 You should have that ability now, Steve. Yep, got it. Thank you. Okay. Well, it looks like we have some good attendance. So I'll call the Village Annual Meeting for 2022 to order. And thank you for joining on this beautiful evening. And I'm Steve Eustis, your moderator for this meeting. And I'm going to start off by introducing Village President Andrew Brown. Thank you, Steve. Really appreciate you moderating this meeting tonight. And before I go into introductions of other individuals here tonight, I just do want to very quickly name the recognition that tonight may very well be the last Village of Essex Junction Annual Meeting. And as such, make sure that we honor that past, this present moment and look forward to the future. So thank you all who have helped to get us to where we are today and where we're going to be going to the future. So thank you. I'd like to start off by just first introducing our staff that we have here tonight. With us tonight, we have Brad Luck, Interim Co-Manager and EJRP Director, Wendy Hisco, Interim Co-Manager and Brown Hill Library Director, Susan McNamara Hill, the Village Clerk. Not with us tonight, but of course, Robin Pierce, Community Development Director, Kelsey Mandigo, the Water Quality Superintendent. We have of course our Fire Chief, Chief Gaborio. We have Colleen Dwyer, our Human Resources Director, Jess Morris, our Finance Director. I see that we also have Rick Hamlin, our Consultant Village Engineer. Thank you all for being here tonight. Of course, I also want to recognize the rest of our Board of Trustees who have worked so tirelessly over this past year to say the least. We have Village Vice President, Raj Chowla. We have George Tyler, Dan Caron and Amber Tebow. And would be remissed without of course, mentioning a couple of special dignitaries that we have here tonight. Representatives Lori Houghton and Representative Karen Dolan. Thank you all for being here tonight. And of course, to the residents who are here as well. Thank you. All right, thank you, Andrew. Oh, before I let you go, I forgot about Rick Jones, Public Work Superintendent. Rick, I am so, so sorry. You know how to get me back for that. Okay, thank you, Andrew. So I'll quickly read down the Village Meeting Informational Hearing Instructions. This is an informational hearing to discuss the articles being voted on by Australian Ballot for the 2022 Village Meeting. As such, there will be no motions, amendments or voting at this meeting. Permanent information on the meeting is on the Village website. All attendees must remain on mute, except when recognized by me. Attendees can get in line to make remarks by using the raise hand tool or using the chat window to type that they would like to speak. People be queued in the order of request and I haven't checked if anyone's on the phone, but I'll check on the phone occasionally as well. And this meeting is only for residents of the Village of Essex Junction for speaking. All remarks, questions and discussions should be addressed to me. Please wait to be recognized before I'm muting and speaking and give your name and street address and speak in a loud voice so that your comments may be heard by everybody. As in our usual Village Meeting, each person should plan to limit their time to two to three minutes so that more people have a chance to speak. As in past years, I will not specifically be timing people, but will encourage people to wrap it up if people are talking too long. My role as moderator is to help you ask the question or make your point. If you need help, please let me know. Above all, please be civil and respectful of your neighbor's opinions. And lastly, as a reminder, the chat window is only to be used to ask to speak and type your first and last name and that you would like to speak. No comments, questions or conversations are allowed in the chat window. So with that being said, we can move to the agenda and I'm going to read the article. We're gonna talk about article one first. We'll go right down in order. And so I'm gonna read the article out first and then we'll go from there and the trustees will have a brief presentation. So article one, shall the voters approve an annual general fund budget in the amount of $6,310,015 for fiscal year July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023, $3,890,397 of which is to be levied in taxes against the village grand list. So now you can see on agenda item number three, article one. So, okay. And I think Andrew, one of the board is going to go over the budget briefly. Yep. So go right ahead. So thank you again. And just to briefly go through the budget that we have presented for you all to be voting upon. The main drivers as to the budget increase are the new positions that we are proposing. The village manager, human resource director, finance director and EJRP customer service specialist as well as a planned increase in the capital transfer. The major reason for those new positions is of course separation and the ending of the shared management structure that we had with the town of Essex. In summary, you can see at the top of the screen what's the current fiscal year budget is of fiscal year 22. The proposed budget of fiscal year 23 with a dollar amount changes and that percent change and the contributing factors as the most significant contributing factors to that increase which of course being driven most significantly by salaries or benefits. With the estimated tax impact, you may have noticed that the budget was increasing by approximately 11% but you'll notice on this slide that the