 All right, we'll call the meeting to order. First on the agenda is to approve the agenda. Is there any modifications to the agenda or just need a motion to approve? All good as far as I know. If you approve, guys, turn it. Second. Okay, all in favor? Aye. Right. So Denise's other hand up, so yeah. Yep. You're all set, Denise? Yeah, okay. And so we have one appointment this evening. We have Bethel Food Shelf and Cindy to represent them on their behalf. So we'll give you your time right now. All right. Do you want me to go to the mic? No, you can sit. I don't think you have to. You don't have to. It's up to you. Whatever it is you want to do. Oh, all right. I'll do it for my seat. I'm Cindy Metcalfe. I have lived in Bethel for 20 plus years. And I am here tonight to ask for municipal support from Bethel for the Bethel Food Shelf. Bethel Food Shelf, as far as I can tell, has been in existence for at least 20 years, if not more. And it's had a rich history of pretty incredible leaders. Before I go much further, I do want to point out one of my board members, our management team members, is Kim in the lower right corner. She is from Stockbridge. And from what I can tell, we've had some pretty marvelous leaders, Bill Green. Years ago, Mary Ann Bachelor, Paula Beal, Gary Burt. And as of 2021, during the pandemic, a group of five of us became managers of the Food Shelf. A little story about how I discovered the Food Shelf. When we were under lockdown during the on our stay at home order during the pandemic, we realized that our neighbors were gonna need things and we didn't know how they were gonna accomplish, we didn't know how we were gonna accomplish it for our own selves. But a group of us got together, had a community, I think it was a phone call then, it wasn't even Zoom at that point. And some, they were ministers and other church leaders and school personnel, community leaders. And we talked about what are we gonna do for our neighbors? And we developed Bethelstrom. And a few of us offered to take on leadership roles in the four areas that we thought people would need help. And I offered to do the volunteer needs coordination so that we could set up a communication system to gather information from people about what they need. And we could also gather information from people who were willing to volunteer in the community. And we actually continue to use that system today for the emergency response, for the emergency shelter whenever we have events. We try to identify what people need and try to find volunteers ready and willing to help out. But when the biggest need during the pandemic was getting food, I had a hard time getting food. I had to figure out curbside shopping and calling in an order and giving my credit card over the phone, and we all had to do that. And there were people in our community who didn't have credit cards, who have the wherewithal to be able to get that food. And what they needed was a connection to the food shelf. And I discovered, I had to search because I just didn't know that they'll have food shelf. And when I found it, I was able to start connecting people to that food resource. And in one of the issues, well, first of all, Gary Burton had taken over management of the food shelf in March, in February of 2020 and the pandemic struck in March. And it was very difficult to manage the food shelf because the volunteers were all in the vulnerable population and couldn't really safely go out. So we had several community meetings with the four churches who were involved in the food shelf. Involved in the food shelf. And we discovered that they needed volunteers and what Bethel Strong had was volunteers. So we put that together. And now, three years later, we transitioned. Gary no longer wanted to be manager in 2021. We slowly transitioned to a management team. At this point, it's six members. And we've been trying to revitalize the food shelf, trying to get the word out that the food shelf exists, that it is there to meet people's needs in supporting their food budgets. And about a year ago, it was approached to come before you and ask for support. And I didn't feel like we had our systems built. I didn't feel like we were integrated enough into the community. I didn't feel like we really knew what this was costing, what the need really was. And so in 2023, we worked really hard on fundraising and on community organizing and getting the word out into the community. We now have over 60 volunteers. 30 of them are active at any one time they circle through. Our management team circles through leadership. We're always looking for new leaders and working really hard to make them feel like a part of the whatever it is that we're doing at the food shelf. And we do a lot of things. We're open two shifts a week, Mondays and Thursdays, and we're experimenting with being open on Saturdays now. In 2023, the pandemic, I mean, every entity that received COVID money saw it go away in 2023. And that's in every entity who saw it go away. Struggled and is still struggling. And that is very true for individuals. There's snap benefit completely went away in March of 2023. We knew that was gonna happen. We anticipated it. We built an inventory list and we've been able to maintain that inventory list throughout the year. But now we know what it actually costs to deal with our neighbors who are struggling to meet their household budgets. We can at least alleviate a portion of their food budget so that they can continue on. We jumped from a $54,000 budget in 2022 to a, it looks like it's gonna be about 86,000, 84 to 86,000 in 2023. That's what it costs. And we're, I think there is a request in your packet, I think, is it in the packet? Yeah, I think I'm gonna submit it to you, ma'am. And it describes a variety of different, it shows you how many people we serve in Bethel and in the other three towns in the service area. So the other towns in the service area are Stockbridge, Barnard and Pittsfield. And then it shows you the number of people that use the food shelf from each of those towns. And so the request from each town is proportional to the number of people. The request is for $30,000. And Kim, did you wanna add anything? Yeah, thank you. And thank you for giving us this opportunity. There are a couple of things that I would add. One is it's important to note, and I think Cindy did make it clear, but to underscore the point that the expenses that we incur are all food related. It's a completely volunteer run organization. We don't pay rent. We do provide a stipend to the church for electricity, but all of our expenses are driven by food costs. And interestingly, despite the fact that we've seen demand in terms of the number of households that we supported over the past year increased by about 17%, we've actually lowered our cost per family that we serve by 13% by really striving to find the best costs for the goods that we provide every day, number one. And also the grants that we largely depend on and through the use of the Vermont Food Bank. So the budget of $83,000 or 86 that we'll hit this year is really truly going right from our budget into the pantries, if you will, of all of the families that we're serving in the four towns that we serve. So just to highlight that, as of the end of the month of November in 2023, we served 209 unique families from this area. 121 of them were new to the food shelf. We've never seen them before. And if you, we do track the number of people in their household, there are 588 people that we served during 2023. By comparison, in 2022, we had 160 unique families. In 21, we had 100 and in 2020, we had 46. So the need is, I think that's our primary purpose for being here is to say our people are not doing well, they need support and I'm hoping that we are reaching our peak and that 2024 will be less need in the community, but this is what the need is now and this is what it costs. Just to give this slide for the food shelf to the Human Services Committee, with their request, the Human Services Committee denied them because it was more than the human services budget is even. So they denied them, sent them a letter saying they were denied and that they had two options. They could petition, which is still on the table. They could still have to petition to get on the warning or they could come to the select board and the select board could put them on the warning without the requirement of them petitioning. So that's really up to you guys. And thank you for providing the information. It was helpful to be able to read and look at the graphs and funding sources and things that kind of better understand it. So just to clarify, both those options were to get on the warning. We're not making a decision tonight or trying to put this into the current budget that we're discussing. This is about the mechanism through which they're getting on the warning. Is that? Well, it's kind of both. I mean, you could say you will put them on the warning for whatever amount you deem that you could put them on the warning for, which saves them from petitioning. And then it kind of obviously goes in the budget as an add-on, right? Whether or not people approve it, or you could say that they have to petition to get on the warning just like somebody else would have to. So we, there's no, there's no version. In my head, I was ready for you to say a version where you're like, and they're here because they're asking to be put in the budget now. But that's not, that's not a option. Not really because they've never had an ask before. You kind of did something different, a little bit different with the library, but they already received an appropriation. These guys are new. So you can, the only thing you're gonna do is either make them petition or not petition, but there's no way you can guarantee the money because the budget could fail at March. That's up to the voters, whether or not you most likely will list them as a separate article. But even if you put them in the budget, they still could get taken out. I mean, we can't guarantee anybody the money. Thank you for that. Yeah, no, sure, happy to. So, I mean, we obviously have a lot of services in the community that we do appropriate money for. And for whatever reason, the food shelf isn't one of them. A couple of questions that I had is, so I was just writing down some notes when you were talking. So you said around 2022, the budget was around 54,000 and then this year you're kind of in the 80s, 86, 83, somewhere in there. But what was it? And I know probably a lot of the need came on COVID, post-COVID times. What did the food shelf look like prior to like the COVID time? I mean, what was the operating budget at that point? I actually, that was run by the four churches and I don't know what their budget was at that point. The food shelf itself looks the same. And then I also was looking in here, it was top that there was a suggested budget of around 95,000 for the food shelf for this coming year. I'm sorry, 91.5. And then it gave a nice funding graph of, it's on page, I guess three if you're following me. It says BAFS income sources January through November. So that was like what you're currently getting funded through. Yes, that's right. So I was just trying to break down the pies because it doesn't talk about numbers but talks about percentages. So just kind of doing the math out. It says in here that Stockbridge is currently giving 5,000 per quarter, right? Correct. So that's 20,000 a year. It's actually 15 because they're, they do the second quarter after town meeting. Okay. So we get. So I'm just trying to follow the pie here. So 31% is grant funding that you receive and then 40% is donations. And then there's another 3% between some local fund raising and a PHS, PHH donation. A project having all these donations. So I guess I'm just kind of, when I was doing the graph out, if you do the graph out, it looks like you have enough money currently to fund it. Without Bethel being in there. So I guess my question was going to be was, is there certain grants that you're anticipating isn't going to be there for this coming year? Or is there certain donors that normally donate that have told you they're not going to donate or? Yep, good question. The grants are competitive and they're all, right now they're all from the food bank. So we got, we got all the grants we asked for. We didn't get the amount we asked for but we got all the grants and every community is seeing the increase in need that we're seeing. So that's, we got to do a good job being competitive for another grant this next year. But it is pretty amazing that we, we don't go to a whole lot of effort to raise money when those donations come in anyway, which is wonderful. The events are labor intensive and we're all volunteers. Project Happy Holidays is labor intensive and we're all volunteers. If the need continues to, if it's, even if it stabilizes where it is, it's going to be, we spend a lot of our time thinking about what grants to go for, how to write them, what, writing them, making the pitch. We would have to do a whole lot more fundraising, you know, to make sure. The other thing is that we're never, we're never sure until the donations come in that we're actually going to be able to cover the cost. We know we've got a budget. We don't know where the money's going to come from. So there's no way to run a business and not have any idea of how to sustain this operation. So having the Stockbridge donation really stabilized us and allowed us to continue providing the service and not have to wonder whether we would have enough money to get us through. That's why we went, that's why we're asking all four municipalities to help support this so we know we have a foundation and we can continue doing the grants and the community outreach. We know we're not reaching, just looking at the numbers in Pittsfield and in Barnard, we know we're not reaching the people that are in need. And we have to figure out a way to do that. And the only way to do that is go in and have a similar community, meaning that we had in Bethel back in 2020, 2021, and