 meeting of the Waterbury Select Board for Monday, August 15th, 2022 with the Steel Community Room. Meeting first thing on the agenda is to approve the agenda. I'll move to approve the agenda. Is there a second? Well, second. I made one amendment to the agenda just to include in the Select Board item a brief update on the town manager search. That is perceptible. And can I also add a letter of support for Wossy for grant application? Sure. We might not need to, but I miss that it was a fifth Monday month, so I'm just going to move this item out. Is there any objections to the amendments to the agenda? If not, all in favor say aye. In the post and the extension, motion passes. We now move to the consent agenda items on the item presented on the list. Welcome to have a motion to approve the consent agenda items. Thank you. We have a motion and a second. Any further discussions on the consent agenda items? There being none, all in favor say aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Motion passes. Now there's a portion of the Select Board where we invite the public to make, if they have something of concern that they'd like to let the Select Board know, we encourage them to come forward, say your name and say if you're a resident of the Florida Barrier, and if you have any concerns that you would like the Select Board to do. Does anyone wish to come forward? Or I don't think there are any people on additional people on Zoom. If there's nothing for the public, we'll move on to the agenda. I want to suggest a first item for the Select Board to discuss the emergency management plan. Gary, if you want to come forward. Of course I would. Did you do the consent agenda? Yeah. You did? Wow. Move right back. A motion was made. I see there's a second in my last unanimous. Geez, I was counting. I didn't hear anything. It's time flies and I have a gun. I've been here 21 years as a fire chief and I've not been laid. You're never laid. I've never been laid. You're never laid. I've never been laid. Wow. Any questions? Did everybody see this bill? Probably not. Okay. So for those of you that were around last year that Barbara provided it, any year before, the year before, this really is not any different other than updated names, the bill of copy I gave you, the date at the top hadn't carried through. And so I've changed that. But this is all boilerplate information that the vast majority of towns in Waterton if you want to use, big towns, cities that have full-time employees in much more areas to cover might have a more in-depth problem. Oh, well, this is pretty more in-depth. It covers a lot of stuff. But it's all boilerplate stuff without knowing what you might be thinking. So if you want to figure out, I really don't have much more to say. Has anything changed since the flood of 2011? All of this is reflective of after the flood in 2011. So this really picked up when Barb came on board because it was kind of piecemeal, I think. Yeah, we had, I mean, like so many communities in Vermont, we had an emergency management plan. It was on a bookshelf in the corner of somebody's office in the gathered dust. And even during Irene, while some of it was implemented, most of what was implemented was implemented through the fire department and the fact that they have an emergency management plan. And the, what is it, incident command system set up and we really didn't have an incident command model kind of, it may have been on the shelf, but it really wasn't there and wasn't really implemented. So the fire department always before Irene happened, ever since I've been here, they've always had some semblance of an incident command plan set up and they have designated officers and line officers that are given certain responsibilities and they have us, they train a lot and they have training for various scenarios. They have done table top exercises. About three months before Irene, not even three months before Irene, probably a month and a half before Irene, I went to Stowe and I took the incident command. What is it, one? Yeah, well it's, it's a bunch of different lower levels, but you probably were taking one for municipal managers and- So I took that incident command module and the eyes rolled back in my head it's just nothing, it's not the way my life works. So anyway, Bar, who was the Vermont Emergency Management Director and left that position just months before Irene, when we hired her through the consulting firm that she worked for, one of the things we asked her to do in that consulting firm to do was to get us up more to speed with this plan. And all select board members' names should be in there someplace. We should actually at some point have a meeting where Gary comes in and talks about how this should be implemented. And when Irene happened, we figured it out, but if we had followed that, it may have been a little bit easier. The people who had to follow it, follow it, the fire department really did their job. The rest of us got the jobs done, just we didn't have kind of the organizational tree that is envisioned in these management plans. So it needs to be updated or authorized, approved, every year or so. So we'd ask you to do that. Gary's looked at it. Bob did a lot of work on it last year with Gary, so I'm confident it's in order. But at some point, we really should have a meeting where it's the only thing that we do. It was probably a year and a half ago we were scheduled to do a full tabletop exercise with all of the staff members and even some of the select board members. But because of certain things that were going on in the community, Main Street's year on instruction was a big deal. We scaled it way back. The wastewater department and the water department played a small role in that. But there are training exercises that are done that we should avail ourselves of at some point. Incident command system, the incident command system, I can't stress enough how really easy it is once you understand it. And it's not hard to get to understand it. It's water classes are online. I can certainly share you the links to take a lot of classes online. Some of them are way beyond what I would even suggest that you take. I was a national sort of instructor so I get how your eyes might roll in some of the classes that you would never need here. But some of the lower level ones, it gives you a grasp of how incident command system works, who's in charge and the whole hierarchy of the process. It's very simple. Bill's right, our fire department uses it for every call no matter how simple it is. Every time the truck rolls out and every time we go do a training, that's what we use because it's used. And because we have the manager form of government here and we have a fairly robust staff, the role of the elected officials is minor compared to what it would be in Ducksbury or Wartown, for example, because those boards have not only legislative bodies, but they're the executives as well. So anyway, at some point, we should do something with this to give them a little bit of a flavor, but that's not right. Yeah, and quite honestly, I've got to check with emergency management because they really haven't done much with the instructors for the last couple years because of COVID. But I'll verify with them whether or not they're still certifying people. And even if there aren't, I can still do a refresher class some morning. We could pick a morning and you could just here have coffee in a bagel or a donut and do it in a couple of hours and then you've at least got a handle on it. So this was not emailed out to you? I mean, Carla's been pretty busy with her election and she's been on the side of the occasion, so it was supposed to be emailed out and if it wasn't, I'll take responsibility for it, but. Has it changed since last year? No, other than names. I went through this, it kind of makes my eyes roll because I'm more action oriented as opposed to this. But this gives everybody in the boilerplate of what we should be concerned about in our community. For me, just give me the emergency and I can deal with that. So we'll email it to all of you. You should just read it. You don't have to read it like you're going to take a test but just read through it so you understand it and then sometime down below we should take up Jerry's offer to just have a little bit of a training on it. It is good information because I know I've been involved with the USDA with a lot of disasters and they're on a bigger scale so you really see where this comes in. But to me, what the important thing is it gives you a framework of who does why and if say the fire departments kind of a bunch of them are all out of town for whatever reason and something happens it at least gives you a good frame of reference for who, even if you pick up the document you could see who may call to do what. Some of it's very common sense but it really doesn't hurt. I think disaster preparedness is something really important and I think, I know what you're saying and sometimes it's come second nature to him and probably a lot of people, especially in public safety it is a second nature. But people like us who are a little bit outside the trenches here, we just may wanna have a good sense because we never know if we're gonna have another Irene or another one. No, we're gonna have another one. Oh yeah, and then it's a matter