tax levy is increasing by 3.9% and the tax rate is increasing to 3.44%. That estimated increase to the average assessed property in Essex Junction would be $32.20 per year and that tax increase is less than the budget increase most notably because of funding from the ARPA grant that we are using to help offset the tax increase to our community as well as a small estimated increase in the grand list of 0.35% has also been included. When you get to your property tax bill, when you receive your property tax bill from our current fiscal year, so fiscal year 22, this is where your property tax dollars length. We do like to share this to make sure that while we are talking about the village of Essex Junction budget, we are talking of 13% of that budget. So when we think about that overall property tax bill just keeping in mind where the money goes. As far as the spending goes, you can see on the screen where the capital funds in capital spending is going to be going to such as the Brickyard Culvert and finishing the Dentmore work as well as continuing work on the Crescent connector, the planned EJRP capital spending as well as the water capital waste water treatment facility and sanitation capital expenditures as well, all of which total a little over 1.5 million. With the enterprise funds, one thing to note is that these funds are all paid for by the users of these funds. These are not a part of property taxes. So if you don't use these programs, you don't pay for it, but rather those who use it pay for it. And you can see the proposed budget and the percentage change for each of the program funds in their respective categories. One of the many factors contributing to the enterprise funds with the waste water treatment plant in particular, those are of course the continued challenges with changing state regulations and the unfunded mandates that are our facilities experience. And we have had to increase staff to keep up with everything going on. Additionally, we have made a change to the calculation of administrative fees, which has kept the increase more stable for the time being. Once new village staff do get settled in, we'll do another analysis of the appropriate level of funding to transfer to the general fund in the future. And we will, that is the end of the budget presentation. Okay, thank you, Andrew. All right. Would anybody like to speak about article one and the budget question? Make a point, anything related to the budget is a fair game and you can just raise your hand if you have something to say. Okay, it looks like Kathy Flick. You can go ahead and unmute and speak. Yeah, it's not Kathy actually, it's her husband Bill. Okay, that's fine. So with the new city, if this all goes through as we think it will, on our tax bills, what happens to the town taxes that we pay now? Do those disappear? Are they still there? Do they become part of the village? What happens with those? Andrew, go ahead, please. Steve, thank you, Bill, for that question. The most simplified answer is the town tax goes away. We would no longer be town residents as of July 1st of 2023. And so as such, we would not be responsible for paying those taxes after that date. Is that fine, Bill? Yeah. Okay, I just didn't know if you had a follow-up. Well, no, I mean, that will lead to a substantial tax decrease for those of us in the village, is that correct? Would you like to answer that, Andrew? Be happy to. As of today, we are looking at approximately a 7% to 8% tax decrease. Okay, I think that's all I had. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Bill. All right, Linda, Suntop was next. Yes, moderator, I would like to ask a question about the presentation. I'd like to see the second slide again, which showed the drivers. Sure, Brad, can you show that second slide? I think it was Brad that was showing that. I think it was a page two that said drivers. Oh, here, yeah, is that it? That's the one, thank you. I needed a little time to absorb that. Yeah, no problem at all. And you're welcome to ask a question on any of those specific items in this list, if you'd like. No, I think I'm good with that. Thank you very much. You're welcome. All right, and then, let's see. I'll lower your hand. Is there anybody else that would like to speak on Article One, if I ask a question? Okay, sounds good. We'll move on then to Article Two. Article Two is, shall the voters of the village of Essex Junction to maintain and administer an unrestricted fund balance of up to 15% of the current year general fund operating budget and require any amount over 15% to be used to stabilize subsequent tax rates. Right, and it looked like Andrew, you had at least a slide on that article as well. Yes, thank you, Steve. We do have a slide for each article. The question here is, when we talk about an unrestricted fund balance, in many ways it's important to think about this as a rainy day fund. What this means is like a savings account that we can tap into these funds should we need to for an unforeseen circumstance. A great example would be in the instance of things like the Halloween storm a few years ago when the Densmore Street Colbert washed away and the road crumbled and made it impassable. The ability to have a savings accounts to help pay for emergency services like that is very important. And what we're asking for is the ability to raise the current ceiling from 10% to 15%. So currently we are only able to have a rainy day funds of 10% and so we are asking it to go up to 15%. And part of the rationale is in alignment with the government finance officers association