figure out how we can identify the need in the community and make sure that they're aware that there's support. So I know it's not exactly what you had petitioned for, the $30,000, but I was, because kind of a shock to us is it's more than our current whole human services piece and Paul, I saw that you were on, so feel free. So I was kind of going through the human services pieces of it. I'm not on the board, but I was just going through the notes and based upon some of the information that was given in last year's report, like writer shares or how many people use something for the other ones. I was trying to figure out where does the food shelf like fit into the human services piece. And I kind of came up with, I mean, our largest one is $7,000. So, and a majority of them are 2,000 or under. And I was just kind of looking like based upon, based upon currently the usages on certain ones and dollar figures that this appropriation, at least looking at it, to apples to apples to be somewhere like in the $4,000 or $5,000 a year type. If you were looking at the visiting nurse association versus tri-valley transit and how many ridership fairs that they do, I was trying to figure out like, how would that weight into ours? I know it's not 30,000, but at least it's a start and we're in there. Paul, am I off on my logic or? No, actually, part of our, we had a lengthy discussion about this. And can you hear me okay? Yes. Okay, so part of our lengthy discussion was if we were to do something from the human services side, where would we land? And what impact would that have on the actual long, the request? So we were looking in the four to five, kind of bracket and we, but we thought that, if we did that, that may hinder their ability to get the full funding that they're looking for by going to have an item put on the warning to go before the town. But that was the range that we were looking at based on the other groups that we fund. And I think VNA is probably the biggest one at seven. Tri-Valley, they wanted to go up to 76 and we actually just went halfway with them to try to keep the budget under control. So that's what we were looking in our discussion. I mean, I guess I don't know exactly the sound of like the request. I don't know if I hear your petition correctly. Your request could be one of two things. It could be what is the select board willing to put in the budget to go before the voters or if not, at least getting on the warning so you didn't have to petition to be on the warning. So that kind of sounds what you're looking for. Yeah, because if the select board agreed to put in just five grand into the budget, then that means that when the select board stands up and talks to the voters about the budget, they will have included your five grand in there. It's a budget they're willing to defend. It's a budget they're willing to talk about. But if they do that, the agreement would be that you can't stand up on the floor and get that raised to 30,000. You'd have to take your five and hopes the budget passes just like the rest of us and get your check in July. That would be the deal if the select board agreed to put you in and add you as a human services item. Yeah, that's up to you. We're just telling you what it costs. Yep. And I don't think this is a decision that I can make, actually. Oh. I mean, I think it would be. I think it is. Go ahead. I think she froze. I think she froze up. Was that you, Kim? I think she froze, yeah. So I think at this point would be, it's a challenging one to just give 30,000 when it's more than the entire budget that we have for that department alone without at least the voters weighing in on the discussion on it. But I mean, I couldn't see why you couldn't start making a donation that is in line with kind of our services now. And then I guess it could be adjusted at different times. Or you can petition the voters for the whole thing and see how that goes. But your question comes up in my mind. So if they, let's go down the path of they are gonna go to the voters for this. That's a one time appropriation, right? So it doesn't solve the bigger sort of systemic question that you're having, which is that this is probably a yearly need and maybe 30,000 isn't the yearly need. And even you were sort of indicating, you're hoping that there's, we're hitting a peak but that we're coming back down. The reality is we just don't know. And so then, and maybe you can't make these decisions by yourself, but then the question is, is what you're looking for something of a more regular appropriation? Or do you wanna go to the voters for the 30,000 and preemptively next year work with the town to be more in line with an appropriation that would then be an ongoing appropriation or more with what the human services does? I mean, I get that you can't answer that question, but I feel like that's sort of what we're talking around is, you might get the 30,000, but then it's a one-off versus doing something a bit more systemic. We would come up with an honest assessment of what it costs to be next year. Right. I think the thing we're looking for is knowing that we can be sustained in some fashion. If we know we have a $91,000 budget, but we don't know where the money's coming from, even at the beginning of the year, I mean, you can't write a budget if you don't have any sense of, and it would be nice to know that 50% of the budget is coming from municipalities to support their neighbors in the work that we're doing with them, and then we will raise the other 50%. But... Uh-oh. There we go. It just blinked for a minute. Sorry, go ahead. So Cynthia, my question is this, if you do outreach in Pittsfield, outreach in Barnard, then you're obviously gonna get more people that are gonna have a service for your service. You're gonna grow your baseline. So would you also, then you would also be going to those towns and saying, you know, you have more people, more services, you need to pay a higher appropriation. I wouldn't say it that way. But kind of, you know what I'm saying. I'm sure you would not. But you know what I mean. You'd still be doing the per capita or whatever. The percentage of clients served per town would be reduced in Bethel by the number of people who are being added in other towns. So that would be the formula we shipped. Okay. Thanks. I mean, I guess that the board, I mean, we don't have to make a decision this evening. Paul's raising his hand. Yeah, Paul. Well, to be honest, one of the other concerns that we had was the impact, excuse me, the impact of $30,000 on the overall budget. It's like a, you know, a penny and a half or something like that on the overall budget that we know is going to be stressed this year. So that was also one of the concerns that we had. Certain, yeah. Yeah, it's a tough budget year. It's a very tough budget year because we have a very slippery slope in that if we give you 30,000 and we just got a new one from the library for 35 last year and we got another one on the table for 16,000 and then we're losing 54,000. Pretty soon, my numbers say, you're gonna need a lot more people. You're gonna have to serve a lot more people because you're not gonna be able to pay their taxes. So I'm calling a slippery slope that we really wanna look at and do we wanna go down that road? The 54,000 he's referring to losing is our sale of the transfer station and that was just a five year payout. So that obviously is in our budget as a revenue but we're gonna take a hit for that. So what we spend now, we're gonna have to make up later and certainly not a lot of non-tax revenue and we've taken some other hits. There's other people that are petitioning. There's other people that are, have changed or coming for more money. So it's insurance, 12% increase. It's a rough year. It's a tough year for everybody. Just tell us what our next step is. If we have to make a choice or decision just let us know that. We just, we want you to know what we know about what we're seeing and what these numbers are telling us. And we've got a problem in our community, not dissimilar to the same problem other communities are facing. And what we choose to do about it is, we're gonna make a decision about that. You're gonna make a decision about that and hopefully it'll be in wonderful partnership. So I mean, I guess my thoughts on it were, if it was gonna go 30,000 it should go on its own warning item. But if we want to add them into the human services register of places that we do appropriate money to a year, that maybe we could as a select board, add them into that and make their appropriation in line with how our other appropriations are going now. But it was kind of like where I'd thrown out the four or $5,000, it's not 30 but it's based upon the weighted percentage of our appropriations. It would be in line with, I mean everybody asked us for more, right? I know Tri-Valley Transit, they ask us for more than we're giving them and we usually have to kind of like say, well, we're not quite there yet but we'll give you a little bit more. A part of that thinking. It is for Tri-Valley Transit, that's exactly how they figure it too. And you probably have more challenge in Tri-Valley. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it goes on writer shares. It's very similar, like you have X amount of people looking for meals, I have X amount of people on writer share and those types of things. So Gene has his hand raised. Yes, Gene. It strikes me in looking at the information that they've provided and that they're looking at at least for 23, they're about half of their revenue is from donations. And if they were to continue to be able to raise half of their funds through donations and we provide 80% of the clients, a quote, one way of saying a fair share would be $48,000 for Bethel. That's nothing for grants. But it's another way of thinking about this in terms of the need. And for the same reason that you and I are talking about this a bad budget year, it's gonna be a bad budget year all the way around. And my guess is it's gonna be harder on the food shelf will continue to grow. So I want to, well, I just wanna make that comment that in some ways the 30 is for me a reasonable request. Should that go to the town for a vote? I would say, yes, I would support that and I would support the board offering to put it on the morning. And I think the, you know, kind of to get back to what Dave was kind of alluding to before is what we're starting to see in the town is over the last couple of years with the cost of everything going up is we're starting to get into like a bit of a vicious circle of, you know, the taxes are going up, the taxes are becoming not just taxes but your goods that you buy everything's becoming a larger burden on families. And in return, more and more families are having to reach out for human service assistance, food shelf and other means. And at the same time we're seeing individuals reach out in regards to paying their taxes or their water and sewer bills. So in any time we make adjustments on, say taxes then that reduces our grand list. So then it, you know, inflates your- It's rough all over. Yeah, so it's kind of like it's like you were saying it's kind of a, you know, kind of the more you give the more you have to raise to give, right? I mean, it's- Which is why I didn't want to come last year and ask. I wanted to be able to make this request after doing a really thorough, honest assessment by spending the year really examining what the need is and what it costs. And, because I understand that I understand that those pressures. So I was thinking about this, if you put them on the warning just if you put them in the group with human services think about them wrong, somebody could stand up and increase their appropriation because they've done that before in Bethel. So it could come up off the floor. We have the same situation currently with South Royalton. As long as they're in there. As long as they're in. You can't be added. Right, you can't be added, but if they're in there it still could. So it still could be raised if someone, you know, petitioned from the floor, you know, brought it up from the floor. And then we also have the same similar situation now with South Royalton Senior Center. They're in the budget for 4,000 but they are petitioning for an additional six because when they went in front of the Human Services Board they presented their financials and they made their request. They were given their request amount. Then apparently they went back and took a look and realized we could be closing the doors. So you still have the additional 27,500 from the library. Now you have six more coming from South Royalton Senior Center and the $30,000 asked from the food shelf. So. But what you're saying, I just want to make sure. Yeah. If we go with Chris's idea of, and I know you were just throwing out numbers. Yeah. Let's just stick with the same numbers. Yeah. 5,000 appropriation in the Human Services budget within our full scope budget. They could still from the floor ask for an additional amount. They could. If they're in there. They could. As long as they're in it. As long as they're in it. Because I think my hang up with that model. Or somebody could decrease it. Or somebody could decrease it. You have to at least be in the services part. Yeah, they could vote it up or down. I think my hang up with that model when you were first presenting, it was a 30,000 asked to a 5,000 give is a huge disparity. They're being very clear as to what they need. And for us to say, okay, we'll get you into the regular budget is one win, but the loss is $25,000 of what's actually needed. Right. But what I'm hearing is, we could do that and put things in line with the Human Services sort of budgets that we're giving across the board. And they could still do an additional ask. The problem with that is, I think that, this is my opinion, you can do it with what you'd like. I think they should petition for the money and put the whole 30,000 on there so that the voters are educated. When they see the warning, it'll be its own item. Because otherwise it's