of how prepared we are that's one of the reasons why I was a little concerned and I know Barbara wanted me to become the emergency management director and I was just concerned with elderly parents who potentially being out of state and especially my role in the select board. I said, I might not be the right time and I felt Gary would do a great job and I think he has. No, I'm just gonna say, just keep in mind that even though we're talking to select board members during an emergency, you don't get to play the, I'm on the select board and this is what I want, is just understand the whole scope as opposed to, it's about official position in the hierarchy that we have as opposed to what your title is sitting here. In fact, there are times when we get to a fire and somebody else that is lower in rank than I am is already called in something because that's what we do. I work for that person. It could be an assistant chief, it could be a lieutenant. So that's just the way it works. I might take over, but not always. I'm curious to know in everyday typical emergencies, probably this thing is quite resourceful, but when it comes to major catastrophes, it's like anything, and you mentioned it earlier, interaction orientated, it's like zoning rates. They don't always cover everything. Sometimes you get a fly by the seat of your pants because major catastrophes are just that. They're catastrophes that either nobody's been through before or so violent that it's like kicking over an inhale in the hallways or scurrying to figure it out. Right, it's- You're right, the fact that we're a small community and we know the people that can do certain things, you're gonna go after those people even if they're in the private sector. And because if you're overwhelmed and the fire department's overwhelmed and you need services. Yeah, and we did that. Right, this isn't, I mean, some of the plans, I don't know if this one does, but there are some bigger plans that identify where the childcare centers are, how you might evacuate them, who's got buses, all these resources are listed, people who have excavators and bucket loaders and heavy equipment. All that stuff is listed in the plans and it's there to try to provide a resource to make it easier to figure out who you can call when you have help. But as much as it is about dealing with the emergency on the ground, it also speaks to how you communicate with the public, who makes decisions, who speaks for the community. So you should have one public information officer, one person who's responsible or at least one on any given shift. If it's an emergency that goes over several days and nobody can stay up 24 hours a day for a week even though we tried. But you might have, okay, I'm the public information officer from eight in the morning till eight at night and then somebody else is gonna do it from eight at night until eight in the morning. And who do you go to to make certain decisions when we sent Bob Butler out to deal with getting the dumpsters that we needed to get over on Randall Street down at South End of Main Street, no more on Union Street. He was given certain authority but then he had to come back to me and say, okay, I can do this, this and this and then, okay, do it again. So it's designed to help build a chain of command and to inform the public who they should look to to provide information when there's an emergency. So, but you're right, I mean, if you have, I mean, Irene was, you know, we don't have a playbook for Irene and the plan that we had, even if we had exercised it three days beforehand it wouldn't have covered every scenario, right? No, and as much as it talks this and the Insurgent Command System talks about who does what, it also is an indicator who doesn't do my what. If somebody, as Bill referred to, the Public Information Officer, if you're not at Chris and somebody from the press comes and talks to you, you don't talk to them. You know, you refer them to the right place because then you start having mixed messages when people want to be helpful and it is not. Yeah, I know, I mean, I'm aware of the fact you got to have a go-to person, you know, yeah. So that's really what this is and what Insurgent Command is all about. It streamlines it, things are a lot smoother, you know, over the years been to a lot of fires and they take hours and hours and everybody knows who's responsible for what. And emergencies such as Irene are problematic but they can still work in the same manner. My only question was we have some staff changes coming up so I know in the past, like, Karla's had a number of roles and given that she's retiring, is she already edited out or is that a conversation that I would have with some of the professors? It's on a computer, it's, you know, as things change and I wouldn't wait until the end of next year when this is due to be realized, it's just a matter of making the changes. When Bill gets done, I think he's gonna subcontract for a couple more years. So it is really just a click of the keys. Thank you. Thanks so much. We're gonna ask you one more quick question. Of course. How your number of calls been? We're a little high right now but we have so much fluctuation that we had a bad day but we didn't have one today. So we just don't know. Right now we're at, I think, 110 and we were at 177 last year. So if it keeps down this path, we'll be higher than last year. I mean, there's always times when we might not have a call for a week or two. You never know, but 10 or so years ago, we had 343 in a year. So it really depends on a lot of the weather, the interstate that we can have 10 calls in one day on the interstate. Not some reasonable, but some reasonable. Not unexpected. Any other more questions? How are you? Thanks, Gary. No problem. Thanks. That's it. Are those all right? Well, I'm just gonna hang out for a while. This is my wife. Thank you. Okay, next item of the agenda. Should I make a motion to adopt the emergency management? Yeah. Well, we probably haven't seen it. So I don't know if we should. Okay. I'll wait till the next meeting if you want. Yeah, I think we should. I kind of know what it is, but I think everyone should at least read it. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. I'll then move on to the next item. It is a Stowe Street speeding. Right. And I'll tell you that I've got a D in handwriting and I never got a one in a C in art. So that's the best I can do when it comes to freehand. Senior Dieter Graf, mayor. Ooh. I think he has a bell. He has a bell. He has a bell. He has a bell. He has a bell. He probably could have done it better. Are there people here that want to talk about this before I say anything? Okay. So, Danny sent to me a week and a half or so ago an email and suggested that somebody had emailed to her and had some concerns about Stowe Street and speeding on Stowe Street. And especially now that the street has been resurfaced and it's smooth and unpainted except for some crosswalks right now. So, Chris has heard this spiel before. I don't think any of the others of you were on the board. Maybe Mike was, but just so everyone understands as far as speeds are concerned, municipalities by state statute are authorized to set the speed limits on town highways, highways that are controlled and owned by the town. And we can set speed limits between the limits of 25 miles an hour on the low end and 50 miles an hour on the high end. You can't go below 25. That is state law. When you set speed limits, this, there may be an updated version of this. This is from 2016, but frankly hasn't changed in the 35 years that I've been here. Setting speed limits, the guide for Vermont towns. A road like Stowe Street, which is a high volume road, you typically have the Regional Planning Commission or some other entity put a tube across the road and count traffic because it is a high volume road. Smaller streets such as Neyland Flats. It's a little smaller Maple Street. Certainly streets like Guile Hill, even Upper Blush Hill. Those kind of streets should typically do what's called speed monitoring. A pace setting arrangement. And the manual basically tells you that you don't want to arbitrarily set speeds just because you want people to go slow. The speed of the highway should be based on how the street is engineered, how it's designed and how it's built. And what the manual says is that for the most part, the average driver will drive at a speed that is safe for that street all things being equal. And I think you probably all have experienced that yourself. You're out on a town highway and you're going along and then it gets a little narrower or there's a bunch more driveways you typically decide to slow down a little bit. So back in the day, I worked with VTrans to set the speed limits on all of the town village streets. And when we did the village, I recommended to the village trustees at the time who were responsible for setting village speed limits. I recommended that main street and Stowe Street should be 30 miles an hour based on the speed studies that we did. And if you drive those streets, 30 miles an hour seems fairly reasonable, I think. I think all of you, if you drive on Stowe Street and you go 30 miles an hour, you're not gonna feel like you're going excessively fast and you're not gonna feel like you're crawling. So I recommended 30 miles an hour. The