and to align with overall best financial practice. I guess the other important thing to note here just that last bullet of anything over that 15% would need to be used for reducing or stabilizing tax rates in future budgets. So not to be allowed to save money beyond that. Thank you. And I guess we can leave the slide up if there's just one. So would anybody like to ask any questions or make any points about article two? Raise your hand. Any questions must be very straightforward. Good slide. All right, so let's move on to shall the voters approve the village of Essex Junction assessing a 1% sales tax, a 1% meals and alcoholic beverages tax and a 1% rooms tax pursuant to 24 VSA section 138B. All right, go ahead Andrew with your slide when ready. Thank you, Steve. I'd like to joke and say that Raj has this one, but we didn't plan it that way. So for the local options tax, this question is really about whether or not the village slash city of Essex Junction would like to have a local option tax similar to what is already existing in places like Burlington, Colchester, South Burlington, Willis and Manuski. It would raise 1% of sales tax from meals, alcoholic beverages, rooms and any time that you pay the state sales tax is when this would be collected. Current the estimates based upon historical revenue capital revenue sources, we're going to have to either delay planned construction, planned infrastructure improvements or we're going to need to come back to you for bond votes to borrow to help pay for those increased expenditures. So we are looking to have individuals who come to the community and shop within our community to help pay for the infrastructure that they use. Things like Champlain Valley Exposition and the events that happen there for instance would be sales to be taxable there. One of the ways to also think about this as I mentioned is that we need to have this revenue in order to help maintain our infrastructure. Otherwise the infrastructure needs to be delayed and that can create some pretty less and desirable instances, so to say. And based upon an analysis that was just recently done generating that average of $675,000 in a local options tax is the equivalent of every household in the village of spending over $21,000 a year on taxable goods. So those are things like personal property, sales, entertainment, meals, alcoholic beverages and lodging within the village. So basically the question to ask yourselves or based on this analysis is that if you spend less than $46 every day of the year on taxable goods in the village then implementing a local option tax is less money out of your pocket per year versus increasing the property taxes. Whereas if you spend more than $46 every day of the year on taxable goods as I mentioned up above in the village then increasing property taxes is less money out of your pocket per year versus implementing a local option tax. And those are the two slides. All right, thank you, Andrew. Who would like to speak to article three? It looks like Bill Flick can go first. Go ahead, Bill. Yes, I just want to clarification on the personal property portion of this. Is this the sale of personal property or is this a personal property tax, for example, a percentage tax on the value of your vehicle every year? Can you answer that, Andrew? And yes, this is personal property is probably not the best word to use. So the sale of a home, the sale of land, the sale of a vehicle are not included in this. Those are taxed in other ways statutorily. So those would not be included. Instead, it is generally things if you shop on Amazon Wayfair and have it delivered to your home, those would be taxed. If you go to Nomad and buy a coffee that would be taxed, those types of things. Okay, thank you, Andrew. Does that answer your question, Bill? Yes, thank you. All right, any other questions? Okay, let's move on to article four then. Shall the village of Essex Junction authorize cannabis retailers and retail portions of integrated licensee establishments in the village pursuant to seven VSA section 863. All right, Andrew, go ahead with your presentation. Thank you again, Steve. So basically the question is whether or not the village slash city of Essex Junction would be allowing cannabis retailers and retail portions of integrated licensees to operate within our borders. These establishments would be subject to state regulations and inspections, which should be noted that many of these regulations are currently being worked out. And so we don't have much answers at this point in time. The establishments would be subject to local rules that apply to all businesses, including zoning ordinances and the regulation of science and public nuisances. We cannot create special rules for cannabis establishments. Currently, the state law does not allow retail cannabis on a property that abuts or is within 500 feet of a school. With a local options tax, we would be able to receive tax revenue on the sales of cannabis. Without a local options tax, there would be no sales revenue coming back to the city or village of Essex Junction. Integrated licensee is somebody who is established that offers retail sales in addition to other cannabis activities, such as a cultivator, manufacturer, and you can see the details there. And that if you have other questions after tonight, please do make sure to go to the cannabis in the community section of the village's website. All right, thank you, Andrew. And it looks like the first hand is trustee Raj Shala. Go right ahead. Thanks, Steve. Andrew, if you don't mind, I just add a