tucked into our budget, then the ask goes up and what we're putting in for our numbers and what our penny on the tax rate is or what our percentage increases becomes skewed because we know they're in for five. Somebody, they could be, someone could ask for more. Whereas if they're just like we did for the library last year, you want 27,500, it's on the warning. Now you didn't make the library petition, but they were already appropriation. You could choose what you wanna do. But I think that it's better left aside as its own item so that the voters can see the full ask. Otherwise, you're kinda sneaking it in or tucking it in. I just feel like if the voters want, and then it's its own item, voters could give them the 30, they could go up, they could go down. But then you're going directly to the voters and you're putting the whole ask, which is what they're asking for in one line. Because there's no way to manage this. I mean, we could try to make a deal with them, but they could still go off the floor high. And then kinda, you know what I mean? Yeah, no. So for the library, they were already in for five. And I think, and they'd asked for like 7,500 or something. So you gave them that, but you made them, you put them on a separate warning article for the 275. So you could put the food shelf in for five and then put them on as a separate ask for 25 or you could put the whole 30 out. I mean, honestly, it's hard to know. Well, and I don't think there's an easy answer. There's not an easy answer, especially at the last minute because we're down to the sign, we're kinda down to the wire. Yeah, but I mean, again, it's not the dollar amount that they're looking for, but I feel free to jump in follows. I would assume that as a citizen of Vermont or Bepple that the food shelves should be a part of that human services. Well, right. And I think that's what I was sort of leaning towards was how do we get this to be a more systemic part of our thinking when we're thinking about the budgets as a whole. And so while I hear, I mean it makes sense, your argument for let the voters see the entirety of it, but then that doesn't put them into the system. You could do just what you did for the library. The library, you put 75 in the appropriations and then you put the separate 27.5 as a warning item. So if you feel like you either gonna give them the five and let them do what they're gonna do, or you could do the five and the other 25 as a separate warning. If you wanna support, or you're not really supporting, you're just saying you put it on the warning. Because if they petition for it, it automatically has to go on the warning. So it's not like the select board has the right to put specific things on the warning, but because human services and appropriations are one thing under the purview of the town of Boulder, it has to go on the warning if they come up with the signatures. But we could also waive that. You could, but Chris is right, I understand your point. You could put them in the human services for whatever amount you're going to and then their separate line item or for the balance or they could, or you don't. And you just leave it at the five and then whatever happens off the floor. Excuse me? Go ahead, Paul. Yeah, so it might be a question of the guaranteed five versus the maybe 30. Once it hits the floor, you don't know what's gonna happen. Once the taxpayers understand the whole concept of how it's going to impact the tax rate, is guaranteed five better than maybe 30. And start to get into the system of the human services list so that it'd be, you wouldn't have to do this fight every year. It would be, you'd know that they'd be that certain amount you could ask for each year and more than likely go through and increase a little bit at a time as the financial situation improves with the town. So do we wanna make a decision tonight about either including in the budget to put it on the warning or? Well, it'd be helpful because I could finalize, I'd like to be able to put my finishing touches on the budget and I need to start working on the warnings. I'm sorry, this is Richard, give me update on the Pleasant Street pump tank. Do we know, this is gonna sound like a sidebar, but do we know how many additional, aside from the ones that are already on our plates, do we know how many asks are out there or is this sort of, yeah, at this point, I think I know how many asks are out there. Yeah, I mean, I know for sure we've already seen the libraries, that's here. And then we just got confirmation from South Royalton Senior Center that they're leaving the four grand in the budget. That was their original approved ask by human services, but they're petitioning for an additional six because they feel that 4,000 is better than nothing. So, but they're going to be petitioning for the other six. So I am expecting that. Right. And then we get some other movers in the budget. There are a few things that we had included that we need to, as well as some things that like today, we're spending more money as we speak. That's right. And I think, so I know that this is a hard set of decisions and there's so many more parameters than just what's on the table being discussed. I think what worries me, and I like what Paul said about, at least you get some sort of guarantee if you put it into, if we put a 5,000 or whatever placeholder number into the human services budget, but it also feels like that is falsely low just to be in line with other human services asks when this is an entirely different entity and they have proven the height of the need in our direct community, just like we've asked of Tri Valley Transit, can we see the numbers for who's being served? We have been provided with numbers of who's being served and the vast majority is in this town. And so it feels like a bit of a slap in the face to come up with a 30,000 ask and give only 5,000 in return. Well, remember, these other ones aren't asked. This is what they've come up with. So Tri Valley always asks for a lot more than you give them. Right, but also none of them are asking in the tens of thousands. Jean has his hand raised when Lindley's done. Yeah, so you could put the five in and then you could do exactly what you did for the library. Five goes in and you warn the other 25, sorry, math. I mean, I think that would be my personal leaning. Okay. And I know that we're sort of, we have to make this decision before we have the rest of the budget discussion. And so it's a little bit unfair to hang the food show bubble. I could tell Cindy tomorrow what you decide, but if you want to hold it, right? Yeah, it's hard. I feel like we're playing with so many numbers and there are so many asks out there that. Okay, Jean has his hand up too. Yeah, no, I get what you're saying, Lindley. It's not an easy choice. Right. Go ahead, Jean. I, my first exposure to the human services budget at a town meeting, I saw a number of worthy organizations that were, in my opinion, not getting enough money, none of them getting enough money to really make a difference. And I wonder if we wouldn't be better servants of the community if we focused in on a smaller number of human services and gave more significant gifts that could make a real difference. That's a completely different way of looking at that human services budget. And I recognize that, but that was my reaction then and is still part of my reaction. Okay, so it sounds like we probably want to, we have a lot of budget things to get through as we get through the night. So, I mean, in fairness, I mean, why don't we, well, I don't, Therese, follow back up with you tomorrow, but I said, why don't we have, Can I talk to you tomorrow and tell you what the suckboard decides so you don't have to stay through the entire budget discussion? Or you could say it's up to you. They're saying that they're gonna look at the rest of the numbers with the full budget. So where are we standing at the moment? We don't know. We don't know. But I think we could probably make either, or give you the reassurance that if it either goes in the budget or not in the budget, that we can put you on the warrant, right? I mean, without getting a petition. So you don't miss your opportunity. So I think if we can't strike a deal as the board, putting it into the budget and the human services end, then we'll make sure that we put you on the warning as your separate item. Okay. Paul wants to know what Therese thinks. That sounds great. The work that's necessary to get the petition signatures. Exactly. Project Happy Holidays. Yeah. That sounds like a lot, but I'll be... Denise, do you have a thought on this? Or you can hear us okay and everything? Yeah. Yes, I can hear you okay. Yeah, I feel, you know, I definitely want it to be put on the warning without having to have them petition the money. Either we put the 5,000 in and then they do like the library and ask for the other 25. But as long as they can get put on the warning without having to do the petition, works good for me. Okay. Sounds like that's the deal. Everybody's kind of agreed on that. So that's good. Just wanted to make sure you were there. You could hear me. Didn't have too much cold medicine going on. I think that's for the thing we're not decided on yet. An agreement among the board is, is it gonna be a 5,000 or some appropriation in the human appropriations category plus something on the warning if you choose to do that, or just the ask for the warning. Yeah, we would choose to do that if that's possible, yeah. Okay. Just so you know. When you're having that conversation. Either way, you're gonna ask for it. Thank you, I think that's good. Well, and thank you for it. The numbers are really helpful. It was that whole printout you gave us in our package. It's taken a couple years to really gather that data and it's a compelling. Yeah, well, and it's no minor amount of work to get that data together. So thank you. Okay, well, thank you. Thanks. All right, and we have public comments. So if there's anything that's not on the agenda this evening that anybody wants. How's it? Chance. Paul's up. Samantha Godin has her hand raised and so does Joshua Downs. So does Paul. Okay, so we'll go to that. It looked like Samantha Godin's hand was raised first. We'll go to you. Sorry about that. Hello. I just wanted to talk about the budget quickly. I looked at the draft and I'm just curious about, again, you guys have not approved it yet, but moving forward on the DPW and the amounts for paving and other items associated with maintaining roads, there is a trend of it being pretty much the same from the previous years. And I'm wondering if that is logical since we have been encountering severe weather impacts and should be going up and set up down, especially when the roads are not as well maintained in the last few months. And well maintained in the last two years, let alone in the last flooding situation. So I'm just wondering if you guys are going to address that in the budget. Yeah, we'll be talking about that more. I know there are movers in the budget on the roads end of things. We do have one, two, three, four working grants that we have been approved through the town that we have to come up with match money for, for projects that are moving forward. And I think you will see if you go back through it, there has been movers in that over the last couple of years is more, we've almost doubled our gravel budget. And as well as money that goes into what we call the high rehab, which is monies that we use, not just for match grant money, but for other projects that we would have in town. We will be going through most of that stuff tonight. We also did put the majority of the ARPA money that we got into the capital road fund as well. So we did put a big chunk of change in there as well. I did see that. One other item related to that, there is an increase in salary. Does that mean we are hiring additional people in the DPW? What we do is I just budget a, I think I budgeted a 4% increase for salaries this year. We kind of estimate on overtime. Kind of that line seems to stay the same, but actually what I'm looking to do is to bring somebody into the parks full-time and they would work in a seasonal position in the winter for the road. Currently we have three full-time guys with CDLs and then we bring in a seasonal who also has a CDL, we bring in Paul. So we currently do pretty much everything with just four people. And but at this point, one of the seasonals is only working when we get a snowstorm. So we do a lot of the work with pretty much just three people. So the increase was budgeted was for salary, increase of the existing. And- And is that 4% across the board as it relates to everyone outside of the DPW? Yes, yep. And it's all based on in the end just because we budget 4% doesn't mean they get 4%. Depends on, you know, merit, cost of living, et cetera. We also had a large increase this year in our health insurance premium went up. We had to switch. Yeah, we had to switch from, or we chose to switch from MVP to Blue Cross Blue Shield to reduce our increase by five grand because the percentage went up 12%. Okay, cause there was a large amount of increase in some some people in the town. So I was just wondering if it was always 4% across the board. It was this year, but like I said, just cause we throw it in there doesn't mean anybody gets it, including myself. It's just something that we've put in. And if we start looking for cuts, a lot of times in the past, we've only budgeted like 3% kind of depends. So we're also trying to be more competitive with the road crew salaries because we know currently, school bus drivers can make up to $30 an hour. Granted, they're not getting pennies, but it's hard to be competitive. Sometimes, especially since COVID this, the CDL salaries have gone crazy and everybody's looking. So it took us over a year to finish to fill our last position to find someone. And that was just because we didn't have any applicants. So it's been tough. And the same thing is going on around us as well as with the state. Okay. Because I did see like for instance, your