trustees at the time said, no, it's too fast. We want all the streets in the village to be 25. So they were set at 25 and they've been 25 since the early 1990s, probably all the streets in the village are 25 miles an hour. And although the state law says that speed studies are necessary, engineering traffic studies are necessary to set a speed limit, it also says if the speed limit has been up and posted for a certain period of time, and I can't remember if it's three years or five years, it's grandfather day. So the fact that if you did a speed study on Stowe Street or Main Street today, if an engineer said it should be 30 or 35, you could say, well, it's been posted at 25 for 30 years and it's okay and the court would uphold that. I don't dispute anybody who has written in and said, they observe vehicles going 50 miles an hour. I was heading down to get lunch down at New Rusty Parker Park today and I crossed the street at 51 South Main Street and I got into the middle of the crosswalk and some pickup truck coming down Bank Hill. He didn't see me or didn't know it was me, but he was flying. I mean, he must've been, I don't know how fast he was going. I don't have radar detectors in my eyes, but I'm sure he was going close to 50 miles an hour and he was a young kid and he was just making a point, feeling his oats. There was nobody else on the street. So I just stood in the middle of the waiting for him to come up and then I said it's 25 miles an hour and then he gave me the finger and he fastened me. So I understand that people drive fast and nobody likes it when it's in their neighborhood. I went out today at three minutes past five until 533 and I sat on North Street up above the speed limit sign facing downhill and 56 cars passed by in that half hour span and the low speed that went through was about 19 miles an hour and the high speed that went through was 38 miles an hour. But you can see this bell curve. There were nine cars that went between 20 and 25. So there were 10 cars that were below the speed limit. Then from 25 to 30, there were 25 vehicles that went that speed. That was the highest number of vehicles that went any particular speed. And then from 30 to 35, it was 18 vehicles. There were three vehicles that went over 35 and nobody went over 40. Now I'm not saying that an hour earlier or two hours later that somebody won't go through there at 60 miles an hour, but this bell curve is exactly what you would expect to see. And the state speed limit says that when you're setting a speed limit, you should set the speed limit at a number at which 85% of the vehicles are traveling slower than that number. So that means there's gonna be 15% of the vehicles that are speeding almost all the time. I didn't do the math, I'm not quick enough to do it, but I think that there's more than, more than 85% of these vehicles are probably traveling under 30. Well, maybe not. Close though. So anyway, it's an issue. Woody's here to talk a little bit about some of the things that we might be able to do with painting lives. I did send Danny's email and then some of the front porch forum posts that we've all seen, I think, to Lieutenant White at the state police and just said, you know, in general, if you could pick up speed enforcement, it would be helpful. But as I said to you in the, well, as I said in the front porch forum post and people don't like to hear it, the police, their priorities in terms of law enforcement are dealing with the property crimes and the disturbances and nowadays even the shootings that we even have in places like Waterbury, that's all related to the stupid drug trade. And, you know, that's where their efforts are. So Lieutenant White, I didn't forward it, I don't think, I believe it's on the website, but we have the, on the website, the police reports are up there, I think for May, June and April, May and June. I'm not sure we have the July one yet, but in May and June, they only had three traffic stops each. And I asked Lieutenant White, I said, gotta try and do a little better than that. When we had the village police department, I would talk to Wayne Sordiff and Darkow and Bill Wolf and Joby Fiesha, all the chiefs that I worked with and said, you know, if your guy out on the shift can make one stop per shift, that would be great. But even that was hard to do when we had four, four and a half full-time village officers because they were responding to so many calls. So it's low on the priority list for the police department. I did call the Washington County Sheriff's Department last week and asked them if they still do traffic enforcement by contract. They do, they have a contract with a couple of the Valley Towns, Watesfield, and Warren, I think, maybe more town. And I asked them if they had capacity to do it here. Now we're spending, you know, $1,000 a day right now on the state police contract. More than that, it's $385,000 a day. And there's a year that we pay the state police contract this year is $384,000. I don't know if there's an appetite or a desire to spend any more. The Washington County Sheriff's Department would charge, they do, they do, they do it. That basically confirms your bell curve, Bill, I guess. Okay, so is this Sto Street? Yeah, from a few years ago. All right, so the 85th percentile here, I'll just pass this around. This was, let's see the data on here, but anyway, we had this done and the 85th percentile was $31,000. So it's confirming what I saw this afternoon. Anyway, the Washington County Sheriff's Department, if you want to do additional traffic enforcement in the town to supplement what the state police can do because the state police, as I said, are spending most of their time on criminal activity. Not that speeding isn't criminal, but it's low hanging fruit and people like to see it. The general public, they know when somebody speeds as opposed to there's a crack house that we're on. They know about the speeding. They're not sure about the other problems that the police are dealing with. But the Sheriff's Department charges 31 and a quarter an hour plus mileage, which is 62 and a half cents a mile. They could do a minimum of three to four hours if they came to town. And the clock for both the mileage and the hourly rate starts when they leave their office at Montpelier and stops when they get back to their office in Montpelier. And Brett Meyer, the captain who used to be a Waterbury police officer here told me, if you wanted this service, if we have a guy going to the valley and they're going to do three or four hours down there, on the way back they could stop in Waterbury and do three or four hours here. And he said we'd split the tube in from Montpelier in that case and try to give both communities a break. I'm not recommending necessarily they could do this. We have a little bit of money in that we didn't hire that community service officer that we talked about hiring which is in the same public safety budget, I believe. Oh, I guess that's in health and something else. But we didn't spend that money. We budgeted for this year. We budgeted almost $25,000 for that position. So why don't you let me, what do you talk to you about the paving project and the painting that still needs to be done in moment if you have questions, so maybe you can ask. I did just want to interject that the state police were in force on the road last Wednesday night and picked up my 17 year old son to the 35 who's on the line now and it's a healthy ticket to get him to drive home responsibly. I was gonna say that since I sent that email to Lieutenant White, Bill told me that he saw him over there twice and I saw him once last week and obviously you saw him as well. So they are doing their job. Bill, I think I know the answer to this, but if and when we do go ahead and hire the community service officer, I know we're talking more like parking and stuff like that. They can't issue speeding tickets. That's beyond there. No, you have to be a certified law enforcement officer to do that. So anyway, Woody's here. So as you know, the street's blank right now, a blank slate, so I think it was last year we began looking at options on possible ways to slow people down with some inventive line striping or something like that. I've spoken with several traffic engineers, other people who are used to line striping, et cetera. You can find theories both ways. And that today told me thought if we left the street blank, studies show that slows traffic down. So if you pull out on the road and you're new and you're saying, I don't know, so you go slow. So that's a theory there. But the one I think I'm most fond of is we're gonna hopefully paint the yellow lines, the state paints our yellow lines, class two roadways in town. And they, one guy has recommended that we narrow the lane widths with a white fog line. Yellow line's down the middle of the white fog line. Picking the number for the width is kind of arbitrary. Anywhere from 10 feet to 10 and a half feet to 11 feet. That'll leave a small shoulder area but it might help funnel the traffic and give the illusion that the street is narrower than it actually is. There's options out there. Town of Galveston did some centerline striping where they take the yellow and then they bolt the yellow out. Looks like a bad paint job, but the ball is almost looks like a little island there. Stowe Street's