I have been looking a lot at other communities like the Vergen's partnership and Montpelier Alive and places like that that are that boost their communities out in the world. And I think that that's something we can begin to think about. Absolutely. I'm honestly thrilled to see the list. What you're offering, I think makes a lot of sense and does not just make us have a pre-4th of July, 4th of July to then be followed up by a 4th of July celebration makes a lot of sense. Not that we don't want the village people to come and sing for us, but I think it's a great plan. What I especially like about it is it's also thoughtful in helping to set up the city to be as successful as it possibly can by not just being a pat ourselves in the back, we've done it, yay, now goodbye, but rather continue that energy, continue that passion that we know is there and ensuring that we have the community engaged in this process in the long term, especially for that downtown alliance that you're talking about, which I think honestly will be critical to ensuring our community continues to be engaged and that our downtown is as vibrant as it can be. I'm sorry, I thank you. That was a really fun one-hour meeting, so. Yeah. No thanks, necessary. Can I ask one question? Please. The formation of a downtown alliance seems, I noticed that the Chittenden County cities are absent from this list, is that, what am I missing here? I think Winooski has something. I don't know about South Burlington and Burlington is in a, you know, except for its own, you know. I don't know how, but we could look into it. The ones, I grew up partly in virgins. I'm really aware of what virgins is doing, which is amazing. And Montalier Live is another, and Barry has its own civic kind of booster group. I think that's kind of what we were looking at and those were the ones we were aware of, so. That's great, I think this is terrific. Right. Yeah, Winooski is an excellent example in Chittenden County, but Montalier Live is just a really excellent example of what a downtown business group can evolve into. And Barry's is really great because it's definitely a booster that the organization's name is called Barry Rock Solid. Yeah. How great is that? It's really, it's boosters and businesses and civic pride all together in one organization. And George, understanding that this downtown alliance is something that has to form the basis of the application for us to go from a village center to a downtown. Yeah. You're, wow, we're kind of communicating through the wavelength, through the ether here, Elaine. That's good to hear. Glad, glad to hear that. Any other questions? Brad has his hand up. Oh, go ahead, Brad. That's fine. To elaborate on the sustained effort, you know, at some time in the last couple of years, the trustees have talked about, you know, as it was related to gather at the table and some other community events and initiatives about putting together a committee to help evaluate those requests as they come in or help allocate money to groups who wanted to put on community events. So I think that can kind of tie in to this sustained effort as well. Brad, that's perfect. That's the only input I had. That's awesome that you brought it back to all that. Well, thank you. Look forward to helping make this all come to fruition. So thank you. Oh, you're very welcome. It was a pleasure and an honor to do it. I just would be curious to know what next steps are in terms of actually pulling this off. That is a great one, Elaine. I thought you were going to figure that out, Elaine. What happened? That was part B of the chart. Yeah, what are you? Did we not get, make that clear? I must have gotten that second. Quick, executive session, quick. No, I think what you're talking about though of having there be a trustee appointed group is that next step of helping to create that. I think that this is something we'll, you know, come back at our maybe our next agenda as again, time is, time is of the essence. And so if there is anybody though who is hearing this and is interested, please do be in touch about ways that you think it might be beneficial to help create this committee. That sounds great. And I'm guessing that in terms of the July 1st celebration we should probably get underway with that. Perhaps we can just meet with Brad and just start laying the groundwork for that. I would be more than thrilled to see that happen and at the same time, I think this is a part of that conversation of, yeah, of having a conversation again at our next meeting to make sure that we can just have a good inclusive group. Yes. Trustee, is anything else? I'm good, thank you. Okay, Marcus, I do see your hand is up. Laura is yours. Thank you. Let me first say that my wife is a part of this particular steering committee so my comments are my own and have not been vetted by her. Let me just say, I think that this plan is great in working out the long-term, especially building into the long-term potential of what a group like this could do. I will say that I'm a little underwhelmed by the initial and I understand the conflict with the July 4th celebrations, but as much as I felt and I went through as a resident over the last couple of years, especially, and then to get to this moment and I know on the day it was signed, we celebrated in this house and really looking forward to that moment on July 1st of really being able to say a city and knowing that it's permanent and in stone and all that. I just feel like it just doesn't feel like the way that I want to walk into a city. And I'll just say this figuratively, I want the fireworks to parade. I want to go, hey, we're a city, as well as building into that long-term again, building on that love we have for this community. So that's my opinion. I'm about to get scolded for it. So my apologies, but