salary has gone up. You asked for a 0.9% rate. So it's not technically a profit. I'll just, I'll have to go back and look at all the salaries. Maybe I have a formula wrong in my spreadsheet, but I'll go back and look. Yes. So now, of course, we're happy to do that. But I will go back through and look at my spreadsheet. So because it's possible, there's an error in there. But thank you. So I'll go back and look at that, see if it's right or wrong. We'll go to, I believe Josh had his hand up second. Sure. Just two quick comments. First on last meeting with the county sheriff, it was really great to hear from him at the meeting. I really liked, he seems to lean towards community policing, my concern about them, just running radar or whatever. The comment I really wanted to say seemed like you guys were deliberating between 20 and 40 hours, and especially hearing comments from other neighborhoods in the crime. I just wanted to kind of put in my two cents that I would love to see you go towards 40 hours or even more. I mean, there's 168 hours in a week, not 40. So 20 hours is just 12%. I mean, I definitely agree that we could use the sheriff's help for more hours than 20, so just for your consideration of the budget. My second point is also on the roads. As we know, like they've just been today the total mud up here, you know, up in Camp Broken Limpus. We have culverts eroding from today again and some of them are the new ones. But it's like lately the road conditions are unsafe more than they're not. But the biggest thing is that because of the camp foreclosure, we have to take these dirt roads as detours. We have no choice. You know, I've heard the comment you don't want to send the town plow up because it'll hurt the roads, but it's, we have everyone else detouring including oil trucks and other heavy trucks, delivery trucks that are also, you know, damaging the roads. We're all putting more traffic, including myself on those roads to detour as this, you know, camp repair continues. And, you know, the only concern, one of the concerns I had is we found that that contractor had been suspended before for intentionally concealing deficient work in Vermont. You know, we're curious, had a discussion with others on the road here in Campbell. If there's anyone keeping them accountable or if we have any inspectors that are separate from them, you know, to guarantee they're doing what's promised, obviously they're not doing it in the time. They promised I, you know, if they were on schedule, they'd be ahead of these storms, but we just, you know, are worried that even when they're done, it's gonna fall apart again. So that's what I had to say. There is a, there is someone representing our interests. We actually pay Du Bois and King, the engineer. So they're not part of, they don't work for J. McDonald. So we do have someone up there and he's up there several hours a day. And if they're pouring or doing any work, he's there all day. I just met with him this morning. It's, it's a nightmare. Obviously, every time it rains, it's like we lose a week because of the way that the narrowness of the site. I saw your drone pictures, which were very good. Thank you. And I had pictures of the site today as well. I actually have a meeting next week with them. They, we just have to get this kicked out. We've got to finish the schedule. We talked about it. They've got pumps running, generators running and just keep dewatering the site. So it is a nightmare. I'm not going to say that it's not, but we do have someone on there. They also had to fill out their paperwork saying that they were not currently debarred with the state when we hired them. So there was some, so there was paperwork done through the contract as well because it's a federal highway project. They did have to provide that sort of information to the, for the contract in order to be awarded. But yes, we do have someone there and I met with him this afternoon. And you're right. The rest of the roads are... We were in the dark for a lot of it. Actually, your latest update that came out where you actually went into detail, that was really helpful. I wish we had more communications and updates up until then because up to this point, we really thought we were going to be reopened at the beginning of December, December 17th. So it's kind of caught us off guard when we were really hoping to be open to it. And now we see it with my own eyes. We know it's not happening anytime soon. No, I can understand that. I spoke to that person today and said, I'm still hoping that we can have, if the rain, once the rain passes, if we can get some dry spell, then hopefully we can still have it open at least to one lane by the 10th. That is my fingers crossed. And once I meet with them, I'll put out another update on Front Forge Forum so that people can be better versed into what's going on because it just needs to stop raining and be like 60 for a while just to dry some stuff out. Well, actually, it needs to freeze. Yeah, I don't know. It's just gonna be, you know. I just needed to stop raining because... It's such a challenge right now because with that road being closed, and like you said, everybody's detouring on different roads, not always necessarily the roads that they should be on, right, normally. And then you mix in this warm weather and it's like mud season. It's the worst case scenario is because you can't do anything with the roads when they're like that. You can't grade them. Really, the only thing to do is to stay off them until hopefully maybe later tomorrow where we can start to do some maintenance to them again. It's supposed to freeze up. I think it's supposed to be in the 30s the next couple of days, but it's... Yeah, it's a pretty unfortunate and I apologize that you guys up there on the hill. Absolutely. Inconvenience way more than you probably should be on this. I'm glad to hear also that you seem to be concentrating on putting more gravel down as well as the future budget because I think that's just adding that gravel even with the snowstorm kind of helps pack in the problems of the dirt roads up here. So that's a good decision. Thanks guys. Thanks Josh. And Paul, you had your hand up, I believe. Yeah, just a quick question for Trace. There was some talk at one point about doing something with the Lister's office. About going to outside and putting it on the warning perhaps to dissolve the office of the Lister and is that gonna happen or is... Yep, that's what's gonna be on the warning is going to be a spoke to Nemerick about listing because they're the ones doing our current appraisal. And then also talked to Rick Benson about it and talked about just best practice. So what we've put in the budget is to have an office person, someone working in the office doing the PTTRs, the day-to-day computer stuff and bringing in an assessor, budgeted an assessor for four hours a month for the year and the current rate for assessing from Nemerick is 95 bucks an hour plus travel. So there's gonna be months we wouldn't need them but I feel like that's a pretty good average and that's what Rick Benson thought as well. I just feel like people are gonna be more comfortable bringing in a professional assessor from outside. So they would obviously have... They would, because they'd be the assessor almost like the defacto-lister, so they would obviously have to be present for any grievances and dealing with... They would also do the valuation. The person in the office would just be doing paperwork. All right, any... You're welcome. Anything else out there? Well, I should give people a kind of flood update for today. So currently the pump station on Bethel Mills is underwater which means we end up shutting down Bethel Mills. Pump station which shuts down Pleasant Street because people shut down St. Hyatt since. And Richard has gone out and taken a look at it. Looks like we have enough space for the night, probably early in the morning if the... Depending on where the flood water is, we may have to bring in Demex or somebody to kind of pump out the Pleasant Street pump station. We had the water hasn't crested yet on River Street. It's definitely getting high. Townsend's field was flooded. We looked like we were gonna close, possibly close Finley Bridge Road because water's already coming up, pooling like it does under the underpass. And we lost a portion of Upper Gilead today. So we're flooding again and the back roads are vast. There's places where there's easily eight to 10 inch mud pits and at this point, there's just nothing we can do. Things are just soft. It has done nothing but rain. And we'll be out once it freezes up. We have material coming. So we'll be able to put more material down. And we can't, we put some out today, but it's also hard to go back out with a heavy trucks to put everything back on the road, so. But... In events like this, when the pump house gets shut down, like you're saying there's enough water in the tank. A sewer. Oh, we're talking sewer. We're talking sewer. Even more fun. Even better. Yeah. No, no. So we notify the stadium. I see, this is why Demex is coming and this is making a lot more sense. And we have to, yeah. We have like... This is not equating. No, no. And we notify the state, obviously, immediately that we have, that the pump station's under, that we've shut it down and everything and follow all the popper procedures so that if we had any release into the river that that's noted, but hopefully we have escaped that because Richard had been monitoring that. That we had a feeling it was going under and it did. Okay. Just like it did in July. All right. Any further public comment? I think Jean might have had his hand up. I just, I noticed when I was looking up flood stuff today with that the National Ocean and NOAA has said that for Vermont, if the world doesn't do much to cut greenhouse gas emissions soon, Vermont could see 15% more precipitation in the winter by the middle of this century. And they are expecting more weather like we had today throughout this coming winter. Yuck. All right. Anybody in person? Public comment? If not, well, we will move forward to, we have the loan mask on the bank line of credit there, which is basically just keep us float. We'll wait for our flood monies to come back to us. And we had, I wouldn't say it was slightly delayed due to some legal pieces of it. It was. That's good to go now. Yep. So you have the resolution for grant anticipation, which you all will sign. Then there's the errors and emissions, which, you know, crystal sign and disbursement request and authorization that crystal sign the promissory note, page two. And the Vermont municipal note, notarization. So it looks like there's plenty of pages here to go around. So if you want to just do, it's actually not going to be just the motion to approve the select board chair to sign documents because there's one, you guys all have to sign the resolution. So you might want to make a motion to approve the resolution grant anticipation borrowing separately. Did you know, did you have it figured how much you thought you might borrow against that? I don't, I'm waiting for the last bill from, hopefully nothing. It's really just one of those things we just need in place. Right, in case. Just in case. Because I am getting, now that the state has approved our money for the $2.5 million loan, I'm able to get my reimbursement back there. So I'm hoping that I don't have to do anything, but it's really going to depend how fast FEMA turns around. I also got my federal highway disbursement. I got the first one and I'm getting ready to get the second one. So this is really just to put in place. So, so a motion to approve the resolution grant anticipation borrowing. Okay, all in favor. Do you also need a motion? Yep. And then make another motion to approve the select board chair to sign the other documents. Second. She tried. Okay. All right, so, all right. So this one, you all sign. No, we're all set. We're going to have three people. So you'll be okay. These two of you sign. I think you have to initial. What? I said I'm saying, you might have to look over here. Is this the other one for all of us? Yep. Let's see this one. The county of. I must go with something else. Yeah, I think you just have to. I don't think I signed that one. Oh wait. You have to, yep. Just initial? I don't think you have to sign because that's a municipal notarization. So it says right here, he has a select board chair. No. Here's an omission. All righty. Very good. Thank you. All right, onward. And then last time we talked about two years ago, we kind of provided a survey to the town during town meeting day. Well, at that point we had some kind of hotter topic alternates in town that we were talking about either going with, at that time there was some discussions about policing moving forward. There was some discussion about Australian ballot versus in person. And we had a zoning piece that we had on there. Yeah, there was Bethel for all. There was a couple things on there. So, and then we didn't do anything last year because probably half of those things either were resolved or were put on the warning last year. So as we were talking last week, last meeting last week, that, you know, do we need another survey this year? And if so, what would some of those questions look like? So, I guess the homework assignment for all of us here was, do we think that we should provide another survey? And if so, what type of questions would we put on there? I know Trees had kind of just through some feedback had put a question on there that some individuals in regards to the recreational facility there in regards to, you know, what would the next stage, what would they like to see the next stage of that look like and there was some options there of tennis court, pickleball court, skating or hockey, volleyball, horseshoes, that kind of stuff. So I guess do we feel as a board that we have enough topics that we would like to put a survey out this year? I know it was easy to do the survey. It was definitely more difficult to get to sit there and go through all