got widths all over the board. It's not really wide enough to have bike lanes or anything like that. There's spots between Railroad and High Street where Stowe Street really isn't wide enough to have parking on both sides of the street. Even though as Gary knows, it's constantly there. Yes, yeah, so we've looked into a lot of those things that may or may not slow traffic down. As Bill put in some of his stuff, we already do with the radar feedback signs in the centerline pedestrian crosswalk things that do help slow traffic. We hope and make it safer for pedestrians, but it's short of drastic measures. It seems to be some sort of line striping or no line striping. That might be an option. Can you update us on the sidewalk? Stowe Street sidewalk project, wasn't that? So there's gotta be a little sidewalk. Yeah, there's a section of sidewalk that's being designed from Swayze Court North on the westerly side of the road. Probably a couple hundred feet that's still waiting on plans from the design engineers. And would that include a crosswalk thinking about where the students from the elementary school often cross down to that field on the river? Or could it? I don't think there was a design for a crosswalk down where they typically walk across to go skiing. My hope was that they would come out, cross at the intersection of High Street and Swayze and then utilize. And the sidewalk would go all the way to that spot. Okay, excellent. Yeah, we really hope that they would use the crosswalk as they are now because if you push the crosswalk to where they typically cross, there's not good sight lines, especially for panoramic flats. As long as there's a sidewalk to access. Where the crosswalk is and then use the new sidewalk, they're gonna go. Great. Several people have made comments on this. The speed signs that go, and people have said, I don't know if they can be reprogrammed or if we stuck with what we have, but if they say if you're going like 10 miles over the speed limit, that they'll flash like slow down, slow down, slow down. This particular one cannot, but there are options and more expensive ones. These are smart, but not that smart. On some of the small feedback signs, the portable ones that we have, I know there's a strobe light that flashes if you're going. Yeah, I mean, I think technically that's supposed to be off in that. Yeah, certainly the state doesn't allow the strobe lights or any kind of thing like that up there. So, I believe still have one of those. Very. So I guess the question is how do we strike Stowe Street? And like I said, the state will set our line strike for us for free, the fog lines or anything like that. It's on us. Anything lettering? Not for free. They do the yellow line and that's it. You mean like saying slow or something like that? Slow to, or whether four letter word down? I don't know, I think the option of, you know, striking it so it makes it here a little narrow, might help. Yeah. People aren't paying attention to the speed limits. Well, I know, there's probably better than nothing. You know, we probably keep striking anyway. Stowe, the whole sheriff thing, we've been over this. If it isn't this road, it's another road somewhere else. It's an ongoing issue that I tell you, get hired knows about it. I don't believe there's going to be any solution and nobody likes to hear my hard-to-know solution. I'll say it again, you know, the sheriff, we're going to, if we think about employing the sheriff, that's money out of our budget that we hadn't planned for. And even if we didn't plan for it to come from somewhere, it's either through a higher taxes or cutting something to some results. You know, you're talking about an eight hour day, you're pushing 300 bucks a day. If you did that once a week, a couple times a month, or something like that, I mean, that's not huge money, but it all adds up in the end. Right, well, I'm not recommending it. Yeah, unless you're willing to, in my opinion, start doubling the fines, let me write what doesn't want to hear this. Retroactive, back to you. Right, the fines are very proper to see. That's my, that's my solution is to either post-signs that says tickets will be doubled, our fines will be doubled, then necessarily mean you've got to follow through with it. I'd like to see you follow through with it. I, again, I don't know if the rest of the board members know, I have a CDL license. I'm very conscientious of how I drive all the time. In fact, we were going to pick up a piece of woodworking equipment there yesterday, and my son asked me, why are you driving like an old woman? And I said to him, I'll bet you there's people on this road that appreciate that, because most of them don't. They drive like hell, you know. If you're going to employ a sheriff, I mean, when do the taxpayers that are abiding by the laws stop having to be on the hook for bad people's actions? And to up the fines, in my book, to pay for the officers that were employing, in my opinion, is the way to build. But I know that's going to follow on deaf ears because it hasn't been passed, so I apologize to Bill. No, no, it's fine. Like I said, I wasn't recommending necessarily that we do it. I have said many times that, you know, without enforcement, it's difficult sometimes to expect people to, if people are driving out there now, and they think that the chances they're going to get stopped by a cop are next to nothing, they don't care much. If you have people out there enforcing it, people see the vehicles, and they'll start paying attention. I don't have the ordinance with me. I don't know what the fine is. Municipalities, you know, if you talk to a lawyer or the legislature, they're going to say that, municipalities are to bear the responsibility of enforcing their ordinances, the cost. The fines are penalties that the people who get the tickets have to pay. And when you combine the fine with the points on your insurance, you know, it's real money to a lot of people. I don't think our, you know, we could, there's probably some room, but you're not going to, if you set the fines at $300 for, you know, for going five miles an hour over the speed limit, I'm pretty confident if somebody challenged that court, the judge is going to throw it out. So why do something that isn't going to stick? I think the question is enforcement or not with our, with the fine structure that we have. And if you want to look at the fine structure, you know, they should be adjusted every once in a while, at least for inflation. But, you know, making them punitive is, I don't think it's going to work. Well, I wonder if a progressive fine, you know, so many miles over, the fine is this, so many miles more than that, the fine is a little bit worse. I think that's how it is. What's that? That's how it is. I couldn't tell you. Well, that's how it is with the state. I'm not sure if it's that way. I'm telling you, they'll look at it. I just wanted to Chris, and this is nothing, I agree with you in a lot of ways, but people who really, especially excessively speed, I don't think it's going to change there, but they're just going to get pissed off about how much they have to pay. And I don't know if it's going to change their behavior. Call me, you know, a pessimist on the scenario, but people who drive fast, drive fast. Well, there is the point system, so. Right. Next time my son gets picked up, he will be driving. Well, the other thing is too, we seem to speculate a lot about how people react, until you initiate some change other than the status quo that we've been doing and don't seem beginning anywhere, you'll never know. You don't have to speculate until the cows come home. Well, I also think that if you expect, even if you start enforcing, if you expect that people are going to stop complaining about speeding, I mean, I've been doing this for 40 years. People complain about speeding and they're made with all the time. And nobody likes it, and I don't blame anybody. They blow by my house, I get mad. Nobody, you know, speeding is a fact of life and don't expect that the complaints are just going to disappear, regardless of what you do. So I think it's important to recognize we can continue to have this conversation for the rest of our lives and likely will. So a couple of things to think about action-wise are we've, Bill's reached out and talked to the lieutenant, there has been increased presence. We can all vouch for that, if we start to see a decrease, we can again reach out and ask if there's a reason there's a lot going on and they need to be elsewhere, of course. Otherwise, we ask for that increase again. We can talk with Bill and agree on whether it's the white plot lines or what it is. That should help as well, it's a small piece. The sidewalk so that the students, I mean, the bottom line is safety, right? It's not just, oh, people are breaking the law so we want to penalize them. People live there, they back out, sometimes they get hit. There's a school there with children are crossing the street. So how can we make it safer knowing that some people are going to speed forever? So that sidewalk is really important. It's gonna create a much safer environment so that when people are breaking the law, we at least know that our kids are in a safe place there. So some action items are to agree, and I don't know how we move forward with the