I just want to say it out loud. Thank you for that, Marcus. And I hope that you're okay after this conversation. Yeah. We hear sirens, we're grown. Absolutely. I do hear and recognize that. You're certainly, you're right that it would be nice to ensure the community can do a nice fist bump and do a nice celebratory scream of celebration on July 1st. So I do hear that. Go ahead, Elaine. You know, this was definitely a big conversation for us because to be honest, when we first embarked on this discussion, I did not know the extent of the 4th of July celebrations and we were planning a huge party to happen at the expo. And then I was talking to Tim Shea and he's like, you know that the exact same thing is going to happen here on the 4th, right? So we kind of had to back off from that, particularly because of your directive about not making them the same. That said, we have a pretty big parade coming up at the end of this month, perhaps we could do a float. And on top of that, are there pieces of the 4th of July celebration that we can add on to that have something to do with the city? I feel like there's room there if the planners of the 4th of July party might wanna think about including a piece of that kind of celebration as well. So like Eddie Van Halen at Maple Street Park, would that be good? That's it. That would, Marcus, all right. Cause I have people in the last time. Cause that'd get things going. Part of the time capsule. All right. Eddie, by the way, I believe Eddie's dead. Well, I know, but I just said that in honor of Ambrose. I said that in honor of Ambrose Cat, who I know is listening. Okay, all right, good. Thank you, George. He appreciates that. And he is sitting here listening. Is Van Halen listening? He is sitting here listening. Yes. That's a lot, okay. Well, now that we've gone down this path, I think we are good. Looking forward to celebrating all of this with her. Yeah, they're mine. I'm not gonna keep that going. You need a trivia night based on the last couple of minutes. I think so. All right. Elaine Bridget, Elise, thank you. Appreciate your thoughts that one hour meeting is highly productive. Congratulations on that. So going into 5-H and to consider the approval of the ethics policy. That was skipped over. You skipped over the inclusion policy. Oh, wow. The declaration of inclusion. That is not very inclusive. Miss G. No, I did miss G. Let's go to 5-G to consider the approval of the declaration of inclusion. I wanted to bring this to you. It's something that was discussed on the February 8th meeting and the inclusion itself. Excuse my cat. This is the first, I guess, official week of inclusion stated by the Governor Scott signed a declaration last year, there's at least 40 towns that have signed onto it already. And Brad, if you can scroll down, I can read through it. That's one of the things that they ask so people can hear it out loud. The village of Essex Junction and or city of Essex Junction condemns racism and welcomes all persons regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression, age or disability and wants everyone to feel safe and welcome in our community. As a village and or city, we formally condemn all discrimination and all its forms commit to fair and equal treatment of everyone in our community and will strive to ensure all of our actions, policies and operating procedures reflect this commitment. The village of Essex Junction and or city of Essex Junction has and will continue to be a place where individuals can live freely and express their opinions. So this can be changed however you want or it can stay as is or you can pass and we could reconsider it in the future. Thank you, Wendy. I do appreciate you bringing this back onto our agenda. The timing of Inclusion Week is a great time to do this. So thank you. I remember when I first brought this up, I think I may have started off by over complicating things and having a fairly lengthy whereas and all that typical stuff. I like what this says. I think this gets to the point very succinctly and am I okay with it as it is? Yep. Yep, good. I appreciate the putting all the words together. Good job. I will move that we adopt the Declaration of Inclusion. George, thank you Dan for the discussion on this item. On that motion. Hearing none. Those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Those opposed, please say nay. So that passed unanimously. Thank you all. Now we'll go into 5-H and the ethics policy. I would, Amber. Yep, I got it. So just some background on this. What I did was I took our current ethics policy and I used the VLCT like of interest in ethics policy as kind of a template to merge the two documents essentially and create kind of a little bit more of a streamlined policy that applies to all elected officials, appointed officials, staff regardless of what department that they're working for. And I think I hit, I did not include every single particular piece of the current ethics policy for the village, but where it seemed to, it seemed like we were really trying to emphasize things like those five principles that you see right there on the screen, I did include those. So that's kind of the process. And this did go, Colleen did review this as did the LCT. Thank you, Amber. Trustees, are there any questions? It looks stellar and there's no way I'm gonna mess with this, it looks excellent. It looks great. I don't have any edits at all. I assume this also will be significantly easier to oversee and maintain from the staffing side of things. Yeah, one of the biggest changes was implementing this. So a person that's hired or elected or appointed gets this at the time that there are any of those things. So they get it once, they sign off on it saying, hey, I've gotten a copy of this. We're doing it once, we're not doing it every