the information and categorize it, but it was good information for us to have and I think it helped us with some of the decisions that we made the following year, but. Part of me thinks that just doing a survey with one question is like, why do it as a survey? Is there a better way to get an equal number if not maybe more responses? And part of my brain is going back to, oh, I don't know, this was probably six, seven years ago at town meeting, one of the entities had this sort of big white paper and then categories and you could put your dot, your sticker dot for what you were voting for. And so if you wanted to vote for tennis courts, volleyball and horseshoes, you put a sticker on each of those three and it's interactive, it's a quick, you can get the same information without asking everybody and without printing out a bunch of these that then end up in the recycle bin. Well, this is at a better way if all we're doing is asking one question. This'll do what we did last time, which is it goes in town report, people can email it to us and they can also do a survey monkey on the website. That's how we did it last time. So that way people that got their town report or didn't go to town meeting could still vote. But you could still ask the rec committee to just do a survey of the 100 people that are at the end. We just felt like this might be a little bit for the reach. Anyways, it just came up and we didn't do it last year. So I just threw a question on here, but if you don't want to do it, it doesn't break my heart. I just wanted to know. Last meeting you were referencing two questions but I couldn't for the life. The other one was the parking, but we pulled it because the select word has to make that decision themselves. And we've had more than enough input through Bethel Connections. It didn't really make sense to kind of beat that horse again. So I took it off. And then I haven't heard from anybody. So I didn't know other than Chris, if anybody wanted any questions added to the survey. I mean, if we wanted to do a survey, I'd come up with not necessarily the wording for all the questions, but some topic ideas that I thought maybe that have been getting kicked around a lot lately. So one would be the library. We're still, you know, what is that vision for the library look like in our town? What does policing look like? I think that's a huge- We did that one last year too. I don't- Two years ago, police. It's gonna hurt. You've got it top of everybody's mind. Yeah, that's a good one, Dave. I thought one thing that might be nice to put out there would be, you know, a question in regards to what does maybe our average Bethel resident, you know, what their concerns for this coming year are. You know, kind of like a poll that gets put out, you know, during presidential times where they say, okay, the economy is weighing, you know, heavy or health care, something like that. And maybe giving them a few options like, you know, family financing or school education or crimes and drugs and alcohol abuse or human services or town or school taxes or, you know, just something that then we can kind of weigh and say, I don't know, just make enough. If it came back really heavy about crime, drugs and alcohol, then I guess that gives us a little bit of direction that a majority of people are feeling concerned about that area and we could, you know, maybe hone in that harder for next year or if it was, you know, taxes, then how would we, you know, do more with less or, you know, those types of things. Or, you know, do we even have a survey, so. Yeah, I don't know. It was just something that had come up and then I knew we hadn't done one last year, but you could also, I mean. Yeah, the one I had here just recently, I threw on there was, you know, how much of our budget should be appropriated towards human services. So, like, you know, right now, I mean, we have 28,000 out of our $3 million budget that's appropriated for human services. So, you know. It's more than that actually if you add in WERPA and all the others. Right, so like, what would that look like or? You're looking at closer to 200,000. Yeah. Yeah. So, I don't know. I don't think it hurts us to, you know, I think the rec department clearly wants some insight, you know, in direction to go. And I like what Chris's idea here is of, you know, yeah, what are the things concerning citizens that can then help direct the board through the next couple of years? I think last time we had, what, five or six questions, maybe five? Five, maybe. Yeah. Because Bethel for all had questions last time and things like that, but so either, I don't know how you feel about it, if... The cost of this is not a huge cost because it's going into the town report. Right, and then we just have to, we don't want 18 million options. Yeah, then we do Survey Mikey online. And then we didn't actually, you know, we didn't, I'm not sure, we might have printed some out in case people wanted them at town meeting, but it's not like we're doing a big mailing or anything, but like I said, I'll scan off my teeth. So I guess at this point is would we like to move forward with a survey? And if that's the case with the board members, then maybe we can send some potential questions on to Therese to kind of compile for us for the next meeting. Do they even want to do one? Denise and Gene, do you want... You do? I'd like to see, yes, I would, and especially I talked to a lot of people at the town meeting and thereafter and they definitely wanted an updated recreation survey because I believe the Recreation Committee Survey was from like 2011 or 2012. So folks would like to see one updated because pickleball wasn't much of a big thing back then and a lot of people would like to see a new survey. Yeah, okay, perfect. What about you, Gene? I would just want to say that when we had the survey a couple of years ago, it was because there were questions about policing that had come up. In other words, there were questions that had come to us that we wanted to gather information about. We had a reason for having the survey. If the reason is to gather information for the Rec Committee, then I would go ahead with it. But I wouldn't worry about trying to invent things to ask people. I would rather be responsive with the survey just to keep it simple. Okay, thank you. So Denise wants a survey, Dave wants a survey. So we'll move forward with the survey and anybody has any questions that they would like to put in the survey or maybe a topic that they hear, then let Therese know and then we can work on that as a board on how we would phrase the questions and put the answers. Yeah, if you just send me yours. Just saying this for a future thought of like, if doing a survey, and maybe you already did this, maybe I'm just not remembering it, but maybe putting it out to the town committees to each submit one question if they have one. Because in some ways it's like, if we're sitting here trying to figure out what to come up with, they may already have two or three questions that they've been wanting to ask. And I think we've talked about in the past of if every entity does a survey, you get fewer, you get diminishing returns. Whereas if we compile them all into one location that goes out to everybody. And so it wouldn't be for this year because it's obviously too much of a nightmare. But just in October, say, hey, if you have anything that your committee is working on that you want included, we're going to do a town survey in the town report, give us your one to three questions or whatever. That's a good idea, especially now that if we're going to get in the habit of doing it, then they'll also be looking for it too to be like, hey, we want to get on that. Well, the planning commission, we asked a question last year, or last time on the survey, the planning commission didn't have zoning questions. So we did that, Bethel for all. So we did, we hit a few last time, which was pretty. You know what I know? We've got some newer committees, we've got some committees that are older that are sort of getting a revamp. They may be kind of rethinking these things and want to get that community feedback. Yeah, that's a great point. Absolutely. Okay, move forward to discussion on the budget. All right, so I will take Samantha's thing, go back and double check my percentages on salary because I could be wrong in my budget. So I will definitely go back and look that up. So I appreciate her mentioning that. So I had gone back after we talked about last time I realized on my way home from the meeting that night that I needed to take a seasonal position out of public works because we would have been picking that up with my parks person. That person would have been in the parks budget. So I put them in there full time and only because it just for ease of splitting it up between highway and parks for my own sake. So I did remove from this budget a second seasonal because I already had it in the parks budget. So that was my mistake. So the wages of the public works department came down because I removed that other person. So I made that change. So obviously that affects overtime social security out of care retirement, the new payroll tax. I also had made, let's see, so I made that change. I also went under the constable budget and I added $80,000 for the Windsor County Sheriff, added, left in $500 for housing of animals and then removed the signage. So that budget is up 23%, but that did give us 80,000 which will give us about the 25 hours. I think we had discussed. So he's on the agenda for more later. So we did that. I verified with Ellie that the rec facility improvement fund could stay at $10,000. And I changed under the municipal office's labor contract. I had gone to 10, but I put that back to 15,000 because you really guys weren't in agreement about what to do about energy coordinator position. So I threw some money, a little bit more money in there in case you made a decision about that. And I think that was really all the changes I had made after our last meeting that we had discussed. But going back through and looking at it and then obviously, oh, I put in the Playhouse Theater, made you a note that they're petitioning for $1,000. And I verified with the alliance that they're staying the same for our contribution at the transfer station. But going back through it and then having more training and another flood event, I think that we need to go back and add more money into the capital roads budget and capital equipment budget and because just, you know, obviously we have 81 miles a road. At least we got a good handle on what it cost. We've been doing it for a while. Exactly. So we have 81 miles a road and it just makes sense to go in and oh, interesting. So to go back in and do that, Paul Valley just said a message saying that the Playhouse is petitioning for $3,000, not the 1,000 that they had originally mentioned. So I guess we're gonna up that. So I'll make a note. Thanks Paul. So I would like to go back through and add some more money into some capital funds because we just, we keep getting hammered with the roads and we need additional funding. It means our E-RAF is gonna be up and some changes with the Camp Brook project. I just wanna be sure that we're not, that's all right, we got to change Playhouse that is going up to 3,000, there you go. So I had. Okay, I'll make that, no, 3,000. I had worked with Theresa a little bit earlier, kind of looking at some of our line items for matching our grants that we have and making sure that we kind of have a bell curb. We don't have to all of a sudden say we need this much more as well as kind of looking at equipment and things like that to make sure that, I mean, the greater that was a half million dollars is now 700,000. Everything is going up and making sure that we are looking at this correctly. So before I get to that, the other thing I was looking at was, we often appropriate money per year for certain potential maintenance or so we have an item for this building where we appropriate $5,000 a year that we don't necessarily use $5,000 a year as well as we appropriate $5,000 or $6,000 a year in the parks, which doesn't always get used. So I guess what I would be suggesting on those is instead of putting those items in those identities as maybe continue to fund them but put them into like the capital improvement fund and then with the capital improvement fund is add that as a subcategory because the way it works is if you have so potential board members. So anything that you put in the budget that's not in a carryover fund at the end, it just, it goes into an undesignated fund where if you had it appropriated in the fund, you could carry that money until you need it and a lot of times what happens at this building here in the parks is you don't need it to all of a sudden, stone wall is falling down and it costs you $20,000 but if you save money over the course of a couple of years you could pay for that rather than have to go to the voters and say, hey, we need 20 this year instead of the five. And what's been happening the last couple of years is we budget five and we may only use $1,000. So there's $4,000 just gets put into the undesignated account. So maybe if we added, like right now our capital, I think if you look at the capital fund description it just talks about municipal infrastructure, water sewer and the building. So that, I mean, that's it. So it doesn't talk about, you know, I guess we could add town hall or parks or something like that and you could take that $10,000 or $11,000 and just add it into that item so that it could carry through, you know what I mean? Yeah, there's some other stuff in building repair like I'd have to go through and because I think that we pay an annual fee to TASCO for the stuff here. So we might not be able to put all five in building repair because obviously the account we're not gonna wanna capitalize a regular maintenance. Or whatever it is. Yeah, but I can look at the difference and make a note difference. Because like usually like this building, for instance, I just go back to the last thing