painting and then have it happen. And then also stay on top of the sidewalk project as well as the monitoring that's happening by the troopers. The good news, bad news with the line-strapping is two years from now it'll all be gone and we can do something different if it didn't happen. The sidewalk, the money is in the budget this year. We'd hoped to have it done, had it done before the paving happened, that hasn't happened, but it is a relatively simple job just waiting on the engineer's drawings. Great. And I will correct myself before, because when we talked about sidewalks three or four meetings ago, I told you that we were doing it ourselves. We're not, we're removing the sidewalks ourselves. We've got plans. There's going to be foam onto the sidewalks, but we're out to bid on the contractor to place the concrete. We've got a state grant that has to be bid, so we'll be bringing that back. But the plan all along was the contractor was going to actually do the pouring of the concrete and finishing on the sidewalk. So. I didn't know that, but. Well, a couple of meetings ago, I presented it and you said something and I said that we were doing it ourselves, so I'm just correcting the rest of it. Yeah, I'll move that we follow Danny's recommendation on those action steps of asking the town to paint the fog lines, to try to give the impression that there's a restricted zone. That way, ask the state, two state troopers whether we're on a contracted list or if we increase the supervision of Stow Street in particular, generally speeding whenever they can do it. And then we'll go through the sidewalk work as soon as we can. Is there a second to Roger's motion? Second. Second. Any further discussion? Do you need any more input bill on width or is that something you just figure out? If you want to give me a width. I hear that expert, but I guess I would say in my general understanding. So again, that's what everything Danny said is that among many best practices. It sounds like one best practice is narrower lane width for speed. So my, I guess intent in this motion would be that we're heading towards a narrower lane width. That's the intent to slow speed. I don't be on that. My other question would just be around parking. If we're, how is striking for parking going? I know like for Main Street, there were some changes after the project where things that had been striped as spaces no longer were. Are we planning to stick status quo for parking or is that a separate conversation? So I would say on Stow Street. On Stow Street. Like are you going to strike any parking, no parking? Hoping we figure out how we're going to do centerline and fogline, but most likely happened from the school north. As I said, Gary would back me on this. The width at Stow Street or a railroad street to High Street is about 33 feet wide, which does not allow for two travel lanes and two sets of parking stalls. So we're parking on each side of the street. I think we know that if you go there, although historically everybody's parked on both sides of the street. Yeah, and right now we don't have an ordinance that restricts that. Some of these folks I spoke with would prefer parking on one side of the street in a bike lane that takes you to the school, you know, up railroad High Street side or we park and stalls on one side of the street and the fogline continues down through. Yeah, I hadn't decided, or I guess no one had decided on parking stalls from that area from the school to Union. So knowing there wasn't enough width. I mean, we could put them in there improperly sized, which is what we've done. Yeah, a width on Main Street is eight feet and those ones up there might be six feet. Did we have stripes for parking on that part of Stow Street? We did specifically in front of my sister's house. Yes. Oh yeah. Yeah, which is on the side railroad. We had three stalls in front of her two or three and then that was it. We didn't have any on the west side of the street. No, not recently. I think we may have in the past. But we haven't, there's no signs that say no parking, there's no striking that says no parking. So we're not able to take action to amend the ordinance tonight. If you really don't want parking there, which would, I mean, I get half a dozen emails a year from Gary who tells me that you can't get a fire truck up Stow Street and certainly up High Street. So if you don't want parking, we can amend the ordinance and make it no parking and stripe it no parking and put signs up no parking. We don't have much letter to issue a ticket right now if they park soon. But we probably can't do that tonight because there probably hasn't been more. Right, and I guess my question was just how does that play into this consideration? So I'm hearing that we need to make a decision online. The parking stalls are the easiest thing for us to take care of. The center line which has to be done by the state much harder to arrange and the fog line also private contractor much harder to arrange. Michael Rock who lives in town can do the parking stalls and very good at that stuff. How soon do you need to know about that? The parking stalls? Right. No worry. So we can move forward on the lines and come back. The city just told me they won't give me a time for doing the center line. So we'll defer a decision on the parking stalls for another meeting but we have a motion. Do you want to read back the motion? On me? I'm not taking that. I saw a list of mistakes. Oh sorry, oh sorry. I heard you were being changed. So the point I had that Danny made in the motion was that we move forward the action of asking the town to paint the fog lines to narrow the width on Stowe Street, continue working with the troopers to increase speeding enforcement on Stowe Street and generally and continue to move forward with the sidewalk project. So again I don't know that that's an action but the action would be painting the fog lines to narrow the width. And the consensus seems to be narrow or have trouble with that. That would be what I would ask. Can I ask one last question here? Sure. What is the regulated width of the drive lane? Main streets 11 and main streets pretty narrow in spots. By year it's closer to 12, of course there's no fog line there but anything less than 10 is not really considered grivable. So that was going to be my concern or are we pushing that limit on that and if so what liabilities? No I think from what I've read 10 and a half seems to be the sweet spot is too. It makes it feel narrow enough that you slow down but does not really constrict movement. As we get narrower your right side tires start to ride on that line. Where's it out? Yeah, so as I said 10 and a half seems to be the sweet spot and if it isn't two years from now. We either go 10 or 11 or 11. Well what brings us to mind is back when we were talking about room 100 reconstruction the fact that the state agency transportation came to us and said we're narrowing up this stretch down through here for vehicles and then you've got your bike lane here on the side. By state law you have to be three feet from a bicycle and the other day, oh my God, the bike was riding right, the pedal biker was riding right on the white line. You know, he's put himself in danger by being a hedge in that line. Yeah, so it's a little concerning that narrowing it up too much. Yeah, no, I mean I think one of the hopes is that that white fog line keeps those people away from the sidewalk a little bit so that when they sit by it, Roger's son sits by it, 35 miles an hour. Evil friends. Never again. You don't feel it when you're standing on the sidewalk as much, you know, they're four feet out. One other thing there and I know we need to move on here but the other day when I was coming down through Main Street, putting along and lo and behold, I came up onto a young gal that was standing at the mobile. There was a car in a parking spot just before that bulb out and there was the light pole there and so out to God she was there. I could not see her. I was from the front of the vehicle was from me to Alyssa before I saw her and she was waiting to walk across. Yeah. And I said, you know, so much for state standards. Yeah. I couldn't even see the woman and it was waiting across at it. You know, it teed me off because I ended up having to drive through because there's no way I could just land on her. But in theory, the bulb out protected her. She had a place to stand not in the sidewalk, not in the road. She was right behind that light pole and the car, you know, and I just. Yeah, yeah, I did too, you know. I want to move to a vote before that because we don't have any of the public that has any real concerns but we'll be proposed before we vote. Make sure it's public comment. Sure. I think this came in the library center. Talk about both. Talking about Southern Street and speeding. When you all put that raised speed belt on the top of the gunk pole, slow that speeding right there. That thing was high enough to tear the axle off with a god damn car. So. Yeah. And so you talk about bringing in paying for more cops for speed enforcement. I'd be far more concerned about ripping the axle off my car. They get pulled over and paid a $50 fine. Axel's gonna be a lot more expensive. So I think, you know, you put it at the top of Stowe Street, Stowe Street, you put it at the bottom of Stowe