single year. Colleen and I had a little bit of discussion about that, but I do think it's better to kind of like, I think most people understand as somebody who's been sitting on these committees for several years, I understand the policy's still there. It hasn't changed. So we can change it on a regular basis if we want to. But I think this is better from an administrative perspective and then you're just gonna keep the acknowledgement on file based on retention policies. The one other thing I will say is that I wanted to do a little bit of cleanup, grammatic, like what you're seeing right there, I want appendix A and acknowledgement, like that's the retentive part of me. So if we approve this tonight, if I can just make some like minor changes, like adding a period here and there, just to clean it up one last time. So along that line, how would you recommend that the motion be worded? Yes, I would say that the trustees approve the conflict of interest in ethics policy effective July 1st, 2022, as presented. So do you feel that that gives you then the latitude to add a period or make some of those grammatical changes that you wanted to make? I would hope so. Okay. I really don't think you guys are gonna, it's not, I'm not gonna say any, yeah, I mean, it's literally. Substantive change, I think it's just grammatical. I don't see any issue. If anybody's good with it, somebody could move Ambrose. I will make that motion using Ambrose precise wording. I appreciate the technicality they're doing. Second. Thank you, Dan. Trustee, is there any further discussion on that motion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Those opposed, please say nay. That was really excellent work, Amber. Good job. Thank you. And that passed unanimously just for a minute. Thank you. That was after I lost the entire first draft. That was after you what? That was after I lost the entire first draft and had to retype the entire thing. Oh, that was the thing? Yeah. Punishing for your good works. I was. I don't think I could have finished it. You couldn't have, it's gone. It's all good though. Good. So our next item is one for executive session, but we had an agenda addition at the beginning. Great, Brad, thank you for having that ready because I do not. So we will go into this new agenda item out and about in Essex. Yeah, so you all heard a presentation back in December from Annie about our report from the out and about committee and a second successful event. This event was spawned out of the original open outside, which was a village only event and then got expanded to be include the village and the town. So, you know, the planning committee actually was supposed to have their first meeting last month, but we had a few people absent. And so the first meeting was supposed to be today and a lot has changed since December. And I just wanted to make sure that the trustees, there was kind of a consensus, although no vote taken back in December to proceed and continue this event as is as a joint event. And I just, before we started planning again, wanted to make sure that that truly is the druthers of the trustees. I've tried to present, you know, both sides to this. One is, I think this has been a successful event over the last couple of years. It's grown, it's been refined. It has good energy. The other side is that, you know, we've really backed off, you know, from the start of these conversations with the town in terms of sharing certain departments for a amount of time, sharing committees. We've really backed off a lot of those things and really gone our separate ways. And so I think it's worthy of asking the question, what is the value to our residents, to our businesses, to continue doing this event and partnering with the town? And I just think it's a worthy question of asking. And there certainly are some areas of value, I think that you all can point out. There probably are also ways that this event could more directly impact and affect our citizens and businesses if it was just the city-wide business, city-wide event. So that's kind of the lay of the land. And hopefully you all can have a conversation and figure out where you'd like us to go. Thank you, Brad. Dan, your hands up first. Well, I hear what Brad's saying. And certainly if it was confined to the city, we could focus, you know, the dense geographic area on events and keep it so you don't have to travel so far from event to event. And you can see a lot more in a short span of time. But I also don't want to be in a competition, per se, with the town, you know, who's got the better mousetrap, who's got the better priority? You know, competing with them basically under the same concept. I mean, that, I don't know. Yep. Doesn't feel good. My thoughts are not, you know, maybe we, the way to resolve this, and Brad, that's great. Yeah, I could see either way, but let's look at it from the point of view of the citizens and how do the citizens benefit most? Do they benefit most from having this one day of sort of collaboration and events and you can go up to the town center and down to the city center? You know, maybe that's a nice tradition to continue. I mean, it's not for our benefit necessarily. It really, I know originally it was to benefit, we did it to benefit local businesses because they were hurting from the pandemic. But I think now it has more of a flavor of a community, you know, a dual community event. So maybe it has some value, it kind of gives it a kind of unique flavor doing it that way. But I don't have really strong, powerful feelings either way to be convinced. Go ahead, Raj. Yeah, I guess I'll agree with George. I think, you know, I think people want to, want to continue this. Couple of things I wanted to mention, if we decide to do some branding on this as our first year of out and about as