that we done in this building was we had to paint the steeple, which, you know, Paul was around, we painted the steeple and that was, I don't know, what it ended up being $40,000 or $50,000 or whatever it was. So it's, you know, a big ask rather than. Yeah, because we had to do last, I had a leak in the ceiling. So two years ago I had Dave Aldrigate fix the ceiling and then while he was in here because he had all this scaffolding, I had him do some, some bulbs were out. But I had him do that while he was in here because he had this scaffolding and but I had to have the ceiling, the roof fixed. And I also had to pay the roofer because we had a leak, so. And then, so then Teresa and I were talking about today, of course, when it was literally her and I are going through the budget and she's getting notifications on the roads that are washed down. I'm like, I'm like, this is great. But so what we started talking about here was, you know, that 50, if you go to page two, which is in the under the materials here, we had to E-Rath. Yep. And the E-Rath was kind of like our best, our best gas of where we think that. Hi, Lisa. Thank you. The July floods is going to land us and and, you know, paying that off in three years. So we were we're feeling that as we're getting more of a ending number, plus a couple of the things that have gotten added recently, like there's potential that, you know, because the Colbert project didn't. Can't broke has been delayed that it's likely it's not going to be paved now. So that's going to have to be done in the spring, which means that it's going to come out with 20% of it. Then some of it's going to have to come out where it would have been 100% paid for before. So there's some of those things. So we were starting to look at moving. I think we feel that the E-Rath will probably be good at $50,000 for three years. But we feel that probably the first year is probably going to have to be more than 50,000 to cover some of the one offs that that didn't necessarily get covered. So we don't feel like we're behind. So we were talking about moving that line. I'm from 50 to 70. And at the same time, we were looking through the highway rehab and based upon the money we've been putting aside in the in the four major grants that we have currently right now to match those funds. We were looking at moving that from 195 to 210. Say which one that was again. Highway rehab on page two at the base of materials. Yeah, that and E-Rath are right next to each other. Great, thank you. So that'll put us more in line. Did we do anything with the highway equipment fund? No, we didn't touch that yet. Okay. And then we talked about potentially putting those pieces of into a fund. Which was who? Which was Parks. Oh, I haven't got there yet. Okay. Which was, okay, Parks. Which was the? Parks beautification. Parks beautification. Which was 5,000. And then. Okay, move to capital, okay. The town hall was whatever was minus the security. 5,000 minus the, yeah, okay. That's what I'm gonna make sure my notes are right. The other piece that we talked to, well I talked about, I'm not gonna throw her under the bus, it's me. Not yet. I guess I got thinking after the last meeting. So I'm still having hard time with, you know, we have to be careful because we're on borrowed time with some of the revenues we're using, right? So if we don't, you know, we have that $54,000 that we get for three more years and then at some point that's two pennies to the tax rate just like that. That's gonna have to happen unless we make an adjustment. And then so I started going back through last year's like, you know, I'll call it what our base, our base budget was. And then we had a lot of bolt-ons that all went through last year. Yeah, we did. And the one that kind of got thinking about afterwards was, you know, we had increased the library, right? So we, I don't know, three years ago, a library was like $2,500, it went to 5,000. And then we gave them 75 last year. And then, then we had the bolt-on for 27.5. And what we were supposed to get out of that, well, it was, I wouldn't necessarily say it was a one-time funding, but it was an increase in funding from normal. But we were also supposed to get back something from the library showing here's our plan going forward and how that, you know, money will be well spent or here's the funding that we really need for the library, right? Because we were talking to that was kind of a stepping stone. So I mean, I guess what I was thinking was, Which now they're saying in their letter that they're gonna do their capital planning in 2024. Right. Right, so it is. I mean, I guess what I was thinking was, putting the 75, putting the 35,000 back to 7,500. And then again this year, putting its own separate warning of 27.5 for the library. That, that, because I guess right now we don't know what the, we don't know what the long-term picture of the library looks like. So you're still saying putting the money in, you just wanna do the same thing you did last year, 7,500 here and then 27.5 on the side. Right, on a separate warning. So they're still going on the warning. It's just a separate article, yeah. Okay. And then maybe that'll inspire some more conversation about, you know, hopefully with the library on, you know, what is the long-term focus of library? Cause that was kind of the reason why we put it on last year was to spur some conversation. It didn't seem like much conversation happened, nor did we get any plan after the fact of what this is gonna look like going down the road. Cause we're still just funding them with a shoestring budget, you know. So I think their budget right now is like 60,000, counting our 35, which is like half of what, Do they were saying they needed that? Half of what they told us is what they need to have a library of that size for this town. So those were my thoughts. And then that could just be an add-on that individuals would vote for. And you could do the same thing with the food shelf. You could put the food shelf in for five and a 15,000. Then you're doing the same thing. You're saying, we put them in for this, we support this, and then obviously the whole gig is up to the voters. But it does set aside that article separately so that people can hopefully pause and be like, okay, this is outside what we've budgeted for. This is an add-on. Because our budget is here, this that we work on, and then these are extras that we really can't control people's ads. You know what I mean? Additions. Yeah, and that was the next thing is I had 5,000 for the food shelf. And then if they wanted the extra 25, then we put that on as a warning item. So I guess right now for talking warning items, we would have the library for 27.5 and the food shelf for 25. And then there's gonna be the South Burlton. Yep, and the Playhouse apparently from number three. But we should deduct the Playhouse out of our budget though. Yeah, yep. And then the Playhouse for three. So there's gonna be like three separate. There's gonna be a 6,000, a 25,000, a 27.5, and a three. Cause I think- But it makes sense to treat them all the same. I think it's important that we put forward our budget. I know, but you have no say over it. But I think- Yes, we do. Well, you do as an individual voter, but not as a select board. We don't. Right? Maybe not. But I guess the way I'm looking at it is we put forward the budget that we recommend based upon the services that have been asked. And then if there's anything extra that the voters want to vote on, which they have the right to do that, then they have that and we can show them how much more this may affect them, right? Because- I think that needs to be really, really, really clear. Well, Chris figured- I don't think it's been clear to most people out there that, okay, we just gave these people $50,000. Now your taxes are going up. Yeah. What you voted passed the budget. That was for that increase that we all talked about and everybody was happy with it. But now that we've gone to this page two, everything you touch there. Exactly. The other thing is, too, is remember last year, nobody asked a single budget question. We put forward the budget, nobody asked a single question and the appropriations just flew through it. We're going- It's because you talked to Lucian all on your own. Yeah. So he doesn't drive that. He didn't even come. That's right, he should come back. But they didn't even, there was no question asked. So it's very difficult to do that and then they passed every appropriation and it's, you just, unless we're standing there with an old-fashioned mimeograph, let me run off your tax bill before you leave. And, but we had figured out, what did you figure out? How many cents on the tax rate? What's the Senate? Penny on the tax rate gives us $20,400. So all the new additions, you're looking at three cents on the tax rate. But we were talking, Dave, about a better delivery system for individuals to understand what that is out of their pocket. So it's easy for us to say a penny is 20,400, but most people at the meeting, they don't know what a penny is until all of a sudden they get the bill and they're like, why did it go up $300, right? Well, that was because it went up. Like last year, we put forward. Not to look at you, but I can't look at it. Cause last year we put forward a budget that was in the two or three cent increase. And by the time all the bolt-ons got, we were in the five, six cent increase, right? So I think what we were talking this year is obviously we're gonna continue to give the information on a cent. You know, this is what your tax rate would be and this is what a cent means to you. But I think we're gonna take it a step forward on each individual item this year to say, based upon the median home value, if we say the house values. Make it up, about $300,000. You know, this means this is an extra, this item will be an extra, make it up, $100 a year for that item. Cause we can do it in the budget. So people at least gonna put one and one together when they're voting for that item to say, okay, well that one's gonna be an extra hundred, that one's gonna be an extra hundred, that one's gonna be an extra 50. So they can at least start thinking about financially what that's gonna put in. Cause we could do it in the budget summary because you go over the budget summary at the start of the select town meeting. Sure, yeah, we can add it. So we could do it in the budget summary because unless we're printing out on the page of births, deaths, or marriages, nobody's reading the whole budget, you know? Maybe we print that at the bottom of the delinquent water bill. Hey, by the way, article 17 is gonna cost you X. But it's, so if we went back in and did that, that way it's in there and Chris is talking about it because he always goes over the budget summary first. But it's very difficult to know. I think it's really smart to make it more understandable. I think often the way in which government speaks has to be in legalese and then it's confusing to the everyday user. And so there does have to be a bit of translation. I think this is just one more area where we speak a certain language of, you know, percentages and cents on the dollar, but it doesn't mean anything. Yeah. Sorry. Yep, just to what you said, put it in there. But if you just put something very simple for every $100,000 your properties assessed at, it costs you $100 per point. Yeah. If it goes up one point, your value, your house to $100,000, that one point costs you $100 on your taxes. Exactly. Very simple, straightforward. Yeah. Everybody knows, oh, it's going up, it's gonna cost me 300 more dollars. And that is simple math for people. Yeah. And if you don't know what your house is valued at, then... We broke it down even last year. We said, if you have a $250,000 house, this is what's gonna be. If you have this size of the mount house, this is what's gonna cost you. That we know what he had to do the real mental math. You know what I mean? It was right there, but we had no questions last year on the budget. None. I watched. And it was, it's, you know, it's difficult to know. And some of the challenges we had, so some of the challenges that we have this year came, so we voted in our budget last year, based upon what the grand list was at that time. And then between when we voted in our budget and the grand list getting finalized, we actually lost some grand list due to some properties. So our grand list ended up decreasing. So then our tax rate went up even more. And then, you know, right now we haven't had any growth in the grand list. And then, you know, anytime there's an adjustment to the grand list, that's an, you know, an increase in taxes. It's either up or down. So there has not been any growth. So that's kind of one thing that we're up against this year. And I mean, we're based upon what we have here with these adjustments, this does not count the add-ons. So it doesn't count the, you know, if we decided to go and do the 20, you know, put the five in the budget, but put 25 as an add-on for the food show. It doesn't count the add-ons. Okay, okay. If we do the 7,500 for the library, but it doesn't count the add-on of 27,500 for the library. And then if we just do the, I think it's 4,000 for the South Royalton. It doesn't count to six. But it doesn't count the extra six. And it doesn't count the 3,000 for the potential. For the Playhouse. Playhouse. That our budget alone is looking at, we're close to 7% increase. In tax, not in the budget itself, but in the taxes over last year. So, which, you know, In the tax rate. We're running kind of on par with inflation here. Now that's higher than, you know, kind of our promise has been to try to be in that 3% areas. But, unless we cut some services, it's, that's kind of where we're laying right now. And some of it is what we're thinking of more appropriations into capital funds, which gives gives us more flexibility. So when weather events and major infrastructure issues happen, we have more where with all to deal with them. But we're not, we're not budgeting out now six years on NERF, right? It's, you