Street. It's gonna slow people down. And would you, are there any limitations to putting this in a bomb-shouldn't-pulled speed fence? Yeah, we kind of had an internal discussion on it. I think the length of the street, we'd have to have numerous, which would be a lot. Speed bumps all have to be properly signed. There should be markings in the roadway as well, so there's a lot more to it. Yeah, it's a class two town highway as well. Speed bumps are good for residential areas. The place that this gentleman's talking about on Guptal Road, we were skeptical about that because it's just, people don't expect speed bumps on roads like that. And I think that for maintenance purposes, especially winter maintenance purposes, it's really good. Okay, I think we're ready to vote. All in favor of the motion, say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed? Any abstentions? Motion carries. Thanks, Bill. Thank you, Bill. Thanks. Hey, next item, Park Planning Study Update. Steve. See you. I think Alyssa asked for this to be on the agenda, as I understand from Bill, and Alyssa is here wrapped on the Park Study, so I wanna make sure to give her an opportunity as well, but Bill asked me to come and give you an update. So the Park Study was kicked off with our meeting on Wednesday, July 13th, and we had our steering committee which is about 10 people at this point. It was public meeting, it was posted, put on the website, and so on. And minutes are available on the Planning Commission site. That's where we're posting the agendas and the minutes, just so you know we don't have a special page for this project because it's kind of a one time, limited time project. So I thought it was a very productive meeting, the consultant SE Group that we have contracted with. They're based in Burlington, and so they really structured the meeting in terms of outlining the course of the project. The next step is a site walk that's scheduled for a week from this Friday. It's the 26th of August, and we're gonna start at 9 a.m. at Hope Davy Park, and then we'll reconvene around noon at the ice center area of the city, the ice center. The purpose of this is really to give the consultant a chance to see the sites in detail and also for them to hear input from the steering committee and any members of the public that attend. Again, it will be a public meeting, be publicly warned and so on. The third meeting is gonna be Thursday, September 15th. This is gonna be what's termed a visioning meeting. It's an opportunity for members of the public. It's gonna be widely advertised. We'll put it on the front porch forum. Make sure that we get as much promotional information as we can relate to give opportunity for the consultant and steering committee to hear from members of the public about the visions people have for these park areas, potential new facilities. There's a group that you may be aware of that wants to build a skate park down by the ice center, and there's an interest in additional soccer fields, potentially other ball fields in that vicinity. So there is a number of new projects that will be discussed and then also existing facilities, how they're managed, and you redesign topics such as potential relocation of the access road into the area of the ice center. One project that I love to see is for us to have some sort of a way to name that park. So that may come out of these meetings as well as either a contest or some fun way to get some ideas and maybe bring those back to you on what we'll name that park instead of just the area of the ice center or something. So those are the three meetings that are scheduled so far. There's the step after this visioning meeting will be concepts that will be brought to you in a public meeting. We're gonna make sure you involve UN, the EFUD commissioners. Natalie Sherman is representing the EFUD, so they're directly involved in this whole project as well. The consultant has, well, we've given the consultant base information on both park areas and then they have done some field work and said that the wetland's delineated for both of the facilities by their environmental consultants that information has been surveyed and will be incorporated into the base mapping for the projects. The goal is to have the whole project wrapped up by the middle of December, that's our hope. And we'll see how quickly we can move things along after this visioning meeting to get a couple initial concepts for both of the park facilities and then we can go from there. So that's really where we are with the project. I think it's generally on schedule. We got a little later start than we hoped just in terms of getting everything organized and so on but we're trying to really keep it moving forward, keep it on track. Thanks. Do you have anything to add Alyssa? No, that was the big thing was to highlight the two dates. Friday, August 26th, I am planning on attending so if anyone has anything they want to highlight to me or obviously Steve to bring up and just to, again, it's now exactly a month out but September 15th, mark on your calendar and hopefully we'll stir up some transport form and otherwise excitement for parts planning because it's so exciting. Tell all your friends, it is gonna be at the pavilion. It will be, it will be parked in the pavilion. And drop-ins so people don't need to come. We're gonna be at five o'clock. It's gonna be five to seven. It's gonna be a drop-in event as opposed to like a presentation interaction. It's gonna be more of a poster event with opportunities for people to ask questions, to provide input and so on. Thanks, that's great. So one thing, I'm not sure it percolates up to the select board. I have been continuing to get some complaints about activities, unsanctioned activities in this golf course that, and I thought we were fairly clear with everyone when we set this planning process up that while the town has been rather a laissez-faire with the disc golf course for the last, as long as it's been there, that we really are asking the disc golf folks not to make any changes, don't do any cutting. I did send an email out to one of the disc golf folks today saying, we've got this study going forward. So I would just like the board to understand there's still a little bit of an issue. And if you have any interactions with people who play disc golf, just ask them to, you can go out there and play. Nobody's saying we're taking the course down, but they shouldn't be moving holes. They shouldn't be cutting trees. They shouldn't be doing anything except playing on the course that exists until we get this study done. And hopefully one of the things that the consultant is looking at is the disc golf course and how that fits into the whole baby park and it's used, right, Steve? Yeah, that's correct, definitely correct. I think there's been Rob, I know, with at least one neighbor with the nearby Moulton farm. And I think there may have been an adjustment they were trying to make. That's been one of the things that I've worked with the disc golf course over the years is trying to mitigate impacts to neighbors. But I wasn't involved in this. Yeah, and I certainly understand, but I certainly understand that and I understand that the neighbor's issues. So I guess what I'm trying to do publicly is just ask for everyone's kind of patience, live with what's there now and hopefully we'll address these issues with this master plan and then in next year's budget, if changes need to be made, we can budget to do them. And it's, you know, I think everyone will be happy if we put that direction. Yeah. One other thing I'll mention too is that we did have a complaint on wetland impact, a formal complaint to the state wetlands office and we had a field visit. This has been probably almost two months ago with Shannon Morrison, the wetland specialist for our area and one of her staff people. And that complaint was resolved. We weren't, we're not in violation of state wetland rules. There are class two wetlands on within the disc golf course that are regulated by the state and Shannon had some management recommendations, but the current practice and use of, oh, word walk across wetland areas, location of holes, maintenance of holes is currently in conformance with the state wetland rules. So that was a good thing to find out that we're not violating any, there'll be some recommendations, buffers along Patrick Brooks, some of the issues that we've tried to wrestle with over the years. So there will definitely be some recommendations, but at the moment, we're not in violation of the rules. So that was good to hear. Thanks. Okay. Very welcome. Thank you. Move on to the next topic, which would be the update on the town manager selection process. Do you want to go or do you want to talk about it, Danny? Sure, I can, absolutely. Sure. So as everyone in this room likely knows, on Friday, the entire town lost internet connectivity. So instead of having four interviews for our town manager candidate, we had approximately four minutes of one interview. So things have been pushed just a couple of days back, but we are interviewing seven candidates. We have four complete interviews today and we have three tomorrow. The next step would be for the search committee to, at the end of all the interviews, we don't discuss in between, but at the very end we'll discuss narrow it down