a city, is the town going to have a problem with that. When vouchers are turned in, I don't want to be funding any vouchers that are turned in the town outside the village and not in the city. So I only want to pay for any vouchers that are handed out and redeemed to city businesses. Other than that, you know, as I guess, as long as there's staff bandwidth within the city and that, you know, there's not any kind of overshadowing with events being stacked in the town, I'm good with it, let's do it. Amber, was there anything you wanted to add? Nope, I'm good. I also don't have a strong opinion. I can see both sides of this. The village started this fantastic event. Would love to see it continue. Ideally, yes, if we, if our city puts forward money, it would be great to have the city money stay here and have it continue to stay here. Although I'm not sure how that would be able to happen if we do it collaboratively with the, with the town. So I think that's the trade-off is we then, in a partnership, we put up some funds and where they get spent, they get spent, not just as part of what it is. I mean, obviously, both communities would have a separate voucher that you hand out. And if somebody wants to, you know, attend an event up there, they'd have to pay what have you. I don't know if there's maybe a, some other way to work it, but it just seems like you can't. You're like, right, Roche, I don't want to see that. So I don't, I don't know how, so if a city resident gets a city out and about dollar and they go up to Mad Taco, well, and if it's not accepted there, go ahead, Dan. What you could, what you're saying, I'm just thinking about it. We could do a break even. They go up to an event up there. You have a city voucher. You have a town voucher. The town vouchers are good here up to the point that that's even where we can swap. So those businesses up there, the town swaps, we get those city dollars for every dollar we get or voucher we get from the town. We give it back to the town and for every city voucher they get to give it back to us, it's even swap. So we reverse only the same amount. As long as we value the same amount, it's going to be the same amount of vouchers. You know what I'm saying? If it's a city dollar voucher or town dollar voucher, but it all washes out when you exchange them and then whatever excess, then that's we'll work that out. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I think it could work. See why they couldn't work. Yeah, I think it could. I think there's absolutely a ways like that. Balance it out somehow. Go ahead, Brad. Yeah, I think I would just add, I think if it's a joint committee, they could figure out those details. I think what you're recognizing though is there are a lot of conversations that need to happen in order to partner with another organization to do this when both are concerned about who's being impacted and who's spending money and how money's being spent and where it's being spent. So I have full confidence that the staff that are involved and community members that are involved in that committee can sort those details out if that's our directive. But I think what you're recognizing is there are now added layers of complications. And so if you want us to go through those, we can do that. And if you want to remove that barrier, then we can do that as well. There's definitely staff capacity and interest in working on our own event. If that's where we're headed. So I'd have to say, I think that really it comes down to either we do it in a true partnership, like we did in the previous year, or we just go our separate ways and do it our own way. And I think that that's really, because otherwise trying to basically put staff in the position of trying to figure out the logistics of this in all honesty, I think are more work and more time than really are necessary. So I admit I'm a little unclear as to the general direction at this point of are we looking to do the status quo? We contribute half. And if we get less than that back, then we get less of that back to our local businesses. Or are we good with separating this effort from the town, having our own version of a city out and about, and we just do our own thing? You know, I think it's so fresh that I look back to what I brought up at a prior meeting about communities that had separated in the past, Winooski and Burlington, become two separate communities, Colchester and South Burlington and Burlington and Winooski. Anyways, that during this separation now, it's still so fresh and that we haven't really totally we're still in that transition. And it feels like we want to continue that relationship, but ultimately it's going to be totally separate as it is with those communities I just mentioned. They don't share events like this. They don't do anything like that. And it's down the road. I don't know how you, the steps, is it something you just sever those, all those things immediately? Or do we transition slowly phase out anything that we did as a group community? You know, that's the ultimate question here. By liking it back to something that I heard before from Marcus about really wanting to celebrate that passion, that energy, to me in all honesty, I am leaning towards let's just separate these, let's have our own event. That would allow us to do what we want, when we want to. It would allow the town to do what they want, not have to worry about the band distribution. Do we have too few in the five corners compared to up at the Essex experience and would just allow us to not compete against each other because they don't need to happen on the same day. They don't need to happen the same weekend. They can happen on their own times. So for me, I'll just name that's where I'm leaning towards. I'm fine with that. I don't say that I'm on defense. The