know, we're trying not. I mean, currently the biggest drivers we have in this budget is, hello, another flood. So we're, we're starting to pay for our, you know, we found out that, you know, we should be responsible and pay for those floods over a three year increment. So, so we have, you know, the continued ERAF, which is even higher this year. And, and we also have, you know, we've increased basically by a penny and a half going with the Sheriff's department over the constable. So that's an increase. And then we do have some, you know, fluctuation on some materials and things that have gone up just based upon, you know, pricing. Well, 7% on some of the stuff, gravel and stuff. The other thing too, I guess I don't want to pause for a second and explain about the grand list. If we're not, everybody's not on the same board of that. When I take the grand list to do the town report and I come up with my estimated tax rate, that's in, you know, December, January. So the grand list has not been lodged yet. It doesn't get lodged until April 1st. And the rule is whatever's on your property as of April 1st, then of course, if anybody grieves or there's grievances, it could go back. So that document obviously is fluid, but it is not lodged. So we're basing a grand list, you know, and then some things changed, whether property that was in somebody's name and they were paying taxes on, then went into like a conservation program. So all of a sudden there's a tax rate drop. So all of a sudden there's some changes in the grand list. So when we put it out in January, when I say, this is what, you know, we think the tax rate's gonna be, I say it with a little asterisk. This is based on the grand list as of this time, but if people aren't aware of that, that is a changing number. So this last time in past, we've done great. If there's a little growth in the grand list, we look like heroes because the tax rate comes down a little bit. Last year there wasn't, but Rick Benson should be in the office tomorrow. So because he's become our assessor right now, I have a feeling there's some permits and things that he hasn't valued yet. So I think there might be some growth in the grand list, but I need to talk to him about that. Obviously we know we'll see a change, you know, in 2025 when the reappraisal comes out. But I just wanted people to understand that the grand list is not, it's not a set in stone when I'm putting those numbers together. It's what we have at that time. And two years ago, we put forward a 2.5% increase budget that after the fact, the grand list went up and it nulled avoid that. So we didn't have any increase in taxes. And the last year it was the opposite where once we got done, then the grand list went down and it ended up being a little bit more expensive. So- Our crystal ball is just a little bit hazy in January because that number hasn't lodged for really yet. So, you know, just so people understand the grand list. Whoops. Jean has a question. Several comments. One, one of the issues that we face and we'll face mightily this year evidently is that we're talking about a relatively small part of people's property taxes. Or, and there is another, there is another actor in determining what my taxes are my property tax that is in addition to the town and that's the school. And so we'll, so that's something to consider. A second comment. I don't know this for sure, but my guess is that most of the people in the town have a mortgage and if they have a mortgage they may be paying their taxes along with their mortgage payment as I am. And I really never see a tax bill. So I, it's not front and center four times a year for me about how much I'm paying for taxes. Most, my guess is whether we're talking about percentages or pennies or points or whatever per, or per thousand valuation for many of the people in the town, that's a hidden expense. It's not something that they write a check for. And so that may be part of the reason that all of the conversations about how much your taxes are gonna go up don't seem to make much of a difference to people voting at a town meeting. That's just a fact of life. And the third comment is, I think that different people for different people, different pieces of information are helpful. Telling me it's a penny means nothing. Telling me it's a percentage increase means a great deal to me because that's how I think. So because I can take a 3% increase, well, that means $3 or $3 out of it or $30 or whatever it is out of a thousand. I can, debt I can do in my head easier than the penny on my tax rate. Those are all things that, so when we talk about how it's going to impact you personally, I think we need to take all of those things, all of those different factors into account. So we're going to hear a lot about the rise in taxes when we don't have any influence at all in the town meeting over a pretty significant portion of that budget or that tax budget and tax bill. So anyway, just a few comments. Okay. Just to comment on the idea you were presenting, Chris, I actually, I really like that. I think the more I sit with it, I think it sort of hits a couple really key things. One, knowing that our 54,000 from the transfer station sale isn't permanent. When you do increases into the capital funds, that is something we can pull back on in future dates. And so that becomes something that we can almost like, let's put towards savings while we can and when we need to, we'll pull back on that. And I like looking at it sort of from that perspective. And I also think then what you were also talking about with the appropriations and like we were talking about with the food shelf of taking the library in the same vein of give them the appropriation, but do the ask to the voters, then it does sort of put the onus on the voters to do some thinking to, to weigh these things out. I mean, I think just even the discussions of these past two weeks, it's clearly hard. It's not, it's not easy. And even when there's only five of us trying to make a decision, we're struggling to come up with a decision that we feel is representative of, you know, the greater population. And so I know that town meeting isn't perfect, but I think it's still a greater population than what's here making that decision. So I really like that idea of put a little more towards our own savings in our future and let the voters make the decision on the bigger appropriations. I agree. I mean, you know, sometimes there's not a discussion on it, but sometimes there is. But it's then you make an excellent point that it's their decision. Maybe that gives them pause to think about it. Right. I think that's a good point. And they might fund it all and they might fund nothing. But it's not up to us then. Right. And one of the nice things is by having it as standalone items, it does spare discussion automatically, right? Because somebody's going to have to present an item. So, you know, maybe if nobody actually comments from the audience, at least their understanding of this is a standalone item or for enhanced funding for a one year or, you know, type deal. Because that's all it really is. Usually those are not appropriate per year. That's a, when they're a standalone item, they're pretty much a one year thing, right? Gene raised his hand. I think Gene, is that a new hand raise or an old one? Yes, no, it's a new one. Okay. Sorry. I love to two comments. On the budget itself. The numbers. One was the police or the. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. The policing. That's 80,000. That's a 20 hour a week figure. 20, 25. That's 25. Okay. Yep. The. There is. There. It may make sense to think about 30. This year. I think we're looking ahead to 40. Down the road. That's just my, that's just. My, my, it's a comment. Yeah, go ahead. Well, you want to come in. Talk about that. And then I have one more issue. One more comment. Yeah. Yeah. The news is that after this budget discussion, we're going to talk about the constable and that they're willing to come on. And I think that I can get pulled out $30,000 out of the existing constable budget that we're not going to spend. I had a conversation with Oscar today about that. And so that we could bring the sheriff's office on sooner, like the beginning of January or so to bring them in to start with, you know, you know, you know, you know, some policing to whatever the, you know, what the sheriff works out, I believe it was 65 an hour to rolling into the 25 hours in June. And then maybe rolling into, you know, the following year, say, you know, 32 or 35. So we can kind of do it in affordable increments. It also allows you to evaluate the sheriff to see if they're doing what you want them to do. And if you're going from basically not much policing to making sure that, you know, a slower ease into it and might work, but that's just my two cents, but they are hoping, we're hoping to get them started here soon. Yeah, I don't disagree with that. I guess what I'm trying to say is to do it in, let's do it in increments. But I'm not sure we can afford it this year. To whatever, to whatever extent we can to be thinking long term or begin helping the town to begin thinking longer term. Go ahead. Denise. No, we just said yes. We just agreed. Yes. Okay. So my, my other comment is. That on the Iraq. We have seven feedback from seven towns. That they want to move forward in one way or another. They want to move forward in one way or another. So I'm not sure if there are six of those towns are putting it on their town meeting as a warning. Bethel has talked about putting in its budget. That's the good news. The bad news or the challenge for the Iraq. Task force right now is that. Randolph dislike the idea so much that they're going to hire their own person. Rather than do a regional. Only. Now, they were 30% of the whole thing. So we are. Trying to figure out what. The next best possible options are. And I don't know what that's going to look like when it comes out in the wash, but we'll know hopefully in the next couple of weeks. Did you have your hand up? Yeah. Actually that was. Our screen keeps going out. See, it keeps going in and out. Oh, our main screen keeps, I can see you, but our main screen keeps shutting in and out. It goes to blue, then it comes back, then it goes to blue. I just want to make sure you were still there. Yeah, well that was the question that I had was, it was in bold print the energy coordinator in the budget. And I don't remember that the select board approved that or where we landed with the money for the energy coordinator and now with Gene's information that Randolph has dropped out, I really feel that it's going to become more of a burden for the town of Bethel and maybe just give them the $4,000 MIRP grant and wait and see where this lands and maybe table this whole energy coordinator for the town of Bethel until next year and let them have the $4,000 MIRP grant is my opinion. All right, what I had done, we had budgeted 15 last year, Denise, in the labor contract line and then I had gone to 10, cut it down because I had used some of the money for two rivers and we kind of put the money in for grant writing and then you're right, you hadn't made a decision, but I was trying to like move along the budget and see what we're going to do and make it a discussion item. So I put it back to 15. So if that idea goes through, then giving them the $4,000 MIRP and then I could easily drop that back to 10, if not even 7,500. Okay, thank you. Do you want stuff at me? Well, just a reminder that for the first year, the participating towns have already, our energy committee, for example, has said that they would be giving that $4,000 toward that project if Bethel participated and all of the other towns are, that's why the first year is less expensive than the second. I just, I don't disagree, Denise, I just would like to like take a look and see what the numbers actually come out to, because we may not be alone when we see what that 30% loss looks like. So maybe for the next meeting, Jean, would it be appropriate to ask you, could you update what the pie would look like? You're muted, Jean. Yes, I will have those figures. I just, just before I logged in here, I sent a revised figure out to the committee for one of their options, and that's not gonna fly, so I don't know where it's gonna come out. It may not, it may come out completely, so it just may fall as not being something that we can reach given the towns that are in. So we'll have to wait, but yes, you'll get more, you'll get a different set of numbers at the next meeting. So Jean, my question is this, is if the position isn't gonna move forward, would it still be the right, would it still be the energy committee wanting or energy committees plural to give them the $4,000 MIRP to help them continue to research this, or do you think the research is done that's just getting the buy-in? I think 90% of the research is done. It is getting the buy-in. It is a number of, it's a perfect storm as we're talking about the budget. It's a perfect storm. We had two storms this year that are hitting our roads. That's one, big one, and the other big one is the schools, and what we're looking at statewide from that. And so it's a perfect storm that just says, in my opinion, right now, knowing what I know, this may be the wrong year. If that's the case, we'll know, but yeah. Okay, well, thank you. I just wanted to know if the 4,000 would still be helpful or not. No, but the 4,000 will still be helpful if we have to do education about that program or anything else. So yeah. Okay, thank you. So Jean, out of curiosity, like the window dressers that you did this year or something equivalent, let's say if we did something like that each year for citizens in the town, what type of budget did that run? That is a zero budget because that is paid for, window dressers is a nonprofit corporation in Maine. They recruit and they are able to build these inserts for low cost for everybody and no cost for some folk simply because it's volunteer labor. And about 30% of the windows that are assembled are donated