to generally two or three candidates that we would call for in-person followup interviews. And that process isn't entirely defined, but will look like a longer process where they come in, they see the facility, there's a chance, there's a larger interview, which I believe consists of the two full boards, EFUD and the select board. There will be opportunity for public questions or input. I just, that's not entirely defined yet. So I don't want to misrepresent that piece as well as meeting or chatting with a couple of staff members and those candidates will be notified by the end of this week. And then, I don't know the dates yet for what, that looks like it's a lot of folks to line up for that in-person. Anything I'm missing or any questions? The only thing is we had a total of 31 applicants, which wound up, you know, whittling down to seven, we had all the committee went either yes, maybe or no, so we eliminate people who got predominance of no's. It was kind of a scoring system. So that's how we got down to the seven candidates who we eventually wound up interviewing. We think we have a good, broad pool of applicants and we're looking forward to, you know, moving forward. I think we're in good shape to get a, you know, a person on board, you know, this fall. Any approximate dates to this too when you think you can get the two or three candidates in front of this, is that more than you thought? End of the month, I think we're talking. Yeah, I don't remember specifically, but I think it was as soon as possible. Well, we're talking about, Oh, for sure. You know, we'll talk about this week, you know, notify which candidates are gonna be moving forward and we'll probably get back to them with formalized, you know, candidate interviews. Well, we'll reach out to the board because I know it's gonna affect everybody's work and stuff like that, so we'll, yeah. On board and you know, if you thought more, exactly. Any questions? Any questions from the public? Yeah, we just, you know, as soon as practical, it would be great, you know, like we just heard about September 15th for this public input part study. If we could set a date for public review or however you think you're getting the public involved, this will be better. So, I think that would be great. We'll talk about that tomorrow at the end of the interviews. Great, thank you. Hey, thanks for our, any other questions? If not, we'll move on to the Wausen grant application. So this was a last minute edition by me and if we don't feel comfortable with cleaning action, we don't have to. I spoke to now Wausen, he then presented about the new facility. I followed up with Nanny Burke after the fact and she mentioned grant applications, which was my old world. There is a grant through the, actually Department of Buildings and General Services at the state. They have recreation facilities, grant, human services, educational facilities and regional economic development. Clicking on it now. I believe the Human Services one. She said, this seems like a fit we'd like to apply. It allows up to three letters of support. So she just asked what the process was. I have not followed up with her since to say that they're definitely applying or when, but it's a September 10th deadline. So because I messed up on Monday's, if the board is comfortable authorizing the letter of support to support Wausen's application for that, I would assume they could work with Bill Andorai on the language for a letter, but I don't know how that process normally is just given the deadline. So a D, applying for the money directly. Correct. So I'm applying for the same grant for work. So really super familiar with the process. They can provide us with a template and they can work with us or Bill or whoever wants to help. And then that way we can all read it at a time, suggest any edits, et cetera. And then all we have to do is put a signature on it. We can either vote on it in advance or just on the six and that way it's prepared and just put a signature on the six and then they'd have plenty of time to submit it with their application. Yeah, that probably is proven again. I just wanted to read it for you. Yeah, thank you. I don't know offhand. I think it's up to $35,000. I will say for other nonprofits, I think it's for shovel writing projects and it requires a one-to-one match of non-state or federal funds. So for a lot of small nonprofits, that can be a challenge to have money in the bank. So to speak, because they've been doing a lot of their own fundraising for a long time, that's something I think is the hand case that they're making up for. So I think they have a vision, seems great, in terms of not taking any action, but I'm happy to follow that up in the rest of the week for the next meeting. Yeah, that'd be great. I don't know if that's my name. It's a great opportunity. To further this until we get more information. And I'd be happy to move to that way, move forward with preparing that letter for signature for the next meeting. I think they would prepare it for us. Like they'd have a template, a letter template, and send it to us to review. And then we either sign it or suggest or make any edits that we might want. I don't know that we need any emotion, but. Okay, yeah, that seems, I think, what I was saying with entity is that they would provide that to us and then we just approve it at the next meeting Okay, just, they need by September 10th, doesn't give us dinner lunch. If we have any changes that need to be made, it's a pretty tight timeframe for changes to be made, but I don't think we can go forward, that's fine. By consensus, the board supported drafting or working with Lossy to draft a letter of support for final approval on September 10th. That sounds good to me. Okay. Okay, if there's no further questions, we'll move on to the manager's items. 2020, my water report, please. Okay, the 2021 water report is locked into the vault and I don't have a conversation. So. I don't know exactly where it is, you know. So at the next meeting, I'll respond to it. If you prefer, I can send it to you electronically. You don't even have to have the paper version of it if you don't want it. The audit, we do an audit every year and we're in, I think we're in good shape. There are a couple of things that the audit has every year auditors, they try to find something for the $25,000 that is able to do this. And it really, I wanted to share with you the management letters of the audit report more than anything because it informs what I wanted you to do on letter B. So I have the management letters for December of 2020 for the year end of 2021 here. And it's not, you don't want significant efficiencies or material weaknesses. And the town has no material weaknesses but the last two years and every year before then there have been a few deficiencies noticed. One in the 2020 report was the tax sale escrow account. It didn't quite balance, we had a separate bank account where we deposited money that we had to hold on to. When we had tax sales, we sold 34 properties of tax sales and most of them were redeemed but we didn't issue one tax collector's deed. There was a little bit of discrepancy there and I think we had bank fee that was charged. So the response to that deficiency was, well, we're just gonna put tax sale escrow money into the town's regular checking account and we'll just make the tax sale escrow fund and do fund accounting and we're all set. They talked about the town should do a fraud risk assessment that was in this year's management letter as well. They'd like us to document and end up our system of internal controls. I think we have a good system of delegation of duties. If the people who deposit money, they don't balance the checkbooks, people who write checks don't balance the checkbooks. We have a process by which when we're gonna pay a bill, either the determinator or I fill out an expense coding form that goes to the bookkeeper with the invoice to the vendor. The bookkeeper prepares the warrants that new folks sign every week and she prints the checks. The checks with the warrants go to the town treasurer. Treasurer waits until the warrants are signed before the checks are signed and then they're issued. So I have a good delegation of duties but this internal control document is something as I mentioned to you many times, I'm not an accountant, I'm pretty good with numbers, I'm pretty good at financing projects, I can do budgets, I think I've shown over the years that I've been able to shepherd the town's money in an efficient and good manner. But coming up with this system of internal controls and these policies, risk assessments, control activities, information communication, I just don't have that skill set or time to do it. Uniform guidance policies for grants, we have all of these policies called for preventive policies, financial management policies, other policies that are required by the federal government and federal grants. We have most of them but some of them are not up to date. So what I would like to do, I will get you the audit reports. Who wants a hard copy versus electronic copy? Digital is fine. You want electronic, you want a hard copy, you want a hard copy, you want a hard copy, you want a hard copy, all right, so. At the next meeting I'll bring enough hard copies for everybody who wants it. I'll send it out