couple of things to this, a couple of clarifications to this slide. The bullet that says, state law does not allow retail cannabis on a property that abuts or is within 500 feet of a school is not quite accurate as none of the rules have been finalized as of yet. So that is a proposed rule as are the rest of the rules as far as I checked late last week, none have been finalized. So we are asking the community to vote on this program without knowing how it is gonna operate. So if that causes any concern, we will have another opportunity to do this in the August primary or in the November election. Retail sales for cannabis cannot start until October. So the reason this is on the ballot now is because we are a village within a town and the town has selected to vote on this in March and has passed it. So one of the feelings from the trustees was that if we did not put this on the ballot, then the town's decision would control for the village and we wanted village residents to have an opportunity to weigh in. So just wanted to put that out there. We have not had a chance to talk about things like zoning, like where might these establishments be located. We have not had a chance as a community to talk about how we feel about the rules since there are no rules yet from the state. So I just put that out there. So folks have a clear understanding. This slide also leaves out any mention of public health and the community has had a real opportunity to have those conversations as of yet either. So I just wanted to add some info to the slide as people weigh this decision. Thanks. All right. Thank you, Rush. That was good. All right. Questions or commentary on article four. Looks like Annie Cooper has her hand up. Go ahead, Annie. Hi, thanks, Steve. My question is if the village vote is positive for is yes. Does the fact that if the village vote and the town vote are equal, does the fact that we as the village have voted on this give us more control than we would have if we didn't vote on it and it was still the same answer. Does this make sense? And then like, do we have more control over what we do with our response if it's equal to the one that the town does? If this makes sense, someone answered. If it doesn't, I'll try harder to clarify. Thank you. Have to try. Thank you. Raj, do you want to take this one? Sure. Annie, yes and if the village votes no, then there won't be any retail establishments as described here in the village. If the village votes yes, the village trustees presumably will act as the local board and regulate retail sales so far as it's able and how far that is, we're not sure yet because they don't have the final rules. So not voting at all was what we talked about a minute ago and that would have let the towns select board act as the board for the area of the village. Voting yes means the trustees will do that for the village and voting no means there won't be any in the village regardless of what the town said. This can always come up at subsequent times via either petition for a special election which would not be ideal or during regularly scheduled elections as mentioned earlier, August, November and whatnot. No decision has to be the last conversation or the last opportunity to vote. So voting yes or voting no is not a final answer as this can always be revisited. The only thing I'll add to that is if we vote yes and an establishment opens for business and the community in a year or two decides that they changed their mind, I believe that establishment would be able to continue and be grandfathered in, that's my understanding. So I hope that helps answer your question, Annie. Go ahead, Annie. Oh, thank you, Steve, sorry. It does, Raj, and I agree. I also understand the grandfathered in as well. But what I'm glad to hear is that number one, if the consensus, if the final vote is a no, we can revisit it and that just gives us more time as I understand. And then if the vote is yes, even if that's equal to the town, we have the ability to manage ourselves. And so I think this was great. Thank you very much for all this information. Thank you, Steve and Raj. All right, you're welcome. All right, any other questions or comments? Any questions or comments? Okay, let's go on to article five. Shell, general obligation bonds or notes of the village of Essex Junction in an amount not to exceed $3,070,000 subject to available grants and aid be used to finance the cost of replacing the Main Street waterline. Go ahead, Andrew. Thank you again, Steve. So basically there is a waterline underneath Main Street and underneath that multi-use path in which it is over 70 years old and has had numerous breaks over the years. And so it is a request to the community to replace that waterline so that that way we can help to reduce the amount of breaks and help to prevent the amount of time that our staff need to spend repairing some breaks within this waterline. Some just pieces to note here that taking on the debt will not require an increase in user rates as the current capital contributions would be enough to cover the payment for the debt. The other portion to note is that with a large waterline that when it fails that the damage really is significant and costly and with it being one of the main arterial waterlines in our community, this is a big one and its impact is pretty significant. So with this pipe reaching the end of its life we are asking the community to help to pay for replacing it. Okay, thank you Andrew for that information. Does anyone in the community have commentary or question on article five? Any commentary