or are no cost for the client. And there are already plans for continuing this, they held it last year in Randolph that we are already looking to try to set a date earlier in the year for repeating the Rochester Randolph Bethel group. And next year, there is no budget cost for that. They have raised some funds, but that's not gonna be a town expense. Well, I guess the only reason why I ask is I know when we started the conversation two meetings ago, when we were talking about this energy coordinator, potential position and the monies that would go towards that is, we also had a little bit of a conversation going on same time about is the money best used for this coordinator or would it be just as well to set aside a piece of money a year that we could do things directly with our own residents making up like a window dresser type thing where we put a budget together and then we could offer some assistance or the ability to make some improvements. You know, are you following me on that, Gene? So I guess my thing is- Yeah, I do, and that's okay as with question coordinator. Because I guess my question, you know, if we're not gonna go, let's say, if this regional coordinator thing falls through, but we had been talking about potentially funding that with X amount of money, you know, I guess the first part is the money could just go away and it'll be less in the budget or do we appropriate that money towards something else that might be helpful for our residents, you know? But maybe something we can- Yeah, I, again, I think that's something that if we were willing to do that and say to the energy committee, you can have up to X number of dollars to do some work, to see what you can do to help the residents in terms of energy costs, then that group is becoming stronger every meeting. So there's a possibility that something might happen there. I would imagine you have a meeting between now and our next meeting, energy committee wise? No, I think they meet the day after our next meeting. Okay. All righty. Do we have anything- But I, you can talk to Scott, but yeah, I don't, those were the comments that I had on the budget was to make, was to encourage moving toward a more, thinking more long-term in terms of police protection and then just to bring you up to speed with where we stand with the energy coordinator. Okay. Anything further on the budget? So it sounds like we're, are we in agreement with, potentially right now of giving- Making these changes. Of doing the food shelf at $5,000 as a human services line item. And then we'll put a separate warning for the additional 25. And then the library we were gonna go and do the annual appropriation like we did last year of 7,500 and then have a separate line item for the extra 27.5. And then there's the South Royalton Senior Center that has the $4,000 appropriation currently that we would add a- Six thousand. A 6,000, are we, are we adding that? Or are we waiting for them to- We'll wait for them to petition. Okay. They gotta get- They gotta get diddly for signatures. They got it for sure. But on the board level, we wouldn't. We'll just wait for them to get the signatures and put the- Wait, because we're already at, because we're already set the fours in and anything that comes next, we'll just go on the warning. So I guess at this point, are we on board with the library piece and the food shelf piece? Dave? Denise, thumbs up. Okay. So we, I'm not thrilled. You don't have to be. I know, nobody is. Nobody is safe. I get it. I just see a, I just see a huge coming. Well, at least they voted on it, right? And the thing is too, is you can't stop it because of the type of appropriation is even if you force them to petition. We still can't. I know. I understand it all. It's crazy. It doesn't mean that I'm concerned about how everybody else sees it. I agree. And how everybody else pays for it. And I think again, like we were just talking about, you know, we'll, we'll put some extra language and make sure in our presentations this year that we are able to better link the out of pocket costs with the items, right? To make it more knowledgeable. So make sense. Okay. All right. Is it possible just that we've talked a lot about at some fairly large changes in this? Is it possible to see an updated version of this once you've made the changes because our next meeting is so far from now. I think I want to like see it in live time while it's still fresh on my brain if that's an option. It might be, depending on how bad it is. And I know that it's not like can we have it tomorrow? It's like, if you haven't done before the holiday break, can we have it before the holiday break? Yeah, or it might be right after. I mean, is it Christmas? It's next Monday. Yeah. Monday, yeah. All right. I don't know. But I'll get it to you fast. These are small changes. Well, the only thing I'm not sure what to do with is should I knock that 10, that 15,000 in municipal back to 10? Just to... I would for now, because it sounds like it's probably best that that's where it's going. All right. So I'll put that back to 10. Yeah, no, that won't take long. And I also want to go through my math. Like I said, and double-check on the raises that Sam had mentioned, I want to make sure my spreadsheet's right. So I will cut that 15 back to 10. Sure, that shouldn't be a big deal, Lindley, I'll try to get to it. Yeah, and it's not, it's more just, if I wait until the middle of January to think about this next, I'll have forgotten it all. Yeah, because I also have a note here that I have to look at the reallocation of the VLCT passive breakdown. So I need to go through that number again too. So it'll give me a chance to do that. Double-check my spreadsheet numbers are for salaries and then I'll send out updated budgets. Send out updated budget. Okay. Yep. Thanks. I've been along. So, the sheriff. The tail end of the sheriff's discussion last time was, for us to, you know, kind of discuss and approve, Theresa, to use the monies that we have currently budgeted for the constable to put some hours into the sheriff's department between now and June 30th. So it sounds like Theresa's has touched base with the sheriff in regards to putting a plan together for that, which would happen after the holidays, maybe a week or two after the holidays. He's willing to start. I thought he was gonna get me a contract last week, but I didn't see one. So he needs to get me a contract. And I figured I could get 30,000 out of the current budget. I talked to Oscar today. We had a conversation about that. He still wants to do his few hours. He has some things to follow up on. He still wants to do that, which is fine. I asked Oscar about the cruiser, because that was a question. He said there's no, the only electronics in the cruiser are the, the, God, I need to use the, the radar's off. There's no computer in there. So he said we could put it in cold storage so it doesn't have to be in a heated space. Just, he said just unplug the battery. And he thought that we would be fine. He also said that he would be willing to look for people to purchase the cruiser if we wanted to sell it. He himself was interested. But of course he wants to discount a price. He's thinking, if I couldn't sell it outright, he'd make me a low ball offer later. He's no dummy. But so, but he did say that he felt that he could, that it would be fine to go into storage. I said, I'm not talking forever. We just, the sheriff comes in now to supplement. Oscar was actually very encouraging about that. He thought that was a great idea. He wanted everybody to know he's in complete favor of that. And then he said that, yeah, we could store. He felt we could store it for a little bit because he understood that we weren't sure we wanna see the sheriff come in now and then see what they're doing. And then we can make a decision about it, about what to do with the cruiser. He said it has 160,000 miles in it. Feels like overall it's in good shape, but obviously we don't wanna store it forever. But he did feel that we could store it for maybe six months or something. Looks like you could probably get about 15 to 20 hours a week based on my calculations. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. He was talking about 65 bucks an hour. So I figured I could take some out of labor. They canceled school for tomorrow. Did they? Yeah. Okay, got good canceled school tomorrow. That's good. They'll keep the buses up for them. So I took some money out of gas. I took some money out of equipment. So I think I can come up with about $20,000 a month. It's been 12 years of school in here. Schools canceled, if you wanna know. Three days, we didn't go to school. Paul. 12 years. We got the call. Yeah. So we good with. So then I'll move forward with signing the contract. I don't think we really need to make a motion on that. It's just. No, I just, no. We're all on board. I don't think there's any motion that needs to be made. Paul's just saying that for the, can the select board also say at the budget presentation how much the increase of budget for law enforcement has on the budget? Yeah, definitely. That'll be one of the line items, Paul, for sure. Cause it obviously is a big thing. But all right, well, like I said, I'll get ahold of the sheriff. Go ahead, Denise. I did want to mention that Saturday, around 5 30, when I was heading to Randolph, I did see the Windsor police or Windsor Sheriff had somebody pulled over in front of GW plastics. And about two hours later when I came back through, they were in that little pull off after the town hall, town office on the right. They were there for a little while. So even though they're not already under contract, I think they're kind of giving us a little taste of what it would be like to have them in town. He did say he was a salesman. Yeah, you're right. And I did email them the next day, Denise, and told them that this life would run move forward. So I'll have to remind him tomorrow cause I thought there would already be a contract in my inbox for me to sign, but there wasn't. So we'll move forward with that. So to get him here, get him coming. Did you guys have any questions about that? About the constable issue or where we're moving with that right now? Jordan said he talked about it last week but I just said to him, just park it in various places around town. Just every day move it to somewhere else and let people see it. Think there's somebody in it. You know, putting a dummy in it. Yeah, parking at the white church, you know, whenever school's getting in and out and then just move it after. Yeah, you know, Joanne and Doug Marshall. That's what Joanne said. She's like, put a dummy in it, trees, like moving around town. Just put that in the church and moving it. Yeah, they're both retired. I know, my God. This could be a fun activity. Cut out in the passenger seat of my truck so I could take the HOV lane truck. That's right. Same thing. Same thing. That's right, that's right. So we talked about it, moving it around town. You know what? And a bunch of people have said... Tell Richard that's gonna be his new vehicle. You can drive it back and forth to the... Oh, Richard, man. Oh, yeah, I'll tell him because I will say, we have had so many people, Scott Putney, a bunch of other people, like, I think they thought we were serious because he's like, you can put it in my driveway and I've had a bunch of people say that we could put the cruiser in their driveway. I'm like, they were just kidding. We can, well, I don't know, 10 to 10 is serious. We'll move it right in there for you. You have to move it, it needs to be loud. But they were, people were like, put it here, put it here, you can put it here. If people were great about it, it was pretty funny. All right, town manager to report anything left that we didn't go over. I didn't even write one because it was left. So we've done it. Select board meeting minutes from the 11th. Long time ago. Second. Okay, all in favor? All right. All right. There were other communications. There was, oh, no. Finances? There was the financials. Yeah, the financials were in there. What was the, there was, oh, well, human services community had their piece in there. Rec committee was in there. Rec committee. And Rec committee, yep. And any other business to come before the board? No. A bit of a lengthy one. The budget season usually is where the lengthy ones are, but. When is our next meeting? Oh, sometime in mid January. Second week in January. Yeah, next one is January 8th. Cause January 1st is the first Monday. So it'll be the eighth in the 22nd. We may have to, I may be the 22nd. So we're going to have to be signing the warning on the 22nd. So, so the next meeting is it. You're going to finalize the budget on the eighth. That's it. It's over. I'll drop the warning and hopefully we can approve the warning. Cause I think that the petitions are due to PAM by the 18th. So, yeah, so that'll make us on the 20s. I can get the budget, they get the warning signed. So we'll get the warning signed that way it can shoot into town report. So that'll be the schedule then. We'll just say the eighth in the one. I didn't say, I think Lindley said. Eight in the 22nd. I will be in person for the eighth. Okay, listen, she's gonna be in person. It's gonna get easy. Trace is gonna forget it. Cause after that, I'm pretty much only remote. Okay. So you get a one shot. Yeah. And then that's it. This is gonna be, and this is why I have to leave the board. There you go. Cause I will not be here anymore. There you go. All right. So yeah, so that's what we'll do. We'll finalize the budget. We'll have the draft warning. And then the next meeting will sign. If there's an issue, we're gonna have to have a special meeting. So because time is now, statutorily we have to have, the warning has to be signed by a certain date. So the budget has to be finalized so that we can finalize the warning sign. And it goes off to town at four. So it's done. Fun time. So that's what we'll be working on. All right. So does anything else need a motion to adjourn? So moved. Second. All right. Good night, everybody.