electronically to you. Do you want it electronically as well? Yeah, so. All right, I'll send it to you electronically. So anyway, those are the management letters from the last two years and the concerns. So. I think perhaps it's, or any of our employees want it. Only through the LCT, their general, like it's just like, we don't have it. There's always, it used to be common practice. We used to bond the treasurer. That's why I thought the treasurer might be mine. But we have blank bonds right now. Did they give you a suggestion as to where their weaknesses might be in the fraud risk? Or did you say you need fraud? Yeah, so it just says the town is not performed a fraud risk assessment. Fraud risk assessment is important because it identifies vulnerabilities to fraudulent activities. The fraud risk assessment would also identify processes, controls, and other procedures used to mitigate the identified risks. We recommend that the town perform it. And it kind of goes in with those internal controls that I was talking about. So I think we have a really good system in place. Doesn't mean that fraud and investment is impossible. You just read the newspaper, you know it happens. I think we have a good system in place. But we should amp it up with policies and then rely a little bit more on training to our staff than we have done. So you don't have to take any action on the 2021 audit report right now because you don't have it. But in letter B, what I would like you to do is allow and authorize me to hire Mike Gilbar as a temporary employee to update the town's financial policies and procedures. Mike was the CFO for VLCT. He just, he retired last year. He is quite knowledgeable about all of these things. And the reason I'm asking you to hire as a temporary employee is he doesn't operate a business. He doesn't have the insurances that you need to operate a business. So we hired as a temporary employee. So, somewhere that would be more than $65 an hour is what we would pay him. And then we would pay obviously the Social Security on top of that and then that payroll would be audited in our insurance policies for workers called and unemployment. I did budget for this for this year in the town's general fund budget. I have professional services like other. 7,425 was last year's budget. We spent 7,300 almost last year. I budgeted 17,465 this year. Some of the 17,465 will be paid to VLCT for the manager's service. And the rest of it will go to this. I think that this is gonna, I don't have an estimate right now on the number of hours. I don't think that this will, there'll be a couple of hours a week. No, it'll be all done by the end of this year at the latest. I'd like it frankly done before November 1st when the new manager comes on board so that these policies and procedures are in place. He can do the risk assessment. I asked him about that and I said, I have to go out and hire a consultant to do it. He said, no, it's just a checklist. He said, I've already, I haven't already. So I don't expect this is gonna cost tens of thousands of dollars, but I think it's important to do and I think it would be good if we had this in place before the next person comes on for my position. He has a motion to approve. I'll make a motion to approve bill hiring Mike Gilbar as a temporary employee to update the town's financial policies and procedures. Thank you for your motion. I'll second it. Motion to second. Any further discussion? If not all in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Motion passes. Okay. The last item is maker's gear request to paint electrical boxes. The MK modeling is here on Zoom. I am a. Thank you. I'm not feeling great, but I'm here. I'm gonna try to do this quickly. I don't know if the last meeting I was at I had talked to the woman in South Burlington who paints the electrical boxes there. And she is a retired art teacher and has worked with school kids to paint boxes. And when I was talking to her, she said I don't recommend more than three or four kids work on a box at a time. So it being summer and it being lovely weather, I reached out to some parents and said, do you have kids who might be interested in this now it would just be easier to do it now than to involve a larger school group. So I met with four students and the artist who worked with us at Brookside a few years ago. And so those kids came up with a design. We thought we'd just try one box the hour ago. This is the one on park, you know the one on main and stow street. And the design idea they came up with was to paint a train around the box. They were inspired by the train art that's up on the train bridge. And then to have each side of the box be a different season. So that's what they wanted to do with it. And that's what I'm proposing. So I don't know what y'all think about that. What do you do next? So just interesting. Just that one box that they're gonna do, that's it? Well, no, we wanna do the second one, but we wanna see how the first one is received before we reach out to another group of kids to see. Okay. So did everybody see the photos that M.K. sent? So are the kids in the photos M.K. are they the ones that are in the painting? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. So is there any problem with that? That one loves trains. No. So then what happens next? We approve it and then you just move forward with the artist and the students and make it happen. Yeah. Right? Yeah. We'll get the box prepped and ready and then we'll set the time with the artists and students and hopefully get it done before school starts with the art of golf. So in the next few weeks, if we can do it, whether cooperating. Does the electrical company have any requirements at all? Like certain kind of paint or anything? It's a town box. It's a town box. Yeah. I mean, we were planning on taping off the identifying information. So on the back of the box, it says property of town of Waterbury or whatever that is. So we would take over that. So you could take the, now you wouldn't, we wouldn't paint over that. I move we let MK and their team of painters move forward with their train design. Thank you, Roger. Do we have a second? Oh, sorry. Chris is seconded. Any further discussion? Any concerns? No, do you have a question? Bill of staff had any concerns and he said no. No, you don't need our help with this, right MK? No. No. We see sales, we don't know if we can figure it out. I love you people. Could you do something like this? No, we don't need your help. Good, okay. If not all in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Motion passes. Feel better, MK. Thank you. Thanks MK. Feel better. Hope you feel better. Okay. There being, unless there's any announcements or something, there'd be nothing before us and we'll come to adjourn. I'll be right back here. Hi, I wonder if I might have two minutes. I tried to be here for seven o'clock. My name's Dexter LaFaber, running for state senate. And I had these perfect plans of going to the Berlin meeting at six and having plenty of time to get here for seven. But they had a site visit and they were gonna be back at 6.30, it's only 17 minutes from there here. So I thought I'd still have plenty of time to be here by seven, but they didn't get back till seven. So I wanted to be, but I didn't just want to come and introduce myself. I'm 11 days into my campaign. It's kind of the last minute thing that we're in a writing campaign. Can I just hold you for a second? Bill, are we allowed to have any political? You're meeting, you can do what you want. It's what's people's, I guess I'm a little concerned because we might get a lot of candidates who will take a valuable select for time as much as I value. You know, if you wanna write something to us, we have the one of our rounds about that you could get information to the voters, but I don't know if it's a select for it. It's just a precedent. I don't know what everyone else feels. Yeah, we already kind of ran a process with another candidate that was interested in coming in and talking about basically the job position that she currently holds and what she was hoping to report with. We felt that in all fairness to all candidates, unless we can give everybody a crack at it, then we can't give anybody a crack at it. And really appreciate you coming in here, but I hope you understand our position. Yeah, I was sort of disappointing, but I was gonna respect you. So I'll say to you the one of our rounds about it. I'm sure I'll be reaching out, you're gonna be doing all the above. Okay. And I'm excited to get to meet you guys first. Thank you for coming. Good night. Okay. Sorry. Thanks, Matt. Hey. There's nothing else before us. Oh, my God. Yeah. We were just wondering about the salt for salt liquor license. Can you tell me about it? Yes. Oh, we didn't hear it. Oh. We have to do it. Oh, yeah. No, we don't hear it. Honestly, this is like super enlightening. I've never been making very much of it. Approved and signed by everyone. All signatures. Yeah, we would have just said consent agenda, but it was a lot to see. See, I was like, maybe they're just signing and not sitting. Yeah. And we did, it's all signed. Now you can go home and have a drink and tell us. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Glad you were here. Y'all move to adjourn. I'll second it. Aye, aye. Aye, aye. Aye. Yes, sir.