or questions? Okay, well let's move on to article six. Shall the voters approve holding the 2023 annual meeting on Wednesday, April 5th, 2023 to act upon any articles not involving voting by Australian ballot and to reconvene on Tuesday, April 11th, 2023 to vote for the village officers and transact any business involving voting by Australian ballot. Andrew, did you have anything to say on this article? Okay, does anyone have any questions or comments? This is a standard article that we have every single year. Any questions or comments? Okay, that one's pretty self-explanatory. So I'm going to move on then down to article seven which is to elect village officers required by law including moderator one year term, one village trustee three year term and one library trustee five year term. And looking at the sample ballot, there's one person running for moderator which is me. There's two people running for the trustee spot Andrew Champaign and Raj Chala. And there's one person running for the library trustee Joe Knox. And so you can, that voting will obviously take place on your ballot same way as everything else. So there's no commentary needed on that. And so we will move on to the next item on the agenda which is the update on the independence in city charter status. So Andrew, who will be speaking to that? So as I mentioned at the very beginning, this is very likely to be our last village of Essex Junction annual meeting in large sense because as of today or as of just this week, the bill H 491, which creates the city of Essex Junction has passed both the house and has passed in the Senate. With that, it will be on its way to the governor for his hopeful signing. And then at that point, that bill would have been signed into law and the city of Essex Junction will be formed on July 1st of 2022. This votes from the community to create the city of Essex Junction passed with 88% supports from the community, well exceeding that of what merger had. It passed unanimously within the committees of the house near a unanimous vote in the full house. It was a unanimous vote in the Senate's committee as well as a unanimous vote in the full Senate. We have heard from the governor and there was a courted in BT Digger about how if there is no technical issue with the bill then there is no reason why he would not sign the bill into law. And so I think at this point in time, well, I am not a betting person. This feels pretty good at this point. It feels like it's fair enough or safe enough to say that tonight is our last village of Essex Junction annual meeting. Right. Thank you, Andrew. That was a good update. It was exciting to see the Senate journal from yesterday. Is there any other comments or questions anybody has on the update here that they might wanna ask? And then I think we should also give the opportunity with either Rep Laurie or Karen if you wanted to say anything having obviously done a lot of work on this in the legislature which I'm sure everyone appreciates greatly. Hi, everyone. We're happy to be here. We're really sad. We're not in person. Hopefully someday soon we can do that again. I think we just both wanna say thank you to the community and all the support over the years to get to this point to the trustees for their amazing work. I mean, honestly, if it wasn't for their perseverance and their relationship with the select board and we wouldn't have gotten here. I wanna thank the select board as well. They worked with us and we found a path forward. And I will say one of the things that came through loud and clear and all the committees we talked to and all the people in the hall we talked to was how well thought out and comprehensive the charter was that was put forth. And that is all due to the trustees and the staff who worked on this for so long. So it is super exciting. I get responsible when I think about it. And I look forward to next year's city of S-extunction meeting. Thank you. All right, any other questions or comments on the charter? Okay. Thank you all. So all right, the next item on the agenda is the public to be heard. And so this is a time when you can bring up other comments about things going on in the village development, anything that was in the book that was mailed out or the newsletter that had come out. Any questions you have on the village now is an appropriate time to bring that up. Who would like to make a comment? Any questions or comments? It's gotta be something on people's minds. All right, Patrick Murray, go right ahead. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. I wanted to speak very briefly on the upcoming vote for the school board as well, which is going to be happening at the same time. And this is not the place to endorse any candidate. So I won't do that, but I'd want to encourage our entire public to absolutely look at the candidates in question, research them thoroughly. I think that this is a very important election coming up and it deserves everyone's full attention. I'll leave it at that. Thank you. All right, thank you. All right, anybody else? Any questions on the community? I think there's still some daylight out there. Perhaps it is, if there's no comments or questions that anybody like to bring up, then I can entertain adjournment from the meeting. I'll move. Okay, all right. You don't vote on it, but let's go from that. And just thank you, everybody, for a nice orderly civil meeting tonight. And as Andrew said, a high probability of the last village meeting and looking forward to the first city meeting. So, all right, thank you all. Have a great day.