board wants to go with that. And it's not like something can't bring back if we decide that maybe we should think about that. I think we've got a lot, the thing is we've got a lot going on right now and we've got a lot going on in terms of community events. On that note, George, I was wondering if maybe this wasn't something that could be on the list of that Elaine was presenting, not, this could be sort of tied into that community celebration that we're doing throughout the year and not completely rebranded as it were, but maybe there's other elements that we can introduce to this that are more trying to reach populations that don't normally show up at these, putting more effort into that and treating it more as an introduction to your community and your businesses that are there and really focus on reintroducing the city through this, one way would be through this event. So that could be one way to approach it and that group that has yet to be formed is amenable to it and we don't know that, but I mean that is one way to approach it. Thank you, Raj. Okay. Trustees, any other comments on this or I do see a hand up from the public? Harlan, go ahead. Floor is yours. Hi. Tough decision. I'd be curious to know what the town's thoughts are on it because we've worked together for so long and I for one was on the merger train I've got a lot of friends out in the town. I think there's a lot of great people out there so on and so forth. Separation happened to take care of our community to be able to focus solely on our community. We wouldn't do out and about with Williston, we're attached to Colchester, we're not doing out and about with them as uncomfortable as it makes me to say this. I feel like we just became our own community and that's where I think that charge tells us that we're to focus on our own community and that's not saying we don't care about the town and like I said, I would definitely love to know what the town's thought process is on this but I really think my personal opinion is we just became an independent city out and about as if I remember correctly as a brainchild that we had started and I think we should focus it on our community. I think that's what separation was all about is to focus on our community. So I can't reiterate there enough where it's uncomfortable to say it because there's a lot of great people in the town and I'm not looking to insult anybody but moving forward, I'm hoping that we are focusing on our community and I think out and about would be just that that it would be the city. So my two cents. Thank you, Harlan, appreciate that and just for clarity and for any other ears that may be listening, this absolutely is not at all a judgment statement or anything like that towards our friends, neighbors and family that live in the town after separation. Instead, the way I really think about this is that 88% of the community of the village soon to be city that said yes, let's separate from the town of Essex to form our own independent community and as such, we shall share only the police department and while we've worked on those MLUs, those agreements to expand it just a little bit for a short period of time besides just the police department, I do think that as we're creating that the city, we do need to have those uncomfortable feelings of sometimes it is just best to go our separate ways and do what the community has asked us to do. So I think we have the consensus at this point. Brad, is there anything else you need? Sorry, no, I'm all set. Thank you. Great, thank you. Trustees, thank you. Thank you, Brad. So yeah, that's the second session. We are now on to the agenda. I move that we approve the consent agenda. I think Dan beat you to that one, Raj. All those, any further discussion? All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, please say nay. Great, so pass unanimously. And into the reading file, any board member comments? One board member comment here. The green update was past Saturday. It was phenomenal. I picked up a bunch of bags here over at the Brownville Library. We had one of the village trucks there. And I actually was down outside of the village, but down by Woodside, 68 acres over down that area. The entrance and there's a tremendous amount of trash. But all over I saw people doing it. It was fabulous. Oh, good for you, Dan. Weather helpful. Good job. Good job. Great. Yeah, I appreciate you acknowledging it. There were a lot of people out. Oh, it was tremendous people. Yeah. Thank you. The only other thing I just wanted to mention, Raj, thanks for covering last meeting. Really appreciate your leadership and being the VP. So thank you. Yeah, I just want to point out we got out of there a lot quicker than tonight. But wow. Yeah, it is true. Yeah, yeah. It was like 58 minutes. But you know, nobody's counting. No, I think Dan still has a record though. I think that might have been 13 minutes. Eight minutes. It was. Yeah. Yep. There we go. He predates his. It's all good though, Raj. I'll pay you back for that one. Yeah. Yeah, sure. How's that next meeting looking? Anyway, any other comments from board members? Staff, any comments? You want to make sure we hear? Great. So then the only executive session is a right. Yep. Thanks for putting that out there, Brad. I'll go ahead and make the motion that the Village of Essex Junction Board of Trustees go into executive session to discuss negotiating or securing real estate purchase or lease options under the provisions of Title I, Section 313A, two of the Vermont statutes, and include the interim co-managers. I'll second. Thank you, George. Any further discussion? Hearing none. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Those opposed, please say nay. Great. Pass unanimously. Thank you all. Trustees, give us like five minutes to the transition.